King Solomon's Doe

St. Catherine of Siena, as a young child, would sit around the family hearth at night and listen to the tales of the saints: she was inspired, with the generous heart God gave her, to seek after Him totally from this very young age.

She went so far as to retreat to the edge of Siena, where there was a cave, to be a hermit at about six years of age. She was persuaded to return home to live again with her family; but the Lord did not leave her longings unanswered. She was graced with heavenly visions from the time of her sixth year, the crowning moment of her life being her espousals with the Lord, from which she wore a ring that no one else could see. At the moment of her death, the tan line from the many years' wear of a supernatural ring became visible on her wedding finger.

She lived with and was tried by her family for the first years of youth, and then she was finally allowed her 'cave'; and lived the life of a hermit for a few years. She understood, by total gift, the balanced life that is a saint's: suffering balanced with the joy of contemplation; poverty balanced with the inexpressible riches of the Holy Sacrament of the Eucharist, where the Lord of Heaven and Earth comes bodily to us; and complete self-denial balanced with a fervent service and fruitfulness in the Lord's vineyard.

There are many facets of this great saint's life, this Doctor of the Church (let no one say the Holy Church is misogynist), this woman who persuaded the Pope himself to return to Rome: but I wanted to capture the essence, in a sense, of her childhood, in which the spiritual one coincided with the bodily.

She has been saying the rosary, and is out away from society, symbolic of the doe that frolics in the verdant pasture of King Solomon; and she is caught in the moment of contemplating the Lord- whether with the eyes of her body or her soul, or both, it is the same. It is the look of absolute, passionate and tender love. It is a reflection of His gaze upon the soul He loves. It is the way He looks at you.

If you notice the rosary, it has upon it a memento mori. This was a common practice, the inclusion of a human skull in art (many have seen the Magdalen Contemplating the Skull) and in sacramentals. This was a reminder, in the deep sense of St. Alphonsus Ligouri, that inextricably tied with loving the Lord and gaining one's own life, is to understand and to accept one's own death: death to self, death of the body, death of one's own desires.

"If you lose your life, you will gain it"- and the Lord lived this first for us: not only in the ultimate sense on the Cross, but also in His very 'emptying of His glory, to become like a slave'. He was showing us, in accepting death, the many kinds, that Love knows no bounds, no limits, no height nor depth: but will go to death and beyond.

Death is also a reminder that we are sinners and must continually ask mercy of the Lord, to sustain us, especially at the hour of death. We have free will until the moment when we appear before Him, and so we must keep watch, and a sober one. A memento mori is meant to help the praying one keep all of these thoughts close to the heart: and remembering death is tied to moving toward the only life that counts: that of seeing the Lord face to face.

A European Crossroads

Below I have pasted two articles from the excellent website, Chiesa. com. One is by Sandro Magister, an experienced journalist and Rome-observer, and a woman who seems to understand the real meaning of being feminist. Both articles underline the enormity of both what the Pope said in his speech at Regensburg, and the terrible predictability of the reaction to it.

I think that many Americans do not grasp the full stage background of Europe today and the Pope's main program. Unlike John Paul II, Pope Benedict is not globe-trotting; rather, his trips have been, like his focus, Europe-centered. The very choosing of the name Benedict brings up the monk who, in the wake of a barbarian-run Europe, was used by the Lord to create a massive movement to renew Christendom and to form a rule that would make saints of many who followed the religious life. The Pope is laboring for the resuscitation of Europe, the cultural as well as the spiritual. In fact, it is the spiritual life, centered on Christ, which will renew Europe- and it is the lack of Christ, the denial of Christ, which is killing
her, like a lack of nourishment kills.

So a Pope named Benedict makes a speech in Europe, quoting a Byzantine Emperor who was the sovereign of a region which would be overrun by Islam within fifty years from the time he said the controversial words to the Persian. This was no mistake by an absent-minded theolgian to a bunch of specialists at Regensburg. His purpose was not to inflame the Muslim, but to make the point that the Muslim could overrun Europe, because Europe has no true moorings, no faith: and will soon, in part by her over-emphasis on pure human reason, be swamped into oblivion by those who hold a faith, even if an irrational one.

Pope Benedict, like Pope John Paul II, promotes discussion toward understanding. However, he is making it very clear that it must be on true grounds; that is, that only a discussion that puts on the table the true differences and foundations of each faith will have any real results. He is saying that like the Emperor and the Persian, we must speak truly and openly about the facts of disagreement: but that it is very difficult to speak rationally with a faith that does not see its God as comportive of reason.


The articles below describe the situation much better than I can:



Why Benedict XVI did not want to fall silent or backpedal

by Sandro Magister


The masterful lecture that the pope-theologian delivered at the University of Regensburg really did send shivers throughout the world. Because what Benedict XVI said there is just what happened afterward. The pope explained the distance that runs between the Christian God, who is love, immolated in Jesus on the cross, but also “Logos,” reason; and the God worshipped by Islam, so transcendent and sublime that he is not bound by anything, not even by that rational assertion according to which there must not be “any coercion in matters of faith.” The Qur’an says this in the second sura, to which the pope conscientiously made reference, but it then makes other and opposite statements. And the violent eruption in the Muslim world against the pope and Christians confirms that this other tendency has the upper hand, giving form and substance to the way in which myriads of the faithful of Allah view the world of the infidels. The other side of pope Joseph Ratzinger’s lecture in Regensburg is the blood poured out in Muslim Mogadishu by sister Leonella Sgorbati, a woman veiled and yet free, a martyr whose last words were addressed to her killers: “I forgive you.”

In reality, almost the entirety of Benedict XVI’s lecture in Regensburg was addressed to the Christian world, to the West and to Europe, which in his view are so sure of their naked reason – too sure – that they have lost the “fear of God.” But here as well the pope’s words found their confirmation in the facts. Hand in hand with the swell of verbal and physical violence on the part of Muslims, on the other side, in theory his own side, the pope was the target of incessant volleys of friendly fire. Just as the sagacious companions of Job attributed the blame for his misfortunes to him, so also Benedict XVI was surrounded by a veritable whirlwind of advice and rebuke of the same sort.

It was the same way in the Vatican. Benedict XVI had the good fortune of installing a new secretary of state and a new foreign minister, both of them firmly in his trust, on the very day that the Muslim attack against him began, on Friday, September 15, right after he came back from his trip to Bavaria. But the grumbling of the curia members hostile toward him did not calm down at all – on the contrary. He got away with the appointment of the new foreign minister, archbishop Dominique Mamberti, from Corsica, who has worked as a nuncio in Sudan, Somalia, and Eritrea, and before that in Algeria, Lebanon, Kuwait, and Saudi Arabia, and thus has direct familiarity with the Arab and Muslim world, and is skilled in the art of diplomacy. But as for the nomination of cardinal Tarcisio Bertone as the new secretary of state – for this, no, they did not forgive him. The fact that Bertone is not a career diplomat, but a man of doctrine and a pastor of souls, is now being held even more against the pope as proof of his ineptitude on the world political scene. In Bavaria, with the assignment changes not yet having taken place, Benedict XVI was accompanied by the outgoing secretary of state, cardinal Angelo Sodano, who has spent his entire life in diplomacy. But the pope was careful to avoid having cardinal Sodano read in advance the lecture he was preparing to deliver in Regensburg. Whole sections of the text would have been censored, if its supreme criterion had been the Realpolitik upon which the Vatican diplomacy of Sodano and his colleagues is nourished.

For Benedict XVI, too, realism in relations between the Church and states is a value. It was so with the totalitarian systems of the twentieth century: with German Nazism as with Soviet Communism. The controversial silences of Pius XII with Nazism, and later, with Communism, of John XXIII, of Vatican Council II, and of the Ostpolitik of Paul VI, had compelling reasons, and in the first place the defense of the victims of those systems themselves. But now, it is being demanded of Benedict XVI that he maintain a similar silence in regard to the new adversary of Islam: it is a silence that is often given the name of “dialogue.” Has pope Ratzinger not respected this? Then this is the comeuppance he deserves from “offended” Islam: threats, demonstrations, burning in effigy, governments demanding retractions, the recall of ambassadors, churches burned, a religious sister killed. The pope is seen as bearing his part of the blame in all this. On the other hand, it’s “post mortem” beatification for his predecessor John Paul II, who prayed humbly in Assisi together Muslim mullahs, and when visiting the Umayyad mosque in Damascus listened in silence to the invectives his hosts hurled against the perfidious Jews. No fatwa was issued for the demolition of the Vatican walls, or for the slitting of Karol Wojtyla’s throat. It was a mere coincidence that Ali Agca, who shot him, was a Muslim – the assassination had been planned in Christian territory...

Benedict XVI does not deny the proper value of political realism. The secretariat of state has mobilized its network of nunciatures to provide for governments the complete text of the lecture in Regensburg, the official note of explanation released on September 16 by cardinal Bertone, and the explanations presented by the pope in person at the Angelus on Sunday the 17th. By the end of September, the ambassadors to Muslim-majority countries will be called to the Vatican for another effort to defuse the tensions. And the pontifical council for culture, headed by cardinal Paul Poupard, is preparing a meeting with Muslim religious representatives.

But realism isn’t everything for Benedict XVI. The dialogue with Islam that he wants to create is not made of fearful silences and ceremonial embraces. It is not made of mortifications which, in the Muslim camp, are interpreted as acts of submission. The citation he made in Regensburg, from the “Dialogues with a Mohammedan” written at the end of the fourteenth century by the Christian participant in the dialogue, the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologos, was deliberate choice. A war was on. Constantinople was under siege, and in a half century, in 1453, it would fall under the dominion of the Ottoman Empire. But the learned Christian emperor brought his Persian counterpart to the terrain of truth, reason, law, and violence, to what marks the real difference between the Christian faith and Islam, to the key questions upon which war or peace between the two civilizations depends.

Pope Ratzinger sees modern times, too, as being fraught with war, and with holy war. But he asks Islam to place a limit of its own on “jihad.” He proposes to the Muslims that they separate violence from faith, as prescribed by the Qur’an itself, and that they again connect faith with reason, because “acting against reason is in contradiction with the nature of God.”

In Regensburg, the pope exalted the greatness of the Greek philosophy of Aristotle and Plato. He demonstrated that this is an integral part of biblical and Christian faith in the God who is “Logos.” And he also did this deliberately. When Paleologos held his dialogue with his Persian counterpart, Islamic culture had just emerged from its happiest period, when Greek philosophy had been grafted onto the trunk of Qur’anic faith. In asking Islam today to rekindle the light of Aristotelian reason, Benedict XVI is not asking for the impossible. Islam has had its Averroes, the great Arab commentator on Aristotle who was treasured by such a giant of Catholic theology as was Thomas Aquinas. A return, today, to the synthesis between faith and reason is the only way for Islamic interpretation of the Qur’an to free itself from its fundamentalist paralysis and from obsession with “jihad.” And it is the only ground for authentic dialogue between the Muslim world and the Christianity of the West.

At the Angelus on Sunday, September 17, which was broadcast live even by the Arab television network Al-Jazeera, Benedict XVI expressed his “regret” at how his lecture had been misunderstood. He said that he did not agree with the passage he cited from Manuel II Paleologos, according to whom in the “new things” brought by Mohammed “you will find only evil and inhuman things, like the order to spread the faith by means of the sword.” But he did not apologize at all; he didn’t retract a single line. The lecture in Regensburg was not an academic exercise for him. He did not put aside his papal vestments there in order to speak only the sophisticated language of the theologian, to an audience made up only of specialists. The pope and the theologian in him are all of a piece, and for everyone. Cardinal Camillo Ruini, who has grasped the essence of this pontificate better than other Church leaders have done, said on Monday, September 18 to the directive body of the Italian bishops that “the fundamental coordinates” of the message Benedict XVI is proposing to the Church and the world are found in these three texts: the encyclical “Deus Caritas Est”; the address to the Roman curia on December 22, 2005, on the interpretation of Vatican Council II; and, last but not least, the “splendid” lecture in Regensburg.

Benedict XVI is hopeful. He would not have been so daring if he did not believe in the real possibility that an interpretation of the Qur’an that marries faith with reason and freedom can be reopened within Islamic thought. But the voices in the Muslim world that are accepting his offer of dialogue are too weak and too few, and almost not to be found. And the pope is too much alone in a wayward Europe that really does resemble somewhat the Eurabia described by Oriana Fallaci, a “Christian atheist” whom he has read, met with, and admired. And then there is the violence that hangs over Christians in Islamic countries, and also outside of them – when, to silence the pope, members of his flock are killed, and all the better if they are innocent, like a religious sister, a woman.

__________





The twofold symbolic weight of the killing of sister Leonella

by Lucetta Scaraffia


The dramatic killing of sister Leonella Sgorbati in Somalia on Sunday, September 16, is, unfortunately, a symbolic action of great significance. This is so for two fundamental reasons. Because, in fact, even in the absence of precise assertions, this is a matter of blackmail. And because the one assassinated was a woman, and a religious woman.

As seen in the history of the Christian persecutions, this time as well the method was chosen of striking others in the place of the one who was indicated by so many voices in the Muslim world as the main target, namely Benedict XVI, and not only because the Italian religious sister was an easier victim The explanation is found in the memorable pages of the Japanese writer Shusaku Endo, which narrate the persecution of the Christians in Japan in the seventeenth century: some Jesuits, although they were ready to die to bear witness to their faith, were forced to commit apostasy by having the Christian country people subjected to torture before their eyes. A Christian can dispose of his own life, even to the point of martyrdom – and the countless Christian martyrs of the past century demonstrate this – but not of the lives of others: the killing and torture of other Christians paralyzes the real target of the aggressive action, it gags him, it prevents him from saying and doing what would be right for himself, until it impedes him from martyrdom. The Japanese case is the most sensational, but there have been other, similar cases, if one only reads attentively the lives of the missionaries of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries: it’s enough to recall the Combonian missionary sisters who were held prisoner by the Mahdi in the Sudan at the end of the nineteenth century.

In threatening the lives of Christians who live in Islamic countries, the intention is to make the pope retract words that he did not say, and what he did not even think. The intention is to make him lose dignity and authority, forcing him to say what is dictated by a certain type of Islamic extremism. And this blackmail is much more weighty than diplomatic protests, demonstrations, threats on fundamentalist websites: it is not possible to ask all Christians who live in Islamic countries to accept the possibility of martyrdom in order to permit the pope freedom of thought and speech, the freedom not to be maliciously misunderstood. It is the most serious thing to have happened yet in the confrontation between the West and Islamic fundamentalism, with the violation of all the rights of respect and reciprocity that the United Nations constantly invokes.

But there is another factor that increases the symbolic weight of this action: the one killed was a woman, a woman who had none of the characteristics of visibly flaunted sexual freedom that the more traditional Islam condemns in the West. A woman was killed who went with her head covered and dressed modestly, but who had chosen the veil freely, and had chosen just as freely to offer her life to God and in service of others. It is this freedom that was struck, this freedom that is the sign of a culture that attributes to women the same dignity as men have.

The simple presence of women of this type, modest and respectful, but free and responsible for their lives and their choices, brings up a problem: it is what for Benedict XVI is the encounter between cultures. Before this is a theological dialogue between religions, it is an encounter between two cultural universes that originated from two different religions, which, in this case, reserve very different places for women. If, in fact, we speak of the freedom and dignity of woman as equal to those of man, we are not placing in doubt an entire religious tradition, but we are proposing a non-negotiable cultural value: and it is precisely on the encounter among cultures and on their founding principles that dialogue must be centered, a dialogue like the one Benedict XVI has proposed, “frank and sincere, with great reciprocal respect.”

To Be Salt and Light

Recently, Pope Benedict made some remarks about faith and reason at the podium of his old university- remarks that most of us would find pretty tough chewing, intellectually speaking. Within this discussion of the balance of faith and reason, he quoted an Byzantine Emperor, Manuel II, from many centuries past. By using this quote, the Pope was trying to illustrate the point that a faith cannot be true in essence if it proclaims as a tenet, something that is contrary to reason: in other words, he was trying to show that God and true faith will comport with reason, not be irrational. This doesn't mean that reason can encompass faith, or mystery, or the nature of God: it just means that a faith inspired by God would not counteract reason, or demand something that we normally hold to be evil, such as 'conversion by the sword'.

What the Pope said, even about Mohammed, was TRUE. It isn't comfortable, it is hurtful when one is mistaken and follows Islam as the true religion, but, nonetheless, it is true: and reasonable. The Pope has since stated that he was not aiming to be offensive, or to deny that there is any good in Muslims or in any passages in the Q'uran, but he was articulating a truth: that Mohammed did not bring any new revelation that was good, but rather the novelties he brought were anti-reason, such as the command to kill those who do not believe in Islam. What Mohammed reiterated from Judaic and Christian sources (upon which he relied heavily) might be good in itself.

The Pope was being 'salt' in that salt is necessary to preserve and to provide an essential nutrient, and also to give 'taste'. To those who are wounded, though, salt is painful.

The Pope was also bringing light on an essential question of our day: the necessary, God-given relationship between faith and reason: and to those who have long been in the dark, light is painful.

Please pray for the Pope, that he might be able to articulate truth in a way that those who are well-meaning and yet mistaken might "turn, and be healed".

I have reprinted the Holy Father's speech below.

Lecture of His Holiness Pope Benedict XVI at the Meeting with the Representatives of Science (Tuesday, 12 September 2006, Regensburg, University)


Faith, Reason and the University
Memories and Reflections


Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen,

It is a moving experience for me to stand and give a lecture at this university podium once again. I think back to those years when, after a pleasant period at the Freisinger Hochschule, I began teaching at the University of Bonn. This was in 1959, in the days of the old university made up of ordinary professors. The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much direct contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties. Once a semester there was a dies academicus, when professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas: the reality that despite our specializations which at times make it difficult to communicate with each other, we made up a whole, working in everything on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason - this reality became a lived experience. The university was also very proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that, by inquiring about the reasonableness of faith, they too carried out a work which is necessarily part of the whole of the universitas scientiarum, even if not everyone could share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. This profound sense of coherence within the universe of reason was not troubled, even when it was once reported that a colleague had said there was something odd about our university: it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist: God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it is still necessary and reasonable to raise the question of God through the use of reason, and to do so in the context of the tradition of the Christian faith: this, within the university as a whole, was accepted without question.



I was reminded of all this recently, when I read the edition by Professor Theodore Khoury (Münster) of part of the dialogue carried on - perhaps in 1391 in the winter barracks near Ankara - by the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on the subject of Christianity and Islam, and the truth of both. It was probably the emperor himself who set down this dialogue, during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402; and this would explain why his arguments are given in greater detail than the responses of the learned Persian. The dialogue ranges widely over the structures of faith contained in the Bible and in the Qur'an, and deals especially with the image of God and of man, while necessarily returning repeatedly to the relationship of the three Laws: the Old Testament, the New Testament and the Qur'an. In this lecture I would like to discuss only one point - itself rather marginal to the dialogue itself - which, in the context of the issue of faith and reason, I found interesting and which can serve as the starting-point for my reflections on this issue.


In the seventh conversation (διάλεξις - controversy) edited by Professor Khoury, the emperor touches on the theme of the jihad (holy war). The emperor must have known that surah 2, 256 reads: There is no compulsion in religion. It is one of the suras of the early period, when Mohammed was still powerless and under threaten. But naturally the emperor also knew the instructions, developed later and recorded in the Qur’an, concerning holy war. Without decending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the “Book” and the “infidels”, he turns to his interlocutor somewhat brusquely with the central question on the relationship between religion and violence in general, in these words: "Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached." The emperor goes on to explain in detail the reasons why spreading the faith through violence is something unreasonable. Violence is incompatible with the nature of God and the nature of the soul. God is not pleased by blood, and not acting reasonably (σὺν λόγω) is contrary to God's nature. Faith is born of the soul, not the body. Whoever would lead someone to faith needs the ability to speak well and to reason properly, without violence and threats... To convince a reasonable soul, one does not need a strong arm, or weapons of any kind, or any other means of threatening a person with death....

The decisive statement in this argument against violent conversion is this: not to act in accordance with reason is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, observes: For the emperor, as a Byzantine shaped by Greek philosophy, this statement is self-evident. But for Muslim teaching, God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality. Here Khoury quotes a work of the noted French Islamist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazn went so far as to state that God is not bound even by his own word, and that nothing would oblige him to reveal the truth to us. Were it God's will, we would even have to practise idolatry.


As far as understanding of God and thus the concrete practice of religion is concerned, we find ourselves faced with a dilemma which nowadays challenges us directly. Is the conviction that acting unreasonably contradicts God's nature merely a Greek idea, or is it always and intrinsically true? I believe that here we can see the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense of the word and the biblical understanding of faith in God. Modifying the first verse of the Book of Genesis, John began the prologue of his Gospel with the words: In the beginning was the λόγoς. This is the very word used by the emperor: God acts with logos. Logos means both reason and word - a reason which is creative and capable of self-communication, precisely as reason. John thus spoke the final word on the biblical concept of God, and in this word all the often toilsome and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and synthesis. In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist. The encounter between the Biblical message and Greek thought did not happen by chance. The vision of Saint Paul, who saw the roads to Asia barred and in a dream saw a Macedonian man plead with him: Come over to Macedonia and help us! (cf. Acts 16:6-10) - this vision can be interpreted as a distillation of the intrinsic necessity of a rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek inquiry.


In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and declares simply that he is, is already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates's attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: I am. This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense perhaps less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act “with logos” is contrary to God's nature.


In all honesty, one must observe that in the late Middle Ages we find trends in theology which would sunder this synthesis between the Greek spirit and the Christian spirit. In contrast with the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, there arose with Duns Scotus a voluntarism which ultimately led to the claim that we can only know God's voluntas ordinata. Beyond this is the realm of God's freedom, in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done. This gives rise to positions which clearly approach those of Ibn Hazn and might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God's transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God, whose deepest possibilities remain eternally unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. As opposed to this, the faith of the Church has always insisted that between God and us, between his eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason there exists a real analogy, in which unlikeness remains infinitely greater than likeness, yet not to the point of abolishing analogy and its language (cf. Lateran IV). God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love transcends knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is logos. Consequently, Christian worship is λογικὴ λατρεία - worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Rom 12:1).


This inner rapprochement between Biblical faith and Greek philosophical inquiry was an event of decisive importance not only from the standpoint of the history of religions, but also from that of world history – it is an event which concerns us even today. Given this convergence, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its historically decisive character in Europe. We can also express this the other way around: this convergence, with the subsequent addition of the Roman heritage, created Europe and remains the foundation of what can rightly be called Europe.



The thesis that the critically purified Greek heritage forms an integral part of Christian faith has been countered by the call for a dehellenization of Christianity – a call which has more and more dominated theological discussions since the beginning of the modern age. Viewed more closely, three stages can be observed in the programme of dehellenization: although interconnected, they are clearly distinct from one another in their motivations and objectives.


Dehellenization first emerges in connection with the fundamental postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at the tradition of scholastic theology, the Reformers thought they were confronted with a faith system totally conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. As a result, faith no longer appeared as a living historical Word but as one element of an overarching philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure, primordial form, as originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise derived from another source, from which faith had to be liberated in order to become once more fully itself. When Kant stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, he carried this programme forward with a radicalism that the Reformers could never have foreseen. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason, denying it access to reality as a whole.


The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in a second stage in the process of dehellenization, with Adolf von Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and in the early years of my teaching, this programme was highly influential in Catholic theology too. It took as its point of departure Pascal’s distinction between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn in 1959, I tried to address the issue. I will not repeat here what I said on that occasion, but I would like to describe at least briefly what was new about this second stage of dehellenization. Harnack’s central idea was to return simply to the man Jesus and to his simple message, underneath the accretions of theology and indeed of hellenization: this simple message was seen as the culmination of the religious development of humanity. Jesus was said to have put an end to worship in favour of morality. In the end he was presented as the father of a humanitarian moral message. The fundamental goal was to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason, liberating it, that is to say, from seemingly philosophical and theological elements, such as faith in Christ’s divinity and the triune God. In this sense, historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament restored to theology its place within the university: theology, for Harnack, is something essentially historical and therefore strictly scientific. What it is able to say critically about Jesus is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and consequently it can take its rightful place within the university. Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant’s “Critiques”, but in the meantime further radicalized by the impact of the natural sciences. This modern concept of reason is based, to put it briefly, on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism, a synthesis confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand it presupposes the mathematical structure of matter, its intrinsic rationality, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and use it efficiently: this basic premise is, so to speak, the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, there is nature’s capacity to be exploited for our purposes, and here only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can, depending on the circumstances, shift from one side to the other. As strongly positivistic a thinker as J. Monod has declared himself a convinced Platonist/Cartesian.


This gives rise to two principles which are crucial for the issue we have raised. First, only the kind of certainty resulting from the interplay of mathematical and empirical elements can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be measured against this criterion. Hence the human sciences, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy, attempt to conform themselves to this canon of scientificity. A second point, which is important for our reflections, is that by its very nature this method excludes the question of God, making it appear an unscientific or pre-scientific question. Consequently, we are faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, one which needs to be questioned.


We shall return to this problem later. In the meantime, it must be observed that from this standpoint any attempt to maintain theology’s claim to be “scientific” would end up reducing Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. But we must say more: it is man himself who ends up being reduced, for the specifically human questions about our origin and destiny, the questions raised by religion and ethics, then have no place within the purview of collective reason as defined by “science” and must thus be relegated to the realm of the subjective. The subject then decides, on the basis of his experiences, what he considers tenable in matters of religion, and the subjective “conscience” becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, though, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and become a completely personal matter. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humanity, as we see from the disturbing pathologies of religion and reason which necessarily erupt when reason is so reduced that questions of religion and ethics no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology, end up being simply inadequate.


Before I draw the conclusions to which all this has been leading, I must briefly refer to the third stage of dehellenization, which is now in progress. In the light of our experience with cultural pluralism, it is often said nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism achieved in the early Church was a preliminary inculturation which ought not to be binding on other cultures. The latter are said to have the right to return to the simple message of the New Testament prior to that inculturation, in order to inculturate it anew in their own particular milieux. This thesis is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and bears the imprint of the Greek spirit, which had already come to maturity as the Old Testament developed. True, there are elements in the evolution of the early Church which do not have to be integrated into all cultures. Nonetheless, the fundamental decisions made about the relationship between faith and the use of human reason are part of the faith itself; they are developments consonant with the nature of faith itself.


And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which reflects one of the basic tenets of Christianity. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, as inquiry into the rationality of faith.


Only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world’s profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. Here I am reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions had been raised, and so Socrates says: “It would be easily understandable if someone became so annoyed at all these false notions that for the rest of his life he despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way he would be deprived of the truth of existence and would suffer a great loss”. The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur – this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably (with logos) is contrary to the nature of God”, said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.

9/11 Anniversary

Today or tonite, watch the documentary Press for Truth. Go to Google, type in the title, and click on video above the search box. You can watch it right online. It is the best thing you can do to remember this day.

TRWK

Faith in the Last Times

Msgr. Robert Hugh Benson died a painful death in his early forties, in the year 1914, two months after Pope St. Pius X- for whom Msgr. Benson had great love and admiration. He was born into an accomplished Anglican family from England, and was the first son of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury. He made a splash by converting to the Catholic Faith and becoming a priest. Upon becoming Catholic, he seemed to endure a martyrdom of prolific writing, hearing confessions and speaking, for it seems he was a very sensitive and reserved man- but a man who loved Our Lord with all that he was. Anyone who has read Come Rack! Come Rope! or The Lord of the World will feel the torrent of deep Catholic piety and absolute surrender to God; yet, in his books, he clearly outlines the essence of faith as being a thing of the will; and that our faith is a work, in the Jamesian sense, a work of love- but not primarily of emotion or intellect.

It is said that his eleven short years as a Catholic priest, until his death, were “each years of eleven years”, so great was his output of novels, poems, lectures, sermons, and non-fiction works. In my estimation he was a literary giant, whose powerful and profound descriptions; depth of themes and human experiences; and even his prophetic moments, rank him with the greatest of the world’s ‘bards’. I’ve always said there is something in the water in England, which produces such writers! However, my thought is that the water of Msgr. Benson’s soul was the Blood of Christ.

This brings me to arguably his most influential novel, The Lord of the World, which outlines the Last Times, the Anti-Christ and the Coming of Our Lord. Benson sets the novel one hundred years ahead- and as he was writing in 1907, we are living on the threshold of the time he imagined. Benson denied that his book was ‘prophetic’ in the literal sense- and it is very interesting to see what he could imagine in terms of technology, and what was beyond him. For instance, he could not imagine either the television, the computer, and certainly not the internet, so he thinks of the characters using a private and very fast telegraph; yet his ‘airplanes’ are really quite sophisticated.

The one area that strikes me as interesting in terms of prophecy, is that he characterizes the Church in the last times as a fortress- a very Pre-Vatican II characterization. Little could Msgr. Benson imagine that the smoke of Satan would literally enter into the very enclaves, through the little cracks of ambiguity left in the proscriptions of the Council, and primarily through the bad will or weakness of those who are meant to protect Her! Little could he understand how the Church could remain and yet be shrouded so that it would be hard even to find Her; or that some of her very shepherds would be leading so many astray. No, he could not imagine it. All of us who love the Church have a hard time grasping the snaking confusion, even though we are witnessing it daily. It is as if The Lord of the World is prophecy drawn in thick marker, a too-clearly unfolding of the decisive battle Sr. Lucy talks about, or a condensed version of real events. It seems that reality is really stranger than fiction, and that the development of the Last Times has taken centuries rather than a hundred years.

Where Msgr. Benson becomes prophetic is at the existential and faith level of the Last Times. How the Anti-Christ gains his power is not so important in the book - rather it is the experience at the levels of reason, emotion and will of the Catholic in the novel that becomes important for us, and those who come in later years. The protagonist, Fr. Percy Franklin, begins the book by a three-man discussion of the last hundred years’ history, in the subterranean apartment of an old, dying Catholic, along with with a young, doubting fellow priest, who later apostasizes. From the rather abstract understanding of the historical processes toward a ‘unified world’, Father Percy goes out into the reality of a world cowering under the prospect of a Great War. There is an unbearable juxtaposition between fear and ultra-modern convenience ( as we are living in today): and yet he spends his most important time in contemplative prayer- he has practiced for years this silencing of thought and emotion, to stand simple in the Presence of the Lord, in the inner recesses of the will. This practice, this understanding, this place of simple will, will be all he has left when the tide of the Anti-Christ comes.

Fr. Franklin’s faith survives the incredible temptation and power present in the ‘peace’-bearing Anti-Christ, because he simply hangs on to Our Lord, the Suffering Lord, with his will. He later hangs on, through the destruction of Rome and the last days of the world, as he leads the remnant of the Church from Nazareth as the last Vicar of Christ. Msgr. Benson’s message to us here is a prophetic message: If your faith in Christ and His Bride is based primarily on reason, or on emotion, it will not withstand the Last Times. It must be a faith forged within the Cloud of Unknowing, within the terrible and silent darkness of simple will. It must be a practiced faith, a faith bolstered by prayer-neither the whining prayer of the emotional nor the abstract faith of the academic- it must be the prayer of the will: the will to love God and to receive His grace. It must be a receptive prayer, for none of us will survive another minute without God’s grace; and we need to be aware of our total dependence upon Him even when we don’t feel Him or see Him in the normal channels or places.

Our faith must be a faith imbued with courage from God, for we will have to hang on in a terrible, sick-peace storm: and hang on to the death, if need be. There was nothing more terrible in Msgr. Benson’s book than the spectacle of former priests leading a liturgy for the Anti-Christ; a close second is the attractiveness of euthanasia for the characters without faith; and third, the superhuman pull of the forces of false peace with the Devil.

It was very interesting to me that Msgr. Benson included the destruction of Rome and the Pope leading the remnant of the hierarchical Church with the Monstrance toward the forces of the Anti-Christ- eerily similar to the visions of Fatima- although in Msgr. Benson’s book, the destruction and the procession take place apart in location and time-one in Rome, one at the edge of the plain of Mageddo (Armaggedon).

Are we living in the Last Times? My reason says, “yes”. The fruit seems to be ripening on the tree; but again, none but the Father knows the hour. However, it is still important to be watchful, to be prepared; for at no time is it easy to be a Christian in the world; and The Lord of the World is a powerful teacher about what it means to be in the world but not of it.