This is the complete text of the Pope's lecture on the role of reason in religion given at his old University of Regensburg in which he states not to act with reason is contrary to God. The controversial citation from the Byzantine emperor about Islam is but a fragment of the address

It is a moving experience for me to be back again at this university and to be able once more to hold a lecture here. My thoughts turn back to those years in which I began teaching at Bonn University after a pleasant period at university in Freising. That was in 1959, in the days of the old university - when professors were still ordinary professors. There were no assistants or secretaries for the various chairs, but then, on the other hand, there was far more direct contact between professors and students, and above all between the professors themselves. We would meet in the staff rooms before and after lectures, and exchanges between historians, philosophy teachers, philologists and of course theologians from both theological faculties [Catholic and Lutheran] were very lively. Every semester there was a so-called Dies academicus [university open day] at which the professor of every faculty introduced him or herself to the whole university and thus made it possible to experience universitas, something which you too, Your Magnificence, just referred to - namely the experience of the fact that despite our specialisations, which sometimes result in lack of communication between us, we do, however, make up one whole and as one whole work in everything on the basis of a single rationality with all its dimensions and thus bear a common responsibility for the correct use of reason. That was what we experienced.

The university was also proud of its two theological faculties. It was clear that they, too, by inquiring into the reasonableness of faith, were doing a job which belonged to the whole of the universitas scientiarum, even if not all of them were able to share the faith which theologians seek to correlate with reason as a whole. And neither was this inner solidarity in the cosmos of reason disturbed when it was once reported that a colleague had said that there was something odd about our university - namely that two of its faculties were devoted to something that did not exist - that is to say to God. That even in the face of such radical scepticism it was 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, was uncontested within the university as a whole.

All this came back to me when I read recently Professor Theodore Khoury's edition of that part of the dialogue between the erudite Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and an educated Persian on Christianity and Islam, which the two men held in the winter barracks near Ankara, most probably in 1391. It is thought that the emperor recorded the dialogue during the siege of Constantinople between 1394 and 1402, and it is therefore understandable that the emperor's own arguments are given in much greater detail than those of his dialogue partner. The dialogue covers the whole range of the construction of faith contained in the Bible and the Qur'an, and deals particularly with the images of God and man. It also necessarily deals with the relationship of the "three laws" or "three rules of life" as they were called: Old Testament; New Testament; Qur'an. I do not want to go into this now but merely wish to touch on one point, which was rather marginal in the whole debate but which fascinated me in connection with the subject of Faith and Reason, and which served me as a starting point for my reflections on this subject.

In the seventh round of the dialogue edited by Prof Khoury, the emperor starts to speak on the subject of the jihad - the holy war. The emperor certainly knew that in surah 2, 256 it says: "There is no compulsion in religion." Experts tell us that this is one of the early surahs from the time when Muhammad was himself still powerless and under threat. But the emperor was naturally also acquainted with the instructions on holy war recorded in the Qur'an, which came into being later. Without going into details such as the different treatment of those who have "The Book" and "infidels", he addresses his dialogue partner in a tone which sounds surprisingly harsh to our ears and says: "Show me just what Muhammad brought that was new and you will only find evil and inhuman things such as his command to spread the faith with the sword." After having lashed out in this way, the emperor goes on to substantiate in detail why spreading the faith by force is unreasonable. It is contrary to the nature of God and to the nature of the soul. "God is not pleased by blood," he says, "and not acting according to reason, not acting reasonably, is contrary to God's nature. Faith is a fruit of the soul and not of the body. Whosoever wants to lead someone else to faith, needs to be able to speak well and to reason in the proper way, but they do not need violence or threats ... In order to convince a reasonable soul, you do not need your arm, or weapons or means with which you can threaten them with death ..."

The decisive sentence in this argument against violent conversion is this: not acting reasonably is contrary to God's nature. The editor, Theodore Khoury, has the following to say on this: "For the emperor, who as a Byzantine had been formed by Greek philosophy, this sentence is self-evident, whereas for Muslim teaching God is absolutely transcendent. His will is not bound by any of our categories, even that of rationality." Khoury quotes the work of the well-known French Islam specialist R. Arnaldez, who points out that Ibn Hazm went so far as to declare that God is not bound to his own word and is not obliged to reveal the truth to us. If he so wanted, human beings would have to practise idolatry.

This is where our ways part as far as our understanding of God is concerned and consequently in the concrete practice of religion - a parting of the ways with which we are directly confronted today. Is it a Greek idea to believe that acting unreasonably is contrary to God's nature, or is that valid intrinsically and for all time? I believe that this is where the profound harmony between what is Greek in the best sense [of the word] and faith in God which is based on the Bible becomes visible. Modifying the first verse of Genesis - the first verse of Holy Scripture, that is - St John the Evangelist opened his Prologue with the words: "In the beginning was the Logos." That is exactly the word that the emperor uses: God acts with Logos. Logos is both reason and word - a reason which is creative and can communicate itself, precisely as reason. In this way St John gave us the final word on the biblical concept of God, in which all the often arduous and tortuous threads of biblical faith find their culmination and their synthesis, the Evangelist says. This encounter between the message of the Bible and Greek thought was no coincidence. The vision of St Paul who saw the roads to Asia blocked, and who one night saw and heard a Macedonian call to him: come over 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.

As it was, this rapprochement had long since begun. The mysterious name of God revealed from the burning thorn bush, which picked this God out of gods with many names, and the simple "I am", which denotes being, already challenges the myth that is in close analogy to the Socratic attempt to overcome and transcend the myth. The process that began with the thorn bush reaches a new maturity in the Old Testament in the years of exile, during which the God of Israel, who has become landless and cultless, proclaims Himself as the God of Heaven and Earth and introduces himself with the simple words "I am" - words that develop the thorn bush formula further. A sort of enlightenment goes hand in hand with this new recognition of God, which expresses itself in sharp mockery of those gods who are merely sorry man-made efforts (cf. psalm 115). Thus, in the Hellenistic period, biblical faith, although it was in sharp conflict with Hellenistic rulers who wanted to force it to adapt to the Greek way of life and its cult of the gods, encountered the best of Greek thought from within. Contacts were made resulting in mutual enrichment, which became particularly evident in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament - the Septuagint, which was produced in Alexandria, was more than a mere translation of the Hebrew text (and is perhaps therefore not very satisfactory): it is an independent textual witness and an important step in the history of revelation as this encounter was realised in a way that was of decisive significance for the birth and spread of Christianity. We are concerned here with the profound encounter between faith and reason, between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith but at the same time from the very nature of Greek thought that had merged with faith, Manuel II was able to declare that not acting "with the Logos" meant acting contrary to the nature of God.

For honesty's sake it must be noted here that in the late Middle Ages tendencies in theology developed that tore this synthesis between Greek thought and Christianity apart. In contrast to the so-called intellectualism of Augustine and Thomas, a voluntarism arose with Duns Scotus, which in further developments finally led to the claim that all we can know about God is His Voluntas ordinata. Beyond that there is God's freedom, in virtue of which he could also have done the opposite of everything he actually did. Such postulations would definitely seem to be drawing closer to those of Ibn Hazm and could lead to an image of a capricious God who is not bound to the truth or to goodness. The transcendence and otherness of God are exaggerated to such a degree that our reason and our sense for what is true and good no longer truly mirror God, whose inscrutable possibilities remain forever unattainable and hidden behind his actual decisions. In contrast, the Church's faith has always maintained that a real analogy exists between God and us, between His eternal Creator Spirit and our created reason in which - as the Fourth Lateran Council stated in 1215 - unlikenesses remain infinitely greater than likenesses, but that analogy and its language are not abolished.

Pushing God away into a pure and inscrutable voluntarism will not make God more divine; on the contrary, the truly divine God is the God who revealed himself as Logos, and who as Logos acted on our behalf. Certainly, love, as St Paul says, "transcends" knowledge and is consequently capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Ephesians 3,19), but it remains love of the God who is Logos. That is why our Christian worship, as St Paul says, is worship that is in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason (cf. Romans 12,1).

The inner rapprochement that took place between biblical faith and Greek philosophical thought is a decisive event not only from the standpoint of the history of religions but also from that of world history. And it is an event that reminds us of our duty today. Given this encounter, it is not surprising that Christianity, despite its origins and some significant developments in the East, finally took on its decisive character in Europe. Conversely one can say that this encounter, with the subsequent addition of 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 calls to de-Hellenise Christianity, calls which have increasingly dominated theological discussion since the beginning of the modern age. If one takes a closer look, three stages of the de-Hellenisation programme can be made out which, although they are connected, differ quite clearly from one another as far their motivation and aims are concerned.

De-Hellenisation first appears linked to the postulates of the Reformation in the sixteenth century. Looking at scholastic theology, the Reformers saw themselves confronted with a certain faith system wholly conditioned by philosophy, that is to say an articulation of the faith based on an alien system of thought. Faith no longer seemed to be a living historical Word, but seemed housed in a philosophical system. The principle of sola scriptura, on the other hand, sought faith in its pure original form as it is originally found in the biblical Word. Metaphysics appeared as a premise from elsewhere, from which one must liberate faith so that it can be its true self once more. With a radicalism that the Reformers could not foresee, Kant, when he stated that he needed to set thinking aside in order to make room for faith, carried this programme forward. He thus anchored faith exclusively in practical reason and denied it access to reality as a whole.

The liberal theology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries ushered in the second stage of the de-Hellenisation programme, with Adolf Harnack as its outstanding representative. When I was a student, and also in my early academic career, this programme was also highly influential in the theological faculties. Pascal's differentiation between the God of the philosophers and the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob served as its point of departure. In my inaugural lecture at Bonn University in 1959, I tried to tried to address the issue. I do not intend to 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 de-Hellenisation in comparison with the first stage. Harnack's central idea was to return to the simple man, Jesus, and to his simple message, which was over and above "theologisations" and "Hellenisations". This simple message represented the real culmination of the religious development of humankind. Jesus had said farewell to the cult in favour of morality. In the end he was described as the father of a humanitarian moral message.

Basically, Harnack wanted to bring Christianity back into harmony with modern reason by liberating it from those apparently philosophical and theological elements such as the belief in Christ's divinity and in the Triune God. The historical-critical exegesis of the New Testament in Harnack's view restored theology to its place within the university. Theology in his view is in its essence historical and consequently strictly scientific. What is established about Jesus through this critical method is, so to speak, an expression of practical reason and therefore justifiable within the university. Behind Karnack's thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason as classically expressed in Kant's Critiques, but meanwhile further radicalised by the impact of the natural sciences. To put it briefly, this modern concept of reason is based on a synthesis between Platonism (Cartesianism) and empiricism confirmed by the success of technology. On the one hand the mathematical structure of matter in its inner rationality, so to speak, is presupposed, which makes it possible to understand how matter works and how to use it. This fundamental premise is as it were the Platonic element in the modern understanding of nature. On the other hand, it is a case of making nature function for our purposes whereby only the possibility of verification or falsification through experimentation can yield ultimate certainty. The weight between the two poles can veer more to the one or to the other side depending on circumstance. A strict positivist [thinker] like J. Monod has described himself as a convinced Platonist.

This gives rise to two decisive fundamental principles for the issue we have raised. First, only that form of certainty that results from the interplay between mathematics and empiricism can be considered scientific. Anything that would claim to be science must be prepared to be measured by this yardstick. Hence the humanities, such as history, psychology, sociology and philosophy try to conform to this scientific canon. Another point that is important for our considerations, however, is that this method as such excludes the question of God and makes it appear as an unscientific or pre-scientific question. We are thus faced with a reduction of the radius of science and reason, which must be questioned.

I will come back to this question later. Meanwhile, it remains to be observed that from this point of view any claim on the part of theology to be "scientific" would reduce Christianity to a mere fragment of its former self. We must however say more: if all this comprises the whole of science, that means reducing human-kind itself, because specifically human questions about where we come from and where we are going to, questions raised by religion and ethics, then cannot find a place within the purview of collective reason as defined by "science" and must be relegated to the realms of the subjective. The subject then decides on the basis of his or her experiences what he or she considers tenable in matters of religion, and in the final instance, the "subjective" conscience becomes the sole arbiter of what is ethical. In this way, however, ethics and religion lose their power to create a community and fall prey to arbitrariness. This is a dangerous state of affairs for humankind. We can see this from those impending pathologies of religion and reason that must necessarily erupt when reason is narrowed down to such an extent that religious and ethical questions no longer concern it. Attempts to construct an ethic from the rules of evolution or from psychology and sociology are simply inadequate.

Before I draw the conclusions to the points I have been trying to make, I must just briefly refer to the that third stage of de-Hellenisation, which is now in progress. In view of our experience with multiculturalism one often hears people say nowadays that the synthesis with Hellenism, which the early Church achieved, was a preliminary inculturation of Christianity that must not 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 milieu. This thesis is not simply false, it is coarse and lacking in precision. The New Testament was written in Greek and reflects the encounter with the Greek spirit, which matured in that development that preceded it in the Old Testament. There are certainly elements in the evolution of the early Church that do not have to be integrated into all cultures. But the fundamental decisions that concern the relationship of faith, and what human reason is in search of, are part of faith itself. They belong to it and are its appropriate unfolding.

And so I come to my conclusion. The broad-brush attempt at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and "saying farewell" to the insights of the modern age. All that is great in modernity must be acknowledged unreservedly. We are all grateful for the enormous possibilities that it has opened up for humankind and for the progress in humanity that has been given us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is the will to be obedient to the truth, and as such an expression of a basic attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of what is Christian. The intention here is not to take anything back nor to criticise negatively but rather to broaden our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers that arise 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 that which is empirically falsifiable, and if we once again disclose its vast horizons. In this sense theology rightly belongs to the university not merely as a historical discipline or as one of the human sciences, but within the extensive dialogue of sciences as an inquiry into the rationality of faith.

Only thus will we become capable of a genuine dialogue of cultures which we are are in such urgent need of today. It is widely held in the Western world that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy that belong to it are universal. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their innermost convictions. A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures, is incapable of a 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 own methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply must 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 is a real question, and one which has to be referred to other planes and modes of thought - to philosophy and theology.

For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of humankind's religious traditions, in particular to those of the Christian faith, is a source of knowledge, and ignoring this would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding. I am here reminded of something Socrates said to Phaedo. In their earlier conversations, many false philosophical opinions were 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 their lives they despised and mocked all talk about being - but in this way they 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 that 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, is the programme with which a theology based on biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. "Not to act reasonably, not to act with Logos, is contrary to the nature of God," said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God and in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great Logos, this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. The great task of the university is to keep on rediscovering this.

The address Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections was given in German at Regensburg University, on Tuesday 12 September 2006.
Translated by Christa Pongratz-Lippitt

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