Coherence

As mentioned below, the whole Muslim revolt erupting over these days came from an address Pope Benedict gave in Germany that — it’s probably safe to say — most of the world has not read or heard. What’s particularly fascinating as an overview of this whole thing is that the Holy Father’s address that day was titled “Faith, Reason and the University.” That faith and reason have to co-exist has been a constant truth Benedict has emphasized in his pontificate.

It’s a theme that’s been coming up a lot in other news, too.

Like this article on what we’ve learned since 9/11.

The fifth commemoration of 9/11 brought forth the expected ceremonies and painful memories. It also generated a particularly thoughtful column in the British magazine Spiked by Frank Furedi, a purported atheist. Atheists may be especially sensitive to a lack of faith in others. Furedi thinks that a “lack of clarity about what the West stands for” has been made excruciatingly evident by the reaction to 9/11, which “exposed and brought to the surface the difficulty Western society has in giving meaning to its way of life.”

Furedi writes: “For a brief moment, many observers believed that 9/11 would represent a rallying point and provide the West with a sense of mission. However, in the absence of a coherent system of meaning, the West struggles to promote its own values; instead, it relies on tawdry advertising and marketing… This focus on improving ‘the image’ indicated that the US was not prepared to engage in a serious battle of ideas.”

It sounds as if Furedi would agree with the statement of President George W. Bush in a recent Wall Street Journal interview about the importance of the war of ideas. Bush said that “the only way to make sure your grandchildren are protected is to win the battle of ideas, is to defeat the ideology of hatred and resentment.”

How are we doing on that, right about now? Who decides? What do you have when an opposing ideology won’t even enter the arena of ideas, to even engage in the battle over things like freedom of religion, and the dignity of the human person? Incoherence, for one.

In that address Benedict gave in Regensburg – which should be famous for its ideas and not notorious for its distortion – he talked about coherence. Looking back at his time spent teaching there, the Holy Father said the university was proud of its two theological faculties and their “shared responsibility for the right use of reason.” They studied the “reasonableness of faith.”

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.

Profound sense of coherence. That’s what you get when you operate “within the universe of reason.” Which is why you’re “not troubled,” says Benedict, even in the face of “radical skepticism,” when you ground all questions and challenges to faith on the premise of reason.

Has that word lost its meaning and “relevance” in the world these day? No…

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.

Some people cannot allow the question of their beliefs about God to be held up to the test of reason. Benedict says that truth fears no question, and dialogue can only bring coherence to cultures.

Interestingly, he referred to that Byzantine emperor again at the end of his address, the one that got him in so much trouble when he quoted Manuel II earlier on Islam. But nobody is talking about this part:

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.

In other words, faith and reason fear no question. How will we ever get this down to a level of dialogue?