Thoughtful authors have reflected
on Benedict XVI’s Regensburg Address as prophetic in warning about Islamic
violence. And the deep reason behind that prophecy is the absence of faith in
Islam. Not that Muslims do not believe in God. They do, but not in the God of
Jesus Christ. The God of Jesus Christ is the Person of His Father. And He can
be accessed only by passing through the Son. Christ testified, “I and the
Father are one” (Jn. 10, 30) and “no one comes to the Father but through me”
(Jn. 14, 6). This means that there must be a relation to the Son such that one
must get out of oneself. And this involves a struggle, an anthropology of
self-transcendence and of lowering self. What’s more, it involves a death event
such that we understand the sacrament of Baptism as a triple drowning with the
emergence of a new self: “I live; no, not I. Christ lives in me” (Gal.2, 20).
Somehow in Christian faith one must go through a conversion of not trusting in
oneself and making a radical leap of acceptance. The self is left behind and
Another fills the void.
There
is need here for a boost from phenomenology so as to be able to differentiate
that there is a way of knowing that is consciousness
that accompanies the moral experience of the self going out of self. It is
other and complementary to the formation of concepts and ideas that are taken
by way of abstraction from sensible experience. So, there are two levels of
experience: that of the self in the moral act, and that of sensible things that
we abstract from and form concepts (ideas). Consciousness is the way of knowing
that has been confused with the self, itself. From Descartes on, the self has
been identified with consciousness, and therefore, what philosophers have
called idealism and relativism. This is a most logical error since
consciousness accompanies the self in its experience of itself as agent. But it
can be seen through as David Walsh puts it: “To know appearance as appearance
is already to go beyond mere appearance; it is already to know the
thing-in-itself.”[1]
Ratzinger
gives the prototypical example in the formulation of the act of faith in Jesus
Christ. Luke recounts Simon entering into the prayer of Christ to the Father
(Lk. 9, 18), and in so doing experiencing in himself what it is to act as
Christ acts (Lk. 9, 18), and therefore become another Christ. The result was
Christ asking him, “who do men say that I am…?” and “who do you say that I am?
And the response comes from (then) Simon’s interior experience of himself
having undergone the conversion (we understand to be faith) of having become another Christ. The proof is Christ
changing his name from Simon to Peter
(“rock”) as Christ’s true messianic name is “cornerstone.” Stone is known by
stone, since knowing emerges from such an ontological identity. The
pre-Christian mind of Simon becomes the Christian mind of Peter. That is, there
is an ontological change in Simon such that by going out himself as prayer to
the Father, he becomes another Christ, and experiences that change to have
taken place in himself. Hence, when Christ asks him “Who do you say that I am?”
Simon-now-become-Christ answers, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living
God” (Mt. 16, 16) because he has become consciousness of the ontological change
that had occurred in him. Christ now changes his name from Simon to Peter
(rock) as Christ is “cornerstone.”[2]
Consciousness,
which is reason, has expanded under the experience of self-transcendence by
being exposed to the ontological reality of being
“another Christ.” As being of the self changes and expands, reason broadens
from mere abstractive conceptualization to consciousness. This is the profound
reason in Benedict’s theological epistemology that reason cannot function truly
as reason[3]
without the self-transcendence and conversion of self to Christ, and this
because Christ is the meaning of person, and person is the meaning of being[4]. And this across the boards beyond
Christianity and any and all religion ideologically. The deep reason is that
Christian faith is not reducible to concepts and ideology because it is an
anthropology of self-giving and self-transcendence (guided conceptually by
Scripture and Magisterium), and, in truth, one cannot give the self totally to
death without Christ as Receptor. The normal denouement of Christian faith is
martyrdom (see Veritatis Splendor #89).
Hence, Christian faith is critical for reason to function because it is
the being of the believer that reason experiences and becomes conscious of. It
is this consciousness of the ontologically real self in which all subsequent
“knowing” of things is embedded and to which it gives meaning.
This consciousness – which is the
life of reason – is unavailable for Islam as religion. For them, God is totally
transcendent to man and cannot be accessed in any experiential way. However, it
could be made available if there were
an immanent cooperative work in which both sides enjoyed a common experience,
and therefore a common consciousness and which, when reflected upon, could
produce a common conceptualization and vocabulary such that there could be
dialogue. At that point, violence begins to vanish.
And let
me quickly add that we are not working with a full deck of cards either. Reason
in the Christian West has withered and been dumbed down by the self-imposed
limitation of positivism, and become nihilistic.[5] It is an empirical totalitarianism. We are
permitted to accept only objectified data reduced to empirical sensation and
abstracted to facticity. Reason groans
in the absence of Being and this thin
gruel. The criterion is subjective certainty, as if certainty for us was a guarantee of realism. Insofar as we are not
working with reason in full contact with the real which involves the
metaphysical self, we need to go through
serious examination and conversion.[6]
In the meantime, it is clear that force must be used in the Middle East to
defend persons against ISIS since they are literally out of control and
violent. But the long range is not force or control but common activities that pull
each side out of self and to regain and broaden reason.
[1]
David Walsh, “The Modern Philosophical Revolution – The Luminosity of
Existence,” Cambridge, (2008) 30. This is the deep reason Walsh holds that Kant
is the first to expose the existential epistemology of so called German
“Idealism” from Kant to Heidegger.
[2]
Cf. Ratzinger’s “Behold the Pierced One,” Ignatius (1986) 25-27.
[3] J.
Ratzinger, “A Christian Orientation in a Pluralistic Democracy?” in Church,
Ecumenism and Politics Crossroad (1988) 218. “What is essential is that reason shut in on
itself does not remain reasonable or rational, just as the state that aims tat
being perfect becomes tyrannical. Reason needs revelation in order to be able
to be effective as reason. The connection between the state and its Christian
foundations is imperative precisely if it is to remain the state and be
pluralist.”
[4]
“In
special way, the person constitutes a privileged locus for the encounter with
being, and hence with metaphysical enquiry… We face a great challenge at the
end of this millennium to move from phenomenon to foundation, a step as
necessary as it is urgent We cannot stop short at experience [both sensible and
moral] alone; even if experience does reveal the human being’s interiority and
spirituality, speculative thinking must penetrate to the spiritual core and the
ground from which it rises. Therefore, a philosophy which shuns metaphysics
would be radically unsuited to the task of mediation in the understanding of
revelation;” John Paul II, Fides et Ratio #83.
[5]
“Reason, rather than voicing the human orientation toward truth, has wilted
unter the weight of so much knowledge and little by little has lost the
capacity to lift its gaze to the heights, not daring to rise to the truth of
being;” John Paul II, Fides et Ratio #5.
[6]
Consider Benedict XVI’s four major talks on broadening
reason to the university La Sapienza, the Sixth European Symposium
of University Professors, "A New Humanism for
Europe. The Role of the Universities" and Regensburg.
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