Thoughts On Dialogue With Muslims
What’s the crisis? Use
force against Islamists and keep them out of the country, or …. What?
Archbishop of Mosul (Nineveh): "Our sufferings today are a prelude of
those that you, Europeans and Western Christians, will also suffer in the near
future," said the Archbishop of Mosul in an interview with Corriere della
Sera. "I lost my diocese. The physical setting of my
apostolate has been occupied by Islamic radicals who want us converted or dead.
But my community is still alive.
"Please
try to understand us. Your liberal and democratic principles are worth
nothing here. You must consider again our reality in the Middle East,
because you are welcoming in your countries an ever growing number of Muslims.
He
warns us, "Also you are in danger. You must take strong an
courageous decisions, even at the cost of contradicting your principles.
The
archbishop continues: "You think all men are equal, but that is not
true: Islam does not say that all men are equal. Your values are
not their values. If you do not understand this soon enough, you will
become the victims of the enemy you have welcomed in your home."
Pope Francis: EG
EG: #252. Our relationship with the followers
of Islam has taken on great importance, since they are now significantly
present in many traditionally Christian countries, where they can freely
worship and become fully a part of society. We must never forget that they
“profess to hold the faith of Abraham, and together with us they adore the one,
merciful God, who will judge humanity on the last day”.198 The sacred
writings of Islam have retained some Christian teachings; Jesus and Mary
receive profound veneration and it is admirable to see how Muslims both young
and old, men and women, make time for daily prayer and faithfully take part in
religious services. Many of them also have a deep conviction that their life,
in its entirety, is from God and for God. They also acknowledge the need to
respond to God with an ethical commitment and with mercy to- wards those
most in need.
Thesis: “What is essential is that reason shut in on itself does not
remain reasonable or rational… Reason needs revelation in order to be able to
be effective as reason.”[1]
To go right to the
point, Christian faith as the supreme act of moral self-transcendence, i.e. as
a moral action, is accompanied by a consciousness of the good. As John Paul II quoted
Christ in “Veritatis Splendor,” “No one is good but God alone” (Mk. 10, 18),
and therefore there is knowledge of reality only in the experience of Christ
who is “the image of the invisible God, the first born of every creature”
through whom and for whom “all things have been created” and in whom “all
things hold together.” (Col. 1, 15-17). That is, the act of Christian faith is
the act that puts us supremely in contact with reality, and in so doing, gives
us full use of our reason, and without which we do not and cannot. That is, we become
reality when we go out of ourselves and become like Christ Who is
out of Himself. In that very act, we experience and become conscious of what is
really real. And it turns out to be an experience of being “good,”[2] and this in turn generates
hope and joy. There is a remark of Joseph Ratzinger that always stands out in
my mind for the radical nature of it: “What is essential is that reason shut in
on itself does not remain reasonable or rational… Reason needs revelation in
order to be able to be effective as reason.”[3]
Let me be clearer. Faith does not
give us primarily clear ideas. It is an action that is the giving of our entire
selves – even to the point of martyrdom. What we do in Christian faith is to
master ourselves, get possession of ourselves and go out of ourselves such as
to be “like” Christ. That going out of self is an action sacramentally driven
by Baptism which through a lifetime of struggle renders us to be “other
Christs.” That is realism.[4]
It is the grounding experience of
becoming reasonable.
What is the real state
of affairs? Pope Francis speaks of openness to Islam. John Paul II in “Crossing
the
Threshold of Hope”
speaks the same. The Muslims believe in the Transcendent God. But this
Transcendent God is so
transcendent that He could never become man and immanent as one of us.
“Didn’t Christ perhaps
become ‘a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles’ (1 Cor. 1,
23)? Precisely because
He called His Father, because He revealed Him so openly in Himself, He
could not but elicit
the impression that it was too much… Man was no longer able to tolerate
such closeness, and
thus the protests began. This great protest has precise names – first it is
called the Synagogue,
and then Islam. Neither can accept a God who is so human. ‘It is not
suitable to speak of
God in this way.’ They protest. ‘He must remain absolute transcendent; He
must remain pure
Majesty, Majesty full of mercy, certainly, but not to the point of paying for
the
faults of His own
creatures, for their sins.’”1
God, they say, is so
great that He cannot become man. He cannot become one of us. But the
most astounding event
that could possibly be imagined is that God, in fact, became man. The Creator
of
all things has become part of
His own creation. The Whole is in the part. The Eternal is in the temporal.
The Necessary is in
the contingent. The ontological ramifications of this event are immense. It
means
that the God Who has
revealed Himself as Three Persons has taken on a human created nature as the
Second Person and
lived out His Personal Divinity as man. This changes the very meaning of
reality since
it cannot be other
than that Christ is the absolute center and meaning of all creation. In the
words of St.
Paul, it means that “He
is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of every creature. For in him
were created all things in the heavens and on the earth, things visible and
things invisible…All things have been created through and unto him, and he is
before all creatures, and in him all things hold together” (Col.
1, 15.-17). And since knowing depends on being, not only what we know, but the
way we know will be determined by this.
Therefore, if the God
of Jesus Christ is Creator, and reveals Himself as Three Persons so
intimately related
that one cannot be without the other, and yet are irreducibly different and
free, then
the deepest meaning of
Reality is Person, and Person in relation, either as Father, Son and Spirit.
The
way Benedict XVI drove
this home was to describe the Person of the Father not as “Father” or
Individual,
but as the action of
engendering the Son. That is, “’Father’ is purely a concept of relationship.
Only in
being-for the other is
he Father; in his own being-in-himself he is simply God. Person is the pure
relation
of being related,
nothing else. Relationship is not something extra added to the person, as it is
with us; it only exists at all as relatedness. “And so, to be father “is
identical with the act of giving. Only as this act is it person, and therefore
it is not the giver but the act of giving…”2
This turns the
world as we experience it upside down. If the being ultimately determining all
things as real beings, and holding them all together, is not an individual
substance as they appear to be, then the way of knowing is thoroughly changed.
And so it is. The way to know Jesus Christ, the Son of the living God – and
therefore a pure relation to the Father -, as the Son of the living God, will
demand that we become relational ourselves. That is, the only way to know Jesus
Christ as Son is to enter into a specific way of knowing which is called
Christian faith. And Christian faith is relational as Christ, the Son, is
relational. And this because like is known by like. Knowing means becoming one
reality with the other. If the person or object to be known is at His root,
relational, then the knower must become relational.
Robert Barron writes that “what follows from these breathtaking descriptions
(of Colossians 1, 15-17 and the Prologue of St. John’s Gospel) is a centrally
important epistemic claim: that Jesus cannot be measured by a criterion outside
of himself or viewed from perspective higher than himself.”[5]
But what if one is not
Christian and believer in Jesus Christ? Since faith is the anthropological act
of going out of self –
or self-transcendence , then anyone who truly goes out of self to God or other
can
know the God-man,
perhaps not as a Christian and call Him Christ, but he will “know” Him.
Islam
Islam is “Faith” as Conceptual Ideology, not Anthropology:
The reality is that
Islam does not live faith as an anthropological act. It is a conceptual act
that leads to prayer and fasting, but this worship more than faith. John Paul
II suggested this when he said: “Whoever knows the Old and New
Testaments, and then reads the Koran, clearly sees the process by which
it completely reduces Divine Revelation. It is impossible not to note the
movement away from what God said about Himself, first in the Old Testament
through the Prophets, and then finally in the New Testament through His Son. In
Islam all the richness of God’s self-revelation, which constitutes the heritage
of the Old and New Testaments, has definitely been set aside.
“Some of the most beautiful names in the human language are given to the God of
the Koran, but He is ultimately a God outside of the world, a God who is only
Majesty, never Emmanuel, God-with-us. Islam is not a religion of
redemption. There is no room for the Cross and the Resurrection. Jesus is
mentioned, but only as a prophet who prepares for the last prophet, Muhammad.
There is also mention of Mary, His Virgin Mother, but the tragedy of redemption
is completely absent. For this reason not only the theology but also the
anthropology of Islam is very distant from Christianity.”[1]
This is the reason that the Koran is recited, not read. David
Burrell remarks: “We have already seen how the Qur’an is
not so much read as recited in the Muslim community, so that verses chanted and
heard in a recurring fashion have the effect of shaping lives by offering
spontaneous phrases with which to guide action. And quite consciously so, since
the term Qur’an means `a reciting,’ and so it was delivered to
Muhammad, who was then told often enough to recite what he
heard. Western writers cannot resist the expression `sacramental’
when remarking on the role which recitation of the Qur’an plans
in Muslim life, for `reciting of the sacred words is itself a participation in
God’s speech.”[
2] In this regard,
Sandro Magister’s remark that “the Koran is not the equivalent of
the Christian Scriptures: it is the equivalent of Christ” is
apposite.
Since Christian faith is an obedience of self-gift, and therefore, free, it is
significant that faith in Islam is not free. And the result of this is the
failure to have any notion of true “secularity” based on the “consciousness” of
the self-transcending believer and the consequent dualism of Church and State
as consequence. Then-Cardinal Ratzinger had this comment:
“The modern idea of freedom is thus a legitimate product of the
Christian environment; it could not have developed anywhere else. Indeed, one
must add that it cannot be separated from this Christian environment and
transplanted into any other system, as is shown very clearly today in the
renaissance of Islam; the attempt to graft on to Islamic societies what
are termed western standards cut loose from their Christian foundations
misunderstands the internal logic of Islam as well as the historical logic to
which these western standards belong, and hence this attempt was condemned to
fail in this form. The construction of society in Islam is theocratic,
and therefore monist and not dualist; dualism,
which is the precondition for freedom, presupposes for its part the logic of
the Christian thing.
In practice this
means that it is only where the duality of Church and state, of the sacral and
the political authority, remains maintained in some form or another that the
fundamental pre-condition exists for freedom. Where the Church itself becomes
the state freedom becomes lost. But also when the Church done away with as a
pubic and publicly relevant authority, then too freedom is extinguished,
because there the state once again claims completely for itself the
justification of morality; in the profane post-Christian world it does not
admittedly do this in the form of sacral authority but as an ideological
authority – that means that the state becomes the party, and since there can no
longer be any other authority of the same rank it once again becomes total
itself. The ideological state is totalitarian; it must become
ideological if it is not balanced by a free but publicly recognized authority
of conscience. When this kind of duality does not exist the totalitarian system
in unavoidable.
“With this the
fundamental task of the Church’s political stance, as I understand it, has been
defined; its aim must be to maintain this balance of a dual system as the
foundation of freedom. Hence the Church must make claims and demands on public
law and cannot simply retreat into the private sphere. Hence it must also take
care on the other hand that Church and state remain separated and that
belonging to the Church clearly retains its voluntary character.”[3]
Benedict XVI’s
conclusion at Regensburg was a recovery of reason which consisted in broadening
it by a living Christian faith and/or the anthropology of service to the other
which is the same. Reason has been limited and darkened in the West by the
self-imposed scientific method which imposes the imperative of objective certainty
as the criterion of truth.[6] Islam lives in an a priori darkness of reason in its very
understanding of the transcendence of God. Benedict’s great project during the
years 2006-2008 was “the broadening of reason.”
[1] John Paul II, “Crossing the Threshold of
Hope,” Knopf (1994) 92-93.
[2] David Burrell, “Freedom and Creation in
Three Traditions,” UNDP (1993) 180.
[3] J. Ratzinger, “Church, Ecumenism and
Politics – Theology and the Church’s Political Stance,” Crossroad (1988)
162-163.
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At the Sixth European Symposium of
University Professors
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Pope Benedict XVI
Widening the
horizons of rationality
On Saturday,
7 June [2008], the Holy Father met with participants at the Sixth European
Symposium for University Professors in the Vatican's Clementine Hall. The
Symposium was taking place in Rome from 5-8 June with an estimated 400
university professors participating from 26 European countries. The following
is a translation of the Pope's Address, given in Italian.
Your
Eminence,
Venerable Brothers in the Episcopate and in the Priesthood, Illustrious Professors,
For me it is
a motive of profound joy to meet you on the occasion of the Sixth European
Symposium for University Professors on the theme: "Widen the horizons of
rationality. Perspectives for Philosophy" promoted by the Professors of
the Universities of Rome and organized by the Office for Campus Ministry of
the Vicariate of Rome in collaboration with the regional and provincial
Institutions and the Municipality of Rome.
I thank
Cardinal Camillo Ruini and Prof. Cesare Mirabelli who have interpreted your
sentiments, and I address my cordial welcome to all those present.
In continuity
with last year's European meeting of university Lecturers, your Symposium
takes up a very important academic and cultural theme. I would like to
express my gratitude to the organizing committee for this choice which
permits us, among other things, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the
publication of the Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio of my beloved
Predecessor Pope John Paul II.
Already on
that occasion 50 civil and ecclesial philosophy professors of the public and
pontifical universities of Rome manifested their gratitude to the Pope with a
declaration which confirmed the urgency of relaunching the study of
philosophy in universities and schools.
Sharing this
concern and encouraging fruitful collaboration among the professors of
various Roman and European athenaeums, I wish to address a particular
invitation to philosophy professors to continue with confidence in
philosophical research, investing intellectual energy and involving new
generations in this task.
The events
which took place in the last 10 years since the Encyclical's publication have
further delineated the historical and cultural scene in which philosophical
research called to enter. Indeed, the crisis of modernity is not synonymous
with the decline in philosophy; instead philosophy must commit itself to a
new path of research to comprehend the true nature of this crisis (cf. Address
to European Meeting of University Lecturers, 23 June 2007, L'Osservatore
Romano English Edition, 11 July 2007, p. 6) and to identify new
prospectives toward which to be oriented.
An
'anthropological question'
Modernity, if
well understood, reveals an "anthropological question" that
presents itself in a much more complex and articulated way than what has
taken place in the philosophical reflections of the last centuries, above all
in Europe.
Without
diminishing the attempts made, much still remains to be probed and understood.
Modernity is not simply a cultural phenomenon, historically dated; in reality
it implies a new planning, a more exact understanding of human nature.
It is not
difficult to gather from the writings of authoritative thinkers an honest
reflection on the difficulties that arise in the resolution to this prolonged
crisis. Giving credit to some authors' proposals in regard to religions and
in particular to Christianity is an evident sign of the sincere desire to
exist from the self-sufficiency philosophical reflection.
From the
beginning of my Pontificate I have listened attentively to the requests that
reach me from the men and women of our time and, in view of their
expectations, I have wished to offer a pointer for research that seems to me
capable of raising interest to relaunch philosophy and its irreplaceable role
in the academic and cultural world.
You have made
it the object of reflection of your Symposium: it is the proposal to
"widen the horizons of rationality". This allows me to reflect on
it with you as among friends who desire to pursue a common journey.
I would like
to begin with a deep conviction which I have expressed many times:
"Christian faith has made its clear choice: against the gods of religion
for the God of philosophers, in other words against the myth of mere custom
for the truth of being" (cf. J. Ratzinger, Introduction to
Christianity, Ch. 3).
Meet the
reality of person
This
affirmation, that reflects the Christian journey from its dawning, shows
itself completely actual in the cultural historical context that we are
living. In fact, only beginning from this premise, which is historic and
theological at the same time, is it possible to meet the new expectations of
philosophical reflection.
The risk that
religion, even Christianity, be instrumentalized as a surreptitious
phenomenon is very concrete even today. But Christianity, as I recalled in
the Encyclical Spe Salvi is not only "informative", but
"performative" (cf. n. 2). This means that from the beginning
Christian faith cannot be enclosed within an abstract world of theories, but
it must descend into the concrete historic experience that reaches humanity
in the existence most profound truth of his.
This
experience, conditioned by new cultural and ideological situations, is the place
in which theological research must evaluate and upon which it is urgent to
initiate a fruitful dialogue with philosophy.
The
understanding of Christianity as a real transformation of human existence, if
on the one hand it impels theological reflection to a new approach in regard
to religion, on the other, it encourages it not to lose confidence in being
able to know reality.
The proposal
to "widen the horizons of rationality", therefore, must not simply
be counted among the new lines of theological and philosophical thought, but
it must be understood as the requisite for a new opening onto the
reality that the human person in his uni-totality is, rising above ancient
prejudices and reductionisms, to open itself also to the way toward a true
understanding of modernity.
Humanity's
desire for fullness cannot be disregarded. The Christian faith is called to
take on this historical emergency by involving the men and women of good will
in a simple task. The new dialogue between faith and reason, required today,
cannot happen in the terms and in the ways in which it happened in the past.
If it does not want to be reduced to a sterile intellectual exercise, it must
begin from the present concrete situation of humanity and upon this develop a
reflection that draws from the ontological-metaphysical truth.
Dear friends,
you have before you a very exacting journey. First of all, it is necessary to
promote high-level academic centres in which philosophy can dialogue with
other disciplines, in particular with theology, favouring new, suitable
cultural syntheses to orient society's journey.
The European
dimension of your meeting in Rome — indeed, you come from 26 countries — can
favour a truly fruitful comparison and exchange. I trust that the Catholic
academic institutions are ready to open true cultural laboratories.
I would also
like to invite you to courage youth to engage in philosophical studies,
opportunely favouring initiatives with a university orientation.
I am certain
that the new generations, with their enthusiasm, will know how to respond
generously to the expectations of the Church and society.
In a few days
I will have the joy opening the Pauline Year, during which we will celebrate
the Apostle to the Gentiles: I hope that this unique initiative constitutes for
all of you an opportune occasion to rediscover, in the footsteps of the great
Apostle, the historic fecundity of the Gospel and its extraordinary
potentiality for contemporary culture too.
With this
wish, I impart my Blessing to you all.
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Taken from:
L'Osservatore Romano Weekly Edition in English 11 June 2008, page 6 |
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What’s the thesis? The
way of knowing depends on the way of being. The Christian way of being is
relational as self-transcendent. It demands a going out of self in obedience to
God and service and love for the other. This self-transcendence is an experience
that is accompanied by a consciousness that we have not been aware of for the
duration of the Enlightenment, say from the 15th or 16th
century to the present day. Descartes, fixing on that consciousness, confused
it with the metaphysical reality of the person, and left us with an idealism
without reality and a relativism without absolutes. That is, he left us with the
person as consciousness.
German “idealism” from Kant onward has been
confused with that error when in reality it is really an existential a recovery
from it. Phenomenology is the culmination of that recovery where the notion of “experience”
takes pride of place, and the experience of the self in the moral moment
constitute a full recovery of realism in the being of the acting person.
[1] J.
Ratzinger, “A Christian Orientation In a Pluralistic Democracy?” in Church,
Ecumenism and Politics” Crossroad, New York (1988) 218.
[2] Every
experience of the “Good” is the experience of becoming Christ. I am proposing
that the experience of the self is the experience of reality, the absolute,
truth, and God. It is becoming Christ as understood in Colossians 1,
15-17. Such an experience reveals “the
other” to also be good and worthy of dialogue – which increases the
self-giving, and the goodness. This is why Francis wants to talk with the
atheists – and everybody.
[3] J.
Ratzinger, “A Christian Orientation In a Pluralistic Democracy?” in Church,
Ecumenism and Politics” Crossroad, New York (1988) 218.
[4]
Consider how much sense this makes when Benedict XVI, in a keynote address to
the Roman Synod on the Word of God: “Furthermore, the Word of God is the foundation of everything, it
is the true reality. And to be realistic, we must rely upon this reality. We
must change our idea that matter, solid things, things we can touch, are the
more solid, the more certain reality. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount the
Lord speaks to us about the two possible foundations for building the house of
one's life: sand and rock. The one who builds on sand builds only on visible
and tangible things, on success, on career, on money. Apparently these are the
true realities. But all this one day will pass away. We can see this now with
the fall of large banks: this money disappears, it is nothing. And thus all
things, which seem to be the true realities we can count on, are only realities
of a secondary order. The one who builds his life on these realities, on
matter, on success, on appearances, builds upon sand. Only the Word of God is
the foundation of all reality, it is as stable as the heavens and more than the
heavens, it is reality. Therefore, we must change our concept of realism. The
realist is the one who recognizes the Word of God, in this apparently weak
reality, as the foundation of all things. Realist is the one who builds his
life on this foundation, which is permanent. Thus the first verses of the Psalm
invite us to discover what reality is and how to find the foundation of our
life, how to build life” [October 6, 2008].
[5]
Robert Barron. “The Priority of Christ, Toward a Postliberal Catholicism,”
Brazos Press (2007) 135
[6]
John Paul II, with Ratzinger beside him, wrote in Fides et Ratio #5: “reason,
rather than voicing the human orientation toward truth, has wilted under 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. Abandoning
the investigation of being, modern philosophical research has concentrated
instead upon human knowing. Rather than make use of the human capacity to know
the truth, modern philosophy has preferred to accentuate the ways in which this
capacity is limited and conditioned.”
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