Benedict's Point?

The pope's speech at the University of Regensburg not only provoked outrage among Muslims, it was also...relevant to this blog!  As David Nirenburg (New Republic) analyzes it, it was really all about the Greeks (or rather, about Athens and Jerusalem):

In order to understand why, we need to unpack the pope's learned thesis, which will be immediately intelligible to connoisseurs of German academic theology and to almost no one else. (The pope's website promises that footnotes are forthcoming.) Simply put, the theological argument is this: Catholic Christianity is the only successful blend of "Jewish" obedience to God (faith) with Greek philosophy (reason). This marriage of faith and reason, body and spirit, is what Benedict, following a long Christian tradition, calls the "logos," the "word of God." 

The pope chose to make his point about the special greatness of his own faith through the negative example of Islam, which he claims has not achieved the necessary synthesis. Like Judaism, Islam in his view has always been too concerned with absolute submission to God's law, neglecting reason.

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The role of Islam in Benedict's argument is important, but it is worth noting that it is not the only religion the pope finds deficient in reason. Even within Christianity, the marriage of faith and reason has often been strained by attempts at what Benedict calls "de-Hellenization," or de-Greeking. Luther's move toward faith, for example, occasioned his attack on the Catholic philosophical movement known as Scholasticism. This meant that much of Protestant Christianity became unbalanced, inclining too far away from "Greek" reason and toward "Jewish" faith, while the Catholic Church strove to safeguard the proper balance. And of course there have been movements inclining too far in the opposite direction, the most important of these being the triumphant "scientific" or "practical" reason of modernity.

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Any Islamic historian, any historian of religion, could easily object that Benedict has his history wrong. It is easy to show that Islam, too, was heavily influenced by Greek philosophy: indeed, the Catholic West would not have known much of that philosophy without the Islamic transmission of the ancient texts in Arabic translation. Aquinas learned his Aristotle from Muslim philosophers such as Averroës and Avicenna (as did Maimonides). And what kind of historian, what kind of serious intellectual, pretends to characterize a religion as vast and diverse as Islam with a single quotation from an embattled medieval Christian polemicizing against it?

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There is another problem. Benedict's plea for Hellenization draws on a German philosophical tradition--stretching from Hegel's The Spirit of Christianity through Weber's sociology of religions to the post-World War II writings of Heidegger--whose confrontations of Hebraism with Hellenism contributed to, rather than prevented, violence against non-Christians on a scale unheard of in the Muslim world. We may grant that such an intellectual dependence is hard to avoid, given the deep and abiding influence of this theological and philosophical tradition on the modern humanities and social sciences. From a Eurocentric point of view, we might even concede the pope's well-worn claim that, as Heine put it in 1841, the "harmonious fusion of the two elements," the Hebraic and the Hellenic, was "the task of all European civilization."

Comments

[Gaius]

I agree the Pope would have been wise to avoid saying anything about Islam. I don't think the religion is the problem as are the people who use it to keep others under their thumb. But there is a big clash coming between the West and middle eastern nations if things within those countries don't change. It's not the religion but the radicalization of politics combined with religion that causes a great divide between us. The West has been successful and our culture has succeded in many ways middle eastern cultures have not. If you doubt this just ask the millions of muslims immigrating to the West why they are leaving. How we bring them into the modern world may not be peaceful especially if we wait to do it. let us hope for the best.

[Paschall]

Lost time is never found again. Paschall.

[Tia Marks]

Hello Classics,
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[sakthi]

I think if you look back the every religions or country's history, everyone will have their own merits and demerits..So its not a clever thing to do analyze of the history,don't think you're better than others..That too people like Pope(who're well popular) shouldn't talk about these kind of issues and make someone hurts...
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