Faith, reason and the university

Once the dust has been allowed to settle on the controversy surrounding the Pope's lecture at the University of Regensburg, the central message he intended to convey will emerge in a better light.

The message is that it is not just possible but also necessary to think and argue rationally about matters of faith. The Pope also claims that Kant's project of "setting reason aside in order to make room for faith" impoverishes faith as much as it limits the use of reason; and that the university has an important role to play in fostering the kind of critical discourse that leads to an informed debate about such matters.

There is a danger of this important message being totally or partially eclipsed by what is clearly a mere corollary to it, namely that no-one can impose faith on others by violent means. (This follows logically from the fact that it is simply impossible to make anyone believe anything against their will.)

Once this central point had been made, there was hardly any need for the conversation between a 14th century Byzantine emperor and his Persian interlocutor to be mentioned at all, let alone allowed to occupy centre stage; and fewer eyebrows (and fists) would have been raised had the subject of holy wars been dealt with on some other occasion, and a bit more tactfully too.

In his lecture Pope Benedict speaks about the "profound harmony" between Greek philosophy and the biblical understanding of faith in God, and of the "intrinsic necessity" of a rapprochement between genuine enlightenment and religion. He is highly critical of those trends in medieval philosophy and theology that present God as "absolutely transcendent", in the sense that "his will is not bound up with any of our categories, even that of rationality".

He warns against the dangers inherent in the image of a capricious God, stemming from a false notion of God's freedom, one "in virtue of which he could have done the opposite of everything he has actually done". And he reserves his strongest criticism for those who think they can break the synthesis with Greek thought achieved in the early Church in order "to return to the simple message of the New Testament". This thesis, the Pope says, "is not only false; it is coarse and lacking in precision".

Thinking rationally about matters of faith, and constantly deepening one's knowledge of them, is seen by the Pope as one of the roles of the faculty of theology within the university. In Bonn, where he began teaching in 1959, there were two such faculties; and the Pope jokingly tells the story of one of his colleagues who had said that there was "something wrong" about the university: "it had two faculties devoted to something that did not exist".

He then goes on to say 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".

Right at the beginning of his lecture, the Pope describes life at the University of Bonn as it used to be when he was teaching there. The story deserves to be retold in full.

"The various chairs had neither assistants nor secretaries, but in recompense there was much contact with students and in particular among the professors themselves. We would meet before and after lessons in the rooms of the teaching staff. There was a lively exchange with historians, philosophers, philologists and, naturally, between the two theological faculties.

"Once a semester there was a dies academicus, where professors from every faculty appeared before the students of the entire university, making possible a genuine experience of universitas - the experience, in other words, of the fact that, despite our specialisations which, at times, made it difficult for us to communicate with one other, we made up a whole, working in every field on the basis of a single rationality with its various aspects, and sharing responsibility for the right use of reason. This reality became a lived experience."

There, in a nutshell, is the Pope's idea of the nature and function of a university. Professor Ratzinger must have thoroughly enjoyed teaching in Bonn.

At the beginning of a new academic year we might do well to ask ourselves whether this genuine experience of universitas as the Pope describes it is still possible at our university; whether we think it is desirable; and, in that case, whether we can do anything to make it happen.

Professor Friggieri is the head of the Philosophy Department at the University.