BENEDICT XVI: NEWS, PAPAL TEXTS, PHOTOS AND COMMENTARY

From the diocesan information service of Rome, a report on the series of seminars on Benedict XVI's three great secular discourses.

Faith and reason
in the Regensburg lecture
by Daniele Piccini
Translated from


The dialectic between faith and reason, analyzed by Pope Benedict XVI in his address at the University of Regensburg in September 2006, was the subject of the first of three meetings arranged by the diocesan office for pastoral ministry in universities, dedicated to a thelogical reading of the Pope's three great secular discourses - Regensburg 2006, Paris 2008, and London 2010 - at the Lateran Apostolic Palace.

The rector of the Pontifical Lateran University, Mons. Enrico Dal Colvolo, spoke of "The religious question among pagans and Christians", showing how the latter availed of philosophical tools to confront the discourse about the divine which the religion of the pagans still considered to have a mythical basis:

"The Christian faith made a clear choice against the gods of religion for the God of philosophy, that is to say, against the myth of habit, for the truth of being", Dal Covolo said.

"From its origins, Christianity joined the question of God with the truth of being, in an inexhaustible dialog between reason and faith, in which reason consistently makes itself available to mystery and thus 'widens iself'."

Francesco D’Agostino, professor of the philosophy of law at the University of Rome in Tor Vergata, discussed the Pope's admonition to science not to lose its way in reductionist scientism.

Benedict XVI's warning to science to "defend itself from itself" was not to refashion scientific methodology: "Scientists should not take a step backward. Science is true but insufficient in the face of reality. The enlargement of 'vision' in its metaphysical, existential and esthetic aspects has ethical repercussions. It is right to obey the truth of things. But not as slaves. Rather, as children obeying the father. We cannot know things that we do not love".

Giorgio Israel, professor of mathematics at La Sapienza University, demonstrated the intimate solidarity between Greek rationalism and the three monotheistic religions, representes culturally adn historically by Maimonides, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Averroes. A union that lasted to the modern era.

"Galileo's affirmation that the world is mathematical," said Israel, "was truly the result of the theological solidality between religion and science. However, Galileo's principle was extremized and misunderstood to the point that it was made to mean that not only the physical world but every aspect of the world was mathematical, thereby inaugurating that positivistic reductionism and that 'self-decreed limitation of reason' denounced by the Pope".

The best defense against relativism, Israel concluded, consists in admitting "a rationality and an idea of objectivity that is wider than that suggested by scientfic canons behind which there is no room for the idea of God".

Cardinal Agostino Vallini, the Pope's Vicar for Rome, expressed the Pope's 'satisfaction' in being told about these philosophical discussions.

He recalled how to the Christian martyrs, dying, had defined the sphere of the individual conscience against the impositions of the pagan religio".

The second encounter, on the Pope'e address at the College des Bernardins in paris in September 2008 will be held on January 27, and dedicated to "European culture, its origin and prospects".


I have so far found Prof. Israel's lecture online and will post as soon as translated. The second of the seminars - focused on the College des Bernardins discourse, took place last night. And excerpts from one of the speakers are published in today's issue of the OR.



'The monk in us':
Reflections on Benedict XVI's 'lectio magistralis'
at the College des Bernardins, Paris
by Giuseppe della Torre
Translated from the 1/28/11 issue of


That Christianity gave a fundamental contribution to shape the European identity, and therefore, to its culture, is an undeniable historical fact which can ignored or downright rejected - as it has often lately - only from partisan ideological poisitions

Between late antiquity and the Middle Ages, there were other operative factors that contributed to the European identity: classical Greco-Roman culture, along with Germanic, Celtiv and Salvic cultures, were also placed into the crucible of Christianity.

Religion forged the culture of the continent, the basis - at least for western Europe - of its very political unity in the Middle Ages. And culture has its language, its paradigms, its values: it modulates sensibilities and promotes intellectual and material processes, Such processes take place over a long time but their roots are profound.

Even models change. For example, it has been rightly observed by Jacques Le Goff that "medieval Europe built new cultural models other than the heroic warrior and the orator of antiquity. The first was an expression of the new religion, Christianity. It is the model of the sacred".

He adds: "Even when the Middle Ages receded into the past and religious ideals were weakening, the sacred would remain present among Europeans, present in art and in literature, present in the idea of human perfection (there would be lay saints), present in the calendar of annual feasts and the very names that Europeans bear even today".

In his fascinating lecture at the College des Bernardins in Paris on Sept. 12, 2008, Benedict XVI recalled another great model that Christianity had introduced to European culture in the act of forging it - and that was monasticism.

It was a monasticism different from previous experiences, such as the late Judaic cult of the Essenes with its dualism between God and Belial, light and shadows; nor like the Hindu and Buddhist models; even unlike Oriental Christian monasticism such as that of St. Anthony Abbot, father of hermits, with its extreme forms of asceticism; or of Pacomius, father of cenobites, which originated monastic living in community.

Benedict XVI referred to the new monasticism which in its choice of an extraordinary lifestyle did not escape from the world but entered it and transformed it profoundly.

As the Pope notes at the start of his reflection, this monastic life was characterized by a search: "They were in search of God. From secondary things, they wished to pass on to the essential, only to what was truly important and reliable. It is said that their orientation was 'eschatological'. But this is not to be understood in a chronological sense, as if they looked towards the end of the world or their own death. It had an existential sense: Behind transitory things, they sought the definitive: Quarere Deum - to look for God".

The essential and characteristic component of Christian monasticism is contained in the well-known principle of 'ora et labora' - prayer and work - which states its orientation in words that belong to the search for those truths that precede the ultimate Truth: Work, which is specific to the human condition, involving man in the work of God's continuing creation of the world.

Monasticism embodied in an exemplary manner the new attitude of Christianity towards the world. It was clearly different from the pre-Christian and non-Christian experiences to which any similarities are only superficial.

It set itself apart, above all, from the idea of the monastic life as a peradigm for escaping the world, to which, on a contrary, religious man believes himself obligated in a salvific sense. The monastic choice was not a transcendence of the worldly dimension, not an escape from created reality, not an annulment of the individual in a disembodied mysticism, much less a dualistic opposition of body and soul. And nNot a tension, as in the Platonic ideal, towards liberating the soul from its bodily prison.

St. Benedict's 'ora et labora' has constituted, through the centuries, a a strong antidote to the temptations which preiodically assail the Christian: such as disembodied spiritualism, or a nascent Manichaeism - arising from a misinterpretation of Augustine - which sees the world as an evil to flee from; nor an apocalyptic eschatology which induces to lack of commitment, to resignation or to terror; or to a rejection of social and political commitment in which States are perceived only as isntitutions of 'grand larceny'.

But Western monasticism also distinguished itself from analogous experiences on the opposite front - that of a sub-mundane eschatology which sees the annihilation of the self in the ocean of nature.

The Benedictine 'ora et labora' later constituted a strong historical antidote to hte nascent resurgent temptations of misreading Thomas Aquinas - seeing a kingdom of God that is realizable and that should be realized here and now, of a merely political function for the evangelical message, a perspective - that can be shared but not as the exclusive, much less the ultimate one - of a revolution that would transform social and political structures to be more just, more 'social', more human. In short, turning the well-known Augustinian image on its head by seeking to shape the City of God on the paradigm of the earthly city.

As Benedict XVI observed, "Together with the culture of the word, monasticism was a culture of work without which the development of Europe, its ethos and its formation in the world would be unthinkable".

He adds, "But this ethos must include the will to ensure that work -and the determination of history by man - should be a collaboration with the Creator, taking its measure from him. Where this measure lacks and man elevates himself to a deiform creator, then the formation of the world can easily be transformed into its destruction".

Thus, in the Bernardins lecture, there was a strong provocaiton to us Europeans: The direct challenge was to let 'the monk in us' grow. The reference here is obviously not to the lifestyle among the many that are possible for the Christian faithful. The reference is to a spirit, an idea of experience, an intellectual course, a methodology of research.

As such, the underlying invitation in the Paris lecture to let 'the monk in us' grow, was addressed not just to believers, but to all Europeans - as Benedetto Croce said, we cannot say we are not Christians - as a probable experience, one that can be tried, if only as an intellectual search that is open to the discovery of God: quaerere Deum.

In this sense, one fully sees the invitation that Benedict XVI has made on many other occasions - to develop personal and social experiences in the perspective of etsi D=eus daretur, as if God exists.

Central to the monastic experience, which is a paradigm that can be imitated, is the word, in the sense that "the desire for God includes a love for letters, a love for the word to be penetrated in all its dimensions".

And since, "in the Biblical Word, God comes toward us as we go towards him, one must learn to penetrate the secret of language, to understand its structure and its form of expression".

Speaking to men, God expresses himself in human words: so one must refine the intellectual and cultural tools to grasp the Word of God within and behind human language.

Benedict XVI noted, "the monastery served eruditio, the formation and erudition of man - a formation with the ultimate objective that man may learn to serve God. But this involves the formation of reason - erudition on the basis of which man learns to perceive the Word in the midst of words".

But what else can monasticism tell us? Today, in our technologically refined society and its emerging disenchantment with secularization, can monasticism constitute for all - believers as well as those seeking to believe - a model that can still be proposed? Can it offer a reason for hope and a remedy for skepticism, resignation and lack of commitment?

Through the paradigm of Christian monasticism, Benedict XVI indicates a possible path today, with all its differences from the past, but even with what is analogous, or better said, with what has always been, for everyone everywhere, the human condition.

It is a possible path for believers and non-believers, since it has to do with not mortifying intelligence and reason, but to stimulate them to grasp the internal structure of all creation, with its intrinsic laws inscribed by God the creator and master.

But the Pope warns against two dangers which can take us away from the proposed paradigm. The first is that of individualism, of arbitrary individual will - which subjectively does not take account of the natural relational structure characteristic of man, and objectively does not take account of human reason which, when purified, is able to know objective truth, just as individualism ignores and does without the link that comes from love.

The other danger is that of fundamentalism, a danger about which we are more aware and sensitive. But we recognize it primarily to the degree in which it represents an external threat - in the manifestations of cultural realities and religious experirnces that are alien to our traditions. For us today, fundamentalism coincides essentially with Islam.

In fact, even within our civilization as it has historically developed, in the modern drift represented by the process of secularization, in the face of the apparent triumph of tolerance as a virtue, as the affirmation of the relativistic idea that every position is equally worthy, one often encounters new forms of fundamentalist fanaticism.

In new configurations, alien idols have reappeared before which ritual worship is demanded with intransigence. [In short, all the hypocirsy and self-destructive stupidity of political correctness!]

Even this brings tension between relationships and freedom, which charatcerized monastic experience and profoundly shaped Western culture, expressed in the binomial 'intellect' and 'love'.

"It would be fatal," exhorts Benedict XVI, "if European culture today can understand freedom only as the total lack of connections, thus favoring fanaticism and arbitrariness inevitably" because these "do not constitute freedom but its destruction".