Faith, Reason and Dialogue

One year ago, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg, Germany. The lecture was hailed by some as epoch-making and one of the great speeches of our time, but from others it provoked angry reactions: Islamic groups issued death threats, and exponents of the neo-liberal Western establishment told the Pope to stick to running churches and spiritual affairs, since faith is supposed to have nothing to do with real life.

The questions opened up by the Pope lie at the heart of any possibility of meaningful dialogue between people of different faiths and none. This is as important for multicultural Australia as it is for other parts of the world.

At the centre of the Pope’s speech was an appeal to “broaden our concept of reason and its application”. A recent book takes up the theme of the nature and use of reason in response to Benedict’s Regensburg lecture. Five writers, from Europe, the Middle East and North America, approach the lecture from the perspective of their own faith tradition: Catholic, Muslim, Jew, atheist. May God Save Reason (Cantagalli, 2007) was presented recently at the twenty-eighth annual “Meeting for Friendship among the Peoples” in Rimini, Italy. The “Meeting”, organised by the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation, is the world’s largest summer cultural festival, lasting a week and attracting 700,000 visitors.

The first impression of an Australian present at the book presentation was that here was a serious challenge to the glib and widespread assumption that the world is divided neatly into enlightened, postmodern thinkers and primitive, pre-industrial obscurantists.

Three of the book’s authors spoke at the Meeting on the question of faith, reason and the possibility of dialogue. While openly prepared to disagree with each other and with Benedict XVI, they did share the Pope’s conviction that genuine dialogue between the world’s cultures and religions will only be possible if “we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and once more disclose its vast horizons”.

The withered version of reason bequeathed us by the Enlightenment traps us inside our own predetermined categories, and what doesn’t fit the categories simply doesn’t exist. But the true dignity of human reason lies in openness to reality in all its factors. Reason is not a cage for defining reality but a window thrown open to all the facets and possibilities of reality as we experience it.

Reason cannot stand outside, or before, experience. As French philosopher Jean Guitton puts it, “a reasonable person is one who submits reason to experience”. The phenomenological basis of the Christian faith is recovered in Benedict’s account of the intertwining of Greek reason and Judeo-Christian belief.

But at the Rimini Meeting, Sari Nusseibeh, rector of Al Quds University, Jerusalem, recalled that Hellenic roots (pre-Socratic, Aristotelian or neo-Platonic) are undoubtedly imprinted in the Islamic intellectual tradition as much as in the Christian intellectual tradition, “despite the opinion implicit in the Pope’s speech that it is Christianity that is most significantly Hellenic”.

Nusseibeh astutely pointed out that when the Pope insists on the “imprint” of Hellenic thought in Christian faith, he is speaking principally to his fellow Christians, and especially those who have claimed in recent years that Christianity needs to free itself of its Greek heritage.

This was echoed by Joseph Weiler, Jean Monnet Chair of Constitutional Law at New York University. Speaking as an orthodox Jew, Weiler noted that the Pope’s address was aimed at three types of public: the Catholic faithful, other religions, and our general political and cultural environment.

Weiler argued strongly, in his A Christian Europe (2003), against the proposal to delete any reference to Christianity in the Preamble to the European Constit-ution. “True tolerance,” he wrote, “is not where you hide, but where you overcome the temptation of coercion. This is why an Orthodox Jew can ask Europe not to be afraid of its past and of its own Christian identity.”

The link between faith, reason and culture was developed by young Muslim academic Wael Farouq, Professor of Islamic Sciences at the Copto-Catholic Faculty of Sakakini, Cairo. Farouq affirmed: “I find no contradiction in myself between the convictions between the Pope’s affirmations, i.e. that reason lies at the basis of faith and that faith is opposed to violence, and that Islam is a religion of love, mercy and reason.”

This position rested on a “broader” use of reason. For Farouq embraced Benedict’s category of “reasonableness”, as opposed to positivist “rationality”. Reasonableness is a relationship between perception and presence, between the human “I” and the real, the mechanism and the tool for the production of knowledge through relationship with reality. He went on: “It is reasonableness that prevents religious thought from becoming ideology (this is precisely the problem of radical Islam), and which would mean its definitive resignation from human life.”

This convergence on the faith–reason nexus, among thinkers crossing geographical, cultural and religious divides, reminded me how far we have come in impoverishing both reason and faith. Reason has been shrunk down to the measure of human perception, and at the same time faith has been explained away as a residual expression of pre-modern ignorance and fear (see recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Michel Onfray and others).

But the religious sense arises in humans not from fear but from wonder. For the ancient Greeks wonder was the basis of every philosophy.

If I were to be born now, with the understanding of the world I have now, my first, my very first reaction as I opened my eyes would be wonder. Wonder at the very existence of reality, a reality made up of sensations, of things, including my own self. Just watch a young baby as it grows into understanding of the world. No fear there, but eyes full of wonder, arms outstretched to embrace the marvel of reality.

Fear, if it comes, comes second. And anyway, fear of what? Why should we be fearful of the dark, of death? Only because those unknowns can deprive us of something that we already know is good. If it were not good to be alive, why fear death at all?

The religious sense grows out of wonder at the fact that reality exists, that I exist as a part of reality, and that my existing is obviously not the result of anything within my control. If I exist, then I depend on something that has somehow brought me into existence and is maintaining me in existence in this very moment.

But this could end up as a blind alley, unless we live our religious sense in a reasonable way. If reason and faith are defined a priori as belonging to universes that have nothing in common, then my religious sense has nowhere to go, and must remain in a subjective, unverifiable and ultimately meaningless search for meaning.

A fully open use of reason acknowledges freely that the existence of reality depends on a dimension beyond the measurable and the comprehensible (as Amanda Shaw demonstrates in her account of “God and Imaginary Numbers” in the latest First Things). It recognises the nature of reality as, fundamentally, mysterious. And since humans are incapable of reaching—let alone defining—this mystery by their own devices, the most reasonable stance for us to take in front of reality is to be open to the possibility that whatever sustains all reality may reveal itself to the hearts and minds of humans. This is the cry of poets and artists in all cultures in all times of recorded history.

Our search for meaning takes one of two forms: the path of reason and the path of faith. The Pope’s lecture and the responses from the writers at the Rimini Meeting claim that these two paths are mutually dependent: each needs the other to flower.

The opportunity and the challenge work in both directions: faith must submit itself to verification by human reason (Benedict defines theology as “an inquiry into the rationality of faith”), and reason—in order to be fully itself—must free itself from the straitjacket of the empirically verifiable in an openness to all the dimensions of the real.

Associate Professor John J. Kinder chairs the Department of European Languages and Studies at the University of Western Australia.