The recent ire that the Muslim world has exhibited in these past few days since the address of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, to the academics at the University of Regensburg only exhibited a grave response of a deep problem inherent within the divide between our brother Muslims’ faith and the Christians view of his religion. I think what is the most fundamental relevance and difference between these two monotheistic religions is in its own concept of God. For our Muslim brothers, God is completely transcendent. A being absolutely incompatible with our own categories. What do I mean by this? God for an Islam believer cannot be in any way characterized by any of man’s conception of God. He cannot explain God’s being by his own terms and language. God is so separated from His creation that even His own prescriptions, he is not bound to follow. Contrast this one with the concept of God among Christians in which a Christian believer believes of the Logus, who has perfectly personified Himself in Jesus Christ through Incarnation. Through HIs birth and presence temporally, perfect revelation of the unseen God becomes manifested. That is why in Christian theology, Christianity has employed the agency of reason, which is in itself a gift of God too, to explain through the best of man’s finite ability this God who has become Man. Why? This is because the Logus is reason in Himself. Jesus Christ gaps the wide breach between Creator and creature that only a God-incarnate can undo, thereby revealing not only God-made-man but reason Himself. Seemingly, this difference indeed becomes more evident in the speech of the Holy Father who underscored the relevance and compatibility of faith and reason and how faith devoid of reason can be a justification for violence.

Just to make an appropriate fixed point to begin his discussion of the natural cohabitation of faith and reason and how illumination of reason with faith creates a profound culture that is inherently Western, the Pope posits an example of a dialogue between Michael Paleologus, a 15th century Byzantine emperor and a Persian scholar. Though the conversation was long as transcribed by a scholar, Prof. Khoury, the pope picked up the central theme of the interlocution that has become the source of incendiary reaction of the Muslim world: “Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman”. Though the Pope puts these words inside his speech, it does not mean that, one, this is his opinion, and two, that this should be interpreted outside from the text of the speech. Clearly, he set examples of why reason without faith is disastrous as exemplified by Europe and the West, and on the other hand, an equally nefarious effect of faith without reason can lead to blind profession of religion and confusion of interpretation.

But the majority of the media agencies have failed to note that the greater part of the speech is mostly directed to the schism of faith and reason in the contemporarry Western civilization of which the Chuch itself is suffering from within and without. That the separation of faith and reason has bred severally antagonistic approaches — a kind of nihilism against anything pertainig to faith. It should be noted that this has indeed weakened current European and Western societies where relativism is palpable from all phases of life, and where a shared common values that has been manifested, inculcated, and inculturated among Western and western-oriented nations like the Philippines has come close to extinction.

What sort of relevance does it make with us Filipinos?

The answer to that is on what influences the Filipinos have most. The grip of American and Western culture among us comes as no surprise considering our history. Sooner or later the redefinition of our values which have been cherished to some degree by our age and the generations before us may come as no later in a generation or two, taking always into account the prevalent effects of cyberspace into our homes and communities.

Thus, the address of the Holy Father shows a timely wisdom at this precise moment of this age and a diagnosis of insidious symptoms that have been formenting for years. What he is concretely talking about is his own insistence of returning to our roots and discover the richness of our heritage that formed us as a nation and as a Church. This is truly indispensable in a world where currents of thought comes coupling with the zeal of change. We cannot dialogue with the world if we fail to instill that which has formed and breathed our being. We cannot bridge authentic relationships of things foreign to our own if we do not know ourselves. Though the Pope has spoken in the name of his faith to redirect Europe in particular, we too as Filipinos may transpose the idea of the pope to ourselves to help us form our identity and consciousness, which we badly are in need of.

September 26, 2006

Helpless State of Affairs

Samuel Johnson said: "Must helpless man, in ignorance sedate, Roll darkling down the torrent of his fate?". My concluding remarks would dwell on this line from the author's Vanity of Human Wishes for I believe that this best explains man's personal thirst of knowledge and the demand of responsibility this entails. It is remarkable that today's event is a reflection of change - a change from desert of ignorance to the garden of knowledge. Though, in our ceaseless movement toward achieving wisdom, we seek that goal before us - the goal of being free because we know. However, this acquired knowledge does not imply segregating from the real world that calls us to render our noble duty. This duty is a responsibility toward others, just as a treasure destined for its possessor. Thus, this change is manifested today as you usher yourself to a new phase in life.

Man becomes helpless if drawn into the darkness of ignorance - he is severed from the fount of truth that clears the path before us. Then, in the end, downfall is not far behind. In your years here in this institution, you have transformed from a parched cloth to a dripping towel, eager to manifest this acquired knowledge into the world. We could sense your anxiety at the same time the anticipation of the hereafter as you begin to taste the bittersweet sap of reality. You should have by now appreciated the feeling you had in the past when you first entered these halls, when you opened your minds to a different world of human care. How you have changed! But this anxious feeling does not entrap us in immobility but should always give us the joy of sharing what we have learned.

In this time and age, the world appears to us wide and vast. The opportunities for us are variegated and things have become complex and subtle. It is imperative for us to find our niches in the space of work just like a patch in a beautiful Roman mosaics, each has its contribution to the beauty of the whole. The beauty of healing is not in the institution it represents but in the goodness that comes from it. That goodness does not become a theory, an idea in itself but becomes a person through our agency. It becomes truly human because of us.

Thus, in the medical knowledge we learned comes the human face of healing. This what makes human care noble because it restores what has been lost. It is as if saying what died was brought to life, what lost was returned.

A Speech That Was Never Read

It is unbelievable that Sapienza University would block Pope Benedict XVI from speaking on its annual opening of its academic year. Sixty-seven professors had signed a letter of protest to the dean of the university, Renato Guarini. Physics professor Andrea Frova was the main signatory of the letter and came charging that the pontiff in 1990, when he was still Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, had "shown hostile to science", when he spoke about Galileo Galilei's trial under the Holy Roman Inquisition. We could not dwell at length on that speech given by the then-cardinal Ratzinger on the 15th of February in 1990. In that speech, however, Joseph Ratzinger quoted an atheist philosopher of science by the name of Paul Feyerabend, who said that "the Church remained more faithful to reason than Galileo himself." According to Giorgio Israel, a mathematics professor of La Sapienza and who wrote in L'Osservatore Romano defending the Ratzinger, the pope had defended Galilean rationality by using the quote to question the attitude of modernity toward itself and its inventions: science and technology.

The speech was clearly Ratzingerian. There were many themes the pope touched on. But the central theses of his essay were centered on two questions: what is the nature and mission of papacy and what is the nature and mission of the university. He went to and discussed the relationship of truth to faith and university. The pope is always fond of using the Greek philosophers Socrates and Plato in his making a point by outlining the question of the former to Euthyphro about believing the constant bickering of the gods and goddesses and its truth. He points that this question posed is not something antithetical to religious people and does not shake the ground of belief but has always been essential to faith even for the first christians. This question as related to faith has also relation to the episkopoi, since this faith finds its truest expression in a believing community, which has basically a leader, a supervisor. The answer to this is found in the beginning and end of the speech. When the pope said that his ministry begins firstly as a bishop of Rome, he, therefore, "surveys the whole landscape, making sure to keep the flock together and on the right path", who unites the whole flock and shows as being first the way to the Christ, the Logos, the Creative Reason Himself. This brings us to the point of that the pope does not impose his faith, but "it is his task to keep alive man’s responsiveness to the truth" and "must again and always invite reason to seek out truth, goodness and God, and on this path urge it to see the useful lights that emerged during the history of the Christian faith and perceive Jesus Christ as the light that illuminates history and helps find the way towards the future."

In between, the pope finds a common ground why faith should have a voice of reason and should not be dispelled by putting forth the idea of John Rawls, that though religious doctrines could not be considered "public reason", it has in its character a non-public reason that cannot be obliterated as such because it is participating in reason itself. The pope sees in Rawls another criterion of this reasonableness of doctrines that stems from its responsibility and well-grounded tradition "in which over a long span of time sufficiently strong arguments have been developed in support of the respective doctrines."

From there, we can see that, indeed, faith as such cannot be relegated to unreasonableness, to the mythological. Thus, theology itself right from the start of the rise of universities in the west had already been included in the core curriculum. Here, the pope pointed out that in due time philosophy rose as an independent domain capable of standing on itself and raise questions it can capable to answer. This happened in medieval universities, whose basic principles still are operative today. Though the pope pointed out that theology, philosophy, law, and medicine have always been cultivated in the universities, what holds them together is their perceived rationality. So much so that they can talk among each other. This I think can be a reason why the pope at least can be invited to speak within the environment of university freedom. He speaks of the reasonableness of the position of faith in the varied debates of the society because it has rich ethical positions that overlap with mankind and has "become a voice of the ethical reasoning of humanity." He, therefore, can speak with any questions of life because faith has reason in itself that compels humans in their states and beliefs.