På kurset i katolsk tro i St Hallvard kirke i går kveld snakket vi bl.a. om forholdet mellom tro og viten, Kompendiet til den katolske kirkes katekisme skriver slik om dette:
3. Hvordan er det mulig å erkjenne Gud ved fornuftens lys alene?
Med utgangspunkt i skaperverket, det vil si verden og den menneskelige person, kan mennesket gjennom fornuften alene med visshet erkjenne Gud som universets opprinnelse og fullendelse, som det høyeste gode og som sannhet og uendelig skjønnhet. (31-36, 46-47)
4. Er fornuftens lys alene tilstrekkelig til å erkjenne Guds mysterium?
På veien mot erkjennelsen av Gud ved fornuftens lys alene, støter mennesket på mange vanskeligheter. Faktisk kan det ikke på eget initiativ tre inn i det indre guddommelige mysterium. Derfor er det avhengig av å bli opplyst av Guds åpenbaring, ikke bare om de sannheter som overstiger menneskets forståelse, men også om de religiøse og moralske sannheter …
John Allen skriver (et stykke nede på siden) om det som skjedde 12. september 2008 – også i en egen artikkel – at det virker som pave Benedikt fikk rett mht Islam, i sitt Regensburg-foredrag, at de som kritiserte ham den gang kanskje nå må beklage. Men det bør de egentlig ikke, for pave Benebikst foredrag handlet jo ikke om Islam, men om forholdet mellom tro og viten:
… In the Catholic commentariat, there’s been discussion lately about whether Pope Benedict XVI is owed an apology for the brouhaha that broke out in 2006 over a speech he gave in Regensburg, Germany, which opened with a citation of a 14th-century Byzantine emperor linking Muhammad, the founder of Islam, with violence.
At the time, Benedict’s quotation was seen as a crass religious slur. Now, with the rise of the self-declared ISIS caliphate in northern Iraq and its bloody crackdown on religious minorities, things look a little different.
However, the revisionist take on his words risks a repeat of the fatal mistake of eight years ago, only in reverse. Aside from its second paragraph, the Regensburg speech really had nothing to do with Islam, and reading it that way distorts the point the retired pontiff was trying to make.
If you read the entire 4,000 word text – which, to this day, relatively few of the pundits commenting on it seem to have done – you’ll discover that Benedict’s primary points of reference aren’t Muslims, but rather Socrates, Duns Scotus, Immanuel Kant and Adolf von Harnack, luminaries of the Western intellectual tradition.
If Benedict was criticizing anything, it wasn’t Islam, but rather Western secularism and its tendency to limit the scope of reason to what can be scientifically and empirically verified, excluding any reference to ultimate truth.
The heart of Benedict’s argument at Regensburg was that reason and faith need each other. Reason shorn of faith, he suggested, becomes skepticism and nihilism, while faith deprived of reason becomes extremism and fundamentalism. In isolation, each becomes dangerous; to be healthy, they need each other.
In Regensburg, Benedict warned against “a reason which is deaf to the divine,” among other things pointing out that ignoring the transcendent handicaps the West in trying to engage the rest of the world, which takes religion seriously, indeed.
“Listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding,” he said.
Benedict XVI saw himself as a teaching pope, not a governor or a diplomat, and there’s no doubt his eight-year reign suffered because of it.
Yet as a teacher, he had an impressive record. ……