ABSTRACT
In his Regensburg lecture on 12 September 2006 Pope Benedict XVI attempted to underscore the compatibility of self-communicating reason with mysterious word, that is, revelation in Christian faith as a source of Christian political ethics. It was an endeavour to demonstrate reasonableness of the ‘Christian spirit’ and its ability to sit in dialogue with the ‘Greek spirit’ in the context of modernity that has denied the rationality of faith in God and its ability to engage in genuine enlightenment that seeks to influence civil liberties and peaceful coexistence among nations. Most importantly, guided by a kind of modern Enlightenment thinking that belittles the role of religion, Hellenistic reason has found revelationbased reason as nothing more than a faith that affirms God’s overpowering will that can be known only through the unquestioning acceptance of and submission to God’s commandments, however irrational they might appear. Such a concept of an absolute God leads to a kind of impenetrable voluntarism that deprives humanity of its moral agency and freedom to act in accord with its intuitive reason. Further, faith in this absolute, omnipotent God renders the good and the just as eternally unattainable to reason without submitting to ‘capricious’ God’s transcendence and otherness, which are not bound to any self-evident ethical norms. The Pope then goes on to attribute such a concept of a transcendent God to Islam whose believers, on the basis of the comments made by the Byzantine emperor, have resorted to spread their faith through violence. This violence in the name of God, as the Pope endeavours to argue, is totally against God’s nature, as conceived in Christianity. In other words, violence and intolerance among Muslims can be traced back to the very nature of God in Muslim revealed texts which present the dichotomy between reason, on the one hand, and revelation, on the other. This dichotomy is then related to the concept of holy war – jihad – in the political realm of Islamic civilization which demonstrates, according to the Pope, ‘unreasonableness’ of Muslim belief in God’s transcendence and omnipotence – the main source for this appalling lack of political ethics in the Muslim world.
