Pope Benedict: Advocating "Reason" or "reason"?

[Charlotte Capitalist Blog]

By Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist,cross-posted by MetaBlog

Originally posted on HBL.

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The Pope recently made a distinction between Christianity and Islam. His primary message was the god of Islam is completely transcendent and has no interaction with us. The message is that we are to simply follow the will of Allah. On the other hand, God of Christianity is connected to us. The link, the Pope says, is "reason".

At first this sounds interesting. It seems the Pope advocates reason. Is it possible that Pope Benedict is a modern-day Thomas Aquinas? Reviewing the Pope's statement, I doubt he is speaking of reason as Objectivists do.

He criticizes "modern reason" as limited through a 3-step process he terms "dehellenization."

Steps 1 and 2:

Behind this thinking lies the modern self-limitation of reason, classically expressed in Kant's "Critiques", but in the meantime further radicalized by *the impact of the natural sciences*.

Step 3 is stripping the Greek spirit from the New Testament. That Greek spirit is Platonic.

The Pope's solution is to remove these limitations upon reason and to expand reason. He calls for "the right use of reason," "reason as a whole," "breadth of reason."

This is achieved:

if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the *empirically verifiable* . . . A reason which is deaf to the divine and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures.

I think the "non-deaf" reason is Philo's "logos" as described by Wilhelm Windelband:

The Logos is Reason as coming forth from the deity ("uttered Reason") . . . With this Logos doctrine the first step was taken toward filling the cleft between God and the sensible world. (Windelband, p. 241--242).

Throughout, the Pope refers to "logos":

The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur--this is the programme with which a theology grounded in Biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. 'Not to act reasonably (with *logos*) is contrary to the nature of God', said Manuel II, according to his Christian understanding of God, in response to his Persian interlocutor. It is to this great *logos*, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures.

And:

...the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. Certainly, love "transcends" knowledge and is thereby capable of perceiving more than thought alone (cf. Eph 3:19); nonetheless it continues to be love of the God who is logos.

And:

In the beginning was the logos, and the logos is God, says the Evangelist.

"Logos" has many meanings. But, in this case it is Philo's. Kant and the Pope are two sides of the same coin. They both present a distorted view of reason. Objectivists should oppose the Pope's efforts just as they do Kant's.

Originally posted by Andy from The Charlotte Capitalist, ReBlogged by Meta Blog

http://ObjectivismOnline.com/blog/archives/002168.html