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Pope Benedict XVI, The Papal Science

Em. Macron, Rediscovering the Path to Europe

Page 10

In point of fact, this rapprochement had been going on for some time. The mysterious name of God, revealed from the burning bush, a name which separates this God from all other divinities with their many names and simply declares "I am", already presents a challenge to the notion of myth, to which Socrates' attempt to vanquish and transcend myth stands in close analogy. Within the Old Testament, the process which started at the burning bush came to new maturity at the time of the Exile, when the God of Israel, an Israel now deprived of its land and worship, was proclaimed as the God of heaven and earth and described in a simple formula which echoes the words uttered at the burning bush: "I am". This new understanding of God is accompanied by a kind of enlightenment, which finds stark expression in the mockery of gods who are merely the work of human hands (cf. Ps 115). Thus, despite the bitter conflict with those Hellenistic rulers who sought to accommodate it forcibly to the customs and idolatrous cult of the Greeks, biblical faith, in the Hellenistic period, encountered the best of Greek thought at a deep level, resulting in a mutual enrichment evident especially in the later wisdom literature. Today we know that the Greek translation of the Old Testament produced at Alexandria - the Septuagint - is more than a simple (and in that sense really less than satisfactory) translation of the Hebrew text: it is an independent textual witness and a distinct and important step in the history of revelation, one which brought about this encounter in a way that was decisive for the birth and spread of Christianity. A profound encounter of faith and reason is taking place here, an encounter between genuine enlightenment and religion. From the very heart of Christian faith and, at the same time, the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith, Manuel II was able to say: Not to act "with logos" is contrary to God's nature.

 

Hellenism is considered as internally divided between a mythical and a reasonable side. Can a divided person forget the one half, then create a relationship with some other person, and inside this relationship be one and not divided? I think not. Ancient Greek myth is not an insignificant anomaly that had to vanish in order for the Greek mind to be purified. Benedict has in his mind a phantom of hellenism, hellenism as a heap of elements, wherefrom picking what seems to him proper to the new Papal Science. He does not know the Greek people as such, and in his world of scientific faith there are no peoples at all, unless we call 'people' an association of brains full of the same ideology.

Therefore, the external historical facts of the meeting of hellenism with the Jewish faith are presented to make self-evident the final and really decisive argument, where Manuel's saying is the testimony of what John's Logos means, because it comes "from the very heart of Christian faith and at the same time the heart of Greek thought now joined to faith" : it is Greek, it is True, the pope seems to say, you love Greece, you have to love This!, in spite of the fact that other things too are Greek, and you need not love them. Then the problem is that this Greek Christianity, papal Greekness, was betrayed in the West, where, instead of arbitrarily worshipping papal reason, some preferred to worhip arbitrariness itself.

 

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Cf.  Manuel II Palaeologus Resources * The Papal Chrislamism * What have we done to Christianity..
Orthodoxy and Science : A changing relationship? * Papacy * Constantinople

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