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Pope Benedict XVI, The Papal Science

Em. Macron, Rediscovering the Path to Europe

Page 18

And so I come to my conclusion. This attempt, painted with broad strokes, at a critique of modern reason from within has nothing to do with putting the clock back to the time before the Enlightenment and rejecting the insights of the modern age. The positive aspects of modernity are to be acknowledged unreservedly: we are all grateful for the marvellous possibilities that it has opened up for mankind and for the progress in humanity that has been granted to us. The scientific ethos, moreover, is - as you yourself mentioned, Magnificent Rector - the will to be obedient to the truth, and, as such, it embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit. The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason [the exact same reason that we both, secular and papal scientists, worship] and [together with it and even more] its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons [towards the empirically unverifiable phantom of God, nonetheless having its own right to be an object of our omnipotent science]. In this sense theology rightly belongs in the university and within the wide-ranging dialogue of sciences, not merely as a historical discipline and one of the human sciences, but precisely as theology, [that is, as the metaphysical branch of our cult of reasoning,] as inquiry into the rationality of faith.

[We must know that we don't need to have a personal relationship with God, we just need to construct global peace and stability, and this we'll do by means of our Cult of Reasoning, and] only thus do we become capable of that genuine dialogue of cultures and religions so urgently needed today. In the Western world it is widely held that only positivistic reason and the forms of philosophy based on it are universally valid. Yet the world's profoundly religious cultures see this exclusion of the divine from the universality of reason as an attack on their most profound convictions. A [person who is blind to God is no problem, but a] reason which is deaf to the divine [laws] and which relegates religion into the realm of subcultures is incapable of entering into the dialogue of cultures [hopefully to procure the Global Agreement, the Triumph of Rationality that we call and is our Faith]. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with [what I define beyond Descartes and anyone else as] its intrinsically Platonic element [that is, opposite to my aristotelian hellenization and equal to what I think as the mathematical side of a Plato whom, in any case, I'm not interested in,] bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to [= it misses the papal freedom to expand to the metaphysical Object, being thus enslaved and obliged to] accept [what, contrary to the otherwise infallible godly all-measuring nature of human reason in general, it manages to define fallaciously as] the rational structure of matter and the correspondence between our spirit and the prevailing rational structures of nature as a given, on which its methodology has to be based.

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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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