Eamonn Fitzgerald's Rainy Day

When the Pope addressed 1,500 students and faculty at the University of Regensburg last Wednesday, he cited a 14th century dialogue between the Byzantine emperor Manuel II Paleologus and a learned Persian during the course of a lecture, titled "Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections," which ran to almost 4,000 words. Now, as many commentators have pointed out since Wednesday, if Benedict had wanted to discuss the relationship between faith and reason, he should not have used a comparison between Islam and Christianity, suggesting that Islam is irrational and violent. But Benedict is not a PC Pope.

According to the exceedingly erudite and informed John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter, the pontiff was making the point that under the influence of its Greek heritage, Christianity represents a decisive choice in favour of the rationality of God. While Muslims may stress God's majesty and absolute transcendence, Christians believe it would contradict God's nature to act irrationally. Based on the Gospel of John, as Allen writes: "In the beginning was the logos, usually translated as word, but it is also the Greek term for reason."

The importance of this is that since the Reformation Western thinkers have come to regard theology and metaphysics as unscientific. But, says Benedict, the rejection of religious and philosophical thinking cannot promote dialogue with other cultures, because:

"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 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."

Here Benedict shows himself to be a superb thinker and one of the few global leaders who understands that "the dialogue of cultures" cannot proceed on the basis of multiculturalism and similar fraudulent notions, But as John Allen and others have pointed out, in today's world, where disinformation is spread around the world in seconds, thinking cannot compete with passion. If a demand for reason is now shouted down by those who are irrational and violent, the outlook is indeed grim.