Chaitanya Jyothi Museum Opening, 2000
RAMANAM
In the Name of The Father, and of The Son and of The Holy Spirit, Amen.
Countrymen,
ORBIS NON SUFFICIT
SOLUS DEUS SUFFICIT
From Pope Benedict: Address at the University of Regensburg, and here.
Key language from the Pope:
The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the [existential] questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason [i.e., the mutual immanence of the Logos of God and thelogos of man], 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, not to act with logos [which is 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. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university.
Archbishop Sentamu, addressing Moslems from his See.
Key phrase from the Archbishop:
It is both my view and my experience that most British Moslems do not feel threatened by our Christian moral foundations but by the cynicism of the secular culture that denies its own foundations.
For over a decade I have stated repeatedly that the resolution of man’s modern problems hinges on his reacquiring logos theology (the Pope’s point), which is the unique and indispensable basis for all doctrines of unity and therefore democracy (the Archbishop’s point).
This is also, and most importantly, the point of The Rev. Dr. Paul Tillich, who is the most lucid, thorough and powerful exponent of logos theology, the central expression of Christianity, the Church and Christian culture have ever produced.
The Archbishop’s point that the disturbers of man should be termed Salafi Jihadists is important and I will use this terminology henceforward.
His term does not, however, identify the equally violent and even more puissant — because they control a nation state — disturbers of man from Iran: the Ayatollahs of Qom.
His point that Moslems feel threatened more by secularism than by Christianity exposes Latinate culture’s Achilles’ Heel: its denial of and hostility against its basis, which is cultural, religious and moral development driven by Christianity, to include Judaism, and to some extent, including positively, by Islam.
The Archbishop’s implied criticism of secularism, for its hubris — “scorning [with tragic destructiveness] the base degrees [from] which [it] did ascend.” — the Pope makes explicit:
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. At the same time, as I have attempted to show, modern scientific reason with its intrinsically Platonic element bears within itself a question which points beyond itself and beyond the possibilities of its methodology. Modern scientific reason quite simply has to accept 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. Yet the question why this has to be so is a real question, and one which has to be remanded by the natural sciences to other modes and planes of thought – to philosophy and theology. For philosophy and, albeit in a different way, for theology, listening to the great experiences and insights of the religious traditions of humanity, and those of the Christian faith in particular, is a source of knowledge, and to ignore it would be an unacceptable restriction of our listening and responding.
These words from these men deeply gratify me because they express truth I have struggled to make apparent through many long years of hearing, in response, “Huh?”
Update 1: Why ISIS Is Irrational: The Asharite/Mutazilite Conflict
Update 2: Stephen M. Kirby: The Lure Of Fantasy Islam
Update 3: Counter-Terrorism: Fundamental Changes Inside Islam
Update 4: Fr. Raymond J. de Souza: Islam Needs A Reformation, But Acknowledging That Terrorism Has A Religious Component
Update 5: Theological Explanations of Islamist Radicalism Deeply Mistaken, Russian Scholars Say
Update 6: Archbishop of Canterbury get it right about Islam and law in Latin Culture. Also here.
AUM NAMAH SHIVAYA
