Faith, reason and dialogue: the Regensburg address, one year on.(Religion)

ONE YEAR AGO, Pope Benedict XVI delivered a lecture at the University of Regensburg, Germany. The lecture was hailed by some as epoch-making and one of the great speeches of our time, but from others it provoked angry reactions: Islamic groups issued death threats, and exponents of the neo-liberal Western establishment told the Pope to stick to running churches and spiritual affairs, since faith is supposed to have nothing to do r with real life.

The questions opened up by the Pope lie at the heart of any possibility of meaningful dialogue between people of different faiths and none. This is as important for multicultural Australia as it is for other parts of the world.

At the centre of the Pope's speech was an appeal to "broaden our concept of reason and its application". A recent book takes up the theme of the nature and use of reason in response to Benedict's Regensburg lecture. Five writers, from Europe, the Middle East and North America, approach the lecture from the perspective of their own faith tradition: Catholic, Muslim, Jew, atheist. May God Save Reason (Cantagalli, 2007) was presented recently at the twenty-eighth annual "Meeting for Friendship among the Peoples" in Rimini, Italy. The "Meeting", organised by the Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation, is the world's largest summer cultural festival, lasting a week and attracting 700,000 visitors.

The first impression of an Australian present at the book presentation was that here was a serious challenge to the glib and widespread assumption that the world is divided neatly into enlightened, postmodern thinkers and primitive, pre-industrial obscurantists.

Three of the book's authors spoke at the Meeting on the question of faith, reason and the possibility of dialogue. While openly prepared to disagree with each other and with Benedict XVI, they did share the Pope's conviction that genuine dialogue between the world's cultures and religions will only be possible if "we over come the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically verifiable, and once more disclose its vast horizons".

The withered version of reason bequeathed us by the Enlightenment traps us inside our own predetermined categories, and what doesn't fit the categories simply doesn't exist. But the true dignity of human reason lies in openness to reality in all its factors. Reason is not a cage for defining reality but a window thrown open to all the facets and possibilities of reality as we experience it.

Reason cannot stand outside, or before, experience. As French philosopher Jean Guitton puts it, "a reasonable person is one who submits reason to experience". The phenomenological basis of the Christian faith is recovered in Benedict's account of the intertwining of Greek reason and Judeo-Christian belief.