Ronald Knox book review

Readers of Universalis who know the work of Ronald Knox – and those who don’t – may enjoy this review of his “Essays in Satire”.

Text of the Pope’s Regensburg lecture

The widespread, sensationalist and inaccurate reporting of the Pope’s lecture on “de-Hellenization” at the University of Regensburg made me search the Web for the actual text. Here it is. In contrast to the “edited highlights” published in the newspapers it is a richly stimulating work, each paragraph of which encourages one to go away and study it, and its sources, and what lies behind them.

Following the tradition of academic lectures, this is a preliminary version, which will be completed in due course with footnotes and references. The final version is something that I look forward to seeing. For a start, it’s not clear which work of Adel Theodore Khoury is being referred to, since he has been writing on Byzantine-Islamic relations for many decades. It would be good to have the exact reference; although there is always a danger that the paper will turn out to be in German!

The chief warning conveyed by this lecture is that we should not pre-emptively give up claims to rationality just in case they might be attacked by atheists at some time in the future. Rationality is at the heart of religion and not an optional extra. The Commandments tell us to “love God… with all your mind”. Since commandments do not command the impossible, this tells us that God is lovable with the mind: that is, that religion is rational. The cowering avoidance-of-conflict that makes religion out to be just “a feeling thing” ultimately destroys religion itself. It also risks destroying rationality altogether, just as science in the rich, educated Islamic world was ultimately strangled by occasionalism. Whether we in the West were protected from this fate by our different institutional structures, as Toby Huff argues in The Rise of Early Modern Science: Islam, China and the West, or whether we were just lucky to escape the Scotists, is itself a subject for some interesting discussions.