What Pope Benedict Taught Me About Faith

This process of “de-Hellenization,” as Benedict called it, has caused faith and reason to go their separate ways. As a result, we witness explosions of irrational faith (and here, to be clear, Benedict was critical of some aspects of Islam). But worse, there has been a “reduction of the radius of science and reason.” Some of humankind’s most fundamental ideals and yearnings, Benedict observed, are now excluded from the realm of public reason, since these things can’t be measured with scientific instruments or expressed in mathematical language. The moral claims of the great religious traditions — even those that rest solely on natural reason rather than revelation — are treated as species of private bias. They are welcome in the church — or mosque or synagogue — but in public must give way to the narrower “reason” of the moderns.

The danger is that this narrowly scientistic account of reason affords humans a much lower status than the one granted them by classical philosophy and revealed religions. You can do anything to people, especially the weak and the poor, if you view human beings as mere collections of particles, lacking any special origin or destiny.

Dialogue between civilizations grinds to a halt. Sounding his most sympathetic notes toward Islam, Benedict worried that “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.”

Pope Francis reprised many of these themes during his visit to Abu Dhabi in 2019, even directly quoting Benedict. Speaking alongside the grand imam of Cairo’s Al-Azhar University, Francis railed against “individualism” and impoverished utilitarianism — that is, the ideological consequences of the materialism and scientism Benedict had targeted at Regensburg.

Put another way: The earlier address came to shape a deeper Catholic-Muslim dialogue, based on a shared critique of a soulless modern world.

A decade after the brouhaha surrounding Regensburg, I was received into full communion with the Roman church, a decision that was in large part inspired by Benedict’s writings. It’s a curious but welcome development: Gazing through Benedict’s lens, I view Islam, in its painful encounter with modernity, with far greater sympathy and solicitude than I ever did as a nonbeliever.

May he rest in peace; may eternal light shine upon him.

Sohrab Ahmari is a founder and editor of Compact, a contributing editor to The American Conservative and the author of “The Unbroken Thread: Discovering the Wisdom of Tradition in an Age of Chaos.”