Political Philosophy and Revelation

14. From Cambridge to Regensburg: On Intellectual Courage

164 14. From Cambridge to Regensburg On Intellectual Courage A decline of courage may be the most striking feature that an outside observer notices in the West today. The Western world has lost its civic courage, both as a whole and separately, in each country, in each government, in each political party, and, of course, in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling and intellectual elites, causing an impression of a loss of courage in the entire society. Alexander Solzhenitsyn The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, 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. Benedict XVI I • The relatively small cities of Cambridge in Massachusetts and Regensburg in Bavaria both are homes of famous universities, of Harvard in Cambridge, of Regensburg in Bavaria. Regensburg is an ancient city going back, under the name of Ratisbona, to the time of the Stoic philosopher-emperor Marcus Aurelius. Harvard is the oldest of the universities in the United States. Older ones can be found in Latin America. Though attempts to found a fourth Bavarian university in An earlier version of this chapter was delivered as a lecture to the Department of Philosophy , James Madison University, April 9, 2007, and published in Vital Speeches 77 (May 2007): 213–17. Epigraphs are from Alexander Solzhenitsyn, “The Harvard Address” (June 8, 1978), The Solzhenitsyn Reader: New and Essential Writings, 1947–2005, ed. Edward E. Ericson Jr. and Daniel J. Mahoney (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 2006), 564; Benedict XVI, “The Regensburg Lecture,” #62, in James V. Schall, The Regensburg Lecture (South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine’s Press, 2007), appendix 1, 146. From Cambridge to Regensburg 165 Regensburg go back to 1487, its full establishment was not until relatively recently in 1965. What do these two cities and their respective universities have in common? And why do I associate them here? In my mind, they provided occasion for two of the most incisive lectures given in modern times about “modern times.” In 1978, the great Russian novelist and philosopher , Alexander Solzhenitsyn, then in his fourth year of exile from the Soviet Union, was invited to give the Commencement Lecture at Harvard . On September 12, 2006, almost five years to the day after 9/11, Josef Ratzinger, former professor at the University of Regensburg, was entering his second year in the See of Peter as Benedict XVI. He was on his first visit to his native Bavaria since becoming pope. Here in Regensburg he was invited to give a lecture at his former academic podium . Both of these presentations were, and this is important, academic lectures in form. That is, they were formal, reflective readings about a fundamental topic as carefully thought through by a free and incisive mind. Both of these relatively brief addresses on their delivery elicited considerable international attention and not a little controversy, almost infallible external signs of their importance. Though at first sight both lectures seemed to analyze the then prevailing major challenge to the West—communism in the case of Solzhenitsyn, Islam in the case of Pope Ratzinger—the fact is that both of these lectures were directed primarily at the soul of our civilization, of its inner coherence or lack thereof. In both lectures, all external problems were considered to be problems of inner positions. They were issues of soul to which Plato called our attention centuries ago. In this sense, both lectures see the order of politics as first a problem in the order of soul. What interests me here about both of these lectures is the need we have among us for both eloquence and intelligence, for both mind and word. We are in great need of those who can articulate briefly and concisely what and where we are. We have, most of us, a difficult time in knowing the truth in its order. But more often, we have even a more difficult time in accepting it even when we know it, since it makes demands on us. The first thing that Solzhenitsyn did in speaking to the Harvard graduates on that rainy day was to make this same point 166  All Nations frankly yet unforgettably: “Harvard...