I’ve been reading and enjoying a bit of Paul Feyerabend lately, so I was interested to hear that there was a recent controversy involving this anarchic thinker and our peculiar current pope Ratzinger, or Benedict, or whatever. How could this be? Well, it’s not difficult to see where the difficulty might arise. Although Feyerabend is no creationist, he certainly makes some claims that might be attractive to those of a religious mindset. Owing to his polemical style, sometimes he’ll come up with an absurd-sounding idea, such as when he suggests that a hypothetical scientist ‘without method’ might one day “discover that the theory of evolution is not as good as is generally assumed and that it must be supplemented, or entirely replaced, by an improved version of Genesis” (Against Method, 21). This sort of stuff would be gold to the pious thinker or advocate of intelligent design looking to mine quotes from pseudo-noteworthy intellectual figures. Especially so-called ‘post-modernist’ ones – but when one takes quotes completely out of context one makes a fool of oneself. Let’s bury the ID issue for the moment. How did the Pope get embroiled in a controversy by way of Feyerabend? Although there is a very interesting story here, we’re going to have to sift through a couple pretty questionable stories in order to actually get at some kind of ‘truth.’ Let’s start with this confusing piece from CNN.

“Pope Benedict XVI has canceled a planned visit to a prestigious Italian university after a protest by academics and students attacked his views on Galileo, the Vatican confirmed Tuesday… academics — pointing to a speech the pope gave at the same university as a cardinal in 1990 — claimed he condones the 1633 trial and conviction of the scientist Galileo for heresy.

The astronomer had argued that the Earth revolved around the Sun, in contradiction to church teachings at the time, and he was forced to renounce his findings publicly.

In comments made 15 years ago when he was still a cardinal, Pope Benedict is reported to have called the trial ‘reasonable and just.’

During his speech, the pope — then Cardinal Ratzinger — quoted an Austrian philosopher Paul Feyerabend, saying, “At the time of Galileo, the church remained more loyal (or faithful) to reason than Galileo himself.

Andreas Srova, a physics professor at the university, said it would have been inappropriate for the pope to appear for the inauguration.”

Oh, Professor Srovna. You physics professors have so little time for hermeneutics. It seems as though you were working from – in this case, literally or even archetypally – ‘a CNN-level’ understanding of these issues. There’s a lot more going on here. Ironically enough, in order to get some more information, we need to go to that bastion of non-partisan journalism, the National Catholic Register. It took me a really long time to figure out the basis of the controversy (as it turns out, nothing) and how it developed (as it turns out, foolishness). Let’s note, for the sake of spite as much as anything, that the arbitrary application of this awful term ‘post-modernism’ in the NCR article is in many ways even more stomach-churning for me than the sound-bite inadequacy CNN’s piece. But at least this offers some context! Look:

“The source of the protests was a 1990 statement about Galileo made by then Cardinal Ratzinger that was extracted — out of context — from a speech entitled ‘The Crisis of Faith in Science.’ The statement read:

‘The Church at the time of Galileo was much more faithful to reason than Galileo himself, and also took into consideration the ethical and social consequences of Galileo’s doctrine. Its verdict against Galileo was rational and just.’

The irony is that this statement was not made by Cardinal Ratzinger at all. The cardinal was quoting someone else. And when you read the entire speech, it’s not only clear that the cardinal didn’t say it, he disagreed with it.

Far from using these ideas to exonerate the Church for persecuting Galileo, Cardinal Ratzinger rejected the temptation to do so, and concluded by saying:

‘It would be absurd, on the basis of these affirmations, to construct a hurried apologetics. The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality.’

But there’s more. The greatest irony is that the words mistakenly attributed to the Pope were uttered by one of the most subversive and controversial postmodern thinkers of the late 20th century, the deceased Austrian philosopher, Paul Feyerabend.”

This passage shines through the editorialization that twists the overall impact of the piece: finally, we can make sense of what actually happened. Ratzinger quoted a passage from Against Method (I’m pretty sure at least, I might have to look that up). And, credit is definitely due to this guy: he knows his shit, and he interpreted it correctly. Above is another polemical statement of Feyerabend’s. Ratzinger’s hermeneutical chops are obvious here: you can’t take a passage like this at face value. We can certainly not construct a ‘hurried apologetics’ in this or any case. What Feyerabend’s quote actually implies is that the so-called ideals of ‘reason,’ ‘truth,’ or ‘justice’ are always social constructs, and that their discipline, with all its methodological tyranny is never really worth its cost: as evident in the persecution of Galileo. Revolutionary thinkers always challenge the images of truth and reason in themselves: like Galileo, and like Feyerabend. It seems that neither Feyerabend nor Ratzinger are encroaching on the precious territory of this tenuous discipline called modern physics as much as it thinks.

So the cause of the controversy amounts to nothing. Ratzinger cites Feyerabend in an address, interprets him correctly and takes into account the context of the citation. We can’t take F.’s assertion at face value, nor can the Church simply pretend that in its history, has not committed a number of decisive errors in the name of its God and His ideals: faith, reason, truth, and justice. (Values which, not incidentally, are only infrequently compatible.) Ratzinger is in fact arguing in a roundabout way that we can’t simply construct a hasty apologetics for the Church because we recognized that it was serving what it knew at the time to be ‘truth’ and ‘justice.’ He clearly says, “The faith does not grow from resentment and the rejection of rationality.” Faith, rather, needs to engage with rationality productively, in order to recognize the rightful place which is to be accorded to each. It’s an excellent, and extremely nuanced argument, founded on a clear understanding of Feyerabend’s arguments. He doesn’t even ‘disagree’ with Feyerabend: he uses the polemical statement to condense an argument that’s in a sense present throughout the text. (Feyerabend himself, it seems, responded approvingly to the quotation.) But then something remarkable happens. A bunch of ideologically-motivated scientists (or scientifically-motivated ideologues, take your pick) take a citation within a citation and distort the entire structure so far out of its context that it loses all its original meaning and gains a new one. Science in a nutshell: science certainly does love its nutshells. It might be beyond the hermeneutic capacities of a pure physicist to grasp the nuances of Ratzinger’s argument, but he certainly doesn’t attempt to justify the persecution of Galileo! A quotation taken out of context thereby forces the Pope to miss out on a potentially rather fruitful engagement with the university, by way of a manufactured protest. Idiocy!
The quality of these news stories is pretty upsetting. Which gives us the moral of the first level of stories: we shouldn’t make very many strong claims from a CNN-level understanding of anything, because it’s pretty much founded on a heap of bullshit wrenched from its context by lazy writers, slapped together into something that’s twice as dramatic as it is useful. Nevertheless, if we, ourselves, take some time to investigate these issues a bit, we can at least figure out what’s going on – and luckily, we can write that down and ‘publish’ it rather cheaply, to make sense of the world for ourselves and others.

What of the ‘real story?’ If there’s a moral to the story beneath these stories, it’s this. I’m as atheist and naturally ‘materialist’ in every sense as the very hypothetical ‘next guy.’ I ‘believe’ in this ambiguous notion ’science’ in the same way I ‘believe’ in logic: remarkably consistent, useful, and fascinating, but essentially incomplete. Thus in this regard, at least, one thing is clear when I take a step back from the ever-present polemicization of scientists and religionists. Science is not done learning from religion, however perennially it may hope to be.