St Mary’s 2011 Pope Benedict XVI Lecture

Rabbi Sacks: Your Grace, Archbishop of Westminster, Archbishop Cartie from Scotland, Principal, Vice-Principal, friends, it is an enormous, enormous privilege to join you this evening. May I congratulate the Principal on having, I think just now, exceeded the number of 4,000 students, which will hasten the day when you are not merely a college but a university in your own right. May I congratulate the Vice-Principal on his imminent translation to Limerick.

I'm sure there's a joke there, but I'm not sure. The only limerick I remember, because I constantly tell it to my office, is “Sir Christopher Wren was having dinner with some men. He said, ‘If anyone calls, say, I'm designing some balls’.”

With appropriate translation for Chief Rabbis, that's what I try and send the message as. How wonderful to see here - I didn't know who I was going to be meeting here - but to see beloved friends from other faith communities, to say hello to Sir Iqbal Sacranie. We enjoyed a friendship so much when you were Head of the… Head of the Muslim Council, and our beloved friend, Mohinder Singh of the Sikh community of Britain, of Birmingham. We spent the most wonderful time together in Amritsar by inhaling the extraordinarily holy atmosphere of the Golden Temple there. 

And, I do believe that in Britain we can be proud of the fact that the leaders of our many faith traditions - Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Buddhist, Jain, Zoroastrian, and Baha'i, the main ones, are actually friends together.

I think the act of friendship means so much, and if only the media could make good news, news for a while. I would have thought getting those nine faiths together must be pretty newsworthy, but nobody seems to think so. It is those friendships across faiths that make Britain a tolerant country, a caring country, a compassionate one, and I am very proud to be a very small part of this community of faiths, and this evening's lecture is something I regard as a very great privilege indeed.

I've been asked to say a little about the continuing echoes and reverberations of that unforgettable visit by the Pope here in Britain, and here in this, I think it was actually in this room, a year ago. And since this is a rather serious subject, I share with you just one light-hearted reflection that I shared with the Archbishop, was it yesterday? I think it was yesterday. Well, the old ones are the best ones, aren't they? And here it is. 

We were waiting here in this room for the Pope, and I think that people were aware we had to come rather early for security reasons, and I think the Principal or the Vice-Principal had decided to keep us occupied and entertained.

We would hear some music, so there was a rather fine singer who sang some German Lieder. Now, I don't understand any German at all, but it did seem to me that these Lieder were magnificently gloomy. I mean, even not understanding a word of German, I kind of got the impression they were about mortality and the shortness of life and how death awaits us all, and it was really good, and there were several of them. And then we waited, and still the Pope didn't arrive, so I think somebody said, ‘Would you sing us some more songs?’ And I don't think he prepared any more songs, so he sang them all over again.

And again, there was a delay, and I can't remember whether we heard them a third time or we merely thought we heard them a third time, but I cannot tell you how blessed and wonderful this was, because that day was the afternoon of the evening of our Day of Atonement, Yom Kippur, when we are supposed to contemplate death, mortality, and the brevity of life. So I don't know what anyone else felt about that, but I felt thoroughly in the mood for the day, and I thank this wonderful Catholic institution for lifting me to these Jewish heights of atonement and repentance. 

Anyway, looking back on that visit, I think I was struck by three things.

Number one, the huge success that it was at every point. There were huge crowds everywhere. It dominated the media.

All the negative predictions, all the anxieties, proved to be totally unfounded. And there was the man himself, the Pope, demonised absolutely appallingly by some of our more aggressive atheists, and there he was in person. A man of gentleness, of quiet, and of calm, a deeply thoughtful man, obviously a deeply compassionate man, who carried with him an aura of grace and holiness that you really did not have to be Catholic or a believer at all to understand and to sense. 

And I felt then, you know, even given the fact that I suppose Britain is in some ways quite a secular society, my mind went back to that moment in the 23rd chapter of Genesis, where Abraham is meeting the Hittites, who are not, as far as I know, Abrahamic monotheists at the time, and yet despite the fact that he was from quite a different theological world from them, they say to him, “You are a prince of God in our midst.”

And I rather think that's how the British public felt in the presence of Pope Benedict XVI here, even to a non-believer, was manifestly a prince of God in our midst. And I think that was a wonderful moment and a blessed one. 

The second point, again I made yesterday, you might think it's trivial. I don't, although I love, you know, I miss academic life because the insults you get in academia are so much more beautiful than those you get in religious life. My favourite put down by one Oxford academic of another was, “On the surface, he's profound. But deep down, he's superficial.”

So this may seem superficial, but I think it isn't. And that is that it is clear that Pope Benedict XVI, like his predecessor, has the ability to do something which is actually one of the most difficult things to do in our time, which is to command attention. And that is very important.

I said there was a time in World War II when Churchill could command attention of everyone merely by speaking on the radio. There was a time when there was only one television channel. Incidentally, it didn't show any programmes on Sundays, so as not to discourage people from going to church. And you could command attention today when on even my satellite television you can get 1,000 channels of television, at least 990 of which don't have a single thing worth watching. And when you can go on the Web and get, I don't know, it must be in excess of a billion websites.

How do you get a message through all that ambient noise? 

And that is very challenging indeed. And the Pope did and does command attention. Here was a man of God, speaking about God, addressing the better angels of our nature. And for a moment people watched and listened, and holy words penetrated that carapace that so often distances us from messages of real spiritual depth. 

There are very few people in the world who could do that, and he did. 

And of course, third, and this was clearly for all of us at that time, and many of us here today, something very special and very precious, were his words here on that occasion.

He spoke about the relationship between faiths, as he saw it, and his words were warm and generous. He first of all began by expressing the Catholic Church's appreciation in his words for the important witness, he said, looking at all of us, that ‘All of you bear as spiritual men and women living at a time when religious convictions are not always understood or appreciated.’ Then he spoke about what we have in common.

His words were on the spiritual level, all of us in our different ways are personally engaged in a journey, the journey he called “the quest for the sacred,” which - he went on to articulate - expresses the deepest longings of the human heart, our love for God and our love for our neighbour, that motivates us, in his words, to cultivate the practise of virtue and to reach out towards one another in love with the greatest respect for religious traditions different from our own. And then he itemised the three levels of dialogue as he understood it. 

First, he spoke about the dialogue of life, which involves simply living alongside one another and learning from one another.

Then he spoke about what he called the dialogue of action, our collaborative engagement in working for peace, justice, and the stewardship of creation. 

And then at the highest level, what he called the formal conversations, what we would call direct interfaith dialogue - sharing our spiritual riches, speaking of our experience of prayer and contemplation, and expressing to one another “the joy of our encounter with divine love.” What a beautiful phrase, “sharing the joy of our encounter with the divine love.”

And then he ended by reaffirming his commitment to engagement and dialogue out of what he said was a genuine sense of respect for you and your beliefs, and pledged the Catholic Church to continue to build bridges of friendship to other religions, to heal past wrongs, and to foster trust between individuals and communities. 

Now, those were remarkable words, and I truly appreciated them. I think every single person there did.

And then speaking shortly, speaking personally, there was a little epiphany as far as I was concerned, because just as the Pope was leaving, he stopped and took both of my hands and told me how much he valued the Catholic-Jewish relationship, and about how much he wanted the work to continue, and in his word, “to deepen.” I regarded that as a very blessed moment indeed. Soul touched soul across the boundaries of faith, and there was a blessed moment of healing. It was, for me, a genuine I-Thou-encounter. 

Now, these things may sound simple and even commonplace, but they really aren't. If we are honest with one another, and I believe God asks of us nothing less than honesty, then there have been ages in human history, and there are even places today, where, to our embarrassment and to our shame, people hate one another in the name of the God of love, practise cruelty to one another in the name of the God of compassion, kill in the name of God of life, and wage war in the name of the God of peace.

Those are indelible stains in the fabric of faith, and we really have to work so hard to move beyond them and make sure that they don't happen again. 

I have often said that the secularisation of Europe began in the 17th century, not because people stopped believing in God. The intellectual heroes of the 17th century, Newton and Descartes, believed in God very much indeed.

Secularisation began not because people stopped believing in God, but because people stopped believing in the ability of people of God to live peaceably with one another. That is what happened. Wars of religion scarring the face of Europe in the late 16th and, for the better… the first half of the 17th century.

That's when people began to search, first for forms of knowledge, then for forms of political authority, and finally for forms of culture that did not rest on dogmatic foundations, that rested instead on things like reason, observation, social contract, the greatest happiness for the greatest number on which all people, even those of sharply conflicting religious beliefs, could agree. 

Secularisation began not because God failed, but because we failed. 

And it is no accident that the new atheists have emerged in the years and in the wake of 9-11, 10 years ago, when the world seemed to be embarking on a new age of wars of religion, just as Europe had done in the 16th and 17th centuries.

I am therefore convinced, and I know so many of you are, that the ability of the world's great faiths to make space for one another, to recognise what I once called “the dignity of difference,” is one of the great challenges of the 21st century, and the fact that Pope Benedict XVI is committed to that process is a mark, I think, of his vision and courage that lifts us all, and I want to salute that. 

So those were the obvious, lasting impressions of that moment. But there is something more, and something that I really must say from the heart.

Let me explain to you why I felt drawn to Pope Benedict long before I met him. And this touches on the question, what is the role of a religious leader in an age of uncertainty like ours? There is a difference between space and time. When it comes to space, thanks to satellite navigation systems and Google Maps - I do thank the Almighty for Google Maps - we are for the first time able to know exactly where we are.

I should tell you that in the age before Google Maps, about 10 or 15 years ago, I used often to take our office team out for a walk in the country to discuss where we should be going. And of course, I walked off boldly in front, and the others, believing that their leader knew where he was going, followed. It often took us very few minutes to realise that we were totally and absolutely lost, and I began to understand why it was that when the Israelites first followed a rabbi into the wilderness in the days of Moses, a journey that should have taken them a few weeks, took them 40 years.

Now, if only Moses had had a sat-nav system. So, but now, thanks to these wonderful technologies, when it comes to space, we know exactly where we are. 

But it is quite different when it comes to time.

We really don't know where we are, and we really can't know where we are. Did the pre-Christian Greeks - Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, know that they were pre-Christian Greeks? Did the people of the Middle Ages think they were living in the Middle Ages? The truth is that obviously not. 

When it comes to time, we don't know, we cannot know where we are, because we don't know what, where the destination will take us, what route we are embarked on, what story we are a part of.

We never know what we'll be until it is. 

I have to tell you, and it shattered me a little bit, sent tingles down my spine. A friend of mine mentioned a couple of days ago that I had been addressing one of their children under the marriage canopy, under the bridal canopy, a Jewish wedding, and I had said to the young couple, you know, however much we know, there is one thing we don't know and we'll never know, which is what tomorrow will bring.

And she said to me, “Do you remember what day that was?” It was the 10th of September, 2001. 

We never know what tomorrow will bring. So we have always needed people who will guide us through the wilderness of time.

And those people are of two kinds, and they're different kinds. The first kind was represented in ancient times by oracles, soothsayers, gazers in crystal balls. Nowadays they're economic forecasters, pundits, much better paid for their efforts, extremely unlikely to get it more right than the oracles used to do. And that is one kind. 

And the other kind are the people that we read about in the Bible called prophets. And the difference between them is profound.

And I can state it simply as follows. If a prediction comes true, it has succeeded. If a prophecy comes true, it has failed. You see, an oracle is interested in what is going to happen. A prophet warns what will happen unless. He tells you about a possible future to help us avert it.

An oracle predicts, a prophet warns. And they're two different things. We are certainly not short of soothsayers and predictors today, but we are terribly short of prophets. And that is what led me to the Pope long before I met him. 

Let me tell you my journey to that place. I have been deeply concerned for some time now. About something that has gone terribly wrong in our culture. Something that wasn't dangerous for several centuries, but has become dangerous now. I can put it this way.

Two of the most formative thinkers of the modern age were in the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes; in the 18th century, Adam Smith. And between them, they developed the theories on which our two great institutions, the State and the market are based. Hobbes developed the theory of the modern state.

The theory that came to be called, he didn't call it that himself, but came to be called the social contract. And Adam Smith laid the foundations for the modern economy through the theories of division of labour and market exchange. Now, those for the past 50 years have become our dominant institutions.

The liberal democratic State on the one hand, the market economy on the other. And those have been our two forms of freedom. Political freedom here, economic freedom there.

But, both Hobbes and Adam Smith constructed their arguments in terms of self-interest and the individual. You remember, Adam Smith famously said, “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect their dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.” He wanted a system that would allow people's own self-interest to lead them without their intending to promote the common good.

And Hobbes did likewise in terms of political theory. Hobbes didn't even think the words ‘good’ or ‘bad’ meant anything other than what I as an individual want. In his own words, “Whatever is the object of any man's appetite or desire, that is it for which he, for his part, calls good.” The good is what we as individuals desire. 

Now, Hobbes and Smith were able to say this because in their age, in their circles, there were strong families, strong communities, a strong sense of national identity. People were used to words like good and evil.

Words like duty and responsibility and obligation. Famously, Adam Smith even wrote a book, a very important book, called “A Theory of Moral Sentiments.”

What happens, however, when all we have left are the Hobbesian state and the Adam Smith free market, but we lose those other things? What happens when we lose our shared ethos, when individual self-interest is all we are left with? When we live in a world marked by individualism, moral relativism, consumerism, when communities grow weak, when families become fragile, when people are left vulnerable alone… what happens when people lose their codes of honour or their sense of the common good, when success or fame or wealth are our only benchmarks… when, as we read in the UNICEF report this week, British parents are spending their time giving children trainers, smartphones and computer games and failing to give them the one thing the kids actually want from their parents, which is time. 

What happens when self-interest is all we have and when our time horizons are limited to the present, when our attention spans are so foreshortened? 10 years ago, this wonderful exercise in sustained sadism called “Thought for the Day,” which I so love doing. You must forgive me my little malicious pleasures, but there it is, you know, everyone's getting up in the morning just about to face a joyous day when some rabbi comes on giving them a sermon, you know, straight back to bed again. 

But I mean the BBC cut that down from three minutes to two minutes 45 seconds 10 years ago on the grounds that even then, nobody could concentrate for three minutes. And I think that's pushing it rather at two minutes 45 seconds maybe a long time now.

And therefore, what happens when people prefer to live for today and not think about tomorrow, where they prefer to borrow and spend than invest and save for the sake of our grandchildren not yet born, where we are consuming our resources in every sense in a way that our children and grandchildren will pay the bill for? 

There is nothing inevitable about morality whatsoever. And we get a little confused here. Darwin was the man who pointed us in the right direction. Darwin was puzzled because on the one hand, he perfectly well knew, and he said, that if natural selection actually is true, then only the ruthless will tend to survive. It is those people who risk their lives for the sake of others who will on average die more often, unable to pass their genes on to the next generation. Natural selection should select for the ruthless.

On the other hand, Darwin knew and wrote that in every human society he had ever come across, people valued altruists and altruism, the people who do make the sacrifice for the sake of others. And Darwin was honest enough to wrestle with this and even sharp enough to come up with a solution which, if I can put it in the language of today, is this, that we hand on our genes as individuals but we only survive as groups. That is the tension.

And groups are held together by bonds of mutuality and trust, so that although there are many books on Darwinian ethics, seeing it in terms of egoism, and others, a whole series of them in recent years - from Frans De Waal, from Axelrod, from Matt Ridley, from Robert Wright - on what they call the origins of virtue or reciprocal altruism, the truth is that, as Darwin fully understood, we are subject to conflicting pressures, both of which are biologically encoded in us. 

Those pressures operate both in the direction of selfishness and selflessness, and which of those two prevails, in the case of Homo sapiens, depends less on nature than on culture. It is culture, and our bit of culture, more perhaps than any other, that of religion, that does the miracle of turning selfish genes into selfless people.

And that culture was shaped in the West by the Judeo-Christian heritage. And therefore, we cannot lose that heritage and expect society, a society that is governed by political and economic considerations alone, considerations which are about the individual self-interest of the agent, you cannot expect such a society to sustain itself. It simply won't.

And here are some very wise words from an American historian writing in the 1950s. I recite them to you because I don't know of any words that seem so germane to our situation in Britain and Europe today. They were written in Volume 5 of Will Durant's great masterwork, “The Story of Civilisation.”

And listen to what he said. And Will Durant was incidentally an atheist. He had at one time thought of becoming a priest, but when he wrote this was an atheist. 

And this is what he wrote: “Hence, a certain tension between religion and society marks the higher stages of every civilisation. Intellectual history takes on the character of a conflict between science and religion. Institutions which were at first in the hands of the clergy like law and punishment, education and morals, marriage and divorce, tend to escape from ecclesiastical control and become secular, perhaps profane. The intellectual classes abandon the ancient theology and after some hesitation the moral code allied with it. 

Literature and philosophy become anti-clerical. The movement of liberation rises to an exuberant worship of reason and falls to a paralysing disillusionment with every dogma and every idea. Conduct, deprived of its religious supports, deteriorates into epicurean chaos. And life itself, shorn of consoling faith, becomes a burden alike to conscious poverty and to weary wealth.

In the end, a society and its religion tend to fall together like body and soul in a harmonious death.” 

Now, that's a very powerful statement by somebody not himself religious. And it is that possibility that has concerned me for years.

I wrote in the Times last week about the secular prophets who influenced me. Thinkers like Alasdair MacIntyre or Philip Reith or Christopher Lash, or on a slightly different political orientation, thinkers like Robert Beller or Jürgen Habermas or Vaclav Havel, all of whom warned of what happens to a civilisation when it loses that sense of the transcendent, or what the Pope called “the search for the sacred.”

And I suggested that if we take that seriously, then we have to put alongside our memories of 9-11 what has happened since, namely the disintegration of the family, the demise of authority, the build-up of personal debt, the collapse of financial institutions, the downgrading of the American economy, the continuing failure of some European economies, the loss of a sense of honour, loyalty and integrity that has brought once respected groups in society into disrepute, and the waning in the West of a sense of national identity. And yes, the riots that took place a month ago. 

It seemed to me that in these past 10 years, we have been in the West so busy trying to save the world that we had no time left to save ourselves. 

And here I therefore speak very personally. I've written and spoken about these things since the Reith Lectures I gave on the Persistence of Faith 21 years ago in 1990. And I have to say that it is very lonely indeed, as I'm sure Archbishop Vincent will testify, and anyone who tries to speak about these things. People don't want to hear such things, least of all from a religious leader. Who understands anymore the difference between prediction and prophecy?.

And in any case, in the Hebrew Bible, and I'm sure a lot of us can sympathise with this, at least three prophets, one called Elisha, one called Hosea, and one called Jeremiah, were described by the very fruity word in Hebrew, “meshuggah,” which still in contemporary Hebrew means a lunatic, a madman. Anyone who dares to say such things in public. 

So it was with a real sense of discovering a truly blessed kindred spirit that I read the works of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI.

His words about what he called “the dictatorship of relativism.” His consistent warning across many fields about what happens when our thinking economically or politically or in terms of cosmological physics or biology, all of which in and of themselves he has enormous respect for. But when they claim to be the whole story about humanity, that struck me as very penetrating indeed - his critique of this reductive understanding of the human being as a mere biological or material phenomenon. 

Here, I recognised long ago when I first started reading his work, was a man who spoke both as a philosopher and as a prophet. Here was a man who was not only a religious leader, but quite clearly a public intellectual, a person whose gaze extended far beyond the present and whose generosity of spirit embraced far beyond the constituency of Catholics or of Christians. 

And that is why I instantly felt a sense of kinship with him and his work. I once defined faith as “the redemption of solitude.” And here was a man in whom I felt my solitude redeemed. Here was a man prepared, I think, to say to Europe - not that he ever used these words, if I may paraphrase from a sacred text, not my own - but I think he was saying, what does it profit the West if it gained the world and loses its soul? 

In fact, I would go further. If you lose your soul, eventually, you lose the world as well.

And what led me to that last conclusion was an unexpected resonance from a quarter that I never thought of. And that was the historian Neil Ferguson. I don't know if you either read his recent book called “Civilisation” or saw his television programmes, but he tells a very, very interesting story at the end of that book.

And here it is. What does he do? The book is about what made the West the best, to which his answer is it had six killer apps. That is, of course, why we have grandchildren, to tell us what on earth a killer app is.

But at any rate, whatever it was, you know, and he tells the following story, very interesting. It is from a member of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. And the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences was charged with the task of finding out how the West overtook China.

China was leading the West in all sorts of inventions until the 15th century. Then from the 15th century onwards, the West started pulling ahead. And this academy was tasked with finding out what was it that gave the West the cutting edge.

And the scholar said, at first we thought it was your guns. You had better weapons than we did. Then we researched further and we realised it was your political system. It was your democracy that gave you the advantage. And then we studied further still and we realised that actually, it was your economy, the market economy, capitalism that led to the individualism, that led to the democracy, that led to the better guns. But for the last 20 years, we have had no doubt whatsoever.

We know it was your religion. 

And that, from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, is quite something. And it is very interesting because today, according to the Editor of The Economist, John Micklethwait, in his 2009 book, “God is Back,” today apparently there are more members in China of the Church than there are of the Communist Party.

And this in the land that 50 years ago, Chairman Mao Zedong declared to be religion-free. In other words, what Europe is losing, China is discovering. And if Christianity today comes with a little sticker saying, yeah, made in China, I said, it's still worth buying.

And therefore, when I listened to the message between the words of Pope Benedict XVI, I heard the words of a true prophet fearing that Europe is losing its soul. 

And therefore, and I mentioned this today, I have the privilege that I will be meeting the Pope in Rome in December to continue the conversation that began a year ago, because I think it is our most important collective conversation. 

I hope I've said enough this evening to indicate that the challenge the Pope issued a year ago will be with us for a very long time indeed.

And I, for one, feel enlarged by a world in which, thanks to the vision, generosity, and expansiveness of the Pope's faith, we have reached a situation in which two faiths, Judaism and the Roman Catholic Church, estranged for many, many centuries, can meet today as friends - sharing our wisdoms, our fears, our hopes, and our love. Thank you.