Pope stresses faith, reason harmony

ROME, Vatican City, Jan. 30 Pope Benedict XVI Wednesday stressed St. Augustine's insistence that reason and faith must be harmonized. "These themes are not to be opposed to one another, but must always go together" to arrive at the truth, he said. Speaking to 6,000 at the general audience, the pope said St. Augustine's intellectual and spiritual journey represents "a model of the relationship between faith and reason, a central theme for the equilibrium and destiny of every human being." These two dimensions "must not be separated or opposed, but rather must be harmonized": they are, in fact, "the two forces that lead us to knowledge," AsiaNews reported Wednesday.

The pairing of faith and reason is therefore central in Augustine's life and thought: he had learned that faith as a child and had rejected it as an adolescent, "because he did not see its reasonableness, and it was not an expression of his reason", meaning truth. "His search for the truth was so radical that he could not be satisfied with philosophies that did not arrive at God", who "is not only a cosmological hypothesis" but "a God who gives life". Augustine said, "'believe in order to understand', but also and inseparably, 'understand in order to believe'", which indicate that "God is not far from our reason and from our lives ... on the contrary, he is close to every human being, and he is as close to his heart as to his reason," the pope said.