Logos and Dia-Logos: Faith, Reason, (and Love) According to Joseph Ratzinger

Reason is a feature that distinguishes Christianity from other religions, as Joseph Ratzinger so often said. The position of religion, as the Jewish-Christian perspective teaches and he stated many times, is positive and complementary: faith admits the constructive criticism of reason, and at the same time human knowledge becomes wider and richer in the light of Christian revelation. In this sense, Ratzinger agreed with Jürgen Habermas that faith and reason can heal each other’s “pathologies.” Christianity admits the ideas of philosophy, as opposed to other religions that do not: this is the so-called “victory of intelligence” in the world of religion. So now, as Ratzinger says, we need a “new Enlightenment” that is wider and deeper than modernism. He has drawn up a theology of the logos and of the dia-logos, of faith, reason, and love, in analogy with the divine Person of the Logos. Truth and faith are in the relationship with reason, the human logos. Moreover, the idea that “God is love” is inside all humankind.