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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.
On 12 September 2006, Pope Benedict XVl delivered his famous polemical address in Regensburg. In spite of everything that was said, the subject ol his Vorlesung was not Islam, but the importance of reason in Christianity and in other religions.1 There, he stated that "the fundamental options that relate precisely to the relationship between faith and die quest of human reason form part of faith itself, and are a development that is in accord with its very nature."2 Faith, reason, and love constitute the three main elements - die three pillars - of the thought of Joseph Ratzinger. Reason and relation, truth and love, logos and dia-logos take us back to "creator Reason," to the Logos that existed "in the beginning" (John 1:1), which created through love. Logos, truth, and Jove are all intimately united: there is an alliance between the divine and the human, because as the Word is made flesh (John 1:14), he has to redeem everything that is human, including reason. These are precedents that naturally do not necessarily form part of the pontifical teaching of the present pope.'3
Athens and Jerusalem
This proposal is neither exclusively Christian nor Catholic. Ratzinger was in the same line of thought as - for example...