01-03-2007 - Traces, n. 3 Within Reality Reason The intention here is not one of retrenchment or negative criticism, but of broadening our concept of reason and its application. While we rejoice in the new possibilities open to humanity, we also see the dangers arising from these possibilities and we must ask ourselves how we can overcome them. We will succeed in doing so only if reason and faith come together in a new way, if we overcome the self-imposed limitation of reason to the empirically falsifiable, and if we once more disclose its vast horizons.... The West has long been endangered by this aversion to the questions which underlie its rationality, and can only suffer great harm thereby. The courage to engage the whole breadth of reason, and not the denial of its grandeur–this is the program with which a theology grounded in biblical faith enters into the debates of our time. “Not to act reasonably, not to act with logos, is contrary to the nature of God.”... It is to this great logos, to this breadth of reason, that we invite our partners in the dialogue of cultures. To rediscover it constantly is the great task of the university. (Regensburg, September 12, 2006) Michele Lenoci (Chair of the Science of Education Department, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Milan) Education, reason, and the fullness of the human person are three things that, in the teaching of Benedict XVI, are constantly referred to as necessary in order to have an impact with reality that is truly capable of curiosity and awe. If education is the path toward a more adequate encounter with reality, we need first and foremost to educate reason, so that its gaze can be capable of overcoming the boundaries within which an obtuse scientism and a petty reductionism would like to lock it. Reality and man possess a variety of dimensions and layers that can be appreciated only through a non-biased vision, but today we are deaf and blind in front of such richness and, therefore, we need to be patiently introduced to it. We also need to educate to reason, meaning that we have to become familiar with that logos that embraces and sustains everything, and of which we can trace the vestiges in the whole of creation, thanks to that reason that, as men, we possess and that characterizes us, making us in the image of God. All of this doesn’t have to recall a unilateral and emphatic rationalism, because the desire for the Infinite–that manifests itself in reason–imbues every properly human activity and renders it capable of a universal embrace. Emotions, passions, and the corporeal dimension itself–when fully human–all tend toward a constant transcending of the particularity and of the situation from which they spring forth and on which they feed, but by which they cannot be exhausted or fulfilled. Education finds here the root of the dissatisfaction that dwells in the heart of man and, at the same time, the final destination where that yearning will ultimately be answered: the logos that is love sustains a path made of “yes;” even from within limitations and evil one can catch a glimpse of the saving embrace, and taste here and now a fuller realization of the self.