"Faith" and "reason" are the two terms around which John Paul II builds his reflections on the human being and his/her highest vocation. This is true not only of the encyclical on "Faith and Reason" but also of the entirety of his magisterium as both thinker and as pastor. In order to clarify the meaning of this affirmation it is necessary to understand the meaning of the two terms faith and reason in the light of two backgrounds: the background of the time in which Karol Wojtyla worked, and the other one of his heart. Together they constitute the very core of his "theological biography". It is only in this way that the full meaning of these two terms and the motive which John Paul II speaks of as being "like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of the truth" 1 can be fully understood.

1. What reason? The metaphors of modern time

In the events of the twentieth century, "reason" is the singular and decisive protagonist: it lies at the very heart of the parable on the modern era, which sees both its apex and decline in this twentieth century. Opening with the triumph of "strong reason", characteristic of the Enlightenment, modernity has led to the widespread diffusion of the experience of fragmentation and non-sense so typical of "weak reason", which has flourished since the fall of ideologies. Succeeding the "lengthy" century, which began with the French Revolution and ended with the out break of the Great War (World War I), is the so-called "short twentieth century" (E. Hobsbawm), marked by the affirmation of the extreme fruits of totalitarianism and of ideological models, which ultimately led to their downfall and collapse (1989). This process is described by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno through a powerful metaphor at the beginning of their Dialectic of Enlightenment: "The fully enlightened earth radiates disaster triumphant." 2 The Enlightenment - taken in the broadest philosophical sense as a continuous process - had pursued the objective of ridding men and women of all fear and of rendering to them complete control of their destiny, thanks to boundless faith in the possibility of reason. Its final outcome - fulfilled through the dramas of the two world wars and the high costs of totalitarianism - can be recognized in the condition of renunciation, in the denial of questions of meaning and the search for the foundation, which is the condition of the so-called "weak thought". Three stages can be identified in this process, which lies at the origin of the crisis of the European consciousness on the threshold of the third millennium, stages which can be traced back to the metaphor of light, darkness and dawn respectively.

1.1 The light of strong reason and its decline

The first stage is characterised by the metaphor of light, which expresses the principal inspiration underlying modernity, which is the pretext of the adult reason to be able to understand and illuminate every thing. According to this pretext, the ability rationally to embrace the world means to make the human person the master of his/her own identity. Emancipation is the dream that pervades all the great processes of transformation in the modern era. The presumption to triumph over every obscurity through the use of reason is expressed by the total visions held of the world, which are the ideologies. Ideology tries to impose the order of reason on the whole of reality, to the point of establishing a complete equation between the ideal and the real. It excludes any form of diversity and is by its very nature violent. The dream of totality becomes inexorably totalitarian. It is not by chance, nor is it an accident of time, that all forms of modern ideology have resulted in totalitarian and violent forms. Indeed, it is precisely this historical experience of the violence of totalitarian ideologies that has produced the crisis of the absolute pretexts of "enlightened" reason.

1.2 The night of weak reason

If adult reason sought to give sense to everything, then the "weak thought" of the post-modern condition does not recognize the possibility of any sense in anything. It is a condition that can be expressed by way of the metaphor of darkness; it is a period of ruin and of failure, of darkness and uncertainty, a period which has, above all, been marked by indifference. For many people, the rejection of the strong and total horizons offered by ideology bears the inability of posing the question about meaning. This has led to the extreme point of a loss of all interest in seeking out the ultimate reasons for human life and death. The extreme face of the epochal crisis of the European consciousness can be associated with the face of "decadence". This means the loss of value, since there is no longer any interest in comparing or measuring oneself to anything. It is in this way that the passion for the truth has been lost. The "strong culture" of ideology shatters into the fragmentation of "weak cultures", in which the loss of hope folds in on itself and everything is reduced to the narrow horizon of the individual's own particular. In this way, then, the end to ideologies appears more truly as the pallid avant-guard of the advent of the idol, which is the total relativism of those who no longer have any faith in the power of the truth, and as a result seem incapable and uninterested in realising the passage from phenomenon to foundation. This is the extreme face of the crisis surrounding the European consciousness at the close of the "short twentieth century."

1.3 The dawn of an open and questioning reason

In the analysis of this process, which takes us from the triumph of modern reason to its decadence, we cannot exclude some signs of change and of hope, with which we will associate the metaphor of the dawn. There is a "nostalgia for a perfect and consumed justice" (Max Horkheimer), which will enable us to recognize a sort of search for lost meaning. We are not talking about "une recherche du temps perdu", of an operation based in the past, but rather of a diffused attempt to rediscover a meaning that goes beyond that of ruin and failure, one that enables people to discern a horizon that inspires and moves them. Among the many expressions used in relation to this search we should point out the use of the expression: a rediscovery of the other. We are witnesses to a growing awareness of the need for solidarity, at an interpersonal level, as also at social and international levels. We can see a sort of "nostalgia for the Totally Other" emerging (Max Horkheimer), a rediscovery of the ultimate questions and the ultimate horizon. This outlines the need for a new consensus on ethics to motivate a moral involvement, not for the sake of the benefits that arise from it, but rather for the sake of the good it arouses in itself. The nostalgia that is evident in the crisis of our present time has, therefore, the face of the other, not only the face that is near by and immediate but also of the Other, that is the transcendent foundation of life and of living together. Thus we can say that there are in fact some signs of a return to a reason that is open to transcending itself and to seeking out the Other.

1. John Paul II, Encyclical Letter Fides et Ratio, Preface, Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1998, p. 3.

2. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, NY, 1969, p. 3.