Benedict XVI's Republic of Reason

Ten years ago, and 66 years after Berlin was stormed by the Soviet army, not far from the bunker in which the Fuhrer of the Thousand Year Reich committed suicide, a German pope addressed the Bundestag of the Federal Republic of Germany. His speech, "The Listening Heart: Reflections on the Foundations of Law," amounted to a call to the assembled legislators to escape another bunker. That bunker was an enclosed state of mind. Far from being a refuge from danger, it was one that cut itself off from the fullness of reason and those truths given expression in religious faith. And by faith, Benedict XVI did not mean the type of beliefs that lead people to fly planes into buildings. Instead, the pope had in mind a faith grounded in a conception of God as Caritas but also Logos: the ancient Greek word that embraced the idea that God is a rational Divinity and the ultimate foundation of human reason itself.