As the Catholic Jubilee year draws to a close, the European consciousness is once again being called to question the relationship between tradition and progress, where the former is usually more rooted in spirituality, and the latter in secular and liberal horizons.

From Greece to today, the tension between faith and reason has spanned every century. Truth in Greek is alḗtheia, a combination of the alpha privative with lḗthē, meaning ‘oblivion’.
Literally, it is ‘the unveiled’. The philosopher, i.e. ‘the one who loves knowledge’, is born as a revolutionary, tending towards total knowledge, the monopoly of the gods, and at the same time illuminating what others do not seek or even conceal.
Public religion aimed, on the contrary, to veil. The Greek temple knows no solar illumination, the idol remains in the shadows, because the direct encounter with the divine frightens and needs intermediaries, the priests.

The history of faith is the history of a symbolic language, where ‘symbol’ is not simply an image, but, again from the Greek, ‘union’ of far and near, of hidden and obvious.
The God of the Abrahamic tradition does not impose himself, but offers himself for interpretation. In Judaism, no one can see God and remain alive, and yet He speaks, reveals Himself in the prophets, hides Himself in silence.

With Christianity, the Logos becomes flesh, the invisible becomes visible, the mystery is concentrated in the Cross – the extreme coincidence of distance and proximity, of power and fragility. God reveals himself as impassibilis sed non-compassibilis: compassibilis because he suffers with man in the Son, while remaining impassibilis in the Father, that is, superior to all passion, thus preserving the hope for all of a reciprocal and eternal gift of self that is not pain, that is, of a love that is finally not accompanied by suffering.

It is no coincidence that ‘dogmas’, a term previously virtually unknown, were only formulated in the modern age. The Immaculate Conception (1854) and then the Assumption (1950) did not invent new truths, but gave conceptual form to a long tradition of faith, precisely at a time when Europe was definitively claiming the individual and his dignity.

The Christian mystery is, and must be, an invitation to intelligence.
God hides himself in order to be sought, and therefore interpreted. The Gospel of John does not say that the Son “showed” or “revealed” the Father, but that “He interpreted Him”(exēgēsato).
Here faith and reason touch each other: the former speaks in symbols, the latter in concepts, but both seek to make the invisible thinkable. The concept of Christian “interpretation” and not “revelation” , despite the fact that the traditionalist approach has always propagated the latter, speaks more of a truth that does not and cannot become the object of a monopoly, and that, even if partially received, one continues at the same time to seek in a dimension of universal solidarity.

It is no coincidence that Joseph Ratzinger and Jürgen Habermas, in a dialogue that has remained famous (2004), admitted that no democracy can survive without an ‘inspired reason’ capable of tapping into the moral root of religions.

Pure reason, without ethics, becomes technique; faith without reason becomes slavery.
They are united and saved by freedom, without which both result in fanaticism.
Man, besides being a ‘social animal’ (Aristotle), is also ‘metaphysical’ (Schopenhauer) and ‘symbolic’ (Cassirer): in this triad lies the true dimension of dialogue between faith and reason.
Both are exercises of consciousness, that is, of presence to oneself and to the world.
One seeks truth in the language of science or logic, the other in the language of mystery and hope. But both live from the same fragile material: trust.
Trust in the depth of Scripture or trust in the power of formulas; an act of faith in the sense that the universe is knowable and not a delirium of signs.

The modern believer cannot ignore Galileo’s lesson: God has given man two books – Nature and the Bible – and when they seem to contradict each other, Nature must be left to its own specific field of enquiry. Secular modernity has not destroyed faith: it has forced it to mature. Modern exegesis has shown how the Bible is both a historical and a symbolic text: a language of hope, not a treatise on cosmology.
At the same time, the deepest quantum mechanics shows, in Federico Faggin‘s studies, that being is relation.

Géza Vermes, a Jew and historian of religions, has recognised that the empty tomb remains a ‘philological’ mystery before being a theological one: inexplicable as invention, plausible as faith.
It does not prove resurrection, but shows that the idea of resurrection was only possible as a real event for those who experienced it.
No one could ever have stolen the body, because no one needed a defeated and crucified Messiah who mysteriously promised to liberate, on a distant future day, not the Jewish people from political subjugation, but all of humanity from death.

Faith must be reasonable and reason must acknowledge, out of honesty, that it believes in something. Any study must at least have faith in its sources in order to develop, and in this sense, an even broader discourse, just as there must be no closure between faith and reason, so there must be no closure between the exact sciences and the humanities.

The problem of evil remains. Evangelical theologian Dorothee Sölle called the idea that suffering serves to improve us ‘theological sadism’. And yet, where does this nostalgia for harmony come from if we have never seen it?
Perhaps that nostalgia is our most universal form of faith: the desire for a just world, which unites believers and non-believers alike. In these very days, between the memory of Dignitatis humanae and the feast of the Immaculate Conception in the heart of a restless Europe and a wounded Mediterranean, the Church reminds us that this nostalgia is not a luxury, but a moral force.

Dostoevsky saw as absurd a freedom that is that of the strong to offend and of the defenceless to succumb as a martyr, and his Ivan Karamazov rejected a priori any future harmony that could explain this, preferring to remain in the memory of the injustice suffered, which at least gives it the dignity of having been.
At the same time, Dostoevsky himself continued to love Christ as the Only One capable of taking upon himself the unbearable weight of such memory, granting the hope of the Resurrection.

In the long night of history, we do not know whether ‘the wolf shall dwell with the lamb … and a little child shall lead them” (Isaiah), as resounded in the liturgy on Sunday 7 December, coinciding with the 60th anniversary of Dignitatis humanae of the Second Vatican Council.
But we have the opportunity to keep our little candle lit: that of faith is the – active – expectation of the day; reason is the courage to continue to illuminate the world. And perhaps it is in this humble, vigilant, stubborn light that both recognise themselves: sisters, at last, in the same conscience.