41
veals the Father. Only when we are configured to
Jesus do we receive the eyes needed to see him.
The dialogue between faith and reason
32.âÂÂChristian faith, inasmuch as it proclaims
the truth of GodâÂÂs total love and opens us to the
power of that love, penetrates to the core of our
human experience. Each of us comes to the light
because of love, and each of us is called to love
in order to remain in the light. Desirous of il-
lumining all reality with the love of God made
manifest in Jesus, and seeking to love others with
that same love, the first Christians found in the
Greek world, with its thirst for truth, an ideal
partner in dialogue. The encounter of the Gos-
pel message with the philosophical culture of the
ancient world proved a decisive step in the evan-
gelization of all peoples, and stimulated a fruitful
interaction between faith and reason which has
continued down the centuries to our own times.
Blessed John Paul II, in his Encyclical Letter
Fides et Ratio
, showed how faith and reason each
strengthen the other.
27
Once we discover the full
light of ChristâÂÂs love, we realize that each of the
loves in our own lives had always contained a ray
of that light, and we understand its ultimate des-
tination. That fact that our human loves contain
that ray of light also helps us to see how all love
is meant to share in the complete self-gift of the
27
âÂÂCf. Encyclical Letter
Fides et Ratio
(14 September 1998),
73:
AAS
(1999), 61-62.
