"Harmony between faith and reason" is necessary, because "it means above all that God is not far, but, on the contrary, that He is near every human being, and that He is as near to his heart as He is to his mind". This was repeated by the Pope, who, in the catechesis for today’s general audience, came back for the third time to the figure of Saint Augustine. For the Pope, Augustine’s intellectual and spiritual journey is “an example of the relationship between faith and reason, which is at the core of the balance and fate of every human being". These two dimensions, explained the Pontiff, "must not be separated or juxtaposed, but must be harmonised, instead, because, as Augustine himself wrote just after his conversion, they are "the two forces that make us know". "Rightly famous", then, Augustine’s two wordings, which express "this consistent synthesis of faith and reason: ‘believe to understand’, as well as, and inseparably, ‘understand to believe’, which, according to the Pope, "express with effective straightforwardness and as much depth the Catholic solution to this problem".
