Zusammenfassung / Summary
In contemporary pluralistic society, every religious truth claim is met with deep suspicion. Yet, this idea of truth cannot be replaced just like that by reasonable consensus, because ‘reasonableness’ and ‘consensus’ are anything but unambiguous and universal concepts. Against this background the former Pope Benedict XVI pleads for a enlargement of reason to the transcendent, so that humans are empowered to interpret their existential questions in a reasonable way and to respond to them on the basis of a life orientating idea of truth. This means that contemporary society can learn a lot from Benedict’s idea of an enlarged reason and truth, which has always been defined as wisdom, thus paving the way for a reasonable discussion about the existing variety of ways of life. But it is also evident that, with his idea of existential truth, Benedict is unable to do full justice to the reality of societal pluralism.