The Pope accuses Western philosophy of being ``too modest'' and failing to consider the fundamental questions of existence with which humanity has grappled for thousands of years. He challenges a nihilistic culture of despair in which people believe there is no point in asking questions about the meaning and purpose of life.

At the same time, he warns the Catholic faithful against the dangers of an anti-intellectual fundamentalism -- fideism -- which gives no place to reason. ``Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth,'' writes the Pope. The 36,000-word encyclical is being regarded as the intellectual keystone in the development of the Pope's teaching andthought, which he has developed in 13 encyclicals in his 20-year reign.

The densely worded, highly technical document represents an astonishing achievement for a man of frail health in his late seventies who has written much of it over the past 12 years between frequent travels. While declaring unwavering faith in God's Revelation in Jesus Christ, the Pope says Christian thinking must be open to the spiritual insights of other cultures past and present, as well as to the intellectual developments of the 20th century.

Launching the document, Fides et Ratio (Faith and Reason), at a press conference in London, Cardinal Basil Hume praised the Pope as a fine philosopher. ``The Pope, far from seeking to suppress or condemn the exercise of reason, is seeking precisely the opposite. Faith has nothing to fear from the truth and everything to gain from the exploration of it. So reason is not the enemy of faith, but its partner.''

Janet Martin Soskice of the School of Divinity, Cambridge University,described the encyclical as an ``impassioned'' statement which revealed much of the real character of Karol Wojtyla, who studied and taught philosophy before becoming pontiff.

``Philosophers are rapped over the knuckles by the Pope for not doing philosophy bravely enough and for failing to ask the big questions. Philosophy has made itself marginal by making its concerns trivial,'' said Soskice. ``He identifies how when we can't ask any more what truth is because everything is relative and we only ask what works, then human beings become profit and loss automatons. We are then pushed by need and greed. The Pope is telling us to look up from the trough a minute and look at the stars.''

At a press conference in Rome for the encyclical, Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, the head of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith and the Pope's closest theological adviser, said the subject had been close to the Pope's heart for years.

``In 1982, when I began to collaborate closely with him, the Pope already had theidea for a development of his first encyclical Redemptor hominis and wanted to go more deeply into the subject of the lack of communication between faith and reason, which becomes lethal for both,'' he said.

The Archbishop of Lublin, Jozef Miroslaw Zycinski, said the Pope was offering an alternative to New Age thinking, though without specifically criticising it in the encyclical. ``A flight to facile irrationalism is today being put forward in the name of protest against the great ideas developed by the philosophical systems of the past. Naive faith in UFOs, astrology and New Age is meant to replace the great philosophical questions of the past about the meaning of life and value systems,'' he said.

The Observer News Service