Paul Bernays was brought from Zurich to Göttingen in 1917 by David Hilbert - the leading mathematician of the time - to assist him in developing his consistency program for the foundations of mathematics. The major exposition of that work appeared in the 1930s in the two volume opus by Hilbert and Bernays, Grundlagen der Mathematik, whose preparation was due entirely to Bernays. In the meantime, Kurt Gödel, a precocious doctorate in Vienna, had discovered his remarkable incompleteness theorems which threatened to undermine Hilbert’s program. Though Hilbert refused to accept that, Bernays undertook to absorb the significance of those theorems through correspondence with Gödel. This led to a lifelong deep personal and intellectual relationship between the two of them whose high points will be traced in the lecture.