It has become a strange and unfortunate commonplace that one must have faith in faith—faith, that is, in the ability to commit oneself to truths that transcend rational justification—not only out of respect for faith’s intrinsic (if futile) beauty, but also as a means to the truth. Confronted with inadequate evidence for the deeper truths of life, one must conjure up a commitment to ideas for which the subjective act of faith can be the only ground, and one must believe not only in the content of faith but in the faith-act itself.
This, at least, is the picture of faith one finds in the writings of Daniel Dennett, Richard Dawkins, and Sam Harris, and it has an embarrassing currency among Christian believers. (For example, a Christian woman once told me earnestly that even if biologists were able to demonstrate common descent to a certainty, she would still reject it for a simplistic interpretation of the Genesis creation account as a matter of faith.)
But Christians can dispense with faith in faith, for this strange recursion stems from a basic misunderstanding of Christian faith. The projection of an opposition between reason and faith—wherein the former claims objectivity and the latter demands assent to a set of propositions that cannot be proven—into the biblical context anachronistically imposes Enlightenment categories where they would not have been intelligible.
Faith, in the Christian life, has nothing to do with a subjective belief that does not admit rational justification (not even Kierkegaard quite said that), because faith begins not with the subject of faith but its object—the Trinitarian life of God. It consists not of assent to some proposition but the entrustment of one’s being to God’s providence. Faith does not originate in the individual believer’s own efforts, but is rather a gift of grace to the believer, usually received in baptism, as one means among many of participating in God’s own life.
Far from posing a threat to one’s faith, knowledge reinforces it: the more reason one has to believe in God’s providence, the more readily the believer entrusts himself to God. Faith likewise facilitates a more intimate knowledge of the plans God has set in store for the believer. As recent scholarship has demonstrated, “faith” in the Bible is often better rendered “faithfulness”; one has faith, therefore, less by belief than by piety. Faith is—at least in the order of time—primarily performative and only secondarily reflective. Recall St. Irenaeus’ dictum: “to believe in God is to do his will.”
The naive concept of faith as blind assent arose from an equally naive and philosophically disreputable theory of knowledge, according to which one knows a thing best by detaching oneself from its use and setting aside personal biases in order to form an idea that corresponds to the thing. The correspondence theory of truth necessarily regards particular “interested” modes of engagement—for example, desire—as inimical to knowledge. Though this theory of knowledge as detached reflection appeals to our cultural prejudices, formed as they are by an unreflective scientism, it is a relatively modern notion that has been thoroughly dismantled by the phenomenological tradition. Knowledge depends on and is conditioned by both our historical-cultural situation and in the context of certain practices. (Of course, this is only novel for the secular philosophical tradition: the historical contingency of knowledge has been recognized in the theological tradition since at least St. Irenaeus, and St. Thomas Aquinas emphasized the importance of bodily practice in his virtue theory.)
The knowledge of faith, rather than relying on the outmoded theories of knowledge where the mind merely represents external objects, is participatory; the act of contemplating the things of God partakes in God’s own Trinitarian activity. The knowledge of faith is not therefore “subjective” in the sense that it happens primarily in the believer, but is “objective” because the believer participates in the eternal activity of the object of faith; the believer’s subjective faith is therefore secondary and derivative.
If the subject cannot escape engagement with the thing to be known, the question remains: what sort of engagement leads to Truth? For the Christian tradition, the answer is faith, hope, and charity, as embodied especially in the Church’s liturgical practices and articulated by her theological tradition.
The tacit participatory metaphysics in which Christian faith becomes intelligible emphasizes that Christianity is not an abstract system or an existential human possibility, but the ontological union of God and man in time and history through the recapitulative activity of the incarnate Word of God. Rebirth, not intellectual assent, takes one up into the life of God, which has descended to us in the flesh. There is more to becoming a Christian than becoming a Marxist (for example): one does not merely become convicted by the truth of a text and then try to convert the world; one must be born into a new life, bodily and spiritually, in baptism. (Hence the common refrain of the Church Fathers: philosophy is always in labor but never able to give birth.)
Faith presupposes a context of certain practices and even bodily transformation—for our flesh is redeemed by Christ’s own flesh—and cannot be considered a general feature of human nature that finds diverse expression in all the great religious traditions. But again, despite faith’s dependency on (renewed) flesh, faith is ordered toward the knowledge of God. Whether in St. Thomas Aquinas’ concept of the beatific vision or St. Gregory of Nyssa’s concept of eternal progress in the knowledge of God, the Christian life finds its highest expression in the contemplation of God.
I don’t intend to limn the structure of faith systematically; the point I wish to make is a modest one. The assault on “faith” as a human constant realized in the different religions in various forms does not threaten anything worth defending. Faith is not a universal feature of human nature. It can appear only within a certain complex network of rites, linguistic habits, rules of conduct, beliefs, and institutions—that is, the historical and embodied existence of the Church. One must attack (or defend) Christian faith where it may actually be found, not in the mind as an idea but as a form of life realized in the historical community established by Jesus Christ.
Thomas Cothran is an attorney who lives in Lexington, Kentucky.
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Comments:
I cannot imagine that in the wake of, for example, Heidegger’s critique in “Being and Time,” one can hold to a straightforward correspondence theory of truth without a great deal of circumspection. But I cannot rehearse that argument here, I can only suggest you add it to your reading list. In any case, the sort of correspondence theory to which you refer is far from obvious. It cannot be attributed, for example, to Aristotle who in the Book III of On the Soul declares that “actual knowledge is identical with its object.” One need not be a Heideggerian or an Aristotelian to reject representational theories of truth: philosophers over the centuries have formulated many other theories of truth, e.g., pragmatism, verificationism, certain forms of identity theory, etc.
As to Aquinas: truth is not something that represents being and thereby maintains a distinction from being. Aquinas is very explicit that truth is a transcendental, i.e., a mode of being. As John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock put it in their study “Truth in Aquinas,” Aquinas maintains that truth "is convertible with Being as such in the entirety of both terms.” Once again, I cannot reformulate Aquinas' argument here, I can only suggest you "take up and read" Aquinas' works on the subject, such as "de Veritate."
When we speak of truth, it does indeed refer to the truth of the judgment, but if the judgment is conformed to the thing it is only because the intellect putting forth the judgment has first itself become conformed to the being of the thing. It is of its very essence to be able" to become all things in an intelligible manner."
A description of this process would then seem a "word salad" to readers of good will who have no frame of reference to provide any possibility of understanding.
That's why, for the most part, conversions do not happen by argument, but by living encounter with the reality of Christ in His Church.
Well said! You're quite correct to point out that Luther and Calvin would have rejected any notion of faith being a human choice. (Calvin took the rejection so far as to take predestination to the illogical conclusion that is indistinguishable from fatalism.) My point was that once the heresies started multiplying, 'faith' came to mean 'denomination' as in 'faith tradition'. Now it was up to individuals to decide which 'faith' they should adhere to.
Reformation thinking that introduced concepts like 'sola gratia' separated (conceptually) the gift from the giver. The gift of faith IS the gift of Christ who IS God. Any attempt to dissect the living faith for the purpose of 'understanding' it better runs the risk of killing it.
So would it be correct, to say in keeping with the thought of Aquinas, that faith is the "deiformity" of knowledge? St Gregory's thought seems much more penetrating, if so - epektasis is not quite the same thing as beatific vision. Here is where the scholastic tradition seems to have opened the door to the very hyper-cognitive understanding of faith and knowledge that this article decries.
I am not sure that reading of Calvin's texts is a proper one. The predestination of Calvin is more like what the author calls "Faith likewise facilitates a more intimate knowledge of the plans God has set in store for the believer." My reading of Calvin is instead that he believe the biblical concept of predestination was something like the grace of God enabling the person to believe and be baptized, and thus be united with Christ and participate in the Trinitarian Life of God. I think that Calvin isn't putting forth a fatalism but that faith is a gift given to the believer. From this reading, it should not be surprising that I would say that the reformers didn't separate the gift and the giver. The reformers, especially Calvin, understood Union with Christ to be the context in which faith and faithfulness subsists. Union with Christ is the wonderful gift of grace, and the foundation of being found dressed in the righteousness of Christ by that union. All that said, since this article isn't primarily about the disagreements between the Reformers and Roman Catholic Church I will only suggest Calvin's Institutes of the Christian Religion in order to judge Calvin's positions.
“I believe the Church to be infallible because God revealed this; and I believe God revealed it because it is affirmed by the Church. In the second proposition “because” is not taken in the same sense as in the first, for it does not signify the formal motive of faith, but only the indispensable condition of faith, that is, the infallible proposition of the object of faith.”
Yes, the distinction between « Connaître » and « Savoir »
Abbé Brémond, the great historian of French mysticism and spirituality, regarded both ways of knowing as necessary.
“In the course of the normal development of man’, says Bremond, ‘there occur moments in which the discursive reason gives place to a higher activity, imperfectly understood and indeed at first disquieting.” This higher activity—this hidden inhabitant—is intuitive rather than logical in its methods. It knows by communion, not by observation. It cannot give a neat account of its experience: for this experience overflows all categories, defies all explanations, and seems at once self-loss, adventure, and perfected love.
However, he cautions that “this kind of knowledge is more like bathing in a fathomless ocean, or breathing an intangible and limitless air. It gives contact and certitude, but not understanding: as breathing or bathing give us certitude about the air and the ocean, but no information about their chemical constitution.”
Thanks for the response. I shouldn't have offered my un-humble opinion of Calvinism.
My only point was that, with the reformation, and the eventual explosion in denominations, came a twisting of the normal understanding of faith. Faith is a supernatural virtue. With that understanding, the question, "What faith are you?" makes no sense. People outside of the Church are more confused than ever about what faith means because they think that Hindus, Buddhists, Calvinists, etc. can all be described as 'people of faith' and that they somehow share that virtue. But this completely destroys the idea that faith is what opens our eyes to the revelation of God through the Bible and Jesus Christ. So the objective reality of the virtue of faith is completely lost on those who consider it a completely subjective phenomenon.
Faith is that human quality clearly recognized as self delusion in all religions other than one's own.
This kind of language is common fare in philosophically informed discussions. Perhaps a greater familiarity with philosophical terminology would help in understanding the article. Others seemed to understand it well enough--even those who disagreed (You have to understand something, even in order to disagree with it).
I guess I wonder why someone who is impatient with basic philosophical terminology is reading First Things in the first place.
You have to be joking, Thomas. This is simply word-salad, as is the majority of your article.