What is supernatural about faith?

[This is the fifth in a series of posts about faith.  Here all the posts in order: 1. Is faith circular? 2. Everyday faith. 3 How faith begins. 4. What revelation really is. 5. What is supernatural about faith? 6. Faith and love.]

In this series of posts about faith, I have several times pointed out how supernatural faith is analogous to natural belief.  Now I want to approach it from the other direction and ask how supernatural faith differs from natural belief.  The question is harder than it seems at first.

Supernatural faith is not different because it demands certitude about something that reason can only know with probability.  As we have seen, everyday belief can do the same thing, to the extent that I may act immorally—I may sin—if I refuse to believe my friend’s word or the word of a legitimate authority on a subject.  Wavering may be unacceptable.

Nor is supernatural faith different because it requires that we accept the existence of a speaker we cannot see.  Everyday belief requires something similar:  it involves a decision in favor of the true existence of a friend, whose interior “face” we never see.  As St. Augustine says in chapter 121 of his Enchiridion, “We love God now by faith, then we shall love him through sight.  Now we love even our neighbor by faith; for we who are ourselves mortal know not the hearts of mortal men.”  Although we never see God’s true face until we enter the beatific vision, that vision will not simply be the first time we have seen the true face of the divinity:  it will be the first time we have ever seen the true face of anyone at all!

In the end, it seems to me that supernatural faith differs from natural belief because it is a response to a supernatural person.  It is not a human identity that I must affirm, but the identity of God:  not God as he can be known through philosophical argument, but God as he is knowable only by his gift of opening to us his inner life.  Since we are by nature social, we are by nature adequate to the task of “knowing” other human persons, that is, of making the necessary decision in favor of their true identity; we are rightly adjusted to that object.  But the interior identity of God stands above all our natural resources for response.

As a result, faith in God does not just happen to get the assistance of grace, the way a physicist struggling to understand quantum mechanics might happen to receive supernatural assistance.  The act of faith in God by its very nature requires the help of grace.  We could not respond adequately to the revelation of God’s interior life without supernatural resources.  In fact, we could not even know that there is such a thing as an adequate response had not God revealed that, too.

Implicit in this conclusion is that faith itself is a mystery, because faith turns out to be an act defined by a mystery.  Just as “self-defense” cannot be understood apart from “aggression,” and “obedience” cannot be understood apart from “authority,” so “faith” cannot be understood apart “the inner life of God”—which is mysterious to us.  Natural belief is defined in terms of the inner life of another human person; because I am a human person myself and have my own inner life, I can grasp at least in a general way the object and nature of natural belief.  But a faith defined by the truly mysterious divine Thou is ultimately mysterious itself.  Only in the beatific vision, when faith is no longer needed, will faith be understood.

St. Thomas’s introduction to the theological virtues is helpful on this point.  Explaining how the supernatural virtues of faith, hope, and charity are distinct from all natural virtues, he says:  Obiectum autem theologicarum virtutum est ipse Deus, qui est ultimus rerum finis, prout nostrae rationis cognitionem excedit (ST 2.1.63, 2 corp).  All the theological virtues have the same object, namely God; and this is not God as knowable by the philosophers, but God considered precisely inasmuch as he is the ultimate end in a way that exceeds our reason’s knowledge.  So when St. Thomas later says that the formal object of faith is the First Truth (ST 2.2.1) he means God revealed as Truth, just as when he says that charity is based on the communication of God’s happiness to us (ST 2.23.1) he means that happiness which has been revealed to us as the eternal processions of the Trinity.  The formal object of faith is the same self-giving God that is the object of charity.

In my next post, I want to pick up this connection between faith and charity to make one last comment on the nature of faith.  So far I have talked about how it begins, but I have not yet spoken of how it matures.

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What revelation really is

[This is the fourth in a series of posts about faith.  Here all the posts in order: 1. Is faith circular? 2. Everyday faith. 3 How faith begins. 4. What revelation really is. 5. What is supernatural about faith? 6. Faith and love.]

One way to define the supernatural act of faith is to say thing it is the mind’s adequate response to revelation.  Just as self-defense is a response to an aggressor’s attack, and obedience is a response to an authority’s command, so faith is defined by God’s act of revelation.  To round out my discussion of faith, then, I would like to devote a few words to revelation.

Revelation is by its very notion something that comes to us from outside the order of nature.  If it came from within the order of nature then it would simply be another natural thing that we could reason about, like the animals and the trees and the mountains.  The very fact that God has revealed anything at all is already a fact that we couldn’t know just from the natural world.  Both the contents and the fact of revelation are news to nature.

As a result, the moment we become aware that revelation has happened, we know something about God’s interior life that we could not have known naturally:  we know that he wanted to say whatever he said.  And for the point I’m trying to make, it almost doesn’t matter what he said:  he could say something trivial, like “Ants have twelve toes,” but it would still be something beyond the order of nature for us to know that God wants us here, in this moment, to know that ants have twelve toes, and he wants it enough to speak it to us about it directly.  That’s not just something about ants:  it’s something about God.

So every revelation brings with it a special knowledge about God’s interior life, just by the fact of being revelation.  But this is a wonderful thing!  Taken to its extreme, to know the interior life of God beyond what is naturally knowable is the life of heaven; it is the beatific vision; it is a share in God’s own interior life.  Any revelation at all, therefore, even before we consider its content, is a small portion of the life of heaven.  It is a gift God gives us, a gift not only of new information but of himself.  To put it another way, following Aristotle’s dictum that the slenderest knowledge of the highest things is better than the greatest knowledge of lower things, any divine revelation whatsoever, no matter what its content, is more precious than any other knowledge we could have.

This likeness between revelation and heaven is increased when we realize that the content of revelation is going to fit with the nature of revelation.  That is to say, given what revelation is by its nature, then of course the content will not ultimately be about something trivial but about God’s interior life.  In this regard, one could say that the doctrine of the Trinity is that content of revelation which most clearly displays the notion of revelation itself, with the revelation of the Cross of Christ right behind it.

If revelation is by its nature God’s self-gift to his creatures, and if faith is the adequate response to revelation, then the very notion of faith will be that it is the mind’s adequate response to God’s approach of love.  In my next post, I want to unpack this conclusion further.

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How faith begins

[This is the third in a series of posts about faith.  Here all the posts in order: 1. Is faith circular? 2. Everyday faith. 3 How faith begins. 4. What revelation really is. 5. What is supernatural about faith? 6. Faith and love.]

In this series of posts about the theological virtue of faith, I began by asking how we come to believe that God is revealing and whether this is something we hold by faith.  Then I looked at some aspects of everyday, natural belief to see what basis nature might provide for grace.  In this post, I want to look directly at the supernatural virtue of faith and trace its beginning.

While natural belief always includes an element of discovering the speaker’s true identity, in the case of supernatural faith this element is quite explicit.  A created agent—a prophet, a priest, an organization, an apparition—makes a claim to this effect:  “I do not speak on my own behalf but on behalf of one who has authority over you, and this is the message, etc.”  Here the need to discover the true identity of the source of the message is out in the open, and the claim in fact is that the first source of the message is some person other than the human person, organization, or apparition one can see.  In other words, part of revelation’s claim is the claim to be revelation.

The searcher’s mind responds first, and if all goes well the response will be something like this:  “This claim has been made, and there is good evidence for the claim.  If true, the claim would give me something I need, and in fact if the claim is not true then I can’t get that thing I need.  So the question is urgent.  I need to say whether the claim is true or false.”  That is as far as the searcher’s mind can go on its own:  this is a well-supported claim about something urgent for me personally.  But because the evidence is not demonstrative, the mind cannot settle the issue without a decision, and decisions are the domain of the will.

At this point the searcher’s will can respond to the claim in various ways.  It might respond by delaying, despite the urgency of the question; it might decide in the negative, despite the credibility of the claim, whether through fear or through egoism; or the will might respond in favor of the claim.  A missionary or a pastor needs an intimate familiarity with the dynamics of delay and denial, because these are the road blocks he needs to surmount.  For our purposes, only the last response is interesting, the response that leads to faith.  In this case, the searcher’s will moves the intellect to assent to the claim.

Because the claim is “I do not speak for myself,” something very important happens when the decision is made in favor of the claim:  at that very moment, the speaker of the claim changes in the searcher’s eyes.  In virtue of the fact that will moves the mind to say, “This claim is true,” the speaker ceases to be the created agent and begins to be the authority on behalf of whom it spoke.  So long as the searcher hesitated, considering the claim, the speaker remained for him merely a creature; but by the very fact of the searcher’s assent, the speaker is divine.  “And we also thank God constantly for this, that when you received the word of God which you heard from us, you accepted it not as the word of men but as what it really is, the word of God, which is at work in you believers” (1Thes 2:13).

Now, if this assent were only a movement of the mind, then two steps would be needed:  (a) this authority exists and (b) I submit to it.  The mind having realized that the authority exists, the will would have to fall into line as a subsequent response.  But because the final movement of the mind is provided by the will, it follows that the one movement of assent is simultaneously on the intellect’s part a conclusion that the authority exists and on the will’s part a decision to submit to it, since the will could not will in favor of such a thing without desiring to submit to it.  When I do not want to submit to an authority, then its existence chafes at me, and I wish it would go away; on the other hand, an authority which I will to exist is one that has my submission already.

To sum up, three things happen at the moment of the decision of faith:  (a) the speaker changes from a creature to God; (b) the intellect decides in favor of the claim that this authority exists; (c) the will submits to the authority.  And yet these are not three movements in sequence but one reality, one movement, seen from various angles.  The assent to the authority’s existence is on the mind’s part a conclusion that the authority exists and on the will’s part a submission to that authority.

This is part of the answer to the question raised in my original post.  Do I fall into a vicious circle if I believe on God’s authority and yet include among the articles of belief the fact that God has spoken?  No, because the mental assent to this fact is the same movement as the volitional submission to God’s authority.  There would be a circle if these two things were separate and one had to come before the other, but there is no moment before faith’s assent when I hold that God’s has spoken, and there is no moment during faith’s assent when I do not submit to God’s authority.

But one could say more about the difference between natural and supernatural faith.  Over the next two posts, I’ll lay out the rest of what I have come to in my own reflections.

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Everyday faith

[This is the second in a series of posts.  Here all the posts in order: 1. Is faith circular? 2. Everyday faith. 3 How faith begins. 4. What revelation really is. 5. What is supernatural about faith? 6. Faith and love.]

As I begin to think about the supernatural virtue of faith, it is important to remember that we have a lot of experience with natural, everyday faith.  We encounter it every time we assent to something on the authority of a friend or someone else we view as reliable.  So we should pause to consider what foundation there may be for grace in our normal experience of belief.  A speaker makes a claim and we believe the claim on the speaker’s authority.  Why?

There are always two elements in this experience.  The second element is that we believe what is said because of who is saying it.  But the first is, you might say, a discovery of the speaker’s true identity.  In the case of an expert, we might try to verify for ourselves that this person truly has the expertise in question and that this person has no reason to distort the facts.  In the case of a friend, we have to move from knowing how this person appears to how this person really is:  Is he in fact as honest as he seems?  Does he in fact keep my best interests in mind?  Is he truly to be counted as my friend?

And with regard to this first element of believe, the element of true identity, we always have to make a decision.  It is hard to know that the expert in front of me has no reason whatsoever to distort the facts; even if he seems to have nothing to gain, maybe there is some advantage to him that is not apparent to me.  And it is even harder to know that a friend is truly a friend:  it usually takes a long time to know someone well enough to testify to his character, and when we reach that point it is not through argument but through an accumulation of experiences and probabilities.  At some point, though, we decide that we will trust this person as a friend.

This decision is truly a decision:  it cannot be demonstrated in a philosophically rigorous way that this person actually has the character he seems to have, and even then it could not be demonstrated in a philosophically rigorous way that this person is acting in character in this instant.  So granted the apparent speaker, I have to make a decision about the speaker behind the appearances.  This is sometimes experienced in a dramatic way when a man deliberates about whether to propose marriage to the woman he loves:  they know each other well, and he thinks she loves him, and he is almost ready to stake the rest of his life on whether she is what she seems and whether she loves as he think—but in the end he has to stop reasoning and arguing with himself and simply make a decision.

This is so because a human person’s true “face” is invisible.  There is the outward face I show to the world, with its grin even when I am unhappy, its polite gaze even when I want to be somewhere else, its adornment meant to help me fit in.  There is also the real “me,” my true face, which I carefully protect and share only with those who gain my trust.  The whole world can see my outward, physical face; only a select group is allowed into some knowledge my interior life.  And even this group, my closest friends, can only conjecture about my true face; a common frustration, even for someone with close friends, is that “no one understands me.”  The “I” in that statement is an inner person invisible both to the eye and to the mind.

Yet at the same time, human beings are by nature social:  a human life is made up of a fabric of relationships with other human beings.  The fact that I cannot directly know my friend’s inner life does not make it unreasonable to believe that he is a certain kind of person.  On the contrary, the probability that this person is really my friend can be so very high in fact that I would act immorally, sinning against my own humanity, if I denied him my trust.  Even though it cannot be demonstrated with rigor, the probability of his trustworthiness can reach a point that it would be willful, obstinate, to deny it.  A man seems to speak unkindly to his wife, and suddenly she is tempted to think that he does not have her best interests in mind, that he does not truly in this moment love her.  Although such a thing may be remotely possible, the wife may actually sin by giving in to the thought.  Every day, a married person has to get up and make a decision to trust her or his spouse:  it never becomes something demonstrated in the past and done with.  And this constant decision in favor of trust is the basis of the social life our nature requires.

This question of a friend’s true identity stands at the center of our original question.  In my next post, I’ll take a look at how grace builds on everyday belief in the case of supernatural faith.

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Is faith circular?

[This is the first in a series of posts about faith.  Here all the posts in order: 1. Is faith circular? 2. Everyday faith. 3 How faith begins. 4. What revelation really is. 5. What is supernatural about faith? 6. Faith and love.]

One of the perks of college teaching is that even as you earn a paycheck you get to revisit questions of longstanding personal interest.  This year I am directing a thesis on the virtue of faith for an excellent senior at Wyoming Catholic College.  His questions have pushed me to take up something that first caught my interest when I was his age.

The question is essentially this:  How we can reconcile the fact whatever is believed by faith is believed on the authority of God revealing with the fact that one of the things that we believe by faith is that God exists and reveals.  Does this land us in a vicious circle?  Do we end up believing in God’s existence on his authority, and grounding his authority in his existence?

On the other hand, if we avoid the vicious circle then we seem to land in a different problem:  if the fact that God exists and reveals is not one of the things we believe on God’s authority, then it becomes difficult to find a role for faith at all.  I recall a conversation I had with one of my teachers, a man who later went on to hold an eminent position at my alma mater.  He maintained that we could reason our way with certitude from miracles and other evidence to the fact that the Church is what she claims to be and that God has really spoken through her; we could then conclude with iron-clad logic that, since God cannot lie, all the contents of the Catholic creed are true.  But of course, this leaves everything in the hands of reason and nothing in the hands of faith.  It takes away the very notion of faith.

It was only slowly that I came to my own way of solving the problem, based in large part on the Gospel of John, with additional help from Thomas Aquinas, Ratzinger, and my own experience of faith.  Although I have still to read some classics on the topic—Newman’s Grammar of Assent comes to mind—my student’s persistent questions have finally supplied the impetus to write out my thoughts here in a public forum where others can comment and, yes, criticize.  Stay tuned for the next several posts.

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ST II-II.3

Question 3 is a short piece on the exterior act of faith, “confession.”  My comments will also be brief.

In Article 2, St. Thomas indicates that every believer would be obliged to speak his faith in certain circumstances, namely when the honor of God or a neighbor’s need require it.  This, he says, is because the act of faith should be directed by the double love of God and neighbor.  But he also comments that not everyone is equally obliged:  those who are by office teachers of the faith are more often obliged to speak their faith—to “confess.”

This seems to show that, in St. Thomas’s mind, “doing theology” in the classroom or in the lecture hall is in fact an exterior act of faith, a “confession.”  And this conclusion fits with his reasoning in Article 1, where he says that confession is an act of faith because speech is intended to express outwardly our interior concepts; the same can be said of teaching or writing theology.

Of course, I’m sure one could do a falsely academic kind of theology in which the teacher divorces what he is saying from his interior convictions, but the trend of these blog posts would be to question whether that activity is “theology” in any but a remote sense of the word.

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ST II-II.2.10

In Article 10, St. Thomas explains, to the great relief of the theologian, that learning about the reasons behind our faith does not diminish faith’s merit—not necessarily, that is. But I want to pull out one point from his argument:

Cum enim homo habet promptam voluntatem ad credendum, diligit veritatem creditam, et super ea excogitat et amplectitur si quas rationes ad hoc invenire potest. Et quantum ad hoc ratio humana non excludit meritum fidei, sed est signum maioris meriti, sicut etiam passio consequens in virtutibus moralibus est signum promptioris voluntatis, ut supra dictum est.

Here St. Thomas asserts the experience of every real theologian, namely that when you have a particularly powerful faith, when you desire nothing more than to submit your mind to God’s truth, precisely then do you love the truth you believe and therefore desire to delve into it. This seems to mean that when faith follows the impulse that is precisely its own, then people “do theology”—seeking the reasons for what is believed, the connections between articles, and so on.

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ST II-II.2.8

Article 9, on whether the act of faith is meritorious, has a particular consolation for the theologian.  St. Thomas says that not only the assent of faith but also the very decision to consider the things of faith can be meritorious:  “doing theology” can be a saving deed!

But in this post I want to focus on St. Thomas’s reply to the third objection.  He says this:

Ad tertium dicendum quod ille qui credit habet sufficiens inductivum ad credendum, inducitur enim auctoritate divinae doctrinae miraculis confirmatae, et, quod plus est, interiori instinctu Dei invitantis. Unde non leviter credit. Tamen non habet sufficiens inductivum ad sciendum. Et ideo non tollitur ratio meriti.

In other words, the one who believes does so reasonably, because there are legitimate reasons to believe, including miracles, and he is urged on by the “interior instinct of God inviting.”  And yet the one who believes does not have the kind of evidence that would allow him to see the truth for himself.

There are two sides to note here.  On the one hand, faith brings reason along to the conclusion that is most reasonable, and this is so true that failure to believe is blameworthy.  The evidence in favor of faith is so probable that it becomes in fact unreasonable not to believe.  To put it another way, faith perfects reason by carrying it further in its own direction than it was capable of going by itself.

On the other hand, the evidence in favor of faith is never more than probable, and so the act of faith is one that closes the gap between mere probability and certitude:  what I can see for myself gets me to probability, and then a graced decision of my will leads me to hold these things with absolute certainty.  It can be frustrating that faith is never a “light” in the sense of offering deductive vision.  But precisely because it requires this decision, the act of faith is something beautiful and good—something meritorious, something of eternal worth.

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ST II-II-2-6 and 7: Blog delay

I have delayed blogging for a while now because I did not know how to approach ST II-II.2.7-8.  These articles pose a question (“Is explicit faith in the Trinity and the Incarnation necessary for salvation?”) with an obvious answer (“Yes, but there are odd situations to account for) and then get into distinctions (man before the fall, man after the fall, heathen in the remote isles, etc., etc.).

My difficult has been that I disagree with St. Thomas’s position on people before the Incarnation.  He follows St. Augustine in saying that the maiores in Old Testament times had explicit knowledge about the Incarnation and the Trinity.  He reasons that you can’t understand the Incarnation without understanding the Trinity, and the Old Testament saints must have known about the Incarnation or else they wouldn’t have prefigured Christ’s passion by certain sacrifices.  Now that last statement is just false:  the spiritual meaning of things in the Old Testament does not depend on any human being intending it; this is in fact how the spiritual meaning of Scripture differs from the literal sense according to St. Thomas’s own account.

Of course, there are other interesting reasons why someone might say that Moses or David had explicit knowledge of the Incarnation or the Trinity, and I have complex reasons for denying it, but it’s a kind of tar baby:  once I begin writing on that, I don’t know when I’ll stop.  So after turning it over, I decided not to begin.

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ST II-II.2.6

In Article 6, St. Thomas asks whether everyone is equally bound to have explicit faith to the same extent.  His response reminds me of the opening verses of the Revelation:

The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave him to show his servants what must soon take place; and he made it known by sending his angel to his servant John, who bore witness to the word of God and to the testimony of Jesus Christ, even to all that he saw.  Blessed is he who reads aloud the words of the prophecy, and blessed are those who hear, and who keep what is written therein; for the time is near.

The revelation is handed down through a chain of messengers:  God to Jesus to an angel to John to the one reading aloud to the one who hears.  (It drives me CRAZY that there are six and not seven members of this chain—but I digress.)  St. Thomas takes this as true of revelation in general, that it comes from God through angels to men and through them to other men, as though flowing down from the mountaintop to the plains—St. Thomas’s own metaphor for revelation in his inaugural homily Rigans montes.

This way of seeing revelation makes faith a necessarily ecclesial thing.  It can never just be simply private, because if I am one of the minores then I am bound to others by my need of their instruction, while if I am one of the maiores then I am bound to others by a duty of teaching them.  And as St. Thomas makes clear in his reply to the third objection, my teaching of others can never just be my own thing, a promulgation of my own ideas, because those I instruct should find in me a reliable witness to the word of God; the stream toward the bottom of the mountain must get its waters from higher up the slopes.

In his parallel treatment in the commentary on the Sentences 3.25.1.3, St. Thomas makes clear that the maiores include priests, prophets, teachers, and preachers.  For the purposes of our present project, I want to emphasize that this list includes theologians, whose work is therefore necessarily ecclesial.  There is no such thing as a merely private theologian.  This seems significant in our quest to define theology.

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