| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
THE VIRTUES
The Virtue of Faith
by Peter A. Kwasniewski
II. The Place of Reason in the Quest for Faith
In the first part of this consideration of faith,1 we saw how faith differs from other intellectual states such as demonstrative knowledge or mere opinion. Faith occurs when the will commands the intellect to accept a proposition whose truth is not directly verifiable. In this sense, the will is said to hold the intellect "captive," i.e., bound to those propositions which a man freely chooses to accept on the basis of reliable authority. The essence of religious faith, a belief that carries with it the promise of present merit and future knowledge, requires that the object believed in should not be evident to the senses or a matter of everyday experience. It is very important to clarify the roles played by intellect and will if we are to understand how religious faith is at once reasonable and beyond or above reason. For we do not wish to reduce faith to a merely rational level, as though it were synonymous with "opinion," nor do we wish to elevate it so high above the human mind that there can be no way of distinguishing the Catholic's profession of his creed from a charlatan's hallucinations.
Reason Is a Handmaiden to Faith
When we speak of faith in general as "the will holding the intellect captive," we need to acknowledge three things: first, that there are objects beyond the reach of reason; second, that it is good for the will to take charge in such matters; third, that the will in so doing is not necessarily preserved from erring, but is at the same time not jeopardizing a reasonable life. The worth of spousal love, the hidden relation between lover and beloved, is well beyond the reach of proof-yet it is good for spouses to cleave to each other by an act of the will, a "willingness" to love and be loved. To establish that it is not unreasonable in certain instances for the will to captivate reason, we should reflect on how necessary it is to act most of the time without full knowledge of attendant circumstances or implications. We are obliged to live according to our awareness of duty and the voice of conscience in us, neither of which can arrogate to itself the privilege of a rigorous science. Even when we accept a mathematical truth on the authority of a sound mathematician, we are using our will to move our intellect to acquiescence, and it is wise to do so until the truth about which he is demonstrating becomes sufficiently clear to us on its own terms.
Now to the heart of the problem. It is not always evident whom we should trust, nor on what subjects. It is far from clear in many cases that we have not been "taken in" or "thrown for a loop." We may place our trust mistakenly, as is obvious not only in religious affairs, as when people are hoodwinked into joining sects or cults, but even more so in familiar social ones. A woman may repose her faith in an unworthy man who subsequently betrays her. A soldier may follow the instructions of a malicious general, and kill hundreds of innocent civilians. A layman may place his confidence in the words of a liberal pastor who distorts the word of God and publicly preaches liberties that Christ condemned. Such deceit happens, regrettably, all the time.
Fortunately, we are not stuck in an inescapable conundrum. When we are dealing not so much with people whose hearts we cannot see, as with doctrines or definite statements that can be evaluated, the solution is found in having proper recourse to our reason whenever possible. I emphasize "proper" because man's reason has a way of becoming too big for its britches and hankering after the illusory freedom promised by rationalism, nowadays represented by scientists and sociologists who try to explain away everything mysterious and marvelous. Having recourse to reason in religious questions means using reason as a tool to clarify and expound the content of proposed beliefs in order to ferret out contradictions and absurdities, and to rest more securely in the truths we have gathered. Although the will may hold reason captive, we can (and must) examine what we hold or would hold, and reject it if it leads to something ludicrous. This much is clear: reason must be called upon to investigate the meaning of that which it accepts "on faith." Blind faith, if it means accepting propositions without inquiring into what they mean and whether or not they are true, is not an activity suitable for human beings. Josef Pieper expresses this point well:
It is clear that without a degree of understanding, faith itself, as an act of the human being, could not be held. No one can give credence to an absolutely incomprehensible message; and one who had not grasped what was being talked about would be unable to receive and believe the direct word of God Himself. Rational understanding of the substance of belief is indispensable to the extent that the believer must know what the divine speech is all about.2
What is the limit of reason? If we can know objects higher than reason, what help can reason afford in such matters? Does it not become needless or even presumptuous? After all, is not faith a leap away from reason, into the abyss of the irrational?
Of course not. Telling a man to "leave his reason aside" would be much like telling him to deposit his feet at the door or take off his head before he enters the living room. In the main, reason has two opposing channels of operation: the positive and the negative. Whatever is naturally knowable by experience or by sure intuition lies along the via positiva, the way of affirmation. Although truths about God fall outside the range of our ordinary experience, they can be known to some extent by analogy with the things God has made (Rom. 1:18-20; Wis. 13:3-9), and to some extent again by the via negativa, the way of denial, through which we carefully negate the imperfections found in creatures. Having received some truth beyond its capacity to prove, reason can nevertheless ask: what does this mean and what does it imply? Operating along these lines, reason has the function of clearing away debris, removing difficulties, and rejecting arguments that involve false premises or a fallacious process of reasoning. In the realm of religion, philosophy acts as precursor to theology, paving the way, preparing the mind, and more than anything else, clearing out unworthy opinions. Reason is the mode of proceeding, not the law of finality; it determines the manner and direction of walking, not the utmost boundaries of the land. St. Augustine expresses well the role of intellectual effort in religious inquiry: "Take heart, and set out confidently and piously in the paths of reason. There is nothing so abstruse or difficult that it cannot become completely clear and straightforward with God's help."3
Faith Never Contradicts Reason
Moved by such cries of conscience, reason is left in a somewhat uncomfortable position, inadequate to satisfy the deepest desire of man's heart. God intended reason to have a preparatory role in the spiritual life of man, not autonomy or self-sufficiency. Right though it is for reason to investigate and expound everything that revelation gives to it, reason is nonetheless the servant of God's word and should endeavor to learn from God what man should do and what God has done. The Protestant theologians of the so-called Reformation thundered against reason, calling it vain and corrupt, unreliable and deceptive. They wished to lower its status as much as possible in order to make room for private, emotional, self-convictive "faith." The Catholic tradition, on the other hand, finds no disagreement or opposition between the truths discovered by unaided reason and the suprarational truths proposed to the reason-proposed, not for the sake of gaining reason's approval, but rather for bringing about reason's illumination and submission to the rule of faith.
According to the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas, the content of our faith exceeds reason but cannot contradict it, since God is the font of all truth, natural and supernatural, reasoned and revealed. What God has revealed to mankind is mysterious indeed, but it is not in conflict with the truth man discovers in the world around him. Anything which contradicts what reason surely knows must be contrary to the true faith; and conversely, anything that contradicts the true faith cannot, upon closer consideration, be reasonable. Consequently, when a person has found the religion whose teachings harmonize both with reason and with revelation, a religion against which every attack claiming to be grounded in "reason" can be shown to be fallacious, a religion in which natural truth is not downtrodden and belittled but refined and magnified, he has indubitably found the true faith, repugnant neither to the nature of man nor to the divine word. Such a creed perfects reason even as it teaches the believer to go beyond it.
As an illustration of reason's important role in the discovery of religious truth, let us take as examples two religions whose falsity can be known by reason. (1) Can a religion be accepted that commands us to believe in a God of wrath who, in observance of an arbitrary covenant, may just as well reward the good with everlasting fire and punish the wicked with heaven's bliss? Yet a man named John Calvin taught this doctrine of absolute predestination irrespective of human works, and many were deceived into following him. Considered in the court of reason, absolute predestination must be false: it flies in the face of everything we are capable of knowing about God from the universe He has created and the Revelation He has given. We are certain from the start that whatever else God is, He must be the source and summit of all good, indeed He must be Goodness Itself, and justice, rendering to each his due, is an indispensable part of goodness. It is one thing to say with St. Augustine that God could justly punish any man because of the stain of unremoved original sin; but to say that a human being is marked for salvation or damnation regardless of any good or evil he does is a flagrant denial of God's perfectly just and merciful love.
(2) A related example is Islam. Islamic theologians maintain that God's will is the only true or actual will in the universe, and that it controls individual men's actions after the manner of a puppet-master pulling the strings of his puppets. In other words, there is no human free will: our unflinching interior certitude that we are free agents capable of willing or not willing is an illusion. There is but one all-encompassing will in reality, the Will of Allah. Naturally, the ordinary Moslem does not stop to ponder what this article of his creed would mean if it were taken seriously. They live as free men, and profess that they are not free.
Reason will allow no such absurdity of doctrine, where belief and experience are placed utterly at odds; reason permits no dualism of mind and heart. If a particular doctrine is impossible to maintain without committing intellectual suicide, at all costs it must be rejected. If mind and heart are asked to contradict one another, both should say no and continue on as intimate friends.
The "Leap of Faith" Is Reasonable
Religious faith is not a "blind leap." While in some respects it may resemble the act of leaping into the unknown, it is more accurate to conceive of it as taking hold of another's hand, reaching up spiritually to the unseen God. Such is the vivid meaning one might lend to the phrases "we hold the propositions of the Creed," "we adhere to the ancient rule," "we have embraced the faith." Furthermore, the inclination to obey the authority of a holy man (St. Paul for instance), when his words move our conscience and do not contradict our intellectual knowledge, is most reasonable. His words may surprise us, they may escape our grasp, but unexpected profundity is not the same thing as contradiction.4 The revelation that God is three Persons in one divine Nature, or the article of faith that the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity assumed human nature, are notably different than falsehood or fantasy. When we examine these mysterious truths, we begin to see that their content belongs in a realm infinitely higher than the natural compass of the human mind. Although the doctrine of the Incarnation or the Trinity is beyond our ability to comprehend, it does not do violence to our reason. Being beyond reason, such doctrines beckon the mind to accept God's word with greater humility and meditate on it with greater fervor. Unquestionably, such doctrines challenge our limited experience and limited ideas of what can and cannot be, according to our human mode of knowing; but they are not self-contradictory.
Religious faith is rational, in the sense that the propositions to be accepted as true are not incompatible with reason, as long as we do not confuse the supernatural with the natural, or measure the works of God by the works of man. The Creed can and should be investigated with close attention, prayerfulness, and devotion, none of which excludes inquisitiveness or perplexity. We may have to wrestle with difficulties, but we shall never be called upon to contradict ourselves. This is extremely important. If God deigns to reveal Himself to man, we must suppose that His revelation, coming down from the infinitely perfect Father to His mortal and limited creatures, will place a heavy burden on the intellect. Faith enters in where demonstration and empirical evidence leave off. God provides the unconvinced but sincere person with every possible way to come up to the edge of faith by rational inquiry. Reason can thus be seen as paving the way, tilling the soil. It will not make the divine way seem less divine, nor the Gospel less enigmatic, nor the soul's life in Christ less veiled. Faith is an unsatisfying state for the intellect to be in, if only because man expects to be able to understand everything in the way he ordinarily understands the world around him. The nature and purposes of God transcend human experience; the teaching of Jesus Christ soars above the discourses of philosophers, however sublime.
Faith is indeed necessary for us. The mysteries of religion-concerning, as they do, the majestic nature of God "who dwelleth in light inaccessible" (1 Tm. 6:16)-bring the human being out of himself, elevate his soul in its activities and in their object, and bear him further than his innate strength is able to carry him. Faith in these mysteries has the wondrous effect of perfecting the mind by drawing it past the boundaries of experience and imagination into the interior life of God. The closer the mind approaches to the Supreme Truth, the closer it comes to the origin and end of every truth, and the stronger is its exercise, vision, and command of all other knowledge. The profound mysteries to which faith introduces us slowly and surely transform our entire life, the inner life of the spirit as well as the life we lead in the world. St. Dionysius, the 5th century theologian, beautifully expresses the total transformation and salvation wrought by the liberating truth of the Gospel. For faith in the divine Word is:
a steadfast foundation which establishes those who have believed and have the simple knowledge of the truth of what is believed in the truth and the truth in them in an unchangeable identity. For if knowledge unifies those who comprehend it with what is comprehended, but ignorance is always a cause of change and self-separation for the one who is ignorant, then according to the sacred word nothing will remove the one who has believed in the truth from dwelling in true faith in which he who believes has the stability of an unmoved and immutable identity.
For he who has been unified with the truth knows well that it is well with him although the many will admonish him as having been ecstatic [i.e., mad or unreasonable]. For while it is hidden to them as an image that he has gone away from error to truth through his genuine faith, he truly knows, against what they say, that he is not mad but that he has been freed from the unstable and changeable journey around the many-shaped varieties of error. For he has a simple truth which is always the same and always in the same way.5
The mind is restless without a knowledge of God. Man can discover millions of fascinating things on his own, but nothing finally makes sense apart from God, as even pagan philosophers knew. Every thoughtful man has had the same experience, and it always leads to the same anxiety of conscience. Although we seek the companionship of God, we neither deserve it nor are capable of coming to it on our own. For Aristotle, the notion of friendship between man and God is unthinkable-for how can the finite and the infinite be joined in any way? They seem to share nothing in common. This blunt realization ought to have a certain effect on us. The world of creatures convinces us of the existence of God, and our restless hearts compel us to long for knowledge of the One whose existence we cannot intelligently deny. Israel longs for her Savior as a bride longs for the bridegroom: so Scripture tells us, and it strikes a deep chord within us.
Faith in God is necessary to man if he would attain his highest end, an end that exceeds his natural powers. St. Thomas Aquinas demonstrates this point in the following manner. Man by nature desires to be happy. Happiness is an activity of the soul in conformity with virtue, engaged upon the best and most knowable object. The soul's highest fulfillment is thus found in knowledge of the highest reality, the Divine Nature. The fullness of such knowledge is, however, unattainable in this life, with man's present powers; hence, nothing of his own doing can satisfy man's ultimate desire. But nature does nothing in vain. Man's spiritual nature, the image of God in him, is not intended to be perpetually frustrated. Therefore, it was in some sense necessary-though merciful is a better word, as God is not under obligation to do anything for us-for God to reveal Himself, as well as to reveal the path by which we can come to know Him. And if God has indeed revealed Himself to mankind, as Christians believe, then each man would do well to seek out this revelation and, having found it, to embrace it wholeheartedly. The acceptance of God's word is not simply a recommendation; it is a duty. "The word of God is living and active, sharper than any two-edged sword" (Heb. 4:12); it is not a dead letter that makes no demands on us.
Before the intellectual assent we call faith occurs one must achieve the judgment that he is obliged to believe. This is the work of the intellect which has seen the evidence and has come to the conclusion that uprightness demands that he assent to it. The will then makes the free act commanding the assent [of the intellect]. Speaking of faith as a human process while still a gift of God, Newman points out to a correspondent that it is not a conclusion drawn from premises, "but the result of an act of the will, following upon a conviction that to believe is a duty....For directly you have a conviction [that] you ought to believe, reason has done its part and what is wanted for faith is, not proof, but will."6
It is incumbent upon each human being to respond to the merciful tidings of God insofar as he knows them. Each person to whom the Gospel is preached is faced with a fundamental choice: belief or doubt, faith or flight. We do not have any "right" to modify or reject divinely revealed truths on account of our circumstances and difficulties. We face the Gospel not when and where and how we please; the God who can be worshiped only "in spirit and in truth" (Jn. 4:23-24) confronts the human heart and asks it to sacrifice everything, including moral qualms and intellectual discontent. How true it is when St. Thomas says: "Divine assistance is necessary if man is not to become agitated."7
Faith Soars Far Above Reason
There is something amazing in any act of faith: the leaping down of a child from a ladder into his father's arms shows reasonable trust, but it is still a capital risk. True religious faith is no different, and we ought to be prepared to take our medicine on trust once we have been assured of its contents. Religion is man's communication with the invisible God; the Christian religion is man's communion with God-made-man. Because all religions are an attempt to seek out the Maker and Ruler of reality and to become united to Him, we should expect to find in any traditional religion a mixture of the ordinary and the extraordinary, the matter-of-fact and the mystifying. This blend is precisely what one does not find either in true philosophy or in false religion. Philosophy is not, and can never be, a religion strictly speaking, because it does not claim to go beyond what the human mind is capable of knowing on its own. Neither can Calvinism (for example) be the true religion, for it is thoroughly absurd, asking us to deny what we know, feel, and experience. Our conscience retches at the thought. True religion will always surpass philosophy but never violate it. Plato and Aristotle, the greatest philosophers of the ancient world, stand in manifest need of heaven-sent teachers. To sway his listeners, Plato has recourse to instructive myths which mask his ignorance; Aristotle despairs of figuring out the destiny of the immortal soul and the way in which man can reach God. God in revealing Himself, sets the philosophers straight and corrects their teachings. He does not say to them, "I created you as intellectual beings, but you'd really better jettison your reason, because what I'm about to tell you won't make any sense at all. It's plain nonsense to thinking creatures such as yourselves." It is equally certain He does not say "Bravo, fellows! You have done all of my work for Me. It seems rather unnecessary for me to go on, so I'll simply congratulate you once more and recommend your treatises to the rest of mankind." The philosophers taught such truth as can be discerned with earthly eyes. Revelation, springing from the same source as human reason, will confirm human truths and do infinitely more, beyond the noblest visions of a Socrates or an Aristotle.
In this way, removing possibilities on the one hand and difficulties on the other, reason sees more and more that the probability of the Catholic faith increases exponentially even while the depth of its mysteries becomes increasingly unsearchable. Contrast the Catholic faith with the ancient heresy of Manichaeism. By positing an ultimate principle of evil (an evil God who is a sort of twin to the good God), Manichaeism appears to do away with the problem of evil, yet it only pushes the problem further back without solving it and proposes a philosophically indefensible claim. Its effort to account for evil in the world terminates in absurdity. Christianity, on the other hand, is full of paradoxes-it even seems reminiscent of a fairy-story, a tangle of tales about the Garden of Eden, the Fall, original sin, covenant and prophecy, the Messiah who is God and Man, crucifixion, resurrection, the Holy Spirit, Eucharist, Penance, the priesthood of Melchizedek, the Apocalypse. Yet in spite of its complexity there is an indefinable calm at the center of it all, a hint that the truth is rich and sweet beyond all expectation, that man and his universe are ineffable mysteries. Only this religion fully accords with the human intellect, with the events of history, with reality as we experience it, and contains no absurdity that reason censures or the heart abhors. If such a religion exists, surely it alone, with its inexhaustible treasures, will satisfy the mind and heart of man. Conscience, aided by reason, will know when such a banquet has been found.8
Reality is more impenetrable the further we push on; the ultimate truth of things defies our attempts to catch and define it. If this is true of visible things, how much more so of the invisible and supersensible? The truths of revelation are deeply satisfying but no less elusive than the mysteries of creation itself. There is no doubt that what revelation teaches is beyond our comprehension, no matter how purified the mental eye, no matter how favored the soul by God. This is the way we should expect the affair to stand. As C.S. Lewis once said, "If I could wholly understand revelation, I would know that it is not revelation." God's inner life and providential activity are not bounded by human conceptions, even while He condescends to communicate Himself to us in every tongue: through history, philosophy, beauties of nature and of art, the prophets, sacraments, prayer. There are as many ways God speaks as there are men willing to listen to Him.
When the Risen Christ says to Mary Magdalene (who is about to embrace Him) "Do not touch me" (Jn. 20:17), it is as though He were declaring once and for all that experiment, simple sense experience of the world, cannot be the ground of faith in God and His works. "Blessed are they that have not seen, and have believed" (Jn. 20:29). It is paradoxical that the world around us is one of the chief ways by which we return to God, and, at the same time, a way that must be surpassed through faith, because the world falls infinitely short of expressing Who God is. "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Ps. 18:1), but the presence of God is not encompassed in natural phenomena. Rather, it is heard in the "still, small voice" (1 Kgs. 19:12) that we strain to hear and seek to obey. By faith, Augustine says, Christ the Word of God
makes us fit to feed like the angels on the light of his presence. For the Word is the best food of the rational creature, and the human soul is indeed rational, even though in punishment for its sin it was bound by the chains of mortality and brought so low that it must try to understand invisible things by conjectures drawn from visible things. That food of the rational creature became visible-not by changing His own nature but by putting on ours-so that he might recall the followers of visible things to Himself, the invisible Word.9
Faith and deductive arguments, like oil and water, do not mix: there is no demonstrative proof of the truth of Christianity. There is overwhelming evidence of many kinds, sufficient to engender moral certitude and lead one to embrace the Catholic religion. As Cardinal Newman shows in many writings, religious evidence is of a much more subtle and complex character than philosophical or scientific knowledge.10 Argument within the context of religious faith has the purpose not of proving but of clarifying and defending. When the medieval scholastics argue about matters of faith, they already accept the Creed; their work consists in showing how certain truths follow from it or how certain errors are vanquished by it. When a Christian apologist presents the faith in a philosophical manner, the 'proof' consists in showing that a disjunctive choice must be made on the basis of what we know about history, the continuity of the Catholic tradition, the lives of the saints, and other 'moral' evidences. Christ cannot be merely a good man or a moral teacher, Lewis observes,11 for He made claims that no other man has made ("I and the Father are one," "No one comes to the Father but through me," etc.). Given what we know of Christ, He is either a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. This is what is meant by disjunctive choice: anyone who takes the life of Jesus Christ seriously must make a choice from the only possibilities available. This decision will be based on what can be known by natural reason or from experience and history. We must not forget the evidence of miracles, which St. Thomas Aquinas offers as a strong reason to believe the truths taught by the Catholic Faith.
Thus if a king sends a letter to which he has attached his seal, no one will dare say this letter was not written by the king's orders. Now it is plan that whatever the saints have believed and handed down to us concerning Christ's faith is confirmed by God's seal, which is to be seen in those works which no mere creature is able to do, namely, the miracles by which Christ confirmed the doctrine of the Apostles and of other saints.
And if anyone says that nobody has seen those miracles done, I reply that it is a well-known fact, related in pagan histories, that the whole world worshiped idols and persecuted the faith; yet now, behold all those-the wise, the noble, the rich, the powerful, and the great-who have been converted by the words of a few simple poor men who preached Christ. Now was this a miracle or was it not? If it was, then you have what you asked for. If you say it was not a miracle, then I say that you could not have a greater miracle than the conversion of the whole world without miracles, and we need seek no further. Accordingly no one should doubt about the faith, and we should believe what is of faith even more than the things that we see, since man's sight may be deceived, whereas God's knowledge is never at fault.12
St. Bonaventure makes the same point with regard to Francis of Assisi's miracle of walking unscathed through a blazing fire which was prepared in the sight of the Moslem sultan.
Take note of the sultan to whom the blessed Francis replied, when he wished to dispute with him about the faith, that faith is above reason and is proved only by the authority of Scripture and the divine power, which is manifested in miracles; hence Francis made the fire which he wished to enter into in their presence.13
The Witness of Sanctity
The Cartesian scientific method with its criteria of "clarity and distinctness" exercised an enormous influence on the newly born biblical criticism movement of the mid-seventeenth century, as seen, for example, in the works of the pantheist Benedict Spinoza. When we ponder the decline of belief in Sacred Scripture and in Christianity, it should be evident how misguided and fatal it is to place the whole basis of belief upon the written word of the Bible. Such an emphasis, taken for granted in Protestantizing countries where the new critical philosophy originally flourished, is a grave mistake from which many Christians to this day have not yet drawn their lesson. The Catholic tradition has always stressed several elements parallel to, or rather, inclusive of, Scripture itself: the Magisterial teaching of the Church (residing preeminently in the office of the Vicar of Christ), the unbroken testimony of sacred Tradition, and the witness of sanctity. Taken together with Scripture, these other elements-most especially the lives of the saints-constitute a phalanx of evidence against which the arrows of textual critics and pedants are launched to no avail. It often happens that we are influenced by a single man or woman whose goodness, simplicity, wisdom, purity, tranquillity, somehow spoke to us and showed us that there is more to life than the material world, more to religion than an old book. The first and final appeal of the Catholic faith must be to the heart and to the conscience, an appeal based on the lives of Christ's faithful followers. Look at the saints and you will see why the faith is true. Scripture often can be obscure, reason often obfuscates, but holiness is a city on a hill, a lamp shedding its light far and wide.
That brings us back to the points urged by Fr. Thomas Dubay about moral rectitude, which we discussed in the first article. Our Lord expresses this truth in the clearest words: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Mt. 5:8). Even when the groundwork for faith has been laid by a right way of living, arguments falter and the mind is left clutching at straws. At the extremity of reason's power, in faith and not in presumption, we beg for a sign. God, knowing our weakness and limitations, provides us continually with signs. The saints, their holy lives and the creed they confess, are the ultimate proof of Christianity; no other religion has them. The world has always been home to a few scattered sages and hermits, but these are not the same as saints. The saint is not a person who abdicates the world and abnegates himself, however admirable this asceticism may be; Hindus and Buddhists have done so long into the past. The saint renounces the world and wins it at the same moment; he renounces himself but retains his full identity, he becomes more himself even while he becomes more like Christ; he finds God in and through the world, instead of rejecting creation as an illusion or a distraction. In Christ the saint learns to redeem the premonitions of death (time, work, and suffering), transforming them into harbingers of eternity, joy, and life.
But to apprehend
The point of intersection of the timeless
With time, is an occupation for the saint-
No occupation either, but something given
And taken, in a lifetime's death in love,
Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender.14
"By their fruits ye shall know them" (Mt. 7:16, 20). Men and women whose lips sing the praises of God, but whose hands bind the wounds of the sick; whose hearts long for heaven, but whose heads think clearly about how to love and help their neighbors; whose minds meditate on the truth of God, but whose lives are sacrificed in the service of family, society, and Church: such men and women are living proofs of the true religion. Although they are very shy of attention (a holy man might walk right in front of us and we not know it), their example stands forth in the world's history to be seen and imitated by all who hunger and thirst for righteousness. The words and deeds of the saints are heroic and deathless, bright as the sun, vast as the ocean. They announce to the whole world: "See what man is made for, see how noble he can become, how true to what he was meant to be, all because of the grace of God!" Saints are still sinners so long as they dwell on this earth; but what separates them from the rest of men is their intense desire to follow the Beatitudes, their deeply rooted fidelity to God's commands, their dignity and simplicity of life, their humble efforts to help other people despite all setbacks. While most humans live as though they were meant to be nothing higher than brute animals, the saintly person lives with an awareness that he is called to be "a new man in Christ" (cf. Gal. 6:15, Eph. 4:24, Col. 3:10), destined for the glory of eternal communion with God if he leads a life worthy of that blessed gift.
As with any truth we hold on the basis of another's testimony, the same question arises with regard to the saints: how are we to tell true saints from false prophets? This is where life and doctrine meet. A man may seem virtuous and earnest in good works; but is he devoting his life to what is true, does he have true knowledge of God? The union of soul to Creator is a union of knowledge, for man is at peace only in the possession of truth. Salvation is as much a deliverance of the mind from falsehood as it is a healing of the heart's moral diseases. Indeed, the heart is to be purged of its faults in order that the eye of the soul may be able to see God, the first beginning and last end of all things. "For this was I born, and for this came I into the world, that I should give testimony to the truth," Our Lord solemnly proclaimed before Pilate. "Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice" (Jn. 18:37). "I am the way, the truth, and the life" (Jn. 14:6). "You shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free" (Jn. 8:32). "Sanctify them in truth," Christ prays to His Father on behalf of the Apostles. "Thy word is truth" (Jn. 17:17). It is imperative to link sanctity with sanity, or seeing reality as it is. F.J. Sheed describes the condition of a world that no longer concerns itself with the truth about reality:
Insanity is all about us. I do not mean that men individually are madmen, but they add up to a society which is not truly sane. Sanity means seeing what's there and planning life accordingly. And as a society, ours does not see the major part of reality at all, therefore does not see aright the minor part that it is aware of, shapes its activities as though the mis-seen fraction of reality were the whole of it. Secular ethics means deciding our actions as though there were no God, while not settling the question whether there is or not. . .To act without full vision is a formula for chaos. And in a chaos we live, exhibited to us by every newspaper we read, yet disguised from us by the care and intelligence and good will expended upon the understanding and ordering of the fraction; disguised again by the mental muscularity, the almost blinding scientific and technological brilliance, with which the seen part of reality is analyzed, is formulated and systematized, packaged, and offered for acceptance. The chaos is amiable so far; but chaos cannot be relied on to stay amiable, there are parts of the world in which it has not.15
If God has revealed Himself, we had better be certain we embrace what He actually said, for our fate hangs upon it. We seek out God, that we may rest in the bosom of His goodness and wisdom, as St. John reclined against the breast of Jesus at the Last Supper. Our conscience impels us to seek the truth and we must go wherever it leads us. Conscience is a sacred shrine easily defiled; our first duty is to keep it pure, the incense of prayer burning day and night. If we would have light, we must reverently and dutifully ask for light. There is no other way.
Moral certitude represents the end of the period of searching, although it marks the spiritual beginning of new life. After attaining such a peak, one never ceases to meditate on the truth, but one becomes certain of where the truth is to be found. Faith and questioning, faith and serious struggle, are not mutual antagonists, for human beings are meant to think, and persistent thinking brings with it a constant challenge both to one's own cramped ideas and to the falsehoods of our age and society. Faith and doubt, on the contrary, are implacable enemies, and the one cannot suffer the other's presence. As long as a man doubts what he believes, he has not found faith, a state in which heart and mind are at peace in the possession of truth. He may be intellectually curious or socially motivated or aesthetically attracted, but he is not morally certain, that is, willing to stake his life, his soul, his everything on the truth of his faith. This is the reason we call martyrs "confessors": they chose to suffer the loss of family, wealth, human respect, indeed their very lives, in order to confess their unwavering faith in Christ and His Church. Their great love of God left no room for cowardly self-love, for expediency or compromise. Let us pray fervently to God for some share in their spirit of courage and self-sacrifice, now that the secular world has turned against the Gospel of Our Lord more fiercely than any Roman persecution had ever done!
A holy priest once said to me, "The life of faith is a heavy cross, a sharing in the Cross of Jesus. If you persevere, this faith will become your salvation." When we seek the truth, we seek to conform ourselves to reality, not bend reality to ourselves. We seek to submit ourselves to what is right, what is pleasing and acceptable to the heavenly Father. For the human intellect in its pride and independence ("I want to be the measure of my life, my beliefs, my behavior"), accepting one's place in the natural order of creation and submitting to the demands of God's revelation is tantamount to a crown of thorns. If we wear it after the example of Christ, however, it will become our crown of glory.
Peter A. Kwasniewski is studying for a Doctorate in Philosophy at The Catholic University of America, concentrating on medieval philosophy.
Endnotes
1 See "The Virtue of Faith: I. Moral Certitude and Moral Integrity," in The Catholic Faith, vol. 3, no. 1, January-February 1997.
2 Scholasticism: Personalities and Problems of Medieval Philosophy, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon Books, 1960), p. 45.
3 On Free Choice of the Will [De Libero Arbitrio], trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Co., 1993), Book I, ch. 6, p. 10.
4 "Spiritual beings have bodies" is seen to be a flat contradiction by those who have studied metaphysics. "Bodies are indivisible" is known to be false to a student of natural philosophy. "God evolves" must be absurd, for the one notion forthwith cancels out the other. Such propositions are untenable because they state or presuppose absurdities.
5 Pseudo-Dionysius, The Divine Names, trans. John D. Jones (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 1980), ch. VII, sec. 4, p. 180.
6 Thomas Dubay, S.M., Faith and Certitude (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1985), pp. 194-195.
7 Commentary on St. Paul's Letter to the Ephesians, trans. Matthew Lamb, O.C.S.O. (Albany, NY: Magi Books, 1966).
8 Religious faith is of an order superior to human faith, because the authority in whom we place our faith is God Himself. We submit to a Church we believe to be founded by the Son of God, we accept revelation as the word of God. If the content of one's faith is revealed by God, and if the object of one's faith is God, then the certitude of the interior act is infinitely elevated. The truths of divine faith are not received on mere human authority or as the result of human reasoning. In the Apostle's voice: "Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of this world?...For the foolishness of God is wiser than men; and the weakness of God is stronger than men" (1 Cor. 1:20, 25).
9 On Free Choice of the Will, Book III, ch. 10, p. 92.
10 See, for the most extensive treatment, Newman's Essay on a Grammar of Assent.
11 See Mere Christianity.
12 Commentary on the Apostle's Creed, trans. Laurence Shapcote, O.P. (Manchester, NH: Sophia Institute Press, 1990), pp. 7-8.
13 Collationes in Hexaëmeron, Vision III, disc. 7, in Hyman and Walsh, op. cit., p. 459.
14 T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages," in Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1943), p. 27.
15 F.J. Sheed, God and the Human Condition (New York: Sheed and Ward, 1966), vol. I: God and the Human Mind, pp. 36-37.