It is absolutely impossible for a man to live without some kind of faith. Faith, in the broadest sense, is the acceptance of truth on the evidence of another. The essence of all faith is the submission of our judgment to the assertion of someone else, on whose word we accept a truth that is not intrinsically evident to our own minds. Human or natural faith is the acceptance of truths on the authority of other men. Supernatural faith is the belief in truths revealed by God, on the testimony of God, and because of the authority of God Who reveals these truths to us.
One of the paradoxes of our age, which has so far not distinguished itself as an Age of Faith, is that millions of men who have found it impossible to believe in God have blindly submitted themselves in human faith to every charlatan who has access to a printing press, a movie screen, or a microphone. Men who cannot believe in the revealed word of God swallow everything they read in the newspapers. Men who think it absurd that the Church should be able, by virtue of the guidance and protection of the Holy Ghost, to make infallible pronouncements as to what has or has not been revealed by God concerning doctrine or morality, will believe the most fantastic claims of political propaganda, even though the dishonesty of propagandists has become, by now, proverbial.
The final irony of the situation is this: that most men have no intellectual right to their theological unbelief. Strictly speaking, of course, no man has an intellectual right to unbelief because theological faith is eminently reasonable. The intelligence has no right to be consciously unintelligent. But there do nevertheless exist a few men who, in all sincerity, have arrived by their own research at the error that theological faith is un-acceptable. We cannot accept their error, but at least we have to admit that they worked hard to reach it. Their ignorance is invincible. They are in “good faith” in having no faith, because they think they have evidence against the validity of faith as such. This supposes (at least in theory) that if they saw the evidence in favor of faith, they would instantly change their view.
But no, the paradox is this. While a few men hold, as a result of reasoning, that theological faith is unacceptable, millions of others reject the notion of faith by an act not of reason but of blind faith. Here is evidence of the supreme intellectual indigence of our civilization: our very refusal to believe is based on faith.
There is still a greater enormity in our unbelief. We disbelieve God on the testi-mony of man. We reject the word of God because we are told to do so by men who, in their turn, were told to do so by men. The only real reason why most unbelievers cannot accept the word of God is that they have already submitted to the fallible authority of men.
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Now, reason shows that the only one who can tell us anything about God is God Himself. Men know nothing of His inner life or of His plans for them. Men can only command belief in their statements about Him when it is reasonable to hold that their statements are not theirs but His—when they speak as His representatives. “The things that are of God no man knoweth, but the Spirit of God” (1 Cor. 2:4).
God, being Pure Actuality, Pure Intelligence, not only sees all truth but is all Truth. Every truth, every being, is simply a reflection of Him. Truths are only true in Him, and because of Him. The light of reason is a natural participation in His Truth.
Reason itself draws its authority from Him. That is why reason, if it be allowed to light our way, will bring us, without prejudice, to faith.
But men without theological faith, reasoning from false premises which they re-ceive, on faith, from the fallible authority of other men, use the God-given light of reason to argue against God, against faith and even against reason itself.
This issue is generally misunderstood, because faith has so often been proposed as alien to reason and even as contrary to it. According to this view, faith is an entirely subjective experience which can neither be communicated nor explained. It is something emotional. It either happens to you or it does not. If it happens, you “have faith.” The fact that you “have faith” does not necessarily have any effect on your reasoning, be-cause your “faith” is an emotional thing beyond the pale of reason. You cannot explain it to yourself or to anybody else. But if faith has no intellectual reference whatever, it is hardly possible to see how “having faith” can contribute much to your outlook on life or to your behavior. It does not seem to be much more important than having red hair or a wooden leg. It is just something that happened to you, but did not happen to your next-door neighbor.
This false idea of faith is the last refuge of religious compromise with rationalism.
Fearing that domestic peace is no longer possible, faith barricades itself in the attic, and leaves the rest of the house to reason. Actually, faith and reason are meant to get along happily together. They were not meant to live alone, in divorce or in separation.
2
The “problem of unbelief” modern times is clearly not a problem of faithlessness but of irrationality. Most men of our time do not have enough brains or training to be capable of a formal sin against the theological virtue of faith. The faithlessness that is so prevalent in a country like America is not formal unbelief but crass ignorance. It is the confusion of well-meaning people who are lost in a fog, who do not know their left hands from their right. The agnosticism and atheism which benight the spirits of men in our time spring less from a formal, deliberate, and studied rejection of revealed truth than from an inability to think.
It is because men are not able to think for themselves that they are so often inca-pable either of belief or of unbelief. They are lucky if they rise high enough to be able to rehearse clearly in their minds the propositions that have been fed to them by the mass media. No one can expect them to have any means of judging the truth or falsity of the things they read in the papers when their best efforts are devoted to spelling out the words. If they cannot keep pace with the thought of another, how can they think for themselves?
A THOMAS MERTON READER · 1.10 The Problem of Unbelief 61 The first step in bringing men to faith is taken on the level not of theology but of philosophy. It is not a matter of faith but of reason. It is impossible to ask anyone to believe in truths revealed by God unless he first understand that there is a God and that He can reveal Truth.
Even in the case of intellectuals who really have some claim to that tide, the inabil-ity to accept the existence of God springs from powerlessness to think. Not that they do not have brilliant or well-trained minds, but in their approach to ultimate metaphysical problems their minds are all but paralyzed by a philosophical equipment that is worse than ineffectual: it leaves them in doubt as to the nature of being, of truth, and even sometimes of their own existence. It is not for these that we raise the question of unbelief.
Even our intellectuals are not sufficiently implemented to sin against faith!
That is why it is a mistake to situate the problem of unbelief on the mere level of proofs for God’s existence. On that level we are not dealing with faith, but with the rational preambles to faith. Pascal saw this clearly. He also saw the paradox that phi-losophers like Descartes, who had in fact reduced theology to the level of philosophy and tended to shift the problem of belief into the area of his “clear ideas” of God, had obscured and falsified the whole issue. Pascal predicted correctly that the influence of Descartes on theology would be a watering down of faith by specious philosophizing.
The problem of unbelief cannot arise until a man has found his way to God. True, since the existence of God is an article of faith as well as a truth accessible to reason, any denial of His existence is materially a sin against faith. But there is so much invin-cible ignorance of the rational preambles to faith that it would be misleading to suppose that the godlessness of most men presents a real problem of unbelief.
3
It has been said that the multitudes are faithless because of their faith in a few.
With the unbelief of these few we touch upon the real problem.
The real problem of unbelief is, to my mind, centered in those who to some extent know God but cannot believe in Him. They are often involved in the most acute spiri-tual anguish because of this ambivalence. They recognize the existence and the value of faith. They often wish they had some of it. They sincerely envy those who can believe, who can accept the teaching authority of the Church and enter fully into Catholic life, with all its privileges and obligations. They are able to appreciate the happiness of truly religious men. They find the claims of Catholicism entirely reasonable. They are not in the least perplexed at the thought that God speaks to men through Christ and that Christ has handed on His ruling, teaching, and sanctifying power to His Mystical Body, which prolongs His Incarnation and keeps Him visibly present in the world of men. And yet they cannot believe.
If we sometimes fail to meet this problem of unbelief in those who would “like to believe but cannot,” it is generally because we are merely apologists when we ought to be Apostles. We have been trained to feed men not with Christ, the Bread of Life, but rather with apologetic arguments. The reason for this is, perhaps, that we have been brought up on the technique of grappling with the Church’s strongest and most vocal opponents: the atheists and skeptics. We imagine that our task is not to announce the word of God but “to convert atheists,” by main force of argument. Even when someone
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with a genuine desire to believe comes to a priest with difficulties and with questions drawn from the enemies of the Church, the chances are that these questions are not re-ally his difficulties at all. He thinks he needs them as a pretext for talking—or he hopes to use them as an excuse for not committing himself to any moral action!
To be unable to understand the mysteries of faith is by no means to be unable to believe them. And yet, as I have said, faith is in no way the blind acceptance of a truth which we have no hope of understanding. Although we can never comprehend the full meaning of these mysteries, yet faith is the key to a relative understanding of them. It is after the initial act of belief that the believer begins to see. Only then can the intellectual difficulties presented by these mysteries be dealt with in a way that is in some sense satisfactory.
4
The motives of credibility always need to be made clear. But their clarification alone will do nothing to solve a problem that is essentially concerned not with credibility but with faith. Information, reasoning, sympathetic explanation of truths usually do not suffice. There is a subtle distinction between merely “making converts” and preaching the word of God. Saint Paul has already anticipated the complaints of those who, when they have dealt out all the arguments in the textbook of fundamental theology, find themselves in a blind alley and attribute their lack of success to the fact that perhaps God has somehow failed to give the prospective “convert” enough grace to believe. The man has accepted all their arguments. He knows that revelation is credible. He wants to believe in God, in Christ, in the Church. He even sees that he ought to believe in them.
He has a fair idea of all there is to believe, and it all sounds rational. But after that—he is inarticulate. He cannot go one step further and formally accept the faith. He cannot
“believe.”
What shall he do? Fold his hands and wait for grace to descend on him from heaven? Saint Paul says:
The justice which is of faith, speaketh thus: Say not in thy heart, who shall ascend into heaven? that is, to bring Christ down. Or who shall descend into the deep, that is to bring up Christ again from the dead. But what saith the Scripture? The word is nigh thee, even in thy mouth and in thy heart. This is the word of faith, which we preach.
(Rom. 10:6-8)
For Saint Paul, the problem of justification is not a matter of proving the truth of this or that doctrine, but of making Christ live in our hearts by faith (Eph. 3:17). An Apostle is one who engenders “new beings” in Christ, by the word of God. “For,” says Paul to the Corinthians, “if you have ten thousand instructors in Christ, yet not many fathers.
For in Christ Jesus, by the gospel, I have begotten you” (1 Cor. 4:15).
The word of faith is what begets spiritual life in the believer. The word, says Saint Paul, is very near to us, once it has been “planted” like the mustard seed in our heart.
This planting starts an interior activity which results in a “new birth,” or the fundamen-tal spiritual transformation from which emerges a new interior self, a “new creature,”
united with Christ by faith. This supernatural transformation is precipitated by the
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“word of faith.” Our spiritual generation as “new men in Christ” depends entirely on our reaction to this “word.” The problem of the catechumen who wants to believe and cannot do so will be resolved as soon as he finds out what to make of the “word” that has been planted in him. Saint Paul sums up his solution in two statements:
With the heart we believe unto justice: with the mouth confession is made unto salvation.
(Rom. 10:10)
Saint Thomas Aquinas, commenting on the words “with the heart we believe unto justice,” says:
This means that it is with the will that we believe. For other things, which pertain to the exterior worship of God, can be done by a man unwillingly. But no one can believe unless he wills to do so (Nemo credere potest nisi volens). For the intellect of the believer is not determined to assent to truth by the force of argument (ex necessitate rationis) as is the mind of one who knows. That is why justification [i.e. supernatural life] is not a matter of knowing but of believing, since justification takes place in the will.*
This movement of the will, by which the intellect accepts the truth of God on faith, is inevitably conditioned by the further action of the will which will be demanded as a consequence of faith. Faith will sooner or later have to be “confessed unto salvation.”
This means that the truth which we believe must take possession of our entire being, in such a way that faith will “work by charity” and our words and actions will outwardly express the change of life that has taken place within us. If necessary, we must even speak loud our faith into the face of death. The man who has no real intellectual dif-ficulties about faith and yet “cannot believe” is sometimes one who cannot face the prospect of this interior revolution. He earnestly desires peace: but not at the price of battle. He wants Christ to be a sign for the salvation of his spirit without being a sign of contradiction. Convinced of the credibility of revelation, hungry for a life of faith, he needs only to make an act of will. But that act of will is so tremendous, so sweeping in its consequences! No wonder the poor man is paralyzed.
This moral paralysis often obscures the intellectual issue. A person who has no real difficulties with Catholic truth can suddenly find himself beset with “problems” which are nothing but the transference of his moral impotence into an intellectual sphere. A week ago, a month ago, he was able to grasp quite clearly the outlines of Catholic doc-trine: but now, under “instruction” he becomes bewildered, he can no longer see. His mind has been darkened by the hesitation of his will. He is subconsciously diverting himself from the truth which he is afraid to embrace in its entirety.
5
It is not for anyone to say how or when God is to dispense His gifts of grace. But it seems to me probable that anyone who sees the credibility of the Catholic faith and feels at some time or other a definite desire to embrace it, has already received sufficient
*Commentarium in Epistolam ad Romanos, cap, 10, lectio 2.
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grace to do so. There is no need to wait about for a star to appear in the heavens or for an angel to tell him to get baptized or for him to see Our Lord surrounded by a great light.
If he does not know for sure whether he has the grace to accept the faith, let him start accepting it anyway, and he will soon find out that he has been given not only sufficient but efficacious grace to do so. Let him make the act of will which he thinks is impossible: he will find out, after he has done it, that it was possible. In so doing he will commit himself to embrace all the apparently severe moral consequences of Christian faith. But he can be morally certain that, if he has enough grace to start the journey, he will also receive all the grace he needs to continue it and to reach the end.
If he does not know for sure whether he has the grace to accept the faith, let him start accepting it anyway, and he will soon find out that he has been given not only sufficient but efficacious grace to do so. Let him make the act of will which he thinks is impossible: he will find out, after he has done it, that it was possible. In so doing he will commit himself to embrace all the apparently severe moral consequences of Christian faith. But he can be morally certain that, if he has enough grace to start the journey, he will also receive all the grace he needs to continue it and to reach the end.