Cursory Meditations on Faith
by Bevin van Liempt

The Epistle from today’s mass struck a chord with me. It has been a message that has been buzzing around in my life for some time.  A core concept from the reading is one that takes a central role in Pope Benedict’s book, Introduction to Christianity, which I have been reading for the last little bit. (Although I had also been looking into it independently because a casual acquaintance of mine had made an off-hand remark about faith: that it was essentially a get-out-of-rationality free card that I would be able to bust out at any given moment and evade the natural conclusions.)

Here is the reading, presented first without commentary:

The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written:

Where is the wise one? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made the wisdom of the world foolish? For since in the wisdom of God the world did not come to know God through wisdom, it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation to save those who have faith.  For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom, and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.

1 Corinthians 1 : 18 – 25

The truth of the matter is, I really do seem quite foolish to most other people I’ve met.  And I can hardly blame them for thinking so. We say some pretty daring things sometimes, and as a matter of fact, we, as Catholics, absolutely must run contrary to popular norms. We tell people that it is not proper to do as they wish with their bodies. We tell people they must have children they don’t feel ready or equipped to have. We tell people that there is no glory in wealth, temporal power, or fame.  Nearly all things that this world holds dear, and all things that it has decided are ends to themselves.  We claim that the Way is narrow, and few are those who find it.

Where the world has said, “Put yourself first.  Don’t let anyone impose on you.  Set your boundaries and defend them fiercely.  No one should have any influence on you but you.” we’ve taken another approach.  “Put others first, always – Sacrifice yourself.  Give freely, even when you don’t want to, and when someone takes advantage of you, give even more to that person.  Humble yourself, and listen to those authorities which have been justly established over you.  Deny yourself the pleasures that you desire, and replace them with suffering for the sake of others.”

Pretty foolish, right?  How can I say with a straight face that my advice to a woman who is trapped in an unhappy, loveless marriage is to not only “stick it out,” but choose to give even more of herself to the man who does not value her.  To forgive everything, even if it is likely to be repeated, and to do good to him who works evil against her.  In what sense are the poor blessed?  Those who suffer are close to God?  What does that even mean?  The list goes on and on.

How can Faith dare?

A major point of contention, and one that I say is not well understood – The Sacrifice of Isaac

How can we make these claims?  The answer, presented plainly and without apology: Faith.  Pure and simple.  But now I’ve really done it, haven’t I?  I’ve revealed that I have no rational basis for what I believe and that it’s just blind and stupid and not based on anything that is demonstrable.  I just proved that it ultimately really is foolishness and nothing more, right?

I don’t really think so.  And the reason is because no one really understand what we mean when we say Faith. Even sometimes those of us who say it. It’s an unfortunate truth that a great many people have misrepresented Faith as something blind: a sort of lazy certainty that suffices to replace understanding.  Others have effectively written Faith out of existence altogether, and reject the whole tool outright.  So let’s start with a clear exposition of what we actually believe Faith to be:

First, let us consider Science, which I’m going to use here in its Thomistic sense.  When we say Science, we’re talking about those things which are apprehensible by the senses.  Those things which we can touch with our hands and see with our eyes.  It’s those things that we have demonstrable proof of.  For example, in my room right now, I have Science of the chair next to me, the colour of my wife’s hair, and the number of empty coke cans lying around (not mine, I swear. Edit: This is Rei, how dare you insert my coke cans into your blog posts?)  I also have Science of the things that I saw earlier, such as the fact that the car was in garage an hour ago, and likely still is, and so forth.

When a reasonable person believes in something he has Science of, he’s simply passively giving assent of the will to what resides in the intellect.  That is to say, those things which we believe as a matter of science are those things which we have seen, and do not actively deny, and which do not contradict with other things we have Science of.  It is a very passive process, in a sense, apprehending in this way.  We see a chair and record it as something we have seen.  While this method can be distorted sometimes, it’s generally only in cases of extreme bias or delusion that we run into trouble with our senses.

Next, on our way to Faith, let’s consider the opposite extreme of Science: Opinion.  These are matters on which we have no useful information whatever.  We have not apprehended anything at all.  A simple way to elucidate Opinion is to ask a crazy question like, “What do you think the weather is going to be like on April 4, 2065?”  If the person should choose to answer, it’s clear that this is not based on any kind of truly relevant apprehensible reality at all.  It would be, at the very most, a slightly educated guess.

This is where Faith comes in.  It was St. Thomas Aquinas who said that Faith was a mean between Science and Opinion.  Here’s the definition as we use it: Faith is when someone else has Science of something, and relays it to you, and you choose to believe it.  This is Faith in its general sense.  It becomes the Theological Virtue of Faith when it has God as its subject, and it is from here that we make our claims.

That is to say, our beliefs are done through choice, not in the absence of evidence, but in evidence that is not apprehended directly. That is: We believe though we have not seen – we believe even though we don’t know for sure.  They’re also subject to reason, as reason is a God-given gift, and required to be used by all men as part of our being made in the image of God.

An Example of Faith

I got a phone call from a person who’s had a pretty bum deal so far in life.  He’s struggled with issues of drugs, violence, injury, poverty, etc.; A lot of people would think by looking at him that he’s kind of shady.  He told me a story about how he’s low on cash to pay for his and his dog’s food, and needed to borrow some to pay for it.  My wife and I had already lent him $80 a couple of days earlier to help get his dog out of the pound. It was pretty possible that I was being taken advantage of, and I was very well ware that it was possible.  Some people around me even made comments to that effect when I off-handedly (and reluctantly) said what I was up to.

Now, the act of faith in this instance is to trust in what I have not seen.  I have not seen that he is reliable, or willing to pay me back.  I have not seen that this money will be going to food.  I have not seen much at all.  All I know, really, is that I was asked for help.  But I made a concerted effort to trust him, and so my wife and I set out to help him.  As of yet, we haven’t been paid back.  But I choose to believe in his claims because that’s the best for everyone – and entirely moreover it’s the only good thing to do.

I firmly believe that when people are exposed to this sort of Charity, it has an effect on them. I certainly have seen the effects of the absence of Charity – cynicalization, hardening, distraction-seeking in a harmful way.  There’s a lot of them.  And I think for someone like him, who has shown some degree of commitment to making a change – or at least the hope that change is possible – it’s a morally better situation to have the love given, even if undeserved. Especially even if I can get hurt as a result.

This is the essence of it – I could be entirely wrong.  I could have misjudged everything, or be choosing to believe in a reality that is different from the objective reality.  I could lose the money that we lent, or worse yet, I could be enabling a slip back into drugs.  These are things that are all possible, and that is the risk of doing good.  But without this faith, he would find himself in isolation.  I know for a near fact this man has few contacts in town, and very few people to call on for help.

My choice, therefore, was two-fold:

1) Accept the man’s claims about reality, and help, knowing that they could be wrong, or
2) trust in what I have seen, and acquiesce to the very legitimate worry that I had been taken advantage of.  Something that could well be the case.
Now if it should come to pass that the second is true, all the better, since what I did was good in and of itself, and good is done through sacrifice, but it would also preclude me from making a connection with him, and this is the hidden evil therein – one need only take an honest look at oneself to realize that we’ve all had cases where we have undeservedly gained trust from others, to our spiritual benefit (a term that I’ll leave undefined for now.)

Now I say this with the full knowledge that this is an imperfect example, and we cannot truly separate out our apprehensions of reality based on science from those we have based on faith.  It’s just to illustrate the concept, and the ways that it can be good, as well as one of the ways that it can go wrong.  Someone else made a claim of reality, the truth of which is known only to them and God, and I made a conscious choice to believe it.

In the same way, when my wife says “I love you,” I take it on faith.  I can look at her actions to see if they’re consistent with what she says, but at the end of the day, I would never be able to determine if she was just convincingly faking.  That risk is always there.  And indeed, when people want to believe that other people are taking advantage of them, they often do, because the evidence is sufficiently ambiguous to give them the mental freedom to formulate that narrative.  Rather than let my beliefs be ungoverned and subject to only what I see with my eyes, or on the other side of the spectrum, let my emotions dictate them in an ungoverned way, I seize control, and choose to believe those things which I deem to be not just right, but good.  I foolishly expose myself to hurt, which often becomes realized, and thereby effect the best end.

Not Faith, but Science?

To bring this conversation back to where it started, the reason the Scripture hit me so hard is because I spend a lot of my time debating and discussing religion with non-believers.  And one thing that comes up over and over and over again is, “Prove it to me.”

For me, this is the error of both – they don’t understand the nature of the claims being made.  Let me say this: if God merely wanted us to believe and that’s all he sought from us, He would have not done things the way that He did.  He would have made the claims that we make immediately apparent to the senses.  He would have parted the Heavens and shown Himself for all to see, saying, “I am the LORD your God!”

The truth is something subtler.  Something more nuanced.  Something more meaningful.  Let’s start here: It seems to be the case that nothing can be Glorified that did not choose to participate in its glorification.  That is to say, if we are to be made perfect, God seems to require that we choose it, and does not wish to force it upon us as a matter of divine will.  And in order for a choice to be meaningful, we have to have the opportunity to choose wrongly.

This is what the claims of our Faith are – a valid, consistent way of looking at things, based, ultimately, on the divine Word of God. It must be taken as that.  It’s not something derived from looking at the world around us, but rather, as a claim made.  The angels in Heaven have seen, and God has seen, and the Saints have seen, but as yet, we only have an account.  And ultimately, it has to stay that way.

What this means for us is that no one can ever give you faith, as the Greeks who desire wisdom might want.  No one can prove it for you, as no matter how adeptly it is expressed, you’ll always have enough intellectual room to work around it.  If you do not wish to hear, you will not hear – which is exactly why Our Lord so often started His teachings with, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear!”

The reason this is the case is simple, I think: God demands participation in your salvation. He is not contented by you lazily letting your intellect govern your will, any more than we are contented with people lazily letting their emotions govern their will.

From the outside, these things can never be grasped in their entirety, only from within do they begin to make sense.  And the impetus to make one search can never be a proof.  It must come from the heart.  A journey.  An encounter.  Never an argument.

This is pretty hard to understand sometimes, and entirely foreign in a secular world, so I’ll do my best to flesh it out some more in part two.