Faith |
From the book New Seeds of Contemplation, itallics by Merton, Bold text by Ion Paradox |
Thomas Merton's Definition of Faith |
First of all, faith is not an emotion, not a feeling. It is not a blind subconscious urge toward something vaguely supernatural. It is not simply an elemental need in man's spirit. It is not a feeling that God exists. It is not a conviction that one is somehow saved or "justified" for no special reason except that one happens to feel that way. It is not something entirely interior and subjective, with no reference to any external motive. It is not just "soul force." It is not something that bubbles up out of the recesses of your soul and fills you with an indefinable "sense" that everything is all right. It is not something so purely yours that it's content is incommunicable. It is not some personal myth of your own that you cannot share with anyone else, and the objective validity of which does not matter either to you or God or anybody else. But also it is not an opinion. It is not a conviction based on rational analysis. It is not the fruit of scientific evidence. You can only believe what you do not know. As soon as you know it, you no longer believe it, at least not in the same way as you know it. Faith is first of all an intellectual assent. It perfects the mind, it does not destroy it. It puts the intellect in possession of Truth which reason cannot grasp by itself. It gives us certitude concerning God as He is in Himself; faith is the way to a vital contact with a God Who is alive, and not to the view of an abstract First Principle worked out by syllogism from eth evidence of created things. But the assent of faith is not based on the intrinsic evidence of a visible object. The act of belief unites two members of a proposition that have no connection in our natural experience. But also there is nothing within reach of reason to argue that they are disconnected. The statements which demand the assent of faith are simply neutral to reason. We have no natural evidence why they should be true or why they should be false. We assent to them because of something other than intrinsic evidence. We accept their truth as revealed and the motive of our assent is the authority of God who reveals them. Faith is not expected to give complete satisfaction to the intellect. It leaves the intellect suspended in obscurity, without a light proper to its own mode of knowing. Yet it does not frustrate the intellect, or deny it, or destroy it. It pacifies it with a conviction which it knows it can accept quite rationally under the guidance of love. For the act of faith is an act in which the intellect is content to know God by loving Him and accepting His statements about Himself on His own terms. And this assent is quite rational because it is based on the realization that our reason can tell us nothing about God as He actually is in Himself, and on the fact that God Himself is infinite actuality and therefore infinite Truth, Wisdom, Power and Providence, and can reveal Himself with absolute certitude in any manner He pleases, and can certify His own revelation of Himself by external signs. Faith is primarily an intellectual assent. But if it were only that and nothing more, if it were only the "argument of what does not appear," it would not be complete. It has to be something more than an assent of the mind. It is also a grasp, a contact, a communion of wills, "the substance of things to be hoped for." By faith one not only assents to propositions revealed by God, one not only attains to truth in a way that intelligence and reason alone cannot do, but one assents to God Himself. One receives God. One says "yes" not merely to a statement about God, but to the Invisible, Infinite God Himself. One fully accepts the statement not only for its own content, but for the sake of Him Who made it. Too often our notion of faith is falsified by our emphasis on the statements about God which faith believes, and by our forgetfulness of the fact that faith is a communion with God's own light and truth. Actually, the statements, the propositions which faith accepts on the divine authority are simply media through which one passes in order to reach the divine Truth. Faith terminates not in statement, not in formula of words, but in God. If instead of resting in God by faith, we rest simply in the proposition or the formula, it is small wonder that faith does not lead to contemplation. On the contrary, it leads to anxious hair-splitting arguments, to controversy, to perplexity and ultimately to hatred and division. It is of course quite true that theology can and must study the intellectual content of revelation and especially the verbal formulation of divinely revealed truth. But once again, this is not the final object of faith. Faith goes beyond words and formulas and brings us the light of God Himself. The importance of the formulas is not that they are ends in themselves, but that they are means through which God communicates His truth to us. They must be kept clear. They must be clean windows, so that they may not obscure and hinder the light that comes to us. They must not falsify God's truth. Therefore we must make every effort to believe the right formulas. But we must not be so obsessed with verbal correctness that we never go beyond the words to the ineffable reality which they attempt to convey. Faith, then, is not just the grim determination to cling to a certain form of words, no matter what may happen to be though we must certainly be prepared to defend our creed with our life. But above all, faith is the opening of an inward eye, the eye of the heart, to be filled with the presence of Divine Light. Ultimately faith is the only key to the universe. The final meaning of human existence, and the answers to questions on which all our happiness depends, cannot be reached in any other way. The living God, the God Who is God and not a philosopher's abstraction, lies infinitely beyond the reach of anything our eyes can see or our minds can understand. No matter what perfection you predicate of Him, you have to add that your conception is only a pale analogy of the perfection that is in God, and that He is not literally what you conceive by that term. He Who is infinite light is so tremendous in His evidence that our minds only see Him as Darkness. Lux in tenebris lucet et tenbrae eam non comprehenderunt. (The Light shines in darkness and the darkness has not understood it.) If nothing that can be seen can either be God or represent Him to us as He is, then to find God we must pass beyond everything that can be seen and enter into darkness. Since nothing that can be heard is God, to find Him we must enter into silence. . |
