Part 11

The Gospels, the Acts of the Apostles, and the Epistles, as unanimously and persistently as they have proclaimed the Incarnation, contain and proclaim another great truth of Christianity, the co-existence of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, and their combined action upon the human soul. {146} The Trinity is written in the New Testament, where it takes its place in the history and in the Faith of Christ from their very beginning. Here, again, men have refused to restrict themselves to History, or to a belief in History; they have essayed to determine the elements, and to explain the "quomodo" of the religions truth; in other words, to transform history into science. Hence all the controversies, all the contests, all the authoritative decisions which have pretended to fix the nature, rank, and relations of the three Divine persons, or the manner of the one God's existence and action in the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.

I enter into none of these controversies; I examine none of the doctrines and decisions which those controversies have either originated, or disputed; I now only seek to determine their essential character; it is the transition from divine truth to human science: it is Theology, the offspring, more or less legitimate, of Religion.

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When I say its offspring more or less legitimate, and speak of Theological science in these guarded terms, it is not that I do not design to say openly all that I think upon the subject. The scientific Theology of Christianity commands often my admiration, always my respect. In their effort to explain the grand facts of the Old and New Testament, its writers have addressed themselves to a glorious task; they have in pursuing it fallen upon and thrown light upon sublime truths; they have engaged for the cause of Christianity in formidable contests; they have lent a moral influence often pregnant of effect to the institutions and authorised teachers of Christ's religion. But their efforts have been even more ambitious than energetic, more compromising than efficacious; they have, even with the words unceasingly in their mouths, shown an ignorance of the limits of human science. The Christian Religion is a miracle, the miraculous work of God; this was the point from which they started, their fundamental datum; forgetting what they have so affirmed, they have sought and they have thought to ensure the triumph of the divine truth by explaining it; they have obscured and changed it by an intermixture of man's work. {148} Man can recognise as realities the facts which are at the same time both Christian dogmas and Christian mysteries. Man can recognise his own subjection to them, but it is not given to man to make of them a science.

Bossuet also essayed to fathom the Trinity; in the midst of his explanations and of his comparisons, he stops short and exclaims: "I do not know who can vaunt that he understands that perfectly, or who can satisfy himself as to what the modes of being can add to being, or as to whence arises their distinction in the unity and the identity which they have with the being itself. All this is not very comprehensible; all this, nevertheless, is truth." [Footnote 39]

[Footnote 39: Élévations sur les Mystères. Works of Bossuet, vol. ix., p. 49.]

Thus after this final effort of his genius, it was in Christian ignorance that the last great doctor of the Church was forced to take refuge.

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It is not only that these attempts of Scientific Theology are unsuccessful, they entail, as experience painfully shows, a serious danger. Pride is the ordinary companion of science, and what pride equal to the pride of the science which dares to believe that it has penetrated the secrets of God's action and of man's destiny! Scientific Theology has had the greatest share in religious persecutions; its doctors have had to defend not only their faith but their system, not only God's work but their own work and this simultaneously. Those whose systems were the most logical have generally been the most tyrannical; history in this respect fully confirms what independently of history might fairly be presumed; namely, that supposing the faith equal, "Christian ignorance" is far more naturally and readily inclined to moderation and charity than Theological science.

But it is not only the scientific Theologians whose ambition and efforts have led them to mount beyond the sphere of human science; others there are who fall in a different manner into the same error and the same peril. {150} The Mystic Theologians ask for light as to the relations of God to man, not from dialectics and reasoning, but from sentiment and inspiration. They admit between God and man a direct and mysterious communication, which, in certain cases and upon certain conditions, conveys to the human being divine revelations of a character personal and individual. With this torch in the hand they approach the questions which concern grace, prayer, and the destiny awarded by Providence to each creature, and flatter themselves that they are able to raise the veil by which the solution of such questions is hidden.

I cannot contemplate without profound emotion these pious impulses of the human soul, desirous of penetrating the secrets of God. What more excusable than that ardent and trembling curiosity in the midst of the darkness of our life and destiny? Whoever believes really in God cannot fail to believe himself under the eye and in the power of God; how, indeed, would it be possible for him to admit that his Creator is indifferent and powerless? {151} There are, it may be added, very few who, at certain moments and under certain circumstances, have not felt, in the innermost recesses of their being, a stirring, an impulsion, not proceeding from themselves, nor from the world around them, inexplicable to them, except as proceeding from a superior source and power. Who of us has not, in the course of his life, been sometimes aware of a design foreign to his own volition, his own forecast, conducting him to an end which he did not forecast? And, finally, in the infinite number of prayers rising to God from the midst of human misery and suffering, are there not some to which the event brings satisfaction, just as there are others with respect to which the contrary is the case? Hence the problems of the divine Grace, the divine Providence, the efficacy of prayer. No doubt the desire is very natural which passionately aspires to solve problems so grand, and which, in the hope to do so, strives to rise to a direct and personal communication with their Divine author. {152} But the more natural the desire, the more profound the error. No doubt God acts upon us, upon our soul, and upon our destiny, by his providence and by his grace; no doubt he hears and listens to our prayers; but it is not given to us to foresee his action and his answer, nor to appreciate them in their motives and their effects. "The ways of God are not our ways." Whether general problems are submitted to man's intelligence, or questions touching him personally trouble his soul; whether the Doctors of Theology construct systems, or the Mystic Theologians fall into ecstasies, we see in all these cases that man has arrived at limits which oppose an effectual barrier to his scientific vision, and which no transports of piety will ever enable him to overleap. Beyond those limits, the condition imposed by God upon man is confidence in spite of ignorance; or in other words, "Christian Ignorance" which is gage at once for his wisdom, his charity, and his liberty.

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Fifth Meditation.

Christian Faith.

Forty years ago, upon the appearance of a work of the Abbé Bautain, entitled "The Morality of the Gospel compared with the Morality of the Philosophers," I published, in the "Revue Française," an essay upon that state of the human soul which is called Faith, upon the different intellectual facts which it expresses, and the different ways by which man attains to it. Although my special subject, at present, is no longer Faith in its abstract sense, but of Faith in Christ, it is not foreign to my purpose to lay before readers in the year 1868 some passages which appeared in my essay in 1828. For notwithstanding the imperfection of the essay referred to, I have not ceased to regard it as founded on just reasoning; it serves as a starting-point for that Meditation upon Christian Faith which I now give to the press.

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By the word faith is commonly understood a certain belief in facts or dogmas of a special nature--in facts or dogmas of religion. This word, indeed, has only this meaning, when in speaking of _the faith_ the term is used alone and absolutely. This, however, is neither its sole meaning, nor its fundamental meaning; it has a still more extended sense from which its religious sense is derived. Expressions like the following are met with:--"I have full _faith_ in your words; this man has _faith_ in himself--in his strength--in his fortune, &c." This employment of the word _faith_ in secular matters, so to say, occurs more frequently in the present day; it is, however, no recent invention, and religious ideas have never been so exclusively its sphere that the word faith has not had also other significations attached to it.

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It appears, then, by the usages of common speech and popular opinion, 1st, that the word _faith_ designates a certain internal condition of the person who believes, and not merely a certain species of belief: that it refers to the nature itself of the conviction, not to its object; 2ndly, that this word was, nevertheless, in its origin, and still is, more generally applied to those kinds of belief termed religious. What then, in its special and ordinary application to religious belief, are the variations which have taken place in its meaning, and which are taking place every day?

Men engaged in teaching and preaching a religion, a doctrine, a religious reform, sometimes whilst appealing to the whole energy of the human mind in its state of liberty, succeed in producing in their disciples an entire, profound, and powerful conviction of the truth of their teaching. This conviction is called _Faith_; a name which neither masters and disciples will repudiate, nor even their adversaries disallow. {156} Faith then is only a profound and imperious conviction of the truth of a dogma of religion; it matters little whether the conviction has been acquired by way of reasoning, or has been generated by controversy, or by free and rigorous examination; that which gives to it its character, and entitles it to the name of _Faith_, is its energy, is the empire which that energy gives to it over the whole man. Such at every time was the faith of the great Reformers, and more especially in the sixteenth century, such the faith of their most illustrious disciples, of Calvin after Luther, and Knox after Calvin.

The same men have preached the same doctrine to persons whom it was impossible for them to convince by the use of reasoning, by an appeal to examination, or to science, to women and crowds of persons incapable alike of laborious study and of lengthened reflection. They spoke to the imagination, to the moral affections, where the persons whom they addressed were prone to feel emotion, and to believe in consequence of emotion. They gave the name of _Faith_ to the result of their action, just as they had done so to the result of the process essentially intellectual of which I was before speaking. {157} Faith thus instilled was a religious conviction, not acquired by reasoning, and deriving its origin in human sensibility. This is the idea of faith as entertained by the Mystic Sects.

Appeals to human sensibility and human emotion have not always sufficed to generate faith. Another spring of human influence has been resorted to; and men have been commanded to adhere to practices and to form habits. Man must sooner or later attach ideas to the acts which are habitual to him, and attribute a meaning to that which produces in him a constant effect. The mind was led to the belief of the principles which had given birth to certain practices and habits. A new kind of faith appeared, it had for its principle and dominant characteristic, the submission of the mind to an authority invested with the right at once to govern man's life and to regulate his thought.

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Finally, faith has not everywhere nor constantly been generated in the human mind, either by the free exercise of the intelligence, or by appeals to sensibility, or by the formation of habits. It was then said that faith was incommunicable, that it was not in man's power to impart faith, or to acquire it by any exertion of his own, that for this purpose God's intervention and the action of his grace were necessary. Divine grace became thus the preliminary condition of faith and its definitive character.

The word _faith_ has, consequently, in turn expressed: 1st, a conviction acquired by the free efforts of the human intelligence; 2ndly, a conviction acquired by way of the sensibility, and without the concurrence of the reason, and often even against its authority; 3rdly, a conviction acquired by man's long submission to a power invested with a power from on high to command conviction; 4thly, a conviction induced by supernatural means,--by divine grace.

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What in the midst of this variety of sources from which it may emanate is the essential and invariable character of faith? What is the state of the soul in which faith reigns when we consider it independently of its origin and of its object?

Two kinds of belief exist in man: the one, I will not call it innate, for this is an inexact and justly criticised expression, but a belief natural and spontaneous which springs up and establishes itself in the mind of man, if not without his being aware of it, at least without the help of any reflection or volition on his part, by the development alone of his nature and the influence of that external world in the midst of which his life is passed; the other kind of belief is the result of laborious examination and reflection, the fruit of voluntary study and of the power possessed by man either to concentrate all his faculties upon a certain object with the design of mastering it, or to direct the thought inwards, and realise what is there taking place--to render an account thereof to himself, and thus to acquire by an act of volition and of reflection, a knowledge which he did not before possess, although the facts which form its object nevertheless existed as facts external--and which he might see by his eyes,--or as facts which were taking place within him.

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Of these two kinds of belief which merits the name of _faith_?

It seems at first sight that the name is perfectly suitable to that kind of belief which I have termed natural and spontaneous: such belief is exempt from doubt and disquietude; it directs man in his judgment, in his actions, and with an empire which he dreams neither of eluding nor contesting; it is ingenuous, unhesitating, practical, sovereign; who would not recognise in it the characteristics of _faith?_

Faith has in effect two characters; but it has at the same time others which belief natural and spontaneous has not. Almost unnoticed by the man who is yet guided by it, this natural and spontaneous belief is to him, as it were, a law from without which he has received, not accepted; which he obeys by instinct without having given it any intimate and personal assent. {161} It suffices for the exigencies of his life; it guides him, admonishes him, impels him, or checks him; but without, so to say, any concurrence on his own part, without giving birth in him to the sentiment that any active, energetic, or powerful principle is stirring within him, without procuring him the profound joy of contemplating, loving, adoring the truth which reigns over him. _Faith_, on the contrary, has this power; faith is not science, neither is it ignorance; the mind which faith penetrates has never yet, perhaps, rendered a true account to itself of that in which it has faith; and, perhaps, never will do so; but the mind is, nevertheless, certain of it; to the mind it is present, living; it is no longer a general belief, a law of human nature which governs the moral man, as the law of gravitation governs bodies; it is a personal conviction, a truth which the moral man has made his own by force of contemplation, of voluntary obedience, and love. Henceforth this truth does much more than suffice to his life, it satisfies his soul; it does much more than direct him, it enlightens him. {162} How many, for instance, live under the empire of a natural and instinctive belief that moral good and moral evil exist, without our being able to affirm that they have _faith_ in them. Such belief is in them, as it were, a master undisputed; to whom, nevertheless, they render no homage, whom they obey without seeing and without loving. But if a circumstance, a cause, however trivial, revealing, so to say, the conscience to itself, should attract and fix their attention upon this distinction between moral good and evil, which is a spontaneous law of their nature; should they knowingly acknowledge and accept it as their legitimate master, should their intelligence honour itself by comprehending it, and their liberty do itself honour by obeying it; should they feel their soul, as it were, the sanctuary of a sacred law, as the focus into which this truth concentrates and establishes itself in order thence to diffuse its rays of light; this is no longer simple natural belief, it is _faith_.

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Faith, then, does not exclusively consist of either of the two kinds of belief which at first sight seem to share between them the soul of man; it partakes at once of natural and spontaneous belief and of the belief which is the fruit of reflection and science; yet it differs from each; like the latter, it is individual and intimate; like the former confidant, active, dominant. Considered in itself, independently of all comparison with any other particular and analogous state of the intellect, faith is the full security of man in the possession of his belief, as absolved from effort, as exempt from doubt; the path which the mind has pursued in arriving at it is obliterated, and a sentiment only is left behind of the natural and pre-existent harmony between the mind of man and the truth itself. To the man whose mind faith penetrates, his intelligence and his volition present no longer any problems for solution as to the things which are the objects of his faith: he feels himself in full possession of the truth to light and to guide him on his way, and in full possession of himself to act according to the truth. {164} As faith has internal characteristics which are peculiar to it, it has also, with some strange and rare exceptions, external conditions which are necessary to it; it is distinguishable from other modes of human belief, not only by its nature, but by its object. Up to a certain point these conditions may be determined and perceived, although imperfectly, according to the nature itself of that state of the soul and of its effects. A belief may be so entire and sure of itself that no further effort of the intellect seems necessary, and the believer, wholly absorbed in the truth which in his judgment he possesses, may lose all memory of the way by which he arrived at it. A conviction may be so forcible as to become master of his every action, as well as of every impulse of his mind, and may imperatively force and morally oblige him to submit all things to its empire; a state this of the intellect which is the fruit, perhaps, not merely of the exercise of the intelligence, but of a strong emotion, of a long obedience to certain practices, and in the midst of which all the three great faculties of man, the sensibility, the intelligence, and the will, are simultaneously in activity, and simultaneously satisfied. {165} Where all this is the case, the occasion which has induced such a situation of the soul, had need be one worthy of the soul, and of its situation; the subject with which it is so occupied, had need be one which embraces the entire man, which sets in play all his faculties; responding to all the requirements of his moral nature, it has a right in return to all his devotedness.

The characteristics of ideas proper to become really a faith would seem _à priori_ to be intellectual beauty, and practical importance. An idea which should present itself to the mind as true, without at the same time striking it by the extent or the gravity of its consequences, might produce certitude; but the name of _faith_ would not be suitably applied to it. {166} Nor would the practical merit, or the immediate utility of an idea suffice of itself to generate faith; to do so it must also attract, it must also take possession of the human mind by the pure beauty of truth. In other words, in order that a simple belief, whether instinctive, or arising from reflection, may become faith, the thing believed must be of a nature to procure to man the united joys of contemplation and of activity, to awaken in him the twofold sentiment, that it is of lofty origin and of potent influence; his idea must be such as that he shall be induced to regard it as a medium between the ideal world and the real world, as a missionary charged to model the one upon the other, and to unite them.

It is easy to understand why the name of faith is used almost exclusively to characterise religious beliefs; no other belief possesses in so high a degree the two characteristics, [Footnote 40] which provoke the development of faith.

[Footnote 40: Intellectual beauty and practical importance.]

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