Faith

Faith and Philosophy

Along with hope and love, faith has been understood in the Christian tradition (following 1 Cor. 13:13) as a theological virtue: a settled disposition enabling one to move towards God by grace. Faith in the theological sense is thus only possible as a gift of God, for one cannot by oneself have natural certain knowledge or even right opinion of the divine realities which the teachings of faith seek to express (Augustine, 41-49). Classically, therefore, faith is considered according to two fundamental dimensions: it refers both to the beliefs or doctrines to which one assents (fides quae creditur), and also to the act of trust or adherence by means of which these beliefs are accepted as true (fides qua creditor, or, especially in the work of M. Luther, fiducia).

But, because the divine realities adhered to by faith inspire one with the hope of attaining them, and also arouse love of the divine goodness which never ends, living faith is always seen to be at work in one's manner of life and one's moral imagination. Because of the foretaste of the divine granted to faith, it intrinsically searches and longs for an ever fuller understanding and participation in the divine realities which the truths of faith announce: 'faith is a habit of mind, by which eternal life begins in us, making the understanding assent to what does not appear' (T. Aquinas, ST 2/2.4.1). Thus faith makes present to human consciousness something of the communion with God which is the consummation of the human person, but which is nonetheless so superabundant that in this present life it can only be sensed by the human mind as a kind of darkness. In the life to come, faith reaches its end, for it is succeeded by the vision of God: hope is relinquished in favour of beatitude; while love journeys without end ever deeper into the life of the Trinity (Dulles, 96).

A perennial question for Christian theology has been the role of faith in relation to reason. In the ancient and medieval periods, faith and reason were generally conceived as complementary. For Augustine or Aquinas, faith is a rational activity. It does not mark the end point of the mind's reach but the beginning - just as a student advances in a discipline by starting from teachings that, to begin with, need to be accepted as true even though one does not ...