title

:

The Eyes of Faith

author

:

Rousselot, Pierre.

publisher

:

Fordham University Press

isbn10 | asin

:

0823212882

print isbn13

:

9780823212880

ebook isbn13

:

9780585283692

language

:

English

subject

Faith, Catholic Church--Doctrines.

publication date

:

1990

lcc

:

BT771.R6813 1990eb

ddc

:

234/.2

subject

:

Faith, Catholic Church--Doctrines.

Page iii

The Eyes of Faith

Pierre Rousselot, S.J.

Translated by

Joseph Donceel, S.J.

With an Introduction by

John M. McDermott, S.J.

Answer to Two Attacks

Pierre Rousselot, S.J.

Translated and with an Introduction by

Avery Dulles, S.J.

Fordham University Press

New York

1990

Page iv

Disclaimer:

This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can be represented using the ISO 8859-1 character set (http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics that are not part of the ISO 8859-1 list will be represented without their diacritical marks.

© Copyright 1990 by FORDHAM UNIVERSITY

All rights reserved

LC 90-82352

ISBN 0-8232-1288-2

Printed in the United States of America

Translated from "Les Yeux de la foi," Recherches de Science Religieuse, 1 (1910), 241-59, 444-75; and "Réponse à deux attaques," ibid., 5 (1914), 57-69.

The siglum DS, used by Fathers McDermott and Dulles, refers to Heinrich Denzinger and Adolf Schönmetzer, Enchiridion Symbolorum, 36th ed. (Freiburg: Herder, 1976).

Page v

CONTENTS

Introduction to "The Eyes of Faith"

John M. McDermott, S.J.

1

The Eyes of Faith I

21

The Eyes of Faith II

45

Introduction to "Answer to Two Attacks"

Avery Dulles, S.J.

85

Answer to Two Attacks

93

Appendix: Principal Theses of the Position of Pierre Rousselot

Introduction

Avery Dulles, S.J.

113

Principal Theses

Wlodimir Ledochowski, S.J.

114

Page 1

INTRODUCTION

John M. McDermott, S.J.

Pontificia Università Gregoriana

A first meeting with Pierre Rousselot's "The Eyes of Faith" may prove somewhat disconcerting. Though widely acknowledged as a major turning point in the development of modern Catholic theology, this essay appears simultaneously basically simple in its fundamental intuitions, now long masticated and digested in current theology, and burdened by a complexity of Scholastic terminology, references to the magisterium's pronouncements, and apparently outmoded discussions of contemporary theories of faith. Actually, for all its brilliance, this essay lacks the thorough mastery of French style typical of Rousselot's other, more polished writings. Sentences are not always completed, and thoughts that deserve greater elaboration are often only sketchily intimated.

"The Eyes of Faith" was written in the midst of a flurry of activity. Rousselot attained his doctorate in philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1908. At the same time he was devoting himself to the completion of the four years of theological studies required of a Jesuit priest. Upon finishing his comprehensive examination in theology at the beginning of summer 1909, he threw himself into fervid preparation for a course on the act of faith which he had been assigned to teach at the Institut Catholique in Paris the following fall. Besides needing to prepare the Latin course notes, lithographed under the title De fide et dogmatismo, a delicate and central topic in the wake of the Modernist condemnations, this young professor had been tapped by his former professor of fundamental theology, Leonce de Grandmaison, S.J., to serve as secretary for the new theological journal, Recherches de Science Religieuse, which the Society of Jesus had decided to inaugurate. To this publication in search of articles he contributed "The Eyes of Faith" in two installments. At the same time, to lay the metaphysical and epistemological foundations for his analysis

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of the act of faith, he was writing three other articles for scholarly journals not to mention various reviews, review articles on recent journal publications, and, in collaboration with J. Huby, S.J., a study on "The Christian Religion." The press of work easily explains the lack of stylistic polish in "The Eyes of Faith." Later Rousselot would return to rephrase, expand, and correct the central intuitions of his original essay, which he termed a ''useful sketch." Unfortunately a premature death at the battle of Les Eparges in 1915 aborted the intended revision. So, despite its imperfections, "The Eyes of Faith" must serve as a stimulating introduction to one of the most profound thinkers of twentieth-century Catholicism. It remains the most penetrating and influential analysis of the act of faith in modern theology. To understand Rousselot's intent in this minor masterpiece it is helpful to place him in the context of his times, especially the intellectual background, and to examine some of the presuppositions of this remarkable essay.

The Challenge of the Enlightenment

Born at Nantes in Brittany on December 29, 1879, Pierre Rousselot was educated into the profound Catholic piety of his family and then had to confront the intellectual turmoil still seething in the kettle of the Enlightenment's challenge to the old order. Intelligible in good part as a reaction to the recurrent and inconclusive wars of religion that had ravaged Europe since the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment fed off a strong yearning for peace. If religious controversy yielded no certitude about the meaning of revelation, perhaps men could not rely only on purported divine words for normative truth in theory and practice. Thus appeal was had to human reason as, if not the ultimate arbiter of truth, at least the sole one accessible to most men. Originally introduced to provide a neutral basis of discussion in controversy, independent reason could not long rest content with an equality of status. If it no longer was constrained to serve as faith's handmaiden in theology, reason had to rely on its own lights and

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had therefore to subject the claims of faith to its own imperious scrutiny. So the servant usurped the role of mistress.

Kant: The Problematic

The most ample and brilliant expression of Enlightenment thought was achieved by Immanuel Kant. Acutely aware of the many antinomies in which finite reason is enmeshed, yet deeply impressed by its unassailable success in mathematics and physics, this Prussian philosopher undertook the resolution of all previous intellectual dilemmas, laying bare, in a transcendental deduction, thought's conditions of possibility. His Critique of Pure Reason divided reality into noumenon and phenomena. The latter represented the realm of universal, necessary scientific laws known in the juncture of sense perceptions, ordered initially according to the a priori forms of sensibility, i.e., time and space, with the categories of thought, under whose universality the sense perceptions were necessarily subsumed. Kant never claimed, however, that such knowledge grasped reality in itself; the categories only prescribed how reason must interpret the sensible appearances. Reality in itself, named the noumenon, remained in principle unknowable. Arguing from the passivity of sense impressions, Kant identified the noumenon first as the origin of sensation. Contrasted with the finite, rational laws of the phenomena, the noumenon represented the realm of the unlimited and the infinite. Within its boundless shores, freedom, the subject's "I," and God might also be located. But valid scientific knowledge was obtained only when sense impressions were interpreted according to the categories; whenever one attempted to argue about supra-sensible realities, the traditional task of metaphysics, antinomies of reason resulted.

While thus explaining the universal applicability of physical laws to sensible appearances, Kant left room for freedom and morality, the realm of practical reason. The mind prescribed categorical imperatives for its freedom, i.e., moral laws universal in application and imposed with the

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necessity of the "should." Although reason was the source of these moral absolutes, whose formal universality was to be followed for its own sake, Kant also allowed for faith in God. God's existence could be postulated by practical reason insofar as experience of this world revealed that not infrequently those most worthy of happiness because of their virtue fail to receive it. Hence one might reasonably believe in an afterlife with rewards and punishments apportioned by a just, omniscient, omnipotent Judge. Moreover, despite the necessity of accomplishing duty for duty's sake, reason's natural desire to know the purpose, or goal, of moral action led to the projection of an ideal society in which happiness was proportioned to virtue. Since this ideal lay beyond human achievement, one might reasonably believe in a God capable of effecting perfect justice.

Clearly, for Kant, faith in God supplied practical answers to questions about the grounds of moral action. But this faith was determined by the structures of human understanding, being reason's "reasonable" complement. What went beyond this rational faith, precisely because it could not be controlled by reason, was declared fanaticism or superstition. Historical revelations were measured by their agreement with the canons of Kant's reasonable faith. Speculative dogmas contributing nothing to moral practice were rejected. Jesus was understood as the teacher of the Gospels and the exemplification of humanity's moral ideal. Considering the backwardness of mankind's moral development, Jesus associated others with His preaching mission and thereby became the founder of a Church. He cannot be considered the founder of a religion since His reasonable religion was universally inherent in human nature from the beginning. Ecclesiastical regulations were deemed necessary only to preserve order and promote morality in the Church. Any priestly claims to legislate beyond the rational moral law and to bind consciences under the threat of sin represented usurpations of divine authority; their rejection could never exclude one from salvation. Rather, each individual person was naturally endowed with a freedom to

Page 5

follow the moral law, and he might hope for grace to forgive and supplement his failures and insufficiencies. Neither nature nor grace was tied to an historical institution or book. Indeed, an historical revelation could add nothing essential to a reasonable religion, and, as enlightenment spread, faith would be ever more liberated from the shackles of history.

The Nineteenth Century: Catholic Theology

The nineteenth century was deeply seared by Enlightenment thought, even when apparently in revolt against it. Theology, both Catholic and Protestant, was no exception to the times, and the Catholic Church, striving to remain faithful to its tradition, was forced to define its position more exactly in the confrontation with various excesses.

The French Revolution's mad obsession with equality that led, over so much slaughter, to the exaltation and fall of Napoleon encouraged many conservative and aristocratic circles to find in the Church a bulwark of tradition, order, and stability. Some theologians thought to strike at the roots of anti-historical egalitarianism by attacking the Enlightenment's understanding of reason. Faced with individual reason's inability to resolve so many of its own antinomies Kant's distinction of noumenon and phenomena was but another variation of abstract reason's inability to grasp concrete reality and foundered on the impossibility of considering the same bodily actions effected by human freedom as simultaneously completely determined by physical laws they stressed the need of divine intervention not only to establish language in its complexity but also to reveal basic truths of reality and establish the moral law. Hence, tradition, reflected in the common reason of the race, was to be preferred to individual reason in deciding metaphysical and religious questions. This traditionalism might also be considered as voluntarism as Rousselot probably regarded it insofar as reason was subordinated to the desire for stability and as the initial acceptance of a tradition by the will supplied the norm for the intellect's subsequent use.

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The first traditionalists manifested more of a critical spirit toward the pretenses of individual reason and the excesses of the age than theological penetration. Then F. de Lamennais' synthesis of traditionalism's appeal to univeral human consent as the criterion of truth and certitude with an Augustinian theory of interior divine illumination manifested some speculative power and consequently won great applause initially. Nonetheless, when he turned against the monarchy of Charles X in favor of political liberalism and representative government, the growing criticism of his theology and politics led to condemnations by the French bishops and Gregory XVI. In his system it seemed impossible to distinguish natural truth from supernatural revelation, whether one looked to extrinsic tradition or internal illumination. So, when Bautain's more profound and comprehensive synthesis of Kant, Augustine, and traditionalism appeared, it did not receive a very favorable hearing, and this Strasbourg convert was obliged by his bishop and Rome to retract his views on the weakness of reason.

If a traditional voluntarism was to constitute one extreme for Rousselot, the rationalism of Georg Hermes represented another. Adopting the Kantian distinction between pure and practical reason, this German theologian admitted universal doubt about speculative truths while relying upon practical reason to establish apodictic certitude about truths of faith. Starting from the fundamental categorical imperative of establishing and preserving human dignity in oneself and others, Hermes demanded that all possible means, including intelligence, be utilized to ensure the imperative's realization. Thus, even though speculative reason might always doubt an historical fact, practical reason had to admit it as true and certain lest the moral imperatives' realization be imperiled. Since the individual's knowledge was limited, he was obliged to have recourse to the witness of others as found in history for the knowledge necessary to act morally. There he found himself confronted by the Christian revelation and the necessity of accepting it as true. Although Hermes' position was heavily criticized for its denigration of speculative reason, Rousselot emphasized those aspects of subsequent ecclesial

Page 7

judgments that condemned the neglect of freedom in faith's assent. Though Hermes admitted the existence of human freedom in accepting the moral imperative, there seemed no viable way of avoiding a necessary assent to faith by practical reason thereafter; hence the freedom of faith in its supernatural character was imperiled. Hermes attempted to distinguish faith in the propositions of revelation from "living faith," a supernatural faith animated by the resolve to live according to the demands of Christian revelation. Yet such a distinction was forced and foreign to Catholic teaching, which at Trent had already defined against Protestantism that faith need not always be linked to charity, a "living faith," but could exist even after charity had left the soul (DS 1544, 1578), what the theologians called "unformed faith." So, that distinction recognized as inadequate, Rousselot could contrast Hermes' rationalism with traditionalism despite their agreement on the weaknesses of individual speculative reason.

A third current of Catholic theology, partially anticipated by Lamennais and Bautain, is found in the ontologisms of Gioberti, Rosmini, and the Louvain school as well as in Anton Gunther's contrapositional dualism. These thinkers presupposed an original metaphysical intuition into noumenal reality on which subsequent distinctions and conceptualizations were based. Even though they tried to open man to historical revelation e.g., as the initial starting point for theological reflection or as a desire for a "more," which supernatural revelation alone could satisfy a clear distinction between natural and supernatural orders was difficult to maintain. Consequently several Roman condemnations attacked this weak point. Rousselot did not refer to this theological current. Perhaps its admittedly Augustinian inspiration involved too many points of contact with his own understanding of the intuition of faith or, more probably, he thought that his theory, by preserving the validity of concepts and the necessity of an exterior sign, or creed, escaped the Roman condemnations.

Page 8

The Nineteenth Century: Protestant Theology

Other responses to Kant developed in Protestantism. To bridge the gap between noumenon and phenomena, Kant, realizing that these realms did not exist in themselves but only in human ways of perceiving physical and moral reality, appealed to aesthetic feelings. The feelings of the beautiful and the sublime join objective elements in the presentation of some sensible figure with subjective elements. In the experience of the beautiful, the subject recognizes in the objective presentation a deeper sense of purpose; in the experience of the sublime, the subject is overwhelmed by a sense of infinity surpassing the sensible presentation, which gives rise to awe. The juncture of objective and subjective not only explains why observers may disagree in evaluating the aesthetic value of objects while doggedly insisting upon the objectivity of their judgments but also shows how the objectivity of the phenomena may be reconciled with the subjectivity of noumenal freedom in the one subject. Even though this attempted reconciliation of freedom and determination did not persuade many subsequent thinkers, Kant's appeal to feelings and finality would be developed.

G.W.F. Hegel, on the crest of the Romantic reaction to the Enlightenment, noted that every conceptual objectification of the phenomena implied limitation. In the very recognition of limit, this limitation was transcended by a feeling for a greater, more mysterious whole, which Hegel could also identify as the religious feeling. Thereafter the questioning mind would attempt to reduce to a concept the greater reality experienced, but this concept in turn, revealed as finite, would be transcended as the human spirit strove through all the phenomenal presentations of history toward a final union of finite and Infinite, man and God, in which all previous distinctions would be destroyed, preserved, and elevated in the ongoing life of God. Thus the religious feelings would ultimately be subsumed into an intellectual vision, or concept, as faith gave way to understanding and God became all in all.

Hegel's thought was heavily attacked for its alleged pantheism and its reduction of Christian revelation, the union of

Page 9

God and man, to the exemplary anticipation of the goal of a necessary historical process. Rousselot accused Hegel and his disciples of "panlogism," reducing everything to conceptual intelligibility. Yet, at the other end of the spectrum, F. Schleiermacher discovered the answer to the Kantian dilemma in appealing to the feeling of absolute dependence, that moment in which the finite spirit, recognizing the limitations of science's rational abstractions, felt itself drawn and upheld by God's power. From this fundamental feeling Schleiermacher attempted to explain and reinterpret Christian doctrine, seeing in Christ the fullest, perfect example of God-consciousness. This plenitude of God-consciousness in turn allowed Him to awaken the feeling in others after it had been obscured by the covering of sin. Despite Schleiermacher's subsequent attempt to interpret dogmas as articulations of that primordial experience, the faith-experience clearly did not involve an intellectual acceptance of truth. As a consequence Rousselot would categorize such a position as "sentimentalism" and reject it as incompatible with Catholic faith and the spirit's demand for truth.

Modernism

Schleiermacher's "sentimentalism" would survive the century in various types of liberal Protestantism. At the end of the century in France A. Sabatier would use the feeling of absolute dependence to safeguard the realm of religion not only from Kant's version of deterministic physics but also from historical criticism. For, if religion's link with God is a feeling in the heart of the individual which ultimately defies all reduction to concepts, the various attempts to define that fundamental experience rationally are not intellectually binding. Dogmas constitute, therefore, not permanent truths of faith but temporally conditioned statements made with the help of current philosophical terminology. Dogma in its historical development shows a pluriformity of expression that can be unified only in terms of the ineffable religious feeling.

Such and similar views strongly attracted certain Catholics like Loisy, LeRoy, and Tyrrell, concerned to bring the Church

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up to date with the modern world and eager to defend the freedom of scientific theology from hierarchical interference as it wrestled with the critical-historical method in interpreting Scripture and the history of dogma. Contrary to Protestants these Catholics generally accentuated the essentially social aspects of the religious experience, but all agreed in finding the kernel of religion not in propositional dogmatic formulas but in some non-rational experience. This "adaptation" was met in 1907 by Piux X's condemnations in the decree Lamentabile and the encyclical Pascendi to whose views all professors of Catholic theology and philosophy were obliged to subscribe. The Roman reaction, however, did not come out of the blue. The Neo-Thomistic revival, which had formed in good part the theology behind Vatican I, had already established the parameters for faith and theology within which Catholic thought had to operate. In reacting to the exaggerated theologies of the nineteenth century, it had anticipatively precluded any acceptance of Modernism.

The Neo-Thomistic Revival

Common to the Romantic theologies in the first half of the nineteenth century were the failure to distinguish adequately reason and faith, natural and supernatural orders, and the basic contrast between a central intuition, or feeling, and rational conceptualizations. The failure of the revolution of 1848 marked the demise of Romantic enthusiasm, but the foundations for the reaction against Romantic excesses were soon in place. In politics, despite Metternich's fall, the Holy Alliance enshrined his authoritarian, conservative positions. In science enthusiasm for biology was yielding to the new advances in physics, which tended to reduce all reality to deterministic laws. Philosophy turned back to conceptual clarity, universal moral laws, and a neglect of the infinite unknown. Church politics under Pius IX adopted the conservative tone of the era, stressing central authority, order, and traditional loyalties. Catholic theology also prepared itself for the new era. Outside the Dominican order, which had suffered

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grievously at the hands of the French Revolution, Thomism had survived the Enlightenment and its aftermath in various centers of Spain and Italy as well as in Mainz. Most responsible for its revival and victory, however, was the Society of Jesus, restored in 1814 as a bulwark against the storms of the age. Although its original professors were somewhat eclectic in theology and philosophy, a younger generation, gathered around La Civiltà cattolica and the Roman College and led by thinkers of real speculative capacity like Matteo Liberatore and Joseph Kleutgen, gradually imposed a renewed Thomism upon the Society of Jesus and, with the support of Vatican authorities, upon the entire Church.

The Thomistic revival was strongly marked by opposition to the condemned theologies of the nineteenth century as well as to Protestantism and liberalism. These early Jesuits read St. Thomas through Suarezian lenses that overlooked the real distinction between essence and existence. Only gradually, through the influence of great Thomists like L. Billot, Rousselot, and J. Maréchal did the real distinction find a place in the doctrine of the Society of Jesus. The Dominicans, growing in members and influence, followed the interpretation of Thomas championed by Cajetan and John of St. Thomas with the clear acknowledgment of the real distinction. Common to both Jesuits and Dominicans indeed, to all the first Neo-Thomists was the strong emphasis placed upon the role of the concept in knowledge. Although all repeated with Aristotle and Thomas that truth was to be found in judgment, all likewise held that the mind attained reality (being) in and through a concept. A concept was produced as the original sense impressions, united into a phantasm, or unified sensible image, were illuminated by the active intellect, which thereby caused the abstraction of form from matter and the projection of the form upon the passive intellect. If, then, being could be known through an abstraction received by the passive intellect, all other knowledge was capable of conceptual expression. This rooting of metaphysics and epistemology in the concept of being resolved the great dilemma of nineteenth-century theology. If being is basically

Page 12

conceptualizable, one has obviated the need of appeal to feeling or non-conceptual intuition in order to have contact with reality. Then, once the intellect is conceived fundamentally as a passive receiver of concepts, its distinction from the will in terms of their formal objects, the true and the good, followed readily. While the intellect receives the true imposed from without, the will actively strives to attain what the intellectual presentations offer as its good, the termination of its desire. Furthermore, the natural-supernatural distinction is firmly established. Since the mind naturally knows being in a concept and God can be known analogously as being, any knowledge of God in a manner surpassing concepts must be supernatural. Hence the beatific vision, seeing God face to face, is recognized as quintessentially supernatural, and whatever leads to it, the graces producing faith and charity, are likewise supernatural, free gifts of God surpassing all claims and desires of nature.

This side of death and the beatific vision, faith is the normal introduction to the supernatural realm. The analysis of the act of belief enjoys a central role in Catholic theology, for there natural and supernatural orders must coalesce without confusion into one act as the natural man with his natural faculties of intellect and will responds to the Christian message and is rendered supernatural by grace. The condemnations of the excesses of nineteenth-century theologies provided the material for the solemn definitions of Vatican I, which determined the guidelines for future Catholic explanations of the act of faith. Though reason can know God's existence by its own natural light (DS 3004, 3026), the supernatural truths of faith utterly surpass natural reason and cannot be discovered or deduced by it (DS 3005, 3008, 3015-3017, 3041). Faith is believed on the authority of the revealing God (DS 3008, 3032). It is God's free gift offered to men for the submission of intellect and will (DS 3008, 3010, 3014, 3031). For all that, reason does not contradict revelation, since both come from God (DS 3017). Reason can be used not only to interpret revelation (DS 3016) but also to discover ''the foundations of faith," "the most certain signs of divine revelation," in miracles and the fulfillment

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of prophecies (DS 3019, 3033f., 3036). Faith is therefore not a blind leap, but an act of human freedom that is eminently reasonable (DS 3009f., 3035). Though the free will is moved by grace, the faith affirmed need not be accompanied always by sanctifying grace, or justification, as a "living faith" (DS 3031, 3035).

Sane as the balance among reason, grace, freedom, authority, and proof might be, the exact correlation of these attributes of the act of faith proved a test of theological acumen. An astute analysis of faith's act was provided by the Cajetanian tradition, especially as summarized and polished by Ambroise Gardeil, O.P., published just a few years before Rousselot's "The Eyes of Faith." The argument is straightforward:

Revelation is supernatural, purely gratuitous from God's point of view, for which man can raise no legitimate claim. Thus the natural insight of the human intelligence cannot expect to penetrate the interior truth of the revealed propositions by its own light.

If the supernatural truth cannot be affirmed as true by any insight of the human mind, how can man legitimately believe? What can move man to assent to the truth? Ultimately the ground for the assent lies not in the intellect, but in the will. Man has not only a knowledge of his natural good, or perfection, but also a love for it. Recognizing that there must be a relation between the good sought and his rational nature, man understands the necessity of intellectual obedience to God if He should reveal any truth. The obligation to accept a possible revelation is all the more pressing in view of the state of sin encompassing and penetrating man. In his search for redemption man is then confronted by the Gospel, demanding conversion, promising grace, assistance, and reward.

The attraction upon the human will is clear, but the act of faith involves the assent to truths, and the intellect should not be moved blindly by the will. Here the motives of credibility are examined. Unlike Kant, who restricted truth to universal propositions of pure and practical reason, the Thomists realized that some truths are contingent and historical, e.g., the existence and life of Caesar. These facts cannot be proven

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abstractly by reason a priori but may legitimately be accepted as true on the basis of veridical testimony. Correspondingly, when the facts of Christ's life and message are proclaimed as true and necessary for salvation, the trustworthiness of the witnesses and the veracity of Christ Himself can be shown by reason. Two main arguments are advanced:

(1) Christ performed miracles as supporting testimony to the truth of what He said. God would not allow a liar to deceive men on such important matters.

(2) He fulfilled prophecies about the Messiah expected by the Old Testament.

In the corporeal resurrection of Christ is found the greatest guarantee of His message. Not only did He predict His resurrection during His lifetime but a miracle of such proportions shows dramatically that God confirmed His life and teachings.

Furthermore, Christ appointed disciples to receive His teachings during His life, witness His resurrection, and proclaim His message to all nations. So with divine authority the Church has continued to transmit Christ's truth through the centuries. Indeed, a further proof of revelation's veracity is the conformity between the message of Christ and Church doctrine a moral miracle of fidelity that testifies to the continuing presence of the God who founded the Church.

An examination of all these proofs leads to a judgment of credibility: one may legitimately believe that the doctrine of the Church has been revealed by God. Though usually assisted by grace, this process of ascertaining the credibility of revelation might in theory be achieved by natural reason alone. To the judgment of credibility immediately succeeds the judgment of credentity, which imposes the moral obligation to believe the propositions whose veracity was approved in the judgment of credibility. This would seem to follow immediately from the previously acknowledged obligation to believe what God revealed and the judgment of credibility. Yet such a conclusion would seem to be purely natural, while the act of faith is pre-eminently supernatural, a pure gift of God. So a distinction was drawn by Gardeil between the rational judgment of credentity, which involves a necessitating conditional

Page 15

credibility, depending on whether or not the link between credibility and the obligation to believe has been concretely actualized, and the supernatural judgment of credentity, which under grace recognizes simply the necessitating character of the credibility and results in the act of faith, first accomplished by the will, then followed by the speculative intellect's acceptance of the truths of faith. Once faith is accepted in the initial act, the habit, i.e., a proximate disposition to act, of faith can become rooted in the soul as faith is lived and all reality is interpreted under the supernatural light of faith. Though the truths of faith remain forever impervious to direct human insight into their truth, supernatural intelligence, a gift of the Holy Spirit, permits the believer to understand them ever more profoundly, especially seeing analogies among the various supernatural truths as well as between them and natural truths.

Such a justification of faith demanded a tremendous knowledge of philosophy, history, and theology. Much theological ink was spilled in explaining how an uneducated Catholic could perform a morally justified act of faith without such erudition. But the more awkward sticking point in Gardeil's analysis involved the movement from the natural judgment of credibility to the supernatural judgment of credentity. Since credibility pertained to the concretely announced message of Catholic faith, and the moral obligation to believe God's revelation was already acknowledged, why was grace needed to draw the obvious conclusion that one should believe the Catholic faith? To obviate the reduction of faith to a rational assent to historical evidence, L. Billot, S.J., seconded by J. Bainvel, S.J., developed a theory emphasizing not the rational justification of faith but the homage offered to God's revelation precisely because God had revealed it. However reasonable the assent, the act of faith assents to God's word on His authority alone. This theory admittedly allows for the obscurity and liberty of faith, stressing the supernatural light that elevates the will and impels it to believe on God's authority. The will then gives an impulse to the intellect for belief as the authority of God behind the revealed proposition is acknowledged.

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For all its acuity Billot's theory failed to indicate how the divine authority might be recognized unless by the intellect which would thereby include it under the motives of credibility. If God, who possesses authority as the Truth to whom all owe credence and obedience, were not recognized as the author of the proposed propositions, the rationally established motives of credibility would lack the essential step in the argument. So the distinction that left room for freedom either undermines the rational motives of credibility or shows itself superfluous. Yet the distinction itself is rooted in the distinction between the knowing intellect and the striving, but blind will that must be guided by the intellect. To overcome the apparent opposition between the rational certitude and the freedom of faith Rousselot first had to bridge the disjunction between intellect and will.

Rousselot's Presuppositions in "The Eyes of Faith"

Contrary to the dominant Thomism of his day Rousselot conceived the intellect primarily as a dynamic power oriented to the fullness of being, to God Himself, beyond all conceptual abstractions. This dynamism found expression in the existential judgment which presupposed a point of view that synthesizes not only the nature, represented in a concept, and its individual supposite but also essence and existence. Hence any affirmation implies the existence of God, creative, absolute Truth.

By orienting the intellectual affirmation to God Rousselot understood the intellect primarily not as a passive receptor of abstracted forms but as a dynamism toward the True as its Good. Thereby he overturned the basis of the traditional distinction between intellect and will in terms of their formal objects, the true and the good. Knowing and loving henceforth influence each other intimately. Here Rousselot revived and expanded the traditional Scholastic notion of connatural, or sympathetic, knowledge, i.e., knowledge by means of tendency. Whereas most earlier Thomists usually appealed to this connaturality to explain the "instinctive" reaction of a moral

Page 17

person to various suggestions, enabling him to judge them immediately in terms of tendencies inculcated by the practice of virtue without need of recourse to reflective, rational arguments subsuming the particular case under general principles, by joining love and knowledge Rousselot conceived knowledge as a tendency toward its goal and effectively rendered man connatural with that goal, specifically the First Truth, God Himself, and with all that led to that goal. Thus, besides a new way of knowing that transcended concepts, a certain community of natures between the knowing subject and the object of knowing was established as the basis of man's spiritual life.

Directing the intellect toward the fullness of being might imperil the validity of concepts and open the door to Modernism's relativization of dogma expressed in concepts. For not concepts, but only the infinite reality of God can satisfy the mind's thirsting for truth. Yet Rousselot remained adamantly opposed to Modernism, which implied, for him, a capitulation to emotionalism and the radical rejection of speculative truth that alone can liberate man from the flux of appearances. In his opinion he had safeguarded the validity of concepts in a twofold manner. First, as an integral part of the fundamental judgment "Being exists," the concept of being could never be totally transcended without destroying the judgment itself. Second, he had postulated the existence of a metaphysical "primordial Adam," de facto Jesus Christ, who in an aesthetic-intellectual vision intuited the entire material universe in its singularity. This intuition not only mediated knowledge of material realities to pure spirits, the angels and God, but also limited the universe's extension in space and time so that a conceptual abstraction could approach it as a limit without being endlessly referred beyond itself.

By defining the intellect in terms of its final object, God, Rousselot recalled St. Thomas' paradoxical doctrine about the "natural desire for the beatific vision." For no concept, only God known in Himself, can satisfy the soul's innate longing for truth. Lest the natural-supernatural distinction be lost, however, during his lifetime Rousselot developed various

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justifications of its validity. In 1910 he conceived the soul's dynamism as naturally oriented to God, but, due to the wounds of Original Sin in the perceiving subject, incapable of attaining that supernatural end. Grace's infusion then overcomes the debilitating, frustrating effects of sin and restores nature to itself.

How well Rousselot succeeded with all his distinctions in responding to the conundrums present in the act of faith has been discussed at length elsewhere. 1 For the present it is enough to have introduced the reader to the intellectual background of the age and the theological-philosophical presuppositions of Rousselot's thought. The reader can judge for himself the success or failure of "The Eyes of Faith" and perhaps be moved to improve upon it.

Note

1. For a more thorough treatment of Rousselot's intellectual presuppositions and development, see my Love and Understanding: The Relation of Will and Intellect in Pierre Rousselot's Christological Vision (Rome: Gregorian, 1983); for a more detailed analysis of the intellectual context of Rousselot's understanding of faith, its presuppositions, influence, critique, and expansion, see my forthcoming Rousselot and Faith (New York: Fordham University Press); for the central role of the understanding of the act of faith in the whole work of theology, see my forthcoming Faith, Reason, and Theology: Vatican II as Conflict and Synthesis of Theologies (Petersham: St. Bede's).

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THE EYES OF FAITH I

Religion and orthodoxy, devotion and dogma, faith and creeds, conscience and beliefs recent controversies have filled the air with these antitheses. While acknowledging with reservations the possibility of a dissociation, Catholicism nevertheless holds that between divine grace and our holding fast to its creed a connection exists that is both normal and natural. This is what shocks our contemporaries in dogmatism. It is stated in the conclusions of the Quicumque creed. It has been proclaimed since the time of the New Testament: "We are of God. He who knows God listens to us" [1 Jn 4:6]. "Everyone who is of the truth hears my voice" [Jn 18:37]. So this is the general problem of faith: How is a Church that to outsiders looks like one sect among many the only depository of the truth? How is a creed that seems to have resulted from random historical events the exclusive message of God to men and the necessary end-goal of every good will?

The narrower problem of the act of faith a purely theological, not an apologetic, problem brings up the same question, and the manner in which it is solved implies a religious philosophy, i.e., a theory of the relations between nature and the supernatural. Here again the central problem is, to use an expressive term of Scholastic language, the connaturality of heavenly grace with a given creed. But to explain the act of faith, we must explain how the conjunction of both terms comes about in the individual. If confessing the dogmas of the Church is the natural and normal expression of the new nature, the life of grace, that God has put into us, how does this new nature find its expression? How does it come to agree

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with the religious ideas that we borrow from our social environment? How is it connected with them? That is the question. 1 St. Thomas defined the components of the problem very exactly when he wrote: "Faith arises mainly by being infused, and from this point of view it is given through baptism; but as for its specification, that comes from hearing, and thus man is taught faith by the catechism."2 Justification and confession: under the technical terms of habitus infusus [infused habit] and of credibilium determinatio [specifying what is believed], we again find two terms that look heterogeneous, and yet the Church continues to affirm their natural solidarity. How does this come about? For grace is found wherever there is a holy will, but beliefs seem to arise and to become organized either in line with the views of natural reason or under the random influence of phenomenal life.

The Church has further narrowed our field of investigation when, during the [First] Vatican Council, she condemned two extreme possible explanations of the conjunction of objective faith with infused faith, of the faith that believes with the faith that is believed. These two explanations are the rationalism of Hermes and Protestant sentimentalism. Hermes attributed to reason all the specifications of our beliefs, whatever constitutes knowledge in our faith.3 For him grace justifies us, but there is no trace in his doctrine of its illuminating function. The sentimentalism the Council had in mind, on the other hand, claimed that the discernment of doctrines depends on an inner witness of experientially perceived grace.4 Hence the condemnation of Hermes forbids us to attribute the determinatio ("specification") exclusively to natural reason without any connection with the habitus; the condemnation of sentimentalism prevents us from saying that the habitus, in the individual who

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possesses grace, always includes some experiential awareness of the specification. Two solutions are excluded: one claiming that grace has no cognitive activity, the other asserting the necessity of an inner objective revelation, perceptible to everyone.

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Since the problem has been framed in this fashion, many modern theologians look for a middle term to use as a kind of "schematism" in order to explain the meeting of infused faith (supernatural power of knowing) with dogmatic faith (the ensemble of objects known). They admit that there may or even must be present in the believer a "scientific faith" or, to use a more general expression and one that also corresponds better to their thought, a faith that is naturally acquired and legitimately certain. 5 They hold that reason can discover the specification of the truths of faith by itself, without grace, through a demonstration of credibility that shows with certitude that we must adhere to the Church of Jesus Christ as God's messenger on earth. In this way, reason presents its object to supernatural faith ready-made.

The doctrine of these modern theologians is by no means Hermesianism. They know that dead faith is a grace. They may, like Hermes, think that reason can, by means of demonstrable credibility, discover the material of faith's object. They may even acknowledge the possibility of a natural faith that not only is certain but, psychologically speaking, perfectly resembles supernatural faith.6 But they do not thereby reduce the knowledge of faith to this [semblance]. They accept, as it were, "twin" faiths, one supernatural, the other natural, the latter lesser in value, solidity, and certitude than the former but nevertheless co-extensive with it, either actually or potentially, with respect to its object.

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These theologians do not claim to force the Holy Spirit to adapt Himself to their approach. Having explained almost always with great dialectical finesse, often with exceptional analytical skill how they envisage the mechanism of the act of faith, they rarely fail to add that their system does not exhaust the wealth of divine ingenuity. If natural certitude turns out to be impossible for some souls, grace can find its own path and make up for that weakness. 7 Some say this only in passing, after exerting themselves fully to make their explanation of natural certitude fit every case imaginable.8 Others develop an explicit theory of what they call gratuitous surrogates of credibility [suppléances de la crédibilité].9 But almost all of them continue to reduce the normal act of faith to one of these types: either the supernatural act of faith virtually contains and elevates a natural act of faith^10 or it has at least been preceded by a natural authentication of the fact of revelation.

It is obvious that such a doctrine makes it difficult to explain the faith of children and of the unlearned. For in the case of the learned a number of authors see no difficulty!11 The documents of the Church are there; they require that faith be not blind but reasonable, and all theologians accept the principle that St. Thomas formulated as follows: non crederemus, nisi videremus esse credendum ["we would not believe if we did not see that we ought to believe"]. But in the case of the young villager brought up on the catechism, how can we claim that he possesses either a scientific faith or a rational demonstration, or in any event the perfect certitude of credibility based on reasons that are absolutely valid? And how could any such thing be claimed of the native whose belief relies on the word of a missionary? We need more than a psychological explanation purporting to show how belief or credulity operates, for any such explanation

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would apply to the Moslem's faith as well as to the Christian's. If the young Catholic is right in believing his mother or his pastor, is the young Protestant wrong in believing his minister or his mother? A thoroughly simple case, but it brings the essentials of the problem into focus.

Hence, when the answer is given by appealing to "respective certitudes," based when necessary upon "reflex practical principles," 12 the difficulty does not seem to vanish. Buddhists and Shintoists have "respective certitudes," and Socrates appealed to a "reflex principle" in order to conclude that everyone ought to worship the gods of his city. An absolute speculative assent, even of the natural order, requires a perfect objective certitude as its foundation. I would fear that translating it might weaken the following proposition of St. Thomas': Proprium motivum intellectus est verum id quod habet infallibilem veritatem. Unde quandocumque intellectus movetur ab aliquo fallibili signo, est aliqua inordinatio in ipso, sive perfecte, sive imperfecte moveatur ["The proper motive of the intellect is the true that possesses infallible truth. Hence, whenever the intellect is moved by some fallible sign, there is some disorder in it, whether it be moved perfectly or imperfectly"].13 Is it fitting that faith be based upon or make its entry by way of a disorder?

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Hence it seems necessary to appeal to the light of grace. What could be more natural in this sort of question? Some explicitly claim that they will explain credibility without grace. Others, like Suárez, for example, believe that they cannot do without grace, at least in explaining the belief of the unlearned and of children.

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One might wonder why all theological writers have not adopted this approach and why they persist in multiplying all manner of subtle investigations and hypotheses to explain how the reasons for believing can be perceived in a purely natural way. It looks as though the reason may be that those who appealed to grace did not show clearly enough how it can create perfect certitude without upsetting the psychological context, without injecting, along with grace, new notions or new objects.

To my mind it is a prejudice, philosophical in nature, that has blocked their path. They had a feeling for the difficulty. They paid attention to the facts. How often admirable, in their ponderings, is that supple argumentative agility, along with that feel for concrete psychology, that Balzac so prized in members of the Catholic clergy. But we must not fail to notice something else. Most of these writers restrict themselves to analyzing the believer's conscious states: they take account only of the elements of representation and overlook the synthetic activity of the intelligence, whether natural or supernaturalized. In Scholastic language we would say that they consider exclusively id quod repraesentatur ["that which is represented"], and never mention the lumen ["light"], id quod inclinat ad assensum ["that which moves us to assent'']. Some others, it is true, do consider this aspect. But when, following St. Thomas, they speak of an assent that is given by virtue of an attraction, they regard it too much as something needed to supplement 14 external motives rather than something that illuminates them. It would seem, for these writers, as though we were dealing with attractions that are consciously experienced, satisfactions grasped reflectively, lines of coherence qua represented.15 Some, as a result, deploy all their inventive ingenuity to discover objective elements in the representative consciousness of the Catholic child that would be

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lacking in the Protestant youngster, while others incur the charge of reducing the proofs of faith to a mixture of probabilities and subjective preferences, and of depicting the unlearned as believing only by virtue of a blissful superficiality. It seems as if no one saw clearly enough how a supernatural illumination could combine with the genuine efficacy of external signs, in such fashion that both elements would be integrated into one selfsame certitude. For both groups true intellectual certitude was still being modeled as the mind's possession of representative concepts that could be equated by substituting equivalent concepts. 16

But even if we limit our consideration to natural knowledge, we know that such a conception does not sufficiently account for the facts. The real movement of the intelligence remains unexplained unless we view it, above all, as an active power of synthesis.

Let us stay with the clearest, most ordinary facts. Take the case of two scientists, both looking for the exact law that explains a set of obscure phenomena and both directed in their search by the thought of the same hypothesis. Or consider two detectives, both examining the scene of a crime and both inclined to suspect a certain individual. Let us assume that the same phenomenon comes to the attention of both scientists, or that the identical detail is simultaneously noticed by both detectives. It does not follow that both will necessarily arrive at identical conclusions. One of them may immediately leap to certainty, while the other remains in the dark. Yet materially that is, in its individuality the new fact is represented in like fashion in both minds. But one man has perceived it, not as a raw and isolated phenomenon, but as a clue pointing to the law or conclusion both were seeking. He has perceived that fact in its connection with the law, made the synthesis of fact with law, and

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instantly affirmed that connection as real. Not so the other. He "does not see." He has the same representations of both the hypothesis and the new fact, and with the same material accuracy as his colleague; he may even think of their relation if his partner explains it to him. Yet the connection escapes him; the synthesis remains unmade. So the difference between the one who sees and the one who does not does not consist in any difference in the notes of the representation, but in the greater or lesser power of their intellectual activity. But, it may be objected, could not the difference reside in the knowledge one of them has acquired, or the experience he has accumulated? Not necessarily, for it may derive uniquely from inborn talent. But even were the difference to derive from experience, our explanation would remain true in principle. For in our example the one who sees does not, at the instant of seeing, have the whole of his knowledge or experience before his mind's eye; his knowledge is present as perceiving, not as perceived. 17 And so we are once more driven back to some difference in the intellectual faculty itself.

The same thing holds true for faith, for the lumen fidei ["the light of faith"], when we perceive something as credible. Short of a miracle this light does not provide us with new objects for knowing; determinatio fidei est ex auditu ["faith is specified by what we hear"]. But it accounts for our perceiving the connection, making the synthesis, giving the assent. The sufficient reason for these three operations, which, we shall presently show, really come down to one, is not located in the representations entertained. Imagine two nearly identical psychological contexts: to explain the luminous certitude of one person and the persisting obscurity of the other, the presence or absence of a new faculty of perception is sufficient. From a different angle, consider two children who

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only know the "faith of their fathers"; their respective assents when analyzed may disclose no difference between them, and yet those assents need not be equally valid. The one may possess legitimate certitude; the other, false opinion. To come back to the first case, observe that the unbeliever may have an exact representation of each one of the propositions in terms of which the one who sees endeavors to explain to him in detail the connection between them, to make it intelligible for him, even to reduce it, as far as such a reduction is possible, by substituting equivalent terms. That exact representation does not yet amount to assent. One of the characters in Loss and Gain tells Charles Reding: "I enter into your reasons; I cannot, for the life of me, see how you come to your conclusion." And the convert answers, "To me, on the other hand, Carlton, it is like two and two make four." 18 It should not constitute a real theological difficulty that the affirmations can differ although the represented notes are alike, since theology conceives of faith as a supernatural cognitive activity.

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There is more to extract from the simple example that we have been using. We should also consider the reciprocal priority between the affirmation of the law and the perception of the fact that serves as a clue. Recent theorists of the logic of discovery have highlighted this peculiarity. We do not first perceive a proof as such, and only then what has been proved. Rather, we see both conjointly, grasping the general law as it subsumes the particular case. Depending on one's point of view, the particular is both cause and effect, proof and application, clue to and consequence of the law. The law is seen through the clue, but it is only in seeing the law that the clue is seen as clue.

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The fact cannot be known as a clue unless we affirm the law.

If the idea of such a reciprocal causality puzzles some readers, I would ask them to consider a case in which we are no longer looking for an explanation or trying to verify an hypothesis, but trying, rather, to enter into a mind, so to speak, to grasp the inner harmony of a psychological makeup. I may have read Hamlet ten times, without understanding Hamlet. I take up the play again and, lo and behold, an utterance that I had hitherto read without really grasping it all at once awakens me to the intuition of the character as an intelligible whole, of a reality that makes sense. "I've got it! That's it!" I exclaim. The perception of that utterance as a clue, as meaningful, is simultaneous in time with the perception of the character as a whole. Logically, it comes first, as truly causing my act of understanding; it is the clue that introduces me into Hamlet, makes me understand Hamlet. But just as logically, from another point of view, it follows upon the understanding; perceiving an utterance as disclosing a character trait makes sense only if the character is already known.

One might perhaps object that in this instance we are called upon not to affirm or to deny, but only to understand. To which we reply that it is a mistake to consider our assent as a more or less voluntary act, as distinguished from the synthesis of the terms. Let us go back to the example of affirming a natural law; perceiving the connection and giving one's assent are one and the same thing. 19 To perceive the connection is to perceive the clue as clue. But the clue cannot be perceived as clue without at the same time perceiving, by necessary correlation and with the same epistemic stringency,20 that to which it is the clue.

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In the theory of faith this last point is of real importance. It compels us to understand, in fact, that in the cases of supernatural knowledge we have been discussing, we must not imagine a "judgment of credibility" that constitutes a distinct act. Perception of credibility and belief in truth are identically the same act. 21

But if the perception of credibility coincides with the act of faith, just as the perceiving of the connection coincides with the accepting of the hypothesis, then clearly nothing stands in the way of our affirming, with St. Thomas, that it is the light of faith that shows that we must believe.22 A vicious circle? Only if we claim to demonstrate a proposition as certain by means of another that is as yet undemonstrated and that depends in turn on the former. But there is no trace of a vicious circle if we say that affirming some proposition requires that we possess the spiritual faculty that makes the connection of its terms clear, the synthetic activity that unites those terms, or, to speak as older authors did, the light that illuminates them. This applies to the Credendum est ["we should believe"] if one makes it a condition for affirming a supernatural truth or, what comes down to the same thing, if one makes of it a proposition that is explicitly uttered, yet believed, not simply affirmed by natural reason.

Theologians will readily grant, supposing faith to be present, that its light can make credibility manifest. But there is no reason for explaining the first act of faith any differently, and refusing to say that the supernatural light illuminates the very act through which we acquire that initial faith. The clue is really cause of the assent we give to the conclusion, yet it is the perceived conclusion that sheds light on the clue, that endows it with meaning. The same is true when we come to believe: insofar as it makes the assent reasonable, the perceived clue

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precedes the assent; insofar as it is supernatural, it follows upon the assent. There are two orders, of rationality and of supernaturality, and we can construct some abstract scheme along the lines of either order. One may say "I see the virtue of a Christian; I conclude to the divine holiness of the Church; I make my profession of faith." Or one may say "I acquire from above a new power of seeing; 23 I confess to the holiness of the Church, and I recognize the holiness of this man as an effect, an application, of the Church's holiness." These two logical sequences represent only aspects of the real, both of them true and both incomplete. Their truths are united and reconciled in the living unity of the affirmation. And there is no vicious circle. There would be a vicious circle or a leap into the dark, an arbitrary and unjustified affirmation only if the affirmed truth were absolutely prior to the condition of its affirmation, without in any way bringing it about through reciprocal causality. The same applies in the case of Hamlet or of the scientific law. The instantaneously acquired habit, call it perceptive knowledge, both precedes and follows its counterpart, perceived knowledge.

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"My Lord and my God!" "Truly this man was the Son of God!" Tradition has always seen in these exclamations of the converted centurion and of the apostle who recovered his faith both the beginning and the manifestation of faith. There is no room here for a "judgment of credibility" as a distinct act. But these words of the Gospel also exemplify very well another feature of the rapid and supernatural induction that, to our mind, explains belief better than what is generally meant by "demonstration of credibility." Consider now what we mean by this last feature.

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The external signs that make us see are surprising in their variety: the holiness of a good priest, the healing of a sick person, the impression produced by a religious feast, and so on. But such a sign is always known both as a real fact, interwoven with the entire fabric of human experience, and as a clue pertaining to the same order as the truth to which it points. So it is known under a new aspect, as constituting part of another world, the supernatural world. That is why many theologians say that the formal object 24 of this knowledge is new. The formal object of natural intelligence is natural being, accommodated to our natural end; the formal object of the knowledge of faith is supernatural being, pertaining to the order of grace, a means to lead us to intuitive vision.

The selfsame being may, therefore, belong to the natural order of our experience and to the supernatural order of grace, and, as we have repeatedly said, inner grace does not present us with new objects of knowledge, but illuminates a new aspect of some object already known. Thus through illumination by grace the gentle disposition of divine Providence prolongs, without any bump or break in conscious life, smoothly and with no violent irruption, what natural knowledge makes clear to us; it makes us see, within the very ambit of objects we were already attending to, clues to the higher world. Discerning a new nature in them is the same as penetrating more clearly and more thoroughly into their reality. The apostle Thomas "saw the man and believed in the God," as the Fathers quite aptly put it. But the God and the man were the same Christ Jesus. Many in our time have seen Rome, i.e., a marvelously human, surpassingly reasonable, and civilizing institution, and have believed in the Church,25 i.e., the mother of the children of God, the spouse of Christ, the teacher of salvation. The two kinds of knowledge are very different, and the former

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often occurs without the latter. And yet, Rome is the Church, and the Church is Rome.

Such a continuity of the two kinds of knowledge is possible only on one condition: that the two formal objects, the natural and the supernatural, be neither opposed nor disparate. The one must encompass and transcend the other, deepening and perfecting it from within. Otherwise the new faculty of seeing would be as experientially perceptible as the sudden acquisition of a sixth sense or the infusion of mystical contemplation in its higher degrees. Experience shows that such is not the case with faith. Hence the supernatural being we are speaking about is natural being, but elevated. In the final analysis the essence of natural being consists in its essential aptitude to serve as a means for created spirits to ascend to God, their final end; the essence of supernatural being, in its aptitude to lead them to God, object of the beatific vision. The two "formal objects" are no more opposed or disparate than the two ends are. 26

Natural intelligence, which may err about notes that are more comprehensive than being, never errs concerning the notion of being itself, which constitutes its formal object, because only this notion can move it. Likewise and much more so, the light of faith is infallible in making supernatural being manifest.27 The reasons for believing, perceived under the influence of grace, are good reasons for believing, and necessarily so.28

The solidity of these reasons is absolutely independent of the power that discursive reason may have of establishing a series of syllogistic arguments between the fact acting as clue and the credibility of Christian faith. The Holy Spirit can manifest this credibility to the soul just as well by illuminating the bond that exists between the holiness of the pastor of his or her parish^29 and the divine holiness of the Church as by illuminating the connection

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existing between the Church's entire history and her direction by God's Providence. For that to happen, it is enough that the connection be a real one.

We must take an even further step. In natural knowledge, the quicker and more penetrating the mind is, the more effectively a slight clue suffices to lead it to a certain conclusion. The same happens in the case of supernatural knowledge. The more responsive the mind is to the promptings of the Holy Spirit, the more easily it will come to assent to the Christian faith by means of signs that are ordinary, everyday signs, in no way "extraordinary" or "miraculous." 30 That is why an incontrovertible tradition, going back to the Gospel itself, praises those who have no need of wonders. They are not praised for having believed without reasons; that would only be reprehensible. But we see in them truly illuminated souls, capable of grasping a vast truth through a tiny clue. Does not experience show that, when the Holy Spirit visits the soul with His consolation, the soul is no longer capable of doubting, as it were, and glimpses manifest signs of the truth in everything. "Think of anything you wish," says the author of L'Aiguillon d'amour, "and you will find in it many reasons for loving your Creator." Some saints went into ecstasy on viewing a blade of grass. So, too, when it comes to faith. When responding to the divine light, the believer sees all of world history as proving the Church's mission; the most commonplace word or fact floods the soul with certitude and peace. Experiences of this sort cannot be expressed in words. But in defining that there are motives drawn from outward signs, the Church never defined that there exist only motives susceptible of expression. The motives we are talking about, if given expression, might well seem contemptible to those bereft of the Spirit. But the lover recognizes the Spouse "by a single hair of her neck."

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Thus far, we have sketched in its main lines the manner in which we can represent how credibility is, in some instances, perceived through grace; now we must explore whether it is legitimate to generalize this explanation, and jettison, accordingly, all notions of scientific faith and purely natural credibility. The facts we have adduced to this point are insufficient to that end. To investigate the essential elements of the act of faith, we must arrive at a clear idea of that posture of human liberty, the "pious will to believe." By showing that the complete liberty and the perfect reasonableness of the act of faith can be reconciled only in and through its supernaturality, we shall penetrate further into the inner organization of this act, and shed more light upon some of its features which the preceding outline had, of necessity, to leave somewhat vague.

Notes

1. The problem is simply considered from the opposite angle when we inquire what distinguishes a Catholic's act of faith from that of a heretic or of a Moslem. The psychological process seems to be absolutely the same.

2. In 4 Sent., d. 4, q. 2, a. 2, Sol, 3, ad 1.

3. Gregory XVI had already condemned this principle of Hermes "that reason is the main norm and the only way by which man may reach the knowledge of supernatural truths" (Breve Dum acerbissimas, Sept. 26, 1835, in Denzinger, Enchiridion, 10th ed., no. 1619). Reason, as intended here, was practical reason. Hermes never claimed that a natural assent might be a salutary act; he even affirmed the opposite, and such is the meaning of his distinction between faith of knowledge and faith of the heart. But this faith of the heart consisted simply in some of kind of submission and resignation of the self to God: faith, as knowledge, was natural, and faith without charity, "dead faith," was not a grace. Hence the supernaturality of faith could no longer be intrinsic to it but was derived entirely from charity.

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By condemning him the Church wanted to teach that faith, even as knowledge, is a grace. This is clear from notes 14 and 17 of the Schema of the theologians, cols. 527 and 529 of the Acta Concilii Vaticani, vol. VII of the Collectio Lacensis. Moreover we should not think that Hermes overemphasized the function of reason in the sense that he held that we could intrinsically demonstrate dogmas. Although even here he went a bit too far, he taught that our assent to the mysteries was caused by the demonstration of the fact of revelation. Cf. the passages to which Denzinger refers, Vier Bücher von der religiösen Erkenntniss I, p. 246. Perrone, the fierce adversary of Hermesianism, admits this in Migne's Démonstrations évangéliques, Vol. XIV, col. 960.

4. The doctrine of "inner experience" and of "private inspiration" has been condemned as heretical: (1) insofar as it is presented as the universal and necessary origin of faith; (2) insofar as it excludes external signs. The former point is clearly shown by the history of the Council: by correcting the original project of the theologians and by adding the word debere the Fathers wanted to show that they wholly reserved the possibility of cases where the Holy Spirit would make faith derive from merely inner motives (Acta 187A; cf. 164A, 77A. Cf. Granderath, Constitutiones dogmaticae SS. oec. Conc. Vaticani explicatae, p. 98n3; Vacant, Etudes théologiques sur les constitutions du concile du Vatican II, pp. 37-38. The second point follows clearly enough from the very form of the canon. ''Should anyone say that divine revelation cannot be made believable through external signs and that therefore men must be led to faith only through each one's internal experience or private inspiration, let him be anathema" (Vatican Council, De fide, Canon 3, in Denzinger, Enchiridion, no. 1812). We must be careful neither to extend nor unduly to restrict the scope of this condemnation. We would restrict it too much, or rather we would do away with it, if we admitted as the only lawful schema of the origin of faith the case of someone who would perform in his heart and without seeing any external signs the act of believing in divine revelation, even if he had later on to acknowledge the true Church among all the historical societies that claim to derive from Christ, because of its conformity with this inner revelation. In that event the Council would have condemned only religious solipsism, absolute individualism. But it certainly wanted to do more and to exclude some conceptions of inner religious experience, even when they finally led up to discerning an external Church (see the texts of the Protestants quoted in the notes of the Schema of the theologians, in Acta, col. 528, notes 1 and 2; see also Denzinger, Vier Bücher von der religiösen

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Erkenntniss II, pp. 301ff.: it looks as if the theologians of the Council took from these pages what they say of the Protestants; all their quotations may be found here and they refer explicitly to the work: Acta, col. 528, note 2). So it seems to us that one would not escape condemnation by the Council if one maintained the necessity of an external fact, while maintaining, as a universal and necessary law, that it is discerned only through the internal fact known first and by itself alone. But we would unduly extend the scope of the conciliar position by claiming that it condemns the theory that explains the origin of faith through the meeting of the internal fact and the external fact, both of them being equally necessary. As long as the internal fact is not the previously perceived norm and rule according to which one judges the external fact, one avoids the condemned heresy. The meeting of the two facts may be conceived in different ways. If one wishes to hold that the knowledge of the internal fact tanquam objecti cogniti ["as a known object"] goes necessarily together with that of the external fact, it seems to me that one does not merit theological censure. But this explanation does not seem to agree with experience or with the analogy of the Catholic understanding. To my mind we should say (and such is the theory that will be defended here) that a certain voluntary disposition produced by grace is indispensably required for every legitimate act of faith and for every certain perception of credibility, not as a perceived internal fact, but as eyes to perceive the external fact. Thus the "internal fact" is "illuminating rather than illuminated, intelligent rather" than intelligible, to borrow a few excellent expressions of M. Mallet [pseudonym for M. Blondel] (Qu'est-ce que la foi? [Paris, 1907]), p. 30. Some other expressions of the same author, pp. 29, 32, sound as if they require an explicit consciousness of the internal fact, a perception of religious uneasiness ut motivi cogniti ["as of a known motive"], but I am not sure that I have understood them well). Hence the supernatural love inspired by grace (which is not necessarily sanctifying love, the love of charity. Cf. St. Thomas, De veritate, q. 14, a. 2, ad 10) is not consciously represented; the eyes of faith do not look at themselves. We are aware of them only insofar as we see the object through them, insofar as we open them, insofar as we use them. So I would sum up in the following way the difference between the Protestant understanding intended by the Council and the Catholic understanding as I comprehend it: the former requires a perceptible grace; the latter, a perceiving grace. Everything depends on the difference between sensa perceptibilia and sensus percipiens [''between what is perceptible by the

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senses and the perceiving sense"]. St. John says (1 Jn 5:20): Dedit nobis sensum ["He gave us understanding to know the truth"].

5. The theologians of the most diverse schools agree on this opinion. Mr. Vacant writes, "It is generally admitted that it is not impossible for man to adhere to the revealed truths because of the authority of God who reveals, through natural assents that would not constitute supernatural faith, although they would in several ways resemble it" (Etudes théologiques II, p. 74). Mr. Bainvel says, "Although theologians admit and common sense teaches that there may exist a purely natural faith in God's word . . ., it will possess an absolute assurance, acquiescence, and certitude" (La Foi et l'acte de foi, 2nd ed. [Paris, 1908], p. 159; cf. p. 172). Likewise Father Gardeil: "That is why all theologians admit that a natural belief, a `scientific faith' in the revealed truth, is the normal result, possible in itself, of the search for credibility" (La Crédibilité et l'apologétique [Paris, 1908], p. 23). Likewise Father Hilaire de Barenton, a follower of the Franciscan school (Etudes Franciscaines [September 1908], 239); likewise Father Billot, whose affirmations are particularly clear (De virtutibus infusis I, 2nd ed., pp. 76-77), and so on. They speak also, quite logically, of a purely rational demonstration of credibility, by which they mean either the possibility of demonstrating the very fact of divine revelation or the possibility of demonstrating the legitimacy of the act of faith (performed in virtue of a reflex principle even though the fact of divine attestation is not rigorously demonstrated. See the many authors quoted by Father Hugueny in Revue Thomiste [May-June 1909], 275-98). The demonstration of credibility (in the wide or strict sense) and the possibility of a natural faith that is certain go together. For all admit that revealed statements offer an intelligible meaning to natural reason; hence it seems to me that one cannot attribute to this reason the power of holding fast to the fact of revelation and deny it the power of giving to its content a proportionate adhesion.

In order to know the philosophical roots of this concept of a natural faith it is worthwhile to outline its historical origins. We will try to do so in a separate note. Let us remark here that this conception has, in its most rigorous form, penetrated into current teaching: among the faithful who have some cultural background, among intelligent youngsters, in Catholic high schools, etc., many conceive of the act of faith as including an act of natural knowledge. "I am a Catholic, because the divinity of the Church is scientifically demonstrated by the prophets, the miracles, the monuments both of the Old and of the New Testament" (from a letter of the father of a family, quoted in La Croix of December 2, 1909, page 1, last column; italics in the original).

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6. Thus Father Billot, in the passage cited in note 5.

7. In the address delivered, on June 11, 1870, before twenty-four delegates of the Council, Franzelin said about the Schema of the theologians: "We must also hold that God's inner grace supplies what is lacking for such kinds of people (the illiterate), in the external presentation of the faith" (Acta, col. 1623A). The words that I have italicized show that to his mind this help is accidental. This is shown even more clearly by the way he speaks elsewhere (De traditione et scriptura, 2nd ed., p. 684).

8. Everyone admits most willingly that in practice it is difficult or morally impossible to believe in Christianity with a purely natural faith (Franzelin, De traditione et scriptura, p. 688; Billot, De virtutibus infusis I, pp. 77-78). So one might wonder why we should argue about an abstract possibility when we agree about what really happens. Why insist so much that we should speak of a physical impossibility and not only of a moral impossibility? The discussion may not matter much for the individual apostolate; it matters a great deal for the theory of religious knowledge that looks wholly different according to which opinion one accepts.

9. See Father Gardeil in his clear and impressive book La Crádibilité et l'apologétique, pp. 97ff.

10. I borrow this formula that perfectly characterizes the theory of scientific faith from Mr. de Séguier, Annales de Philosophie Chrétienne, 37 (December 1897), 276.

11. "Nulla difficultas quoad doctos" ["No difficulty insofar as the learned are concerned"] (Mazzella, De virtutibus infusis, 3rd ed., p. 794; cf. p. 394). Schiffini, De virtutibus infusis, p. 262.

12. "As for me," writes Viva, "I share the opinion of Lugo and others that there is no need to appeal to a supernatural illumination by the Holy Spirit to explain the presence in the young and the ignorant of a sufficient evidence of credibility as distinguished from a mere probability. . . . Thus everyone argues within himself . . . : I who know nothing about some things, especially in the field of religion, must follow the judgment of those who are wise and pious. But the pastor is wise and pious. So I must follow his judgment and I am bound to believe what he tells me to believe . . ." (Damnatae theses, prop. XXI of Innocent XI, n. 10). Such is the usual explanation taken over by an infinite number of authors. What a shaky foundation for supernatural faith! Where is the difference from the unbeliever? What if the youngster prefers the schoolteacher to the pastor?

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13. De veritate, q. 18, a. 6.

14. Some authors, however, such as Suárez, De fide, disp. 4, sect. 5, nn. 9-10, understand the influence of grace as intrinsic, as complementary to the motives.

15. John of St. Thomas, Cursus theologicus in 2am 2ae, De fide, disp. 3, a. 1, s. 2, n. 3: "From the side of the object it adds a certain representation by penetrating not into the truth, but into the fitness of the object to move us to assent." Emphasis added.

16. A recent discussion has pitted against each other, about the question mentioned here, two theologians of great authority, Mr. Bainvel and Father Gardeil (Revue Pratique d'Apologétique, May, June, August, November, 1908). I am not trying to summarize their suggestive and nuanced explanations. May I be allowed nevertheless to say that the impression produced by these debates seems to me clearly to confirm what I am saying in the text. To my mind Mr. Bainvel grounds perfectly the proposition which he states in this way: "The unlearned possess really sufficient reasons for believing, although they are unable to systematize them. . . . We should speak not so much . . . of `subjective surrogates' to explain credibility as of some help that makes us directly and spontaneously perceive motives that are really valid" (May 1, p. 188). It is evident, moreover, from the arguments of his adversary that without grace this perception is not certain (which Mr. Bainvel would not deny, at least as far as the question of fact is concerned). So the point is to see how grace can cause someone to perceive, with an objective and true certitude, reasons that would only be probable for natural intelligence left to its own resources, to indicate for grace a role between the two roles which are often the only ones that are considered: objective instruction or revelation (opposed to experience), subjective or affective impulsion (impossible to prove). The first part of this study tries to state precisely wherein this middle role consists; the next part will consider the Thomistic theory of knowledge by way of attraction, to which Father Gardeil so rightly draws our attention. We shall try to determine the conditions on which these attractions can fulfill the role that is defined here, that role being not exactly to supply for, but rather to effect, knowledge, to make us see and not to exempt us from seeing.

17. If knowledge is eels * [habit], it should be considered here, not as having, but as what Scholasticism understands by habitus.

18. Newman, Loss and Gain, p. 324.

19. In Scholastic language: the esse quod significat compositionem et divisonem intellectus ["the being that means affirmation and

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negation by the intellect"] is not, like predicamental being, a represented note, a note belonging to the essence.

20. This means that if the clue is perceived as probable, the hypothesis confirmed by it is affirmed only as probable, etc.

21. Hence the credibility perceived in the light of grace is not objectum quod, i.e., the term of knowledge, a thought object, it is quo, or sub quo, i.e., a condition of the object. Earlier authors conceive its role in this way, but only in some instances. (See, for instance, John of St. Thomas, Cursus theologicus in 2am 2ae, De fide, disp. 2, art. 3, nn. 12ff.)

22. 2a 2ae, q. 1, a. 5, ad 1; cf. ibid., a. 4, ad 3.

23. This power is acquired only through an act of the will, the oboeditio fidei, the pius affectus credendi ["the obedience of faith, the pious will to believe"], as we shall show in the second part of our investigation. Therefore the joining of the two objects indicated here by no means exhausts the complex reality of the act of faith, which unites in its living unity what is too often scattered into a great number of "judgments" and "commandments."

24. Ratio sub qua ["the aspect under which"].

25. See, for instance, P. Löwengard, La Splendeur catholique (Paris, 1910), pp. 163ff.

26. "The supernatural end and the natural end are not disparate ends and do differ not as two opposites, but only as that which exceeds and that which is exceeded" (L. Billot, De gratia Christi I [Rome 1908], p. 46). No modern theologian has emphasized more strongly this essential idea than the author of this remarkable little book. It seems to me that all those who are interested in the question of nature and the supernatural would read it with pleasure and profit, even if they have not received a Scholastic formation. If the latter wish to enter into contact with the doctrines of the School, will they not profit by their dealings with an original and powerful mind (even should its austere rigidity shock them occasionally) more than by reading a flat, colorless textbook, whose wise mediocrity will bore them?

27. Cf. St. Thomas, In Boetium de Trinitate, q. 3, a. 1, ad 4.

28. When we say that somebody believes for a reason that is only probable "in itself," either this expression has no meaning, or it means: a reason that is capable of lawfully engendering only a probability in the human mind, as it is too weak to perceive fully the reality of the phenomenon in question.

29. The impossibility of expressing this connection in words and in concepts by no means prevents its being certain and intellectual.

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There are many examples of such an inability even in the natural exercise of the intellect as an illative sense.

30. We should not believe that the sign of the Church mentioned by the Vatican Council must necessarily assume the form of a consideration of the whole of ecclesiastical history or even of the total action of the Church in the world in our time. The "holiness of an outstanding Christian woman" or "the marvelous effects of Holy Communion" all this enters into the "proof based upon the Church."

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THE EYES OF FAITH II

"Should anyone say that the assent of Christian faith is not free, but produced necessarily by arguments of human reason, . . . let him be anathema." 1 Just as faith is reasonable and at the same time supernatural, so, while it is certain, it is nonetheless free. It is the theologian's task to show how these different features harmonize. This harmony may be conceived of in two ways. Either we consider the notes that appear to be mutually exclusive as given separately, as deriving from different principles; then we are faced with the task of reconciling them. Or we could show that, although those notes seem incompatible at first blush, they do in fact answer to each other, and reciprocally engender each other in the complex and indissoluble whole that is the act of faith. In the first part of this study, where we were confronted with an act that is simultaneously both reasonable and supernatural, we tried to show how its reasonableness derives from its very supernaturality. We must now undertake a similar task for its certitude and its freedom.

The apparent antinomy between two features is quite easily grasped. The objection runs as follows: either you see with certitude that God has spoken, or you do not see it with certitude. In the first case, how can the assent be free? And in the second, how can its certitude be legitimate? The simplicity of this dilemma should not lead us to underestimate its strength.

The most usual explanations may be reduced to two schemas; they both share the common feature of separating, or sundering, the two notes that seem to destroy each other freedom and certitude in order to assign temporal and real priority to one or the other of them.

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Some say: Believe blindly first, and afterward you will see. Others say: See clearly first, and afterward you will believe. But while the first group jeopardizes the legitimacy of faith's certitude, the second group does the same with its freedom.

Voluntarists make up the first group. Their idea of belief can be fairly well expressed in the words of a contemporary author, which I am deliberately lifting out of their context. 2 He says that faith consists in "grasping first, and because one chooses to do so, what will afterward be a conviction in agreement with the truth; . . . in other words, in order to have faith, we act as if we had it." Either we directly invite reason, infirm and proud as it is, to submit itself to some doctrine that claims to be revealed, or, to modify this approach in a quite natural and almost imperceptible way, we commit ourselves to forcing the machine to submit, by means of virtuous action, persuading our senses and imagination through familiarity with the Catholic setting, through rites and gestures. In either case, the purpose is to win the "heart" over before the intelligence.3 This unilateral voluntarism knows only this style of exhortation: Will, and you shall see. Practice and you shall believe. "Use holy water and benumb yourself" (Pascal). It is easy to see how faith, in this system, is voluntary. But, clearly, it seems to salvage freedom only by doing damage to intelligence. Can it be said that an assent reached in this way is still "in agreement with reason," and is this not the "blind adherence" that the Vatican Council rejects?

Hence, most theologians prefer the inverse order. They do not subordinate the perception of credibility to love, or to the will, but draw a distinction between two aspects of a double movement. The first aspect, whatever its contingent modalities may be, is essentially intellectual. It culminates in the knowledge of what there is to

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believe, in the knowledge of the fact of revelation, of the divine origin of the Catholic Church. It has the believer concluding: "This is believable." A second movement, this one voluntary, has him saying: "I believe." It is clear that the act of faith, in this second schema, is reasonable. But, as for me, I do not see how this approach safeguards the requisite of freedom. I fail to see that such a belief is voluntary, to use the words of St. Thomas, "not only with regard to the performance of the act, but also with regard to the specification of its object." 4 Theologians who envisage matters this way can indeed subscribe to Innocent VIII's condemnation of Pico de la Mirandola, but only by interpreting the terms of the proscribed proposition with considerable subtlety: "It does not lie in man's free power to believe that an article of faith is true, when it so pleases him, and to believe that it is false, when it so pleases him."5

Both these opposed explanations share, accordingly, a common weakness, which prevents them from safeguarding, really and simultaneously, the two properties that must be combined in the act of faith, freedom and certitude. Each grants pride of place to the note it seems to value more highly. But both seem to permit that first and preferred note to smother its counterpart, whereas the Church attaches equal importance to both.6

Nevertheless each note seems to demand its pride of place simply in order to exist. How would the act of faith be certain if the love in it were not directed by a view that is reasonable? How would it be free if love did not open its portals to the light? In short, it seems that if the act of faith is to conform to the conditions the Church imposes, the two following statements must be true at the same time:

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It1is1because1man1wills1that1he1sees1the1truth.

It1is1because1man1sees1the1truth1that1he1wills.

Take either of these statements in isolation from the other, and you collide with the requirements of dogma, or with those of experience, or with both together. If, on the contrary, we succeeded in showing that both statements are simultaneously true, we would have a theory of the act of faith that is satisfactory from both dogmatic and psychological points of view.

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Anyone who holds that there exists in the act of faith a reciprocity both of priority and of causality between light and freedom has less of a difficulty in showing that such a thing is possible than in explaining how, in such a case, the act remains reasonable.

But human life furnishes quite a number of occasions on which free will, by the very fact of choosing one side over another, or, more generally, of choosing some good, engenders, or opens the entryway for, a new light, one that modifies the coloration, as it were, of the objects perceived, and thus makes a decision seem reasonable not the decision qua made, precisely, for there is not yet a made decision, but the decision in the making. This is the story of all our free acts: the "practical judgment" and the "voluntary election," distinct though they are for reflective reason, but fused by the same lightning bolt of real duration, reciprocally cause each other; each brings the other into reality as condition of its own realization.

Something similar may occur for speculative judgments. Not, of course, in the sense that some simple "command of the will" could make us see or believe in virtue of some despotic and arbitrary power, white

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now and black a moment later. Will does not act upon intelligence all that extrinsically. But the heart or sense-appetite can work its charms, can seduce reason. If it seems difficult to admit that some sudden decision of the will could exert an influence of this kind in speculative matters, the reality is undeniable, at least in cases involving some inclination deeply rooted in the subject. A love, a passion, an appetite may thoroughly impart its own coloration to the whole world of perceived objects, so much so that it powerfully influences, nay, even transforms, our judgments about "things in themselves." A man in the grip of passion sees things with new eyes, sees in them a new "formal object," as it were. There is no need to give examples of such an everyday phenomenon. It is also easy to understand that such an affective habit and therefore the vision of love that it defines however ineluctable and domineering it might possibly become through habituation, could originally have been freely accepted. Since an intense love may conquer the soul in a shorter time, we might imagine, at the limit, an emotion so strong and entailing so radical a consent that it suffices to transform in a single moment one's whole manner both of living and of seeing. In this case of a habit, which a single act of exceptional intensity could succeed in implanting, a perfectly reciprocal priority would take place, loving vision shedding its light on free election, and free election affording access to the loving vision. In this spontaneous emergence of a totally willed evidence, fullness of certitude would go hand in hand with fullness of freedom.

It is imperative, furthermore, to notice this: in the phenomenon in question, the subject has not explicitly decided to color his understanding. The will has freely chosen, not the new knowledge as such, but the love, or the manner of living that necessarily implies that love.

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Though the act constitutes an indivisible unity, it in no way jumbles up the "formal aspects" of knowledge and volition. What is directly chosen is the good, the end, the way of living, and only through it the way of seeing. 7

If we apply these considerations to the love of the divine Good, of the divine End, we will have no difficulty in establishing a schema of the act of faith wherein the two properties of freedom and certitude, far from mutually interfering, will, on the contrary, support each other by interfusing with each other by, if I may be permitted the expression, a kind of circumincession. A reciprocal causality runs between the homage one chooses to render to God (oboeditio fidei, pius affectus credendi ["the obedience of faith, the pious will to believe"]) and the perception of supernatural truth. Love^8 arouses the faculty of knowing,9 and by the same stroke knowledge justifies that love. Without any preceding "judgment of credibility," the soul instantaneously believes and can exclaim "My Lord and my God!" Free election and certain knowledge are wedded in this lightning flash, but each preserves its identity. Election is oriented to the divine Good, to the new way and life that are chosen, not directly to the knowledge as such. And the intelligence, despite the ardent atmosphere of love that may bathe it, can perceive in all security the eminently reasonable and lawful character of the decision it makes. This last point, however, requires further elaboration.

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It is not very difficult, it is even rather usual among the Scholastics, to establish relationships of reciprocal causality between the voluntary homage rendered to God in faith and what is called the "practical judgment" (about the act to be performed). But here we are undertaking something different, since we are striving to incorporate,

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in a unique act, the equivalent of "speculative" judgments of "credibility" as well. (The judgments are generally represented as preceding the act of faith, thereby imposing the task of reconciling, as best one can, this preliminary certitude with the plenary freedom of the act.) Here we will suppose the interpretation of a "sign'' or a "clue," taken from the visible world, already described above, and try to integrate it into the act of faith itself. By establishing a necessary connection between natural and supernatural truth, that theory justifies the act of faith before the bar of reason. 10 In order to show how the free act of faith can encompass a certitude that depends on love and is oriented to reality, we have adduced the example of sensible or voluntary loves that present the world of objects under a new coloration, and thereby command even man's speculative judgments.

But here a serious difficulty arises. One might say:

I grant that the influence of the appetite in speculative matters is possible. I even beg to remark that its influence is excessive, and this I deplore, because I must challenge its legitimacy. In such matters pure and disinterested reason is, by nature and by God's will, the only suitable tool, the only competent judge. The will can command reason to move into action; every other voluntary influence is only apt to spoil everything. Despite all pragmatism, common sense will always maintain that neither the will's decrees nor the heart's desires can define what is true. Every judgment de vero ["about what is true"] whose specification is commanded by appetite is an arbitrary judgment in which the person has basically no motive other than his whim. By making a free act of love prior to the act of knowing, you have come down, in fact, to defending a voluntarist coup d'état,11 or a leap into the dark, or the heart's vulgar seduction of reason. If your explanation boasts anything new, it is

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only that it requires of reason that it be so thoroughly seduced as to lose all awareness that it has been seduced.

Is not the ideal and morally obligatory rule in matters of speculative truth that of expelling every sentimental influence, of taming one's appetites, of submitting oneself purely to the object? This method, the method of common sense, may look questionable to the mind's eye as long as, vaguely divining that some great truth may lie hidden in "pragmatism," the mind remains as yet unable to extract it. That truth shines forth with fresh radiance when, after fully applying the pragmatic principle (that all knowledge is the expression of some appetite), we come to acknowledge that intelligence itself is the expression of a natural appetition for the supreme and subsisting Truth. Not only does every affective habit define a vision of love, but every vision also is a vision of love and is defined, in beings affected by potentiality, by an appetitive habitus, whether conscious or unconscious. Enchanted, as it were, charmed and fascinated by the God who made it capable of Him, reason itself is nothing other than a pure love of Being. 12 Once we have seen this, we can better understand the infinite reverence for the intellectual light that is so remarkable, for instance, in St. Augustine. Even while aspiring to aid reason by voluntary inclinations, we fear to pour any "coarse unctions" into that pure delight in being by which intellectual evidence manifests the truth. God has made our spirit naturally sympathetic to being as such; we have no right to adulterate this divine mixture by adding in our personal sympathies for particular beings. Thus every substituting of a new vision for the natural vision, every influence of voluntary inclination on the speculative judgment, seems to be a perversion, a corruption, not a refinement of intelligence, a lack of respect for God and

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for God's image. Once again, whenever an absolute judgment is at issue, freedom and legitimacy seem forever incompatible; and if the assent of faith must combine these two features, we must at least discover some property in it which is absolutely unique and original, which distinguishes it from all other judgments defined or commanded by appetite.

In order to determine this special property, consider the common root that makes those other assents illegitimate. It consists in the fact that intelligence takes as the rule and measure of its assent, not the First Truth, the only legitimate norm of an absolute judgment, but some lower, particular, determinate end. 13 The First Truth should be the sole norm of absolute judgments, because in making such judgments man acts not insofar as he is this or that bodily individual, subject among his peers to such and such limitations, but insofar as he is simply man, partaker of intellectual nature, image of God, spirit. As such, his only norm must be God, for, according to the teaching so dear to St. Augustine, "only the First Truth is superior to the spirit." So it amounts to the same thing whether we submit and orient ourselves to some end as regards our speculative intelligence (i.e., insofar as we are reasonable) or whether we orient ourselves to it wholeheartedly and simply as to our ultimate End, something that we owe uniquely to God. Hence it is the supreme disorder, insofar as we are spirits, to take some creature as our end and to let passion make us say to that creature: "There is no longer good or evil, true or false; there is only you!"

A practical end legitimately measures the truth of practical reason. Likewise, it would legitimately measure the truth of speculative reason if the end in question were the ultimate End of man. Since the ultimate End is, by definition, all-inclusive, it follows that if the beloved

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reality were really and truly the total Good of the one loving it, then that reality would also measure the rectitude of reason itself, the good of spirit as spirit; hence the truth of the absolute judgment would be relative to it essentially. It should be readily evident that only the supreme and subsistent Truth, God alone, can be such an End, since man is entirely oriented to Him, not only insofar as he is this particular individual, but even insofar as he possesses an intellectual nature. Thus the rectitude of our intelligence, when it knows with certainty, comes entirely from the fact that God has inspired it with a natural inclination to the First Truth, that is, to Himself insofar as He is the End of all spiritual beings. 14 Because of this inclination intellection is natural to us, and when truth dawns on us, we experience pleasure. Therefore, to ensure the legitimacy of any inclination man might accept as norm for making an absolute judgment, the first and essential condition is that it incline him, not toward some lower and particular end, but toward the ultimate End of all intellectual natures.

We begin to see now how an understanding of intelligence as a connatural inclination and sympathy, as a pure love of God and of being, makes the exigencies of a rigorous intellectualism even more inflexible, while at the same time opening the way to a natural and coherent theory of certitude that is both legitimate and free, even where an absolute speculative judgment is concerned. If intelligence is an inclination, every voluntary inclination that would restrict it and impose some particular being on it as its norm would be a perversion, a corruption of nature. But we can also conceive of an inclination that deepens and expands it, that enables it better to penetrate its object, derived and secondary being, by making it more deeply enamored of the subsisting Truth, its primary object and ideal. This transformation by love

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will be identical to an increase of intelligence, and the loving vision it directs will be a more perfect knowledge along the very lines of intellectuality itself.

Every inclination that causes us to make an absolute judgment ought to be an inclination toward the ultimate End. This is a necessary condition of the legitimacy of assent. But it is not a sufficient condition or, at least, we may say that it is such only if we explain more precisely what we mean. For it is evident that we may not judge absolutely in line with every inclination that follows from any and every idea we may have formed of God. Allow speculative reason to take as its norm any and every inclination, any and every emotion of this kind, and you give free rein to all sorts of fanaticism. This kind of error occurs not only among Jews or heretics; one knows of saints who were led into error by some devout inclination. In such cases, what directs the intellect's judgment is an inclination toward God as conceived, toward God as represented (hence toward an object somehow particularized). Man cannot unhesitatingly trust such super-added affective tendencies the way he trusts reason, which God naturally inclines toward Himself. Man has a right to trust affective tendencies absolutely, as much as or more than his intelligence; he may garb himself in this willed love as in a new nature and make absolute judgments in accord with it only if he knows with certainty that this new love comes from God no less than his reason itself, only if God testifies on behalf of this new way of living as strongly as He testifies on behalf of the nature He has given us. This may become manifest by the perception of a clue that unveils at some point the intimate interplay of the natural and supernatural worlds, or, rather, the latter's inferiority to the former, and in doing so makes it plain that the belief in question must be true, else reason plays us false and reality is inconsistent. Once

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we have clearly established in this way that religion is divine, rational evidence itself no longer has the right to direct our absolute judgments, any more than the will does to be religious. Since the latter conditions the former, it furnishes the most lawful rule for our assents.

In the act of faith love needs knowledge as knowledge needs love. Love, the free homage to the supreme Good, gives us new eyes. Being, become more visible, delights the beholder. The act is reasonable since the perceived clue summons the natural order as witness to the new truth. The act is free, since man, if he so chooses, can refuse to love his supernatural Good. Or, to express the same thing in other words: reflection distinguishes two causal series that co-exist in the act without interfering or intersecting with each other. Man, on the one hand, wills some good, orders his life toward it, and thus assumes a new nature (that makes him see). This is the order of the will. The mind, on the other hand, sees a fact, interprets it as a clue, and concludes from it to a truth (that makes him live). This is the order of intelligence. But we do not have here two really separable processes: the living unity of the one selfsame act integrates all this.

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We can shed more light on the role of the external clue or sign (sanctioned by the Vatican Council) and on the identity of affective habit with perceptive knowledge by reminding the reader of those texts in which St. Thomas explains the assent of divine faith by referring to those special ways of knowing that derive from virtuous habits. Just as the habit of a certain virtue makes us know what is consonant with that virtue, he says, so the habit of faith makes us know that we must believe. 15

St. Thomas knows of certain kinds of knowledge that he calls per modum naturae ["natural"]; we may call

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them, for brevity's sake, sympathetic. It is easy to explain how this kind of knowledge works and how it differs from knowledge that operates conceptually and discursively. One may know chastity (and judge, in a given instance, what is harmful or conducive to it) in two ways: either one has carefully followed a course in ethics, and acquired general ideas or principles (under which one strives to subsume the case in question), or one is chaste, and interiorly experiences attractions or repugnances, sympathies or aversions (that help one judge through a quick inference and "instinctively," as it were, whether a given object favors or threatens the virtue). 16 Everyday experience provides many instances of such knowledge, either in connection with virtuous habits or with regard to other forms of habituation. When asked about the spelling of a word, I write down two proposed spellings, or depict them in my imagination, and decide whether the word is spelled correctly or not by trusting the quality of the impression produced on my "memory" or on my "habit" of orthography.17

In such instances there occurs a quick comparison between perceptive knowledge (habitus, eels, * "memory") and the perceived object, and we judge according to a reaction of the affective kind; we judge of the "truth" of the object according to whether it agrees or disagrees with the faculty or habit that we felt was at work.

Is this exactly the way we should envisage the sympathetic knowledge that, according to St. Thomas, underlies the judgments of faith? If so, the act of faith would necessarily comprise not only an experience but also a representation (however fleeting and simple you wish to make it, but a representation when all is said) of the "interior fact" tanquam objecti cogniti ["as a known object"]. We would experience such good "vibrations," as we approach the external fact and draw out its

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applications, that is, we would feel so good in thinking of Christianity, we would savor so intensely the harmonious attractions that Christianity awakens in our heart, that we would conclude that they are made for each other. Two remarks are in order here: first, that, despite appearances, we would in such a case approach Christianity by way of its truth as grasped in thought (inferred from a comparison); secondly, that the role of the exterior signs (especially of the miracles the Vatican Council explicitly mentions), even if not always and absolutely superfluous, would at least be reduced to a very modest minimum.

But reflect more attentively, and it becomes clear that the essential feature of sympathetic knowledge does not consist in a comparison following upon an impression. Genuine sympathetic knowledge is immanent to the very tendency impelling the soul toward or drawing it away from some object, immanent to the very movement of desire or aversion. Separate that knowledge from the feeling of attraction or horror which, in our previous example, the object awakens in a chaste person, and you have misunderstood it, you have mistaken it for one of its effects. In itself, and indistinguishable from love or hatred, before the mediation of the rapid reflection and the swift discursive activity mentioned above, this knowledge naturally finds expression in the language of appetition: I want it! I do not want it! How charming! How intolerable! etc. 18 May we envisage the act of faith as based on this type of sympathetic knowledge?

We may undoubtedly do so, subject to two provisos: that we have assimilated, on the one hand, the conception of intelligence as inclination toward the subsisting Truth, and that we realize, on the other, that what is seen sympathetically in faith is not, per se loquendo ["properly speaking"], the specification of the various

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dogmas, 19 but their common property of being good to believe: ea quae sunt fidei esse credenda ["that which is of faith must be believed"].

Granting that intelligence is the expression of an appetitive tendency is the same as granting that we must not think of the sympathetic tendency in intellectual knowledge as restricted to some particular cases of intellection, but see it as necessarily following from a general law of intelligence as such.20 This amounts to granting that the formality of being, which is the proper reaction of our intelligence, is known per modum naturae ["naturally"]. True, it seems to be imposed upon our intelligence, and perceiving it does not arouse affective resonances in us. But the sympathy may be no less real, despite its remaining unconscious. The affirmation of being, which seems at times to be imposed from without by the objects we apprehend, is in fact the expression of our most intense desire, the expression of the irresistible charm by which God creates and conserves the intelligent soul by drawing and orienting it toward Himself. The gravitational pull of sympathy is generally immersed in the unconscious, which is why the affirmation of being appears to the superficial observer as occurring simply per modum rationis ["on the rational level"].21

When the intellectual desire of God has been healed and transformed, it is also identical with the affirmation of being contained in the knowledge of faith. However, since this new enticing love is welcomed freely (for it is not irresistible), its visibility in knowledge through sympathy is more pronounced in faith-knowledge than it is in natural affirmations. In this respect there is the same difference between these two affirmations as natural history recognizes between an organ functioning within and one that is visible on the outer surface of the body. Christ is known by faith as a master to whom we must listen, as

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a mediator to whom we must cling, as a way we must follow, but only if our free will simultaneously accepts "some appetite of the supernatural Good," as St. Thomas puts it, and thereby yields to this master, turns to this mediator, and chooses this way. This voluntary inclination alone arouses and sustains the synthetic notion of the supernatural world that allows us to interpret the clue. 22 If reflection subsequently chooses to translate what is thus perceived into concepts, it will succeed only by saying: esse audiendum, esse credendum ["it must be listened to, it must be believed"]. But when we make an act of faith this is precisely what we see:23 that we must listen, that we must believe. Thus the word of the Gospel is shown to be literally true: See how to listen, blepete * pws * akovete*24

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If our explanation has any merit, it is that of according love an essential role in the act of faith without, however, working any detriment to the most rigorous intellectuality. For us, feeling is not a seducer of intelligence; freedom actually engenders evidence. It is precisely intelligence, corrupted by sin, that is set free by supernatural love. Grace gives intelligence a perfection proper to it, the perfection of seeing (videre esse credendum ["to see that it ought to be believed"]). We must, it is true, safeguard the perfect freedom of belief, yet it would be dangerous to insist exclusively on the voluntary aspect of the act. We must strongly emphasize its rational aspect and the objectivity of the reasons for believing against the anti-intellectualistic errors^25 that have been so solemnly condemned by supreme authority.

There should be no confusion about the essential difference that distinguishes our explanation of voluntary

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influence from the theory of the coup d'état. The upholders of the coup d'état are obliged to say: "No perceived truth moves the intelligence"; we, on the contrary, hold that love gives us eyes, the very fact of loving makes us see, creates for the loving subject a new species of evidence. Yet we must not imagine that, when it comes to motives of credibility, this evidence is so absolutely personal, as a vision of love, as to be utterly incommunicable.

True, this sometimes happens. It can happen, perhaps, and for excellent reasons, with saints, and with persons who have an intense inner life. 26 It also happens very frequently in the case of unlearned people and with the reasons they may have, if what we said about them above merits acceptance. In such cases grace illuminates for the subject facts that, in their original complexity, are known only to him, and the knowledge that thus arises is no less incommunicable than the most personal perceptions of the "illative sense" in the natural order. The root of the incommunicability lies in the very matter of the knowledge. But if God's Spirit awakens such evidences in a person's inmost depths, evidences perceptible only ''to the spirit of man that is in man," He does not, for all that, abdicate His power of shedding light on facts that are visible to all like the life of Jesus Christ, the history of Israel, or of the Church. Though the Holy Spirit carry "His torch in the hidden corners of Jerusalem," He can also beam the rays of His sun toward "the city built on the mountain top." The motives for believing that are drawn in this fashion from patent facts can be put into the form of discursive reasoning and constitute the object of the science of apologetics. This fact calls for two remarks.

First, the faith of those who know these motives for believing is not necessarily firmer than the faith of those

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who do not. We ought even to say that grace makes the faith of the peasant (charbonnier) just as reasonable, in the principal and authentic meaning of the word, as the faith of the historian or the doctor. 27 Nevertheless, the possession of reasons for believing that are susceptible of being expressed, developed, and communicated is infinitely precious to the Church, especially because of its social and catechetical value. Spread abroad by words and books, the proofs of religion everywhere cooperate with grace, and attract people of good will, with a power of illumination surpassing what any pious person's individual action can effect. It would be insulting to the Holy Spirit and to tradition to scorn this work of explaining the reasons for believing. Only a ludicrous Catholicism would scorn not only Apollos, but Paul as well, insofar as they both start from Scripture [Acts 17:2, 18:38]!

The mere fact and this is our second remark that the historical and external proofs of religion can be expressed in language, boiled down to a logically coherent whole, and proposed to everyone in that guise does not authorize the conclusion that a man, without the illumination of grace, can perceive them synthetically as proofs and assent to them with genuine certainty. Whether the proofs of religion be individual or communicable, two conditions are necessarily required for their perception: the presentation of the object and the possession of a spiritual faculty capable of grasping it.28 In either case the first factor is useless without the second. And if for the proofs of faith the second element is necessarily a supernatural light, there is no contradiction in saying both that these proofs have an objective value that is fully satisfactory, and that grace is nevertheless required to perceive and affirm them. It is exact to say that they "call for the assent of every reasonable man" but only because it is exact to add that a truly reasonable

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judgment about Christ, the Church, the Scriptures can be made only with the help of God's grace. Such seems to be the true conception of traditional apologetics: it unfolds the array of external and historical reasons and judges that, as reasons, they are wholly sufficient and good. But it does not view them as acting ex opere operato ["by themselves alone"]; it holds equally fast to the conviction that they are both absolutely legitimate and undeniably inefficacious if God does not open the soul's eyes. 29 That tradition requires of the listener, not that he reflect on the "interior fact," but that he experience that "interior fact" itself, to wit, that right disposition of the will that enables him to understand the ''external fact."

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By now this much should be clear: we think not only that, in supernatural faith, the willingness to believe is necessary for belief, but also that the graced "sympathization" of the intelligence^30 to the supernatural world is indispensable if the act of believing is to be legitimately certain. In other words, it looks as if we have to give up the concept of "scientific faith," or "natural faith," held by modern theologians.

This seems already to follow from the Church's positive teaching on the liberty of faith. If my belief in Catholic truth is truly free in its specification, how would it be compatible with a scientific faith that is certain, purely natural, and depending in no way on the will? So there remains only the hypothesis of a natural faith that itself would be certain and at the same time free. But in the case we are dealing with, the affective surplus, the measure of love, an indispensable condition of freedom, makes an absolute speculative judgment illegitimate. This measure of love keeps the act from being fueled by

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the pure love of Being, when only that love is entitled to inspire such judgments. It might be objected that free moral action sharpens the intelligence. True, but its moral value is constantly measured by the light of natural reason that we possess, and however sharpened it becomes, it does not entitle us to leap into the total adhesion required by Christianity, a doctrine that claims the right to judge, as a higher authority, the very principle of morality.

So we cannot escape the necessity of appealing to an infused affective habit that renders us sympathetic to supernatural being and, at the same time, grounds a free love of a desirable good, and awakens us to a new power of seeing. Is it necessary, moreover, in proving that this supernatural sympathization is required, to employ the roundabout approach which skirts that special note of the act of faith, its liberty? It is a general law of all knowledge that subject and object must naturally have something in common. We say, in Scholastic terminology, that the "formal object" of a faculty defines that faculty and can be grasped by no other faculty. In more modern terms this means that all perceived knowledge requires a corresponding perceiving knowledge or, again, that the subject must see itself as such and such, so to speak, in order to form the idea of the object as such and such or, again, that underlying all knowledge of an object through a representation, there exists overtly or covertly some knowledge of the object through attraction, through sympathy, through a feeling for some quality. The application of this principle to the present topic can take the form of the following syllogism: Man can see things under the formal aspect of supernatural being 31 only through some supernatural faculty. But we can adhere to the objects of revelation with a faith that is certain only by knowing them under the

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formal aspect of supernatural being. Therefore a supernatural faculty is required in order to adhere to the objects of revelation with a faith that is certain. The major premiss derives directly from the principle that we have posited. The minor premiss can be demonstrated as follows: the specification of the formal object of every intellectual act essentially includes the expressing of a being's relation to its ultimate end (since intelligence is precisely an appetite for the supreme Truth, the ultimate End of all spiritual beings). So holding fast to the objects of revelation under the formal aspect of natural being would implicitly affirm that they belong to the natural order, hence, would fail to understand them correctly. In simpler terms, affirming the truths of faith without having been influenced by heavenly delight would amount to accepting these truths in a sense that is not the sense in which God utters them. 32

In conclusion, then, just as we need eyes for seeing, and need that natural sympathy for total being which is called intelligence for perceiving things under the aspect of being, so for believing we must have that spiritual sympathy for the object of our belief which is called the supernatural grace of faith.

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After all these abstract discussions, permit me briefly to draw attention to the stories and sayings of the Gospel. True, speculative theology is not biblical theology, and we cannot hope to pack into a few paragraphs a complete idea of how faith is conceived of in the Synoptics or in St. John. It is only proper, nonetheless, to invite the reader to relive the global impression about faith that studying the Gospels left him with: that way he may judge for himself which of the conflicting theories seems to offer

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him the most exact interpretation of those normative realities. That is why it will not be out of place here to recall briefly a few sayings and incidents already known to all.

Is it an exaggeration to say that nowhere in the evangelists do we find any hint of anyone's perceiving truth or credibility by natural powers alone, so that some subsequent free act would then transform that perception into a supernatural adhesion? Consider the theory of faith that is clearly incorporated in the Fourth Gospel as well as in all the concordant indications we can glean from the Synoptics. They would appear to boil down to these three ideas: the earthly life of Jesus Christ is God's revelation to men; through the bodily senses, both good and wicked alike are equally able to perceive Christ's words and deeds; but the understanding of those words and deeds, the knowledge that pierces through flesh to spirit, the discovery of the Son of God in the Son of Man, this is not granted to all, it is the prerogative of those having good will. Men of good will are those who do the will of the heavenly Father or, what amounts to the same thing, those whom the Father "draws" to give to His Son. Freedom is emphasized more by the Synoptics; gratuitousness, by St. John.

When, in the Gospel, someone does not believe, it is because he does not see (that he should believe). In the presence of a miraculous fact two attitudes are mentioned: either the person believes with the salutary faith Jesus praised (hence with supernatural faith), or the person remains "without understanding." That means: having witnessed a miraculous phenomenon, the person fails to interpret it as a clue to Christ's divine mission. After the multiplication of the loaves and Christ's walking on the water, "the disciples were more and more amazed, for they had not understood the fact of the

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loaves, but their heart was hardened" [Mk 6:52]. That is why they are asked: "Do you not see? Do you not understand? Is your heart hardened? . . . Do you not understand" [Mk 8:17, 21]? The state of mind Christ reproaches is not that of someone who has understood the miracle as a clue to divine power at work, and refuses to submit his will, but that of someone who has witnessed an astonishing occurrence, merely registers the raw fact, and fails to take a loftier view of it. What such a person lacks is what we called, in technical language, perception of the clue, synthesis, and assent. 33 Such persons are reproached for a failure of intelligence.

For, in the Gospel, when anyone fails to see, his not seeing is culpable. The inability to understand the miracle is tantamount to a "hardening of the heart." "They will not believe even if someone rises from the dead," we read in St. Luke [16:31]. And in St. John [12:37]: ''Though He had worked so many signs in their presence, they did not believe in Him." That condition of material vision and spiritual blindness both John and the Synoptics attribute to the hardening predicted by Isaiah, i.e., to what we would term in theological language a lack of grace: "This is why they could not believe, because, as Isaiah said, `He has blinded their eyes, and hardened their hearts,'" etc. [Jn 12:40; cf. Mt 13:14, Mk 4:12, Lk 8:10]. Again, we read in the Fourth Gospel: "I have spoken to you and you do not believe. The works that I do in the name of my Father bear witness concerning me. But you do not believe because you are not of my sheep. My sheep hear my voice" [Jn 10:25-27]. This last text, as is well known, is one of the passages referred to by those who talk about "Johannine determinism"; however exaggerated this theory may be, no one can deny, and a Catholic should be the first to admit, that, according to John, a difference exists between the sons of the devil

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and those who are born of God, a difference that may be called physical. It is what we refer to as sonship, divine adoption; it is a new nature, sanctifying grace, that causes us to believe, i.e., to see signs of the supernatural in the visible world.

Finally, according to the Gospel, a trifle should be enough to make us see, and, what amounts to the same thing, to make us believe. That is the Scriptural basis for what we said earlier: 34 that the livelier God's love is in a soul, the more some slight clue suffices for that soul to discern the truth. In St. Matthew and in St. John those who look for miracles are blamed,35 not because miracles are not a proof of Christ's mission, but because humans could, if better disposed, recognize Him from slighter and subtler clues. The "signs of the times'' [Mt 16:3; cf. Lk 12:56] are clues of this sort, and so is Jesus' very teaching. He calls attention to His miracles when His teaching fails to persuade them [Jn 14:11]. It is enough for the pure to act purely, for them to know that Christ speaks the truth.36

The fault of the Jews, then, appears to consist in this: though spectators of Christ's human life, they were unwilling to see that He was the Son of God. If Jesus had not come in the flesh, if they had not enjoyed that wondrous sight, "they would not have sinned" [Jn 15:22; cf. 9:39-41 with 12:40]. Those who are enlightened, on the contrary, those who believe, who do not stop short at the fleshly vision, come to acknowledge the Son of God. As St. John puts it, when contemplating Him, they contemplate the one who sent Him; when seeing Him, they see the Father [Jn 12:45, 14:9]. Why do they see? Because they have received a new understanding from above: "He has given us understanding." It seems clear that believing is impossible without this heaven-sent faculty. "They could not believe," says the Evangelist very simply

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[Jn 12:39]. St. Paul will echo him on this point. 37 But space does not permit our even skimming the surface of that great Apostle's theory of faith. Yet if we could, how well it would confirm what we have said, from the famous passage about the "veil" that covers the heart of the Jews [2 Cor. 3] to that divinely accurate saying about those who are lost "because they have not welcomed the love of truth'' [2 Thess. 2:10]!

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So deeply is the conception of a purely rational faith rooted in us that even those who may find the doctrine outlined in these pages appealing, and who would be relieved at unburdening our theology of a notion that scarcely agrees with reason and experience, may still have some misgivings or difficulties. Let me finish, accordingly, by forestalling several objections.

We hope that nobody will reproach us with having said that natural reason is unable to perceive with certitude the proofs of faith as though that came down to saying that there are no proofs for the faith. We have sufficiently insisted on the role of the external clues. The Church does not lack for signs. Rather than suffer from a scarcity of signs, she abounds in them. Everything in the world is a proof for the Church. What is lacking are intelligences able to grasp them. And here we may cite once more what St. Augustine said of a Gospel passage: Nihil igitur vacat, omnia innuunt, sed intellectorem requirunt ["So nothing is meaningless. All things whisper suggestions. But what they require is someone to understand them"].38

But, someone might object, out of a praiseworthy desire for clarity, by coming up with an extreme case: let us suppose that some prophet brings a dead person back to

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life in order to demonstrate that his claims are divinely guaranteed. Will not his onlookers' intelligences be convinced, and naturally so, that they are faced by an attestation coming from the infallible God? 39 The example is clear and quite apt to shed light on what separates us from those theologians whom we have felt free to contradict. We do not need to appeal, as many have shrewdly done,40 to the countless reasons for doubt that human laziness and levity might pile up in such a case. We have located our motive for denying the possibility of legitimate assent in the supernatural character of the truth announced. But nothing is wanting to ground the assent, neither understanding of the terms nor certainty of their connection! What is wanting is a subject capable of seeing, a faculty capable of performing the synthesis. And so, everything is wanting. The synthesis cannot be reduced to the synthesized elements. Whither can the baffled spirit turn when confronted with the miracle our objector has hypothesized? Will he doubt about the facts, or take refuge in ordinary humdrum experience in preference to this exceptional and stimulating phenomenon? Will he rashly affirm a truth that does not seem to make sense? I do not know, and it hardly matters. But one path is blocked: he cannot make a legitimate affirmation.

Finally we should note that the need for some special and gratuitous help for the perception in question arises from the potential state of man in his earthly trials, of man "under way." Daemones credunt et contremiscunt ["The demons believe and they tremble"]! The knowledge of a spiritual being who has reached his goal and is directly aware of his relation to the ultimate End should not be envisaged as "free" in the way we are free, but as suffused with affection. The angels and blessed see God in proportion to their love for Him;41 the demon believes^42 insofar as, his nature tending totally toward

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God, he experiences his total person as rejected by Him. The supernatural penetrates him through and through, but he experiences it, as someone has put it, as a void [en creux]. In this way even the problem of the "faith of the demons," which can seem so archaic and strange, helps to point up the difference between the two conceptions of knowledge that inexorably clash throughout the treatise on Faith. For some, our intelligence gathers up intelligible replicas of things, and these representations are not intrinsically modified by the total dynamism of the subject. For others, what is most knowing in knowledge depends essentially on the relation of the subject to his ultimate End.

Notes

1. Vatican Council, De fide, Canon 5, in Denzinger, Enchiridion, no. 1814.

2. I borrow these words, which I use to characterize what I call the voluntarist explanation, from the work of Abbé J. Martin on Clement of Alexandria, in L'Apologétique traditionnelle I, p. 69. Later on, we will have to quote more expressions, remarkably apt and accurate, of the same author, that encourage us not to take in their rigorous Scholastic sense the formulas we took over above. In his text, moreover, they do not display this brutal nudity (the italicizing of first and afterward is mine). In his three volumes J. Martin has clearly pointed out the necessity of a good voluntary disposition in order to see the proofs of the faith. Nowhere do I see him speak of a reciprocal priority between light and good will, but the affirmation of this reciprocity seems to me to be the natural complement of his doctrine.

3. It is practically the same to say "Start by believing, and the light will come" as to say "Act as if you had the faith, and you will end up believing." If there is a difference, it consists in this, that in the first case one wants directly to coerce the intelligence, whereas in the second case, one wishes to seduce and bribe it. One wins over the automaton, the machine, in the hope that reason will follow the movement. But in fact in either case one substitutes an unruly natural activity for grace. True, it is impossible to recommend too strongly to those seeking faith to obey their conscience in everything, to do

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whatever seems good to them, whatever seems the better course; we may even advise them to perform specifically Christian practices, insofar as they help to overcome the resistance of the flesh and of pride. (Thus penance, thus confession of sins. "The Credo is often reached through the Confiteor.") However, trying to extract an act of faith out of one who does not yet see is a lack of the reverence due to the soul and of the reverence due to God of the reverence due to the soul, because intellectual probity is a serious duty, especially in matters of such importance; of the reverence due to God: no more than we have the right to give Christ's body to a positivist who would wish to show his sympathy for the Catholic Church through the "gesture" we call communion do we have the right to hand over (so far as it is in our power) supernatural truths through purely natural and mechanical means to those to whom God, whose mercy remains forever free, has not yet granted the grace of seeing the truth. Now, trying to arouse faith by means of a material and inferior habituation amounts basically to the system of "holy water" (I do not mean it here in the sense which this quip had for Pascal, who understood clearly that we must ''make our two components believe"). The danger that we point out here is perhaps not altogether imaginary, and it is possible that a few "practical" men, full of robust scorn for the abstractions of theoreticians, have at times forgotten too much that faith is first and foremost a grace, that one does not evoke it by playing at Catholicism, that one does not force the Holy Spirit. Let us not exaggerate, however, but proceed with extreme delicacy, remembering that the divine attraction may make itself felt even through what is most human in worship and in the Church.

4. De virtutibus in communi, a. 7. Theologians commonly admit that it is not enough, for faith to be free, that man have the power of positing the act or of not positing it. Such a freedom exists also in the case of knowledge. And it is precisely from scientific knowledge that the Council, by condemning the Hermesian theories of necessitating proofs, wanted to distinguish faith. Hence, in the present instance, freedom of "specification" must be added to freedom of "exercise."

5. Denzinger, Enchiridion, no. 737. The theologians in question have seen the difficulty quite clearly and have tried to solve it by means of several attempted explanations which we have no room to discuss in detail. Let me only mention the three main types. Some of them (especially those who conceive of the act of faith according to the model of a syllogism) admit that the evident knowledge of the fact of divine revelation would suppress the freedom of faith. So a free faith requires what they call inevidentia attestantis ["the

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non-evidence of the one who witnesses"]. If the Virgin Mary and the apostles had the evidence that what they were believing was the word of God, they did not believe with the free faith the Councils are talking about. This bizarre consequence might suffice to render the explanation questionable.

Others claim that if a person assents with certainty Credibile est ["This is believable"] or Credendum est ["I must believe"], the further assent Verum est ["It is true"], hence the Credo [''I do believe"], still remains absolutely free. So they must make of the judgment of credibility an obligatory and distinct stage of the origin of faith and say that fully affirmable does not imply fully true.

A third group explicitly admits that natural reason can, by its power alone and through a necessary demonstration, succeed in demonstrating the credibility, hence also the truth, of the dogmas taught by the Church; but for them the freedom of faith remains intact since, as they put it, faith consists in affirming these dogmas not because one sees their truth, but because one wishes to pay homage to God. This system can avoid the objections raised against the two others, but its upholders are obliged to introduce a distinction in the proposition condemned by Innocent VIII. They admit that this proposition may be held when one means the natural and scientific assent to the revealed truths; it would be false and condemned only if one means: to believe out of obedience.

6. When we read the authors' explanations, we generally get the impression that they intend to speak of a priority that is both real and chronological. But it would hardly be useful to affirm the chronological simultaneity if one maintained the causal and exclusive priority of one of the two elements.

7. Even as some people, on choosing to become, e.g., soldiers or tradesmen, implicitly accept, after some training, to regard things from the special point of view of the soldier or of the tradesman, so the fact of making such and such a weighty decision, or of interiorly ratifying a violent passion, may really be identical with accepting new principles, new ideas, new eyes.

8. This does not necessarily refer to the love of charity, for it is a point of defined dogma that faith may be "unformed," i.e., unaccompanied by sanctifying grace and charity (Denzinger, Enchiridion, nos. 1791, 1814). Cf. St. Thomas, De veritate, q. 14, a. 2, ad 10: "The will determines the intellect to assent to that which is of faith. But that will is neither an act of charity nor an act of hope, but some appetite of a promised good"; 2a 2ae, q. 5, a. 2, ad 2: "Faith, which is

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a gift of grace, inclines man to believe according to some attachment to a good, even if it is unformed." One might hold that faith is never unformed in its acquisition, that the love of charity always accompanies the first act of faith. At any rate, as we have already said above (pp. 31-32), there is no need of explaining the first act of faith differently from the following ones.

9. J. Martin speaks very well of the grace of faith when he calls it "the grace of transforming one's own vision and of finally discerning one's errors" (L'Apologétique traditionnelle II, p. 3: and again ibid., p. 102: "If they accepted that, the faculty of judging well would reside in them").

10. "Should anyone say that divine revelation cannot become believable through external signs . . . let him be anathema" (Vatican Council, De fide, Canon 3, in Denzinger, Enchiridion, no. 1812). The main endeavor of contemporary theology in the treatise on Faith an endeavor that is well justified by the many voluntarist and sentimentalist errors has revolved around the doctrine defined in this canon. Absorbed in the reasonableness of faith, the Scholastic thinkers of our time have unfortunately studied it apart from its freedom and have allowed others to develop the very rich (and very Thomistic) theory of the reciprocal priority of causes. (If Mr. Le Roy had only written about faith pages similar to those in which this point is touched [Dogme et critique, 2nd ed., pp. 327-32], he would not have deserved so much justified criticism, and we would be greatly indebted to him for having expounded in such a brilliant, suggestive, and modern way a theory that is basically less new than he may imagine). The most recent Thomistic exposition of the reciprocal priority in the free act is to my knowledge that of Father Garrigou-Lagrange, O.P., in Intellectualisme et liberté chez saint Thomas (Kain, 1910). The question of faith is mentioned on p. 42.

11. St. Thomas has given us this remarkable description of the act of faith: "It may happen that the will determines the intelligence and chooses as an object of adherence such and such a judgment clearly and precisely for a motive of the voluntary, not of the intellectual, order, to wit, the goodness, the appropriateness, of such an adherence. That is what happens in belief when, for instance, somebody believes another person because he finds it seemly or useful to do so. We (Christians) also are inclined to believe the Word because we are promised the reward of eternal life if we believe; it is this reward that induces the will to believe, in the absence of every intellectual motive" (De veritate, q. 14, a. 1). Many have wished to see in this

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passage a description of the essential schema of the acts of faith, of the schema that explains even the acquisition of faith, and it is this text that some rely on for their theory of a "command" of the will, understood in the sense of an extrinsic motion and, as someone put it, of a "coup d'état." But a very simple objection arises spontaneously: Is this eternal life, whose attraction draws the soul, known beforehand as real, or is it not? If it is, one has opted already (before the first act of faith) for the fact of the divine attestation, in which case there is no more need of a coup d'état, and we may say that freedom has vanished. If it is not, we must admit a reciprocal priority, or the adherence is unreasonable. (Just as Pascal was told that his system of the wager would demonstrate the religion that would have invented the most dreadful hell, one might tell our theologian that his reasoning concludes in favor of the religion that hits upon the most enticing colors for depicting its heaven.) But we cannot return to reciprocal priority without having assigned a role in the act of faith to that sign, that clue, which the light of faith illuminates to help us see ea quae sunt fidei esse credenda ["that which is of faith must be believed"]. It seems to me that in the above text St. Thomas was merely thinking of the case of the adhering to a particular dogma by one who is already firm in his decision to remain a Catholic. See below, note 24.

12. I have tried to explain this concept in an article of the Revue de Philosophie (March 1, 1910) entitled "Amour spirituel et synthèse aperceptive."

13. We use here as synonymous, in the spirit of Scholastic language, the terms speculative judgment and absolute judgment. But I do not wish to deny that within every practical judgment an absolute judgment is really implied.

14. It is exactly the same to say that God is the First Truth as to say that He is the ultimate End of spiritual beings. And it is this identity (be it noted in passing) which shows that in explaining the act of faith it is not enough to hold the theory of faith of homage or of mere authority (as distinguished from scientific faith) defended by Father Billot and expounded with great skill in French by Mr. Bainvel. After the Vatican Council we can no longer, as William of Auvergne once did, explicitly exclude from the oboeditio fidei ["the obedience of faith"] the idea of divine veracity. (He said that we must believe God "gratuitously and obediently, and not because He is truthful, or because it is true that He Himself speaks. In this way one would believe anybody" (De fide, c. 1, ed. of 1674, vol. I, p. 7). Notice the contradiction between this conception of the act of faith and the formula of the catechism: "Because You are the truth itself," etc.). But

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to my mind a distinction between the authority of the one who witnesses and the veracity of the testimony (see Billot, De virtutibus infusis I, p. 214n2) does not apply when we are speaking of a homage demanded from intellectual beings. For us the only adorable Person is the infallible Essence. Nevertheless the theory of the faith of homage seems to me a great step forward when compared with the theory of syllogistic faith. But I believe that it needs further development so that it integrates the very perception of credibility within homage.

15. See 2a 2ae, q. 1, a. 4, ad 3: q. 2, a. 3, ad 2; and De veritate, q. 14, a. 10, ad 10. Cajetan rightly notes about the first of these passages: "The author speaks of seeing that which is of faith, under the common aspect of credibility. . . . That he really means this becomes clear from what is said in the following article, in the response to Objection 1: Through the light of faith they are seen as what should be believed, as was said, which is undoubtedly right here."

16. See P. Rousselot, L'Intellectualisme de saint Thomas, p. 74 [The Intellectualism of St. Thomas, p. 78].

17. See what Mr. Bergson says in Essai sur les données immédiates de la conscience, p. 96 [Time and Free Will, pp. 70-71] about qualitative perceptions immanent in the very knowledge of quantity.

18. However, if an intellectual faculty is the subject of sympathetic knowledge, the very word of this knowledge will be the expression of charm and delight (or, on the contrary, of repugnance); it will be a word of love.

19. St. Thomas seems at times to attribute such a power of experiential discernment to common faith: "For just as through other habits of virtues man sees that which suits him according to this habit, so also through the habit of faith the human mind is inclined to give its assent to the objects which agree with the true faith, and not to others" (2a 2ae, q. 1, a. 4, ad 3). Taken out of context (see above, note 15) and understood in an absolute and universal sense, this affirmation leads to the theory of the discerniculum experimentale ["experimental discernment"] defended by Antoine Perez and Pallavicini, and squarely contradicted by experience. (One may find an exact summary of it, with the reasons why it is generally rejected, in Schiffini, De virtutibus infusis, no. 148). What is universally true in St. Thomas' assertion is that the habit of faith inclines ad assentiendum ["to assent"]; such is formally its role, as we are trying to explain in the text. As Silvester of Ferrara puts it very exactly, the infused habit is ''that by which man firmly adheres and assents to the things that are proposed to be believed, and by which the intellect is illuminated so as to know that they have to be believed" (In Contra

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gentiles III 40). But the knowledge of this "credendity" is absolutely identical with the adhering, is the adhering itself, even as, in natural knowledge, certain practical knowledge of affirmability is precisely the assent. As for an inclination that is no longer formally ad assentiendum ["to assent"], but, ad discernendum num haec vel haec conveniant rectae fidei ["to discerning whether this or that agrees with genuine faith''], the response of St. Thomas calls for the following remarks: (1) This inclination is not experienced by everyone. As is the case with other virtues that give rise to such kinds of knowledge, this requires that the virtue be possessed at such a level of intensity that it has already penetrated one's natural inclinations. (2) This felt inclination seems to belong to the order of graces gratis datae ["gratuitously given"]. So one cannot conclude from its absence in some and its presence in others to a higher degree of charity in the latter: when St. Bernard denied the Immaculate Conception, he may well not have been inferior in charity to an immaculist, even should the latter have felt, through some inner instincts of grace, the goodness of the cause he was defending. (3) Although the experiencing of such instincts is a grace, the subject's disposition cooperates with it. A convert from Protestantism at times keeps in his mind some biases that make him lean to the side opposed to orthodoxy. It happens that a rather lukewarm religious, but one who has been raised in a thoroughly Christian milieu, possesses a "Catholic sense" that is more reliable and more delicate than another's who is very humble and very fervent, but who was converted late in life, etc.

20. Permit me to refer, for what has been said in this paragraph, to the article mentioned in note 12 above, and also to "L'Etre et l'Esprit," in the Revue de philosophie, June 1, 1910.

21. Knowledge is ideal and perfect when, to the full light of consciousness, appear not only the perceived knowledge, but also the perceptive knowledge, and the basic sympathy that unites the subject to the object. Such a perception is lacking in the evidence deriving from the conceptual category of the ens concretum quidditati sensibili ["concrete essence of a sensible being"]. That is why the evidence of a scientific demonstration does not satisfy the mind fully but only provisionally (cf. St. Thomas, Contra gentiles III 39).

22. See above, pp. 27-28, 29-30.

23. It seems as if in the first act of faith (I am not speaking of the first external and oral expression) the supernatural truth (that Jesus is Lord, that the Church speaks for God . . .) is directly affirmed. This truth is believed, and the "credendity" is seen, but seen as the "I

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think" is seen in a natural intellection. The "credendity" is a condition of the representation (ratio sub qua ["formality under which"]). As the soul that awakens to an intellectual life does not explicitly say Cogito ["I think"], or Video [''I see"], Fidendum intellectui ["I must trust the intellect"], so the soul that awakens to the life of faith does not explicitly say Credo ["I believe"], or Deux dixit ["God has said"], or Credendum est ["I must believe"]. But in both cases the three affirmations are really and implicitly contained in the assertion that refers directly to being. The act of thinking and the act of believing, apperception and divine attestation, "goodness of the reason" and "credendity" are affirmed exercite ["implictly"]. Afterward reflection can extract them and even build a series of logically connected arguments leading to the affirmation of the truth of faith. But the rational process represented by this chain of arguments unveils only one of the aspects of the act. As an affirmative synthesis, the total and real act requires a new love and new eyes. Of this newness there is no trace in the rational process. Many explanations of the act of faith, misled by a typical Cartesian illusion, transform into a distinctly and previously thought judgment what is in reality a condition of the act.

24. We have tried to explain the universal assent of Catholic faith on account of which one says: "O my God, I believe whatever You have revealed," or, more simply, "I believe. I am a Christian." This act is the encounter of infused faith with the confession of a specific religion. This is the crucial point at which we wanted to tackle the problem of faith (see pp. 21-22). It is much easier to explain how a man who wants to remain a Catholic believes a specific dogma, for instance, pontifical infallibility. What makes him will it is the desire for eternal life already known. Here the analysis by St. Thomas mentioned above (in note 11) applies without difficulty. It is clear that the will of saving his soul by remaining in the Church prescribes to him the specification of his assent. Knowingly to give his assent to the contradictory proposition would mean to lose both the life of grace and the habit of faith (2a 2ae, q. 5, a. 3). Yet the act is perfectly free, because the man is free to will to remain a Catholic or not.

25. After having mentioned the agnostic error which claims that we cannot recognize God in the world and in history, the encyclical Pascendi adds: "This being so, everybody can easily see what happens to . . . the motives of credibility. The Modernists reject them completely and relegate them to intellectualism, which they call a ridiculous system that died long ago" (Denzinger, Enchiridion, no. 2072).

26. In the Roman Breviary for July 31 we read in the Fourth Lesson that St. Ignatius of Loyola used to say: "If Holy Scripture did not

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exist, he would be willing to die for the faith solely on account of what the Lord had shown him at Manresa." For saints, however, the proof deriving from a "voice coming from heaven" never does away with the proof from the "surer word of prophecy" (cf. 2 Pet. 1:18-19).

27. This means that in our explanation there is no room for what is generally meant by "respective certitudes," which would do for an unlearned person, but not for a learned one, and which would not be sufficient "in themselves." Anyone who took in the entire psychological context of the unlearned person who really has faith would eo ipso possess reasons for believing that are legitimate and valid for everyone. The pastor's reasons may be more communicable than those of the uneducated peasant (charbonnier), but the more reasonable assent, in the full meaning of the word, is that of the one a higher infused light illuminates (cf. Silvester of Ferrara quoted in note 19). In evaluating the intellectuality of an act, the quality of the spiritual light matters more than the nature of the illuminated objects.

28. If we explain to someone who already possesses the faith proofs that he does not yet know, it will be enough, if he is to be able to perceive them as proofs, that they be adequately proposed to him. If we explain them to someone who does not have the faith, he must also receive from above the pious will to believe. As for the individual reasons, they do not work for everyone, not because they are not capable of being illuminated by the light of grace, but because they cannot be sufficiently proposed. What is lacking here, then, is the presentation of the object.

29. "Do you think, men, that we would have been able to comprehend these things in the Scriptures if we had not received grace to understand by the will of Him who willed these things" [Justin, Dialogue with Tryphon, no. 119]?

30. We do not say that there cannot be a certain and legitimate act of faith without sanctifying grace. This would be heretical (Denzinger, Enchiridion, no. 1791). Nor do we say that there can be, without grace even actual grace no act of holding fast to the Catholic doctrine that would be subjectively but illegitimately certain. This might not agree well with experience. Millions of people adhere with absolute subjective firmness to false religions, to Islam, for instance, and I do not see that, despite the loftiness and difficulty of our mysteries, we have to say that our religion seems more improbable to natural reason than these others. If this case occurs, it is one of that "acquired faith" which is, to speak like St. Thomas, a simple opinion, "an opinion bolstered by some reasons" (Prolog. sent., a. 3. sol. 3).

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31. It should be clearly understood that we are speaking here, not of the reflex knowledge of supernatural being as such (which is a technical notion), but of the spontaneous knowledge of it (tanquam rationis sub qua ["as of the aspect under which"]). This corresponds in natural intellection, not to the idea of being that philosophers ponder, but to the one that all men employ, whether or not they are capable of learned abstraction.

32. The Scholastic question of the "formal object" of the supernatural virtues is one of those controversies that we might be tempted to leave alone as too subtle and devoid of real interest. Yet in fact it presents in strictly technical terms the capital problem of the knowledge of faith and vividly underscores its central point. I believe that we must say about the formal object of faith that, if we consider precisely the representation as such, there is not per se any difference between the notions that an unbeliever and a believer have of our mysteries, but that, if we consider the representation with the assent, the supernatural faculty defines a new formal object. Now, in those who possess the virtue of faith, provided there be a sufficient presentation, the representation does not occur without the assent.

33. See above, pp. 27ff.

34. See above, pp. 34-36.

35. Mt 12:39: "A wicked and adulterous generation seeks a sign . . ."; cf. 16:4 and Mk 8:12. Jn 4:48: "Unless you see signs and wonders, you will not believe."

36. Lk 12:57: "And why do you not judge for yourselves what is just?" Jn 7:17: "If anyone wishes to do His will, he will know about the teaching."

37. 1 Co 2:14, 16: "The unspiritual man . . . is not able to understand. . . . But we have the mind of Christ."

38. In Joannem 24 6 (PL XXXV, 1595); cf. In Joannem 18 11 (ibid., 1543). To show that the demonstration must be possible through our natural lights alone, it is not necessary to refer to the proposition Bautain was told to subscribe to: "Although reason has been rendered weak and obscure through Original Sin, there has remained in it enough light and power to lead us with certainty to the existence of God, to revelation . . ." (Denzinger, Enchiridion, no. 1627). We might reply a priori that, since the proscribed error is Traditionalism, the word reason is opposed here to tradition, not to the internal and subjective illumination of souls. Moreover, the positive documents back up this interpretation. The later declaration, that Bautain subscribed to in 1844 at the behest of the Sacred Congregation of Bishops and Religious, distinguishes natural truths, such

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as the existence of God, about which it states that we may know them "with our reason alone . . . with the lights of right reason alone," from the motives of credibility, about which it never uses a similar exclusive term (see ibid., note). Finally, the theses that Bonnetty subscribed to explicitly add: "The use of reason precedes faith and leads man to it by means of revelation and grace" (ibid., no. 1651).

39. Cf. Gardeil, La Crédibilité, pp. 73-96, and "Crédibilité," in Dictionnaire de théologie catholique, cols. 2215ff.

40. Lugo, De virtute fidei divinae, disp. II, sect. 1, nn. 22ff., 47, etc.; Hugueny, Revue Thomiste, May-June 1909; and others.

41. Cf. St. Thomas, I, q. 12, a. 6.

42. We are speaking here of the reason for the assent as such, not of the reason for knowing the different specific dogmas. On the latter point I do not see that there is anything to add to what St. Thomas says (2a 2ae, q. 5, a. 2). But the two questions are distinct, both in the present case and in the case discussed above (cf. pp. 58-59 and note 19).

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ANSWER TO TWO ATTACKS

INTRODUCTION

Avery Dulles, S.J.

Fordham University

Rousselot's article "The Eyes of Faith" was rightly perceived by the Neo-Scholastic theologians of the day as a major assault on their own method and doctrine, which they regarded as faithful to St. Thomas and the Thomistic tradition. One of the most serious critiques was written by the Abbe Hippolyte Ligeard, a specialist in the history of the treatises on faith and apologetics in the Middle Ages. 1 Appearing in the same journal that had published Rousselot's original article, Ligeard's critique confined itself to a single point: Did Thomas Aquinas in fact hold the doctrine that Rousselot attributed to him? Rejecting Rousselot's position that the light of faith is needed to manifest the value of the arguments of credibility, Ligeard accepted in substance the interpretation of St. Thomas that had already been proposed by Ambroise Gardeil, O.P.: namely, that the judgment of credibility precedes faith in time, and that it follows upon a sheerly rational inquiry, resulting in a naturally firm judgment of the divine origin of the Christian religion and of its dogmas.

Ligeard's critique of Rousselot may be summarized in the following three points:

1. Rousselot is correct in insisting that faith has a supernatural formal object. For St. Thomas the "eyes" of the believer must be supernaturalized by grace in order for adherence to supernatural truth to be possible. For St. Thomas, therefore, there can be no "natural" or "scientific" faith. This non-Thomistic thesis Ligeard attributes to Pierre Abelard (1079-1142) and Georg Hermes (1775-1831).

2. St. Thomas does, however, maintain that one can establish the credibility of the Christian religion by reason alone on the basis of the external signs. The credibility of the Christian dogmas is evident because the fact of their revelation is

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naturally knowable although the content of the Christian dogmas can be grasped only by faith. In exceptional cases, Ligeard admits, the interior touch of grace may render the credibility of Christianity evident without external signs; the supernatural light of faith can supply for the defect of proofs. But grace is not essential for the certainty of the fact of revelation, which can be known by a natural use of reason.

3. According to Thomas Aquinas the genesis of faith normally occurs in four stages:

(a) The message of the Gospel is proposed by words. The preachers of the Gospel authenticate their authority by miraculous signs, which Aquinas compares to the seal on a letter from a king.

(b) The hearer by a natural process of reasoning arrives at a naturally firm judgment of credibility.

(c) The supernatural light of faith manifests the truth as a participation of God's own truth and infallibility, and thus as calling for the supremely firm adherence of faith. By the light of grace we see our obligation to believe and thus arrive at the judgment of "credentity."

(d) Under the influence of the will, which is drawn by the value of believing, the intellect proffers the assent of faith itself.

To summarize Ligeard's position: Rousselot is at one with Thomas Aquinas in holding that the light of faith is needed for the judgment of credentity ("I must believe") and for the act of faith ("I do believe"), but St. Thomas unlike Rousselot does not hold that grace is needed for a certain demonstration of credibility ("it would be reasonable to believe"). Against Rousselot, Ligeard insists on a process involving three stages: first, a natural judgment of credibility; then, a supernatural judgment of credentity; and, finally, the supernatural assent of faith itself.

Rousselot prepared a response to Ligeard, to be printed in the same issue as Ligeard's critique; but as he was completing it, a fascicle containing an early installment of the article on "Faith" for the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique appeared in print. 2 Here Rousselot found his positions impugned by his

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former professor in the Jesuit scholasticate at Hastings, Stéphane Harent. Some fifteen columns of this lengthy article were thematically devoted to Rousselot, under the subheading "System that includes the preparation for faith in faith itself, under the influence of the infused virtue." 3 Rousselot is also mentioned in passing at several other points in the article. Like Ligeard, Harent found a few points he could approve in Rousselot; for instance:

1. Rousselot correctly rejected the idea that the believer could perceive within himself the presence of grace inclining him to believe, and thereby distinguish what was revealed from what was not.4 This concept of a discerniculum experimentale ("experiential detector") had been developed by some seventeenth-century Jesuit theologians (A. Perez, Cardinal Pietro Sforza Pallavicino, and Martin d'Esparza Artieda) on the basis of a misinterpretation of several texts in St. Thomas.

2. Rousselot was within his rights in rejecting the thesis that there could be two kinds of faith, natural and infused, both having the same object.5 The idea of fides acquisita ("naturally acquired faith"), which Duns Scotus had admitted as a prerequisite of fides infusa ("supernaturally infused faith"), was critized by Juan de Lugo in the seventeenth century.

3. Rousselot was correct in insisting that the influence of grace on the perception of credibility does not necessarily negate the value of reason in the approach to faith.6 Grace need not be seen as taking the place of the logic of the proofs, but may be seen as illuminating that very logic.

Immediately after his summary of Rousselot's system Harent proposes six specific objections, lettered (a) to (f),7 which may now be paraphrased:

(a) The knowledge of credibility cannot be the same as the knowledge of faith, for credibility is evident, whereas faith is obscure. Rousselot errs in apparently identifying the two judgments.

(b) In rejecting the existence of any judgment of credibility prior to faith, Rousselot sets himself against a long tradition going back to Augustine, who asserted, "No one believes

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anything without first perceiving that it ought to be believed." 8 Thomas Aquinas repeated this thesis. In modern times it had been constantly held for centuries by all the theological schools, and was authoritatively taught by Pope Pius IX.9

(c) The Church is a sign of credibility not simply for believers (as Rousselot holds) but also for those who do not yet believe.10 In perceiving the Church as a miraculous reality, I could achieve certitude that the Church had a divinely accredited mission, but I would not yet be a believer, because I would not yet know that the Church was commissioned to preserve and interpret divine revelation.

(d) We first receive the gift or virtue of faith (habitus fidei), according to the more probable opinion, only when we come to justification. The perception of credibility, however, occurs when we dispose ourselves for faith and justification, and thus before the infusion of the virtue.11

(e) Even the judgment of credentity (the perception of a personal obligation to believe) precedes faith; otherwise there would be no possibility of a sin of formal infidelity. To sin formally against faith I must both perceive that I ought to believe and at the same time refuse to believe. In Rousselot's system this is impossible since one cannot perceive the credibility or credentity of the Christian religion without already being a believer.12

(f) Rousselot depreciates the value of apologetical arguments because he asserts that they cannot be convincing except to believers. If unbelievers had a different apparatus of knowing, it would be pointless to propose the evidence of credibility to them. Besides, Rousselot wrongly maintains that even feeble arguments are made sufficient by the light of grace. If this were true, what would be the value of the "very certain signs" described by Vatican Council I?13

At other points in his article Harent made several further criticisms which should be mentioned here because Rousselot alludes to them in his response.

1. Rousselot, according to Harent, misconstrues the teaching of Thomas Aquinas on the role of the will in faith.14 For

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St. Thomas the will has the power to intervene and to command assent when intrinsic evidence is lacking. When he portrays the intellect as loving and the will as giving intelligibility, Rousselot confuses the roles of will and intellect. He takes over from the pragmatists the false thesis that knowledge always depends on desire or appetite.

2. Rousselot's theory that the perception of supernatural truth and the devout inclination to believe (pius affectus credendi) reciprocally cause each other involves a vicious circle. 15 For him, we see the credibility because we want to believe and we want to believe because we see the credibility. This theory undermines the real force of the evidence of credibility.

3. Rousselot refers vaguely to some kind of community of nature as a prerequisite for knowing God.16 If this were needed, we could have no natural knowledge of God, for God is not in the same species or genus as any creature. Rousselot fails to recognize that in knowing we do not produce the object by our own powers, but submit passively to an object that exists independently of us. Thus we are naturally capable of knowing things immeasurably superior to us, including the divine and the supernatural, provided they are manifested to us.

4. No Catholic denies that grace is required to believe in a manner conducive to salvation. The teaching of the Second Council of Orange on this point is uncontestable.17 But it does not follow that grace is needed to perceive the credibility of the Christian religion. Indeed, those who maintain the possibility of a purely natural act of faith an act that would not be salutary do not contradict official Catholic teaching.

5. If Thomas Aquinas believed, as Rousselot contends, that only a supernaturalized faculty could grasp the fact of revelation, he could not take the position he does on the faith of demons.18 The demons believe, according to St. Thomas, because they perceive the evidence of credibility by their unaided intellect. This case undermines Rousselot's "metaphysical principle" that only a supernaturally elevated faculty is capable of knowing revelation.

6. As Rousselot recognizes, St. Thomas spoke rather obscurely, even hesitantly, about the natural or supernatural

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character of the judgment of credibility. Rousselot seeks to develop St. Thomas' thought on this matter by appeals to Kant's aesthetics and to pragmatism. It would be more prudent to rely on the great theologians who have sought to clarify the thought of St. Thomas in the light of new definitions of the Church. 19

The articles of Ligeard and Harent give a fairly representative sampling of the objections made to Rousselot by the Neo-Scholastic theologians of the day. In responding to his critics Rousselot holds firmly to his thesis that the judgments of credibility and credentity can be elicited only under the influence of faith itself. He enters with alacrity into the fray, occasionally indulging in mockery and sarcasm. How adequately he replies to the objections raised is a point that may be left to the reader's own judgment.

Notes

1. "La crédibilité de la révélation d'après S. Thomas," Recherches de Science Religieuse, 5 (1914), 40-57.

2. S. Harent, "Foi," Dictionnaire de théologie catholique VI:1 (Paris: Letouzey, 1920), cols. 55-514.

3. Cols. 260-75.

4. Cols. 243-44. The seventeenth-century systems are expounded and criticized in cols. 245-54.

5. Cols. 271-73, referring to Rousselot's "Remarques sur l'histoire de la notion de foi naturelle," Recherches de Science Religieuse, 4 (1913) 1-36, esp. pp. 12 and 35.

6. Cols. 175-76, without mention of Rousselot by name.

7. Cols. 264-75.

8. De praedestinatione sanctorum 2:5 (PL XLIV 962), quoted by Harent, col. 187.

9. Pius IX, Encyclical Qui pluribus (DS 2780).

10. In this connection Harent quotes Vatican Council I's Constitution on Catholic Faith, Dei Filius, chap. 3 (DS 3014).

11. At this point Harent argues from the Council of Trent's Decree on Justification (DS 1526 and 1530).

12. Here Harent quotes from an unsigned article, "Rassegna teologica," in La Civiltà cattolica, 62, No. 3 (1911), 331.

13. Cf. Vatican I, Dei Filius, chap. 3 (DS 3009; cf. 3012 and 3013).

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14. Col. 262.

15. Col. 435; cf. 263.

16. Cols. 268-70.

17. Harent, following Cardinal Louis Billot, calls attention to the expression ''sicut oportet ad salutem consequendam" ("as is necessary to attain salvation") in Vatican I, Dei Filius, chap. 3 (DS 3010); cf. Council of Orange, canon 6 (DS 376). Harent, col. 271.

18. Col. 274, referring to Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae 2a 2ae, q. 5, a. 2.

19. Cols. 274-75.

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ANSWER TO TWO ATTACKS I

I have never denied the rational demonstration of credibility but only the possibility of perceiving this demonstration as convincing without a supernatural light, which is a very different matter. I am sorry that the neglect of this fundamental distinction makes a large part of Ligeard's critique miscarry.

I begin at the end so as to start with what brings us together. Ligeard recognizes that the theory of natural faith is foreign to St. Thomas, for whom "apart from infused faith there is no certain faith." This seems evident to him; he writes even "too evident."

On this point I observe only that this "too evident" truth is ignored by almost the whole chorus of modern theologians (I have cited a number from different schools in Recherches, 1910, p. 245, note 1 [see above, Part I, note 5]: almost all proclaim the possibility of natural faith and almost all think that this doctrine can be found in St. Thomas. Ligeard, in concluding, names once again Hermes and Abelard. Let us not say that he has dissimulated what the others say, since to dissimulate is "naughty"; let us say that he maintains a respectful silence in their regard. However that may be, when it comes to pass that all agree on the findings shared by Ligeard and myself, the theology of faith will have significantly changed, since the Angelic Doctor now enjoys such great authority.

This change will be all the greater because one cannot stop where Ligeard does. It will be quickly seen that St. Thomas, if he requires grace for the assent of faith, requires it also for the certain perception of the fact of revelation, or for the certain affirmation of credibility. 1

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Ligeard is obliged to admit that for St. Thomas reason unenlightened by grace can conclude with absolute certitude: Christian doctrine is credible, Christian doctrine is revealed by God, but that reason with its unaided power is incapable of deriving this other proposition: Christian doctrine is true. With merely natural reason one could assert: whatever God reveals is true. 2 One could also say: God has revealed Christian doctrine. But one could not complete the syllogism, and reason, which has surmounted so many obstacles just to arrive at credibility, would stumble helplessly at this last frail barrier! I am sure that if Ligeard had to expound his own theory of faith instead of having to describe that of St. Thomas he would not have ended with such an inconsistent and psychologically improbable position. What delight will his extrinsicist thesis arouse in circles where the Thomistic doctrine of faith already has such a good press, thanks to the genius of certain adversaries to paint caricatures!

What, then, is the reason for this position? It is the prejudice, unfortunately common among contemporary Scholastics, that makes them consider only the objectively known elements in knowledge and makes them neglect the synthetic activity of the intelligence, which St. Thomas calls "light." A large part of Ligeard's argumentation, as I see it, goes beside the point because he understands all the texts that speak of a real sufficiency of the reasons for believing as though they could convince an unhealed intelligence, for he seems to confuse true demonstration of credibility with the perceptibility of that demonstration independent of all supernatural light.3 This prejudice appears prominently in the main lines of his argument and betrays itself in a hundred details in his style.

For the main lines of the argument the reader may look at the passages from the Contra Gentes transcribed

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on page 47, keeping in mind my "Remarks" in Recherches, 1913, pp. 21-22: "Against these testimonies and reasonings," I asserted,

it is useless to bring up the passages in which St. Thomas proclaims the perfect rationality of Christian faith, the objective sufficiency of history and miracles to establish its basis. There is no shadow of opposition between all this and the absolute necessity of the light of grace: these signs of the supernatural world are, on the contrary, like colors capable of being illuminated by that light according to the general theory of the intellectual light and the formal object.

Ligeard's argument comes down to saying: there are colors, and so it is evident that eyes are not needed!

The same prejudice can be detected in details of Ligeard's style. "Nowhere," he writes on page 46, "Nowhere does one find that for St. Thomas the divine origin of the message can become certain for us only in a supernatural light. Quite to the contrary, for him it is proved by rational arguments." Would one then wish for tactile or olfactory arguments or arguments proportioned to an angelic intellect? And why would light be required for a rational animal except to clarify rational arguments? Review the following texts and wonder at the conclusion: "As is evident, the rational argument forms a single totality: it draws all its value from the rational elements that constitute it. Proof, it is said, gets all its value from the elements that constitute it!" How clearly one sees here the habit of considering only the material cause in intellection and of confusing the elements synthesized with the synthesis! How close this is to Taine and Condillac, and how far from St. Thomas! Let us note again another trace of the same fundamental error where we read: "If Jesus had not judged it appropriate to perform

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miracles, what other argument except a supernatural light could have testified to the divinity of His mission" (p. 50)? I hope Ligeard will pardon me if I insist: we are here at the heart of the subject. Besides, he himself takes pleasure in accumulating expressions to make the reader understand that he does not consider the supernatural light as informing the rational elements, as unifying them in uniting itself to them, but as supplying in addition to them supplementary information. "St. Thomas," he writes,

makes the action of supernatural graces intervene to supply for the defect of rational proofs. But the graces add nothing to their influence, to their value, to their certitude. They do not reinforce; they replace them in their absence. Thus one could not say that the certitude of the fact of revelation results from a supernatural light giving all their force to the rational arguments: the former appears only where the latter are not present [p. 50].

I thank Ligeard for these words and I ask the reader who is familiar with St. Thomas: Whether one accepts or rejects my thesis regarding the exclusive privilege of the light of grace to manifest credibility with certitude, must one not admit that according to the saint, this role is at least possible, even in the case of the most stringent proofs? Must one not admit that the terms of my opponent exclude this possibility and that the discussion has been conducted with an inexact notion of what St. Thomas understands by light? 4

But here comes what is perhaps most curious and most telling. Since Ligeard recognizes in the act of faith the action of the light of grace, he is obliged, in line with his principles, to suppose the presence of some extraordinary visum ["thing seen"]. "In the adherence of faith," he says, "the relation between God and the revealed truth

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appears to us by the light of grace; the link between the revealed proposition and the First Truth thus becomes evident in this supernatural light: the eyes of faith perceive it as an emanation of the First Truth participating in its absolute infallibility" (p. 49). And below: "The supernatural light . . . effects the synthesis between the knowing subject and the object known: to the eyes of faith are revealed the supernatural relations which unify the Christian dogma and God Himself, the source of all truth, and it is this vision which determines in our spirit the movement of adherence that constitutes the act of faith" (p. 56). Thus, before the act of faith, here comes a new vision, a totally supernatural one, which impels us to believe. The "rational elements," so powerful a little earlier, seem to have operated in vain. It may seem surprising to see the St. Thomas of Ligeard join illuminism to extrinsicism in this way, but in the end this outcome is very logical. If one cannot conceive that there are rational arguments whose truth can be made evident by the light of grace, then one cannot admit the idea of a light of grace that would not bring new objects and data into the psychological framework. Thus the novum lumen ["new light"] will inevitably be confused with a novum visum ["new object seen''].

But now if we move to the famous text of the 2a 2ae: per lumen fidei vident esse credenda ["by the light of faith they see that these things are to be believed"] [q. 1, a. 5, ad 1], which is the very expression of my thesis, things will change a little.

Ligeard refuses to understand this text, as I do, as referring to the judgment of credibility. On the other hand, he is too honest and too intelligent to reduce it to meaning simply: per lumen fidei videntur ea quae creduntur ("by the light of faith the things believed are seen"), especially because the text is found in an article in

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which St. Thomas is asking whether the object of faith can be scientifically known, and he replies in the negative. What then? Ligeard bravely introduces between the judgment of credibility and the act of faith a new act of the mind which is a perception, under a supernatural light, of the "moral obligation to adhere" to the fact of revelation. This is called, in Scholastic terms, a supernatural judgment of credentity. This new idea of Ligeard's pleases me for three reasons.

First, because Ligeard thereby admits, as I do, a perception prior to the act of faith, effected under the influence of the light of faith itself. Personally I understand this as logically prior because the light of faith could not act before existing. I hope that Ligeard himself understands it this way and that he is a sufficiently good disciple of St. Thomas to admit reciprocal causality without difficulty.

Secondly, because, having made this concession, Ligeard no longer needs to attribute to the light of faith a particular manifestation of "the supernatural relations that unite the Christian dogmas to God," a manifestation that is incomprehensible and illuministic unless it is simply the judgment of credibility. He has found a totally different object for the supernatural insight: credentity, moral obligation. He can in this way purge his system of all illuminism. 5

Thirdly, if I may be permitted to speak personally, because when I was seeking to understand the Thomistic doctrine of the act of faith, I myself passed through the stage which we have seen taken by Ligeard, and which many others have no doubt taken. But once the real identity and reciprocal logical priority of the judgment of credentity and the act of faith have been grasped, it is not hard to understand that the perception of the credendum ["that which ought to be believed"] and of the

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credibile ["that which is believable"] does not involve two distinct moments.

That St. Thomas so understood the matter will be concluded by the unprejudiced reader from an attentive study of the articles in question (2a 2ae, q. 1, aa. 4 and 5). The saint writes: "Sub communi ratione credibilis . . . sic sunt visa ab eo qui credit. Non enim crederet, nisi videret ea esse credenda vel propter evidentiam signorum vel propter aliquid huiusmodi." ["They are seen by the believer as satisfying the general criteria of credibility. For he would not believe unless he saw that they ought to be believed either because of the evidence of the signs or something similar."] And again: "Infidels are ignorant concerning matters of faith, for they neither see nor know them in themselves nor do they know that they are credible. But the faithful have knowledge of them in this way, not by demonstration, but insofar as they see that they are to be believed [credenda] through the light of faith, as has been said.'' St. Thomas speaks here of a supernatural perception of credibility (in which, moreover, the will intervenes, making them credenda). Unlike Ligeard, St. Thomas does not add a supernatural credentity to a natural credibility.

Under what influence did this last idea come to my adversary? The curious reader will easily find out because Ligeard gives rather ample testimony in his "brief notes." It has probably been noticed that to explain his steps in the historical investigation of the thought of St. Thomas, Ligeard makes a "preliminary observation" that he regards as indispensable. Now, this is nothing other than an echo of the well-known distinction that has dominated the controversy about the act of faith since the seventeenth century and that, beginning from what I take to be a false supposition, is precisely what hinders the correct understanding of the thirteenth-century

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author that St. Thomas was. It will also be noticed that, at the end of his study and as a final summary, Ligeard attributes to the saint one of the variant conceptions of the act of faith that distinguish the theologians of recent centuries i.e., that the proof of credibility leads not to the assertion "God has really said it," but rather to "it is legitimate and prudent to believe." It is well known how certain modern authors were obliged to explicate this prudential moment as a distinct judgment to save the freedom of faith which they no longer knew how to put in the perception itself. But it is striking how incompatible this is with the credenda propter evidentiam signorum of St. Thomas.

I notice that I have said nothing about the first text that Ligeard adduces, taken from the third book of the Sentences. It is the reply to the objection formulated as follows: "Faith comes from something within us; but what comes from within us is an acquired habit; hence faith is an acquired habit." St. Thomas replies by enumerating the elements of faith that are in us, i.e., in our power. Not surprisingly he makes no mention of the light of grace. For the other texts any reader not totally bored by this controversy may wish to refer to my articles.

Let us observe in concluding that Ligeard's first page does not give a very accurate idea of my position with regard to St. Thomas. 6 I said that he requires the light of grace for the certain perception of credibility, according to the statement per lumen fidei vident esse credenda. The historical question was not treated ex professo until my third article. For what I said about the temporal simultaneity between that perception and the confession of faith (a simultaneity explained in the first article), I was drawing a conclusion from the principles of St. Thomas; I was not claiming to expound his doctrine directly.

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II

Several months after having drafted my reply to Ligeard, I became aware of the fine article on "Faith" that Father Harent contributed to the Dictionnaire de théologie catholique. It is a monument of 264 columns and is as yet only at the peristyle. To speak less figuratively, the article is at its beginning, thus far representing only 742 duodecimo pages. I found in it to my pleasure those qualities of magisterial plenitude, serene benevolence, and breadth of spirit that I previously admired "sitting at the feet of Gamaliel." It is a remarkable summary of the treatise on faith as elaborated by the Scholasticism of the past four centuries, the most precious results of which were consecrated by the Vatican Council. Yet there are two things for which one will look to this article in vain: (1) an historical account of the theology of faith from the origins to our day; (2) a theory of the act of faith giving to the will the intrinsic role that Thomas gives it. The rich scriptural and patristic treasures, which the Vatican Council surely did not exhaust, and which contain such magnificent reserves for current pressing needs, do not seem to interest the author except to the extent that modern Scholasticism has used them. If we place ourselves in the point of view of the contemporaries of Bellarmine and Melanchthon, Harent's study of faith in the New Testament is a masterpiece. Today it remains very precious, indeed, but is it not incomplete?

As for the learned author's conception of the epistemology of faith, here, for brevity's sake, are two rather typical examples. In column 225 he complains of troublemakers who want to "confuse" "the rational preparation for faith" with "the invisible and supernatural preparation." This "confuse" is pure gold and will give food for thought to those who think that the Vatican Council neither contradicted nor erased St. Augustine

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(not to speak of St. Paul and St. John the Evangelist). But lovers of St. Thomas will find something still better in column 304: "St. Thomas, according to his custom, groups with the believer's habitus fidei all the graces that serve for the exercise of faith and for perseverance in faith, revelation, actual interior graces, and a special exterior providence and summarizes all this under the name of `lumen fidei.'" O wonderful precision of Thomistic expression! Do revelation and exterior providential circumstances enter into the lumen fidei? Is it possible to show more clearly one's failure to understand as St. Thomas did the idea of a spiritual power of synthesis, so that one is reduced to looking everywhere outside and in the many blessings of fortune to supply for the role that the infused habitus filled for the Master? The reader who has followed our studies will sense that this passage from Father Harent provides a splendid exhibit for the trial.

In a very different sense here is another remark that should be mentioned and one with which I perfectly agree:

It is not fideism to make grace play a role in the knowledge of the preambles of faith if one understands by grace a subjective help for knowledge and not an object of the intellect. . . . Even if one should exaggerate the role of such a grace in credibility . . ., this exaggeration would not suppress the use of reason before faith; it would not take the place of the objects that reason must see, the motives of credibility, and the logic of the proofs [cols. 175-76].

Father Harent expounds at length the doctrine I have proposed and then criticizes it (cols. 260-75). Not having at my disposal as much space as he, I shall limit myself to indicating very rapidly what I regard as inexact in his

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criticism. For the rest it will be sufficient, to forestall the most serious objections, to refer to publications which the Reverend Father unfortunately failed to take into account.

1. Already in the title, an inaccuracy: "System that includes the preparation for faith in the act of faith itself." It is not the whole preparation for faith but only the decisive and certain perception of credibility that I regard as produced under the influence of the infused habit.

2. "Sympathetic knowledge" is interpreted in a way totally foreign to my thought. According to Harent, understanding is for me "only a kind of sympathy or love" (col. 261, end). I allegedly claim that to know is to will and to love (col. 275, top), reducing every perception of truth to a perception of beauty (ibid.). Could the very brief summary given in my "Eyes of Faith" of a rather complex noetic theory lend itself to this interpretation? One must believe so, since Father Harent has misunderstood me. But before reaching that conclusion and especially before formulating his judgment, why did he not follow up the references to the articles I explicitly cited, 7 in which I had elaborated on this apparently strange doctrine? The more shocking it appeared, the more necessary it would be, as I see it, to hesitate in attributing to me what I was suspected of saying. Since it was known where to find the answer, did I not have the right that anyone wishing to report my position would take the means to find out, rather than risk a hasty interpretation, not in some periodical but in an important article in an encyclopedia that will endure? I do not dare ask the reader to consult the articles cited in my note but I beg anyone who is interested in these questions to ponder several powerful pages by Xavier Moisant in the Revue Pratique d'Apologétique for April 1, 1912 (pp. 24-29). Here it is explained how I understand the factor of

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sympathy necessarily present in all knowledge. It is shown that I presuppose something very different from the "vague" community of nature between subject and object described by Father Harent. Here one of the best qualified authorities on Scholasticism and pragmatism sets forth my position regarding the one and the other. If one could justly accuse Scholasticism of skepticism because it makes knowledge depend upon an impressed species, which is an unconscious sympathy, then, and only then, would Harent's arguments against my thesis be valid. Father Jeannière, S.J., a good Scholastic who has recently published a much esteemed Criteriology, and who is a clear-sighted opponent of pragmatism, has found nothing to criticize in my "Eyes of Faith" and has even found fit to praise it; he had read the preparatory studies for it and refers his readers to them. 8 I regret that Father Harent did not inform himself better. The saying of St. Jerome's ''Read first, then despise" (legant prius, ac postea despiciant) expresses a demand too just ever to be impertinent.9

3. Let us turn now to the six objections that Father Harent lists in order from (a) to (f). Objection (a) contains not a word I could not sign; it totally passes by my thesis. It says, in effect: Faith is obscure, but the perception of credibility can be evident; "the knowledge of credibility is therefore not the knowledge of faith; one identical knowledge of one and the same object, by the same light, cannot be both evident and non-evident" (col. 264). This is undeniable, but I never said it was knowledge of one and the same object. In denying the coincidence of objects, I affirmed the identity of the act. Only those who look on faith as discursive knowledge can see any impossibility here. I hope I am not expected to reproduce the demonstrations of their opponents, very convincingly (in my opinion) presented in the manuals.

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If the act of faith is not discursive, the motive ("God has said it") is not absent, to be sure, but is perceived (and sometimes evidently perceived) as a "whereby" (ut quo). 10

The only difficulty here could consist in seeing how what holds for acts of faith after the infused habit is acquired could be likewise true of the act whereby it is acquired. I do not wish to repeat the explanations given at length in Recherches, 1910, n. 3, p. 253, etc. [see above, pp. 29ff.]. The Gospel and experience provide sure examples of sudden explosions of a perfectly reasonable faith. One must therefore admit the possibility of a sudden confession of faith not temporally preceded by any demonstration of credibility.11 If this is the case, it is pointless to object, as Father Harent does under the letter (b), that some authorities (St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Pius IX) affirm the distinction between the two moments (credibility and faith) in terms that suggest a necessarily temporal sequence. Without exaggerated literalism one cannot make the affirmation of these texts bear on the temporal distinction of the two moments. They have in view the reasonableness of faith which remains perfectly intact with a logical distinction.

But here the discursivist concept of faith clashes most openly with the organic concept, so that it becomes clear which conception conforms to reality and which does violence to it. For Father Harent (col. 267), "faith is an essentially mediate and extrinsic form of knowledge in which testimony and its value do not arrive subsequently, by way of reflection on direct knowledge, but must be explicitly known before the act of faith, since testimony is the motive." It is the last part of this assertion which I contest.12 It would be difficult to find a clearer illustration that people constantly take as the only type of the act of faith (or of the initial act of faith of which we are

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speaking) one particular type, which is not the most common in experience and which has no other privilege than that of being, at first sight, the most adapted to academic discussion. A theory of the act of faith should, however, be applicable to all acts of faith. That is an elementary requisite. One is perfectly entitled to make a special study of the most explicit acts, in which certain essential characteristics may appear in sharper relief, but if any one characteristic can be lacking in any act of faith, it does not belong to the essence of the act of faith. If it be recalled that there is not a single supernatural act without a movement of faith, as St. Thomas teaches, 13 one will quickly see that the discursivist theories rest on a very narrow foundation. For the moment, let us take the very simple case in which the first free and meritorious act of a child whose reason begins to awaken consists in obeying his mother who tells him, "Ask the little Jesus to make you a good boy." Perhaps I am oversimplifying again, but I am much closer to experience than Father Harent, since I am not aware that mothers begin by telling their children: "You know, there is a good God who has told us that Jesus exists.'' The testimony is not at all "explicitly known before the act of faith," and yet there is an act of faith; hence the formal motive of divine authority is present, and there is then sufficient knowledge of the testimony. Examples of this type make it apparent, in opposition to discursivism, that there can be priority without an interval, and thus answer Father Harent's objection (b).

In his objections (c) and (d), my censor seems only to be reiterating the current anti-supernaturalist thesis. Objection (e) picks up a really feeble criticism from Civiltà cattolica. In my theory, it is objected, the positive and formal sin of infidelity would become inexplicable. Either there would be no judgment of credibility, in

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which case one could not prudently assent, and the lack of faith would no longer be imputable per se; or there would be a judgment of credibility, in which case, according to me, there would also be faith. Hence formal infidelity would no longer be possible. But in either hypothesis this sin would be easily explained according to my principles. Either one had made a certain judgment of credibility and had had faith, and one would be rejecting both together through bad will and distaste for the supernatural good or else one would not have had them even while being solicited by grace, and one would have simultaneously refused both to believe and to see that one should believe. This last type of sin against the light is abundantly illustrated by the examples and words from the Gospel that I cited to confirm my thesis, and which my critics have failed to mention at all.

Objection (f) is this: if the best apologetical arguments, those most highly praised by the Vatican Council, are not really convincing without grace, wherein do they differ from the feeblest arguments, which can also be made to suffice through grace? I reply that they do not differ in degree of supernatural certitude. All kinds of arguments, in this respect, se habent ut excedentia et excessa, as the School puts it, for faith has more supernatural certitude for those who have more sanctifying grace. The arguments in question excel by reason of their greater communicability. They excel especially in the line of certitude by their greater capacity to consolidate faith with respect to its material cause (ex parte causae materialis), in the context of the believer's ideas. So likewise, when two sinners leave the confessional, the infused virtue of temperance, for example, may exist in a higher degree in the one who has less acquired temperance. Yet the virtue would be subjectively less well established because its dominion over the sense appetite would pass into act less easily.

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The Reverend Father attributes to me besides some strange fancies and some very frivolous statements on the question of the supernatural. Certain sentences in Recherches, 1910, p. 257 [see above, pp. 33-34], were intended to prevent exactly that misunderstanding in the minds of attentive readers. But anyone who tries to be concise is likely to miss the target, especially with readers not accustomed to be concise. Even a benevolent interpreter disfigures one's thought, making it necessary then to add innumerable corrections, to the great displeasure of other readers.

Notes

1. I take these two terms to be convertible as far as St. Thomas is concerned. Ligeard, after first insinuating a distinction, then neglects it, and for very good reason. At the end he makes it reappear.

2. Let us recall that in this debate "natural faith" is taken to mean every "natural belief in the extrinsic truth of the proposed assertion" (terms of Father Gardeil's cited in my third article, p. 33, note 2) [the reference is to his "Remarques sur l'histoire de la notion de la foi naturelle,'' Recherches de Science Religieuse, 4 (1913), 1-36]. Hence it would be natural faith if one believed by submitting to the authority of God but without any grace (a case admitted by Cardinal Billot, De virtutibus infusis I, pp. 76-77; Bainvel, La Foi et l'acte de foi, pp. 38-39, 58-62, 170-72; and Van Noort, Tractatus de fontibus necnon de fide, pp. 242-44. It is also natural faith if one believes "resolving the assent into external motives or signs of credibility as the reason for believing" (Suárez, cited in the same article as above, p. 25n2).

3. Tanquerey seems to me to yield to the same prejudice when he writes in the 13th ed. of his De fide (1911), p. 140: "If one denies that this can be done naturally, does one not by that very fact deny the demonstrative power of miracles?" I am pleased to take this occasion to thank the learned author for having made such courteous mention of my essays at several points in his volume (pp. 100, 126, 140).

4. Ligeard (p. 41, note) speaks of Cajetan, whom I had also cited, as if he were singular in believing that infused faith could make one see the credibility. Is he not familiar with other Thomists who even if they admit, as Cajetan did, the possibility of scientific faith have no difficulty in granting this thesis, which Ligeard seems to regard as

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inconceivable? Neither Tanquerey, as I read him (De fide, p. 140), nor Father Garrigou-Lagrange (Revue Thomiste, July-August, pp. 486-87) [see Réginald Garrigou-Lagrange, "Chronique d'apologétique," Revue Thomiste, 21 (1913), 473-89] accepts the opinion of Ligeard on this point. The most difficult part of the journey has already been made once one understands that grace can, without any "extraordinary" light, make credibility perceptible, so that the infused virtue which perfects reason is a power of seeing signs of the divine world in this world.

5. The reader will no doubt suspect that these two different ways of understanding the supernatural light belong, in Ligeard's work, to two different "redactional levels." I am inclined to agree with such a reader.

6. Am I alone in a position to complain? According to Father Gardeil, writes Ligeard (p. 40), credibility "is ordinarily the fruit of an exclusively rational demonstration." I would think if "by exception" were substituted for "ordinarily'' the statement would come closer to Gardeil's thought. But let us leave our neighbor's harvest undisturbed.

7. These articles are found in the Revue de Philosophie, March and June 1910. They were mentioned in "Les Yeux de la foi," p. 454, note 1, and p. 461, note 1. [See above, Part II, notes 12 and 20. The articles are "Amour spirituel et synthèse aperceptive," Revue de Philosophie, 10 (March 1910), 225-40, and "L'Etre et l'Esprit," ibid., (June 1910), 561-74.] One may also see Revue Néo-scholastique of Louvain, November 1910. [This article is "Métaphysique thomiste et critique de la connaissance," Revue Néo-Scholastique de Philosophie, 17 (November 1910), 476-509.]

8. Criteriologia (Beauchesne, 1912), pp. 47-48.

9. In correcting the proofs, I wish to add a remark. Later in Harent's article (col. 435) it only "seems" that intelligence is for me nothing but love. When one is expressing such grievances, is it not proper to ascertain their validity? In reading the same column of this new fascicle, followers of Aristotle and St. Thomas will observe that for Harent reciprocal causality is equivalent to a vicious circle.

10. See section XII of Harent's article.

11. Tanquerey is prepared to recognize this: "We concede that occasionally the act of faith is elicited immediately, under the influence of grace, without any previous and distinct judgment of credibility; but we deny that it is impossible for the case to be otherwise" (De fide, p. 140).

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12. See also col. 173, top, where Harent proposes what he himself calls "the great apparatus of speculative judgments of credibility." He writes: "several speculative judgments must prepare for this practical judgment [of credibility] . . . . First, the intellect must adhere to the existence of the true God, His knowledge and truthfulness, then to the fact of Christian revelation, and, to have Christian dogma in detail, it must also adhere to the infallible Church or something taking its place. . . . This plurality of previous speculative judgments comes from the fact that testimony is a much more complicated intellectual procedure than simple intuition, especially when there is question of divine testimony given in the past and applied through human testimony. . . . Moreover, these preparatory judgments for faith are not immediate. . . . Thus other judgments are needed to supply proof or intellectual motives for them." In all good faith and without any spirit of contention I ask: How can one contend that all this is distinctly and explicitly known before any act of true faith? Here precisely is the question. I grant that all this is known but I deny the absolute need for explicit and previous judgments. The disagreement here pertains not to theology but to psychology. From the theological point of view it may be surprising that the author is compelled to say, in treating the rationality of faith, that the faith of the uneducated must be postponed ''to avoid extreme confusion" (col. 195). If any act of faith is normal, is it not that of the simple, of whom it is written: revelasti parvulis [Mt 11:15; Lk 19:21]?

13. "No one can be moved toward God by any other motion without being simultaneously moved by faith" (De veritate, q. 28, a. 4).

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APPENDIX

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Principal Theses of the Position of Pierre Rousselot

Avery Dulles, S.J.

In the decade after the publication of "The Eyes of Faith" Rousselot's positions found increasing favor both inside and outside the Society of Jesus. In view of the division of opinion, the Superior General of the Jesuit order, Wlodimir Ledochowski, appointed an international committee of theologians who concluded that Rousselot's theory should not be followed in the Society of Jesus, inasmuch as the Institute of the Society recommended following the safer opinions and those more approved in the Church (Constitutions, Part IV, no. 358). Father Ledochowski thereupon issued a letter of July 15, 1920, forbidding Rousselot's opinions to be taught or defended by Jesuits. This letter, published in the Acta Romana Societatis Iesu, 3 (1919-1923), 229-33, contains two appendices, the first summarizing the principal positions of Rousselot, the second listing books and articles in which Rousselot had expounded his positions.* The first appendix, translated from the Latin, is reproduced here as a useful summary of the essentials of Rousselot's doctrine on faith and credibility. The first appendix, translated from the Latin, is reproduced here as a useful summary of the essentials of Rousselot's doctrine on faith and credibility.

* In a letter of February 11, 1951, on faithful adherence to the teaching of Pius XII's encyclical Humani generis, Father General John Baptist Janssens stated that Father Ledochowski's prohibition still held good. (See Acta Romana Societatis Iesu, 12 [1951], 72-94, esp. 77.) In view of the fact that Vatican Council II did not reaffirm the pertinent passages of Humani generis on the "rational character of the credibility of the Christian faith," it may be doubted that these prohibitions of past Jesuit generals are binding upon Jesuits at the present time.

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Principal Theses of the Position of Pierre Rousselot

Wlodimir Ledochowski, S.J.

I

On the Perception of Motives of Credibility

Thesis 1. Even after the motives of credibility, such as miracles and prophecies, have been rightly proposed, a person cannot naturally come to affirm: the revealed mystery (Trinity, Incarnation, etc.) is true; or even, it is credible (i.e., can reasonably be affirmed), and is to be believed (i.e., I am bound to affirm it).

Thesis 2. But there is necessarily required a new supernatural intellectual light, infused by God (which is called lumen fidei, habitus fidei, "les yeux de la foi"), whereby the intellect is strengthened and elevated so that it perceives the connection between the motive of credibility and the truth of the revealed content.

Thesis 3. The impotence of the intellect to perceive this connection, and the necessity of that elevating grace, are not only moral (arising from a more or less great difficulty) but truly physical. Grace alone renders the intellect apt to perceive the supernatural truth, since a supernatural faculty must correspond to a supernatural formal object. A miracle is not the object of the judgment of merely natural reason. In order for it to be perceived as it is, as a sign of supernatural truth, that interior grace is required: "On dira que la lumière de grâce est necessaire pour connaître le miracle."

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Thesis 4. Without that supernatural light, the arguments indeed have objective value, but they cannot be perceived by the intellect, which lacks the synthetic power to perceive the connection.

An apologetical demonstration cannot be historically convincing, at least truly and fully, unless it is accepted by faith and unless one adheres to the magisterium of the Church, which confirms it.

Thesis 5. But with that light, a person sees the connection between the motive or sign and the revealed truth:

(a) when the motive is perfectly proposed, as in the case of the learned, which is the only case considered by many authors;

(b) even when no full proof is given, by a mere indication of the truth, as in the case of children and unlettered persons. The more powerful the intellect, the fewer signs and indications it requires to perceive the truth;

(c) and even when the motive, although it is in fact connected with truth, is not de jure and necessarily connected with it. This case is verified in a Catholic child who believes because of the testimony of its mother, or that of a good pastor, and who is not more than ordinarily holy. Such a child is in circumstances very like those of a Protestant or Mohammedan child.

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II

On the Act of Faith

Thesis 6. The act whereby credibility is perceived by the light of supernatural grace is not really distinct from the act of faith whereby one adheres to the revealed truth. For wherever the connection is perceived, one assents to it. Indeed the perception of the connection does not really differ from the assent.

Thesis 7. Hence one should not imagine a judgment of credibility which is made by a distinct act, for one perceives credibility and confesses truth by one and the same act. To recognize a miracle as such, to believe the fact of revelation, and to believe the truth of the faith all three are accomplished by one and the same act.

Thesis 8. One should not admit a judgment of credibility distinct from and prior to the act of faith. The only way of saving both the legitimacy of faith and its freedom is to hold that there are reciprocal causality and priority between the perception of credibility and the exercise of freedom (or the pius credulitatis affectus). The following two propositions must both be true:

Because I want to believe, I see that I should believe; because I see that I should believe, I want to believe.

"Dans le même acte, l'âme voit qu'il faut croire, parce qu'elle veut croire, et elle veut croire parce qu'elle voit qu'il faut croire."

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