The Necessity of Faith

At worst, “faith” can become a bland word standing for little more than a vaguely pleasant and praiseworthy feeling; thus, people are described as having faith in themselves, faith in life, etc. This is a debasement of the term, however. Properly, faith is the state of soul and act of will that accepts and hopes in God’s promises.

Is it necessary to believe in something transcendent, or can we survive without it? By transcendent let us mean something beyond eating and sleeping and earning one’s daily bread. Surely one can survive in a raw biological sense. But such an existence will not have any meaning or sense. To give meaning to life, one has to have an ideal of some kind, whether sacred or secular.

People find ideals in various places. One can, for example, throw oneself into artistic, scientific, or philanthropic activity, counting that as one’s ideal, without worrying about final causes or the final end (in both senses) of life. The classical violinist Pinchas Zukerman once recalled that his father was a Talmudic scholar yet, paradoxically, was not a believer; instead “he believed in music.” An odd place to locate one’s belief, I’d say. Music is a wonderful thing, a sublime thing; but it is an item in the created universe. It is not a principle of my very being; I don’t live or die by it.

Alternatively, one can seek a larger wisdom embodied in philosophical tradition, which will lead one to seek the ultimate meaning and purpose of life and one’s place in the universe. This search is inevitably tied up with what is most commonly denominated faith, along with its sibling, reason. But let me concentrate for a moment on faith. I’d like to devote a little reflection to why this word, of all words, is used to denote the wide sphere of thought and feeling it suggests for us.

Faith is, in its most basic sense, simply trust. The definition given in a pocket Catholic dictionary of mine is most suggestive: “The acceptance of the word of another, trusting that one knows what the other is saying and is honest in telling the truth.” This is the beginning of the entry on “faith”; no mention is made of God or religion at the start. The entry goes on to say that “the basic motive of all faith is the authority (or right to be believed) of someone who is speaking.” When that Someone is none other than God, then the motive becomes extremely plausible. The fact is that we all have motive for believing that there is an ultimate meaning and goodness in the universe. Our very existence and that of the world, natural and manmade, around us, give us reason for gratitude and wonder—at the very least, curiosity about where it all came from. We realize that we owe a debt of gratitude to someone or something for the very fact of existence, even had the external circumstances of our life not been the happiest.

Before the sense of faith as assent to creed and allegiance to the church, we have this more basic sense of faith. I would characterize it as an attitude of mind that trusts that the universe in which we are placed is ordered and intelligible, that there is an ultimate meaning which we can either discover through reason or, if not, that will be revealed to us at some point. Faith in this sense is a safeguard against cynicism and despair. Human beings are flawed and fallible, human life is finite, but there is a larger order of which we are a part, a larger context in which our lives are played out, and that order is fundamentally good and just. Although the world may be going to the dogs, the universe is fundamentally all right, according to the perspective of faith.

I have often wondered how to account for the fact that the word “faith” has become so indissolubly attached to the concept of religion. One reason, I think, is that at the bedrock of religion is this conviction of trust in a superintending order.

I would certainly not end there, at this basic bedrock faith, but it is an excellent base to build upon. From there I would go on to consider the record of history and the testimony of revelation; of how the belief in the true God came to a poor, nomadic tribe; of how this tribe brought forth a man who was revealed to be not only a mighty prophet but God’s own Son; of how he founded a church; of how the seeds of the church were planted in Rome, the seat of the secular empire, and of the spiritual civilizational pathways that led to and from there; of where that church is to be found today; of the intersection of faith and culture—in short, to the whole romance brilliantly traced by Chesterton in his indispensable book The Everlasting Man. Some readers might go with me all the way on the path as I trace it, others might go part of the way; regardless, the process of elaborating from the basic foundational faith to the faith in something particular and concrete is the point here.

Now, why must we bind ourselves in faith to something historical and civilizational? I believe it is because such a faith helps us transcend our petty selves and bind ourselves to something greater and grander. We realize that we individuals are part of a story or history that God is telling in time. By placing our faith in something that happened in history we overcome the limitations of the ego and of the present. We transcend the generic and find the particular. This is necessary because reality in its fullness is wildly particular and not at all generic or abstract.

At worst, “faith” can become a bland word standing for little more than a vaguely pleasant and praiseworthy feeling; thus, people are described as having faith in themselves, faith in life, faith in faith, or faith tout court (directed at nothing in particular). This is a debasement of the term, however. Properly, faith is the state of soul and act of will that accepts and hopes in God’s promises and is itself, paradoxically, a divine gift.

But preliminary to this sense is a basic trust, a humility, a docility, a receptiveness to truth. This is the sort of faith we can all cultivate regardless of the specific content of our beliefs at the outset of our path. The difficult thing is to fill this preliminary, unformed faith with content, and the right content. To do so one should, I believe, avail oneself of the best of the Western tradition as our guide and follow where it leads.

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