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§ 4

THE FORMAL ROOT OF THE ACCESS OF MAN TO GOD

Clearly all forms and directions of the surrender of man to God are variations of a unique and unitary movement towards God, of that movement in which man goes to God qua God. This is the very root of the surrender, or better still, the radical surrender itself. All types of surrender presuppose this radical surrender: they are inscribed in it and are the directional modalities of it. This surrender is what we call, in a more or less vague and nominal manner, faith. Faith in itself is a surrender, and is the radical form of the access of man to God.

Of course, this affirmation is just a mere postulate, because unless one details with full rigor what is understood by faith, the affirmation remains floating in a vacuum. On the other hand, such an affirmation may appear surprising in view of the fact that in the previous chapter we have attempted an intellectual justification of the reality of God. So, it might not seem that the access of man to God is a matter of faith. Intellection and faith do not appear to be compatible. Nor is this the only problem. The fact is that, as we have said, the surrender of man to God has several forms and directions according to the type of persons involved and the situations in which they find themselves. And this is because man surrenders to God from himself in all his individual, social, and historical concretion. The diversity of ways and types of surrender of man to God is the {210} inexorable consequence of that concretion. Hence, concretion is essential to surrender as such; in other words, it affects faith itself. Faith is essentially and constitutively concrete.

If we wish to penetrate into what the access to God is, it will be necessary to consider the three questions that have just come to our attention:

I. What is faith formally considered, i.e., what is faith qua faith?
II. What is the unity between intellection and faith?
III. In what does the essential concretion of faith consist?

These are the three steps, which must be covered in order to reach the understanding of what faith is.


I

What is faith formally?

We take faith here in all of its dimensions as a human phenomenon. But in order to avoid lengthier discussions, I shall aim almost immediately towards what is of primary interest to us, faith in God.

In general faith has usually been understood as an assent to a judgement founded upon the testimony of another, and that consequently faith is an intellectual knowing. In this type of understanding two things are clear, the object of faith and the formal characteristic of the act of faith. The object of faith is the truth of a judgement. The character of the act of faith is an assent because of a testimony. In the problem, which concerns us here, faith would have as its object a series of affirmations about {211} God, and would consist in assenting to its truth based on a testimony, which ultimately would be the authority of God Himself.

That this exists in some form or another in any act of faith is more or less plausible. But only “in some form”. Because the important question is another: Is that the first and formal structure of any faith, and especially faith in God? Once we frame the question from this perspective, the inadequacy of the foregoing concept of faith becomes clear, with respect to what concerns the formal character of the act of believing, as well as what concerns its own proper object.

In the first place, faith does not consist in the connection between testimony and what is contained in testimony, but rather in admitting the testimony as testimony, from the point of view of the believer. But this implies that, which is primary and decisive in faith is found not in the assent, but in the admission. Now, admission is a phenomenon that surpasses the limits of intellectual assent. So it then becomes necessary to ask what, precisely, admitting is. With that the problem of faith has emerged intact from this discussion. In the second place, it becomes clear that faith, as a type of admission, does not rest primarily and formally upon a judgement. It is certain that faith rests upon something true. But, is the truth of a judgement the radical and primary form of truth? Not at all. Therefore, the least that must be said is that faith does not consist in the assent to a judgement, but in the admission of what is true. This moves the problem along different paths, both when dealing with the faith as such and when dealing with faith in God in particular.

Above all, one thing is clear: the admission is a mode of that we have been calling “surrender”. Surrender, as we saw, is a going from ourselves towards another person, giving ourselves to that person. Man surrenders to God accepting His {212} I, His own personal being, in terms of the personal reality of God. Therefore, faith is primarily and radically the surrender of my person to a personal reality, to another person. What there is in faith as assent to a testimony is but an aspect of something more primary: of surrender. Faith is not assent to a judgement, but surrender to a personal reality. The act of faith is an act of surrender, which requires, on the one hand, that we say in what faith consists as surrender to personal reality, and on the other, that we clearly present the characteristics of this surrender qua surrender.

1. The nature of the surrender in which faith consists is specified by the nature of that upon which the faith rests, i.e., by that to which the faith surrenders. We have just mentioned it: faith is the surrender to a person, to a personal reality. The question then reduces to saying what is the aspect of this personal reality to which my person formally surrenders in the act of faith. Unless that is stated, we have done nothing but blow smoke with respect to the most general act of surrender, what is proper to faith, i.e., the belief in truth. Faith is a surrender to a person, which encompasses a belief in truth. Under pretext that faith is not based formally upon the truth of a judgement, the philosophy of religion and theology have hurled themselves along this way of surrender to a person, without questioning the moment of truth; and with that, what properly belongs to faith as an act of surrender has been lost. This is, to my way of thinking, a serious defect of current theology and philosophy.

The surrender, which faith constitutes is a surrender to a person inasmuch as that person entails truth. What is this truth? That is the issue. One might think that it is the {213} case of a truth communicated by the person to whom the surrender is made. In other words, faith would be the surrender to a person insofar as he communicates a truth. In the case of divine faith, it would be to believe that which God communicates. The surrender of faith would consist, as St. Augustine said, in a credere Deo, in believing God.

Saint Augustine himself vociferously attacks this concept of faith as inadequate, because what is decisive is not to believe what a person says, but something deeper and more radical: to believe in the person itself. In the case of God faith is credere in Deum, to believe in God, and not simply credere Deo, believing God. However, what is it to believe in a person, and in particular, what is it to believe in God? For St. Augustine, the matter presents no doubts: credere in Deum (est) credendo amare, credendo diligere¹ (to believe in God is to love while believing). Taken from the point of view of our analysis, faith would be personal surrender through love.

A consideration inevitably surfaces when we face this Augustinian concept of faith as personal surrender. According to it, faith would be an act of love, an act of surrender. But this is clearly inadequate: faith is not only an act of love, but a surrender to a person qua bearer, so to speak, of truth. And St. Augustine would not deny it. What happens then is that the notion of believing in God, credere in Deum, involves a certain internal duality in St. Augustine. There would be, on one hand, an amare, a love, which rests upon the person as such, and on the other, a belief, a credere, which would rest upon the truth “borne” or communicated by the person in question. However, faith is a unitary phenomenon: it is a loving, which must encompass believing intrinsically and formally, or put differently, it is a believing that is an intrinsic and constitutive moment of loving. Now, {214} this can only occur if the truth to which faith refers is not the truth borne by the person in which one believes, but rather is the truth in which the person consists in himself. We are not dealing, therefore, with the truth of what the person says or does, but with the truth, which is that person himself qua reality. Hence, faith is, intrinsically and at one and the same time, loving and believing. This is, to my way of thinking, just what constitutes believing in God: faith is the surrender to a personal reality qua true. Here is what we have been searching for. Faith, as I said, is an act of surrender to a personal reality. Now, what is specific to this surrender and makes of it an act of faith is that the surrender rests upon a person qua true. It is necessary, therefore, to justify and explain this conceptualization.

Everything depends upon what is understood by “truth”. We have said so repeatedly. Primary and radical truth is not the conformity of thought with things, i.e., truth is not primarily a property of thought, but a property of reality itself, that characteristic according to which reality itself is actualized in the intelligence. This is what I have called real truth. This truth has, as we indicated, three dimensions: patency of reality, firmness of reality, effectivity of reality. Patency, firmness, and effectivity are the three dimensions of the intellective actualization of reality. Now, with respect to a personal reality, this truth takes on particular characteristics, which make of it a personal truth. In the first place, personal reality actualizes itself in the form of a manifestation of its own reality. But let us not confuse this manifestation with statement; personal reality can be manifested in a thousand other ways. In the second {215} place, personal reality has that type of firmness, which is fidelity to what it offers to be. Finally, in the third place, personal reality actualizes itself in accordance with that characteristic, which makes of it something indisputably a fact. Personal reality is a reality, which qua reality is a truth, which possesses, intrinsically, and at one and the same time, these three dimensions.

Consequently, the surrender to a personal reality qua real personal truth, i.e., qua manifest, faithful, and indisputable fact, is precisely the formal essence of faith. We will only have penetrated into this phenomenon after we liberate ourselves from a narrow concept of truth, i.e., as if truth were only manifestation, and at that, an enunciative manifestation. For faith —we shall see this in a separate paragraph— a certain manifestation is necessary. But it is also co-essential for faith, that the person to which it surrenders —man or God— be a person with a fidelity upon which one can rely, and in addition may constitute a reality as indisputably a fact as the sun or the mountains. To believe in a person, to have faith in him, is to surrender to him in this his real personal truth, and not in the truth of what is communicated. Faith in what a person communicates is only possible founded upon faith as a surrender to the person qua truthful.

This is, in its highest form, the case of faith in God. God is absolutely personal reality. Hence, His real personal truth is also absolute: it is, at one and the same time, as we indicated, absolute manifestation, absolute fidelity, absolute indisputability. Because of this, our surrender to Him qua real personal truth, is faith. And because of it, faith is inscribed totally in the theological dynamic tension between God and man. Faith, in fact, is a metaphysical form of inter-personal causality {216} between the divine person and the human person. God qua true is intrinsically and formally present to the human person qua real and true. Therefore, surrendering oneself to God in faith, is surrendering oneself to the transcendent foundation of one's own person. Conversely, faith is a motion towards my internal transcendence; it is faith in personal transcendence, it is faith in the real truth, which in a manifestative way, faithfully and indisputably effective, is constituting me fontanally. Faith in personal transcendence is already faith in God. The unity of these two italicized propositions, is faith as dynamic tension of my real truth in the real truth of God.

This surrender to God in faith is the formal character of any surrender to God. Every surrender is, as we have seen, acquiescence, supplication, and refuge seeking. But these three moments are precisely and formally moments of faith; because it is faith, which makes them possible and necessary at the same time. In faith, man de facto surrenders to the personal reality of God as manifested, faithful, and indisputably effective. These three dimensions of the personal truth of God, are unitarially included in the act of faith in the divine person, in the surrender of man to the personal reality of God qua true. Now, in its aspect of surrender to the personal reality of God qua manifest, faith is acquiescence. In its aspect of surrender to the personal reality of God qua faithful, faith is supplication. In its aspect of surrender to the personal reality of God qua indisputably effective, faith is refuge seeking. So, faith is acquiescence, supplication, and refuge seeking. If it were to lack any of these moments, it would cease to be faith. Therefore, faith, as surrender to the personal reality of God qua {217} true, is the very essence of acquiescence, supplication, and refuge seeking, i.e., it is the very essence of the surrender of man to God, of the access of man to God.

Such is faith as a surrender, specified by the nature of that upon which the faith rests. Now we have to take a further step and ask ourselves, What are the characteristics of this surrender to the true personal reality of God insofar as act of surrender?

2. The characteristics of faith qua personal act derive in good measure from the very nature of its object:

A) Faith rests upon the true, but is not mere assent: it is surrender. Naturally, a surrender, which involves, according to what we have said, a moment of truth: it is a surrender to the personal truth of another, be it man or God. Now, in this dimension, the constitutive surrender of faith is what we call personal adherence. That is the first characteristic of faith.

In faith, one human person adheres to another person, in casu to the divine personal reality. Adherence is not the assent, but rather assent is the enunciation of the adherence, an enunciation generally only of the intellectual type. Furthermore, the adherence is anterior to any assent not only because the latter is founded upon the former, but because strictly speaking the adherence is in a temporal sense anterior to any expressed assent. Precisely because the adherence is extended to a person, we are admitting everything that this person may manifest to us beforehand, even if the manifestation is never complete. However, this does not establish it as blind faith, as it is usually called (we shall return to this theme), but as a personal faith, something entirely different. In a certain way, it is a faith, which even if it does not see everything, at least in principle it makes it possible to see. {218} As a determinant of an adherence, we commonly express (not in a technical sense) that faith is “inspiration”: that which moves one towards adherence is the faith, which a person inspires. In this adherence, man incorporates himself into the person that is believed, and in a certain way links himself to that person’s fate. And since the person to which one adheres is real truth, it follows that the person adhering, in some way, acquires the properties (let us use that expression) of the personal truth belonging to whom he adheres. In virtue of this, the one who adheres has potentiated his own real truth in and with the real truth of the person adhered to; he has become, so to speak, more true: more manifest, more faithful, more factual or real. This leads us to a second characteristic of faith:

B) Faith is not only personal adherence, but an adherence that has the characteristics of a firm certitude. What is this firmness? It is a personal assurance; not a psychological obstinacy. Of course, this assurance admits of degrees; there are adherences, which are more and others, which are less firm. What are these degrees? They are not, as the philosophy and theology of the beginning of this century imagined, degrees in the scale of assurances, from mere possibility passing through probability until certainty, which would then be nothing but the upper limit of the probabilities. No. Faith, adherence, ascribes itself fully to certainty and is within it. Assurance is not the limit of probabilities, i.e., of insecurities. Between certitude and probability there may not be discontinuity, but there is always a distinction of nature. Faith as certitude is always firm adherence. Negatively stated, faith excludes the fear of erring. And it is this fear, which admits degrees from within the certitude itself. The degrees of certitude are not measured by insecurities, but by the positive energy, so to speak, with which {219} the adherence springs forth from the mind and installs itself in it. To have a greater faith than someone else does not mean to have more probability than this other one, but to believe with more energy. The firmness of an adherence is intrinsic and does not refer extrinsically to probabilities and possibilities. To lose a certitude does not mean reducing it to a mere probability or possibility or impossibility, but reducing it to something uncertain, to have lost the energy of the personal adherence, regardless of the causes and motives that produced the loss. Faith, in this aspect, is a personal assurance more or less strong, energetic and resistant.

This firmness discloses a double aspect in faith. Until now we have discussed faith as act. But this act, precisely because it is firm, leaves the one who executes it in a state: this is faith as state. The “I believe” of the act, is accompanied by the “I have believed” of the state. This state is not merely individual. All men are born and live in a society. And every society has a world. Here “world” does not mean the respectivity of the real qua real, but the system of ideas, values, norms, customs, etc., which are current in that society; and therefore the individuals in that society consider them as “being there”. By being there they are tópos, place, something, which is at hand. These ideas, etc., are principles or powers, which determine the life of the individuals who comprise the society in question. The system of these principles or topical powers of a society is what, to my way of thinking, constitutes their world. Their ideas about God form part of their world. As a moment of the world, faith is something upon which one is based firmly, with security. This is the faith in which man is constitutively installed in a society. The individual may not share this faith for a variety of {220} reasons; as we shall see later, an installed mind is not a closed mind. But if the individual shares that faith, generally it is not a faith that has issued from the depths of his personal mind, but rather has been shaped by the form of his social world. At any rate, faith is not only an act, but also the firmness of a state of surrender, of adherence, be it individual or social (topical).

C) This surrender is always personal. As such, we already pointed out, it is not merely a being “carried”, but an active and positive “going” from our own selves to God. If we were just “carried”, we would be “dragged” by a power that does not depend upon us. This is what occurs with the inchoate access of man to God. In that access, it is God Himself who, by reason of being “pre-tension”, drags us from Himself towards Himself, regardless of whether man is aware of it or wishes it. But concerning the plenary access, i.e., of our surrender to God, we ourselves are the ones going; therefore we are, from ourselves, the ones who provide the surrender. Surrender is donation. The person to whom we grant it is not extraneous, of course, to our donation. But his function is not a “dragging” motion, as in the inchoate access, but a motion of mere “attraction”, including in this concept all the varied forms with which a person can request without forcing us: solicitation, insinuation, suggestion, etc. Each person accepts and makes this attraction his own, or he rejects it. Only by making it his own, it is converted into a personal surrender. To surrender oneself consists precisely in making this attraction ours. And to make an attraction ours is precisely to opt. Indeed, this is what is radical about faith: faith is option. Here is the third characteristic of that surrender in which faith consists, qua surrender. What is always radical about man is option: {221} love, vocation, religion, etc., are essentially options. And faith is an optional surrender to a person qua true. It is an option of our whole reality and not only of the intelligence, the sentiment, or the will; it is an option of our reality towards the radical and ultimate figure of our relatively absolute being, of our I.

The option is not an inclination or tendency of our soul, but an act of our person, if one wishes, an act of our reality qua personal. And because of this, by being a personal option, faith is radically free. “Free” means here that we are not dragged to it without coercion, but simply attracted: freedom consists in our being the ones who determine whether to make this attraction our own. It follows that freedom is not arbitrariness. A free option is not an arbitrary option, but one, which is not forced. Hence, precisely because that attraction exists, the option is founded exactly upon that which attracts us, i.e., upon that which it offers us in its personal truth.

In summary, faith is, formally, a surrender or personal adherence, firm and optional to a personal reality qua true. Ultimately, faith is simply to make our own that attraction with which the personal truth of God moves us towards Him. It is in this faith that the radical access of man to God consists.

But this poses a serious problem. This surrender, actually, is a faith. But the God we are now referring to is not the God of any particular religion (Christian, Brahmanic, Phoenician, or any other). It is purely and simply God qua God; a God, in this sense, which is personal, but common to any religion: this is God as absolutely absolute {222} reality in His absolute concretion. Since that reality does not present itself to us immediately, but at most in a “towards”, it was indispensable to justify His existence intellectually. But even though justified with a strict line of reasoning, it is unclear how this reality may be an object of faith, of a free optional surrender of my person; this is the problem of “intelligence-faith”, the second of the three great questions, which faith posed to us. The first was the formal characteristics of faith. Let us proceed now to the second: the unity of intelligence and faith.
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¹ Tract. in John. XXIX, 6.