{258} (cont’d)

B) Unity of knowledge and faith in God. Let us readdress the issue. We already saw that knowledge and faith are essentially different: knowledge is an intellection of the reality of God, and faith is the personal surrender to Him qua true. But we also saw that they are essentially connected: all knowledge of God traces the ambit of a possible faith, of a possible surrender, because God is the fundamenting reality of our I, and therefore His knowledge opens in and by itself the area of my fundamentality. Between knowledge and faith in God there is, therefore, a unity, which is not one of mere convergence, but an intrinsic and radical unity. In this sense the same truth, the existence of God, can be at one and the same time a truth of reason, and a truth of faith: the “at one and the same time” is precisely that radical unity. Yet, it is a unity, which is only possible, or better still, it is unity only of possibility. We need something, which will make it actual as reality. And in this “something” is what the “at one and the same time” we seek for formally consists. This something is the will to fundamentality. How?

Let us remember that man is a reality whose being is relatively absolute, an acquired being supporting itself religatingly on the power of the real. This is not a theory, but an incontrovertible fact, something immediate, a radical fact, which {259} concerns my entire being. Religation to the power of the real is, therefore, something inexorable. In this religation everything real shows itself to me as constitutively enigmatic, and therefore problematic; i.e., everything real, “at one and the same time”, real things and my own I. My person finds itself, therefore, religated in its own I, but in a problematic way. Which means that I am relatively absolute, and that my I is not only acquired, but in order to be so, it is radically necessitated of a fundament in order to be. And it is such, inexorably, because to acquire my I is something radically inexorable. In such a fashion, the power of the real is, not speculatively, but physically and really, what hurls me inexorably towards the real fundament of the power of the real. This is what we call “God”. Therefore, God is reality-fundament as terminus of the “towards” to which the power of the real inexorably hurls us.

I have repeated the term “inexorable” monotonously and insistently. I have done so with the clear intent to show that that reality-fundament, which is God, is not something, which man may or may not concern himself with, as with so many other things in life, but velis nolis is something towards which we are physically hurled not accidentally, but constitutively. Hurled: that is, the power of the real inexorably opens the ambit of fundamentality. God is, for us, quoad nos, reality-fundament, with respect to which, therefore, each person not only can choose, but has to choose; moreover, each person, is inexorably so choosing in all the constitutive acts of his own I, i.e., in all the acts of his own life. In other words, with respect to God the I inexorably has with respect to God a will to fundamentality, primarily and formally because in every moment the I needs a fundament. God is the real fundament of my I. {260} At this point an observation will suddenly strike the reader; I am aware of it and will discuss it a little further on.

The reality-fundament is not only real, but is at one and the same time a possibility of mine, and my own possible way to be absolute. This possibility is divided in two. Let us investigate each half by itself.

One is the possibility of considering God as a reality in and by Himself, and nothing more; i.e., God, merely as supreme reality in Himself. This is God, reality-fundament, reduced to reality-object. Then eo ipso, we have already explained it, God remains distanced from man, and man is separated from God. This is not just a mere concept realized more or less dialectically; it is the very reality of what, throughout the history of religions, comprises the dii otiosi, the otiose gods. They are realities, without doubt, and supreme realities, but otiose with respect to man who in general has no relationship with them, either of supplication or of support. An otiose god is a real god, but one that does not intervene in the life of the person; in such case the life of man is not traced out as a function of God. This is the reality-fundament of God reduced to reality-object. And we should not think that this is only proper to primitive mentalities. Fundamentally, the theós of Aristotle is a super-otiose god: not only does he not bother with man, nor man with him, but he cannot have any relationship with the cosmos. And this is not the case for Aristotle only. Basically, this is the situation today for a large percentage of mankind in ever increasing numbers. Their atheism is rather the theism of an otiose god. They admit the existence of God, of a first cause, and they even admit His strictly demonstrative knowledge; but for them He is only a mere reality in itself, which does not intervene in {261} life, with respect to which the consideration of a surrender in faith makes no sense. This is a rigorous knowledge of God, but without faith in Him. From this fact spring most of the considerations we have been presenting in the preceeding pages. Here we have, thus stated, one possibility. God real reality, but otiose; this is the otiosity of God. The ambit which it opens for us is the emptiness of distance. And the appropriation of this possibility is an alienation from God.

The other possibility is to opt for the fundamentality of God as such, qua reality-fundament. It is, throughout the history of religions, the case of all the other gods. God is then not only a supreme reality, but an ultimate reality, possibilitating, and impelling: this is what I have called “God qua God”. He is certainly a supreme reality. But His “supremacy”, so to speak, with respect to us discovers Him as absolutely absolute reality. That upon which our I, our relatively absolute being, is founded positively, is an absolutely absolute reality, and therefore, something that for us is formally founding. In that case, together with the reality of God, man has the possibility of being relatively absolute in Him. Besides knowledge of God, indeed, there is faith in Him. This is the fundamentality of God as differentiated from the otioseness of God. The ambit which it opens for us is not the emptiness of distance, but the field of our dynamic tension in God. The appropriation of this possibility is the surrender of our person to the personal reality of God, the donation of our person to Him in faith: this is life in function of God.

Here are the two termini of the choice: otiose God or fundamenting God. And precisely because it is a question of choice, it is in both cases a free choice. Certainly it is {262} inexorable that we choose, but the termini of the choice with respect to my possibilities are free. Yet, free choice does not even remotely mean that it is arbitrary. Just the opposite. It is an option of the will to truth and, therefore, a constitutively founded option. My freedom to opt for an otiose God or for a fundamenting God, is a decision not about what I believe, but about what the reality itself of God is. It is, therefore, a founded option. Founded on what?

The will to truth, we have already pointed out, is not only a series of acts, the acts to choose for one terminus or another, but primarily a principle of attitude. For us, the choice we shall freely carry out is founded upon this attitude. And this attitude has two moments. One consists, of course, in wishing to discover the fundament towards which we are hurled. But in addition it is an attitude of self-surrender, to make our I accept what we have discovered to be our fundament.

a) Above all, the will to fundamentality is the attitude, which sparks the stepping march of the intellective process towards intellectively knowing what the fundament is, that fundament to which our relatively absolute being is inexorably hurled by our constitutive religation. This is the will to fundamentality as motorizing force of the intellective process. We have reflected on this in the previous chapter. There, we had to prove that the power of the real is founded on an absolutely absolute reality, on God, who by reason of being fundament of the power of the real is the fundament of this power being an ultimate, possibilitating, and impelling power. And as fundament of this power, God possesses those same three characteristics. He is, {263} therefore, eo ipso, not only a supreme reality, but a founding God, whose character as personal we also had to prove. By all this the possibility of an otiose God is rationally excluded, and the reality of a founding God rationally founded. The choice for a founding God is, then, founded in its turn upon rational reason: this is the demonstrative knowledge of the reality of a founding God.

b) But the will to fundamentality as an attitude not only motivates intellection; it is something more. It is the will to make my I accept that which reason has proven to me is the reality-fundament. This is the attitude of surrendering to the fundament, which reason discovers. And this is not itself rational, but a desired congruence with the rational. It is a congruence, which has a precise name: the reasonable. Reasonable does not necessarily mean that it is a truth not sufficiently proven, but rather that it is in conformity with reason, which primarily means that it is congruent to accept in life that which reason knows, be this knowledge sufficient or not. And the acceptance of the matter will become more reasonable as its knowledge becomes more rigorous. What is reasonable, in this sense, is more than the rational; indeed, this is the rational transfused into the whole being of man. Even if we were to be presented with a mathematical demonstration for the necessity of the will accepting and incorporating into the being of the person whatever reason discovers, still, the real and effective acceptance would always remain open to choice. This is why the will to fundamentality is necessary. Present day man is more in need of it than ever before. The vital acceptance of the rational in its turn is not rational; it is more than rational, it is reasonable.

From this stems, on one hand, the possibility of a dissociation {264} between knowledge and faith: this is the lack of will to fundamentality. God is known, and there is no faith in God, his fundamentality is not accepted. With this the reality-fundament, God-founding, is left eo ipso reduced to a reality-object, to an otiose God.

But, on the other hand, the possibility exists to have actual unity, rational knowledge of God and faith at one and the same time: this is the will to fundamentality as an attitude of the reasonable. The attitude of the reasonable is based upon the rational part of reason. This is the rational as something offered, which is precisely what the reasonable is. Thus far, reason shows that it is reasonable to accept reason. And from the point of view of surrender, reason makes of the rational something acceptable for the will. This is what in a very imprecise way and in a different conceptual context (the context of the so called “proofs” of the supernatural) was called credibility. But not only this. Reason would not be acceptable if it were not in itself acceptant. And that it should be such just expresses the inexorability of choice. This is what sometimes, in the context just referred to, used to be called credentiality. They are not two unconnected concepts. From my perspective, reason is acceptable because it is acceptant; I maintain that all credibility is founded upon a previous credentiality. But underlying both credibility and credentiality is the will to fundamentality as a firm attitude.

The will to fundamentality as an attitude to proceed towards the fundament of my I in religation sparks the intellective process. This process itself constitutes the ambit of a possible surrender to God. But this same attitude of free and reasonable will to surrender to whatever intelligence shows me to be the fundament of my I, is the principle of my real {265} surrender to what intelligence knows. By virtue of this, the surrender, which was a simple constitutive possibility of the knowledge of reality-founding, converts itself, by the same principle, into free realization of that possibility, into faith. Thus, the will to fundamentality as an attitude is the unitary principle of the intellective process about God and of the personal surrender to Him qua true person. We are not dealing with the question of whether faith leads to intellection, or intellection to faith, but rather with the fact that both aspects constitute a radical unity. That is, their unity is in the very root from which the movement of the person towards God emerges: in the will to fundamentality as the principle of attitude. Knowledge and faith are but two moments of this unitary movement. The will to fundamentality as the principle of attitude is therefore, in itself, the radical unity which is not only possible, but real, of knowledge of God and faith in Him as a free choice for the reasonable person. This is what we have been arduously searching for.

However, it is not something as univocal as might appear at first sight, because this attitude of fundamentality, however well founded, does not always lead to what we have just discussed. There are, actually, great numbers of men who despite their will to fundamentality have no strict knowledge of God and do not surrender to Him. This is precisely the observation I had in mind above, which surely and with reason must have struck all readers. It is necessary for us to be concerned about it, because until now we have only posed to ourselves the problem as to how knowledge and faith in God are radically “unified” in the will to fundamentality. And this has left the reverse question standing, i.e., not the question whether knowledge {266} and faith are rooted in the will to truth, but the question whether this will unfolds —and under what conditions— in knowledge and faith. That is the question concerning the will to truth in human reality, the third of the three great questions, which the will to truth posed to us.

C) The will to truth in human reality. Strictly speaking this question is already settled from everything we have said. Free choice, I have argued, is a choice founded upon a demonstration of the reality of God, which we attempted in Chapter Three. And consequently the will to truth unfolds into strict knowledge and faith. To be sure, this is only speculation. But let us not forget our purpose. We were not attempting to outline the way by which a person reaches God —these ways are infinite. The only thing we were attempting is the intellective justification of all these ways, and of all these arrivals. As soon as we have provided this justification, the purpose has been achieved. But such considerations might seem merely dialectical to many, because intellective justification involves an intrinsic problematism. I had already warned about this expressly when I began the exposition of the justification for the reality of God: this justification “is the explanation of an experience we are experiencing physically; therefore, always has that resonance of problem proper to the character of the march of personal life”. The justification we have found preserves all its value, but precisely because of this it forces us to question that problematic resonance.

The problematic character appears concretely in three facts, which concern the two
{267} moments we described when dealing with the will to fundamentality as an attitude. First and foremost, there is the start of the “intellective process” set in motion by that will. The fact is that intellectual justification of the reality of God has been carried out in multiple ways; as a result, we have numerous so called “proofs” of the existence of God. But this multiplicity is not simply “multiple”, because “new” ones have repeatedly been attempted largely because the previous ones, for a variety of reasons, did not appear quite satisfactory. And of course, I do not think the proof outlined here is exempt from this condition, though I consider it rigorously conclusive. This is a first fact we must keep in mind. However, there are two other facts, which refer to the will to fundamentality in what concerns the “choice”, which occurs in it. First is the fact that countless persons ignore the question. The inexorable characteristic of having to choose is seriously affected by indifference. This is a second fact we must address. But beyond this, many persons, whose numbers are ever increasing, do not even reach the point of ignoring the question, because they never felt it as a question in the first place. That is, not only does it not seem inexorable to choose one terminus or another, but it does not even appear inexorable that the will to fundamentality is actually constitutive of the human person. This is the third fact to which I referred. Under these conditions it seems as if the will to fundamentality were somehow in suspense. Such is the way, which these three facts, in a concrete way, frame the question of what the will to truth may be with respect to human reality.

Let us begin by reflecting upon each of the three aforementioned facts separately. Only in this way we will be in {268} a condition to unitarily conceptualize the problem they pose.