{296} (cont’d)

III

The concretion of faith

Faith, we say, is the surrender to a personal reality qua true. And surrender is appropriation of a possibility through choice. It is the very essence itself of volition. Because of this in each volition there are two aspects, which we must distinguish. One, that aspect by which I appropriate a possibility. Under this aspect, appropriated possibility is that which has the determining characteristic of my person. Volition is, under this aspect, an act of the person. Yet there is another aspect inseparable from the previous one, but different from it in a certain way. It is the aspect according to which, when opting for the foregoing possibility as my determination, I surrender my person to be in one determinate way rather than another; volition is surrender and it is such by being appropriation through choice. In the case of faith in God, it is the act {297} of surrendering myself to be I in God foundedly. In this aspect, volition is not determined by possibility; rather, it is the person who determines the realization of the possibility. Then volition is not “an” act of the person, but is “the” act itself of realizing oneself as a person. Whoever desires something, even to take a walk, is surrendering himself as person to be personally a walking or ambulating I, to realizing himself as walking person. These two aspects are but the two sides of a selfsame act: every appropriation is surrender and every surrender is appropriation. Volition, on one hand, is the person as “subject” of the appropriation of possibility; it is, on the other, the desired “object” itself, because it is the surrender of the person to be one way rather than another. All of which allows us to see that a person is not only a subject of volition (first aspect), and object of it (second aspect), but is identically the latter as much as the former. In what sense? Of course, it is not a merely formalistic identity as Kant would think, as if the identity of both aspects were that which constitutes personal reality, i.e., as if being a person consisted in auto-determination. On the contrary, it is the personal reality, already real as person (reality, which is “his-own”) occurring in an occurrence, which consists in that this reality making itself I, make itself the being of the substantive of my person. What constitutes the identity of self-determination is personal his-ownness, not this identity, which constitutes the person. It is “my” reality qua “mine”, which by reason of being mine, is subject “and” object of the volition of itself. Therefore, surrender is not self-determination as formalistic identity of subject and object, but the reality already personal in his-ownness, which surrenders in appropriation {298} through choice. Now, it is thus clear that surrender is of the person with all the characteristics it already possesses. It is not an I that desires, but that the one who desires is I. Therefore, surrender is an essentially concrete act, where “concrete” means that in it reality is involved, reality qua his-own, in accordance with everything it already is and has become.

And this is essential for the problem of faith in God. Faith in God is my surrender to His personal reality qua true. Hence, it is always and only concrete surrender, and consequently, concrete faith. Until now we have seen in what faith formally consists as such. Still, this leaves unanswered what faith is, what the surrender itself is in its concretion, in the same way that the formal explanation of being a person leaves unanswered the concretion according to which each man is a person. I designate by “concretion of faith” the modes, shades or qualities (the term is not important) according to which faith is not only “the” faith, but “my” faith. What is this concretion of faith?

We are not dealing with the case of a merely practical concretion, as if the differences under question were minor variations of how persons “function”, so to speak, in their faith. Much deeper than the functional, it is something constitutive of the believing person. But this still needs further clarification, because it is not the case of differences, which consist only in the personal mode of being of each person, yet are extraneous to faith itself. In that case these differences would be something, which concerns faith only concomitantly, something similar to the way age, for example, accompanies scientific research, but does not form part of it. In the concretion of faith we are concerned with more than mere concomitance because concomitance is in fact always something {299} extrinsic. But the concretion under question concerns the very structure of faith qua faith. And this is because faith is not the mere admission of truths, but is the surrender of the entire person; and therefore the modes of being a person not only “accompany” faith, but are an intrinsic moment of its constitution: they are precisely its positive and intrinsic concretion. Faith is an act of will to fundamentality. And this will is lived by each person in his own way. Each person surrenders to the occurrence of his own fundamentality in his own way. And in this is what the concretion of faith formally consists. Certainly faith is always “the” same, but never the same thing: “my” faith is not “your” faith, not qua faith, but because in one case it is mine and in another it is yours. The unity of faith is not something, which concretizes itself in different persons, but is the identical meaning of radically concrete persons. To be “mine” is a formally constituting moment of faith in God. Put in a deliberately exaggerated way, the problem is not how the same faith is lived by different persons, but in what measure and up to what point different persons have the same faith. And this is not a subtlety: history bears indisputable testimony to what we are referring. That is the radical concretion of faith; it is not an adventicious concretion to faith, but a concretion of faith from within faith itself. Faith has personal modalities; there are many personal modes of the same faith. This is a significant problem because it requires maneuvering between two dangers, which have usually damaged the conceptualization of faith. One is the danger of considering faith as something, which rests upon itself, and therefore, is only applied externally to the concrete situations of the person; the ingredients of this concretion would {300} simply vitalize something previous, namely faith itself. This is on all counts a monstrous extrinsification of faith. The other danger carries the opposite sign. It consists in supporting itself only upon the mental structures of each person; in this case faith would be a blind impulse, or at best a subjective attitude, which emerges from the psychic structures. In fact, however, faith is neither the one nor the other. Faith emerges from personal structures and possesses the sense and extent of truth in these same structures and from them. This intrinsic articulation is precisely the problem of the concretion of faith as mine. It is a problem concerning principles.

And in this concretion, faith is mine in several dimensions. Above all, faith in its radical concretion is concrete by reason of the individual characteristics of the person who surrenders himself. Faith is the surrender of my person to another personal reality qua true. The person who surrenders in faith is not “the” (impersonal) person, but “this particular” human person in his intrinsic concretion. The one who believes is not man in the abstract, but “this particular” man; not “the” abstract person, but “this particular” person. And this is something essential for any faith; it is not something exclusive to faith in God; but acquires its maximum expression concerning such faith. But in addition faith is concrete because of the different modalities, which the surrender itself incorporates. And above all, faith is concrete by the mode of how God is seen in it as fundament of my I. To see God concretely as the fundament of my being is something, which depends essentially upon the concretion in accordance with which I am turned towards God.

I am turned towards God from my concrete personal reality, because faith is the surrender of my person, mine —not the faith of a person, but my surrender, of my person—, which forces one to ask about the concretion {301} of this faith. This is not merely a fact, but something, which is a formal and essential constituent of faith as such. No faith is faith unless it is my faith. The moment of faith is my belief, my surrender to the personal reality of God, which is not only manifest to men and humanity, but to me as a person. Faith is essentially personal. And the person is always my person, mine, untransferable, and unchangeable for others. Faith is mine for several reasons.

In the first place, faith is mine by reason of the person, by reason of my own person. But this would be a unity of mere singularity. And in fact there is more to it. Each person is a person in his own way. And if the reality of being a person is always one, the individual way of being a person is the individual way in which I am one. And this, which is true from the point of view of personeity, is even more visible as true from the point of view of personality, i.e., from the being of the substantive of my person. My reality qua person, as personeity, makes the configuration of its I in the course of my life.

This is absolutely essential for faith. The correct intellection that the type of the person must be considered as a constitutive ingredient of the act of faith, would uproot, or at least would put into its proper place, so many considerations, which are made based on the particular characteristics of persons. It is said, for example, that such-and-such a person believes because he is neurotic; but this only means that he will be a believer neurotically, not that he may not be a believer personally. It is a different personality, but it is a personality, which is mine with its neuroses, with its imperfections, with its qualities and dispositions, and it is this personality, which decides. It is my faith, the faith of my person. It will be the same faith, which another person has with a different personality, {302}, but it is so by reason of the terminus upon which faith rests.

But let us add that this concrete person, by reason of his personality has, besides his own particular concretion and his own dimensions, not merely individual, but also social and historical dimensions. The faith of any religion is not the same in different societies, or even in the same society as it changes and varies in space and time. The belief that it remains the same is chimerical. The people of Israel certainly believed in Yahweh, but did so with respect to a set of particular social conditions; theirs was a theocratic nation. Other societies are not. Now, not only is this not alien to faith, but without that there could be no faith. The social conditions are formal and constitutive ingredients of faith. And, above all, just as there is immersion in societies, there is also immersion in history. The people of Israel felt itself to be a chosen people, but only after a long history and not from the beginning; they reflected upon many isolated episodes of their life as a people, and discovered in them the unity, which could exist in all, and in this way appeared the idea of chosen people. That history is a concretion of faith. It is not fortuitous, therefore, that faith in Yahweh did not begin to be preached in a universal manner from the beginning, but only after a historical experience. In general it can be said that the history of religions is the experience that peoples have made of God throughout history, and in our case, is the history of the faith of those peoples.

It is, therefore, essential for faith what my person is, my personality with all its concretions, individual, biographic, with all my personal gifts and with my history, installed in a society, an installation, which is not necessarily a limitation. An installed intelligence is not a {303} limited intelligence. And, consequently, nothing of all this precludes, but on the contrary, demands the intellective modulation, which forms an essential part of faith; of course, an intellective modulation, precisely modulated by the characteristics of my person.

In the second place, faith concretizes not only through me as a person; it is also connected with my mode of surrender. There are those who are eager and those who are procrastinators in surrendering themselves. There are those quite precipitous to acquire faith; others are not. There are some who have an enlightened surrender. There are some who have a staunch faith, and others who display a weak faith. These are all different modes of surrender. And among these different modes of surrender is how the surrender of my concrete person to the personal reality of God qua reality precisely occurs.

But, in addition, faith is concrete through a more subtle moment, upon, which we must dwell. Each may have or can have his idea of God, by reason of the terminus of his faith. I do not refer to the case that one may be a polytheist and another a monotheist. Within, for example, Christian monotheism a saint can have an idea of God different than that of another. God is not only God, but is also my God. One sees God from the point of view precisely of the personal truth of God, but with essential reference (without which there would be no diversity), to those dimensions through which God makes a donation to me. In definition He may be the same to all, but the lived faith is not the same to all. There are some who see God, above all and primarily, as merciful, as charitable; there are some who see Him as Supreme Being. Each has his own God; his own; and this is so a fortiori, if we consider the idea of God in different religions.

b>{304} However, this is not a relativism. It is an aspectualism, which is different. I see the reality-fundament of God with different aspects. And this is so, because, from the point of view of man, How can any particular aspect of that person to whom one surrenders in truth because it is true, be absent from the unity of inter-personal causality we mentioned above? This moment of fidelity is not lived equally, for example, in the people of Israel and in our Christian society. Between the Israelite conception that Yahweh above all belongs to Israel, and the conception that to be a true Israelite one must ground oneself in Yahweh, there is an enormous difference. The collision of these two conceptions is precisely the crucifixion of Christ. The historical path of the idea of God in Israel, and above all the idea of God in different religions, and different peoples, manifests at what level it is essential that we give consideration to the concretion of faith.

If the encounter of man with God, beginning with the accessibility of God to man, is founded on the fact of religation, fundament of my personal being; and if the person is essentially concrete, the actual encounter of man with God and of God with man, the surrender of man to God as truth cannot be anything but concrete. There lies the root of the concretion of faith, modulated as much by the individual dimension of man as by his social dimension, and his historical dimension.