Welcome back. I hope that you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving break. Beginning this week, we’ll return to our consideration of the three remaining virtues—Faith, Hope, and Love—also known as the theological virtues. And so, we begin with Faith.
And we begin by asking, as Gregory of Nazianzus did, “What is faith?” He answered that, first of all, “faith is to believe what the eye does not see….” It is, at its foundation, a matter of what we believe.
The world is rather fond of making two different but equally foolish errors when it comes to faith: Either they say that it is good to have faith, so long as you believe in something; or to say that faith is irrational, a superstition that only unthinking people have—that we should not have faith in anything.
Now, Faith is no virtue at all just because we believe in something we cannot see—John Lennon, the famous Beatles rock star said, “I believe in everything until it’s disproved. So, I believe in fairies, the myths, dragons. It all exists, even if it’s in your mind.” Indeed, one could say the same thing about unicorns, leprechauns, and bigfoot—believing in them is not true faith.
But just because it is possible, like Lennon, to have misplaced faith—a false belief in the unseen—that does not mean the answer is to get rid of faith altogether and to pretend we can have faith in nothing and rely on our reason alone. The truth is, everyone believes in something they cannot see.
Our friend Chesterton said that “It is an act of faith to assert that our thoughts have any relation to reality at all,” and the great 20th century philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein recognized that “[a]t the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded”—or in T.S Eliot’s words: “We must believe in order to think.”
Now, this may be a bit much for a Monday morning. If so, just remember—faith starts with what you believe—and true faith believes in less than everything, but more than nothing.
Have a wonderful day.