I shall describe faith in five parts:
1. How faith differs from knowledge
2. How it differs from opinion
3. How it is related to common and private goods
3. How it is related to knowledge in matters of religion
4. How faith in Divine things is different from faith in human things
1. How Faith Differs From Knowledge
The verb “to assent” is equivocal; that is, it has two meanings which bear an analogy to each other. I say I “assent” to the proposition that the whole is greater than the part, or that 2 + 2 = 4, because understanding what realities “whole” and “part” and “greater than” refer to, I understand that a whole must be greater than its part; or likewise that 2 + 2 = 4, from understanding the elements of this proposition. Or, to use yet another example, from understanding the demonstration that a triangle has two right angles, I can understand that the conclusion is true, and I assent to it. In all three of these examples, “assent” refers to an act of the mind.
In its other meaning, “assent” refers again to an act of the mind, but involves the will as well. This other meaning seems to be connected historically, in fact, to the word “consent”. This is the meaning of the word which is operative every time someone holds an opinion. Opinions are about things which we do not know, but nevertheless hold. Because we do not know what we assent to in this case, we cannot hold it through an act of the mind exclusively. Yet, at the same time, we understand that there is a difference between an opinion and a surmise or suspicion. Surmises or suspicions are not held in the mind in the stable manner of an opinion, because in their case as well, we do not have the means to know that they are true. How is it, then, that opinion is like knowledge in the stability with which we hold it, but like surmise or suspicion in the fact that we lack the wherewithal to claim that we know? Opinion must, clearly, involve an act of will as well as an act of mind; for we will to hold a position.
It must be understood that to say that the will is involved is not to say that the act of opining is either unnatural or forced. Often people are accused of holding a position “willfully,” as if to suggest that this is wrong. But what is wrong is not willing itself, but some sort of inordinate willing. (This is perhaps a little like what is meant when someone is accused of being “selfish.” Does that mean that we should act in a way that involves completely ignoring our own good? Of course not. It means that we should act in a way that involves an inordinate and misapprehended good of self, which excludes the good of another.) There is no other way but through an act of will that an opinion can be held in a stable fashion.
On examination, indeed, we must realize that our lives are necessarily chock full of opinions, much more than they are full of knowledge. No one, or very few people, can be said to know who his mother or father is, who his president is, how many planets there are, whether viruses cause illness, whether viruses exist, whether Japan exists, whether he has a stomach, whether he will be alive tomorrow or in ten minutes, whether there ever was a Shakespeare, whether the Declaration of Independence is a forgery, etc. In each of these cases and thousands of others, what we recognize is that “it would be unreasonable” to hold otherwise than what we hold. Yet that does not prevent someone from doubting, now and then, an opinion such as one of these. In doubting, he relinquishes his opinion, in a way that true knowledge could never be relinquished.
But to say that “it would be unreasonable” to doubt such things is to say that opinions have reasons too, just as knowledge does. But we must be very clear about the difference between what we mean by “reasons” in each case. It is a different question to ask, “Why do you think the sun is hot?” than to ask, “Why is the sun hot?”; or again, “Why do you think that triangles have two right angles?” than, “Why do triangles have two right angles?” In the first of each of these pairs of questions, what we are seeking through the question is not, precisely, what makes it to be true, but rather, what makes us think it is true; in other words, the question seeks a cause of the thought, and not a cause of the reality. But in the act of knowing (for example, when we prove a geometric proposition) we come to know an effect precisely through our knowledge of its cause. Then what makes us think that the thing is true is the same as what makes it be true. When this is achieved fully, there is no longer a need for an act of will to think what we think; we simply understand, via an act of mind, that what is is.
We hold an opinion, therefore, when we apprehend (more or less consciously) that reasons for holding something justify our opinion, that is, justify our holding what we hold. Formally speaking, the reasons must be reasons for holding something, not reasons for the thing itself. To the degree that we make ourselves see that the reasons are reasons for the thing itself, we can change our opinions into knowledge. Yet most of our intellectual furnishings are seen, on reflection, to be opinions — reasonable ones indeed. Perhaps we can even see, on still further reflection, that this is simply the human condition, because the aspiration of reason is higher than the senses, and yet reason must always start out from what the senses offer; and that makes a kind of faith or opinion inevitable right from the start. To imagine that we might dispense with opinion and make judgments about things only as far as we know them is, if I may say so, a completely unrealistic opinion.
Faith, then, is generically like opinion. One might even think (opine) at first that it simply is opinion, since in either case one holds what one holds by a natural act of willing, through reasons deemed appropriate for making such an act. But in my next post I will try to describe how it differs from opinion.
