The Good of Faith.

From Professor James R. Stoner, Jr.'s "Last Lecture."


 

IV. Faith


Constitutionalism, learning, beauty—next is faith. On nothing else is society so misled as on the question of what faith is and whether it is good—not just society at large, I think, but even many of us who take pride in being faithful. Faith is presented as the opposite of science: scientists know, others merely believe. This is not entirely wrong, but incomplete, for it takes for granted that modern science and faith speak about the same things, which is hardly obvious—indeed, is obviously mistaken, as anyone with faith can recognize. By opposing science and faith, faith is clumped together with all non-science and hence with a lot of nonsense, with every prejudice, fantasy, error, and falsehood. Even the faithful are misled into treating faith as a matter of the heart, not the mind—an opinion again not entirely false, but the cause of serious errors: distrust of learning on the one hand, and exaggerated trust of feelings on the other.

For me the breakthrough came when reading Thomas Aquinas on the virtue of faith. Faith, he says, is an intellectual virtue—the habit of mind that accepts true propositions on authority, sometimes because one hasn’t had the time yet or doesn’t have the capacity to know them scientifically (I’m not simply being elitist here; as Tocqueville wrote, even the philosopher must accept a thousand things on the authority of others), or because in this life, given the imperfection of our senses and our minds, we can at best know them “as through a glass darkly,” though we hope one day to know them clearly as we see God face to face.

Belief, says Aquinas, is between opinion and knowledge, far from ignorance, close to truth. The image I propose is of a staircase: the ascent to knowledge, every step higher, nevertheless requires planks to stand on along the way. Perhaps the greatest philosopher can climb a pole or rest sufficiently on the rungs of a ladder—but most of us ascend best by stairs, where merely stepping forward makes us step upward, little by little, and there are plenty of landings or places to rest. It is essential to this image, and to St. Thomas’s argument, that faith and science ultimately seek the same truth—and that, to most of us, is a matter of faith, for Christ said, I am the way, the truth, and the light. But if he told the truth—and how dare we doubt him on this point?—then we faithful have nothing to fear from science, nor scientists from faith, for we have the same end: knowledge of the truth about all things. I like to pray, “Lord, help us to see Christ in every truth we learn, and to look for truth in Christ.” If you notice that my argument supposes there is one true faith, I concede the point and invite you to consider which it is.

Now if I am right that we should see faith and reason as complementary, not conflicting, then we have within our hands an insight which can revolutionize the world of learning—within our faith tradition, we have resources that can restore the wholeness to learning, can give beauty back its luster, can even ennoble our political institutions by keeping the goods they secure in perspective. I don’t mean this will happen by suppressing science under faith, but by freeing the faithful from the fear that learning will cause them to lose their faith. Here is a task that will take a generation or more, that is not promised immediate reward or success, but which, against all appearance, makes the life of the Catholic in the university today the most exciting and demanding that I know.