Faith in Faith

This is a nice way of putting it:

If it were necessary or useful to prove the Absolute, the objective and transpersonal character of the human intellect would be sufficient as evidence, for that same intellect testifies irrecusably to a purely spiritual first Cause, to a Unity infinitely central but containing all things, to an Essence at once immanent and transcendent (Schuon).

As we’ve said before, there are certain "limit categories" beyond which it is impossible to think conceptually, and I suspect -- or maybe even guestimate -- that these are either different aspects of the same “object,” or its first entailments -- in this case,  such categories as Transcendence, Immanence, Unity, Cause, Center, Essence; or rather, the very Cause of causation, Unity of oneness, Center of centrality, and Essence of essentiality.

Total Truth not something we can grasp, but which we can certainty reach. In other words, so long as we are confined here to the land of finitude, our reach exceeds our grasp. 

But then again, you might say that our reaching is the grasping, in the sense that faith is already a kind of knowing, or darkness visible. Somewhere Schuon says something similar… Can’t find the exact passage, but this will do:

Faith is like an "existential" intuition of its "intellectual" object.

We come into the world with preconceptual categories that are ready to be filled out by experience. The mind is not a blank slate, but rather, has an implicit structure that is -- so to speak -- con-cave to the world’s con-vexity and vexation. It is similar to animal instinct, only on a higher nonlocal plane.

Which may sound a bit woowoo, but is really quite experience-near, and is why there exist all those universals that are present in every culture. In The Book of Absolutes, Gairdner discusses the current state of the research, which finds “the existence of some 311 human universals (and counting).” (I read this book way back in 2009; may be time for a second look, but not now.)

At any rate, my point is that what we call “faith” is (at least for the Christian) a link between two realities. This link is anything but static, although it can be if yr doin it rong. 

But when properly functioning, it is no more static than the link between our intelligence and the intelligibility of the material world. What occurs between these two terms is an endlessly spiraling intellectual adventure that only ends upon death. Just like religious faith, scientific faith deepens over time. Unless, of course, yr doin it rong.

This dynamic link is a two-way flow, in that we begin with the data of the senses and work our way up from questions to ideas to concepts to judgments to system, etc. 

But just as with religious faith, our scientific faith always exceeds our grasp. Or rather, whatever we grasp always results in more questions and deeper exploration. If we could arrive at the end, we would be God. Every scientific answer generates new questions -- thank God, for if this weren’t the case we’d be bored stiff. And as boring as the stiffest evangelical atheist.

On the other hand (or cerebral hemisphere), we can actually reach the end, this being what folks call God, precisely. Looked at this way, a dynamic religious faith is a science of the vertical. Or, in the words of Schuon, it is

a priori a natural disposition of the soul to admit the supernatural; it is therefore essentially an intuition of the supernatural, brought about by Grace.

Which is why it is universal, celebrity atheists notwithstanding. The latter live in the shelter of their own simple beliefs, which begin and end with an unjustifiable faith in themselves, of all persons. For it is written,

There was never any conflict between reason and faith, but between two faiths (NGD).

There can, of course, be conflict, but only because error or passion or presumption has entered the picture: Genesis 3 All Over Again. Don't they ever get bored of it?

Come to think of it, this entire discussion has much in common with Lonergan’s Insight  and Method in Theology, in that his whole point is that what is universal is our insight into reality, while what is particular is the object of insight. 

These objects vary from matter (physics) to organisms (biology) to “the past” (history) to Celestial Central (religion), but the Method is the same. Which is a good introduction to the next post. 

We’ll end with a few more observations by Schuon on the subject of faith:

There is no faith without any knowledge, nor knowledge without any faith.

Faith is a priori a natural disposition of the soul to admit the supernatural; it is therefore essentially an intuition of the supernatural…

 

Faith as a quasi-ontological and premental certitude…. The mystery of faith is in fact the possibility of an anticipatory perception in the absence of its content; that is, faith makes present its content by accepting it already, before the perception properly so-called.