[Fr. Robert Barron]
[Comments on Lumen Fidei]
Well, in New Atheist and secular circles today,
faith as you know, is regularly ridiculed.
It‘s pre-scientific mumbo-jumbo, it’s just a bunch of uncritical nonsense,
it’s credulity, it’s accepting things on no evidence, it’s surrendering your intellectual integrity, etc. etc..
I hear it every day.
Read someone like Christopher Hitchens, and you find an echo of Immanuel Kant,
who said: “Dare to know.”
Hitchens says: It’s time to grow up. Faith is just a surrender to some authority figures.
It’s time for you to think for yourself.”
Look in much of the secular media
and people of faith are presented as either yahoos or wild-eyed fanatics.
If you want to see evidence of this, look at Bill Maher’s “Religulous.”
– how people of faith are presented.
I think the new encyclical, so it’s written as Pope Francis said by 4 hands,
it’s written under his name, but was written largely by Papa Ratzinger,
it’s called “Lumen Fidei,” the “Light of Faith.”
I think it’s an attempt to respond to this caricature of faith.
The text is wonderful, it’s rich, very allusive, it’s very smart, full of cultural insight and,
so though it’s signed by Francis, it bears the mark…
anyone who has read Joseph Ratzinger over the years
can see Ratzinger’s styling very much.
It would take me hours to develop all the motifs and themes of it.
I’ll just say three simple things that the Popes seem to say about faith.
Here’s the first one: Faith is not irrational. In fact, faith is the reasonable response to the creator God.
Now here is what Pope Ratzinger/Pope Francis mean.
We valorize technological reasoning, and for good reasons.
Technology has been a wonderful thing for all the benefits to the human race
that come from it.
But technological reason is a very aggressive reason. It puts things under bright light,
puts them on an operating table.
It analyzes them. It asks its question and makes the thing answer.
It‘s more objectifying and more aggressive, more interruptive.
Well, who is God? God is not an object in the world
because God is the creator of all things.
As I’ve often said on Thomas Aquinas: God is not “ens summum” (the highest being).
He is “Ipsum esse,” which means “To be itself."
God is the sheer energy of existence from which all finite things have come.
And what does that mean?
It means He cannot be, even in principle, the object of an aggressive investigation.
You can’t put God on an operating table,
you can’t put God under the bright light of analytical reason,
which is why, and you find it throughout the Bible,
God is associated with darkness.
Now, with light, too, and I’ll get to that, but there’s association with darkness.
Why? Because, as Isaiah the prophet said:
“ Thou, O God of Israel, art a hidden God.”
He doesn’t mean hidden like the dark side of the moon, which is just something in the world
that is provisionally hidden
or hidden like Bigfoot. Is there a Bigfoot?
I don’t know. He might be hiding in somewhere out there.
Not in that sense.
It means God in principle is hidden from the aggressive gaze of technological reason.
And that’s why God is in shadow, you might say.
God is always in the darkness.
God is always seen out of the corner of our eyes.
And it’s why faith is the proper response to the living God.
Second point under the same rubric:
God is not a distant force, an abstract principle,
but God is a person.
Well, persons, even human persons, in the same way cannot be simply
analyzed in that aggressive way.
I’m going to put you under the microscope, under the bright light,
and I’ll understand you. No, no!
Persons are known fully only when they disclose
themselves to us.
Which is why, even in regards to a human person,
faith is the right response.
It’s an acceptance in trust.
The point here is:
Faith is not unreason.
Faith is right reason in regard to God,
in the things of God.
I’m using (Cardinal) John Henry Newman’s language there,
but it’s a very important point to hold off the Christopher Hitchenses and Bill Mahers of the world today.
Ok. Here is the second point the Popes make about faith.
It’s darkness as I’ve been saying, but faith is a darkness that turns to light.
Why? Once you accept the address of the living God,
you’ve responded in faith to the address of God,
now you found the proper organizing principle of all your whole life.
God is not one thing among many.
I’m interested in my job as rector of the seminary,
I’m interested in Word On Fire,
I’m interested in my family,
all sorts of things.
God isn’t one of those many things I’m interested in.
God is the ground of all existence;
hence God is that which speaks in and through all things.
Furthermore, God therefore is the power that unites the self.
He is the light shed on all aspects of the self.
In the light of God I now know what to do,
what to think, what to prioritize, how to behave.
Faith therefore is darkness, yes,
but it’s also luminosity.
It’s also light.
Hence, the title: “Lumen Fidei.”
By the light of faith, I know who I am.
To me, one of the most interesting parts of the encyclical was
the analysis of idolatry.
When you don’t have faith,
you don’t accept the address of the living God.
What’s going to happen?
As Chesterton said:
“You don’t stop believing. You start believing in anything.”
In other words: now you are looking here, here,
there, there, following all sorts of idols:
wealth, pleasure, honor, power, worldly glory, etc.
“Necessarily,” the Popes say here,
it’s interesting: “Necessarily, when you stop having faith,
you become a polytheist,” because you are running after
a whole slew of different idols.
It is by no means accidental that, in the Bible,
the devil speaks in the plural.
The devil, the demonic, is a splintering power.
Faith is a unifying and illuminating power.
Here is the third observation,
what I also find extremely interesting
from this encyclical:
Faith is liberating.
Faith means freedom.
And here is how the Popes get at it.
They go back to Saint Paul.
Paul famously says in Galatians and especially in Romans,
that we are justified not by works of the law, but through faith.
Faith justifies.
The Popes read that, not much in the Lutheran way, as demonizing good works,
but this way:
Whenever I think I will find the meaning of my life on my own terms,
I lock myself in the very narrow space of my ego.
So I will justify myself. I will save myself through my own efforts,
my own thoughts, my own accomplishments.
I’m locked in this narrow space.
You are in fact justified, saved,
liberated not by your own accomplishment,
but by a surrender to the purpose of God.
There is faith.
Faith is a surrender to the alluring darkness of what
God wants you to become.
Faith opens you to the infinitely vast space of God’s intentions for you.
And that’s why faith is not debilitating,
faith is liberating.
Faith opens up the heart and the soul
and the mind to these infinite horizons.
We are justified, saved, liberated not by our own efforts,
but by faith.
Faith gets you out of the infinitely boring space of your own ego.
That’s why I would say in conclusion,
again looking at these two Popes,
Benedict and Francis:
This encyclical is Benedict’s last and Francis’ first
great challenge to the secularism that’s already overrun much of Europe,
that threatens to overrun our country
and threatens to debilitate the human project.
That’s why these two Popes I think
are speaking out so strongly in favor of faith.