In a previous video, we discussed how faith is a
supernatural light that elevates the mind above the things of this world.
This raises some questions. A believer might ask:
If faith is a light, why does it leave our minds in obscurity – or even in darkness? Some great
saints have even spoken about God leaving us to live in the dark night of the soul.
Then, a skeptic might add further questions: Why isn’t the testimony of faith clearer?
And isn’t it dangerous for us to assent to something if we cannot see for ourselves
whether it is true or false? Doesn’t this abandon what is characteristic of the life of reason?
Let’s start with this skeptical objection about whether faith is dangerous.
In fact, Aquinas himself poses this very objection in his Summa Theologiae.
He replies by explaining that the light of faith functions very much like the way we grasp the
truth of the first principles of natural reason: one does not construct an argument to prove the
principle of non-contradiction. You do not try to prove that something cannot both be and not
be in the same respect and at the same time. This truth is self-evident to every rational
mind. It is presupposed for every other proof that we might formulate by the light of reason.
In the same way, when the light of faith is infused into the mind of a believer,
he is able to judge rightly that the primary articles of faith proposed to him
should be believed – for example, that God is our ultimate happiness.
Aquinas describes this as faith as giving us a kind of “implicit cognition,” a new
“grasp of the mind.” We “intuit” that what is being proposed to us is true.
Faith thus does not involve an abandonment of reason, nor is it dangerous to assent to what
it proposes, because faith involves a knowledge of higher truths by a higher light. At the same time,
properly supernatural truths – truths like that Jesus Christ is God – while they may have many
confirming signs and miracles associated with them, cannot simply be proved by natural reason.
This is true even if a person hears the Gospel and sees miracles that confirm it.
Those miracles are what are traditionally called “signs of credibility.” They make it reasonable to
believe Christ’s message. But they do not compel the mind to believe the claim that Jesus is God.
Believing that requires a special gift of faith. And in fact, many people
met Jesus in person, heard his preaching and saw his miracles, and yet did not believe.
People sometimes think that faith infuses new information into the mind, but Aquinas doesn’t
think so. We learn of the propositions of faith as God speaks to us exteriorly through divine
revelation – for example, through the words and actions of Jesus, which were witnessed
by the Apostles, are recorded in Scripture, and continue to be preached by the Church.
This public revelation is different from God’s action in giving us the interior light of faith.
That interior light has a particular function: it elevates the mind so that it will assent to the
truths of faith that we’ve heard exteriorly with our ears. The light of faith gives us
to know that they are true, but it does not infuse new truths into the mind.
This means that, what we know by faith, we know by relying on the testimony of another.
Ultimately, it is God himself who bears witness to himself. Faith thus gives us
a special kind of knowledge – an indirect kind of knowledge, because we do not see directly
the truth of what we believe, although we do know it as true because of the light of faith.
In what sense is faith dark or obscure?
There are three senses of the darkness of faith, according to Aquinas.
The first is the view of the truths of faith of a mind that remains trapped by sin.
In fact, all of us have inherited a mind and a soul tainted by the disorder of sin,
both original sin and our own personal sins, which make this problem worse for us.
Though our intellect is made to know – and especially to know God – sin causes even the
natural light of reason to be obscured, because it introduces disorder into the soul: the soul
is no longer subject to God, and hence the lower powers in us, like our bodily desires, also rebel,
they are no longer subordinate to our minds, and they even impede our exercise of reason.
They become fixated on and “inflamed” by the lower goods of the body,
and higher spiritual goods start to lose their savor. This is because sin is a turning away
from the light, a stepping into darkness. And so the more one turns away from God,
the more the truths of God may come to seem darker and less evident.
What happens when a sinner has a conversion? Aquinas takes the
language of conversion literally: the sinner is turned towards God by God’s own initiative.
And this is a turning towards the light of faith, so that one’s mind is illuminated by grace.
A person who previously was turned away from God and fixated on created and sensible goods,
now is turned back by God’s initiative towards the divine light who is God himself,
and the mind is flooded with God's light.
Second, Aquinas speaks about the obscurity of the believer’s faith.
Of course, the faith itself is not obscure, nor are the objects of faith in darkness.
“To be light is proper to God,” Aquinas says, who is “light by essence..." "but because ‘he dwells
in unapproachable light whom no man has ever seen' (1 Tim 6:16), we were not able to approach him.”
This is why faith is obscure relative to us: God’s light is so bright that our minds are dazzled by
it. Because our intellect cannot transcend the limitations of our bodily way of knowing while
we remain in this world, we can only know the highest truths of God in an obscure way.
Third, faith is obscure because it does not totally remove the imperfections and weaknesses
of our intellects. Our mind desires to know, but in faith it doesn't see perfectly clearly
its object, and so faith leaves the mind restless, even with the light of faith by which we genuinely
come into contact with God, we don't have a direct vision of him. And so the mind keeps churning, it
keeps trying to see directly. It is not entirely satisfied because it wants to know in full.
We feel as if we remain in a certain darkness, even when we receive the light of faith.
This is a normal dimension of the experience of faith, according to
St. Thomas, so we should not be troubled if questions arise in our minds to which
we do not immediately find answers. Questions about the faith are not properly speaking doubts,
as long as our firm assent to the truth of the faith does not change.
One final point is important: Faith gives us much more than knowledge of facts about God;
it puts us in real contact with God himself,
so that we begin to know him as our Father and our Redeemer, who loves us and who saves us.
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