Believing is something radical, that is to say, different at its roots from “forming an opinion,” or “forming a conviction,” if you like. To make a judgment based on particular knowledge and inferences is a very important and, in innumerable areas, indispensable intellectual activity: but “believing” is a different process.

In its content and unfolding, our faith is something comprehensive and living. Did a flower ever come into the world by way of a gardener examining a heap of torn parts individually, judging each one on its own for its value, beauty, and usefulness, without seeing or evaluating their mutual relationship, and then sticking and attaching roots, fibers, stems, leaves, buds, calyxes, petals, stamens, and pistils to one another, mixing in parts of various plants according to his own taste and preference? You cannot even construct a “lifeless thing,” a machine or a building, in this way; here, too, the plan of something whole forms the basis, and every smallest little piece is placed in it in some proportion. You have to know the whole thing if you are to judge the parts.

Believing does not mean “having insight” or “agreeing to an insight gained through one’s own intellectual effort,” as it were, confirming it once again with the stamp of one’s own judgment based on reason: “Yes, it is so because I have proven it.” Certainty of belief is different from scientific certainty based on testing and experimenting.

Believing means: holding something to be true based on witness.

Believing means: accepting someone else’s testimony about an object, in particular an object that I cannot witness through my own sensory perception or logical deduction. Believing means a well-founded act of trust in an external communication and it has therefore essentially two poles: the one who believes and the one who is believed.

Everyone knows that such acceptance and approval are by no means required only in the realm of religion. They are indispensable in many areas of human life. Take mathematics, for example, which cannot be handled otherwise than that you first accept the meaning of the symbols, that is, “believe,” and only when you deal with them can you “see” and determine that they are also “correct”; whoever asked for proof of this first would never learn addition. History consists of an accumulation of “natural acts of faith” in reports and documents about events that no living person can verify directly; we can only examine the reliability and credibility of the reports and the reporters, and even this only on the basis of other witnesses who are just as far removed. In daily life, every person accepts two fundamental determinations of his existence only based on faith: namely, that the father of the family is his father, that the mother is his mother. Who would even think of questioning this communication just because it is purely a “matter of faith”? Oh, the extent to which a family would be broken up and all human relationships in it destroyed if “evidence” of paternity were to be demanded and sought after! And by the way, it seems to me that this very fact that everyone can only “believe” their own father, never “prove” with absolute certainty, is of the deepest parable-like significance for our relationship with God.

In the Christian realm, Church doctrine defines faith as “the decision by which the Spirit resolutely and permanently affirms God who reveals His mysteries.”

You see, two things are already presupposed: that there is a God and that He has made Himself known to humans. But how does one find out what God who reveals has communicated to us and thus what is already known to Him? Only through a messenger, a witness, someone who claims to be the recipient and intermediary of those “mysteries,” that is, of what is otherwise inaccessible to the human spirit. So initially one has only a single question: whether the messenger is credible.

At this point you must be careful. This is where the second distortion of vantage point occurs. It has become almost common practice to refrain from acknowledging the stance of the questioner in such discussions, as if someone could ask without any “position” or “point of view.” It makes a tremendous difference whether I am looking at a building from the inside or the outside. If I am inside, no matter how I crane my neck, I cannot turn in such a way that I really get exactly the same view as if I were standing outside; no one will have such a strong and precise imagination that he can comprehend what actually strikes the eyes of another person, down to the details. Catholics who get caught up in religious turmoil keep saying that they now have to approach the obligatory investigation as something “without any preconditions,” that is, disregarding everything they already and still know and believe (because at least at this stage they have not yet by any means “lost” the entirety of belief; they are only insecure and frightened with regard to a few phrases!); they say they should act as if they did not believe anything: that this is what intellectual honesty demands. Isn’t this, on the contrary, outright intellectual posturing, a desperate “as if,” a false way of posing the question from which one cannot even think “straight”?

Certainly, a passionate and well-meaning effort on behalf of unbelievers (perhaps for a certain unbeliever) frequently plays a role here, as a real motive, often deeply hidden from oneself: one wants to “have nothing” on him, one wants to enter his fight “with the same weapons,” one wants to see with the other person’s eyes; especially with women this subliminal wish often plays a decisive role. But all empathy with a blind person does not cancel out my own ability to sense light, all empathy with a child does not really put me on his level, and whoever starts from this “as if” only obstructs the solution. Quite to the contrary, objectivity requires that I start from what I already know and have, from what you at present cannot reject and deny with good cogent reasons.

That seems to me to be the primordial act of the Catholic faith—everything else is just its development and branching out. In this old, so simple formula: “I believe everything that God has revealed and that the holy Catholic Church sets forth to believe,” the schoolchild and the much-talked-about “mommy” have the faith of the Church as completely and truly as Augustine, Thomas, and Pascal. The catechumen, who can say and carry out this one sentence with a clear conscience, is ready to be received, no matter how unclear his ideas about the doctrine of the Trinity, the Eucharist, or Mariology may be. It goes without saying that it is good, beneficial, and required that he receive explanation and instruction in this faith individually according to the degree of his education, but if he would die before the lesson could proceed, one could easily answer for baptizing or confirming him and give him the Blessed Sacrament: for he has the faith of the Church. Conversely, one would not be justified to do this for a pupil in religious instruction, no matter how clever and interested he may be, who on the basis of his own insight “finds the Catholic views” on one hundred and one topics “fabulous”—who, for example, considers the Catholic concept of marriage the only reasonable one, Christian cosmology and anthropology the only plausible one, Catholic morality by far the most useful, etc.—but nevertheless sees nothing else in the Church than an imposing basin of all human heritage made up of intellect, experience, and culture and who, as a whole and in detail, always only agrees “subject to revocation,” as long as and to the degree that something corresponds to the intellectual level he has reached, as long as he does not find that new knowledge leads him beyond this framework.

He cannot become Catholic; he is not Catholic because he doesn’t believe:

And then the parts are all in his hand,

Minus only the spiritual band!

Möhler expresses this connection in the powerful, clear language of his century: “This is the mystery of our knowledge of God: only in the whole can he who created the whole be known because he reveals himself completely only in the whole. How is the single individual to know him? Only because the individual, although not the whole, can yet embrace it with great mind, with love. Thus, although the individual is not the whole, the whole is yet in the individual and the individual knows what the whole is. We, as individual essences, expand ourselves to the whole in love. Love grasps God.” But if we arrogantly step out of this whole, if we want to trim it according to our measure, instead of expanding ourselves according to its measure, then, “We do not thus lift ourselves to the All, but narrow-heartedly draw it down to us and see of God only as much as we are, the many parts of the whole. Although we thus wish to be the whole, we know only what a part knows.”

Now please do not hear in this that our religious drive for knowledge and thirst for understanding have out of false modesty prematurely set a limit and that we may or even should fall asleep into self-satisfied intellectual indolence with a comfortable conscience, with a general assent to faith that we are “partaking of the whole.” Rather, we embark on a journey that we can never fully experience.

This essay is the Introduction to The Church in the Flesh, by Ida Friederike Görres, translated by Jennifer S. Bryson.

Republished with gracious permission from Cluny Media.

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The featured image is “The Christening” (1920), by Gonzalo Bilbao, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.