Faith
Definition and Explanation
- Catechism of the Catholic Church, point 1814:
- "Faith is the theological virtue by which we believe in God and believe all that He has said and revealed to us, and that Holy Church proposes for our belief, because He is truth itself."
- The King James Bible:
- "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Heb. 11:1).
- Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologiae, IIaIIae, questions 2,6,7:
- "The act of believing is an act of the intellect assenting to the Divine truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God."
- Cause:
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- Faith is infused into the human soul by God in two aspects. First, God reveals the objects to which faith assents, which objects surpass human reason. Second, God is the cause of man's movement to assent to the truths of faith, a movement otherwise beyond the capabilities of human nature.
- Effects:
- Faith brings about two sorts of fear in man's soul: servile fear, i.e., the fear of being punished by God, and filial fear, i.e., the fear of separating oneself from God or making oneself equal to God.
- Faith also begins the purification of the soul by turning it away from the subjection of love of transient, corporeal things and to God instead.
Examples from Western History and Literature
Pious Aeneas
Aeneid II.921-35: “Then come, dear father. Arms around my neck: / I’ll take you on my shoulders, no great weight. / Whatever happens, both will face one danger, / Find one safety. Iulus will come with me, / My wife at a good interval behind. / Servants, give your attention to what I say. / At the gate inland there’s a funeral mound / And an old shrine of Ceres the Bereft; / Near it an ancient cypress, kept alive / For many years by our father’s piety. / By various routes we’ll come to that one place. / Father, carry our hearthgods, our Penates. / It would be wrong for me to handle them–– / Just come from such hard fighting, bloody work–– / Until I wash myself in running water.”
"Antigone"
Yes, it was not Zeus that made the proclamation; / nor did Justice, which lives with those below, enact / such laws as that, for mankind. I did not believe / your proclamation had such power to enable/ one who will someday die to override / God’s ordinances, unwritten and secure. / They are not of today and yesterday; / they live forever; non knows when first they were. / These are the laws whose penalties I would not incur from the gods, through fear of any man’s temper. ("Antigone," 494-503).
Jane Austen's Fanny Price
They entered. Fanny's imagination had prepared her for something grander than a mere spacious, oblong room, fitted up for the purpose of devotion: with nothing more striking or more solemn than the profusion of mahogany, and the crimson velvet cushions appearing over the ledge of the family gallery above. “I am disappointed,” said she, in a low voice, to Edmund. “This is not my idea of a chapel. There is nothing awful here, nothing melancholy, nothing grand. Here are no aisles, no arches, no inscriptions, no banners. No banners, cousin, to be 'blown by the night wind of heaven.' No signs that a 'Scottish monarch sleeps below.'”
Rodion Raskolnikov
"Crime and Punishment," Epilogue, II: “There was a New Testament under his pillow. Mechanically he took it out. It was hers, the very one from which she had read to him the raising of Lazarus. At the beginning of his prison life he had been afraid that she would pester him with religion, talk about the gospels and press books on him. But to his great astonishment she did not once speak of it, and never even offered him a New Testament. He himself had asked her for it not long before his illness and she had brought it to him without a word. He had not yet opened it. He did not open it even now, but an idea flashed through his mind: ‘Could not her beliefs become my beliefs now? Her feelings, her aspirations, at least…’