The Faith of a Child

“Oh, Sancta Simplicium!” (Blessed Simplicity.) These words, uttered at the stake by fifteenth century Czech theologian Jan Hus as he was burned for heresy, speak for anyone who has grappled with the questions of philosophy, religion, or even life in general. Invariably, by following the path of reason and inquiry, we do not discover the answers which we set out on the journey to find, but rather end up breaking down every norm by which we live. Then how we long for the simplicity of the mind that trusts in the world it sees. As Christians, how we long for the simple trust of faith. Yet the more our minds are empowered with knowledge, the quicker we are repelled by the demands of faith. We want to believe what we can know. The conclusions of Christianity cannot be deduced through objective reasoning. Thus, we are tempted to follow the logic of observation, which often leads to the despairing conclusion that life is meaningless. Oh cursed be the fruit of the tree of knowledge!

A first glance at life suggests itself to be merely a blip on the journey from nothing back to nothing, and thus, life is stripped of all enduring meaning. Some people are fine with this, others are overcome with despair. But against the pragmatic realism of the atheist, the Christian counters with a foolish hope. This hope declares that life has meaning—a meaning defined by love. Theologians have written countless books and used practically every philosophical and deductive path available to prove the soundness of the theory of theism, and by extension, the fullness of Christian truth. Yet ultimately, no one is convinced. The objection of the atheist against a meaningful world still holds firm. The problem for the Christian philosopher is that this objection never completely goes away. It bothers us constantly. We struggle against the prospect of meaninglessness as an all-consuming despair, hiding ourselves from the phantom of doubt.

The one factor that seems over and over again to prove the atheist right is the prevalence of suffering. Suffering strikes at random, and thereby seems to prove the chance, and thereby the meaninglessness of life. According to Christianity, the problem of suffering is answered by pointing beyond this life, to an age of perfect love, when all sorrow shall cease. For “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes. Death will be no more; mourning and crying and pain will be no more, for the first things have passed away.” (Rev. 21:4) Through belief in an unseen afterlife, Christianity places faith in the way of salvation itself.

In the ancient world, both in Judaism, and in other cultures, life was explained by way of reward or punishment for actions—a sort of cosmic and moral accounting system. It was expected that long life, wealth, and children were signs of a life well lived, while early death, poverty, and childlessness were considered retribution for sin. Yet it was not long before it became obvious that blessing and suffering worked in a much more abstract manner. The book of Job presented the refutation of this philosophy within Judaism. Similarly, in Greece, Plato came to the conclusion that the unjust man will go further in the world while the truly just man “will be scourged, racked, bound, and after suffering every kind of evil, he will be impaled.” (Republic, bk. II) From this, Plato formulated his philosophy of a republic, in which a corporeal, rather than individual justice, is the defining aspect of society, and ultimately, the meaning of life. Christianity replaced Plato’s justice with Jesus’ love. The similarity is that both philosophies explain suffering by maintaining that the individual good is not the ultimate goal of life: in Plato it is the success of the republic, in Jesus, the good of one’s neighbor. As philosopher, Plato made many attempts to explain the meaning of suffering—none are very satisfying, least of all to one who is actually suffering.

Jesus, conversely, did not attempt to explain the meaning of life in neat and tidy philosophical formulae. What he gave was a moral program, which by following would bring the Kingdom of God—a society of love. His answer to suffering was more abstract, but ultimately far more profound and satisfying than that of any philosopher. What he did was to share in our suffering, thus setting an example of love, that we too might see suffering as an opportunity, in Pope John Paul II’s words, to “unleash love… to give birth to works of love towards neighbor,” and by so doing, “to transform the whole of human civilization into a civilization of love.” Thus suffering takes on a truly salvific meaning. (Salvifici Doloris, 30) In Jesus’ passion, the suffering of the world is alleviated through love.

We are still left wondering, however, why we should believe all of this. Might it not all be a bunch of hermeneutical “mumbo-jumbo?” Could this not simply be the work of philosophers trying to make us feel better about a meaningless existence and moralists trying to guilt-trip us into behaving lawfully through fear of perdition? In Plato’s dialogue on the Republic, Glaucon’s objection against Socrates that the unjust man is the most rewarded, still challenges our notion of moral order, for we have seen such men as these reap the benefits of their craftiness. How can we reconcile this? Why would we willingly align ourselves with the just, who are the victims, rather than the unjust, who are the exploiters? Do we have such a strong faith in an afterlife that we can order our whole lives toward that goal and give up the rewards of selfishness here on earth? And how can we reconcile suffering once it touches us, unexpected and severe? How often still in our suffering will we not cry out against God and life? After all the iniquity in the world which we have seen, why would we choose to believe in this man Jesus, who chose suffering, and promised no earthly reward?

If we look for the answer to this question in philosophy and logic, we will be disappointed. Jesus did not answer these questions directly. He did not explain life in the same manner as Plato. The Christian philosophy on life was established over the ensuing centuries, based on Jesus’ teaching, but codified first by the Apostles, and later, by such Christian philosophers as Origen, Tertullian, Augustine, and ultimately Thomas Aquinas. In an attempt to understand philosophically what Jesus had taught morally, these men unapologetically employed the existing Hellenistic and Semitic philosophies. Christianity is not and has never claimed to be uninfluenced by the philosophies of other cultures. Jesus’ mission was to present a moral program, change the way people thought about God, and to identify the meaning of life as love. Beyond this, he left systematic philosophy to the philosophers. He left no comforting conclusions to the existential questions which have tormented us no less since his time than they did before. Thus, to follow him, we must have faith. How much easier it would be if we, the philosophers, could learn to follow in simple faith, rather than tying our brains in knots grappling with questions we will never be able to answer through empirical knowledge.

The mistake we make is to try to “prove” the truth of Christianity through logic. Christianity may be a philosophy, but that was never meant to be its primary aspect. Let us rather begin from the conclusion: why are we trying to prove it? Ultimately we either want to believe it, or else we already do. And why would this be so if we cannot prove its truth? Why would we accept the difficult moral program of Jesus, and a salvation found in suffering when we could more logically come to a conclusion based on personal selfishness, or at the very least, a Platonic corporeal self-service? Ultimately, we want to believe it because we want to believe that love has meaning. Logic cannot reconcile suffering, yet love can, for it is suffering’s answer—its antidote.

Thus, despite its non-philosophical origins, Christianity gives a better glimpse of truth than any other philosophy the world has put forth. After all, Christianity is a window into a completely other realm, a realm defined by love. Where all other philosophies try to explain upward from our own observation, with empirical reasoning, Christianity explains downward, ontologically, from the highest truth down to our imperfect understanding. Thus, to reach even the threshold of Christian understanding, a “leap of faith” is required.

This is where Jesus enters not only the salvation history, but the epistemological history of the world. He transformed the way people would have to think and reason, because he built the bridge between philosophy and God. As a man, he led us to something higher, and only by letting him offer his hand to our inquiry, will we come close to an idea of truth. Pope Benedict XVI compares the human situation “with that of Peter trying to walk upon the water at Gennesareth. (Matt. 14:30) He wants to get across to the Lord, but he cannot. The philosopher, we might say, is Peter on the lake, wishing to step beyond his mortality [human knowledge] and glimpse life, but not succeeding, indeed sinking beneath the waves. The waters of mortality bear down his will to see. Only the Lord’s outstretched hand can save the sinking Peter, that is, humankind… Philosophical understanding remains a walking on the waters: it yields no solid ground. Only God incarnate can draw us out of the waters by his power and hold us firm. His promise is that we will attain the vision of God, which is life, not through speculative thinking but by the purity of an undivided heart, in the faith and love which take the Lord’s hand and are led by it… It is through the patience that faith and its offspring, love, engender, that purification finds its mainstay in the Lord who makes the paradoxical walking on the waters a possibility and so gives meaning to an otherwise absurd existence.” (Ratzinger: Eschatology, V,4,c) Faith, to the philosopher, is just as laughable as walking on the water. We train ourselves to believe that we can answer all the questions of life by ourselves, just as Peter believed he could walk across the water by himself. But it is only once we put our hand into the outstretched hand of Jesus, giving up our intellectual stubbornness, that we can be led across the abyss into truth.

It is at the point where faith is demanded that we feel God’s comfort for our restlessness. God does not ask us to understand him. He asks us to believe in him (Rom. 10:9) “Thou shalt believe!” Søren Kierkegaard beautifully identifies this shalt, as the only place in which we may find the repose of eternity. (S. K. Works of Love) It is belief—faith—that holds the key to salvation.

Our stubbornness, or perhaps simply our mortality, wishes to unravel the mysteries of our existence in an orderly fashion, but that will always be impossible. Even in science this has proved futile, as each set of answers only manifests new questions. We are like children, incapable of understanding the fullness of truth that surrounds us, and yet obliged to obey for the sake of the truth we do not yet know.

Yet what truths do we, and what truths do we not know? We may try to forget everything we have been taught and begin our philosophy at a true beginning point, but that is nearly impossible. In modern society we cannot divorce our notion of morality from what we have been taught by institutional religion. It can even be argued that the basic principals of Christianity are so ingrained in Western society that any contemporary philosophy has to be first a point of departure from them, before they can be anything else at all. We first must break down what we know about life and morality in order to build it back up again in a new way. Then we have to ask if we are truly philosophers, or only rebellious children attempting to break down the truths we have already learned. This very question resolves the philosophical denouement in Leo Tolstoy’s great novel, Anna Karenina, when the character Levin observes a group of children making mischief. Their mother makes the children stop what they are doing, explaining the wastefulness of their activity. The children do not understand that they are wasteful, or that their actions are the first step in a breakdown of that very order which gives them their security, they only know that their fun has been curtailed. Levin then compares his own philosophical journey away from the Church to the activity of the children: “Brought up with an idea of God, a Christian, my whole life filled with the spiritual blessings Christianity has given me, and living on these blessings, like the children I did not understand them and want to destroy what I live by… Yes, what I know, I know not by reason, but it has been given to me, revealed to me, and I know it with my heart, by faith in the chief thing taught by the Church.” Tolstoy then turns the question to that of philosophy at large: “Don’t all the theories of philosophy try by the path of thought, which is strange and unnatural to man, to bring him to a knowledge of what he has known long ago, and knows so certainly that he could not live at all without it? Isn’t it distinctly to be seen in the development of each philosopher’s theory that he knows what the chief significance of life is beforehand, and is simply trying by a dubious intellectual path to come back to what everyone knows?… Well then, leave us with our passions and thoughts, without any idea of the one God, of the Creator, or without any idea of what is right, without any explanation of moral evil. Just try to build up anything without those ideas! We destroy them only because we’re spiritually satiated.” (pt.8, ch. 13) The character of Levin was able in the end to abandon his philosophical angst in Christian tradition, which is truly a corporeal exercise in faith. And love, once again, is the offspring of faith. (Ratzinger: Eschatology, V, 4, c)

We are expected to trust in God with the same simplicity with which a child must trust its parents. Our philosophizing is viewed by God with the same tender compassion with which the parent answers the child’s naïve questions. Perhaps the parent gives incomplete answers, not to conceal information, but to fill the child’s knowledge as it is capable. Similarly, God enlightens us to the extent we are able to understand. If we think we can answer all the questions of life through the power of our own reasoning, we are as foolish as the child who thinks it could order its household as well as its parents. The wise philosopher will submit his inquiry to the wisdom of God, just like the child who thirsts for education, welcoming the enlightenment that is given with the faith that the answers beyond his understanding are safely in the hands of one much wiser than we. “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully.” (I Cor. 13:11-12)

Let us return now to Kierkegaard, who touches this same theme: “From the spiritual point of view it is like a child brought up in the home of well-to-do parents, who quite naturally forgets that his daily bread is a gift; now since the Christian religion has many times been rejected by those who were brought up in it, because they preferred all kinds of novelties, just as wholesome food is refused by a person who has never been hungry, in favor of sweets; now since the Christian religion is everywhere presupposed, presupposed as known, as given, as indicated—in order to go further: now it is certainly asserted as a matter of course by everyone; and yet, alas, how seldom is it considered, how seldom perhaps does a Christian earnestly and with a thankful heart dwell upon the idea of what his condition might have been if Christianity had never come into the world!” (Works of Love) Christianity has taught us the selfless love upon which we rely in our time of need. If we had never been given the commandment to “love thy neighbor,” what would the world be like? Would it be a world we would want to live in?

It is this commandment—the heart of Jesus’ moral program—which gives both the promise of the future, and the answer to the problem of suffering here and now. By observing the good that can be gained in the world through love, particularly through the step-by-step elimination of suffering when we confront it with our individual acts of love, we see Christianity’s answer to the philosophers’ question. The meaning of existence is love, and love as an active force in the world is the only satisfactory explanation for suffering. Jesus did not teach as a philosopher teaches, but, more than a philosopher, he taught through actions that are more powerful than words.

This is why the Apostle said that we are only justified through faith (Rom. 5:1), For neither deductive reasoning, nor moral purity can put us into that childish trust, that faith which is necessary to believe that God became man, and that our destiny is with him in a life of everlasting love. Further, it is faith which can inspire us to order our lives toward the good of one another. Now we can see the salvific nature of faith, that it gives an assurance, both of greater knowledge to come, and a sublime destiny of love. In his latest encyclical, Benedict XVI said that “faith is not merely a personal reaching out toward things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for… faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a ‘not yet’. The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality.” (Spe Salvi, 7) It is faith which begets love, and it is love which can bring the Kingdom of God to fruition.

So what, by way of a conclusion, should the Christian philosopher regard as his tool of inquiry?—Faith, which is the water over which we would walk, but can only traverse by giving our inquiry over to the hand of truth to pull us up as we flounder in the abyss of our own reason.