When I was growing up Evangelical, I thought I knew what faith was. Faith meant things that should never, ever be questioned; that it would be impious, even blasphemous, to drag down into the sordid arena of inquiry. Consequently, as I grew to the age of inquiry, it seemed to me that Faith and Truth were necessarily in conflict; in late adolescence I decided that I couldn't have Faith, because I wanted Truth.
But I discovered that Faith isn't closing your mind; as "The evidence of things not seen, the substance of things hoped for", it is instead that particle of information which causes Truth to emerge from the disordered sea of fact. When I went out "Looking for (Truth) in all the wrong places", I could not find it until I returned to Faith; all the truths I laid my hands on added up to a senseless universe. I had been bashing my head against the solid wall of materialistic determinism, not noticing there was a door in the wall the whole time close by. Faith is the golden key which opens that door. The wall is just as solid as before, I have not stopped believing in matter or reason, but the wall no longer obstructs my passage to the enclosed garden of the soul.
Perhaps I should speak a bit more of the precise nature of this revelation. What closed the door of Faith for me was that I identified reason so closely with the techniques of modern Science; though it established for me many things as true, it could not point to a purpose behind all the universe of marvels it paraded before me. So I sailed the vortexes of nihilism with the lodestone at the center of my soul spinning crazily, but when the Pole Star of Faith rose above the horizon, my direction lay clear before me.
What caused me to be able to accept the faith I had rejected in adolescence was firstly the realization that Faith was not contrary to Reason, but was rather the very Soul of Reason. The soul of the Body is different from the Body, and invisible; but it is not contrary to the Body, and it is the Soul that makes it live. So Reason lives only when in possession of its soul. Secondly was the place that Beauty gained as an indicator of purpose. I had previously followed the teachers of modernism in regarding beauty as irrelevant to the search for Truth; I have written previously of Being as an absolute value, which cannot be argued either for or against. This realization changed everything for me; before, I was at war with my heart, and felt that as I valued Truth I must put everything that I intrinsically felt to be valuable to trial before the august tribunal of Reason, which my training had taught me to regard as brutally materialistic. Now I thought, for the first time, "Why not? Why should not my perceptions of beauty be regarded as the central datum which influences the ordering of all other information? Why must the eyes of the body be regarded above the eye of the soul?". I suppose it was a persistent regard for Truth which saved me from abandoning truth altogether at this point, (as many do) thereby becoming degenerate, but it really never occurred to me that a beauty which was not simultaneously true could be truly beautiful. All the modern world regards Truth and Beauty as a duality, but they are one.
Dostoevsky wrote that Beauty would save the World. On the face of it, that is an absurd thing to say; certain it is that many are damned by it. Perhaps it is true only for those who have themselves lain in the pit of Nihilism, on whose benighted brains it finally dawns that, perhaps if the world is only beautiful it is meaningful; and the dark tormented dreams disperse, leaving one free to walk in the morning of a new day.
When at the high-tide of youth and health I went looking for purpose, I had no hope, I wanted to die; now that I am not so young, and not completely healthy, I am sustained by Faith, and I believe I could rejoice in my being if I could see but one ray of light. There are times when I have thought that if I were deprived of all my faculties except the ability to breathe, it would be enough; I could rejoice in the possession of my life in the joy of breathing. If Love is the affirmation of Being, then Faith is the surrender to Love; it is this surrender which led me to the God who is Love, and from there to the Christ who saves, and on to the Scripture which records the truths of our Faith, and the purposes of God, and from thence, in the fullness of time, to that Faith "Once delivered to the Apostles".
What caused me to be able to accept the faith I had rejected in adolescence was firstly the realization that Faith was not contrary to Reason, but was rather the very Soul of Reason. The soul of the Body is different from the Body, and invisible; but it is not contrary to the Body, and it is the Soul that makes it live. So Reason lives only when in possession of its soul. Secondly was the place that Beauty gained as an indicator of purpose. I had previously followed the teachers of modernism in regarding beauty as irrelevant to the search for Truth; I have written previously of Being as an absolute value, which cannot be argued either for or against. This realization changed everything for me; before, I was at war with my heart, and felt that as I valued Truth I must put everything that I intrinsically felt to be valuable to trial before the august tribunal of Reason, which my training had taught me to regard as brutally materialistic. Now I thought, for the first time, "Why not? Why should not my perceptions of beauty be regarded as the central datum which influences the ordering of all other information? Why must the eyes of the body be regarded above the eye of the soul?". I suppose it was a persistent regard for Truth which saved me from abandoning truth altogether at this point, (as many do) thereby becoming degenerate, but it really never occurred to me that a beauty which was not simultaneously true could be truly beautiful. All the modern world regards Truth and Beauty as a duality, but they are one.
Dostoevsky wrote that Beauty would save the World. On the face of it, that is an absurd thing to say; certain it is that many are damned by it. Perhaps it is true only for those who have themselves lain in the pit of Nihilism, on whose benighted brains it finally dawns that, perhaps if the world is only beautiful it is meaningful; and the dark tormented dreams disperse, leaving one free to walk in the morning of a new day.
When at the high-tide of youth and health I went looking for purpose, I had no hope, I wanted to die; now that I am not so young, and not completely healthy, I am sustained by Faith, and I believe I could rejoice in my being if I could see but one ray of light. There are times when I have thought that if I were deprived of all my faculties except the ability to breathe, it would be enough; I could rejoice in the possession of my life in the joy of breathing. If Love is the affirmation of Being, then Faith is the surrender to Love; it is this surrender which led me to the God who is Love, and from there to the Christ who saves, and on to the Scripture which records the truths of our Faith, and the purposes of God, and from thence, in the fullness of time, to that Faith "Once delivered to the Apostles".
3 comments:
Beautiful post! I don't know exactly what you mean by calling faith a "particle of information", because I tend to think of information as something that can pass through the soul without affecting it in a meaningful way. But then I thought about it and realized that to be "in-formed" is to be changed inwardly. Then I thought of the grain of mustard seed, how it's a small particle, and began to see the beauty of calling faith a "particle of in-formation". Is this something like what you were getting at?
No. I wasn't trying to be that subtle, though it's a nice idea. I was just refering to my belief that Scientific objectivity numbs our senses to half the universe, and that the more important half; that's why I consider much of modern scholarship to be a kind of brain-damage, profoundly disabling to the ability to process spiritual information. That it's hard for us to even think of spiritual things as a kind of information to me highlights the extent of the problem, but the modern divorce between sense and soul is not true of human culture generally; I wrote a poem once, in which I tried to express something of this. It ends with the lines,
Though Heart is like eternal Mind
It's not akin to calculation
And in the mind there is a heart
Which throbs, and feels, and drives the circulation.
Does this clarify things for you or further confuse them?
Clarifies! Especially the poem. I had it rattling around in my mind all day yesterday.
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