disorder; on the natural level, as waste and exhaustion of irreplaceable resources; on the biological level, as degenerative diseases and the deterioration of racial stocks; on the moral level, as an overweening bumptiousness; and on the spiritual level, as blindness to divine Reality and complete ignorance of the reason and purpose of human existence. In such circumstances it would be extraordinary if the innocent and righteous did not suffer—just as it would be extraordinary if the innocent kidneys and the righteous heart were not to suffer for the sins of a licorous palate and overloaded stomach, sins, we may add, imposed upon those organs by the will of the gluttonous individual to whom they belong, as he himself belongs to a society which other individuals, his contemporaries and predecessors, have built up into a vast and enduring incarnation of disorder, inflicting suffering upon its members and infecting them with its own ignorance and wickedness. The righteous man can escape suffering only by accepting it and passing beyond it; and he can accomplish this only by being converted from righteousness to total selflessness and God-centredness, by ceasing to be just a Pharisee, or good citizen, and becoming * perfect as your Father which is in heaven is perfect.’ The difficulties in the way of such a transfiguration are, obviously, enormous. But of those who ‘speak with authority,’ who has ever said that the road to complete deliverance was easy or the gate anything but * strait and narrow’?
Chapter XVIII Faith
ThE word ‘faith’ has a variety of meanings, which it is -L important to distinguish. In some contexts it is used as a synonym for ‘trust,’ as when we say that we have faith in Dr. X’s diagnostic skill or in lawyer Y’s integrity. Analogous to this is our ‘faith’ in authority—the belief that what certain persons say about certain subjects is likely, because of their special qualifications, to be true. On other occasions ‘faith’ stands for belief in propositions which we have not had occasion to verify for ourselves, but which we know that we could verify if we had the inclination, the opportunity and the necessary capacities. In this sense of the word we have ‘ faith,’ even though we may never have been to Australia, that there is such a creature as a duck-billed platypus; we have ‘faith’ in the atomic theory, even though we may never have performed the experiments on which that theory rests, and be incapable of understanding the mathematics by which it is supported. And finally there is the ‘faith,’ which is a belief in propositions which we know we cannot verify, even if we should desire to do so—propositions such as those of the Athanasian Creed or those which constitute the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception. This kind of ‘faith’ is defined by the Scholastics as an act of the intellect moved to assent by the will.
Faith in the first three senses of the word plays a very important part, not only in the activities of everyday life, but even in those of pure and applied science. Credo ut intelligam —and also, we should add, ut ogam and ut vivam. Faith is a pre-condition of all systematic knowing, all purposive doing and all decent living. Societies are held together, not primarily by the fear of the many for the coercive power of the few, but by a widespread faith in the other fellow’s decency. Such a faith tends to create its own object, while the widespread
mutual mistrust, due, for example, to war or domestic dissension, creates the object of mistrust. Passing now from the moral to the intellectual sphere, we find faith lying at the root of all organized thinking. Science and technology could not exist unless we had faith in the reliability of the universe— unless, in Clerk Maxwell’s words, we implicitly believed that the book of Nature is really a book and not a magazine, a coherent work of art and not a hodge-podge of mutually irrelevant snippets.
To this general faith in the reasonableness and trustworthiness of the world the searcher after truth must add two kinds of special faith—faith in the authority of qualified experts, sufficient to permit him to take their word for statements which he personally has not verified; and faith in his own working hypotheses, sufficient to induce him to test his provisional beliefs by means of appropriate action. This action may confirm the belief which inspired it. Alternatively it may bring proof that the original working hypothesis was ill founded, in which case it will have to be modified until it becomes conformable to the facts and so passes from the realm of faith to that of knowledge.
The fourth kind of faith is the thing which is commonly called ‘religious faith.’ The usage is justifiable, not because the other kinds of faith are not fundamental in religion just as they are in secular affairs, but because this willed assent to propositions which are known to be unverifiable occurs in religion, and only in religion, as a characteristic addition to faith as trust, faith in authority and faith in unverified but verifiable propositions. This is the kind of faith which, according to Christian theologians, justifies and saves. In its extreme and most uncompromising form, such a doctrine can be very dangerous. Here, for example, is a passage from one of Luther’s letters. Esto peccator, et pecca farther ,• sed fortius crede et gaude in Chris to, qui victor est peccati, mortis et mundi. Peccandum est quam diu sic sumus ; vita haec non est habitatio justitiae. (‘ Be a sinner and sin strongly; but yet more strongly believe and rejoice in Christ, who is the conqueror of sin, death and the world.
So long as we are as we are, there must be sinning; this life is not the dwelling place of righteousness,’) To the danger that faith in the doctrine of justification by faith may serve as an excuse for and even an invitation to sin must be added another danger, namely, that the faith which is supposed to save may be faith in propositions not merely unverifiable, but repugnant to reason and the moral sense, and entirely at variance with the findings of those who have fulfilled the conditions of spiritual insight into the Nature of Things.
‘This is the acme of faith,’ says Luther in his De Servo Arbitrio, ‘to believe that God who saves so few and condemns so many, is merciful; that He is just who, at his own pleasure, has made us necessarily doomed to damnation, so that He seems to delight in the torture of the wretched and to be more deserving of hate than of love. If by any effort of reason I could conceive how God, who shows so much anger and harshness, could be merciful and just, there would be no need of faith,’ Revelation (which, when it is genuine, is simply the record of the immediate experience of those who are pure enough in heart and poor enough in spirit to be able to see God) says nothing at all of these hideous doctrines, to which the will forces the quite naturally and rightly reluctant intellect to give assent. Such notions .are the product, not of the insight of saints, but of the busy phantasy of jurists, who were so far from having transcended selfness and the prejudices of education that they had the folly and presumption to interpret the universe in terms of the Jewish and Roman law with which they happened to be familiar. ‘Woe unto you lawyers,’ said Christ. The denunciation was prophetic and for all time.
The core and spiritual heart of all the higher religions is the Perennial Philosophy; and the Perennial Philosophy can be assented to and acted upon without resort to the kind of faith about which Luther was writing in the foregoing passages. There must, of course, be faith as trust—for confidence in one’s fellows is the beginning of charity towards men, and confidence not only in the material, but also the moral and spiritual reliability of the universe, is the beginning of charity or love-knowledge in relation to God. There must also be faith in
authority—the authority of those whose selflessness has qualified them to know the spiritual Ground of all being by direct acquaintance as well as by report. And finally there must be faith in such propositions about Reality as are enunciated by philosophers in the light of genuine revelation—propositions which the believer knows that he can, if he is prepared to fulfil the necessary conditions, verify for himself.
But, so long as the Perennial Philosophy is accepted in its essential simplicity, there is no need of willed assent to propositions known in advance to be unverifiable. Here it is necessary to add that such unverifiable propositions may become verifiable to the extent that intense faith affects the psychic substratum and so creates an existence, whose derived objectivity can actually be discovered ‘out there,’ Let us, however, remember that an existence which derives its objectivity from the mental activity of those who intensely believe in it cannot possibly be the spiritual Ground of the world, and that a mind busily engaged in the voluntary and intellectual activity, which is * religious faith,’ cannot possibly be in the state of selflessness and alert passivity which is the necessary condition of the unitive knowledge of the Ground.
That is why the Buddhists affirm that Moving faith leads to heaven; but obedience to the Dharma leads to Nirvana,’ Faith in the existence and power of any
