On the forums I frequent, the issue of what belief is came up on a thread about the Perpetual Virginity of Mary. What exactly is required of a Catholic when we are asked to ‘believe’.
One of the other Catholic posters quoted a good definition:
Belief: (be and lyian, to hold dear). That state of the mind by which it assents to propositions, not by reason of their intrinsic evidence, but because of authority.
I am fortunate enough to be spending a few days with my best friend who lives several states away from me. She has a two hour Adoration slot from 2-4 am at her parish each Monday night… or is it Tuesday morning? I digress… Anyway, I am able to go with her when I visit and as my current parish has no real Adoration to speak of, it is a great blessing. As I spent time in meditation and prayer, I came across an article which really addressed this line of dscussion and the Holy Spirit brought to mind some recent things which all tied together neatly with her definition. I shared that on the forum and wanted to ‘store’ it here for future reference.
There is a fabulous editorial at the beginning of the April 2008 Magnificat, written by Peter John Cameron, O.P., that speaks to what it is to believe (his words and clips are in green so as to differentiate them from my own thoughts).
Cameron discusses belief not only as faith in God, but rather reminds the reader of the tie between that ‘mature’ or ‘advanced’ belief in God etc and the smaller ones we engage in every day without recognizing them for what they are. Such examples include “a husband [waking] up in the morning believing that his wife still loves him; the food that a waiter puts in front of us we eat believing it not to be poison; we believe that the 7:19 train scheduled for Baltimore will actually take us there and not to Sheboygan.”
Cameron goes on to say “Without “belief” our life would be an endless process of interrogating, examining, second-guessing, and proofing. Saint Thomas Aquinas in a Lenten sermon once said, “How would anyone be able to live unless they put belief in someone? How would they even believe who their own father might be? And therefore it is necessary that human beings believe someone about those things which they cannot know perfectly by themselves.” Believing launches our humanity and enables us to go forward in life.”
The Catechism says believing “is an authentically human act” (CCC 154). We ‘believe’ because we are human – it is our nature. To refuse to believe is to refuse to be human – to refuse to hope and to wonder – to refuse to be teachable and malleable. To refuse to believe hardens our heart because in doing so we deny a part of ourselves – the very heart/essence of who and what we are.
Cameron quotes Benedict, “The act of saying “I believe” is “an act in which the will and the understanding, the teaching and the guidance I have been given, are all cooperatively involved. This act transcends my own limits.” (Pope Benedict XVI)”
To refuse to believe anything but what we ‘know’ by our own ability, exclusive of any other human being, is to refuse knowledge entirely. It is to refuse to engage in the communal process of human thought. Even scientists ‘believe’ in what has been studied and learned before. They did not find it out themselves, but trusted in the ‘belief’ and work of those who came before… even if they were able to ‘prove’ by their own experimentation the ‘truth’ of previous minds, they are standing on the shoulders of such men… on the ‘foundation’ that those scientists ‘belief’ which existed even BEFORE they could ‘prove’ what they intuited to be ‘true’ has given.
Indeed, it is often the way that science, beginning with a hypothesis, BELIEVES before it can PROVE… many times continuing to believe in the face of great opposition. Pope Benedict XVI said that “for the believing Christian the words ‘I believe’ articulate a kind of certainty that is in many respects a higher degree of certainty than that of science… We live faith, not as a hypothesis, but as the certainty on which our life is based.”
Cameron continues “To say “I believe” means that I refuse to live by my own ideas, my constructs, my preconceptions, my self-imposed measure. In the words of Pope Benedict, “To believe means that we become like angels. We can fly, because we no longer weigh so heavily in our own estimation. To become a believer means to escape our own gravity… Someone who believes has found in the truth the pearl for which he is ready to give everything, even himself.”
To refuse to believe is to CHOOSE to limit ourselves and to CHOOSE to limit God. It is to say “No – The mental construct I have of You is big enough for me – wondrous enough – I don’t want a God I can’t understand and comprehend.” To refuse to believe is to become a black hole (RNW dropped that idea in conversation and I’ve taken it and run wild) and, overwhelmed by our own gravity, consume not only ourselves but all that is good and light within our grasp. In the end that becomes too much for us and instead of the apparent destroying of all that which we have consumed, we are destroyed. (Hawking radiation analogy here, though I realize that all analogies break down in the end – some in more stellar fashion than others… pun intended…) We become not larger, but smaller, until at last, overwhelmed by our efforts to deny and annihilate all that is light and good, we cease to exist entirely.
Cameron again… “Belief in God changes us. Faith is a way of knowing…. As St. Augustine expressed it, “I believe, in order to understand; and I understand, the better to believe” (see CCC 158).” The Catechism says that “what moves us to believe is not the fact that revealed truths appear as true and intelligible in the light of our natural reason: we believe ‘because of the authority of God himself who reveals them’” (CCC 156, citing Dei Filius 3) just as our reason for believing our husband, the waiter, and the train schedule come from the authority of those in a position to know who reveal them to us.
