Christian faith consists of true beliefs about God derived from God’s revelation of himself, as reflected in the authoritative teaching of the Catholic Church. To this, we should add that Christian faith is not based primarily on external arguments or evidence for the truth of God’s revelation, or the credibility of the Catholic Church for that matter, but rather on the grace of God, or God’s own self, which moves the Christian believer inwardly, through the faculties of intellect and will, to believe that truth. This is what I take to be the position that both Augustine and Thomas Aquinas take concerning Christian faith; and it is my task in this essay to unpack the most important claims both Augustine and Aquinas make about Christian faith (hereafter just “faith”) in more detail.
In particular, I discuss and defend Augustine’s and Aquinas’s respective epistemologies of faith. This entails analyzing central claims both thinkers make in order to determine the ways in which the true beliefs about God the faithful form and hold are reasonable as well as properly grounded. In the first two sections of the essay, I highlight what I take to be some of Augustine’s enduring epistemological insights concerning the reasonableness and origins of faith. First, I expound Augustine’s claim that it is eminently reasonable to believe what the Catholic Church teaches as true, even in the absence of rational demonstration or proof of that truth, because the Catholic Church is a credible authority, and believing the testimony of a credible authority is a main avenue by which we can attain truth that nevertheless remains “unseen.” Second, I show how, on Augustine’s account, the authority of the Church does not move us fully to believe that truth, even though we derive the truth about God from the teaching of the Church. The actual ground of faith—that which actually gives rise to our faith-beliefs, or which moves us to believe—is the inward movement of God in the mind and will by grace. By illuminating our mind and charging our will with love, God directs and draws us inwardly to believe the truth that God teaches us through the Church.
I read Aquinas’s own account of faith in a distinctly Augustinian light, so in the third section of the essay, I turn to Aquinas to explain more fully how faith-beliefs are adequately or rationally grounded—that is, based on a specifically truth-conducive ground. On Aquinas’s view, we principally form and hold true beliefs about God on the basis of God “moving inwardly” in us, as well as the “inward instinct of the divine invitation” to believe the truth about God that God has revealed. Like Augustine, then, Aquinas sees love, or desire more broadly, as an essential component of faith (specifically what Aquinas calls “formed faith”): it is our love of God, infused in our will by God’s grace, that draws us to believe what our intellect also recognizes in the infused “light of faith” to be true revelations from God. Thus, on my reading of Aquinas, God’s grace is indeed sufficient from an epistemic point of view as a distinctly rational ground for forming and holding faith-beliefs.
In the final section of the essay, I consider and then counter three main objections to my reading of Augustine and Aquinas. Thus, by the end of the essay, I not only discuss some of the main features of the accounts of faith that Augustine and Aquinas respectively offer; I also defend those accounts, as well as the epistemology of faith that I derive from them.
At a pivotal moment in Book VI of his Confessiones, Augustine claims that he no longer is under any epistemic obligation to withhold his assent from certain propositions—particularly those proposed by the Catholic Church—that cannot readily be demonstrated or proven to be true. Previously, under the influence of the Manichees, Augustine had been unwilling to submit to the Church out of fear of falling into intellectual error. “Fearing a precipitate judgment,” he writes, “I kept my heart from giving any assent, and in that state of suspended judgment I was suffering a worse death. I wanted to be as certain about things I could not see as I am certain that seven and three are ten.”1 However, having now recognized the Manichean demand for absolute certainty to be faulty and unreasonable (as well as costly to his spiritual health), he defends his “preference” for the Catholic faith as follows:
I thought it more modest and not in the least misleading to be told by the Church to believe what could not be demonstrated—whether that was because a demonstration existed but could not be understood by all or whether the matter was not one open to rational proof—rather than from the Manichees to have a rash promise of knowledge with mockery of mere belief, and then afterwards to be ordered to believe many fabulous and absurd myths impossible to prove true. Then, little by little Lord, with a most gentle and merciful hand you touched and calmed my heart. I considered the innumerable things I believed which I had not seen, events which occurred when I was not present, such as many incidents in the history of the nations, many facts concerning places and cities which I had never seen, many things accepted on the word of friends, many from physicians, many from other people. Unless we believed what we were told, we would not do anything at all in this life . . . . [So] you persuaded me that the defect lay not with those who believed your books, which you have established with such great authority among almost all nations, but with those who did not believe them.2
In this passage, Augustine begins to offer argumentative support for the epistemic principle that it is often (but certainly not always) reasonable to believe (credere) what it is not possible to know (scire). There are clearly a great many facts about events, places, and other things that we cannot “see”—that is observe directly, or prove to be true. And yet, regarding those facts, “unless we believed what we were told, we would not do anything at all in this life.” Thus, belief derived from authority (auctoritas) becomes a genuine mode of obtaining or learning truths that we cannot in principle know or “see,” including those divine truths about which the Catholic Church speaks.
In De utilitate credendi, Augustine makes a more finely grained epistemological distinction between knowing and believing. Knowledge is a paradigm deliverance of reason, and specifically of rational demonstration or proof. Belief is derived not from rational demonstration or proof but rather from an external authority. Finally, opinion (opinio) is belief put forward as knowledge: hence, it manifests a fundamental error, even if it is not necessarily false.3 Augustine writes: “Our knowledge, therefore, we owe to reason; our beliefs to authority; and our opinions to error. Knowledge always implies belief, and so does opinion. But belief does not always imply knowledge, and opinion never does.”4 So, for example, Augustine says he believes but does not know “that most wicked conspirators were once put to death by the virtuous Cicero;” and yet, he also readily admits, “Not only do I not know that, but I am quite certain that I cannot possibly know it,” since this fact occurs in the past, and lies beyond what reason can demonstrate or prove to be true.5
Like Plato before him, then, Augustine also thinks there is a great epistemic disparity between knowledge and belief. Consider his reading of Daniel 3, as he recounts it in De magistro:
But what about those young men of whom we have heard (Dan. 3) how they vanquished King Nebuchadnezzar and his fiery furnace by faith and religion, how they sang praises to God, and won honors from their enemy? Have we learned about them otherwise than by means of words? I reply, yes. But we already knew the meaning of all these words. I already knew the meaning of “three youths,” “furnace,” “fire,” “king,” “unhurt by fire” and all the rest. But Ananias, Azarias and Misael, are as unknown to me as those sarabarae [also from Dan. 3], and their names did not help me one bit to know them, nor could they help. I confess I believe rather than know that everything we read of in that story happened at that time, just as it was written down. . . . And I know how useful it is to believe many things which I do not know, among them this story about the three youths. Thus although there are many things I cannot know, I do know how useful it is to believe them.6
The claim here is that propositions (most notably, propositions about the past) that contain terms whose meanings are unknown or even unknowable—in this case, the proper names “Ananias,” “Azarias,” and “Misael,”—cannot furnish the content of knowledge, but only belief. Augustine then clarifies why: “Everything we perceive we perceive either by bodily sense or by the mind . . . . When we are asked about the former we reply if they are present to our senses . . . . But when we have to do with things which we behold with the mind, that is, with the intellect and reason, we speak of things which we look upon directly in the inner light of truth which illumines the ‘inner man’ and is inwardly enjoyed.”7 Knowledge of a given truth therefore entails sensory or intellective contact with the persons, things, or events about which that truth speaks. When we lack such contact—for example, when we are separated by time from facts of ancient history—the only path open to us is belief.
Consequently, belief is often the appropriate epistemic stance to take towards things that fall outside the range of what we can know, properly speaking. Take, for example, the will of a friend: our friends’ good will towards us remains hidden within their own hearts, and yet we trust that their will toward us is good, so we readily believe that their will toward us is good. In De fide rerum invisibilium, Augustine writes,
For the truth is that from your heart you trust a heart other than your own and are prepared to believe what you are unable to see either with the eye of your flesh or with that of the mind. With your body you can see the face of a friend, with your mind you can see your own trust, but the trust of your friend cannot be the object of your love if no such mutual trust is found in you, a trust which enables you to believe something you cannot see in your friend.8
Augustine certainly realizes that we should choose whom we trust and hence believe with caution and care; and yet, no friendship is based solely on rational proof or the sort of evidence that is convincing to the senses or the mind. No matter how often our friends demonstrate their benevolence towards us, their behavior and words remain open to interpretation and doubt; and yet, out of trust, we believe them anyway. “For it remains true,” Augustine says, “that if we are not to believe what we cannot see, yet, at those times when the dispositions of our friends remain somewhat uncertain and we do give them our trust, then, when we eventually ascertain proof of their intentions in adverse circumstances, it still comes down to a matter of believing rather than seeing their goodwill towards us.”9 If the trust and the belief it engenders were absent, then “friendship as a whole would therefore disappear, because its essence is mutual love.”10 Such love unites not only friends but also married couples and families; it therefore binds the members of human society together. Thus, Augustine even goes so far as to claim that “nothing would remain stable in human society if we determined to believe nothing that we could not scientifically establish.”11
Augustine’s main argument here may seem to be pragmatic rather than intellectual; but in fact, by pointing out how ubiquitous and necessary belief is in our lives, he further underscores the utter reasonableness (that is what he also means by the “use” or “advantage”) of believing that which we cannot know or “see,” as well as the utter unreasonableness of not believing that which we cannot know or “see,” when we have a credible authority on which to rely.12 As we already have seen, in his Confessiones Augustine states that the intellectual “defect” actually lies with those who refuse to entrust themselves to the requisite authority in matters of belief (religious belief in particular), rather than those who do so entrust themselves. And this is because Augustine realizes that often the only path to attaining truth—itself of supreme epistemic value—is by believing, rather than knowing, what we cannot “see.”
Augustine therefore claims that it is eminently reasonable to believe the teaching contained in Christian Scripture and the Creeds, and proclaimed by the Catholic Church, even if it concerns mysteries and realities past, present, and future that we cannot know or “see.” Again, since we readily assent to many truths that remain “unseen”—otherwise, “human society itself could not endure”—“how much more credence should be given to those divine matters which remain unseen!”13 But there is more that Augustine claims here. The Catholic Church serves as a credible authority in matters of religious belief, and the visible evidence for this is found in the providential ordering of salvation history itself, “through the predictions of the prophets, through the incarnation and teaching of Christ, through the journeys of the apostles, through the reproaches, crosses, blood and deaths of the martyrs, through the laudable lives of the saints, and in every case through miracles worthy of such achievements and virtues, and suitable to the various times.”14 Moreover, the Church “has reached the highest pinnacle of authority, having brought about the conversion of the human race by the instrumentality of the Apostolic See and the succession of bishops.”15 Augustine also says that the Church serves as a credible authority in matters of faith because it is the Church that God promised through Abraham, testified to through the prophets, fulfilled and established in Christ (who is the “seed of Abraham”), and then handed on to the apostles and bishops, as well as the whole human race, as the recipients of God’s power and grace.16
Augustine is certainly not advancing these series of claims as rational proof that the Church is the epistemic authority in matters of religion that God has established. Accepting the Church as the source from which we receive divine truth is itself primarily a matter of faith or trust, not reason, even if reason aids us in discerning whether the Church is an authority worthy of our faith or trust.17 Thus, Augustine defends the credibility of the Church’s authority in order to provide some guidance about which authority in religious matters it is to which we should entrust ourselves, since, on Augustine’s view, there is religious truth to be found (why else would we seek it so fervently?), and reason alone cannot tell us where that truth is to be found. Fear of being deceived by the Church should be no obstacle here: as Augustine knows first-hand, “So long as we cannot know pure truth it is misery no doubt to be deceived by authority; but it is certainly greater misery not to be moved by it.”18 Moreover, “there is no need to give up the hope that God himself has constituted some authority relying on which as on a sure ladder we may rise to him.”19 So once more, it is not only epistemically justifiable, but also epistemically advantageous to take the Catholic Church at its word, and believe what it claims and teaches to be true about God.
In concluding this section, it is important to note that on Augustine’s view, even if reason does not normally move us to assent to divine truth (Augustine readily admits that “it is a difficult matter [for us] to know God by reason”), it still plays an important role in the acquisition of theological knowledge.20 In De vera religione, Augustine states plainly that “Authority demands belief and prepares man for reason. Reason leads to understanding and knowledge.”21 Thus, Augustine affords reason the primary role of furnishing depth of understanding (intellectus) to what we believe in faith even if we only can achieve full understanding, and thus perfect happiness, in the life to come.22 In matters of religion, then, faith enables the proper use of reason, since divine truth only can be cognitively attained piecemeal, or “gradually step by step.”23 More specifically, faith is necessary because it makes the mind more supple and willing to inquire into divine truth: we become more “fit to receive the truth” by first believing what we are told. Just as “every kind of scholastic discipline, however humble or easy to acquire, demands a teacher or master if it is to be acquired,” so the study of religion, which deals with things that remain “unseen,” demands a teacher or master—in this case, the Catholic Church, as appointed by God—to whom we must first submit in faith and from whom we must learn so that we can continue to grow in our understanding and knowledge of God.24 Furthermore, for Augustine, growth in such understanding and knowledge requires not only the right state of mind but also the right state of will, because it is our love of God that orients us fully towards God and propels us on the journey towards achieving full understanding and knowledge of God.25
My claim so far is that faith for Augustine consists of reasonably held beliefs about God derived from the teaching of the Catholic Church, which Augustine also takes to express revealed truth about God. But by “reasonable,” Augustine means something like the following: credible authorities such as the Catholic Church are a viable means of acquiring true belief, so by believing what they say—even if we lack rational demonstration or proof of what the say—we are still doing something of positive epistemic value, well within the bounds of rational sense. This is why it is irrational, broadly speaking, to withhold assenting to teaching proposed by a credible authority (as Augustine himself did in his youth); in doing so, we not only forfeit the opportunity of attaining truths otherwise not available to us, we also forfeit the opportunity (at least in the case of religion) of subsequently understanding and knowing (in Augustine’s technical sense) those truths that we first attain through belief.
But now we need to face the more difficult epistemological question—one which I realize Augustine did not directly face—concerning what actually grounds the true beliefs we form about God in faith. As William Aston defines it, “a ground for a belief is something that fulfills a certain function in the formation and/or sustenance of the belief.”26 Alston further claims that the grounds on which we base our beliefs may be either “doxastic” or “nondoxastic.” Doxastic grounds are other beliefs with propositional contents; nondoxastic grounds primarily include experiences (sensory and otherwise), but like beliefs also constitute psychological states internal to the believer that guide the formation of beliefs (as well as sustain those beliefs). “Basing” a belief on a specific ground requires taking account of that ground, or being guided by it, allowing the ground to influence and inform the psychological process by which one forms and holds certain beliefs. Now, from an epistemic point of view, it is obviously advantageous to base our beliefs on the right sorts of grounds: that is, grounds that lead us to form true beliefs, or are truth-conducive. Alston deems these sorts of grounds “adequate”: so a ground on which a given belief is based (and which also sustains that belief) is adequate if it entails the probable truth of that belief, on the condition that the belief is based on that ground.27 I also think we can use the term “rational” to describe grounds of these sorts; so “rational ground” is the term I will use throughout the remainder of the essay to pick out a ground that is specifically truth-conducive, and which therefore motivates (guides, leads) us in forming true beliefs.
So now we can ask: on Augustine’s account, on what rational ground does the person of faith base his beliefs about God, or his faith-beliefs? Some of what Augustine says (particularly in his earlier writings) might suggest that the person of faith bases his faith-beliefs on the aforementioned arguments for the credibility of the Church, which constitute specific doxastic grounds. While these arguments certainly do not amount to rational demonstrations or proofs, they certainly appeal to reason (as Augustine also suggests), and specifically lend rational support to the Church’s authority in matters of religious belief. However, we need to ask, do these arguments or “motives of credibility” (as they are commonly referred to) really move us to believe what the Church teaches? While it is true these arguments may begin to move us to believe, or at least enable us to take the Church’s authority in religious matters more seriously, they seem to lack the rational force necessary to move us to believe the Church’s teaching with full conviction concerning the truth of that teaching: at best, they attest to the probable truth of that teaching. And even if we grant that these arguments do constitute rational grounds sufficient to move us to believe, it is not clear who they appeal to, apart from those philosophers or apologists willing and able to assess their rational credentials.28 Additionally, these arguments seem to be directed more to those who already accept the authority of the Catholic Church than to those who do not accept it. Those with faith are far more likely to accept the fulfillment of prophecy, the lives of saints and martyrs, as well as the unprecedented growth of the early Church, etc., as visible evidence of the Church’s divinely appointed status than are those who lack it. Finally, Augustine states quite clearly and consistently that we accept the authority of others because of the personal bonds that conjoin us: children believe their parents, students believe their teachers, and friends believe one another not on the basis of arguments but rather on the basis of trust, which in turn enables “mutual love.”
Some of what Augustine says may suggest that it is not arguments for the credibility of the Church that furnish rational grounds for faith-beliefs but simply other beliefs about the Church. In short, we believe what the Church says about maters of faith because we also believe that the Church is a credible authority in matters of faith; so the latter belief grounds the former. And yet, this latter belief itself seems to be a faith-belief, which we form and hold primarily not on the basis of rational arguments (as we just saw) but on the basis of still other beliefs: for example, the belief that the Church has been appointed and constituted by God. But again, this particular belief is also formed and held in faith: so even if we possess arguments that support it (and Augustine clearly thinks we do), these arguments do not seem to possess the rational force necessary to move us to believe it, nor do they seem to be at all a part of the psychological process by which we come to believe it and continue to do so—even if we subsequently employ those arguments to help bolster its rational credentials. Thus, it too needs another ground.
Perhaps, then, we should construe the Church’s authority differently: we hear what the Church proclaims and straightaway believe what it says, without making inferences from any other beliefs. Thus, we could identify the rational ground of faith simply as the Church’s telling or proclaiming certain things to us. However, we then have to face the empirical fact, which Augustine readily recognizes, that the Church’s teaching does not elicit faith from all who hear it proclaimed to them, perhaps most obviously because the Church teaches things that are difficult to believe, especially using reason alone.29 Why, then, do some believe what they hear, and others do not believe what they hear? Augustine says:
For all men do not possess faith, who hear the Lord in the Scriptures promising the kingdom of heaven; nor are all men persuaded, who are counseled to come to Him, who says, “Come unto me, all you who labor.” They, however, who have faith are the same who are persuaded to come to Him. This He Himself set forth most plainly, when He said, “No man can come to me, except the Father, who has sent me, draw him.” And some verses afterwards, when speaking of those who do not believe, He says, “Therefore I said unto you, that no man can come unto me except it were given unto him of my Father.” This is the grace which Pelagius ought to acknowledge, if he wishes not only to be called a Christian, but to be one.30
In this passage from De gratia Christi, one of his later anti-Pelagian treatises, Augustine explicitly identifies God as the cause of faith, since God alone provides the grace that can persuade us to believe what God teaches through the Scriptures, and hence the Church. Thus, Augustine readily recognizes that the exterior teaching of the Church is entirely insufficient to move us to believe. There needs to be an inner teaching or light, given to us by God, so that we may be moved by God to believe: “they who believe at the voice of the preacher from without, hear of the Father from within, and learn; while they who do not believe, hear outwardly, but inwardly do not hear nor learn.”31
We must note that Augustine’s claim here is entirely consistent with a central tenet of his overall epistemology. In De magistro, Augustine argues that no genuine learning is possible without divine aid, and specifically the direct illuminating presence of God to the mind. Typically, we think that all learning occurs by means of words or other signs: teachers talk and we listen, expecting to gain the knowledge that teachers possess and aim to pass on to us. But words themselves, Augustine says, cannot impart knowledge, because words by themselves do not show us what they signify, and hence what they mean: “from words we can learn only words.”32 Even the pedagogical activity of pointing to a word’s signified object, or showing without words by ostension what a word signifies, is fraught with ambiguity and hence remains open to misinterpretation.33 (For example, Augustine highlights the obvious difficulty in showing someone what “walking” means when one is already walking).34 Thus, no amount of exterior teaching can yield the sort of inward knowledge or understanding (“seeing” for ourselves) necessary for grasping what a word truly signifies and means. “Even when I speak what is true and [the learner] sees what is true, it is not I who teach him. He is taught not by my words but by the things themselves which inwardly God has made manifest to him.”35 We are, then, fundamentally reliant on the divine light to teach us: “our real Teacher is he who is so listened to, who is said to dwell in the inner man, namely Christ, that is, the unchangeable power and eternal wisdom of God.”36
So if it is the case that all learning requires the divine light—God’s pointing us to the real referents and meanings of the words we hear spoken to us—then much more divine light (God’s augmented presence to the mind by grace) is needed to teach us concerning the divine mysteries we hear about proclaimed to us in Church teaching, so that we may in turn believe what it is that we hear. Now, in the case of faith, it is not initially clear how far the divine pedagogy extends and what we actually “learn” by God’s grace, even though clearly, the illumination that God provides does not unveil the full truth concerning the mysteries of faith. As we already have seen, Augustine claims that understanding always follows faith, and that our understanding of divine truth in this life is always partial. But at the same time, Augustine also recognizes that the inner cognitive state of those who believe versus those who do not believe is fundamentally different: the mind of the believer is clearly illuminated by grace in an epistemically significant and positive sense, given that such illumination leads him to believe. For the moment, then, I claim the following on Augustine’s behalf: God leads us to believe by way of teaching us inwardly what to believe, or illuminating our minds so that we recognize what is proposed to us for belief as true (since God is indeed Truth itself), even if we do not and cannot understand that truth fully.
God’s drawing us to believe—an act of persuasion rather than coercion—of course also requires our willing cooperation, or a free act of will. While God indeed “acts upon the reasonable soul in order that it may believe in Him (and certainly there is no ability whatever in free will to believe, unless there be persuasion or summons towards someone in whom to believe),” it still remains the case that “to yield our consent to God’s summons, or to withhold it, is (as I have said) a function of our own will.”37 Thus, even in illuminating us regarding what we should believe, God does not force us to believe. God draws us freely to believe what God shows us to believe by working in our wills, creating in us a desire and love for God himself. In De spiritu et littera, Augustine says:
We . . . affirm that the human will is so divinely aided in the pursuit of righteousness, that (in addition to man’s being created with a free-will, and in addition to the teaching by which he is instructed how he ought to live) he receives the Holy Ghost, by whom there is formed in his mind a delight in, and a love of, that supreme and unchangeable good which is God, even now while he is still “walking by faith” and not yet “by sight;” in order that by this gift . . . he may conceive an ardent desire to cleave to his Maker.38
The gift of himself to us in the person of the Holy Spirit provides precisely the divine aid we need in order to cleave to God as our “supreme and unchangeable good,” and therefore act out of that desire in conformity with God’s teaching on how we ought to live. This applies specifically to the act of faith as well, since it too requires a free choice of will. So coming to have faith in God is inseparable from loving who God is.
The act of faith on Augustine’s view is thus a function of both the intellect and the will: it is “thinking with assent.”39 Here, Augustine actually means much more than this definition initially suggests: the assent of faith, which certainly entails the intellective act of believing what the Catholic Church proposes for our belief, is motivated by our love of God—a love that we express by believing what God teaches us through the Church. The will, then, is surely involved; but as John Rist argues, Augustine’s voluntas, only roughly and inaccurately translated as “will,” actually refers to our most fundamental mindset or orientation—we could say, again, our heart’s determining desire—which guides not only how we live but also how and what we believe.40 If our voluntas is directed toward God, then we accordingly will give full assent to the truth that God teaches us through the Church; in effect, we will want to believe divine truth not because we understand it (at least not at first) but because we love it. If our voluntas is not directed toward God, then we will fail to assent to the truth that God teaches us through the Church; we will not want to believe divine truth, not merely because we do not understand it, but rather because we do not love it. Thus, Rist writes, “To be able to believe in God, to have faith in him, is to have something of the love of God (itself a gift of God)—that loving belief being the further prerequisite to further moral and theological understanding. . . . In religion (widely conceived) thinking the truth cannot be separated from loving the truth, and in our present world loving the truth cannot be separated from faith.”41 In this sense, Rist says, love not only prepares the mind to believe, it also prepares the mind, and thus reason, to “fully to perform its proper and most important functions”—that is, understanding and knowing God better in this life, fully in the next life.42
As I read Augustine, then (the mature Augustine in particular), it is not the authority of the Catholic Church itself that moves us to believe, but rather our love of God, and thus our love of divine truth as illumined for us by God in the teaching of the Catholic Church. That is, it is our love of God, or our rightly ordered voluntas, that moves us to accept the authority of the Church and believe what it says about God, just as it is often the trust in our parents, teachers, and friends—itself the root of love—that rightly moves us to accept their authority and believe what they say.43 Faith truly is an act of loving belief, or “thinking with assent”: believing the Church, and hence believing God, because of our love of God. Or, as Augustine also says, true faith entails believing in God, rather than merely believing God:
But the Lord Himself says openly in another place: “This is the work of God, that you believe in Him whom He has sent.” “That you believe in Him,” not, that you believe Him. But if you believe in Him, you believe Him; yet he that believes Him does not necessarily believe in Him. For even the demons believed Him, but they did not believe in Him. . . . What then is “to believe in Him”? [It is] believing to love Him . . . believing to go to Him and to be incorporated in His members.44
In other words, while the demons believe God, they do not believe in God, or we could say, for God’s own sake. Those who believe in God love God—which the demons clearly do not. Once more, then, on a fully Augustinian view, the act of faith is inseparable from the love that spurs and accompanies it.
We are finally in a position to locate the requisite ground for forming and holding faith-beliefs on Augustine’s view: our being drawn by grace in love to believe the truth about God that God illuminates for us in the teaching of the Catholic Church. Or more concretely: we believe that p, where p expresses a divine truth in propositional form, on the ground of being directed by divine light and drawn by divine love to believe that p, when we hear it proclaimed to us by the Church that p. And this means that it is God’s grace, or we could even say God himself, that is the ground of faith, because it is God’s grace that illumines the intellect and charges the will, thereby furnishing a basis in the intellect and the will for forming faith-beliefs. This nondoxastic ground is also clearly rational, or truth-conducive, on the condition that we base our faith-beliefs on it: because by taking account of it, and allowing it to influence the psychological process by which we form and hold faith-beliefs, we in turn are led to know the Truth itself as depicted in the Church’s teaching.
In concluding this section, I must make two important points. First, the epistemology of faith I am advancing on Augustine’s behalf does not undermine the importance of the Church’s authority, even if faith for Augustine, on my reading, is not testimony-based belief, properly speaking. Neither am I undermining Augustine’s explicit claim that we “owe” our beliefs to authority. Here, I take Augustine to mean that we derive our beliefs about God from the Church—and rightly so. The Church’s testimony is imperative because it is through that testimony that we hear divine truth proclaimed to us.45 Second, although Augustine’s account of faith is foundational and instructive, we need to consider how faith-beliefs are grounded in God’s grace in more detail. In order to complete this important task, we turn to Aquinas, who I think offers a more nuanced but still deeply Augustinian epistemology of faith.
Following Augustine, Aquinas also defines faith as a species of belief, or “thinking with assent.”46 And by this, Aquinas means an act of the intellect firmly cleaving to the propositional truths that constitute divine revelation, or sacra doctrina; truths which nevertheless remain “unseen” by the intellect in this life. More specifically, faith is an act of intellect determined by the will, so for Aquinas, as for Augustine, the act of believing what is revealed by God is voluntary. But the true cause of faith does not originate in the will: it comes directly from God. First, God must reveal those divine truths that surpass what natural reason can grasp. Second, God must create faith within us by grace, so that we are able to assent to those same truths:
As regards the second, viz. man’s assent to the things which are of faith, we may observe a twofold cause, one of external inducement, such as seeing a miracle, or being persuaded by someone to embrace the faith: neither of which is a sufficient cause, since of those who see the same miracle, or who hear the same sermon, some believe, and some do not. Hence we must assert another internal cause, which moves man inwardly to assent to matters of faith. The Pelagians held that this cause was nothing else than man’s free-will: and consequently they said that the beginning of faith is from ourselves. . . . But this is false, for, since man, by assenting to matters of faith, is raised above his nature, this must needs accrue to him from some supernatural principle moving him inwardly; and this is God. Therefore faith, as regards the assent which is the chief act of faith, is from God moving man inwardly by grace.47
Like Augustine, Aquinas claims that the assent of faith is internally rather than externally caused: that is, it originates in a distinctly “supernatural principle” internal to us, rather than any “external inducement” such as a persuasive miracle or sermon. Thus, while “seeing a miracle, or being persuaded by someone to embrace the faith” indeed figures as a cause of faith, which may dispose us to have faith, “seeing a miracle . . .” is not sufficient to motivate us fully to believe in faith. God must first “move inwardly” so that we believe in faith.
Aquinas further explains that the intellect must be empowered by grace in order for the assent of faith to occur. By the infused habit or “light of faith,” “the human mind is directed to assent to such things as are becoming to a right faith, and not to assent to others.”48 So while unbelievers remain in ignorance regarding matters of faith, even when they hear them proclaimed to them, “the faithful, on the other hand, know them, not as by demonstration, but by the light of faith which makes them see that they ought to believe them.”49 Why ought the faithful to believe those truths that God has revealed? The answer: because God has revealed them: “for the faith of which we are speaking, does not assent to anything except because it is revealed by God.50 However, the intellect does not assent to divine truth by reasoning from divine authority (or, for that matter, by way of rational argument or demonstration), but rather by the power of God’s grace, and specifically the light of faith, which enables the intellect to recognize or discern, immediately or non-inferentially, what propositions are have been revealed by God, and therefore are worthy of belief.51
Moreover, the light of faith “does not move us by way of the intellect, but rather by way of the will,” which we have seen, moves the intellect to assent.52 In expressing the truth about God, the propositions of faith also express the truth about the will’s “end”: they depict God as the object of the believer’s supernatural beatitude, the guarantor of eternal life.53 Consequently, also under the influence of God’s grace, and empowered by an infused habit, the will moves the intellect to assent to the propositions of faith, since it is drawn to the “last end” that those propositions depict as a great good. “Faith, which is a gift of grace, inclines man to believe, by giving him a certain affection for the good, even when that faith is lifeless,” or devoid of love.54 This inclination is in turn amplified by love, which Aquinas claims is the true “form” of faith. He writes: “Now it is evident from what has been said . . . that the act of faith is directed to the object of the will, i.e. the good, as to its end: and this good which is the end of faith, viz. the Divine Good, is the proper object of charity. Therefore charity is called the form of faith in so far as the act of faith is perfected and formed by charity.”55 On Aquinas’s view, then, only formed faith (fides formata)—faith that is linked with a love for God as the Divine Good—is a theological virtue, properly speaking, because without love, the mind of the believer is not fully ordered to God (its final end) as a good.56 Thus, when infused with the virtue of faith, the intellect is fully disposed to assent to divine truth; when infused with love, the will is fully disposed to move the intellect to assent to divine truth. Aquinas says, “It is part of the very account of faith that it always carries the understanding to the truth, since the false cannot come under faith. . . . From charity, which forms faith, the soul has it that it is infallibly ordered to the good end. And so all formed faith is a virtue.57
In sum, then, Aquinas argues that God infuses the habit of faith in the intellect in order to direct the intellect to himself as the First Truth. So God directs the intellect to himself as the First Truth by empowering the intellect to assent to revealed truths about God, as expressed by the propositions of faith. That is to say, God extends the cognitive “range” of what the intellect considers to be worthy objects of assent: the propositions of faith, which the intellect recognizes to be revelations from God. Additionally, since the intellect assents to divine truth (which remains “unseen”) with the aid of the will, God infuses a habit in the will, which in turn draws the intellect to assent to divine truth as a desired good, especially in love. Perhaps most importantly, then, by working internally in the intellect as well as the will, God ultimately causes or motivates the intellect to assent by way of directing and drawing or inviting and inclining the intellect to assent through the will, proposing divine truth (and thus himself) as a worthy object of belief and as a good to be desired and loved.
We are now in a position to ask: what is it, precisely, that grounds the assent of faith in an epistemically relevant and positive sense on Aquinas’s view? It is certainly clear for Aquinas what causes and motivates that assent: it is “God moving man inwardly by grace,” directing the believer to divinely revealed truth and drawing him to believe it, on account of God himself, who is both the True and the Good. But again, does “God moving man inwardly by grace” constitute a sufficient rational ground for believing? Consider what Aquinas says:
The believer has sufficient motive for believing, for he is moved by the authority of divine teaching confirmed by miracles, and, what is more, by the inward instinct of the divine invitation: hence he does not believe lightly. He has not, however, sufficient reason for scientific knowledge, hence he does not lose the merit.58
In this passage, Aquinas draws an important distinction between two different types of motives for believing: “the authority of divine teaching confirmed by miracles,” on the one hand, and “the inward instinct of the divine invitation,” on the other hand. And while he recognizes that the believer can be moved to some degree by external evidences for the authority of divine teaching, he clearly views God’s inward, personal invitation to the believer as the superior motive. He further claims that the believer’s inward instinct to believe God is a sufficient motive for believing, even if it does not provide the sort of motive—an argument or demonstration—that would compel belief. As Aquinas says elsewhere, only the devils believe under compulsion, and thus against their will, since they possess unique epistemic access by way of their “natural intellectual acumen” to evidences for the authority of the Church’s teaching.59
I claim, then, that Aquinas identifies the inward instinct to believe God as the primary rational ground of faith on which we base our faith-beliefs; and this means that for Aquinas, as for Augustine, grace is indeed sufficient from an epistemic point of view.60 The divine invitation, or inward instinct to believe, is clearly a psychological state (a nondoxastic ground) internal to us; thus, it is precisely the sort of ground that we have access to and which guides the process by which we form beliefs about God; and it is clearly truth-conducive, insofar as it draws us—or perhaps better, God draws us through it—to form beliefs about God whose content is the truth that God has revealed, which we hear proclaimed to us in the teaching of the Church.61 Thus, when faith-beliefs are based on the divine invitation and inclination to believe, that gives those beliefs an extremely high probability of being true on the condition that they are so based. Obviously Aquinas would add that in the case of formed faith, where the virtues of faith and love perfect the intellect and will respectively, there is a guarantee that those beliefs are true, on the condition that they are so based, since it is God who is inviting and inclining us to believe and God cannot fail in directing and drawing us to himself as the True and the Good. The inward instinct to believe operates in us when our cognitive and volitional powers are heightened by grace: when we rightly recognize God in the teaching of the Church as both the revealer of truth and our supreme good, and we are rightly moved by God (ideally in love) to believe accordingly. Upon analysis, the psychological process by which we form true beliefs about God reflects an intimate cooperation between the intellect and the will, working as they ought to under the power of God’s grace in bringing us to form true beliefs about God. Like Augustine, then, Aquinas claims that the act of faith truly is an act of loving belief.
In the final section of the essay, I consider and then reply to three main objections to the epistemology of faith I have sketched on Augustine’s and Aquinas’s behalf. I list these objections now and then deal with them in turn. (1) The epistemology of faith I assign Augustine and Aquinas makes God’s inward invitation and inclination, or God’s directing and drawing us to have faith in love, the ground for forming true beliefs about God in faith. But in order to be fully justified in believing, the person of faith needs further external grounds for believing that he possesses this ground; and yet, no such grounds seem to be available. Thus, the assent of faith remains unjustified. (2) Isn’t it more accurate to say that Augustine and Aquinas identify the primary ground of faith as divine authority, exercised through the teaching of the Church, rather the inward instinct to believe? The primary reason why we believe what God has revealed to us is because God has revealed it, even though we still need grace to believe. Consequently, I have misidentified the proper ground of faith. (3) Finally, in what sense is the assent of faith voluntary, if it is caused and motivated by God’s grace? Or, in what sense are our faith-beliefs truly our own, if it is God who causes and motivates us to form and hold them?
In response, I think that the first objection expresses a distinctly modern mindset, one which holds that the ultimate ground for believing any proposed truth must be publicly recognizable and verifiable. According to this mindset, then, we should withhold assent from any proposed truth for which we cannot furnish such a ground. If this is the case, then the Christian believer, on my reading of Augustine and Aquinas, is flouting a major epistemic obligation, since he assents on the basis of God’s inner invitation and inclination to believe. But now I ask, why should we be skeptical, rather than prima facie open-minded, that there are is such a ground, and that the believer rightly employs it in forming and holding certain beliefs about God? We readily form beliefs all the time on the basis of grounds, whether they are beliefs or experiences, which are part of our own psychological make-up, and thus are not available for public evaluation or scrutiny.
For example, I cannot publicly verify that I am presently seeing red in an external red object; but I certainly remain well within my epistemic rights in forming the belief that I am seeing red in that object—assuming I have no reason to doubt that my visual faculties are in good working order, and other external conditions (e.g., the lighting in the room) are suitable for my really seeing red. We could say that I trust that my visual faculties are in good working order (they haven’t failed me so far in comparable conditions), so I believe what I see without hesitation (even though my seeing red remains the ground of my belief). Similarly, why should we expect the Christian believer to verify that he really is enjoying the inward instinct to believe what he hears proclaimed to him by the Catholic Church? He trusts that his cognitive and volitional faculties are in good working order, under the influence of God’s grace, in the requisite conditions (his hearing the Church’s teaching proclaimed to him), so he believes what he hears without hesitation (even though the inward instinct remains the ground of his belief).62
Perhaps, then, the objection should be rephrased as follows: it is because the ground for forming and holding faith-beliefs is so utterly unique and difficult to verify that we should be skeptical regarding both its actual occurrence and its veracity. There seems to be a clear difference between seeing red in an external object—a reliable experience that most of us have regularly—and being inclined to believe proposed truths that many regard as incredible, let alone false. So while it is true that the character of sensory experience is irreducibly first-personal, it is practically universal; consequently, we in fact can verify that it occurs and that it is reliable with some level of confidence. For example, I can verify, to some degree, that you are seeing red in an external object by matching your visual experience with my own (assuming I am observing the same object), as well as those of others who claim to enjoy the same visual experience. This sort of public verification is clearly absent, though, in the case of faith.
In response, I once again think we need to be careful about making public verification the criteria for determining the occurrence or the adequacy of all of the grounds on which we base our various beliefs. Certainly, since sensory experience of colors is practically universal, and for the most part veridical (at least as far as we can tell), then there is little room for doubting its existence and importance as a ground for forming and holding sensory beliefs. But we need not make sensory experience the criterion for determining whether certain other sorts of grounds are epistemically legitimate. I think both Augustine and Aquinas would happily admit that the ways in which God’s grace enables us to have faith, and consequently form and hold true beliefs about God in faith, are well beyond our powers of verification. So just because we cannot verify the working of grace in us does not mean that we should doubt its existence in us or its adequacy as a ground, because this would entail doubting that God is sufficient not only to cause faith but also to ground it.
We must also say that the objection, even as reformulated, fails to take into account the essential difference between the activity of justifying a belief and the state of being justified, so construed as a property of a belief. While it is true that justifying a belief—furnishing an argument, reason, or evidence for it—renders that belief justified, it also remains the case that we can be justified in forming and holding certain beliefs without having actively justified them, or being able to justify them.63 Since I have chosen to employ the term “grounded” in place of “justified” in this essay (precisely in order to avoid the confusion between justifying and being justified), we also can state the problem with the objection as follows:
On this reading, S’s belief, B, being based on a certain ground, G, requires S to have a higher-level belief about the relation of G and B. The trouble with this is that it seems that normal mature human subjects do not have such higher-level knowledge whenever they form a belief on a certain basis. To do so they would have to have some conceptual grasp of PES [positive epistemic status] and would have to identify the ground sufficiently to take it to be what is conferring that status. And not all human believers generally are cognitively sophisticated enough to satisfy these requirements.64
Here, Alston nicely pinpoints the problem with requiring “normal mature human subjects” to have some sort of further privileged epistemic access that enables them to determine the adequacy of the grounds of their beliefs, and therefore the positive epistemic status of their beliefs. In short, such a requirement is simply unreasonable. And it seems especially unreasonable to require normal Christian believers to have higher-level belief or knowledge about the supernatural ground of faith, including its relation to their faith-beliefs and its adequacy, or truth-conducivity, in particular. Once more, this sort of knowledge is simply beyond their ken. What is most important, then, from an epistemic point of view is not that the believer should be able to assess the God-given ground of any particular faith-belief in order to determine its adequacy (for how could he?), but only that he does, in fact, base his belief on that ground.
However, lest the reader think I am quarantining the ground of faith from epistemic evaluation altogether, I certainly also think, along with Augustine and Aquinas, that Christian believers can justify their faith-beliefs to some degree, and that such a task is important, since justifying a belief clearly increases its positive epistemic status. As both Augustine and Aquinas note, there are at least some discernible signs that grace is at work in the believer more generally: the virtue of faith in particular is characterized not only by conviction—a firm adherence to revealed truth—but also by a love of God, which manifests itself in the lives and good works of the faithful. God’s grace not only transforms the mind, causing the faithful to hold to truths that surpass what natural reason can demonstrate; it also transforms the will, causing the faithful to live lives characterized by moral virtue, and in some cases, unparalleled acts of sacrifice and strength (e.g., the martyrs and saints).
Moreover, it certainly is of positive epistemic value for the believer to further justify his faith-beliefs by furnishing broader reasons and evidence for the credibility of the Church; such reasons and evidence also support, albeit indirectly, the existence and epistemic efficacy of grace, since it is grace that leads the believer to accept what the Church teaches. Finally, it falls to at least some believers to offer a rationally persuasive and even compelling account of how grace both causes and grounds faith (which is, in fact, the goal of this essay). As Augustine argues, once faith is active in our minds, and love is at work in our hearts, we put ourselves in a prime epistemic situation to understand better what it is we believe; and it is this understanding, or higher-level knowledge (we could say), that helps us better inquire into and grasp both the nature of what we believe as well as how we believe it. But such understanding and knowledge, on a genuine Augustinian view, must be preceded by faith; because only by possessing the virtue of faith does the person of faith become more attuned to mysteries of faith.65
We now can turn to the second objection I voiced above. I have already argued that faith is not testimony-based true belief, properly speaking, because the testimony of the Church, through which God reveals divine truth to us, is not sufficient to move us to have faith, on either Augustine’s or Aquinas’s account. And yet, so the objection goes, isn’t it still more appropriate to say that we assent to divine truth not on the basis of any divinely implanted instinct, but rather on the basis of God himself, because God has revealed such truth?66 Here, in reply, we need to identify what it means to believe in God himself, or on account of God. If we believe that p on the ground of our further belief that God has revealed that p, then the question arises as to what grounds this latter faith-belief: on what ground do we base our belief that God has revealed that p? Here, we might appeal again to other beliefs we have about how God has worked in salvation history, per the teaching of the Church, which we also believe primarily in faith, even if we possess additional reasons and evidence to support them. But if these reasons and evidence do not ground those beliefs—and I don’t think they do—then what does ground them?
My own view, which I also claim to derive from Augustine and Aquinas even more specifically, is that our faith-beliefs are not formed or held on the basis of any other beliefs: that is, they are basic. This does not mean that our faith-beliefs lack any ground, only that they are primarily based on a nondoxastic ground. Both Augustine and Aquinas imply that we actually see, by way of divine illumination or the inner light of faith (rather than pure vision), that God has revealed that p, and that we assent accordingly. In fact, Aquinas argues that the light of faith “is more capable of causing assent than any demonstration,” given that it, unlike the light of reason, “cannot fail, anymore than God can be deceived or lie.”67 This suggests, once again, that the requisite rational ground for believing divine truth is our recognizing divine truth when we hear it proclaimed to us, and our being drawn accordingly through our own will to believe it. But if this is the case, then God truly is the ground of faith in a very real sense: we believe divine truth on account of God himself, whose own truth is recognized by the intellect and esteemed—ideally loved—by the will.
We should also note that the rational ground on which we base our faith-beliefs need not be the very thing we cite when pressed to offer a reason why we hold those beliefs.68 When asked why certain faith-beliefs I hold are reasonable, I could offer any number of replies: I could cite the motives of credibility, which strengthen the Church’s authority, or I could cite divine authority itself. I might also say that I believe what the Church teaches because I also believe that the Church is the chosen authority through which God teaches us about himself. So my professed reason why I hold certain-faith beliefs may diverge considerably—at least initially—from the actual ground on which I base those beliefs. But why should this concern us? As I just argued above, our ability to justify our faith-beliefs further strengthens the positive epistemic status of those beliefs, even if the further justification we provide need not form any part of the actual grounds on which we base and continue to hold those beliefs. So just because we may not explicitly cite God’s inward instinct in us as the actual ground of our believing God (again, at least initially) does not mean that we are not basing our faith-beliefs on that ground. In fact, we need not be actively aware that this process is occurring: we base beliefs on adequate grounds all the time without actively reflecting on those grounds. (Think of the myriad sensory beliefs we form and hold at any moment without being aware of how our sensory capacities function).
That said, I do think that the rational ground of our beliefs cannot be so buried in our consciousness that it evades any identification by us; otherwise, we would have no reason for thinking that we have taken account of it in forming and holding our beliefs. So when pressed, I suspect the faithful would reply—as I think both Augustine and Aquinas would reply—that the reason they hold certain beliefs about God in faith is, at bottom, because their heart tells them to believe, or because they are ineluctably drawn in love to the One about whom the Church teaches, and whom they recognize in that teaching. This sort of faith clearly only can be created in us by grace; and this is the faith about which I claim both Augustine and Aquinas speak.
The final question remains, however, to what extent a faith caused by and grounded in grace, which directs and draws us to form and hold faith-beliefs, is really our own. How is it that we are the ones freely forming and holding faith-beliefs if it is God who is always leading us to do so? As we have already seen, Augustine argues that while God indeed “acts upon the reasonable soul in order that it may believe in Him (and certainly there is no ability whatever in free will to believe, unless there be persuasion or summons towards someone in whom to believe),” it still remains the case that “to yield our consent to God’s summons, or to withhold it, is (as I have said) a function of our own will.”69 I take Augustine’s claim here to be the following: apart from God’s grace there is no real freedom to believe, because apart from God’s grace there is no real “persuasion” or “summons” that would make us want to believe. Apart from the influence of grace, that is, our will is indifferent or even resistant to God’s invitation to believe, especially given our captivity to sin.70 Grace, then, not only heals the will, but also liberates and enlarges it so that we can freely will the good and believe, even if, as Augustine argues, our willing the good is also assisted by grace: “[God] operates, therefore, without us, in order that we may will; but when we will, and so will that we may act, He co-operates with us. We can, however, ourselves do nothing to effect good works of piety without Him either working that we may will, or co-working when we will.”71
This answer may seem even more mystifying to the philosopher looking to carve out space for the act of faith independent of God’s grace. Clearly, one could argue, if God not only works in us so that we may believe that p but also cooperates with us in forming and holding the belief that p, then we cannot properly be credited with forming and holding the belief that p; once again, it is entirely unclear how we are the authors of what we believe. In response, I think it is helpful to turn once again to Aquinas. Like Augustine, Aquinas argues that in order to will the good and believe we must first be freely turned toward God by God, or “the gratuitous help of God moving [us] inwardly.”72 This movement by God in us then prepares us to receive habitual grace, or what Aquinas also calls the “light of grace,” which resides as an accidental quality in the soul.73 The light of grace in turn serves as the “principle and root” of the requisite infused habits and virtues, specifically the theological virtues of faith and love, which respectively perfect our faculties of intellect and will and in turn fully dispose us to assent to divine truth.74 Aquinas, then, clearly thinks that God’s grace works through and with our created nature and faculties (particularly our intellect and will) rather than against them: “as from the essence of the soul flows its powers, which are the principles of deeds, so likewise the virtues, whereby the powers are moved to act, flow into the powers of the soul from grace.”75 That is to say, we receive grace so that we can in turn make the assent of faith with our own intellect and will and thereby form true beliefs about God. Hence, Aquinas concludes, “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, so that it is subject to the free-will in relation to God.”76
The larger point here, of course, is that Aquinas, like Augustine, sees no opposition between divine and human agency, or grace and free will, in bringing about the assent of faith. And this is because neither Aquinas nor Augustine sees any opposition between nature and grace. If grace actually elevates and builds on nature, since nature itself is the creative product of God’s grace (or the love God has for all of creation), then there is no possibility that God’s grace in us will interfere with our nature, and hence interfere with the free exercise of our will.77 Or put another way, if grace elevates and builds on nature, there is no way divine and human agency, or grace and free will, are forced to compete for the same causal “space.” Clearly, God must give us grace in us in order for us to have faith: Aquinas, like Augustine, recognizes the need for operating grace. But in doing so, God does not commandeer the soul or its powers. Aquinas says that grace acts in us as a formal and not an efficient cause, making us partake or “participate” in the divine nature, albeit accidentally rather than substantially, “as whiteness makes a surface white.”78 The further effect of this divine action in us is simply the work of God’s grace cooperating with us in the actual operations of our will. Thus, just as “the work of heat is to make its subject hot, and to give heat outwardly,” so the work of God’s grace is to inhabit the soul and thereby become the “principle” of free meritorious acts such as the assent of faith.79
There is, of course, much more we could do in rendering Augustine’s and Aquinas’s account of the relation of grace and free will more philosophically perspicuous. My own brief approach here has simply been to diffuse the objection that rooting faith in grace undermines our own willful participation in forming faith-beliefs; and I have done so following Augustine and Aquinas in treating the relation of grace and free will theologically, in terms of the broader relation of nature and grace. If we can begin to show how God’s grace works on behalf of human agency rather than against it, since grace elevates and builds on nature, then we clearly have a theological basis for denying that grace undermines the causal efficacy and autonomy of our will in forming faith-beliefs. It then remains the task of the philosopher or philosophically attuned theologian to demonstrate or explain the compatibility of grace and free will in greater detail.80 But completing this momentous task lies well beyond the scope of this essay: it requires the ongoing activity of faith seeking understanding.
In this essay, I discussed and defended what I take to be central to Augustine’s and Aquinas’s respective epistemologies of Christian faith. While Augustine and Aquinas certainly do not speak on behalf of all of the Christian tradition, they certainly exercise considerable authority in it: thus, one of my further goals was to compose and defend a genuine epistemological model for Christian faith culled from Augustine and Aquinas. I realize, of course, that Augustine and Aquinas do not speak in one voice, even though I admittedly hear their voices overlapping in important ways: both uphold the reasonableness of faith, and both emphasize the sufficiency of grace as the cause and rational ground of faith. I also realize that the epistemological model I derive from Augustine and Aquinas is only a model for what faith looks like, since neither Augustine nor Aquinas offers us a singular model for faith. Nevertheless, I do think this model is founded on important insights that these two eminent Christian thinkers offer, and therefore can and should be located in the enduring Augustinian and Thomistic traditions.
1. Confessiones 6.4.6. Translation in Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford, 1991).
2. Conf. 6.5.7.
3. Commenting on Augustine, Dewey Hoitenga writes, “Knowledge is thus always true, belief sometimes true, opinion never. Augustine evaluates holding an opinion harshly not because opinion is necessarily false, but because he means by holding an opinion “being opinionated,” which he defines as the attitude of those who “think they know what they do not know.” It is an attitude that, for Augustine as for Plato, manifests a fundamental error. Knowledge and belief, then, are the only two warranted cognitive states, for knowledge is always true, but belief sometimes is as well” (Dewey J. Hoitenga Jr., Faith and Reason from Plato to Plantinga: An Introduction to Reformed Epistemology [Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1991], 60).
4. De utilitate credendi 11.25. Translation in The Usefulness of Belief, Augustine: Earlier Writings, ed. and trans. John H. S. Burleigh (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1953), 291–323.
5. Ibid.
6. De magistro 11.37. Translation in The Teacher, Augustine: Earlier Writings, Burleigh, 69–101.
7. De mag. 12.39–40. M. F. Burnyeat argues (following Jonathan Barnes) that Augustine therefore sorts all knowable propositions into two categories: (1) propositions such that if a person S knows that p, then S has perceived by the senses that p; (2) propositions such that if S knows that p, then S has perceived by the mind that p (M. F. Burnyeat, “Wittgenstein and Augustine De magistro,” The Augustinian Tradition, ed. Gareth B. Matthews [Berkeley: University of California, 1999], 296).
8. De fide rerum invisibilium 1.2. Translation in Faith in the Unseen, trans. Michael G. Campbell, On Christian Belief, ed. Boniface Ramsey (Hyde Park, NY: New City, 2005), 183–94.
9. De fide rer. 2.3.
10. De fide rer. 2.4.
11. De util. cred. 12.26.
12. Robert Wilken claims that De utilitate credendi might also be rendered in English as “On the Reasonableness of Believing” (Robert Louis Wilken, The Spirit of Early Christian Thought [New Haven: Yale, 2003], 168).
13. De fide rer. 3.4.
14. De util. cred. 17.35.
15. Ibid.
16. De fide rer. 3.5–5.8
17. In De vera religione 24.45, Augustine says, “reason is not entirely absent from authority, for we have got to consider whom we have to believe.” Translation in Of True Religion, Augustine: Earlier Writings, Burleigh, 225–83.
18. De util. cred. 16.34.
19. Ibid.
20. De util. cred. 10.24.
21. De vera relig. 24.45.
22. Augustine emphasizes this point in his Retractiones 1.14.2. “For in this life,” he writes, “knowledge, however great, does not mean perfect blessedness, for that which is still unknown is incomparably greater.” Translation in Burleigh, Retractions 1.14.2, Augustine: Earlier Writings, 284–86.
23. De util. cred. 10.24.
24. De util. cred. 17.35.
25. So, for example, Augustine writes, “Things must be believed of which a man may later achieve understanding if he conduct himself well and prove himself worthy” (De util. cred. 9.21; see also De util. cred. 10.24). Augustine also consistently cites Isaiah 7:9 in defense of his position: “Unless you believe, you will not understand.”
26. William P. Alston, Beyond “Justification”: Dimensions of Epistemic Evaluation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 2005), 82.
27. Or, more technically, “when a belief B is based on a ground that is significantly adequate, that gives B a significantly high probability [of being true] on the condition of being based on that ground” (Beyond “Justification”, 99).
28. John Jenkins makes a similar point regarding what he calls the “naturalist interpretation” of Aquinas, which he says wrongly makes the assent of faith based on a cluster of arguments that appeal to natural reason (John I. Jenkins, Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas [Cambridge: Cambridge, 1997], 164–65).
29. Again, I take it to be a central Augustinian point that “it is a difficult matter [for us] to know God by reason” (De util. cred. 10.24).
30. De gratia Christi 10.11. Translation in On the Grace of Christ, trans. Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, Saint Augustine: Anti–Pelagian Writings, Nicene and Post–Nicene Fathers, vol. 5, ed. Philip Schaff (1887; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 217–36. I have modified the translation a bit.
31. De praedestinatione sanctorum 8.15. Translation in Schafff, On the Predestination of the Saints, Nicene and Post–Nicene Fathers, vol. 5, 493–519.
32. De mag. 11.36.
33. Gareth Mathewes argues that it is precisely the problem of ambiguity in ostensive learning, which Augustine readily recognizes, that renders the doctrine of divine illumination in Augustine necessary. See Gareth B. Matthews, “Knowledge and Illumination,” The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, ed. Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann (Cambridge: Cambridge, 2001), 171–95, and in particular 173–75 and 180–81.
34. De mag. 3.6.
35. De mag. 12.40.
36. De mag. 11.38.
37. De spiritu et littera 34.60. Translation in Schaff, On the Spirit and the Letter, Nicene and Post–Nicene Fathers, vol. 5, 83–114.
38. De spir. et litt. 3.5.
39. De praed. sanct. 2.5.
40. John Rist, “Faith and Reason,” The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, 26–39, and in particular 32–37.
41. Ibid., 37.
42. Ibid., 38.
43. Clearly we also often believe what others tell us not on the basis of trust or love (which may only be implicit) but on the testimony they offer; in such cases, the content of the testimony itself serves as the ground of the belief. But I do not think this is the case with faith, as I argue here.
44. In Joannis evangelium tractatus 29.6. Translation in Homilies on the Gospel of John, trans. John Gibb and James Innes, Nicene and Post–Nicene Fathers, vol. 7, ed. Philip Schaff (1887; repr., Peabody, MA: Hendrickson, 1994), 7–452. I took some liberties with this particular translation, including translating the Latin preposition in as “in” (rather than “on”) in English because I think it more clearly conveys Augustine’s point.
45. Robert Audi nicely distinguishes between testimony-based belief and belief produced by testimony in “Testimony, Credulity, and Veracity,” The Epistemology of Testimony, ed. Jennifer Lackey and Ernest Sosa (New York: Oxford, 1996), 26.
46. Summa theologiae II–II.2.1. Translation (and all further translations of ST unless otherwise noted) in Summa Theologica, trans. the Fathers of the English Dominican Province (New York: Benziger Bros., 1948). For a more elaborate version of this section of the essay, see Paul A. Macdonald Jr., “A Realist Epistemology of Faith,” Religious Studies 41.4 (2005): 273–93, as well as chapter five of Knowledge and the Transcendent: An Inquiry into the Mind’s Relationship to God (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America, 2009).
47. ST II–II.6.1.
48. ST II–II.1.4 ad 3.
49. ST II–II.1.5 ad 1.
50. ST II–II.1.1. See also Quaestiones disputatae de veritate 14.7 ad 7; QDV 14.9. Aquinas claims that the act of faith consists in believing certain things about God (credere Deum), believing God (credere Deo), or believing on the basis of divine authority, as well as believing for the sake of God (credere in Deum), or believing towards God as one’s desired end (ST II–II.2.2).
51. Jenkins emphasizes this in Knowledge and Faith in Thomas Aquinas, 185–97.
52. Expositio super librum Boethii De trinitate 3.1 ad 4. Translation of In BDT in Faith, Reason, and Theology: Questions I–IV of his Commentary on the De Trinitate of Boethius, trans. Armand Maurer (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1987).
53. QDV 14.1.
54. ST II–II.5.2 ad 2.
55. ST II–II.4.3.
56. ST I–II.55.1. According to Aquinas, a habit can be called a virtue when it confers both “an aptness to a good act” and “also the right use of that aptness” (ST I–II.56.3). Or more succinctly: “any habit that is always the principle of a good act, may be called a human virtue” (ST II–II.4.5).
57. ST II–II.4.5. Translation in Mark D. Jordan, On Faith: Summa theologiae, Part 2–2, Questions 1–16 of St. Thomas Aquinas (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1990).
58. ST II–II.2.9 ad 3.
59. ST II–II.5.2 ad 2.
60. I’m adapting Saint Paul’s claim about the sufficiency of grace in 2 Corinthians 12:9.
61. In identifying the inward instinct to believe as a nondoxastic ground, I do not mean to suggest that it is a special type of experience, religious or otherwise. Nothing Aquinas says suggests this either.
62. I have deliberately not included a discussion of proper functioning in the essay, since I have chosen instead to focus on the role grounds play in the formation and sustenance of faith-beliefs. However, I discuss proper functioning further in both “A Realist Epistemology of Faith” and Knowledge and the Transcendent. In particular, I rely on aspects of Alvin Plantinga, Warrant and Proper Function (New York: Oxford, 1993) and Warranted Christian Belief (New York: Oxford, 2000).
63. Alston, Beyond “Justification,” 18.
64. Ibid., 85.
65. Rist, “Faith and Reason,” 32.
66. John Lamont argues that it is the divine testimony, or God’s speaking to us, which rationally grounds our faith-beliefs, and grace enables us to recognize divine testimony when we hear it (John R. T. Lamont, Divine Faith [Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004]). Against Lamont, I think that it is impossible to exclude grace from the rational grounding of faith, because grace not only enables us to recognize the divine testimony when we hear it proclaimed through Church teaching, it also inclines us to believe it, and hence believe God, ideally out of love.
67. In BDT 3.1 ad 4.
68. Alston, Beyond “Justification,” 86.
69. De spir. et litt. 34.60.
70. De natura et gratia 3.3.
71. De gratia et libero arbitrio 17.33. Translation in Schaff, On Grace and Free Will, Nicene and Post–Nicene Fathers, vol. 5, 443–91.
72. ST I–II.109.6.
73. ST I–II.110.2.
74. ST I–II.110.3 ad 3.
75. ST I–II.110.4 ad 1.
76. ST II–II.2.9.
77. We could also say that all of creation is graced insofar as it participates, albeit remotely and defectively, in God’s own essential being and goodness (ST I.6.4).
78. ST I–II.111.2 ad 1.
79. ST I–II.111.2.
80. Eleonore Stump offers the following recent “friendly suggestion” to help save Augustine’s account in particular from theological determinism: even though God’s grace is necessary to move a person to have faith, or to will to have faith, “it is up to her either to refuse grace or to fail to refuse grace, and God’s giving of grace depends on what the will of the human person does” (Eleonore Stump, “Augustine on Free Will,” The Cambridge Companion to Augustine, 124–47, in particular 141). The idea here is that only God can move a person to accept grace, but it remains within a person’s power to refuse grace or to fail to refuse grace; and by ceasing to refuse grace—thereby occupying a neutral position vis-à-vis grace—a person puts herself, via her own free will, in a position to receive grace. Stump’s suggestion here is philosophically novel, but it still is theologically problematic insofar as it ultimately makes God’s decision to give grace contingent on human free choice; a position I think both Augustine and Aquinas would reject on theological grounds.