The safest way for us to advance on this part of our journey is to comment on two important passages, in which Saint John of the Cross talks about faith under these two aspects: as darkness and as certitude. From the point of view of our human intellect, these two qualities of faith seem to contradict each other. In the natural order, whatever is certain can be clear to the intelligence that apprehends its certitude. In the supernatural order, things are, for the present, reversed: what is most certain is most obscure. For this reason, intellectual difficulties about the mysteries of faith do not of themselves constitute doubts or temptations against faith. We cannot expect to understand with clear intrinsic evidence what is essentially obscure to our natural intelligence. Saint John of the Cross explains why. Faith makes us believe truths that are beyond all proportion to human understanding and are only known in so far as they are accepted on Divine Revelation.
Hence it follows that for the soul this excessive light of faith which is given to it is thick darkness, for it overwhelms that which is great and does away with that which is little, even as the light of the sun overwhelms all other lights whatsoever, so that when it shines and disables our powers of vision they appear not to be lights at all.1
It is only in this sense that faith is said to blind and darken the understanding. It is not that natural knowledge has no value in itself. But natural knowledge can no more serve to teach us the mysteries of God than a flashlight can help an owl to find its way about when it is dazzled by the light of high noon. The light of the sun blinds not only the owl but the flashlight, and he who wants to find his way to God must be led by the hand.
In the chapter we are considering,2 Saint John of the Cross goes into psychological details which we have already talked about enough. It suffices for us to recall here that our natural knowledge depends on concepts abstracted from the images of things. Our intelligence is naturally disposed to arrive at truth with the help of the senses. However, Saint John of the Cross is careful to explain that it also “has a faculty for the supernatural, when Our Lord may be pleased to bring it to supernatural action.”3 In other words, the intelligence can know truths supernaturally without the medium of any sense image and beyond distinct concepts. God can, if He so wills, illuminate the mind directly with His infinite light. And in fact He does so, in heaven. This “aptitude” which the soul has for receiving such illumination is not, properly speaking, natural. But the intelligence is by nature in a state of passive or obediential potency to receive this light. This state of passive potency does not give the soul, strictly speaking, any “aptitude” for supernatural illumination. That aptitude comes with the active potency conferred by grace upon the soul proximately disposed and attuned to supernatural things.
Now, it is precisely by faith, hope, and charity that the soul develops this active potency for the supernatural which has been conferred upon it by grace. By this I mean that the practice of the theological virtues disposes the faculties of man to receive higher lights and inspirations from God, which reach our intelligence without passing through any sensible medium. In other words, the soul’s growth in the infused virtues prepares it for a direct and supraconceptual experience of the reality of God and of His mysteries.
But is faith itself supraconceptual? Yes and no. It is on the borderline. It makes use of concepts in order to convey to our minds knowledge of a God Whose infinite perfections exceed the capacity of all concepts. Its concepts, as we have seen, really attain to Him. The statements made by faith about God are objectively true. Nevertheless the concepts used in these statements fall infinitely short of the actuality of God’s perfections, so that in their mode of expression they can be said, in some sense, to hide Him as much as they reveal Him.
Saint John of the Cross explains the peculiar function of concepts in an act of faith by an interesting comparison:
If one should say to a man that on a certain island there is an animal which he has never seen, and give him no idea of the appearance of that animal, that he may compare it with others that he has seen, he will have no more knowledge or imagination of it than he had before, no matter how much is being said to him about it.4
In this example he assumes that the animal on the island really exists. Everything that is said about the animal is true. The man who hears about the animal discovers something he did not know before. If he believes its existence he has acquired a new truth. But unfortunately he has no means of knowing what kind of animal this is. Let us suppose that it resembles no other animal on earth. If our man sets out to imagine this strange creature under the same form as the animals he knows of, he will be misled by his own imagination. And Saint John concludes that the only thing this man would really know about the animal would be its name, which he had received “by hearing.”
It is the same with the concepts of faith. The truths which faith proposes to our belief about God as He is in Himself have, as the saint says, “no relation to any sense of ours.” We have never seen anything like them. And yet faith gives us possession of these truths in an obscure but certain manner, and it does so by means of the concepts and propositions to which we assent in an act of belief. How is this? Saint John of the Cross makes a distinction. The knowledge of God that is offered to us in the articles of our faith has no proportion to our senses or our natural understanding. Yet it is received through the senses by our consent.
For, as Saint Paul says, fides ex auditu (faith cometh by hearing). As though he were to say: Faith is not knowledge which enters by any of the senses but is only the consent given by the soul to that which enters through the hearing.5
Nevertheless, Saint John of the Cross goes on to insist on the second half of his paradox—the certitude of faith. Faith is not a mere blind assent of the will in defiance of the intellect. By its assent the understanding is blinded, yes, but it is also positively enlightened. Faith is an intellectual light. It enlightens the mind to supernatural things by depriving it of its natural light, not with respect to all knowledge but only with respect to supernatural mysteries which our intelligence alone could never penetrate. But while darkening our minds in this one particular way, faith simultaneously makes them capable of higher light by which they penetrate the mysteries of God. John of Saint Thomas would situate this higher light less in faith itself than in the illumination of the Gift of Understanding which perfects faith. Saint John of the Cross does not make that distinction. “Pure faith” for him is faith enlightened and strengthened by all the power of the Gifts.
Faith is dark night to the soul, and it is in this way that it gives it light; and the more [the soul] is darkened, the greater light comes to it.6
It is here that the saint goes on to compare faith to the pillar of cloud that led the Children of Israel out of Egypt across the desert. This cloud was dark by day, and by night it was a pillar of fire. Yet, though it was a pillar of fire, it remained dark. Erat nubes tenebrosa et illuminans noctem. “That is to say the cloud was full of darkness and gave light by night.”7
Man was made to know truth, and his salvation consists in loving the highest Truth, which cannot be loved unless it first be known. But there is only one kind of knowledge that effectively confers upon man the light without which he cannot reach this supernatural end. This knowledge comes to him in the obscurity of faith.
The prophet said, “unless you believe, you will not understand.”8 Faith alone can win us intelligence of the mysteries of God. But faith has something more. “Without faith,” says Saint Paul, ”it is impossible to please God.“9
What does it mean to please God? God is said to be pleased with the soul which He finds filled with His own reality, His own love, His own truth. In a mysterious way, we please God by knowing Him, because we can only know Him by receiving His light into our hearts. Faith, then, is not only capable of penetrating the intimate substance of God’s Truth, but it is an immediately redemptive knowledge of God. It “saves” us. Its light is more than a ray of speculation: it confers life. The awakening of faith not only gives light to the understanding and peace to the will: it transforms a man’s whole moral being. He becomes a new creature. He is born again.
What is this new life? It is the substantial presence of God. Rather, it is a new and special presence of God Who, by His power, presence, and essence holds all things in being. This new presence is spiritual. What is it? We have already described it. God is present in His own light and His own love. By faith, hope, and charity, God becomes the object of a potential experience in the depths of the soul since by grace He confers upon the faculties the power and the desire to possess Him in the intimate consciousness of our union with Him by love. He reveals Himself within the soul as the object of its deepest longing. He promises, by His obscure presence, clear vision. His promise makes us desire that vision. And by our desire, we already embrace the vision, though it remains obscure.
In a word, faith gives us more than light, more than life: for the “light” it gives us is God Himself. The life it confers upon us is nothing else than the very being of God, Who created all life by breathing upon the waters of the abyss, and Who becomes the principle of our new supernatural existence.
Now none of this flows purely and simply from the conceptual content of faith. It comes directly from God.
What are we to conclude? In every act of faith, there are two elements at work. First there is the formula, the conceptual complex containing the truth to which we assent. This presents itself to our mind like any other intentional knowledge: in the form of a judgment. But it does not enlighten the mind in the same way as ordinary knowledge. On the natural plane, a conceptual judgment illuminates the mind by the clear evidence which it contains. In an act of faith, the conceptual content of the proposition throws no light, of itself, upon the understanding. The difference between belief and unbelief is not measured by our power to grasp the meaning of the articles of faith. A man may acquire a profound technical knowledge of the theology of the Holy Trinity and never believe in the Trinity. Another who has no grasp of the dogmatic problems involved in the mystery may believe it. He is the one to whom God has made Himself “present.” He is the one who is “saved.” He is the one who can be raised to contemplation. Hence in every act of faith there is a second and more important element: an objective and supernatural light, penetrating the depths of the soul and communicating to it the real content of truth which cannot be fully grasped in the terms of the credible proposition.
Each of these two elements is absolutely necessary for an act of living faith, because there is an intimate relation between them. If the articles of faith were merely an occasion for the infusion of supernatural light, then it would not matter what God proposed to us for our belief. One concept would serve as well as another. But this would mean that the intentional content of our creed would be without value or meaning. Any creed would do as well. Hold anything you like! If you are sincere, God will infuse light into you, and you will know Him. But the God Who is Wisdom would not uselessly reveal a whole body of truths that had, in the end, no objective value. He Who is Truth would not complacently put His grace at the disposal of all, on the sole condition that they be ready to adhere to falsity on His account!
The relation between the conceptual content of faith and the infused light by which God actually gives us His Truth lies in this: that the truth is actually contained, in a hidden manner, in the articles of faith themselves. And it is by the light of faith that we find the truth in those articles.
This accounts for all the statements Saint John of the Cross has been making about the power of faith: that it is the only way to union with God: that it is essentially obscure and “hides” God, yet at the same time is pure truth, perfect in its certitude, and conveys God to us as it were under cover of a cloud.
Saint Thomas Aquinas also supports the distinction we have made by saying that faith consists principally in an infused light but that it receives accurate determination to a particular truth by the various articles proposed for our belief.10
Let us now turn the pages of Saint John of the Cross until we come to a classical passage in The Spiritual Canticle11 where he gives a full and beautiful explanation of the part played by the articles of Christian faith in mystical contemplation.
Here is the stanza which the saint proposes to explain:
O cristallina fuente,
Si en esos tus semblantes plateados
Formases de repente
Los ojos deseados
Que tengo en mis entrañas dibujados.
The soul, in love with God, here addresses faith, not considered as an abstraction or as a mere allegorical figure, but as a living reality existing and working in the spirit of the believer. This fountain is what Christ called a spring of “living waters that springs up unto everlasting life.”12 I translate and paraphrase as follows; the soul says to faith: “O crystal fountain! I wish that you would suddenly form and display, in the reflection on your silvery surface, a clear picture of the eyes and visage of God which are now present in the depths of my being, not clearly seen but formless and obscure like a faint outline sketched in pencil.” Like all the other stanzas of The Spiritual Canticle, this one is mysterious. Someone might easily quarrel with the explanation if it did not come to us from the poet himself, who might reasonably be expected to know better than anyone else what the stanza meant.
The soul here turns to faith with intense desire, says the saint, because it has just come from the consideration of all created things and is fully aware that God is not to be found in them as He is in Himself. Creatures are such faint reflections of His divine Being that they are no more than the footprints He has left behind Him as He went on His way. They bear witness to His passing: but by that very fact their testimony is tinged with a special anguish. They only tell us that He has passed by. They cannot deliver to us the secret of where He has gone!
Faith, on the other hand, can tell us this secret. Much more, faith is actually His hiding place Who has “made darkness His covert, His pavilion round about Him.”13 As Saint John of the Cross already explained at the beginning of his Canticle: “He that has to find some hidden thing must enter very secretly into that same hidden place where it is, and when he finds it, he too is hidden like that which he has found.”14 And so Saint John repeats that faith will give the soul the “most vivid light from her Beloved” and will provide “the only means whereby the soul may come to true union and spiritual betrothal with God.”15 The thought comes from Scripture. Sponsabo te mihi in fide, “I will espouse thee to myself in faith.”16
The soul is at once confronted by the paradox of faith. It is nailed to the Cross of anguish and darkness which is the crisis of true faith. It sees that faith, because it is at once certain and obscure, reveals God by hiding Him and by hiding reveals Him. However, this is no mere intellectual dilemma. It is not a problem, for a problem can be disposed of by reasonable solution. The soul is not looking for a solution. It is not proposing a question that faith must answer. Its anguish is of a different and far deeper nature. It is the agony of love that possesses God without seeing Him, which already rests in the possession of Him and is yet restless because it needs to rest in pure vision. Thus its rest is at best a suspension in the void.
Saint John of the Cross now comes out plainly and tells us the one great truth about faith which makes it the source at the same time of deepest anguish and of exalted peace. He tells us this truth in two ways. First he says, as he has said before, that faith communicates to the soul divine truth in “dark and unformed knowledge.” Then finally he declares—and this is all-important—“Faith gives and communicates to us God Himself.”17 I quote the same idea from The Dark Night of the Soul:
This Dark Night [pure faith, perfected by the Gifts of the Holy Ghost] is the inflowing of God into the soul, which purges it of its ignorances and imperfections, natural and spiritual, and which is called by contemplatives infused contemplation. . . . Herein God secretly teaches the soul and instructs it in perfection of love without its doing anything or understanding of what manner is this infused contemplation.18
And now Saint John of the Cross explains how faith communicates God in a hidden manner. The articles of faith actually contain the truth of God. God is the formal object attained by our belief. He is the substance contained beneath the appearance which is constituted by a credible proposition about Him.
Articles of faith and truths revealed by God in Scripture or tradition can be compared to the Sacrament of the Most Holy Eucharist, in which Christ, God, is presented to our gaze under the species of bread and wine. There is no substance of bread in the consecrated Host. The visible accidents of bread which strike our senses are maintained in being directly by His power, without inhering in any created thing or entering into metaphysical composition with the Divine Being. So too in the articles of faith. We begin the Creed with the words “I believe in God the Father Almighty.” This proposition offers to our minds certain concepts based on images. The concepts and images suscitated in us by this article of belief contain the substantial truth of God, but in themselves they remain as it were created appearances or “species” through which faith must penetrate in order to arrive at Him. If the mind stops short at a subjective and imaginary notion of a human “Father” endowed with an indefinitely magnified human power, it does not reach God. This sterilizes our act of faith.
Saint John uses a different comparison. The articles of faith are like a precious vessel made of gold and plated over with silver. God is the gold overlaid by the silver of the formal propositions which we believe.
Faith is compared to silver with respect to the propositions it teaches us and the truth and substance which they contain in themselves is compared to gold; for that same substance which now we believe, clothed and covered with the silver of faith, we shall behold and enjoy in the life to come with the gold of the faith laid bare.19