Is the word ever actually used in this way in the language game which is its original home? – What we do is to bring words back from their metaphysical to their everyday use.
Something can be incandescently obvious but still utterly unintelligible to us if we lack the conceptual grammar required to interpret it.
2.1 Lost in Translation
In the winter of 1672, the Provincial of the Jesuits in Paris, Pierre Coton, received a despairing letter from a mission in Port Royal, Acadia (now Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia). His correspondent, Pierre Biard, reported that the objects of his missionary endeavours – the Mi’kmaq people – were completely lacking in abstract, internal, and spiritual conceptions. They had no sense of metaphysical notions such as ‘substance’, and distinctions between the virtues of wisdom, fidelity, justice, mercy, gratitude, and piety were largely incomprehensible to them. Most worrying of all, they were innocent of anything that resembled a conventional notion of belief: ‘we are still disputing, after a great deal of research and labor, whether they have any word to correspond directly to the word Credo, I believe.’ Just imagine, Biard continued, what follows for attempts to school the Mi’kmaq in the Creed and the fundamentals of Christianity.Footnote 2 Conversion could not be a matter of persuading the Mi’kmaq to relinquish one set of beliefs and replace them with another. They seemed to have neither competing beliefs, nor a notion of what a belief was.
Not all seventeenth-century missionaries to the Americas regarded the translation of basic Western religious conceptions into native vocabularies an intractable problem. Puritan minister Roger Williams (1603–83) was the founder of the colony of Rhode Island, an abolitionist, and a strong advocate for indigenous rights. He was also a talented linguist and produced the first book on the Narragansett language, including a separate chapter on religion. Here he provides Narragansett equivalents of basic theological concepts – ‘God’, ‘the soul’, ‘prayer’, ‘hell’ – and even offers a kind a catechism rendered into the native tongue.Footnote 3 However, Williams’s ambitious translation project was informed by his conviction that the American first peoples had descended from Adam and Noah some five-and-a-half thousand years before. On the basis of this contracted genealogy he also imagined that he had discovered in Narragansett vocabulary etymological links to various Hebrew expressions and, in keeping with this, customs that resembled ancient Jewish practices.Footnote 4 All of this was consistent with a relatively common view in the seventeenth century that ‘heathen religions’ were corrupted and degenerate forms of the original monotheism practised by Adam and the biblical patriarchs.Footnote 5 This idea underpinned the earliest forms of comparative religion which, in addition to their acceptance of the universal history set out in the pages of Genesis, also involved the projection onto indigenous cultures of a new early modern conception of religion that focused on beliefs and practices.Footnote 6
These assumptions came under sustained pressure during the eighteenth century with challenges to the authority of the universal history set out in Genesis, along with a growing body of empirical evidence that cast doubt upon the idea of a common origin of all religious beliefs and practices. John Locke’s Essay concerning Human Understanding (1689) makes reference to travel relations that attest to the existence of whole nations – both civilised and ‘uncultivated’, that ‘want the idea and knowledge of God altogether’.Footnote 7 Huguenot philosopher Pierre Bayle argued similarly for the existence of nations of atheists.Footnote 8 In the following century, in his Natural History of Religion (1757), David Hume flatly rejected the idea that all extant religions were to be understood as either degenerate forms of, or elaborations upon, a primeval monotheism. In short, it was Biard’s perspective, rather than that of Williams, that became typical of the understandings of subsequent missionaries and field anthropologists, and which reflected a significant body of opinion among philosophers.Footnote 9
Reports from nineteenth-century missions to the Pacific are replete with observations about a ‘lack of any expressions for abstract things’ in ‘barbaric’ and ‘uncivilized’ languages.Footnote 10 The first of the German Neuendettelsau missionaries to Papua New Guinea, Johann Flierl, wrote of the language of Kâte people that they have virtually ‘no words into and with which to be able to express spiritual and religious concepts’.Footnote 11 Lutheran missionaries like Flierl had a particular investment in vernacular languages, since they often sought to translate the Bible, or parts of it, Martin Luther’s 1534 German translation of the Bible having provided a powerful precedent. Accordingly, their efforts have played a significant role in the preservation of indigenous languages in New Guinea and Australia.Footnote 12 But the lack of a familiar religious terminology inevitably generated significant difficulties of translation (along with some spectacular mis-renderings, as when, to the amusement of his Pitjantjatjara auditors, Ronald Trudinger described the coming of the Holy of Spirit recorded in Acts 2:3 as a ‘deluge of wallabies’ rather than the more canonical ‘tongues of fire’).Footnote 13 More directly to the point, correspondence from the Neuendettelsau missionaries reveals a list a problematic terms that closely match those identified by Biard. Antipodean indigenous languages apparently had no way of accommodating ‘spiritual concepts’, ‘higher concepts’, and ‘Christian notions’. Specifically, there were no equivalents to ‘belief’, ‘Spirit of God’, ‘blessed’, ‘miracle’, and the verbs ‘to love’ and ‘to worship’.Footnote 14
Moving to the other side of the Pacific and more recent history, the Wari’ (or Pakaa Nova) people of the Amazon basin seem similarly bereft of a terminology of belief. The Wari’ first became known to the outside world at the beginning of the twentieth century, owing to their attacks on workers constructing the ill-fated, and now long abandoned Madeira-Mamoré railway, undertaken in the hope of affording Bolivian rubber growers access to the Atlantic. Following this unhappy start, more peaceful contacts were made by Protestant missionaries in the 1950s. Translators found in the native language what they thought was an acceptable expression for belief in God in the word howa – ‘to accept’, ‘to agree’, or ‘to think that something is true’. But for the Wari’ themselves, the term used for experience of the other dimension of reality was not cognitive, but visual: ‘to see’.Footnote 15 Their shamans were the ones who ‘saw’, while Catholic priests and Protestant missionaries were those who ‘believed’. Conversion to Christian belief necessarily meant something quite different to those on the two sides of this linguistic divide. Anthropologist Aparecida Vilaça, attempting to offer an explanation for the apparently odd fluctuations in the religious beliefs of this group, concludes: ‘the idea of belief to express a relationship to the “supernatural” is, I think, alien to the Wari’.Footnote 16
The cattle herding Dinka tribes of South Sudan (or the Jieng, as they refer to themselves) offer yet another example. In his ground-breaking study of the religion of the Dinka, Godfrey Lienhardt informs us that ‘it is not a simple matter to divide the Dinka believer … from what he believes in, and to describe the latter then in isolation from him as the object of belief’. This relates to the fact that the Dinka, on Lienhardt’s account, lack a concept of mind comparable to that of modern Westerners. Inevitably, then, their experiences of non-human ‘powers’ are not adequately described as ‘beliefs’, not least because it is these ‘powers’ that structure their experience.Footnote 17 The Western conception of belief, Lienhardt suggests, calls for a distinctive theory of mind that we cannot assume is widely shared.
The cumulative weight of reports such as these has prompted speculation among some anthropologists about whether absence of a notion of belief is less the exception than the rule. Perhaps the Western notion of ‘belief’, in the big scheme of things, is the odd one out. Social anthropologist Rodney Needham has maintained that ‘there are numerous linguistic traditions which make no provision for the expression of belief and which do not recognise such a condition in their psychological assessments’. Belief, in our sense, he concludes, ‘is a relatively modern linguistic invention, and it does not correspond, under any aspect, to a real, constant, and distinct resource of the self’.Footnote 18 ‘Belief’ heads Marshall Sahlins’s list of ethnographic terms standing in need of ‘considerable rectification’.Footnote 19 In evolving a sense of belief, understood as assenting to particular propositions, it looks as though the modern West has taken a unique turn.Footnote 20
How does all of this bear upon the issue of ‘belief in the supernatural’ and the Humean tendency to regard such belief as an irrational holdover from the past? One thing we might say is that it puts pressure on our assumption that belief – understood as agreeing with, or giving assent to, some proposition – is natural and universal, or that it offers the best way of characterising the ways of knowing and being of those who are not modern and Western. This all the more so when ‘belief’ is dismissively conjoined with ‘the supernatural’ – another concept that is conspicuously absent from the vocabularies of many non-Western peoples.Footnote 21 (Indeed, as we will see in Chapter 5, the term ‘supernatural’ was also missing from the Western lexicon until the Middle Ages.) Anthropologist Martin Holbraad has accordingly suggested that to speak of the ‘irrational beliefs’ of other cultures is ‘to shirk analytical responsibility for the failures of our own categorical (or more broadly conceptual) repertoire’.Footnote 22 We find a similar sentiment in Marshall Sahlins’s characterisation of much of ‘received ethnography’, said to operate with ‘a misleading conceptual apparatus composed of nearly equal parts of transcendentalist equivocation and colonialist condescension’.Footnote 23 More directly relevant to Western history, Greg Anderson, in his fascinating account of the beliefs and practices of ancient Athenians, has asked us to consider whether Athenian encounters with the gods might arise not as a consequence of Athenians having a different or distorted perception of the world, but of their world being ontologically different to ours.Footnote 24 More generally, he hints that when we dismiss the ‘supernatural’ experiences of peoples of the past or, by implication, those of other cultures, this is a consequence of uncritically assuming the superiority of our own conceptions of reality.
It follows that the supposedly primitive commitments of others might represent less a systematic failure of their rationality than a symptom of the inadequacy of our own conceptual apparatus. There has been a belated recognition of the parochial and historically contingent nature of Western conceptions of, say, land ownership and private property. Accompanying this has been a growing realisation that the consistency of these conceptions with the relationships to land and country of many indigenous peoples cannot be resolved simply by declaring that modern Western understandings must trump all others. Something similar may well hold true for the repertoire of cherished philosophical concepts that we imagine to be natural and universal but which, no less than our ideas about private property and ownership, have complicated histories of their own. Categories of philosophical analysis such as ‘belief’, ‘natural’, and ‘supernatural’ are neither simply given, nor the unique discoveries of the modern West. The puzzles that we encounter in attempting to understand other cultures – and, indeed, own past – should ideally motivate us to think carefully about the role of our present vocabularies and analytical tools in generating those puzzles. The tendency of modern psychology to concentrate its investigative endeavours almost solely on WEIRD populations (Western, educated, industrialised, rich, democratic) does not help, since generalisations based upon this idiosyncratic sample will hardly hold good universally.Footnote 25
As it directly pertains to the issue of ‘belief’, it turns out that this is not just a straightforward matter of the West versus the rest. Our modern Western understandings of faith and belief have also evolved significantly over time. It is not too much of an exaggeration to say that first-century Jews, Christians, and Pagans, like Biard’s Mi’kmaq, had no conception of belief either, at least in our modern sense.Footnote 26 When we look carefully at the closest Greek and Latin equivalents to our modern English terms ‘faith’ and ‘belief’, it becomes clear that they bear different and more wide-ranging meanings than those we presently attach to them. We are more distant from past believers than we think, and the idea that we share with them a common epistemological vocabulary arises out of mistaken assumptions about the stability of meaning of terms like faith’ and ‘belief’. At the same time, it is possible to engage in a partial reconstruction of the past meanings of these terms. This enables us to identify some of the crucial historical turning points that have contributed to the formation of what I am suggesting is a distinctive conceptual category that decisively shapes how we now view religious phenomena.
2.2 Faith as Trust
This is not the occasion for an exhaustive history of understandings of ‘faith’ and ‘belief’ in the Western intellectual tradition.Footnote 27 But we can point to specific moments in the evolution of these ideas that reveal just how distinctive and path-dependent our modern conceptions are. Far and away the most important factor in shaping our modern, Western understandings of belief have been the fortunes of this concept in the emergence and development of Christianity. The key terms in the first century were the Greek pistis and Latin fides, which are typically rendered into English as ‘faith’ or ‘belief’.Footnote 28 This terminology was central to early Christianity and distinguishes it from both first-century Judaism and the contemporary Graeco-Roman religions. As Teresa Morgan has now established in her magisterial Roman Faith and Christian Faith (2015), the primary meanings of the pistis/fides lexicon in the first century centre on trust.Footnote 29
This recognition of the centrality of trust only gets us so far, however, because our natural tendency is to subject ‘trust’ to further analysis and ask after the extent to which it might be understood as a cognitive attitude, an emotion, a virtue, or a set of social relations. First-century sources evince no such distinctions. As Morgan puts it, faith is treated as ‘simultaneously cognitive and affective, active and relational’.Footnote 30 The relational aspect of faith, which is the most central, extended to the trustworthiness of God, to trust or confidence in God, trust in the person of Jesus, and trust among persons in the Christian community. Faith was also understood as a divine gift, and one that demanded a response of obedience. It was linked to a set of behaviours and obligations. There is little evidence that faith was understood primarily as right belief, or as assenting to propositions. Neither, at first, was there a conception of ‘the faith’, a body of doctrines to which orthodox Christians subscribed.Footnote 31
All this is reflected in how the earliest Christians thought of themselves – not as a community set apart by the unique set of propositional beliefs to which they subscribed, but as ‘those who trust’ or ‘the faithful’.Footnote 32 Second-century Christian self-identifications expand into a range of expressions, but still retain something of this sense. Christians embody a form of ‘godliness’, a ‘mode of worship’, a ‘new race’, ‘a new way of life’ – self-conceptions that also emphasise the relational and non-cognitive.Footnote 33 The descriptor ‘Christian’, we should remind ourselves, was initially an outsider’s term and remained so for some time. Extending well into the Middle Ages, and in keeping with the New Testament terminology, the expression that Christian communities most often used for themselves was ‘the faithful’ (fideles) rather than ‘Christians’ (christiani).Footnote 34 It is significant in all of this (as I and others have argued at length elsewhere) that there was no concept ‘religion’ available at this time – or at least not one that equates to our modern conception. The idea of distinct religions, characterised by sets of beliefs and practices, is also a development that is peculiar to the modern West.Footnote 35
While there was undoubtedly something novel in these understandings of faith in early Christianity, there were also important continuities with the usages in classical and Hebrew literature that are worth briefly mentioning. Looking to the closest equivalents of pistis in the Hebrew Bible, we encounter the idea of confidence in God based on his past acts, along with connotations of trust in God’s promises.Footnote 36 As already noted, the New Testament references also include an element of obedience, and these are even more prominent in the Hebrew.Footnote 37 Again, though, there is little emphasis on ‘beliefs’ (plural), or the idea of giving assent to doctrinal claims.Footnote 38
Precedents in the classical Greek literature also have affinities with the New Testament references, with pistis referring primarily to confidence or trust, and particularly trust between persons.Footnote 39 In the philosophical works of Plato and Aristotle, because trust (pistis) was sometimes thought to entail a degree of uncertainty, it was occasionally contrasted with certain knowledge or ‘science’ (epistēmē).Footnote 40 In the Republic, Plato consigns pistis to the category of ‘opinion’ (doxa), which has a lower grade of certainty than ‘science’ (epistēmē). These are not understood as forms of knowledge, however, but affections of the soul, and part of Plato’s intention is to downplay the significance of the world of the senses, to which belong the less certain affections of conjecture and opinion.Footnote 41 The basic thrust of Plato’s position, then, is more or less opposite to what we now tend to hold: for us, it is natural to assume that more certainty is to be found in the material realm and in matters of empirical fact. Although Aristotle’s priorities are different, he follows Plato in observing a distinction between knowledge and belief/opinion.Footnote 42
Some of the Church Fathers sought to engage with these philosophical traditions, not least to deflect accusations that Christianity had abandoned any attempt at rational justification of its central claims. Clement of Alexandria (c.150–c.215), a convert to Christianity who was well versed in Greek philosophy, argued that while Christian faith was distinctively different from anything that had come before, it was not inconsistent with the principles of logic taught in the philosophical schools. Aristotle, for example, had proposed that genuine knowledge or ‘science’ (epistēmē) was based on logical demonstration. But he had also pointed out that the process of demonstration must begin somewhere. If an infinite regress is be avoided, and knowledge/science is possible at all, these must be premises that are themselves certain but undemonstrated.Footnote 43 Geometrical and logical axioms, common notions, the consensus of ‘the wise’, innate ideas or preconceptions (prolȇpseis), were all proposed as possible first principles. Clement argued that ‘faith’ occupied a similarly foundational position for Christians, with its reliability guaranteed by its divine origins.Footnote 44 It followed that faith was not so much a lower grade of knowledge as the necessary foundation for the construction of any ‘science’. Faith, for Clement, was the solution to a logical difficulty of which the philosophers had been well aware. At the same time, Clement insisted that knowing God is not simply a matter of reasoning from the correct premises: there are moral impediments that must first be cleared away. It is the ‘pure in heart’ who see God.Footnote 45 This, too, was contiguous with the contemporary understanding of philosophy as primarily a moral enterprise involving spiritual exercises.
It would be a mistake, then, to think that there was an ancient ‘philosophical’ literature with its own technical epistemological vocabulary that might be placed into a simple relation to a comparable ‘religious’ terminology. In the first century the philosophical traditions present themselves as competing ways of life. In so far as they have doctrinal content, that content is to be grasped within the mode of living prescribed by the relevant school. Christianity and Stoicism, for example, might seem to be offering rival truth claims about the world, but these are better understood, as C. Kavin Rowe has persuasively argued, not as ‘individual statements to be taken as true or false, as just justified or not, case by case’ but as ‘summoning people to a different pattern of being in the world’.Footnote 46 It was not, then, a simple matter of weighing up rival truth claims, along with relevant supporting arguments, since the force of the respective truths becomes apparent only through the adoption of the prescribed way of life. Christian ‘faith’, then, is not easily translatable into a generic philosophical language, or slotted into a continuum of epistemological categories, or graded in terms of its relative certainty in relation to other species of knowledge.
That was to change when the full canon of the Aristotelian corpus found its way back into Western Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. But during this later period philosophy presented itself in a different guise. No longer a living tradition able to compete with Christianity as an alternative way of life, it became instead a resource for dialectical reasoning, a toolkit that could assist with the systematic articulation of a new Christian ‘theology’. Philosophical doctrines and techniques, detached from their original therapeutic context, were accorded a kind of neutral instrumentality. What look like the epistemological categories of the ancients were thrust into prominence as scholastic thinkers began to grapple with such questions as how Christian faith relates to Aristotelian understandings of ‘science’ (epistēmē, now rendered into the Latin scientia).Footnote 47 Subsequently, when trust became marginalised in discussions of faith, as in a number of early modern treatments, the prospect for regarding faith and belief as deficient forms of knowledge arose for the first time.Footnote 48 From the seventeenth century onwards, then, belief was folded into what we now call epistemology (although the word itself did not make an appearance until the mid-nineteenth century) with genuine knowledge understood as true belief plus some justificatory condition.Footnote 49 This gave rise to a commonplace philosophical definition of knowledge as ‘justified true belief’ which is then often read back into ancient philosophical texts and indeed frequently attributed to Plato.Footnote 50 In fact, for both Plato and Aristotle, knowledge (epistēmē) and belief (doxa) seem to have different objects, complicating readings that regard one as a subset of the other. (And this, even if we disregard further difficulties of translation.) For now, though, suffice it to say that observing some distance between faith and belief on the one hand, and propositional knowledge on the other, was not peculiar to the canonical documents of the Jewish and Christian traditions. Only much later was faith relocated from a social sphere in which trust was at the centre into an epistemological framework in which it comes to be understood primarily in terms of its relation to generic and disembodied ways of knowing.
There were, however, even in the first century, indications of the potential for this kind of transition. In spite of the dominance of the relational aspects of faith over the cognitive, we encounter instances of what Morgan has termed the ‘reification’ of pistis/fides, in which the trust relationship is objectified or given expression in some tangible form. Examples include oaths of allegiance, letters of credit, and, in the religious context, the idea of the formal covenant.Footnote 51 Necessarily, moreover, trust does not exist without something being held to be true about the objects of trust (even if held implicitly or tacitly). To trust in God is to be committed to the view that God is trustworthy: belief in implies belief that, in modern philosophical parlance. The idea that pistis/fides should entail an element of doctrinal commitment became more prominent as divisions arose within early Christian communities. While these were often to do with practices, doctrinal diversity and ‘false teaching’ also became a matter of increasing concern. Addressing himself to the dangers of schism in the early Church, Ignatius of Antioch (b. c. ad 50) insisted that possession of genuine Christian faith entailed the affirmation that Jesus was the Son of God, born of a virgin, crucified by Pontius Pilate and Herod, and resurrected from the dead.Footnote 52 This tendency to codify the content of Christian belief, which culminates in the composition of formal creedal statements in the fourth and fifth centuries, is a prominent instance of the reification of pistis/fides.
The beginnings of the reification of faith were inseparable from changes in the authority structures of the early Church, which can be understood along the lines of Max Weber’s notion of ‘the routinization of charisma’.Footnote 53 Weber adopted the term ‘charisma’ directly from the Greek of the Pauline epistles, where it refers to gifts bestowed by God on the Christian community (one of which, incidentally, was the gift of faith). On the Weberian account, personal charismatic authority is inherently unstable on account of the natural lifespan of the individuals in whom it is vested. A successful transition of authority therefore requires a process of ‘routinisation’ in which personal charisma is transmuted into more enduring structures. Typically, charismatic authority devolves onto traditional leadership structures, legal-rational bureaucracies, or some combination of both. In the case of the Christian Church we witness these two elements in the idea of an apostolic succession and in the development of a hierarchical priesthood that enjoyed an inherited authority and the charisma of office. Ignatius, again, offers an instructive description of these adjustments in the evolving authority structures of the early Church: ‘the bishop presiding in the place of God, and with the presbyters in the place of the council of the apostles, and with the deacons, who are most dear to me, entrusted with the business of Jesus Christ’.Footnote 54 The bureaucratic elements consisted not only in the gradual establishment of the structures of the Church and formalisation of its rituals, but also in the composition of creedal formulations that answer to the rationally established norms, decrees, and rules that for Weber characterise legal-rational bureaucracies. (Looking ahead, we will witness an analogous process in early modern formalisations of ‘scientific’ knowledge, when scientia ceased to be characteristic of an individual mind and became cumulative, corporate, and transgenerational.) These objectifying tendencies converge in the promulgation of the formal creeds and symbols of the fourth and fifth centuries – the Nicene Creed (325, 381) and the Symbol of Chalcedon (451).
2.3 Creedal Commitments
In the summer of 325, the first of the Christian emperors, Constantine the Great, convened a council in Nicaea (now Iznik, north-western Turkey) to settle matters of contested doctrine and fix the date of Easter. He invited some 1,800 bishops from across the Roman Empire, with some 300 eventually making the all-expenses-paid journey.Footnote 55 On 19 June, after a month of sitting, the council promulgated the original Nicene Creed, consisting of twelve doctrinal articles prefaced by the phrase ‘We believe’.Footnote 56 While, as the example of Ignatius makes plain, informal creedal statements had been around long before this, the Nicene Creed has come to be regarded as the definitive statement of Christian belief and is typically understood as embodying the propositional essence of Christianity.Footnote 57
Constantine, it must be said, had been less concerned with the precise content of Christian doctrines than with the preservation of social order throughout his empire. In the period leading up to the council he had been troubled by reports of civil unrest in Alexandria occasioned by doctrinal disputes. Writing to the bishops concerned, he expressed his fears of ‘tumults’ and ‘sedition’ and chastised them for placing their ‘minute investigations’ of ‘unimportant matters’ above the unity of ‘one faith, one sentiment, and one covenant of the Godhead’. His own preference was to privilege a unity of worship, with the bishops keeping their potentially divisive theological speculations to themselves.Footnote 58 In the end, that did not happen. Constantine was compelled to convene the historic council and, fatefully, matters that he had deemed minute and unimportant became enshrined in the Christian creeds as core articles of belief. It should be said, parenthetically, that while Constantine is sometimes criticised for his theological naïvety and indifference to the specifics of Christian belief, he represented a long-standing tradition in which state religion was primarily about the promotion of cohesion and unity – typically expressed through ritual acts – rather than doctrinal conformity. ‘Religion’ in this sense, was rightly directed worship, not correct belief.
It is natural for us to think of these creeds as sets of propositions that constitute the content of the ‘Christian faith’ or the ‘Christian religion’. Belief, understood in this way, is about understanding and agreeing with, or ‘assenting’ to, the propositions set out in the creed. On the face of it, moreover, the creeds specify precisely what counts as orthodox Christianity and what should be regarded as heretical. The practice of marginalising and persecuting heretics reinforces this perception that at its heart Christianity is about believing a set of propositions. The fact that the North African bishops were prepared to resist the imposition of Constantine’s practice-oriented understanding of Christianity also suggests that the conciliar period represents a new phase in Christian understandings of faith and belief.
Yet, while these creedal statements place a premium on the importance of lending intellectual assent to propositions, they also preserve some of the original elements of trust that were associated with faith and belief.Footnote 59 The formulaic opening profession ‘We believe’ can still be taken to mean ‘We place our trust in …’ rather than ‘We believe in the existence of …’.Footnote 60 The additional descriptors, ‘maker of heaven and earth’, and so on, would then be ways of identifying or otherwise specifying the nature of the primary objects in which trust of confidence is being expressed. This certainly seems to be the sense of the later articles of the creeds. ‘We believe in … one, holy, catholic and apostolic Church’ is clearly not intended to be profession of belief in the existence of the Church, but rather a statement of allegiance to it, confidence in its authority, and commitment to maintaining its unity. Again, recall that the Latin fides had no verb form and hence no possibility for the expression ‘I faith’.Footnote 61 The modern tendency to use the first person singular ‘I’, along with the use of a separate verb credo (I believe) lends itself to the construction ‘I believe that’ in a way that can stress the propositional content, rather than the stance of the believer.Footnote 62 Faith/belief can then be understood to have separate subjective and objective components.
It may seem that Augustine of Hippo (354–430) had something like this in mind when he proposed a distinction between ‘the faith by which it is believed’ (fides qua creduntur) and ‘the faith which is believed’ (fides quae creduntur).Footnote 63 This dichotomy was revived in the seventeenth century and invoked to support the idea that faith could be distributed in a binary way on the basis of its supposedly subjective and objective aspects.Footnote 64 But this is not what the phrases connoted for Augustine and this modern interpretation is inconsistent with the general picture of faith that we encounter during this earlier period in which elements of willing, trusting, acting, obedience, commitment, and knowledge in some form, are all closely conjoined.Footnote 65 Augustine’s position is somewhat analogous to what Plato had argued about the object of love (eros) in the Symposium: the act of love can be understood only in relation to what is loved; the two cannot be separated.Footnote 66 For Augustine the ‘faith’ that is believed, cannot be considered independently of the ‘faith’ by which it is believed. This was to change in the early modern period.
The liturgical function of creeds also complicates the idea that they are solely to do with assenting to propositions.Footnote 67 Professions of belief had been integral to baptismal rites from very early in the history of the Christian Church.Footnote 68 The creeds, as John Henry Newman would later observe, ‘are devotional acts, and of the nature of prayers addressed to God’.Footnote 69 This ritual context is suggestive of creedal declarations as what we now refer to as ‘speech acts’ or ‘performative utterances’.Footnote 70 J. L. Austin, one of the leading ordinary language philosophers of the last century, contended that philosophical understandings of language and meaning had been distorted by a preoccupation with propositional assertion. One of the more revealing examples he used to contest that tendency was the formulaic declarations of a traditional wedding ceremony: ‘I take you to be my lawfully wedded husband/wife …’; ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’; and so on. Clearly, these are not so much assertions of some truth about the world as the performance of actions that bring into being a new state of affairs. One way of thinking about how the verb ‘to believe’ operates within the creedal context, then, is to categorise it with these ‘illocutionary’ speech acts.Footnote 71 Again, this is not to claim that these statements make no reference at all to objective features of the world or historical events. But like wedding vows, creedal recitation assumes, rather than asserts, the existence of the relevant parties.
It is also worth noting that the objects of speech acts such as wedding vows are not fully specified: this is the force of the familiar phrases ‘for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health’. What is being committed to is not, and cannot, be definitively established in advance. Complete knowledge of the other person in the relation, or of the various circumstances likely to obtain in the future, are not prerequisites for commitment. On the contrary, commitment, in a way, becomes a prerequisite for a deeper knowledge.Footnote 72 In this sense, marriage, if taken to be a sacrament, parallels the sacrament of infant baptism, in which an infant is initiated into a communal setting which it is envisaged will provide the context for a more fully developed and explicit knowledge. There are also analogies here to the maxims associated respectively with Augustine who repeatedly maintained that ‘unless you believe you will not understand’, and Anselm of Canterbury whose famous maxim was ‘faith seeking understanding’.Footnote 73 These assume forms of knowledge that are unattainable without at least some degree of prior commitment, and that these commitments also involve actions and behaviours along with participation in the life of a community.
None of this is to deny that creeds had an exclusionary function and that their articulation made possible formal definitions of heresy and heterodoxy, typically understood as believing – assenting to – erroneous propositions. It is tempting to think that the category of heresy, along with the practice of persecution of heretics, offers a compelling example of why we ought to think of religious faith and belief in terms of individuals giving assent to doctrinal statements.Footnote 74 But again it is more complicated than this. Among the perceived dangers of heresy were social instability and rejection of the authority of temporal or ecclesiastical powers. As already observed, what initially prompted a reluctant Constantine to convene the Council of Nicaea was a concern about civil unrest in the Empire rather than a theological interest in promoting a specific version of Trinitarian Christianity. During this period, as J. Rebecca Lyman has observed, heresy ‘was increasingly no longer only an ecclesiastical matter or a serious theological challenge, but a problem of public safety, since correct belief and worship ensured the unity and stability of society’. The articulation of heresiological categories was ‘often a means to establish or maintain common boundaries’.Footnote 75 Accordingly, under the Christian emperors, penal laws effectively classified heresy as a crime against the state.Footnote 76 Subsequently, heresy came to be considered an instance of laesa majestas (injured majesty), a concept that originates from Roman legal definitions of treason.Footnote 77
The same would be true for heterodox belief in the Middle Ages. Arguably the perceived danger of medieval heresies lay less in individuals believing the wrong things (in our sense) than in the potential for heretical movements to challenge temporal and ecclesiastical authorities. There was certainly no lack of heretical groups during the Middle Ages: the Apostolic Brethren, Arnoldists, Brethren of the Free Spirit, Bogomils, Cathars, Fraticelli, Henricans, Humiliati, Lollards, Neo-Adamites, Paulicians, Petrobrusians, and Waldensians, to name the more prominent. While, on a parallel with our modern understandings of plural religions, such groups are often defined in terms of the heterodox beliefs to which their adherents supposedly subscribed, what they shared was a common concern with perceived ecclesiastical abuses and corruptions, and resistance to aspects of the prevailing social order. The policing of correct propositional belief was often secondary to the need to supress movements imagined to constitute a threat to the legitimacy of both the Church and temporal rulers.Footnote 78
Some historians have gone so far as to contend that the putatively heterodox beliefs of groups such as the Cathars and Bogomils were the construction of committed churchmen, and that the doctrinal deviations of the heretics lay largely in the imaginations of Inquisitors.Footnote 79 Medievalist Mark Pegg tells us that ‘there were no pre-existing heresies in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries until the thinking of Latin Christian intellectuals invented them’.Footnote 80 According to this account, medieval heresy was constructed by projecting the opinions of historical heretical ‘types’ and heresiarchs – Marcion, Mani, Arius – onto marginal social groups. As was the case for these earlier emblematic heresies, political considerations were at the fore. Robert Moore proposes that we think of the persecution of medieval heretics as a general social phenomenon and of a piece with the persecution of Jews, lepers, homosexuals, and prostitutes – in short, those perceived to lie on the margins of Christian society. Their suppression was not about ‘belief’ in our sense at all, but a mechanism to shore up the social cohesion of medieval societies.Footnote 81 The medieval ‘war on heresy’ was thus analogous in some respects to the more recent notion of a ‘war on terror’ and the idea of an ‘axis of evil’. This latter identification had more to do with a domestic US audience than a geopolitical reality.
Even if we are sceptical of the ‘invention of medieval heresy’ hypothesis it should be clear that heretics, whatever their imagined doctrinal commitments, were guilty by definition of a failure to believe in, in the sense of trusting in, ‘one holy, catholic, and apostolic Church’ in as much as they contested its authority and threatened its unity. They could hardly fail to believe in its existence, without which the exercise of its powers of coercion would be impossible. Their transgression consisted in a stubborn adherence to their own opinions out of mistrust, pride, and obstinacy. Hence the insistence of medieval thinkers that the guilt of heretics arose out of a remediable moral failing rather than sincere but mistaken beliefs. From the twelfth century onwards, medieval thinkers had specifically identified ‘pertinacity’ as the defining vice of heretics.Footnote 82 Aquinas would link this vice back to pride and covetousness, which headed the list of the seven deadly sins.Footnote 83 All of this comports with an understanding of pistis/fides as not simply an epistemological category, but a broader moral, social, and relational phenomenon.
2.4 Belief without Knowledge?
When Constantine the Great embarked upon his ultimately unsuccessful mission to dissuade the North African bishops from what he regarded as dispute-engendering doctrinal hair-splitting, he had suggested that the subtle distinctions at issue were beyond the comprehension of most of the faithful: ‘how few are capable either of adequately expounding, or even accurately understanding the import of matters so vast and profound!’Footnote 84 He had a point. The philosophical complexity of the articles of the Christian creeds poses a further problem for the idea of belief as simple knowledge of and assent to propositions. The relational predicates in the Nicene Creed, for example, specify that the Son is ‘eternally begotten of the Father’ and the Spirit ‘proceeds from the Father and the Son’. But what does ‘eternally begotten’ actually mean, and how is it different to ‘proceeding from’? While members of councils responsible for the vocabulary of the creeds may have had some notion of what they were intending to convey – and, importantly, what they were ruling out – this could hardly have been true for the vast bulk of the Christian community many of whom would have lacked the philosophical sophistication necessary to fully comprehend these articles.Footnote 85
Strictly speaking, moreover, what is being affirmed in the original Greek is not quite the same as what is being affirmed in the Latin. The Father is ‘ruler of all’ in the Greek, but ‘omnipotent’ or ‘almighty’ in the Latin. Jesus is ‘of one being with the Father’ in the Greek, but in Latin, ‘of one substance’.Footnote 86 Arguably, these expressions reflect slightly different ontological commitments – the latter seeming to require, for example, some kind of metaphysics of substance. None of this is intended as a normative judgement on the validity of the creeds, but it does point to the fact that full comprehension and assent to their literal, propositional content could not have been the condition for genuine faith, or membership of the Church, for the simple reason that for most of the faithful this would have practically unachievable.
How then, was belief supposed to work in relation to these creedal formulae? For the bulk of the faithful, belief had to be a matter of trusting in the Church and in those charged with the business of getting the doctrinal details correct.Footnote 87 Belief in (that is, trust in) the one Holy, catholic, and apostolic church amounts to confidence that the councils of the Church have got the more abstruse propositions right. The third-century maxim that there is ‘no salvation outside the church’ (extra Ecclesiam nulla salus) reinforces this understanding.Footnote 88 Salvation was not a matter, primarily, of explicitly assenting to the right set of propositions, but of being incorporated into the body of the Church through the medium of the sacraments. The specialised task of getting the doctrines right was left to theological authorities. Looking ahead, the most unambiguous statement of this position would be reiterated in the decrees of the Council of Trent (1545–63), at precisely the historical moment when this view of faith faced its most serious challenge : ‘We believe all “that which is contained in the word of God, written or handed down, and which the Church proposes for belief as divinely revealed”.’Footnote 89 Of course, if there were two (or more) churches offering competing proposals for belief this option would become problematic. This was the difficulty that became acute following the Protestant Reformation. The predicament generated by competing magisterial contributed to the rise of an instrumental conception of reason intended to provide the criterion for justified belief (where ‘belief’ is understood to be a form of knowledge). Along with this notion came the insistence that we take personal responsibility for what we affirm and do so in possession of all of the evidential grounds upon which we affirm it. But these epistemic ideals, as we will see, have problems of their own and, arguably, turn out to be impractical and unobtainable.
In the fourth century, an issue related to the conceptual complexity of creedal formulae was the status of biblical patriarchs and prophets who, on the basis of biblical authority, were generally thought to have been saved on account of their ‘faith’.Footnote 90 Clearly, then, the object of that faith could not have been the articles of the creeds. Indeed, this would also have been true of the disciples and the first generation of Christians who lived before the promulgation of the creeds.Footnote 91 Augustine of Hippo (354–430), writing in the period that followed the Council of Nicaea, grappled with this question, concluding that ‘true religion’ had existed since the beginning of the world. With the coming of Christ, this religion was for the first time called ‘Christian religion’.Footnote 92 True religion, on this account, had always had adherents, even if explicit assent to fundamental Christian doctrines would have been impossible for them.Footnote 93 Augustine thought that there had always been ‘one faith’, but over historical time a growth in knowledge. Medieval thinkers subsequently drew parallels between the faith of infants and the unlearned, and pre-Christian patriarchs and prophets. While neither would have been able to read the Bible or offer an account of the articles of the creed, they were nonetheless thought to have been capable of saving faith.Footnote 94 This faith became known as ‘implicit faith’.
We shall return to Augustine shortly to consider his ideas on the status of second-hand knowledge. For now, and looking well ahead, the formal category of implicit faith was developed by successive thinkers at the abbey of St Victor during the high Middle Ages. Founded early in the twelfth century and located at the foot of Montagne Sainte-Geneviève on the outskirts of Paris, the abbey became one of the main centres of intellectual life in medieval Europe. Along with the schools of Ste Geneviève and Notre-Dame de Paris, it provided the foundation for the University of Paris, established around 1150 and generally regarded as the second-oldest university in Europe. Its most influential leader was Hugh of St Victor (c.1096–1141) whose De sacramentis christianae fidei (‘On the Sacraments of Christian Faith’) was one of the first systematic theological treatises of the Middle Ages. In his seven questions on faith, Hugh followed Augustine in proposing that ‘right faith’ had in some sense been in evidence from the beginning of the world. This faith consisted in trust in God along with a diffuse apprehension of a future redemption. In these earlier times, as in the present, ‘the faith of the simple minded’ consisted in their trust in those whose expectations were more fully formed. All had the same faith, but not the same knowledge.Footnote 95
Peter Lombard (c.1096–1160), whose Sentences overtook Hugh’s De sacramentis to become the standard theological textbook during the high and later Middle Ages, also addressed this issue, concluding similarly that there were those, both before the coming of Christ and in his own time, who ‘believe what they do not know’.Footnote 96 These individuals had what he calls a ‘veiled faith’. Lombard’s ‘veiled faith’ would subsequently evolve into the more formal ‘implicit faith’ (fides implicita), which became a standard category for scholastic philosophers.Footnote 97 When Thomas Aquinas came to take up this issue he conceded that there were degrees of knowledge and that it was sufficient for those not in the business of philosophy to assent to ‘primary articles of faith’ and to have an ‘implicit faith’ in the rest. This meant, in essence, cultivating an attitude of trust in God and in his earthly representatives.Footnote 98 The biblical patriarchs were also included in the number for whom implicit faith was regarded as efficacious.Footnote 99 Aquinas deals with implicit faith in a number of his works, offering a more complete treatment than any of his contemporaries. One way in which he imagines implicit faith to work is analogous to the way in which, if we have knowledge of a general principle, we will have implicit knowledge of its specific applications.Footnote 100 (For example, we may not ever think explicitly about the prime number 104,729 or contemplate its properties. But if we know what a prime number is, there is a sense in which we know implicitly that 104,729 is divisible by only itself and one.)
Requiring others to believe on our behalf may seem to be a problem that we only get ourselves into when we seek to justify one particular kind of belief – that is, religious belief, or belief that transcends the sensory realm, or is in some sense ‘above reason’. Indeed, for some, this encapsulates the whole problem with religious belief. However, reliance on authorities goes beyond the religious sphere, and a moment’s reflection will reveal that we rely upon others for much, if not most, of what we think we know. Aristotle had observed that ‘some trust/faith [pisteuein] is necessary for whoever wants to learn’.Footnote 101 But it was not until Augustine that we encounter an extended treatment of this principle, and of how it might be rational to believe on the basis of authority. In the Confessions, he offers these reflections on all of the things he knows on the basis of trust:
I began to consider the countless things I believed in though I could not see them and had not been present when they took place, such as the many events in the history of the nations, so many of them to do with places and cities that I had not seen; and so many things I learned from friends, doctors, all sorts and conditions of people. Unless we believed in them [quae nisi crederentur], we would never take action of any kind in this life …. Finally, there was my unshakeable conviction about the parents who had begotten me, which I could not know [scire] except by hearing and believing it.Footnote 102
These sentiments amount to a kind of sociology of knowledge in which Augustine sets aside theoretical, epistemological considerations to focus instead on how in practice we come to know things. He points to the fact that reliance upon authorities of various kinds is necessary for much of our knowledge and that leading a normal life would be impossible without it.Footnote 103 The warrant for holding such knowledge is twofold: practical necessity and the trustworthiness of our sources. Religious belief, one case of such knowledge, relies upon both.
In De ordine (On Order), written towards the end of the fourth century when the Western Empire was on the verge of disintegration, Augustine had already suggested a two-stage path to knowledge, in which authority comes first, followed by reason. What this transition required, however, was not so much a training in philosophical dialectic as the leading of a good life. Only after individuals live out what they believe, says Augustine, ‘do they appreciate how reasonable were the notions they learned before understanding them’.Footnote 104 The adoption of a particular form of life is also important for gauging the reliability of human authorities. Here the criterion is whether the lives of authorities are consistent with their teachings.Footnote 105 Augustine also acknowledges a difference between ‘the uninstructed crowd’ and ‘the learned’, the former being more reliant on authority than the latter. What is more important for those who have no talent for higher learning is that ‘they live a clean life of upright desires’. This will be the basis upon they will judged, Augustine surmises, when they leave this present life.Footnote 106 In sum, for Augustine, not only do we need to believe things that we cannot understand, but belief (in the sense of trust) is actually a prerequisite for understanding. This brings us back to his dictum that ‘unless you believe, you will not understand’.Footnote 107
Augustine’s reflections about the distinctiveness of Christian believing were also informed by the contrasting cases of classical philosophy and Judaism. The question of the relation between Christianity and the philosophical schools was a long-standing one. St Paul’s identification of philosophy as ‘the wisdom of the world’, along with his observation that the gospel was folly to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews gives some weight to the thesis that the relationship was conceived, on the Christian side at least, as primarily oppositional.Footnote 108 But his address to an Athenian audience at the Areopagus, recounted in Acts 17, takes a more conciliatory line – Christianity as the fulfilment of the inchoate aspirations of ancient philosophy. The more eirenic of the Church Fathers adopted a similar perspective, viewing both Judaism and Christianity as, in some sense, a ‘preparation’ for the Christian gospel.Footnote 109 In all of this, the relation to Christianity was not conceived of primarily in terms of competing sets of doctrines: rather, the philosophical schools were seen as offering alternative prescriptions for the attainment of happiness and the leading of a fulfilled life.Footnote 110 At the same time, doctrines, teachings, and cosmological assumptions were integral to these ways of life.Footnote 111
In the long prelude to his conversion to Christianity Augustine had explored two philosophical schools in depth – Academic Scepticism and Platonism – and his reflections on these traditions are directly relevant to the question of the role of belief in the Christian life. A core element of Scepticism was the withholding of assent from what could not be known with certainty. This practice of the suspension of belief was supposed to lead to the goal of tranquillity of mind. In our terms it thus had a psychological or moral, rather than an epistemological aim. Because the Sceptics held that little, if anything, could be known with certainty, the ultimate ambition of this school was, quite literally, ‘a life without belief’.Footnote 112 This was clearly inconsistent with Christianity and Augustine accordingly mounted a number of arguments against Scepticism, some of which René Descartes would later adopt in the seventeenth century.Footnote 113 But Augustine was adamant that there are things that we need to affirm if we are to attain genuine happiness, and we must commit to these things even if we do not fully know or understand them: ‘If assent is taken away, faith goes too, for without assent there can be no belief. And there are truths, even if they are not seen, which must be believed if we would attain to a happy life.’Footnote 114 In the late nineteenth century, William James would take a similar line in his celebrated lecture, ‘The Will to Believe’.Footnote 115 The success of the schools of sceptical philosophy in antiquity reflects the goal they shared with Christianity – the attainment of the happy life, or beatitude.
Apart from Augustine and the Church Fathers, the other key philosophical conversation partner for medieval thinkers was Aristotle, although his influence would not be fully felt in the Christian West until the translation projects of the twelfth century.Footnote 116 With the eventual appearance in the mid-twelfth century of a Latin version of the Posterior Analytics – in which Aristotle discusses the criteria for ‘scientific’ knowledge – the full complement of Aristotle’s logical works, collectively known as the Organon, became available to Latin scholars for the first time.Footnote 117 The condition for certain knowledge, or science, that the Greek philosopher set out in these logical writings prompted a new conversation about the scientific status of Christian theology and the nature of faith. This took place largely in a new venue that was purpose-built for such discussions – the medieval university.
What Aristotle meant by ‘science’ is quite different from our present understandings of the term. In fact, the English ‘science’ did not take on its now familiar meaning until the nineteenth century.Footnote 118 As already noted, for Aristotle genuine scientific knowledge was arrived at by means of logical demonstration from incontrovertible principles and it bore the highest degree of certainty.Footnote 119 This, at least, was the ideal, since it was recognised that in reality only a deductive mathematical system would fully meet those criteria.Footnote 120 Because most Christian doctrines were clearly not arrived at by a process of logical demonstration, this raised the question of their certainty and scientific status. The brilliant logician Peter Abelard (d. 1142), perhaps best known today on account of his ill-fated romantic liaison with Héloïse, was one of the first to bring discussions of the nature of faith into the orbit of Aristotelian classifications of knowledge, concluding that faith was to be located between science and opinion.Footnote 121 While some critics found fault with the assessment, worrying that it placed faith too close to opinion, most scholastic thinkers conceded the point that faith was less certain than ‘science’, as Aristotle had conceived it. Hugh of St Victor agreed with Abelard that ‘Faith is a form of certitude of mind concerning things not present, which stands as greater than opinion, but less than science.’Footnote 122 Thomas Aquinas followed suit. Citing with approval Augustine’s definition of faith as ‘thinking with assent’, Aquinas maintained that assent, being an act of the will, is required precisely because faith falls short of certainty and lies between science and opinion.Footnote 123 And like both science and opinion, faith concerns propositions.Footnote 124 As for the scientific status of theological truths, Aquinas squared that circle by proposing that theology (sacra doctrina was his expression) was indeed a science for God, but a ‘subordinate science’ for us, since its principles were not self-evident, but required God (for whom they were self-evident) to reveal them to us.Footnote 125
These developments signal the beginnings of a new dialectical approach to Christian belief. In the eleventh century, Anselm of Canterbury (1033/4–1109) had already sought to articulate the logic of ideas long cherished by the Christian community on the basis of faith and practice. In a practical realisation of his motto, ‘faith seeking understanding’, he produced works such as Why God Became Man which sought to explicate the logic of the Incarnation and the sacrificial nature of Christ’s death.Footnote 126 Before this, as Jaroslav Pelikan has argued, the idea of Christ’s atoning sacrifice was not embedded in doctrinal statements but rather ‘was left to the liturgy of the Mass, above all to the interpretation of the Eucharist as sacrifice, to the hymns and prayers, and to the sacramental life of the Church’.Footnote 127 Anselm offered instead a step-by-step argument for the Incarnation that, in his own words, was ‘logical and incontrovertible’ and, in principle, could address even the concerns of Jews, Muslims, and Pagans that taking human form was unfitting for the Deity.Footnote 128 With works such as these, we see the beginning of a relocation of the substance of faith from the practices of the Church, including its liturgical performances and contemplation of its sacred texts, to more formal theology.
Increasing use of the term ‘theology’ is a marker of this trend towards the systematisation of belief. Until the innovations of Peter Abelard, the key expressions for the substance of Christian beliefs were doctrina, which reflected the pastoral activities of preaching and teaching, and lectio divina, which referred to the practice of the spiritual exegesis of scripture involving prayer and meditation.Footnote 129 ‘Theology’ (theologia) had something of a dubious reputation, typically being reserved as a label for Pagan thinking about the gods.Footnote 130 Abelard’s application of Aristotelian logic to Christian teaching represented further steps towards a formal theology, and he was the first to deploy the term in a positive sense in the titles of some of his writings. These innovations were not greeted with universal approbation. Bernard of Clairvaux complained that Abelard was ‘an old Master turned theologian’, offering some insight into the negative connotations of the latter designation and its reputation for logic chopping.Footnote 131 Part of what was at issue here was the desirability of a shift in emphasis away from contemplative practices to dialectical disputation. This transition was accompanied by changes in institutional settings as the locus of doctrinal reflection moved from monasteries to cathedral schools and then to the first universities. Even when general agreement had been reached on the legitimacy of theology as a ‘scientific’ activity, there remained significant differences over whether it was a practical science oriented towards goodness, or a speculative science oriented towards truth.Footnote 132
Aquinas’s insistence on the scientific status of theology was not intended to reduce Christianity to its propositional contents. Faith was not just about propositions. Ultimately, the real object of faith was God himself, who is the ‘first truth’, and not some proposition.Footnote 133 Moreover, because an act of the will is involved – Aquinas’s ‘inner assent’ – belief is to some extent under voluntary control. Aquinas explains that this enables us to account for the fact that while two individuals might witness the same miraculous event, or hear the same sermon, only one might believe or have faith as a consequence.Footnote 134 At the same time, this assent is not simply a matter of exercising free will but also calls for the operation of ‘a supernatural principle’, whereby God moves man inwardly by grace.Footnote 135 This was a more technical restatement of the New Testament idea that faith was a divine gift. In yet another apparent complication, however, Aquinas also speaks of faith as a kind of interior ‘instinct’.Footnote 136 But, of course, our instincts originally come from God, too. While having faith is not something that simply arises from our natures, in the sense that it is a gift from God, it is entirely consistent with the natural operations of the mind. This enables Aquinas to conclude that ‘unbelief is contrary to nature’.Footnote 137
For our purposes, the most important thing to note is that the first significant deployment of the term ‘supernatural’ (supernaturalis) occurs in these discussions. What Aquinas meant by ‘supernatural’ and the long-term consequences of this coinage have been the subject of considerable discussion, and will be considered in more detail in Chapter 5.Footnote 138 What is clear, however, is that Aquinas is not setting out a two-tier understanding of reality. Neither does he have in mind the kind of exclusive disjunction between natural and supernatural that is characteristic of modern usages. In a sense, Aquinas is offering a naturalistic account of faith, in so far as he assumes that part of the justification for believing comes from the fact that belief arises out of the proper operations of our natural instincts: we have both a natural orientation towards God and a natural belief-forming propensity.Footnote 139 The difference between this position and what presently counts as a naturalised epistemology hangs crucially on our understanding of ‘natural’ and ‘supernatural’, and that is what has changed between the thirteenth century and now.
All of this gives us what appears to be a very complicated picture. These apparent complications were then more manageable because our medieval forebears were operating with a multi-layered understanding of non-competing causes that could make sense of these doctrinal claims. Admittedly, there was an incipient tension between what was to be attributed to divine grace and what to human free will. This would later become the central point of contention in Reformation debates about the nature of justification. The relevant point is that during this period we do not have a disjunction between two separate realms of activity – natural and supernatural. For the scholastics, it was ‘natural’ for God to work in his creatures, even though his activity went beyond what the creatures could effect through their own natural powers. The term ‘supernatural’, in these first usages, thus operates within a causal economy that is unfamiliar to modern minds. We might also observe that there was a grain of truth in David Hume’s ironic remark at the conclusion of ‘Of Miracles’ – ‘the Christian Religion not only was at first attended with miracles, but even at this day cannot be believed by any reasonable person without one’ – at least in terms of medieval understanding of the workings of faith. In faith, the movement of the will to lend its assent calls for something beyond natural human powers.Footnote 140 But as we will see, the same could also be said of more mundane mental operations.
These connections between the idea of the supernatural and genuine faith will be explored in more detail in Chapter 5. For now, though, we can sum up the key features of this history. First, we encounter new and distinctive usages of ‘faith’ (pistis) in the New Testament that stress the primacy of trust and focus on its social, relational, and affective dimensions. There follows the emergence of creedal formulae that promote consideration of how faith and belief now relate to doctrines set out in propositional form. We witness the influential attempt, in the writings of Augustine, to formalise the relations between trust, propositional belief, and authority. Finally, in the high Middle Ages, we have attempts to relate Christian faith to Aristotelian ideals of knowledge provided by the newly translated works of Aristotle. This last development is nothing less than the inception of theology. It was accompanied by the compensatory mechanism of implicit faith, which relieved the majority of Christians of the burden of having a full knowledge of theological doctrines. This sketch is hardly exhaustive. But it sets out some of the key aspects of pre-modern understandings of faith/belief, sufficient to provide a sense of how they begin to take on a new complexion in the modern period, beginning with the Protestant Reformation.
Looking ahead, the sixteenth-century Reformation brought a decisive end to the institutionally mediated trust relations that had been central to early Christian and medieval conceptions of faith. The shattering of the doctrinal monopoly of the medieval Church confounded appeals to ecclesiastical authority since there were now competing authorities offering divergent doctrinal prescriptions. It was no longer possible simply to reside trust in ‘the Church’ because there were multiple churches each with their own distinctive teachings. As a consequence, faith necessarily became a more personal matter, with individuals assuming for themselves the burden of understanding and assenting to sets of beliefs. The traditional resort to ‘implicit faith’ became increasingly suspect, and its critics articulated a new understanding of Christianity that required an explicit knowledge of, and agreement with, a set of doctrines.
The loss of a unitary ecclesiastical authority also motivated the quest for alternative, universal criteria for religious truth, now understood in propositional terms. ‘Reason’ or ‘the light of nature’ came to assume a much more prominent role in determining what truth claims individuals should assent to. So, too, did experience or ‘experiment’ (the Latin experimentum meaning ‘practical experience’). These developments ceded to the increasingly independent enterprises of philosophy and the natural sciences the power to adjudicate matters of belief. While there was some precedent for this in the scholastic positioning of ‘faith’ within a broader framework of modified Aristotelian understandings of scientific knowledge (scientia), this compromise became difficult to sustain when the whole edifice of Aristotelian philosophy came under assault in the early modern period.Footnote 141 The new experimental science offered a different epistemic context against which faith was to be calibrated, even though the new science had itself surreptitiously borrowed a conception of experimental testing from the religious sphere and was no less reliant upon networks of trust.Footnote 142 At the same time, the general precedent of thinking about faith in relation to Aristotelian thought meant that theological notions of ‘faith’ continued to be answerable to philosophical conceptions of knowledge and belief, although these were now inflected by the new experimental natural philosophy. ‘Reason’ and its variants ‘natural light’, ‘natural reason’, or ‘right reason’ would be proposed as either an adjunct to, or replacement for, ecclesiastical authority and the operation of divine grace in moving the faithful to assent to the truths of revelation. Reason had traditionally been understood as a divine gift that naturally disposed the soul to accept legitimate truths of revelation. It was ‘natural’ in the sense that God had ordained it to be integral to the nature of human beings. Fatefully, reason was destined to become ‘natural’ in a totally different sense, one that directly opposed it to ‘supernatural’ and hence placed it in opposition to putatively revealed truths.
Together, these trends are often construed as Christianity’s ceding of its epistemic authority to the independent arbiter of philosophy, this being just another exemplification of a general trend of secularisation. More accurately, the religious crisis of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focused attention on the problem of knowledge and its justification in an unprecedented way. This, in turn, enabled the development of a new understanding of philosophy as an independent enterprise that has as one its central concerns what we now call epistemology. It is not a complete exaggeration to suggest that modern epistemology was invented to address the problem of the justification of religious beliefs in early modern Europe.Footnote 143 This is because religious belief, along with the social and political implications of religious divisions, was the main intellectual preoccupation of the period. The religious predicament of the Latin West subsequently came to determine the agenda of modern philosophy with its distinctive focus on knowledge and its justification. But the precondition for this new kind of philosophy was a problematic that arose within a divided Christendom in which correct propositional belief emerged as a central concern.
