SPE SALVI

We must return once more to the New Testament. In the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews we find a kind of definition of faith which closely links this virtue with hope. Ever since the Reformation there has been a dispute among exegetes over the central word of this phrase, but today a way towards a common interpretation seems to be opening up once more. For the time being I shall leave this central word untranslated. The sentence therefore reads as follows: “Faith is the hypostasis of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen.” For the Fathers and for the theologians of the Middle Ages, it was clear that the Greek word hypostasis was to be rendered in Latin with the term substantia. The Latin translation of the text produced at the time of the early Church therefore reads: Est autem fides sperandarum substantia rerum, argumentum non apparentium - faith is the “substance” of things hoped for; the proof of things not seen. Saint Thomas Aquinas, using the terminology of the philosophical tradition to which he belonged, explains it as follows: faith is a habitus, that is, a stable disposition of the spirit, through which eternal life takes root in us and reason is led to consent to what it does not see. The concept of “substance” is therefore modified in the sense that through faith, in a tentative way, or as we might say “in embryo” - and thus according to the “substance” - there are already present in us the things that are hoped for: the whole, true life. And precisely because the thing itself is already present, this presence of what is to come also creates certainty: this “thing” which must come is not yet visible in the external world (it does not “appear”), but because of the fact that, as an initial and dynamic reality, we carry it within us, a certain perception of it has even now come into existence. To Luther, who was not particularly fond of the Letter to the Hebrews, the concept of “substance”, in the context of his view of faith, meant nothing. For this reason he understood the term hypostasis/substance not in the objective sense (of a reality present within us), but in the subjective sense, as an expression of an interior attitude, and so, naturally, he also had to understand the term argumentum as a disposition of the subject. In the twentieth century this interpretation became prevalent - at least in Germany - in Catholic exegesis too, so that the ecumenical translation into German of the New Testament, approved by the Bishops, reads as follows: Glaube aber ist: Feststehen in dem, was man erhofft, Überzeugtsein von dem, was man nicht sieht (faith is: standing firm in what one hopes, being convinced of what one does not see). This in itself is not incorrect, but it is not the meaning of the text, because the Greek term used (elenchos) does not have the subjective sense of “conviction” but the objective sense of “proof.” Rightly, therefore, recent Protestant exegesis has arrived at a different interpretation: “Yet there can be no question but that this classical Protestant understanding is untenable.” Faith is not merely a personal reaching out towards things to come that are still totally absent: it gives us something. It gives us even now something of the reality we are waiting for, and this present reality constitutes for us a “proof” of the things that are still unseen. Faith draws the future into the present, so that it is no longer simply a “not yet.” The fact that this future exists changes the present; the present is touched by the future reality, and thus the things of the future spill over into those of the present and those of the present into those of the future. (7)

Pensées August 8, 2007

If evil is a privation of good, it is necessary that arguments in favor of evil suffer an analogous privation of reason. This is why arguments in support of immortality are bereft of intelligibility, as is evident to those who are looking for it.

The Ends of Science

Selections from Eric Cohen's article in First Things, 167 (November 2006): 26-30.

....The trouble is that most scientists — at least most modern biologists, whose work dominates the public imagination about science — do not seem to reflect much or deeply about the limits of their method, or about the moral significance of the ends they seek and the means they use....In the public realm, most biologists seem, all too often, like scientific geniuses and moral simpletons, applying rational rigor to their investigations of nature but relying on feeling as their only moral compass. And for all its appreciation of nature’s complexity, the scientific mind seems no rival for the Bible or Aristotle or Machiavelli in understanding human complexity. Next to the philosopher, the neuroscientist still looks, all too often, like a fool....

For it turns out that the methods of science cannot vindicate the ends of science, and the knowledge acquired by scientific methods cannot always justify the particular experiments used to acquire it. Yet scientists desperately want such vindication in the eyes of their fellow citizens: Good science (meaning interesting, promising, exciting) needs to be seen as good (meaning virtuous, praiseworthy, compassionate) by everyone. And so scientists have invented a new method to defend the unfettered freedom of the old one: They claim the mantle of science while making ethical claims (“embryo research is good”) that rest on no special scientific basis at all, and they portray their opponents as antiscience for raising ethical questions that are entirely consistent with the scientific facts (“embryological development begins at conception”)….

From the beginning, science was driven by both democratic pity and aristocratic guile, by the promise to help humanity and the desire to be free from the constraints of the common man, with his many myths and superstitions and taboos. The modern scientist comes to heal the wretched bodies of those whose meager minds are always a threat to experimental knowledge. Salomon’s House, where the elite of Bacon’s scientific utopia would decide which inventions to publish and which to hide, existed both to protect men from science and science from men. It offers a new salvation and seeks to elude the oppressive trappings of the old one. It brings a new compassion and a new contempt. This was true in the beginning, and it is true today….

[C]all it the original sin of the scientific Enlightenment— [it] still haunts modern science: Perpetual progress is not the same thing as perfection. Infinite progress also means infinite discontent, as man is left in a state of eternal becoming with no end. “Indefinite perfectibility,” Condorcet’s dream, is an irreconcilable contradiction.

Perfection, after all, is an end, a limit, something definite. Christ embodies the perfection of love. The philosopher grasps the perfection of knowledge. Yet the scientist destroys the possibility of perfection by seeing a world in permanent flux. Perhaps the only perfection available to the modern scientist is stoic acceptance of contingency on the way to oblivion—and indeed, there is no necessary contradiction between stoic philosophy and modern natural science. Yet stoic acceptance of nature is precisely what modern science, technological from the beginning, is incapable of embracing in spirit. Modern science portrays a world where acceptance of our fate within nature is all we can do, and yet it remakes knowledge in such a way that technological striving is seen as the only thing worth doing. Modern biology, like Sisyphus, is haunted by temporary successes and ultimate failure. It fends off death but cannot eradicate it; it explains death’s role in natural selection but not the death of individual men still thirsty for salvation….

[Max] Weber’s essay on “science as a vocation” is perhaps the best starting point for understanding the limits of scientific aspiration in our time. Weber praised scientists for living in the world of facts and criticized those who sought salvation by pretending that the old gods still exist. But he also reminded scientists that they have nothing privileged to say about the realm of value, the realm that matters most to human beings seeking knowledge of how to live. Like everyone else, the scientist must decide which ends to pursue, which gods to serve, which demon will “hold the very fibers of his life.” And these are exactly the questions that the scientific method cannot answer. Divine salvation may be an illusion but so is believing that science can tell us how to live in the world it dissects and describes, and how to live well in a world where scientific power is so readily, so seductively, so dangerously, at our disposal….

In every area of public life where science and morality intersect, there are questions about the use of science that science itself can never answer. On stem cells, scientists can tell us the potential benefits of destroying human embryos but not whether the progress of medicine justifies the willful destruction of nascent human life. On drilling in Alaska, scientists can estimate the potential oil reserves and the potential harm to the ecosystem but not whether we have a moral responsibility to expand the domestic oil supply or to preserve an unsullied wilderness even with economic harm to ourselves. On human exploration of space, scientists can estimate the economic and human costs of putting a man on Mars and the potential benefits of such a mission to the advance of human knowledge, but they cannot say whether human greatness in space is more worthy of public funds than ongoing research into curing AIDS. Science is power without wisdom about the uses of power.

Josef Pieper on Hope & the Reformed Doctrine of Faith

In response to a recent insightful comment to my post on adapting elements of Reformed catechisms for use in a catholic catechism for children, I am giving the following quote from Josef Pieper’s little book on Christian hope. The comment concerned the Reformation doctrine of faith, which is defined by the Heidelberg Catechism as “not only a certain knowledge, whereby I hold for truth all that God has revealed to us in his word, but also an assured confidence…that not only to others, but to me also, remission of sin, everlasting righteousness and salvation, are freely given by God.”

I take this to be a confusion of the theological virtues of faith and hope since no less an authority than St. Augustine wrote, “faith must be distinguished from hope, not merely as a matter of verbal propriety, but because they are essentially different.” In other (Aristotelian) words, faith and hope have different formal objects: “Can anything be hoped for which is not an object of faith? It is true that a thing which is not an object of hope may be believed.” Specifically, hope has for its object “only what is good, only what is future, and only what affects the man who entertains the hope.” Faith, on the other hand, has for its object everything which comes under Christian belief:

‘Accordingly, faith may have for its object evil as well as good; for both good and evil are believed, and the faith that believes them is not evil, but good. Faith, moreover, is concerned with the past, the present, and the future, all three. We believe, for example, that Christ died,--an event in the past; we believe that He is sitting at the right hand of God,--a state of things which is present; we believe that He will come to judge the quick and the dead,--an event of the future. Again, faith applies both to one's own circumstances and those of others.’

Faith and hope concern the same objects, only the objects of faith are common objects, whereas the objects of hope are personal.

Pieper, in his masterful thomistic treatment of the theological virtue of hope, exposes two vices opposed to it: despair and presumption. He identifies the latter with the doctrine of the Reformation described above.

‘The second form of presumption, in which, admittedly, its basic character as a kind of premature certainty is obscured, has its roots in the heresy propagated by the Reformation, viz. the sole efficacy of God’s redemptive and engracing action. By teaching the absolute certainty of salvation solely by virtue of the merits of Christ, this heresy destroyed the true pilgrim character of Christian existence by making as certain for the individual Christian as the revealed fact of redemption the fact that he had already “actually” achieved the goal of salvation. (Moreover, the theology of the Reformation denied not only the negativity of the “not yet”, but also its positive side: in no sense does it regard man’s proper existence as a positive progression towards fulfillment.) It has often been observed how close – both logically and phsychologically – this second form of presumption is to despair on the one hand and, on the other, to the moral uninhibitedness of that “inordinate trust in God’s mercy” that theology reckons, along with despair, among the “sins against the Holy Spirit.” It is but proper to emphasize at this point what is surely obvious: that we are speaking here only of the objective erroneousness of the presumption that is part of Reformation theology. It would be ridiculous and absurd to raise or attempt to answer the question of subjective guilt.’