Faith

By Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann

I believe in God….But what is belief, faith? If we look impartially at this affirmation “I believe in God,” and reflect on what these words might mean, it becomes mystifying….And this is true even though we thought we understood it.

First of all, it is obvious that belief and knowledge are not the same, or at least knowledge as commonly used in its everyday sense. If I say: “I believe in God” – i.e., I know God exists – this type of knowledge is in no way similar to the knowledge that in my room there is a table and outside my window rain is falling. This latter – what we call objective knowledge – is independent of me, it enters my consciousness apart from free choice of any kind. It is, in fact, “objective”; and I – the subject, the person within me - am only able to accept it and make it my own. But when I say “I believe in God,” then I am making an affirmation which requires a choice, a decision. In other words, it presupposes some kind of personal participation by my entire being. As soon as this personal participation, this choice disappears, then my faith dies, becomes sort of non-existent. Genuine faith of this sort is far from our norm, and therefore faith must in no way be reduced to simply an objective, independent part of my convictions and worldview.

Many people turn to God in times of fear, unhappiness, or suffering, but when these moments pass they return to a life completely unrelated to faith, living as if God did not exist. Even more people believe not so much in God as in religion, strange as this may sound. They simply like being in a church, they find it cozy and comfortable. Many of these people have been accustomed since their childhood to the “holiness” of church and rituals. Here everything is beautiful, deep, mysterious – quite different from what they find in the world’s day-to-day insanity and evil. And without ever thinking about it, or pursuing it on a deeper level, these people hold on to this “religiosity.” But religiosity has almost no connection to “real” life. Religiosity provides good, clean “experiences,” making it easier to live; but religion in this scheme is isolated and divorced from real life.

Finally there is a third category of people: those who view religion as something useful and necessary for human society, for the nation, for the family, for children, for the terminally ill and sick, for upholding honesty and morality. In other words, these people reduce religion to its usefulness. When I was a young priest, I remember how mothers would approach me for help in uprooting some bad habit from their children by means of confession. “Tell my child that God sees everything; then he will be afraid and won’t do such and such….”

Religion as help and comfort; as a kind of recreational pleasure in holy and exalted things; religion as usefulness. In all of these there is a measure of truth, but when reduced only to these, religion is no longer faith as the Apostle Paul described it at the dawn of Christianity: “Now faith is the realization of what is hoped for and the certitude of things unseen.” (Hebrews 11:1)

Let’s reflect on these strange words: “realization of what is hoped for, the certitude of things unseen.” They are strange because of an apparent contradiction: if I am hoping for something, how can it be already realized?  If it is realized, then logically there is nothing to hope for. And how can something that is not seen – or, in other words, something impossible to observe and to examine – be seen and known? How can it become within me certitude, something genuine and true, a reality, something that I possess? Yet it is precisely in this way, employing these apparent paradoxes, that the Apostle Paul defines faith. Notice that this definition does not include the word God; that word appears later, in the following verses of his letter. Here he speaks of faith as a special, characteristically human condition – a kind of gift human beings possess.

“So you say it’s a gift, but what gift?” To this question we may respond as follows: it is a yearning, the longing, the hopeful anticipation for something desired, the presentiment of that something other which alone will make life worth living.

And here is something strange: the atheist philosopher Jean Paul Sarte defines man in almost exactly the same way, saying: “man is a useless passion.” He calls this passion, this yearning, “useless” because in his opinion it is illusory: there is nothing to yearn for, there is nothing for which to wait or to hope, there is nothing foe which to thirst. But what is significant is that even he finds in man this hopeful anticipation and thirst. So faith itself, according to the Apostle Paul, is the knowledge of, and the encounter with that which a person – without perhaps even realizing it – anticipates in hope; it is the yearning and thirst that are revealed as his very life. If this thirst did not exist, if this hopeful anticipation did not exist, then there also would be no encounter; and if that for which a person thirsts does not exist, then this anticipation within him also would not exist. It is in this encounter that the unseen becomes certitude, something that I experience as my own, as reality.

All of this means that faith, in the Christian experience, is the fruit and manifestation not simply of knowledge; it is not a conclusion based on reasoning and analysis. Faith is not an intellectual calculation, but neither is it simply a religious emotion which is here for a moment and then evaporates and is gone. Faith is the encounter, the real encounter between what is deepest in a person – that thirst which is so distinctly a part of him, and that toward which his thirst is directed – even if he doesn’t know what it is. St. Augustine was the one who spoke best about this “realization of that which is hoped for” and the “certitude of things not seen,” when he said: “You made us for Yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.” But this also brings us to the third and most enigmatic word of our confession of faith: “I believe in God” – which brings us to the word “God.”

Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann (departed 1983) would broadcast two talks every week into the Soviet Union on Radio Liberty. This talk was from one of his broadcasts in the 1970s and can be found in a collection of his writings called I Believe (SVS 1991).