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| Saint Thomas Aquinas by Carlo Crivelli, downloaded from Wikipedia |
The audio which is about 47 minutes long is the center of the lesson. It is entitled Is "Faith Irrational? Aquinas on the Rationality of Belief" by Fr. Dominic Legge, OP. Be sure to follow along with the handout provided (the link for it is below the audio). It's a powerful lecture which provides a framework for understanding belief and what it means.
The first part deals with misconceptions about belief. The one that I'm most familiar with is the misconception that faith and reason are contraries (usually skepticism which says faith is unreasonable, and its contrary fideism which rejects science in favor of faith). The opposite error, which I've not encountered, is the idea that the whole of the faith can be explained by reason. The selected reading by Aquinas explains that there are certain truths of the faith which can be reached through reason (such as the existence of God), while there are certain truths which are beyond human reason (such as the doctrine on the Trinity, three persons in one essence).
Fr. Legge then moves on to explain natural belief. He sets this up by outlining "[f]our classical modes of response to a proposition proposed to you": 1) you can doubt that it is true 2) you can suppose it is true (an opinion) 3) you already know (meaning that you have direct access to the facts whether the proposition is true or false) 4) you believe the person (give assent to the proposition as true because you have reasons to believe he is telling the truth). We do the fourth response all the time (examples given: your birth date, people who tell you Istanbul exists, etc.). These beliefs are reasonable.
And so in the next section, Fr. Legge posits that Christian belief is reasonable. There things which we can know (the preambles of the faith, such that God exists), we acknowledge the limits of our knowing (errors and the impossibility of completely understanding an infinite God with a finite mind), and we've signs which confirm our belief (miracles or the amazing fact that the Church manages to survive despite Christian foolishness over the centuries).
In the final section he talks about supernatural faith. We can understand this infused supernatural faith by analogy with natural belief. These two things are similar, but not the same thing. The supernatural faith is a gift from God; it is not something we can attain through human efforts. I think inspiration is a good word to describe the effect of supernatural faith: a light bulb goes on inside the mind, and you see the the truths of the faith in a way which is life changing.
If you cannot gain faith through human efforts, there is always the option to pray for it. This prayer by St. Anselm of Canterbury is a good one:
Teach me to seek you,
and reveal yourself to me as I seek:
For unless you instruct me
I cannot seek you,
and unless you reveal yourself
I cannot find you.
Let me seek you in desiring you:
let me desire you in seeking you.
Let me find you in loving you:
let me love you in finding you.
As I was going through this lesson, it seemed to have a lot of information to take in. I've ploughed through this in order to post something, but it's something I think I'll need to re-visit to be sure that this is clear in my mind, such that I could present it myself in a clear way.
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