Belief and Faith: A Philosophical Tract

by Josef Pieper, Unknown .

Text: English, German (translation)

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Catholic

120 pages, Hardcover

First published December 16, 1975

About the author

Josef Pieper was a German Catholic philosopher and an important figure in the resurgence of interest in the thought of Thomas Aquinas in early-to-mid 20th-century philosophy. Among his most notable works are The Four Cardinal Virtues: Prudence, Justice, Fortitude, Temperance; Leisure, the Basis of Culture; and Guide to Thomas Aquinas (published in England as Introduction to Thomas Aquinas).

Reviews

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Belief and Faith, Josef Pieper

I've long pondered the philosophical-theological issue of belief and faith. Are they identical? If not, what is the difference? And how can a person come to terms with the phenomenological reality of holding a religious belief with an ever present mental unrest? Does a person's mental unrest necessarily negate their belief?

So I was excited to discover Josef Pieper's classic essay “Belief and Faith.”

Josef Pieper (1904-1997) was a German Catholic philosopher, and a Neo-Thomist. It is not surprising, then, that he borrows much in his examination of belief and faith from the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, most centrally the Aquinas model that faith is believing in truth propositions on the basis of authoritative divine testimony. Let me try to unpack that following Pieper's examination in his book.

While Belief and Faith is a short book, a long essay, really, the real essence, I believe, is in Part V. Here Pieper, with Aquinas, states that belief is a free act of the will:

“However convinced we are of the credibility of a witness, it is not enough to compel us to believe; however incontrovertible the content of a truth may appear to the knower, it is not so to the believer” (43).

Getting back to Aquinas, central to the theory of belief, particularly in the religious realm, is the idea of authoritative testimony. A simple example: If I see a Roman Missal on my desk, I wouldn't say, “I believe there is a Roman Missal on my desk.” I know there is a Roman Missal on my desk. I have direct visual and certain knowledge of this fact. However, if I'm talking to a friend on the phone and he says, “There is a Roman Missal on my desk,” I can choose to believe or not believe him. In this case, I do not know, there is a Missal on his desk, but I can choose to believe, or non-believe, depending on how I judge the credibility of my friend. He is the knower, I am the believer. If I choose to believe, it is on the strength of another person's testimony.

Good so far. Now Pieper interjects the concept of “certainty.” The least interesting of the definitions is “certainty as a 'firm assent, that is, assent excluding all doubt and regarded as ultimate'.” (44) This definition excludes the possibility that “belief and uncertainty can coexist side by side” in the believer.

More important to my purpose is the second definition Pieper gives us: “certainty is a 'firm assent founded on the evidentness of the matter.' Here the “evidentness” of the matter means nothing more nor less than its obviousness, which for the person involved springs from a clear cognition of this same matter. According to this definition, no believer, of course, can possess certainty – for belief means: to accept as true and real a matter which is not in itself obvious.” (44)

Within belief, according to Pieper, coexists both certainty (definition 1) and uncertainty (definition 2). Thomas Aquinas “coined a terse formulation for the duality of the matter: in belief, he says, there is aliquid perfectionis et aliquid imperfectionis, an element of perfection and an element of imperfection. The perfection inheres in the firmess of the assent, the imperfection in the fact that no vision operates – with the result that the believer is troubled by a lingering 'mental unrest'.” (45)

In other words, in an act of belief, no matter how certain I am in assent, I may have a lingering doubt, a “mental unrest,” caused by “searching investigtion, probing, consideration, confering with oneself … being on the track of, a mental reaching out for something not yet finally found.” (46)

“The movement [of the mind] is not yet stilled; rather there remains in it a searching and a pondering of that which it believes – although it nevertheless assents to what is believed with the utmost firmness... What we have is not really a compound, rather an antithesis, persistent thinking in spite of unshaken assent.” (47)

Aquinas goes on to say that “it is part of the nature of belief to leave doubts possible. This possiblity is based on the fact that the believer's intellect is not really satisfied; rather, the mind, insofaras it belives, is operating not on its own but on alien soil.” (47)

To be continued....

[cadfael · Rating 4 out of 5]

Good defense of empiric belief by proxy of succession/lineage.