Tria Lumina
Jn. 20:29:
Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.
If you’re like me, then on first hearing those words you interpret them to mean that faith is something provisional, something that makes up for a lack, even something which tries to compensate for a deficiency but doesn’t quite do it. We often treat faith this way: faith is what we have when we’re missing out on the “seeing.”
In a way, of course, all this is true. Our intellect is darkened because of sin, and we cannot easily know the truths which we ought to know. However, faith is much more than a patch for faulty reason. First of all, we have to remember that faith is a gift, an infused virtue. Faith is not the same as “I don’t know, but I just believe it.” Faith is not our human attempt to understand the transcendent.1 Faith does not come from our efforts at all; it comes from God as a grace.
Faith means that we believe the truth because God has revealed it; faith is the virtue that allows us to believe on God’s authority. This means that faith (lumen fidei) is “more certain than all human knowledge”(lumen naturae) (CCC, 157). How often do we treat faith as the least certain element in our lives?
What does Jesus tell us, though? He says that it’s better for us to have faith than to have mere human knowledge. This is one reason that we are not created with the Beatific Vision: we learn to trust God. However, faith does point to that greater light (lumen gloriae) we will have in Heaven. In this way, faith is a foretaste of Heaven on earth.
1 Even the fact that we often speak of “different faiths” shows that we consider faith a product of human ambition. God does not contradict himself; the truth is one. If faith comes from him, then two people cannot have faith in contradictory doctrines. Perhaps it’s simply not polite to imply that people have imperfect faith these days.
