If you’ve been following Nancy Pelosi’s comments lately and the subsequent remarks by bishops and those in the blogosphere, you may have seen that the blog “Aliens in this World” has posted a translation of what St Augustine said.

A friend sent the Latin to me:

Utrum quod in utero formatum adhuc est, animatum posset intellegi.

80. (21, 22–25) Si autem litigabunt duo viri, et percusserint mulierem in utero habentem, et exierit infans eius nondum formatus; detrimentum patietur, quantum indixerit vir mulieris, et dabit cum postulatione.

Mihi videtur significationis alicuius causa dici haec, magis quam Scripturam circa huiusmodi facta occupatam. Nam si illud attenderet, ne praegnans mulier percussa in abortum compelleretur, non poneret duos litigantes viros, cum possit et ab uno hoc admitti, qui cum ipsa muliere litigaverit, vel etiam non litigaverit, sed alienae posteritati nocere volendo id fecerit. Quod vero non formatum puerperium noluit ad homicidium pertinere, profecto nec hominem deputavit quod tale in utero geritur.

Hic de anima quaestio solet agitari, utrum quod formatum non est, ne animatum quidem possit intellegi, et ideo non sit homicidium, quia nec examinatum dici potest, si adhuc animam non habebat.

Sequitur enim et dicit: Si autem formatum fuerit, dabit animam pro anima. Ubi quid aliud intellegitur, nisi, et ipse morietur? Nam hoc et in caeteris ex hac occasione iam praecipit: Oculum pro oculo, dentem pro dente, manum pro manu, pedem pro pede, combustionem pro combustione, vulnus pro vulnere, livorem pro livore: talionis videlicet aequitate. Quae Lex ideo constituit, ut demonstraret quae vindicta debeatur. Nisi enim per Legem sciretur quid vindictae deberetur, unde sciretur quid venia relaxaret, ut dici posset: Dimitte nobis debita nostra, sicut et nos dimittimus debitoribus nostris? Debitores igitur Lege monstrantur, ut quando ignoscitur appareat quid dimittatur. Neque enim debita dimitteremus, nisi quid nobis deberetur Lege indice disceremus. Si ergo illud informe puerperium iam quidem fuerit, sed adhuc quodammodo informiter animatum (quoniam magna de anima quaestio non est praecipitanda indiscussae temeritate sententiae), ideo Lex noluit ad homicidium pertinere, quia nondum dici potest anima viva in eo corpore quod sensu caret, si talis est in carne nondum formata, et ideo nondum sensibus praedita. Quod autem dixit: Et dabit cum postulatione quod maritus mulieris, informi excluso, dandum constituerit, non est in promptu intellegere: quippe, quod graecus habet, pluribus modis intellegitur, et tolerabilius cum postulatione dictum est, quam si aliud diceretur. Fortassis enim postulabit ut det, ut eo modo satis Deo faciat, etiamsi maritus mulierve non expetat.

This is my own rendering:

Whether what is not yet formed in the womb can be understood as being ensouled.

80. (21, 22-25) “If two men quarrel and strike a pregnant woman, and the child (infans) that is not yet formed is expelled … he will pay whatever penalty the woman’s husband declares, and he will render it upon request.”

It seems to me that this is said for the sake of signifying something rather than that Scripture is concerned about deeds of this kind. For if did address it, so that a pregnant woman who has been struck would not be forced to miscarry, it would not suppose that there were two men fighting since this could also be perpetrated by one, who fought with the woman herself, or even if he did not fight with her, still willingly acted to harm another’s offspring. But it did not wish to regard the death of an unformed child as homicide, nor did it think what is borne in the womb to be a man.

Here the question regarding the soul usually comes up, whether what is not formed cannot be understood as ensouled, and therefore it would not be homicide since it cannot be said to be determined, if it still did not have a soul.

For it goes on to say: “If it was been formed, he will give a life for a life.” What else then should be understood except that he also should die? For it has established this already in the other cases of this type: “An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a hand for a hand, a foot for a foot, a burn for a burn, a would for a wound, a bruise for a bruise”: namely the justice of retribution. So the law established it to show what retributions would be owed. For unless it is known by the Law what retributions are owed, how would it be known what a pardon looses, as can be said: “Forgive us our debts as we forgive those in debt to us”? Debtors, therefore, are shown by the Law, as when it is not known it would be apparent what would be forgiven. For we would not forgive debts unless we had learned what is owed to us as the Law indicates. If therefore the offspring was unformed, but still in a certain way formlessly ensouled (since the great question concerning the soul must not be bound by the fear of an untested opinion), therefore the Law has did not wish to regard it as homicide, because it cannot yet be said that there is a living soul in a body that lacks sense, if it is such, not yet formed in the flesh, and therefore not yet provided with the senses. But, however, it said: “And he will render upon request what the woman’s husband established would be given for the expelled unformed offspring.” It is not easy to understand: naturally “Asioma,” what the Greek holds, is understood in several ways, and “upon request” is said to be more tolerable, than if it were said to be something else. For perhaps he would offer to render something, in order to satisfy God in this way, even if the husband or the woman did not ask.

I didn’t have a lot of time, so there may be errors.

The atmosphere is so different here in Guadalajara (and Mexico City also in some ways) from the EEUU. I feel really at home because of the Catholic atmosphere. The piety of the people is so great. True, not everyone comes to Mass, etc. but the Church is more tangible here.

For example at the parish where I am, there are six Masses on Sunday and priests hear confessions during all of them, and many people come. The statues and furnishings in the Church are beautiful, and people are very reverent to the Blessed Sacrament and our Blessed Mother’s image, etc. The parish has a food pantry, clothing for the poor, medical supplies for people, and a bookstore that is open almost every day. There are catechetical classes, the Rosary, etc. very frequently. People are just in the church during the day, too. It’s great.

America magazine had a contest awhile ago to write an essay on the theme “the case for God.” I thought about entering it, but I had plenty of things that I was obliged to write, and I didn’t think my chances of winning were that good.

Now, if the theme is simply about proving God’s existence, that’s not exactly fresh. It’s been done. Also, once we come to know that God exists, what are we supposed to do? Walk away from the chalkboard, brush off our hands, and call it a day? The choice of legal vocabulary for the theme, however, seemed to me to imply something more than proving God’s existence; it seemed to presume God’s existence but without regarding his authority. It seemed to beg whether man needed God anymore. Not just atheism, but God-is-dead-and-we-killed-him nihilism.

My entry would have put the theme on trial, so to speak. Honestly, “the case for God”? Are we, his creatures, judges while the onus lies on God to prove himself to us? Read Job. How prideful can we be?

After debunking the theme, my essay would have gone on to discuss the time when God really was on trial and we really were the judges. Remember that? Even Pilate said, “I find no case against him.” God did die, and we killed him.

In the end, the essay would have been about our pride and God’s humility.

“[...] once the child is grown, he may look back and feel, ‘I would have preferred nonexistence.’”

In this letter to Since You Asked by Cary Tennis (Warning: Some foul language), a couple considers it wrong to have a child because any harm that comes to the child would then be their fault and the child may end up preferring non-existence. I doubt that they are actually trying to make (or looking for) a moral argument, but we do encounter something of the same kind of thought in a broader sense, namely, “Is it always better for a person to exist than not to exist?”

To the ancient (and Christian) mind, this question is absolutely absurd because existence is good. This is a self-evident principle, and it used to be recognized as such. Today, we’re a little more confused, but still no one can really deny that it is better to be than not to be. After all, how can not-being be good for the thing that is not? Existence is good, plain and simple.

In fact, existence is participation in God’s Being, which He is and which is his Goodness. God is, and God is Good. As they say, God’s essence and existence are identical. So, for God what he is and that he is are the same thing. Being itself cannot not be.

For creatures, however, essence and existence are not identical. I can to some degree talk about what a unicorn is, but there are, in fact, no unicorns. Still, a tree can exist at one time and then exist no more at another time. Since the existence of creatures is a priori dependent on God, he himself maintains their existence. Creatures have no existence on their own; it is always God who keeps them existing. This brings us back to the point: existence is always good. Being is good. Evil, in fact, is a lack of being. It’s the lack of a good that should be present, a corruption in the order of good beings.

Perhaps many of us are “still thinking that evil is a substance,” as Augustine says. Perhaps not quite. I think the problem is deeper. At least a dualist or a Manichee thinks that good and evil are real things. The question from Since You Asked betrays a graver fault: a doubt about the quality of goodness as a reality. In fact, the question is only following relativism to its quasi-logical conclusion. If I decide what is good and bad for me, then I can’t decide what is good and bad for others. If I can’t decide what is good and bad for others, then if another decides that it’s bad that he exists, it would be blameworthy for me to have contributed to his existence.

The question is perhaps a species of man’s basic question about morality: “What do I have to do?” This question depends on the answers of two others: “Where am I?” and “Where am I going?” In terms of morality, these questions are basically anthropological: What am I? What is my end? How do I achieve my end? These questions presume the goodness of existence. It makes no sense for the end (purpose, goal) of human existence to be in any way non-existence. This would not be an end at all because it would, in fact, be the annihilation of the I.

If being ain’t good, ain’t nothing good.

TIME Magazine has an online morality quiz, which presents a number of scenarios to which the quiz-taker responds with either “I could” or “I could not.” Even the phrasing lends itself to Emotivism.

The questions all engage the same principle (one may not do evil to bring about good) except for one, which deals with double effect. The trouble is that the questions betray a clear Consequentialist bent in the way that they’re phrased.

For example, the first question:

It’s war time, and you’re hiding in a basement with a group of other people. Enemy soldiers are approaching outside and will be drawn to any sound. If you’re found, you’ll all be killed immediately. A baby hiding with you starts to cry loudly and cannot be stopped. Smothering it to death is the only way to silence it, saving the lives of everyone in the room. Assume that the parents of the baby are unknown and not present and there will be no penalty for killing the child. Could you be the one who smothered it if no one else would?

Note, of course, that the question is not about the moral status of the action but only about whether the quiz-taker could be the one to do it, which points toward Emotivism. This question, like almost all the others boils down to “do something evil in order to achieve a good effect?”

The question which engages the principle of double effect:

An out of control trolley is heading down a track toward five unsuspecting people and will surely kill them all. You could throw a switch diverting it to a siding, but an equally unsuspecting man is standing there and the train will kill him instead. Could you throw the switch, killing one to save five?

Of course, the question at the end of the scenario, “Could you throw the switch, killing one to save five?” is not accurate since it does not distinguish the death of the one as only indirectly voluntary. You can see the Consequentialism at work: “1 dead vs. 5 dead.” No consideration about what the object of the action is, about what is actually being chosen. In this case, the correct moral evaluation is: throwing the switch to save five people is good. The death of the one person is an unintended secondary effect of the action, not a means to saving the five people. It is foreseen but not intended, and since there is no other way to save the five which would not result in the death of the one and since life is proportional to life, double effect applies to this scenario.

Taking again the example of the doctrine of the reservation of Holy Orders to men alone, I’d like to examine some of the “lines of defense,” if you will, in our understanding. These lines of defense have contradictory counterparts in the world.

1) A Unitive Notion of Human Nature.

In the proper understanding of human nature, we know that a human being is a material body informed by a spiritual soul. The soul is thus the form of the body, and the person is not seen as separated from his body in any way. When we understand this and reflect on the natural–even obvious and physical–differences between the sexes, we recognize clearly the beauty of their relationship (even on a merely natural level) as ordained by God’s wisdom.

This notion is under attack on several fronts. An atheistic evolutionary view of the human person has led us to believe that our sexual differences are purely accidental in two senses. First, they are a product of chance factors. Second, they are only on the surface and do not pertain to who we are as persons. This can dispose us to resent our bodies and to resent sexual differentiation. It also leads us easily to believe that “men can do anything women can do and vice-versa.”

2) A Realist Notion of the Sacraments.

This follows closely on the heels of the unitive notion of human nature. If we don’t split in our minds the material and the spiritual, then we have no problems with the sacraments. If the sacraments are merely signs, if they do not really bring about anything, then they are only functional. If this is the case, then there is no need for the priesthood. In fact, the priesthood itself is only a functional position. Why, then, should sexual differences pertain to qualification? On the contrary, though, the priesthood is a matter of essence, of being, and not only of doing. Therefore, if there are real differences between the sexes (not, of course, a complete difference of nature or anything of the sort) then it is easy to understand how one sex is capable of being (and as a consequence of doing) something that the other is not, even in the supernatural order.

The sacraments do not undercut human nature! Rather, they sanctify it. Thus, the signs of the sacraments–which are actually conveyers of the divine life–are not arbitrary. Christ chose water for baptism because of the natural significance of water. Similarly with all the sacraments. Because he created human nature in the way that he did: male and female, Christ could not have instituted, e.g., marriage to be between anything but a man and a woman. He could not institute a sacrament which would contradict human nature like that! Similarly, because of the nature of the sacramental priesthood, Christ could not bestow the sacramental priesthood on women. He cannot contradict the order he established in human nature.

There are attacks on at least two fronts. The first disregards matter as having any role to play in spiritual things. The seconds disregards the spiritual altogether and leads us to behave merely bestially. Actually, both tendencies lead us to behave like beasts: A human being who splits for himself spirit and matter does not become like an angel.

3) Faith.

Faith is the final line of defense, it seems. Even if we do not understand the reservation of Orders, at a minimum we accept it because of faith. Now, I realize that the doctrine of the reservation of Orders is at the present time understood to be de fide tenenda, that is, it is understood to be a logical necessity of something revealed by God but not as something itself revealed by God.¹ However, because of our faith in the institution of the sacraments by Christ and our faith in the guidance of the Church by the Holy Spirit, we have to hold firmly as irreformable the doctrine of the reservation of Orders. Even if we do not understand something, surely we would believe it because we have God’s word for it?

This line of defense is greatly under attack by a Kantian split wherein God is seen as purely transcendent and incapable of acting in a concrete way in history. This has very subtly crept into our way of thinking. After all, God really is transcendent. That part is true. However, we can never deny the Incarnation and Providence. When we begin to believe that we cannot really know anything about God–which would mean we are incapable of knowing anything that is really worth knowing–we treat Faith as mere belief.² We pretend that we are all just trying to grasp the divine through different paths, on a search for the truth. We ignore the fact that Christ came to testify to the truth (John 18:37) and that the Holy Spirit guides the Church into all truth (John 16:13). God told us truth which we must believe; he has not left us to grope in the dark but has sent light into the world (John 1:9).

We can see how a bad concept of human nature leads to a bad concept of grace and the sacraments. Even then, Christ reveals human nature clearly to us, but we do not believe him because of the hardness of our hearts.

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1 “A similar process can be observed in the more recent teaching regarding the doctrine that priestly ordination is reserved only to men. The Supreme Pontiff, while not wishing to proceed to a dogmatic definition, intended to reaffirm that this doctrine is to be held definitively, since, founded on the written Word of God, constantly preserved and applied in the Tradition of the Church, it has been set forth infallibly by the ordinary and universal Magisterium. As the prior example illustrates, this does not foreclose the possibility that, in the future, the consciousness of the Church might progress to the point where this teaching could be defined as a doctrine to be believed as divinely revealed. (Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith.” Doctrinal Commentary on Concluding Formula of the Professio Fidei. 11)

2 “Thus, theological faith (the acceptance of the truth revealed by the One and Triune God) is often identified with belief in other religions, which is religious experience still in search of the absolute truth and still lacking assent to God who reveals himself. This is one of the reasons why the differences between Christianity and the other religions tend to be reduced at times to the point of disappearance.” (Dominus Iesus. 7)

I find it easy to see why people have difficulties understanding certain things properly today. I am thinking, for example, of the doctrine of the reservation of Orders (i.e., that the Church has no authority to confer Holy Orders on women). This topic has come to mind because of the recent attempted ordinations in St. Louis.

This issue in particular is very hard to understand because of several cultural factors, especially: Nominalist philosophy, Pragmatism, Neo-Manichaean notion of the body’s relation to the person, etc. I am not surprised or upset in the least when people have questions about why women cannot be priests. It is certainly difficult to explain sometimes (I once had to explain it to a devout little girl in about twenty seconds on her way into the church with her mother).¹

The problem in understanding this issue seems to me to be related to why we are finding it increasingly difficult to conceive of the family as a natural (much less a divine) institution. If sexual differentiation doesn’t matter for the priesthood, then it doesn’t matter for marriage either, and we are seeing all kinds of related issues on that front. The deeper problem is one of human nature. People no longer want to see sex as an essential part of a person. Rather, we like to separate the person from his body in our minds such that sexual differences are treated as purely incidental, accidental, and as not having to do with a person’s identity.

Of course, the consequences of this split between a person and his body are frightful. Sexuality is no longer thought of as involving a real relationship but is seen as merely physical, etc. Obviously, marriage and priesthood suffer. The whole sacramental system begins not to make sense, and even the Incarnation begins to mean nothing to us.²

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1 She asked her question with an adorable expression: “Can girls be priests?” She was very young, so I felt kind of bad telling her “No.” I didn’t feel bad because of the truth but because I was afraid she would confuse priesthood with devotion to the Church and thus feel dissuaded from piety. In fact, I tried to go the route of explaining that God made people different and so we have to love him and serve him in different ways. If I had more time, my plan was to ask her about families (although, this is risky since you never have any idea what a child thinks constitutes a normal family), then to ask her what we call priests (”Father”), trying to explain that the Church is like a mother and a priest is like the father of a parish. I didn’t get the chance to get that far because they were on the move, though.

2 Incidentally, when did believing God simply because he is God stop being considered a good thing? There was, for example, an article on the attempted ordinations which asked, “What would Jesus do?” The question seems strange, since the Church has always held the opposite answer from the article by asking the question: “What did Jesus do?”

Perhaps you’ve seen this disturbing story of one brother of a set of twins who survived two attempts to kill him in the womb.

When I read this, I found it to be sickening. Not only is it considered reluctantly acceptable to kill an innocent child, not only is it excused or ignored: In this story, it is actually the occasion for boasting in the child’s miraculous survival.

The whole tone of the story is: “How adorable! My baby survived my two direct attempts to kill him.”

Obviously, the mother was devastated when doctors told her that one of her children would likely die in utero and that his death would probably lead to the death of his brother. But, why would anyone accept the advice to induce the death of the child?

Sadly, I can begin to imagine something of the rationale behind the decision. Of course, it’s based on purely consequentialist ethics.

The perverse line of thinking goes like this:

1) If I do nothing, I end up with two dead children.
2) If I kill one of the children, I end up with one dead child.
3) Therefore, I should kill one of the children.

Horrifyingly, we are all conditioned to think this way in our current culture. This is one reason, for example, that people (e.g., The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Understanding Catholicism) either can’t or refuse to understand the difference between a proper application of double effect and doing evil to achieve good.

Everyone wants to look at what is considered to be the result, the outcome of the action. From that point, it’s just a matter of calculating what will achieve the “best” result.

No one wants to ask the question: “What are we actually doing?” that is, “What is the object of the action?” Even the mother’s quote: “Doctors carried out an operation to let Gabriel die …” betrays a confusion about what is actually being done.

The whole tone of this article is reprehensible. It makes the situation sound wholesome when, in fact, it is monstrous.

But after the operation which was meant to end his life, tiny Gabriel had other ideas.

[ ... ]

“The doctors couldn’t believe it when they could still hear his heartbeat the next morning.”

I often wonder at the appellation “pro-choice.” What does it mean? Does it mean that a person thinks abortion is a morally acceptable option in some or all circumstances? Does it mean that a person thinks the question of whether an action is moral does not pertain at all to abortion? Does it mean that a person is simply in favor of the human faculty of free choice?

Really, there weren’t a lot of options for names for the pro-choice position. For example, the Pro-life movement takes its name from the human good (life) which it seeks to protect. The title “pro-life” indicates the good to be protected. Does the title “pro-choice” indicate a good to be protected?

One could argue that the good to be protected is “choice.” However, in the context of the “pro-choice” position, there is a fundamental misunderstanding about what freedom is. In fact, freedom is seen as separate from any point of reference and treated as something indifferent, independent, and ultimately arbitrary.

The pro-life position is that life is a fundamental human good. Nothing we do can change that; it’s part of human nature. Freedom in the proper sense is also a human good, but the important point is this: Freedom is not able to determine what is good for man. Freedom comes from human nature; it does not precede it.

Let’s look at the history of man’s understanding of freedom (broadly and briefly).

Classically, freedom is understood as being for the good. In other words, man is free from things that hinder his attainment of the good. He can cooperate with attaining his good (or “end,” “goal,” or “purpose”) in a way that is more excellent than non-rational creatures. An acorn is inclined to its end of being a tree and moves toward the attainment of that end by necessity but without free cooperation. Man, on the other hand, may freely choose to cooperate in the attainment of his end. He is not “free” to decide what his end is! But, he is free to choose the means of pursuing that end, and, thus, he does have the possibility of rejecting his end. This is an abuse of freedom, though. In fact, a man who is farther from his end is less free since his freedom is for the purpose of attaining his end.

In this classical notion, freedom does not come first. Man’s nature comes first and freedom is a faculty which man necessarily has because he has reason and will. Freedom is also recognized as something that can be perfected: a man can be more or less free.¹

The Nominalist conception of freedom, however, is that freedom is indifferent. Freedom precedes reason and will, and, therefore, is neither for nor against the good. Of course, in the Nominalist understanding, “good” is only what one calls good and is not a stable concept. In this understanding, man’s freedom is static: it cannot be disposed or attracted to anything. In fact, the Nominalists would see an attraction to the good as making a man less free.

This is where “pro-choice” is left. In accepting a Nominalist understanding of freedom (freedom precedes reason) the position is left unable to assert anything about what is good for man and can only repeatedly affirm what it considers to be man’s primary ability to choose. While “pro-life” clearly indicates a good that comes from human nature, “pro-choice” cannot say anything about what is good or what is evil: it can only say that man must have no “constraints” on his free choice whatsoever. Even an attraction to the good would be considered a constraint. Only completely indifferent and independent “choosing” is “free.”

If the “pro-choice” position had any kind of reasonable understanding of human nature, it would not focus only on the act of “choosing” in itself but would be trying to answer the question, “What should be chosen?”

Sadly, the answer is often, “Killing an innocent person.”

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1 If you’ve ever wondered why there’s no sin in Heaven, this helps explain it. In Heaven, we’ll be perfectly free such that it will be impossible for us to sin. Trying to understand this really shows how much we’ve inherited the Nominalist conception of freedom.

We often find ourselves in this age in the habit of considering “religion,” “faith,” and “belief” as merely subjective realities. Due to Relativism–with roots in Kant’s notion of the mind’s activity in creating reality/morality–we can think of the object of faith as created by the person who has faith. There are other tendencies as well, such as regarding the subjective experience of a person as more important than reality.¹

For instance, even our use of the term “faith” is often incorrect because of the subjective qualities we give to it. Faith is, in fact, the virtue by which we believe God on his own authority: it is a truly human act, our adherence to God in obedience. However, do we find ourselves talking about “different faiths”? What do we mean, there? Do we mean that God reveals contradictory truths to us?

No. In fact, what has happened in our minds is that we have become more concerned with the experience of believing something than with the truth of what is believed. Even then, we ought to be more concerned with God’s activity. Faith is a gift; it is an infused virtue, not something we can acquire but which God can freely give to us. We should not treat faith–or the life of faith, then–as something which we ourselves construct.

We are not active before God. We are passive, and we must recognize that in humility. We do not find ourselves in a world where everyone is trying to get to know God by different paths. We find ourself in a world where God became man and revealed himself to us fully. God himself established the Church into which we must be incorporated. This Church is here in our day and age, and she can be found at your local Catholic Church.

Why do we all pretend to be agnostics, searching for an unknown God when God must always and has already taken the initiative?

From Dominus Iesus, #7:

The proper response to God’s revelation is “the obedience of faith (Rom 16:26; cf. Rom 1:5; 2 Cor 10:5-6) by which man freely entrusts his entire self to God, offering ‘the full submission of intellect and will to God who reveals’ and freely assenting to the revelation given by him”.15 Faith is a gift of grace: “in order to have faith, the grace of God must come first and give assistance; there must also be the interior helps of the Holy Spirit, who moves the heart and converts it to God, who opens the eyes of the mind and gives ‘to everyone joy and ease in assenting to and believing in the truth’”.

The obedience of faith implies acceptance of the truth of Christ’s revelation, guaranteed by God, who is Truth itself: “Faith is first of all a personal adherence of man to God. At the same time, and inseparably, it is a free assent to the whole truth that God has revealed”. Faith, therefore, as “a gift of God” and as “a supernatural virtue infused by him”, involves a dual adherence: to God who reveals and to the truth which he reveals, out of the trust which one has in him who speaks. Thus, “we must believe in no one but God: the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit”.

For this reason, the distinction between theological faith and belief in the other religions, must be firmly held. If faith is the acceptance in grace of revealed truth, which “makes it possible to penetrate the mystery in a way that allows us to understand it coherently”, then belief, in the other religions, is that sum of experience and thought that constitutes the human treasury of wisdom and religious aspiration, which man in his search for truth has conceived and acted upon in his relationship to God and the Absolute.

This distinction is not always borne in mind in current theological reflection. Thus, theological faith (the acceptance of the truth revealed by the One and Triune God) is often identified with belief in other religions, which is religious experience still in search of the absolute truth and still lacking assent to God who reveals himself. This is one of the reasons why the differences between Christianity and the other religions tend to be reduced at times to the point of disappearance.

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1 One of the books I encountered over the summer even claimed that “true Christians” would not be disturbed by the discovery of Jesus’ tomb with his remains present there since the “experience of resurrection” is what is important rather than the historical event of the Resurrection. (I’d like to introduce that author to my good friend St. Paul. “If Christ is not risen, your faith is in vain.” Doesn’t sound like a “true Christian,” I guess.)