Faith Before Proof

But we have heard from the Scriptures that the Lord has given people the power to choose for themselves and to refuse for themselves, and so we rest on faith as a test that cannot fail. We show a willing spirit, since we have chosen life and believe God through his own voice. Whoever has believed the Word knows that the matter is true, for the Word is truth; and whoever has refused to believe the one who speaks has refused to believe God. [a]

The apostle says: “By faith we understand that the ages were put in order by the word of God, so that what is seen was not made out of things that appear. By faith Abel offered God a fuller sacrifice than Cain, and by it he was attested to be righteous, God bearing witness to his gifts; and by it, though he is dead, he still speaks” — and so on, down to “rather than enjoy the pleasures of sin for a season.” So faith counted these men righteous before the law was given, and made them heirs of the promise of God. Why should I go back over the record we have in hand and bring forward more witnesses to faith? “Time would fail me if I told of Gideon, Barak, Samson, Jephthah, David and Samuel and the prophets,” and what follows.

Now there are four things in which truth resides: sensation, understanding, knowledge, and opinion. In the order of nature, grasping a thing with the mind comes first; but for us, and as things come to us, sensation is first, and the substance of knowledge is formed out of sensation and understanding together, while plain evidence belongs to understanding and to sensation alike. Sensation, then, is the ladder up to knowledge. But faith walks over the path of the things the senses give, leaves opinion behind it, hurries on to what cannot deceive, and comes to rest in the truth.

Suppose someone says that knowledge rests on proof worked out by reasoning. Then let him hear this: first principles cannot be proved. They are known neither by a craft nor by shrewdness — shrewdness deals with things that can change, and a craft is a matter of practice only, not of theory. This is why the first cause of the universe is held to be something faith alone can grasp. For all knowledge can be taught, and whatever can be taught rests on something known beforehand; and the first cause of the universe was not known beforehand to the Greeks. Not to Thales, who concluded that water was the first cause, and not to the natural philosophers who came after him. Anaxagoras was the first to give Mind the mastery over material things — and even he did not keep up the dignity that belongs to the cause which does the work, since he described certain absurd whirlpools, and left Mind lying idle and even foolish. That is why the Word says, “Call no one on earth master.”

For knowledge is a settled condition of the mind produced by proof, while faith is a grace that leads a person from what cannot be proved to what is universal and simple — to what is not bound up with matter, and is not matter, and is not under matter. Those who do not believe, as you would expect, drag everything down out of heaven and out of the unseen region to the earth, “literally clutching rocks and oak trees with their hands,” as Plato says. Holding on to things of that kind, they insist that only what can be touched and handled exists, and they define body and being as the same thing. Those who argue against them very reverently defend certain forms that the mind alone can see, forms without bodies, coming down from somewhere above out of the unseen world, and they hold out strongly for a true being.

“Look, I am making new things,” says the Word, “which no eye has seen and no ear has heard, and which has not come up into the human heart.” With a new eye, a new ear, a new heart, whatever can be seen and heard is to be taken in — by the faith and the understanding of the Lord’s disciples, who speak and hear and act spiritually. For there is genuine coin and there is counterfeit, and the counterfeit fools ordinary people, though it does not fool the money-changers, who have learned how to sort out and tell apart a false stamp from a true one. So the money-changer tells the ordinary man only that the coin is bad. Why it is bad, only the banker’s apprentice learns, the man trained in that line of work.

Now Aristotle says that the judgment which follows on knowledge is, in fact, faith. So faith is something higher than knowledge, and is the test of it. Guesswork, which is only a feeble supposition, is a counterfeit of faith, the way a flatterer is a counterfeit friend and a wolf a counterfeit dog. A workman sees that by learning certain things he becomes a craftsman, and a helmsman that by being taught the art he will be able to steer; in the same way a man does not think it enough merely to want to be fine and good — he must learn it by practicing obedience. And to obey the Word, whom we call the Instructor, is to believe him and to go against him in nothing. For how could we take up a position of hostility toward God? So knowledge takes its stamp from faith, and faith, by a kind of divine give-and-take, comes to take its stamp from knowledge.

Epicurus too — who put pleasure far above truth — supposes faith to be a preconception of the mind, and he defines a preconception as a grasp of something evident and a clear grasp of the thing itself. Without a preconception, he says, no one can inquire, or doubt, or judge, or even argue. How could anyone learn about the thing he is investigating without some notion beforehand of what he is after? And the man who has learned has by then turned his preconception into a firm grasp. If someone who learns does not learn without a preconceived idea that takes in what is being said, then that man has ears to hear the truth. Happy is the man who speaks to ears that hear — and happy, certainly, is the man who is a child of obedience. To hear is to understand.

If, then, faith is nothing but a preconception of the mind about what is being talked of — and obedience goes by the same name, and so do understanding and being persuaded — then no one will learn anything without faith, since no one learns anything without a preconception. So there is fuller proof still that what the prophet said is entirely true: “Unless you believe, neither will you understand.” Putting the same oracle in his own words, Heraclitus of Ephesus says, “If a man does not hope, he will not find the unhoped-for, since there is no tracking it and no road to it.”

Plato the philosopher says in the Laws: “The man who is to be blessed and happy must from the very start have a share in the truth, so that he may live as a truthful man for as long as possible; for he is a man to be trusted. But the man not to be trusted is one who takes pleasure in a lie he tells on purpose, and the man who takes pleasure in a lie he does not intend is a fool. Neither of them is to be envied. For a man with no friendliness in him is untrustworthy and ignorant.” And in the Euthydemus, does he not hint that this is “the kingly wisdom”? In the Statesman he says it outright: “So the knowledge that belongs to the true king is kingly, and the man who has it, whether he is a ruler or a private person, will by all means be rightly called royal because of that very art.”

Now those who have believed in Christ both are and are called chrēstoi, “good men,” just as those who are cared for by the true king are kingly. For as the wise are wise by wisdom, and the law-abiding are law-abiding by the law, so those who belong to Christ the King are kings, and those who are Christ’s are Christians. Then Plato goes on and adds plainly: “What is right will turn out to be lawful, since law is by nature right reason, and is not to be found in writings or anywhere else.” And the stranger from Elea declares that the kingly, statesmanlike man is “a living law.”

Such is the man who fulfills the law by “doing the will of the Father” — written up on a high pillar and set as a model of divine virtue for everyone who has the power to see. The Greeks know the staffs of the ephors at Sparta, with the law written on the wood. But my law, as I said above, is royal and alive, and it is right reason: “Law, the king of all, of mortals and immortals,” as Pindar of Boeotia sings. For Speusippus, in the first book of his work against Cleophon, seems to write in Plato’s own manner: “If kingship is a good thing, and the wise man alone is king and ruler, then the law, which is right reason, is good.” And so it is. The Stoics teach what agrees with this, assigning kingship, priesthood, prophecy, lawgiving, riches, true beauty, noble birth and freedom to the wise man alone — though even they admit that such a man is exceedingly hard to find.

So all the teachings named above appear to have been handed on to the Greeks from Moses the great. That everything belongs to the wise man is taught in these words: “Because God has shown me mercy, I have all things.” And that the wise man is loved by God, God hints when he says, “The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” For the first of these is expressly called God’s friend; the second is shown to have been given a new name meaning “he who sees God”; while Isaac was chosen by God for himself, in a figure, as a sacrifice set apart, to be for us a foreshadowing of the plan of salvation. [r]

Among the Greeks, Minos, the king of a nine-year reign and the close friend of Zeus, is celebrated in song — because they had heard how God once talked with Moses “as a man speaks with his friend.” Moses, then, was a sage, a king, a lawgiver. But our Savior goes beyond all human nature. He is so lovely that he alone is loved by us, whose hearts are set on the true beauty, for “he was the true light.” He is shown to be a king: innocent children hailed him as one, and so did Jews who neither believed nor knew, and the prophets proclaimed him. He is so rich that he despised the whole earth, and the gold above it and beneath it, and all its glory, when the enemy offered them to him. And what need is there to say that he is the only High Priest, the one who alone possesses the knowledge of the worship of God? He is Melchizedek, “King of peace,” of all beings the fittest to stand at the head of the human race. He is a lawgiver too, since he gave the law through the mouth of the prophets, laying down and teaching with perfect clearness what is to be done and what is not. And who is of nobler birth than the one whose only Father is God?

Come, then, let us bring in Plato agreeing with these very teachings. In the Phaedrus he calls the wise man rich, when he says: “Dear Pan, and all you other gods who are here, grant me to become beautiful within; and let whatever outward things I have be friendly to what is inside me. May I count the wise man rich.” And the Athenian stranger, finding fault with people who think that those with many possessions are rich, speaks like this: “For the very rich to be good as well is impossible — the men, I mean, whom most people count rich. The ones they call rich are those who, among a few men, own the possessions worth the most money; and any bad man may own those.”

“The whole world of goods belongs to the believer,” Solomon says, “but not a penny to the unbeliever.” Much more, then, is the Scripture to be believed which says that “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man” to lead a philosopher’s life. But on the other hand it calls “the poor” blessed — as Plato understood when he said, “Poverty is not to be reckoned a shrinking of a man’s resources but a swelling of his greed; for it is never slender means that make poverty, but greed. And the good man, being free of greed, will also be rich.” And in the Alcibiades he calls vice a slavish thing and virtue the mark of free men. “Take the heavy yoke off yourselves and take up the easy one,” says the Scripture, just as the poets call vice a slave’s yoke. And the saying “You sold yourselves to your sins” agrees with what was said above: “Everyone, then, who commits sin is a slave; and the slave does not stay in the house forever. But if the Son sets you free, then you will be free, and the truth will set you free.”

And again, that the wise man is beautiful, the Athenian stranger asserts in the same way as if someone were to say that certain men are just even though they happen to be ugly to look at. And when one is speaking of an outstanding uprightness of character like that, no one who called such men beautiful on that account would be thought to be talking extravagantly. And prophecy foretold that “his appearance was poorer than that of all the sons of men.” Plato, moreover, has called the wise man a king, in the Statesman; the remark is quoted above.

These points being shown, let us come back to what we were saying about faith. Plato proves with the fullest possible demonstration that faith is needed everywhere, and he praises peace at the same time: “No one will ever be trustworthy and sound in a time of faction without complete virtue. There are plenty of hired soldiers, full of fight and willing to die in war; but most of them, with very few exceptions, are reckless men and criminals, insolent and senseless.” If these observations are right, then “every lawgiver who is of even the slightest use will keep his eye, in making his laws, on the greatest virtue.” That virtue is faithfulness, which we need at all times — in peace, in war, and through all the rest of life; for it appears to take in the other virtues as well. “But the best thing is neither war nor faction, for it is a thing to be prayed against that we should ever need them. What is best is peace with one another, and good feeling.” From these remarks it is plain that, according to Plato, the greatest prayer is to have peace. And faith is the greatest mother of the virtues.

So it is rightly said in Solomon, “Wisdom is in the mouth of the faithful.” Xenocrates too, in his book On Good Judgment, says that wisdom is the knowledge of first causes and of the being that the mind alone perceives. He takes good judgment to be of two kinds, practical and theoretical, and the theoretical kind is human wisdom. So wisdom is good judgment, but not all good judgment is wisdom. And it has been shown that knowledge of the first cause of the universe belongs to faith and is not a matter of proof.

For it would be strange if the followers of Pythagoras of Samos, refusing to prove the matters under question, treated the bare “He said it himself” as ground enough for belief, and if that phrase by itself was enough to settle what they had heard — while people devoted to the contemplation of the truth presume to distrust the Teacher who can be trusted, God the only Savior, and demand from him tests of what he says. But he says, “Whoever has ears to hear, let him hear.” And who is that? Let Epicharmus say it:

Reckoning certain people unbelievers, Heraclitus says they “do not know how to listen or how to speak” — helped in this, no doubt, by Solomon, who says, “If you love to listen, you will take it in; and if you lean your ear toward it, you will be wise.”