Faith, the foundation of Cristian Life

Excerpts of Abbot’s Marmion masterwork: Christ, Life of the Soul

All holiness, as I have said - and my greatest desire is that this truth should be engraved in the depths of your souls - all holiness for us consists of participating in the holiness of Christ Jesus, the Son of God.

But how are we to particpate in it? - By receiving Jesus Christ Who is the one source of holiness. When speaking of the Incarnation, St. John tells us that all those who receive Christ are “ made the sons of God”: Quotquot autem receperunt eum dedit eis potestatem filios Dei fieri. And how do we receive Christ, the Incarnate Word? First and before all, by faith: His qui credunt in nomine ejus.

St. John then says that it is faith in Jesus Christ that makes us children of God. That is likewise the thought of St. Paul: “ For you are all the children of God by faith in Christ Jesus”: Omnes filii Dei estis per fidem, quae est in Christo Jesu. Because by faith in the divinity of Jesus Christ, we identify ourselves with Him; we accept Him as the Son of God and the Incarnate Word. Faith yields us to Christ; and Christ, introducing us into the supernatural domain, yields us to His Father. And the more perfect, profound, ardent and constant our faith is in Christ’s Divinity, the more right we have, as children of God, to the communication of Divine life. In receiving Christ by faith, we become by grace what He is by nature-children of God; and then our state calls forth an influx of divine life from the Heavenly Father. Our state of “children of God” is like a continual prayer: O Holy Father, give us this day our daily bread, that is to say, the divine life of which Thy Son has the plenitude!

I wish to speak to you of this faith. Faith is the very first attitude we ought to have in our relations with God: Prima conjunctio ad Deum est per fidem.l2 St. Augustine says the same: “It is primarily faith that subjects the soul to God”: Fides est prima quae subjungat animam Deo. St. Paul says: “Without faith it is impossible to please God. For he that cometh to God, must believe”; Sine fide impossibile est placere Deo. With still greater reason, it is impossible without faith to attain to His friendship and remain His child: impossibile est ad filiorum ejus consortium pervenire.

You see at once that this subject is not only important, but vital. We shall understand nothing of the supernatural life, of the divine life in our souls, if we do not grasp that it is altogether founded upon this faith, In fide FUNDATI, upon this intimate and profound conviction of the divinity of Jesus Christ. For as the Holy Council of Trent says: “Faith is the root and foundation of all justification”, and in sequence, of all holiness: Fides est humanae salutis initium, fundamenttum et radix omnis justificationis.

We will now see what is this faith, what is its object, and how it is manifested.

‑ I ‑

Let us consider what happened when Our Lord lived in Judea. When we read the account of His life in the Gospels, we see it is first of all faith that He requires from those who come to Him.

We read that one day two blind men were following Him, crying out: “Have mercy on us, O Son of David” Jesus lets them approach Him, and says to them: “Do you believe that I can do this unto you?” And they reply: “Yea, Lord”. Then He touches their eyes and gives them back their sight, saying: “According to your faith, be it done unto you”. Again, after the Transfiguration, He finds, at the foot of Mount Thabor, a father who asks the cure of his son possessed by a devil. And what does Jesus say to him? “If thou canst believe, all things are possible to him that believeth” Immediately the father of the boy cries out: “I do believe, Lord, help my unbelief”. And Jesus delivers the child.19 When the chief of the synagogue asks Him to save his daughter, Our Lord still gives the same reply: “Believe only, and she shall be safe”.

These words often fall from His lips. Very often too we hear Him say: “Go, thy faith hath saved thee: thy faith hath made thee whole”. He says this to the paralytic man. He says it to the woman who had suffered from an infirmity that had lasted twelve years and was cured by touching the hem of His garment with faith.ll

He makes faith in Him the indispensable condition of His miracles. He requires this faith even from those He loves the most. When Martha, the sister of His friend Lazarus, whom He comes to raise from the dead, says to Him that if He had been there her brother would not have died, Our Lord tells her that Lazarus shall rise again. But He wills before working this miracle that Martha should make an act of faith in His Person: “I am the Resurrection and the Life: believest thou this?”

Where He does not meet with faith, He deliberately limits the effects of His power. The Gospel expressly says that at Nazareth “He wrought not many miracles, because of their unbelief”: Et non fecit ibi virtutes multas propter incredulitatem eorum. If I may so express it, Christ’s action appears to be paralysed by lack of faith.

But wherever He finds it, He can refuse it nothing. He takes pleasure in praising it openly. One day when Jesus was at Capharnaum, a pagan officer who commanded a company of a hundred men came up to Him and asked the cure of one of his servants who was sick. Jesus says to him: “I will come and heal him.” But the centurion at once replies: “Lord, I am not worthy that Thou shouldst enter under my roof: but only say the word and my servant shall be healed. For I also am a man ... having under me soldiers, and I say to this one, Go and he goeth, and to another, Come, and he cometh, and to my servant, Do this, and he doeth it.” In the same way, it is sufficient for Thee to speak one word, to command the sickness, and it will depart.

What faith in this pagan! Christ Jesus, even before pronouncing the liberating word, manifests the joy this faith causes Him: “Amen, I say to you, I have not found so great faith in Israel. And I say to you that many Gentiles shall come and shall sit down at the feast of eternal life in the kingdom of heaven, while the children of Israel, who were the first to be called to this banquet, shall be cast out on account of their unbelief.” And turning to the centurion, He says to him: “Go, and as thou hast believed, so be it done to thee.”

Faith is so pleasing to Jesus that it even obtains from Him what appeared not to be His first intention to grant. We have a striking example of this in the cure besought by the woman of Canaan. Our Lord had reached the coasts of Tyre and Sidon, a pagan region. A woman of these parts, being come where He was, cries in a loud voice: “Have mercy on me, O Lord, thou, Son of David: my daughter is grievously troubled with a devil.” But Jesus answers her not a word Then His disciples come and say to Him: “Send her away, for she crieth after us.” And Christ answers that His mission is only to preach to the Jews. He had reserved to His disciples the work of evangelizing the pagans. But the woman, prostrating herself before Him, says: “Lord, help me ”, and Jesus answers her as He had answered the apostles, but in employing a proverbial saying, then in use for dinguishing the Jews from the pagans: “It is not good to take the bread of the children and to cast it to the dogs.” And the woman, animated by her faith, exclaims: “Yea, Lord: for the whelps also eat of the crumbs that fall from the table of their masters.” Jesus is so touched by this faith that He cannot refrain from extolling it, and immediately granting her what she asks: “O woman, great is thy faith: be it done to thee as thou wilt.” And from that same hour, her daughter was cured.

Doubtless, nearly all these examples have to do with bodily cures; but it is also on account of faith that Our Lord forgives sins and grants eternal life. What does He say to Magdalen, when she comes and throws herself at His feet and washes them with her tears? “Thy are forgiven thee.” The remission of sins is assuredly a grace of a purely spiritual order. And for what reason does Christ restore the life of grace to Magdalen? On account of her faith. Christ Jesus says exactly the same words to her as to those He cured of their bodily ills: “Thy faith hath made thee safe: go in peace.” See again at Calvary. What a magnificent recompense He gives to the good thief on account of his faith! This man was probably a brigand; but upon the cross when all the enemies of Jesus hurled sarcasms and mockeries at Him saying: “If He be the Son of God, as He says, let Him now come down from the cross and we will believe Him”-this thief confesses the divinity of the Christ abandoned by His disciples and dying on a gibbet. He speaks to Jesus of “His Kingdom” at the moment when Jesus is about to die: he asks for a place in this Kingdom. What faith in the power of the dying Christ! And how moved Jesus is by this faith! “Amen, I say to thee, this day thou shalt be with Me in Paradise”. He forgives him all his sins because of this faith, and assures to him a place in the eternal Kingdom.

So then faith is the first virtue Our Lord claims from those who approach Him and it remains the same for us all.

When, before ascending into Heaven, He sends His Apostles to continue His mission throughout the world, it is faith He requires; and in this faith He sums up, as it were, all the Christian life: “Go, teach all nations ... he that believeth and is baptized, shall be saved: but he that believeth not shall be condemned”.

Is faith alone then sufficient? No, the sacraments and the observance of the commandments are necessary too, but a man who does not believe in the Divinity of Jesus Christ is a stranger to His commandments and sacraments. Besides, it is because we believe in the Divinity of Jesus that we observe His precepts and approach the sacraments. Faith then is the basis of all our supernatural life.

God wills that during the stage of our mortal life we should serve Him by faith. His glory requires it to be so. It is the homage He expects from us and the probation we have to pass through before arriving at the eternal goal. One day we shall see God unveiled; His glory will then consist in communicating Himself fully ill all the spendour and brightness of His eternal beatitude. But as long as we are upon earth, it enters into the economy of the Divine Plan that God should be for us a hidden God. Here below, God wills to be known, adored and served by faith - and the greater, the more ardent and practical this faith is, the more we are pleasing to God.

‑ II ‑

But you may say, what is this faith? Speaking in a general way, faith is the adherence of our intelligence to the word of another. When an upright, loyal man tells us something, we admit it, we have faith in his word; to give one’s word is to give one’s self.

Supernatural faith is the adherence of our intelligence, not to the word of a man, but to the word of God. God can neither deceive nor be deceived. Faith is the homage rendered to God as the supreme truth and authority. In order that this homage may be worthy of God, we must submit ourselves to the authority of His word, whatever be the difficulties our mind encounters. This Divine word affirms the existence of mysteries beyond our reason; faith can be required from us in things where our senses, our experience seem to tell us the very contrary of what God tells us; but God requires our conviction in the authority of His revelation to be so absolute that if all creation affirmed the contrary we should say to God in spite of everything: “My God, I believe because Thou sayest it.”

To believe, says St. Thomas, is to give, under the empire of the will, moved by grace, the assent and adherence of our intelligence to Divine truth: Ipsum autem credere est actus intellectus assentientis veritati divinae ex imperio voluntatis sub motu gratiae. It is the mind that believes, but the heart is not absent from believing; and so that we may make this act of faith, God places in us at baptism, a power, a force, a “habitude”: namely the virtue of faith, whereby our intelligence is inclined to admit the testimony of God out of love for His truth, That is the very essence of faith, but this adhesion and this love naturally include an infinite number of degrees. When love that leads us to believe yields us up entirely to the full acceptation in both our mind and conduct, of the testimony of God, then our faith is perfect: it operates and manifests itself by charity.

Now what is the testimony of God that we have to accept by faith? It is summed up in this: That Christ Jesus is God's own Son, sent for our salvation and given for our sanctification.

You know that the voice of the Father has only been heard three times by the world, and each time it was to tell us that Christ is His Son, worthy of all love and all glory: Hic est filius meus dilectus ... ipsum audite: “Hear ye Him.” That was, according to Our Lord’s own words, God’s testimony to the world when He gave it His Son: Qui misit me Pater, ipse testimonium perhibuit de me. And to confirm this testimony, God gave His Son the power of working miracles; He raised Him from the dead. Our Lord Himself tells us that life everlasting depends for us upon the full acceptation of this testimony: Haec est autem voluntas Patris mei qui misit me, ut omnis qui videt Filium et credit in eum, habeat vitam aeternam. Christ Jesus often lays stress on this point: “Amen, I say unto you, that he who believeth Him that sent Me, hath life everlasting ... (he) is passed from death to life”.

We cannot too often meditate on these words of St. John: “God so loved the world as to give His only begotten Son”. And why did He give Him? “That whosoever,” he says, “believeth in Him may not perish, but may have life everlasting”. And he adds in explanation: “For God sent not His Son into the world to judge the world, but that the world may be saved by Him. He that believeth in Him is not judged. But he that doth not believe, is already judged: because he believeth not in the name of the only begotten Son of God”. “To judge” here means to condemn. Now St. John says that he who does not believe in Christ is already condemned. Note this term: “is already condemned”. What does it mean? That it is vain for one who has not faith in Jesus Christ to try to save himself: his cause is even now judged. The Eternal Father makes faith in His Son, Whom He has sent, the first necessary attitude of our soul and the source of our salvation. Qui credit in Filium habet vitam aeternam: qui autem incredulus est Filio, non videbit vitam, sed ira Dei manet super eum. God attaches so much value to our belief in His Son that His wrath abides - again remark the present tense: it “abideth” now - on him who does not believe in his Son. What does all this signify? That faith in the Divinity of Jesus is, according to the designs of the Father, the first thing needful in order to share in the Divine Life; faith in the Divinity of Jesus Christ bears with it all other revealed truths.

All revelation, it may be said, is contained in this supreme testimony God gives us that Jesus Christ is His Son, and all faith is likewise contained in the acceptation of this testimony. If we believe in Christ’s Divinity, we believe at the same time in the whole revelation of the Old Testament which has its fulfilment in Christ; we believe the whole revelation of the New Testament, for all that the apostles and the Church teach us is only the development of the revelation of Christ.

Whoever then accepts the Divinity of Christ embraces the whole of revelation. Jesus is the Incarnate Word; the Word says all that God is, all that He knows; this Word is incarnate and reveals God to men: Unigenitus qui est in sinu Patris ipse enarravit. And when by faith we receive Christ, we receive all revelation.

Therefore, the intimate conviction that Our Lord is truly God constitutes the first foundation of our supernatural life. If we understand this truth and put it into practice, our inner life will be full of light and fruitfulness.

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