The Goal and Process of Faith in Aquinas and John of the Cross

What is the purpose and meaning of our lives, the universe, and everything? “42” may be a cute joke, but most people subscribe to the fundamental answer that our culture has unconsciously drilled into us and is implied by the meaninglessness of an answer like “42”: you determine your meaning and purpose. This answer is not absolute and equally applied to every area of one’s life but can exist in degrees and on a scale. For example, a Christian believer may say, “God’s providence guides my life…but only to this extent, only in ‘broad strokes,’ only so far.” This view betrays how the Christian is still the one in charge, rather than God. Although we are responsible for our lives, we are not in charge. The process of realizing all the ways in which we drive God out of our lives, whether explicitly or implicitly, is the work of faith. If our bodies and souls are temples of the Holy Spirit, then they belong to God, and all that we have is a gift from God. Isn’t that what the Bible says? “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?” (1 Corinthians 6:19). And “what do you possess that you have not received? But if you have received it, why are you boasting as if you did not receive it?” (1 Corinthians 4:7). We are stewards of this earth and ourselves, not the sole possessors.

In fact, if God created us and we are His, then He shows us our true selves, our true purpose, and true happiness. The Second Vatican Council stated this fact clearly: “The truth is that only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light. For Adam, the first man, was a figure of Him Who was to come, namely Christ the Lord. Christ, the final Adam, by the revelation of the mystery of the Father and His love, fully reveals man to man himself and makes his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, no. 22).

The purpose of our lives is revealed by faith. And this purpose is that “all men are called to one and the same goal, namely God Himself” (Ibid., no. 24). Or as Saint Peter put it, “Although you have not seen [Christ] you love him [and] you rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, as you attain the goal of [your] faith, the salvation of your souls (1 Peter 1:9). In other words, there is only one reason we are on earth: to become a saint, which is nothing other than being drawn to the infinite goodness of God and the happiness of heaven.

Faith, however, is adhering to what is revealed to us. Actually, St. Thomas Aquinas taught that faith has nothing to do with believing that God exists per se. Faith actually means accepting what God has revealed to us about Himself and ourselves, which simply presupposes that we accept God exists (Summa Theologiæ, 2a2æ.2.2). Faith means believing not in a God but in a God Who is love, Who is a Trinity, Who became incarnate, Who suffered, died, and rose again for our salvation. Faith comes through hearing as St. Paul taught: “How can they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? … Thus faith comes from what is heard, and what is heard comes through the word of Christ” (Romans 10:14, 17). Faith is in the word of Christ, in what Christ says of Himself to us, not what we say of Christ.

Therefore, I do not determine the content of Faith or its objective meaning although I must make the effort to interpret it correctly and appropriate it truly into my own life, to make it my own. It is the Church’s job to make sure that I do not swerve from faith’s true meaning.

Through faith we adhere to God’s divine nature as revealed in Scripture and the creeds. Yet faith is more than intellectual adherence; it is the virtue of wanting and attaining God, “the ultimate good, as he has revealed himself to us in the person of Christ” (Brian Davies, The Thought of Thomas Aquinas (2009), 274). Although God is perfectly understandable to Himself, we are finite and can only glimpse at God in bits and pieces. Therefore we can say many things about God but never exhaust Who God is. The creed tries to summarize what we can say about God in a simple, memorizable format.

St. John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic of the 16th century, describes faith as the “proximate and proportionate means of union with God.” What he means is that it is only by faith that we can truly be united to God. But because God is infinitely beyond our nature, we can never truly grasp what faith reveals to us; we simply assent to it by God’s grace. Like a blind man trying to understand colors, we try to understand God through faith, but whereas the blind man may be able to talk about the color red, the Christian believer actually does unite with God although only in psychological darkness. We are united to God, but we can’t “prove” it or feel it or see it; we simply accept it by a sheer act of faith in the dark with the help of God’s grace.

But can’t creation help us to unite ourselves with God? St. John of the Cross would say that created things themselves cannot unite us with God. Faith alone can make use of created things to unite us to God. He gives a deductive argument to prove his point: 1) No created thing possesses any essential likeness to God; 2) but such a likeness is required for anything to serve as a true means of union with God; 3) therefore, no created thing, considered in its nature, can serve as a proper means of union with God. Faith alone possesses the likeness to God that can unite us with Him. St. John describes how true faith works in the believer:

We assent to things heard from outside of us, handed on to us by others, where revealed truths remain simply words or names of things we don’t really understand. Our minds approach these truths without knowledge, but by God’s grace, our souls are truly united with God’s divine nature. If we really understood the content of faith, then we wouldn’t need faith. Our intellects always try to compare the revealed truths of faith with things we know on our own, things from our everyday experience, and although the comparisons and illustrations we make to help explain the faith are true to a certain extent, they do not really grasp at the core of faith. The believer must cling to the truth that is revealed to him in the dark.

Faith’s proper action is to detach our affections and desires from creatures and draw them to God. St. John of the Cross says, “All of a person’s attachments to creatures are pure darkness in God’s sight. Clothed in these affections, people are incapable of the enlightenment and dominating fullness of God’s pure and simple light; first they must reject them [the negative work of faith]. There can be no concordance between light and darkness” (John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, trans. K. Kavanaugh, 123, 1.4.1). Here St. John is simply repeating what was written in the First Letter of John: “Do not love the world or the things of the world. If anyone loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him. For all that is in the world, sensual lust, enticement for the eyes, and a pretentious life, is not from the Father but is from the world” (1 John 2:15-16).

But we should be careful not to think that St. John of the Cross disliked creation. In fact, he had a small cave in a beautifully-forested valley that was his favorite place to pray. He would often wander in the countryside, singing to God with the aid of creation. Nevertheless, St. John warns us sternly of the tempting allure of created beauty. It truly is beautiful, and that’s why it can be dangerous. Fortunately, St. John provides us a simple test to see whether we are using God’s creation properly for our spiritual good or whether we are overly attached to it in a way detrimental to our souls:

I said advisedly that, if the rejoicing of the will were to rest in any of these things, it would be vanity. But when it does not rest in them, but as soon as the will finds pleasure in that which it hears, sees, and does, soars upward to rejoice in God, so that its pleasure acts as a motive and strengthens it to that end, this is very good. In such a case not only need the said motions not be shunned when they cause this devotion and prayer, but the soul may profit by them and indeed should so profit to the end that it may accomplish this holy exercise. For there are souls who are greatly moved by objects of sense to seek God.

I wish, therefore, to propose a test whereby it may be seen when these delights of the senses aforementioned are profitable and when they are not. And it is that whenever a person hears music and other things, and sees pleasant things, and is conscious of sweet perfumes, or tastes things that are delicious, or feels soft touches, if his thought and delight are at once centered upon God and if that thought of God gives him more pleasure than the sensory experience which causes it, this is a sign that he is receiving benefit from it and that this thing of sense is a help to his spirit. In this way such things may be used, for then such things of sense serve the end for which God created and gave them, which is that he should be the better loved and known became of them. (John of the Cross, The Ascent of Mount Carmel, trans. Peers (1957), 3.24)

The work of this detachment is accomplished principally through mental prayer and meditation, hence its repeated importance in the Catholic spiritual tradition, especially from the Carmelites, Jesuits, and Cistercians. Meditation on Scripture, the life of Christ, the Saints, or virtues develops and focuses the believer’s desire for the true good and moves it away from the illusory good, or sinful good. Nevertheless, St. John of the Cross says that finite thoughts, like all created things, cannot in any way be a proper means of union with God. How, then, does imaginative or discursive mental prayer assist the development of faith? The use of images and visualization is a heuristic, temporary process that weans one's desire from sinful things to supernatural things. It is taking a step back in order to go two steps forward, so to speak. Meditation is not an end in itself but a means to detach the will from the false good. As St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila teach, meditation gives way to affective prayer and then to non-discursive contemplation, which is the true exercise of faith, one of its most intense expressions or operations in this life.

As the Divine Essence is presented to the intellect in psychological darkness, experienced as a longing for knowledge and the constant tension of frustration because this longing occurs but not at the end of the effort of our minds to understand the content of faith, it is then that the Divinity attracts the movement of the will in a motion of love. In fact, John of the Cross teaches that faith is ordained to love, and the presence of the Beloved, known by the intellect with the greatest possible certitude, creates an intense desire for union: “For although it is hidden [the soul] has a notable experience of the good and delight present [in the hidden God presented to it]. Accordingly she is drawn and carried toward this good more forcibly than any material object is pulled toward its center by gravity" (John of the Cross, The Spiritual Canticle, trans. K. Kavanaugh, 512, 11.4).

Faith gradually strips our notions of God that are inadequate, incorrect, like barnacles off of the side of a ship. Faith presents to us true faith, a true notion of God, in darkness and obscurity. In this obscurity, God purifies our love. The whole spiritual life occurs through this constant darkness. There is no coincidence that the sight of God in Heaven is called the Beatific Vision and that we are given the “Lumen Gloriæ,” or the Light of Glory. On earth, all is in darkness, and we barely taste what Heaven is like. Is it any surprise that holy places are typically dark places?