Proportioning your beliefs to your faith

Proportioning your beliefs to your faith

Posted on January 6th, 2009 by Frank Wilson

One day in November 1973 I was sitting on a Metroliner bound for D.C. I had bought a copy of Newsweek at Philadelphia’s 30th Street Station, but didn’t even open it because I wanted to finish the book I was reading. This was In My Own Way, the autobiography of Alan Watts, which had come out the previous year

I finished the book, stared out the window for a while, then picked up the magazine — and discovered that Alan Watts had died some days earlier. It was an odd experience, if only because, in the prose I had just been reading, Watts had seemed so very much alive.

I suppose a thrice-married, former Episcopal priest with a drinking problem (“I don’t like myself when I’m sober,” he told a friend) could be regarded as a dubious choice for a guide to religion, but I continue to think that much of what Watts had to say on the subject is worth paying heed to.

In an essay called “The World’s Most Dangerous Book,” for instance, he says something that is very worth pondering. Belief, he says, is “holding to a rock.” Faith, on the other hand, is “learning how to swim.” (By the way, the book referred to in the essay’s title is called the Bible.)

It is, of course, common for people to think of faith in terms of belief, that is, in terms of a proposition or set of propositions to which one either assents or does not. Actually, though, the two words are quite different in both meaning and origin. The word faith can be traced to the Latin word fidere, meaning to trust. Belief comes from an Old English word referring to whatever or whomever one holds dear. Oddly, belief for a time simply referred to trust in God, but by the 16th century had come to mean accepting something intellectually as true.

It should be clear from this what Watts was driving at. Faith is a sense we have of things, a sort of feeling about them, something on the order of what Wordsworth describes in “Tintern Abbey”:

… I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things.

People are unlikely to quarrel over how they feel about the nature of things. If, however, they start thinking about how they feel about the nature of things and undertake to reduce how they feel into a set of formulae, look out. Christianity split into its eastern and western components over a single word: filioque (meaning “and the son,” and indicating that the Holy Spirit proceeds not from the Father alone, but from the Father and the Son).

Such quarrelsomeness is not confined to religion. Secular ideologues can be every bit as contentious. And then there is the almost preternatural intensity of disputes among academicians.

I do not mean to disparage all belief. I am, after all, a practicing Catholic and subscribe to a few that others doubtless consider bizarre. The Real Presence, for instance, the doctrine that the communion wafer, after the consecration, is the body and blood of Jesus. Why would I believe that? Well, principally because it is an essential constituent of a mythos I grew up with, which has a long and distinguished pedigree, and which I know quite well, and feel comfortable with. I think “there’s something to it,” and I suspect that if I explained this to a Mongolian shaman, he would understand, since for him the world is still a place wherein what Rudolf Otto called the “numinous” periodically manifests itself.

I remember hearing Huston Smith, the scholar of religion, tell of how, when he explained the story of Christmas to his Hindu yoga teacher, the man found it completely believable — because he saw Jesus as an avatar, a divine being who out of mercy had descended into our fallen world.

Put to the service of faith, as a means of articulating its mystery, beliefs can be quite useful. But they can never be allowed to get in the way of what faith is about. That “sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused” is supposed to prompt a certain kind of behavior. “Preach the Gospel always,” St. Francis advised. “If necessary, use words.” Genuine faith is lived, not thought about or argued over. It has to do with being good and kind. If Jesus said anything that just about everybody can agree with, it is that “the Law was made for man, not man for the Law.”

A perfect example of how to proportion your beliefs to your faith is provided by an odd French cleric named the Abbé Mugnier. A friend of Edith Wharton and much admired by Proust, the abbé was once asked if he believed in Hell. He replied that of course he did, how could he not, it was a doctrine of the Church. Then, after pausing just long enough, he added: “Of course, I don’t necessarily believe that anyone is there.”