Transcending All Understanding by Kasper Walter

Author:Kasper, Walter [Kasper, Walter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Spiritual & Religion
ISBN: 9780898702569
Publisher: Ignatius Press
Published: 2011-04-14T16:00:00+00:00

The Eyes of Faith

Augustine himself struggled with this problem. The difficulty, he said, was so great that only God could solve it, and God solves it by giving us faith. We could not even, as Augustine indicates, seek for faith if God did not come to the aid of our search. This answer seems at first like an embarrassed solution: one has the impression that God is appearing on the scene in deus ex machina fashion.

Actually Augustine’s argument is not quite as naive as it looks at first. For an ultimate basis, which is under discussion here, can in fact never be established on a yet more ultimate basis. If, then, I believe in God as the ultimate basis of all reality, then this faith can itself never be grounded in anything higher. The alternative placed before us, therefore, is whether a man himself can give himself an ultimate basis or whether he will bow down before an ultimate and absolute basis, which can only be God, and acknowledge him. If he does this latter, it is because God, who is the truth and hence the light of life, has dawned on him.

The acknowledgment of God is thus no blind groping. Rather it is enlightened by the light of God’s truth, which shines upon man. It is in this sense that Augustine and the whole tradition speak of the light of faith and of the grace of faith enlightening man. Again and again they cite the verse of the Psalm: “In your light we see light” (Ps 36:9), P. Rousselot has spoken of the eyes of faith enlightened by the light of grace.

This answer is biblically well founded. Jesus himself makes clear that “those who are without” hear his parables, to be sure, but they do not understand. To the disciples, however, the mystery of the kingdom of God is “given” (Mk 4:11). Therefore Peter is told after having confessed Jesus as the Messiah and the Son of God: “Flesh and blood have not revealed this to you, but my Father in heaven” (Mt 16:17). According to Paul, no eye has seen and no ear heard what God has prepared for those who love him, but the Spirit of God, who sounds the deep things of God, reveals it to our spirit. Thus only the spiritual person can judge all things (see 1 Cor 2:9-10, 15). The letter to the Ephesians speaks of the enlightened eyes of the heart (see Eph 1:18), and the Gospel of John says succinctly: “No one can come to me unless the Father, who sent me, draw him” (Jn 6:44).

God himself thus shows himself as “drawing” in faith, as fascinating and convincing. In faith there dawns on man a light, so to say, in which everything else can be seen anew, better and more profoundly. To the extent that faith is a unique experience of revelation, it is the gift of a new possibility of sight that contains its evidence in itself.

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