You want to believe in God but your intellect prevents it.
First, allow me to relieve you of a burden: you cannot force yourself to believe. Faith is a gift, not a work of man.
But know this: the insurmountable gulf which you imagine stands between your present doubt and deep faith does not exist.
For if you want to find God, you are already praying. You are in the atrium of faith, and now you must walk through the door into the great hall in which the fire burns.
Your task is to deepen your prayer. It will become unselfconscious, sweeping into all aspects of your being.
For now, your lack of faith is a gift. It presents the possibility of a journey: a journey from nothing to everything. It requires boldness. By praying, you begin to experience that which you will experience for all eternity; you begin to do that which you will do for all eternity.
Your method will not be to close your mind on the certainty of God; it will be to open your mind to the possibility of discarding the irrational limitations in which it now finds itself encased.
Your first step is to release yourself from sterile modern preoccupations with ‘rationalism’. (Fear not: to matters of the intellect we will return. As martyred philosopher Edith Stein noted, “God is Truth. All who seek truth seek God, whether this is clear to them or not.”)
The modern mind treats ‘reason’ as a philosophy of its own - but it is not. Reason is a tool with which to make deductions from foundational metaphysical assertions. Reason alone - divorced from any context in which to operate - can never supply these fundamental assertions. Nor can it reach them through its own efforts: this attempt results in a circular fever dream of recurring tautologies, uncertainties, and absurdities.
It is within one of these fever dreams that you now find yourself. Your intellect is both your greatest strength - for the knowledge that God is necessary has bought you this far - and your greatest weakness, for modernity has twisted and deceived your mind, allowing you to access only a thin slice of reality.
Wandering without an ultimate destination, you have become trapped in a dead-end side corridor of erroneous reason. The path to the Truth is unclear. But the walls of your corridor have been built without a strong foundation: they will give if you push.
This is not the rejection of reason, but the empowerment of reason. It is an acceptance of the fact that reason is only meaningful when it has a foundation upon which to operate. As Bishop Robert Baron explains: “Authentic faith is not infrarational (contrary to reason) but rather suprarational, transcending the rational, and not comprehended by reason alone.”
Just as we cannot use reason alone to reach ultimate truth, even if we reached this truth, we could not ‘know’ it in the same way we ‘know’ mundane details about the world. We, as limited beings, cannot contain the infinite. Our experiences within reality give us no sense of that which is outside this reality; our experiences in time give us no sense of that which is timeless.
Again, we are confronted by the fact that to close our minds on the certainty of God is impossible. God - should He exist - cannot be enclosed.
I hope that this will bring relief to those of you who have despaired that reason alone could not bring you to belief, despite your willingness.
So far, I am sure that it seems to you that we have made no progress at all. Afterall, we have merely clarified further limitations. But in fact, we have made great progress: we have gone from mere willingness to willingness and humility.
God is best known in not knowing him.
— Augustine of Hippo, De Ordine, II, 16
The above statement by St. Augustine is one of the foundational ideas of apophatic theology: the notion that we can approach God through negation, to speak only in terms of what may not be said about ultimate truth.
This negative philosophical approach (the via negativa), which embraces rather than obscures our limitations, has great relevance as an antidote to our time of tyrannical but flawed philosophies.
Among the great theologians of the apophatic tradition is Dionysius the Areopagite. Dionysius counsels that agnōsia is the path to God. Agnōsia (‘unknowing’) is not agnoia (‘ignorance’), but rather a state of acceptance that no finite knowledge can fully know the Infinite One. It is a stable state of openness to that which is beyond and above knowledge.
Such an openness is necessary if we are to receive the ultimate Truth. There is no way for us to reach outside of reality with our intellect, to make contact with God of our own volition, but we can be open to receiving His voice when He calls.
I counsel that, in the earnest exercise of mystic contemplation, thou leave the senses and the activities of the intellect and all things that the senses or the intellect can perceive… and that, thine understanding being laid to rest, thou strain (so far as thou mayest) towards a union with Him whom neither being nor understanding can contain.
— Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology
Again, I cannot lead you to an encounter with God. That is between you and Him. But I can help to remove the walls that modernity has erected around your mind, that cut you off from the deeper, hidden realities. Once these walls have fallen, you may step vulnerable and naked into the outer darkness.
I am sure that many of you have listened to the great works of religious music and gazed upon the great works of religious art, and - though you appreciated them - you felt there was a barrier between them and your soul. You appreciated them - but you knew this was not enough.
This is because your entire intellectual framing of the experience was flawed: that you even attempted to ‘appreciate’ them was wrong. You have been conditioned by a secular age to view these events as cultural artifacts to be performed by a performer and appreciated by an observer, rather than as sacramental events to be participated in.
Instead, approach these events in the same frame as Moses ascended Mount Sinai:
And then Moses abandons those who see and what is seen and enters into the mystical darkness of unknowing; in this he shuts out every knowing apprehension and comes to be in the wholly imperceptible and invisible, being entirely of that beyond all – of nothing, neither himself nor another, united most excellently by the completely unknowing inactivity of every knowledge, and knowing beyond intellect by knowing nothing.
— St. Dionysius the Areopagite, The Mystical Theology
Don’t try to enjoy or appreciate the experiences that move your soul and bring you closer to God - just live in them. Perhaps, as you return to them, they will begin to live in you.
These recordings, which I like very much, capture the spirit of sacramental participation over performance:
Lord, grant me the faith of that little girl.
Perhaps these move you. But faith is not a feeling; faith is not knowledge; faith is a gift. All we can do is ask for it. A moment of ecstasy is a doorway to hidden realities, and if it is revealed to you, you must choose to open that door.
That doorway is Christ. Christ is the point at which metaphysical reality and physical reality touch, and so is the access point to the Truth you seek. “Jesus, being above all essence, has stooped to an essential state in which all the truths of human nature meet.”
As you pass through the door, focus not on knowledge but on trust. Throw yourself into trust in God’s love.
This trust is necessary because, unlike the placid vision of Christianity that modernity presents, an acceptance of God’s existence is terrifying in its implications, for you and for the world - so terrifying, in fact, that a fear of God is what causes many to reject His existence.
Pray to God for the gift of faith. Attend mass, that your actions may be written back onto your soul. Find and speak to your local priest, that you may have a better source of spiritual guidance than my humble blog.
This is a good time to undertake this journey. Last Sunday was the Second Sunday of Easter, when Christians recall the story of doubting Thomas. Those of you who have struggled with doubts may find inspiration in his struggle and its conclusion.
…having seen the risen Lord, Thomas then says, "My Lord and my God."
There's nobody in the New Testament who gives a more thorough and exalted attestation of Jesus than this. Nobody…
Thomas the doubter is the one who was led finally through both reason and faith to come to the greatest confession anywhere in the New Testament.
— Bishop Robert Baron
At some point you will again find yourself in silence. But silence does not mean absence. And although the silence will return, you will be changed. You will know the Truth.
You shall seek me, and shall find me: when you shall seek me with all your heart.
— Jeremiah 29:13
If this essay meant something to you, please consider liking and becoming a free or paid subscriber. In just a few clicks, you could make a huge difference to me.
Sic transit imperium,
Johann
Thank you for this. Refreshing truth, in an age when seemingly a vast majority seek the quick fix, the easy remedy. I would like to add something, based on nothing more than my own experience and of a few to whom I am close. Great sorrow, the loss of someone we love more than our own lives, the shadow of death that follows close on our heels in this fallen world, from our first breath to our last -- such pain, grief and fear can open our being to the unsought mercy of God, precisely in moments when all hope has been lost.
When people ask if I believe in God, I say, god is what there is, so what is there to believe, it’s the only thing there is.
One energy. The physicists came to the same conclusion as monotheists.