Lumen fidei [published on June 29, 2013] claims to be
“in continuity with all that the Church’s magisterium has pronounced”; thus there is an explicit reference—but only in a footnote—to Chapter 3 of the Constitution
Dei Filius of the First Vatican Council (no. 7, note 7). It is also about the “faith [that is]
received from God as a supernatural gift” (no. 4), and it specifies that faith is a “
theological” and “
supernatural” virtue given by God (no. 7). Similarly we read:
Since faith is one, it must be professed in all its
purity and integrity” (no. 48); not a single article of the Creed can be
denied; there is a need for vigilance to ensure that the deposit of
faith is passed on “in its entirety (no. 48).
But those are the only traces of the traditional teaching.
All the rest of the Encyclical buries these all-too-rare allusions in
a context that is quite foreign to them. This context connects the idea
of faith with the idea of experience and personal encounter, which
establishes a relation between man and God, without making it clear
whether this is the intellectual relation of knowledge[1] or the
affective relation of love.[2] Nor is it very clear whether this
personal encounter corresponds to the profound requirements of nature or
whether it surpasses them by introducing man into a specifically
supernatural order.[3] The problem is compounded by the failure to cite
the classical notions of natural and supernatural in describing this
relation: it is above all a question of existence.[4]
The central idea is that faith is first of all existential, the
product of an encounter with the living God that reveals love and leads
to communion (no. 4, no. 8). It is essentially dynamic, openness to the
promise of God and memory of [that promise about] the future (no. 9),
openness to love (no. 21, no. 34), attachment to the source of life and
of all fatherhood (no. 11), an experience of love (no. 47)…. It consists
of “
the willingness to let ourselves be constantly transformed and renewed by God’s call” (no. 13).
There is no definition of what a theological virtue is, and the
reader will search in vain for a specific definition of the three
theological virtues, which consequently are mixed up. Never is faith
related to the authority of God who reveals (the word “authority”
appears once, in no. 55, but in reference to another subject). The
revealed deposit of faith is mentioned only in no. 48, but it is not
defined—particularly the fact that it was completed at the death of the
last apostle.
No. 18 recalls that
“Christian faith is faith in the incarnation
of the Word and his bodily resurrection; it is faith in a God who is so
close to us that he entered our human history.” But it must be
admitted that it is quite difficult to recite the act of faith on the
basis of the considerations proposed here, according to which faith
relies not on the authority of God who can neither deceive nor be
deceived, but rather on the “
utter reliability of God’s love” (no. 17), and on the reliability of Jesus “
based… on his divine sonship” (
ibid.). In other words: I believe in God because he is love and not because he is truthful.
We find in footnote 23 an excerpt from
Dei Verbum that speaks about “[willing assent]
to the revelation given by God”, which requires
the grace of God, anticipating it and assisting it, as
well as the interior helps of the Holy Spirit, who moves the heart and
converts it to God, and opens the eyes of the mind and makes it easy for
all to accept and believe the truth (no. 29).
Yet further on the Encyclical reads:
The creed does not only involve giving one’s assent to a
body of abstract truths; rather, when it is recited the whole of life is
drawn into a journey towards full communion with the living God (no.
45).
The necessity of faith in order to be saved is presented in a non-directive manner: the beginning of salvation is “
openness to something prior to ourselves, to a primordial gift that affirms life and sustains it in being” (no. 19). Or else: “
Faith in Christ brings salvation because in him our lives become radically open” (no. 20). This is far from the Gospel clarity:
Go ye into the whole world and preach the gospel to every
creation. He that believeth and is baptized shall be saved: but he
that believeth not shall be condemned (Mark 16:15-16).
On the contrary, no. 34 says:
The light of love proper to faith can illumine the
questions of our own time about truth…. As a truth of love, it is not
one that can be imposed by force; it is not a truth that stifles the
individual. Since it is born of love, it can penetrate to the heart, to
the personal core of each man and woman. Clearly, then, faith is not
intransigent, but grows in respectful coexistence with others.
Incidentally, one might wonder about the catechetical effectiveness of the definition of the Decalogue given in no. 46:
The Decalogue is not a set of negative commands, but
concrete directions for emerging from the desert of the selfish and
self-enclosed ego in order to enter into dialogue with God.
In short, faith, as it is presented in
Lumen fidei, is first of all an experience of life and of love, fully realized in the “
encounter with Christ” (no. 30): “
Faith knows because it is tied to love, because love itself brings enlightenment” (no. 26). Jesus is said to be the one savior because “
all God’s light is concentrated in him, in his ‘luminous life’ which discloses the origin and the end of history” (no. 35)….
It is much too early to propose, based on a first encyclical, a key
to reading the teaching of Pope Francis; the next encyclical—which is
said to be dedicated to poverty—will be more personal and will enlighten
us more precisely. We will simply be so bold as to point out that Lumen
fidei is indeed in line with post-conciliar teaching. Vatican II wanted
to open up the Church to the modern world, which is characterized by
its rejection of the argument from authority. Thus the Council claimed
to be pastoral, avoiding all dogmatic definition so as not to give the
impression of coercing contemporary minds.
From this perspective, the considerations on faith in
Lumen fidei are somewhat reminiscent of what the immanentist philosopher Maurice Blondel wrote:
If faith increases our knowledge, it is not initially and
principally inasmuch as it teaches us certain objective truths by
authorized testimony, but rather inasmuch as it unites us to the life of
a subject, inasmuch as it initiates us, through loving thought, to
another thought and another love. (M. Blondel in A. Lalande, Dictionnaire technique et critique de la philosophie [Paris: PUF, 1968], 360, emphasis added.)
It is not learning objective truths, but becoming united to the life
of a subject and being initiated by loving thought to another thought
and another love. Hence a problem arises: how can one be content to
propose to modern minds, which are smitten with autonomy, what the
authority of divine revelation imposes on us? And how can we do this
without giving the impression to those minds that the authority of
divine revelation is contrary to their aspirations to autonomy? And
without diluting the revealed deposit itself either or diminishing its
authority? These are the difficulties with which the Magisterium has
been struggling for fifty years.
In a recent article, Fr. Jean-Dominique, O.P., recalls the interest
with which the Protestants of Taize welcomed the non-dogmatic teaching
of Vatican II:
The Council’s intention is to drop an excessively static
and notional language so as to adopt resolutely a dynamic, living
language. This whole magnificent document [Dei Verbum, the
conciliar document on Revelation—Editor’s note] will consider Revelation
as the living Word that the living God addresses to the living Church
composed of living members…. This whole document on Revelation will be
dominated by the foundational evangelical themes of word, life and
communion. The Word of God, is the living Christ whom God gives to
mankind so as to establish between him and them the communion of the
Spirit in the Church.
Thus the Church gave up “
speaking about the acceptance of revelation in terms of submission to authority” so as to speak primarily about a “
personal faith that accepts God’s revelation” (Roger Schutz and Max Thurian,
La Parole vivante au Concile [
Les Presses de Taize, 1966], 77-78, cited by Fr. Jean-Dominique, “
Concile ou révolution?” in
Le Chardonnet [July 2013]: 6).
This intention no longer to resort to dogmatic definitions is
deplored by the Declaration of the bishops of the Society of St. Pius X
dated June 27, 2013:
We are truly obliged to observe that this Council without
comparison, which wanted to be merely pastoral and not dogmatic,
inaugurated a new type of magisterium, hitherto unheard of in the
Church, without roots in Tradition; a magisterium resolved to reconcile
Catholic doctrine with liberal ideas; a magisterium imbued with the
modernist ideas of subjectivism, of immanentism and of perpetual
evolution according to the false concept of a living tradition [which is
also found in the writings of Maurice Blondel—Editor’s note],
vitiating the nature, the content, the role and the exercise of
ecclesiastical magisterium.” (See DICI no. 278, dated July 5, 2013).
(DICI no. 279 dated July 19, 2013)
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