virtus fidei – actus fidei

I recently came to a more nuanced way of thinking of faith. In Forming Intentional Disciples, Sherry Weddell points to a way of expressing the relationship between faith and works, that controversial duo that has been a bone of contention among Christians for centuries. She speaks of this in relation to the graces received through the sacraments, but it clarifies thinking when it is used in the relationship between faith and works.

Virtus fedei, the virtue of faith, is what is freely given to us at baptism through the grace of God. It is the “capacity to believe”.  Actus fedei, a personal act of faith, is what transforms that capacity to believe into true belief, a personal explicit faith.

Quoting Ms. Weddell, “The Church’s understanding of saving faith is that it is not merely the passive capacity for grace …. Neither can true faith exist without charity. Intellectual assent alone, without charity and good works is what the Church calls fides informis”, and it is a dead faith that does not save.  

The Glue that Binds

In today's Gospel Jesus counsels forgiving not seven times but seventy. Forgiveness has been called the core of the Christian faith (C.S.Lewis). The Christian answer to conflict and violence is forgiveness, not tit for tat. To defeat your enemy, Lincoln said, make him your friend.

Forgiveness is not an easy yoke to shoulder, but often the hardest thing we can undertake. Forgiving may take years of effort. But it is what Christ demands and offers by way of invitation to liberation and new life. My commentary on today's reading (Living In Christ) notes that persons meeting who hold a grudge against one another stiffen, like corpses. Life flows again when we can forgive.

It is Christ's spirit of love that enables us to forgive. That was brought home to me today when I read that Plato in the Timaeus (31b-c) pointed out that "Two things cannot properly be put together without a third; there has to be some bond between the two to draw them together. The most beautiful bond is the one that produces the greatest union of itself and of the things it brings together . . ." (quoted in D.C. Schindler, "Ever Ancient, Ever New" in Communio, Spring-Summer 2012, at p. 47).

The point the author makes is that Christ is the glue, the bonding agent that draws two together in friendship. (Of course, that is the basic principle of the theology of Christian marriage. It applies, it seems, to all true friendships.)

Schindler goes on to say, "Compare to the opening line of Aelred of Rivaulx's work on friendship: 'You and I are here, and I hope that Christ is between us as a third"; On Spiritual Friendship, trans. Laurence C. Braceland (Trappist, K.Y.: Cistercian Publications, 2010),55."

I think of forgiveness as a core part of the Christian "glue" (love) that holds friends together. It is a crucial grace among the many graces of love, emanating from Christ, who is Love personified, drawing two into His loving embrace, and making friends of them.

Progress or Paganism

Anne Applebaum in her Pulitzer Prize winning book Gulag: A History contrasts the horror and revulsion most intellectuals felt for Naziism as compared with the comparative indifference they exhibited to Stalin's tyranny, which arguably resulted in more victims than Hitler's evil. Ms. Applebaum doesn't speculate as to why this is the case (Introduction, xix), but I have my ideas.

Communism was attractive to western intellectuals because it seemed to represent the culmination of the secular progress of the Enlightenment, and was viewed as a fulfillment of Christian eschatology, shorn of its other-worldly emphasis. Naziism, to the contrary, was a throwback to paganism pure and simple. Morris Berman, in Coming to our Senses, at p. 258, cites the work of the Austrian writer Guido von List (1848 - 1919), who argued that Germany needed to return to a pure paganism emphasizing the volkisch life and a true religion of pagan sun worship. Hitler was exposed to these ideas in his youth and the Nazii movement embodied many of them. Martin Bormann, Hitler's deputy after Rudolph Hess "flew the coop" wrote, "The National Socialist and the Christian outlooks are incompatible. Our National Socialist philosophy stands far higher than the conception of Christianity . . . If in the future our youth hears nothing about Christianity, whose teaching is much lower than ours, Christianity will disappear of itself." (Quoted from Joe J. Heydecker and Johannes Leeb, The Nuremberg Trial, p. 243 (World Publishing Co. 1958)).

Each of these ideologies, really false religions, caused millions of deaths. So shouldn't we be leery of new "liberation" movements that claim to see reality more clearly than Judeo-Christianity?