The Act of Faith in Augustine and Aquinas

THE ACT OF FAITH IN AUGUSTINE AND AQUINAS T HE FORMULATION OF the act of faith is today in the process of change, and this is to be applauded. The critique made of the traditional formulation is that the original message and datum of faith has been handed down to us within a cultural and philosophical framework and embodiment which is no longer comprehensible and therefore no longer credible to and for the men of our day. This critique is partly correct and partly dangerous if it is not carefully understood. The task of relating faith to the needs and agonies of the men of each and every generation is one of the most serious obligations of Christians themselves but, above all, of their pastors. It is a continuous and on-going dialogue between the apostolic generation and the present generation, and it is this solicitude and dialogue which characterize the " Catholic and apostolic faith." The very nominations of " Catholic " and " apostolic " give us the two traditional poles of the dialogue in an effort to be faithful to the past as well as to the present. It is this principle of dialogue which has characterized the very life of the Church during its two-thousand year tradition and, in fact, represents a perfect definition of the word " tradition." The preaching of the Church must be in continuous and living dialogue with the present generation by faithfully translating the everancient , ever-new apostolic witness and message through the many and various languages of men in time and space. This double tension and polarity of the Catholic faith, therefore, represent its original past as well as its dynamic present, command and measure its activity which was inaugurated at Pentecost and continues unabated and faithful to the present day. The Catholic faith would be fallacious and vacuous without this fidelity and continuity in and to the present from 143 144 PETER J. RIGA the past. This tradition has also emphasized the very important and crucial role which the apostolic powers invested above all in the successor of Peter in the See of Rome have played in this faithful elaboration, transmission, and interpretation of the Catholic and apostolic faith. It has always emphasized that this prerogative is not of human origin but of divine right. This dynamism of the faith is related to the world of men in a twofold way: the first is in the area of action where men in fact actually live and breathe; the other is in the area of thought where wisdom governs the actions of men in a total and, as it were, a finalized way. The reality of today is that never has faith and the Church been needed so badly as now, even if the modern world admits this only in spite of the inability of many within the Church to relate their faith efficaciously to the needs and problems of modern man. We have behind us in the past one hundred years two great councils as well as a great wealth of theological, spiritual, liturgical, and moral research, development and investigation; this, above all, in the light of the fact that the previous theology has been and continues to be impotent to perform the task of efficacy, that is, of relating the Catholic faith to the needs and understanding of the modern world. In order to have arrived at the point where we now are in our development, it is, and continues to be, evident that the bark of Peter has had some rough seas to traverse as any history of the Church of the past one hundred years will patently reveal: modernism, church and state, evolution and psychiatry, social teaching and birth control , clerical discipline and collegiality-and many more. Thus, the transmission of the Catholic faith as efficacy for today's world has been and continues to be a troubled and turbulent one. If this is indeed the case today, then it becomes all the more important to examine the notion of faith in its historical developmental sense, so as to see clearly what the task of the modern theologian must be in separating the notion of divine faith from its developmental cadres...