Trust: Who or What Might Support Us?

7. Trust in Search of Insight

98 s e v e n Trust in Search of Insight In chapter 6, we have seen that the Cartesian renewal of science, in its all-encompassing sense, is dominated by faith (or trust) in reason. The reason thus proclaimed to be the sovereign master of truth and certainty can be characterized as the human capacity of conceptual de- and reconstruction. Beginning with the intellectual destruction of all that has been trusted as true and valid, insofar it was not indubitably certain (while continuing to trust the existentially most important part of it in the praxis of one’s life), philosophy must produce the certified truth of all that exists by constructing it as a system in which all things are distinguished and linked according to a universal coherence. Hegel, who thought that his system had realized the modern project, at least in its main articulations, concluded that, if any other faith or trust existed outside of the philosopher’s faith in reason, the latter would comprehend it as a subordinate dimension of itself. True religion seemed to compete with philosophy in the pursuit of truth, but he spent considerable time and energy on showing that all religions only represented lower-level expressions of the deepest and most complete truth unfolded in the conceptual theory of his phi- Trust in Search of Insight 99 losophy. In his view, Christian faith represents the truth in symbolic forms of the imaginative, narrative, prophetic, and emotional dimensions of civilization; but Reason and philosophy “lift up” that truth from the level of their religious expression to that of conceptual transparency . Trust in reason and philosophy absorbs, and thus elevates or “sublates” religious faith. faith and belief There are several reasons why religious faith protests against Hegel’s theory. Not primarily because of Hegel’s contrast between the conceptual level of human understanding and its prefiguration on the level of affectivity and imagination, but rather because the characteristic intentionality of his philosophy cannot replace the religious intentionality of Jewish, Muslim and Christian, or any other faith. The scienti fic and the religious intentionality are not two versions of a purely theoretical approach, as if the religious relation could be reduced to another species of the genus theory. Faith is not a preconceptual or still unclarified version of conceptual knowledge, but instead a radically different attitude. As pistis, fides, fiducia, or radical trust, faith confides the faithful to the God in whom they believe. It constitutes a very special variety of being turned toward and attached to God, which—as we have seen—cannot be reduced to an objectifying intention. Faith is thus not another word for belief, as if it were equivalent with having opinions, ideas, or explanations about God. The kind of acquaintance involved in faith is related to an attitude that combines longing confidence, complete surrender, receptive devotion, and obedient adoration . The attention of the faithful is captivated by God’s invisible facing and wordless protection of their worldly and eternal existence. Their adoration is a responsive movement of opening oneself to the One on whom all things, events, and personal relations depend. The language (but also the silence) of trust and prayer utterly differs from the language and the silence that express or accompany scholarly interest or simple curiosity. Beliefs and theology speak about God, but prayer speaks to God. If it is true that speaking or writing 100 Trust in Philosophy and Religion about God necessarily thematizes or objectifies God, how then is theology , and how are “articles of faith” possible without reducing prayer to examination? Does not an investigation corrupt, or even destroy, the faithful attitude by transforming God into an object that fits the panoramic scene of all theory? If so, God would appear as the summit or as the totality of all objects. But then this superobject would be a finite part of a composite whole or that finite whole itself.1 Before developing these remarks, let me try to evoke a most naïve, not yet philosophically or theologically stylized, experience of the religious relation itself. the religious relation It is extremely difficult to give an accurate description of the appropriate relation that is the core of adoration. However, many descriptions produced by saints and naïve believers can be recognized as genuine evocations, even if none of their descriptions are completely adequate and most of them only...