Interior Motives
Seeking the Gift of Faith
Yesterday, we covered the gratuitous aspect of grace. The story about Volta reminded me of a great thinker in more recent times who has a more humorous anecdote about the gratuitous nature of grace. The thinker was Mortimer J. Adler, a tireless educator who’s perhaps best known for his work on the Great Books of the Western World.
Yet most people probably wouldn’t recognize Adler as a serious thomist (even being a collaborator with the Dominican Friar, Father Walter Farrell). Yet even while being considered an excellent thomist, Adler wasn’t a Catholic for many of his thomist years (though he did end up converting later in life). Asked about this apparent discrepancy, Adler is said to have remarked something along the lines of, “I take Saint Thomas seriously; faith is a gift, and I haven’t been given it.” (This story can be found in the 1998 book, The Millennium, by the Norbertine canon, Alfred McBride)
This story highlights the radical nature of the gift of faith. But can’t we do anything to gain faith? Can’t you just go listen to sermons or seek persuasive arguments for the faith? Surely then you would make yourself a believer. Yet, following Saint Thomas Aquinas just as Adler did, we see that such human efforts aren’t sufficient for faith. As Aquinas notes,
videntium enim unum et idem miraculum, et audientium eamdem praedicationem, quidam credunt et quidam non credunt. Et ideo oportet ponere aliam causam interiorem, quae movet hominem interius ad assentiendum his quae sunt fidei.
For people see one and the same miracle, and hear the same preaching, but some believe and some do not believe. Therefore there must be another, interior cause that moves man interiorly to assent to the things of faith.
(The Latin text is from Saint Thomas’ Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 6, a. 1, as found in the Opera Omnia edited by Stanislaus Fretté, vol. 3, Paris: Vivès, 1872, p. 117.)
So faith needs some interior motion, a motive force deep within that we ourselves can’t cause. What then can we do to get faith? The best way is to pray for faith, to ask the Lord, “Help my unbelief” (Mark 9:24). For faith is that gift of light that comes down from the very Father of lights (James 1:17).