by - Protopresbytr Alexander
Schmemann
I believe in God….But
what is belief, faith? If we look impartially at this affirmation “I believe
in God,” and reflect on what these words might mean, it becomes
mystifying….And this is true even though we thought we understood it.
First of all, it is
obvious that belief and knowledge are not the same, or at least knowledge as
commonly used in its everyday sense. If I say: “I believe in God” – i.e., I
know God exists – this type of knowledge is in no way similar to the
knowledge that in my room there is a table and outside my window rain is
falling. This latter – what we call objective knowledge – is independent of
me, it enters my consciousness apart from free choice of any kind. It is, in
fact, “objective”; and I – the subject, the person within me - am only able
to accept it and make it my own. But when I say “I believe in God,” then I
am making an affirmation which requires a choice, a decision. In other
words, it presupposes some kind of personal participation by my entire
being. As soon as this personal participation, this choice disappears, then
my faith dies, becomes sort of non-existent. Genuine faith of this sort is
far from our norm, and therefore faith must in no way be reduced to simply
an objective, independent part of my convictions and worldview.
Many people turn to
God in times of fear, unhappiness, or suffering, but when these moments pass
they return to a life completely unrelated to faith, living as if God did
not exist. Even more people believe not so much in God as in religion,
strange as this may sound. They simply like being in a church, they find it
cozy and comfortable. Many of these people have been accustomed since their
childhood to the “holiness” of church and rituals. Here everything is
beautiful, deep, mysterious – quite different from what they find in the
world’s day-to-day insanity and evil. And without ever thinking about it, or
pursuing it on a deeper level, these people hold on to this “religiosity.”
But religiosity has almost no connection to “real” life. Religiosity
provides good, clean “experiences,” making it easier to live; but religion
in this scheme is isolated and divorced from real life.
Finally there is a
third category of people: those who view religion as something useful and
necessary for human society, for the nation, for the family, for children,
for the terminally ill and sick, for upholding honesty and morality. In
other words, these people reduce religion to its usefulness. When I was a
young priest, I remember how mothers would approach me for help in uprooting
some bad habit from their children by means of confession. “Tell my child
that God sees everything; then he will be afraid and won’t do such
and such….”
Religion as help
and comfort; as a kind of recreational pleasure in holy and exalted things;
religion as usefulness. In all of these there is a measure of truth, but
when reduced only to these, religion is no longer faith as the Apostle Paul
described it at the dawn of Christianity: “Now faith is the realization
of what is hoped for and the certitude of things unseen.” (Hebrews 11:1)
Let’s reflect on
these strange words: “realization of what is hoped for, the certitude of
things unseen.” They are strange because of an apparent contradiction:
if I am hoping for something, how can it be already realized? If it
is realized, then logically there is nothing to hope for. And how can
something that is not seen – or, in other words, something impossible to
observe and to examine – be seen and known? How can it become within me
certitude, something genuine and true, a reality, something that I possess?
Yet it is precisely in this way, employing these apparent paradoxes, that
the Apostle Paul defines faith. Notice that this definition does not include
the word God; that word appears later, in the following verses of his
letter. Here he speaks of faith as a special, characteristically human
condition – a kind of gift human beings possess.
“So you say it’s a
gift, but what gift?” To this question we may respond as follows: it
is a yearning, the longing, the hopeful anticipation for something
desired, the presentiment of that something other which alone will
make life worth living.
And here is
something strange: the atheist philosopher Jean Paul Sarte defines man in
almost exactly the same way, saying: “man is a useless passion.” He calls
this passion, this yearning, “useless” because in his opinion it is
illusory: there is nothing to yearn for, there is nothing for which to wait
or to hope, there is nothing foe which to thirst. But what is significant is
that even he finds in man this hopeful anticipation and thirst. So faith
itself, according to the Apostle Paul, is the knowledge of, and the
encounter with that which a person – without perhaps even realizing it –
anticipates in hope; it is the yearning and thirst that are revealed as his
very life. If this thirst did not exist, if this hopeful anticipation
did not exist, then there also would be no encounter; and if that for
which a person thirsts does not exist, then this anticipation within him
also would not exist. It is in this encounter that the
