Can non-Catholics have the theological virtue of faith? Fr Marín-Sola
‘Is her authority an indispensable element for every act of our divine faith?’
Abstract: This extract from Fr Marín-Sola discusses the relationship between faith and the authority of the Church. It argues that the Church’s authority is key in making the assent of faith to divine revelation. The debates revolve around whether faith in the Christian revelation, which is a type of mediate revelation, can exist without reference to the Church established by Christ.
This is Part I. Click here for Part II:
Editors’ Notes
“You are judging, sir,” answered Mr. Morley, “let me say it, of things you do not know. You do not know what the Catholic religion is; you do not know what its grace is, or the gift of faith.”
The speaker was a layman; he spoke with earnestness the more intense because quiet. Charles felt himself reproved by his manner; his good taste suggested to him that he had been too vehement in the presence of a stranger; yet he did not feel the less confidence in his cause. He paused before he answered; then he said briefly, that he was aware that he did not know the Roman Catholic religion, but he knew Mr. Willis. He could not help giving his opinion that good would not come of it.
“I have ever been a Catholic,” said Mr. Morley; “so far I cannot judge of members of the Church of England; but this I know, that the Catholic Church is the only true Church. I may be wrong in many things; I cannot be wrong in this. This too I know, that the Catholic faith is one, and that no other Church has faith. The Church of England has no faith. You, my dear sir, have no faith.”
Loss & Gain, John Henry Newman, pp 109-110.
Fr. Francisco Marín-Sola was born in the Spanish province of Navarre in 1873. He received his habit in the Order of Preachers in 1897. He is most known for his work The Homogenous Evolution of Catholic Dogma, which was first published in 1923 and very well received. Critics went as far as calling it a theological masterpiece, and comparing it to Melchior Cano’s De locis theologicis.
This book is almost completely unavailable in English today. (For now…)
We are here presenting an edited passage from this work, translated by a friend of The WM Review. This extract falls in our ongoing discussion of issues surrounding the dogma extra ecclesiam nulla salus, (‘outside the Church, there is no salvation’ – sometimes referred to with the acronym ‘EENS’).
In this first part of the excerpt, Fr. Marín-Sola discusses the organic relation between the authority of the Church and our assent of divine faith. It is important to understand that when he refers to ‘our faith’, he is not speaking in a sort of communitarian way, but specifically referring to the faith quoad nos – i.e., not faith in itself, but as it pertains to us.
In particular, we can see it addressing the ideas summed up in the text from Loss & Gain above: Is it even possible to have supernatural faith without regard for the Catholic Church? He answers this question with regard to St Thomas Aquinas in the second part.
What he writes is particularly relevant for us who have been deprived of ordinary authoritative preaching for decades.
It also illustrates why it is so necessary for us to belong to the true Church and to adhere to all of her teachings without compromise. It should also help us to grow in our love for our Holy Mother who nourishes us with heavenly doctrine, and move us to pray all the more fervently for a solution to the crisis in the Church.
From
The Homogenous Evolution of Catholic Dogma
Fr Francisco Marin-Sola OP
The Organic Place of the Authority of the Church in Our Divine Faith
Chapter III, Section III
— An excerpt translated by a friend of The WM Review —
Headings and some line breaks added for reading online
Immediate and Mediate Revelation from the Perspective of the Person
In previous sections, we have continuously talked about immediate and mediate revelation, but it was from the perspective of the object. In this section, it is necessary to also talk about immediate and mediate revelation, but from a different standpoint, namely, from the perspective of the person. Understanding this dual division of revelation into immediate and mediate from two different viewpoints is crucial to avoid confusion when reading the treatises “De fide et Ecclesia” by theologians.
In faith, two things are involved: the revealed object and the person to whom it is revealed. The object can be revealed in itself or disclosed in another truth in which it is latently contained. Revelation, in the first case, is termed immediate or formal, and in the second, mediate or virtual. For instance, if God has revealed the proposition that the human soul is spiritual, spirituality is immediately revealed in itself; however, the immortality it implies is revealed not in itself but rather mediately in spirituality, in which it is intrinsically and essentially included. This is the immediate and mediate revelation from the perspective of the object.
But in revelation, in addition to the revealed object, the person to whom it is revealed also plays a role. This person can receive divine revelation in two ways: the first is directly from God, without any intervention from other men; the second is not directly from God, but mediately through other men to whom God communicated it, or perhaps from other men who, through successive generations, have been receiving [divine revelation] from those to whom God first and directly communicated it.
The first is called immediate revelation because there is no man in between God who reveals and the person to whom He reveals; the second is called mediate for the opposite reason. The angels, our first father, the patriarchs and prophets, the apostles and evangelists, those who had the ineffable privilege of hearing the Incarnate Word on earth, and even every soul to whom God by Himself, or without the intervention of any man, has revealed His secrets, had immediate revelation; the rest of us, who have not had direct revelation from God, only have mediate revelation.
As seen, this division of revelation into immediate and mediate is from the perspective of the person, not the object. It does not consider whether the object has been revealed in itself or in another, but rather focuses on whether the person has received the revelation immediately from God or has received it through other humans. This immediate or mediate revelation from the perspective of the person is what we will discuss in this section whenever, without expressing the opposite, we use the words immediate and mediate.
How the departure from St Thomas began
Our faith, [faith quoad nos] the divine faith given and owed by all Christian believers to the truths of the revealed deposit, is (setting aside the unique case of private or special revelation) a faith of mediate revelation. This mediate character must never be lost sight of, as it is the key or formal reason for the necessity or existence of the ecclesiastical magisterium and the nature and extent of its relation with our faith.
Certain theologians, because they have not paid sufficient attention to this mediate character of revelation on which our faith is based (a character that is precisely the root of the necessity of the ecclesiastical magisterium and, therefore, its nature and extent), have not understood the great theory of Saint Thomas on the relation of the Church with our faith.
To establish this relation, they have taken as a criterion the question of whether private revelations are or are not of divine faith. The question of private revelations, by the mere fact of being immediate, is entirely irrelevant to the question of the relation of the Church with our faith in the revealed deposit, which is faith of mediate revelation.
The nature of the faith we must give to the revealed deposit – a deposit that is the formal reason for the doctrinal authority of the Church – is the guiding principle that every true theologian must take when studying the relation of the Church with our faith, and not the nature of the faith we must give to private revelations, which are inherently foreign to that authority.
It is, therefore, truly surprising to see a theologian of the stature of Suarez pose and guide the question in this way: “Whether private divine revelation pertains to the formal object of faith and consequently (!) whether the authority of the Church pertains to this formal object, and how faith is resolved in it”.[1] That “consequently” explains everything; with it, Suarez closes the door to understanding Saint Thomas’s theory on the relation of the Church’s authority with our faith, which is of mediate revelation.
Suarez, like Lugo and Ripalda, does not seem to have paid sufficient attention to the radical difference between faith [quoad se] and our faith [faith quoad nos], and to the mediate character of the latter, which is the key to the treatise “De Fide” by the Angelic Doctor, as we will try to show in this section.
The nature of faith
In faith, it is essential to distinguish two essentially different elements: first, the revealed object; second, the proposition and explanation of that object.
In immediate revelation, both elements are divine. God is the one who reveals the object, and God is also the one who proposes and explains it. In mediate revelation, the second element, i.e., the proposition and explanation of the revealed truth, is done by humans who, even if presumed to be endowed with much holiness and knowledge, are inherently fallible unless they possess divine assistance to propose and explain everything and only what God has revealed, without any human mixture or distortion.[2] The essential or formal aspect in the assent of divine faith is, therefore, the revealed object; the proposition or explanation are conditions without which there would be no faith.
Although in faith, whether by immediate or mediate revelation, two elements come into play – the revealed object and its proposition or explanation – what is truly believed and assented to is the revealed object.
However, it could not be assented to without prior proposition and explanation. The essential or formal aspect in the assent of divine faith is the revealed object; the proposition or explanation are conditions without which there would be no faith.
Since the divine faith founded on immediate revelation is as true as that founded on mediate revelation, if the latter requires an element that the former does not, then this element applies, not because it is revelation, but because it is mediate revelation; not because it is divine faith, but because it is ours.
Our divine faith is of mediate revelation, and mediate revelation necessarily requires human proposition and explanation. It cannot be argued, therefore, that if it is divine faith, nothing human can enter into it, nor can it be said that if something human enters, it is no longer divine faith (but human or ecclesiastical). However, it can and must be said that there is no divine faith if the human explanation that enters into it is of such a nature that it can alter or modify the divine object, the revealed meaning. For the object is essential to faith, and the object of faith is exclusively divine: nothing else but the First Truth.
Posing the questions
With these remarks, perhaps unnecessary for many readers, we are going to address an important and delicate issue; we are going to study the organic place that the infallible authority of the Church occupies in our faith, noting once and for all that by our faith, we mean that divine faith which, for those of us who have not had nor have immediate revelation from God, we give to the truths revealed by God to the Apostles, and entrusted by them to the Church in the sacred deposit of Scripture and Tradition.
The theologian is faced with the following questions:
Is the authority of the Church an indispensable element for every act of our divine faith in the revealed deposit?
Is there room for an act of divine faith in a truth of the deposit before it is defined by the Church?
Is our act of faith only “I believe because God has revealed it,” or is it necessarily “I believe because God has revealed it and because Holy Mother Church thus teaches”?
In short, apart from a special revelation or intervention from God, is the Church the only means that connects our divine faith with the revealed deposit, or are there other means by which human understanding can come into contact with the revealed deposit through divine faith?
The theory of Vazquez-Suarez
The theologian Vazquez, illustrious in many respects, was the first to clearly and openly respond negatively to all these questions or aspects of the same question.
For Vazquez, the authority of the Church is not an indispensable element for every act of our divine faith, except for the ignorant, those who do not have sufficient theology or knowledge to see or deduce with evidence the latent depths of the revealed deposit. But for the wise, for the theologian, for the one who, through his theological, exegetical, historical, and critical knowledge of the Bible and Tradition, can deduce the sense of the revealed deposit with evidence, the authority of the Church is not indispensable.
For the theologian, theological demonstration or individual reason is what the authority of the Church is for the common believers. It should not be objected, says Vazquez, that what is known by science or reasoning cannot deserve more assent than scientific or theological assent, for the theologian who deduces something from the revealed by evident reasoning has at his disposal two assents: one, theological, based on reasoning, which is the means by which he deduces it, and the other, of divine faith, based on divine revelation, which is the starting point from which he deduces it.
And these two acts are possible and available to the theologian, and they do not require the authority of the Church at all. This is, laid bare, the famous theory of Vazquez, a theory that anyone who formally draws theological conclusions without the Church’s definition has to end up with.
Suarez, in his effort to explain or mitigate a theory of Molina, ended up adopting the aforementioned theory of Vazquez. He admitted that the inclusive virtuality (which he calls formal-confused) of the revealed is formally of faith. He presented the two famous assents as possible for the theologian, one of them being of divine faith without any intervention of the Church’s authority.
The Church removed
Suarez was followed in this matter by de Lugo and Ripalda, and as most modern theological texts are more or less influenced by these great theologians, it is not uncommon to find in them, the following affirmations:
The authority or definition of the Church is not indispensable for the act of our faith, for our faith is the same as that of angels, patriarchs, and prophets, and they did not need the proposition or explanation of the Church to believe. Therefore, the act of our faith does not necessarily carry the “I believe… because the Church teaches so,” although the authority of the Church is ordinarily necessary, especially for the simple believers who cannot elevate themselves to the pure motive of divine authority without the Church.
But the theologian who, with his individual reason (theological demonstration), discovers with evidence a truth or virtuality or latent sense of the deposit, must or can give it the assent of divine faith (in addition and distinct from theological) without any definition from the Church. That is what the two assents are for.
The theory presented by Vazquez-Suarez, which is prevalent in modern theological manuals, suggests that the explanation of the revealed deposit made by fallible human reason deserves divine faith and merits divine assent for the wise. In this theory, reason plays a role for the wise comparable to the Church’s role for the ignorant or common faithful in the proposition and explanation of the revealed deposit. The authority of the Church, as mentioned by the Vatican Council in the preservation and exposition of the deposit, is considered necessary for us.
However, in this theory, “us” refers not to everyone who receives the revelation mediately (a mediation that can only be guaranteed by the Church’s infallible definition or by a new revelation or extraordinary intervention of God) but specifically to those who are not sufficiently theologians or exegetes to guarantee, by their reason, that mediation or distance, to propose and explain to themselves the meaning of the revealed deposit.
All of this, which is quite common in modern theological manuals after Suarez, is, in our opinion, a deviation from the true theory of St. Thomas and a lack of recognition of the sublime and necessary role that the authority of the Church occupies in our faith.
In the next part, we shall see what this true theory of St Thomas is, on the necessary role of the Church.
Further Reading:
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[1] Suarez, De Fide, d. 3, title of section 10.
[2] [St Thomas:]
“Two things contribute to faith. Firstly, the habit of the intellect by which it is disposed to obey the will tending towards divine truth…; secondly, it is required for faith that believable things be proposed to the believer, and this is done by man” (ST, I, q. 111, a. 1, ad 1).
“Two things are required for faith. One of them is that believable things be proposed to man…; the other thing required for faith is the believer’s assent to what is proposed” (II-II, q. 6, a. 1).
And every proposition made by humans is fallible unless done with divine assistance. “Just as created existence, in itself, is vain and defective unless contained by the uncreated being, so every truth is defectible unless rectified by divine Truth” (De Veritate, q. 14 a. 8).
It is needless to note that whenever we speak of a proposition of faith made by the Church, it is understood through the authentic and infallible organs of the Church’s teaching, such as the definitions of the Pontiff or Ecumenical Councils (solemn magisterium), or the universal teaching of the Pastors (ordinary magisterium). Therefore, a proposition made by particular organs, such as a missionary, a particular bishop, etc., has no more value than their conformity with the proposition of authentic organs, which is the rule of our faith.