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CHAPTER 1
Medieval Varieties of Believing
CONSIDER THE STORY of the theologian and the child. A Middle English version from the 1380s, in John Mirk's popular collection of homilies, went like this. There once was "a great master of divinity" who worked tirelessly to write a book explaining "why God would be believed one God in three persons." One day, as he walked by the seaside contemplating this mystery, he found a "fair child" who "had made a little pit in the sand." The theologian asked what he was doing, to which the child replied that he was pouring "all the water in the sea into this pit." The theologian scoffed, "Leave off, son, for thou shalt never do that." The boy answered that he would just as soon accomplish his task as the theologian would accomplish his, then mysteriously vanished. After this mystical encounter, the theologian "left off his studying, and thanked God that so fair warned him." The story concludes, "Good men and women, this I have said to you, as God hath inspired me, willing you for to have full belief in the trinity."
The tale is first attested in the early thirteenth century and occurs in countless manuscripts thereafter, with many variations. Sometimes the child is Christ or an angel. Often the theologian is identified as Augustine of Hippo, a distinctly odd choice given that Augustine did indeed finish his De Trinitate, an early masterpiece of systematic theology. With Augustine as its protagonist, the story became a popular subject of Renaissance painting, appearing first in Benozzo Gozzoli's frescoes at San Gimignano in the 1460s (figure 1.1). William Caxton, founder of the first English printing press, included a version in his 1483 translation of the Golden Legend, even though it was not in his source text, because he had admired a painting of the scene on an altar in Antwerp.
The tale obviously addressed the relationship between understanding and believing. But it also addressed a more fundamental paradox that troubled medieval Christians: how might finite and fallen creatures like themselves access an infinite and perfect creator? The trinity was in some sense an answer to this very riddle: God became man so that we might approach him. But because the trinity is an incomprehensible mystery, rather than solving the problem it was simply the most important instantiation of the paradox itself: with what flawed human faculty might we know that God became man? The problem was still the necessity of accessing perfection with our imperfection, which could all too easily be unmasked as an arrogant fallacy.
The category of belief was, for medieval Christians, at heart a way of negotiating this characteristic predicament of a religion that posits an utterly transcendent deity but then desires to know him. Belief mitigated the potential hubris that adhered in every attempt to approach God, not only because it was biblically sanctioned — all who believe are saved — but because it was amphibious, a kind of knowledge-claim without implying knowledge. Belief was an ordinary human operation, as familiar in the tavern as at the university; and yet, when sanctified, belief might reach all the way to heaven. As a concept with one foot in epistemology and another foot in saving faith, belief was ideally positioned to address the dilemma of how finite creatures might approach an infinite creator. Hence the story of the theologian and the child. On the surface, the story appears to posit belief as a radical alternative to understanding. And yet, when the story identifies the theologian as Augustine, author of De Trinitate, the message becomes more ambiguous. Might belief be a prop to reason? Or might reason tell us what to believe, even if those things transcend reason? Or might a limited understanding be sufficient to raise human beings toward a God who agrees to meet believers halfway?
Another way to say this is that the same amphibious quality that made belief so useful also made it slippery and polysemous, because the Christian category of belief looked, smelled, and tasted like so many other, more mundane operations that could not reach to heaven. Everyone from the bishop to the ploughman knew that belief was required: belief in God, belief in Christ, belief in the fundamental doctrines of Christianity. But what was it, how did it function, and how could it be achieved?
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From the perspective of theologians, a fundamental issue was how belief related to knowledge, understanding, and intellect — that is, the business of theology itself as a science of God. Was belief a species of knowledge, or was it the opposite of knowledge? Did belief utilize reason, or did belief reject reason? Besides being difficult questions, these were deeply personal issues for scholars, whose professional investment in rational inquiry left them — like the theologian walking on the sand — perpetually vulnerable to charges that Christianity demanded belief in, rather than analysis of, divine mysteries.
As on so many issues, the most influential source for medieval thought was Augustine. Perhaps surprisingly, given his famously pessimistic view of human nature, Augustine developed an essentially rationalist view in which "belief" opens human minds to intellective knowledge of God. "Belief," he wrote in his most fundamental observation on the subject, "is nothing else than to think with assent." Since belief is fundamentally propositional, "thinking" must come first, "for no one believes anything unless he has first thought that it is to be believed." Yet thinking of divine things is beyond our capacity without divine assistance; thus, despite the centrality of reason, belief is never a merely human operation. As he wrote elsewhere, "it is God who gave us even to believe" (nam et ut credamus, Deus dedit). Propositional truth comes from God, and then we use our will to "consent to the truth." Augustine thus made belief a partnership between will and intellect: intellect learns of the truth from God, will directs that knowledge toward proper ends, and the resultant belief then seeks yet more knowledge. Understanding grows as belief grows.
In On the Free Choice of the Will, for instance, Augustine argued that it is proper that "we want to know and understand what we believe." Of course, believing takes priority. His proof text was Isaiah 7:9 — a verse to which we shall return — which Augustine rendered as nisi credideritis, non intelligetis, "Unless you believe, you will not understand." But once we believe any "important question of theology," it is appropriate that we should then desire to understand it, according to Christ's promise,Seek, and ye shall find: "For what is believed without being known cannot be said to have been found, nor can anyone become capable of finding God, unless he has first believed what afterwards he is to know." In a sermon, Augustine debated between two rival claims: "I understand in order to believe" and "I believe in order to understand." The second was fundamental, according to Isaiah 7:9. But Augustine admitted that the first also held a grain of truth, because understanding, if already grounded in belief, can produce more belief. Those who believe just a little are enabled thereby to listen to preachers — like Augustine himself, delivering this sermon. Thus begins a chain reaction, for auditors are exhorted with reason, which produces more belief. Here Augustine turned to the text of Mark 9:24, "I believe, Lord, help my unbelief," the oxymoronic prayer of a man who has just enough belief to know he needs more.
Trying to understand Augustine in his own context is beyond our scope; what matters for the present argument is that, building upon Augustine, a rationalist strain in medieval theology stressed the partnership between belief and understanding. So, for instance, Anselm of Canterbury interpreted Augustine's credere ut intelligam — "believe in order to understand" — to mean that the highest purpose of belief is to open the credenda of Christianity to the intellect:
I do not endeavor, O Lord, to penetrate thy sublimity, for in no wise do I compare my understanding with that; but I long to understand in some degree thy truth, which my heart believes and loves. For I do not seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe in order to understand.
Likewise, in his De Incarnatione Verbi, Anselm suggested "that no Christian ought to question the truth of what the Catholic Church believes [credit]," but "rather, by holding constantly and unhesitatingly to this faith, by loving it and living according to it, he ought humbly, and as best he is able, to seek to discover the reason why it is true [quaerere rationem quomodo sit]." As Marcia Colish notes, while Anselm shared with Augustine a core epistemological concern — "the theological problem of speaking about God" — Anselm developed a new sense that the task of theology was not just to express the divine logos but to define it. Anselm's lifelong project to prove the rationality of Christian belief — that the trinity is theologically necessary, that atonement is a reasonable economy of exchange, and that logically the greatest thing that can be conceived must exist — is not a claim that Christianity can be independently derived from reason. Rather, given belief in revelation, we may approach God most effectively through our reason. Belief is not only an act of faith, it is also a series of propositions to be understood, creating for Anselm what Virginie Greene calls "a virtuous circle in which faith and intelligence feed one another."
A similar maneuver can be found a generation later in a treatise on the trinity by the French Augustinian, Richard of St. Victor. Richard admitted that "some of the things which we are commanded to believe appear to be not only above reason, but also contrary to reason"; in these things "we are more accustomed to rely on faith than on reasoning, on authority rather than argumentation, according to that saying of the prophet: unless you believe, you will not understand." But, Richard argued, Isaiah did not mean that understanding is impossible, he meant only that it is available "conditionally" to the faithful. In particular, Richard deployed the theological commonplace that divine things are eternal, unchanging, and "entirely unable not to be." And, he argued in a crucial twist, "it is entirely impossible for any necessary being to lack a necessary reason." In other words, God and his will are knowable through reason: "It will be our intention in this work concerning those things which we believe [credimus], to adduce not only credible [probabiles] reasons but also necessary ones, and to preserve the teaching of our faith by clarification and explanation of the truth. For I believe without a doubt that although they may be hidden from our efforts for a while, there is no absence not only of probable but also of necessary arguments for the explanation of anything that has necessary being." This argument, elaborating upon Anselm's concepts of necessity and fides quaerens intellectum, is as close as we are likely to find to a union of belief and reason.
A more aggressive variety of rationalism can be found in Ramon Llull, a Majorcan theologian who learned Arabic in order to convert Muslims in Spain and North Africa around the turn of the fourteenth century. Llull denounced his predecessor, Ramon Martí, who had supposedly used reason to convince the King of Tunis that Islam was false, but when the king asked him to prove the truth of Christianity, he responded that it could not be proved —"It is simply necessary to believe." Llull, by contrast, insisted that he could indeed prove the truth of Christianity, because the principle of "necessary reasons" held that all truths, both spiritual and philosophical, must align together. By this logic, Llull offered the remarkable argument that Arab philosophers were really Christians rather than Muslims, because to be a philosopher is to distinguish truth from falsehood: "Educated Saracens do not believe that Mohammed is a prophet, because in the Quran, which contains their law, they find many things incompatible with holiness and true prophecy." Here we see the potential violence of a rationalism in which only those who believe properly can be said to understand, and understanding is presumed to be the path to Christian belief.
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If Augustine established the rationalist uses of belief, other Church Fathers bequeathed to the Middle Ages a very different perspective, whose heirs willfully trampled the fences Augustine had built. Most importantly, an alternative tradition, originating in opposition to Gnostic rationalists, stressed that Christian belief was an alternative to understanding, and that Christianity required believing without or against reason and evidence. Tertullian, a bitter polemicist against the Gnostics, argued in his second-century De Carne Christi that the implausible and seemingly oxymoronic death of the incarnated God should be believed precisely "because it is absurd": prorsus credibile est, quia ineptum est. Likewise, his more restrained successor Lactantius, advisor to the first Christian Emperor Constantine, expanded upon an argument in Cicero's On the Nature of the Gods: "If you believe, why then do you require a reason, which may have the effect of causing you not to believe? But if you require a reason, and think that the subject demands inquiry, then you do not believe; for you make inquiry with this view, that you may follow it when you have ascertained it." Two centuries later, Pseudo-Dionysius birthed a long tradition of apophatic or negative theology, insisting that God so transcends even the categories of our thought that true belief is as much about unknowing as knowing. Pope Gregory the Great in the sixth century, considering the unbelief of Doubting Thomas, wrote, "If God's method of operating is understood through our reason, then it is no longer something at which we marvel. Neither does our faith have any value, if human reason furnishes it with experimental proof." As Glenn Most has shown, this became the standard interpretation of Christ's words to Doubting Thomas — "Blessed are those that have not seen, and yet believe" — in the Latin West: "proof that we should not try too hard to understand." Christ's words functioned as a message for future generations who, unable to see Christ's resurrection for themselves, would have to believe the reports of witnesses without question.
Following Gregory and other patristic theologians, belief was taken in some quarters to be authentic only when it clashed with reason. Here the most influential voice was William of Auvergne, Bishop of Paris from 1228 to 1249, whose work De Fide insisted that belief is virtuous when we believe what appears to be untrue. Our natural propensity to believe the evidence of the senses is not the same thing as authentic Christian belief: "Just as it is one thing to love someone because of his merit ... and something else [to love] from the virtue of loving, so it is one thing to believe on the basis of probability or evidence, and something else to believe from the virtue of believing itself." Belief that requires proof is an injured faculty, like a person who needs a cane to walk. But propping belief with reason is not only unnecessary, it is actually misguided, even monstrous, because the knowledge of faith is far stronger and more certain than the knowledge of the intellect: belief perceives the deep, inner essence of the universe, rather than the mere outward shadows of worldly epistemology. For belief to rely upon evidence is thus a perversion of divine order.
This impulse found its fullest expression in the mystical tradition, that element of Christianity that involves, in the words of Bernard McGinn, "the preparation for, the consciousness of, and the reaction to what can be described as the immediate or direct presence of God." A whole host of practices or technologies were developed in the Middle Ages to unite with God or come directly into the divine presence, ranging from asceticism and mortification on one side of the spectrum, to meditation and contemplative exercises on the other. Belief was not always a central category for mystics: when Francis of Assisi received his stigmata, for instance, it was not "belief" but devotion that drove the nails into his flesh in the midst of a forty-day fast. Nonetheless, we can find in medieval mystical writings some of the most eloquent claims that belief is a radical alternative to understanding.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "The Birth of Modern Belief"
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