Eje 1 - Aportes para un Plan Nacional de Educación .1 Pertinencia

John of the Cross never tires of saying, over and over again in different ways, that faith "is the habit of a

dark and

certain soul."

I have always thought of John as the great

doctor of faith

because if he is the master and guide on

spiritual paths, he is especially so on the nighttime paths of faith. Among the many thoughts that are developed in his books concerning this subject, the following words from his

Ascent of Mount Carmel

might be taken to be a synthesis of

those ideas:

Faith is the substance of things to be hoped for and these things are not manifest to the intellect, even though its consent to them is firm and

certain.

If they were manifest, there would be no faith. For though faith brings certitude to the intellect, it does not produce clarity, but only

darkness.

I will try to explain these two concepts that, like a backbone, constitute the essence of faith:

dark

and

certain .

... ... ...

This is called - using a complicated name - the

cognitive process.

The mystery of faith is taken from this.

Impressions and sensations of different objects enter the human mind through the channel of the senses. In reality, the mind is a filter or netting. Essentially, from each object detected by the senses, the mind takes that which the object is in itself, and also separates that which the object has in common to all other objects of its class. That is, it deduces a common idea of all objects and, as a conse­ quence, arrives at a universal. It is a task of

universalization.

Let us take a concrete example.

I see a chair here; there, I see another chair that is different from the first; there is another chair that does not look anything like the other two in design or size. And so

on. Fifty chairs of fifty different shapes enter my mind. Now the work of the mind begins. The mind puts aside the particular characteristics of the fifty chairs, or rather, of the images of the chairs, and picks out what is common to all fifty: a universal idea of chair. From now on, I will be able to recognize a chair.

Does the same thing happen in the process of knowing God? In truth, no. The Lord is not clothed in colors or smells, does not have measurement, cannot be appre­ hended by the senses. God cannot

enter

the laboratory of the mind and submit to analysis and classification. Because of this, God will never be an

object of the intellect,

because there is nothing in the mind that has not passed through the senses_. The Lord is an

object of faith.

Only faith can "understand" Him properly.

So then, God will never take part in our little game. He will always be

outside,

transcendental; He is

above

the normal processes of human knowledge. He is in another orbit. God is

something else.

I mean, God is not to be "understood" analytically because He will never be part of our gymnastics of syllo­ gisms, premises, and conclusions of induction and deduc­ tion. God is "understood" on one's knees: praising Him, welcoming Him, living Him. The "overtaking" of John of the Cross is not to be understood in the intellectual sense - that is not possible - but in the actual sense. To conquer (intellectually) God? In this sense, God is unassailable. The difficult and necessary thing is to be conquered

by

Him.

Because it is not possible to intellectually "overtake" Him, then God is

mystery.

This does not mean that He is

something mysterious,

but rather that He is inaccessible by

intellectual power: as the Bible says, we will never be able to look at Him face to face.

Henri de Lubac once wrote that in every sense, God is totally different. A process which brings us to other beings or other truths will not be able to bring us to Him, just as representations, sufficient for other beings, are not capable of representing Him.

Even after logic has demanded that we affirm that God exists, His mystery remains intact. Reason does not reach Him. Dialectic and representation cannot cross the thresh­ old.

But even before any dialectic or representation, our spirit affirms that He who might be reached by dialectic and representation is beyond all dialectic and represen­ tation.

And this affirmation, moving from darkness to light and from light to darkness, remains standing.

This beautiful concept of de Lubac's underlines the "gift" of faith before, here, and beyond all dialectic and representation. The true believer surrenders in darkness, and only then begins to understand the mystery - and certainty is born.

Saint Augustine in

Contra Adimantum

says:

"Do you think you know what God is? Do you think that you know what God is like? He is nothing you imagine, nothing your thought embraces. 0 God, You who are above every name, above all thought, beyond every idea and every value, 0 Living God."

Because of this, human words will never be "messen­ gers" of the real essence of God. Words carry and transmit images of the realities we live, hear, and feel. God, being out of reach of the senses, will never be understood by us in terms of our language. Every word referring to God will have to be in the negative: in-finite, in-visible, in-compre­ hensible, un-created, un-named ... Words cannot convey Him; that is, the Lord is greater than anything we can imagine, dream, desire. He truly is the In-comparable One. God is

understood

in faith. More than an intellectual object, He is the object of contemplation. It is very well to become involved in the things of God. But, originally, the act of faith consists in approaching "mystery" in the dark­ ness of night. John of the Cross says:

To attain union with God, a person should advance neither by understanding ... nor by feeling ... but by belief ... For God's being cannot be grasped by the intellect ... or any other sense ... The most that can be felt and tasted of God in this life is infinitely distant from God ...

In document INFORME FINAL DEL CONGRESO NACIONAL DE EDUCACIÓN ENRIQUETA COMPTE Y RIQUÉ (página 55-64)