What is Faith? from (Cardinal Ratzinger ) Pope Benedict XVI

Faith is one of the capacities of man which set him apart from the rest of creation. Because man (homo sapiens) can grow in wisdom, knowledge, and understanding, he can also be convinced that something is a truth or a falsity. He can believe. Generally, when we speak of knowing something, we mean we are certain of its truth. We have assented to it. In many cases, this certainty is gained through a convincing experience, or set thereof, or by some scientific demonstration, which presents enough evidence to compel us into assent. However, faith must always be a free response of the will, not a forced reaction to evidence. Therefore, the assent of the believer occurs differently in the structure of faith, than assent to other forms of knowledge.

A Concise Dictionary of Theology refers to three different types of assent, taking its distinctions from John Henry Cardinal Newman. Many of today’s Christians “believe” with notional assent, meaning they accept the abstract ideas of the Truth, but without fully being touched and changed by it, or, put more practically, without living according to the Truth. However, the belief of true faith requires “full assent to truth, especially concrete rather than abstract truths”. This real assent is the assent of faith which the early Christians claimed when they stated “I believe.”

When the Church fathers composed their statement of faith, they used the Latin word credo, “I believe.” Etymologically credo comes from the Latin words cor (heart) and do (to give). Therefore, when they stated their belief in Jesus as Christ, they were giving their heart to him. Moreover, biblically, the word for heart corresponds with what St. Thomas Aquinas refers to as the will. In other words, the ancient Christians testified that in believing in Jesus, they were giving their hearts, their wills, indeed their entire selves, to him, God enfleshed. But from what does this assent of faith come? To what exactly are we assenting?

Contrary to scientific knowledge or other types of certainty, the assent of faith comes from a personal encounter with God. He reveals himself to us, and we respond with the assent of faith. “Through being touched in this way, the will knows that even what is still not ‘clear’ to reason is true” and it assents to faith in God. “When the heart comes into contact with God’s Logos, with the Word who became man, this inmost point of his existence is being touched.” Or, put another way, “just as a person becomes certain of another’s love without being able to subject it to methods of scientific experiment, so in the contact between God and man there is a certainty of a quite different kind from the certainty of objectivizing thought.”