Faith Is a Virtue

One of our staff members read this from C.S. Lewis at a recent staff meeting.  It got me thinking about how naive we can be about what influences our reason.  We aren't purely rational beings.  There are virtues that support good reasoning that we have to nurture into habits.  We have to be conscious of what could influence our reasoning.  Faith is one of those virtues, as Lewis describes it here.  Faith isn't wishing.  It's an attitude of our will and mind that can be fostered or suppressed, and thus adversely influencing how we hold our beliefs.

Faith seems to be used by Christians in two sense or on two levels....In the first sense it means simply Believe - accepting or regarding as true the doctrines of Christianity.  That is fairly simple.  But what does puzzle people - at least it used to puzzle me - is the fact that Christians regard faith in this sense as a virtue.  I used to ask how on earth it can be a virtue - what is there moral or immoral about believing or not believing a set of statements?...What I did not see then - and a good many people do not see still - was this.  I was assuming that if the human mind once accepts a things as true it will automatically go on regarding it as true, until some real reason for reconsidering it turns up.  In fact, I was assuming that the human mind is completely ruled by reason.  But that is not so....

Faith, in the sense in which I am here using the word, is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.  For moods will change, whatever view your reason takes.  I know that by experience.  Now that I am a Christian I do have moods in which Christianity looks very improbably; but when I was an atheist I had moods in which Christianity looked terribly probable.  This rebellion of your moods against your real self is going to come anyway.  That is why Faith is such a necessary virtue:  unless you teach your moods "where they get off," you can never be either a sound Christian or even a sound atheist, but just a creature dithering to and fro, with its beliefs really dependent on the weather and the state of its digestion.  Consequently one must train the habit of Faith.

From Mere Christianity, p. 138-139.

Comments

[ToNy]

>> "Faith is the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods."

That's not the definition of faith!

Sounds more like the definition of "healthy skepticism".

[Ryan Mayer]

Then what is?

[Wanda Zippler]

I just can't see faith as a virtue, I need to see the verb attached to a subject before I can decide if it is a virtue or not.
I am a Christian, my husband is an atheist we both have loads of faith, but frequently he has faith in things that run completely contrary to what Christians believe. Is it a virtue for my husband to have faith the the thing inside a pregnant woman is not a human? If I were to ever get pregnant again our marriage would be over because I have faith it is a human, and his faith would tell him it was a disposable mass that he did not want. If faith was always a good thing it would not cause conflicts that would destroy a marriage.

[Ryan M]

Wanda- You and your husband must love one another very much to remain together despite having different views on very big questions! I'm glad you point out that ultimately faith must have an object (as does "choice", which is why for one to say they are "pro-choice" is grammatically incorrect). Faith is really trust. And trust has an object. In the sense Lewis is talking about, trust here is trust in the things you know to be true even when they don't "feel" true. In a relationship, having faith in someone is about trusting them even when it is not easy or when you maybe don't like them at the moment. So the object of faith is really truth.

[Wanda Zippler]

"Wanda- You and your husband must love one another very much to remain together despite having different views on very big questions!"
It isn't always easy. Some days love is a choice God says I have to make, and other days it is a gift God has given me.

[Ryan M]

ToNy- What then, is faith?

[ToNy]

beats me