A thing may be incredible and still be true; sometimes it is incredible because it is true. Faith is total reliance upon God’s omnipotent goodness. And many infidels but disbelieve the least incredible things; and many bigots reject the most obvious. Love is faith, and faith, like a gathered flower, will rootlessly live on. Faith is belief in revealed truths. Ultimately the object of faith is God himself, who is not, however, known by the human mind in his divine simplicity but only discursively and by means of propositions. These revealed truths are authoritatively presented in the creeds. Thus, to have faith means to believe in the articles of faith summarized in the creedal affirmations of the church. Faith stands between knowledge (Scientia) and opinion. As a trusting and confident attitude toward God, faith (fiducia) may be compared with trust in one’s fellow human beings. Faith is firm and free from all hesitations. Some truths may be objects of faith to one person and of knowledge to another. In particular, some of the preliminary articles of faith—such as the existence, unity, and incorporeality of God—are capable of being philosophically demonstrated and are revealed as objects of faith only for the sake of those many who are unable to follow the path of abstract reasoning. Those matters which are of faith absolutely are above reason—incapable of being arrived at by human reasoning, however expert. #RyanPhillippe 1 of 8

Truth of faith is above reason. At the end of the year we turn with eagerness to all that God has for the future, and yet anxiety is apt to arise when we remember our yesterdays. However, God is the God of our yesterdays, and He allows the memory of them to turn to the past into a ministry of spiritual growth for our future. God reminds us of the past to protect us from a very shallow security in the present. This is an area where faith and reason overlap, since the basic theological propositions—those of natural theology—are held to be both demonstrable and revealed. Faith is an act of the intellect assenting to divine truth at the command of the will moved by the grace of God. That is to say, whereas in knowledge the intellect is moved to assent by the object itself, known either directly or by demonstrative reasoning, in faith the intellect is moved to assent through an act of choice, whereby it turns voluntarily to one side rather than to the other. Faith does not, however, represent an arbitrary or unmotivated decision. It is a response, under influence of divine grace, to certain external evidences, particularly miracles. As such, it is sufficiently determined by evidence to be rational and yet sufficiently undetermined and free to be meritorious. #RyanPhillippe 2 of 8

All of God’s people are ordinary people who have been made extraordinary by the purpose He has given them. Faith is defined by the first Vatican Council (1870) as a supernatural virtue, by which, guided and assisted by divine grace, we hold true as what God has revealed, because we have perceived its intrinsic truth by our reason but because of the authority of God who can neither deceive nor be deceived. Unless we have the right purpose intellectually in our minds and lovingly in our hearts, we will very quickly be diverted from being useful to God. We are not workers for God by choice. Many people deliberately choose to be workers, but they have no purpose of God’s almighty grace of His mighty Word in them. Let Him have His way. Be careful that you vigorously maintain God’s perspective, and remember that it must be done every day, little by little. Do not think on a finite level. No outside power can touch the proper perspective. The Constitution on Faith provokes a query, for faith, characterized as a belief in various truths on divine authority presupposes a knowledge both that God exists and that he has revealed the propositions in question. The whole structure of belief rests originally upon the historical evidences of miracles and others manifestations of divine activity which do not establish the articles of faith themselves, but rather the fact that the omniscient God has revealed these articles. #RyanPhillippe 3 of 8

The human’s need for perfection is the fulfillment of both our intellectual and our emotional powers, which indeed are not existentially separate. The more it is pleasing, liberating, and intrinsically human the closer we are to the culmination of the ethical life—the life devoted to freedom of the intellect—and this is found in the intellectual love of God. One must lose oneself in order to find oneself, but in so doing, one finds that what one really has discovered is God. Love and charity is practiced and through love we shall have harmony and through harmony, peace, as potent a force in our lives as it has ever been before. However, we have the right to choose for ourselves between the risk of falling into error by adopting a faith which may turn out to be false, and this risk of missing our highest good by failing to adopt a faith which may turn out to be true. This hypothesis refers specially to a personal God; and in our dealings with a cosmic Thou, as with our fellow humans, a venture of faith on our part may be necessary if we are to establish any beneficial relationship. To respond as a person and to another person involves showing a certain trustfulness and willingness to believe something good about someone, rather than something bad, when you have the possibility of doing either and thereby anticipate proof and verification. #RyanPhillippe 4 of 8

It may be that God can or will disclose himself only to one who shows such an initial faith and is willing to venture in trust beyond what has been established by scientific proof or philosophical demonstration. Stated differently, it is possible that in order to gain the religious knowledge upon which our personal good depends, we must give rein to our passional desire to believe. We cannot reasonably be required to adopt a methodology which would prohibit us from finding this good: for a rule of thinking which would absolutely prevent me from acknowledging certain kinds of truths if those kinds of truth were really there, would be an irrational rule. There is nothing to make it significantly more probable either that there is or that there is not a God; and in such a situation, we are entitled to follow our desires. In social situations, our willingness to trust someone in advance of proof of his trustworthiness may help to make him trustworthy but does not bring him into existence, and faith in the existence of a divine creator of the Universe cannot bring such a being into existence. We shall act, then, only upon live options which we should most like to be true. The right to believe argument stands to reveal an invitation to wishful thinking. #RyanPhillippe 5 of 8

I am aware of God acting toward me in and through events in the World around me, so that at all times I am having to do with God and God with me. In every advance from sense data to the perception of an ordered World or from the projection of a scientific hypothesis to its observational verification, as in every successful voyage of discovery or in the invention of some new kind of machinery, there must be not only an act of theorizing or of insight but also a sustained effort of will which carries the operation through to completion. In both these respects religious cognition shares a common structure with knowledge in the sciences and in person life. It is direct awareness of God, with its own assurance. And not merely in works, but also in faith, has God preserved the will of humans free and under his own control. God is willing to appear openly to those who seek him with all their hearts, and to be hidden from those who flee from him with all of their hearts, he so regulates the knowledge of himself that he has given signs of himself, visible to those who seek him, and not to those who seek him not. #RyanPhillippe 6 of 8

God having created human beings as personal, always acts toward him in ways which respect and preserve man’s freedom and responsibility. For this reason, God does not reveal himself to man in his unveiled glory, for in a direct, unmediated awareness of infinite perfection of man’s frail moral autonomy would be destroyed. Therefore, the divine presence is always mediated through the events and circumstances of a World which God has created to be a relatively independent sphere of interaction with his human creatures. Human personal autonomy is protected by the fact that one can become conscious of God’s activity towards one only by an uncompelled response of faith. Thus, humans are not only free to obey or disobey God; they also have the prior and more fundamental freedom to be conscious of God or to refrain from being conscious of him. Thus human mind displays a natural tendency to interpret its experience religiously, but this tendency acts only as an inclination which can be resisted and inhibited. Man is this cognitively free in relation to God. Faith is the correlate of freedom and is related to cognition as free will is to conation. Faith is a sense perception. We may look at the puzzle picture, seeing it now as a meaningless disarray of lines and now as the outline of, say, a human face. This is an instance of purely visual interpretation. #RyanPhillippe 7 of 8

 However, the concept of seeing can be expanded into the of experiencing as, referring to the way in which a situation is apprehended through our sensory apparatus as a whole is experienced as having some particular kind of significance; that is, as rendering appropriate some particular dispositional response on our part. We have seen how troubling mental conflicts, under a high need for closure, can lead us to seize and freeze, to grow servile or increasingly rigid. However, meditating the presence and activity of God and as speaking a divine imperative to them, we are undergoing a religious mode of experiencing as. Those events which we see as acts of God can also be seen as having proximate natural or human causes; and the person of Christ, seen by Christian faith as divine, is depicted in the New Testament as being at the same time genuinely human. The precondition of faith serves to protect human’s freedom and autonomy as a finite personal being in relations to the infinite God. However, once we lose sight of God, we begin to be reckless. However, have faith and God will do greater things that he has ever done before. I cherish your true love in my heart. I wish to always live in a dream, in which your image I can see. #RyanPhillippe 8 of 8