Credenza

CREDENZA. - In its general and broadest meaning, to believe is to accept a proposition, a fact, a doctrine, not on account of their intrinsic evidence, but on account of the authority of a witness, or on account of the force of motives of an affective and sentimental order. Belief, therefore, is formally an intellectual assent, but other psychological coefficients converge in it, since the intrinsic motive that determines it, namely trust in the witness, is not a purely cognitive modality, but also an affective-volitional disposition. For this reason belief is ordinarily a complex psychological situation in which the predominant element is of an intellectual order, but the will is also engaged, often the feelings, practical interest, and at times, as in the case of religious faith, the whole personality. The opposition, today fairly frequent, between belief and certainty of evidence, is legitimate insofar as the motive of the intellectual assent is formally different in them, but it is not necessary if it refers to the persuasion of this assent, which can be most firm even in faith, when the motives of credibility are certain and evident (cf. St. Thomas, De verit., 14, 1, ad 7).

In certain modern philosophical currents, belief is presented as the condition and the universal motive of certainty. Even before E. Kant, D. Hume had ascribed certainties of fundamental metaphysical value, first of all causality, to a persuasion of a purely psychological order, and T. Reid had universally appealed to a trust of common sense. Kant, after having denied to pure reason the possibility of metaphysical knowledge, demanded from faith (a faith still conscious, founded upon the demands of morality and duty) the certainty of the supreme religious and moral truths. Subsequently F. E. Jacobi placed the knowledge of the true, the beautiful and the good in an intimate spiritual feeling in which we place our trust, and T. Jouffroy proclaimed that "believing is a universal necessity," and that, in the final analysis, "an act of blind but irresistible faith is the foundation of every persuasion." The neo-criticism of C. Renouvier affirms that objective evidence alone is never sufficient to generate certainty, but at the basis of every affirmation there are postulates which feeling and will surmount by an act of faith. So think, among others, G. Hamilton, Goblot, E. Lotze. A similar attitude was adopted more recently by M. A. Balfour, who invites us to take as our norm the deep and impulsive instincts of our soul, and to believe in authority, in morality, in free will, in God; and by F. Brunetière, who appeals to Christianity, as the maker of the world's civilization, as a sure norm of our faith.

All these forms, and others even more recent, of dogmatism, fideism and mysticism, serve to confirm the importance and the large place that belief and faith undoubtedly have in human knowledge. But the claim to make belief the "primum philosophicum," and to reduce all human knowledge to its common denominator, is altogether unjustified both in fact and in principle. There are not a few truths, both of the common and of the philosophical order, which determine thought solely by virtue of their objective necessity that opens to the light of the intellect. To speak of a faith or trust in the value of our faculties, to which we must in the end entrust ourselves, is justified in relation to the senses, inferior forms of knowledge and predominantly passive functions, incapable of mediating and controlling themselves, but it does not hold for the intellect, which finds itself again in the light of its self-conscious spirituality, and, finding itself again, also knows how to discern in the immutable values of the true the objective conditions that determine it in its functions and in its acts. V. FEDE.

Ugo Viglino