Faith, even as a mere possibility, appears threatening. It appears threatening because it involves the basic assumption that no one is sufficient to understand reality, to realize his own happiness, or to supply a cause for the fact of his existence. It relativizes the internal subjectivity which to each person is the most precious proof of their own existence. Yet the thirst to respond to those fundamental questions which reason itself feels so keenly—What is real? What constitutes the happiness of man? Why is there something rather than nothing?—nevertheless seems to imply that their answers lie somehow at the frontiers of the powers of reason.
How might we show this? A moment ago, a certain path of thought alighted in my mind which would demonstrate neatly, if also rather hurriedly, the necessity of faith as something beyond reason, of faith as something that reason can verify and validate but never usurp. It takes as its starting point two fundamental principles of rational thought, namely, the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of sufficient reason. The first states that something cannot be so and not-so in the same way and at the same time; the second that whenever something is so or not-so, it must be because of some reason. Nothing can both be and not be, and nothing can be without any reason. These principles cannot be proven: they are the foundation of reason’s ability to question the world and thus the basic criteria for what is absurd and what is not. That the second is no longer entirely credible on its own is the sign of the insanity of our culture and the weakness of its philosophy.
Suppose we were to try to answer the third question above, Why is there something rather than nothing? Ask yourself this: can something be the cause of its own existence? If something were the cause of its own existence, it would have to be present before it existed so that it could accomplish the act of creating itself. But if something existed before itself, then at that time it would be true both that the thing existed and did not exist, which is absurd. Therefore it is obvious that nothing can be the cause of its own existence. Reason demands an explanation for the existence of everything; and now we see that everything, individually and as a whole, must be explained by something else.
It is evident, therefore, not only that there must be a reasonable explanation for the existence of everything but also that everything is insufficient to explain its existence. Even if each thing caused something else, the universe as a whole would still lack an explanation, a cause. Even if it appears to be true that I cause the chair, and the chair causes the table, and the table causes my book, and my book causes me, since the causal chain cannot help being circular it does not actually provide a solution. Because of the principle of non-contradiction, then, whatever explains the existence of everything that exists must not be itself a caused thing.
Whatever that sufficient cause is or turns out to be, we can call it existence itself; since if it does not receive existence from some other thing as its cause, but is nevertheless the cause of the existence of everything else, it must receive existence from itself. But it cannot receive existence from itself as its own cause, since nothing could be more absurd than that; and the only other way something can have existence without receiving it is simply to be existence. It causes existence by being existence.
Keeping in mind that we are attempting to conduct a demonstration according to the tools available to reason based on reason’s most fundamental principle, what else can we say about this je-ne-sais-quoi which we are calling existence itself? Clearly it is uncaused, since it is both its own existence and the foundation of the existence of all other things. But the more I look for it the less I find it. In fact, as I search for it I find that it is very far from me. It is immediately clear that it is none of the things with which I am already familiar, since I have never met or experienced a thing that did not depend in some way on something besides itself for existence. In other words, I have never come across anything in this world which could not possibly lose its existence. Even our sun is capable of ceasing to exist, since its size and brilliance are both contingent on certain chemical reactions in its core. Therefore whatever sort of thing existence itself might be, and whatever else I may come to know about it, I should not look for it among the things that have come to be or can cease being. This means that, whatever this cause is that we are thinking about, we can call it other than the universe.
Can existence itself be a thought? Perhaps; though it should be noted that this would imply a mind (since no thought can exist except in a mind), and this mind would also have to have the same identity as the thought, namely that it is existence itself. It would be absurd for an uncaused thought to exist in a caused mind: if the thought is non-contingent, the mind must also be so.
However, if existence itself is also other than the universe, how can reason come to know it? For now reason by its own necessity has pushed the object of its greatest desire out of reach! What could be more magnificent to know than the original and sufficient reason for all things—not only the reason behind the mystery of joy and sorrow, but also the reason behind the mystery of why there is something rather than nothing, the reason why you and I exist? But that is precisely what is impossible to know. It has become somewhat clear that the first cause exists, and it is already clear to everyone what that first cause has done (everything), but it is still a mystery what that first cause is itself. To call it existence itself provides a name, but truly not a comprehensible name.
Why cannot reason investigate more into the nature and identity of this thing which provides existence for everything? Because if everything receives all being, all goodness, all power, all truth from this thing, existence itself, then existence itself must be understood to have all being, all goodness, all power, and all truth in a pre-eminent way (otherwise it could never be the foundation of those things to everything in the universe). But now we have come to the end of reason, the insuperable difficulty: for now if reason tells us that everything that exists receives everything it is from existence itself, then none of the things that we know how to describe or name are at all similar to existence itself. Every name is the name of an effect, every nature the identity of a contingent being. For that most precious, most desirable, most reasonable, most important thing, existence itself, whatever it is, there is no name, no reality, no knowledge, no relationship that is known or knowable by reason which comes close. Because it is totally other, it is total mystery. This is the furthest that reason can reach. This is the domain of faith. We have arrived, by this brief philosophical overview, at the threat that faith appears to make to reason. Faith testifies that not all that is true is accessible to reason, and that therefore there is something that it cannot investigate or know. Since reason wants to be its own criterion of truth, this seems to be a threat; but since reason itself makes its own inability to penetrate the mystery of existence itself very obvious, faith is the defining boundary of reason, not a threat against it. If faith receives from beyond what is knowable some ray of light that makes our situation more clear, reason can accept it and must verify it, but just as the basic position of faith must be relative to what is knowable by reason in order for it to be legitimate, so reason is defined by the frontier of what is knowable by faith alone (that is, by some divine gift). And so faith speaks of the God beyond all being, and reason rejoices to hear of Him at last.
