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By ThoughtCo
Updated March 21, 2018
Faith is the first of the three theological virtues; the other two are hope and charity (or love). Unlike the cardinal virtues, which can be practiced by anyone, the theological virtues are gifts of God through grace. Like all other virtues, the theological virtues are habits; the practice of the virtues strengthens them. Because they aim at a supernatural end, however—that is, they have God as "their immediate and proper object" (in the words of the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1913)—the theological virtues must be supernaturally infused into the soul. Thus faith is not something that one can simply begin to practice, but something beyond our nature. We can open ourselves to the gift of faith through right action—through, for instance, the practice of the cardinal virtues and the exercise of right reason—but without the action of God, faith will never come to reside in our soul.
What the Theological Virtue of Faith Is Not
Most of the time when people use the word faith, they mean something other than the theological virtue. The Oxford American Dictionary presents as its first definition "complete trust or confidence in someone or something," and offers "one's faith in politicians" as an example. Most people understand instinctively that faith in politicians is an entirely different thing from faith in God. But the use of the same word tends to muddy the waters and to reduce the theological virtue of faith in the eyes of nonbelievers to nothing more than a belief that is strong, and in their minds irrationally, held. Thus faith is opposed, in the popular understanding, to reason; the latter, it is said, demands evidence, while the former is characterized by the willing acceptance of things for which there is no rational evidence.
Faith Is the Perfection of the Intellect
In the Christian understanding, however, faith and reason are not opposed but complementary. Faith, the Catholic Encyclopedia notes, is the virtue "by which the intellect is perfected by a supernatural light," allowing the intellect to assent "firmly to the supernatural truths of Revelation." Faith is, as Saint Paul says in the Letter to the Hebrews, "the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen" (Hebrews 11:1). It is, in other words, a form of knowledge that extends beyond the natural limits of our intellect, to help us grasp the truths of divine revelation, truths that we cannot arrive at purely by the aid of natural reason.
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