DHARMARAM VIDYA KSHETRAM

Pontifical Athenaeum of Philosophy, Theology, and Canon Law

TO BE IN THE TRUTH

Dain K. Philip
Reg. No. 2000215

An Assignment on Philosophy of God

Bengaluru
September 2021
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Summary of the chapter ‘To Be in The Truth’ in the book ‘God or Nothing’ by
Cardinal Sarah on an interview with Nicolas Diat.

The way Cardinal Sarah define ‘Faith’

In fact, faith is always a Paschal journey in search of the Father's will, in line with Abraham's
fidelity and obedience even to the altar on which he was to sacrifice his son, Isaac. We are the
children of Abraham, our father in faith, and we belong to the lines of the spiritual descendants
of the people of the Exodus, traveling through the desert. Since Abraham had to agree to
sacrifice his son Isaac, the son of the promise, faith is an act that makes us radically different.
Saint Paul defines faith as obedience to the Father (Rom 16:25). It is important to understand
that faith is a covenant of love that causes us to become one and the same being with the
beloved person. This loving sentiment is based on a mutual faith that gives credit to the other
and counts on his fidelity in the future. In his book The Sign of Jonas, Thomas Merton
wondered whether it was possible to declare that by Love, the soul receives the very ‘form’ of
God. In the language of Saint Bernard, this form, which we could associate with a divine
likeness, is the identity for which we are created. The man who believes agrees, like Abraham,
to become the prisoner of the invisible God; he agrees to let the Father possess him in obedient
listening, peacefulness of heart, and the lights of his intellect. In faith and love, God grows in
me and lifts me up to him. We place our faith in Jesus Christ. To put it differently, I would say
that faith is adherence to a word that is known to come from a place beyond and higher than
me. Faith consists of willing what God wills, loving what God loves, even if that leads us to
the Cross. But faith is also a gift from God, because man always responds freely to the call of
heaven. What he knows he knows only in the half-light of evening, walking with the help of a
cognitio vespertina and not yet of a cognitio matutina, a knowledge of clear vision, according
to the beautiful terminology of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas.

Interpretation of ‘Hope’ by Cardinal Sarah.

“We rejoice in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance, and endurance
produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us, because
God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us”
(Rom 5:1-5). Since our faith and our hope rest in God, we have nothing to fear. In his encyclical
Spe salvi, Benedict XVI wrote brilliantly about hope: ‘Hope, in fact, is a key word in Biblical
faith, so much so that in several passages the words ‘faith’ and ‘hope’ seem interchangeable.
Thus the Letter to the Hebrews closely links the fullness of faith to the confession of our hope
without wavering. The one who has hope lives differently; the one who hopes has been granted
the gift of a new life. Of course, he knew they had gods, he knew they had a religion, but their
gods had proved questionable, and no hope emerged from their contradictory myths.

Who is this God of forgiveness?

“Therefore my heart yearns for him; I will surely have mercy on him, says the Lord” (Jer
31:20). The prophet Isaiah puts it this way: God has carved us on the palms of his hands. The
Father surpasses and overwhelms the tenderness of all the mothers in the world: “Can a woman
forget her sucking child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb? Even
these may forget, yet I will not forget you. The Book of Jonah declares that this God is a
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gracious God and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in mercy," (Jon 4: 2). God is good
and beautiful, and his creatures are all in his image; Genesis, with its account of the beginning
of the world, is brilliantly filled with God's beauty. God’s beauty, which is reflected in creation
but can be destroyed by man, can always be reborn thanks to forgiveness. If man rejects
forgiveness, he detaches himself from God and falls into a subhuman life dominated by
ugliness, lying, and evil. As for Jeremiah, he reveals to us a God trembling with tenderness for
Ephraim: “Is Ephraim my dear Son? Is he my darling child? For as often as I speak against
him, I do remember him still.”

‘Contemplation’ for Cardinal Sarah

Jesus turns to Andrew and John, who have asked him: “Rabbi, where are you staying?” And
he answers: “Come and see.” Saint Thomas thus gives a mystical sense to words that actually
mean that only an encounter and personal experience can enable us to know Christ. We
ceaselessly need to hear the noise of the world: today logorrhoea is a sort of imperative, and
silence is considered a failure.... Contemplation is a precious moment in the encounter between
man and God. One day, the saintly Cure asked him, “What are you doing there, dear friend?”
He replied, “I look at him, and he looks at me.” The little peasant said nothing, because he had
no need to speak in order to tell Christ that he loved him; in return, he had no need of any sign
from the Son of God, because he knew that he was truly loved. Christ’s sacred humanity is
always the way by which to arrive at God: to allow him to speak in the silence, before the
Blessed Sacrament, looking at a crucifix, in the presence of a sick person who is another Christ,
Christ himself. Thus contemplation is the exact opposite of practical activity; by definition, it
is the most important moment in human life. Man absolutely needs God, as a new-born needs
his mother. The greater the wisdom, the more important is the place in life occupied by
contemplation. John Paul Il exhorted Christians to be “contemplatives in action.” In the
commentary on the Gospel of John by Saint Thomas Aquinas, there is a particularly
illuminating passage. For Saint Thomas, practically speaking, there is no contradiction between
contemplation and activity.

Bibliography

Sarah, Robert. God or Nothing: A Conversation on Faith with Nicolas Diat. San Francisco,
Ignatius Press, 2015.