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Rémi Brague and this Extraordinary Use of ‘Believe’

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Andrew Lomas
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Abstract

Rémi Brague in On the God of the Christians gives a defence of the validity of faith against modern presumption that science supplies the model for all knowledge. Brague argues that since God is superpersonal, faith must know God in the way we know persons. Personal knowledge requires the connaturality of a loving will: hence faith in God requires love, utterly unlike any scientific knowledge. In criticism, it is suggested that love is essentially motivated by its object's value, and so presupposes knowledge of the object. What is crucial in faith is not the love the subject brings but the demands of a supremely valuable reality. Since faith is, in the broadest sense, experiential, it has points of contact with scientific rationality.

Keywords

Rémi BragueFaith and scientific knowledgeConnatural knowledgeIntentionality of loveBalthasar's aesthetic analogy
Type
Original Article
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 100 , Issue 1085 , January 2019 , pp. 43 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © 2017 Provincial Council of the English Province of the Order of Preachers

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References

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