The World of Religions, November-December 2007 —
Mother Teresa, therefore, doubted the existence of God. For decades, she felt that heaven was empty. This revelation was shocking. The fact seems astonishing given her constant references to God. Yet, doubt is not the denial of God—it is questioning—and faith is not certainty. Certainty and conviction are often confused. Certainty comes from indisputable sensory evidence (this cat is black) or from universal rational knowledge (the laws of science). Faith is an individual and subjective conviction. For some believers, it resembles a vague opinion or an unquestioned inheritance; for others, it is a more or less strong, deep-seated conviction. But, in any case, it cannot be a sensory or rational certainty: no one will ever have definitive proof of God's existence. Believing is not knowing. Believers and non-believers alike will always have excellent arguments to explain whether God exists or does not exist: none will ever prove anything. As Kant demonstrated, the order of reason and that of faith are of a different nature. Atheism and faith are matters of conviction, and more and more people in the West are indeed calling themselves agnostic: they acknowledge having no definitive conviction on this question.
Since it rests neither on sensory evidence (God is invisible) nor on objective knowledge, faith necessarily implies doubt. And what appears paradoxical, but is perfectly logical, is that this doubt is proportional to the intensity of faith itself. A believer who only weakly adheres to the existence of God will less frequently be beset by doubts; neither their faith nor their doubts will disrupt their life. Conversely, a believer who has experienced intense, luminous moments of faith, or even who has staked their entire life on faith like Mother Teresa, will eventually feel the absence of God as terribly painful. Doubt will become an existential ordeal. This is what the great mystics, such as Thérèse of Lisieux or John of the Cross, experience and describe when they speak of the "dark night" of the soul, where all inner lights are extinguished, leaving the believer in the most naked faith because it no longer has anything to rely on. John of the Cross explains that this is how God, by giving the impression of withdrawing, tests the heart of the faithful to lead them further along the path of perfect love. This is a sound theological explanation. From a rational perspective, external to faith, this crisis can easily be explained by the simple fact that the believer can never have certainty, objective knowledge, about the foundation of their faith, and they inevitably come to question it. The intensity of their doubt will be commensurate with the existential importance of their faith.
There are certainly very committed, very religious believers who claim never to experience doubt: the fundamentalists. Even worse, they consider doubt a diabolical phenomenon. For them, to doubt is to fail, to betray, to descend into chaos. Because they wrongly elevate faith to the status of certainty, they forbid themselves, both internally and socially, from doubting. The repression of doubt leads to all sorts of tensions: intolerance, ritualistic pedantry, doctrinal rigidity, demonization of non-believers, and fanaticism sometimes escalating to murderous violence. Fundamentalists of all religions are alike because they reject doubt, this dark side of faith, which is nevertheless its indispensable corollary. Mother Teresa acknowledged her doubts, however painful they were to experience and express, because her faith was animated by love. Fundamentalists will never welcome or admit their own doubts, because their faith is founded on fear. And fear forbids doubting.
PS: I am delighted to welcome Christian Bobin to our team of columnists.