The World of Religions, November-December 2007 —
Mother Teresa doubted the existence of God. For decades, she felt that heaven was empty. This revelation was shocking. The fact seems astonishing given the constant references she made to God. Yet doubt is not the negation of God—it is a questioning—and faith is not certainty. Certainty is confused with conviction. Certainty comes from indisputable tangible 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 soft opinion or an uncritical heritage; for others, it resembles a more or less strong inner conviction. But, in any case, it cannot be a tangible or rational certainty: no one will ever have certain proof of the existence of God. Believing is not knowing. Believers and non-believers will always have excellent arguments to explain whether God exists or not: neither will ever prove anything. As Kant showed, 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 calling themselves agnostic: they acknowledge that they have no definitive conviction on this question.
Since it is based neither on tangible evidence (God is invisible) nor on objective knowledge, faith necessarily implies doubt. And what appears paradoxical, but is entirely logical, is that this doubt is proportionate to the intensity of the faith itself. A believer who adheres weakly to the existence of God will more rarely be overcome by doubts; neither his faith nor his doubts will turn his life upside down. Conversely, a believer who has lived intense, luminous moments of faith, or even who has staked his entire life on faith like Mother Teresa, will end up feeling the absence of God as terribly painful. Doubt will become an existential test. This is what the great mystics, like Thérèse of Lisieux or John of the Cross, experience and describe when they speak of "the dark night" of the soul, where all interior lights are extinguished, leaving the believer in the most naked faith because he 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 in order to lead them further along the path to the perfection of love. This is a good theological explanation. From a rational point of view external to faith, one can very well explain this crisis by the simple fact that the believer can never have certainties, objective knowledge, about what founds the object of his faith, and he necessarily comes to question himself. The intensity of his doubt will be in proportion to the existential importance of his faith.
There are certainly very committed, very religious believers who claim to never experience doubt: fundamentalists. Better still, they make doubt a diabolical phenomenon. For them, to doubt is to fail, to betray, to sink into chaos. Because they wrongly elevate faith to certainty, they internally and socially forbid themselves from doubting. The repression of doubt leads to all sorts of tensions: intolerance, ritual pointillism, doctrinal rigidity, demonization of unbelievers, fanaticism sometimes going as far as murderous violence. Fundamentalists of all religions are similar 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 live and to express, because her faith was animated by love. Fundamentalists will never welcome or admit their own people, because their faith is based on fear. And fear prohibits doubt.
PS: I am delighted that Christian Bobin has joined our columnists.