Eric Gill (1882-1940) was an engraver, illustrator, sculptor and typographer. He was also an influential member of the Distributist movement and founder of a community of Catholic workmen, which combine the poverty of St. Francis and the rule of St. Dominic. In his book The Necessity of Belief (London: Faber & Faber, 1936) Gill gathers together "an impressive body of convergencies" to lead the reader "to admit the necessity of belief."
We can now proceed to argue the necessity of belief. And the necessity is a double one. It is not only necessary that men should be able to believe; it is also necessary that the should have something to believe in. Let us attack the first thing first. It is necessary to men that they should be able to believe.
We call a person 'matter of fact' when we mean that he accepts nothing except upon proof. It is rightly a term of reproach. Such a person is wanting in a faculty which other persons possess. But it is probable that no one is wholly incredulous. It is impossible for anyone to prove everything. Some people are more cautious than others, but no one can prove everything and believe nothing. On the lowest ground of human life such a state of mind would be impossible.
And when we come to examine the matter we find that even the evidence of our sense involves belief at the last. For I am not capable of proving with certain proof that the evidence of my sense is trustworthy. To see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to smell. How can I prove that what we seem to see, to hear, to touch, to taste, to smell is really what it seems to be, or is really there or anywhere at all? I am not asking anyone to deny the evidence of sense impressions or even to deny the validity of conclusions argued from that evidence. I am simply pointing out that it is ultimately by a kind of faith, by the use of the faculty of believing, that we accept the evidence of our senses, and that it is by another act of faith that we accept the conclusions of our arguments.
For it is not possible to prove the laws of thought, the law of contradiction and all the rest. Either thos elaws are true laws or they are not; we cannot prove them positively. And when we say that we are so constituted that we cannot doubt the laws of thought, we are saying that at least that elementary belief is a necessity. We must at least be able to believe that much. To be unable to accept the self-evident is absurd. We believe it to be absurd. We cannot prove it to be absurd, we can only believe it. It is no use arguing that unless a man accepts the self-evident he cannot hope to 'get on' and make money, or to live a decent life and see good days. For in such a case all argument is absurd and there is no meaning in meaning. Therefore, to start with, we start with an act of faith: belief in the self-evident is a necssity to man, and it is a necessity that he should have the ability to believe. The very ground of thought is unprovable, therefore, it we are to think, we must start by believing. The ability to believe is a necessity in the sense - sine qua nihil.
Fr. Martin D'Arcy (1888-1976) entered the Jesuit novitiate in 1906 and was ordained in 1921, having completed his studies at Oxford. Sent to teach at Stonyhurst, he returned to Oxford as Rector and Master of Campion Hall, before being appointed Provincial for England in 1945. Dismissed from the post five years later, he returned to a life of teaching and writing. Fr. D'Arcy is perhaps best known as one of the leading Catholic philosophers of his day and as an art collector. As a complement to Gill's work we present an extract from D'Arcy's The Nature of Belief (London: Sheed & Ward, 1931)
From belief through interpretation we can pass to another use of the term "belief", as something distinct from "vision"- this will be used from now onward, unless the context makes another sense clear: fides ex auditu; belief on another's word, on authority and written testimony. This implies that we have not the evidence directly before us, that we are not compelled by what we see. I do not say that this distinction is free from ambiguity- there are some who would maintain that an assertion about the future must be a belief, and that communicated information may, if the medium be pure, deserve the name "direct- but it will serve. We shall never be in a position to see the correct solution to the problems involved, if we prejudge the matter and assume that belief is necessarily a form of knowledge inferior to vision. It has been the fashion for some time to extol experience and decry belief, and the result, as we shall see, has been unfortunate. To counteract the effect of this fashion it is necessary to begin with an apologia for belief.
In any community of men and women, large or small, both belief and experience are necessary for the continuation of life. The well-being of civilization depends on a well-adjusted balance between these two; and therefore the plea for belief which follows must not be understood as an attack on experience as such. Obviously the end and consummation of human activity is vision and enjoyment, and Christianity with its promise of the Beatific Vision in the hereafter has no other purpose than to prepare man for that beatitude. It comes into conflict, indeed, with secular ambitions, but this conflict is caused not by a denial of experience, but in its teaching that, so far as the supreme ideal is concerned, we must live by faith in this present life. This faith is, of course, religious and supernatural, but what is said of the highest can be applied also to mundane beliefs. The majority of men have always lived under authority and taken their belief from others. It is their right and duty at times to question customs, laws, authority and beliefs, but it certainly is not normal or wholesome to question everything. There may be a few who in the full vigor of their extraordinary powers are capable of doing this, but the average man and woman have neither the capacity nor the time. The danger is that we may feed them false hopes of so doing. Two results generally follow, conceit and cheap sophistry, with an aftermath of skepticism. The false hopes are encouraged by those in responsible positions, with the best of intentions and the vaguest of principles. Whereas, it is their part to have clear conceptions of the end in view, its possibilities and consequences, they trust to a good will and the shibboleths of the day. The policy and outlook of men who are otherwise level-headed have been weakened by a romantic conception of human nature, a conception dangerous in its consequences and apt to foster a spirit of unreality and even hypocrisy at meetings and conferences where the welfare and destiny of civilization are discussed. I say "unreality" because the weaknesses of human nature are slurred over or ignored, and it is taken for granted that a modicum of education and freedom are a divinely discovered means of rescuing man from the temptation to do wrong, to pursue selfishly ambitions and to judge intemperately and foolishly. The unreality of this cannot, however, be hidden altogether, and that is why hypocrisy enters in. The gibe intended for the church-going businessman, that he kept his piety for Sundays and his impiety for weekdays, recoils on those who having excited undue expectations have to spend most of their time frustrating them.
The truth surely is that men are a compound of strength and weakness, and so various in character and talents that it is madness to demand of them all the same critical judgment on the questions which have troubled even the greatest intellects. We all start life with beliefs which we have learnt from others, and we all need a discipline to mould our character and our thought. Nor does this cease at some adult stage. We never cease to rely on community life and to lean on good friends, to give of the one talent which may be ours and to gain by the gifts and talents of others which we do not possess ourselves. We stand on the shoulders of the past and learn to the end of our lives from the accumulated experience of mankind. Socrates discovered wherein he was wise when he looked into himself and said that at least he knew he was ignorant. Such wisdom is allied with modesty, and if he did question all it was in no spirit of self-assertion, no joy of eristics. The sophists, on the other hand, show a love of questioning for its own sake, and take a pride in their own astuteness. They represent an extreme, no doubt; but the constant encouragement to all members of a community to think for themselves, to regard personal opinion and not truth as the end of education, to consider their own right to judge as equal to that of no matter whom- this has for result the production of a type which is not far removed from that of the sophist.
E I Watkin (1888-1981) was a convert and close associate of Eric Gill, with whom he founded the pacifist movement, Pax. He is best known for his historical, philosophical and religious writings, in particular on mysticism. The following is from The Balance of Truth (London: Hollis & Carter, 1943) a study of modern errors and the search for the triune Godhead.
The decline and fall of metaphysics since the Middle Ages has been due to a false epistemology, and its falsity has consisted in its partiality, in the refusal to admit as valid knowledge what does not belong to a favoured category of knowledge, what has not passed an epistemological tests imposed a priori. What is evident has been rejected because it cannot be provd by the sole criterion the critic will acept. The result has been philosophies true only to a portion of the total experience it is the province of philosophy to interpret. Consciousness has been declared the sole relaity. Matter- that is to say, the reality existing in time and space and quantitively measurable- has been declared the sole reality with equal confidence. Finally, when no evidence is accepted save the unit consciousness of the moment, isolated from its context, a complete scepticism is reached which denies the possibility of knowledge.
Against these and all other partialities we must accept the testimony of all forms of experience- that is, of all human contacts with reality, of every category and at every level. On examination these contacts are found to be intuitions of truth. Some are clear but abstract- pre-eminently the clearest and most abstract intuitions, the apprehensions of measurable quantity of which the positive sciences rest. Others are concrete but obscure. Such as intuitions of moral value, of beauty, and fater a different fashion of God.
Others, again, are both abstract and obscure. Such are the metaphysical intuitions of being, visions of an intelligence focused on the remote depths of what is at once closest and most distant; closest on its surface, most distant in its centre- namely, being as such. It is, in fact, impossible to establish a rigid line of demarcation between dim and concrete intuitions of truth and those clear and abstract intuitions to which belong the conclusions of scientific demonstration. I term these intuitions dim or obscure because they cannot be rigorously defined and their content demonstrated in terms of the definite apprehensions proper to the positive sciences. But they can be equally cogent and powerful. Their obscurity is neither weakness nor uncertainty.
This is shown by the correlation between aesthetic beauty perceived by aesthetic intuition and embodied in works of art, and harmonious mathematical forms and relations. The mass-and-line analysis of pictures as undertaken, for example, in Mr Harold Speed's "The Practice and Science of Drawing", reveals as the skeleton of the masterpieces analysed such mathematical forms and relations. The perception of these is intermediate between the pure aesthetic intuition which is expressed by the unanalysed pciture and functions in its appreciation and the clear intuitions of the mathematician. Indeed, a mathematical demonstration is often invested over and above its strictly mathemtical evidence with an aesthetic quality It is apprehended as beautiful.
Music is essentially an harmonious arrangement of sounds, the dance of motions. Poetry depends for its beauty on correlations of accent, quantity, tone, pitch and verbal quality. The mathematical substratum of architecture is obvious.
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