Are you saying love and reason are components of faith, or that they allow faith to flourish? If the former, it would seem to make understanding of first importance prior to faith which would run into my first to issues. If it is the latter I agree, however, I would ask:
1.) Why be faithful?
2.) To what ought we be faithful (herein lies the problem of choosing just any creed, which reason seems to solve, but if it solves it then it seems that reason comes before faith. In fact, just in answering it seems we place reason prior to faith)?
—I realize now how ignorant I am to ‘faith’.
My problem is if it is prior to understanding I do not see how it is not blind. I use to see it as something after it; that is acting on mere reasons rather than certain full knowledge, but my two reasons in the OP changed my mind a bit a long with a lot of coincidental things. My mind as of late is either lacking its normal clarity (which is not much anyhow
) or seeing a lot of ignorance in my mind I was not aware of earlier.
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I would answer first by repeating that to me faith is an act of reason (it is rational) and faith is an act of love (not undertaken for its utility). It therefore commits the whole being. May I explain?
To my thinking, in the fallen being, the capacity to reason is itself fractured. We reason as dying beings, unlike Adam. And unlike pristine man, we have taken unto ourselves our own well being. This, in my lexicon, is the meaning of Adam’s awareness of his nakedness and subsequent covering of it. One result is that reason must be pressed into use in the fulfillment of the needs of the being. Rationality, that which can be used, and irrationality, that which is of no potential use, is born in that effort.
And what is the activity of reason in the fallen being? It reduces the outside world in the form of concepts to its parts, and reassembles it in new ways useful to the being. It sees a tree, reduces it to wood and reassembles it into a home, conceptually. The process of reason is virtually digestive. That which does not lend itself to this digestive process is, at least in the interim, irrational.
Love presents a problem for reason. On the one hand, it appeals to reason in as much as utility can be found in love - the benefits of friendship and community, for example. On the other hand, strictly speaking, it’s work is against the effort of reason in as much as it threatens the existence of self. It makes no sense to give away food when you are hungry or will be hungry. Reason cannot fully rationalize love, and yet cannot irrationalize it, if you will.
This is so in as much as love is a capacity of the being on a par with reason and, by the way, reason is uncomfortable with that relationship since the rational view of fallen reason’s own work is to take charge of the sustenance of the being. Reason can ill tolerate voices to the contrary as it works out man’s fulfillment.
If any of this has made sense to you, we can go on to faith as a principal expression of both reason and love, but I wanted to establish the playing field, at least in terms of my own thinking. Or we can take the shorthand - which comes first in faith, reason or love? It is simply a matter of whether one steps out with one’s right foot or one’s left, but one has not moved until both feet have.
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