The Essence of the Catholic Faith

It has been said about early Christianity that it did not concern itself with ultimate questions, that it did not clearly express faith in another life after death, but instead proclaimed the imminent end of the world and the establishment of God's kingdom. But are these not essentially the same thing? The nature of the soul's immortality was not precisely described because it is implicitly contained throughout the Gospels.

Christian faith was born from the belief that Jesus did not remain dead but was raised by God, and that this resurrection is a fact—not merely the philosophical idea of the soul's immortality. Christianity arose from the merging of two great spiritual currents: Jewish and Greek, with Rome ultimately stamping it with the seal of practicality and societal continuity. Among the Jews, belief in another life was neither clear nor universal, but their faith in a personal, living God led them toward this belief. Faith in a personal God, the Father of mankind, inherently implies belief in individual human eternity, a belief that began to take root even before Christ.

Hellenic culture eventually discovered death, and the discovery of death equates to the recognition of a hunger for immortality. From the Zeus-centric religion of nature, they transitioned to the more spiritual religion of Apollo, the religion of redemption. This theology's two most important elements were the belief that souls continue in their ordinary form after death and the veneration of the souls of the departed. The idea of the soul's immortality was not a philosophical principle but theological reasoning. Both Jews and Greeks reached the true discovery of death, through which nations, like individuals, entered intellectual adolescence—the age of tragic awareness of life. It was during this time that humanity conceived the living God.

The discovery of death revealed God to us. Christ's death was the supreme manifestation of death—the death of a man who should not have died, yet did. This discovery was characteristically Christian: the discovery of immortality, prepared by the development of Jewish and Hellenic religions.

Paul brought this discovery to its fullness. His theology—the first Christian theology—focused on the resurrection of Christ as the central doctrine. For him, it was significant that Christ became human, died, and was resurrected—not so much what Christ did during his life. The focus was not on ethical but religious acts and Christ's immortality. Those who do not believe in Christ's bodily resurrection can venerate Christ, but they are not Christians in the strict sense. This dogma, which holds that Christ's resurrection and immortality guarantee the resurrection and immortality of all believers, became the core of Christology.

The God-man came so that humanity might also become divine, that is, immortal. The purpose of redemption was to save us from death, not so much from sin—only insofar as sin is death. Humanity fell so that Christ could redeem us, not because of the fall.

At the Council of Nicaea, Athanasius emerged as the embodiment of popular faith rooted in the hunger for immortality. He opposed Arianism, which threatened the foundation of this belief by considering Christ merely a moral teacher, the most perfect man. The Athanasian and Nicene Christ—the Catholic Christ—is not cosmological or ethical but transformative and divine, the Christ of faith.

Dogmatics forever bid farewell to clear thinking and rational concepts, reconciling itself with unreason. In short, it took life as its foundation, and life is inherently irrational and opposed to clear reasoning.

This central dogma of resurrection through Christ includes another sacrament of fundamental significance: the Eucharist, the primary motive of Catholic popular devotion. Through the Eucharist, Christ's body is offered as the bread of immortality. God, the Immortalizer, is consumed.

For Catholics, sin has never caused particular anxiety, as the sacrament of confession provides absolution. Sin is material, contagious, and hereditary, from which baptism and absolution heal. Catholicism does not neglect ethics, but its ethics serve eschatology, subordinating the former to the latter. Eastern Christianity is predominantly eschatological, Protestantism mainly ethical, while Catholic faith finds a compromise between the two.

True sin—the sin of heresy—lies in thinking with one's own mind. The gravest sin is disobedience to the Church, whose infallibility protects us from reason. What is vital for life is enforced, and to enforce it, an entire dogmatic structure is built. The Church defends this structure against rationalism and modernity, thereby defending life.

The Church has neither supported nor actively opposed science, as theology inherently includes natural and historical sciences. However, reason attacks, and faith negotiates with it because it does not feel secure without reason. Thus, we arrive at the grounds for credibility, though faith precedes reason. St. Augustine sought understanding through faith, desiring to believe in order to understand.

The guiding principle of Catholic faith is deriving the truth of a principle from its supreme goodness or utility. And what could be more useful than the immortality of the soul? Scholastic theology emerged, giving rise to its handmaiden, scholastic philosophy. Scholasticism, this magnificent cathedral, gradually became a natural theology, a weakened Christianity. It strove to justify dogmas through reason, showing that while dogmas transcend reason, they do not contradict it, providing philosophical grounding for them.

Catholicism oscillates between two poles: mysticism, an intimate experience of the living God manifested in Christ, and rationalism, against which Catholicism fights. This tension turned Catholic dogmatics into a system of poorly resolved contradictions. The Trinity was a compromise between monotheism and polytheism; in Christ, humanity and divinity reconciled, as did nature and grace, free will, and divine providence. The price for this was suppressing the intellectual needs of believers.

Dogmatics demands acceptance of all or nothing; its essence is lost if not wholly embraced. The Catholic solution to immortality and individual eternal salvation satisfies both the will and life itself. However, if we rationalize this solution through dogmatic theology, it fails to satisfy reason, which has its own imperatives, just as life does. It is futile to regard as transcendent something that clearly appears as irrational.

Infallibility is, in essence, a rationalist category.

Miguel de Unamuno " A tragikus életérzés", Európa könyvkiadó, 1989