“Oh Lett that Last will Stand”

Recently, a prominent Shakespeare scholar defined religious faith thus: “Faith in God should be constant, certain, and absolute, not erratic or optional.” He contrasted the ambivalent, Coleridgean “poetic faith” that Shakespeare’s plays ask of their audiences with religious faith’s presumably rigid certitudes. ¹ While many medieval and early modern theologians held that, ideally, faith is constant and certain, they often wrote about the experience of lived faith quite differently. Thomist theology’s nuanced understanding of faith acknowledges the certainty of divine truth—what we should have faith in—but insists that, due to our weakness, we may not be completely certain of that truth. Aquinas understands faith both as willed assent and given certainty. Yet fides differs from scientia (knowledge) in part because in the believer “a movement … to the contrary of that which he holds with absolute firmness” may arise. ² Willed assent “does not quiet the restless motion of the intellect, which continues to … puzzle over ‘those things which it believes, even though it assents to them with absolute firmness … just taken by itself, the intellect is not satisfied.’” ³ To put it in affective terms, fides cannot yet have the fullness of its desire.