Doubts can be located in the emotions, intellect, or will. Emotional doubts can be potent, but very often, when you interrogate them, there’s no There there at all. Those who seek to counsel the doubtful can often be of tremendous help simply by listening and letting the doubtful one speak his feelings aloud so that simple sunlight dissipates the emotional doubt. The doubt he had about the new job turns out to be rooted not in reality but in the fact that it plucked the string of some half-forgotten childhood trauma. Once that comes out into the light, he can move on.
Sometimes doubts arise from real and reasonable questions. If the Church is guided by the Spirit, why did the priest scandal happen? If the Bible is inerrant, how come it says the world was made in six days? If God called me to marry this woman, how come I’m so attracted to that one? None of these are forbidden questions. All of them need to be addressed in some way. And indeed, the classic manner in which Christian philosophy came to treat of everything from soup to nuts is a great deal more thorough than we generally like.
St. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, carefully and methodically addressed thousands upon thousands of doubts about the Faith fearlessly and with the enthusiastic approval of the allegedly obscurantist Church that was allegedly terrified of the human mind. He knew— as the apostles knew—that the Faith had walked out of the grave and therefore had nothing to fear from the truth. Indeed, even by St. Thomas’s day, that Faith was already an anvil that had worn out a thousand hammers. So he interrogated it for all it was worth.
In contrast, turn on the TV that so often boasts we live in an Age of Reason that has triumphed over the Dark Ages of Faith. You will find that what in our civilization passes for “asking tough questions” consists of people shouting past each other with sound bites and accusations, then breaking for the sacred commercial. A medieval disputatio would bore a TV producer to tears. Our media don’t want to argue (a word derived from the Latin “to clarify”). They want noise about evidence for the Flat Earth or the menace of vaccination or the Fake Moon Landings to attract a crowd so that they might accomplish their real purpose: selling beer and shampoo. That’s the difference between the Age of Faith and our supposed Age of Reason: Medievals used the intellect; our age merely worships it.
The Catholic Church still lives in the Age of Faith. Therefore, it believes that, with the help of the Spirit, an intellectual fault can be dealt with by learning to think and getting decent information. Those seeking to counsel the doubtful must therefore be willing to roll up their sleeves and do the hard work of thinking as best they can. Pietistic bromides like “It’s not ours to question” are not Catholic. On the contrary, it is emphatically ours to question long and hard until we’ve gotten an answer. “It is,” says Proverbs 25:2, “the glory of God to conceal things, but the glory of kings is to search things out.”
We are to worship God with our minds as well as our hearts. So the cry that the living God show his face—the intellectual hunger to come to the resolution of doubt—is a perfectly legitimate thing. As Chesterton said, “The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.” Those who counsel the doubtful should not squelch that doubt with false piety but help direct the doubtful to the only thing that can satisfy them: truth. The truth may well turn out to be (and in the case of God will turn out to be) a mystery so bright that it cannot be comprehended fully by the intellect. But the problem will be too much light, not too little. The healthy intellect can accept such an arrangement and say, “It is enough, Lord.”
That said, there is a place where doubt can cut itself off from the power of mere counsel to help. This is when doubt is located not in the intellect but in the will. He who says “I believe that I may understand” is living a healthy intellectual life. He is asking questions to find things out. But when a person begins asking questions to keep from finding things out, no counsel will help. All that is left is prayer for a miraculous act of conversion (or reconversion) by the Holy Spirit. That’s what Paul warns about when he speaks of those who are “ever learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth” (2 Timothy 3:7, KJV).
It’s a technique we seem tempted by from infancy. Here’s a kid staving off bedtime by asking endless questions while ignoring the answers. He’s not interested in truth. He’s interested in keeping Mom from turning out the lights. A few years later he deploys his best tree-house lawyer skills to argue that, although Dad told him to stop bothering his sister, he requires definition about precisely which side of the car is his. It’s all so confusing! Does poking her leg meet the technical definition of “bothering,” or is it merely a friendly gesture she is choosing to misinterpret? Not long after, he is in a sophomore moral-theology class, suggesting ingenious posers like “If I could save someone’s life by cheating on a test in this class, then couldn’t we say that cheating in this class is a good thing?”
A few years later, that boy is a young married man asking himself, “How far can I go with my secretary before it’s technically, precisely, ‘adultery’ or ‘fornication’? This is so confusing! I doubt there’s an answer to this mystery! I guess I’ll just have to be loving toward her on those late nights at the office.” When his wife finally confronts him after the secretary turns up at the door pregnant, we find our hero saying, “I believe in the primacy of conscience, not in some fading rules in a catechism. I don’t think I owe anyone an apology.”
Note the technique deployed first in the service of venial and finally of mortal sin: Ask questions, not to find anything out but to keep from finding anything out. The problem is not honest doubt centered in an intellect seeking light, but dishonest doubt centered in a will seeking darkness. It is ordered toward deliberately making nonsense, rather than sense, out of obvious moral teaching.
The Church rejects such games. She gives us a relatively small number of rock-bottom truths about God, the human person, how we should worship, how we should act, and how we should pray. Things like “You shall not commit adultery” and “Avoid near occasions of sin.” Beyond that, she asks us to form our hearts, minds, and bodies in light of those rock-bottom truths, while acknowledging that things can get enormously complex, sticky, ambiguous, and conflicted. In short, the Church is the original practitioner of a theology of doubt. Only the thing she urges us to doubt is not the small body of dogma entrusted to her care but our own ability to squeeze God into our heads or whittle him down to fit our political, cultural, sexual, social, philosophical, and financial demands.
That’s because the problem of doubt centered in the will is not lack of information but mule-headed refusal to embrace the bleedin’ obvious. When such a perverted will becomes acute, it can destroy a soul completely, as Jesus warned the Pharisees whose wills so twisted their intellects that they declared, “It is only by Be-el’zebul, the prince of demons, that this man casts out demons” (Matthew 12:24). As C.S. Lewis sagely observed of Uncle Andrew, “The trouble about trying to make yourself stupider than you really are is that you very often succeed.”
Such persistence in seeking darkness is the radical sickness of soul that prompts Jesus to say, “Do not give dogs what is holy; and do not throw your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under foot and turn to attack you” (Matthew 7:6). When it is a perverted will that “questions” in order to refuse light rather than seek it, wisdom says to the one who counsels the doubtful, “Don’t beat your head against the wall. This kind does not come out except by prayer and fasting.”
Thanks be to God, though, many doubters are more like Thomas than like the hardened Pharisees. How do we begin to help these honest doubters? Speaking of Lewis, his other famous uncle (Screwtape) gives us the best backhanded advice here. Our infernal correspondent says:
The Enemy loves platitudes. Of a proposed course of action He wants men, so far as I can see, to ask very simple questions; is it righteous? is it prudent? is it possible? Now if we can keep men asking “Is it in accordance with the general movement of our time? Is it progressive or reactionary? Is this the way that History is going?” they will neglect the relevant questions. And the questions they do ask are, of course, unanswerable; for they do not know the future, and what the future will be depends very largely on just those choices which they now invoke the future to help them to make. As a result, while their minds are buzzing in this vacuum, we have the better chance to slip in and bend them to the action we have decided on.
When in doubt, start with the platitudes, the same old stuff, the ordinary teaching of the Church, the common sense, the stuff your mother taught you, the next practical thing, and the cry “Help me, God!” Above all, draw near to God, his Body the Church, and the sacraments, not away from them. Just as your body needs sufficient food, rest, play, and work, so your spirit does too. Feed on the Eucharist; rest in the revelation of Christ; get counsel from a priest, spiritual director, or wise person. Play with the questions you have by bouncing them off others who have the information and the wisdom to help you find your answers. And give your spirit a workout by not getting distracted from your day-to-day duties of obedience to Christ and winding up with your mind “buzzing in a vacuum.” If you are counseling others, don’t try to be a hero if you genuinely can’t help. The great thing about being Catholic is that you don’t have to know it all. It’s a big Church with a lot of resources to draw on. Odds are good that any doubt a person struggles with has already been chewed over in minute detail by somebody else somewhere in the Church’s theological and pastoral treasury of experience. Learn how to find information (starting with the Catechism). The great blessing of God’s strange gift of doubt is that, as with the stranger gift of exercise, you slowly build up “muscles” over time. You discover that the house built on the rock is not shaken by the storm of doubt. You realize your faith did not shatter. You see once more that the Church’s teaching and the wisdom of God are sensible and beautiful. And you find that Blessed John Henry Newman was simply being accurate when he famously observed, “Ten thousand difficulties do not make one doubt.”
(For more information, see my book THE WORK OF MERCY: BEING THE HANDS AND HEART OF CHRIST (available here, signed by me, or in Kindle format here, or as an audiobook here).
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