The Chuch and the Formal Object of Faith
A Brief Answer
Q. Does the Proposition or Explication of the Church enter in to the formal object of faith?
Here, we must begin by making three distinctions. First, between what is essential for faith in itself and what is essential for faith as it is proposed to us. Second, following from this, we must distinguish between what enters into the formal object of faith per se and what attaches to the formal object per accidens insofar as faith exists in those receiving faith mediately rather than immediately. Third, following from this, we ought to distinguish between being some thing and pertaining to some thing.
As to the first distinction, it is one thing to consider a certain habit or act in what is essential for that habit or act to exist in general and a completely different question to consider that habit or act in this or that state. Hence, we must be careful to consider as distinct what is essential for Divine Faith and what is essential for OUR Divine Faith, i.e., Divine Faith that relies on mediate revelation. Hence, the formal object of the intellect is being under the aspect of the true, yet the formal object of OUR intellection is being as intelligible as it is abstracted from the sensible. The modifying clause is a certain “condition” which “pertains to” the formal object in our circumstances, yet does not enter into the formal object.
From this flows the second distinction. We can either consider the union between the material proposition of faith and the formal motive of Divine Authority, i.e., God [formal motive] saying that such and such a things [material object] is true, or we can consider the union of such and such a proposition to the subject who receives it. The former consideration of the union between the formal motive and material object is what is necessary per se for Divine Faith, the second consideration concerns necessary conditions that attach themselves to the formal motive in order that such a faith could exist in this or that situation.
Hence, it is true that the formal motive of faith in general is the “authority of God revealing,” yet to give an integral presentation of the formal motive in such a case is to also list those necessary conditions without which it would not be able to exist. Hence, for OUR Faith, i.e., the faith of those who receive Divine Revelation, one would rightly include the additional conditions (as St. Thomas frequently does) and say “the first truth AS IT IS PROPOSED BY THE CHURCH.”
Lastly, it is here that we ought to invoke the third distinction. For, to be a condition for some thing is to pertain to that thing or that act, yet it is not to be that thing or that act. Hence, the formal motive of the assent of faith remains the authority of God revealing, not the authority of the Church. Yet, the authority of the Church pertains to the formal motive insofar as it is its condition, not insofar as it is identical to the formal motive or enters into formal union somehow with the formal motive.
It is here that many theologians have become very confused, either, on the one hand, refusing to include the Church in the formal motive of faith in any way, or misunderstanding how a formal motive could be modified by certain conditions without entering in as the formal motive itself.