What happened to the centuries and to the men of the "enlightenment" is before everyone's eyes and experience: bewilderment, darkness and fear. Today, more than ever, we need great light. The Pope quotes Dante in Paradise who describes faith as a "spark, which expands into a lively flame and sparkles in me like a star in the sky".
An encyclical on faith - an ideal closing of the trilogy of theological virtues treated in Pope Benedict's encyclicals (Deus Caritas est; Spe salvi) - in the year of faith. A torch that passes from one pope witness to another, to reach the hands of every faithful and act as a mother. In the Acts of the Martyrs we read this dialogue between the Roman prefect Rusticus and the Christian Gerace: «Where are your parents?», the judge asked the martyr, and he replied: «Our true father is Christ, and our mother is faith in Him ». For those Christians, faith was a "mother", it brought them to light, it generated a new luminous vision of existence, for which they were ready to bear witness until the end.
We believed in love
Faith is a journey and has a history that must be known. From Abraham - our father in faith - faith is shown as a call and a promise. The Pope writes: “It is true that, as a response to a preceding Word, Abraham's faith will always be an act of memory. However, this memory is not fixed in the past but, being the memory of a promise, becomes capable of opening up to the future, of illuminating the steps along the way... (it is) a profound appeal, always written in the heart of his being". Moreover. “The great test of Abraham's faith, the sacrifice of his son Isaac, will show the extent to which this original love is capable of guaranteeing life even beyond death. The Word that was capable of raising a child in her body "as if dead" and "in the dead womb" of sterile Sarah, will also be capable of guaranteeing the promise of a future beyond any threat or danger." In the faith of Israel the figure of Moses emerges, but everything tends towards the coming of Jesus, who manifests the full reliability of God, especially in his death for man. The evangelist John writes: He who has seen bears witness, and his testimony is true; he knows that he speaks the truth, so that you too may believe. And Dostoevsky, in his work The Idiot, has the protagonist, Prince Myshkin, say at the sight of the painting of Christ dead in the tomb, by Hans Holbein the Younger: That painting could also make someone lose faith.
Faced with the cross of Jesus we can despair or convince ourselves of the total reliability of God's love, faith in his unshakable love for us. The logic of faith is entirely centered on Christ and the life of the believer becomes an ecclesial existence: "Faith is not a private fact, an individualistic conception, a subjective opinion, but is born from listening and is destined to express itself and become an announcement" .
