The Distinction between the Preambles to the Faith and the Articles of Faith: A Couple of Comments from a Layman

        The following is from a lay Catholic perspective, and thus is, on that very basis, possibly fallible. I also wrote it as primarily addressed to fellow Catholics, so I hope no one takes offense to this. In the last couple of days I've seen a few posts on Facebook concerning the nature and role of natural theology, what, if anything, it can tell us about God, and whether faith is even a reliable means to knowledge. As for the reliability of faith qua faith, that is something that I think should be addressed by either a layperson with the right qualifications, or, preferably, an ordained clergyman of the Roman Catholic Church.

        As for the question concerning natural theology, I will risk commenting briefly on it, because I think it might shed a little clarity on some aspects of the questions I just mentioned. In reading over once again the second question of the first part of St. Thomas's Summa Theologica, I noticed he makes explicit reference to a distinction between the articles of faith and the preambles of faith, a distinction that is acknowledged by the Magisterium of the Catholic Church, and thus by her faithful. Here, St. Thomas introduces the concept of an article of faith by, as he often does, alluding to an objection:

Objection 1. It seems that the existence of God cannot be demonstrated. For it is an article of faith that God exists. But what is of faith cannot be demonstrated, because a demonstration produces scientific knowledge; whereas faith is of the unseen (Hebrews 11:1). Therefore it cannot be demonstrated that God exists.

One important point of clarification that bears mention is that St. Thomas does not have the same conception of "science" in mind that we do when he talks about whether God's existence can be demonstrated on the basis of scientific knowledge. What he has in mind is closer to an axiomatic system, like geometry, in which the axioms of the discipline are self-evidently known. From these axioms, which are indemonstrable insofar as they are self-evident, one works one's way to 'scientific' knowledge by reasoning from the axioms to conclusions derived from the axioms. This is a 'science' in the Aristotelian sense of the term.

         Now, the main point of Aquinas's introducing this objection is to address the question of whether God's existence can be known on the basis of something other than faith, the concept of which he introduces by means of the term 'article of faith.' Like the term 'science,' but less so, what Aquinas has in mind by using the term 'faith' does not exactly correspond to how many contemporary folks think of it. One common conception of faith is that which is opposed to reason or contrary to reason. For Thomas, however, faith is in perfect accordance with reason insofar as the two can never contradict one another, as one common way of parsing his distinction has it. In this sense, faith, by which he means the Christian faith, can be shown to be rational, reasonable, and non-contradictory by means of human reason.

         To get more fully at what he means by faith, however, one needs to understand what he has in mind in his response to "Objection 1."

"The existence of God and other like truths about God, which can be known by natural reason, are not articles of faith, but are preambles to the articles; for faith presupposes natural knowledge, even as grace presupposes nature, and perfection supposes something to be perfected. Nevertheless, there is nothing to prevent a man, who cannot grasp a proof, accepting, as a matter of faith, something which in itself is capable of being scientifically known and demonstrated."

The preambles to the articles of faith, then, in St. Thomas's sense, are things that can be known on the basis of natural reason, in contradistinction to things that cannot be thus known. In classifying the existence of God as one of these preambles, he is endorsing the idea that one can know about God independently of God's revealing this knowledge to humanity. Other such preambles would include things like God's attributes, such as his omnipotence, his omniscience, his being all-good, his being immaterial in nature, etc. Articles of faith, then, are things that cannot be known on the basis of rational demonstration. These would include, for St. Thomas at least, such things as God's Triune nature, that the world is not eternal (i.e., that is had a beginning), that the Second Person of the Trinity, i.e., Jesus Christ, became man and died for the sake of atoning for the sins of Adam's race, and that Christ will raise from the dead all who have previously died on the Final Day of Judgement. 

        This is not to suggest that St. Thomas's particular reading of the preambles is doctrinally binding on all the faithful. For example, while it is dogmatically required of all Catholics to accept on the basis of faith the idea that God's existence can be known through human reason, it is unspecified whether this implies knowledge in the sense of rational demonstration or merely knowledge in some less stringent sense. But that there is a distinction between the preambles and the articles is a basic one that no faithful Catholic can ignore. On the other hand, it is sometimes not articulated very clearly by Catholics who deny that God's existence can be demonstrated, i.e., through natural theology as traditionally conceived, what exactly is the reason this is bad. If it's simply because they don't think there are any good proofs to be found, this seems pretty understandable, though I still think it is mistaken. If there's something about the very idea of showing that God exists that bothers them, it isn't exactly clear to me why this is undesirable, and thus I have a hard time sympathizing with it. I thus challenge Catholics who hold this second view to articulate their reasoning clearly and cogently and ask themselves whether, on this basis, they should find that their doubts are warranted. 

         P.S. Here is a brief, but not bad summary of the articles from New Advent:

Certain revealed supernatural truths such as those contained in the symbol of the Apostles. The terms were not used by the Fathers or by ecclesiastical writers in the early Middle Ages. St. Bernard and Richard of St. Victor employed them, the latter applying them to truths having God for their object and so explicitly stated as to compel assent. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, the article of faith is any revealed supernatural truth which is distinct in itself from other such truths but which unites with them to form the organic whole of Christian teaching. Thus the articles of the Creed announce truths which are in themselves distinct from one another but parts of a complete summary of the truths which have been revealed to help us to gain our last end. They are for Christian theology what fundamental principles are for a science. Not every revealed truth is an article of faith, nor are theologians agreed on what constitutes any truth an article of faith. Some would limit these articles to the contents of the Apostles' Creed. Others say that every truth defined by the Church, or in any other manner explicitly proposed for our belief, is an article of faith. De Lugo describes them as the principal or primary truths which are the basis of other revealed truths or principles. In the Catechism of the Council of Trent (p. 1, c. 1, q. 4), the truths of the Apostles' Creed are called "articles" by a sort of simile frequently used by our forefathers; for as the members of the body are divided by joints (articuli) so also in the profession of faith whatever is to be believed by us distinctly and separately from anything else we properly and appositely call an article".

http://www.newadvent.org/utility/search.htm?safe=active&cx=000299817191393086628%3Aifmbhlr-8x0&q=preamble&sa=Search&cof=FORID%3A9.