A Proper Confidence

A few months ago, the now late Pope Francis’ health crisis had me revisiting Conclave, the Oscar-nominated film that captures the intricate mix of theology, politics, and human ambition that shapes the selection of a new pontiff. Pope Francis had been recently admitted to the hospital, and the plot felt more like a prediction of future events than a fictionalized drama. Sadly, I was right.

One of the film’s most striking moments comes early, when the Dean of the College of Cardinals, played by Ralph Fiennes, delivers a sermon to his fellow prelates. The scene echoes a real historical moment I recall vividly — when Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, later Pope Benedict XVI, addressed the College of Cardinals before the 2005 conclave that elected him. Ratzinger famously warned against what he called the “dictatorship of relativism,” a creeping erosion of moral and doctrinal certainty in the face of pluralism:

How many winds of doctrine have we known in recent decades, how many ideological currents, how many ways of thinking. The small boat of the thought of many Christians has often been tossed about by these waves — flung from one extreme to another: from Marxism to liberalism, even to libertinism; from collectivism to radical individualism; from atheism to a vague religious mysticism; from agnosticism to syncretism and so forth … Every day new sects spring up, and what St. Paul says about human deception and the trickery that strives to entice people into error (cf. Eph 4: 14) comes true. Today, having a clear faith based on the Creed of the Church is often labeled as fundamentalism. Whereas relativism, that is, letting oneself be “tossed here and there, carried about by every wind of doctrine”, seems the only attitude that can cope with modern times … We are building a dictatorship of relativism that does not recognize anything as definitive and whose ultimate goal consists solely of one’s own ego and desires. We, however, have a different goal: the Son of God, the true man. He is the measure of true humanism.

Fiennes’ character, Cardinal Thomas Lawrence, also turns to the Letter to the Ephesians. But his concern is not relativism or doubt — it is certainty itself. He commends a faith that walks hand in hand with uncertainty:

Let me speak from the heart for a moment. Saint Paul said, “Be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ.” To work together, to, uh, to grow together, we must be tolerant. No one person or — or faction seeking to dominate another.

And speaking to the Ephesians, who were of course a mixture of Jews and gentiles, Paul reminds us that God’s gift to the Church is its variety. It is this variety, this diversity of people and views, which gives our Church its strength. And over the course of many years in the service of our mother the Church, let me tell you, there is one sin which I have come to fear above all others.

Certainty. Certainty is the great enemy of unity. Certainty is the deadly enemy of tolerance. Even Christ was not certain at the end. My God, my God, why have you forsaken me? He cried out in agony at the ninth hour on the cross.

Our faith is a living thing precisely because it walks hand in hand with doubt. If there was only certainty and no doubt, there would be no mystery. And therefore no need for faith.

Let us pray that God will grant us a pope who doubts. And let him grant us a pope who sins and asks for forgiveness and who carries on.

The messages of the two deans may seem like polar opposites. But this is only at the surface level of appearances. There is a dialectical approach to faith and doubt that would see the sentiments of both figures, one historic and one fictional, as essential to each other.

We live in a chronically anxious culture that is saturated with insecurity and ambiguity. The temptation of certainty is immense. It offers psychological shelter from the anxieties of modern life, a framework that simplifies the complexity of existence. But this approach does not just bind; it blinds. Certainty locks us into rigid schemas that make the world feel manageable but at the cost of seeing it as it truly is. Faith, doubt, courage, conviction — these qualities can and should coexist. In fact, they need one another. But a particular kind of certainty, usually rooted in a desire to control things that are completely uncontrollable, often refuses to share space with other dispositions. Certainty seduces us with the promises of finality, of escape from this perpetual dialectic. But certainty does not give us more of the world; it gives us less.

What, after all, can we know for certain? The answer is: very little. Descartes concluded that the only thing he could not doubt was his own act of doubting. Everything beyond that — his senses, his perception of the world, even the solidity of the table in front of him — was subject to uncertainty. Modern science only deepens the paradox. The table that appears solid is, at the atomic level, a flurry of particles in motion.

But the other side of the coin is no less dangerous. If we extol the dangers of certainty alone in an undialectical fashion, we don’t just traipse listlessly through life in some sort of ideal open society. Quite the opposite. A militant rejection of any and all kinds of certainty often finds us as subjects in Ratzinger’s “dictatorship of relativism.” I’ve seldom heard people more strident than cosmopolitan commentators confidently warning us about the dangers of intolerance and the threat they pose to liberal society.

To move through daily life, one must act with a kind of practical faith — faith in our senses, in the accuracy of street signs, in the idea that fellow drivers will obey traffic signals. We cannot doubt everything all at once. Even doubt itself requires a kind of faith, a trust in the very principles that make doubt possible. Without a proper confidence that our daily acts of faith can be trusted and relied upon, we couldn’t get out of bed in the morning.

Rather than valorizing doubt or reducing life to an ever-increasing list of immutable facts, a lively faith in an unstable world is far less tidy and far more personal. In a fantastic little monograph that he wrote at the end of his life, Lesslie Newbigin sketches out a dialectical relationship between faith, doubt and certainty. He merits quoting at length here:

Both faith and doubt have their proper roles in the whole enterprise of knowing, but faith is primary and doubt is secondary because rational doubt depends upon beliefs that sustain our doubt. The ideal that modernity, following Descartes, has set before itself, namely, the ideal of a kind of certainty that admits no possibility of doubt, is leading us into skepticism and nihilism. The universe is not provided with a spectator’s gallery in which we can survey the total scene without being personally involved. True knowledge of reality is available only to the one who is personally committed to the truth already grasped. Knowing cannot be severed from living and acting, for we cannot know the truth unless we seek it with love and unless our love commits us to action. Faith is the only certainty because faith involves personal commitment. … The confidence proper to a Christian is not the confidence of one who claims possession of demonstrable and indubitable knowledge. It is the confidence of one who had heard and answered the call that comes from the God through whom and for whom all things were made: “Follow me.”

Pope Francis’ ministry embodied the “proper confidence” Newbigin recognized was so essential, humbly walking in the light of God’s grace in a way that was a gift to the watching world. The world could use more leaders like Francis, not less.

I pray for the College of Cardinals. Whether Catholic or not, we have been blessed by the ministry of three great popes in my lifetime, and I hope these blessings continue to flow from Rome. I want a pope who doubts. A pope who wrestles. But I also want a humble pope whose belief in the Son of God, the true man, compels him more than his ego and desires. A pope who both believes in the forgiveness of sins and asks for forgiveness himself.