The Difference Between Faith & Belief
In Alan Watts’s classic, The Wisdom of Insecurity, he writes about the difference in faith and belief in a way that opened up a door in my mind: The way I understand his description reads to me as the difference between dogma and an agnostic spirituality. It’s the difference between an assurance that you know how things are, and a willingness to recognize that you never will.
He writes:
We must here make a clear distinction between belief and faith, because, in general practice, belief has come to mean a state of mind which is almost the opposite of faith. Belief, as I use the word here, is the insistence that the truth is what one would “lief” or wish it to be. The believer will open his mind to the truth on condition that it fits in with his preconceived ideas and wishes. Faith, on the other hand, is an unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be. Faith has no preconceptions; it is a plunge into the unknown. Belief clings, but faith lets go. In this sense of the word, faith is the essential virtue of science, and likewise of any religions that is not self-deception.
Most of us believe in order to feel secure, in order to make our individual lives seem valuable and meaningful. Belief has thus become an attempt to hang on to life, to grasp and keep it for one’s own. But you cannot understand life and its mysteries as long as you try to grasp it. Indeed, you cannot grasp it, just as you cannot walk off with a river in a bucket, it is clear that you do not understand it and that you will always be disappointed, for in the bucket the water does not run. To “have” running water you must let go of it and let it run. The same is true of life and of God.
Belief clings, but faith lets go. I love this whole passage so much. I also love the way he picks apart the specificity of language, reminding us to look at etymology and roots rather than jumping to conclusions made by cultural shortcuts. Faith, for example, is so commingled with religion, that people no longer understand what it actually means. As Cynthia Bourgeault explains, “I am quite certain, for example, that this direct noetic seeing is what St. Paul had in mind by the term faith (as in “faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen”). But in our own diminished age even faith has now gone dark and tends to be understood as a “blind” leap into the dark rather than a luminous perception of the invisible golden thread.”
Times are weird as hell—culturally, socially, emotionally, energetically. It feels like the world is trying to get back on its feet after being felled in a forest, and the air seems labored and hard—like we’re all trying to get back up to pace after a long time of not running at all. I don’t think belief does us much good in these moments, when everything seems so uncertain; it’s not an optimistic stance. But, faith on the other hand, feels like an opening—not a surrender, per se, but an “unreserved opening of the mind to the truth, whatever it may turn out to be.” It’s not a surprise that the subtitle of Watts’s book is “A Message for the Age of Anxiety.” It’s an old book, but it’s an eternally relevant sentiment. Perhaps, because with belief, we fixate on the future as though it’s something that we can will into being—worrying about the future is the engine of anxiety. The antidote is allowance, more faith, less fixating.