The centrality of the Syriac language in the Maronite tradition: the place of faith (6/7)

Faith is, above all, a person's wholehearted commitment to an ideal greater than themselves. It rests on trust. In Saint Paul's words, it is “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). Faith thus emerges as perseverance and hope, grounded in Christ's sacrifice and in the certainty of unseen realities. It is the capacity to hope and to believe in the truth of what cannot be seen.

These unseen realities are handed down through tradition, from which they derive their legitimacy. One can exercise faith in Christ only once one has received assurance of his existence, come to know him, and become aware of his message and his will. This knowledge comes through history, through an understanding of his teachings, and through an embrace of his Passion and his victory over death. Yet none of this is witnessed directly; it is handed down. Faith and tradition are therefore intimately and structurally linked.

The Incarnation

Christianity is embodied in the flesh of Christ, in the depth of history, and in the heritage that flows from it. It becomes tangible in tradition, prayer, song, language, and the Eucharist. For Benedict XVI, spirituality without incarnation becomes an abstraction: if God enters history, faith cannot be abstract, disembodied, or culturally neutral.

Faith always exists in a concrete historical form. There is no pure Christianity, without incarnation and detached from history. A faith without a cultural identity is an intellectual fiction and, ultimately, a theoretical construct, Benedict XVI tells us.

A Maronite way of life that laid claim to an abstract universalism by abandoning its Syriac language would enter a process of disintegration. It would be living under the illusion of a disembodied Christianity. For, to quote Benedict XVI, “a faith that no longer has the courage to embrace its concrete cultural character dissolves into moralism, and ultimately into ideology.”

“Universality does not consist in abstract uniformity, but in the ability to enter into every culture without losing one's own identity,” he also writes.

The Individualization of Faith

Religious faith, understood as a relationship with the transcendent, is not originally a closed conceptual system. It is rooted in a rich historical, linguistic, and symbolic context that makes it both living and diverse. Western modernity, however, has gradually separated faith from the conditions in which it is embodied, producing an abstract form liable to drift into ideology.

Long before it did in the West, this abstraction emerged in Lebanon with the Constitution of 1926, which replaced the translation of the Turkish term millet (people, nation) with “religious denomination.” In seeking to subject multiethnic Lebanon to a Jacobin-style regime, this constitution erased the cultural and historical dimensions of its constituent populations. By asserting a single identity and a uniform heritage, it relegated their distinctive characteristics to the realm of an individual faith devoid of tradition and detached from everything that gathers around worship.

Yet a faith that is uprooted, stripped of its cultural expressions, and reduced to abstraction ceases to be a lived experience and loses its substance. Simone Weil emphasizes that human beings have a fundamental need to belong to a historical continuum. “To be rooted is perhaps the most important need of the human soul,” she says. Religion thus becomes a way of inhabiting the world, passed down through rites, their languages, and their collective memory.

Faith, in its authentic form, is always an experience embodied in a culture. According to Weil, human beings need to be situated within a lived historical and symbolic fabric. Without these roots, faith becomes abstract and loses its existential dimension. It is no longer “food for the soul,” but a purely intellectual construct.

Modernity and Secularization

Modernity tends precisely to uproot faith by separating it from the cultural forms through which it is expressed. It thus reduces faith to a set of universal principles, independent of historical heritage. Faith is rationalized into a theoretical system and individualized, detached from the social body. According to Martin Heidegger, modernity thus produces a disembodied relationship with the world, grounded in abstraction and reduced to purely intellectual content.

Applied to religion, this shift gives rise to a disembodied faith, universalized through secularization, which turns it into a set of abstract propositions, independent of any cultural or territorial context. Alasdair MacIntyre sees this as a fragmentation of moral traditions, leading to greater vulnerability and making individuals more susceptible to social and ideological manipulation.

Religious concepts themselves become secularized, producing a faith stripped of transcendence. The transcendental idea becomes material and immanent. Eric Voegelin interprets this phenomenon as an ideology that, by replacing faith, seeks to make salvation immanent.

Rather than making religion disappear, secularization reconstitutes it as a rigid identity. “Secularized” and uprooted religion ceases to be a spiritual experience and becomes merely a marker of identity. Cultural and linguistic uprooting thus gives rise to collective, conflict-ridden identities devoid of historical depth. Benedict Anderson analyzes this transformation as the formation of an “imagined community” that unites individuals around abstract representations.

Modernization, which claims to create an open society through secularization, thus paradoxically tends to build conflict-ridden societies lacking cultural and spiritual roots.