The word "faith" seems to mean a few different things. That bedevils discussion, and it may be tempting to focus on some nicely pinned-down authoritative definition, but I think this is just the inconvenient truth, that a range of different things all get the label "faith" pinned somewhere near them. The things themselves are probably more important than the label, whatever exactly they are, so I'd rather have a difficult but worthwhile discussion that tries to bring them all into focus and sort them out, than define a clearly winnable debate that doesn't actually matter to anyone.
So for instance I really like this identified nuance:
Gadianton wrote: ↑Tue May 16, 2023 4:48 am
The most fundamental kind of religious faith is belief in the miracle. Every holy book out there is rooted in some kind of miracle. That's basically what makes it a religion. When you first throw in to follow that charismatic leader, it's all about the mystery and wonders the leader will perform. Faith is belief that the UFO will appear; that this convincing leader can make that UFO appear. ... it's like putting your money on that pharmaceutical start-up that will 1000x if they can pull it off while the critics balk. So you sell all you have, you follow that prophet, and six month's later, all the crap he's talked up doesn't materialize. Well, in the interim, you've established a relationship with the leader and the group, and now the criteria of your faith shifts from belief in the miracle, to loyalty to the leader and group.
I think this is true. There's a phase or form or kind of faith that is all about making a bold leap with high hopes, and then there's this other phase or form or kind of faith that seems to be completely the opposite: stay in the boat and don't ask for too much. Both these things regularly do get called "faith", but when you look from this angle, it's hard to see why we'd ever even think them alike, let alone call them the same.
Even as I'm shaking my head at how opposite these two notions of faith seem to be, though, other things besides faith spring to mind that have the same kind of paradox. Romantic love is both giddy infatuation and steadfast faithfulness. Artistic creation is both ecstatic vision and dogged persistence; so is scientific discovery. Starting a business is staking all you have on a dream—and staying up late grinding details.
I think this kind of paradox, in which the same concept seems to embrace opposites, is probably typical for undertakings that humans can successfully pursue, but that take much longer than the natural human attention span, and are bigger than the natural screen size of the human imagination. These things that we do may be coherent processes in which everything connects, but we perceive them as blind people feeling different sides of an elephant. Sometimes they're one thing, and sometimes another.
If you do have hold of one of those too-big-to-see things—a marriage, a business, a novel—then I think you're going to have to have the analogs of both of Gadianton's kinds of faith. If you didn't have reckless optimism at the start, you wouldn't be doing it at all. If you don't have the persistent loyalty, you'll never go the distance. So your initial enthusiasm must partly have been confidence in your own persistence. And conversely part of your persistence is going to have to be the ability to keep rekindling the initial flame.
I think that's possible, anyway. For every real but multi-sided elephant there may be many chimeras—composite beasts that were never actually real. The instincts that let us launch and sustain long-term projects will also let us get sucked into illusions. Plenty of people persist in bad marriages, waste endless time on impossible novels, work their fingers raw trying to spin straw into gold.
When the glorious promise doesn't come true right away, we can settle down into persistence. That can be the awesome human superpower that lets us do wondrous things, or it can be the horrible human trap that confines us. Which it is, in each particular case, can be hard to discern.
I was a teenager before it was cool.