Last week I posted about faith being more than mental assent. I read this the other day in Christian Wiman’s devastatingly beautiful My Bright Abyss. I think it compliments (and goes right to the existential root of) the point I was making. It also reminds me of the old adage of Thomas Aquinas: only God can move the human will nonviolently. 

Faith is nothing more — but how much this is — than a motion of the soul toward God. It is not belief. Belief has objects — Christ was resurrected, God created the earth — faith does not. Even the motion of faith is mysterious and inexplicable: I say the soul moves “toward” God, but that is only the limitation of language. It may be God who moves, the soul that opens for him. Faith is faith in the soul. Faith is the word “faith” decaying into pure meaning. 

— Christian Wiman, My Bright Abyss, p. 139