""Faith comes from what is heard".
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In other words, in faith the word takes precedence over the thought, a precedence that differentiates it structurally from the architecture of philosophy. In philosophy the thought precedes the word; it is after all a product of the reflection that one then tries to put into words; the words always remain secondary to the thought and thus in the last resort can always be replaced by other words. Faith, on the other hand, comes to man from outside, and this very fact is fundamental to it. It is-let me repeat-not something thought up by myself; it is something said to me, which hits me as something that has not been thought out and could not be thought out and lays an obligation on me.
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Faith cannot and should not be a mere product of reflection. The idea that faith really ought to arise through our thinking it up for ourselves and finding it in the process of a purely private search for truth is basically the expression of a definite ideal, an attitude of mind that fails to recognize the intrinsic quality of belief, which consists precisely in being the reception of what cannot be thought out-responsible reception, it is true, in which what is heard never becomes entirely my own property, and the lead held by what is received can never be completely wiped out, but in which the goal must be to make what is received more and more my own, by handing myself over to it as the greater.
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Philosophy is by its nature the work of the solitary individual, who ponders as an individual on truth. A thought, what has been thought out, is something that at any rate seems to belong to me myself, since it comes from me, although no one's thinking is self-supporting; consciously or unconsciously it is intertwined with many other strands. The place where a thought is perfected is the interior of the mind; thus at first it remains confined to me and has an individualistic structure. It only becomes communicable later, when it is put into words, which usually make it only approximately comprehensible to others. In contrast to this the primary factor for belief is, as we have seen, the proclaimed word. While a thought is interior, purely intellectual, the word represents the element that unites us with others. It is the way in which intellectual communication takes place, the form in which the mind is, as it were, human, that is, corporeal and social."
Joseph Ratzinger, 1969
