Your servant Romano Amerio wrote in Iota Unum:
The denial of the primacy of knowledge over life has penetrated the Church. . . . The supernatural virtues of hope and charity are thus deprived of their foundation and become mere manisfestations of vitality. . . . It is characteristic of modernism to base beliefs on a feeling and an experience of the divine. . . . This is the mentality that Lessing expressed so well in the parable in Eine Duplik. “If the infinite and omnipotent God were to give me the option between the gift in his right hand, which is the possessing of the truth, and the gift in his left, which is searching for the truth, I would humbly pray: O Lord, grant that I may search for the truth, for possessing it belongs only to you.”
The mistake in this position lies in regarding as humble an attitude that is really an intense form of pride. What is someone really preferring when he prefers searching for the truth to truth itself? He is preferring his own subjective movement and the activity of the Ego more than the good that his powers of acting are given him to attain. In short the Object is being valued less than the subject and an anthropocentric view is being adopted that is irreconcilable to religion, which seeks the creature’s subjection to the Creator and teaches that in being thus subjected the creature finds its own satisfaction and perfection. . . . “Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after justice, for they shall be satisfied (with justice).” The subjective quest for beatitude must take second place to the triumph of God, its Object. . . .
Faith is . . . the thing that substantiates hope, not something substantiated by hope. [Faith is the definition of things hoped for, the testimony of things not seen. —Hebrews 1:1]. One hopes for heaven because one believes it is there; one does not believe it is there because one hopes for it . . .
In conclusion, the priority of faith over hope belongs to the basis of Catholic religion, which is rationality. All the theological virtues have a motive, and what is a motive if not a reason? Their character as motivated acts was clear in the now disused formulas of acts of faith, hope and charity, and in the act of sorrow, all of which were taught in catechisms and used daily in Christian life. You believe in revelation because God exists and is truthful. You hope for eternal salvation and the forgiveness of sins because Jesus Christ merited them and strengthens our wills. You love God because he is infinite Good and infinitely lovable, and you love your neighbor, who is not infinitely lovable, because you love God who has made him. Lastly, you are sorry for and repent of your sins because you have offended God and because you have lost him as your happiness. Reasonableness or rationality thus dominated all the doings of the Catholic religion, which never takes the dependent creature man as its foundation, but the all sufficient God. . . .
