Believing into God

What if Christianity's greatest synthesis was also its quietest loss?When Thomas Aquinas married the Gospel to Aristotle's philosophy, the achievement was celebrated for centuries as the harmony of faith and reason. In Believing Into God, philosopher Xavier Ortiz Monasterio argues that the marriage came at a hidden cost: fitted into Aristotle's framework of propositions, demonstration, and intellectual assent, Christian faith was quietly denatured - reduced from a total, living relationship with a personal God to agreement with statements about God.Ranging from the Church Fathers' credere in Deum ("believing into God") through Anselm, Bonaventure, and the thirteenth-century Aristotelian revolution, Monasterio recovers a forgotten line of medieval thinkers who resisted the change - and builds toward a bold alternative: a theory of faith grounded in narrative rather than proposition. Abraham did not assent to a doctrine; he answered a call. Scripture does not merely inform the intellect; it moves the heart and demands a response. Drawing on speech-act theory and anticipating Hans Frei's Eclipse of Biblical Narrative, the book asks what theology becomes once it stops pretending to be an Aristotelian science.Dr Xavier Monasterio (1926-2011) studied under Merleau-Ponty in Paris, kept company with Camus and Sartre, and taught philosophy for thirty-four years at the University of Dayton. Left unpublished and untitled at his death, this manuscript is his most sustained work - a philosophically rigorous, deeply Catholic challenge to a synthesis most take for granted.The author's original eight chapters are presented as he left them; three concluding chapters, reconstructed from his own notes and essays, carry the argument to its intended end and are clearly identified as such.