Nobody surely doubts that he lives and remembers and understands and wills and thinks and knows and judges. At least, even if he doubts, he lives. If he doubts, he thinks. If he doubts, he knows he does not know. If he doubts, he judges he ought not to give a hasty ascent. I love this being and this knowing. Where these truths are concerned, I need not quail before the academicians when they say “What if you should be mistaken?” Well, if I’m mistaken, I exist.
St Augustine, City of God
Doubt is a strange thing. It evokes both respect and disdain. I often wish I could be washed of its stains. At times when doubt serves only pain, I ask bent and bowing that it be stricken from the record of my insides and I hope with a fervor that I could be saved from its power. And yet, when I see doubt hovering over the minds of others, even those I love, it’s a trait I find no difficulty admiring. To accept no fact or fate, to ask each question and doubt each answer, is a dangerous, demanding, and admirable way to live and think. A world without doubt would either be righteous in ways we cannot understand or desperately bland. Doubt gives us the chance to believe instead of know. To be certain through tribulation, rather than naivety. To go, instead of stay.
Yet doubt calls for consistency in a way its opposite does not. If one finds it necessary to turn the page back, she truly ought turn to chapter one. Doubt is a gauntlet of backwards equations that can never be solved, yet with each step truth demands that a further step be taken. This awful riddle is the first reason among many that I am no scientist or saint. The one who doubts and doubts truly, whether he is doubting a proof, a pamphlet, or the reality of love, must doubt to a degree that harkens eternity in reverse.
Doubt, a mechanism some must employ despite scoffs and insult, is a brave choice. Some read of Thomas and shake their heads for his idiocy, his unbelief, his weakness. But he didn’t turn away, he didn’t laugh and walk another direction. He stuck his finger in there and touched what he could already see. What audacious courage. I doubt I would have the will to even lift my hand. Had he turned away, instead of embracing his elementary questions, he’d have proven himself nothing but a man of fright. It may be admired to turn the page backward instead of onward, to move in doubt instead of belief. But to turn away, to ignore the question altogether (as my lesser half is fond of doing) is to submit oneself to neither doubt nor faith, but fear.
Doubt is often quiet, and always lengthy, as it must be. To know if a wordless doubt has turned to irresponsible fear is a knowledge only the doubter can have, and an allegation no one can make. Because the greatest, most exemplary forms of doubt involve proofs that took (and still take) very long to prove.
Doubt gives us a chance. But only a chance, and not certain success. Like any inner tool, it can be used and misused. Well placed, and misplaced. Doubt can land us in heaps of either pride or humility, and we’ll be incapable of telling the difference. Unlike its opposite, doubt lives very near logic and is thus easy to defend. The doubter must only be willing to rewind his logic’s dance one step further than his listeners’, and if he can be so patient they will surely applaud (as will he). With the proper use of doubt, one can always be righter, but never truly Right. It is with cruel and unnecessarily patient doubt that I have won more arguments than I deserve.
The other half of doubt’s tough chance is to find what we ought to in its trials. To read two pages backward, so that we might skip two chapters ahead. To find that though tested and stripped, some inkling of belief still lives. A kernel of truth begs us forward. Doubt is redeemed in its opposite, in the one who looks both ways and crosses as taught, when little. Doubt gives us a chance, not an answer.
I’ve often wondered if a world without pain is a world without feeling. I cannot know, as it’s a logic that calls upon two unknowns. However a fact just as pretty sits before us each, and that is that a world without doubt is a world without faith. That we can claim for certain, as it’s an equation with intimate knowns that rely upon one another, scattering us each across a wide spectrum as doubters, believers, and both. We can hope that our thinking slides us to the proper end of the scales, we can doubt and be uncertain. Or we can doubt in circles, we can doubt without end or answer. To those strong souls that choose the latter, I offer genuine empathy for their despair. Not only will they have nothing to know, but nothing to believe, no one to properly love, no place to doggedly go.
If there is one secret truth I love, it is that hope waits on doubt, though doubt doesn’t know, or care. Faith waits on doubt, because doubt must work, while faith need only be.