Dear Nikola,

Here's this morning's e-mail to Klemens. It tells you what's going on outside and inside of me.
 
"Good morning. I'm up and functioning but as of now still without the faith that I can negotiate the stairs. That may change. Nathaniel brought me supper at 8 p.m. and just now asked whether I was ready for breakfast. I awoke with a cluster of new questions. If as Max Weber argued, Protestantism was the spirit of Capitalism, was Protestantism also spirit of Newtonian science? If as St Paul argued, "the just" shall live by faith, how is the faith in reason which inspires contemporary astrophysics and believes that the Garden of Eden evolved from an "Urknall" (big bang) and modern biology which identifies Charles Darwin as the author of Genesis, and modern quantum mechanics which dissolves the precision of consciousness, and modern physical relativity which confuses time space and gravity, how is this faith (Glaube, Pistis, Trust, Zuversicht) to be distinguished from the Pauline faith which in the Platonic tradition fuses justice and life? Meanwhile Nathaniel has brought me, and I have finished, breakfast."

Thank you very much for your telephone call day before yesterday. Our conversation has seeded my thinking ever since. The word which lingers in - and returns to my mind is πίστις, pistis, which is translated as trust and to my mind is rooted in Romans 1:17,
“Ὁ δὲ δίκαιος       ἐκ πίστεως  ζήσεται,” 
but the just (man)  from trust  shall live.

This in the contexts both of trust (or lack thereof) in the unconventional therapy for my lameness which you recommended, and in the context of my independent, solitary ruminations, concerning the role that trust plays in the recondite theories of astrophysics, of special and general relativity, of quantum mechanics and of mathematical physics in its many specialized applications.  I ask myself, and I ask you, should the assertion that the just man shall live by trust be dismissed as rhetorical flourish, or shall it be entertained  as a possibly fundamental reality of our existence? If there were some validity in the assertion that my life was an expression of trust, there follow the questions: trust in whom or what? In myself, in my god, in my family, in my friends, in reason, in science, or in something else, and if so what? There immediately arises for me the subsidiary question, if my whole life hinges on trust, is it not inescapable that the essential components of this life, my knowledge, my understanding, my social and political relationships should likewise hinge on trust? I ask you, and I ask myself, because I do not know.

πίστις (pistis) is the original word with which both in Romans 1:17 and in 1st Corinthians 13:13 St Paul praises a specific spiritual virtue which Liddell and Scott translate as "trust", (in German Vertrauen), a virtue which the Jacobeans render as "faith, and which Luther calls "Glauben". Rightly or wrongly, I find a difference between faith and trust, almost to the point of contradiction. Classically, faith is a confession of belief in the truth of verbal statements, as in the Confession of the Nicean Creed, while trust is active reliance on the reality of specific phases of the world in which I live, as for example, trust in my ability to negotiate stairs.

You recommended for my lameness a treatment, the name and the nature of which I do now know. I suspect that it would not help me, unless I trusted in it, or trusted it; and if I trusted the treatment it would be likely to benefit me irrespective of all historical perspectives. Before I submitted to such a treatment, I would need to trust it; the prerequisite for trust is information. I ask therefore that you provide me with relevant descriptors and URL's to make it possible for me to acquire the information which might nurture the required trust.

A this juncture it seems worthwhile to inquire about the function and mechanism of trust in the various phases of my existence. I trust my ability to get up out of this armchair, but I do not trust my ability to go downstairs.  I am unable to go downstairs in the absence of trust in my ability to do so.  Is it similarly (only) an absence of trust, which stands in the way of my grasping the fusion of space time and gravity? of Hilbert Spaces?  of any and all the other things at which my understanding balks? Or are all these considerations merely a game, a ploy to conceal or to distract from my ignorance.

I very much hope that you are well. Telephone or write at your convenience.  Give my regards to your parents.
EJM