Perhaps these aspects of his thought merit fuller exposition. In a sense, this is not surprising. His theory of faith is not his best piece of work: Christology and Mariology were subjects better suited to his genius, which was not, I think, metaphysical.
His theory of faith, as a theory, does not stand up under analysis; his promise of an "easier solution of the difficulties to be found in the question of faith" 5 remains unfulfilled.
On the other hand, his thought has an historical importance. Perhaps alone among nineteenth-century thinkers on the problem, he escaped the nineteenth-century mentality; and for this reason, his other promise, of "a more adequate concept of the lofty nature of faith," is rather satisfyingly fulfilled. Curiously enough, he exercised no verifiable, direct influence on later theologians, perhaps because of the formidable language in which he wrote.
Nonetheless, he is their forerunner, in certain aspects of their method, and in certain emphases they have chosen to make. He deserves, therefore, something more than passing notice by the historian. A full exposition of Scheeben's theory of faith would, I think, have to be constructed in such a way as to bring out, not the validity of his synthesis, which is dubious, but the fertility of his individual ideas, which is real enough. This would be its outline. One would begin by setting forth his concept of the relations between faith and the beatific vision; this would be the best introduction to his doctrine of the supernaturality of faith.
On its intellectual side, faith was for Scheeben a participation in the knowledge of God, operated by God's own light. With the entrance of this light into the soul is begun its transformation into a "child of light," image and heir of the "Father of lights. By this insistence on the mystical nature of faith, as a union with God, and an enrichment of the mind through an anticipatory grasp of the ultimate riches of the beatific vision, Scheeben counterpoises his later insistence on the sterner aspect of faith as the sacrificium intellectus.
