Given That Charity Is Necessary for Faith, How Can There Be Such Thing as Dead Faith?
If charity is gone, then faith ceases to be practical, that is, supplying the means to the end of reaching salvation and God and becomes a purely speculative and scientific object of knowledge: if I loved God or if I wanted to be saved, then that’s what I would have to do, according to the articles of faith. But I don’t, in fact, love God, etc. So, in practice I am under no obligation to act out my knowledge. Hence the faith is dead: it is causally inefficatious. Moreover, one no longer hopes, because acting to attain salvation is absurd, if one does not want to be saved, and even if he knows how he can be saved.