Me: OK, a bunch of different issues or approaches here, let’s take them one at a time.

1) “Reasoning oneself into faith”: Eh? Not totally sure what this means. I wasn’t raised Christian. I was pretty hostile to Christianity. Therefore, I had a lot of misconceptions about what Christianity actually entailed, a lot of anti-Christian beliefs that I needed to realize were wrong, and a great reluctance to consider Christianity worthy of my attention. Once I had figured out that Christianity explained a lot of the world around me–more than any other belief system I’d found–I still didn’t have faith. I prayed, trying to be responsible (not assume I’d received an answer because I was seeking one), and eventually got what I needed to trust God and know He existed. But even that answer to prayer was enmeshed in and depended for its interpretation on the conclusions I’d already come to: In other words, I was at the point where I was convinced through philosophy that if objects in the world were in fact meaningful and good, the only valid explanation for that fact would be Christianity. And so when my prayers (essentially a kind of cross between “Lord, help my unbelief” and “Are you there, God? It’s me, Margaret”) were answered, they were answered not in specifically Christian terms but rather with the faith in God as Creator. I was able to trust that the world was God’s creation. Because of prior conclusions I’d reached, that was enough for me to trust Christ.

Later–especially the week I was Confirmed, the summer after my Confirmation, and the fall term of my senior year (fall 1999)–I really wrestled with my faith. I had a lot of doubts, a good amount of prideful rebellion, and a hint of despair. I can think of non-philosophical ways for people to struggle with faith and doubt (Chesterton has a tart little line about, I think, a man who says he cannot accept the Trinity when he means that he is sleeping with his neighbor’s wife). But for me, not only were these struggles raised by (among other things) philosophical concerns, they were also allayed through philosophical seeking. In other words, I prayed so that I might think more clearly, and as I came to understand better I also was more able to trust.

I don’t think either of those situations (how I initially came to Christianity, or how I dealt with doubts) is “reasoning myself into faith” in the sense of a) treating the faith as impersonal intellectual propositions to receive my “sic” or “non,” or b) thinking that I’m doing the work here while God is standing off to one side waiting for me to pull myself up by the bootstraps. Obviously, God made me such that I could come to know Him; He gave me opportunities to find Him; He answered my prayers when I finally was able to seek Him honestly. He’s the Hound of Heaven, yo, and not lightly put off the chase! But I also had a responsibility to use the opportunities He gave me, to seek Him, to respond to His call, to open my heart.

2) Self-evidence, reason, and rationalism. As I understand it, Enlow’s objection to considering Cur Deus Homo as an argument for the Incarnation “from reason” is that it relies on premises that only Christians would accept in the first place, rather than relying on premises that, say, Spinoza, or Hume could accept. I have a few objections to that view.

First, it seems to conflate reason and rationalism, which seems to me to be forfeiting a game we can win. The Cartesian “I’ll only allow premises I can’t possibly doubt!” project is not only not the only possible understanding of reason–it’s an incoherent understanding of reason. (Argh, I don’t esp. have time to get into that–you could either read the section on Descartes in The Will to Power, or, better yet, you could just read Meditations on First Philosophy and watch the [unintentional] sleight of hand.) Other attempts to ground an account of reason on solely “rational” or “natural” or “in no way, shape, or form theological” premises fail too–here’s a quickie argument along those lines. Therefore, I really, really want Christians to keep away from rationalist accounts of what reason is. They aren’t necessary and don’t work.

All reasoning works with premises. I believe that any account of reason will ultimately become either an account of selfishness or an account of God. I do not think reason, by itself, can prompt a person to choose one of those two accounts–reason can’t push you to choose love over pride or vice versa. But reason can do a lot of things. Reason can show you what the choice really looks like. It can force you beyond your premises and it can change your premises (for example, by showing you that two beliefs you hold are coherent in themselves but incompatible with one another, and you’ve got to decide which one you’re more sure of). It can show you the consequences of unexamined beliefs you already hold–showing you how some of your “premises” drive you toward pride and some toward love.

That’s what Cur Deus Homo did for me. It was so striking to me precisely because I wasn’t Christian, yet I found the view of sin, justice, and mercy Anselm presented really made sense to me in light of my own beliefs and experience. Anselm’s account of sin rests in part on a definition of wrongdoing as a violation of the given order–not a social construct, not bad because it’s self-destructive, etc. Anselm’s account of justice, similarly, involves punishment as redress for wrong, giving each man what he deserves, and, therefore, Hamlet’s realization, “Use each man after his desert, and who shall ‘scape whipping?” I realized, reading and discussing and prodding at CDH, that, based on my experience, I believed these things but had not understood them before. I then had to work out the relationship of my beliefs about wrongdoing and justice to Anselm’s beliefs about God and Christ. Notice that it’s possible to cash out the aspects of Anselm’s thought that immediately struck me without using the word “God.” (OK, so I equivocate a little by saying “the given order”; suffice it to say that I had no idea how much my own sense of personal sin relied on a sense of Creation, and a loving Creator, and it’s hard for me to work my way back into the way I thought when I was first realizing the consequences of my beliefs.) So, much of my intellectual quest has involved figuring out the stuff I just said in this paragraph; figuring out that premises which I thought did not logically require belief in God in fact did require such belief; and then choosing these necessarily theist premises over the many atheist beliefs I also held (beliefs I eventually realized were incoherent, untrue, and damaging).

3) Trust without reasons. I totally agree that God requires trust in things that go against our ordinary experience of the world (“Therefore Sarah laughed”). I would not characterize that as “going against reason.” Let me see if I can make clear why.

Think of a Mormon, or a Nietzschean, or a Raelian. Despite their varying levels of weirdosity, each of these evangelizing folks could say the same thing to me that Enlow is saying: Reason won’t get you to the truth, you have to just trust without asking for a reason to trust. “‘Trust in God begins in silences, imponderables, action without foundation’–that’s why you should be a Mormon. I know it looks like it makes no sense, but that’s the beauty of it! Credo quia absurdum and all that…”

I have stuff to say to these people, because I do think that reason can illuminate the truth of Christianity and the falsehood of the Mormon or Nietzschean (or, presumably, Raelian, not that I’ve spent a lot of time on this one…) worldview. Reason can’t force them to leave aside their wrong beliefs; you can always choose conformity or comfort over truth, self over God, Hell over Heaven. But you can show them reasons they should be more interested in what you believe than you are in what they believe.

There are all kinds of situations in which reason illuminates the truth of Christianity. There are non-Christians–Avery Dulles reading his books and worrying that he might have to come back to Christ. There are Christians struggling with doubts–is “original sin” just nonsense used to induce a feeling of shame? If you said to me, when I was in these situations, “Trust God and don’t worry about your questions,” I really don’t see how that would have helped, since the whole point was that I needed to know why I should trust God, or trust Christ over the vapory Deist god, or trust Christianity over Judaism.

Take two examples of people who say, “Trust me.” Let’s say my best friend, Gloria, is generally a totally stand-up chick, really loyal and awesome, but lately when I call her she’s never in, I caught her whispering darkly in a corner with a guy I’m interested in, she stops talking when I enter a room, and she seems to be avoiding me. I ask her what’s going on and she says, “I can’t tell you yet! Trust me.”

Meanwhile, my friend Patty is having some trouble with her husband Tom. He comes home too late, he gives fishy excuses, a strange woman called the other night and hung up when Patty picked up the extension. Tom has had scores of affairs in the past, and Patty is in agony wondering if it’s starting all over again. She breaks down and asks Tom whether he’s seeing someone else. “Trust me,” he says tensely, not looking her in the eye.

It’s pretty obvious that Gloria (who’s planning a surprise party for my birthday) and Tom (who’s sleeping with his co-worker Betty) are at different levels of trustworthiness. It makes sense for me to trust Gloria, even though she’s asking me to deal with a situation that makes me tense and uncertain. If I were Patty, I don’t think I’d trust Tom as far as I could throw him.

Similarly. I have reason to trust God… to trust Christ… and to trust the Catholic Church. Therefore, when I don’t understand something, I have reason to believe that God’s right and I’m just confused. But in order to get to that place of trust, of belief even though I have not put my hand in Christ’s wounds, I had to figure out why I should trust. And that is where reason can shine its light.