Choosing Faith vs. Receiving Faith, Part 2

Alice laughed. "There's no use trying," she said: "one can't believe impossible things." 

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was your age, I always did it for half-an-hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast." 

Belief conceived as spiritual knowledge represents no triumph of the freely choosing, deeply desiring mind: on the contrary, it suggests a mind bound by observation, inference, and conclusion, even if the observation consists of spiritual rather than physical assay.

These two notions of belief—belief as spiritual puzzlement on the one hand, and belief as spiritual knowledge as the other—make radically different approaches to faith, it is true. And they roughly correspond to two different readings of Mormonism as a social text: one sees the Restoration as the ultimate "scandal of particularity," making claims of such astounding audacity and specificity that they affront reason and leave the mind in stunned silence; the other sees the Restoration as the ultimate theory of everything, bringing the spiritual dimension firmly within the physical cosmos and thus, in theory anyway, making everything subject to the regime of the known. It's the former reading, and the former approach to belief, that resonate emotionally for me. But it's the latter that excites me.

Either way, there's no need to haul out the creaky, unstable category of personal choice to ground the idea of religious belief. On the contrary, both notions of faith point us toward what I've been calling a "fortunate failure" of the mind—either a failure to comprehend God, or a failure to overthrow the tyranny of fact. We do not choose our beliefs; our beliefs capture us. With John Donne we cry to heaven, "Take me to you, imprison me, for I,/ Except you enthrall me, never shall be free."

And why is it a fortunate failure? It was a "fortunate Fall" that made us choosing subjects in a tragic world—fortunate, in part at least, because it shut us up in a fleshy prison of the mind, in need of so great a Redeemer. And it is only the "fortunate failure" of that prison, the blessed implosion of the always-choosing, always-wanting, always-striving human mind, that clears the way for Christ's silent capture of the soul.