The dissatisfaction with reasoning

 “…[B]elief is more like a craftwork than a process of reasoning”—Madeline Bunting

First, Ms. Bunting strikes a feminist chord with the passage “belief is more like a craftwork than a process of reasoning.” Like Margaret Atwood, author of The Penelopiad (2005), she reconvenes belief within a woman centered worldview, gendering the notion of belief as craftwork. Consider the tale of the Odyssey and the absence of Odysseus from Penelope’s life: was her craftwork the evidence of her wit? If she succeeded in prolonging the advances of her suitors, so also belief prolongs, from this theological-anthropological view, a mode of fidelity in relationship, and it enacts an expression that communicates commitment in the midst of competing values.

a.       Primordial faith

Second, the metaphor of craftwork indicates the central dissatisfactions of what Dermot Lane calls “healthy secularization”. The metaphor indicates a resistance to propositional reasoning and the misgivings that have come with the decent of classical culture and prevailing winds, the flattening sense of history held in mainstream  culture, the needs for verified truth, the legitimacy given to the appeal to experience—however, all this has produced a “healthy secularization” (Lane 2003, 74). Craftwork is held in the Catholic Worker tradition as a mode of resistance to industrial era notions of machinery that have led to the commodification of time, and with capitalism, the exploitation of people. To invoke craftwork for belief, can therefore influence what Ormond Rush has called “hermeneutical reception” (Rush 2009, 74). That is, the wording allows for an alternative interpretation of the meaning of belief. It is only effective because of the existence of what Rahner has called the supernatural existential, or what Lane calls ‘primordial faith’. He defines this as “an attitude of trust and confidence and acceptance that is brought to bear on the value and worthwhileness of human existence” (Lane 2003, 76). The attitude of dissatisfaction with reasoning is also described by William James:

“your whole subconscious life, your impulses, your faiths, your needs, your devotions, have prepared the premises, of which your consciousness now feels the weight of the result; and something in you absolutely knows that result must be truer than any logic-copping rationalistic talk, however clever, that may contradict it’ (Brown 2004, 30).

In Lane’s terms the subconscious is ‘brought to bear’ on the meaning of existence. Just as important, the impulse of subconscious can contradict reason ‘however clever’. For her part, Ms. Bunting has contrasted the process of reasoning with craftwork to show that belief has bearing on human lives. The use of craftwork implicitly critiques the polarization of women’s lives from men’s lives and the false dichotomy wherefore women’s lives included craftwork at home, while rational men performed in public, as Odysseus did as war strategist while his ‘devotion’, Penelope, remained a domestic—the pair of his consciousness, thus his sub-consciousness. The reception of belief by women must be empowering of the “worthwhileness of [particularly their] existence” insofar as it acknowledges the surfeit of possibility in women that has for centuries been lost while belief defined as the process of reason categorically relegated women to secondary human existence.

b.      Yearning

Ms. Bunting is no exception in marking out belief in contrast to the process of reasoning. St. Augustine spoke of being impelled to belief: ‘without bodily force, he is drawn by a chain of his heart’ (“Confessions” Book 10, chapter 27). St. Aquinas pointed to an instinct of the heart (in affection) as how God drew one to belief (Lane 2003, 90). Likewise, Blaise Pascal distinguished from reason the ‘reasons of the heart’ (O’Collins 171). We certainly find belief represented biblically as attraction: “Jesus stayed out in the country; and people came to him from every quarter” (Mk 1:45). This attraction is a response to the “special revelation of the universal saving will of God in Christ” Lane writes, and the effect is “like a magnet drawing pieces of iron unto itself” (Lane 2003, 91). Thus, we come to belief, drawn by gentle force, as those who chose to visit with Jesus in the countryside to learn his teaching. Jesus is the Word of God, the ‘revelation that elicits faith’ (O’Collins 2011, 180). Like those who walked with Jesus we come to belief “…through the wisdom which gently draws the human … which leads it through visible realities to those which are invisible” (Gaudium et Spes n.15). Finally, belief is itself a “compelling conclusion” writes Gerard O’Collins, because in the same way we gradually came to know and love, then commit to a spouse, marriage gives further grounds to believe in that person (O’Collins 2011, 177). In other words, belief is not what one arrives at through an abstract, evidence-gathering procedure, but basically a personal engagement of the heart.

c.       Religious belief

The nature of craftwork raises a further vector of thought, namely, that it divests us of the pretentions of “pure” reason. In this case, belief tends in the direction of lived reality and the contention that we are “called to a real definitiveness” (Rahner and Weger 1981, 9). If craftwork means something, at least it connotes a humble work of beauty. Similarly, definitiveness means to act our choice where others can see it; if the world is a stage let the belief be known “in the full glare of the lights” (Rahner and Weger 1981, 16). This choice belies a contrast to primordial faith, what Dermot Lane distinguishes as religious faith. The definite religion is not a set of propositions but a medley, what John Henry Newman said of religion: “it is a rite, a creed, a philosophy, a rule of duty, all at once” (Brown 2004, 17). In this sense, belief is a craftwork to stitch together the meaning of our lives and something made not to linger in the mind but to be put forth before God and neighbor.