On Intentionality

Part 3, Enchantment by Choice?

Concerning my own recommendations regarding intentionality, the most pushback I have received is about the role of intentionality in recovering enchantment, the subject of Hunting Magic Eels.

The question flows from what we discussed in the last post. Can enchantment be a choice? Can an encounter with God be an act of will? Can you make yourself believe something if you don’t really believe it?

Simply put, can you, via intentionality, re-enchant yourself? And if you can, isn’t this “re-enchantment” fundamentally different from the taken-for-granted enchantment experienced by our forebears 500 years ago? Isn’t enchantment-by-choice different from an enchantment of naivety?

On this point, Paul Ricoeur famously described what he called the “second naivety” of religious belief. The first naivety is the stage of pre-critical belief. In this first naivety belief is simple, straightforward, literalistic, and given. Faith was trusting, accepting, and childlike. But as we grow up we move into a stage of critical reflection and questioning. We kick the tires of timeless verities. We question settled truths. We interrogate the tradition. We dissect the dogmas. In modern parlance, we engage in what is called “deconstruction.”

But after this critical stage, continues Ricoeur, some of us return to faith. We call this “reconstruction.” The pieces are put back together again. Ricoeur describes this return as a “second naivety.” This second naivety is a post-critical stage. Faith is re-embraced, but it has also been changed and transformed by the season of questioning. As the title of a Brian McLaren book puts it, the second naivety is “faith after doubt.”

To return to our question, is the experience of enchantment different during the first versus second naivety? Is the experience of enchantment different in the pre-critical versus post-critical stages? It would seem so. Once God has been questioned and doubted, once the childlike faith has been lost, faith seems to be permanently destabilized. Questions nag and doubts linger. The second naivety feels more provisional than the first.

I agree with this. And following from the last post, I think modernity permanently changed the conditions of faith. I also don’t think the clock can be rolled back. Consequently, faith in a secular age is always going to feel more tentative, provisional, and contested when compared to prior eras where faith was a cultural given. This loss of our culture’s “first naivety” can be lamented and viewed as tragic. And people will nostalgically long for the lost culture of Christendom, with its taken-for-granted givenness and homogeneity. But I don’t think we can put that genie back in the bottle.

While we can lament the impacts of modernity upon the conditions of belief, the call I make in Hunting Magic Eels isn’t a call to “choose enchantment.” The intentionality I describe isn’t pretending or metaphysical cosplay. The intentionality I call for isn’t like Dorothy visiting Oz where, in the book version, she has to wear green-tinted glasses locked onto her face to guarantee she will see the city as green. To make this point in the book, I rework a quote from the novelist Iris Murdock:

Whenever we experience religious doubts or have crises of faith, “pure will” can usually achieve little. It is small use telling oneself “Stop having doubts! Believe! Have faith!” What is needed is a reorientation which will provide an energy of a different kind, from a different source. Notice the metaphors of orientation and of looking. Faith is not a jump of the will, it is the acquiring of new objects of attention and thus of new energies as a result of refocusing.

Re-enchantment isn’t a “jump of the will.” Experiencing God isn’t a choice. Mystical encounter isn’t a decision. We cannot pretend something is there when it isn’t. The goal of “acquiring new objects of attention” through intentional practices isn’t to trick yourself. It is, rather, to make oneself available to new experiences. Let me share again the famous quote by Karl Rahner:

The devout Christian of the future will either be a ‘mystic’—someone who has ‘experienced something’—or will cease to be anything at all.

Underline the words “experienced something.” We’re not re-enchanted via choice, decision, willpower, or intentionality. We are re-enchanted because we have encountered--really and truly--a reality other than our own. What re-enchants us isn’t intentionality but ontology. The role of intentionality in my call for enchantment is to make us increasingly open, available, and receptive to these ontological encounters. Again, what re-enchants isn’t choice but experience.

Re-enchantment isn’t tricking yourself to believe in something you doubt. You’d feel the falsity of that in your mind, that you are only pretending. Re-enchantment is, rather, being intentional in making yourself open and available to sacred encounters. And it’s those sacred encounters, those ontological interruptions, that pull us deeper into mystery and adventure of faith.