Here it is crucially important to recognize how complex the act of choice truly is. There are at least two ways in which this is true. First, whether one wants something depends on the way it is described, or, more precisely, the way one describes it to oneself. I want to eat the piece of pie before me; I do not want to eat the several hundred calories before me. I want to do whatever it takes to become a fine scholar; I do not want to spend the evening studying Greek. And so on. We are all familiar with how the multitude of ways in which the same action can be described introduces complexity into our decisions. Sometimes the choice of how to act has to be preceded by a deliberate decision to think of the action in one way rather than another; thus I focus on the calories the pie contains, and not its other features, as I choose to forego. At other times we are unable to choose between the different ways of regarding the action, and we drift in indecision, or allow our very lack of decision to make the choice by default. I cannot decide whether my desire to learn Greek outweighs my disinclination to work this evening, and so I let my attention wander, and soon events intervene to remove the decision from me. However, the ways we describe an action are not indefinitely variable, for our thinking is responsive, at least to some extent, to the world around us. The pie really is a certain number of calories, Greek really is of a certain value; I may choose to disregard these facts, but I cannot change them.
The dependence of choice upon description is one source of complexity. Another is that our willing is reflexive, indeed multiply so. I can want to want something (or not to want it), or even want to want to want it, and so on. Philosophers who have discussed this phenomenon speak of first- and second-, or even higher, order desires.11 Thus I may not want to pray at the moment, but I want to want to pray; I realize that the desire is a good one, and that my lack of it is a fault. Interestingly, how these second-order desires translate to the first order varies from case to case. Sometimes one can want to want something without thereby actually wanting it; for example, I might want to want to eat only healthy foods, in the sense that I recognize that this would be an excellent desire to have, and sincerely wish that I did have it, without in any sense actually possessing it. On the other hand, there are cases where to want to want something is tantamount to wanting the thing itself. To return to the example of prayer, if I want to want to pray, do not I thereby, in a sense, want to pray? The problem is not sheer lack of desire; it is that the desire is present but undeveloped, and needs to be actively expressed. Often in such a case one can cultivate the desire by acting as if one already had it. A character in Tristram Shandy remarks, “I kiss my father not because I love him, but in order that I may love him.” That captures nicely the complexity of human desire: there is what we want and what we want to want, and we continually act with an eye toward both sets of desires.
I hope it will now be apparent that the question of whether the act of faith originates with us or with God may not have a simple answer. What, after all, is the act of faith? Is it believing, or wanting to believe—or perhaps even wanting to want to believe? And believing in what, or whom? What, for example, of one who comes to believe in Christ as he was preached by the Arians? Suppose such a person slowly and imperceptibly comes to see that Arianism is inadequate, and that Christ must be acknowledged as truly God; is there some definite point on this continuum which was the initium fidei? And what about motive? Suppose someone comes to believe because he thinks that doing so will get him to heaven, but has no conception of its larger meaning? It might be answered that believing is not primarily a matter of intellectual assent, but of living in faith. Then yet more questions arise. How much faith, and how consistently expressed? If it is fundamentally a way of life that matters, and not an act of assent, then why must belief in God be involved at all? Could not the desire to live a moral life, which often exists long before any act of assent, itself be the initium fidei?"
