The Heart Has Its Reasons

Towards a Theological Anthropology of the Heart

Tóth

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9781498202657
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

This book explores a hitherto neglected area of theological anthropology: the unity of human emotionality and rationality embodied in the biblical concept of the heart. While the theological contours of human reason have for long been clearly drawn and presented as the exclusive seat of the image of God, affectivity has been relegated to a secondary position. With the reintegration of the body into recent philosophical and theological discourses, a number of questions have arisen: if the image (also) resides in the body, how does this change one's view of the theological significance of human affectivity? In what way is our likeness to God realized in the whole of what we are? Can one overcome the traditional dissociation between intellect and affectivity by a renewed theory of love? In conversation with patristic and medieval authors (e.g., Irenaeus, Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, Aquinas) and in dialogue with more recent interlocutors (Pascal, Ricoeur, Marion, Milbank, John Paul II), this work pursues a novel theological vision of the essential unity of our humanity.

1

Reason, Faith, and the Rediscovery of Sensibility

This is our natural condition and yet most contrary to our inclination.

—B. Pascal, Thoughts, fr. 72. “Man’s disproportion”

A Curious Diagnosis

Is there something wrong with the modern mind? Does it suffer from a chronic disease? Can one detect symptoms of a potential malaise? There are a few solitary thinkers who, in a bold and curious manner, claim to have diagnosed what they see as a latent and threatening illness: the modern mind has lost its balance, it has become disproportioned and it even shows signs of a fatal disintegration. One such critical voice narrates the following etiology:

Our anthropological forebears’ premature standing up on their hind legs seems to have not only set back our sensory organs but upset the equilibrium of our minds. The one-sided, grotesque triumph of reason stunted the world of our senses and emotions. By understanding our world (an impossible undertaking!) we wanted to master nature, through endless activity, tools, inventions, discoveries and finally even at the cost of murderous destruction. But reason alone is unable to grasp all of reality. This way, standing on two feet, in an unnatural, forced, dislocated posture, we could only create a tongue that is totally useless even for the faithful description of one of our everydays, incapable for example of putting into words the prevailing (moral) tone. I can say this because I have honestly tried, for five and a half years, to keep making entries every blessed day in the columns of the Logbook entrusted to my care. Yesterday, during breakfast, I gave up.1

This is the voice of a Kierkegaardian figure, a veteran sailor named Captain Kirketerp, who, driven ashore after many years of following the sea and no longer having a crew to command, is willy-nilly forced to formulate his own wisdom concerning life and the world. He faithfully continues to record his daily observations in the Logbook entrusted to his care. In a playful but deadly serious conversation with his good old friend Admiral Maandygaard (a no less Kirkegaardian character, we imagine), Kirketerp muses over our deficient human condition and comes up with his own explanation of why the course of events had gone astray. Or rather, his fictitious-scientific narrative may not be meant to explore causes in the first place, but, in an etiological manner, has been invented to interpret the present; it seeks to understand a certain current deficiency in human thought and language.

However, this is a concern rather of the author himself, Géza Ottlik (1912–90), a Hungarian novelist (and former mathematician), who, as one of the finest writers of the twentieth century, struggles to find a kind of meta-language, one that is a more suitable means of grasping reality in its entirety. Written in a complex postmodern prose style, which juggles several intertwining layers of narration in a Borgesian-Joycean manner, Ottlik’s short story is a sustained meditation on the possibility of the unattainable: a way to achieve a higher degree of thought despite the fact that, in his words, “we are doomed to failure: our mode of conceptualization is not suitable for this.”2 What we need, says Ottlik’s Maandygaard, are multidimensional concepts that are “composites of rational, emotional, volitional, moral and aesthetic elements or units of reality”; unfortunately, however, “of all that we are equipped to understand only the rational component.”3 For what we suffer from is a curious disease, “a pathological hypertrophy of the intellect at the expense of the emotions.”

Of course, the very existence of Ottlik’s short story is telling proof of literature’s magic power to transcend its own limits and realize the impossible: through a real tour de force, Ottlik’s Logbook manages to convey a sense of such wholesome rationality at work, one that reintegrates into itself the emotional, volitional, moral, and aesthetic element and one that eventually succeeds in faithfully recording, or recreating rather, the multidimensional integrity of human experience and thought. Playful and fictitious, Ottlik’s meditation and his own artistic practice invite one to take the import of his (Kirketerp’s) pseudo-scientific theory seriously. Modern reason appears to be impoverished in a mysterious manner.

Moreover, Ottlik’s narrative reminds us of another distinctive voice of a former student of philosophy, whose entire poetic practice is a constant plea for keeping a wholesome relationship between poetry and philosophy, poetry and religious belief. T. S. Eliot, too, is convinced that there is something wrong with the modern mind; it bears signs of a curious schizophrenia: “the modern world separates the intellect and the emotions, what can be reduced to a science, in its narrow conception of “science,” it respects; the rest may be a waste of uncontrolled behavior and immature emotion.”4 In an effort to face such a complex phenomenon, Eliot too formulates a theory that, in his case, is not embedded in the texture of fiction, but is directly put forward as a tentative literary-critical theory in a series of lectures that remained unpublished long after his death.5

Interestingly, Eliot, who is often considered to be an intellectual and anti-emotional poet, as a literary critic devoted much of his time to questions of poetic emotion, trying to outline ways in which thought can be captured by way of emotion.6 In other words, he was seeking to find what he termed “the emotional equivalent of thought” or “thought-feeling” that comes about when philosophical ideas or systems of belief are turned into poetry. Eliot spent years formulating this tentative theory that would explain the occurrence of “metaphysical poetry,” which he particularly admired and held as an example for his own poetic practice. What he discovered in the Metaphysical poets was in fact the highest achievement a poet could dream of: the overcoming in certain felicitous moments of what he termed “the dissociation of sensibility,” or in other words, “the disintegration of the intellect”; a poet’s greatest accomplishment is in rare moments the harmonization of thought and feeling, intellect and sensibility. What Eliot found was not easy to conceptualize, and we see him constantly struggling to find the right words to establish a suitable conceptual framework capable of expressing his nascent intuitions. In the course of the lectures, he formulates and reformulates in various ways the same stubborn insight: “I take as metaphysical poetry that in which what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought is brought within the grasp of feeling, or that in which what is ordinarily felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.”7 Since the dissociation of sensibility—which in Eliot’s view occurred in the seventeenth century—such transforming activity has been the primary task of the best poetry; the poet must always try to contribute to the tantalizing effort of the re-unification of the mind, for no less is at stake than the integrity of modern culture. Thus, Eliot puts forward the following vision:

Humanity reaches its higher civilization levels not chiefly by improvement of thought or by increase and variety of sensation, but by the extent of cooperation between acute sensation and acute thought. The most awful state of society that could be imagined would be that in which a maximum condition of sensibility was co-existent with a maximum attainment of thought—and no emotions uniting the two. It would probably be a very contented state, and is all the more awful for that.8

Such a fissure does not only occur between scientific rationality and sensibility, or philosophy and sensibility, but also affects the relationship between religious belief and religious sensibility. In this respect, Eliot sees the main deficiency of the modern age in the twin problems of the decline of religious belief and the parallel waning of religious sensibility: the modern person is not only unable to believe certain statements about God in the way people in earlier periods could, but he is also unable to feel towards God the way they formerly could. And all this has serious consequences for the attitude towards religion. Because religious feeling is disappearing, expressions of such a feeling become totally meaningless, while intellectual formulations of the same beliefs still retain some intelligibility: “A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can still understand, but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it become meaningless.”9

Eliot’s curious and admittedly tentative theory has received criticism for being too vague and lacking in scientific rigor; it has been said to be more of a myth than an arguable account of poetic development or cultural history, and has been dismissed as a strange figment of an eccentric poet’s wishful mind.10 And indeed, Eliot’s argumentation in the literary critical essays often implies more than it clearly expresses; his style is often elusive, with sudden shifts of focus, passing remarks, and curious lacunae. Eliot is not a systematic thinker and is not a specialist in the history of mind. He works with vague and undefined concepts and he is unable to give a solid shape to his imaginary theory. Even the key term of his vision, the notion of “sensibility,” seems to have become useless for later generations; it has become obsolete and has disappeared almost completely from the language of literary criticism.11 Younger critics had other important problems to solve, leaving the riddle of sensibility and the intellect unresolved. And yet, what if this half-scientific, half-fictitious, inelegantly and blunderingly put theory contains a grain of truth? Might we not need a new vision, a new narrative that retells the essential unity of the mind: the intellect and sensibility?

The Grandeur of Reason and Pascal’s Mysterious Heart

In the prolonged silence a third voice can be heard from afar, from a remote quarter of the seventeenth century. This too is the distinctive voice of a solitary thinker, a versatile mind, at once mathematician and physicist, philosopher and theologian. Pascal’s voice may sound all too familiar to us: “Le coeur a ses raisons, que la raison ne connait point.”12 Of course, we all know and readily agree that the heart can have its own reasons that are unknown to reason itself. But do we really understand what Pascal meant by this ingeniously formulated distinction? Can we reconstruct his intellectual universe that reveals what he took as reason and what was for him the function of the heart? Much has been written on the meaning of the Pascalian heart, less, perhaps, on Pascal’s understanding of reason. However, the most difficult problem of all is disentangling an imbroglio: the relationship between Pascal’s reason and the mysterious ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Reason, Faith, and the Rediscovery of Sensibility
• Chapter 2: The Essential Polarity of the Human Condition
• Chapter 3: Human Likeness to God
• Chapter 4: Human Emotionality and the Imago Dei
• Chapter 5: The Unity of Love
• Chapter 6: Between Embodiment and Spirituality
• Chapter 7: Gathering the Threads
• Bibliography