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September 7, 2005
Hello everyone,
In today’s society, there are two aspects of our human nature that seem perpetually out of tune with one another. These two elements, one called reason and the other consisting of faith, hope, and love, metaphorically correspond to the head and the heart. In the second half of the two-part Introduction we looked at recently from Peter Kreeft’s book Heaven: The Heart’s Deepest Longing, Kreeft waxes poetic about these two diverse aspects of human nature, suggesting that for the ancient Greeks, the “head,” or reason, was the highest good. However, in Judeo-Christian teaching, the “heart,” guided by the love of God, was afforded the highest place. Kreeft was careful not to dismiss the head, however, for he recognizes that the two form a complementary pair. We are, after all, total persons and the head and the heart form a single unit that exists in the self-same person. Rather, he suggests that in the event of a conflict, the heart can reveal truths to which the head is blind. Thus, Kreeft creatively writes: “Where head-lights fail, the heart lights up itself.” He goes on to suggest that “We need hard heads but soft hearts”; “To ascend the sky of reason we must become hard: doubting, critical, endlessly testing and proving,” but to ascend to the depths of love, “our strength is our softness.” He follows this thought by restating our Lord’s teaching in Matthew 18:3–4:
. . . We must become little children, for only a little child is strong enough to open the greatest gate, the gate of the Kingdom of heaven. That gate is the heart, and who can open your heart like a child? The child in us is called by three names: faith (trust, openness), hope (idealism, wonder), and love (adoration, yea-saying). These are all terribly vulnerable things, quickly laughed at by a cynical, sophisticated world. (Peter Kreeft: The Heart’s Quest for Heaven (Part II))
In Plato’s conception of the total person (as spelled out in the Republic and in the Phaedrus), the soul has three parts: a rational part, a spirited part, and a desirous part. These parts can be thought of as corresponding to head, heart, and stomach: the head, seeing with the eyes of reason, knows what is best and can keep both the spiritedness of the heart (that, incidentally, makes for a fine warrior) and the appetites of the stomach under control. However, Evelyn Underhill sketches a model in which the spiritual part of man is deepest, followed by his emotional aspects, and lastly by his intellect. In her wonderfully poetic prose, she writes:
. . . Mere knowledge, taken alone, is a matter of receiving, not of acting: of eyes, not wings: a dead alive business at the best. There is thus a sharp distinction to be drawn between these two great expressions of life: the energetic love, the passive knowledge. One is related to the eager, outgoing activity, the dynamic impulse to do somewhat, physical, mental, or spiritual, which is inherent in all living things and which psychologists call conation: the other to the indwelling consciousness, the passive knowing somewhat, which they call cognition.
Now “conation” is almost wholly the business of will, but of will stimulated by emotion: for wilful action of every kind, however intellectual it may seem, is always the result of interest, and interest involves feeling. We act because we feel we want to; feel we must. Whether the inspiring force be a mere preference or an overwhelming urge, our impulse to “do” is a synthesis of determination and desire. All man’s achievements are the result of conation, never of mere thought. “The intellect by itself moves nothing,” said Aristotle, and modern psychology has but affirmed this law. Hence his quest of Reality is never caused, though it may be greatly assisted, by the intellectual aspect of his consciousness; for the reasoning powers as such have little initiative. Their province is analytic, not exploratory. They stay at home, dissecting and arranging matter that comes to hand; and do not adventure beyond their own region in search of food. Thought does not penetrate far into an object in which the self feels no interest—i.e., towards which she does not experience a “conative” movement of attraction, of desire—for interest is the only method known to us of arousing the will, and securing the fixity of attention necessary to any intellectual process. None think for long about anything for which they do not care; that is to say, which does not touch some aspect of their emotional life. They may hate it, love it, fear it, want it; but they must have some feeling about it. Feeling is the tentacle we stretch out to the world of things. (Mysticism and Psychology)
Two weeks ago, we finished Universalism: One Way of Many with a quotation from authors George Grant and Mark Horne about “the sad tendency of modern men to . . . either hold to the truth obnoxiously or . . . a lie graciously.” If we “hold to the truth obnoxiously,” that suggests that we may have an overzealous head that is as cold as it is accurate; if we hold to “a lie graciously” that suggests that we may be suffering from a weak-minded heart that is too lazy to seek out the truth or too cowardly to stand up for it. I strongly suspect that we would tend to want to suggest which is worst, the soft mind or the hard heart. But that misses the larger point entirely: they are both dysfunctional. Most all of us are familiar with the admonition Jesus gave to the Twelve when He sent them out into the world: “Behold, I send you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be shrewd as serpents and gentle as doves” (Matthew 10:16). We can view Jesus’s statement as a recognition of the healthy integration of head and heart.
To be as “shrewd as serpents” requires a discerning spirit that recognizes good from evil, right from wrong. Head and heart must come together on the matter and must examine the inward before turning to the outward. Obviously, if we are to be as shrewd as serpents, this requires some judgment calls not only on the part of our own actions but on the part of those in our surrounding environment as well. But how might this be done without being “judgmental” in the pejorative sense? In other words, how can we look with perfect lucidity out of these eyes and see with clarity what actually exists in the life of another? The answer is very simple. Keep yourself pure. And when we thus see with clarity, is not it our chosen response—a conscious decision on our part—that determines if we are being “judgmental” or not? Cannot we choose to respond in an appropriate manner that is not condemning, a way that does not inappropriately elevate us to some kind of one-man judge and jury? In Matthew 7:5, our Lord uses a very captivating metaphor that expresses these very truths: “First take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” He does not say, “First take the log out of your own eye so that you can see clearly to gouge out the eye of your brother” (which would be to hold the truth obnoxiously) or “take out the log and care nothing at all that your brother has a speck in his eye, pretending instead that you see nothing” (to hold to a lie graciously).
If you truly care about your brother, you will desire his well-being; if you see with clarity that he has a speck in his eye, you will desire its removal. Granted, there may be instances in which, with true clarity of vision, you recognize that speaking directly to your brother would be unwise and that you do better to let the truth speak for itself. Further, there may also be instances in which you are given no good opportunity to speak at length with your brother and you likewise say nothing. But at the least, if you care about him at all, will you not pray that God will reveal the speck to him? Will not your heart be burdened for him? For when we are not seeing clearly, we are held in a form of bondage—we must always see a problem as the problem it actually is before we can hope to effect a cure. Now then, let us look at the entire passage about logs and specks in context, lest anyone accuse of us of glibly passing over any part of it and trying to make it say something it does not:
Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? Or how can you say to your brother, “Let me take the speck out of your eye,” and behold, the log is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye. Do not give what is holy to dogs, and do not throw your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet, and turn and tear you to pieces. (Matthew 7:1–6)
What kind of judgment are we to avoid? Certainly, if we too recognize that we suffer the same kinds of sins and temptations (the log in our own eye), it will also affect the manner in which we speak to our brother about the speck in his own: among other things, we will approach him with humility of spirit. Yet are we to pluck out our eyes so that we do not recognize the shapes of the dogs and the swine that we will invariably encounter from time to time? Are we not to be able to discern the difference between pearls and pigs? No. Surely the eyes of our mind and heart are involved, and not only are they involved, but they need to be cleared of debris so that they are seeing as clearly as is possible. The July 2, 2005, issue of Dynamis offers us some further thoughts on the matter:
Does this “necessary state of life” required of all Christians, this focus on our own faults, imply that we may ignore wrong doing, or blithely pass over evil? When the Lord says, “Judge not, that you be not judged” (Mt. 7:1), does He mean we are to live as if sin is not in the world? We cannot avoid meeting reprobate, godless, and immoral people. Even fellow Christians fall into sin. Hence, St. John urges that we “try the spirits whether they are of God” (1 Jn. 4:1).
Of course not all attitudes, choices and people are “of God.” Therefore, let us not accept relativist morality. There is right and wrong. This is why the Lord directs us not to give “what is holy to the dogs; nor cast your pearls before swine” (Mt. 7:6), and why St. Paul warns us that “many walk, of whom I have told you often, and now tell you even weeping, that they are the enemies of the cross of Christ whose end is destruction, whose god is their belly, and whose glory is in their shame” (Phil. 3:18,19). May the Holy Spirit guide us “into all truth” (Jn.16:13)! Finally, the Lord teaches us how to make the decisions involving right and wrong: pray incessantly and knock at heaven’s door until all is made clear (Mt. 7:7,8). God will help us.
Thus, Christ instructs the Twelve to be as “shrewd as serpents,” for He is sending them out “as sheep amidst wolves” (Matthew 10:16). However, being “as shrewd as serpents” makes them as aware of the log in their own eye as it does the speck in their brother’s, and because they love both their Lord and their fellow brother, they are “as gentle as doves.” They do not “hold to a lie graciously”—they are as “shrewd as serpents.” But they definitely do not “hold to the truth obnoxiously,” for they are “as gentle as doves.” Thus we see that there is a unity of head and heart, though in actuality, Jesus would not likely have seen it as a unity of head and heart at all, for as we first uncovered in Supernatural Irrigation Systems of Eternal Life, the:
Hebrew [language] differs from Greek in some interesting ways. For instance, there is no separate word or concept for heart and mind, sacred and ordinary. Thus the language reflects the way of thinking; the Greek pattern we have inherited separates heart from mind while Hebrew thought does not. The same is true for sacred and ordinary, which are not separated in Hebrew thought, so all of life is to be enjoyed for God. (Hebrew)
We, however, are the dual inheritors of the Greco-Roman world and the Judeo-Christian value system, the two historical “streams” that, according to Kreeft, were creatively if stormily married during the “Medieval synthesis” only to be annulled by the Renaissance and the Restoration (Peter Kreeft: The Heart’s Deepest Longing (Part I)). Thus, when we speak of the complementary nature of tough heads and soft hearts, we are simply joining back together what was never separated in Hebrew thought and has only relatively recently been divorced in our own. In any case, having separate words for head and heart is not such a bad thing, for when analytic thought is functioning in a healthy manner, it is simply a truth-seeking tool that takes things apart only so that when the pieces are put back together again, the whole is understood that much more clearly. The end goal of healthy analytic thought is never to leave both halves divorced but rather to ensure that when they are brought back together, they enjoy one another’s company all the more, for they have now gotten to know each other far better individually than they did previously and thus function better collectively. So then, when head and heart are balanced, a holistic perspective results, the mind illumined by wisdom and the heart by faith, hope, and love.
Though the head is usually conceived of as the instrument of thought, the heart can be an invaluable aid in helping the head understand correctly; as St. Augustine noted, there are some things in this world that have to first be believed before they can be understood: “[U]nderstanding is the reward of faith. Therefore do not seek to understand in order to believe, but believe that thou mayest understand” (Tractate XXIX). In a footnote of the excellent book Does God Suffer? by Thomas G. Weinanady, the author cites another Augustinian quotation: “For although no one can believe in God unless he understands something, nonetheless the faith by which he believes, heals him, so that he may understand more fully. For there are some things which we believe only if we understand and other things which we understand only if we believe” (28). In the same footnote, Weinandy also cites St. Anselm from his Proslogion: “For I do not seek to understand in order to believe but I believe in order to understand. For I believe even this: that I shall not understand unless I believe.”
What is more, when we speak of the Greeks believing that reason should be in the driver’s seat, we are not necessarily expressing a notion so foreign to the Christian one. For the Greeks were not so much suggesting that reason should trump love, but rather that reason should rule the wayward passions, which corresponds quite closely to the Christian virtue of self-control. In fact, we find this kind of thought championed even in fairly recent times within a Judeo-Christian understanding of the world, such as in the thought that made Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous argument published in 1792 so powerful. The central difference between the Greek conception and Christian thought is the power source by which virtue is effected and to which it is directed. For while the Greeks were building on the same human foundation, they were doing so apart from Christ. The Greeks were trying to ascend to the realm of the gods (or the laws by which the gods were themselves governed) whereas the Christians were empowered by the Incarnated God who became flesh and made His dwelling among them; it was back again to Him that all their actions were directed. Because God made the world and everything in it, the virtue that the Greeks sought was truly virtuous, but it fell short of the love of Christ. Nevertheless, we cannot ignore the contribution of the Greeks, for as Kreeft writes in Justice, Wisdom, Courage, and Moderation: The Four Cardinal Virtues:
[I]sn’t it true that righteousness, a righteousness far surpassing the four cardinal virtues, becomes available to us when we are joined to Christ? It certainly is. And isn’t this a supernatural righteousness, a fruit of the Holy Spirit himself? Absolutely. But supernatural virtue is not subnatural virtue. It does not dispense with natural human foundations and with our responsibility to be active, not passive, in cultivation of virtuous habits.
I particularly appreciate what Kreeft writes about “supernatural virtue is not subnatural virtue.” Virtue reflects the character of God; virtue is honorable simply because it is virtuous. We demonstrate that we recognize this truth every time that we admit that we have seen non-believers whose lives appear more exemplary than many believers we know or when we regard other believers as hypocrites whose lives are at odds with their professed belief. It has been said (and I am inclined to believe it) that there are more atheists borne of disillusion with the lives of professing believers than for any other reason. Admittedly, an atheist may very well have a log in his eye. But he can see clearly enough with his other eye to realize that you, who claim to have 20-20 vision, nevertheless have intentionally covered yours with a black patch. No, our Lord deems it important that the log be removed from our eye; a large part of His purpose on earth was all about log removal. In fact, it was upon logs very much like these that He was crucified and gained victory over sin and death.
If head and heart are working in concert, the gentle dove is as shrewd as a serpent in part to avoid being gobbled by the world. How foolish the dove that says the snarl of the wolf and the coo of his own song are indiscernible parts of the same melody. If the wolf snaps up the dove in its jaws and devours it, the dove effectively becomes part of the wolf’s body and the snarl is the only remaining sound the world hears. But if the dove is shrewd, he will not flirt with the jaws of the wolf and thus his song yet retains the power to stir the hearts of mortal men with its strange, otherworldly beauty. Indeed. Head and heart both must work in harmony, for if either fails, death is the invariable result. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no man part.
God bless,
Eric
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