Scriptorium Daily
Bottom Line: The intellect cannot be divorced from feelings or emotion. The highest intellectual activity will be motivated by the highest emotions to see God, but cannot find God without His revealing Himself. Religion without revelation cannot see God. Knowing is sterile unless God gives it meaning and passion.
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Dead, but sane?
Passionate, but crazy?
These often seem like the two options in life. Think clearly and live like a machine or be poetic and lose the ordered intellect.
Christians refuse either and her greatest poets (like Dante) have demanded a passion that ends in a vision of God that is fantastic and geometric.
The Christian poets and philosophers have always declared the two are united in heaven without confusion.....
Great Christians such as Thomas, Dante, Luther, and C.S. Lewis may have disagreed on how the mystery was to be precisely understood, but they agreed that when it was correctly understood it would be precisely true and passionately beautiful. In fact, they could disagree in theology, philosophy, and hymnody precisely because they agreed that Christianity was a revelation of God to man that empowered a passionate intellect!
This is a terrific power to unleash in mankind and the disunity that sometimes occurs amongst the divines is less shocking than there startling unity on so much.
What humanity needs is a ‘feeling intellect’ and the proper place for that feeling intellect to be directed. This property of the soul is a way to motivate the mind and order the passions of individual persons.....
Reason is not just a “logic machine” that can control the lower passions. What motivates the desire for logic? What motivates the passion for geometric precision or scientific understanding?
This is the feeling intellect about which William’s writes so effectively. For Williams this property is not confined to individual men, but is also a greater cosmic reality. This recognition begins, however, with the activation of a logical passion or a passionate precision in the feeling intellect.....
Plato has suggested three parts to the human soul: a multi-form beast (erotic passions), a lion (higher passions), and a ’small man.’ It is the man, who contains the intellect, that should govern the rest, but this is difficult. Fortunately, he has one advantage: as a mini-me (!) he contains all the parts of my soul and so knows the way these parts should be ordered.
This model-man placed by Plato inside the head is rightly ordered with passions and emotions that are directed by reason. In a well ordered soul, the ‘model man’ in the head can govern the greater man in the body because it understands each part of the nature of the whole. It is a paradigm for the greater man.
The intellect in this picture is not just ‘reason,’ but an intellect with passion (a small amount!) at its immediate disposal.
What does the whole man do? He seeks, as is suggested in Timaeus , for “right ordering” (justice) in the cosmos. Man, if rightly ordered, looks for the Feeling Intellect in the whole. He knows and loves it having seen an image of it in himself, but there the problem arises.....
Unlike Plato, the Christian has the advantage of the God who is our proper End having revealed himself to mankind. As Williams writes the quest for the cosmic Feeling Intellect without the Revelation of God in Christ Jesus is as likely to end in demon worship as anything even remotely good.
In commenting on Williams, Lewis adds (Arthurian Torso, pp. 118-119) that acknowledging the mere reality of the Feeling Intellect is not enough to save mankind. The vision of the Feeling Intellect can be turned to evil as well as good: ending in an Infernal Vision as well as the Beautific.
It can worship the sign instead of the One to whom the sign points. This is the arrogant student (Lord have mercy!) who worships the creature rather than the Creator, the poem rather than the Poet, and the art rather that the Artist.
This arrogance is heard whenever mankind cries out for culture for culture’s sake. Even great men, great Christians, can fall into this wicked idolatry.....
Great poetry and great music do reach the feeling intellect. They are able to inspire it and then the high passions motivate the intellect to see the Good, True, and Beautiful. This seems good, but it is worldly wisdom that can only destroy and not bring true salvation.
In that quest, man cannot succeed, but God has mercy on fallen man and reaches down to Him. God who is known to be unknown reveals Himself.
At that point the temptation for men who reject this revelation is to turn to the worship of pure “soul” or intellectual activity. The poet can love his poetry, the artist his art, and the musician his music. This seems better, but it will equally fail. Now the man is loving that stirs and frames love and not the object of that love.
Culture is not the answer. It too is a false god if it is sought for its own sake. It can stir the small feeling intellect in a man to reach out to the Divine, but it cannot find a sure resting place.
It is easy to go the wrong way if man simply looks for the known Unknown in his own wisdom. Even great poetry, art, or music at best only wakes us up from our sleep and shows us that we are lost. Only God can guide us back to Himself from this dark place.
Christianity is a revelation from God to man. It is the Way God provides from the dark wood for man’s small feeling intellect to find the great objective fact of the cosmic Mind. In the person of Jesus Christ, God then reveals Himself to man in a way man can love, the Feeling Intellect empowering man’s feeling intellect to find its proper end. (more)
