The Heart Has Its Reasons (Blaise Pascal)

      Am I not taking the little novel too seriously? Am I not treating it as a work of philosophy – or scripture even? Literature reaches us not through abstract thoughts but through emotional response – through the heart. And the heart is a central theme of this book. I think some truths, perhaps the most important ones, require the participation of a pure and lucid heart. This is what great literature speaks to and can bring out in attentive readers. I have nothing against reason and logic. I love logic. I have nothing against science as long as it is conscious of what it is doing and what it cannot do. But great literature is even more important for understanding things. 

       A friend, who had recently converted to Islam, reported to me in conversation how a naïve, uneducated person responded to her conversion: namely, with the question “But how do you know it’s true?” That was supposed to be evidence of the friend’s naiveté. But that question is right on target. It is the question any honest person must ask themselves about whatever core beliefs guide their lives. In this society, concern about truth and how truthfully one lives does indeed seem naïve. I think my friend’s uneducated friend asked the crucial question.      

     So I repeated it: “How do you know it’s true?” “I know it in my heart,” was her reply. It might seem that this response is a conversation-thought stopper. Why? Because it is so personal, so “subjective.” No one can really look inside her heart. Even her closest friends have only ‘indirect evidence’ of what is there – her words, acts, attitude to life in general, the way she does live. I grant that can be ‘evidence’ of a certain kind for her, though it can never attain the status of a proof. It can flow into her words, acts, attitudes, and life such that her life itself can be evidence of a sort, though not proof. After all, as Pascal movingly wrote:

 

The heart has its reasons, which Reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things. It is the heart that feels God, and not Reason. This, then, is perfect faith: God felt in the heart.

 

The imagination is the interpreter, the translator of these feelings. This is extremely complex and difficult to describe. It depends on how pure and even “childlike” the individual heart is, on the one hand; on a kind of wisdom and goodness, on the other. The “enemy” in this battle takes the form of wishful thinking; or narcissistic, self-gratifying, self-elevating, or simply self-consoling fantasy.

      Here the concept of sin can clarify the difference between imagination and fantasy: sin is that which divides us from Creation, from a community with our fellow human beings, and focuses on an Ego born in this opposition – to our family; to that potential in us that I think of as the soul (capacity for joy, for hope, faith, love). Sin is whatever dissolves these connections, imprisoning us in an ego-fantasy world that is in reality what Hell is. In contrast, whatever belongs to our inner life that is joyful, loving, affirming, hopeful, trusting, reconciling, healing – and in a way amazingly impersonal, though you are never more yourself – forces the concept of God (or for some, Goodness) on some people. You can pretty much know whether the imagination or the fantasy is in play by asking the simple question: does it cut me off from my essential relations or illuminate them? Does it connect me more deeply and deepen my understanding or is it merely self-flattering? Does it relate me to God – or to truth, hope, faith, above all love – or does it elevate my self-brand over other? (When I speak of connections, I’m not talking about being connected mindlessly to some cult or sect to keep the ego afloat, which is pure division, an central image of sin perhaps.)

    The key feature of the heart – feelings, emotions, moods, and attitudes – is that through the heart alone higher realities can be revealed to us. The preciousness, the true worth of my children manifests itself alone in the love that I have for them – more, that I rightly have for them, for a person who lacks love for their children is rightly considered defective. The preciousness of a loved one may be revealed through the grief of losing them. Our awe in beholding the sea, mountains, or a waterfall reveals the beauty of nature. Our horror over evil done reveals again the preciousness of the victims of evil. A person who betrays someone and feels no remorse – more, does not even find it sane to feel remorse – doesn’t understand what he has done when he betrayed someone. The emotional component is necessary to know what is real and true.

      Moderns tend to want to write off the pronouncements of the heart as subjective emotions projected onto the blank screen of nature. Reason-detached-from-the-heart alone is at work here, blind to another possibility. Our hearts are vehicles of knowledge, of knowing a dimension of reality we experience all the time but to which pure reason – the head – is blind. Or they can be: emotions like thoughts can also be false – they can be sentimental, for example. If we mean by ‘Reason’ that which connects us to a reality – i.e. that which cannot be reduced to our subjective desires, wishes, needs, or beliefs – then the heart belongs to Reason. In any case, reason alone, the head, cannot determine whether only that to which reason has access exhausts the possibilities of reality – and so Reason cannot exhaustively understand Reason.

       A key belief in how we experience and understand emotions I find in how we answer the Hamlet challenge – to do believe, with Hamlet, that there are more things in Heaven or Earth than are dreamt of in our science? Or do we deny this. Our convictions on these colors all emotional experience. And many other beliefs as well.

    I want now to briefly unpack some of those feelings that can give rise to a longing for something beyond what reason can reveal. Joy as C. S. Lewis understood it; as the opposite of narcissistic fantasy and sentimentality: “…an unsatisfied desire which is itself more desirable than any other satisfaction”; “a longing for he knows not what. It stirs and troubles him (to his life-long enrichment) with the dim sense of something beyond his reach and, far from dulling or emptying the actual world, gives it a new dimension of depth.” The longing produced in many readers by Tolkien’s forests, for example, makes all real woods a little enchanted. Its antithesis is narcissistic fantasy – daydreaming of being a great athlete admired by the girl you want. There is no ego in this special kind of longing that Lewis calls “joy.” Joy is a feeling that can force the concept of “God” on a person.

        Love is a crucial feeling that can give rise to intimations of God. Many – sadly not everyone – express the joy over the birth of a child in the language of love: ‘my baby is a gift.’ There is not irrationality involved if the new parent doesn’t go on to say: ‘And therefore God must exist.’ If there is a gift, there must be a giver. Still, some people, inhabiting a certain attitude toward life, will feel the idea of God forced on them by such love. Of course, we all experience bouts of despair as well, and despair points us towards the Nothing. But if you have experienced both genuine love and a bout of despair, your heart will tell you that in love – except for perhaps sexual love, typically a realm of illusions – you are in reality; despair deals with self-pitying illusion. In love you feel reality, the true goodness of what you love; in despair you feel the unreality of the world and yourself. Love is like listening to a wonderful prelude or fugue of Bach – real music. Despair is like listening to a Death Metal band shouting obscenities at the world.

        I recall very well when my grandmother (Granny Lovan) died – on the day before Christmas Eve. I was in my second year at the university and was home for Christmas vacation. Over a year of university had removed any remaining doubts about the sense of religion for me at that time. I saw it – like Spock perhaps – as a superstitious belief system to be superseded by the scientific Enlightenment. That faith went deep with all my grandparents I attributed to their generation. It followed I did not believe in an afterlife. My grandmother was gone. At the funeral, I was aware that my scientific rationalism alienated me from most of the rest of my family, including my grandmother. I listened to the funeral sermon with discomfort. At some point during the reading of the 23rd Psalm, the actual meaning of my grandmother’s death, the thought of what a loving and good woman she had been to me – and to everybody else as far as I know – took possession of me. She was real to me. All the memories came back. And all of a sudden, my cold, scientific rationalism was revealed to be what it was: cold and condescending – not a heroic recognition of truth over comforting illusion.

      It’s not that I immediately believed in an afterlife. My faith 40-plus years later tells me I may hope and so I hope. But rightly or wrongly, my faith doesn’t depend on whether I think there is an afterlife. But at my grandmother’s funeral, I did immediately feel shame. Years later, I read something that made sense of my shame. ‘To love someone means you believe they will live forever.’ My love for my grandmother forbade me at least to rule out the possibility of continued life for her; forbade me from coldly pronouncing ‘she is dead’ and considering my family sentimental for hoping otherwise. As we cannot possibly know what lies beyond the grave and as we do love, nothing stops us from hoping except an ideology taken as fact and a cold heart. None of that is evidence or proof of God’s presence in the world. It is a kind of refutation of cold, hard rationalism – of strict naturalism. It is also a matrix within which a non-sentimental faith may make sense.

    A strict, scientific naturalist would interpret these feelings as purely subjective, a product of evolution, or whatever. And I can’t prove him wrong. He can’t prove me wrong either. He can point out that my evidence is subjective and is most likely wishful thinking on my part. We human beings are for better and worse not fully rational creatures. But the inner life – the heart – forces itself on us. We cannot always bracket it out, or brand it as illusory or sentimental, as I have been trying to make sense of. Do our deep human desires and aspirations point toward a real fulfillment or are they inevitably doomed to frustration? Are our longings for meaning, dignity, immortality, and deep spiritual experience a dead-end street, or are these and other such aspirations destined for fulfillment? Here is what C.S. Lewis wrote about the emotional response of awe in The Problem of Pain:

 

There seem to be only two views we can hold about awe. Either it is a mere twist in the human mind, corresponding to nothing objective and serving no biological function, yet showing no tendency to disappear from that mind at its fullest development in poet, philosopher, and saint; or else it is a direct experience of the really supernatural, to which the name revelation might properly be given.

    Intellectually, I simply assert that it is a draw, an intellectual stalemate. (I would be glad to respond to arguments that it is not a stalemate.) The facts can be read one way or the other. Philosophers of genius have tried to make sense of both possibilities. People worthy of respect have led authentic lives based on both. Relying on the head alone we can never reach a judgment. But if we love – my grandmother in this instance – it seems a betrayal to side with the skeptic. Ultimately, if we love the world, if we love life, it will seem a betrayal to side with the cold rationalist.      

      Our judgment on Shakespeare's line – ‘there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of your philosophy, or science’ – determines whether it is rational only to believe what the objective (scientific) evidence supports. If I believe there is more, then obviously my natural reason (my head) will not reach it. Perhaps my ‘heart’ is the only portal through which to experience it. If I deny there is more because I decide only to believe that for which there is objective evidence, then my denial itself is not based on objective evidence, but just as much on the heart, though a heart of a different quality. Like my heart just before my grandmother’s funeral. My current belief: We trust what our hearts tell us, what our hearts can honestly bear.

    In any case, this is the dimension in which books like A Christmas Carol can reveal reality. Not as a newspaper report of transcendence but by giving profound expression to the truths the heart (always in partnership with the head) can reach.