To Warm, Not Instruct
There is a famous line from the Pensées of Blaise Pascal: “The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things.”
As Pascal goes on to elaborate, faith is primarily about love than intellect. God makes His appeal to the heart, rather than toward the mind. Thus, when we fall in love the heart “has its reasons” of which “reason does not know.”
As Pascal goes on to say: “It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason.”
Pascal also states the relation in the negative: “The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him.” Indeed. As I describe in Hunting Magic Eels, this was my problem for many years, turning God into a Rubik’s Cube that I had to solve.
I bring all this up to underline Pascal’s description of Jesus’ and Paul’s method of persuasion: “We do not prove that we ought to be loved by enumerating in order the causes of love; that would be ridiculous. Jesus Christ and Saint Paul employ the rule of love, not of intellect; for they would warm, not instruct.”
For they would warm, not instruct.
I think this is, in a nutshell, the path for evangelism in an increasingly post-Christian culture. We could describe this as “Augustinian evangelism,” an appeal directed toward the restless modern heart. And the goal of this communication isn’t rationalistic. The goal is to warm the heart, to make the appeal of God come alive with promise and possibility. A tenuous flicker fanned into a flame.
There are lots of ways to do this. My last three books—Hunting Magic Eels, The Shape of Joy, and The Book of Love—are each, in their own way, my experiments with Pascal’s strategy.
They are attempts to warm.
I think Robert Hunter, a lyricist for the Grateful Dead, likely had Pascal's line in mind when he wrote the lyrics for *Eyes of the World*;
[Chorus]
Wake up to find out that you are the eyes of the world
The heart has its beaches, its homeland and thoughts of its own
Wake now, discover that you are the song that the morning brings
But the heart has its seasons, its evenings and songs of its own...
Trichotomist and Dichotomist debates aside, I think there needs to be fusion of the Mind and Heart to make our faith more dynamically alive, fruitfully productive and proactive. One at the expense of the other, causes a spiritual ‘anisomelia’ of sorts. If reason removes wonder, and ends up deconstructing one’s joy, then there are potentially 'trust issues' involved. When we are reconciled to the fact that [this world] is grotesquely unfair and out of balance, it makes striving and struggling for ‘The Kingdom’, all the more real. The human mind can only carry us so far, and God is never limited to human constructed categories. That is why the ‘Via Negativa’ needs to spring from the heart.