The Heart Has It’s Reasons Which Reason Does Not Know (The Heart is Truly Rational If It Is Truly The Heart)

 

Faith is not a leap into the dark but a step into the light.

"When I consider the brief span of my life swallowed up in the eternity before and behind it, the small space that I fill, or even see, engulfed in the infinite immensity of spaces which I know not, and which know not me, I am afraid, and wonder to see myself here rather than there; for there is no reason why I should be here rather than there, now, rather than then.”

Blaise Pascal, Pensées #205

Long my imprisoned spirit lay

fast bound in sin and nature’s night;

thine eye diffused a quickening ray;

I woke, the dungeon flamed with light;

my chains fell off, my heart was free,

I rose, went forth, and followed thee.

(Charles Wesley)

NUIT DE FEU 

(“For he is like a refiner's fire" - Malachi 3:2)

from an essay by Nayeli Riano on Blaise Pascal (1623-1662):

Based on Pascal’s writings about his faith we might think that his reasons for being a believer were deduced from reasoned arguments and careful studies in theology, philosophy, and hermeneutics. But the Pensées were a project that he began only in his final years—despite his dying at the young age of 39. His religious conviction, instead, came from a personal experience that could only happen to a worldly ascetic. Pascal had his own mystical encounter one night at the age of thirty-one, which lasted about two hours. It is a wonderful story: After Pascal’s death in 1662, a servant, sorting through Pascal’s belongings, found a piece of parchment sewn into his coat, inside which was a small paper. On that small paper was a personal prayer and description of what he had felt that night. The paper had a small cross drawn at the top with the following words written below it:

In the year of the Lord 1654

Monday, November 23

From about half-past ten in the evening

until half-past twelve.

 

Fire

God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob

Not of philosophers nor of the scholars.

Certitude. Certitude. Feeling. Joy, Peace.

God of Jesus Christ,

My God and thy God.

“Thy God shall be my God.”

Forgetfulness of the world and of everything, except God.

He is to be found only by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Greatness of the soul of man.

“Righteous Father, the world hath not know thee,

but I have known thee.”

Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy.

Jesus Christ.

I have fallen away: I have fled from Him,

denied Him, crucified him.

May I not fall away forever.

We keep hold of him only by the ways taught in the Gospel.

Renunciation, total and sweet.

Total submission to Jesus Christ and to my director.

Eternally in joy for a day’s exercise on earth.

I will not forget Thy word. Amen.

{His ecstasy is in his pen;the slanting letters proclaim it, like steeples reaching into the sky: “Joy, joy, joy, tears of joy!”

Malcom Muggeridge}

This short recollection of a moving moment describes Pascal’s strongest argument in favor of Christianity: Its direct connection to the heart. Pascal explained the role that the heart plays as the appropriate channel for the mind since the heart has access to intuition that man cannot obtain by his reason alone. Pascal famously wrote, le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point, “the heart has its reasons, which reason does not know.” This quote is often misinterpreted, taken to mean that the heart ought to be exalted over the head. Eliot corrected this faulty interpretation and offered the proper meaning of this phrase in his introduction: “The heart, in Pascal’s terminology, is itself truly rational if it is truly the heart.” When something falls so clearly into the heart’s domain, it is so intuitively rational that our minds can only but affirm it. Through our hearts we may apprehend pre-rational first principles about our personhood and about our existence on and beyond this world because it opens us to be receptive of emotional and aesthetic experiences that our mind, intuitive or mathematical, will never grasp unaided.

https://voegelinview.com/blaise-pascal-the-mathematical-and-the-intuitive-mind/

“At the very least, people who claim complete disinterest in God should try to understand what Jews and Christians believe and how they view life—above all because the implications for notions such as human dignity and freedom are so crucial for our life together. But let there be no misunderstanding or caricature of this position. Those who have encountered God in this way prize the importance of reason highly (just as they prize the important place of nature, science, and tradition). They do not for a second think that faith is irrational. Reason is absolutely vital, but rationalism, the ism based on reason alone, is wrong and dangerous because it represents the overreach of reason. Reason by itself can neither justify itself nor explain or sustain the meaning of life. When it is asked to, it inevitably collapses into irrationality as modern philosophy demonstrates.”

Os Guinness

“...We rightly think that there is something mysterious and perhaps inexplicable about the “real presence.” But nobody who has the experience of that thing is likely to think it to be simply an illusion: it comes to us with a self-verifying character that silences skepticism, even if it also calls out for interpretation. Such was the nuit de feu of Pascal: the night of 23 November 1654 when, for two hours, he experienced the total certainty that he was in the presence of God—“the God of Abraham, of Isaac and of Jacob, not the God of the philosophers and the wise men,” in other words a personal God, intimately revealed, not conjured by abstract argument. Père juste, le monde ne t’a point connu, mais moi, je t’ai connu, he wrote then, on the scrap of paper on which he recorded the experience: astonishing words, which only total conviction could have engendered.”

Roger Scuton, The Soul of the World

For we know how dearly God loves us, because he has given us the Holy Spirit to fill our hearts with his love.

Romans 5:5

"By the mystery of this water and wine, may we come to share in the divinity of Christ, who humbled himself to share in our humanity...”

from the Roman Catholic Holy Mass

Being asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God would come, he answered them, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed, nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or ‘There!’ for behold, the kingdom of God is in the midst of you.” 

Luke 17:20-21

Kroeker and Ward in Remembering the End:

[Jesus’] scandalous practice of forgiving sins exemplifies a way of life that is to be imitated and a consciousness of “mind” that is to be cultivated in and by the church, as the earthly enactment of eternal truth. Those attached politically to the body of Christ are therefore participants in a drama that is both human and divine, earthly and heavenly, bodily and spiritual, individual and social. This drama is a source of possible offense in its prophetic witness to the God-man who remains the slain Lamb: it is witness to a truth that, even as it is publicly enacted on the earth, cannot be communicated directly (not even in miracles). It can be seen only by the free and obedient decision of the heart.

Ephesians 2:8-10:

“For by grace you have been saved through faith. And this is not your own doing; it is the gift of God,  not a result of works, so that no one may boast.  For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

Matthew 25:34-36,40:

Then the King will say to those on his right, ‘Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, I was thirsty and you gave me drink, I was a stranger and you welcomed me, I was naked and you clothed me, I was sick and you visited me, I was in prison and you came to me.’

And the King will answer them, ‘Truly, I say to you, as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers, you did it to me.’

For him (Dietrich Bonhoeffer), the reality of the world was its reality as reconciled by Christ (2 Corinthians 5:19)

“God does not repay evil for evil, and thus the righteous should not do so either. No judgement, no abuse, but blessing. The world would have no hope if this were not the case. The world lives by the blessing of God and of the righteous and thus has a future. Blessing means laying one’s hand on something and saying, Despite everything, you belong to God. This is what we do with the world that inflicts such suffering on us. We do not abandon it; we do not repudiate, despise or condemn it. Instead we call it back to God, we give it hope, we lay our hand on it and say: may God’s blessing come upon you, may God renew you; be blessed, world created by God, you who belong to your Creator and Redeemer. We have received God’s blessing in happiness and in suffering. Yet those who have been blessed can do nothing but pass on this blessing; indeed, they must be a blessing wherever they are.” (DBWE 16, p. 632)

“To be Christian, to believe in Christ, means and has always meant this: to know in a transrational and yet absolutely certain way called faith, that Christ is the Life of all life, that He is Life itself and, therefore, my life. “In him was life; and the life was the light of men.” All Christian doctrines—those of the incarnation, redemption, atonement—are explanations, consequences, but not the “cause” of that faith. Only when we believe in Christ do all these affirmations become “valid” and “consistent.” But faith itself is the acceptance not of this or that “proposition” about Christ, but of Christ Himself as the Life and the light of life. “For the life was manifested and we have seen it, and bear witness, and show unto you that eternal life, which was with the Father, and was manifested unto us” (1 Jn. 1:2). In this sense Christian faith is radically different from “religious belief.” Its starting point is not “belief” but love. In itself and by itself all belief is partial, fragmentary, fragile. “For we know in part, and we prophesy in part … whether there be prophecies, they shall fail; whether there be tongues, they shall cease; whether there be knowledge, it shall vanish away.” Only love never faileth (1 Cor. 13). And if to love someone means that I have my life in him, or rather that he has become the “content” of my life, to love Christ is to know and to possess Him as the Life of my life.”

For The Life Of The World

 by Alexander Schmemann

His divine power has granted to us all things that pertain to life and godliness, through the knowledge of him who called us to his own glory and excellence, by which he has granted to us his precious and very great promises, so that through them you may become partakers of the divine nature, having escaped from the corruption that is in the world because of sinful desire” (2 Peter 1:3–4).