Reason and Emotion in Religious Thinking

Another sample from The Prophets by Abraham J. Heschel.  This one is taken from Part II, Chapter 3: "The Philosophy of Pathos."

We have been trained to draw a sharp contrast between reason and emotion.  The first is pure spontaneity, the drawing of inferences, the ordering of concepts according to the canons of logic.  Emotion, on the other hand, is pure receptivity, an impression involving neither cognition nor representation of the object.  Such a contrast, however, is hardly tenable when applied to religious experience.  Is religious thinking ever to be completely separated from the stream of emotion that surges beneath it?  Religious reason is more than just thinking, and religious emotion is more than just feeling.  In religious existence, spontaneity and receptivity involve each other.  Is there no reason in the emotional life?

True, if emotion is unreasonable, it tends to distort a person's thinking.  But emotion can be reasonable just as reason can be emotional, and there is no need to suppress the emotional roots of one's life in order to save the integrity of one's principles.  Receptivity and spontaneity involve each other; the separation of the two is harmful to both.

Reason may be defined as the capacity for objectivity or as a person's ability to think in impersonal terms.  To think in personal terms, or subjectivity, is to be exposed to bias and error.  In the light of such a definition we have to exclude reason from the nature of God, Whose Person is the truth, and ascribe only emotion to Him.  Impersonal reasoning in God would mean an operation in ideas devoid of divinity.  Furthermore, pure reason comprehends a concrete fact as if it were an abstraction, a particular being in terms of a generalization.  But it is the greatness of God according to the Bible that man is not an abstraction to Him, nor is His judgment a generalization.  Yet in order to realize a human being not as a generality but as a concrete fact, one must feel him, one must become aware of him emotionally.

Is it more compatible with our conception of the grandeur of God to claim that He is emotionally blind to the misery of man rather than profoundly moved?  In order to conceive of God not as an onlooker but as a participant, to conceive of man not as an idea in the mind of God but as a concern, the category of divine pathos is an indispensable implication.  To the biblical mind the conception of God as detached and unemotional is totally alien.

God Is At Stake

Have just discovered Abraham J. Heschel, who is quickly becoming my new favorite writer.  Reading his excellent book The Prophets, which I highly recommend.  To give you a taste, here is a section from chapter 11 (Justice) that I find beautiful and provocative:

Why should religion, the essence of which is worship of God, put such stress on justice for man?  Does not the preoccupation with morality tend to divest religion of immediate devotion to God?  Why should a worldly virtue like justice be so important to the Holy One of Israel?  Did not the prophets overrate the worth of justice?

Perhaps the answer lies here:  righteousness is not just a value; it is God's part of human life, God's stake in human history.  Perhaps it is because the suffering of man is a blot upon God's conscience; because it is in relations between man and man that God is at stake.  Or is it simply because the infamy of a wicked act is infinitely greater than we are able to imagine?  People act as they please, doing what is vile, abusing the weak, not realizing that they are fighting God, affronting the divine, or that the oppression of man is a humiliation of God.

He who oppresses a poor man insults his Maker,

He who is kind to the needy honors him.

Proverbs 14:31

The universe is done.  The greater masterpiece still undone, still in the process of being created, is history.  For accomplishing His grand design, God needs the help of man.  Man is and has the instrument of God, which he may or may not use in consonance with the grand design.  Life is clay, and righteousness the mold in which God wants history to be shaped.  But human beings, instead of fashioning the clay, deform the shape.

The world is full of iniquity, of injustice and idolatry.  The people offer animals; the priests offer incense.  But God needs mercy, righteousness; His needs cannot be satisfied in the temples, in space, but only in history, in time.  It is within the realm of history that man is charged with God's mission.

Justice in not an ancient custom, a human convention, a value, but a transcendent demand, freighted with divine concern.  It is not only a relationship between man and man, it is an act involving God, a divine need.  Justice is His line, righteousness His plummet (Isa. 28:17).  It is not one of His ways, but in all His ways.  Its validity is not only universal, but also eternal, independent of will and experience.

People think that to be just is a virtue, deserving honor and rewards; that in doing righteousness one confers a favor on society.  No one expects to receive a reward for the habit of breathing.  Justice is as much a necessity as breathing is, and a constant occupation.