I want to pick up something from Scott’s recent comments (here and here), particularly this:

My objection is to the phrase:”our reasoning capacity is dependent upon our emotions”. I think this is backwards. Rather, I would say that low quality emotional intelligence derives from weak reason, so our emotions are dependent on our reasoning capacity.

This is another area where it would be worth clarifying my perspective, ie exactly how I see emotion and reason working together, as I have a large measure of agreement with what Scott said (it’s why I like Chris Locke’s Mystic Bourgeoisie site, as there the reason side is given a healthy prominence). Often I feel I am trying to fight off an idolatrous elevation of ‘reason’, and that can lead me to excessively praise the importance of the emotions. I do think that in the end emotions are the more important (ie judgement is more important than logic; I see logic (dialectic) as inert, and by judgement I ultimately mean a right discernment of value, to love that which is most worthy of being loved) but there are lots of ways in which it is the interaction between them which is of most interest.

What is at issue here is the question of the right ordering of the soul; what might otherwise be called spiritual growth, or growth in understanding. In my view, understanding grows and is fed by contemplation, and in many ways that is an intellectual act. Understood within the Christian tradition, contemplation is a) an enhanced lucidity of understanding (not a murky fog) ; b) fully intellectually engaged, but without being solely intellectual; and c) focusses on something outside the individual. This is the prime theological task – theology understood as indissoluble from spirituality: “‘the inherent momentum of theology is towards contemplation, and… this is no abdication of academic rigour or the critical function; the most rigorous and critical turn theology takes may flow from the passionate desire to know the living truth’.” (Mark McIntosh)

Now this emphasis upon contemplation is almost immediately vulnerable to a collapse into a Platonic schema – and it is precisely that collapse which I see as most dangerous (as does McIntosh). In other words, the path of contemplation is seen as something primarily intellectual, rational, mental – whereas I see it (and I believe the Christian tradition sees it) as something rather more, something which, in particular, bears fruit within a mundane life.

What is the Platonic schema? I’m going to quote from Andrew Louth, writing in ‘The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition’:

Let us remind ourselves of what Platonic mysticism looks like. Man, it says, lives in a transient world of sensible phenomena and of conjecture, or opinion, based upon it. But his soul belongs to a higher, truer world which is eternal and immutable. To regain its kinship with that world the soul must purify itself from this world; it must seek to die to this world, to live now the life it hopes it may lead after death… Intellectual purification, or dialectic, trains the soul in abstract thought; it weans the soul from dependence on the world of sense and accustoms it to the more austere, but also more real because eternal, world of the Forms or Ideas. When the soul has sufficiently purified itself it may – suddenly and without warning – attain contemplation, theoria, of the highest of the forms, the Beautiful or the Good, for which it has longed. In this gratuitious act of theoria the whole world of ultimate reality is seen as a single whole, and the meaning even of sensible reality becomes clear.

That is the conceptual framework which I am continually railing against – it is a conceptual framework which underlies so much of our culture, and it is a framework which has struggled with Christianity from the very start (and Christianity has gained some things from it, to be sure).

The most important difference, as I see it, rests with what might be described as the ‘motive force’ driving the ascent. With Plato, the motive force is the desire of the individual to surpass mortal life and to find a home in the sphere of the divine. It is thereby driven, ultimately, by spiritual pride (what Augustine calls superbia) and it is an essentially rational act – the training for the ascent is the intellectual training of dialectic. Christian contemplation is radically different. Here is Louth again:

The end of Augustine’s quest is to have his longing satisfied, to find the Truth – but to find it as something disclosed, to receive it as grace… Thus we have Augustine’s way of the soul’s ascent. It is deeply Plotinian, and he feels free to cite Plotinus as he develops it. The soul desires God; a desire that may be aroused by created things. Its search is a search for the object of its love. It passes through creation and rises above it – above and within – into the soul. There it finds a vast and wonderful thing, which Augustine calls memory, and driven by its desire for God, it at last recognizes God, not as one who can be found, but as one who discloses himself in the soul, that soul which depends on him for its very esistence. It is, as I have said, deeply Plotinian. Even the final disclosure of God finds parallels in Plotinus.

But only parallels. Plotinus’ One is immutable and insensible. It is the object of the soul’s quest – but cares nothing for the soul, or its quest. Not so with Augustine’s God: ‘Thou didst call and cry to me, and break open my deafness.’ Augustine’s emphasis on grace and on God’s own activity towards the soul vastly transcends Plotinus’ own notion of the soul’s dependence on the One… This leads him at length to the doctrine of the Mediator: only through the Incarnation of the Word is the possibility of union with God opened to us. This is very important, for here Augustine cuts himself off completely from his neo-Platonist background… without God’s condescension to us in the Incarnation to respond to, we will either – in Augustine’s view – be provoked to despair by our awareness of sin, or seek to ascend to God under the inspiration of pride. Man can only find purity of heart through humility, and he can only come to humility and avoid despair, if this humility is awakened in his heart by the love of God in the Incarnation…

In other words, the key driver in the ascent of the soul is not self-will, but a response to divine initiative, to grace. Louth again: “Here we have an extraordinary break with Plotinus: what for Plotinus is the culmination of the soul’s experience is for the mature Augustine only the beginning of the way”. Where this really begins to break from the Platonic path is that the role of contemplation is actively engaged within the public life of the contemplative and the wider life of the church. Louth again:

And so Christian theology, and in particular Christian mystical theology, is ecclesial, it is the fruit of participation in the mystery of Christ, which is inseparable from the mystery of the Church. Within the Platonic tradition the mystic is an individual, or at best the member of an intellectual elite; the whole business of moral, and especially intellectual, purification is something to be pursued by a small, cultured group with sufficient means to provide the leisure to devote to it… for the Christian the mystical life is the flowering of the baptismal life, and baptism is incorporation into the Body of Christ, his Church… The Christian mystic’s search for God takes place within the Church and has no significance apart from the Church.

Moreover, the contemplative life bears fruit in action, principally active love, and it is here that the virtues cultivated by the different traditions stand in starkest contrast, and it is here that my point about emotional intelligence (eudaimonia) gains traction. For the disciplines of Platonism are intellectual ones alone – such disciplines as apply to the body have their merit only in so far as they allow the intellect to ascend unimpeded. Christian virtues are rather different. Not only are they not wholly geared around supporting the intellect, but their point, their telos, lies outside the individual completely, in loving service to another. There is a unity seen in Christian contemplation between the nature of the summit (God is love); the nature of what needs to be cultivated by the soul in order to attain that summit (love of God and of neighbour) and the virtues displayed by one on the path (the fruits of the Spirit – love, joy, peace etc). Or as St John put it:

We know that we have come to know him if we obey his commands. The man who says, “I know him,” but does not do what he commands is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But if anyone obeys his word, God’s love is truly made complete in him. This is how we know we are in him: Whoever claims to live in him must walk as Jesus did. Dear friends, I am not writing you a new command but an old one, which you have had since the beginning. This old command is the message you have heard. Yet I am writing you a new command; its truth is seen in him and you, because the darkness is passing and the true light is already shining. Anyone who claims to be in the light but hates his brother is still in the darkness. Whoever loves his brother lives in the light, and there is nothing in him to make him stumble. But whoever hates his brother is in the darkness and walks around in the darkness; he does not know where he is going, because the darkness has blinded him.

In sum, I agree with Augustine that love is the highest form of knowing. When I argue that “our reasoning capacity is dependent upon our emotions” that is what I mean; not that reason and emotion cannot have a fruitful interaction, nor that our emotions cannot be informed by our reasoning, but that in the end it is through love that we ascend and know – to know fully, even as we shall be fully known.