"City of God
Reflection Essay
What does it mean that
God expects us to be both intellectually and emotionally responsible in how we
formulate a coherent and verifiable worldview?
More specifically, in this essay I want to consider how our God-given
rationality and emotions can coexist. This
question is one that is very important to me personally, for while I am someone
who possesses deep feelings I greatly prefer to focus on facts to the exclusion
of emotion when making decisions. I
would rather think about a statement like '. . . those who say this wish to
suggest that the world is eternal and without any beginning . . . rave in the
deadly madness of ungodliness' (452-453) than think about how I should love God
with all of my heart.
A crucial part of
intellectual responsibility that can be neglected by theistic rationalists is
the role of emotions in human life. The
fact that we are emotional and relational creatures testifies to the reality
that our Creator is also an emotional and relational being, for properties like
emotionality cannot emerge from non-emotion.
Rationalists deal in facts, and it is a fact that we are emotional
beings by nature. I, as a rationalistic
person, have made the mistake at various points in my life of ignoring my
emotional side due to the possibility of potential
interference with my reason. It is
undeniable that feelings can drastically distort our rational
comprehension. They can create a desire
for something to be true or real that isn’t, can erupt and subside rather
quickly and unpredictably, and can create an emotional attachment to something
we know is false. Augustine supplies an
example of how emotions can arise so spontaneously: '. . . we sometimes weep
even when we do not wish to do so' (599).
The dilemma becomes apparent. Reason leads to God; God created us to be
emotional creatures; emotions often hinder most people from objectively
pursuing or understanding truth. But is
this an inescapable dilemma?
God does not demand
that our reason and our feelings nullify each other and cancel each other
out. Augustine articulated this quite
well. 'Yet if we felt no such emotions
at all while subject to the infirmity of this life, we should then certainly
not be living righteously. For the
apostle condemned and denounced certain persons who, he said, were "without
natural affection"' (599-600). God
imbued us with both reason and feelings.
Neither one must lead to abandonment of the other, as both reveal the
glorious nature of the one who fashioned them.
Work
Cited
Saint
Augustine. The City of God against the Pagans.
Trans. Dyson, R.W. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Print."
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