A Trinitarian Psychology of the Creative Imagination: Mind, Will, and Heart

thank you Alex and dr. Sanford for your double introduction you have already heard the best speech dr. Sanford summarized in about two minutes basically what I'm going to say in an hour there is a handout did anybody not get it who was handing out the handout keep your hand up so that you can get one because this is not so much a speech or a talk as a kind of seminar and I have a one-page outline my notes here which I'll be talking about and you can't really tell the players without a scorecard so here's your scorecard what is the difference between an artist and a large pizza a large pizza can easily feed a family of four what is the difference between no what is the question that a philosophy major will probably ask more frequently for the rest of his life than any other do you want fries with that I'm privileged to be here among genuine students and philosophers and artists and being a philosopher rather than an artist I'm an amateur talking about a subject that many of you will be professionals in namely the role of art and beauty and this whole dimension of human life but it's equally distinctively human an equally part of the image of God and a most important battlefield in the culture war and in our cultural mandate but it's often neglected so it's an aspect of what ought to be the main focus of the humanities namely know thyself which was the first and greatest commandment of the God that Socrates worshiped the god that he thought was somehow mysteriously behind the Delphic Oracle that was the inscription over the door post to the temple of Delphi and he took that very very seriously so seriously that his whole life was a kind of Socratic dialogue in pursuit of that in fact the thing he focused his apology on one of the greatest if not the greatest of speeches in the history of Western civilization was a riddle on exactly that subject on two occasions in the apology he said something like you will not believe this you're going to gee at this you're going to scorn me you're going to not accept this you're going to call me an idiot but but be sure and use the word for sure EPIK stay mate is kind of knowledge be sure of this Socrates very seldom claims to be sure of anything and what he claims to be sure of there is something that certainly seems not to be true at all it is no evil can happen to a good man any radical feminists in the audience please excuse me for using the old fashioned inclusive language rather than the newly fashionable exclusive language man means equally males and females no evil can happen to a good man whether in this world or in the next how did he know that he's never been in the next and he's certainly a good man and what's happening to him is that people are misunderstanding him hating him falsely judging him as an atheist condemning him to death and killing him and those are all certainly bad things that are happening to a good man and in the middle of this he says no evil can happen to a good man sounds like soccery solution of the problem of evil is it doesn't exist but if you take this puzzle this riddle in light of the inscription over Delphi and the gods first commandment know thyself and you put them together and you find the link between them you understand the key to Socrates and in a sense the key to Western civilization know thyself is the question the middle term is the answer and the corollary is no evil therefore can ever possibly happen to a good man know thyself what is the self Socrates ancient that question by the use of a word which radically changed its meaning because of one man namely Socrates the self is the sole soul used to mean ghosts so his listeners seemed to be hearing Socrates saying that your true self is your ghost most of the Greeks believed that when you died something survived but it was a ghost like a ghost image on an old-fashioned TV set but a lingering image or pattern of the real flesh-and-blood self that was alive for a while but now is in the dead Lance the shadow lands the shadow is not more substantial than that of which it is a shadow just the opposite and talked to me said notes the other way around this living self here this body pulsing with red blood is only a shadow of your real self which is immortal we still haven't caught up the socrates if you see death in a Hollywood movie usually you see a ghost emerge from the body and disappear into the sky like a cloud that's what the pagans thought some chakra thought he thought the soul was like an iron bar heavier this is why Thomas Aquinas says that the soul is not in the body the body is in the soul you can't put an iron bar in a feather but you can put a feather in an iron bar now that's a half-truth Socrates didn't know that the body was an equally necessary part of our essence he didn't think the body was evil as low kindness and the neoplatonist thought but he sort of discounted it and certainly I can harm you if I'm a bad man by torturing you because then I torture your body it makes it very difficult for you to practice virtue especially intellectual virtues so Socrates conveniently ignored that holiness of the body but it's a profound half truth if you had to choose between the death of your soul in the death of your body or even diseases of the soul and diseases of the body or paralysis of the soul and paralysis of the body not much choice there would you rather be a complete human being with all the intellectual and moral virtues in a wheelchair or would you rather have a healthy body but haven't the faintest idea what to do with it and be quite morally and intellectually insane no question it's a profound half truth well this lecture or seminar or whatever you want to call it is an attempt to help cast a little more light on that fundamental question know thyself what is the self especially what is the soul the Bible gives you two rather different answers to that question because as in science paradigm shift and sometimes one paradigm or hypothesis or framework illumines the data better than another and doesn't thoroughly exclude the other so sometimes two theories or hypotheses that seem at first to be contradictory are not really contradictory at all they're just different perspectives and the two perspectives both what you find in the Bible are dichotomy and trichotomy you can't really literally cut up a soul as you can cut up a body but you can mentally do that you can abstract one aspect or dimension of it from another just as you can abstract the soul from the body Aristotle was certainly right and Plata was certainly wrong when Plato thought the soul and the body were both separate substances or as Aristotle thought that they're a single substance composed the form and matter so that the soul was to the body rather like the meaning is to the words you can't change the words of a story without changing its meaning and you can't change the meaning without changing the words so the relationship is of course much more intimate than Plato thought but certainly the soul is not the body and the body is not the soul there is a significant formal difference between them and that's a dichotomy and within the soul is also a dichotomy in Aquinas certainly between the the competitive powers whether rational or irrational and the inductive powers and that's a very fruitful way of looking at things by everything else as one or the other of those two in the Bible we also sometimes get a trichotomy a three-part picture for instance Hebrews 4 verse 12 I think it is says the Word of God is like a sword that penetrates and distinguishes the soul from the spirit what's the spirit body soul and spirit if there's any one question in philosophy that almost guaranteed never to get a final and clear and adequate answer it is Socrates great question of know thyself Gabrielle Marcel the great French Catholic existentialist he calls himself a Socratic by the way he doesn't call himself an existentialist famously distinguished between two kinds of questions that philosophers asked problems and mysteries and an ordinary language a problem is something you can solve an industry is something that it's either difficult or impossible to solve Marcel goes deeper he says why is the mystery not only difficult but in principle impossible to get an adequate answer to where the problem is sometimes problems are very complex like how many grains of sand are there on the planet Earth or exactly how old is the universe but you can get answers to those questions why can't you get a definitive answer to the question why does Romeo fall in love with Juliet why did Dante see this plain-jane Beatrice as a goddess nobody else did why can't philosophers understand the relationship between the body and the soul adequate why can't theologians explain to ordinary people how predestination free-willed or not at all conflict all of those mysteries have something in common that is we are involved in them they're about ourselves we can't detach ourselves from them they're not purely objective whatever you can detach yourself from can be seen in principle in an adequate way but what is inside you well you can't do that I think David Hume made a lot of mistakes because he tried to do that he said where is the self I don't see it I look inside and I see no little man pulling the strings so there is no self and where is moral conscience I look inside and all I see is passion so that's all there is you don't see it because it's very I with which you see you can note that it exists because you see its effects but you can't see it as an object because it is a subject so this talk will not be adequate it will be confusing it will not satisfy you I hope in fact if it satisfies you I will be dissatisfied and if it is satisfies you I will be satisfied if you look on this page you see that I call this in the title a Trinitarian psychology and on the first line I begin with the ultimate source of everything which is the nature of the God who creates everything and whose image is in some way responsible for or implanted in or shadowed forth however remotely by everything as the artist is always inevitably revealed in every syllable of his art and since God is three therefore certainly we who are made in God's image are in some significant sense three we're not three persons or one person but we're communitarian because God is now of the three ingredients in the human soul that are usually distinguished namely what we usually call the intellect and the will and the passions or the intuition or the imagination or the heart or the Faculty of love you'll notice that that third ingredient is the trickiest there's no one perfect word for it it's sort of the leftovers and yet every major psychologist from Plato who was the first to map the soul and give us a psychograph to Freud who is almost the polar opposite of play-doh in every other way does distinguish those three powers of the soul you're not going to find a perfect parallel however all the columns don't necessarily match up in fact on a number of them I might have to switch the role of the father and the role of the Holy Spirit you can't do that theologically of course God is sort of set in stone but his image is more shadowy and more negotiable so the columns are not perfectly aligned but they're always threefold that's very impressive something especially a special about the number three let's start at the lowest God creates the universe the universe is the sum total of all matter and energy in space and time well let's look at space first it has three dimensions it's not funny as height as depth has breadth is that an image of something in God course height is a natural image of God's transcendence and depth is a natural image of God's imminence and breadth is a natural image of God's universality hmm mere coincidence mere cleverness what literary critic lowly conceit an artificially invented image that sort of jars you know something much more natural let's look at time time to is divided into three dimensions past present and future hmm is that a coincidence the history of time is fundamentally understood in terms of persons because God is three persons and us because he created the universe for us he didn't greet us for the universe his intention was not to create a lot of gases and galaxies but a lot of gods and goddesses that's why he created gas in galaxies he made us out of them all right what's the fundamental human enterprise that distinguishes humans from animals concretely which art is the oldest and most pervasive and universal art if your anthropologist and you're looking at some very very primitive tribe let's say the Neanderthals and you wonder whether they're animals or humans and you don't believe in in in a kind of a third species that's neither animal nor human which makes very little sense what do you look for you look for stories storytelling is the oldest and most pervasive of all arts all right what is the story the story has a beginning in the middle and an end yeah so does a line yeah but a a story has a plot a sequence somebody once classified all plots in 12 categories somebody said no there's only seven basic plot somebody else said there's three basic plots I say there's one three things happen in a story first some sort of a situation is set up you're introduced to a protagonist or protagonists in some sort of a setting or situation like here's a committee even the Garden of Eden and at first nothing happens well that doesn't have to be your literary technique you can begin in radius race in the middle of events but the Bible doesn't it begins in imperfection which we would find boring and then something happens God somehow or other decides not to put up a sign saying no snake in the grass and all hell breaks loose that's the second stage the situation which had been set up is now upset and then somehow or other it's reset may be successfully maybe like unsuccessfully maybe it's a comedy maybe it's a tragedy and these are the three stages of every story and the theological terms for these three stages are creation fall and redemption and ultimately from God's point of view its creation and redemption and glorification the third stage is future alright we've already seen a little messiness I've introduced sort of four stages here creation fall Redemption glorification you can see Redemption as part of glorification the beginning of it alright let's let's turn to another author in the Bible let's talk turn to Saint John who is the most profound and philosophical of all the biblical authors and the most philosophical he used a lot of Greek philosophical terms like blog awesome Sophia and Dunamis especially in his first letter he loves three words to describe God three divine attributes life light and love actually the word he usually uses for light is folks but logos also has that as one of its meanings God is life eternal life supernatural life is Oh a God is light got his truth and God his love there are a lot of other doing attributes God is justice no he's not he's just God is power no he's not he's powerful God is wisdom no he's not he's wise but he's not only true he's truth and he's not only a lover he's love and he's not only a life Giver his life itself and we somehow participate in his very life and his very truth and his very love hmm well that's just John wait a minute go down a little bit two or three columns into Hinduism like most human things I think Hinduism is a mixture of some profound wisdom and some profound error but for thousands of years Hindus have explored the soul the self and they though they did not believe in a personal creator God they did believe in something like the soul as the Divine image or even more than that as itself divine and the word for the single monotheistic Hindu god Hindu by the in division by the way is both polytheistic and monotheistic Brahman the one great one the three words that are universally used are such chick and Anandi in fact one of the most popular first names in Hinduism in India is such an Ananda all three of them snot means infinite life or infinite reality or infinite energy or infinite being chit means infinite knowing or infinite understanding and Ananda means infinite joy and these are the three things everybody wants most deeply in their hearts if they knew themselves I think that's very profound psychology they correspond very closely not exactly but very closely to John's three divine attributes infinite life infinite light infinite love because the supreme joy is to love hmm go back up to to the column about absolute values this is rather sloppy for a philosopher but let's let's assume that we all know what a value is and let's assume that we all know what the words absolute and relative mean and let's say that almost everybody who has any sanity or common sense left that is almost everybody outside of universities in the state of Texas no you know you're in one of these flyover States between Hollywood and Harvard halfway between two in sanity's knows that goodness truth and beauty or three absolutes we all want them we all want an infinitely nobody wants a few good things but there's some evil things too nobody wants to know on Monday but to be stupid on Tuesday and nobody wants to see some beauty and some ugliness unless the ugliness helps to set off the beauty everybody wants them everybody wants them unlimitedly and absolutely they're non-negotiable well they again three the good the true and the beautiful they correspond rather nicely truth and light light is a natural symbol of truth which is why the only Greek god that soccer has ever mentioned by name in any of the other than a humorous ways that got Apollo was the god of the Sun which is the source of light which is a natural symbol for truth and then goodness well life is good and beauty beauty's trickier equally powerful in the soul maybe the most powerful of all maybe it's the first thing that you notice by the way almost all the great philosophy books are written by men and the first thing in a woman that a man notices is her beauty that's probably not the first thing that a woman notices in a man but in any case beauty is is the most striking thing when the hard-nosed pragmatic Romans were converted to this strange religion of Christianity it wasn't first of all by the obvious truth of Christian theology you know there's only one God and he's absolutely perfect and he's three persons and and Jesus both divine and human that didn't seem to make immense sense at first and the way Christians live it's goodness that was impressive but most pagans didn't really want to be martyrs and saints but the beauty of it the fact that they were singing hymns as they entered into the Lions mouths that was impressive how could they find beauty and joy in their lives if they were poor and sick and persecuted that's a puzzle that's impressive well there are three human enterprises that are devoted to these three things the devotion to goodness is all the virtues all morality all of ethics ethics is much too narrow a term for it and the devotion of truth is science which originally meant simply knowing so the philosophy and theology are Sciences and then art all the arts art for art's sake and art for something else's sake practical arts all the Arts these are human enterprises devoted to some form of goodness truth and beauty three again interesting go down to to play to a psychology you see Plato has three powers of the soul in the Republic he argues that the experience of inner conflict proved that there must be three somehow separate forces in the soul which move us in one direction or another and one of them is the mind which naturally knows the truth especially the justice and the good and another is something else much more mysterious the passions the desires Plato had a rather low and simplistic concept of them but there they are and then there's a third thing which he called thumos or the spirited part you didn't call it the will as aristotle did Aristotle had a better psychology and Plato I think but Plato recognize that this third power was a key because I've had to side with either the mind in its understanding of the good or the mindless desires in their instinctive love of the good and that's very similar to Freudian psychology where you have the ego and the super-ego and the edge and the will performs the part of a kind of shuttle diplomacy between the the IDI and the super-ego in Plato it's quite a different it's supposed to be a hierarchy the mind should rule the passions through the will well you find the same three fold nature of our natural images in our body for these three powers of the soul they happen to all start with the letter H the hands the head in the heart in the Middle Ages almost all statues of seen Agustin had the same form he had his two hands outstretched in one hand was an open book presumably the Bible in another hand was a burning heart whether it was his own heart or the Heart of Jesus the Sacred Heart you couldn't tell and that why he was the same because he couldn't tell the difference the head of the heart what about the hands the hands actually makes the decisions and does the work that counts too and literally the heart is a blood pump and literally the head is just that funny-looking round ball on your shoulders and literally the hands are just five fingers on each but their natural symbols for the souls three powers and within the body we have three values three bodily values value of the bodily power symbolized by hands as health which enables an organism to work to function and the value of the head is awareness and on the bodily level that sensation and the value of the heart is a kind of attraction and rejoicing in love and and on the bodily level that's simply pleasure physical love and when you rise from the body to the soul you see these same threefold attributes on a deeper level as Plato showed so brilliantly in the Republic the crucial virtue justice means basically that it is to the soul what health is to the body it integrates everything else and makes it work properly everything doing its own work so it's the master virtue and then knowledge is a kind of inner sensation knowledge is not fundamentally from Plato the process of reasoning but it's the essence of reason namely understanding what Aristotle later would call the first act of the mind and what Plato would classify as the the ultimate end of Education the fourth quarter of the divided line in the Republic and then what about that third thing well happiness happiness in the old-fashioned sense of the word not the modern sense of the word when Plato or Aristotle I talk about happiness they use either the word macario's which usually means supreme happiness or eudaimonia which is a more ordinary word for happiness if you compare the word happiness in modern English with the term eudaimonia which Aristotle uses you see the difference between the typically ancient and typically modern mind quite starkly and how Shaolin we are you die moneena has three parts you means good that assumes you can't be happy unless you're good wicked people are miserable the middle of it Diamond means spirit demon means an evil spirit Diamond has not that connotation but happiness is basically inward and spiritual and finally ayah which turns an adjective into a noun means the objectively real and at least comparatively lasting state rather than the temporary subjective feeling a much deeper concept of happiness than ours our word happiness comes from the old english hap which if you know your Shakespeare you know means chance and that's about as shallow an ocean of happiness as you could possibly get and what shows us how shallow we are is our honest answer to the question what would you say to your friend if you suddenly saw on his face this morning a smile that you never saw before you would probably say what happened to you did you just win the lottery happiness is not a matter of chance you are responsible for your happiness according to Plato and Aristotle all right but again the same three when you get to Buddhism in most forms of Buddhism you have two absolute values Praja and Karuna or wisdom and compassion in some a third is mentioned I don't know what the Buddhist word is but it's basically peace something sort of corresponding to the stoic otter ox yeah absence of perturbation but there again three absolute values compassion isn't quite the same as love it's not active but it's a little bit on the way and Buddhist wisdom isn't quite the same as Christian wisdom but it's certainly the perfection of the mental power and the peace the peace that the world cannot give a deep inner peace there's something there some insight there well let's turn to Western civilization let's start with the Jews God's chosen people and therefore God's collective profit to the world and therefore our primary data about history and society and politics and public life God established three offices three authorities among his chosen people thus mediating his authority in in in human forms prophets priests and kings Jesus of course flames to be the fulfillment of all three kings what are Kings Kings exercise power they're the hands of a society what are prophets prophets are the minds of a society prophets are the the ones who reveal the mind and will of God and what a priests priests are the ones who humbly serve and and and and feed the society they do the the actual work and of course that's what Jesus does when he claims to be the way the truth and the life he's claiming to be respectively the priest and the prophet and the King the clearest of these three is the middle one there's always a clear concept of the mind and truth as his object the next clearest one is at least for most of us the will the moral will which is responsible for it for action and for life and the most mysterious one is the heart that third category and what priests do is is they are responsible for the mysteries a significant word the latin word dogma is the word that the Western church usually used to translate the Greek word mysterion so dogmas are not the opposite of mysteries they are mysteries the priests do that and those correspond to three divine attributes if you read Romans 8:28 which for me is the most wonderful and most difficult to believe verse in the entire Bible the most difficult to believe because it certainly doesn't seem to be true that as Paul says there all things work together for good for those who love God for those who are called according to his purpose all things no exception everything including hemorrhoids and halle costs that's very hard to believe but it's very wonderful astonishing it's almost too good to be true I deeply sympathize with atheists to understand the gospel well enough to think it's the world's greatest fairy tale and the world's greatest fallacy and absolutely ridiculous and it couldn't possibly be true because that's obviously wishful thinking is much too good to be true they're close to face anybody who says it's boring and it's ugly and it's wicked never understood it at all but that's an absolutely wonderful thing but logically follows necessarily follows from the three most non-negotiable divine attributes you're probably well aware of the fundamental argument for atheism from the problem of evil which is that if God is all good and all-powerful and all-wise then since he's all good he wants nothing but goodness especially for us and if he's all-wise he knows what is good and what is evil he makes no mistakes and if he's all-powerful he was the creator if he can bring everything out of nothing then he has the power to do anything that's meaningful anything that is not self contradictory and therefore he would get exactly what he wants he'd get nothing but good but there is evil evil is definitely data that counts very strongly against such a God so it's very tempting for philosophers or theologians at any age to be either atheist to deny his existence or pagans and deny God's power and wisdom and goodness and have imperfect gods who are made in our image but to believe that there is a God that is all good all-wise and all-powerful and nevertheless tolerates evil that's extremely difficult and only the gospel makes it possible how in the world could God do such a thing well let's take an example of the greatest evil that ever happened the torture and murder of Almighty God the time the devil licked his chops and heard the most delicious words he ever heard in his life my God my God why hast thou forsaken me chested and dares to say the devil almost turned God into an atheist for a minute there that is the event that we Christians celebrate on a holiday that we dare to call Good Friday and agustin dares to say in words that the church has enshrined Edith's Easter liturgy Oh Felix culpa the greatest evil is not the evil leave suffer but evil you do so the evil in Calvary was not simply the pain that Christ suffered but the sins that caused that pain and even that is part of the plan not that they're good Paul doesn't say all things are good he says all things even sin works out for good of course there are qualifications the only way seen can work out for good is through the golden door of repentance but it does I suspect that in heaven even now st. Peter's thanking God for the opportunity to confess his sins to other Christians yes I was that too I once denied my lord I suppose it's dangerous or maybe even impossible for us imagine how we can participate in that good in heaven we're not in heaven yet but we believe it alright so if God has all power it's the great king and all wisdom the great priest and all goodness all love the great prophet priest and King together then it logically follows that all things work together for good you have to believe that if you don't then God's either weak or stupid or wicked well we accept that by supernatural virtues theological virtues virtues which on the one hand are directed towards God as their only adequate object and which are inspired by God or come from God as their ultimate efficient cause and they are of course faith hope and charity what is faith faith is our way to truth faith is not a feeling faith is a seeing through a glass darkly a believing the Baltimore Catechism defines faith as an act of the intellect prompted by the will which believes all the things that God has revealed on the grounds of the character of the one who reveals it all right so that's the theological virtue that corresponds to the intellect and perfects it charity is the virtue of the will because charity is once again essentially not a feeling charity is a will st. Thomas Aquinas defines charity or Christian love or a got a very simply as the will to the good of the other the best definitions are always the shortest Dorothea days definition of a good society is the best one I've ever heard a good society is one that helps you to be good and then hope hope it's much more mysterious virtue hope is something like faith directed towards the future but that future direction means that it appeals not just to seeing but to desiring to the the love the heart and those three theological virtues faith hope and charity are answers to what can't call the three greatest questions anyone could possibly ask Canton is certainly the most important of modern philosophers he's not infallible and he makes some fundamental mistakes I think especially in his epistle Knology but he also has a brilliant mind that focuses on central things and this focus is wonderful here are the three most important questions of the world what should I do what can I know and what may I hope and charity is the basic answer in Christianity to what should I do and faith namely that which God has revealed is the answer to the question look and I know God cannot deceive or be deceived and hope is the answer to for one thing I hope happiness eternal happiness something that transcends everything that I hope for on earth and everything I can know on earth something that well here's the Bible definition of heaven I has not seen ear has not heard nor is it entered into the heart of man the things that God has prepared for those who love him when I was writing my book entitled everything you ever wanted to know about heaven but never dreamed of asking my uncle said I hear you're writing a book I said yeah he said what's the title I said everything you ever wanted to know about heaven but never dreamed of asking he said oh it's a book about heaven then I said yeah he said it must be wrong I said what do you mean you haven't read it yet in fact I haven't even written it yet how do you know what's wrong he said you believe the Bible don't you I said yeah he said well here's how the Bible to find seven is not seen here he's not heard nor has it entered into the heart of man now you're a man right right and these thoughts have enter into your heart right right so it must be wrong I almost threw the book away but I put a preface in the book where I said if God marked this book with colored crayons like the Jesus Seminar is marked the Gospels we like we don't like that passage and had to divide it into black passages which were simply para C's Brown passages which were serious confusions read passages which were dangerous partial truths yellow passages which were helpful truths and white passages which he agreed with completely what would that my manuscript look like and I said well I think or at least I hope that there would be very few black passages and few or no white passages and hopefully some yellow passages but most of them do be red or brown well I said that storytelling is the fundamental art among human beings so let's look at six very famous and rightly famous storytelling's let's start with the greatest book in the 20th century the Lord of the Rings don't laugh for poles picked it everybody but the critics picks it as the greatest book of the Queens entry which says the fact that critics decried it and one of them I think was Edmund Wilson who's a real snob said we who have devoted ourselves to the enterprise of Education despair at these poles why have we taught these people to read if they're going to read that trash well that says a lot about it I mean Wilson this has nothing about the Lord of the Rings in the Lord of the Rings we have three what literary critics often call Christ figures Christ is not an accident Christ is the key to we are equally the revelation of the supreme revelation of the nature of God and the supreme revelation of the nature of ourselves Christ is the answer to Socrates know thyself john paul ii is very strong on that alright so the three christ figures in the lord of the rings' three protagonists three self sacrificial saint heroes who sacrifice their lives who die in different ways in order to save middle-earth their Aragorn who happens to be a king and Gandalf who happens to be a wizard which is very much like a prophet and Frodo who is very much like a priest that carrying of the Ring that's sacramental there are all sorts of almost overtly Catholic symbolisms there well let's look at the greatest novel ever written I classify the Lord of the Rings as an epoch rather than a novel certainly The Brothers Karamazov is the greatest novel ever written back in the 70s I think it was I recall Time magazine published an article in which they interviewed the how many was it I think it was 24 greatest writers in the world greatest living novelists and they asked them what are the 10 greatest novels ever written and there was only one novel that was on everybody's list it was the Brothers Karamazov all right we have three brothers Dimitri Ivan and Alyosha what's the me tree like he's a real egotist he would be a great leader he's a bit like st. Peter now he's got foot-and-mouth disease he makes a lot of mistakes but he's got a strong will all right that's one part of ourselves Ivan is a philosopher an intellectual brilliant that argument in the middle of the novel between himself and Alyosha is pious seminarian brother is the best argument between an atheist and a theist and old human literature in fact I warn anyone whose faith is weak not to read it because Ivan's arguments are very persuasive he wins the argument in words but not in reality Alyosha is the the saintly humble priest like a figure like Frodo he's The Hobbit in Ivan's the wizard and Dimitri's the king or wants to be the king once again the will the intellect the heart the mysterious humble passionate thing let's look at the most philosophical show on TV the original Star Trek Gene Roddenberry by the way was a philosopher there's a velocity major and a pretty good one I think it was an agnostic but it was a good tough thinking agnostic you have three major characters Captain Kirk who's a captain thus a kind of a king you have mr. Spock the science officer who's the the intellect and you have bones McCoy the humble doctor who does most of the work and patches up bodies and puts people together perfect alright let's look at a very popular movie Jaws three characters Quint who is the captain of the Orca a Hooper who's the scientist from outside and Brody who's the local sheriff who's rather humble and even afraid of water but he's sort of central identified with him more than anybody else Plato said by the way that in his three parts of the soul mirrored by three classes in society by far the largest class and the one that most people identify with is this third one the passions the the desires you look in the Gospels and you see that Jesus also picks out three of his twelve disciples as a kind of inner circle they alone accompany him at perhaps the highest point in the lowest point in their lives the highest point being Transfiguration and the lowest point being Gethsemane and their Peter James and John and who's Peter Peters the rock he's the leader it's not a very good leader at first but you know it must've been a joke from for Jesus to say Oh your name is Simon I'm gonna change your name it's rocky rocky sandy he became a rock it's a prophecy John is the mystic the theologian the philosopher he's brilliant he's profound and James is the practical Marlys whether this is the James who wrote the Epistle or James who is the relative of Jesus that fits the third category rather nicely alright let's look at one more let's look at Harry Potter same threefold pattern Hermione is the brilliant student the genius and Ron is the humble one The Hobbit like one and Harry's the leader the Peter figure the main protagonist and even among the Angels three of them are mentioned in Scripture Michael Gabriel and Raphael what's Michael he's a warrior a king a leader strong-willed who's Gabriel Gabriel is a prophet he delivers messages and Ray feel ray feel does the work he company's Tobit on his journey well as I said at the beginning this is not a perfect parallel and there may be some confusions here for instance when I talk about life maybe I should put that in the third column Colin corresponding to the Holy Spirit and maybe I should put love in the first column which corresponds to the will so it's not perfect but the fact that there are so many triads and they all fit individually even they don't perfectly fit with each other that's got to be more than a coincidence well what I want to focus on now very briefly and I want to get most of your input on it I'm so I'm gonna give myself the hook in five minutes because I think there's gonna be a lot of good questions here what I want to focus on is that third soul power which we usually call the heart and if you look at the word heart in Scripture if you use a concordance which is the best way to study scripture instead of reading commentaries and secondary sources read scripture on Scripture and get a concordance and trace every use in scripture from Genesis through revelation of a key term like heart used constantly I find seven different meanings of that word in scripture sometimes the heart is a kind of knowing it's an intuitive knowing rather than a rational knowing you just know with your heart rather than with your rational head sometimes it means the creative imagination not the sensory imagination which is simply the ability to preserve a remembered past sense experience in your memory even though it disappears from your present day sensory consciousness but the creative imagination to imagine something that was never imagined before like hobbits you know we wouldn't have the Lord of the Rings if it hadn't been for a second great student of Tolkien's who wrote a term paper which is very dull and accidentally left a page blank and Tolkien was reading it and he was rather bored so he scribbled idly on the empty page in a hole in the ground lived a hobbit because he was just in love with words they said when I write what's a hobbit hmm I don't know forget it go back to the firm paper no boring go back to hobbit I've done fine I've got to find out what a hobbit is how in the world can I find out what a hobbit is it was only one way write a story that one so we did in the publisher this is great can we have a longer Hobbit and he said sure so he wrote the Lord of the Rings and he sent it to eleven publishers and they got turned down every day and if it wasn't for CS Lewis's badgering and we would never have the Lord of the Rings but that's the creative imagination you create something that doesn't exist and then it does obviously all three faculties are at work here in fact in almost everything distinctively human that we do all three powers of the soul somehow cooperate just as the three persons of the Trinity always cooperate the father's the creator but he creates through the word the son and then the spirit moves over the face of the waters but we primarily ascribe creation to the Father and thus we primarily ascribe the creative imagination to the heart rather than just the mind or the will sometimes the heart means emotions feelings feelings of all kind as distinct from clear concepts or thoughts more often it means number four distinctively human emotions emotions are not universally human animals share them but we have emotions that animals don't have for instance guilt or compassion or gratitude I've gotta tell you the story one of the profoundest philosophers i ever know and one of the most saintly that i ever know was father Norris Clarke at Fordham University and he used to come to Boston College after he retired just to interact with the students just on his own and he told us that he went to Tibet when he was in his 80s just to interact with the Buddhist monks there to find out what kind of wisdom they had and he said he was both impressed and disappointed and at the end of a couple of days of very fruitful dialogue with and that the abbot said well father you are a Catholic and I'm a Buddhist and I think that all men are basically Buddhists and all religions are basically one but you don't think that so let's test our hypothesis certainly we don't believe the same things but I think this is a sense in which we are one here's how I propose to test that hypothesis I'm going to ask my students these three monks who speak very good English and who are quite bright a question I've never asked them before and I'm going to ask you the same question and to compare your answer with theirs to see how different they are thought reflexive sign what's the question the question is what is the very first psychological origin of any religion at all no one can possibly be religious in any significant sense unless they start with X what is X give it to me in a single word or phrase so we asked the three monks that question they all wrote down their answers on a piece of paper and folded them up and father Clarke wrote his answer on a piece of paper and folded it up and then they opened the papers and the very same English word was written on all four pieces of paper the word was gratitude for the Clarkson is very profound very profound I think you proved your point now I'm going to prove mine what do you Bruce mean by gratitude and the other said gratitude cosmic gratitude gratitude for everything everything that exists in everything that doesn't exist gratitude for the body of the soul whether they exist or not gratitude for the past the present the future gratitude for pleasure and pain gratitude for for peace and war gratitude for everything and final torture that's what I mean - but if you don't believe in a God but you don't to whom are you grateful then when you are grateful for everything and the long smile and said we don't know brother Clark's a smiler said we do but that's that's a profoundly human emotion a profound religious emotion dietrich von Hildebrand in his classic a little book the heart argues very persuasively I think for the reintroduction of the heart and distinctively human emotions into the image of God not just the intellect in the will but this third power as well the most usual biblical meaning for the word heart is meaning number five whatever power it is that is responsible for love whether it's love in the emotions a distinctively human feeling or love in the will will to the good of the other love is obviously the highest value of the meaning of life and therefore whatever power in us is capable of producing that is is a central power let's call that the heart sometimes it means the will which is the source of charity or Caritas or agape not the stoic will not the the hard cold calculating will but the the loving will the burning heart when the disciples on the road to Emmaus met Christ and they didn't recognize him and then he celebrated the Eucharist and he did and he disappeared they said we should have known our hearts were burning within us when the Word of God opened to us the Word of God they thought they knew the Word of God and Papert but they didn't recognize the Word of God in the flesh but the two were the same but I think the deepest meaning of the heart is one that it's the most difficult to define and that's meaning number seven all right whose intuition is it whose creative imagination is that whose emotions is it whose love is it whose will is it me what's the meaning of me now all of these things yeah but all these things are plural are you plural or are you saying it the word eye is the most singular word in the world it's the only word that doesn't share any meaning at all when you apply it to both yourself and somebody else human being shares meaning on one your one man shares meaning even Peter shares meeting some of you were named Peter but my eye is not your eye my eye is your you and your eye is my you so that by that owns and is responsible for all of these powers in a sense that's the heart and Solomon in Proverbs says keep your heart with all diligence for out of it are all the issues of life and I don't think he meant by issues what we men mean today so he's got issues things that issue forth the first Clause an ultimate source in us of all our powers that constitute the image of God in us is almost as mysterious as God himself why can't we know God because his name is I not it why was Jobe satisfied at the end of the book if God didn't give him any answers at all to his agonizing questions because his eye appeared the key verse that explains the puzzle of the book of Job is when Jobe says to God I had heard about you with the hearing of the ear in other words I knew you as an object the personal objective of the worshipful object but an object now I see you face-to-face eye-to-eye well that's what we'll get in heaven that's why Thomas Aquinas was the wisest theologian who ever lived not merely because he wrote the sympathia logica but because he answered Christ perfectly when shortly before his death according to sworn testimony by brother reginal his confessor Aquinas was lying prone on the floor alone in the chapel in the middle of the night and Christ was speaking to him from the crucifix and said to Thomas brother Thomas you have written very well of me what will you have as your reward and Thomas replied only yourself Lord be Thomas alright let's talk about this let's talk about especially the role of the heart and what it means and the role of art as an expression of and communication to hearts and why it's so powerful and why we have neglected it so much of this generation so I'm ready for questions

Channel: University of Dallas

Views: 2,057

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: philosophy, theology, apologetics, socrates, Jesus, university of dallas, classical education, lectures, peter kreeft

Id: y9_1bkSDA3E

Length: 63min 59sec (3839 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 25 2019