Heart

“[The heart is] the place where intellect and emotion and spirit will converge in the human self.”

• • • • Parker Palmer

Reason and Imagination

When Descartes said, “I think, therefore I am,” he did us no favor, but further fragmented us, making us limit ourselves to the cognitive at the expense of the imaginative and the intuitive. But each time we read the gospels we are offered anew this healing reconciliation and, if we will, we can accept the most wondrous gift of the magi.

Madeleine L'Engle

Cloud of Unknowing

“The Cloud of Unknowing teaches that we can achieve communion with God only through the Grace of divine Love. To prepare ourselves to receive this gift, we must enter a state of quiet stillness, suspended between heaven and earth. Above – between us and God – lies a mysterious “cloud of unknowing”, which our understanding can never penetrate. Between us and the world, we must create a “cloud of forgetting”, leaving conscious thought and desire below. In this timeless place of forgetting and unknowing, we may begin to hear that for which we are listening.
John Luther Adams

Proof of God?

“a cable which is made up of a number of separate threads, each feeble, yet together as sufficient as an iron rod. An iron rod represents mathematical or strict demonstration; a cable represents moral demonstration, which is an assemblage of probablilities, separately insufficient for certainty, but when put together irrefragable.”
John Henry Newman

Defining love

“God is love” (1 Jn. 4:16). But someone eager to define this is blindly striving to measure the sand in the ocean…
John Climacus

Three Elements of Reason

Firstly, there is the reception of the facts to reason about. These facts are received either from our own senses, or from the report of other minds; that is, either experience or authority supplies us with our material…
Secondly, there is the direct, simple act of the mind perceiving self-evident truth, as when we see that if A and B both equal C, then they are equal to each other. This act I call Intuition.
Thirdly, there is an art or skill of arranging the facts so as to yield a series of such intuitions which linked together produce a proof of the truth or falsehood of the propositions we are considering.

C.S. Lewis

Kinds of Truth

“There was, of course, something one-sided in all this. [The Priority of imagination over reason.] I was oblivious of every aspect of truth except that which appealed to me. But at the same time I grasped a truth of great importance. I had realized the danger of abstract thought when it loses touch with the concrete realities of life, and I had discovered the truth of experience, which is mediated through the imagination, and which often gives a deeper insight into reality than abstract thought.”

Bede Griffiths