Deeper than emotions
Garvey, John
Of several minds: John Garvey DEEPER THAN EMOTIONS THE GUIDING ROLE OF DOGMA THE CONNECTION, or lack of one, between our emotions and what we finally are is a mystery which is not on our minds...
...JOHN GARVEY Commonweal: 358...
...something must be brought to the feeling, some way of reading the feeling which gives us the language we need to say what it means...
...and we will not be able to see what the love we are called to show one another means, unless we see it dogmatically, in the richest sense of the word...
...At the beginning of the recitation of the Creed in the Orthodox liturgy the priest says, "Let us love one another, so that with one mind we may confess the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, the Trinity, one in essence and undivided...
...Those children will never become Nazis...
...It is wrong to wish to be less than we are capable of being, even if our century makes the wish understandable...
...We may or may not feel passionate about it, but beyond feeling we understand the need to work for it, even if the work is dogged and without passion...
...to be pro-life is...
...We think of the emotions as central to what makes life important...
...and of course it was considered permissible to mistreat Jews and schismatics and heretics...
...We may not agree about what justice means, but we do agree that, whatever it means, it is worth risk and inconvenience...
...It is a dogma—the Incarnation—that tells Christians what love finally means: a freely accepted self-emptying which allows the Giver of life, who already fills the universe, to become manifest...
...Nazis and followers of Pol Pot and members of the Klan all dandle children on their knees...
...Deep feelings of love may finally have nothing to do with love in any important sense...
...The language, for better or worse, comes to us from culture, or religion, or socr but it does come to us from outside...
...the fact is that in the ages when officially sanctioned Christianity reigned, it was all right to torment criminals before their death...
...Torturers no doubt love their wives and children deeply, are loyal to their friends, mourn their dead...
...It would be ideal, our aesthetic sense tells us, if feelings and dogma came together in a case like this and strong emotions meshed with decent belief, forming a whole...
...It shouldn't be thought that true love involves a steely determination and no feeling at all, although there may be times when it does involve this...
...This could be some of what appeals to us obscurely in the grey atmosphere which surrounds the detective novels of Simenon, Le Carre's thrillers, and it may be why we respond to the stubborn decency of some of Dick Francis's protagonists...
...For example, to be pro-choice is not dogmatic...
...We assume the primary importance of the emotional life to an extent which probably would have seemed strange to our ancestors...
...Just as the knowledge of joy is deeper than the emotion of happiness, there are forms of love which are much deeper than the emotions we ordinarily associate with love...
...How is one to know what conclusions are proper...
...Dogma and orthodoxy can be like that, of course...
...If circumstances, economic or cultural, force us to continue living or working against the emotional grain, we feel that something monumentally unfair is at work in our lives...
...No doubt they have the same visceral feelings about their children that I have about mine: they would die to keep them alive...
...Emotions lie at the surface of a perception which is deeper than emotion can ever be...
...This may be a legacy of Romanticism, which could almost be defined as the range of emotional possibility which stretches from Madame Bovary to Dracula...
...Finally, it is a perception, a vision, and an understanding...
...We are tempted to say,' 'Those people (Nazis, Argentinian torturers, Soviet camp guards, whoever) may feel strongly, but they feel strongly about the wrong things...
...The husband who is faithful to a wife who is terribly ill, acts of courage, friendship in difficult times, all of these can involve going against the emotional grain for the sake of something which we know—even if our knowing is often dim, something truly dark—to be more important than emotion...
...Emotions do matter and are real, often important, parts of our life...
...There can be no proof for this assumption...
...We know that prominent Nazis were profoundly moved by Bach's music, and it would be a kind of fear, an unreasonable self-protection, for me to assume that what moved them was not the same glory and loveliness that moves me...
...It would be nice if there were some obvious connection between strong affection, powerful emotion, the feelings we believe should make us better people, and the way we really are...
...it might involve turning around years after the fact, seeing clearly what love has meant in a particular situation for the first time...
...it leads us to something that can only be called dogma, or orthodoxy...
...How does someone come to the' 'right way" of feeling about something...
...What does this have to do with dogma and orthodoxy...
...We assume, for instance, that it is right to pursue justice, even if doing so leads to great personal inconvenience, perhaps to death...
...This belief serves as a form of secular dogma: it directs and leads our feelings and emotions, and can transform them...
...A strong emotion about a relationship validates it...
...We have a reasonable, but wrong, fear of the extremes of human freedom...
...Francis of Assisi...
...Francises, Bachs, Dostoyevskys, or even ordinarily affectionate and loyal friends or good parents...
...It would be nice because it would allow us to believe what we seem to need to believe: that our lives are whole and connected at some level, that we are one sort of being...
...It can be found in ACLU members and the most liberal Unitarians...
...Given the fact that Nazis can be moved by the emotions of love and loyalty, given the appreciation of beauty which can be found in the soul of the torturer, why is it that this 21 June 1985: 357 profound feeling does not translate into a feeling about all human beings...
...How could the love of one parent for his or her child not lead to compassion for all other parents and their children...
...This rigidity exists, however, not only at Jerry Falwell's level or in the claims of the most conservative bishops...
...Maybe in our despair we find ourselves wishing sometimes that this level were as far as humanity could go, the speechless level which would make a murder a local and limited affair, something done only because we have to eat...
...it is an a priori belief, and one of the few which seems to be shared by a great many otherwise different groups...
...or they fail to draw the right lessons from what they feel...
...But life is frequently not so accommodating...
...Like so many other experiences, it may not be immediately and fully available to us...
...This shouldn't lead us to think that other ages were good at them...
...We can't avoid assuming some things about values and meaning...
...But they are not necessarily guides to how we should live, nor are some of the most overwhelming and apparently good emotions connected with goodness...
...Strong emotions may prove no more than indigestion or ulcer symptoms do about the real spiritual state or the virtue of the person who experiences them...
...Of several minds: John Garvey DEEPER THAN EMOTIONS THE GUIDING ROLE OF DOGMA THE CONNECTION, or lack of one, between our emotions and what we finally are is a mystery which is not on our minds enough...
...They lack the language, and therefore presumably the capacity...
...Our fascination with wolf-ckudren, with those who are raised outside of human community, is a reflection of our desire to see what it would be like to see human emotion and response in the raw...
...They will also never become Wallenbergs, or Gandhis, or St...
...they suggest a rigidity and closed-mindedness which no one finds sympathetic...
...What tends to get called "dogmatic" or "orthodox" is unpopular dogma and orthodoxy...
...Love must be present, informing our confession of faith, for our confession to be true...
...How could a Mengele happen in the same race which produced a St...
...not innate...
...But that isn't the case...
...Our age doesn't offer us a good vocabulary for dealing with these things...
...These things don't come from feelings alone...
...Feeling good about what we are and what we are doing is absolutely important to our consideration of such questions as whether we will continue a marriage or friendship or a line of work...
...This presents a new problem: it leads us to the realm of the objective...
...one which is willed, or which doesn't seem to come from the heart in some way apparent to us, strikes us as false, hypocritical, and somewhat less real...
...It doesn't matter that the same vehemence and closedmindedness can be brought to either side of the debate...
...But dogma means something richer than this...
...The words have a largely negative reading these days...
Vol. 112 • June 1985 • No. 12
