Divine Plagiarism

Faith and Reason. The Heart and the Mind. People talk about them like they are entirely separate. Different, to be sure, but they are hardly separate. Quite literally, the heart without the mind soon becomes a vegetable; the mind without the heart soon becomes a corpse. An incandescent light makes more heat than light, a florescent bulb more light than heat. Increase the heat of either, you increase the light, cut out all heat and you lose all light. The more you are in love with someone, the more you want to know about them. The more you know about them, the more you fall in love with them.

The Classical Greek philosophers never really trusted the heart. Plato and Aristotle tell us that the passions war against the reason, and the only basis for civilization is the triumph of reason in that war. In their masterworks, Augustine and Aquinas did a tremendous job of adapting Aristotle’s works into a Christian context. Perhaps, though, we went a bit too far. Marcus Aurelius thought along Aristotelian lines, seeking balance in all things. He was right to hate Christianity. We upset all existing balances. Jesus does not bring peace, but a sword; He breaks all of the truces we have made with the brokenness of this world.

There was no St. Aristotle, any more than there was a St. Gautama. His may have been be a useful civic faith, but it was not Christianity. It is not the faith of Abraham, the great Middle Eastern mystic, into whose line we are grafted. It is not the faith that causes the great king David to dance undignified through the streets of his polis for sheer joy.

Surely the heart runs wild. Surely it runs astray. But no more than the mind does. All things are darkened after the fall, Paul makes that much clear. But our minds are no less darkened than our hearts. The atrocities and deceptions brewed in the mind of man are no less evil than the hatred that bubbles from our hearts. We need Jesus to redeem both of them. We need Him to give us the heart of a Savior and the mind of Christ.

Until He remakes us, though, our hearts and our minds run rampant. So we are given fences. Electric ones, sometimes. Our minds are bounded by the consequences of our actions. You can believe what you wish about aerodynamics, but if you build an airfoil upside down, your plane will crash. You can believe what you wish about sociology, but if you make a society where the most innocent are murdered freely, you will have violence on your streets. Pascal calls it the ‘dignity of causality.’ In a fallen world, that dignity is generally expressed in negative consequences. But the alternative is worse. Without concrete consequences to actions, we would get so lost in our own minds that we would never be pulled back out. So from time to time, our thoughts are broken by the laws of His universe. They prevent us from becoming satisfied with any answer that is not Him.

He does the same for our hearts. Laws will not break hearts, though. There must be something else. Something has to move us from the places where our hearts grow comfortable, something has to stop us stagnating. Something has to break all answers that are not Him. So He gives us the curse. He thwarts our desire, showing us the incompleteness in loving anything but Him.

We try to drown out the curse. It is trying to tell us something. Maybe we should listen. Love a friend, and he will hurt you. Love work, it will involve frustration and pain. Love a hobby, and you will eventually find it boring. Love a woman, she will eventually pass away. The curse tells us that we were made for a better world than this, because nothing in this world can truly and permanently satisfy our hearts.

I really like warm weather. I prefer 110 degrees to 40 by far. I remember joking that ‘Cold weather is due to the fall of man… if they were walking around naked in the garden, it couldn‘t have been that cold.’ Maybe was more right than I thought. I do not claim to be an expert in the hydrology of the early Earth, but from my limited knowledge, I understand that there was a vapor canopy that covered the Earth. There was eternal sunshine, eternal summer. I imagine it was great back then. I think that now, though, we would get lost in it. So He breaks summer and makes winter. Winter keeps us from getting lost in summer, from taking it for granted. It brings renewal in spring, and fall takes it away before we can get too comfortable. But even winter has snow. There is grace even in the brokenness.

Desire will lead us home, if we follow it where it leads. We see Him reflected in many things. Really, anything we truly love is a reflection of Him. That is, after all, what our hearts were made for: loving Him and being loved by Him. The curse makes sure that it cannot end anywhere but with Him, for in Him the curse is broken. So even the curse is His servant, His agent to prod desire from resting too long in one place. The curse is the counterpart to desire after the fall, the goad to our passions.

Lewis is still right, though. Our desires will not be fulfilled in anything other than loving Him, but that fact cannot become license not to love anything but Him. If you wanted to find the perfect artwork, you would not stop frequenting art stores, nor would you stop buying other artworks. As your tastes became more and more refined, you would buy better and better works, and in those works you would see more and more aspects of that perfect artwork that you truly desire. Without learning to appreciate the artwork available, you would never be able to appreciate the perfect artwork. You might not even recognize it if you saw it.

We love Him incompletely, safely, imperfectly. Through loving His works and loving others, He breaks us and perfects our love. You get love by giving it away. In approaching His love, we must give away more and more of our own. The more love we give away, the more He gives us. He just makes sure that our love is never completely satisfied with anything but Him.

In the Kingdom, we won’t need goads or fences. We will ride bareback, and desire will run free in His pastures. But as long as we live in a world of briar patches, the curse keeps desire from destroying us. If we listen.