Instinct and Intellect Balanced Equally (Dante’s Paradise)

Last updated on: May 2, 2020 at 7:13 pm by John Mark N. Reynolds

Instinct and Intellect Balanced Equally (Dante’s Paradise) 2020-05-02T19:13:55-04:00 John Mark N. Reynolds

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Here my powers rest from their high fantasy,

but already I could feel my being turned-instinct
and intellect balanced equally as in a wheel whose motion nothing jars-by
the Love that moves the Sun and the other stars.*

Easy to forget how odd the first time instinct, usually trustworthy, and intellect jarred against each other. As a little boy, my instinct, quite correct given my experience, was that Mom and Dad may not be always right, but were better judges of what to do than I was. From this I extrapolated, not unreasonably, that grownups were better decision makers than I was. Since my parents spent years ministering to hurting folk, some of whom lived with us, a jolt was not so long in coming. Some adults in the house were less sane than my younger brother. Imagine!

They were making bad choices, obviously bad choices. My good instinct, trust your elders, came into conflict with my intellect. Thankfully, my folks were such that they could talk this through with me and cause me to see a tension. The world was not as it should be and I would have to accept this fact. Older people should be mentally and spiritually older, but sometimes they were not.

Instinct must still be trusted in most cases, however. Why? Isn’t skepticism good? Isn’t the skeptical man, the dialectical man? This is just so and not even because the world is broken. The skeptical man learns that appearance and reality are not always the same. Imagine a fishnet stuck into the aquarium. Looked at from the front, the fishnet handle might appear to be broken, when it is not. There is an optical illusion! What appears to be, is not what is. Growing up, we train our instinct to account for illusions of this sort. In a good world, most of what we see is the way it seems to be (in some important sense), but this may not be the whole truth. The sun rises, or so it seems, but from another perspective the sun never rises relative to Earth at all.

This kind of “tension” between instinct and intellect is not jarring, but educational! Students are delighted with optical illusions. They are like the trick of an honest magician: fun to see, even if we know they are illusions! When we are shown, we do not feel cheated, but fascinated. This is the skepticism that would exist if there had been no Fall and there was no sin.

There is, God help us, a disillusioning that comes when what should be isn’t. I have failed those that had a right to expect better of me. People fail us. Reality is broken and so what nature would be is not what nature is. Food is not growing for every hungry child. Parasites are in places where people should not be or where the parasite should not have been taken. Instinct, the shortcut our intellects need, fails us. Villains should be revealed by their very appearance, but sometimes the good seem ugly and the bad beautiful.

Our intellect also is broken. We reason the best we can (mayhap!), but we may still reason badly! Our instinct warns us that going “that way” is dangerous and bad. Our intellect, in service to some ideology we have been taught, talks us out of our best impulses. We indulge in justification by way of rationalization.

What to do?

We must have a second, and temporary, kind of skepticism. We must live by instinct most of the time for considering everything with a skeptical eye would burn us out. We must consider that our instinct may be wrong and immediately be open to evidence that this is so. We live unquiet mental lives.

So it goes.

The good news is that there is place, a place that is making everyplace like itself, where our instinct (good is great, good is beautiful) and our intellect will always agree. We will look, see, and all our being will speak the truth. Our impulse will match our reflection, our deepest intuition will be our considered opinion. Where God is, there is in truth beauty, in goodness truth, and in beauty wisdom. All our best reasoning and impulses will match if we keep thinking and feeling, both having become as they should be. We might be delightfully surprised, but never disappointed in a hoodwink.

Our instinct and intellect will be moved by love without any jars.

Always.
World without end.

Amen.

—————————————————————-

*Dante Alighieri. The Paradiso (Signet Classics) Canto XXXIII (p. 338). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

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