"The heart has its reasons, which reason does not know. We feel it in a thousand things."
"It is the heart which experiences God, and not the reason. This, then, is faith: God felt by the heart, not by the reason."
"The knowledge of God is very far from the love of Him."
"We do not prove that we ought to be loved by enumerating in order the causes of love; that would be ridiculous. Jesus Christ and Saint Paul employ the rule of love, not of intellect; for they would warm, not instruct."
I found these quotes while reading a post on evangelization. The point of the post was to suggest that in these post-Christian days, evangelization may be done better by warming the heart rather than by instructing the rational mind. I suppose this is in the line of what Jesus said: "I have come to kindle a fire upon the earth, and how I wish it were already burning!"
And really, when said like that, that is the core of evangelization. Jesus spoke to the hearts of people. So did all the evangelists. Even the most brilliant, like Augustine, spoke to the heart even as he used the capacities of the mind.
But there are qualifications to be made. If you look at the Pensees, you can see many of them for yourself. The quotes above come in a context in which it is clear Pascal is not trying to oppose intellect to emotion, or anything of that sort. Rather, he is trying to describe how humans think in a broader, more holistic sense. Some of what he says is not unlike what Iain McGilchrist says about the right and left hemispheres of the brain, in his book The Master and His Emissary.
Maria Popova has a reflection on Pascal's understanding of intuition and logic which is helpful as a starting point.
We are to love God with all our heart, and mind, and strength. All our capacities are meant to be integrated and ordered towards the unum necessarium.
Speaking for myself, my heart is attracted by the Good, True and Beautiful. Love is this inclination towards what is desirable, lovable. As Augustine says, our hearts are restless until they rest in Him. We would not be able to rest in something that was untrue, or not entirely good or beautiful. This would be a false rest, like an enchantment. Not the "re-enchantment" that some Christians have recently claimed we need to counter an excess of utilitarian, flattened rationalism; but the illusory, besorcelled kind, like Rilian in The Silver Chair. The kind that distracts you from God, confuses you, and does not bring you closer.
It is the mind that is inclined to the True. There is scientific evidence that emotion is an aspect of cognition, an important one, linking perception and action. In other words, the heart grounds the reason. I've read that people who don't have access to their emotions have problems with reasoning especially where decisions are involved. Aquinas says that the sheep runs from the wolf because it perceives the wolf as a threat -- in other words, it uses the cognition available to an ovine.
(The "heart" is not just emotions, though in that last paragraph I wrote as if they were somewhat interchangeable. I will have to try to straighten that part out some other time. Right now I'm trying to show how emotions are in large part cognitive; they are to do with perception of what is desirable and undesirable.)
I think Pascal is trying to bring out a wider sense of what human intellect is, one that was understood by the ancients but had been reduced in modern times. More importantly perhaps, he was describing the heart as that which loves. We can't love what we don't know, or only know erroneously. But love is a sort of integration of all the faculties.
Without recognizing the intellectual perceptiveness of the heart, we run the risk of making sentimentality into the operating principle of evangelization. Already, sentimentality is the non-nutritive substitute for love in our modern culture. But our hearts can't rest in something that isn't real, or is only real in a reflected, partial way.
There is a kind of unreality in decontextualized rationality. We see too much of this in our culture as well.
But the solution isn't to free the heart from the mind, or vice versa, it is to reintegrate them. Our culture, indeed, seems to have to relearn this again and again. Perhaps one human at a time, which is after all how evangelization works.
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