Whether Order Is the First Need of All

The more genuine sources of order come not from opinion-makers but from custom, convention, and continuity. The appeal is to the three parts that make an associated sensibility: heart, imagination, and intellect, and all three are calculating and decision-making, and all three tutored by the eternal standards of what is right and what is wrong.

I recall from our parish priest’s recent homily some words about “prudence” and whether someone might soon name a newly born child “Prudence,” a young girl of course. I suspect not what with the connotations and the usual shortening of first names, the mother calling her daughter from the back yard: “Prude…!”

It was a good homily with dictionary definitions from Merriam-Webster and centered in the first of the Sunday readings from the Book of Wisdom, a good source if one wishes to avoid risk in one’s life.

Apart from Merriam-Webster, also “a mighty plenty” from Aristotle and the Catholic Encyclopedia for more dogmatic definitions.

A southernism that, “a mighty plenty.”

It’s common sense, of course, that “sense” that precedes good judgment, that virtue prudence. Our friendly father was exercising wisdom and understanding in making the argument that prudence possesses an empire over all the moral virtues with an aim not only to perfect the will but the intellect in its practical decisions, number one then on that list of virtues, prudence that is.

One arrives at a cross-roads, to coin a metaphor, a set of daily circumstances and the usual here-and-now give-and-take of everyday life. There’s a road to be taken and if Robert Frost is to be trusted a road not to be taken. This regardless of that wonderful Yogi Berra quote that if one comes to a fork in the road, take it.

The golden mean tells us that the choice should be made in such a manner that we procedurally first, take counsel, second judge soundly the fitness of the “means” suggested at the conclusion of that taking counsel, and then command the will to act, poco a poco, so to speak.

And that’s how moral judgments are made although a bit more on that later.

There we have it; the means leading to the ends can be described as prudent. The more one pursues this prudence, the more it becomes a stable habit because of repeated action, which is not to suggest that prudence makes us into automatons.

So, prudence is no doubt an acquired habit, and thus excludes remissness or back-sliding even though it seems true that adapting means to ends does not always imply prudence lest we lose sight of that word “ambiguity.”

But let us move into another arena, that of politics and poetics:

One of our traditional conservative mentors, Russell Kirk, was a prudent man who found it difficult to separate politics from poetics. I mention this because Dr. Kirk, in one of his seminal treatises, The Politics of Prudence, examines the “roots” of our current disorder in much the same manner as our parish priest in his homily on prudence; neither is a fan of modernism.

The two would agree that happiness does not lie in mere sensual pleasures but in the prudent maintenance of customary relations and affections. The two would likely also agree, I believe, that at issue these days is the battle to sustain the moral imagination so defined by Burke, Eliot, and others.

But that’s another word to be added to the arsenal here, imagination, which needs an according definition. Here’s one from Iris Murdoch who wonders whether something exists between sense and intellect:

“Imagination is said to be ‘spontaneous’, thus to be distinguished from the more ‘automatic’ mental functions (Imagination is ‘lively’)”….

I like that but try to control that liveliness each week in church.

This from her Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, a fairly dense book from someone known mostly as a novelist but gaining good traction these days as philosopher. She goes on to argue that the exercise of reason is ideally automatic, a point I believe our parish priest would find truthful and important as a daily force of freedom acting against irrational barriers. Which leaves me wondering if the good father is not one with Immanuel Kant in believing that morality is fundamentally based on reason and not upon the imagination and surely not on the heart.

But here’s a proposition I thought just the other day when sitting in the barber’s chair: Is moral judgment an ability to imagine various situations or is that too much of a feeling, too much of a kind of free play, that speculative activity that comes about when lying on one’s back and when puffy white clouds become cavorting dolphins.

My barber is not a talkative man.

Well, whatever; I shall not wander down to the church to quiz the friendly father since I do believe we are mainly on the same page. The exercise of reason is practical and the answer one might give a parent when questioned “Why did you do it?” well, selfish desire. And we all know that the imagination and the heart own and exaggerate our capacity for egoistic fabrications. Moral improvement as we all learn from Plato and as we make our way out of the cave always involves a progressive destruction of false images. Living is always an imperfect activity which is why memory seems always to be retracing its steps.

I believe Dante came to know this best when at the end of that good poem he came to know that he had seen many things his intellect apprehended by a sort of Neo-Platonic light which he could not express by direct speech but by imaginative metaphor. But the last lines express the leap his heart makes when his soul surrenders its desire and its will to the harmonious movement of love.

It has to be the following movement of his heart without which the poem would have no point.

Of course prudence, as our diplomatic priest was suggesting, is a cardinal virtue tutoring the intellect which would suggest that we place the seat of our existence in our intellectual “soul.”

Having said that, I’m not prepared to argue that our dutiful priest is un-imaginative, a reader, say, only of the Reader’s Digest. I believe him to be a man who believes in custom, convention, and continuity, and thus a defender of “order,” which as the title to my notes here argues may be the “first need of all.”

Maybe….

I’m also not, by the way, into a critique of that homily with one exception I noted to myself during that homily: and that is, “the heart has reasons which reason knows nothing of…. We know the truth not only by reason, but by the heart.”

I mention that because as I recall our priest made a punctuation finger jabbing point in his homily that to say to someone that “Follow your heart…” is very bad advice. “Parents,” he added, “take heed.”

Which leaves us wondering whether truth is accessible only by the intellect? And an awkward moment that Sunday at church because one does not raise one’s hand during the homily to raise an objection.

Perhaps a smallish snort and then a quick looking down at the floor.

You know, “Who me?”

But the good father often tells his parishioners that he’s “not a romantic.” But he doesn’t explain why. He does seem to have some fears about the imagination but doesn’t explain why.

I do not raise my hand.

I believe, though, that truth is also known by the heart, the latter being that faculty that makes us know things by intuition, sensitivity, sentiment, compassion, the latter also one of the very first needs of all.

Should I also critique his understanding of Romanticism? Perhaps later…. Or I might anonymously send him a copy of Bernard Dive’s Newman and the Imagination, a fine book, but very dense, ten pages a day for me lest my concentration meander. Newman, newly canonized, and about time.

But I’m meandering now into a seventeenth-century philosopher, Pascal, whose thought very often these days is used indiscriminately to justify the many numerous examples of irrational human behavior, a total contradiction of the “spirit” of Pascal’s thought.

What was he thinking, then, this guy with the computer language name?

Well, in his Penseés, he epigrammatically discusses religious belief beginning with this proposition: Belief cannot be justified by knowledge of God. And by that he means the existence of God cannot be justified rationally with the exception of a natural religion vouched by St. Thomas as a prelude to the articles of faith.  Ultimately to apprehend religious truths, one needs to understand they are provided directly to the heart, and by that he also means that the heart is the first anterior superior mind.

It’s a bit more lively then again briefly to mention Newman, a man familiar with the tradition of spiritual autobiography, Protestant in particular, albeit his own conversion had not been evangelical since his own feelings were not “violent” but a returning to, a renewing of, principles under the power of the Holy Spirit and through his encounters with theological texts as he makes clear in the beginning chapters of the Apologia. He then goes on to assign to the Church the means of maintaining religious truth in this anarchical world.

Good man he was, deserving of that saint-hood.

And a good thing it is because there is a solid need to keep young disciples under control lest they meander into no direction at all, and/or the heretical road they should not take.

Without meandering too much. I don’t think our parish priest was directing his argument about following the heart/bad advice at evangelical autobiographical conversion interpretations. Too much zeal, without a guide, effort without a true result.

Strange, then, that Pascal then gives the “heart” a quality of “mind” and also “imagination” a quality of mind. And endows the two of them an equal degree of trust that he gives to “reason,” or “intellect,” and he was, by the way, no mere romantic because he was also a very fine mathematician….

Back for a moment then to the controlling metaphor at the beginning:

That crossroad of decision making:

A well-tutored intellect leads to a prudent decision….

By the same-token, a well-tutored heart and a well-tutored imagination unless we discount the two thus:

Follow your heart is bad advice….

Follow your imagination is bad advice….

Or maybe not: Create in me a clean heart oh God and renew a right Spirit within me….

Kirk was a correspondent with the poet T. S. Eliot who was also as everyone knows an extraordinary essayist.

Let’s consider poetics for a moment:

Eliot has an essay titled “The Metaphysical Poets” which came out in 1921. Eliot was at pains in this essay to describe what he called a “dissociation of sensibility.” There’s that root word, again, “sense.” In this essay, then, Eliot was reviewing an anthology of poems, Herbert Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics & Poems of the Seventeenth Century.

Eliot believes that this century, the seventeenth, was a cultural dividing line important in understanding the “mind” and our Western Civilization. He and the later Kirk, were no fans of Descartes and his “hyperbolic doubt” which they both believed became the model for modern mechanistic philosophy.

What’s his point? Descartes, that is:

Well, the senses deceive. What does not deceive is a certainty principle such as 2 + 3 equals five. But do note that kind of thinking which is rational, analytical, and cold. Everything outside of that falls into disrepute. Thus the only way of thinking that has substance and value is through reason, which then separates or dissociates reason from heart and imagination.

The result was manifest in poetics, in imaginative literature, and is likely why politics these days is called political science, and a sadness to those of us who consider it “philosophy.”

For Eliot, the metaphysical poets in his study wrote works of imaginative literature that embodied a fusion of thought and feeling that later writers, poets especially, were unable to achieve because of this dissociation of sensibility. The metaphysical poets, by contrast wrote works that were both intellectual and emotional but later works were either intellectual or emotional but not both.

What this meant to Eliot is that the earlier poets owned a fusion of thought and feeling expressed in language that was a direct sensuous apprehension of their thought:

Be patient with me for a moment:

The poet John Donne is for Eliot a good case in point. He has a poem titled “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” a very fine piece.  In short, the poem is a narrative about a man, the speaker in the poem, parting from his wife. Let’s modernize the thing for a moment and say that it’s a business man about to make a business trip and he is speaking to his wife as she drops him off at the airport “terminal.”

We understand this emotionally as sadness akin to mourning, as would any loving couple about to be separated by time and distance.

So, as readers we sensually apprehend the emotion, a “sense,” a feeling, emotiveness, even a deeply felt compassion.

Well, our speaker also wants to refute this emotiveness and earthquake trepidation by making the “metaphysical” argument that parting is also a positive experience because their love is not mundane but divine which is less emotive and more intellectual.

He intellectually “compares” their love to the motion of heavenly spheres calling it “sublunary.” Note then how he takes something common, the movement of stars and such across the night sky, but then elevates the argument by suggesting that the loving bond between husband and wife does not dissolve but only changes form.

In truth, he writes, their souls remain as one without a “breach, but an expansion, / Like gold to airy thinness beat.” Also the circular movement of his “firm” thinking is that his trip will end where it began which is metaphysically the image of a circle which then solidifies the eternity of their love, like a wedding band.

So, what has happened?

The poem is physical and metaphysical and an associated sensibility synthesizing as it were intellect, imagination, and heart.

Eliot is much the same kind of poet in the Twentieth Century in his suburb long poem the “Four Quartets” in which he writes as follows:

In my beginning is my end (at the poem’s beginning)

and

In my end is my beginning (at the poem’s conclusion)

and the whole “beautiful” in its circularity.

Our old traditional conservative mentor Dr. Kirk often referred to himself as an imaginative conservative which for many would seem a contradiction in terms. Apart from that, there are those who would make him into either a neoconservative or a paleoconservative, a classification which he would “prudently” resist.

But in the text I mentioned earlier he remarks that the greatest works of politics are poetic; he mentions this as a rebuttal of modern politics because they divorce politics from religion, from imaginative literature, and from tradition, and therefore they do not speak to the souls of their audience but rather revel in their spiritual irrelevance.

What was Kirk then?

Although a prose writer, a master poet speaking to the hearts of his readers and tutoring the heart through parable, allegory, and analogy.

And for old Kirk prudence is something much more than intellectual habit and a notion that may have left him at odds with our local parish priest, light-heartedly, though, I’m sure.

And one might also mis-interpret my title here: “Whether Order is the First Need of All.”

Because in one manner of thinking to do so is think of order as a collectivist form arising from the ideology of progress and by which we surrender our humanity to the cult of scientism and bureaucracy, that business called the “political process,” e.g., political tinkering, consolidation.

That’s an appeal to the intellect, but not an appeal to the soul or the heart ,which is the business of the moral imagination and its kissing cousin, imaginative literature.

The more genuine sources of order come not from opinion-makers but from custom, convention, and continuity. The appeal is to the three parts that make an associated sensibility: heart, imagination, and intellect, and all three are calculating and decision-making, and all three tutored by the eternal standards of what is right and what is wrong.

There’s an oddity at the end here but one I find intriguing and actually the result of an undergraduate paper for my religion professor from now oh-so-many decades ago, Robert Esbjornson—blessings upon his memory. It had to do with that moment in Deuteronomy when God commands Moses to ascend Mount Pisgah and there God grants Moses a sight of the Promised Land.

In the essay, though, I tried as an 18-year-old to argue that it was not mere “sight” but “insight,” a coming together, or confrontation, of human and divine, temporal and eternal, a “moment” of revelatory vision albeit frustrating because it’s incomplete but should be read with an awakened heart, imagination, and intellect. That was as bold and foolish as a college freshman could be, but in hindsight was close to being right.

Newman, I think, understood this as he seems at times to take such pains in his Grammar and how and why the heart is restless unless and until it takes rest in the unceasing desire of union with God in heaven.

All well and fine, but I’m one with Kirk in believing that one must first find a means to bring some coherence to the material at hand, which must mean that order is the first need of all, which prescribes then natural law, common law, and social norms, a sort of faith, without which the age is likely to slip into sardonic apathy and fatigued repression….

And if heart and flesh are mere analogues of one another… which could make our parish priest’s argument legitimate: To follow the heart is bad advice since heart and flesh are mere analogues and consistent with sweaty prom nights. Heed it well….

But my argument is that heart and flesh are not mere analogues, although Christ was incarnate in both, and both were spiritual forms, shining out with more charm than reason can apprehend. Morality is also not cooly abstract and, Socrates, like Christ, must have reclined on a gentle grassy slope and listened to the rhythmic summer songs of the cicadas, thinking not of the phylum euarthropoda but rather of following his heart and loving and forgiving all those others openly… the first need of all.

This essay is taken from a chapter in a memoir in progress, “The Man Who Wore a Tea Cup on His Head.” 

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The featured image is “Investiture of the Duke of York with the Order of St Patrick at Dublin Castle” (1898) by Amédée Forestier, and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.