Cultivate A Well-Ordered Heart
Since the explosion of the book Bronze Age Mindset several years ago, the word “vitalism” has been a major point of contention among Christian writers. BAP, of course, is no Christian; his work has far more in common with classical and Germanic paganism than anything found in the scriptures. This has caused many short-sighted Christian writers to dismiss the concept of vitalism altogether as a form of pagan body-worship. In fact, a proper understanding of human vitality, the capacity by which we sense and feel “full-life” goods in the world, is a necessary part of the fully human life.
Catholic philosopher Max Scheler defines vital feelings as sensations that are non-localized in the body, expressing a current state or condition. When you wake up well-rested and you feel great, it is signaling a vital condition that permeates your entire body and is not localized like touch in the fingers or taste on the tongue. When you feel shame, your skin might flush, your pulse increase, but the shame itself is not a localized sensation. Vital feelings are associated with vital values, the goods that pertain to life. Experiencing beauty, acting nobly, receiving praise, or winning a competition will all incite positive-valued vital feelings within an individual. Likewise, ugliness, ignobility, shame, or defeat incite negative-valued feelings. It is not even necessary to experience those things oneself. We feel shame when we see others acting in disvalued ways. Vitalism draws attention to the way in which the priority of these feelings and values is neglected in contemporary society, whose twisted doctrines of equality elevate the disvalues of sickly life over the values of life fully lived.
An example of the need to re-emphasize rightly-ordered vital values can be found on Rob Henderson’s substack, where he describes disgust as the “behavioral immune system.” Hopefully, it doesn’t need to be said that vital moral sentiments cannot be reduced to merely biological responses to unhealthy stimuli. While I don’t think that Henderson is implying this kind of reductionism in his essay, the fact that moral sentiments are not merely biological has been used to defend the equally erroneous statement that we must divorce morality altogether from our existence as biological creatures, as Evangelicals have done for centuries. A significant portion of God’s moral commands to humanity in Scripture can only be understood in the context of the fact that we are our bodies.
If one is a Christian, then it must be acknowledged that God has made the world in such a way that some things are inherently noble, beautiful, and good, while others are inherently ignoble, ugly, and bad. We, too, were created as incarnate creatures, whose bodies were designed by God specifically for the kind of world that he created. The vital senses are a way of experiencing the vital world in the same way that the perceptual senses experience the material world. We can admire the loyalty of the dog, the nobility of the stag, and the beauty of the swan because values are divinely-ordered, embedded in reality as God designed it, and not merely subjective. It is not wrong for us to keep a dog in our home, but then be disgusted at the sight of a rat or snake in the same place. In fact, we should question ourselves if we don’t feel differently about a puppy than we do about a cockroach. Blaise Pascal coined the phrase “désordre du coeur” to refer to people who had somehow lost their normal, God-given capacity for feeling positive value and negative disvalue. Think back about a time that you opened a carton of milk, and it smelled foul. Your body responded to that smell with a variety of feelings, all of them negative, informing you of the disvalue of this spoiled milk. Wouldn’t it be strange for someone to smell that milk and feel nothing? Wouldn’t it be stranger if they smelled it, were pleased by the smell, and began to drink it?
The denial of the significance of the body to Christian ethics derives from the way that early Evangelicals blindly absorbed the scientific culture of the 17th and 18th-century Enlightenment without seriously considering the implications of those beliefs. As Mark Noll points out in Chapter 4 of The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind, many Evangelical assumptions about the relationship of body to mind, reason to emotion, and thought to will reflect an uncritical acceptance of scientific theories tracing back to Bacon and Locke rather than any scriptural interpretation. Creating a false dichotomy between rational, intellectual morality and irrational, bodily feelings, they deny that the emotions have any role to play in the ethical questions of human life. Even when Evangelicals of this period, most prominently Immanuel Kant, attempted to critique this empirical sensualism, they remained trapped within a flawed notion of Enlightenment rationalism, which treats the human being as a house divided against itself. Edmund Husserl’s Crisis of the European Sciences describes the way Kant’s Evangelical ethics collapsed into self-contradiction because it remained tethered to the assumption that morality must be rationalistic in the narrowest, conceptual sense of the word. Meanwhile, Catholic ethicists retained key insights into the deeply rational source of the feelings. As Blaise Pascal tells us: “le cœur a ses raisons que la raison ne connaît point.”
What of Christian humility? When I was a professor at Louisiana Christian University, many Christian Studies students would object to my lectures on the Nicomachean Ethics, saying that the Christian life was incompatible with courage, honor, or self-respect. They emphasized the notion that God was not a respecter of the goods of this world, and that only those who gave up their life would earn eternal life. However, this fallacy was addressed by Augustine of Hippo sixteen hundred years ago. God does not hate the rich and love the poor for their poverty. He has no contempt for the strong or favoritism for weakness. The descriptions of humility in the Bible reflect a perspective that the holiness of God is something far beyond the categories we comprehend in this life. God’s holiness is so distant from the human condition, and our love for Christ should consume us to such a degree that when we behold Christ, the distinctions of this world seem to fade from sight. The ideal Christian doesn’t hate wealth, health, and strength, but is indifferent to them when they stand in the way of Christ.
Many Christians today find themselves in a situation where they have nearly lost the capacity for correct vital feelings. It is not true that feelings are random or anarchic. This false belief is the product of the culturally contingent fashions of the Enlightenment and has infiltrated Reformed Christian thought for centuries. Feelings are ordered to God’s Creation, but like any other sense, can be warped by our environment and behaviors. If you listen to your music too loudly, it will diminish your hearing. If you work in a slaughterhouse or a paper mill, you will stop noticing those smells after a while. If you surround yourself with disvalues, you will desensitize your vital feelings to the negativity of those disvalues.
If you found that your vision was slowly declining, day by day, and everything was getting dimmer, you would rush to the doctor immediately and beg him to restore your sight. Today, many Christians are finding their vital senses growing dimmer and dimmer, yet refuse to seek the healing of the spirit. This inability to feel disvalues like disgust is frequently called “tolerance,” but it is the tolerance that a blind man has to an ugly work of art. The kind of Christian who has malice for the vital goods of this world is not holy but is deformed. They have internalized the notion that they should repress these feelings instead of trusting them and projected their internal sickness outward against those blessed by God with vital grace. God created those feelings to guide us in this world, and we too often shut ourselves off from feelings of shame, disgust, and revulsion, which operate as God’s red-siren alarms and behavioral immune system against vital depravity. That a thing is disgusting is itself a perfectly valid proof that this thing is immoral and should be abhorred.
Most pastors are right to tell you to avoid experiencing things of disvalue in the world, but we should also seek to experience good things in order to train our feelings. The difference between a man who has memorized many good moral principles and the good man is that the good man feels value in his actions and acts without dwelling on his ethics. There is no need for the good man to rationally contemplate each action because he has become sanctified by God in his innermost recesses. The moral truth has been written on his heart, not his intellect, as the Apostle Paul says: “For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law, these, having not the law, are a law unto themselves: Which shew the work of the law written in their hearts,” Romans 2:14-15.
Christians need to reject the false, Enlightenment belief that feelings are inherently sinful. God creates human beings as not just thinking creatures but also feeling creatures. Just as we try to conform our thoughts to the Word of God, we must likewise conform our feelings to God’s standards. When those feelings conform to Pascal’s ordre du coeur, they are pointing us towards the good and away from the evil. Pastors who condemn young Christians for their positive feelings toward God’s people and their negative feelings against the disvalues of this world are standing against a God-given order inherent in Creation. God meant for Man to trust his feelings in and about this world. We know that his regenerative, healing power can restore us from the injuries and wounds inflicted by the sinful life that we used to lead, but one cannot see with God’s redeemed vision unless one first opens one’s eyes. Likewise, we will never be able to feel as God intended us to feel unless we are willing to open ourselves to God’s message, played not in the dry language of logic and doctrine but on the chords of the heart.
Exercise. Lift weights. Care for your body. Seek out beauty in this world. Cultivate honorable friendships and romantic love within marriage. Play sports. Practice the fine and dramatic arts. Read good novels. Likewise, abhor anything which deliberately elevates ugliness, anything disgusting or debased, and those who are dishonorable and depraved. Christ tells us to care for the poor, not those who betray their friends. He tells us to protect the weak, not the mockers or scorners. If one is incapable, in the words of Leo Strauss, to tell the difference between a great civilization and a tribe of cannibals, this is not a mark of holiness. It is a deformity of the vital sense.
