The Evangelical Imagination by Karen Swallow Prior

Author:Karen Swallow Prior
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Christianity and Culture—United States;Evangelicalism—United States;REL012110;REL015000;REL084000
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2023-05-17T00:00:00+00:00

Sensible Sentimentality

Sentimentality and sensibility were never only about emotion. Both concepts are related not only to our capacity for sensory experience (which animals share with humans) but also to the intellectual faculties that, through the senses, receive perceptions and form impressions. Even having an impression depends on more than mere sensory ability. An impression requires attentiveness to the sensory event and reception of it in the mind (whether consciously or subconsciously). Think of the way we find ourselves subconsciously humming a song we heard earlier in the day, perhaps without even having noticed the song playing at the time. In this way, sensibility, which is a kind of aesthetic experience, is as connected to the rational mind as it is to emotional response. Most significantly, sentimental philosophy, recognizing that the body and mind are connected, understands that sensory experience constitutes “the basis of intellectual and imaginative constructs.”66

While we are right to be suspicious of sentimentalism wherever it might be found (even, or perhaps especially, in our own tradition), in seeing how it originated as a response to an opposite impulse, we might not only correct its error but also avoid erring in the opposite direction through overcorrection (by placing too little value on our emotional register). Virtue, as the classical tradition teaches, is the moderation between two extremes. It is a kind of harmony.

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