The Healing Presence by Leanne Payne

Author:Leanne Payne
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: REL019000
ISBN: 9781585587452
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 1995-08-01T00:00:00+00:00

10

The Terrible Schism

in the Heart of Man

Christians use such phrases as head and heart and head knowledge versus heart knowledge to distinguish between discursive reason on the one hand, and intuitive, symbolic, feeling ways of knowing on the other. The latter has to do with the way of faith and love, prayer, worship, the Sacraments, and repentance. This language acknowledges the terrible schism in the heart of man that Kierkegaard cried out about when he said that we have forgotten how to exist, and can only think and talk about being.

This way of speaking, making the heart a metaphor to stand for the neglected faculty, is deeply embedded in our terminology. This has much to do with our history—a history of slowly losing the Christian supernatural, and therefore the vital Christian “myth” or symbolic system.

Throughout this book and the other books I have written, I’ve used such phrases as “mind and heart,” “intellect and heart,” “the cold intellect,” “the schism between head and heart,” “the way the heart sees,” “it is with the heart that we see the Unseen Real,” “the way the deep heart knows” (meaning the more “unconscious” reaches of our being). All this is a way of expressing the schism we moderns suffer due to the false separation between reason and faith, that which is behind the elevation of the rational faculty (making it to be the whole mind) and the denigration and even denial of the intuitive, feeling mind.

The pagan world distinguished between the educated, rational mind (the elite) and the mind of the masses (the common man). The elite were initiated, so to speak. On the one hand, they had access to the best that practical, moral reason could come up with (which is considerable), and on the other, as with the Gnostics and so on, they had their secret doctrines, the gnoses, fueled more often than not with the power of dark ways of knowing. All of this knowledge, of course, fell short of divine wisdom, the dimension the Jews as a people in communication with God had.

Then Christ, the Light of the World, dawned upon the Greco-Roman world, and His gospel was the same for all—educated and uneducated, rich and poor, free and slave, male and female, Jew and pagan. He differentiated between the wisdom of this world and the wisdom that comes through communication with God. At the foot of His Cross, the elite and the common alike can find the one true wisdom. And that wisdom, because it has to do with God living in us, changes all of life. There was to be no more elite as opposed to common. There was to be one body of men in Christ. Initiations into secret doctrines were out. Great moral teachers would learn from the unlearned, such as Peter and John. Repentance, belief, and initiation into Christ through baptism replaced pagan rites and gnoses. The power of the Holy Spirit (the Christian supernatural) and the light of the gospel overcame and replaced superstitions and the dark powers and ways of knowing.

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