Emotional Factors in Catholic Belief

[maolsheachlann]

If it please the forum, I would like to start a thread about emotional or non-rational factors in Catholic belief.

We would all (I imagine) say we are here because, looking at life and the world, we have come to the objective conclusion that Catholicism is the Truth-- the way things really are, whether we like it or not.

Many others would postulate a plethora of non-rational (even irrational), emotional, aesthetic etc. etc. reasons for our adherence to Catholic belief.

I think few of us would contend that emotional factors have NO influence on our belief, though we would (probably) insist that the intellect has to give its ratification before faith is accepted.

So I thought it might be interesting to come up with a list of non-rational, emotional, aesthetic etc. etc. reasons for Catholic belief. I am throwing all of them in-- all the ones I've heard, all the ones that have occurred to me independently, whether or not I think they have any bearing on reality. I think self-awareness can only be a good thing. I am including motives for theistic belief in general as well as Catholic belief in particular.

1) Fear of mortality and desire for immortal life
2) A guilt complex or sense of sin and desire to escape from this
3) A desire to believe the universe is purposeful and ordered rather than random and chaotic
4) The Kantian insistence that, ultimately, justice just HAS to prevail and that it obviously does not prevail in this life
5) A desire to escape from ambiguity and uncertainty into dogma and discipline
6) Ritualism-- smells and bells, vestments etc.
7) Medievalism, anti-modernity
8) Sexual repression (usually postulated as an effect of religious belief but often as a cause, too)
9) Snobbery-- what might fairly or unfairly be described as the Evelyn Waugh brand of Catholicism
10) Irish nationalism
11) A sense of duty towards our ancestors (not exactly the same thing as Irish nationalism)
12) Childhood exposure to rosary, Christmas carols, etc.-- nostalgia
13) Islamophobia, the Church as a bastion against Islam
14) Aesthetic Catholicism-- not quite the same thing as ritualism or snobbery
15) A mystical experience
16) The Marxist's belief that religion, and especially Catholicism, is there to prop up power structures and quell the Peoples' discontent with fairy stories
17) Because the Catholic Church, for an Irish person, is the obvious spiritual homeland
18) Togetherness, tribalism
19) Ego-identification with the prestige of Catholicism

Can anyone think of any others? Any thoughts?

[Alaisdir Ua Séaghdha]

I presume 11) means immediate ancestors (parents, mother) as much as the more remote?

A spouse (usually a wife) can be a consideration too. I also heard people saying that their commitment stems from their children.

It can equally said that there are a myriad of emotional factors in abandoning Catholicism. The lack of intellectual foundation via catechesis in the schools makes that much easier.

[maolsheachlann]

Yes, by 11) I meant parents and grandparents as well as ancestors in general.

I definitely think the same thing applies to leaving the Church or not entertaining Catholic belief in the first place. In fact, I think a very interesting list could be made of such considerations, too.

I have been reading the collected essays of George Orwell and it's really striking how Orwell doesn't even CONSIDER that Christainity might be true, despite writing (fairly) respectfully about Christian authors like Eliot, Chesterton and Lewis. His argument is "nobody actually believes in immortality anymore, even if they say they do". Of course, this is hardly an argument at all. I think Orwell's assumption-- history is moving in another direction-- is one that carries weight with a lot of people (even Christians), even though we can be severely deluded about the direction in which history is moving-- for instance, Orwell took it as read that laissez-faire capitalism was a dead dog.

I sometimes wonder if anybody is motivated by purely rational considerations. One thing about which relatively little seems to be written, from a Catholic or Christian perspective, is how believing can be a moral or immoral act. And yet this isn't such an absurd idea even by secular standards because we often treat belief or unbelief as a moral matter. For instance, if you believed that another race was inferior, that would be seen as immoral by many people. In contemporary discussions about religion, it is usually assumed that belief and faith are to be judged by their consequences. But Christ seems to speak of faith as a good in itself.

[Askel McThurkill]

I remember reading a piece on the back of the Brandsma Review a few years ago that Orwell was frightened by the Occult due to activity with a voodoo doll in school and that this is a reason why he wrote as George Orwell and not Eric Arthur Blair. Interesting that someone can disbelieve the supernatural and still fear the preternatural.

Superstition plays a role, though, both as a factor for and against belief.

[maolsheachlann]

I have heard unbelievers frankly admit that the fear of the supernatural plays a role in their unbelief.

This seems so alien to me.

[hibernicus]

It is quite possible for people to believe in a preternatural/supernatural/transcendent world without believing it possesses an inherent moral order. (For example, I knew Alan Turing was an atheist but only recently I came across a profile of him which stated that he believed in an afterlife. This is not unique - the TCD philosopher Alan Berman wrote a history of atheism which mentions that it was a fairly common position in the early modern period, and the early twentieth-century British Hegelian philosopher McTaggart also held this view. It is only startling because of the assumption that atheism and materialism are coterminous):

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/J._M._E._McTaggart

Part of Orwell/Blair's unbelief reflected a reaction against his public-school, which was conventionally Anglican like most such establishments at the time - anyone who has read both 1984 and his essay about the school "Such, Such Were The Joys" will realise that the world of Oceania with its dirt, food shortages, anti-sex propaganda, and constant invocation of Big Brother who sees everything and will punish "thoughtcrime" severely owes a great deal to the public-school ethos as it then was, with the idea that boys should be hardened up and not have it soft.
The sense that history was moving in a particular direction derives from nineteenth-century liberal belief in progress, which was underpinned by belief in a Protestant providence which particularly favoured the British. (This glossed over some things to which Orwell was exposed in later life, including how they actually ran their colonial empires and the sheer extent of urban poverty.) Orwell keeps the sense that history is moving in a certain direction, but what he loses is the sense that this process has any concern for human well-being. He was I think really an anarchist, and I would say one of the more sympathetic exponents of the view that the nature of the world is such that if there is a personal Creator He is not the sort of being one should worship.

I don't think the items on your list are necessarily irrational; there is not an absolute distinction between emotion and intellect. The Kantian argument from the existence of a moral sense is not irrational at all; it can be analysed and criticised like any other argument.
Perhaps what you are getting at is more the gap between intellect and conviction. Why, for example, did Newman suddenly see the parallel between Anglicanism and the schismatics of the Early Church with such force ("I looked at myself in the mirror and I was a Monophysite") while his friends like Pusey, who were equally aware of the data and could understand perfectly well the view which he was expressing, did not feel his force at all? Or the difference between Newman's conviction "that the Church of Rome is the true Church, and we are not in the true Church because not in communion with Rome" and his long period of hesitation before acting on that conviction, in case he might be delusional?

[maolsheachlann]

I didn't mean to suggest they were all irrational (as opposed to non-rational) or invalid-- not at all. For instance, a mystical experience seems to me to be a perfectly valid reason to embrace Catholicism. However, it's not really something you can present in argument with other people or propose as a reason to believe in Catholicism.

[rogerbuck]

I see that the list above isn't "irrational". The first catch-all word I thought of is "arational" in the sense of not being opposed to reason. Looking it up in my dictionary I see it simply put as: "not based on or governed by logical reasoning." I say "catch-all" because I am not sure all these on the list are best described as emotional either.

Hibernicus speaks of the gap between intellect and conviction, which it seems to me includes things that are higher than emotion such as conscience.

To my mind, much of the list ranges from what I would call, lower unpleasant forms of emotion (e.g. Islamphobia and tribalism) to much noble forms such as the aesthetic. At what I call the higher end of the spectrum, emotion begins to merge with realms that, to my mind, transcend emotion.

Authentic mystical experience is certainly one example of that, but I would say conscience is too (which has been partially included here under "a sense of duty towards our ancestors").

So "arational" covers a spectrum from base emotion to noble emotion to that which has it roots, at least, in something higher than emotion, pure and simple.

As a convert - from New Age Neopaganism to Anglican Christianity to Catholic Christianity - the list encourages me to look at the arational factors of my faith. I see everything in myself from the base tribalist stuff to I hope nobler sorts of emotion to what I cannot help but feel was a mystical experience in 1997 which led me out of the New Age.


However, there is an ongoing set of arational experiences here that I would hesitate to call mystical, but don't easily fit the emotional categories listed above either.

I speak of the day to day experience of the Sacraments. I go daily to Mass in significant part because my whole life with daily Mass feels different, better than without it. (As I've discovered sometimes when I've missed Mass for a few days due to illness, or once years ago weeks in a remote location in Spain where I couldn't even receive the Sacrament on Sundays - awful).

JRR Tolkien apparently once said:

‘The only cure for sagging or fainting faith is Communion…. Like the act of Faith, it must be continuous and grow by exercise. Frequency is of the highest effect. Seven times a week is more nourishing than seven times at intervals.’

I have more about this at my website here if anyone is interested. But I guess in brief, I think there is an experience of the Sacraments that becomes more obvious, the more regularly one participates and I know not what to call that experience. Neither mystical nor simply emotional seem correct to me.


P.S. I put a lot of white space into the above, because with longer posts I find it so much easier to read from a computer screen. There are very, very good posts in this forum in very long paragraphs that I have to print out in order to read properly. I may be a small minority, but if shorter paragraphs are better for even ten per cent of the people, I would encourage shorter paragraphs

[maolsheachlann]

I am also in favour of more white space in posts!

I did say "non-rational" in my original post, which is different from irrational. I would take "non-rational" as having no pejorative connotations, although I might be wrong in this.

I agree about the sacraments. I have read a lot of conversion stories and so often attendance at Catholic Mass, or at Communion, or just being in front of the Blessed Sacrament, is a motive for peoples' conversion.

[pugio]

The gap between the intellect and conviction is interesting.

There was a time when, as a teenager, I had total conviction in God, strong awareness of His presence and a desire to pray and be close to Him. Yet I was uncatechised, had little knowledge of religious teaching and could only really have been described as a Theist, such was my vague understanding of Christianity. I probably would have regarded apologetics or proofs for God's existence with some bemusement: surely everyone knows deep down that God is real? The heavens declare his glory, the skies proclaim the work of his hands.

Compare this to some years later. I read a lot, knew all the different arguments back and forth, recognised that God's existence made sense, and that the claims of Christian orthodoxy were plausible and coherent. But do you think I would ever dream of getting on my knees and addressing this ultimate Reality in prayer? Fat chance! Just pride or stupidity on my part? Perhaps.

But it is clear that something beyond logical evidence is necessary. Terry Eagleton, a Marxist literary critic, writes about this nicely in his book on the God debates: 'somewhere along the line, a peculiar way of engaging with the evidence emerges which embraces reason but also transcends it'

The question is what triggers this? We know that faith is a divine gift and the movement from intellectual persuasion to faith requires some sort of actual grace from God. But I suppose we're concerned here with the shapes these graces take in our lives. There were several things in my case, but among the most important was exposure to Christ's real presence through repeated attendance - not communion - at weekday Mass out of a strange curiosity.

The role of the Sacraments in sustaining belief is fascinating. I think the faith-works combination in Catholicism expresses itself in the importance of praxis in Catholic spirituality. Notice that nobody ever says: 'I'm a practising Protestant.' Catholicism is not something which can be merely believed but must be acted out. Not simply because it is logical to 'act on' faith with works but also because our faith is nourished by our reception of the sacraments. To quote Eagleton again: 'faith is as much performative as it is propositional'. Or as St James would say, without works it is dead.

[pugio]

While recognising the limitations of human persuasion, I do think that addressing the appalling state of Irish catechesis should be priority at the moment. (And I imagine that most here agree.) However, as we're talking about the role of subjective experience in conversion, it might also be worth asking how 'non-rational' means might be used in evangelisation.

Maybe a practical lesson to be learnt from this is that Catholics should be less reticent in the use of imagery and in the public celebration of the faith generally. I'm thinking in particular of the way that processions, especially the Corpus Christi procession, are generally confined nowadays to church grounds if they take place at all. We should really take a cue from Southern Europe there. There ought to be fireworks on Divine Mercy Sunday!

[rogerbuck]

I enjoyed Pugio's last contributions here very much. Yes, the profound question as to how grace "triggers" faith is a lifetime's meditation.

But a phenomenological approach to "the shapes these graces take in our lives" may not require a lifetime.

I certainly agree that imagery, public celebration and catechesis are vital. But I am reminded of the chicken and the egg. Why is catechesis so awful? Why is the imagery in so much Catholic literature so utterly bland and anodyne? Why is there no longer zeal for public processions?

The more I ponder this, the more I come back to the liturgy. Ratzinger once wrote:


"When the liturgy is something each one makes by himself, then it no longer gives us what is its true quality: encounter with the mystery which is not our product but our origin and the wellspring of our life ... I am convinced that the ecclesial crisis in which we find ourselves today depends in great part upon the collapse of the liturgy. [Italics mine]

This risks being a platitude in traditionalist circles, but I find it only becomes ever more real for me with every passing year - or even month.

Something that is powerful for me here is my experience in recent years of the Institute of Christ the King when I lived both in Liverpool and Madrid. This Institute certainly pays a deep attention to beautiful imagery, public celebration and catechesis ... and the wellspring of that I think is the liturgy.

Coming back to Pugio:

Sept 6, 2013 20:52:55 GMT pugio said:

However, as we're talking about the role of subjective experience in conversion, it might also be worth asking how 'non-rational' means might be used in evangelisation.

I think the Institute has a very profound understanding of this indeed. I am getting a bit tongue-tied. But I think the points here are:


1) Following Ratzinger, the collapse of the liturgy may be far, far more central than even most traditionalists appreciate.

2) The restoration of the liturgy may therefore take priority even over catechesis.

3) My day to day experience of the Institute of Christ the King in Madrid and Liverpool has personally demonstrated this to me.