Patron Saint

This is a new blog, but it has an old name. Fourteen years ago, I named my first blog "Heart Speaks to Heart" after John Henry Newman's Latin motto: Cor ad Cor Loquitur. I'd read Newman in college and felt a strong sense of spiritual kinship with him, particularly when I read his Grammar of Assent. I saw a mind circling around and around an understanding that was almost beyond words, a vision of truth, reason, God and humanity that bordered on the mystical.

I won't claim mystical vision for myself, but I find myself often enough circling around my own intuitions searching for the right words to frame my thoughts and communicate with--bring into unity--people of different starting points and different contexts. 

Ultimately, all of our words are stand-ins for the thing we cannot ever fully share or know with perfect confidence--the worlds that exist within each person, the world as it appears around and to each individual soul. 

We cannot argue ourselves or anyone else into faith--and more of what we know rests on faith than we "rational" types admit even to ourselves. If appeals to sentiment are weak and mawkish, appeals to strict deductive or inductive reason can seem untethered and unreal, nothing but intellectual castles in the sky. 

We are rational animals, Newman agrees, but most of the time, we don't actually reason using formal logic. We reasom from the sum of all of our experiences, intuiting connections and building expectations and beliefs. We build great edifices around reasonable trust, from the time we are very young, and we raze and rebuild over and over as our foundations of trust shift. 

And trust can be reasonable or unreasonable, but it is ultimately in the domain of the heart.

From the Grammar of Assent:

"The heart is commonly reached, not through the reason, but through the imagination, by means of direct impressions, by the testimony of facts and events, 
by history, by description. Persons influence us, voices melt us, looks subdue us, deeds inflame us. Many a man will live and die upon a dogma: no man will be a martyr for a conclusion."

So. Fourteen years later, I return to an old name for a new blog. Fourteen years more experienced and (I hope) wiser than when I began, I am again writing under the motto of my intellectual and spiritual patron, who spilled so much ink trying to explain what his heart knew.

Saint John Henry Newman, pray for us.