OUR SPONSORS

Please support our sponsors

CATHOLIC QUOTES

 Encyclopedia RSS

 Catholic Encyclopedia

SPECIAL OFFERS

S  i  d  e  b  a  r

Noble and Ignoble Feelings

This Rock Volume 18, Number 4   April 2007     Reasons for Hope By Cherie Peacock   Letters   The Great Divorce: The Evil Fruits of Henry VIII’s Divorce By Christopher Check   Quick Lesson in Canon Law   Further Reading   Lady Anne Boleyn   Repugnant to the Laws of God   "Enslaved by Your Passion for a Girl"   A Philosopher with Heart By Dietrich von Hildebrand   Dietrich von Hildebrand, 1889-1977   The Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project   Should We be Indifferent to Everything but God? By Alice von Hildebrand   Noble and Ignoble Feelings   The Holy Madness of Love   Seven Principles of Cathoilc Social Teaching By Christopher Kaczor   Rich in Poverty   For Further Reading   What You Do for Them You Do for Him   Damascus Road The Other Side of the Mirror By Scott McDermott   By the Book Not by Scripture Alone By Jim Blackburn   Truth be Told They Sang All the Way to the Guillotine By Matthew E. Bunson   Classic Apologetics The Supernatural Kinship of Catholics By Rev. Paul van Kuykendall Thomson   Quick Questions   Last Writes By Karl Keating    Preview (pdf; 3MB)    Subscribe    Permissions

The idea that it would be good to eliminate "affectivity"—feelings and emotions—can be traced back to Aristotle, who sees man’s superiority over animals in the fact that he has both intelligence and will. Feelings, he tells us, are something he shares with animals. A great thinker can be partially blind, and this is a case in point. Aristotle fails to make a crucial distinction between the physical feelings (pain, physical pleasure) that man shares with animals, psychological feelings, and a radically different type of feelings which are intentional—conscious responses to an object calling for such responses. Admiration, veneration, esteem, and love are responses to what is admirable, venerable, estimable, or lovable. Man’s vocation is not only to know God, but to love him, which presupposes knowledge.

There is something tragic in the fact that even though this is the very core of Christian revelation, so many "spiritual" people are blind to its crucial importance. Their distrust of feelings is such that they do not perceive any difference between non-spiritual and spiritual feelings, between legitimate and illegitimate feelings, between noble and ignoble feelings—between those that we should disavow and those we should sanction with our will.