Listen to your heart
On good sense and good sensibility
Are you an Elinor or a Marianne?
Does this question mean anything to you at all?
If not, I’m honored to be the person to introduce you to a work of literature that changed the world when it debuted in 1811—not because it was groundbreaking per se, but because it was the first of Jane Austen’s novels to be published.
The book is Sense and Sensibility, and Elinor and Marianne—the Miss Dashwoods—are the story’s main characters, a pair of sisters who find themselves kicked out of their childhood home after their father’s passing. Elinor, the always pragmatic older sister, exemplifies good sense: she never allows herself to be carried away by emotion, consistently drawing her sister’s focus back to the real and practical.
Marianne, by contrast, is the poster child for sensibility. Regularly swept into fits of emotion, her antics (namely, taking too many walks in the cold rain after having her heart broken) actually lead to her contracting a dangerous illness before the book’s end—among other embarrassing and painful moments.
“Me!” returned Elinor in some confusion; “indeed, Marianne, I have nothing to tell.”
“Nor I,” answered Marianne with energy, “our situations then are alike. We have neither of us anything to tell; you, because you do not communicate, and I, because I conceal nothing.”
From Sense and Sensibility, chapter 27
As usual, there’s more to the story than what appears on the surface, and by the novel’s last chapters, the cool and collected Elinor experiences a love that breaks through her hard exterior, while Marianne comes to understand the foolishness of her excesses and chooses a match based on love and good reason.
Austen’s message is clear: there’s no substitute for good sense, but there’s nothing human about ignoring sensibility and pretending to be emotionless and unaffected, either.
The heart doesn’t get a ton of respect in modern times. Mind, rationality, good sense, research—all these categories tend to trump sensibility when it comes to anything important. After all, numbers don’t lie, but emotions might; quantify the data, put the numbers in the spreadsheet, run the algorithm, use the results to make your decision.
It’s as easy as that, right?
The heart’s bad rep persists even within Christian circles, which isn’t totally unwarranted. The prophet Jeremiah tells us that the heart is “deceitful” and “disastrous.” The hearts of Pharoah and Israel are hardened; the hearts of the inhabitants of Jericho “melt” when they see the Israelite army approaching; the hearts of the apostles who encounter the resurrected Jesus on the road to Emmaus burn; God gives new hearts to individuals and groups of people; Paul speaks of a “circumcision of the heart” by the hand of the Holy Spirit.
The biblical record implies that the reality is much messier than the spreadsheets and algorithms would imply, and that’s because the biblical concept of the heart encompasses more than simple emotion. For biblical authors, “heart” actually meant both sense and sensibility; it’s not just the center of the emotional life, but the home of intellectual faculties, intentions, and desires, too.
This is the core of why biblical authors reference the heart so often, and why there seem to be so many competing claims about what the heart does and why it’s important. Contrast this with the modern conception of things, which would separate the heart and the mind or brain.
I trust that you already know how important good sense—wisdom—is for a believer. But when was the last time you considered the other side of things? What might happen if, rather than avoiding emotion in favor of rationality, you instead asked God to mold your sensibilities?
And I will give you a new heart, and a new spirit I will put within you. And I will remove the heart of stone from your flesh and give you a heart of flesh.
Ezekiel 36:26
I can’t say for certain what the outcomes will be for you, but here’s what I’m thinking:
You may understand joy and delight more deeply.
We know from Galatians 5 that joy is a fruit of the spirit. Joy is deeper than simple emotional happiness, sure, but it’s still an emotional experience—something that needs to be processed through the heart (in the modern understanding of the word) as well as the mind.
At times, the cares of the world seem too serious for a delightful spirit. That’s exactly why joy and delight are so important to cultivate. As believers, we have a hope that transcends those cares; we have a deep, enduring peace that shelters us from despair and buoys us through every hardship. Joy and delight are completely appropriate reactions to the abiding, transformative, free love of God; it’s our role and vocation to model that to a world in need of it, and we can’t model it until we’ve cultivated it.
You may think more clearly.
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis argues that the rise of moral relativism is actually detrimental to the heart. There’s a bit of irony in this argument: typically, we conflate relativism and sensibility, assuming that an “anything goes” attitude about morality will simply lead to a society of people doing what feels right emotionally with no concern for actual standards of right and wrong.
Lewis’ argument is slightly more nuanced than that: It’s not emotion, he claims, but instinct that we’re beholden to when we act this way.
“It still remains true that no justification of virtue will enable a man to be virtuous. Without the aid of trained emotions the intellect is powerless against the animal organism. I had sooner play cards against a man who was quite skeptical about ethics, but bred to believe that ‘a gentleman does not cheat’, than against an irreproachable moral philosopher who had been brought up among sharpers.
…
“The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest-Magnanimity-Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man.”
C.S. Lewis, in The Abolition of Man
The human experience wasn’t meant to be dissected. The heart will atrophy if not trained properly, and in its place the appetite (belly) and the intellect (head) will run amok.
As believers, we have a worldview that says everything can be redeemed. Fundamentally, the transformation of the Holy Spirit makes us more truly human, more fully integrated, more attuned to the character of our Creator. The journey starts once you surrender it all.
From the archives:
For more on the heart, see here:
Where is your heart?
For the last several months, my book club has been reading N.T. Wright’s The New Testament and the People of God. The first in Wright’s four-volume Christian Origins series, the book provides exceptional detail on the world that Jesus lived in, detailing what Jews in the first century believed and what that means for modern Christians.
A visual reminder:
