Instinct
- Michael Haldas
- Jun 26, 2019
- 2 min read
“Human beings, by virtue of being created in the divine image, instinctively engage in mimesis, the imitation of their Creator. As sub-creators, they have all the material (physical and ideological) that the Creator Himself has placed within their reach.” (Edith M. Humphrey)
“God gave humanity the instincts of a two-fold organization, blending the divine with the earthy, that by means of both he may be naturally and properly disposed to each enjoyment, enjoying God by means of his more divine nature, and the good things of earth by the sense that is akin to them.” (St. Gregory of Nyssa)
“That there exists in the human minds and indeed by natural instinct, some sense of Deity, we hold to be beyond dispute, since God himself, to prevent any man from pretending ignorance, has endued all men with some idea of his Godhead, the memory of which he constantly renews and occasionally enlarges, that all to a man being aware that there is a God, and that he is their Maker, may be condemned by their own conscience when they neither worship him nor consecrate their lives to his service.” (John Calvin)
“Faith is the spiritual language of the instinct. To lose faith means to plunge the instinct into dumbness and powerlessness, or, on the contrary, to unbridle it completely. Therefore, a person without faith either lives in estrangement from his own instinct, not yet completely devolved to a lack of spirit and lack of form (the West), or it has already capitulated to an unbridled, Nietzschean, animal instinct (Bolshevism).” (Ivan Ilyin)
“The Freudian proposition that much of our apparently higher behavior arises from an adjustment to the primitive instincts of the id suggests that our higher behaviors, on close examination, may turn out to be more morally ambivalent than we would like to think. Correctly understood, however, this does not lead to the conclusion that we are nothing but the products of our primitive instincts, or undermines the proposition that we have a basic, core dignity as human beings.” (Rev. Dr. Emmanuel Clapsis)