Sentient intelligence and liturgy

Abstract

Many times one realizes that certain liturgical celebrations lean towards sentimentalism or rationalism. This reveals a serious problem, which is a reflex of the rupture between to feel and to intelligize, as if they were two numerically distinct faculties. The rectfication of this distortion comes with Xavier Zurbini’s ‘sencient’ intelligence, which has revolutionized current epistemology, showing that the separation between to feel and to understand constitutes a serious error, as “to understand is a way of feeling, and to feel is, in man, a way of understanding”. ‘Sencient’ intelligence has brought light into liturgy, in the measure in which the unity between feeling and understanding, in all the modalities of apprehension of reality (primordial apprehension, Logos and reason) demands wholeness not only in celebration but also in the deepening of faith.