Thinking From the Chest

“The Scriptures speak of God as the One who tries the ‘heart and reins’ of men. Our metaphor for this would be God testing the ‘head and heart,’ the reason and emotions. But in the ancient Hebrew metaphor, the heart was the seat of the intellect, and the reins — the kidneys — were the seat of the affections. So while Scripture does distinguish reason and emotion, it does not separate them the way we tend to do. They are both located in what C.S. Lewis, in his great book on education entitled The Abolition of Man, called ‘the chest.’ Our thoughts do not float on the surface of our lives, like leaves on a pond” (The Case for Classical Christian Education, p. 96).