Sentimental Thoughts

When I was young, I thought the sentimental and the good were one and the same. I had reached that conclusion through purely anecdotal means, likely influenced by sentiment, rather than through any use of reason: the hateful in high school seemed to lack all sentimental feelings. Cool kids necessarily had to make ruthless cuts with old ties - with those who were no longer perceived as cool and who might weigh their own popularity down.

The sentimental were backward-looking and loyal, since nostalgia and sentiment are closely joined. The unsentimental were forward-looking, eager to use people for their own ends, and more of the "what have you done for me lately?" stripe.

Those stereotypes are false as it turned out. It was only decades later that I learned that the kind and sentimental priest at our high school had sexually abused children. And Joseph Stalin was a sentimentalist (well, I suppose all Russians are) who "loved" his wife, at least if you define love as having strong feelings. He also cried over his grandchildren and such.

Flannery O'Connor and Walker Percy both wrote of "tenderness leading to the gas chamber". (The full quote, originating with O'Connor, is: "In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness, and tenderness leads to the gas chamber.") In the NR article mentioned in a previous post, Flannery O'Connor is seen as the ultimate anti-sentementalist:

"Already as a young child, O’Connor envisioned herself as a thorough but unsentimental kind of Christian. When told that she was being watched over by guardian angels, for example, she flailed at them in the air, determined to rout all pious notions of divine protection. She was unabashedly eccentric in the admirable and literal sense of the word — not in easy disdain for the masses, but in candid recognition that Christians are necessarily ex-centric, pivoting about another Center than the world’s hub or their own ego."

O'Connor's confidence in God's love for her must've been very deep in order to eschew the help of angels!

From the OED, sentimental is defined as:

1. Of persons, their dispositions and actions: Characterized by sentiment. Originally in favourable sense: Characterized by or exhibiting refined and elevated feeling. In later use: Addicted to indulgence in superficial emotion; apt to be swayed by sentiment.

1749 LADY BRADSHAIGH in Mrs. Barbauld Richardson's Corr. (1804) IV. 282 What, in your opinion, is the meaning of the word sentimental, so much in vogue among the polite... Every thing clever and agreeable is comprehended in that word...I am frequently astonished to hear such a one is a sentimental man; we were a sentimental party; I have been taking a sentimental walk. 1752 H. WALPOLE Let. to Mann 27 July, I am still sentimental enough to flatter myself, that a man who could beg sixteen guineas, will not give them. 1763 F. BROOKE Hist. Lady J. Mandeville (1820) 34 Your squires are an agreeable race of people, refined, sentimental, formed for the belle passion. 1823 SOUTHEY in Q. Rev. XXVIII. 517 Rousseau addressed himself to the sentimental classes, persons of ardent or morbid sensibility, who believe themselves to be composed of finer elements than the gross multitude. 1826 DISRAELI Viv. Grey V. xv, A soft sentimental whisper. 1827 SCOTT Highl. Widow v, Never satisfied with dropping a sentimental tear when there was room for the operation of effective charity. 1837 LANDOR Imag. Conv., Steele & Addison Wks. 1853 II. 152/2 Dear Addison! drunk, deliberate, moral, sentimental, foaming over with truth and virtue. 1862 M. E. BRADDON Lady Audley xviii, You have no sentimental nonsense, no silly infatuation..to fear from me. 1865 DICKENS Mut. Fr. I. iv, I am not setting up to be sentimental about George Sampson.
b. absol. (with the). Also (? nonce-use) as n., a sentimental person.

1784 Unfort. Sensibility. I. 39 Your dying sentimentals, who can..execute more mischief in a single hour, than [etc.]. 1849 G. CUPPLES Green Hand iv. (1856) 44 Come, come, old boy,..'twon't do for you to go to the sentimental, you know! 1908 R. BAGOT A. Cuthbert v. 48, I could hardly say more without approaching dangerously near to the sentimental.
c. Arising from sentiment or refined æsthetic emotion. Obs.

1760-72 H. BROOKE Fool of Qual. (1809) III. 158 Music..is but..a distant and faint echo of those sentimental and rapturous tunings. 1764 GOLDSM. Hist. Eng. in Lett. (1772) I. 41 They [i.e. the English in 7th cent.] were only incapable of sentimental pleasure.
2. Pertaining to sentiment. a. Arising from or determined by feeling rather than by reason.

"Arising from or determined by feeling rather than by reason" is interesting.

There is no reason in Stalin's alternating brutality with petty kindnesses. And surely those with the most reason seem the least sentimental nowadays; "Reason" magazine, for example, is libertarian, which is the political philosophy that would seem to have the least amount of sentiment attached. Liberals are accused, rightly I think, of being ignorant in not anticipating outcomes due to naivety and sentimental, utopian feelings.

But, on the other hand, there is no reason in God's love for us. The most unreasonable thing God ever did was to come down to earth and die for us. Many atheists think Christians are sentimental in imagining a happy, endless afterlife. We are left with this mysterious mix of God as a sentimental father who forgives the sinner 70 times 7, and the God who allows men's hearts to harden to the point of rendering the Holocaust.