Bottom Line: The intellect cannot be divorced from feelings or emotion. The highest intellectual activity will be motivated by the highest emotions to see God, but cannot find God without His revealing Himself. Religion without revelation cannot see God. Knowing is sterile unless God gives it meaning and passion. 
Commentary:
Dead, but sane?
Passionate, but crazy?
These often seem like the two options in life. Think clearly and live like a machine or be poetic and lose the ordered intellect.
Christians refuse either and her greatest poets (like Dante) have demanded a passion that ends in a vision of God that is fantastic and geometric.
The Christian poets and philosophers have always declared the two are united in heaven without confusion. It was after all the supremely precise philosopher Thomas who also could write great poetry saying:
SING, my tongue, the Savior’s glory,
of His flesh the mystery sing;
of the Blood, all price exceeding,
shed by our immortal King,
destined, for the world’s redemption,
from a noble womb to spring.
Great Christians such as Thomas, Dante, Luther, and C.S. Lewis may have disagreed on how the mystery was to be precisely understood, but they agreed that when it was correctly understood it would be precisely true and passionately beautiful. In fact, they could disagree in theology, philosophy, and hymnody precisely because they agreed that Christianity was a revelation of God to man that empowered a passionate intellect!
This is a terrific power to unleash in mankind and the disunity that sometimes occurs amongst the divines is less shocking than there startling unity on so much.
What humanity needs is a ‘feeling intellect’ and the proper place for that feeling intellect to be directed. This property of the soul is a way to motivate the mind and order the passions of individual persons.
Stimulating this function of the soul was an object of the great romantic poets of the nineteenth and early twentieth century, but it was not enough in itself.
C.S. Lewis writes of the ‘feeling intellect’ in his commentary on Charles Williams great poem Taliessin Through Logres:
The expression ‘feeling intellect’ is borrowed from Wordsworth’s Prelude (XIV.226) and the whole passage in which it occurs is a comment on the later poet’s meaning. Wordsworth has just emerged into clear moonlight on the top of Snowdon and there looked down on the sea of mist out of which ‘mounted the roar of water’. This scene has become to him a symbol of the human mind in what Wordsworth believed to be its highest condition; and the various names he uses to indicate that condition (imagination, power, spiritual love) are all, on William’s view summed up in 1.226 as ‘the height of feeling intellect’. The important difference between the two poets is that where Wordsworth is thinking of a subjective state in human minds, Williams is thinking of an objective celestial fact. The Feeling Intellect may be attained for moments by human beings; but it exists as a permanent reality in the spiritual world . . .
(Arthurian Torso, page 101)
Reason is not just a “logic machine” that can control the lower passions. What motivates the desire for logic? What motivates the passion for geometric precision or scientific understanding?
This is the feeling intellect about which William’s writes so effectively. For Williams this property is not confined to individual men, but is also a greater cosmic reality. This recognition begins, however, with the activation of a logical passion or a passionate precision in the feeling intellect.
This smaller individual “feeling intellect” is a great good, perhaps the highest men without Revelation can know. Plato demonstrates this in Republic IX 588c and following. Here he has Socrates and a friend create an image of the soul that is inside each man:
“What sort of an image?” he said.
“One of those natures that the ancient fables tell of,” said I, “as that of the Chimera or Scylla or Cerberus, and the numerous other examples that are told of many forms grown together in one.”
“Yes, they do tell of them.”
“Mold, then, a single shape of a manifold and many-headed beast4 that has a ring of heads of tame and wild beasts and can change them and cause to spring forth from itself all such growths.”
“It is the task of a cunning artist, ” he said, “but nevertheless, since speech is more plastic than wax and other such media, assume that it has been so fashioned.”
“Then fashion one other form of a lion and one of a man and let the first be far the largest and the second second in size.”
“That is easier,” he said, “and is done.”
“Join the three in one, then, so as in some sort to grow together.”
“They are so united,” he said. “Then mold about them outside the likeness of one, that of the man, so that to anyone who is unable to look within but who can see only the external sheath it appears to be one living creature, the man.”
Plato has suggested three parts to the human soul: a multi-form beast (erotic passions), a lion (higher passions), and a ’small man.’ It is the man, who contains the intellect, that should govern the rest, but this is difficult. Fortunately, he has one advantage: as a mini-me (!) he contains all the parts of my soul and so knows the way these parts should be ordered.
This model-man placed by Plato inside the head is rightly ordered with passions and emotions that are directed by reason. In a well ordered soul, the ‘model man’ in the head can govern the greater man in the body because it understands each part of the nature of the whole. It is a paradigm for the greater man.
The intellect in this picture is not just ‘reason,’ but an intellect with passion (a small amount!) at its immediate disposal.
What does the whole man do? He seeks, as is suggested in Timaeus , for “right ordering” (justice) in the cosmos. Man, if rightly ordered, looks for the Feeling Intellect in the whole. He knows and loves it having seen an image of it in himself, but there the problem arises.
He knows that his love is of something, but he does not know what that something is or exactly where to find it. (Symposium 200) Man can continuously look for that something, but the cosmos is vast and (in the end) it is hard to be hopeful that he will find that which he seeks.
Unlike Plato, the Christian has the advantage of the God who is our proper End having revealed himself to mankind. As Williams writes the quest for the cosmic Feeling Intellect without the Revelation of God in Christ Jesus is as likely to end in demon worship as anything even remotely good.
In commenting on Williams, Lewis adds (Arthurian Torso, pp. 118-119) that acknowledging the mere reality of the Feeling Intellect is not enough to save mankind. The vision of the Feeling Intellect can be turned to evil as well as good: ending in an Infernal Vision as well as the Beautific.
It can worship the sign instead of the One to whom the sign points. This is the arrogant student (Lord have mercy!) who worships the creature rather than the Creator, the poem rather than the Poet, and the art rather that the Artist.
This arrogance is heard whenever mankind cries out for culture for culture’s sake. Even great men, great Christians, can fall into this wicked idolatry.
The great poet Dante, even with the advantages of Christian revelation, confused his passionate poetry to Beatrice with the god to whom all poetry and passion ultimately point. Her icon in the poet’s mind becomes an idol and destroys rather than heals.
This is a reminder to the Christian of Saint Paul’s injunction not to seek worldly wisdom. It cannot save no matter how beautiful.
Great poetry and great music do reach the feeling intellect. They are able to inspire it and then the high passions motivate the intellect to see the Good, True, and Beautiful. This seems good, but it is worldly wisdom that can only destroy and not bring true salvation.
In that quest, man cannot succeed, but God has mercy on fallen man and reaches down to Him. God who is known to be unknown reveals Himself.
At that point the temptation for men who reject this revelation is to turn to the worship of pure “soul” or intellectual activity. The poet can love his poetry, the artist his art, and the musician his music. This seems better, but it will equally fail. Now the man is loving that stirs and frames love and not the object of that love.
Culture is not the answer. It too is a false god if it is sought for its own sake. It can stir the small feeling intellect in a man to reach out to the Divine, but it cannot find a sure resting place.
It is easy to go the wrong way if man simply looks for the known Unknown in his own wisdom. Even great poetry, art, or music at best only wakes us up from our sleep and shows us that we are lost. Only God can guide us back to Himself from this dark place.
Christianity is a revelation from God to man. It is the Way God provides from the dark wood for man’s small feeling intellect to find the great objective fact of the cosmic Mind. In the person of Jesus Christ, God then reveals Himself to man in a way man can love, the Feeling Intellect empowering man’s feeling intellect to find its proper end.