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In the aftermath of Pope Francis’ lovely encyclical, Dilexit Nos (He loved us), there is an inspiration to pursue in some depth a psychology in the true sense, i.e. a study of the psyche (ψυχή), the Greek word for soul. Dilexit Nos deals with the Sacred Heart of Jesus, and so prompts questions about the status of the heart in the psyche. How does the heart relate to the array of faculties exercised by the human soul, i.e. the intellect, perception, the appetites for what is good, the autonomic drives to survive? And how does the heart figure in the thought of the great doctors of the Church, and how did they derive it from their pagan antecedents in the philosophical cultures of ancient Greece and Rome?
We first ought to assess the meaning of the word “heart” in popular parlance. We can start to develop a basic folk psychology, i.e. a common understanding of the soul that allows us to interact with other people in daily life, based on these popular expressions.
He has a lot of heart. Perhaps we might say this of an athlete, or a great political leader. Someone who has a lot of heart does not have merely intellectual convictions. They invest in what is right, with a tenacity and without holding anything back. Someone with a lot of heart is without reservation, giving everything and without any kind of insincerity. We love the Sacred Heart of Jesus because He is holding nothing back in His love for us. He does not harbor some secret annoyance with us, the way we sometimes do when we are with friends or family. Jesus is not checking His phone while only giving us half of His attention.
His heart was not in it. Someone may recognize the value of a cause intellectually, but if their heart is not in it, they lack some necessary enthusiasm. Someone whose heart is not in something is insincere, and is harboring secret rebellious thoughts. Phony politicians like Kamala Harris do not really show us their hearts, and we can detect that their core interests do not align with what they are saying. A priest whose heart is not in his ministry is going through the motions each day. Deep inside, this faithless priest does not really believe in his mission and divine call.
We would be wrong, I think, based on this survey of common semantics and folk psychology, to identify the heart exclusively with emotions. Someone can lack heart, when their mind rejects the endeavor. If we intellectually reject an endeavor as illogical, our heart will not be in it, even if we emotionally identify with it. We might be emotionally involved with a romantic partner, but intellectually we know they are not a good fit for us long term.
So, the heart, based solely on popular parlance, seems to be a kind of unifying faculty of the soul, which brings together both passions and the intellect. The heart, then, may not be its own separate psychological faculty, but a kind of umbrella term for multiple faculties. The idea of the heart reminds us that our various psychological faculties are not meant to be independent from one another. Integrity, from the Latin, integritas, is a virtue that seeks to cultivate a harmony between the different psychological powers. If our emotions are not aligning with our intellect, we have a problem in which we are emotionally cold to what we know to be true. This is a serious vice in which we have more passion, for example, for sports or celebrity gossip than what we know to be important intellectually, like our own salvation and the search for God. When our faculty of speech does not align with our intellect and/or our hearts, we are engaging in a serious vice of duplicity. For instance, we might say we believe in Jesus with our lips, but at the same time we are emotionally cold, our wills are not enthusiastic, and our intellects are even rejecting what we are saying. This is a profound state of hypocrisy. We try to achieve integritas when we make the sign of the cross on ourselves three times before the proclamation of the gospel: once on the forehead, to sanctify the mind, once on the lips, to sanctify our speech, and once on our chest, to sanctify our passions.
Pope Francis captures this unifying function of the heart when he notes that, from Greek philosophers like Plato, we get the idea that the heart unites the rational and instinctive aspects of the person.[1] The idea of the heart presupposes the rejection of the idea that reason and the passions/instincts are in separate compartments. The intellect is not just this cold faculty of calculation and deductive logic that tries to rein in the passions, which we might conceive, in a corollary error, as this subterranean irrational force foreign to the intellect. Instead, both intellect and passions work together, forming a powerful synthesis of a person that is fully invested in something. We see this sort of powerful synthesis in the highest heroism of the Catholic martyrs. Neither intellectual doubt, nor emotional coldness, compromised the full investment of the martyrs.
People can be scared of integrating their passions, because they have passions perverted by original sin, and so they view their spiritual objective as suppressing their passions with their intellect, instead of uniting the passions with the intellect. Or, people think they have done enough simply by external conformity to Church rules. They do not want to probe into their hearts, to see if there is a full unity of their person, intellect and passion, in the cause of Christ. These people show up for Mass, but in their lives outside of church, they have all sorts of un-Christian passions and worldly desires.
We can survey the idea of the heart through the great Catholic intellectual tradition, going back to pagan thinkers like Aristotle. Aristotle recognizes part of the soul that has reason. But the rational, intellectual faculty is not isolated from the passions. Instead, Aristotle says that there are two parts to reason: one that reasons and thinks, and another part of reason that obeys reason. The passions, though they do not directly engage in thinking, are not irrational. They are rational, insofar as they can obey reason, the way a child shows rationality by obeying his father.[2] Aristotle captures the idea of the heart, which is unity of the intellect and the passions, both of which partake of the rational faculty.
We see the terrible error of the isolation of the intellect from the passions, and so the denial of the unifying notion of the heart, in the philosophy of Stoicism, practiced by many Roman leaders, like Marcus Aurelius. The Stoics believed in a rational force ruling the universe, and that our goal is to become a sage, that is committed only to this rational force, in spite of the sacrifices this rational force might require of us. The passions we have that grasp at things in life are like illusions that try to distract us from this perfect rational force. In his great book, Meditations, Aurelius praises a benefactor by the name of Apollonius, for not showing any passion: “From Apollonius, true liberty, and invariable steadfastness, and not to regard anything at all, though never so little, but right and reason: and always, whether in the sharpest pains, or after the loss of a child, or in long diseases, to be still the same man.”[3] The Stoic is unflappable, showing no emotion through the sheer force of his intellect. The intellect is not working with the passions, but silencing them. Our Lord was not a Stoic. He wept at the death of Lazarus.[4] In the garden of Gethsemane, He begged His Father to relieve Him of the coming crucifixion.[5]
We now consider—very briefly, of course—the heart as it figures in the great doctors of the Church, Aquinas and Augustine. We might see these figures as opposites, with Aquinas being coldly logical and Augustine as being passionate to a fault at least prior to his conversion, and still retaining strong elements of poetry and autobiography in his writing, in which he poured out his heart. In reading the Summa Theologiae, on the other hand, we have no idea who Aquinas is. It is almost like a disembodied intellect, working through questions with relentless rigor. Aquinas was a saint, and we can be sure he had a warm love of God in addition to his brilliant mind. But, it is possible that a very cold person could have written the Summa. Someone can understand God with analytical rigor, but still be very distant from God in his heart.
Aquinas considers the question of whether the passions pertain to the appetitive, or the apprehensive, parts of the soul.[6] The appetitive parts of the soul seek what they perceive as good, and the apprehensive parts of the souls seek the truth. The unifying concept of the heart suggests that, though the passions belong primarily to the appetitive, they participate in the apprehensive. When we perceive with our intellect something as true, our passions need to align with this apprehension, so we also feel and desire according to what is true.
But Aquinas establishes a rigid separation between the appetitive and the apprehensive powers of the soul. For Aquinas, our appetites are drawn to external objects, while our apprehensive faculty is drawn to ideas of objects. What is true, the object of the apprehensive power, pertains to an idea in the mind, while what is good pertains to an object external to the self, which the appetites and passions crave.
But, with all due respect to the Angelic Doctor, perhaps we need to rethink this division between intellect and the passions. In our daily interactions, the perception of truth, which pertains to an idea in the mind, connects with—or ought to connect with—our passionate appetites for what is good. For instance, when we perceive a person with our intellect as a truthful person, we tend to gravitate to him with our appetites. Aquinas sounds too much like a Stoic, in treating passions and intellect as though they belonged to two parallel domains. The mind in this conception seems a cold knower and calculator, while the passions seek what they perceive as good, in a way that is indifferent to truth.
Chesterton, in his biography of St. Francis, warned that heresy always sets the mood against the mind.[7] The mood becomes an overzealousness that exceeds rational bounds and becomes a monomania. The heart cannot just be emotions, without the mind, because the abandonment of the intellect leads to an unmoored intensity.
When St. Augustine tells us that our hearts will be restless until they rest in God[8], he is talking about the full peace of holiness, in which both our intellect and our passions align with God. We not only recognize the truth of God, but we also have a passion for His will.
The spiritually mature person is not inwardly divided, with mind and passions oriented in different directions. Augustine says specifically that the heart has to rest in God, because if only the mind rests in God, passions might still be at war with God. If only the passions rest in God, one’s mind lacks a clear grasp of the nature of God and of orthodoxy.
[1] Dilexit Nos, Sect. 3.
[2] Nicomachean Ethics, I.&.1098a.5.
[3] Marcus Aurelius, The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius Antoninus, trans. by Meric Causabon, Book I, Section V, pg. 13.
[4] Jn 11:35.
[5] Mt 26:36-46.
[6] ST I.II.Q22.A2.
[7] G.K. Chesterton, Saint Francis of Assisi, (San Fransisco: Ignatius Press, 2002): 316.
[8] Augustine, Confessions, Book I, Chapter 1.
