Returning to our hearts
Pope Francis thinks our age is forgetting about the heart. And he has written a major new document, Dilexit Nos, to remind us of its importance. We offer a few extracts.
Pope Francis writes: The heart is the locus of sincerity, where deceit and disguise have no place. It usually indicates our true intentions, what we really think, believe and desire, the ‘secrets’ that we tell no one: in a word, the naked truth about ourselves. It is the part of us that is neither appearance or illusion, but is instead authentic, real, entirely ‘who we are’. (…)
This interior reality of each person is frequently concealed behind a great deal of ‘foliage’, which makes it difficult for us not only to understand ourselves, but even more to know others: ‘The heart is devious above all else; it is perverse, who can understand it?’ (Jer 17:9). We can understand, then, the advice of the Book of Proverbs: ‘Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life; put away from you crooked speech’ (4:23-24).
Mere appearances, dishonesty and deception harm and pervert the heart.
Despite our every attempt to appear as something we are not, our heart is the ultimate judge, not of what we show or hide from others, but of who we truly are.
It is the basis for any sound life project; nothing worthwhile can be undertaken apart from the heart. False appearances and untruths ultimately leave us empty-handed.
As an illustration of this, I would repeat a story I have already told on another occasion. “For the carnival, when we were children, my grandmother would make a pastry using a very thin batter. When she dropped the strips of batter into the oil, they would expand, but then, when we bit into them, they were empty inside. In the dialect we spoke, those cookies were called ‘lies’… My grandmother explained why: ‘Like lies, they look big, but are empty inside; they are false, unreal.’”
Instead of running after superficial satisfactions and playing a role for the benefit of others, we would do better to think about the really important questions in life. Who am I, really? What am I looking for? What direction do I want to give to my life, my decisions and my actions? Why and for what purpose am I in this world? How do I want to look back on my life once it ends? What meaning do I want to give to all my experiences? Who do I want to be for others? Who am I for God? All these questions lead us back to the heart.
In this ‘liquid’ world of ours, we need to start speaking once more about the heart and thinking about this place where every person, of every class and condition, creates a synthesis, where they encounter the radical source of their strengths, convictions, passions and decisions.
Yet, we find ourselves immersed in societies of serial consumers who live from day to day, dominated by the hectic pace and bombarded by technology, lacking in the patience needed to engage in the processes that an interior life by its very nature requires.
In contemporary society, people ‘risk losing their centre, the centre of their very selves’. [6] “Indeed, the men and women of our time often find themselves confused and torn apart, almost bereft of an inner principle that can create unity and harmony in their lives and actions. Models of behaviour that, sadly, are now widespread exaggerate our rational-technological dimension or, on the contrary, that of our instincts”. [7] No room is left for the heart.
The issues raised by today’s liquid society are much discussed, but this depreciation of the deep core of our humanity – the heart – has a much longer history. We find it already present in Hellenic and pre-Christian rationalism, in post-Christian idealism and in materialism in its various guises.
The heart has been ignored in anthropology, and the great philosophical tradition finds it a foreign notion, preferring other concepts such as reason, will or freedom.
The very meaning of the term is imprecise and hard to situate within our human experience. Perhaps this is due to the difficulty of treating it as a ‘clear and distinct idea’, or because it entails the question of self-understanding, where the deepest part of us is also that which is least known.
Even encountering others does not necessarily prove to be a way of encountering ourselves, inasmuch as our thought patterns are dominated by an unhealthy individualism.
Many people feel safer constructing their systems of thought in the more readily controllable domain of intelligence and will.
The failure to make room for the heart, as distinct from our human powers and passions viewed in isolation from one another, has resulted in a stunting of the idea of a personal centre, in which love, in the end, is the one reality that can unify all the others.
If we devalue the heart, we also devalue what it means to speak from the heart, to act with the heart, to cultivate and heal the heart. If we fail to appreciate the specificity of the heart, we miss the messages that the mind alone cannot communicate; we miss out on the richness of our encounters with others; we miss out on poetry. We also lose track of history and our own past, since our real personal history is built with the heart. At the end of our lives, that alone will matter.
It must be said, then, that we have a heart, a heart that coexists with other hearts that help to make it a ‘Thou’. Since we cannot develop this theme at length, we will take a character from one of Dostoevsky’s novels, Nikolai Stavrogin. [8]
Romano Guardini argues that Stavrogin is the very embodiment of evil, because his chief trait is his heartlessness: “Stavrogin has no heart, hence his mind is cold and empty and his body sunken in bestial sloth and sensuality. He has no heart, hence he can draw close to no one and no one can ever truly draw close to him. For only the heart creates intimacy, true closeness between two persons. Only the heart is able to welcome and offer hospitality. Intimacy is the proper activity and the domain of the heart.
“Stavrogin is always infinitely distant, even from himself, because a man can enter into himself only with the heart, not with the mind. It is not in a man’s power to enter into his own interiority with the mind. Hence, if the heart is not alive, man remains a stranger to himself”. [9]
All our actions need to be put under the ‘political rule’ of the heart. In this way, our aggressiveness and obsessive desires will find rest in the greater good that the heart proposes and in the power of the heart to resist evil. The mind and the will are put at the service of the greater good by sensing and savouring truths, rather than seeking to master them as the sciences tend to do. The will desires the greater good that the heart recognizes, while the imagination and emotions are themselves guided by the beating of the heart.
It could be said, then, that I am my heart, for my heart is what sets me apart, shapes my spiritual identity and puts me in communion with other people. The algorithms operating in the digital world show that our thoughts and will are much more ‘uniform’ than we had previously thought. They are easily predictable and thus capable of being manipulated. That is not the case with the heart.
The word ‘heart’ proves its value for philosophy and theology in their efforts to reach an integral synthesis. Nor can its meaning be exhausted by biology, psychology, anthropology or any other science. It is one of those primordial words that “describe realities belonging to man precisely in so far as he is one whole (as a corporeo-spiritual person)”. [10]
It follows that biologists are not being more ‘realistic’ when they discuss the heart, since they see only one aspect of it; the whole is not less real, but even more real. Nor can abstract language ever acquire the same concrete and integrative meaning. The word ‘heart’ evokes the inmost core of our person, and thus it enables us to understand ourselves in our integrity and not merely under one isolated aspect.
This unique power of the heart also helps us to understand why, when we grasp a reality with our heart, we know it better and more fully.
This inevitably leads us to the love of which the heart is capable, for ‘the inmost core of reality is love’. [11] For Heidegger, as interpreted by one contemporary thinker, philosophy does not begin with a simple concept or certainty, but with a shock:
“Thought must be provoked before it begins to work with concepts or while it works with them. Without deep emotion, thought cannot begin. The first mental image would thus be goose bumps. What first stirs one to think and question is deep emotion. Philosophy always takes place in a basic mood (Stimmung)”. [12]
That is where the heart comes in, since it “houses the states of mind and functions as a ‘keeper of the state of mind’. The ‘heart’ listens in a non-metaphoric way to ‘the silent voice’ of being, allowing itself to be tempered and determined by it”. [13]
These extracts are from nn. 5-16 of the document. We have kept the text’s footnotes as hyperlinks, giving the notes’ numbers as given in the document. Hence, we start with note 6. When quotations are from Pope Francis himself, we have removed the note. For the full document, click here.
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