Paying attention to the guidance of the heart is no guarantee of prudent action, as Mark Antony and Cleopatra demonstrate with grand style, but there is something nobler in giving the heart its whole due than in bypassing its counsel and resorting to mere calculation.
According to the 17th century mathematician and Catholic apologist Blaise Pascal, “the heart has its reasons, which reason knows not” —a point brought up yesterday by participants at the Wyoming School of Catholic Thought here at Wyoming Catholic College. In Pensées, Pascal was arguing against contemporaries of his already smitten with a modern mathematical model of rationality. Centuries later, in the acceptance speech for the Nobel Prize, William Faulkner likewise warned the world not to forget “the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed – love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice.”
I had occasion in a commencement address two weeks ago to think about this use of the word “heart.” When I was the age of the graduating seniors, I scorned the idea that emotions of any sort had their origin in the heart, because (in my enlightened view), the heart was “a hollow muscular organ that pumps the blood through the circulatory system by rhythmic contraction and dilation,” as an online dictionary puts it. The brain was obviously the supreme bodily organ. Any kind of intelligence, I was quite sure, must reside in the brain, and what is sentimentally called heart must be a deception generated by the nervous system, a feeling “referred,” as the doctors say about pains, to a locus in the chest. Seriously, does the heart actually know anything? Sections of Einstein’s brain are still on display in the Mütter Museum of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, but who cares about his heart?
Modern medicine has made us experts in dealing with the heart as an impressive and tireless pump—in fact, Lander, Wyoming, has a new state-of-the-art facility—but, as Pascal saw, it might also have led us to downplay the experience of the heart as the center of felt knowledge, especially in human dealings. Why is it that in every language and every literature, the heart has such priority? No Valentine shows a brain transfixed by Cupid’s quivering arrow. We might call someone the “brains of the organization,” but we use metaphors of the heart for anything felt to be truly central: “the heart of the matter,” not “the brain of the matter.” We can talk about people being open-hearted without picturing surgery—but open-brained? I don’t think so. And the description “open-minded” says nothing about the capacities of a brain.
Qualities of the heart have been much on our minds this week in the Wyoming School for Catholic Thought, where participants have been working through Shakespeare’s Roman plays, Coriolanus, Julius Caesar, and Antony and Cleopatra. C.S. Lewis writes in The Abolition of Man that “The heart never takes the place of the head: but it can, and should, obey it.” The head, however, has to be rightly educated and the heart rightly formed. Hearts are shaped by many influences, as Shakespeare’s Roman plays show so memorably. In Coriolanus, the great warrior Caius Marcius urges on the soldiers who fight beside him: “Now put your shields before your hearts, and fight/With hearts more proof than shields.” What is heart in these senses? In the first case, it is an organ beating in the chest; in the second, which smacks of martial Rome, it is resolve and courage tougher than the material of any shield.
After the battle, when the consul Cominius offers a tenth of all the spoils of Corioles to Marcius, newly renamed Coriolanus, the warrior says, “I thank you, general;/But cannot make my heart consent to take/A bribe to pay my sword.” Obviously, he means that he did not fight with any motive of personal gain—but why does he phrase it in a way that makes the “I” seem almost helpless in relation to the heart, which not only refuses consent but also interprets the reward for his greatness in battle as “a bribe”? The man is divided, and his reason cannot control his heart, which “like a hot proud horse highly disdains/To have his head controlled” (to use a simile of Christopher Marlowe’s).
Later in the play, Coriolanus’ formidable mother criticizes his refusal to humble himself to the common people in order to win their votes for his consulship. Although she hates the commoners as much as he does, she shows a greater willingness to control her emotions: “I have a heart as little apt as yours,/But yet a brain that leads my use of anger/To better vantage.” Coriolanus cannot be himself and “use” his heart for his own gain any more than a woman could still be chaste while she uses her body “to better vantage” with other men than her husband. “Away, my disposition, and possess me/Some harlot’s spirit!” Coriolanus cries as he imagines humbling himself to the people. He cannot do it. His proud heart scorns anything that would diminish its sense of worth, and disaster follows.
Paying attention to the guidance of the heart is therefore no guarantee of prudent action, as Mark Antony and Cleopatra also demonstrate with grand style, but there is something nobler in giving the heart its whole due than in bypassing its counsel and resorting to mere calculation. This week of thinking through Shakespeare’s Rome reminds me that a great part of our mission at Wyoming Catholic College lies precisely in forming the hearts of our students—that is, in educating their emotions for “love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice courage and honor.” How? Through what we call “poetic education.” It includes our outdoor programs (a matter for another time) and our careful thought in the Humanities sequence about character, choice, and action in such poets as Homer, Virgil, Dante, and Shakespeare. It means careful attention to the nuances of language (every great speech in Shakespeare could provide examples) that make the subtleties of feeling knowable and bring the awakened mind into harmony with the instructed heart.
Republished with gracious permission from Wyoming Catholic College‘s weekly newsletter.
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This essay recalls to me SIRACH 37:13-14. And establish the counsel of your own heart, for no one is more faithful to you than it is. For a man’s soul sometimes keeps him better informed than seven watchmen sitting high on a watchtower.
Having recently been discussing and contemplating consciousness intertwined with the intellect as well as what I describe as spiritual-driven decisions as opposed to purely rational or emotional ones, this essay is most timely.
Serious question, Dr. Arbery… Where should we place ‘gut instincts’ and ”My gut tells me…” in relation to matters of the heart?
Great addition, Meg Brinley! Thank you.
Thanks a lot to professor Arbery for his timely essay, because mind, soul, and body is person, created in the image of the living God Charity. Aristotle said that natural history strives towards immortality, and that the human soul has four main levels, dustlike, common with chemistry, vegetative, common with fungi, plants, and invertebrates, motional & emotional, common with animals, and rational, common with God. Then, Steno discovered that the heart is only a muscle, but recently, scientists know that the heart has indeed its own nervous system, and it can be said to be seat of motion & emotion, so when Sirach advises to counsel ones heart, he so to speak counters Cartesianism or gnosticism. And gut feelings are proper to vegetative soul, namely fear that is indeed an healthy instinct. Free will, of course, is centrered in our brain, and it must draw on the whole human organism, or so do I think, with rational mind, compassionate heart, and healthy fear, to cultivate friendship. In other words, the mind centrers on God, and the soul centrers on virtues, and the body immortal. Steno was profoundly wrong in his all greatest scientific moment, as common scientists all go.