The document directly reminds us of the basic and universal experience of the elevated heart rate, the “butterflies,” felt by persons in love:
“Transcending all scientific explanations, a hand placed on the heart of a friend expresses special affection: when two persons fall in love and draw close to one another, their hearts beat faster; when we are abandoned or deceived by someone we love, our hearts sink.”
As such, the heart is the most noble, integrative human faculty — a sensus communis of the whole person, body, soul and spirit, as it were — following on volition and yet somehow also preceding it, a mystery of autonomous self-direction and of autonomic spontaneity together. Thus, the observation cited above, however inconsequential or even puerile it might seem, is actually a moment of high import. Aquinas took “heart” to be an identity with will, and thus an expression of strength, of might. Yet with respect to the heart, there is a dynamic altogether not reducible to will. Just as there is a mystery of iniquity, common experience counsels that there is a mystery of the preferential; there is a non-necessity in the attraction to, and election of, a particular good among other goods, that often surprises even the subject himself. Thus, for the impassible Godhead to possess the faculty of kardía — that it has, in Christ, received this faculty into itself — is groundbreaking. In the days of the Fathers, Origen noted the “sovereign subjectivity of the Logos.” It might be time to revisit this insight with a redoubled seriousness and openness.
A 2nd Century heresy known as patripassianism maintained that in Christ’s passion, it was God the Father who suffered, owing to a distinction among Father, Son and Spirit that is merely modal; for the patripassianists, the Trinity amounted to no more than a trifold expression of a fundamentally unipersonal deity. Zeal to preserve the Trinitarian personal structure of the Christian God, together with a mindset inherited from Stoic philosophy, has led perhaps to a conception of a Father who is “a-emotive” — or, far worse, consumed with vengeance. “God is love,” St. John writes, succinctly and sublimely. The ontological “space” for his heart, his heart precisely as God, needs to be discovered.
This was already foreshadowed in the work of Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger:
“In the pierced heart of the Crucified, God’s own heart is opened up; here we see who God is and what he is like. Heaven is no longer locked up. God has stepped out of his hiddenness.”
If we have seen the heart of Jesus, indeed we have seen the Father. At the same time, in the heart of Jesus we see also ourselves, and all the possibility of being human, fully revealed and made transparent.
Nonetheless, Western tradition has tended to equate divinity, divine impassibility, with something like epic apatheia. However much we esteem in-love-ness and sensitivity to the other as marks of enlightenment in human persons, we hesitate to ascribe them to divine persons.
Dilexit Nos stands against this Christianized Stoicism and indeed drives it back further — but it does not stand alone in doing so. Consider this rather shocking passage from Ratzinger, prophetic as is so much of his theology: “… there can be no Passion without passions: suffering presupposes the faculty of the emotions.” The cardinal then goes on in praise of Origen,
who grasped most profoundly the idea of the suffering God and made bold to say that it could not be restricted to the suffering humanity of Jesus but also affected the Christian picture of God. The Father suffers in allowing the Son to suffer, and the Spirit shares in this suffering, for Paul says that he groans within us, yearning in us and on our behalf for full redemption (Rom. 8:26 f.).
In like manner, Hans Urs von Balthasar teaches that God is no “motionless order or sequence” but a supernal “happening” — however little we in our finitude can disengage the concept of “happening” from the concept of change.
Balthasar attributes to the Trinity, in the eternal and therefore perfect coincidence of freedom and necessity, a life of unalloyed intersubjective love, sublimely exuberant and mutually fruitful. To excerpt just a few lines:
[W]e can say that, if human love is enlivened by the element of surprise, something analogous to it cannot be excluded from the divine love. It is as if the Son born of the Father “from the outset surpasses the Father’s wildest expectations.” “God loves despite his omniscience, constantly allowing himself to be surpassed and surprised by the Beloved.”
My late mentor, a Balthasarian, taught once in a lecture I attended as a teenager, “If you don’t think the Persons of the Trinity are madly in love with each other, you’re crazy.”— words that have remained with me indelibly since. For St. John of Ávila, the love of the soul of Christ aims firstly to “wound the heart of the Father.” For St. Peter Julian Eymard, the heart of Christ is a “furnace of love for God… divided between his Father and us.” For St. John of the Cross, God is, through love, “captivated,” “bound,” “taken prisoner,” “wounded,” by even the creaturely soul. Citing St. Francis de Sales, Dilexit Nos affirms that “we can ‘steal’ the Lord’s heart.”
The encyclical reiterates the teaching of the Catechism of the Catholic Church that “it is not possible to speak of new suffering on the part of the glorified Lord, [yet] ‘the paschal mystery of Christ… and all that Christ is — all that he did and suffered for all men — participates in the divine eternity, and so transcends all times while being made present in them all’.”
And this brings us straight back into the depths of mystery: impassibility of beatitude versus vulnerability as love’s inalienable precondition. As Ratzinger writes in Behold the Pierced One, “God is a sufferer because he is a lover.” God is, then, both passionless and impassioned: while utterly free of change and progression, he embraces a subjective permeability to the other that entails vulnerability and ekstasis after the manner of an utterly stable “super-attribute” — to adapt the language of Balthasar, irrevocably abiding, in a stance of forever; in God, amor carries no dark notes of concupiscence or interest. Drawing on Origen, specifically as interpreted by de Lubac in connection with Bernard of Clairvaux, Ratzinger relays: “When you hear someone speak of God’s passions, always apply what is said to love.”
The attempt to divorce God from all organic conceptions of love is, to say the least, not conducive to the love of God. God is not the enemy of love, but its highest actualization. Lest we ourselves take an unfortunate nominalist turn, in the words of Balthasar: “The vitality and freedom of eternal love in the realm of Divine Being constitutes the prototype for what love can be, at its best, in the realm of creaturely development.”
Ratzinger finds regrettable that “emotions are placed under a kind of taboo in spirituality,” where unnatural repression spurs as backlash “a wave of emotionalism… largely chaotic and incapable of commitment.” Ratzinger had noted the ennobling of human emotion via the heart of Jesus appearing in Pius XII’s Haurietis aquas.
Dilexit Nos points out how the worship of the Sacred Heart was a devotion “many Jansenists found… difficult to comprehend.” Together with Pius XII, the encyclical reprimands as elitist false mysticism the Jansenist disdain for “all that was human, affective and corporeal,” taken in contradistinction to the supposed “pure worship of the Most High God.”
So too, Dilexit Nos warns sternly of both atheistic secularization and of amorphous spiritual esotericisms, “new manifestations of a disembodied spirituality.” It sees in neo-Jansenist dualisms “a recrudescence of that Gnosticism which proved so great a spiritual threat in the early centuries of Christianity because it refused to acknowledge the reality of ‘the salvation of the flesh’.”
The heart brings us to a realm of the mystery of predilection, a milieu freer and more spontaneous than will. To be enchained by love is joy — joy not merely for us, as we take our rightful place according to a creaturely status. Captivation to a Beloved finds in God its infinitely perfect prototype.
Image: “Loved Us to The End” (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0) by Lawrence OP
V. J. Tarantino is co-founder of Sacred Beauty, a Private Association of the Faithful in the Diocese of Bridgeport. She has studied ancient and Medieval metaphysics and has devoted her adult life to the service of liturgy (study of liturgical texts and norms, the cultivation of sacred elocution, musical performance and composition, the beautification of sacred space, and the organization and direction of public Eucharistic Adoration) and to immersion in the writings of the Doctors of the Church and of recent Popes. Her writing can be found at https://questionsdisputedandotherwise.substack.com/
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