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The Logic of the Sacred Heart

Today’s solemnity of the Sacred Heart is of rather recent provenance as Church history goes.  Although the full humanity of Christ, body and soul, was defined clearly in the first series of ecumenical Councils of the Church, the notion of worshipping and honouring the ‘heart’ of Jesus has its roots in the early Middle Ages, with Saint Bernard of Clairvaux and the Cistercians, Saint Bonaventure and the Franciscans, as well as the Jesuits, who took the heart as their symbol, before culminating in the visions of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque (+1690), as compiled and published through her saintly spiritual director, Saint Claude de la Colombiere.

This devotion flows naturally from what we believe of Christ: That His divine Person is united hypostatically (that is, in the ‘hypostasis’ or ‘Person’ of the divine Logos) with His human nature, including His human body. Of course, we honour Christ’s entire body, blood, soul and divinity, which we receive in Holy Communion under the mystical species.  But we honour the heart specifically as the seat of the emotions, the symbol of love and affection, as that which suffers and bleeds for another. ‘Out of His heart shall flow rivers of living water‘, Christ declared of Himself (John 7:38).

Saint Thomas wrote that revelation is always attuned to our own capacities, sensitivities and proclivities,. Our tradition, even in the secular realm, has the ‘heart’ as the centre and locus of our affective life. The word ‘heart’ is mentioned hundreds of times in the Bible (depending on how one translates the Hebrew term lev, which, providentially, sounds like our English ‘love’), and in songs and poetry throughout the ages, up to all the modern ballads sung with such heart-felt intensity, to make up, one supposes, for what they lack in talent and musicianship.  Oh Bach and Palestrina, where art thou!

Praise the Lord

Read the Whole Article at https://catholicinsight.com/