Heart

Word of the Week

“The HEART has its reasons, that the head knows nothing of,” said Pascal. He wasn’t referring to warm cuddles. He meant that we know far more than what we can deduce logically from premises, or what we can observe directly through the senses. We see, in a flash of light, what is good and beautiful. Or we can; it does happen; but our systems of education seem aimed at making sure that it happens as rarely as possible. You can control the head by giving it false premises, and then letting the reasoning machine go on. Lucretius compares that sort of thing to building a house with a level that isn’t level and a T-square that isn't square and a plumb line that doesn't hang plumb. Your walls are going to buckle and collapse. Of course, Lucretius himself had the wrong premises —he believed that the only things that really exist are atoms and empty space — but the point still stands. With false premises, the rationalist will not only go wrong; he will go more wildly wrong than any man alive. He will be Chesterton’s madman who has lost everything BUT his reason.

     The HEART seems close to what the schoolmen in the Middle Ages called the INTELLECT: not your reasoning power, but instant and immediate vision. But there’s more. When the sacred author says that we are to love the Lord God with all our HEART and mind and soul and strength, he is urging us to commit the core of our beings to God. Some things we can see only when we give ourselves up to them. Maybe that is true of all beings who love and can be loved: unless you give your HEART, you will not see. It is hard to tell which comes first, the vision or the love. Perhaps it is best to think of them as in a dance.

     If you give your HEART, you give yourself in TRUST, and that is another dimension to this most suggestive word. “Heart speaks to heart,” was the motto that John Henry Newman took for his coat of arms when he became a bishop; not mind to mind, but heart to heart, because the deepest human knowledge is not of facts, but of persons. Dietrich von Hildebrand said that there was as great a gap between impersonal and personal being as there was between inanimate and animate nature. I like to think that my dog Jasper stands trembling on the brink of personality. That is what being around human persons has done to man’s best friend.

     Now, the word HEART has its kin all over the Indo European languages. We have to remember, though, that the Indo European K shifted to a hard H in the Germanic languages (cf. Latin CAPUT, English HEAD; Latin CALX, English HEEL), and to S in many of the great eastern branches of the family. So English HEART is kin to Latin COR, CORDIS, and Greek KARDIA, and Welsh CRAIDD = CORE (CORE too is from French COEUR, HEART), and Russian SERDTSE. But it is also related to words having to do with confidence and trust: Latin CREDERE, to BELIEVE; Welsh CREDU, to BELIEVE, Sanskrit SRADDHA, naming something you do with full faith. So it is that CREED and HEART are cousins.