It is somewhat apropos that the leading cause of death in the United States is heart disease. Not just because of our collective lifestyles but because of the fact that it symbolizes the much larger heart disease that afflicts even the physically healthiest among us. We are, as CS Lewis once put it, “men without chests.” Our hearts are dying from neglect and we are greatly in need of transplants so that we can live truly human lives.
Transplant seems like a bit of an exaggeration, until we ponder the number of times Sacred Scripture speaks of getting a new heart. Psalm 51 “create in me a clean heart O God” and Ezekiel 36:26 “And I will give you a new heart” among others could be brought to mind. The point is that what we are about to discuss is no mere self-improvement project but a complete rebuild by the Master Builder Himself. Why we must be in a receptive position will become clear in a second, but we must belabor the point so as to grasp what God is offering to us in Christ.
Redeeming the Emotions
St. Gregory Nazianzen said, “what has not been assumed has not been healed.” His point is that Christ assumed a true human nature and lived a truly human life in order to redeem ours. Our Lord came not just to redeem us, but to heal us. Just as that redemption starts now, so too does the healing. More to the point, Christ He was effective in redeeming our affectivity. He lived the perfect affective human life so that we could be healed. He didn’t just want us to love our neighbor in some dry volitional way, He wanted us to feel the love too.
Christ didn’t just heal our emotions from afar, but He wept in the face of sadness. He commanded His disciples to “rejoice because your names are written in heaven” (Lk 10:20), but then showed them how to “rejoice at that very moment” (Lk 10:21). One of the most beautiful parts of The Chosen series is the way in which they depict the sheer delight that Our Lord felt and expressed when He performed a miracle.
Christ gave us new hearts in order to love the right things in the right way, but until we grasp that this love includes the affective dimension, our love will always be mediocre. I might love my neighbor because I want to help him, but that love will always be cold unless I feel compassion in the face of his need. In order to be truly effective my compassion must be affective.
This does not mean I let the perfect become the enemy of the good and only do something good if I can feel it, but that Christ’s redemptive act includes my feelings. I should expect that I would feel it and if I don’t I should ask Him to further heal my feelings. I should not just ask for sorrow for my sins, but sorrow that is felt. There is no such thing as peace or joy that is not in some way felt in our hearts. Even if we are suspicious of our affective dimension, we should never allow that suspicion to turn into hatred.
Encountering the Beautiful
What these new hearts will enable us to do is to encounter the beautiful. It is not surprising that a culture that moves away from God is also no longer able to encounter beauty. Beauty is what fuels the heart. It is beauty deprivation in our culture that has caused the endemic heart disease. suffering from beauty deprivation. Reality is marked by three transcendentals, three categories of being that all being share and that we were given natural radar for. Our intellects are built to truth. Our wills are built to goodness. Our hearts are built to beauty. We know what truth and goodness are, but we struggle with beauty. Even St. Thomas’ definition of beauty as “that when seen pleases” is rather elusive unless our hearts are alive. The beautiful is the thing that once we see it, see not just with our eyes but with the “eye of the mind”, we are moved, but not in order to possess it but to take delight in its existence.
Our affections are moved because of this encounter with the beautiful. But the moment we turn our focus away from the object that moved us and towards the pleasure it causes inside of us, we lose both the pleasure and the beauty. In short, we begin to neglect our hearts and slowly they begin to die. The problem is not the pleasure—that is what keeps the heart pumping—but the love of the pleasure. To love the pleasure is selfish, but to love the object that stirred us in the first place is true love. The pleasure then is felt love.
It is perhaps easiest to see when it comes to married love. A wife will often tell her husband who insists on her beauty, that he is blinded by love. But it is actually love that opens his eyes to the beauty. He is fixated on the object of his affections and not the affections themselves. The man who does this will never stop feeling those affections and in fact they will only get deeper as his love deepens. She “has his heart.” But if he can only focus on the pleasure her smile brings and not on the beauty of the smile itself, his love will die and his heart atrophy.
God made our hearts this way because He wants us to “taste and see the goodness of the Lord.” He wants us to feel the gift of reality by contemplating the beauty of created things. In contemplating and not trying to manipulate them to maximize pleasure, they become signs of His Goodness and Love.