The heart

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[...] If we look at scripture,we do not find in the Old or New Testament any contrast between head and heart. In the Bible, we don't just feel with our hearts-we also think with our hearts. The heart is the place of intelligence and wisdom. In scripture, feeling and thinking are held together. In the Bible, the heart is the conscience-the moral spiritual center of the total person. Evil thought comes from the heart, but equally the heart is where the Holy spirit cries out, "Abba, Father".

The heart is a unifying concept in another way.
Not only does it hold together feeling and thinking, but it transcends the soul-body contrast. The heart is the spiritual organ, the center of our bodily structure, but the heart also symbolizes our spiritual understanding. It's a point of convergence and interaction for the human person as a whole.

Here is St.Macarius of Egypt writing about the heart:

"The heart governs and reigns over the whole bodily organism. And when grace possesses the pastures of the heart, it rules over all the members and the thoughts, for there in the heart is the intellect, and all thouths of the soul and its expectations. In this way grace penetrates also to the members of the body".

The heart is the center of the phisical organism-when it stops beating, we are dead. But it is also the place where the intellect dwells, the center of spiritual understanding. It is through the heart that we experience grace, and through the heart grace passes to all members of the body. The heart contains, say the Macarian homilies,"unfathomable depths", including what is meant today by the unconcious....In the heart are the works of righteousness and wickedness. In it is life' in it is death.

The heart then has a central and controlling role.

The heart is open on one side to the unfathomable depths or the unconcious, open on the other side to the abyss of God's glory. When the Orthodox tradition speaks of the Prayer of the heart, that doesn't mean prayer just of the feelings and emotions, it doesn't just mean what in western Roman Catholic spirituality is termed affective prayer.

Prayer of the heart means prayer of the total person, prayer in which the body also participates. In the hesychast tradition, entering the heart means the total reintegration of the human person in God.[...]

From an article "The Passions: Enemy or Friend?"

by Bishop Kallistos of Diokleia

(In Communion/ Fall 1999)

 

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