The central importance of the heart in the spiritual life finds a unique emphasis in the work of the Catholic philosopher Dietrich von Hildebrand.
Spiritual writers, in accordance with Scripture, are no strangers to this idea. But in Western philosophy, there has been a focus on the intellect and the will as our primary spiritual powers.
Yet the heart is a spiritual power found at the innermost core of our being.
One of Hildebrand’s best books on the subject is The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity. As he writes, the heart “in many respects is more the real self of the person than his intellect or will.”
Literally, we do have a physical organ called the heart, which pumps our blood. However, the word “heart” is also used in a metaphorical sense: to name a spiritual reality that is likewise central. It similarly maintains, in an integral way, not just our health, but our personal existence.
Therefore, to overlook the heart is to overlook the way that our emotional life operates in a primarily spiritual dimension.
In many ways, we do have emotions that are indeed bodily based. For example, it is certainly possible to be cranky when presented with feelings of hunger.
But there is also an undeniable spiritual dimension to our emotional life that transcends the body. For example, consider the affective response we can have to music.
Here the music is having an effect on us, but not in a merely physical way. The effect is based not so much on sound waves physically hitting an ear drum as on a meaning accessed by our heart. The heart knows how to read the auditory signs as signifying something else, a something that transcends the audible.
There are many examples one could choose in this regard. But consider the recent passing of the composer Ennio Morricone, who is known for his numerous film compositions.
His soundtrack to the Academy Award–winning 1986 film The Mission is justly famous. If you have not heard it, I challenge you to open your heart while listening to “Gabriel’s Oboe” from that soundtrack.
If you are able to access a spiritual experience via that music, consider that it should come as no surprise. The subject of the film The Mission is, in fact, 18th-century Jesuit priests in South America.
Many will know Morricone primarily for his “spaghetti Western” soundtracks; that is, his music for cowboy movies filmed in Italy. In an early iconic role, Clint Eastwood starred as the bounty hunter known as “The Man With No Name” in A Fistful of Dollars (1964), For a Few Dollars More (1965), and The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly (1966), all directed by Sergio Leone and scored by Morricone.
Less well known is that Morricone composed a Mass for Pope Francis celebrating the 200th anniversary in 2014 of the restoration of the Jesuit order. Suppressed by Pope Clement XIV in 1773 (shortly after the time depicted in the film The Mission), the order was restored by Pope Pius VII in 1814.
The human heart is a very complex and interesting thing, accessing a range of emotional experiences from the simple to the sublime. Music is just one physical manifestation of clues which point to invisible realms of spiritual affectivity.
The spiritual experiences to which music gives us access may be so sublime that we have no words for them.
Just as Eastwood played an inscrutable man with no name in the Leone/Morricone films, so too there are emotional experiences that can have no precise names. The best we can do is let a composer name them indirectly, by using the audible symbols of his music.
As with the mysterious gunslinger, in this realm it is actions (not words) that are most important. The experience itself counts as what is worth having for its own sake, whereas talking about it loses such direct access.
Hildebrand’s book on the many realms of affectivity was originally published under the title The Sacred Heart. That’s because the second part of it is devoted to an incredibly insightful theological meditation on the human and divine affectivity of Jesus. Yet the first part of the book is a pathbreaking philosophical treatment of how our human affectivity works.
Perhaps no topic in philosophy is more important. For, as St. John Henry Newman writes, “the affections are the instruments by which the soul has pleasure. When they are exercised duly, it is happy; when they are undeveloped, restrained, or thwarted, it is not happy.”
“This is our real and true bliss, not to know, or to affect, or to pursue; but to love, to hope, to joy, to admire, to revere, to adore,” says Newman. “Our real and true bliss lies in the possession of those objects on which our hearts may rest and be satisfied.”