The Heart Makes Us Human
Educate the Heart
The heart is a microcosm.
If you look in a concordance, there are 927 references to “heart” in the NKJV.
Speaking of the concordance, have you ever noticed that concordance means with the heart? Or literally with hearts together. Concordance is related to the word concord, meaning agreement. How beautiful to think about concord as with one heart.
We use the word heart all the time in English.
We learn things by heart.
We feel things in our hearts.
We refer to the desires of our hearts.
We know things by heart.
Just one of the 927 references to heart in the Scripture reminds us:
“Let the words of my mouth and the meditation of my heart
Be acceptable in Your sight, O Lord, my strength and my Redeemer.”
(Psalm 19:14)
What Do We Mean by the Heart?
Saint Macarius the Great explains:
“The heart itself is only a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and lions. There are poisonous beasts, and all the treasure of evil. There are rough and uneven roads. There are precipices. But there too is God and the angels. Life is there and the Kingdom. There too is light, and there the apostles and heavenly cities, and treasures of Grace. All things lie within that little space.”
The heart is a microcosm.
The heart is not the mind. While both the heart and the mind offer a way of knowing, the heart understands intuitively, while the mind relies on reasoning powers to understand.
The heart knows in an instant, in an ‘aha’ moment, while the mind calculates.
The heart synthesizes, while the mind analyzes.
Knowing with the heart results in concord with the thing known, while knowing with the mind results in discord with the thing to be known, because it usually means the thing is cut up in pieces. This is the difference between knowing the frog in the mud and loving it or knowing the frog on the dissection table.
Knowing with the heart is a kind of love, while knowing with the mind is authoritative, as it sets itself in judgement over the thing to be known.
Knowing with the heart is poetic, while knowing with the mind is discursive. The word poetry means a making or creating, in other words, a bringing together of things, like memory; while discursive means a dividing of the course, in other words, a splitting of the way; the discursive can arrive at the destination, but not in a direct way.
The problem with most of our approaches to helping our students acquire knowledge, is we go straight to the mind and skip over knowing by heart.
Acquiring knowledge works like this: The body through the senses perceives the other, the heart knows it intuitively as a thing to be known, then the mind analyzes it.
The mind alone makes us calculators.
The body alone makes us animals.
But the heart makes us human.
C.S. Lewis writes something similar: “It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal” (The Abolition of Man).
Who can plumb the depths of the heart? So for now, I offer this working definition of the heart: The faculty of the soul that acquires understanding by participation in the thing to be known; it is like falling in love, and opposed to reasoning.
The heart knows by participation, not by reasoning.
Once upon a time, two disciples of Christ, on the road to Emmaus, were discussing the latest news, trying to understand the facts. Many witnesses claimed they had seen Jesus alive, though he had before their own eyes been crucified only a few days before. Luke says that they “conversed and reasoned.” How does the brain process this kind of information?
Then a man they did not recognize “drew near and went with them.” The stranger asks them about their conversation and why they are sad.
Once of the disciples replies, “Are you the only stranger in Jerusalem, and have you not known the things which happened there in these days?” And Cleopas, for that was his name, explained the news to the stranger.
To this, the stranger says, “O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!” And then the stranger opened the Scriptures to them, expounding the things therein concerning Christ.
They approached the village where they would stay, and the stranger indicated that he would walk on,
“But they constrained him, saying, ‘Abide with us; for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.’ And he went in to tarry with them.”
“Now it came to pass, as He sat at the table with them, that He took bread, blessed and broke it, and gave it to them. Then their eyes were opened and they knew Him; and He vanished from their sight.
“And they said to one another. ‘Did not our heart burn within us while He talked with us on the road, and while He opened the Scriptures to us.’”
Notice that their rational discussion of the evidence did not help them understand. While their encounter with Jesus and study of the Scripture made their hearts burn, their eyes were not opened until Christ offered communion: the table, the blessing, the breaking of the bread. While their rational understanding failed, their hearts were able to see at last.
They saw Christ, but they were slow of heart, the eyes of their hearts did not recognize him. Why did their senses fail them?
They conversed and reasoned, but they could not see. Why could they not reason their way to understanding?
Because reason never grants understanding; it is impossible to reason about what we do not understand. Reason’s job is to order and analyze what we already understand. Reason can increase our understanding through comparison and analysis, but it must have an idea or image to work with in the first place.
The heart is not accessed by the mind—it is the other way around—the mind can only be properly activated by way of the heart. The heart reaches out in desire to know before the mind can articulate the nature of the query. The heart understands intuitively that Bridal Veil falls is sublime, that the wings of a dragon fly are magical, and that the eyes are the window to the soul. None of these truths can be “taught.”
I will say this another way: Reason does not lead to understanding. The understanding of the heart leads to reasoning.
Thus the heart gains understanding through participation, not analysis.
In this way, acquiring knowledge is like falling in love.
Dr. Taylor in Poetic Knowledge writes, “So, when St. Augustine says, ‘There is no enjoyment where there is no love,’ he means that to enjoy a thing is to gain a real knowledge of it. Enjoyment is spontaneous, surprising, unplanned, and immediately captivating to the senses and emotions as well as to the mind; in other words, poetic. Augustine explains: ‘Because love is a movement [of the soul] and every movement is always towards something, when we ask what ought to be loved, we are therefore asking what it is that we ought to be moving toward . . . . It is the thing in regard to which possession and knowing are one and the same.’”
Knowing by heart helps us love and strengthen relationships.
Knowing by heart builds relationships with things, people, and God. In a verse by Hillaire Belloc, his heart is reaching out and embracing his beloved homeland:
The Southern Hills and the South Sea They blow such gladness into me. That when I get to Burton Sands And smell the smell of Home Lands, My heart is all renewed and fills With the Southern Sea and the South Hills.
Knowing by heart strengthens relationships with people. In Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s narrative poem Evangeline, the heroine, without seeing him, recognizes her lover with her very heart. In this scene she is sitting with her father on an evening:
Close at her father’s side was the gentle Evangeline seated,
Spinning flax for the loom that stood in the corner behind her.
. . .Thus as they sat, there were footsteps heard, and, suddenly lifted,
Sounded the wooden latch, and the door swung back on its hinges.
Benedict knew by the hob-nailed shoes it was Basil the blacksmith,
And by her beating heart Evangeline knew who was with him.
And knowing by heart, ultimately, is the cornerstone of our relationship with God. For this reason the Psalms use such language as:
“My soul longs for You like a thirsty land” (Psalm 143:6)
“My soul longs, yes, even faints for the courts of the LORD; My heart and my flesh cry out for the living God” (Psalm 84:1)
“Blessed is the man whose strength is in You, whose heart is set on pilgrimage.” (Psalm 84:5)
This knowing by heart progresses through steps, from things, to people, and finally, to God. First, the heart participates in the objects of sense perceptions, then the heart desires to know the source of those things. In C. S. Lewis’ beautiful novel Till We Have Faces, the god has called upon Psyche to be sacrificed upon the holy Grey Mountain. She resolves to go to the mountain to be sacrificed not just willingly, but longingly. Psyche must explain to her sister her peace and even joy about ascending the god’s mountain. She explains:
“It was when I was happiest that I longed most. It was on happy days when we were up there on the hills, the three of us, with the wind and the sunshine . . . where you couldn’t see Glome or the palace. Do you remember? The colour and the smell, and looking across at the Grey Mountain in the distance? And because it was so beautiful, it set me longing, always longing. Somewhere else there must be more of it. Everything seemed to be saying, Psyche come! But I couldn’t (not yet) come and I didn’t know where I was to come to. It almost hurt me. I felt like a bird in a cage when the other birds of its kind are flying home . . . The sweetest thing in all my life has been the longing — to reach the Mountain, to find the place where all the beauty came from — “
Until the Day when we will see Him face to face, our heart longs and reaches towards Him through prayer. Prayer is not a mere reciting of words. It happens in the heart, where the heart thirsts for Christ. To know Christ by way of the heart is to be fully human.
A theologian is not someone who writes papers and expounds Scripture, where the word theologian literally means knowledge of God. Saint Evagrius says, “The one who prays is a theologian, and the one who is a theologian prays.” Isn’t this exactly what we want for our children?
Educating the heart is the essential work of an educator.
Saint John of Kronstadt writes,
“What should our most important [concern] be when educating the youth? We must chiefly strive to enlighten the eyes of their understanding (Eph 1:18). Have you not noticed that our heart acts first in our life, and in nearly all acquisition of knowledge the heart sees certain truths (ideas) before the mind comes to understand them? This is how knowledge is acquired: the heart understands at once, indivisibly, instantaneously; afterward, this single action of the heart’s vision is transmitted to the mind, and there divided into categories such as ‘preceding’ or ‘subsequent.’ The sight of the heart is analyzed by the mind.”
Educating the heart of the child, then, is the essential work of an educator. Perhaps, the story of the Road to Emmaus from the Gospel can help us understand how to educate the heart.
First, educating the heart is not through reasoning-first. Reasoning short-circuits the understanding of the heart. The disciples on the way to Emmaus “conversed and reasoned,” so when Christ joined them on their way, they did not recognize Him.
The only way to know a frog is to walk in his footsteps for a while. With a child-like innocence, to follow the sound of his croak, to jump in the mud with him, to laugh upon missing him and falling on your face, to giggle upon finally feeling the rough texture of his skin. This is knowing by heart. This is knowledge by participation and knowledge as love.
But to dissect the frog on the table kills the thing to be known. Literally, the frog is unrecognizable as it is dismembered. The scientist is the master of all he surveys, and he stands in judgement over the specimen.
Second, humility is the prerequisite for educating the heart. When the disciples tell Jesus everything, he replies, “You fools!” Before proceeding with the lesson, Christ humbles his students.
Analysis does not teach humility. A high school student, who reads Crime and Punishment, answers a few reading guide questions that tend toward reasoning and analysis, and maybe writes a thesis on the symbolism of the dream of the horse, is rewarded with an “A.” The student pats himself on the back and feels like he has mastered in a few weeks what Dostoyevsky created after countless years of personal experience and suffering, not to mention the time spent actually writing the timeless novel. The average student does not have time to sit in wonder in the presence of a great work. The demands of the pacing of the class will not allow for awe.
However, the heart can be taught through difficult studies. Challenge and even failure help teach humility. Simone Weis in her essay “Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View to the Love of God” suggests:
“It does not even matter much whether we succeed in finding the solution or understanding the proof, although it is important to try really hard to do so. Never in any case whatever is a genuine effort of the attention wasted. It always has its effect on the spiritual plane and in consequence on the lower one of the intelligence, for all spiritual light lightens the mind.”
Third, Humility makes possible an openness to new friends. The disciples walking with Jesus do not recognize Him until they acquire humility. Their hearts begin to burn within them as Jesus draws near to them, and they listen with rapt attention to his lesson on the Scriptures.
On the other hand, analysis before understanding of the heart is judgmental. I wonder about the habit of mind nurtured in many schools that teach mastery through analysis without ever letting the heart sit in wonder. Do our students and our children meet people the same way they meet books? Do they analyze and judge a person before opening themselves up to recognize that person as wonderful (as in full of wonder) as a bearer of the image of God? If you think about it for a little bit, you will see that it is impossible to really know a person who you do not first love. Educating the heart means to reserve judgement – to let a new friend be himself. Whether that new friend is a frog, a book, or another human being.
Fourth, the heart is further educated when it acquires the habit of attention. Incidentally, with all my talk about the heart’s ultimate purpose as knowing God, it is important to note that attention is the substance of prayer. Simone Weil explains this clearly: “The key to a Christian conception of studies is the realization that prayer consists of attention. It is the orientation of all the attention of which the soul is capable toward God. The quality of the attention counts for much in the quality of the prayer.”
We can assist our children in preparing their hearts for prayer, by teaching attention. To teach them attention demands that we tarry with the book, the feather, or the painting. Remember that the disciples on the road to Emmaus “constrained him, saying, ‘Abide with us; for it is toward evening, and the day is far spent.’ And he went in to tarry with them.”
To tarry means:
“To stay, to abide.”
“To stay in expectation, to wait.”
“To delay, to put off going or coming, to defer.”
The etymology suggests that it is related to the word target and implies a striking against a thing to make it stop.
Tarry in your lessons. Tarry with a quality picture, essay, or story. The goal should not be to “get through the material,”- that heart-destroying phrase—the goal should be to hit the target by stopping long enough to know it by heart.
Simone Weil says: “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them. Man cannot discover them by his own powers, and if he sets out to seek for them he will find in their place counterfeits of which he will be unable to discern the falsity.”
Lastly, we educated the heart by strengthening the memory. The opposite of to remember is not to forget; it is to dis-member, that is, to pull apart. To remember means to pull together the parts and pieces and make meaning of a thing. That is why (at least partly) the disciples remembered Christ when he offered communion. The action re-members, brings together the meaning of the cross, death, and resurrection of our LORD. “Do this in remembrance of me.” Christ said.
We can educate the hearts of our students by training them in memory: yes, they should literally memorize words that are good, true, and beautiful, but in a more profound way, memory is a bringing together of things, data, pieces, into a meaningful whole. It is synthesis. Memory is how we make meaning.
In conclusion, educating the heart makes us human because it prepares us to grow in knowledge by love, that is, it helps us know anything the way He Who Is Love knows it. Saint John of Kronstadt explains well how understanding is the action of the heart:
“The idea belongs to the heart and not to the mind. In other words, it belongs to the inner man, not to the outer man. Therefore, to have the eyes of their understanding enlightened (Eph 1:18) is a very important matter in acquiring knowledge, but especially the truth of faith and moral law.”
This is the kind of education we are seeking, the kind of education that prepares the soil of heart for prayer, whereby we participate in the very life of God.