This article first appeared in Our Sunday Visitor magazine. Subscribe to receive the monthly magazine here.
Many people have heard — and repeated — that there is a distinction between “head knowledge” and “heart knowledge.” Certainly, there is a distinction to be made here, but we can draw too sharp a line between the different component parts of the human person.
After the Protestant Reformation, the West was plunged into an empirical rationalism, the roots of which were integrated into our country. All that could be known was known through empirical, testable evidence. Everything important could be apprehended by sense observation. We see these ideas today when brain mapping tries to explain things like love or prayer.
The rationalist movement gave rise to various Protestant reactions, such as the Great Awakening, that stirred the hearts of Christian believers to reclaim their faith in the midst of a secular, rational moment. The Romantic movement in the arts did this in its own way as well: How stirring the story of the hero who was bound to lose! How gallant the doomed lover dying for his beloved!
The role of passion
Catholic anthropology, the Church’s account of the nature of the human person, has always acknowledged component parts to man. The highest of these is the rational faculty. The power of reason is not simple computing or empiricism, but rather an understanding of all things as they fit together. The ultimate reality of this knowledge is called wisdom.
The human person is also composed of parts that it shares with its fellow animals: passions, emotions, lower desires. These parts are not bad; they are good and directly willed by God for the human constitution. Nevertheless, the image of God has always been located in the ability of man to think and to choose freely, always in the context of relationality. This is the definition of his rational nature. The passions and emotions provide “movement,” which can be seen in the word e-motion.
A relationship with truth
As composite beings of rational soul and body, the movements of the body free us from being idea generators alone. We are meant to channel our contemplation and thought process into action, both rational and physical. St. Thomas Aquinas says that our rational self is to be the ruler; however, it is to rule benevolently. If the reason acts like a tyrant, the lower faculties will rebel. If it rules weakly, the lower faculties will take over.
If someone says, “listen to your heart,” or, “you need to move from head to heart knowledge,” a Catholic should respond: “I listen to my head, my heart, my whole being.” There is no heart knowledge that is opposed to truth, and our rational faculties are endowed with the capacity to ascertain just that: the truth. That Truth is ultimately a person, one with whom we are to enter into relationship. Jesus Christ is not data or facts alone. However, mere passion or feeling is insufficient to have a real relationship with someone. Integrity demands our whole person and that we love the whole person in truth.
