19. The Proper Objects of the Heart Are Truth and Justice.
19. The proper objects of the heart are truth and justice.19
Cultural critic bell hooks tells us that “the heart of justice is truth telling.”23 One cannot build justice on falsehoods. Those who are engaged in lies cannot also be engaged in justice-making. Currently our culture seems to be going through a truth crisis with “fake news” and incendiary news and very often cold indifference to the truth. There must be a reason why Satan is called “the father of lies.”
To say that the proper objects of the heart are truth and justice, as Aquinas does, may strike one as surprising since he is so known for critical and systematic thought. Is it not amazing that someone of his intellectual depth would insist upon truth and justice residing primarily in the heart?
In fact, this underscores how biblical a thinker Aquinas is, for in Jewish thought the intellect is in the heart, not the head. It is a distinctly modern consciousness that has abandoned such understanding and instead rationalized cognition. Descartes’s definition of truth as “clear and distinct ideas” is a good example of this modern philosophical tendency. Despite modern science’s unparalleled discoveries and contributions to our knowledge of the world, its tendency to reduce things to merely quantitative dimensions sucks out many dimensions of reality that feed us and open the door to meaning and to value-making. Science coming on with quantity as so basic an approach to knowledge and fact-finding is part of the modernist trend that is visible in Descartes—and, unfortunately, in our schools and universities.
Einstein himself criticized such thinking when he said that we have been given two gifts—rationality and intuition—and that values lie in the intuition and not in our rational intellect. He cautions us to be wary of too much rationality, for our values do not come from the intellect, but from “intuition and deep feeling, which are the same thing.” The intellect provides methods, but it does not construct values.24
Of course if we live in a myth (as the modern era did) of a “value-free” approach to truth, then the idea that the truth is in the brain alone buttresses such an empty concept of “value.” Science and the HeartMath movement are learning today that the brain is not restricted to the head, but actually operates within the heart itself. For instance, the heart sends more signals to the brain than the brain sends to the heart. The heart, therefore, directly influences emotional processing and higher cognitive faculties such as attention, perception, memory, and problem-solving.25
Aquinas seems to have anticipated this modern debate. Of course, much of our scientific method was developed to combat the excessive right-brain approach of allegories and symbols and the resultant sentimentalizing ad nauseam invoked by an essentially anti-intellectual medieval culture. This is one reason why Aquinas was so excited to discover Aristotle. Right-brain excess, we might say, is as dangerous as that of the left.
Aquinas sought a middle way where both the rational and the intuitive would find a working balance. Many postmodern thinkers advocate doing the same. But first there must be a break from the idolatry of rationality, an idolatry that has taken over so much education and decision-making in our time. It seems to be part and parcel of patriarchy. Wisdom, which Aquinas celebrated his whole life, is feminine in both the Bible and around the world. Patriarchy banishes wisdom in a quest for naked knowledge. We are now bearing the burden of that one-sidedness as we face an ecological crisis that threatens to destroy the earth as we know it.
A great irony in this whole discussion is how often those “Thomists” who claim to follow Aquinas get completely bogged down in trivial texts and rational debates about unending rational dogmas and declarations that rarely get to the heart at all (where spirituality and passion reside). Those students of Aquinas who know what they are talking about—such as my mentor Père Chenu—remind us that for Aquinas all morality resides not in the will but in the passions!26 This was a very controversial position by Aquinas in the Middle Ages, and it is still controversial today, but it parallels Rabbi Heschel’s teaching on the centrality of passions to prophets and explains the emphasis Aquinas puts, as we saw above, on compassion, which is after all a kind of passion, along with his teaching on anger (see chapter 24).
That truth and justice reside in the heart therefore is biblical, as Aquinas knew well. It also represents a revolution in our awareness and prefigures a revolution in our educational systems from childhood through professional school. A prophetic upheaval of education is long overdue, and Aquinas could lead the way. In some ways, it is already underway in programs such as the aforementioned HeartMath, which, among other things, has confirmed the hypothesis that the brain is present in the heart itself.
I have offered practices in this educational revolution for over forty years by creating training programs in spirituality that have proven very fruitful. “Art as meditation” and “body prayer” are integral to that training. Art comes from the heart, after all. And the right part of the brain operates much of the heart, located as it is on the left side of the body. Also, as psychologists Claudio Naranjo and Robert Ornstein proposed in the 1970s, “extrovert meditation” (what I call “art as meditation”) is “the way of the prophets.”27 I have written about this extensively in my books Original Blessing; Creativity; The A.W.E. Project; and at dailymeditationswithmatthewfox.org. Above all, I have witnessed over forty years of results by implementing it in my pedagogy for training mystics and prophets. A prophet is a seeker of both truth—Thomas Merton says a prophet cuts through 5,000 knots of lies—and injustice. As Rabbi Heschel tells us, every prophet interferes. With what? With lies and injustice.
Rationalism has so dominated the modern era that it took over much of twentieth-century artistic philosophy. In her groundbreaking book, The Re-Enchantment of Art, Suzi Gablik speaks about her journey from abandoning the modernist culture of art that she was fed on to another vision of art, one that is about personal and social transformation.
Modern aesthetics, she learned soon enough, was “a small but doctrinaire religion.” What are its dogmas? “I was trained to view art as a specialized pursuit, devoid of practical or social goals. The concept of ‘art for art’s sake’ was primary. … [Its] patriarchal philosophy declared art to be self-sufficient and ‘value-free.’”
Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, a kind of guru of the modernist movement, declared that modern art was “a thing of no consequence” with no social function to perform. Gablik fought against this philosophy and its “core truths of secularism, individualism, bureaucracy and pluralism—all of which in our society have reduced the mythic and the sacred to rags.” Art succumbs to the values of the society at large which pursues “manic production and consumption, and the maximizing of profits.” Sadly, these become the “ultimate goals for the artist too.” A “certain moral lapse occurs.” What claims to be “value free” is instead value uncritical and thus succumbs uncritically to the dominant values of a culture.
Gablik abandoned this materialistic philosophy in favor of other values—a “sense of community, an ecological perspective, and a deeper understanding of the mystical and archetypal underpinnings of spiritual life.” Art can actually be, she discovered, a “creative work in service to the whole, a philosophical framework for artists who see themselves as agents of social change.” She declares that “the great collective project has, in fact presented itself. It is that of saving the earth.” Time to make art “as if the world mattered” she says. Interconnectedness becomes an underlying new value. Therefore compassion becomes an underlying new value.
She developed groups for “deep listening” and recognized her new philosophy as a more “feminine” way of operating.28 Art can be service-oriented instead of self-oriented, as she came to learn.
Is Suzi Gablik’s journey in the late twentieth century an echo of Aquinas’s teaching in the thirteenth—that “the proper objects of the heart are truth and justice?” Is this one more instance of a premodern consciousness instructing the postmodern?
If truth and justice are the proper objects of the heart, then there is no room for sentimentalism, which is, as Anne Douglas has demonstrated, what happens when justice gets repressed. It is “rancid political consciousness,” as she puts it. It is the opposite of real religion and real spirituality.29
The vision of God
is arrived at
through justice.