Sacred Heart

← Encyclopedia

The Sacred Heart is the Roman Catholic devotion that takes the physical heart of Jesus as the visible sign of his love for humanity, and offers worship to that love through the image of the wounded, burning heart. It is at once an object of meditation and a practice: a way of directing prayer toward the suffering and the tenderness of Christ at the same point. The heart is not a chosen emblem but the organ itself, the muscle that beat in a particular body in first-century Galilee, pierced by a soldier’s lance after death and held, within the devotion, to be still the seat from which a measureless love is poured out. To honor it is to honor the love through the flesh that loved.

The wound in the side

The devotion has long roots, and they begin not at the heart but at the wound that opens onto it. The Gospel of John records that after Jesus died on the cross a soldier pierced his side with a lance, and at once there came out blood and water. The Fathers read that lanced side as the source from which the Church is born — a second Eve drawn from the side of the sleeping new Adam, the sacraments flowing from the opening as water and blood. The wound was, from the first, a door. What later writers did was to follow the wound inward, past the torn flesh of the side to the heart behind it, and to make of that interior the chamber of an intimacy.

The pivotal labor was done in the cloister. Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), abbot of Clairvaux and the great twelfth-century preacher of the Song of Songs, read the whole of Scripture through the nuptial image of the Bride and the Bridegroom, the soul and the Word, drawn into a union of wills he called unitas spiritus — a unity of spirit, never a fusion of substance. In his preaching the wounds of the crucified become clefts in the rock where the dove shelters, openings through which the soul reaches what the body conceals. The secret of the heart lies open through the holes of the body, he taught: the iron that passed through Christ’s side reached his soul, and through the visible wound the invisible wound of love is shown. This is the Cistercian affective turn, the discovery that the Passion is to be entered through feeling, that the meaning of the Song is opened by love and not by argument. Bernard’s friend William of St. Thierry gave the same spirituality a more systematic, trinitarian frame, holding that love is itself a kind of knowing. From the Cistercians the side-wound passed into the wider current of medieval mysticism as a fixed place of devotion, a refuge into which the soul could withdraw.

The Helfta women

What Bernard made an image, a circle of women made a private practice. At the Saxon convent of Helfta, in the second half of the thirteenth century, three visionary writers turned the wound and the heart behind it into the center of a recorded interior life. The convent followed Cistercian customs without formally belonging to the order, drew its spirituality from Bernard and William, and required its nuns to be schooled in Scripture and the liberal arts; its visions arrive saturated in the chant of the Mass and the Office, structured by the church year. This is the milieu treated under Helfta convent mysticism, and its writers must be kept distinct from one another. Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207–c. 1282), a former Beguine who entered Helfta only at the end of her life, brought with her the minne-mysticism of the Beguine movement of the Low Countries — Love as a feminine power, pursued in a storm of longing. Mechthild of Hackeborn (c. 1240–1298), the choirmistress, was called the Nightingale of Helfta for her voice. And Gertrude the Great (1256–c. 1302) — not the abbess, Gertrude of Hackeborn, who never wrote and was never canonized, but the visionary author of the Legatus Divinae Pietatis, the Herald of Divine Love — gave the devotion its founding scene. In a vision she rests her head against the wounded side of Christ and hears the beating of his heart. The heart is no longer only the source of the sacraments; it is a heart that can be listened to, leaned upon, loved in return. Catholic tradition names Gertrude and the Helfta women the medieval root of the devotion that the modern Church would later organize.

Alongside the Helfta visions ran the Franciscan stream. The Vitis Mystica, the “Mystical Vine” — a meditation on the Passion long ascribed to Bonaventure, the Seraphic Doctor, and earlier even to Bernard, though the Quaracchi editors later judged its authorship uncertain — dwells on the opened side and asks why the heart was wounded after death, when wounding could no longer cause pain. The answer it gives is that the heart was opened so that through the visible wound the invisible wound of love might be seen, and that the soul might enter and dwell there. The same Franciscan affective devotion to the Passion, the same dwelling on the five wounds, runs through the broader Rhineland and Low-Country currents collected under Rhineland mysticism — the school of Meister Eckhart, Tauler, and Suso — where the heart of Christ and the ground of the soul are pressed close together. By the late Middle Ages the wounded heart was a settled object of contemplation across the monastic and mendicant worlds, but it remained diffuse: a theme, not yet a cult.

Paray-le-Monial

The devotion in its modern, organized form belongs to seventeenth-century France. Between December 1673 and June 1675, a nun of the Order of the Visitation at Paray-le-Monial in Burgundy, Margaret Mary Alacoque, who had entered the convent in 1671, received a series of apparitions in which Christ showed her his heart — encircled with thorns, surmounted by a cross, burning with flame, the wound visible in its side. He asked, in these revelations, that the heart be honored: that amends be made to a love met with coldness, and that a feast be kept in its name. The reports met resistance within her own community. They found their decisive advocate in her confessor, the Jesuit Claude de la Colombière, who took the revelations seriously and lent them the weight of his order. From the Visitation cloister and the Society of Jesus the practice spread outward, gradually and against considerable opposition. A liturgical feast was eventually established, and in 1856 it was extended to the whole Latin rite. Alacoque, beatified by Pius IX in 1864, was canonized by Benedict XV in 1920. The wider institutional history — the 1899 consecration of the human race to the Sacred Heart under Leo XIII, the 1956 encyclical Haurietis aquas, the long quarrel with the Jansenists who attacked the devotion as crude attachment to mere flesh — belongs to Sacred-Heart devotion as the cult’s institutional career; what concerns the devotion as a discipline of prayer is what it asks the heart to do.

Reparation

What practitioners hold is specific, and it turns on a single act. The heart is not treated as a symbol the devotee has chosen, but as the actual heart of the incarnate God; and the love it represents is held to be wounded — not only by the lance, but by human indifference, by the coldness and ingratitude with which a measureless love is met. Out of this comes the devotion’s defining gesture: reparation, the consoling of a slighted love, the offering of love in return for love spurned. This is what distinguishes the Sacred Heart from a general piety of the heart. It is not enough to be warmed by it; the devotee is asked to console it, to make amends to it, to answer an injury done to God by the world’s neglect. The revelations reported to Alacoque attached promises to particular observances, among them communion on the first Friday of nine consecutive months and the keeping of a holy hour. These claims are tradition-internal: the Church accepts the devotion and has canonized Alacoque, while holding, as it does with all private revelation, that no Catholic is bound to believe the apparitions themselves. The doctrine the Church does bind is narrower and older — that the physical heart is venerated not as an organ in isolation but as inseparable from the divine Person, a sign that carries the believer past itself to the one it signifies.

The image and its turn

The image is among the most recognizable in Western religious art: a human heart girdled with thorns, pierced and dripping, surmounted by a small cross and ringed with rays or fire, often shown on the breast of Christ as he draws back his robe to disclose it. It belongs to a broad post-Reformation turn in Catholic piety toward the affective and the bodily — a Catholicism that answered Protestant austerity with warmth, blood, and the heart made visible, that put the literal organ where the Reformers had put the printed word. The historian Caroline Walker Bynum traced how the high Middle Ages had already learned to think the love of God through the body, through wounds and blood and the maternal imagery of a nursing Christ; the Counter-Reformation took that bodily devotion and gave it a single, arresting focus. The thorns and the flame carry the whole charge in one figure: the wound that is also a fire, the suffering that is also a tenderness, grief and ardor held at one point.

The devotion did not stay private. In France it was taken up as a public emblem. During the Revolution the peasants of the Vendée who rose for the king and the Church wore the Sacred Heart as a badge under the motto Dieu et Roi, God and King; the heart became the closest thing their army had to a uniform, and through them the sign of a Catholic and royalist order set against the secular republic. In the année terrible of 1870–71, with France invaded by Prussia and torn by the Paris Commune, the devotion swelled into a national vow, crowned by the building of the basilica of the Sacré-Cœur on the heights of Montmartre. The historian Raymond Jonas has shown how a prayer revealed to one cloistered nun became, over two centuries, an instrument of political meaning its origin did not predict — a private intimacy turned into a public sign of allegiance.

Scholarship and texts

The medieval substrate of the devotion is held in the great public-domain editions. The Helfta corpus survives in the Benedictine Revelationes Gertrudianae et Mechtildianae (Oudin, 1875–77), the workhorse Latin edition carrying Gertrude’s Legatus and Exercitia and the two Mechthilds’ books; Bernard’s Song sermons survive in the nineteenth-century English of Samuel J. Eales (Cantica Canticorum: Eighty-Six Sermons on the Song of Solomon, 1895) and in the Latin of the Migne Patrologia; the Vitis Mystica and the authentic Bonaventure are in the Quaracchi Opera Omnia (1882–1902). The modern doctrinal statement is Pius XII’s encyclical Haurietis aquas (1956), which traces the devotion from the lanced side of John’s Gospel through the Fathers and the medieval saints and insists that the heart venerated is the real heart of Christ, the natural sign of his threefold love.

The patristic image at the root of the whole tradition — the Church born from the pierced side, the sacraments flowing from the wound — was the subject of the young Karl Rahner’s doctoral dissertation, E latere Christi, whose conclusion presents the birth of the Church from Christ’s side as the common teaching of the Fathers; Rahner returned to the theme in his essay on the preliminaries to a theology of devotion to the Sacred Heart, reading the heart as the symbol of the whole inner person. Caroline Walker Bynum’s Jesus as Mother (University of California Press, 1982) set the medieval heart-devotion within the affective and bodily piety of the High Middle Ages, and Raymond Jonas’s France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart (University of California Press, 2000) is the standard account of its French political afterlife. The Vincentian scholarship on the heart of Christ in early-modern French spirituality, surveyed in the Vincentian Heritage Journal, situates Paray-le-Monial within the broader seventeenth-century French school of the interior life.

The heart as the seat of the self

The heart taken as the seat of the self, and a devotion organized around it, is not unique to this tradition. In Sufism the qalb is the inner heart in which God is known and remembered — al-Ghazali distinguished the lump of flesh that pumps blood from the subtle substance, connected to it, that is the real essence of the human and the place of gnosis, of dhikr, the remembrance of the divine name. In the Upanishads the heart-cave is the chamber in which the Self is found, the atman dwelling smaller than a grain of rice and larger than all the worlds. And in the Christian East the prayer of the heart, treated under Byzantine hesychasm, draws the mind down into the heart to rest in the divine name — a discipline of the heart’s interior that the liturgy frames but that lives, like the Western devotion, in the extra-liturgical labor of the person at prayer. These are parallel namings of the heart as the deep place where spirit and soul meet what exceeds them, each exact in its own grammar, none reducible to the others.

What the Sacred Heart names is narrower than any of them, and that narrowness is the point. The other traditions speak of the heart — the inner organ of every self, the cave where any seeker may find what is sought. This devotion does not speak of the heart in general. It speaks of one heart: this particular muscle, in this particular body, opened by this particular lance, shown to one seventeenth-century nun in a Burgundian cloister and asking, of all things, to be consoled. The general heart is a place one enters. This heart is a person who asks something back. To love it is not to descend into one’s own interior but to turn outward toward a wounded other and make amends — and it is in that turning, the answering of a slighted love rather than the finding of a hidden self, that the devotion locates the whole of what it means.

→ Related: Rhineland Mysticism · Bernard Of Clairvaux · Bonaventure · Helfta Convent Mysticism · Gertrude Of Hackeborn · Beguine Mysticism · Jesus Christ · Sacred Heart Devotion · Christianity · Mysticism · Sufism · Meister Eckhart · Liturgy · Spirit · Soul