The Heart of the Matter

Papa Smurf:     Knowing what to do doesn’t come from here [pointing at his head] … it comes from here [pointing at Patrick’s midriff], where it matters most.

Patrick:             My spleen?

Papa Smurf:     No, your heart! I’m trying to have a moment here, you whippersnapper!

The Smurfs (2011)

The following is taken from the trailer for Disney’s short film Inner Workings,¹ which was screened in cinemas as a prelude to the studio’s latest animated classic, Moana² (I substitute bold text where the trailer uses blue, and italic where it uses red):

Are you a party animal or a pragmatist?

Are you sensible or spontaneous?

Do you follow your head or your heart?

 

Plodding, logical, mechanical head versus fun, free, romantic heart. Right? Thanks to Ventrilock at freedigitalphotos.net.

The film features Paul, a nondescript employee of a firm enticingly titled Boring, Boring, and Glum, along with his anthropomorphised internal organs, whose struggle for power over control of Paul and his actions constitutes the premise of the story. Although his lungs, stomach, and bladder play minor roles in the action, Paul’s brain and heart are clearly the two candidates for the top management position in his body, and they have very different ideas about how things ought to be run. The heart is all in favour of dancing in the shower, eating ginormous stacks of syrup-smothered pancakes, tootling off on spontaneous beach trips, and chatting to the redhead running the sunglasses stall. The brain, meanwhile, is focussed entirely on getting to work, so that Paul can sit at a desk doing what is apparently the most tedious job ever, in a room full of people who are so uniformly dull that they even eat lunch in monotonous synchrony. Moreover, every one of the heart’s suggestions is met by the brain with a conviction that it is bound to end up getting Paul killed, for example by aquatic electrocution, obesity-induced heart disease, or the attack of an angry shark. Each scenario the brain envisions is played out for us the viewers in 2D-animated form, finishing with Paul being interred in one of an increasingly amusing selection of coffins appropriate to the nature of his demise – so the obesity one is absolutely enormous, and the shark-attack one still has the angry shark attached to it (in which case, goodness knows how they managed to actually get him into the coffin, but hey, it’s a deliberately daft fictional scenario within another deliberately daft fictional scenario, so I probably shouldn’t plough too much thought into the matter).

Head or heart? We’re used to this kind of language: the head is envisioned as the boring, pragmatic one, concerned with what is factual or reasonable, while the heart represents what we really desire for our happiness regardless of the practicalities involved. Familiar as the dichotomy is, however, it does not by any means constitute an inherent or universal notion about the way human thoughts and feelings function. In the ancient world, it was by and large the heart that was considered the centre of thought – both rational and emotional. The brain, meanwhile, was generally assumed to be rather more pointless. Consider Ancient Egyptian embalming practice: the heart was important enough to warrant being replaced into an embalmed corpse before it was buried, while the brain, as we all know from Horrible Histories, was mashed up using a pointy implement and pulled out through the nose.³ Similarly, Aristotle believed the heart to be the seat of the mind and the brain to function as merely a cooling system for the blood; Lucretius, the Roman scientist-poet (because in the good old days of Ancient Rome you could write scientific-cum-philosophical works in hexameter verse and actually be taken seriously) also considered the chest to be where the animus, the consciousness, was located.⁴ The Greek φρήν (phrēn), literally ‘midriff’, can be translated equally plausibly as ‘heart’, meaning the seat of emotion, or as ‘mind’, meaning the seat of intelligence and reason, depending on context;⁵ the Latin pectus occupies a very similar semantic field, sometimes even standing in for the soul or even the individual himself.⁶ (Granted, some people challenged these ideas with theories about neuroscience that resemble modern ones more closely, but their ideas didn’t really take hold.)

Greek and Roman thinkers weren’t helped in their understanding of physiology by the fact that dissection was illegal in their societies, so they probably didn’t even know what a brain looked like.

The heart is also represented as the seat of rational thought of the kind we would tend to locate in the brain in the Bible. The Hebrew for ‘heart’ is לֵב (lēv) and, though it’s usually translated as exactly that, some contexts demand a different rendering. Consider the following;⁷ in each case the word in bold is being used to translate לֵב: 

“But whoever did not pay attention to the word of the Lord left his slaves and his livestock in the field.” – Exodus 9:21

“Give your servant therefore an understanding mind to govern your people, that I may discern between good and evil, for who is able to govern this your great people?” – 1 Kings 3:9

“Then I sent to him, saying, ‘No such things as you say have been done, for you are inventing them out of your own mind.’” – Nehemiah 6:8

“He takes away understanding from the chiefs of the people of the earth and makes them wander in a trackless waste.” – Job 12:24

“O simple ones, learn prudence; O fools, learn sense.” – Proverbs 8:5

That last verse is particularly telling: it’s one of those instances of repetition of the same idea using different vocabulary that positively infests Hebrew poetry, and so the meaning of one half informs the correct understanding of the other.

Now, I’d like to nip in the bud any suggestion that the locating of consciousness, reason, and intelligence in the heart somehow amounts to an outdated, unscientific inaccuracy in the Biblical text that undermines its authority as true. What’s going on is a metaphor, exactly like our own colouring of the heart as the seat of emotion and desire: we know the heart is really nothing more than a prime pump for the circulatory system, but we still say things like, “I love her with all my heart,” or, “He’s heartbroken,” and don’t consider them falsehoods. The metaphor is culturally understood, just like when we talk about, say, the sun rising. (Plus, even if the Bible were affirming something that seemed to contradict the conclusions of modern science, I’d suggest taking the side that’s backed up by divine infallibility.⁸)

 

Just a pump. Thanks to dream designs at freedigitalphotos.net.

Furthermore, I’d like to make it clear that the Bible also refers to the heart the way we do, as the seat of emotion, but since this is an idea we’re familiar with, I felt it needed less concerted demonstration. Nevertheless, a few examples (drawn from some of the same books as those given above) might be appropriate to demonstrate the word’s breadth of meaning:

“And the king said to me, ‘Why is your face sad, seeing you are not sick? This is nothing but sadness of the heart.’ Then I was very much afraid.” – Nehemiah 2:2

“If my heart has been enticed toward a woman, and I have lain in wait at my neighbour’s door…” – Job 31:9

“A glad heart makes a cheerful face, but by sorrow of heart the spirit is crushed.” – Proverbs 15:13

So what’s my point? And what has Inner Workings got to do with any of this?

Well, first off, I think it’s worth bearing in mind, when one is reading the Old Testament and stumbles across an instance of the word ‘heart’, that it does have this very holistic meaning. The ancient-world heart, the Biblical heart, is not some wild, passionate, reckless force that operates independently of reason, intelligence, and pragmatism. If Inner Workings had been written by a team of ancient-world thinkers, there would have been no representation of the brain and heart as opposing forces; the two would have been one and the same. (It would therefore have been rather a boring film, so it’s probably just as well it wasn’t written by a team of ancient-world thinkers.) Knowing this helps inform the way we interpret and apply passages that mention the heart. Try Psalm 57:7, for instance: “My heart is steadfast, O God, my heart is steadfast! I will sing and make melody!” This is not just about emotional stability, but being deliberately grounded in a sound understanding of the truth – think, ‘my mind is steadfast’ – which is the origin of the desire to praise. I’m not by any means suggesting that the emotional side of things be supplanted by an entirely rational interpretation; rather, the two need to go together. Too often, I think, we detach doctrine from affection – head from heart – when to do so is simply unbiblical and very unhelpful.

There’s also a bit of a warning to be picked up, particularly for academic types like myself. When the Bible warns against following the desires of the heart, it doesn’t just mean the kind of unruly, spontaneous passions generated by Paul’s heart in Inner Workings. The dull, practical purposes of the brain are actually just as deadly. This is, in fact, exactly what Paul’s brain realises at the most poignant moment of the film; as Paul sits in the dull office doing dull work surrounded by dull people, it envisions another version of his death, where he grows old in perpetual dullness and then clambers into a coffin of his own volition. The ending is exactly the same as in every previous scenario. Paul’s brain realises that its own desires will kill him as surely as the heart’s will, however comparatively sensible they seem. The solution the film offers is a compromise between brain and heart that allows Paul to enjoy himself without things getting completely out of hand; what isn’t dealt with is that Paul is still going to die, whether or not he has a nicer time on his way to the coffin that he would otherwise have done. Real life, ongoing and meaningful existence, doesn’t come from following the desires of the heart, the mind, or the ancient-world combination thereof; it comes from being in Christ, who has life in himself, and to whom all those desires are to be submitted. Thank God that he has redeemed both our rational and our emotional aspects that they might be used together in service of his glory.

Footnotes 

¹ One wonders whether there’s really any point making a trailer for a film that’s only going to include a few more minutes of footage than the trailer contains, but if you feel inclined to view it, here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoP9OQxSd9c. 

² It’s really good and I encourage you to see it if you get the chance. Here’s a taster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=93lrosBEW-Q. 

³ I couldn’t find the song about mummification, but you can have this little sketch instead if you like: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5kFVgHwEkLE. 

⁴ Lucretius’ poem is given the title De Rerum Natura, ‘About the Nature of Things’. William Ellery Leonard swapped hexameter for iambic pentameter when he translated it in 1916: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.02.0131. 

⁵ It’s the second word on this page; click on ‘LSJ’ for the full rundown: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=frhn&la=greek. 

⁶ Click on ‘Lewis & Short’: http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/morph?l=pectus&la=la. 

⁷ And yes, I did just stick לֵב into the STEP Bible search function and browse the results, so do feel free to do the same: https://www.stepbible.org/?q=version=ESV|version=WLC|strong=H3820a&options=HNVUG. STEP Bible is a thoroughly excellent resource and really intuitive to use; you basically just stick whatever it is you’re looking for (translation, book, word) into the search bar and hey presto, everything you wanted to know is right there – although I’ll be even happier once they get the Hebrew tagged and the Old Testament Peshitta on the system. 

⁸ A point I touched on quite significantly last week as well.