On Theology VI - Communicatio Cordium: The Composite Hypostasis as the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ

Neo-chalcedonian christology, medieval mysticism, identity with Christ, and the prayer of the heart

*A Post-Script Preface*

This ended up becoming quite long. I have procrastinated writing this because it is so significant and personal to me. Given that fact it felt overwhelming to embark upon writing this. Consequently, the entry rapidly became flooded with citations and quotes which are the fruit of years of devotion to these topics, extending this piece of writing further than I intended. Some sections are redundant and some are not the most well written. Above all, this piece suffers from the malady of trying to say everything, but in the content explored below I cannot help but see everything summed up in One. For that I apologize to the reader. With that being said, however, this week I decided to break through and simply write it. And, though very lengthy for this platform, I hope a full reading will be rewarding to you. It’s basically four sections long. (1) An introduction to rehash the previous entries and how they lead us here. (2) A presentation of the doctrine of the composite hypostasis in orthodox neochalcedonian christology with relevant citations. (3) An in-depth gloss of relevant passages from the mystics who write about the divine-human heart (as loaded as this section is with citations, so much was still left out!) and its obvious comport with the doctrine exemplified in the previous section. And, (4) a series of conclusions which tries to set out why this is meaningful at every level of the christian community; how God wills to reform, revive, and reinvigorate us in the Sacred Heart of Christ. That is how the doctrine of the composite hypostasis and the mysticism of the Sacred Heart might form our inner lives of prayer; how it may transform our minds philosophically; how it may be the grounds for a renewed ecclesiology that has the power to heal schism and unite the fractured Body of Christ; and how this Body of Christ, the church, may become a political reality in the world.

The footnotes section also, the depth and breadth of the citations in this piece, from ancient to modern, eastern and western, Greek and Latin and Russian, philosophical, dogmatic and mystical, hopes to serve as a witness to this ecclesiology which I think is latent in the christology explicated below. In the composite hypostasis, and in the Sacred Heart alike, the church simply is Christ existing as a community; the Totus Christus. Hopefully the breadth of the sources cited will evince the spirit of the famous Thomas Merton passage: “If I can unite in myself the thought and devotion of Eastern and Western Christendom, the Greek and the Latin Fathers, the Russian and the Spanish mystics, I can prepare in myself the reunion of divided Christians. From that secret and unspoken unity in myself can eventually come a visible and manifest unity of all Christians. If we want to bring together what is divided, we cannot do so by imposing one division upon the other. If we do this, the union is not Christian. It is political and doomed to further conflict. We must contain all the divided worlds in ourselves and transcend them in Christ”¹. That ‘secret and unspoken unity’ of the Church just is the person Jesus Christ, and His Sacred Heart. I hope that shall become manifest in what follows.

Introduction:

Heretofore it has been my hope to plumb the depths of christian theology and show there, in its viscera, the christological identity of prayer and thought. The same Word is the subject—and object—of both. The Word is the word we pray, making himself personally identical to us and lifting us up in to the life of the Trinity and by His Spirit “making intercession” (Rom8:26) in us and bubbling up in the cry “Abba! Father!” (Gal4:6); and, the Word is the word we think as the Image we behold with “the eyes of our understanding” (Eph1:18), saving us from being “irrational animals” (2Pet2:12) “without understanding” (1Tim1:7) and filling us with the “all… understanding” (Col1:9) and the “full assurance of understanding” (Col2:2). Furthermore, it is not with a “merely human” (1Cor3:3) mind that we think, contemplate, behold, commune with, and love God, but with “the mind of Christ” (1Cor2:16). There is no final division between the work of the human mind to know and the work of God to reveal Himself, for Jesus Christ, as the “one mediator between God and humanity” (1Tim2:5), IS both. He has in fact taken our intellectual faculties as His own, deifying them, and granting us the knowledge of God. Christian theology is therefore opposed neither to the speculative rationalism of philosophy nor to the personal warmth of prayer, scriptural exegesis, and mystical experience—it is, in truth, a necessity that it accomplish both. Just as a body without a soul is not a human being, nor a rational soul without a body a human being, but only together do they become what they truly are. To do the former (philosophy) without the latter (true prayer) would be to limit oneself to the “natural mind” which “receiveth not the things of the Spirit of God” (1Cor2:14); to do the latter without the former risks becoming “vainly puffed up” (Col2:18) by spiritual experiences untethered to understanding and in direct opposition to the apostolic command to “think on these things” (Phil4). Thus far, then, the work has been focused on resolving the inherent tensions of a theology which binds itself to abstractions about nature—is naturally minded—and the strictures of formal logic, and to recover what protestant spiritual writer A.W. Tozer called “experiential heart theology” which belongs to the tradition of a “grand army of fragrant saints”²

With this entry, however, I hope to make my first foray into the actual weaving together of the knowing proper to speculative or dogmatic thought and the knowing proper to mystical experience and the prayer of the heart. In the former domain we have the technical and speculative account of the “composite hypostasis” of neochalcedonian christology, in the latter the spirituality and prayer of the mystics of the “Sacred Heart of Jesus”. I hope to show the latter to be the concrete spiritual experience of the former with no remainder—the same Jesus is equally rationally contemplated by Maximus and Leontius and mystically experienced by Gertrude and Mechthild. There is no division nor separation. The prior entries have sought to say of the speculative and dogmatic enterprise “we can know God with our minds (now His by incarnation) and speak of Him truthfully”; now I hope to say of the spiritual life of prayer “we can know God with our hearts and, by experience, truly feel the depths of His love”. We began this series with the passage of St. Evagrius: “The Breast of the Lord [Jesus Christ], is the knowledge of God; one who reclines on it will be endowed with theology”³. Now we aim to show that the Sacred Heart that beats in the Lord’s breast, experienced by the lovers of God, and witnessed to by many mystics, is not only not at odds with the church’s most powerful dogmatic minds but is, in fact, in perfect harmony with orthodox christology—we shall do this in opposition to a narrative which categorizes mystics and mysticism as at best an eccentric ornament to the orthodox faith and at worst a dangerous path of heresy which is at odds with the dogma of the church. This matters because the church, as the Body of Christ, simply is the reality—as community—of the composite hypostasis and the Sacred Heart. If the church’s self consciousness is properly formed by Christ, and by the proclamation of Christ, we may at last recover our vocation as Christians to be God in the world—to be the Body of Jesus Christ.

The Composite Hypostasis

The Council of Chalcedon 451AD

“For it was for this purpose that the Word of God was made man, and he who was the Son of God became the Son of Man: so that man, having been taken into the Word and receiving adoption, might become the son of God. For it was not possible that we could have attained to incorruptibility and immortality, unless we had been united to incorruptibility and immortality. But how could we be joined to incorruptibility and immortality, unless incorruptibility and immortality had first become what we ourselves are?”⁴ So says St. Irenaeus of Lyons (c130AD-c202AD) in his magisterial work “Against Hereies”. He adds in the next section: “For I have shown from the Scriptures, that no-one of the sons of Adam is, absolutely and in every respect, called ‘God’ or named ‘Lord.’ But that He [Christ] is Himself, in His own right, and beyond all men who ever lived, God and Lord and King eternal, and the incarnate Word, proclaimed by all the prophets and by the Spirit himself — this may be seen by everyone who has attained even to a small portion of the truth. Now the Scriptures would not have testified these things about Him, if, like others, He had been a mere man. But the divine Scriptures do testify both these things of Him: that He had in Himself that pre-eminent birth that is from the Most High Father; and also that He experienced that pre-eminent generation which is from the Virgin.”⁵ The central mystery of the Christian faith has always been Jesus Christ; and in the scriptural and traditional proclamations about Him is an inescapable paradox: this mysterious union of two opposite natural predicates, this dual predication being made of “one and the same Son”. He is a Son both in His eternal generation from the Father—His divinity—and His generation from Mary—His humanity. And, Irenaeus says this is not simply the fruit of “later” catholic dogmatic speculation but rather is “from the scriptures”. The scriptures express this duality and unity, and the saints of God immediately begin to attempt to make sense of it. Those who did so, faithfully to the scriptures and to the church, were called orthodox; those who did so unfaithfully were corrected for their heterodoxy or labeled as heretics⁶. Though, neither Irenaeus nor Nicaea brought this project, of thinking through the gospel’s dual predication of divine and human idioms to one and the same subject, to an end. 400 years later (and now two millennia later) the church continued to attempt to reconcile itself rationally and dogmatically to this biblical grammar.

In that time St. Sophronius of Jerusalem, mentor to St. Maximus the Confessor and eminent neochalcedonian theologian, repeats many of the more ancient orthodox Irenaean interpretations of scripture: “Whole is the God who is hymned [by christians], whole is the same who appeared as a human being; perfect is the same God who is acknowledged and perfect is the same human being who is revealed.” The unity and wholeness as well as the duality of divinity and humanity. Yet more, by the time of St. Sophronius the church was becoming more capable of exceedingly specific and intricate grammar for what is ‘two’ and what is ‘one’ in Christ: “For from two natures He possessed the union of Godhead and humanity, and was recognized in two perfect natures, Godhead and humanity. Neither did any change or mingling intervene in the union, nor was any division or severing admitted into the difference and duality of forms or essences after the union… for the elements [of nature] are united hypostatically”. While the heretic Nestorius was believed to posit that there were two subjects/persons in Christ along with His two natures, on the other hand was the heretic Eutyches who believed in the unity of Christ’s person but collapsed the distinction between the two natures, positing only “one incarnate nature of the Word”. Sophronius, and the orthodox tradition, counters by saying the duality of the two natures are united in one hypostasis—they are “united hypostatically”. The latter unity, he says, maddens Nestorius and the former duality enrages Eutyches because they “did not know the power of the hypostatic union in accordance with which the Word became flesh without change, and the flesh, endowed with soul and mind, was divinized without undergoing change”. On the one hand (Eutychean monophysites) we are “thrown into the sea of confusion” and on the other we are “borne into the pit of division” (Nestorian two-subjects). Sophronius says we cannot find our way out of the perils of either confused sea nor divided pit unless we cease from “shrink[ing] from speaking of the composite hypostasis as One”⁷.

What is one is the Hypostasis/Person of Christ and what is two are His natures. The natures, though, are nothing without Him who unites them and makes them real; so while there are two natures there are not two separate existences. As Leontius of Byzantium says “the term 'Christ' does not signify a nature, but a hypostasis (person), in association with which the natures are observed, and in which the persona is defined”⁸. The hypostasis, Leontius says, is “that which exists for itself”⁹, and which unites in itself every natural predicate it enhypostasizes. Because an abstract nature (for our purposes ‘Divinity and Humanity’), the Byzantine says, “never exists for itself”. And, while the enhypostasized natural predicates retain their essential integrity, they achieve, in act, hypostatic identity with each other. This interpenetration of attributes and predicates in the hypostasis of Christ was called by the greek fathers “perichoresis”, and with that term the union, identity and distinction is signified. As Hegel notes of any given thing, even the most simple, it is a coincidence of many different essences in one Thing. Salt may be white, and square, and savory, and small etc. “All these many properties” he says, “are in one simple Here, in which they therefore interpenetrate”¹⁰. In this interpenetration, perichoresis, each essence shares its properties with the other so that tasting this small white square is also to taste its savoriness. In order, though, for this to happen the principle of the Thing’s existence must be no-thing—not an essence at all—allowing it to receive and generate whatever natural predicates it must. Hegel calls this principle (logos) the “indifferent medium”¹¹ wherein all the difference coincides and is identical. “The difference” Hegel therefore says “is thus only in thought”¹². In this he agrees Leontius of Byzantium who says “to recognize the natures 'purely on the conceptual level' is to make them non-existent and non-essential, or else confused and obliterated”¹³.

Hegel’s statement that abstract opposites can interpenetrate and exist together in a simple unity rings eerily similar to our neochalcedonian fathers; but even more specifically does his insistence that the essential differences exist “in thought only”. The formula that the two nature’s of Christ were different “in thought only” was, according to Sebastian Mateiescu, popularized by pro-chalcedonian emperor Justinian’s “Edict on True Faith” in 551AD and adopted by the Second Council of Constantinople in 553AD¹⁴. The formula teaches that the hypostasis of Christ actually and symmetrically is both His humanity and His divinity in such a way that they can be differentiated “in thought only”, or abstractly. The hypostasis is therefore an “indifferent medium” which “exists in itself” and really is the whole of it’s essential differences. As Jordan Daniel Wood has convincingly argued the hypostasis must be “irreducible to, inseparable from, and indifferent toward the nature it is”¹⁵. Consequently, hypostasis “can receive—and be—utterly incommensurable natures (i.e. divine and human, infinite and finite, created and uncreated etc.) without diminishing them” for “hypostasis in itself possesses nothing natural to oppose any nature”¹⁶.

Though branches and leaves and roots and fruits and trunks are all essentially opposed to each other, and exclusive of each other, they are all united—and identical—in the hypostasis of the tree¹⁷. The great poet W.B. Yeats observes the mystery of hypostasis, saying: “O chestnut tree, great rooted blossomer, Are you the leaf, the blossom or the bole? O body swayed to music, O brightening glance, How can we know the dancer from the dance?”¹⁸. In the hypostasis of a dancing dancer, both human body and abstract essence of “the dance” become identical. One may point to a couple dancing and say “that is the tango”; in such an observation, however, the humanity of the dancers is not lost, it is in fact their very bodies which concretize and reveal the dance to be what it is. The poet is right indeed, there is no abstract tango. And, there is no abstract, that is natural, God-World relation.

The doctrine of the composite hypostasis is therefore the doctrine not only of the union of divinity and humanity but of their Personal identity, and it matters for us because it values the work of abstract thought but recognizes its penultimate nature. The true End of thought terminates in personal knowledge of, and identity with, God in Christ Jesus. Because both natures simply are Him the natures communicate their properties to each other and allow for a univocal experience of abstractly opposed natures. Though it may always be truly said of God that He is, by nature, unknowable, unspeakable and insensible, in the Incarnation God becomes knowable, speakable, and sensible in the humanity of Jesus. “This is the hypostasis and the composite Person”, says St. Sophronius, “which is composed from an unconfused blending and does not know a segmentation of coming together, and it obtains an undivided existence that is one and remains one, neither becoming two insofar as it exists as one, nor confusing and leading to one unity and an identity of nature and essence—those elements from which it is naturally constituted.”¹⁹ Leontius of Byzantium, too, spoke of this identity in Christ and the biblical form of “double predication”. In this, he discerned as Sophronius did the perils of confusion or division and yet he also found safety in the composite hypostasis of Christ, saying “we are well protected against both dangers [of confusion and division], thank God: the difference in what is united is proclaimed, even in their union, by the double predication of nature; and the identity of person is summed up by the concurrence of the united natures in one hypostasis.”²⁰. The “parts” of Christ are His natures, the whole of which is His person— “the true is the whole”²¹. The parts though are not parts which signal incompleteness—God is not a “part” of Christ in that sense, but is “whole into whole” God and Man. Therefore the same Leontius says “One has to take this reference to "parts" prudently; for I do not say they are parts because they are naturally incomplete, but because they comprise together the persona of the hypostasis in Christ.”²²

The composition is therefore not “natural”, that is it is not of the necessity of nature, but it is personal. It is the fruit of the Love that God is. The natures do not change abstractly, becoming some new third nature. Divinity remains infinite, uncreated, incorporeal, impassible and unchanging etc. while humanity remains finite, created, corporeal, passible and changing. Instead, the natures communicate their activities, idioms and properties to each other, not abstractly, not naturally, but concretely and hypostatically in the Person of Christ.

Leontius of Jerusalem elucidates just this point against the monophysites who were comfortable with the language of composition (they spoke of “one composite nature” of the Lord) but feared of a division that would come from predicating a duality of natures “composed” in One Person. He says: “So that we may take account of everything, though, how is it that you who say it’s necessary to recognize one natural name for the composite whole affirm two opposite names for it, calling it both ‘created’ and ‘uncreated’? What’s even more incredible is the fact that, though you say that only ‘the uncreated’ and ‘the impassible’ about Him are ‘from the divinity’, but ‘the created’ and ‘the passible’ are ‘from the body’, you’ve asserted that you ‘do not hear’, that you ‘do not say’, these things about Christ as applying to a particular part, but on the basis of the whole Christ! We concede that you’d like to go over the whole thing again, but we just have to make the point to your partisans that, if you really think opposite things about each of the realities in Christ, giving them equal honour, and if you recognize the whole of Christ by nature to be of this kind—something that’s surely said about His whole hypostasis on the basis of both of the natures that are in Him—then His divinity is just as truly passible and created as is His flesh, and His flesh is just as impassible and uncreated as His divinity. Such assertions aren’t just rife with blasphemy; they’re also clearly impossible. It’s never yet been possible for opposites to be affirmed of anything in the same sense, in the same respect, and in precisely the same way”²³. Leontius’ rebuke hits home because if the monophysites hope to continue speaking in terms of “created” and “uncreated” in Christ, the question remains: what is it that is either created or uncreated? The answer being His natures, which abstractly cannot be identical as the very definition of the one is its opposition and negation of the other. But, hypostatically—personally—they can interpenetrate.

The natures therefore only are insofar as they are Him. So, His “parts” are whole because He—Himself, in Person—is whole, because there is no divinity nor humanity apart from Jesus Christ. It is not a blending of two subjects with two natures in this composition, rather, it is the identity of the two natures as One Subject, and the perichoresis of their natural activities. Humanity can thus become divinized, share in the life of God, while remaining human because the same whole Christ is both—and God can become man in the faithful, while remaining True God because the same Christ is both. The ground of our deification then in in the hypostasis of Christ, for in Him we can speak of the predicates of one nature actually in the other. As Robert Jenson notes: “That God the Son and a man are one hypostasis in Christ thus means that they have one capacity for being narratively describable, that any sequence of events predicable of one must be formulable as predicated of the other. If “Jesus died” is a true assertion, then, so and only so, is “God the Son died.” If “God the Son shares the Father’s universal rule” is a true assertion, then so, and only so, is “The man Jesus shares the Father’s universal rule”²⁴. Jesus, in His holy gospel, has therefore made it possible for us as humans to receive divine predicates—to “share in the divine nature” (2Pet1:4).

St. Maximus the Confessor unceasingly limns this theme of our deification, the bearing of God in our flesh, through Christ’s Person: “through His assumption of human flesh possessing intellectual soul, He became the very thing “that He was not,” that is, composite in His hypostasis, “remaining” exactly “what He was,” that is, sim­ple in nature, in order to save mankind… He became what is the common lot from all these, a human being, indeed God visible in the flesh, to those capable of seeing beyond the flesh”²⁵. Maximus then concludes: “It was, then, the Word Himself, who strictly without change emptied Himself to the limit of our passible nature. By taking on flesh He subjected Himself truly to being per­ceived by the senses, and so was called the “visi­ble God” and “God on earth.” Through the flesh, which by nature is passible, He manifested His infinitely immea­surable power, for “it”—obviously the flesh—was “blended with God and He became one, the stronger side predomi­nating,” precisely because it was assumed by the Word, who deified it by identifying it with His own hypostasis”²⁶. God deifies us by identifying us with His own hypostasis, baptizing us into His Person. This is why Maximus says of the believing man that “he himself by grace is and is called God, just as God by His condescension is and is called man for the sake of man, and also so that the power of this reciprocal disposi­tion might be shown forth herein, a power that divinizes man through his love for God, and humanizes God through His love for man. And by this beautiful exchange, it ren­ders God man by reason of the divinization of man, and man God by reason of the Incarnation of God. For the Logos of God (who is God) wills always and in all things to accomplish the mystery of His Incarnation”²⁷. God is truly transcendent in Christ because God personally is both God and not-God, allowing for creatures to truly know Him and become one with Him. “He Himself is always the same” Maximus avers “and is beyond all change or alteration, becoming neither greater nor lesser, He nonetheless becomes all things to everyone out of His ex­ceeding goodness: lowly for the lowly, lofty for the lofty, and, for those who are deified through His grace, He is God by nature, and Deity beyond all knowledge as God beyond God.”²⁸

Having come only this far we can suffice it to say, the entire mystery of the Christian faith has always been the God-Man Jesus, and the “double predication” of different natures to “one and the same” subject: Jesus, the Lord, the Son of God. A double predication which passes from Christ to those who are “in Him”, who are “filled with all the fulness of God” (Eph3:19). In exchange for bearing the unnatural marks of corruption, sin, and death we are granted by Christ, in the gospel, to bear the supernatural marks of Divinity. Maximus says that in the faithful “Christ is always born mysteriously and willingly, becoming incarnate through those who are saved. He causes the soul which begets him to be a virgin-mother who, to speak briefly, does not bear the marks of nature subject to corruption and [carnal] generation”²⁹. As Christ becomes incarnate in us then “we shall pass from the grace which is in faith to the grace of vision, when our God and Savior Jesus Christ will indeed transform us into himself by taking away from us the marks of corruption and will bestow on us the original mysteries which have been represented for us through sensible symbols here below”³⁰. The “original mysteries” are all united in the One Mystery which was hidden and is now revealed in the gospel “which is: Christ in you, the hope of glory” (Col1:27)—(though we shall, in the following section, evince this identity of sensible symbol and original mystery in the devotion of the Sacred Heart of Jesus). The apostle Paul continually bears this witness saying “great is the mystery of godliness: God was manifested in the flesh” (1Tim3:16) and “the Mystery of God is Christ” (Col2:2). St. Maximus the Confessor agrees concerning the Mystery: “This mystery is obviously the ineffable and incomprehensible union according to hypostasis of divinity and humanity. This union brings humanity into perfect identity, in every way, with divinity, through the principle of the hypostasis, and from both humanity and divinity it completes the single composite hypostasis, without creating any diminishment due to the essential difference of the natures. The result, as I said, is that the hypostasis of the two is one, and their natural difference remained inviolate, and thus the quantity of each of the united natures is preserved undiminished even after their union. For when and wherever things united suffer no change or alteration, the essential principle of each of them remains pure and unmixed. And insofar as the essential principle of each remained inviolate even after the union, the natures retained their integrity in every way, neither nature disowning anything properly its own because of the union.”³¹

Yet, more! Though “each [nature] remained inviolate even after the union” and they “retained their integrity in every way, neither nature disowning anything properly its own because of the union”, both natures share themselves with the other in His Person. “He elevated nature to Himself, making nature itself another mystery”³² says Maximus. This, finally, is the classic doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum. Given that He Himself is both natures they communicate their idioms to each other as we have said above. Jesus, as man, is called the Almighty God—and God, as God, suffers and dies on the cross. Maximus says “He is not only man, for He Himself is also God, and neither is He only beyond being, for He Himself is also a human being, thus He is neither mere man, nor naked God, “for the preeminent lover of mankind has truly become man.”³³ Notice, in this passage, that Jesus Christ is neither mere man nor naked God—pure abstract nature—but truly and actually is the God-Man and that “out of His infinite longing for human beings”³⁴. The proper activity of each nature is at work in the other. “The whole man wholly pervading the whole God, and becoming everything that God is”³⁵ he says, and this happens so radically as to say “the natures were innovated”³⁶. Consequently, because “the flesh in question was His own […] the Incarnate Word can be called a “Suffering God””³⁷. Therefore, “His sufferings are wondrous, for they have been renewed by the natural divine power of the one who suffered”³⁸. Finally, on this point, Maximus speaks about the miracle of Christ’s walking “on the surface of the sea as if it were dry land” he says: “By walking about in this manner, He shows that the natural activity of His own flesh is inseparable from the power of His divinity, since movement from one place to another is an activity' belonging to His human nature but not to the Divinity beyond infinity and being, which is united to it ac­cording to hypostasis”³⁹. The composite hypostasis therein shows that all God-talk receives and is determined by the content and character of the life of this Man Jesus. For, while a man, “the natural activity of His own flesh is inseparable from the power of His divinity”. And, this overflows—it “boils over” (ebullitio) says Meister Eckhart—into us. So that we, as human creatures, may become inseparable from the power of His divinity through love.

In conclusion to this section, we can surmise thus far that the doctrine of the composite hypostasis, as a dogmatic and speculative development by the church’s sharpest minds, opens up into all sorts of useful philosophical pursuits (“He elevated nature to Himself, making nature another Mystery” means that nature, or being, as a mystery which is the preoccupation of philosophy is in fact caused by the Incarnation). Maximus, Leontius, Eriugena, Cusanus, Eckhart and other neochalcedonians can look Plato, Plotinus, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schelling in the eye and meaningfully contribute to the pursuit of wisdom and human knowledge. But, it is not this coincidentia oppositorum between philosophy and theology in the Word of God that I hope to pursue here, but rather to show that this doctrine of the “composite hypostasis” not finally be accepted as a token of doctrine without “pressing on to know the LORD” (Hos6:3) in prayer, and receiving there in the warm feeling of the conscious experience of Divine Love identity with God in Christ. For if it is true that the Mystery of God is Christ, and both God and Man really are personally identical in Christ then God is available to us in Him not only to be thought of and spoken of, but to be known and loved and spoken to; to be personally addressed by us as Beloved and experienced as Lover. And, here, in this mystical union of cognition and sensation, of actual experience, in Christ may be born a revived ecclesiology of incarnation.

A final connecting word between this section and the next must be given. The connection between the aforementioned neochalcedonian christology and the following passages from various medieval mystics is the emphasis upon actual experience as the consummation of this endeavor. That the doctrine of the composite hypostasis is the ground of mystical experience is not my own fashioning, nor are we making some inordinate leap from a dry and dogmatic “here” to a robust and mystical “there”. Maximus himself, in the same passage just cited above (footnote 28), pointed to the Mystery’s knowability by experience:

“The word of Scripture recognizes that knowledge of divine realities is twofold. On the one hand, there is relative knowledge based only on reasoning and concepts, and lacking the actual perception of what is known through experience, and it is this knowledge that we use to order our affairs in this present life. On the other hand, there is knowledge that is true and properly so called, which is gained only by actual experience—without reasoning and concepts—and provides, by grace through participation, a whole perception of the One who is known. By this latter knowledge we attain, in the future rest, the supernatural divinization that is actualized unceasingly. They say, moreover, that relative knowledge based on reasoning and ideas can motivate our desire for the participative knowledge acquired through active engagement. They also say that this active, experiential knowledge, which by participation furnishes the direct perception of what is known, negates the relative knowledge based on reasoning and ideas.”⁴⁰

It is this “actual experience” which I hope to move on to now, to show that the symbolic and mystical language of the Sacred Heart maps perfectly on to this speculative theology of the neochalcedonians. Or, rather simply, the mystics cited below can be shown to be experiencing what the theologians above have shown to be the Truth of God and Jesus Christ. I pray, as Maximus averred was possible, that this knowledge I relate will “motivate [your] desire for the participative knowledge acquired through actual engagement”, that is, I hope you are moved to prayer and to the gift of tears through the following section.

The Sacred Heart

Concerning the doctrine of the composite hypostasis examined above Lutheran theologian Eberhand Jungel said: “Talk about the humanity which belongs to the divinity of God should express this, together with faith in the "personal unity" of the eternal word with the man Jesus. That God creates as his counterpart man is the execution of his self-determination, according to which God does not desire to come to himself without man. This self-determination, if it really is a decision of love which desires to come to itself with another one and only with that one, implies the freedom of God and man as opposites of each other. If God has created man as the one elected for love, then man is what he is for his own sake. For one is loved only for his own sake or not at all. In this regard, the difference between God and man is in the fact that God can create what then as something created is loved by its creator for its own sake, whereas man, although his love is creative in a certain sense, does not first create what he loves. If then man is the one elected for love, he is what he is in a relationship to God which is determined by freedom. This relationship could only be diminished by any talk of the necessity of God for man. Love bursts apart the relationship of necessity by surpassing it.”⁴¹

Though left relatively unmentioned in the excursus above, love is at the heart of the doctrine of the composite hypostasis. We saw in Maximus that Christ “divinizes man in His love for God, and humanizes God in His love for man” (Amb7.22), and this meditation forces him to exclaim “Oh the wonder of God’s love for mankind!” (Amb41.5). For if the Mystery of God is Christ, and God is Love (1Jn4:8), then the Mystery of Christ is the Mystery of Love. For “God so loved” (Jn3:16) is the very heart of “the Word was made flesh” (Jn1:14). “He that loveth his wife loveth himself… even as the Lord the church” says the Apostle Paul, “for we are members of his body, of his flesh, and of his bones. This is a great mystery: but I speak concerning Christ and the church.” (Eph5:28-32). That is, as Jungel said, God does not wish to come to Himself without man. Therefore in Christ God brings us with Him to Himself in the fruition of love, making our hearts and souls His own and submerging them in divine depths. St. Maximus goes so far as to say that, in Christ's composite person, He becomes “the soul of our soul”⁴². This union and identity of heart and soul, which maintains natural difference, was also familiar to Rhineland mystic St. Hadwijch of Antwerp, she says:

“The soul is a bottomless abyss in which God suffices to himself; and his own self-sufficiency ever finds fruition to the full in this soul, as the soul, for its part, ever does in him. Soul is a way for the passage of God from his depths into his liberty; and God is a way for the passage of the soul into its liberty, that is, into his inmost depths, which cannot be touched except by the soul's abyss. And as long as God does not belong to the soul in his totality, he does not truly satisfy it.”⁴³

St. Mechthild, too, was no stranger to this union and identity of souls in Christ. On the feast of Pentecost the Lord spoke to the 13th century abbess, saying: “Your soul is mine, and my soul is yours. Just as it was written of Jonathan and David that their souls were glued together, your own soul is bonded even more tightly to mine with the glue of love, as I will show you today”⁴⁴. The Lord then lifts her soul up on wings to meet Him. As she ascends she is told by heavenly hosts that she needs to prepare herself for her heavenly Bridegroom. She quickly become frantic and cries out “I do not know how to prepare myself!”, and she is just as quickly comforted by her Lord who clothes her with a white robe and says to her “Receive the robe of my innocence, which I give you as an eternal reward… I have prepared this for you from my sufferings and from your own pains”. After these words, she says, “the soul melted completely into the Beloved” and she felt that “she had become one Spirit with Him”.

The revelation of Jesus Christ is, therefore, the revelation that “by Your will and for Your pleasure we exist” (Rev4:11). In the Person of the Son, God embraces and envelops every creature with Himself, making us all beloved “in the Beloved” (Eph1:6), and He does so “according to the good pleasure of His will” (Eph1:6) a good pleasure which He “set forth in Christ” (Eph1:9) and which He bestowed on us. We were created for the very purpose that we may be the subject and object of Divine Pleasure. A pleasure in which God fills our hearts with the Spirit of His Love (Rom5) by which, and in Whom, we return love and delight from our hearts—now One heart with the Lord—back to God.

The mystics who write of the Sacred Heart write of just this sacred exchange. They are many and their lives and writings drip with the glowing sweetness of the experience of this Truth: that God has created us in love, for love, and by love. That at the heart of all things, at the heart of God, in the nexus of created and uncreated Reality, there is a human heart, the human heart of Jesus that throbs with they whole mystery of divine romance. We exist, as creatures, in this Sacred Heart. And in it—or in Him—God has bound Himself to man with the unbreakable chain of love. With all of this in mind we now turn to the primordial mystics of the Sacred Heart, St. Gertrude of Helfta and her spiritual mother St. Mechthild of Hackeborn, Hadewijch of Antwerp, the Margarets (the cripple, of Cortona, and Mary Alacoque), Lutgard of Aywières and their “actual experience” of this dogmatic truth:

Gertrude finds herself, as she very often does, in a state of divine rapture and ecstasy in the Love of God. She sees herself to be reclining on the breast of Christ, as the Beloved disciple did. “And so, in this state of holy elation, she tore herself away from the place where she seemed to be reclining delightfully on the Lord’s breast and threw herself down on the ground, like a wretched corpse, with these words “Lord, I offer myself to bear everything that may be to your praise!“. The Lord at once made haste to rise and, lying down on the ground beside her, as if gathering her to himself, he said: “this is my own [flesh]!” As though revived by the virtue of the divine presence, she raised herself up before the Lord and said “yay my Lord I am the work of your hands.” And the Lord said “you have received this further grace because my love is so intertwined with you that I could not live in complete blessedness without you.” Marveling at the excessive condescension of these words, she said “oh my Lord, Why do you speak this, since having deigned to find your delight in your creatures, you have an infinite number of others, both on earth and in heaven, with whom you could live in complete blessedness, even had I never been created?” To which the Lord replied: “he who has always lacked a limb does not suffer the same affliction as someone who has one of his limbs cut off when already an adult. So, from the moment I set my love upon you, I could never suffer us to be separated from one another.”⁴⁵

The Sacred Heart, as the absolute revelation of God’s freedom which Jungel averred above, has bound God to man in the union of Love, in the Person of Jesus Christ, the Eternal Son. God does not *need* us, it is true; He loves us, but love’s demands are far fiercer than necessity’s. And the pains of its arrows are the sweetness of love. It elicits from our hearts the cry of St. Gertrude “by your wounded heart, most loving Lord, pierce my heart with the arrow of your love”⁴⁶. In this wounded love God cannot live without us, as He says to Gertrude, not because He is extrinsically bound to us by necessity but because He has set His love upon us in the infinite fulness of His freedom. So He “draws all men to Himself” (Jn12:32) in the crucified Jesus in whom “all things in Heaven and Earth are held together” (Col1). He discloses this to Gertrude in a vision, telling her: “Just as you stretch out your hand when you want to take hold of something and, when you have taken it, you draw it back toward you, so, languishing with love of you, when you are distracted by exterior things, I stretch out my heart to draw you to myself and again, when, your inmost thoughts in harmony with mine, you recollect yourself and again attend to me, then I draw back my heart again, and you with it, into myself, and from it I offer you the pleasure of all its many virtues”⁴⁷. The End, therefore, to which all things return—“return! return! O Shulammite! return! return!”—bears the form of Christ (it is christo-logical) and His Sacred Heart, it is the “drawing in” of His heart. We are returning, in mystical theology and in the eschaton, to an absolute personal identity with God through the Sacred Heart of Jesus. But this return happens in us by the same means as it happened in Christ, through the surrender and exchange of hearts in Love.

Margaret the Cripple, after a mystical vision wherein Christ exchanges hearts with her, says: “The heart of God is united to the soul, as if it were the soul’s own heart […] and such souls see into themselves as if they see themselves in God’s eyes, because their eyes are God’s eyes”⁴⁸. The soul’s own heart and God’s heart, in Christ are One Sacred Heart.

So far, we are beginning to see that the Sacred Heart is as experientially capacious as the doctrine of the composite hypostasis is intellectually. Compare Margaret’s wisdom—quoted above—learned by experience, to St. Maximus’ speculation on the soul so filled with the love of God: “Having in this way already become God through divinization, man might have been able […] to acquire knowledge of [beings], not as man but as God, having by grace the very same wise and informed knowledge of beings that God has, on account of the divinizing transformation of his intellect and powers of perception”⁴⁹. It is love, flowing from the Divine Heart, which brings about this “divinizing transformation”. As the Lord tells Gertrude in the prologue of her largest work “anyone who with intentions like these transcribes what is written in this book will find at each stroke of a pen arrows of love from the sweetness of my divine heart being aimed at him, which will move his soul to rejoice in the delights of divine sweetness”⁵⁰. These arrows of Love are the interpenetrations of perichoresis; and, by them the Divine nature supplies itself to and fulfills itself in our human nature. Thusly “the Lord Jesus said to Gertrude: “behold, here is my heart, the sweet instrument of the adorable Trinity. I hold it in front of the eyes of your heart; it will supply all that you lack faithfully making up for all you entrust to it”⁵¹. It will supply all we lack because “the heart of the Lord”, she goes on to marvel, is “the unique, most precious treasure-house of the divinity, containing all goodness” and in Christ it is “placed at the service of such a little creature, waiting, like the servant of a lord, to supply for all her negligences”.

This “supplying” (the suppletio of Gertrude’s thought⁵²) of divinity to humanity and vice versa is the classic doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum (the exchange of attributes), or perichoresis. It is, indeed, good doctrine and the ground of all theological reflection, but in actual experience it is the communicatio cordium (the exchange of hearts/love) which makes this real in us. Knowledge of the former may precede and “motivate desire” for the latter, or, inversely, the latter may come first and search out for itself understanding of what it has come to know by experience. This communicatio cordium, the exchange of hearts, is among the central themes of Gertrude’s writing. She exclaims in thanksgiving: “you have granted me the priceless gift of your familiar friendship, giving me in various ways, to my indescribable delight, the noblest treasure of the divinity, your divine heart, now bestowing it freely, now as a sign of our mutual familiarity, exchanging it with mine”⁵³.

In this exchange she experienced she also knew it to be—most likely due to her being well educated in the Helfta monastery from her adolescence, wherein she read the fathers of the church—the composite hypostasis of Christ. In one vision “her most loving Jesus seemed to draw her toward himself by the breath of love of his pierced heart, and to wash her in the water flowing from it, and then to sprinkle her with the life-giving blood of his heart…” Later, in the same vision she is grafted, like a branch into a tree, into His Sacred Heart: “she beheld her soul, as was said above, in the likeness of a tree fixing its roots in the wound of the side of Jesus Christ; she felt in some new and marvelous way that there was passing through this wound, as through a root, and penetrating into all her branches and fruit and leaves a wondrous sap which was the virtue of the humanity and divinity of Jesus Christ”⁵⁴. And, again, she receives from Him a kiss of the composite hypostasis while singing the trisagion (thrice-holy: “holy, holy, holy”). When the second “holy”, signifying the second Person of the Trinity, is sung the Lord says to her: “Behold, in this kiss, and with this second “Holy,” which is addressed to my person, I will give you all the holiness of my divinity and my humanity”⁵⁵.

The living experience of the communicatio cordium is not limited to Gertrude and the Margarets either. Thomas of Cantimpré, the prolific biographer of female medieval mystics, records the Life of Lutgard of Aywières, a pioneer in the mysticism of the Sacred Heart. Early in her life, at the time of her conversion, “Christ appeared to her” Thomas says, “in that human form in which he had once lived among mortals. Drawing back from his breast the garment in which he seemed to be covered, he showed the wound in his side, bleeding as if recently opened”⁵⁶. This experience of the Divine Heart marked her to such a degree that later in her life when Christ approaches her and asks: “What do you want?”, Lutgard responds “I want Your Heart”. To which Jesus replies “No, rather it is I who want your heart”. “So be it, Lord” she says “on condition that you temper your heart’s love to my heart and that I may possess my heart in you. Indeed, with you as my shield, my heart will be secure for all time”. Thomas then adds his commentary, saying “so a communion of hearts occurred from that time on, or rather, the union of an uncreated with a created spirit through a surplus of grace. It was this of which the Apostle says: she ‘who clings to God is made one spirit with him”⁵⁷. In these passages the communicatio cordium of the Sacred Heart is disclosed to be that ancient and orthodox doctrine of the communicatio idiomatum. Bernard McGinn agrees that Thomas of Cantimpre’s biographical accounts hope to show Lutgard’s Sacred Heart mysticism of the communicatio cordium to be in conformity with “the traditional motifs of cistercian mysticism”⁵⁸. Furthermore, I hope to offer an interpretation of these mystical motifs as in conformity not only with cistercian traditions, but the orthodox dogmatic tradition on the whole, and the neochalcedonian tradition in particular. In actual experience the wisdom of the adoration of the Sacred Heart paired with the christology of the neochalcedonians manifests the true dogma of the Church. The two coming together (by theology and by prayer) is what every preacher or theologian hopes to commingle and proclaim, what the church hopes to teach and form in her disciples. Consider what St. Margaret of Cortona was shown by revelation:

“Then Christ showed himself to her as though crucified, saying, "Put your palms upon the places of the nails of my hands." When Margaret out of reverence said, "O no, my Lord!", immediately the wound in the side of the loving Jesus opened and in that opening she beheld her Savior's heart. In this ecstasy she embraced the Crucified Lord and was raised up by him into heaven. She heard him telling her, Daughter, from these wounds you absorb what preachers seek to express.”⁵⁹

The kerygma of the church, the content of its preaching—its phronema—is Jesus Christ Himself. As the apostle says “we preach Christ crucified” (1Cor1:23). When one knows the Love of God by experience, when one finds oneself in the loving swirl of the communicatio cordium one has come therefore come to know the whole mystery of the churches preaching; what “preachers seek to express”. St. Gertrude experienced a similar revelation—that the experience of love in the Divine Heart is the content of the whole kerygmatic fulness of the Church. She missed Mass one week due to sickness, and while lying down sick in her quarters her heart drooped with sadness as she longed to hear the gospel proclaimed in the sermon that week. The Lord then comforted with His heart. The passage goes as follows:

“When she saw the others assembling for the sermon, she complained within herself and said to the Lord: “you know, my dearest, how gladly I would now hear the sermon with all my heart, where I’m not held back by sickness.” To which the Lord answered: “would you like me to preach to you, my dearest?” She answered: “I would, very much.” Then the Lord made her lean against his heart, with the heart of her soul close to his divine heart. When her soul had sweetly rested there a while, she heard in the Lord‘s heart two wondrous and sweet pulsations.”⁶⁰

Gertrude’s mentor and spiritual mother St. Mechthild also experienced the pulsations of the Sacred Heart: “Reclining on his bosom, she listened with the attentive ear of her heart to the beating of Christ’s heart, which had a constant, vigorous pulse. The divine heartbeat sounded as of it were inviting the soul, saying, […] Come my bride, and enjoy my divinity!”⁶¹. It is my contention that these “sweet pulsations” with a “constant, vigorous pulse” carry in themselves the very knowledge of the teaching and preaching, the creeds and councils, of the church—they are the demonstration of orthodox christology. In them the soul truly knows God, truly feels Him, truly senses Him with the mind and soul.

Spiritual Senses In The Sacred Heart

“He comes with His treasures” says St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, and “the delights that He brings are infinite, since they are Himself”. The sensible and intelligible delights the soul feels in God, she says, are God Himself. And in this delight “a phenomenon occurs” she continues, “God, who is in our depths, receives God coming to us, and God contemplates God! God in whom beatitude consists"⁶². Firstly, we may note, in this passage from St. Elizabeth, the perdurance of the themes of duality and unity. Though they can be now faithfully interpreted under the hermeneutical guidance of the doctrine of the composite hypostasis. But, for the purposes of this section it is the emphasis—in this union of Divine Treasure, and the human sensible experience of Divine Treasure, both of which Elizabeth says “are Himself”, that is, are His composite hypsostasis—on the spiritual sensation the soul has of God. Most christian mystics who write of their experience with, and revelation of, Divine Love speak in terms of the phenomenon of spiritual sensation. This phenomenon, St. Symeon the New Theologian says, is possible because in Christ, God “gives us by his Spirit a new super-sensible sensation, so that through all our senses his gifts and graces, which supernaturally transcend sensation, can be sensed clearly and purely”⁶³. And, it must be said, it is not as though Symeon is a lone star in this constellation of spiritual sensation. Bernard McGinn demonstrates⁶⁴ from the scriptures themselves, on through Origen, to Gregory the Great, to Bernard of Clairvaux and all in between, the christian tradition is saturated with speech about “the spiritual senses”. Origen says “he who has reached the peak of perfection and beatitude will be delighted by the Word of God in all his senses”⁶⁵. These are, he continues “divine senses”. And, rather paradoxically, he says that this is “a sensuality which has nothing sensual in it”⁶⁶. St. Julian of Norwich spoke also, in her revelations, of a spiritual sensation. She says “I saw full assuredly that our Substance is in God, and also I saw that in our sense-soul God is: for in the self-[same] point that our Soul is made sensual, in the self-[same] point is the City of God ordained to Him from without beginning; into which seat He cometh, and never shall remove [from] it. For God is never out of the soul: in which He dwelleth blissfully without end.”⁶⁷ She speculates, also, that this is the case because Christ’s Person unifies God and Man, and through Him “a worshipful oneing betwixt the body and the soul” happens in us. Mechthild, too, spoke of this true, super-sensible divine sensation. Once, while praying, the LORD spoke to her saying: “Behold, I give you my eyes to see everything with them. I give you my ears to understand everything you hear with them. I give you my mouth to utter all that you should with it, whether you are speaking, praying, or singing. And I give you my heart to consider everything with it, loving me and all things for My sake.” With these words God drew the soul totally into Himself and united Himself with her. It seemed to her then that she saw with God’s eyes, heard with God’s ears, and spoke with His mouth; and she felt that she no other heart but His”⁶⁸. This knowing which comes by spiritual senses, spiritual eyes, spiritual ears and the warm love of the Sacred heart is the deepest and most real knowing there is. At its heart it is unitive knowing, a knowing by which we become consciously aware, or aware by conscious experience of Love that we are One with Him. It is a sensing of the super-sensible and super-essential God, the knowing of Love. Through loving union in the Sacred Heart Hadewijch experiences this knowing:

“I received from Him a kiss from him; and by this token I was shown what follows: Having been made one with him, I came before his Father. There the Father took the Son to himself with me and took me to himself with the Son. And in this Unity into which I was taken and where I was enlightened, I under­stood this Essence and knew it more clearly than, by speech, reason, or sight, one can know anything that is knowable on earth.”⁶⁹

It is this knowing that theology seeks and which it cannot fully lay claim to until it enters into the inner chambers of prayer to abandon itself to Love, to Jesus Christ and His Sacred Heart.

Conclusion(s):

Why? Why are these resources, ancient and modern, Eastern and Western, dogmatic and mystical, being summonsed? What is the importance of recovering, and deepening, devotion to and union with the Sacred of Heart of Christ? Is this not an act of intellectual self-pleasuring which merely produces a smug grin at the coordination of mystical symbolism and christian orthodox dogmatics and not, rather, the groanings of spiritual prayer and the realization of righteousness in the life of the believer? What, if any, spiritual power does this [or any] biblical symbol have?

Karl Rahner says: “From its beginnings to the present day, the theology of devotion to the heart of Jesus, as understood by the simple faithful, by the theologians in their discussions and by the magisterium in its pronouncements, teaches that the heart of the Lord is a symbol of the love of Christ”⁷⁰. But, is it a mere symbol—is it a mere signpost pointing to a Reality not its own or does it actually commune with and possess Reality as its own? Rahner thinks the latter. He says “being is of itself symbolic, because it necessarily ‘expresses’ itself”⁷¹. Therefore “a symbol is […] not to be primarily considered as a secondary relationship between two different beings, which are given the function of indicating one another by a third, or by an observer who notes a certain agreement between them”⁷². Surely this must be true! As the scriptures declare “the whole fulness of deity dwells in Him bodily” (Col2:9). Therefore the symbol and Image of the Invisible God (Col1:15), the flesh of Jesus Christ—His heart not excluded—is God Himself. The symbol of God is, in Christ, identical to God as a mode of His incarnation. The Spirit then rests upon this symbolic flesh and catches us up into it, baptizing us in the life of God and setting our hearts ablaze with the Love of God. “The whole spiritual world seems mystically imprinted on the whole sensible world in symbolic forms” Maximus says “for those who are capable of seeing this, and conversely the whole sensible world is spiritually explained in the mind in the principles which it contains. In the spiritual world it is in principles; in the sensible world it is in figures”⁷³. The Sacred Heart is not a supplement to the gospel, it is the gospel in image and in content.

To renew speech and devotion to the Heart of God is to renew a kind of performance of the Word which brings the hearer into a personal experience with the Word—when we speak of the Sacred Heart the hearer is induced into a form of experience which grants faith in the Love of God which overflows from that Divine Heart. And, after all, “faith comes by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God” (Rom10:17). St. Maximus again affirms this by saying “[Jesus Christ] consented to be both embodied and expressed through letters, syllables, and sounds, so that from all these He might gradually gather those who fol­low Him to Himself, being united by the Spirit, and thus raise us up to the simple and unconditioned idea of Him, bringing us for His own sake into union with Himself by contraction to the same extent that He has for our sake ex­panded Himself according to the principle of condescen­sion.”⁷⁴. Olivier-Thomas Venard agrees, then, when he says that the preaching of the gospel (including, obviously, the gospel of the Sacred Heart) will ultimately culminate in “the experience of an encounter with the resurrected one”⁷⁵. The Risen One is manifest here as He was to Thomas, inviting us to reach into His wound and touch that Sacred Heart.

The Christian tradition should have no issue with this sacramental understanding of the symbol the Sacred Heart. For when we point to the bread and wine of the communion meal we are pointing to bread and wine, but more, we can point and say identify our Beloved and say “this is our God”. God Himself sharing in this identification says to us “this is My Body”. A symbol and the reality. To recover devotion to the Sacred Heart, then, is to say with the holy scriptures “you are the Body of Christ” (1Cor12:27). It is to devote ourselves to prayer, to offer the whole of our lives upon the altar of the holy cross, and wait there upon the LORD until the fire of His Spirit of Love descends upon us and eats us up—consuming everything—until we become living sacraments, the Body of Christ. The Divine Heart throbbing in our hearts, insatiably groaning in prayer, and teaching us to love our neighbors.

The goal, therefore, of this piece has been two-fold. (1. To make a heartfelt appeal to recover devotion to the love of Jesus Christ symbolized in the revelation of the Sacred Heart. Recognizing within that devotion the promise of theosis, that God will “fill us with the all the fulness of God” (Eph3:19), wherein we become living sacraments of God in this evil age—the Body of Christ. (2. To show both the orthodox/biblical/dogmatic/traditional and speculative/philosophical/academic grounds in which the faithful soul may hope to share the whole fulness of the Divine Heart in prayer. The latter serves the former, enlightening it, and clarifying the inner movements of the longing soul. Allowing it to hope for ever deeper, ever more glorious realities available in the Love of God in prayer, and it is only in prayer that these realities are received.

19th Century Dutch Reformed missionary to South Africa Andrew Murray called this reality of the Divine-Human heart “the perfect heart” and said: “The perfect heart is a gift to be obtained in prayer. David asked the Lord to give it to his son Solomon: “Give to Solomon my son a perfect heart, to keep Your commandments, Your testimonies, and Your statutes” (1Chron29:19), even as he had prayed for himself long before, "Let my heart be perfect in Your testimonies." (Ps119:80) Let all of us who desire for this blessing follow his example: let us make it a matter of definite, earnest prayer. Let each son and daughter of God say to the Father: "Give Your child a perfect heart”⁷⁶. St. Callistus, in the Philokalia, continuing this theme of the prayer of the Sacred Heart says “If you wish to pray as you ought, imitate the dulcimer player; bending his head a little and inclining his ear to the strings, he strikes the strings skillfully, and enjoys the melody he draws from their harmonious notes.” He follows this by asking: “Is this example clear to you? The dulcimer is the heart; the strings—the feelings; the hammer—remembrance of God; the player—mind.” Let us bend our intellects, with St. Callistus, down to our hearts and strike there the infinite fulness of the feelings of divine love. In that state, “by remembrance of God and of Divine things” he concludes “the mind draws holy feelings from the God-fearing heart, then ineffable sweetness fills the soul, and the mind, which is pure, is lit up by Divine illuminations. The dulcimer player perceives and hears nothing but the melody he enjoys. So the mind, during active prayer, descends into he depths of the heart with sobriety and can no longer listen to aught but God. All his inner being speaks to God with the voice of David: 'My soul followeth hard after thee' (Ps63:8)”⁷⁷. When praying in this way, St. Ilias the Presbyter says, “a kind of flame surrounds” surrounds the heart, “as fire surrounds iron, and makes it wholly incandescent”. The person initiated into this experience through the gospel does not retain this fire in his heart alone, rather, he “sees his body, which by nature is of clay, become incandescent through grace”⁷⁸. The revival of the Sacred Heart, and a renewal of its devotion, that we seek will therefore be an ever-growing manifestation of this incandescence. Personally, ecclesially, and politically the Sacred Heart of Jesus beating sweetly in the breast of His holy ones, manifesting the Kingdom of God in all things—the increase of which “there will be no end” (Is9:7)—is the End we seek.

In what follows are a few conclusions, then, we might draw from the renewal of devotion to the Sacred Heart, of a need for a philosophy of the Sacred Heart, of how the Sacred Heart may become manifest as a political reality, and the hope for the unity of the church and its healing of schism in the Sacred Heart.

Renewed Devotion to the Sacred Heart

In 1673 a young French nun named Margaret Mary Alacoque began to have a series of visions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ. Though she was preceded by Gertrude and Mechthild in the revelation and adoration of the Sacred Heart, she is the principle actor in development of modern devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. She felt herself deeply called by the Lord Himself, over the period of 18 months, through these visions, to renew devotion to It. In that period of time she says Jesus “revealed to me the wonders of His Love and the mysterious secrets of His Sacred Heart”⁷⁹. He says to her: “My Divine Heart is so inflamed with love for men, and for you in particular that, being unable any longer to contain within Itself the flames of Its burning Charity, It must spread them abroad by your means, and manifest Itself to them (mankind) in order to enrich them with the precious graces of sanctification and salvation necessary to withdraw them from the abyss of perdition”

“Next”, she says, “he asked me for my heart. I begged him to take it; he did, and placed it in his own divine Heart. He let me see it there—a tiny atom being completely burned up in that fiery furnace. Then, lifting it out—now a little heart-shaped flame—he put it back where he had found it. ‘There, my well-beloved,’ I heard him saying, ‘that’s a precious proof of my love for you, hiding in your side a little spark from its hottest flames. That will be your heart from now on; it will burn you up—to your very last breath; its intense heat will never diminish”. So intense was this communicatio cordium that she received from the Lord a new name. He says to her “I’m giving you a new name: the beloved disciple of my sacred Heart”.

In the following visions, over months, she discerned herself to be a vessel of God—now aptly called the Apostle of the Sacred Heart—called to renew the tender warmth that comes from the conscious experience of love in the saints of God. To recover the intercessory and incarnational vocation of the church in the Sacred Heart. Jesus mourns to her that in his church there is “nothing but coldness and dislike”. And, so she has been recruited as an intercessor and an apostle to renew the tenderness of love to the world, love for God and neighbor—which in the Word of God and His Sacred Heart are “one fruition of love”.

Though it is true that devotion to the Sacred Heart may have been reduced to a set of mythical or fantastical—even magical—practices in our time. And though it is also true that a simple retrieval of kitschy religion looked upon with the gaze of a magical imagination does not have the strength to rescue us from our dire need. The bold and unconditional proclamation of the gospel of Jesus Christ—a genuine exchange of hearts accomplished by Him and in Him—however, does. Is it not also true in our times as it was in St. Margaret’s that the followers of Jesus are often filled with “coldness and dislike” not just for the Lord but for their neighbors and their enemies. Do we not live in a time of fear and panic—what Stanley Hauerwas calls “the conspiracy of safety”— which cause us to coldly look upon our neighbors with suspicion, and fuel the fires of violence (Israel and Palestine, Russia and Ukraine etc.)? Yet more! We do so often in the name of God and use the sacred scriptures to justify ourselves and ingratiate ourselves in the slop of wrath in culture wars. But, does not Christ stand before us with His Sacred Heart now, as He did to Margaret then, “in a blaze of glory…” and with “flames issuing from all parts of his human form, especially from his divine breast which was like a furnace”⁸⁰ and call us to repentance, to His cross, and to the baptism of the Holy Spirit of love.

We stand in desperate need of a revival of the revelation the Sacred Heart in the gospel. The heart which is not only the Lord’s but ours; in it we become not merely like the Lord but we “become the Lord Himself”⁸¹ loving God IN and AS our neighbors. As Eckhart says “heart to heart one in one is how God loves”⁸², and so God’s love for us becomes God’s love in us and as us. Here in the Sacred Heart, Eckhart adds, “my eye and God’s eye are one eye, one seeing, one knowing, and one love”⁸³. This transformed vision, a divine seeing of ourselves and our neighbors “after the Spirit” (2Cor5:16), is already a major factor of Sacred Heart mysticism—let alone, biblical witness. Seeing, then, with His divine eyes His own face reflected in the face of my neighbors. In this love we hear, as St. Angela did, the Lord embrace us in His heart and say “you are I, and I am you”⁸⁴ . And, with St. Catherine we hear Him say “open your mind's eye and look within me, and you will see the dignity and beauty of my rational creature (human beings)… if you should ask me who they are, I would answer,” said the gentle loving Word, “that they are another Myself”⁸⁵ For, by the eyes of the Sacred Heart we see “the Lord God of all is to be adored and worshipped beneath the mask of many faces”⁸⁶ for He is “lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his”⁸⁷.

The love and ravishing of the Sacred Heart is a kind of ecstasy, therefore, taking us out of ourselves and into God to see all things in Him. St. Gregory of Sinai says “there are two forms of ecstasy in the spirit: one, of the heart (going deep into the heart, in forgetfulness of all things), the other, enravishment (being carried beyond the limits of all that is). The first belongs to those who are still learning, the second to those who have attained to perfection in love. Both alike place the mind in which they act outside the senses (or the consciousness of outer relationships); for Divine love is an intoxicating forcing of thoughts by the spirit towards the most excellent, which deprives a man of the sense (or the consciousness) of outer relationships”⁸⁸.

Ours is a time of vitriol, hatred, and wrath. The church is divided by schism and the love of many has grown cold as our Lord warned us would happen (Mt24). We stand, therefore, in need of a revival of the Sacred Heart and a sinking down of our consciousness into it. That our hearts may be melted from their cold hardness into the warmth of Divine Love. For only in the enravishment of Divine Love does our sanctification truly lie. “Batter my heart three-personed God” says the holy sonnet, “for I, except You enthral me, shall never be free; Nor ever chaste, except You ravish me”⁸⁹.

The Communal-Power of the Gospel Image

That a deep communal revival and an experience of God is possible through a renewed rehearsal of the symbolic grammar of the gospel around a particular image or icon is not new. And, that the church stands in desperate need for just this is not new. Many examples may be proffered from the sacred symbols of the ecclesial bread and wine, and the waters of baptismal grace for the church, to the symbol of the effulgent Taboric light of Jesus to the hesychasts of Athos and Byzantium. The Word’s incarnation in symbols, in words and in images, has always had the gracious power of communal spiritual and political formation. But, given the thrust and content of this piece I would like to shortly cite the “Sister Books” of the nine 13th-14th century women’s monastic houses of the Rhineland.

The Sister Books are a form of communal mystical/hagiographical literature. They stand out in modern study as one of the first examples of christian women’s literature which is not written or mediated by men, nor written to men. The Sister Books are, as scholar Gertrud Jarron Lewis says, “by women, for women”⁹⁰. There are nine sister books, one from each monastery, wherein countless heavenly visitations, visions, ecstasies, raptures, signs and wonders, auditions, and other spiritual phenomena are regaled. Bernard McGinn says “the importance of images in the spiritual life of the Dominican nuns is evident throughout the Sister Books”. That is, a certain set of images and symbols in the gospels and in the church’s iconography were raised up into a renewed devotion and induced personal encounter with God—McGinn says, for these nuns, “gazing at images often induced visionary experience”. He says that the texts of the sister books betray which “particular images that were treasured by the nuns”. In these sister books, he says, “the two primary modes of Christ’s appearance, as a child (often in Mary’s arms) and as the “Man of Suffering” (Schmerzensmann) in his passion, were among the most common images found”⁹¹. The sisters of these spiritual communities had the Spirit of Christ raising up to their conscious awareness images of the gospel, the effulgent glories of the infant Christ and the Suffering God-Man, and inducing by these images divine experiences which transformed the communities to which these women belonged. Hedwig, of the Unterlinden monastery, for example, once at the consecration of the elements of the eucharist meal “saw the deepest mysteries of the undivided Trinity through rays of interior light” . McGinn says that the rest of the account in the text “says that everything that the “remarkable doctor St. Augustine” wrote in all his books could not be compared to “one moment of the purest understanding by which she was incomparably illuminated into a divine way of knowing in that hour. Upon her return to herself” McGinn comments, “Hedwig said that she was able to preach about the essence of the ineffable Trinity to the whole world”. Another nun, named Anne of Ramschwag, in the Diessenhofen sister book, spoke of a time when she was a small child learning in the monastery and the Christ-Child appeared to her in a schoolbook to encourage her learning. The Christ-Child was a prolific vision for Anne. One Christmas Eve she “was raptured in a divine light” McGinn relays, and she “beheld her body separately so that she could see two children within her who embraced in a loving manner: “And in this showing she recognized that one child was our Lord and the other was her soul and how she and God were united”. Sophie of Klingenow, in the sister book from Toss, relays about when she has become completely overwhelmed by a sullen conscience, weighed down by the remembrance of sins. This guilt and shame so riddled her with pain and sorrow that she felt her heart had become frail from it; and, so intense was this pain that it caused her to faint thrice. Then, that very night, as she retired to her chambers she made the sign of the cross and uttered the prayer of our crucified Lord “Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”, and suddenly, McGinn says, she was transformed:

“Then I saw a light coming from heaven that was beautiful and wonderful beyond measure. It surrounded me and shone and blazed in me, through and through. My heart was totally altered and was filled with an unspeakable and unaccustomed joy, so that I completely forgot all the distress and pain that I had previously had.”

This encounter with God in Christ was only the first in a series of mystical experience that spanned eight days in number, wherein the depth of the unspeakable union the soul has with God in Christ was revealed to her. Towards the end of her life, McGinn tells us, Sophie was asked to describe what was revealed to her about this union. She, of course, relayed nothing more than the pure light of the Gospel of Jesus Christ:

“And in this light that was my soul I saw God shining in a marvelous way, as a beautiful light shines out from a beautiful light-giving lamp. And I saw that he so fit himself in with my soul in love and goodness that he was truly united with her and her with him. And in this loving union my soul received assurance that all my sins were freely forgiven.”

These experiences, for these women, that shaped them around the holy symbols and images of the gospel (the Christ-child, the cross, the divine heart etc.) formed the christian communities of an entire region around the gospel, and saturated them in the experience of the Spirit of God regardless of age or gender and healed them of mental and spiritual ailments, lifting the weight of a burdened conscience, and freeing them to look after their fellow sisters in love. And, these encounters were not confined to a series of private or individual events. It was a communal experience as well. McGinn says “on Pentecost, as the community of Unterlinden was singing the Veni Creator, Sister Gertrude, suddenly saw the divine fire in a visible way coming down from heaven with a loud sound upon the holy convent of nuns as they sang to God. And it filled the whole choir where the sisters were gathered in praise of God, illuminating them to such a degree with divine splendors that they all looked like flames”⁹².

In the case of the Helfta monastery, this communal experience was explicitly shaped around the revelation of divine love which simply is the Mystery of the Divine Heart. St. Gertrude recounts a Mass, when the Eucharist was being consecrated, where Christ appears; and plunging the host into the Divine Heart, pulling out blood red, He offers Himself—in all His sweetness—not only to her, but to all her sisters: “Then she saw the Lord Jesus holding in His hand the host (of the Eucharist) which He seemed to plunge into the heart of God the Father, then He withdrew it, rosy red, as though it were stained red with blood.… Then, in the abundance of this overflowing sweetness whilst giving the kiss of peace with His divine lips to all the holy ones there assembled, He accorded to the choir of virgins, in preference to all the others, the privilege that, after the mouth kiss, He laid His tenderest kiss upon their heart. After this, the Lord poured forth as it were, all the honeyed torrents of His divine love, giving Himself to the community with these words: “I am wholly yours; let each of you enjoy me to her hearts content”⁹³

Could it be, that in our day a revival of devotion to Jesus’ heart, and a communal surrendering of our hearts to Him in Love might not break out in a spiritual renewal of the people of God in the gospel as it did in Helfta, and in the nine communities of the sister books? May it be that our kids, our men, women, old and young, may enter into that mystical experience and that may it form us in personal and communal ways that shape our minds and our actions into the way of Jesus Christ. Plunging us, as bread and wine given to the world for the life of the world, into the Divine Heart and offering us to the world saying “I am wholly yours; let each of you enjoy me to your hearts content”. It is this self-gift, first in God—as God—then in us—as us, that will become the church’s political existence. But, first, before we hope to explore the christian community as sacred political reality, we must allow our minds to “be filled with the knowledge of God in all spiritual wisdom and understanding” (Col1:9). We must bend our minds down to the dulcimer of the sacred heart, and there think God.

The Need For Philosophical Thought—The Mind Gone Deep Into Sacred Heart

Given the intellectual and theological malaise of our time, this spirituality cannot afford to be unreflective or irrational nor simply an act of private pious feeling and religious sensations. It must be also wise, rational, reflective and contemplative. It must be the perfect union, and identity, of the whole of the philosophical and theological enterprise with the tender heart of prayer and righteousness in the gospel of Jesus. The latter sublating and fulfilling the former. As St. Maximus said earlier, the knowledge of “actual experience” sublating the knowledge which comes by abstraction, concepts and ideas. The question is, however, is there any ground to hope that a retrieval of neochalcedonian christology, and a renewed devotion to the Sacred Heart and prayer, could truly transform or enrich the modern intellectual landscape?

“The question as to what impact the rise of Christian theology had on the philosophical tradition is not new” says Johannes Zachuber “however, a detailed analysis of Christological debates after Chalcedon has not been a prominent starting point”. “Historians of philosophy” he continues “often bypass Greek theological authors from late antiquity altogether”. It remains therefore a possibility that a recovering of the philosophical theologies of neochalcedonian authors like St. Maximus or the Leontii may aid the church in her understanding the Heart of God, and aid the world in her philosophical grasp of Reality. Zachuber holds out hope that neochalcedonians may still ‘transform the philosophical tradition’, but only if the church recovers this spiritual understanding—the mind of Christ. “Jesus Christ is at the very heart of Christianity” he concludes “and [His] conceptualization, therefore, at the centre of Christian theology”⁹⁴. It is now manifest that the Church cannot afford to continue thinking, in an uncritical apophaticism, that God cannot be thought or known by thought; furthermore, that He can be known personally in conscious experience not simply to be held privately. But to be contemplated, shared and interpreted for the life of the world. For God, in His incarnation, in the mind which has “bent over” to hear the sweet melodies of the dulcimer of the Sacred Heart, can be seen and known—and thereby become our own seeing and knowing. “We have the mind of Christ”.

“It is no longer a grief to our age that it knows nothing of God” says G.W.F. Hegel “rather it counts as the highest [philosophical] insight that this cognition is not even possible. . . . For the doctrine that we can know nothing of God...has become in our time a universally acknowledged truth, a settled matter, a kind of prejudice”⁹⁵. Hegel, the notorious German idealist philosopher, believed this cognition of God, and our sharing in Divine Cognition, to be possible; yet more, he shared our conviction that it was not only possible but essential. For him, however, it was not only essential to the life of the church but for the philosophical enterprise itself, for there to be any knowledge of the truth at all. He says: “The goal of philosophy is the cognition of the truth—the cognition of God because God is the absolute truth. In that context nothing else is worth troubling about compared with God and God’s explication. Philosophy knows God essentially as concrete, as the spiritual, realized universality that is not jealous but communicates itself. Even light communicates itself. Whoever says that God cannot be recognized is saying that God is jealous, and is not making a serious effort to achieve cognition when he speaks of God”⁹⁶. In his lectures on the philosophy of religion he opens by saying “I wanted to make this cognitive knowledge of God and religion the object of my lectures because… I believe it has never been so important and so necessary that this cognition should be taken seriously once more”⁹⁷. If in Hegel’s day it could be said “it has never been so important” to think God, and that we are not “making serious” enough effort to do so, then we may safely conclude—given the ever growing apophatic impulse—that we too are in desperate need to think the Mystery of God in Christ. As Paul says, “the Mystery of God is Christ” (Col2:2). Therefore, “there cannot be two kinds of reason and two kinds of spirit, a divine and a human reason, or a divine spirit and a human spirit that would be strictly distinct from one another as if their essence were strictly opposed”⁹⁸. Notice, as with the neochalcedonians, for Hegel, the Logos/Reason is not of two in reality but One, uniting in Himself two natures, divine and human. To think, to truly think, is to think God and Man together in one Word/Reason/Logos. A philosophical Nestorianism is rejected, there are not two hypostases of God and man but One: Jesus Christ. Therefore to faithfully think the mystery of being is to think the mystery of God, which sets ones mind on and in Christ. This clearly means the mind cannot rest until it’s gaze is set upon this Word, not conceived abstractly but concretely revealed in Christ by His Spirit.

Plato says, that “[a] sense of wonder is the mark of the philosopher. Philosophy, indeed, has no other origin”⁹⁹. Hasidic master Abraham Joshua Heschel calls this wonder “radical amazement” which is “the state of maladjustment to words and notions”¹⁰⁰. If wonder is the mark of a philosopher and the origin of all philosophy then Hegel indeed is right that. What is more wonderful to the mind than God, the Infinite, the Creator? Both the subject and the object of philosophy, therefore, is God. And, in Christ, it is God we cognize in this man. It is this cognition of God which sinks down into the heart and becomes personal encounter. Hegel himself says that he has set out in his philosophy “to help bring philosophy closer to the form of Science, to the goal where it can lay aside the title ‘love of knowing’ and be actual knowing”¹⁰¹. In this actual knowing of God, Hegel says, “philosophy is theology, and [one's] occupation with philosophy—or rather in philosophy—is of itself the worship of God”¹⁰². We cannot, therefore, abandon our vocation to achieve the cognition of God, to have understanding.

Bernard Lonergan says the “summit of the ascent” of theology is “the deep-set joy, and solid peace, the power and vigor of being in love with God”¹⁰³. This is manifestly true. “But,” St. Augustine famously says “who loves what he does not know? For it is possible something may be known and not loved: but I ask whether it is possible that what is not known can be loved; since if it cannot, then no one loves God before he knows Him. And what is it to know God except to behold Him and steadfastly perceive Him with the mind?”¹⁰⁴. And, if St. Bernard of Clairvaux is right that “there is no other reason for loving God than God Himself”¹⁰⁵ then God Himself, as God, must make Himself to be thinkable and knowable in the Sacred Heart and Mind of Jesus Christ as a very condition of His being God; and christianity has an irrevocable vocation to know it’s God and to share that knowledge with the world. “This is eternal life” says our Lord Jesus, praying to His Father, “that they might know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom You have sent” (Jn17:3). Theology cannot, therefore, continue to merely explicate the human subjectivity of religion, nor can it continue merely presenting what others have believed about God in the past if it is going to fulfill it’s vocation to fall in love with God—yet more, to become the love of God. It must unite these all in one act. It must “comprehend with all the saints what is the breadth, and length, and depth, and height; and to know the love of Christ, which passeth knowledge, that ye might be filled with all the fulness of God” (Eph3:18-19). It must understand the faith of the Son of God, and achieve—or receive, rather—the cognition of God and offer it to the world through the proclamation of the gospel. Then it might be fulfilled in our day what the LORD to the prophet Jeremiah: “I will give you shepherds after my own heart who will feed you with knowledge and understanding” (Jer3:15).

Sacred Heart As Political Reality

Finally, this cognition and proclamation must, if it is going to be justified as true spiritual depth and authentic conscious experience of divine love, thrust us forth as laborers in the divine field of the world to love our neighbor and care for the poor. It must become flesh in us as justice and restoration. It must become a political reality. Words, cognition of divine realities, and the knowledge holy mysteries is, after all, “the noise of clanging cymbals” and “ nothing” (1Cor13) if it does not become Love. The communicatio cordium reveals itself in the refusal of the faithful to enjoy divine realities, to receive salvation, without one’s neighbor. As Olivier Clement says “this exchange of love if we do not want it to be illusory must be confirmed by an infallible test, brotherly love”¹⁰⁶.

“The just man justices” the poet says, and “acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —Christ”¹⁰⁷. The Just Man is Jesus Christ, we must say. And, the is of that sentence is the identity achieved in the composite hypostasis. “The just man is the word of justice” says Meister Eckhart, “that by which justice expresses and manifests itself”. He then unfurls a doctrine of the composite hypostasis, and the Sacred Heart, which will be the ground of christian political reality: “If justice did not justify, no one would have knowledge of it, but it would be known to itself alone, as in the text: “No one has ever seen God; the Only-Begotten who is in the Father's heart has made him known” (Jn1:18), or “No one knows the Father except the Son” (Mt11:27), or "No one knows who does not receive" (Rv. 2:17). It is a universal rule that no one knows divine perfection “who does not receive.” Thus justice is known to itself alone and to the just man who has been taken up by justice. This is the meaning of the text that says that the Trinity, God, is known to itself alone and to the man that is taken up in it. The Psalm says: "Blessed is the man you have chosen and taken up" (Ps. 64:5). […] Justice has an exemplar in itself, which is the likeness or idea in which and accord­ing to which it forms and informs or clothes every just man and thing”¹⁰⁸.

The Word “forms and informs” every man justified by the Gospel until that man becomes Jesus Christ, who is the Just Man:

“The just man proceeds from and is begotten by justice and by that very fact is distinguished from it. Nothing can beget itself. Nonetheless, the just man is not different in nature from justice, both because “just” signifies only justice, just as “white” signifies only the quality of whiteness, and because justice would make no one just if its nature changed from one place to another, just as whiteness does not make a man black or grammar make him musical. From this it is clear in the sixth place that the just man is the offspring and son of jus­tice. One is and is called a son in that one becomes other in person, not other in nature. "The Father and I are one" (Jn. 10:30)-we are distinct in person, because nothing gives birth to itself; we are one in nature, because otherwise justice would not beget the just man, nor would the Father beget the Son who became other in person, nor would gener­ation be univocal. This is what is meant by “The Word was God”¹⁰⁹.

“For this rea­son the just man is always being born from justice itself in the same way that he was born from it from the beginning of the time he be­ came just. It is the same in the case of the generation and conservation of light in a medium. It must be continuously generated (Grace) because it is not continuously possessed (Nature). The just man as such is what he is completely and totally from justice itself and in justice itself as his principle. This is what the text means: "In the Principle was the Word." Further, the just man insofar as he is just knows nothing, not even himself, outside justice itself. How could he know that he is just outside justice itself? It is the principle of the just man. It is proper to man and to reason to know things in their principles”¹¹⁰.

The Gospel therefore, as the eucharist host in the community at Helfta, immerses us in the sacred heart of justice and pulls us out—rosy red in the blood of Christ—wholly and entirely justified with a justice not our own, but which we now posses as our own to go out “into all the world” (Mt28):

“The just man of whom we are now speaking by way of exam­ple is not light in and of himself. Hence the subsequent passage about that just man John the Baptist, “He was not the light.” The […] point is that the just man or just thing in itself is dark and does not shine. It shines in justice itself, its principle, and justice shines in the just man, although what is just, in that it is inferior, does not compre­hend justice. It is evident that justice is present entirely in every just man. Half justice is no justice. If it is entire in every just man, it is also entire outside every just man and thing. This is what the text means: “The darkness did not comprehend it”¹¹¹.

Half justice is no justice, therefore in order to faithfully unveil the Word as political reality in the church—as the Kingdom of God—the church must recover her spiritual senses in the Sacred Heart to see herself and her neighbor entirely in Justice. True religion in act, divine politics, is then grounded in this abiding experience of Love in the church. To recapture and renew this reciprocal cognition and sensation of God in the Sacred Heart will be to lay the groundwork for a more traditional—though brand new—christian political reality. As Hegel says earlier: “Everything depends on subjective religion; this is what has inherent and true worth… my concern is with what needs to be done so that religion with all the force of its teaching might be blended into the fabric of human feelings, bonded with what moves us to act, and shown to be efficacious, thus enabling religion to become entirely subjective”¹¹². That is, that dogma and orthodoxy sink into the heart and become Love. Mother Maria Skobstova of Paris, the christian martyr who died in the nazi death camp at Ravensbruck, sent there for her non-violent resistance to the nazi occupation of Paris wherein she aided in the smuggling of thousands of Jews out of nazi controlled territories, saw this need for a whole philosophical, theological, mystical account of human-divine communion. She laments that “all the trends of social Christianity known to us are based on a certain rationalistic humanism, [and] apply only the principle of Christian morality to “this world,” [but] do not seek a spiritual and mystical basis for their constructions”¹¹³. “To make social Christianity not only Christian-like but truly Christian,” she says “it is necessary to find one more dimension for it, to bring it out of flat soulfulness and two-dimensional moralism into the depths of multi-dimensional spirituality. To substantiate it mystically and spiritually.”

This is desperately needed. In our days the church is on all fronts, intellectual, spiritual, moral, political, theological and historical, confronted with her own failures and her own misapprehensions of God—a half beloved church can only half love their neighbors—a half justified church can only do half justice, and there is no such thing.

Theologically protestants, and the reformed tradition, fail to cognize God because they refuse to be taught by the tradition of the church, the holy fathers and mothers, on how to read scripture or pray. Catholics and Orthodox, for varying reasons, have become so backward—due to their unholy marriage to the state and powers of this world—in their traditionalism that they fail any longer to see God, only to repaint the images of this saint, church theologian or another. The Russian Orthodox Church, under the nefarious guidance of Patriarch Kirill, are currently in an unrepentant and adulterous affair with the nation-state. The Moscow patriarch, at the beginning of the Ukraine war, was reported to have been invoking his episcopal blessing on missiles and attack helicopters, as well as offering stirring speeches to soldiers soon to cross into their neighbor’s borders and kill them—an unspeakable unfaithfulness. The Southern Baptists are under federal criminal investigation by the US Department of Justice for a mass cover-up of pastors guilty of sexual assault, rape and clergy abuse in cases numbering over 700. The Roman Catholic Church has been guilty of one of the most egregious worldwide scandals of child-rape and sex trafficking by priests, then covered up by those in power, these cases number in the thousands.

Historically, as critical theory of religion aptly takes root in the academy, the depths of religious depravity the church has descended to in order to cling on to world power and wealth is becoming more and more common knowledge. Christians of late antiquity had developed after Constantine a new, and wholly unbiblical, sacred history by which the Roman Empire was seen to be the medium by which God was uniting the nations under His messiah Jesus Christ. That “sacred history” was, Fr. Behr agrees, “a bubble of self-conceitedness”. A bubble which has aptly popped in our epoch. Pedophile popes, rapist popes, racist popes, religious wars and genocides and crusades, the church reduced to the structure of the episcopacy—which lay conveniently at the behest of the empire, the sacraments used as weapons, the doctrines of the church used as political tools. The list goes on and on. And, people are now far more aware of how easily the church has accepted a role in civil religion to prop up the status quo and embrace worldly power. The average person is more keenly aware than ever before the truth of this maxim (which I’ve heard attributed to Peter Brown but cannot find the citation): “the Roman Empire was not christianized, Christianity was imperialized”. Religion’s place as “opium of the masses” has been rightly perceived and rightly condemned. Even on a more local scale, in the consciousness of parishioners of small churches, these dynamics of worldly coercive power are being seen more clearly. People are more conscious of how the church has used the doctrines of divine judgment and hell as a forceful motivating power to perpetuate dysfunctional systems of power—using equally dysfunctional theologies of Divine power to do so—and to coerce people to turn a blind eye to injustices. There is also, in all of this, a growing discontent with many of the facile and meaningless trinkets of doctrine and theology which have no merit to the faith nor to reason. A distrust festers in the hearts of many, and, it appears there is no where to turn to assuage this suspicion.

And yet, at the same time, there is a growing cry for righteousness and justice in the world. A growing cry for love. People are yearning for “pure and undefiled religion”. To find a community rooted and grounded in love who will take care of the orphan and the widow, who will weep and mourn over the world, who will be peacemakers in a world of coldness, violence and war. But there is no where in the world that justice may spring forth! For, as Eckhart taught us, justice comes forth from God—and is God Himself. It must certainly, therefore, be said that the foundations of secularism, atheism, marxism, capitalism, conservativism, modernism, nihilism or liberalism are far too weak to bear such a load. For the cancerous rot of the passions of sin have set into the whole world—“the whole world lieth in wickedness.” (1Jn5:19). The world is in birth pangs. It is longing for the fulness of the Body of Christ, for His Sacred Heart. Its only hope is the Lord God Jesus Christ. But, we are His ambassadors… His heart must beat in our chest with the fierce and abundant love He has for all men. “The more we go out into the world, the more we give ourselves to the world, the less we are of the world, because what is of the world does not give itself to the world” says Mother Maria. This is true for us she says because it is true for God: “The great and only first founder of worldly endeavor was Christ, the Son of God, who descended into the world, became incarnate in the world, totally, entirely, without holding any reserve, as it were, for His Divinity”¹¹⁴.

To recover in our day, therefore, the neochalcedonian doctrine of the composite hypostasis must also be to recover a vibrant mysticism of the Love of God in the Sacred Heart, and to recover that must be to recover the pure proclamation of the unconditional and life-transforming Gospel, to recover this proclamation will then be to become a political reality which incarnates justice and righteousness by tending to the wounds of the world, giving ourselves to it with Christ. This will be a move from the social christianity of Niebhur’s “Christ and Culture” to the incarnational christianity of Robert W. Jenson’s “Christ AS Culture”—or, Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s Chalcedonian “christ existing as community”¹¹⁵, or St. Augustine’s “totus Christus”. Herein, the Body of Christ is seen to be the ongoing mode of the incarnation in the community of the people of God. It has no recourse to the State. Not its thrones, nor its dominions, nor its powers, neither its weapons, nor its armed forces. The Church has a citizenship in heaven. Its power is the power of the Almighty Creator God. Its weapons “are not carnal but are mighty through God to the pulling down of strongholds” (2Cor10), it bears not the sword of steel but the sword of the Spirit “which is the Word of God” (Eph6). It does not defend its borders with soldiers, but with martyrs. It does not grow through killing its enemies but by “not loving their own lives even unto death” (Rev12:13), through the death of her martyrs the church grows! Bearing witness, forever, to the Lamb of God seated upon the throne who “was dead yet is alive forevermore” (Rev1).

It is manifest then that the Church is called, in and by the Sacred Heart of God, to be a political reality which really affects the worlds policies of economy and war. Not through worldly power, but by the power of God. But, one step at a time, then, the church must be healed of its schisms and begin to give itself to the ministry of intercession. For if we cannot “tarry with [the Lord]” in His Gethsemane of prayer, how will we tarry with Him in the poor and the outcast.

Incarnational Ecclesiology of Intercession

One of the most essential components of St. Margaret’s visions is the intercessory ministry to the Heart of Jesus, to soothe His wounds and ease His pain. The loose ecclesiology sketched above is precisely how I interpret this theme. The Church, like Israel—or rather, as grafted into Israel—is elected by God for the sake of the world. The church, then, is an ongoing act of divine incarnation of Him who “comes down from heaven” in order to give His flesh—the Divine-Human Body of Christ— “for the life of the world” (Jn6:51). The church is to share then in the intercessory priesthood of Christ. But, what is the form and content of this intercession?

In Margaret’s visions it is clear that our coldness and dislike towards Jesus, our “contempt for all His endeavors”, has hurt His heart and daily causes Him to suffer pain. Through faith in the justification given us by Christ in the Gospel, He tells us, we must become “partaker[s] of that sorrow unto death which it was My will to suffer in the Garden of Olives”. And by prayer, intercession, the sacramental life of the church, and by works mercy we are to heal His wounds and, in His words to her, “soothe the bitter grief I suffered when my disciples abandoned Me”.

Of course, if these visions are meant merely to point to a God whose feelings are hurt and requires our prayers and attention to assuage His fractured ego, we may well discard them as useless. If the above doctrines are true, however, then when Christ speaks of His pain and His “sorrow unto death”, He speaks not of simply of Himself but of our neighbors with whom He identifies—who constitute Him as members of His Body. For if we take the Sacred Heart seriously, it means that if my neighbors heart is hurt, if my neighbor is oppressed, if my neighbor is a victim of injustice, then Christ in Him is victim with him. As He says in the gospel “if you have done so to the least of these you have done so unto me” (Matt25). To become with St. Margaret ‘disciples of the Sacred Heart’, then, is to recognize with Bonhoeffer that “[Jesus] is the mediator, not only between God and human persons, but also between person and person, and between person and reality”¹¹⁶. Giving ourselves to the adoration of the Sacred Heart, to love our neighbors as we see them in His most holy heart, and ministering to Christ in them is the key. “The way to one’s neighbor leads only through Christ.” he says. “That is why intercession is the most promising way to another person, and common prayer in Christ’s name is the most genuine community”¹¹⁷. The vision of the God-Man, therefore, whose manhood is the humanity of us all, and whose Sacred Heart “is so inflamed with love for mankind”, seeps into our bones and becomes, then, by a sacred osmosis, a political reality which drives us to Love and Justice. This is the Word which comes to the prophets, the Divine-Human Word whose “heart melts within His breast” (Ps.22:14), in love for mankind it “grows warm and tender” (Hosea11:8) and cries out “let justice roll down like water and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” (Amos5:24). As the Lord told St. Margaret, “It will burn you up—to your very last breath; its intense heat will never diminish”.

Oh! Lord Jesus Christ! Smite us in our breasts with the heat of Your Love. Burn us up til our very last breath with a vehemency that will never diminish. Heal the fractured mirror in our hearts which divides our vision of You and scatters our eyes to idols and blinds us to Your face shining in our neighbors and our enemies alike. Remove the scales from our eyes and let us, again, see Your lovely face in the faces of our neighbors. Let there be no one, any longer, who is “at ease in Zion” (Amos6:1). Lord of the Harvest! Thrust us forth as laborers into Your field to tend to the wounded, the traumatized, the oppressed and the marginalized. Let us not settle until things change. But, my loveliest Jesus, let us do so with all the sweetness of Your patience and kindness—never to be tempted by the gun, or the sword, or the pen of the legislator. Write, instead, your Law upon our hearts and upon the hearts of all in Your Sacred Heart. Amen.

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I do not know how to end this piece, which is by most standards a bit confused. All I can say is that, like William of St. Thierry: “I want to see and touch the whole of him and—what is more—to approach the most holy wound in His side, the portal of the ark that is there made, and that not only to put my finger or my whole hand into it, but to wholly enter into Jesus’ very heart, into the holy of holies, the ark of the covenant, the golden urn, the soul of our humanity that holds within itself the manna of the Godhead” ¹¹⁸. I want to see and touch the whole of Him. To “intwine my limbs with Him”¹¹⁹ that He may become incarnate in me. We need, desperately need, that “whole of Him”—for the Whole Christ is Jesus Christ and His Body, the community which bears His Name. For He is the kingdom (the political reality of God), He is the fulness, He is the Mind of God, He is the Love. As the scriptures say, “He is the all” (Sir43) and “Christ is all things” (Col3:11). “Everything”, Balthasar hymns to the Lord, “hearkens back to your throbbing Heart. Time and the seasons still hammer away and create, and your Heart drives the world and all its happenings forward with great painful blows. It is the unrest of the clock, and your Heart is restless until it rests in me. Your Heart is restless until we rest in you, once time and eternity have become interfused. But: Be at peace! I have overcome the world. The torment of sin has already been submerged in the stillness of love. The experience of what the world is has made love darker, more fiery, more ardent. The shallower abyss of rebellion has been swallowed up in unfathomable mercy, and throbbing majestically reigns serene the Heart of God.”¹²⁰

And,

“Lord, whither do you draw those whom you thus embrace and enfold, save to your heart? The manna of your Godhead, which you, O Jesus, keep within the golden vessel? of your all-wise human soul, is your sweet heart! Blessed are they whom your embrace draws close to it. Blessed the souls whom you have hidden in your heart, that inmost hiding-place, so that your arms overshadow them from the disquieting of men and they only hope in your covering and fostering wings. Those who are hidden in your secret heart are overshadowed by your mighty arms; they sleep sweetly, and in the midst of the clergy look forward joyfully, for they share the merit of a good conscience and the anticipation of your promised reward. They neither fail from faintheartedness, nor murmur from impatience.

But those who kiss thus, sweetly mingle their spirits, and count it pleasure thus to share each other’s sweetness. Receive, O Lord, do not reject my whole spirit that I pour out on you in its entirety, despite the fact that it is altogether foul. Pour into me your wholly fragrant spirit that through your fragrance mine may stink no longer, and the sweet smell of you, Most Sweet, may permeate me ever more and more. This is what happens when we do what you told us to do in your remembrance. You could not have ordained a sweeter or a mightier means to forward the salvation of your sons. This is what happens when we eat and drink the deathless banquet of your body and your blood. As your clean beasts, we there regurgitate the sweet things stored within our memory, and chew them in our mouths like cud for the renewed and ceaseless work of our salvation. That done, we put away again in that same memory what you have done, what you have suffered for our sake. When you say to the longing soul: “Open your mouth wide and I will fill it,” and she tastes and sees your sweetness in the great Sacrament that surpasses understanding, then she is made that which she eats, bone of your bone and flesh of your own flesh. Thus is fulfilled the prayer that you made to your Father on the threshold of your passion. The Holy Spirit effects in us here by grace that unity which is between the Father and yourself, his Son, from all eternity by nature; so that, as you are one, so likewise we may be made one in you.

This, O Lord, is the face with which you meet the face of him who longs for you. This is the kiss of your mouth on the lips of your lover; and this is your love’s answering embrace to your yearning bride who says: “My beloved is mine, and I am his; he shall abide between my breasts.”  And again, ““My heart has said: ‘My face has sought you.’”¹²¹

Amen.

1. Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander pg21

2. A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God

3. St. Evagrius of Pontus, Mirror for Monks and Virgins 1.120

4. St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies III.19.1

5. St. Irenaeus of Lyons, Against Heresies III.19.2

6. It goes without saying that this process is, and has been, tainted by the church’s blasphemous embeddedness in worldly imperial power. In fact, by the time of the neochalcedonians which I seek to elucidate here, it was not uncommon for christians to kill each other by the thousands, and tens of thousands, over these creedal formulas and their political consequences. Though it goes without saying that these debates cannot be reduced to the politics operative in them at the time, neither can my admittedly naive account of heresy be abstracted from those political dimensions. There are undoubtedly people condemned to the label of heresy who were sincere, catholic and even saintly but whose bishop or emperor made the decision to condemn them for purely political reasons.
For more on the subject I’d recommend Jesus Wars by John Phillip Jenkins or Power and Persuasion, and Authority and the Sacred by Peter Brown

7. St. Sophronius of Jerusalem, Synodal Letter 2.3.4

8. Leontius of Byzantium, Epilyseis 5

9. Leontius of Byzantium, Epilyseis 8

10. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 113

11. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 115

12. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit 136

13. Leontius of Byzantium, Epilyseis 7

14. Sebastian Mateiescu, “In Contemplation Only”: Revisiting the Debate Between the Chalcedonians and the Anti-Chalcedonians On the Reality of the Natures of Christ, Modern Theology 39:3 July 2023 pg492

15. Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ 1.2, pg27

16. Jordan Daniel Wood, The Whole Mystery of Christ 1.2.2, pg30

17. In her article Leontius of Byzantium and the Concept of Enhypostaton: A Critical Re-evaluation Anna Zhyrkova makes the same inference using the example of granite:

“For instance, a particular piece of rock, whose substance can be identified as granite, is different from its in-substantiated comple- ments (quartz, feldspar, and biotite), a combination of which makes up its substance. In turn, its substance of granite can be viewed as what is en-hypostasized in a particular granite rock. The en-hypostasized substance of granite is not therefore ontologically identical with a piece of rock of that kind…

A granite substance determines a given particular to be what it is in respect of its account and essence. In that sense, it essentially constitutes a particular rock of granite. In a sense it is in a particular rock, but not as its size or weight are in it. For neither size nor weight determine what this particular rock is as such.”

18. W.B. Yeats, Among School Children VIII

19. St. Sophronius of Jerusalem, Synodal Letter 2.3.7

20. Leontius of Byzantium, CNE 5

21. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit preface 20

22. Leontius of Byzantium, CNE 4

23. Leontius of Jerusalem, Testimonies of the Saints 1873A-1873B

24. Robert W. Jenson, Lutheranism pg94

25. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 3.2

26. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 3.3

27. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 7.22

28. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 21.16

29. St. Maximus the Confessor, Commentary On The Our Father 4

30. St. Maximus the Confessor, The Ecclesiastical Mystagogy 24

31. St. Maximus the Confessor, QThall60.2

32. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 5.5

33. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 5.3

34. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 5.4

35. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 41.5

36. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 41.6

37. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 2.3-4

38. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 5.18

39. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 5.7

40. St. Maximus the Confessor, QThall60.5

41. Eberhard Jüngel, God As The Mystery Of The World I.3

42. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua to Thomas prologue 2

43. St. Hadewijch of Antwerp, Letters 18.69-79

44. St. Mechthild of Hackeborn, The Book of Special Grace 1.23

45. St. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love III.5

46. St. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love II.5

47. St. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love III.26

48. Margaret the Cripple, Vita 60

49. St. Maximus the Confessor, QThall. Intro. 1.2.18

50. St. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love Prologue

51. St. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love III.25

52. A short meditation on the suppletio is covered by Sr. Maximilian Marnau on pages 36-37 of her introduction to Gertrudes Herald of Divine Love published by Paulist Press

53. St. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love II.23

54. St. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love III.18

55. St, Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love II.18

56. Thomas of Cantimpre, The Life of Lutgard of Aywières I.2

57. Thomas of Cantimpre, The Life of Lutgard of Aywières I.12

58. Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God Vol. 3: The Flowering of Mysticism pg165

59. St. Margaret of Cortona, Life 6.152

60. St. Gertrude of Helfta, Herald of Divine Love III.51

61. St. Mechthild of Hackeborn, The Book of Special Grace 2.1

62. St. Elizabeth of the Trinity, Heaven In Faith 17; from The Complete Works of St. Elizabeth of the Trinity volume 1

63. St. Symeon the New Theologian, The Practical and Theological Chapters, The Second Chapters 2.3

He adds in the following chapter: “Any man who is insensible to the One must be insensible to everything, just as he who senses the One thereby senses all things, even though he is outside all sensation. He stands within the sensation of all things, but is not overcome by this sensation.” (2.4)

64. Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God: A History of Christian Mysticism vol. 1: The Foundations of Mysticism pg121

“But how exactly does the spiritual person learn to read the inner text [of the Song of Songs] behind the erotic images and longing language of the lovers in the Song of Songs? Here Origen bridges the gap between the inner and the outer person, between heavenly and carnal love, by means of the teaching about the spiritual senses of the soul {aisthesis pneumatike, aisthesis theia) that he developed from Clement of Alexandria. This is one of his most important contributions to the history of Christian mysticism.

According to the Alexandrian, “the divine scriptures make use of homo­nyms, that is to say, they use identical terms for describing different things . . . so that you will find the names of the members of the body transferred to those of the soul; or rather the faculties and powers of the soul are to be called its members” (Comm, on Song prol. [ed. 64.16-65.19; Lawson, pp. 26-27]). Therefore, any bodily description contained in the Bible (and what book of scripture contains more potent descriptions of body parts and bodily activities than the Song?) is actually a message about the inner person’s relation to the Word because this person possesses “spiritual senses” analogous to the senses of taste and touch, hearing, smell, and sight by which the outer person relates to the material world. Seeking the proper understanding of the erotic language of the Song is the exemplary exercise by which these higher and finer “senses” of the fallen, dormant intellect are awakened and resensitized by the spirit in order to be made capable of receiving the transcendental experience of the presence of the Word. Through these “organs of mystical knowledge,” which Origen calls “a sensuality which has nothing sensual in it,” “the sharpness of sensual experience is brought back to its primordial intensity,” as Peter Brown puts it.”

65. Origen of Alexandria, Commentary on the Song of Songs I.4

66. Origen of Alexandria, Contra Celsum 1.48

67. St. Julian of Norwich, Revelations of Divine Love chapter 55

68. St. Mechthild of Hackeborn, The Book of Special Grace 2.34

69. St. Hadewijch of Antwerp, Letters 17.101-111

70. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations vol. 4, Theology of the Symbol pg221

71. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations vol. 4, Theology of the Symbol pg229

72. Karl Rahner, Theological Investigations vol. 4, Theology of the Symbol pg230

73. St. Maximus the Confessor, The Ecclesiastical Mystagogy 2

74. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 33.2

75. Olivier-Thomas Venard, A Poetic Christ: Thomist Reflections on Scripture, Language, and Reality (T&T Clark, 2019) pg17

76. Andrew Murray, Be Perfect ch. 5

77. St. Callistus of Constantinople, Philokalia, Texts on Prayer 1.1-3

78. St. Ilias the Presbyter, Philokalia, A Gnomic Anthology 2.105-106

79. St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, Autobiography Chapter IX

80. St. Margaret Mary Alacoque,

81. St. Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua 21.15

82. Meister Eckhart, The Book of Divine Consolation

83. Meister Eckhart, Sermon 57, Q12

84. St. Angela of Foligno, The Book of the Memorial of Blessed Angela IX.C

85. St. Catherine of Siena, The Dialogues prologue 1

86. William of St. Thierry, Exposition on the Song of Songs 17

87. Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire

88. St. Gregory of Sinai, Philokalia, On Commandments and Dogmas 58-59

89. John Donne, Holy Sonnets 14

90. Gertrud Jarron Lewis, By Women, For Women: The Sister-Books of Fourteenth Century Germany

91. Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God vol. 3: The Flowering of Mysticism pg303

92. Bernard McGinn, The Presence of God vol. 3: The Flowering of Mysticism pg298

93. St. Gertrude of Helfta, The Herald of Divine Love III.17

94. Johannes Zachuber, Christology after Chalcedon and the Transformation of the Philosophical Tradition

95. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion 1.86-87 (From Robert R. Williams introduction in “Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God” pg11)

96. G.W.F. Hegel, 1824 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (From Peter Hodgson’s Fortess Press book Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit pg259)

97. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion 1.86 (From Robert R. Williams introduction in “Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God” pg7)

98. G.W.F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion 1.130 (From Robert R. Williams introduction in “Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God” pg7)

99. Plato, Theaetetus 155D

100. Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man Is Not Alone (1972) pg11

101. G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit preface 5 (trans. Miller)

102. G.W.F. Hegel, 1821 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (From the introduction to Peter Hodgson’s Fortess Press book Hegel: Theologian of the Spirit pg5)

103. Bernard Lonergan, Method In Theology 2.4

104. St. Augustine of Hipp, De Trinitate 8.4.6

105. St. Bernard of Clairvaux, On Loving God I.1

106. Olivier Clement, The Roots of Christian Mysticism pg153

107. Gerard Manley Hopkins, As Kingfishers Catch Fire

108. Meister Eckhart, Commentary on John 14-15

109. Meister Eckhart, Commentary on John 16

110. Meister Eckhart, Commentary on John 18

111. Meister Eckhart, Commentary on John 22

112. G.W.F. Hegel, Religion is One of the Greatest Concerns in Life

113. Mother Maria Skobstova, Essential Writings, The Mysticism of Human Communion pg75-76

114. Mother Maria Skobstova, Essential Writings, The Mysticism of Human Communion pg78

115. A phrase used by Bonhoeffer in Sanctorum Communio, Ethics, and his 1933 Christology Lectures

116. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship pg60 (Fortress Press, DBW4)

117. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Discipleship pg63 (Fortress Press, DBW4)

118. William of St. Thierry, On Contemplating God 3

119. St. Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Godhead 2.22

120. Hans Urs Von Balthasar, Heart of the World chapter XIII page 219

121. William of St. Thierry, Meditations 8.4-5