To many, the Sacred Heart is a vaguely Irish thing, associated with statuary in appalling taste. Perhaps the Irishry comes partly from the memorable lines in Juno and the Paycock: “Sacred Heart o’ Jesus, take away our hearts o’ stone, and give us hearts o’ flesh!”
Juno’s exclamation takes in a verse from the book of Ezekiel, in which God says: “I will take away the stony heart out of your flesh, and I will give you an heart of flesh.”
The play, however, is not at all straightforward, though the Hitchcock film (1930) is surprisingly good.
The play, however, is not at all straightforward, though the Hitchcock film (1930) is surprisingly good.
In Eliot’s lines, “The nightingales are singing near / The Convent of the Sacred Heart,” it is unclear what purpose the reference serves.
So the artistic connections of the Sacred Heart remain thin.
There is always the Sacre Coeur at Montmartre (begun in 1875 to “expiate the crimes of the Commune”), but generally it is represented at best by objects of popular piety such as the Hungarian painting on glass shown here.
It is a pity, for the devotion has remarkable depths.
It originates not in the Victorian era but in the 17th century. There had earlier been such a devotion associated with the Carthusians, but the popular version was initiated by the extraordinary Frenchwoman Margaret Mary Alacoque (1647-90). She saw a series of visions of Jesus.
“Behold the Heart that has so loved men,” she heard him say, displaying a flaming heart, pierced and surrounded by thorns.
What could it all be about?
In a way, it speaks for itself. Everyone knows what a heart is: a fleshy pump for blood that symbolises love.
In a way, it speaks for itself. Everyone knows what a heart is: a fleshy pump for blood that symbolises love.
In the Christian economy of salvation, humankind is believed to have been redeemed by God taking on human flesh – becoming a man.
Doubtless devotion to the Sacred Heart was encouraged by the Catholic Church in opposition to the dour, etherialised teachings of the Jansenists. This was a re-run of the second-century battle of St Irenaeus of Lyon against gnostics who despised the Incarnation.
Doctrine, as developed in the early centuries of Christianity, stated that Jesus was God and man. He was not simply a man who was very close to God. Nor was he a man whose soul had been replaced by the person of God the Son. He was one person, the Word or Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who had assumed human flesh, with a human soul and a human will.
The Sacred Heart itself does not figure much in the fat Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992).
“The prayer of the Church,” it says, “venerates and honours the Heart of Jesus just as it invokes his most holy name. It adores the incarnate Word and his Heart which, out of love for men, he allowed to be pierced by our sins.”
But isn’t worshipping the body of Christ idolatrous, since it is a created thing?
The answer would be that the body of Christ was, and is, necessarily united with his divinity.
John Damascene, the eighth-century Syrian theologian, insists that Jesus’s dead body in the tomb was separated from his human soul but still united with his divinity. This may sound mad speculation, but follows logically from the belief that God took on a human body and a soul.
As for Christ since his Resurrection, the Apostle Thomas is reported to have exclaimed “My Lord and my God” only after he had the chance to place his hand into the wound in Jesus’s side.
It is not dead flesh that Christians worship in their devotion to the Sacred Heart, but the person whose living heart it is. That person is believed to have loved each member of humanity with his human will, symbolised by his heart.
When Augustus Toplady, no Roman Catholic but a Calvinist member of the Church of England, wrote of the “Rock of Ages, cleft for me” (an image taken from Exodus 17:6), he referred to the water and blood that flowed from the side of Jesus.
It would be interesting to hear a conversation in heaven between him and Margaret Mary Alacoque.
Doubtless devotion to the Sacred Heart was encouraged by the Catholic Church in opposition to the dour, etherialised teachings of the Jansenists. This was a re-run of the second-century battle of St Irenaeus of Lyon against gnostics who despised the Incarnation.
Doctrine, as developed in the early centuries of Christianity, stated that Jesus was God and man. He was not simply a man who was very close to God. Nor was he a man whose soul had been replaced by the person of God the Son. He was one person, the Word or Second Person of the Holy Trinity, who had assumed human flesh, with a human soul and a human will.
The Sacred Heart itself does not figure much in the fat Catechism of the Catholic Church (1992).
“The prayer of the Church,” it says, “venerates and honours the Heart of Jesus just as it invokes his most holy name. It adores the incarnate Word and his Heart which, out of love for men, he allowed to be pierced by our sins.”
But isn’t worshipping the body of Christ idolatrous, since it is a created thing?
The answer would be that the body of Christ was, and is, necessarily united with his divinity.
John Damascene, the eighth-century Syrian theologian, insists that Jesus’s dead body in the tomb was separated from his human soul but still united with his divinity. This may sound mad speculation, but follows logically from the belief that God took on a human body and a soul.
As for Christ since his Resurrection, the Apostle Thomas is reported to have exclaimed “My Lord and my God” only after he had the chance to place his hand into the wound in Jesus’s side.
It is not dead flesh that Christians worship in their devotion to the Sacred Heart, but the person whose living heart it is. That person is believed to have loved each member of humanity with his human will, symbolised by his heart.
When Augustus Toplady, no Roman Catholic but a Calvinist member of the Church of England, wrote of the “Rock of Ages, cleft for me” (an image taken from Exodus 17:6), he referred to the water and blood that flowed from the side of Jesus.
It would be interesting to hear a conversation in heaven between him and Margaret Mary Alacoque.