Mind Your Heart

We need to talk about the human heart. Confusion abounds.

Photo by Anne Nygård on Unsplash

Perhaps we should start with the Scriptures. The Hebrew word rendered ‘heart’ in English Bibles is ‘לב’, which we’ll transliterate ‘lēb’ (‘lēv’ would also work).

Lēb is all over the Hebrew Bible. I mean all over.

It’s in perhaps the defining passage(s) of the Hebrew Scriptures, the שמע (Shema):

Hear, Israel, the LORD our God, the LORD is one. And you shall love the LORD your God with all your heart (לְבָבְךָ֥) and with all your being and with all your might.¹

Earlier, in Genesis 20, Abimelech protests to God that he had acted with respect to Sarah from a “pure heart”, and God agrees that he acted בְתָם־ לְבָבְךָ֙, “with a pure heart” (Alter), “in the integrity of your heart” (ESV), “with a clear conscience” (NIV). Solomon enjoins his child in Proverbs 4 to “listen to my words,” to “guard them within your heart (לְבָבֶֽךָ׃)” (Alter’s translation).

This could go on for a while. ‘Lēb’ peppers the Pentateuch. And the OT historical books. And Psalms. And Proverbs. Oh, and the prophets. It shows up almost 600 times, roughly every 40 verses. Around once every chapter and a half, on average. Include the closely related ‘lebab’ in the count and you’re right at once per chapter.

Lēb is A Thing.

Here’s the deal, though: we tend to misunderstand these biblical passages because we have a truncated view of what lēb involves. We read the Old Testament through contemporary eyes: we think of the heart as, fundamentally, the seat of feeling and emotion, of desire and will, and—this is crucial—not as the seat of thought and rationality, of deliberation and judgment.

Consider Jeremiah 17:9²:

More crooked the heart than all things,
     it is grievously ill and who can fathom it?

Some folks conclude from this that the deepest problem besetting the human condition is our emotions, our desires, or (most misleadingly) our feelings. This makes sense, of course, if the heart is simply the seat of those sorts of things.

But this view of lēb is, to be blunt, just wrong. It is wrong because it demands a truncated picture of the human heart. Lēb involves feelings, emotion, desire, yes. But, equally, and just as fundamentally, lēb involves thought, judgment, understanding, rationality. Lēb includes the mind.

Commenting on Deuteronomy 6, Robert Alter mentions this explicitly:

The heart is the seat of understanding in biblical physiology, but it is also associated with feelings.³

Notice that the framing idea for Alter is understanding. Feelings are an “also”.

It’s not just Alter. The inclusion of the mind within our lēb is just a commonplace among Hebrew scholars. In part this is because other Semitic languages share this feature in common: the various but linguistically interconnected words for ‘heart’ refer synecdochically to whole selves, including all of our core faculties like desire, will, emotion, and—you guessed it—mind. Indeed, English Bibles often translate a cognate of ‘lēb’ in 1 Samuel 9:20 using ‘mind’.

But in larger part scholars recognize this because it’s sorta obvious if you actually pay attention to how the Scriptures use ‘lēb’.

Take Psalm 119:11, in which the Psalmist insists:

I have stored up your word in my heart.

“Storing up” the word of God is no doubt more than an intellectual feat, but it surely isn’t less than intellectual. One uses one’s mind, and other parts of oneself as well, to store up God’s word. So the Psalmist recognizes that the heart is not just a seat of feelings. It is also the seat of the intellect. Likewise Proverbs 4:20-27. And on the list could go. (There’s a related point to make about the Old Testament idea of remembering, which involves more than the mind, but not less.)

These examples are typical of ‘lēb’ in the Old Testament. The human faculty most often clearly in view when the Old Testament deploys ‘lēb’ is the mind.⁴ In other words, according to the Hebrew Scriptures, your mind is fundamental part of your heart.

Hearts are, as it were, minded.

And yet, rarely have I seen contemporary discussions of, for example, Jeremiah 17 include a conversation about the deceitfulness of the mind. This is no doubt facilitated by translations like the ESV, which seemingly contrast mind and heart in Jeremiah 17:10. But ‘mind’ is an at best controversial translation of ‘כְּלָי֖וֹת’ in verse 10. Alter, for example, renders this ‘conscience’. Jeremiah is getting at one’s “inner parts”. The word’s close cousins often refer to literal kidneys! Regardless, Jeremiah is using ‘lēb’ in v. 9 to refer to a person’s whole self, just as the Psalmist and others do. Just as Hebrew intends.

Anyway, if I had to pick one aspect of the cultural zeitgeist that irks me the most, it would be the bifurcation of mind and heart, between “head” and “gut”. It’s a plague. A pox on our house. And it is everywhere.

I see the consequences of this cultural lie every semester in my students. It leads them to think that getting in touch with their deepest desires is the way to a fulfilled life. It makes them think self-control is a vice rather than a fruit of the Spirit. It leads them to mistake empathy or affirmation for love.

I can understand the instinct here. There is a tradition—one that in some ways has become more powerful as people have endeavored to correct it—according to which the deepest, most important—the essential—aspect of humanity is our mind, our intellect. This tradition is no doubt false. We are more than minds!

To solve this problem, many people want to insist on the importance of feeling, of emotion, desire, and other more obviously embodied forms of human experience. Often, folks will try to do this by insisting that we ought to elevate the heart. In some sense, I applaud this move. These folks, in other words, want to elevate emotion and desire and such. And that is a needed correction.

The problem is that these same folks often fail to deal with the contemporary misunderstanding of the heart as not involving the mind. (I’ll have more to say about one prominent proponent of this move in a future post.)

We are left, therefore, with a fundamental distinction, perhaps even opposition, between mind on the one hand and emotion, will, desire on the other. As if these two aspects of the self operate independently.⁵ In English, like in Hebrew, ‘heart’ insists on picking out our deepest self. And as a result, our minds are jettisoned as constitutive of who we are. We become, in our deepest parts, a bundle of feelings and desire. No wonder it then becomes difficult, when feeling and knowledge conflict, to act on anything other than feeling. In other words, down this path lies expressive individualism in its Romantic form.

The solution is to return to the biblical picture, contained so clearly in lēb: we should mind our hearts.

We must reintroduce the mind into the conversations about the heart. If the heart is our deepest self, minding our hearts reintegrates anthropology. We position ourselves to appreciate that we are more than minds, but not less. We needn’t choose between mind and emotion or desire or will. These things are interconnected; they affect one another; they collectively make us who we are. Just as it is wrong to expel the mind from the heart, so it is wrong to think the mind is all there is to the heart.

If we mind our hearts—if we situate the mind within the heart, as one but only one of its fundamental faculties—we will be better able to mind our hearts in a different sense: to tend to them, care for them, cultivate them. Or, maybe better, we will be better able to participate with God as He molds and shapes our hearts further into the Image of His Son.

Consider: minding the heart changes the way we ought to think about internal conflict. Mind and emotion or desire can both go wrong. It’s not that one is trustworthy and the other not. It’s that sometimes it’s one that goes awry, sometimes the other. Sometimes it’s both! When mind and emotion or desire conflict, our heart is at odds with itself. Our truest, deepest self is a divided heart. Whether our emotions or our mind ought to win the day cannot, then, be settled just by judging which is deeper or more essential. We must discern which aspect of our selves—if any aspect at all!—is responding adequately to the Truth, to God and His World.

Mind your heart, so you can mind your heart.

1. This is Robert Alter’s translation in The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Vol. 1 (Norton, 2019).

2. Alter’s translation. The ESV renders this verse, “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?” For the reasons Alter gives, I prefer his rendering.

3. Robert Alter, The Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary, Vol. 1, p. 641.

4. I talk about this a bit further in Chapter 2 of Knowledge for the Love of God.

5. More nerdily, this move is fundamentally an embrace of the psychological tradition initiated by the 18th century Scottish philosopher David Hume. He’s a prominent player in the Accidental War on Humanity, and someone to whom we’ll return. In particular, he was way out ahead of Darwin in thinking that humans are constructed from swarms.