The Kinde Yerning of the Soule
Simone Weil and Julian of Norwich on the Secret of the Heart
A couple of orientating comments. This is the first of what I expect will be a relatively lengthy series of ruminations on the deep heart—the beginnings of a theology of the deep heart. I’ve not planned out the series in any real detail; I will let it unfold as it unfolds. That said, the first few posts, including this opening one, will focus on laying out the sources that have shaped my thinking on the heart.
If memory serves, I first saw the distinction between the heart’s depths and its shallows in this astounding passage from Simone Weil’s “Beyond Personalism,” which, let me warn you, requires slow reading and re-reading:
Goodness is the sole source of the sacred. Only good and those things that have some relation to goodness are sacred.
This profound but childlike part of the heart that always expects good is not what is involved when a man lays claim to his rights. The little boy who jealously watches to see if his brother has a larger piece of cake gives in to an impulse that comes from a much more superficial part of the soul. The word justice has two very different meanings corresponding to these two parts of the soul. Only the first is important.
Every time the childlike lament rises from the depths of the heart—the lament that Christ himself could not hold back, “Why do they harm me?”—there is certainly injustice. For if, as it often happens, it is merely the result of a mistake, the injustice then consists in the inadequacy of the explanation.
Those who inflict the blows that cause this cry are giving in to impulses, which vary according to the people and the situation. At times some find pleasure in this cry. Many do not know the cry has been raised. For it is a silent cry which resounds only in the secret of the heart.1
Later, reading Julian of Norwich, I came upon the groundwork for a theology of the deep heart in a famous and notoriously difficult passage (from chapter 37 of the Long Text):
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