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“I take Thee, O Sacred Heart, for the sole object of my love,
the protection of my life, the pledge of my salvation, the remedy
of my frailty and inconstancy, the reparation for all the defects
of my life, and my secure refuge at the hour of my death.”
With these fervent words of devotion, Saint Marguerite Marie Alacoque
(1647–1690) first prayed to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Since
then, generations of the faithful have approached images of the
Sacred Heart inspired by her visions with similar words of reverence
and devotion. But what of the secular reader? How do we approach
the collection of Sacred Heart images found in this book? How do
we approach this assembly of bleeding, pierced, and viscerally wounded
red hearts? Some encircled in the vise of a crown of thorns portrayed
in anatomical precision, some as sweetly as valentine hearts? What
to make of the Sacred Hearts of artists as varied as Lucas Cranach
the Younger, Pompeo Batoni, Odilon Redon, or Salvador Dali, not
to mention the crop of contemporary “outsider” artist
who have appropriated this image, when juxtaposed against the cloying
sentimentality of the hearts depicted on Catholic prayer cards?
A cohesive devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus emerged as a Church
sanctioned phenomenon only in the late 17th century when it spread
through both Catholic and initially Protestant Europe. In Catholic
circles, devotion to Jesus’ heart was most zealously promoted
by succession of influential French Jesuits. A number of the images
of the heart of Jesus, however, predate the 17th century, and cannot
therefore be directly related to that century’s devotional
practices. Yet, they are crucial to this discussion because they
are proof that the heart of Jesus stood as a powerful symbol of
Divine presence much earlier than the 17th century.
The 20th century German Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner recognized
this powerful symbolic function of Christ’s heart. He described
the word heart “as a primordial word, an archetypal symbol
that says something about a person’s innermost center, depth
and ultimate unity.” To understand Rahner’s deceptively
simple definition requires elucidation of the set of complex concepts
of symbol, archetype, and Self, borrowed from Jungian psychology,
that stands behind it.
The English word symbol comes from the ancient
Greek word symbolon, which in turn was derived from the preposition
syn (“together, common, simultaneous with, or according
to”) and the noun bolon (what has been thrown”)
from the verb ballo (“to throw”). The Greeks thought
of a symbolon as a tally which originally was a notched stick used
in commerce, split in lengthwise, the seller keeping one half, the
buyer the other. In this sense, a symbolon or tally was two halves
of the same object, which when put together reconstituted the object.
Such a tally could be used to provide proof of identity; for instance,
the legitimacy of a banker’s order could be verified by a symbolon
or tally that accompanied the order, familiar and recognizable to
a second party who possessed the other half of the tally. Based
on its original connotation, we might say a symbol is constituted
of two halves, which in order to fulfill its function must be recognized
by a least two individuals, or two groups of people, and thus serves
to link and connect them.
For the founder of analytical psychology Carl Jung,
the concept and function of a symbol, while shadowing the original
Greek conception, was rather more complex. For him, a symbol was
the manifestation of a function that allowed psychic energy (in
Freudian terms the libido) to be transformed into artistic, religious,
and scientific achievement. According to Jung, a “true symbol…should
be understood as the expression of an intuitive perception which
can as yet, neither be apprehended, or expressed differently.”
Symbols, like myths and rituals, were a manifestation of an innate
pattern of psychological behavior or disposition. These innate patterns
he termed archetypes. Jung postulated that archetypes were fundamental
components of the collective unconscious that affect an individual’s
conscious behavior. An archetype was not a particular perception,
feeling, intuition, or thought, but rather an inherited subconscious
idea, image, or feeling that became manifest during a person’s
lifetime of experience and influenced the “I” or self-conscious
(for both Jung and Freud, ego) driven behavior.
When Rahner proffered that the Sacred Heart be seen
as “archetypal symbol that says something about a person’s
innermost center, depth and ultimate unity,” he is suggesting
that images of Christ’s bleeding heart, like the ones collected
here, are a conscious manifestation of an unconscious archetype.
These manifestations of the archetype of the heart are revelatory
of a person’s “innermost center,” a psychological
component Jung designated the Self.
From this perspective, each image in this book, whether by Salvador
Dali or an unknown 15th century artist, tells the story of consciousness
and its relationship with the collective unconscious at that particular
moment in time. And since the archetype is an unconscious process
that may only be known through conscious behavior, it may be argued
that the images of the bleeding heart express the relationship between
the Self and the ego. Through images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus,
the ego recognizes the Divine within.
In Karl Rahner’s quote above it is unclear whether his “ultimate
unity” corresponds to Jung’s collective unconscious. In
considering the images of the Sacred Heart, we might marvel at their
similarity over times and places. Should we then conclude that a
“person’s innermost center” (Jung’s Self) is
a universal entity, an essential element of the collective unconscious?
In his Psychological Types, Jung defined the
collective unconscious’ content as an entity that,
“does not originate in a personal acquisition, but in the inherited
possibility of psychic functioning in general, namely, in the inherited
brain-structure. These are mythological associations—those
motives and images, which can spring anew in every age and clime,
without historical tradition or migration. I term these contents
the collective unconscious. Just as conscious contents are engaged
in a definite activity, the unconscious contents…are similarly
active. Just as certain results or products proceed from conscious
psychic activity, there are also products of unconscious activity,
as for instance dreams and fantasies.”
Religion, too, was seen by Jung as a product of unconscious
activity. In a Jungian interpretation, we imagine God because we
have a Self. Religion becomes the vehicle to manifest the archetype
that pushes us to find meaning and seek relationship with Self.
In Symbols of Tranformation, Jung wrote, “Christ, as
hero and god-man, signifies psychologically the Self; that is he
represents the projection of this most important and most central
of archetypes. The archetype of the Self has, functionally, the
significance of a ruler of the inner world—of the collective
unconscious.” The bleeding heart, shown as being worshipped,
or in the act of transiting between Christ and the devout then expresses
in symbolic terms this archetypal relationship; in the image of
Christ we recognize the echo of our own divine nature. This does
not imply a denial of the historicity of Christ as man/son of God,
rather it recognizes that the image of Christ, like the images of
the Sacred Heart, also articulates the profound truth that His story
is our story. Thus both faithful and secular viewer may recognize
the truth of the Christian mystery as either a Divine or personal
universal. The faithful recognize the archetype of the Sacred Heart
as embodying the unity of the conscious ego with the Divine; the
secular recognize it as the unity of the ego and the Self.
Liliana Leopardi
Professor of Art History
Chapman University
Orange, California
September 15, 2009
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