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The Sacred Heart of Jesus is one of those things that
commands a mental drawer of its own. To look at it is to try comparing
it with other things, but the steady, somber gaze of Jesus, augmented
by the tender gesture to his blazing heart, defies easy definition.
The heart is a sui generis combination of symbols and things that
never lose their discontinuity in spite of their claim to constitute
an emblem that one still finds everywhere centuries after it first
appeared.
The heart was regarded as the seat of love by troubadours
who defined courtly love in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
as a chaste mixture of the sensual and the spiritual. Poetry, song,
and visual art portrayed this love as an address and a contemplation,
as in the French tapestry (#6; 1400), L’Offrande de Coeur,
where the lover addresses the beloved in the visual discourse of
a St. Valentine’s heart-shaped fruit offered in his right hand,
perhaps as he extols the fidelity of his love symbolized by the
dog whose tail touches his foot and paw her knee. The small heart
sublimates the amorous intimacy that the lovers would enjoy as well
as the extent of sacrifice the lover will undertake for his beloved,
offering to her his vital organ.
It was a simultaneous gesture of erotic intimacy and
self-sacrifice that the Christian mystical tradition spiritualized
as an intimate relation of Christ and the human soul. A late example
is a Dutch holy card by Cornelius Galle the Younger, quoting a passage
from Song of Solomon, “My beloved is mine, and I am his”
(#61; ca. 1660) as Jesus and his beloved exchange hearts. This erotic
connection also infused the spirituality of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque
in the following decade, to whom Jesus appeared. Asking her for
her heart, Jesus extracted it from her chest at her pleading and
placed within his own heart, where she said it was consumed as in
a hot furnace.
But Marguerite-Marie remembered the mystical experience
not in naturalistic depictions, but in the symbolic visual language
of the emblem (#55; 1675). In doing so, she followed a pious emblematic
tradition. The Catholic image of the heart emerged in the later
Middle Ages as the visualization of poetic language. The heart appears
with the jarring disjuncture of an extended, even strained metaphor
in fifteenth-century manuscript illustrations. Consider Barthelémy
d’Eyck’s Contrition and Fear of God Return a Purified
Heart to Soul (#7; 1455), where ideas morph into imagery in
a process of transformation that is oddly imperfect if we regard
the images from the aesthetic bias of naturalism. But the scene
turns quietly mysterious if we look at it through the lens of the
emblematic tradition or even the twentieth-century enigmas of surrealism.
Contrition and Fear of God are two allegorical figures that have
leapt from the scribal page to flank a heavy cross to which is nailed
the pale flesh of the human heart. The two have performed this service
for the Soul, who kneels reverently before them to accept their
gift. Fear of God carries a scourge at her side. Barefoot and dressed
in a white habit, she is the purified and cloistered companion of
the secular Contrition who joins her to present the crucified heart
to the Soul, whose blue cope and position at the foot of the cross
recall the humility of Mary, willing recipient of suffering. The
allegory unfolds beneath the hovering sword of “Divine Justice,”
suggesting that the travails of the heart are the work of providence
and that the blood that runs down the cross to the breast of the
Soul is shed in a redemptive process of purification that is the
work of God.
But the clever allegory and the solemn legibility
of the scene do not exhaust the meaning of the image. The impaled
tissue atop the cross resists completely accommodating learned allusion
and figural transformation into lofty ideas. It remains flesh and
the brown stains beneath it refuse to dissolve into the airy substance
of literary imagination. The trace of blood that issues from the
slab of tautly stretched tissue is more blood than metaphor. The
heart registers pain and the sharp sword looms to fix this sensation.
The image is not pure emblem. The heart does no double duty. It
is what it is, a piece of human flesh served up on a rude pallet
of wood by the impassive servants of divine justice. Why? Because
the view of the Christian life espoused by the patrons of Barthelémy
d’Eyck and those who put his image to pious use framed the
difficulty and purpose of human existence on the model of the life
and death of Jesus. It was Jesus, after all, who prayed desperately
for an alternative ending, but accepted the will of God that his
flesh be nailed to a cross, where it hung in agony until his life
ended beneath the steely blade of divine justice. According to a
classical view of Christian redemption, Jesus satisfied the demands
of divine wrath for a just sacrifice to cancel the offense of human
disobedience. Blood was necessary and the suffering was real. That
is the way the universe works. All human suffering takes on a new
meaning as a result, seen now through the lens of Christ’s
suffering and death. And so the Soul accepts her heart disciplined
by the painful rigors of contrition and unflinching reverence for
a God who wields a massive weapon—not as punishment, but as
the means of removing the alienating effects of sin.
It is not a story that appeals to as many today as
it once did. Yet the message of suffering as the medium of union
with Jesus, as the way of drawing closer to God by emulating the
mortification undergone by Jesus, remained fundamental to the devotion
to the Sacred Heart as it took shape in the life of Marguerite-Marie
Alacoque during 1670s. The iconography of the Sacred Heart through
the eighteenth century demonstrates this as in Pompeo Batoni’s
Sacro Cuore di Gesù (#18; ca. 1740) or José
de Páez’s Adoration of the Sacred Heart by Saints
Ignatius Loyola and Aloysius Gonzaga (#19; 1773). The Jesuits
vigorously promoted the long cause of the Sacred Heart and insisted
on the literal appearance of the heart as a human organ. In so doing,
they were devoted not only to Alacoque’s visions, but to the
older tradition already seen at work in the allegorical image of
Contrition and Fear of God. The heart was not simply a metaphor,
but the actual presence of God. And what could be clearer than José
de Páez’s paean to the colossal presence of the heart
or the grasping hand of Batoni’s Jesus? The Jesuits stressed
the literal heart in fierce opposition to Catholic reformers and
Jansenists (not to mention Protestants), who imagined a natural
world in which divine presence was concentrated in the individual
human conscience rather than possessed and controlled by church
authorities and enforced by sympathetic monarchies. A secular world
meant the enlightened separation of church and state, a world in
which liberal democracies would operate as sovereign realms and
the sacred was at work in ethical behavior and civil society rather
than ecclesiastical ritual.
The profusion of images gathered by Peter Névraumont
clearly shows that the Jesuits succeeded, at least inasmuch as they
were able to promote a cause that took root in popular piety as
well as in new religious orders. Yet the visual record testifies
that over time that the heart went from the literal organ cupped
in the hand of Batoni’s eighteenth-century Jesus to the mid-nineteenth-century
badge or decal floating on the chest of the Savior (#82) and finally
vanished altogether by the end of the century in the image of Jacques-Joseph
Tissot’s Notre-Seigneur Jésus-Christ (#24). What
remains constant, however, is the steady gaze of Jesus, fixed beseechingly
on the viewer. It is the address of the courtly lover transfigured
into the offer of divine love. If the heart flattens into an emblem
and even disappears in some cases and the presence shifts from organ
to person, the doleful beckoning to respond to the personal example
and invitation of Jesus remains.
And yet, in spite of the iconographical changes, the
symbol of the Sacred Heart itself persists—as garden ornament,
tattoo, prayer card, and Elvis. An emblem of compassion, of ethnic
identity, of traditional Catholic piety, of camp or kitsch or folk
or fine art, the image lives on in popular piety and commercial
mass-culture as a widely circulating logo of virtually anything
the bearer wants it to mean. But wherever it appears, the heart
bears something of the original juxtaposition of different orders
of representation, the transposition of word and image, the abrupt
and unresolved amalgamation of thought and body. The dislocation
of the heart never loses its arresting oddness and never rests with
a single explanation. What does it mean? One looks to Jesus and
awaits his quiet account.
David Morgan
Professor of Religion
Department of Religion
Duke University
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