Don't Follow Your Heart

There is a saying ascribed to Isidore the Priest warning that "of all evil suggestions, the most terrible is the prompting to follow your own heart." The modern reader will be taken aback. "Follow what your heart says" is part of the standard popular wisdom of our day, like "following your dream."

Are we being told to suspect our deepest emotions and longings, when surely we have learned that we have to listen to what's deepest in us and accept and nurture our real feelings? But the desert monastics would reply that, left to ourselves, the search for what the heart prompts is like peeling an onion; we are not going to arrive at a pure and simple set of inclinations. In the matter of self-examination, as in others, "the truth is rarely "pure" and never "simple."

The desert means a stepping back from the great system of collusive fantasy in which I try to decide who I am, sometimes try to persuade you to tell me who I am (in accord, of course, with my preferences), sometimes use God as a reinforcement for my picture of myself, and so on and on. The "burden" of self-accusation, the suspicion of what the heart prompts, this is not about an inhuman austerity or self-hatred but about the need for us all to be coaxed into honesty by the confidence that God can forgive and heal. Henri de Lubac, one of the most outstanding Roman Catholic theologians of the twentieth century, put it with a clarity and brevity very hard to improve upon: "It is not sincerity, it is truth which frees us....To seek sincerity above all things is perhaps, at bottom, not to want to be transformed." He has also observed that "psychology alone is not suited, at least in the most subtle cases, to discern the difference between the authentic and the sham." Like the desert teachers, he warns us against easy assumptions about the natural wisdom of the human heart.

If the heart contains the love of God, one may wonder where is the danger of being guided by it? It is confusing on the surface, but there is something intelligible behind this contradiction. It was Abba Isidore who expressed strong reservations about being guided by the heart. These reservations have to do with listening to what you

are the promptings of your feelings. He wants us to be clear that listening to these promptings is not a guarantee of getting it right. "How can I be wrong if I am so sincere?" is not a Christian principle.

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