Sacred Heart Devotion: Memory, Body, Image, Text - Continuities and Discontinuities [1 ed.] 9783412521271, 9783412521257

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Franziska Metzger / Stefan Tertünte (eds.)

Sacred Heart Devotion Memory, Body, Image, Text – Continuities and Discontinuities

Erinnerungsräume. Geschichte – Literatur – Kunst Herausgegeben von Franziska Metzger und Dimiter Daphinoff Band 2

Franziska Metzger / Stefan Tertünte (eds.)

Sacred Heart Devotion Memory, Body, Image, Text – Continuities and Discontinuities

Böhlau Verlag wien köln weimar

Kindly funded by the University of Teacher Education Lucerne, the Priests of the Sacred Heart, the Swiss Province of the Jesuits and the Diocese of Basel.

Deutsche Nationalbibliothek Cataloging-in-publication data  : http://dnb.d-nb.de © 2021 by Böhlau Verlag GmbH & Cie. KG, Lindenstraße 14, D-50674 Köln All Rights Reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any other information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher. Cover Illustration  : Jozef Mehoffer, Sacred Heart of Jesus (Serce Jezusa), 1911, public domain Translations and editing  : Sharon Casu, Fribourg Cover design  : Michael Haderer, Vienna Typesetting  : Michael Rauscher, Vienna

Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht Verlage | www.vandenhoeck-ruprecht-verlage.com ISBN 978-3-412-52127-1

Table of Contents

Franziska Metzger / Stefan Tertünte

Devotion and Memory. Trans-Disciplinary Approaches to the Sacred Heart ..   7

1 MEMORY, BODY AND DEVOTION  : CONCEPTUAL REFLECTIONS FOR A ­ TRANS-DISCIPLINARY APPROACH Franziska Metzger

Memory of the Sacred Heart. Linguistic, Iconographic and Ritual Dimensions . 23 Marcello Neri

Memory and Devotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  49 Elke Pahud de Mortanges

The Sacred Heart as Memorial Body. An Analytic Approach to Its Somatic Presentations and Bodily Appropriations in Devotion and Art.. . . . . . . . .  61

2 TRANSFORMATIONS AND TRANS-CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF SACRED HEART DEVOTION FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE 20TH CENTURY Pietro Antonio Viola

Restoring the Body to the Heart. Iconographical and Theological Developments between the Council of Trent and Paray-le-Monial.. . . . . . .  91 David Morgan

The Image of Love. Eros and Agape in the History of Devotion to the Sacred Heart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Stefan Laube

Heart and Vial as Communicating Tubes. Notes on the Imagery of Vessels in Early Modern Times . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 135

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Daniel Sidler

Pluralisation and Centring. Sacred Heart Devotion in Eighteenth-Century Switzerland.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Denis Pelletier

The Sacred Heart between History and Memory. Le Cœur in Les Études carmélitaines (1950) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Paul Airiau

The Heart of Christ in the Eucharist. The Reformulation of the Devotion to the Sacred Heart by Msgr. Maxime Charles, Rector of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre (1959–1985). . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Fransiskus Purwanto SCJ

The Inculturation of the Devotion to the Sacred Heart among the Javanese in Ganjuran, Yogyakarta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229 Sven Baier / Damian Troxler

The Power of the Metaphor. Iconographic Devotion in Pupils’ Daily Lives . . . 251

3 MEMORY, IMAGINATION, EXPERIENCE  : THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS Nicolas Steeves SJ

The Sacred Heart  : A Fundamental Stimulus for the Theological Imagination .. 267 John van den Hengel

Refiguring the Memory of a Devotion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 285 José Tolentino de Mendonça

Rediscovering the Place of the Heart. A Spiritual Challenge for the Present . . 317 Editors and Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325

Franziska Metzger / Stefan Tertünte

Devotion and Memory Trans-Disciplinary Approaches to the Sacred Heart The complex relationship between religion and memory and specifically between devotion and memory can be conceptualised as a central dimension of religious communication. Mechanisms of memory fundamentally shape, stabilise and transform religious language and ritual practices, form religious communities and play a role in situating these communities in society. A focus on memory is particularly suited for innovative trans-disciplinary ­approaches to Sacred Heart devotion. The present volume combines memory studies and cultural history of religion, theology and history of art in the analysis of icono­ graphy, devotional discourses and ritual practices. Images, narratives and ritual practices of the Sacred Heart both create spaces of memory and are linguistically and iconographically shaped and ritually produced and used spaces of memory. The subject matter and the trans-disciplinary approach of the volume support a perspective of longue durée from the Middle Ages to the present that increases analytical depth, allowing a systematic investigation of textures of memory, of the stabilisation and transformation of codes and their interrelation.

Shifts in Perspective The approach underlying the contributions of this volume is based on a post-structuralist constructivist perspective on memory as it has significantly been developed by social and cultural, especially literary studies with a focus on the deep-structures and mechanisms of memory construction.1 With regard to the historical dimension, the contributions pursue a self-reflexive cultural historical perspective – in line with a second cultural historical shift2 – on religion as a system of meaning production, 1 See among others  : Assmann, Erinnerungsräume  ; Erll and Nünning (eds.), Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses  ; Erll, “Travelling Memory”  ; Langenbacher, Niven and Wittlinger (eds.), Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe  ; De Cesari and Rigney (eds.), Transnational Memory. Circulation, Articulation, Scales  ; Sierp, History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity  ; Oesterle (ed.), Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, Wissen  ; Metzger and Daphinoff (eds.). Ausdehnung der Zeit. 2 Paradigmatically for this second cultural historical transformation  : Graf and Große Kracht (eds.), Re-

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that is on linguistic, visual and ritual communication. This approach deconstructs dichotomies with regard to image and text, body and mind, spirituality and theology. It converges therein with the sociological and cultural scientific approaches of the contributions by religious scientists and art historians as well as with those of the systematic theological contributions. The interrelation of these approaches substantially underscores the innovative character of the volume. In the last few years, religious and Church history has participated in research on memory mainly with regard to the relationship between religion and nationalism3, i.e. the construction of religious and national identities and their often conflictive relation in 19th and 20th-century Europe, with a special focus on Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, France, and Belgium. Whereas the history of historiography has been investigated in a number of projects related to religion and nation building4, other modes of memory construction in the religious context such as monuments and sacral lieu have comparatively rarely been the object of religious historical analysis5. The deep structures of the construction of memory in texts, images and rites, modes of mythicisation of saints and other figures, of places and spaces, that is the dynamics of their communicative construction, promulgation and transformation have rarely been focused on by religious history, religious studies and theology so far.6 ligion und Gesellschaft  ; Hölscher (ed.), Baupläne der sichtbaren Kirche  ; Altermatt, Konfession, Nation, Rom  ; Damberg (ed.), Soziale Strukturen und Semantiken des Religiösen im Wandel  ; Hellemans, “Die Transformation der Religion und der Grosskirchen in der zweiten Moderne”  ; Altermatt, “Ambivalences of Catholic Modernisation”  ; Ruff, “The Postmodern Challenge to the Secularization thesis  : a Critical Assessment”. 3 See especially the contributions in  : Haupt and Langewiesche (eds.), Nation und Religion in Europa  ; Altermatt and Metzger (eds.), Religion und Nation  ; Geyer and Lehmann (eds.), Religion und Nation  ; van der Veer and Lehmann (eds.), Nation and Religion. 4 See especially the contributions in  : Otto, Rau and Rüpke (eds.), Historiography and religion  ; Berger and Lorenz Chris (eds), The Contested Nation  ; Armborst-Weihs and Wiehl (eds.), Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewusstsein zwischen religiöser und konfessioneller Toleranz und Identitätsfindung. 5 See Devotion and Memory. Contemporary Church History. Ed. Metzger and Strübind  ; Markschies and Wolf (eds.), Erinnerungsorte des Christentums  ; Meier and Schneider (eds.), Erinnerungsorte  – Erinnerungsbrüche  ; Di Stefano and Ramón Solans (eds.), Marian Devotions. 6 See Metzger, “Devotion and Memory” and other contributions in Devotion and Memory. Contemporary Church History. Ed. Metzger and Strübind. This research gap can be detected beyond the religious field. Especially literary studies have given interesting impulses. See among others  : Vietta and Uerlings (eds.), Moderne und Mythos  ; Ghervas and Rosset (eds.), Lieux d’Europe. Mythes et limites  ; Cruz and Frijhoff (eds.), Myth in History, History in Myth  ; Krüger and Stillmark (eds.), Mythos und Kulturtransfer  ; Metzger/Daphinoff (eds.), Ausdehnung der Zeit. Interesting lines of interpretation regarding the visual, material and spatial dimension of memory production and mediation have been presented by the project “EuroVision – Museums Exhibiting Europe” (EMEE) (Popp, Schumann et al. (eds.), The EU Project ‘Museums Exhibiting Europe’ [EMEE]).

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The history of devotion in general and of Sacred Heart devotion in particular has been part of the first cultural historical shift in religious and Church history since the late 1980s. Like social historical approaches a decade earlier, this research was significantly influenced by modernisation theory7 and – directly linked to the latter – by a functionalist approach with a focus on questions regarding the function of certain rites, symbols and religious practices in the social and political field.8 In contrast, in the vein of the second cultural historical shift since the late 1990s, according to which in a perspective of second order observation semantics, discourse, and the staging of identity are brought to the fore, leading to a more complex vision of religion and modernity, devotion has less often been dealt with. This has not least to do with the strong social historical research of the previous period. Innovative approaches have been introduced in the last few years by sociologically and anthropologically oriented religious studies which, also regarding Sacred Heart devotion, have focused on trans-cultural and trans-temporal dimensions of symbolical and ritual practices.9 For other devotions, research in gender and religion10 and a recent attention for religious objects and materiality of religion11 has brought to the fore interesting results and conceptual reflections.

  7 See among others the following influential publications  : Gabriel and Kaufmann (eds.), Zur Soziologie des Katholizismus  ; Altermatt, Katholizismus und Moderne  ; Hervieu-Léger, “Religion and Modernity in the French Context”  ; Schieder (ed.), Religion und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. On this thread of research and the two cultural historical shifts see  : Franziska, “Religion und Geschichte. Transformationen einer Verhältnisgeschichte”.   8 See especially Busch, “Frömmigkeit als Faktor des katholischen Milieus”  ; id., Katholische Frömmigkeit und Moderne  ; Jonas, France and the Cult of Sacred Heart  ; Menozzi, Sacro Cuore  ; Moore, HerzJesu-­­Ver­ehrung in Deutschland  ; Schlager, Kult und Krieg  ; Blaschke and Kuhlemann (eds.), Religion im Kaiserreich. Milieus  – Mentalitäten  – Krisen  ; Blaschke (ed.), Konfessionen im Konflikt  ; Altermatt, Katholizismus und Moderne  ; Olenhusen, “Feminisierung von Religion und Kirche im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert”.   9 See for example  : Morgan, “Rhetoric of the Heart”  ; id., Sacred Heart of Jesus  ; Zanchi, Le migrazioni del cuore  ; Woets, “Engaging with the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Catholic Ghana”. 10 See for example  : Pahud de Mortanges, “‘Be a somebody with a body’”  ; Werner, “Liturgie und Männlich­ keit in der katholischen Mission in Skandinavien”. 11 See with trans-disiplinary approaches  : Houtman and Meyer (eds.), Things. Religion and the question of materiality  ; Laube, Von der Reliquie zum Ding  ; Morgan, Images at Work  ; Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte  ; Neri, Gesù affetti e corporeità di Dio  ; Hamburger and Bouché (eds.), The Mind’s Eye  : Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages  ; Reeve, “Material religion, education, and museums  : Introduction”  ; Nightingale and Greene, “Religion and material culture”  ; Buggeln, “Museum space and the experience of the sacred”  ; Laube, “Umgebung und Konversion”  ; Czerny, “Orte für Kunst als Sakraräume – Sakralräume als Orte der Kunst”  ; Macho, Das zeremonielle Tier  ; Hopkins and Wyke (eds.), Roman Bodies.

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The dimension of memory has not been included and reflected systematically in this field so far. It is therefore especially promising to look at devotional practices, narratives, images, the creation and use of spaces and objects, including bodies – sacralised bodies as well as bodies of agents of religious practices –, in a trans-disciplinary approach.

A Focus on Entanglements, Variations and Transfers The concept of the volume grounds on the fundamental thesis that memory of the Sacred Heart was/is created trough linguistic and iconographic codes, through ritual and ritualised practices, and through narratives, and that Sacred Heart devotion is modelled as space of memory.12 The central foci of research underlying the individual contributions are based on this thesis according to which various types of memory can be distinguished that are closely intertwined  : iconographic codes, ritual practices and narratives. They analyse the multi-layered textures of memory creating images, rites and narratives of memory, their variations, transformations and usage in different fields  : in popular devotional practices, in pastoral care, in theological reflection and spiritual discourse, in art, religious objects, public transmission through diverse media (including the internet). They explore different local, regional and national contexts, also beyond the Catholic community, in different times and over longer periods. The important dimension of transformations includes variations of radical deconstruction, whose decoding, however, depends on the knowledge of the respective codes. The entanglement of the three modes and the notion of textures of memory is conceptually delineated in the contributions of the first part by Franziska Metzger (Lucerne), Marcello Neri (Modena) and Elke Pahud de Mortanges (Freiburg i. Br./ Fribourg) and in the third part by Nicolas Steeves (Rome). The entanglements and textures of memory are analysed in a number of the historical contributions of the second part. Pietro Antonio Viola (Trento) demonstrates with a focus on 16th and 17th-century northern Italy how images and their ritualised staging trigger narratives, how they activate narrative memory. Conversely, David Morgan (Durham, USA) shows how, in the same period, discourses of the Sacred Heart were visually activated, and Daniel Sidler (Basel) delineates how the iconographic, ritual and narrative 12 See conceptually Marcello Neri’s and Franziska Metzger’s contributions in this volume. See also  : Metzger, “Memory of the Sacred Heart – Iconographic and Ritual Variations”  ; Metzger, “Erinnerungsräume”.

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dimension of memory had a forceful effect in the devotional and memorial “centring” that he analyses for 18th-century Switzerland. The three authors also look at contestations and shifts in meaning that produced differing spaces of memory. In order to systematically access the functioning of Sacred Heart memory, ritual, symbolic and narrative patterns, iconographic strategies, modes of theological imagination and ritual staging are centred on  : the functioning of the Sacred Heart as icon, symbol, ritual object, as producer of practices, as texture of ritual practices and discourses and its effect on the institutionalisation of communities and narrative mediation, or in Sven Baier and Damian Troxler’s words the “power of the metaphor”. Mechanisms such as detemporalisation, the creation of presence, of immediacy and tangibility of the transcendent “other”, i.e. the enactment of eternity, the visualisation of the invisible, of sacred and of sacralised spaces are brought to the fore. All three modes of memory, but especially the analysis of iconography and ritual staging, revaluate the dimension of the body. Bodies as spaces of memory are present throughout the volume and systematically conceptualised by Elke Pahud de Mortanges and José Tolentino de Mendonça (Rome), linking anthropological and theoretical reflections on pluri-fold embodiment  – of Christ, the individual believer and devotional communities – and on the human senses that produce, store and embody layers of memory. As Elke Pahud de Mortanges points out, the dimension of embodiment helps to conceptualise religious memory. The in-depth focus on the functioning of the memory of the Sacred Heart turns the analytical attention especially to the complex dynamics of transfers, variations, adaptations and transformations (diachronical and synchronical), as it is especially given to transformations in semantics, iconography and discourses. Changes in image and meaning, in the relation of emblem and metaphor, in the narrative moulding and implementation, to name just a number of modes of variation, adaptation, transformation, are analysed with a focus on devotional imagery and art, rites, theological, intellectual and pastoral discourse and spiritual exploration up to present-day popular culture. Denis Pelletier (Paris) and Paul Airiau (Paris), Stefan Laube (Berlin), Fransiskus Purwanto (Yogyakarta) and Sven Baier (Lucerne) and Damian Troxler (Lucerne) are focusing on these dimensions. Denis Pelletier analyses the “revisiting” of the memory of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in the 1950 edition of Les Études carmélitaines dedicated to Le Cœur, making use of history and human sciences in order to “take charge of a common memory” in a time of perceived religious crisis. In his contribution, Paul Airiau centres on Maxime Charles’ (Rector of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre between 1959 and 1985) re-reading and liturgical re-formulation of cordial devotion and their effect on Charles’ standing in French Catholicism. Sven Baier and Damian Troxler analyse instances of new modes of spirituality,

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for example the “spiritualisation of commodities” in contemporary popular culture, particularly football. Fransiskus Purwanto shows how multi-layered structures of Sacred Heart memory in Indonesia are the result of entangled cultures of memory, of cultural transfers from European conceptions and practices and their remodelling in the 20th century and in the present by integrating various rites of Indonesian popular culture. Stefan Laube analyses entanglements of (Sacred) Heart symbolism with other visual and narrative codes, and with a variety of fields of knowledge and religion in the intersecting fields of Catholic and Protestant theology, alchemy and philosophy. He demonstrates the fluctuation of iconographic memory between stability and polyvalence, both within a respective community or intellectual discourse and beyond in relation to others. A line of continuation can be drawn from the contributions on the history of the Sacred Heart in the last few decades to the theological contributions that represent theoretical and practical actualisations of the Sacred Heart. Nicolas Steeves focuses on the concept of imagination as based on layers of memory, linking text and image in the formation of “images that surpass reality” (Bachelard) and José Tolentino de Mendonça on the sensual and emotional dimension of the heart and their relevance in the production of memory. John van den Hengel (Ottawa) reflects on a “refiguration of the memory of Sacred Heart Devotion into a Theology” forming agency and spiri­ tuality based on an actualisation of memory. Sven Baier and Damian Troxler present another mode of actualisation in their didactic reflections on cultural memory of religion as a field in history teaching. Different effects, modes of usage and functionalisation of Sacred Heart devotion become apparent throughout and could be systematised according to the following types. a) Sacred Heart devotion contributed to the devotional community of believers – individuals and communities – with Christ. The spiritualisation of communities was guided by codes of seeing, interpreting and by devotional practices, as it was discursively fostered by various agents in different times. b) The creation of narratives of memory of the devotion can especially be found in religious communities – the Jesuits and Eudists in particular, as Pietro Antonio Viola, David Morgan, Daniel Sidler and Stefan Laube show – with the objective of creating a dominant iconographic and discursive variation and marking a dominant narrative of memory of Sacred Heart devotion. c) To evade too simplistically functionalist interpretations, politicisation – in the broad sense of the term as public usage and staging in the public sphere13 – is 13 For this concept of politicisation of religion see a number of contributions in  : Luginbühl, Metzger et al. (eds.), Religiöse Grenzziehungen im öffentlichen Raum  ; Altermatt and Metzger, Religion und Nation. See also  : Neuhold, Mission und Kirche, Geld und Nation.

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conceptualised as a complex mechanism that relates not only to the public sphere and to the position of Catholic communities in society and in relation to political opponents, but also to inner-Catholic lines of conflict and contestation, a dimension that has been largely neglected by research so far. Both dimensions are particularly relevant in Daniel Sidler’s analysis of processes of devotional and memorial centring and in Paul Airiau’s study of Maxime Charles’ reforming of memory in Sacré Cœur du Montmartre.

Deconstruction of Binaries and a Long-Term Perspective A constructivist perspective focusing, as delineated, on the functioning of linguistic, visual, narrative formations, variations and transformations as well as on specific uses of the Sacred Heart enables us to deconstruct binaries, to point at the close relationship between language and image, of (theological) discourse and practice/ experience, of body and mind, emotion and ratio (emotionality and rationality), materiality and spirituality/imagination, internalisation and externalisation, private and public, experience and memory. This deconstruction of binaries and the address of ambivalences moves the perspective from identity to diversity, pluralism and complexity. The supposed dichotomies are not least entangled through memory, or in other words  : the approach focusing on memory makes it possible to deconstruct these dichotomies in the concrete instances of Sacred Heart devotion as well as epistemically in the various disciplines and through the exchange between the disciplines producing a productive “déplacement” or “alienation” suitable for the shifts in perspective delineated. The approaches presented above are supported by a long-term perspective that is also responsible for the choice of temporal and regional foci of the historical contributions in the second and partially also in the third part of the volume. Conceptually, this long-term perspective is based on a double vision  : a longitudinal focus on long continuities and subtle variations and adaptations on the one hand, and an in-depth focus on shorter time spans of perceived complex transformations, alterations in codes, functioning and usage on the other. Regarding the latter, periods of perceived crisis, of societal and individual liminality14, as times of redefinition and transformation of the devotional sphere in general and of Sacred Heart devotion in 14 On liminality and memory see  : Thomassen and Forlenza, “Liminality and Experience”  ; Thomassen, Liminality and the Modern, pp. 90–92. See also on crisis and memory  : Nünning, “Making Crises and Catastrophes”  ; Koselleck, “Einige Fragen an die Begriffsgeschichte von Krise”.

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particular – “Sattelzeiten”15 – are of special interest. Therefore, the 16th and 17th centuries (Pietro Antonio Viola, David Morgan, Marcello Neri and Stefan Laube) and the second half of the 18th century (Daniel Sidler) are especially analysed and interpreted as periods of openness and plurality, of ambivalences and fluctuation on the one hand, of closure, hierarchisation and exclusion of/from memory on the other (Marcello Neri). Regarding the second half of the 19th century and the early 20th century (John van den Hengel and Marcello Neri) the positioning of Catholics in radically changed social and political circumstances, in which a “new” public presence of religion had to be sought16, as well as ecclesiastical centring – ultramontanisation – are emphasised. In the mid-20th century a new religious language had to be found against the background of a perceived crisis of religious communication, as the Jesuit philosopher and anthropologist Michel de Certeau realised  : “It is henceforth impossible, in Western Europe, to cogitate on the problems of our time in the language of religious knowledge.”17 This perception by theologians and other Catholic intellectuals is an expression of complex religious transformations which pertained not only to theological thinking but also to new approaches to rites and symbols, to transformations of devotional memory as Denis Pelletier and Paul Airiau show in their contributions. The present volume originates in the trans-disciplinary conference “Sacred Heart Devotion. Memory – Body – Image – Text  : Continuities and Discontinuities” that the editors organised at the Centro Studi Dehoniani in Rome on 8 and 9 November 2020. The project benefitted particularly from the stimulating discussions in the trans-disciplinary and international context of the conference. The publication aims at generating and structuring innovative insights not least through its highly trans-disciplinary perspective and its conceptual and methodological reflections. This publication would not have been possible without the support of a number of persons and institutions. We thank Sharon Casu for the translations of Paul Airiau’s, Denis Pelletier’s, Pietro Antonio Viola’s, José Tolentino de Mendonça’s and Fransiskus Purwanto’s contributions and for the editing of all articles, and John van den Hengel 15 Reinhard Koselleck’s terminology. See Koselleck, “‘Erfahrungsraum’ und ‘Erwartungshorizont’ – zwei historische Kategorien”  ; Motzkin, “Über den Begriff der geschichtlichen (Dis-)Kontinuität”  ; Jörn Leonhard, Erfahrungsgeschichten der Moderne. 16 On the public dimension of religion see especially  : Graf and Große Kracht (eds.), Religion und Gesellschaft. 17 “Il est désormais impossible à l’Europe occidentale de penser les problèmes de notre temps dans les termes d’un savoir religieux.” (de Certeau, La faiblesse de croire, p. 209, translation by the authors.) See also Michel de Certeau  : “A mesure qu’un vocabulaire de la prière, des lois morales, des formules dogmatiques semble s’effriter entre leurs mains (des théologiens, F.M./S.T.) comme une poussière du passé, il ne leur reste, pour dire ce qu’ils sont, que le langage des autres et la protestation ou la confession d’une solidarité humaine.” (de Certeau, L’étranger ou l’union dans la différence, p. 132.)

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for the translation of Marcello Neri’s article. We thank P. José Arnaiz Ecker, Sven Baier, P. Pedro Iglesias Curto, David Neuhold, Elke Pahud de Mortanges, P. Artur Sanecki and Damian Troxler for the continuous valuable exchange of ideas at different stages during the preparation of the conference in Rome. We thank Dimiter Daphinoff for encouraging the publication of the volume in the series “Erinnerungsräume” he edits with Franziska Metzger as well as Dorothee Rheker-­Wunsch, Julia Beenken and Michael Rauscher from the publisher Böhlau for their support throughout the publication process. The publication would not have been possible without the generous financial support by the University of Teacher Education Lucerne, the Priests of the Sacred Heart, the Swiss Province of the Jesuits and the Diocese of Basel. References Altermatt, Urs and Franziska Metzger (eds.). Religion und Nation. Katholizismus im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart  : Kohlhammer, 2007. Altermatt, Urs. “Ambivalences of Catholic Modernisation.” Religious Identity and the Problem of Historical Foundation. The Foundational Character of Authoritative Texts and Traditions in the History of Christianity. Ed. Judith Frishman, Willemien Otten and Gerard Rouw­ horst. Leiden  : Brill, 2004, pp. 49–75. Altermatt, Urs. Katholizismus und Moderne. Zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte der Schwei­ zer Katholiken im 19. und 20.  Jahrhundert. Einsiedeln  : Benziger, 1989, Fribourg  : Academic Press, 21991. Altermatt, Urs. Konfession, Nation, Rom. Metamorphosen im schweizerischen und europäi­ schen Katholizismus des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Zürich  : Huber Verlag, 2009. Armborst-Weihs, Kerstin and Judith Becker (eds.). Toleranz und Identität. Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewusstsein zwischen religiösem Anspruch und historischer Erfahrung. Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010. Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume  : Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München  : C.H. Beck, 1999. Berger, Stefan and Chris Lorenz (eds.). The Contested Nation. Ethnicity, Class, Religion, and Gender in National Histo­ries. London  : Palgrave, 2008. Blaschke, Olaf (ed.). Konfessionen im Konflikt. Deutschland zwischen 1800 und 1970  : ein zweites konfessionelles Zeitalter. Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002. Buggeln, Gretchen T. “Museum space and the experience of the sacred.” Material Religion 8 (2012)  : pp. 30–50. Busch, Norbert. “Frömmigkeit als Faktor des katholischen Milieus. Der Kult zum Herzen Jesu.” Religion im Kaiserreich. Milieus – Mentalitäten – Krisen. Olaf Blaschke and Frank Michael Kuhlemann (eds.). Gütersloh  : Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1996, pp. 136–165. Busch, Norbert. Katholische Frömmigkeit und Moderne. Zur Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte

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des Herz-Jesu-Kultes zwischen Kulturkampf und Erstem Weltkrieg. Gütersloh  : Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 1995. Cruz, Laura and Willem Frijhoff (eds.). Myth in History, History in Myth. Leiden/Boston  : Brill, 2009. Czerny, Ilonka. “Orte für Kunst als Sakraräume – Sakralräume als Orte der Kunst.” Orte und Räume des Religiösen im 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Elke Pahud de Mortanges. Paderborn  : Schöningh, 2016, pp. 39–54. Damberg, Wilhelm (ed.). Soziale Strukturen und Semantiken des Religiösen im Wandel. Transformationen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1989. Essen  : Klartext Verlag, 2011. de Certeau, Michel. L’étranger ou l’union dans la différence. Paris  : Payot, 1969. de Certeau, Michel. La faiblesse de croire. Paris  : Payot, 1987. Reprint of  : de Certeau, Michel. “La rupture instauratrice”. Esprit (1971)  : pp. 1177–1224. De Cesari, Chiara and Ann Rigney (eds.). Transnational Memory. Circulation, Articulation, Scales. Berlin/New York  : De Gruyter, 2014. Devotion and Memory. Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte/Contemporary Church History. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Andrea Strübind. 31.2 (2018). Di Stefano, Roberto and Francisco Javier Ramón Solans (eds.). Marian Devotions, Political Mobilization and Nationalism in Europe and America. New York  : Palgrave Macmillan, 2016, pp. 57–82. Didi-Huberman, Georges. L’image ouverte. Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels. Paris  : Gallimard, 2007. Erll Astrid and Ansgar Nünning (eds.). Medien des kollektiven Gedächtnisses. Konstruktivität, Historizität, Kulturspezifität. Berlin/New York  : De Gruyter, 2004. Erll, Astrid. “Travelling Memory.” Parallax 17 (2011)  : pp. 4–18. Gabriel, Karl and Franz-Xaver Kaufmann (eds.). Zur Soziologie des Katholizismus. Mainz  : M. Grünewald, 1980. Geyer, Michael and Lehmann, Hartmut (eds.), Religion und Nation. Beiträge zu einer unbewältigten Geschichte. Göttingen  : Wallstein Verlag, 2004. Ghervas, Stella and François Rosset (eds.). Lieux d’Europe. Mythes et limites. Paris  : Editions de la Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2008. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm and Klaus Große Kracht (eds.). Religion und Gesellschaft. Europa im 20. Jahrhundert. Köln  : Böhlau Verlag, 2007. Hamburger, Jeffrey F. and Anne-Marie Bouché (eds.). The Mind’s Eye  : Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages. Princeton  : Princeton University Department of Art and Archaeology, 2006. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard and Dieter Langewiesche (eds.). Nation und Religion in Europa. Mehrkonfessionelle Gesell­schaften im 19. und 20.  Jahrhundert. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus Verlag, 2004. Hellemans, Staf. “Die Transformation der Religion und der Grosskirchen in der zweiten Moderne aus der Sicht des religiösen Modernisierungsparadigmas.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 99 (2005)  : pp. 11–35. Hervieu-Léger, Danièle. “Religion and Modernity in the French Context  : For a New ­Approach to Secularization.” Sociological Analysis 51,1 (1990)  : pp. 15–25.

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Hölscher, Lucian (ed.). Baupläne der sichtbaren Kirche. Sprachliche Konzepte religiöser Vergemeinschaftung in Europa. Göttingen  : Wallstein Verlag, 2007. Hopkins, Andrew and Maria Wyke (eds.). Roman Bodies. From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. London  : British School at Rome, 2005. Houtman, Dick and Birgit Meyer (eds.). Things. Religion and the question of materiality. New York  : Fordham University Press, 2012. Jonas, Raymond. France and the Cult of Sacred Heart. An Epic Tale for Modern Times. Berkley and Los Angeles  : University of California Press, 2000. Koselleck, Reinhart. “Einige Fragen an die Begriffsgeschichte von Krise.” Begriffsgeschichten. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2006, pp. 203–217. Koselleck, Reinhart. “‘Erfahrungsraum’ und ‘Erwartungshorizont’ – zwei historische Katego­ rien.” Vergangene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1979, pp. 349–375. Krüger, Brigitte and Hans-Christian Stillmark (eds.). Mythos und Kulturtransfer. Neue Figurationen in Literatur, Kunst und modernen Medien. Bielefeld  : transcript Verlag, 2013. Langenbacher, Eric, Niven, Bill and Ruth Wittlinger Ruth (eds.). Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe. New York/Oxford  : Berghahn, 2012. Laube, Stefan. “Umgebung und Konversion. Von raumgreifenden Kunstwerken und ihren sakralen Potenzen.” Orte und Räume des Religiösen im 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Elke Pahud de Mortanges. Paderborn  : Schöningh, 2016, pp. 11–37. Laube, Stefan. Von der Reliquie zum Ding. Heiliger Ort – Wunderkammer – Museum. Berlin  : De Gruyter, 2011. Leonhard, Jörn. “Erfahrungsgeschichten der Moderne  : Von der komparativen Semantik zur Temporalisierung europäischer Sattelzeiten.” Begriffene Geschichte. Beiträge zum Werk Reinhard Kosellecks. Ed. Hans Joas and Peter Vogt. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 423–448. Luginbühl, David, Franziska Metzger et al. (eds.), Religiöse Grenzziehungen im öffentlichen Raum. Mechanismen und Strategien von Inklusion und Exklusion im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart  : Kohlhammer, 2012. Macho, Thomas. Das zeremonielle Tier. Rituale – Feste – Zeiten zwischen den Zeiten. Graz  : Styria Premium, 2004. Markschies, Christoph and Hubert Wolf (eds.). Erinnerungsorte des Christentums. München  : C.H. Beck, 2010. Meier, Frank and Ralf H. Schneider (eds.). Erinnerungsorte – Erinnerungsbrüche  : mittelalterliche Orte, die Geschichte mach(t)en. Ostfildern  : Thorbecke, 2013. Menozzi, Daniele. Sacro Cuore. Un culto tra devozione interiore e restaurazione cristiana della società. Rom  : Viella, 2001. Metzger, Franziska and Dimiter Daphinoff (eds.). Ausdehnung der Zeit. Die Gestaltung von Erinnerungsräumen in Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst. Köln  : Böhlau, 2019. Metzger, Franziska. “Erinnerungsräume.” Ausdehnung der Zeit. Die Gestaltung von Erinne­ rungsräumen in Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst. Ed. Dimiter Daphinoff and Franziska Metzger. Wien/Köln/Weimar  : Böhlau, 2019, pp. 19–44.

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Metzger, Franziska. “Memory of the Sacred Heart  – Iconographic and Ritual Variations.” Schwei­zerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 113 (2019)  : pp. 391–402. Metzger, Franziska. “Devotion and Memory  – Discourses and Practices.” Contemporary Church History 31/2 (2018)  : pp. 329–347. Metzger, Franziska. “Religion und Geschichte. Transformationen einer Verhältnisgeschichte.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte, Problem Schweizergeschichte  ?/Y a-t-il un problème avec l’histoire suisse  ? Ed. Irène Herrmann and Thomas Maissen. 59.1 (2009)  : pp. 32–55. Moore, John. Herz-Jesu-Verehrung in Deutschland. Religiöse, soziale und politische Aspekte einer Frömmigkeitsform. Petersberg  : Michael Imhof Verlag, 1997. Morgan, David. “Rhetoric of the Heart  : Figuring the Body in Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.” Things. Religion and the question of materiality. Ed. Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer. New York  : Fordham University Press, 2012, pp. 90–111. Morgan, David. Images at Work. The Material Culture of Enchantment. Oxford  : University Press, 2018. Morgan, David. Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Visual Evolution of a Devotion. Amsterdam  : Amsterdam University Press, 2008. Motzkin, Gabriel. “Über den Begriff der geschichtlichen (Dis-)Kontinuität  : Reinhart Kosellecks Konstruktion der ‘Sattelzeit’.” Begriffene Geschichte. Beiträge zum Werk Reinhard Kosellecks. Ed. Hans Joas and Peter Vogt. Berlin  : Suhrkamp, 2011, pp. 339–358. Neri, Marcello. Gesù affetti e corporeità di Dio. Il cuore e la fede. Assisi  : Cittadella, 2007. Neuhold, David. Mission und Kirche, Geld und Nation. Vier Perspektiven auf Léon G. Dehon, Gründer der Herz‐Jesu‐Priester. Basel  : Schwabe Verlag, 2019. Nightingale, Eithne and Marilyn Greene. “Religion and material culture at the victoria & albert museum of art and design  : the perspectives of diverse faith.” Material Religion 6 (2010)  : pp. 218–235. Nünning, Ansgar. “Making Crises and Catastrophes – How Metaphors and Narratives Shape the Cultural Life.” The Cultural Life of Catastrophes and Crises. Ed. Carsten Meiner and Kristin Veel. Berlin  : De Gruyter, 2012, pp. 59–88. Oesterle, Günter (ed.). Erinnerung, Gedächtnis, Wissen. Studien zur kulturwissenschaftlichen Gedächtnisforschung. Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. Olenhusen, Irmtraud Götz von. “Feminisierung von Religion und Kirche im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.” Religion und Geschlechterverhältnis. Ed. Ingrid Lukatis and Regina Sommer. Opladen  : Leske und Budrich, 2000  : pp. 37–49. Otto, Bernd, Rau, Susanne and Jörg Rüpke (eds.). Historiography and Religion – Narrating a Religious Past. Berlin  : De Gruyter, 2015. Pahud de Mortanges, Elke. “‘Be a somebody with a body’. Christus-Heterotopien in Kunst und Kommerz des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel von Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys und Conchita Wurst.” Orte und Räume des Religiösen im 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Elke Pahud de Mortanges. Paderborn  : Schöningh, 2016, pp. 223–245. Popp, Susanne, Schumann, Jutta et al. (eds.). The EU Project ‘Museums Exhibiting Europe’ (EMEE). Ideas, Results, Outlooks. Wien  : edition mono, 2016. Reeve, John. “Material religion, education, and museums  : Introduction.” Material Religion 6 (2010)  : pp. 142–155.

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Ruff, Mark Edward. “The Postmodern Challenge to the Secularization thesis  : a Critical Assess­ment.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 99 (2005)  : pp. 385–401. Schieder, Wolfgang (ed.). Religion und Gesellschaft im 19. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart  : Klett-Cotta, 1993. Schlager, Claudia. Kult und Krieg. Herz Jesu – Sacré Cœur – Christus Rex im deutsch-französi­ schen Vergleich 1914–1925. Tübingen  : Tübinger Verein für Volkskunde, 2011. Sierp, Aline. History, Memory, and Trans-European Identity. Unifying Divisions. New York  : Routledge, 2014. Thomassen, Bjorn. Liminality and the Modern. Living Through the In-Between. New York  : Taylor & Francis, 2014. Thomassen, Bjorn and Rosario Forlenza. “Liminality and Experience. Rethinking the Theoretical Foundation of Memory Studies.” Ausdehnung der Zeit. Die Gestaltung von Erinnerungsräumen in Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Dimiter Daphinoff. Köln  : Böhlau, 2019, pp. 73–98. van der Veer, Peter and Hartmut Lehmann (eds.), Nation and Religion. Perspectives on Europe and Asia. Princeton  : Princeton University Press, 1999. Vietta, Silvio and Herbert Uerlings (eds.). Moderne und Mythos. München  : Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2006. Werner, Yvonne Maria. “Liturgie und Männlichkeit in der katholischen Mission in Skandinavien.” Orte und Räume des Religiösen im 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Elke Pahud de Mortanges. Paderborn  : Schöningh, 2016, pp. 187–206. Woets, Rhoda. “Engaging with the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Catholic Ghana.” Material Religion 13 (2017)  : pp. 240–244. Zanchi, Giuliano. Le migrazioni del cuore. Variazioni di un’immagine tra devozione e street art. Bologna  : EDB, 2017.

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1 MEMORY, BODY AND DEVOTION  : CONCEPTUAL REFLECTIONS FOR A T­ RANS-DISCIPLINARY APPROACH

Franziska Metzger

Memory of the Sacred Heart Linguistic, Iconographic and Ritual Dimensions

Fig. 1  : Blazing Sacred Heart with chalice and host, procession banner, Tirol, around 1800, public domain.

Fig. 2  : Devotional image of the Sacred Heart, late 19th century, public domain.

The two images of the Sacred Heart, a procession banner from Tirol dated around 1800 and a devotional image from the late 19th century, both used as ritual objects, offer themselves for an analysis with regard to the dimension of memory (see fig. 1 and 2). Serial iconographic reproduction in a long-term perspective, ritualisation, materiality and sensual tangibility, which the two objects and the history of their usage demonstrate, are central mechanisms of religious memory.1 Iconography and – closely linked to it – practices of seeing and of demonstrating, in fig. 1 and 2 by angels and by Christ himself, and in fig. 1 even in a double way inasmuch as the banner 1 On religious memory see by the author of this contribution  : Metzger, “Das Gedächtnis der Religion”  ; id., “Devotion and Memory”. On Sacred Heart devotion  : Metzger, “Memory of the Sacred Heart”.

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itself was presented as an object in a procession, are central modes in the practice of devotional memory.2 Moreover, the two examples represent the close entanglement of the visual, ritual and narrative dimensions of memory. Against the background of a threefold understanding of the relation of religion and memory, which I will introduce at the beginning of my essay, the focus will be on the iconographic, ritual and narrative dimensions of the Sacred Heart. I thereby combine a long-term perspective on continuities with one on discontinuities and ruptures of codes with a special focus on art.

Modes of Religious Memory My conceptual reflections build on the thesis that the complex relation of religion and memory is an essential mechanism of religious communication. Mechanisms of memory are central for the modelling and stabilisation of religious language, of ritual practices and of the formation and fostering of religious communities. I conceptualise religion as a system of meaning production, that is of discourses  – semantics, images, and narratives  – and ritual practices which can be understood as religious communication.3 In accordance with constructivist, poststructuralist approaches in memory studies, I conceptualise memory as space of selection, not unlike Jacques Derrida’s or Michel Foucault’s notion of ‘archive’ and approaches by representatives of systems theory.4 Memory as space of selection is regarded as fundamentally the result of processes of construction and not as something ‘neutral’ and ‘given’. Selected parts of memory are used and modelled by different modes of memory construction and transmission  : images, monuments, architecture, symbolic and ritual practices (religious as well as non-religious), historiography, education, and various types of media. The focus of this approach lies on the dynamics of memory, on the complex texture of codes and modes of interpretation, of ritual and narrative use, of reiteration, adoption and transmission as well as of – more or less fundamental and radical – transforma2 See in a perspective of religious studies and history of art  : Morgan, “Rhetoric of the Heart”. 3 See for a comparable approach among others  : Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter  ; id./Große Kracht (eds.), Religion und Gesellschaft  ; Hölscher (ed.), Baupläne der sichtbaren Kirche  ; Altermatt, Konfession, Nation, Rom  ; Damberg (ed.), Soziale Strukturen und Semantiken des Religiösen im Wandel. 4 See Derrida, Mal d’Archive  ; Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir. See also  : Luhmann, Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft  ; Esposito, Soziales Vergessen  ; Csáky, “Die Mehrdeutigkeit von Gedächtnis und Erinnerung”. – My approach is more constructivist than conceptions which differentiate between memory as storage and functional memory, “Speicher-” and “Funktionsgedächtnis” (see Assmann, “Funktionsgedächtnis und Speichergedächtnis”).

Memory of the Sacred Heart 

III. Narrative memory & narratives of memory

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I. Linguistic & iconographic / visual codes as space of memory

II. Ritual & ritualised practices as memory

a) Memory of the Sacred Heart is created and Sacred Heart devotion is modelled as memory b) Images, narratives and ritual practices of the Sacred Heart create spaces of memory and are painted/narrated and ritually used spaces of memory

© Franziska Metzger

Fig. 3  : Modes of religious memory I, © Franziska Metzger.

tion.5 Transformations, reconfigurations to the point of deconstruction, but also interaction, conflictive and competing relations between different agents as communities of memory, not least in a long-term perspective, counteract more static conceptions of social or cultural memory and monolithic, potentially essentialising perspectives.6 Based on my previous research and conceptualisation in the field of memory and religion,7 I define three modes of religious memory which are to be seen in an entangled relationship  : I. linguistic and iconographic/visual codes as space of memory, the decoding of which enables the understanding of discourses and marks ways of seeing, II. ritual and ritualised practices as memory, and III. narrative memory, that is the construction of memory through narratives, and more specifically narratives of memory (see fig. 3). In a communication theoretical approach linking semiotic and 5 For the concept of textures of memory see Metzger, “Apokalyptische Diskurse als Gedächtnis- und Erwartungsräume”. 6 See for this perspective focusing on dynamics of memory  : Daphinoff/Metzger, “Einleitung”. See for similar postulates in recent transdisciplinary memory research  : Olick, “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products”  ; Carrier/Kabalek, “Cultural Memory and Transcultural Memory – a Conceptual Analysis”  ; Feindt et al., “Entangled Memory”  ; Langenbacher/Niven/ Wittlinger (eds.), Dynamics of Memory and Identity  ; Erll, “Media and the Dynamics of Memory”  ; id., “Travelling Memory”. 7 See especially Metzger, “Devotion and Memory”.

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discourse analytical methodology, I regard discourses – based on and creating semantics, iconography and narratives – and ritual and ritualised practices as intrinsically intertwined in complex modes. This approach therefore deconstructs dichotomous notions of discourse vs. practice, language vs. image, rites vs. language, language vs. emotion. In and through all three modes – but especially through the first two, as will be shown – memory of the Sacred Heart is created, and Sacred Heart devotion is modelled as memory. All three modes form spaces of memory as textures of memory that are used, reproduced and (radically) transformed by different agents and communities. Images, narratives and ritual practices of the Sacred Heart both create spaces of memory and are created – painted, narrated – and ritually used spaces of memory. I will demonstrate this in the following systematisation.

Linguistic and Iconographic/Visual Religious Codes as Space of Memory Linguistic and iconographic religious codes – including forms of seeing – as space of memory constitute the fundamental framework for the two other modes of memory. This conceptualisation is based on the poststructuralist philosophical premise – influenced by philosophy of language and semiotics – that memory is linguistically and vi­ sually constructed. This approach emphasises on the one hand the dimension of memory in language, while it presumes on the other hand that memory is eminently created by linguistic and visual codes as polyvalently deployable and combinable inventories – as a web of possibilities of symbolisation8 – that are stabilised by communities of communication and which equally form such communities.9 Three central characteristics of linguistic and iconographic codes as memory will be systematised in what follows. Multi-layered textures of memory (a) originate in the codification and reproduction of semantics, images and narratives decodable in a religious community. The codification of semantics and images in religious communities can be interpreted as linguistic transposition of sacrality, of the code ‘transcendent/immanent’. With regard to visual codes that are essential for the Sacred Heart, iconography and forms of seeing related to the Sacred Heart as practices of decoding are intrinsically bound together. What a viewer sees and how he sees it is determined by the respective community. The Sacred Heart in all its iconographic variations – 8 See Zolles, “Die symbolische Macht der Apokalypse”. 9 See the fundamental poststructuralist positions in philosophy of history  : White, Metahistory  ; id., Tropics of Discourse  ; de Certeau, L’écriture de l’histoire  ; Megill, “Recounting the Past”. See on this approach  : Metzger, “Erinnerungsräume”, pp. 20–21.

Memory of the Sacred Heart 

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III. Narrative memory & narratives of memory a) Narrative memory as narrative stabilisation of codes and practices of memory b) Narratives of memory

II. Ritual & ritualised practices as memory

I. Linguistic & iconographic / visual codes as space of memory - emphasis on the dimension of memory in language - memory as eminently created by linguistic and visual codes as polyvalently deployable and combinable inventories

a) Veneration and commemoration b) religious rites as «techniques of memory» (T. Macho) c) Creation of memory through materiality

a) Multi-layered textures of memory b) intertextuality c) Radical questioning and deconstruction, creating complex self-reflexive relation to instances of religious memory

Central communicative practices: 1) Demonstrating / showing 2) Seeing and interpreting 3) Complex embodiment 4) Narrating 5) Listening / interpreting

© Franziska Metzger

Fig. 4  : Modes of religious memory II, © Franziska Metzger.

– with thorns, blood, beaming, – as an emblem integrating text as most basically in the case of Alacoque’s image (fig. 5),10 – lifted out of Christ’s body as in Pompeo Batoni’s painting in the Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Gesù all’Argentina in Rome from 1767 (fig. 6),11 – integrated in Christ’s chest as in many devotional images of the 19th and 20th centuries, – or in relation with another holy figure, most commonly Mary, such as for example in Maurice Denis’ painting Sacré-Cœur crucifié from 1916 (fig. 7), but also Catherine of Siena and Margaret Mary Alacoque as in Corrado Mezzana’s altarpiece from 1922 in the Basilica di Santa Maria sopra Minerva in Rome (fig. 8) or the late 19th century mystic Maria Droste von Vischering of the Congregation of Our Lady of Charity of the Good Shepherd,12

10 On Alacoque’s emblematic image as well as her visions and devotion see especially Morgan, The Sacred Heart of Jesus, pp. 9–12, 24  ; id., “Rhetoric of the Heart”, especially p. 94  ; Seydl, “Contesting the Sacred Heart of Jesus”, p. 216. 11 See Seydl, “Contesting the Sacred Heart of Jesus”  ; Rosa, Settecento religioso. 12 See the devotional image accessible on  : https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Droste_zu_Vischering#/ media/Datei:Maria_Droste_zu_Vischering_and_the_Sacred_Heart_of_Jesus.jpg

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Fig. 5  : Emblematic image of the Sacred Heart, produced originally in 1685 at Margaret Mary Alacoque’s direction, Alamy Stock Photo. Fig. 6  : Pompeo Batoni, The Sacred Heart of ­Jesus, 1767, oil on copper, Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Gesù all’Argentina in Rome, public domain. Fig. 7  : Maurice Denis, Sacré-Cœur crucifié, 1916, Musée départemental Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye, © RMN-Grand Palais/ Benoît Touchard.

can be interpreted as a complex icon, asserting the living presence of sanctity in paintings, serial prints, such as the example produced by Currier and Ives in New York in the 1830s (fig. 9), and ritual objects alike. In the icon of the Sacred Heart as it was used in the above examples, variations of the complex relationship of the bodily and the symbolic dimension of the heart become visible. Sometimes the icon can be interpreted as a synecdoche, standing as pars pro toto, i.e. as a visual excerpt for the larger corporal setting, sometimes it is mainly a metaphor, a figurative heart. In fact, visualisation enables the simultaneity of corporality and its symbolic transcendence, the simultaneity of demonstrating the visceral

Memory of the Sacred Heart 

Fig. 8  : Corrado Mezzana, Christ between Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Margerite Mary Alacoque, Rome, Basilica di Santa Maria sopra Minerva, 1922, public domain.

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Fig. 9  : Devotional image, serial print, Currier and Ives (New York), lithograph, hand-painted, 1856, public domain.

dimension of the essence of Christ’s corporality and its sacralised transformation.13 With Stephen Jaeger, who has worked on other icons, we could, in certain cases, speak of hyper-mimesis with regard to the iconography of the Sacred Heart,14 inasmuch as by establishing the extraordinary of Christ’s physiognomy the icon goes to the boundaries of the ‘human’ and beyond reality to the sublime, magnifying humanity into divinity. This is not only the case in devotional images, but also in art, especially in symbolist paintings, e.g. by George Desvallières and Jozef Mehoffer in the early 20th century. Desvallières’s symbolism works through inner-worldly, social action  : in his painting Le Sacré-Cœur from 1905 Christ, in agony for the world, forcefully opens his flesh in order to lay bare his heart – the symbolist transcription of this carnal act centred on the heart raises Christ to sublimity (fig. 10). Regarding this painting, the Catholic 13 See Morgan, The Sacred Heart of Jesus. 14 Jaeger, Enchantment, pp. 99–199.

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Franziska Metzger Fig. 10  : George Desvallières, Le SacréCœur de N.S.J.-C., 1905, private collection, CR 1102, © Henriot.

philosopher Léon Bloy wrote  : “You have done what no one else could do today. You created a Sacred Heart that induces one to weep and tremble. You unleashed a lion […], the Heart of Jesus needed a painter […]. By dint of love and faith, you have been deemed worthy of foreknowing the red Pelican, the Pelican that bleeds for its infants.”15 In Le Drapeau du Sacré Cœur, also by Desvallières, from 1918, the figure of Christ raises his heart and puts it on the white of the French tricolore banner – a gesture that cites Eugène Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple.16 Christ’s sublimity is demonstrated in this political gesture in which again the heart is the pivot between immanence and transcendence (fig. 11). Jozef Mehoffer’s symbolism, on the other hand, is that of art-déco. Just as Christ is pointing at his heart, the painter is pointing at the beauty of his work of art  : an entanglement of the symbolism of beauty and that of an all-embracing – and adorned – 15 Léon Bloy, “L’Invendable, 1904–1907”, Paris  : Le Mercure de France, 1904, 174–175, cited in  : Ambroselli de Bayser, “George Desvallières et la Grande Guerre” (translation by the author). On Desvallières’ works of art see especially  : Ambroselli de Bayser et al. (eds.), George Desvallières. Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre complet  ; Ambroselli de Bayser, George Desvallières et la Grande Guerre. 16 Eugène Delacroix’s La Liberté guidant le peuple, 1830, Musée du Louvre, Paris, https://www.louvre.fr/ oeuvre-notices/le-28-juillet-la-liberte-guidant-le-peuple

Memory of the Sacred Heart 

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Fig. 11  : George Desvallières, Le Drapeau du Sacré-Cœur, 1918, Monument aux morts de Verneuil-sur-Avre, Eglise Notre-Dame de Verneuil-sur-Avre, CR 1608, © CDP.CGE (Conseil Général de l’Eure), Thierry Leroy.

goodness. Both beauty and goodness are at the same time transcended in this painting into the sublime  : the sublimity of Christ is produced through sublime art (fig. 12). The usage of codes and their interrelation as textures of memory is significantly marked by intertextuality (b) as the above examples show, inasmuch as new iconographic elements and transformed meanings are integrated, appropriated and modified within the Catholic community, whereas codes belonging to religious memory can also be integrated in new contexts external to the religious field.17 The integration into non-religious discourses, sites and spaces makes the texture of linguistic and iconographic memory even more complex. For this reason too, the Sacred Heart is an excellent example, inasmuch as the polyvalence of the icon (growing over time) enables its reimagining and reimaging, its rewriting and transformation. Two examples will demonstrate this. In Odilon ­Redon’s Sacred Heart painting (1910), the figure of an introspective Christ – with a radically transformed face compared to the serially reproduced memory of Christ’s ‘portrait’ – does not reveal his heart nor does Christ gaze at the believer  ; the heart, 17 For the concept of intertextuality see the fundamental contributions by Julia Kristeva, f.ex. in  : Desire and Image.

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Franziska Metzger Fig. 12  : Jozef Mehoffer, Sacred Heart of Jesus (Serce Jezusa), 1911, public domain.

which is only slightly hinted at, is an invisible space and reverses the mechanism of making the invisible visible (fig. 13). In this painting, the icon is not present anymore  ; what remains is the symbolism of the Sacred Heart that does without icon, the signified with only an allusion of the signifier. A second example  : tattoos of the Sacred Heart, as one can find hundreds in a short Google-search, both within a Catholic discourse community and in a plurality of syncretistic transformations, frequently present variations of the icon of the heart without the figure of Christ – therein resembling Alacoque’s emblem – or are part of a montage of various icons, both sacral and non-sacral. Iconographic bodily spaces thus become highly intertextual – and at the same time highly idiosyncratic – embodiments of memory. Based on the mechanism of intertextuality and texture of memory, radical questioning and deconstruction of codes of religious language and iconography and their ironic citation (c) create a complex self-reflexive relation to instances of religious memory.18 Deconstruction and ironic reintroduction of the icon of the Sacred Heart can be analysed in modern and contemporary art, as the following examples will

18 See Metzger, “Apokalyptische Diskurse”.

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Fig. 13  : Odilon Redon, Le Sacré Cœur, 1910, Musée d’Orsay, Paris, photo © RMN-Grand Palais (Musée d’Orsay)/Hervé Lewandowski.

show. Salvador Dalí’s The Sacred Heart of Jesus (1962)19 exposes the seriality of Sacred Heart iconography  : the card that the figure of Christ, resembling a pop singer, is holding like a devotional image is strikingly displayed as an article of daily use and mass production. Christ’s gesture of showing his heart, which we can see on the card and perhaps look through the card on his body, is uncovered, ironised and deconstructed in an effect of alienation or defamiliarisation (Verfremdung) by a Christ who no longer identifies with the heart he displays. The heart on the card is decorporalised, whereas Christ is exclusively ‘body’, bringing to expression what the rite has turned the icon into  : the icon, though transformed, is still recognizable, but has lost its meaning. Dalí’s surrealism in this painting comes close to a – possibly critical – reflection on Pop Art. Also in Pop Art we find transformed uses of the Sacred Heart, in which defamiliarisation of meaning in a free-floating icon becomes even more obvious, be it in Jack Kerouac’s bodily heart (see fig. 14),20 dominated and outshone by another part of 19 See the painting on  : https://www.wikiart.org/en/salvador-dali/the-sacred-heart-of-jesus. 20 Jack Kerouac, Sacred Heart, N.D., exhibited at  : Museo MA*GA, Gallarete, 2017/18. See Bandera, Castiglioni and Zanella (eds.), Kerouac Beat Painting, on Kerouac and the sacred see especially the contri-

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Fig. 14  : Jack Kerouac, Sacred Heart, N.D., © John Shen-Sampas. Fig. 15  : Jeff Koons, Sacred Heart (Blue/­ Magenta), 1994–2007, © Jeff Koons.

the body or in Jeff Koons’ gigantic shiny heart (see fig. 15) in various colours which was, among others, exposed on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2008.21 In both works only the title links the icon to textures of memory, reinforcing at the same time the effect of defamiliarization. Damien Hirst’s Sacred Heart sculptures with various titles referring to Sacred Heart iconography (The Sacred Heart of Jesus, The Immaculate Heart – Sacred, The Kiss of Death)  – again an expression of the play with seriality  – are radical, ironic alienations citing central iconographic codes and narratives of Sacred Heart memory and exposing them – doubly in a mise en abyme – in containers filled with formaldehyde.22 Formaldehyde stands for the human and not transcendent creation of eternity and immortality, using a chemical substance that is highly toxic, but of no consequence to the bull’s heart that Hirst used in these sculptures, as neither the other ‘instruments’ creating the serialised stabbing of the heart are. Hirst presented the Sacred Heart installation, among others, 2007 in an Anglican church in London under bution by Stefania Benini, “Visions of Jack”. See also  : Hill, “Jack, His Jeans, and the ‘Anti-Fashion’ of the Beat Generation.” 21 Jeff Koons, Sacred Heart, 1994–2008, Photograph of his exhibition On the Roof, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2008  : http://www.jeffkoons.com/artwork/celebration/sacred-heart. 22 Damien Hirst, The Sacred Heart of Jesus, 2005 (Exhibition  : The Death of God  – Towards a Better Understanding of a Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools, Mexico City, 2006), http://damien hirst.com/the-sacred-heart-of-jesus. See Damien Hirst, The Immaculate Heart – Sacred, 2008, http:// damienhirst.com/the-immaculate-heart-a-sacre  ; Damien Hirst, The Kiss of Death, 2005, http://damien hirst.com/the-kiss-of-death.

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the title New Religion, an exhibition in which the artist aimed at fusing the boundaries between science and religion.23

Ritual and Ritualised Practices as Memory The linguistic and iconographic dimension of religious memory in general, and of the Sacred Heart in particular, can only be thoroughly analysed if this dimension is considered in its close relation to ritual and ritualised practices, including the creation of sacralised places – including ‘natural’ spaces –, pilgrimages and processions, ritual objects and (spiritual and pastoral) texts. All these practices create spaces of memory. Ritual and ritualised practices can be analysed with regard to their role in the creation of memory (1), with regard to their functioning, i.e. their in-depth structure (2), and with respect to the materiality of ‘doing’ memory (3). Focusing on these three levels of analysis, I propose the following systematisation, which becomes meaningful with the Sacred Heart in mind. The veneration and commemoration (a) of Jesus, Mary and saints24 produces memory through symbolical and ritual practices, thereby combining spirituality and memory, both within a community and of the individual devotee. Individual and social dimensions are intrinsically linked in a complex way. While in feasts for the veneration of the Sacred Heart practices of commemoration in the community predominate, in the contemplation of paintings or in devotional images the spiritual community of the devotee with Jesus is built up in the act of veneration as commemoration. Maurice Denis’s painting shown above enacts this spiritual community much the way votive pictures showing a saint together with Christ do. With regard to the deep structures of devotional practices, mechanisms of memory (b) can be regarded as central for the functioning of devotional practices. We could speak of the creation and mediation of memory in performance. With Thomas Macho, religious rites can be conceptualised as ‘techniques of memory’ that make the invisible visible and sensually experienceable.25 A relation to transcendence is created – this is a central intention of the respective mechanism of memory – persuasively through repetition and thus through memorial reproduction of practices such 23 Hirst, New Religion, especially v. See on the exhibition  : Ryan, “Catholic Iconography, Cultural Memories and Imaginaries”, pp. 244–245. 24 This dimension of memory can be compared to national memory construction through the commemoration of national heroes of an – often mythic – past, of those fallen in a war, or of ‘events’ or essentialised ‘qualities’ of a national community. 25 Macho, Das zeremonielle Tier, pp. 16–17.

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as those described in the above paragraph. Modern and contemporary works of art deconstruct this mechanism of memory. Dalí’s painting reflects not least on this dimension of repetition, in which it is crucial that it is not (only) the viewer, a possible devotee, who is the agent of such repetition, but Christ himself. Similarly, Koons and Hirst ironically reflect on the mechanism of iconographic reproduction and repeated, serial creation of sacred/sacralised objects by radically alienating the respective visual and material codes. Memory is also created through the materiality of religious rites (c), including (sacred/sacralised) objects, monuments, buildings, places, spaces and bodies or parts of bodies. The materiality of ‘doing’ memory is a dimension that in memory studies has only been conceptualised in recent years, especially with regard to the memory construction in museums, and which has been thematised in religious studies and to a lesser degree in religious history only recently.26 Sacral objects, images and bodies, spaces including paths of a procession or routes of pilgrimage can be conceptualised as spaces of memory created through materiality.27 Their creation and ceremonial usage generate sensuous and material routines– including sounds and smells  – as memory enabling and enacting religious belief. This systematisation is based on a position that considers a number of often closely intertwined practices as paramount, as can be shown with regard to the Sacred Heart and beyond. These practices, which can be conceptualised as communicative practices, construct and promulgate codes. A first practice is that of demonstrating/showing in or through images and objects. This practice is produced by different agencies both external and internal to the respective images and objects  : by their creators and mediators in the pastoral or educational fields on the one hand and by Christ as in many Sacred Heart images (or as a variation by angels, as in fig. 1) on the other hand. Closely linked to practices of demonstration are practices of seeing and interpreting images, objects and actions. A third practice links the previous two, the interplay of bodies  : of the body of Christ, the body of the individual viewer and/or devotee and 26 For conceptual lines in recent memory studies regarding materiality see  : Popp et al. (eds.). The EU Project “Museums Exhibiting Europe” (EMEE)  ; id. et al. (eds.). European Perspectives on Museum Objects  ; id. et al. Making Europe Visible  ; Olick, “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products”  ; Simonsson, Displaying Spaces  ; Bijsterveld, “Ears-on Exhibitions. Sound in the History Museum”. – For conceptual contributions in religious studies and history  : Material Religion. The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief (since 2005, ed. by Amy Landau, David Morgan, S. Brent Plate, and Kata Rakow)  ; Morgan, Images at Work  ; Houtman (ed.). Things  : Religion and the question of materiality  ; Laube, Von der Reliquie zum Ding. 27 See Laube, Von der Reliquie zum Ding  ; Morgan, Rhetoric of the Heart  ; Pahud de Mortanges, “‘Be a somebody with a body’”.

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their relation to other devotees in a community. We could speak of multiple embodiment. Seeing and embodiment stand in a complex relationship in the enactment of devotional memory of the Sacred Heart, be it in paintings, devotional images or other objects. The body of the viewer – David Morgan uses the term of the ‘embodied I’ – and the icon as embodiment – the ‘embodied eye’ – are both marked by gazes and their entanglement.28 Although generated by the viewer, the code of the devotional gaze builds on the illusion of reciprocal viewing initiated by Christ’s gaze. In the case of the Sacred Heart one could even go further and see the ‘sacred eye’ transposed into the heart as focal object (in the case where it is detached from the figure of Christ) or doubled, producing a triangle of gazes (eyes-heart-eyes), as David Morgan has shown.29 The ‘eye’/‘heart’ becomes the sacred ‘other’ of the observer, inducing absorption and contemplation with the aspired effect of self-transcendence.30 Ritual practices create and reproduce not only images, but also narratives as memorial practices. Therefore, narrating as well as listening and interpreting what is narrated can be distinguished as fourth and fifth communicative practices.

Narrative Memory and Narratives of Memory Narrative memory, i. e. the construction of memory through narratives consisting of layers of discourses and images, and in a narrower sense narratives of memory can be considered as a third mode of the relationship of religion and memory.31 Narratives of memory are produced and promulgated, stabilised and transformed especially through a number of central agents such as historiography and history teaching, literature, film and art, monuments and ‘created’ sites in nature, the staging of the past in festivities, and various types of media.32 The concept of narrativity of memory in 28 Morgan, The Embodied Eye. David Morgan analyses especially the passion imagery of the medieval and early modern period. See also id., “Rhetoric of the Heart”. 29 Morgan, Images at Work. 30 Morgan, The Embodied Eye, p. 74. 31 Research on memory has  – if dealing with religious communities  – often focused on the complex relation of national and religions narratives. See among many others the contributions in  : Haupt and Langewiesche (eds.), Nation und Religion in Europa  ; Altermatt and Metzger (eds.), Religion und Nation  ; Armborst-Weihs and Wiehl (eds.), Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewusstsein  ; Otto, Rau and Rüpke (eds.), Historiography and Religion  ; Contemporary Church History 31 (2018) with a focus on devotion and memory, ed. by Andrea Strübind and Franziska Metzger. 32 On mechanisms of the deep structures of narratives of memory, especially of mythicised narratives see with a theoretical focus  : White, Metahistory  ; Megill, “Recounting the past”  ; Barthes, Mythologies. – With regard to concrete analysis conceptually interesting, among others  : Jarausch/Sabrow, “‘Meister­

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a broader sense is based on the narrativist position that narrating itself is an act of memory, inasmuch as it links the temporal dimensions of past, present and future.33 Apart from – diverse – narratives of memory regarding the origins of Sacred Heart devotion, central discourses forming the meaning of the Sacred Heart such as the discourse of sacrifice and atonement, of love and the eternity of this love, sympathy and mercifulness – all linked to moral discourses, their fostering, transmission and mediation – were not least narratively produced, and created narrative memory. Moreover, we can speak of a narrative stabilisation of Sacred Heart memory through references to diverse other narrative particles, especially from the Bible, but also from specific texts regarding the veneration of the Sacred Heart established by those propagating the devotion, through pastoral and didactic narrations as well as through spiritual texts as expressions of individual devotional experience. All these can be described as practices of narrative memory. As Pietro Antonio Viola, David Morgan and Daniel Sidler demonstrate in this volume for the late medieval and early modern period, and Denis Pelletier and Paul Airiau for the second half of the 20th century, different narrative memories – and narratives of memory – regarding the promoted ‘origins’ and original propagators of the devotion have to be pointed out. They are, moreover, closely linked to diverse pictorial and ritual enactments. An in-depth analysis of the narrative dimension of Sacred Heart iconography leads to the conclusion that unlike paintings of Christ in a biblical environment that became en vogue in the 19th century,34 Sacred Heart images for their part did, and do, rarely stage memory narratively, as they mostly lack a visually produced dimension of narrativity. Rather, the Heart of Christ became the symbol of central discourses of memory – especially in images of mass production in the 19th and 20th centuries –, which were fostered by more narrative modes of commemoration (pastoral, didactic). We may find exceptions in paintings where the figure of Christ is transposed into a concrete historical or contemporary context such as in the paintings by George Desvallières shown above, especially Le Drapeau du Sacré-Cœur, where the temporal link makes certain implied narratives tangible, the narrative, above all, of the sacrifice by the French soldiers during the Great War which is sanctified by Christ’s gesture, erzählung’”  ; Assmann, “Die Sakralisierung der Geschichte”  ; Bottici/Challand, Imagining Europe  ; ­ obring, “The visual depiction of Islam in European history textbooks”  ; Buschmann, “Geschichten im W Raum”  ; Barricelli, “Historisches Lernen und Emotion”. 33 See for respective positions  : Erll, “Narratology and Cultural Memory Studies”  ; Nünning, “Selektion, Konfiguration, Perspektivierung und Poiesis”  ; Neumann, “The Literary Representation of Memory”  ; Lachmann, Geächtnis und Literatur  ; Buschmann, “Geschichten im Raum”. 34 For this genre and its apocalyptic narrative with a focus on British painters see  : Smith, “The Sublime in Crisis  : Landscape Painting after Turner”  ; Metzger, “Apokalyptische Diskurse”.

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if not as a coherent story, yet as a narrative trigger.35 And Dalí’s Christ in a dynamic narrative gesture seems to show what the Sacred Heart once had been and what he himself turned it into.

Spaces of Memory  : Reflections on the Functioning of the Sacred Heart as Memory All three modes of memory create spaces of memory understood as textures of inventories of memory that are produced and used, appropriated, reproduced and transformed. The concept of spaces of memory should not be reduced to spatially defined memory  ; rather it ought, in an in-depth perspective, to emphasise the dynamics of memory construction through linguistic and iconographic codes, practices and narratives. Similar to the ‘place of practice’ (‘lieu pratique’) in Michel de Certeau’s conception of space,36 I conceptualise spaces of memory as textures of interpretations and imaginations, in which elements of different linguistic and visual codes, their entanglement, their fostering, but also their transformations come to the fore.37 With regard to the Sacred Heart, iconographic codes and practices of seeing and interpreting in particular can be interpreted as spaces of memory. Plurality, variability and entanglements, reproduction and transfer into new contexts of interpretations, but also their entrainment as negative foil in radically transformed variations and deconstruction constitute these complex spaces of memory and are an expression of their interwovenness. In a communication theoretical perspective the focus of analysis must lie especially on deep structures, on the functioning of codes, practices and narratives of religious memory, on ritual, symbolic and narrative patterns, iconographic strategies and modes of staging – on the ‘formal conditions’ (‘conditions formelles’), in Michel Foucault’s words (see fig. 16).38 Based on my previous research,39 a number of mechanisms in the dynamics of the different modes of religion and memory in general and of the Sacred Heart in particular can be regarded as especially important. They can be systematised as follows.

35 See Ambroselli de Bayser et al. (eds.), George Desvallières. Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre complet, vol. 3, 401–403. 36 de Certeau, L’invention du quotidien, p. 173. 37 For a more detailed conceptualization of spaces of memory see Metzger, “Erinnerungsräume”. 38 See Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir. 39 See Metzger, Religion, Geschichte, Nation  ; id., “Devotion and Memory”.

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Linguistic and iconographic / visual codes, ritual practices and narratives as religous memory

Religion and Memory scheme of analysis for all three modes of religious memory with a focus on Sacred Heart devotion

Their functioning as religious memory mechanisms of memory construction and usage

Functions for a religious community

a) detemporalisation

- construction of continuity through retroprojection and repetition - teleological perspective / eternalisation - synchronisation of times

Functionalisation within a religious community and beyond into society

b) creation of presence, temporally and spatially, creating immediacy of the transcendent

different agents playing a role as producers and promulgators of respective discourses and practices

c) visualisation of the invisible – important role of embodiment in making present the unimagniable absolute «other» d) creation of sacred/sacralised spaces – heterotopia

situation of communication

© Franziska Metzger

Fig. 16  : Religion and memory  : scheme of analysis, © Franziska Metzger.

Detemporalisation (a) is a central mechanism of both religious and non-religious memory, as research on national memory construction shows.40 Detemporalisation is, firstly, created through the construction of continuity from the past to the present and future, in which retro-projection – especially in narratives – and repetition – especially in rites, ritual objects and images, as has been demonstrated for Sacred Heat iconography in the previous sections – play a central role. Furthermore, past, future and ‘eternity’ are bound together by an all-encompassing teleological perspective. In Sacred Heart iconography from the 18th to the 20th centuries the providential teleological dimension is on the one hand visually made present in the lack of historical specificity that fosters an impression of ‘eternity’. On the other hand, the teleological dimension creating eternity is intensified through the mechanism of repetition and seriality, foreshadowing future eternity as eternal seeing, both by the devotees and in Christ’s eternal vision. Eternalisation through art is staged in Mehoffer’s painting  : Christ’s eternally static pointing at the heart should not only eternally strike the angel behind Christ with awe, but every observer, now and in the future. Thirdly, different times are synchronised  – different past times as well as past, present and future  –, creating simultaneity of the non-simultaneous in narratives, images and ritual practices. In Sacred Heart devotion, this simultaneity concerns the devotee and the eter-

40 See among others Assmann, “Die Sakralisierung der Geschichte”  ; Metzger, Religion, Geschichte Nation.

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nal figure of Christ as well as an implied communion with a past, present and future community of believers. The creation of presence (b), both temporally and spatially, or in Hans-Georg Soeffner’s words ‘appresentation’ (‘Appräsentation’)41 is a second important mechanism of religious memory, relying on repetition, ritualisation and personalisation. As shown before, visual mechanisms of making Christ present create immediacy of the transcendent. We could speak of a mise en scène of the transcendent with material means. In devotional images of the Sacred Heart ‘presence’ is enacted through the intersecting gazes and the fluctuation and dynamism of embodiment and disembodiment, making the unseen visible, revealing it in the seemingly interactive relation.42 Deconstruction of this mise en scène of the transcendent is a central dimension in the contemporary works of art mentioned earlier. The fluctuation between embodiment and disembodiment is fundamentally due to the visualisation of the invisible (c). Because of the synchronic immediacy that images and religious rites create, ‘appresentation’ and visualisation of the not present and the visually not known, radically different ‘other’ are particularly effective. Two variations of Sacred Heart images function in this mode, even reinforcing each other if combined. In the emblematic variation the symbolic depiction as ‘focal object’ stands in the place of the absent ‘object’, i.e. Christ.43 In the iconographic variation, where the figure of Christ appears, embodiment makes present the transcendent, absolute ‘other’, the ultimately unimaginable. Everything that makes Christ different from ordinary humans – his gaze, his gesture and centrally his heart – stages transcendence and enacts eternity. This is even more the case inasmuch as Sacred Heart imagery refrains largely from narrative settings and spaces. Space plays an important role, though. A fourth mechanism regards the dimension of space (d), particularly the creation of sacred spaces through memory. (Ritual) objects, images, human bodies, bodies of saints or of Christ, shaped spaces and ‘natural’ spaces, paths of pilgrimage, processions in the public sphere, and in a more abstract sense also narrative spaces are sacralised through the dimension of memory. Sacralised spaces can be conceptualised as ‘heterotopia’ in Michel Foucault’s terms, as real, but utterly different spaces, as “a simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live”,44 inasmuch

41 Soeffner, “Protosoziologische Überlegungen zur Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals”  ; id., Zur Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals. See Belting, Bild-Anthropologie. 42 See Morgan, Images at Work. 43 See on this interpretation  : Morgan, Images at Work. 44 Foucault, “Des espaces autres” (“Of other spaces”), p. 756 (translation by the author).

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as they link immanence to transcendence, past, present and future, creating eternity through memory.45 The space unfolded by an image or shaped by a sculpture, the spatial dimension of the heart and of Christ’s body as the essence of sacredness, and the space connecting Christ and the devotee, created by the intersection of gazes, can all be interpreted as heterotopic spaces transcending immanence within the immanent. Not only images and sculptures, but also tattoos transform the body into a heterotopia – if only for the tattoed individual. In Dalì’s and Hirst’s works of art analysed earlier, and if you will in Koons’ heart, too, inasmuch as it exposes an idyllic children’s world,46 religious heterotopia is exposed and ironised as created, manipulated and commercialised by humans. Repetition and seriality foster all the mechanisms of memory of the Sacred Heart delineated above. Memorial reproduction conveys stability to the icon with long continuities in its visual, material and narrative expressions alike, including adaptation, variation and radical transformation up to the point of deconstruction. All these variations constitute the complex textures of Sacred Heart memory. References Altermatt, Urs and Franziska Metzger (eds.). Religion und Nation. Katholizismus im Europa des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart  : Kohlhammer, 2007. Altermatt, Urs. Konfession, Nation, Rom. Metamorphosen im schweizerischen und europäi­ schen Katholizismus des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts. Frauenfeld  : Verlag Huber, 2009. Ambroselli de Bayser, Catherine, Priscilla Hornus and Thomas Lequeu (eds.). George Desvallières. Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre complet. 3 vols. Paris  : Somogy éd. d’art, 2015. Ambroselli de Bayser, Catherine. George Desvallières et la Grande Guerre. Paris  : Somogy éd. d’art, 2013. Ambroselli de Bayser, Catherine. “George Desvallières et la Grande Guerre.” LISA – Litérature, histoire des Idées, Images et Sociétés du monde Anglophone. 10 (2012), https://journals. openedition.org/lisa/4828#ftn8. Armborst-Weihs, Kerstin and Judith Becker (eds.). Toleranz und Identität. Geschichtsschreibung und Geschichtsbewusstsein zwischen religiösem Anspruch und historischer Erfahrung. Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2010. Assmann, Aleida. “Funktionsgedächtnis und Speichergedächtnis  – zwei Modi der Erinne­ 45 See with regard to religious spaces  : Daphinoff, “Sakraler Raum, Erinnerungsraum und das Ringen um Deutungshoheit”  ; Mohn, “Inszenierte Sinnsysteme”  ; Valentin, “Spiegel, Reisen, Klänge”  ; Metzger, “Apokalyptische Diskurse”  ; Pahud de Mortanges, “’Be a somebody with a body‘”. 46 In the case of the exposition of Koon’s heart on the roof top of the Metropolitan Museum in New York in 2008 we can even speak of two heterotopia. On the exposition On the Roof see  : http://www.jeffkoons. com/artwork/celebration/sacred-heart.

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rung.” Generation und Gedächtnis. Erinnerungen und kollektive Identitäten. Ed. Kristin Platt and Mihran Dabag. Opladen  : Leske + Budrich Verlag, 1997, pp. 133–142. Assmann, Aleida. “Die Sakralisierung der Geschichte.” Id., Arbeit am nationalen Gedächtnis. Eine kurze Geschichte der deutschen Bildungsidee, Frankfurt a.M.: Campus, 1993  : pp. 47– 57. Bandera, Sandrina, Alessancro Castiglioni and Emma Zanella (eds.), Kerouac Beat Painting. Skira editore  : Milano, 2018. Barricelli, Michele. “Historisches Lernen und narrative Emotion. Anmerkungen zu einer erzähltheoretisch orientierten Geschichtsdidaktik, die Gefühle respektiert.” Emotionen, Geschichte und historisches Lernen. Geschichtsdidaktische und geschichtskulturelle Perspektiven. Ed. Juliane Brauer and Martin Lücke. Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2013, pp. 165–184. Barthes, Roland. Mythologies. Paris  : Les Lettres nouvelles, 1957. Belting, Hans. Bild-Anthropologie. Entwürfe für eine Bildwissenschaft. München  : Wilhelm Fink, 2001. Benini, Stefania. “Visions of Jack. Sacred imagery in Kerouac’s writing and painting.” Kerouac Beat Painting. Eds. Sandrina Bandera, Alessancro Castiglioni and Emma Zanella. Skira editore  : Milano, 2018, pp  : 75–93. Bijsterveld, Karin. “Ears-on Exhibitions. Sound in the History Museum.” The Public Historian 37,4 (2015)  : pp. 73–90. Bottici, Chiara and Benoît Challand, Imagining Europe. Myth, Memory, and Identity. Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 2013. Buschmann, Heike. “Geschichten im Raum. Erzähltheorie als Museumsanalyse.” Museums­ analyse. Methoden und Konturen eines neuen Forschungsfeldes. Ed. Joachim Baur. Bielefeld  : transcript Verlag, 2010, pp. 149–169. Carrier, Peter and Kai Kabalek. “Cultural Memory and Transcultural Memory – a Conceptual Analysis.” The Transcultural Turn  : Interrogating Memory Between and Beyond Borders. Ed. Lucy Bond and Jessica Rapson. Berlin/Boston  : De Gruyter, 2014, pp. 39–60. Contemporary Church History 31 (2018), thematic focus on devotion and memory, ed. by Andrea Strübind and Franziska Metzge. Csáky, Moritz. “Die Mehrdeutigkeit von Gedächtnis und Erinnerung.” Digitales Handbuch zur Geschichte und Kultur Russlands und Osteuropas. Vol.  9, 2004, http://epub.ub.unimuenchen.de/archive/00000603/01/csaky-gedaechtnis.pdf. Damberg, Wilhelm (ed.). Soziale Strukturen und Semantiken des Religiösen im Wandel. Transformationen in der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 1949–1989. Essen  : Klartext Verlag, 2011. Daphinoff, Dimiter and Franziska Metzger. “Einleitung.” Ausdehnung der Zeit. Die Gestaltung von Erinnerungsräumen in Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst. Ed. Dimiter Daphinoff and Franziska Metzger. Wien/Köln/Weimar  : Böhlau, 2019, pp. 7–15. Daphinoff, Dimiter. “Sakraler Raum, Erinnerungsraum und das Ringen um ­Deutungshoheit. T.S. Elios Murder in the Cathedral und G.B. Shaws Saint Joan.” Orte und Räume des Religiösen im 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Elke Pahud de Mortanges, Pa­ der­born  : Schöningh, 2016, pp. 121–132. de Certeau, Michel. L’écriture de l’histoire. Paris  : Éditions Gallimard, 1975.

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de Certeau, Michel. L’invention du quotidien. Vol. 1  : Arts de faire. Paris  : Éditions Gallimard, 1990 (first published in 1980). Derrida, Jacques. Mal d’Archive. Paris  : Édition Galilée, 1995. Erll, Astrid. “Media and the Dynamics of Memory  : From Cultural Paradigms to Transcultural Premediation.” Ed. Brady Wagoner. Oxford  : Oxford UP, 2017, pp. 305–324. Erll, Astrid. “Narratology and Cultural Memory Studies.” Narratology in the Age of Cross-Disciplinary Narrative Research. Ed. Sandra Heinen and Roy Sommer. Berlin/New York  : Walter de Gruyter, 2009, pp. 212–227. Esposito, Elena. Soziales Vergessen. Formen und Medien des Gedächtnisses der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2002. Feindt, Gregor et al. “Entangled Memory  : Toward a Third Wave in Memory Studies.” History and Theory 53 (2014)  : pp. 24–44. Foucault, Michel. L’Archéologie du savoir. Paris  : Éditions Gallimard, 1969. Foucault, Michel. “Des espaces autres.” (1967/1984). Id., Dits et écrits, vol. 4. Paris  : Éditions Gallimard, 1994, pp. 752–762. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm and Klaus Große Kracht (eds.). Religion und Gesellschaft. Europa im 20. Jahrhundert. Köln  : Böhlau, 2007. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. Die Wiederkehr der Götter. Religion in der modernen Kultur. München  : Verlag C.H. Beck, 2nd ed. 2004. Haupt, Heinz-Gerhard and Dieter Langewiesche (eds.). Nation und Religion in Europa. Frankfurt a.M.: Campus Verlag, 2004. Hill, Virginia. “Jack, His Jeans, and the ‘Anti-Fashion’ of the Beat Generation.” Kerouac Beat Painting. Eds. Sandrina Bandera, Alessancro Castiglioni and Emma Zanella. Skira editore  : Milano, 2018, pp  : 75–93. Hirst, Damien. New Religion. With an interview by Sean O’Hagan. London  : Paul Stolper/ Other Criteria, 2006. Hölscher, Lucian (ed.). Baupläne der sichtbaren Kirche. Sprachliche Konzepte religiöser Vergemeinschaftung in Europa. Göttingen  : Wallstein Verlag, 2007. Houtman, Dick. Things. Religion and the question of materiality (The future of the religious past). New York  : Fordham University Press, 2012. Jaeger, Stephen. Enchantment. On Charisma and the Sublime in the Arts of the West, Philadelphia  : University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Jarausch, Konrad H. and Martin Sabrow, “‘Meistererzählung’. Zur Karriere eines Begriffs.” Die historische Meistererzählung. Deutungslinien der deutschen Nationalgeschichte nach 1945. Ed. id. Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2002, pp. 9–32. Kristeva, Julia. Desire in Language  : A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art. New York  : Columbia University Press, 1980. Lachmann, Renate. Gedächtnis und Literatur. Intertextualität in der russischen Moderne. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1990. Langenbacher, Eric, Bill Niven and Ruth Wittlinger (eds.). Dynamics of Memory and Identity in Contemporary Europe. New York/Oxford  : Berghahn Books, 2012. Laube, Stefan. Von der Reliquie zum Ding. Heiliger Ort – Wunderkammer – Museum. Berlin  : de Gruyter, 2011.

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Luhmann, Niklas. Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1997. Macho, Thomas. Das zeremonielle Tier. Rituale – Feste – Zeiten zwischen den Zeiten. Graz  : Styria Premium, 2004. Material Religion. The Journal of Objects, Art and Belief (since 2005, ed. By Amy Landau, David Morgan, S. Brent Plate and Kata Rakow). Megill, Allan. “Recounting the Past  : ‘Description’, Explanation, and Narrative in Historiography.” The American Historical Review 94,3 (1989)  : pp. 627–653. Metzger, Franziska. “Apokalyptische Diskurse als Gedächtnis- und Erwartungsräume in der Sattelzeit um 1900.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 110 (2016)  : pp. 23–51. Metzger, Franziska. “Das Gedächtnis der Religion. Gedächtnis als Kategorie für die Katholizismusforschung” Katholizismus  – transnational. Ed. Andreas Henkelmann, Christoph Kösters, Mark Edward Ruff and Rosel Oehmen-Vieregge. Münster  : Aschendorff Verlag, 2019, pp. 123–144. Metzger, Franziska. “Devotion and Memory  – Discourses and Practices.” Contemporary Church History 31/2 (2018)  : pp. 329–347. Metzger, Franziska. “Erinnerungsräume.” Ausdehnung der Zeit. Die Gestaltung von Erinne­ rungs­räumen in Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst. Ed. Dimiter Daphinoff and Franziska Metzger. Wien/Köln/Weimar  : Böhlau, 2019, pp. 19–44. Metzger, Franziska. “Memory of the Sacred Heart  – Iconographic and Ritual Variations.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 113 (2019)  : pp. 391–402. Metzger, Franziska. Religion, Geschichte, Nation. Katholische Geschichtsschreibung in der Schweiz im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert – kommunikationstheoretische Perspektiven. Stuttgart  : Kohlhammer, 2010. Mohn, Jürgen. “Inszenierte Sinnsysteme – Gärten als Heterotopien in der europäischen Religionsgeschichte.” Orte und Räume des Religiösen im 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Elke Pahud de Mortanges, Paderborn  : Schöningh, 2016, pp. 55–87. Morgan, David. “Rhetoric of the Heart  : Figuring the Body in Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.” Things. Religion and the question of materiality. Ed. Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer. New York  : Fordham University Press, 2012, pp. 90–111. Morgan, David. Images at Work. The Material Culture of Enchantment. Oxford  : Oxford University Press, 2018. Morgan, David. The Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Visual Evolution of a Devotion. Amsterdam  : Amsterdam University Press, 2008. Morgan, David. The Embodied Eye. Religious Visual Culture and the Social Life of Feeling. Berkeley/Los Angeles/London  : University of California Press, 2012. Neumann, Birgit. “The Literary Representation of Memory.” A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin et al.: de Gruyter, 2010, pp. 333– 343. Nünning, Ansgar. “Selektion, Konfiguration, Perspektivierung und Poiesis  : Zur ästhetischen Aneignung von Geschichte und Erinnerung im Roman.” Geschichte, Erinnerung, ­Ästhetik. Ed. Kirsten Dickhaut and Stephanie Wodianka. Tübingen  : Gunter Narr Verlag, 2010, pp. 113–137.

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Olick, Jeffrey K. “From Collective Memory to the Sociology of Mnemonic Practices and Products.” A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin/New York  : De Gruyter, 2011, pp. 151–162. Otto, Bernd, Susanne Rau and Bernd Rüpke (eds.). Historiography and Religion – Narrating a Religious Past. Berlin  : de Gruyter, 2015. Pahud de Mortanges, Elke. “‘Be a somebody with a body’. Christus-Heterotopien in Kunst und Kommerz des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel von Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys und Conchita Wurst.” Orte und Räume des Religiösen im 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Elke Pahud de Mortanges. Paderborn  : Schöningh, 2016, pp. 223–245. Popp, Susanne et al. (eds.). European Perspectives on Museum Objects. Selected Examples on the Change of Perspective. Wien  : edition mono/monochrom, 2016. Popp, Susanne et al. (eds.). The EU Project “Museums Exhibiting Europe” (EMEE). Ideas, Results, Outlooks. Augsburg  : edition mono/monochrom, 2016. Popp, Susanne et al. Making Europe Visible. Re-interpretation of Museum Objects and Topics. A Manual (EMEE Toolkit series, vol. 1). Wien  : edition mono/monochrom, 2016. Rosa, Mario. Settecento religioso  : politica della religione e religione del cuore, Venice  : Marsilio, 1999. Ryan, Sean Michael. “Catholic Iconography, Cultural Memory and Imaginaries. The Sacred Heart in Irish Emigrant Identity.” Religion in Cultural Imaginary  : Explorations in Visual and Material Practices. Ed. Daria Pezzoli-Olgiati. Baden-Baden  : Nomos, 2015, pp. 229– 252. Seydl, Jon L. “Contesting the Sacred Heart of Jesus in late eighteenth-century Rome.” Roman Bodies. From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century. Ed. Andrew Hopkins and Maria Wyke. London  : British School at Rome, 2005, pp. 215–227. Smith, Alison. “The Sublime in Crisis  : Landscape Painting after Turner.” The Art of the Sublime. Tate Research Publication. Ed. Nigel Llewellyn and Christine Riding, January 2013, https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/the-sublime/alison-smith-the-sub lime-in-crisis-landscape-painting-after-turner-r1109220. Simonsson, Märit. Displaying Spaces. Spatial Design, Experience, and Authenticity in Museums. Umeå  : Umeå universitet, 2014. Soeffner, Hans-Georg. “Protosoziologische Überlegungen zur Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals.” Die Wirklichkeit der Symbole. Grundlagen der Kommunikation in historischen und gegenwärtigen Gesellschaften. Ed. Rudolf Schlögl et al. Konstanz  : UVK, 2004, 41–72. Soeffner, Hans-Georg. Zur Soziologie des Symbols und des Rituals. Weilerswist  : Velbrück, 2010. Valentin, Joachim. “Spiegel, Reisen, Klänge. Jim Jarmuschs Filme eröffnen Räume jenseits der Alltagsrealität.” Orte und Räume des Religiösen im 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Elke Pahud de Mortanges, Paderborn  : Schöningh, 2016, pp. 133–146. White, Hayden. Metahistory. The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. Baltimore/London  : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973. White, Hayden. Tropics of Discourse. Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore/London  : Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978.

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Wobring, Michael. “The visual depiction of Islam in European history textbooks (1970–2010).” Yearbook. International Society for History Didactics 35 (2014)  : pp. 229–251. Zolles, Christian. “Die symbolische Macht der Apokalypse. Zu den Grenzen moderner Identität.” Abendländische Apokalyptik. Kompendium zur Geneaogie der Endzeit. Ed. Veronika Wieser, Christian Zolles et al. Wien  : de Gruyter, 2013, pp. 125–155.

Images Batoni, Pompeo. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, 1767, oil on copper, Chiesa del Santissimo Nome di Gesù all’Argentina in Rome, https://archive.org/download/fig-2/fig-2.jpg (fig. 6). Dalí, Salvador. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, private collection (cat. no. of Dalí foundation 792), https://www.wikiart.org/en/salvador-dali/the-sacred-heart-of-jesus. Denis, Maurice. Sacré-Cœur crucifié, 1916, Musée départemental Maurice Denis, Saint-Germain-en-Laye (fig. 7). Desvallières, George. Le Sacré-Cœur, 1905, private collection, published in  : Ambroselli de Bayser, Catherine Priscilla Hornus and Thomas Lequeu (eds.). George Desvallières. Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre complet. Vol. 2, Paris  : Somogy éd. d’art, 2015, p. 249 (fig. 10). Desvallières, George. Le Drapeau du Sacré-Cœur, 1918, Monument aux morts de Verneuilsur-­Avre, Eglise Notre-Dame de Verneuil-sur-Avre, published in  : Ambroselli de Bayser, Catherine, Priscilla Hornus and Thomas Lequeu (eds.). George Desvallières. Catalogue raisonné de l’œuvre complet. Vol. 3, Paris  : Somogy éd. d’art, 2015, p. 403 (fig. 11). Devotional image of the Sacred Heart, late 19th century, http://rosenkranzbeten.info/rosen kranzbeten/kinder-im-herz-jesu-monat/ (fig. 2). Devotional image of the Sacred Heart, serial print, Currier and Ives (US print office), lithograph, hand-painted, 1835, https://fineartamerica.com/featured/sacred-heart-of-jesusamerican-school.html (fig. 9). Emblematic image of the Sacred Heart, produced originally in 1685 at Margaret-Mary Alacoque’s direction (fig. 5). Hirst, Damien. The Immaculate Heart – Sacred, 2008, http://damienhirst.com/the-immacu late-heart-a-sacre. Hirst, Damien. The Kiss of Death, 2005, http://damienhirst.com/the-kiss-of-death. Hirst, Damien. The Sacred Heart of Jesus, 2005, http://damienhirst.com/the-sacred-heart-ofjesus. Kerouac, Jack. Sacred heart, N.D. (fig. 14), recent exhibition  : Museo MA*GA, Gallarete, 2017/18, https://wsimag.com/museo-maga/it/artworks/116401. Koons, Jeff. Sacred Heart, 1994–2008 (fig. 15). Koons, Jeff. Sacred Heart, 1994–2008, Photograph of his exhibition On the Roof, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York 2008, http://www.jeffkoons.com/artwork/celebration/sacred-­ heart. Mehoffer, Jozef. Sacred Heart of Jesus (Serce Jezusa), 1911, https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File  :Serce_Jezusa,The_Sacred_Heart_of_Jesus,_1911,_Josef_Mehoffer.jpg (fig. 12).

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Mezzana, Corrado. Christ between Saint Catherine of Siena and Saint Margerite Mary Alacoque, 1922, Chapel in the Basilica di Santa Maria sopra Minerva, Rome (fig. 8). Procession banner showing a blazing Sacred Heart with chalice and host, Tirol, around 1800, www.kulturraumtirol.at/index.php?id=126&no_cache=1&tx_ttnews[tt_news]=217 (fig. 1). Redon, Odilon. Le Sacré Cœur, 1910 (RF 1941 24), Musée d’Orsay, Paris, accepté par l’Etat à titre de legs de Paul Jamot en 1939 (fig. 13).

Marcello Neri

Memory and Devotion

A thorough investigation of the relationship between memory and devotion, especially regarding the imagery and imagination of the Sacred Heart, could prove to be a fascinating undertaking both from the point of view of religious experience as from the perspective of the history of ideas and representations. What happens when an image so intimately connected with European history, such as the devotion to the Sacred Heart, engages with a cultural context and religious tradition completely divergent from it  ? How does one translate the great concepts refined by critics in order to explain the complex history of effects, inevitably triggering such concepts as colonization, Europeanization, Christianization, etc.? What can Europeans learn from this passage of a devotion into other cultures which, because of the diachrony of time, resonates as alien, distant, sometimes almost meaningless even for many who live their spiritual experience in the European tradition  ? The essays in this volume open up glimpses of a real interest in the link between memory and devotion, not only for those whose lives are configured by faith but also more broadly for those in civil life. Is not the exercise of memory, even at the level of academic research, a devotional practice of historical and sociological reasoning  ? Does not the injunction to memory that is cultivated and handed down ask for a dedication of the forces of the soul and intellectual honesty which have, after all, the form of a true cultural devotion  ? In short, the juxtaposition of memory and devotion appears at first sight not to be arbitrary and impertinent. In order to advance the legitimacy of this field of investigation, there is the immediate temptation to retrace the formal framework of both memory and devotion in order to identify their affinities and connections. But this is precisely a temptation to which both figures under examination offer strenuous resistance.

Practices Memory and devotion resist being brought to their most basic forms because neither is experienced outside of real practice. They always are memory and devotion ‘of something’. In fact, it is the ‘thing’ that gives shape to memory and devotion. From the methodological point of view, only subsequently, in the recognition of their be-

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ing practiced, is it possible to identify certain formal characteristics of both. But in trying to engage such a methodology one senses a lack of a solid foundation precisely because in dealing with the practices of memory and/or devotion one senses a breakdown of any stable acquisition of a methodological nature. In a nutshell, to say it in another way  : memory is not the archive, even though it works on archives and draws heavily from them (and it doesn’t matter whether it is a documentary, a testimonial or psychic archive). Memory differs from being a merely archival storage exactly because of the way it functions as the great archival container of history and human events. With memory it is a question not only of ‘why’ one makes use of the archive, but also and above all of ‘how’ one relates to the archival material. In short, memory not only draws on a database (be it paper, electronic, psychic or experiential), but takes hold of the ‘archived’ in such a way that it is no longer an archive. Memory works on the archive against the archive, to the point of making it irrelevant, useless, unattainable. Memory knows that the archive is a trap, a codified form of oblivion. It cannot do without it, but, from the very beginning, it declares its estrangement from the archives which it frequents so intimately. In fact, in the face of the archival power to prepare the material which alone composes the knowledge we call history, memory declares its own otherness in its desire to tell stories. Something very similar could be said of devotion. With these brief remarks about the link between memory and devotion, and this extremely short phenomenology of memory, I would now like to focus on the link between memory and the configuration of faith, also in its normative expressions, as the backdrop of the Catholic way of believing. This link is clearly inscribed in the core of the liturgical celebration of the believing community, understood and lived as a memorial of the deeds and passion of the Lord in which he has intentionally condensed the meaning of his life. The Eucharistic memorial does not repeat or recall (a past event), but makes present not only the meaning of Jesus’ life, but also and above all, the concrete reality of his life.

Eucharistic Memorial Thus, from the very beginning, the community of believers has understood the celebration of the Lord’s Day as giving us contemporaneity with the materiality of his living and dying for us all. That this being present occurs objectively, as the dogma of transubstantiation intends to affirm, is considered marginal with respect to the experience lived by believers in their practical celebration of the Eucharist. Faith of whatever kind always creates a reality that escapes the empirical conditions of veri-

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fication  ; this is true above all for those who are well aware that they are in a space of trust which cannot be proven. But faith can, however, give indications of itself. The Eucharistic memorial of the real presence of the Lord is destined, in fact, to be materially annihilated in the body of the believers  : the divine presence disappears in the bodily experience of a community of believers. The body therefore dissolves the sacramental realism of the Christian memorial, which becomes a life practice among many other ways of being in the world. Every Sunday the Christian community gathered around the Eucharistic table celebrates the strange link between a memory that disappears in the here and now and a memory that transfers bodily into the daily practices of living. The Eucharistic dissolution of the real presence by its incorporation into the simple existence of believers (wherever they are and whatever they do), makes the Christian memory of the Lord shift from the logic of the belonging of some individuals to the spaces of living of all. The daily practices of the believing body thus become a dissemination of the Eucharistic memory in every conceivable contact within the wider social body. The bodily effectiveness of Christian memory in the anonymous contacts and touching of people’s experiences goes hand in hand with a healthy dissipation of the identity referent of that same memory. Because of its diffusive character, made of these fleeting touches unable to be a self-memory, Christianity injects into the social textures of human life the messianic trait which is proper to the time of God by which his memory is nourished. In fact, we must not forget that the Eucharistic assembly is a convocation that suspends the chronological form of human time into a waiting for the Lord’s future coming. Disappearance and absence are therefore the two pivots around which the celebration of the real presence of the Lord revolves. The sacramental content of this presence disappears in the bodily incorporation which, in turn, lives in a time which is not only unavailable, but which also annihilates any claim to the validity of the representations that this incorporation makes of it. Christian memory is therefore a festive dance performed at the edge of an anterior future from which comes the strength for an unprecedented configuration of the future coming of every human order. The emptiness of the ‘messianic’ (J. Derrida), which is inside the beating heart of the Christian celebration of memory, radically subverts its fundamental coordinates. The past that is ‘to come’ and the anterior future interweave their plot in the celebration and make present the container/content (of the real presence) of the Eucharistic memory celebrated by the community of believers, which already bears in itself the signs of an uncontrollable surplus. In this sense, the Eucharistic celebration of the Lord’s memory is crisscrossed from top to bottom by evident signs which make impossible any governance of memory, not only by the Church. The ‘messianic’ practice

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of memory, therefore, has a subversive character  : it radically questions every established order. But precisely because it is a practice, it never intends to suspend the temporal and chronological outline of this action. It will continue to provide only a sketch of an unconditionally hospitable community always in the process of coming  : If the messianic appeal belongs properly to a universal structure, to that irreducible movement of the historical opening to the future, therefore to experience itself and to its language (expectation, promise, commitment to the event of what is coming, imminence, urgency, demand for salvation and for justice beyond law, pledge given to the other inasmuch as he or she is not present, presently present or living) […].1

If the Eucharistic celebration of the memory of the Lord is practised at the height of this disjunction of time – this ‘messianic’ time – it opens up a political dimension all too often disregarded by the community of believers. It is a dimension where the memory of one’s own momentary convocation around the body of the Lord, which is destined to disappear in the bodily practices of those who have fed on it, allows it to be captured by the call of a justice rendered to all, which industriously expects such a “figure of absolute hospitality whose promise one would choose to entrust to an experience that is so impossible, so unsure in its indigence, […] to a quasi-transcendental ‘messianism’ that also has such an obstinate interest in a materialism without substance […].”2 The messianic withdrawal from every representational presence, which finds its realistic index in the Eucharistic disappearance of the Lord’s body in its incorporation into the life of the believer, opens it to the practices of a justice that no law can guarantee. This justice beyond law is exactly the messianic, unstable and indigent achievement of the Eucharistic memory of the Lord. It is an achievement with a definite political configuration, an approximation which is continually suspended and then taken up again in view of establishing the universal hospitable community to come. The quasi-transcendental character of the ‘messianic’ consists precisely in political practices that do not essentialize the institutional configuration of living together among the many. This political bent of the Eucharistic memorial is not irrelevant to the devotional constellation surrounding the imagery of the Sacred Heart as found within the Dehonian tradition. It is not irrelevant because it could give a connecting point between two major intersecting characteristics of the Dehonian definition of Catholic belief  : that of spirituality and that of social commitment. 1 Derrida, Spectres of Marx, p. 167 (translation of Spectres de Marx). 2 Ibid., p. 168.

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Already in the life of the founder of the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus these two dimensions remained in some way simply juxtaposed to one another. Today the question remains whether this juxtaposition without a deep connection between the spiritual and the social was structural or due to contingent reasons  ? This calls for an investigation of what we might call the basic traits of the formation of Dehonian memory, which in its essential articulation has not yet, in my opinion, been fully carried out. How much and in what way has the history of effects configured Dehonian memory and passed into today’s expression of faith  ? What role was played by the imagined Dehonian tradition within the congregation causing it to expand, if not generate, this dichotomy between the spiritual and the social in Dehonian memory  ? To what extent could the activity of the founder promoting a specific spiritual charism at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries when a nascent social sensibility was spreading in the Catholic Church, have given rise to a rift within himself between his spirituality and the ecclesial activity which at the time began to express itself more commonly in the social sphere  ? And if, because of an appeal by pontifical authority and the respectful obedience with which he accepted this call, such a dichotomy became apparent at some point in Dehon’s experience as founder and writer, is there something specifically Dehonian that has induced this intervention from above  ? By allying the Dehonian tradition with studies in the formation, configuration, and representation of memory, we discover that all these questions find an indispensable and necessary point of support, allowing us to enter more persuasively into the present form of Dehonian memory as a whole. Always bear in mind that memory, unlike an archive, is never something static, but in continuous evolution and determination. This is valid all the more in the endless memories – diachronic as well as synchronic  – that give shape to Christianity. In fact, one might say that Christian memories are structurally unstable, dynamic and not determinable once and for all. They are not such because, in one way or another, each of them is traversed by the subversive potential of the ‘messianic’ that flows in the Eucharistic memorial. As for the spiritual-social dyad in the Dehonian formulation of faith, it seems to me that the time has come to seek in politics, as non-established practices of justice beyond law, the junction between two dimensions of the same memory that risk, in their disjunction, to tear it apart irreparably.

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Memory and Tradition Before moving on to take a more in-depth look at the devotion to the Sacred Heart in the practices of Catholic Christianity between the beginning and the end of modernity, it might be helpful to indicate, at least intuitively, the role that memory plays in the construction of the Catholic tradition. This has been the case since the beginning of that historical phenomenon which we mistakenly call singular Christianity. From the very beginning the form of memory presents us with constitutive multiplicity. The canonical form of the New Testament scriptures is exemplary, as well as normative of this reality  : the event of Jesus’ life is not accessible except by decomposing these memories of him which cannot be harmonized with one another. But this relatively plural narrative of normative Christian memory finds its genesis in an unreconstructible trickle of oral memories that have left indelible traces in the written text, without which they could never have been produced. We are interested in two aspects of this brief phase in the millenary scriptural history of Christianity  : how, on the one hand, the narrative of memory of the marginal experience of the man of Nazareth was ignited, and what, on the other hand, was the dynamic that guided oral tradition to become scripture. Both interests come together in that field of investigation that is called the ‘third quest’ of the historical Jesus. How and when did the oral narrative memory of Jesus begin  ? Not with Jesus and in what he said, but rather with what was remembered of what he did or said. Or perhaps we should say  : by the impact on his first disciples of what he did and said. Bearing in mind what we have said, we could say that it is precisely this process of ‘remembering’ merging the horizons of the past and the present which made the past present again. What we find in these first retellings of what is now the synoptic tradition are the memories of the first disciples – not of Jesus himself, but the remembered Jesus […]. In fact, the narratives about Jesus did not begin with Jesus but, at most, with the first eyewitnesses. From the very beginning we are not so much confronted with Jesus but with how he was perceived.3

The mere fact that things happen does not generate memorial processes  : in order for them to be ignited, it is necessary that what happens leaves a mark in the lives of those who are at its origin. Only in this way can we enter into that originating time that we can call the ‘event’. According to Badiou, for something to be an event, it must call for a response or it must address someone who was in a position where everyone 3 Dunn, Jesus Remembered, pp. 130–131.

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could have been.4 This relational character of the event becomes a subject, for to be a subject means to respond with fidelity to the event that summoned him or her to be who he or she is. I have made this small philosophical digression because it allows me to outline my way of understanding what I mean in regard to devotion  : a practice of fidelity to the event which makes us be who we are.5 To continue with Badiou, the genesis of the subject in fidelity to the event activates ‘processes of truth’.6 These are not just a repetition of the event, whose primary characteristic is not found simply in the fact that it has taken place, but the surprise of its irruptive arrival as an anterior future (once again, messianic time), and become points of support for a circulation of the event which, as an anterior future, can never be univocally determined. Now, it is possible to understand the formation of memory exactly as one of the processes of truth ignited by the event through which one confesses one’s fidelity to it. I believe that in this way it is possible to go a step further in clarifying the link between devotion and memory. Taking up Dunn again, we can say that the memorial process of truth is not the reproduction of the event but consists of the devotion of the subject to it. This allows the process of truth to circulate outside the subjectivity which declares itself faithful to the event that has generated and marked it. In my opinion, this is the backbone structure of the figure that Catholicism calls tradition  : that is, it is fundamentally devotional and memorial, or, to say it in other words, the memorial process is the inexhaustible, always incomplete, process of formation of Catholic memory by virtue of devotion (consisting of individual subjects who are bound together in fidelity to the event that generated them), as one of the possible processes of truth ignited by the anterior future of the event. With this in mind, it is clear that an effective tradition is such only if it is open and cumulative. Open, because such a tradition is only one of the possible memorial processes of truth faithful to the originating event. Cumulative, because such a tradition is at home in the temporal diachrony of the messianic devotion of the subjects generated in fidelity to the event which is not identifiable by virtue of the stasis of an established belonging, but only in the dynamics of a truth process whose end cannot be determined by its event-time because it is ‘messianic’. A trace of such a basic structure of tradition remains in its ecclesiastical setting (although the Church tradition tries to neutralize the indeterminate nature of the messianic opening through the subsequent assignment of a chronology) because it always declares itself to be faithful to the scriptural memory of the Christian event even when it is implemented as a 4 Badiou, Saint Paul. 5 See Hurtado, How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God  ? 6 See Badiou, Saint Paul.

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selective power, which it invokes in name of fidelity to the originating event (here it is not so much a matter of the legitimacy of this ascription of power, but rather the way it justifies itself), tradition never manages to completely exclude what it claims not to be part of itself – that is, the orthodoxy of faith. This is true of the entire ecclesial tradition. Because it is such a prime and normative example of this trait of inclusive exclusion (this struggle within tradition because of a force it cannot control) let us examine briefly how it applies to the so-called Christological Councils. Before arriving at their dogmatic formulation, all the Christological articulations at stake in the Christ event were in fact part of its common and thus diverse memories articulated in changing and different cultural contexts. It is only within these memories that the possibility of incompatibility between the different formulations could arise. Only in relation to these would the ecclesiastical authority feel the duty to give a settling word. But even after such a word has been pronounced, it is not possible to access the proper meaning of what was determined without referring (equally normative) to what (seems) to have been excluded from ecclesial tradition. This effect of return and permanence marks deeply the overall body of Catholic tradition. In a nutshell, the proclaimed orthodoxy is a living memory of a condemned heresy, whose power remains alive, as a necessary element, because of the exclusionary character of orthodoxy. What has been excluded is the spectre that haunts the ecclesiastical determination of the Christ event, upsetting its dream of having put in place a uniform memory. This is the spectre that in the body of tradition acts like a vaccine giving it the strength of an always possible and unexpected reactivation.

Devotion to the Sacred Heart This digression into the broad scope of the way tradition works in the Catholic Church allows us to frame and understand the trajectory of the devotion to the Sacred Heart between the beginning and the end of modernity, the time of its greatest flourishing. We could say, in fact, that the spiritual imaginary surrounding the Sacred Heart was the devotional way in which the Catholic faith defined its relationship to modernity at its beginnings and its end as the historical epoch of the “Europeanisation of the world” and of the invention of the “dualism of powers” (Fr. Prodi). The modern world ceases to be a mere reflection of an immutable cosmic order  ; it becomes something mal­ leable to which humans, with their work and ingenuity, must give form and direction. It is in this atmosphere of ‘enterprise’ that the individual can be born, that is, the becoming of personal singularity which is no longer necessarily predetermined for life

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by his or her cultural environment and birth status. Humans become an ‘enterprise’ to and for themselves, being able to make of themselves something other than what their surrounding environmental conditions seem to permit. Modernity’s world is one that opened up and became a contested space between diverse forces and impulses, thus allowing it to be a fertile field for human freedom and inventiveness. If the world is no longer sacred, but a profane space for human work, if the world belongs to the human hand and mind, then the world is no longer subject to a power that must necessarily be religious to govern it properly. For such a world there arises the claim of a power other than the sacred, a power that is deliberately political in the modern sense. This dualism of power, sacred and political, whose forces operate in the same world inhabited by men and women, will become the basic institutional dynamic around which European modernity and its slow constitutional process will take shape. It is in the presence of and in response to these profound transformations announced by the first symptoms of modernity that we see a first, unique definition of devotion to the Sacred Heart on the horizon of European culture, and it comes from an illiterate Capuchin friar  : Thomas da Olera.7 In his profound spiritual intelligence, which pivoted on a singular experience of God’s love, based on the theme of the Heart of Jesus, Thomas showed that he was a brilliant interpreter of the transformations that were reshaping the human in his time both at the level of the public forms of coexistence between new social classes, and at the level of the soul where the individual was confronted by the warm balm of the unimaginable excess of mercy that is God. This Capuchin friar revealed to the European spirit the capacity of unprecedented sensitivity of Catholicism for the historical time in which it lived and for the challenges that nascent modernity, together with the Reformation, posed to faith and the Church. Thomas da Olera understood well, guided by the harmony of the devotion to the Heart of Jesus, that in front of the new order of reality and of the world it was no longer possible to successfully repeat the path followed during the long duration of the Middle Ages. Rather, in the new time it was necessary to devise new forms of positioning and implementing the Catholic faith within the social, political and spiritual parameters in a continuous movement and transformation. The Franciscan itinerary, which had relocated Christianity at the crossroads of human movements ignited by the resumption of commerce and communications in the 12th century, thereby making monastic stability somewhat obsolete, found in the spiritual plasticity induced by devotion to the Heart of Jesus as proposed by Thomas da Olera, its worthy modern correspondent. It configured, in fact, the access of faith 7 See Neri, “Il Cuore di Gesù negli scritti di Tommaso da Olera. Una singolare esperienza di agape”.

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to the unimaginable excess that is God revealed in the warm intimacy of His mercy which, in the devotion, became an authentic practice of the human soul. The reference point that articulated the imaginary of this devotion was the memorial narrative of the Christian Scriptures, through which a devout relationship of the believing soul with the mystery of the loving excess of God was attained without any further (institutional) mediation, in a contemporaneity over which no instituted power could take hold and assert sovereignty. Through devotion to the Heart of Jesus Thomas thus found a (Catholic) keystone to give shape to an individual and personal relationship between God and the believing soul. Through devotion to the Heart of Jesus, Thomas therefore found an adequate way to identify a suitable moment and a questioning of nascent modernity, imagining within Catholicism an area in which faith could be practiced also as a warmth of believing affections and not only as an outcome of an institutional dictate. This opened a third possible way between the confessional decomposition with which European Christianity reacted to the socio-political novelty of modernity  : it was neither the pure, vertical immediacy of one’s conscience before God as proposed by the Reformation, nor the institutional totalization of the mediation between God and the individual carried out by the Catholic Church after the Council of Trent. An alternative way which would soon be deactivated through the particular direction given to the devotion to the Sacred Heart in the wake of Margaret Mary Alacoque, becoming ecclesiastical canon. In Paray-le-Monial the nascent devotion suffered a sudden shift that brought it back completely under institutional control of the Church, with a decidedly strong desire to bring also the political power of the King of France to its side. In short, a devotion seeking to bring together the tensional opposition of the dualism of powers was quickly bent to the imaginary of a renewed alliance between throne and altar. From the experience of faith, individual and discovered, pivoted on the scriptural memory of the Christ event (Thomas da Olera), it was transformed to a private vision which had to be subjected to the verification and control of ecclesiastical authority. A vision which, among other things, intimated an official recognition of the Sacred Heart through the institution of an ad hoc liturgical feast, thus sealing the validity of the devotion by desisting from the believing experience which it is able to generate. In a further move, the liturgy of the Church then became the means of politically asserting the Sacred Heart as the banner of Catholicism in the heart of a Europe that had now definitively escaped from ecclesiastical tutelage. This is the form of the devotion to which Fr. Dehon attached himself and in which he began to outline the picture of a spiritual experience which would show to have the quality of a founding charism. Here it is good to remember how Christian memory in its tradition works  : what is discarded remains, precisely, the spectre of the selected and preselected that imposes

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itself. This permanence, within the accumulative form typical of the Catholic tradition, drags with it a reactivating force always on the verge of being triggered. For the devotion to the Sacred Heart this was what happened with Fr. Dehon and his foundation of a religious congregation dedicated to the Sacred Heart. In a complex game of thresholds, between institutional deactivation and charismatic reactivation, with Fr. Dehon the devotion to the Sacred Heart resumed as an affectionate configuration of the believing soul, thus sanctioning the entry into a progressive de-institutionalisation of this devotion and its practices put into practice against a background of strong Eucharistic colours. Certainly Dehon was the typical case of someone having a foot on the threshold, which left him right between the movement of deactivation on the one side and reactivation on the other. Let me give an example to clarify this. On the one hand, he and his congregation still depended on ecclesiastical authority for the possibility of having daily exposition of the Eucharistic sacrament in the chapels of the community. However, on the other hand, he detached himself from this protection by indicating to his community the practice of a frequent visit to the Eucharistic sacrament reposed in the tabernacle. What at first sight would seem to be a simple matter of piety, turns out to be, in the light of what we have just said, a decisive entry into the space of a reactivation of the devotion to the Sacred Heart such as, for a moment, it was made possible at the beginning of modern times. The underlying spiritual harmonies between the faith experience of Fr. Thomas da Olera and the charismatic return of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in Fr. Dehon’s foundation are many – and are what we might call a transit of devotional memory from one end of modernity to the other. But reactivation never consists in a mere repositioning of the power of memory, but rather in its transfiguration to the point of it being unrecognizable. This is the potential of the devotion that Fr. Dehon left in the hands of the congregation he founded. And it is within this context that, in my opinion, the question of the dualism between the spiritual and the social, with which it is still struggling to come to terms, should be placed. In the gap which with Margaret Mary Alacoque was filled by the institutionalization of the devotion to the Sacred Heart, there remained a trace of its connection to the celebration of the Eucharist and the Eucharistic sacrament. When Fr. Dehon charismatically reactivated the devotion, its scope was therefore heightened through the addition of the social dimension of the celebration of the Eucharist, which broadened the affective identification of faith at the dawn of modernity to a community in which individuals recognize themselves as spiritually linked to one another. The excess of mercy (Thomas da Olera), in the charismatic reactivation imbued with the ‘messianic’ that looms over the Eucharistic celebration as its embodiment and disappearance in the practices of daily life, finds its expression in a surplus of

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justice irrespective of any codification of law and political institutionalization that might correspond to it. This is the spiritual key according to which, in my opinion, one should read Fr. Dehon’s incomplete passage to ‘democracy’ which, at a certain point in his life, characterized the social turn of Fr. Dehon’s work. In the horizon of the messianic excess of justice each of these words are important  : passage, democracy, incomplete. The juncture to overcome the dichotomy between the spiritual and the social, to arrive at a more fruitful oppositional tension at the hem of the same cloak, was already outlined in the same trilogy of terms by Fr. Dehon. They push us on the part of the devotion to the Sacred Heart towards taking on the major traits of a political anthropology at the level of the “change of epoch” (Pope Francis) that we are going through, showing that we are able to do justice to the memory that has generated us. Translation John van den Hengel, SCJ References Badiou, Alain. Saint Paul  : The Foundation of Universalism. Stanford  : Stanford University Press, 2003. Derrida, Jacques. Spectres of Marx. The State of the Dept, the Work of Mourning & the New International. New York/London  : Routledge, 1994. Translation of Derrida, Jacques. Spectres de Marx. Paris  : Galilée, 1993. Dunn, James D.G. Jesus Remembered. Grand Rapids  : Eerdmans, 2003. Hurtado, Larry W. How on Earth Did Jesus Become a God  ? Historical Questions about Earliest Devotion to Jesus. Grand Rapids  : Eerdmans, 2005. Neri, Marcello. “Il Cuore di Gesù negli scritti di Tommaso da Olera. Una singolare esperienza di agape.” Tommaso da Olera. Totus ardens. Ed. Rodolfo Santarin. Brescia  : Morcelliana, 2018, pp. 73–115.

Elke Pahud de Mortanges

The Sacred Heart as Memorial Body An Analytic Approach to Its Somatic Presentations and Bodily Appropriations in Devotion and Art The veneration and commemoration of the Sacred Heart was enforced in the 19th century as an instrument of ecclesiastic restauration and papal loyalty.1 The fact that the Sacred Heart was mostly represented as a very concrete piece of flesh in the chest or in the hand of a quite feminine2 Jesus was qualified by enlightened circles of theologians as a trivialization and a “visceral devotion”, as well as tasteless, religious kitsch and a “heaven full of perfume”.3 Even today, this prejudice is widespread and is subliminally applied in scholarly theology. As right as it may be, inasmuch as it highlights the excesses and exaggerations of sentimental decoration, instrumentalization or trivialization, this evaluation obscures at the same time the fact that so-called popular piety’s focus on the somatic and bodily aspect of the Sacred Heart is a rather adequate understanding and expression of the fundamental anatomy of salvation in Christianity. One could even say that, in a way, popular piety as a somatic religiosity has always been aware of this in a quite unconscious-conscious way.

Theoretical Framework  : Body and Embodiment To highlight this, I will apply the category and concept of body and embodiment as a theoretical framework and analytical tool in order to present and to analyse different 1 Norbert Busch, Katholische Frömmigkeit. – The following remarks reflect the presentation the author gave at the Sacred-Heart Congress in Rome (8 November 2019). They have already been published in Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religion und Kulturgeschichte (2019) under the title “The Sacred Heart as Body and Embodiment. Contribution to a Topography and Cartography of Modes and Motives in the History of its Devotion”. The chapter headings, the image section, the footnotes and the bibliography have been supplemented and extended. The final chapter concerning the adaptations in modern art and music is new. 2 von Olenhusen, “Feminisierung”, pp. 37–49. 3 Schlager, Kult und Krieg. Schlager gives a wide overview of the criticism and reservations expressed by the enlightened theological circles of the 19th century  : “Geschmacklosigkeit” (123), “Gift religiöser Sentimentalität” (123), “ein ganzer Himmel voll Parfümerie” (127), “Eingeweideandacht” (98).

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modes and motives of embodiment and disembodiment of the Sacred Heart in the history of its devotion. The category of embodiment originally came up in the 1990s in cognitive theory, a philosophical and psychological approach. One could summarize the insights of cognitive theory in the following way  : our mind would not be able to work and to “think” outside of our body  ; our mind exists and works only as an “embodied mind”4. This insight makes the old contrast between mind and matter obsolete. As for the category of embodiment, it is an analytical tool in sociology and in the cultural sciences5, and is especially valued in the field of gender studies, where its emergence, with the 1993 publication of Judith Butler’s iconic book Bodies That Matter, represented a turning point6. By applying the category of embodiment, I would like to situate my own approach in the broader perspective of questioning and determining the relationship between memory and religion. As an analytic, hermeneutic and heuristic instrument, the category embodiment helps us trace and understand the process of memory construction in the history of Christianity in particular.7

Body and Memory in Christianity One usually speaks of Judaism, Christianity and Islam as ‘book religions’. This notion suggests that the Holy Scriptures, words and texts play a prominent role in the memory and the memory culture of these three religions. As true as this statement is, it conceals the fact that in Christianity the body has a special function. The body in Christianity is not a secondary field of symbolization or a storage medium, as paper, writing, word and texts are. Words, texts, and books already reflect, translate, represent and transform the primarily occurring revelation and salvation.8 The primarily occurring revelation and salvation in Christianity is a body, and as such it has an anatomy. The Word, in John 1  : 1, has not become a book, but flesh. Therefore, one may say that the central data of revelation and salvation of Christianity are body events and modes of embodiment. I only mention here the central Christo4 Rosch, Thompson and Varela, The Embodied Mind. 5 Öhlschläger, “Körper”  ; Beise, “‘Körpergedächtnis’ als kulturwissenschaftliche Kategorie”, pp.  9–25 (Lit.). 6 Öhlschläger, “Gender/Körper, Gedächtnis und Literatur”. 7 Metzger, “Memory of the Sacred Heart”  ; Assmann, Erinnerungsräume  ; id., Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis. See also Morgan, “Religion and Embodiment”. 8 See Pahud de Mortanges, “Body@Performance”  ; Gudehus, Eichenberg and Welzer (eds.), Gedächtnis und Erinnerung, p. 242.

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logical data incarnation, passion and bodily resurrection. We could call these body events the memory-internal structure or architecture of Christianity. The memory-internal structure of Christianity is primarily somatic, but so is also the memorial community that emerges and constitutes itself by remembering these basic data.9 This memorial community forms, in its self-description, a new10 supra-individual, social body and social interactive space called Church. In the Eucharistic celebration, this community makes present the (missing anatomic) body of Christ, who over and over again is embodied in the Eucharistic bread and wine as well as in the faithful when they eat this Eucharistic bread and drink the Eucharistic wine, closing the great gap between absence and presence, past and present, divine and human.11 In what follows, I try to design a basic topography and cartography of the different motives and modes of embodiment in ecclesiastical and popular veneration and commemoration of the Sacred Heart. By doing this, I take a traditional analytic perspective that is oriented towards motives and not chronology. This also means that I do not take a normative approach  : I do not ask what is the only correct form of embodiment. Rather, I want to uncover the diversity of the references of the individual motives and modes of adaptations, representations and transcriptions.12

The Sacred Heart Body as Memorial Body The aim of this section is to shed some light on that particular part of the body of the Word that became flesh, and which is named the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In the history of Christianity, a few individual parts of the body of Christ have been venerated as relics. However, the Heart of Jesus and its veneration have to be distinguished from the so-called bodily relics associated with Jesus. Only those parts of his body that he did not take with him when he was corporally assumed into heaven can be consid  9 See Campe, “Körper”, pp. 320–322. He distinguishes between “memoriale Körper” and “monumentale Körper”. Pahud de Mortanges, “Body@Performance”. 10 A misunderstanding has to be avoided. When I speak of “new”, I do not want to make a theological statement or even deny the roots of the Church in the Old Testament’s “qahal Yahwe”. Here, I only assume the speech of the Church Fathers, according to whom the church was born out of the side wound of Jesus. Tromp, “De Navitate Ecclesiae ex Corde Jesu in Cruce”  ; Rahner, “Flumina de ventre Christi”  ; Stierli (ed.), Cor salvatoris  ; Menard, “L’interpretation patristique de Jean 7,38”. 11 It was Michel Certeau who pointed out the disappearance of the body of Christ and spoke about the “corps manquant” which first of all generates the possibility of faith. See Füssel, “Tote Orte und gelebte Räume”  ; Füssel, Zur Aktualität von Michel de Certeau. 12 I would like to draw your attention to the basic works of David Morgan, which offer important insights  : The Sacred Heart of Jesus  ; “The Visual Piety of the Sacred Heart”.

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Cross with Jesus’ body piercing his SIDE with a lance

CROSS Jesus on the cross with lance (SIDE)

BODY Jesus as a figure pointing at his HEART in his chest

Cross with the five wounds symbols (HEART)

Jesus holding his HEART extracorporally

HEART Decorated with symbols of the suffering Crown of thorns, cross, flames, piercing of the lance, with lance only Fig. 1  : Two motive-lines of the Sacred Heart Body as Embodiment of Jesus’ Passion, © Elke Pahud de

Fig. 1: Two motive-lines of the Sacred Heart Body as Embodiment of Jesus’ Passion Mortanges. (© Elke Pahud de Mortanges) [halbseitig]

ered as bodily relics in a strict sense  : a section of the holy umbilical cord, the holy prepuce (Jesus’ foreskin), his baby teeth, some of his hair, some of his blood mixed with soil. Since the resurrection is considered as bodily resurrection and perfection, no essential human part of his body could remain on earth.13 This first mode of embodiment of the Sacred Heart (fig. 1) is related to a remarkable shift and transcription concerning the very beginning of Christianity in the hour of Christ’s suffering, the last hour of the passion. Jesus’ side is pierced by a spear thrust by a Roman soldier when he is already fixed on the cross. The wound caused by the spear is the fifth and final wound of the suffering which is inflicted to him, the first four wounds being those on his hands and feet. According to John 19  :34, blood and water flowed from his side when it was pierced. In ecclesiastical imagery and iconography, Jesus’ side wound has a vulva-like appearance.14 Through further developments, this side wound was replaced by or equated to the Heart of Jesus. It is now the Sacred Heart itself which shows exactly this vulva-shaped wound, from and through which, according to the Fathers of the 13 Pahud de Mortanges, “Body@Performance”  ; Müller, Die hochheilige Vorhaut Christi. 14 See Bynum Walker, Fragmentierung und Erlösung, pp. 61–108 (“Der Leib Christi im Spätmittelalter – eine Erwiderung auf Leo Steinberg”)  ; Wendel and Nutt (eds.), Reading the Body of Christ (see Introduction).

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Fig. 2  : Five-Wound-Cross, Freiburg/Germany, 19th century, public domain. Fig. 3  : Spear-pierced Heart of Jesus, 19th century, public domain.

Church, the memorial social body named Church and the sacraments (as practices of remembrance) were born.15 Unfortunately, I cannot pursue this aspect any further at this point, but it will be the subject of the publication in preparation under the title Gender Ambiguities. The fe@male Body of the Sacred Heart. In the iconography, one can distinguish two main lines of motive which document how this wounded heart body became a pars, which embodies (as a pars pro toto) the whole narrative of what Jesus means to mankind. In the first motive, the process of abstraction is as follows  : at the very beginning, there is a global iconographic representation of Jesus on the cross, whose side is pierced by the spear. After abstraction, the cross is exclusively decorated with the symbols of the five wounds of Jesus. The fifth wound is represented as a pierced heart (fig. 2). Further levels of abstraction can be observed in representations which show only and exclusively the pierced heart (fig. 3). In the second motive, the process of abstraction is as follows  : the global iconographic representation is replaced by the entire figure of Jesus (without the cross), pointing to the heart in his chest, or holding his heart in his hand and offering it to the observer (fig. 4 and 5). 15 See Footnote 31. This opinion is held by the Church Fathers from Asia Minor like Justinos, Apollinaris, Tertullian and Cyprian. There is another interpretation, presented by the Church Fathers of Alexandria, who replaced the motives of birth of the church and sacraments by the motive of birth of knowledge (Gnosis). See Stierli and van Rijen, “Art. Herz Jesu A”, p. 290  ; Stierli (ed.), Cor salvatoris.

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Fig. 4  : Jesus points to the heart in his chest, probably 19th century, public domain. Fig. 5  : Pompeo Batoni, Sacred Heart, 1767, Jesus offers his heart to the observer, public domain. Fig. 6  : The detached heart is venerated by men and angels, 17th century, public domain.

Both lines of motives are included in the representation of a detached heart that is decorated with various symbols of the suffering of Christ  : the crown of thorns, the piercing, the cross. With this decoration, the heart body embodies and represents the whole passion (fig. 6). The Sacred Heart Body becomes a real and concrete condensation of it  ; it becomes an icon and functions as the iconographic shortcut par excellence.

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There also exists  – and this could be called a third motive or form  – a pictorial presentation of the Sacred Heart without any reference to the passion and the five wounds of Jesus. In this variation, the heart is not a pierced piece of flesh, but a glowing and inflamed heart shining like a diamond. This iconographic presentation alludes to the vision of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque.16 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the official Roman Church did not permit the use of the detached, decorated icon in her official cult. Nor did she want to receive indulgence by representing the Sacred Heart without the whole figure of Jesus. In other words, the Roman Catholic Church established in the 19th century a normative code regarding the iconography of the Sacred Heart.17 This might be seen as a rejection of a sensualistic popular piety which could be qualified – theologically speaking – as an expression of the sensus fidelium of the faithful.18

Modes and Motives of Embodiment of the Sacred Heart Body in Different Bodies Mode 1  : The Sacred Heart Body embodied in the heart and on the skin of the faithful (individual bodies)

Popular piety and private devotion developed an intense bodily and somatic religiosity with regard to the Sacred Heart. This somatic religiosity affects and deals with all human senses  : seeing, hearing, feeling, tasting, touching. The mode of embodiment of the Sacred Heart Body in the heart of the faithful is part of a private and deeply intimate piety and devotion. In the case of the German Cistercian nun and mystic Gertrude of Helfta (1256–1301/02), it is linked to and embedded in a vision she had the day of the Feast of Saint John the Evangelist (fig. 8 and 9).19 Gertrude of Helfta, who is represented in a window of the basilica Sacré-Cœur in Paris, was made “apostle” of the Sacred Heart in the 19th century. In her book Legatus divinae pietatis, she reports a vision she had the day of the Feast of Saint John the Evangelist. In her vision, she was resting with Saint John on the breast of Jesus  : she was on the right, the wounded side, while he was on the left side. Gertrude reported

16 17 18 19

See “Herz Jesu”, Erdteilallegorien  ; and Romberg, Die Welt im Dienst der Konfessionen, pp. 418–427. See Schlager, Kult und Krieg, pp. 117–121. Pahud de Mortanges, “‘Eigener Sinn’ oder ‘Eigensinn’  ?”. Helfta, Gesandter der göttlichen Liebe, pp. 263–265. In reference to the motive of John resting on Jesus’ breast, see Rahner, “De dominici pectoris fonte potavit”, pp. 103–108.

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Elke Pahud de Mortanges Fig. 7  : Modes and motives of embodiment of the Sacred Heart Body, © Elke Pahud de Mortanges.

supra‐ individual  geographic‐ political bodies

individual  bodies

supra‐individual social‐ecclesiastical  bodies

feeling unspeakably delighted to hear and feel the heartbeat of Jesus. In the vision, she looked at John and asked him if he had also felt this delight the day of the Last Supper, which John confirmed. Listening to the heartbeat of Jesus was not only a delight for Fig. 7: Three motives more of embodiment of the Sacred Heart. Gertrude, it also made heart beat in same rhythm of love.20 Modes and motives of but embodiment (©her Elke Pahud dethe Mortanges)/ halbseitig In her vision, Gertrude entered in a quite intimate and bodily communication with the heart body and the heartbeat of Jesus. This could be called a communicatio cordis, which also finds iconographic expression in the pictorial ecclesiastic tradition, where her heart in her chest is marked21 by Jesus’ heart. Baby Jesus sometimes even occupies her own heart, which in some pictures is also shaped as an open vulva. In the 18th century, this intimacy with which devotees practice their personal devotion of the Sacred Heart was iconographically expressed in “the most important and enduring portrayal of the Sacred Heart”, painted by the Italian artist Pompeo Batoni in 1767.22

20 See Spitzlei, Erfahrungsraum Herz, pp. 81–179. 21 Unfortunately, I cannot give here an overview of the widespread connotation of body marks in religions in general. See Benthien, Haut. See also the exhibition Jüdisches Museum Berlin, Haut/ab  ! Haltungen/zur/rituellen/Beschn/eidung  ; Gabbe, “Unter die Haut”. 22 Morgan, The Sacred Heart, p. 16.

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Fig. 8  : Saint John the Evangelist on the breast of Jesus, 19th century.

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Fig. 9  : Holy Gertrud of Helfta (1256–1301/02), probably 18th century.

In this portrayal, Jesus “seeks out the viewer’s eye for an intimate connection, as if the image pleads for a personal and thoroughgoing response from those who look at it”.23 Another mode of embodiment of the Sacred Heart through marks on the faithful’s body or skin in the sense of a physical inscription can be observed in the stigmata of Saint Francis of Assisi (1181–1226).24 For the first time in the history of Christianity, a man received the body marks of the five wounds of Jesus on his skin in 1224 while praying on the mountain of La Verna. His stigmatization was read by Bonaventura as a union of love between Christ and Francis, as their being equalized in the passion, as attracting Jesus’ passion on his own skin (fig. 10).25 Francis as a stigmatized man is transformed into a body of memory, a human bodily icon of passion and love.26 In the case of Saint Gertrude and of Saint Francis, the mode of embodiment of the Sacred Heart is framed by a mystical and spiritual discourse of love which has a 23 24 25 26

Ibid., p. 16. Schmidt-Hannisa, “Eingefleischte Passion”  ; Overbeck and Niemann, Stigmata. See Teuber, “‘Sichtbare Wundmale’ und unsichtbare Durchbohrung”, especially pp. 164–172. In the 19th century, a great number of women were marked with stigmata. For this reason, it is named the Golden Age not only of Apparitions of St. Mary but also of stigmatization. See Pahud de Mortanges, “Irre – Gauklerin – Heilige  ?”.

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Fig. 10  : Stigmatization of Francis of Assisi, 13th century, public domain.

Fig. 11  : Heart of Jesus Tattoo.

clear hetero and homoerotic dimension. This erotic dimension of the Sacred Heart devotion is an anthropological pattern which makes it easily readable and usable in other, non-religious contexts. Nowadays, writing on the human skin is quite common in Western Europe, as seen in the widely spread trend of tattooing. A particularly popular motive is the Sacred Heart, which is physically present on the chest, the arm or the back of a person (fig. 11). Despite this analogy between stigmatization and Sacred Heart tattoos, one should however be aware that Sacred Heart tattoos by no means necessarily constitute a religious statement as is however the case in stigmatization. On the contrary, new contexts and iconographic narratives of memory are created in embedding the Sacred Heart’s body into a larger setting.27 By this process, it is transferred to another mode and type of space, where different cultural codes are (re)produced, (re)written and (re)composed. 27 See the group-exhibition with the collaboration of Hamacher and Pahud de Mortanges, Aus der Tiefe rufe ich zu Dir. Gotteserfahrung und Teufelsküche, at the Haus für Kunst, Uri, Switzerland, 13 September–­ 23 November 2014, www.hausfuerkunsturi.ch/allgemeines/aus-der-tiefe-rufe-ich-zu-dir-d1.

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Fig. 12  : Heart of Jesus Scapular (linen). Apostolado de la Oración. Pio IX de julio 1877.

Mode 2  : The Sacred Heart Body embodied in ecclesiastical communities, religious confraternities and prayer circles (social-ecclesiastical bodies)

Wearing a Sacred Heart tattoo can be very private or very public, depending on where it is placed on the body and how it is covered by clothing. Wearing a small scapular – a piece of fabric on which the Sacred Heart is printed, sometimes together with the Heart of Mary – also seems to be very personal, and an expression of the most private piety (fig. 12). As it is put on one’s own heart, it is like a seal, or, formulated in a more modern way, like a badge one wears to make one feel where one belongs to.28 Wearing the scapular must not be something private, though, as it can also be an emblem of the members of Sacred Heart confraternities, who form and belong to supra-individual, social-ecclesiastical bodies dedicated to the devotion of the Sacred Heart Body. Numerous are also the Catholic congregations devoted to the Sacred Heart.29 Contrary to these congregations, the confraternities are ecclesiastical communities of so-called “faithful lay(wo)men” who continue to live in the world, who have families and who practice their private piety in a collective way by embodying and representing their dedication to the Sacred Heart.30 28 The poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, “Das Roseninnere”, expresses this intimate relation between inside and outside, by pointing it out in the form of a question  : “Wo ist zu diesem Innen/ein Außen  ? Auf welches Weh/legt man solches Linnen  ? Welche Himmel spiegeln sich drinnen […].” 29 Among others  : Brothers of the Sacred Heart (1821), Congregatio Missionariorum Filiorum Ss. Cordis Jesu (1867), Congregatio Sacerdotum a sacro Corde Jesu (1878, Dehonianer), Apostole del Sacro Cuore di Gesú, Congrégation du Sacré Cœur, Société des Filles du Sacré Cœur (1872) et al. For a more complete list, see “Liste der katholischen Herz-Jesu-Ordensgemeinschaften und -Kongregationen”, Wikipedia. 30 Pötzl, “Bruderschaften”  ; Scheutz, Lobenwein and Weiss (eds.), Bruderschaften als multifunktionale Dienst­leister  ; Busch, Katholische Frömmigkeit, pp. 266–268.

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Fig. 13  : Procession in Bozen/ Tirol the day of the Sacred Heart Feast, 21st century. Fig. 14  : Tiroler Schützen Fahne, 20th century.

The so-called small Heart-of-Jesus Scapular originated in the visions of the nun Marguerite-Marie Alacoque (1673–1675) and was first adopted in an informal way. Its use did not require a prior blessing by a priest, nor was wearing it necessarily linked to a membership to a scapular confraternity. It was attributed protective and apotropaic functions not only during the plague outbreak in Marseille in 1720, but also during the cholera pandemic of 1860, the German-French war of 1870, and the First World War.31 In 1910, the so-called scapular-medal replaced the wool scapular. From then on it became obligatory to be part of a confraternity to receive indulgence from the Roman Catholic Church.32 Different Sacred Heart confraternities were established in the Baroque era and especially in the 19th century, and spread rapidly around the world.33 The Fraternity of the Heart of Jesus (in France since 1690, in Rome since 1729) counts more than 10’000 branches. The Garde d’Honneur du Sacré Cœur was originally founded 1864 in France by Salesian nuns, then spread rapidly through derivative fraternities in the Netherlands, England, Spain, Canada, Perú, United States and Switzerland. In 1872, even Pope Pius IX became a member of the Garde d’Honneur.34 The confraternities use banners as symbolic representations of their social body, namely a community devoted to the Sacred Heart (fig. 13 and 14). On the day of the Feast of the Sacred Heart, which became a universal feast of the Roman Catholic

31 32 33 34

See “Scapular of the Sacred_Heart”, Wikipedia  ; Schlager, Kult und Krieg, pp. 116–118. See Schlager, Kult und Krieg, 118. See Pötzl, “Bruderschaften”  ; Holzem, “Wissen – Praktiken – Emotionen”. “Garde d’honneur du Sacré-Cœur”, accessed 17 July 2020, www.gardedhonneurdusacrecoeur.org. For more information see the overview in Hoffmann, “Herz Jesu B  : Gemeinschaften”.

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Fig. 15  : Cœur Sacré de Jésus – Espoir et Salut de la France, 19th century, public domain.

Church in 185635, they used to appear in a public space in splendid and solemn processions. Not only these processions, but also the regular reunions and services, were accompanied by religious prayers and songs, expressing their special dedication to the Sacred Heart and fostering their community as a community of memory.36 Mode 3  : The Sacred Heart Body embodied and embedded in various countries and the whole world (geographical and political bodies)

These processions in public spaces were also a way to reclaim the public space for the Sacred Heart. This leads us to the motive of the embodiment of the Sacred Heart in geographical and political bodies. Contrary to the individual, intimate and mystical discourse of love and private communicatio cordis experienced by Saint Gertrude of Helfta and the nun Marguerite-­ Marie Alacoque, the motive of a supra-individual communicatio cordis and embodiment appears in the early 18th century. The Sacred Heart becomes in quite a literal sense not only part of the entire world, but is even placed at its centre. This is because the colonial conquest of the world, which started in the 15th century from Europe, was closely connected to the desire to spread Christianity geographically to the end 35 It was Pope Pius IX – following a demand of the French bishops – who introduced this feast as a worldwide ecclesiastical feast celebrated the week following the Feast of the Holy Sacrament. See  : “HerzJesu-­Verehrung”, Kathpedia  ; Schlager, Kult und Krieg, p. 103. 36 There is a huge diversity and variety  : “Flammengebet” of saint Gertrud, Litany of the Sacred Heart, 9-day-worship to the Sacred Heart, rosary of the Sacred Heart, prayers to the Sacred Heart, Cantique de la Garde d’Honneur et al.

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of the world. Transferred into this global context, the Sacred Heart is loaded with an ecclesiastical, geo-political meaning of expansion and submission.37 In the so-called Baroque Continent allegories38, the Sacred Heart Body is embedded and incorporated in an allegorical presentation of the world. This presentation, which is very prominent in the ecclesiastical iconography of the principality of Augsburg, is based on the book by Anton Ginther, Speculum amoris et doloris in sacratissimo ac divinissimo cor de Jesu, which was first printed in 1706. The world is symbolized by the four continents known at that time  : Europe, Africa, Asia and America. In the 18th century, they were commonly, and not only in a religious context, represented by female and/or male bodies/personifications. These personifications of the continents bow their knees and backs in veneration of the Sacred Heart Body of Jesus. In the parish church of Bad Hindelang39, a painting portrays a female Europe vicariously offering Jesus a bowl full of burning and enflamed hearts, and this type of depiction is not an isolated case40. In the parish church of Hofen, for instance, the artist Johann Nepomuk Nieberlein has placed the Heart of Jesus in the central nave fresco  ; here too, the four continents bow before it. The centrally placed Sacred Heart in this fresco is embedded in the context of the four other wounds of the Passion.41 The motive of embodiment taking up geographic space, of expansion and submission of the world to the Sacred Heart is taken up, altered and adapted in the 19th century by popes and bishops, who first consecrated individual countries to the Sacred Heart, and then, with Pope Leo XIII, the whole world was consecrated to the Sacred Heart in 1899. This consecration as a ritual act of memory linking present to past and future veneration of the Sacred Heart was renewed various times (1964, 1982, 1984), most recently by Pope Francis in 2013.42

37 See Post, Küster and Sorgenfrey (eds.), Christliche Heilsbotschaft und weltliche Macht  ; Wendt, Vom Kolonialismus zur Globalisierung. 38 The following insights are due to apl. Prof. Dr. Alexander Leichtle (Bern), who put me on the trail of baroque Continental allegories in connection with the worship of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. His manifold literary references directed me to a research project at the University of Vienna (https://erd teilallegorien.univie.ac.at). I would like to take this opportunity to thank him deeply for his advice. 39 See “Hindelang (Oberallgäu), St. Johannes Baptist”, Erdteilallegorien. 40 In southern Germany, the motive of the allegorical Europe presenting a bowl of inflamed hearts was quite common in the 18th century  ; see Romberg, Die Welt im Dienst des Glaubens, pp. 418–427. 41 See “Hofen (Ostalbkreis), SS. Georg und Laurentius”, Erdteilallegorien. 42 1896 Vorarlberg, 1899 the whole World, 1900 Columbia, 1915 Germany, France and Austria-Hungary, 1919 Belgium  ; see Schlager, Kult und Krieg, pp.  139–177  : “Nationale Herz-Jesu-Weihen”. It is quite remarkable that the number of dioceses consecrated to the Immaculate Heart of Mary surpasses by far the number of countries consecrated to the Heart of Jesus.

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Adaptations, Transcriptions and Re-coding in Visual Art and Music There is a broad reception and a huge variety of adaptations, transcriptions and re-coding as transformations of memory of these modes and motives of the Sacred Heart in visual art and, nowadays, in fashion. Only a few of these transformations and transcriptions shall be presented here. Unfortunately, the connection of the Sacred Heart with contemporary fashion campaigns must be ignored and left aside.43 Joseph Beuys (1921–1986)

The motive of the Heart of Jesus is present in the work of the German artist and painter Joseph Beuys in different ways. Friedhelm Mennekes, priest and art connoisseur, mentions over thirty different portrayals.44 Particularly noteworthy for this discussion are the five Sacred Heart devotional pictures that Joseph Beuys acquired one evening in 1971 in a restaurant in Naples, Italy. Beuys was having dinner there with the Italian art dealer and gallery owner Lucio Amelio when an old lady came in with a bundle of holy pictures depicting Jesus and offered them for sale. While still at the table in the restaurant, Joseph Beuys inscribed them with what appear to be, at first sight, enigmatic phrases  : “The inventor of the gravitational constant”, “The inventor of electricity”, “The inventor of nitrogen synthesis”, “The inventor of the steam engine”, “The inventor of the 3rd thermodynamic law” (fig. 16).45 As mentioned at the very beginning of this article, within the Catholic Church these images of devotion were primarily considered kitsch in the 19th century, while in the 20th century they were seen as echoes of a piety from distant times. However, Beuys was obviously able to gain something from them that  – according to Mennekes – had the potential to become a heterotopia even within the Christian tradition.46

43 See for example the Exhibition at the MOMA in New York titled Heavenly Bodies. Fashion and the Catholic Imagination, by Andrew Bolton, Metropolitian Museum of Art, 10 May–8 October 2018. Images by Katerina Jebb. See also the fashion campaign by Dolce & Gabbana Autumn/Winter 2018–19  : Marchetti, “Dolce & Gabbana  : la moda è la nostra religione”. 44 Mennekes, “Das Herz Jesu”, p. 193. See also Mennekes, “Im Gespräch mit Beuys”  ; Mennekes, Franz Joseph van der Grinten zu Joseph Beuys  ; Adriani, Konnertz and Thomas, Joseph Beuys  ; Van der Grinten and Mennekes, MenschenbildChristusbild. 45 Mennekes, “Das Herz Jesu”, p. 183 (translation by the author)  ; see also Pahud de Mortanges, “‘Be a somebody with a body’”, pp. 233–239, esp. p. 237. 46 Mennekes, “Das Herz Jesu”, p. 191.

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Elke Pahud de Mortanges Fig. 16  : Joseph Beuys, Christ the inventor of the steam engine, 1971, © 2020, Prolitteris, Zürich.

But what does the Beuysian appropriation and transformation of the Sacred Heart images mean  ? For Beuys, the risen Christ is “the spiritual substance, the sacrament, the concrete that changes the whole world, down to matter”.47 He is the anthropological point of reference par excellence, inasmuch as man cannot think without Christ. “There is”, Beuys said in an interview in 1984, “no other possibility for man than to place himself in the role of Christ”. For “the mystery of the appearance of a higher human being” has “really taken place […] in such a way that from now on this Christ exists in every human being. Whether I want this or not  : the essence of the Christ lives in me as in every other human being. So one can also say  : every human activity is accompanied by this higher self living in man, in which the Christ lives. Quite simply.”48 According to Beuys, Christ, his pierced heart, and the sacraments of the Church stand at the very beginning of Christianity. In the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, visible bread and wine are transformed into Christ’s invisible body and blood. In the language of the Church, this transformation of energy is called transubstantiation. 47 Van der Grinten and Mennekes, MenschenbildChristusbild, p. 109 (translation by the author). 48 Mennekes (ed.), Beuys zu Christus, p. 125 (translation by the author).

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When man took over the world by technical means, energy conversion became the task of machines like the steam engine, which produces invisible steam from visible water, and thus creates effective energy. In other words, technical rationality actually transformed the Christian model of energy conversion, which is why it makes sense for Joseph Beuys to call Christ the inventor of the steam engine. However, it is only through the artistic act, in this instance Beuys’s writings on the Sacred Heart images, that this connection becomes visible on the one hand, but on the other hand is productively inherited and made present. Transubstantiation and energy conversion of matter into the substance of Christ no longer take place during the sacraments, nor through the technical production of steam by means of machines, but in and through art. The central elements of Joseph Beuys’ performance art (Aktionskunst) which represent this energy transformation and substance transformation are organic substances such as honey, fat, felt, wax, but also inorganic substances such as pumps, light bulbs, batteries, and copper.49 For a further examination of the Beuysian adaptation of the Sacred Heart motive, his work from 1975, which was exhibited in Naples in the Gallery Area 24 (25 December 2007–25 January 2008), is of particular interest. In this work, he took the wellknown, iconic image designed by Pompeo Batoni (shown above in figure 5), pasted it onto a chequered sheet, sealed it and signed it with Joseph Beuys and his trademark hat, transforming a very concrete and well-known instance of Sacred Heart m ­ emory.50 Frida Kahlo (1907–1954)

The oil self-portrait of the Mexican painter Frida Kahlo (1907–1954)51 named Las dos Fridas was created in 1939, when Frida divorced from her husband Diego Rivera (1896–1957), a Mexican artist and painter like Kahlo52. With the background of the worship of the Sacred Heart, the iconographic allusions and appropriations in and of this painting are unmistakeable. Frida Kahlo seems to take up the motive of the intimate communicatio cordis, mentioned above in the discussion around Saint Gertrude 49 Ibid., p. 78. See Pahud de Mortanges, “‘Be a somebody with a body’”. 50 This will be explored further in a book project on Body, Religion and Memory that is currently in progress. 51 As it is not possible to discuss her work in general or in detail here, the following literature is highly recommended  : Anderson, “Remembrance of an Open Wound”  ; Herrera, Frida  ; Herrera, Frida Kahlo. Ein leidenschaftliches Leben  ; Herrera, Frida Kahlo. The Paintings. 52 They got married for the first time in 1929 (until 1939), and for the second time in 1940 (until Frida’s death in 1954). Frida Kahlo’s relationship with her husband Diego Rivera, who was older than her by 20 years, was not easy. See “Frida Kahlo,” Wikipedia.

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Elke Pahud de Mortanges Fig. 17  : Frida Kahlo, Las dos Fridas, 1939. Collection Museo de arte Moderno. INBAL/Secretaría de Cultura, © 2020 Banco de México Diego Rivera & Frida Kahlo Museums Trust. Av.5 de Mayo No.2, col. Centro, alc. Cuauhtémoc, c.p. 06000, ­Mexico City

of Helfta. With her vision, Gertrude entered in a quite intimate love-discourse with the divine heart of Jesus. This dialogue was so intimate that her heartbeat attuned to that of his divine heart. In Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait, this divine-human love-discourse seems to be transformed into a self-communication between the artist’s own two hearts  : her broken European heart and her Mexican heart. As mentioned above, this portrait was painted in only three months in 1939, when the separation and divorce from her husband plunged Frida Kahlo into a deep crisis. Hand in hand, the two Fridas, lifesize, sit next to each other on a green bank. They are connected to each other not only by their hands, as their two hearts are also connected by an undamaged artery. While one Frida is dressed in European-Victorian clothes, the other wears a traditional Mexican Tehuana skirt and a short-sleeved blouse. The first Frida has a torn artery, a torn chest and a wounded heart, although the chest and heart of the other Frida are intact. The European Frida holds a surgical clamp in her right hand which does not seem to stop the blood from the open artery, as it continues to drip on her white dress. Meanwhile, the unharmed, Mexican Frida holds a small portrait of the young

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Diego in her left hand.53 According to some researchers54, the self-portrait reflects the immeasurable pain due to her separation from her husband in 1939, while others point to a much more fundamental conflict in the life of Kahlo, namely that of duality in general. There are several forms of duality, or ambiguity, that can be considered  : the ambiguity of gender, of origin (her father was born in Germany, her mother was Mexican with Spanish roots), of physical integrity, illness and suffering (Kahlo had polio and had suffered an accident when she was a girl).55 Nevertheless, one thing seems to be evident  : past and present, being whole and being hurt and harmed, are fixed in this portrait in the timeless simultaneity of a “now”. Two years earlier, Frida Kahlo had already created a work named Memoria o el corazón56, in which the motif of the wounded heart also plays a central role, and which I suggest should be read as a precursor of Las dos Fridas. An oversized, bulging red heart lies at Frida’s feet. Frida is dressed in white and stands in the centre of the painting, her chest pierced by a very long pole. It is striking that this Frida is wearing a jacket, but no hands emerge from it. On her left, there is a Mexican skirt and a top on a hanger, the same size as the figure of Frida. From this top, a single arm protrudes, hooked through Frida’s jacket sleeve. To her right, there is a quite smaller blue skirt and a white blouse on a hanger. From the white blouse, an arm with a hand reaches for Frida in the middle, but finds no hand. In this painting, the motif of the heart is explicitly linked to the pierced heart of Jesus himself. This thesis will need to be substantiated and explained elsewhere, referencing Kahlo’s Roman-Catholic background and her knowledge of and recourse to the Christian narrative of passion, pain and suffering.57

53 Herrera, Frida Kahlo. Ein leidenschaftliches Leben, pp. 250–251. 54 Kettenmann, Kahlo, pp. 54–55  : “In this picture, she processes the emotions surrounding her separation and marital crisis. The part of her person that was respected and loved by Diego Rivera is the Mexican Frida in the Tehuana dress, while the other Frida wears a rather more European attire. […] The rejected, European part of Frida Kahlo, is in danger of bleeding to death” (translation by the author). 55 See Anderson, “Remembrance of an open wound”, pp. 119–130  ; Herrera, Frida Kahlo. Ein leidenschaftliches Leben, especially pp. 57–66. 56 The context of the production of this painting was the love affair that her husband had started with her younger sister Cristina in 1934, which had greatly distressed Frida Kahlo. Herrera, Frida Kahlo. Ein leidenschaftliches Leben, pp. 152–160. 57 See https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Frida-Kahlo-Memoria-o-el-corazon-1937_fig12_290670614 (12.06.2020). We reserve further explications to our publication in preparation on Religion, Body and Gender mentioned above.

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Johann Sebastian Bach (1685–1750) and Claudia Märzendorfer (*1969)

In music as well as in visual art can one find the motive of the Heart of Jesus and the aspect of an intimate communicatio cordis. Johann Sebastian Bach’s Advent Cantata (BWV 61), composed in 1714, speaks in verse 5 of the dwelling of Jesus in the heart of the believer, as already seen with Saint Getrude of Helfta. Öffne dich, mein ganzes Herze, Jesus kömmt und ziehet ein. Bin ich gleich nur Staub und Erde, Will er mich doch nicht verschmähn Seine Lust an mir zu sehn, Dass ich seine Wohnung werde. O wie selig wird’ ich sein  !58

Johann Sebastian Bach’s cantata poet, Erdmann Neumeister59, used trochaic verse to imitate the beating of the heart and to show how one heart attunes to the rhythm of the other60. This motive of the heartbeat of Jesus and the rhythm of love to which the heart of the faithful attunes can also be observed in the works of the Austrian artist Claudia Märzendorfer (*1969), in the exhibition I love God which took place in 2012 in Graz, Austria (KULTUMgraz 2012). Her art performance Heartbeat on an Ice Record consisted in a record made of ice playing the heartbeat of her friend, the artist Zenita Komad. For the performance, the record was taken out of a freezer once a week and played on the record player for several seconds before the record melted.61 As seen above with Frida Kahlo, where the divine-human dialogue of the hearts was transformed into a human-human self-dialogue of the heart, in Märzendorf ’s performance the heartbeat of another human being becomes audible. This heartbeat, however, is extremely fleeting  : within a few seconds it melts away and dissolves com-

58 Johann Sebastian Bach, Cantata. See Brigitta Aicher, “Nun komm, der Heiland Heiden (Adventus Christi) für 3 Solostimmen, Chor und Kammerorchester BWV 61. Hg. Von Hans Grischkat. Mainz  : 1956.” I want to thank Brigitte Aicher for making her unprinted master’s thesis available. I owe her these insights and references to Johann Sebastian Bach and Erdmann Neumeister. 59 Axmacher, “Erdmann Neumeister”, pp. 294–302. 60 Aicher, “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland”, p. 47. 61 Rauchenberger, “Herzklopfen”  : “Die Platte wurde einmal pro Woche aus dem Gefrierschrank geholt und auf dem Plattenspieler aufgelegt  : Etwa sieben bis zehn Sekunden war der dumpfe Herzschlag zu hören. Dann spätestens waren die gepressten Rillen zerschmolzen. Der erzeugte Ton verfloss.”

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pletely. It remains in the memory, but there is no physical memorial body (record) left which embodies the memory of the beating heart of her friend. La Bohème (2018/19), Konzert Theater Bern

To conclude my remarks, I would like to take a look at the 2018/2019 production of Giacomo Puccini’s opera La Bohème at the Konzert Theater in Bern, Switzerland.62 What is special about this production and adaptation of the original story  ? The director Matthew Wild and the stage designer Kathrin Frosch have convincingly transposed the plot of the play from the Parisian art scene of the 1830s into the 1960s. Instead of a Parisian attic, the play takes place in the so-called silver room and in the living spaces of the pop art artist Andy Warhol (1928–1987).63 Moreover, a second narrative level is introduced  : the staging switches from the narrated time – the young artist Marcello with his friends and his beloved Mimi, who is dying of tuberculosis – to the present time. In the present, the aged Marcello in his wheelchair marvels at his own artwork in a museum on the occasion of a retrospective of his lifework. In this retrospective, a heart is located in a transparent glass cube (fig. 18). It is an immense, artificial but realistic heart, once designed by the young Marcello. This heart captivates by its physicality, its flesh-like texture, and its bodily presence. It is pure muscle, and it embodies vitality and life. It is no surprise that the old Marcello will not survive this confrontation with the embodiment and bodily icon of his artistic power and masculine youth. The way in which the stage designer Kathrin Frosch designed this artificial heart is strongly reminiscent of Christian iconography, and of the splitting and transformation of the Heart of Jesus into a bodily icon and memorial body (pars pro toto) that has been discussed above. But it must of course be emphasized that this narrative connection was not necessarily or even not at all intended by Frosch herself. Nevertheless, her work strongly suggests this association in the light of the previous discussion on the representations of the Sacred Heart in the history of its devotion. This short florilegium of quite different adaptations of the Sacred Heart motif in the œuvre of different artists and in different arts could be expanded further. As different as the origins, biographies, and life-historical experiences and reflections behind them may be, they all have one thing in common  : they all represent, in their own way, a transformation and re-coding of the iconic memorial body of the Sacred Heart. At the same time, these artistic adaptations in turn shed a new light on the 62 Böni, “Materialmappe – La Bohème – Konzert Theater Bern 2018”. 63 Künzli, “Eintauchen in die Vergangenheit”, p. 27.

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Elke Pahud de Mortanges Fig. 18  : La Bohème, Konzert Theater Bern, production 2018/2019, programme, © Anette Boutellier.

chronologically preceding inner-Christian production of memory. They invite us to see and read these inner-Christian modes and motifs of embodiment of the Sacred Heart in a new manner, and thus they contribute unintentionally – or without self-understanding – to the inconclusive hermeneutic process of memory production in the ongoing history of the devotion of the Sacred Heart. References Adriani, Götz, Winfried Konnertz and Karin Thomas. Joseph Beuys. Leben und Werk. Köln  : DuMont, 1981. Aicher, Brigitta. “Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland. Eine theologische und musikanalytische Untersuchung zur Adventskantate BWV 61.” Master’s thesis, Solothurn, 2015 (Manuscript). Anderson, Corinne. “Remembrance of an Open Wound  : Frida Kahlo and Post-revolutionary Mexican Identity.” South Atlantic Review 74 (2009)  : pp. 119–130. Assmann, Aleida. Erinnerungsräume. Formen und Wandlungen des kulturellen Gedächtnisses. München  : C.H. Beck, 2015. Assmann, Jan. Religion und kulturelles Gedächtnis. Zehn Studien. München  : C.H. Beck, 2007. Axmacher, Elke. “Erdmann Neumeister – ein Kantatendichter J. S. Bachs.” Musik und Kirche 60 (1990)  : pp. 294–320. Beise, Arnd. “‘Körpergedächtnis’ als kulturwissenschaftliche Kategorie.” Übung und Affekt  : Formen des Körpergedächtnisses. Ed. Bettina Bannasch and Günter Butzer. Berlin  : De Gruyter, 2007, pp. 9–25. Benthien, Claudia. Haut. Literaturgeschichte, Körperbilder, Grenzdiskurse. Reinbek bei Hamburg  : Rowohlt Verlag, 2001. Busch, Norbert. Katholische Frömmigkeit und Moderne. Die Sozial- und Mentalitätsgeschichte des Herz-Jesu-Kultes in Deutschland zwischen Kulturkampf und Erstem Weltkrieg. Güters­ loh  : Gütersloher Verlagshaus,1997.

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Bynum Walker, Caroline. Fragmentierung und Erlösung. Geschlecht und Körper im Glauben des Mittelalters. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1996. Campe, Rüdiger. “Körper.” Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Lexikon. Ed. Nicolas Pethes and Jens Ruchatz. Reinbek  : J.B. Metzler, 2001, pp. 320–322. Füssel, Marian. “Tote Orte und gelebte Räume  : zur Raumtheorie von Michel de Certeau S. J.” Historical Social Research 38/3 (2013), pp. 22–39. Füssel, Marian. Zur Aktualität von Michel de Certeau. Einführung in sein Werk. Wiesbaden  : Springer Verlag, 2018. Gabbe, Bettina. “Unter die Haut. Eine Konferenz auf der Spur religiöser Tätowierungen.” www.juedische-allgemeine.de/kultur/unter-die-haut, 20 December 2011. Gertrude of Helfta. Gesandter der göttlichen Liebe. Translated by Johannes Weissbrodt. Freiburg i.Br.   : Herder Verlag, 2001. Gudehus, Christina, Ariane Eichenberg and Harald Welzer (eds.). Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ein interdisziplinäres Handbuch. Stuttgart  : Springer Verlag 2010. Herrera, Hayden. Frida. A Biography of Frida Kahlo. New York  : Harper & Row, 1983. Herrera, Hayden. Frida Kahlo. Ein leidenschaftliches Leben. Translated by Dieter Mulch. Frankfurt a. M.: Fischer Verlag, 2008. Herrera, Hayden. Frida Kahlo. The Paintings. New York  : Harper Perennial, 1991. Hoffmann, K. “Art. Herz Jesu B  : Gemeinschaften.” Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche 5 (1960)  : pp. 294–299. Holzem, Andreas. “Wissen – Praktiken – Emotionen. Nachdenken über eine kulturgeschichtliche Weiterführung der Bruderschaftsforschung.” Bruderschaften als multifunktionale Dienst­leister der Frühen Neuzeit in Zentraleuropa. Ed. Martin Scheutz, Elisabeth Lobenwein, and Alfred Stefan Weiss. Wien  : Böhlau Verlag, 2018, pp. 529–546. Kettenmann, Andrea. Kahlo. Slovakia  : Taschen 1992. Künzli, Maria. “Eintauchen in die Vergangenheit.” Berner Zeitung, 26 November 2019. https:// www.bernerzeitung.ch/kultur/klassik/eintauchen-in-die-vergangenheit/story/22577064. Menard, J. E. “L’interpretation patristique de Jean 7,38.” Revue de l’Université d’Ottawa 25 (1955)  : pp. 5–25. Mennekes, Friedhelm (ed.). Beuys zu Christus. Eine Position im Gespräch. Stuttgart  : Katholi­ sches Bibelwerk, 1989. Mennekes, Friedhelm. Joseph Beuys. MANRESA. Eine Aktion als Geistliche Übung zu Ignatius von Loyola. Frankfurt am Main  : Insel 1992. Mennekes, Friedhelm (ed.). Franz Joseph van der Grinten zu Joseph Beuys. Köln  : Wienand 1993. Mennekes, Friedhelm. “Das Herz Jesu bei Joseph Beuys. Transformationen eines mittelalterlichen Bildthemas.” Stimmen der Zeit 217 (1999)  : pp. 183–194. Mennekes, Friedhelm. “Im Gespräch mit Beuys.” MenschenbildChristusbild. Auseinandersetzung mit einem Thema der Gegenwartskunst. Ed. Franz Joseph van der Grinten and Friedhelm Mennekes. Stuttgart  : Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1984, pp. 118–123. Metzger, Franziska. “Memory of the Sacred Heart – Iconografic and Ritual Variations.” Schwei­ zerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 113 (2019)  : pp. 391–402.

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Moore, John. Herz-Jesu-Verehrung in Deutschland. Religiöse, soziale und politische Aspekte einer Frömmigkeitsform. Petersberg  : Michael Imhof Verlag, 1997. Morgan, David. The Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Visual Evolution of a Devotion. Amsterdam  : University Press, 2008. Morgan, David. “Religion and Embodiment in the Study of Material Culture.” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Religion. Ed. John Corrigan. New York  : Oxford University Press, 2015, http://religion.oxfordre.com/view/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acre fore-9780199340378-e-32. Morgan, David. “The Visual Piety of the Sacred Heart.” Material Religion 13/2 (2017)  : pp. 233–236. Morgan, David. Images at Work. The Material Culture of Enchantment. Oxford  : University Press, 2018. Müller, Alphons Victor. Die “hochheilige Vorhaut Christi” im Kult und in der Theologie der Papstkirche. Berlin  : Schwetschke, 1907. Öhlschläger, Claudia. “Körper.” Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ed. Christian Gudehus, Ariana Eichenberg and Harald Welzer. Stuttgart  : J.B. Metzler, 2010, pp. 241–245. Öhlschläger, Claudia. “Gender/Körper, Gedächtnis und Literatur.” Gedächtniskonzepte der Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Astrid Erll and Ansgar Nünning. Berlin  : De Gruyter, 2005, pp. 227–248. Olenhusen, Irmtraud von. “Feminisierung von Religion und Kirche im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert.” Religion und Geschlechterverhältnis. Ed. Ingrid Lukatis and Regina Sommer. Opladen  : Leske und Budrich, 2000, pp. 37–49. Overbeck, Gerd and Ulrich Niemann. Stigmata. Geschichte und Psychosomatik eines religiösen Phänomens. Darmstadt  : Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2012. Pahud de Mortanges, Elke. “Irre – Gauklerin – Heilige  ? Inszenierung und Instrumentalisierung frommer Frauen im Katholizismus des 19. Jahrhunderts.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 100 (2006)  : pp. 203–225. Pahud de Mortanges, Elke. “‘Eigener Sinn’ oder ‘Eigensinn’  ? Rezeption und Revision der theologischen Schlüsselkategorie sensus fidei seit dem Zweiten Vatikanischen Konzil.” Theo­ logie aus dem Geist des Humanismus. Festschrift für Peter Walter. Ed. Hillary Mooney, Karlheinz Ruhstorfer and Viola Tenge-Wolf. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder Verlag, 2010, pp. 254–271. Pahud de Mortanges, Elke. “‘Be a somebody with a body’. Christus-Heterotopien in Kunst und Kommerz des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts am Beispiel von Andy Warhol, Joseph Beuys und Conchita Wurst.” Orte und Räume des Religiösen 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Elke Pahud de Mortanges. Paderborn  : Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2016, pp. 223–245. Pahud de Mortanges, Elke. “Body@Performance und Gedächtnis. Zur Anatomie des Heils in den Erinnerungskulturen des Christentums.” Zeitschrift für Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 31 (2018)  : pp. 348–362. Post, Franz-Joseph, Thomas Küster and Clemens Sorgenfrey (eds.). Christliche Heilsbotschaft und weltliche Macht. Studien zum Verhältnis von Mission und Kolonialismus. Gesammelte Aufsätze. Münster  : LIT Verlag, 2004. Pötzl, Walter. “Bruderschaften.” Historisches Lexikon Bayerns. www.historisches-lexikon-bay erns.de/Lexikon/Bruderschaften.

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Rahner, Hugo. “De dominici pectoris fonte potavit.” Zeitschrift für Katholische Theologie 55 (1932)  : pp. 103–108. Rahner, Hugo. “Flumina de ventre Christi.” Biblica 22 (1941)  : pp. 269–302, 367–403. Rauchenberger, Johannes. “Herzklopfen.” 5 June 2019. https://www.miteinander.at/herzklop fen/2016/auf-eis-und-ewig. Romberg, Marion. Die Welt im Dienst des Glaubens. Erdteilallegorien in Dorfkirchen auf dem Gebiet des Fürstbistums Augsburg im 18. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart  : Franz Steiner Verlag, 2017. Rosch, Elanor, Evan Thompson and Francisco J. Varela. The Embodied Mind. Cognitive Science and Human Experience. 1991. Rev. ed. Cambridge, MA  : MIT Press, 2016. Scheutz, Martin, Elisabeth Lobenwein and Alfred Stefan Weiss (eds.). Bruderschaften als multifunktionale Dienstleister der Frühen Neuzeit in Zentraleuropa. Wien  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2018. Schlager, Claudia. Kult und Krieg. Herz Jesu – Sacré Cœur – Christus Rex im deutsch-französi­ schen Vergleich 1914–1925. Tübingen  : Tübinger Verein für Volkskunde, 2011. Schmidt-Hannisa, Hans-Walter. “Eingefleischte Passion. Zur Logik der Stigmatisierung.” Schmerz und Erinnerung. Ed. Roland Borgards. München  : Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2005, pp. 69–82. Spitzlei, Sabine B. Erfahrungsraum Herz. Zur Mystik des Zisterzienserinnenklosters Helfta im 13. Jahrhundert. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt  : Frommann-Holzboog Verlag, 1991. Stierli, Josef, ed. Cor salvatoris. Wege zur Herz-Jesu-Verehrung. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder Verlag, 1954. Stierli, Josef and A. van Rijen. “Art. Herz Jesu A.” Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche 5 (1960)  : pp. 289–294. Teuber, Bernhard. “‘Sichtbare Wundmale’ und unsichtbare Durchbohrung. Die leibhafte Nachfolge Christi als Paradigma des anhermeneutischen Schreibens.” Stigmata. Poetiken der Körperinschrift. Ed. Bettine Menke and Barbara Vinken. München  : Wilhelm Finke Verlag, 2004, pp. 155–179. Tromp, Sebastian. “De Navitate Ecclesiae ex Corde Jesu in Cruce.” Gregorianum, 13 (1932)  : pp. 489–527. Van der Grinten, Franz Joseph and Friedhelm Mennekes. MenschenbildChristusbild. Auseinandersetzung mit einem Thema der Gegenwartskunst. Stuttgart  : Katholisches Bibelwerk, 1984. Wendel, Saskia and Aurica Nutt (eds.). Reading the Body of Christ. Eine geschlechtertheologi­ sche Relecture. Paderborn  : Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2016. Wendt, Reinhard. Vom Kolonialismus zur Globalisierung. Europa und die Welt seit 1500. Pa­ der­born  : Ferdinand Schöningh Verlag, 2016.

Art Exhibitions/Fashion Campaigns Aus der Tiefe rufe ich zu Dir. Gotteserfahrung und Teufelsküche. Haus für Kunst, Uri, Switzerland. September 13–November 23, 2014. www.hausfuerkunsturi.ch/allgemeines/aus-dertiefe-rufe-ich-zu-dir-d1.

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Bolton, Andrew and Katerina Jebb. Heavenly Bodies. Fashion and the Catholic Imagination. Metropolitian Museum of Art. 10 May–8 October 2018. Haut/ab  ! Haltungen/zur/rituellen/Beschn/eidung. Jüdisches Museum Berlin. 24 October 2014– 1 March 2015.

Internet Sources “Frida Kahlo.” Wikipedia. Accessed 14 July 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frida_Kahlo. “Herz-Jesu-Verehrung.” Kathpedia. Accessed 18 March 2019. http://www.kathpedia.com/in dex.php/Herz-Jesu-Verehrung#Hochfest_des_Heiligsten_Herzens_Jesu. “Herz Jesu.” Erdteilallegorien. Accessed 13 March 2019. https://erdteilallegorien.univie.ac.at/ schlagwort-glossar/herz-jesu. “Hindelang (Oberallgäu), St. Johannes Baptist.” Erdteilallegorien. Accessed 13 March 2019. https://erdteilallegorien.univie.ac.at/erdteilallegorien/hindelang-oberallgaeu-st-johan nes-baptist. “Hofen (Ostalbkreis), SS. Georg und Laurentius.” Erdteilallegorien. Accessed 13 March 2019. https://erdteilallegorien.univie.ac.at/erdteilallegorien/hofen-ostalbkreis-ss-georg-­undlaurentius. “Liste der katholischen Herz-Jesu-Ordensgemeinschaften und -Kongregationen.” Wikipedia. Accessed 13 March 2019. https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_katholischen_HerzJesu-­Ordensgemeinschaften_und_-Kongregationen. “Scapular of the Sacred Heart.” Wikipedia. Accessed 13 March 2019. https://en.wikipedia.org/ wiki/Scapular_of_the_Sacred_Heart. “The Two Fridas.” Wikipedia. Accessed 12 April 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_ Two_Fridas. Böni, Salome. “Materialmappe – La Bohème – Konzert Theater Bern 2018.” Accessed 16 April 2020. https://www.konzerttheaterbern.ch/site/assets/files/0/26/208/boheme_materialmap pe_2019-02-14.pdf. Marchetti, Simone. “Dolce & Gabbana  : la moda è la nostra religione.” 25 February 2018. https://d.repubblica.it/moda/2018/02/25/news/sfilata_dolce_e_gabbana_colore_droni_ borse_vestiti_scarpe_tendenze_autunno_inverno_2018_2019-3878904/.

Images Batoni, Pompeo. Sacred Heart, 1767, upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/8b/Ba toni_sacred_heart.jpg (fig. 5). Beuys, Joseph. Christ the inventor of the steam engine, 1971, Zürich (fig. 16). Cœur Sacré de Jésus – Espoir et Salut de la France, 19th century, http://nobility.org/wp-content/ uploads/2011/10/Flag.jpg (fig. 15). Five-Wound-Cross, Freiburg/Germany (19th century), commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:F% C3%BCnfwundenkreuz_Freiburg_01.jpg (fig. 2).

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Heart of Jesus Scapular (linen). Apostolado de la Oración. Pio IX de julio 1877, https://cloud 10.todocoleccion.online/antiguedades/tc/2016/05/15/19/56855439.jpg (fig. 12). Heart of Jesus Tattoo, de.tattooimages.biz/image/18921-beautiful-portrait-of-jesus-fore arm-tattoo (fig. 11). Holy Gertrud of Helfta (1256–1301/02), probably 18th century, fsspx.at/de/news-events/ news/16-november-hl-gertrud-von-helfta-33591 (fig. 9). Jesus points to the heart in his chest, probably 19th century, mostsacredheart.com (fig. 4). Kahlo, Frida. Las dos Fridas, 1939 (Oil on canvas), Collection Museo de arte Moderno. INBAL/Secretaría de Cultura (fig. 17). La Bohème, Konzert Theater Bern (2018/19), La Bohème, production 2018/2019, programme (fig. 18). Pahud de Mortanges, Elke. Modes and motives of embodiment of the Sacred Heart (fig. 7). Pahud de Mortanges, Elke. Two motive-lines of the Sacred Heart as Embodiment of Jesus’ Passion (fig. 1). Procession in Bozen/Tirol the day of Sacred Heart Feast, 21th century, https://media.unserti rol24.com/uploads/2015/06/schuetzen_sk_herz.jpg (fig. 13). Saint John the Evangelist on the breast of Jesus, 19th century, https://corazondejesus.es/es piritualidad/simbolos-muestran-los-bienes-la-vida-purgativa-encerrados-sagrado-cora zon-jesusii (fig. 8). Spear-pierced Heart of Jesus, 19th century, sagradocorazndejess_wikimediacommons_050618 (fig. 3). Stigmatization of Francis of Assisi, 13th century, upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ b/b3/Stigmata.jpg (fig. 10). The detached heart is venerated by men and angels, 17th century, arttattler.com/archivelatin america.html, commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8399526 (fig. 6). Tiroler Schützen Fahne, 20th century, https://tiroler-schuetzen.at/uploads/fahne_herz_jesu. jpg (fig. 14).

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2 TRANSFORMATIONS AND TRANS-CULTURAL DIMENSIONS OF SACRED HEART DEVOTION FROM THE MIDDLE AGES TO THE 20TH CENTURY

Pietro Antonio Viola

Restoring the Body to the Heart Iconographical and Theological Developments between the Council of Trent and Paray-le-Monial The most judicious historiography has been investigating the existing relationships between images, the function of memory, and connection with the sacred for a long time.1 During the 16th century, a situation that had first developed in the Middle Ages and in particular around the spread of Franciscan spirituality and other mendicant orders seemed to crystallize in a clear way  : reminding the different historical moments in the life and especially the death of Christ became a typical constant of religious practice in the 15th but especially in the 16th century. Meditation on the figure of Christ and in particular on his bodily aspect regained an unquestionable centrality  : beginning with the stimuli offered by the devotio moderna and with that extraordinary text that undeniably influenced most devotional forms of the time, namely De imitatione Christi, a religiousness based on the need to find instruments capable of materializing and concretizing in living images the theme of one’s own meditation spread throughout Europe. The Franciscans in particular became masters in promoting, through the practices of the confraternities inspired by them and the rituals they conducted themselves, a spirituality destined for a wide public but capable of requiring, first of all, an individual and emotional involvement. This type of meditation required extensive knowledge of the contemporary figurative heritage  : Ottavia Niccoli describes the usual modalities of the practice of faith in the years between the 15th and 16th century with great clarity  : The orante had to imagine concrete places and people of the Passion, with the help of images familiar to him  : the prayer was therefore implanted in a continuous process of interior visualization of the circumstances of the life of Christ and the saints, a process that was made possible precisely by a long familiarity with the images and that, in turn, was kept in mind by the painter who usually did not stray from the stereotypes that he generated.2 1 On some important methodological notes on how to interpret these reports see Toscano, “Storia dell’arte e forme della vita religiosa”. 2 Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore, p. 94 (translation by Sharon Casu).

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Pietro Antonio Viola Fig. 1  : Lorenzo Lotto. Ritratto di fra Gregorio Belo, 1546–1547. Metropolitan Museum, New York, public domain.

Numerous texts on spirituality, among which surely the most famous is Zardin de oration fruttuoso, but also the remarkable pages of diary, letters and reflections of the main Italian mystics3 of the time, confirm this overall picture, supporting the idea that at the centre of the devout practice there was, above all, a continuous reflection around the images of the Passion. One can for instance consider a painting by Lorenzo Lotto, an author not chosen accidentally  : he was representative of what has just been presented above, but he was also the bearer of those new instances that marked the delicate passage between the years immediately preceding the Council of Trent and those following its reception. In his Ritratto di fra Gregorio Belo of 1546–1547 (fig. 1) one can find all the elements this article is dealing with  : the intense relationship between reading, meditation, imaginative capacity, function of memory and relationship with the theme of the Passion of Christ.4 The theme of redemption through the sacrifice of Christ became increasingly suspect precisely during those 3 Among the most important figures of the mysticism of the first half of the century are Stefania Quinzani, Osanna Andreasi, Camilla Battista Varano, Caterina Fieschi, Domenica del Paradiso, Battistina Vernazza. For some information on the lives of these women and above all for a rich overview of the main texts that can be traced back to them, see Pozzi and Leonardi (eds.), Scrittrici mistiche italiane, pp. 287–381. It is worth mentioning here how the spiritual and mystical experience of these women often has its roots in the practice of figurative prayer, starting from an in-depth meditation on the mysteries of the Passion of Christ. 4 For the interpretation of this painting and some works of Lotto see Niccoli, Vedere con gli occhi del cuore, pp. 90–96.

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years, in the context of the response of the Church of Rome to the movements of the Reformation and to those movements which were explicitly heretical. The relationship between seeing and meditation could therefore also be indirect, prompted by memory or a written text, thus fostering the development of an interior vision even more alive and effective than the presence of some image or simulacrum. This observation is certainly true for those who had made the experience of prayer their habitual condition of life, particularly in the form of meditation, as is shown by the effects that this context had on the practice of the greatest mystics of the time, like John of the Cross, Teresa of Avila and Ignatius of Loyola. However, the same could not be said about popular devotional practices, which needed the continuous support of images to encourage the activation of memory in handling the relationship with the sacred.

Compianti and Sacri Monti  : A Successful Synthesis In this context, the trajectory indicated by the development and diffusion of the large groups of the compianti in the region of the Padan Plain, and the establishment of the Sacri Monti in the Alpine regions becomes emblematic. At a time of still particularly vital exchanges between theological elaboration, liturgy and devotion, the extraordinary compianti by Nicolò dell’Arca (fig. 2), Guido Mazzoni (fig. 3), Alfonso Lombardi (fig. 4), and Antonio Begarelli (fig. 5), represent a high point of synthesis in the search for a balance between the demands of worship and the manifestation of sincere popular piety  : these groups, almost always life-size, were inaugurated and employed particularly during the celebrations of the Holy Week,5 but often found a central position relative to the place where the Eucharist was consecrated so as to recall, also visually, the immediate relationship between the physical and historical sacrifice of Christ and its continuous renewal in the sacramental reality. The reorganization of the choir of Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence is also a reminder that the context was that of a continuous reflection on the reality of the body of Christ  : in 1552, at the height of the Council, Baccio Bandinelli placed a colossal statue of the dead Christ on the main altar,6 with the aim of underlining the direct connection between Christ’s sacrifice and the real presence in the Eucharist. In the cities of the Padan Plain and inside churches, in the context of liturgical practice, it was considered enough to revisit in5 For this and other new research about the Compianto of Nicholas see Agostini and Ciamitti, “Niccolò dell’Arca. Il compianto sul Cristo di Santa Maria della Vita”. 6 For the events regarding the program of the reorganization of the Florentine Cathedral wanted by Cosimo I see Verdon, L’arte sacra in Italia, pp. 257–269.

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dividual scenes of the Passion through the creation of strongly expressive works that could credibly encourage the participation of the faithful in a historical fact which, now brought back to mind, thus visually became part of an eternal present. In such a particular context as that of the Lombardy-Piedmont area at the foot of the Alps, where features of the landscape could provide inspiration, different forms of symbiosis between popular needs, institutional demands and preaching were achieved, so as to create a real narrative unicum through the incredible creation of the Sacri Monti. Analysing the genesis of the system of the Sacri Monti would be too complicated and not within my competence  ;7 what is important here is to underline how such a creation is perfectly comprehensible within the spiritual climate I am trying to analyse, where the centrality of the events that had led to the sacrifice of Christ assumed an increasingly decisive role. No longer satisfied with simply recalling a precise moment, the intention was to try to reconstruct the landscape and the general context within which to place an entire story, in a sort of physical and mental journey through the events of the Passion  : one of the first and most extraordinary realizations of a Sacro Monte, that of Varallo (fig. 6) (where a brilliant artist of the caliber of Gaudenzio Ferrari worked), shows that the possibility of a new form of pilgrimage was born, a “pilgrimage in one’s own land”8 at a time when the possibility of a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, firmly in the hands of the Turks (definitively since 1517) seemed to be forever excluded. This constituted a veritable internalization of the practice of travel, corresponding more and more to a ritual practice that would in those years lead, in a Counter-Reformist environment, to “personal patterns of spiritual exercises”9. It was no longer necessary to make the long journey to see the lands in which God’s glory was made manifest  : now everyone could devotionally make an “internalized pilgrimage understood as a spiritual journey”10, meditating in front of the scenes that evoked and re-actualized the different moments of Christ’s life. The impossibility of reaching the true Jerusalem gave rise to the desire to build ‘new Jerusalem’, not only in a material sense, but also and above all in a spiritual sense. The believer was thus personally involved in the development of the story of the Passion  ; he was called to become a character of the events represented  ; he was emotionally spurred to take a stand with respect to a story that was not relegated to the past, but directly questioned him about

  7 In this regard see Zanzi, “Il ‘sistema’ dei Sacri Monti prealpini”, or more generally on religious culture and the social context within which this system developed to its maximum splendour in the midst of the Counter-Reformation, see Idem, Sacri Monti e dintorni, pp. 49–152.   8 Zanzi, “Il ‘sistema’ dei Sacri Monti prealpini”, p. 46 (translation by Sharon Casu).   9 Ibid (translation by Sharon Casu). 10 Ibid., p. 47 (translation by Sharon Casu).

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Fig. 2  : Niccolò Dell’Arca. Compianto sul Cristo morto, 1463–1464, Santa Maria della Vita, Bologna, public domain. Fig. 3  : Guido Mazzoni. Compianto sul Cristo morto, 1483–1485, Chiesa San Michele del Gesù, Ferrara, public domain. Fig. 4  : Alfonso Lombardi. Compianto, 1518– 1519, Cattedrale di San Pietro, Bologna, public domain.

his being in the present11 (fig. 7). The faithful, who had been taught by the liturgy, especially by the relationship with the sacrament of the Eucharist, to know how to look beyond appearances, were invited to see beyond the mere features depicted, to grasp the profound meaning of Christ’s sacrifice for their lives. The Sacri Monti became a fundamental instrument to nourish the devotional spirit of entire populations of the western Alpine region, especially when the theories of the main theologians of the Reformation began to spread in those areas in an increasingly invasive way  : Saint Charles Borromeo and the Jesuits soon understood their value. However, a particular phenomenon arose when what had been developed in relation to the need to deepen the relationship with the sacrificial aspect of the Eucharistic liturgy became entirely autonomous  : there was a rift between liturgical practice and devotional perception inasmuch as the body of Christ and everything that revolves around the Passion were no longer at the centre of the meditations of these extraordinary complexes. In fact, fewer and fewer Sacri Monti were dedicated to Christ and his story  – except for the episodes traditionally linked to the meditation of the rosary – and more and more were dedicated to Mary or other saints,12 or to all those 11 It is worth reminding that the characters represented in the different chapels of the Sacred Mountain of Varallo have the typical faces of the local people, the clothes and tools that were usually used in the daily life of those valleys. 12 To realize that this is the case just scroll through the list of Sacri Monti presented in the essay edited by Pacciarotti and Colombo, “Per un repertorio di Sacri Monti realizzati (o progettati) nella regione prealpina”, pp. 77–107.

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Fig. 5  : Antonio Begarelli. Compianto su Cristo morto o Pietà, 1524–1526, Chiesa di Sant’Agostino, Modena, public domain. Fig. 6  : Gaudenzio Ferrari. Crocifissione, 1520–1528, Sacro Monte di Varallo (Vc), XXXVIII cappella, public domain. Fig. 7  : Detail from  : Gaudenzio Ferrari. Crocifissione, 1520–1528, Sacro Monte di Varallo (Vc), XXXVIII cappella, public domain.

realities that were challenged by the Reformation. This trend was reflected in many other contexts, including those mentioned above in connection with the Padan Plain mortori  : direct representations of the body of Christ decreased and, most importantly, ended up being relegated to marginal areas, side chapels, spaces dedicated to private devotion. A relativization of the theme of the Passion took place, but, most notably, an aspect that might appear fundamental to Catholic theology seemed to become secondary, namely the clear reference to the Eucharistic sacrament as a real participation in the unique sacrifice of Christ. Why precisely, at the very moment when the sacrificial reality of the Eucharist was clearly reaffirmed, was the devotional horizon deprived of the possibility of using visual instruments that could clarify the meaning of the liturgical celebration  ? What was offered in return  ?

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The Eucharist at the Centre of the Believers’ Imagination Confirming the centrality of the Eucharistic sacrament, in clear opposition to the doubts raised by the world of the Reformation, the Church also gave it the function of a catalyst for the collective identification of the Catholic world. Having clarified the doctrinal aspects of the real presence, and having sanctioned the relevance of the sacrificial role of the Eucharist in relation to the singular sacrifice of Christ, it became necessary, however, to avoid any possible confusion in the practice  : anything that might distract attention from the absolute centrality of the sacrament and from the place where this sacrament was celebrated could be judged suspect and therefore disposable, including the representation of the physical body of Christ. In fact, such representations ended up being seen with distrust, at least in their function as a corollary to the liturgy, since they risked leading the believer to focus their attention on Christ’s only sacrifice, the historical one, and to neglect the sacrificial reality of the Eucharist. Even the use of the term ‘Christ’s body’ began to be limited as much as possible to the sacrament of the altar, to the detriment of any other use. The only real and certain presence of Christ was to be the one in the Eucharist. To seek other forms of presence or to give excessive importance to the role of memory or to the imaginative function that would not lead to a sacramental encounter with Christ soon became unacceptable. Above all, the question of the sacrifice of the Mass could have constituted an extremely problematic reality if the misunderstanding that the only possible sacrifice had been that of Christ on the cross had been left unchallenged. This belief about the single sacrifice was a reality continually reminded by the scenographic productions of the great fictile groups of the Padan Plain (fig. 8), but also, from a much different perspective, by the Reformers and all those heretical groups that were beginning to animate Italian cities more and more frequently. It suffices to think of the events concerning the quite rapid and uncontrolled diffusion of the emblematic text Beneficio di Cristo, which certainly had a substantial influence also on the artistic productions of the time.13 That which the devotion, through the production of works of art of a 13 Critical interpretations of the original meaning and intention of this text are quite diverse. Here I will try to offer a brief overview, although I realize this is an operation at the limit of correctness. However, this operation is in any case necessary to understand the complexity of the historical situation that is the background to the birth of such a peculiar and characteristic text. Caponetto, since the critical edition of 1972, wanted to underline the unique peculiarity of the text of the Beneficio, which is difficult to attribute to a single theological or religious movement  : however, he intended from the beginning to highlight its connection with Waldesian spirituality, but also with suggestions coming directly from the German Protestant world (Luther and Melanchthon in particular). Others, already before Caponetto, had identified a strong connection with Calvinist theology, in virtue of the fact that the text is full of

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high cultural level, had elaborated as a vital possibility of interaction with theologico-liturgical research to achieve a better understanding of the global meaning of the Eucharistic sacrament, was interpreted as risky and consequently strongly limited in its possible developments. The form of devotion that was more willingly promoted was no longer so free and creative, but more structured and controllable, entirely at the service of a clear transposition of doctrines considered reliable. It is not a question of judging this choice negatively, a choice which must always be placed in the broader and more complex framework of the historical and social order of the time  : rather, it is a question of verifying how it influenced the believers’ perception of the Eucharistic aspect and the subsequent forms of representation of aspects related to the Body of Christ. The forms of mysticism also became increasingly controlled, and if until the middle of the 16th century the relationship with images that allowed for forms of widespread popular devotion had been normal, the paradigm change mentioned above led to a practice increasingly reduced to the intimate and personal space, where the relationship with the images of Christ also needed new mediations. The heart of the space for the public manifestation of the faith became structured more and more around the Eucharist, making the most of the architectural and iconographic elements that could emphasize it (fig. 9)  ; the theme of Christ’s bodily mediation was resolved mainly through the ever more widespread representations of the Eucharist that began to overthrow the images of the dead body of Christ. The centre of gravity of the reflection on the reality of the Passion moved more and more from the historical dimension of the causes to the transcendent dimension of the effects  : it remained a fundamental place for religious reflection but in an increasingly more interior and intimate perspective, leaving the door open to forms of spirituality that would leave more and more room to the search for a sort of direct identification with the reality of God, taking for granted the mediation of the human reality of Christ. In this regard, the so-called abstract French spiritual school of the early 17th century is emblematic.14

quotations from the Istituzione della religione cristiana  : see Bozza, Il Beneficio di Cristo e la Istituzione della religione cristiana di Calvino and for wider bibliographical references Idem, Nuovi studi sulla Riforma in Italia. Ginzburg and Prosperi, Giochi di pazienza, instead meritoriously highlighted the presence of a specific, purely Benedictine trend, even fuelled by possible neo-Pelagian instances of a humanistic origin and by surprising prophetic visions, themes taken up and explored in Prosperi, L’eresia del Libro Grande. The excessive imbalance on the Benedictine origin is rightly rebalanced, by those who, like Firpo, cannot help but highlight the clear and indisputable connections between Benedictine spirituality and Waldesian theology  ; in this regard, see two interesting articles that can also serve as a synthesis on the issue  : Firpo, “Giorgio Siculo. Discussione del volume di Adriano Prosperi”  ; Niccoli, “Cinquecento religioso italiano”. 14 See Cognet, La scuola francese (1500–1650).

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Fig. 8  : Antonio Begarelli. Deposizione, 1530–1531, Chiesa di San Francesco, Modena, public domain. Fig. 9  : Cosimo Fanzago. Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo, navata centrale, 1630, Naples, public domain.

In Search of New Iconographic Syntheses The birth of a quite particular iconography such as that of the Sacred Heart has to be placed in this context, in my view, necessarily starting from the visions of Margaret Mary Alacoque, but finding acceptance in the iconographic palimpsest prepared by the spirit of the time a few decades earlier. Rediscovering more and more the need to not lose contact with the humanity of the Incarnate Word, in order to avoid drifting towards pure abstractionism, and considering it essential not to give in to visions of anthropological pessimism that would have led, as in fact happened, to forms of rigorism mortifying the reality of affections, it was a matter of identifying new images capable of reviving public forms of belief and of supporting personal devotional practices, without affecting doctrinal certainties.15 The task of mediation was far from easy and safe, but the condensed work exemplified and relaunched by the visions of Margaret Mary had a surprising and extraordinarily successful outcome. The reference to the Passion remained an inescapable element, but it was no longer possible to pass through the suspect image of the offering of Christ’s body except through a new symbolic synthesis  : the part for the whole guaranteed sufficient clarity, but it was a 15 For a useful and agile frame of reference on the cultural context that produced the iconography born from the vision of Margaret Mary Alacoque see Zanchi, Le migrazioni del cuore, pp. 5–15.

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matter of identifying the part that could best be immediately reconnected to the iconography of the Eucharist, favouring, at the same time, the intimate agreement of the devout orante, that is, his total emotional involvement. The heart of Jesus “presented as in a throne of flames, more dazzling than a sun and transparent as a crystal, with the venerable plague, surrounded by a crown of thorns and surmounted by a cross”16 (fig. 10) became a powerful image of synthesis capable of replacing the role maintained for centuries, in the history of devotion, by the images of the Passion and in particular by those of the Pietà and of the Compianti. Since the mediation of Christ’s physical body in its entirety was no longer available, the heart best represented the possibility of guaranteeing the connection with the materiality of the human condition  ; the explicit forms of glorification, throne, flames, sun and rays, immediately recalled the now canonical representative formula of the glorification of the Holy Eucharist (fig. 11), while the plague, the crown of thorns, and the cross were explicitly reconnected to the reality of the Passion. All these elements were reunited in a single and powerful symbol, with a single great risk, namely that of leaving too much space for the emotional, especially in relation to the personal reception of the devotional practice. The balance reached during the 16th century around the figure of the dead body of Christ – a formal, but also liturgical and devotional balance – was thus reinterpreted around the figure of the heart, risking however to lose depth by reducing the devotional aspect essentially to the emotional and sentimental dimension. In this regard, the most fortunate outcome of the iconography of the Sacred Heart, the one inspired by the famous painting by Batoni (fig. 12), shows precisely the impossibility of avoiding this risk  : on the one hand, a material heart that reminds the reality of man and in particular of affections, reconnecting it to the sphere of faith  ; on the other hand, the figure of Jesus in the background that seems to have no body because it is already the Jesus of the faith who forgot history and the signs of his humanity too quickly. The strongly unbalanced interpretation towards the dimension of affections, with all the risks that followed from it,17 involved a push towards the resolution of the aspect of faith in the future perspective of eternal life, risking the marginalization of earthly and material reality, which the Christian faith could not afford.

16 Ibid., p. 5 (translation by Sharon Casu). The words with which Margaret Mary Alacoque confided in her mother superior, Mother Saumaise, the description of the Heart of Jesus before which she lived her ecstatic mystical experience, remained so fixed in her memory that they were related word by word in a letter written 15 years later, dated 3 November 1689, to the Jesuit Father Jean Croiset. 17 Ibid., pp. 22–24.

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Fig. 10  : Margherita Maria Alacoque. Sacro Cuore, disegno a matita, 1675, Monastero della Visitazione, Turin, Alamy Stock Photo. Fig. 11  : Angelo Maria Spinazzi. Ostensorio, 1762, Collegio Alberoni, Piacenza, public domain. Fig. 12  : Pompeo Batoni. Sacro Cuore di Gesù, 1760, Chiesa del Gesù, Rome, public domain.

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The Ambiguity of the Heart The powerful force of a symbol such as that of the heart, in its extraordinary capacity for synthesis and immediacy, nevertheless retained a certain ambiguity in its claim to absoluteness,18 a claim unbalanced in favour of the aspect of affections, as seen above, and which threatened the overall sense of a full relationship with the person of Christ in his entirety. The risk of a departure from the human reality of the historical Jesus is well described by the iconographic changes introduced in a theme dear to the spiritual tradition, that of the Noli me tangere. Precisely during or immediately following the years of the celebration of the Council of Trent, one could observe the spread of a new interpretation of the theme that seemed to put the loss of the connection with the body and history of Jesus under the spotlight. On the one hand, the medieval tradition offered the image of a risen Christ who, in taking leave of Mary Magdalene, presents himself to the spectator dressed, covered with fabrics that veil the physical features without concealing the signs of the Passion, but which develop a sense of overall lightness capable of immediately generating a clear reference to the ultracorporeal dimension. On the other hand, authors such as Titian and Correggio in the early 16th century, and Bronzino in 1561 (fig. 13), conveyed the narrative of extraordinary bodies that are perfectly visible in their entirety, but that keep hidden the signs of the lived history and that hand themselves over for a last farewell before being removed forever from the believer’s gaze  : what is made fully visible seems to immediately escape the possibility of being held back. One is here faced with a proper departure from the corporeal dimension of faith  : the clear unveiling of Christ’s body, in his full physicality, suggests a distance that can only be closed by the dimension of affection. But what about the lived history  ? What about the body  ?

The Fence of Memory The iconography of the Sacred Heart, initially constructed on the basis of the visions of Saint Margaret, attempted to provide a possible answer to these complicated questions by trying to recover the dimension of memory as a possible instrument of mediation between history and affective relationship. The retrieving of the names of the genealogy of Jesus and the staging of the signs of the Passion were not only instruments of a narrative, but they also became the tools that memory employed to maintain a firm grounding in history  : they somehow became the anchor to which one could 18 See Neri, Gesù affetti e corporeità di Dio, pp. 39–69.

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Fig. 13  : Angelo Bronzino. Noli me tangere, 1561, Louvre, Paris, public domain.

attach a symbol that, precisely because of its claim to absoluteness, risked entrusting everything to the mere space of imagination and reducing the relationship of faith mainly to an affective relationship. The iconography of the five plagues (fig. 14), abundantly widespread in the late Middle Ages, already provided the imaginative substratum on which to build a new iconography focused on the figure of the heart, but also provided the possible synthetic and symbolic reference to the reality of the Passion through the immediate allusion to the parts of Jesus’ body touched by the signs of the nails and by the passage of the spear. In this way, through the simple presence of these elements, the believer’s (not only affective) memory was able to set in motion the reconstruction of a story, that of the Passion, heard but also seen many times in sacred representations in churches or on parvises during the celebrations of the Holy Week. One of the first representations of the Sacred Heart (fig. 15), a representation in which the heart itself began to have a completely autonomous and central function, suggests the impossibility of losing the direct connection with the story of a body that has suffered the tragedy of martyrdom and with the practice of the Eucharist that continues to directly reference the sacrifice of the cross  : in fact, these are the very elements that Margaret Mary did not want to discard in the representation of her vision, even if the heart and its wound evidently assumed a predominant role. The

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Fig. 14  : Antica rappresentazione delle Cinque Piaghe, Chiesa de Logonna-Daoulas, public domain.

Fig. 15  : The Sacred Heart and the Wounds of Christ displayed on a Cross, 1495 c., Bodleian Ms Arch. G f.13.

monstrance composition which, as seen above, obviously underwent the influence of the new ritualistic Eucharistic devices of the time, was conceived as an instrument for the exaltation of the heart which is placed at the centre of the composition. The open wound on the inscription charitas constitutes the heart of the heart, the window open on God’s affective world, an infinite space impossible to narrate which can only be guessed but not arbitrarily interpreted. There was the need to create a sort of fence made of signs of memory that helped the believer not to rely entirely on the guidance of feeling. The references to the blows of the spear and the three nails, the chalice, the flames, the cross and the crown of thorns, were the necessary corollary to remind everyone that one could not be in relation with the heart of God if one did not pass through the memory of a historical fact, through the particular experience of a concrete body that had offered itself in a unique and unrepeatable way. The memory of the passages of the Passion, then, becomes not a process of emphasizing the emotional aspect, as it might seem, but the most suitable structure to mitigate and filter the expansive force of feelings that could arise from a misinterpretation of the powerful symbol of the heart. Only a part of the historical body of Jesus remains for the whole, but the whole does not disappear completely, thanks to the presence of some signs that recall its presence in an incontrovertible way  : the memory that knows how to interpret these signs forces the believer to come to terms with their own history,

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to not think that the relationship with the sacred can only be resolved on the level of mystical understanding. History remains, and it is necessary to leave this history and to return to it so as to correctly interpret one’s own experience of faith  : a mysticism without memory would become inarticulate and prey to pure sentimentalism. In this case, the iconography of Margaret Mary’s vision in no way aims to yield to the power of the symbol of the heart which, although valued and placed in a central position, is not left free to act outside the fence that the memory of the Passion builds around it.

Intimist Drift of an Iconography The subsequent reception of the spirituality of the Sacred Heart, as well as its iconographic interpretation, was not able to mitigate the effective power of the symbol of the heart towards a spiritualist drift forever. Comparing the sobriety of the representation desired by Margaret Mary with what later became the most widespread forms of representation of the Sacred Heart, among which the already mentioned work of Batoni stands out for its importance and diffusion, one can see how the door of the fence was opened wide. If, on the one hand, the presence of Jesus was recovered in the figure, on the other hand the elements that had allowed the heart to be immediately relocated in a story were abandoned, elements that were perhaps considered too conceptual and an obstacle to immediate fruition, but that would have allowed a more exact decryption of the symbol. Without this mediation the heart took over, and the cross, the flames and the crown of thorns were not enough to provide the right key to interpret the image  : these elements lost their structuring function and instead assumed a purely ornamental function with the aim of emphasizing even more the reality of the heart. As a matter of fact, the attempt to recover the figure of Jesus in order to avoid an excess of abstractionism and the risk of a departure from the faithful interpretation of the “first revelations” of Margaret Mary was an answer to the need to codify in a definitive way the main function assigned to the image of the heart  : that of sustaining, before anything else, the necessary emotional hold of the symbol to which the faithful entrust themselves. This emotional hold of the devout image draws strength precisely from the invariance of its iconic connotations, thus leaving the religious gaze substantially indifferent to the artistic quality of the product, and rather granting it the experience it is searching for  : emotional recognition.19 19 Zanchi, Le migrazioni del cuore, p. 30 (translation by Sharon Casu).

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By giving space to the devotional function of the image and limiting, however, all other functions, the perspective was limited to the emotional relationship – considered as the only important aspect  – that the orante managed to establish with the direct emanation of the representation of a vision that, through the saintly Visitation Sister, Jesus himself had wanted and promoted  : this is a mechanism similar to that which had led to the production of icons and which had required, with the necessary differentiations, the stabilization of the iconographic model. The choice of this type of representation had the aim of soliciting mainly the emotional memory so as to activate a direct dialogue with the sacred interlocutor, but lost the access to a historical memory guaranteeing the connection with the original event and its permanence within a network of effective relationships with other believers. The devotion to the Sacred Heart thus became mainly an intimist and individualistic devotion that only regained an eminent public space after several decades, and mostly after the political demands changed.

A Path with a Predictable Outcome  ? During the 15th and most of the 16th century, the history of the birth of the iconography of the Sacred Heart demonstrates an attempt to pass through the image of the concrete body of Jesus, trying to maintain a balance between public and private devotional needs. However, the stabilisation of the iconography that required the presence of the whole figure or half-bust of Jesus on which the figurine of a heart with carnal features was stuck, a figurine hypostatized by the presence of a mystical light, reveals the prevalence of a dimension that preferred the abrogation of time, or rather of the function proper to memory to place in time the bonds that give meaning to the present  : the light that emanates from the flattened silhouette of Jesus, who holds out his heart to the faithful on his left hand and which recalls the even brighter outline that surrounds the heart itself, speaks of a dimension entirely dedicated to the present of the mystical moment. What really mattered was what the believer could experience in front of this image, the invitation to reciprocate an offering so demanding that it could only be partly fulfilled, through the fulness of one’s own agreement of love  : everything seems to resolve on a purely spiritual level, where the dimension of the body loses depth and importance. But paradoxically, as the body disappeared, the true dimension of memory also disappeared, that memory which needs the body to give a concrete depth to feelings. One remains suspended in a sort of limbo that speaks of an eternal present of affections and that thrusts one towards a future that is too vague because it lacks clear references to a history that precedes it. Faced with the

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rigorist and rationalist excesses of a particular theology, the image of the Sacred Heart that tradition has codified has certainly contributed to preserving the faith from a certain barrenness, but it has not succeeded in preserving that balance that the attempts of previous centuries had tried to maintain by following the fragile path of memory  : a balance based on the signs sown within history by the bodily presence of Christ, signs celebrated in his passion, continually brought back to the present by the celebration of the Eucharist in the life of the faithful and projected towards the future in the sacramental eschatological realization. Right when the symbol of the heart had seemed to celebrate its triumph, an inexorable decline towards an intimist drift began and seemed to take over. The story that I have tried to trace in this essay aims to emphasize the concrete possibility of resisting this drift, a possibility that allows us to rediscover the great vitality and power of a symbol that cannot afford to lose its relationship with memory  : of what use would a heart without the memory of the body, even if it were that of God, be today  ? Translation Sharon Casu References Agostini, Grazia and Lucia Ciamitti. “Niccolò dell’Arca. Il compianto sul Cristo di Santa Maria della Vita.” AAVV, Tre artisti nella Bologna dei Bentivoglio. Bologna  : Nuova Alfa Editoriale, 1985, pp. 229–362. Bozza, Tommaso. Il Beneficio di Cristo e la Istituzione della religione cristiana di Calvino, Rome  : AGI, 1961. Bozza, Tommaso. Nuovi studi sulla Riforma in Italia. Il Beneficio di Cristo. Rome  : Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 1976. Cognet, Louis. La scuola francese (1500–1650). Storia della spiritualità 9, Bologna  : EDB, 2014. Firpo, Massimo. “Giorgio Siculo. Discussione del volume di Adriano Prosperi.” Storica VI, 18 (2000)  : pp. 143–152. Ginzburg, Carlo and Adriano Prosperi. Giochi di pazienza. Un seminario sul “Beneficio di Cristo”. Turin  : Einaudi, 1975. Neri, Marcello. Gesù affetti e corporeità di Dio. Il cuore e la fede. Assisi  : Cittadella, 2007. Niccoli, Ottavia. “Cinquecento religioso italiano  : discutendo un recente volume di Adriano Prosperi.” Storica VI, 18 (2000)  : pp. 153–160. Niccoli, Ottavia. Vedere con gli occhi del cuore. Alle origini del potere delle immagini. Roma-Bari  : Laterza, 2011. Pacciarotti, Giuseppe and Silvano Colombo. “Per un repertorio di Sacri Monti realizzati (o progettati) nella regione prealpina.” Gerusalemme nelle Alpi. Per un Atlante dei Sacri Monti prealpini. Ed. Luigi Zanzi and Paolo Zanzi. Milan  : Skira, 2002, pp. 77–107.

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Pozzi, Giovanni and Claudio Leonardi (eds.). Scrittrici mistiche italiane. Genoa  : Marietti, 1988. Prosperi, Adriano. L’eresia del Libro Grande. Storia di Giorgio Siculo e della sua seta. Milan  : Feltrinelli, 2000. Toscano, Bruno. “Storia dell’arte e forme della vita religiosa.” AAVV, Storia dell’arte italiana. Parte I, vol. III. Turin  : Einaudi, 1979, pp. 273–318. Verdon, Timoty. L’arte sacra in Italia. Immagine religiosa dal paleocristiano al postmoderno. Milan  : Mondadori, 2001. Zanchi, Giuliano. Le migrazioni del cuore. Variazioni di un’immagine tra devozione e street art. Bologna  : EDB, 2017. Zanzi, Luigi. Sacri Monti e dintorni. Studi sulla cultura religiosa ed artistica della Controriforma. Milan  : Jaka Book, 1990. Zanzi, Luigi, “Il ‘sistema’ dei Sacri Monti prealpini.” Gerusalemme nelle Alpi. Per un Atlante dei Sacri Monti prealpini. Ed. Luigi Zanzi and Paolo Zanzi. Milan  : Skira, 2002, pp. 17–71.

Images Alacoque, Margherita Maria. Sacro Cuore, disegno a matita, 1675, Monastero della Visitazione, Turin (fig. 10). Antica rappresentazione delle Cinque Piaghe, Chiesa de Logonna-Daoulas (fig. 14). Batoni, Pompeo. Sacro Cuore di Gesù, 1760, Chiesa del Gesù, Rome (fig. 12). Begarelli, Antonio. Compianto su Cristo morto o Pietà, 1524–1526, Chiesa di Sant’Agostino, Modena (fig. 5). Begarelli, Antonio. Deposizione, 1530–1531, Chiesa di San Francesco, Modena (fig. 8). Bronzino, Angelo. Noli me tangere, 1561, Louvre, Paris (fig. 13). Dell’Arca, Niccolò. Compianto sul Cristo morto, 1463–1464, Santa Maria della Vita, Bologna (fig. 2). Fanzago, Cosimo. Chiesa del Gesù Nuovo, navata centrale, 1630, Naples (fig. 9). Ferrari, Gaudenzio. Crocifissione, 1520–1528, Sacro Monte di Varallo (Vc), XXXVIII cappella (fig. 6 and fig. 7). Lombardi, Alfonso. Compianto, 1518–1519, Cattedrale di San Pietro, Bologna (fig. 4). Lotto, Lorenzo. Ritratto di fra Gregorio Belo, 1546–1547. Metropolitan Museum, New York (fig. 1). Mazzoni, Guido. Compianto sul Cristo morto, 1483–1485, Chiesa San Michele del Gesù, Ferrara (fig. 3). The Sacred Heart and the Wounds of Christ displayed on a Cross 1495 c., Bodleian Ms Arch. G f.13 (fig. 15). Spinazzi, Angelo Maria. Ostensorio, 1762, Collegio Alberoni, Piacenza (fig. 11).

David Morgan

The Image of Love Eros and Agape in the History of Devotion to the Sacred Heart In her autobiography, Margaret Mary Alacoque described the long wooing undertaken by her divine suitor, who would eventually become her spouse and enjoy a mystical union with her that would encourage devotion to the Sacred Heart.1 It was not a tranquil relationship, but one roiled by passion and pain, buffeted by Jesus’ severe demands, and succored by his unparalleled affections for the Visitationist nun. The amorous nature of the relation was registered in the visual expression of the devotion by Alacoque herself in the form of the Valentine’s heart (see fig. 4), whose emblematic form, treated as an exchange of hearts, had emerged in romantic or courtly love in the late Middle Ages.2 This tradition is visible in an early fifteenth-century French tapestry in which a noble suitor offers his heart to a lady (fig. 1). A Flemish tapestry inspired by an Italian print in the next century shows a seated maiden, likely Love, with a flaming heart on her lap. Both motifs traveled from aristocratic, courtly life to the convent, and were likely taken there by noble women who joined cloistered communities. Almost everything about Alacoque’s intense relationship with her lover, pivoting on the figure of his heart, was not unique to her, but embedded in a long history of women religious mystical spirituality inspired by the Song of Songs. There are many histories of the devotion to the heart of Jesus.3 My approach is to focus on a particular strand of this history – the element of nuptial mysticism – whose visual and rhetorical forms were central to the devotion. Special attention is given to how devotion to the heart of Jesus was modified first by Jean Eudes for use among the priests of the order he founded, and shortly later by rivals of the Eudist view of the heart of Jesus by the Jesuits as they sought to broaden the reception of Alacoque’s devotion to the Sacred Heart. If there is a sure place to start in undertaking this historical project, it is with the writings of two highborn women in the thirteenth-century at the Benedictine convent at Helfta – Gertrude of Helfta and Mechthild of Hackeborn, who were later 1 See Alacoque, Autobiography, p. 41. 2 See Høystad, History of the Heart, pp. 111–150. 3 See Hamon, Histoire de la Dévotion au Sacré Cœur  ; Bainvel, Devotion to the Sacred Heart  ; and Wright, Sacred Heart.

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David Morgan Fig. 1  : Anonymous, Offering of the Heart, ca. 1400–10, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, © RMNGrand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

joined by Mechthild of Magdeburg.4 The nuptial mysticism that fired the spiritual experience of all three accorded a fundamental place to Amor, love as desire, as the engine propelling the passionate relationship of suitor and maiden, lover and beloved, from wooing to betrothal to spiritual marriage. Modelled on the Song of Songs, the relation employed the passionate language of the text to transform its sensuous sexuality into a robustly embodied asceticism in which pleasure became pain and suffering passion. This inversion likewise refashioned the exchange of hearts in courtly love into a mystical union in which Jesus placed his heart within the breast of his cloistered lover and sometimes hers within his chest. As we will see, this became a motif among women mystics over the centuries that followed before Alacoque reported it and it became the basis of the devotion that issued from her career in the Visitationist house at Paray-le-Monial in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. This essay traces the history of the heart of Jesus as the figure of love in the spirituality of cloistered women from the thirteenth to the seventeenth century, demonstrating how the modality of love shifted from eros to agape in the crafting of what became the modern 4 Gertrude, Life and Revelations  ; Mechthild of Hackeborn, Book of Special Grace  ; and Mechthild of Magdeburg, Flowing Light of the Godhead.

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devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. In doing so, the role of iconographic memory and its transformations and shifts of meaning will be analyzed in detail.

The Benedictines of Helfta Devotion to the Heart of Jesus originates in ascetic orders of the later Middle Ages that sought to renew the contemplative life by bolstering the stringent Rule of Benedict in monastic practice. For some, this came to mean that suffering was a way of participating in Christ’s Passion. It meant a kind of spiritual mimesis in which suffering helped purify the soul and purge the flesh’s control over the heart, leading toward mystical union and performing reparation for sin, and thereby becoming more like Christ. Devotion to the heart of Jesus emerged as a contemplative, cloistered, and fervent piety. It made great use of scriptural poetry and its setting in liturgical office, thriving on figurative imagery as trigger for sensuous meditation. Meditative practice mapped out the internal journey or progression toward the increasingly intimate presence of Christ to the heart of the devotee. Heart, both the devotee’s and the heart of Jesus, emerged as the primary focus of this piety. The heart of the believer and the heart of Jesus were corresponding media whose conjoining was the experience of unio mystica. For Bernard of Clairvaux, this mystical relation was best understood within the figural imagery of the Song of Songs, which offered him the master nuptial trope of Bridegroom and Bride. “By special privilege,” he writes, the Bride or soul, “wants to welcome him down from heaven into her inmost heart, into her deepest love  ; she wants to have the one she desires present to her not in bodily form but by inward infusion, not by appearing externally but by laying hold of her within.”5 In another sermon, Bernard states that whenever the Bridegroom, or Word, came to him, “none of my senses showed me that he had flooded the depths of my being. Only by the warmth of my heart, as I said before, did I know that he was there, and I knew the power of his might because my faults were purged and my body’s yearnings brought under control.”6 The heart warmed because it was the organ that received the “inward infusion of love” and therefore registered the presence of the divine. Although he did not develop the heart imagery to the degree that Gertrude and Mechthild would, owing in no small way to inspiration by Bernard’s commentary on the Song of Songs, Bernard did suggest that the heart was the will that submitted itself by the power of 5 Bernard, Commentary, p. 177, Sermon 31. 6 Bernard, Sermon 74, in Selected Works, p. 55.

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love. He applied this to Christ’s own self-humbling to taking on flesh in the Incarnation as well as to his followers who attain voluntary humility by virtue of “an inward infusion of love” that springs from the heart or will. This proceeds not by reasoning or external force or compulsion. It must come from the heart, which is infused by divine love. And for Bernard, it always leads beyond the flesh, beyond imagery or sound, dream or vision. “With good reason then,” he told his community, “I avoid trucking with visions and dreams  ; I want no part with parables and figures of speech  ; even the very beauty of the angels can only leave me wearied. For my Jesus utterly surpasses these in his majesty and splendor. Therefore, I ask of him what I ask of neither man nor angel  : that he kiss me with the kiss of his mouth.”7 The “kiss” here is the kiss from the opening verses of the Song of Songs, the love-struck yearning of the Bride for her Groom. Bernard relied on the physical nature of a kiss to propel longing beyond the flesh, not as dream or vision, but as spiritual ecstasy. For this reason, he was guided by the dense imagery of the Song of Songs, the Psalms, and the Gospels. If imagery launched Bernard’s meditation and experience of divine love but then vanished in an ineffable presence, in Gertrude and Mechthild, imagery played a more persistent role in a mysticism in which devotion to the Heart of Jesus came to the fore.8 Bernard, for his part, insisted that the kiss of the Bridegroom was the incarnate Word, “not indeed an adhering of the lips that can sometimes belie a union of hearts, but an unreserved infusion of joys,” it “is not a mere pressing of mouth upon mouth  ; it is the uniting of God with man.”9 Both Mechthild and Gertrude, on the other hand, experienced the Canticle’s intimacy of a face-to-face embrace with Jesus. Gertrude quoted Bernard in discussing its effect  : “not attracting the bodily eye, but rejoicing the heart.” Yet she continued by describing how the eyes of Christ “appeared opposite to mine … and affected not only my soul, but even my body and all my strength.”10 The visual encounter remained fundamental to her mystical experience. She goes on to describe how, while reading the Canonical Hours or saying the Office of the Dead, “Though has often, during a single Psalm, embraced my soul many times with a kiss,” recalling the subject of Bernard’s famous second sermon on the Song of Songs. Yet Gertrude considered no favors of that sort and others Jesus showed her to  7 Bernard, Commentary, p. 6, Sermon 2.   8 There is a substantial literature on the celebrated nuns at Helfta, see Bynum, “Women Mystics in the Thirteenth Century.” Bynum anchors her study in the considerable bibliography of the topic.  9 Bernard, Commentary, p. 6, 7. 10 Gertrude, Life and Revelations, 112, Book 2. The Latin title of the book, Legatus Memorialis Abundantiae Divinae, is now translated as The Herald of Divine Love, although the Latin term “legatus” would be better translated as “ambassador” or “envoy” or “representative.” For the English, I have used the translation by The Poor Clares throughout, and so refer to it as Life and Revelations.

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compare with the eye-to-eye encounter  : “nothing touched me so much as this majestic look.”11 The direct gaze of Jesus suited the nuptial mysticism that fully deployed the amorous relation of the Song of Songs as the basis for the relation between Jesus as suitor and bridegroom, and nun as beloved and bride. Eros or Amor was a key figure among the women mystics at Helfta as the Christian allegorizing of Cupid, whose arrow penetrated their heart to infect it with the intense love of Christ, their Bridegroom and Lover. Gertrude once described how, when “she had retired to the place where I pray, it seemed to me that I saw a ray of light like an arrow coming forth from the Wound of the right side of the crucifix, which was in an elevated place, and it continued, as it were, to advance and retire for some time.”12 The pulsing arrow of divine love, invoked by the prayer she had requested, came to her after the sacrament as she knelt before an actual crucifix that hung above the place to which she regularly retired for prayer and meditation at the monastery. Amor played a major role in the writings of Mechthild of Magdeberg, who arrived at Helfta around 1270. The much younger Gertrude first received visions in 1281. The nuptial motif was central of the older Mechthild, and no doubt encouraged the younger, as it did Gertrude. Beauty, Amor, and suffering intertwined, as in the following invitation from the Bridegroom to follow his way of suffering in the Passion, recalling the Song of Songs and linking its sensuousness to the contemplation of the Passion  : “Look at me, my bride. See how beautiful are my eyes, how comely is my mouth, how on fire is my heart, how agile are my hands, and how swift are my feet. So follow me  ! You shall be martyred with me…”13 During the late Middle Ages, heart piety spread across western Europe, from convent to convent and order to order, as well as far into lay piety, especially in Germany and the Low Countries. Meditating on the Passion of Christ during Lent and particularly during Holy Week was the practice  – we could speak of a mechanism of memory – that became central to the piety and was keyed to the indictment for causing Christ’s suffering and achieving contrition through the ordeal of assuming the responsibility of one’s sin for his suffering. Accordingly, his heart remained the focus of the wounds of Christ. In a related aspect of lay piety, the heart of the devotee became the site for visualizing and teaching the procedure of conviction and contrition. This issued in a host of devotional manuals and emblem books that charted the path of the renegade heart from control by vices and Satan to regeneration and 11 Gertrude, Life and Revelations, p. 113. 12 Ibid., p. 80. On the motif of arrows of Love and the transformation of Cupid into Christ in late medieval art and piety, see Newman, “Love’s Arrows.” 13 Mechthild, Flowing Light, p. 54, bk 1, #29.

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purification (see fig. 2).14 As we shall see shortly, this strand of visual piety exerted some influence on women religious as the devotion to the Sacred Heart took form during the seventeenth century. But among late medieval and early modern women religious engaged in ascetically propelled mystical visions and ecstasies, the framework drew closely from the Canticles and nuptial mysticism. Catherine of Siena, a tertiary Dominican, experienced a mystical marriage to Jesus, which was sealed by his gift of a gold ring to her.15 Catherine’s most famous experience, long remembered in cloistered piety, was receiving the stigmata. This occurred in a manner that recalls St Bonaventure’s account of St. Francis’ reception of the stigmata, though instead of rising into the air to meet the Crucified Christ, who descended from heaven on the wings of Seraphim, Catherine rose up to meet a crucifix. “Then from the scars of His most sacred wounds I saw five rays of blood coming down towards me, to my hands, my feet and my heart.”16 Catherine’s desire was not simply to be regenerated, but transformed through ­union with Jesus, and the wounds served as the basis for this unity. In response to the Psalm that asked God to “create a new heart with me” (Psalm 50  : 12), she asked Jesus “to take her own heart and will from her.” Her request was granted for “it appeared to her that her Heavenly Bridegroom came to her as usual, opened her left side, and took out her heart, and then went away.”17 She proceeded to live for a few days without a heart, she told her incredulous confessor and biographer, Father Raymond of Capua. Jesus returned to her as she was praying in a Dominican church, holding in His holy hands a human heart, bright red and shining…came up to her, opened her left side once again, and put the heart He was holding in His hands inside her, saying “Dearest daughter, as I took your heart away from you the other day, now, you see, I am giving you mine, so that you can go on living with it forever.” With these words, He closed the opening He had made in her side, and as a sign of the miracle a scar remained on that part of her flesh, as I and others were told by her companions who saw it.18

14 The long list of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Catholic emblem books devoted to the spiritual education of the human heart includes the following, many of which went through multiple editions and remained in print in some cases well into the nineteenth century. Among the most important were Anton Wierix, Cor Jesu Amanti Sacrum, ca. 1595, which directly was re-issued by Carel van Mallery in 1628 and inspired Ronco’s Fortezza Reale and Hajnal’s Sacré Cœur de Jésus. 15 Raymond of Capua, Life of St. Catherine, p. 82. 16 Ibid., p. 154. 17 Ibid., p. 144. 18 Ibid., pp. 144–145.

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Visitationist Order before Alacoque Canonized in 1461, Saint Catherine of Siena became a spiritual paradigm for women religious dedicated to becoming the spouse of Jesus and understanding his Passion as a central motif of experiencing intimate connection to him. The importance of Saint Catherine’s experience of the heart of Jesus was something that occupied the tradition that lead to Alacoque. But what appears in the record of biographies and other documents by and about devotees to the Sacred Heart is a return to the nuptial mysticism of Amor and the Christ-Cupid armed with arrows of tribulation that made suffering the medium of intimate union between Bridegroom and Bride. An important instance of this is the experience of Anne Marguerite Clement (1593–1661), who joined the Visitationist order shortly after Francis de Sales and Jane de Chantal founded it. Sister Anne went on to become a mother superior in the order and her biography, published in 1686 in French, may have been a powerful resource for Margaret Mary Alacoque. One vigil of the feast of all saints our holy founder [Francis de Sales] made a sermon on the great love that God carried for holy souls and proved powerfully that it was so prodigious that it excited his goodness sometimes to exchange his heart with theirs, as he did with Saint Catherine of Sienna. This discourse bore such a lively impression on [Mother Anne’s] soul that she concentrated on it for the rest of the day. The following night she awoke with a start and found herself completely penetrated by the presence of God in an extraordinary manner. Jesus himself appeared to her seated in the midst of her heart, wanting her to note by this situation the claim of possession that he had come to make on her. And to make it even more certain for her, he said  : “Your heart is mine, and I am yours, your soul belongs to me, I have made it my property.” Such tender words from Jesus Christ produced in her such grand effects of love and of recognition that, not finding herself strong enough to bear them, she cried  : “Lord, it is enough, withdraw yourself from me.”19

Mother Anne’s plea, “it is enough” (“c’est assés”), recalls a similar utterance conveyed in a very popular and widely circulating devotional emblem book of her lifetime. In his Cor Jesu Amanti Sacrum (Lover of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, 1595) and Carel van Mallery’s re-issuing of the pamphlet in 1628 (reproduced here), Antoine Wierix included an image of the new Cupid or Amor (Jesus) firing arrows into a heart over which the Holy Spirit hovers (fig. 2). The caption protests  : 19 Galice, Vie de la Mère Clément, pp. 47–48 (translation by the author). The book first appeared in Latin  : Gallicio, Ideae divinae benignitatis.

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Fig. 2  : Christ-Cupid fires arrows in to a Human Heart, from Carel van Mallery’s edition of Antoine Wierix, Cor Jesu Amanti Sacrum (1595), public domain.

Enough, Jesus, you have wounded it, Enough, the whole thing is pierced by burning arrows. Desire is far, far from here, For this heavenly cupid conquers fire with fire.

It seems significant that there are five arrows, one for each of the wounds suffered by Jesus on the cross, because sharing the wounds of Christ was one of the primary ways in which Gertrude and Alacoque as well as a long line of religious in-between sought to participate in Christ’s suffering as a means of compensating him and drawing into intimate likeness with him. A blind, pagan cupid scampers beneath as angels fly to succor the heart attacked by missiles. Amor, whom we saw in Mechthild and Gertrude, is the new Cupid, or Jesus, wounding the heart of his lover in the task of its spiritual transformation from a den of iniquity to a throne of virtue (which is visualized in the series of images that followed in Wierix’s book). The image of the wounded heart recalls a version of Amor evoked by Mother Anne. One day as she studied the stigmata received by Francis of Assisi and Catherine of Sienna  :

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It pleased divine goodness to draw to itself all the powers of my soul by a very great meditation, and to pour out its light, which illuminated my mind at the same time and excited my heart, but with an ardor so lively and burning for holy Love [Amour] that I believed that she was going to consume me. I felt in that moment a violent pain at the bottom of my heart, as if it were being pierced in five places. At the same time, I heard the voice of Jesus Christ say to me  : “I want to impress on your heart five kinds of love instead of the stigmata of which I have marked my lovers [amans] in order that you might be like a memorial that you may always remember my passion and my death.”20

Margaret Mary Alacoque Margaret Mary Alacoque presents two especially interesting aspects in light of the history we have traced so far. The tradition of nuptial mysticism frames her devotion to the Sacred Heart and the visual piety of mimesis is fundamental to her mystical experience and ascetic practices. I will focus my remarks on these two elements in bringing the story I have told thus far to completion. Alacoque’s autobiography, which she was ordered to prepare by her Jesuit confessor, completing the task in 1685, portrays a life obsessed with purity and spiritual undiluted perfection, a compulsion that drives her unrelentingly to a Savior who demands compensation for her every shortfall. Morosely conscious of her failure to submit her will perfectly to God’s, to image him completely by conquering her willful self, the teenage Alacoque inflicted considerable pain on herself, understanding self-mortification “to form afresh this resemblance and conformity with Him.” The means for doing so was binding “this miserable and criminal body with knotted cords, which I drew so tightly that I had difficulty in breathing and eating.”21 The mimetic impulse at work here was propelled by the desire to imitate saintly and divine prototypes in the belief that resembling others would rescue her from her offensive self. She reported that at this time, before she had been allowed to enter a religious order, she concentrated her reading on Lives of the Saints, telling herself “I must find one that is easy to imitate, so that I can do as she did in order to become a saint.”22 What this generally meant in practice was performing various acts of penance as the means of paying for offenses.

20 Galice, La Vie de la Mère Clément, p. 349 (translation by the author). 21 Alacoque, Autobiography, p. 34. 22 Ibid., p. 36.

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This internal conflict of self-annihilation and self-transformation came to focus on conforming to Jesus’ suffering  : “How happy should I be, O my dear Saviour, if Thou wouldst imprint on me the likeness of Thy sufferings.”23 Whereas devotion to Mary had been her early practice, in time she was emboldened to address Jesus directly.24 She prayed tearfully at the foot of her crucifix and wrote that she was given to understand that Jesus wanted her render her “conformable in all things to His suffering.” From that time, “He was always present to me under the form of the crucifix or of an Ecce Homo, or as carrying His cross.”25 Each of these was a familiar motif in devotional paraphernalia and in illustrated manuals such as those engraved by Wierix, and by many others, as well as prayer cards. Moreover, her Autobiography shows how she built on such instances of discursive memory. Alacoque’s turn to Jesus also intersected with the dominant drama of her life as a teenager that unfolded when her mother and family determined to find her a husband. A number of suitors began calling at the house.26 The girl’s response was to experience Jesus as a pressing suitor. “I have chosen thee to be My spouse,” he told her. To convey to her that he would brook no competition, he showed her one day after she had received Communion “that He is the most beautiful, the wealthiest, the most powerful, the most perfect and the most accomplished amongst all lovers. After having pledged myself to Him for so many years, how came it, said He, that I now sought to break with Him for another  ?”27 Alacoque “willingly consented” to “the Divine Spouse of my soul” taking possession of her, “making Himself Master of my liberty.” She declared to her family “that all suitors should be dismissed.”28 After that she set about searching for the right convent to join. Her family wanted her to become a member of an Ursuline house where other family members lived. But “a secret voice said to me  : ‘It is not there that I would have thee, but at the Holy Maries.”29 We do not learn why the Visitationist house was her choice, though she did offer a fascinating story about the image of the co-founder of the order  : “Once 23 Ibid., p. 44. 24 See the second page of Alacoque’s Autobiography, where she describes her early years  : “The Blessed Virgin has always taken great care of me…I did not dare address myself to her divine Son, but only to her,” 20. On the next page she indicates that her father died when she was eight years old. Her spirituality was driven by this absence and the need to placate the demanding male whom she offended with her imperfections. She referred to Jesus in her Autobiography at one point as friend, spouse, and father, p. 59. 25 Ibid., p. 25. 26 Ibid., p. 31. 27 Ibid., p. 40. 28 Ibid., p. 41. 29 Ibid., p. 42.

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when I was looking at a picture of the great Saint Francis of Sales, it seemed to me that he called me ‘his daughter’ and cast jupon me a look so full of paternal love that I no longer regarded him otherwise than as ‘my good father.’”30 The story may convey a powerful psychological urge for the lost father. But it is also possible that she had heard something of the nature of the Visitandines in stories about Mother Ann. The parallels in her biography and the story Alacoque tells of her own life are striking. For that matter, some of the same motifs can be found in the biography of Catherine of Siena  : early recognition of a desire to devote oneself to Jesus as spouse, strong opposition by family, followed by a triumphant victory in joining a religious order.31 And like Catherine and Mother Ann, Alacoque sought to share the Passional sufferings of Jesus, asking him if he would “imprint on me the likeness of Thy sufferings.”32 The importance of a kind of spiritual mimesis mediated by the pious literatures that did so much to shape the mystical piety of women religious bears heavily on Alacoque. Everything she related regarding her youth in her Autobiography was not written until she was in her thirty-eighth year (in 1685). No doubt Alacoque saw the roots of her nuptial mysticism, corroborated by many sources that she had read or heard about, as grounded in her youthful memories. These included her experiences of suitors and her intense desire to dismiss them in favor of the divine Lover to whom she took ascetic extremes of conforming herself, converting pleasure into pain as the medium of union with her beloved. In her mind, these were evidence not only of an early discernment for a religious vocation, but the wooing of her heavenly suitor. The Jesuit scholar of the Sacred Heart, Father Edmond Letierce, noted in his learned if strongly slanted account, Étude sur le Sacré Cœur (1890), that a tradition emerged in the seventeenth century among the daughters of Saint Francis de Sales, the Order of the Visitation, of special devotion to the heart of Jesus, and Letierce offered a brief account of leading figures in the order who evinced this devotion, tracing a path that culminated in Alacoque.33 The Jesuit historian of the Sacred Heart, Jean Bainvel, seems to echo this judgment when he notes that Mother Ann Clement had “a clear intuition that the Visitation Order had been instituted by the Sacred Heart and in the interest of the Sacred Heart.”34 There was indeed something about the Visitationist Order that provided an institutional disposition that favored nuptial

30 Ibid., p. 43. 31 Compare Vie de la Mère Clément, pp. 9–27, with the Life of St. Catherine of Siena, pp. 14–33, and Alacoque, Autobiography, pp. 19–36. 32 Alacoque, Autobiography, p. 44. 33 Letierce, Étude, pp. 27–35. 34 Bainvel, Devotion to the Sacred Heart, p. 230.

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mysticism and therefore helps account for the steady series of mystical experiences of the Sacred Heart in France that must have informed Alacoque’s experience.

Eudist Devotion and Iconography But it is here that changes to the tradition are found at work and become quite visible in the devotional iconography that was crafted in the second half of the seventeenth and early decades of the eighteenth century. In the imagery, we will see that the amorous character of nuptial mysticism at work in Alacoque was diminished by Père Jean Eudes as he worked out a devotion fit for his Eudist priests and re-tasked by the Jesuits as they undertook an important shift from Alacoque’s nuptial mysticism by pressing the devotion in the direction of a far more popular form in the eighteenth century. Let me begin with this image (fig. 3), which was used to illustrate Jean Eudes’ major theological work, The Admirable Heart of the Very Holy Mother of God, a three-volume, eighteen-hundred-page production that he completed just weeks before his death in 1680. The book appeared in the following year. When precisely this image was produced has not been possible for me to determine. The presence of the two Eudists, who are labeled “Sons of the Venerable Father Eudes” in the 1908 edition of the Admirable Heart in Eudes’ Complete Works suggests the image came after his death. They kneel before a flaming, floating heart occupied by the Virgin and Child, and light their long tapers in the flames emerging from the top of the heart. In a ribbon above, we read that this is the “Heart of Jesus and Mary, the Furnace of Love.” One of the Eudists uses his taper to ignite the globe beneath the heart and each of them holds a flaming heart in his hand. The hand-held heart is familiar from contemporary iconography such as Philippe de Champaigne’s well-known portrait of St. Augustine, in Eudes’ own portraiture before and after his death, and in portraits of Jane of Chantal and Francis de Sales. Sometimes the heart is the inflamed organ of the believer, and sometimes in Eudist imagery it is labeled the heart of Jesus, or Jesus and Mary. The ambivalence is characteristic of Eudist iconography. The twelfth book of Admirable Heart is called “On the Divine Heart of Jesus,” and there Eudes stated that the heart of Jesus is “a furnace of love in regard to the most holy Mother, the flames of which sparkle in marvelous privileges by which he has enriched her.”35 That suggests that what we are looking at in Fig. 3 is the sacred heart of Jesus, as Eudes understood it. He was never concerned with portraying a single image of the heart of Jesus per se, 35 Eudes, “Livre 12  : Du Divin Cœur de Jésus,” in Le Cœur admirable, in Œuvres Complètes, vol. 8, p. 213 (translation by the author).

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Fig. 3  : Anonymous, The Sons of Venerable Father Eudes strong in the Heart of Jesus and of Mary, 17th century, public domain.

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Fig. 4  : Depiction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, 1690. Picture Art Collection, Alamy Stock Photo.

as was the case with Alacoque and the Jesuits. This is why, Jean Bainvel, following Letierce, noted that Eudes tended not to differentiate the two hearts, speaking not of “hearts” in the plural, but usually of the “heart of Jesus and Mary,” assuming they were one and the same.36 For Eudes, the heart of Jesus was inextricable from the heart of Mary and from the flame it kindled in the hearts of devotees. But for the nuptial tradition in which the heart of Jesus was exchanged for the heart of his lovers, Christ’s heart was singularly the focus, which developed a very discrete iconography, even as early as Alacoque (fig. 4), as images from her life time and circle at Paray-le-Monial certainly show. Proponents of Eudes’ understanding of the Sacred Heart of Mary have asserted that the two devotions were not at odds with one another, while some prominent Jesuit interpreters of Alacoque’s devotion have insisted on distinguishing them.37 Two features stand out. One is the insistence by Eudes that the heart of Mary is one and the same with the heart of Jesus (see fig. 3)  ; and second, Eudes did not stress the key role of reparations that Alacoque did in her devotion to the Sacred Heart. For those committed to the idea of Mary as co-redemptrice, the pairing of the hearts of Mary and Jesus makes perfect sense. The two suffer together. But in the history of nuptial 36 Bainvel, Devotion to the Sacred Heart, 266. Letierce made this very point, Étude, pp. 111–112. 37 “Introduction,” Eudes, Le Cœur admirable, pp. cxxxviii–cxli.

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mysticism, while the Virgin is always revered, she represents something of a tension between the devotee and Jesus as Bridegroom. The strongly Eucharistic link to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Gertrude of Helfta grew even stronger in Alacoque and is expressed in, among other things, the idea of reparations for sins of neglecting the Eucharist, which some Jesuit critics of Eudes faulted him for ignoring.38 In the image that accompanied the posthumous publication of The Admirable Heart, the Congregation of Jesus and Mary appears at the top (see fig. 3) and displays the heart of Jesus and Mary as a furnace of love. The furnace is a figure much discussed by the mystical tradition since the late Middle Ages. Eudes gave it careful attention in his book, where he developed a complement to the nuptial imagery cultivated from the Song of Songs by women religious since the thirteenth century. He called the Magnificat “the sacred canticle of the very holy heart of the blessed Virgin.”39 In other words, the Magnificat (Luke 1  :42–55) was for Eudes the loving response of the soul of Mary to her divine suitor, God the Father. Earlier in the book, Eudes took up the relation between Mary and God the Father. Quoting Song of Songs 4  : 9 in the Vulgate (“You have wounded [vulnerasti] my heart, my sister, my bride, you have wounded my heart with a glance of your eyes, with one jewel of your necklace”), Eudes asks  : who is speaking here  ? And then answers his own question  : It is the eternal Father. To whom does he address these words  ? It is to the blessed Virgin, whom he calls his Sister and his Spouse…. He says that she wounds his Heart in order to express the very ardent love and the immense and infinite manner in which the heart of the divine Mary is inflamed with respect to this adorable Father, and [to express] the incomprehensible love that he has for his unique and well-loved Daughter.40

Eudes cited Saint Bernardine of Sienna, who praised “that divine love with which the heart of the Virgin burned like a fiery furnace … from this heart, as a furnace of divine ardor, the Blessed Virgin brought forth” her response to God.41 Eudes also quoted Saint Bernardine hailing the heart of Jesus as “a furnace of very ardent love, enflaming and burning the entire universe.”42 This recalls the lowered taper in Fig. 38 For the assertion that the reparation is missing in Eudes, see Letierce, Étude  ; and the reply from a Eudist perspective, “Introduction,” Eudes, Le Cœur Admirable, vol. 6, pp. cxlvi–cxlix. 39 Eudes, Cœur admirable, vol. 8, p. 9 (translation by the author). 40 Ibid., vol. 7, pp. 190–191 (translation by the author). 41 Ibid., vol. 8, p. 10  ; Saint Bernardine of Sienna, Sermon 9, De Visitatione et Septem Verbis B.M.V. Serm. ix. (Op. tom. iv.) (translation by the author). 42 Eudes, Cœur admirable, vol. 8, p. 208 (translation by the author).

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3, placed beneath the orb in order to ignite it with divine love. A caption beneath the image as it appears in the sixth volume of Eudes’ Collected Works alludes to this  : “The sons of V[enerable] P[ère] Eudes taking from the heart of Jesus and Mary the fire of divine love to ignite the world.” But for Eudes, the two hearts were joined. He asserted this clearly when he opened the twelfth book of the Admirable Heart, devoted entirely to the heart of Jesus, as follows  : It is not right to separate two things that God has joined so closely by the strongest bonds and by the very tightest knots of nature, of the grace and the glory  : I want to speak of the divine Heart of Jesus, the only son of Mary, and the virginal Heart of Mary, mother of Jesus … These two hearts of Jesus and of Mary are so intimately united that the Heart of Jesus is the principle of the Heart of Mary, as the Creator is the principle of his creature  ; and that the Heart of Mary is the origin of the Heart of Jesus, as the mother is the origin of the heart of her child.43

It seems clear that for Eudes, the sacred Heart of Jesus was part and parcel of the Heart of Mary. Alacoque’s spirituality moved in a different direction. Eudes regarded the nuptial relation to pertain principally to Mary and God the Father, rather than to Jesus and the nun. Perhaps this produced a maternal focus more suitable to a Congregation of priests like Eudes’. It certainly endorsed the popular idea of Mary as co-­redemptrice.

The Company of Jesus and the Sacred Heart of Jesus As the Jesuits worked closely with Alacoque in the last fifteen years of her life, the significance of the devotion came to reside in the salvific significance of the heart, as the very essence of Christ’s compassion, his self-sacrificing act of agape, and the key role of his suffering in the devotion’s recognition of paying reparations for the abuses suffered by the heart of Christ in the Eucharist.44 For Alacoque, the devotion first centered in her mystical relation with Jesus as her spouse and the favors he showed her, reflecting the long tradition of nuptial mysticism. But increasingly, she became focused on the heart’s Eucharistic significance, the importance of reparations, and 43 Ibid., pp. 206–207 (translation by the author). 44 Galliffet, Adorable Heart, p. 61. This is the English translation of the Latin De cultu Sancrosancti Cordis Dei ac Domini nostril Jesu Christi, 1726. The French translation of the Latin text, L’Excellence de la devotion au Cœur adorable de Jésu-Christ, appeared in 1733.

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the role of imagery in establishing and disseminating the devotion among women religious and dispensing among them the blessings promised by the Sacred Heart. In all of this, Alacoque was dedicated to concentrating on the heart itself, as the imagery she endorsed clearly shows. As it took shape in the 1690s following her death, the imagery remained close in spirit to what Alacoque had endorsed, as evident in an engraving that appeared in the Jesuit François Froment’s Veritable adoration du Sacré Cœur du Jesus-Christ, published in 1699 (fig. 5). For a time, the image of the heart continued to be emblematic, a Valentine’s shape encircled by a decorative lacework of thorns, as the heart surrounded by the flatly arrayed lacework of the crown shows. The imagery confirms that for Alacoque the heart was always very clearly the heart of Jesus and his alone. It was this heart that had come to her in the special favors of the mystical union of sponsus and sponsa. None of the ambivalence that moves through Eudist iconography is present. After her death, the Jesuits continued to treat the heart as the singular focus of the devotion and regarded Alacoque’s mystical favors as endorsing the new devotion, which they labored to show was not new, but rooted in the past and authoritatively established by Christ in the life of Alacoque. The heart was both a mechanism of creating memory of the devotion and making devotional practice a memorial practice. Gradually, devotion to the heart shifted from the nuptial tradition of the Canticles to devotional practice of recognizing one’s own sins as the cause of Christ’s suffering. Froment’s Veritable adoration du Sacré Cœur offers its readers a chapter on the practice of honoring images of the Sacred Heart, for which he included the image reproduced here (fig. 5). “It will suffice sometimes to consider this Image in the form of contemplation in order to derive some feelings of piety. In gazing on the Heart crowned by thorns, consider the pain that your sins caused it  ; ask its pardon with all the bitterness of which your heart is capable.”45 This visual piety was no longer associated with the amorous features of the nuptial tradition, but now contributed to the important task of recognizing the meaning of Christ’s sacrifice. Froment encouraged the devotee to ask for an exchange of hearts with Jesus not as part of a mystical marriage, but as the spiritual life enjoined by Christ’s supreme act of love.46 As the Jesuits focused their energy on shaping the devotion theologically, the fleshly character of the heart came to the fore as a development of the discrete focus on the heart of Jesus, resulting in a new iconography that was quite different. While the nuptial tradition had stressed the amorous character of the heart in figuring the relation of Bridegroom and Bride among women religious, the Jesuits pressed the de45 Froment, Veritable adoration du Sacré Cœur, p. 335 (translation by the author). 46 Ibid., p. 332.

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Fig. 5  : “Now your heart appears to me,” Judges 16  :18, from Père François Froment, SJ, Veritable adoration du Sacré Cœur du Jesus-Christ. Paris  : François Louis Rigoine, 1699, following page 334. Photo  : Author.

votion in a different direction. Where Eudes recoded the image of love to an identity of maternal and filial heart, the Jesuits foregrounded the suffering heart as the focus of the devotion  : an anatomical heart highlighted its literal agonies and their salvific significance as well as the literal correspondence of Christ’s heart to the heart of the devotee. The shift to the anatomical heart as well as the difference of the Eudist understanding of the Sacred Heart was systematically undertaken in the early eighteenth century by Jesuits who laid the groundwork for Alacoque’s beatification. The Jesuit father, Joseph de Galliffet, who had studied under Alacoque’s confessor, Father Claude de la Colombière, composed a massive case for the devotion, first published in 1726, De cultu sacrosancti cordis Dei. There we find the hearts of Jesus and Mary clearly distinguished and anatomically detailed. The images reproduced here (figs. 6 & 7), come from a 1743 edition of the French translation of the Latin original, L’Excellence de la dévotion au Cœur adorable de Jésus-Christ, affirm the Jesuit perspective on the Sacred Heart of Jesus regarding its corporeality and its difference from the devotion promoted by the Eudists. Beneath the image of the heart of Jesus, the caption clearly signals the Jesuit insistence on the organ of the heart as the basis for the devotion  : “The Sacred Heart of Jesus was shown, as we see it here, to the Venerable M. Margaret

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of the Visitation in a vision that she related in the memoire of her life. We have made the divine heart to be engraved in its natural form, the same figure, size, and features of the heart in a human body.”47 The heart of Jesus was to transform if not replace the heart of human devotees, and so its material reality as an actual heart was something that the Jesuits stressed. Eudes, Jesuit criticism maintained, did not treat Christ’s heart as robustly material, but as part of a compact of three aspects  : divine, spiritual, and corporeal.48 The two images appear in a chapter devoted to the imagery of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary, where devotions to each are provided. But Galliffet was careful to avoid confusion with Eudes by offering two distinct devotional exercises, one to the heart of Jesus and one to the heart of Mary. They are not addressed together, but separately. Each was illustrated by the images reproduced here. The two hearts cannot be confused with one another, no matter how sympathetically conjoined they were in suffering. The heart of Jesus is wrapped in a crown of thorns, bears the bleeding wound from the spear of Longinus, and is topped by a cross emerging from the aorta. By contrast, the heart of Mary exhibits only a sword plunged into the same area as the wound in Christ’s heart. Clearly, the imagery is meant to convey that their suffering was shared, but that they were not the same heart. They are rather the organs of two different people, son and mother. Moreover, the Valentine emblem and its Rococo frilliness evident in Fig. 4 have been exchanged for a naturalistic verity. The thorns are no longer a decorative motif encircling the heart, but now a tautly wound set of cords binding the organ of the Savior and tearing at its flesh. The wound is an anatomically accurate slit into the meat of the heart, not an oblong shape stretching from one side of the Valentine to the other, as we see in Fig. 4. The Jesuits made a point of ignoring or marginalizing Eudes in the process of building the case for the official recognition of the Sacred Heart and in promoting the cause of Alacoque for beatification. Among the dozens of theologians, church fathers, nuns, and mystics whom Galliffet marshalled in his detailed defense of the devotion, he made only one reference to Jean Eudes in a long chapter on Mary’s heart, referring to him as “an eminent client of the Sacred Heart of Mary.”49 Monsignor Jean-Joseph Languet de Gergy, bishop of Soissons, made no reference to Eudes in his Life of the Venerable Margaret Mary, a biography published in 1729 to promote Alacoque’s cause for beatification.50 The marginalization is telling, and there were several reasons for it. The putative confusion of Mary’s heart with the heart of Jesus was one. Another was 47 Galliffet, L’Excellence de la devotion, caption of image, following page 280 (translation by the author). 48 See Hamon, Histoire de la Dévotion au Sacré-Cœur, vol. 3, pp. 177–209. 49 Galliffet, Adorable Heart, p. 253. 50 Mgr. Languet, Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marguerite-Marie.

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Fig. 6  : Sacred Heart of Jesus, in Joseph de Galliffet, L’Excellence de la devotion au Cœur adorable de Jesus-Christ. Lyon  : Henri Declaustre, 1743, following page 280, public domain.

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Fig. 7  : Immaculate Heart of Mary, from Joseph de Galliffet, L’Excellence de la devotion au Cœur adorable de Jesus-Christ. Lyon  : Henri Declaustre, 1743, following page 290, public domain.

Eudes’ silence on reparations and their importance for understanding the Eucharistic relevance of the Sacred Heart for Alacoque and the urgency of frequent communion as a primary means of dispensing grace. And like Alacoque, Galliffet also stressed the key importance of displaying images of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as an explicit revelation of Jesus to Alacoque.51 The revelatory nature of Alacoque’s visions of the Sacred Heart were what came to distinguish between Eudes and Alacoque  : whereas Eudes was moved by the inspiration of his personal piety, Alacoque was propelled on a mission that was divinely directed by the revelations she received.52

51 Galliffet, Adorable Heart, 279–80  : “Jesus Christ was pleased to declare in a revelation recorded by Mother Margaret Mary, that the picture of His Heart was a cause of delight to Him, that He desired it to be exposed for the veneration of the faithful, and that He would shed abundant blessings on the places where it was venerated, and on those who honored it.” 52 Discussed in Letierce, Étude, pp. 109–110.

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But it appears that the Eudists were not happy with the Jesuit bias against their founder. An image that was probably painted sometime in the opening decades of the eighteenth century may register their discontent (fig. 8). It is quite evident that this image borrowed the motif of the engraving of Mary and the infant Jesus in a flaming heart (see fig. 3). I have not been able to determine a date or a painter, but there is enough evidence to suggest something about its purpose. The changes that have been made to the engraving’s contents are striking. The two Eudist acolytes are replaced by two figures, a male saint on the left and a female religious on the right. Who are they and why are they there  ? The male figure wears white robes, which could be Carthusian, but the source of the figure indicates it is the great Cistercian mystic, St. Bernard of Clairvaux (fig. 9).53 This print by Jean Morin, produced as the frontispiece to a Vie de Saint Bernard published in 1648, likely derived from another engraving also produced by Morin, which was itself a copy of a painting of St. Bernard by Philippe de Champaigne.54 In all three, Bernard is shown in the ecstatic grip of a heavenly vision. Only the frontispiece (fig. 9) shows the Song of Songs as the source of inspiration. Since a frontispiece was more likely to circulate in published form than a painting, it is possible that Fig. 9 was the source for Bernard in Fig. 8. In any case, the figure was mildly adjusted for use in Fig. 8. Most notably, Bernard no longer gazes on the biblical text of Fig. 8 or into effulgent clouds as in Champaigne’s original painting. Fig. 8 shows Bernard mystically beholding the Sacred Heart of Our Lady and the Christ Child, the subject of Eudes’ devotion. And the female figure with Bernard in Fig. 8 bears the robes and habit of a Cistercian nun, which, though she was Benedictine, is what Gertrude and her sisters at Helfta had wanted to be. So we may assume the kneeling figure paired with Bernard is Gertrude, who was especially fond of Bernard’s writings, especially his famous set of sermons on the Song of Songs. If I am correct about this, this painting is a visual rejoinder from the Eudists, using a modified version of their own image to correct the Jesuit project of identifying the Sacred Heart with Alacoque and creating a narrative of memory that marginalized Jean Eudes. By invoking the authority of Bernard and Gertrude, the earliest promoters of heart piety, the Eudist patrons of Fig. 8 wanted to anchor the heart of Mary and Jesus in older literature and authority than Alacoque. Eudes himself had first read about the Sacred Heart of Jesus as a young Oratorian in the work of Gertrude,

53 The Carthusian engagement in the history of the Sacred Heart is considerable, and much older than Alacoque’s time. For a discussion, see Nabert, “La trace cartusienne.” 54 Philippe de Champaigne’s original portrait of Saint Bernard appears to have been lost. François Vincent Latil produced a copy of it. In addition to the engraving reproduced here, the other engraving of Champaigne’s portrait is also by Morin, and is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

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Fig. 8  : Anonymous, Heart of Jesus and Mary, with Saints Bernard and Gertrude, early 18th century. Boyadjian Collection, inventory no. FB 512, Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels, Belgium.

Mechthild, Bernard of Clarivaux, and the Carthusian writer Johannes Lansperigus, who had published the first Latin edition of Gertrude’s Life and Revelation in 1536, among others.55 By 1640, Eudes had fixed on the heart of Mary as the vehicle for understanding his focus on divine love. And in The Admirable Heart, he mentioned Gertrude’s mystical devotion to the heart and drew on Bernard’s devotion to the Virgin as authoritative support for honoring the heart of Mary.56 Fig. 8 urges that the combined energies of Jesus and Mary are the source of divine love that will enflame the world, not in the form of a nuptial mysticism favored by women religious, and drawing directly from the Song of Songs for authority and inspiration, but on the mystical vision of the Mother of God, which suited Eudist priests much better than mystical marriage to Jesus. There may also be an ecumenical claim at work in the Eudist program image. ­Eudes opened his discussion of St. Bernard in The Admirable Heart by noting that “the innumerable favors with which the Mother of God has honored all the religious orders that are in the Holy Church, principally those that are specially consecrated to 55 Bainvel, Devotion to the Sacred Heart, p. 261. 56 Eudes, Le Cœur admirable, vol. 7, pp. 267–272, 380–82, 502–04  ; vol. 8, pp. 295–297.

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David Morgan Fig. 9  : Jean Morin, Saint Bernard, after Philippe de Champaigne  ; frontispiece to La Vie de Saint Bernard. Paris  : Antoine le Maitre, 1648. © RMNp-Grand Palais/Art Resource, NY.

her, are so many voices that preach to us the kindness and affections of her maternal heart towards her children.”57 Thus, the image asserts the universal grounds of Marian devotion and corrects its sectarian appropriation by the Jesuits by arguing what the Eudists wanted to claim was its proper genealogy  : Cistercian, Benedictine, Eudist, and much more. In his book, Eudes cited and praised Carthusians, Bernardines, Dominicans, and Augustinians, among others as contributing vital testimony to the history of the devotion. Fig. 8 contends therefore that adoration of the heart of Jesus consisted of multiple witnesses, not just Alacoque and the Jesuits. And the image re-asserts the inextricability of the hearts of Jesus and Mary as a single heart. Facing opposition all around, and eventually suffering expulsion and suppression in the eighteenth century, the embattled Jesuits were less inclined to hymn the praises of ecumenism. At the end of the nineteenth century, Letierce contended that only the Jesuits were the choice of Jesus to conduct devotion to his Sacred Heart to the world. And, he pointed out, none of the new congregations such as the Eudists or the Oratorians, for example, “found themselves to be predestined as collaborators” of

57 Ibid., vol. 7, p. 267 (translation by the author).

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Fig. 10  : Ferdinand Delamonce, They will come and adore, frontispiece, Joseph de Galliffet, De culti sacrosancti cordis dei, 1733, public domain.

the Sacred Heart.58 And contrary to what one might have expected would be divine preference for the older orders such as the Dominicans or the Franciscans, it was on a “son of Ignatius” that Christ’s choice fell, Father Colombière, who served as Alacoque’s confessor. Letierce quoted Émile Bougaud, Bishop of Laval and church historian, who, in his Life of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, asserted that Colombière’s selection was Providence’s way of compensating the Company of Jesus for the valiant services it had rendered in the middle of the sixteenth century against the Protestant heresy and in the seventeenth against the Jansenism.59 For at least some Jesuits, the Sacred Heart was a divine gift to their order, a view that helps us understand the tenacious way in which they defended and promoted Alacoque’s cause as their own. The Jesuits called on an alternative crowd of witnesses than did the Eudists to make their point. Focusing on the image of the flaming Valentine’s heart of Eudist iconography throws into relief the shift undertaken by the Jesuits. The Jesuits were headed in a different direction. That is clear in Fig. 10, which served as the frontis58 Letierce, Étude, p. 37 (translation by the author). 59 Ibid., 41. Bougaud’s Histoire de la Bienheuruse Marguerite-Marie was translated into English as The Life of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, see p. 113.

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piece of the 1733 French translation of Galliffet’s 1726 De cultu sacrosancti cordis Dei. The heart floats effulgently among a host of angels, a pope, a bishop, a monk, a king, and a soldier, who gather to worship as the Church, which one nineteenth-century ­Jesuit writer called “the most affectionate spouse of the Savior.”60 It is critical to note this shift in spouses – from the nuptial mysticism of a cloistered nun to ecclesia, the Church-universal. Accordingly, the heart is no longer an emblem of Amor, but a corporeal organ, the very stuff of the Eucharist. The caption, “they will come and adore,” commands the future of the devotion by alluding to its past, specifically to the Gospel of Matthew’s account of the Magi who found the newborn child and “adored him” (adoraverunt eum, 2  : 11). But the caption also recalls the seventeenth-century Latin hymn attributed to King João IV of Portugal, translated into the familiar Christmas carol as “O Come, let us adore him” (venite, adoremus). It is a text referring to the Nativity, and therefore to the Incarnation as the biblical basis for the future of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. If that is correct, then Galliffet substituted for the emblem of a nuptial mysticism the biological organ in order to register the devotion’s emphasis on the incarnation, and therefore helped move the devotion from the margins of a religious order to the center of the Catholic faith. References Alacoque, Margaret Mary. The Autobiography of Saint Margaret Mary Alacoque, tr. The Sisters of the Visitation. Rockford, Illinois  : TAN Books, 1986. Anon. “Devotion to the Sacred Heart.” The Messenger of the Sacred Heart 2, no. 2 (February 1867)  : pp. 39–45. Bainvel, Rev. J. V., S.J. Devotion to the Sacred Heart  : The Doctrine and its History, tr. E. Leahy. London  : Burns Oates and Washbourne, 1924. Bernard of Clairvaux. Commentary on the Song of Songs, tr. Matthew Henry. Altenmünster, Germany  : Jazzybee Verlag Jürgen Beck, 2017. Bernard of Clairvaux. Selected Works, tr. G.R. Evans. New York  : Paulist Press, 1987. Bougaud, Émile. Histoire de la Bienheuruse Marguerite-Marie, 3rd ed. Paris  : Librairie Poussielgue Frères, 1875. Bougaud, Émile. The Life of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, tr. A Visitandine of Baltimore, Mary­ land. Charlotte, NC  : TAN, 2012. Bynum, Caroline Walker. “Women Mystics in the Thirteenth Century  : The Case for the Nuns of Helfta.” Id. Jesus as Mother  : Studies in the Spirituality of the High Middle Ages. Berkeley  : University of California Press, 1982, pp. 170–261. Eudes, Jean. Le Cœur admirable de la trés sacrée Mère de Dieu, ou la Dévotion au trés saint

60 Anon., “Devotion to the Sacred Heart”, p. 39.

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Cœur de la Bienheureuse Vierge Marie. In Œuvres Complètes du Vénérable Jean Eudes, 12 vols. Paris  : Gabriel Beauchesne, 1908, vols. 6–8. Froment, François, SJ. La Veritable adoration du Sacré Cœur du Jésus-Christ. Paris  : François Loüis Rigoine, 1699. Galice, Père Jean Augustin. La Vie de la vénérable mère Anne Marguerite Clément, première supérieure du monastère de la Visitation de Sainte-Marie de Melun. Paris  : Coignard, 1686. Gallicio, Giovanni Agostino. Ideae divinae benignitatis in serva sua Anna Margarita Clemente, sanctimoniali Visitationis beatae Mariae. Lyons  : L. Arnaud and P. Borde, 1669. Galliffet, Joseph de. The Adorable Heart of Jesus, tr. R.S. Dewey, SJ. Philadelphia  : Messenger of the Sacred Heart, 1890. Galliffet, Joseph de. L’Excellence de la devotion au Cœur adorable de Jésu-Christ. Lyon  : Henri Declaustre, 1743. Hajnal, Père Mathias. Le Livre des Amants du Sacré Cœur de Jésus. Vienna  : Michel Rickhes, 1629. Hamon, Auguste SJ. Histoire de la Dévotion au Sacré Cœur, 5 vols. Paris  : Gabriel Beauchesne, 1923–1939. Høystad, Ole M. A History of the Heart. London  : Reaktion, 2007. Languet, Mgr. Jean-Joseph. La Vie de la Vénérable Mère Marguerite-Marie, 5th ed. Paris  : Perisse Frères, 1853. Letierce, Père Edmond, SJ. Étude sur le Sacré Cœur. Paris  : Imprimerie de Nôtre-Dame des Prés, 1890. Mallery, Carel van. Cor Jesu Amanti Sacrum. Antwerp  : J. Galle, 1628. Nabert, Nathalie. “La trace cartusienne de la dévotion au cœur du Christ” Revue des Sciences Religieuses 84, no. 3 (2010)  : pp. 359–371. Newman, Barbara. “Love’s Arrows  : Christ as Cupid in Late Medieval Art and Devotion.” The Mind’s Eye  : Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages. Ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché. Princeton  : Princeton University Department of Art and Archaeology, 2006, pp. 263–286. Raymond of Capua, Blessed. The Life of St. Catherine of Siena, tr. George Lamb. Charlotte, NC  : TAN Books, 2011. Ronco, Alberto. Fortezza Reale del Cuore Humano. Modena  : Cassian, 1628. Gertrude the Great and the Religious of Her Monastery. The Life and Revelations of Saint Gertrude the Great, translated by the Poor Clares of Kenmare. Charlotte, North Carolina  : TAN Books, 2002. Mechthild of Hackeborn and the Nuns of Helfta. The Book of Special Grace, translated by Barbara Newman. New York  : Paulist Press, 2017. Mechthild of Magdeburg. The Flowing Light of the Godhead, translated by Frank Tobin. New York  : Paulist Press, 1998. Wright, Wendy M. Sacred Heart  : Gateway to God. Maryknoll, NY  : Orbis Books, 2001.

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Images “Now your heart appears to me,” Judges 16  :18, from Père François Froment, SJ, Veritable adoration du Sacré Cœur du Jesus-Christ. Paris  : François Louis Rigoine, 1699, following page 334 (fig. 5). Anonymous, Heart of Jesus and Mary, with Saints Bernard and Gertrude, early 18th century. Boyadjian Collection, inventory no. FB 512, Royal Museums of Art and History, Brussels, Belgium (fig. 8.). Anonymous, Offering of the Heart, ca. 1400–10, wool and silk tapestry. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (fig. 1.) Anonymous, The Sons of Venerable Father Eudes strong in the Heart of Jesus and of Mary, engraving, 17th century. Reproduced in Œuvres Complètes du Vénérable Jean Eudes, vol. 6. Paris  : Gabriel Beauchesne, 1908, frontispiece (fig. 3). Christ-Cupid fires arrows in to a Human Heart, from Carel van Mallery’s edition of Antoine Wierix, Cor Jesu Amanti Sacrum (1595), published in Antwerp by J. Galle, 1628 (fig. 2). Delamonce, Ferdinand. They will come and adore, frontispiece, Joseph de Galliffet, De culti sacrosancti cordis dei, 1733  ; reused as frontispiece in L’Excellence de la devotion au cœur adorable de Jesus-Christ, French translation, Lyon  : Henri Declaustre, 1743 (fig. 10). Depiction of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, 1690. Picture Art Collection (fig. 4). Immaculate Heart of Mary, in Joseph de Galliffet, L’Excellence de la devotion au Cœur adorable de Jesus-Christ. Lyon  : Henri Declaustre, 1743, following page 290 (fig. 7). Morin, Jean. Saint Bernard, after Philippe de Champaigne  ; frontispiece to La Vie de Saint Bernard. Paris  : Antoine le Maitre, 1648 (fig. 9). Sacred Heart of Jesus, in Joseph de Galliffet, L’Excellence de la devotion au Cœur adorable de Jesus-Christ. Lyon  : Henri Declaustre, 1743, following page 280 (fig. 6).

Stefan Laube

Heart and Vial as Communicating Tubes Notes on the Imagery of Vessels in Early Modern Times What does it mean when a heart or a vial appears in an engraving, and this in the 16th and 17th centuries, in the Emblematic Age  ?1 And what does it mean when the semantics of these geometrical forms get multiplied as soon as they are visibly filled  ? It seems that in early modern cultures of knowledge and piety, the vial and the heart are powerful signs.2 Thus, two contemporary spiritualities emerge, one biblically oriented and one that takes into account nature and its materialities. The common feature of these spiritualities is that they are often expressed in sequences of images, so that the steps of meditation for the pious and the stages of transmutation for the adepts are better anchored in memory. The article analyses the expressiveness and the validity of such heart representations and builds a bridge to the pictorial language of alchemy, in which the glass vial plays an outstanding role. In it, not only matter should be redeemed, but also the human being who experiments with it. As soon as we come across a vial or a heart that exposes a pictorial content in its geometric design, we are above all dealing with a figure that arouses the memory through human perception. Memory is conceptualised as a complex and multilayered mechanism of establishment, use, and transformation of practices of visualization, perception and meditation by different agents – Catholic and Protestant theologians, alchemists, philosophers – especially inasmuch as iconographic memory fluctuates between stability and polyvalence.

Heart as a Sign – Heart as an Organ Everyone is probably familiar with the heart as a visual sign  ; everyone can paint it. It will undoubtedly be a curved figure  : two rounded humps at the top, which taper and meet at the bottom, signifying in many contexts love, feeling and tenderness. Even in 1 At that time, it was believed that every phenomenon shares some similarities which, in a multi-stage process, depict the whole. See Ashworth, “Natural History and the Emblematic World View”  ; Praz, Seventeenth Century Imagery  ; Warncke, Sprechende Bilder – Sichtbare Worte. 2 Stafford, Symbol and Myth.

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the age of its transplantability, the heart in our global civilization remains an ubiquitous symbolic organ of humanity and affection.3 On the keyboards of our smartphones and laptops, as an indicator of our inner states, one can easily create various heart symbols, in all possible colors, broken or pierced with arrows, all of which are easily understandable in the broad socio-cultural context of its contemporary usage. In most world cultures, the heart plays a central role in human relationships. Its meaning goes far beyond the reference to a specific organ in the body  : the heart often refers to the innermost nature of a person’s character, her ‘spirit’ or ‘soul’ in the broadest sense. In biblical language and theological anthropology, not only feeling, but also wanting and thinking have their seat – often hidden – in the heart.4 It is not easy to trace the development of the heart shape. Its history is one of plural codifications creating a space of memory, from which polyvalent constructions of meaning could be deduced.5 The relationship between form and meaning, signifier and signified, the visible and the invisible fluctuated between containment and openness. The heart shape can be traced back to Mycenaean tombs excavated by Heinrich Schliemann.6 Evidence of playing cards with the heart symbol in the late 15th century indicates that the heart symbol was widespread in large parts of society at that time already. At the same time, some devotional images depicted damaged hearts, with puncture wounds made realistic by a real cut in the paper, as can be seen in the famous little image “The Sacred Heart” from the Albertina in Vienna.7 The physical wound inflicted to Christ’s side by Longinus’ piercing lance becomes the portal through which the believer enters into his love. Christ’s ‘Sacred Heart’ became one of the most central images in Christian piety in popular devotional books, in particular as the focal point in mystical piety.8 Henry Suso, along with his contemporaries Johannes Tauler and Master 3 Høystad, A History of the Heart  ; Schipperges, Welt des Herzens  ; Kruse and von Plessen, Von ganzem Herzen  ; Sloterdijk, “Herzoperation oder  : Vom eucharistischen Exzeß”  ; Pigeaud  : “Cœur organique, cœur metaphorique”  ; Deneke, Sprache der Herz-Operateure. 4 Martin Kemp has pointed out that in the prophecies of Jeremiah in the Old Testament, in his famous lamentations, the heart is invoked no less than sixty-six times. Kemp, “Heart”, in Christ to Coke  ; Seifert, “‘Erforsche mich, Gott, und erfahre mein Herz…’ Das Herz in Theologie und Frömmigkeit”. 5 See Franziska Metzger’s article in this volume. 6 Vonessen, “Das Herz in der Naturphilosophie”  ; Bräm, “Vom Herzen. Ein Beitrag zur systematischen Ikonographie”  ; Kemp, “Heart”. 7 Lentes, “Körper schafft Heil”, p. 152. This heart picture is used as the cover for Georges Didi-Huberman’s L’image ouverte (Paris  : Gallimard, 2007). What could that mean  ? There is no image without opening. And often, the open image reveals a fundamental dissemblance. One seeks similarity not in the resemblance with the forms of the real, but in the matter  : in the moods of a body suffering in the act of martyrdom, that is, in the spectacular repetition of the sufferings of Christ. 8 Bräm, “Vom Herzen. Ein Beitrag zur systematischen Ikonographie”, pp. 169–175.

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Fig. 1  : Juriaan oder Jurr Pool, Anatomics among themselves with a heart, 1699, Leiden, Museum Boerhaave.

Eckart, was occupied throughout his life by the tension between the transcendence of the divine and its medial presence in this world.9 Suso desired from God a “[…] permanent mark of our mutual love, that I am yours and that you are my heart’s eternal affection, a testimony that no loss of memory could ever eradicate.”10 Intuitively, Suso grasped what needed to be done. He took a stylus and carved Jesus’ nomen sacrum, IHS, directly into the flesh above his heart. Although he bled, he felt no pain. After the wound healed, “[the name] remained on his heart, and whenever the heart beat, the name moved with it.”11 Until the Renaissance, the figure of the heart was nothing more than a sign with its symbolic meaning – a geometrical stylized image consisting of two symmetrical semicircles converging at the bottom in a point in order to express a bond of affection. This heart symbol, however, looked quite different from the actual organ in people’s bodies, which was faithfully depicted for the first time in that period in graphics in

  9 See also Webb, Medieval Heart. 10 Seuse, Deutsche mystische Schriften, pp. 26–27 (translation by the author). 11 Ibid (translation by the author). I would like to thank Gia Toussaint for this reference in her talk “Heart and Cross in the Works of Henry Suso”, at the CIHA, Florence, September 2019  ; see also Braungart, “Schmerzgedächtnis – Körperschrift”, pp. 364–365.

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anatomical treatises and in representative paintings from the university milieu (fig. 1). “One has glorified the heart as the sun, even as the king, while upon closer examination one finds nothing but a muscle,”12 said Nicolaus Steno (Niels Stensen) – a Danish physician, anatomist and geologist who made a career as a convert in the Curia  – with disparaging sobriety.13 However, the pictographic heart is similar enough to the ­anatomical heart – albeit remotely – to make it recognizable. We know by perceptual instinct and pictographic custom how such schematized visual signs work – as iconographic memory.14 A similar schematization for easier recognition was applied to the vessels that alchemists handle. In illustrated works and manuscripts, a wide range of various devices is often portrayed as the telling pear-shaped glass vial, which suitably served as stage for pictures. As already stated, the heart as a pictorial symbol reveals the hidden state of the human mind  : the invisible inner state is made at least partially visible, comprehensible. It is hardly surprising that the heart is present in the universal pictorial scripts that circulated among scholars during the Renaissance. The motif can already be found in the mysterious work of Horapollo, the Hieroglyphica discovered by humanists of the early Renaissance,15 dating from late antiquity, as an inflamed heart on a burning censer, which probably represents a sacrificial altar.16 The meaning of the sign is debated  : Egypt, fervent prayer, immortality. Such heart images can certainly be seen in the context of the (then almost fashionable) attempts of scholars – from Jan Amos Comenius to John Wilkens – to develop a universal language consisting of signs that functioned according to spontaneous mechanisms of pictorial effect as codified memorial mode.17 It was a matter of bringing res and verba together better, compared to what had been the case before then, by means of a pictogram.18 Not only heavenly 12 Nicolaus Steno, Nicolai Stenonis Opera philosophica, ed. Wilhelm Maar (Copenhagen  : Vilhelm Tryde, 1910), quoted in Schipperges, Welt des Herzens, pp. 63–64 (translation by the author). 13 This disillusioned view of the heart as a muscle did not prevent him from choosing a traditional emblem with a black cross and a red heart at its centre as Auxiliary Bishop of Münster. See Sobiech, Herz, Gott, Kreuz. 14 A minimal level of resemblance is enough, as we see repeatedly with other iconic images  : we have no trouble in seeing two dots, a vertical line, and a curved, horizontal one within a perfect circle as the head of a happy person. 15 Horapollo, Zwei Bücher über die Hieroglyphen. 16 Book 1/22. In the literature, there is a drawing that is attributed – probably mistakenly – to Albrecht Dürer. 17 Weststeijn, “From hieroglyphics to universal characters. Pictography in the early modern Netherlands”  ; Schadel, Sehendes Herz (cor oculatum) – zu einem Emblem des späten Comenius. 18 Dutch has a beautiful contemporary term for pictograms  : “bildletteren”. The fact that Latin was becoming less and less important as a world language at that time could have fuelled these efforts. The produc-

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love can be expressed through the emblem of the heart, but also its very earthly variant, which can be just as passionate since it causes suffering. In the age of the Baroque, one could unproblematically combine erotic allusions with religious virtue. Particularly in devotional literature from around 1600, the heart ensemble became the much-used vocabulary of an elaborate pictorial language – among both Catholics and Protestants.19 The cover picture of the work Pia desideria (Antwerp 1624) by the Belgian Jesuit Herman Hugo shows a winged heart (fig. 2), designed as a vessel in which there is a flame.20 It is undoubtedly one of the most widespread works of Baroque emblematics.21 What does the phrase “Baroque emblematics” actually mean  ? Not least something like a universally applicable visual language. Like no other symbol, the heart is predestined to convey the relationship between human beings and God in all its different facets at a glance. Incidentally, the polyglot author, Herman Hugo, was very interested in establishing a lingua franca based on images and on the power of pictographic memory. Thanks to the reports of the Jesuits, he was also familiar with the sign systems of non-European cultures. He therefore noticed that the Chinese wrote with brushes that Europeans used exclusively for painting.22 The ideal of universal comprehensibility may have inspired the author of what is probably the first systematic study of writing from its beginnings to the printed book to also write the emblem book Pia desideria and have it richly illustrated by Boetius à Bolswert. The stylized shape of the heart is so generally understandable and omnipresent that hardly any reader of the emblems had to think about this self-evident symbolisation, in contrast to many other visual motifs, whose meaning could not be understood without explanation. The heart also plays a prominent role as a pictorial symbol in the development of the Reformation, for instance in the Luther rose  : in a blue field encircled by a golden ring, the seal shows a white rose with five petals and tion of vernacular-language treatises had increased more and more, the translators became more and more diligent. At the end of the 17th century there was an unprecedented linguistic diversity, which was perceived by many as a Babylonian confusion. 19 Wirth, “Religiöse Herzemblematik”  ; Spamer, Das kleine Andachtsbild vom 15. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert, pp. 149–156  ; Dubois, “Some Interpretations of the Notion of Cœur in Seventeenth-Century France”. 20 With the winged hearts, the call for change has become an image. That hearts can fly is declared by the priest during Mass  : “Lift up the hearts” (Sursum Corda). The faithful reply  : “We have them with the Lord.” 21 Dimler, “Herman Hugo’s ‘Pia Desideria’”  ; Dekoninck, Ad imaginem  ; Höpel and Kuder (eds.), Mundus Symbolicus, pp. 59–63. 22 “When individual letters are qualified to denote not words, but the things themselves, and when all these [letters] are common to all people, then everyone would understand the writing of the various peoples even though each one would call those things by different names.” (translation by the author). Hugo, De prima scribendi origine, p. 60.

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Stefan Laube Fig. 2  : Herman Hugo, Pia Desideria, libri III, Antwerp  : Aertssens, 1629, frontispiece.

sepals, while the centre is occupied by a red heart with a black cross.23 This coat of arms was known above all because it was found on the title pages of many works by Luther. Luther himself called it “a mark of my theology” (“ain merkzeichen meiner theologia”).24 In fact – as shall be shown later – the heart occupies a central position in Lutheran anthropology.

The Heart in the Janus-Faced 17th Century From the perspective of the history of ideas and knowledge, the 17th century can be described as ambiguous.25 At the beginning of the century, a new knowledge paradigm, characterized by empiricism, experimentation and intersubjectivity, began to establish itself. On the other hand, there were pictures based on analogies, symbols and signs which were often ambitious in their aim to find out what holds the world 23 Conermann, “Luther’s Rose”  ; Pastoureau, “Heraldique du cœur (XIIe–XVIe siècle)”. 24 Luther in a letter to Lazarus Spengler dated 8 July 1530, WA, Luthers Briefwechsel, vol. 5, p. 444. 25 Principe, The Scientific Revolution.

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together at its core.26 Even though, in retrospect, a rational and objective field of knowledge increasingly gained prominence, the alternative was always to delve into one’s own self in search of correspondences between the microcosm and the macrocosm. It is interesting to note, at this point, that both the representatives of the objective and those of the subjective approach to knowledge eagerly resorted to the heart metaphor in order to illustrate their methods.27 For example, William Harvey, who discovered blood circulation in animals and humans through anatomical studies, compared the planets orbiting the Sun and receiving life-giving energy from it to the blood circulating around the heart  : “The heart, consequently, is the beginning of life  ; the sun of the microcosm, even as the sun in his turn might well be designated the heart of the world  ; for it is the heart by whose virtue and pulse the blood is moved, perfected, and made nutrient, and [the heart] is […] indeed the foundation of life, the source of all action.”28 Similarly, in his revolutionary planetary studies, Johannes Kepler, astronomer and mathematician with an affinity for the mystical, described the sun as the heart around which everything revolves.29 On the other hand, two protagonists of the alternative access to knowledge, both contemporaries of Harvey and Kepler, were Robert Fludd and Jacob Böhme. R ­ obert Fludd was a prominent English Paracelsian physician, astrologer, mathematician, cosmologist, cabbalist and much more. In a diagrammatic representation, man is represented as a microcosm in which the heart (cor) corresponds to the sun (sol).30 Another telling example can be found in the works of Jacob Böhme  – the cobbler and autodidactic philosopher from Görlitz – who experienced the then still new and theologically controversial heliocentrism, with its movement of the planets around a central sun, as spiritual liberation, from which he could derive a dynamic view of the relationship between the world and humanity.31 Although the expansion of the universe into the immeasurable and the juxtaposition of the small existence of human beings to the newly defined cosmos initially aroused feelings of insecurity, fear, and abandonment, Böhme succeeded in revealing direct connections to God by 26 Gloy, “Das Analogiedenken der Renaissance. Seine Herkunft und seine Strukturen”. 27 Vonessen, “Das Herz in der Naturphilosophie”. 28 Harvey, “Of The Quantity Of Blood Passing Through The Heart,” in Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus. See also Gregory, Harvey’s Heart  ; Hamraoui, “L’invention de la pathologie cardiaque entre philosophie et expérience (1628–1749)”. 29 See Rossi, Geburt der modernen Wissenschaft in Europa, pp. 174–175. 30 Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi majoris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia, vol. 2, p. 275. 31 Weeks, Boehme. An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Mystic.

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Stefan Laube Fig. 3  : ­ Jacob Böhme, Representation through a drawing of his Cosmogony in Vierzig Fragen von der Seele, 1620.

seeing the whole of divine creation at work even in the tiny components of nature. In this context, he used terms such as ‘light’, ‘sun’, and ‘heart’ almost synonymously.32 There is a fascinating variety of fancy graphic intepretations of Böhme’s philosophy, but almost all of them were derived posthumously and rather speculatively from his writings by his admirers – with one exception  : the geometric world model of a philosophical sphere. In the tract Psychologia vera, oder Vierzig Fragen von der Seelen, there is a drawing by Böhme himself next to the text (fig. 3). The whole structure can be read in three dimensions, in which the two semicircles represent hemispheres structured by a cross. In the two hemispheres, the dark and the light world face each other, separated and yet dependent on each other, since the world of light is born out of the dark by fire. The quarterings created by the cross indicate the wholeness that consists of Father, Holy Spirit, Son and – remarkably enough – Earth.33 And the heart

32 Already for Cusanus, who lived one and a half centuries before Böhme, God was in everything, and everything was also in God. Ricklin, “Le cœur, soleil du corps  : une redécouverte symbolique du XIIe siecle.” 33 For the Christian traditionalists, it was surprising that Böhme extended the Trinity by including the earth, i.e. materiality.

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is right in the middle of the cross, at the intersection between nature and God  : “The heart on the juncture of the cross means the reason or the center of the deity, so that one learns to distinguish the deity from nature, and Christians learn to understand rebirth, when God was reborn for us in Christ from his heart on the cross […].”34 For Böhme, light is the heart of nature, embodied by the sun, which stands at the centre of the universe. Light is also the heart of the deity itself. Böhme’s new and original ideas – expressions of the variety of constructions of meaning of the heart, of multi-layered textures of memory35 – did not find a home in Lutheran orthodoxy.

Vial as a Tool – Vial as a Living Being – Vial as a Sign Another type of depictions, in alchemical art, deals with a particularly rich spectrum of vessels, namely vials, glass flasks and retorts – containers that were often transparent and in which transmutations took place.36 Goethe’s Faust conveys the impression that such equipment gives right in the opening monologue  : “With boxes round thee piled, and glass, / And many a useless instrument, / With old ancestral lumber blent – / This is thy world  ! a world  ! alas  !”37 What these vessels and laboratories actually looked like still largely remains an open question. We do know that in the Middle Ages scholars used glass retorts and flasks in their laboratories because they made it possible to see what was happening inside. However, this seems to be contradicted by the fact that the glass of that time generally could not withstand heating for long periods of time. It is therefore assumed that the glass flasks were usually encased in a clay jacket, which of course greatly reduced the visual effect. Standard equipment for alchemical experiments seems to have been less the fragile glass vials, and more the robust retort made of copper or cast iron.38 Where does the term ‘vial’ come from  ? No overview of glass art is without reference to a document from 982, with which in Venice the Doge Tribuno Memmo donated the island of San Giorgio to the Benedictines. “Phiolarius Domenico”, a bottle maker, is mentioned in this document. Traditionally, the Venetian lagoon was home to a strictly regulated glassmaking trade, first in Cannaregio, and from the 13th century onwards uniquely on the island of Murano. The trade relations between Venice 34 Böhme, Psychologia vera, oder Viertzig Fragen von der Seelen, p. 32 (translation by the author). 35 See Franziska Metzger’s contribution in this volume. 36 Taylor, “Evolution of the Still”  ; Frietsch, Häresie und Wissenschaft. Eine Genealogie der paracelsischen Alchemie, pp. 235–285. 37 Goethe, Faust I, lines 53–56. 38 Forbes, Short History of the Art of Destillation from the Beginning to the Death of Cellier Blumenthal.

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and the Islamic and Byzantine Orient led to an increase in the quality of production from which the whole of Europe profited. Bottles and beakers were the common products of Venetian glassmakers,39 along with the fiala, an elegant, bellied bottle with a long neck. In his writings on the production of the Philosopher’s Stone, Michael Sendivogius (Michał Sędziwój) from Poland, who was considered a successful and serious goldmaker40 and whose writings were read well into the 18th century, often used the term ‘tool’41, distinguishing between ‘tools of nature’ and ‘tools of art’. Natural tools were dissolving substances, such as water or mercury, as well as volatilising substances, such as fire. Sendivogius considered art tools to be an oven, called Athanor, then an “egg-shaped glass” – which is best made of a transparent, colourless material, tightly closed, and in which Mercury unites with the “Sulphur of Gold” –, as well as an “ash pot” in which the ‘philosophical Egg’ is to be buried.42 The ‘philosophical Egg’, the glass vessel, looked in fact more like a pear, but since the pear had no symbolic meaning in alchemy, the adepts preferred to speak of an egg.43 In such vessels, which were placed on an Athanor, the ‘Mercurius’ or “prima materia metallorum” swirled  : “[…] put it, as it should be, in its clear, translucent and round vessel, well stuffed and closed, through the seal of the hermetic, and let it warm in its well-prepared place, imparting a tempered heat.”44 The purpose of the vessel is to capture the creative power of nature (natura naturans), and the shape of the vessel is essential. For many alchemists, the vessel can do something wonderful  : it was a vas mirabile. Many alchemists followed the motto “Unum est vas” (“One is the vessel”). They were convinced that the whole secret lay in the knowledge about the hermetic vessel. It follows that the alchemical vessel could not be arbitrarily shaped  : as a small cosmos, it had at least to be rounded off. Sometimes, the vessel from which the Philosopher’s Stone is to be born is seen as a kind of ‘matrix’. Many adepts only appeared as experimenters if the vessel had an egg shape. Behind this was the conviction that the probability of the success of creative or birthing processes increased noticeably 39 Zecchin, Vetro e vetrai di Murano. Studi sulla storia del vetro  ; Barovier Mentasti, Il vetro veneziano. 40 The alchemist working for Emperor Rudolf II in Prague became famous when he turned a silver coin into gold before the Emperor’s eyes. The emperor was so impressed that he had a commemorative plaque put up on the Hradschin  : “Let another do what the Pole Sendivogius has done” (translation by the author). Szydło, Water Which Does Not Wet Hands  : The Alchemy of Michael Sendivogius  ; Prinke, “New Light on the Alchemical Writings of Michael Sendivogius (1566–1636)”. 41 Sendivogius, Eines großen Philosophen fünf und fünfzig Briefe den Stein der Weisen betreffend, pp. 70– 72. 42 Ibid., p. 74. 43 Sheppard, “Egg Symbolism in Alchemy”. 44 Sendivogius, Chymische Schrifften, p. 369 (translation by the author).

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Fig. 4  : Johann Daniel Mylius, Anatomia auri sive tyrocinium medico-chymicum, Frankfurt a.M  : Jennis, 1628, Pars V, p. 8.

when the shape of the vessels was based on the shape of an egg or a uterus.45 In general, the relationship between alchemist and vial often appears as a meeting between two rational beings, a fascinating thing-human encounter also staged by poets  : “Hail precious phial  ! Thee, with reverent awe,/Down from thine old receptacle I draw  !/ Science in thee I hail and human art./Essence of deadliest powers, refin’d and sure,/Of soothing anodynes abstraction pure,/ Now in thy master’s need thy grace impart  !”46 Pictures of vessels used in laboratory practices could be found in almost every illustrated treatise on alchemy. The reader often came across schematic images in the style of technical drawings. Concerning the visual language of alchemy, the following is striking  : in late antiquity and the Middle Ages, illustrations in alchemical sources were rare, and they remained largely limited to depictions of devices and simple signs. It was not until the 15th century that there started to appear sophisticated images – often in a series  –, first in illuminated manuscripts,47 and from the middle of the 16th century also in printed works. During this process, a very special vial, a vial as

45 Jung, Erlösungsvorstellungen in der Alchemie, pp. 19–20, 249–250. If the vessel had side necks in which rising vapours were deposited, it would look like a schematised pelican. See illustrations of vessels in animal physiognomies  : della Porta, De Distillationibus libri IX, pp. 42–43. 46 Goethe, Faust I, lines 345–350. 47 Obrist, Les débuts de l’imagerie alchimique (XIVe–XVe siècles).

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a pictorial apparatus, became more and more frequently employed in these illustrations. Transparent containers provided a frame that could be filled, not with empirical but with metaphorical material. In the test tube, chemical reactions could clothe themselves in a dramatic narrative. Substances functioned as allegories, taking on the roles of figures from the Bible and ancient mythology. The main pictorial element in Johann Daniel Mylius’ Anatomia auri, for example, is the vial (fig. 4). The twelve-step process of making the Philosopher’s Stone unfolded in vivid scenes on three panels.48 In the vial as pictorial apparatus, a symbolic and at the same time experimental practice of knowledge seems to have found its icon. What may the picture of the vial signal on a general level  ? That natural processes require protected spaces, especially when they are recreated in the laboratory. This idea still seems valid for today’s science. One only has to think of the origin of life through cell division  : only when molecules come together in the nourishing environment of a cell can the components assembled there participate in the amazing dance that is called life.49 An observation of modern times may lead one to conclude that glass vessels inspired Blumenberg’s “postulate of visibility” (“Sichtbarkeitspostulat”) of experimentally generated knowledge. The test tube, which the scientist inspects in his laboratory, rises to a heroic pictorial motif, since it is supposed to radiate transparency, neutrality and objectivity.50 As elements of series of pictures especially, vials were able to explain the transmutation stages and thus the dynamics of nature far better than texts could, especially when the goal was to keep the working steps in mind.51 Through these vials, a symbolism could unfold that drew from the union of opposites. The motor of development is the conflict of opposites  : solving and binding (solve et coagula), sublimation and condensation, Mercury and Sulphur, Moon and Sun, woman and man, all strive for unification, for coniunctio. Image sequences aimed to capture the production process of the Philosopher’s Stone as a development of a transformation permanently kept in flux by agents. It was a matter of translating the permanent kinetic energy expressed in the dictum solve et coagula, since this key alchemical formula describes something 48 The transparent vial filled with image scenes became a central mode of representation in alchemical manuscripts, as well. On the one hand, the vial appeared as a pictorial form that set the frame for itself as a vessel, as in Donum Dei. More often, however, the vial was filled with images and was embedded in a picturesque background  ; particularly impressive is the splendid alchemical manuscript Splendor Solis. 49 Bryson, A Short History of Nearly Everything, pp. 368–390. 50 See postcard with Louis Pasteur in his laboratory from the year 1885. Espahangizi, “From ‘Topos to Oikos’”. 51 Laube, “Bilder aus der Phiole”.

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that is difficult to grasp  : permanent volatility, i.e. the decomposition, separation or dissolution of a substance and its subsequent reassembling at a higher level. Dissolution and binding continue alternating on the ladder of transformation until one has reached the goal, namely the Philosopher’s Stone.52 Vials reflect nature, which is permanently dynamic. Vials can thus become elastic bubbles.

Vascular Structures and Metaphors A vessel is far more than just a thing. One need not think immediately of the miraculous vessel of the Grail in the legendary tales of the Middle Ages or the mischievous Pandora’s box from antiquity.53 In the thinking of Martin Heidegger, Ernst Bloch and Georg Simmel, the vial seems to be a type of thing particularly suitable for concretizing philosophical thoughts.54 For Heidegger, the container seems to be the thing summarizing everything. The observation of the jug leads him to reflect on the relationship between heaven and earth, mortal and divine, condensed the object that has four dimensions (Geviert).55 As containers and conveyors, these things acquire an ambivalent structure between the inner and the outer, between form and content, between visibility and concealment. Containers are perfect objects for metaphorical thoughts. Human beings seem to be vessels that, from the very beginning, were destined to absorb something. The interaction between inner and outer surface invited metaphorical considerations. Since Plato’s time, ancient philosophy presented the body as the vessel of the soul or spirit. The Bible speaks of a creating God who sees himself as a potter moulding human vessels.56 Human beings are designed so that their inner being must be filled to not feel empty. In a passage in Genesis 2  :7, “then the Lord God formed man from the dust of the ground”, in Hebrew ‘formed’ is yatsar, a word that expresses especially the moulding of a vessel in the hands of a potter. Gender connotations were often dominant when speaking of vessels  : women were considered vessels of life or of the male reproductive power. 52 Even though the detailed chemical transformation process shows a wide range of variation, and in this respect there are hardly two alchemists who follow exactly identical instructions, all experiments are characterized by a typical procedure. One distinguishes four – later three – phases, which differ in colour  : melanosis (blackening), leukosis (whitening), xanthosis (yellowing), iosis (reddening). 53 Egeler, Der heilige Gral. Geschichte und Legende  ; Dora Panofsky and Erwin Panofsky, Pandora’s Box. 54 Simmel, “Der Henkel. Ein ästhetischer Versuch [1923]”  ; Bloch, Geist der Utopie. 55 Heidegger, “Das Ding [1950]”. See also Harman, The Quadruple Objects, pp. 82–95. 56 Rom. 9  :20–21.

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Fig. 5  : Drawing of an anatomical heart, lateral and three-quarter views. Pen and ink drawing attributed to Giulio Romano or one of his followers, between 1500 and 1599 (Rome  ?), London, Wellcome Library, no. 27100i.

As mentioned above, vessels were essential for the core process of alchemy – distillation. The technical term for the container in alchemical sources is vas hermeticum. Even today, the word ‘hermetic’ is still used to describe something firmly closed. The strict demarcation of outside and inside, of everyday life and experiment, was essential for the transmutatory process. Nothing should enter from the outside, nor should anything escape from the inside.57 The heart as an organ was also seen as having a housing structure consisting of different chambers.58 In the 16th century already, the anatomical heart was drawn like a vessel, held by a hand (fig. 5).59 This resulted, with the emblematics, in the human heart with a stylized aorta that acts as a divine channel allowing the entry of the Holy Spirit. The fact that the heart was often depicted as a vessel suggests a number of idioms. In German, for example, one speaks of “pouring out one’s heart” (“Herz ausschütten”) or of an “overflowing heart” (“überquellenden 57 Jung, Erlösungsvorstellungen in der Alchemie, pp. 19–20. It is not uncommon for alchemical knowledge to convey bold theories of creation. From the riddle of transmutation, whole philosophical constructions of thought and worldviews could be deduced. The earth was a large distilling vessel which had been made by the omniscient Creator with his own hands, a Creator emulated by all alchemists, especially the followers of Paracelsus. 58 For Aristotle, the heart is the starting point of the vessels, and the actual seat of the force by which the blood is first fabricated. Ada Neschke-Hentschke, “Le rôle du cœur dans la stabilisation de l’espèce humaine chez Aristote”. 59 The spout of the vessel is shown in the picture (fig. 5) on the right as having three orifices, representing the superior vena cava, the aorta and the trunk of the left and right pulmonary arteries. See also the drawing from Leonardo da Vinci’s notebook of anatomical studies  : Laurenza, Leonardo. Anatomie, p. 157 (fig. 49) and Vesalius, The Heart and Associated Organs, vol. 6 of On the Fabric of the Human Body.

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Herz”). The Bible says  : “For out of the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks.”60 The heart seemed to be an excellent container.

Heart and Vial as Interacting Vessels between Body and Soul The image of the heart and vial creates a separate pictorial field, a frame within the frame, as it is already known in the history of art from the window or mirror motif. With the help of allegories, a stage opens up that makes it possible to see something that is actually barely visible or completely invisible. Such a vessel as pictorial apparatus is of interest to the visual sciences because it deals with natural knowledge or inner contemplation by visual means – a hieroglyphic symbol of the path of salvation –, on the one hand more from the perspective of matter, on the other hand rather from the perspective of soul. In alchemy, the transmutation process is driven by tiny particles. At several stages, it is supposed to create polar tensions pushing for unification.61 In piety – whether Catholic or Protestant – processes of inner purification based on the Holy Scriptures are in the foreground, demanding visualization. And the heart as vessel provides the perfect pictorial symbol for this. As the devotion to the Sacred Heart spread, so did the imagery, appearing in every kind of medium. Particularly inventive is Antonius Wierix’s series of engravings entitled Cor jesu amanti sacrum, published in Antwerp (1585).62 In this series, the soul is symbolized by a heart, which the Child Jesus, as the personification of divine love, makes pious by purifying it  ; Child Jesus then instructs it before uniting himself with it. Another example, from the opposite confessional side, can be found in Daniel Cramer’s Emblemeta Sacra (1617), the first complete series of heart emblems from the Protestant environment.63 In it, the heart is combined with other pictorial motifs or, in other terms, spaces of memory  : hearts in fires, pierced by arrows or swords, with wings, on pillars in the sea, chained to a coffin  ; hearts from which flowers, wheat, trees or crosses grow  ; hearts weighed on a scale, balancing on a pyramid, etc. Through heart motifs, Cramer mostly visualized aphorisms from the Bible. In the twelfth emblem, for example, he uses the saying “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”64 60 Matt. 12  :34. 61 The Philosopher’s Stone was neither made of stone nor gold  ; it was usually described as highly compacted reddish powder. It would have been simple to depict it in this way, but the visual language of alchemy took another direction. 62 Emblem 5, 7, Wierix II, Cor Jesu amanti sacrum (1585)  ; Dekoninck, Ad imaginem, pp. 361–362. 63 Mödersheim, ‘Domini Doctrina Coronat’  : Die geistliche Emblematik Daniel Cramers (1568–1637). 64 Matt. 5  :8.

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In the accompanying medallion, which occupies almost the entire page, there is a view of the city in the background, and in the foreground a heart with eyes, placed on the ground, as it is being watered with a jug held by a hand descending from the sky (fig. 6). At the same time, the eyes of the heart are directed towards the sun, marked with the Hebrew letters for Yahweh. The unusual picture, which nevertheless depicts everyday work in the garden, serves as a reminder to the viewer to keep the famous biblical saying present. The title of the German translation from 1622 mentions explicitly Deutungsbilder,65 i.e. symbols that visualise a proverb or a conceptual context. In any case, this emblematic mechanism of memory between image and writing goes far beyond the 6th-century view of Pope Gregory I, according to whom images convey to the ignorant what writing reveals to the knowledgeable.66 Emblematic knowledge appeals to the emotions and adheres particularly well to memory. At the same time, the image is already part of a rational process of abstraction. In the Lutheran conception of human being, the term ‘heart’ or cor occupies a central position. Thus, it is also possible to present the central dogmas and doctrines of Lutheran theology through emblems with a heart metaphor.67 Cramer’s visual references to the heart bring the dry, abstract knowledge of theology to life. With the increasing establishment of the Lutheran Reformation, an academic theology with a focus on dogmatic debate emerged in the 16th century. Against this academic theology in Lutheranism, a more or less strongly spiritualistic piety movement gradually developed, came to the surface in around 1600 with Johann Arndt, and at the end of the century led to Pietism.68 Nevertheless, all statements that Cramer makes in his emblems about human beings  – their ‘heart’ as their inner being  – thus stand in a clearly defined theological context, without however making them unacceptable to readers of other denominations. Nevertheless, the first edition of Cramer’s Emblemata Sacra made its demarcation from the Jesuits explicit in the wording of the title.69 The striking closeness between a gradually emerging pietism and Jesuit religiosity was to become apparent in the course of the 17th century, especially in the practices of piety around the heart.70 Besides this, the Protestantism of that time had still quite different inflections. At the beginning of the 17th century, Protestantism developed in a direction that cast 65 Cramer, Emblemata Sacra. 66 Brakensiek, “Emblematik und Bildtheologie”, pp. 366–367  ; see also Grove, “Emblem and Impact”. 67 Mödersheim, ‘Domini Doctrina Coronat’  : Die geistliche Emblematik Daniel Cramers (1568–1637). 68 Wels, Manifestationen des Geistes, pp. 13–55  ; Sträter, “‘Wie bringen wir den Kopff in das Hertz  ?’”. 69 Cramer, Societas Jesu et Roseae Crucis vera. 70 On Christian Hoburg’s Lebendige Hertzens-Theologie, see Heijting, “Christian Hoburg’s Lebendige Hertzens-Theologie (1661)”  ; from the Jesuits’ perspective, see Rai, “Spotless Mirror, Martyred Heart”.

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Fig. 6  : Daniel Cramer, Emblemata Sacrorum. Secunda Pars  : Das ist  : Fünffzig Geistlicher in Kupfer gestochener Emblematum in Kupffer gestochen auß der h. Schrifft (…), Frankfurt am Meyn  : Jennis, 1624, p. 61. Fig. 7  : Theophiel Schweighardt [Daniel Mögling], Speculum Sophicum Rhodo-Stauroticum Das ist: Weitläuffige Entdeckung deß Collegii unnd axiomatum von der sondern erleuchten Fraternitet Christ-RosenCreutz (…), (s.l.) 1618 (frontispiece). Fig. 8  : Christi Testamenta, Jacob Böhme, Thesophische Wercke, Amsterdam 1682.

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doubt on the credibility of Christian doctrines exclusively related to texts. Theology and natural history under the sign of the heart entered into a symbiosis with Rosicrucianism, which was strongly influenced by the Paracelsian philosophy.71 On the frontispiece of Theophil Schweighart’s (i.e. Daniel Mögling) Speculum sophicum rhodo-stauroticum, two female personifications face each other in niches under the motto “Ora et labora” (fig. 7). The personification on the right, embodying theology, holds a heart in her right hand which is marked with the letters “Α – Ω”, “Z” and “‫”ה‬ (=Azoth for the elixir of life). The one on the left, who embodies physiology, holds a flaming heart.72 The extraction of the divine spirit from matter is the alchemical parergon, the “preliminary work” which is followed by the enlightenment by the divine spirit in prayer in the ergon, the “actual work”. With this assumption of a divine action in matter, Paracelsianism expresses itself as a specific form of natural piety that consciously and provocatively transcends the limits of confessional theology.73 Deterred by the subtleties of Lutheran orthodoxy, more and more Protestants saw reading the Book of Nature as an alternative to the pure belief in Scripture. This new approach often made use of a metaphorical language inspired by alchemy. The visual world that Jacob Böhme’s philosophy sought to translate in the course of the 17th century seems to unite the visual language of heart and vial.74 The heart of nature, upside down and burning in the fire of wrath, touches the radiant heart from the world above (fig. 8). The lower heart surrounds a tree trunk, which grows from within nature and on whose branches there are two winged, eyed hearts drawn as vessels, one on each side, into which divine rays from the upper heart flow.75 For some people, the laboratory was intended to illustrate the changes and cleansing that took place within the human being  ; others, like Böhme, no longer needed a laboratory at all, and built an entire philosophical scaffolding from the fascination of transmutation. For Böhme, the search for the Philosopher’s Stone is a spiritual process that is fulfilled in the Christian rebirth of the individual, in the reintegration of the fallen Adam. 71 Eidighoffer, Die Rosenkreuzer, pp. 22–26. 72 Simons, “The Flaming Heart”. The physician Daniel Mögling, who was fascinated by the manifestos of the so-called Rosicrucian Brotherhood, the Fama Fraternitatis and the Confessio Fraternitatis from 1614 and 1615 respectively, as well as the Chymische Hochzeit of 1616, added remarkable copper engravings to the Speculum Sophicum Rhodo-Stauroticum (The Mirror of the Wisdom of the Rosy Cross). Neumann, “‘Olim, da die Rosen Creutzerey noch florirt, Theophilus Schweighart genant’”. 73 Wels, Manifestationen des Geistes, pp. 234–252. 74 Zuber, “Thesophische Spekulation und erbauliche Frömmigkeit”. The theologian Adolf von Harleß already pointed out in the 19th century that the content of his works, put into words by Böhme, can be traced back to the sequences of pictures in which the vial played a leading role. Von Harleß, Jakob Böhme und die Alchymisten. 75 It is obvious that the heart bearing an eye refers to the inner eye. Geissmar, Das Auge Gottes.

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Fig. 9a and 9b  : [Paul Kaym/Nicolaus Häublin]. Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiegel (…), Amsterdam/ Danzig, 1680, frontispiece, p. 22.

In works by nonconformist Protestants, the form of the heart in its various variations is prominently represented, such as the simple central heart, the fiery heart.76 Paul Kaym, imperial customs collector in Liegnitz and author of eschatological books, who exchanged views with Böhme on the question of the time of the beginning of the apocalypse, is considered to be the author of the lavishly illustrated Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiegel (“Bright, Shining Heart-Mirror”), in which the heart is shown as a transparent vessel.77 On the title page, there are two hearts within one big heart serving as frame (fig. 9a). In the first one, the Lamb of God is placed on a rock in the surf with the inscription “The New Birth”. Significantly, the heart of the shadow world be-

76 Flames appear from the heart. Folk texts know that love can burn. In the image of the heart, the feeling is made vivid. The blazing fire expresses extreme devotion. See Simons, “The Flaming Heart”. 77 This compilation of devotional texts by mystical authors from the late Middle Ages, such as Johannes Tauler, appeared posthumously in 1680. Geissmar, Das Auge Gottes. Bilder zu Jakob Böhme, pp. 47–48  ; Schott, Magie der Natur, pp. 36–37.

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low, reading “The Old Birth”, is upside down. The treatise became known through the sixteen heart diagrams probably designed by Nikolaus Häublin – remarkable compositions, some of which seem almost surrealistic (fig. 9b). Its main theme was the heart as a virtual stage to unfold the contrast, or rather the reciprocal relationship between the light and shadow worlds. Salvation forces descend through an opening in the sky, and are allegorically visualized in the individual chambers of the heart. The sequence of images describes the path of the heart to mystical enlightenment.

Some More Divergences and Convergences What became a theme in spiritual emblematics through the heart in all its variations is the exuberant and demanding love of God as well as humans’ attempts to do justice to these offers of love. As one can see from Anton Wierex’s heart series of 18 engravings, the human heart is like a fortress against the hostilities of the devil. The situation only changes when the divine child enters the heart.78 The child uses the heart as a place of learning. He establishes a treasure of grace in it and paints in it pictures of the last four things – death, judgment, heaven and hell (fig. 10).79 The motif of the infant also refers to the fact that the infant opens up the world with the help of pictures.80 Whereas love is sexless or infantile in the heart series, the entire creative process of the vials is often staged as a union of the sexes, sometimes even as coitus. In alchemy, what is symbolized by a vial is the build-up of erotic tension between the substances of nature  ; hence the juxtaposition of man and woman, who embody different material principles, namely sulphur and mercury. Their union brings about a refinement of matter and, at the same time, a healing of the human being. Allegorically, transmutation found its crowning conclusion in the union of man and woman, in the reconciliation of sexual dualism. In the versions of Donum Dei, a pictorial manuscript compiled from the 15th century,81 the erotic meeting or copulation of a naked human 78 Newman, “Love’s Arrows  : Christ as Cupid in late Medieval Art and Devotion”. 79 Certainly, the content of the emblem was sometimes not self-explanatory. Rather, the emblematists thought that deciphering the emblem helped with the memorization of it. On the other hand, the solution to the puzzle should not be too difficult. Daly, “Emblem and Enigma. Erkennen und Verkennen im Emblem”. 80 Bannasch, Zwischen Jakobsleiter und Eselsbrücke  ; Laube, “Dinggedächtnis. Johann Amos Comenius’ ‘Orbis pictus’ (1658)”. 81 The booklet with the title Donum Dei from the Herzog August Bibliothek Wolfenbüttel has a very inconspicuous appearance. It is only fifteen centimetres high and eighteen parchment sheets thin. The manuscript is not only remarkable because it describes in twelve steps how to get to the Philosopher’s Stone or because it is so richly illustrated. The manuscript is remarkable above all because it presents

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Fig. 10  : Anton Wierex II, Jesus paints the last four things in the human heart, Engraving. Published by the artist. 1 of 18 plates of the Cor Jesu amanti sacrum, Antwerp 1595. Fig. 11  : Donum Dei, Pergamenthandschrift, 15. Jahrhundert.

couple celebrating a ‘chymical wedding’ (‘chymische Hochzeit’) catches the eye (fig. 11). Rarely had the sexual act been portrayed so plainly. Salacious subjects were allowed when the sexual act was not to be understood literally. Rather, the coniugatio, coniunctio, or even coniugium of philosophical mercury and sulphur is the key idea behind this. Just as man is made of semen and blood, so gold can only come from mercury (menstruum) and sulphur (sperm).82 Alchemy is strikingly characterized by gender analogies. On a terminological level especially, female traits are expressed, for instance in the use of the words, matrix, uterus or menstruum. The earth and its interior is a living being, a mother to be described through gynomorphic metaphors. The religious scientist Mircea Eliade has pointed this out emphatically. Through ritual behaviour and technical skills, human beings are able to release raw ores from the uterus of the earth. In the context of terra mater and petra genitrix, Eliade even speaks of “The World Sexualized” in a chapter heading.83 pictures in the form of a vial. According to the twelve-tiered Opus Magnum, twelve different vial pictures are shown. Limbeck, “Das Opus magnum in zwölf Bildern”. 82 According to Petrus Bonus in his Margarita pretiosa novella, published 1546 in Venice. 83 Eliade, The Forge and the Crucible, p. 34.

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In the spiritual-theological heart emblematics, one will occasionally come across the requisites of alchemy, such as ovens, bellows or retorts – since it was necessary to prepare, shape and even bake the heart. The Nuremberg poet Georg Philipp Harsdörffer, with whom the term Sinnbild originated,84 took up the heart, in Protestantism popularized by Cramer, as an emblem motif in his tract Hundert Geistliche Hertzens-Siegel (“A Hundred Spiritual Heart-Mirrors”), published in the middle of the 17th century.85 In it, vial-like hearts filled with pictures of scenes play a major role – the heart like a seal that is supposed to be impressed on the viewer (fig. 12). In the world of ideas of the Sturm und Drang, the metaphor “heart of glass” emerged.86 In the handwritten version of a heart poem, Jakob Michael Lenz writes “my heart melts to glass” (“schmelzt mein Herz zu Glas”).87 The heart no longer stands only for unity and identity now, but also for fragility and brokenness. Just as the vial, originally a lifeless artefact, can come to life, so the heart, originally a source of life for humans and animals, can stop and become an artefact. On the other hand, it is just as possible to encounter the heart in the pictorial language of alchemy.88 And sometimes, the heart appears in picture and word. In the famous alchemical illuminated manuscript Aurora consurgens, attributed to a pseudo-Thomas of Aquinas, the alchemist prepares for the charity of God  : “Know that you cannot have this science until you purify your mind for God, that is, wipe out all corruption in your heart.”89 The heart stands here for a knowledge that arises from divine inspiration, which is only incorporated by the adept when he proves that he is worthy. The illustration shows two figures, the one on the right offering their heart from within their body (fig. 13). As the symbol of the invisible, the driving force behind the material itself and the elements, the heart contains the entire process of natural creation and artificial alchemical transformation. In this picture, the heart actually has the same origin as the excrements represented by the figure on the left  : faeces, urine, spit, hair – four different kinds, as the elements. But while the second figure refers to the common and ordinary nature of the work, which can be found everywhere, the heart, which is only made visible by breaking the integrity of the body, reveals the pure, hidden matrix underlying the elements.90 84 Höpel, Emblem und Sinnbild. Vom Kunstbuch zum Erbauuungsbuch, pp. 165–166. 85 Arthyrus (= Georg Philipp Harsdörffer), Das erneurte Stamm- und Stechbüchlein. 86 Scholz, “Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz  : An mein Herz/Unser Herz/An das Herz”. 87 Langen, Der Wortschatz des deutschen Pietismus, pp. 71–72, 411 (translation by the author). 88 Pereira, “Il cuore dell’alchimia”. 89 Ps.-Thomas Aquinas, Aurora consurgens, I, X, 5, quoted by Morosow, Erbe des Nikolaus von Kues, p. 97 (translation by the author). 90 Pereira, “Il cuore dell’alchimia”, p. 300.

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Fig. 12  : Fabianus Arthyrus [= Georg Philipp Harsdörffer], Das erneurte Stamm- und Stechbüchlein: Hundert Geistliche Hertzens Siegel/ Weltliche Spiegel/Zu eigentlicher Abbildung der Tugenden und Laster vorgestellet/ und Mit hundert Poetischen Einfällen erkläret Durch Fabianum Athyrum, der loblichen Sinnkünste Beflißnen. Nürnberg: Fürsten, 1654, p. 309.

Fig. 13  : Aurora Consurgens. Zürich.

Alchemy as art consisted of a practical and a speculative element. For the alchemist, working with matter was by no means exclusively pure handicraft  ; he saw it rather as a way to perfect his own soul. Paracelsus spoke of a lower and an upper alchemy  : on the one hand, there was the concrete herbal and metallurgical work, which was to provide valuable foundations for chemistry and pharmacy  ; on the other hand, the transformation of the elements became a mirror of spiritual purification.91 Alchemy became a religious service. In the most extreme case, the Philosopher’s Stone, which dissolves itself in the transformation from impure matter to pure gold, could refer to the resurrection of Christ.92 The Church must have felt challenged, if the adept thought he could act like God and imitate creation.

91 That true transmutation is spiritual transmutation was also the core concern of the famous psychological alchemy interpretation by Carl Gustav Jung, who identified archetypes of humanity in the pictorial figures of alchemy. 92 This parallel is clearly expressed in the alchemical manuscript Buch der heiligen Dreifaltigkeit (Book of the Holy Trinity), when it speaks of a “medicine of Jesus Christ” to be received.

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Stefan Laube Fig. 14  : Giambattista della Porta, Magiae naturalis libri vigenti, Leiden 1644, frontispiece.

Memory as Glue Between Material Union and Spiritual Love Heart and vial are quite similar in their shape  : the heart tapers at the bottom, the vial at the top. Sometimes, heart and vial appear altogether, as on a frontispiece that precedes the Magia naturalis of Giambattista Della Porta (fig. 14). Sun rays form a straight vertical line from the sun to the vessel in the middle and to the heart at the bottom. In the early modern pictorial tradition, heart and vial seem to behave complementarily. When it comes to the inner transformations of human beings and nature, the heart seems to be more responsible for the subjective-spiritual, the vial more for the objective-material. For a long time, in theology, the heart symbol was purely spiritual. It was only in the 20th century that Pierre Teilhard de Chardin developed a cosmic-theological explanatory framework that took account of the material dimensions of the heart metaphor.93 This entanglement of materiality and spirituality had been achieved by the vial much earlier. Descartes, Newton and mechanistic philosophy only gave the thing expansion and mass. For the pictorial language of alchemy, the difference between inner essence and utterance is fundamental in any material 93 Teilhard de Chardin, Das Herz der Materie. Kernstück einer genialen Weltsicht.

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configuration. The things of nature have a deeper meaning, which is expressed by external signs, and the adept can read these signatures of nature. Be that as it may, heart and vial emblematics are a means of expression for inner processes that are not sensually perceptible. The ars memorativa of places (loci) and images (imagines), firmly anchored in the rhetorical canon of antiquity,94 also applies to vials and hearts, especially when they are part of image sequences. Bearing in mind that pictures are easier to remember than texts, complex meditative exercises in dialogue with God or nature can be internalized. Certainly, the common feature of the heart and vial picture series is that both generate an easy-to-remember meaning on an allegorical level. Spiritual transformations in the heart chambers, chemical reactions in the test tube, dressed in a dramatic pictorial narrative, could only be comprehended if one was familiar with the meaning of pictorial signs. References Arthyrus, Fabianus. Das erneurte Stamm- und Stechbüchlein  : Hundert Geistliche Hertzens Siegel/ Weltliche Spiegel / Zu eigentlicher Abbildung der Tugenden und Laster vorgestellet/ und Mit hundert Poetischen Einfällen erkläret Durch Fabianum Athyrum, der loblichen Sinnkünste Beflißnen. Nürnberg  : Fürsten, 1654. Ashworth, William B. “Natural History and the Emblematic World View.” Reappraisals of the Scientific Revolution. Ed. David C. Lindberg and Robert S. Westman. Cambridge  : CUP, 1990, pp. 303–332. Bannasch, Bettina. Zwischen Jakobsleiter und Eselsbrücke. Das ‘bildende Bild’ im Emblem- und Kinderbuch des 17. und 18. Jahrhundert. Göttingen  : V&R unipress, 2007. Barovier Mentasti, Rosa. II vetro veneziano, Milano  : Electa, 1982. Berns, Jörg Jochen and Wolfgang Neuber. “Mnemonik zwischen Renaissance and Aufklärung. Ein Ausblick.” Ars memorativa. Zur kulturgeschichtlichen Bedeutung der Gedächtniskunst 1400–1750. Ed. Jörg Jochen Berns and Wolfgang Neuber. Tübingen  : Niemeyer, 1993, pp. 373–187. Bloch, Ernst. Geist der Utopie. München/Leipzig  : Duncker&Humblot, 1918. Böhme, Jacob. Psychologia vera, oder Viertzig Fragen von der Seelen. Amsterdam  : Jansson, 1632. Bräm, Andreas. “Vom Herzen. Ein Beitrag zur systematischen Ikonographie.” Micrologus. Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 11 (2003)  : pp. 159–192.

94 Yates, The Art of Memory  ; Neuber, “Locus, Lemma, Motto. Entwurf zu einer mnemonischen Emblematiktheorie”  ; Berns and Neuber, “Mnemonik zwischen Renaissance and Aufklärung. Ein Ausblick”  ; Strasser, Emblematik und Mnemonik der Frühen Neuzeit im Zusammenspiel  : Johannes Buno und Johann Justus Winckelmann.

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Brakensiek, Stephan. “Emblem und Bildtheologie.” Handbuch der Bildtheologie in vier Bänden. Vol. 3. Ed. Reinhard Hoeps. Paderborn  : Schöningh, 2014, pp. 356–376. Braungart, Georg. “Schmerzgedächtnis – Körperschrift.” Meditation und Erinnerung in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. Georg Kurz. Göttingen  : Vandenhoek&Ruprecht, 2000, pp. 357–366. Bryson, Bill. A Short History of Nearly Everything. A Journey through Space and Time. London  : Black Swan, 2016. Conermann, Klaus. “Luther’s Rose. Observations on a Device in the Context of Reformation Art and Theology.” Emblematica 2 (1987)  : pp. 1–60. Cramer, Daniel. Emblemata Sacra, Das ist  : Fünfftzig Geistliche in Kupffer gestochene Emblemata, oder Deutungsbilder, aus der Heiligen Schrifft, von dem süssen Namen vnd Creutz Jesu Christi. Franckfurt am Mayn  : Palthenius, 1622. Cramer, Daniel. Societas Jesu et Roseae Crucis vera  : Hoc est Decades quattuor Emblematum Sacrorum ex Sacra Scriptura, de dulcissime nomine et cruce Iesu Christi. Frankfurt am Mayn  : Impensis Lvcae Iennis, 1617. Daly, Peter M. “Emblem and Enigma. Erkennen und Verkennen im Emblem.” Erkennen und Erinnern in Kunst und Literatur. Ed. Dietmar Peil, Michael Schilling, and Peter Stroh­ schneider. De Gruyter  : Berlin 1998, pp. 325–350. Dekoninck, Ralph. Ad imaginem. Status, functions et usages de l’image dans le litterature spiri­ tuelle jesuite du XVIIe siècle. Genève  : Droz, 2005. della Porta, Giambattista. De Distillationibus libri IX. Straßburg  : Zetzner, 1609. Deneke, Viola. Die Sprache der Herz-Operateure. Anmerkungen zur Geschichte der Herztransplantations-Operation. Göttingen  : Cuvillier, 2018. Didi-Huberman, Georges. L’image ouverte. Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels. Paris  : Gallimard, 2007. Dimler, Richard G. “Herman Hugo’s ‘Pia Desideria’.” Mundus Emblematics. Studies in NeoLatin Emblem Books. Ed. Karl A. E. Enenkel and Arnoud S.Q. Visser. Turnout  : Brepols, 2003, pp. 351–379. Dubois, Elfrieda. “Some Interpretations of the Notion of Cœur in Seventeenth-Century France.” Seventeenth-Century French Studies 9 (1987)  : pp. 4–25. Egeler, Matthias. Der heilige Gral. Geschichte und Legende. München  : Beck, 2019. Eidighoffer, Roland. Die Rosenkreuzer. München  : Beck, 1995. Eliade, Mircea. The Forge and the Crucible. Transl. Stephen Corrin. Chicago  : University of Chicago Press, 1978. Espahangizi, Kijan. “From ‘Topos to Oikos’  : The Standardization of Glass Containers as Epistemic Boundaries in Modern Laboratory Research (1850–1900).” Science in Context 28 (2015)  : pp. 397–425. Fludd, Robert. Utriusque Cosmi majoris scilicet et minoris metaphysica, physica atque technica historia. Oppenheim  : de Bry, 1617. Forbes, Robert J. Short History of the Art of Destillation from the Beginning to the Death of Cellier Blumenthal. Leiden  : Brill, 1948. Frietsch, Ute. Häresie und Wissenschaft. Eine Genealogie der paracelsischen Alchemie. Mün­ chen  : Fink, 2013.

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Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. Faust I, Anna Swanwick (New York  : P.F. Collier & Sons Company, 1909–1914). Geissmar, Christoph. Das Auge Gottes. Bilder zu Jakob Böhme. Wiesbaden  : Harrassowitz, 1993. Gloy, Karin. “Das Analogiedenken der Renaissance. Seine Herkunft und seine Strukturen.” Das Analogiedenken. Vorstöße in ein neues Gebiet der Rationalitätstheorie. Ed. Karen Gloy and Manuel Bachmann. Freiburg i.Br./München  : Alber, 2000, pp. 215–255. Gregory, Andrew. Harvey’s Heart. The Discovery of Blood Circulation. Cambridge  : Icon, 2001. Grove, Laurence. “Emblem and Impact.” Emblem and Impact. Vom Zentrum und Peripherie der Emblematik II. Ed. Ingrid Höpel and Simon McKeown. Newcastle upon Tyne  : Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2017, pp. 1–23. Hamraoui, Éric. “L’invention de la pathologie cardiaque entre philosophie et expérience (1628–1749).” Micrologus. Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 11 (2003)  : pp. 555–575. Harleß, Adolf von. Jakob Böhme und die Alchymisten. Berlin  : Schlawitz, 1870. Harman, Graham. The Quadruple Objects. London  : Zone Books, 2011. Harvey, William. “Of The Quantity Of Blood Passing Through The Heart.” Exercitatio Anatomica de Motu Cordis et Sanguinis in Animalibus. Transl. Robert Willis. Frankfurt am Main  : Fitzer, 1628. Heidegger, Martin. “Das Ding [1950].” Vorträge und Aufsätze (1936–1953). Vol. 7. Frankfurt am Main  : Klostermann, 2000, pp. 167–187. Heijting, Willem. “Christian Hoburg’s Lebendige Hertzens-Theologie (1661)  : A Book in the Heart of Sevententh-Century Spirituality.” Religious Minorities and Cultural Diversity in the Dutch Republic  : Studies Presented to Piet Visser on the Occasion of his 65th Birthday. Ed. August den Hollander, Alex Noord, Mirjam van Veen and Anna Voolstra. Amsterdam  :VU University, 2014, pp. 192–207. Höpel, Ingrid. Emblem und Sinnbild. Vom Kunstbuch zum Erbauuungsbuch. Frankfurt am Main  : Athenäum, 1987. Höpel, Ingrid and Ulrich Kuder (eds.). Mundus Symbolicus. Emblembücher aus der Sammlung Wolfgang J. Müller in der Universitätsbibliothek Kiel. Kiel  : Ludwig, 2004. Horapollo. Zwei Bücher über die Hieroglyphen. In der lateinischen Übersetzung von Jean Mercier nach der Ausgabe Paris 1548. Ed. and transl. Jean Mercier and Helge Weingärtner. Erlangen  : Specht, 1997. Høystad, Ole Martin. A History of the Heart, London  : Reaktion, 2007. Hugo, Herman. De prima scribendi origine. Antwerp  : Plantin, 1617. Jung, Carl Gustav. Erlösungsvorstellungen in der Alchemie. Vol. 6. of Grundwerk. Olten  : Walter Verlag, 1984. Kemp, Martin. “Heart.” Christ to Coke. How Image Becomes Icon. Oxford  : OUP, 2012, pp. 81–113. Kruse, Cornelia and Marie-Louise von Plessen. Von ganzem Herzen. Diesseits und jenseits eines Symbols. Ed. Stiftung Schloss Neuhardenberg. Berlin  : Nicolai, 2004. Langen, August. Der Wortschatz des deutschen Pietismus. Tübingen  : Niemeyer, 1968. Laube, Stefan. “Bilder aus der Phiole.” Goldenes Wissen. Die Alchemie – Substanzen, Synthesen,

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Symbolik, Ed. Petra Feuerstein-Herz and Stefan Laube. Wiesbaden  : Harrassowitz, 2014, pp. 73–87. Laube, Stefan. “Dinggedächtnis. Johann Amos Comenius’ ‘Orbis pictus’ (1658).” Literatur und Materielle Kultur. Ed. Susanne Scholz and Ulrike Vedder. Berlin  : De Gruyter, 2018, pp. 188–197. Laurenza, Domenico. Leonardo. Anatomie, Stuttgart  : Belser, 2009. Lentes, Thomas. “Nur der geöffnete Körper schafft Heil. Das Bild als Verdoppelung des Körpers.” Glaube, Hoffnung, Liebe, Tod. Von der Entwicklung religiöser Bildkonzepte. Klagenfurt  : Ritter, 1995, pp. 152–155. Limbeck, Sven. “Das Opus magnum in zwölf Bildern.” Goldenes Wissen. Die Alchemie – Substanzen, Synthesen, Symbolik. Ed. Petra Feuerstein-Herz and Stefan Laube. Wiesbaden  : Harrassowitz, 2014, pp. 246–256. Mödersheim, Sabine. ‘Domini Doctrina Coronat’  : Die geistliche Emblematik Daniel Cramers (1568–1637). Frankfurt am Main  : Peter Lang, 1994. Morosow, Witalij. Das Erbe des Nikolaus von Kues im Spiegel der Alchemie. Münster  : Aschendorff, 2018. Neschke-Hentschke, Ada. “Le rôle du cœur dans la stabilisation de l’espèce humaine chez Aristote.” Micrologus. Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 11 (2003)  : pp. 37–53. Neumann, Ulrich. “‘Olim, da die Rosen Creutzerey noch florirt, Theophilus Schweighart genant’  : Wilhelm Schickards Freund und Briefpartner Daniel Mögling (1596–1635).” Zum 400. Geburtstag von Wilhelm Schickard. Ed. Friedrich Seck. Sigmaringen  : Thorbecke, 1995, pp. 93–117. Neuber, Wolfgang. “Locus, Lemma, Motto. Entwurf zu einer mnemonischen Emblematiktheorie.” Ars memorativa. Zur kulturgeschichtlichen Bedeutung der Gedächtniskunst 1400– 1750. Ed. Jörg Jochen Berns and Wolfgang Neuber. Tübingen  : Niemeyer, 1993, pp. 351– 173. Newman, Barbara. “Love’s Arrows  : Christ as Cupid in late Medieval Art and Devotion.” The Mind’s Eye. Art and Theological Argument in the Middle Ages. Ed. Jeffrey F. Hamburger and Anne-Marie Bouché. Princeton  : PUP, 2006, pp. 263–287. Obrist, Barbara. Les débuts de l’imagerie alchimique (XIVe–XVe siècles). Paris  : Le Sycomore, 1982. Panofsky, Dora and Erwin Panofsky. Pandora’s Box. The Changing Aspects of a Mythical Symbol. Princeton  : PUP, 1962. Pastoureau, Michel. “Heraldique du cœur (XIIe–XVIe siècle).” Micrologus. Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 11 (2003)  : pp. 145–159. Pereira, Michela. “Il cuore dell’alchimia.” Micrologus. Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 11 (2003)  : pp. 287–305. Pigeaud, Jackie. “Cœur organique, Cœur metaphorique.” Micrologus. Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 11 (2003)  : pp. 9–37 Praz, Mario. Studies in Seventeenth Century Imagery. 2nd ed. Roma  : Edizione di storia e letteratura, 1964. Principe, Lawrence M. The Scientific Revolution. A Very Short Introduction, Oxford/New York  : OUP, 2011.

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Prinke, Rafaeł T. “New Light on the Alchemical Writings of Michael Sendivogius (1566– 1636).” Ambix 63 (2016)  : pp. 217–263. Rai, Eleonora. “Spotless Mirror, Martyred Heart  : The Heart of Mary in Jesuit Devotions (Seventeenth-Eigtheenth Centruries).” The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Meaning, Embodiment, and Making. Ed. Katie Barcley and Bronwan Reddan. Berlin, Boston  : De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 184–203. Ricklin, Thomas. “Le cœur, soleil du corps  : une redécouverte symbolique du XIIe siecle.” Micrologus. Natura, Scienze e Società Medievali 11 (2003)  : pp. 123–145. Rossi, Paolo. Die Geburt der modernen Wissenschaft in Europa. München  : Beck, 1997. Schadel, Erwin. Sehendes Herz (cor oculatum)  – zu einem Emblem des späten Comenius. Frankfurt am Main  : Peter Lang, 2003. Schipperges, Heinrich. Die Welt des Herzens. Sinnbild, Organ, Mitte des Menschen. Frankfurt am Main  : Knecht, 1989. Scholz, Rüdiger. “Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz  : An mein Herz/Unser Herz/An das Herz.” Lenz-Jahrbuch. Sturm-und-Drang-Studien 10/11 (2000/2001)  : pp. 153–172. Schott, Heinz. Magie der Natur. Historische Variationen über ein Motiv der Heilkunst. Vol. 2. Aachen  : Shaker, 2014. Seifert, Siegfried. “‘Erforsche mich, Gott, und erfahre mein Herz…’ Das Herz in Theologie und Frömmigkeit”. Herz. Das menschliche Herz – Der herzliche Mensch. Ed. Susanne Hahn. Dresden/Basel  : Verlag der Kunst, 1995, pp. 127–148. Sendivogius, Michael. Chymische Schrifften. Wien  : Krauß, 1750. Sendivogius, Michael. Eines großen Philosophen fünf und fünfzig Briefe den Stein der Weisen betreffend. Aus dem Lateinischen übersetzt. Frankfurt/Leipzig  : 1770. Seuse, Heinrich. Deutsche mystische Schriften. Ed. and transl. Georg Hofmann. Düsseldorf  : Patmos-Verlag, 1966. Sheppard, Harry J. “Egg Symbolism in Alchemy.” Ambix 6 (1958)  : pp. 140–148. Simmel, Georg. “Der Henkel. Ein ästhetischer Versuch [1923].” Philosophische Kultur. Über das Abenteuer, die Geschlechter und die Krise der Moderne. Neuausgabe, Berlin  : Wagenbach, 1998, pp. 111–117. Simons, Patricia. “The Flaming Heart  : Pious and Amorous Passion in Early Modern European Medical and Visual Culture.” The Feeling Heart in Medieval and Early Modern Europe. Meaning, Embodiment, and Making. Ed. Katie Barcley and Bronwan Reddan. Berlin, Boston  : De Gruyter, 2019, pp. 19–42. Sloterdijk, Peter. “Herzoperation oder  : Vom eucharistischen Exzeß.” Blasen. Vol. 1 of Sphären. Mikrosphärologie. Frankfurt am Main  : Suhrkamp, 1998, pp. 101–140. Sobiech, Frank. Herz. Gott, Kreuz. Die Spiritualität des Anatomen, Geologen und Bischofs Dr. med. Niels Stensen (1638–1686). Münster  : Aschendorff, 2004. Spamer, Adolf. Das kleine Andachtsbild vom 15. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. München  : Bruckmann, 1930. Stafford, Barbara Maria. Symbol and Myth. Humbert de Superville’s Essay on Absolute Signs in Art. University of Delaware Press, 1979. Sträter, Udo. “‘Wie bringen wir den Kopff in das Hertz  ?’ Meditation in der Lutherischen

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Kirche des 17. Jahrhunderts.” Meditation und Erinnerung in der Frühen Neuzeit. Ed. Georg Kurz. Göttingen  : Vandenhoek&Ruprecht, 2000, pp. 11–37. Strasser, Gerhard F. Emblematik und Mnemonik der Frühen Neuzeit im Zusammenspiel  : Johannes Buno und Johann Justus Winckelmann. Wiesbaden  : Harrassowitz, 2000. Szydło, Zbigniew. Water Which Does Not Wet Hands  : The Alchemy of Michael Sendivogius. Warsaw  : Polish Academy of Sciences, 1994. Teilhard de Chardin, Pierre. Das Herz der Materie. Kernstück einer genialen Weltsicht. Olten  : Walter, 1990. Taylor, F. Sherwood. “The Evolution of the Still.” Annals of Science 5 (1945)  : pp. 185–202. Vesalius, Andreas. The Heart and Associated Organs. Vol. 6 of On the Fabric of the Human Body. Transl. William F. Richardson. San Francisco  : Norman, 2009. Vonessen, Franz. “Das Herz in der Naturphilosophie.” Das Herz. Im Umkreis des Denkens. Vol. 3. Biberach  : Thomae, 1969, pp. 9–52. Warncke, Carsten-Peter. Sprechende Bilder – Sichtbare Worte. Das Bildverständnis in der Frü­ hen Neuzeit. Wiesbaden  : Harrassowitz, 1987. Webber, Heather. The Medieval Heart. New Haven/London  : Yale University Press, 2010. Weeks, Andrew. Boehme. An Intellectual Biography of the Seventeenth Century Philosophy and Mystic. Albany  : Suny, 1991. Wels, Volkhard. Manifestationen des Geistes. Frömmigkeit, Spiritualismus und Dichtung in der Frühen Neuzeit. Göttingen  : V&R unipress, 2014. Weststeijn, Thijs. “From hieroglyphics to universal characters. Pictography in the early modern Netherlands.” Nederlands Kunsthistorisch Jaarboek 61 (2011)  : pp. 239–281. Wirth, Karl-August. “Religiöse Herzemblematik.” Im Umkreis der Kunst. Vol. 2 of Das Herz. Biberach  : Thomae, 1966, pp. 63–106. Zecchin, Luigi. Vetro e vetrai di Murano. Studi sulla storia del vetro. 3 vols. Venezia  : Arsenale 1987–1990. Yates, Frances A. The Art of Memory. London  : Routledge, 1966. Zuber, Mika A. “Theosophische Spekulation und erbauliche Frömmigkeit. Jacob Böhme, die neue Wiedergeburt und ihre Alchemisierung.” Jacob Böhme. Grund und Ungrund. Der Kos­mos des mystischen Philosophen, edited by Claudia Brink and Lucinda Martin. Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden. Dresden  : Sandstein, 2017, pp. 114–127.

Images Arthyrus, Fabianus [=Georg Philipp Harsdörffer]. Das erneurte Stamm- und Stechbüchlein  : Hundert Geistliche Hertzens Siegel / Weltliche Spiegel / Zu eigentlicher Abbildung der Tu­ gen­den und Laster vorgestellet/ und Mit hundert Poetischen Einfällen erkläret Durch Fabianum Athyrum, der loblichen Sinnkünste Beflißnen. Nürnberg  : Fürsten, 1654, p. 309. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, 165-19-eth-1. (fig. 12). Aurora Consurgens. Zürich, Zentralbibliothek, Ms. Rh. 172, fol. 19v. (fig. 13). Böhme, Jacob. Representation through a drawing of his Cosmogony in Vierzig Fragen von der Seele, 1620. Reproduced in Alles in Allem. Die Gedankenwelt des mystischen Philosophen.

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Jacob Böhme. Denken  – Kontext  – Wirkung. Eds. Claudia Brink and Lucinda Martin, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden  : Sandstein, 2017, p. 62 (fig. 3). Christi Testamenta, Jacob Böhme, Thesophische Wercke, Amsterdam 1682. Reproduced in Frank van Lamoen  : Der unbekannte Illustrator  : Michael Andreae. Jacob Böhmes Weg in die Welt. Zur Geschichte der Handschriftensammlung. Übersetzungen und Editionen von Abraham Willemsz van Beyerland. Ed. Thedor Harmsen, Amsterdam  : Inde Peilkaan, 2007, p. 298 (fig. 8). Cramer, Daniel. Emblemata Sacrorum. Secunda Pars  : Das ist  : Fünffzig Geistlicher in Kupfer gestochener Emblematum in Kupffer gestochen auß der h. Schrifft (…), Frankfurt am Meyn  : Jennis, 1624, p. 61. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Th 470 (fig. 6). della Porta, Giambattista. Magiae naturalis libri vigenti, Leiden 1644, frontispiece. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek (fig. 14). Donum Dei, Pergamenthandschrift, 15.  Jahrhundert, Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, Cod. Guelf. 77.2 fol. 5r. Reproduced in Goldenes Wissen. Die Alchemie – Substanzen, Synthesen, Symbolik. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek (Ausstellungskatalog) Wiesbaden 2014, p. 249 (fig. 11). Drawing of a anatomical heart, lateral and three-quarter views. Pen and ink drawing attributed to Giulio Romano or one of his followers, between 1500 and 1599, Rome  ?, drawing  : black chalk, pen and brown ink and brown wash, sheet 8 × 17.9 cm. London, Wellcome Library, no. 27100i (fig. 5). Hugo, Herman. Pia Desideria, libri III, Antwerp  : Aertssens, 1629, frontispiece. Reproduced in Mundus Symbolicus. Emblembücher aus der Sammlung Wolfgang J. Müller in der Universitätsbibliothek Kiel. Exhibition cartalogue. Kiel  : Ludwig, 2004, p. 60 (fig. 2). Juriaan oder Jurr Pool, Anatomics among themselves with a heart, 1699, oil on canvas, 74 × 117 cm, Leiden, Museum Boerhaave. Reproduced in Das menschliche Herz – Der herzliche Mensch. Begleitbuch zur Ausstellung “Herz” vom 5.10.1995 bis 31.3.1996 im Auftrag des deutschen Hygiene-Museums. Ed. by Susanne Hahn, Dresden/Basel  : Verlag der Kunst, 1995, p. 9 (fig. 1). [Kaym, Paul/Häublin, Nicolaus]. Helleleuchtender Hertzens-Spiegel (…), Amsterdam/Danzig, 1680, frontispiece, p.  22. Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, M  : Th 1383. Reproduced in Alles in Allem. Die Gedankenwelt des mystischen Philosophen. Jacob Böhme. Denken – Kontext – Wirkung. Eds. Claudia Brink and Lucinda Martin, Staatliche Kunst­ sammlungen Dresden, Dresden  : Sandstein, 2017, p. 80 (fig. 9a and 9b). Mylius, Johann Daniel. Anatomia auri sive tyrocinium medico-chymicum, Frankfurt a.M  : Jennis, 1628, Pars V, p. 8. München, Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, Res/4 Alch. 67 (fig. 4). Schweighardt, Theophiel [Daniel Mögling]. Speculum Sophicum Rhodo-Stauroticum Das ist  : Weitläuffige Entdeckung deß Collegii unnd axiomatum von der sondern erleuchten Fraternitet Christ-RosenCreutz (…), (s.l.) 1618 (frontispiece). Wolfenbüttel, Herzog August Bibliothek, 24.3. Quod. (3) (fig. 7). Wierex II, Anton. Jesus paints the last four things in the human heart, Engraving. Published by the artist. 1 of 18 plates of the Cor Jesu amanti sacrum (Antwerp 1595). Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, MH 443 (fig. 10).

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Pluralisation and Centring Sacred Heart Devotion in Eighteenth-Century Switzerland As in other Catholic countries, the eighteenth century was an ambivalent time for the Catholic Church and for Catholic piety in the Swiss Confederation and its Allied Cantons (Zugewandte Orte). Still, there existed numerous practices and forms of piety and religiosity that had developed or spread in the sixteenth and especially in the seventeenth century. Some of those forms and practices were known almost in the entire Catholic world, whereas others were mainly part of local religions.1 There was, for example, a rich ‘topography of grace’ where the devotees venerated Mary, the newly canonized saints, as well as local, often non-canonized ‘aspiring saints’.2 The devotion practiced at various sites was typical of what historians call ‘Baroque Catholicism’  : it was an affective piety in which emotions, bodies and materiality played a significant role in the spiritual experience and in the shaping of religious memory.3 On the other hand, the Catholic Church and Catholic piety in its various forms were reshaped by the Enlightenment and by various reform movements throughout almost the entire eighteenth century, but especially towards its end. In the Swiss Confederation, this influence was profound because Switzerland was a highly diverse political entity at the time. The country consisted of rural and urban areas, of Reformed and Catholic cantons as well as bi-confessional regions, especially in the jointly governed bailiwicks (Gemeine Herrschaften). Therefore, the territory of today’s Switzerland was characterized by a proximity of the confessions and the penetrability of the confessional borders.4 In the eighteenth century, Protestant Enlightenment thinkers, who were especially present in the cities, thus criticized – among other aspects – the 1 The concepts of “local Religion” or “local Christianity” in early modern Catholicism was first elaborated by William A. Christian, Local Religion in sixteenth-century Spain, and by Marc R. Forster, The Counter-Reformation in the Villages. Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer. – I would like to thank Tamara von Rotz and Samuel Weber for their comments, critiques and support. 2 I prefer the term “topography of grace” (in German  : “Gnadenlandschaft”) to “territory of grace”, the latter of which is more common in historical studies, as the term “topography” is less associated with (political) entities. For further explanations, see Sidler, Heiligkeit aushandeln, pp. 27–37. The term “territory of grace” is prominently used by Luria, Territories of Grace. 3 For the “Baroque” as a periodization beyond art history, see Hersche, Musse und Verschwendung. 4 For the confessional borders and their penetrability, see e.g. Bock, Konversionen in der frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft, and Volkland, Konfession und Selbstverständnis.

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external manifestations of Baroque Catholicism. Moreover, there were Enlightenment movements within the Catholic Church itself which tried to reform the school system or to reduce the number of feast days. Recent research has shown that these reform movements existed not only in the cities, but also in rural areas, for example in the Benedictine monastery of Einsiedeln.5 Therefore, the main argument of this contribution is as follows  : the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in eighteenth-century Switzerland is situated at the intersection of various ambivalences, especially between the Baroque and the Enlightenment. In its devotional forms and practices, the Sacred Heart was clearly part of the affective Baroque piety (part I). For this reason, conservative priests considered it a suitable means to “counteract” the Enlightenment, whereas proponents of the Enlightenment used it to illustrate their criticism of Baroque piety (part II). Meanwhile, reform-minded Catholics saw the devotion to the Sacred Heart, which had not been widespread in Switzerland before the beginning of the eighteenth century, not as a traditional but as a new form of piety which could be harnessed for their attempts to focus on essential beliefs, norms and practices (part III). Towards the end of the eighteenth century, devotional practices were once again reshaped by political developments. During the Helvetic Revolution and the Helvetic Republic (1798–1803), the Sacred Heart was a symbol of conservatism, which led to it being perceived as suspicious or even illegal by both ecclesiastical and secular authorities (part IV). The pluralisation, contestation, and transformation of iconography, ritual practices and their theological meaning and narrative propagation by different agents, which created different spaces of memory6, will be analysed in what follows.

Sacred Heart Devotion as a Form of Baroque Piety In eighteenth-century Switzerland, the cult of the Sacred Heart was ubiquitous  : it was exercised in front of altars, as well as in front of publicly exhibited and privately used cult images,7 in numerous litanies and especially in confraternities that began to spread in Switzerland from the 1730s.8 Even though little is known about the 5 See, recently published, Fässler, Aufbruch und Widerstand, pp. 99–210. For a short overview of the Enlightenment in the Catholic cantons of the Old Swiss Confederacy, see Im Hof, Aufklärung in der Schweiz, pp. 57–61, and for the city of Lucerne especially Wicki, Staat, Kirche, Religiosität. 6 See Franziska Metzger’s contribution in this volume. 7 Books treating Sacred Heart devotion were often divided into “public” and “private” devotion. See e.g. the book published in 1765 by Schauenburg/Hausen, Gründliche Verehrung des allerheiligsten Herzens Jesu. 8 Towards the end of the century, there emerged the first churches dedicated to the Sacred Heart. In Ger-

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concrete practices associated with the devotion beyond normative texts, it was undoubtedly a highly affective form of piety. The materiality of the devotional images and objects, the bodies of the devotees and their interplay with the devotional objects, sensual tangibility and emotional connections were important.9 Devotional texts often emphasize the emotional link from heart to heart, a connection that was also rendered physical, for example by touching or “devoutly kissing” (“andächtigem Küssen”), as the German Jesuit Franz Schauenburg put it in his widely known devotional book about the Sacred Heart written in the mid-eighteenth century.10 Of course, the Sacred Heart devotion was not an invention of Baroque Catholicism, as several studies have pointed out. In Switzerland, as elsewhere, it had been known for much longer, for instance as part of medieval mysticism. As such, it was still practiced in early modern Catholicism, especially in monasteries and in the personal spirituality of members of Catholic orders. Still, it was not until the late seventeenth century that devotion to the Sacred Heart became widespread both geographically and socially as a form of piety. The ‘master narrative’ about the spread of the Sacred Heart devotion usually tells the story of how Catholic orders, particularly the Jesuits, disseminated the devotion after the visions of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque in the 1670s and 1680s.11 In their colleges and on their missions to the countryside, the Jesuits distributed images and devotions, often written by members of the order.12 These texts were also distributed in the Swiss cantons, and not only in Lucerne, Freiburg and Solothurn, where the Jesuits were active as an educational and missionary order. The devotional books written by the German Jesuits Hermann Goldhagen and Franz Schauenburg, for example, were printed, among other places, in St. Gallen, an Allied Canton of the Swiss Confederation, or were at least widespread and known in

man-speaking countries this happened first around the year 1720. See Moore, Herz-Jesu-Verehrung in Deutschland, p. 23. In Switzerland, the church in St. Fiden (next to St. Gallen) in 1779 was probably the first church dedicated to the Sacred Heart. See Poeschel, Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kantons St. Gallen, vol. 2, part 1, Die Stadt St. Gallen, pp. 193–208.  9 According to David Morgan, the Sacred Heart was far more than symbolic, at least until the nineteenth century. See Morgan, “Rhetoric of the Heart.” 10 Schauenburg/Hausen, Gründliche Verehrung des allerheiligsten Herzens Jesu, p.  38. The connection from heart to heart is also mentioned in other devotional texts, e.g. in forms to enroll in a confraternity. See e.g. StASZ, SG.CII.6275, Bruderschafts-Brief, 1797. 11 For the visions of Alacoque and the beginnings of the devotion in France, see among others  : Morgan, Sacred Heart of Jesus, pp. 5–12  ; Jonas, France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart, pp. 9–16. 12 The historian Karl Richstätter has counted about 50 devotional practices written and published by Jesuits throughout the fifty years before 1773. See Richstätter, Die Herz-Jesu-Verehrung des deutschen Mittelalters, p. 381.

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this area.13 They produced a narrative memory of the devotion to the Sacred Heart which had a long-lasting impact. This ‘master narrative’, which was spun by the Jesuits themselves as early as in the eighteenth century,14 should not hide the fact that the spread of a new cult cannot be understood as a straightforward process, and certainly not as one that was overseen by a single Catholic order.15 In different geographical and social contexts, the cult had its own peculiarities, and its introduction sometimes faced resistance. An example of a specifically Swiss history of the introduction and spread of the cult is particularly evident in Lucerne and in the other Catholic cantons of central Switzerland (the so-called Innere Orte). The first confraternity dedicated to the Sacred Heart in the Swiss Confederation was founded around the year 1700 in the Ursuline convent in Lucerne. This was not just due to the early adoption of the Sacred Heart devotion by this community in other convents or to the proximity of the Ursulines to the Jesuits, who served as their confessors.16 The person who was particularly crucial for the introduction of the devotion was the Ursuline sister Euphemia Dorer from Baden (1667–1752). From the end of the seventeenth century onwards, she claimed to have visions comparable to those of Alacoque some years before. According to these visions, which she then put into writing with the help of others, Sister Euphemia – just like Alacoque – was ordered to promote and popularize the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus as well as that to the Heart of Mary. Encouraged by her superior and by the Jesuits, she immediately undertook her mission, establishing a confraternity, distributing prayer texts and putting up a picture of the Sacred Heart in the Church of her convent.17 Later, she continued her work in Freiburg in Breisgau. When she passed away in 1752, she, also like Alacoque, died in the odour of sanctity and was soon venerated like a saint due to her spiritual example and her commitment to making the Sacred Heart widely known (fig. 1).18 13 See part IV of this contribution as well as the research by Schärli, Auffällige Religiosität, pp.  87–95, 108–110. 14 See e.g. Schauenburg/Hausen, Gründliche Verehrung des allerheiligsten Herzens Jesu, pp. 6–16. For an overview of this interpretation of the spread of the Sacred Heart devotion in German-speaking countries, see Moore, Herz-Jesu-Verehrung in Deutschland, pp. 15–24. 15 For a similar approach, see Vélez, The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto. 16 Already in the late seventeenth century, the first confraternity to the Sacred Heart in German-speaking countries was founded in the nursery of the Ursulines in Vienna. See Dessl, “Die Herz-Jesu-Verehrung in Oberösterreich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert”, pp. 91–103. 17 For the visions, see Ursulines in Brig, Das Leben und die Schriften der gottsel. 1. Teil, 2. Abteilung  : 82 Unterweisungen aus der zweiten Hälfte ihres ersten Aufenthaltes in Luzern 1695–1699, pp. 132–135. For the biography of the nun, see Albisser, Die Ursulinen zu Luzern, pp. 238–246. 18 In 1778, her portrait in the style of pictures of saints was distributed in Freiburg i. Br. See Albisser, Die Ursulinen zu Luzern, p. 242.

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Fig. 1  : Euphemia Dorer’s vision printed on an altar in Oberried, next to Freiburg i. Br. (1738). Courtesy of Andreas Strittmatter.

In the 1720s and 1730s, the devotion to the Sacred Heart received a new impetus in Lucerne’s Ursuline convent, whence it spread to the city of Lucerne and beyond. This was once again due to the initiative of a single local actor, a priest called Johann Christoph Bisling. Bisling had already initiated the foundation of a confraternity in a monastery in Zug in 1713.19 In the 1720s, he urged the introduction of a High Mass, a devotion and a feast day for the Sacred Heart in the Ursuline convent, which he supported financially, mainly with an inheritance from his mother.20 Later, he also donated to the church an altar piece dedicated to the Sacred Heart and a plaque for the oratory of the convent.21 The Ursulines could therefore claim that they commemorated the Sacred Heart daily, weekly, monthly and annually in various forms – from individual prayers to a one-day feast.22 Afterwards, Bisling founded two more 19 Henggeler, Die kirchlichen Bruderschaften und Zünfte der Innerschweiz, p. 26f. 20 He donated for a mass, a High Mass and ten masses for the Feast of the Sacred Heart. StALU, AKT 19I/127, Nr. 7  : J. C. Bisling an das Ursulinenkloster, Roth, 24.5.1720. A letter confirming the donation can be found in  : StALU, AKT 19I/127, Nr. 6. 21 See the pictures in Albisser, Die Ursulinen zu Luzern [n. p.; figure 18]. 22 StALU, AKT 19I/127, Nr. 9  : Bericht wegen der Stiftung deß Herz Jesu Fests, 1726  ; StALU, AKT 19I/127,

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confraternities in the parishes of Kleinwangen and Root, and in several letters to the Superior of the Ursuline convent he made suggestions as to what could be done to promote the devotion in the convent as well as among the population.23 Shortly thereafter, Sacred Heart confraternities were established in other parishes in the canton of Lucerne and in the surrounding areas, sometimes combined with feast days.24 This indicates that local personalities like Dorer or Bisling, and an institution like the Ursuline convent could and did act as catalysts for the spread of the devotion in the wider region. Along with other similar forms of piety introduced around the same time especially in the five Innere Orte – for instance the confraternities dedicated to the Passion of Christ –, a new topography of grace emerged, offering the faithful a piety centred on Jesus. These new offers complemented and, as will be elaborated below, also competed with the numerous places – as places of memory and veneration – dedicated to Mary and other canonized or aspiring saints that had emerged since the sixteenth century.25

The Challenge of the Enlightenment Similar developments can be observed in other regions of the Swiss Confederation and in its Allied Cantons. In the region of St. Gallen, for example, a monastery of the Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, founded in 1761 in Gommiswald by the secular priest Joseph Helg (1720–1787), was an important catalyst for the devotion to the Sacred Heart, which was cultivated in the monastery together with the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament.26 In this context, the devotion was presented not Nr. 10  : Kleines Verzeichnuß, 1726 (this document lists the several ways of devotion practiced in the Ursuline nursery). 23 He recommended to celebrate a Holy Mass dedicated to the Sacred Heart, several practices of devotion and the linking of prayers to the rosary with a litany dedicated to the Sacred Heart. StALU, AKT 19I/127, Nr. 2  : J.C. Bisling an die Subpriorin des Ursulinenklosters, Roth, 28.4.1731. 24 For the confraternities founded in the five cantons in central Switzerland, see as an overview Henggeler, Die kirchlichen Bruderschaften und Zünfte der Innerschweiz, pp. 25–28. At the same time, several confraternities were founded in the Freie Ämter in today’s canton of Aargau  : in Dietwil in 1728, in Oberrüti in 1728, in Lunkhofen in 1733. In some places, for instance in Oberrüti, a feast day was not introduced before the end of the eighteenth century (in Oberrüti in 1771). According to  : StAAG, KI/12 (Oberrüti), KI/28 (Dietwil), KI/26 (Lunkhofen). 25 For the dominance of the cult of Mary in early modern Catholicism, see Hersche, Musse und Verschwendung, vol. 1, pp. 611–614. For the Swiss context, see Sidler, Heiligkeit aushandeln, pp. 73–142. 26 See Sailer, Eigentliche Bildung, und Anrühmung des neuen Jungfräulichen Prämonstratensischen Insti-

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only as an expression of Baroque piety, but also as a form and practice which could suitably counteract the unseating of the Church and of religion in the Age of Enlightenment.27 This idea was put forward by the Premonstratensian Sebastian Sailer (1714–1777), otherwise known for his comedies written in the Swabian dialect, in a book about the monastery published in 1769. In this text, Sailer drew a stark contrast between religiosity in the monastery and the outside world. According to Sailer, many people were extremely pessimistic about the situation of the Church and  – closely linked to this, of course – about the situation of the world, as the “political constitutions of today’s world” were considered to be “the most serious persecutions” the Church had ever suffered. The text went on to claim that some suspected that the Antichrist – or at least his “forerunner” (“Vorläufer”) – had instigated this persecution, while others believed that the Catholic Church would have to “flee […] across the wide seas” to another part of the world.28 In contrast, the Blessed Sacrament and the Sacred Heart were symbols of the Catholicism Sailer wished to defend. Thus, he saw the monastery as a new “light” that “had risen in the midst of the darkest mists, the raging thunderstorms” which inspired new hope in those willing to prevent “the end of Christianity in our areas”.29 In these dark times, Sailer saw in Josef Helg, the founder of the monastery, the personification of that “holy zeal” (“heilige[r] Eifer”).30 For Helg, the devotion to the Sacred Heart was of particular importance. He had initially wanted to call one of his communities – of which Helg founded a total of four – the “Sacred Heart Society of Catholic Virgins” (Herz-Jesu-Gesellschaft christkatholischer Jungfrauen).31 In Gom­ tuts von der Ewigen Anbettung des allerheiligsten Sacraments des Altars, und des göttlichen Herzens Jesu Christi in höchstdemselben auf dem neu-ernannten Berg Sion […], p. 47f. See also a small book written by Helg himself, also containing documents such as the letter of the foundation of the confraternity to the Sacred Heart  : Helg, Ewiger Seelenschatz, pp. 12–18. 27 For this “genre”, see Graf, “‘Einfache Dechristianisierung’. Zur Problemgeschichte eines kulturge­ schicht­lichen Topos.” 28 Sailer, Eigentliche Bildung, und Anrühmung des neuen Jungfräulichen Prämonstratensischen Instituts von der Ewigen Anbettung des allerheiligsten Sacraments des Altars, und des göttlichen Herzens Jesu Christi in höchstdemselben auf dem neu-ernannten Berg Sion […], p. 5f (translation by the author). – For Sailer as an author of books in dialect, see Oehler, Sebastian Sailer. 1714–1777. 29 Ibid. 30 Sailer, Eigentliche Bildung, und Anrühmung des neuen Jungfräulichen Prämonstratensischen Instituts von der Ewigen Anbettung des allerheiligsten Sacraments des Altars, und des göttlichen Herzens Jesu Christi in höchstdemselben auf dem neu-ernannten Berg Sion […], p. 6. 31 For the foundations, see Scharfenecker, “Die Ewige Anbetung im Gebiet der Fürstabtei St. Gallen und das Kloster Libingen.” – Josef Helg was a controversial personality in the late eighteenth century. As a proponent of Baroque piety, he was one of the people fighting for the Church and religion to maintain their role in society through his writings, his sermons and with his other projects, especially the

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Daniel Sidler Fig. 2  : Altar in Gommiswald (around 1786). Courtesy of the Cantonal Preservation of Historical Monuments (Denkmalpflege) St. Gallen.

mis­wald, the Sacred Heart of Jesus was soon present in material form on the high altar and worshipped in the confraternity (fig. 2). The clergy presented it as a devotion that was for the “good of all souls”, and a way of promoting the participation of the laity. At least implicitly, it thus stood in contrast to the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, which was primarily a form of piety cultivated by the nuns.32 If Catholics saw the Sacred Heart as a “weapon” against the Enlightenment, Enlightenment thinkers, Catholic and especially Protestant ones, viewed the cult as yet another expression of Catholic “unreasonableness”.33 The Berlin Enlightenment phi-

foundation of nurseries and the attempt to canonize Niklaus von Flüe. The Catholic historiography of the nineteenth century considered him to be a saint himself, despite his reputation of not being able to organize and finance his projects. For his personality and projects, see Sidler, Heiligkeit aushandeln, pp. 441–448. 32 See Sailer, Eigentliche Bildung, und Anrühmung des neuen Jungfräulichen Prämonstratensischen Instituts von der Ewigen Anbettung des allerheiligsten Sacraments des Altars, und des göttlichen Herzens Jesu Christi in höchstdemselben auf dem neu-ernannten Berg Sion […], pp. 47f. 33 For examples of proponents of Catholic Enlightenment – especially within Jansenism and Josephinism – arguing against the Sacred Heart devotion, see Dessl, “Die Herz-Jesu-Verehrung in Oberöster­ reich im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert”, pp. 103–110.

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losopher Friedrich Nicolai, to cite just one prominent example, used the devotion to the Sacred Heart to illustrate his more general critique of Catholicism. The devotion promoted by the Jesuits – this “rather darkly bigoted devotion to the fleshly Heart of Jesus, which is founded neither in writing nor in reason” – was in his perspective an expression of the “spiritual charlatanism” of that religious order.34 Furthermore, he saw the litany dedicated to the Sacred Heart that pilgrims sang on their pilgrimages as an expression of Catholic bigotry, as clothing worldly pleasures in religious forms which were immediately followed by excessive drinking and eating.35

Normative and Memorial Centring in Eighteenth-Century Catholicism The attempt to defend Baroque Catholicism against the critics from the Enlightenment and to promote corresponding practices of Catholic religiosity certainly helps to explain the spread of the Sacred Heart devotion in eighteenth-century Switzerland. At the same time, however, the devotion was becoming part of discourses cultivated by reform-minded Catholic authors. These discourses can be subsumed under the term ‘centring’ or even ‘normative centring’. This concept has been suggested by Bernd Hamm to study developments in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, during the Renaissance and Reformation. Hamm describes this process as an “orientation of religion and society towards a guiding and authoritative, regulating and legitimizing center”. For instance, he identifies such an orientation in the reduction of themes and terms towards the center of belief. According to Hamm, this process of centring was not limited to the time of Reformation but continued throughout the process of ‘confessionalization’.36 Similar processes of (normative) centring can be seen in various developments in eighteenth-century Catholicism in Switzerland and elsewhere, such as the reduction of feast days and the focus on those days considered most important, or in the reduction of side-altars in churches and the concentration on the central altar. Without explicitly mentioning the Sacred Heart, Ludovico Muratori (1672–1750), an 34 Nicolai, Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz, p. 98f. (translation by the author). In this writing, Nicolai mentioned Vienna. 35 Nicolai, Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz, p. 35. Similar discourses and arguments can be observed in the debates between Jesuits and Jansenists in France. For a short overview, see e.g. Morgan, “Rhetoric of the Heart. Figuring the Body in Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus”, pp. 102–106. 36 Hamm, “Reformation als normative Zentrierung von Religion und Gesellschaft”, p. 241 (translation by the author). Hamm explicitly mentions the increased focus on the Heart of Jesus in Late Medieval pictures of the Passion as an example.

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Italian proponent of Enlightenment, addressed this issue. Muratori argued, using the Blessed Sacrament as an example, that instead of the saints and Mary, Catholics should centre their external and internal devotion on Jesus Christ.37 In Switzerland, similar proposals for reforms of Catholic piety were suggested, envisaging a reduction of content and practices and a concentration on what was already known to the ancient Christians. The Swiss Jesuit Joseph Anton Weissenbach (1734–1801), for instance, criticized what he perceived as giving too much attention to “secondary matters”, such as the too numerous devotions and the “external pomp” during service, while the Gospel, “which does not consist of secondary matters, not of pomp”, was neglected.38 The devotion to the Sacred Heart fits into this discourse. It seemed to be particularly suitable to recall the event of the salvation and to render it ritually present. One could speak of a memorial centring, a centring of memory towards salvation, wherein the iconographic, ritual and narrative dimensions of memory were interrelated. In this perspective, the pluralisation of the topography of grace was not at all the aim of the promotion of this devotion. Rather, other religious and profane cults were to be marginalized or rather bundled together in a form that directed the faith of the devotees to Jesus as the normative centre of Christianity and to his heart as the physical centre of his body. Jesuit Franz Schauenburg, for example, contrasted the Sacred Heart devotion with the veneration of “secondary relics” such as the nails, the cross and the lances which had merely touched the body of Christ, as well as with the veneration of the hearts of dead princes or other “heroes”, in comparison to which the veneration of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was an “infinitely higher grace” (“ein unendlich höhere Gnad”).39 While this discourse was carried forward by priests and other ecclesiastical elites, the devotees were interested above all in a spiritual offer that allowed them to address their fear about the salvation of their souls and their hope for miracles to resolve their everyday concerns. In this context, popular piety and the discourse of the elites were drifting apart.40 A closer observation of church interiors – and understanding ‘centring’ not only normatively but also spatially – reveals that the desires of the local population 37 See Lehner, Die Katholische Aufklärung, pp. 146–150. 38 Weißenbach, Die Vorbothen des neüen Heidenthums, pp. 122–125. These “secondary matters” (“Neben­ dinge”) were  : “all the ceremonies, festivities, praises and offerings, all the federations and confraternities, all the legends and books with examples, all the blessings and absolutions, all the rules of life and statues, all the symbols, attributes and figures unknown by the first Christians.” On the other hand, Weißenbach recommended “exercises in the love of God, the contemplation of divine perfection, the devotion to the Holy Trinity, the confidence in Jesus […]” (translation by the author). 39 Schauenburg/Hausen, Gründliche Verehrung des allerheiligsten Herzens Jesu, p. 24f. (translation by the author). 40 For the divergence of popular and elite piety, see e.g. Habermas, Wallfahrt und Aufruhr.

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and those of the ecclesiastical elites sometimes clashed. Reform-minded Catholics saw a problem not only in the (too) many cults of saints, but also in the ‘decentration’ of church interiors with their numerous side chapels and side altars. Therefore, in Lucerne parishes, as early as the 1730s, the introduction of new forms of piety was to be halted in the name of ‘centrality’  : parish priests and the secular authorities in Lucerne resisted the establishment of new confraternities, arguing that too many ‘side devotions’ had a negative effect on those tenets of Catholic religiosity they considered central beliefs.41 In this sense, the argument of ‘centring’ could ironically also be harnessed against the spread of the Sacred Heart devotion which was still a relatively new cult in eighteenth-century Switzerland. Local actors used this argument to defend their traditional practices of piety against the new form, and even church authorities sometimes dismissed the devotion to the Sacred Heart on these grounds. For example, in Sursee, a small town near Lucerne, a lengthy controversy around an image of the Sacred Heart arose in the 1770s between the local clergy and the local commissioner of the Bishop of Constance. The cause and content of this controversy are not easy to understand. It revolved around the behaviour of the local clergy who did not follow episcopal instructions and were accused of issuing unspecified “abuses” from the pulpit. To increase the pressure, the bishop cited the recognition of the recently established confraternity to the Sacred Heart, which he linked to the behaviour of the clergy. Even more interesting, though, is the second demand of the bishop, on which he agreed with at least part of the local population  : the image of the Sacred Heart of Jesus ought to be moved from the altar dedicated to the Holy Cross to another altar. This was justified on the grounds that a confraternity of Mary (Mariä Mitleiden) was already established on the altar, and its members would therefore be disturbed in their contemplation.42 From this point of view, the Sacred Heart not only focused on central beliefs but also pluralized the topography of grace and unsettled existing devotional practices.

The Sacred Heart in the Helvetic Revolution and Republic In the years around 1800, during the short period of the Helvetic Revolution and Helvetic Republic (1798–1803), the situation for the Sacred Heart devotion became

41 See Wicki, Staat, Kirche, Religiosität, p. 229. 42 See the documents in  : StALU AKT 19C/1807. For the organization of the room in the church, see Reinle, Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kantons Luzern, vol. 4, Das Amt Sursee, pp. 432–434. According to Rudolf Henggeler, a confraternity to the Sacred Heart in Sursee had been founded as early as 1762 (Henggeler, Die kirchlichen Bruderschaften und Zünfte der Innerschweiz, p. 25).

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even more complicated. At that time, several practices associated with the cult fell outside of the framework of legitimate spiritual practice as the Catholic Church and the political authorities defined them. As during the French Revolution, the devotion to the Sacred Heart was considered a traditional and conservative form of piety associated with the old regime.43 In the region of St. Gallen, the Sacred Heart – or at least groups of devotees dedicated to it – even became “a conspicuous religiosity”, as Jolanda Schärli pointed out. Now, even the book written by the Jesuit Franz Schauenburg, the sixth edition of which was published in 1802, was considered dangerous to the stability of political and public order. In the reasoning of the episcopal commissioner and the Helvetic district court, it could be interpreted as propagating false stories and new but undesired forms of Christianity. Therefore, they halted the distribution of the book on grounds that could also be summarized under the keyword ‘centring’. The devotion to the Sacred Heart was said to encourage bigotry and deviate from the central tenets of the faith while promoting unverified miracle stories. In addition, Schauenburg was thought to encourage illegal gatherings, which was undesirable from an ecclesiastical perspective and dangerous from a political one.44 As the investigations proceeded, it became apparent that this assumption was not unfounded. A group close to the local priest interpreted Schauenburg’s book in a way that did not encourage traditional confraternities, but rather new, little formalized prayer circles, called “Liebes-Verbündnuss” by Schauenburg.45 These could also be led by laymen, and its members did not meet in churches or other sacred rooms but in private houses where they found themselves beyond the authority and control of the clergy. From the church’s point of view, these Sacred Heart Associations were considered ‘sects’, and therefore had to be forbidden by the authorities.46

Conclusion The devotion to the Sacred Heart was – as this article and several other contributions to this book have shown  – manifold, variable and controversial. In Switzerland as elsewhere, the cult was promoted, attacked, criticized and defended by actors outside and inside the Catholic church from the moment it was first placed on the topo­

43 The devotion to the Sacred Heart in revolutionary France has been elaborated in Morgan, Sacred Heart of Jesus, p. 22f. 44 This case has been examined by Jolanda Schärli. See Schärli, Auffällige Religiosität, pp. 87–95, 108–110. 45 See Schauenburg/Hausen, Gründliche Verehrung des allerheiligsten Herzens Jesu, p. 39f. 46 See Schärli, Auffällige Religiosität, pp. 87–95, 108–110.

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graphy of grace in the early eighteenth century. Hence, the history of its spread and veneration is not a linear and continuous one leading directly to global expansion in the nineteenth century. It is, on the contrary, a history of ruptures and discontinuities, of the coexistence of various modes and interpretations. Given the importance of bodies, materiality, spaces and emotions in its devotional practices, the Sacred Heart was appropriated by conservative priests as well as by philosophers of the Enlightenment who promoted or criticized its veneration as a typical expression of traditional Baroque piety. Simultaneously, the Sacred Heart devotion was integrated into changes within early modern Catholicism. Popular forms of piety were criticised and – through the Sacred Heart and other new forms of piety – central beliefs were brought into focus normatively, physically and spatially. This process of ‘normative centring’ is closely linked to practices of religious memory as they are analysed in several contributions to this book.47 Through normative centring, a close link between past, present and future was established as images and other ritual objects, devotional texts and practices perpetuated the living sanctity of Jesus, made transcendency present and tangible. This whole complex of memory made the Sacred Heart devotion forceful and at the same time versatile. In addition, this case study discussing several aspects of the Sacred Heart devotion in early modern Switzerland may contribute to a closer and comparative understanding of the cult in different geographical and social contexts. As the Swiss case shows, the ‘master narrative’ of the spread of Sacred Heart devotion ought to be deconstructed, linear interpretations called into question, and local particularities emphasized instead. For instance, even though the cult has been repeatedly examined, it has seldom been underlined that its spread was not only promoted by Catholic orders. As has recently been shown for other cults expanding to the entire Catholic world, local priests and laymen participated in the establishment of global cults and venerations, either as donors, authors, editors, painters or artists. In this respect, the analysis and reflections presented in this article may contribute to a global history of the Sacred Heart, shedding a new light on the interplay between local religion and global Catholicism. References Albisser, Hermann. Die Ursulinen zu Luzern. Geschichte, Leben und Werk 1659–1847. Stans  : Buchdruckerei Paul von Matt, 1938.

47 See also Metzger, “Memory of the Sacred Heart – Iconographic and Ritual Variations.”

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Bock, Heike. Konversionen in der frühneuzeitlichen Eidgenossenschaft. Zürich und Luzern im konfessionellen Vergleich. Epfendorf  : Bibliotheca-Academica-Verlag, 2009. Christian, William A. Local Religion in sixteenth-century Spain. Princeton  : Princeton University Press, 1989. Dessl, Reinhold J. “Die Herz-Jesu-Verehrung in Oberösterreich im 18. und 19.  Jahrhundert.” Jahrbuch des Oberösterreichischen Musealvereines. Gesellschaft für Landeskunde 132 (1987)  : pp. 81–136. Fässler, Thomas. Aufbruch und Widerstand. Das Kloster Einsiedeln im Spannungsfeld von Barock, Aufklärung und Revolution. Egg bei Einsiedeln  : Thesis, 2019. Forster, Marc R. The Counter-Reformation in the Villages. Religion and Reform in the Bishopric of Speyer, 1560–1720. Ithaca/London  : Cornell University Press, 1992. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. “‘Einfache Dechristianisierung’. Zur Problemgeschichte eines kulturgeschichtlichen Topos.” Säkularisierung, Dechristianisierung, Rechristianisierung im neuzeitlichen Europa. Bilanz und Perspektiven der Forschung. Ed. Hartmut Lehmann. Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1997, pp. 32–66. Habermas, Rebekka. Wallfahrt und Aufruhr. Zur Geschichte des Wunderglaubens in der frühen Neuzeit. Frankfurt/New York  : Campus, 1991. Hamm, Berndt. “Reformation als normative Zentrierung von Religion und Gesellschaft.” Jahrbuch für Biblische Theologie 7 (1992)  : pp. 241–279. Helg, Josef. Ewiger Seelenschatz. Einsiedeln  : n.p., 1772. Henggeler, Rudolf. Die kirchlichen Bruderschaften und Zünfte der Innerschweiz. Einsiedeln  : J & K Eberie, 1956. Hersche, Peter. Musse und Verschwendung. Europäische Gesellschaft und Kultur im Barockzeitalter. 2 vols. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2006. Im Hof, Ulrich. Aufklärung in der Schweiz. Berne  : Francke, 1970. Jonas, Raymond. France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart. Berkeley  : University of California Press, 2000. Lehner, Ulrich L. Die Katholische Aufklärung. Weltgeschichte einer Reformbewegung. Paderborn  : Ferdinand Schöningh, 2017. Luria, Keith P. Territories of grace. Cultural Change in the seventeenth-century Diocese of Grenoble. Berkeley  : University of California Press, 1991. Metzger, Franziska. “Memory of the Sacred Heart  – Iconographic and Ritual Variations.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 113 (2019)  : pp. 391–402. Moore, John. Herz-Jesu-Verehrung in Deutschland. Religiöse, soziale und politische Aspekte einer Frömmigkeitsform. Petersberg  : Michael Imhof Verlag, 1997. Morgan, David. Sacred Heart of Jesus. The Visual Evolution of a Devotion. Amsterdam  : Amsterdam University Press, 2008. Morgan, David. “Rhetoric of the Heart. Figuring the Body in Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.” Things. Religion and the Question of Materiality. Ed. Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer, 90–111. New York  : Fordham University Press, 2012. Nicolai, Friedrich. Beschreibung einer Reise durch Deutschland und die Schweiz. Vol. 5. Berlin  : n.p., 1781.

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Oehler, Hans Albrecht. Sebastian Sailer. 1714–1777. Marbach  : Deutsche Schillergesellschaft, 1996. Poeschel, Erwin. Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kantons St. Gallen. Vol. 2, part 1, Die Stadt St. Gallen. Basel  : Birkhäuser, 1957. Reinle, Adolf. Die Kunstdenkmäler des Kantons Luzern. Vol. 4, Das Amt Sursee. Basel  : Birk­ häuser, 1956. Richstätter, Karl. Die Herz-Jesu-Verehrung des deutschen Mittelalters. Munich/Regensburg  : Kösel & Pustet, 1924. Sailer, Sebastian. Eigentliche Bildung, und Anrühmung des neuen Jungfräulichen Prämonstratensischen Instituts von der Ewigen Anbettung des allerheiligsten Sacraments des Altars, und des göttlichen Herzens Jesu Christi in höchstdemselben auf dem neu-ernannten Berg Sion […]. Constance  : n.p., 1769. Scharfenecker, Uwe. “Die Ewige Anbetung im Gebiet der Fürstabtei St. Gallen und das Kloster Libingen.” Benediktinerinnen-Abtei St. Gallenberg in Glattburg bei Oberbüren. Ed. Markus Kaiser. St. Gallen  : Verlag am Klosterhof, 2004, pp. 63–76. Schärli, Jolanda. Auffällige Religiosität. Gebetsheilungen, Besessenheitsfälle und schwärmeri­ sche Sekten in katholischen und reformierten Gegenden der Schweiz. Hamburg  : Disserta, 2012. Schauenburg, Franz. Gründliche Verehrung des allerheiligsten Herzens Jesu, edited by Guilielmus Hausen. Dillingen  : Leonhard Brönner, 1765. Sidler, Daniel. Heiligkeit aushandeln. Katholische Reform und lokale Glaubenspraxis in der Eidgenossenschaft (1560–1790). Frankfurt/New York  : Campus, 2017. Ursulines in Brig. Das Leben und die Schriften der gottsel. Euphemia von Baden, Ursulinerin zu Luzern und zu Freiburg i./B., 1. Teil, 2. Abteilung  : 82 Unterweisungen aus der zweiten Hälfte ihres ersten Aufenthaltes in Luzern 1695–1699. Ed. F. X. Rölli. Lucerne  : Gebrüder Räber, 1885. Vélez, Karin. The Miraculous Flying House of Loreto. Spreading Catholicism in the Early Modern World. Princeton  : Princeton University Press, 2018. Volkland, Frauke. Konfession und Selbstverständnis. Reformierte Rituale in der gemischtkonfessionellen Kleinstadt Bischofszell im 17. Jahrhundert. Göttingen  : Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2005. Weißenbach, Joseph Anton. Die Vorbothen des neüen Heidenthums. Vol. 2. Basel  : n.p. 1779. Wicki, Hans. Staat, Kirche, Religiosität. Der Kanton Luzern zwischen barocker Tradition und Aufklärung. Lucerne  : Rex-Verlag, 1990.

Images Altar in Gommiswald (around 1786). Courtesy of the Cantonal Preservation of Historical Monuments (Denkmalpflege) St. Gallen (fig. 2). Euphemia Dorer’s vision printed on an altar in Oberried, next to Freiburg i.Br. (1738). Courtesy of Andreas Strittmatter (fig. 1).

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The Sacred Heart between History and Memory Le Cœur in Les Études carmélitaines (1950) “What is the heart, that throbbing muscle that astonished the Primitives  ?”1 It is with this question that the volume of the Les Études carmélitaines published in the autumn of 1950 under the title Le Cœur begins. Jacques Froissart (1892–1962), better known by his religious name Bruno de Jésus-Marie2, was the director of the journal. He was born in Bourbourg, in French Flanders, not far from Dunkirk. Passionate about poetry and philosophy, he entered the Carmelite novitiate in 1916. From 1917 to 1920, he studied at the Gregorian monastery where he attended the lectures of Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange, teacher of Thomism, and began a friendship with the Dominican Marie-Dominique Chenu, three years his junior. Ordained in 1925, he took over the direction of the Études carmélitaines historiques et critiques in 1930, a journal created in 1911 and which was then in decline. Within a few years, he made this journal a tool in the renewal of the reflection on the mystical tradition of Carmel. Renamed Études carmélitaines mystiques et missionnaires, then simply Les Études carmélitaines – now published by Desclée de Brouwer –, the journal regularly published thematic volumes and became, in the words of Étienne Fouilloux, “a meeting place for philosophers, theologians, psychologists and doctors for an approach to mystical phenomena without blinders”3. Interrupted during the German occupation, Les Études carmélitaines began regularly publishing thematic issues once again in 1946, the most famous of which was devoted, in 1948, to Satan.4 In 1948, the International Congresses of Religious Psychology were also resumed, which he had founded in 1935 and which were one of the places where Catholicism opened up to psychoanalysis. There are three main reasons to focus here on the 1950 volume Le Cœur. The first is the context of the publication, which coincides with a questioning of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in the aftermath of the Second World War. In June 1945, at 1 “Liminaire”, Le Cœur. Les Études carmélitaines, p. 9. The printing of the volume was completed on September 20, 1950, and it appeared without Nihil obstat, according to the custom of the journal (translation by Sharon Casu). 2 For what follows, see the brochure Le Père Bruno de Jésus-Marie, Les Études carmélitaines  ; Desmazières, L’inconscient au paradis. 3 Fouilloux, “Satan 1948”, p. 261 (translation by Sharon Casu). 4 Ibid., p. 261.

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the Basilica of Montmartre, a National Congress of the Sacred Heart highlighted the gap between the spirituality of the young generation of Catholic activists and the works traditionally devoted to this devotion. In 1949, a chaplain of the Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre, André Dérumaux, launched a survey on young people and the Sacred Heart, which revealed similar difficulties. The second reason for this interest stems from a conviction  : one of the characteristics of this crisis was to question the relationship between the history of the devotion to the Sacred Heart and the way in which collective memory had seized upon this devotion in order to inflect it in the face of current events. At the time of the Liberation, these current events were political, linked to the consequences of the Vichy regime. However, devotion to the Sacred Heart also creates a particularly strong link between two fields that are often considered to be contradictory, namely spirituality and the human sciences. It is a laboratory for the encounter between Catholicism and modernity. Finally, in the years following the Liberation, French Catholicism was already facing a crisis of legitimacy of its system of meaning. Historians have emphasized the succession of crises that, over a period of fifteen years, affected the moving forces of French Catholicism. They neglected the question of the Sacred Heart, because it was reputed to be conservative and outdated. Yet the questioning of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in the 1940s and 1950s took place alongside the crises of the ‘new theology’, of ‘Christian progressivism’, of worker-priests (prêtres-ouvriers), of vocations, of the ‘deconfessionalization’ of Catholic movements. Between memory and history, between spirituality and human sciences, the volume dedicated to the heart stood on the ridgeline of a crisis whose global dimension would only appear later, at the time of the Second Vatican Council. As the author of the introductory text already quoted testifies, “[g]oing from the anatomical heart to the Sacred Heart, crossing time and space, we have not dissociated grace from nature in such a living matter. Certainly, to love with the same heart is not always to love with the same love. However, the heart has the nobility of being the Centre  : that of humanism as well as that of the Incarnation.”5 In this article, I will first try to place the 1950 volume in its immediate context, before analysing the way in which its authors wanted to both revisit the memory of the devotion to the Sacred Heart and to widen its history beyond a legacy that the 19th century had inflected in a direction that had become reactionary and inaudible to the majority of the faithful.

5 “Liminaire”, Le Cœur. Les Études carmélitaines, p. 9 (translation by Sharon Casu).

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A Devotion on Trial The National Congress of the Sacred Heart in Montmartre (June 14–17, 1945)

Let us go back a few years. From June 14 to June 17, 1945, a National Congress of the Sacred Heart was held in Paris in a context that deserves some clarification.6 In January 1942, the Jesuit Charles Parra, director of the Apostleship of Prayer, had launched a project celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of the ‘invention’ of the Apostleship of Prayer in 1844 with a celebration during which France would be officially consecrated to the Sacred Heart, according to the wish addressed by Marguerite-­Marie Alacoque to King Louis XIV in 1689. The date of the commemoration had been set for October 28, 1944, the Feast of Christ the King, but the Liberation of Paris and the difficulties that followed had led to the event being postponed. The consecration took place six months later, on the Feast of the Sacred Heart. But times had changed, and so had the regime. It was no longer France, but only the “Christian families of France” who were consecrated to the Sacred Heart on June 17, after a double celebration, at Notre-Dame de Paris and then at the Basilica of Montmartre, punctuated by a radio broadcast by Pius XII. No official representative of the French government attended the ceremony. The spirit governing the event was clearly a continuation of the Vichy years. For three days, from June 14 to June 16, in the presence of bishops and of nuncio Roncalli, and in conjunction with the speeches of several prelates and officials, a number of processions that took place on Montmartre displayed the Catholic population of France  : “Young boys from Paris”7 (Crusaders, Valiant Hearts, Cub Scouts and Catholic Action movements) on June 14  ; “mothers, widows with families and especially wives of prisoners”8 on the 15th  ; young girls (Cadettes, Valiant Souls, members of the women section of the Catholic Action movements, which were “much more numerous”9 than the boys two days earlier) on the 16th. After three years of preparation which had made possible “the consecration of more than a million families to the Sacred Heart”10, the ceremonies were “a means of finalizing by a public and solemn act the project of the consecration of French families to the Sacred Heart, launched in the various dioceses in the aftermath of our disasters”11.  6 The proceedings of the congress were published in 1946 under the title Le Sacré Cœur de Jésus et la doctrine du corps mystique. I draw on the accounts, published in this volume, of René Brouillard, “Le Congrès national du Sacré Cœur”, pp. 205–212, and Charles Parra, “La journée du 17 juin 1945”, pp. 213–222.   7 Brouillard, “Le Congrès national du Sacré Cœur”, p. 210 (translation by Sharon Casu).   8 Ibid., p. 211 (translation by Sharon Casu).   9 Ibid., p. 211 (translation by Sharon Casu). 10 Parra, “La journée du 17 juin 1945”, p. 214 (translation by Sharon Casu). 11 Brouillard, “Le Congrès national du Sacré Cœur”, p. 205 (translation by Sharon Casu).

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Finally, on the evening of June 16, a meeting of the Catholic Association of Heads of Families12 was held at the Wagram Hall, in the presence of 300 fathers, delegates of the dioceses13. There, it was reminded that “the recovery of France can only be achieved through the recovery of the family.”14 At the end of a speech by Cardinal Suhard, three motions were voted for by acclamation. The first called for the introduction of the family vote, even though women had just voted for the first time in the municipal elections of 29 April and 13 May 1945. The second motion called for the indissolubility of marriage and the authority of the head of the family to be enshrined in law. The third defended equality between public and private schools and the “allocation of school vouchers to all heads of families”15 to enable them to support the school of their choice. From Vichy to the Republic, everything went on as if nothing had changed, either in the representation the people had of a country organised around its Catholic heads of family, or in the demands of the Church of France considered as the body of the nation. This apparent unanimity did not, however, exclude a certain amount of concern. In a conference on “Le Sacré-Cœur et l’Action catholique” (“The Sacred Heart and Catholic Action”)16, Mgr Feltin, Archbishop of Bordeaux, remarked on the disaffec­ tion of young people with the devotion to the Sacred Heart. He was concerned about this and asked  : “Do our Catholic Action activists know and love the Sacred Heart of Jesus sufficiently  ?”17 Among the French bishops, Mgr Feltin had been one of the strongest supporters of the Vichy regime during the Occupation. In his intervention, he reproached the chaplains of the youth movements for their promotion of a spirituality exclusively oriented towards collective action and commitment, to the detriment of personal spirituality. He also denounced the abusive use of social surveys within Catholic Action  : “Some movements, especially those addressed to a cultivated milieu, have been accused of giving too much space to surveys and of spending too much time recording small, uninteresting observations. This criticism is not unfounded”18, he explained, with a touch of anti-intellectualism. 12 “Réunion des A.C.C.F. à la salle Wagram”, Le Sacré Cœur de Jésus et la doctrine du corps mystique, pp. 229–234. 13 On the Catholic Association of Heads of Families, see Laloux et alii, Histoire des associations familiales catholiques. 14 “Réunion des A.C.C.F. à la salle Wagram”, Le Sacré Cœur de Jésus et la doctrine du corps mystique, p. 233 (translation by Sharon Casu). 15 Ibid., p. 234 (translation by Sharon Casu). 16 Archbishop Feltin, “Le Sacré Cœur et l’Action catholique”, Le Sacré Cœur de Jésus et la doctrine du corps mystique, pp. 119–133. 17 Ibid., p. 120 (translation by Sharon Casu). 18 Ibid., p. 131 (translation by Sharon Casu).

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Others shared this new concern. The historian Jacques Benoist, who wrote the best history of the Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre, clearly described how this disaffection was experienced in the form of a generation gap.19 Older generations, gathering in devotional associations and confraternities, and in the movement of the Apostleship of Prayer, remained attached to traditional practices of restorative devotion. The younger generations, spearheaded by the Specialized Catholic Action, lived a spirituality of commitment, nourished by a reading of the Gospel that privileged the person of Christ to the detriment of images of the Heart and of the Side Wound, which they considered to be superstitions from another age. This is why, in 1949, Cardinal Suhard, Archbishop of Paris, and Canon Aubé, Rector of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, entrusted Father André Dérumaux, recently appointed chaplain of the basilica, with the task of conducting a survey among young people on the devotion to the Sacred Heart. The first results of this survey appear in the volume of Les Études carméli­ taines which is the subject of this article, and which shall now be presented in detail. The Heart According to Les Études carmélitaines (1950)

The printing of the 402-page volume was completed on September 20, 1950. It brought together 24 authors, including two women, the psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto (1908– 1988) and the artist and literary critic Claudine Chonez (1912–1995). Seven of these authors were clerics. Four of them participated as theologians  : the Jesuits Louis Beir­ naert (1906–1985) and André Lefèvre (1903–1970), the Dominican Marie-­Dominique Chenu (1895–1990) and the Carmelite friar Philippe de la Trinité (1908–1977). Two others, the Belgian Redemptorist Pierre Debongnie (dates not found) and Louis Cognet (1917–1970), a priest of the diocese of Clermont-Ferrand who became curator of the library of Port-Royal, contributed as historians. The last theologian was André Dérumaux (1908–2000). To this group can be added Swâmi Ādide­vâ­nanda (1912–1983), monk of the Ramakrishna Mission in Madras. Among the 16 lay authors, eight were concerned with the connection between literary and artistic creation and criticism  : Paul Claudel (1868–1955), Stanislas Fumet (1896–1983), the museographer and art critic Germain Bazin (1901–1990), the Christian surrealist Michel Carrouges (1910–1988), Claudine Chonez, Jacques Madaule (1898–1993), the novelist and academic Armand Hoog (1912–1999) and the painter Michel Tapié (1909–1987), also an art critic. The group included two doctors, Françoise Dolto and the neuropsychiatrist Jean Lhermitte (1877–1959), and a philosopher, Henri Gouhier (1898–1994), 19 Benoist, Le Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre, vol. 2, pp. 890–892  ; Le Sacré-Cœur des femmes, pp. ­1627–1634  ; Fouilloux, “Le Sacré-Cœur”.

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professor at the Sorbonne. Finally, five authors came from the religious sciences, all directly or indirectly linked to the Ecole Pratique des Hautes Études  : the orientalists Louis Massignon (1883–1962), Jean Doresse (1917–2007) and Émile Dermenghem (1892–1971), the antiquist Antoine Guillaumont (1915–2000) and the ethnologist Guy Stresser-Péan (1913–2009), a specialist in pre-Columbian civilizations. Bruno de Jésus-Marie was the director of this group, many members of which were regularly in contact with him. About ten authors had already contributed to one or more thematic issues of Les Études carmélitaines or to the International Congresses of Religious Psychology. Others were long-time relations  : Bruno de Jésus-Marie met Father Chenu when they were both studying at the Angelicum  ; Stanislas Fumet was one of the founders of the collection “Le Roseau d’or” (“the Golden Reed”), published by Grasset, where in 1929 the Carmelite published a biography of John of the Cross with a preface by Jacques Maritain  ; Paul Claudel was a regular visitor to the Villa Scheffer where the Carmelite resided, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris. Some relations might have been established indirectly  : Germain Bazin was a disciple of René Huyghe, who had already collaborated with the journal  ; the same was true of Jean Doresse, Antoine Guillaumont and Henri-Charles Puech, another former collaborator. Louis Massignon and Emile Dermenghem shared an interest in Islam and interreligious dialogue, while Armand Hoog and Jacques Madaule shared a political commitment close to Christian democracy. A network of sociability thus took shape, connecting Christian commitment with research in literature and in the human sciences  : this volume was the work of a group, and not of a simple collection of individuals. The book is organized in five parts without subheadings, but well delimited in their subject matter. The first part (Lhermitte, Dolto) deals with the heart within the framework of the sciences of the psyche. The second part (Guillaumont, Doresse, Ādi­ devânanda, Massignon, Stresser-Péan) is based on a comparative anthropology that broadens the object ‘heart’ to the scale of a history of civilizations. The third part deals with the tradition of the Sacred Heart itself from an exegetical and theological (Lefevre, Chenu) as well as from a historical and literary approach, from the Middle Ages to modern times (Bazin, Debongnie, Hoog, Dermenghem, Beirnaert, Cognet), with an extension to contemporary literature that escapes the specifically Christian register to focus on positivism (Gouhier), romanticism (Madaule), André Breton (Carrouges) and Jean-Paul Sartre (Chonez). In the fourth part of the volume, Germain Bazin comments as an art historian on the rich iconography (31 black-and-white off-text plates) he has assembled for the volume. Finally, the last part draws lessons from this history (Fumet, Philippe de la Trinité, Claudel). All in all, the volume had the aim of understanding the spiritual and mystical tradition in order to re-establish a Christian anthropology, not against the human sciences, but with them, in a pluridisciplinary process.

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André Dérumaux’s Survey

Admittedly, there is little convergence between this approach and the 1945 National Congress. The issue of Les Études carmélitaines devoted to the heart was not a response to the ongoing debates. There is nothing in it that resembles a desire for controversy. But it appeared in a precise sequence, between the Liberation upstream and, downstream, the Haurietis Aquas encyclical of 1955. Moreover, as said above, Abbé Dérumaux presented the first results of his survey. Dérumaux remarks a disaffection that he explains in several ways. Devotion to the Sacred Heart appears obsolete, imbued with “superstition” and “bad taste”20 because of the way it highlights the bloody viscera of Christ. The students contrast it with “the modern need for simplicity”21, the “modern concern for authenticity”22, which leads them to seek “direct recourse to Christ, to his humanity known through the Gospel or present in the host, without lingering on intermediaries, as the human Heart of Jesus appears to them”23. Dérumaux underlines the doleful image of this devotion, as well as its content considered politically reactionary, “political or chauvinistic”. He contrasts it with the spirituality of the Catholic Action movements, which “places the emphasis on personal fulfilment, on the beneficial social action of Christianity, on the spiritual and apostolic activity of the Christian, much more than on the necessary renunciation, on the hidden, humiliated and suffering life, on expiation.”24 A “new way”25 is therefore needed. Dérumaux agrees in part with Archbishop Feltin’s analyses, but without repeating the latter’s criticism of youth movements. He also allows the reader to understand how devotion to the Sacred Heart is the stage of a crisis which brings into play the relationship between history and memory of the Sacred Heart in two different registers, one political, the other spiritual.26 Concerning the spiritual side, Dérumaux shows how the realism of the mystical experiences of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque and her successors have become literally incomprehensible in its visceral and carnal dimension, at the same time as collective 20 Dérumaux, “Crise ou évolution dans la dévotion des jeunes pour le Sacré-Cœur  ?”, Le Cœur. Les Études carmélitaines, pp. 296–326, citation p. 299 (translation by Sharon Casu). 21 Ibid., p. 299 (translation by Sharon Casu). 22 Ibid., p. 302 (translation by Sharon Casu). 23 Ibid., p. 300 (translation by Sharon Casu). 24 Ibid., p. 307 (translation by Sharon Casu). 25 Ibid., p. 316 (translation by Sharon Casu). 26 On the history of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in France in contemporary times, see Jonas, France & the Cult of the Sacred Heart  ; Menozzi, Sacro Cuore.

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memory has somewhat erased it in favour of the pious imagery that was developed in the 19th century. This imagery has watered down the radicality of the mystical experience of the foundress. It has contributed to making it even less accessible as it oscillates between the obscene image of bloody viscera and the bland, outdated imagery designated as “Sulpician”. Basically, a part of Baroque spirituality has been erased from the collective memory to the point of making the history of the devotion to the Sacred Heart foreign to the younger generations. On the political side, the difficulty stems from the way in which the counter-revolutionary trend had seized the devotion to the Sacred Heart after the execution of King Louis XVI and the wars of the Vendée, based on the historically disputed episode of the “vow of Louis XVI” in 1792.27 The opportune “discovery”, the day after the beatification of Marguerite-Marie by Pius IX, of the request she had supposedly made to King Louis XIV to consecrate France to the Sacred Heart in 1689, reinforced this counter-revolutionary trend by giving it an anti-republican dimension.28 This dimension was at the heart of the “national vow” formulated in the aftermath of the military defeat of September 1870. Certainly, the First World War and then the pontificate of Pius XI influenced the political meaning of the devotion to the Sacred Heart, by making it compatible with a Catholicism that was intransigent about values but susceptible of adhering to the Republic.29 But the Vichy episode reinforced the anti-democratic dimension inherited from the 19th century.30 During the congress of June 1945, the most conservative part of French Catholicism was displayed at the Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre, in contradiction with current political events as well as with the transformation of young Catholics affected by the legacy of the Resistance. In other words, on a political as well as on a spiritual level, the memory of the Sacred Heart, as it has been established in the 19th century, never ceases to hinder its own evolution in the face of history.

27 See the recent syntheses by Bernard Hours, “Contre-Révolution avant 1789”, and Christian Sorrel, “Sacré-Cœur”, in Martin, Dictionnaire de la Contre-Révolution, respectively pp. 195–201 and 471–474. 28 Rodriguez, “Du vœu royal au vœu national. Une histoire du XIXe siècle”. 29 Becker, La guerre et la foi, pp. 104–116  ; Boniface, Histoire religieuse de la Grande Guerre, pp. 255–263  ; Lesti, Riti di guerra. 30 Vallin, “Le Sacré-Cœur dans la culture politique française”, pp. 367 ff.

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A Memory Revisited. Between Mysticism and Politics Le Cœur is therefore indicative of a moment when history and the human sciences were mobilized to take charge of a common memory and to revisit it in the light of current events. On the Side of Devotion

The extraordinary manifestations of the mysticism of the heart are the subject of five articles. The Jesuit Henri Lefevre deals with the scriptural roots of the ‘Side Wound’. After studying at the Biblical Institute in Rome, he taught exegesis at the scholasticate of Enghien in Belgium.31 The side wound, according to St John’s interpretation, “has the value of a sign”32. “Jesus’ side struck with the spear and letting a flood of water and blood gush forth thus manifested […] the fulfilment of what the prophets had foretold about the redemption of Israel.”33 Father Chenu centres his study of the “affective categories in the language of the school” on Bonaventure, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. He sees three different ways of responding to a common concern, that of differentiating between cognitive and affective faculties. How, then, could we “cast in the same mould [their] vocabulary and [their] methods”  ?34 Following a strategy that was dear to him, Chenu thus confirms the coherence of the scholastic tradition while historicizing the ways in which it is embodied, which leaves the field open to possible re-readings. In a very long article (nearly fifty pages), the Redemptorist Pierre Debongnie discusses the “beginnings and rebeginnings” of the devotion before the 17th century. A historian of spirituality and a pupil of Alfred Cauchie, the founder of the Revue d’histoire ecclésiastique, Debongnie retraces the genesis of a tradition that leads from la Vie de Marie d’Oignies by Jacques de Vitry to the Vigne mystique by Saint Bonaventure. This tradition goes through the life of Saint Lutgarde d’Aywières written by Thomas de Cantimpré, and by the mystical nuns of Helfta – Mechtilde of Hackeborn, Mechthilde von Magdeburg and Gertrude the Great – whom Don Guéranger exhumed in 1875. Debongnie also evokes Margaret of Cortona, whose biography by François Mauriac he recalls, as well as Angèle de Foligno, of whom Ernest Hello made “for the French

31 32 33 34

Beylard, “Lefevre André.” Lefèvre, “La Blessure du Côté”, Le Cœur, pp. 109–122, citation p. 111 (translation by Sharon Casu). Ibid., p. 115 (translation by Sharon Casu). Chenu, “Les catégories affectives dans la langue de l’école”, Le Cœur, pp. 123–128, citation p. 124 (translation by Sharon Casu).

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public, a magnificent and unfaithful adaptation”.35 Rhenish mysticism, whose speculative dimension was ill adapted to the effusions of the wounded heart, and then the devotio moderna of Thomas a Kempis, interrupted this lineage. The adventure of John Eudes and Marguerite-Marie Alacoque is therefore a “new beginning”. Debongnie makes a triple contribution. On the one hand, he describes the extraordinary realism of the figures of the mysticism of the Heart, of the exchange of hearts and refuge in the open wound, of the passion for the wounds and the mixing of blood and bodily secretions, of the channels between hearts and rays of light. On the other hand, he inscribes it in a long tradition of Christian literature, rooted in the Middle Ages but which casts its shadow even on the “Catholic literary Renaissance” of the interwar period with Hello and Mauriac. Finally, he clears the necessary space for the 17th century and its paradoxical novelty within this tradition. The 17th century is in fact treated in two articles with very different tones. Émile Dermenghem, who wrote on Saint John Eudes and Marie des Vallées36, was not a specialist in the devotion to the Sacred Heart. Published in 1926, his biography of Marie des Vallées was an early work.37 Dermenghem was an Islamologist, close to Louis Massignon. He had most notably published a Vie de Mahomet in 1929, then a Vie des saints musulmans in 1942, when he became archivist-librarian of the General Government of Algiers.38 As for the Jesuit Louis Beirnaert, author of the article devoted to Saint Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, he was one of the pioneers of the Catholic reception of psychoanalysis.39 After being appointed to the journal Études, in Paris, he began a didactic psychoanalysis with Daniel Lagache in 1946. His article40 was a psychoanalytical reading of the symbolism of the heart in the saint, enlightened by her childhood relationship with her mother. He identified three conjoined figures  : that of the wound, a theme “constantly associated in her with the figure of Christ”41 and centred on the secretions of the body  ; that of the “secret cavity”42 where one takes refuge and which gives access to the “dwelling place”43 of the heart “where one

35 Debongnie, “Commencement et recommencements de la dévotion au cœur de Jésus”, Le Cœur, pp. 147–193, citation p. 177 (translation by Sharon Casu). 36 Dermenghem, “Saint Jean Eudes et Marie des Vallées”, Le Cœur, pp. 224–227. 37 Dermenghem, La vie admirable, 1926. 38 Boyer, “Émile Dermenghem.” 39 Desmazières, “Spiritualité jésuite”  ; Lemoine, “Louis Beirnaert.” 40 Beirnaert, “Note sur les attaches psychologiques du symbolisme du cœur chez sainte Marguerite-Marie”, Le Cœur, pp. 228–233. 41 Ibid., p. 228 (translation by Sharon Casu). 42 Ibid., p. 231 (translation by Sharon Casu). 43 Ibid., p. 230 (translation by Sharon Casu)

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finds acceptance and regeneration”44  ; and finally that of “the furnace, the flame, the sun”45, directly associated with the heart of Christ. The psychoanalytical reading does not disqualify the mystical experience of the saint. However, it does produce a shift towards the unconscious which in turn enhances the “rational” dimension of the symbolism of the heart in John Eudes. This subtle rebalancing finds confirmation in the conclusion of Emile Dermenghem himself. He invites the reader to reorient the devotion to the Sacred Heart more towards the school of Coutances. The latter was indeed “more speculative, less sentimental, more symbolic”46 than that of Paray-le-Monial. It was therefore more in tune with the heritage of the French School of Spirituality (Bérulle, Condren, Olier) as well as with the contemporary trends of spirituality. On the Political Side

The political side of the history of the devotion to the Sacred Heart, on the other hand, was only briefly studied. This can be understood as an effect of memory. It is known today that the message of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque had from the outset a political content. Indeed, the vocabulary of desire and pleasure that she used referred in part to the political notion of sovereignty. The Visitandine thus established a “theological-political” relationship between the royalty of Christ and that of the monarch. But her message was overlain, at the beginning of the 18th century, by the shift of this same vocabulary from “sovereign desire” and “good pleasure” to the register of intimate passions. Very early on, collective memory thus reconfigured the history of the devotion by obstructing the understanding of the original message. However, the authors of the 1950 volume did not know of this evolution, which would only be explored several years later, by the historian Jacques Le Brun, in two decisive articles on the vocabulary of Marguerite-Marie and her entourage.47 In fact, the political memory of the Sacred Heart appears in two articles of the collection, that of Louis Cognet on the polemics with the Jansenists in the 18th century48 and that of Stanislas Fumet on the “Prophétisme du Sacré-Cœur” (“Prophetism of the Sacred Heart”)49. 44 Ibid., p. 231 (translation by Sharon Casu). 45 Ibid., p. 232 (translation by Sharon Casu). 46 Dermenghem, “Saint Jean Eudes et Marie des Vallées”, p. 226 (translation by Sharon Casu). 47 Le Brun, “Une lecture historique”  ; “Politique et spiritualité”. See also Marx, “Autour de l’image du Sacré-­Cœur de Jésus”. 48 Cognet, “Les jansénistes et le Sacré-Cœur”, Le Cœur, pp. 234–253. 49 Fumet, “Prophétisme du Sacré-Cœur”, Le Cœur, pp. 355–378.

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Louis Cognet underlines the attention that Jansenist authors paid to the piety of the heart, in the wake of Saint Augustine and until the middle of the 18th century for some of them. Jansenists were not unaware of the “carnal” dimension of this piety of the heart, even if they insisted particularly on its symbolic dimension. It was in the name of political issues that devotion to the Sacred Heart had become for them an object of polemics. In the controversy that followed the bull Unigenitus (1713), they were on the side of the “appellants”, while the supporters of the Sacred Heart were mostly on the side of the “acceptors”. The polemic intensified after 1765, when Pope Clement XIII officialised devotion to the Sacred Heart, but it was then tied to the political issue of the fight against the Jesuits. The polemic redefined itself again during the Revolution, around the opposition between supporters of the Constitutional Church and the counter-revolutionary current. From the 18th century onwards, devotion to the Sacred Heart thus became the support for political confrontations which partly denatured it and which already testified to its decline. Although using different arguments, Stanislas Fumet agrees with Louis Cognet’s analysis. A journalist and man of letters, Fumet was then literary director of the journal Temps présent and a member of the steering committee of the Centre catholique des intellectuels français.50 He was close to Jacques Maritain. He had been involved in the “return to Thomas”51 since the interwar period. Fumet was also the only author of the volume to take up the filiation between Louis XIV’s “failed vow” in 1689 and the French Revolution. Although he devoted the second part of his article to “the royal fault” and its consequences in the history of contemporary France, it was in a manner quite different from the counter-revolutionary tradition. In his article, the “royal fault” becomes a metaphor for modernity and its mistakes. The 18th century that he hated was that of Choderlos de Laclos and Sade, “the reign of the non-heart”52 and of the cynical violence of feelings and actions. The Revolution of 1789 was “the work of a France that only loses its mind because its heart has been mislaid”.53 Fumet was philosophically an anti-modernist. He used the question of the Sacred Heart to renew the theme of intransigent Catholicism. His argument is compatible with the idea of the “social kingship of Christ” as developed by Pius XI in the encyclical Quas Primas (1925), instituting the Feast of Christ the King. But he was a Democrat, a former Resistance fighter who rubbed shoulders with the communists in the National Writers’ Committee and who admired General de Gaulle. He was not 50 Germain, Angremy and Favier, Stanislas Fumet  ; Pelletier, “Fumet (Stanislas)”, pp. 615–616. 51 Chenaux, Entre Maurras et Maritain  ; Fouilloux, Une Église en quête de liberté. 52 Fumet, “Prophétisme du Sacré-Cœur”, p. 374 (translation by Sharon Casu). 53 Ibid., p. 372 (translation by Sharon Casu).

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interested in the notion of “expiation”, nor in the confraternities and congregations of the Sacred Heart which multiplied under the Restoration, nor in Father Ramière’s “national vow” and its repercussions on the “Apostolate of Prayer” and the Eucharistic Crusade. His reading of the devotion to the Sacred Heart was certainly political. However, he ignored the 19th and 20th centuries, when the political memory of this devotion had been forged. In Stanislas Fumet as in Louis Cognet, it is as if the 17th century had been both the starting point of the devotion to the Sacred Heart and its apogee. Basically, the spirit which presided over this issue of Les Études carmélitaines was that of a return to the sources of the devotion.

History Enlarged  : Between Literature, Religious Sciences and the Sciences of the Psyche Around this central corpus, three series of articles broaden the history of the Heart by striving to give a universal dimension to the devotion to the Heart of Christ. These articles successively bring into play the sciences of the psyche, the religious sciences and a literary and artistic tradition that goes beyond Catholicism alone. Mysticism of the Heart and the Sciences of the Psyche

The two authors who open the volume are the neuropsychiatrist Jean Lhermitte and the psychoanalyst Françoise Dolto. It is thus through the psyche that the reader is invited to enter into a global approach of the heart. Jean Lhermitte54 was an important figure in French neuropsychiatry. To him we owe the discovery of “Lhermitte’s sign”, a neurological syndrome characteristic of multiple sclerosis. A member of the Academy of Medicine since 1942, retired in 1948, Lhermitte was a committed Catholic physician, familiar with Les Études carmélitaines and the Congresses of Religious Psychology. In 1938, at the request of Cardinal Pacelli, he wrote a report on the possibility of subjecting candidates for the priesthood to a psychological examination to validate their vocation.55 Like many French Catholic doctors, Lhermitte defended a neo-Hippocratic conception of medicine, which inscribed illness and treatment in a “somatopsychic” approach to the personality of the patient.56 In 1941, he published a volume for the new collection “Que sais-je” on Le 54 Desmazières, L’inconscient au paradis, pp. 64–68, 89, 143  ; Ohayon, L’impossible rencontre, pp. 188–189. 55 Desmazières, L’inconscient au paradis, pp. 216–217. 56 Lhermitte, Les fondements biologiques de la psychologie.

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rêve, where he appeared extremely suspicious of psychoanalysis. In 1949, he had just written the preface to Reflections sur la psychanalyse by Father Nédoncelle and the psychoanalyst Juliette Boutonier, but was hardly more open to the work of Freud, to whom he reproached his libido theory.57 In 1950, Françoise Dolto was not yet the renowned psychoanalyst she would later become.58 Coming from a bourgeois family, strongly affected by her Catholic education, she followed from 1938 the seminary of Jacques Lacan, to whom she became very close. She became a member of the Paris Psychoanalysis Society in 1939 and made herself known in 1949 with her first article in the Revue française de psychanalyse devoted to the “flower dolls” that she used in two analytical cures for children. However, she published mainly in militant journals  : the Revue de l’Union des femmes françaises, a result of the Communist Resistance  ; the Conférences de l’École des parents, of Christian inspiration  ; the journal Psyché by Maryse Choisy, Bruno de Jésus-Marie’s main competitor in the Catholic reception of psychoanalysis  ; and finally Les Études carmélitaines, for which the 1950 article was her third.59 She regularly participated, with her husband Boris Dolto, in the International Congresses of Religious Psychology. Of the two articles, Jean Lhermitte’s60 is the more ambitious. The author goes through the whole history of psychology, from Greek philosophy (Aristotle and Galen) to Descartes and Bichat, in search of representations of the heart as the seat of the soul’s passions. He then continues the genealogy by evoking the theory of emotions of the psychiatrist Carl Lange and of William James, considered one of the founders of religious psychology. As mentioned above, Lhermitte was a neurologist rather than a psychiatrist, but this allowed him to build a system of reciprocal validations, between the sciences of the psyche and neurology on the one hand, and between the brain and the heart on the other. This approach allows him to show the relevance of the metaphor of the heart as the seat of passions and emotions. Although he did not address the question of the Sacred Heart, the scientific genealogy he offered can suggest that the metaphor of the heart continues to have a strong symbolic meaning. Françoise Dolto’s article is more modest.61 It is a short text on the place of the symbolism of the heart in children’s psychoanalysis. Dolto focuses on popular expressions – “having a bad heart”, having a “good heart” or “no heart”, having a place “in 57 Lhermitte, “Qu’est-ce que la psychanalyse”. 58 Notice “Dolto Françoise, née Marette (1908–1988)”, in Roudinesco and Plon, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, pp. 236–241  ; Sauverzac, Françoise Dolto, chapters IV and V. 59 Arzel-Nadal, “Bibliographie générale”, Françoise Dolto et l’image inconsciente du corps, pp. 265–277. 60 Lhermitte, “Le cœur dans ses rapports avec les états affectifs”, Le Cœur, pp. 17–32. 61 Dolto, “Le cœur, expression symbolique de la vie affective”, Le Cœur, pp. 34–38.

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the heart” of the mother. She presents the role of the heart in the mechanism through which the child constructs its affective identity through its relationship with others. One could also say that Dolto made plausible in advance, in the eyes of the reader, Beirnaert’s interpretation of the relationship between Marguerite-Marie Alacoque and her mother. I will conclude this analysis with three remarks. The presence of Lhermitte, Dolto and Beirnaert in the issue can obviously be explained by the project of Bruno de Jésus-Marie, who used Les Études carmélitaines to rethink the spiritual and mystical tradition of Carmel in the light of the sciences of the psyche. As a result, the journal became, as said above, one of the centres of the encounter between psychoanalysis and Catholicism. These three authors are also representatives of a certain moment in the reception of psychoanalysis in France. Jean Lhermitte was the heir to the French psychiatric tradition that resisted Freud. Françoise Dolto, on the contrary, was very close to Jacques Lacan. Finally, Beirnaert had just taken part, on two occasions, in the meetings of the Cercle Eranos held in Ascona, Switzerland, around Carl-Gustav Jung.62 Jacques Lacan publicly reproached him for this in the spring of 1950. Beirnaert thus quickly distanced himself from Jungian psychoanalysis. Yet Bruno de Jésus-Marie was interested in the Jungian theory of archetypes and in the value Jung accorded to the religious experience, whereas Freud placed such experience on the side of illusion and neurosis.63 Finally, the reading of the three authors demonstrates the importance that each of them gives to the symbolic dimension of the heart. The question of the symbol and its meaning (the “symbolic function”) is at the heart of Jacques Lacan’s “return to Freud”. It plays an essential role in his reading of Roman Jakobson’s work, in his encounter with Claude Lévi-Strauss, and more generally in the establishment of structuralism in France.64 However, the notion of symbol is also at the centre of the Catholic debate on the devotion to the Sacred Heart. Focusing on Jean Eudes and Coutances to the detriment of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque and Paray-le-Monial means emphasizing the symbolic dimension of the suffering heart of Christ, to the detriment of the visceral and overly carnal dimension that it took on in Baroque mysticism and that became incomprehensible in the aftermath of the Second World War, as André Dérumaux showed in his survey. 62 Desmazières, “Spiritualité jésuite”, pp. 140–141. 63 Beirnaert, “Le père Bruno et la psychologie religieuse”, Le père Bruno de Jésus-Marie, pp. 37–42. 64 Notice “Symbolic”, in Roudinesco and Plon, Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse, pp.  1060–1062  ; Lévi-­ Strauss, “Introduction”, p. xlvii–lii.

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The Contribution of the Religious Sciences

The second part of the volume is devoted to conceptions of the heart outside the Christian tradition. Each of the five authors gives to the figure of the heart, between representation and rites, its universal dimension. Some of them more or less discreetly build bridges to the Christian doctrine of the Sacred Heart. Between anthropology and philology, the sciences of religions are called upon to expand the history of the heart to the scale of the world. Among the authors, Swâmi Ādidevânanda held a special place, writing the article “La notion de cœur dans la vie spirituelle de l’Inde” (“The notion of the heart in India’s spiritual life”)65. He was a monk of the Râmakrishna Mission, which operated in the monastery of Mylapore, in a suburb of Madras (now Chennai). He is also known for his translations of sacred texts from Sanskrit into Kannada, a language spoken in South India, and into English. The other four authors were all connected to the École Pratique des Hautes Études (EPHE). Three of them were still young researchers at the beginning of their career. Antoine Guillaumont66 was a specialist in Christianity in the Ancient East. Since 1947, he had been a lecturer in Syriac at the EPHE, where he was later elected director of studies in 1952. Jean Doresse67 was a young specialist in the Coptic world. Employed from 1947 by the French Institute of Oriental Archaeology in Cairo to work on Coptic monasteries, he became acquainted with the recently discovered scrolls from the Nag-Hammadi library. He published the first scientific presentation on this subject with Henri-Charles Puech, professor at the EPHE and a renowned specialist in ancient Gnosticism.68 He was soon put in charge of organizing the national archaeological service of Ethiopia where he continued most of his career. Finally, Guy Stresser-Péan69 was a student of Marcel Mauss and Daniel Rivet, who was appointed in 1954, again at the EPHE, to a chair of “Religions of Pre-Columbian America”. For these three young researchers still at the beginning of their careers, an article in Les Études carmélitaines was undoubtedly an opportunity. On the other hand, Louis Massignon had been a major figure in French Islamology for several decades, professor at the Collège de France since 1926 and professor at the EPHE since 1932. Massignon was also a committed Catholic, following in the footsteps of Father Charles de Fou65 Ādidevânanda, “La notion de cœur dans la vie spirituelle de l’Inde”, Le Cœur, pp. 88–95. 66 Le Boulluec, “Antoine Guillaumont”  ; Amiel, “Antoine Guillaumont (1915–2000)”  ; Dictionnaire prosopographique EPHE. 67 Rassart-Derbegh and Fuchs, “Les dons de Jean Doresse.” 68 Puech and Doresse, “Nouveaux écrits gnostiques”. 69 Dictionnaire prosopographique EPHE.

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cauld. A Franciscan Tertiary since 1932, he had recently been ordained a priest in the Greek-Catholic rite in 1950 and dedicated a large part of his activity to the Islamic-­ Christian dialogue and to the reconciliation of the three “Abrahamic religions”.70 Les Études carmélitaines have then called upon true specialists in sciences of religions to extend their reflection on the heart outside of Christianity. It is interesting to see how these authors acknowledged, more or less clearly, the Catholic tradition of the Sacred Heart. The most discreet among them was Stresser-Péan, who merely points out some “strange cases of religious syncretism”71 that occurred in Yucatan after the evangelization of the Maya. Jean Doresse, who has studied the mortuary rites of the ancient Egyptians, ventures further by stressing that “the heart is for them soul, life and thought, seat of the creating verb, conscience or divine witness, god placed in the chest of man”.72 In this heart, “necessary for celestial survival as well as for life here below, man will be able to find the gods directly and unite with them”.73 Antoine Guillaumont, for his part, constructs a double genealogy, Greek and Hebrew, of which Christianity is the synthesis. The Hebrews have a metaphorical use of the heart, “seat of religious life” and “centre of all psychological and moral life”.74 The Greeks, on the other hand, wonder where to locate intelligence, in the heart or in the brain. The Fathers of the Church, especially Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, synthesize this double heritage. They borrow from both the metaphorical tradition of the Hebrews and from the Greek philosophers. Saint Augustine, finally, “vigorously defends, following Plotinus, the immaterial nature of the soul”, but he makes the heart the place of “the deepest intimacy of the person” and, “above all, the place of religious excellence”.75 As for Massignon, he seeks to make plausible, not without difficulty, the encounter between Islam and devotion to the Sacred Heart. While the heart (qalb) is indeed the “place of the divine secret”76 in the Koran, Islam at the same time distrusts blood, which is considered impure. There must therefore be a double detour, through circumcision and the martyrdom of Hallaj. Circumcision appears in the Qur’an only 70 Lory, “Louis Massignon”, pp. 563–564  ; Avon, Frères prêcheurs, pp. 568–577. 71 Stresser-Péan, “Les sacrifices par arrachement du cœur dans l’Ancien Mexique”, Le Cœur, pp. 103–106 (translation by Sharon Casu). 72 Doresse, “Le cœur et les anciens Egyptiens”, Le Cœur, pp. 82–87, quotation p. 87 (translation by Sharon Casu). 73 Ibid., p. 87 (translation by Sharon Casu). 74 Guillaumont, “Le sens des noms du cœur dans l’Antiquité”, Le Cœur, p. 41–81, quotation p. 42 (translation by Sharon Casu). 75 Ibid., p. 73 (translation by Sharon Casu). 76 Louis Massignon, “Le ‘cœur’ (al-qalb) dans la prière et la méditation musulmanes”, Le Cœur, pp. 96– 102, quotation p. 97 (translation by Sharon Casu).

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allusively with the expression “uncircumcised hearts”, but this suggests, in the eyes of the Islamologist at least, that “Islam meditates well on the ‘sixth wound’ which was the circumcision of Christ, a wound of which St. Catherine of Siena bore the ringshaped mark on her finger”.77 On the mystical side, the blood that was shed at the time of Hallaj’s martyrdom draws a tenuous path to an encounter. “This blood that escapes from the heart, and that mixes with the water of tears, recalls the spear’s blow to the side of the crucified Jesus, which is, in fact, the only tolerable representation for Semites of the Christian idea of a worship of the ‘Sacred Heart’.”78 An Artistic and Literary Tradition

A final group of authors positions itself at the juncture between the literary and artistic fields. This encounter sketches another tradition of the heart, essentially French, which, although it has links to Christian literature, never ceases to escape from it and rebels against it in the contemporary age. Two of these authors hold a special place, namely the painter Salvador Dalí and the museum curator Germain Bazin. The previous spring, Dalí had met Bruno de Jésus-Marie and had promised him an article on “La physique du Cœur” (“The physics of the Heart”), which never arrived. It was therefore replaced by an out-of-text reproduction of a painting dated 1949, the first version of La Madone de Port-Lligat, in which the bust of the Virgin is marked by a gap in which lies the Child Jesus, whose thorax also bears an opening containing a loaf of bread. Michel Tapié briefly comments on this mise en abyme. He underlines “the emptiness that occupies the place of the Hearts of the Virgin and of the Child Jesus” and connects them to the Spanish mystical tradition  : “Besides the vertigo linked to the call of emptiness as well as to that of love without limits, one cannot help but think of that nothingness so precious and so lucidly explored by Saint John of the Cross.”79 Germain Bazin, for his part, played a central role in the issue. He published three texts80, and it is he who collected the iconography and provided the commentary. Bazin was a disciple of Émile Mâle and René Huyghe, who brought him to the Louvre 77 Ibid., p. 100 (translation by Sharon Casu). See the entries “Circoncision, excision”, “Cœur” and “Sang” in Amir-Moezzi, Dictionnaire du Coran. 78 Ibid., p. 101 (translation by Sharon Casu). 79 Tapié, “A propos de la Madone de Port-Lligat de Salvador Dali”, Le Cœur, p. 286–287, citation p. 286 (translation by Sharon Casu). 80 Bazin, “En quête du sentiment courtois dans la pensée et l’art français”, Le Cœur, pp. 129–146  ; “Le visage de la miséricorde”, Le Cœur, pp. 329–339  ; “Note sur l’iconographie du cœur dans l’art chrétien”, Le Cœur, pp. 339–352.

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in 1937 as assistant curator of the painting department, in charge of overseeing the restoration of works of art.81 It was also thanks to Huyghe that Bazin joined the editorial board of the magazine L’amour de l’art, which Bazin directed from 1947 to 1952. Finally, he was the author of monographs on painters (Memling, Fra Angelico, Corot) and works on various artistic movements (the French Primitives, Impressionism). He is representative of an art history that creates a connection between the world of museums and the cultured public. He was also a Christian, passionate about religious painting and architecture, and endowed with a substantial literary culture. It was thus at the meeting point between art and literature that he first combined the tradition of courtly love in medieval Provençal literature with Romanesque and Gothic statuary. In a critical discussion with the anthropologist Robert Briffault, who in 1945 had published a monograph on Les troubadours et le sentiment romanesque, Bazin confirmed the thesis of the Arab origin of courtly literature, which brings him closer to the approach of Massignon, whose Le martyre d’Hallaj he commented on. However, contrary to Briffault, who asserted that the Church had hindered the rise of courtly literature and precipitated its decline, he supported the theory of a close correspondence between profane and sacred love, a correspondence that he tracked back to the 16th century through Maurice Scève and Louise Labé, then in the 17th century with L’Astrée d’Honoré d’Urfé, the pastoral novels, then La princesse de Clèves by Madame de La Fayette, up to the 19th century with Auguste Comte, the “Woman Messiah” of the Saint-Simonians and Michelet. Through them, the true literary tradition of the heart had survived, but it was now outside the realm of sacred art and religious literature. The iconography gathered for the volume and Bazin’s commentaries go along the same lines. In “Le visage de la miséricorde” (“The face of mercy”), the representation of Jesus is used as the grounds for a reflection on the encounter between art history and history of spirituality. It is a beautiful investigation into the humanization of the figure of Christ, written in an often metaphorical style that allows for some daring comparisons, for example between the “Beautiful Bodhisattva” of Ajanta, India, and the Christ of the Last Supper by Leonardo. Nevertheless, most of the article focuses on the Christian tradition, from French Romanesque art to 17th century Baroque Spain, including Duccio and Giotto, Rembrandt, Zurbaran, Greco and the Valladolid school, and Georges de la Tour. One aspect is striking  : all the works cited or reproduced predate the visions of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. It is that “these Spanish works, Rembrandt’s paintings, some of Georges de la Tour’s paintings in France, are the last authentic expressions of religious feeling in art. From the 18th century onwards, art 81 Émile-Mâle, “Germain Bazin”  ; Archives nationales de France, Germain Bazin Fonds.

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is part of the century and, with it, the century enters the Church”.82 One might expect a different treatment in the “Note sur l’iconographie du cœur dans l’art chrétien” (“Note on the iconography of the heart in Christian art”). In fact, after remarks on the first representations of John leaning his head against the heart of Christ, and on the first heart-shaped reliquaries, the note is consecrated to the 17th and 18th century, but through Spanish and German Baroque, and the Brazilian statuary that Bazin knew well. France is absent, and so also absent is all the iconography of the heart that had developed in the wake of restorative devotion and the national vow. In art history, too, the 17th century had been an apex of the devotion to the Sacred Heart, whose subsequent history was only a long decline. Finally, I will briefly mention the authors who focussed on contemporary literature. Henri Gouhier had been a Professor of Philosophy at the Sorbonne since 1941. A specialist in French philosophy from Descartes to Bergson, he offers an analysis of the heart in Auguste Comte, between the religion of Humanity and the mythical figure of Clotilde de Vaux.83 Armand Hoog84 and Jacques Madaule85 had in common the fact that their literary career was coupled with political commitment, the former with the Jeune République, the latter alongside the Mouvement républicain populaire (MRP). A literary critic for Carrefour, Hoog published his first novel in 1947, and spent most of his career at Princeton University in the United States. His “Esquisse d’une mythologie française du cœur” (“Sketch of a French mythology of the heart”)86 is an overview of French literature from Chrétien de Troyes to André Breton, whose main figures are Maurice Scève and Ronsard, Honoré d’Urfé and the classics of the 17th century. “Le cœur moderne” (“The modern heart”) was born between the Enlightenment and the early Romantics, with Abbé Prévost, Rousseau and Chénier, then Châteaubriand and George Sand. As for Jacques Madaule, he offers a genealogy of contemporary literary sentiment, which includes Victor Hugo, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Verlaine and Claudel.87 Finally, Michel Carrouges88 was a Christian surrealist, close to Breton, on whom he published a critical study in 1950. The following year, he would be excluded from the surrealist movement precisely because of his Catholicism. As for Claudine Chonez89, 82 “Le visage de la miséricorde”, Le Cœur, pp. 338–339 (translation by Sharon Casu). 83 Gouhier, “Auguste Comte et le règne du cœur”, Le Cœur, pp. 254–260. 84 Boudon, La Jeune République, pp. 189–190. 85 Comte, “Madaule (Jacques) 1898–1993”, in Julliard and Winock, Dictionnaire des intellectuels, pp. 887– 888. 86 Hoog, “Esquisse d’une mythologie française du cœur”, Le Cœur, pp. 193–223. 87 Madaule, “Le cœur de Baudelaire à Péguy”, Le Cœur, pp. 261–277. 88 Carrouges, “Le cœur surréaliste”, Le Cœur, pp. 278–285. Fonds Michel Carrouges, website. 89 Weill, “Claudine Chonez.”

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a sculptor, poet and literary critic with the French Radio-Television (RTF), she was a “travelling companion” of the Communist Party, which she would leave in 1956 after the invasion of Hungary by the Red Army. Her article is devoted to the novels and the dramatic works of Jean-Paul Sartre.90 The analysis of the texts clearly reveals the following  : for Les Études carmélitaines, there was indeed a French tradition of the Heart. However, since the 19th century, this tradition had no longer been carried on by those who reclaimed the devotion to the Sacred Heart.

Conclusion In the history of Catholicism, and perhaps more generally in the history of the three monotheisms, the “return to the sources” has always been a preferred route for those seeking reform. In the 20th century, Maritain and those close to him defended a return to the sources of Thomism against the abuses of contemporary scholasticism  ; the Ateliers d’Art Sacré wanted to return to the medieval sources of Christian iconography beyond the “drifts” of Baroque art and then of Sulpicianism  ; the Jesuits of Fourvière made of the return to the Fathers of the Church a means of responding to the demands of the present time. And the idea of a return to the sources notably fuelled the aggiornamento at the Second Vatican Council. Obviously, those in charge of Les Études carmélitaines, and first of all Bruno de Jésus-Marie, wanted to “return to the sources” of the devotion to the Sacred Heart, which was made difficult by the fact that these sources drew on the piety of the Baroque age. Baroque mysticism, whose manifestations are of an incredible carnal realism, had become difficult for the faithful to understand. The extraordinary manifestations of the piety of the Heart appeared to them as superstitions, almost obscenities. Moreover, the moving forces of French Catholicism regarded Baroque Christianity as a foil, linked to the consequences of the Council of Trent, which had led to the authoritarian ecclesiology of the 19th century. Thus, a dual choice is implicit in the volume on Le Cœur. On the one hand, the authors make the experience of St. John Eudes and Marguerite-Marie Alacoque both a “beginning” and a “golden age”, whose genesis they trace back to Christian antiquity. On the other hand, they extend the history of the heart to the whole world, by appealing to the religious sciences. In this way, they attribute to the devotion to the Sacred Heart a kind of hidden universality, which history and anthropology bring to light.

90 Chonez, “La fraternité chez Jean-Paul Sartre ou de la nausée au don du cœur”, Le Cœur, pp. 288–295.

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Confrontation with the human sciences is a key to the history of contemporary spirituality. What is at stake, in fact, is the encounter between religious knowledge that is born out of spiritual experience and knowledge about the religious that is born out of scientific enquiry.91 This choice has a price, which must be paid. In fact, it is possible that the most authentic experience of the heart, at one time or another in history, can be found outside the tradition of the Sacred Heart established by the collective memory. Le Cœur is underpinned by the idea that something was lost after the 17th century, and that the true tradition of the heart is neither in the devotion of reparation nor in the reactionary legacy of the national vow. However, there is a positive counterpart to this loss. What is striking in this volume is the way in which it constructs a French tradition of the heart, which developed in literature until Auguste Comte, Baudelaire, André Breton and even Jean-Paul Sartre. This French tradition has allies, in the Spain of El Greco and Salvador Dalí, in the Islam of the mystics or in Hinduism. Basically, this is another way of confirming France’s vocation to devote a worship to the heart, and it is up to the believers to make good use of it. But what use, concretely  ? Father Philippe de la Trinité answers with prudence to Father Chenu’s theological overtures.92 André Dérumaux’s proposals are undoubtedly more effective. He suggests, in order to convince young people, to reorient the devotion to the Sacred Heart towards “a more scriptural presentation” which would satisfy their desire for exegesis, “a more theological presentation” centred on the mystery of the Incarnation, “a more liturgical presentation” which conforms to the experiences of youth movements.93 This was, in fact, the programme of Mgr Charles at the head of the Richelieu Centre, then at the Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre when he succeeded Mgr Aubé in 1959.94 Nevertheless, the last word goes to literature, for it is the ultimate place for mystical experience to take shape and be transmitted. If the task of introducing and concluding the volume on Le Cœur is entrusted to Paul Claudel, it is undoubtedly because the author of Le Soulier de satin is the best defender of a literature that has not renounced being Christian, but also, and perhaps above all, because he is a figure of literary modernity. Translation Sharon Casu

91 Pelletier, Savoirs religieux. 92 Philippe de la Trinité, “Du Cœur du Christ à l’esprit d’amour. Point de vue théologique”, Le Cœur, pp. 379–389. 93 Dérumaux, “Crise ou évolution dans la dévotion des jeunes pour le Sacré-Cœur  ?”, Le Cœur, pp. 318– 324. 94 See Paul Airiau’s contribution in this volume.

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Dictionnaire prosopographique de l’EPHE. Online  : https://prosopo.ephe.fr/. Accessed 01/06/ 2020. Émile-Mâle, Gilberte. “Germain Bazin. Portrait.” http://sfiic.free.fr/core/core11_portrait_ba zin.htm. Accessed 01/06/2020. Fonds Michel Carrouges. Michel Carrouges. Un itinéraire singulier au carrefour du surréalisme et de la spiritualité. Website. https://www.michelcarrouges.fr/. Accessed 01/06/2020. Fouilloux, Étienne. “Satan 1948.” Au cœur du xxe siècle religieux. Paris  : Éditions ouvrières, 1993, pp. 259–275. Fouilloux, Étienne. Une Église en quête de liberté. La pensée catholique française entre modernisme et Vatican II (1914–1962). Paris  : Desclée de Brouwer, 1998. Fouilloux, Étienne. “Le Sacré-Cœur.” Les lieux de l’histoire de France. Ed. Olivier Wievorka. Paris  : Perrin, 2017, pp. 297–310. Germain, Marie-Odile, Jean-Pierre Angremy and Jean Favier (eds.). Stanislas Fumet ou la présence au temps. Paris  : Cerf, 1999. Henriet, Patrick (ed.). L’École pratique des hautes études de 1868 à nos jours. Invention, erudition, innovation. Paris  : Somogy, 2018. Hours, Bernard. “Contre-Révolution avant 1789.” Dictionnaire de la Contre-Révolution. Ed. Jean-Clement Martin. Paris  : Perrin, 2011, pp. 195–201. Jonas, Raymond. France & the Cult of the Sacred Heart. An Epic Tale for Modern Times. Berkeley and Los Angeles   : University of California Press, 2000. Joseph de Sainte-Marie O.C.D. “L’œuvre et la pensée théologiques du P. Philippe de la Trinité O.C.D. (22 janvier 1908–10 avril 1977).” Ephemerides Carmeliticae 29 (1978/2)  : pp. 313– 393. Julliard, Jacques and Michel Winock (eds.). Dictionnaire des intellectuels français. Les personnes, les lieux, les moments. Paris  : Seuil, 2002. Laloux, Ludovic. “125 ans d’apostolat de la prière en France (1844–1969).” L’éveil des catholiques à la dimension internationale de leur foi, 19e et 20e siècle. Ed. Gérard Cholvy. Montpellier  : Centre régional d’histoire des mentalités, 1996, pp. 103–108. Laloux, Ludovic, Emmanuel Michel and Élisabeth Masson-Leruste. Histoire des associations familiales catholiques  : un siècle d’action civique et sociale depuis les associations catholiques de chefs de famille. Paris  : F.-X. de Guibert, 2005. Le Boulluec, Alain and Marie-Joseph Pierre. “Antoine Guillaumont.” École pratique des hautes études. Section des sciences religieuses. Annuaire 108 (1999–2000)  : pp.  17–20, https:// www.persee.fr/doc/ephe_0000-0002_1999_num_112_108_12983. Accessed 01/06/2020. Le Brun, Jacques. “Politique et spiritualité  : la dévotion au Sacré-Cœur à l’époque moderne.” Concilium 61 (1969)  : pp. 25–36. Le Brun, Jacques. “Une lecture historique des écrits de Marguerite-Marie Alacoque.” Nouvelles de l’Institut catholique de Paris 1 (1977)  : pp. 38–53. Lemoine, Laurent. “Louis Beirnaert, S.J. (1906–1985), À la rencontre insolite et fructueuse entre éthique psychanalytique et éthique chrétienne.” Revue d’éthique et de théologie morale 229 (2004/2)  : pp. 89–114. Lesti, Sante. Riti di guerra. Religione et politica nell’Europa della Grande Guerra. Bologna   : Il Mulino, 2015.

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Levi-Strauss, Claude. “Introduction à l’œuvre de Marcel Mauss.” Marcel Mauss. Sociologie et anthropologie. Paris  : PUF, 1989 [1950], pp. ix–lii. Lhermitte, Jean. Les fondements biologiques de la psychologie. Paris  : Gauthiers-Villars, 1925. Lhermitte, Jean, Juliette Boutonier, Maurice Nédoncelle, Vérine. Réflexions sur la psychanalyse. Paris  : Bloud & Gay, 1949. Lhermitte, Jean. “Qu’est-ce que la psychanalyse”. Réflexions sur la psychanalyse. Ed. Jean Lhermitte, Juliette Boutonier, Maurice Nédoncelle, Vérine. Paris  : Bloud & Gay, 1949, pp. 5–36. Lory, Pierre. “Louis Massignon.” L’École pratique des hautes études de 1868 à nos jours. Invention, erudition, innovation. Ed. Patrick Henriet. Paris  : Somogy, 2018, pp. 563–564. Marx, Jacques. “Autour de l’image du Sacré-Cœur de Jésus  : France and the Cult of the Sacred Heart de Raymond Jonas.” Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire 81/4 (2003)  : pp.  1277– 1291. Menozzi, Daniele. Sacro Cuore. Un culto tra devozione interiore e restaurazione cristiana della società. Rome  : Viella, 2001. Ohayon, Annick. L’impossible rencontre. Psychologie et psychanalyse en France (1919–1969). Paris  : La Découverte, 1999. Pelletier, Denis. “Les ‘savoirs du religieux’ dans la France du 20e siècle. Trois moments d’une histoire intellectuelle de la sécularisation.” Recherches de science religieuse 101/2 (2013)  : pp. 167–180. Puech, Henri-Charles and Jean Doresse. “Nouveaux écrits gnostiques découverts en Égypte.” Comptes rendus des séances de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres 92/1 (1948)  : pp. 87–95, https://www.persee.fr/doc/crai_0065-0536_1948_num_92_1_78224. Accessed 01/06/2020. Rassart-Derbegh, Marguerite and Geneviève Fuchs. “Les dons de Jean Doresse.” Bulletin de la Société d’histoire naturelle et d’ethnographie de Colmar 73 (2016)  : pp. 71–83, https://www. museumcolmar.org/sites/museum/files/2019-09/4_1611_SHNEC_Bulletin%273_M%20 RASSART-DEBERGH_71-83.pdf. Accessed 01/06/2020. Rodriguez, Miguel. “Du vœu royal au vœu national. Une histoire du xixe siècle.” Les Cahiers du Centre de Recherches Historiques 21 (1998), https://journals.openedition.org/ccrh/2513. Accessed 23/05/2020. Roudinesco, Élisabeth and Michel Plon. Dictionnaire de la psychanalyse. Paris  : Fayard, 2006 (3rd edition). Sauverzac (de), Jean-François. Françoise Dolto. Itinéraire d’une psychanalyste. Paris  : Flammarion, 2008, coll. “Champs biographie.” Sorrel, Christian. “Sacré-Cœur.” Dictionnaire de la Contre-Révolution. Ed. Jean-Clement Martin. Paris  : Perrin, 2011, pp. 471–474. Vallin, Pierre. “Le Sacré-Cœur dans la culture politique française.” Christus 139 (1988)  : pp. 362–372. Weill, Nicolas. “Claudine Chonez. Une femme écrivain et journaliste.” Le Monde 23 April 1995.

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The Heart of Christ in the Eucharist The Reformulation of the Devotion to the Sacred Heart by Msgr. Maxime Charles, Rector of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart of Montmartre (1959–1985) Sometimes, starting a reflection with citations allows one to ask some questions. Then  : […] Abbot Maxime Charles. A brilliant leader of men, an attractive apostle and an at times unbearable model of Don Camillo, this little Perigordian […] with a great sense of pastoral care and of organization, but above all with the resources of a profound Eucharistic spirituality, which came directly from Bérulle […] was, for several generations of sorbonnards and seminarists, a kind of Catholic Lucien Herr.1

Thus the philosopher Jean-Luc Marion, co-founder in 1975 of the journal Communio with three other people close to Charles, described the late rector of the Sacred Heart Basilica (known as ‘de Montmartre’, Paris) during his reception speech at the Académie française in 2010. He then praised his predecessor, Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, whom he knew as one of his parishioners and advisers, and to whom he was also connected by the strong relationship they both had with Charles, the Cardinal between 1945 and 1959, and Marion between 1967 and 1975. Then again  : Charles, said Lustiger in the homily given for his funeral in 1993, was a “sinful and faithful servant who also announced the infinite mercy of the Pierced Heart”, and who, “as ‘the scribal disciple of the Kingdom of Heaven’, to whom God entrusted his treasure, [managed] to ‘bring out the new and the old’, in an abrupt or seductive way, often in a surprising way, which today has become the common good of the life of the Church” (Mt 13  : 52).2 Or finally  :

1 Marion, “Discours de réception” (translation by Sharon Casu). Jean-Luc Marion (1945–), ENS Ulm (1967), associate Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paris IV and the University of Chicago, member of the French Academy, co-founder of the French edition of Communio. 2 Lustiger, “Homélie” (translation by Sharon Casu).

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He […] drew from a much longer and richer tradition than is superficially believed, in order to innovate and propose a worship of the Heart of Christ which is at the heart of the faith in Christ and which, not content with being independent of circumstances, can even constitute a point of reference in their fluctuations

wrote Jean Duchesne in the 1984 volume dedicated to Charles. Duchesne was one of the first French Catholic analysts of the American ‘Jesus revolution’, also co-founder of Communio and collaborator of Lustiger, having known and frequented Charles between 1965 and 1975.3 “Eucharistic Spirituality”, “infinite mercy of the Pierced Heart”, “new and old”, “worship […] at the heart of the faith”  : the Sacred Heart of Charles was not that of the beginning of the 20th century, and it influenced the French Catholicism of the “Second French Revolution”.4 It is therefore necessary to shed some light on Charles’ re-reading of cordial devotion, that is, on the transformation of memory that he conducted, by arguing that firstly, this transformation of memory was, from him, unexpected, but not illogical in its content  ; and, secondly, that his partial distancing from mainstream Catholicism ensured his success.

The Right Man in the Right Place  ? It is partly by chance that Charles linked his destiny to Montmartre, in 1959. In the spring of that year, Cardinal Feltin, Archbishop of Paris, proposed that he replace the rector of the basilica, Mgr. Henri Aubé, who had been in office for 19 years.5 It was however a complete break with his previous ministries, even though in 1944 a position at the basilica had been more or less offered to him.6 Born in 1908 of Perigordian parents who had moved to Paris to achieve their social ascension, he became a priest in 1935 after his studies at the minor seminary of Conflans and then at the Carmes university seminary of the Catholic University of Paris. Charles was first a vicar in the “red suburbs” (i.e. communist) of Malakoff in the south of Paris (1935–1940), 3 Duchesne, “Au cœur de la foi”, p. 81 (translation by Sharon Casu). Jean Duchesne (1944–), ENS Saint Cloud (1966), agrégé in English, teacher of preparatory classes, co-founder of the journal Communio, literary executor of Fr. Louis Bouyer and of Cardinal Lustiger. 4 On the influence of Charles, recently put into perspective by Fouilloux, “Monseigneur Maxime Charles and his descendancy”. 5 Historical archives of the Archdiocese of Paris, 4Z30, 4 [correspondence between Charles and his parents]  : Charles à ses parents, 22/04/1959. 6 Historical archives of the Archdiocese of Paris, 4Z30, 4  : Charles à ses parents, 20/04/1944.

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then chaplain of the Chantiers de la jeunesse française (an organization which served as a substitute for military service, 1940–1944).7 In 1944, he was appointed chaplain of the Sorbonne where he founded the Richelieu Centre, which united almost all the different Catholic student associations of the Faculties of Science and of Arts.8 In a perspective that brought together the specialized Catholic Action of the end of the 1930s, the “parish missionary community” of the Son of the charity Georges Michonneau, and the Cité des Jeunes of the Marist Marcellin Fillère, he aimed at religious conquest and not at socio-civic action. To this aim, he used the methods tested in Malakoff and at the Chantiers  : creation of teams of selected militants, trained and instructed to strengthen the Catholic presence and to operate a sociological shift among the students, by articulating personal contacts (discussions) and collective activities (liturgies, courses, conferences, pilgrimages…).9 He developed the Catholic force in the student life, with a community room and the mobilization of large crowds, both in liturgical celebrations and in pilgrimages during the school year and holidays. He thus developed an integral Catholicism in which socio-civic action (unlike what used to dominate at the JEC) and the application of public ecclesiastical law (demanded by the intransigents) were minimised. The theological training promoted at the Centre was close to the patristic and eschatological current of the “reformer third party” (Daniélou, Bouyer, Lubac), and was manifested in the founding of the theological journal Résurrection, in 1956.10 Charles’ spirituality was based on a Christocentrism and a liturgy which exploited all the possibilities of the ‘liturgical movement’, especially in para-liturgies based on biblical and ancient sources and carefully staged. These spiritual traits found expression in the annual “climb” that the Centre organised at the Sacré-Cœur of Montmartre from 1948 onwards. A vigil guided by biblical texts and spiritual meditations ended there with a solemn Mass.11 Although he had attended the basilica as chaplain, and previously as a small seminarist, and although, during his seminary years, he was sometimes involved in cordial devotion (month and litanies of the Sacred Heart, first Friday of the month, consecration to the Sacred Heart), and although he looked for the psychological intimacy of Jesus in the  7 Emmanuel, La vie cachée.  8 Pruvot, Monseigneur Charles.   9 On Fillère  : Damblans, Rendu and Thévenon-Veicle, Le Père Fillère. On the parish reinterpreted by Michonneau  : Fouilloux, Les chrétiens français, pp. 147–160. 10 Pruvot, Du Centre Richelieu au Sacré-Cœur  ; Perrin, “Cinquante ans de la revue Résurrection”  ; Fouilloux, Une Église en quête de liberté, pp. 149–191. 11 Pruvot, Monseigneur Charles, pp. 167–182. Charles also celebrated the Mass of the Ascension 1945 in Montmartre with the students (Historical archives of the Archdiocese of Paris, 4Z30, 4  : Charles à ses parents, 10/05/1945).

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Heart of Christ and not only a cult of love12, Charles was distant from the dominant cordial spirituality, at least that which was expressed in Montmartre. The latter was marked by a form of intransigence expressed in patriotic providentialism (France, chosen by God, makes amends for her sins by loving), in a certain sensitivity to private revelations and cordial mysticism, and in the spiritual techniques of rosary meditation, of the holy hour, of consecration and weekly Friday processions, carried on especially by aging lay people (Worshippers). However, the renewal of the sanctuary had been envisaged for about fifteen years by the Archbishops of Paris and by part of the clergy assigned to the sanctuary, most notably the Rector Aubé and one of the chaplains, Abbot André Dérumaux. The development of a liturgical worship, a revival through rejuvenation of the ­laity ensuring perpetual adoration, stronger coordination with the parishes of the diocese, and a scriptural re-reading of cordial spirituality, were all pursued to varying degrees. They reflect the contemporary upheaval of cordial worship crystallized between the 1880s and the 1920s, by a scriptural, liturgical and Christognosic spirituality constituted in the 1920s and 1930s. Aubé, who was personally more sensitive than Dérumaux to the mysticism of private revelations of the 18th–20th centuries, was nevertheless mostly in charge of the completion of the construction of the basilica of Montmartre. The change of generation, awaited by the diocesan hierarchy, had not yet taken place.13 Charles could have then appeared to be the right man to carry out this project. At the Centre Richelieu, he had shown organisational and administrational qualities, indispensable to the rector of the basilica (an important real estate complex, about sixty employees, a newly built école-maîtrise14 …). He had developed a spirituality adapted to his public, solidly anchored in contemporary developments, which allowed him to update the cordial worship and thus to renew the audience of the sanctuary. Finally, together with priests and laypeople, he had committed himself to the creation of a community, called Résurrection, resulting from the community life between priests at the Richelieu Centre, of the militant commitment of some of the students, and of the journal Résur-

12 Historical archives of the Archdiocese of Paris, 4Z30, 6  : Maxime Charles, Carnet 1929–1932, Notes per­sonnelles, 07/02, 06, 10/10, 30/12/1930, 06, 17/02, 22/06, 03/07/1930 (“My so beloved Jesus, on this day consecrated to Your Heart, to Your Love, to the holy dispositions of Your soul, I want with respect and adoration to enter into your intimate life.” translation by Sharon Casu), 09/08, 14/09/1930  ; Carnet 1933–1938. Notes personnelles, 15/09/1940 – I am using the version typed by Michel Emmanuel. 13 On the Sacred Heart of Montmartre, Benoist is indispensable, Le Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre (more specifically pp. 534–542  : methods of prayer  ; pp. 617–640  : iconography  ; pp. 683–744  : sacred history of France  ; pp. 879–954  : spirituality), and Le Sacré-Cœur des Femmes, pp. 1613–1644 (the basilica and its religious universe between 1940 and 1959). 14 École-maîtrise  : a particular type of school which provided the liturgical practice and the singing in the service.

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rection.15 Organization, renewal, community  : he checked off the boxes as desired by the archbishop. For his part, he saw in this an opportunity to further his ecclesiastical career, a way to avoid exhaustion and his wasting away as a student chaplain, the possibility to capitalize on his Sorbonne activities on a larger scale (he had been authorized to make the basilica the pole of attraction for his network of alumni of the Centre), and an opportunity to refocus on spiritual activities that he considered far too neglected. Moreover, Feltin allowed him to choose his successor (who will be one of his spiritual sons and collaborators, Lustiger), and offered him the direction of the diocesan pilgrimages, which guaranteed to him the possibility of continuing, and even extending, an activity that he considered essential.16 At the end of June 1959, after some hesitation, the appointment was made official. Charles took up his duties immediately, before being installed in October on the day of the Feast of Christ the King, after a summer during which he went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.17

The Memorial Reorientation of the Cult to the Sacred Heart As soon as he was installed, Charles renewed the pastoral care of the basilica to make it a “doctrinal and spiritual diocesan centre”.18 This transformation intended to be supported by a spiritual reorientation, the promotion of the liturgy, generational renewal, the forging of new links with the Parisian parishes and the women’s congregations of Montmartre, the occupation of public space, and the spiritual welcome of tourists. This transformation could rely on human and material means, partly inherited from Aubé, and at the same time widely developed  : a certain renewal of the chaplains, a choir, and the welcoming of a monastery of Benedictine nuns of the Sacred Heart providing liturgical and spiritual service, premises for spiritual retreats lasting several days, and for training courses or daily meetings (Ephrem House). The transformation also benefitted from the function of director of diocesan pilgrimages. A real pragmatism accompanied the realization of these transformations, but also a rapidity which aroused resistance and words of caution.19 The liturgical renewal was rapidly implemented, emphasising the Holy Week in particular, by exploiting the leeway offered by 15 Pruvot, Du Centre Richelieu au Sacré-Cœur. 16 Historical archives of the Archdiocese of Paris, 4Z30, 4  : Charles à ses parents, 22/04/1959, 28/05/1959  ; 4Z30, 104 [notebooks], beginning of Ascension [07/05] 1959. 17 Historical archives of the Archdiocese of Paris, 4Z30, 4  : Charles à ses parents, 28/05/1959. 18 “Du renfort à Montmartre”  ; Testis, “Installation de M. le chanoine Charles”, 5. 19 Council of Cardinal Feltin in 1960, to be read in the Historical archives of the Archdiocese of Paris, 4Z30, 105, notebook 1960, 1st entry, no date.

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the rules, up to the full application of the reforms of Vatican II, interpreted according to the previous norms and practices. An aesthetic of sober majesty, supported by attention to music, was developed, enforced from the outset by eliminating the massive chandeliers and the French flags of the choir.20 Starting from 1960, the public space was taken over by a Way of the Cross on the slopes of the Montmartre hill, immediately attracting large crowds informed by extensive advertising, and by ceremonies overflowing onto the square, which was fitted with a PA system – not without causing a certain amount of irritation among the local residents which was relayed by communist town councillors.21 The generational renewal and the welcoming of tourists were achieved between 1959 and 1961 by calling on the alumni of the Richelieu ­Centre. These were to continue the Résurrection groups, to found the “Foyers adorateurs” and the “Saint John groups” (for students or young adults entering professional life), who practiced direct evangelisation of tourists and night worship, which until then had been an exclusively male activity. The militant system of the Sorbonne was thus brought in, based on a lay leadership supervised by a chaplain and yearly elected. Monthly activities (theological courses, apostolic activity and Eucharistic worship) and mobilizing quarterly activities (autumn retreat, pilgrimage…) ensured the regular presence of a new public in the basilica. The connections with the parishes and the religious communities were redesigned to recruit individual practitioners of worship among the parishioners, by developing the function of in situ welcome at Ephrem and by proposing to parish priests to make Montmartre the place of spiritual conversion for the leaders of the Catholic Action or parish movements. Finally, the pilgrimages organised by Charles in a diocesan perspective (to Lourdes in particular) or inherited from the Richelieu Centre were integrated into the calendar of the basilica (the Holy Land in the summer).22 Adapted according to circumstances, enlarged by creating groups for each state of life or age group, this system remained in place until 1985. As for spiritual reorientation, it was quickly conceptualized. In 1960, an issue of the journal Résurrection built a structure that would evolve very little and would be constantly relayed by chaplains and lay people. Firstly, the Sacred Heart was defined as the Heart of Christ, that is to say the “psychological attitudes of Christ”, “his interior life”23, “the supreme part of the soul, summit of his spirit”24, a conception claimed to be biblical and inspired by John Eudes. Thus,

20 21 22 23 24

On these ornamental and spatial transformations, Benoist, “Les aménagements liturgiques”, pp. 15–21. “Conseil municipal de Paris.” Short testimony of the year 1962 in Arnette, De la Gestapo à l’OAS, pp. 177–179. Charles, “Adorateurs”, 2, 4. See also Charles, “Cœur de Jésus”, p. 31 (translation by Sharon Casu). Vorges, “Lorsque l’on descend” (translation by Sharon Casu).

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all the movements of the soul of Christ, God’s masterpiece, which are very close to those of men, but perfect, inspired by the Holy Spirit, filled with the love of the Father and of men, and capable of being communicated, can only be designated by the word Heart, which is entirely appropriate.25

Secondly, the divinity of Jesus, that is the assumption of his personality by the Word, allows his psychological states to be eternalized and thus to remain perpetually present, his interior life being “eternally manifested in the Trinity”.26 Charles and his mediators exploited here the thought of Pierre de Bérulle on the perpetuity of the states of Christ, an author discovered by Charles at the end of the 1920s by reading the Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux by Abbot Henri Brémond, and explored in particular during the Carmes seminary for his theology of priesthood.27 Thirdly, the Eucharist, the continuous incarnation of Christ, allows through worship to know the intimate life of Jesus as much as his apostles, and thus to be spiritually converted and to participate in the sanctification of the world through the communion of saints. To summarize, the worship of the Sacred Heart was considered the worship of the Heart in the Eucharist, namely a practice of intimacy with the Word which allows for the divinization of the believer and of the world. In this perspective, pictorial representations of the Sacred Heart were marginalized. Was Charles’ conception original  ? It was in part. He followed the re-readings of the mid-1960s developed by the members of the hierarchy, who wanted to disconnect the cordial worship from its earlier sentimental expressions, to remove its political connotations (in France), to anchor it in Scripture and in dogmatics, and to link it firmly to the Eucharist and the liturgy. However, they did not reunite the different historical strata of devotion around a central core, as Charles did with Bérulle and the Eucharist. Nor did they make it a privileged mode of spiritual life.28 Nor did they arrive at the more specifically Eucharistic inflection of Charles and his entourage in the early 1970s. Charles thus developed more strongly the idea that the Eucharistic presence is a bodily mediation perpetuated as long as the world lasts, whose objectivity (the real presence) obligates the worshipper to decentre himself. The incarnate Word is therefore present in front of the one who prays to him, who is thus through the mediation of his senses and of his psychology in direct contact with the second person of the Trinity who makes himself accessible to him. This inflection 25 Charles, “Diversité et unité”, p. 3 (translation by Sharon Casu). 26 Charles, “Adorateurs”, p. 2 (translation by Sharon Casu). 27 Emmanuel, La vie cachée, p. 452. 28 “La devotion au Sacré-Cœur”  ; “Le Sacré-Cœur de Jésus”.

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was linked to the theological-philosophical reflection developed again in Montmartre from the years 1966–1967. The journal Résurrection, which had gone out of print in 1964, was revived in 1968 at the request of a group of khâgneux, of agrégés, and of normaliens (students) recruited by Charles from 1965  : Jean Duchesne, Jean-Luc Marion, Jean-Robert Armogathe, Rémi Brague, Michel Gitton, Michel Costantini.29 Following the example of their 1960 predecessors, they proposed an issue devoted to the Sacred Heart, in 1972, whose introduction, by Marion, synthesized all that Charles had developed, while giving it the goal of a theological work  : the encounter with the incarnate Word, for many Christians, for centuries, and especially for the last century, for the frequent visitors of the Basilica of Montmartre, is realized in a unceasingly repeated face-to-face encounter with Christ, always present in this continuous incarnation that is the Eucharist  ; the Church, Body of Christ, manifests, in fact, the presence of the Word through the sacraments, and mainly that of the Bread and Wine  ; in this Eucharistic presence, God as man makes himself knowable, up to the intimacy of Trinitarian life  ; the superabundant richness of this presence constitutes precisely the Heart of Christ, the place where the splendours of the relation between the assumed humanity and the incarnate divinity rest  ; in contemplating this mystery, in recognizing the perfection of the divine design, the Christian learns to say the Salvation. This heart-to-heart with the Trinitarian depth of the Eucharistic Christ is precisely what the worship of the Heart of Christ allows.30

If Charles reformulated the worship of the Sacred Heart into a worship of the Heart in the Eucharist, he also had to redirect the dominant themes of Montmartre’s cordial spirituality, namely atonement, reparation, penance, and the social reign of the Sacred Heart. Linked to the idea that intimacy with and imitation of Jesus were the core of spiritual attitudes, consecration was understood in a biblical sense. Articulated to Baptism, consecration is a surrender of the self to God in response to his creative and redemptive initiative. Penance is the assumption by the faithful in his flesh, in 29 The “khâgneux” are students in the preparatory classes for the competitive examination of the Ecoles normales supérieures of the rue d’Ulm and of Saint-Cloud  ; the “normaliens” are the students of these Ecoles normales. Rémi Brague (1947–), ENS Ulm (1967), agrégé of Philosophy, Professor of ­Philosophy at the University of Paris I at the Ludwig-Maximilian-Universität of Munich, member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, co-founder of the French edition of the journal Communio  ; Michel Gitton (1945–), agrégé of Classics, priest of the Paris diocese (1974)  ; Michel Costantini (1949–), ENS Ulm (1967), agrégé of Grammar, Professor of Semiotics of arts and literature at the University of Paris VIII. 30 Marion, “Avertissement”, 2 (translation by Sharon Casu).

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the painful form linked to the consequences of sin, of the imitation of Christ in his attitudes of offering to the Father even to the point of desolation. Reparation and the social kingdom are the socialization of intimacy with the Eucharistic Heart through the communion of the saints, individual conversion thus becoming the necessary precondition for collective conversion, the social power of the Church thus becoming only spiritual.31 The Feast of Christ the King was thus depoliticized, carrying on the critical re-reading of the connection between cordial worship, patriotism and hostility to the Republic, explained by the anxiety of Catholics during the years 1870–1920 in the face of societal transformations that they had not understood.32 However, in the early 1970s, this depoliticization could not have opposed the leftist turn of the heirs of May 1968. On 13 February 1971, an attempt to occupy the basilica by the Red Aid, involving the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre and the film-maker Jean-Luc Godard, and wanting to challenge on behalf of the people a monument celebrating the crushing of the Commune, ended in an aggressive police evacuation and a trial.33 In court, Charles asked for indulgence as a former student chaplain who understood militant commitment  ; towards the Catholics and in the press, he dissociated the desire of the promoters of the basilica from the crushing of the Commune, basing his argument on historical data. But he found it difficult to convince those who were not already convinced, so much so that the bell of one of the small domes of the basilica was blown up on the night between 22–23 May 1974, in the name of the Commune, and his new plea to depoliticize was badly received by the partisans of a Catholic and French monarchy.34 31 Cournier, “Formes du culte”  ; Levaud, “Consécration et réparation”  ; Hémer, “Le règne social”. 32 Charles can hardly be situated on the left of the French political spectrum. He undoubtedly considered Vichy favourably  ; after the Liberation, his choice to become chaplain of the Chantiers de la Jeunesse, and his appointment as chaplain attached to the Ministry of Industrial Production, Communications and Labour in 1944 (he undoubtedly saw this as a career opportunity, but this is at the very least shortsighted when considering the context) earned him accusations of collaboration, which he always defended himself against. At the Richelieu Center, he was vigorously anti-communist, without neglecting possible tactical alliances, and forged ties with Auguste Martin, president of the Amitié Charles Péguy (Charles, “De Chartres à Jérusalem”). 33 Founded in 1970 in the context of a strong leftist agitation, the Red Aid is an organisation supporting and defending far-left militants. In 1871, after France’s defeat against the German Empire, a portion of Parisians rises up against the government and the National Assembly, based in Versailles, and proclaims the Commune, an autonomous political organisation, named after the Paris Commune of the French Revolution. It is crushed by government forces during the “bloody week” of May 1871. The construction of the Basilica of the Sacred Heart, voted by the National Assembly in 1875 in response to a desire expressed in 1870, has very often been interpreted by the left and the far-left as expiation for the “crimes of the Commune”. 34 On the 1971 event, essential elements and references in Benoist, Le Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre,

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This episode, in fact marginal although mediatized, shows the interest of seeing the memories of the worship to the Sacred Heart at play. The event indeed concerned memory, since the Red Aid, in the context of a leftist upsurge which was as intense as it would be brief, revived the anticlerical interpretation of the construction of the basilica, constituted in the 1875s. On the other hand, the partisans of patriotic providentialism perpetuated ne varietur a reading of the years 1870–1890 which made France the nation elected by the Sacré-Cœur. Furthermore, one cannot forget the Catholics who saw in the construction of the basilica the sign of a past and condemnable collusion with royalism or with the State.35 Between these two interpretations, Charles tried to offer another understanding of his sanctuary and of the worship that it sheltered. He thus sifted devotion to the Sacred Heart through a double sieve  : that of the historical method, based on the bibliography he had at his disposal at the time, and that of the critical evaluation of a spirituality, based on an articulation of the spiritual and the temporal inherited from the one that had been established after the condemnation of the Action française in 1926 and which had been canonized by the very recent Vatican II (the constitution of a potential Catholic state, guided at least by natural law, is actualized by the free conversion of citizens and not by the action of public institutions). His was thus a break in memory, which, if not acknowledged, was at least extensive. The founding and preceding past makes it possible to reread the immediate past. An older memory reworks, even obscures, recent memory. Patristics, a portion of the Middle Ages, and the French reception of the Council of Trent, which continued until 1710, made obsolete, or at least reinterpreted, a large part of the 18th, 19th, and the first half of the 20th century. Charles thus invented a new memory, which had the latent weakness of evacuating the collective and projective dimensions of the previous memory, articulated to intransigence and patriotism/nationalism. Indeed, this new memory opened up no other horizon of expectation than that of individual conversion, collectivized through the communion of saints, that is to say invisibly. In this aspect, Charles was clearly on the side of the eschatologists, far from the apocalyptists.36 It was a renewal of cordial thinking, but not only, for Charles also very quickly transformed the concrete modalities of this cordial memory, if one considers devopp. 854–855, p. 859, to which I add “La tentative”. According to Siegel, La Clandestine, pp. 127–129, Sartre was manipulated by Maoists guaranteeing Charles’ agreement  ; according to Rajsfus, Le travail à perpétuité, p. 259, Charles tried to corrupt the policemen called to testify at the trial  ; according to Chaintron, Le vent soufflait, p. 410, manipulation of the Red Aid to cover up the action. 35 On these interpretations, Benoist, Le Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre, pp. 813–878. 36 On the distinction between eschatology and apocalyptism, Airiau, L’Église et l’Apocalypse, p.  17, pp. 86–92.

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tional practices as the bodily anchoring of spiritual conceptions. In 1960, he started to question the recitation of offices, of litanies and invocations to the Sacred Heart, and of rosaries before the exposed host. Firstly, he modified the form of the ‘holy hours’ on Fridays, using the model he had used since his time at the Richelieu Centre  : three successive 20-minute sequences, each composed of a biblical text, of a psalm and of invocations. He then introduced silent adoration as the only possible form of prayer. The material organization of the basilica was transformed for this purpose between 1960–1961, modifying the sensory experience of prayer and of cordial worship  : new lighting emphasising the exposed host, purification of the decoration of the choir, the laying of a carpet in the aisles and the ambulatory to muffle the visitors’ footsteps. Except during liturgies, the basilica thus became a silent place, including for the tourists who flocked there in increasing numbers. To compensate for the disappearance of recited prayers that occupied and guided piety, Charles very quickly proposed a new technique  : to focus on one of Christ’s attitudes by discovering in it the psychology of the Incarnate Word in order to taste and adore it  ; to recognize oneself as a sinner and decide to convert  ; to socialize one’s own adoration by introducing pleas for one’s loved ones or the world. This method, derived from his Berullian conception of the Heart of Christ, was presented to the “Foyers adorateurs” by a chaplain in the evenings they came to worship, propagated by the Basilica journal, and formalized between 1964–1965 by making available to the worshipers handouts of a more or less A4 format proposing an outline for “biblical adoration”. The hour, devoted to a theme (God is love, the Son of the Father…), was divided into three twenty-minute sequences, each with the same structure  : an extract from the Gospels, about ten lines outlining the dominant orientation of the text and the spiritual attitudes to be developed (adoration, contrition, supplication), a prayer or an extract from a psalm summarizing the sequence.37 In all, some 120 different subjects were this way progressively treated until 1985, five to ten being proposed each year to the worshippers. The last innovation, from 1969 onwards, was the introduction of a time of Eucharistic adoration during Mass itself, after the end of the canon and before the Pater. The consecrated host was erected vertically with the aid of a small horizontal clip placed on the paten, which was itself placed on the chalice, and soon the use of a crystal chalice and a rosé wine allowed the Eucharistic wine to be seen. There was then an adoration of ten to forty-five minutes, guided by the officiant, presenting 37 Historical archives of the Archdiocese of Paris, 4Z30, 23–25 [organisational notebooks]  : notebook 1966–1967, including worship sheets numbered X to XV. Some sheets were published in Odile Marquis and Jean-Hugues Marquis (eds.), Spiritualité du Sacré Cœur, pp. 214–223  ; Jean-Hugues Marquis (ed.), Cent regards  ; id. (ed.), Cent nouveaux regards.

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three times the spiritual attitude to aspire to before becoming silent. Practiced with the students of Résurrection, this “Mass of Adoration” was soon introduced in place of the Holy Hour on the first Friday of the month, as well as on the Feast of Corpus Christi.38 Finally, a time of adoration was also introduced in the Vespers of Solemnity between the end of the Magnificat and the benediction of the Blessed Sacrament.

A Spirituality in its Context Charles then built a coherent conception of the cordial worship which became rapidly socialized through his personal network partly absorbed by Montmartre, through the entry into this memory under construction of the faithful frequenting the basilica and those who are attracted by this new pole under constitution. However, as one can clearly see, this re-reading of memory was very precisely situated historically. The scriptural dimension, with the use of biblical texts for adoration  ; the liturgical dimension, with Eucharistic concentration, the relying on theorists and practitioners of the liturgical movement of the 1950s (Fr. Josef-Andreas Jungmann sj was the authority allowing to justify the new structure of the Holy Hour), the development of para-liturgical forms inspired by ancient liturgies and occasional innovations  ; the absence of neo-Thomism, replaced by direct access to St. Thomas in the Pars tertia of the Summa Theologica, and by the use of Berullian theology, of particular patristic inspiration  ; the primacy of personal and silent prayer for conversion generating apostolic action  ; a strong relativization of ecclesiastical public law in favour of a certain eschatologization  : all these elements express a solid anchoring in the reforming Catholicism of the 1950s and 1960s, in its patristic-eschatological version, with the originality of Berullism – the bibliography of the 1960 issue of Résurrection demonstrates it amply.39 However, the conflicts regarding the interpretation of Vatican II quickly placed Charles and those close to him in the Montino-Wojtylian neo-intransigent camp, who valued an integralism rooted in a doctrinal intransigence revisited in the light of Vatican II, reducing the socio-political dimension. The heart of Charles’ personal spiritual and theological synthesis, namely the loving surrender of the self to 38 Guérandel, “La messe”. 39 The bibliography includes  : Stierli, Joseph, Richard Gutzwiller, Hugo Rahner, Karl Rahner, Le cœur du Sauveur. Études sur la dévotion au Sacré-Cœur. Mulhouse  : Salvator, 1956  ; Hans Urs von Balthasar, Le cœur du monde. Paris  : Desclée de Brouwer, 1956  ; Christus 15 (1957)  ; Augustin Bea, Hugo Rahner, Henri Rondet and Friedrich Schwendimann (eds.), Cor Jesu. Commentationes in litteras encyclicas Pii PP. XII “Haurietis Aquas”. Rome  : Herder, 1959 (considered encyclopaedic and lacking a synthesis).

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the Incarnate Word to participate in the salvation of the world, aligned him with Bouyer, Josef Ratzinger and von Balthasar, who strongly defended the primacy and transcendence of Revelation. They were the references, and sometimes the mentors (Bouyer, through training sessions), of the young academics writing Résurrection until 1975 (Duchesne, Marion, Brague, Armogathe) – before they left to found the French edition of Communio – and of those who remained or came after them (including Jean-Yves Lacoste).40 Charles’s Berullian conception of the priesthood and of Christ drove him to gather around him seminarians to ensure that they got a training parallel and partly opposite to that of the Diocesan and University seminaries of Paris (an informal group of the 1970s, with Philippe Barbarin among others, then the “Fraternité Jésus-Prêtre” until 1985, with Éric de Moulins-Beaufort most notably).41 These orientations, joined with his reading of the liturgical reform according to the ‘liturgical movement’ of the 1930s-1950s, his appreciation of the Eucharistic worship, his emphasis on spiritual conversion before temporal commitment, set him apart from a good portion of Parisian or French Catholicism, at least until the arrival of Lustiger on the Parisian seat (1981). However, the latter dissociated himself from Charles by his very strong articulation of a Christology comparable to Charles’ to an ecclesiology combining in the episcopal head both hierarchical institution and prophetic charism, presenting thus the culmination of ecclesiological intransigence.42 The construction of Montmartre was thus progressively dissolved after Charles’ retirement (1985), as Lustiger left the heirs of the rector to continue their practices for five years before dispersing them around Paris where they tried, in their own way, to recreate the Montmartre they had known. In the 1960s, therefore, Charles participated in reformist Catholicism, but he was out of step with the dominant cordial worship of the basilica of Montmartre. Then, when the requested reform was carried out but gave rise to a decomposition of Catholicism that seemed more or less controllable, Charles was out of step with the atmosphere that then prevailed… However, this shift should not make the effectiveness of Charles’ proposals throughout his rectorship disappear  : his capacity to bring some of the alumni of the Richelieu Centre to Montmartre and to use them to renew the sanctuary  ; his capacity to attract future university students who would build part of their theological thinking there by discovering Eucharistic adoration  ; his capacity to attract a large audience through liturgies and pilgrimage practices  ; his capacity to attract, train and mobilise activists. It is therefore necessary to wonder about the corre40 Fouilloux, “Aux origines”. 41 Elements in Christien, “L’après-Concile”, pp. 196–198. 42 Airiau, “Le cardinal Lustiger.”

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lation between what Charles says and does, what his public is, and what his context is, especially since Charles and his milieu regularly insisted on the correlation between their cordial worship and the times they lived in. As the opening of the 1960 issue of Résurrection that discusses this claims, the cordial cult answers “to several problems of the day  : that of piety in a hectic world, that of a truly theological charity in a society of philanthropists, that of personal relationships with God in a climate where thought is too confined inside the sciences and technology”.43 One can perceive here the remonstrative dominance of reflection, which actualized the commonplaces of the intransigent understanding of a modern society that has ceased to refer to God in its organization, values and occupations. But one also observes a very clear reaction to France’s entry in its ‘second revolution’, that of urbanization, technological and scientific development, and acceleration of social rhythms.44 The cordial worship revisited by Charles was therefore relevant for the populations who realized and benefitted from the accelerated modernization of French society, while still being subjected to it  : the intellectual and technical elites, male and female, especially those who had just started their professional life. Through monthly adoration, the worship guaranteed a form of control over time and of relativization of the social and thus intellectual logics imposed upon them in their daily activity. Moreover, the techniques of adoration requiring a certain virtuosity, especially in the exploration of the psychology of Christ and his articulation to the Word, corresponded to the intellectual agility which they had been able to develop in their studies. The insistence on the psychology of Christ also made it possible to integrate the vulgarization of psychoanalysis and psychology, neutralizing them from a Catholic point of view, while reducing the sentimentalization possibly introduced by the iconography. The integration of corporeality in the 1970s with the insistence on the reality of the Eucharistic presence was a very unconventional response to the ‘sexual liberation’ that was becoming established as a social practice and political project. This was also a way of reaffirming the antecedence of the real as opposed to the subjective and the impossible radical socio-political reconstruction of this same reality. Moreover, Marion found in it one of the roots of his thoughts on the erotic phenomenon, on donation and phenomenological saturation. It was also another way of breaking with the cordial imagery that stimulated sentimentality, and of mobilizing the intellect in the understanding of the real presence of the Word, corresponding then to the audience that Charles wanted to attract to Montmartre who had passed through secondary and higher education. At the same time, by focusing the activity 43 “Éditorial” (translation by Sharon Casu). 44 Mendras, La Seconde Révolution.

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of the Basilica on annual pilgrimages and by proposing a reading of Second Vatican Council liturgy inspired by previous practices, he retained the ability to attract practitioners of a popular Catholicism and supporters of a ‘sacral religion’ who may have not agreed with the dominant form of post-Vatican II Catholicism. Thus, Charles did not write off the mass mobilizations that had characterized the militancy of the 1880–1960s, nor the entire liturgical decorum that had accompanied them. However, by focusing on the religious and by marginalizing socio-political commitments in its name, Charles’ cordial devotion drew the consequences of the 1950s exhaustion of the Catholic myth of ‘France elder daughter of the Church’, challenged by the myth of ‘Christianity’ associated with the focus on Catholic Action to the detriment of civic and political engagement, and reacted in its own way to the valorization of political commitment and of the effectiveness of socio-political action, dominant in the 1960s and 1980s, until politics was confronted with its growing inability to transform the world. It is on this political issue that I can conclude my reflection. By largely erasing the social and civic dimensions of cordial worship, Charles focused Catholic militancy on the religious, disconnected from other social fields except through personal commitment. In this respect, he participated in the decomposition-recomposition of intransigence in its French version.45 But can the worship of the Sacred Heart still persist when the socio-political dimension that is so central to it has been eviscerated  ? In fact, Charles’s journey leads us to doubt that a memory solidly constituted and considered as evident of a devotion could quickly and easily be replaced by a new memory, and moreover a new memory acknowledging the criticism, that is to say, evaluating the past according to the requirements of compatibility with what is conceived as normative because foundational, of social relevance, and of relying on documents. For, in French Catholicism, what remained of the worship to the Sacred Heart was not so much Charles’ construction but rather the charismatic reinterpretations (the Emmanuel Community was in charge of the sanctuary of Paray-le-Monial from 1985) and the prophetic-intransigent permanence. Without a doubt, this is due to the peculiarity of the temporal sequence during which Charles carried out his operation, and his participation to a partial form of neo-Tridentinism which aimed to raise the spiritual level of the faithful by critically re-reading the previous spiritual forms.46 While, more or less calmly, a massive sifting of Catholic devotions and rit45 Point already developed in Airiau, “Virtuosité, intégralisme, intransigeance  ?”, pp.  77–82 (especially pp. 78–80 – and “Montrouge” will be replaced by “Malakoff ”, the memory seeming to be brutally missing to the author…). 46 On the “neo-tridentinism” of the Catholic clergy during Vatican II, Perrin, Paris, pp. 241–263.

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ualities began to take place, some of which, having exhausted their potential, tended to wither away (specialized Marian devotions, souls in Purgatory, guardian angels, St. Joseph, St. Philomena…)  ; while, as a consequence, many spiritual practices of the 19th century, prolonged until the 1950s, resisted only by their articulation to traditional and integrist networks established at the beginning of the 1960s, maintaining them or re-circulating them to challenge the application of Vatican II and soon the Council itself  ; while Charismatism developed and spread, a form of unexpected religious emotionalism that was soon legitimised by the reappropriation of previous worships and devotions, particularly the cordial worship  ; Charles’ proposal, a form of controlled modernisation related to a certain spiritual elitism, could not really have fuelled an alternative memory. Too specific in its audience, even if it was able to respond to the ritual and sacral expectations of part of the Catholic population taking its distances from the tradi-integrist contestation or from the dominant application of Vatican II, out of step with the dominant line of Parisian or even French Catholicism, Charles’ proposal did not in fact connect the Sacred Heart inseparably enough to the other elements that constituted it. In fact, by going from the worship of the Sacred Heart to the Eucharistic worship of the Heart of Christ, Charles reached a Christological concentration without the mediation of particular spiritualities, and made the Sacred Heart disappear. This is at least what those who had been influenced by him in various ways from 1959 onwards suggested, from General Philippe Morillon to Marion, to priests who explicitly recognized themselves as his heirs (Gitton and the Apostolic Community Aïn Karem, founded in 1985) or who acknowledged in him a form of intellectual paternity (Armogathe, Lacoste).47 If they cultivated, to varying degrees, his memory and his practices, they did so without giving the worship of the Sacred Heart a central place, the memory of Charles being much more that of the articulation of theological training, apostolic practice and liturgical prayer, to the possibility of intimate contact through Eucharistic adoration with the interiority of the Incarnate Christ. However, the Heart of Jesus became as important in Charles’ spiritual life after 1959 as it was absent be47 Morillon, Paroles de soldat, 160–162 and Académie d’éducation et d’études sociales, La vie intérieure, p.  255, p.  279, Paris, speaks more of the intelligence of the faith than of the Sacred Heart  ; Lacoste, “Travail théologique”  ; Armogathe, Raison d’Église, ch. 2  ; Marion, “Splendeur” (“[…] the spirituality of Monsignor Charles was centered on the fundamental grace of the Eucharist […]” (p.  17)  ; “[…] we appeal in every moment of contemplation to the texts in the Gospels which recount the words and thoughts of this unique man who, as the absolute Son, referred himself perfectly to the Father. […] Praying, then, consists in uniting visual attention to naked reality, and intelligent attention to the meaning of his presence, in seeing and also in speaking (in order to hear) the words of Christ.” (p. 27, translation by Sharon Casu)  ; see also Marion, La rigueur des choses, p. 52.

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fore then. It became even more important at the beginning of the 1980s, at the same time as the ‘heart’ of Charles himself, which he never considered to be sufficiently converted and faithful.48 The dialectic between the Heart of Christ and the heart of Charles thus expresses the spiritual fight, the conflict passing from the socio-political field to the spiritual interiority, such as what is more widely observed in other spiritual places.49 The Sacred Heart thus becomes a means of understanding oneself, of saying and doing one’s own truth in one’s intimate life, a new modality of constructing and understanding of the European individual by himself. But Charles did this according to an intransigent and integralist Catholic modality, refusing the confinement of the individual in his subjectivity and the endless exploration of this subjectivity in any way – including ecstatic corporeal experiences. In this respect, because his spirituality had a real social influence through his heirs or those who had been influenced by him, and because it was helpful to him as a priest who wanted to know and control his subjectivity as a compulsively dominating, impulsive, and indecisive man, Charles can be considered a good and useful witness of his time, and the Sacred Heart can be considered a worship whose developments are always unexpected. Translation Sharon Casu References “Conseil municipal de Paris. Réponse à des questions écrites. Questions d’intérêt local. N° 1659.” Bulletin municipal officiel de la Ville de Paris (1960)  : p. 2728. “Du renfort à Montmartre.” Montmartre 230 (1959)  : p. 8. “Éditorial.” Résurrection 14 (1960)  : p. 1. “La dévotion au Sacré-Cœur. La question qu’elle nous pose.” La Documentation catholique 1452 (1965)  : col. 1283–1286. “La tentative d’occupation du Sacré Cœur.” Montmartre 266 (1971)  : pp. 10–13. “Le Sacré-Cœur de Jésus et le renouveau liturgique. Conférence de S. Em. le cardinal Lercaro.” La Documentation catholique 1470 (1966)  : col. 781–796. Académie d’éducation et d’études sociales. La vie intérieure. Une nouvelle demande. Paris  : Fayard, 1998. Airiau, Paul. “Le cardinal Lustiger et les intégristes.” Colloquium “Jean-Marie Lustiger, entre

48 Historical archives of the Archdiocese of Paris, 4Z30, 125–128  : between 1980 and 1984, “Cœur” (“Heart”) refers to the Sacred Heart for 134 of the 480 or so occurrences of the word, the others referring massively to Charles himself. 49 Airiau, L’Église et l’Apocalypse, pp. 47–50.

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crises et recompositions catholiques, de 1954 à 2007”, Paris, 12–14 october 2017. Forthcoming. Airiau, Paul. “Virtuosité, intégralisme, intransigeance  ? La communauté apostolique Aïn Karem au regard de l’histoire.” Catholicisme et identité. Regards croisés sur le catholicisme français contemporain (1980–2017). Signes des temps. Ed. Bruno Dumons and Frédéric Gugelot. Paris  : Karthala, 2017, pp. 17–43. Airiau, Paul. L’Église et l’Apocalypse du XIXe siècle à nos jours. Faits et representations. Paris  : Berg International, 2000. Historical archives of the Archdiocese of Paris, 4Z30  : archives Maxime Charles. Armogathe, Jean-Robert. Raison d’Église. De la rue d’Ulm à Notre-Dame. Paris  : Calmam-Lévy, 2001. Arnette, Raymond. De la Gestapo à l’OAS. L’itinéraire atypique d’un homme de Dieu. Levallois-­ Perret  : Editions Filipacchi, 1996. Benoist, Jacques. “Les aménagements liturgiques du Sacré-Cœur (1870–2000).” Livraisons d’histoire de l’architecture 1 (2001)  : pp. 9–26. Benoist, Jacques. Le Sacré-Cœur de Montmartre de 1870 à nos jours. Patrimoine. Paris  : Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 1992. Benoist, Jacques. Le Sacré-Cœur des femmes de 1870 à 1960. Contribution à l’histoire du féminisme, de l’urbanisme et du tourisme. Patrimoine. Paris  : Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 2000. Chaintron, Jean. Le vent soufflait devant ma porte. Paris  : Éditions du Seuil, 1993. Charles, Maxime. “Adorateurs, en Esprit et en verité.” Montmartre 234 (1960)  : pp. 2–6. Charles, Maxime. “Cœur de Jésus   : Âme du Christ.” Résurrection 14 (1960)  : pp. 31–39. Charles, Maxime. “De Chartres à Jérusalem.” Feuillets. L’Amitié Charles Péguy, 216 (1977)  : p. 19. Charles, Maxime. “Diversité et unité du culte au Cœur du Christ.” Montmartre-Orientations 32 (1978)  : p. 2. Christien, Lionel. “L’après-Concile en France et l’essor des communautés de formation de prêtres.” Nouveaux mouvements et nouvelles communautés, VIIIe université d’été d’histoire religieuse. Ed. Gérard Cholvy. Montpellier  : Centre régional d’histoire des mentalités, Université Paul Valéry, 2000, pp. 191–209. Cournier, Louis. “Formes du culte au Cœur du Christ.” Résurrection 14 (1960)  : pp. 62–74. Damblans, Jean, Denis Rendu and Madie Thévenon-Veicle. Le Père Fillère ou la nostalgie du futur. Paris  : ŒIL, 1989. Duchesne, Jean. “Au cœur de la foi.” La politique de la mystique. Hommage à Mgr Maxime Charles. Limoges  : Éditions Critérion, 1984, pp. 81–92. Emmanuel, Michel. La vie cachée de l’abbé Charles. Les années de formation sacerdotale d’un séminariste de l’entre-deux-guerres, 1908–1939. Sagesses et Cultures. Paris  : Parole et Silence, 2018. Fouilloux, Étienne. “Aux origines de Communio France (1969–1980).” Catholicisme et identité. Regards croisés sur le catholicisme français contemporain (1980–2017). Signes des temps. Ed. Bruno Dumons and Frédéric Gugelot. Paris  : Karthala, 2017, pp. 17–43. Fouilloux, Étienne. “Monseigneur Maxime Charles et sa descendance.” Archives de sciences sociales des religions 188 (2019)  : pp. 173–184.

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Fouilloux, Étienne. Les chrétiens français entre crise et libération, 1937–1947. XXe siècle. Paris  : Éditions du Seuil, 1997. Fouilloux, Étienne. Une Église en quête de liberté. La pensée catholique française et modernisme et Vatican II, 1914–1962. Anthropologiques. Paris  : Desclée de Brouwer, 1999. Guérandel, Alain. “La messe avec adoration à Montmartre.” La Maison Dieu 203 (1995)  : pp. 103–107. Hémer, Max. “Le règne social du Sacré-Cœur.” Résurrection 14 (1960)  : pp. 81–96. Lacoste, Jean-Yves. “Travail théologique et urgence de l’évangélisation  : l’exemple de Maxime Charles.” Résurrection 120–121 (2007)  : pp. 83–98. Levaud, Pierre. “Consécration et réparation.” Résurrection 14 (1960)  : pp. 75–80. Lustiger, Jean-Marie. “Homélie.” Résurrection 47–48 (1993)  : pp. 9–14. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Avertissement.” Résurrection 39 (1972)  : p. 2. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Discours de réception, et réponse de Mgr Claude Dagens.” Accessed on 02.11.2019. www.academie-francaise.fr/discours-de-reception-et-reponse-de-mgr-claude-­ dagens. Marion, Jean-Luc. “Splendeur de la contemplation eucharistique.” La politique de la mystique. Hommage à Mgr Maxime Charles. Limoges  : Éditions Critérion, 1984. Marion, Jean-Luc. La rigueur des choses. Paris  : Flammarion, 2012. Marquis, Jean-Hugue (ed.). Cent nouveaux regards sur le Christ eucharistique. Paris  : Basilique du Sacré-Cœur, 1989. Marquis, Jean-Hugues (ed.). Cent regards sur le Christ eucharistique. Paris  : Basilique du Sacré-­Cœur, 1985. Marquis, Odile and Jean-Hugues Marquis (eds.). Spiritualité du Sacré Cœur. Au cœur du Christ. Paris  : Desclée de Brouwer, 1981. Mendras, Henri with the collaboration of Laurence Duboys Fresney. La Seconde Révolution française (1965–1984). Bibliothèque des Sciences humaines. Paris  : Gallimard, 1988. Morillon, Philippe. Paroles de soldat. Lettres à un jeune officier. Paris  : Balland, 1996. Perrin, Luc. “Cinquante ans de la revue Résurrection.” Résurrection 120–121 (2007)  : pp. 21– 38. Perrin, Luc. Paris à l’heure de Vatican II. Églises/Sociétés. Paris  : Les Éditions de l’Atelier, 1997. Pruvot, Samuel. Du Centre Richelieu au Sacré-Cœur. Doctrine chrétienne et apostolat des laïcs  : la revue “Résurrection”, 1954–1964. DEA d’histoire du XXe siècle. Edited by Philippe Levillain. IEP de Paris  : 1993. Pruvot, Samuel. Monseigneur Charles, aumônier de la Sorbonne, 1944–1959. Histoire Biographie. Paris  : Les Éditions du Cerf, 2002. Rajsfus, Maurice. Le travail à perpétuité. De la galère au journalisme. Manya  : Levallois-Perret, 1993. Siegel, Liliane. La Clandestine. Récit. Paris  : M. Sell, 1988. Testis, “Installation de M. le chanoine Charles, nouveau recteur de Montmartre.” Montmartre 231 (1959)  : pp. 4–9. Vorges, François de. “Lorsque l’on descend à la crypte de Montmartre.” Montmartre 239 (1961)  : p. 25.

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The Inculturation of the Devotion to the Sacred Heart among the Javanese in Ganjuran, Yogyakarta This article tries to describe and reflect on the development of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in Ganjuran. How has this devotion, brought to Indonesia by Dutch lay people, developed in an Asian context  ? Has it become just ritual piety, or has it acquired a cultural significance, too  ? How have ritual practices and material expressions of the Sacred Heart in Ganjuran transformed instances of visual and ritual memory of the Sacred Heart  ?

The Context of the Ganjuran Church The Church of Ganjuran is located in Java, 30 kilometres from Yogyakarta. This parish is part of a housing complex of rice farmers and sugarcane plantations inhabited by 6,775 Christians, of which 99 % are Javanese. The land in this area is fertile thanks to the Merapi volcano and to ravines that provide water for the rice plantations (sawah).1 The long cultural and religious history of Java encompasses Buddhism, Hinduism, and Islam. In the 8th century, the region of Central Java was ruled by the Kingdom of Shailendra, with Buddhism as its official religion. A century later, the Mataram Kingdom introduced Hinduism. Both religions played an important role in Javanese society.2 Multiple çandi (temples) were built at this time, the most famous of which are the Borobudur and the Mendut (Buddhist çandi), and the Prambanan (Hindu çandi).3 At the end of the 15th century, Java was controlled by the Mataram Sultanate, which brought Islam to the region.4 Since 1945, when Indonesia became independent, the region of Central Java has been an integral part of Indonesia, despite its special status as Mataram-Yogyakarta Kingdom. Islam, Protestantism, Catholicism, Hinduism, 1 Sya’ban, “Sedekah bumi”, pp.  462–464  ; Pasandaran, “Reformasi Irigasi dalam Pengelolaan Terpadu Sumberdaya air”, pp. 219–224. 2 Kartodirdjo, Poesponegoro and Notosusanto. Sejarah Nasional Indonesia II, pp. 72–128  ; Berg, “Gambaran Jawa Pada Masa Lalu”, pp. 68–97  ; Rahardjo, Peradaban Jawa, pp. 143–211. 3 Forshee, Culture and customs of Indonesia, pp. 10–12  ; Dumarcay, Borobudur  ; Lamoureux, Indonesia  : a global studies handbook, pp. 12–14. 4 Lombard, Nusa Jawa  ; Moedjanto, Konsep Kekuasaan Jawa.

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and Buddhism are officially recognized religions.5 Most of the population is Muslim, while Catholicism accounts for about 2,91 % of the population.6 A portion of this 2,91 %, 395.509 Christians, reside in the diocese of Semarang.7 Traces of these various traditions are present among the Javanese. The slametan8, for instance, which consists in the consumption of festive foods, is similar to ceremonies that take place in Arab countries, and the types of food and the symbolic meaning they carry are the result of the encounter between Javanese traditions, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. It can be a commemoration of the dead or a celebration of important life events  : birth, marriage and other occurrences perceived as blessings. The ritual of the slametan begins with a process aimed at establishing peace among the members of the community.9 The leader presides over prayers of intercession and reconciliation, so that all members of the community may be at peace and in harmony. Finally, the food is distributed. Other elements that play an important role in the life of the Javanese are water, traditional Javanese music – the Gamelan10 –, and special days dedicated to rituals and prayers. The Slametan ceremony practiced today by the Javanese as well as the Ganjuran Catholics is the result of a very complex encounter between various elements, namely the Javanese tradition of mystical religiosity and different religions such as Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity. The Javanese tradition combines the spiritual wealth of these religions with “animists, Hindu-Buddhist teachings and practices combining magic, mysticism, veneration of powerful souls, spiritual cults, and the worship of holy places.”11 The Javanese culture and religion accept and incorporate a wide variety of beliefs  : “the belief in God or Allah the Almighty, Muhammad the Prophet, other prophets and saints, the cosmogonic concept of creation and the cosmological view of nature and the world, eschatology, deities, the concept of death and the afterlife, the spirits of the ancestors, guardian spirits, and the concept of ‘magical power’,” as Ahmad Hakam states.12 The Javanese culture is a fertile ground for the encounter between various religious traditions, creating a new memory which thus  5 Boelaars, Indonesianisasi, pp. 60–77.   6 Akhsan na’im and Syaputra, Kewarganegaraan, p. 10.   7 Data from https://www.dokpenkwi.org/2015/10/26/keuskupan-agung-semarang-2/  8 Geertz, Religion of Java, pp. 30–85  ; Beatty, Varieties of Javanese Religion, pp. 25–49.  9 Suseno, Etika Jawa, pp. 38–69. 10 Hill, “The practice and social evolution of the Javanese Gamelan  : Evolution and continuity”, p. 24. 11 Hakam, “Communal Feast Slametan”, p. 103. Niels Mulders explains about this phenomenon  : Mulders, Kebatinan dan Hidup sehari-hari orang Jawa, pp. 14–20  ; Suwito, “Slametan dalam kosmologi Jawa”, pp. 90–105. 12 Hakam, “Communal Feast Slametan”, p. 103. See also  : Koentjaraningrat, Javanese Culture, pp. 349–350.

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accommodates a variety of religious and cultural practices.13 This process can be understood easily in the context of Javanese mysticism (Kebatinan).14 Javanese spirituality places great value on the principles of harmony and unity. These principles enable the Javanese to reconcile various spiritual experiences and various theological views that might otherwise be considered incompatible.15 God as the highest reality is felt as directly involved in human life. The relationship with the Creator holds a special place because it is also closely related to the harmony of relationships with others.16 In this context, harmony is associated with private and social life, as well as ambition and social order. Everyone has their place, and everyone is invited to contribute to a social harmony that reflects the harmony of the universe.17 Javanese spirituality (Kejawen) as the mystical ideal of unity and harmony covers three aspects of Javanese life  : the relationship between human beings, the relationship between human beings and nature, and the relationship between human beings and God. To build these harmonious relationships, people should be willing to sacrifice themselves for harmony and not impose their will on others. Ultimately, the vision includes a broader relationship, namely that between the microcosm (the human individual) and the macrocosm (the universe). Microcosm and macrocosm are always interdependent, so holding different beliefs, Catholic and Kejawen, is not regarded as a sin.18 According to Hakam, this harmonious relationship is reflected in the slametan ceremony. “The concept of inner and outer and the relationship between individual and society is thus assumed to be manifested in the slametan ritual which requires the community members’ attendance and their awareness of others’ condition of goodness through the ceremony.”19

13 Koentjaraningrat, Javanese Culture, pp. 349–350. 14 “Kebatinan presupposes the existence of an eternal living space within humans. Therein lies the absolute reality of the final and definitive background of all that is temporary, impermanent or artificial. The entire natural world with all its energies is present immanently in the mind in the form of an infinite unity between each of the respective forms. When man activates his mental faculties with feeling or samadhi, he frees himself from prejudice about the variety of forms. Through contact with the spiritual realm, humans realize themselves as one-in-all and all-in-one  ; furthermore, he received power over the spiritual forces in the cosmos. The kebatinan style is cosmos-centric  ; included in magic, astrology, occult and future prophecies.” Subagya, Kepercayaan – Kebatinan, p. 43 (translation by the author). 15 Hakam, “Communal Feast Slametan”, pp. 106–107  ; Mulders, Kebatinan dan Hidup sehari-hari orang Jawa, pp. 50–51. 16 Endraswara, Agama Jawa, pp. 199–214  ; Hakam, “Communal Feast Slametan”, p. 102. 17 Endraswara, Agama Jawa, pp. 249–269. 18 Hakam, “Communal Feast Slametan”, pp. 99–113  ; Mulder, Mysticism in Jawa, pp.64–65. 19 Hakam, “Communal Feast Slametan”, p.103.

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In several studies on the slametan, experts agree that the ceremony is a result of intercultural and religious encounters that involve many elements of both culture and religiosity.20 Many scholars admit that the slametan ceremony has a special place in Javanese religiosity. This slametan ceremony is carried out to mark and interpret important events in the people’s private life as well as in the community life. On a personal level, the slametan is often associated with rituals that carry religious meaning. Slametan ceremonies are held to mark preparations for birth, the birth of a child, marriage, and rituals to pray for the dead  : a slametan can be held when people die, and to commemorate the third, seventh, fortieth or one-hundredth day, the first and second anniversary since the death, and the one-thousandth day.21 After that, the family can hold a slametan ceremony for the dead in accordance with their wishes. These slametan ceremonies have more sacred characteristics and are interpreted according to the religion adhered to by the Javanese. This means that the meaning of slametan is associated with the theological meaning of life after death according to Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Christianity.22 The Javanese also hold slametan related to living together. This slametan accompanies building a house, cleaning the village, gratitude for the harvest, and other events according to the customs of each village.23 As Mark Woodward has shown, this type of slametan aims to show the people’s harmonious life together and their desire to build a respectful community. The slametan which accompanies the cleaning of a village is also associated with the ancestors and village founders who have died, or with divine powers and ancestral spirits. The purpose of the ceremony is the realization of peace, harmony, health, prosperity and abundant blessings for the lives of all villagers. The slametan has a fixed structure.24 It is usually held in families, and those close to the family are invited regardless of their religion, beliefs, social position and ethnicity. All neighbours are invited to attend the Salvation.25 The ceremony is usually held shortly after sunset (after Maghrib prayer). After the guests arrive, a Master of Ceremony begins by welcoming the present and expressing the intention of the cer20 Beatty, Varieties of Javanese Religion, p. 50  ; van den Boogert, “The role of slametan”, p. 356 21 Koentjaraningrat, Javanese Culture, pp. 352–366  ; Beatty, Varieties of Javanese Religion, pp. 50–51  ; Endraswara, Agama Jawa, pp. 26. 22 van den Boogert, “The role of slametan”, p. 369  ; Woodward, Java, Indonesia and Islam, p. 135. 23 Pamberton, “Jawa”. On the Subject of Jawa, pp.  327–336  ; van den Boogert, “The role of slametan”, p. 353. 24 See for the following  : Geertz, Religion of Java, pp.  12–14  ; van den Boogert, “The role of slametan”, pp. 353–354  ; Beatty, Varieties of Javanese Religion, p. 30–34, especially 33  ; Koenjaraningrat, Javanese Culture, pp. 346–348. 25 Woodward, Java, Indonesia and Islam, p. 121  ; van den Boogert, “The role of slametan”, p. 363.

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emony, the specific purpose of the slametan. When guests arrive, the food for the actual prayer meal will be on display in the centre of the room. It traditionally consists of cones (tumpeng) of yellow rice (sega kuning), side dishes of fish, eggs, meat, vegetables, fruit, and tea. Today, many families make tumpeng as a symbol and to respect the tradition, although they tend to serve prepared food in a box. The modin (mosque official) or prayer leader (Christian or other) pronounces the prayer. A Muslim prayer leader would usually pronounce the first chapter of the Qur’an and a prayer common in the Muslim world, but sometimes other, more suited passages from the Qur’an are chosen. When the modin pronounces the last part of the donga, the guests hold their palms up, say amin upon his pause, and rub their face with their palms so as to absorb the blessings from heaven. After this, the modin is invited to start the meal. The food is dished out and eaten there, and what is left is taken home by the guests. This marks the end of the ritual.26

The Mission of the Laity in Collaboration with the Jesuits in the Early 20 th Century The evangelization of the Catholic Church among the Javanese in Yogyakarta is closely related to the new mission strategies of the Jesuits.27 A well-known missionary was Father François Van Lith (1863–1926) from Oirschot, Netherlands, who introduced a new way of evangelization through inculturation and the training of pastoral workers.28 He started his mission in Muntilan and moved to the villages around Menoreh (Boro-Promasan, Borobudur), and to Yogyakarta.29 Missionaries in Muntilan were experiencing many challenges, and the economic approach they had adopted did not appear to be producing encouraging results. Van Lith, learning from the missionary work carried out by Kyai Sadrach, tried a cultural approach instead.30 He began to learn the Javanese language and culture, participated in slametan in villages, and visited and learned from kyai and leaders in the villages. He also established contacts with cultural leaders and several figures from the Yogyakarta Palace. He watched shadow puppets shows and other art performances such 26 See Geertz, Religion of Java, pp. 12–14  ; van den Boogert, “The role of slametan”, pp. 353–354  ; Beatty, Varieties of Javanese Religion, p. 30–34  ; Koenjaraningrat, Javanese Culture, pp. 346–348. 27 Beck, “Back to Sendangsono”, pp. 244–263. 28 Ibid., p. 249. 29 Rosariyanto, Booklet 70 Tahun Keuskupan Agung Semarang, p. 33  ; Purnomo, Menelusuri “Sisi Lain”, pp. 48–50  ; Tartono, Barnabas Sarikrama, pp. 6–7. 30 Steenbrink, Catholics in Indonesia 1808–1942, pp. 373–375  ; Beck, “Back to Sendangsono”, p. 249.

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as ketoprak and gamelan. In addition, Van Lith SJ chose education as a missionary method. In fact, he trained young people to become teachers by educating them on the Javanese culture and on the knowledge of Christ through the Javanese language and culture. At the same time, then, he also prepared teachers to become religious teachers, catechists.31 In an effort to evangelize the Javanese, van Lith translated the Lord’s Prayer and other prayers into Javanese.32 In his training of the élite, Van Lith SJ trained catechists from the villages around Muntilan. He taught catechumenates in Javanese and used Javanese symbols to explain the Catholic religion. Some Javanese in the Boro, Sendangsono area began to be interested in the evangelization model carried out by the Van Lith SJ. Many Javanese accepted his work, including Barnabas Sarikrama, as Stefanus Tartono demonstrated.33 Sarikrama became the first baptized Javanese on 14 December, 1904, followed by 171 other people, the day the statue of Our Lady was erected to commemorate the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of Mary.34 Sarikrama later became a catechist who spread the gospel in the Boro area. To commemorate this first baptism, Pastor Y. Prennthaler SJ built a Marian shrine, inaugurated on December 8, 1929.35 The aim of the construction of this historical monument, the “Lourdes of Indonesia”, was to eliminate the impression of the area being haunted. The Ganjuran area experienced another mode of evangelisation, through the missionary work of lay people.36 This movement collaborated with the one developed by Van Lith SJ, and was supported by teachers who were also catechists. In the conference of the leaders of the Catholic Church organised by the Governor General D. Fock, which took place from 31 August to 8 September 1925, in Bogor and Jakarta, Dr. Julius Schmutzer commissioned an exhibition to demonstrate his efforts to create a Javanese Christian style of art  : an angel created for a Javanese Christian chapel (çandi) in Ganjuran.37 The Dutch family Schmutzer had first come to this region for economic reasons, to build a sugarcane mill. They were active in the Church and in the missionary move-

31 Suharyo, “Refleksi Perjalanan dan Arah Ke Depan Keuskupan Agung Semarang”, pp.  286–288  ; Muskens, Sejarah Gereja Katolik Indonesia, pp.  855–860  ; Steenbrink, Catholics in Indonesia, 1808– 1942. Vol. 2, pp. 373–383. 32 Purnomo, Menelusuri “Sisi Lain”, p. 45. 33 Tartono. Barnabas Sarikrama, pp. 16–31. 34 Beck, “Back to Sendangsono”, p. 251. 35 Tartono, Barnabas Sarikrama, pp. 38–40  ; Muskens, Sejarah Gereja Katolik Indonesia, p. 867. 36 Aritonang and Steenbrink (eds.), A History of Christianity in Indonesia, pp. 702–705. 37 Steenbrink, Catholics in Indonesia, 1808–1942, pp. 395–397.

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Fig. 1  : Candi of Ganjuran, personal document.

ment, a social commitment based on Rerum Novarum.38 Moreover, they were knowledgeable about popular devotions, especially Marian devotion and the devotion to the Sacred Heart.39 In 1919, the Schmutzers built a primary school in Ganjuran, followed by three village schools in 1923 and twelve primary schools around Ganjuran in 1930.40 Every teacher was a graduate of Muntilan, trained by Van Lith SJ to become a catechist as well. When the Schmutzer family left the estate in 1934, there were already 1.350 Catholics in this area, still a small minority. Julius Schmutzer organized the Gondang Lipuro sugarcane mill according to the principle of justice by giving balanced wages to farmers and workers. To realize this project, he built a canal to supply the plantation with water, after receiving permission from the King of Jogja on 28 February 1924. He modernized the factory by importing new machines from the Netherlands. He committed himself in many ways to help the farmers by providing them with good training and economic sharing. In 1924, in contrast to the European architectural style of churches at that time, this family built a church in the Javanese joglo style for the congregation, composed mostly of Javanese people. It seems that this family was influenced by a new architectural style developed in the Dutch East Indies.41 This church’s statues of the angels, 38 Steenbrink, Catholics in Indonesia, 1808–1942, p. 395  ; Suharyo, “Refleksi Perjalanan dan Arah Ke Depan Keuskupan Agung Semarang”, p. 289. 39 Steenbrink, Catholics in Indonesia, 1808–1942, p. 368. 40 See on the following Steenbrink, Catholics in Indonesia, 1808–1942, p. 396. 41 Huib Akihary describes this new style  : “We probably can propose – while we are pursuing the better understanding – that an Indo-European Style can only arise from a synthesis of the Western construction system and the Eastern art form  ; therefore, the Javanese pendopo as an original building, should be further developed. We can take an illustration that it is a possibility to find a Greek temple in a wooden structure version. A real Indo-European architecture can be developed if the occupation of architects is on the Javanese’s hand, and they are also educated by an architectural training utterly in Dutch Indies (…) since the suitable form for Indo-European style, in this case Javanese art, can’t be found in Europe.

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Jesus, Mary and the Trinity were designed by Joseph Schmutzer in Bogor. They were sculpted by a Muslim artist from West Java and by an artist of Chinese origin. As Karel Steenbrink explains, the design “of the altar decoration and the statues was adapted as much as possible to the Hindu-Javanese tradition”. This church is dedicated to the Sacred Heart.42 The Schmutzer family also built a chapel for the Sacred Heart. The chapel demonstrates great artistic creativity in the tradition of Javanese çandi, as could be found in the Prambanan, the Hindu çandi of the 8th–9th centuries.43 As Steenbrink delineates in detail, the cornerstone was laid on 26 December 1927 by Bishop A. van Velsen, Bishop of Batavia, on the 65th anniversary of the sugar factory as “an expression of gratitude”.44 The construction of a çandi dedicated to Christ the King was certainly intended to underline the arrival of Christianity as the successor of the Javanese Hindu tradition. From the very beginning, the Schmutzer family introduced the practices of the devotion to the Sacred Heart  : adoration to the Blessed Sacrament, prayers to the Sacred Heart, the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, especially for the Feast of Christ the King. On 11 February 1930 Bishop van Velsen inaugurated the çandi.45 On that same occasion, the whole island of Java was consecrated to Christ the King. On the wall of the chapel there is the following Javanese inscription  : “Sampejan Dalem Maha Praboe, Jesus, Kristoes Pangeraning, Para Bangsa” (“Jesus Christ, You, Supreme King, Lord of all nations”).46 The stones used to build the çandi come from Mount Merapi (between Yogyakarta and Central Java), which has a spiritual value for the Javanese  : Mount Merapi is thought to be a symbol of God’s presence as a father, while the South Sea, personified as Kanjeng Ratu Kidul, is a symbol of God’s presence as a mother.47 Thus, the south-facing çandi of the Sacred Heart of the Lord Jesus is conceived as a reunion between God as Father and God as Mother.48 In addition to symbolizing the presence Therefore, that such form should be revitalized first, and later the construction and the art form can be harmonized as the final goal of the style. That development, in which the Javanese presupposes to become an autonomous architect, will occur parallel with the efforts to reach the autonomy of the Dutch Indies.” Akihary, Architectuur en Stedebouw in Indonesie 1870–1970, p. 42 (translation by the author). 42 Steenbrink, Catholics in Indonesia, 1808–1942, p. 396  ; Suryanugraha, “Candi Ganjuran  : Seni Liturgis Budaya Jawa”, p. 123. 43 Steenbrink, Catholics in Indonesia, 1808–1942, p. 396. 44 Ibid. 45 Steenbrink, Catholics in Indonesia, 1808–1942, p. 397  ; Boelaars, Indonesianisasi, p. 414. 46 Suryanugraha, “Candi Ganjuran  : Seni Liturgis Budaya Jawa”, p. 137. 47 Triyoga, Manusia Jawa dan Gunung Merapi, pp.  45–51  ; Santoso, Architectural Inculturation and Transformation, pp. 18–19  ; https://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/27470. 48 Sugiyana, Devosi kepada Hati Kudus Yesus, p. 22.

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Fig. 2  : The statue of Jesus Christ of Ganjuran, public domain.

of God as Father, the statue of the Sacred Heart of the Lord Jesus is also a symbol of the presence of God as a mother with her womb who, out of mercy, was willing to suffer and die to give birth to humans.49 In 1948, during the revolutionary period, the sugarcane plantation was burnt down after a bombing by the Dutch. The church founded by the Schmutzer family remained intact and the çandi grew in prestige and veneration, becoming a place of pilgrimage for Ganjuran and Javanese Christians. Since the declaration of independence in 1945, the Church of Ganjuran has held processions of the Sacred Heart on the Feast of Christ the King. However, at least until 1990, the devotion to the Sacred Heart had not proved popular among the Catholics of Yogyakarta, and did not occupy a special place.50

49 Suryanugraha, “Candi Ganjuran  : Seni Liturgis Budaya Jawa”, p. 136. 50 Goreti, Yuliati, Supriyono, “Maintaining Socio-Cultural Values”, pp. 28–29  ; Bramasti, “Dampak Sosial Sebuah Karya Seni pada Kaum Miskin dan Tertindas”, p. 438.

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The Devotion to the Sacred Heart in Javanese Tradition Since 1990, the Church of Ganjuran has been renewing its pastoral vision to be in harmony with Javanese culture, the needs of the people and the new vision of the Diocese of Semarang. This renewal was first led by Father Utomo, a priest of the Archdiocese of Semarang.51 These transformations can be regarded as creating multi-layered structures of the Sacred Heart devotion, intertwining symbolic, visual and ritual practices, and their social significance as Javanese traditions and as Sacred Heart devotion moulded in early modern and modern Europe. By this process, both spaces of memory are transformed, thus creating a new space of memory. Father Utomo took the apostolate of prayer to the Sacred Heart as the starting point for the life of the Church.52 He organized this apostolate of prayer first in the villages and then in the diocese of Semarang, as well as in other dioceses. The apostolate of prayer used Javanese symbols  : holy water, stories, means of meditation and times of prayer. Today, this prayer is known as the Nusantara Prayer to the Sacred Heart. It was influenced by the traditional practice of the devotion to the Sacred Heart – the legacy of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque  : adoration before the Blessed Sacrament, praying the litanies of the Sacred Heart, and participation in the celebration of the Eucharist on the First Friday. An important element of this apostolate is receiving God’s blessings and sharing them with others. As Danang Bramasti has shown, Fr. Utomo strongly emphasized the aspects of ritual piety  : celebrations of the Holy Communion, liturgical prayers, and spiritual actions.53 In 1997, springs were found at the bottom of the çandi of the Sacred Heart. In the Javanese tradition, water, especially in a sacred place, plays an important role. Today, this spring is an integral part of the inculturation of Ganjuran, with a blessing of the Perwitasari water. This blessing is performed for every large gathering of pilgrims, Catholics and non-Catholics, who come to pray quietly and to receive the blessing. For many Javanese people, the water received at a pilgrimage is a water that brings peace and wellbeing.54 Every day, pilgrims come from all the parishes of the Semarang diocese, but also from Jakarta, Bandung, Surabaya, and many other cities.55 Every first Friday of the 51 Bramasti, “The Role of Patronage in the Existence of the Temple of Ganjuran”, pp. 41–43. 52 See for the following  : Bramasti, “Dampak Sosial Sebuah Karya Seni pada Kaum Miskin dan Tertindas”, pp. 439–441. 53 Ibid., pp. 439–441. 54 Kurnianto, “Makna Simbolis Dekorasi di Gereja Ganjuran Kabupaten Bantul Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta”, p. 5  ; Raslan, “Gereja Ganjuran, Bentuk Indah Akulturasi Jawa, Hindu-Buddha, dan Eropa”. 55 See for the following  : Bakok, “Musik Liturgi Inkulturatif di Gereja Ganjuran Yogyakarta”, pp. 28–30.

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Fig. 3  : Ganjuran Perwitasari Water, public domain. Fig. 4  : The offerings during the great procession, personal document. Fig. 5  : The Gunungans – the offerings, personal document.

month, and every kliwon Friday (a special day for Javanese people), the evening mass is celebrated in Javanese, with gamelan music, Javanese costumes and elements of inculturation, namely the blessing of the Perwitasari water and the Nusantara prayer with the procession of the Blessed Sacrament. Each celebration brings together about 750 believers. Many non-Christians attend the kliwon Friday Eucharist  : they follow the celebration with respect and in an atmosphere of harmony with all the pilgrims. Although the celebration lasts two or three hours, many pilgrims enjoy the silence of the night and the gamelan music with all its splendour.56 On the Sunday after the Feast of the Sacred Heart, the Ganjuran Church celebrates the great procession of the Blessed Sacrament to honour the Sacred Heart of Jesus. This celebration lasts four hours, starting at 7 a.m. with the procession of all parishioners and pilgrims. During the Eucharistic offering, people bring the Gunungan57, offerings consisting of agricultural products and traditional Javanese foods presented in the shape of a mountain and then distributed to those present. This celebration is crowned by the procession of the Blessed Sacrament, which ends with a public feast

56 Ibid. 57 Irwan, Simbol, Makna dan Pandangan Hidup Jawa.

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where people eat traditional food in the form of apem, as a symbol of their willingness to share their blessings and to build a path of mutual forgiveness.58 In addition to ritual actions, Father Utomo encouraged various social actions in favour of farmers and fishermen, as well as the poor and the sick.59 He did not work alone, but collaborated with priests, parish councils and servants of the Sacred Heart. On 12 and 16 October, 1990, on the initiative of Fr. Utomo, the Church of Ganjuran organized an Asian seminar on Social Action, sponsored by the Federation of the Asian Bishops’ Conferences (FABC), which was attended by representatives of farmers from regions of Asia accompanied by national and international observers. The seminar resulted in the Ganjuran Declaration and in the constitution of the World Food Day’s Farmers Association. Meanwhile, the Ganjuran Declaration was at the heart of the development of sustainable agriculture and of rural communities with a spiritual identity. This development is the precursor of the organic farming movement in many parishes of the Archdiocese of Semarang, which brings together Catholic and non-Christian farmers who, in a spirit of dialogue with all religions, and living in harmony with nature, focus on environment-friendly agriculture. This movement cultivates the spirit of dialogue and the spirit of Laudato Si.60 For the Ganjuran people, the history of the Schmutzer family’s social commitment to the poor, of inculturation and dialogue, is a heritage of faith and an integral part of the life of the faithful. The presence of the çandi of Ganjuran connects this legacy of the faith from the time of the çandi’s foundation to the life of the Church today. Nowadays, the spirit of solidarity with the poor, inculturation, and dialogue with other religions are the strengths of the Ganjuran people. The presence of the Ganjuran temple is felt by both Catholics and non-Catholics. Dialogue between religious communities is a form of hospitality. This spirit of fraternity manifests itself, as Emiliana Sadilah states, in the form of the slametan, celebrated every year before the great procession, when the parish of Ganjuran invites the non-Christians living around the church.61 The social commitment to the poor is a typical manifestation of inculturation. The Church of the Archdiocese of Semarang devotes 15% of each parish’s income to char-

58 Nurhayati, Mulyana, Ekowati and Meilawati, “Inventarisasi Makanan Tradisional Jawa Unsur Sesaji di Pasar-Pasar Traditional Kabupaten Bantul”, pp. 131–132. 59 See for the following  : Bramasti, Bramasti, “Dampak Sosial Sebuah Karya Seni pada Kaum Miskin dan Tertindas”, pp. 430. 60 Francis, Laudato Si’ (Vatican City  : Vatican Press, 2015), n. 21, 34,129. 61 Sadilah, “Makna Simbolik Tradisi Prosesi Di Gereja Ganjuran”, p. 175.

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itable works, especially for the poor, the sick, the handicapped and the outcasts.62 The parish of Ganjuran cares for the poor through various charitable activities, helping to build housing and providing health assistance. It also tends to the elderly, the sick, and gives scholarships to students.

Encounter, Mission, and Dialogue How can one make sense of the multi-layered architecture of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in Ganjuran  ? The Church of Ganjuran is a fertile place for encounters between the Javanese culture and the Gospel and Christian spirituality brought by Christians from the Netherlands. Various devotional traditions from Europe can be identified, such as adoration, the Way of the Cross, processions, the First Friday Mass and liturgical prayers. The Church has integrated various expressions of Javanese culture with its symbols, gamelans and dances, offerings of agricultural products, and much more. In Ganjuran, the Church applies three important principles in accepting Javanese culture, as Robert J. Schriter delineates.63 First of all, it avoids a reductionist attitude that eliminates certain aspects of the culture that might be considered less important.64 This is an inclusive cultural approach, inasmuch as every culture is regarded as a living organism. Secondly, the Church respects the particular identity of Javanese culture and the Javanese vision of the world.65 Finally, the Church takes into consideration the problem of socio-cultural change, since the dynamics of change are as important as the search for or preservation of identity.66 The encounter between Dutch Christian culture and Javanese culture introduced by the Schmutzer family gave rise to a new culture of devotion to the Sacred Heart. Although Christ is presented as a king, he appears as a merciful king, close to and protecting humanity. This conception of Christ is clearly expressed in the merciful statue of Jesus the King. This belief also manifests itself in the form of Gunungan, representing the king’s concern for human peace and prosperity. Devotion to the Sacred Heart has led the Church of Ganjuran to become familiar with the richness of Javanese spirituality. In Asia, including Indonesia, a complex feeling of admiration and fear, gratitude and suspicion still persists in the relationship 62 Memo Administrator Diocesan Keuskupan Agung Semarang No. 1117/A/X/2009  : https://www.parok inandan.com/2018/01/pedoman-pelaksanaan-pengelolaan-dana.html 63 Schriter, Constructing Local Theologies, pp. 42–45. 64 Ibid. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid.

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with Christianity, as Sintha Wahjusaputri, among others, shows.67 In some cases, this leads to the building of walls or barriers. Yet, Christ came to destroy the “dividing wall”68 and He is the way to communion.69 By breaking down the walls, Christ creates in Himself a union of diversities  : He teaches that all human beings are on the path to the same destination. In Ecclesia in Asia¸ John Paul II proclaimed that “[b]eyond all divisions, Jesus makes it possible for people to live as brothers and sisters, recognizing a single Father who is in heaven (see Mt 23  : 9). In him, a new harmony has emerged […]”.70 He is the way, the place of a vertical relationship with the divine, of a horizontal communion with the world and with others. In the Asian context and in Ecclesia in Asia, the Church prefers to speak of the spirit of dialogue, communion, and sharing of gifts.71 In fact, Ecclesia in Asia calls the Church’s faith in Jesus a “gift received and a gift to be shared”.72 It affirms that inculturation implies mutual enrichment  : “In the process of encountering the world’s different cultures, the Church not only transmits her truths and values and renews cultures from within, but she also takes from the various cultures the positive elements already found in them.”73 For the Church in Asia, the choice to make concerning the mode of inculturation is clear  : it should not be based on “confrontation and opposition, but [on] the spirit of complementarity and harmony”.74 “In this framework of complementarity and harmony, the Church can communicate the Gospel in a way which is faithful both to her own Tradition and to the Asian soul.”75 Devotion to the Sacred Heart in Ganjuran has led the Catholic Church to engage in a mission of living dialogue with non-Christians in daily life, through fraternity and spirituality. The FABC informs about the Church’s mission and dialogues.76 a) The dialogue of life, where people strive to live in an open and neighbourly spirit, sharing their joys and sorrows, their human problems and concerns. b) The dialogue of action, in which Christians and others collaborate for the integral development of people and for their liberation. 67 68 69 70 71

Wahjusaputri, “Religion Conflicts in Indonesia”, pp. 931‐936. Eph 2  :14 (NRSVCE). Jn 14  :6. John Paul II, Ecclesia in Asia, post-synodal apostolic exhortation, 6 November 1999, Vatican.va, 13. Kroeger, “The Faith-Culture Dialogue in Asia”, p. 85  ; Yun-Ka Tan, “Towards Asian Liturgical Inculturation”, p. 6. 72 John Paul II, Ecclesia in Asia, 10. 73 Ibid., 21. 74 Ibid., 6. 75 Ibid. 76 See for the following  : Achiel Peelman, L’inculturation. L’Eglise et les cultures, p. 99.

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c) The dialogue of theological exchanges, where specialists seek to deepen their understanding of each other’s religious heritage and to appreciate each other’s spiritual values. d) The dialogue of religious experience, in which people, rooted in their own religious traditions, share their spiritual wealth, for example concerning prayer and contemplation, faith and the means of searching for God or the Absolute.77 The apostolic exhortation Ecclesia in Asia speaks clearly of the centrality of Christ, the point of reference for all attempts at evangelization and inculturation. “[The] Church’s unique contribution to the peoples of the continent is the proclamation of Jesus Christ […] ‘[The Church] wants to offer the new life she has found in Jesus Christ to all the peoples of Asia as they search for the fullness of life […]’78 […] The Church’s faith in Jesus is […] the greatest gift which the Church can offer to Asia.”79 Although the Asian Church is a minority, it continues its progress with optimism, courage, and hope. Pope John Paul II saw a “new springtime of Christian life”80 in Asia with the beginning of the new millennium, and he was certain that Asia would become “the land of a bountiful harvest”81. The rediscovery of the Asian roots of Christianity had led to a renewed awareness of Asia’s religious and cultural heritage. Ecclesia in Asia recognises the richness of these values and sets out some of them  : “love of silence and contemplation, simplicity, harmony, detachment, non-violence, the spirit of hard work, discipline, frugal living, the thirst for learning and philosophical enquiry”, “respect for life, compassion for all beings, closeness to nature, filial piety towards parents, elders and ancestors, and a highly developed sense of community”, “a powerful sense of solidarity”, “a spirit of religious tolerance and peaceful co-existence”, “a remarkable capacity for accommodation and a natural openness to the mutual enrichment of peoples in the midst of a plurality of religions and cultures”.82 The theological foundation of inculturation in Ecclesia in Asia lies in the mystery of “The Uniqueness and Universality of Salvation”  : “As the definitive manifestation of the mystery of the Father’s love for all, Jesus is indeed unique, and it is precisely this uniqueness of Christ which gives him an absolute and universal significance.”83 God’s 77 Ibid. 78 Special Assembly for Asia of the Synod of Bishops, Relatio ante disceptationem  : L’Osservatore Romano (22 April 1998), 5, cited in  : John Paul II, Ecclesia in Asia, p. 9, footnote 36. 79 John Paul II, Ecclesia in Asia, 10. 80 John Paul II, Tertio Millennio Adveniente, 18, quoted in John Paul II, Ecclesia in Asia, 9. 81 John Paul II, Ecclesia in Asia, 4. 82 Ibid., 6. 83 Ibid., 14.

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plan of salvation, which was accomplished once, in a precise time and space, in a specific cultural context, reaches all peoples, all human situations, all ages, the entire universe. From this Christological foundation, the Synod Fathers came, at the 1998 Special Assembly for Asia, to a decisive and incisive affirmation  : the inculturation of faith in Asia “involves rediscovering the Asian countenance of Jesus and identifying ways in which the cultures of Asia can grasp the universal saving significance of the mystery of Jesus and his Church”.84 They were convinced that by “[c]ontemplating Jesus in his human nature, the peoples of Asia find their deepest questions answered, their hopes fulfilled, their dignity uplifted and their despair conquered”.85 Ecclesia in Asia sees different ways in which the Spirit is present in the inculturation of the Gospel in Asia. The Spirit teaches the Church wisdom in judgment and creativity in finding adequate and effective ways to engage in dialogue with different cultures and religions, ensuring “that the dialogue unfolds in truth, honesty, humility and respect”.86 It works in people’s hearts, creating a strong desire for a life of fulfilment, “guiding [them] in the ways of truth and goodness”87, preparing them “for the saving dialogue with the Saviour of all”88 and “for full maturity in Christ”89. More­ over, the Spirit brings dynamism and creativity to the Church. He fills it with gifts and charisms, opens it to other cultures and makes it grow in true catholicity, communion and harmony. “The Spirit gathers into unity all kinds of people, with their different customs, resources and talents, making the Church a sign of the communion of all humanity under the headship of Christ.”90 The Church, as a sacrament of Christ, having received from Him a missionary mandate, is convinced that it is itself the instrument of salvation among peoples. It can offer the living water for which Asia thirsts. But what are the best channels through which this living water can flow to reach its destination  ? Ecclesia in Asia states forcefully  : “The question is not whether the Church has something essential to say to the men and women of our time, but how she can say it clearly and convincingly  !”91

84 85 86 87 88 89 90 91

Ibid., 20. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 21. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 18. Ibid., 16. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 29.

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Conclusion The Ganjuran Church has conducted an extensive dialogue with the poor, as recommended by the FABC. It has engaged in living dialogues with the poor in order to discover their aspirations and needs, so that it can proclaim the Gospel within their expectations. Through these contacts and experiences, the poor can teach the Church humility, solidarity, and detachment from material wealth. This church is a church of the poor, with the poor and among the poor, and not only for the poor. The phenomenon of the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus in Ganjuran leads to a deeper reflection on the attitude of Javanese Christians towards it. For some European Catholics living in the Catholic tradition, the practice in Ganjuran will be considered strange because this devotion is also practiced by Muslims. Some accept this as an example of inculturation in continued development  ; some might call it a phenomenon of syncretism  ; others consider it an example of living in harmony and dialogue, also in the search for God  ; others still would say that this is the new reality, an encounter with plurality and hybridity. This tradition, understood by the Javanese in the context of Ganjuran, can lead to a new appreciation of the richness of the devotion to the Sacred Heart. Perhaps, one can take a new perspective on hybridity. Hybridity occurs because Ganjuran Catholics live among a variety of cultures which meet and enrich each other  : the Javanese culture with all its symbolic richness, the Nusantara cultures which are very diverse, and the culture of the Catholic Church, very much influenced by that of Western Europe. This hybridity is also nourished by the encounter with Javanese Muslims and people from other religions. Moreover, it is supplemented by the presence of ethnic, religious and cultural pluralities, as well as by the diversity of social issues. This hybrid reality enables many people to meet sympathetically, to share human and spiritual wealth, to strengthen their mutual faith, and to build new alliances. The tradition of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque’s devotion to the Sacred Heart still has its place, namely in various aspects of this devotion  : respect for the Blessed Sacrament, procession of the Blessed Sacrament, prayer of adoration, First Friday Mass, litanies of the Sacred Heart. These are inventories of memory used, reworked, made present and associated with social and environmental problems of the present through the integration of various Javanese elements such as gamelan, dances, fashion arts and various material offerings. Different elements of the archipelago have also become important parts of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in Ganjuran. In short, the devotion to the Sacred Heart in Ganjuran originated from the piety of the people of the Netherlands and was inculturated in Javanese culture, thus becoming a theological locus of ritual and social piety. In the Asian context, this devotion is

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also a means of dialogue with non-Christian religions, culture, the poor, and the universe more generally. The Church of Ganjuran presents a living model of the Church, which teaches its people to offer themselves to God in true worship, to participate in the emancipation of the community, to realize the Kingdom of God in society, and to preserve the integrity of creation. Translation Sharon Casu References Adi, Santoso. Architectural Inculturation and Transformation  : A Case study on three Catholics Churches in Java. Master’s thesis, National University of Singapore, 2010. Akhsan na’im and Hendry Syaputra. Kewarganegaraan, Suku Bangsa, Agama, dan Bahasa Sehari hari Penduduk Indonesia. Hasil Sensus Penduduk 2010. Jakarta  : Badan Pusat Statistik, 2011. Akihary, Huib. Architectuur en Stedebouw in Indonesie 1870–1970. Zutphen  : de Walburg Pers, 1990. Aritonang, Sihar Jan and Karel Steenbrink (eds.), A History of Christianity in Indonesia. Leiden  : Brill, 2008. Bakok, Yohanes Don Bosko. “Musik Liturgi Inkulturatif di Gereja Ganjuran Yogyakarta.” Resital 14 (2013)  : pp. 28–30. Beatty, Andrew. Varieties of Javanese Religion. Cambridge  : Cambridge University Press, 1999. Beck, Herman L. “Back to Sendangsono. A Marian Pilgrimage Site as a Lens on Central Javanese Cultural Values.” Bijdragen Tot De Taal-, Land-en Volkenkunde 174 (2018)  : pp. 244–263. Berg, CC. “Gambaran Jawa Pada Masa Lalu.” Historiografi Indonesia. Sebuah Pengantar. Ed. CS. Soedjatmoko. Jakarta  : Gramedia, 1995, pp. 68–97. Boelaars, Hub JWM. Indonesianisasi. Dari Gereja Katolik di Indonesia Menjadi Gereja Katolik Indonesia. Yogyakarta  : Kanisius, 2005. Boli, Ujan B. and G. Kierchbeerger. Liturgi Autentik dan Relevan. Maumere  : Ledalero, 2006. Bramasti, Danang. “The Role of Patronage in the Existence of the Temple of Ganjuran.” IJCAS 2 (2015)  : pp. 35–49. Bramasti. Danang. “Dampak Sosial Sebuah Karya Seni pada Kaum Miskin dan Tertindas.” Patrawidya 16 (2015)  : pp. 429–446. Dumarcay, Jacques. Borobudur. Singapore  : Oxford University Press, 1978. Forshee, Jill. Culture and customs of Indonesia. London  : Greenwood Press, 2006. Geertz, Clifford. Religion of Java. Chicago  : The University of Chicago Press, 1960, pp. 30–85. Gereja Hati Kudus Tuhan Yesus Ganjuran. Rahmat yang menjadi berkat. Yogyakarta, 2004. Goreti, Christian Maria, Dewi Yuliati and Agustinus Supriyono. “Maintaining Socio-Cultural Values as a Media for Catholic Missions at Hati Kudus Tuhan Yesus Church in Ganjuran, Yogyakarta.” Indonesian Historical Studies 4 (2020  :1)  : pp. 28–29.

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Hakam, Ahmad. “Communal Feast Slametan  : Belief System, Ritual, and the Ideal of Javanese Society.” Hayula 1 (2017)  : pp. 99–113. Hasto, Rosariyanto Floribertus (ed.). Bercermin pada Wajah-wajah Keuskupan Gereja Katolik Indonesia, Yogyakarta  : Kanisius, 2001. Hill, Denise. “The practice and social evolution of the Javanese Gamelan  : Evolution and continuity.” Contemporary Theatre Review, 11 (2001)  : pp. 19–27. Irwan, Abdullah. Simbol, Makna dan Pandangan Hidup Jawa  : Analisis Gunungan Pada Upacara Garebeg. Yogyakarta  : Balai Kajian Sejarah dan Nilai Tradisional, 2002. John Paul II. Ecclesia in Asia. Post-synodal apostolic exhortation. 6 November 1999. Vatican. va. John Paul II. Tertio Millennio Adveniente. Apostolic letter. Accessed 04 August 2020. Vatican va. Koentjaraningrat, Raden Mas. Javanese Culture. Singapore  : Oxford University Press, 1985. Kroeger, James H. “The Faith-Culture Dialogue in Asia  : Ten FABC Insights on Inculturation.” East Asian Pastoral Review 45, no. 3 (2008)  : pp. 78–93. Kurnianto, Yonas Arya. “Makna Simbolis Dekorasi di Gereja Ganjuran Kabupaten Bantul Daerah Istimewa Yogyakarta.” Jurnal Pendidikan Seni Rupa 4 (2016). Lamoureux, Florence. Indonesia  : a global studies handbook. California  : ABC-CLIO, Inc. 2003. Lombard. Denny. Nusa Jawa  : Silang Budaya. Kajian Sejarah Terpadu. Bagian III  : Warisan Kerajaan-Kerajaan Konsentris. Jakarta  : Gramedia, 2000. Moedjanto, G. Konsep Kekuasaan Jawa. Yogyakarta  : Kanisius, 1987. Mulder, Niels. Kebatinan dan Hidup sehari-hari orang Jawa. Keberlangsungan dan perubahaan kulturil. Jakarta  : Gramedia, 1983. Mulder, Niels. Mysticism in Jawa. Amsterdam  : The Pepin Press, 1998. Muskens, Sejarah Gereja Katolik Indonesia, 3b. Ende  : Arnoldus, 1974, pp. 855–860  ; Nurhayati, Endang, Mulyana, Venny Indria Ekowati and Avi Meilawati. “Inventarisasi Makanan Tradisional Jawa Unsur Sesaji di Pasar-Pasar Traditional Kabupaten Bantul.” ­Jurnal Penelitian Humaniora 19 (2016)  : pp. 124–140. Pamberton, John. “Jawa”. On the Subject of Jawa. Yogyakarta  : Mata Bangsa, 2003. Pasandaran, Effendi. “Reformasi Irigasi dalam Pengelolaan Terpadu Sumberdaya air.” Analisis Kebijakan Pertanian 3 (2005)  : pp. 217–235. Peelman, Achiel. L’inculturation. L’Eglise et les cultures. Paris  : Desclée, 1988. Phan, Peter C. The Asian Synod. Texts and Commentaries. New York  : Obis, 1999. Purnomo, Aloys Budi. Menelusuri “Sisi Lain”. Sebuah “Kebun Anggur Tuhan” Keuskupan Agung Semarang. Semarang  : Inspirasi, 2012. Raslan, Karim. “Gereja Ganjuran, Bentuk Indah Akulturasi Jawa, Hindu-Buddha, dan Eropa.” https://regional.kompas.com/read/2017/11/23/22154321/gereja-ganjuran-bentuk-indah-­ akulturasi-jawa-hindu-buddha-dan-eropa  ?page=all Sadilah, Emiliana. “Makna Simbolik Tradisi Prosesi di Gereja Ganjuran.” Jantra 2 (2007)  : pp. 167–176. Santoso, Adi. Architectural Inculturation and Transformation  : a Case Study on Three Catholic Churches in Jawa. Singapore  : National University, 2010, pp. 18–19.

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Sartono, Kartodirdjo, Marwati Djoened Poesponegoro, Nugroho Notosusanto. Sejarah Nasional Indonesia II. Jakarta  : Balai Pustaka, 1977. Schriter, Robert J. Constructing Local Theologies. Maryknoll  : Orbis, 1985. Soedjatmoko cs. (ed.). Historiografi Indonesia. Sebuah Pengantar. Jakarta  : Gramedia, 1995. Special Assembly for Asia of the Synod of Bishops, Relatio ante disceptationem  : L’Osservatore Romano (22 April 1998), p. 5. Steenbrink, Karel. Catholics in Indonesia, 1808–1942  : A Documented History. Vol. 2, The Spectacular Growth Of A Self-Confident Minority, 1903–1942. Leiden  : Brill, 2007. Subagya, Rahmat. Kepercayaan – Kebatinan, Kerohanian, Kejiwaan – dan Agama. ­Yogyakarta  : Kanisius, 1976. Sugiyana, Fransiskus Xaverius. Devosi kepada Hati Kudus Yesus. Makna dan Peranannya dalam Kehidupan social. Yogyakarta  : FTW, 2003. Suharyo, I. “Refleksi Perjalanan dan Arah Ke Depan Keuskupan Agung Semarang.” Bercermin pada Wajah-wajah Keuskupan Gereja Katolik. Ed. Fl. Hasto Rosariyanto. Yogyakarta  : Kanisius, 2001, pp. 286–288. Sumardiyo Hadi, Yohanes. Seni dalam Ritual Agama. Yogyakarta  : Pustaka Pelajar, 2006. Supratikno Rahardjo. Peradaban Jawa. Dari Mataram Kuno sampai Majapahit akhir. Depok  : Komunitas Bambu, 2011. Suryanugraha, C.H. “Candi Ganjuran  : Seni Liturgis Budaya Jawa.” Liturgi Autentik dan Relevan. Ed. B. Boli Ujan and G. Kirchberger. Maumere  : Ledalero, 2006, p. 123. Suseno, Frans Magnis. Etika Jawa. Sebuah Analisis Filsafi tentang Kebijaksanaan Hidup Jawa. Jakarta  : Gramedia, 1988. Suwardi Endraswara. Agama Jawa. Ajaran, Amalan dan Asal-usul Kejawen. Yogyakarta  : Narasi, 2015. Suwedi, CS (ed.). Ensiklopedi Islam Nusantara. Jakarta  : Direktorat Pendidikan Tinggi Keagamaan Islam, 2018. Suwito, NS. “Slametan dalam kosmologi Jawa  : Proses Akulturasi Islam dengan Budaya Jawa.” Ibda 5 (2007)  : pp. 90–105. Sya’ban, A. Ginanjar. “Sedekah bumi.” Ensiklopedi Islam Nusantara. Ed. CS Suwedi. Jakarta  : Direktorat Pendidikan Tinggi Keagamaan Islam, 2018, pp. 462–464. Tartono, Stefanus S. Barnabas Sarikrama. Orang Indonesia Pertama Penerima Bintang Kepausan. Muntilan  : Musium Misi Muntilan, 2005. Triyoga, Lukas Sasongko. Manusia Jawa dan Gunung Merapi. Persepsi dan sistem Kepercayannya. Yogyakarta  : Gajahmada Press, 1991, pp. 45–51. van den Boogert, Jochem. “The role of slametan in the discourse on Javanese Islam.” Indonesia and the Malay World 45 (2017)  : pp. 352–372. Wahjusaputri, Sintha. “Religion Conflicts in Indonesia Problems and Solutions.” Sociology Study 5 (2015)  : pp. 931‐936. Woodward, Mark R. “The ‘Slametan’  : Textual Knowledge and Ritual Performance in Central Javanese Islam.” History of Religions 28 (1988)  : pp. 54–89. Woodward, Mark. Java, Indonesia and Islam, Dordrecht  : Springer, 2011. Yun-Ka Tan, Jonathan. “Towards Asian Liturgical Inculturation.” FABC Papers no. 89 (1999).

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Images Candi of Ganjuran (fig. 1). Ganjuran Perwitasari Water, https://mudikaganjuran.files.wordpress.com/2007/05/ganjuran5.jpg (fig. 3). The statue of Jesus Christ of Ganjuran, published in  : Kurnianto, Yonas Arya. Makna simbolis dekorasi di komplek gereja ganjuran kabupaten bantul daerah istimewa Yogyakarta. Program studi pendidikan seni rupa, Yogyakarta 2016, p. 81, https://docplayer.info/57111 662-Makna-simbolis-dekorasi-di-komplek-gereja-ganjuran-kabupaten-bantul-daerah-­ istimewa-yogyakarta.html (fig. 2). The Gunungans – the offerings (fig. 5). The offerings during the great procession (fig. 4).

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The Power of the Metaphor Iconographic Devotion in Pupils’ Daily Lives Devotion to objects and religious symbols can be found not only in traditional customs and famous cults of past societies but also in the daily lives of modern multi-cultural classrooms. Individual devotion to objects may range from small figures working as lucky charms to earrings, necklaces, and tattoos. The cult of the Sacred Heart – which emerged in 17th-century France – may serve as an impressive historical example of the politization of religious devotion. From the outset of the French Revolution until the end of the 19th century in particular, the cult incorporated a political dimension1  : the image of the Sacred Heart was regarded as an identifying sign of counter-revolutionary movements pursuing objectives like restoring the authority of the Church and consecrating France to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Among believers, bearing the image of the Sacred Heart on one’s body was considered a protection against “evils” caused by the French Revolution. Ironically, among the Republican opponents, the image of the Sacred Heart rather served as a striking proof of counter-revolutionary engagement and was frequently used to convict its producers and distributers in trials. As the historical example of the Sacred Heart shows, iconographic devotion may often be accompanied by benefits and drawbacks. This can be extended to modern and secular forms of devotion as well  : what is regarded as a talisman by a certain in-group may be despised by another group and lead to discrimination. In order to raise awareness and tolerance for devotional practises in the classroom, questions like, “Why do people show that they belong to a certain faith/party/group  ?” and, “What do the objects you wear say about you  ?” may be discussed. In Switzerland, particularly with regard to faith, such questions can easily be linked to competences outlined in the harmonised curriculum. The so-called curri­ culum 21 – a relatively new, comprehensive collection of competences2 for the Swiss school system – incorporated the area of religion in the subject “Life skills”. Among others, there is a competence related to the influence of religion on culture and soci1 See Jonas, France and the cult of the Sacred Heart. 2 The term “competence”, in the educational sense, is meant as the ability to know, intend, and do something effectively. See Weinert, Leistungsmessungen in Schulen, p. 27 et seq.

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ety  : “Pupils can recognize religious motives in their daily lives and in cultural works. They can assess how religions are presented in the media.”3 The question of the effects of religion on culture and society can thus be related to the field of cultural memory, appearing both as iconographic and ritual memory. In what follows, appropriate examples of the two forms will be outlined. The aim is to bring them into the classroom in a manner which is likely to be beneficial for the understanding and learning success of each member of a multi-cultural class.

Learning Success and Intercultural Sensitivity In terms of learning success, it is vital to relate the contents of one’s teaching to the learners’ daily life. Relying on their professional experience, the authors of this article will focus on pupils in Secondary I – meaning an average age of between 12 and 16 years. According to the early-20th century psychologist Lev Vygotsky and his theory of social constructivism, learning only takes place in the so-called zone of proximate development4, i.e. the link between previous knowledge and the new content of a lesson. Therefore, the question of interest must be, where pupils come across religion and religious items. Nowadays, they may coincidentally find religious items in shops, exhibited on market stands or while surfing online market places. However, religious items may well be found in the classroom and lead to disputes and, sometimes, intolerance. Just as in other European countries, issues regarding religious clothing and the placement of religious symbols inside the classroom have been, and still are, fiercely debated in Switzerland. The authors’ approach is meant to raise awareness of religious diversity and community-oriented iconographic devotion between members of a school or class and, more generally, of society. For this purpose, Birgit Meyer’s and Dick Houtman’s concept of ‘things’5 – emphasizing the interplay between object and beholder –, and their pragmatic approach to religion  – raising questions like, “How does a religion materialize  ?” and, “Which things do religions involve  ?” – are likely to be beneficial. Furthermore, in order to achieve intercultural sensitivity, the Development model by the American sociologist Milton J. Bennett can be employed.6 The model shifts from 3 Bildungs- und Kulturdepartement des Kantons Luzern, Lehrplan für die Volksschule des Kantons Luzern. Gesamtausgabe, p. 342. 4 See Semyonovic Vygotsky, Denken und Sprechen. 5 Houtman, Things  : Religion and the question of materiality, p. 4 et seq. 6 Bennett and Bennett, “Developing intercultural sensitivity”. See  : https://www.idrinstitute.org/dmis/, accessed 25 May 2020.

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ethnocentric stages  – ways of avoiding cultural difference  – to ethnorelative stages  – which can be seen as ways of seeking cultural difference. Even if the final stages of Adaptation and Integration may not seem to be fully achievable in the classroom, the model can still sketch out a path to a more tolerant process of dealing with diversity in general. Besides permitting pupils to analyse examples of contemporary cultures, the dimension of memory can also give insights into how past societies dealt with iconographic devotion. The politicisation of religion offers a first field of implementation  : the developing nations of 19th-century Europe – with their frequent clashes between the patriotism of the Republican movements and the religious piety of a more conservative, clerical and lay elite – can not only be an interesting matter to study, but can also show what a powerful tool iconography can be when constructing the memory of a certain in-group, thereby clearly distinguishing it from other groups. A second field of implementation, considered pertinent by the authors, lies in the way in which instances of cultural (resp. religious) memory have been and are transferred and transformed into new forms of popular devotion. This mechanism will be later presented through an analysis of contemporary devotional practices related to football.

Historical Example  : the Cult of the Sacred Heart in France One specific historical example worth examining is the cult of the Sacred Heart in 18th and 19th-century France. Although it started as a religious movement inside the Catholic Church, the cult was heavily politicised during the French revolution. In 1793, an insurrection following mass conscriptions in western France led to a fierce response by the Republican government. The confrontation, later known as the War in the Vendée, created two distinct military groups, each with its own identifying symbol  : the Tricolour for the Republican troops, the banner of the Sacred Heart for the counter-revolutionaries.7 However, the function of banners and uniforms was not simply to allow one to recognize one’s own group members, but also included a spiritual dimension  : while for Vendéen insurgents bearing the image of the Sacred Heart on one’s body (in the form of cloth and paper badges) was considered a protection, it also served as a welcome proof of counter-revolutionary engagement for the Republican opponents who frequently used the image of the Sacred Heart in their trials, which eventually brought convictions and death penalties to its bearers, producers, and distributers.8 7 See Jonas, France and the cult of the Sacred Heart. 8 Ibid.

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Fig. 1  : Tricolour flag with the symbol of the Sacred Heart. Drapeau “Cœur sacré de Jesus, espoir et salut de la France”. Europeana 1914–1918 project, public domain. Fig. 2  : Insignia of the Royalist insurgents during the War in the Vendée (1793), public domain.

In the classroom, pictures of the Sacred Heart tricolour and badge can exemplify how the iconographic memory of a society is able to serve both spiritual and political purposes, and how it may well be accompanied by drastic consequences for individuals. After this example, one can discuss with pupils from various backgrounds which advantages they may reap and which challenges they may face if they belong to a certain faith, party, or group. They will likely strongly identify with other group members, but they might also have to endure a lack of understanding or even intolerance when showing their affiliation to an out-group. Moreover, the example of the Sacred Heart shows that what is considered desirable religious devotion by some might be regarded as mere idolatry by others. Another revealing aspect in the history of the devotion to the Sacred Heart is the general reception it received inside the Catholic Church. David Morgan, professor of religious studies at Duke University, has shown how controversially and fiercely the question of the worship of the Sacred Heart was debated – especially among Catholics.9 Crucial questions seem to have been whether the second commandment is affected by worshipping a single organ or if the heart is rather a symbol, which would mean that the devotion of it is just another manner of venerating Jesus. The dispute indicates that iconographic devotion is sometimes not only the subject of criticism from other groups, but also a critical issue that can endanger the social cohesion of a group. To employ another example, there are divergent conceptions of the full-body 9 Morgan, “Rhetoric of the Heart”, p. 90 et seq.

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veil in the Islamic world  : whereas a few countries require women to wear a nikab or burka, many others do not, or even forbid women to use such stark forms of veiling.10

Religion in Post-Secular Societies Contemporary issues to be discussed in the classroom are day-to-day experiences concerning religious items like crucifixes, or religious clothing such as hijabs. Milton J. Bennet’s Development model11 can be employed to classify teachers’ various possible ways to react to these issues. If teachers take an ethnocentric view, they may consider Christian items part of their cultural heritage and therefore superior. If they have a minimalization approach, they may ban every religious item from the classroom. However, when moving to an ethnorelative stage, they may permit them all. Another question is whether individual devotion to lucky charms and tattoos can already be considered equal to religious devotion and whether, as a result, one can request the same tolerance, or if it is still somehow possible to prohibit unwanted secular clothing. Can teachers in a secular school system argue that religious types of clothing (such as hijabs) are allowed, while others (such as hats or caps) are not  ? This question clears the path for the discussion on modern spirituality. According to the famous sociologist Max Weber, the modern age is generally associated with processes of secularisation and disenchantment.12 Yet recent research does not suggest that people nowadays are less spiritual, even if traditional religions are losing ground against more modern forms of spirituality. Just like religions, these forms of spirituality also rely on material manifestations of their faith. Birgit Meyer, professor of religious studies at the University of Utrecht, draws an important conclusion  : “The more important point is that the idea of an immaterial religion is a fiction  ; even a semiotic ideology that denounces religious things and pictures cannot do without material forms.”13 Even in secularized societies, religious consciousness has not disappeared. As Max Weber claims, the process of secularization in society is clearly related to the process of modernization – at least in Europe.14 These processes have brought social changes 10 See “A Brief History of the Veil in Islam”, Facing History and Ourselves, accessed 21 June 2020, https:// www.facinghistory.org/civic-dilemmas/brief-history-veil-islam. 11 See Bennett and Bennett, “Developing intercultural sensitivity”. See  : https://www.idrinstitute.org/dmis/, accessed 25 May 2020. 12 Weber, Lassman, Velody and Martins, Max Weber’s “Science as a vocation”. 13 Meyer, “There is a spirit in that image”, p. 319. 14 Weber, Lassman, Velody and Martins, Max Weber’s “Science as a vocation”.

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and transformations as well as being accompanied by a decline in religiosity. Nevertheless, some argue, especially in the field of sociology of religion, that a ‘de-secularization’ of modern societies is taking place.15 According to Jürgen Habermas, religion has anything but disappeared from society. In his 2001 German Book Trade Peace Prize speech on the subject of faith and knowledge, he presented his post-secularization thesis, according to which mankind is living in a post-secular time.16 Post-secular societies are those that adapt to the continuity of religious communities in their secularized world. The idea of secularization, i.e. that religion is disappearing through modernization, is losing more and more ground as religion gains worldwide public significance.17 Habermas argues that in the age of globalization and digitization, secularized societies in Europe have to confront religious movements (fundamentalism, for instance), and they encounter these movements within their own society as well as worldwide. Jürgen Habermas speaks of the vitality of the world’s religions – and of a cultural force that has maintained its power throughout the centuries.18 In this sense, modern societies remain sensitive to religious content, and thus retain a religious consciousness.19 However, it is necessary to translate religion in such a manner that its contents are understood by a post-secular society – and especially by young people. So where can traces of religiosity be found in the secular world, outside the church and pastoral efforts  ? How can a language for these traces be found such that post-secular societies and especially young adults can understand it  ?

Football as a Significant Devotional Object of Theological and Historical Analysis One of the languages undeniably understood today by the younger generations is the language of football. Is the connection between religiosity and football not too much of a constructed or simplified motif  ? Or are there real similarities between the two  ? Well-founded references and evidence can be found in the work of numerous religious scientists and sociologists. For example, the scholar of religion Werner ­Veith argues that football uses a vocabulary and a terminology which originate in 15 Berger, “The desecularization of the world. A global overview”, pp. 1–18. 16 Habermas, Glauben und Wissen. 17 See Graf, Die Wiederkehr der Götter  ; Pollack, “Religion und Moderne”, 73–103  ; Altermatt, “Postreli­ giöses oder postsäkulares Zeitalter  ?”, pp. 79–91  ; Kallscheuer and Brague, Das Europa der Religionen. 18 Habermas, Aufsätze und Repliken. 19 Kapperer, Leidenschaft und Fussball.

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religion.20 People then naturally use terms such as “football god”, “miracle”, “sacred pitch”, “redeeming goal” or even “hand of god”. However, it is not only about the vocabulary itself, but also about how it is used in football. The summoning of a “football god” during the game is ordinary  ; nobody questions the use of the term. The employment of such vocabulary is seen as a necessary part of their mental register, even for intellectual and enlightened football fans. Veit recognises in football an integrative, meaning-building, and identifying dimension, in the same way that religion involves these dimensions.21 For the development of the meaning-building dimension, sport relies on symbols and rituals that have been shaped by religion. With its rich use of emblems and its highly ritualized action, a feeling of togetherness is conveyed. In a consequent step, one can focus on rituals as social practices  : Emile Durkheim (1912) described forms of collective rituals in his theory of religion which are related to a state of collective excitement, mostly achieved through singing and dancing together.22 He referred for example to the totemism of Central Australian and North American tribes, which he regarded as the oldest and at the same time simplest social form of religion, and his assumption was that all later religious phenomena could be inferred from these practices. He located these community rituals in their function of binding the individual to the collective, and therefore described them as mechanisms of memory. Through common rites, religious communities and their individual members confirm and assert themselves. Rituals can be instruments of social integration, of construction of an ‘us’ and of shared values. There are various forms of religious rituals that include collective behaviour. By excluding specifically religious aspects, one can discover some similarities between religious rituals and football rituals. In what follows, a few of the common aspects of the two types of ritual are mentioned.23 Moral communities. In both religious celebrations and football matches, the members of a specific community come together and share a certain excitement. This excitement is expressed through words, songs, and gestures that all are codified, and that thus constitute the content of a collective memory that can be accessed. They adapt their own rhythm to the collective rhythm, and experience a collective emotional state. As mentioned above, individuals achieve social integration and thus shared values. 20 Veith, “Rituale im Fussball”. 21 Ibid. 22 As cited in Müller, Fussball als Paradoxon der Moderne, p. 167. 23 Sterchele, “The Limits of Inter-religious Dialogue and the Form of Football”, pp. 213–215.

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Separate time. Both the religious community and the football community have their own unique calendar. The rituals of each community (celebrations and matches) are repeated in a definite, cyclical rhythm that interrupts the rhythm of ordinary life. Separate space. Religious rituals and football rituals take place in a separate space which, borrowing from Michel Foucault, might be termed ‘heterotopia’24. These places differ from places of public life as they have different and specific rules, concerning for instance one’s behaviour or dress code.25 Organization and rules. Like the Catholic Church, football has its own laws and strict hierarchies, from FIFA to local clubs. The same rules apply everywhere and the International Committee, the highest instance in the hierarchy, governs everything.

The Relation between Religion and Football There are religious references in the history of football, too. The combination of rituals related to religion and football dates back to the Renaissance, when football, in the modern sense, did not yet exist. In Italy, a game called calcio, with quasi-religious traits, was created around that time, and it later gave rise to football as it is known today. However, the game had quite different rules and included different rituals. In France and England, soule was played after the service or on religious holidays  : the priest blessed the players and the ball, which was thrown from the church tower.26 In medieval England and France, football was one of the Shrove Tuesday customs, and so it was a part of religious festive traditions. Folk football was played by the common people there, while the nobility and the authorities preferred to hunt, ride horses or do military exercises. In contrast, the Italian calcio, which was played in Florence during the Renaissance, was reserved to the nobility.27 Even if the game has changed a lot since then, the religious references have massively influenced the ritual character of the game, and still do so today. Moreover, in its early days, theologians played an important role in the development of football.28 In England, for example, during the age of industrialization, Thomas Arnold – Principal of a Rugby School and member of the Anglican Church – tried to develop his school into a school for Christian gentlemen. The school was intended to herald a 24 Foucault, “Des espaces autres”, pp. 752–762. 25 For more on the relationship between football and its “holy” space, see Neuhold and Neuhold, “Fussball und Raum”, pp. 79–98. 26 Altwegg, Fussball, pp. 92–108. 27 Müller, Fussball als Paradoxon der Moderne. 28 Ludwig, “Football, culture and religion”, pp. 201–222.

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new era of education, and Arnold wanted to steer the playfulness of the students in the right direction. Up to that time, playing football had mainly been regarded as a sign of rebellion and was only played during leisure time. Arnold began to integrate football into the official teaching programme and thus tried to win back control over the subversive game. He saw football as an opportunity to promote male virtues such as discipline, selflessness, and the notion of fair play.29 A similar development took place in a German school  : Dr. Conrad Koch, director of a high school in Braunschweig and a studied theologian, tried around 1870 to bring sports and team-building activities into the classroom. He also chose football as a teaching subject. With the introduction of football, Koch wanted to bring not only physical education lessons but also ethical values such as discipline and team spirit into the classroom. However, he faced strong resistance to this new form of education. Koch and his colleagues were attacked as “game-apostles”, since football was not considered a sporting activity by the traditional gymnastic circles.30 Football triggers passion – whether positive or negative – and usually with enormous intensity. Today, it seems that a large part of the world is fond of the game. Football is a universal point of reference, regardless of region, nation, or generation. For these reasons, football may be seen as a form of language and mediation understood by many. In addition to the examples mentioned above, there is a further, crucial example that shows a clear connection to the cult of the Sacred Heart.

The Personality Cult of the “Iglesia Maradoniana” in the Tradition of the Sacred Heart Devotion One of the most impressive examples of a personality cult is the veneration of Diego Maradona. This cult has developed so much that a separate church has been established in Argentina, the “Iglesia Maradoniana”31 – the Maradona Church. The church symbol is “D10S”, which combines the Spanish word for ‘god’ (Dios) with the number 10, Maradona’s former shirt number. The “Iglesia Maradoniana” has composed its own songs and chants based on church rituals, and they are solemnly sung by a choir, like in a church service. They celebrate two holidays  : the birth of Maradona on “Maradona Christmas”, and “Maradona Easter”, names which clearly refer to Chris29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 See “La iglesia Maradonia,” Religion i spansktalende lande, accessed 26 June 2020, http://spansk-greve. simplesite.com/414129755.

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tianity. On Maradona Easter, they celebrate the victory of the Argentina team in the 1986 World Cup, in which Argentina beat England in the quarter-finals with the famous goal scored by Diego Maradona known as the “Hand of God goal”.32 Of course, the “Iglesia Maradoniana” cannot be compared to an established religion. Yet the worship of Maradona reaches more than amazing dimensions. The rituals are unmistakably taken from the Christian veneration of saints, and there are numerous devotional objects that serve the worship of the “Santo Diego”. There seems to be no doubt about where the origin of this liturgy lies  : symbols and rituals are clearly taken from the Christian Catholic liturgy, and the image of the “Santo Diego” is unmistakably connected to the iconography of devotional objects. These images are reminiscent of some common depictions of Christ in devotional pictures – Jesus with a flaming heart and gestures of blessing. The design of the “Santo Diego” devotional picture was developed further, but it is remarkable to see Diego Maradona as “Santo Diego” represented exactly like Jesus in the Sacred Heart iconography. This symbolism has been used with regard to other well-known football players, such as Lionel Messi, who are also portrayed similarly to figures in devotional pictures.33 The devotional style combines football with classic religious elements and has spread worldwide, to Barcelona, London, Madrid and of course Naples.34 The “Santo Diego” portrait is not only printed on posters, but also appears in personal shrines, which contain a mixture of religious objects and representations of popular culture. Such shrines are of great importance to football fans  : even touching the objects seems to have a meaning, as it allows to feel the presence of the sacred.35 Sports can be based on such meaning-building dimensions, and through such rituals they can strengthen the feeling of belonging. Football, with its worldwide popularity and its ability to spark passion, can provide a link to religious education. No other sport brings so many spectators into stadiums and viewers in front of the television. It exemplifies collective emotions that also occur in religious movements. Nevertheless, football remains football, and it is not a 32 Ludwig, “Football, culture and religion”, pp. 201–222. 33 See Madu, “Leo Messi Isn’t Diego Maradona, and That’s Probably Okay,” Paste Magazine, accessed 28 June 2020, https://www.pastemagazine.com/soccer/leo-messi/when-lionel-messi-was-red-carded/. 34 See Salerni, “L’adesivo Santo Diego  : ‘Maradona proteggici’ tra recupero della memoria e napoletanità,” Identità Insorgenti, 18 March 2019, https://www.identitainsorgenti.com/identita-ladesivo-santo-diego-­ maradona-proteggici-tra-recupero-della-memoria-e-napoletanita/. 35 See “El lugar de oración para los futboleros  : así es la Iglesia Maradoniana,” FutbolRed, accessed 28 June 2020, https://www.futbolred.com/curiosidades-de-futbol/asi-es-la-iglesia-maradoniana-un-lugarpara-­los-­fieles-del-10-argentino-97469.

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religion. Although one must avoid making an objectively inadmissible connection, it remains important to find a language that young people understand  : when it comes to teaching young people, it is essential to find a topic that is relevant for them.

From Football to Religion and back into the Classroom The “Iglesia Maradoniana” may be a starting point for young people in particular, as football can be seen as a clearly beloved component of popular culture. In order to design competence-promoting lessons, different types of tasks are important. A learning process can be initiated, for example, if school lessons are based on existing ideas and previous experience. It is also essential that the subject matter is related to the learner’s world and thus has a certain topicality, so that the pupils are curious about a planned discussion.36 In religious education, the question of appropriate pupil orientation arises. Most pupils are hardly interested in theology and church in the traditional sense, which is why it is essential to show in what manner religion influences modern society. How can one assist pupils in their development of the ability to reflect on religious thought and action, and to understand the meaning of historical references  ?37 Since nowadays, as mentioned above, young Western people often have only an abstract idea of religion, and since neither religion nor faith are fixed components in their life, it may seem difficult to demonstrate that religious topics are also relevant to life and culture. A playful and unusual introduction to religious education is therefore all the more important. Pupils will be particularly surprised and curious when they are confronted with a topic that seems to clash at first glance, such as the picture of the “Santo Diego”.38 The teacher may open a discussion in the classroom, asking simple questions like “Who is shown in the picture  ?”, “Which objects are there  ?”, “What is unusual about the picture  ?”. Gradually, pupils will recognize the spiritual connotations of the “football saint” and relate them to their own notions of religion. Next, the teacher can focus on the iconographic tradition of the picture and display the “Santo Diego” next to a classical picture of Jesus touching his Sacred Heart. While comparing the two pictures, pupils should finally recognize to what degree religion still influences today’s popular culture, and they should see the necessity of dealing with religious matters in the first place. 36 See Luthiger, Wilhelm, Wespi and Wildhirt, Kompetenzförderung mit Aufgabensets, pp. 43–44. 37 See Kuhlemann, “Religionsgechichte”, pp. 217–218. 38 See Luthiger, Wilhelm, Wespi and Wildhirt, Kompetenzförderung mit Aufgabensets, pp. 43–44.

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Therefore, via popular images like the “Santo Diego”, which have a cultural meaning and relevance for young people, one can create access to their world and foster an understanding of religious topics and questions. Many connections can be found in football, for instance  : rituals, tattoos with religious motifs, footballers who cross themselves, fans who pray, and many other practices. By highlighting these elements, students can reflect on the value of religion and on their own awareness of it. This is the didactic power of the metaphor. References Altermatt, Urs. “Postreligiöses oder postsäkulares Zeitalter  ?” Mehrdeutigkeit  : Die Ambivalenz von Gedächtnis und Erinnerung. Ed. Moritz Csáky. Wien  : Passagen, 2003, pp. 79–91. Altwegg, Jürg. “Fussball  : Das Ritual der Globalisierung.” Es glaubt  : Suche nach Spiritualität und Religion. Ed. Lukas Niederberger. Baden  : Lars Müller, 2009, pp. 92–108. Bennett, Janet M. and Milton. J. Bennett. “Developing intercultural sensitivity  : An integrative approach to global and domestic diversity.” Handbook of Intercultural Training. Ed. Dan Landis, Janet M. Bennett and Milton J. Bennett. Thousand Oaks, California  : Sage, 2004, pp. 147–165. Berger, Peter. “The desecularization of the world. A global overview.” The desecularization of the world. Ed. Peter Berger. Washington, D.C.: Ethics and Public Policy Center, 1999, pp. 1–18. Bildungs- und Kulturdepartement des Kantons Luzern. Lehrplan für die Volksschule des Kantons Luzern. Gesamtausgabe. 11 February 2020. https://lu.lehrplan.ch/container/LU_DE_ Gesamtausgabe.pdf Durkheim, Emile. Die elementaren Formen des religiösen Lebens. 1912. Frankfurt am Main  : Suhrkamp, 1994. Foucault, Michael. “Des espaces autres, 1967/1984.” Dits et écrits. Vol. 4. Paris  : 1994, pp. 752– 762. Graf, Friedrich Wilhelm. Die Wiederkehr der Götter  : Religion in der modernen Kultur. Bonn  : Verlag C.H. Beck, 2nd ed. 2004. Habermas, Jürgen. Glauben und Wissen. Friedenspreis des Deutschen Buchhandels. Frankfurt am Main  : Suhrkamp, 2001. Habermas, Jürgen. Aufsätze und Repliken. Nachmetaphysisches Denken. Vol.  2. Berlin  : Suhrkamp, 2012. Houtman, Dick. Things  : Religion and the question of materiality (The future of the religious past). New York  : Fordham University Press, 2012. Jonas, Raymond. France and the cult of the Sacred Heart  : An epic tale for modern times. Studies on the history of society and culture. Vol. 39. Berkeley  : University of California Press, 2000. Kallscheuer, Otto and Rémi Brague. Das Europa der Religionen  : Ein Kontinent zwischen Säkularisierung und Fundamentalismus. Frankfurt am Main  : Fischer, 1996.

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Kapperer, Thorsten. Leidenschaft und Fussball  : Ein pastoral-theologisches Lernfeld. Würzburg  : Echter Verlag, 2017. Kuhlemann, Frank-Michael. “Religionsgeschichte im Geschichtsunterricht. Legitimation, Aufgaben, Themenstellungen.” Bildung in der postsäkularen Gesellschaft. Ed. Stefan Müller and Wolfang Sanders. Weinheim  : Beltz, 2018, pp. 211–228. Ludwig, Frieder. “Football, culture and religion  : Varieties of interaction.” Studies in World Christianity, 21/3 (2015)  : pp. 201–222. Luthiger, Herbert, Markus Wilhelm, Claudia Wespi and Susanne Wildhirt. K ­ ompe­tenz­­­för­derung mit Aufgabensets  : Theorie – Konzept – Praxis. Bern  : hep, 2018. Meyer, Birgit. “There is a spirit in that image. Mass-Produced Jesus pictures and protestant-­ pentecostal animation in Ghana.” Things  : Religion and the question of materiality. Ed. Dick Houtman. New York  : Fordham University Press, 2012, pp. 296–320. Morgan, David. “Rhetoric of the heart. Figuring the body in devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus.” Things  : Religion and the question of materiality. Ed. Dick Houtman. New York  : Fordham University Press, 2012, pp. 90–111. Müller, Marion. Fussball als Paradoxon der Moderne  : Zur Bedeutung ethnischer, nationaler und geschlechtlicher Differenzen im Profifussball. Wiesbaden  : VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 2009. Neuhold, David and Leopold Neuhold. “Fussball und Raum – ‘Vergöttlichung’ unter geraden Linien und schrägen Bedingungen.” Orte und Räume des Religiösen im 19.–21. Jahrhundert. Ed. Franziska Metzger and Elke Pahud de Mortagnes. Paderborn  : Ferdinand Schö­ ningh, 2016, pp. 79–98. Pollack, Detlef. “Religion und Moderne  : Zur Gegenwart der Säkularisierung in Europa.” Religion und Gesellschaft  : Europa im 20. Jahrhundert. Ed. Friederich Wilhelm Graf. Köln  : Böhlau, 2007, pp. 73–103. Sterchele, David. “The Limits of Inter-religious Dialogue and the Form of Football Rituals  : The Case of Bosnia-Herzegovina.” Social Compass 54/2 (2007)  : pp. 211–224. Veith, Werner. “Rituale im Fussball  : Sinnstiftung und Kontingenzbewältigung in modernen Gesellschaften.” Münchner Theologische Zeitschrift 58 (2007)  : pp. 344–352. Vygotsky, Lev Semyonovic. Denken und Sprechen. Weinheim und Basel  : Beltz, 2002. Weber, Max, Peter Lassman, Irving Velody and Herminio Martins. Max Weber’s “Science as a vocation”. London  : Unwin Hyman, 1989. Weinert, Franz Emanuel. Leistungsmessungen in Schulen. Weinheim  : Beltz, 2001.

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“La iglesia Maradonia.” Religion i spansktalende lande. Accessed 26 June 2020. http://spanskgreve.simplesite.com/414129755. Madu, Zito. “Leo Messi Isn’t Diego Maradona, and That’s Probably Okay.” Paste Magazine. Accessed 28 June 2020. https://www.pastemagazine.com/soccer/leo-messi/when-lionelmessi-was-red-carded/. Salerni, Flavia. “L’adesivo Santo Diego  : ‘Maradona proteggici’ tra recupero della memoria e napoletanità.” Identità Insorgenti, 18 March 2019. https://www.identitainsorgenti.com/ identita-ladesivo-santo-diego-maradona-proteggici-tra-recupero-della-memoria-e-na poletanita/. “War in the Vendée.” Wikipedia. Accessed 14 June 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_ in_the_Vend%C3%A9e.

Images Insignia of the Royalist insurgents during the War in the Vendée (1793). Retrieved from  : https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File   : Coeur-chouan.jpeg#/media/File   : Coeurchouan.jpeg (14.06.2020) (fig. 2). Tricolour flag with the symbol of the Sacred Heart. Drapeau “Cœur sacré de Jesus, espoir et salut de la France”. Europeana 1914–1918 project/Public domain. Retrieved from  : https:// commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File  :Drapeau_%22C%C5%93ur_sacr%C3%A9_de_Jesus,_ espoir_et_salut_de_la_France%22.jpg (28.06.2020) (fig. 1).

3 MEMORY, IMAGINATION, EXPERIENCE  : THEOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS

Nicolas Steeves SJ

The Sacred Heart  : A Fundamental Stimulus for the Theological Imagination Readers of a series on ‘spaces of memory’ will kindly forgive me, I hope, for launching a reflection on the Sacred Heart as a fundamental theological stimulus with a personal trip down memory lane. In May 1981, when I received my First Holy Communion, my paternal grandfather offered me a small children’s missal. As a recent convert to Catholicism, he was more likely swayed by the sales force in the bookshop than by theological science. His gift fascinated me, regardless, because it seemed a grownup’s book  : small and leather-bound in shiny black and gold. As I leaved through it repeatedly in the weeks after my First Communion, I saw that the last part of the Missal tackled “Popular Catholic Devotions,” including “Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and the Immaculate Heart of Mary.” Such things had not been brought up at home or at my parish catechism classes, so their oddity caught my fancy. The section ended with two questions, and their answers  : “What is devotion to the Sacred Heart  ?” and “What is the Apostleship of Prayer  ?”1 Without ever guessing that, decades later, his eldest grandson would become a Jesuit priest with a soft spot for the Sacred Heart and a passion for the relation between theology and the imagination, Grandpa Steeves had handed him a children’s missal sponsored by the Apostleship of Prayer and the Jesuits, with a special focus on that devotion. Every little bit helps. Memory, faith, and the imagination were hooked.

An Imageless Devotion  ? Memory Triggers Theology With 40 years’ hindsight, this missal prompts two theological insights. (1) It lists the Sacred Heart as a ‘devotion,’ i.e. as a prayerful Catholic practice separate from the sacred liturgy. The book does offer some child-friendly theology about the devotion’s “purpose”  : “to help us accept the love of Christ and to return our own love.”2 Nonetheless, the missal’s bent is essentially devotional, emotional and prac1 Southard, Trinity Missal, p. 108. 2 Ibid., p. 151.

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tical. Published in a decade where popular devotions were on the wane in Northern Hemisphere Catholicism, the missal’s publishers were probably reluctant to venture much further. (2) Strangely, this missal shows not a single image of the Sacred Heart, whether symbolic or realistic. By contrast, it figures many didactical photos of a priest saying the various parts of Mass and others of mosaics in Lourdes to help meditate the mysteries of the Rosary  – but none of the Heart of Jesus. Not only should such aniconism strike us as odd for any children’s book, it also clearly breaks with centuries of image-based devotion to the Sacred Heart. It may well be that the missal’s editors simply found no such image suited to kids in the Year of Our Lord 1976, judging traditional images too saccharine and contemporary ones too scary. Nonetheless, one would be remiss not to point out such a blatant rupture with living devotional memory and such a shortcoming in the realm of image-based, memory-focused pedagogy. Forty years later, in a different ecclesial context and amidst a global culture rife with all manner of imagery, what can a theologian say, then, about devotion to the Sacred Heart and its relation to the imagination of the Church as body and to the imaginations of the individual believers she gathers  ?

Imagery and Renewed Devotion to the Sacred Heart  : Margaret Mary Alacoque By now, this book’s readers know that medieval and modern devotion to the Heart of Jesus is, and always was, deeply grounded in representations of a wounded heart – whether symbolic or realistic. The same readers are acquainted with the story of Margaret Mary Alacoque, the Visitation nun graced with “great apparitions” of the Sacred Heart between 1673 and 1675. Let us focus for a while on the aspects of her life and message that have to do especially with imagery. Margaret Mary thus recounted that in the “Second Revelation,” dated 1674, Christ presented her with a clear image  : “his divine Heart […] on a throne of flames, more dazzling than the sun and as clear as crystal, with the adorable wound, surrounded by a crown of thorns […] with a cross on top.” Christ had also made known to her his desire that “his divine Heart […] be honored in the figure of this Heart of flesh, whose image he wanted to be exhibited and worn [on Margaret Mary’s heart … ]  ; wherever this holy image was exhibited to be honored, he would pour forth his graces and blessings.”3 From the start therefore, 3 Margaret Mary Alacoque, Letter to Fr. Croiset, November 3, 1689, in Hamon, Histoire, pp. 148–149  ; also see “Lettre CXXXIII au R.P. Croiset, 4e du Manuscrit d’Avignon,” in Monastère, Vie, 1990, pp. 477– 479, according to the manuscript (translation and italics by the author).

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Alacoque’s devotion rested on, and grew from the image of the human heart of Jesus – and not just a mental picture, but a material one too. This was not a mere fancy of hers  : she took it on good authority – on God’s authority. It took Margaret Mary eleven years, however, to make good on Christ’s promise. As the new novice mistress for her Paray-le-Monial monastery, she was finally able to carry out the plan which Jesus had entrusted to her over a decade earlier. On Friday, July 20, 1685, the feast of St. Margaret, she asked her novices, as a gift on her name day, to build an altar to the Sacred Heart. They then carefully placed on it the famed inkand-pen symbolic drawing of an open human heart, pierced with three nails, topped with flames and a cross, surrounded by a crown of thorns and the five Latin names ‘Iesus,’ ‘Maria,’ ‘Ioseph,’ ‘Anna,’ and ‘Ioachim.’4 Although their novel worship eventually brought the mistress and her novices “humiliations and mortifications” at the hands of their sisters in the convent, they soldiered on. A few weeks later, Margaret Mary claimed that Christ had made clear to her a list of promises. The following one is especially relevant to us  : “He will abundantly pour forth his blessings in every place where the image of this loveable Heart is shown to be loved and honored.”5 Once again, a material image was to be an integral part of this devotion to the Sacred Heart which Margaret Mary was effectively renewing. Her practice spread little by little to the outside world, especially thanks to other Visitation monasteries and to members of the Society of Jesus, under the aegis of Fr. Claude La Colombière, the visionary’s confessor and confidant. Now, Margaret Mary was not the “creator” of a devotion to the Heart of Jesus in the Catholic Church. The spiritual practice had arisen some centuries earlier, in the middle ages. Born in monastic environments, it became popular with both male and female religious  : Cistercians and Franciscans chiefly, but also a third order Dominican such as Catherine of Siena.6 Many of these men and women found their personal 4 See Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, “Autobiographie,” in Monastère, Vie, 1990, pp. 123–124  : “But I did not yet find a way to expand devotion to the Sacred Heart, when that was all I aspired to. And here is the first chance that His goodness gave me  : since Saint Margaret’s feast fell on a Friday that year, I asked our Novice Sisters, whom I then took care of, that all the small homages they had intended to pay me in honour of my name day be paid instead to the Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ. They did this willingly by building a small altar, on which they put a small image, drawn with a pen on paper, to which we tried to pay all the tributes that this divine Heart suggested to us. This drew both me and them many humiliations, contradictions, and mortifications, all the more so as I was accused of wanting to introduce a new devotion.” (Translation and italics by the author). 5 Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, “Lettre XXXV à la Mère de Saumaise, à Dijon (24 août 1685),” in Monastère, Vie, 1991, p. 194 (Translation and italics by the author). 6 To mention but a few  : Peter Damian, William of Saint-Thierry, Guerric of Igny, Anthony of Padua, Joseph Hermann, Clare of Assisi, Margaret of Cortone, Angela of Foligno, Albert the Great, Master

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and communal faith rekindled by apparitions or visions of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, often described in vivid images and powerful narrative. Various passages in the Old and New Testament warranted some form of worship to the divine heart. But the birth of this devotion also deeply tied in with a theological paradigm shift in the 12th century. Worship of the invisible Godhead typical of the first Christian millennium – and closely tied to (Neo)Platonism –, slowly but decisively gave way to a new love for Christ’s humanity, typical of Bernard of Clairvaux, then Francis of Assisi, and no stranger to the Aristotelian revival in the Dominican world. This visual and theological emphasis on Christ’s humanity soared with Carmelite mystics and Jesuit missionaries. Prior portrayals of the Lord’s Cross, peaceful in their Platonic idealism and evoking Easter morning, gave way to mournful, realistic Crucifixes where Good Friday’s red gashes bled wide and strong. Theology was evolving  ; so were mentalities, social and ecclesial imaginaries, and art.

Medieval Devotion to Sacred Heart Devotion to the Savior’s wounded Heart, in fact, was not to remain locked inside the high walls and delicately wrought columns of cloisters and convents, consuming ardent souls and bodies in secluded monastic cells. Among the pious people of God too, printed images of the wounded Heart of Jesus started to appear in the late middle ages. Alongside lifelike crucifixes, they quickly gained wide circulation in Europe. The cover of L’image ouverte, by French art historian Georges Didi-Huberman shows one  : a strikingly stark woodcut with gouache, ca. 1470, named Das heilige Herz.7 This highly symbolic image was probably meant for private devotion. Its simplicity still strikes our imagination today, arching over the baroque, sentimental imagery of the Sacred Heart to which we are generally more accustomed, and tapping into our post-Bauhaus, post-Art Deco sensitivity to streamlining and graphic bare necessities (not to mention recent tastes for elementary emoticons on our communication devices). This simple woodcut would have been extremely efficient for those who were steeped in the highly symbolist culture that prevailed before Ockham’s razor. Under

Eckhart, Henry Suso, Mechtilda of Magdeburg, Mechtilda of Hackeborn, Gertrude of Helfta, Bridget of Sweden, Ludolph of Saxony, Jan van Ruysbroeck, Bernardino of Siena, and Stephan Fridolin. 7 Didi-Huberman, L’image ouverte, cover. The image belongs to the Graphische Sammlung Albertina in Vienna, Austria. https://sammlungenonline.albertina.at/#/query/3e2b7c82-8656-45da-a9a5-36fad 96f73aa, consulted on 30.03.2020.

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the angle of fundamental theology, this image, discreetly but powerfully pointing to the Heart of the God-man, revealed both God and man more clearly  ; it also stirred up viewers’ faith. From the perspective of moral theology, this image doubtless also fostered the other two theological virtues – hope and love.8 The image of the wounded heart of the Savior kindled the fire of love in believers’ hearts and stirred up their zeal for a more active, practical charity. In fact, as scholastic theology soared and popular devotions developed, more and more hospices were erected for the poor, the sick, and pilgrims. In a nutshell, an image like this woodcut of the Sacred Heart impacted both knowledge and action. Its effect was epistemological and ethical. These effects we must now further explore, as theologians.

Devotion and Revelation Historians can point out that devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus, both medieval and modern, was born from private revelations in words and images. But theologians shall also note that these private revelations did not ultimately clash with the public Revelation which the Church claims was fulfilled once and for all in the words and deeds of Jesus of Nazareth, as handed down by Tradition and Scripture.9 In fact, the

8 See 1 Corinthians 13  :13  : “And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three.” (Bible quotations herein are taken from the online 1989 New Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition.) Also see 1993 Catechism of the Catholic Church, 1813  : “The theological virtues are the foundation of Christian moral activity  ; they animate it and give it its special character. They inform and give life to all the moral virtues. They are infused by God into the souls of the faithful to make them capable of acting as his children and of meriting eternal life. They are the pledge of the presence and action of the Holy Spirit in the faculties of the human being. There are three theological virtues  : faith, hope, and charity.” https://www.vatican. va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p3s1c1a7.htm, consulted on 31.03.2020. 9 Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum, 4  : “The Christian dispensation, therefore, as the new and definitive covenant, will never pass away and we now await no further new public revelation before the glorious manifestation of our Lord Jesus Christ (see 1 Timothy 6  :14 and Titus 2  :13).” http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/ vat-ii_const_19651118_dei-verbum_en.html, consulted 30.03.2020. See also Catechism of the Catholic Church, 67  : “Throughout the ages, there have been so-called ‘private’ revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church. They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by the Magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.” https://www.vatican.va/archive/ccc_css/archive/catechism/p1s1c2a1.htm, consulted 30.03.2020.

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heart is a symbol or archetype10 common to many cultures, including those from the Middle East and Mediterranean that combined in the Old and the New Testament. Through the image of the heart in particular, cultures could converge rather than clash  ; the Christ-like mission of reconciliatio oppositorum11 could be expressed and symbolized by the biological reality of a heart pumping blood through a body, imbuing “bad blood” with fresh air to make it life-giving again. One did not need to see an actual heart beat to grasp its symbolism  : collective premodern memories of war-mongering, farmyard butchery, and such, ensured that even rudimentary knowledge of biology lent the symbol of the heart great evocative power. Truth be told, however, it took a while for the Magisterium of the Catholic Church to tolerate and allow, then promote and promulgate, devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Thanks to the efforts of John Eudes, a liturgical feast of the Sacred Heart of Jesus was authorized locally for the priests of the Congregation of Jesus and Mary and the women religious of Our Lady as of November 1672.12 But it took another two centuries for the solemnity to become universal  : Pope Pius IX inserted it as an obligatory feast in 1856, on the Friday after the Octave of Corpus Christi, according to the divine demands Margaret Mary had disclosed.13 Holy Mother Church has historically been prudent, if not prudish, in enforcing liturgical demands arising outside the bounds of the early Church’s regula fidei or canon of truth.14 The distinction between pri10 Influential theologian Karl Rahner, SJ, called such archetypes Urbilder  : see Rahner, “30. Meditation,” p. 236  : the Virgin Mary is the “Urbild der Kirche.” He also called the Heart of Jesus a “true sign”  : “im echten Zeichen des Herzens Jesu” (Rahner, “Ignatianische,” p. 462). More relevantly, see his deep reflection on the heart as an Urwort (translated as ‘primordial word’ or ‘key word’)  : see Rahner, “Sinn,” pp.  556–558  : “There are evocative, synthetic, unifying primordial words in which somehow […] everything is gathered together in one and becomes ‘intimate’. […] If we humbly ask ourselves where in the Church we hear such a synthetic, primordial word in religious practice today […], then it is difficult to name another than the word HEART […] that could strike the one centre of our being at once. Could anyone name another  ? Who can say  : ‘There, listen, another word has long since called into its unifying expanse that which you have so far only overheard  ?’ This word must designate the unifying Christ himself, in whom alone God is near […]. What other words than ‘Heart of Jesus’ designate the Lord who unifies all, or realize the fullness of Him whom it again designates as unifying and intimate  ? There is none  ; no other such word has sounded but the words ‘Heart of Jesus’.” Also see Rahner, “Siehe,” pp. 488–495, where he calls the heart “a real, original symbol, a true symbol.” (translation by the author). 11 See below on Nicholas of Cusa and coincidentia oppositorum. 12 Hamon, “Cœur (Sacré),” columns 1032–1033. 13 See Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, “Autobiographie,” in Monastère, Vie et Œuvres, 1990, pp. 122–123  : “I ask you that the first Friday after the octave of the Blessed Sacrament be dedicated to a special feast to honour my Heart.” (translation by the author). 14 The expression regula fidei was coined by lawyer-theologian Tertullian in De praescriptione haeretori-

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vate revelations and public Revelation is real. Nonetheless, theologians are bound to think through not just Tradition, Scripture, and great theologians, but also everyday practices that have become enshrined in memory and history. Devotion to the Sacred Heart is paradigmatically such a reality. Let us now examine briefly how the Sacred Heart, in image, narrative, poetry, and prayer, can be a fundamental stimulus for the theological imagination. We will first step back and look at the key role that images and the imagination in general play in Catholic theology. We shall then focus on the image of the heart as it is remembered and used in Scripture. Finally, this chapter will suggest a few theological consequences of, and stimuli for, a Christian faith rooted in the image of the Sacred Heart.

Theology as Word-Craft We often think of theology as words. After all, theology is often showcased as “Godtalk,” both God talking about Himself and humans speaking about Him – in Tradition and in Scripture, in the Church’s Magisterium, in her theologians’ treatises, in her priests’ preaching, in her poets’ hymns. Even heretics are hounded for their very words – for speaking falsely of God and man. Theological libraries brim over with big books broaching all aspects of theology  : biblical, dogmatic, fundamental, moral, patristic, and spiritual, to name just a few. We take it for granted that the spoken and printed word is the best means to define divinity. After all, “in the beginning […] the Word was God.”15 Furthermore, theology took an academic bent in the middle ages which only increased in reaction to widespread rationalism. Many today thus believe that theology is nothing but a highly specialized field, rife with technical words like ‘transubstantiation,’ ‘circumincession,’ or ‘hypostatic union.’ Now, while technical words are useful, even vital to the scientific study and expression of theology, academic theologians should not forget that such words are not the primary language of faith. “God-talk” often relies on simpler words  – Urworte  – born out of everyday sensations of the world around us, out of physical and corporeal realities translated into imagery, symbol, and metaphor.16 cum (XII, 5)  : “Quaeramus ergo in nostro et a nostris et de nostro  : idque dumtaxat quod salva regula fidei potest in quaestionem devenire.” It has roots in Irenaeus of Lyons’ “rule/canon of the truth”  ; see Adversus Haereses 1.8.1  ; 1.9.4  ; 3.4.1. 15 John 1  :1. 16 See note above on Rahner. Also see Alonso Schökel, Inspired, especially ch. 4 “Inspiration and Language,” pp. 121 et seq.

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Believers have struggled forever with the issue of God-speak  : may we even talk about God  ? Don’t divine mystery and our unworthy words command silence  ? As Augustine of Hippo noted, however, Christians believe that God chose to self-reveal to us not with ineffably lofty words but with merely human words. “God speaks through a man, in a human way, because in this speaking he is looking for us.”17 The Hebrew prophets and poets built upon created life, human or otherwise, to talk about the Creator and his creation  ; Jesus’ larger-than-life parables were handed down to us in koine Greek. As Augustine points out, the reason for the humanity of God’s language is soteriological  : no Savior could guide us home safely lest he speak our language. Many centuries later, Paul Ricœur famously theorized and rejoiced in the fact that Biblical narrative and poetry essentially rests on metaphors.18 Medieval theologians, in fact, had already reflected on metaphor19 and analogy, till the Fourth Lateran Council enshrined this dogmatically  : “For between creator and creature there can be noted no similarity so great that a greater dissimilarity cannot be seen between them.”20

Metaphors in Scripture and Theology But how could mere human words worthily express the eternal divine Word  ? In the part of the Summa theologiae dedicated to prophesying (II II, QQ. 171 et seq.), Thomas Aquinas notes that God spoke through the prophets by means of their imagination, shedding divine light on mental images to reveal linguistic truth about God or about human nature and affairs. Take one of the most famous Old Testament prophecies about the heart  : “A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you  ; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.”21 Although we know this is biological nonsense (all the more so in times when open-heart surgeries and organ transplants were unimaginable  !), we instinctively know full well to what spiritual reality the prophet is referring. The metaphors 17 “Sed per hominem more hominum loquitur  ; quia et sic loquendo nos quaerit.” Augustine of Hippo, The City of God, XVII, PL 41, 537, quoted in Alonso Schökel, Inspired, p. 122. 18 See e.g. Ricœur, Rule and Ricœur, Figuring. 19 See e.g. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Q. 1, art. 9, “Whether Holy Scripture should use metaphors  ?” Response  : “It is befitting Holy Writ to put forward divine and spiritual truths by means of comparisons with material things. For God provides for everything according to the capacity of its nature. Now it is natural to man to attain to intellectual truths through sensible objects, because all our knowledge originates from sense. Hence in Holy Writ, spiritual truths are fittingly taught under the likeness of material things.” https://www.newadvent.org/summa/1001.htm#article9. Consulted 20.10.2020. 20 Fourth Lateran Council, Canon 2. 21 Ezekiel 36  :26.

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found in the words which the prophets wove together at God’s behest arose from human experience, through senses, memory, and the imagination, geared toward the intellect and the will, and perceived under new divine light. For Aquinas, the imagination isn’t merely words  : it is a treasure trove of images, mined from the five bodily senses, refined, reworked, and stashed away in memory.22

What is the Imagination  ? At this point, we must step back and ask  : What is the imagination  ? This question is simple only in appearance. Twenty-five centuries of Western philosophy struggled in vain to settle for good what the imagination is.23 I personally use an Aristotelian approach based on Jesuit theologian and literary scholar William F. Lynch  : “the imagination is that which in us receives and forms images of things and people  ; its task is to imagine the real.”24 For a better grasp, we can further list what the imagination does – its functions. In a nutshell, it helps us know, act, convince, discover, interpret, 22 See Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, Q. 78, art. 4, “Whether the interior senses are suitably distinguished  ?” Response  : “[…] phantasy or imagination is as it were a storehouse of forms received through the senses. Furthermore, for the apprehension of intentions which are not received through the senses, the ‘estimative’ power is appointed  : and for the preservation thereof, the ‘memorative’ power, which is a storehouse of such-like intentions. A sign of which we have in the fact that the principle of memory in animals is found in some such intention, for instance, that something is harmful or otherwise. And the very formality of the past, which memory observes, is to be reckoned among these intentions.” http:// www.newadvent.org/summa/1078.htm#article4, consulted 30.03.2020. 23 For a comprehensive history of Western philosophy of the imagination, see Kearney, Wake and Kearney, Poetics. 24 See Steeves, Grâce à l’imagination, p. 231. Also see Fordham University Archives, New York. Lynch, William F. “What is an Image  ?,” Carleton College Convocation, November 26, 1965, I  : “I like to think that the first and the greatest of the works of the human imagination is the task of imagining the real.” II  : “By the imagination I mean something both simple and complicated but not mysterious. It is not a special mysterious faculty discovered by the romantic poets and located in some special place between the twelfth and the thirteenth rib in only very special people who can alone contact a very special part of reality called beauty. It is something much simpler and more human. It is all the resources in a human being that can be brought to bear on the things inside and outside of him to form images of them. It is that part of us, but to me that means the whole of us, which forms images of things. It is, I repeat, the whole of us, everything in us and the whole of a lifetime, that forms our images of things. It is not simply the eyes or any other particular faculty. It is as much the heart as the eyes, for someone has said that the heart sees more than the eyes do. It is the memory of other things similar to that I now see, and therefore my whole past is conspiring, for good or bad, to form my images of what is in front of me. And it is my wishes too. In good part I see what I want to see, and what I do not see is often what I do not want to see.” Also see Aristotle, De Anima, III, 3, 428a.

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and mediate.25 The imagination is key, therefore, to each human existence. As Lynch rightfully points out, the imagination is not a selfish treat for an artistic elite  ; we all possess imagination, albeit to different degrees. Everybody knows, however, that our imagination can go terribly wrong  : it wreaks havoc when it fixates or gets unreal. “The vocation of the imagination is that at all costs it put me in contact with reality. But let me say […] that if this first vocation fails […], then man must create frightening substitutes, for the simple reason that he will be frightened […] at his separation from reality.”26 Millions throughout human history have been murdered by tyrants in the name of unspeakably evil ideologies or utopias based on highly rational, but also highly imaginary fears.27 However, I should also point out that millions of others in the course of history have been cared for, fed, clothed, and taught by men and women with a Christ-formed, dynamic imagination. Their “labor of love”28 sprung from an imagination touched by the poverty of the manger, the joy of the beatitudes, the self-sacrificing love of the crucified Lord, and the life-giving breath of Easter and Pentecost. Per se, the imagination is neither good nor bad, neither healthy nor sick. Like every human reality (and this counts for memory and reason too  !), the imagination must be evangelized and saved. When it is, it is one of the strongest tools we can gear for the good.29

A Christian Defense of Images and the Imagination This is why Scripture is full of images, from Genesis myths to Book of Revelation drama, from Psalms’ imagery to Pauline similes, from prophets’ preaching to Jesus’ parables.30 This is why the Church fathers, despite their criticism of unreal fantasizing, preached so imaginatively as they read and interpreted Scripture and constantly mined new meaning.31 This is why the Church has been so creative in its works of mercy and its works of art. Of course, Christianity took a while to think imagery through. In the conflict around icons and iconoclasm, saints like John of Damascus rose up to defend p ­ ictures 25 See Steeves, Grâce, ch. I, pp. 27–82, especially p. 81. 26 Fordham University Archives, New York. Lynch, William F. “What is an Image  ?,” Carleton College Convocation, November 26, 1965, I. 27 See Ricœur, Ideology. 28 1 Thessalonians 1  :3. 29 See Steeves, Grâce, ch. III, especially pp. 136–154. 30 See Steeves, Grâce, ch. II, pp. 83–129. 31 See Ibid., pp. 45–47  ; 335–380.

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of Jesus, Mary, and the saints. John knew full well that Exodus 20  : 4 forbade representing God for fear of idolatry. But Christians, in his mind, had reached a spiritual adulthood that allowed them to paint not the God invisible, but the God-man Jesus Christ  : “It is clear that when you contemplate God, who is a pure spirit, becoming man for your sake, you will be able to clothe Him with the human form. When the Invisible One becomes visible to flesh, you may then draw a likeness of His form.”32 Scripture clearly states that Christ “is the image of the invisible God.”33 It is not ours to decide whether God should be visible to us in Christ  : Christians believe that God already made that choice eternally and historically. Iconoclasts, therefore, oppose God’s plan of salvation. “Either, therefore, take away images altogether and be out of harmony with God who made these regulations, or receive them with the language and in the manner which befits them.”34 It does not behoove us to decide to make away with icons of Christ. Just as metaphors rightly point to God, pictures, mosaics, and many other art forms can make God known, loved, and served. Prophets and psalmists spoke of God’s heart  ; Jesus referred to his own in Matthew 11  :29. Therefore, it is licit for Christians to sing the Sacred Heart in their hymns and worship him through visible imagery. And it is also the fruit of a Christ-like faith and imagination to serve God by serving the poor, who are literally and metaphorically his spitting image.

Imagination and Incarnation  : Christian, Christ-Like Faith The real reason for which the imagination is so central to Christian faith and theology is the Incarnation. John of Damascus waxed angry  : “You, who refuse to worship images, would not worship the Son of God, the Living Image of the invisible God, and His unchanging form. I worship the image of Christ as the Incarnate God.”35 The role of the imagination is important in any human belief, but it takes on a special role in Christianity because of the Incarnation of the Word. Obviously, here ‘incarnation’ does not just mean ‘embodiment,’ as in most contemporary philosophy  ; in Christian theology, it means also the Annunciation and the Nativity. Christ is Word made flesh  ; He is also Image made flesh. The fate of the imagination in Christian theology thus stands and falls on the Incarnation of the Eternal Word in the man Jesus. As Clement 32 33 34 35

John of Damascus, Images, p. 9. Colossians 1  :15. John of Damascus, Images, p. 13. Ibid., p. 24.

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of Alexandria poetically put it, Christ is the perfect image and likeness of God, sent so that we too may once again be perfect images in the likeness of God, healing our imaginations away from original sin’s harm.36 Christian theology holds the following  : starting with prophets of old, soaring to new heights in Jesus, God speaks in stories and poetry that tell us of his love for us – and also of his zeal, jealousy, fear, wrath, and tender mercy for us. God expresses himself through the human imagination to make an impression on us  : a real impression of the True, the Good, the Beautiful.37 Based on this Revelation as imaginative expression, men and women of faith can in turn read, preach, paint, and sing their own faith expressions, so as to make a true faith-impression on others. Thus, Scripture and Tradition can be pictured as a constant play of imaginative words, expressing and impressing mental pictures that tell us the truth about God and the world, and make us act upon that reality. Faith, therefore, may be rightfully described as a particular imagination.38 According to Scripture, if I can look at things with God’s eyes, if I can love others and self with God’s heart, I am saved by virtue of divine faith. The Christian faith is not an airy-fairy fancy  ; it is the ability, by means of a Christ-like imagination, to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. That is what Jesus’ parables teach us to do.39 To put it tersely  : “No faith without imagination.” Now, it is not that faith and imagination are equals, for Scripture says we are saved by faith,40 true enough – but by a living, loving faith,41 infused with the imagination needed to know the living, true God, and act with hope and love. Faith in Christ and the imagination can thus be “neither confused nor separated.” Such echoes of Chalcedon’s Christological adverbs lead us back to the bond between imagination and Incarnation. Christ the Mediator must inform our imagination, es-

36 See Clement of Alexandria, Exhortation, XII, 120  : “O you who are all images, but not all likenesses, I desire to restore you according to the original model, that you may become also like me. I anoint you with the unguent of faith, by which you throw off corruption, and show you the naked form of righteousness by which you ascend to God.” (translation based on Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, The Ante-Nicene Fathers, volume  II, Eerdmans, Grand Rapids, 1979, pp.  205–206, corrected on the basis of Claude Mondésert’s translation in Le Protreptique, Sources Chrétiennes II bis, éditions du Cerf, Paris 1976, pp. 190–191). 37 On expression and impression as a form of Tradition, hence Revelation, see Steeves, Grâce, ch.  VI, especially pp. 367–368. 38 On faith as imagination, see Steeves, Grâce, ch. IV, pp. 268–286. 39 See Steeves, Grâce, ch. II, pp. 109–129. 40 See Ephesians 2  :8. 41 See James 2  :17.24.

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pecially in its mediating function.42 The mediating imagination thus helps us bridge the gap between God and man, time and eternity, death and life. The Cristian imagination’s task is therefore to find the real in what Nicholas of Cusa named coincidentia oppositorum.43

The Heart in Scripture How does the Sacred Heart of Jesus play into all of this  ? The heart is what Karl Rahner called an Urwort, an Urbild, an Ursymbol  : a primitive, basic word, image, and symbol.44 It is not a constructed concept.45 All of us presumably can relate to the shape of a heart. What the symbol of the heart means, however, is a different issue. Its polysemy should not elude us. For instance, in a few decades in France around the time of Margaret Mary Alacoque, the main metaphorical meaning of the word cœur shifted dramatically, from courage to feelings. We should not take for granted our romantic view of the heart as schmaltzy Valentine’s Day kitsch. In the Biblical world, the heart meant the center  : we still get this in phrases such as “the heart of the matter.” As applied to persons in the Bible, the heart was a shortcut for moral conscience, a central place to discern and decide. “Keep your heart with all vigilance, for from it flow the springs of life.”46 “The heart is devious above all else  ; it is perverse – who can understand it  ? I the Lord test the mind and search the heart, to give to all according to their ways, according to the fruit of their doings.” 47 The heart was taken as a preeminently spiritual place where God speaks with us and gives us what we need  : “Create in me a clean heart, O God, and put a new and right spirit

42 See 1 Timothy 2  :5. 43 See Nicholas of Cusa, De docta ignorantia, as well as De conjecturis and De visione Dei. 44 See note above. Leo Scheffczyk also called it “the most eloquent real-symbol of Love” (“sprechendste Realsymbol der Liebe”)  : Scheffczyk, Herz Jesu II. 45 See Rahner, “Siehe,” p. 488  : “I deliberately speak of the heart as a ‘word’, not as a concept. […] [now,] the word we are concerned with must per se emphasize the corporeality, the possible gestalt and image of both the word and the concept. And since we human beings always think with word-concepts and not wordless concepts, and since with them we must faithfully work towards our salvation – this side of any imageless or wordless mysticism – true to the written word of God, and to the incarnate Word of the Word of God, here too therefore we must always speak of the word, and not of the concept.” (translation by the author). 46 Proverbs 4  :23. 47 Jeremiah 17  :9–10.

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within me.” 48 In the New Testament too, the heart is a pars pro toto  : “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.”49 “For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”50 “I am gentle and humble in heart.”51 Perhaps Psalm 33 expresses best the articulation between the heart of God and human hearts  : “The counsel of the Lord stands forever, the thoughts of his Heart to all generations. […] He who fashions the hearts of them all, and observes all their deeds. […] Our heart is glad in him, because we trust in his holy name.”52 God’s Heart is thoughtful, merciful, faithful  : it fashions our hearts as the conscience where God speaks to us and where we choose how to act. In Scripture, the human heart is a place for joy because it is a place for trust and faith.

A Few Theological Consequences There is no need at this point to go on about the place of the heart in Scripture and Church Fathers, prior to the medieval and modern visions described above. The heart, whether God’s or ours, is a key symbol in Revelation to express a wealth of meaning, deeply impressed in the faith of Jews and Christians. In turn, these faithful have expressed their faith through the heart, as metaphor in poetry, inspiring symbol in theology, and motif and motive in graphic arts. In this wealth of meaning, the heart of God has come to symbolize in a special way mercy, love, and tender care for the poor and needy. There is thus a seamless transition between heart, guts, bowels, and womb – less biologically than metaphorically, in faith. Theologically, the heart reveals God’s “innards,” including maternal aspects like pregnancy, birthing, and beyond, that aptly complement more widespread words and images of divine paternity. Through the Incarnation and Jesus’ reference to his own Heart in Matthew 11  : 29, any previous barrier between the heart of the Creator and that of the creature has been superseded and brought to fulfilment. The Sacred Heart of Jesus was received theologically as a symbol of his divine-human love, both for his Father and for his human brothers and sisters. Committed to memory, this symbol stimulated the theological imagination of preachers such as St. Francis de Sales, missionaries like the

48 49 50 51 52

Psalms 51  :10. Matthew 5  :8. Matthew 6  :22. Matthew 11  :29. Psalms 33  :11.15.21.

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Jesuits who taught the Gospel in places where pictures spoke louder than words, and religious women who ran schools and clinics on a Sacred Heart-infused charity – to give but a few examples. In the 20th century, major theologians such as K. Rahner and H. Urs von Balthasar enquired theologically about the Sacred Heart. In addition to the papers mentioned above, let us point out Rahner’s second doctoral dissertation in theology, dedicated to the Sacred Heart. While he is best known for his intellectual, abstract approach to theology, he also refreshingly grounded some theological investigations on the bildhaftiges Urwort of the Sacred Heart, which he claimed as an affective antidote to deadly spiritual indifference.53 As for Balthasar, he penned inter alia that wonderfully dramatic, densely poetic series of short meditations on the Sacred Heart called “Heart of the World.”54 Let us draw some final thoughts from French art historian and philosopher of images Georges Didi-Huberman. His concept of the ‘open image’ could and should renew theology based on images in general, and on the image of the open, wounded Heart of Jesus in particular. (His prodding is all the more valuable coming from a non-Christian background.) A few stimuli for us theologians, as we ponder memory, the imagination, and images of an open, wounded Heart  : “Images embrace us  : they open up to us and close in on us insofar as they elicit in us something we could call inner experience.”55 As we ponder creativity, vulnerability, revelation  : “Images are created by us in our image.”56 As we ponder a life-giving, dynamic image of the Incarnate Word  : “The incarnation, then  : a motive, a motor.”57 What is an ‘open image’ for Didi-Huberman  ? It is first and foremost an experience, an event which rends the veil between the real and us. “The phrase ‘open image’ targets a very particular economy of the image – most of the images that surround us only offer us screens, stopgaps, stitches through resemblance – where forms, aspects, and resemblances are torn up and suddenly reveal a fundamental dissemblance. […] The open image therefore designates less a certain category of images than a privileged moment, an image-event where the aspectual organization of the similar is torn in contact with the real. […] There is no worthy opening – I mean, one able to create an event – without closure, with the obstacle it crashes into.”58 Again, this disclosure

53 See Rahner, “Ignatianische,” pp. 458–459  : “1. Indifferenz und Herz Jesu.” 54 Balthasar, Heart. 55 Didi-Huberman, L’image, p. 25 (translation by the author). 56 Ibid., p. 30 (translation by the author). 57 Ibid., p. 31 (translation by the author). 58 Ibid., p. 35 (translation by the author).

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event is one of Revelation in its essence – pulling away that which veils reality  : “There is no image without opening. Because opening up is then equivalent to unveiling.”59 What can open images of the Sacred Heart point to  ? A contributor to our book sees how Jesus’ wounded side evokes a vulva – Christ birthing the Church, according to the patristic reading of John 19  :34 as the fulfilment of Adam birthing Eve in Genesis 2:21–23. Didi-Huberman chooses to show art that portrays that Christ’s wound as a mouth, viz. Carlo Crivelli’s Polittico di sant’Emidio (Ascoli Piceno, 1473). Psychoanalysis, much later, convincingly disclosed how wounds speak. On this basis, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard showed how the imagination reaches towards the surreal. Not the unreal, but the surreal, viz. a joint capacity to critically surpass the real through iconoclasm (‘sur-real’) and to commit to reality by means of the incarnation (‘sur-real’).60 The imagination “is not, as etymology suggests, the faculty to form images of reality  ; it is the faculty of forming images which surpass reality, which sing reality. It is a faculty of super-humanity.”61 The surreal imagination helps us find (true) reality by going beyond the (merely apparent) real. Dalí’s surrealistic 1962 painting of the Sacred Heart, for instance, can teach us at once to tear down false images of the Sacred Heart that we have come to idolize and to worship the reality of Christ’s Heart. If an image helps our imagination gain knowledge of a given theological reality rather than hinder it, then this image is an essential means for a faith that is both alive and committed to memory. As a conclusion, therefore, I hold that, notwithstanding memories from my childhood missal, the Sacred Heart is not just devotional  ; it is also theological. To rephrase that claim in light of Pope Francis’s teaching  : popular devotions are a real locus fidei which express and impress the sensus fidei fidelium.62 The Sacred Heart of Jesus – imagery included  – is a locus theologicus. Images and symbols are not a ‘Poor Man’s Bible’ in a pejorative sense  : all of us, illiterate and educated, need our imagination and memory to be struck by images of Divine Revelation so that our faith be real and saving. For Christian theology, the image of the Sacred Heart can do just that, however its visual representations change over time, as memory and cultures shift and adapt to reveal God’s eternal love for us. 59 Ibid., p. 42 (translation by the author). 60 See Kearney, Poetics, pp. 101–103. 61 Bachelard, L’eau, p. 23 (translation by the author). 62 See Francis, Evangelii Gaudium, 126  : “Expressions of popular piety have much to teach us  ; for those who are capable of reading them, they are a locus theologicus which demands our attention, especially at a time when we are looking to the new evangelization.” See also International Theological Commission, Sensus Fidei, 81  : “the sensus [fidei] fidelium […] is not just an object of attention for theologians, it constitutes a foundation and a locus for their work.”

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References Alonso Schökel, Luis. The Inspired Word. Scripture in the Light of Language and Literature. New York  : Herder and Herder, 1965. Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologiae. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/ Consulted 31.03. 2020. Bachelard, Gaston. L’eau et les rêves   : essai sur l’imagination de la matière. Paris  : Librairie José Corti, 1942. Balthasar, Hans Urs von. Heart of the World. San Francisco  : Ignatius Press, 1979. Clement of Alexandria, “Exhortation to the Heathen.” The Ante-Nicene Fathers, Volume II. Grand Rapids  : Eerdmans, 1979. (See Le Protreptique. Paris  : Éditions du Cerf (SC 2 bis), 1976). Didi-Huberman, Georges. L’image ouverte. Motifs de l’incarnation dans les arts visuels. Paris  : Gallimard, 2007. Francis, Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium. 2013. http://www.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/apost_exhortations/documents/papa-francesco_esortazione-ap_20131124_evangelii-gaudium.html Consulted 31.03.2020. Hamon, Auguste. “Cœur (Sacré).” Dictionnaire de Spiritualité, Ascétique et Mystique, Tome II-1. Paris  : Beauchesne, 1953. Col. 1023–1046. Hamon, Auguste. Histoire de la Dévotion au Sacré-Cœur. I. Vie de Sainte Marguerite-Marie. Paris  : Beauchesne, 1923. International Theological Commission, Sensus Fidei in the Life of the Church. 2014. http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/cti_documents/rc_cti_20140610_ sensus-fidei_en.html Consulted 31.03.2020. John of Damascus. St John Damascene on Holy Images. Followed by Three Sermons on the Assumption. London  : Thomas Baker, 1898. John Paul II. Catechism of the Catholic Church. 1993. https://www.vatican.va/archive/ENG0015/_INDEX.HTM Consulted 30.03.2020. Kearney, Richard. The Wake of the Imagination. Toward a Post-modern Culture. London, Routledge 1988. Kearney, Richard. Poetics of Imagining. Modern to Post-Modern. New York  : Fordham University Press, 1998. Monastère de la Visitation Paray-le-Monial. Vie et Œuvres de sainte Marguerite-Marie, Tome 1. Paris-Fribourg  : Éditions Saint-Paul, 1990. Monastère de la Visitation Paray-le-Monial. Vie et Œuvres de sainte Marguerite-Marie, Tome 2. Paris-Fribourg  : Éditions Saint-Paul, 1991. Rahner, Karl. “30. Meditation. Maria und die Kirche.” Sämtliche Werke. Band 13. Ignatiani­ scher Geist. Freiburg  : Herder, 2006, pp. 232–238. Rahner, Karl. “Der theologische Sinn der Herz-Jesu-Verehrung.” Sämtliche Werke. Band 13. Ignatianischer Geist. Freiburg  : Herder, 2006, pp. 555–562. Rahner, Karl. “Ignatianische Frömmigkeit und Herz-Jesu-Verehrung.” Sämtliche Werke. Band 13. Ignatianischer Geist. Freiburg  : Herder, 2006, pp. 451–466.

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Rahner, Karl. “‘Siehe dieses Herz  !’ Prolegomena zu einer Theologie der Herz-Jesu-Verehrung.” Sämtliche Werke. Band 13. Ignatianischer Geist. Freiburg  : Herder, 2006, pp. 488–495. Southard, Robert. Blessed Trinity Missal. Brooklyn  : W.H. Litho & Co., 1976. Ricœur, Paul. Figuring the Sacred  : Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Minneapolis  : Fortress Press, 1995. Ricœur, Paul. Lectures on Ideology and Utopia. New York  : Columbia University Press, 1986. Ricœur, Paul. The Rule of Metaphor  : Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language. London  : Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978 (1975). Scheffczyk, Leo. “Herz Jesu II. Systematisch-theologisch.” Lexikon für Theologie und Kirche, Band 5. Freiburg  : Herder, 1996. Col. 53–54. Steeves, Nicolas. Grâce à l’imagination. Intégrer l’imagination en théologie fondamentale Paris  : Éditions du Cerf, 2016. Vatican II. Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum. http://www.vatican.va/archive/hist_councils/ii_vatican_council/documents/vat-ii_const_ 19651118_dei-verbum_en.html Consulted 30.03.2020.

Archival Sources Fordham University Archives, New York. Lynch, William F. “What is an Image  ?,” Carleton College Convocation, November 26, 1965.

John van den Hengel

Refiguring the Memory of a Devotion

The devotion to the Sacred Heart formed part of the Christian humanist movement, which at the beginning of modernity succeeded in reconnecting Christianity with the transcendent. Scholastic theology of the late Middle Ages had disastrously failed to keep alive the link between nature and grace as “an all-inclusive religious vision of the world”.1 The so-called medieval school theology lost connection not only with the earlier spiritual teachings but even more so with experience. The restoration of this link with experience – in part achieved by the Reformation – was accomplished in Catholic circles by the spiritual thrust of The Imitation of Christ of the Brothers of the Common Life, The Introduction to the Devout Life of Francis de Sales, and the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius of Loyola. They had in common a piety seeking to infuse the immense social, moral, scientific and spiritual movements of beginning modernity with a spiritual grounding. In establishing this spiritual grounding, moderns invented a new language, new practices, new experiences. What drove this momentous shift of modernity, which has had such a global impact, was a new relationship to the transcendent, a new imagining of the human person by recognizing human capacities rather than weaknesses, and a new vision of the earth and the cosmos. The new relationship to the transcendent  – an epochal shift of perspective – saw human capacities which were forever changing the face of the earth in the big scientific adventure that characterizes this period, as immersed in the loving, creative agency of the divine. This was the birth of human subjectivity which in its earliest presentations was not divorced from the transcendent but part of the creative act of God. Modern spirituality saw transcendence in immanence  : a divine presence in nature, invisibly energizing human agency. This, according to Louis Dupré, was the spiritual genius of early modernity.2 It is perhaps best expressed in the Essais of Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592) who maintained – as Erich Auer­ bach reminds us  – that humans are not moved by plans or doctrines but through their movement among things. He recognized that ‘things’ direct humans – humans move among them, live in them. And so, it is among things that humans are to be found. With open eyes and impressionable minds, they stand in the midst of the 1 Dupré, Passage to Modernity, p. 221. 2 Ibid., p. 226.

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world. Humans, he held, follow their own inner rhythm, which, “though constantly induced and maintained by things, are not bound to them, but freely skip from one to ­another.”3 What counted was the rhythm of one’s own inner movement. Into this spiritual thrust of modernity we also place the origins of the Sacred Heart devotion in the 17th century.

Cultural Roots of the Devotion What was significant in this breach of the medieval culture of authoritative tradition was the fascinating role of the human heart. The heart’s significance emerged in the modern anatomical studies of Andries van Wesel, better known as Andreas Vesalius. In 1538 he published the very popular anatomical plates entitled Tabulae ­Anatomicae Sex. In van Wesel’s plates – although modern – we can still see what tradition had maintained about the human heart. In the teaching of Galen, going back to the second century, the heart had been presented as the life-giving energy of the body. In van Wesel’s plates, which became highly popular during this time, anatomically the heart was still shown as Galen had taught. In this view a small amount of blood of the human body while passing through the lungs became mixed with air, allowing the thinned blood to pass from the left ventricle in the heart to the right. In this almost miraculous passage through the ventricle, the human heart was shown to be the place where “the vital forces are kindled and the arteries originate”4, that is, it was the place where humans derive life and heat, spirit and vitality, or more specifically, the place where blood becomes humanly alive. The heart was “shown” to be the locus where in the human body the transcendent and the immanent encounter  : the place where the interior rhythm of the person has its origin. The new human interiority of modernity, the source of the emergence of the modern individual or ego, was made visible. It was a case of theory blinding observation. However, it was also a powerful image of the new relationship of transcendence inhering in the natural. This so-called ‘scientific’ observation of the heart soon fell victim to the more accurate observation of William Harvey’s human heart as a pump. As Harvey’s more accurate biological conjecture of the human heart took hold, the science of Andreas 3 Auerbach, Mimesis, pp. 294–295. 4 The concluding chapter “Two Birds come to the Mustard Tree” of Frans van Beeck’s Christ Proclaimed  : Christology as Rhetoric, p. 519–575. Van Beeck acknowledged the need to delve below the surface of traditional Christology and to connect with a cultural need. He found it in the intense interest in the human physiognomy and the role of the human heart in the 16th century. From this there was a clear path to the devotion to the Sacred Heart. See p. 525ff. See also Landsberg, Pharetra divini amoris, 1533.

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Vesalius faded away,5 but the theory of the life-giving force of the heart remained, re-emerging a century later in the imagery of the Sacred Heart of Jean Eudes and Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. In the transposition the physical heart of Jesus became the locus of the interior rhythm of his person, the source of his transforming love for humanity. Van Beeck summarizes what took place in these years in three points  : 1. In the devotion there was a clear visual concentration on the physical heart of Jesus as a separate organ, reflecting modernity’s desire for a tangible, physical, experiential point of reference for the spiritual  ; 2. Vesalius’ role of the human heart as the origin of vital forces was transferred to the physical heart of Christ which is now prominently visualized as “a burning furnace of love”  ; the physical heart remained indispensable for the devotion  : a clear cultural humanistic point of reference. It reflects the modern interest in human interiority. This was clearly a modern devotion. 3. In relation to the larger tradition, the heart of Jesus did not refer to the dead and pierced Jesus – as it did in so many of the subsequent works on the Heart of Jesus – but to Jesus as a human-divine person who was “despised” by humans and the interior source of the love, gratitude and abandonment to the Father.6 In the devotion to the Sacred Heart, as it emerged in the writings of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, this natural human base of the human-divine heart of Jesus was central. In the report she was asked to write by her superior, Mère de Saumaise, Marguerite-Marie wrote, in full accordance with the modern appeal to human interiority, about “what happened within me” (“ce qui se passait dans mon interieur”).7 She described what was happening within her in terms of a language and experience of love that was clearly contemporary without any clear link with tradition and the Jesus of the scriptures. She was the recipient of a love of Christ for herself which in her Les Colloques amoureux was expressed in the ardent language of ‘profane love’ according the bishop 5 See the interesting historical study on the human body by J.H. van den Berg in Het menselijk lichaam, een metabletisch onderzoek. 6 Van Beeck, Christ Proclaimed, p. 544. 7 Alacoque, L’autobiographie as found in Sainte Marguerite-Marie Alacoque. These notes, written in obedience to her superior are included in her memoir which she wrote in 1783 at the request of her director, Fr. Rolin. See http://www.livres-mystiques.com/partieTEXTES/margueritemarie/#_Toc7513987, accessed June 24, 2019. It must be noted that reference to the Sacred Heart preceded Jean Eudes and Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, as Marcello Neri has indicated, but the origin of the devotion must be attributed to Marguerite Marie Alacoque. See Marcello Neri’s “Il cuore di Gesù negli scritti di Tommaso da Olera  : Singulare esperienza di Agape”, pp. 74–115.

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of Auxerre in 1731.8 A good example of this ‘profane’ language of her writings can be found in the following extract  : I felt being let down into this furnace of love where I thought of nothing else except to love him, feeling within me such strong and violent movements that it seemed to me that my soul was going to separate from my body, that I was so fatigued that I could not put one foot in front of the other. I had to do constant violence for fear of being found out. It seemed to me that the tranquility of the night existed only to allow me to enjoy the embraces and loving encounters of my divine Bridegroom with whom the hours were only moments.9

The language is edgy psychologically, however, it is clear that the intent of these writings was to have the reader experience the “fire of love” in a deeply personal and experiential encounter. It was hyper-physical with a direct connection to the physical vital forces of Jesus’ heart. Her own image made this clear. Her original representative figure of the Sacred Heart was that of a stand-alone heart, surrounded by a crown of thorns, with a number of wounds out of which flowed drops of blood  ; the heart was crowned with a flame and a cross. It stood for the inner life force of Jesus, his sentiments. Another image showed a stand-alone heart affixed to the cross with only the hands and feet, no torso. The relation to Jesus here was direct with the physical heart. In one account Marguerite-Marie spent around two to three hours “her mouth glued to the wound of his Sacred Heart”.10 However imbalanced this divine-human encounter sounds to our modern ears, the direct physical and experiential character and effect upon Marguerite-Marie is not only what makes it modern but also makes it different. What was proposed was a physical relation of love between the divine heart of Jesus and humanity, in this case, Marguerite-Marie, which, because of the intensity of this love, passed over into the human person and made her capable of manifesting and passing on this ardent love to others.11 In one of the exchanges between Jesus and Marguerite-Marie we read, “On another day,   8 Yves Ledure (Spiritualité du Cœur du Christ) reflects on the theological poverty of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque’s memories on the devotion  : “It seems difficult today to take these manuscripts as they are as a major source […] of the devotion to the Heart of Christ as was done in the past.” (p. 109, translation by the author).  9 L’autobiographie, p. 64 (translation by the author). 10 Ibid., p. 88 (translation by the author). 11 “My divine Heart is so filled with love for humans and for you in particular, that, while no longer being able to contain them within the flames of my ardent charity, it is necessary to spread them to others with your assistance and to manifest them to them.” Sainte Marguerite-Marie Alacoque – Sa vie par elle même, p. 66 (translation by the author).

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the Saviour asked me this question ‘My daughter, are you willing to give me your heart so that I may deposit my suffering love in it  ?’”12 Or, in another place  : “My daughter, he told me, it gives me such pleasure to see your heart, that I want to put myself in its place and to serve you with all my heart.”13 This is more a spousal than an agape relationship. The devotion that emerged from these “revelations” by way of practices clearly sought to reproduce in the devotees a similar, experiential event. Their theological foundation was less easily detectible. As Yves Ledure writes  : “It seems difficult today to take these manuscripts as they are as a major source […] of the devotion to the Heart of Christ, as was customary in the past.”14 As Ledure rightly adds  : “Without putting into question the exemplary life of the Visitandine of Paray-Le-Monial, one cannot but ask the question of the pertinence of such an amorous experience of her relation with Jesus. This tonality, it must be said, is present throughout these manuscripts. It is true that the generosity of a life given does not exclude eventual psychic imbalances.”15 It is not my intent to go through the history of interpretation that constructed the experiences of Marguerite-Marie into what became the devotion to the Sacred Heart in the 18th and particularly in the 19th centuries. It must be understood as a construction of meaning – a gradual expansion of the cult – fed by the piety of individuals as well as by the assumption of the devotion into the life of the post-Tridentine Church and the identity politics of post-revolutionary France. But allow me to mention a few  : The injection of the Jesuit spiritual tradition into the devotion through the interaction of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque with her spiritual director, Claude de la Colombière  ; the concomitant existence of the devotion to the Hearts of Mary and Jesus of Jean Eudes who already in 1670 created a mass in his religious community in honour of the Sacred Heart.16 This liturgical enrichment of the devotion expanded the linguistic and scriptural frame of reference of the devotion.17 Because of the official hesitation 12 Sainte Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, p. 83 (translation by the author). 13 Ibid., p. 87. 14 Ledure, Spiritualité du Cœur du Christ, p. 109 (translation by the author). 15 Ibid., p. 107 (translation by the author). 16 Yves Ledure in Spiritualité de Cœur du Christ makes “visibility” – both of the “heart” and of the “real presence in the Blessed Sacrament” – the link of the devotion to modernity. This link is made by Marguerite-Marie herself in her promotion to communion every first Friday of the month and the Holy Hour on Thursdays with as its special theme the consoling of Jesus in the Garden of Olives. 17 Even before Marguerite-Marie Alacoque received her first “revelation” of the Sacred Heart in 1672, Jean Eudes had already created and instituted a Eucharist and a calendar feast of the Sacred Heart for his community. The liturgical texts of the feast of the Sacred Heart were composed by Jean Eudes and first celebrated in 1670. The scriptural references focus exclusively on the heart as the organ of love and hence on the power of love descending from the Father into Sacred Heart with as aim to enkindle human hearts with a love for God.

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of the Church to accept the devotion, the installation of an official liturgical feast of the Sacred Heart had to wait until 1765 in France and until 1856 in the universal church. The gradual linkage of the devotion of Marguerite-Marie with the feminine Rhineland mystics of the Middle Ages  : Gertrude of Helfta (1256–1302), Mechtilde of Magdeburg, a Beguine (c.1207–c.1282/1294) and Mechtilde of Hackeborn (1241– 1298), as well as with the mystic Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153) which enriched the spiritual tradition. The linkage of the devotion with the patristic tradition and the birth of the Church through the reference to blood and water that flowed from the side of Jesus on the cross which gradually refocussed the devotion to the pierced side of Jesus on the cross (John 19,37) and less to consoling Jesus in his agony in the garden of olives. Also, through the linkage of the devotion with French spirituality, the devotion inherited its meditational practices of union with Christ in which the practitioner sought to enter more fully into the thoughts, actions and feelings of Jesus in his hidden and public life, as well as rooting the devotion itself into the inner trinitarian life.18 The devotion gained in popularity by becoming linked with political life in Europe. In France the devotion became part of the strategy of pro-monarchists in their struggle against the Republican transformation of the state and against the separation of Church and State.19

The Sacred Heart at the End of Modernity  : Crisis and Reconfiguration The modernity that first opened up the cultural, political and religious configurations of the original devotion had by the mid 20th century been emptied of the memory of its original force. Most of the practices attached to the devotion at the height of its existence had gone into disuse. The remnants of the devotion gradually lost their appeal. By then, the modernist experiment with its incessant search for certainty in the construction of the human ego was no longer capable of delivering the promise of fraternity, freedom and equality of the so-called Enlightenment. The memory of the original spiritual offering of a new bond with transcendence had become drowned in doubt. The Sacred Heart as a memory could no longer call upon “establishment procedures”, that is upon “unan-

18 See the meditation cycles of Léon Jean Dehon where this insertion of the devotion into the motifs of French Spirituality and of Jesuit spirituality are very prominent. See his La retraite du Sacré-Cœur (1896), Mois du Sacré-Cœur de Jésus (1900), De la vie de l’amour envers le Sacré-Cœur de Jésus (1901), Couronnes d’amour (1905), Cœur sacerdotal de Jésus (1907), L’année avec le Sacré-Cœur (1919). 19 Van den Hengel, “Crisis within Modernity”.

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imously agreed upon protocols” in academic circles for the devotion to retain validity and remain part of common discourse.20 The language of devotion requires it to be supported by the needs and beliefs of its interlocutors. When that support collapses – when the memory fades  – the structure of the devotion dissolves unless the community of interpretation establishes a new protocol suited to new addressees. The era of modernity which had had such an enormous impact, ended in a severe crisis of meaning in the 20th century. This led to “a radically changed topography of the religious relation with God, making a direct relation with God more and more impossible.”21 What were some of the consequences of this epochal shift on the devotion to the Sacred Heart  ? With the underlying cultural and religious matrix slipping away, the memory of the devotion, however, would not allow it to disappear. Hence those who had had strong attachments to the devotion began to look for a new interpretative framework. Beginning around 1930, theologians began a process of resourcement of the devotion. In the hermeneutical reinterpretation practices were critically examined.22 They culminated in the publication of an encyclical on the Sacred Heart by Pope Pius XII in 1956  : Haurietis aquas. This led to a change of interpretation. Most of the efforts at re-interpretation came from religious communities whose spirituality had been grounded in the 19th century devotion to the Heart of Christ. In the aftermath of Vatican II all these communities had been mandated to shift their foundational narratives and their raison d’être.23 What emerged from the 1930s onward was a gradual transformation of the devotion into a new form. From being a popular devotion with its practices, it became configured into a theology of divine agape grounded in the agency of the person of Jesus. Here the impact of the incorporation of the devotion into the liturgy of the Church with a whole new range of scriptural references began to show its influence. These scripture texts went far beyond the minimal reference to Jesus by Marguerite-Marie Alacoque.24 As a consequence, the language shifted from 20 Ricœur, Memory, History, Forgetting, p. 20. 21 Neri, Giustizia della Misericordia, p. 18 (translation by the author). 22 The words and concepts were generally anthropocentric such as consolation (Karl Rahner, “Some Theses on the Theology of the Devotion”) or reparation (Glotin, Le Cœur de Jésus, pp. 163–179). 23 Also, the Congregations that refer to the Sacred Heart in their original title, have undergone major transformations in the aftermath of Vatican II where they were asked to return to the original charism of their founders. See, for example, the Rule of Life of the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Comparing the constitutions of these congregations before and after the chapters of renewal shows the extent of the refiguration that the devotion has undergone. 24 The scriptural texts of the Jean Eudes’ mass of the Sacred Heart of 1672 were Ezekiel 36. 26 (“new heart”) and John 15 (“Abide in my love.”). In the spirit of the time, the main focus of the texts was upon the effects and affects of God’s love upon human aesthetic experience. The new liturgical texts centered on John 19.37  : the piercing of the side of Jesus on the cross.

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‘Sacred Heart’ to refer to Jesus, to the name ‘Heart of Christ’. From a strict devotion it transformed into a theology. The theologies on the Heart of Christ since 1930 have gone in two directions. A first re-grounding of the devotion into a theology of the Heart of Christ took the 17th century model as a peripheral index to what was indeed central to the Christian tradition. The second direction retained a more direct reference to the devotional origin in Marguerite-Marie. What opened this new thrust and generalized it was the 1956 encyclical Haurietis ­aquas.25 In the encyclical Pius XII effected an almost complete erasure in the discourse on the Sacred Heart of references to the historical origin and practices of the devotion in the 17th century. Haurietis aquas, while acknowledging the intent of the historical devotion, traced the roots of the devotion to the pierced side of Christ in scripture and to the patristic, theological and mystical tradition of God’s love of theologians such as Bonaventure, Bernard of Clairvaux, and the Rhineland mystics. In line with Haurietis aquas26, some theologies of the Heart of Christ subsequently downgraded the devotional origin with Marguerite-Marie and began to look for the spiritual origins of the devotion in the scriptures and the writings of the Patristic theologians and the mystical (especially feminine) writers of the Middle Ages.27 This remaking of the memory of the devotion, which for three centuries had been borne under the name of Marguerite-Marie, shifted the writings on the Sacred Heart into a totally new direction. In the new literature, Marguerite-Marie and her “promises” and the different practices were seen as peripheral. In its place came a theological reconstruction whose links to the original “revelations” and practices were hardly recogniz-

25 The encyclical, while noting the decline of the devotion, defined the devotion as follows  : “Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is devotion to Jesus Christ Himself, but in the particular ways of meditating on his interior life and on His threefold love  : His divine love, His burning love that fed His human will, and His sensible love that affects His interior life.” (par. 40). 26 The encyclical sought to reinvigorate the declining devotion by insisting on its deeper theological roots. In par. 19 we read  : “But after We have paid Our debt of thanks to the Eternal God, We wish to urge on you and on all Our beloved children of the Church a more earnest consideration of those principles which take their origin from Scripture and the teaching of the Fathers and theologians and on which, as on solid foundations, the worship of the Sacred Heart of Jesus rests.” The encyclical states quite clearly that the devotion should move beyond the writings of Marguerite Marie  : “In addition, that this devotion flows from the very foundations of Christian teaching is clearly shown by the fact that the Apostolic See approved the liturgical feast before it approved the writings of St. Margaret Mary.” Par. 98. 27 See, for example, de Geradon, Le Cœur, la langue, les mains  ; Walsh, The Heart of Christ in the Writings of Karl Rahner  ; P. Mourlon-Baernaer, SJ, “Cœur – langue – main dans la Bible”  ; Callahan, Karl Rahner’s Spirituality of the Pierced Heart  ; Hayes RSCJ, The Heart is a Sacred Space  ; Bovenmaers, Biblical Spirituality of the Heart.

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able. These writings no longer started with Marguerite-Marie. She was only awarded a space – if at all – in a lengthy historical study of God’s love in the history of salvation. But her role was no longer central  ; she was seen as the foundress of a movement, but she no longer controlled the content of the movement. She became a small figure in a much larger historical tradition. Hermeneutically, however, it is good to remind ourselves, to use a Dutch expression, that this attempt to recuperate the devotion in a theological dress occurred only when the cows had already fled the devotional stable.28 What stands out in these first refigurations of the devotion into a theology of the Sacred Heart is their almost unanimous turning away from the physical heart of ­Jesus. The ‘heart’ loses its physicality and its enrootedness in human experience and becomes a symbol, a symbol of the personhood of Jesus, a symbol of love or as the pierced side of the dead Jesus. The human physical heart, precisely the point of origin, the original attraction to an organ thought to connect the human and divine, is made symbolic. The experiential physical dimension is discounted. It is good to recall that in the traditional language of the devotion to the Sacred Heart there was often no reference to the person of Jesus. He was identified simply as “the Sacred Heart”.29 This shift opened up a number of avenues for enriching the Christological reflection within a contemporary context.30 What emerged gradually was a contemporary Christology with as its main focus the agency of divine love revealed particularly in the pierced side of Christ on the cross. The tendency has been not to name this a Christology but a devotion. However, it has all the characteristics of a developing Christology  : a Christology of the Heart of Christ, where the heart represents the physical heart of Christ as the tangible symbol of God’s agapeic or Trinitarian love. The second route of the devotion taken in the last century was a more complex refiguration of what emerged in the 17th century. It honoured the history of recep28 That is the route taken also by Haurietis aquas. It insists that in fact the devotion did not originate with St. Marguerite-Marie  : “In addition, that this devotion flows from the very foundations of Christian teaching is clearly shown by the fact that the Apostolic See approved the liturgical feast before it approved the writings of St. Margaret Mary.” Par. 98. In subsequent writings, especially those influenced by Haurietis aquas the historical reference to Marguerite-Marie lessened and theologies began with the Old and New Testament, the Patristic Period, the theologies of Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, the late medieval Rhineland mystics and the teaching of the Magisterium in the 19th and 20th centuries. For the history of the devotion see de Margerie, Histoire doctrinal du culte au Cœur de Jésus. 29 For example, in the process against the “Oblates of the Heart of Jesus” in 1883–1884, several consultors of the Holy Office made reference to the omission in the writings of Leon Dehon of the name of Jesus, instead speaking of the Sacred Heart. 30 Among the more recent works on the Sacred Heart devotion, see Menozzi, Sacro Cuore  ; Glotin, La Bible du Cœur de Jésus  ; Ledure, Spiritualité du Cœur du Christ  ; Neri, Giustizia della misericordia.

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tion. It accepted that the event of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque was a genuine spiritual experience which resonated among the Christian people and became a highly popular devotion. It sought to carry forward something of the original experience. These reflections retained on the whole the references to the modern cultural experience. But they also saw the theological deficit.31 This second route sought to retain features that made it part of the modern experience. This theological refiguration sought to go back to the originary experience and the modern cultural anthropological and material expression. This called for a specific pathway ahead. It involved returning to and actualizing the religious insight of the “revelations” of Marguerite-Marie and particularly its reference to bodiliness, to the ‘heart’.32 These two ways of actualizing the devotion to the Sacred Heart were in reality the gradual creation of a new theological Christological model. In this paper I will call it Kardia Christology. I argue that by taking into account the central elements of the tradition of the Sacred Heart devotion – its focus on love, reparation, its practices and devotions and the focus on the ‘heart’ – and its social outreach, this Christology is not a doctrinal Christology but has all of the characteristics of a practical Christology. Its thrust focusses on the practical and aesthetic/spiritual nature.33 It honours the contemporary understanding of ‘action’ and ‘agency’.34

31 In the theological writings at mid-century the references to the origin of the devotion in Marguerite-­ Marie were still quite prominent. See, for example, the works collected in Stierli, Gutzwiller, Hugo Rahner, Karl Rahner, Heart of the Saviour  ; Fleming, “Simplified Devotion to the Sacred Heart”  ; Galot, “Quel est l’objet de la devotion au Sacré-Cœur”  ; Galot, “Le Cœur du Christ”. Later these references began to diminish. This position is quite obvious in the writings of Yves Ledure on the Sacred Heart. In his Spiritualité du Cœur du Christ he proposes to drop the insistence on the spiritual, interior, devotion to the Sacred Heart and urges the Congregation of the Priests of the Sacred Heart to give their energies to the social spirituality that emerged in their founder’s spiritual vision. More about his below. 32 The writer who has strongly maintained the importance of Marguerite-Marie Alacoque in the contemporary approach is Glotin, Le Cœur de Jésus. 33 This is similar to Yves Ledure’s position in Spiritualité de Cœur du Christ. He maintains that current reflections are a transformation of the original devotion into a new Christology. On p. 63 he writes  : “One measures in this way to which point the source of this spirituality is scriptural, evangelical and displays an ecclesial dimension. […] To revitalize this spiritual current of thought, it means to leave the devotional fringes and to anchor oneself in the evangelical and more specifically in the mystical, since it involves the mystery of the birth of the Church.” (p. 63, translation by the author) The process is an historical process of a faith which in new cultural contexts renews its understanding and relation to Christ. As such it becomes a hermeneutical process. As Ledure says a bit further  : “We do not find ourselves any longer dealing with a particular devotion which participates in the Christian mystery. Here we have a complete Christology which envelops the whole journey, both historical and mystical, of the one who claims to be the source of eternal life for the believer.” (p. 73, translation by the author). 34 Van den Hengel, “Can There Be a Science of Action  ?”.

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So, what is a practical Christology  ? A practical Christology differs from classical Christology by its focus away from the identity of Christ to a consideration of the role of human action and agency in the belief in Christ. The emphasis lies on the anthropological  : the Christian route of human agency. An outline of such a practical Christology/theology is to be found in the hermeneutical philosophy of Paul Ricœur. For him “actions” are not objects as explored in sociology or psychology. A hermeneutical study of human action or a practical theology is not an exploration of the ‘what’ of action – the object of a human action – but of the agent  : the ‘who’ of action. ‘Who’ speaks  ? ‘Who’ acts  ?35 The core issue of human actions is not what is done but the force and dynamism of the agent  : the who of action  : the self. Action is what the self does, what characterizes the self. The human self is a force and dynamism of action. The self is not a something, an object but a dynamism, an agent or a capacity to act.36 At stake, therefore, in a practical Christology is the human self who is shaped or transformed by the ‘what’ and the ‘why’ of what he or she does or commits the self to do. What is central is the identity of the agent. The human self is an agent  : he or she is a capacity to act. The human becomes a self by acting. And what is acting  ? It is the capacity of a human self to project him or herself into the world, into the future, by doing something. Analytic philosophy has identified these projective actions as promissives or commissives  : that is, actions by which I commit myself  : I sign this contract to […] Jane, I marry you […] I commit myself to work for this community […] I swear that I will […] I give my word that […] I promise to repay you […] Actions are words given to another, projections of an agent self who commits him/herself to do something and whose identity from that moment is shaped by the energy and the dynamism of the fulfilment of what was promised. My word commits me. I am measured by the given word. It forms my self. The self is a projection of my action. Translated into the task of practical theology, it is a projection of a self toward a given word and to a possible world in which this self promises or commits to live with and for others. Hence the central question – the ‘materiality’ – of a practical Kardia Christology is the becoming of the human self in all of his/her bodiliness, or the potential of the human believer in the person of Christ to open up the future and to contribute to the goodness of the world. A practical Kardia Christology explores what the self in light of the Gospel – in light of God’s agape – is capable of, what the self can become and how it can contribute to the well-being of the world. Obviously, this ‘self ’ is not the solipsistic self – the ego of Descartes or modernity. It is not a substantive I who is 35 Ricœur, Oneself as Another, p. 16. 36 Ibid., pp. 88–112.

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the center and control of meaning but a self who is in a constant dialectical relation with the other or with an other. This self does not control meaning  ; it is a self that acknowledges his/herself as a gift, the result of a relation.37 As Léon Dehon, founder of the religious community of the Priests of the Sacred Heart, clearly saw, the devotion to the Sacred Heart could not be solely about my interiority, an inner self, it needed to be also an openness to others, the situation of workers, to human prosperity, to the world. Dehon proposed a human interiority based on the devotion and an economic and political world shaped by the cult of the Sacred Heart.38 Humans are a power to change the world. In a Christian context, humans, as he saw them, were the power to live out of a gift or to be a testimony or witness of the gift of love of the Sacred Heart.

The Interiority and Social Dimension of Kardia Christology Before exploring Kardia Christology through the scriptural model of Wisdom, a dimension of the Sacred Heart devotion needs to be pointed out which will open up the twofold thrust of Kardia Christology. The Sacred Heart devotion contained a route to an interiorized devotion and one to an outward societal engagement. This twofold thrust, I propose, is the central theme of Kardia Christology. While the interiority of the devotion has been generally acknowledged, the social dimension was less so. In his survey of the development of the cult of the Sacred Heart, Daniele Menozzi pointed to a number of authors in the 19th century who, beside focusing on the interiority of the devotion, also began to insist on its societal thrust.39 As exemplars of this thrust, he pointed to the writings of Henri Ramière40, but particularly to Léon Dehon.41 These 37 Ricœur, Oneself as Another, pp. 319–355. See my “Paul Ricœur’s Oneself as Another and Practical Theology”  ; Id. “Théologie pratique et l’émergence d’un nouveau soi-même”  ; Id., “The Self as Witness  : An Anthropology of the Heart”. 38 Léon Dehon (1843–1925) founded a religious community in France in 1878 as part of an important 19th century movement around the Sacred Heart. 39 Menozzi, Sacro Cuore, pp. 107–225. Menozzi pointed out particularly the writings of Henri Ramière (1821–1884) who in 1879 and 1880 wrote a series of articles dedicated to the Ordre social chrétien, and of Léon Dehon (1843–1925) who in 1889 began a periodical under the title Le règne du Sacré-Cœur dans les âmes et dans les sociétés. See also the contemporary works of François Chevé, Catholicisme et démocratie ou le règne du Christ (Capelle, 1842) and François Huet, Le règne social du christianisme (Paris  : Firmin Didot Frères, Librairie éditeurs, 1853) 40 Henri Ramière lived between 1821 and 1884. He had a singular devotion to the Sacred Heart. He was one of the first to note the social thrust of the devotion. See his Le Règne social du Cœur de Jesus (Toulouse, 1831). 41 Outside of the periodical Le règne which Dehon published between 1889 and 1903, he wrote a series

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authors had noted that from the beginning of the devotion with Marguerite-Marie Alacoque, the devotion had not only a corporeally interior, deeply personal intent in relation to the heart but also an outward political, social thrust.42 In 1690 Marguerite-­ Marie wrote a letter to the French king demanding that the emblem of the Sacred Heart be attached to the arms and standards of the French army. The societal thrust in the 19th century saw the ‘Sacred Heart’ stand for a social critique of modernity and a political critique of the Republican form of government. It pointed to a particular – the monarchical – form of governance. For a period in the 19th century French Catholic intransigents promoted the insertion of the Sacred Heart on the tricolour flag of France.43 In line with this, Léon Dehon, between 1889 and 1903 published a periodical named Le règne du Sacré – Cœur dans les âmes et sociétés, in which he expressed his desire to have the love of the Sacred Heart “begun in the mystical life of souls, descend and penetrate in the social life of peoples”.44 The devotion to the Sacred Heart from the beginning has been an intricate mixture between private and public. At its core was a deep awareness of the grounding love of God for human existence not only for individuals but also for human society. It called for certain practices  – liturgical and eucharistic, as well as acts of reparation and consolation – but these practices were accompanied by a deep awareness of the need for a social testimony of this originary love. For Dehon one of the more important outreaches of the devotion lay in the world of workers – for him the most alienated segment of the population. The reign of the Sacred Heart must include the workers’ of other social texts  : Manuel social chrétien (Paris  : Bayard, 1895), Les directions pontificales politiques et sociales (Paris  : Labrairie Blond et Barral, 1897), Catéchisme sociale (Paris  : Labrairie, Blond et Barral, 1897), Nos congrès 1897 (Paris  : Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1898), Richesse, médiocrité ou pauvreté (Nîmes  : Commission des Actes du Congrès de Nîmes, 1899), La renovation sociale chrétienne  : Les conférences romaines 1897–1900 (Paris  : Librairie Blond et Barral, 1900). 42 See the letter of Maguerite-Marie Alacoque to the king of France in 1690. 43 Neuhold, Mission und Kirche, Geld und Nation, pp. 311–390. 44 Leo Dehon, “Les opportunités du règne du Sacré-Cœur” in Œuvres sociales  : Les articles 1889–1922 (Roma  : Centro Studi, 1978) p.  3 (translation by the author). And the text continues  : “It will bring the sovereign remedy to the cruel ills of our moral world. […] These considerations already give us to understand that the veneration of the Heart of Jesus is not, for us, a simple devotion but a veritable renewal of Christian life and even the most important since the Redemption. This thought dominates all the efforts of our apostolate.” This societal thrust became more and more in evidence in the writings of Dehonians. See, for instance, Ledure, “Le règne social de Sacré-Cœur chez père Dehon (1843–1925)” (translation by the author), Id., “Pensée sociale et projet fondateur chez Léon Dehon”  ; Id., “Léon Dehon entre mythe et histoire. L’oubli du sociétal “  ; Bourgeois, Le père Dehon et “Le règne du Cœur de Jésus” 1889–1892  ; Tessarolo, “Le règne social du Cœur de Jésus dans les écrits de Léon Dehon”  ; Tertünte, Léon Dehon und die Christliche Demokratie  ; van den Hengel, “The Social Charism of Father Dehon in the Church”.

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social and economic prosperity and well-being.45 This world view insists – here Dehon is clearly Scotist in his Christology – that God’s agapeic love has entered into the human social sphere from the beginning and is to be lived there by creating – in the words of Pope Francis – a “space of fraternity, justice, peace and dignity for all”.46 Dehon’s spirituality subtly combines interiority and sociality. In the words of Marcello Neri  : “If the body is the quivering of God before wounded humanity, and mercy is the vibration of his beatitude […] then Dehon’s spirituality is a moment of transition between the end of modernity and the various experiences of human loving.”47 Dehon strongly believed that “By occupying themselves with social works, priests and working people do not leave supernatural life, they fulfill the duties of charity and equity demanded by the Gospel.”48

Kardia Christology as Practical Theology With these preliminary notes let us turn to the delineation of Kardia Christology. To what sort of world does Kardia Christology seek to give shape  ? Taking the lead of Léon Dehon, it must do two things. In the contemporary social context, it is called upon to give shape to human interiority, to a new self, beyond the ravages of the Cartesian ego of modernity  : the self as gift and agent of hope. And secondly, it must give shape to a society beyond the ravages of neo-liberalism and capitalism. Kardia Christology  : the Self as a Witness of the Agape of God

A practical theology, as I said above, is first of all a certain way – a Christian way – of projecting the self in the world. Its task is to coordinate the self with the movements of the world and to explore there the possibility of hope despite the radical evil that surrounds humans. Human beings exist either as authentic or as false witnesses of 45 For Dehon this outlook was particularly stimulated by Pope Leo XIII and his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). In Mission und Kirche, Geld und Nation, David Neuhold notes how Dehon made a great effort to transform the spirituality of the Franciscan Third Order, to which he belonged, away from abnegation and world-denial to an acceptance of material prosperity and social reform for workers. Especially in the Congress of Nîmes in 1897, Dehon engaged the Third Order toward a concern for economic issues and social organization. For a fuller presentation on this topic see pp.  227–248 of Neuhold’s book. 46 Evangelii Gaudium par. 180  ; Neri, Giustizia della misericordia, pp. 40–41. 47 Neri, Giustizia della Misericordia, p. 39 (translation by the author). 48 Dehon, “L’idealism dans les œuvres sociales.” Le règne du Sacré-Cœur dans les âmes et les sociétés (Septembre 1900) Oeuvres Sociales I (Andria  : Edizione CEDAS, 1976), p. 451 (translation by the author).

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this hope beyond the incapacitating evil in the world. Nowhere do humans find absolute certainty about the authenticity of this witness. Their witness is based not on certainty but on a belief. That is why for Christians, this believing hope is grounded in a hermeneutic of the biblical text. It is here where for them this religious hope reveals itself as a promise on the part of God. In hope the self believes itself grounded in a belief, in an originary good. It believes that there is a surplus, an excess, of meaning at the source of life.49 Kardia Christology does not start with the human self as capable but as a gift – a gift of God’s love. It starts with a faith, a confiance, in this gift of God’s love that is the self. The mode of this gifted self is most beautifully described in the writings of the Book of Wisdom. I will draw on this exploration of the self in Wisdom literature to reflect on the self of Kardia Christology.50 Wisdom explores the creative force which underlies the law and the prophets of the First Testament. The Wisdom writings point to Wisdom’s capacity to give shape to the human self.51 Wisdom is presented in the form of writings in which Wisdom draws its readers to be attentive “to what is going forward in oneself as reader”.52 André Beauchamp shows how an encounter with Wisdom in the various writings of the First Testament lures its readers to reach behind their different experiences of life and their various encounters, to uncover within themselves a summons to a deeper origin, and “to discover the truth of the origin as a promise of new life”.53 The discovery of this origin is not just an insight or the result of a questioning. In fact, Wisdom writings maintain, according to Beauchamp, that this origin is not immediately available at the cognitive level. It takes the intense probing of life, first through the writings of Wisdom and subsequently in our experiences, to bring this origin to view or to intimate it.54 This origin will not appear as something that I possess. It is a gift in which the self questions itself. The writings of Wisdom create an awareness that by speaking its words  – the writings 49 See the beautiful pages on the topic of regeneration and redemption in Ricœur, The Symbolism of Evil, pp. 232–278. 50 We are relying on the reflections on Wisdom in André Beauchamp’s L’un et l’autre testament in the extensive and detailed interpretation of Beauchamp in Jim Pambrun’s God’s Signature. 51 Pambrun, God’s Signature, p. 519. 52 Ibid., p. 489. 53 Ibid., p. 514. The integration of our consciousness with an origin was also a theme of Bergson (1859– 1941). Bergson’s philosophy was an attempt to reconnect humans with the primordial in a type of conversion. See H. Bergson, L’énergie spirituelle (Paris  : Alcan, 1910). 54 Beauchamp makes a distinction between beginning and origin. If origin is the experience of the surplus of life, beginning refers to the discovery of this primordial desire by the self in words and language. It is through the accumulation of words in the books of wisdom that the self is led to the experience of the origin.

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of Wisdom – that I generate an experience of an other  : the words do not live in a vacuum. They make us aware that there is an other and that an understanding passes between myself and this other. The writings reveal this origin to be the Wisdom that was with God from the beginning and received a voice “in the beginning” of creation. Inherent in the human self is a desire to uncover this origin – this other – in the self. It most clearly manifests itself in our effort to speak. Our words, our capacity to speak, evoke – like “in a glass darkly” – an origin without making it present or a possession. Between the self and the origin there occurs an encounter where in some manner the infinite breaks through my time and in touching me transforms me. It inevitably leads to the other. By placing wisdom at the side of God from the beginning, the books of Wisdom discern the presence of an other in God before ever there was a Law, before ever there was a heaven and an earth. And by encountering this origin, the human self discovers that life – all life – is built on a surplus – an excess.55 This experience of Wisdom as an experience within oneself of a new self, a more original self, Beauchamp called the “great event of the spirit”. Here the self emerges as a gift, not as a something which I possess.56 What is significant in Wisdom, as it is for Kardia Christology, is the nature of this origin. It is an encounter with Lady Wisdom, with an origin that was with God from the beginning. It is an encounter with God’s desire for humans, for the earth. As such it offers the reader of Wisdom or the self of Kardia Christology a way of living in a world borne by another, in a world constituted by an encounter with an other, in a world originated in God’s agape. For the sage of Wisdom such an offer can only take place in a material reality  : in the reality of the written word, in a real encounter with an other, in the materiality of our body, in the nuptial encounter of man and woman. Significant for wisdom, like for Kardia Christology, is the insistence on corporeality. In Kardia Christology this corporeality of God’s agape has become enfleshed in the physical Jesus – in the ‘heart’ – but also in the enfleshed body of the believer. The ­experience of origin is related to a beginning, to what is happening in one’s bodiliness, in one’s experience of life and its various encounters. It is not a solely spiritual ­experience without the body, outside of cultural experiences and social relations.57 The enigma of life is that in our desire to say more, to reach the origin, 55 Beauchamp uses the nuptial metaphor to describe this encounter. He recognizes that the first language of Adamah when he wakes from his sleep and encounters Woman is a language of recognition  : “This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh.” See his “Epouser la Sagesse – ou n’épouse qu’elle  ?” (translation by the author). 56 Pambrun, God’s Signature, p. 525. 57 The need to break with the idolatry of the subject, which does not allow the self to locate itself outside of the body, inaccessible to the drama of life and even of death, was signalled by Gabriel Marcel and his

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to speak another word, the endeavour never ends  : it never suffices because there is always another word to say. Nothing we do reaches beyond our beginning to speak, beyond every new birth, to unveil the origin. Our capacity for metaphor, for the poetic, throughout history, evinces our desire to say more, to reach beyond, to touch the surplus, but it never succeeds, there is always yet more […] We all belong to the promise, we are all children of hope. In a similar way, I suggest, Kardia Christology points to an originary dimension of the self. The Second Testament identifies Jesus as “wisdom of God” (1 Cor 1.24) and the theme of wisdom weaves through the narrative of the Gospels. In Kardia Christology we detect a similar exploration of a new self as is found in the writings of Wisdom. It explores how through the reading of the scriptures about the person of Jesus in the Gospels we can uncover what lies at the origin of a self that comes forth from the self-outpouring of God in the enfleshed Christ, “the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation” (Col 1.15). In the words of Jim Pambrun about Wisdom, there is in Kardia Christology a “meaning of a new self, a sense of a new origin in one’s own self, whose foundation is pushed back to the very origin of an experience interior to YHWH himself. ‘The concept of creation introduced, with God’s own interiority, the concept of alterity.’”58 In Kardia Christology this self-outpouring of God is named agape. Not unlike Wisdom the naming of this origin, agape, takes place in the Scriptures, particularly in the testament of the Gospel through the words and deeds of Jesus, who was the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, who was Wisdom incarnate. But here too the words remain enigmatic and it takes an intense and deep reading to intimate the origin that underlies the multiplicity of words and images of the Gospels. We can reach behind these words and receive an intimation of the self ’s true origin in the surplus and excess of God’s creative agape. They reflect a self that is created in the image and likeness of God. In line with the origins of the devotion to the Sacred Heart in the outpouring of God’s love, symbolized in the physical heart of Jesus, Dehon searched for the best way to give his followers a window into this origin. He did it by writing meditations on the Sacred Heart. Six of his seven works on the Sacred Heart were a methodical series of meditations. He wrote these to allow his followers to become united with the Heart of Christ, to engage their true origin in the fire of trinitarian love. This explains the reason for the emphasis on the physical heart in the devotion. For, as with Wisdom, agape is not just a spiritual reality  : it is physical, it is a bodily self in a notion of “ownmost body” in which he sought to reintegrate the fleshly with the mysterious. See his Homo Viator (Paris  : Aubier, 1944). 58 Pambrun, God’s Signature, p. 533.

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physical world for whom the heart is a point of encounter. Also, agape cannot exist without my brother and sister, without the poor, the mourners, the hungry and the thirsty. Hence, to what I give testimony in a Kardia Christology is for what I hope  : the self as a bearer of a promise of God’s agape as my real origin in our physical existence. “Our very existence becomes the expression enfleshed of that mobility of love and intimacy interior to divine life.”59 This was exactly the task of religion as Kant defined it. Religion asks the question  : What may I hope for  ? Kardia Christology would help activate this belief in the self, as the bearer of hope in a fragile and fractured world, as a witness of God’s love.60 There is a danger here of seeing this search through life for its origin too solipsistically. The discovery of origin is not a possession. It is not for its own sake because the origin is also the thrust toward the other. Moreover, it is also the path of discovery of the self ’s own sinfulness and the gift of pardon. The path of discovery happens in one’s bodiliness, in all the experience of life and its various encounters  : these are not without the twists and turns of our human jealousies, our betrayals, our violence. The devotion to the Sacred Heart historically carried with it a deep sense of the sinfulness of individuals and of the people. That is also the route of Wisdom. Wisdom is often linked with the Suffering Servant of Isaiah who in his relation to the people “was wounded for our transgressions, crushed for our iniquities” (Is. 53. 5). It is good to recall here the history of the notion of reparation in the devotion to the Sacred Heart, a deeply personal reparation but also social reparation. Hence, Kardia Christology is not without its figure of the Suffering Servant, or the Son of Man who must suffer and die and rise again. Kardia Christology incorporates all this history. The human is defined – as does Ricœur using Spinoza – as a conatus as “the desire and effort to be”.61 Ricœur called this desire and effort to reach beyond the self the “ontological vehemence” of the self.62 For Spinoza this effort to persevere in existence was of the very essence of a thing. The self is this energy, this desire and lack connoted by the very term conatus. Such a mode of existence is a way of “attestation”, of witness, a belief in the self as capable. Thus, in the context of Kardia Christology, the self is a gift – a belief, a confiance. It allows the self to project itself forward towards his or her ownmost possibilities. 59 Ibid., p. 537. 60 Ricœur, “The hermeneutics of testimony”, pp. 119–120. Christoph Theobald has called this reflection of ways of living in the world a theology of style. He referred to what the Bible called sanctity  : a hospitality pushed to the limits. Interview of Christoph Théobald by Bernard Litzler in Echoc  : Là hebdomadaires des familles, November 20, 2019. 61 Ricœur, Oneself as Another, p. 316. 62 Ibid., p. 316.

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To what the self gives testimony is hope  : the self is a gift and a bearer of a promise. Kardia Christology would help activate this attestation, this belief of the capable self, the bearer of hope, a testimony of the gift of God’s love.63 It would enliven the hope of an individual believer or a community of believers within the confines of today’s “specific coordination [of the self] with the movements of the world”. In other words, it would activate the commitment to make viable in a specific period of time the hope in the belief in the excess of God’s love. The focus of such a practical theology will be upon the present as possibility (potentiality) or the present as a capacity to open up a future as envisaged by the kingdom of God. Kardia Christology  : the Social Self in the Agency of Agape

What about the social/political thrust of Kardia Christology  ? Here also we must avoid the temptation to want to “see” something of this more as if it is a spectacle. The veil that conceals our origin in the enunciation of our beginnings is only partly lifted. Beauchamp warns us that it is not to be discovered in some kind of conceptual order. As I have maintained above, one must seek to unveil the origin in the practical order, in the engagement of our freedom. Wisdom remains down to earth. It concerns itself with the engendering of a new humanity, in effecting justice in all its material conditions. Wisdom never dissociates “the realities of the body and the realities of the heart.”64 For there is to be found what originates in me the desire for a life with and for others. From whence comes my desire to live in just and welcoming institutions  ?65 In Christianity this search for the self in relation to the other is intimately connected with the scriptural naming of God. In the New Testament the name of God emerges most significantly not in the exuberant manifestation of glory, but in the humility of God – in God’s self-emptying (Phil 2.7). In this self-effacement of God, God wishes to make Self known as One who annihilates Self so that the Other may be, may exist. This is reflected in the Trinitarian movement but also in creation. In this self-effacement, this self-emptying, there is space for the other, even more for the engendering of the other and God’s justice in all its material conditions, for creation. Perhaps, we can take it a step further  : in the engendering of the other lies the capacity

63 Ricœur, “The hermeneutics of testimony”, pp. 119–120. 64 Beauchamp, L’un et l’autre Testament, Tome I  : Essai de lecture, p. 257 (translation by the author). 65 For a further elaboration of this human ethics, see Ricœur, Oneself as Another, particularly Study Seven “The Self and the Ethical Aim”, pp. 169–202 and Study 9 “The Self and Practical Wisdom – Conviction”, pp. 240–296.

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of the self and his/her engendering of the other, and the just conditions for life. This engendering of the other becomes then “the only lieu of the presence of the divine, of life, to us.”66 This could redefine the self “as an event”, as “an experience of a desire to encounter the other”67 but also as a capacity to engender the other. The self would then be an act of testimony of the origin, that is, the self as a desire for the other, the desire that the other be, the desire that the world be. It would be an expression of Wisdom’s delight to be in the presence of the children of humanity, its delight in God’s earth  : “Our deepest comprehension of an origin becomes an experience in freedom of a desire such that, in our own relation to our finite conditions, we discover a desire within us that turns toward the other.”68 It would mean that in the gradual uncovering in the self of its origin lies as well the discovery within the self of an experience of a desire for the other, for encounter, and for the capacity within the self of engendering the other. In self-effacement everything is given to the other, to humanity, to the earth. The books of Wisdom use the marriage imagery to express this  : the nuptial encounter of man and woman. The image is most appropriate inasmuch as the nuptial encounter is the engendering act of new life and the provision of the needs to live, of novelty in creation, but also of the desire of the mother that the child, the other, exists. The experience of the origin in the encounter of the other does not generate sameness. In the nuptial encounter between man and woman the engendering of the child is not first of all an attempt to secure a future for the man and the woman, or for the succession of generations. In the birth of the child there lies an experience of promise, of a newness of life, the unthought of and surprise of the new. In the encounter of man and woman something of the origin is revealed  : in the joy at the birth is revealed the surplus of life itself, the “promise of life beyond expectation, a surplus unimaginable”.69 “Our very existence becomes the expression, enfleshed, of that mobility of love and intimacy interior to divine life.”70 For Beauchamp this translates into “the dilation of the human heart”, the movement in Wisdom toward God which is, in fact, a reflection of God’s desire to move toward us in Wisdom.71 The enfleshment of Wisdom in the people – in Israel – becomes then the very inscription of God’s own origin in the world.72 In the books of Wisdom, this embodied desire that the other be is most 66 Pambrun, God’s Signature, p. 534. 67 Ibid., p. 534. 68 Ibid., p. 535. 69 Ibid., p. 558. 70 Ibid., p. 537. In this context, it is important to note that for Beauchamp the heart is the “seat of one’s relation to one’s own bodiliness” (p. 553). 71 Ibid., p. 559. 72 Ibid., p. 573.

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concretely expressed in the engendering of the human household, the place for which “a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh” (Gen 2.24). In the engendered child a new future is revealed. And this movement of Wisdom toward us is actually the desire of God to move toward humanity and to the earth in its fragile and concrete conditions and to the existence of a people. In the final analysis, the first reader of Wisdom was Israel and it was this people that the text sought to engender. Wisdom’s intent was to create a movement of desire to live with others and for others and to do this in creating the human household, just and welcoming institutions, a sustaining earth and a welcoming relation to other nations. Israel was to be a people who would be witnesses of the presence of origin in its midst as a desire that the other be, that other nations be. In a similar way this desire for the other is expressed in Kardia Christology. It too has a social and political thrust. At its heart too lies the movement of God’s desire for humans and the earth to be, a desire for justice. To use an imagery of Beauchamp, here too one experiences “the vibration of the sounds of the infinite”.73 But for this life to find its way in the world it must take into consideration the resistance of the closed hearts, the “heart of stone”, jealous and violent in the encounter with the other. The promise of life is also to be enveloped in pardon, in the experience among all the vicissitudes of life, that one is not abandoned. Here the figure of the Suffering Servant of Isaiah but also the figure of Christ and the cross of Christ encounters us. The liberation of the self, overwhelmed by its resistance of its own heart, cannot be effected by one’s own efforts. It is a sheer gift. It allows a recognition that all life comes forth out of death. The Suffering Servant and the Christ figure bring to the fore this message of pardon, this gift of life in the giving of life. In this way the cross of Christ becomes a deeply embodied act that is evocative of the self-effacement of the Father in the begetting of the Son. On the cross the total self-gift of Jesus became the engendering of his body, the church of disciples, but also of creation into a new creation – the surplus and excess of God’s engendering. The pierced side stands for the giving back to the Father the ones he engendered in his self-gift. In the engendering of the community of disciples there came to be what had been there in the beginning, when “the word was with God”. It allowed all things to come into being so that “without him not one thing came into being” (John 1.3). For John this is the engendering of light and life and of the world so that for those who “received” him, it “gave the power to become children of God […] born of the will […] of God” (John 1.11). Along these lines, just as the reading of the books of Wisdom can lead its readers to explore their own relationship to an origin that called them into existence, so Kardia 73 As quoted in God’s Signature, p. 564.

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Christology can lead to an acknowledgement of an experience in the self of an origin grounded in agape, manifested in the self-effacement of Jesus on the cross. Like Wisdom, being made aware of this agapic origin can lead one to acknowledge the self ’s embodied desire that the other be as an expression of that origin. If in Wisdom this intimation of the self takes place as a new reading of the Torah and the Prophets, in Kardia Christology this reading of the Torah and the Prophets receives its new key in the Wisdom of Jesus. Kardia Christology, in other words, is the re-reading of scriptures as it is done in the liturgy of the Church of the promise of a new creation, new life in resurrection. The reading of the scriptures in the liturgy has a closure to it. They read the story of Jesus as a closure of the book of the first and second testament. It is a final reading. In Kardia Christology this is expressed in the engendering of a new social body in and through the new body of readers of the scriptures. It connects Kardia Christology with the shaping of history and the earth as an abode of justice and love. But even more so, what Kardia Christology seeks to bring forward is the testimony that our communities, our institutions, our nations, our earth are filled with the force of an origin in agape. What Beauchamp has called the “dilation of the human heart”74  – a wonderful way of expressing how interiority is bound together intricately with sociality – is expressed by Dehon, as we saw above, in his desire that his followers take on the social question. He saw clearly that the devotion to the Sacred Heart could not be solely about my interiority, my inner self, it needed to be also an openness to others, to the situation of workers, to human prosperity, to the earth. In his periodical Le règne du Sacré-Cœur dans les âmes et dans les sociétés, this originating agape had a founding experience in the world of workers. For Dehon, this outlook was particularly stimulated by Pope Leo XIII and his encyclical Rerum Novarum (1891). For the Dehonians following the directives of Léon Dehon has meant throughout their history a close attention in their social engagements to the social encyclicals since Rerum Novarum, taking seriously what Pope Francis stated in Evangelii Gaudium that “God, in Christ, redeems not only the individual person, but also the social relations existing between people” (EG 178). The originating love that encountered us in Jesus, the Word engendered in God who came to us in the flesh and did not leave us “orphaned” – “you in me and I in you” (John 14.18,20), has entrusted this power of love to those who are commissioned to “love one another as I have loved you” (John 15.12). In the end, there is a love, there is a mercy, there is a kindness that can transform the world. Within Christianity this love has always been spoken of as a love unto death. It bears

74 Pambrun, God’s Signature, p. 519.

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the image of a Father’s love who abandons the Son on the cross, but in the Spirit raises this Jesus from the dead in a community of disciples.

Dehon’s Pure Love within a Practical Kardia Christology For Dehon, this involvement with the social was part of the praxis of what he called ‘pure love’. Albert Bourgeois, a former superior general of the Dehonians, identified ‘pure love’ as the link within the devotion of the Sacred Heart of one’s interiority with social involvement. Underlying both was a thrust of love, connecting interiority and sociality.75 So how may we understand this ‘pure love’ in a Kardia Christology  ? The figure of pure love has a long and – since the 17th century, a controversial – tradition in the Church.76 Pure love carries within it an enormous paradox. To love God, it holds, one must sacrifice oneself. To love means to cipher oneself out of the picture. In the words of Jacques Lebrun  : “The loss of the one who loves is its triumph, the ruin of all hope and the destruction of the subject of love come in place of recompense. To go out of oneself to the point of losing one’s being and the being that one has in God and in the divine design becomes the ultimate condition to attain the end goal of the desire.”77 Within this context pure love as a total gift of self became an annihilation of the self – a self effacement – even to the point of foregoing any beatitude – accepting even eternal damnation – for the sake of the other. Accordingly, the agency of love became disconnected from the joy of love. This became the debate in the 17th century which presumed that someone’s personal interest – love of self – was opposed to God’s interest so that humans would have to sacrifice their self-interest even to the point of foregoing eternal salvation. On this point, one would do well to recall a saying of Thomas Aquinas  : “If one supposes that God was not well disposed to humans, humans would have no reason to love God.”78

75 See Albert Bourgeois, “Le père Dehon et le règne du Cœur de Jésus. 1893–1903”, in  : Studia Dehoniana SCJ, 25/2 (1994)  : “Through pure love, ‘your interests, your good pleasure and your glory’ […] Fr. Dehon will signify more and more the reign of the Heart of Jesus in souls and in societies.” p. 81 (translation by the author). 76 See Lebrun Le pur amour de Platon à Lacan  ; P. Rouselot, Pour l’histoire du problème de l’amour au Moyen Age  ; see also the controversial work of Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros. For Leo Dehon’s notion of pure love, see Neri, Giustizia della misericordia, pp. 63–69. For Neri the notion of pure love leads to an “aporia invincibile”. See also his “Uno stile per lo Spirito”, p. 331. Neri resolves the aporia by insisting that such language is hyperbolic. 77 Lebrun, Le pur amour, pp. 341–342. 78 IIa IIae, q. XXVI, a. 13 ad 3.

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Also, for Dehon pure love is a “totally disinterested love”.79 It does not appear that in his writings ‘pure love’ is hostile to human well-being. Yet it is a love that seeks no return. It is fully gratuitous, because it is given for itself. The love of the devotion to the Sacred Heart must rise, Dehon maintains, above the exercise of self-love, it must rival the love that God has for Self or for us. That means it must be a totally disinterested love. Even when Dehon does not say so explicitly, it is clear that when we encounter the word ‘love’ in his writings, he intends pure love. All love according to him must be disinterested love. Its image is that of the Sacred Heart. “Love,” says Dehon, “has but one method […] love has but one practice […] which is to serve God for love” (VAM 28). Such a love, in Dehon’s perspective, must be practical because it must find its outlet in the “exteriority of the world”.80 There is no safe distance from love. It is good to remember in this context that for Dehon this pure love is not a matter of the will but of affection. It is an affection that must influence the will in our journey of discovery of God’s agape  : our desire to be close to God, not just my desire but a desire for all “in every time, in every place, in every condition”.81 For Dehon such a love is effective only to the extent that it mirrors God’s disinterested, other-centered, love. If for Dehon this pure love was to function in his notion of the Sacred Heart in souls and societies – he translated it as a political and socio-economic concern for the workers – his pure love on the social level does not translate into a totally disinterested love. In most of his writings on the social issues, love must be understood as an interaction of love and justice in the movement of the world. As Dehon states in L’Année du Sacré-Cœur  : “Let us note, in passing, that our Lord gives there a lesson in justice and charity to all the owners. One ought to give an equitable salary and to give it without delay.” But he urges owners to go further than justice  : “It is good even to go beyond justice and along the lines of charity to give more than one ought to those who cannot work much, to unfortunate people, to the poor and to the powerless.” (ASC, février), no. 66). Here, Dehon does not speak of pure love, but of a justice that must be informed by love. What would such a pure love in the social sphere mean for Kardia Christology  ? For Neri such a pure love could only be a formal ideal. He maintains that it is not humanly practical. Pure love functions only as a regulating principle, a maxim without practical content82 or a type of ultimate horizon for the ethos of agape. All love, he says, is in79 See, for instance, meditation 13 of De la Vie de l’Amour envers le Sacré-Cœur de Jésus, entitled “Sur l’amour pur et désinteressé.” This use of the pure love, however, is not a meditation of God’s amour pur but an exhortation of human amour pur (translation by the author). 80 Neri, Giustizia della Misericordia, p. 64 (translation by the author). 81 Ibid., p. 64 (translation by the author). 82 Ibid., p. 67.

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terested love, never a realization of pure love. However, within a practical Christology, such as Kardia Christology, one might want to let pure love mirror the language of the teaching of Jesus, particularly as found in his Sermon on the Mount (Mt 5.1–7.28).83 The language of Jesus here is highly hyperbolic. The sermon enunciates the praxis of the kingdom of God – “Be perfect […] as your heavenly Father is perfect.” It is love expressed in terms of the Father’s self-effacement in the Son or as total self-gift to and in the other. In the Sermon this becomes translated into a number of reformulations of the ancient Ten Words. In the mouth of Jesus these become humanly impossible “commandments” that one must understand not as ethical but as hyper-ethical statements.84 The mandate “Love your enemies” contains an internal contradiction making it practically impossible to fulfill. The same can be said of all the sayings of Jesus about anger, sexual relations and divorce  : “you have heard it said” […] “But I say.” Jesus subverts the original commandments into the language of the kingdom in which there is no anger, no unforgiving thought, no lustful looks, no display of piety. In order that these sayings do not become immoral, Ricœur says, they must be “formulized by the rule of justice”.85 On the other hand, within the exaggeration of these mandates one can intimate the task of Kardia Christology. In it the practical and ethical must surpass themselves by bringing the reader to the verge of the human origin in the giftedness of God’s agape. These impossible imperatives are a testimony to the experience of unnameability of the origin of the imperative. And yet it gives an orientation to agency that will create a dialectic between the impossibility of action and the generosity of spirit. The social praxis of agape, as it is found in the sermon, provides only an intimation of the Name of God. Yet the intimation of the Name is given and becomes recognizable in a hyper-ethical experience of an impossible imperative, of a total self-effacement, of pure love. Only partially is the veil that hides us from the beginning lifted  : something of the self-effacement of God to be re-found in the effacement of the self for the sake of the other. The Sermon on the Mount identifies the origin as “the Father” making readers aware that a direct naming is not possible. For Ricœur this meant reaching out beyond the practical and ethical to the aesthetic sphere. “Love your enemies”, he says, is an expression of another economy of life. It is presented to us as world of our highest possibility, even though what makes it possible does not come from us but from another. This way of acting, he calls, the economy of the gift.86 It

83 Dumais, “Sermon sur la Montagne” Supplement au Dictionnaire de la Bible (Paris  : Editions Letouzey & Ane, 1994) col. 772–931. 84 Ricœur, Amour et justice, p. 54. 85 Ibid., p. 56 (translation by the author). 86 Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, p. 37.

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says to our freedom, “Since it has been given you, give […]” that is, act with the same generosity as it has been given to you. This is a logic of superabundance. If one seeks to name God at this height, one has moved beyond  – but one has not abrogated  – the cognitive capacity to express and the ethical capacity to do, and entered into the realm of liturgy, of doxology, of praise and thanksgiving.87 Levinas’ notion of the height of testimony might help us understand this. Height, for Levinas, is what points to the infinite. In that sense, testimony at its height is testimony of God, of what Levinas calls “the glory of the infinite”. The testimony of God is beyond what can be said or named. 88 The height of testimony is always beyond naming. In that sense, testimony is always “higher” than anything said, or “lower” (en-deçà) that is, lower than our capacity to say, like to a past “before” anything can be said. This “beyond” of Levinas is like the Platonic Good. For Levinas, and here we come close to Dehon, the good is dis-interested goodness, what Dehon has identified as “pure love”. The question this “pure love” raises is whether as disinterested goodness, or an infinite goodness can ever become a particular good or action  ? Levinas will not allow the Name of God to be said. He keeps it from being said. However, Ricœur suggests, The Name of God is named “by an accumulation of excessive, hyperbolic expressions destined to shake up ordinary thinking”.89 Applied to the Name of God, these excessive, hyperbolic expressions have an extraordinary effect. They do not reach into the realm of the Name of God. Instead, Levinas insists, “the Name is traced only with a view to its own effacement.”90 For Levinas, therefore, the word we say is not a word about God, but it withdraws to be traced in the human sphere by our responsibility for the widow and the orphan, that is, for the needy other. The Name of God shows itself in the care for the other. The goodness beyond being becomes a superabundant goodness and responsibility towards my neighbour. Like Dehon’s pure love, totally dis-interested love – God’s love – happens when in my relation to the other all my self-centered desires have been emptied and I become a complete response to the other. In this way, Dehon’s injunction of pure love is much like Jesus excessive injunction of “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt 5.48). This hyperbolic language takes one beyond ethics, the type of ethics of justice that honours the agapé of God. Agapé is of an infinitely more elevated order than any action we can produce.91 This is the language of pure love.

87 “Paul Ricœur on Biblical Hermeneutics”, p. 109. 88 Levinas, Humanisme de l’autre homme, p. 78 (translation by the author). 89 Ricœur, “Emmanuel Levinas  : Thinker of Testimony”, p. 121. 90 Levinas, “The Name of God according to a Few Talmudic Texts”, pp. 123–124. 91 Ricœur, Liebe und Gerechtigkeit, p. 8.

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It is this type of retaking of the gospel of Jesus as a way of naming God, a way of making tangible the revelation of Jesus, that constitutes Kardia Christology. Benedict XVI in the encyclical Caritas in veritate attempted something similar. He translated this love into a justice in relation to charity. Economic life and economic justice is thereby transformed away from the current notion of fairness or giving the other what the other is due to a notion of a justice governed by fraternity and even more so by gratuity.92 Charity, in other words, within a Christological sense, brings about an enhancement of the value of justice. So, if pure love is to remain a human project, it must be interpreted as a way of infusing justice with the superabundance of God’s agape. It allows justice to reach higher or, as Max Scheler notes, it exalts the value.93 It allows it to be infused with the superabundance of love to reach its highest capacity of justice. It thus becomes a rule of generosity in our dealing with the world  : a reflection of an economy of the gift. The excess of pure love can find its expression, as it did for Dehon after 1889, in his passion for a right social and political order, for the reign of the Sacred Heart in societies. A Kardia Christology is a Christology that does not seek to create another separate space for humans to live in. It remains the space of our world. But it is a space transformed by the agape of the Gospel. It takes the gospel message as a powerful language to raise our language and our action to its limit, goaded by the signifier or qualifier ‘kingdom of God’, making the extraordinary stand forth in the ordinary.94 The task of Kardia Christology is to explore the possibility of human hope in the midst of the movements of the world. Kardia Christology seeks to work out the Gospel message within the context of the “economy of the gift”. The material and textual guide of Kardia Christology is the scriptures both in their proclamation of the new self in the image and likeness of God in Christ but also as a hope for the life of the world – the dilation of the human heart.95 In other words, Kardia Christology is a Christology that searches out the possibilities of authentic living, using the Gospel as its guide. Along these lines, this Christology becomes a commitment to this world, to its well-being, a commitment to social justice and the fair sharing of the goods of the world.

92 Pope Francis’ Evangelii Gaudium promotes the same  : “The Gospel is about the kingdom of God (see Lk 4  :43)  ; it is about loving God who reigns in our world. To the extent that he reigns within us, the life of society will be a setting for universal fraternity, justice, peace and dignity.” (par. 180) 93 Scheler, Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values. 94 Ricœur, “The Self in the Mirror of the Scriptures”, p. 218. 95 Ricœur, Soi-même comme un autre, p. 37.

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Conclusion This proposal to interpret the devotion to the Sacred Heart through or as a Christology using as a model the Wisdom reading of the Law and the Prophets must not be confused with the much more ancient Wisdom Christology. Wisdom Christology used the notion of Wisdom as the pre-existent, heavenly being of Proverbs 8 as a way of interpreting the intense debates of the first centuries around the identity of the divine-human person of Christ.96 This doctrinal approach helps to interpret the identity of Jesus in relation to the Father. In Kardia Christology, Wisdom is first of all a spiritual experience of ourselves in all our bodiliness in the image of Christ. Wisdom, prior to becoming personified in Proverbs 8, is first of all a figure or a schema of relations, a Gestalt, which probes experientially the deeper meaning of the cosmos or creation, a new force in history which led to a transforming experience of the self.97 The wisdom experience is for this reason first of all an aesthetic and practical experience  : an experience of the gestation of something new  : a new awareness of the subject’s presence to him/herself in history. We find something similar to this Wisdom in Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Gaudete et exsultate (2018) which sought to “re-propose the call to holiness […] for our time” (#2). It is a restatement of the human self as “a life […] constantly offered for others, even until death” (# 5). Gaudete et exsultate hyperbolically asks its readers to both fill the present moment “to the brim with love” and to live this unconditional love “in the midst of human weakness” (# 18)  : charity to the full (#21) together with “a heartfelt and prayerful acknowledgement of our own limitations” (#50). It is a living of the excess, God’s surplus, despite our weakness, despite sin. The letter insists that we are able to love with the Lord’s unconditional love, but not of our own power but with the gift of the Lord’s life shared within our fragile lives (#18). Pope Francis proposes that the giftedness, the surplus of grace that settles in the midst of life, pushes life to newness  : “He impels us constantly to set out anew, to pass beyond what is familiar, to the fringes and beyond. He takes us to where humanity is most wounded. […] Unafraid of the fringes, he himself became a fringe (See Phil 2  :6–8  ; John 1  : 14). So, if we dare to go to the fringe, we will find him there  ; indeed, he is already there.” (#135)98

96 See for example, O’Boyle, Towards a Contemporary Wisdom Christology  ; Ebert, Wisdom Christology  ; Schüssler Fiorenza, Jesus  : Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet  ; Dunn, “Jesus  : Teacher of Wisdom or Wisdom Incarnate”  ; Christ, Jesus Sophia  ; Schillebeeckx, Jesus, An Experiment in Christology, pp. 429–431. 97 Pambrun, God’s Signature, p. 470. 98 See my “A Reflection on the Book of Marcello Neri Giustizia della Misericordia”, pp. 17–34.

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But whose project is this Kardia Christology  ? Marcello Neri proposes that it is the mission of the Dehonians who received this project from their founder.99 The word of this origin is found in his writings. He had an intuition, an intimation, of this originating agape. He created an institution in which he sought to engender this intuition into a mode of life. The Congregation was to be the enfleshment of this agape. But in reality, this Kardia Christology pertains to all humans. It takes seriously the search for an origin that questions us, an origin that is experienced as a call, as a questioning, as a curiosity, pertaining to all. The discipleship to pure agape, as Jesus indicated, is addressed to all. We encounter it in all its materiality in the cosmos, in our earthly, bodily condition. It is in our world, in our finite human condition where the blessings of life show forth. What appears here as the locus of the transcendent is the human self in all its fragility, in its bodiliness, in its finality, as place of the uncovering of an origin that engendered us and thrusts us forward to the other. That gift lies in everyone’s humanity. References Alacoque, Marguerite-Marie. Sainte Marguerite-Marie Alacoque – Sa vie par elle même. Paris-­ Fribourg  : Saint Paul, 1993. Auerbach, Erich. Mimesis  : The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Princeton  : Princeton University Press, 1974. Beauchamp, André. L’un et l’autre Testament, Tome I  : Essai de lecture. Paris  : Seuil, 1976. Beauchamp, André. “Épouser la Sagesse – ou n’épouse qu’elle  ?” Pages exégétiques. Paris  : Cerf, 2005, pp. 299–327. Bergson, Henri. L’énergie spirituelle. Paris  : Alcan, 1910. Bourgeois, Albert. “Le père Dehon et ‘le règne du Cœur de Jesus. 1893–1903’”. Studia Dehoniana SCJ, 25/2 (1994).  Bourgois, Albert. Le père Dehon et “Le règne du Cœur de Jésus” 1889–1892. Roma  : Studia Dehoniana 25.1, 1990. Bovenmaers, Jan G. Biblical Spirituality of the Heart. New York  : Alba House, 1991. Callahan, Anice. Karl Rahner’s Spirituality of the Pierced Heart  : A Reinterpretation of Devotion to the Sacred Heart. Lanham  : University Press of America, 1985. Chevé, François. Catholicisme et démocratie ou le règne du Christ. Paris  : Capelle, 1842. Christ, Felix. Jesus Sophia. Die Sophia-Christologie bei den Synoptern. Zürich, 1970. Dehon, Léon. La retraite du Sacré-Cœur (1896), Dehondocs Webside. Dehon, Léon. Mois du Sacré-Cœur de Jésus (1900), Dehondocs Website. Dehon, Léon. De la vie de l’amour envers le Sacré-Cœur de Jésus (1901), Dehon Docs Website. Dehon, Léon. Couronnes d’amour (1905), Dehondocs Website. 99 Neri, Giustizia della misericordia, pp. 11–21.

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Dehon, Léon. Cœur sacerdotal de Jésus (1907), Dehondocs Website. Dehon, Léon. L’année avec le Sacré-Cœur (1919), Dehondocs Website. Dehon, Léon. Manuel social chrétien. Paris  : Bayard, 1895. Dehon, Léon. Les directions pontificales politiques et sociales. Paris  : Labrairie Blond et Barral, 1897. Dehon, Léon. Catéchisme sociale. Paris  : Labrairie, Blond et Barral, 1897. Dehon, Léon. Nos congrès 1897. Paris  : Maison de la Bonne Presse, 1898. Dehon, Leon. Richesse, médiocrité ou pauvreté. Nîmes  : Commission des Actes du Congrès de Nîmes, 1899. Dehon, Léon. La renovation sociale chrétienne  : Les conférences romaines 1897–1900. Paris  : Librairie Blond et Barral, 1900. Dehon, Léon. “Les opportunités du règne du Sacré-Cœur.” Oeuvres sociales  : Les articles 1889– 1922. Roma  : Centro Studi, 1978. Dumais, Marcel. “Sermon sur la Montagne” Supplement au Dictionnaire de la Bible. Paris  : Editions Letouzey & Ane, 1994. col.772 –931. Dunn, James D.G. “Jesus  : Teacher of Wisdom or Wisdom Incarnate.” Where Shall Wisdom Be Found  ? Wisdom in the Bible, the Church and the Contemporary World. Ed. Stephen W. Barton. Edinburgh  : T & T. Clark, 1999. Dupré, Louis. Passage to Modernity  : An Essay in the Hermeneutics of Nature and Culture. New Haven and London  : Yale University Press, 1993. Ebert, Daniel J. Wisdom Christology  : How Jesus Becomes God’s Wisdom for us. Philipsburg  : Presbyterian and Reformed, 2011. Fleming, Thomas V. “Simplified Devotion to the Sacred Heart.” Theological studies 16 (1952). Galot, Jean. “Quel est l’objet de la devotion au Sacré-Cœur  ?” Nouvelle Revue théologique 77 (1955)  : pp. 924–938. Galot, Jean. “Le Cœur du Christ,” DDB, 1956. Geradon, Bernard de. Le Cœur, la langue, les mains. Paris, 1974. Glotin, Edouard. Il Cuore misericordioso di Gesù. Roma  : Edizioni Dehoniane Roma, 1993. Glotin, Edouard. Le Cœur de Jésus  : approches anciennes et nouvelles. Namur  : Vie consacrée, 1997. Glotin, Edouard. La Bible du Cœur de Jésus. Paris  : Presses de la Renaissance, 2007. Hayes RSCJ, Pamela. The Heart is a Sacred Space. Middlegreen  : St. Paul, 1985. Huet, François. Le règne social du christianisme. Paris  : Firmin Didot Frères, Librairie éditeurs, 1853. Landsberg, Johannes Julius. Pharetra divini amoris. Variis ignitisque aspirationibus, orationibus atque exercitiis referta. Gennepius, 1533. Lebrun, Jacques. Le pur amour de Platon à Lacan. Paris  : Seuil, 2002. Ledure, Yves. Spiritualité du Cœur du Christ  : Ils regarderont celui qu’ils ont transpercé. Bruyères-le-Châtel  : Nouvelle Cité, 2015. Ledure, Yves. “Le règne social de Sacré-Cœur chez père Dehon (1843–1925). Essai d’interprétation d’une dynamique historique.” La devotion au Cœur du Christ. Histoire et symbole. Paray-le-Monial, 1987, pp. 41–60.

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Ledure, Yves. “Pensée sociale et projet fondateur chez Léon Dehon.” Revue des sciences religieuses 84, no. 3 (2010)  : pp. 325–340. Ledure, Yves. “Léon Dehon entre mythe et histoire. L’oubli du sociétal.” Dehoniana X, 2012, pp. 81–112. Levinas, Emmanuel. Humanisme de l’autre homme. (Essais). Montpellier  : Fata Morgana, 1972. Marcel, Gabriel. Homo Viator. Paris  : Aubier, 1944. Margerie, Bertrand de. Histoire doctrinal du culte au Cœur de Jésus. Paris  : Mame, Vol. 1  : 1992, Vol. II  : 1997. Menozzi, Daniele. Sacro Cuore  : Un culto tra devozione interiore e restaurazione cristiana della società. Roma  : Viella, 2001. Mourlon-Baernaer, Pierre SJ. “Cœur – langue – main dans la Bible. Un langage sur l’homme.” Cahiers évangiles no. 46. Paris  : Cerf, décembre 1983. Neri, Marcello. Giustizia della Misericordia  : Europa, cristianesimo e spirituale dehoniana. Bologna  : Edizione Dehonane Bologna, 2016. Neri, Marcello. “Il cuore di Gesù negli scritti di Tommaso da Olera  : Singulare esperienza di Agape.” Tommaso da Olera  : Totus Ardens. Marcelliano, 2019, p. 74–115. Neuhold, David. Mission und Kirche, Geld und Nation  : Vier Perspektiven auf Léon G. Dehon, Gründer der Herz-Jesu-Priester. Basel/Stuttgart  : Schwabe Verlag, 2019. Nygren, Anders. Agape and Eros. London  : SPCK Press, 1953. O’Boyle, Aidan. Towards a Contemporary Wisdom Christology  : Some Catholic Christologies in German, English and French 1965–1995. Rome  : Gregorian Biblical Bookshop, 2003. Pambrun, James. God’s Signature. Leuven  : Peeters, 2018. Pius XII. Haurietis Aquas. 1956. Rahner, Karl. “Some Theses on the Theology of the Devotion.” Josef Stierli, Richard Gutz­ willer, Hugo Rahner and Karl Rahner. Heart of the Saviour  : A Symposium on devotion to the Sacred Heart. New York  : Herder and Herder, 1958. Ramière, Henri. Le Règne social du Cœur de Jesus. Toulouse, 1831. Ricœur, Paul. “The hermeneutics of testimony,” Essays on Biblical Interpretation, ed. By Lewis S. Mudge (Philadelphia  : Fortress, 1980) p. 119–120. Ricœur, Paul. The Symbolism of Evil. Tr. E. Buchanan. Boston  : Beacon Press, 1967. Ricœur, Paul. Amour et justice/Liebe und Gerechtigkeit. Tübingen  : J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1990. Ricœur, Paul. Oneself as Another, tr. Kathleen Blamey of Soi-même comme un autre. Chicago/ London  : The University of Chicago, 1992. Ricœur, Paul. “The hermeneutics of testimony.” Essays on Biblical Interpretation. Ed. Lewis S. Mudge. Philadelphia  : Fortress, 1980. Ricœur, Paul. “Emmanuel Levinas  : Thinker of Testimony.” Figuring the Sacred  : Religion, Narrative, and Imagination. Tr. David Pellauer. Minneapolis  : Fortress Press, 1995. Ricœur, Paul. Memory, History, Forgetting, Tr. Kathleen Blamey and David Pellauer. Chicago/ London  : University of Chicago Press, 2004. Rouselot, Pierre. Pour l’histoire du problème de l’amour au Moyen Age. Paris  : Vrin, 1981 (original 1903. Scheler, Max. Formalism in Ethics and Non-Formal Ethics of Values  : A New Attempt toward

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the Foundation of an Ethical Personalism. Tr. Robert L. Funk. Evanston, Northwestern University Press, 1973. Schillebeeckx, Edward. Jesus, An Experiment in Christology. New York  : Crossroad, 1979. Schüssler Fiorenza, Elizabeth. Jesus  : Miriam’s Child, Sophia’s Prophet  : Critical Issues in Feminist Christology. New York  : Continuum, 1994. Stierli, Joseph, Richard Gutzwiller, Hugo Rahner and Karl Rahner. Heart of the Saviour  : A symposium on Devotion to the Sacred Heart. New York  : Herder and Herder, 1956. Tessarolo, Andrea. “Le règne social du Cœur de Jésus dans les écrits de Léon Dehon.” Rerum Novarum en France. Ed. Yves Ledure. Paris  : Éditions Universitaires, 1991, p. 117–13. Tertünte, Stefan. Léon Dehon und die Christliche Demokratie  : Ein katholischer Versuch gesell­ schaftlicher Erneuerung In Frankreich am Ende des 19. Jahrhunderds. Freiburger theologi­ sche Studien. Freiburg  : Herder, 2007. Van Beeck, Frans. Christ Proclaimed  : Christology as Rhetoric. New York, Ramsey, Toronto  : Paulist Press, 1979. Van den Berg, Jan Hendrik. Het menselijk lichaam, een metabletisch onderzoek. Part I. Nijkerk  : G.F. Callenbach, 1959. Van den Hengel, John. “Can There Be a Science of Action  ?” Philosophy Today 40 (1996)  : pp. 235–250. Van den Hengel, John. “Paul Ricœur’s Oneself as Another and Practical Theology.” Theological Studies 55 (1994)  : pp. 458–480. Van den Hengel, John. “Théologie pratique et l’émergence d’un nouveau soi-même.” Théologie pratique. Pratiques de théologie. Ottawa, University of Ottawa Press, 2013. Van den Hengel, John. “The Self as Witness  : An Anthropology of the Heart.“ Anthropologia Cordis (Seminario teologico SCJ, Taubaté (Brasil), 2014. Studia Dehoniana 61 (2016)  : pp. 107–132. Van den Hengel, John. “Crisis within Modernity  : Léon Dehon and the Social Reign of the Sacred Heart.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 110 (2016)  : pp. 53–83. Van den Hengel, John. “The Social Charism of Father Dehon in the Church.” Re-reading Léon Dehon, Studia Dehoniana. Rome  : Centro Studi Dehoniani, 2017, pp. 43–63. Van den Hengel, John. “A Reflection on the Book of Marcello Neri Giustizia della Misericordia.” Dehoniana XVII (2019)  : pp. 17–34. Walsh, Michael J. The Heart of Christ in the Writings of Karl Rahner. An Investigation of its Christological Foundations as an Example of the Relationship between Theology and Spiri­ tuality. Rome  : Gregorian University Press, 1977.

José Tolentino de Mendonça

Rediscovering the Place of the Heart A Spiritual Challenge for the Present The cardiologist of Indian origin, Sandeep Jauhar, recently wrote a book on the fascinating adventure of modern cardiology. The way he describes the heart can offer a realistic starting point for spiritual and theological reflection. He says  : The heart’s vital importance to our self-understanding is no accident. If the heart is the last major organ to stop working, it is also the first to develop – starting to beat approximately three weeks into fetal life, even before there is blood to pump. From birth until death, it beats nearly three billion times. The amount of work it performs is mind-boggling. Each heartbeat generates enough force to circulate blood through approximately 100,000 miles of vessels. […] We associate the heart with life because, like life itself, the heart is dynamic. From second to second, and on a macroscopic scale, the heart is the only organ that discernibly moves. Through its murmurings, it speaks to us  ; through its synchronized contractions, it broadcasts an electrical signal several thousand times more powerful than any other in the body.1 […] [A] record of our emotional life is written on our hearts.2

The Bible has also reminded us, in a thousand ways, of this realistic centrality of the heart, the first and the last of human organs, an admirable engine, a precise sensor of life, at once tangible and intangible, measurable for its electrical activity, but also for the register of emotional and spiritual life. When the author of John’s First Letter reminds us that “God is greater than our heart”,3 he does not mean that God does not have a heart. On the contrary, God is heart. God has an infinitely large heart of mercy. The words written by the prophet Hosea resound  : “My heart recoils within me  ; my compassion grows warm and tender.”4 For that reason, God guarantees his creature that “you will seek the Lord your God, and you will find him if you search after him with all your heart and soul.”5 The heart becomes the organ used in the search for

1 Jauhar, Heart  : A History, pp. 13–14. 2 Ibid., p. 26. 3 1 Jn 3  :20 (NRSV). 4 Hos 11  :8. 5 Dt 4  :29.

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God because the heart  – and what it signifies  – can teach something fundamental about God. As the Father’s pedagogue, as his revelator, Jesus presents himself to the believer thus  : “[L]earn from me  ; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”6 Benedict XVI commented on this Gospel passage with the following words  : “[…] [F]rom the infinite horizon of his love, God wished to enter into the limits of human history and the human condition. He took on a body and a heart. Thus, we can contemplate and encounter the infinite in the finite, the invisible and ineffable Mystery in the human Heart of Jesus, the Nazarene.”7 And, reinforcing this line, Pope Francis challenges the Church of today to believe in this love, to anchor one’s daily spirituality in the divine heart. He insists on how important it is “to understand, to experience, to enter in this mysterious world, to be astonished and to have patience with this love which communicates itself.”8 In fact, relying on what the heart of Jesus teaches is a greater, more demanding and more urgent challenge than it seems. Very often, the question about God (or the question about the meaning of life) becomes a strictly rational or even too idealized argument, detached from existence, which forces one to relativize if not to ignore what one’s emotions or one’s senses of the body have to say. I remember a terrible phrase by the French poet René Crevel that his body had taught him nothing.9 The mysticism of the Sacred Heart of Jesus affirms exactly the opposite of this sort of asthenia, because in it, as Michel de Certeau explains, the body – our body – is “informed”10. This information that the body carries is a consequence of the mystery of the Incarnation. In the mysticism of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the divine does not escape the potential of the body and its grammar. Or, in other words  : the body is a space of memory which comes to expression in one’s own senses – one’s own senses produce, store, and embody layers of memory. Indeed, human beings have much to learn from the heart and its guardian, the body. For instance, an important theology of the senses was developed in the Christian tradition. This was a theology that, however, considered the senses above all in their spiritual dimension, in a sort of movement that made the soul correspond to what was said about the body. Even if in both cases one speaks concretely of touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight, the so-called natural senses were considered faculties of the body, useful to know earthly things, while the spiritual senses were described

  6 Mt 11  :29   7 Benedict XVI, “Angelus, 1st June 2008,” accessed 13 July 2020, Vatican.va.   8 Francis, “God’s lullaby, 27 June 2014,” accessed 13 July 2020, Vatican.va.  9 Crevel, Mon corps et moi. 10 de Certeau, La fable mystique, p. 408.

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as capacities of the soul, useful to learn divine reality. The dominant paradigm was to a large extent (and in part still is) one of opposition  : a notion of the spiritual experience more as an affirmation of a break than as a construction of unity. The truth is that people today are faced with an increasing need to establish connections, to bring into dialogue the knowledge of belief and the knowledge of life. It is a need to rediscover a grammar of the human as well as a new, certainly more sapiential look on the grammar of faith. Life – and its beating heart – is an immense laboratory for attention, sensitivity, wonder, mystery, research or encounter, and it allows one to recognize the reverberation of a fantastic presence, however precarious and rarefied it may be, namely that of the heart of God revealed by Jesus. For this reason, one must ask oneself  : cannot the spirituality of the heart of Jesus play a role in the process of maturation of faith and its proclamation in the contemporary world  ? Reflecting briefly on the senses, the gateways to the heart of existence, it seems firstly that through touch one reaches the heart. It is perhaps the most visceral, primary, and delicate of the senses. Touch is indelible and concrete  ; it is a boundary of the body and one of its thresholds  ; it is anonymous and ardently singular  ; it is punctual and concise, but its durability in people is often incalculable. One can describe touch as a creator and decoder of languages that seduce or repel, interrupt or prolong, caress or isolate (and vice versa). As the Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa reminds his readers in a valuable book entitled The Eyes of the Skin  : “All the senses, including vision, are extensions of the tactile sense  ; the senses are specialisations of skin tissue, and all sensory experiences are modes of touching and thus related to tactility.”11 With the sense of touch, one is connected to time and memory  : through tactile impressions one sets off on endless journeys without which one would not be oneself. Touch allows one to avoid crashing into one another and, on the other hand, makes encounters possible. For this reason, the question that Jesus asked one day, in the middle of a dense crowd, continues to be significant  : “Who touched me  ?”12 The disciples tried to dissuade him, reminding him that there was a crowd of people holding him and touching him, but in vain, because what Jesus said was that there are correct and incorrect ways of touching. One’s own autobiography is also a story of touch, of the way one touches or does not touch, of the way one has or has not been touched. The story this autobiography contains is mostly submerged  ; one pays no attention to it. Yet, there is a kind of knowledge throughout one’s own life that is reached only through touch – touch as a practice of generating memory and bringing memory to the fore. Peter’s first great encounter with Jesus ends with a particular but extremely valid re11 Pallasmaa, “Touching the World”, p. 10. 12 Mk 5  :31.

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quest. Peter understands who Jesus is and says to him, “Go away from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man  !”13 Instead of saying, “Lord, save me  !”14, as he will do later in the scene of the storm on the lake, Peter here places the objective awareness of his own fragility before the exercise of trust, and prefers to say, “Get away”. The idea of a static boundary between pure and impure, between sin and grace, where no transformation can or does take place, is something that Jesus is determined to deny. Unlike the Pharisaic tradition, for instance, which declared the need for a barrier of purity, Jesus touches the untouchable, and opens His heart to those whom it is forbidden to touch. Concerning taste, the Psalter proposes to taste God. And this is no accident, since the Psalms combine faith with the first person singular. Being poetry and prayer at the same time, they are not built with concepts  ; theirs are words that accompany the body, the real beating of the heart, the pain and delight of existing. What everyone lives is the starting point towards a relationship with God, a relationship that is rarely linear, never predictable or repetitive. The believers who immerse themselves in the psalms do not separate their faith from their emotions. When they must dance, they dance  ; when they must bless, they bless. But at the same time, when they have to cry out into the darkness of the night, they do so with frightening concreteness. Prayer must show the lines of fire of life  ; only in this way can it be a learning about God. It is therefore not surprising that the Book of Psalms occupies such a special place among the biblical texts that refer to taste and flavour. Psalm 27 says, “I have asked the Lord for one thing, and this alone I seek  : to dwell in the house of the Lord every day of my life, to taste the beauty of the Lord….”15 But when does one taste  ? One tastes when one stops merely devouring the world  ; when an inner slowness arrives  ; when one contemplates with one’s taste buds  ; when one’s body contemplates  ; when, entirely focussed, it observes, surprises, glimpses and approaches the secret, letting that sort of epiphany reveal itself. Taste is a form of intimacy that always presupposes deep contact. One can appreciate, evaluate, distinguish the things that remain external  ; instead, taste always implies a total relationship. There is no hurry. The more exquisite the food is to one’s palate, the smaller the portions one divides it into, to prolong that moment. In the smallest portion one feels the ultimate taste  ; in that tiny crumb one captures the highest sweetness. It is not just a matter of filling up one’s stomach, nor of hastily satiating one’s hunger. The revaluation of taste taking place nowadays is also the sign of an epochal change  : people seek a more inclusive knowledge, in which the decisive element is not 13 Lk 5  :8. 14 Mt 14  :30. 15 Ps 27  :4.

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only the mind, but the total reality of the body and of the world that people constitute. Those who do not consider everyday practices, like tasting, a waste of time can gain a greater awareness of themselves. The capacity to taste represents one of the most elementary forces of life. The essential link between knowing and tasting, confirmed by the use of the same word in Latin (sapio), should not come as a surprise. The excellent pedagogue Rubem Alves said, “to enter a school, pupils and teachers should first pass through a kitchen” and learn that knowledge, as well as taste, is an art of desire.16 Thirdly, the sense of smell is a magnificent interpretative centre of life. Every moment, every season, every person has a particular own smell. Smell gives an emotional tone to an instant that one wants to distinguish from others. It is volatile  ; one can only talk about it through metaphors. However, in reality, it is not abstract at all  : its volatility is bound to materialise. In materialising, it has a function of memory linking past, present and future. When a person applies a few drops of perfume on the skin, that same perfume, which has been produced in industrial quantities, becomes their own. It becomes their fragrance. The body makes each perfume unrepeatable, because it absorbs it and reproduces it in a way that is only its own. Smell then appears to be a sort of map, an intimate source of knowledge. Consider for example the following passage from Mark’s account  : “While [Jesus] was at Bethany in the house of Simon the leper, as he sat at the table, a woman came with an alabaster jar of very costly ointment of nard, and she broke open the jar and poured the ointment on his head.”17 What is this woman doing  ? What is she trying to reveal  ? The priceless spikenard she pours on that persecuted preacher’s head is worth more than a thousand words. The languages of faith are necessarily plural, although this is too often forgotten. It is precisely that plurality which is staged here. The sense of smell is a kind of listening, but, if listening is traditionally linked to the reception of verbal speech, the sense of smell listens instead to a silent language, that of faith expressed intensely without the need to name it. There is no doubt that this woman has taken a great risk with her gesture, and that the weight of its meaning has not gone unnoticed among those present. One does not apply perfume on a stranger by chance, nor does one pour such expensive ointment for nothing. The woman has the intention to perfume with the unforgettable smell of spikenard. This is clear from what follows in the story. But some were there who said to one another in anger, ‘Why was the ointment wasted in this way  ? For this ointment could have been sold for more than three hundred denarii, 16 Alves, “A arte de produzir fome” (translation Sharon Casu). 17 Mk 14  :3.

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and the money given to the poor.’ And they scolded her. But Jesus said, ‘Let her alone  ; why do you trouble her  ? She has performed a good service for me’.18

“She has performed a good service for me”  : this comment by Jesus must motivate a reflection on the goodness of what, from other perspectives, seems only a waste. The truth is that one needs not only bread, but also roses. On certain occasions, waste is not only an abnormal or eccentric behaviour, but is the expression that best reflects the essential. The most common attitude is to reduce the spiritual life to what is necessary, to what must be done, to the moral norm, to duty, and not infrequently this causes it to wither. Everything is right, no one can accuse the faithful of anything, but it is the heart that accuses them  : there is little love, little generosity, little excess. And no matter how much one tries to hide it, the reality is this  : where there is no excess of love, there is no love. The life lived in love must seem a waste, to oneself and to others, like that valuable perfume that has been poured. An odour is very different from an image. In the image, the relationship between subject and object takes the form of a representation, but in olfaction the object sticks to the subject  : it is pure impregnation. The image speaks of an object that is outside of the subject, but when the sense of smell signals a perfume it is because it is already on the subject. At the end of the first week of life, newborns recognize their mother by her smell. And vice versa, it also happens that, years later, mothers still miss the unique smell of their baby. One of the most emblematic phrases of Pope Francis’ first apostolic exhortation was the recommendation that shepherds “be shepherds, with the ‘odour of sheep’”19, and the meaning of this is clear. Fourthly, hearing is perhaps one of the most appropriate senses to deal with the complexity of life. Yet human beings listen to themselves so little, and so rarely is the art of listening part of the skills they develop. True listening is practiced not only through external hearing, but also through the senses of the heart. Listening does not simply mean collecting some sound data  : it is first of all an attitude  ; it is an inclination towards the other  ; it is readiness to welcome the said and the unsaid, the enthusiasm of the story and its opposite, its pain. With one’s ears one can hear the noises of the outside world, the cacophony, the voices, the music that comforts us. However, with regard to selfless listening of the other, there is an additional level of hearing that needs to be experienced. It is not simply a matter of listening with the ears, but also of listening with the heart  : a deep listening in which all the senses are necessary. Julia Kristeva talks about an infra-lan18 Mk 14  :4–6. 19 Francis, “28 March 2013, Chrism Mass,” accessed 13 July 2020, Vatican.va

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guage, connected with the body, biology, passions, and an ultra-language, which includes history, present ideas and the future20  : these are all challenges for listening, and again memory has a central role in both dimensions. Judaism and Christianity are religions of listening  : the important prayer of Shemà Israel begins with, “Hear, O Israel”  ; “Let anyone with ears listen”, recites a New Testament motif that characterizes the Christian canon. What is required in listening  ? Perhaps only what Clarice Lispector wrote  : “Listen to me, listen to the silence. What I say to you is never what I say to you but something else instead. It captures the thing that escapes me and yet I live from it […].”21 Finally, sight turns the world into a window, but it is clear that there are other dimensions of looking which are just as essential, starting with the dimension of reflexivity  : the body, which looks at things, is also capable of looking at itself  ; it both sees and is visible. The gaze is essential to be able to celebrate the encounter with oneself and with others. Only if someone looks and lets themselves be impressed by those in front of them can they love people as such. In a similar way, the gaze is essential to begin the search for the meaning of life. One of the most important theological treatises on sight, De visione Dei (The gaze of God), by Nicholas of Cusa, explains God’s gaze in this way  : But the angle of Your eye, O God, is not of a certain magnitude but is infinite. […] Your sight sees – roundabout and above and below – all things at once. […] [Creatures] exist by means of Your seeing. But if they were not to see You, who see [them], they would not receive being from You. The being of a creature is, alike, Your seeing and Your being seen.22

In the Gospels, Jesus realizes a pedagogy of the conversion of the believer’s gaze, which allows one to reach, progressively, a deeper level of understanding. Christ is the therapist of the gaze. He offers one the bridge that allows one to cross from seeing to contemplating and from simple gaze to vision of faith. Iconography of the Sacred Heart often encompasses both dimensions of vision. In conclusion, one must look at spirituality based on the Sacred Heart as an integral art of being. Humanity lacks masters of life, of a total life. It lacks cartographers and witnesses of the human heart, of its infinite and impervious paths, as well as 20 See Kristeva, The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, especially p. 190  ; id., “Freudian Models of Language. A Conversation.” 21 Lispector, Agua Viva, p. 8. 22 Nicholas of Cusa, De Visione Dei, p. 694, p. 695, p. 698.

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of daily life, where everything is, and is not, extraordinarily simple. It needs a new spiritual grammar that can concretely reconciliate the elements that today’s culture often considers incompatible  : reason and sensitivity, efficiency and affection, individuality and social commitment, administration and compassion, spirituality and body, law and heart. Translation Sharon Casu References Alves, Rubem. “A arte de produzir fome.” Folha 29 October 2002. Benedict XVI. “Angelus, 1st June 2008.” Accessed 13 July 2020. Vatican.va. Crevel, René. Mon corps et moi. Paris  : Editions du Sagittaire, 1925. de Certeau, Michel. La fable mystique, xvie–xviie siècle. Vol. I. Paris  : Gallimard, 1987. Francis. “28 March 2013, Chrism Mass.” Accessed 13 July 2020. Vatican.va Francis. “God’s lullaby, 27 June 2014.” Accessed 13 July 2020. Vatican.va. Kristeva, Julia. The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt. Translated by Jeanine Herman. Columbia University Press  : New York, 2000. Kristeva, Julia. “Freudian Models of Language. A Conversation.” Journal of Experimental Psychology 3–4 (Spring 1996–Winter 1997). Lispector, Clarice. Agua Viva. Translated by Stefan Tobler. New York  : New Directions Publishing, 2012. Pallasmaa, Juhani. “Touching the World.” The Eyes of the Skin  : Architecture and the Senses. Hoboken. New Jersey  : Wiley, 2005. Nicholas of Cusa. De Visione Dei. Translated by Jasper Hopkins. Minneapolis  : The Arthur J. Banning Press, 1988. Jauhar, Sandeep. Heart  : A History. New York  : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019.

Editors and Contributors

Editors Franziska Metzger, Prof. Dr. Professor of history at the University of Teacher Education Lucerne, Director of the Master Study Programme “Public History” and of the research focus Memory Cultures at the Institute for History Education and Memory Cultures  ; Chief editor of Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte/Swiss Journal for Religious and Cultural History (SZRKG) Research interests  : memory studies  ; religious history, especially religion and memory, religious transformations in transnational perspectives  ; history of historiography and philosophy of history  ; fin de siècle cultural and intellectual history  ; theory of history Recent publications  : Metzger, Franziska. “Erinnerungsräume.” Ausdehnung der Zeit. Die Gestaltung von Erinnerungsräumen in Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst. Ed. Dimi­ ter Daphinoff and Franziska Metzger. Köln  : Böhlau, 2019, pp. 19–44  ; Metzger, Franziska. “Das Gedächtnis der Religion. Gedächtnis als Kategorie für die Katholizismusforschung.” Katholizismus transnational. Beiträge zur Zeitgeschichte und Gegenwart in Westeuropa und den Vereinigten Staaten. Ed. Andreas Henkelmann et al. Münster  : Aschendorff, 2019, pp. 123–144  ; Metzger, Franziska. “Devotion and Memory – Discourses and Practices.” Contemporary Church History/Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 31.2 (2018)  : pp. 10–30. Stefan Tertünte scj, Dr. Director of the Centro Studi Dehoniani in Rome, Coordinator of the International Dehonian Theological Commission, Chief editor of Dehoniana Research interest  : history of French social Catholicism in the 19th century  ; history and theology of modern and contemporary religious life  ; spirituality of and devotion to the Sacred Heart of Christ Recent publications  : Tertünte, Stefan. “Das Missionarische aus der Sicht der Herz-Jesu-­ Priester (Dehonianer).” Zeitschrift für Missionswissenschaft und ­Religionswissenschaft 103 (2019)  : pp. 301–307  ; Tertünte, Stefan. “Pope Francis and the Revolution of Tenderness  – a new Chance for the Sacred Heart  ?” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte 113 (2019)  : pp.  421–427  ; Neuhold, David and Stefan Tertünte. “Mission als Konsolidierungs- und Profilierungsfaktor einer jungen Kongregation. Zu den Anfängen der Missionstätigkeit der Herz-Jesu-Priester.” 100 Jahre

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IIMF. Ed. Michael Sievernich, Mariano Delgado and Klaus Vellguth. St. Ottilien, 2016, pp. 256–267.

Contributors Paul Airiau, Prof. Dr. Professeur at the Académie de Paris  ; Agrégé et docteur en histoire Research interests  : history of religion and contemporary politics  ; anthropology of contemporary Catholicism (clergy, believers) Recent publications  : Airiau, Paul. “La résurrection dans l’apologétique catholique en France (1870–1900). Croire et savoir l’impossible.” La résurrection de la chair. Actes du colloque organisé par la Faculté de théologie de l’Institut Catholique de Toulouse (19 mai–20 mai 2017). Ed. Philippe-Marie Margelidon, Jean-François Galinier Pallerola and Emmanuel Cazanave. Paris/Toulouse  : Parole et Silence. Les Presses Universitaires, Institut Catholique de Toulouse, 2018, pp.  265–302  ; Airiau, Paul. “Les catholiques traditionalistes.” Les minorités religieuses en France. Panorama de la diversité contemporaine. Ed. Anne-Laure Zwinling et al. Paris  : Bayard, 2019, pp. 233–26  ; Airiau, Paul. “L’homme, l’ecclésiastique, le parlementaire. Pour une anthropologie du clerc en politique.” Le Temple national. Les ecclésiastiques français au Parlement depuis 1789, à paraître en 2021. Sven Baier Scientific collaborator at the University of Teacher Education Lucerne  ; Secondary school teacher in Zurich, teaching History & Geography, English, German, Art and Life Skills  ; master student at the University of Teacher Education Lucerne Research interests  : political education  : Master thesis “Respolitica Helvetica – Zugänge zur politischen Bildung auf Sekundarstufe I in der Schweiz” (2020, together with Damian Troxler) dealing with the access for political education on Secondary I level in Switzerland and outlining a multidisciplinary approach to bring up-to-date political issues into the classroom  ; devotion and memory Stefan Laube, PD Dr. Privatdozent, Institut für Kulturwissenschaft, Humboldt University Berlin  ; currently researcher at the Herzog August Library in Wolfenbüttel on alchemy and its pictorial language Research interests  : the history of collections and museums, memory studies, material cultures and the history of knowledge, especially in the early modern period

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Recent publications  : Laube, Stefan. Von der Reliquie zum Ding. Heiliger Ort – Wunder­ kammer  – Museum, Berlin  : Akademie, 2011  ; Laube, Stefan and Petra Feuerstein-­ Herz (eds.). Goldenes Wissen. Die Alchemie – Substanzen, Synthesen, Symbolik. Exhibition catalogue and essays. Wiesbaden  : Harrassowitz, 2014. David Morgan, Prof. Dr. Professor of Religious Studies and Director of Graduate Studies, Duke University, Durham, USA Research interests  : material culture of religion, visual culture, the history of Christianity in the modern era Recent publications  : Morgan, David. The Forge of Vision  : A Visual History of Modern Christianity. Berkeley  : University of California Press, 2015  ; Morgan, David. Images at Work  : The Material Culture of Enchantment. New York  : Oxford University Press, 2018  ; Morgan, David. The Thing About Religion  : An Introduction to the Material Study of Religions. Chapel Hill, NC  : The University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Marcello Neri, Prof. Dr. Professor for Ethics at the Istituto Superiore di Scienze dell’Educazione e della Formazione “G. Toniolo” of Modena  ; Member of the Departmental Centre “Law and Pluralism” at the Law Faculty of the University of Milano-Bicocca  ; Editor with the online Catholic magazine Settimana News Research interests  : religion, law and politics in Europe  ; ethics and human vulnerability  ; Catholic Church and public space Recent publications  : Neri, Marcello, Fuori di sé. La Chiesa nello spazio pubblico. Bologna  : EDB, 2020  ; Neri, Marcello. “Religione e spazio pubblico europeo  : il potere sovrano dell’economia.” Pluralismo religioso e integrazione europea. Ed. Stefania Ni­ natti. Milano  : Giappichelli, 2019, pp. 87–98  ; Neri, Marcello. “Post-representational Order and Naked Citizenship.” Interdisciplinary Journal for Religion and Transformation in Contemporary Society (2018/2)  : pp. 322–331. Elke Pahud de Mortanges, Prof. Dr. Professor of dogmatic theology at the University of Freiburg i.Br. (Germany) and lecturer in „Gender Aspects in Religious Studies“ at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland). Research interests  : dialogue between theology, literature and art  ; gender aspects in religious studies  ; gender, body and memory  ; history of Christian theology and devotion

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Recent publications  : Pahud de Mortanges, Elke. “Das Schicksal fehl- und totgeborener, ungetauft verstorbener Kinder aus theologischer Sicht.” Das mittelalterliche Marien­ heiligtum von Oberbüren. Archäologische Untersuchungen in Büren an der Aare, Chilch­matt. Ed. Archäologischer Dienst des Kantons Bern. Bern, 2019, pp.  53–83  ; Pahud de Mortanges, Elke. “Body@Performance und Gedächtnis. Zur Anatomie des Heils in den Erinnerungskulturen des Christentums.” Zeitschrift für Kirchliche Zeitgeschichte 31 (2018)  : pp. 348–362  ; Pahud de Mortanges, Elke. “Max, Salvatore und das Heimweh nach der Sehnsucht von einst. Anmerkungen zu Arnold Stadlers Roman ‘Sehnsucht. Versuch über das erste Mal’.” Auch der Unglaube ist nur ein Glaube. Arnold Stadler im Schnittfeld von Theologie und Literaturwissenschaft. Ed. Jan-Heiner Tück. Freiburg i.Br.: Herder, 2017, pp. 99–109. Denis Pelletier, Prof. Dr. Directeur d’études at the Ecole pratique des hautes études in Paris  ; Chief editor of Archives de sciences sociales des religions Research interests  : history of contemporary Catholicism  ; religion and politics in contemporary Europe Recent publications  : Pelletier, Denis. Les catholiques en France de 1789 à nos jours. Paris  : Albin Michel, 2019  ; Pelletier, Denis and Jean-Louis Schlegel. A la gauche du Christ. Les chrétiens de gauche en France de 1945 à nos jours. Paris  : Seuil, 2015 [2012]  ; Pelletier, Denis. La crise catholique. Religion, société, politique en France, 1965–1978. Paris  : Payot, 2005 [2002]. Fransiskus Purwanto scj, Dr. Lecturer at the Faculty of Theology of Sanata Dharma University and the Wedabhakti Theology Faculty, Yogyakarta, Indonesia  ; coordinator of research at the Theology Faculty and in the Archdiocese of Semarang Research interests  : practical theology and Church development Recent publications  : Purwanto, Fransiskus. “Menapaki Jejak Diri dalam Panggilan Kristus.” Rohani 67 (2018  :5)  : pp.  16–20  ; Purwanto, Fransiskus. “Membaca sejarah den­gan kaca mata iman.” Padi Tumbuh Tak Terdengar (Padi Groeit Geruisloos). Ed. Cees van Paassen. Palembang  : Rumah Dehonian, 2018, pp. 1–8  ; Purwanto, Fransiskus. Pengelolaan Data Umat. Surakarta  : Adigamasentosa, 2016. Daniel Sidler, Dr. Scientific collaborator of “Stadt.Geschichte.Basel” Research interests  : cultural and social history of catholic reform  ; history of practices of beatification and sanctification  ; history of early modern cities

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Recent publication  : Sidler, Daniel. Heiligkeit aushandeln. Katholische Reform und lokale Glaubenspraxis in der Eidgenossenschaft (1560–1790). Frankfurt/New York  : Campus, 2017. Nicolas Steeves sj, Dr. Associate Lecturer in Fundamental Theology  ; moderator of the First Cycle of Theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University, Rome, Italy Research interests  : fundamental theology, the theological role of the imagination, creative fidelity, J.H. Newman, 20th c. French Jesuit theologians Recent publications  : Steeves, Nicolas. “La pietà popolare  : un locus theologicus.” Nuova Umanità 227 (2017)  : pp. 21–32  ; Steeves, Nicolas. E io ti dico  : immagina  ! L’arte difficile della predicazione. Roma  : Città nuova, 2017 (with G. Piccolo) (vers. française  : Et moi, je te dis  : imagine  ! L’art difficile de la prédication, Paris  : Éd. du Cerf, 2018  ; vers. spagnola  : Y yo ti digo  : ¡imagina  ! El difícil arte de la predicación, Estella  : EVD, 2019)  ; Steeves, Nicolas. “La postmodernità, (s)fortuna per l’immaginazione  ? Sfide teologiche.” La lotta di Giacobbe, paradigma della creazione artistica. Un’esperienza comunitaria di formazione integrale, su Chiesa, estetica e arte contemporanea, ispirata a Romano Guardini. Ed. Yvonne Dohna Schlobitten and Albert Gerhards. Assisi  : Cittadella 2020, pp. 245–256. José Tolentino Mendonça, Dr. Cardinal, Archivist and Librarian of the Holy Roman Church Recent publications  : Mendonça, José Tolentino. Our Father, Who Art on Earth  : The Lord’s Prayer for Believers and Unbelievers. Mahwah, NJ  : Paulist Press, 2013  ; Mendonça, José Tolentino. No Journey Will be Too Long  : Friendship in Christian Life. Mahwah, NJ  : Paulist Press, 2015  ; Mendonça, José Tolentino. Thirst  : Our Desire for God, God’s Desire for Us. Mahwah, NJ  : Paulist Press, 2019. Damian Troxler, MA Scientific collaborator at the University of Teacher Education Lucerne  ; Secondary school teacher (History & Geography, Music, English, German, Life Skills)  ; PhD-Student in the field of political education and contemporary history Research interests  : political education  : Master thesis “Respolitica Helvetica – Zugänge zur politischen Bildung auf Sekundarstufe I in der Schweiz” (2020, together with Sven Baier) dealing with the access for political education on Secondary I level in Switzerland and outlining a multidisciplinary approach to bring up-to-date political issues into the classroom  ; devotion and memory.

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Editors and Contributors

John van den Hengel scj, Prof. Dr. Professor emeritus Research interests  : Christology, practical theology and the writings of Léon Dehon Recent publications  : Van den Hengel, John. “Crisis within Modernity  : Léon Dehon and the Social Reign of the Sacred Heart.” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Religions- und Kulturgeschichte/Revue suisse d’histoire religieuse et culturelle 110 (2016)  : pp. 53–83  ; Van den Hengel, John. “The Self as Witness  : An Anthropology of the Heart.” Anthropologia Cordis (Seminario teologico SCJ, Taubaté (Brasil), 2014). Studia Dehoniana, # 61 (2016)  : pp. 107–132  ; Van den Hengel, John “Théologie Pratique et émergence d’un nouveau Soi-Même.” Théologie pratique. Pratiques de théologie. Ottawa  : University of Ottawa Press, 2013. Pietro Antonio Viola scj, Dr. Lecturer at the Romano Guardini Higher Institute of Religious Sciences in Trento  ; degrees in Conservation of Cultural Heritage and Theology Research interests  : the relationship between biblical narration and forms of its representation in the artistic field  ; the relationship between theological elaboration and the forms of devotional production influencing the fields of knowledge and artistic practice Recent publications  : Viola, Pietro Antonio. “Tra arte e teologia  : Begarelli e i Benedet­ tini cassinesi.” Emozioni in terracotta. Guido Mazzoni e Antonio Begarelli. Sculture del rinascimento emiliano. Ed. Francesca Piccinini and Giorgio Bonsanti. Modena  : Franco Cosimo Panini, 2009, pp. 71–81  ; Viola, Pietro Antonio. “Anche il Vaticano alla Biennale.” Settimana 25 (2013), p. 14  ; Viola, Pietro Antonio. “Una storia che non c’è. Appunti su un patrimonio iconografico che non si è mai sviluppato.” http://www. dehoniani.it/settimana-dehoniana-una-storia-che-non-ce/, 30 agosto 2016.

ERINNERUNGSRÄUME GESCHICHTE – LITERATUR – KUNST

Band I: Dimiter Daphinoff | Franziska Metzger (Hg.) Ausdehnung der Zeit Die Gestaltung von Erinnerungsräumen in Geschichte, Literatur und Kunst 2019. 288 Seiten, mit 17 s/w-Abb., gebunden € 38,00 D | € 39,00 A ISBN 978-3-412-51316-0 E-Book € 32,99 D | € 34,00 A

Der erste Band der Reihe „Erinnerungsräume“, zu welchem Autorinnen und Autoren aus der Schweiz, Deutschland, Österreich, Dänemark, Polen und den USA beitragen, legt konzeptionelle und thematische Linien für künftige Bände der Reihe. Aus geschichtsund literaturwissenschaftlicher sowie soziologischer Perspektive setzt sich ein erster Teil des Bandes mit dem Umgang mit Zeit in der Erinnerungskonstruktion, mit der Verschränkung von Erfahrung, Zeitwahrnehmung und Zukunftsvorstellungen auseinander. Ein konkreter Fokus wird auf Zeitvorstellungen im fin de siècle liegen, wie sie etwa im Zukunftsroman und kulturpessimistischen Krisenwahrnehmungen hinsichtlich der Zukunft zum Ausdruck kommen. Die Beiträge des zweiten Teils widmen sich Dynamiken von Erinnerungsnarrativen in Literatur, Kunst und Fotographie, Geschichtsschreibung und öffentlicher Geschichtsvermittlung. Spezifische Werke gelangen dabei ebenso in den Blick wie Konflikte um Erinnerungsnarrative im öffentlichen Raum.

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