What Is the Heart?

In his final encyclical, Dilexit nos, Pope Francis called on philosophers to turn their attention to the heart. “The heart has been ignored in anthropology,” he wrote, “and the great philosophical tradition finds it a foreign notion, preferring other concepts such as reason, will or freedom.” When we lose sight of the heart, Francis warned, we lose the possibility of personal intimacy; we become strangers to ourselves. More than this, the eclipse of the heart lies at the root of many of our gravest global crises—poverty and inequality, war and the constant threat of war.