The Heart Loves, Will Chooses, and Mind Justifies
...and why this is unhelpful
I continually see a sentiment going around that has some truth to it, but also has some significant error. I thought it might be helpful to consider that here. What is often being articulated is something like this: Who you really are is only found in your gut, and your gut drives your life. “Gut” here is usually seen as your “feelings” or your emotions.
On this framing of personhood, your mind doesn’t actually guide you - nor should it - but is carried along by wherever the gut, and its close friend the will, want to go. This is often juxtaposed as the head vs. the heart. As of late, I’ve seen this opinion connected with Thomas Cranmer, which sounded questionable to me, but someone pointed me to its actual source, which is a talk from Cranmer scholar Ashley Null. As Null puts it here:
“According to Cranmer’s anthropology, what the heart loves, the will chooses, and the mind justifies. The mind doesn’t direct the will. The mind is actually captive to what the will wants, and the will itself, in turn, is captive to what the heart wants.”
Null is a Cranmer scholar, and so I am going to trust that this is a good reading of an aspect of Cranmer’s thought (and I’m not going to critique what Null says but want to critique how his quote is being employed).
It is true, of course, that one of the functions of the mind could be self-justification. But to call this “the mind” is not a valid way to think about the mind biblically, nor historically. The problem is that the “mind” has been reduced to what we used to call ratiocination. Ratiocination was the process of the mind in deductive reasoning (or intellectually reasoning through an argument). But the mind is a much broader thing in biblical and historical psychology than this.
Historically, it makes no sense to say that the “mind doesn’t direct the will,” since the will has no content outside of the mind. The will can only follow what the mind provides, since the will only follows knowledge, and all knowing is an aspect of the mind. Notice how big a “thing” the mind is historically and biblically. We know math, persons, pain, and beauty, and we are even called to know the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge (Eph. 3:19). We are to love God with our minds. Even the memory is a feature of the mind.
What folks seem to be saying when they use this quote is that the mind cannot force the will, directing it to wherever it immediately demands. And there is a lot here that is helpful. Our mind does seek to self-justify. Our mind can seek to self-deceive. But the heart and mind cannot be separated. The mind is in the heart in a biblical psychology. This is why Jesus calls us to “understand with our heart” (Matthew 13:15).
In modern psychological discourse, the mind is often reduced down to one of its characteristics, and is often degraded. What we mean when we use the “head-heart” contrast, I think, is that the mind has a tendency to try to dis-integrate our persons defensively, leading us to shut ourselves off from an aspect of ourselves. In this sense, when we degrade our mind by asserting it is simply something that self-justifies, we are only making the opposing error from what we are reacting against. Seeing people ignore their emotional lives, moderns have tended to just reverse that mistake by undermining the centrality of the intellect in human personhood.
Rather, we are called to be whole-hearted, integrated selves. That is no less a call of the mind than of the will than of our affections. None of those, by themselves, are called “the heart” in scripture. But the heart is the integrating center of a person, bringing all of these capacities into harmony. To be whole-hearted is to embrace the full integration of our humanity according to the full truth of who we are.
This means that no part of our person is somehow untainted by the Fall. Our mind is warped, our will is depraved, our conscience is confused, and our heart seeks to use one of these against the others in dis-integration. None of these function independently, but that is not solely an issue for the mind, but is also an issue for the emotions, will, conscience, etc.
It seems to me that there is a tendency to sanctify one capacity of personhood while downgrading others in contemporary discourse. You can tell a lot about where a person is coming from by discerning which aspect of personhood they see as untainted or what they see as the “true self.” But instead of leading us into integration, they are simply following a pendulum swinging from one error to its opposite.
We need to focus our attention on the full integration and sanctification of the person. Unfortunately, failing to do this often leads to a kind of dis-integration rather than the full integration of who we are in Christ, and who we are called to be in him.