Head knowledge? Heart Knowledge? Huh????

 ‘Huh? Heart knowledge? That doesn’t exist right? Lolz’

‘I don’t know how to define that… is that where you get all the virtues like compassion, and charity?’

‘It’s the subjective experience right? Emotions and opinions that we have on God?’

Scarily enough, these are some of the answers that I got when I asked youth to define the term, ‘heart knowledge’.

Head knowledge and heart knowledge are favourite terms of catechists and adults in charge of formation and the like. I always hear them getting thrown around. You know, ‘David, you have too much head knowledge. You need to learn more heart knowledge!’? Well, actually, no, I don’t know. These terms have actually caused me much angst for a very long time now, because, 1) they are extremely vague and ambiguous terms, so I have spent quite some time trying to figure what they mean, and 2) growing up as an impulsive nerdy teenager, I obviously read a lot and acquired a lot of ‘head knowledge’.

As a confused youth, I went through several phases where I was confused about the terms and just nodded to trying unsuccessfully to ditch ‘head knowledge’, to trying unsuccessfully to ditch ‘heart knowledge’ in a reactionary manner, to finally finding peace after dropping the concept totally for one with clearer and well defined terms. It should be interesting to note that, as someone who has read books and extracts of Catholic teaching fairly decently across the history of the Holy Mother Church’s two thousand history, such terms where never employed until the last fifty years, and then, mostly in evangelical protestant circles. They’re essentially new age fluff as my theologian/teacher mentor calls it.

It tastes good, it sound good, but no one is sure about what it is.

Ambiguity

The ambiguity of terms is a great cause for concern and as a pseudophilosopher and student of science, I do not like ambiguous terms at all. While, head knowledge is easy enough to define, and is 'limited' to the theoretical knowledge or reason that one attains through reading and so on, often these are concrete concepts like ‘Jesus Christ was crucified for our sins.’, however, ‘heart knowledge’ is much more difficult to define. It is anything from between, ‘practical experience’ to ‘feelings and emotions’ to ‘subjective opinions’, but exclude what is head knowledge (after all, they cannot be the same in order for a distinction to occur).

Now, each of these three things are very different and shouldn’t lie under the same umbrella. ‘Subjective opinion’ is something not unique to ‘heart knowledge’ since it will exist in the realm of theory as well, thus the terms will overlap, and remain ambiguous.

Next, ‘feelings and emotions’ are not a good foundation for the faith at all; the church fathers warn that emotions are fickle and easily manipulated. For example, when we are in the presence of the Blessed Sacrament, we should not expect to feel anything at all, because the transubstantiation happens at a level beyond our sensory ability to perceive. What we look at, smells, tastes, looks and feels exactly like ordinary bread and wine. Yes, we often feel a supernatural sense of peace in His presence under the veil of a sacrament, but what happens if all that is taken away, and we presented with the consecrated host that looks, tastes, feels and smells like ordinary bread? Well, our mind intellectually reminds us that piece of bread before is really the body, blood, soul and divinity of Christ hiding under the appearance of bread. I can imagine several possibilities where one will not feel this feeling at Mass, for example being in a state of anger or in a state of distraction. Thus, if one’s foundation of faith is based on feelings, it will surely fall like the house built on sand. (This is not to say that there are not emotions involved in our spiritual life. That supernatural sense of peace that signifies God’s presence is mystical experience, and a great consolation, but should not be the bar for our faith. Neither does it not mean that there is only one way to know things, only that not all ways of knowing things are equal.)

Finally, we are left with ‘practical experience’, which is only one that provides somewhat of a clear distinction between knowledge from the Heart and from the Head. However, even here there lies ambiguity. For example, say, I was meditating on a piece of scripture and was then granted an epiphany of said passage by God, and felt his supernatural peace as reassurance, now would that be head knowledge or heart knowledge? It was certainly a theoretical and reasoned gain of knowledge yet, it was also a practical experience. Furthermore, the seat of knowledge is the head in western philosophy and the heart is the seat of emotion. It is from the west that we as Catholics derive our philosophy. Thus, that is how society has come to view these terms. No one says, ‘my head is filled with sorrow’ or ‘I have grasped the theory of relativity in my heart.’ That certainly sounds odd.

Anti-intellectualism

To add to the problem, when heart knowledge is used in juxtaposition to head knowledge, it is usually taken to mean all three aforementioned definitions at once, with the further presumption that intellect is limited to head knowledge. Yet, knowledge is function of the intellect, in fact, to know something is also act of the intellect (and yes, there is a difference between knowing and knowledge, whereby the former is a spiritual/emotional perception of information and the latter an ownership of information).  Thus, I can know Christ in my heart, but in order to do that, I must have knowledge of Him in my head.

However, this article is not meant to deal with that epistemology, and I trying to make this as readable as possible, so we’ll get back onto the real point, the separation and limitation of the intellect to the ‘head knowledge’. Often, when these terms are used, they are done so, while probably unwittingly, in an antagonistic fashion. At catechism classes and retreats, I so often hear the teacher or retreat master say after a very short and simple lecture, ‘Okay, I think that’s enough head knowledge, let’s do activity X to use our heart to learn instead.’ or during planning sessions, ‘that’s too much head knowledge, we don’t want to go too much in depth, it will fly over their heads.’ Unfortunately, an unintended consequence of keeping lessons ‘practical’ in such a manner is that the kids then go through life with the idea and complacency that I don’t actually need to learn about God, I’m just fine the way I am. Jason T. Adams, a high school theology teacher, sums it up rather neatly, with my emphasis:

In the religion classes at Catholic schools, the academic breakdown and failing interest of the students is caused by two factors. First, students have been conditioned to think that faith and reason are opposed. Catechists have coined an expression that reveals this: "When it comes to faith, I want to teach my students heart knowledge instead of head knowledge." Contrary to this trite philosophy, "head knowledge" (a grasp of the tenets of faith), and "heart knowledge" (the application of understanding to concrete practices) are not mutually exclusive; rather, they are mutually beneficial and inextricably related.

The result of this false dichotomy is an attitude in the students that religion is about feelings, not substance. Because their orientation is non-intellectual from the onset, they are ill equipped to handle concepts that stretch their minds or call for mental discipline. The content of faith becomes so subjective to the students that they believe there are no such things as right or wrong answers to questions of faith.

You can read the rest here. Again, that is not to say that these teachers do it on purpose. I firmly believe it is well intentioned and done as a means of maintaining interest or not to ‘scare’ the kids off. Moreover, these terms and the conventional way that they are used appear to my mind to be remnants of the great anti-intellectual movement of the 1960s. Yes, yes, intellectualism and the intellect are different things, but it is this general I-don’t-want-to-use-my-brain attitude that has prevailed and created the Generation Y and now Generation Z eras of mental laziness and apathy. I had a dear young friend cheekily remark to me the other day, ‘don’t you ever get bored talking about intelligent things? Talk about meaningless things, it’s more fun.’ Personally, I feel this particular attitude is annoying thorn left in society side, amongst other things, from the hippie revolution in the ‘60s.

Hippism. Bringing the world back to the stone age since 1969.

Another problem is that catechists don’t give their teenage students enough credit. In school, by the age of fourteen, they are learning abstract concepts like trigonometry or photosynthesis. These things seem rather easy to understand, however try to recall when you were fourteen trying to grasp the idea that light could be used to split water into hydrogen ions and oxygen ions and the H⁺ ions were then used to power the enzyme that made energy in the body. It probably took you a while, but you learnt it nevertheless and passed your examination.

Theology is no different, it has terms which seem foreign when first discovered, but the definitions are memorised and churned about in the head until an understanding is formed. For example, the idea of Transubstantiation. It essentially means that the substance or essence of the bread and wine, that is their ‘breadness’ and ‘wineness’, the things that make bread and wine, bread and wine, are changed into the substance of Christ, while the accidentals, the smell, shape, colour, texture, etc caused by this ‘breadness’ and ‘wineness’ remains. This is certainly not beyond the average teenager to comprehend, though it will take a bit of time to reflect upon.

However, all this is not to say that one should throw the Summa Theologica at young rebellious teenagers. There are of course different levels of understanding, and the appropriate level should be taught, however the point is that what is taught should not be watered down and diluted like a homeopathic therapy.

Devotion and Theological Thinking

A possible solution to the ambiguity of head and heart knowledge is simple to drop the terms altogether for something which is completely concrete and understandable at an instant.

Consider the third definition of head and heart knowledge, which is the only useable one, that of theoretical and practical application or experience of theology. Theology, very simply put, asks the question of if God exists, and He could talk to us, what would He say? In Christianity, God talked to us, He gave us the Word, and the Word was made flesh and dwelt among us. So, what did this loving word say? In summary, God loves you so much that he sent His only Son to die for your sins, now love Him back with all your being and love your neighbour as yourself.

So how is this translated into theoretical and practical knowledge? Theoretically, one has to have the knowledge that God loves you; practically, one has to love God. Thus, to get the knowledge, one must first learn it and reflect on it, this we call ‘Theological Thinking’. This knowledge is then put into practice in an act of love towards God, simply put, a ‘devotion.’

The Rosary, both a devotion and contemplation.
Archbishop Fulton Sheen calls it 19 minutes of perfect prayer.

Recently, after a talk, my priest reminded us that most people nowadays perform a great deal of devotion but they leave out theological thinking. He said that the two of them go hand in hand and they cannot be separated from each other and that absolutely everyone is capable of some form of theological thinking.

This is certainly true, while not everyone will reach the same depth of thought, it is more than possible to meditate or contemplate on the word of God. That is why a church is usually filled with statues, paintings and stained glass windows that depict saints and various stories from their lives or from the bible. Together with the priest’s homily every Sunday, the simple illiterate folk from olden times probably had a much greater appreciation of theology than we do despite being unable to read.

Intellect

These acts of devotion and theological thinking are in fact acts of the intellect. Thus, in an ironic strict sense, ‘heart knowledge’ is ‘head knowledge’. While knowing God can come through various means, the act of devotion and theological thinking are both acts of intellect, because one must will oneself to perform the action. Since they both stem from the intellect, one cannot separate the practical from the theoretical, so to speak, and one requires both of them together to nourish the intellect and gain a greater knowledge of God. True to the both/and mentality of Catholicism, neglecting one of these acts will result in a stumping of spiritual growth.

This is one of the reasons that the Pentecostal Renewal movements that spring up megachurches have such high attrition rates, they are all devotion without any real foundation. The same can be said for the movements within the church which are influenced by it and similar groups. ‘Head knowledge’ gives ‘heart knowledge’ its foundation.

However, with ‘head knowledge’ being eschewed for ‘heart knowledge’ for the last fifty years, most will be found wanting for even the most basic foundations of the faith to begin some meditation. Which begs the question, over the last year, how many books on the faith has one actually read? They don’t strictly have to be theology, but even books about the lives of saints and spirituality, because if they are good books, they will spring out from theology. Or even articles online, which are very easy to find.

Yes, my friends, this very long article was to inspire you to go pick up a nice good Catholic book. But seriously, the words we use are important because of the concepts that they hold. You'll be doing what the Holy Father, and all his predecessors have been telling us, LEARN about the faith.