The Heart Has Its Reasons: Towards a Theological Anthropology of the Heart

The Heart Has Its Reasons explores a hitherto neglected area of theological anthropology: the unity of human emotion and reason embodied in the Biblical concept of the heart. While the theological contours of human rationality have long been clearly drawn and presented as the exclusive seat of the image of God, affectivity has been relegated to a secondary position. With the reintegration of the body into recent philosophical and theological discourses, a number of questions have arisen: if the image (also) resides in the body, how does this change one’s view of the theological significance of human affect? In what way is our likeness to God realised in the whole of what we are? Can one overcome the traditional dissociation between intellect and affect by a renewed theory of love? In conversation with patristic and medieval authors like Irenaeus, Tertullian, Gregory of Nyssa, Maximus, and Thomas Aquinas, and in dialogue with more recent interlocutors such as Blaise Pascal, Ricoeur, Marion, Milbank, and John Paul II, Beata Toth pursues a novel theological vision of the essential unity of our humanity.