NORTHEAST CATHOLIC COLLEGE

PRINCIPALITER CORDIS:

PERSONHOOD AND THE PRIMACY OF THE HEART IN AQUINAS’S DE MOTU CORDIS

A SENIOR THESIS

SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR

A BACHELOR OF ARTS IN PHILOSOPHY WITH HONORS

BY

CORIN A. FRIESEN

WARNER, NEW HAMPSHIRE

23 March 2018

 Abbreviations:

ST = Aquinas, Summa Theologiae

DMC = Aquinas, De Motu Cordis (On the Motion of the Heart)

SPEC1 = Aquinas, Commentary on the First Epistle to the Corinthians

DSS = Aquinas, De Substantiis Separatis (On the Separate Substances)

DPN = Aquinas, De Principiis Naturae (On the Principles of Nature)

In De Anima = Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima

In De Caelo et Mundo = Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s De Caelo et Mundo


 Introduction

The heart is a common colloquial symbol for love and personhood. When one says “I love

you with my whole heart,” no one would mistake this phrase as meaning that the person is

restricting love to a merely physical motion of a rather small bodily organ. Rather, everyone

understands that “I love you with my whole heart” means “I love you totally, with my entire

being.” It is assumed that this phrase is merely metaphorical and has nothing to do with human

personhood except poetically. But for St. Thomas Aquinas, the heart is much more than a mere

metaphor.

Anyone acquainted with Aquinas’s anthropology knows that Aquinas defines a human being

as a composite of soul and body. Despite this fact, “Aquinas’s identification of the human person

with the composite has received considerable attention in connection with his account of

personal immortality.”1 In other words, are the immortal souls of the dead still people? Some

Thomists, devoted as they are to the text of Aquinas, say that separated souls are not persons

while other Thomists, concerned as they are with a broader application of Aquinas’s

philosophical framework, are generally inclined to say that separated souls are persons.2

Despite even the traditional Thomist’s adherence to the importance of the body for human

personhood, both sides of the dispute end up taking the fact of the body for granted. Either the

1 Therese Scarpelli Cory, Aquinas on Human Self-Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2004), 90n. Cory goes on to cite significant contributors to this debate, notably including Eleonore Stump,
who falls within the analytic Thomist camp. Cory does not take a side in the dispute because her own
topic—the intellectual soul’s self-knowledge—is not exclusive to either position, though I suspect that the
total ramifications of her research will inevitably lead to the need for an adequate treatment of the issue.
2
The contention between the two sides does not arise from a disparity of premises—both positions agree
to the textual definition of a human being as a composite of soul and body—but from the difference
between the two approaches. Traditional Thomists tend to be quite comfortable remaining within
Aquinas’s text and context (often to a fault), while so-call “analytic Thomists” tend to be quite
comfortable bracketing off text or retooling formulations that are deemed either unhelpful or
unintelligible to current philosophical inquiry (also to a fault).

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body is required for personhood and hence only important to complete a metaphysical system or

the body is not required for personhood and hence not taken very seriously at all. After all, most

of the powers of the composite flow from the soul as its animating principle of actuality, so it

seems that the soul is where all of the action is.

The consequence of this academic tendency is that Aquinas scholarship has become so

focused on the soul that it gives human personhood a rather abstract, disembodied character.

When medieval understandings of the body became outdated, Aquinas’s concept of the soul was

preserved above the changing study of matter. Moreover, Aquinas says that the soul is present in

its entirety in every part of the body, 3 a claim which seems compatible with practically any

system of physics and biology. Aquinas’s major works mostly employ general formulations that

do not seem to require any particular characterization of life in the body. These reasons confirm

the body’s marginalization within Thomistic discussions, so one can understand why the soul

enjoys primacy in studies of Aquinas’s anthropology. One can also understand why Aquinas’s

work can appear removed from actual human experience.

But perhaps the characterization of the body and its role in Aquinas’s anthropology has been

too easily overlooked. It perhaps does not occur to enough Thomists that Aquinas ascertains the

structure and powers of the human soul, including the intellect’s pure immateriality, from its

animation of a human body. After all, the concept of “soul” is only meaningful when understood

as the life principle of a living body,4 and a soul can only animate a body disposed to receive it as

its form.5 Aquinas follows Boethius in defining a person as “an individual substance of a rational

3
Cf. ST I-I q. 76 a. 8
4 “The soul is the act of a physical organic body having life potentially.” ST I-I q. 76 a. 5 sed contra
5
In other words, the human substance is not individuated by any kind of body but by such a body, cf.
DMC para. 24, ST I-I q. 76 a. 5

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nature,”6 but the individuating principle of man is body. If the soul that actualizes the human

composite possesses a hierarchy of powers, it stands to reason that the individuating body itself

will have a hierarchical structure reflecting the nature of which it forms a part. In fact, Aquinas

frequently employs bodily analogies in his argumentation in order to illustrate psychological,

moral, and metaphysical principles.7

A return to human personhood as one encounters it in a human body is crucial to recovering

and furthering a genuinely Thomistic account of human personhood, one that asks not only

“what is a human person?” but also “what makes a person specifically human?” The scope of an

exhaustive project adequate to this topic would require a deep investigation of Aquinas’s texts

and also an extensive engagement with contemporary physics and biology, both of which the

present thesis cannot even remotely hope to address sufficiently. Rather, this thesis will focus on

Aquinas’s little-referenced treatise on the heart, De Motu Cordis, in order to discern Aquinas’s

conceptions of the human heart.

Most of Aquinas’s references to the heart come in the form of quotations from Scripture

which employ the term “heart” to designate the deepest aspect of a human being. However,

Aquinas does mention the heart outside of Scripture in notable places, most notably devoting his

treatise De Motu Cordis exclusively to the heart. De Motu Cordis itself seeks merely to discover

6 ST I-I q. 29 a. 1
7
Aquinas agrees with Aristotle in criticizing Plato on just this point, cf. In De Anima, Bk. I, c. I, l. 8, 106.
Essentially, Aquinas says that Plato was a faulty metaphysician because he argued from constructed
images not found in nature rather than from natural objects. See also Cory’s mention that “Aquinas’s
theory of indistinct cognition even has the resources to explain why it is psychologically possible for
Socrates to conclude wrongly that the ‘I’ he perceives just is his soul or mind to the exclusion of the
body” (Cory, Aquinas and Human Self-Knowledge, 91). Similarly, the “indistinct” account of the physical
world and the body in most Thomistic accounts leads Thomists to give too much priority to the soul
abstracted from body, to metaphysics removed from physics, and (one fears) to an absolute ethics in an
all-too Aristotelian isolation from Christian revelation.

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the cause of the heartbeat of the physical heart. However, this “merely physical” treatise of

Aquinas is saturated with rich metaphysical content that points directly to the startling

implication that Aquinas conceived of the heart as the ultimate reality of the human subject.

This thesis claims that Aquinas implies in De Motu Cordis that the heart is the source and

summit of human personhood. Such a “total” reading of the work is legitimated by the status of

De Motu Cordis as one of the most mature of Aquinas’s writings, being penned while Aquinas

was producing the latter parts of his Summa Theologiae in Naples, likely in the final year of his

life (1273).8 The thesis will present Aquinas’s conceptions of human personhood in order to

frame its reading of De Motu Cordis. It will then explicate the text of De Motu Cordis in light of

some key references from within Aquinas’s larger work in order to show that the heart enjoys

ontological priority for the existence of human personhood. A brief survey of important texts in

Aquinas follows in order to apply this realist conception of the heart to Aquinas’s larger work.

Finally, some recent biological research is referenced to illustrate that Aquinas’s account of the

human heart, far from being merely outdated medieval physiology, has bearing on the findings of

contemporary science and contributes to a bioethical critique of brain-death as a criterion for

death.

“My Soul Is Not I”

It is easy to assume that where there is a soul, there is a person, much as proponents of brain-

death as a criterion for death assume that where there is a brain there is a person. But Aquinas

says that “man is not a soul only, but something composed of soul and body.”9 Aquinas identifies

8 Cf. Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas (Vol 1): The Person and His Work (Washington D.C.: The Catholic
University of America Press, 1996), 214, 327, 356
9
ST I-I q. 75. a 1

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man with the composite of soul and body because of his understanding of Boethius’s definition

of a person which Aquinas adopts: “a person is an individual substance of a rational nature.”10

This definition applies to God and angels as well as to human beings because God and angels

have rational natures as well. 11 The rational nature as defined is not sufficient to constitute a

person because the nature is signified by definition abstractly, constituting a secondary substance

rather than a primary substance; but a person is a primary substance. 12 This restriction makes

sense because it would be absurd to point to the definition of human nature—“rational animal”—

and say “that’s Socrates.” Instead, “Socrates” is this rational animal, a primary substance.

Thus an individuating principle is required in order to constitute a person, not merely the

definition of a nature. God can be said to be an individual not as if he were composed of matter13

but because in Him alone Essence and Existence (esse) are one. 14 An angel is an individual

because, although it is not material, its essence is distinct from its act of being (esse), i.e. an

angel’s essence and existence are distinct. A human is an individual because his nature—rational

animality, which is another way of saying soul-body composite—enters into composition with

matter. What makes Socrates a rational animal in general is his rational animality because he

possesses this nature in common with other humans; but what makes Socrates this rational

animal is his flesh and bones animated by his soul, not the idea of rationality and general flesh

and bones added to it.15 In other words, the individuating principle of human nature is the body.

10 ST I-I q. 29 a. 1
11 Cf. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being
(Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000), 241-242
12 Cf. ST I-I q. 29 a. 1 ad 2: “When ‘individual’ is added, [the definition] is restricted to first substance.”
13
Cf. loc. cit. ad 4
14 Cf. Wippel, 244
15
Cf. Wippel, 241: “Human being taken universally does not subsist, but this human being, to whom the
meaning of person applies, subsists.”

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 The absence of the body signals an absence of what constitutes a human primary substance,

and hence the soul separated from the body is not a person (i.e. by Boethius’ definition of a

person as applied to humanity). Aquinas states this fact most pithily in his commentary on First

Corinthians, significant for the fact that Aquinas penned it with his own hand in the last few

years of his life, the same period in which he authored De Motu Cordis.16 Aquinas says “the soul,

since it is part of man’s body, is not an entire man, and my soul is not I.”17 The formulation is

unmistakably clear: a human soul separated from its body is not a person. It is for this reason that

Aquinas goes on to give, perhaps surprisingly, a philosophical, not theological, proof for the

resurrection of the body. His reason for doing so is surprising as well: “if the resurrection of the

body is denied, it is not easy, yea it is difficult, to sustain the immortality of the soul.”18

Essentially, since nature is always moving towards perfection and nature’s final causality is never

thwarted, it is absurd to think that death, which is an imperfection, would be the final event in a

human life. One can therefore expect to be reunited with one’s body in the future.19 It is

important to keep these mature conceptions of human personhood from Aquinas in mind because

it highlights just how concrete Aquinas takes the existence of a human person to be and just how

seriously he identifies human personhood with the composite of soul and body.

Given this summary of Aquinas’s metaphysics of personhood, one may immediately object to

the project of this thesis by claiming that Aquinas has already sufficiently characterized human

16 Cf. Torrell, 250

17
SPEC1 para. 924
18 loc. cit.
19
Aquinas notes that this natural argument is the reason why Plato believed in reincarnation: Plato
essentially misinterpreted nature’s teleological movement, cf. loc. cit. Thus the only bit of revelation
needed for Aquinas’s argument is the fact that time had a beginning and will have an end, cf. Aquinas, De
Aeternitate Mundi.

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personal existence. Aquinas clearly uses the term “person,” not “heart.” It seems that there is no

need to speak about the heart at all except by way of metaphor or synthesis with Scripture. While

it is true that Aquinas has definitively stated that the body is required for human personhood, this

definitive statement gives no positive characterization of what this life in the body entails.

Moreover, Aquinas took Scriptures, including its term “heart,” to be authoritative and this fact is

born out by Aquinas’s use of the term “heart” outside of explicitly Scriptural contexts. Cory

suggests that Aquinas seems to use the term “heart” to indicate “what is most private in human

psychology”20 but she ascribes Aquinas’s adoption of the more or less metaphorical term to the

language of his sources, mainly Scripture and Augustine. 21 However, in answering the question

whether man can teach the angels, Aquinas says “angels are never enlightened by men

concerning Divine things. But men can by means of speech make known to angels the thoughts

of their hearts: because it belongs to God alone to know the heart’s secrets.” 22 What is striking in

this passage is that Aquinas finds it expedient to add that man makes the thoughts of his heart

known to an angel by means of speech (per modum locutionis). By drawing the speech-act into

his formulation of disclosing personal secrets, Aquinas seems to be emphasizing that a human

person’s bodily nature is necessary for a human being to be a full human person, an aspect of

knowledge that angels do not have from personal experience and which therefore only God can

know. While locutionis may be taken to mean a merely mental “word” in the Augustinian sense,

the fact that Aquinas uses the metaphor “heart,” a physical metaphor, lends itself to a more realist

interpretation. This passage opens the door to interpreting Aquinas’s conception of the heart as

more than a metaphor for personhood, having to do with the concrete manifestation of the human

20
Cory, “Attention, Intentionality and Mind-Reading in Aquinas’s De Malo” in Questions on Evil: A
Critical Guide, Ed. M. V. Dougherty (London: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 170.
21 Cf. op. cit. 171
22
ST I-I q. 117 a. 3

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composite, as he implies in De Motu Cordis.

The Significance of Heart in De Motu Cordis

That the heart may be crucial in characterizing human personhood was a concept not at all

foreign to Aquinas. Aquinas lived in “a time when life was defined by extension into the world”

and by circulations of “a whole range of physical and spiritual entities in motion, variously

routed out of and into the heart.”23 The paradigm of the heart even affected political theory.

Aquinas himself likens a king to the heart in the passages of De Regno which he himself

authored.24 Aquinas took time away from his Summa Theologiae near the end of his life to treat

of the heart, indicating that the heart was no mere trivial concern to him. A look at the text of De

Motu Cordis reveals that Aquinas saw the heart as the source and summit of human personhood

as a composite of soul and body.

De Motu Cordis has an ostensibly small scope, namely, to characterize the nature of the

heart’s natural motion, i.e. the heartbeat: “What moves the heart and exactly what kind of

movement does it have?” 25 In light of what was said earlier about discerning the nature of the

human soul from its manifestation in the body, Aquinas shows in this defining question of De

Motu Cordis a keen interest in an exact description of the heart’s physical motion. He is keenly

aware that a mistaken characterization of the facts would affect his account of their causes,

especially as it touches the soul.

Aquinas eliminates various possibilities for the cause of the heart’s motion with a palpable

attitude of wonder at the strange motion the heart possesses. The cause does not appear to be the

23
Webb, The Medieval Heart (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 2
24 Cf. Aquinas, De Regno ad Regem Cypri, Bk. 1 para. 19
25
DMC para. 1

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nutritive soul since the motion of the heart does not appear to produce any of its effects

(generation, nutrition, growth or diminution). 26 Nor does it appear to be the sensitive or

intellectual soul since these powers only move appetitively, a kind of motion which does not

seem to belong to the evidently involuntary motion of the heart.27 The motion of the heart even

seems unnatural since, while every natural motion is not violent, the heart’s motion appears

violent in that it consists of the opposite motions of push and pull.28 Nevertheless, Aquinas is

compelled to note that the heart’s motion must indeed be natural and even intrinsic since the

cessation of the heartbeat ends an animal’s natural life.29

To solve this conundrum, Aquinas takes five steps amounting to a radical understanding of

the human heart. First, Aquinas takes the tact of launching the discussion into the cosmic realm.

In responding to the opinion that the heart is moved by heat, Aquinas states that

a fully developed animal, one that is capable of moving itself, is more like the
whole universe than anything else. This is why man, who is the most fully
developed of animals, is called by some a microcosm. Now in the universe the
first motion is local motion, which causes alteration [e.g. warmth] and the other
motions. So we more clearly see in animals that local motion is the principle of
alteration, and not the contrary [i.e. more universal motion, e.g. elemental fire or
heavenly bodies]. As the Philosopher says in the Physics: ‘For all natural things,
to move is to live.’30

Aquinas is saying that heat does not move the heart but rather that the heart produces heat by

26 Cf. op. cit., para. 2

27 Cf. op. cit., para. 3
28
Cf. op. cit., para. 4. These are the familiar “systole” and “diastole” of the human heartbeat.
29 Cf. loc. cit.
30
op. cit., para. 9

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by moving.31 More importantly, Aquinas draws an analogical likeness between fully developed

animals (among which are human beings) and the universe as a whole. Aquinas plunges the

conception of man deep within paradox: on the one hand, man is a part of a universe (“micro-”);

on the other hand, man is a universe unto himself (“-cosm”). 32 This paradoxical tension is crucial

to understanding the experience of human personhood as a soul-body composite because it

characterizes it with the simultaneity of being at once a part and a whole. Aquinas applies this

sort of analysis in characterizing the experience of animality:

when an animal descends [i.e. falls] it undergoes a motion natural both to it as a

whole and to its body, since in the body of an animal the dominant element is
heavy, whose nature is to move downward. But when an animal rises it undergoes
a motion natural to it as a whole, because its source is an intrinsic principle,
namely the soul.33

This theme of paradoxical simultaneity will be taken up later, but the crucial point to keep in

mind at this point is that Aquinas draws an analogy between man and the cosmos in order to get

a clue as to what what the place and cause of the heart’s motion might be.

Second, Aquinas asserts that the motion of the heart is the first motion of the animal: “the

essential is prior to the accidental. But the first motion of the animal is the motion of the heart.” 34

In this way, Aquinas can already claim that the heart performs for the body what the First Mover

31 Contrary to Descartes’ opinion in his Discourse on Method , Aquinas holds that heat’s essential purpose
is to warm; any resulting motion is accidental. Hence it cannot be the cause of the heart’s motion, but
rather the heart produces heat. Aquinas does say near the end of De Motu Cordis that “warmth and cold,
whether from the outside or occurring naturally within, cause such motions of the heart and private parts
in animals, even against reason” (DMC para. 28), attributing a reason to for the rapidity of the heart’s
motion in an encounter with a hot subject. Cf. Descartes, Discourse on Method & Meditations on First
Philosophy, Translated by Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), Part V, 49
(p. 27)
32
This tension is more or less characteristic of medieval thought: “in medieval thinking, the body does
not stand only for the world, it is defined, above all, by the way in which it stands in the world” (Webb,
7).
33 DMC para. 11
34
op. cit. para. 10

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performs for the cosmos, that is, to effect the first motion. However, this likeness only regards

the heart insofar as it is a bodily organ, as this function of the heart is performed just as well in

animal bodies as it is in human bodies. Aquinas acknowledges this fact by stating that “in

animals that act only by nature and not by intent, the whole process of motion is natural…. But

only man acts from intent and not by nature.”35 While it seems the cause of the heart’s motion

has nothing to do with man’s intentional agency and hence with his personhood, Aquinas is not

finished with his analogies yet.

Third, Aquinas therefore draws a series of parallel analogies regarding first things, expressly

arguing for the naturalness of even intentional human agency:

Nevertheless, the principle of every human action is natural. For although the
conclusions of the theoretical and practical sciences are not naturally known, but
rather are discovered through reasoning, nevertheless the first indemonstrable
principles are naturally known, and from them we come to know other things. In
the same way, the desire for the ultimate goal, happiness, is natural to humans, as
is the aversion toward unhappiness. Thus, the desire for things other than what
constitute happiness is not natural. The desire for these other things proceeds from
the desire of the ultimate goal. For the goal in acts of desire is just like the
indemonstrable principles in acts of the intellect, as is said in the second book of
Physics (200a15-25). And so even though the movements of all the other parts of
the body are caused by the heart, as the Philosopher proves in On the Motion of
Animals (703a14), these movements can still be voluntary, while the first
movement, that of the heart, is natural. 36

Simplifying the passage down to its essential analogies, Aquinas has just drawn a likeness

between A) the first indemonstrable principles in human reason, B) the necessary desire for

happiness in the human will, C) the principle of appetite in animals, i.e. the sensitive soul, and D)

the first motion of the heart in the body. These likenesses are not accidental. They are crucial to

35 op. cit. para. 13

36
op. cit. para. 14

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showing how the heart, being a physical organ as part of the body of a human being’s composite

nature, reflects the nature of which it forms a part. The likeness drawn between natural desire for

happiness and the motion of the heart is significant for explaining how the heart’s motion,

inasmuch as the heart moves all of the other parts of the body as its “first cause,” can give rise to

such diversity of motion in the body. Moreover, the physical beating of the heart is a physical

image of the constant and stable inclination of the will towards happiness as its necessary desire.

Far from being without hierarchy, Aquinas indicates that just as there is a hierarchy of powers in

the soul and a priority of principles within knowledge and appetite, the body likewise possesses a

hierarchy reflecting the cosmos and that which animates it, i.e. the soul.

Fourth, Aquinas takes up what he has already hinted at by saying explicitly that the motion of

the heart (and therefore the hierarchy in the body) is the natural result of the soul:

an upward motion is natural to fire as a result of its form, and hence that what
generates fire, giving it its form, is essentially a place-to-place mover…. [I]nsofar
as the animal has a particular kind of form, namely the soul, nothing prohibits it
from having a natural motion as a result of that form. And the cause responsible
for this motion would be what gives the form.37

In other words, Aquinas says that since the natural action of fire is upward motion, its form must

be capable of imparting locomotion. Similarly, since the animal possesses the natural motion of

the heartbeat, there must be a form capable of imparting locomotion to the heart. No other

intrinsic principle is able to do this in an animal other than the soul. When this insight is

considered in light of the status of the heart as the first motion of an animal, it turns out that it is

really the soul which moves the heart as a natural result of its being the form of the heart. Thus

the heart, being body, receives motion from the soul.

37
op. cit. para. 15

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 It must be noted immediately that the heart’s relationship to the soul has been established as

matter to form, and thus the heart is no longer considered as a merely physical organ but more

belonging to the composite of matter and form, i.e. body and soul. This composition of the heart

is crucial to bear in mind in order to draw from it its full significance for human personhood.

Fifth, Aquinas feels comfortable to declare “thus, the motion of the heart is a natural result of

the soul, the form of the living body and principally of the heart.” 38 In the context of the

exposition of this thesis, Aquinas’s conclusion appears appropriate and even lackluster. However,

it is otherwise not hard to miss just how startling this assertion is: the soul is the form of the body

but principally of the heart (principaliter cordis). Aquinas appears to contradict what he himself

says in his Summa Theologiae in which he explicitly says that the soul is present whole and

entire in every part of the body.39 How is it possible for the soul principally to inform the heart?

Is Aquinas making a claim similar to Descartes’ pineal gland that the soul is exclusively in the

heart while the heart moves the rest of the body mechanically? Or is Aquinas saying that the soul

is “more present” in the heart than in the other parts of the body?

Aquinas does explicitly say that the soul is present in every part of the body and yet also says

that the soul moves the heart principally. The solution to this apparent contradiction is Aquinas’s

likeness between man and the cosmos. The soul animates the body and is present in every part of

the body, just as God is the First Mover of the universe and in His Providence is present in every

part of the universe. The omnipresence of God does not mean that God as present in one place as

He is in another in an absolutely unqualified sense; rather, “as long as a thing has being, God

38 “Sic igitur motus cordis est naturalis quasi consequens animam, inquantum est forma talis corporis, et
principaliter cordis.” DMC para. 17
39
Cf. ST I-I q. 76 a. 8

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must be present to it, according to its mode of being.” 40 The more something partakes in being,

i.e. the more actual it is, the more it resembles God and the more perfectly God dwells in it

according to its own mode of being. Therefore, a cause that imparts causality to other causes, as

God does, is “more strongly the cause of all motions than are the individual moving causes

themselves.”41 Within the body, the heart is the first mover causing all of the other movements of

the body; but within the composite of soul and body, the heart receives its natural motion from

the soul as the cosmos is moved by the First Mover.

It is well to observe immediately that Aquinas does not open himself up to the criticisms

justly leveled at Descartes’ pineal gland because Aquinas does not think that a heart transplant

would entail a change of soul. Since the soul is everywhere in the body but animates it

principally through the heart as the first cause of motion in the body, a heart transplant simply

entails a material substitution of the organ principally animated by the soul, not the only organ

animated by the soul.

Because the heart is the principal thing moved by the soul, the heart takes on the character of

a celestial sphere in Aquinas’s cosmology. Indeed, it resembles the highest sphere in the cosmos,

which the First Mover moves directly according to Aquinas’s cosmology. For Aquinas, this

cosmological likeness solves the apparent violence of the motion of the heart, being made up of

the opposite movements of push and pull. In a beautiful passage, Aquinas says:

It is important to note that every property and movement is a result of a form in a

particular condition. So as a result of the form of a subtle element like fire, there
is motion to a subtle place, namely upwards motion. Now the most subtle form on
earth is the soul, which is most like the principle of the motion of the heavens.

40ST. I-I q. 8 a. 1; emphasis added.

41
DSS c. XIV para. 77, said of God the Unmoved Mover inasmuch as all causes that bestow the power of
causality upon other causes are more causes than those whose power of causality is thereby caused.

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 Thus, the motion that results from the soul is most like the motion of the heavens.
In other words, the heart moves in the animal as the heavenly bodies move in the
cosmos.42

This beautiful statement, drawing on medieval astronomy, likens the heart to a heavenly body,

moving constantly and enjoying a cosmic status as one of the secondary causes of physical

changes within the sublunary realm. 43 In Aquinas’s cosmology, the heavenly bodies cause

motions beneath their spheres (including the “sublunar” motions on earth) by being directed by

angels—Aristotle’s “separate intelligences”—whose wills are perfectly inclined towards and

obedient to the laws of the First Mover (God). 44 Aquinas claims that the heart is like these

heavenly bodies in that “in order for the heart to be the beginning and end of all motions in the

animal, it had to have a movement that is like a circle, but not exactly circular, composed namely

from a push and pull.”45 Circularity is the closest a natural body comes to divine immutability, as

“every movement arises from something immovable.” 46 Aquinas thus likens the systolic and

diastolic “push-pull” motion of the heart to the continuous, circular motion of the heavenly

bodies, which are in turn imitations of Divine Causality. These likenesses are not perfect but

analogous, reflections of the First Cause according to their own mode of being.

42 “Omnis autem proprietas et motus consequitur aliquam formam secundum conditionem ipsius, sicut
formam nobilissimi elementi, puta ignis, consequitur motus ad locum nobilissimum, qui est sursum.
Forma autem nobilissima in inferioribus est anima, quae maxime accedit ad similitudinem principii motus
caeli. Unde et motus ipsam consequens simillimus est motui caeli: sic enim est motus cordis in animali,
sicut motus caeli in mundo.” DMC para. 18; emphasis added.
43 “The rays from the heavenly bodies do in fact materially affect all things on earth” (In De Anima, Bk II,

Ch. VII, Lectio 14, para. 420). Aquinas also says “hence the higher a celestial body, the more universal,
lasting, and powerful its effect. And since the celestial bodies are the instruments, so to speak, of the
separate substances which cause motion, it follows that a substance which moves a higher orb has a more
universal knowledge and power, and must therefore be nobler” (ibid., Bk XII, Ch. 8, Lectio 9, para.
2562). Aquinas states this after describing the fascinating particular effects of each planet on what lies
below its sphere.
44
Cf. DSS c. XVIII
45 DMC para. 19
46
ST I-I q. 82 a1

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 Although the likeness of the heart to the heavenly bodies and to the First Mover in the body

applies to irrational animals as well as to man, the heart of a man is principally informed not by

any soul but by the soul to which it is disposed. In fact, nothing can be informed by a given form

unless it is disposed to receive that form.47 So a cat’s heart is disposed to receive the animal soul

of a cat, not of a man; but Socrates’ heart is disposed to receive the form of the rational soul, not

an irrational feline soul.

One can discern why these thoughts on the heart in De Motu Cordis imply that the heart is

the principal source of human personhood. According to Aquinas, the human person is the

composite of soul and body, and the soul is the form of the body but principally of the heart;

therefore, the heart is the principal (i.e. most prior) composite of soul and body in the total

composite that is man. It must be stressed that this is not a temporal priority, nor a qualitative

priority, but an ontological priority analogous to God’s omnipresence and Providence present in

the causes of the universe to the degree that they participate in being. Aquinas also says that “the

middle [is that] by which the nature of an animal is preserved, namely, the heart.”48 The heart has

metaphysical priority for human personhood because it is the the principal composite in the

bodily hierarchy of a human being’s individual substance as a rational creature by which the

composite is principally preserved.

As far as the heart being the summit of human personhood, Aquinas says that what is in the

47 “But in the things of nature, the form is not the result of the matter, but on the contrary, as is evident in
the second book of Physics, matter has a disposition for form” (De Motu Cordis para. 26). This is why
Aquinas says that in order for a change to occur, one must have three things present: matter, form, and
privation, i.e. the potential to receive the given form or the disposition towards receiving that form. Cf.
DPN, c. 1, para. 8.
48
In De Caelo et Mundo, Lecture 20, Chapter 13, 482. Significantly, this work is contemporaneous with
De Motu Cordis, cf. Torrell, 234

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middle has the character of an ultimate. 49 All motions of the composite arise from the heart “and

they also end there.” 50 It belongs to the heart’s reflection of the First Mover by its imitation of

circular motion that the motions to which it gives rise also find their rest in returning to it. This

occurs physically with the circulation of the blood, a scientific discovery unknown at the time of

Aquinas; yet Aquinas still intuited that the heart gave rise to circular motion. The point is that the

heart is not only the principal part of the body animated by the soul but also the ultimate thing

animated by the soul, that to which the composite life of a human person is most linked. 51

A fascinating implication of the heart as likened to the motion of a heavenly body is the

possibility of making a philosophical argument for the existence of a guardian angel for each

human person. Since Aquinas accepts Aristotle’s attribution of the motion of the heavenly bodies

towards their ends to intelligent substances, which Aquinas understands to be what the Judeo-

Christian tradition has called angels,52 it is easy to see that the soul, as active principle, is like an

angel to the physical organ of the heart as its direct mover (the heart “moves in the animal as the

heavenly bodies move in the cosmos” 53). But if the likeness be taken as referring to the heart as

the principal composite—the source and summit of human personhood—the likeness of the heart

to the motion of a heavenly body indicates a higher substantial intelligence that guides a human

person towards happiness. The physical beating of the heart is the physical image of the

49 Cf. In De Caelo et Mundo, Lecture 20, Chapter 13, 485

50 DMC, para. 19
51
“The vitals [are] those functions that are immediately related to the heart's motion, such that when they
cease life ceases.” DMC, para. 24
52 Cf. Aristotle, “Metaphysics,” Bk XII, Chapter 8, 1073a35-37. Aquinas, in commenting on this passage

and on the whole of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, never once calls these substantial movers “angels;” however,
he accepts Aristotle’s primary postulation of the existence of these intelligent movers. It is in De
Substantiis Separatis that Aquinas reveals that he understands them to be the angels as the Christian
revelation calls them, which Aquinas makes explicit in Chapter XVIII.
53
DMC, para. 18

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necessary inclination of the will towards happiness, and the heart as the source and summit of a

human person yearns for happiness in the entire composite, body and soul. Insofar as this motion

is a motion resembling the motion of the heavenly bodies, an intelligence may very well guide it.

This surprising implication points to a rational, philosophical foundation for positing a guardian

angel that watches over and guides each human heart. This position has precedent in the

philosophical tradition in Socrates’ daimon or divine sign.54

Supporting Passages

In light of the conclusion that Aquinas implies in De Motu Cordis that the heart is the source

and summit of human personhood, there are two particularly significant passages from Aquinas’s

Summa Theologiae that take on new meanings otherwise inaccessible to more metaphorical

readings and even help to confirm the findings in De Motu Cordis.

The first passage indicates that the heart indicates the totality of a human being. Aquinas

dedicates an entire article in his Summa Theologiae to “whether it is fittingly commanded that

man should love God with his whole heart?”55 It is to be expected that Aquinas answers

affirmatively, but it is his exact formulation that is of interest here: “some kind of totality was to

be indicated in connection with the precept of the love of God.”56 Aquinas here indicates that the

heart indicates a total love for God, one that includes heart, soul, mind, and strength. It is

important to note that the following question asks “Whether to the words, ‘Thou shalt love the

Lord thy God with thy whole heart,’ it was fitting to add ‘and with thy whole soul, and with thy

54
Cf. Plato, Apology 31d and Phaedrus 242b-d
55 ST II-II q. 4 a. 4
56
loc. cit.

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whole strength’?” 57 Although Aquinas answers that the heart here signifies the will, he says that

the will here moves the mind, the sensitive appetites (“soul”), and the bodily strength of a person

to the love of God. This “total coordination” by the will of all of the faculties and powers of a

person, body and soul, still indicates that the heart indicates a totality that encompasses the

human person in its composite of soul and body without at all separating the two. It must be kept

in mind that Aquinas first answers the question about the heart’s totality before then answering

why the Scripture adds to such a total concept “soul” and “strength.”

The second passage indicates that the heart signifies the nature of a human being which

encompasses both body and soul, i.e. the composite. Aquinas answers the question whether the

New Law, the law of the Gospel, is written upon the heart. Aquinas answers affirmatively “we

must say that the New Law is in the first place a law that is inscribed on our hearts, but that

secondarily it is a written law.”58 Aquinas clarifies what he means by his use of the word “heart”

in this context in his reply to Objection 2, which argued that the natural law is already written on

the human heart and is thus sufficient to the works of the New Law:

There are two ways in which a thing may be instilled into man. First, through
being part of his nature, and thus the natural law is instilled into man. Secondly, a
thing is instilled into man by being, as it were, added on to his nature by a gift of
grace. In this way the New Law is instilled into man, not only by indicating to
him what he should do, but also by helping him to accomplish it.59

Here Aquinas designates “man’s nature” as that upon which the law of the Gospel is inscribed,

whereas earlier he had used the term “heart.” The conclusion follows that “heart” here signifies

“human nature” for Aquinas, which is the composite of soul and body, as his definition of human

57
ST II-II q. 4 a. 5
58 ST I-II q. 106 a. 1
59
loc. cit. ad 2

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nature indicates. As personhood requires individuality, and the law of the Gospel is only

inscribed upon individual hearts, Aquinas implies that he understands the word “heart” not

merely in a metaphorical way but rather as the core of a human being’s personhood. When put in

reference to the insights in De Motu Cordis, this core is not merely the soul and body in the

abstract, but the physical heart itself as the principal organ animated by the soul.

Modern Biology and Bioethics

These findings regarding the heart in Aquinas’s writings are open to the criticisms that they

are the fruit of outdated biology. Modern biology seems to have revealed that the brain is more

important for the life of a person than the heart, and the descriptions of the heart’s function do

not seem to reveal any emotions arising from the heart and certainly no such movements

returning there.60 The heart is more or less conceived of as a mechanical pump necessary for the

circulation of blood.

While these criticisms do represent typical thought on the heart in mainstream biology, some

current research is uncovering that

the heart is, in fact, a highly complex information-processing center with its own
functional brain, commonly called the heart brain, that communicates with and
influences the cranial brain via the nervous system, hormonal system and other
pathways. These influences affect brain function and most of the body’s major
organs and play an important role in mental and emotional experience.61

This “heart brain” is a nexus of nervous tissue that functions independently of the brain and even

affects it. This “heart brain” renders the heart so independent of the brain that when extracted

60Cf. DMC para. 19

61
McCraty (ed.), Science of the Heart: Exploring the Role of the Heart in Human Performance (Boulder
Creek: HeartMath Institute, 2015), 1-2

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from the body and placed in vitro in a special oxygenated solution, it is able to beat by itself.

Although the heart’s function is typically described merely as a pump for blood, the heart

circulates much more than blood, approaching a total circulatory function more akin to the

medieval conception of the heart: 62

Research has shown that the heart communicates to the brain in four major ways:
neurologically (through the transmission of nerve impulses), biochemically (via
hormones and neurotransmitters), biophysically (through pressure waves) and
energetically (through electromagnetic field interactions). Communication along
all these conduits significantly affects the brain’s activity. 63

In light of such research, it is possible that there is a need to shift the current biological paradigm

from one that asserts brain-primacy to one that conceives of the brain as coordinating more

primal functions.64 These more primal functions would be detected by testing whether whole-

body coherence is maintained when they are absent.

As it turns out, brain-dead patients (medical patients which exhibit no brain activity) can still

maintain whole-body coherence. Austriaco argues that “BD [brain dead] patients manifest

integrative functions that are somatically mediated and can only be accomplished by the body

working as a whole.”65 This foundation of such integrative functions would be what Aquinas

calls vital functions, “those functions that are immediately related to the heart's motion, such that

when they cease life ceases.” 66 In fact, one brain-dead patient, kept on a ventilator since

childhood, went through puberty and healed himself when his body was infected or wounded.67

Such whole-body integrity does not seem to indicate a dead individual.

62 Cf. Webb, 2
63 McCraty, 3
64 Cf. Webb, The Medieval Heart, 16: “what if the brain’s function is instead transmissive?”
65
Austriaco, “Is the Brain-Dead Patient Really Dead?” (Studia Moralia 41: 2003, 277-308), 293
66 DMC, para. 24
67
Austriaco, 292

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 Thus, applying Aquinas’s thoughts on the heart to the bioethical determination of whether a

brain-dead patient is dead or not, it is reasonable to say that the “death” of the brain indicates a

defect in the matter of a person’s composite nature such that rationality is not able to manifest

itself. This does not mean that the soul that animates a brain-dead patient is absent from its body.

It is the same rational soul that animates the entire body, including the brain and the heart. One

must characterize the majority of brain function as a non-vital function on an authentically

Thomistic view of the body and hence the death of the brain does not constitute the death of a

person. Thus brain-death is an inadequate criterion for death of the person. Whole-body

disintegration linked to the failure of vital functions is a better criterion and, from the perspective

of Aquinas’s conceptions of human personhood, a necessary criterion.68

Aquinas’s account of the heart and the human body is thus not as outdated as one might at

first think. It can, in fact, add to the manner in which science is conceived and approached and

contribute to a non-reductive understanding of the human body and its relation to human

personhood. The fact that Aquinas places such heavy emphasis on the necessity of a body for a

human to be a person opens up a deep affinity between Thomism and the physical sciences,

requiring a rigorous engagement with and conversation between philosophical anthropology and

contemporary science. It was the method of the Angelic Doctor himself to accurately describe

the body so as not to err in his characterization of human nature.69

Conclusion

In sum, Aquinas’s use of the term heart cannot simply be called a metaphor adopted from

68 This is Austriaco’s proposal which he calls “systems-based,” cf. Austriaco, 302, 305-306
69
Cf. DMC, para. 1

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Scripture arbitrarily assigned to human personhood. Indeed, Aquinas’s use of the term “heart”

involves even the bodily aspects of man as befitting Aquinas’s conception of a human person as a

composite of soul and body. De Motu Cordis shows that this inclusion of the body is not body in

the abstract but body as the necessary individuating principle of a human person. Moreover, De

Motu Cordis indicates that the body is an ordered hierarchy reflecting the hierarchy of the soul

and the cosmos at large, including a highest bodily part, which Aquinas in no abstract sense

clearly indicates is the physical heart as a natural image of God the First Mover. The heart is

animated by the soul and hence is a part of the composite that is a human person; but the heart is

also the principal locus of the body-soul composite within the hierarchy of a human composite

nature. It is thus the source of human personhood and, being the highest, likewise the summit of

human personhood. That a heart is at once a part of a man and the whole of a man is the very

paradox of the human person as a microcosm: a human person at once has and is a heart.

It is thus reasonable to conclude that saying “I love you with my whole heart” is not merely a

metaphor for affection but a metaphor grounded in the structure of the human person and

metaphysically indicating the totality of the person who loves, body and soul. It is the same

metaphor used by Scripture commanding the love of God with one’s whole heart.


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