I believe that one of the evolving nightmares of western European history has been the manner in which men abandoned the heart ground, gave up on their duty and call to be ‘the hidden man of the heart’ St Peter alludes to [1 Peter, 3, 4], and instead increasingly identified their masculinity with and ‘occupied’ the mind’s abstract space, colonizing it as their own. In doing this, the men shoved the woman’s soul space, with its magical water, into a political and psychological netherworld or ‘backwater’; the men also, in doing this, created a new kind of mind, not the old spiritually perceptive and discerning mind of ‘nous’ with its ‘direct seeing’, not even the Greek ‘reason’ with its ability to see the big picture, and weigh up and evaluate supports for what we assume, but a modern ‘intellect’, whose space is precisely made more and more abstract, so as to escape the heart ground– and yet still try to control it by conceptual ‘thought’, rather than accept and suffer it by existential ‘passion.’
The mind that men created when they abandoned the heart ground is a mental space more and more rarefied, more and more removed from ground level reality, where heart must stand, and passion must contend. Men wanted an easy triumph, by taking thought, and using thought to map and plan, to control, to dominate, the world at no cost. By the clever use of mind they sought to win cheap victories… In doing this, they ceased to be real men, and the sacred meaning of manhood was more and more lost. The heart was given up on, and abandoned; passion was no longer lived, however much its echo was still faintly remembered. The heart’s passion, and its buried truth, has become merely the stuff of entertainment= video games, TV, movies, retain stupid cartoon-like evocations of the old Celtic, or Red Indian, heroic warrior way, but these are popular in inverse relation to how much they are lived. Already in the 19th Century, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, and Dostoyevsky, all watched the concrete heart passion die, for want of anyone to pick it up and run with it, while the abstract mind rose ‘higher and higher.’
In many modern battles, mental organisation has prevailed against the loose structure of raw passion of heart. This has been happening more and more. As men become mentalised and abstracted, the world goes to hell, becoming ever more of a heartless waste ground, with the jackals roaming the street and the vultures perched in high rise buildings above them; and more and more violence, the shadow of men’s castration, is heaped on women. People like Jung are not wrong to say we need to bring the womanly and the soulful back, but that cannot happen unless the real men of heart step up, to take on the men of no heart. Every man worth his salt knows what the real battlefield in this world is: it is the battle ground, indeed the killing ground, of true heart against false heart, and this must be fought inside us, but that in itself is not enough, because it must be fought in the world, to not allow the world to end up in the hands of men with no heart. True passion must fight mental abstractionism, as well as fallen passions, to establish the heart as the ‘chief’, the king, the leading reality, of this world.
If spirituality remains only in the ascetic desert, or only in the worshipping temple, there can be no redemption of the world. The heart’s passion is bound to the world, because it is called to fight for the world’s redemption. This is a fight, material and spiritual; anyone who says redemption can come without any fight is a liar and a coward: another of no heart or of bad heart. The no hearts rise above the fight, the bad hearts fight dirty. Only the true hearts fight nobly, and with honour, for truth: for heart truth.