In a homily traditionally attributed to St Macarius the Great, we find the following description of the human heart:
the heart itself is but a small vessel, yet there also are dragons and there are lions; there are poisonous beasts and all the treasures of evil. And there are rough and uneven roads; there are precipices. But there is also God, also the angels, the life and the kingdom, the light and the Apostles, the treasures of grace—there are all things. (Pseudo-Macarius, Fifty Spiritual Homilies, 43.7)
His warning about the dark side of the human heart reminds me very much of one of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poems where he says: ‘O the mind, mind has mountains; cliffs of fall / Frightful, sheer, no-man-fathomed. Hold them cheap / May who ne’er hung there.’
I think it would be a great error to read these passages as if they were suggesting that somehow ‘it’s all in the mind’. Rather, I think they remind us that the heart, the seat of the personality, is not closed in upon itself but is open to the transcendent – what kind of transcendence depends on how we orient our heart.
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