Volume 99, Issue 3, Summer 2025
Andreas Kramarz
Pages 353-387
https://doi.org/10.5840/acpq2025813318
The Heart as the Integral Center of the Person
Toward an Integral Anthropology
¡°Heart¡± in a spiritual sense, beyond the physical organ, is ubiquitous in poetic and spiritual writings but strikingly absent in most accounts of philosophical anthropology, including much of the Thomistic tradition. By connecting elements from Scripture, Augustine, Aquinas, and Personalism and enriched by psychological and neurobiological scholarship, this article argues that ¡°heart¡± does indicate a specific notion regarding the human person, neither simply synonymous with ¡°soul¡± nor to be equated with any individual faculty. Recognizing relationality and integrality as first principles of reality prepares the metaphysical foundation for a view of the faculties and operations within the human person that, beyond isolated analyses, explores their interconnectedness and identifies the heart as the deep integral center of the person at which the various operations emerge, converge, and are integrated.