August 28, 2025

What does it mean to “love God with all our heart”? Drawing on Aristotle, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dietrich von Hildebrand, and Humanae Vitae, this article explores Christian affectivity — the role of our emotions, passions, and affections in truly loving God. Far from being “mere sentiment,” authentic affectivity is essential to the Great Commandment and to a living, joyful faith.

Loving God With All Our Heart: Christian Affectivity and The Great Commandment

Although the word “heart” is mentioned just over 589 times in Sacred Scripture, perhaps nowhere but in the context of “The Great Commandment” does it have such a compelling impact on all men of good will. St. Mark’s narrative of this historical event is as follows:

“One of the scribes came up, and when he heard them arguing he realized how skillfully Jesus answered them. He decided to ask him, ‘Which is the first of all the commandments?’ Jesus replied: ‘This is the first: Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! Therefore you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The scribe said to Jesus: ‘Excellent, teacher! You are right in saying, ‘He is the One, there is no other than he.’ Yes, ‘to love him with all our heart, with all our thoughts and with all our strength, and to love our neighbor as ourselves’ is worth more than any burnt offering or sacrifice.’ Jesus approved the insight of this answer and told him, ‘You are not far from the reign of God.’ And no one had the courage to ask him any more questions.”

In many commentators’ remarks regarding this passage of St. Mark’s Gospel, they point out that this particular scribe was not filled with deceit and trickery as were the others; he was, rather, “an obviously upright man who is sincerely seeking the truth.”

The aim of this short “dissertation” of sorts will, hopefully, be to continue with the same sincere intent of the trustworthy scribe in seeking truthful understanding of our universal call to not only love God, but more precisely, “to love God with all our heart.”

Christian Affectivity and Dietrich von Hildebrand

To that end, let’s hone in on that sphere of human love commonly known as “Christian affectivity” brilliantly presented by Dietrich von Hildebrand in his book The Heart: Source of Christian Affectivity.

To begin, it first makes good sense to briefly review the Aristotelian philosophy having to do with man’s quest for happiness, which, according to Aristotle, is man’s greatest and highest good, the one for the sake of which every other good is desired.

Choosing this feature of Aristotle’s philosophy seems appropriate because realized happiness — and man’s search for happiness — is indeed intimately linked with human affectivity. Moreover, “Christian affectivity” in particular specifically addresses happiness in the context of man’s relationship with his ultimate good, God, which is the key to understanding “The Great Commandment.”

Aristotle and the Search for Happiness

In the introduction of his book The Heart, Dietrich von Hildebrand states that it is conventionally held that both Plato and Aristotle, indeed the whole of the Greek philosophical tradition, steadfastly maintained that the heart and any associated affective feelings, emotions, or sentiments were subordinate to the spiritual realm.

This despite the fact that Aristotle’s more detailed teachings in several areas, most notably in his own writings in The Search for Happiness, seemingly contradict these ancient assumptions.

Nevertheless, declaring happiness to be the highest good of man, the traditional Aristotelian philosophical position holds little regard for the role of human affectivity in attaining or realizing personal happiness. For Aristotle, the “happy life” is the life according to the intellect, a life solely spent in the undeviating, relentless contemplation of truth.

This is the activity which comes closest to fulfilling Aristotle’s conditions for happiness since it brings into the fullest and most important realization all the most noble powers of man — that is, his extraordinarily unique ability to reason.

According to Aristotle, the intellect and the will alone belong to the rational part of the soul of man, and it is only through man’s power to reason that happiness can ever be experienced. The affective realm belongs strictly to the irrational part of man, that is, to the area of experience which man allegedly shares with the lowliest of all animals.

As human beings, we have bodies that need to be cared for in certain ways, thus our need for strictly bodily goods such as health, food, clothing, and shelter. These various bodily goods can and do provide us with pleasurable feelings and emotions, affections if you will; they are, however, goods we share with other animals. Consequently, they are often seen as being subordinate to other greater goods — goods of the soul or, more specifically, the rational mind.

Unfortunately, by relegating human affectivity to the irrational and lowest realm of human experience, and by fixing happiness to man’s contemplation of truth alone, it necessarily follows that man would only be able to achieve brief and fleeting moments of true happiness, if any at all.

Who could deny that fatigue, interruptions, distractions, economic and social status and the like all pull man away from the conditions necessary for the genuine contemplation of truth and the possibility of attaining happiness?

Given these stipulations, for Aristotle, happiness and the pursuit of the ideally perfect life could only be realized by a very few extremely privileged souls.

Nonetheless, it should be noted that Dietrich von Hildebrand, although recognizing the lower standing given to human affectivity as a whole by Aristotle, steadfastly maintains that Aristotle actually contradicts himself by claiming that happiness, as purely a “thought” or “act” of the will, does not also include some pleasure generally associated with those sense pleasures attained from “bodily goods.”

Von Hildebrand points out that happiness, by its very nature, has to in some way be “felt” to truly be authentic happiness. To say otherwise means happiness is actually nothing more than a cold, sterile word if it is summarily dismissed when it’s associated with some type of corresponding pleasant feeling.

The Oversimplification of Human Affectivity

Oddly enough, it appears that the philosophical community’s greatest strength may be their greatest weakness when it comes to human affectivity as a whole.

Philosophy, a very disciplined science known for making careful and complete distinctions, clearly seems to have oversimplified the realm of human affectivity. By failing to develop a proper hierarchical structure within human affectivity as a whole, all affectivity gets summarily lumped and dumped into the category of bodily emotions, passions, and sentiment which are all generally viewed with deep “suspicion” by most philosophers and by many sincerely devout Catholics as well.

Von Hildebrand’s position is simply this: as long as all spiritually affective acts are seen in the light of the lower, irrational sense-experience of man, and are not granted a status comparable to that of the intellect and the will, even legitimate Christian affectivity will continue to be flippantly referred to as mere emotionalism and pious sentimentality.

Failing to make distinctions within the world of human passions, feelings, and all human affectivity is tantamount to putting the contrition of St. Peter after his denial of Christ, and the sorrow of Mary Magdalene as she stood weeping beside the tomb of Jesus, within the same ontological make-up as a lecherously jealous husband seeking revenge. Not the same!

At this point it should be bluntly stated that it simply would not be proper, nor truly Christian, to label every intensely passionate and strong form of affective response as disordered and irrational.

An “hysterical” response may quite often be fully adequate, rational, and proper — as the Apostle Peter demonstrated.

St. Thomas, Aristotle, and the Passions

The point Von Hildebrand makes is that there exists a very clear and identifiable difference between what are generally referred to as passions, and affective experiences motivated by goods endowed with wholesome values.

St. Thomas provides the credibility for this concept when he says:

“…the passions are powers given to man to attain what is good for him within this world. But they must be under the control of reason and the will. And this control must be in the direction of moral good, else the passions will lead man astray.”

Aristotle, too, in what appears to be another contradiction to his overall diminishment of human passive powers, seemingly allows for the possibility of well-reasoned affectivity by the following comment taken from his philosophical treatise Politics I:

“Reason rules over the irascible and concupiscible not despotically, as does a master over a slave, but politically or royally, as one rules over free men who are not wholly subject to the ruler.”

Von Hildebrand warns us that within the sphere of human affectivity, as long as one sees every affective response in the light of undistinguishable “passion,” we are forever doomed to misinterpret the most important and authentic parts of genuine Christian affectivity.

Interestingly, in the context of Christian affections, it seems that our very existence can be called a fruit of affective love. The continuation of humanity itself can rightly be thought of as being ultimately derived from the end of carnal affectivity — albeit carnal affectations that are not always controlled, well-reasoned, or properly ordered and directed.

Yet, to dismiss outright, belittle, or question the legitimacy of affective love in general, and particularly in the area of spousal conjugal love, is obviously absurd.

Humanae Vitae and the Legitimacy of Affective Love

Though some may (wrongly) imply it’s a dated and irrelevant document, the brilliant encyclical Humanae Vitae is abundantly clear. In this treasured letter to the Church, Saint Pope Paul VI clearly refers to the legitimate place affective love has in marriages when he states the following:

“This love (between husband and wife) is first of all fully human, that is to say, of the senses and of the spirit at the same time. It is not, then, a simple transport of instinct and sentiment, but also, and principally, an act of the free will, intended to endure and to grow by means of the joys and sorrows of daily life, in such a way that husband and wife become one only heart and one only soul…”

In equating the fullness of our humanity with the love of the senses, Saint Pope Paul VI validates the legitimacy of properly ordered, well-directed passions.

Are we to believe that legitimate affective love is limited, or even restricted, to those bonded by the sacrament of Holy Matrimony?

Does the often intimate personal love between the individual person and, as St. Augustine would say, “Our Wondrous Creator,” consist solely in acts of the will?

Today, sterility and passionlessness too often seem to be the criteria in which we determine the validity — the legitimacy, if you will — of the individual human person’s love of God. How can that be??

Feelings Really Do Matter

Given the admittedly limited evidence presented here, theologians, philosophers, and all men of goodwill will hopefully be compelled to further contemplate this phenomena within their own personal hearts and minds.

Christian affectivity profoundly impacts modern interpretations concerning various practices of Christian piety and devotion. It undoubtedly impacts all Christians’ personal prayer.

In essence, without our fully human, wholly affective response to the truths of our faith, our faith can eventually become deficient, stale, and ultimately incomplete.

The good news is that through the mystery of the Incarnation, the centrality of the fully affective human component (the heart) has become known in and through the person of Jesus Christ — He Who is Truth Incarnate.

Ultimately, it is Jesus Christ Who is the source and end of all truly proper, well-ordered, genuinely human, Christian affectivity.

Thus, one cannot deny that in order to fulfill the precepts laid out in “The Great Commandment” — “to love God with all our heart” — necessarily includes a thoughtful, willful, and affective response to our Almighty God and Father.

So, yes, “rejoice in the Lord always, again I say rejoice!” — for feelings really do matter.