17-05-2025
Sacred Mysteries: The flaming heart of Pope Leo's spirituality
I very much like a picture painted in about 1650 by Philippe de Champaigne. It shows a bare-headed bishop in an extravagant cope (echoing the cope of St Augustine in El Greco's Burial of the Count of Orgaz, from 70 years earlier). He sits, pen poised in the air, looking up at a ray of light from an incandescent cloud labelled Veritas, Truth. His left hand holds a human heart on fire, its flames drawn, as if by a draught, towards his head. It's a very Baroque painting.
This too is St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), a huge influence on Western Christianity. A flaming heart features on the coat of arms of Pope Leo, whose life has been as an Augustinian missionary. Here the heart is pierced with an arrow.
That image illustrates part of Augustine's incomparable autobiography, the Confessions (10: 6): Vulnerasti cor meum verbo tuo – 'You have pierced my heart with your Word.' My Loeb edition has percussisti, 'struck' not 'pierced', but with the same effect: 'And I have loved you.'
'But what then is it that I love when I love thee?' asked Augustine, in Richard Challoner's translation from 1739. 'Neither the Beauty of the Body, nor the graceful Order of Time, nor the Brightness of Light, so agreeable to these Eyes, nor the sweet Melody of all Sorts of Musick, nor the fragrant Scents of Flowers, Oils and Spices, nor the sweet Taste of Manna or Honey, nor fair Limbs alluring to carnal Embraces. None of these Things do I love, when I love my God. And yet I love a certain Light, and a certain Voice, and a certain Fragrancy, and a certain Food, and a certain Embrace, when I love my God: the Light, the Voice, the Fragrancy, the Food, and the Embrace of my inward Man.' So he goes on, in his questioning, gradual way.
Pope Leo has simply adjusted the coat of arms which as a bishop he was expected to have. I don't want to go on about heraldry, which can be offputting in its technicality, but, as in stage directions, left and right are accounted from the shield-holder's point of view, so dexter is on the left from the spectator's viewpoint, and sinister on the right. The Pope's shield is divided party per bend sinister, as I think heralds would say, split diagonally from the sinister top corner.
In the upper, azure part, an argent fleur-de-lys stands for the Virgin Mary. Pope John Paul II had the letter M with the same function, which some held to be less heraldically correct.
The motto under the shield is In Illo uno unum, 'In the One, we are one.' The phrase is taken from St Augustine's Expositions on the Psalms, commenting on Psalm 127 (128 in the Book of Common Prayer) and explaining that 'although we Christians are many, in the one Christ we are one', a sentence based on St Paul's Epistle to the Romans (12:5).
'How are we many, and yet one?' asks Augustine. 'Because we cling unto him whose members we are; and since our Head is in heaven, his members may follow.'
All this might sound a bit arbitrary, but Pope Leo's personal spirituality is an Augustinian approach to Jesus Christ, the centre and goal of Christianity. Pope Benedict XVI shared this Augustinian outlook. Implicitly all Latin-rite, Anglican or Nonconformist Christians do.
Interpreting Augustine left divisions too. Philippe de Champaigne's daughter joined Port Royal convent in Paris, which developed Jansenist habits of thought and piety. He painted a moving picture of her sitting on a not very comfortable chair, cured from paralysis.
