Content area
Full text
VON HILDEBRAND, Dietrich. The Heart: An Analysis of Human and Divine Affectivity. South Bend, Ind.: St. Augustine's Press, 2007. xx + 140 pp. Cloth, $24.00-This book is the first volume to appear in the Dietrich von Hildebrand Legacy Project, whose mission is "to engage the contemporary world, both Christian and secular, by uncovering and disseminating the buried treasure of Dietrich von Hildebrand's thought and witness" (p. ix). The work was originally published in 1965 as The Sacred Heart. In the present introductory sections (including the preface by John Haldane, an explanation of the Legacy Project by John Henry Crosby, and Edmund Husserl's evaluation of von Hildebrand's doctoral dissertation, presented and translated by John F. Crosby), the contributors make a good case for republishing it.
The book has three parts: (1) a philosophical/spiritual account of human affectivity, whose "center" is called the "heart"; (2) a scriptural meditation on the Heart of Jesus; and (3) a meditation on the place of the human heart in our spiritual transformation in Christ.
The first part is largely an effort to retrieve the place of affectivity in the philosophical understanding of the human person. Von Hildebrand argues that from the ancients to the present, philosophy has largely...