The Reins and the Heart

Why will we let a heart speak, but not a kidney?

No one is troubled when Scripture tells us that a heart understands, rejoices, hardens or breaks. Our own language still has broken hearts and heartfelt apologies. But encounter a man whose reins instruct him in the night, or a God who searches the reins and the heart, and the Bible suddenly sounds strange.

Reins is an older English word for kidneys. The Hebrew Scriptures speak of them; Greek and Latin preserve the image. In Revelation, Christ says that he searches “kidneys and hearts.” The Revised Standard Version Catholic Edition gives us “mind and heart.” The sentence is immediately intelligible. The organ has disappeared.¹

That is worth noticing. Scripture speaks through bowels, wombs, bones, flesh, eyes and breath. These are not simply primitive substitutes for emotion, compassion, strength or desire. Nor are they a code in which each organ has one fixed spiritual meaning. They are a bodily language of the human person.

Translate that language into abstractions and a sentence may become easier while its connections become harder to see. Biblical echoes grow faint. Liturgical phrases lose their roots. An ancient commentator can seem fanciful because his reader can no longer see the word he is explaining.

What God finds in the kidneys

Augustine pauses over heart and reins in his commentary on Psalm 7. He understands the heart as our thoughts and cares, and the reins as our delights: what we hope those cares will bring us to enjoy. “Delight,” he says, “is the end of care.”²

Two people may perform the same charitable act. One gives because someone needs help; the other wants admiration. Their hands do the same thing. Their inward ends differ. The God who searches heart and reins sees both.

Augustine does not leave us with a tidy equation in which heart means thought and kidneys mean emotion. He qualifies the distinction, assigning earthly delights to the reins and higher delight to an upright heart. His account also draws on ancient associations between the lower body and sexual pleasure. This is an interpretation of the image, not a timeless anatomical chart.

The distinction matters because biblical organs overlap. Kidneys instruct; hearts desire; bones rejoice. We should no more reduce these expressions to a diagram of the psyche than treat “gut feeling” or “heartbroken” as medical theories.

The image also entered prayer. Among the traditional prayers following the Litany of the Saints is this petition:

Ure igne Sancti Spiritus renes nostros et cor nostrum, Domine.

Burn with the fire of the Holy Spirit our reins and our heart, O Lord.³

It continues by asking that we may serve God with a chaste body and please him with a clean heart. Scripture’s bodily language has become the language of worship. Read only “mind and heart,” and the prayer’s strange anatomy no longer looks biblical. The meaning remains partly accessible; the connection becomes harder to recognise.

A heart that listens, a love with inward parts

Even the familiar heart is stranger than we think. Modern speech often makes the head responsible for thought and the heart for feeling. Scripture does not keep that division.

When Solomon asks God for the wisdom to govern, the Hebrew describes his request as a listening heart. The RSV-CE gives “an understanding mind.” That conveys the capacity he needs, but the original image also suggests how wisdom comes: by listening.⁴

Benedict XVI made this phrase the governing image of his 2011 address to the German Bundestag. The year before, he had described a heart capable of listening as a summary of the Christian understanding of the person. We do not come to ourselves through thought enclosed within itself, but through receptivity to others and to God.⁵

One can be intelligent without listening, or know a great deal while remaining unreceptive to reality. A listening heart makes wisdom sound like a disposition we must cultivate, not merely a capacity we possess. It is an image one can pray.

Paul’s language can be less comfortable. In Philippians 1:8, he expresses his longing through the Greek splanchna: the inward parts or viscera. Older English could call these “bowels.” Today that word is more likely to suggest digestion than affection.

Translators face a real difficulty here. Literal wording can communicate the wrong thing. Yet Chrysostom’s homily turns precisely on the bodily expression: he hears Paul describing an inward love made warmer by Christ. The image supplies the language of his interpretation.⁶

“Affection” may convey the sense. It cannot, by itself, show an English reader why Chrysostom starts talking about inward parts. An edition of his homily needs to preserve that connection, whether in the quotation or in a note.

Mercy, too, has bodily associations. Hebrew compassion belongs to a word family related to reḥem, the womb. Etymology is not meaning: this does not license translating every instance of compassion as “womb.” But Isaiah gives divine fidelity a maternal image when Zion fears she has been forgotten. Can a woman forget her nursing child, or fail to pity the child she has borne? Even if she does, God will not forget Zion.⁷

The passage gives us a mother and child before carrying us beyond the human analogy. Its force is not exhausted by the statement “God is faithful.”

Images that remember

Some losses become apparent only when we read one biblical book beside another.

Hannah sings that her horn is exalted in the Lord, then that God will exalt the horn of his anointed. The image draws on an animal’s visible strength. The RSV-CE renders the two occurrences as “strength” and “power.” But in Luke’s Benedictus it retains the “horn of salvation” raised up in David’s house.⁸

Each passage remains intelligible. Their shared language is less visible. This does not establish that Luke is referring only to Hannah: the horn belongs to a wider scriptural vocabulary of strength and kingship. It does show why an image cannot always be translated as though its work ended with one verse.

A word can carry a memory. Preserve it in one passage and explain it away in another, and readers may miss the echo.

John offers an especially striking correspondence. In John 1:18, the Son is in the Father’s “bosom.” At the supper, John 13:23 places the beloved disciple in the bosom of Jesus. Both verses use kolpos. The RSV-CE keeps “bosom” in the first but gives “close to the breast of Jesus” in the second.⁹

The second rendering is understandable, especially when the posture of reclining at an ancient meal is unfamiliar. Still, the repeated word invites us to notice a relationship:

The Son is in the bosom of the Father.

The beloved disciple is in the bosom of the Son.

What theology to draw from that correspondence is a further question. A translation or its notes should first make it possible to notice it.

Sometimes the note already does the work. In Matthew 20:15, the landowner asks whether the workers begrudge his generosity. Beneath that rendering lies the question, “Is your eye evil because I am good?” The RSV-CE puts the bodily expression in a footnote.¹⁰

The idiomatic rendering explains the grievance. The eye shows it: envy corrupts the way we look at another person’s good. Here the reader can have both the understood sense and the image that bears it.

The loss is not always modern

This is not a story of ancient fidelity followed by modern destruction. Translation has always involved interpretation, and modern versions sometimes recover bodily language that older ones obscured.

Consider nephesh, often translated “soul.” Depending on context, it can mean life, self, person, appetite or a living being. It can also have the concrete sense of throat. In Isaiah 5:14, the King James Bible says that hell has “enlarged herself”; the New American Bible, Revised Edition, describes Sheol enlarging its “throat.” The modern rendering brings the devouring body back into view.¹¹

It would be just as mechanical to translate every nephesh as “throat” as to translate every occurrence as “soul.” Context decides. The useful question is what this particular wording allows the reader to see.

Nor did Greek and Latin readers inherit every Hebrew image. The expression “slow to anger” in Exodus 34:6 is, literally, “long of nostrils.” The Septuagint and Vulgate give the sense of patience rather than preserve the nose.¹² Some bodily imagery had already been interpreted away long before the Fathers began commenting.

For the same reason, we cannot blame the whole phenomenon on modern “dynamic equivalence.” The comparatively formal RSV also interprets hearts, horns and eyes. Translators of different schools face the same pressures: words become obsolete, idioms mislead, and familiar anatomy acquires an unfamiliar emotional register.

Explanation is necessary. The loss comes when it leaves the reader no way back to the image.

Why the body matters

Some biblical images remain familiar enough that we hardly notice their daring. All the psalmist’s bones praise God. Broken bones are asked to rejoice. All flesh is grass. The Word becomes flesh.¹³

These expressions do more than decorate propositions. “My whole being will praise you” conveys something of the sense, but bones give that wholeness weight. Broken bones make repentance and restored joy palpable. Flesh compared with grass places human splendour in a field already beginning to fade.

Catholics need not discover a complete philosophical anthropology behind every organ to take this language seriously. The Catechism teaches the profound unity of body and soul: their union forms one human nature. In its account of prayer, it retains the biblical heart and explains it as the hidden centre of decision, encounter and covenant.¹⁴

That offers a useful model. Keep the word, and help the reader enter its meaning.

It is especially important in editions of the Fathers. Their exegesis can already seem remote. Some interpretations depend on ancient assumptions; others go well beyond the historical sense of a passage. We should acknowledge that without creating a further obstacle by removing the language they are discussing.

When Augustine comments on kidneys, the reader needs to know that his scriptural text contains kidneys. When Chrysostom develops Paul’s visceral language, “affection” alone is insufficient. The translator is conveying not only a biblical statement, but the wording on which an argument depends.

An unfamiliar image may need explanation. Its unfamiliarity is not a reason to leave the commentary without its subject.

Images and their limits

Images can also mislead. Cassian tells of an elderly monk, Serapion, who had imagined God in human bodily form. Persuaded that the divine nature cannot be confined in that way, he found himself unable to pray. “They have taken away my God from me,” he cried.¹⁵

Cassian regards his anthropomorphism as an error. Indeed, the conference leads towards prayer purified of bodily images; the story is not his defence of retaining them. It warns us how easily a mental picture can be mistaken for God.

Preserving Scripture’s imagery is a different matter. To say that God is slow to anger is not to give him human nostrils. To speak of a listening heart is not to locate discernment in cardiac tissue. We can learn what an image conveys without making it a literal description.

The opposite mistake is to suppose that an abstract equivalent exhausts what the image offers. “Power” tells us what a horn signifies, but cannot reproduce its place in a song, its recurrence in a prophecy, or the way those passages sound together in prayer.

An image can be understood and still have more to teach us.

Let the strange word remain

A good translation need not turn the Bible into an archaeological puzzle. Sometimes literal wording genuinely misleads. Sometimes a metaphor has lost its physical force. No responsible reader should impose a fixed theology of organs on every occurrence.

But readers can learn. They can discover what reins means, why a horn signifies strength, how an eye can be evil, and what it meant to recline beside someone at supper. Notes, preaching and commentary can give them that knowledge without making every sentence cumbersome.

Once those images become visible, Scripture’s language opens differently. The heart listens. The bones praise. Flesh thirsts. Inward parts yearn. The person who prays comes before God with a body, not merely with thoughts about one.

So let the broken bones rejoice and the horn rise. When Christ searches the reins and the heart, let the kidneys remain strange for a moment.

Augustine may have something to tell us about them. The liturgy may already have turned them into prayer. And the smoother sentence, for all its clarity, may not say everything the image can.

Sources and notes

Biblical wording identified as RSV-CE is from the Revised Standard Version, Catholic Edition (1965/1966). Literal glosses and explanatory paraphrases are distinguished from that wording in the text. Psalm references use the Hebrew numbering; Psalm 16 is Psalm 15 in the traditional Greek and Latin numbering.

1. Psalm 16:7, Hebrew; Revelation 2:23, Greek; Revelation 2, RSV-CE. “Kidneys and hearts” is a literal gloss of the Greek, not a quotation from the RSV-CE. Return to text.

2. Augustine, Exposition on Psalm 7, §§9–11, especially §9 on care and delight and §11 on earthly and heavenly delight. The brief quotation follows the public-domain English translation in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, first series, volume 8. Return to text.

3. Ure igne Sancti Spiritus, liturgical text and manuscript witness, Université de Caen; see also the Rituale Romanum, “Litaniæ,” printed p. 109. The English is a literal rendering of the Latin petition. Return to text.

4. 1 Kings 3:9, Hebrew and RSV-CE. Return to text.

5. Benedict XVI, address to the German Bundestag, 22 September 2011, and address at the conclusion of the Roman Curia’s retreat, 27 February 2010. Return to text.

6. John Chrysostom, Homily 2 on Philippians, on Philippians 1:8. Return to text.

7. Isaiah 49:15, Hebrew and literal gloss; Brown–Driver–Briggs, entries under רֶחֶם. Isaiah’s maternal image is the main evidence here; the word translated “womb” in that particular verse is beten. The passage uses a verb for compassion from the related r-ḥ-m family. Return to text.

8. 1 Samuel 2:1–10, RSV-CE; Luke 1:69, RSV-CE. Compare also Psalm 132:17 for the horn in Davidic imagery. Return to text.

9. John 1:18: Greek, RSV-CE. John 13:23: Greek, RSV-CE. The verbal correspondence is between these verses; John 13:25 uses a different Greek word for breast, stēthos. Return to text.

10. Matthew 20:15 and its footnote, RSV-CE. Return to text.

11. Brown–Driver–Briggs, נֶפֶשׁ; Isaiah 5:14 in the NABRE and KJV. Return to text.

12. Exodus 34:6: Hebrew, Greek and Latin. The Septuagint uses makrothymos and the Vulgate patiens. Return to text.

13. Psalm 35:10; Psalm 51:8; Isaiah 40:6; John 1:14. The later allusion to thirsting flesh is Psalm 63:1. Return to text.

14. Catechism of the Catholic Church, §§362–368, especially §365, and §§2562–2563. Return to text.

15. John Cassian, Conference 10, §§3–5. The old English translation spells the monk’s name “Sarapion.” His cry is quoted from that public-domain translation; the argument about preserving biblical wording is this essay’s application, not Cassian’s stated conclusion. Return to text.