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Why Follow Your Heart is the Oldest Heresy · Theology Made Podcast

• 0:06
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Theology Made Podcast.
• 0:08
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Jordan Vale.
• 0:09
  In today's episode,
• 0:10
  we're going to look at why follow your heart is the oldest
• 0:12
  heresy.
• 0:15
  SPEAKER_00: The most repeated advice in modern culture is 2,000 years old.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: The church called it heresy the first time.
• 0:21
  Somewhere in the 2nd century,
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  a man named Valentinus was making his case to the bishops of
• 0:26
  Rome.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_00: He was brilliant,
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: educated in Alexandria,
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  SPEAKER_00: schooled in the best philosophy of the Mediterranean world,
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  SPEAKER_00: the kind of thinker who could make a room go quiet,
• 0:34
  SPEAKER_00: fixated on what he had to say next.
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  SPEAKER_00: And his idea was simple at its core.
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  SPEAKER_00: The truth, Valentina said, is not out there somewhere.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's in here.
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  SPEAKER_00: You have a divine spark buried inside you,
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  SPEAKER_00: fragment of the sacred,
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  SPEAKER_00: hidden beneath the noise of ordinary life.
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  And your real job,
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  not the job the world handed you with the real one,
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  is to find it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Listen to it.
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  SPEAKER_00: Follow it wherever it leads.
• 0:56
  SPEAKER_00: He almost became Pope.
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  SPEAKER_00: Valentinus was serious,
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  SPEAKER_00: widely respected,
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  SPEAKER_00: and his teachings spread fast across the Mediterranean,
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  SPEAKER_00: through communities in Rome and Alexandria and Carthage,
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  SPEAKER_00: carried by people who found it deeply compelling.
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  SPEAKER_00: They called it Gnosticism.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Church eventually called it Heresy.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the idea has never really gone away.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_00: It changed its toga robes for a Gucci bag.
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  It traded Greek philosophical vocabulary for the language of
• 1:19
  therapy and authenticity.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: But the claim at the center stayed constant across 2,000 years.
• 1:25
  SPEAKER_00: The truth is inside you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Trust your feelings.
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  SPEAKER_00: Follow your heart.
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  SPEAKER_00: Some phrases have a way of becoming invisible because they're everywhere.
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  SPEAKER_00: And follow your heart is one of them.
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  SPEAKER_00: It shows up in graduation speeches,
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  SPEAKER_00: wedding toast,
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  SPEAKER_00: Disney films,
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  SPEAKER_00: therapy sessions,
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  SPEAKER_00: Instagram captions,
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  SPEAKER_00: and corporate retreat presentations.
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  SPEAKER_00: Ariel sang a version of it in 1989.
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  SPEAKER_00: Oprah built a media empire on it.
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  Every major Disney protagonist for the last three decades has
• 1:54
  been told some
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  SPEAKER_00: version of it at their lowest moment.
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  The advice has become so pervasive that challenging it feels
• 2:00
  like not only being
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  SPEAKER_00: intolerant but aggressive,
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  SPEAKER_00: like arguing against kindness or puppies.
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  SPEAKER_00: But it's not a neutral piece of psychological wisdom.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is making a specific metaphysical claim.
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  SPEAKER_00: It assumes that your inner life is fundamentally reliable.
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  That your desires at their deepest level are pointing somewhere
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  worth going.
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  That to suppress them is to betray yourself and to follow them
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  is to find yourself.
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  SPEAKER_00: And those are large assumptions.
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  SPEAKER_00: And for most of history, they were considered dangerous ones.
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  SPEAKER_00: And to understand why,
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  you need to go back to that room in Rome where Valentinus was
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  making his case.
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  The Gnostic system is worth understanding on its own terms
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  because it's not stupid.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is seductive in the way that good heresies always are.
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  Meaning It Starts From Something Real And The Basic Structure
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  Goes Like This The
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  Material World Is Not The Good World It Was Not Made By The
• 2:50
  Highest God But By A
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  Lesser Creator An Inferior Being Who Created A Mess The Real
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  Divine Realm The
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  Plamora Meaning The Fullness Exists Somewhere Beyond This World
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  Entirely And Human
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  SPEAKER_00: Beings Are Caught In Between
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  SPEAKER_00: Most people,
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  SPEAKER_00: Valentinus taught,
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  SPEAKER_00: are trapped in matter,
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  SPEAKER_00: in bodies,
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  SPEAKER_00: in ordinary life,
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  SPEAKER_00: in the noise.
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  SPEAKER_00: But some people have something else.
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  A divine spark,
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  pneuma,
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  a fragment of the true sacred imprisoned in flesh.
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  SPEAKER_00: And what saves you is not faith or love or grace.
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  SPEAKER_00: What saves you is gnosis,
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  SPEAKER_00: knowledge,
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  SPEAKER_00: a special interior knowing of who you really are beneath all the layers.
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  SPEAKER_00: Your real self is divine.
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  SPEAKER_00: Your real self is good.
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  SPEAKER_00: Your real self is not this body,
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  SPEAKER_00: not these social roles,
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  SPEAKER_00: not these obligations and commitments and failures.
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  SPEAKER_00: Your real self is the spark.
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  SPEAKER_00: And to be saved is to recognize it, trust it, follow wherever it leads.
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  SPEAKER_00: Hyrenius,
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  SPEAKER_00: writing around 180 AD,
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  SPEAKER_00: watched what this produced in actual communities and was not impressed.
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  SPEAKER_00: His great work, Against Heresies, runs five volumes.
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  SPEAKER_00: It's exhaustive,
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  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes Exhausting But it is completely serious.
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  SPEAKER_00: He watched communities fracture.
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  SPEAKER_00: Teachers claimed special revelation that no one else could verify.
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  SPEAKER_00: People abandoning families on the authority of their inner experience.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Gnostic teachers,
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  SPEAKER_00: conveniently,
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  SPEAKER_00: were the ones qualified to guide you toward your divine spark.
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  SPEAKER_00: For a fee, of course.
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  And his critique was not only philosophical,
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  but it was theological and practical.
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  Once you locate final authority inside the self,
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  nothing outside the self can check it.
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  SPEAKER_00: No teacher, no scripture, no tradition, no community.
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  SPEAKER_00: You carry all the truth you need already.
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  SPEAKER_00: The task is just to listen closely enough.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he realized that was not liberation.
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  SPEAKER_00: That was a trap.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fast forward, the year is 1951.
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  SPEAKER_00: A psychologist named Carl Rogers publishes Client-Centered Therapy,
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  SPEAKER_00: a book that will reshape how Americans understand themselves.
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  SPEAKER_00: His argument is that the human self at its core is trustworthy.
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  People have what he calls an actualizing tendency,
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  an innate drive towards growth and health.
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  What gets in the way is not the self,
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  but the conditions imposed on the self from outside.
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  SPEAKER_00: Conditional love,
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  SPEAKER_00: societal demands,
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  religious frameworks that tell you the self is broken and needs
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  correction.
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  SPEAKER_00: Therapy,
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  SPEAKER_00: Rogers argues,
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  SPEAKER_00: should offer unconditional positive regard,
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  SPEAKER_00: full acceptance of the person as they already are.
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  Strip away the external demands and judgment,
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  and the self will naturally orient towards health.
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  SPEAKER_00: It knows where it needs to go, it just needs permission.
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  SPEAKER_00: Fifteen years later,
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  a sociologist named Philip Reif published a book called The
• 5:15
  Triumph of the
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  SPEAKER_00: Therapeutic.
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  SPEAKER_00: And it's not that he was arguing for or against Rogers specifically,
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  SPEAKER_00: but he was making a larger analytical observation.
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  And it's one of the most precise diagnostics of modern culture
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  ever written.
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  SPEAKER_00: His argument is that something fundamentally had shifted.
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  SPEAKER_00: The old framework,
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  SPEAKER_00: what he called religious man,
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  SPEAKER_00: understood the self as something requiring formation from outside.
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  SPEAKER_00: You were not the source of truth.
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  SPEAKER_00: You were the creature who needed to be shaped toward the truth.
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  SPEAKER_00: The self had to be trained.
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  SPEAKER_00: The new framework, therapeutic man, had inverted this entirely.
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  SPEAKER_00: The self was now the source of truth.
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  SPEAKER_00: The task was no longer formation, but discovery.
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  SPEAKER_00: You were not being shaped into something.
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  SPEAKER_00: You were uncovering who you already really were.
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  SPEAKER_00: The self, at its depths, was reliable, even sacred.
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  And I thought this was one of the most consequential cultural
• 6:02
  revolutions in human history.
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  He was not optimistic about where it led The thing about the
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  Gnostics is they did
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  not see themselves as rebels They saw themselves as the real
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  Christians The more
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  enlightened Christians The Christians who understood what the
• 6:15
  tradition was
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  SPEAKER_00: actually pointing towards beneath the surface Valentinus,
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  SPEAKER_00: he read the
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  He found in the Christian scriptures a confirmation bias of
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  what he already believed.
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  And this matters enormously because it means the Gnostic move
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  is not specifically
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  SPEAKER_00: anti-religious.
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  It is a particular way of using religious or quasi-religious
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  language in service of
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  SPEAKER_00: one specific claim.
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  SPEAKER_00: The inner life is authoritative.
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  SPEAKER_00: What you feel at your depths is
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  SPEAKER_00: And you see this move constantly in contemporary culture.
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  The person who leaves a religious tradition saying they need to
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  find their own truth.
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  SPEAKER_00: They're making structurally the same move Valentinus made.
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  The therapist who instructs a client to honor what their body
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  is telling them as
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  the primary moral compass is structurally working within a
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  Gnostic framework.
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  SPEAKER_00: The cultural assumption that authenticity is the supreme virtue,
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  SPEAKER_00: that the worst possible thing is to betray yourself,
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  SPEAKER_00: is Gnosticism repackaged in the vocabulary of self-help.
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  SPEAKER_00: Now Augustine.
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  SPEAKER_00: Augustine was born in 354 AD in a small city in what is now Algeria.
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  SPEAKER_00: His mother, Monica, was a devoted Christian.
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  SPEAKER_00: His father, not quite.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was brilliant,
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  SPEAKER_00: restless,
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  SPEAKER_00: and for most of his 20s and early 30s,
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  SPEAKER_00: quite deliberately following his heart.
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  SPEAKER_00: His heart led him to a mistress he kept for 13 years in love deeply.
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  It led him to a dualistic religious movement with Gnostic
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  echoes,
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  which he found...
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  Intellectually satisfying for about nine years before it
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  stopped working for him.
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  SPEAKER_00: It led him from North Africa to Rome to Milan,
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  SPEAKER_00: always moving,
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  SPEAKER_00: always seeking,
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  SPEAKER_00: always arriving somewhere and finding it slightly less than he had hoped.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he records all this in the Confessions, written around 400 AD.
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  SPEAKER_00: And the famous line is the opening paragraph.
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  Thou have made us for thyself,
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  and our heart is restless until it reposes in thee.
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  SPEAKER_00: Notice what he's not saying.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's not saying the heart is evil.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's not saying desire is bad.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's saying the heart is restless.
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  SPEAKER_00: It wants something.
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  SPEAKER_00: The desire is genuine.
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  SPEAKER_00: It is also pointed badly,
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  chasing satisfactions it'll never actually find in the places
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  it keeps looking for
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  SPEAKER_00: them.
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  SPEAKER_00: And his analysis runs against the modern intuition.
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  Modern culture assumes that the integrity of a desire is a kind
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  of authentication.
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  SPEAKER_00: That if you feel something strongly enough,
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  SPEAKER_00: that strength is evidence that feeling is pointing somewhere true.
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  SPEAKER_00: Augustine assumes the opposite.
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  Desire is often loudest exactly when it is most confused about
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  its own object.
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  SPEAKER_00: The restlessness is not the problem.
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  SPEAKER_00: The restlessness is the clue.
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  And this is where it matters to be careful because the
• 9:00
  Christian tradition has been
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  SPEAKER_00: distorted in both directions on this question.
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  One distortion,
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  the self is corrupt,
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  untrustworthy,
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  so suppress everything.
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  Desires are suspect,
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  the body is a problem,
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  feelings are distraction,
• 9:10
  obey the rules.
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  SPEAKER_00: You are worse than a frog.
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  SPEAKER_00: The other distortion,
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  SPEAKER_00: this is where therapeutic Christianity tends to land,
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  SPEAKER_00: is that the gospel simply affirms you as you are.
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  That grace means God is on the side of whatever your inner life
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  is generating.
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  SPEAKER_00: That sanctification is just permission.
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  SPEAKER_00: And this distortion is more comfortable and less obviously harmful,
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  SPEAKER_00: which probably makes it more dangerous.
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  SPEAKER_00: But the actual tradition,
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  SPEAKER_00: going back to the Desert Fathers of the 4th century,
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  SPEAKER_00: through Ignatius of Loyola in the 16th,
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  SPEAKER_00: through John Wesley in the 18th,
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  SPEAKER_00: is neither of these.
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  SPEAKER_00: The Desert Fathers,
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  people who took the inner life more seriously than pretty much
• 9:42
  anyone in history,
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  SPEAKER_00: were obsessed not with suppression,
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  SPEAKER_00: not with affirmation,
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  SPEAKER_00: but with discernment,
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  SPEAKER_00: with the question of how to tell one kind of inner motive from another.
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  SPEAKER_00: They believed interior experience was real and significant,
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  SPEAKER_00: but they also believed it was not self-interpreting.
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  SPEAKER_00: You needed other people, a community, a tradition, a practice.
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  Not to override the inner life,
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  but to help you understand what it was actually pointing at.
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  SPEAKER_00: Because the self,
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  SPEAKER_00: left alone with its own experience,
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  SPEAKER_00: is remarkably bad at reading itself accurately.
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  SPEAKER_00: Abba Moses, one of the 4th century desert fathers, put it like this.
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  SPEAKER_00: A monk must die to his neighbor and never judge him at all.
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  SPEAKER_00: The whole discipline was oriented around the slow,
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  SPEAKER_00: hard work of noticing your inner movements without simply obeying them.
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  SPEAKER_00: Testing them,
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  SPEAKER_00: sitting with them,
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  learning over years to distinguish the desire for the genuinely
• 10:29
  good from the
• 10:30
  desire that was merely dressed in good language This is not
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  follow your heart,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's also not ignore your heart,
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  SPEAKER_00: it's something more demanding than either Learn your heart
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  The consequences of follow your heart as a cultural operating
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  system are not theoretical.
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  SPEAKER_00: They are very visible.
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  SPEAKER_00: Commitment becomes structurally difficult.
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  Real commitment means remaining through the periods when the
• 10:50
  heart is telling you to leave.
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  SPEAKER_00: If the inner life is the final authority,
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  then staying in a hard marriage or demanding friendship or a
• 10:56
  costly vocation past
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  SPEAKER_00: the point where it feels good becomes incoherent.
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  SPEAKER_00: You are, apparently, betraying yourself.
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: Formation becomes structurally difficult.
• 11:04
  Formation requires accepting that who you are now is not who
• 11:06
  you are made to be.
• 11:07
  SPEAKER_00: That the inner...
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: Life itself, the desiring self, needs to change.
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  SPEAKER_00: But if the inner life is already authoritative,
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  SPEAKER_00: the concept of formation collapses into the concept of self-expression.
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  SPEAKER_00: Community becomes structurally difficult.
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  SPEAKER_00: Real community requires holding people accountable,
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  which means speaking truthfully to someone about something they
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  do not want to
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  SPEAKER_00: hear.
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  It requires accepting that others can see you with some
• 11:28
  accuracy and that their
• 11:29
  observations carry away even when they conflict with your own
• 11:32
  self-assessments.
• 11:34
  A framework built on inner authority makes this feel like
• 11:37
  violation rather than care.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_00: The 17th century Puritans
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  SPEAKER_00: There's a reason against heresies by Arrhenius.
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  SPEAKER_00: If you open it now, it still reads with urgency.
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  SPEAKER_00: Aaronius was not primarily worried about abstract doctrine.
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  He was worried about what happens to real people when they're
• 12:15
  told their inner life is divine.
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  He watched teachers claim special authority on the basis of
• 12:20
  interior experience.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: And he watched communities organize themselves around those claims.
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  SPEAKER_00: And he saw the damage.
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  Once the inner life is authoritative,
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  any external check becomes illegitimate.
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  SPEAKER_00: Tradition can't correct you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Community can't hold you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Scripture can't challenge you.
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  SPEAKER_00: Except insofar as you find in it confirmation what you already believed.
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  The people who left Gnostic communities in the second century
• 12:41
  to reconnect with
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  SPEAKER_00: what Irenaeus called the rule of faith,
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  SPEAKER_00: meaning the shared,
• 12:45
  SPEAKER_00: public,
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  SPEAKER_00: historically continuous teaching of the church,
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  SPEAKER_00: were not exchanging freedom for constraint.
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: They were exchanging a small,
• 12:52
  SPEAKER_00: closed world organized around their own interior experience for a larger,
• 12:55
  open world that had been tested across time and community and
• 12:59
  encounters with
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: reality.
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  SPEAKER_00: The inner life matters.
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_00: Irenaeus believed that.
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  SPEAKER_00: He just did not believe it was its own teacher.
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  SPEAKER_00: Let's go back to Augustine.
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  SPEAKER_00: He's in the garden behind the house where he's been staying.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_00: In crisis,
• 13:11
  SPEAKER_00: weeping,
• 13:11
  unable to move either toward the life he knows he should want
• 13:14
  or away from the life
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_00: he's been living.
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  And he hears a child's voice from somewhere over a nearby wall
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  chanting a phrase he
• 13:21
  SPEAKER_00: does not recognize.
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  SPEAKER_00: Take up and read.
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  SPEAKER_00: No further would I read,
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  SPEAKER_00: nor did I need,
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  SPEAKER_00: for instantly as the sentence ended,
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  SPEAKER_00: there was infused in my heart something like the light of full certainty,
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  SPEAKER_00: and all the gloom of doubt vanished away.
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  SPEAKER_00: He was not following his heart in that garden.
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  He had been following his heart for 30 years and they brought
• 13:50
  him into a garden in
• 13:51
  SPEAKER_00: Milan,
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  SPEAKER_00: weeping,
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_00: unable to move.
• 13:54
  SPEAKER_00: What happened to him did not come from inside.
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  SPEAKER_00: It came from outside and met him in his interior.
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  SPEAKER_00: The meeting changed what his interior was.
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_00: He called it grace.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_00: And the tradition he founded called it Preventian Grace.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Meaning that grace that comes before.
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  SPEAKER_00: The idea that you do not find God by following your desires inward.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_00: You find God when something from outside your own interior reaches in
• 14:16
  And Reorders It This Is Not The Gospel Of Self-Discovery It Is
• 14:20
  The Gospel Of Being Found
• 14:23
  Follow your heart never gets around to asking the most basic
• 14:26
  question about itself.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_00: What is your heart exactly?
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: What has formed it?
• 14:30
  SPEAKER_00: What is assorted?
• 14:31
  SPEAKER_00: Whose voices are you hearing when you think you're hearing your own?
• 14:33
  Every person who's ever followed their heart with confidence
• 14:36
  has a heart that was
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: shaped before they started following it.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_00: By parents,
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: by trauma,
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_00: culture,
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: education,
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_00: media,
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: by what they were praised for and what they were shamed for,
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_00: by fear,
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: grief,
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: longing,
• 14:44
  by things that happened before they were old enough to choose
• 14:47
  whether or not to let
• 14:48
  SPEAKER_00: them.
• 14:48
  The self is not an unspoiled,
• 14:50
  untouched,
• 14:50
  natural resource waiting to be tapped.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Valentinus was offering something much simpler.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: The truth is already in you.
• 14:55
  SPEAKER_00: Just listen.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_00: And the church,
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_00: at its best,
• 15:23
  across 17 centuries of argument and practice and failure and
• 15:26
  recovery has kept
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: saying,
• 15:27
  SPEAKER_00: it's not that simple.
• 15:29
  The heart has a teacher to not choose and cannot generate from
• 15:31
  inside itself.
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: And until the heart has been taught,
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_00: it'll keep finding the divine in smaller and smaller things,
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: calling each one ultimate and moving on when the thing disappoints.
• 15:41
  Augustine,
• 15:41
  near the end of his life,
• 15:42
  wrote a treatise called On the Trinity.
• 15:44
  Late in that text,
• 15:45
  he describes the self as a kind of image,
• 15:47
  imago Dei,
• 15:48
  the image of God.
• 15:49
  SPEAKER_00: The self is not God,
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: it is not divine,
• 15:51
  but it was made by something divine and it carries within it a
• 15:53
  restlessness that no
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_00: created thing will satisfy.
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: This is a different account of the inner life than Valentinus offered.
• 16:00
  SPEAKER_00: It takes the inner life seriously,
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_00: in fact,
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: more seriously in many ways,
• 16:03
  SPEAKER_00: because it refuses to let the desire to be answered easily.
• 16:07
  SPEAKER_00: It says your longing for transcendence is real.
• 16:09
  SPEAKER_00: It says the restlessness is not a malfunction.
• 16:11
  SPEAKER_00: It says you are pointing at something true,
• 16:13
  SPEAKER_00: something outside yourself,
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: something that will not finally be found by going further in.
• 16:18
  SPEAKER_00: The modern version of Follow Your Heart closes that gap.
• 16:21
  SPEAKER_00: It tells you the destination is already inside,
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: the divine spark is already yours,
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: the task is discovery rather than formation.
• 16:27
  The Christian tradition,
• 16:28
  though,
• 16:29
  says the thing you're looking for is not inside you.
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: It is outside you and is looking for you.
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it has been doing so longer than you've been looking for it.
• 16:37
  SPEAKER_00: And when it finds you, it will not confirm what you already wanted.
• 16:40
  SPEAKER_00: It will change what you want.