Catholic Commentary
Paul's Open Heart and Appeal for Mutual Affection
11Our mouth is open to you, Corinthians. Our heart is enlarged.12You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted by your own affections.13Now in return—I speak as to my children—you also open your hearts.
2 Corinthians 6:11–13 presents Paul's emotional appeal to the Corinthians to reciprocate his open and enlarged heart with their own. Paul declares he has spoken freely and made room for them in his affections, but accuses them of restricting themselves through their own contracted feelings rather than through any limitation he imposed.
Paul opens his whole self to the Corinthians, then asks them: why have you made yourselves small where you should be wide?
2 Corinthians 6:11 — "Our mouth is open to you, Corinthians. Our heart is enlarged."
Paul's direct address, Korinthioi — the only time he names his recipients mid-letter — signals an emotional climax. This is not rhetorical flourish; it is the language of a man who has been misunderstood, slandered, and yet refuses to close himself off. The phrase "our mouth is open" (to stoma hēmōn aneōgen) echoes the prophetic idiom of unhindered speech: Paul has concealed nothing, flattered no one, and softened no hard truth. He has spoken entirely freely (cf. 2 Cor 3:12 — "great boldness of speech").
The second clause, "our heart is enlarged" (hē kardia hēmōn peplatyntai), intensifies this. In Hebrew anthropology, the heart (lev) is the seat of the whole person — will, intellect, and affection. To enlarge the heart is to make room, to be capacious for another. The verb platynō (to widen, to broaden) appears in the LXX of Psalm 119:32 — "You enlarge my heart" — where it refers to God's own work of interior expansion that enables the keeping of the commandments. Paul implicitly claims that his love for the Corinthians is itself a work of divine enlargement; his heart has been made wide enough to hold them despite their ingratitude and coldness.
2 Corinthians 6:12 — "You are not restricted by us, but you are restricted by your own affections."
This verse turns the mirror on the Corinthians with surgical precision. The word "restricted" (stenochōreisthe, from stenochōria — narrowness, constriction, affliction) appears earlier in 2 Corinthians 4:8, where Paul says he is "perplexed but not driven to despair," never "hemmed in." Now he uses the same vocabulary to diagnose the Corinthians' spiritual condition: they are hemmed in — but by themselves. "Your own affections" (tois splanchnois hymōn) is, literally, "your bowels" — the Greek term for the visceral center of compassion and feeling, the gut-level capacity for tenderness. Their inner organs of love, so to speak, have contracted. Paul does not accuse them of active hostility; their problem is one of interior narrowness, perhaps a lingering suspicion, pride, or attachment to rival teachers (cf. 2 Cor 11:4), which has made them small where they should be wide. The restriction is self-imposed — a form of spiritual claustrophobia born of their own disordered affections.
2 Corinthians 6:13 — "Now in return — I speak as to my children — you also open your hearts."
The word translated "in return" (antimisthian) means a reciprocal exchange, even a wage or recompense. Paul is not demanding payment for services rendered; he is calling for the only currency that love recognizes: love returned. The parenthetical "I speak as to my children" (hōs teknois legō) is deeply significant. Paul's fatherly authority over the Corinthians is established in 1 Corinthians 4:15 ("I became your father in Christ Jesus through the Gospel"). He invokes that relationship here not to command but to appeal — which is itself a pastoral act of restraint and respect. A father does not force a child's affection; he asks for it. The imperative "open your hearts" (platynthēte kai hymeis) mirrors the verb of 2 Corinthians 6:11 — Paul is asking them to become what he already is for them: enlarged, capacious, unhemmed.
Typological and Spiritual Senses: At the typological level, Paul's open-hearted plea anticipates Christ's own self-disclosure in the Sacred Heart, the cor dilatatum of Christian mystical tradition. The pattern of a love that is given freely, meets restriction in the beloved, and then appeals — rather than coerces — for reciprocation maps directly onto the structure of divine love in human history: God's covenant overture, Israel's hardening of heart, and the prophetic call to return (cf. Hosea 11:8 — "My heart recoils within me; my compassion grows warm and tender"). At the moral sense, Paul models the only pastoral disposition worthy of the name: one that remains open when it would be entirely justified in closing.
Catholic tradition illuminates this passage with particular richness through three lenses: the theology of the human heart, the nature of apostolic authority, and the spirituality of mutual self-gift.
The Enlarged Heart and the Catechism. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches that "the heart is the dwelling-place where I am, where I live" (CCC 2563) and that prayer is the raising of the heart to God. Paul's language of an "enlarged heart" resonates with this anthropology: the heart that is open to God becomes capable of being open to others. Constricted affection — the Corinthians' problem — is, in this light, also a symptom of a heart not yet fully surrendered to divine love.
The Church Fathers. Saint John Chrysostom, in his Homilies on Second Corinthians (Homily 13), marvels at Paul's boldness in naming the Corinthians directly: "He calls them by name — a mark of great love and great grief at once." He reads the "enlarged heart" as Paul's heroic refusal to let insult or ingratitude diminish pastoral charity. Saint Ambrose, in De Officiis, uses this passage to ground his teaching that Christian ministers must maintain an interior expansiveness (amplitudo animi) that cannot be shrunken by the failures of those they serve.
Apostolic Authority as Paternal Love. Vatican II's Presbyterorum Ordinis (no. 9) describes the priest's relationship to the faithful as one of genuine fraternal and paternal affection — not domination but service in love. Paul's insistence that he "speaks as to children" while refraining from command perfectly embodies this ecclesiology. Authority in the Church is always at the service of communion, not a substitute for it.
The Mutual Exchange of Love. The concept of antimisthia — reciprocal recompense — anticipates what Saint John Paul II, in Dives in Misericordia (no. 14), calls the merciful love that "seeks, as it were, to be itself reciprocated." Divine mercy does not override freedom; it appeals. Paul images that same divine pastoral logic.
Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with causes for interior narrowing: parish conflicts, wounds from Church scandals, theological polarization between different communities, and the ordinary friction of family and ministry life. Paul's diagnosis of the Corinthians — not maliciously closed, but self-restrictedly narrow in their affections — is a precise description of many relational impasses in the Church today.
The practical application is twofold. First, the call to examine where our own splanchna — our gut-level capacity for warmth and tenderness — has contracted around a grievance, a disappointment, or a prideful attachment. This is not a call to naïve reconciliation but to the specific spiritual work of interior expansion: widening the heart through prayer, confession, and deliberate acts of mercy toward those who have disappointed us.
Second, for anyone in pastoral ministry — priests, deacons, catechists, parents, parish leaders — Paul models something countercultural: vulnerability as a pastoral instrument. He does not leverage his apostolic authority to force compliance; he names his own openness and asks for a response. In an age of manipulation and transactional relationships, this kind of transparent, non-coercive appeal is itself an act of evangelization, showing that the Gospel creates a new kind of human relating.
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