Shimjeong

Jon Auror

Korean: 심정 (Shimjeong)
Hanja: 心情 — heart-affection / the feeling-state of the heart
Also known as: Heart; Divine Heart; God's Heart (하나님의 심정, Hananim-ui Shimjeong)
See also: God's Heart — the specific theological article on God's shimjeong and the concept of han

What is Shimjeong?

Shimjeong (심정, 心情) is the most foundational concept in Unification theology — the deepest, most essential dimension of the inner life, in both God and the human beings created in His image. It is most often translated as “heart,” but this translation is acknowledged even by Rev. Moon himself to fall short. Shimjeong is the irrepressible impulse of a being who was created to love — the inner drive that compels relationship, that seeks joy through giving and receiving love, that cannot be satisfied in isolation, that aches when its object is lost.

In everyday Korean, shimjeong describes the deep affective state of a person: the shimjeong of a mother for her child, the shimjeong between friends who have shared suffering together, the shimjeong a person carries for a homeland they have never seen but for which they long without knowing why. Rev. Moon appropriated this intimate, embodied word and placed it at the center of his entire theology: God possesses shimjeong toward humanity with the same quality — but infinitely — that a parent possesses it toward a beloved child.

What we mean has a deeper meaning than is conveyed by the English word. It means to be loving, caring, sensitive.

— Sun Myung Moon, New Hope: Twelve Talks

This admission — that the concept exceeds translation — signals immediately that shimjeong is not a theological category to be defined and filed away. It is a living reality to be entered, experienced, and developed through the four love relationships of the human family.

Section I — Etymology: The Two Characters of Shimjeong

The compound 心情 rewards examination character by character.

心 (shim, heart-mind): In the classical East Asian philosophical tradition, 心 is one of the most complex and contested concepts. Unlike the Western distinction between mind (rational) and heart (emotional), the Chinese and Korean 心 holds both together: it is the seat of moral cognition, emotional response, and spiritual perception simultaneously.

In Confucian thought, 心 is the governing faculty of the person — the organ through which the moral nature is expressed and through which one relates to Heaven.

In Neo-Confucian philosophy (Sŏngnihak, 性理學), the 心 mediates between the original, pure nature (sŏng, 性) and the expressed emotional response (chŏng, 情). In Buddhist thought, 心 is the ground of all experience — the “mind-only” school (唯識, yogācāra) holds that all phenomena arise from 心. In each tradition, 心 is not a mere organ but the inner core of what a person essentially is.

情 (jeong, feeling, affection, sentiment): 情 is the affective, relational dimension of the inner life — the warmth of human connection, the bond formed through shared life and shared suffering.

In Korean culture specifically, jeong carries unique resonances: it is the deep, often inarticulate attachment that forms between people who have lived through difficulty together — the kind that makes separation painful even when the relationship is not particularly comfortable. Jeong is why Koreans who have argued fiercely with a neighbor still feel a pull of grief when that neighbor moves away.

Together, 心情 (shimjeong) names the felt state of the heart — not emotion as passing mood, but the deep, abiding affective orientation of a being toward its objects of love.

In Rev. Moon's teaching, this compound is taken out of the realm of human psychology and placed at the foundation of the entire cosmos: it names the innermost character of God Himself.

The key conceptual distinction in Unification theology is between shimjeong as root and sarang (사랑, love) as fruit. Shimjeong is the inner impulse; sarang is its expression in action.

One can behave lovingly — giving, serving, sacrificing — without shimjeong as its source, and that love will be cold, dutiful, ultimately hollow. Shimjeong is what makes love warm, persistent, and inexhaustible. God's love for humanity is inexhaustible precisely because it flows from His shimjeong — His aching, parental, irrepressible heart.

Section II — Shimjeong within the Exposition of the Divine Principle

The Exposition of the Divine Principle does not treat shimjeong as a separate topic but places it at the very foundation of its ontology, in the section on the Dual Characteristics of God. God's original nature (Seongsang, 性相) contains intellect, emotion, and will as its three faculties — but at the core of all three, animating and unifying them, is shimjeong: the emotional impulse to seek joy through love.

This places shimjeong in a specific structural relationship to Seongsang (internal nature) and to love. Shimjeong is not simply one component of Seongsang alongside intellect and will. It is the motivating center of Seongsang — the reason God's intellect engages, the reason His will acts, the reason He creates at all. Without shimjeong, God's omniscience and omnipotence would have no direction, no purpose, no warmth:

Life began because love started budding in God's heart. Since life started from love, the result must also be produced through love. Since the beginning was love, the end must also be love. This is why we human beings are miserable when love is taken away.

— Sun Myung Moon (57-21, 05/21/1972) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 1

The phrase “love started budding in God's heart” — the Korean literally speaks of love beginning to sprout in the shimjeong — is a precise theological statement. The universe did not originate in an act of divine will or a logical necessity. It originated in an overflow of shimjeong: God's heart could not contain its longing to love, and creation was the result.

Section III — Shimjeong as God's Nature: Why God Creates

The question Rev. Moon returned to repeatedly — “Why did God create human beings?” — is answered not through philosophical argument but through the logic of shimjeong: God created because His Heart needed an object. Not an object to display His power, not a servant to carry out His commands, but a partner who could receive His shimjeong and return love freely.

In creating human beings, God utterly devoted Himself in His many efforts, giving all His heart and soul and the essence of His life. He totally poured out all His love and affection. He created human beings to exist in a relationship with Him that no force could ever undo or sever. Because God created people in such a way, He can feel peaceful as He beholds them. All affection and happiness can dwell within God only through them.

— Sun Myung Moon (20-205, 06/09/1968) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 1

This passage is striking in what it reveals about the nature of shimjeong. God did not create casually or effortlessly. He invested “the core of His bone, core of His flesh and core of His bone marrow” — the most intimate, essential substance of His being — into the creation of human beings. This is shimjeong in action: total investment, without reservation, in the object of love. And the result is that God “can feel peaceful” only when He beholds His children. His happiness depends on them. His shimjeong is not self-sufficient; it is inherently relational, inherently vulnerable.

This vulnerability of shimjeong is theologically significant. It means that God — the omnipotent Creator of the universe — can be wounded. He can grieve. He can long for what has been lost. And when the Fall occurred, this is precisely what happened.

Section IV — The Shimjeong of Grief: God's Han After the Fall

Because shimjeong is the deepest layer of God's being, the Fall was not merely a moral failure or a doctrinal problem. It was a wound to God's Heart. The concept of han (恨) — a uniquely Korean word describing deep, unresolved grief mixed with longing — is what Rev. Moon applied to God's inner state after the Fall:

God's joy was to begin by finding a starting point from which He could begin a journey in happiness with human beings, heading toward infinity and eternity. But God lost the basis upon which to begin, due to the Fall. Even after six thousand years, God has not recovered from the shock of Adam and Eve's Fall.

— Sun Myung Moon (20-205 / 20-210, 06/09/1968) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 1

The sustained pain of this loss — described in the Cheon Seong Gyeong as persisting across “tens of thousands of years” — is what the entire Providence of Restoration is working to resolve.

Every central figure in providential history — every patriarch, prophet, and martyr — was in some sense an expression of God's shimjeong seeking an outlet: an attempt to find, in that person, someone who could resonate with His Heart and create the conditions under which His children could be restored to Him.

The entire emotional force of the Providence is the force of God's shimjeong working its way through history toward its consummation.

Section V — The Four Types of Shimjeong and the Human Family

Rev. Moon taught that shimjeong develops through four distinct love relationships — each adding a new dimension and depth, and each corresponding to a different aspect of God's own Heart. These four types together constitute the complete range of love that a perfected human being should experience:

Child's shimjeong (자녀 심정, janyeo shimjeong) is the first and most foundational. The pure, receptive, trusting love of a child toward its parents is the model for the human relationship with God. It is characterized by total dependence, gratitude, and the joy of being loved unconditionally. Before any other dimension of love can develop healthily, this foundational receptivity — the ability to receive love and rest in it — must be established.

Sibling's shimjeong (형제자매 심정, hyeongje-jamae shimjeong) extends love horizontally, beyond the vertical parent-child bond. Brothers and sisters love as equals — with playfulness, rivalry that becomes solidarity, the bond of shared origin. This shimjeong, when extended outward, is the basis of all community: the feeling of kinship with the whole human race as brothers and sisters born from the same divine Parent.

Spousal shimjeong (부부 심정, bubu shimjeong) is the most intense and exclusive of the four — the total, singular love between husband and wife. This is the love through which God's creative purpose is most directly realized: the union of a man and woman who represent the masculine and feminine aspects of God's nature, becoming “one flesh” in a way that mirrors God's own internal wholeness.

Parental shimjeong (부모 심정, bumo shimjeong) is the crowning form — the unconditional, sacrificial love that a parent pours out for a child without any expectation of return. Rev. Moon consistently identified this as the love most nearly approximating God's own heart. A parent who loves does not calculate; they give because they cannot do otherwise. This shimjeong, once fully developed, makes a person nearly incapable of abandoning another human being:

Fallen men lost three hearts (shimjeong) simultaneously. They lost the heart of young, small children, and they lost the heart of brothers and sisters that was centered on God's love. Simultaneously, they lost the heart of children, the heart of husband and wife, and the heart of parents, which are the realms of heart within God's love.

— The Blessing and Ideal Family, Sun Myung Moon

The full weight of this passage: not one of the four types of shimjeong was preserved through the Fall. All four were lost simultaneously — because the Fall corrupted the lineage itself, the root from which all four types grow. This is why the restoration of shimjeong requires the Blessing Ceremony: a new lineage must be established through True Parents before the four types of shimjeong can genuinely flourish again.

Section VI — Shimjeong in the Course of Providential History

The Providence of Restoration can be read as the progressive expansion of God's shimjeong through history — a movement from the most distant, formal relationship between God and fallen humanity toward the immediate, filial relationship that was always the goal.

In the Old Testament Age, humanity stood in the position of servants before God. The relationship was formal, mediated through the law and through sacrificial offerings. The shimjeong exchanged was that of a master and a faithful servant — genuine, valuable, but distant. God could not yet call human beings His children; they could not yet call Him “Father” without presumption.

In the New Testament Age, Jesus introduced a revolutionary intimacy. “Abba, Father” — the address of a child to its parent — became for the first time available to human beings through their faith in Jesus and the work of the Holy Spirit. The shimjeong of this age is that of adopted children: real, transformative, precious — but still distinguished by the barrier of lineage. Adopted children have a different bloodline; their shimjeong with the parent is genuine but incomplete.

In the Completed Testament Age, the full restoration of shimjeong becomes possible. Through True Parents — who stand as the restored original ancestors — the direct parent-child shimjeong can at last be established at the level of lineage, not merely of faith. The circle that began when God's shimjeong first overflowed in the act of creation can finally close: God's children return to Him not as servants, not as adopted heirs, but as the direct expressions of His own Heart that He always intended them to be.

Section VII — Shimjeong and True Love: Root and Fruit

Shimjeong and true love (참사랑, cham sarang) are inseparable but not identical.

Shimjeong is the root; true love is the fruit. One can give without shimjeong — one can serve, sacrifice, even die — and that act, though noble, will be experienced as obligation rather than grace, as duty rather than abundance. Shimjeong is what makes true love inexhaustible: because it flows from a source deeper than decision or discipline, it cannot be depleted:

True love grows bigger and bigger the more it is invested. Conversely, if the principle were that true love would grow smaller, God would be depleted through His investment. But the opposite is the case.

— Sun Myung Moon (237-130, 11/13/1992) Cheon Seong Gyeong, Book 1

This is the physics of shimjeong: love that flows from God's Heart multiplies with use rather than diminishing. It is the opposite of finite resources, which are depleted through expenditure. God's shimjeong is the one inexhaustible source — and when human beings develop their own shimjeong through the four love relationships, they participate in this same infinite logic. The family, in Unification theology, is the school of shimjeong precisely because it is the place where all four types of love are simultaneously present and demand to be developed.

Section VIII — Comparative Perspectives

Augustine and Cor Inquietum: The closest Western theological parallel to shimjeong is Augustine's celebrated opening of the Confessions: “Our heart is restless, until it repose in Thee” (inquietum est cor nostrum, donec requiescat in Te). Augustine's cor — the heart as the center of desire, love, and spiritual orientation — shares the Unification 心 (shim) both structurally and emotionally. The inquietum (restlessness) mirrors the shimjeong of longing — the heart that cannot rest until it finds its true object.

However, for Augustine, the movement is entirely from the human side toward God; the Unification teaching adds the reciprocal dimension: God's shimjeong is equally restless, equally longing, equally unfulfilled until humanity returns to Him.

Confucian tradition — Ren (仁): The foundational Confucian virtue of ren (仁, benevolence/humaneness/co-humanity) is composed of 人 (person) and 二 (two) — humaneness as the quality that exists between two people in a relationship.

This captures something of the relational, other-directed character of shimjeong. Confucian philosophers, particularly Mencius, grounded ren in the ceyin zhixin (惻隱之心) — the heart of commiseration, the spontaneous feeling of care aroused when one witnesses suffering. This spontaneous, heart-level responsiveness to the other parallels the shimjeong of parental love in Unification teaching.

The key difference: Confucian ren is a moral virtue to be cultivated; Unification shimjeong is first God's own ontological nature, which human beings are invited to share.

Buddhist tradition — Karuṇā and Maitrī: Mahayana Buddhist teaching distinguishes maitrī (loving-kindness, the wish for all beings to be happy) from karuṇā (compassion, the wish for all beings to be free from suffering).

Both are aspects of what in Unification theology would be called shimjeong — particularly in their application to all sentient beings without discrimination. The Bodhisattva's vow to remain in the cycle of existence until all beings are liberated is structurally parallel to God's sustained engagement in the Providence of Restoration across millennia.

The difference is that in Buddhist cosmology, this compassion flows from the recognition of the emptiness of self and the illusory nature of distinctions; in Unification theology, it flows from the personal, parental shimjeong of a God who created each person as a unique and irreplaceable object of His love.

Islamic tradition — Maḥabba and the Divine Rahma: The Sufi tradition developed the concept of maḥabba (محبة, divine love) — God's love for humanity and the human lover's response — as the supreme spiritual reality. Al-Ghazali and Ibn ʿArabī wrote extensively on God's longing for His creation and creation's longing for God. The Quranic attribute al-Raḥmān al-Raḥīm (the All-Compassionate, the All-Merciful) — both derived from the Arabic root r-ḥ-m, the same root as raḥim (womb) — describes a divine love as intimate, enveloping, and nurturing as a mother's love for the child she carries.

This maternal quality of divine love resonates directly with the parental shimjeong at the center of Rev. Moon's understanding of God's Heart.

Section IX — Shimjeong in New Religious Movement Scholarship

The concept of shimjeong has attracted scholarly attention as both a theological category and a sociological mechanism. Scholars examining the emotional culture of the Unification movement have noted that shimjeong functions as a community-bonding term of considerable power — one that frames the movement's relationships (between members, and between members and True Parents) in the vocabulary of deep, family-like affective bonds.

Eileen Barker (The Making of a Moonie, 1984) observed, without using the term itself, that the Unification community's emotional culture centered on an unusually intense sense of family affection among members — a feature she attributed in part to the movement's explicit cultivation of the four love relationships as spiritual practice.

Later scholars, including scholars writing in Nova Religio and Numen, have examined shimjeong more directly as a theological concept, noting its distinctive contribution to debates in the theology of religion about divine passibility (whether God can suffer or be affected).

The Unification insistence that God has shimjeong — that He can grieve, long, and be wounded — places it firmly in the camp of those traditions (process theology, open theism, certain strands of feminist theology) that affirm divine passibility against the classical theist tradition of divine impassibility. The specific application of han (the Korean concept of unresolved grief) to God's inner state has been noted as a theologically original contribution that grew directly from the Korean cultural context of Rev. Moon's formation and ministry.

Key Texts on tplegacy.net

God's Heart — the companion glossary entry focusing specifically on God's shimjeong and the concept of han

Cheon Seong Gyeong — primary source, especially Book 1, Chapters 2 and 4

The Blessing and Ideal Family — primary source for the four types of shimjeong and their restoration

The Dual Characteristics of God — the ontological context in which shimjeong is located within God's Seongsang

Sermons of Rev. Moon — full primary source collection