Religious Emotions : Some Philosophical Explorations [1 ed.] 9781443810722, 9781847185716

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Religious Emotions

Religious Emotions: Some Philosophical Explorations

Edited by

Willem Lemmens and Walter Van Herck

Cambridge Scholars Publishing

Religious Emotions: Some Philosophical Explorations, Edited by Willem Lemmens and Walter Van Herck This book first published 2008 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing 15 Angerton Gardens, Newcastle, NE5 2JA, UK British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Copyright © 2008 by Willem Lemmens and Walter Van Herck and contributors All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owner. ISBN (10): 1-84718-571-1, ISBN (13): 9781847185716

In memory of Robert C. Solomon

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Acknowledgements ..................................................................................... x Introduction ................................................................................................ 1 Willem Lemmens & Walter Van Herck Modernity and the Ambivalence of Religious Emotions Chapter One............................................................................................... 12 Petri Järveläinen What are Religious Emotions? Chapter Two .............................................................................................. 27 Mark Wynn Religious Emotions and Religious Experience Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 34 John Corrigan Cognitions, Universals and Constructedness: Recent Emotions Research and the Study of Religion Chapter Four ............................................................................................. 48 Katja Thörner About the Question of the Real Cause of an Emotion and its Importance for the Concept of ‘Religious Experience’ Chapter Five .............................................................................................. 59 Desiree Berendsen Traditions as Paradigm Scenarios: Applying Ronald de Sousa’s Concept to William James’ View on Religious Emotions Chapter Six ................................................................................................ 75 Walter Van Herck Lift up your Hearts. On Emotionalism in Religious Experience

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Chapter Seven............................................................................................ 87 Gabor Boros The ‘Secularisation’ of Religious Emotions: Hope and Fear, Love, and Felicity in Spinoza, Descartes and Hobbes Chapter Eight........................................................................................... 105 Herman De Dijn Spinoza and Religious Emotions Chapter Nine............................................................................................ 120 Peter Losconzi Passionate Reason: Science, Theology and the Intellectual Passion of Wonder in Descartes’ Meditations Chapter Ten ............................................................................................. 131 Willem Lemmens The Passion of Christianity: on Bach’s St. Matthew Passion and Religious Emotions Chapter Eleven ........................................................................................ 145 Javier Carreño Erotic and Religious Passion: Revisiting Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments Chapter Twelve ....................................................................................... 161 Ann Van Eechaute C.S. Lewis on Myth and Fact in Affective and Religious Life Chapter Thirteen...................................................................................... 174 Beatha Toth Imagination, Belief and Abstract Thought within the Orbit of Religious Experience Chapter Fourteen ..................................................................................... 183 Louise Sundararajan Kong (Emptiness): a Chinese Buddhist Emotion Chapter Fifteen ........................................................................................ 198 Robert C. Roberts Compassion as an Emotion and Virtue

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Chapter Sixteen ....................................................................................... 219 Peter Goldie Freud and the Oceanic Feeling Chapter Seventeen ................................................................................... 230 Robert C. Solomon The Many Dimensions of Religious Emotional Experience Contributors............................................................................................. 247

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The editors would like to acknowledge and thank the publishers for their permission for publication of Chapter 15, ‘Compassion as an Emotion and Virtue’, by Robert C. Roberts, which was published before in: Ingolf Dalferth and Andreas Hunziker (editors), Mitleid, Religion in Philosophy and Theology Vol. 28, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2007. The editors also express their gratitude to Dr. Chris Gemerchack, who assisted them with care and intellectual devotion in preparing this collection for publication.

INTRODUCTION MODERNITY AND THE AMBIVALENCE OF RELIGIOUS EMOTIONS WILLEM LEMMENS & WALTER VAN HERCK

In recent decades contemporary Anglo-American philosophy has seen a boom in publications on the subject of ‘the emotions’. Robert C. Solomon’s book, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life (1976), is generally considered the beginning of this more or less circumscribed debate. Solomon inaugurated what he and many after him welcomed as a real rehabilitation of the emotions. Authors like Ronald de Sousa, William Lyons, Patricia Greenspan, Robert Gordon and Harvey Green (to name but a few) followed in Solomon’s footsteps by elaborating theories of the emotions that challenged what he called ‘the myth of the passions’.1 According to this myth, philosophers and theologians in particular had treated the emotions (or ‘passions’, as they were called until the dawn of the nineteenth century) as disturbing, anti-rational forces originating in the dark regions of body and mind. In opposing reason they were considered dangerous to the moral and spiritual health of the self and inimical to social life. Solomon and others claimed exactly the opposite. According to them the entire Platonic-Cartesian myth of reason as a necessary master of the passions rested upon ‘an error’ (as Damasio pointed out from a neurological perspective in his famous Descartes’ Error).2 This error, which has been reinforced in our Western culture by the Christian religion and certain philosophical traditions (such as Stoicism), needed a radical revision. Emotions, as Solomon et al. have made clear in various studies, are not blind, purely physiological and bodily-steered ‘gut reactions’. They do not necessarily oppose our volitions, beliefs and judgments. Rather, they coconstitute the intentional and cognitive relation of the mind to the world. Emotions are not necessarily antagonists of reason and understanding, but are rather their handmaidens, if not their actual guides. Without emotions we would not be able to judge the world and other people, evaluate

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Introduction

ourselves and others and make significant choices in life. Criticising the so-called feeling theory of the emotions—known as the James-Lange theory and often also ascribed to Descartes and Hume—Solomon and his heirs thus inaugurated the now widespread cognitivism in contemporary theory of the emotions. Today, it is widely accepted that emotions express evaluative perceptions or even judgments, that they have a history and that they mould and shape not only the beliefs, but also the character and life stories of human beings. Emotions, in short, constitute the character and identity of human beings and are an essential aspect of our mental life. The rehabilitation of the emotions in contemporary philosophy is intriguing and asks for further reflection. Clearly it goes hand in hand with the parallel flourishing in ethics of the view that feeling and imagination play a crucial role in moral judgment. This view has been expressed by those influenced by the later Wittgenstein, and more recently by Iris Murdoch, John Casey, Charles Taylor and Martha Nussbaum.3 These and other moral philosophers shaped the profound critique of the one-sided rationalism dominant in mainstream moral theories until late last century. In Anglo-Saxon moral philosophy, the insight that reason, virtue and affectivity were necessarily interwoven aspects of a full moral life gained acceptance. Morality feeds on feeling and affect in addition to calculation and prudence; reason needs the heart not only to teach us about, but to assist us to actually live the good life. It is not surprising then that after the first boom in theories of the emotions, various philosophers have studied the specific role and nature of moral emotions. Publications by authors like Justin Oakley, Michael Stocker, Simon Blackburn, Richard Wollheim, Peter Goldie and Martha Nussbaum confirmed the cognitivist theory of the emotions inaugurated by Solomon.4 In these books the existing debate on the emotions was enriched with the deeper analysis of the role of feeling and judgment in emotional experience, the relation of emotion to virtue and the relation between narrativity, emotions and moral vision. Remarkably, however, these studies remained silent about, or noted only in passing, the existence of so-called religious emotions. This brings some interesting questions to the fore. First of all, why was the realm of religion so poorly treated by almost all major theorists of the emotions? Moreover, after closer consideration, does the ‘myth of the passions’ give an accurate picture of the alleged historical oblivion or repression of the emotions? Is this repression due to a Christian-inspired philosophy and theology, as most participants in the emotions debate at least implicitly acknowledge? If not, what could be a more adequate picture of the historical shifts and changes within the accounts and theories

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of the emotions? Finally, could the answer to these questions teach us something conceptually about the nature and significance of these socalled religious emotions for human life? The almost total negligence (until recently at least) of the relation between religion and emotions in contemporary philosophical theory of the emotions has historical roots. Our era is one of secularisation and individualism, which is the result of a long and complex process of transformation in Western culture since the eighteenth century. Hans Blumenberg has coined this transformation the Umbesetzung (reoccupation) of the self-understanding of modern man.5 It is through the sober cultivation of its own conditions of life and its sense of humanity, rather than through its relation to an absolute transcendence, that the modern self finds its moral destiny. This depreciation of the classical Platonic-Christian vision of human nature has dramatically changed the value-horizon of modern culture. From the seventeenth century onwards, as Charles Taylor has also pointed out, the increasing appreciation of an ethics of ‘ordinary life’ seals a real retreat of the sacred.6 This results in a gradual shift in focus from ‘God’ to ‘human nature’ in the primary value systems of Western culture and society. Family life, individual well-being in work and leisure as well as commerce and sociability become the central goods in moral life. The revaluation of man’s mundane, this-worldly condition leads further to the idea that a full human life necessarily requires the cultivation of passions and sentiments. Taylor masterfully pointed out in his Sources of the Self that in a first phase the emergence of the ‘ethics of ordinary life’ went hand in hand with a liberal Presbyterianism or deism, for example in the writings of the Earl of Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson. In a later phase, however, this recognition of the value of ordinary life was integrated into a much more naturalistic, even anti-religious moral metaphysics, of which Hume is the most prominent spokesman.7 The revaluation of the passions and sentiments was, from then on, interwoven with a wholly secular, pagan moral value-horizon, exemplified by a scientific worldview. As we will see immediately, this transformation also leads to the coining of the term ‘emotion’ as a substitute for the concept of ‘passion’ in the nineteenth century. This completes in a certain sense the secularisation of modern moral anthropologies. The ‘ethics of ordinary life’, which inaugurated the appreciation of passions and feelings and ‘the retreat of the sacred’ so typical for Modernity have clearly echoed through twentieth century theories of the emotions. Solomon’s ‘rehabilitation of the emotions’, for example, is directly inspired by existentialism and Nietzschean romanticism—two

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Introduction

trends in contemporary thinking famous for their opposition, even hostility towards Christianity and its Platonic metaphysical theology. But also in Martha Nussbaum’s recent Upheavals of Thought, the heritage of ‘ordinary life’ ethics is remarkable. Nussbaum defines her extreme cognitivist view of the emotions in terms of an actualised Aristotelian eudaimonism.8 In this eudaimonism, which is also shaped by the NeoStoic cognitivist theory of the emotions, she integrates a normative ideal of authenticity in a mundane and liberal ethics. Nussbaum’s eudaimonism claims that emotions are evaluative judgments which relate the self to its ‘own life plans, values and important projects’. As necessary ingredients of the affective life, emotions such as love and hate, compassion and grief, guilt and shame, are wholly committed to the ‘dear self’ and its thisworldly concerns: family-life, friendship, success in one’s job and career, the development of one’s personality, sexual flourishing. Nussbaum’s breathtaking analysis culminates in the defence of love as a central emotion that should be educated and transformed into a simultaneously caring and benevolent attitude towards kin and humanity as a whole. Closely interwoven with compassion, this normative concept of love should be clearly distinguished from the transgressive love towards God or the Absolute Good, as historically expressed by Plato and Augustine.9 Nussbaum nevertheless recognises the existence of certain emotions (awe, wonder) which sit uneasily within her eudaimonistic scheme and have obviously a religious connotation. These emotions do not focus on the mundane self, but recognise as their intentional object a transcendent Good—God, the Absolute, the totality of Being, the existence of the universe sub species aeternitatis —that is absent, or at least foreign to a naturalised liberal eudaimonism. Nussbaum certainly recognises that love and compassion could possibly differ in significance against a religious ‘value-horizon’, which was a common perspective before the dawn of Modernity. She devotes, for instance, long analyses to the Augustinian Divine Love and to the highly rationalistic Amor Intellectualis Dei of Spinoza. As a normative ideal, however, she most explicitly rejects these accounts of love. Nussbaum seems convinced that categorising emotions such as awe and wonder, but also love, compassion, fear and guilt, from within a religious scheme of values would betray the liberal individualism and secularism taken for granted in contemporary theories of the emotions. It is as if this betrayal also ignores dramatically that the secularised worldview underpinning these theories is most in tune with human nature as such.10 This brings two further questions to the forefront: how accurate is in fact the ‘myth of the passions’ dominant in contemporary theories of the

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emotions? Moreover, is the alleged negligence of the emotions in the Western intellectual culture due to a Christian-inspired philosophy and theology - as this myth defends? The valuing of the passions and sentiments in the eighteenth-century ethics of ordinary life at least indicates that the historical details of this myth could be nuanced. The so-called rehabilitation of the emotions is not an invention of late twentieth-century philosophy and science, but occurred earlier in the history of Western thinking. The works just mentioned, from Shaftesbury to Hume, bear testimony to this. For these thinkers, but also for someone like Rousseau, it did not make sense to reduce man’s affective life wholly to the stark opposition between emotion and cognition, or reason and passion. To be sure, passions were viewed as occasional outbreaks of disturbing, irrational forces originating in the dark regions of body and mind. However, on another level, passions or affects were considered by these and other eighteenth century moralists as signs of a higher sensibility, more particularly the capacity for aesthetic and ethical judgment, and as part of the character of the virtuous self. Indeed, it is no coincidence that the language of moral sentiments flourished precisely in eighteenth-century anthropology. The existence of a rich affective vocabulary in eighteenth-century philosophy (with its distinction between passions, affects, affections, feelings, sentiments) leads to a further observation: the category of the ‘emotions’ is a recent invention. This is in any case the central thesis of Thomas Dixon’s From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. In his well documented and convincing study Dixon points out the historical background of this conceptual invention. He turns Solomon’s ‘myth of the passions’ on its head and requests a fundamental revision of the idea that the Christian theology and worldview as such radically oppose the emotions or dismiss them as evil.11 As Dixon makes clear, the category of the ‘emotions’ became popular in English- speaking philosophy and science sometime between 1800 and 1850 through figures like Thomas Brown and Thomas Chalmers. Foreshadowed by Hume, these thinkers provided the impulse for a real secularisation of the study of the emotions, culminating in the first scientific treatment of the emotions with Charles Darwin and William James.12 Here we see the Umbesetzung, as mentioned by Blumenberg, mirrored in the history of science: the older categories of the ‘passions’ and ‘affections’, ‘sentiment’ and ‘feeling’ belonged to a discourse with roots in a religious worldview. The substitution of these terms with the concept of ‘emotion’, so Dixon argues, marks a transformation toward a new paradigm, which inaugurated a much more reductionist view of the

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Introduction

nature and dynamics of humankind’s affective life. However, according to Dixon, this also means that the stark opposition of emotion and intellect, the schism between the affective and the cognitive aspects of human nature ascribed to the whole of Western culture and thought from Plato to the twentieth century, is incorrect. It is only through the reductionism of Darwin and James that this antagonistic account of the ‘emotions’ emerged. Dixon also nuances the alleged hostility of Christian theology—and the Platonic metaphysics interwoven with it—towards the emotions: according to him, this aspect of the ‘myth of the passions’ is also fundamentally misleading. Certainly, orthodox theologians and Christianinspired philosophers in the nineteenth century opposed the physicalist theories of the emotions, which became increasingly dominant in science and philosophy. They did so to preserve, so to speak, the non-reductionist anthropological views of Christian inspiration, which often leave space for the specific role of the affections and passions as constituents of a religious way of life. Orthodox Christians like William Whewell and William Sewell, but also ‘natural theologians’ such as Sir Charles Bell and James McCosh, recognised the constitutive role of the higher affections or emotions for religious life during the nineteenth century. They thus prolonged a tradition with roots in the thought of Augustine and Thomas, but reworked from a typical eighteenth-century Christian anthropological perspective, with figures such as Isaac Watts, Jonathan Edwards and Friedrich Schleiermacher. In Catholicism, moreover, the constitutive role of affections and passions for Faith was also already acknowledged by figures like Cardinal Newman and René de Chateaubriand before the twentieth century. Newman, for example, remarks in his Grammar of Assent: “Conscience has an intimate bearing on our affections and emotions, leading us to reverence and awe, hope and fear . . .”13 And in his Génie du Christianisme, Chateaubriand depicts, in his inimitable rhetoric, how Catholic Christianity is nothing less then a ‘religion of passion’: “la religion chrétienne est elle-même une sorte de passion qui a ses transports, ses ardeurs, ses soupirs, ses joies, ses larmes, ses amours du monde et du désert. . . . Comme toutes les grandes affections, elle a quelque chose de sérieux et de triste . . .” Beauty, towards which the Christian soul aims, so Chateaubriand further remarks, is eternal and Platonic in nature: it consists in the relation towards the Divine. “Pour arriver à la jouissance de cette beauté suprême,” Chateaubriand adds, “les chrétiens prennent une autre route que les philosophes d’Athènes: ils restent dans ce monde afin de

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multiplier les sacrifices, et de se rendre plus dignes, par une longue purification, de l’objet de leurs désirs.”14 The increased awareness of the irreducible role of the passions and emotions in human life—as it became apparent in eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy and nineteenth-century proto-psychology—was thus clearly mirrored during that same era in the religious anthropologies of Christianity. One could add to this a further remark. No doubt, this positive appreciation of man’s affective nature as constitutive of Faith and the religious way of life has its roots deep in the philosophical and theological traditions of Christianity (we have already mentioned Augustine and Thomas Aquinas). However, one cannot ignore that these traditions underwent important changes and transformations through the ages. There is, after all, a considerable difference in the concrete way in which, for example, a Church father in Augustine’s day, a Dominican monk in thirdteenth-century Italy or a Protestant believer in Jonathan Edwards’ eighteenth-century America would each conceive of his affections towards God and the way he should bring these into tune with his will and the aspirations of his faith.15 Moreover, one should not ignore the broader metaphysical horizon of Christian anthropology with its dramatic conception of man’s fallen nature, the need for redemption and grace and the life-long struggle to overcome sin. Chateaubriand’s characterisation of the Christian religion reminds us of this fact: specific passions and emotions may be recognised as vehicles of Faith and salvation. Indeed, the longing for salvation is itself a form of passion. However, human nature is also, according to Christian anthropology, prey to lower forces and appetites which should be conquered and overcome by the will. How central is this gloomy perspective on human nature for the religious person in general? Or does this perspective rather reflect a biased, pessimistic dismissal of human nature—specific for a certain type of Christian religiosity? Is such a biased preoccupation with human life not rightly criticised in liberal culture and, more specifically, in contemporary theories of the emotions? If so, speaking of ‘the myth of the passions’ may be misleading from an idea-historical perspective, but is nevertheless understandable from a more normative point of view. Contemporary theorists of emotions like Nussbaum and Blackburn should then perhaps be welcomed for their emancipatory zeal in propagating a positive, secular paganism which radically opposes the Christian conception of human nature with its excessive desires, cultivation of guilt and gloomy melancholy, but also its extreme joy and devotion, its longing for the eternal beyond measure.

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Introduction

It would take us too far to develop a meta-critique of the normative intentions underlying the dismissal (albeit implicit) of Christian anthropology by contemporary theories of the emotions. However, the historicity of Christianity and the need we may feel to create a genealogy of its so-called dark view on the human condition should not blind us to a deeper, more urgent question, at least from a philosophical and scientific point of view: how should religious man as such be considered? More precisely, how necessary and unavoidable is the realm of religion for the conditio humana irrespective of the specific tradition in which it manifests itself? This question is surely even more difficult to answer than the historical reconstruction and evaluation of Christian anthropology. However, this question is the central issue brought forward by the quest for a specific religious affectivity—or, in terms of this contribution, the nature and significance of ‘religious emotions’. Do specific ‘religious emotions’ exist, and if so, what is their nature and significance? Does it make sense to coin this term to refer to a specific region of the affective life of humans? Can this region be distinguished from, for instance, the moral or aesthetic spheres? Specific moral and aesthetic emotions at least seem to exist. The delineation of their causal conditions, their specific phenomenology, and their relation to language, culture and social praxis have recently been explored extensively. But what about religious emotions? One of the challenges for contemporary philosophical anthropology is, without doubt, to develop a conceptual analysis that does justice to this class of emotions. It may be the case, as Robert C. Roberts recently argued in his Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology, that the concept of the emotions is “fuzzy on the edges” and to a certain degree “indeterminate”.16 As Roberts also remarks however, one cannot ignore the presence in folk psychology of the category of the ‘emotions’. From this fact, philosophical analysis starts to delineate the conditions under which this category is used, with reference to different practices, language games and value systems that offer a conceptual grid to classify specific types of emotions, a sense of hierarchy between emotions, the components of emotions, and their phenomenological colour. Why should such an analysis not be extended to religious emotions? The study of Petri Jarvelaïnen—one of the few in contemporary theories of the emotions devoted specifically to religious emotions—shows that such a conceptual analysis makes sense.17 In common life people do refer to the love for Christ or the Prophet; they express their fear for Divine Wrath or their longing for Grace or an absolute peace of mind. Many religious traditions also refer to the specific

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joy and sense of wholeness effectuated by prayer or the religious life in general. As Roberts defends: emotions are complex concern-based constructions involving specific evaluations and perceptions, as well as feeling and bodily reactions. Why could one not speak then of a general concern of the religiously minded soul which structures and shapes, so to speak, a panoply of emotions and affective states which flourish through this religiously inspired commitment? This religious commitment could further be described in terms of the narrative order established by a certain religious tradition. Interwoven with moral and ritual practices, such a narrative order then forms the value-horizon that gives the religious emotions an existential and symbolic significance typical for the religious way of life as such. This conceptualisation should, however, also leave room—so Jarvelaïnen stresses following William James—for the specific relation of the religious mind to the Absolute. For without this specific experience of transcendence, it is hard to make sense of the intentionality of religious emotions. Religion is a realm of human life that has considered, in all cultures and times, the role of the emotions as constitutive. Despite growing secularisation, religion still shapes and moulds—as do morals and art, technology and science—the affective life of numerous individuals, and thus their relations to the world and to other people. Religion establishes a value-horizon against which specific attitudes, desires and existential concerns are expressed. Spiritual traditions, in addition to religious practices and institutions, have been established in all cultures—and often these religious traditions function as important catalysts of social and spiritual life. Religion, however, also causes psychic distress. It can lead to fanatic and excessive behaviour which challenges the Aristotelian view of man as an ‘animal rationale’—a view so dear to our Enlightenment culture. Against the background of these considerations one should further develop the quest for the specificity of religion as a constitutive realm of the human condition, for better or worse. And insofar as both religion and the emotions are constitutive for being ‘human’, the quest to understand their interaction is unavoidable. Most of the following essays draw on material that was presented at the International Conference on Religious Emotions. Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, held at the University of Antwerp in September 2005. This conference was the outcome of a four year research project, sponsored by the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) and by the Research Council of the University of Antwerp. We are grateful that Desiree Berendsen and Ann Van Eechaute joined our Philosophy

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Department to conduct this research. The project benefited significantly from the input given by various guest speakers and colleagues we had the honour of welcoming in Antwerp in the course of this project. We are especially grateful to Susan James, William Lyons, Donald Ainslie, Thomas Dixon, Peter Goldie, Wessel Stoker, Petri Järveläinen, Robert C. Roberts, Herman De Dijn, Gabor Boros, Mark Wynn, John Corrigan and Robert C. Solomon. The first five chapters of this collection try to elucidate the nature of religious emotions. What are the components of religious emotions? Do they differ from religious experience? Are they universally given or culturally constructed? The chapters 6 till 12 take a more historical perspective. They correct the idea that only in recent times emotions received the attention they deserve. Religious emotions prove to be prominently present as well in the Christian tradition of the West, as in our philosophical inheritance. The chapters 13 till 16 elaborate on some paradigmatic aspects concerning the specificity of religious emotions: imagination, emptiness, compassion and oceanic feeling. The philosophical study of religious emotions has only just begun. Robert C. Solomon, to whose memory we dedicate this book, reminds us in the last chapter of what makes this study notwithstanding worthwhile. A better understanding of the emotions is essential to gain insight in the nature of religion. This insight could in its turn induce the idea that the human emotional spectrum is far wider than often supposed.

Notes 1

Robert C. Solomon, The Passions, Doubleday-Anchor, New York 1976 ; William Lyons, Emotion, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1980; Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion, MIT Press, Cambridge, Mass. 1987 ; Robert M. Gordon, The Structure of Emotions : Investigations in Cognitive Pychology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987 ; Patricia Greenspan, Emotions and Reasons : An Inquiry into Emotional Justification, Routledge, London 1988 ; O. Harvey Green, The Emotions : A Philosophical Theory, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht 1992. 2 Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes’ Error. Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Putnam’s Son, New York 1994. 3 Cf. Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics. Writings on Philosophy and Literature, Chatto&Windus, London 1997; John Casey, Pagan Virtue. An Essay in Ethics, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1990. For publications of Taylor and Nussbaum cf. infra.

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4 Cf. Justin Oakley, Morality and the Emotions, Routledge, London 1992 ; Michael Stocker, Valuing Emotions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996 ; Simon Blackburn, Ruling Passions. A Theory of Practical Reasoning, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1998 ; Richard Wollheim, The Emotions, Yale University Press, London&New Haven 1999 ; Peter Goldie, The Emotions, Clarendon Press, Oxford 2000 ; Martha Nussbaum, Upheaval of Thoughts. The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001. 5 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1985. 6 Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1989, Part III, “The Affirmation of Ordinary Life”. See also his Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 2002. 7 For more about Hume’s normative account of a mundane ethics, cf.: Willem Lemmens, “Virtue without Providence? The Ethics of Hume’s Religious Scepticism”, in Bijdragen: International Journal in Philosophy and Theology, 61, 3, 2000, 285-307. 8 Nussbaum 2001, 49-55. 9 Ibid., 54-5. 10 On Nussbaum’s views religion and the idea of ‘transcending humanity’ (or a purely mundane moral value-horizon) cf. : Fergus Kerr, Immortal Longings. Versions of Transcending Humanity, SPCK, London 1997, 1§22. Kerr also gives a fine analysis of Iris Murdoch’s Platonic concept of moral vision and its relation to the experience of transcendence (Chapter 4). 11 Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, 3. 12 Ibid., 98-179. 13 Cardinal Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, London 1970. Cited in Dixon 2003, 185. 14 Chateaubriand, Génie du Christianisme, Flammarion, Paris 1966, 302-3. 15 For the historical transformation of Christian religious affectivity cf. infra Chapter 6: Walter Van Herck, “Lift up your Hearts. On Emotionalism in Religious Experience.” 16 Robert C. Roberts, Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, 20, 56-9. 17 Petri Järveläinen, A Study of Religious Emotions, Luther-Agricola-Society, Helsinki 2000. Cf. also infra, Chapter 1: “What are Religious Emotions?”.

CHAPTER ONE WHAT ARE RELIGIOUS EMOTIONS? PETRI JÄRVELÄINEN

Emotions such as joy, sorrow, hope, and fear have been widely discussed during the last two decades in the circle of philosophy of mind. It is commonly argued that emotions either are a cognitive act of mind or involve such acts as an essential component. Emotions are not just irrational somatic perturbations and feelings which are associated with bodily movements but they either are or involve cognitive evaluations. For instance, fear is an emotion that consists of an unpleasant feeling and the thought of something dangerous. Correspondingly, joy is an emotion that consists of a pleasant feeling and the thought that something positive is at hand. If a person says 'happy to see you' in an emotional sense of an utterance, he or she has perceived another and formed a self-regarding evaluation according to which seeing another is positive for him or her. Perceiving and evaluating are cognitive phenomena. Without them a pleasant or unpleasant feeling would be senseless. In brief, emotions are intentional phenomena. Intentionality of emotions means that they are directed to objects, external or internal or both. Even the most known theory of emotions in modern thinking, namely that put forward by William James, involves the idea of intentionality even though it has been characterised as a feeling-theory of emotions. According to James, bodily movements are caused by 'exciting fact'. From ancient theologians via Protestant Reformers to Friedrich Schleiermacher, William James and Rudolf Otto, several theological writers have turned their focus on the 'inner man' and the special religious feeling of the soul. The mainstream Christian tradition has interpreted the spiritual life in terms of a dialectical relationship between fear and love, a notion which can be traced back to Plato's Philebus. One might suppose that also the modern philosophical discussion had inspired theologians and philosophers of religion. For instance, mainly based upon A. J. Ayer's view of religious language as emotional language, some theologians and

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philosophers of religion used to argue that religious language does not have an extramental significance but expresses inner feelings rather. In the light of recent discussion on emotions, this view is at first sight problematic, and in this sense the recent discussion could open the way for new insights into the role of emotions in religion. However, the question of religious emotions has not been particularly central in the contemporary philosophy of religion. In dealing with psychological phenomena associated with religion, the mainstream approach within the philosophy of religion has been to focus on the question of 'religious experience', in particular its evidential force. In my opinion, more independent analysis of religious emotions would be fruitful with respect to deepening our understanding not only of religious emotions, but of religion itself. Moreover, I believe that the history of theology looks a little bit different when read from the experiential point of view. In what follows, I will briefly characterise the discussion of emotions in contemporary philosophy of mind and will sketch out a view as to how one should understand emotions. According to this view, emotions involve at least two compounds: an affective-feeling component and a cognitive component. I will then apply that view to the question of religious emotions and suggest that typical religious emotions are natural emotions which involve characteristic cognitive, personal and practical aspects.

1. Emotions in the philosophy of mind The ideas put forward in the recent discussion of emotions in the philosophy of mind can be traced back to ancient philosophy.1 Aristotle's analysis of various emotions involves three common components. First, emotions involve an evaluation stating that something positive or negative is happening in a relevant way to the subject. Secondly, the former gives rise to a pleasant or unpleasant feeling that signifies an awareness of one's or someone else's position. Finally, Aristotle thought that there are somatic changes associated with emotions which may influence an emotional state.2 For the Stoic philosopher Chrysippos, emotions are false judgments. In spite of their irrationality, emotions as judgments are cognitive phenomena. In the Stoic context, a judgment means an assent to a proposition. Stoic emotions, such as distress, pleasure, appetite and fear, consist of two judgments: that something is good or bad and that one should react in a certain way. It was Seneca in particular who, in later Stoic discussion, added to this characterisation the notion of the first movements of the soul. He thought that bodily reactions were something

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Chapter One

like pre-emotions, which are not full-fledged emotions if they are not associated with the judgment of mind. 3 The Stoics had a negative view of the emotions. They thought that the soul is badly disturbed and damaged by uncontrolled emotions. Learning to see the world and one's position therein from the point of view of logos frees us wholly of the emotions. This is called apatheia. Aristotle had a more positive attitude toward emotions. According to his view, one should learn to emote correctly insofar as emotions are a constitutive element of the virtuous life. Furthermore, the Stoics believed that judgment is essential for emotions: emotions are embedded in a psychophysical setting, but in order to analyse them it is sufficient to concentrate on judgments. Aristotle’s view is broader. For him, analysing emotions means that the psycho-physical setting is taken into an account. In recent discussions some authors such as Robert Solomon and Martha Nussbaum have followed the Stoic path and argued that emotions either are or involve judgments. For Solomon, emotions are constitutive (sets of) judgments we make concerning both ourselves and the world. Emotions are our choices that create our personality and give meaning and colour to our world.4 For Nussbaum, an emotion involves an acceptance of a belief.5 One topic of discussion is whether all emotions involve a belief. For instance, Patricia Greenspan has pointed out that many emotions involve uncertain affective thoughts rather than beliefs.6 It has been more popular to deal with emotions as complexes than to concentrate on beliefs and judgment. For O. Harvey Green and Robert Gordon, emotions also involve volitional aspects. According to Green, emotions are structures of desire and belief. The basic emotions can be analysed as follows: gladness: A believes with certainty that p and A desires that p; sorrow: A believes with certainty that p and A desires that not-p; hope: A believes without certainty that p and A desires that p; fear: A believes without certainty that p and A desires that not-p.7 For Gordon, beliefs and desires are causes of the effects which are designated by emotion-terms.8 Both of these theories are problematic. Emotions as complexes have been analysed more successfully in componential theories which follow the Aristotelian line of thinking. According to William Lyons, typical emotions are constituted by several components such as perception, belief, evaluation, desire, behavioural suggestion, physiological changes and their registrations, and feelings. For his causal-evaluative theory, in order to be deemed an emotion, a mental phenomenon has to involve self-regarding evaluation (judgment) that causes abnormal physiological changes.9 Also Patricia Greenspan argues that the core of emotions is constituted by two

Religious Emotions: Some Philosophical Explorations

15

components. According to her view, emotions are affective states of comfort or discomfort directed to the cognitive content which is articulated by evaluative propositions.10 Justin Oakley suggests that emotions are complexes of cognitions, behavioural suggestion and affect. I believe Oakley is right concerning numerous emotions but there are emotions which do not seem to involve any call to action. Oakley sketches out a fascinating notion of psychic feelings and affects. According to his view, we are not aware of all emotions as physiological states but rather as states of mind.11 It may be interesting to note that this kind of idea can be traced back to medieval discussion on emotions. It was William of Ockham who first argued that there are lower emotions of the body and upper emotions of the will.12 To my knowledge, the most extensive theory of emotions is the one put forward by Ronald de Sousa. He argues that emotions show similarities to beliefs, desires and perceptions, but cannot be reduced to them. He analyses the object-directed aspects of emotions as a set of attitudes which are learnt in situations he calls 'paradigm-scenarios'. They involve characteristic objects of specific emotion-types and characteristic responses to them. De Sousa thinks that emotions are culturally dependent. We learn some emotions very early in life, while other, higher skills are presupposed to have their corresponding emotions. By reading novels and listening to music, a person becomes acquainted with the emotional repertoire of a culture.13

2. The generic condition of emotions I agree with the componential theories and I think that theories equating emotions either to feelings or cognitions are wrong: concerning the characterisation of emotions, the answer is not either/or but both/and. In my view, all emotions involve an affective feeling component and an evaluative cognitive component. The first component is particularly essential in identifying a mental phenomenon as an emotion. The latter is crucial for distinguishing emotions from each other and identifying an emotion as a certain emotion. I call this the generic condition of emotions. Let us consider briefly both of those components. In my view the cognitive component is embedded in a larger system of cognitive attitudes. For instance, if a person fears a dog, there is (1) an external object, a dog; (2) the perception to which it gives rise; (3) the inner object or intentional object, thought of the dog; (4) the self-regarding evaluation of a dog that involves two aspects: an attitude (belief, thought, etc.) that a dog is harmful and the notion that a dog is harmful just for

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Chapter One

oneself. I agree with those authors who think that the cognitive attitude associated with an emotion is not necessarily a belief. It may be just a thought, image, guess, etc. I am willing to characterise cognitions broadly in order to apply my view, for instance, to emotions caused by music. Concerning 'pure music', in my opinion, it is the form that affects a person. Furthermore, sometimes music causes objectless moods rather than emotions. Moods, however, may be objects of emotions and in such a case a person gives some content to mood. The affective-feeling component is caused by the cognitive component. Affections are bodily changes that may be taken also as mental changes. Feelings are unanalysable qualia, unpleasant or pleasant states of consciousness by virtue of which one is aware of one's state and the cognitive system associated with it. So, it seems to me, that in typical emotions there are at least two main intentional stages. First, there is an intentional stage associated with perceptions and evaluations. Second, there is an intentional stage associated with feelings. The cognitive component is directed to the content of the object of an emotion. Usually the object is perceived in an extramental world, but in numerous emotions it is just an intramental content of thinking and remembering. The affective-feeling component is directed to the cognitive component via effects caused by the cognitive component.

3. Three specific conditions of religious emotions In the famous passage from The City of God characterising the affections of Christians, Augustine writes: “They fear eternal punishment and desire eternal life.” 14 In dividing basic religious emotional attitudes into positive and negative feelings he follows the idea put forward by Plato in his Philebus.15 The idea of mixed feelings of fear and love/desire was widely accepted as a Christian model of religious affections in ancient theology. Besides Augustine, it was also made use of by Gregory the Great who formed his theology of spirituality upon the notion of two compunctions, namely: the compunction of love and the compunction of fear.16 In modern theology, this tradition was continued by Rudolf Otto, who argued that religion is based upon an affective awareness of God as mysterium tremendum et fascinans. The term tremor refers to the feelings of awe, majesty and energy whereas the term fascinans refers to the feelings of attraction and wonderfulness.17 It is fascinating that this tradition of mixed religious feelings has gone through history in such an unbroken form. Besides intellectual tradition, the history of religious emotions is a strong

Religious Emotions: Some Philosophical Explorations

17

and vivid history that one can encounter in all times and cultures. What are religious feelings or emotions? Many writers both in classical and modern philosophy of religion have supposed that religious emotions, or at least some of them, are variations of general emotions. For instance, Augustine—who adopted the Platonic theory of the soul—thought that passions are located in the lower part of the soul whereas the will belongs to the immaterial upper part of the soul. As motions of the lower part of the soul, emotions are psychosomatic. Simple physical pleasure and pain are not emotions. Emotions are reactions of the emotional part of the soul. They involve an emotional evaluation, an emotional feeling, and typical bodily changes. Even though Augustine believed that the emotions of Christians are directed according to the spirit, he thought that religious fear, desire, pain, hope, and joy are natural emotions in the lower part of the soul.18 In modern philosophy of religion, William James, for instance, thought that religious emotions are variations of natural emotions.19 Besides the notion of natural religious emotions, there is a theological tradition that has argued for special spiritual emotions caused by the Holy Spirit.20 The tradition was put forward by Alexandrian theologians. Friedrich Schleiermacher's notions of religious disposition and feeling of dependence are modern variations of this tradition even though he interpreted it in a profane way. Schleiermacher believed that all people have a latent religious consciousness. I will return to this view below. The tradition of specific spiritual abilities and senses involves both theological and philosophical questions of its own, and I have dealt with it in another context.21 One of the interesting themes associated with it is the notion of homo religiosus adopted by some theories of comparative studies in religion. It may be of interest to note that this notion can be traced back to the tradition of mystical theology, and in this sense it is rather theological or philosophical belief than a scientific notion in a strict sense of the word. For my purposes here, however, it is necessary to concentrate on 'natural' religious emotions and questions associated with them only.

3.1. The cognitive object condition According to the generic condition of emotions sketched out above, emotions involve an affective feeling component and an evaluative cognitive component. Taken for granted that religious emotions are variations of general emotions, the generic condition can be applied to them. The structure of religious emotions is similar to general emotions: they are pleasant or unpleasant feelings directed to cognitive contents of

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Chapter One

mind. If so, how to distinguish religious emotions from emotions in general? Distinguishing emotions from each other by virtue of their cognitive contents is crucial for cognitive theories of emotions. So, I argue that in distinguishing religious emotions from other emotions, the point of departure (and thus not the whole story) should be the cognitive component. Even James, whose theory is usually known as a feeling theory, writes that religious emotions are "concrete states of mind, made up of a feeling plus a specific sort of object."22 For James, the object is that of consciousness and he thinks that it is associated with a person's awareness of himself or herself in relation to the divine. In my view, religious emotions involve a thought of the divine as their essential component. I call this the cognitive object condition of religious emotions. The notion of the cognitive object condition may be criticised in different ways. First, one can say that the cognitive approach is not plausible since it is precisely feelings that are essential in religious life, not cognitive contents. Secondly, even if the cognitive approach is accepted, the notion of the divine is problematic. Given this criticism of the cognitive approach, what kind of view could be an alternative to it? If one argues, say, that emotions should be distinguished in terms of feelings, one encounters the problem of their unanalysable character. Feelings are unpleasant and pleasant experiences of consciousness. Their intensity varies and they may be mixed. However, as experiences they are dumb. It might even be that different emotions involve similar feelings. If a person is happy to see another person and if he or she is happy to read a good philosophical article, he or she may feel similarly ‘happy’ in both cases even though two different emotions are involved. Correspondingly, it has been argued that two different emotions may cause similar states in brains; alternatively, the same emotion may generate various brain states.23 Furthermore, an advocate of the cognitive view is not necessarily claiming that feelings are not important in religion. He or she is but arguing that in identifying religious emotions the point of departure should be the cognitive content of those emotions. Concerning the criticism of the notion of the divine, it is true, for instance, that not all religions involve the concept of God. In some theological traditions, religion consists of metaphorical language that expresses the inner experiences of a person but does not involve any transcendental dimension. Moreover, a person may feel an emotion which involves the notion of the divine, but it seems that his or her emotion is not a religious emotion. For instance, if a tourist wandering in a Japanese

Religious Emotions: Some Philosophical Explorations

19

temple says, "nice gods here," this kind of an utterance may express something else than a religious attitude. For one thing, in characterising religious emotions the point of departure should be the standard cases rather than the exceptions. I don’t find atheistic interpretations of religion philosophies or religiously oriented world-views more preferable than attitudes adopted by religious people and institutions. It is a common Western idea that religion, as Cicero put it, is a link between men and god or gods. Also in ordinary language religion is something associated with transcendent. The term 'divine' is an open term that does not define strictly any theological content. It just refers to something outside the human mind and world. What makes 'something outside the human mind and world' religious is a different question dealt with below. Moreover, it should be taken into account that the notion of cognitive object is not necessarily associated with an attitude of assent. For instance, a praying person may have an attitude such as “Listen to me, if there is anybody out there.” Accordingly, a person gazing in wonder at a nice landscape may suddenly remember a sentence 'by tranquil streams he leads me' and feel religiously without forming a belief that there is a Creator. Furthermore, the cognitive object condition does not give an answer to the question concerning the cause or causes of religious emotions. In applying Patricia Greenspan’s theory, one could say that the cognitive object condition concerns the inner cause of religious emotions in such a way that the thought of the divine can be regarded as an internal object causing comfortable or uncomfortable affects in a person. The question concerning the outer object—that is, the cause of an inner object—remains open. A believer who has religious faith may believe that his or her thought of the divine is caused by the Holy Spirit. A person who does not have religious faith may give another kind of explanation for religious emotions. For example, Sigmund Freud believed that the origin of religious emotions lies in traumatic and neurotic experiences which are tied to power, authority, sexuality and guilt.24 Moreover, some contemporary authors have paid attention to the fact that if moods and other psychosomatic states can dispose the mind to feel emotions, it is nevertheless difficult to judge what has caused an occurrent emotion.25 Let us imagine that a person has drunk ten cups of coffee. He or she is listening to a religious program on the radio. Suddenly the person begins to feel an unpleasant emotion, for instance fear of eternal punishment. What is the reason for this? The answer could be ‘too much coffee’, ‘the mournful voice of the speaker’, or ‘the listener is repenting his or her sins’. Independently of the answer, the emotion would look the

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Chapter One

same in all cases. I referred above to the traditional theory of the spiritual senses and experiences. The theological answers to the philosophical problem presented here have been raised within this tradition. The cognitive object condition is a necessary but not sufficient condition of religious emotions. It is true that there are emotions directed to religious objects which are not religious emotions. Some other aspects than those expressed by the cognitive component are necessary when characterising religious emotions. In what follows I will sketch out two further conditions that I call the depth condition and the pragmatic condition. According to the depth condition, the object of a religious emotion is existentially significant for the subject feeling it. According to the pragmatic condition, the thought of the divine is associated with religious practises such as worship, praying, or meditation.

3.2. The depth condition Our tourist in a Japanese temple is just admiring symbols of foreign gods. One could say that they cause something to occur in a person. In this sense they are existentially significant for a person. I am not pursuing this kind of existential significance, however. Rather, I refer to the significance that characterises one's commitments and personality. It seems that in order to be deemed religious, emotions have to be selfregarding. William James thought that the object of a religious emotion is a person in relation to the divine. One finds a similar description in Friedrich Schleiermacher's and Rudolf Otto's descriptions of religious emotions. For Schleiermacher, religious emotions are associated with relation, namely that characterised by dependence.26 Correspondingly, Rudolf Otto thought that the roots of the religious emotions of awe and love rest upon the mental state called creature-feeling.27 Taking into an account the self-regarding nature of religious emotions, it makes sense to argue that religious emotions are associated with personal identity. Feeling religiously illuminates for a feeling subject who he or she is. Feeling religiously proves that a person is a religious person. The question arises, however, concerning what it means to be a religious person. In pursuing the answer to this question, one can think that there is a specific religious ability in a mind, which means that the concept of person is characterised substantially, or rather that the concept of person should be characterised functionally. Historically, in the theories of Schleiermacher and Otto, it has been thought that one has a primordial inner capacity for an affective relation to God. In these theories it has been supposed that actualisations of natural inclination to religious experiences

Religious Emotions: Some Philosophical Explorations

21

are associated with the depth dimension of a personality. Schleiermacher associated a notion of natural religiousness with an ability and inclination to have religious experiences (religiöse Anlage). He argued that all people have such a tendency but for many it is latent because education and culture have veiled it. For Otto the holy as a priori category is a universal and essential characteristic of the human spirit. Otto argues that the actualisation of the a priori religious consciousness occurs during the evolutionary historical process, from magic and worship of the dead to its purest stage in Christianity. Accordingly, he thought that there are persons of specific religious talent who have essentially influenced the development of religious consciousness.28 Particularly in the existential tradition, however, it has been thought that analysing personal significance at this level is not very meaningful for individual persons. It is more essential to note that people make personal choices through which they form their identity. Some contemporary authors have stressed that existential choices should be analysed by taking account of the network of institutions, traditions, and human relations in which they are made. For instance, Paul Ricoeur argues for the existence of the dialectic between the permanent and changing aspects of personality.29 He refers to these aspects by three keywords: sameness, selfhood, and other-than-self, and he associates this view with the notion of character. Character is open to change since it is formed by identifications with values, ideals, models, and heroes. Values, ideals, models, and heroes form the ‘other than self’ that is adopted via narratives as a part of selfhood. For instance, when Paul the Apostle wrote that it is not himself but Christ who lives in him, he meant—according to reading based on narrative theory of selfhood—that his identity is made up of other (Christ) than self. In the light of Ricouer’s theory, ‘Paul’ is a life story of the person whose open aspects of personality have picked up something from the world outside the person. In this life story, the essential aspect is the discordance that has broken the integral ‘emplotment’. Such discordance is tied to the foreign narrative, or kerygma, of Christ. The concordance of Paul’s (Saul’s) life story has accepted the discordance to such a degree that Paul takes his life as a new ‘emplotment’. In short, in applying this kind of theory to the question concerning the meaning of an utterance ’religious person’, one can think that a religious person is a person who has adopted religious values and ideals via narratives in such a way that he or she identifies himself or herself with and in them.

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3.3. The pragmatic condition A person may feel positively when encountering religious matters. For example, a person may feel good when visiting worship. However, he or she may claim that the experience was not religious in nature and that he or she is not a religious person. If a person says that 'I am not a religious person' he or she means that religious matters do not make any difference for him or her. In other words: an experience does not fulfil the depth condition. Furthermore, in such a case a person does not link any religious meaning to the experience. Where does religious meaning come from? The notion of religious meaning belongs to philosophical and theological semantics. However, the majority of believers probably do not have any philosophical or theological skills. And yet it is they, if anyone, who feel religious emotions. They learn those emotions in a religious culture which, of course, can be analysed as having metaphysical and semantic presuppositions but which does not practise philosophy or theology. For practical life, also for practical religious life, semantic questions are associated with practise. Ludwig Wittgenstein writes: “[H]ow does he learn the words: ‘A lump of sugar, please’—i.e. the expression of a wish?!. . . . Well—the grownups may perform before the child, may pronounce the word . . . but now the child must imitate that. . . . After such-and-such language games have been taught it, then on such-and-such occasions it uses the words that the grown-ups spoke in such cases.”30 For Wittgenstein, grown-ups are representatives of culture. Culture, for its part, is a form of life that is typical of human beings. Culture is rooted in a biological basis, but it is through Geist that the human being forms its characteristic traits.31 The biological basis of culture is pre-linguistic: a crocodile does not hope because hope is not a part of its form of life. Culture and Geist are linguistic and they form new forms of life in language: the human being hopes since this is a part of his or her form of life.32 One learns human forms of life by participating in those forms of life, that is, human practises. Accordingly, as Ronald de Sousa—whose theory I have explained above—has suggested, emotional practises are little dramas, paradigm-scenarios. In making use of his notion, one is able to analyse religious emotions in their contexts in such a way that their meaning can be derived from religious paradigm-scenarios. Emotions are religious if they are situated in, or are reminiscences of, religious practises. A typical reminiscence is a prayer that is usually learnt at a very young age thanks to one’s mother and father who have taught one to pray. De Sousa argues that in reading novels and listening to music, a person becomes acquainted with the emotional repertoire of a culture. In a similar way a person

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23

becomes familiar with the repertoire of religious emotions when he or she participates in such religious practises as singing hymns, reading religious literature and so forth. So, the cognitive component presented above is not as difficult as it may seem to be at first sight. On the contrary, cognitions derive their meaning from practical religious life. Even though the cognitive component is prior to other components in analysing religious emotions, the practical aspects are prior to other aspects in religion itself. I agree with post-Wittgensteinian theologians such as Ferguss Kerr and George Lindbeck who argue that the socio-linguistic aspects of religion are prior to its experimental aspects.33 Lindbeck introduces this view in a nutshell: Religion cannot be pictured in the cognitivist (and voluntarist) manner as primarily a matter of deliberately choosing to believe or follow explicitly known propositions or directives. Rather, to become religious—no less than to become culturally or linguistically competent—is to interiorize a set of skills by practice and training. One learns how to feel, act, and think in conformity with a religious tradition that is, in its inner structure, far richer and more subtle than can be explicitly articulated. The primary knowledge is not about the religion, nor that the religion teaches such and such, but rather how to be religious in such and such ways.34

A religious person learns the meaning of 'the divine' in socially determined practises such as worship, praying, meditation, and so forth. When a cognitive content derives its meaning from religious practises and a person finds it existentially significant, an emotion is a religious emotion.

4. Concluding remarks My argument above has proceeded as follows. According to the generic condition of emotions formed with the help of mainstream cognitive philosophy of mind, emotions in general involve an affective-feeling component and a cognitive component. Affects are psycho-physical changes that are associated with feelings—pleasant and unpleasant states of consciousness. Religious emotions are variations of general emotions characterised by the generic condition. They can be deemed as religious by using three specific conditions which are: the cognitive object condition; the depth condition; and the pragmatic condition. According to the cognitive cognition, the essential part of religious emotion involves a thought of the divine. According to the depth condition, religious emotions are self-regarding emotions that show personal commitments and illuminate one’s personal identity as a religious person. According to the

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Chapter One

pragmatic condition, the religious meaning of the cognitive component comes from socially embedded religious practises. In so arguing I have abandoned two strong traditions of Christian theology. First, I have not dealt with the question of special spiritual emotions described by mystical theology. In writing the history of theology, analysing the notion of spiritual emotions opens fascinating tasks for philosophical and theological investigations. From this point of view, the history of theology looks very different from the one written in textbooks. Another common theological idea that I have not dealt with at length here is the notion of homo religiosus and the religious form of consciousness. To some extent the view I expressed above can be characterised as a reformulation of this honourable tradition which involves both philosophically and theologically interesting themes of its own. I am not willing to mystify the nature of consciousness as strongly as this tradition does, at least according to my reading. Nor am I so sure whether all people have at least a latent religious attitude. I rather would say that it is not impossible for people to feel religiously. For one thing, as psychosomatic reactions, religious emotions are like emotions in general. Furthermore, if human beings were unable to apprehend themselves as individuals having different relationships, and if they had no sense of wholeness, distances, and proportions, they would hardly have religious emotions whatsoever.

Notes 1 For the history of philosophical theories of emotions in general, see Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004; Juha Sihvola & Troels Endgberg-Pedersen (eds.), The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy (The New Synthese Historical Library 46), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, London 1998. For recent discussion, see John Corrigan, Eric Crump, John Kloos, Emotion and Religion: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography, Greenwood Press 2000; Daniel Farrell, "Recent Work on the Emotion", Analyse & Kritik 1, 1988, 71-101; Petri Järveläinen, Tunteet ja järki [Emotions and Reason], Helsinki University Press, Helsinki 2003; Amelie Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions, University of California Press, Berkeley 1980. 2 For Aristotle's view on emotions, see John M. Cooper, "An Aristotelian Theory of the Emotions" in A. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Aristotle's Rhetoric (Philosophical Traditions 6), University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London

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25

1996, 238-57; William W. Fortenbaugh, Aristotle on Emotion, Duckworth, London 1975. 3 For the Stoic theory of emotions, see Tad Brennan, "The Old Stoic Theory of Emotions" in Sihvola & Engberg-Pedersen (eds.) 1998, 22-70; Martha Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practise in Hellenistic Ethics (Martin Classical Lectures 2), Princeton University Press, Princeton 1994; Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000. 4 Robert Solomon, The Passions, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame 1983. 5 Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001. 6 Patricia Greenspan, Emotions & Reasons: An Inquiry into Emotional Justification, Routledge, New York, London 1988. 7 O. Harvey Green, The Emotions: A Philosophical Theory (Philosophical Studies Series 53), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, Boston, London 1992. 8 Robert Gordon, The Structure of Emotions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1987. 9 William Lyons, Emotion (Cambridge Studies in Philosophy), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1980. 10 Greenspan 1988. See also Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration, Clarendon Press, Oxford 2000. 11 Justin Oakley, Morality and the Emotions, Routledge, London 1992. See also Michael Stocker, "Psychic feelings", Australian Journal of Philosophy 61, 1983, 5-26. 12 For Ockham's view, see Vesa Hirvonen, Passions in William Ockham's Philosophical Psychology (Studies in the History of Mind 2), Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht 2004. 13 Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotions, The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA 1987. 14 Augustine, The City of God, transl. by H. Bettenson, Penguin books, London 1984, 562. 15 For the theory of Plato, see e.g. Tapio Nummenmaa, Divine Motions and Human Emotions in the Philebus and in the Laws. Plato’s Theory of Psychic Powers, Societas Scientiarum Fennica, Helsinki 1998. 16 For Gregory the Great’s theology, see Carole Straw, Gregory the Great: Perfection in Imperfection, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1988. 17 Das Heilige. Über das Irrationale in der Idee des Göttlichen und sein Verhältnis zum Rationalen, Leopold Klotz Verlag, Gotha 1929. For Otto's thinking, see Melissa Raphael, Rudolf Otto and the Concept of Holiness, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1997. 18 For Augustine’s view, see Petri Järveläinen, A Study on Religious Emotions, Schriften der Luther-Agricola Gesellschaft 47, Helsinki 2000.

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19 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience. A Study in Human Nature: Being the Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion Delivered at Edinburgh in 1901-1902 (New American Library), A Mentor Book, A Division of Penguin Books, New York 1958. For James' theory on emotions in general, see James F. Brown, Affectivity: Its Language and Meaning, University Press of America, Washington 1982. 20 For this tradition in general, see Andrew Louth, The Origins of the Christian Mystical Tradition: From Plato to Denys, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1991. 21 Järveläinen 2000. 22 James 1958, 40. 23 William B. Cannon, "Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage" in C. Calhoun & R. C. Solomon (eds.), What is an Emotion, Oxford University Press, New York 1984. For the neurophysiological basis of emotions, see Antonio Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Papermac, London 1996. 24 Sigmund Freud, The Origins of Religion: Totem and Taboo, Moses and Monotheism and Other Works, ed. by. A. Dickson, Penguin Books, London 1990. 25 See, e.g. Claire Armon-Jones, Varieties of Affect, Harvester Wheatsheaf, New York, London 1991. 26 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Über die Religion. Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern, ed. by R. Otto, Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 1967. 27 Rudolf Otto 1929. 28 See Järveläinen 2000, 55-8. 29 Paul Ricouer, Oneself as Another, the University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1992. 30 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie 1, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright (eds.), Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1980 § 169. 31 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Bemerkungen über die Philosophie der Psychologie 2, G. H. von Wright and H. Nyman (eds.), Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1980 § 14. 32 BPP 1 § 916. 33 Ferguss Kerr, Theology after Wittgenstein, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986; George A, Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, SPCK, London 1984. 34 Lindbeck 1984, 35.

CHAPTER TWO RELIGIOUS EMOTIONS AND RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE MARK WYNN

How to define religious emotions? This is the primary issue I wish to address, and I will approach it by investigating two other questions, namely: (1) what are religious emotions? and; (2) what can the study of emotions contribute to the study of religion? Emotions can of course play any number of roles in religious life from an intellectual and practical point of view. I would like to sketch out four such roles that seem to me to be of some importance. In presenting each of these ‘models’ of the emotions’ contribution to religion, I will take, in each case, the work of one recent philosophical commentator (writing on emotions in nonreligious contexts), and will relate that author’s work to the thought of John Henry Newman, whose approach involves some recognition I will suggest of each of these four models. In concluding, I will relate this discussion about roles to our two focal questions. Let me begin with a passage from John Deigh: Many people are sensible of flats and sharps, for instance, though they have no concept of half steps in a diatonic scale. Wild geese are no doubt sensible of changes in the weather, though they have no concept of seasons. To be sensible of a property is to be able to detect its presence and to discriminate between those things that have it and those that do not. To have a concept of a property, by contrast, is to be able to predicate it of some object and, hence, to locate it in a system of propositional thought.1

So, on this view, it is possible for a person to reliably discriminate a certain property even if they cannot specify the nature of the property in conceptual or verbal terms. Moreover, Deigh suggests that this sort of preconceptual discrimination is sometimes achieved through states of feeling. Hence he comments:

28

Chapter Two Roughly speaking, one feels fear at what is scary, horror at what is gruesome, and disgust at what is foul. These properties characterise the way things look, sound, taste, smell. A scary mask, for instance, will have certain exaggerated features that are designed to alarm or frighten the innocent or unsuspecting viewer, and a scary voice will have a certain unusual cadence and pitch that unsettles the listener. . . . the important point is that the scary differs from the dangerous in being at least sometimes a true or direct property of the way something looks and sounds. Something that looks dangerous is something that one can infer is dangerous from the way it looks, whereas one need make no inference to see that something looks scary.2

On this account, I can be sensible of a property through my felt response to it—specifically, I can grasp the scariness of something in my feeling scared, whereas I grasp the dangerousness of something by inserting the thing into some wider causal network (a task which requires some conceptual work) and coming thereby to appreciate how it might do me or others harm. So, on this view, felt responses function as non-conceptuallymediated modes of perception. Let us consider now a second account of how emotional feelings may contribute to our sense of the world. Here is Peter Goldie reflecting upon how a person’s understanding of the dangerousness of ice may be deepened after they have fallen on ice for the first time. So here we begin with a (conceptually articulated) sense of something’s dangerousness (the knowledge that ice can cause people to slip, and so on), and this understanding is said to be deepened in the new feeling of fear towards ice that follows the fall: Coming to think of it in this new way [post fall] is not to be understood as consisting of thinking of it in the old way, plus some added-on phenomenal ingredient—feeling perhaps; rather, the whole way of experiencing, or being conscious of, the world is new. . . . The difference between thinking of X as Y without feeling and thinking of X as Y with feeling will not just comprise a different attitude towards the same content—a thinking which earlier was without feeling and now is with feeling. The difference also lies in the content, although it might be that this difference cannot be captured in words.3

The case described here involves a deepening of some initial sense of the dangerousness of ice, where that deepening is realised in the new feeling towards ice. So like Deigh, Goldie is supposing that sometimes a person’s understanding may be relative to what they feel—only here the feeling serves to deepen an already articulated conceptual grasp of some subject matter, rather than preceding any such grasp. I take it that in cases of this

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kind the feeling does not just lie alongside the conceptual appreciation of the dangers of ice, but is rather infused by that appreciation: this sort of feeling can only be had by someone who has some general appreciation of what ice is and the dangers it presents, and the feeling is shot through with that appreciation, without its content being simply reducible to what can be articulated in those terms. My third model concerns the way in which emotions can direct our enquiries, and thereby pave the way for a deepened discursive understanding of some issue. Michael Stocker notes this possibility when he comments that states such as anger and self-pity can be mood-like, and accordingly “they seek out and collect, even create, sustaining or concordant facts (or ‘facts’), which they then use to justify and sustain that emotion, which then leads to further seeking, collecting, creating and coloring.”4 Of course, this way of putting the point suggests that the emotions may serve simply to rationalise some initial, emotionally sustained prejudice. But the emotions can also be understood to play a more constructive role in this connection. As Ronald de Sousa notes: Paying attention to certain things [as we do when our emotions are engaged] is a source of reasons . . . but comes before them. Similarly, scientific paradigms, in Kuhn’s sense, are better at stimulating research than at finding compelling and fair reasons for their own adoption. They are too ‘deep’ for that, too unlike specific, easily formulated beliefs.5

Rather like some recent evolutionary psychological accounts of the emotions, De Sousa’s view suggests that emotional responses can help to set the agenda for our thinking, rather as in science a ‘paradigm’ provides an initial way of organising the data and accordingly of determining which questions need to be addressed, and which lines of enquiry are most likely to be fruitful. To put the point another way, on this sort of account, emotional responses constitute patterns of salience—because when our emotions are aroused, our attention is drawn to certain features of the environment rather than others, and in this way the emotions help prereflectively to shape the course of our discursive enquiries. The first two models we considered treated felt responses as a kind of mode of perception: on this sort of approach, our emotional responses enable a new appreciation of the character of our environment. We could think of this third model as building on the first two: it is because they can function as modes of value perception that emotional responses can help to set the agenda for our thinking: emotional responses light up features of environment (as scary or dangerous, for example), and thereby they focus

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our attention on those features as deserving of further attention, while consigning others to the periphery of our awareness. For my final model, I will turn to musical experience in particular. Here Geoffrey Maddell offers a description of a familiar kind of musical experience: [H]earing the dominant seventh evokes a desire, and sometimes something akin to a longing, for its resolution. That is a state of consciousness directed to an intentional object; it is also an affective state of consciousness. It is not the entertaining of an evaluation which (magically) leads to certain bodily disturbances. One may, if one is so disposed, regard the desire for the tonic resolution as ground for the evaluation that such a resolution would be ‘a good thing’, but it would be a total distortion to suppose that the desire, or the longing, is an evaluation, one which inexplicably leads to certain physical effects. It is a mode of ‘feeling towards’ its intentional object.6

Maddell’s target in this passage is the same thought-plus-feeling model that Deigh and Goldie’s comments are intended to rebut. For Maddell too, it is not so much that emotional feelings are simply a kind of thoughtinduced sensation, where the intentionality of the emotion is to be attributed solely to its ‘thought’ component and not at all to its ‘feeling’ component; rather, on this account, emotional feelings can themselves pick out a subject matter. In this particular case, a certain perceptual input (the music) is supposed to generate a felt response which is directed towards a possibility which has yet to be realised in the music (the ‘resolution’). So this possibility is not grasped perceptually (since it is not yet available to be heard), nor is it thought about discursively (in musicological terms, for example); instead, its character is recognised, however imperfectly, in the felt longing for it. This final model is clearly akin to those of Deigh and Goldie, but makes a similar point (about the intrinsic intentionality of emotional feelings) in a rather different way, since the emotion in this case is directed to something which has yet to be actualised, and is therefore not available as a direct object of sensory or other experience. I am going now, more briefly, to consider how these models may be applied to the case of religious understanding and experience, and to do so by noting a few remarks of John Henry Newman in his work The Grammar of Assent. First of all, in this work Newman draws a celebrated distinction between having a ‘real image’ and having simply a ‘notion’ of God. Speaking of the impression (that is, an idea rooted in experience) of God that a young child may have, he writes:

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It is an image of the good God, good in Himself, good relatively to the child, with whatever incompleteness; an image, before it has been reflected on, and before it is recognized by him as a notion. Though he cannot explain or define the word ‘God’, when told to use it, his acts show that to him it is far more than a word.7

Here the child is said to lack a notion of God—and in Newman’s terms this means that he has no verbalised understanding of God of the kind one might find in a dictionary. Even so, the child enjoys a kind of understanding of God through his felt responses, and specifically in his moral experience. For example, in the experience of remorse the child recognises that he is accountable to someone, and whether he realises this or not, this sort of accountability is ultimately a matter of being responsible before God (because accountability of this kind obtains whenever and wherever I might be, by contrast with our accountability to human authorities). So in this way, emotional experience serves as a kind of pre-reflective mode of perception of God: God is presented to the child in the affectively toned experience of conscience; however, the child does not cognise the object of his experience in precisely those terms because he lacks relevant concepts (specifically, he lacks any ‘notion’ of God). So Newman provides one illustration of our first model, though there are others (not least Rudolf Otto, who provides I think a more obvious exemplar of this model). But Newman also maintains, more characteristically, that doctrines or discursive thoughts about God properly precede feeling. For instance, he comments: Knowledge must ever precede the exercise of the affections. We feel gratitude and love, we feel indignation and dislike, when we have the informations actually put before us which are to kindle these several emotions. We love our parents, as our parents, when we know them to be our parents; we must know concerning God, before we can feel love, fear, hope, or trust towards Him.8

In the same vein, Newman thinks of a ‘notion’ of God as preceding and then being deepened by the first-hand encounter with God that we enjoy in the experience of conscience, where this encounter supplies what he calls a ‘real image’ of God. Although he does not quite say so, Newman seems to think that just as knowledge by acquaintance of a particular thing cannot be communicated exhaustively in verbal terms, so knowledge by acquaintance of God (enjoyed in the ‘hearing’ of God’s voice in the feeling of conscience) cannot be fully rendered in purely verbal or doctrinal terms. So on this point, Newman presents an example of our second model, of how a certain verbal understanding may be deepened

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through feeling, and how the new understanding that is thereby achieved is informed by this verbal understanding (as he says, ‘we must know concerning God before we can feel love, fear . . . or trust towards him’), without being reducible to it. These first two models, in Newman’s rendition of them, both depend on treating feeling as a mode of perception of God (since both involve the idea of ‘hearing’ the voice of God in conscience). But Newman also assigns emotions the sort of role that I have described in our third model. Take, for example, this passage: One of the most important effects of Natural Religion on the mind, in preparation for the Revealed, is the anticipation which it creates, that a Revelation will be given. That earnest desire of it, which religious minds cherish, leads the way to the expectation of it. Those who know nothing of the wounds of the soul, are not led to deal with the question, or to consider its circumstances; but when our attention is roused, then the more steadily we dwell upon it, the more probable does it seem that a revelation has been or will be given to us. 9

Here the ‘wounds of the soul’ (Newman is referring I take it to the affectively toned recognition of our own wrongdoing) light up the question of revelation as deserving of attention. More exactly, the person who experiences such wounds is led to wonder whether God (whose existence can be known on natural theological grounds) has made any special provision for rescuing us from this predicament—and accordingly, this person attends to the question of revelation more closely, is more likely to spot whatever evidence bears on the question, and on Newman’s view has a justified presumption that a revelation will be given. In all of these ways, then, this affectively toned condition can shape a person’s discursive enquiries by leading them quite properly to attend to a certain question, to identify evidence bearing on that question, and to assign a larger weight to that evidence than they would otherwise have done. This passage could also be taken to illustrate our final model. Newman supposes that those who know the wounds of the soul experience an ‘earnest desire’ of revelation, and this we could say is at root—whether the subject of the experience would put it this way or not—a desire for God, since God alone can bind these wounds. So here a certain moralexperiential input (given in feelings such as remorse) casts the mind forward to a ‘resolution’ (some new mode of relationship with God) which has yet to be achieved but is anticipated in feeling. The recent philosophical work on emotion that I have surveyed helps us to read Newman, I suggest, with new insight, and in turn, reading Newman helps us to see that some of that philosophical work has clear

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antecedents. Moreover, Newman’s work provides one way of applying work in the philosophy of emotion to the question the role of feeling in religion (though there are no doubt other ways of giving our four models religiously significant content). To conclude, the emotions that Newman identifies all satisfy, I think, Petri Jarvelainen’s criteria for the religiousness of an emotion (the cognitive object, depth and pragmatic criteria). And Newman’s account suggests how emotions which are religious in this sense may play rather different roles in the religious life. So let us return now to our two initial, focal questions. What are religious emotions? Newman would say: religious emotions are emotions which help to structure and guide the religious life in these (and no doubt other) ways. And what can the study of emotions contribute to the study of religion? Following Newman (and thinking of our first, second and fourth models), we might say: this sort of study can help us to appreciate the contribution that may be made by emotional feelings to the intentionality of religious experience, and to recognise more clearly the interplay between concept and felt response in such experience. We might also say (thinking here of the third of our models): the study of emotion can help to reveal the epistemic (as distinct from the merely psychological) significance of our emotional experience in so far as it guides our reflections on religious and other questions.

Notes 1

John Deigh, ‘Cognitivism in the Theory of Emotions’, Ethics 104 (1994), 840. Ibid., 842. 3 Peter Goldie, The Emotions, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000, 59-60, author’s emphasis. 4 Michael Stocker with Elizabeth Hegeman, Valuing Emotion, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1996, 94. 5 Ronald de Sousa, ‘The Rationality of Emotions’, in Amélie Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions, University of California Press, Berkeley 1980, 139. 6 Geoffrey Maddell, ‘What Music Teaches About Emotion’, Philosophy 71 (1996), 76, Maddell’s emphasis. 7 John Henry Newman, An Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, 105. 8 Ibid., 109. 9 Ibid., 328-9. 2

CHAPTER THREE COGNITIONS, UNIVERSALS, AND CONSTRUCTEDNESS: RECENT EMOTIONS RESEARCH AND THE STUDY OF RELIGION JOHN CORRIGAN

The study of emotion has undergone a renaissance over the last several decades. The refinement of methods for studying emotion, the ongoing elaboration of a precise research vocabulary, and above all the crosspollination that has taken place among the various branches of the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities have enormously enriched academic discourse about emotion. Moreover, that discourse has overflowed its academic petri dish into the broader culture, where magazine self-help quizzes, television talk show programs and bestselling manuals about emotional life have advanced—unevenly but steadily— broad reflection about emotional experiences in everyday life. The current surge in emotions research is not the first renaissance in the study of emotion, nor is it an investigative track that has emerged out of a background so distant as to be invisible. Emotions have been under continuous close scrutiny since the Renaissance itself, and before that as part of longstanding debates rooted in readings of Aristotle and other writers who forayed emotion in classical antiquity. In terms of the intersection of emotions theory and the study of religion, however, the early twenty-first century is a particularly important time. The intertwined arguments about religious experience and emotional life, which have been passed down in the West through theologically-inflected investigation, are unraveling. Specifically, the theological framing of emotion as a core irreducible datum of religious experience has suffered damage in debate with historians, philosophers, and psychologists, among others. The debate has been lively and inventive. Moreover, in a broader cultural environment characterised by intense thoughtfulness about the relation of the religious to the secular in public life, and about religious hatreds that issue in

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violence, analysis of the emotional component in religion appears increasingly more urgent. There is an historical tradition shaping current thinking about religion and emotion. A recent annotated bibliography of emotions research addressed over twelve hundred important writings about religion and emotion.1 Most of those were twentieth-century sources, but enough were of earlier provenance for us to be clear that investigation of religion and emotion has been a project central to the intellectual history of the West for some time. It is fair to say, in fact, that religion provided the lion’s share of the explanatory scaffolding for emotion until recently. Perspectives on emotional life drawn from Jewish and Christian scriptures—one thinks of the laments of Job and the New Testament command to love—set the stage for later religious writers. Augustine of Hippo, writing in the late fourth century, offered in the Confessions (and in later writing) an understanding of emotions in their linkage with thinking and will, virtue and sinfulness. Emotion was experienced most profoundly in a soul joined to God. At the same time, Augustine, drawing on Plato, stressed the tensive nature of emotional life, arguing that everyday experience involved the negotiation of mixed desires, of feeling fear alongside love, of volitionally shaping behaviour out of simultaneous experiences of attraction and repulsion. Divine grace assisted the Christian in navigating these turbulent seas of feeling. Purest emotion was at bottom religious, and, as Augustine’s followers maintained for centuries thereafter, knowledge revealed in religion directed feeling to its proper ends. As pre-Christian theories of emotion receded or were selectively incorporated into this view, theology was able to claim more securely the authority to define emotion and to identify its relation to will and action. Feeling and thinking were joined, imperfectly but consistently, in a Christian rhetoric that extolled the ideal of wilful action, untainted by impure worldly passion. Medieval writers illustrated a vision of the Christian life as resting upon a foundation made up of knowledge harmonised with love of God. In so doing, they modelled spirituality as the cultivation of the affections. In the mystic, feeling and knowing were fused in religious vision. Under the influence of Thomas Aquinas, “passion” came to be understood more clearly as bodily experience, and specifically as an aspect of sense appetite. Aquinas also advanced the theory that the “activity” of the soul placed it in opposition to the “passivity” of the passions, thereby complicating thinking about the role of emotion in motivation and tipping theory towards a negative valuation of emotion experienced apart from

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soulful relationship to God. Renaissance writers who theorised about religion and emotion were interested in Thomas Aquinas’ processing of Aristotelian ideas generally, and they carried forward a number of the theological assumptions about emotion imbedded in the Thomistic analysis. Thomistic influences on thinking about emotion in the West remained in force until the nineteenth century, and in some circles framed theory into the twentieth century. Competition came from interpretations that acquired momentum in the seventeenth century. In René Descartes’ metaphysics, physical substance was distinguished from mental substance. That meant that will and cognition were separate from human bodies that are limited by the laws of physics. Cartesianism as such dovetailed with some previous theological views of the self in its seeming divorce of volition and thinking from the senses. It similarly reinforced an important strand of religiously oriented thinking about emotion by proclaiming that emotions were located in the interplay of heart, brain, and blood. As physical phenomena emotions were a matter of sensation of stimulus or activity in the body. However, Descartes also described emotion in connection with mental phenomena such as belief and conceptualisation, leaving it to appear as independent of the body, a part of mind or soul. He accordingly attempted to locate emotion in an ambiguous position, ultimately settling on the invention of a middle ground: the pineal gland in the brain brought the activated sensations of the body together with mental processing, so that bodily agitation, conveyed through tubes to the pineal gland, was rendered there as fear, surprise, hope, or other emotions. The other crucial turn in theorising emotion came with Benedict Spinoza’s elaboration of the role of emotion in ethics. Spinoza sought to replace Descartes’ dualistic metaphysics with a theory maintaining that emotions (Spinoza defined forty-one of them) in fact were species of pain, pleasure, or desire and that the soul did not have potential mastery over emotion in the Cartesian sense. Emotions accordingly were suspect in a process of ethical deliberation. In the next century David Hume attempted to reframe theory about emotion in connection with ethics, arguing that ‘direct’ emotions were simple sensations having to do with pain or pleasure, but indirect passions arose in the mind in connection with ideas. From the Enlightenment into the twenty-first century, the subsequent development of theory about religion and emotion veered back and forth between theologically informed analysis and interpretation which sought other grounds—and especially materialist grounds—for understanding emotion. Increasingly, the latter approach came to the forefront as its arguments became more precise, its evidence more plentiful, and its

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rhetoric more persuasive. That did not mean that theological interpretations of religion and emotion disappeared. Indeed, one of the most important and influential renderings of emotion in religious life appeared in Rudolf Otto’s Das Heilige (1917), a book deeply indebted to the work of the German pastor and theological professor Friedrich Schleiermacher a hundred years earlier. For Otto, religion was a matter of simultaneous attraction to and repulsion by the numinous, or “holy.” Drenched in feeling, experience of the holy involved a range of profoundly emotional moments, including experiences of fear, awe, dread, thrill, ecstasy, and other feeling states. But Otto especially sought to preserve the authority of theological understandings of emotion in religion from impingement by arguments from non-theological quarters. He attempted to construct a firewall against probings by methods arrayed by non-parochial investigators. That firewall took the form of a claim that the experience of emotion in religion (and by that he meant Christianity) was fundamentally “mysterious” and therefore inaccessible to objective scientific analysis. Otto wrote: We are dealing with something for which there is only one appropriate expression, mysterium tremendum. . . . The feeling of it may at times come sweeping like a gentle tide pervading the mind with a tranquil mood of deepest worship. It may pass over into a more set and lasting attitude of the soul, continuing, as it were, thrillingly vibrant and resonant, until at last it dies away and the soul resumes its "profane," non-religious mood of everyday experience. . . . It has its wild and demonic forms and can sink to an almost grisly horror and shuddering. . . . It may become the hushed, trembling, and speechless humility of the creature in the presence of— whom or what? In the presence of that which is a Mystery inexpressible and above all creatures.2

Otto’s interpretation of emotion in religion has attracted its share of critics, including those who have objected to its Christian bias and universalism, and those also who have seen it as a species of what the philosopher Rom Harré, writing about emotion, has called “ontological illusion”.3 Such criticism has become more pointed as research in emotion has flourished in a range of fields: neuroscience, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, sociology, literary studies, and history, among others. There has been overlap among approaches and theories generated in some of these areas, and there have been sharp divergences as well. One way of sorting this research—and especially with regard to its relation to the study of religion—is to arrange it with respect to the issue of universalism. That is, we might identify in various approaches the degree to which emotion is taken to be a universal of human existence, or,

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conversely, an aspect of experience that is constructed largely out of local culture. Some critical interpretations of emotion describe it as largely a cultural artefact, while others consider it to be similar across time and place. In some of the most recent scholarly writing, there is an attempt to avoid casting emotion as one or the other, but the conceptual technology by which universal and local aspects of emotion can be joined in an encompassing definition has not been developed. The universalist view is perceptible in an assortment of critical discourses about emotion. A good starting point for appreciating this strand of interpretation is Charles Darwin’s The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872). In defining emotional life largely as the physical performance of emotion—the signalling of emotion through postures, cries and other sounds, bodily movement, and certain behaviours—Darwin took a materialist tack in theorising emotion. For Darwin, the adaptive process involved the acquisition of skill in communicating to members of one’s species as well as to other species one’s prospective behaviour in any number of situations. Though the behaviours associated with emotional expression often varied from species to species, the ways in which animals of a certain species expressed emotion seemed to vary little across settings and environments. This led followers of Darwin to proceed with their research on emotion on the assumption that emotion was indeed universal. So, for example, Paul Ekman, in exhaustive research on facial expressions of persons in a wide range of cultural settings, concluded that emotions such as happiness, anger, and fear varied little in humans, regardless of cultural context or geographical location. For Ekman, emotion was biological and therefore universal within humans (although he did assign a role to culture as an elicitor of emotion).4 Another kind of universalist interpretation foregrounds language. As a recent and more refined version of the taxonomies of emotion constructed by Renaissance and Enlightenment writers, this approach observes similarities, across cultures, in the language that expresses emotion. By constructing emotional lexicons and comparing them across cultures, anthropologists and linguists seek to identify universals in the expression of feeling. Anna Wierzbicka has described this approach: “The basic idea is that language is a key issue in ‘emotion research’ and that progress in understanding of ‘emotions’ requires that this issue be addressed. ‘Human emotions’ vary a great deal across languages and cultures, but they also share a great deal,” which can be discovered “by anchoring the analysis in universal human concepts [e.g. good and bad, know and want] and their ‘universal grammar.’”5 So, for example, Wierzbicka proposes that all

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languages have a word for feel, have words like cry and smile, and describe some feelings as good and others as bad. With certain qualifications, emotion thus appears as a human universal. Structuralist interpretations of culture, which emerged in the writings of Emile Durkheim and his followers, also have contributed to a universalist understanding of emotion in human societies. Structuralist analyses, and especially those of the last decade, emphasise performativity as an aspect of emotional life that varies little across cultures. Performance takes shape through the experience of universally realised structures in social life. Societies create rituals to mark and to perform shared meanings of important events for the human collective. Because rituals of grief and mourning, for example, are similar across cultures, we can expect to find that the emotional experience of those involved also is similar. Structuralist, linguistic, and materialist (à la Darwin/Ekman) theories of emotion are rarely one-sided. That is, the emotional universalism that is redolent in the writings of scholars who work within those paradigms is seldom doctrinaire and is not ignorant of the importance of cultural setting to the emotional lives of people. This is true as well with biological theories of emotion, which, as their explicators maintain, are a piece of the puzzle, not the entire picture. Recent biological research and especially neuroscience nevertheless represents the most powerful and concerted attempt to define emotion through reference to physical aspects of emotional experience that are common to all persons. By charting the course of chemical cascades in the brain, the electrical activity in various lobes of the brain, and overall neural function, researchers have been able to determine to a much greater degree than previously the ways in which emotion is a bodily state.6 This branch of what might be simply referred to as psychobiology is best understood as a way of investigating the genetically given bases for emotion in people. It advances the argument that experience is neurological, and in so doing places to the side questions about cultural variability in emotional experience. As an alternative to constructionist interpretations of emotion that are grounded in the trust that emotion will differ substantially from one cultural context to another, such biologically-driven theories have much to offer. Nevertheless, like interpretations framed in theology—such as Otto’s—they can universalise in a way that limits their usefulness. So the warning of Frederick Turner reads as follows: The picture is not a simple one of biological enlightenment dawning after a dark night of social-constructionist obscurantism. We must not go back to the old doctrines of biological determinism and the human as genetic robot, or forget the reasons—good ones at the time—why social

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Chapter Three constructionism itself first arose as a corrective to Social ‘Darwinism.’ Religion is seen in biological-reductionist terms as a disease of subjectivity. . . . We must beware lest we replace social reductionism with biological reductionism.7

In order to appreciate Turner’s concerns, let us consider the social constructionist approach that he mentions in his remarks about biological determinism. That approach takes seriously the authority of local culture to create experiences for people. It emphasises that emotional life is the product of “feeling rules”8 that are constructed historically and culturally. There is a relativism, rather than universalism, that guides this way of thinking about emotion. That relativism, which has emerged out of social scientific (including historical) study of culture, has taken emotion as an example of the way in which persons conform to socially-derived codes of behaviour. Where universalism, particularly that framed in biological arguments, views emotion as natural and cross-cultural, constructionist interpretations see emotional life as the product of a complex of cultural influences that are specific to the local environment and that carry forward the unique sets of meanings and codes of conduct for that society. As Weston LaBarre observed sixty years ago in writing about the cultural basis of emotions, and laughter in particular, “even if the physiological behavior be present, its cultural and emotional functions may differ. Indeed, even within the same culture, the laughter of adolescent girls and the laughter of corporate presidents can be functionally different things,” so that there is “no natural language of emotional gesture.”9 Ethnographic studies of people in a wide range of cultures have provided evidence for some of the principal claims of relativistic interpretations of emotion. Some of the authors of these ethnographies have concluded that emotion is largely a cultural product, while others have looked for ways in which to leave some room for cross-cultural similarities. In either case, analysis proceeds on the assumption, as articulated by Michelle Rosaldo, that “cultural idioms provide the images in terms of which our subjectivities are formed, and furthermore, these idioms themselves are socially ordered and constrained.” In other words, as Benedicte Grima has written, “emotion is culture.”10 Seen through this lens, the emotional lives of people unfold according to cultural scripts. Emotion is a socially dictated performance, in which fear, anger, compassion, jealousy, love and other emotions are performed representations of shared meanings of events within cultural groups. Persons follow, as it were, “feeling rules” in behaving certain ways— through postures, motions, words, vocalisations, tears, blushes, and other behaviours—that are “emotional.” Those rules are not universal. They

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vary from place to place and over time. In the words of Clifford Geertz, “not only ideas, but emotions, too, are cultural artefacts.”11 Emotion understood as subject to cultural difference has led scholars to various conceptualisations of human experience of emotion. What people in one culture understand to be emotional might not register with people whose local culture is constructed differently. Tahitians, for example, conceptualise emotional life in ways that leave out some emotions that Westerners would consider part of a person’s emotional repertoire. Eskimos above the Arctic Circle, in Utku culture, do not, according to some observers, experience anger, an emotion that universalist theories of emotion—and most lay observers—would consider standard. The Ifaluk emotion of fago, which is a compound of compassion, love, and sadness, might seem impossible or at best contradictory unless we knew that in Ifaluk culture the exercise of compassion toward a person is blended with a sense of the suffering of that person. To feel that suffering alongside compassion and love is to experience the emotion of fago. An Australian Pintupi will feel shame because of a sense of sexuality as a threat to social order. An Illongot person in the Philippines, whose concept of the self does not include the notion that lusts exist within a person and must be repressed, associates shame not with sexuality but with anger.12 In short, ethnology has documented instances in which there are significant differences between cultures in conceptualisation of the self and accordingly differences in emotional life. This has reinforced theory oriented toward a relativistic understanding of emotion. Some scholars who have pursued the study of emotion in this way, however, also note the ways in which relativistic analyses can be overextended. Charlotte Hardman, for example, concluded after an extended period of living with the Lohorung in Nepal that emotion was only partly constructed in culture, and criticised theoretical models of emotion that in privileging local culture excluded the possibility of certain kinds of universals. Anthropologist and historian William Reddy likewise stated objections to constructionist theorising that overlooks emotional continuities within and among cultures.13 Historical study of emotion has made strides in tracking change in emotion over time. Emotional life changes because of altered contexts for social life, shifting ideological grounds, revolutions in family, gender, and class experience, and because of other kinds of structural transformation. So, in looking for differences in the emotional lives of persons who lived in different historical periods, historians discover, for example, that what appears to us today to be the angry cursing of medieval monks was, in fact, an exercise in patience and calmness when considered within the

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context of the time, hundreds of years ago. By the same token, where a twentieth-century American is likely to judge a public show of anger to be embarrassing and objectionable, a citizen of ancient Greece just as easily could have taken such a display to evidence heroism, or to be a species of divine frenzy. Jealousy, so often condemned in contemporary literature, was not the “green-eyed monster” in early modern France, where it had a positive connotation. Feelings of happiness, and the conceptualisation of that emotional state, are best seen, as Darrin McMahon has demonstrated recently, as profoundly conditioned by historical circumstances.14 The distinct contribution of philosophers to the current scholarly investigation of emotion has been to provide insight into the manner in which emotion is related to cognition. A line of inquiry that has been especially important began as criticism of the James-Lange theory of emotion. The American psychologist William James and the Danish physician Carl George Lange, working independently, concluded at the end of the nineteenth century that emotion was the experience of physiological alterations, the perception of various kinds of disturbances within the body—changes in respiration, heart rate, perspiration, and so forth. Fear accordingly was the perception of the body’s response to a bear running towards one, and sorrow an emotion that followed upon the body’s tearful response to another kind of stimulus. Such a view of emotion as a physiological stimulus-response mechanism took emotionality as a matter of hydraulics: emotions were forces that developed a critical level of pressure internally through intense physiological change and then burst forth in urgency to be recognised by the individual. Criticism of this theory has centred on the reconceptualisation of emotion in its linkages to ideas, or, as the philosopher Robert Solomon has proposed, the adoption of “a cognitive theory of emotions” where concepts and beliefs are fundamental to the creation of emotionality. Emotion, steeped in ideas, attitudes, and desires, accordingly is an interpretation of the world, and a judgment about it.15 This argument lines up in some unexpected ways with the strand of Christian thinking about emotion in religion as experience that blends feeling with thinking. Current philosophical discussion of the cognitive aspect of emotion proceeds out of a broader and in some ways more complicated set of intellectual backgrounds than Christian theologising and prospects a different sort of agenda than theology. However, it is also the case that there is overlap between the two, and the study of emotion in religion through an exploration of cognitive dimensions of emotion will be informed by both strands of interpretation.

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The debates between universalists and relativists about emotion have shaped discussion about religion and emotion in profound ways. Scholars since the end of the twentieth century have been deeply engaged in thinking about what kinds of generalisations can be made about religion. Is it true, as Jonathan Z. Smith has written, that “there is no data for religion; religion is solely the creation of the scholar’s study”? And does that mean that any kinds of universals—or even local patterns—that scholars might define are suspect?16 There are, obviously, a great multitude of religious communities around the world, manifesting enormous diversity in their beliefs and practices, and in their emotionalities. An older “history of religions” that emerged in the nineteenth century sought to abstract from this diversity certain common elements. One of those common elements was emotion. Researchers working out of a Judeo-Christian background invented the religions that they observed as emotional in the same ways that Christianity, and especially Protestantism, were emotional. They universalised emotion in religion based upon a model that they were familiar with in the churches and chapels of Europe, or in the everyday devotions of people in European streets. The emotional aspect of religion in far-flung kingdoms around the world they confined to a narrow inventory of feeling-states that European researchers believed formed the core of any religious life. This was universalism that was plainly reductive, and its effect (and probably its goal as well) was to de-mystify non-Christian religions, to make them seem as just other species of the dominant religion of the West. Ironically, the religion that researchers discovered in all of those different cultures was one in which the emotional core lay largely unexamined and unexplained. Emotion itself was still mysterious. So, while this approach to the study of religion was reductive in its universalising a world of religious emotion as Christianlike experience, it universalised emotion in such a way as to comport with a view of emotion in religion as still being an “essence” of religion, and, à la Otto, impenetrable. Even Max Müller, who coined the term “the science of religion” (Religionswissenschaft) and is lauded as the “father of religious studies,” could only define religion as a “mental faculty . . . a groaning of the spirit . . . a love of God.”17 On the other hand, cultural relativists who have argued the case against universalising both religion and emotion likewise risk approaching emotion reductively. In the late twentieth century, such researchers steadfastly stressed the reality of difference among religious communities as part of a corrective to previous interpretations that fashioned all religiosity as species of Western and especially Christian emotional experience. At the same time they have maintained that emotion itself is

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made in culture, that it is not a “faculty” as Max Müller would have said, and that it is certainly not so mysterious as to be insusceptible to analysis. So, where some scholars have universalised religion (reductively) and at the same time resisted reductionism in their writing about religious emotion per se, others have demanded that we acknowledge profound differences between communities—all the while moving the analysis of religious emotion so decisively into the area of culture, rendering it so ‘made in culture’ that broader biological and psychological approaches are excluded from interpretation. The renewed study of emotion, which has been underway for a couple of decades now in the sciences and the humanities, offers an assortment of challenges to the study of religion. One of the most significant of these is, simply, that we know a great deal more about emotion than we did in the mid-20th century. That has meant that in practice we are less inclined to privilege it as something too complex for analysis; and, with regard to religion, it has meant that we have to rethink approaches to the study of religion that take emotion for granted as an irreducible datum at the same time that we guard against new kinds of reductionisms—biological, sociocultural, psychological, and so forth. In short, interpretation will have to move from explaining religion as emotional to exploring the ways in which emotion and religion are intertwined.

Notes 1

John Corrigan, Eric Crump, and John Kloos, Emotion and Religion: A Critical Assessment and Annotated Bibliography, Greenwood Press, Westport, CT 2000. See also John Corrigan (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion, Oxford University Press, New York 2007. 2 Rudolf Otto, The idea of the holy: An inquiry into the non-rational factor in the idea of the divine and its relation to the rational, translated by John W. Harvey. Oxford University Press, London 1936, 12-13. 3 “This ontological illusion, that there is an abstract and detachable ‘it’ upon which research can be directed, probably lies behind the defectiveness of much emotion research.” Rom Harré, ‘An Outline of the Social Constructionist Viewpoint’, in Rom Harré (ed.), The Social Construction of Emotions, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1986, 4. 4 Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Paul Ekman (ed.), Oxford University Press, New York 2006; Paul Ekman, ‘Biological and cultural contributions to body and facial movement in the expression of emotion’, in Amelie Rorty, (ed.), Explaining Emotions, University of California Press, Berkeley 1980, 73-101. Ekman claims the existence of six common

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emotions, but is not clear about whether elicitors of emotion are identical across cultures. Discussion of several key questions about emotions and universals by James Averill, Paul Ekman, Phoebe C. Ellsworth, Nico H. Frijda and others is ‘How is Evidence of Universals in Antecedents of Emotions Explained?’, in The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions (Series in Affective Science), Paul Ekman and Richard J. Davidson (eds.), Oxford University Press, New York 1994, 144-178. 5 Anna Wierzbicka, Emotions across Languages and Cultures: Diversity and Universals Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1999, 34-5. While emphasising the importance of cultural diversity in forming emotional life, Wierzbecka proposes eleven ‘emotional universals’ based upon language analyses (275-307). Much research in language universals is indebted to Noam Chomsky, who has written that “We may take UG (Universal grammar) to be a theory of the language faculty, a common human attribute, genetically determined, one component of the human mind”, in Essays on Form and Interpretation, North Holland, New York 1977, 164. Karl G. Heider, Landscapes of Emotion: Mapping Three Cultures of Emotion in Indonesia, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1991; Spero M. Manson, James H. Shore, and Joseph D. Bloom, ‘The Depressive Experience in American Indian Communities: A Challenge for Psychiatric Theory and Diagnosis’, in Culture and Depression: Studies in the Anthropology and Cross-cultural Psychiatry of Affect and Disorder, A. Kleinman and B. Good (eds.), University of California Press, Berkeley 1985, 331-68. 6 Nancy Eisenberg, ‘Emotion, Regulation, and Moral Development’, in Annual Review of Psychology 51, 2000, 665-697. On religious experience and brain scans see the provocative but flawed study by Andrew Newberg and Eugene G. d’Aquili, Why God Won’t Go Away, Ballantine, New York 2002. E. L. Schiffelin, ‘Performance and the Cultural Construction of Reality’, in American Ethnologist 12, 1985, 707-24; Arthur Kleinman, Patients and Healers in the Context of Culture, University of California Press, Berkeley 1980. 7 Frederick Turner, ‘Transcending Biological and Social Reductionism’, in Substance 30, 2001, 220. 8 On ‘feeling rules’ see Arlie R. Hochschild, The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling, University of California Press, Berkeley 1983. 9 Weston LaBarre, ‘The Cultural Basis of Emotion and Gestures’, in Journal of Personality 16, 1947, 52, 55. 10 Michelle Z. Rosaldo, ‘Toward an Anthropology of Self and Feeling’, in Culture Theory: Essays on Mind, Self, and Emotion, Richard A. Schweder and Robert A. LeVine (eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1984, 150. Benedicte Grima, The Performance of Emotion among Paxtun Women, Oxford University Press, New York 2005. An overview of themes and methods in the social scientific study of emotion as it was emerging in the 1980’s is in Catherine Lutz and Geoffrey M. White, ‘The Anthropology of Emotions’, in Annual Review of Anthropology 15, 1986, 405-436. See also Lila Abu-Lughod, Veiled Sentiments:

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Honor and Poetry in a Bedouin Society, University of California Press, Berkeley 1986. 11 Clifford Geertz, ‘The Growth of Culture and the Evolution of Mind’, in The Interpretation of Cultures, Basic Books, New York 1973. 12 Michelle Z. Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Illongot Notions of Self and Social Life Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1980; Signe Howell, ‘Rules not Words’, in Indigenous Psychologies: The Anthropology of the Self, Paul Heelas and Andrew Lock (eds.), London 1981, 133-44; Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo and David W. Gegeo, ‘Shaping the Mind and Straightening Out Conflicts: The Discourse of Kwara’ae Family Counseling’, in Disentangling: Conflict Discourse in Pacific Societies, Karen Ann Watson-Gegeo and Geoffrey M. White (eds.), Stanford University Press, Stanford 1990, 161-213. 12 Robert I. Levy, Tahitians: Mind and Experience in the Society Islands, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1973; Jean Briggs, Never in Anger: Portrait of an Eskimo Family, Harvard University Press, Cambridge 1970; Catherine A. Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and their Challenge to Western Theory University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1988; Fred R. Myers, Pintupi Country, Pintupi Self: Sentiment, Place, and Politics among the Western Desert Aborigines University of California Press, Berkeley 1991; Rosaldo, Ibid. 13 Charlotte E. Hardman, Other Worlds: Notions of Self and Emotion among the Lohorung Rai Berg, Oxford 2000. William M. Reddy has challenged what he characterises as extreme constructionism in the work of Rosaldo, Abu-Lughod, and Grima, and offers an alternative approach that focuses on strategies for the concentration of attention (see ‘Against Constructionism: The Historical Ethnography of Emotions’, in Current Anthropology 38, 1997, 327-351) and The Navigation of Feeling: A Framework for the History of Emotions, Cambridge University Press, New York 2006. 14 Lester K. Little, ‘Anger in Monastic Curses’, in Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.) Cornell University Press, Ithaca 1998, 9-35; Carole Z. Stearns and Peter N. Stearns, Anger: The Struggle for Emotional Control in America’s History, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1986; Peter N. Stearns, Jealousy: The Evolution of an Emotion in American History, NYU Press, New York 1989; Darrin M. McMahon, Happiness: A History, Atlantic Monthly Press, New York 2005. The historical study of emotion began in the rich ferment of ideas among historians in France in the 1920's. Lucien Febvre outlined the direction of that project in an essay published in 1938 entitled ‘Histoire et Psychologie’: "The task is, for a given period, to establish a detailed inventory of the mental equipment of the men of the time, then by dint of great learning, but also of imagination, to reconstitute the whole physical, intellectual and moral universe of each preceding generation.” Lucien Febvre, ‘History and Psychology’, in A New Kind of History and Other Essays, Peter Burke (ed.), K. Folca (trans.), Routledge and Kegan Paul, New York 1973, 9. For Febvre this task translated to a test of the historian's ingenuity in developing investigative techniques that would make it possible "to reconstitute the emotional

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life of the past” (Lucien Febvre, ‘Sensibility and history: how to reconstitute the emotional life of the past’, in A New Kind of History, 12-26). 15 Robert C. Solomon, The Passions, Anchor Press/Doubleday, Garden City, New York 1976. 16 Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1982, xi. 17 Max Müller, ‘The Science of Religion, Lecture One’, in The Essential Max Müller: On Language, Mythology, and Religion, Jon R. Stone (ed.), Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2002, 113.

CHAPTER FOUR ABOUT THE QUESTION OF THE REAL CAUSE OF AN EMOTION AND ITS IMPORTANCE FOR THE CONCEPT OF ‘RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE’ KATHIA THÖRNER

In his book, Religious Experience1, the philosopher Wayne Proudfoot examines “the conditions under which people ascribe emotions to themselves and others and under which they identify certain moments of experience as religious to show that these conditions include . . . judgments about the causes of their experiences.”2 For this purpose he refers, on the one hand, to the experiments of the social psychologist Stanley Schachter and his ‘two-factor theory of emotion’, and on the other hand he refers to reports of ‘conversion experiences’ which are accompanied by bodily arousals. It is important to notice that Proudfoot points out that the concept of ‘religious experience’ not only includes background concepts or rules but also a judgment about the cause. This entails the question of what is considered to be the real cause, and in the end the best explanation of the experience.

1. Justifying ‘religious experience’ by an ambiguity of the word ‘experience’ After having examined the approaches of Friedrich Schleiermacher (On Religion: Speeches to its Cultured Despisers, 1799), William James (Varieties of Religious Experiences, 1902), and Rudolf Otto (The Idea of the Holy, 1958), Proudfoot states that these authors inhibit the search for the best explanation of religious experience through their exploitation of an ambiguity in the word ‘experience’: they attempt to justify the content by immediate experience. The word ‘experience’ is ambiguous because it

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can express how something appears to a person; but it can also be used as an achievement word like ‘perceive’. If one likes to refer to an experience in the first sense, one has to quote what is described by the subject because it is a matter of referring to the experience as an experience. But if one must judge whether somebody experienced something in the second sense, one does not have to share the explanation given by the subject. For example, if someone claims to have experienced the energy of an old tree, it cannot be denied that this person has indeed had that impression or conviction. But one can refute the claim that there is a sensible energy between a tree and a person, as is implied in the report of the experience. To neglect this difference can serve to support an apologetic or protective strategy in explaining religious experience, a strategy which consists in the confusion of identifying the phenomenon by the report of the subject of experience—which includes already an assumption about the cause—and then explaining the phenomenon in order to find the best explanation. A theoretical approach must refer to individual experiences that are identified in religious terms, but the explanation given by the subject could possibly be wrong. So, it is not a reductive strategy to explain the phenomenon without using religious terms if this explains the phenomenon in a better way. An apologetic strategy would object that those explanations no longer refer to the same phenomenon.3 But this objection, following Proudfoot, neglects the fact that what is really to be called a religious experience does not depend on the description given by the subject, precisely because it is not a question that can be justified on the authority of the first person alone. The basis for such a strategy is also detected by Proudfoot in the concept of religious experience as found in James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience.4 Proudfoot remarks that James is unaware of the ambiguity stated above when he speaks of an “undifferentiated sense of reality” in the chapter, “The Reality of the Unseen.” Proudfoot states that this “sense of the presence of an unseen reality becomes the thread that runs through the Varieties,”5 and that the “sense or consciousness of the presence of a reality or power that transcends the self and its ordinary world“ is described by James as “the common core of religious experience.”6 But the words ‘sense’ or ‘feeling’ have the same ambiguity as the word ‘experience’. They can also be used as: (1) a phenomenological description and; (2) as an “identification by reference to the causes of the stimulation of our sensory apparatus.”7 The difference consists, as stated above with regard to the word ‘experience’, in the question of authority. In describing a person’s sensation one must quote the person’s own description. But the

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description includes an hypothesis about the causes of the sensation which does not need to be shared. James thinks that for “a science of religions,” “consciousness” could serve at best as the “doorway into the subject.” Since he considers religious experience as ‘peak experiences’ which are not accessible to all people, he claims that “[t]hose of us who are not personally favoured with such specific revelations must stand outside them altogether.”8 Proudfoot states that James thus restricts the authority of description and explanation to the subject of religious experience because at this point he is not aware that a report is not mere description, but includes claims that can not be justified by immediate experience. The fact that religious experiences are accessible to some people only, is not a sufficient reason to call all experiences that are described in religious terms, ‘religious’. There are also only certain people who can report that they have seen aliens, but this is not a sufficient reason to treat them like experts on aliens. The assumption that a religious experience is immediately identifiable by the experience itself depends on the idea that there is a special feeling which involves immediate knowledge of what is felt. This idea is connected to a theory of emotion which rests on the assumption that it is possible to identify emotions by immediate feeling. Proudfoot’s argumentation tries to refute this kind of emotion theory. He wants to show, in reference to the experiments of the psychologist Stanley Schachter, that our statements about what we feel depend on certain convictions about our environment, and that these are considered to be the cause of the emotion. I think that Proudfoot is right in the assumption that emotions, as well as religious experiences, can neither be justified nor explained by immediate experience. To do this it is important to refer to its real cause, and the question of the real cause of an experience necessarily opens a discourse of justification. At the same time I am not convinced that Schachter’s experiments, which have led him to the ‘two-factor theory of emotion’, are suitable to support this thesis either. In this paper I would like to discuss whether it is justified to apply the results of the experiment by Schachter to the area of religious experience.

2. The ‘two-factor theory’ of Schachter and Singer Proudfoot first wants to show that emotions are determined by a cognitive element. In reference to one of Schachter’s experiments (1962), he points out that the cognitive content specifies which emotion a person thinks one feels, whereby the content is determined by an assumption concerning the

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cause of the emotion. So the result of the experiment by Schachter is that we do not come to know our own emotions by an immediate feeling; rather, the way in which we specify our emotions depends on the interpretation of the environment. Schachter‘s assumption is that an emotion “consists of two factors: (1) a general and diffuse pattern of arousal in the sympathetic nervous system, and (2) a cognitive label, or explanation by which the subject understands this arousal.9 This idea appears counterintuitive. Most people would say that they do immediately feel that they are afraid when they stand in front of an aggressive dog. They would not say that they have a certain belief about the dog, together with a general arousal. How can Schachter maintain that an emotion consists of two different factors which are linked by the person and not immediately felt as a quality, like fear as such? Together with Jerome Singer, the psychologist Stanley Schachter developed his so-called ‘two-factor theory of emotion’ based on a set of experiments. The two factors are as stated above: 1) a general and diffuse pattern of arousal in the sympathetic nervous system, and; 2) a cognitive label, or an explanation by which the subject understands this arousal. The assumption was that the label or cognition would determine whether the arousal was experienced as anger, joy, bliss or awe. To prove this they designed an experimental setting which makes it possible to manipulate the arousal and the available cognitive labels independently. To evoke the first factor—the general arousal—they gave an injection of adrenaline to the test subjects; informing some of the subjects of the effects, misinforming others, and leaving the rest in ignorance. To achieve different correlations to the second factor—the cognitive label—they manipulated the environment of the test subject. For this purpose, some of Schachter’s assistants in the same room received the instruction to act in a euphoric manner one time and in an angry manner the other. So, among others, the following prediction could be tested: “. . . given a state of physiological arousal for which a person has no immediate explanation, he will ‘label’ this state and describe his feelings in terms of the cognitions that are available to him.”10 The result was indeed that those subjects, who were not given an explanation of the arousal, insofar as they were ignorant of the effect of the injection, described their emotions according to the environment. This means that they felt joy when there was an euphoric scene and angry when the assistants acted in that mode. Moreover the subjects described their emotions as caused by the given situation. “Later experiments have shown that arousal created by drugs, physical exercise, or natural hormonal changes can be labelled anything from euphoria, humour, love, and sexual attraction to hunger, anxiety, conflict, anger, and

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menstrual distress.”11 So the experiment shows that ignorant and misinformed test subjects ascribe the unexpected symptoms in terms that were suggested by conditions of their immediate environment. Proudfoot concludes that this result harmonizes with the philosophical assumption that the conjunction between an emotion and an object is a ‘non-contingent and grammatical’ one. The important point in respect to a philosophical approach to a theory of emotion is that an “emotion can be identified only by reference to its object and grounds, and this identification is independent of whether or not the object exists outside of the subject’s thought and of the validity of the grounds.”12 He then presents the following supposition: “Given the results of Schachter’s experiments, it seems quite plausible that at least some religious experiences are due to physiological changes for which the subject adopts a religious explanation.”13 In order to demonstrate this thesis Proudfoot refers to the report of Stephen Bradley which is also quoted by William James in the Varieties in the chapter Conversion.

3. The ‘two-factor theory’ applied to the ‘conversion experience’ We are informed that Bradley was an unlettered man and that his conversion took place after he heard a sermon, on the basis of a text from Revelations, by a Methodist preacher. Proudfoot remarks that “Bradley‘s testimony reads like a textbook example designed to illustrate Schachter’s theory.”14 The feature which makes Bradley’s account in Proudfoot’s argumentation a striking one is that Bradley differentiates two steps in his experience which seem to equal the two factors assumed in Schachter’s theory. I quote Bradley: At first, I began to feel my heart beat very quick all of a sudden, which made me at first think that perhaps something is going to ail me, though I was not alarmed, for I felt no pain. My heart increased in its beating, which soon convinced me that it was the Holy Spirit from the effect it had on me.15

Proudfoot sums up the experience in his own words as follows: He notices his heart rate suddenly increase. He looks to discover the cause of it and, in the context of having just returned from the revival service, attributes it to the Holy Spirit.16

The accelerated heart rate is considered as: (1) the unexpected arousal, and the reference to the operations of the Holy Spirit as (2) the explanation or

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labelling. Proudfoot adds to Bradley’s explanation that it was the fact of having just returned from the revival service that convinced Bradley that the Holy Spirit could have this effect on him. This added explanation, which differs from Bradley’s in the way that it stops to speak of the effects of the Holy Spirit, continues to the assumption quoted above that, “given a state of physiological arousal for which a person has no immediate explanation, he will ‘label’ this state and describe his feelings in terms of the cognitions that are available to him.”17 So, an observer is allowed to substitute another ‘label’. After listing other examples, among them the experience of the Pentecost episode among the disciples of Jesus, Proudfoot claims, “The history of religion is replete with the religious labelling and explanation of anomalous bodily states and activities.”18 But there is obviously one difficulty in comparing the Schachter’s experiment to the report of Bradley’s conversion experience: if one considers the experiment of Schachter, it is convincing to say that the real cause of the arousal is the injection of adrenaline. For Schachter, as the leader of this experiment, it is obvious that the test subjects only appear to feel angry or joyful. The real explanation is that their feelings are the effect of the injection. But in the case of Stephen Bradley there is no outside observer who could decide if the accelerated heart rate is the effect of the revival service or of the Holy Spirit. It seems possible to solve the problem of the missing observer by creating an experimental setting which is suitable to test the dependence of bodily arousals and the attribution of causes in religious terms. Proudfoot refers to such an experiment by Pahnke19 in which some subjects, in the setting of a service, received a drug while others only received a placebo. The result was that “the subjects receiving the hallucinogen labelled their experiences in religious terms to a significantly greater extent than did those who received the placebo; and their reports of their experiences showed a significantly greater coincidence with nine characteristics previously gleaned from the reports of classical mystics.”20 Obviously, there is a connection between the effect of the drug and the experiences which resemble characteristics of reports from mystics. But like the experiment of Schachter, this setting is quite an artificial one, and it is questionable if the results can serve to explain the emergence of emotions in normal cases as opposed to the emergence of religious experience in cases where no stimulating substances are involved.

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4. Criticism: Religious experience as a special case of emotional excitement? Schachter’s experiment shows that a person who feels unexpected arousals tries to explain them, but it does not have much to say about the process of the emergence of emotions in normal conditions. In the same way, Pahnke’s experiment shows that people have the tendency to explain unexpected experiences in a religious setting in correspondence to their current environment and practice. But the experiment does not supply an approach to the best explanation of mystic experiences. The ‘two-factor theory’ refers to an artificial case which demonstrates that the idea that emotions can be identified by immediate feeling is obviously wrong. But the comparison between the artificial conditions of Schachter’s or Pahnke’s experiment and the conversion experience of Stephen Bradley seems to imply that there is a hidden or unknown cause in the latter case, too. Proudfoot obviously considers religious experiences as “anomalous bodily states and activities”21 which are explained in religious terms. Following the analogy to the experiment of Schachter, this explanation receives the status of a labelling, and this implies that other explanations could be more appropriate. In the final chapter of his book, Proudfoot claims that he does not only like to open the discourse to alternative explanations, but he wants to seek the best explanation. And the criterion for being the best explanation is to refer to the real cause of an event. I would like to demonstrate that the question about the real cause of an emotion, with respect to religious experience, cannot be answered by the results of the ‘two-factor theory’ simply because it is not a theory of the emergence of emotions. But this has not escaped Proudfoot’s notice. Regarding the emergence of emotion, Schachter follows the approach of the so-called ‘attribution theory’. Following Proudfoot, this approach “can be seen as an extension of Schachter’s demonstration that people interpret diffuse physiological arousal in the light of the context in which they find themselves.”22 I would like to present this approach because it shows that it is possible to get criteria for the real cause in normal conditions without an outside observer, because the identification of emotions is not a private matter. The ‘attribution theory’ is a research program in social psychology. It is “actually a loose coalition of theories concerned with the ways people perceive the causes of their bodily states and behavior.”23 This theoretical approach has its origin in a behavioural theory of self-perception. The following statement can be considered as a central one:

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Individuals come to ‘know’ their own attitudes, emotions and other internal states partially by inferring them from observations of their own overt behaviour and/or the circumstances in which this behaviour occurs. Thus, to the extent that internal cues are weak, ambiguous, or uninterpretable, the individual is functionally in the same position as an outside observer, an observer who must necessarily rely upon the same cues to infer the individual’s inner states.24

The knowledge of our emotions, according to this statement, consists partially of a connection between an ‘internal cue’ and distinctive overt behaviour and/or the circumstances in which this behaviour occurs. The ‘internal cue’ is obviously considered to be pre-cognitive, in the sense of vague or not yet determined, but not unconscious. To come to ‘know’ an emotion it is necessary to make inferences from observations of the overt behaviour and/or circumstances. If you ask about the cause of the emotion, it seems that there are two different kinds of causes: the first cause is a brute fact which produces the ‘internal cue’; the second cause is connected by the subject to this ‘internal cue’. The latter is constitutive for the emotion which we come to know; the former is constitutive for the emergence of the ‘internal cue’. In most cases the two causes will be identical because we have learned to make correct inferences. It is only possible to speak of ‘two causes’ in consideration of the emergence of the emotion. If someone connects his own inner state to an object as the cause of this inner state, and calls this connection ‘fear’, the word ‘fear’ refers to the connection made by the subject. For example, if someone is actually afraid of a dog, the emergence of ‘fear’ is not the result of a dangerous dog as a pure fact and the belief that the dog is dangerous. It is sufficient if the dog is considered to be really dangerous, and this includes the conviction that there is really a dog at all. If another person thinks that the dog is well-behaved and not dangerous whatsoever, one can distinguish between the dog as the object of different judgments, and the judgments as such, but there is not the dog on the one hand and the judgment on the other as two distinct entities that cause the fear. If one speaks of the cause of an emotion, and not of the cause of a vague ‘internal cue’, this always includes a judgment about an object which can be differentiated in two aspects: 1) Reality: ‘There is an object x’, and 2) Appraisal: ‘x is dangerous/disgusting/ and so on.’ Two kinds of ‘mistake’ are possible: 1) ‘There is no x.’ If this would be recognised, the emotion would subside after a certain time; 2) ‘X is not dangerous/ disgusting/and so on.’ If this would be recognised, the emotion would subside after a certain time, although appraisals are obviously more resistant than judgments of existence. These are two cases in which

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something appears to somebody in a certain way and this apprehension causes a certain emotion. The emotion earns the status of an inference which is based on a certain belief and/or perception. Emotions, therefore, can be wrong in the sense of unfounded. This is the same sense in which Proudfoot speaks of ‘experience’ and ‘sense’ as words which express how something appears to be, and which can serve as a phenomenological description. However this is another kind of mistake as presented in the experiment of Schachter. In the experiment, the mistake of the test subjects does not consist in a false belief or perception that causes an unfounded emotion— i.e. emotions which result from false judgments—but in a false assumption about the cause of their bodily arousal or ‘internal cue’.

Conclusion The assumption that emotions at least can be considered with regard to two factors does not entail that one can explain an emotion on two separate levels, such as bodily arousal in natural terms, and ‘labeling’ in referring to the cultural setting. If we use the term ‘emotion’ to refer to several emotions like fear, anger, bliss, and so on, the term involves a judgment about an object and does not refer to mere bodily arousal. So the explanation of an emotion has to ask about the judgment in order to find the real cause. In considering Bradley‘s ‘conversion experience’ as a “textbook example to illustrate Schachters theory,”25 Proudfoot describes religious experience as a given symptom that is connected to a cause which is due to the cultural setting. He does not state explicitly that religious experiences are the result of unfounded beliefs like some critics of religion do. Nevertheless, I think he makes this point implicitly when he applies the results of Schachter’s experiment to religious experience and claims that “[t]he common element in religious experience is likely to be found . . . in the beliefs held by the subject about the causes of the state.”26 Firstly, it is important to notice that it is a special feature of the tradition of Methodism to deem essential the belief that there is a direct operation of the Holy Spirit in conversion. At the same time it is only one aspect among others, for example the conviction of redemption through Jesus Christ. Proudfoot considers the conviction of redemption as a consequence of Bradley’s assumption that his bodily arousal is due to the operation of the Holy Spirit. But even if it can be supposed that Bradley’s accelerated heart rate was the effect of just having returned from the revival service, and not the effect of the Holy Spirit, this would not explain

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why Bradley described his experience as a conversion. The term ‘religious experience’, at least in this special sense of ‘conversion experience’, refers to the connection of a bodily excitement and the conviction that one is redeemed. So, to identify an experience as a ‘conversion’ cannot be separated from the conviction of being redeemed, just as one cannot separate the appraisal that something is dangerous from the emotion of fear. In order to find the real cause of ‘religious experience’ it is not sufficient to find an explanation of bodily symptoms because the meaning of the expression ‘religious experience’ includes more than a reference to the cause of mere bodily symptoms. However, it is this latter assumption which could be implied by comparing it to the experiment of Schachter. The crucial question to ask in order to justify Bradley’s conviction that his experience has really been a conversion is whether there are good reasons to identify it with this term, and not the question what really causes his bodily arousal.

Notes 1

Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience, University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles 1985. 2 Ibid. 229. 3 Such a strategy is ascribed to D. Z. Phillips in his work Religion without Explanation, Basil Blackwell, Oxford 1976. 4 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Macmillan Company, New York 1961. 5 Ibid. 162. 6 Ibid. 169, 164. 7 Ibid. 8 Ibid. 397. 9 Proudfoot, 99. 10 Following Proudfoot, 99. [Schachter (1971), 4.] 11 Ibid. 100. 12 Ibid. 101. 13 Ibid. 102. 14 Ibid. 103. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 103ff. 17 Ibid. 99. 18 Ibid. 106.

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Walter N. Pahnke, ‘Drugs and mysticism’, in B. Aaronson and H. Osmond (eds.), Psychedelics: The Uses and Implications of Hallucinogenic Drugs, Doubleday, New York 1970, 145-65. 20 Proudfoot, 105ff 21 Ibid. 106. 22 Ibid. 108. 23 Ibid. 24 Following Proudfoot, 109. Daryl J. Bem, ‘Self-perception theory’, in L. Berkowitz (ed.), Advances in Experimental and Social Psychology, 6, Academic Press, New York 1972, 1-62. 25 Proudfoot, 103. 26 Ibid. 107.

CHAPTER FIVE RELIGIOUS TRADITIONS AS PARADIGM SCENARIOS: APPLYING RONALD DE SOUSA’S CONCEPT TO WILLIAM JAMES’ VIEW ON RELIGIOUS EMOTIONS DESIREE BERENDSEN

Is gratitude a religious or a natural emotion? I think it can be said that almost all people feel gratitude when a child is born in their family. That would be an argument for it to be a natural emotion. When, however, this gratitude is expressed in having the child baptised, it seems to be a religious emotion. Was this gratitude in that case already a religious emotion or did it become religious with the baptism? In this paper I will argue that an emotion can only be religious when it is interpreted as religious in a religious context. Religious emotions are variations of natural emotions. They are emotions with a specific object—a theory William James holds, as we shall see—but that is not the whole story. Religious emotions are interpreted as religious in a specific tradition. Without the appropriation of the emotion in a religious context, an emotion could never be seen as religious. In this sense, religious traditions function as paradigm scenarios with the double aspect, as Ronald de Sousa describes them. The tradition provides the characteristic object(s) of the religious emotion, namely that which is seen as the divine in a tradition, and it gives a set of characteristic or ‘normal’ responses to the situation. Religious traditions thus provide ways to live with religious emotions; they provide practices and rituals to cope with (emotions or experiences of) the divine. Thus, religious traditions both evoke and form religious emotions. The goal of this paper is to show that religious traditions can be seen as the paradigm scenarios in which religious emotions are evoked and formed. In order to reach this goal, I first want to introduce the concept of

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a paradigm scenario which is coined by Ronald de Sousa. Then I will discuss a constructivist approach to religion, according to which religious experiences are made possible by a religious culture. In the third section I will describe William James’ view on religious emotions in order to be able to show in the fourth section that his studies on religious experience can be read as suggesting to consider religious experience as a practice of meaning construction. If this is the case, then it can be concluded that religious traditions not only form, but also evoke religious emotions.

1. Paradigm Scenarios: Ronald de Sousa Emotions direct people’s attention and people are made familiar with the vocabulary of emotion by association with paradigm scenarios, according to Ronald de Sousa.1 So, if someone thanks God for the child she has got, the gratitude she feels is learned by association with the tradition in which she lives. Her emotion directs her attention towards God. She might express this gratitude by having her child baptised. The ritual of baptism is the paradigm scenario in which the emotion of gratitude has its proper stance. Baptism is the Christian paradigm scenario, one in which the emotions connected with birth can be played out and assigned their proper place. According to de Sousa, emotions are more than just a movement of the heart; there is a subject and an object involved in emotions. Emotions are a kind of perception in the sense that there is something, a situation or an object, that evokes the emotions. In the case of gratitude, the birth of the child is the situation which evokes the emotion. The subject who has the emotion is the mother; the object is the birth of the child. De Sousa argues for the independent status of emotions as a source of knowledge. According to him, emotions carry information about the world beyond the subject, although they are not species of beliefs (de Sousa 1997, 41). Already in the introduction of his The Rationality of Emotion, he holds that “[w]hat remains of the old opposition between reason and emotion is only this: emotions are not reducible to beliefs or to wants” (de Sousa 1997, xv-xvi). This is directed both at those who hold that emotions are opposed to reason and at those who hold that emotions are wholly analysable in rational terms. Also in the introduction of The Rationality of Emotion, he gives an outline of his main insights about the nature of emotions: The key idea is that our emotions are learned rather like a language and that they have an essentially dramatic structure. The names of emotions do not refer to some simple experience; rather, they get their meaning from their relation to a situation type, a kind of original drama that defines the

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roles, feelings, and reactions characteristic of that emotion. Such original defining dramas I call paradigm scenarios (de Sousa 1997, p. xvi).

De Sousa holds that the stories that characterise different emotions are learned by association with these paradigm scenarios. In order to clarify de Sousa’s view on emotions, we thus have to clarify this concept of ‘paradigm scenarios’. People learn to live with emotions like they learn a language, and emotions have a dramatic structure. How can we clarify these original defining dramas? De Sousa states: We are made familiar with the vocabulary of emotion by association with paradigm scenarios, drawn first from our daily life as small children, later reinforced by the stories and fairy tales to which we are exposed, and later still, supplemented and refined by literature and art. Paradigm scenarios involve two aspects: first a paradigm situation providing the characteristic objects of the emotion . . . and second, a set of characteristic or ‘normal’ responses to the situation.2

So people learn the vocabulary of the emotions in their daily life as small children and later they are reinforced by the stories, art, and culture to which they are exposed. The paradigm scenarios by association with which people are made familiar with emotions have two aspects: the object and the response. In the case of the grateful woman, she might have learned to name the feeling she has as ‘grateful’ in the books she read and the movies she saw. The situation of giving birth and having a (healthy) baby then is the object of the emotion and gratitude is the normal response to this situation. This gratitude is not an emotion that pops up and disappears. It may last for a period of time. That it lasts can be explained by the fact that emotions have a dramatic or narrative structure.3 De Sousa uses the concept ‘paradigm scenarios’ to make it possible to see emotions as rational without having to define exactly the objects, desires, beliefs, intentionality etc. that are connected with emotions. “Like scientific paradigms, in the sense of Thomas Kuhn4,” he says, “emotions are better at stimulating research in certain directions than at finding compelling and fair reasons for their own adaption. They are too ‘deep’ for that, too unlike specific beliefs” (de Sousa 1997, 198). As has been said above, emotions direct people’s attention, rather than providing concrete information. Therefore, following Kuhn, de Sousa uses the concept ‘paradigm’ instead of trying to develop a fixed theory about emotions. Paradigms are a kind of sign, rather than a full-fledged theory. Just like Kuhn, de Sousa connects paradigms and models. According to de Sousa, “[e]motions themselves act like models . . . they themselves give us

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frameworks in terms of which we perceive, desire, act, and explain” (de Sousa 1997, 24). The emotion, then, is a kind of perception. It makes people see certain things and not see other things. As in the case of the woman’s gratitude for her little baby, usually parents tend to perceive their child as the most beautiful in the world. I have said that, analogous with Kuhn’s paradigms, de Sousa’s paradigm scenarios have two aspects.5 Thomas Kuhn uses the concept of paradigm on the one hand for the whole constellation of shared convictions, values and techniques of a research community. This is the more sociological use of the term. On the other hand it indicates one aspect of that constellation, namely the exemplary models for solving scientific puzzles in a specific research project (Kuhn 1970, 175). Just as for Kuhn paradigms have a sociological aspect and an aspect concerning the content of the research, for de Sousa too a paradigm scenario has a sociological aspect and an aspect concerning the ‘content’ of the emotion. On the one hand, a paradigm scenario is a situation type providing the characteristic objects of the specific emotiontype, and on the other hand it is a set of characteristic or ‘normal’ responses to the situation, where normality is first a biological matter and then very quickly becomes a cultural one. Thus a paradigm scenario has to do both with the object and the subject side of emotions; both with the ‘thing’ that causes the emotion and the person who ‘has’ the emotion. How people react in certain situations is learned, emotional reactions are learned, but not everything can be learned. Much of what people learn builds on what was innate. The same is true for emotions. Children learn to identify their responses to certain situations as specific emotions by providing names for the emotions in the context of the scenario. Thus, “[p]aradigm scenarios, in setting up our emotional repertoire, quite literally provide the meaning of our emotions” (de Sousa 1997, 189). According to de Sousa, emotions can be seen as ‘cognitive’ if they are seen as perceptions, rather than as knowledge or judgments.6 Emotions are perceptions in the sense that there is something, a situation or an object, which evokes the emotion. “Emotions face both in and out: they reflect facts about the subject but refer also to something outside, to which they typically are responses” (de Sousa 2004, 63). They say something about the subject that experiences the emotion and at the same time say something about the world outside the subject to which emotions are often responses. In the sense that emotions say something about the world, de Sousa is in agreement with Solomon.7 In the example of the grateful woman, the perception of the child, which is something in the outside world, is influenced by the emotion of gratefulness itself. At the same time the emotion is caused by the child: if the child would not be there, the

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woman could not be grateful about the birth of this child. Although emotions itself are a kind of perception rather than knowledge or judgments, they also influence people’s perception. The perception of your child as the most beautiful in the world might not be totally accurate. However, the emotion is accurate, because it tries to communicate a certain ‘truth’, namely the unconditional love for ones child once it is born. Emotions thus play an important role in people’s lives because they orient people’s attention and therefore influence people’s decisions (de Sousa 2004, 65, 66). Whether or not gratitude at the birth of a child is felt as for example religious, is an important difference between people who might and people who might not consider having their child baptised. In the sense that paradigm scenarios are models for action, they are a kind of ritual (de Sousa 1997, 322-23). Both paradigm scenarios and rituals in religious traditions have a structuring function. Paradigm scenarios structure emotions just as rituals structure religious life. However, just as religion should not merely consist of doing the right rituals, emotions should not be merely ritual either. If paradigm scenarios are kinds of original ritual ways of behaviour in certain situations, but if emotions should not be merely ritual reactions on specific situations, then the question of appropriateness of emotions comes up. What kind of emotion is appropriate in which situation? It is to these kinds of questions that paradigm scenarios are an answer. There are in every culture paradigmatic ways to react emotionally to certain situations. These paradigmatic ways have some objectivity, in the sense that certain situations ask for certain specific emotional answers. In that sense, according to de Sousa, emotions are rational (de Sousa 1997, 184-86). Since people are able to experience emotions and, what is more, are able to use them because of their structuring force as paradigm scenarios, people are more rational than purely ‘rational’ beings without feeling and more sensible than mechanically determined beings. De Sousa’s analysis of emotions as functioning in paradigm scenarios provides us with a way to see emotions as a source of knowledge and as being rational in a specific sense. As Järveläinen points out, de Sousa advocates a theory according to which emotions are socially construed phenomena.8 The notion of ‘paradigm scenario’ seems to be a very good tool to describe the rationality of emotions and put them in a broader social context, without leaving the body out of the description of emotion. Indeed, emotions are not just separate entities, but function in a context. This context determines their meaning and their rationality. Emotions are not just subjective experiences, but function in a social context. Therefore children are able to learn emotions by learning in which situation what emotion is appropriate.

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Once people have learned to use their emotional repertoire, they interpret various situations they are faced with through the lens of different paradigm scenarios. When a particular scenario is chosen, it arranges and rearranges people’s cognition and perception. Different from James, de Sousa has not written about religion. However, I think his idea of emotions functioning in paradigm scenarios is very well applicable to a certain view on religion and, as a consequence, on religious emotions.

2. Religion as a cultural linguistic system In religious anthropology and even in certain brands of theology it has become common sense to see religion as a cultural or cultural linguistic system. In anthropology, Clifford Geertz did pioneering work, whereas George Lindbeck tried to apply these anthropological insights by combining them with a Wittgensteinian view on language in an orthodox protestant theology. I first want to introduce briefly Geertz’s definition of religion, and next Lindbeck’s cultural linguistic theology. In a well-known article, Geertz defends the thesis that religion is a cultural system.9 This means, first and foremost, that according to Geertz, religion is connected with human cultures. Geertz’s famous definition of religion is as follows: a religion is a system of symbols which acts to establish powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations in men by formulating conceptions of a general order of existence and clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the moods and motivations seem uniquely realistic (Geertz 1973, 90).

The concept of ‘symbol’ is central both to his description of culture and religion. Religion is in first instance a system of symbols. According to Geertz, cultural systems of symbols are sources of information. They give meaning to reality with a double gesture, both by shaping themselves to it and shaping it to themselves. Geertz uses the distinction of ‘model of’ and ‘model for’ to clarify this (Geertz 1973, 93-4). Rituals seem to be models of reality because they are ways to understand reality. A ritual models reality in order for it to be interpreted religiously. According to Geertz, however, this is not the only aspect of ritual. For participants in a ritual, it is not just a model of what they believe, but also a model for the believing of it (Geertz 1973, 114). Hence, rituals not only represent faith, they also shape it. According to Geertz the systems of symbols form powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations. He believes that motivations are intentional, whereas moods are not.10 A mood is religious when it serves in the context of a

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religious system of symbols. If sacred symbols did not at one and the same time induce dispositions in human beings and formulate general ideas of order, then religious activity or religious experience would not exist (Geertz 1973, 98). An experience or activity is only religious if it is, by the one who has the experience, seen as symbolic of some transcendent truths. In the case of our grateful women, the baptism of her child must be seen in the context of Christian beliefs about life; otherwise the baptism does not have any meaning. Theologian George Lindbeck agrees with the anthropologist Geertz that in explaining religion, socio-cultural factors should come prior to those which are associated with experiences. Religious experiences are made possible by a religious culture.11 Lindbeck develops his cultural linguistic approach to religion in contrast with two others: one that emphasises the cognitive aspects of religion and one that stresses the experiential-expressive dimension of religion. In cognitivism, church doctrines function as informative propositions or truth claims about objective realities. According to Lindbeck this is the position of traditional orthodoxies. The `experiential-expressive' (liberal) approach interprets doctrines as uninformative, nondiscursive symbols of inner feelings, attitudes or existential orientations (Lindbeck 1984, 16). This kind of approach began with Schleiermacher. Lindbeck proposes an alternative account, namely, his cultural-linguistic approach in which church doctrines are seen as regulative. Here emphasis is placed on the various ways in which religions resemble languages, together with their correlative forms of life, and are thus similar to cultures. Church doctrines are viewed mostly with regard to their function and not as expressive symbols (as in the experiential-expressive approach) or truth claims (as in the cognitive approach of religion). Doctrines are seen as communally authoritative rules of discourse, attitude and action (Lindbeck 1984, 18). According to Lindbeck, religion as a doctrinal system is second-order discourse. Religion can be seen as a cultural and linguistic framework that shapes the entirety of life and thought. A Christian woman can only experience the birth of her child in the context of gratitude towards God. This is not something that is added to a general emotion of gratitude. To become religious, then, is to become skilled in the language, the symbolic system of a given religion. To become skilled in a specific religious tradition is to interiorise a set of skills by practice and training (Lindbeck 1984, 33-5). Thus, Lindbeck concludes, religion need not be described as something universal arising from within the depths of individuals; it can be just as plausibly construed as a class name for a variegated set of culturallinguistic systems that differentially shape and produce our most profound sentiments, attitudes, and awareness (Lindbeck 1984, 40). So, according to

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Lindbeck religion is not generic, but is a cultural system. Although he does not hold that religion is generic, he does hold that people have the ability to learn the language of a religious tradition. This ability, however, is not a religious ability. According to Lindbeck, a religious tradition is a language that can be learned by training, just as de Sousa’s paradigm scenarios are socially learned.

3. What is a religious emotion? William James According to William James, religious emotions are not specific emotions, but are variations of natural emotions.12 For James the specificity of a religious emotion is its object. A religious emotion, other than regular emotions, does not only consist of the arousal of physical change, but is also directed at an object. For James, religious emotions—like all other emotions—are psychosomatic reactions (James 1997, 59). But the specificity of religious emotions consists in the object of the emotions, namely the divine. As a pragmatist and empiricist, James is not very interested in the divine itself, but in what can be caused by such an idea. Religious emotions, in James’ view, are physiological reactions which are interpreted in the context of thoughts concerning the subject’s standing in a special relation to the divine. These thoughts are the cognitive aspect of the emotion, and this cognitive aspect is the basis for evaluating the significance of the feeling for the subject. So, in James’ view, religious emotions have a cognitive aspect. And despite his solitary definition of religious experience, he believes that the cognitive aspect of a religious emotion is dependent upon habits of thinking in the social environment of the subject.13 This is the case because an emotion becomes a religious emotion by way of a specific evaluation. If this evaluation arises from a social context, a social constructivist interpretation of religious emotions is made possible. The divine, although it is not clear what exactly that is, is the object of the cognitive aspect of the religious emotion because it is that which causes the religious emotion. So, a religious emotion is not only caused by the perception of a physiological change, but also by its object; namely, the idea of the divine. Or, to state it the other way around, the divine is that toward which the religious emotion is directed. It is surprising to see the importance of the cognitive aspect in James’ view on religious emotions, insofar as one of the main criticisms of his emotiontheory is that it neglects the cognitive aspects of emotions. In his general theory of what an emotion is, James defends a so-called ‘feeling theory’.14 Here he does not speak about religious emotions. James’ general view on emotions and his view on religious emotions differ

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concerning the importance they give to the cognitive aspect in emotions and religious emotions respectively. According to James, emotions are bodily processes. Emotions are feelings caused by changes in physiological conditions. First there is a physical reaction, and then there is the feeling of that reaction, which is the emotion. The emotion, thus, is the awareness of the physical reaction.15 The feeling of the bodily changes, on which people apparently do not have influence, is the emotion. The emotion thus wholly consists of the feeling of physical arousal. This feeling is what James calls the material of the emotion. Without that material there cannot be any emotions. James’ arguments for this position are primarily physiological. An argument contra his position, as he sees it himself, could be that emotions vary with the social environment (James 1969, 256). James, however, is not convinced that this is a counterargument to his position. He uses an evolutionary argument to explain this: conventions have their use in social environments, and since human beings are social animals, the most important part of one’s environment are other human beings; therefore, emotions as expressions of my consciousness of other people are useful for evolution. Thus, although emotions are private feelings, they have a function in social behaviour, in that people behave differently in public or at home. But then another objection comes up, namely whether there is any evidence for the assumption that particular perceptions do produce widespread bodily effects by a sort of immediate physical influence, antecedent to the arousal of an emotion or emotional idea (James 1969, 258). It might not be very surprising to hear that James holds that there is such evidence of which he gives several examples, varying from the shiver we feel when listening to music to fainting when seeing blood. The main advantage of this approach is that emotions are seen as physical, and are therefore connected with the human body. As a consequence of which, emotions are impossible to have without bodily experiences. For James, the feeling of fear is bound up with the bodily states which follow on the perception of a terrifying fact. The mental life and corporeal frame are tightly connected in his view. Even intellectual acts hardly ever take place without bodily accompaniment. Feeling, as a bodily state, thus has an important place in this theory. The main disadvantage, however, is that it is not clear at all which physical processes cause which emotions. If there is not any judgment involved in the emotion, it is hard to tell what the difference is between, say, trembling from fear or from excitement. By neglecting the cognitive part of emotions, James fails to distinguish between similar emotions.16 James supposedly would answer that the cognitive aspect of emotions is in what

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has caused it. But since the emotions are bodily feelings, they are not analysable in terms of an object at which the emotion is directed. This is the reason why feeling-theories are commonly seen as non-cognitive theories of emotion in which reason and emotion are opposed. However, although James’ theory of emotions is commonly seen as the main example of a feeling-theory, his view on religious emotions surely has cognitive aspects. James’ view on religious emotions is mainly criticised on three points. The first is that his definition of a religious emotion is narrow because he sees religious experience primarily as something experienced by individuals.17 Churches and doctrines at best play a secondary role in transmitting and communicating the original inspiration. For James, religion is a matter of the heart, rather than of the head. Furthermore, James does not see the importance of collective religious life, which is not just the result of (individual) religious connections, but which in some way constitutes or is that connection. Not only religious experience, but also the language in which these experiences are expressed is social. And what is more, all experiences require some vocabulary, not only to express them, but in order to experience them in the first place (Taylor 2002, 24, 27).18 We will come back to this point in the last section as well. A third criticised element of James’ view on religion is the momentary aspect of his description of a religious experience. James does not seem to be able to appreciate the continuous aspect of religious life in which religious emotions arise, or which is a consequence of a religious experience (Taylor 2002, 115-16). An important critique of James’ theory of emotions was that feeling is too general a category to define emotions. His view on religion seems to be too narrow in that it focuses mainly on the ‘topexperiences’ of ‘religious geniuses’. In the last section of this article I will show that it is possible to interpret James’ ‘theory of religion’ more broadly. The discussion of James’ theory of emotion and religious emotion provides us with some elements for the discussion about religious emotions. Firstly, I agree with James that feeling, as a bodily state, is an important element of emotion. Furthermore, in order to be able to say that religious emotions have a certain type of rationality, intentionality—as the directedness toward something—becomes important. A religious emotion—on James’ account in The Varieties of Religious Experience—is intentional in the sense that it is directed at the divine; and it is religious because of the object at which it is directed. However, in the case of religion, it is difficult to assert that the religious emotion is directed at the divine itself, because it is hard to say anything about the divine itself. I

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think, however, that it is not necessary to hold that a religious emotion is directed at the divine in order to maintain that religious emotions can be rational. For religious emotions to be rational, the dimension of a religious tradition and the way a tradition speaks about the divine could be more important than knowledge about the divine itself. In this way a religious emotion is not just a private emotion, but has a function in the social environment of the religious tradition and the accompanying practices.

4. Religious Traditions as Paradigm Scenarios It might be an unusual interpretation, but it is possible to read James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience in a Lindbeckian fashion, suggesting that one considers religious experience as a cultural form and practice of ‘transcendent’ meaning construction. James himself, however, pays no attention to the constructive function of language—and thus culture—in the constitution of both experiences and thought. Jens Brockmeier, however, interprets The Varieties of Religious Experience as suggesting that one views “religion as a particular cultural practice of transcendent meaning-making” (Brockmeier 2002, 80). We have already seen that James’ attention is directed not to questions of theology and metaphysics but to experience and consciousness. According to Brockmeier, for James, the human condition, by its very nature, is one of ‘transcendental homelessness’. This is why people need to create for themselves mental or spiritual homes in the universe of meaning. In this view, religious practices are not supernatural manifestations, neither do they give form to any specifically religious or spiritual human nature; they are cultural practices. Even though the religious experience itself is a subjective and private experience, its significance to the subject as a religious experience has a social aspect. As we have seen above, for James, a religious emotion is an emotion that occurs in the context of religious reference.19 An emotion is a religious emotion if it is caused by a religious object. And becoming aware of this kind of causation is influenced by cultural factors. James’ studies on religious experience are based on descriptions from people who claim to have had religious or mystical experiences. James himself does not claim to have had any such experiences: “[I] can speak of them only at second hand” (James 1997, 299). Obviously then, his information about ineffable experiences is second-hand as well. But how can one consider this type of information reliable if these experiences really are ineffable? Considering the extensive linguistic material on which James’ studies are based, Brockmeier notes that it is surprising how little James seems to be aware of the problematic relationship between

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experience and language.20 This might indeed be one of the most striking differences between James’ enterprise and contemporary studies by Geertz’s students of cultural meaning-making. Psychologists and anthropologists, and even theologians such as Lindbeck, are aware of the fact that descriptions are always interpretations of reality or meaningconstructions. In contrast, James views the linguistic accounts he studies as transparent media of human experience. James sees mystical experience in the first place as a human experience that, despite its peculiarity and eccentricity, is an ordinary and natural part of the human realm; it has lost any ontological or metaphysical connection with the divine. But then again, if these experiences are ineffable, how could James describe them? Because, according to Brockmeier, it is the other way around: “Not the experience of the ineffable but the very attempt to verbalize this experience—the transformation of the ineffable into the effable, the unsayable into the sayable—that is the distinctive characteristic of mysticism, or at least of that type of mysticism with which James is concerned” (Brockmeier 2002, 89-90).

In Brockmeier’s view, it is in these attempts at giving meaning to an uncharted and unfamiliar dimension of human experience where the quest for transcendent meaning arises and religion comes into being. Religion, on this account, is something conceptual (and that implies, linguistic) which enters the picture when it comes to making sense of experiences that reach beyond our ordinary language games. In this way religion, as doctrine and institution, may blend with people’s personal effort to find ‘deeper’ meaning. Religion, in this view, is the naming of the unsayable. In that sense, religion is the paradigm scenario in which what is unsayable is expressed. What makes the interpretation of James’ account of religious experience as an account of the construction of religion particularly interesting is that it is conceived of as a conceptual construction after the model of ‘immediate feeling’—that is, what James the empiricist sees as the model of emotions. For this reason, James has no difficulty understanding that religion not only gives form to ineffable experiences, but that it is the intellectual, spiritual, and institutional culture of religious communities that, at the same time, suggests, if not evokes, precisely these experiences—together with the language at hand to describe them. Brockmeier argues convincingly that, despite himself, James shows in The Varieties of Religious Experience that language—both as spoken and written discourse—does not just give form and expression to experiences or thoughts but also shapes and creates them.

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Concluding remarks We can learn from James that, for emotions to become religious emotions, not only (a thought about) the divine as the object of the emotion is necessary; also required is a religious tradition in which one learns to interpret specific emotions as religious emotions. In that sense religious traditions function as paradigm scenarios for religious emotions. Religious emotions then are rational to the extent to which they are constituted by the tradition from which they arise. If religion as a cultural system has some rationality and if emotions are rational because they function in paradigm scenarios, then religious emotions are rational to the extent they arise from, and function in, the tradition that functions as a paradigm scenario. In this way religious emotions are made possible by a religious tradition, but this tradition in turn depends on religious emotions because they make long-term religious attitudes possible. Religious traditions are the paradigm scenarios for religious emotions in the sense that they are the context in which religious emotions are learned and that they provide ways to cope with those kinds of emotions. Therefore, despite James’ psychological and individual approach to religion, the combination of his view with a cultural-linguistic approach to religion and Ronald de Sousa’s concept of paradigm-scenarios shows the importance of religious traditions in the context of religious emotions. It is not exaggerated to state that without religious traditions, religious emotions could not be delineated as such. An important question that arises in this context concerns the place of (religious) communities in learning and developing religious emotions. If a religious tradition is the paradigm scenario for religious emotions, then religious communities are the places where people can become acquainted with these kinds of emotions. Further research in psychology and sociology of religion is needed to study what kind of community can foster the forming and evocation of religious emotions. Another question concerns both the necessity and the possibility of distinguishing good and bad emotions. Of course it can be healthy to have bad emotions—being angry in the case of injustice being done to you, for example. If, however, the rationality and the adequacy of emotions depends on whether the right paradigm scenario is played out, it is of great importance that the paradigm scenarios which are learned are appropriate and open to critique and adjustment to different situations.

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Notes 1

Ronald de Sousa, The Rationality of Emotion, The MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1997. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (de Sousa, 1997) followed by the page number. 2 Ronald de Sousa, ‘The Rationality of Emotions’ in A. O. Rorty (ed.), Explaining Emotions, University of California Press, Berkeley 1980, 142-3. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (de Sousa 2000) followed by the page number. 3 Cf. Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration, Clarendon Press, Oxford 2000. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Goldie 2000); Robert Solomon, ‘Emotions, Thoughts and Feelings: Emotions as Engagements with the World’ in Robert Solomon (ed.), Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, 76-88. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Solomon 2004). 4 Cf. Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (2nd edition enlarged), University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1970. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Kuhn 1970) followed by the page number. 5 Cf. de Sousa 1980, 143; de Sousa 1997, 182. 6 Cf. Ronald de Sousa, ‘Emotions: What I Know, What I’d Like to Think I Know, and What I’d Like to Think’ in Robert Solomon (ed.), Thinking about Feeling, Op.cit., 61-75. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (de Sousa 2004) followed by the page number. de Sousa here argues contra: Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001; Robert Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, Hackett, Indianapolis 1993. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Solomon 1993). 7 Cf. Solomon 2004. 8 Petri Järveläinen, A Study on Religious Emotions, Luther-Agricola Society, Helsinki 2000, 43. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Järveläinen 2000) followed by the page number. Cf. also (Solomon 2004, 81). 9 Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in The Interpretation of Cultures: selected essays by Clifford Geertz, Basic Books, New York 1973, 87125. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Geertz 1973) followed by the page number. 10 Geertz does not use the rather technical philosophical term ‘intentional’. It is clear, however, that he intends the same: “But perhaps the most important difference, so far as we are concerned, between moods and motivations is that motivations are ‘made meaningful’ with reference to the ends toward which they are conceived to conduce, whereas moods are ‘made meaningful’ with reference to the conditions from which they are conceived to spring. We interpret motives in terms of their consummations, but we interpret moods in terms of their sources” (Geertz 1973, 97).

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11 George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine: Religion and Theology in a Postliberal Age, SPCK, London 1984. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Lindbeck 1984) followed by the page number. Cf. also: Järveläinen 2000, 68-70; Desiree Berendsen, Waarom geloven mensen?, Kok, Kampen 2001, 137-50; Desiree Berendsen, ‘A Protestant Theology of Sacramental Presence: How ‘Postliberal’ is George Lindbeck’s Theology in The Nature of Doctrine?’, in Lieven Boeve and John C. Ries (eds.), The Presence of Transcendence: Thinking ‘Sacrament’ in a Postmodern Age, Peeters, Leuven 2001, 93-105. Further references to these texts will be indicated respectively by (Berendsen 2001a) and (Berendsen 2001b). 12 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, A Study in Human Nature with a new introduction by Reinhold Niebuhr, Simon & Schuster, New York 1997, 40. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (James 1997) followed by the page number. 13 Cf. Järveläinen 2000, 46-49 14 Cheshire Calhoun and Robert Solomon (eds.), What is an Emotion? Classical Readings in Philosophical Psychology, Oxford University Press, Oxford 1984, 811. Cf. also Ronald de Sousa, ‘Emotion’ in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2003 edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2003/entries/emotion/ 15 William James, ‘What is an Emotion?’ in Collected Essays and Reviews, Russell and Russell, New York 1969, 247. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (James 1969) followed by the page number. 16 Cf. J.W. Van Saane, De rol van gevoelens en emoties in de religieuze ervaring: een theoretisch psychologische benadering, Kok, Kampen 1998, 122-23. Cf. also (de Sousa 1997, 38, 51-65). de Sousa holds: “The feeling theory, at best, defines only a genus. The main deficiency of the feeling theory, however, is that there are too many aspects of emotion about which it does not tell us enough.” (The Rationality of Emotion, 38). de Sousa explicitly deals with James’ theory (here not under the heading of feeling theories, but as a physiological one) on 51-65 of The Rationality of Emotion. He summarises James’ theory in two theses, to which he has three objections. The theses are: 1) emotional consciousness consists in a kind of perception of our own bodily states, which is sufficient to differentiate the several emotions; 2) the brain contains no special emotion centres. The objections he raises are: firstly, James does not deal with the question as to which are the defining components of emotion. Secondly, according to James, emotions just involve general arousal. de Sousa comments that there is little point in a theory that tells us nothing about the differences between various emotions. The third objection is that there are emotional brain centres. “The most telling blow to James’ theory has emerged from the finding, in the brain research . . . that there are indeed ‘centers’ in the brain that specifically control at least the more obvious components of emotion states, ” 59. Despite all this, there is still something positive to say about James’ theory: “Much of the experience of emotion may well be caused by feedback from peripheral muscles, especially those involved in

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emotional expression. . . . On the other hand, James was clearly wrong in claiming that emotions did not stem from special brain centers,” 63-4. 17 Charles Taylor, Varieties of Religion Today: William James Revisited, Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 2002, 4-5, 23-4. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Taylor 2002) followed by the page number. 18 Cf. also Jens Brockmeier, ‘Ineffable Experience’, in Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9, No. 9-10, 2002, 79-95. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Brockmeier 2002) followed by the page number. 19 Cf. Fraser N. Watts, ‘Psychological and Religious Perspectives on Emotions’, in The International Journal for the Psychology of Religion, 6 (2), 1996, 76. Cf. also Järveläinen 2000, 48. 20 Cf. Brockmeier 2002, 82-86.

CHAPTER SIX LIFT UP YOUR HEARTS: ON EMOTIONALISM IN RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE WALTER VAN HERCK

There is a clear distinction to be made between: (1) the emotions that an individual experiences; and (2) what that individual tells us about its emotional experiences. One can live a rich emotional life and at the same time tell an autobiographical story in which the role of emotions is minimised or neglected. Emotions should not be confused with the discourse about emotions. Moreover, it is clear that such an emotional discourse is not merely an expression of emotions, but that the terms in which it is stated are partly constitutive of the emotions themselves. Theological, philosophical or scientific theories about the emotions (3) should in their turn be distinguished from the discourse of the emotional subject. Augustine’s passionate autobiography is not to be equated with his theory of the human passions. It is my purpose here to focus on the emotional discourse of religion. In this context I will argue for a certain hypothesis about the development of religious emotions. In contemporary philosophy of religion one can find from time to time the statement that religion is really an emotion.1 Using the idea—already defended by stoic philosophers—that every emotion is based on a number of convictions, some hope to reintroduce cognitivism into the philosophy of religion. What presented itself as a defence of the role of emotion reveals itself in this way as a ‘veiled’ rationalism. This type of philosophy of religion is completely in line with a contemporary, postmodern conception of religion. On the one hand, religion is seen by many people as a set of convictions or opinions about the creation of the universe, the existence of a supreme being, of life after death, etc. Religion can thus be seen as a potential rival of science. On the other hand, one often sees in religion a method to invoke and express deep emotions and sentiments (feelings of love, charity, solidarity).

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One image of contemporary religion which is very prominent in the media is evangelical Christianity in the USA, in which the two features just mentioned are recognisably present. This group of believers is marked firstly by a set of explicit convictions (about God, political conservatism, patriotism, rigid moral positions), and secondly by an outspoken emotional expression (emotional outbursts during service, charismatic preachers, etc.). With this in mind, it is important to see that this type of religion is neither characterised by an ascetic ideal, nor by a specific way of life, a symbolically constituted life stance, nor ritual forms. Yet the forms of this type of religious consciousness did not come out of the blue. In fact they are the intensified forms of a dynamic that is present in Western culture since the end of the Middle Ages or the beginnings of modern time.

1. Textual testimony of a growing religious sentimentalism: Four prototypes of religious experience It is possible to trace in the history of Christianity four prototypes of religious experience, namely: the ascetic, the ritualistic, the mystical and the doctrinal-rational. These distinctions are of course somewhat arbitrary insofar as the different types are never found in a pure form. Reality is—as ever—much more complex and mixed than our analytical distinctions which are, for this reason, no less useful. Together with these different types of religious experience, it is also possible to recognise that they contain a certain sequence. Late Antiquity and the Christian Middle Ages are in this hypothesis dominated by the ascetic and ritual type. From the late Middle Ages onward, the mystical and rational type start to dominate. In summary: pre-modern Christianity can be characterised as mainly ascetico-ritualistic, while modern Christianity, is more mystico-rational. The first two types are collective by nature. The ascetico-ritualistic praxis is performed in groups and cannot exist without the ‘common culture’ of a collective. The third and fourth type present things as if the real experience of religion is interior (mystical feelings or rational convictions), as if all exteriority is futile and the true ground of religion is by nature individualistic.

Text 1: Benedict of Nursia The first, ascetic type is to be found in the oldest sources of monasticism. The desert fathers2 lived as semi-eremites in the Egyptian deserts. Their religious praxis consisted mainly in the meditative performance of handwork and prayer. Religiosity and devoutness are for them skills that

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have to be apprehended by practice and imitation of a master. Their practices are, among other things, intended to free them from passions, dreams and thoughts. In this way they hope to create an opening in the soul for God. This type of religious experience is continued by Benedict of Nursia (480-547) and given expression in his Rule for Monks—a guiding rule that had definitive influence on the development of western monasticism. The religion we find in this rule is the religion of a lifestyle. By performing certain practices (like manual labour, fasting, waking, psalm singing, self-imposed silence, etc.) in a tight rhythm and on specific locations, the monk seeks to constitute a certain religious attitude or habit. The Rule for Monks by Benedict shows us a simple and uncomplicated form of religious experience. In it, the world is neither embraced nor despised: The world is accepted. The ascetic aspect consists in no more than fasting, waking, and accepting the pain that is part of life. Benedict writes in his prologue that he wants to open a ‘training school for the service of the Lord’ in which he hopes not to impose anything that is too difficult or too heavy. His spirituality comprises the whole of human life: inner and outer (a distinction Benedict never makes himself). Prayer and contemplation are inner; liturgy, manual labour and charity are outer. Only one chapter of the rule is ‘spiritual’ in the modern sense of the word. It treats of the sequential acquisition of the virtue of humility (Ch. 7). The highest step illustrates how much inner and outer are interwoven in his perspective: The twelfth step of humility is that a monk always manifests humility in his bearing no less than in his heart, so that it is evident at the Work of God, in the oratory, the monastery or the garden, on a journey or in the field, or anywhere else. Whether he sits, walks or stands, his head must be bowed and his eyes cast down. . . . Now, therefore, after ascending all these steps of humility, the monk will quickly arrive at that perfect love of God which casts out fear. Through this love, all that he once performed with dread, he will now begin to observe without effort, as though naturally, from habit, no longer out of fear of hell, but out of love for Christ, good habit and delight in virtue.3

The first step on this ladder of humility consists in the fear of God. In the quote given above which describes the last step (twelfth degree) fear has no part. There are clearly emotions at work here: fear, love and the feeling of being small that suits humility; but none of these emotions are exalted. With Benedict we do not find any far-reaching purely interior quest, no affective form of mysticism4, no visions, no ecstasies and no selfmutilating penance. On the contrary, affectivity is here embedded in the total dynamics of religious life. Love of God is connected with something

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that, from a contemporary point of view, is outrageous, namely habit. Contemporary spiritual forms have to be mainly (sometimes in a compulsive way) original, creative and expressive. Spirituality must testify of personal growth and self-development. But to Benedict the highest level of being a monk is characterised by ‘the habit itself to do what is good’. The notion of habit means that a specific way of acting (emotions included) has become part of the self. In pre-modern Christianity, asceticism is connected with ritual. Ritual too is an outer praxis directed at the acquisition of an inner habit. The ritual field forms a sacral microcosm in which, by nature, the normal attitude towards one’s own actions is transformed in a way that reminds of the freeing oneself for God in ascetical praxis. For in a ritual, one acts without letting one’s intentionality have a definitive influence on the identity of the ritual action in question. One does something because it has always been done and because God or the gods have ordained it that way. The liberating force of ritual is not so much an evocation of emotions, but rather the opposite: in ritual one can do something meaningful and this meaning can not be reduced to the will, the desires or the intentions of the actor.5 Ex opere operato brings about a decentralisation of the self. Or to put it differently: ritual can move and touch because it demonstrates in a telling way that the subject’s emotions are irrelevant. It divests the subject of its emotions and directs attention to something higher and holier. The sought-after, spiritual goal can therefore be described as an attempt to make one great liturgy of life itself, to move through life like one moves through a ritual, that is to say: guided and directed by something larger than life.

Text 2: Hadewijch The second text is the ninth letter of Hadewijch (13th century). In the English translation from Middle Dutch: May God make known to you, dear child, who he is, and how he deals with his servants, and especially with his handmaids—and may he submerge you in him! Where the abyss of his wisdom is, he will teach you what he is, and with what wondrous sweetness the loved one and the Beloved dwell one in the other, how they penetrate each other in such a way that neither of the two is distinguished from the other. But they abide in one another in fruition, mouth in mouth, heart in heart, body in body, and soul in soul, while one sweet divine Nature flows through them both, and they are both one thing through each other, but at the same time remain two different selves—yes, and remain so forever.6

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In this letter the love for God is modelled on erotic love. The terminology is more emotional (‘sweet’) and sensitive (‘enjoying one another, mouth in mouth’) than one will ever find in the Patristic age. The association with God is confidential and intimate. Hadewijch’s mysticism of love is conditioned by the thought and feeling of Bernardus of Clairvaux. Bernard of Clairvaux once became involved in a controversy with the Benedictine tradition which, until then—together with Augustine’s heritage—had dominated Europe’s spiritual culture. Benedict’s rule brought spiritual homogeneity to the European continent thanks to its wide distribution. With the foundation of the abbey of Cluny in 910, the Benedictine ideal reached its point of culmination, but an aberration was lurking behind its greatest success. The ‘third church’ of Cluny (1095) was the biggest in the Romanesque style. The abbey was exempt from royal or diocesan authority and was placed directly under the pope. The importance of the choir prayer or Opus Dei was raised beyond all proportion until the monks lead an exclusively liturgical life. This came at the expense of the prescribed manual labour. Reaction came about when Robert of Molesme founded Citeaux in 1098 with the intention of bringing the purity of Benedict’s rule back to religious life. In 1112 Bernard entered the monastery with 32 companions. His talents brought enormous success to the Cistercian movement. When Bernard died in 1153, this new monastic order was settled in more than 300 places. A controversy with Cluny was to be expected. Citeaux restored manual labour to its rightful place and reduced feudal luxury. In its restoration of the rule Citeaux also went beyond what the rule demanded: agriculture and manual labour in the most barren regions, extreme poverty and simplicity, isolation, no scholarship or study, no pastoral care. Increasing moments of complete silence were introduced and mortification or castigation was practised regularly. According to the Flemish Bernard-scholar P. Verdeyen, the meeting between Bernard and Guillaume of Saint-Thierry around the year 1128 in the hospital of Clairvaux was crucial for the birth of mysticism in its strict, more affective sense.7 During their illness they spoke to each other about the Song of Songs. This biblical hymn of corporeal love is given a mystical interpretation. Its opening sentence: "O that you would kiss me with the kisses of your mouth"8 is interpreted as the words of the soul which wants to take Christ as its groom. The Song of Songs had already been commented on by the church fathers, but in a more retired and less affectionate manner. Lode Van Hecke quotes Bernard: “The goal of the monk is not to search for the earthly Jerusalem, but for the heavenly, and this not progressing by foot, but using the affects.”9 The logic of love and

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amorousness is applied to the mystical subject. This is the birth of an emotional mysticism with the human soul as bride. This entails a complete transformation of the relation to Christ and the image of Christ. This relationship is stripped of its cosmic dimensions and changes into a more intimate relation. Christ is less an imperial Pantocrator and more a fellow traveller, an equal. It stimulated interest for the child in its crib, for the wounds of the crucified. Because Christ comes ‘closer’, the devotion to Mary increases (which will effect the rosary prayer, the Salve Regina, the feast—not the dogma—of the Immaculate Conception).

Text 3: Ignatius of Loyola Gradually, religious culture is transformed in an important way. The mystico-affective mode of experience shuns the exteriority essential to the ascetico-ritualist mode and it disciplines only the interior. Not the rhythm of acting and working, not ritual action, but inner desires and emotions are the object of mystical discipline. Not only is the purely negative act of guarding oneself against the power of the passions required, but also the more positive acts of making inner resolutions10, remembering, imagining and feeling. Because Bernardus and Hadewijch shaped the relation to God on the model of nuptial love, the Loved One remained central to them. But in later authors, less attention is given to the object of love as they turn their focus inward to the investigation and development of one’s own emotions. The late modern or postmodern idea that spirituality is mainly a matter of self-observance and self-realisation is announced here. The Spiritual Exercises by Ignatius of Loyola (1491-1556) are a spiritual quest to find the will of God in one’s personal life. The will of God can be found by paying attention to the stream of one’s own emotions. The next quotation is taken from his Spiritual Diary. This text— consisting of two copy-books—was found in his writing table after his death. In the first part, two hundred times mention is made of the tears he weeps before, during and after mass. In addition to this flood of tears, the reader is struck by the frequent use of the first person singular characteristic of many sixteenth and seventeenth century authors.11 Ignatius is preoccupied with his own plans, feelings and thoughts. When he puts his feelings in writing, this effectively reinforces his inner life. The expression of the emotion provokes new emotions. It also becomes clear in what sense emotions have a physiological dimension: Ignatius is in tears, unable to talk, his hair stands on his head, and his body feels like it is being burned:

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Mass of the Holy Name of Jesus – After experiencing remarkable devotion and tears while I prayed, from preparing for mass and during mass very great devotion, also tears; only at times could I retain the power of speech; resolution fixed on poverty. After mass, devotion not without tears, while I considered the choices in the election for an hour and a half or more. When I came to offer what seemed to me most reasonable, and to which my will felt most impelled viz. that no fixed income should be allowed, I desired to make this offering to the Father through the mediation and prayers of the Mother and Son. Firstly I prayed her to assist me before the Son and Father. Next I implored the Son that together with the Mother He might help me before the Father. Then I felt within me that I approached, or was taken before, the Father, and with this movement my hair rose and I felt what seemed a very remarkable burning in every part of my body, followed by tears and the most intense devotion. Later, when I read over what I had written and saw that it was well written, fresh devotion, not without water in my eyes; and later still, when I remembered the graces received, a new experience of devotion.12

2. Understanding this growing sentimentalism The natural and the supernatural relate to one another in a new way How can we explain the rise in the importance of emotions in religious experience within the framework of a history of ideas? The pivotal turn seems to be connected with the downfall of the metaphysics of participation. The metaphysics of participation was often the implicit background of pre-modern philosophy, science and morality, and above all of a series of religious practices. ‘Participation’ is here used to point to the participation of the natural order in the supernatural order. The natural desire for God can thus be seen as a divine spark—a little cinder—present in the dynamics of human desire. When searching for the underlying, fundamental structure of reality, one finds a divine order. Being itself is in this perspective a ‘borrowed’ form of being, namely by participation in God’s being. This metaphysics of participation leaves the possibility open of more singular exchanges between nature and the supernatural. Prayer and sacrifice in one direction; revelation, grace and miracle in the other direction. At the moment, however, when the natural order becomes more conceptualised scientifically as an immanent order completely intelligible in itself, the metaphysics of participation collapses.13 Connected to this evolution is the tendency to conceive of God in ever more transcendent terms. The first cracks in this old worldview appear under the influence of

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nominalism and a radical form of Aristotelianism. The God of nominalism is rationally inaccessible and presents Himself as pure will. A hidden God, who can potentially want everything at any time, does not demand intellectual admiration, for he is beyond comprehension. Because he is will, he must be approached with the will, i.e. with emotion, desire and love.14 The new spiritual culture of interiority and emotion pushes the ascetico-ritualist praxis to the background (although this praxis is not immediately relinquished). Symbols and rituals are gradually perceived as mere expressions of an inner world of emotions. As such they become substitutable. The ability of symbols to give presence, not so much to our emotions, but to something supernatural, fades away.

The autonomy of reason and spirituality’s independence Spirituality becomes more independent from theology and this also causes a growing sentimentalism. From the twelfth century onwards the twin sisters of theology and spirituality begin a process of separation. Theology is given a prominent role in the rising universities. Non-academic spirituality is refused entrance—so to speak—and waits outside at the universities gates. Theology enjoys the university context so much however that she hardly ever returned to her spiritual sister outside. In pre-modern times thinking about faith was itself part of a religious praxis. Patristic theology can not be distinguished from patristic spirituality. The writings of the church fathers did not distinguish between the knowledge and practice of faith.15 Theology was a specific, intellectual act of devotion and piety. Not without reason theology is called in this context a praying theology, a theologia orans.16 By entering the universities and schools theology is rendered more rational, scholarly and scientific. The separation from spirituality thus effects a curtailment of the concept of theology. The reverse is also the case: philosophical and doctrinal reflections are ever less present in spiritual writings. Devoid of its cosmic-symbolical thread of life and torn away from its unity with a more intellectual theology, the concept of spirituality narrows down over the centuries to a purely interior, personal, unmediated and emotional relation to God. The locus of this new type of spirituality is no longer to be found in Benedictine abbeys. It is to be found along smaller, somewhat more marginal paths: in the nascent mendicant orders (Franciscans and Dominicans), the Beguine movement, Modern Devotion and—later on— in the Reformation. In summary, this ‘new’ spirituality can be characterised as follows: (1) The importance of the external and the material is reduced, which

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results in extremis in contempt for the world, the body17; (2) The importance of the inner is increased in the form of more self-inquiry and extensive methods to work with one’s feelings, resolutions, images, memories, thoughts and consciousness. Ritual and symbols are reduced to vehicles of evocation or expression of these inner processes; (3) Intellectual reflection is put aside and makes room for more affective contents. A spiritualised and emotional religious experience abates the more external methods of asceticism, ritual and its way of life in favour of methods directed at interiority. These last methods are more vulnerable. Attitudes acquired through actions and praxis leave deeper traces than attitudes acquired through verbal or mental inculcation. Modern types of spirituality have developed complex sequences of mental exercises which have to be repeated at set times in order to retain their effectiveness.

Conclusion The tendencies that were established in the late Middle Ages and reinforced in modern times still influence our contemporary understanding of religious and spiritual matters. Sentimentalism presupposes individualism. That western religious experience is highly individualised is not a matter of debate. ‘Believing without belonging’ is its sociological expression. Even those who count themselves among the members of a religious group are inclined to distance themselves personally from the official policy, hierarchy and moral view points of that group. Rituals and ceremonies are only deemed meaningful if a personal touch is added. Personal, spiritual growth is often mentioned as the criterion used to measure the value of collective, religious events and processes. No world view or religion seems to be exempt from this individualising trend. Even the way one lives life as a Muslim has become the object of personal choice. Being a Muslim devotee is no longer a collective matter. Individualism is a condition of possibility for sentimentalism. In different Christian churches there are groups—such as charismatic groups or Pentacostalism—that stimulate a personal religiosity charged with emotion. Personal, public confessions, dramatic fits of crying and exalted jubilations are common phenomena in those circles. In more traditional Christian groups however the same tendencies can be found, be it on a smaller scale. Together with the reduction of religion to emotion, one also comes across the opposite. This is the case when emotion itself becomes a religion. One’s own emotional life is used as a spiritual compass. Not God,

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virtue, duty or loyalty determine one’s direction in life, but simply ‘that which feels good’. ‘Do whatever makes you feel good’ is a maxim that is often heard. Is the described shift the cause or effect of secularisation? Or should it be interpreted as a sign of the vitality of anti-secularisation forces? Is religious sentimentalism a good or bad thing? From which perspective should these questions be asked (societal, philosophical, theological and historical)? There are a thousand questions here. Perhaps one remark is permitted. Religion is, from an anthropological point of view, a collective phenomenon. Symbols and rituals function in some respects as a natural language. Like a natural language they cannot be produced and controlled. In the same way as a private language cannot exist, because then following a rule would be the same as thinking to follow the rule (Wittgenstein), a private symbol or a private ritual is nonsensical. Individualisation is blind to the collective colour in which religion is set, and to the fact that even the most individualist religious experience is still parasitic on religious traditions, texts, symbols, rituals, etc. Emotions do not constitute the symbols, but the symbols are constitutive of a particular type of religious, affective life.

Notes 1

See for example Andrew Collier, On Christian Belief: A Defence of a Cognitive Conception of Religious Belief in a Christian Context, Routledge, London 2003, xiii: “Faith or trust is not itself a belief but an emotion. All emotions presuppose beliefs.” 2 See for example G. J. M. Bartelink, De bloeiende woestijn. De wereld van het vroege monachisme, Ambo, Baarn 1993, and C. Wagenaar, Woestijnvaders. Een speurtocht door de vaderspreuken, Gottmer, Nijmegen 1981. 3 Timothy Fry (ed.), RB 1980 The Rule of St. Benedict: In Latin and English with notes, The Liturgical Press, Collegeville 1981, 201-3. 4 P. Verdeyen, ‘Un théologien de l’expérience’, in Uit mijn tijd, Ruusbroecgenootschap, Antwerpen 2001, 23: “. . . elle [la Règle de saint-Benoît] ne parle guère de la valeur de l’expérience personnelle. L’ascèse monastique se méfie plutôt des sentiments personnels . . . ” 5 I rely here on: Caroline Humphrey & James Laidlaw, The Archetypal Actions of Ritual: A Theory of Ritual Illustrated by the Jain Rite of Worship, Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, Oxford 1994. Also, Paul Moyaert, Ethiek en sublimatie, Sun, Nijmegen 1994, 51-61 and Idem, De mateloosheid van het christendom, Sun, Nijmegen 1998, 97-172.

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Hadewijch, The Complete Works, translated and introduced by C. Hart, Paulist Press, New York 1980, Ninth Letter. 7 P. Verdeyen, art. cit., 31. N. de Paepe situates the arrival of love mysticism in the Low Countries around 1160. See N. de Paepe in, Hadewijch, Een bloemlezing uit haar werken, Amsterdam/Brussel, 1979, xix: “De vroegste uitingen van Minnemystiek ten onzent moeten rond 1160-70 gedacht worden. Deze eerste sporen van Minnemystiek betreffen dan een geestdrifitig leven in en van de liefde, een beleving van de verhouding tot God, totaal gedragen door een innige en aanhankelijke liefde die intens emotioneel beleefd wordt.” 8 Holy Bible, Revised Standard Version, Nelson, New York 1952, 703. 9 Lode Van Hecke, Bernardus van Clairvaux en de religieuze ervaring, Pelckmans, Kapellen 1990, 51, my translation. See also 52 where reference is made to the sensible qualities of the experience of God in terms of sweetness (‘dulcedo’, ‘suavitas’).” Bernard quotes many times Ps. 33, 9 (Savour how sweet the Lord is) and Mt. 11, 30 (For my yoke is sweet). 10 Many examples can be given of this inner disciplining. See for example the role of making resolutions in Thomas a Kempis, De Imitatione Christi, I.19. 11 René Descartes’s Discours de la méthode, for example, is overloaded with ‘je’ and ‘moi’. 12 Saint Ignatius of Loyola, Personal Wrtings, Joseph Munitz and Philip Endean (eds.), Penguin, London 1996, 74. 13 See J.H. Walgrave, Geloof en theologie in de crisis, De Vroente, Kasterlee 1966, 106 ff. and G. Vanheeswijck & W. Van Herck, Verlossend inzicht. Filosofie en christendom, Altiora, Averbode 2005, 40. 14 Compare M. Meyer, Le philosophe et les passions, Livre de Poche, Paris 1991, 96: “La rupture avec l’intelligence, avec la Raison, avec l’ordre absolu, rend ce dernier transcendant. Un Dieu extérieur, en surplomb, dont la nature ne se laisse plus comprendre et saisir de façon purement intellectuelle, devient un Dieu inaccessible à la raison, et il n’est plus alors que volonté, volonté libre. . . . Il ne s’agit plus de connaître mais de vouloir . . .” 15 P. Verdeyen, ‘La séparation entre théologie et spiritualité. Origine, conséquences et dépassement de ce divorce’, in J. Haers & P. De Mey (eds.), Theology and Conversation: Developing a Relational Theology(BETL), Peeters & Leuven University Press, Leuven 2004, 675-87. Compare also, F. Vandenbroucke, osb, ‘Le divorce entre théologie et mystique: ses origins’, in Nouvelle revue théologique 82 (1950), 372-89. A. Louth writes, “[T]his interdependence between theology and spirituality is broadly maintained in patristic theology, and is still the case with Anselm, the Victorines and others, but . . . by the time of the Renaissance there had appeared a divorce between them: Thomas à Kempis’s Imitation of Christ is hardly a work of theology but a work of devotion, and Cajetan’s little treatise on analogy, say, is scarcely a work of spirituality.” Theology and Spirituality, SLG Press, Oxford 2000, 5. 16 A. Louth, op. cit., 4: “So spirituality—prayer—is, I suggest, that which keeps theology to its proper vocation, that which prevents theology from evading its own real object.”

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17 Compare David Torevell, Losing the Sacred: Ritual, Modernity and Liturgical Reform, T&T Clark, Edinburgh 2000, particularly Ch. 3, ‘Modernity and Disembodiment’, and J.H. van den Berg, Het gelovige innerlijk, Callenbach, Nijkerk 1981.

CHAPTER SEVEN THE “SECULARISATION” OF RELIGIOUS EMOTIONS: HOPE AND FEAR, LOVE, AND FELICITY IN SPINOZA, DESCARTES, AND HOBBES GÁBOR BOROS

As if we were witnessing a not negligible shift of paradigms, that part of seventeenth century mainstream philosophical systems that had been taken as peripheral experience is nowadays the subject of a surprising revival. The theories of passions or affects offered by Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinoza but also Locke, Malebranche, and Hume are no longer halfforgotten lore, of concern only to certain historians of philosophy.1 Even devoted scientists have found them to be useful stimuli.2 Given this unmistakable trend in philosophy today, it seems evident that we can investigate early modern theories of emotions for the way they deal with religious emotions as well, especially since the meaning of religion or religiosity for those thinkers is a highly controversial issue. The seventeenth century is the period that figures prominently in theories either maintaining or criticising the thesis that the main feature of early modernity is to be construed as the secularisation of genuine religious or theological goods.3 In my view, what later periods take over from the immediately preceding ones are not substantial solutions, but selected questions without answers, tasks without solutions. This is the case insofar as the answers and alleged solutions elaborated in the preceding periods have in the meantime grown void of meaning. It is in this sense that my investigation aims at unveiling some particular forms of the ‘secularisation’4 of religious emotions found in the theories of the above mentioned thinkers. But, to be sure, one essay cannot be expected to furnish us with an overall investigation of the relevant phenomena. What it can accomplish is at best to identify some of the relevant emotions the

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Middle Ages would certainly have called “religious,”5 and determine in which way and in which context they were interpreted in the theory of passions of at least one of the main seventeenth century thinkers. I admit to having somewhat arbitrarily chosen hope and fear, love, and felicity as the emotions to be investigated in the work of Spinoza, Descartes, and Hobbes respectively. In spite of this arbitrariness, having finished the analysis I hope we will be able not only to put the question concerning the precise character of the ‘secularisation’ of those emotions, but also to give some tentative answers.

1. Hope and Fear Emotion theorists today are ambiguous about the emotional character of hope—sometimes it is regarded as an ‘intellectual emotion’—and also whether hope and fear can be taken as a symmetric pair like love and hate. Now I have chosen this pair of emotions precisely because hope is, for Spinoza, not only one among many other affects—affect is his term for what today we would call emotion—but also one among the basic ones. The treatment of the affects in his Ethics is geometrical in character. This means that up to a certain point it does matter when exactly a particular affect is first mentioned and defined, and hope ranks quite high in this respect. Spinoza introduces first the three primary affects, which are desire, joy, and sadness. The second rank is accorded to love and hate, but the third is already assigned to hope—and fear. What J. R. Averill has stated in one of the contemporary manuals on The Emotions could have been a quotation from Spinoza: A person cannot hope for something unless he or she also fears that the hoped-for event might not happen. Hope and fear are two sides of the coin, so to speak; hence, considerations that apply to one also apply to the other.6

For Spinoza, joy and sadness are, so to speak, the two main genera of emotion: every emotion must belong to one of them. It should be evident that hope is the affect belonging to joy, whereas fear is an affect of sadness. But to tell the whole story we have to add that Spinoza is one of the resolute cognitivists among past emotion theorists. For him the affects both are ideas and presuppose ideas that constitute their intentional objects. When analysing an affect it is therefore extremely important not only to find the right genus for it, but also to know in what kind of knowledge the idea has its origin. Concerning hope and fear, their

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respective definitions make it clear that the hoped-for or feared object is represented in an idea of the imagination, which is Spinoza’s term for the lowest kind of knowledge. We have a temporally bound idea of a future or past event as the intentional object of hope or fear. But past, present and future are nothing but characteristics—not of the thing itself, but of our own having-been-affected or to-be-affected—whereas the ideas originating in reason have no relation to time, to our affectedness. Hence, from the fact that the basic ideas of hope and fear are inadequate, it follows that those who are led by reason are not allowed to have these two affects: Affects of Hope and Fear cannot be good of themselves. . . . Therefore, the more we strive to live according to the guidance of reason, the more we strive to depend less on Hope, to free ourselves from Fear, to conquer fortune as much as we can, and to direct our actions by the certain counsel of reason.7

The man led by reason entirely is essentially hope-less. However, if we must admit that the man led by reason cannot always ‘conquer fortune’, it is even more the case with the man of imagination—notwithstanding whether he or she might have already realised the deceptive character of his inadequate ideas, especially concerning those future events he or she regards as good or bad. For these are precisely the ideas on which depend his or her hopes and fears. Thus, the man led by imagination—called “Everyman” by Herman De Dijn8—may very well detect the illusive character of his everyday world, nevertheless he cannot yet find the new world of reason. In a famous passage from his Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza compares this man to someone “suffering from fatal illness.” He has to “employ a remedy . . . however uncertain, with all his strength. For all his hope lies there.”9 Here again: fear of death necessarily involves hope for a new life. There is, however, a clear asymmetry between fear and hope. For though both kinds of men live on a border-line—the man of imagination looking for reason, and the man of reason not being able to get entirely rid of imagination—and both are spurred on by fear and supported by hope, it is incomparably better for them to long for the hoped-for state of affairs than to flee from the feared ones. Hope is namely an affect of joy that— unlike sadness—can well be active in the Spinozean sense. That is to say, it can be based on an adequate idea of its intentional object, whereas sadness cannot but be passive, basically inadequate. To be sure, as we have been told, hope itself will never become active. Still, unlike fear, hope can guide us to activity.

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This feature of hope we find reaffirmed in some political arguments of Spinoza’s second magnum opus, the Theological-political treatise. The question is how people can be forced to observe the laws issued by a certain government, given that the two main motivational forces deeply rooted in human nature are precisely hope and fear. According to Spinoza, the society where laws are observed by people hoping for rewards is preferable to the one where most people are motivated by fear of punishment. “Secondly,” he writes, “laws should in every government be so arranged that people should be kept in bounds by the hope of some greatly desired good, rather than by fear, for then everyone will do his duty willingly” (Ch. 5, sentence 46). This treatise also directs our attention to another role of hope, which is closely related to the possible religious character of this emotion.10 In the Preface, Spinoza reflects on the causes of why it is so difficult to remove superstition from men’s minds. He urges us to recognise the motivational force of hope: The origin of superstition above given affords us a clear reason for the fact, that it comes to all men naturally, though some refer its rise to a dim notion of God, universal to mankind, and also tends to show, that it is no less inconsistent and variable than other mental hallucinations and emotional impulses, and further that it can only be maintained by hope, hatred, anger, and deceit; since it springs, not from reason, but solely from the more powerful phases of emotion. Furthermore, we may readily understand how difficult it is, to maintain in the same course men prone to every form of credulity. For, as the mass of mankind remains always at about the same pitch of misery, it never assents long to any one remedy, 11 but is always best pleased by a novelty which has not yet proved illusive.

Hope, therefore, has an eminent religious role to play in Spinoza, although the quotation only specifies its role in maintaining superstition, i.e. false religion. The hoped-for objects of the superstitious are those goods that are principally illusive: there are always some new ones that have not yet proven to be illusive, and for this reason they can be hoped for, at least until the illusion is lost. To obtain these objects men are naturally prone to believe in the superior power of whatever they are offered as such. So we can see how miserable the state of the man of imagination, surrendered to superstition, can be. One may wonder, however, if this is the only role hope plays as a religious emotion in Spinoza. Does he think that superstitione tollenda, tollitur religio? The quick answer is certainly: no. Although not only the false but also the true religion can be invested “with such pomp and ceremony, that it may rise superior to every shock, and be always observed with studious reverence by the whole people”; and

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although the “precious name of religion” can well be misused in despotic regimes to make men “fight as bravely for slavery as for safety, and count it not shame but highest honour to risk their blood and their lives for the vainglory of a tyrant”12; none of this alters the fact that Spinoza makes use of the word ‘true religion’, which is certainly not identical with superstition and will not disappear once superstition has been deleted. But is there a role for hope to play in the Spinozean true religion? I will certainly not exhaust the complex issue of “true religion” in Spinoza now, but certain fundamental remarks must be made concerning hope. Evidently, hope for illusive objects cannot be tolerated in the true religion. Illusions about the real use or harmfulness of objects are rooted in the inadequate ideas of imagination, from which we could infer the close connection of reason, adequate ideas and true religion, even if we did not encounter the following lines in the fourth part of Ethics: Again, whatever we desire and do of which we are the cause insofar as we have the idea of God, or insofar as we know God, I relate to Religion. The Desire to do good generated in us by our living according to the guidance of reason, I call Morality. The Desire by which a man who lives according to the guidance of reason is bound to join others to himself in friendship, I call Being Honourable, and I call that honourable which men who live according to the guidance of reason praise; on the other hand, what is contrary to the formation of friendship, I call dishonourable.13

If, according to this series of definitions, the truly religious desires and deeds have their origin in the rational way of life (taken in the strict Spinozean sense), then hope is forbidden to have any role in true religion. This is made abundantly clear in the scholium to the next-to-last proposition of Ethics 5, where piety and religion are said to belong to the “Strength of Character” (Fortitudo) introduced in part 3, scholium to Prop. 59.14 This identification shows again the essential connection between true religion and being led by reason. In this scholium, hope and fear are the main motivating emotions of those people who remain superstitious in the Spinozean sense, i.e., those who believe in an afterlife of rewards and punishments instead of knowing, with the sage, that the true nature and dictates of reason as well as the true character of the eternity of the mind have nothing to do with an afterlife. Nevertheless, we can be sure that real people will hardly ever arrive at the state of pure reason, let alone of the emended intellect of the sage, where there is not only nothing more to fear, but also nothing more to hope for. Unlike fear, hope—both as the emotion of the man of lethal illness and as the motivation of the people governed by prudent legislators—has an important role to play in Spinoza’s thought insofar as it

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assists the conversion from superstition to the true religion (true in the Spinozean sense). Hence, I do not think we are being unfaithful to Spinoza when we claim that hope can indeed be interpreted as having a religious role.

2. Love The structure of hope I have just outlined can certainly be regarded as paradigmatic for Spinoza’s more basic emotions in general. Consequently there are plenty of things that could be inferred concerning love in the works of Spinoza as well. Nevertheless, and for a variety of reasons, I decided rather to look at love in the writings of Descartes as a candidate for being a secularised religious emotion. Love is one of the primitive passions Descartes enumerates at the beginning of the second part of Passions of the Soul. There are six of them: wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness. The general definition of love is given in Article 79 of the Passions of the Soul, and reads as follows: “Love is an emotion of the soul caused by a movement of the spirits, which impels the soul to join itself willingly to objects that appear to be agreeable to it.” This definition lends itself to a “physiological” interpretation: love is said to be an emotion of the soul caused by those tiny particles of blood Descartes calls ‘animal spirits’. Descartes continues discussing the species of love in the same vein, namely, “as a natural philosopher,” as witnessed by the frequently quoted expression “en physician.” First of all, he abandons the traditional distinction between concupiscent love and benevolent love.15 According to him, this distinction conveys only some effects of love but does not get at its essence. The main Cartesian distinction regarding love, which should reveal the essence of this emotion, reads as follows: We may, I think, more reasonably distinguish the kinds of love according to the esteem which we have for the object we love, as compared with ourselves. For when we have less esteem for it than for ourselves, we have only a simple affection for it; when we esteem it equally with ourselves, that is called 'friendship'; and when we have more esteem for it, our passion may be called 'devotion'. . . . in all of them we consider ourselves as joined and united to the thing loved, and so we are always ready to abandon the lesser part of the whole that we compose with it so as to preserve the other part. In the case of simple affection this results in our always preferring ourselves to the object of our love. In the case of devotion, on the other hand, we prefer the thing loved so strongly that we are not afraid to die in order to preserve it.”16

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The first thing we have to stress is the role of devotion within this distinctively Cartesian notion of love. For the most appropriate object of love qua devotion cannot but be God or—and this could be the cornerstone of a Cartesian political theology—our prince. The main effect of this kind of love is the self-sacrifice of the lesser part of the whole, i.e., the human subject. Descartes continues: As for devotion, its principal object is undoubtedly the supreme Deity, for whom we cannot fail to have devotion when we know him as we ought to. But we may also have devotion for our sovereign, our country, our town, and even for a particular individual when we have much more esteem for him than ourselves. . . . We have often seen examples of such devotion in those who have exposed themselves to certain death in defence of their sovereign or their city, or sometimes even for particular individuals to whom they were devoted.17

Undoubtedly, there are considerable difficulties with this model for constructing a theory of love. Let me start with the most obvious: the proportion between the lover and the loved object can hardly be defined in that unanimous way which is required for the distinction. Another difficulty concerns our intuitive concept of love implying the opposite of what the physics-based concept suggests. According to this concept the lovers have to compete with each other in renouncing the advantages of the unequal status within the whole composed by them. The relation between those people who are extremely conscious of their own highest value and behave accordingly would hardly count as love. Descartes’ attention, however, is not always directed toward theoretical solutions to the problems. And here too we see that a certain practicalpragmatic attitude characterises his treatment of love. He is not very concerned with showing that the species of love analysed by him are the most important ones. Instead he simply applies his general theory of love to different problems within such varying fields as ethics, metaphysics, politics, and also religion or theology. In what follows I will confine myself to the latter, somewhat broadly conceived. My point of departure will be the way Descartes considers the genesis of the adequate love of God in men. This question might sound a bit awkward at first, but it becomes intelligible as soon as we have a look at Descartes’ letter to Pierre Chanut from June 6 1647, in which Descartes investigates the thesis that the narration of the creation in the Genesis focuses on man: Preachers, striving to incite us to the love of God, often lay before us the various benefits we derive from other creatures and say that God made

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It seems obvious that Descartes had to regard as inadequate the love of God which comes into being by the ‘machination’ of the preachers, since this is based on a false picture of the world. But in no way am I suggesting that Descartes regarded the love that originates in this way as illegitimate, or that he would have judged it to be abominable. That this was not the case is attested by a strange gesture he made in a letter to the Calvinist Princess Elisabeth from January 1646, in which he attempts to console her for the conversion to Catholicism of her brother: For all of them who are of the same religion as I am (and who are in the majority in Europe) must approve of this decision, however easy it is to detect its rightly condemnable motives and circumstances. For we believe firmly that God makes use of different means to attract the souls to him. It can happen that someone who entered a monastery with sinful aims will really become a saint.19

On the other hand, he must have regarded this love as inadequate in some way, since he was convinced that there can be a kind of love of God which relies on a true idea of the universe. That this was his view becomes evident from his answer to the question of Pierre Chanut, one of his correspondents on love. Chanut asks “whether the light of nature by itself teaches us to love God, and whether one can love him by the power of that light alone”20. Preparing his answer almost like in a scholastic quaestio, however strong the argument Descartes enumerates, his answer to this question is in the end positive. None the less, I have no doubt at all that we can truly love God by the sole power of our nature. [I do not assert that this love is meritorious without grace—I leave the theologians to unravel that] but I make bold to say that with regard to the present life it is the most delightful and useful passion possible and can even be the strongest, though not unless we meditate very attentively since we are continually distracted by the presence of other objects.21

This is an answer with far-reaching and not always unambiguous consequences. It is difficult not to ask whether Descartes, giving this answer, does not come close to a pantheistic attitude. For after the question

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we have just read, Descartes himself cites some words from Horace that hint at a similar attitude: [O]ur soul’s nature resembles His sufficiently for us to believe that it is an emanation of His supreme intelligence, a breath of divine spirit (et divinae quasi particula aurae).22

Yet there is one more thing, an implicit statement that points in this direction. All we have to do is apply the general definition of love to the— adequate, i.e. natural—love of man towards God. This purely intellectual love is—like love in general—nothing else than the soul’s joining itself willingly to an object (se joindre de volonté à l’objet). In other words, we consider ourselves as joined and united to the thing loved, and so we are always ready to abandon the lesser part of the whole that we compose with it (se considérer soi même avec ce bien-là comme un tout dont il est une partie et elle [l’âme] est l’autre). Now if we represent this union for ourselves and feel joyful about it, then the danger arises that “we might be so absurd as to wish to be gods, and thus make the disastrous mistake of loving divinity instead of loving God.”23 It seems obvious that what Descartes has in mind when talking about ‘absurdity’ is the same as the consequence of the Stoic ethics that he himself had praised earlier in connection with the “provisional moral code” in the third part of his Discourse on Method. There he spoke about “the secret of those philosophers, who in earlier times were able to escape from the dominion of fortune and, despite suffering and poverty, rival their gods in happiness.”24 The way he tries to avoid this dangerous consequence— which has been reassessed in the letter to Chanut along the argumentation of the contemporary Christian critics of Stoicism25—is by considering man as part of the whole universe comprising the order created and maintained by God. We must weigh our smallness against the greatness of the created universe. We must reflect how all creatures depend on God, and conceive them in a manner proper to His omnipotence. . . . If a man meditates on these things and understands them properly he is filled with extreme joy . . . he thinks that the knowledge with which God favoured him is enough by itself to make his life worthwhile.26

But if we stress the unity of the ego and the well-ordered universe to avoid making ourselves God-like, we will run the risk of assuming the unity of the whole nature with the rational—i.e. God-representing—human soul, and through this with the divine creator. Everything depends on how we reconstruct the connection between God and the world maintained by him,

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or to put it textually, how we interpret the expression “through Him [God] (par lui [Dieu])” in Descartes’ letter to Chanut from 6 June 1647: [W]hen we love God and through Him unite ourselves in volition to all things He created, then the more great, noble, and perfect we reckon them, the more highly we esteem ourselves as being parts of a more perfect whole.”27 This thread can be followed in both the Principles of Philosophy and other statements of the letters to Chanut. Rendering relative the exceptional status of man in the middle of the universe is another aspect of the tendency to pantheism. The following quotation stems from the Principles of Philosophy: In ethics it may admittedly be an act of piety to assert that God made everything for our benefit, since this may impel us all the more to give him thanks and burn with love for him. . . . But nevertheless it is wholly improbable that all things were in fact made for our benefit, in the sense that they have no other use. And in the study of physics such a supposition would be utterly ridiculous and inept, since there is no doubt that many things exist, or once existed, though they are now here no longer, which have never been seen or thought of by any man, and have never been of any use to anyone.28

This idea undergoes an interesting development in the letter to Chanut. Descartes assures us that “God alone is the final as well as the efficient cause of the universe.”29 But at the same time he claims no exceptional status for man within the universe of the creatures: “And since creatures serve each other, any of them might ascribe to itself a privileged position and consider that whatever is useful to it was made for its sake.” Neither the Old nor the New Testament can be cited as witnessing man’s privileged position: “The six days of creation are indeed described in Genesis in such a way as to make man appear its principal object; but it could be said that the story in Genesis was written for man and so it is chiefly the things which concern him that the Holy Spirit wished particularly to narrate. . . .” And concerning the New Testament it is absolutely not evident for Descartes that “the mystery of the Incarnation, and all the other favours God has done to men” would hinder him from “having done an infinity of other great favours to an infinity of other creatures.” This formulation and similar ones make us think that the big favour of man—having or being a rational soul—does not prove for Descartes his absolute privileged position within the universe. The rational soul is a particularly human favour, but it cannot be excluded that other creatures have been awarded with other particular favours.

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3. Felicity Felicity is one of the passions Hobbes defines at the end of Ch. 6 of Leviathan (“Of the Passions, and the Speeches by Which They Are Expressed”). Here he defines it as follows: “Continual success in obtaining those things which a man from time to time desireth, that is to say, continual prospering, is that men call Felicity.”30 The expression “continual success” is stressed by Hobbes himself, and certainly not by chance. The rival theories of felicity, which he refutes at one point or other in Leviathan, are interpreted as sharing the view that felicity is something static: a state of life where the presupposed highest good is attained to and no more striving is needed. There are three such views Hobbes mentions in different contexts. The first is common to the beasts and primitive people: the beasts have no other felicity but enjoying their everyday “food, ease, and lust”31, which is not much different from what is “common to all men”, namely “placing felicity in the acquisition of the gross pleasures of the senses and the things that most immediately conduce thereto”32. The beasts have no capacity to investigate causal relations; common people do have this capacity but in vain. As for the more sophisticated theories, Hobbes mentions two of them. One is the thesis of the ancient philosophers who maintain there is a finis ultimus, a summum bonum, which consists—in Hobbes’ interpretation—“in the repose of a mind satisfied”33. But the whole epistemological basis of Hobbes’ philosophy excludes the possibility of such a satisfied mind. The sense organs of a living human body deliver continually a great amount of stimuli that get processed in those inner bodily parts that belong to the imagination. Nothing affects the body that does not influence it in a positive or negative way, conditioning it to feel desire or aversion when the idea of the affecting body emerges. Which means that for every living human body, where there are desires there are also unsatisfied appetites which hinder the individual from feeling felicity, from taking his ease. As another formulation of the original definition puts it, “Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter”.34 Following this line of thought we can unveil a most important material realisation of the formal definition. For though the definition itself leaves undecided which—if any—object of desire leads unmistakably to a continual feeling of felicity, in Chapter 11 (“Of the Difference of Manners”) he speaks about “a general inclination of all mankind,” which is nothing else than “a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”35 One could argue that

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since the whole Leviathan is about power relations, felicity is in the background of the analyses of the war of ecclesiastical and civil power. But this issue cannot be pursued here. Now let us turn back to the third rival concept of felicity in Hobbes’ work, which will constitute a bridge to the last part of this essay. Hobbes occasionally mentions the possibility of felicity in an afterlife. What he objects to this notion, as seen in a strange paragraph left out of the Latin version of the text, is not simply that it is static but that it is unintelligible. “For,” as we read, “there is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind, while we live here [“here” is omitted in Latin]; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense.” This is the first objection accentuating the dynamic character of real felicity. But Hobbes continues with another sentence omitted in the Latin version: “What kind of felicity God hath ordained to them that devoutly honor Him, a man will no sooner know than enjoy, being joys that now are as incomprehensible as the word of school-men beatifical vision is unintelligible.”36 However ironic this last sentence might be, in Chapter 11 Hobbes invests the “unspeakable joys of heaven” with a meaning we are perfectly entitled to call secularised. We can interpret his irony in a strong way, imagining, for instance, that there is no heaven and no hell. Nevertheless, the expectation of a future felicity overpowering all the earthly ones can influence and incite real earthly joy in humans, who—unlike beasts—are capable of letting themselves be influenced by their insights into the future effects of present deeds (Chapter 59). But felicity can play the role of a mediator between transcendence and immanence one more time—almost the other way around. Namely, ‘extraordinary felicity’37 can function as a sign of “divine calling” or as a “mark of God’s extraordinary favour”38. However, “great felicity in the enterprises of their [the Jews] governors”39 was “not assured evidence of special revelation”40. Still, if this sort of felicity was missing, the people were “blaming sometimes the policy, sometimes the religion”41. The most interesting passage showing us the decisive role eternal felicity plays in civil politics, rather than in religion, is found in Ch. 36, “Of the World of God, and of Prophets”. Since natural causes can produce most extraordinary dreams and visions, we need to use our natural [added in the Latin] reason “to discern . . . between natural and supernatural visions or dreams”42 before obeying a pretended prophet who requires “us to obey God in that way which he in God’s name telleth us to be the way to happiness / to follow him on the way to eternal salvation. For he that pretends to teach men the way of so great felicity pretends to govern them

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. . . which is a thing that all men naturally desire, and is therefore worthy to be suspected of ambition and imposture.” In other words, the possibility of “supernatural gifts” is not excluded, but people naturally longing for power and even more power can all too easily deceive men by acting the prophet, thereby gaining political power over them. For Hobbes, there is no doubt that it is our civic duty to regard ourselves as exempt from all such inquisition if “the prophet is the civil sovereign, or by the civil sovereign authorised.” This is, by the way, almost the Hobbesian definition of a true prophet. In a passage where he is insisting on the purely spiritual meaning of the expression “Kingdom of God” these political overtones scarcely perceptible. Against those who would like to make use of this phrase to suggest the superiority of ecclesiastical power over civil power, Hobbes writes the following: The Kingdom of God in the writings of divines, and specially in sermons and treatises of devotion, is taken most commonly for eternal felicity after this life, in the highest heaven, which they also call the kingdom of glory; and sometimes for (the earnest of that felicity) sanctification, which they term the kingdom of grace; but never for the monarchy, that is to say, the sovereign power of God over any subjects acquired by their own consent, which is the proper signification of kingdom.43

4. Secularisation Having made this survey of certain emotions as paradigm cases of former and always possible religious emotions, we can now ask ourselves: what is missing in the above outlined analyses of hope and fear, love, felicity?; and what took the place of the religious moment? For the sake of transparency, I’ll quote some passages from Thomas Aquinas, not to pretend a historical comparison but to be able to see more clearly the gap that opened up in the period of the dissolution of the medieval outlook. In the first five questions of I-II of the Summa Theologiae, published in English under the title of Treatise on Happiness, one of the primary concerns of Thomas is to show that “there is an ultimate end for human life”, and that “man cannot have several ultimate ends”44. Obviously, the arguments Thomas is opposing are not based on a mechanical reconstruction of human being-in-the-world but on authorities like Dionysius or independent reflection on the nature of reason and will. He comes to the conclusion that “there is one ultimate end for all men”, and that “God is the ultimate and of man and all other things”45. For Thomas, Felicity is “possession of the ultimate end,” which for rational creatures

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means “knowing and loving God”46, an activity that can also be put in terms of the vision following the locus classicus: “when He will appear, we will be like Him; because we will see Him as He is” (I John 3:2). Therefore, “ultimate and perfect happiness can only be in the vision of the divine essence”47. Now when Hobbes affirms that the concept of the visio beatifica as man’s felicity is unintelligible, the reason for that is certainly not that he endorses a contrary Franciscan view preferring the activity of the practical as opposed to the theoretical intellect. Unintelligibility, for Hobbes and his age, means that the same question cannot be posed in the same theoretical context any longer. What I had in mind when speaking of contextchange—or I could speak of paradigm-shift as well—is a radical change concerning the dominant type of causality one has to take into account when explaining phenomena of conscious life. For when Aquinas asks in the very first question “does man act for an end?” he is at the all-important watershed. “A cause is naturally prior to its effect. But end is conceived as something last.” When Aquinas uses the word “cause” here, it must be understood as efficient cause, whereas “end” refers clearly to the concept of a final cause. The decisive moment for Aquinas is that it is a matter of course to put the accent on the end, the final cause; whereas for the age of the automata, the mechanical outlook represented by Hobbes, it is equally evident that what matters most is the efficient cause. There can be no clearer proof of this than the fact that, on the one hand, Aquinas connects deliberation to acting for an end, whereas doing things without deliberation means something like acting to be explained on the basis of the efficient causes. Hobbes, on the other hand, strives to reduce will and deliberation to quasi-mechanical happenings in our body, explicable on the basis of efficient causality. And it is also significant that the only way Hobbes thinks God can enter philosophy is as the first cause of all movement. Concerning hope and love, let me just refer to the fourth part of Aquinas’ Disputed Questions on the Virtues, “On Hope”. In article 1, “Whether hope is a virtue”, the question emerges in objections 5 and 6 concerning what distinguishes hope and love—emotions that “give their names to virtues”—from the other emotions like longing and pleasure, that do not. Aquinas makes clear in his response that only the theological virtues can take their names directly from “movements, or emotions” of the mind. Hope as an emotion can only be distinguished as naming a theological virtue when its object is not a bad one, i.e. the double object of “the eternal life itself” on the one hand, and “God’s help, through which we hope to get it”48.

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In Spinoza, as we have seen, hope can also be distinguished, but perhaps not as a virtue—let alone a theological one. We can hope for ‘bad objects’, i.e., ‘illusive’ goods, whereas the object of the distinguished hope is the real highest good, which is the loving knowledge of the union of the mind with the whole nature. If there is a second object of this hope, this is certainly not the help of God-Nature on the level of the substance. As we have also seen, only finite causes, “free men” led by reason in the first place can help us to obtain this state, which can be called ‘eternity of the mind’, but not in the sense of an afterlife where we will experience pleasure “as one of the gifts of blessedness”49. There is also a political aspect of distinguishing hope in Spinoza: observing the laws of one’s state ought to happen on the basis of hope for reward, as a certain joy which can lead us to the state of a free man who follows them, so to say, sua sponte—having pleasure already without rewards. Concerning love—not charity, which Descartes refuses to treat in his philosophical writings—we can simply quote Aquinas’ way of telling the story of the whole composed of the lover and the loved object in order to see how Descartes “secularised” this relationship: [E]ach thing loves the good of the whole of which it is part more than it loves its own good; that is why it is natural for a hand to risk being wounded in order to protect the whole body. In human beings, this natural love of God is corrupted by sin. But in their original, undamaged, natural state they were able to love God above all things in the way I have explained.50

Evidently, what is missing in Descartes’ story is the rupture in human nature brought about by sin. This explains why Descartes’ version of the natural love towards God was so disturbing: it is difficult to see how sin can remain a fundamental corruption of human nature if one can truly love God devotionally “by the sole power of our nature.” We can also add that when Descartes exemplifies the perfect love he speaks about the love of a good father towards his children who are regarded “as other parts of himself”51. For Aquinas it is love of a friend which provides the best example: “It is in feeling that we are united by charity; thus, if you love a friend, you think of him as ‘another yourself’, while if you love God, you think of him as more than yourself”52. I think I am entitled to draw some general conclusions on the basis of the above analyses. What we can obviously be sure of is that something happened between the Middle Ages and the early modern period, something that may be termed secularisation or paradigm shift or new beginning, or whatever connotes the emergence of a new theoretical and

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practical context for posing the questions concerning religious emotions. The unintelligibility of earlier claims concerning religious emotions, i.e., their becoming void of meaning, resulted from the fact that the meaning of religion had changed. The shift was so great that all three of my thinkers have been accused of atheism. I myself would prefer to speak of a profound ambiguity: for them the theoretical context was provided by the mathematically mechanised science of their age, which accentuated efficient causality and limited our sphere of explanatory interest to this nature that (ex-) tended to comprise everything that is, including even God or divinity. This effect of contemporary science was certainly stressed by the reception of such Hellenistic philosophies as Stoicism and Epicureanism. What they tried to do with their religion was to integrate it into the new context, and they were sometimes enthusiastic about the possibility of success, a type of success that was terrifying to critics of this movement, such as Pascal. The result was what we could term the particularising or even privatising of religion, which might be said to amount to a sort of success of a very general, vague idea of the Reformation. It was certainly not by chance that all three thinkers have been associated with all sorts of Protestant movements: Descartes was named a reformer and was associated with the “Rosicrucian Enlightenment”; it has been maintained that Hobbes had an orthodox Calvinist theology; and Spinoza’s connections to the chrétiens sans église is best known.

Notes 1

Just to mention two titles from the increasing literature: Susan James, Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Clarendon Press, Oxford 1997; Stephen Gaukroger (ed.), The Soft Underbelly of Reason: Passions in the Seventeenth Century, Routledge, London 1998. 2 See Antonio Damasio’s two books: Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain, Putnam’s Sons/Avon, New York 1994, and Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain, Harcourt, New York 2003. 3 Concerning this debate I follow Blumenberg: “What mainly occurred in the process that is interpreted as secularization, at least (so far) in all but a few recognizable and specific instances, should be described not as the transposition of authentically theological contents into secularized alienation from their origin but rather as the reoccupation of answer positions that had become vacant and whose corresponding questions could not be eliminated.” The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, MIT Press, Cambridge MA 1983.

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I understand this expression in the sense of picking up questions that are relevant to the new frame of knowledge without having the answers they were provided with in the old frame. 5 This is the way I try to escape from the notorious difficulties haunting those who attempt to define religious emotion. 6 R. Harré and W. Gerrod Parrott (eds.), The Emotions: Social, Cultural and Biological Dimensions, Sage Publications Ltd., London 1996, 36. 7 Baruch de Spinoza, Ethics in The Collected Works of Spinoza, Vol. I, ed. and trans. by Edwin Curley, Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 1985, IV, Proposition 47 Scholium, 573. Further reference to this text will be indicated by Ethics followed by the volume, proposition number, scholium and page number. 8 See what Herman De Dijn writes about this passage: “Anticipating a fundamental truth from the theory of emotions in the Ethics (IV P 47 S), at this stage Spinoza attributes to Everyman the insight that the way out of this fluctuation between fear and hope is love—not the love of ordinary things but the love directed toward something eternal and infinite (§§ 8-10). Unfortunately, knowing this does not seem to be enough to master it (§§ 10).” Spinoza: The Way to Wisdom, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette, IN 1996, 32. 9 Spinoza, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect in Collected Works, Op. cit., 8. 10 Cf., J. Lagrée: “Les passions religieuses chez Spinoza“ in F. Brugère & P.-F. Moreau (eds): Spinoza et les affects, Presses de l’Université de Paris-Sorbonne, Paris 1998, 91-103. Her interpretation of religious emotions differs considerably from the one I’m arguing for in this paper. 11 Benedict de Spinoza, A Theologico-Political Treatise and A Political Treatise, trans. by R.H.M. Elwes, Dover Publications, London 2004, 4. 12 Ibid., 5. 13 Spinoza, Ethics IV P 37 S1, 565. 14 “All actions that follow from affects related to the Mind insofar as it understands I relate to Strength of character, which I divide into Tenacity and Nobility. For by Tenacity I understand the Desire by which each one strives, solely from the dictate of reason, to preserve his being. By Nobility I understand the Desire by which each one strives, solely from the dictate of reason, to aid other men and join them to him in friendship.” Spinoza, Ethics V, P59 S, 529. 15 René Descartes, The Passions of the Soul, in Selected Philosophical Writings, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge1988, 81. 16 Ibid., 83. 17 Ibid. 18 René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes Volume III, John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff and Dugald Murdoch (eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985-1991, 222. 19 René Descartes and Élisabeth de Bohême, Correspondance avec Élisabeth et autres lettres, Jean-Marie and Michelle Beyssade (eds.), Flammarion, Paris 1993,158. “Car tous ceux de la religion dont je suis (qui font, sans doute, le plus

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grand nombre dans l’Europe) sont obligés de l’approuver, encore même qu’ils y vissent des circonstances et des motifs apparents qui fussent blâmables; car nous croyons que Dieu se sert de divers moyens pour attirer les âmes à soi. . . .” 20 Descartes, Philosophical Writings Vol. III, Op.cit., 212. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid. 23 Ibid., 213. 24 Descartes, Philosophical Writings Vol. I, Op.cit., 123. 25 Cf., J. Eymard D’Angers, Recherches sur le stoicisme au XVIe et XVIIe siècles, G. Olms, Hildesheim, New York 1976. 26 Descartes, Philosophical Writings Vol. III, Op.cit., 213. 27 Ibid., 224. 28 Descartes, Philosophical Writings Vol. I, Op.cit., 248. 29 Descartes, Philosophical Writings Vol. III, 222. 30 Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, Edwin Curley (ed.) Hackett, Indianapolis 1994, 34. 31 Ibid., 63. 32 Ibid., 44. 33 Ibid., 57. 34 Ibid. 35 Ibid., 58. 36 Ibid., 35. 37 Ibid., 72, (Ch.12, ‘Of Religion’). 38 Ibid., 186, (Ch. 26, ‘Of Civil Laws’). 39 Ibid., 324, (Ch. 40, ‘Of the rights of the kingdom of God’). 40 Ibid., 186. 41 Ibid., 324. 42 Ibid., 290. 43 Ibid., 271. sq. (Ch. 35, ‘Of the Signification of Kingdom of God’). 44 St. Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Happiness, edited and trans. by J. A. Oesterle, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame 1983, Q. 1, a. 4, 5. 45 Ibid., a. 7, 8; p. 14. 46 Ibid. 47 Ibid., Q. 3, a. 8; 39. 48 St. Thomas Aquinas, Disputed Questions on the Virtues, Margaret Atkins (ed. & trans.) and Thomas Williams (ed.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2005, 221. 49 Ibid., 223. 50 Ibid., 224. 51 Descartes, Passions of the Soul, Op.cit., 82. 52 Aquinas, Disputed Questions on the Virtues, Op. cit., 224.

CHAPTER EIGHT SPINOZA AND RELIGIOUS EMOTIONS HERMAN DE DIJN

Emotions can be called religious if they contain relevant cognitive, personal and practical aspects.1 The emotion of reverence is not necessarily a religious emotion. But it can take the form of a religious emotion if it contains a reference to gods or God, and is related to certain religious practices such as prayer or ritual. Acceptance of the existence of religious emotions presupposes that emotions can contain cognitive elements of a specific kind and are related to specific activities. Spinoza holds a cognitive theory of emotions2 in which emotions are seen as closely related to striving and acting.3 He even thinks that religious emotions are quasi inescapable. Both ordinary people and the philosopher are characterised as having religious emotions. But in the former these religious emotions contain false, inadequate conceptions of deity (E I App), while the philosopher is said to have only true, adequate conceptions (E V). What is remarkable is that Spinoza distinguishes two forms of religion in ordinary people: superstition and ‘pious’ faith (TTP 13, sub fine). Whereas superstition cannot lead to salvation or blessedness, pious faith does. This means that it is not only the philosopher or the wise man who can enjoy salvation. Salvation or blessedness is possible also for the ‘true’ believer, even though his knowledge of God is inadequate.4 Salvation or blessedness is commonly understood as a state of mind intimately related to or consisting in specific religious emotions. That superstitious people do not know salvation does not mean they do not have religious emotions. They have them, but these emotions cannot be called salvation or blessedness, because the emotions predominant in superstition are fear and hope, i.e., emotions dominated by sadness. The blessedness or salvation of the wise man consists fundamentally in knowing and loving God-Nature and in the contentment of the soul going with these actions. Most interesting here is the case of the pious believer. Even though he is not in

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the truth, nevertheless he leads a ‘true way of life’ (TTP 5, Sh, 112), providing him with a ‘reward’ not unlike the emotional state of contentment in the philosopher. The question then arises how an emotional life combined with false ideas about God can possibly yield salvation, a state of mind not exactly the same, yet analogical to the one of the philosopher. In what follows, I will concentrate not so much on the emotional life of superstitious people, but develop especially Spinoza’s views on salvation both in the ‘true’ believer and in the philosopher.

1. Superstition and the emotions Spinoza’s analysis of the superstitious mindset is to be found mainly in the Appendix of the first part of his Ethics and in the Preface to the Tractatus Theologio-politicus (TTP). Spinoza links superstition here to the attempt to deal with anxiety (and other negative emotions) by the emotion of hope. The fear-hope complex is inherently unstable, because, although hope is an empowering emotion, it is always itself linked to fear. Superstition arises when the complex fear-hope is combined with anthropocentrism and anthropomorphism: with the idea that there are one or more governors of things whom we can influence favourably. Superstition is linked to awe (admiratio) for the many things and happenings we do not understand, but which we try to accommodate by postulating super-beings who resemble us, i.e., who also have certain thoughts, feelings and aims. As Susan James has pointed out, superstition in Spinoza’s sense requires the belief of one’s special election by the gods or God. In other words, fear is blocked not only by hope, but by the additional element of self-esteem and pride.5 The rigidity of superstition is due to these elements of admiratio, averse of questioning, and electio. This makes people especially vulnerable to credulity, and to surrendering themselves to others who consider themselves the elect. So, it is not anthropomorphism and the teleological worldview alone that produce superstition, but the ‘infrastructure’ of emotions—as James calls it—combined with them. In particular, it is the desperate search for confirmation of one’s election which leads to a kind of frenzy, exacerbating the superstitious hermeneutics of nature and history, and the engagement in activities of magic and ritual. The inherent instability of this mind-set needs constant fortification by more extravagant beliefs and practices, all kind of pomp and ceremony, and often also by quasi-philosophical constructions. In turn, these constructs are again defended with great zeal, leading to strife between factions, with wars exacerbated because of the blending of religious beliefs, politics and religious practices. Religion becomes a kind

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of madness comparable to what happens when an individual’s life is infatuated with money, or honour, or lust. These are all species of delirium, says Spinoza, even though they are not counted as diseases (E IV P44 S). The price of superstition is that one’s mind is blocked by an emotional setup which is predominantly negative, constantly under threat of falsification and upheaval, and therefore requiring ever more ‘epicycles’ of thinking, ever greater delusions about oneself, and hatred of ‘the others’. Superstition is the combination of dogmatism and fanaticism.

2. The ‘true’ religion of the philosopher Two aspects must be kept in mind when we discuss Spinoza’s conception of ‘philosophical’ religion (religio) in the Ethics (and in the TTP). The first is that this too is religion: it is not just knowing certain things. As Richard Mason has pointed out, religion is “not what is believed or known, but (almost entirely) how we act. . . .” Religion, piety and honour are introduced together, in Part IV of the Ethics. Religion is understood in terms of action: “whatever we desire and do, whereof we are the cause . . . insofar as we know God.”6 Secondly, philosophical religion is introduced (in the Ethics) via a discussion of the active emotions, i.e., emotions which we have insofar as we are truly rational or in so far as we reach the level of intellect. In E III P59 S, Spinoza characterises all actions which follow from active emotions as fortitude (fortitudo). This virtue is subdivided into courage (animositas) which is the right, rational attitude taken vis-à-vis oneself, and nobility (generositas) which is the right, rational attitude taken vis-à-vis others, involving the desire to help other men and join with them in friendship. The rational desires to do good for others and to join with them in friendship are later (E IV P37 S1) called piety (pietas) and probity (honestas).7 The very names of these actions refer to the (Roman) idea that the life of the strong and free individual has its natural setting in human community (there is an explicit reference to politics in E IV P37 S2). It is this ‘true way of life’ of the strong, or free, or virtuous man that Spinoza—at the end of E IV, where he paints the model of the free man: IV P67-73—links to religion in his formula: vera vita et religio (E IV P73 S). Religion, as a complex of emotions, desires, and actions is closely connected with the active emotions related to self and others, to courage (animositas) and nobility (generositas), aspects of fortitude (fortitudo) of the free man. Another short formula for the full moral life is pietas et religio (E V P41), which says approximately the same as the prior formula insofar as piety, which is close to nobility, presupposes courage.8

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But what is (true) religion? In E IV P37 S1, Spinoza says: “whatever we desire and do of which we are the cause insofar as we have an idea of God, i.e., insofar as we know God, I relate to ‘religion’.” Although religion, i.e., desire and action as related to knowledge of God, is introduced already in E IV, very little is said about it in this part. For example, we do not come to know which emotions are crucial to it. Spinoza simply tells us that we have to await the next part of the Ethics to understand to what extent we can reach the way of life related to it (E IV P73 S, sub fine). But we already get a glimpse of it in E IV App 4: In life . . . it is useful above all to perfect our intellect, i.e. reason, as far as we can, and in this one thing the supreme happiness, i.e. blessedness, of man consists. For blessedness is simply the contentment of mind that arises from the intuitive knowledge of God, the attributes of God, and the actions that follow from the necessity of his nature.

Religion then is everything which follows from our adequate understanding of God, from the intuitive knowledge of God. It is a way of life Spinoza calls blessedness, of which the last proposition of the Ethics tells us that it is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself (E V P42), and that it consists in the love of God which arises from intuitive knowledge (E V P42 Dem). As is clear from the passages from E IV and V we have already referred to, religion is characterised by two fundamental, active emotions: love of God (Amor erga Deum) and contentment of mind (animi acquiescentia), and by the desires and actions which follow from them. The whole of E V confirms the picture of true, philosophical religion already reached so far. The blessedness of religion requires that man is capable of intuitive knowledge, and in the first place intuitive knowledge of his own concrete self as eternal modification of God (E V P24-31). This necessarily leads to active emotions: love of God (Amor erga Deum (E V 15+16) or Amor intellectualis Dei (E V P32 Cor)); and the highest pleasure (laetitia) accompanied by the idea of oneself and of one’s own virtue, leading to the highest contentment of mind (E V P27 Dem). This contentment of mind (acquiescentia animi) related to the love of God and of oneself “is not in fact distinguished from glory (by Defs. 25 and 30 of the Emotions)” (E V P36 S). Insofar as we conceive of our own emotions and actions as having their source in ourselves (ultimately in God), we rejoice in ourselves; that is, we experience contentment of mind, and we see ourselves (and God) as praiseworthy. This glory one experiences is totally void of conceit because we know at the same time that all we are and all we are capable of is, ultimately, God’s work (E V P36 S). So, the

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contentment of mind which is one with understanding and love of God automatically becomes praise of God: self-glorification is reverence.9 Spinoza is aware that the meanings of ordinary emotional terms are pushed here to their limits, especially when, in the second part of E V, emotions are talked about in the context of ‘the eternal part’ of the mind. With respect to this ‘part’, it does not make sense to speak of transition from one state to another, something which is essential in ordinary emotions (E III Def 3). There is clearly a tension between the process of arriving at intuitive knowledge and the emotions’ origination at this moment, and the ‘state of perfection’ one then enters into, and which doesn’t seem to allow for transition (E V P33 S). Similar difficulties seem to be present in other wisdom traditions. Although religion’s basis is (intuitive) knowledge, it is fundamentally a way of life consisting in emotions, attitudes and actions. The fundamental emotions are emotions related to God, love and reverence of God, and a deep contentment of mind. The picture is complicated because, as already mentioned, Ethics V consists of two parts: an explanation of the conditions upon which one can reach blessedness in one’s life (E V P120); and an explanation of the eternal life of the mind “without relation to (the duration of) the body” (E V P21-40). Some commentators see this division in terms of development. In the first part Spinoza only talks about Amor erga Deum (love towards God), whereas in the second part he speaks of Amor intellectualis Dei (intellectual love of God, towards him, and by him).10 Supposedly, the second fundamental religious emotion too undergoes a similar development from acquiescentia in se ipso (selfcontentment) towards acquiescentia animi (mentis) (contentment of mind).11 It is clear that the two parts of Ethics V constitute a different perspective. But it seems unnecessary to talk about a progression in stages.12 The second perspective, of the eternity or immortality of the mind, is simply a certain dimension within the first. It is in real life that the mind reaches an intuitive view of things sub specie aeternitatis and experiences the kind of emotions which constitute ‘eternal’ blessedness. In the second perspective, the perspective of eternity, man’s intellectual love of God is said to be “a part of the intellectual love with which God loves himself” (E V P36 Dem), and it is also claimed “that the love of God for men, and the intellectual love of the mind for God, is one and the same” (E V P36 Cor). It does not follow from this that Spinoza now, as against E I P21, I P31 and II P2, claims that intellect and (active) emotion belong to God’s proper nature. The intellectual love of God for men is the love God has insofar as he produces his infinite mode of thought, the infinite intellect. Each time Spinoza speaks of God’s

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intellectual love, he refers to the infinite mode which is its condition of possibility, i.e., the infinite idea or intellect of God. It is precisely because our intellect is part of God’s intellect, both being modifications of God’s attribute of Thought (Cogitatio) that they can be one and the same. The God of Ethics V is not different from the God of Ethics I: it is an impersonal God or Nature who produces an infinite modification, belonging to Natura naturata, in which everything is known and loved, including God in his absolute nature, or Natura naturans (E I P29 S). Or, as the Korte Verhandeling has it (KV 1:9, GI, 48: 19-25 & KV 2:22, GI, 101, n.1: 28-33), God cannot love unless he ‘first’ produces ‘the son of God’ or ‘an immediate creature of God’. This infinite ‘creature’ or modification does not belong to God’s absolute essence, constituted only by the attributes.13 The change in vocabulary from self-contentment (acquiescentia in se ipso) to contentment of mind (acquiescentia animi) seems to indicate a change in kind of self-esteem: from an awareness of ourselves as bodies living in the ordinary course of nature, towards an awareness of ourselves “without relation to the existence of the [our] body” (E V P40 S). In the Korte Verhandeling (KV 2:22, GI, 100:7) Spinoza called this change a ‘rebirth’ (‘wedergeboorte’). The contentment of mind does not involve an awareness of time, but “a timeless joy or contentment,” not related to any actual increase in perfection.14 Analogously, the intellectual love of God is not based on joy as related to increase of perfection, but is blessedness itself, i.e., “the mind [simply being] endowed with perfection itself” (E V P33 S). According to Donald Rutherford, this raises the question as to the identity between the self living in duration, and the self experiencing itself as eternal. Only the latter self experiences “the highest human perfection” and “the highest contentment of mind that can exist” (E V P27 Dem). This seems to indicate that the mind of the philosopher reaching intuitive knowledge and love of God must be “bifurcated, such that I am aware of myself both as an eternal mind and as an enduring mind—a claim that challenges the assumption that ‘I’ denotes a unified self.”15 That there is this kind of bifurcation or divide between two ‘parts’ of the self is perhaps not so much a problem as an asset in Spinoza’s thinking. Reaching ‘eternal bliss’ seems to require a kind of gap between the old and the new self, where the new self is somehow aware of the old, but considers it as of almost no importance (E V P40 Cor), and where the new awareness is not so much the awareness of a ‘self’, independent of the rest, but experiences itself as an expression of the Power of Nature itself.

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3. The pious faith (the universal religion of Christ)16 When one reads only the Ethics, it looks as if there is a strict dichotomy between philosophy (and science) and religion. The first is concerned with the truth and is the product of reason or intellect; the second is full of anthropomorphic and anthropocentric illusions and is the product of the imagination. The first is related to active emotions (see section 2); the second to passions derived from fear and hope and wonder (see section 1). However, if one concentrates on the political works and especially on the TTP, a much more sophisticated picture appears. Some developments of the imagination, in combination with certain organisations of the passions, make a substantial difference for the quality of survival of groups of people. Social and political systems survive more or less well on the basis of evolved structures of ideas and emotions. And even though none of these structures were, up to a certain point (the advent of modern political science with Macchiavelli and particularly Hobbes), the product of rational thought, some are much better than others for providing securitas et pax, the aim of all social systems. According to Spinoza, shrewd politicians succeeded more or less well in steering social systems for the better. They accepted the fact that human beings are prone to illusion and passion, and understood intuitively how to organise these illusions and passions in such a way that they produce desired societal results (TP 1 § 1-2). Political theory (as developed in the Tractatus Politicus) can explain how socialpolitical systems are best structured so as to produce security and peace even though humans collectively are inevitably governed by illusions and passions. The trick is not to treat human beings as if all of them are really rational; it is to use illusions and passions via promises and threats (the law) to produce desired ends. With respect to religion, Spinoza recognizes that this social phenomenon too can take different forms, some of which are detrimental, some however beneficial, both socially and individually speaking. Especially certain forms of the Christian religion—to which some of Spinoza’s friends belonged—clearly were considered by Spinoza as beneficial to the believer and to society. The title and subtitle of the TTP are: “Tractatus Theologico-politicus containing a number of dissertations, wherein it is shown that freedom to philosophize can not only be granted without injury to Piety and the Peace of the Commonwealth, but that the Peace of the Commonwealth and Piety are endangered by the suppression of this freedom.” The implication is that a religion that allows freedom of thinking and philosophising is compatible with peace of the state.

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In chapters 13 and 14 of the TTP, Spinoza describes a form of religion as based on the fundamental message of the Jewish-Christian Bible.17 This form of religion, unlike the philosophical religion of the Ethics, is not based on adequate knowledge of God and his attributes. Adequate knowledge is a gift, not a commandment (TTP 13, Sh, 219). The Christian religion is a matter of obedience to a Lawgiver. Since it is a religion of the many, it must be based, not on philosophical knowledge, but on a very simple religious doctrine in which God’s attributes are understood to be Justice and Charity, i.e., God is understood as a model human beings can imitate and at the same time obey. The kernel of this ‘universal’ religion— which all people, even children, can participate in—is not knowledge, but moral practice. What is important here is not true, but pious dogmas, leading to the good life of piety and obedience to the divine commandments of justice and charity (TTP 14, Sh, 223). If someone, upon coming to know the truth, would reject the anthropomorphism of ordinary religion and would become ‘self-willed’ (i.e., deviate from the moral path), then “he has a faith which in reality is impious; and if by believing what is false he becomes obedient to the moral law, he has a faith which is pious” (TTP 13, Sh, 219). The pious faith of the Christian religion essentially consists not in metaphysical-theological speculations, not in rites and ceremonies, nor in any exhaustive knowledge of the stories that are in the Bible. Its essence is the practice of justice and charity in obedience to God (and to the civil authorities). The prophets (or Christ) “taught only very simple doctrines comprehensible by all, setting them forth in such a style and confirming them by such [simple] reasonings as would most likely induce the people’s devotion to God” (TTP Pref., Sh, 54). The creed which is behind the ethico-religious practice contains only a few essential dogmas (enumerated in TTP ch. 14), which can be adapted to each group’s specific situation and imaginative and intellectual capacities. Ceremonies and rites and stories are de facto inevitable, but do not constitute the essence of religion: they too may take different forms as long as they are subservient to the real function and aim.18 As becomes evident from TTP Ch. 13 and 14, Spinoza clearly believes the testimony of Scripture that the Christian religion, if lived properly, provides salvation to nearly all men insofar as they are capable of obedience. If salvation would require knowledge, then this salvation of the many would be in doubt completely. That pious faith, and not only philosophical religion, can provide salvation, is something which itself cannot be explained rationally (TTP 15, Sh, 234); or, at least “nobody has [as yet] been successful in proving it” (TTP 15, Sh, 233). Yet, there is

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moral certainty about the link with salvation because of the testimony of the prophets who themselves relied upon their own experience and not upon ‘mathematical proofs’ (ibidem), and because of the obvious peace of mind of those who are engaging in good actions (TTP 15, Sh, 235). “[It] follows that Scripture—and especially Christ—has brought very great comfort to mankind” (TTP 15, Sh, 236). In the TTP there are numerous passages where Spinoza closely links pietas and religio (in the sense of ordinary religion).19 Piety is not only the moral attitude vis-à-vis others, there is also piety vis-à-vis one’s country (TTP XVIII, G III, 232: 9-15; XX, G III, 241-2: 29-9), and piety vis-à-vis God and men (TTP XVIII, G III, 236: 3-6; TTP XX, G I, 244: 3-7). This close link between piety vis-à-vis others and piety vis-à-vis God should not surprise us, because obedience to God requires justice and charity towards others and vice versa. In many places—for example, in the subtitle of the TTP—piety stands for religion and vice versa, thereby anticipating or stressing the link between religion and moral practice. It is high time to investigate which emotions and desires are involved in the pious faith of the true believers, and what is their link with salvation. What is most remarkable with respect to the emotional set-up of the pious believer is that Spinoza describes this not so much in terms of emotions, but in terms of attitudes, attitudes of the soul (animus). The same fundamental attitudes are referred to again and again. First, as we have seen, obedience to God, expressing itself in justice and charity towards others. The obedience to God goes together with devotion (devotio) (TTP 5, Sh, 121: “obedience and devotion”; TTP Pref., Sh, 54). This devotion is defined in E III Def. Af. 10 as “love for a person at whom we wonder” (Park, 215) which seems to be incompatible with other attitudes present in the believer which exclude the obsession with wonder. But the Explanation to Def. 10 provides a clarification which is important in our context: [W]onder arises from the novelty of a thing. If, therefore, it happens that we often imagine a thing at which we wonder, we shall cease to wonder at it. So we see that the emotion of devotion easily degenerates into simply love (Park, 215).

The obedience of the true believer is not so much based on fear of punishment and hope of reward; it involves devotion and love as of children towards their parents. In ordinary religion God functions as an exemplar vitae, a just and loving Father who asks us to be just and charitable towards others, our brothers and sisters, and who forgives our sins if we repent (dogma nr. 7: TTP 14, Sh, 225). In ordinary religion, it is

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believed “that God cares for the world and mankind” (TTP 5, Sh, 121). Obedience to God is contrary to self-abasement which is “a false appearance of piety and religion” (E IV App 22, Park, 284), so it is compatible with self-esteem and, as we will see, with self-contentment. Justice is sometimes linked directly to fairness or equity (aequitas) (E IV App 14; TTP 19, Sh, 283), and both refer to the attitude to render each individual what is his or her due (under the law). Charity of course presupposes emotions like love, compassion, favour, benevolence, etc., but in the context of pious obedience these go without the deviations due to partisanship and excessive pride. Secondly, simplicity (animi simplicitas: TTP XIV, G III, 176: 24-25): Scripture does not condemn ignorance, but obstinacy (contumacia: TTP XIV, G III, 176: 26) which is incompatible with obedience. Thirdly: sincerity and confidence in one’s faith. What is important in pious faith is not knowledge, but acceptance of the religious doctrine with full confidence and conviction (“sine ulla haesitatione, sed integro animi consensu”: TTP XIV, G III, 178: 33-34), without any misgivings or doubts (“absque ulla mentis repugnantia, sineque ulla haesitatione”: TTP XIV, G III, 179:3). Heretics and schismatic individuals are “only those who teach such beliefs as promote obstinacy, hatred, strife and anger,” whereas the faithful are “only those who promote justice and charity to the best of their intellectual powers and capacity” (TTP 14, Sh, 226). The true believer has confidence, moral certainty, that he knows the true meaning of the Scripture’s message (TTP 7, Sh, 158). Faith “requires not so much true dogmas as pious dogmas” (TTP 14, Sh, 223). Even if these beliefs, philosophically speaking, contain not a shadow of truth, this does not matter, as we read: [P]rovided that he who adheres to them knows not that they are false. If he knew that they were false, he would necessarily be a rebel, for how could it be that one who seeks to love justice and obey God should worship as divine what he knows to be alien to the divine nature? Yet man may err from simplicity of mind, and, as we have seen, Scripture condemns only obstinacy, not ignorance (TTP 14, Sh, 223).

What makes faith impossible is a mind oriented on the extraordinary, on novelty, on gratuitous speculations. This is why the mixture of religion and philosophical speculation is so disastrous (TTP 7, Sh, 156-9: against Maimonides). What Scripture teaches and requires us to believe comes down to a very simple, mainly moral doctrine that can be heard ‘without surprise’ (TTP note 8 to Chapter 7, Sh, 301). It goes as follows: religion consists “in honesty and sincerity of heart (“in animi simplicitate et veracitate”, TTP VII, GIII 116: 30-1) rather than

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in outward actions” (TTP 7, Sh, 159). Attitudes like these cannot be constrained by force or law. What is needed to bring them about is “godly and brotherly exhortation, a good upbringing, and most of all, a judgment that is independent and free (“proprium et liberum judicium”, TTP VII, GIII, 116-7: 35-1)” (TTP 7, Sh, 159). This implies that the true believer is capable of tolerating the deviant opinions and interpretation of others, and of judging people in terms of their good works rather than in terms of what they say (TTP 14, Sh, 220-1). The true believer, the person of pious faith, is then a person characterised by simplicity and sincerity, by confidence in his quiet belief, loving family and neighbours. It is a person of ‘one mind’ (integer animus: TTP V, GIII, 96:17). Such a person’s life is characterised by blessedness or salvation, i.e., by (vera) animi acquiescentia (TTP VII, GIII, 111:30; TTP XV, GIII, 188:2), the self-contentment following in the mind from one’s good deeds. Spinoza claims, as we have seen, that no one can rationally understand how salvation can be linked to faith. But once we understand which attitudes are involved in the pious person’s life, this seems much less mysterious. These attitudes are blessedness, just as in the Ethics, where blessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself (E V P41). When Spinoza indicates that simplicity and truthfulness of heart (animi simplicitas et veracitas: TTP VII, GIII, 116:32) can not be forced upon people, he redescribes this saying that people cannot be forced to be blessed (beatus) (TTP 7, Sh, 159). “[M]an can achieve blessedness simply through obedience” (TTP 15, Sh, 232). “[S]imple obedience is a way to salvation” (salus) (TTP 15, Sh, 236). This salvation or blessedness “is nothing other than the peace of mind (animi acquiescentia) that results from good actions” (TTP 15, Sh, 235). The true contentment of mind, in which true salvation and blessedness consists, does not, of course only depend on doing good works. Peace of mind is also related to the simplicity and confidence of one’s religious belief in the very simple and clear message of Scripture (TTP 7, Sh, 154), accepted without anxiety and doubt. Both the philosopher and the pious believer are saved or blessed even though in the case of the philosopher we can explain the link between his knowledge of God and his salvation, whereas in the case of the pious believer we cannot understand how inadequate knowledge can yield blessedness. Is salvation in the believer then identical with salvation in the philosopher? Is the blessedness or contentment of mind exactly the same? Not really: “[H]e who, while unacquainted with these writings (Holy Scripture), nevertheless knows by natural light that there is a God having the attributes we have recounted [to be discovered only in philosophy: see

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TTP 4], and who also pursues a true way of life, is altogether blessed— indeed, more blessed than the multitude, because in addition to true [truthful] beliefs he also has a clear and distinct conception of God” (TTP 5, Sh, 121, emphasis added). Solomon the wise already knew this, and promised “true blessedness simply in return for the cultivation of intellect and wisdom, for from wisdom will the fear of God come to be understood, and the knowledge of God be found” (TTP 5, Sh, 115, emphasis added). The pious believer reaches blessedness, contentment of mind (acquiescentia animi), thanks to a mind in which the imagination is occupied by Christ’s simple message of a caring God whom we should imitate, in which religious beliefs are held without doubt and hesitation, with moral certainty, in which the heart is truthful and full of trust—a heart capable also of justice and love for one’s neighbours. Although this is real blessedness, real salvation, something is missing: the awareness of the truth about oneself and about one’s real relation to God. This may explain the absence, in the context of salvation through obedience, of the element of glory (gloria) present in Ethics V (E V P36 S). Faith seems vulnerable in ways which do not apply to philosophical wisdom. Pious faith is very closely related to the existence of a religious community (and even a political community) in which it is possible to practice the works of justice and charity, in which it is possible to bring up one’s children in a good way, in which one’s beliefs are not constantly under pressure by others questioning them or ridiculing them, etc. According to Spinoza, religious practices, ceremonies, narratives, by themselves are not sufficient to secure the proper emotions and attitudes.20 “Words acquire a fixed meaning solely from their use; if in accordance with this usage they are so arranged that readers are moved to devotion, then these words will be sacred. . . . But . . . if these words are arranged differently, or if by custom they acquire a meaning contrary to their original meaning, then both words and book will become impure and profane instead of sacred” (TTP 12, Sh, 207). What is important is not what is ‘external’, but what characterises the inner heart. The right attitudes of the heart can, unfortunately, not be obtained by command or tricks: they are essentially a by-product (like the blessedness of the philosopher).21 As Susan James has pointed out, ‘from the outside’ religion cannot really be distinguished from superstition.22 Spinoza even accepts that there is always the possibility for religion to slide back into superstition (TTP XII, GIII, 159: 15-23; see also Ep. 73, GIV, 307-8: 188). According to James, this difficulty of separating out religion and superstition is not so important from the point of view of politics or political philosophy; more important is to take into account the function(s)

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they inevitably seem to play (and continue to play) in society.23 Already in the Ethics, Spinoza is much more subtle than the dichotomy between the slave and the free man would suggest. Emotions such as humility and repentance, which are rather on the side of superstition and religion, are not completely rejected because they are good for society. Spinoza sides here with the prophets, “who looked to the common advantage and not to that of a few, [and who] recommended humility, repentance, and reverence so much” (E IV P54 S). Although it is true that, with respect to political effects, the difference between religion and superstition may be more or less irrelevant, this is not the case with respect to the problem of individual salvation. Even though the person of pious faith does not experience the salvation of the wise man, his is a happy life, completely different from the life of a superstitious person. Yet, it may be true that in the societal context of today, in which simplicity of faith and a life in dedication to others is more and more difficult, the sliding into superstition—this time not simply religious, but also ideological, superstition24—is almost inevitable. It would mean that less and less people will know salvation through obedience. The message of Christ directed towards the many will hardly be heard by the many. The few who hear it are bound to hear it in a version which fills their craving heart with superstition.

Notes

Spinoza texts and editions used: Spinoza Opera 4 vol., edited by Carl Gebhardt, Carl Winters Universitätsbuchhandlung, Heidelberg reprint 1925 [Abbrev.: GIII, 116:32 = Volume 3, page 116, line 32]. Further abbreviations: E = Ethica, TTP = Tractatus Theologico-politicus; TP = Tractatus Politicus; KV = Korte Verhandeling; Ep = Epistola. Spinoza, Tractatus Theologico-politicus (Gephardt Edition 1925), translated by Samuel Shirley, E.J. Brill, Leiden 1999. [Abbreviations.: TTP 13, Sh, 112 = chapter 13, page 112]. Spinoza, Ethics (Oxford Philosophical Texts), edited & translated by G.H.R. Parkinson, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2000 [Abbreviations: E V P36 S, Park, 310 = Ethics V, Proposition 36 Scholium, 310]. 1 Cf. supra: Petri Järvaläinen, ‘What are Religious Emotions?’, Chapter 1; Petri Järvaläinen, A Study on Religious Emotions, Schriften der Luther-Agricola Gesellschaft, Helsinki 2000. 2 Nico Frijda, Spinoza en het moderne emotie-onderzoek (Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis 70), Eburon, Delft 2000.

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Spinoza’s theory of the emotions can be found in Ethics III. See Herman De Dijn, ‘Spinoza and Revealed Religion’, in Studia Spinozana 11 (1995), 39-52. 5 Susan James, Spinoza on Superstition. Coming to Terms with Fear (Mededelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis 88), Damon, Budel 2006. 6 Richard Mason, Spinoza or Pascal? Two Views on Religion (Medelingen vanwege het Spinozahuis 76), Eburon, Delft 2000. 7 On the link between piety and our relation with others, see also E V P4 S. 8 The active emotions mentioned in E III P5 S are in the course of E IV and E V closely linked to piety or to piety and religion; see: E IV P18 S; E IV P37 S1 (with E IV App 15); E IV P73 S (with E IV App 4); E V P41 S. 9 For renewed attention to this virtue, see: Paul Woodruff, Reverence. Renewing a Forgotten Virtue, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001. 10 Alexandre Matheron drew attention to this distinction, but already warned not to see this as two different stages: Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza, Minuit, Paris 1969, 583, n. 43; Pierre Macherey, Introduction à l’Éthique de Spinoza. La cinquième partie. Les voies de la libération, PUF, Paris 1994, 93 ff, 151 ff; Wolfgang Bartuschat, Spinozas Theorie des Menschen, Felix Meiner, Hamburg 1992, 326 ff. 11 Giuseppina Totaro, ‘‘Acquiescentia’ dans la Cinquième partie de l’Éthique de Spinoza’, in Revue Philosophique de la France et de l’Etranger, 130:1 (1994), 6579; Donald Rutherford, ‘Salvation as a State of Mind: The Place of Acquiescentia in Spinoza’s Ethics’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 7:3 (1999), 447-473. 12 Herman De Dijn, ‘Ethik als Heilkunde des Geistes (5p1-5p20)’ in Michael Hampe und Robert Schnepf (Hrsg.), Baruch de Spinoza. Ethik, Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2006, 273. 13 See further: Martial Gueroult, Spinoza. 1: Dieu (Ethique, I), Aubier, Paris 1968, 272-294 and 562-3; Herman De Dijn, Spinoza. The Way to Wisdom, Purdue University Press, West-Lafayette (Ind.) 1996, 209. 14 See: Donald Rutherford, art. cit., 463-4. 15 Ibidem, 473 (and note 99). 16 See also: Herman De Dijn, ‘Spinoza and Revealed Religion’, 46-50. 17 The ‘hermeneutical’ retrieval of this message relies on a method of interpretation discussed in TTP chapter 7. More about this method in: Herman De Dijn, ‘Over de interpretatie van de Schrift volgens Spinoza’, in Tijdschrift voor Filosofie 29 (1967), 667-704. 18 In TP 4 §46, in his description of the ideal form of religion in an aristocratic state, Spinoza specifies that this religion requires big and magnificent temples. 19 See under ‘pietas’ and ‘religio’ in: Emilia Giancotti Boscherini, Lexicon Spinozanum (2 vol.), Martinus Nijhoff, La Haye 1970. 20 See Susan James, art. cit., 15. 21 See also Herman De Dijn, ‘Theory and Practice and the Practice of Theory’, in Marcel Senn & Manfred Walther (eds.), Ethik, Recht und Politik bei Spinoza (Beiträge der Spinoza Gesellschaft), Schulthess, Zürich 2001, 47-58. 4

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Susan James, art. cit., 15-6. Ibidem, 16-20. 24 Ibidem, 17. 23

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CHAPTER NINE PASSIONATE REASON: SCIENCE, THEOLOGY AND THE INTELLECTUAL PASSION OF WONDER IN DESCARTES’ MEDITATIONS1 PÉTER LOSONCZI

I intend to propose a somewhat unusual way of interpreting Descartes’ philosophy. Although significant efforts have been made for revealing the complexity of his thought, Descartes is generally considered as the thinker of rigid rationalism and subjectivism, as well as of secular scientism. This is why it may seem bizarre to speak of religious emotivism within the context of Cartesian philosophy. To my mind, however, a complex and interesting reading of Cartesian philosophy could be developed through a combined consideration of his theory of the passions and of the religiously relevant aspects of his writing. Of course, it is possible to outline only certain aspects of such an interpretation. Since the passion of wonder occupies a central role in such a reading of Cartesian philosophy, I will focus on the question of wonder as it appears in different Cartesian writings.

1. Passionate reason and the intellectual love of God First and foremost, however, I would like to mention another element of Cartesian philosophy in support of my proposal: the concept of passionate reason. Needless to say, Descartes does not speak about such a conception himself, but I propose to introduce this special notion because it seems to me that Cartesian reason in many cases turns out to be, as it were, passionate in its character. This feature can be detected, for instance, in the famous Letter to Chanut, where Descartes contemplates the issue of the intellectual love of God.2 This topic is the most frequently analysed aspect of Descartes’ “religious emotivism”. But this text is important to mention not only because of its philosophical content, but also due to its

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literary style and tone. Even the opening paragraph of the letter proves to be interesting in its own right. Here Descartes asserts that this question would prove to be difficult to discuss briefly even for a wiser man than him: after all, he preferred to “write at once what [his] enthusiasm dictates rather than to take longer in thought and after all write nothing any better”.3 This is an interesting expression since it says that even a longer and more thorough discussion of the problem may lead to the same result as the one he actually expounds in the letter. That means that in the case of the intellectual love of God it is not deductive argumentation based on clear and distinct pieces of knowledge that turns out to be the most appropriate method of discussion. It is enthusiasm that can serve as the driving force of the theoretical explanation of the subject in question. In this way Descartes abandons the demand for a thorough but potentially vague inquiry—without suggesting that when following his train of thought, his correspondent would necessarily be lacking the most important information about the issue. This does not mean, of course, that Descartes would consider his own standpoint as senseless. Rather, to my mind, it means that he finds it possible to present a discussion that springs from enthusiasm and, at the same time, meets the minimal conditions of rational discourse. This piece in itself breaks with the framework of the so-called “pseudo-science of epistemology” which—according to T. S. Eliot—has “haunted the nightmares” of the last centuries.4 Of course, the subject matter of Descartes’ inquiry fundamentally influences this peculiar attitude. As it is declared in the letter, intellectual love of God is “the most delightful and useful passion possible” in this present life.5 As Pierre Guenancia puts it, discussing this intellectual passion—that is, a passion which is engendered not by the body, but is produced in the soul by the soul itself6 —Descartes anticipates his theory of the so-called internal emotions of the Passions of the Soul.7 I propose to introduce the term passionate reason because it becomes evident that the Cartesian notion of rationality has an important emotive aspect. By this I mean not merely that Descartes speaks of intellectual passions but that reason itself is emotive in a certain sense. As in the case of the passion of wonder, as we will see, this emotive or passionate aspect essentially belongs to productive rationality. It is also interesting to realise that the question of the intellectual passions comes to the fore in a religious context, which is not to say that it is limited exclusively to the field of religion. For instance, in the Passions, Descartes speaks of intellectual joy within an aesthetic context.8 However, I think that together with intellectual love and other possible emotions,

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wonder can be regarded as the central element of inquiry regarding Descartes’ religious emotivism.

2. A sudden surprise of the soul: wonder as the first of all passions9 Wonder gains a central role in the Passions of the Soul. It is classified as one of the six simple and primitive passions.10 By definition, it is “a sudden surprise of the soul which brings it to consider with attention the objects that seem to it unusual and extraordinary.”11 On the one hand, it is caused by an impression in the brain which represents the object as something unusual and, in this way, worthy of special consideration. On the other hand, it originates from the movement of the spirits stimulated by the impression to flow with great force to the place in the brain where the impression is located, thus preserving and strengthening it there. Moreover, this movement also passes into the muscles which serve to keep the sense organs fixed in the same orientation. In this way, the organs will also continue to maintain the impression in the way in which they formed it.12 However, speaking about specifically intellectual passions Descartes evidently admits that certain passions are independent from the bodily functions. What I would like to emphasise now is that Descartes stresses the element of concentration or focusing with respect to the passion of wonder. This passion is a very peculiar one. In paragraph 53 of the second part of the Passions of the Soul, Descartes says that “[w]hen our first encounter with some object surprises us and we find it novel, or very different from what we formerly knew or from what we supposed it ought to be, this causes us to wonder and to be astonished at it [and since] all this may happen before we know whether or not the object is beneficial to us [we can] regard wonder as the first of all the passions”.13 So, the passion of wonder evolves suddenly when we encounter an unusual, novel object. This unexpectedness is the origin of wonder. As in paragraph 72 Descartes explains that surprise—which is proper and peculiar to the passion of wonder—comes from the sudden and unexpected arrival of the impression, which changes the movement of the spirits. The component of surprise is essential to wonder. In fact, surprise is present in many other passions, in which case we can speak about the mixture of wonder and the other passion in question.14 This element of surprise can be the cause of that concentration or focusing which we have mentioned above. The original novelty, the extraordinary character of the object is what brings the soul to consider it

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with special attention. The soul’s attentiveness or concentration is converted into bodily processes by means of the physiological procedure described above. I propose to portray this movement as an oscillation. The soul attains an idea of the object which it finds extraordinary, and which in fact stimulates the soul to “consider [the object] with attention.” This attention exercised by the soul produces those bodily movements that, on the one hand, go through the brain, and on the other, set the fixation of the sense organs. All this produces a back-and-forth flow of movement which results in a special contemplation of the object and its qualities. This process runs until the soul’s attentiveness relinquishes for any reason. Another important characteristic of wonder is that the evolvement of this passion may happen before we know whether the object is beneficial for us or not. This is the reason why wonder is the first of all passions.15 That is to say, the passion of wonder can be characterised as a passion of potentiality in the sense that we do not know whether the object carries any benefit for us: “it has as its object not good or evil, but only knowledge of the thing that we wonder at.”16 Seen from a phenomenological point of view, the strength of this passion is commensurate with the degree of the novelty of the object: the more extraordinary the object, the more intensive the passion that evolves.17 This position of wonder has a fundamental philosophical relevance.

3. Wonder as the beginning of knowledge All that Descartes writes about the usefulness of wonder is very important for my interpretation. For, “[o]f wonder . . . we may say that it is useful in that it makes us learn and retain in our memory things of which we were previously ignorant.”18 This function can be attributed to this passion because we wonder only at extraordinary things. Something can appear extraordinary to us for two reasons: either because we have been ignorant of it; or because the object is different from the things we have known before. We call it extraordinary just because it appears to be different. From this follows the scientific relevance of the passion of wonder. The function of wonder in the attainment of knowledge is that “when something previously unknown to us comes before our intellect or our senses for the first time, this does not make us retain it in our memory unless our idea of it is strengthened in our brain by some passion, or perhaps also by an application of our intellect as fixed by our will in a special state of attention and reflection.”19 As we have noted above, this attentiveness is not carried out exclusively by means of the bodily organs, but it has an intellectual form as well. What is important to consider again

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is the special character of the passion of wonder in the sense that while “[t]he other passions may serve to make us take note of things which appear good or evil . . . we feel only wonder at things which appear unusual.”20 This unusual character, one may say, ‘invites’ or ‘incites’ the mind to become acquainted with the object. A consequence of this fact is, according to Descartes, that those people who are not naturally inclined to wonder are usually very ignorant.21 Wonder is, as it were, a detector of whether or not a thing is worthy of examination; of whether the mind should fix on it and remember it. In other words, it marks the object’s aptness for being known. This analysis of the function of wonder in the formation of knowledge broadens our understanding of the role that memory plays in the Cartesian metaphysics of knowledge. As mentioned above, with the term passionate reason I refer not only to the presence of the intellectual passions in Cartesian philosophy. It is not merely the case that reason contains an emotive layer but, genealogically speaking, a body of knowledge itself originates from the passion of wonder. We can take this aspect as a reformulation of the ancient conviction that philosophy begins in wonder. The Cartesian development of the scientia mirabilis is, in fact, rooted in wonder. 22 I will come back to this question later. For the moment, however, one should note that a religious connotation may also be attributed to the passion of wonder. Although this topic emerges in the Third Meditation only, I find it very important insofar as it concerns the problem of Cartesian religious emotivism.

4. Wonder in the Third Meditation: divine metaphysics and epistemology To begin with, I would like to quote a part of the Third Meditation that has been largely neglected, namely, its closing paragraph. Here, concluding his demonstration for the existence of God, the Divine Being, possessed with all the perfections and subject to no defects whatsoever23, Descartes writes as follows: But before examining this point more carefully and investigating other truths which may be derived from it, I should like to pause here and spend some time in the contemplation of God; to reflect on his attributes, and to gaze with wonder and adoration on the beauty of this immense light, so far as the eye of my darkened intellect can bear it. For just as we believe through faith that the supreme happiness of the next life consists solely in the contemplation of the divine majesty, so experience tells us that this same contemplation, albeit much less perfect, enables us to know the greatest joy of which we are capable in this life.24

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First of all, I would like to mention that this passage from the Meditations can be interpreted as a peculiar metaphysical equivalent of the Ignatian colloquy, an intimate conversation with God, which is a crucial constituent of the Ignatian spiritual exercises. As Zeno Vendler writes on this passage in his Descartes’ Exercises, this is a text that “could have been written by St Ignatius himself.”25 Vendler gives a detailed examination of the Cartesian use of the Ignatian method, contributing to the again and again recrudescending debate about this issue. Anyhow, in this particular case the Ignatian allusion seems to be defendable and what is more, this passage may be interpreted as endowed with real metaphysical relevance. What I would like to underline in this regard is that in its intellectual form, the passion of wonder appears as a primary instrument of the mind’s relation to God. In the Third Meditation we find the achievement of the peculiar focusing or concentration that by definition belongs to wonder. In the form of the idea of God—which represents an infinitely perfect being—Descartes encounters something extraordinary and unusual. In a letter to Mersenne from 1630, he writes that “most people do not regard God as a being who is infinite and beyond our grasp, the sole author on whom all things depend [but they] think it sufficient knowledge of him to know that ‘God’ means Deus in Latin and what is adored by man.”26 He warns that those who are satisfied by this formal definition without ascending to higher thoughts can easily become atheists.27 The text of the Meditations is certainly one piece of those higher thoughts. Here by the word ‘God’ is meant “a substance that is infinite, [eternal, immutable], independent, supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created both [the mediator] and everything else . . . that exists.”28 The Cartesian gesture of contemplation is the metaphysical realisation of the intellectual fixation which he mentions in the Passions, where he writes that the novelty of the object makes the new object retain in our memory through strengthening its idea “by an application of our intellect as fixed by our will in a special state of attention and reflection.”29 But if the object represented by this idea engenders wonder, then, by definition again, Descartes has either become acquainted with something of which he either had been previously ignorant, or with something entirely different from the things he had known before. Since Descartes applies a definition of God, we cannot speak about absolute ignorance here. However, this knowledge of God attained by the meditatio is indeed different from anything else he had known beforeʊotherwise it would not have been a source of wonder. But in what would this difference consist? What is the novelty that comes to Descartes’ mind through this knowledge of God? According to the text, this is the beauty of the immense light

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which is, in fact, God. This is a special element of transcendence that according to the Cartesian argument brings about the conclusion to the factual existence of a God whose definition is given in the text and who is represented by an inborn idea of infinitude. This transcendence reveals itself in the immensity of the light that the “darkened eye” of the human mind can bear only limitedly. Immensity as a divine attribute appears in several places in the Cartesian metaphysics as an expression of divine power, a special quality of His substantiality.30 Nevertheless, speaking of the immensity of the divine light, Descartes seems to allow another approach when speaking of God and his attributes. The Cartesian metaphysics of God turns out to be aesthetic in its essence: beauty is added to the list of the divine names and, what is more, this is a divine name which pervades all the attributes of the divine light. This aesthetic aspect can also be an important object of a wider analysis of Cartesian religious emotivism, especially if we consider that in the closing sentence of the paragraph cited above, Descartes speaks of the very same joy that we encountered earlier, and he describes it specifically as an internal passion within an aesthetic context. So, this special intellectual passion is produced not merely by divine infinitude,31 as divine beauty plays a crucial role in its production as well. It would surpass the limits of this paper to discuss the importance of this problem for early and medieval metaphysics and theology, as well as its decline in early modernity. Elsewhere I tried to argue that this divine name may prove to be a crucial element even of the Cartesian divine metaphysics.32 However, a full examination of this problem requires further investigation. Before concluding this investigation I would like to touch upon some further questions concerning the function of wonder in Cartesian science in general and in the metaphysics of God in particular. First, I would like to return to the thesis regarding the scientific significance of the passion of wonder. This thesis requires a certain complementary explication. One may argue that the notion of wonder appears only in the Third Meditation, where it is preceded on the one hand by the argument for radical doubt as the means of striving for knowledge, and on the other hand by the discovery of the cogito. However, the expansion of hyperbolic doubt performed in the First Meditation—though later it proves to be an instrument of the appropriate philosophical method—remains a negative element in the course of the foundation of knowledge. Taken in itself, hyperbolic doubt is the beginning of not knowing, of total and disturbing ignorance. The metaphysical discovery of the cogito in the second phase of the meditatio is really a turning point in this regard, and provides the first, albeit slight, piece of knowledge that is certain and unshakeable.33

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But it is a well-known fact that the existence of an infinitely perfect and trustworthy God is the final and ultimate warranty for the stability of the body of knowledge in Descartes. That is to say, the demonstration of the existence of the divine being—whose immense light evokes wonder— provides the ultimate stabilisation of knowledge. In fact, in the Second Set of Replies Descartes asserts that although an atheist can be clearly and distinctly aware of a mathematical truth, nonetheless “this awareness of his is not true knowledge, since no act of awareness that can be rendered doubtful seems fit to be called knowledge [and consequently he] will never be free of this doubt until he acknowledges that God exists.”34 It is important to stress that Descartes makes an essential distinction between an isolated act of awareness (cognition) from systematic, appropriately grounded knowledge (scientia). Descartes should not be characterised as an, as it were, theoretical atomist. His declared intention was to build a solid building of science. In other words, as Jeffrey Stout writes, “our term ‘knowledge’ was not part of the Latin or French vocabulary of Descartes’ thought, […] his problem was not with knowledge but with scientia”35 That is to say, scientia is not possible without attaining the knowledge of God. In this sense the internal passion of wonder in its metaphysicotheological context is intimately connected to the ultimate metaphysical ‘beginning’ of knowledge. Another dilemma concerning my approach may be whether it is legitimate to attribute an exceptional status to this short passage on contemplation found in Descartes’ treatment of the question of God, as well as in the development of his metaphysics in general. It is a matter of fact that we can find certain definitions and descriptions of God in the Meditations prior to the introduction of the decisive proof of the Third Meditation. In the First Meditation Descartes speaks of an omnipotent God who made him the kind of creature that he is.36 But at this point he is hesitant regarding precisely the trustworthiness of this God. This uncertainty remains when he shifts from the supposition of an unreliable God to the hypothesis of the deceiving demon, at least in the form of a dilemma regarding the existence of a good and reliable God. Again, the Third Meditation also contains a definition of God that precedes the one that leads to the demonstration of the existence of God. Discussing the issue of the objective reality of the ideas, Descartes speaks of an idea that gives him the understanding of “a supreme God, eternal, infinite, immutable, omniscient, omnipotent, and the creator of all things that exist apart from him.”37 Finally, in the passage which introduces the demonstration itself, Descartes writes that “[b]y the word ‘God’ I understand a substance that is infinite, eternal, immutable, independent,

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supremely intelligent, supremely powerful, and which created both myself and everything else (if anything else there be) that exists.”38 What is the difference between the preceding cases and the passage at the end of the Third Meditation, and how to defend the uniqueness of this fragment? What is important to realise is that in the passage discussed above, the object of Cartesian contemplation is not the idea of God but the attributes and the beauty of God himself. At this point we shift from a conceptual understanding of the word ‘God’ to the contemplation of the really existing divine being. As mentioned above, Descartes expressed his dissatisfaction with those who “stick at the syllables of his name and think it sufficient knowledge of [the divine] to know that ‘God’ means Deus in the Latin and what is adored by men.”39 This conception is criticised for being formal and empty, and in its place Descartes offers another one that not only gives a more complete description of God in the terminological sense, but—and this is the crucial point here—the very idea by means of which Descartes understands ‘God’ contains something—immensity, infinite perfection, i.e., the element of transcendence—that points beyond the sphere of pure mental representation and erupts into the field of real existence. This is the moment, in my opinion, that engenders wonder: the radical and real manifestation of transcendence. Descartes contemplates divine beauty; that is, the immense light of God (or, maybe, God as immense light) which ultimately surpasses the capacity of the darkened human intellect. The beauty of this immense light as such has not been mentioned among the divine names in the previous definitions of God. But on the occasion of the contemplation of God it plays a decisive role. It would surpass the limits of this paper to consider the consequences of this moment. Nevertheless, it evinces that there is a fundamental divergence between the former, conceptual approaches to God and the contemplation described in the closing paragraph of the Third Meditation. As Jean-Luc Marion has shown, metaphysically speaking it is the immensity of God that—through the application of the scheme of causation—renders possible a “new beginning of the Meditations.”40 Nevertheless, it is important to emphasise that in parallel with the model of the immensity of power and divine substantiality—and, consequently, with the logic of causality—Descartes also speaks of the immensity of divine light. That seems to imply the possibility of a new logic within the Cartesian approach to the Divine. This new logic, at the same time, has an essential connection with the peculiar intellectual form of wonder which appears in the text we have been analysing.

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Notes 1

This essay is an enlarged and revised version of the paper I presented at the conference Religious Emotions: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives (University of Antwerp, Belgium, 19-21 September 2005). I am indebted to the colleagues whose remarks on my paper helped me to complete the present version. 2 Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, J. Cottingham et al. (eds.), Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1984-91, iii. Correspondence, 305-14. 3 Letter to Chanut, 1 February 1647, 305-6; emphasis added. 4 T.S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry: The Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge, 1926 and The Turnbull Lectures at The John Hopkins University, 1933, Faber and Faber, New York 1993, 81. 5 Philosophical Writings iii., 309. 6 The Passions of the Soul, in Philosophical Writings, Op.cit., i., 381. 7 Pierre Guenancia: ‘Passions et liberté chez Descartes’, see this article on the web at http://www.itereva.pf/disciplines/philo/Enseignement%20de%20la%20philosophie /Bulletins/Bulletin2/pgbull2.htm. For the Cartesian discussion of internal emotions, see Passions of the Soul, 381. 8 Ibid. 9 Cf. Passions of the Soul, 350 and 353. 10 Ibid., 353. 11 Ibid. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 350. 14 Ibid., 353. 15 Ibid. 16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 Ibid., 354. 19 Ibid., 354-5. 20 Ibid., 355. 21 Ibid. 22 See on this question also Amy S. Schmitter: ‘Descartes and the Primacy of Practice: the Role of the Passions in the Search for Truth’, in Philosophical Studies 108, 99-108. 23 Meditations on First Philosophy, in Philosophical Writings, Op.cit., ii., 35, AT VII 52. 24 Ibid., 35-6. 25 Zeno Vendler, ‘Descartes’ Exercises’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 19, 1989, 193-224, 208. 26 Letter to Mersenne, 6 May 1630, Correspondence, 24-5.

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Ibid., 24. Meditations on First Philosophy, 31. 29 Passions of the Soul, 75. 30 Cf. Objections and Replies, in Philosophical Writings, Op.cit., ii., 116. 31 Cf. Laurence Renault, Descartes ou la félicité volontaire: L’idéal aristotelicien de la sagesse et la réforme de l’admiration, Presses Universitaires de France, Paris 2000, 50-92. 32 My short article, ‘Descartes és az isteni szépség’ [Descartes and divine beauty] was published in Hungarian, in Világosság , 47, 115-21. 33 Cf. Meditations on First Philosophy, 16. 34 Meditations on First Philosophy, 101. 35 Jeffrey Stout, The Flight from Authority: Religion, Morality, and the Quest for Autonomy, University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame 1981, 37. Cf. also the translator’s note in Meditations on First Philosophy, 101, n. 2. 36 Meditations on First Philosophy, 14. 37 Ibid., 28. 38 Ibid., 31. 39 Letter to Mersenne, 6 May 1630, Correspondence, 24-5. 40 Cf. Jean-Luc Marion, ‘The Essential Incoherence of Descartes’ Definition of Divinity’, trans. Frederick P. Van de Pite, in A. Rorty (ed.), Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, University of California Press, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London 1986, 297-338. 28

CHAPTER TEN THE PASSION OF CHRISTIANITY: ON BACH’S ST. MATTHEW PASSION AND RELIGIOUS EMOTIONS1 WILLEM LEMMENS

Culture, like religion, concerns the question that science leaves unanswered: the question of what you should feel. The knowledge it gives us is knowledge neither of facts nor means, but goals: the most precious knowledge that we have. —Roger Scruton The true religion should teach us about greatness and misery, should inspire us to self-respect and self-disgust, to love as well as hate. —Blaise Pascal

For Christianity, the figure of Christ incarnates the core of faith: the Saviour-Son who promises victory over the evil and finitude of earthly life, and is thus the way to eternal life in God. At issue in the Christian liturgy is identification with Jesus’ suffering and death, through which the faithful create precisely those “motivations, moods and attitudes” that, according to Clifford Geertz, are essential for religion as such.2 The affective transformation effected by liturgy seems essential for the believer to experience the joy and awe towards his Redeemer which foster simultaneously time the profound religious attitudes of consolation and trust. In the history of Christianity, the practice of celebration and worship, through which the story of Jesus and the symbolism of salvation are brought to life, has undergone several transformations both in content and in form. From the seventeenth century onwards, the Reformation brings about an internalisation of the identification with the figure of Christ. In contrast with the Catholic tradition, which is oriented toward externality and symbolisation, the Protestantism of Luther and Calvin emphasises the

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word and the intellectual-spiritual attunement of the soul to an intimate contact with God (and this in and through Christ). In connection with this, music—and more specifically song—has always played a prominent role in Protestantism. It is no coincidence that in German Protestantism of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the songful remembrance of Christ’s agony and death was transformed into an independent genre of liturgical music: as if through music the word of God is brought to life in a way that speaks most directly to the heart of the individual believer. Johann Sebastian Bach, the entirety of whose oeuvre has been called the ‘fifth gospel’, has also given us no less than four ‘passions’ in which Christ’s agony and death are commemorated in musical form. Inspired by the four gospels of the New Testament, as is generally known, Bach thus tried to give a peculiar musical expression to these different narratives of Christ’s sacrifice. Performed on the specified day of the holy week, these passions served for Bach’s eighteenth-century Protestant fellow believers as a ritual remembrance of Jesus’ sacrificial death: by integrating music and a reading of one of the gospels he created a narrative drama illustrating step by step the Easter mystery in a way that penetrated the hearts of the faithful. In this way, the musical expression of the Passion of Christ should bring about a transformation in the consciousness of the faithful in and through an intensified identification with his crucifixion. Ideally, if people are engaged with it, this identification should result in a sort of catharsis—the comforting awareness of the idea of salvation and a purified return to everyday life. Transgression of the everyday in and through the awareness of suffering and death—however it might be symbolised—is considered by figures such as Geertz and William James to be the core of religious experience tout court.3 At first sight we ‘enlightened moderns’, believers or nonbelievers, are still more or less familiar with this fact, certainly if we are confronted with the aesthetic symbolisation of the Christian Easter mystery in and through the music of, for example, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion. Or more accurately: we think we can form an image fairly easily of the concrete dynamic and meaning of this Christian symbolism and of the deep religious dimension brought to life in the musical experience of it. But is this really the case? Does the performance of a masterpiece such as the Matthew Passion, which even today still gathers together people of divergent religious backgrounds around Easter-time, comfort us in the same way as it did Bach’s contemporaries? Or more precisely, how do we ‘moderns’ experience the quest for purification and spiritual comfort which the Matthew Passion as a religious musical composition in one way

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or another wants to offer? No doubt, our life world differs fundamentally from Bach’s: we lack, whether we are believing Christians or not, the sense of strong embeddedness in the religious and narrative tradition of the Christian faith which was taken for granted by Bach and his contemporaries.4 It has been claimed that it is indeed the sublime music of the Matthew Passion as such that has the power to awaken in us a sort of primaeval religious identification beyond the limits of specific religious traditions and rituals. The music would thus function as the unique medium which brings about the transgression and inner transformation seen as the core of religious experience. If this is the case, then Bach’s music would not be the fifth Gospel but rather a sort of universal Gospel. In other words, the music would activate some kind of hard-wired religious sensitivity and evoke in the listeners emotions that are universally recognisable regardless of one’s cultural or religious background. In what follows I offer some critical comments on this way of thinking and propose to specify the uniqueness of the kind of emotional and affective transformation that is at stake in Bach’s religious music as such. A thorough understanding of this transformation necessarily presupposes, as I will argue, a deeply felt sense of the kind of ‘passion’ specific to Christianity.

1. Passion and passions Already in the late Middle Ages, the term ‘passion’ was assumed to mean ‘the Passion of Christ’. The Merriam-Webster also gives the following as the first meaning of ‘passion’: “the sufferings of Christ between the night of the Last Supper and his death,” immediately followed by; “an oratorio based on a gospel narrative of the Passion.” Merriam-Webster then distinguishes the following meanings of the concept of ‘passion’: “a powerful emotion or appetite”; “an intense, driving, or overmastering feeling or conviction”; “an emotion that is deeply stirring or ungovernable”; and, additionally, “ardent affection,” “a strong liking or desire for or devotion to some activity, object, or concept,” “sexual desire” or “the object of such desire.” In Bach’s eighteenth century, when one heard the word ‘passion’ one would undoubtedly think spontaneously of the story of Christ’s suffering; but in a derivative sense, the notion of ‘the passions’ also referred to the feeling of being affected by powerful emotions, with the emotion of ‘love’ occupying the central place, as is the case today (according to Merriam-Webster). To specify the significance of ‘passions’ requires greater nuance than simply equating ‘passions’ with ‘emotions’. Philosophy and psychology

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today seem to lack such nuance insofar as they understand ‘passion’ merely as an old-fashioned synonym for ‘emotion’, but this is seriously misleading. First of all, the contemporary notion of ‘emotion’ has a much more positive connotation than ‘passion’ or ‘the passions’ had in the eighteenth century (and in the entire history of philosophy). Furthermore, in Bach’s time people distinguished passions from feelings (‘sentiments’, Gefühle), and from affects (‘affects’, ‘affecte’). At the time the concept of emotion was simply not in use, only arriving to supplant the concept of passion (for example, in the English-speaking world) during the course of the nineteenth century, primarily under the influence of the Scottish Enlightenment (by figures such as David Hume and Thomas Brown). In the eighteenth century, ‘the passions’ were referred to by the French, German and Dutch respectively as: ‘les passions’, ‘die Leidenschaften’ and ‘de passies’. While the passions were viewed positively by such eighteenth-century authors as Hume, Adam Smith and Rousseau, in those days the ruling attitude was one of suspicion regarding all forms of nonrational ‘affections’ of the soul. Inspired by Plato and the Stoics, but also the early Christian Church Fathers, it was said that the passions were a sign of the irrationality and even (in Christianity) the sinfulness of humanity. A few decades after Bach, Kant, for example, would claim that the passions (along with feelings and affects) were a ‘sickness of the soul’ because they disturbed the pure functioning of reason. Passions, according to Kant, must simply be eradicated in order to make room for moral autonomy and rationality. Feelings and affects seem less heinous to Kant insofar as they are more a sign of weakness (a part of human nature) than an explicit source of irrationality and sin: entirely positive they would never be. And yet in the eighteenth century, specifically in philosophy and theology, still another, somewhat different vision of the affectivepassionate nature of humanity gained currency. In the English-speaking world, Jonathan Edwards introduced the notion of ‘religious affections’ which was actually built upon elements taken from the image of humanity as portrayed by St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas. In contrast to the purely corporeal passions, (religious) affections are a class of feelings that arise on the basis of ‘knowledge of divine affairs’, as Edwards proposes in his Treatise concerning Religious Affections of 1746.5 In German philosophy prior to Kant, particularly in the psychology of such authors as Christian Wolff, Moses Mendelssohn and Johann Tetens, a third faculty of feeling (das Gefühl), next to ‘will’ and ‘reason’, was recognised as constitutive of moral and religious life. This line would be advanced by Schleiermacher, who recognised direct feeling as the actual source and

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origin of religious experience. In fact, of old there has been in Christian anthropology a great sensitivity for the ambivalence of human passions and emotions. Ultimately, as Augustine had already advocated, it is precisely the passion of love that, when properly attuned, carries us toward God and raises humanity above its low, sinful nature. The same thought recurs in St. Thomas, who recognises in the Love of God the ultimate destination of human longing. This assertion is not without importance for the evaluation of the religious-cultural context of the St. Matthew Passion. As a typical liturgical oratorio, this masterful musical composition is embedded in the religious tradition of Protestant Christianity. Within this tradition the appreciation of inwardness and the emotional life of the faithful came to occupy a central position during the seventeenth and eighteenth century, for instance in Pietism.6 The role of music in the ritual remembrances of the Easter saga, like those performed in the Lutheran Leipzig of Bach’s time, should be understood against this background.7 The strict framing of the story of Christ’s Passion according to St. Matthew in a mosaic of chorales, meditative arias and reflective recitatives, had precisely the aim of bringing about an eradication of the irrational, sinful passions of the faithful by an intensified experience of purification and consolation. Music here served an essential mediating role to the extent that it infiltrated the soul of the listener with specific feelings and attitudes. For Bach, music is, as it were, the personal language of the soul, possessing an expressiveness that transcends the merely verbal. In a recent study of human emotions, Martha Nussbaum proposes that music gains unprecedented access to human emotions, more so than any other form of art.8 It is as if music taps into a dimension of emotional life that remains inaccessible to mere discursive reason and everyday consciousness. But what can this purifying effect of music have meant for Bach’s contemporaries? And what might it mean for the audience today, Christian believers as well as non-believers? First of all, it should be noted that for the sincere believer, attendance of a ritual—in this case the Matthew Passion during the Easter period—is not to be dissociated from the particular way of life and the inner striving for moral and spiritual elevation distinctive to the tradition of Christianity. Therefore, the mediating function of music should not be understood in too magical a sense—as if it in itself carries one toward a sort of religious core, which can be understood and experienced independent of the cultural context and tradition in which the Matthew Passion is embedded. It is rather that the expressiveness of the music is interwoven with an entire religious tradition and philosophy of life, which for the believer is only

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brought to life to the extent that the music speaks to one, moves one’s soul and stirs certain emotions. For this reason, the swell of emotions brought about by seeing and hearing the Matthew Passion could not (and cannot) be considered apart from the story of the Passion of Christ. For Bach and his faithful contemporaries, the musical experience fostered directly and in an almost implicit manner a deep love for the figure of Christ, symbol of God’s mercy and Redeemer of the sins of humanity. To awake this vivid experience of religious love, music was considered a uniquely adequate medium, because it touched directly the affective capacities of the faithful. But without the narrative context in which the musical performance is embedded, the transformation of the affective life of the listener in a religious way would not be possible.9

2. Comfort and Faith Against this background, the link between ‘passion’ and ‘comfort’ in the context of the Matthew Passion is obvious. This connection refers to a crucial aspect of Christian faith, the breeding ground of Bach’s magisterial creation. The remembrance of Christ’s suffering and death has always been the core of the Christian ritual. Christ’s suffering and eventual crucifixion is indeed the symbol, or better, the realisation of God’s love and mercy. As the Christian faith teaches, in the sacrifice of his Son, God has provided humanity with a source of comfort and hope in salvation. This mercy-sacrifice now takes part in a sort of paradox or, if you will, at least in the ambivalence of human nature (according to Christian anthropology). On the one hand, not only is the weakness, finitude and mortality of man brought to expression in the passion of Christ, but also, and above all, his ineradicable tendency to evil (what Kant calls das Böse).10 At the end of the Matthew Passion, after Christ has already been crucified, the force of evil inherent in human nature is expressed sublimely in chorus no. 58b & d and no. 61b & d. There, in a few phrases, Bach lets the blind cruelty of humanity resonate in the mockery and hubris of the high priests and the Roman soldiers toward their Saviour. Earlier in the piece, the same urge to do evil is expressed in the sublimely-oppressive chorus no.45b, “Lass ihn kreuzigen” (“Crucify him”), shortly after the thundering “Barrabam”. Man’s inborn sinfulness and weakness, but also his longing for remorse, is also expressed with an almost tragic sensitivity in the figure of Peter, in particular in the heartbreaking “Erbarme Dich” (aria no.39 of the Matthew Passion). On the other hand, the entire Matthew Passion draws as it were upon the human capacity for empathy, more precisely with the suffering of

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Christ. Indeed, Christ appears here as the ultimate object of identification. Participating in his passion is a source of sweet joy for the faithful, so beautifully announced in the poignant Aria a doi Cori no.20 (“Ich will bei meinem Jesu wachen”) and the sublime “Gerne will ich mich bequemen” (Aria no.23). Precisely this recognition of the role of empathy derives from a typical Christian appreciation of the emotions and passions as a source of elevation for moral consciousness and moral purification. The sinful, proud individual carries a burden of guilt for Christ’s death; and yet the same person is indeed capable of repentance by identifying with the suffering they have caused, and is therefore worthy of God’s mercy. This positive evaluation of empathy remains, in effect, coloured by the story of suffering. Christian faith today is sometimes confused with candy-coated philanthropy or naïve enthusiasm. Seen historically, this is misleading. Elevation of the spirit to the pure emotions of love, hope and awe for the greatness of God is in effect first made possible by a contrite withdrawal from the deluge of all-too-human passions and feelings: desperation and anxiety, guilt and shame, but also remorse and regret, deep compassion for the suffering Christ, and finally, trust in God’s mercy and goodness ‘despite everything’. Even more: one already catches a glimpse of this mercy by getting caught up in the suffering of Christ. Human existence may be a vale of tears, but redemption is to be found in the hope and trust in God. Also this tension between the longing for elevation and salvation and the tragic reality of the human condition as such is brought to expression in the St. Matthew Passion. Chateaubriand has welcomed this confrontation with the night of personal passions as the sublime kernel of the Christian view on human existence. In order to undergo the ‘jouissance’ of God’s Love, as he calls it in Génie du Christianisme, Christians attach themselves to “this world in order to multiply the sacrifices, and to make them more dignified by an extensive purification of the object of their desires.”11 According to Chateaubriand, the Christian religion itself appears here as passion, as “une sorte de passion qui a ses transports, ses ardeurs, ses soupirs, ses joies, ses larmes, ses amours du monde et du désert (…) Comme toutes les grandes affections, elle a quelque chose de sérieux et de triste.” In this sense Christianity distinguishes itself radically from the Greek ethos of the rational mastery of the passions and emotions (Aristotle), or from the alleviation of them through contemplation (Plato). Ecstasy, ascendance (to God) or descent (to the worldly), mixed with regular alternation between hope and desperation, guilt and penance, joy and suffering, and all of this in confrontation with the figure of Christ—this is the core of the Christian

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life of passion. It should also be clear that humanist faith in the ultimate goodness of—or at least manageability of—the emotions and passions so typical of the Enlightenment (with Hume and Smith, for example) or of modern liberalism (including Martha Nussbaum, among others) is indeed foreign to Christian anthropology.12 From all this it should be evident how specific the idea of ‘comfort’ is that echoes through the Christian teaching of salvation. ‘Comfort’ (or ‘consolation’) in the perspective of traditional Christian faith must be understood in a rich, substantial sense. It is not the fleeting sentiment of relief or the volatile moods evoked by some aesthetic rapture, caused for example by music from a genius like Bach. Related to ‘fidelity’, comfort points toward the fortifying of faith in and through participation in ritual. ‘Through comfort to perseverance in faith’, one might say. The St. Matthew Passion, as the expression of a religious ritual, thus offers comfort in the sense of encouragement for the man or woman of faith: one knows oneself strengthened in one’s desire for transcendence and contrition—despite one’s failings. But such a liturgical event also provides ‘comfort’ in the sense of “offering of consolation” or “relief of spiritual or bodily affliction.” Indeed, in the music, Christ’s sacrifice of mercy is commemorated in a dramatic, almost palpable manner. However mysterious it may be, this sacrifice is, in effect, for the Christian believer the answer to the suffering and finitude of earthly existence. Music strongly reinforces identification with the core of the Christian faith: it reaches right down into the intimate life of the listener. In this sense it may even be suggested that in Bach’s day and age—at least for the sincere faithful—the St. Matthew offered more than mere comfort. The experience of the passion of Christ is a confession of faith in which emotion and rapture sharpens one’s insight into the mystery of faith. Through faith, comfort here transforms the emotions and desires and repairs the trust of the faithful, a trust that can be interpreted as a form of knowledge of the divine.

3. From Religious Tradition to Music (and back) This brings us to a thorny question that often arises in discussions concerning the St. Matthew Passion. As a musical composition, Bach’s brilliant masterpiece can certainly be experienced divorced from its original religious-ritual context and can be a source of aesthetic enjoyment and reverie. But does this not imply that its proper experience gets lost insofar as it no longer fulfils the function it once had in the Christian tradition from which it originated?

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The question here, of course, is what one understands by ‘proper’. Two extreme positions are possible. A first proposes that the musical expression and the liturgical-spiritual content of the Matthew Passion are interwoven with one another. From this perspective, an authentic experience of this masterpiece seems almost impossible independent of a religious-faithful, indeed even specifically Christian-Pietist context. A second position asserts just the opposite. The religious framework of the Matthew Passion should only be considered as the circumstantial cultural mould into which Bach poured his universal, sovereign music—music that can be experienced as a pure emanation of beauty free from all cultural rootedness. For this reason it is not at all necessary that one hears and experiences the Matthew Passion within a strictly religious context: the universal value of its beauty resounds even for the nonbeliever (or for a believer from a different denomination). This second position sounds undoubtedly the most sympathetic and convincing in contemporary culture. It seems almost absurd to suggest that the non-believing atheist should doubt the ‘correctness’ of one’s emotion, amazement, fascination and the refined pleasure felt upon listening to the Matthew Passion. Furthermore, why would the nonbeliever fail to experience comfort from this musical experience, a comfort that goes beyond a mere momentary illusion and, in one way or another, even carries with it a sort of religious attitude? The necessity of trust and encouragement (possibly even of a spiritual nature) in one’s daily life is indeed a universal human need. Just as universal is the desire people have to give meaning to the mystery of existence, to the awareness of the finite and transitory nature of life, and to connect this desire with an entire vision of life. More specifically: feelings of guilt and shame; awareness of the malignancy of humankind versus an ideal of moral innocence and purity; the idea of redemption ‘beyond human comprehension’; yes, and even the deep love or longing to become ‘one’ with the absolute—are not all these ingredients of the Matthew Passion comprehensible and accessible for the modern Bach enthusiast regardless of his (or her) belief or disbelief? It seems incontrovertible. Without doubt, one does the Matthew Passion an injustice when one makes the aesthetic genius of this work of art dependent upon its purely liturgical function. If the experience of this musical composition was indeed only ‘authentic’ within the original religious-liturgical context from which it arose, then an authentic performance of it would no longer be possible today. For how many Bach enthusiasts still have the religious belief and strength of faith his contemporaries possessed? Is the aesthetic dimension of Bach’s music, and the emotive richness it evokes, not

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distinct from its strict religious and ethical significance and meaning? Who would dare to suggest that the beauty of a Greek temple is only ‘accessible’ to the faithful Greek in the fifth century before Christ (whatever one might understand by that ‘faith’)? Or that someone of the Jewish or Muslim faith cannot experience the magnificence of Michelangelo’s Last Judgment? From this perspective it makes sense to contend that the musical greatness of the Matthew Passion is unmistakeably accessible in every culture or any age where one finds people with the exceptional talent necessary to unleash the sublime beauty that lies enclosed in Bach’s score. Neither talent nor effort in service of the music, and even less the passion for listening to it, have anything whatsoever to do with religious faith or even devotion to a religious tradition. Still, this consideration requires some qualification. Recognition of the sovereign meaning and function of art is one of the indisputable achievements of Modernity. This recognition goes back to Romanticism and even leads to a sort of substitution of art for religion in our culture since the nineteenth century, if we may believe Roger Scruton. The sovereignity of art, especially of music, is indeed indisputable in our culture. But this produces an interesting dilemma for the defenders of the sovereignty of art and of Bach’s music as such.13 In order for religion (or what which remains of it today) to be truly meaningful, it must in one way or another be interwoven with human existence and with a totality of practices, convictions and attitudes that transcend the strictly religious. Religion, put differently, will only come to life if it addresses itself to people, appeals to them, mobilising their emotions and desires; in short, only if it creates a universe of significance that provides meaning and orientation to concrete existence. In this sense, every religion is embedded in a community and a shared cultural horizon of meaning. For this reason, the St. Matthew Passion only had meaning and content for the listeners in Bach’s time insofar as this oratorio was indeed more than a brilliantly conceived aesthetic work of art. Here art was woven organically into a way of life strongly embedded in a concrete historical and cultural horizon. What did this ‘way of life’ or life-form consist in? Well, among other things, it consisted in the attempt of the believer to attune one’s own life to the Christian tradition into which one was born. The musical experience of the Matthew Passion was thoroughly intertwined with the entire religious symbolism of Christ’s passion. Assuming this symbolism falls just outside the purely aesthetic, it is distinguished from it—and at the same time,

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irrevocably connected to it—insofar as the particular expressivity of the oratorio is irreducibly nourished by this symbolism. This interweaving of the ethical-religious and the aesthetic is not without its consequences for the contemporary perception of the Matthew Passion. To be sure, one can be largely estranged from Christian symbolism and the faith that is brought to expression in this masterpiece. One can see the narrative of Christ’s passion merely as a nice story - an allegory, if you will - of the mystery of human existence and the eternal longing of humans for consolation and redemption. And yet still one must not fail to involve this story in one’s own existence in one way or another to be able to really understand the dramatic religious message of it and to be able to experience in its full meaning the musical expression of this message. One must, or so it seems, in one way or another gain access to the deep despair of Christ on the cross, to Peter’s awareness of guilt and infinite sorrow, to the intimate longing for the love of Christ that comes to expression in the arias, to the realisation that only ‘redemption beyond human comprehension’ can overcome the deep-seated urge to do evil, and so forth, to actually experience in full the profundity and spiritual power of this work. In short, a tacit knowledge of the Christian tradition seems required to give meaning to this piece of art as such. But couldn’t we then say that the modern, liberal nonbeliever must also be familiar with the tradition of Christian faith in order to really know what the St. Matthew Passion ‘is all about’? If so, then it seems that more is needed to fully appreciate this work than the capacity for musical rapture and the receptivity to the beauty of Bach’s music. One needs to share the knowledge of a common culture, in this case, the Christian culture and the dramatic narrative of the Christ Saviour which stands at the center of the Christian symbolic order, to understand what Bach’s masterpiece is all about.14 This idea of a ‘shared’ knowledge may sound strange to both the liberal nonbeliever and the Christian believer, who are often considered to have opposed worldviews and a very different outlook on the human condition. One could even speculate about the willingness of the liberal and secular minded person to identify wholeheartedly with the logic of sin and redemption, despair and consolation which is central to the experience of the Matthew Passion. Nonetheless, I contend that the willingness to open one’s mind to this logic – even only in an imaginary identification – is necessary to really understand what the oratorio expresses and to experience the sort of consolation the story of Christ’s sacrifice offers to the believer. One may now ask how this capacity will evolve in the future in a culture where more and more people seem to have no idea whatsoever of

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even the basis of Christian faith, its traditional symbolism and the way of life in which this faith is externalised. Even more: the idea that emotions, along with the attitudes and meanings associated with them—shame and guilt, love and compassion, trust and hope, faithfulness and forgiveness, etc.—receive a unique interpretation in and through the Christian form of life sounds strange and even presumptuous to the ears of many people today. Such a symbolisation of affective life through a concrete religious tradition is often dismissed as a sign of ‘bad faith’, in which the nostalgia for a lost world resounds. For example, the Christian idea of ‘radical evil’ along with the notion of guilt and punishment associated with it; but also the idea of mercy and love of the absolute, have not only lost their power of expression but are sometimes even seen as downright threatening. But if the expressiveness of these emotions and the attitudes and meanings associated with them are undermined, will this not have an influence on the experience of art which appeals to—indeed, feeds upon—precisely this entire affective-spiritual reality? Perhaps Bach’s Matthew Passion—along with so many of his religiously inspired works—could fulfil a unique role precisely on this point. It is through an initiation to this masterpiece that contemporary humanity, believers or nonbelievers, can (again) get in touch with the staggering existential explosiveness of the passion story and the Christian symbolism of salvation associated with it. Perhaps what Iris Murdoch claims to be valid for all great art is also valid for Bach’s music: just like religion, art is a sort of method by which to develop a deep ‘moral’ vision of human life, a vision that cuts through the selfish, narcissistic consciousness of humankind and alleviates the banality of the everyday. According to Murdoch, through art (and religion), one learns to see what life is actually about, catches a glimpse of the True and the Good.15 Through its connection with human existence, art—truly great art—is thus actually always more than mere aesthetic enthusiasm or a form of sentimental consolation. In this sense, there is no reason not to recognise Bach’s Matthew Passion as a work in which the aesthetic and the religious are inextricably bound to one another. By virtue of its embeddedness in a concrete religious tradition the work gains its significance and uncompromising aura.

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Notes 1

This is a sligthly modified version of my article in Dutch: ‘De passie van het christendom. Over Bachs Matteüs-passie en religieuze identificatie,’ in Desiree Berendsen, Ann van Eechaute, Walter Van Herck (red.), Bewogen hart, verstilde ziel. Filosofische essays over religie en emotie, Damon, Budel 2006, 173-87. I thank Chris Gemerchack for his translation and Ortwin de Graef, as always, for his suggestions on style and argument. Of course, I take the responsibility for all remaining flaws in my argument. 2 Clifford Geertz, ‘Religion as a Cultural System’, in The Interpretation of Cultures, Hutchinson, London 1975, 90. 3 Cf. Geertz, op.cit.; William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, The Gifford Lectures 1901-2, Dover Publications, New York 2002 (1902), in particular Lectures VI and VII. 4 To be a religious believer has become ‘optional’, as Charles Taylor would say : it is not taken for granted anymore in contemporary Western Enlightened culture. For the individual believer in our secularised world a strong identification with Christian faith is a conscious choice, rather than an implicit commitment taken for granted. Cf. for this : Charles Taylor, A Secular Age, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass. 2007, ‘Introduction’. 5 Cf. Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003, 75. 6 In Catholicism as well, this tendency of a growing inwardness of belief can be traced, for example, in the Jansenism of Port Royal in the seventeenth century. On this cf. : Henri Brémond, Histoire littéraire du sentiment religieux en France, Armand, Colin, Paris 1967. 7 The role of Music in the liturgy (and thus in everyday life) of Bach’s time was remarkable. Cf. Cantagruel, Le Moulin et la rivière. Air et variations sur Bach, Fayard, 1998, 165 ff.. 8 Cf. Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of the Emotions, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001. 9 On the intrinsic relation between music and religion in the case of Bach, cf. : Gordon Graham, The Re-enchantment of the World. Art versus Religion, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2008. 10 Cf. Part 1 and 2 of Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone, Hoyt H. Hudson and Theodore M. Greene (trans.), Harpercollins, New York 1958. 11 Chateaubriand, Génie du christianisme, Part II.3.8, Garnier-Flammarion, Paris 1962, 302. 12 Cf. Martha Nussbaum, Op.cit. 13 Cf. Kees Van Houten, ‘De troostende Bach’, in Hendrik Opdebeeck (ed.), De Matthäus. Kan passie troosten? SPES-cahier, Tertio, 2005, 39-44. Van Houten considers the distinction between Bach’s religion-inspired and purely profane Music as contingent with respect to its religious meaning and expressiveness.

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For the relation between emotions and a common culture cf. : Roger Scruton, «Emotion, Practical Knowledge and Common Culture», in Explaining Emotions, ed. by A.O. Rorty, University of California Press, Berkeley 1980, 519-36. 15 Cf. Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Penguin Books, New York 1992, and in particular Chapter 4, ‘Art and Religion’.

CHAPTER ELEVEN EROTIC AND RELIGIOUS PASSION: REVISITING KIERKEGAARD’S PHILOSOPHICAL FRAGMENTS JAVIER E. CARREÑO

Johannes Climacus’ Philosophical Fragments1 stands out amongst Søren Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works for its ambitious, thoroughly anticlimatic project of philosophically proving the main of Christianity. This self-confessedly ludicrous enterprise, however, is far from being pointless, insofar as it introduces insightful explanations of religious conversion and the life of faith. Climacus’ revisiting of Christianity is founded upon the distinction between passion in general—the case of erotic love—and religious passion—which is faith. This distinction is no mere opposition, insofar as erotic love is entailed by faith. The study of this relationship may help establish that religious passion requires of the understanding not only to pursue its highest possibility, but also to realise that our true passion is to surrender to an other. Because reason is not blind to faith, but sees in it its passion, faith is not blind. We proceed first by analysing the situation of passion before religion called Socratic self-collectedness. Over-against this background we highlight the particular turn-to-self and to recollection in the mystical account of divine love in Chapter II of Fragments. Then we turn to the analogy between ‘the passion of erotic love’ and ‘passionate understanding’ at work in Chapter III.

1. Self-Collectedness as Method Kierkegaard’s Climacus understands that to explain the possibility of a Christian way of life to another who presumably, like Socrates, is not himself a Christian, means to explain the moment of conversion.2 The first step towards presenting conversion is a description of a preceding state, and the point will be to show that conversion is not so much the

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acquisition of a ‘new’ knowledge as the overhaul of the very way we learn3—and consequently, live. As a start, Climacus focuses on the method of Socratic learning, called anamnesis, or recollection, which serves as the archetypal model for the mind to encounter its objects.4 The theory of recollection holds that one can search for an idea only in virtue of already inherently ‘having it’, even though this is unbeknownst to the learner. In order for the mind to recollect the ideas latently present in the soul, the individual needs assistance—a teacher. Furthermore, this relation between the learner and the teacher must be nuanced so that the learner will not forget that the locus of truth—and, eo ipso, happiness—is his own subjectivity. Hence, the teacher must not claim to be the source of another’s idea, but his merit as teacher must be that of being the unobtrusive instigator of another’s self-reflection. Climacus calls “self-collectedness” (PF 11) this two-fold concern of the teacher for being a facilitator, i.e., for delivering what is already inchoative in the learner’s soul while keeping his own acumen for himself. For Climacus, only this social disposition effectively eases the learner’s begetting of the existential “self-knowledge [which] is Godknowledge” (ibid.) and which is the highest good par excellence. Since Socratic self-collectedness promotes disinterested justice and freedom in the highest realm of thinking, it is no wonder that Climacus hails it as the cornerstone of the Ethical. Accordingly too, lack of selfcollectedness makes the teacher-learner relation tyrannical. If the teacher captivates the attention of the learner without directing it towards truth, he would keep the latter forgetful about herself. Such forgetfulness would make of the learner a prime victim of sophistic exploitation. Simultaneously, too, the teacher would become mistaken about his place in the world, falling instead for the pursuit of prestige. Hence the strong condemnation that Climacus makes of ‘authorities’, i.e. those who claim to be sources rather than mere indexes of the truths that bloom in recollection: for an authority “does not give but takes away” (PF 11). Kierkegaard’s critique of the established church and academia is at stake5, but what is relevant for us is that what goes amiss in the absence of self-collectedness is passion. The teacher’s and the learner’s mutual disinterestedness in ‘discipleship’ is sustained by self-love; if either onebut especially the learner-develops a certain fondness of the other, selflove begins to wane and ‘passion for another’ (cf. PF 12) to wax. Both the enthusiasm of the learner for the teacher, and the teacher’s paternalism towards the learner are instances of ethical failures, because the sole point of Socratic teaching is for each to focus solely on acquiring the truthful and the good by self-reflection, recollection, and self-knowledge.

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Even though Climacus will show that passion for another is revelatory of religious transcendence, we must first take note of the sense in which this passion could also develop into the very obstacle of this revelation.6 The disadvantage of passion for life is that whoever is passionate for another risks becoming dispassionate for herself, and give up thinking for herself. In becoming dispassionate about oneself, one may unwittingly become an idolater by giving to the temporal, the circumstancial, and the transient the care and attention that solely belongs to the eternal7: “My relation to Socrates . . . cannot concern me with regard to my eternal happiness, for this is given retrogressively in the possession of the truth that I had from the beginning without knowing it” (PF 12). The primordial locus of truth, and therefore of happiness, is subjectivity, my own and that of each one for oneself.

2. The Moment Putting human relations on the horizon of temporal impermanency and depreciating their relevance to happiness raises some questions. Only a rather skewed analysis would render passionate love for another tantamount to the self’s forgetfulness of herself as the original locus of truth. Even the ideal of the Ethical life as the midwifery of ideas—which also fulfils the duty to treat the other as an end in itself (Kant)—ought not render human love superfluous. For human love claims that my happiness is put at stake in wholeheartedly loving an other. What, then, would have to change in the Socratic picture in order that an other would be truly of outmost importance for me? Climacus polemically responds: nothing changes in the picture if this other to whom I relate is a human other8, but if the other is the divine, then everything in this picture has to change, for this other is indeed an absolute other—a different kind of teacher. The first change in this picture consists in what it means to be related to the divine. A typically Socratic theology, such as Aristotle’s, claims that the god does not purport to meddle with the human because his activity as thought-thinking-itself9 is always for himself. Since man can be no Socratic teacher to the god—who, for sure, needs none such—the Aristotelian theology excludes that man would be of interest to the god.10 Yet, what if love, and not self-interest, was more to the essence of understanding the divine? What if the god’s love for an other did not run counter to the concept of the divine as thought-thinking-itself? Climacus invites us to think in the following manner: while the god’s love for himself is highest and complete—for “love does not have the satisfaction of need outside itself but within” (PF 24)—the worth of his love is in no

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wise diminished by the beloved being lower than himself. Divine love is not a movement out of a lack and towards an object on which the movement’s worth hinges, but on the contrary, the worth of divine love acquires an absolute character because of its origin. That the worth of love loses none of its essential absoluteness when its object is finite—in another registry, fallen—enables a moment of overlap between the infinite and the finite, where the asymmetry between the one and the other is most keenly felt: “The moment emerges precisely in the relation of the eternal resolution to the unequal occasion” (PF 25, emphasis added). Here the absolute intersects the finite, and the given historical time is no longer transient and contingent, but rather, it is the moment, the fullness of time.11 In and through this moment there is, to be sure, a self-emptying, a kenosis of the divine in the god-man, which, rather than resulting in the assimilation of the god to man, produces instead the strong realisation of their mutual disparity. Let us now turn towards the implications of the moment. The relation between the god and man originates in god, not in man, and the point of this love is to win man: “for only in love is the different made equal, and only in equality or in unity is there understanding” (ibid.). What does it mean to have equality, unity, and understanding with the divine? How can these seemingly metaphysical categories be grasped? The likeliest way to come to think of this process, according to Climacus, is through the language of love—for we all know what it means for a lover to aim at “winning” his beloved. A mystical recount of the god’s love will thus use the language of İȡĮıIJȒȢ and İȡȦμİȞȠȢ, lover and beloved, and basically formulate a story of eros. According to Climacus, “there is no perfect earthly analogy” (ibid.) for divine love—but the least imperfect and most elucidating of these analogies is a love tale.12 Thus Kierkegaard’s Climacus introduces his famous parable of the “king who loved a maiden of lowly station in life” (PF 26) to elucidate the means by which the god woos man. The story can awaken “the mind to an understanding of the divine” (ibid.) because in this setting we can understand why the lover would sacrifice himself in order to spare the beloved from self-deception. By means of the love story we realise that if the god were to fulfil the soul’s every desire (what Climacus calls winning the beloved by means of ‘erotic ascent’) without prompting the soul to ask why it needed to be ‘won over,’ the soul would be irremediably deceived. And the outcome of deception would be fatal; Climacus imagines that not even being placed in heaven could redress the sorrow springing from a soul discovering its unrepentant remorse for sin.

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We must take note of the fact that this care of the god not to deceive the beloved is of outmost importance for Climacus. The god becomes man in accordance with this truthfulness, together with the desire for man’s love to respond to the god’s love and not to the god’s grandeur. For “the god is not only zealous for himself but in love wants to be the equal of the most lowly” (PF 34). From this point onwards, throughout Fragments, we see this concern to avoid divine-made and man-made (self-)deception becomes the guiding principle for ‘deducing’ ‘Christianity’.13 Climacus has forewarned us that, while being the least imperfect of analogies, all the same the ‘love story’ falls short from fully reflecting divine love. To some extent, one would say that every analogy as analogy is imperfect, but these imperfections are almost mechanically filtered; the disparity between the analogising and the analogised bothers us little. In Climacus’ analogical description of the divine love, however, we meet an imperfection which is not easily filtered—one which is meant to tease us so intensely as to bring our analogising of the divine to a full stop altogether. This dramatic collapse is two-pronged. First, one cannot get away with “play[ing] light-mindedly with the god’s pain” (PF 34), that is, with the suffering of the god becoming flesh out of love, and then undergoing rejection by man—without being astonished and genuinely moved by the very disproportion of this suffering. Second, one cannot absolve oneself, as the peculiar storyteller or reader of this tale, from being addressed by the god’s “most terrible decision” (ibid.). For the rejection of the god’s love is hell; and just as the promise of this love is eternal, our rejection of it in time also becomes eternal. Whoever hears or tells this narrative cannot withdraw from its conclusions, but she must become selfreflective in light of its awful14 implications: When an oak nut is planted in a clay pot, the pot breaks . . . what happens then when the god plants himself in the frailty of a human being if he does not become a new person and a new vessel!. . . . And the situation of the understanding—how terrifying, for it is indeed less terrifying to fall upon one’s face while the mountains tremble at the god’s voice than to sit with him as his equal, and yet the god’s concern is precisely to sit in this way. (PF 34-35)

Thus Climacus challenges the belief, held from Aristotle onwards, that pity and fear are to be purged because they are the gravest impediments for right judgment. At least in terms of the divine, Climacus introduces the exception—where pity and fear facilitate right judgment. In fearing the divine, the learner does not flee from rationality, but rather revisits rationality itself in a new light: “the teacher thrusts the learner away”

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prompting the learner to “discover his untruth” (PF 14)—thus making a beginning in wisdom. By emphasising this coming-to-a-halt, Climacus introduces a distinguishing mark between Socratic passion and religious passion. To be sure, both Socratic teaching and religious conversion aim at triggering self-reflexivity—not as a mere thought-experiment, but as an actual event in the here-and-now. However, the heightening of passion by means of self-reflection in Socratic teacher/learner relations does not offer selfsurrender as a conscious possibility. In the moment, on the other hand, self-reflection arises for the sake of making self-surrender a conscious and free decision. This is the very peculiarity of the story of the god-mademan. Even if one doubts that the god became flesh, one cannot discard it as impossible—for it is now feasible in thought that the god may become man in history out of love for man. What does this mean for the existing individual? Nothing less than facing the possibility of surrendering wilfully to a god whose goodness for concealing his divinity speaks of his honest concern for the learner, and of the promise lying within this concern. The surrendering, the accepting of this promise, is the acquisition of an indelible mark by means of which one becomes accountable for eternity. After this mark, one cannot return to the secure primacy of the selfrelation, spelled out by Socratic self-collectedness: one is neither the locus of truth nor of happiness, but both depend on my relation to the divine other. Somebody speaking on behalf of erotic love, however, could object that self-surrender is not exclusive to the religious, for it is also found in passionate love: I am, in a way, ‘in the hands’ of the beloved. Keeping this objection now in mind, we turn to the further specification of religious passion, namely, its appeal for passionate thinking.

3. Passionate Thinking Kierkegaard’s Climacus has capitalised on the discovery of divine love’s gravity, which, as a mere ‘love story’ collapses and thereby introduces self-reflection. Is the sense for the divine, then, only acquired through myth, poetry, and the mystical—but not through rational thinking? Is reason in search of the divine a defeat to no avail? Climacus’ concern at the onset of Chapter III of Fragments is that this is not the case, but if anything, the very opposite: reason, the movement of thinking, is passionate, and the grasping of passion in reason gives us the very key to the divine encountering the mind. For the passion of understanding is the origin of faith. In the following, we will see how this strategy of

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presenting the intellect as passionate goes hand-in-hand with the analogue of passionate love. Climacus begins by referring to the beginning of Plato’s Phaedrus, where Socrates tells Phaedrus that he, Socrates, has no time to disprove the existence of mythical creatures, not only because it is a bootless kind of philosophy, but also because he does not know who he is (cf. Phaedrus,15 229d ff.). We find it paradoxical that a man who has so genuinely strived for self-clarity and self-reflection has not, at the dusk of his life, attained the self-knowledge he longed for (and, consequently, has not aimed for the knowledge of divine beings)—as if the genuine purpose of thinking was not the acquisition of concrete (self-)knowledge. That the understanding always seeks without securely finding can likewise be rendered as the understanding paradoxically seeking to understand what cannot be thought of. This formulation of man’s understanding suggests that, on the surface, the drive to understand in virtually endless because it can never attain its object. However, on a reflective level, this means that the understanding is finite and limited. The seeming infinity springing from finitude is a paradox—and the name ‘paradox’ here is fitting if we understand by it an obstacle that compels the thinker to plunge, not into irrationality, but into critical self-reflection. Critical projects are the order of the day in Modernity. But there is a reversal of Modernity in Climacus’ Fragments when he renames this paradox affecting the thinker the god.16 Let us spell out what is at stake in this renaming. Common to philosophical projects since Plato is the notion that the vision of the divine engenders an endless contemplation: this paradigm, grounded in the unbounded movement of the mind, is most patent in the Hegelian transformations of Spirit. In religion, on the other hand, the vision of the divine in this world is death (cf. PF 30). Is there a solution for this antinomy? According to Climacus, yes—precisely the interpretation of the understanding as passionate. For on the one hand it is true that the mind would not experience such boundlessness if it did not have, as Socrates says, “something divine in it.”17 Yet on the other hand the divine intends to deliver a death of sorts—the “dying of our old selves”—and this death is endured by man in his (self-) understanding. Let us now see in more detail how passion articulates this antinomy. There are two co-ordinates for gathering passion. First, passion is of a transitive aspect: to have passion is to be passionate. Second, passion circumscribes a movement of intensification that yields, contrary to expectation, a paradoxical resolution: a downfall. This downfall is not quite like ‘losing heart’ in a given task; in Climacus’ analysis, the downfall is a collision: .

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Though one tends to associate emotions and appetites with passion, strictly speaking few events can qualify as passion in Climacus’ sense. Poetic and artistic examples readily come to mind: artistic representation is passionate wherever the visible manages to put itself aside and open up a space for the invisible, the non-representable. A work of literature according to passion is one where the literal level goes to the ground so that a metaphorical, non-verbal sphere of meaning can open up. Thus in poetry the spoken or the written word truncates itself for the sake of the unspoken, the silent—that which lacks straightforward signification. Passion is latently present here even when it does not cross the artist’s or the poet’s mind that her aim is paradoxical. So it is with the thinker. By means of method she aims at clarity and intelligibility—and yet any given thinker’s systematic account abounds with inconsistencies and lacunas. These moments of ‘aphonia’ are not, according to Climacus, just petty mistakes. Instead, they are collapses with something greater than the mind: genuine encounters with the divine. Climacus illustrates this collapse in the following fashion. At the onset, the thinker is dissatisfied with the knowable—all that can be recollected under the rubric of anamnesis—and acknowledges the pursuit of the unknowable. The dissatisfaction does not quell with the idea (peculiar to Idealism) that it is absurd to posit the existence of something that cannot be known: the thinker has the sense that he is not in a witch-hunt, and hence his passionate pursuit of the inscrutable is exacerbated, propelling his endeavor into several shortcomings. The first of these is the failure to prove the existence of the unknowable (the god) in a meaningful way (cf. PF 39, ff.) because proofs are either explicating concepts or naming objects, but never deciding the existence of realities. If one does not start with the existence—the actual “being there” of the divine, there is no proving of him.18 The second is the failure to describe the unknowable (the god) by way of inverting the predicates applied to man (immortal, omnipresent, omnipotent, etc.), for in these terms, differences (inequalities) are attained arbitrarily: reason itself cannot arrive at what is other than itself by negating itself on its own, insofar as it presupposes and employs itself all along. The third failure—evidently borrowed from Plato’s Theaetetus (cf. 209D)—is that in order for the understanding to

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grasp the identity of what is wholly other than itself, it first has to grasp the difference (cf. PF 45, ff.), which is aporetic – but not purposeless, since it teases one key question: what is the difference between myself and the unknown? The answer lies in myself – and here at least the understanding meets its own Waterloo: [T]he understanding has strong objections . . . and yet, on the other hand, in its paradoxical passion the understanding does indeed will its own downfall. But the paradox [the god], too, wills this downfall of the understanding, and thus the two have a mutual understanding, but this understanding is present only in the moment of passion. (PF 47)

Against the infamous critique of Kierkegaard as either an irrationalist or a fideist we soon notice that the downfall is not a descent into irrationality, and essentially for two reasons. First, it befalls on the understanding to answer the question of the difference between the unknown and oneself, which is sin, the recollection of myself as sinner. As Chesterton puts it, “a man can divide himself from God, which, in a certain aspect, is the greatest distinction of all.”19 Second, and more importantly, the passionate thinker already knows that our true passion lies in surrendering to an other who is missing. Were it not for this precious insight, the downfall of the understanding would not just be ‘madness’: it would be traumatic – like throwing oneself into the arms of a stranger which could crush as much as embrace. And the thinker learns this in and trhough erotic love.

4. The Imperfect Metaphor of Erotic Love The aforementioned evolvement of passionate understanding into religious understanding undeniably hinges on one strong given: that any passionate drive, whether consciously or not, seeks its own downfall, finding its climax in an anti-climax. Yet it is difficult to consent spontaneously to this idea. Climacus is aware of this shortcoming, and thus he gives evidence for the nature of passion by providing the analogy to the passion of erotic love [Elskov]: A person lives undisturbed in himself, and then awakens the paradox of self-love as love [Kjærlighed] for another, for one missing. (Self-love is the ground or goes to the ground in all love, which is why any religion of love [Kjærlighed] we might conceive would presuppose . . . to love oneself in order to command loving the neighbour as oneself). (PF 39)

Anybody can fathom how a self-collected individual suddenly ‘falls in love’ with another and becomes credulous towards this other. Climacus’

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finest insight here is the realisation, however, that the immense power of the other for whom I am erotically opened lies in his/her absence, in not quite yet being there. This other may inhabit my imagination and be addressed copiously in thought—but precisely this excess points to a negativity in the relationship with this other: she is not there in a positive sense for me, and her absence is precisely what intensifies her impact on me. Hence the adjective “paradoxical” attached to passion: the absence of the other is the very condition for my passionate falling in love with her. That I fall passionately in love with an other that is not there as a correspondent of my love entails that there is continuity—describable in terms of potency, act, İȞȑȡȖİȚĮ, and finality—between my self-love, and passionate or erotic love: Self-love lies at the basis of love [Kjærlighed] but at its peak its paradoxical passion wills its own downfall. Erotic love also wills this, and therefore these two forces are in mutual understanding in the moment of passion, and this passion is precisely erotic love [Elskov].20 (PF 48)

Self-love (on the basis of which self-collectedness emerges) is already passionate: inchoatively, erotic love is at work within it, like a Socratic daimonon, preparing the person (which has so far loved herself) for the moment of complete self-surrendering which is erotic love as such. Almost the same, nearly instantly recognisable situation takes place when the understanding, as it reaches the apex of passion, no longer understands itself, but brings itself down: Just as the lover is changed by this paradox of love so that he almost does not recognise himself any more . . . so also that intimated paradox of the understanding reacts upon a person and upon his self-knowledge in such a way that he who believed that he knew himself now no longer is sure (PF 39).

Yet, if the parallel fits so nicely, why should we come short of saying that religious conversion is identical to the erotic opening for the one missing par excellence? Time and again Climacus has insisted that the transformation of selflove into love for one missing is an imperfect metaphor for religious conversion (cf. PF 48, 49). What this means is that passionate love cannot carry us, cannot transfer us over into the passion of the understanding, that is, into the moment of conversion. Faith as the passion of the understanding is not an offshoot of opening up in love for another. Furthermore, erotic passion cannot give us the right picture of the passion of the understanding, for erotic love is the passion of love, a moment

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immanent to the transformation of self-love into passionate love for an other. As Climacus says, “love . . . does not change the beloved, but changes itself” (PF 33). But the god is love, and changes itself by taking the form of man, that the beloved may change starting with the latter’s self-recognition of the difference. That is, the god is not a moment immanent to the transformation of self-understanding into passionate understanding. The god is beyond the thinker’s understanding, and is a veritable other to the understanding: “for the learner is indeed untruth” (PF 14) and absolutely other to the truth. The learner “will not be able to set himself free” (PF 17) the way she sets herself free in loving an other. But Truth sets her free, and she understands. We refrain from concluding, however, that erotic love, being unable to break man free from sin, is therefor deceitful or condemnable as solely sensual. On the contrary, there is nobility to erotic love, a positive value that is reaffirmed in being a restricted metaphor to the encounter with the divine. On this score we are reminded of how Vigilius Haufniensis (Climacus’ editorial twin) would express the worthiness of erotic love: The expression of spirit for the erotic is, therefore, that it is simultaneously the beautiful and the comic. Here there is no sensuous reflection upon the erotic, for that would be sensuality, in which case the individual would lie far below the beauty of the erotic: rather, it is the maturity of the spirit. (Concept of Anxiety, 69).

On behalf of this maturity, we would also like to cite a biographical example. There is a memorable passage in Viennese Psychologist Viktor E. Frankl’s retelling of his concentration-camp experience during World War II, where the author acquires substantial strength and endurance in the almost iconic, imaginary contemplation of his wife. He has not seen her after years of confinement and hardship, but his thinking of her does not have the quality of longing. At some point, while thinking of her, he comes to the realisation of something else: [F]or the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love. . . . For the first time in my life I was able to understand the meaning of those words, “The angels are lost in perpetual contemplation of an infinite glory.”21

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Conclusion In light of the foregoing we note that Climacus’ presentation helps us understand religious conversion as a unique event of self-reflection and self-surrendering, which differs 1) from Socratic midwifery and 2) from erotic love. Out of this process of identity and difference comes the necessity of both genuine divine transcendence and genuine self-reflection as preconditions for religious passion. Thereby, too, we find arguments against 1) the confinement of religious passion to a place beyond the reach of reason, and 2) the reduction of faith to a mere alternative within the horizon of man’s self-understanding.

Notes 1

Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments, or a Fragment of Philosophy by Johannes Climacus, edited and translated by Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1985. Henceforth Fragments or PF. Cross references to the Danish, whenever they are not in the Hong translation, I draw them from the Samlede Værker, Bind 6: Philosophiske Smuler, Begrebt Angest, Tre Taler ved tænkte Leiligheder. A.B. Drachmann et al. (eds.), Gyldendalske, Copenhagen 1978. 2 Since for Climacus Christianity does not describe a state of being but a process of becoming, the description of conversion spells out everything that is essential to Christianity. Cf. Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments Vol. I., edited and translated by H.V Hong and E.H. Hong, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1992, cf. Part 2, Sect. 2 Ch IV, Div. 1, §3, 381 ff. 3 Climacus emphasises the point that becoming religious cannot be the learning of something new, but it is the acquisition of a capability, or else conversion, just like the discovery of other pieces of knowledge, is rather insignificant: “If the learner is to obtain the truth, the teacher must bring it to him, but not only that. Along with it, he [the teacher] must provide him with the condition for understanding the truth” (PF 14). 4 Since Aristotle onwards, Plato’s theory of learning by means of recollection has been severely criticised, to the point of making Climacus’ reduction of all ways of learning to this model objectionable. Yet perhaps Climacus is not far off the mark when he sees in German Transcendental Idealism a certain family resemblance with the Socratic theory of recollection. If we agree that every object of cognition and every world as horizon have been transcendentally and a priori constituted by the mind, then the acquisition of knowledge is, roughly speaking, a kind of ‘recollection’—an acquisition of the given as transcendentally pre-given. This reduction to a transcendental ego is also the leitmotiv of transcendental phenomenology—hence the relevance of Climacus’ assimilation of all

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philosophies to anamnesis. Cf. Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, trans. by David Carr, Northwestern University Press, Evanston (IL) 1970, §54ff. 5 Even though we would like to sustain the distinction between what Kierkegaard thinks and what Climacus says (following Kierkegaard’s own suggestion, in A first and a last explanation (In Concluding Unscientific Postscript Vol I, 625 ff. See also Merold Westphal, ‘Placing Postscript as a Pseudonymous text’, in Becoming a Self: A reading of Kierkegaard’s Concluding Unscientific Postscript, Purdue University Press, West Lafayette 1996), the rejection of authority and of ‘Christendom’ can be identified as a Kierkegaardian leitmotiv through and through (Cf. Stephen Mulhall, Faith & Reason, Ch.1: ‘The idolatry of reason,’ Duckworth, London 1994). Without going into further detail, we are diffident of Climacus’ lambasting of authority, and some evidence for our suspicion is found in the final chapter of Fragments, where Climacus undergoes all sorts of contrived acrobatics to spuriously demonstrate that the mere hear-saying of the god becoming man is sufficient for religious conversion. Not only is this picture of religion distant from anything Biblical (denying the role of ministering in the economy of grace); it is also not psychologically feasible, for not just any man converts on a rumour— though some do—and for most the life of holiness is not immediate, without necessarily faltering on authenticity. Fans of Climacus’ take on Christianity should be wary of some of the bizarre conclusions that they have to accept, for instance, Climacus’ claim that the god-man, in his immediate contemporaneity, “must expressly wish its [the contemporaneity’s] termination lest he [the disciple] be tempted to see with his physical eyes and to hear with his mortal ears—all of which is wasted effort” (PF 106). Can the god-man and all learners be therefore so indebted to the Judas figure that triggered the deliverance from immediate contemporaneity? 6 Even if Climacus is using a Platonic problematic and a Greek situation—i.e., the problem of pederasty in Greek learning—it is quite evident that Climacus is placing an homologous Judeo-Christian denouncement of the carving of intellectual idols who suppress, with their discourse of truth’s historical evolution, everyone’s equidistance to the truth as found in inwardness. By taking the extreme here, Kierkegaard’s Climacus denounces as antithetical to Socratic midwifery and to Christianity what is, after all, a strong issue for both currents—i.e., the unfolding of truth as a gift that requires active response in history and for the sake of other actually existing, yet historical, actors. 7 “The temporal point of departure is a nothing, because in the same moment I discover that I have known the truth from eternity without knowing it, in that same instant that moment is hidden in the eternal, assimilated into it in such a way that I, so to speak, still cannot find it even if I were to look for it” (PF 13). 8 “[F]or even if a divine point of departure is ever given, this [Socratic midwifery] remains the true relation between one human being and another, if one reflects upon the absolute and does not dally with the accidental but with all one’s heart renounces understanding the half-measures that seem to be the inclination of men” (PF 10). Eventually Climacus will suggest that, once one is in the religious, and

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self-love goes to the ground in love-of neighbour, our relation to the human other changes. Whether Climacus in the end overcomes the stern subjective ‘monadology’ secured by the Socratic principle of self-collectedness is, to my mind, rather doubtful; however, this failure is in no way detrimental to the lucid insights of Kierkegaard’s own Works of Love. 9 Cf Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book XII (Ȝ) Chapters 6ff. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, transl. by W.D. Ross. Vol II, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1995. Climacus introduces Aristotle’s definition of god as unmoved mover in PF 24, but I concur with Evans in that the introduction of Aristotle here makes for a completely un-Aristotelian understanding of the divine. Cf. C. Stephen Evans, Passionate Reason: Making Sense of Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments, Indiana University Press, Bloomington 1992, 47. 10 Climacus’ implicit critique is that this description of the divine absolves both god and man from a mutual relationship, making it precisely contingent, ruled by mere chance, simply occasional. God, randomly and unawares, provides the principles of intelligibility for man, but this is as much as the Aristotelian theology can propose. How, then, can one challenge Aristotle on this score? From what follows, it becomes obvious that Climacus will do so by undermining Aristotle’s claim that “the primary objects of desire and of thought are the same” (Metaphysics 1072a27). 11 For further elaborations on the moment and its timely implications refer to Søren Kierkegaard, The Concept of Anxiety: A Simply Psychologically Orienting Deliberation On The Dogmatic Issue of Hereditary Sin, by Vigilius Haufniensis, edited and translated by Reidar Thomte with A.B. Anderson, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1980, in particular Part III introduction. Also Louis Dupré, ‘Of Time and Eternity’, in International Kierkegaard Commentary: The Concept of Anxiety, ed. by R. Perkins, Mercer, Macon 1985, 111-132. 12 Just as Kant was keen on avoiding the error of deducing morality from nonmoral sources, so does Kierkegaard’s Climacus avoid elucidating divine love by means of something other than love. However, Climacus’ choice of erotic love here as the guiding metaphor for conversion should not be taken for granted. Commentators of Climacus note that Climacus is not quite a Christian, and we find relevant philosophical evidence for this claim when he makes the story of erotic love—a ‘love-tale of two’—the leading metaphor for the encounter of the divine. Especially a Christian would say that approximating religion through the passion of Eros can be misleading because there is an even better, less misleading metaphor—namely, family relations, family values. Union, equality, understanding—these are more aptly understood in the context of the family than in the context of passionate love. The scandal of Judeo-Christianity is the idea of covenant as seeking divine sonship (cf. in this regard Scott Hahn, Swear to God: The Promise and Power of the Sacraments, Doubleday, New York 2004). 13 Cf. Anthony Rudd, ‘The moment and the teacher: problems in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments’, in Søren Kierkegaard: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers. Vol 2: Epistemology and Psychology, D. W. Conway and K. E. Gover (eds.), Routledge, London 2002, 257-275. I concur with much of Rudd’s

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critique of Climacus’ ‘proto-Christianity,’ although I would debate with him whether an acceptable view of Christianity would need to have an inter-religious theory of salvation. Be that as it may, even though Climacus intensely uses Biblical references, it is true that he has stripped away from Christianity not only accounts of miracles, works of grace, and discipleship in the form of a community, but also essential dogmas such as the atonement, for which Climacus offers, at the end of Fragments, a thoroughly unconvincing account (as noted in n. 5 above). 14 We understand the term awful here in both positive (awesome, awe-provoking) and negative (sublime) connotations. 15 Plato, Phaedrus, in The Collected Dialogues of Plato, trans. R. Hackforth., E. Hamilton and H. Cairns (eds.), Princeton University Press, Princeton 1961, 478. 16 I would like to refer here again to Evans’ analysis of Fragments. In the 4th chapter of his Passionate Reason he provides a helpful analysis of the schools of interpretation on what the paradox is. The consensus is that the paradox, the very offence to thought, is the incarnation, the god-man; the debate, whether the thought of the god-man is irrational or not (cf. 98). That the paradox is not just the god but more specifically the god-man springs from the specification that the paradox receives in the fourth chapter of Fragments, when Climacus says that “the presence of the god in human form . . . is precisely the teaching” (55). This further specification of the paradox as the incarnation is not taken into account in our present analysis, because Climacus himself notes, with the example of Socrates, that the paradox is already latent in the experience of merely thinking the divine and becoming self-reflective. 17 Plato, Phaedrus 230a. This passage is quoted twice, in Greek and in translation, in Fragments 37and 39. What fascinates Climacus so much about this passage is not only the fact that Socrates—a sinner from a Christian point of view—not only asks whether there is something divine in him but also whether he is a ‘Typhonic’—i.e., arrogant, monstrous—creature. Climacus reads Socrates in this passage as precisely coming to the point of self-surrendering which prompts the retrieval the consciousness of sin. 18 Not without reason, readers have found striking similarities between Kierkegaard’s Climacus and Anselm, not only on the grounds of the coincidence of the book titles (Anselm has his own Philosophical Fragments too) but more relevantly, there are three common elements: 1) Both authors agree that a proof of god, while being a useful mental exercise, is not meant to become a consuming task for the one who already begins with the active belief (in Anselm’s case, the prayer) that God exists. 2) Arguably Climacus’ arguments resemble Anselm’s famous Ontological proof when the former points at the understanding’s coming to a great confirmation/realisation out of a mental experiment. Finally, both authors coincide that there can be a salutary effect for the soul out of trying to command a proof. For further discussion, cf. John D. Glenn, ‘Kierkegaard and Anselm.’ In International Kierkegaard Commentary: Philosophical Fragments and Johannes Climacus, ed. R.L. Perkins, Mercer, Macon 1996, 223-43. 19 G.K. Chesterton, St Thomas Aquinas / St. Francis of Assisi, One volume edition, Ignatius, San Francisco 2002, 59 (emphasis added).

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20 We are of the idea that this enigmatic formulation of the paradox of erotic love could be most clearly understood in casuist terms. Climacus wants to make a parallel between 1) the collapse of the thinker with the divine, and 2) the collapse of passionate self-love with erotic love [i.e., self-love reversing and erotically opening to the one missing]. The first conflict is possible because there is an absolute difference between the thinker and the divine. The difference between self-love and erotic love in the second conflict, however, can hardly be compared; it is a difference between first cause and finality resolved in actuality. 21 Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning, Pocket Books, New York 1984, 57.

CHAPTER TWELVE C.S. LEWIS ON MYTH AND FACT IN AFFECTIVE AND RELIGIOUS LIFE ANN VAN EECHAUTE

And you and I have need of the strongest spell that can be found to wake us from the evil enchantment of wordliness which has been laid upon us for nearly a hundred years —C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

The primary question I wish to address here is quite simply this: how are we to understand religiously relevant affectivity? In an attempt to gain insight into the manner in which believers themselves experience and write about their affective life, I turned to C.S. Lewis. Do not the titles of his autobiographical and essayistic work refer to important emotions, such as joy, grief, pain and love? I soon discovered, however, that his work is also preoccupied with the refusal to recognise as ‘emotional’ such phenomena as joy and the most significant events in life. Should one interpret this, as some do, as a purely personal distrust, a puritanical or stoical attitude towards life? On the contrary, the life and writings of Lewis—his fighting in the war, his religious conversion, and his dutiful and passionate commitment to the two main women in his life—reveal another picture. Although Lewis described his conversion as highly antagonistic to his own inclinations towards a comfortable life of ‘safety first’, he nonetheless accepted Christianity, which for him meant an upheaval of both his person and his life. For Lewis, the God of the Christian faith does not teach stoical and puritanical lessons. Lewis writes in The Weight of Glory: If there lurks in most modern minds the notion that to desire our own good and earnestly to hope for the enjoyment of it is a bad thing, I submit that this notion has crept in from Kant and the Stoics and is no part of the Christian faith. Indeed if we consider the unblushing promises of reward

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He however also refutes these ‘promises and rewards’ as a mercenary affair. Desire and longing for example can only come about after one has disciplined oneself with obedience to some practice. Longing cannot be an end (or an aim) in itself; it is a by-product of some proper activity in which one is deeply engrossed. If it becomes an end in itself and is pursued directly (‘mercenary’ or purely for the gain), it turns into a “dumb idol, breaking the heart of their worshipper” (WG 98). These remarks are in keeping with Lewis’ general treatment of the phenomena of desire, longing and the natural loves: they are seen as goods but can only come about or survive under particular circumstances, such as attention given to something else, obedience or charity. Also, these enjoyments and rewards do not imply that the Christian life will be an exemplar of wholeness and emotional integration. That Lewis and Chesterton do not show many signs of either emotional conversion or integration, elicits from David Leigh the following conclusion: “Unlike what is suggested by some contemporary psychologists of religion, holiness is not necessarily wholeness.”2 There are several passages to be found in Lewis’ work where this “disintegration” or “tension” does not appear as a contingent defect, but as an intrinsic feature of Christian life. One cause for the lack of wholeness could be the much more intense confrontation with, and knowledge of, sin, which Lewis believes the Christian life introduces: “No man knows how bad he is till he has tried very hard to be good . . . and Christ, because He was the only man who never yielded to temptation, is also the only man who knows to the full what temptation means.”3 Another cause is the uncertainty about and dependence upon God’s ways with us. Lewis’ lack of emotional integration is thus not a contingent defect, but is rather an integral part of what Christianity meant to him. Moreover, as we will see below, Lewis deeply distrusted the constitutive importance of emotions for religious life. So neither mercenary arguments nor emotional welfare can be used as an argument in the defence of Christian life in education. This brings me to a further question I wish to raise: Could fictional work or other related means perhaps be successful in religious education? Considering Lewis’ anthropology and views on the language of religion, this question can be restated as follows: How is the heart, the “innermost” or “real centre”4 of man, affected or touched by poetic language in religiously relevant ways? In an attempt to answer this question, I start with an account of Lewis’ views on religious language in general and his views on the aestheticliterary appeal of Christianity in particular.

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1. The poetic quality of Christian language In his essay “The Language of Religion”, Lewis differentiates ordinary, poetic and scientific language, while religious language—not being a language of its own—moves between the aforementioned uses or forms of language. Religious language typically hovers between ordinary and poetic language. Under dialectical pressure, however, it can move either towards the scientific style and become theology, or towards the poetic style. Theological language is “often necessary, for purposes of instruction, clarification, controversy and the like. But it is not the language religion naturally speaks. We are applying precise, and therefore abstract, terms to what for us is the supreme example of the concrete.”5 Theological language is “in a sense alien to religion, crippling, omitting nearly all that really matters, yet, in spite of everything, sometimes successful” (LR 262). Religious language can also follow its spontaneous direction towards a poetic form of expression, the necessity of which is related to the grounds for belief, namely ‘authority’ and ‘religious experience’. The authority of the revelation that “Jesus Christ is the Son of God” cannot but take the form of a poetic statement since the reality of which it speaks is outside our mundane, ordinary experience. Scientific-theological analogical interpretations or restatements will miss the “subtle and sensitive exploitations of imagination and emotion with which poetry works” (LR 262). Lewis sees the religious message better received by one who strives to be a good and better son and father by meditating on the Divine Fatherhood and Sonship. About this way of receiving, Lewis says: “Information has been given him: as far as I can see in the only way possible” (LR 263). Lewis’ essay on religious language concludes with some dark and visionary rumination about the hypothesis that humankind is not only losing the possibility of really seeing, but also of interpreting what is seen as something other than ‘the expression of an emotion’. Here, Lewis repeats his constant and almost obsessive warning against the interpretation of poetic language as essentially emotional, which is the dominant thrust of this essay. Refusing the emotional interpretation of poetic and religious language and experience seems crucial to Lewis’ way of thinking. At the same time, the emotional interpretation seems to be very powerful and tends to destroy the thoughts, experiences and sensibilities Lewis deems so crucial (or shows that these phenomena are disappearing). His repeated arguments run as follows.

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As soon as Lewis introduces poetic language, he starts contesting its emotional interpretation: “I feel fairly sure what it does not consist in: it does not consist in discharging or arousing more emotion.” (LR 256) Poetic language is not intended to release and arouse likes and dislikes, but wants to make you imagine: “The invitation is not to my emotions but to my senses.” (LR 257) Typical for poetic language is the “use of adjectives,” “masses of factual information.” (LR 257) There is a difference between understanding someone’s fear and being infected by it. Moreover, if emotions or reactions are reported, they themselves could or should not be the centre of attention: of interest, rather, is what they convey about an object. Poetic language does convey information, but this information can “be received only if you are ready to meet it halfway” (LR 260-1); it can be verified or falsified, but only “to a limited degree and with a certain fringe of vagueness” (LR 260). The same goes for religious language, although the information it contains is only understood on the basis of trust or the Credo ut intelligam (LR 261); or for those whom “will meet them halfway” (LR 262). Feelings or emotions derive their value or horror from that which causes them, such as a peculiar musical passage or the death of a loved one. One cannot simulate the enjoyment of music in the absence of the piece of music it is bound up with; and the existence of sedatives gives no comfort to one who fears the death of someone dear: “a mother who is anxious about her son who is on active service . . . dreads not grief but the death of her son” (LR 264). Lewis summarises: “So in our Christian experiences. No doubt we experience sorrow when we repent and joy when we adore. But these were by-products of our attention to a particular Object” (LR 265).

2. Christianity as true mythology When Lewis writes of ‘theology’ in the (1944) essay, “Is Theology Poetry?”6, he does not mean the scientific form ordinary religious language can take, as he does in the essay “The Language of Religion” (1960). He has in mind rather “the systematic series of statements about God and about man’s relation to Him which the believers of a religion make” (ITP 10). Here Lewis reduces the question “Is theology poetry?” to the question: “Does Christian Theology owe its attraction to its power of arousing and satisfying our imagination? Are those who believe it mistaking aesthetic enjoyment for intellectual assent, or assenting because they enjoy?” (ITP 11). Again, this query engages the relationships between religion and theology, between imagination and the emotions. This time,

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however, Lewis examines the connection between the language of Christianity and the literary form of myths. There is a widespread view that myths are like fairy tales, products of fantasy and imagination. As such, they do not contain any truths or facts: myths are fictional stories. Of course, they speak obliquely about the origin and destiny of the world and humanity, about the place of Gods and people in the world, about humanity’s orientation in the cosmos and about the evaluation of our behaviour in it. But all that is just metaphorical or allegorical rather than an exact representation of the human condition as it really is. Myths are internally coherent but they do not correspond with reality or factual history. At best, taken separately, they contain lessons or morals; taken together, they do not form a single coherent picture. Different myths or sagas contradict one another; some elevate, while others downgrade humanity. Contrary to myths and sagas, the Christian religion—traditionally assisted by natural theology—claims divine truth about the universe. The Christian narrative and the Bible depict historical facts and present the true history of salvation. Natural theology in particular offers a rational method to establish the best possible evidence for the truth of Christianity. Traditionally, the Bible gives us revealed truth in the form of the word of God Himself, and so it is not the product of human imagination or confabulation. In this light, the common view holds to an important discontinuity between myths and the Christian doctrine. C. S. Lewis also subscribed to this widespread view at a certain point: myths are lies, whereas belief in God is true belief. An important turning point in Lewis’ life, however, involved a switch from this commonly held view to a continuity view on the relation between myth and Christianity. Lewis underwent a double conversion: first from atheism to theism; then, from a general belief in God to the specific doctrine of Christianity. A central element in this second conversion was Lewis’ acknowledgement of the continuity between myth and Christianity. Lewis welcomed such a continuity view since he greatly admired Greek myths, Nordic Sagas and Irish legends as much as he did the story of Christianity. Although he finds the Christian myth less seductive then the older myths because it is ‘barren’, it does not stand in an antagonistic relationship with them. On a continuity view, these older ‘fairy-tales’ become metaphysically respectful, since they are reservoirs of trans-rational truths and provide insights—admittedly partial and distorted—about realities beyond the reach of logical inquiry. The continuity view is aptly expressed by David Downing’s phrase, “Christianity is true mythology,”7 and Lewis’ own phrase, “Myth becomes

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fact.” (ITP 16) Because myths are better understood as real, albeit unfocused gleams of divine truth falling to human imagination, mythology reveals its own kind of truth and Christianity is true mythology. So the relationship between myth and Christian faith is much more complex than the simple opposition between lies and truth, fiction and reality. Myths contain their own kind of truth and eventually realise themselves in factual history. The mythical status of Christianity, however, does not automatically equip the Christian message with the same imaginary force as the Greek myths, Nordic Sagas and Irish legends. This has to do precisely with the truth of the Christian myth, as Lewis remarks, “in a certain sense we spoil a mythology for imaginative purposes by believing in it.” (ITP 12) The contemplation of what we take to be real can, on the other hand, also yield aesthetic pleasure, though this pleasure is only the result of rather than the cause of belief. Moreover, Lewis thinks that the Christian myth is not very good poetry and that it is much less seductive than pantheism, or animism, or even the evolutionary scientific outlook on life.

3. Emotions, instincts, love and the heart One should certainly take these considerations into account before one draws conclusions that are too optimistic, not only with respect to the poetic and mythical status of religious language and the Christian message, but also concerning the power and possibilities of fiction— poetry and myth—for religious life and education. In this regard, another important aspect needs to be taken into account if we are to better judge the place and impact of fiction; namely, Lewis’ religious anthropology, and more specifically the meaning and place of ‘the heart’. Lewis himself is a master of mingling fiction and fact in his own work. The highly personal Surprised by Joy and A Grief Observed, for example, should be considered as fictionalised autobiography. And The Screwtape Letters, a hilarious correspondence between devils concerning the methods for tempting and corrupting humans, contains an intriguing account of vice and sin in correspondence with Lewis’ anthropological views—his strongly held opinions about the very facts of human life. In The Screwtape Letters, the demon Screwtape writes to his nephew Wormwood, a younger devil, about vice and sin and how these can be instilled and encouraged by working on human capacities, psychological faculties and laws. Lewis has Screwtape distinguish three significant dimensions: imagination, reason, and will which can be identified with the heart:

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Think of your man as a series of concentric circles, his will being the innermost, his intellect coming next, and finally his fantasy. You can hardly hope, at once, to exclude from all the circles everything that smells of the Enemy [i.e., God]: but you must keep on shoving all the virtues outward till they are finally located in the circle of fantasy, and all the desirable qualities inward into the Will. It is only in so far as they reach the Will and are embodied in habits that the virtues are really fatal to us. (I don’t, of course, mean what the patient mistakes for his Will, the conscious fume and fret of resolutions and clenched teeth, but the real centre, what the Enemy calls the Heart), (Screwtape 28).

I will try to highlight the interplay between these faculties by taking a look at how the notion of the heart is situated in the field of affective concepts in general. My hypothesis, for the time being, is that the unsystematic affective notions scattered over different fictional, essayistic and autobiographical fragments in Lewis’ work seem to belong to three kinds or groups: the mainly negative notion of the emotions; the somehow positively-evaluated notions of instinct and desire which should be preserved and increased; and the notion of the heart, which is associated with the will and with love and charity. Under the somewhat inapt heading of “instinct and desire”, I also include a phenomenon to which Lewis refers, in The Weight of Glory, as silent and actually silenced: “Almost our whole education has been directed to silencing this shy, persistent, inner voice.” (WG 31) For Lewis this voice reminds us that our good cannot be found on this earth. It is named “the inconsolable secret in each one of us.” (WG 29-30) Lewis’ careful treatment and evocation of this phenomenon could serve as an incentive to examine the methods and motives used by education to silence such an inner voice and inconsolable secret. Inspired by Lewis, I think that not only religious education, but education in general, should be concerned to foster, to a certain extent, a sense of being inconsolable and of harbouring a secret—an awareness of a riddle which has no solution and which can and should not be untangled.8 For Lewis, the response to this riddle became Christianity, even though Lewis’ Christianity offers no solution to, or exit from, our situation on Earth. The lesson from this kind of Christianity is that wholeness is intrinsically unreachable and that this ‘response’ does not function as a psychological solution. Christianity thus conceived is, perhaps surprisingly, compatible to a particular interpretation of psychoanalytic practice which consists in not having or knowing answers either in advance or afterwards. One does not end the psychoanalytic practice or come out of it with a host of answers or information about oneself or one’s past. Much of the existential value of

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this type of analysis consists in learning that, even after having given attention to one’s inadmissible desires, and time to the mess that is one’s life, things are just as they are. The hope is that the time dedicated to this mess in the course of analysis will not solve, decode or articulate it into something else, but rather teach one that one simply has to do what can be done; one must put the mess in its place and go back to work. Also, this attention should be, and is in fact (if pursuid loyally) a labour of love. This is symbolised in the utterly uneconomic expenditure of time and money on the analyst and on oneself. The mess, negativity or—formulated more neutrally—‘externality’ has to be confronted partly because of time and money considerations, and this confrontation is fostered by the restricted and tightly-structured setting. (Although the possibilities of this peculiar psychoanalytical practice or wisdom are probably severely restricted for children, children can however benefit, of course, from the labour on themselves by persons responsible for their education and by the scope of charity these persons can reach). In this light then, the difference between emotions and desires or instincts comes down to this: the former are the product of what we want to be, they are contrived and their content can be articulated in propositions, whereas the latter have to do with the way we are; they are more amorphous. In standard or typical delineations of emotions, one will rarely find instincts and desires mentioned next to categories such as moods, sensations, feelings or dispositions. Harry Frankfurt explores a phenomeon that seems to come near to it in the context of his writings about caring9. Caring is constituted by an identification with desires external to our willing or choosing. Caring is distinguished from choosing to the degree that the caring identification with certain desires remains ‘open’ and does not assimilate these prior desires to secondary conscious intentions. Emotions, on the other hand, contrary to instincts and desires could indeed be seen (as Robert Solomon10 once defended) not as passive (or given) , but rather as a product of our own choice. That is why these dominant contemporary cognitive analysis are (as Kristjan Kristjansson11 remarks) intimately related to the Enlightenment project. Lewis would agree with this enlightened characterisation of the emotions, but he would not see this as a positive characteristic. He would consider the contemporary choice in favour of emotions as a sign of a lack of lucidity: it bears testimony of the weakness of the emotions, their secondary status and their irrelevance. As controllable and capable of being produced, emotions constitute neither the basic problematic aspects of life nor the most significant experiences. Instincts, desires, love and their by-products are responsible for these dimensions. Emotions, as Lewis

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says, “usually talk too loud, protest too much, to be quite believed”12: they are the products of the person we want to be, the presented, imagined or moralised self. This approach of Lewis sheds a specific light on what is perhaps the central, if not the central religious state of mind: love. Although sometimes included in the category of the emotions, love turns out for Lewis to be something radically different from a controllable and active mental state. As a matter of fact, love seems to be related more closely to the category of instincts and desires. Love and its variant, charity, are given—or not—and charity consists partly of the acceptance that natural love cannot be preserved directly. These mental states are perhaps also silent, not very remarkable or apparent to the subject, i.e. far from the social and striving self. Perhaps charity—and probably grace—is related to the possibility of seeing oneself as given, of looking the instincts in the face with acceptance and, at the same time, keeping a real sense also of their force and resistance. The possibility of seeing one’s instincts as somehow unchangeable and given makes them at once more innocent, since they are no longer one’s own active responsibility and yet, at the same time, they become more disconcerting, something one just has to live with or ‘put-up’ with. The subject no longer wastes time on fantasies about their causes and strategies to change them, but sees them as traits toward which one must be vigilant. Charity, grace and love are related to the possibilities of seeing and loving oneself as one’s neighbour, of identifying without concurrence, of putting up with oneself, of being able to look one’s own facticity in the face “with deep feeling for the sin in spite of which we love the sinner.” (WG 106) Emotions, then, are presented by Lewis as a mere shell or even crust of the person which prevents one from reaching one’s real nature. This ‘real’ nature, perhaps what we really love, is itself not ‘affectless’, but is a given capacity to receive. It is amorphous since it is not in line with clear intentions, and not analysable in further beliefs and desires. These observations do not justify the rejection of the category of emotions or the analysis that is made of it, but show the phenomenon from another perspective, perhaps as derived and secondary and with an entirely different value and meaning than is found in the contemporary debate on the emotions We may not forget that Lewis is writing during a particular period of analytical philosophy. The philosophers he refers to are, for example, Ryle and Pears. One of the first books on the topic, Action, Emotion and Will by Anthony Kenny, was published in the year Lewis died.13 Lewis is reacting to discussions about emotions which were conducted in literary theory.

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And in philosophy, the emphasis was on a moral emotivism which was characterised by a completely different view of emotions than the intentional and cognitive view developed in the general emotion-debate, a debate which started slowly in the sixties but has become very intense during the last two decades. In the latter period emotions are identified with the (interplay of) beliefs and desires which the subject holds about the object. Without such an intentional object one cannot speak about emotions, according to this new apporach in the emotion debate, at best about amorphous feelings or moods. With this reduction of the essence of emotion to beliefs and desires, emotions also have become responsive to reason and the subject has, for example, been proclaimed responsible for his emotions. And this is in keeping with what Lewis would say about emotions. But his views only converge about the nature of emotions, not about the value and standing given to them in contemporary philosophical discussion. Everything Lewis says about meaningful religious experience is contrary to the rationalist, cognitivist and voluntarist consequences drawn from the contemporary, prevalent view on emotions. It is not yet clear to what degree the most recent work—for example, the specific type of intentionality of feeling Peter Goldie develops—could account for the broad affective field Lewis sketches. The elucidation of Lewis’ view on the emotions in terms of the nowadays popular cognitivism in emotion theory would of course require a study on its own. Notwithstanding, I think his approach of love and joy as phenomena sui generis, not to be reduced to the emotions as such, deserves attention. Love and Joy and the special kind of will they are related to could very well be philosophically described and analysed with the notion of the ‘by-product’ as developed by Elster in Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality. Lewis himself introduces the term ‘by-product’, and often his use of this term could come directly from Elster. A useful approach is also offered by O.H. Green. In his article “Is Love an emotion?” he replies “No” to this question and formulates the core of the problem smartly: “If love is strong and lasting, it tends to elucidate the semantic assessment typical for emotions; if love is not strong or lasting, we may question whether it is really love. Semantic assessment, then, is not easily applied to love, and this is because of what is desired and how much it is desired.”14 Emotions, being a set of semantically assessable beliefs and desires, only arise from love and from what we care deeply about. The emotions of fear for, and grief over the death of one’s child, for example, find their root in an unaccountable and primitive love. What is

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this love, if not itself an emotion? Care and love are not simply heaps of unfocused desires. Although love is grafted onto primitive and unaccountable or ‘semantically unassessable’ desires, it cannot be reduced to them. Here, I think, is the place where an appeal to the notion of the heart becomes fruitful. I end with a sketch of Lewis’ notion of the heart. As a proper name for the workings of a will which does not follow the designs of the self but the will of God, it is—as is the will—distinguished from reason and imagination. Whatever reason and imagination can teach the subject regarding recognition, comfort or even moral sensibility, when it comes to proper religious workings or grace, all this knowledge is secondary. Even religious understanding acquired by reason and imagination is dependent on a prior trust, on a practice which prepared the heart to meet the poetic message halfway. Most of all the heart is associated with the will, since it is essentially conative—bound up with a specific kind of action and free in a special sense. This will is also labelled “heart”, since it is the best we can achieve and offer, and since it is a simultaneous combination of the highest levels of passivity and activity. On the one hand, the heart involves passivity because it is receptive to the message and example of Jesus Christ, but this passivity must be understood in an active sense, namely as lived. It is also passive because it is only possible after one has thrown in the sponge15 about one’s autonomous and independent possibilities. On the other hand, the heart includes activity since acute recognition of limited possibilities constitutes a lessening of worry, which sets the mind free for reality and a real response to it. One of the results is affective, since contemplation of reality and the lessening of worry are eventually also rewarded with a better knowledge of one’s own wants, the survival of one’s natural loves and an intensifying of one’s desires. But this is an outcome which can never be an end in itself. Even if we cannot follow Lewis in his specific religious answer to the riddle of human existence, and do not want to break the spell of worldliness, his understanding of the affective life can nevertheless teach us something about the possibly peculiar affective consequences of a secular life. Perhaps we can also learn from him that emotion is an intrinsically secular concept: but also that we could start to give the concept of emotion an entirely different status, one not based on stoical or puritanical, but on passionate grounds. The deepest likings and impulses of any man are the raw material, the starting-point, with which the Enemy (the name the devil gives to God) has furnished them. To get them away from those is always a point

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Notes 1

C. S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory, Harper Collins Publishers, New York 2001 (1949), 96. Further references to this text will be indicated by (WG) followed by the page number. 2 David Leigh, S.J., ‘The Psychology of Conversion in Chesterton’s and Lewis’ Autobiographies’, in Michael H. Macdonald & Andrew A. Tadie (eds.), G. K. Chesterton and C. S. Lewis: The Riddle of Joy, William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, Grand Rapids MI 1989, 303. 3 C. S. Lewis, ‘Faith’ in Mere Christianity, Fount, An Imprint of Harper Collins Publishers, London 1997, (1952), 118. 4 C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, HarperCollins Publishers, New York 2002 (1942), 28. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Screwtape) followed by the page number. 5 C. S. Lewis, ‘The Language of Religion’, in Lesley Walmsley (ed.), C.S.Lewis Essay Collection and Other Short Pieces, Harper Collins Publishers, London 2000, 261. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (LR) followed by the page number. 6 C. S. Lewis, ‘Is Theology Poetry?’, in Walmsley, Op. cit., 10-21. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (ITP) followed by the page number. 7 David C. Downing, C. S. Lewis’ Journey to Faith: The Most Reluctant Convert, InterVarsity Press, Downers Grove IL 2002, 147. 8 Otherwise, certain futile quests and obsessions can claim the upper hand; I am thinking, for example, about what Jon Elster calls “the obsessional search for meaning”. Jon Elster, Sour Grapes: Studies in the Subversion of Rationality, Cambridge/Paris, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1983, 101. 9 H.G. Frankfurt, The Importance of What We Care About, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1988. 10 Robert Solomon, The Passions: Emotions and the Meaning of Life, Hackett Publishing Company, Indianapolis/Cambridge 1993 (1976). 11 Kristján Kristjánsson, ‘Some Remaining Problems in Cognitive Theories of Emotion’, in International Phiosophical Quarterly, 41, 2001, 393.

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C.S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, HarperCollins Publishers, London 2002 (1955), 276. 13 Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will, Routledge, London and New York 1963. 14 O. H. Green, ‘Is Love an Emotion?’, in Roger E. Lamb (ed.), Love Analyzed, Westview Press, Boulder CO 1997, 219. 15 C. S. Lewis, ‘Faith’, in Mere Christianity, HarperCollinsPublishers, London 1997 (1952), 123.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN IMAGINATION, BELIEF AND ABSTRACT THOUGHT WITHIN THE ORBIT OF RELIGIOUS EMOTION BEÁTA TÓTH

The emotions recorded by works of literature constitute a small but none the less important segment of the stock of general human emotion. Works of theoretical research often refer to passages of fiction—novels or dramas—as illustrative material in the effort to support their own basic assumptions concerning the nature of the emotions. Curiously, poetry—the traditional site par excellence of the formulation of affective experience— figures with much lesser weight in the present debate. Moreover, what we register as almost completely missing from the picture of present-day scholarship on the subject is the consideration of poets’ own literary critical accounts of what they consider as the basic characteristics of poetic emotion. Such a lack is all the more conspicuous in the case of religious emotion which by nature is more mediated and is strongly reliant on the imagination and linguistic expression in liturgical, religious and literary texts. The wealth of religious emotion recorded in poetry is surely worthy of thorough theoretical study, and in such a systematic approach, why would one ignore the first-order reflection of poets themselves who, as ‘specialists’1 of the emotions, claim to have the invaluable first-hand knowledge of an experienced craftsman? And sometimes even more than that: built on the concrete analyses of poems and the acute observations concerning the shape of the emotions presented in literary works, their remarks amount to a veritable ‘theory’ whose import reaches far beyond the actual works themselves and the practical knowledge of the tricks of the trade. Before turning to one such theory in order to find a way into the question of religious emotion, we must in some way relate the emotions of literature to the rest of human emotional experience.

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As Keith Oatley has recently suggested, the essential continuity between the emotions of conversation and the passions of fiction lies in the fact that they both strive to make sense of emotional experience by assimilating emotions into a narrative line and attributing them to characters.2 Both everyday conversation and fiction present us emotions that contribute to the construction of our mental models of other persons. And both conversation and fiction represent the explanatory effort to interpret human action and emotions in folk theoretical terms, that is, by way of a narrative in terms of beliefs and desires. Fictions, in particular, are simulations of social interaction through which we are confronted with our social-motivational world. Oatley sees the difference between the aims of nonfictional writing and fiction in the fact that while nonfictional writing ‘tends to be about explanation of the world’, fiction centres on the emotions instead as ‘means by which we become absorbed in stories’. In this sense, “the emotions are fiction’s joints and muscles”3 that give vitality to the narrative structure. However, it is not only mental simulations of social interaction or folk theoretical explanation that one encounters when reading fiction. At a deeper level, literary works embody symbolic knowledge transformed into emotionally effective stimulation. According to the ‘law of apparent reality’, as has been described by Nico F. Frijda in a seminal article on the ‘Laws of Emotion’4 (the basic laws that he sees as governing our emotion mechanisms), emotions are elicited by events appraised as real, independent of the fact of their actual veracity. In this sense, vivid imagination also has the properties of ‘reality’: it can elicit or abate strong emotions and serves to draw symbolic knowledge within the sphere of emotional experience. Frijda’s laws illuminate the subtle ways reason and emotion intertwine in our emotive faculty: the more dimensions of reality are drawn within the purview of emotion and its laws, the more emotion is extended beyond the merely proximal and perceptual; thus emotive power is conferred on stimuli that do not by nature have it. Frijda holds that the ‘law of apparent reality’ should eventually turn into the ‘law of reality’. It is full reality in such an extended sense that in the end must shape human emotion: future concerns, long-term consequences, the imaginative vision of our world and one’s own situation in it must all play an integral part in the constitution of our emotive life. Frijda’s ultimate aim is to show that there is no fundamental opposition between Emotion and Reason: reason is not necessarily a rival to emotion in the sense that it would aim to suppress emotion through the exertion of one’s voluntary capacities or deprive certain aspects of reality of their emotive powers. On the contrary, we should see reason as an ally in the tiresome effort to extend the laws of

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emotion to an ever greater fullness of reality beyond one’s immediate interests. Such an extension of the sphere of emotion towards the domain of abstract thought was a life-long concern for the poet-critic, T. S. Eliot, who after earning a doctoral degree in philosophy did not pursue an academic career as a philosopher,5 but chose poetry instead. He did not sever all ties with philosophy, however, but continued to meditate on the possibilities of emotionalising philosophical/theological thought through the means of poetry in the majority of his numerous literary critical essays.6 While he is generally known as an ‘intellectual’ poet, the champion of poetic ‘objectivity’ and author of the famous precept of the ‘objective correlative’, his broader concern, the central preoccupation with the extension of poetic emotionality to include the ‘emotions of metaphysics’ has been largely overlooked. In a series of long-unpublished lectures delivered for academic audiences in Trinity College, Cambridge in 1926 (The Clark Lectures) and in 1933 (The Turnbull Lectures)7, Eliot attempted to develop his own theory of what he called ‘metaphysical’ poetry. In such poetry, an entire system or various fragments of abstract philosophical systems are, in his words, ‘drawn within the orbit of feeling’ and turned into poetry. Eliot’s ‘theory’ in many respects remains admittedly tentative and partial; it oscillates between observations of general validity and the subjective remarks of a poet with certain personal preferences for the type of poetry that he considers as ingenious. It is production-oriented in the sense that it seeks to find a model and justification for Eliot’s own poetic practice. It is a ‘theory’ also in the sense of being partly conjecture concerning certain developments in literary history and the philosophy of mind. Eliot was aware of the immense theoretical difficulty inherent in his subject and he felt the disturbing lack of an adequate conceptual framework and terminology that could have housed his nascent intuitions. One must actually gather his ‘theory’ from fragments of ideas and argumentation even in his most discursive passages. Besides the lectures on metaphysical poetry, his insights on poetic emotion are scattered throughout his entire oeuvre of various essays that were mostly written as analyses of the full corpus or particular works of poets. Nevertheless, even in their fragmentary form and blundering formulations, Eliot’s ideas are well worth considering. I suggest that Eliot had anticipated present-day discussions on the nature of emotion and its relation to reason in many respects. What follows then, is my own construal of Eliot’s tentative theory concerning the relation of poetic emotion and the abstract thought of philosophical/theological accounts of reality.

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Examining the flow of world literature as, in his words, “the empty shell of a vanished unity of feeling,”8 Eliot distinguishes between two basic types of poetic emotion.9 The first one comes about when the poet perceives and records accurately the world as it is given at every moment, thus fixing and making more conscious and precise emotions in which most people participate.10 This type of emotion then is the result of a stabilising effort on the part of the poet, who enriches human experience by adding to it the poetic formulation of our well-known emotions. Nevertheless, Eliot also makes the succinct observation that in expressing what other people feel, the poet is also slightly changing the feeling by making it more conscious, thus refining people’s sensibility.11 The other type of emotion, however, adds to human experience in a different way. Being the fruit of a complex intellectual effort, ‘the emotions of metaphysics’ are created when the poet enlarges human consciousness by bringing within the grasp of feeling what is ordinarily apprehensible only by thought.12 Such a procedure results in the evocation of new emotions which “appear as the equivalents of mental speculations”13; they are feelings from beyond “the ordinary boundaries of experience.”14 Eliot maintains that for a metaphysical poet, “nothing is ineffable”15 and that his poetry displays a quality in which “the most rarefied feeling can be exact and exactly expressed.”16 In this manner, the poet is capable of extending the frontiers of ordinary human experience; he makes thought a commonly accessible emotional experience, in his words, ‘sensuous thought’ that can be appropriated by others and thus is able to modify general human sensibility in a significant manner. From the ‘fusion’ of philosophical thought and personal emotion emerges the ‘thought–feeling’, or the ‘emotional equivalent of thought’. Clearly, Eliot here is trying to find words for a phenomenon that has no traditional conceptual description. What is even more striking is his suggestion that, in metaphysical poetry, the transformation of thought and emotion is a two-way process: it is not only philosophical thought that is turned into feeling, but “what is ordinarily felt is transformed into thought without ceasing to be feeling.”17 What we get in this way is a kind of ‘feeling-thought’, the inherent philosophy of a poem that is solely communicable by poetic means and cannot be reconverted into intellectual terms without considerable loss of meaning. Such ‘thinking’ is not carried out according to the laws of logical reasoning or conceptual arguments, yet it discloses genuine intellectual activity on the part of the poet. It comes about when a philosophical system or certain philosophical ideas are dealt with not as a theory or the object of the poet’s reflection or his own

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comment, but as something “perceived”18; when they become matter for ‘inspection’, that is, when they are ‘realised’.19 Eliot observes such “tincture of human emotions by philosophy”20 in three different periods of world literature: in thirteenth-century Italian poetry and Dante in particular; in the so called ‘metaphysical poetry’ of seventeenth century England (Donne, Crashaw, Cowley); and in the poetry of two nineteenth century French poets—Jules Laforgue and Tristan Corbière. And we may rightly add that he considers his own poetic practice as the continuation of this poetic trend. In an ingenious and innovative approach, Eliot views disparate poetic works in a new light as stages of the same process that he terms the ‘history of emotion’ or ‘the history of sensibility’. What he endeavours to study is the emotional organisation of a certain age that, in his view, issues from the intellectual background, the prevailing philosophical/theological assumptions of the period. He is interested in what we could call an alternative account of the history of ideas: the alteration of feeling that arises as a natural concomitant of the ideas themselves and that appears as the ‘sensibility of thought’. Such alteration is eminently recorded in works of poetry. An archaeology of different emotional worlds is vital for the understanding of the philosophy/theology of particular periods; Eliot insists that one cannot think with, for example, Thomas Aquinas, unless one can also feel with him.21 So what do we find in Eliot’s alternative historical account concerning the alteration of one central emotion, the emotion of love? According to Eliot, in the poetry of antiquity (in Sappho and Catullus), the unity of the experience of love—something that had previously only existed unconsciously—receives conscious expression, and thus the emotion is fixed “in the right and minimum number of words, once and for all.”22 Thought plays a part in the creation of such an experience as a modifying factor; however, it does not create a new emotion. What we are presented is the well-known emotion of daily life and the acute observation of its physical and mental concomitants. It is not until the thirteenth century that the metaphysical form of love first appears and receives unparalleled expression in the poetry of Dante. This emotion has an intellectual quality; the actual experience is reshaped in the light of a philosophical/theological system, with which Dante fully identifies. He uses the love experience of adolescence as raw material that is transformed to express practically the total range of possible human love experience, from the carnal to the most spiritual. In letting the ordered and comprehensive cosmological belief of his time transform the original emotion, Dante expands the emotion and is even able to make us feel the

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subtle, conceptually ungraspable difference between his love for Beatrice in heaven (the already sublimated feeling which is still human) and the love felt towards God in the beatific vision (when the boundary of human love is enlarged to its utmost limits). All this becomes possible because a definite philosophical/theological system is assimilated emotionally by the poet. In Eliot’s words: “the feelings are organised according to an organised view of the universe, so that there is given the feeling-equivalent for every detail in the system and also for the consummation of the system—and also for the system as a whole.”23 Eliot contends that the emotion of divine love expressed in later centuries of religious poetry fails in just this respect: it substitutes divine passion for the human and does not enlarge the boundary of human love toward the divine. As Eliot argues: “Instead of being presented with a new passion, we find only the old one with a new, and slightly unreal object. The emotion is the same emotion watered down.”24 Here the poet no longer has an ordered system of thought as a background, but must unite disparate thought in a continuity of feeling. He does not necessarily believe in the philosophy/theology he relies on; his belief can be partial or may be completely absent. Eliot thinks that metaphysical poetry can occur among different conditions: “either in the full possession of belief, or in the disintegration of belief, or in the conscious loss of belief and the search for it.”25 And so the phenomenon of “the isolation of thought as an object of sense”26 is the result of a later development that could hardly have been possible before the seventeenth century. So where does that leave us? In his alternative history, Eliot views human culture in terms of a wholesome co-operation between sensibility and abstract thought where the emotions mediate between what he calls ‘acute sensation’ and ‘acute thought’.27 Interestingly, the term ‘sensibility’—so pivotal in Eliot’s account—has almost completely disappeared from the vocabulary of literary criticism since Eliot. As we learn from an article on the history of the term, it is not because a new vision has been proposed but simply because the focus of attention has lately shifted to different problems of the field.28 Surely, several details of Eliot’s theory of metaphysical poetry may be matter of dispute. I believe, however, that Eliot’s main achievement is not so much the oft-criticised, tantalising effort to heal what he registered as the ‘dissociation of sensibility’: the supposed historical split between thought and feeling. His real contribution lies in the fact that he seeks to give proper identity for the emotions, not despite reason’s territory or in separation from thought, but together with thought: Eliot recognised the essential co-existence and

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mutual interrelatedness of thought and feeling that solely gives autonomy to both domains. And this joins him with recent anti-cognitivist approaches that wish to counter the over-intellectualising of the emotions. These new accounts set out to obtain full citizenship for the emotions by arguing for an essential and distinct thought-aspect within emotion that, however, cannot be explained in terms of intellectual beliefs imported from outside the emotion, so to speak. As Peter Goldie has recently suggested, “The difference between thinking of X as Y without feeling and thinking of X as Y with feeling will not just comprise a different attitude towards the same content—a thinking which earlier was without feeling and now is with feeling. The difference also lies in the content, although it might be that this difference cannot be captured in words.”29 I think that it is this difference that Eliot attempted to capture and that we may see as lying at the heart of religious emotion.

Notes 1

For example, the twentieth century Hungarian poet–Ágnes Nemes Nagy–writes: “When I am sometimes asked what I consider to be the most essential for the craft of poetry, I usually answer more or less in these words: ‘The poet is the specialist of emotions. In practising my craft, it has been my experience that the so-called emotions have at least two layers. The first layer carries the known and acknowledged emotions; these have names—joy, terror, love indignation. There is mutual agreement about their meaning, they have a past, a science, and a literary history. They are citizens of our hearts. The second layer is the no man’s land of the nameless.’” Ágnes Nemes Nagy, ‘The Poet’s Introduction’, in Between: Selected Poems, Corvina, Dedalus, Budapest, Dublin 1988, 9. 2 Keith Oatley, ‘From the Emotions of Conversation to the Passions of Fiction’, in Antony S. R. Manstead, Nico Frijda, Agneta Fischer (eds.), Feelings and Emotions: The Amsterdam Symposium, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2004, 98-115. 3 Ibid.,111. 4 Nico F. Frijda, ‘The Laws of Emotion’, in American Psychologist 43 (1988), 349-58. 5 Eliot’s doctoral dissertation in philosophy is entitled Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley, Faber & Faber, London 1964. 6 On Eliot’s views on the emotive power of poetry see Beáta Tóth, “Undisciplined Squads”: Investigations Into T. S. Eliot’s Critical Approach to the Emotional Aspect of Poetry, Catholic University of Louvain, unpublished doctoral dissertation, 1998.

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7 They were published as Ronald Schuchard (ed.), The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, Faber & Faber, London 1993. 8 T. S. Eliot, The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, 52. 9 As he observes, the history of human emotion recorded by poetry can be seen as a cumulative process which, however, is in no way linear. In the course of centuries many emotions are abandoned, mislaid, corrupted or they disappear completely from human sensibility. The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, 52. 10 Ibid., 95. 11 T.S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets, Faber & Faber, London 1957, 20. 12 The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, 220. 13 Ibid., 200. 14 Ibid., 120. 15 Ibid., 200. 16 Ibid., 200. 17 Ibid., 220. 18 T.S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood, Methuen, London 1957, 170-71. 19 Eliot distinguishes three distinct ways of how philosophical thought can enter poetry. “One is when a thought which may be and most often is a commonplace . . . is expressed in poetic form though in the language of thought. . . . Such gnomic utterances occur frequently in drama, where they gain a great deal of their force from the position which they occupy and the light which they cast on the dramatic action: the Greek choruses are full of them. The second type is the discursive exposition of an argument, such as we find in the ‘Essay on Man’, and at its highest, in the passages in the Purgatorio expounding the Thomist-Aristotelian theory of the origin and development of the soul. Immense technical skill is necessary to make such discourse fly, and great emotional intensity is necessary to make it soar. And the third type occurs when an idea, or what is only ordinarily apprehensible as an intellectual statement, is translated in sensible form; so that the world of sense is actually enlarged.” The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, 53-4. 20 Ibid., 295. 21 Ibid., 84. 22 Ibid., 51, n. 17. 23 Ibid., 154. 24 Ibid., 167. 25 Ibid., 293. 26 Ibid., 133. 27 Eliot writes: “Humanity reaches its higher civilisation levels not chiefly by improvement of thought or by increase and variety of sensation, but by the extent of co-operation between acute sensation and acute thought. The most awful state of society that could be imagined would be that in which a maximum condition of sensibility was co-existent with a maximum attainment of thought—and no emotions uniting the two.” The Varieties of Metaphysical Poetry, 221. 28 See the article “Sensibility” in Alex Preminger, T. V. F. Brogan (eds.), The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, Princeton Univiversity Press, Princeton, New Jersey 1993, 1144.

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29 Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration, Clarendon Press, Oxford 2000, 60. As David Pugmire has observed: “For the very reason that spontaneity is vital to real emotion, reflection has a proper role in it.” David Pugmire, Rediscovering Emotion, Edinburgh University Press, Edinburgh 1998, 134.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN KONG (EMPTINESS): A CHINESE BUDDHIST EMOTION LOUISE SUNDARARAJAN

According to Harry Frankfurt1, while all animals exhibit desires, only humans exhibit the desire to have certain kinds of desires and not others. This self-reflexive dimension of desires is referred to by Charles Taylor as “second order desires,” which is “the power to evaluate our desires, to regard some as desirable and others as undesirable.”2 Religious traditions abound in vocabularies to articulate these second order desires which, however, have so far been neglected in psychology. To explore the possibilities of cross fertilisation between religion and psychology, this paper uses psychological theories to analyse a second order desire in the Chinese Buddhist tradition, known as kong (emptiness), on the one hand; and explores implications of kong for contemporary psychological theories of emotions, on the other. In the following analysis, I situate kong in the cultural/historical context of aesthetic savouring, identify both as second order desires, and examine the cognitive processes involved in the realisation of kong, with special focus on cognitive recoding that results in profound transformation of emotional intent. Implications of this investigation for both religion and psychology will be adumbrated in the conclusion. An investigation of kong needs to start with a review of the Chinese notion of aesthetic savouring for two reasons: a) phenomenologically speaking, kong is a particular case of savouring—the savouring of loss or depression; b) as a well-articulated second order desire, the notion of aesthetic savouring renders accessible to analysis the cognitive structure and information processing involved in second order desires. To sharpen the analysis, the second order desires of savouring and kong will be compared and contrasted with the contemporary approach to hope as a first order desire. The main textual sources for the comparative investigation are, on psychology, the theory of hope by Snyder, et al.3; and

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on savouring and kong, a book of aphorisms written by Hung Ying-ming of the sixteenth century, Cai-gen Tan (Discourse on vegetable roots)4 which has been an influential book to this day as pop psychology/philosophy—something of a Chinese counterpart of the Chicken Soup for the Soul. To show its relevance to the modern Chinese audience, a contemporary Chinese commentary of Cai-gen Tan5 will be consulted.

1. The Chinese Notion of Savouring The Chinese notion of savouring6 differs from the typical Western formulation as well as the Indian rasa. The Western formulation entails relishing a positive experience in the here and now7; the Chinese savouring includes negative experiences as well, and has a relatively wider scope of temporality that extends to both the aftertaste of an experience8, and the subtle incipient phase of things (Cf. Sundararajan, 2004). The Chinese savouring differs from rasa in three respects: a) whereas rasa concerns discrete emotions of anger, erotic love, etc.9, the Chinese savouring computes multiple emotional states to capture a particular affective brew; b) whereas rasa attempts to transcend the self with portrayals of archetypes of emotions such as the love affair between Krishna and Radha, the Chinese savouring is an affirmation of the individual self with its taste, values, and memories as the sole measure of what is worth savouring; and c) whereas rasa is other-worldly oriented with its highest aspiration to be the tasting of ultimate reality— Brahman10—the Chinese aesthetics of savouring is part and parcel of the Confucian program of self-cultivation for social harmony and the art of government. In the following discussions, the Chinese notion of savouring will be examined along two registers: self-reflexivity and cognitive recoding.

2. The Centrality of Self-Reflexivity in Savouring Impetus to the development of savouring may have stemmed from the importance given to self-reflexivity, namely the intrapersonal self to self transaction, in China.11 According to Berry12, the Chinese have five communities, four of which involve interpersonal transactions: the transaction among heaven, earth and humanity; that between government and the people; and that among friends; and that within family. The fifth community in contrast entails intrapersonal transactions:

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The fifth community is the community of the individual person with oneself, the harmonious indwelling of the phenomenal ego in the deeper interior self. Because the full development of an authentic self is a basic requirement for the development of the other communities, there is constant mention in Confucian thought of the need for turning inward and reflecting on a person’s own thoughts, desires, and actions. (Berry 107)

The self-reflexive turn of consciousness by which experience becomes available to awareness is defined by Zelazo as “an experience plus an additional experience of that experience.”13 This can be graphically represented as follows: (Experience of X) –> (experience of ((Experience of X)) Zelazo speculated that there needs to be a mental process “whereby the contents of consciousness are fed back into consciousness so that they can become available to consciousness at a higher level.”14 This phenomenon is generally known as “second order awareness” in contrast to the “first order experience”15 which is specified as “experience of X” in the diagram above. One major difference between the first order experience of taste and the second order awareness of savouring lies in the fact that the latter is a self-initiated action and cannot be imposed from without. Otherwise put, we can give the devil a taste of his own medicine, but not make him savour it unless he wants to. This agentic aspect of savouring and its corresponding conative implications loom large in one of the earliest textual references to flavour, the Chung Yung, which stated that “There is no body but eats and drinks. But they are few who can distinguish [zhi, literally “cognise”] flavours.”16 The term “zhi” is difficult to translate. In contrast to the first order experience of taste, to be cognisant of (zhi) flavours entails knowing that one knows the flavours. Without the second order awareness of knowing (knowing that one knows), it would not be possible to manipulate one’s experience in ways characteristic of savouring, such as prolonging the experience, making fine discriminations of taste, etc. Even before its aesthetic application to savouring, the second order awareness of knowing played an important role in the moral philosophy of Confucianism. This moral imperative may be a consequence of the immanent notion of the Tao, as Confucius allegedly said, “The path [Tao] is not far from man” (Chung Yung, 393). Since the Tao is the operative principle of life, a principle followed necessarily by all forms of life from plants to animals and humans, the difference between the uninitiated and the sage lies in development of consciousness—the former follow the Tao

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unknowingly, whereas the latter knowingly. The main thrust of the Confucian pedagogue was, therefore, to raise consciousness to the second order awareness so that people will know that they know, or in Fung’s words, “to give people an understanding that they are all, more or less, actually following the Way [Tao], so as to cause them to be conscious of what they are doing.”17 The principle of savouring is an aesthetic extension of this moral imperative to develop second order desires.

3. Cognitive Recoding in Second Order Desires To recapitulate, second order desires refer to the desire of second order awareness to evaluate the first order experiences. This self-reflexive evaluation tends to be based on what Charles Taylor refers to as the “moral map” which consists of “certain essential evaluations which provide the horizon or foundation for the other evaluations one makes” (Taylor 39), such as happiness or the good life. Articulation of the moral map has two versions: strong or weak evaluation (Taylor). “Weak evaluation” is based on pragmatic considerations, such as the utility value of the object; “Strong evaluation” in contrast is based on moral and ontological categories, such as right or wrong, good or bad, being or nonbeing (“nothingness”). Second order desires tend to be “strong evaluations,” in contrast to weak evaluations that are prevalent in science. Strong evaluation via the moral map can result in cognitive recoding of experiences and even transformation of emotional intent. For illustration, consider coping with goal block from two contrasting perspectives: the scientific theory of hope versus the Cai-gen Tan (Discourse on vegetable roots). The hope theory of Snyder (Snyder, et al.) deals primarily with first order experience, in which emotion is immersed in action18 such that it plays an ancillary role, as “sequelae” of goal pursuits (Snyder, et al. 114). More specifically, emotions “reflect the person’s perceived success (positive emotions) or lack of success (negative emotions) in goal pursuit activities” (Snyder, et al. 114). The Cai-gen Tan in contrast deals primarily with second order desires that are more under the sway of the moral map than the simple laws of stimulus and response. The contrast between the two can be stark. For instance, the hope theory (Snyder, et al.) predicts that impediments in pursuits of goals decrease well-being. Not so, says Cai-gen Tan: frustration is good for you and gratification of desires rots like opium, or more literally, “Words that grate on one’s ears, and things that frustrate one’s desires are the foundation stones for self cultivation in

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virtue. A life filled with words pleasant to one’s ears, and things gratifying to one’s desires is a life buried in opium” (Wang 24). Another example of the cognitive recoding of experience via the moral map is the Chinese notion of the ‘golden mean’, which is a binocular vision that sees two sides of the same coin—thesis and antithesis—at once. When this principle recodes experience, success is not necessarily positive, nor failure negative, because “Extreme engenders its opposite” says Cai-gen Tan: “In favor the seeds of calamity are sown, thus it is time to stop and turn around when things are going one’s way; after failure things may turn in the opposite direction toward success, thus it is important not to give up when frustrated.” (Wang 31). Like the hinge that maintains its equilibrium above and beyond the movements of the door, one who follows the golden mean treats success and failure alike, since both require the modulation of a delicate sense of balance and proportion, elements which have become definitive of the Chinese notion of wellbeing.

4. Savouring and Transformation of Emotional Intent At the level of second order awareness, one’s attention shifts from the object of emotion to emotion itself as the object of one’s reflection. This contemplative intentional stance of savouring is different in many respects from goal pursuits that loom large in the hope theory of Snyder, et al. Reflective attending tends to foreground the sensations, feelings, and action readiness that are left out in the calibration of goal pursuits. Reflective attending is also more passive than goal pursuits. Because of its disengagement from goal oriented reasoning and execution of an action plan, reflective attending is referred to by Frijda and Sundararajan19 as “detachment,” which may be understood as an an over-arching mental attitude of receptive observation, of unfocused attention that lets information come in from the outside and elicited meanings from within, without prior selection by expectancies and, perhaps, subsequent selection by relevance. Of particular relevance to savouring is one type of action readiness referred to by Frijda and Sundararajan (2007) as “acceptance wriggles”— the actions that aim at maximising sensory and affective contact with the object. The authors gave a few examples: in gustatory savouring it includes inhaling smells, and having the food circulate around one’s tongue; in aesthetic savouring it involves stillness, turning away from distractions, seeking to let imagination flow, relaxing the body so that it allows virtual participation in the scene, and so on. This type of action

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readiness signifies the emotional intent of acceptance or letting be, which is diametrically opposed to the intent of mastery or control behind agency and goal pursuits, constructs which are central to Snyder’s hope theory (Snyder, et al.). Whereas savouring is usually associated with the aesthetic experience in the West, making it an unlikely candidate for coping with goal block in real life, the thin line between refinement of emotions in the aesthetic and that in real life is crossed in traditional China.20 Can savouring with its “acceptance wriggles” function as an effective response to goal block? To the extent that savouring, as second order awareness of experience, has the potential for cognitive recoding of experiences resulting in possible novel appraisals and transformations of the original emotional intent, the answer is likely to be in the affirmative. To explore this possibility, the remainder of this paper is dedicated to kong, the Chinese Buddhist notion of emptiness.

5. The Chinese Buddhist Notion of Emptiness —Kong and Detachment The Chinese notion of kong can be traced back to the Buddhist concept of sunyata, meaning ‘nothingness’ or ‘emptiness’, which is the logical conclusion of the Buddhist doctrine of impermanence of all things. Expressing the Buddhist sentiment of ‘vanity, vanity, all is vanity’, the appraisal of kong tends to be global, such as: “All glamour is empty in the end” (commentary on Cai-gen Tan, Wang 80). Typically kong entails an appraisal not only of the state of affairs of particular goals, but an appraisal so far- reaching that it calls into question the very possibility of having goals and concerns at all. Otherwise put, kong names this existential shudder that shakes up the very foundation of things, the very basis of all goals and concerns that the Buddhists call ‘attachment’. Indeed a common expression for the word kong is “ten thousand desires/concerns have become ashes.” Or in the words of Cai-gen Tan: “What’s life like before you were born and after you are dead? Upon such reflections all desires are rendered cold ashes” (Wang 303-4). But kong does not spell nihilism: with the deconstruction of attachment comes the consolation of ‘detachment’. Detachment entails a very complex emotional state, a phenomenon aptly captured by the following statement of Master Eckhart: “Therefore, detachment is the very best thing. It purifies the soul, cleanses the conscience, inflames the heart, arouses the spirit, quickens desire, and makes God known.”21 The above statement of Master Eckhart shows how

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detachment is not to be confused with resignation, nor with social withdrawal in sadness. In comparison to these manifestations of negative affect in response to goal block, detachment is much more complex in structure. It is second order awareness—or savouring—of loss or depression. As such, detachment entails cognitive recoding of the experience resulting in transformation of the original emotional intent. In Eckhart’s statement above, this emotional transformation takes the form of a creative combination of opposite emotional intents—“purifies” (the soul) and “cleanses” (the conscience), on the one hand, and “inflames” (the heart) and “arouses” (the spirit), on the other. Another possibility with radical emotional transformation is taste reversion. In the Buddhist tradition, salience of mortality has often been the trigger for kong with its characteristic taste reversion: “Fame and material gain are sweet, but upon the thought of death they both taste like chewing wax” (Cai-gen Tan, chapter 160, Wang). For individuals with sufficient understanding of the Buddhist notion of impermanence, taste reversion can set in on seemingly innocuous occasions such as when the party is over: “The guests are crowded in the hall and the revelry is at its height. What a happy occasion! All of a sudden, the water in the clepsydra comes to an end, the candles and the incense go out, and the tea grows cold. What a dreary scene! Disgusting and utterly tasteless. This is the way most things are . . .” (Cai-gen Tan, adapted from Isobe 202). The emotional transformation involved in the realisation of kong is different from the garden variety covered so far in psychology: experimental psychology has studied extensively the modification of emotion by something external to the affect system, such as pharmacological or cognitive interventions; for instance, cognitive reappraisal.22 In contrast, the radical cognitive reappraisal of things in kong is not the result of a deliberate cognitive intervention so much as that of an emotional upheaval. The experience of kong comes closer to a relatively neglected type of emotional transformation, which is emotion modified by emotion, a phenomenon quite common in aesthetic experiences.23 This dynamic process of emotion to emotion interaction is usually non-conscious. In contrast, the Kong experience has a high degree of transparency characteristic of self awareness, as evidenced by the clearly delineated sequence of transformation (in italics) in terms of antecedent, cause, and effect in the above quotation from Cai-gen Tan: The guests are crowded in the hall and the revelry is at its height [the initial state]. What a happy occasion [original emotion]! All of a sudden, the water in the clepsydra comes to an end, the candles and the incense go out, and the tea grows cold [change as antecedent]. What a dreary scene!

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In the following paragraphs, selected poems from classical Chinese poetry are presented to examine more closely emotions associated with kong and detachment.

6. Emptiness in Classical Chinese Poetry Consider first the three poems by Meng Chiao (751-814), lamenting the premature death of his child.24

Apricots Die Young Apricots die young: their flowers are nipples which the frost cuts and they fall. They lead me to grieve my late child and to write these poems. A Don’t let freezing hands play with these pearls– If they play with these pearls, the pearls will surely fly loose. Don’t let the sudden frost cut off spring time– If it cuts off spring, no bright flowering. Scattering, falling, small nipple buds In colorful patterns like my dead baby’s robes. I gather them–not a full hand’s grasp, At sunset I return home in hopeless [kong] sorrow. B In vain [kong] I gather up these stars from the ground, Yet on the branches I see no flowers. Sad–a solitary old man, Desolate–a home without children. Better the duck that sinks in the water, Better the crow that gathers twigs for nesting. Duckling in the waves, breaks through them, still flies, Fledglings in the wind, ruffled, boasting to one another. But blossoms and baby will live no more, I sigh in vain [kong], facing these creatures. C Nipping chill, the frost killed spring, From branch to branch it seemed a tiny knife. Since the flowers have fallen from the tree’s trunk, Like mountain caves the hollows cry out in vain [kong].

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Spot after spot–the blossoms that fell to earth, Dot after dot–like oily drops of light. Now I know that between heaven and earth, The millions of things are all fragile.

Emotions depicted in all three poems by Meng Chiao are variants of the depression theme—bereavement, grief, loss, sadness, etc. Translated as “hopeless” (“At sunset I return home in hopeless sorrow”) in the first poem, kong is not just the ‘hopelessness’ or ‘helplessness’ of depression. Indeed, there is a structural difference between kong and the rest of the terms in the depression cluster: kong is the second order awareness of depression. The instances of kong are as follows: “At sunset I return home in hopeless [kong] sorrow” “In vain [kong] I gather up these stars from the ground” “I sigh in vain [kong], facing these creatures” “Like mountain caves the hollows cry out in vain [kong]”

Kong expresses the futility (“emptiness,” “uselessness,” and “meaninglessness”) of having sorrow, of gathering the fallen blossoms from the ground, of expressing grief by sighing, or of grieving like the mountain hollows howling in the wind. In all these instances, the term kong is a feeling about feeling, a higher order representation of emotions made possible by the recursive loop of self-reflexivity. Another crucial difference between kong and the rest of the depression cluster is that the latter is univocal in its negative valence, whereas the former is not: kong is loss with a consolation. The consolation of illumination or enlightenment is expressed in the realisation of impermanence in the envoi of poem B: “Now I know that between heaven and earth/The millions of things are all fragile.” Consider another example. The following lyric is written by the last ruler of Southern T’ang, Li Yü (937-978), who, in addition to personal tragedies—the death of his wife and their young son—lost his throne and was taken as a captive to the new capital of the usurping Sung dynasty, where he stayed for the rest of his life till his forty- first birthday, upon which occasion he was forced to drink the poisoned wine and died. This lyric was written during Li Yü’s captivity away from his palace (Liu and Lo 303, tr. Daniel Bryant): Tune: “Ripples Sifting Sand” The things of the past may only be lamented, They appear before me, hard to brush aside: An autumn wind blows in the courtyards and moss invades the steps;

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A row of unrolled beaded screens hangs idly down, For now no one comes for all the day. My golden sword now lies buried deep, And all my youth is turned to weeds. In the cool of evening, when the heavens are still and the moon blossoms forth, I think of all those towers of jade and marble palaces reflected, Shining emptily [kong] in the Ch’in-huai.

As can be expected, there is much nostalgia, loss and grief in the last emperor’s reminiscences, but the sense of kong that concludes the poem is not simply all that. The last emperor thought of the gleaming reflection of his palaces in the river Ch’in-huai, and felt “empty” (“kong”). The translation ‘in vain’ would do as well here. In vain is the beauty of the former palaces—all their grandeur in reminiscence only mocks the dethroned ruler. Yet, there is more. Kong is the feeling that everything is ‘empty’ to the very core. Indeed the imagery of the shimmering reflections of grandeur captures well this Buddhist sense of emptiness: all that glory and splendour of towers and palaces, of jade and marble, turn out to be sheer reflections on water, a mirage shot through and through with ‘nothingness’. In the present context, the poet/emperor’s detachment is manifest in a paradoxical combination of antithetical emotions: on the one hand, the “empty” reflections on water suggest the sentiment of disillusionment and emotional withdrawal; on the other, there is a hint of consolation, an appreciation—so characteristic of savouring—for the aesthetic beauty of things, without which it would not have been possible for the poet to capture that enchanted moment when the moonlight shines forth in full splendour against the coolness and serenity of the evening sky (“In the cool of evening, when the heavens are still and the moon blossoms forth”). We may recall an insight from Master Eckhart that this paradoxical combination of emotions is characteristic of detachment. To explore further the structure of detachment, consider the following lines of a lyric by Ou-yang Hsiu (1007-1072): Recollections of West Lake Flocks of blossoms gone, yet West Lake’s good, Shattered scattered residue of red As willow down comes misting down The willow hangs across the wind all day long. Dispersed without a trace are the pipe songs,

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Gone are the tourists of the lake, Not till then do I realize the emptiness [kong] of spring. I let the thin gauze curtain fall Fine rain, a mated pair of swallows, coming home. (adapted from the translation of Jerome P. Seaton, in Liu and Lo 331, emphasis added)

It is quite common, at least in the Chinese tradition, for a sense of kong to follow on the heels of the feeling that the party is over—tourists are gone and music bands dispersed at the famed West Lake. But more than the realisation that spring has come to an end, kong entails a self-reflexive appraisal of one’s attachment to spring as well. The concomitant detachment consists of, again, a paradoxical combination of emotions: on the one hand, there are the sentiments of resignation and emotional withdrawal as suggested by the falling curtain; on the other, there is an appreciation of affective ties as suggested by the return (presumably out of attachment to the nest site) of the mated swallows. Detachment also entails the emergence of a psychological space. It is from this psychological space, cordoned off, as it were, by layers of diaphanous screens—the gauze curtain and the fine rain—that the poet welcomes the returning swallows with renewed appreciation but without attachment. Note the profound transformation of the poet’s emotional intent from tenacious attachment to spring—“not till” (line 3, second stanza) all the merry making of the season has come to an end will he give up the hope—to quiet resignation (letting down the curtain), from a sense of loss marked by the departure of spring to a sense of gain as suggested by the returning swallows. But things do not necessarily go full circle—the poet has come to approach loss and gain alike with a grain of detachment. Along with the emergence of psychological space is the transformation of time. The impetuousness of spring with its festivities—the tourists and the music bands—is transformed, with the realisation of kong, into a leisurely, contemplative time, witnessed by the willow that sways gently in the wind all day long. Note the absence of “goal directed energy” characteristic of “agency thinking” (Snyder, et al.) in this picture. What we have instead are “acceptance wriggles” (Frijda and Sundararajan 2007): the willow hangs in the wind languidly with as little self determination and purposeful pursuit as the contemplative poet behind the gauze curtain. Lastly, in its movement from attachment to disillusionment kong mimics the taste reversion of disgust, except that in the present context the realisation of kong entails a double reversion of taste from good to bad, and back again. Shweder and Haidt found in Medieval Hindu texts a subtype of disgust that entails “horror and disillusionment, as well as

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world-weariness associated with the quest for detachment, transcendence, and salvation” (403). The possible connection between disillusionment and disgust as “the rejection response to bad-tasting foods [and by extension, experiences]”25 is intimated at the beginning of the poem, but countered with the opposite evaluation: contrary to conventional wisdom, the spoliation of spring (“Shattered scattered residue of red”) at West Lake is pronounced “good” (line 1, first stanza). Read along this line, this poem concerns a re-definition of pleasure and draws the distinction between conventional pleasure, which does not survive the spring (or symbolically youth), and refined pleasure, which does. Taken together, this selection of classical Chinese poems shows how the Buddhist notion of emptiness can recode experience to allow for a paradoxical combination of opposite emotional intent—savouring of loss or depression—an interdigitation of the positive emotion of contemplative appreciation (savouring) on the one hand, and the negative emotion of grief and sorrow on the other. Because of its radical recoding of experience, kong signifies a creative response to severe goal block and loss, a response in terms of acceptance, but not resignation; letting be, but not giving up; savouring rather than coping.

Summary and Conclusion This study capitalised on the potentials of cross fertilisation between religion and psychology by an investigation of the Chinese Buddhist notion of emptiness (kong), from the perspective of cognitive theories of emotions. The phenomena of kong were situated in the cultural historical context of aesthetic savouring, identified as a second order desire, and compared and contrasted with a prominent psychological theory of hope which approaches emotions as first order experiences. Using classical Chinese poetry as illustration, the cognitive processes of kong were analysed in terms of self-reflexivity and cognitive recoding which evinced potentials for profound transformation of emotional intent. The potential contribution of this study to the field of religion may be surmised as follows: it puts an important Buddhist emotion on the map of religious emotions as deserving of further scholarly investigations; it highlights the importance of moral maps in the shaping and transformation of our emotions; it restores to “strong evaluation” its original complexity and possibilities beyond the scandal of “fundamentalism”; it sheds some light on the complexity and creativity inherent in detachment-related phenomena. Potential contribution to psychology lies in the fact that this study fills a knowledge-gap in contemporary theories of emotion

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concerning the importance of second order desires and the need to study religious emotions without reducing them to “first order phenomenology” (Lambie & Marcel). For those clinically inclined, this study has practical implications. The Buddhist notion of kong offers an alternative treatment approach instead of the rhetoric of hope that privileges coping, agency and goal pursuit. As an alternative response to goal block, the Buddhist kong advocates letting be and acceptance that facilitates savouring of experiences, even negative ones.

Notes 1

Harry Frankfurt, ‘Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person’, in Journal of Philosophy 67 (1), 1971, 5-20. 2 Charles Taylor, Human Agency and Language, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1985, 16 (author’s emphasis). Further references to this text will be indicated by (Taylor) followed by the page number. 3 C. R. Snyder, J. S. Cheavens and S. T. Michael, ‘Hope Theory: History and Elaborated Model’, in J. Elliot (ed.), Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Hope, Nova Science, New York 2005, 101-18. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Snyder, et al.) followed by the page number. 4 Yaichiro Isobe (trans.), Musings of a Chinese Vegetarian, Yuhodo, Kanda, Tokyo 1926. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Isobe) followed by the page number. 5 Q. J. Wang, The Wisdom of Life in Cai-gen Tan (in Chinese), Cong-wen Guan, Tabai 2004. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Wang) followed by the page number. 6 Cf. Louise Sundararajan, ‘Twenty-four poetic moods: Poetry and personality in Chinese aesthetics’, in Creativity Research Journal 16 (2 & 3), 2004, 201-14. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Sundararajan 2004) followed by the page number; Louise Sundararajan and James R. Averill (2007), ‘Creativity in the everyday: Culture, self, and emotions’, in R. Richards (ed.), Everyday Creativity and New Views of Human Nature (pp. 195-220), American Psychological Association, Washington D. C. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Sundararajan & Averill) followed by the page number. 7 Cf. Fred B. Bryant, ‘A Four-Factor Model of Perceived Control: Avoiding, Coping, Obtaining, and Savoring’, in Journal of Personality 57 (4), 1989, 773-97. 8 Cf. Eugene Chen Eoyang, The Transparent Eye, University of Hawaii Press, Honolulu 1993. 9 Cf. Richard A. Shweder and Jonathan Haidt, ‘The Cultural Psychology of the Emotions: Ancient and New’, in M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland-Jones (eds.), Handbook of Emotions (2nd ed.), Guilford, New York 2000. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Shweder & Haidt) followed by the page number.

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Cf. Harsha V. Dehejia, The Advaita of Art, Motilal Banarsidass, Delhi 1996. Cf. Louise Sundararajan, ‘The Veil and Veracity of Passion in Chinese Poetics’, in Consciousness & Emotion 3 (2), 2002, 197-228. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Sundararajan 2002) followed by the page number. Cf. also Sundararajan & Averill. 12 Cf. Thomas Berry, ‘Affectivity in Classical Confucian Tradition’, in Tu Weiming and Mary Evelyn Tucker (eds.), Confucian Spirituality, Crossroad, New York 2003, 96-112. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Berry) followed by the page number. 13 Philip David Zelazo, ‘Towards a Characterization of Minimal Consciousness’, in New Ideas in Psychology 14 (1), 1996, 73. 14 Philip David Zelazo, ‘Minds in the (Re)Making: Imitation and the Dialectic of Representation’, in Janet Wilde Astington (ed.), Minds in the Making: Essays in Honour of David R. Olson, Blackwell Publishers, Oxford 2000, 158. 15 Cf. John Lambie and Anthony Marcel, ‘Consciousness and Emotion Experience: A Theoretical Framework’, in Psychological Review 109, 2002, 219-59. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Lambie & Marcel) followed by the page number. 16 James Legge, ‘The Doctrine of the Mean’, in The Chinese Classics, Vol. I, Wen Shih Chi, Taipei 1971 (1893), 387. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Chung Yung) followed by the page number. 17 Yu-lan Fung, A Short History of Chinese Philosophy, The Free Press, New York 1966, 175. 18 Cf. Nico H. Frijda, ‘Emotion Experience’, in Cognition and Emotion 19, 473-98. 19 Nico H. Frijda and Louise Sundararajan, ‘Emotion Refinement: a Theory inspired by Chinese Poetics’, in Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2 (3), 2007, 227-241. Further reference ton this text indicated by (Frijda and Sundararajan 2007). 20 Cf. Louise Sundararajan, ‘Reveries of Well-Being in the Shih-p’in: From Psychology to Ontology’, in Anna-Teresa Tymieniecka (ed.), Analecta Husserliana Vol. LVI, Kluwer, the Netherlands 1998, 57-70. Cf. also Sundararajan 2002, 2004. 21 David O’Neal, Meister Eckhart from Whom God Hid Nothing: Sermons, Writings and Sayings, Shambhala, Boston 1996, 193. 22 Cf. J. J. Gross and O. P. John, ‘Individual Differences in Two Emotion Regulation Processes: Implications for Affect, Relationships, and Well-Being’, in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85, 2003, 348-62. 23 Cf. Keith Oatley, ‘Scripts, Transformations, and Suggestiveness of Emotions in Shakespeare and Checkov’, in Review of General Psychology 8, 2004, 323-40. 24 In W. C. Liu and I. Y. Lo (eds.), Sunflower Splendor: Three Thousand Years of Chinese Poetry, trans. Steven Owen, Anchor, Garden City NY 1975, 160-61. Further reference to this text will be indicated by (Liu and Lo) followed by the page number and translator. 11

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25 Paul Rozin, Jonathan Haidt and Clark McCauley, ‘Disgust’, in M. Lewis and J. M. Haviland-Jones (eds.), Handbook of Emotions (2nd edition), Guilford, New York 2000, 644.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN COMPASSION AS AN EMOTION AND VIRTUE1 ROBERT C. ROBERTS

1. Introduction One desideratum in a general understanding of emotion is that it be able to account for emotion-types that are special to traditions. Accounts or theories that restrict themselves to biological references—say, the parameters of evolution or the bio-chemistry and circuitry of the brain, or facial expressions or the responsiveness of the peripheral nervous system—do not have very good resources for satisfying this desideratum. Needed is a genuinely mental account of emotions, and one, furthermore, that gives a central place to the propositional content of mental states. Only in conceptual and narrative diversity is to be found the kind of diversity that distinguishes traditions and the experiences and patterns of life characteristic of traditions. In the past thirty years a great deal of work has been done with this kind of understanding of emotions. Anthropological studies tend to suppose that emotions are shaped by “culture.”2 Some psychologists have also offered accounts that stress their “cognitive” aspects.3 But philosophical accounts are by their nature more focused on the concept of an emotion itself and on the concepts of the various emotion-types, and it is from them that we can expect the most developed conceptual accounts. The judgment-accounts of Robert Solomon4 and of Martha Nussbaum5 are particularly well adapted to afford rich analysis of cultural differences among emotion-types, as is my own proposal that we should think of emotions as concern-based construals.6 In The Art of Rhetoric7, Aristotle gives conceptual or narrative accounts of a number of emotion-types. I am going to compare the kind of compassion that Aristotle describes with Christian compassion. Aristotle’s concept has some claim to be not culturally shaped, but to be simply universal human compassion as such. Nussbaum makes the case that

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Aristotle’s conception is the one found in the Greek tragedians, so for convenience’s sake I will call it the tragic conception of compassion, though she thinks that almost the same concept is found in modern Europe and America, and no doubt elsewhere. I begin with Aristotle also because his analyses of emotion-types raise an issue of contention between me and Solomon-Nussbaum as to the nature of emotions in general. The issue between Solomon-Nussbaum and me is whether emotions are essentially judgments, or whether they are better regarded as a kind of “appearance” or quasi-perceptual impression that I call a construal.8 In a nutshell the difference is this. Judgments are episodes of belief, of which, therefore, two things are true. First, they need not involve any appearance or presentation as perceptions do. You can judge that something is red without anything’s appearing red to you; you can judge that your mother has a long nose without having an impression (say, in imagination) of her long nose. And second, you can have an impression or be subject to an appearance of something’s being so-and-so without assenting to the proposition that it is so-and-so. In the heat of the summer the road ahead can appear to you as covered with water without your taking it to be true that it is covered with water. To say that emotions are construals in my sense of the word is to say that they are always an impression, a presentation of the situation to the subject in some quasi-perceptual way; and that the subject of an emotion need not assent to what the emotion is “telling” him. In these two ways emotions are more like perceptions than they are like judgments. In the analyses of emotion-types presented in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, he seems to support my side of this disagreement. He clearly distinguishes judgment (țȡϟıȚȢҗ and conviction (ʌϟıIJȚȢ) on the one side, from appearance (ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮѽҏ ijĮȚȞϱμİȞȠȞ) on the other. (On this distinction, see De Anima 3.3, 482b1-5, where he points out that the sun can “appear to us to be a foot in diameter though we are convinced that it is larger than the inhabited part of the earth.”) He says that “the object of rhetoric is judgment (țȡϟıİȦȢ)” (1377b20), that is, rhetoric is the art of convincing hearers of something, and “the emotions (ʌΣșȘ) are all those things through which men change their bearing toward judgments (țȡϟıİȚȢ)” (1378a23-24). So the rhetorician is an expert at managing the emotions of his audience, in the interest of changing their judgments. But in Aristotle’s accounts of the emotion-types, the language of țȡϟıȚȢ and ʌϟıIJȚȢ does not characterize the kind of mental state the emotion is. Instead, Aristotle uses the language of desire (ϷȡİȟȚȢѽҏ ȕȠϾȜİıșĮȚ) or pleasure (ψįȠȞȘ) or pain (ȜϾʌȘ) occasioned by or characterizing appearance (ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮ ijĮȚȞϱμİȞȠȞ) or (more rarely) thinking, deeming, imagining (ȠϥİıșĮȚ). For example,

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“Let fear be a pain or trouble from an impression ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮȢ) of imminent destructive or painful harm” (1381a25-26); “Let shame then be a pain or trouble concerning things that appear (ijĮȚȞϱμİȞĮ) to tend toward the disgrace of evil” (1383b15-16), “shame is an impression (ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮ) about dishonor” (1384a27); “indignation (ȞİμİıκȞ) is being pained at the appearance (ijĮȚȞȠμνȞУ) of undeserved good fortune” (1387a10).9 My substantive arguments concerning compassion do not depend on Aristotle’s agreeing with me about the nature of emotions, but if I am right that he tended to think of them as impressions, as distinct from judgments, this would make sense of the art of rhetoric. In general, impressions prod us to judgment. We tend to believe our impressions, and so it makes sense for the rhetorician, who wants to produce conviction in his audience, to be an impression-manager. But this is not to say that impressions are judgments, or that they necessarily produce the corresponding judgment, any more than sensory impressions necessarily engender conviction. Sometimes we don’t believe our eyes, and similarly sometimes we don’t believe our emotions. In my analysis of compassion I will try to show how attending to the separability of emotions from the corresponding judgments aids the cause of a moral psychology of the emotions and virtues. Aristotle includes an entire logical analysis of compassion in the following compact sentence: “Let compassion then be a pain upon the impression (πʌϠ ijĮȚȞȠμνȞУ) of destructive or painful evil, when it seems (ijĮϟȞȘIJĮȚ) nearby, which befalls one not deserving of it, and which one might expect oneself or someone close to oneself to suffer” (1385b14-18). Interpreting Aristotle in terms of my own view, the emotion of compassion would be a painful impression of a situation as having the following features: 1) the person I am feeling compassion for is suffering some destructive or painful misfortune; 2) the person does not deserve his suffering; 3) his suffering is of a kind to which I and those I care about are also vulnerable. The English word ‘construe’ comes from the Latin construere, which means ‘to construct.’ The psychological idea I have in mind is that an impression or ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮ can have within it quite a bit of conceptual and even narrative complexity, that it can be a single impression that is a “construction” of a complex situation, a situation with several dimensions or parameters. The formal parameters (we might call them the parameter-types) that define tragic compassion are the three that Aristotle identifies in his compact definition. When a person is feeling genuine compassion, these are the term-types in which he is construing the situation to which his attention is directed. The construal that constitutes

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his particular episode of compassion will be in terms of particular instances of these types: he will feel compassion toward a particular person, with a particular misfortune, whose agency is involved or not involved in a particular way in his suffering, to which he and his are vulnerable in particular ways. I should bring one more crucial feature of my view of emotions into connection with Aristotle’s account of compassion. I say that emotions are not just construals of situations in such terms as Aristotle identifies in his analyses, but that they are concern-based construals. To feel an emotion, a person must be concerned, in ways characteristic of that emotion-type, about the situation under the terms of the construal. Aristotle’s analysis commonsensically implies this, though he doesn’t make it explicit. All normal human beings are, I suppose, concerned about suffering, but in addition I have to care about this particular individual’s suffering—I have to want him not to suffer, and I have to care about whether he deserves the suffering. Without such desires, concerns, and cares, a construal would not amount to an emotion, and I say that such concerns are part of the subject’s construction of the situation. The concern is what makes the construal evaluative, an impression of the importance, one way or another, of the situation; and this evaluativeness or sense of the situation’s importance is essential to the emotion. I shall consider the three parts of Aristotle’s analysis of compassion in the light of the Christian tradition. I will attempt to show that Christianity does have a distinctive kind of compassion, both as an emotion and as a virtue. And I will also try to show that the concern-based construal view of emotions provides insights and explanations in the moral psychology of compassion, as an emotion and as a virtue, that are not so easily provided by the view of emotions as judgments.

2. The Proposition of Evil Aristotle says that in feeling compassion a person sees the object of his compassion as suffering some evil. The evil must be seen as nontrivial, and he specifies that it be either destructive or painful (or both). These can be separated. Some pains that are not destructive are nevertheless worthy of compassion, and some destructions or degradations that are not painful are likewise worthy of it. As an example of the first kind, a parent might properly feel compassion for a child who had lost a relatively unimportant toy. The child is in great emotional pain, but her Dad understands that she is not really being harmed; for example, she is not suffering physical or psychological damage. An example of the second kind would be feeling

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compassion for a person with Down Syndrome. The victim is in no pain, and is perhaps overall less subject to emotional pain than most normal people; but still, one might properly feel compassion for him for the way his life falls short of being a complete human life. So destruction and pain are separable kinds of evil; but of course they very often go together. Either one, says Aristotle, may be an occasion for compassion. This paper asks whether Christianity has a distinctive kind of compassion, and if so, what it is like. Christians will accept the proposition of evil, but Christianity might have a distinctive conception of evil that would make for a difference in the norms for compassion. Nussbaum has pointed out that the Stoics’ special concept of evil radically affects their concept of compassion—so radically, indeed, that they conceive compassion as a big moral mistake. The only real harm to which human beings are subject is shortfall from virtue, and virtue consists in being indifferent to the kind of eventualities that most people regard as evils. Since compassion evinces concern about these false evils, it is itself something like a vice. The case of the Stoics shows that there is no universal consensus about compassion, and that therefore Aristotle’s analysis is contestable. Christianity, like Stoicism, has a distinct conception of evil, but it differs from the Stoic view. Most of what Aristotle would regard as evils—physical pain, physical disability, poverty, illness, intense anxiety and depression, loss of loved ones, deprivation of educational opportunities, severe restriction of political freedom, and so forth—are also evils in the Christian understanding. That is why it has been typical for Christians to found schools, hospitals, orphanages, food pantries, and refuges for the homeless, to work for safety in neighborhoods and equitable distributions of the goods of this world. Stoicism does not provide much motivation for this sort of action. But in addition to such “commonsense” evils, Christians regard sin and being out of fellowship with God as the primary harms to which human beings are subject. Thus Søren Kierkegaard, speaking for the Christian tradition, can say “there is really nothing in the wide world that is able…to compensate a person for the harm he would inflict on his soul if he gave up the thought of God.” So a Christian might well feel compassion for someone who is healthy, prosperous, well educated, surrounded by friends and family, fulfilled in his work, and in the full enjoyment of political liberty, in case that person has given up on the thought of God. If the Christian is seeing with his Christian eyes, he sees this person as suffering enormous evil. Out of this compassion come the missionary efforts directed at conversion and

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spiritual nurture that are often associated with the Christian promotion of the institutions and activities I mentioned above. I conclude that the proposition of evil in the logic of compassion affords room for a distinctively Christian version of this emotion. This difference is consistent with a great deal of overlap between Christian and tragic compassion, inasmuch as the two agree on many of the harms that properly occasion the emotion.

3. The Proposition of Non-Desert The second element in Aristotle’s analysis is that the subject construes the sufferer as not deserving her own suffering. If the subject sees the sufferer as having brought the suffering on herself by her own action—and thus as deserving the suffering—then his emotion will not be compassion. The reason seems to be that compassion, in Aristotle’s analysis, is a kind of pain at the sufferer’s suffering, a pain that results from wishing the sufferer well10 combined with seeing that the sufferer is not doing well. The pain is a frustration of the subject’s well wishing for the sufferer. If the subject construes the sufferer as deserving her suffering, then he sees the suffering as fitting, and there is no frustration. The idea would be that a construal of deserving is something like a wish that the sufferer suffer, or at least a willingness, a complacency, about the sufferer suffering; and this is incompatible with the peculiar kind of pain that compassion is, on Aristotle’s analysis. Nussbaum points out how widespread is people’s agreement that the proposition of non-desert is in the logic of compassion, and she cites Candace Clark’s Misery and Company11 as confirming the same of contemporary American compassion. As a judgmentalist, however, Nussbaum thinks that the proposition of non-desert is a judgment of nondesert; that is, the subject of compassion does not just construe the sufferer as not deserving his suffering, but judges him to be undeserving of it. If we suppose that compassion is a judgment, the Christian tradition will reject the proposition of non-desert, as will the Hebrew Bible, though less clearly. Let us start with the latter. Psalm 78 associates God’s compassion for the people of Israel quite directly with their sin: They remembered that God was their rock, the Most High God their redeemer. But they flattered him with their mouths; they lied to him with their tongues. Their heart was not steadfast toward him; they were not true to his covenant. Yet he, being compassionate, forgave their iniquity, and did not destroy them; he restrained his anger often, and did not stir up all

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The Psalmist cites compassion as God’s motive for forgiving the people’s iniquity. Because of his compassion he does not punish them as they deserve (“stir up all his wrath”). It looks as though God judges the people to deserve the suffering that his punishment would bring, but is compassionate. Thus he does not judge them to be undeserving of this potential suffering. I say that this case is less than completely clear because the last sentence in the quotation seems to withdraw or mitigate the judgment of desert. The people are “but flesh,” thus too weak to be held accountable for their sin. I think that at best the judgment that the people are weak mitigates slightly their guilt and thus makes it a bit easier for God to forgive them. I do not think that it is consistent with Hebrew Bible thought to suppose that their being “but flesh” implies that they would not deserve the suffering that God’s punishment would bring on them. So I do think that the ancient Hebrew concept of compassion deviates from tragic compassion along the lines of the proposition of nondesert. A clearer case of deviation from it is one of the paradigm examples of compassion in the New Testament, Jesus’ Parable of the Prodigal Son. The younger son asks his father for his share of the inheritance now (this is already an offense against the father) and when it is granted goes off to another country where he squanders the wealth in riotous living. He is out of money, miserable and hungry. It is as clear as can be that the prodigal’s troubles are his own doing, and he goes home, hoping that his father will take him on as a hired hand if he confesses himself to be unworthy: And he arose and came to his father. But while he was yet at a distance, his father saw him and had compassion (πıʌȜĮȖȤȞϟıșȘ), and ran and embraced him and kissed him. And the son said to him ‘Father, I have sinned against heaven and before you; I no longer deserve to be called your son.’ But the father said to his servants, ‘Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him; and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found.’ And they began to make merry (Luke 15.20-24).

The father surely knows that the son has brought his suffering on himself, and if he couldn’t figure this out for himself, he has the son telling him “I have sinned against heaven and before you; I no longer deserve….” If a judgment is an episodic belief, then the father judges, at the moment of his compassion, that the son deserves his suffering. So this example is a clear

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denial, by the author of the Christian tradition, that a judgment of nondesert is essential to compassion. But it is not a straightforward rejection of Aristotle’s analysis of compassion if we understand the emotion in the more strictly Aristotelian way. On the construal view of emotions, emotions are a kind of aspectseeing. One need not be seeing in all of the aspects in which one is judging, nor judging in all the aspects in which one is seeing. So the father might be judging the son to be guilty of his suffering (that is, occurrently agreeing to the proposition that the son is uttering at the moment of homecoming) while seeing him as needing to be helped, as the beloved who was lost and is found. The phenomenon of seeing in one way while judging in another is exemplified also in forgiveness, where the combination is essential to the act (it is not essential to compassion). In forgiveness, one must judge the forgiven one as culpable of wrongdoing (otherwise an essential rationale for forgiveness is missing), but one must also not be angry at the offender for the offense, that is, not be seeing the offender as worthy of punishment12 (for if one is seeing the offender in this way, then one is not in a forgiving state of mind). Instead, one must be seeing the offender in benevolent terms. In the Christian tradition compassion and forgiveness are closely associated: compassion is frequently a motivation for forgiveness, and forgiveness clears the way for compassion. The latter is especially important, because of the contrariety between anger and compassion. The compassionate person may simultaneously judge the sufferer to be guilty of some offense against him, but anger at the sufferer is in very strong friction with compassion for her, because in anger one wants the offender to suffer, while in compassion one wants the sufferer not to suffer. So Christian compassion does not require a judgment of non-desert; but this does not distinguish it from tragic compassion, for the view that is most plausibly Aristotelian also does not strictly require a judgment of non-desert. But if we take the propositions in the Aristotelian analysis of compassion to be determinants of construal, then tragic compassion does require a construal of innocence. And here, Christian and Aristotelian compassion part ways. The father of the prodigal son construes the son in benevolent terms—as the beloved who was lost and is found and who needs help. But there is nothing about desert or non-desert in his view of the son. Indeed, since the parable is also a paradigm case of forgiveness, a judgment of guilt is required on the father’s part; and while a judgment of guilt combined with a construal of non-desert is possible, it is an irrational overall state of mind analogous to that of the phobic who knows that the

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object of his fear is not dangerous; and I do not think that we want to attribute such an irrational state of mind to the father in the parable. The association of forgiveness and compassion in the parable and in the Christian tradition more broadly perhaps explains Christianity’s deviation from the tragic compassion that is much more widespread, both in the ancient world and even down to modern times, if the findings of Candace Clark are to be credited. Forgiveness is central to the teachings of the Christian tradition. The gospel itself is a story of God’s compassionate forgiveness of the human race and of our deliverance from sin. All have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God; all stand in need of the forgiveness that God offers in Christ. The world is not divided into forgivers and forgiven; every forgiver needs forgiveness. Forgiveness is not thematized in ancient Greek literature, and is hardly exampled13, despite the preoccupation of that literature with the problem of cyclical vengeance. The idea that Christian compassion gets its distinctive character from the gospel story, and in particular from its association with forgiveness, seems plausible to me, and if true would illustrate how the presence of one virtue (in this case forgivingness) in a moral outlook may influence the character or logic of other virtues in that outlook (for example, compassion). In any case, Christian compassion does differ from tragic compassion in not requiring a proposition of non-desert. This is a more fundamental deviation from tragic compassion than the first one we noted—Christianity’s variant concept of harm—inasmuch as that variant did not involve an outright rejection of one of the propositions fundamental to tragic compassion.

4. The Proposition of Commonality The third proposition in Aristotle’s analysis of compassion relates the sufferer to the compassionate person herself. Putting the proposition in the first person plural (where it belongs), it says the sufferer and I have a common vulnerability. Aristotle’s point is beautifully illustrated by a passage from Leo Tolstoy’s story “The Death of Ivan Ilych.” One of the most terrible things about dying, as Ivan Ilych experienced it, was that his family and friends made him feel so utterly alone in it. They were in the bloom of health and pleasure, in the midst of social hilarity and vigorous activity. He, in his disgusting misery, weakness, and despair, was an alien to them. Only one person, a servant boy, took a different attitude: [Ivan Ilych] saw that no one felt for him, because no one even wished to grasp his position. Only Gerasim recognized it and pitied him. And so Ivan Ilych felt at ease only with him. He felt comforted when Gerasim

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supported his legs (sometimes all night long) and refused to go to bed, saying: “Don’t you worry, Ivan Ilych, I’ll get sleep enough later on,” or when he suddenly became familiar and exclaimed: “If you weren’t sick it would be another matter, but as it is, why should I grudge a little trouble?” Gerasim alone did not lie; everything showed that he alone understood the facts of the case and did not consider it necessary to disguise them, but simply felt sorry for his emaciated and enfeebled master. Once when Ivan Ilych was sending him away he even said straight out: “We shall all of us die, so why should I grudge a little trouble?”—expressing the fact that he did not think his work burdensome, because he was doing it for a dying man and hoped someone would do the same for him when his time came.14

The family members’ failure of compassion is in part a failure to see the commonality between Ivan Ilych and themselves. Because Gerasim is more self-transparent about his status as a mortal and a potential sufferer, he is able to see the suffering Ivan Ilych as a fellow. Thus Gerasim’s selfunderstanding aids his seeing the other with the eyes of compassion. The family members suffer an epistemic defect that is at the same time a defect of the will: they are unwilling to be like Ivan Ilych, and so they do not see (clearly). Because Gerasim is relatively reconciled to his mortality and vulnerability, he sees clearly. Is the proposition of commonality characteristic of Christian compassion? To adjudicate this question, let us look at a strongly paradigmatic exemplar of Christian compassion, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The following is a prayer that she and her sisters used daily in their Home for the Dying in Calcutta: JESUS MY PATIENT Dearest Lord, may I see you today and every day in the person of your sick, and while nursing them, minister to you. Though you hide yourself behind the unattractive disguise of the irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable, may I still recognize you, and say: “Jesus, my patient, how sweet it is to serve you.” Lord, give me this seeing faith, then my work will never be monotonous. I will ever find joy in humoring the fancies and gratifying the wishes of all poor sufferers. O beloved sick, how doubly dear you are to me, when you personify Christ; and what a privilege is mine to be allowed to tend you. Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high vocation, and its many responsibilities. Never permit me to disgrace it by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience. And O God, while you are Jesus, my patient, deign also to be to me a patient Jesus, bearing with my faults, looking only to my intention, which is to love and serve you in the person of each of your sick.

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Chapter Fifteen Lord, increase my faith, bless my efforts and work, now and for evermore. Amen.

I remarked, at the beginning of this paper, that judgment and construal accounts of the nature of emotion have the advantage, over more biologically based understandings, of enabling us to see how particular worldviews and narratives can be taken up in a person’s emotional orientation to the world. These words of Mother Teresa illustrate the point robustly. Mother Teresa’s compassion is much more complex, with regard to the proposition of commonality, than Gerasim’s. Mother Teresa’s behavior toward the sick—helping, nursing behavior—is roughly the same as Gerasim’s, but there is quite a difference in their compassion as an emotion, that is, in their way of concernfully seeing the patient. Where Gerasim sees a fellow vulnerable human being, Mother Teresa sees in each of her patients Jesus of Nazareth, the compassionate suffering redeemer of the world. In her compassion she sees a commonality and she sees herself, but interestingly, the commonality is not directly of herself with the sufferer, as in Gerasim’s compassion. In the gospel story, Christ is both the sufferer and the minister to sufferers, and his ministry consists in large part of identifying with them. Mother Teresa sees the commonality between her patient’s suffering and the suffering of Christ, and she sees herself as a fellow minister with Christ. Another difference made by the gospel narrative’s shaping of her compassion is the note of joy and pleasure that her prayer expresses. Aristotle stresses the pain of compassion—indeed, defines the emotion as a kind of pain. Compassion no doubt has a painful aspect for Mother Teresa—after all, it moves her to alleviate the sufferer’s suffering—but in emphasizing her service to Jesus and the sufferers’ likeness to him, her prayer is dominated by terms of endearment: how sweet it is to serve you, how doubly dear the patients are, what a joy and privilege it is to serve them. Her acts of compassion to sufferers are acts of love to Jesus, the lover of sufferers, and satisfy her desire to serve him, and to serve with him. The prayer expresses not only the joy of gratitude for being integrated into Christ’s enterprise, but also a certain anxiety about being adequate to that calling. The attractiveness of the sufferer can be in jeopardy, for he is “disguised” as irritable, exacting, unreasonable (and we might add, disgusting), so Christian compassion requires a “seeing faith” that looks through the disguise and sees the Christ and the beloved of Christ who is hidden behind this off-putting exterior. We saw a moment ago that Gerasim could see things in Ivan Ilych that were invisible to his family,

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and that he did so by way of a certain self-understanding as vulnerable and mortal. Something analogous goes for Mother Teresa: it is a spiritual discipline to see the beauty in these sufferers, and the discipline has to do with her experience of herself. Compassion is an emotion, and emotions are not just judgments—e.g. that this sufferer is in relevant respects very much like myself. Emotions are perceptions, and if the perception has a reflexive element, as Christian compassion does, one must have a more or less spontaneous impression of oneself as being a certain way. Christian spirituality engenders a perceptually immediate understanding of oneself as an individual creature of a loving God, as a member of a species beloved of God, as equal in status before God with all other sinners, as a sinner for whom Christ died a bloody and painful bodily death. If this way of understanding oneself is to affect one’s emotional life, it must enter deeply into one’s impression-dispositions; it cannot be merely a matter of belief or judgment. Mother Teresa prays for the ability to see through the illusion that the poor sufferer is not lovely. And by her way of life she does what she can to dispel the illusion of dissimilarity in the other direction as well, that is, the dissimilarity of herself from the poor sufferer. Like Christ, she puts herself among the people, as much as possible on a footing with them, in her way of dressing, eating, working. People are incredibly insistent on rank, and whether I am anxious because I am outranked by others (intellectually, say, or socially) or joyful and complacent because I consistently outrank many others, this concern and this ranking way of seeing myself and others in relation are barriers to compassion, with its proposition of commonality. Christianity teaches that all such rankings are inessential, not the truest or deepest story about human beings. And the saints have known that the impression one has of oneself as in common with the sufferers is promoted by a whole way of life in which that commonality is acted out. So with regard to the proposition of commonality, Christian compassion deviates significantly from tragic compassion. The proposition of commonality, in the most mature instances of Christian compassion, is not so much about common vulnerability as about common status before God. The terms of commonality in which the Christian sees the sufferer derive from the gospel story. The sufferer and myself are equally objects of God’s love. The story says that Christ has so identified with each of us, and so suffered for our sins, that any sufferer can personify him for us. In loving and serving the sufferer we love and serve both Christ and the sufferer. In the most distinctively Christian kind of compassion, this common bond with Christ is experienced as an aspect of the emotion.

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5. Compassion as a Virtue I said at the beginning that one desideratum for an understanding of emotion is that it account for cultural, world-view, and narrative variants of emotion-types. I think we have seen pretty clearly that compassion, as an emotion, is subject to such variation, and I hope we have also seen how Christian compassion differs from tragic compassion. Because of the moral and spiritual importance of emotions like compassion, another desideratum in an understanding of emotions is that it suggest an account of how emotions, as episodes, are related to virtues, which are traits of character or dispositions of the personality. Compassion is an emotion, but a virtue also corresponds to it, and goes by the same name. A general understanding of emotions should suggest how the emotion and the virtue are related. I have said that judgment accounts do a pretty good job of dealing with emotions’ cultural, world-view, and narrative variability, though I argued that the construal view handles some phenomena in moral psychology more gracefully. Judgment accounts do less well at explaining the relation between emotions and virtues. The view of emotions as concern-based construals has two major resources for explaining how emotions relate to character-traits: 1) the fact that emotions arise out of concerns, and 2) the fact that perception (in the broad sense of construal) can be trained, with perceptual sets or dispositions resulting. These are resources because virtues are dispositions to spontaneous response, and so are a person’s more basic concerns and his or her habits of perception. Some virtues—and compassion is one of them—are dispositions to emotion and the entailed perceptions and the actions that the emotion motivates. These virtues, then, will be explained as concerns of a certain sort, on which perceptions of a certain sort impinge, by virtue of relatively fixed perceptual dispositions. Both concerns and perceptual dispositions can be shaped by a person’s worldview. Let me summarize each of these briefly. A concern may be merely passing (say, a concern to get a band-aid for one’s cut finger) or it may be long-term (say, a love of one’s work, one’s country, or God). Any of the latter can be basic to virtues (industriousness, patriotism, agape). The emotion of compassion is an episode in response to someone who is suffering harm; it involves seeing the person in characteristic ways (sketched in the discussion above of tragic compassion and Christian compassion) and it entails a desire to help, to alleviate the harm or protect the sufferer from it. According to my understanding of emotions, this motivating construal is based on a dispositional concern. In this case the concern is benevolence, the desire that people flourish. The

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compassionate person dispositionally wishes human beings well; thus when he construes one of them as suffering, the construal is the characteristic pain that Aristotle makes central to the emotion, and entails the desire to help. Human nature seems to contain a pre-cultural disposition of well-wishing to one’s fellow human beings, as David Hume suggests; but concrete instances of this disposition in individuals will always be culturally shaped, by what one takes human beings, and their basic value, to be. In the Christian framework human beings are seen as extremely valuable because of their being created in God’s image and being the object of God’s love. This conceptually nuanced concern for human beings in general is therefore one aspect of the virtue of compassion, and is the concern on which the emotion of compassion is based. In another sense, too, the benevolence behind compassion will not be a merely natural disposition: it will result from nurture and maturation. Love of neighbor is a goal of Christian education, and presumably people can also mature into deeper and deeper tragic compassion. People differ considerably in how concerned they are for the wellbeing of other people, and in the range of people and people-types for whom they have this concern. Many factors go into this development and differentiation, among which the following come to mind: having suffered oneself; having “accepted” one’s vulnerability to suffering; the modeling that is provided by a community of persons of compassion; the performing of compassionate acts oneself; close personal interaction with sufferers that aids one’s capacity to see their situation from their point of view; discussion of sufferers, suffering, and remedies that keeps compassionissues before one’s mind; and enough distance from the suffering of others to prevent or mitigate the tendency of the mind to “jade.” The disposition resulting from such nurture will be the basis not just for the emotion of compassion, but for a whole range of emotions, both “negative” and “positive.” It is the basis for compassion when the other is suffering, but perception of the other as flourishing or as recovering from suffering will be joy; the response to another compassionate person will be admiration or some other approving emotion; the response to someone who culpably causes suffering will be indignation; to someone who helps in the relief efforts of compassion, gratitude. And so on for other emotions as well. So, on the construal account of emotions, the virtue of compassion consists in part of a concern for the wellbeing of the neighbor. The other aspect of the virtue is the disposition to see sufferers in the terms specified as normative by the tradition. Perceptual sets are trainable and the training will characteristically have a conceptual side; that is, as a

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training in perceiving, it is a training in conceiving. Thus the pathology microscopist has eyes that have been trained to see things on microscope slides that the rest of us cannot see. We do not see these things even if we have 20-20 vision, because we do not have the conceptually-shaped perceptual set of the pathologist. Similarly, the person with the virtue of tragic compassion has been trained to discriminate sufferers in terms of blameworthiness / innocence and their similarity to himself in respect of vulnerability to harm. The more spontaneously the individual regularly sees sufferers in these terms, the more perfectly does he exemplify the virtue of tragic compassion, assuming of course that he also has a disposition of benevolence. And the analog holds for Christian compassion, which consists, in significant part, in the perceptual set to see sufferers as personifications of Christ, to see them as having a common nature with oneself, and not to be deterred from compassion on noticing that they are to blame for their suffering. In both the tragic and Christian traditions, the emotion of compassion is prima facie virtuous. That is, the word ‘compassion’ denotes a mental state that is right with respect to appropriate objects. For example, in the tragic tradition, it is correct to see a sufferer as worthy of help only if he is innocent of his suffering; in the Christian tradition it is correct to see a sufferer as worthy of help even if he is not innocent of his suffering. For two reasons, the emotion is only prima facie virtuous. First, the emotion is only an indicator, not a guarantor, of the virtue because of the possibility of what Kierkegaard calls ‘feeling’ or ‘flashes of emotion’15—that is, emotion episodes that seem to have (and may indeed have parts of) the canonical grammar, but do not, to use a phrase of Aristotle, “proceed from a firm and unchangeable character.”16 Compassion the virtue is, in both traditions, something steady, a deep disposition. Second, an emotion with a different grammar from the canonical one may be allowed to be compassion without allowing it to be virtuous. If ‘compassion’ is the name of a virtuous emotion, then strictly speaking, an adherent of the tragic tradition should deny that what Christians call compassion is fully virtuous; and vice-versa. The adherent of the tragic tradition will think the Christian lacking in moral seriousness, since his emotion “ignores” the culpability of the sufferer; the Christian will think the tragic character ungenerous, unforgiving, or perhaps lacking in contrition. Still, each could recognize the other’s emotion as compassion, because of its similarity to his own, while being inclined to say of the other, “It is compassion, but of a degenerate kind” or, “It is similar to compassion, but it is not real compassion.”

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It is possible to feel the “right” emotion on the wrong occasion. For example, a member of the tragic moral tradition might feel an emotion that satisfies all the standards for tragic compassion, but feel it on an occasion when, say, the sufferer was in fact not innocent; or he might feel it for an animal that did not satisfy the proposition of evil (imagine for a moment that lobsters have brains such that they feel nothing and that someone feels tragic compassion for a lobster that is being dropped into boiling water). In such cases the emotion is straightforwardly false: it is a perception of a sufferer as innocent who is not innocent, or of a creature as suffering that is not suffering. Occasional emotional mistakes of this ilk don’t impugn the subject’s virtue; perfect cognitive reliability is too high a standard for human virtue. But habitual or characteristic mistakes do impugn it. To be a virtuously compassionate person, then, it is not enough to feel the canonical emotion, even regularly; one must be inclined to feel it on the right occasions, and this suggests that the compassionate person will have discriminating judgment—will not be easily taken in by histrionics and con artists, for example. Another way to go wrong emotionally is to feel one of the variants of compassion that is non-canonical for one’s moral community. Thus a member of the tragic moral community might construe a sufferer as worthy to be helped despite knowing the sufferer to be guilty of his suffering. A Christian might find herself inclined to construe sufferers in terms of their guilt or innocence for their suffering, or might find herself inclined to feel a compassion for sufferers that resembles Christian compassion in not balking at culpability, yet does not see Christ in the sufferer. Such moral defects can be partially occasioned by the influence of circumambient moral cultures. Thus the Christian might be influenced, emotionally, by living among adherents of the tragic moral tradition, or vice-versa. The person with a well-formed virtue of compassion will have a certain consistency or traditional purity in his compassion-disposition and will be emotionally autonomous vis-à-vis the influence of alien moral cultures. Nussbaum has noted the prevalence of the ideal of tragic compassion across cultures, and I have signaled some ways in which Christian compassion differs from it. Christian compassion seems to be a minority opinion in the world and is often so even in nominally Christian communities. Christian moral nurture will often have the form of Christianizing a pre-existent tragic compassion, including a program of maintenance involving a regular discipline of reminders such as the prayer used daily by Mother Teresa, and other devices of worship. So one might say that tragic compassion is the default formation for human beings. Not

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that it is an automatic development, requiring no training; but that it is the kind most likely to arise in morally serious communities, absent some special influence. Christianity will explain why its own brand of compassion is not the default formation by pointing out that the information about God on which Christian compassion turns is specially revealed in the gospel narratives—both the forgiving generosity of God that undermines the proposition of non-desert, and the Jesus-story that shapes the proposition of commonality. It will also explain the morally “rigorist” character of tragic compassion (its shortfall of generosity and humility and contrition) by reference to the tainting of humanity by sin. Let me end with a brief word about why I think my view of emotions handles better their relation to virtues than judgment accounts do. Judgmentalism comes in many versions, and I will comment on only one of them. Martha Nussbaum rejects Aristotle’s proposition of common vulnerability as essential to compassion because a god who was not vulnerable in the way humans are might show compassion.17 If one takes a view of compassion like the one I have offered in this paper, Nussbaum’s argument will not seem very strong. After all, if Christian and tragic compassion can diverge as much as I have claimed they do, it seems odd to think that a god’s compassion would have to be just like human compassion. Perhaps human compassion is governed by a proposition of commonality, but divine compassion is not. In any case, Nussbaum rejects the proposition of commonality as essential to compassion and replaces it with what she calls the eudaimonistic judgment, which says something like the sufferer’s wellbeing is an important part of my own wellbeing. The eudaimonistic judgment functions in Nussbaum’s account of compassion in much the way the concern for the other’s wellbeing functions in my own thinking about compassion. In fact, when Nussbaum expounds her idea of the eudaimonistic judgment she makes very liberal use of the word ‘concern.’ Nussbaum’s judgment account is one of the more radical versions of it, one that commits her to saying that an emotion is nothing but a judgment, or set of judgments, of a certain kind. Putting a judgment in the place of the concern is thus a device of the reduction program. But the eudaimonistic judgment is not fit to function in this way. If I am genuinely concerned for the wellbeing of the other, then I will be distressed by the other’s suffering, and in a way this distress compromises my own wellbeing. So from my concern for the other it follows that my wellbeing is (to some extent) tied to his. But the concern, and the entailed fact of my wellbeing’s entanglement with the other’s, does not of itself amount to a judgment on my part that my wellbeing is tied up with the

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other’s. Such a judgment would require a further, reflective, move on my part, which I may or may not make. So while it is true that compassion requires a concern for the wellbeing of the other, it does not follow that compassion requires the eudaimonistic judgment. The eudaimonistic judgment is a judgment about one of the necessary conditions for compassion, not itself a necessary condition. This confusion seems to result from trying to pack too much moral psychology into the concept of a judgment. Nussbaum may respond that a concern is a kind of judgment. While my concern for a sufferer’s wellbeing may not be a reflective judgment that my wellbeing is tied up with his, still it is a judgment, a sort of “immediate,” unreflective one. Is a concern a judgment? Certainly, some concerns can be expressed in a judgment of the importance of something; but such a judgment does not automatically express the corresponding concern, nor does a concern entail a judgment of importance. If my particular concern to smoke a cigarette involves a belief that it is important for my eudaimonia to smoke a cigarette, then that concern can be expressed in the judgment, it is important to my wellbeing for me to smoke a cigarette. But I may have a concern to smoke a cigarette without judging that it is important to my wellbeing to do so; in fact, I can be concerned to smoke a cigarette while judging that it is detrimental to my wellbeing to smoke the cigarette.18 This seems to be just the situation that an imperfectly developed Stoic might find herself in. In the presence of a mourner, her heart goes out to him in a very unStoic way: she is concerned for his wellbeing, conceived as entailing that his wife not have died. Being well enough imbued with Stoic doctrine, however, she judges that it is not a misfortune for his wife to have died. Further, the judgment that S’s wellbeing is a matter of my well-being differs from the concern for S’s wellbeing. For it seems that I can judge that S’s wellbeing is a matter of my well-being without being concerned for S’s wellbeing—say, in case my judgment that S’s wellbeing is a matter of my well-being is “academic.” My judgment that S’s well-being is a matter of my well-being can express my concern for S’s well-being, but only if I am concerned in this special way for S’s well-being. Of course the judgmentalist can stipulate that when she talks about a eudaimonistic judgment, it necessarily expresses a concern on the part of the subject making the judgment. But then it looks as though the rigmarole about judgments is an idling device of theory; it would have been more efficient and less confusing just to talk about concerns in the first place. I have sketched how, on my view of emotions, the emotion of compassion is related to the virtue of compassion. How will a

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judgmentalist account for this relation? Assume that compassion as a virtue is a disposition to notice sufferers and suffering when they are present, to feel compassion on noticing that someone is suffering, and to come to the aid of sufferers, as one is able, out of the motive provided by the emotion. Basic to any judgmentalist answer will be to make the virtue a disposition to form the judgments that constitute the emotion. The next question is, What is a disposition to form judgments? I suppose the most natural answer to this question is “beliefs.” So, to take tragic compassion as an example, the compassionate person will be one who believes propositions such that he will be disposed to judge, of particular sufferers, the propositions that form the content of the judgments that amount to compassion for those particular persons. That is, he believes that people can suffer, that only those innocent of their suffering deserve compassion, and that he can suffer in the way other people do (or, to adopt Nussbaum’s substitute for the third proposition, that some people’s suffering affects his own well-being). Then, on the dispositional basis of such beliefs, he will form, on a typical appropriate occasion, the judgment that Amy is suffering significantly, Amy is innocent of her suffering, and I could suffer the way Amy is suffering (or: Amy’s suffering affects my well-being). The problem with this account of the virtue of compassion is that believing the general propositions doesn’t seem to amount to the virtue of compassion any more than judging the particular propositions to be true amounts to the emotion, at least not if ‘believe’ and ‘judge’ are taken in the usual minimalist sense of contemporary philosophical discourse (to believe a proposition is to be disposed to assent to it sincerely). If ‘believe’ is to mean something richer and more complicated, it is plausible to think that the added values will be concerns and perceptions, as is strongly suggested by Nussbaum’s own liberal use of the language of concern and of seeing-as; but in that case it would be more efficient, analytically, just to speak of these things, rather than to use the less precise code-language of judgments, and so have to be constantly explaining oneself.

Notes 1

This paper is reprinted, with permission, from Ingolf Dalferth and Andreas Hunziker, editors, Mitleid, Religion in Philosophy and Theology Vol. 28, Mohr Siebeck, Tübingen 2007. 2 For example, Michelle Z. Rosaldo, Knowledge and Passion: Ilongot Notions of Self and Social Life, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1980; and Catherine

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Lutz, Unnatural Emotions: Everyday Sentiments on a Micronesian Atoll and Their Challenge to Western Theory, University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1988. 3 For example, R. S. Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation, Oxford University Press, New York 1991. 4 See Solomon’s The Passions, Doubleday, Garden City 1977 and Not Passion’s Slave, Oxford University Press, New York 2003. 5 See The Therapy of Desire, Princeton University Press, Princeton 1994 and Upheavals of Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2001. 6 Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 2003. 7 I shall be using the Loeb Classical Library edition with translation by John Henry Freese (Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London 1926), but I do not follow Freese’s translation in all cases. I thank Steve Leighton for excellent advice on my treatment of Aristotle here. 8 For a discussion of the nature of construals, see my Emotions, 69-83. 9 John M. Cooper argues that while Aristotle lacks a well developed account of the nature of emotions, he identifies the elements of an account that would take them to be “affected states of mind, arising from the ways events or conditions strike the one affected, which are at the same time desires for a specific range of reactive behaviors or other changes in the situation as it appears to her or him to be” (“An Aristotelian Theory of the Emotions” in A. O. Rorty, editor, Essays on Aristotle’s Rhetoric, University of California Press, Berkeley 1996, 251). Cooper attributes to Aristotle the distinction of ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮ (the cognitive ‘striking’) from what I am calling judgment and denies that the latter is an essential element (p. 247). Nussbaum argues against Cooper that Aristotle intends ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮȚ to be beliefs or judgments. She argues that 1) he distinguishes a “simple” ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮ, to which the subject does not assent and which therefore involves no inclination to act (e.g. the startle response) from a ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮ that is a judgment/emotion, which, because it involves assent, has practical implications (e.g. fear); 2) the ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮ passages in the Rhetoric make no technical distinction between ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮ and judgment; 3) Aristotle sometimes uses įȠțİϧȞ, ȠϥİıșĮȚ, and ȞȠμϟȗİȚȞ, and the ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮ passages are “rare cases” (“Aristotle on Emotions and Rational Persuasion” in op. cit., 307); and 4) in Aristotle’s use of ijĮȞIJĮıϟĮ, “what is stressed is the fact that it is the way things are seen by the agent, not the fact of the matter, that is instrumental in getting emotions going” (ibid.). For more discussion of Nussbaum on this issue, see Emotions, 83-91. 10 On well wishing, see Nicomachean Ethics 1155b35ff where, however Aristotle does not connect well-wishing with compassion or any other emotion. 11 University of Chicago Press, Chicago 1997. 12 Here seeing is concern-based seeing, that is, emotion; and ‘worthy of punishment’ is meant to express the desire for punishment that is characteristic of anger. For more on this view of forgiveness, see my “Forgivingness”, American

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Philosophical Quarterly 32, 1995, 289-306, reprinted in Cliff Williams, editor, Personal Virtues, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2005, 222-252. 13 One example is Achilles’ “forgiveness” of the house of Priam in Book 25 of the Iliad; another possible one is Socrates’ attitude to the court that condemns him, as recounted in Plato’s Apology. Achilles is a clearer example than Socrates, because Achilles’ moral outlook endorses the possibility that anger is justified, whereas Socrates has always been under suspicion of Stoic tendencies. And while Stoics certainly advocate the suppression of anger, the way they suppress it—by debunking the supposed harms that the offender has inflicted—is very far from forgiveness. 14 The Death of Ivan Ilych and Other Stories, New American Library, New York 1960, 138. 15 See Upbuilding Discourses in Various Spirits, translated by Howard and Edna Hong (Princeton University Press, Princeton 1993), 68-74. I have discussed feelings of this sort in Emotions, 314-52. 16 Nichomachean Ethics translated with an introduction by David Ross, revised by J. L. Akrill and J. O. Urmson (Oxford University Press, Oxford 1989), 1105a35, 34. 17 Upheavals of Thought, 318. 18 Equally, I can be concerned to help another in a compassionate way without believing that doing so will serve my wellbeing. Maybe acting on my compassion will cost me a great deal—so much that my wellbeing is actually diminished by the action—and yet I may still want to do it.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN FREUD AND THE OCEANIC FEELING PETER GOLDIE

At the beginning of his Civilisation and its Discontents, written in 1929, Freud refers to a letter from someone who, as Freud rather oddly puts it, “calls himself my friend” (251)1, but whom we know to be a regular and much valued correspondent of Freud’s, the French writer and mystic Romain Rolland. Rolland, having read Freud’s earlier work, The Future of an Illusion, had written to Freud saying that he, Freud, had failed to appreciate “the true source of religious sentiments” (251); this, Rolland said, was “a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without, which he finds confirmed by many others, and which he may suppose is present in millions of people. It is a feeling which he [Rolland] would like to call a sensation of ‘eternity’, a feeling as of something limitless, unbounded—as it were ‘oceanic’.” Later, Freud glosses the feeling as being of “oneness with the universe” (260). Freud said: “I cannot discover this ‘oceanic’ feeling in myself” (252). But he did not dismiss the feeling itself as an illusion. Rather, he took pains to say what the origin and explanation of the feeling was. I will get to what Freud said about this in a moment. But I think we can all ask ourselves whether or not we have had such a feeling, or one similar to it, and what it might be like to experience it. Phenomenology is a tricky business: it is hard to be accurate about one’s own thoughts and feelings, and, even if one achieves accuracy, there remains all that is below the surface of consciousness: not only the Freudian unconscious, but also what one is simply not reflectively aware of: what is, to use William James’ term, ‘subliminal’. As an illustration of this, when I began my research for this paper, it immediately struck me that I cannot be sure whether or not I have myself ever experienced a feeling of oneness with the universe. Unlike Freud, I do not think I can give an absolute denial; I am just not sure. Perhaps we should just leave it there. Perhaps the best we can do is to say that some people have

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experienced a feeling of oneness with the universe, while others, like Freud, have not. I want to try to do a bit better than that.

1. The Oceanic feeling as a neurological state One possible route to a better understanding of the oceanic feeling might be to consider its physiology. Consider toothache. The materialist—one who maintains an identity theory—would claim that the particular psychological state which is someone’s toothache is the very same thing as a particular neurological state of that person. Moreover, when considering psychological states such as toothache, it is reasonably plausible for the materialist also to claim that there is some law-like relation between psychological types and physical or neurological types, so that toothaches as a type are identical to a type of neurological state. After all, without such a law-like relation, dentistry would be a more haphazard business than it is. When it comes to psychological states such as the oceanic feeling, however, it might intuitively seem less plausible that every time you have a feeling of oneness with the universe, a particular part of your brain lights up. This was presumably what Freud had in mind when he said that the oceanic feeling will ‘defy’ characterisation in terms of physiology. I must say that I was also of this view: toothache is one thing; the oceanic feeling is quite another.2 However, I have been intrigued to see some interesting work by Dr. Andrew Newberg and his colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania, who have conducted experiments involving brain scans on Buddhist Tibetan monks and Franciscan Nuns whilst they were engaging in religious meditation. According to Newberg, what these brain scans showed at the time of peak meditation was a notable slowing down of neural activity in that part of the brain (the posterior superior section of the parietal lobe) responsible for maintaining the sense of one’s own body, and for orienting this self in a representation of three-dimensional space.3 Let us assume that this work is supported by further evidence, and it turns out that there is a law-like relation between these kinds of experiences and a kind of neural activity. So far as I can see, these relations will not help us to reach any conclusion, one way or the other, concerning the merits of the oceanic feeling or generally how we should evaluate it. Jonathan Rée made just this point for Descartes in a review of Antonio Damasio: Descartes may well have shared the neurologist’s dream that science will one day reach a stage where every idea in the mind can be paired off with

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a particular process in the brain, but he knew that the achievement would contribute nothing to the task of sorting the good ideas from bad. . . . The marks that distinguish lucidity from confusion will not show up on any brain scan.4

Moreover, these possibilities should not lead us to a ‘nothing-but’ materialism, in which something of value in its non-material guise becomes reduced to being nothing but that thing in its material guise, as one might say that the thought of God is nothing but a certain neurological event. This kind of materialism was the target of William James in his The Varieties of Religious Experience. He called it ‘medical materialism’. Medical materialism, he said, “finishes up Saint Paul by calling his vision on the road to Damascus a discharging lesion of the occipital cortex”, and “George Fox’s discontent with the shams of his age, and his pining for spiritual veracity, it treats as a symptom of a disordered colon.”5 No, we can readily accept that there is a law-like relation between the oceanic feeling and a certain kind of neural or brain activity, whilst leaving all kinds of other interesting questions wide open.

2. The ‘ideational content’ of the feeling So let us turn, as Freud did, to what he called the feeling’s ‘ideational content’ (252)—in other words, the object of the feeling, or what the feeling is about. Freud did not deny that the oceanic feeling, in those who have experienced it, was a feeling of oneness with the universe. But he looked for a genetic, psychoanalytic account of the feeling which would explain this ideational content. His account, roughly, goes like this: An infant at the breast does not at first distinguish between himself—his ego—and the external world; only as he realises that certain sources of pleasure—paradigmatically the mother’s breast—are not always available to him, and that certain sorts of pain are not always capable of being set aside, does he come to “set over against the ego an ‘object’, in the form of something which exists ‘outside’ the ego” (254). These are the first steps towards what Freud called the ‘reality principle’. Freud continues: In this way, then, the ego detaches itself from the external world. Or, to put it more correctly, originally the ego includes everything, later it separates off an external world from itself. . . . If we may assume that there are many people in whose mental life this primary ego-feeling has persisted to a greater or lesser degree, it would exist in them side by side with the narrower and more sharply demarcated ego-feeling of maturity, like a kind of counterpart to it. In that case, the ideational contents appropriate to it would be precisely those of limitlessness and of a bond

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This is an intriguing genetic explanation of what Rolland was talking about, and it sits quite comfortably with the materialist explanation. But, as with the materialist explanation, we can happily remain neutral about it: that is, we can remain neutral about the origins of the oceanic feeling whilst we are concerned with its ideational content in mature adults, and whilst we are concerned with its value. As Nietzsche said in his Genealogy of Morals, “the cause or the origin of a thing and its eventual utility, its actual employment in a system of purposes, lie worlds apart; whatever exists, having somehow come into being, is again and again reinterpreted to new ends, taken over, transformed, and redirected by some power superior to it . . .’.6

3. How to classify the oceanic feeling How, then, can we make progress in understanding the oceanic feeling, if we are to put to one side both its physiology and its genealogy? Part of our difficulty arises, I think, from thinking of the oceanic feeling as sui generis, as unlike anything else. Let us ask again what the object is of the oceanic feeling. In a sense this is a question of taxonomy: a question of how best to classify this feeling. There are at least two possible answers here. One is that the oceanic feeling is a feeling, and its object is oneness with the universe; another is that there is a feeling of oneness, and its object is the universe. I recommend the latter. Let me explain why. If we simply classify the oceanic feeling as a feeling, then it will just fall into this very heteronymous class, along with all sorts of other feelings, from the feeling of pain in your tooth, to the feeling in your stomach that it’s time for lunch. As a mere feeling, perhaps the most we will be able say about it is that it has what William James would call a certain hedonic tone: pleasurable perhaps. But so might the feeling that it’s time for lunch. On the other hand, if, as I recommend, we classify the oceanic feeling as a kind of feeling of oneness, then we can try to see what feelings of oneness there might be which take other kinds of objects— objects other than the universe—and to see what all these feelings of oneness have in common. This, I hope to show, is a policy that will bear fruit. The policy has application to emotions and feelings more generally, in a way which should be immediately obvious. When considering, for example, fear of the unknown, we naturally classify this for further examination as a kind of fear, rather than just as a kind of emotion, so that

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we can then go on to consider what fear of the unknown might share with other kinds of fear such as fear of the dark or fear of the dog. William James advocated this very policy with regard to what people of his day called ‘religious sentiment’ (27). This, he said, is not a “single sort of mental entity”; we need to distinguish: “There is religious fear, religious love, religious awe, religious joy, and so forth. But,” and this is precisely the point that I wish to make here, he continues: [R]eligious love is only man’s natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious fear is only the ordinary fear of commerce . . . ; religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only it comes over us at the thought of our supernatural relations; and similarly of all the various sentiments that can be called into play in the lives of religious persons (27-8).

Thus one can not only have, as James’ examples show, one kind of emotion directed towards many kinds of object, but also many kinds of emotion towards one object: feelings of fear, of anger, of love, of oneness, all towards the one object—a lover perhaps, a child, one’s father, the universe, nature, God. But why should I be so bold as to suggest that there is such a kind of emotion, a feeling of oneness, to go along with the other more commonor-garden kinds of emotion, such as fear, anger, and love? To repeat myself, the answer, really, is instrumental—because of the fruit that this policy bears: we can throw light on feelings of oneness by treating them as a category, and seeing what they have in common in spite of taking different objects. So let us now see where this line of investigation takes us.

4. The oceanic feeling as mood or emotion Max Scheler, in his book The Nature of Sympathy, gives some examples of what he called identification, and what I am calling the feeling of oneness. They share a certain phenomenology. Scheler’s examples included: ecstatic religious identification; the identification with a totem or with one’s ancestors, which takes place in certain cultures; a mother’s identification with her child; what he called ‘mutual coalescence’ in truly loving sexual intercourse; and the ‘mutual coalescence’ to be found in the psychology of the group.7 Freud too talks of lovers in the context of a feeling of oneness: he says, “At the height of being in love the boundary between the ego and object threatens to melt away. Against all the evidence of his senses, a man who is in love declares that ‘I’ and ‘you’ are

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one, and is prepared to behave as if it were a fact” (253). To these examples, one could add others: two ballroom dancers—Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers—move as one, think as one, feel as one; the musician feels as one with his music—he loses himself in it. All these examples share a peculiar sense of a weakening or even removal of the psychological and sensory boundaries between oneself and the object of the feeling. As one might say with a nod in the direction of Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy, the feeling is Dionysian rather than Apollonian. But why is the feeling of oneness, so diverse in its objects, an emotion, rather than a mere bodily feeling or a thought? In a moment I will qualify the claim that the feeling of oneness is an emotion, but let me first draw the contrast with bodily feelings and with thought. The feeling of oneness cannot be a bodily feeling because bodily feelings have as their object states of the body. This distinguishes bodily feelings from both thoughts and emotions because both thoughts and emotions can be directed towards objects in the world beyond the bounds of one’s body. Freud himself seemed to think that the oceanic feeling was more like a thought: “I may remark,” he said, “that to me this seems something rather in the nature of an intellectual perception, which is not, it is true, without an accompanying feeling-tone, but only such as would be present with any other act of thought of equal range” (252). I believe this to be mistaken. First, there must be room for internal psychological conflict which is not available if we simply set belief against belief, judgment against judgment, intellectual perception against intellectual perception. Just as there is psychological conflict between the fear you feel of the spider and your belief that there is nothing to be frightened of, so it must be possible for there to be conflict between your feeling of oneness with something or some person and your belief that there is you, distinct from the object, and separately identifiable. Secondly, a feeling of oneness is something that can easily dissipate in spite of one’s thoughts; indeed, the very thought ‘I am one with so-and-so’ is very likely to cause the dissipation of the feeling, the faltering of the dancers’ steps, the lover’s return to strict application of the principle of individuation. In this respect, the feeling of oneness is rather like the feeling that you will not fall as you walk along a plank over a river; if you think about the feeling, it tends to go away. There is much more I would like to say about this, but I should now turn to my qualification of the claim that the feeling of oneness is an emotion: the feeling, I now want to say, can be either an emotion or a mood. Moods, like emotions, are intentional; but whether a particular experience on a particular occasion is a mood or an emotion will depend

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on the specificity of its intentional object.8 Compare two kinds of misery: being miserable about the state of your marriage, and being generally miserable, miserable about everything. The former is an emotion and the latter is a mood. But this example brings out two important points about emotion and mood. First, specificity admits of degree, and, although there will be instances which are clearly either emotion or mood, there is no sharp dividing line between the two; all we can say is that roughly the less specific or more nebulous the intentional object of a state, the more likely it is to be a mood rather than an emotion. Secondly, over time mood can turn into emotion and emotion into mood. You are generally miserable, and then some minor marital incident focuses your mind on the state of your marriage. Or, in the other direction, marital misery widens out into general misery—into misery with your job, with your house, with your whole life. Mood shades into emotion and emotion into mood, often with no clear point at which the change takes place. We can now apply this distinction between emotion and mood to the feeling of oneness.9 The feeling of oneness that a dancer has with her dance partner, or the feeling of oneness that a lover has with her lover, are kinds of emotion, having more specific objects. In contrast, a feeling of oneness with the universe, or of oneness with everything—in other words the oceanic feeling—is a kind of mood. Like so many moods, its cause can be distinct from its object; just as too much espresso can cause you to be anxious about things in general, so stimulants—such as drink, drugs, ritualised and rhythmical dance, music or chanting—can cause a feeling of oneness with the universe. Also, like the mood of anxiety, some people will be more disposed to the oceanic feeling than others. Indeed, there is some empirical evidence that there are causal connections between being anxious by disposition and being disposed to have these kinds of experiences. There is also something of a contrast between mood and emotion which reveals itself in action: moods do not bring about particular actions, although they have characteristic expressive behaviour and they can shape the way one acts in all sorts of ways. Just as the generally anxious person does all sorts of things anxiously10, so the person who feels at one with the universe will have characteristic patterns of behaviour; like drunkenness, as William James says, it “expands, unites, and says yes” (387).

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5. The constancy of the oceanic feeling as an existential condition Now, with the idea in front of us that the feeling of oneness can be either a mood or an emotion, depending on the degree of specificity of its object, we can return to Rolland. In his letter to Freud, which is available to us, Rolland characterises the oceanic feeling as “a constant state (like a sheet of water which I feel flushing under the bark [boat]).”11 And Freud, as we have seen, confirms his understanding that, for Rolland, it was ‘a peculiar feeling, which he himself is never without’. It seems that the nature of Rolland’s religious experience changed as he grew older: in his youth, he had just occasional mystical experiences, whereas in his maturity, the state was constant. Rolland used another interesting simile: the oceanic feeling, he suggested, is like the sunlight, always there, but sometimes hidden by clouds. This is how he put it: “For one ray of sunlight to split asunder the protective covering of the clouds is not enough to keep the fields bathed in light; [the mind] must now redouble its efforts to find the weak points, so that it may, at last, remove every obstacle.”12 One might perhaps put it like this: Rolland thought of himself as having a natural tendency to have feelings of oneness, to be in this kind of state. And as he matured, the state was more and more a part of his life: an existential condition, which he thought could be shared by anyone of whatever religion; the feeling, he said, is “totally independent of all dogma, all credo, all Church organization, all hope in a personal survival”, with “its rich and beneficent power, be it among the religious souls of the West, Christian or non-Christian, or among the great minds of Asia. . . .”13 Now, thinking of the oceanic feeling as a mood, as I have been suggesting, helps us to see how the mood can consolidate into an emotion—how the mind can come to focus in on some particular and more specific object associated with some particular religion, as a devout Christian might have a feeling of oneness with Jesus. Rolland describes this process as one by which the feeling is “collected, canalized and dried up by the Churches.”14 But this, perhaps, is the expression of a prejudice.

6. Just a delusion? This leads me to the final question that I want to address. Should we conclude, in disagreement with Rolland, that the experience of a feeling of oneness is an experience which we should try to avoid? After all, a feeling of oneness with something is, in a sense, misplaced: the feeling is of

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oneness, when in fact there is more than one; or, alternatively, the feeling is of a fading away of the boundaries of the self when in fact these boundaries have not faded away. Moreover, we might think, the feeling of oneness is delusional in that is often brought on by stimulants such as drink or ritualised dancing. And finally, of course, we can have feelings of oneness with things that do not exist—with the devil perhaps. Disorder and delusion are possible no doubt. Let me cite a paper by Jeffrey Rabin and colleagues from the UCLA Faculty of Neurology. They say the following: [C]lues to the neural substrates of religious-numinous experience may be gleaned from temporolimbic epilepsy, near-death experiences, and hallucinogen ingestion. These brain disorders and conditions may produce depersonalization, derealization, ecstasy, a sense of timelessness and spacelessness, and other experiences that foster religious-numinous interpretation. Religious delusions are an important subtype of delusional experience in schizophrenia, and mood-congruent religious delusions are a feature of mania and depression.15

But surely not all feelings of oneness are like this; one should not skew the sample class. It is surely possible to experience great joy whilst having a feeling of oneness, without dismissing the experience afterwards as a delusion, hoping rather for its recurrence. Moreover, we must remember William James’ cautionary remarks about medical materialism: epilepsy may well have played a causal role in the experience of St Paul on the road to Damascus, but this on its own should not lead us to dismiss the experience as nothing but a disordered delusion. If anything, matters are the other way around, in that our moral and prudential evaluation of a feeling of oneness will often impinge on our medical or scientific verdict. The issue here is not simply a matter of whether or not the object of the feeling of oneness exists; it is also a matter of whether or not the feeling is appropriate to its object. Let me draw an analogy with romantic love. I go to a cocktail party, drink two glasses of champagne on an empty stomach, bump into an acquaintance of many years, and am suddenly struck by the thought that I have been in love with her all this time. If my loving her is wildly inappropriate, then we might later agree that the champagne distorted my thinking—that I was deluded in my thinking that I love her. But if she really is the love of my life, then we might later agree that the champagne helped me to relax, to properly lift up my eyes to her beauty and her talents, and to enable me to see her as she really is. As Iris Murdoch put it, “By opening our eyes we do not necessarily see what confronts us. We are anxiety-ridden animals. Our

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minds are continually active, fabricating an anxious, usually selfpreoccupied, often falsifying veil which partially conceals the world.”16 Similarly, ritual music and chanting, drugs, or even epilepsy might, like the glasses of champagne, lift the veil of self-preoccupation, perhaps enabling one to see things as one ought. And yet, we must not forget that certain people’s dispositions to have feelings of oneness are very open to exploitation and manipulation by others—especially by those who have morally suspect motives. What these exploiters and manipulators can do is set things up so that their audience gets into an unfocussed mood of a feeling of oneness and then harangue them into the emotion, directing their feelings onto the wrong object. I speculate that those most open to exploitation may well be amongst those who have a high degree of anxiety of one kind or another—anxiety that is so pleasurably relieved by stimulants, and by the ensuing onset of the feeling of oneness: the attachment-anxious lover is exploited by the false lover, the insecure teenager by the leader of the suicide cult, the highly-strung communicant by the fraudulent evangelist, the hungry mob by the rabble-rousing, selfseeking revolutionary. The very fact that the feeling of oneness involves an abandonment of the Apollonian principle of individuation for a Dionysian unity opens up the risk of manipulation by unscrupulous others. We need to keep our wits about us. Murdoch’s anxiety-ridden veil of selfpreoccupation might at its worst be egotistical and falsifying; but at its best it can be simply prudence.

Conclusion This is all I have to say about the oceanic feeling. My overall approach has been to consider the feeling as part of a wider category of feelings of oneness, which can take a wide variety of objects, more or less specific. I hope that this approach has enabled some progress, even if it leaves us with no overarching principle for evaluating these feelings. But perhaps this is, after all, the correct result—one that is in line with Aristotle’s thought—true, but some think of little help—that one should have the right feelings at the right times, about the right things, towards the right people, and in the right way.17

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Notes 1

All page references are to the version in Volume 12 of The Penguin Freud Library, Penguin Books, London 1985. 2 As Charles Taylor remarked: “a toothache is more likely to have a general neural correlate than the condition of being suspicious of communists, or desiring a promotion”; and elsewhere in the same paper he puts the oceanic feeling into the latter camp. In ‘Mind-Body Identity, A Side Issue?’, in The Philosophical Review 76, 1967, 201-13. 3 As Newberg puts it, this area “becomes deafferented—it is forced to operate on little or no neural input. The likely result of this deafferentation is a softer, less precise definition of the boundaries of the self. This softening of the self, we believe, is responsible for the unitary experiences practitioners of ritual often describe” in A. Newberg, E. D’Aquilli, and V. Rause (eds.), Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief, Ballantine Books, New York 2001, 87. 4 In ‘Exit Cogito’, a review of Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow and the Feeling Brain, by Antonio Damasio, London Review of Books 26: 2, January 22, 2004, 22. 5 The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, M. E. Marty (ed.), Penguin, London 1982, 13. All references are to this edition. 6 Second Essay, Section 12. 7 Max Scheler, The Nature of Sympathy, tr. P. Heath, Routledge, London 1954, 1836. Cf. Goldie 2000, 189-94. 8 This, I maintain, is the right distinction, rather than in terms of duration as some claim. Emotions can be long-lasting, and moods can be brief. 9 A study by Phil Shaver in the Department of Psychology at the University of California at Davis found that people with a high degree of attachment anxiety “were more likely to ‘speak in tongues’, experience the Holy Spirit, etc, during ‘holy roller’ religious services,” and perhaps the same is true of feelings of oneness. (From correspondence by email.) 10 Goldie, 2000, 147. 11 Here I am greatly indebted to William B. Parsons’ ‘The Oceanic Feeling Revisited’, in Journal of Religion 78, 1998, 501-23, which includes the full text of Rolland’s letter. 12 Cited in Parsons, Op. cit., 517. 13 Ibid, 503. 14 Ibid. 15 J. L. Saver and J. Rabin, ‘The neural substrates of religious experience’, Journal of Neuropsychiatry and Clinical Neuroscience 9, 1997, 498-510. 16 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, Routledge, London 1970, 84. 17 Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics 1106b20. I discuss some of these issues in ‘Emotion, Reason, and Virtue’, in Emotion, Evolution and Rationality, P. Cruse and D. Evans (eds.), Oxford University Press, Oxford 2004, 247-66.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN THE MANY DIMENSIONS OF RELIGIOUS EMOTIONAL EXPERIENCE ROBERT C. SOLOMON

As the reader will quickly discern, I am not a religious person. Indeed, I come to the subject rather late, and I would describe myself (at best) as someone who is searching for spirituality. Nevertheless, I have thought about this topic, albeit “from the outside,” for many years out of escalating despair over the stupidities and cruelties that have been advanced in the name of religion. Perhaps, like William James, I am trying to find a balance for that and appreciate just why religion does seem to be so satisfying to a good many good people. Or perhaps, despite myself, I’ve joined the long list of philosophers who once again become “seekers” after a lifetime in the secular world. But in any case, I leave it to the tender reader to decide whether I have made any progress at all. A century ago, in 1902, William James wrote his most famous work, The Varieties of Religious Experience1 (although the honour for his most influential work must surely go to his two-volume Principles of Psychology2 and some of the essays that preceded it, notably his “What is an Emotion?” of 1884). I mention this here, in conjunction with his work on religion, because a good part of James’ protean genius was the manyfaceted nature of his interests. But with this, there are inevitably contradictions and confusions. It has often been commented that James wanted it both ways with respect to religious belief, that it was both rational and irrational, arguable and beyond argument. So, too, his views on religion conflicted with his best-known theories about emotion, which he defended in his more straightforwardly psychological works. In this essay I am concerned, like James, with the many dimensions of religious emotional experience. I will begin with some preliminary points drawn from a general view of emotions that is very much at odds with James, which I have defended extensively elsewhere. Nevertheless, I find myself very much agreeing with his views of religion and religious

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emotional experience. So the main thrust of my argument here will be that emotions are not nearly as primitive as James once suggested, and religious emotional experience, by contrast, is rich, complex, and metaphysically meaningful.

1. The meaning of emotion Before we tackle the complex and controversial questions concerning the religious emotions, we need to get a different orientation regarding the nature of emotions in general. In his best-known and most quoted analysis, James tells us that an emotion is a sensation (or set of sensations) caused by a physiological disturbance which in turn was prompted by some upsetting ‘perception’ or other. Thus an emotion is basically a primitive bodily response, or as he emphatically put it, “bodily changes follow directly the PERCEPTION of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur as they occur IS the emotion.” (Both the italics and capitalization are in the original). This physiologically-based view is belied, however, by the exceptional sensitivity of James’ religious speculations. (In his defence, even in his strictly psychological writings James does allow that there might be exceptions to this stark physiological picture, emotions that display a minimum of bodily disturbance, for instance, aesthetic emotions, and, we might surmise, some spiritual emotions as well). Several aspects of this seeming contradiction have long intrigued me, the equivocation about the nature of emotion: first of all, the inadequacy of what has become the ‘official view’ of James’ theory; second, James’ seeming inconstancy regarding the value and meaning of religious experience. To begin with, emotions are not mere sensations and so not so primitive as James suggests. They are not reducible to or directly dependent on physiological processes, much less the ‘peripheral’ symptoms of autonomic nervous system response to which James referred us. Of course, all emotions are based on physiology insofar as they have their causal substratum in the brain, as James continually reminds us. (In Varieties, he writes, “Scientific theories are organically conditioned just as much as religious emotions are; and if we only knew the facts intimately enough, we should doubtless see ‘the liver’ determining the dicta of the sturdy atheist as decisively as it does those of the Methodist under conviction anxious about his soul. When it alters in one way the blood that percolates it, we get the Methodist, when in another way, we get the atheist form of mind.”3) But some of our emotions are enormously sophisticated, complex, multi-dimensional processes. In current neuro-

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talk, they essentially involve complex and abstract informational processing in the cerebral cortex and “higher” brain centres. In some cases, notably in the case of religious emotions, they may be distinctively if not uniquely human. (But I will happily suspend judgment concerning a small select group of possibly spiritual mammals, including dolphins, elephants, possibly some other primates, and, in deference to my more sensitive readers, perhaps dogs and cats). To put the matter simply, if an emotion were only (as James suggests), a simple sensation or set of sensations), brought about by changes in the physical body, it is difficult to see how any emotion could be of any religious or spiritual significance, other than as a curious symptom or causal epiphenomenon. Thus we might find that saints tend to sweat when receiving a revelation or that the fear of God increases the breathing rates and raises the blood pressure of believers, but there is nothing of significance in these bodily changes. But surely we want to say something like “a revelation is an intense emotional experience” and “fearing God is of considerable significance,” unlike, for instance, an irrational fear of spiders, which may produce the same physiological symptoms. So, to put my thesis rather baldly and without fanfare, an emotion necessarily involves what philosophers since the late Middle Ages have referred to as intentionality, the peculiar property of being directed towards or about something. And just to avoid some serious confusions that have been introduced by analytic philosophers of language and cognitive scientists in recent years, we should restrict the notion of intentionality to living experiencing conscious creatures, and ignore such distracting analogies as thermostats (that might be described as if they sensed the temperature and so had intentionality) and assertions, propositions, symbolic notations and such (that might well be described as directing us toward or being about their meanings).4 Intentionality, as it was discussed by Franz Brentano and Edmund Husserl, about a century or so ago, does have to do with meanings, to be sure, but for our purposes, restricting our attention to emotions, we should insist that the meaning of an emotion is not just—as the classic definition goes—what it is about, its intentional object. The meaning of an emotion is not just the thing or person or state of affairs to which the emotion is directed. It is also what that object (thing, person, state of affairs) means to the subject, the person who has the emotion. So one’s anger might be directed to the person making an arm and finger movement in the next car, passing (illegally) in the right hand lane. (That, you might say, is the fact of the matter). What that object means (as opposed, for example, to what it refers to), however, is something quite different. The Buddha may have

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perceived a lotus blossom—that is the dull fact of the matter. But the meaning of his experience, needless to say, was infinitely more than that. Getting back to our ‘road rage’ example of anger above (a most unBuddhist emotion), we should note that the object of the emotion is not just the other person’s movement but a culturally defined gesture (as opposed, for instance, to swatting a fly or wiping his nose). Furthermore, in the context of this confrontational interpersonal setting, it is clearly a rude gesture. But the rude gesture is not yet sufficient to identify the object of anger. It must be taken as rude, intentionally rude, by the subject, who also believes, in the usual case, that it is a gesture directed at him. (In a less usual case, a moral prig or disgusted social critic who is concerned with the increase in vulgarity in modern society might be offended that anyone would make such a gesture, but this is a much more complex case). But the idea that the gesture must be taken as intentionally rude, directed at the subject, and be offensive to him (a further condition) means that the meaning of the emotion is much more than its bald object (“objectively” described). (In the language of J.L. Austin, it is the perlocutionary act that matters. not just the locutionary act of intending something). It is the meaning to the subject, taking in all of the cultural conventions, implications of social status, psychological dispositions, personal experiences and idiosyncrasies that this entails. So, to summarise, an emotion requires intentionality, which means that it must be about something, and it must mean something to the subject. An emotion may involve various feelings, but no feeling (or set of feelings) is sufficient to constitute an emotion. Every emotion almost certainly involves some physiological (neurological) processing, but this, too, is not what makes it an emotion. An emotion is a meaningful experience (which is not yet to say a fully conscious experience). There remain some very general questions about the nature of the intentional objects. Some objects of emotion are famously obscure or even inaccessible. For example: Freudian, “free-floating” anxiety. Consequently there are questions about the relationship between emotions and moods, since moods are (mistakenly) defined as being without objects. I mention this issue here because in the case of religious feelings, these are often characterised as moods rather than emotions as their peculiar objects are sometimes characterised in extremely vague terms: ‘the holy’, or simply ‘the unknown’. James’ pragmatist colleague John Dewey wrote famously of “religious attitudes,” again to capture the idea that religious feelings need not have a concrete object. Christian faith, to be sure, has its special intentional object (or objects, depending on the details of one’s theology), but other religions, notably Buddhism, are by no means so clear. What is

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clear IS that whatever religious emotions are about, what they are about is very meaningful to the subject. Moreover, the nature of perceptions that initiate or characterise religious emotions are also problematic, which is to say, for instance, that there may be no ‘fact of the matter’ where religion is concerned. Alternatively, any fact might trigger religious associations and feelings. Furthermore, the scope and identity of intentional objects is often unclear, not only in religion, but in perception and emotion in general. Thus Freud has persuasively argued that the object of love is rarely the beloved as such, but more often some projected fantasy figure, often based on one’s parents. Much earlier, Marcilio Ficino argued a medieval conception of ‘Platonic love’, that one may immediately love one’s beloved but one really loves God through the beloved. Plato himself, of course, said that one naively thinks that he loves the beauty of the beloved, but what he really yearns for is Beauty (the eidos) itself. Thus it might be objected that the Buddha did not perceive just a lotus blossom but perceived in or through the lotus blossom the whole of existence. And when various Christian saints have had their ecstatic moments, whether Saint Paul, Saint Teresa, or Meister Eckhart, it might be said that whatever they saw—if such mere perceptual language even applies in such cases—it was nothing less than the infinitely mysterious. Indeed, even calling the infinite ‘God’ may be simple-minded, which is why many religions, most notably the ancient Hebrews, refused to give the ultimate object of religious experience any name at all.

2. Is religion about belief? One of the largest but often unrecognised obstacles to understanding the nature of religious experience is the very strong but often unquestioned assumption that religion mainly consists of beliefs. This is understandably true of philosophers, since belief is their currency (and some would insist their only currency). But it is also a widespread popular idea, often coupled with the comforting and socially invaluable idea that religious beliefs are personal beliefs, so the usual demands of seeking agreement and justifying what one believes are not only suspended but actively discouraged. Now I would be the first to insist that mutual toleration is one of the most important social virtues, and we certainly need a lot more of it right now. But the proper basis for toleration is not some exceptional and epistemologically dubious notion of personal beliefs that remain oddly irrelevant to evidence and argument. Rather, religion has only modestly to do with belief. What else is there?

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Well, to begin with, religion is a way (or a great many ways) of experiencing the world, of living, of interacting with other people and with Nature. It involves a set of practices and rituals, not only prayer and church services and meditation and prescribed rituals of purification but any number of ways, whether individual or collective, of thinking, looking, talking, feeling, moving, and acting. (The Buddhist ‘Eight-fold Path’ is but one good illustration of this ‘practical’ dimension of religion). Furthermore, I would suggest, religion for most people is primarily a matter of belonging, not of belief. Unfortunately, this important social function of religion is obscured by the fact that most members of most religious communities would insist that what holds them together are their shared beliefs, rather than the other way around. This last suggestion obviously has social and cultural (not to mention theological) implications that go far beyond the scope of this essay, not least the ominous possibility that sectarianism, ‘us’ vs. ‘them’, is for many people the very essence of religion. But instead, too many religious people insist that theirs is the true religion, an epistemological claim that really doesn’t make any sense even if one were to think that the teachings of his or her religion was perfectly consistent, coherent and defensible. (Kierkegaard insisted that his own religion, Christianity, was thoroughly paradoxical). But if we think about religion as first of all a matter of community, shared ways of living, talking, experiencing with shared rituals, ceremonies, and practices, we can readily dispense with the epistemological arrogance and understand perfectly well why people should favour and feel comfortable with others of their own religion. It is not that beliefs are wholly irrelevant to religion, but the beliefs are secondary, at best. (One might think of doctrines and dogmas along the lines of shared passwords, codes, and expressions of solidarity). It is safe to say that most adherents of the major religions of the world do not even vaguely understand the beliefs of their particular religion, its ‘theology’ or its metaphysics. Furthermore, it is dangerous arrogance to pretend that one knows, for certain, just what the world is like, not to mention when and how it will end. It is hard to imagine a more lethal combination than dogmatic belief in the apocalypse or the ‘end of times’ and enormous political power. One religious figure who was very clear about the secondary and problematic place of belief in religion was the Danish existentialist and devout Christian philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard insisted that the central beliefs of Christianity were “paradoxes,” literally nonsense, but that was no obstacle to a committed Christian like him. Quite the contrary, it was the paradoxical nature of Christine beliefs that marked their

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essential nature, their meaning. It was the paradoxicality of religious doctrines, as opposed to more commonsensical and readily justifiable beliefs that inspired passion. What made a person a Christian, according to Kierkegaard, was faith, “passionate inwardness” in the face of paradox, and not belief as such. Instead, he insisted, the emphasis should be on how one believes, not what one believes. The idea that we can justify our religious beliefs and show them to be rational was, for Kierkegaard, a laughable evasion of religious experience. The obvious contrast to Kierkegaard was Immanuel Kant, who argued that faith was a matter not only of belief but of rational belief, beliefs that could be justified as “postulates” of the rational demands of the Moral Law. (It is not as if Kant didn’t also hold out for religious experience, but as mere “feeling” (Gefühl) this had no moral worth as such). Indeed, one would think that, between Kant and Kierkegaard, one could not imagine a more stark contrast between two opposing conceptions of faith (that is, unless one were to bring in something like Nietzsche’s or Freud’s deconstructive atheism). But what Kierkegaard and Kant both missed, I think, was the idea that religious faith (and religious emotion more generally) is not just an individual matter, whether of personal psychology or universal reason. They both ignored (or contemptuously dismissed) ritual and religious practices, and they treated religious communities not much better. Kant criticized ‘heteronomy’ in general, that is, accepting ideas from other people rather than thinking them through autonomously, and Kierkegaard famously condemned ‘the herd’ and the Christian ‘mob’ years before Nietzsche latched onto the same insulting metaphors. Both Kant and Kierkegaard thought very little of the outward expression of religiosity. Kierkegaard’s “Knight of Faith” is distinctive precisely in the fact that he (or she?) is indistinguishable from anyone else, and for Kant, it was only the rationality of Christian beliefs that was in question, not their overt or social expression in rituals or ceremonies. The possibility that religion is not an individual matter, whether of passion or belief, was not taken sufficiently seriously by either of them. But one only gets a grip on what religious passion really is when one gets beyond the idea the phenomenology of “passionate inwardness” as well as the idea that religious faith is belief and considers a robust social phenomenology concerning the intentionality of religious experience: what it is about, what it means, and to whom, and who it includes (the Christian or Buddhist community, the whole of humanity, every living thing, possibly the living earth itself). And this is the case, I would argue, even for the most solitary thinker.

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3. Reason and passion, intentionality as cognitive experience Kant and Kierkegaard also represent a false but ancient antagonism between belief and emotion. Kierkegaard feels compelled to choose (as did David Hume, an atheist whom Kierkegaard probably never read, who polemically announced that “reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions”). I have long argued against any such opposition, as have other philosophers (notably Nietzsche and Aristotle, but also the great Christian theologian Thomas Aquinas). But the problem is not just that such an opposition ignores what is now commonly referred to as ‘the rationality of the emotions’, but it also gives us a false phenomenology, which has now become a respected piece of the contemporary discipline of ‘cognitive science’. Quite apart from their various views on the nature of rationality, a great many cognitive scientists and philosophers of mind ignore or even flatly deny the all-important concept of experiential cognition, including emotional cognition. (Daniel Dennett, for example, denies experience and phenomenology pretty much altogether, though with great charm and flamboyance and good deal of wriggling. But his bottom line is that “there is no such thing.”5 Of course, the majority of cognitive scientists are not concerned with religion and religious experience at all. (Dennett, in particular, has recently published his own critical book on religion, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon.6 But it is now a virtually cliché for a great many researchers of the ‘mental’ that there are two different sorts of mental phenomena, sensations and ‘feelings’, on the one hand, and intentionality, which consists primarily (if not wholly) of propositional attitudes (rather than the usual ‘objects’ of emotion such as people, their actions, events, and states of affairs). Daniel Dennett goes one step further: For him there is only intentionality in the form of linguistic judgments, and it the false phenomenology suggested by such judgments about our own experience that makes it seem as if there are feelings and sensations to be referred to. But there are no such things!7 But assuming (as we certainly must) that there are such things as sensations and feelings, the question is whether these are adequate to explain religious emotions (often called ‘religious feelings’) or whether and how intentionality must be brought in to complete the explanation. This, of course, brings us right back to William James. James, like most current cognitive scientists, is a bona fide empiricist, and I would argue that some such distinction (between feelings and intentionality) has plagued empiricists at least since the days of John Locke. James, too, feels

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compelled to choose, not just between the rationality and irrationality of religious emotions (about which he wavers) but between feelings and intentionality. His ‘official’ account of emotion, as I argued (briefly) above, emphasises the former at the expense of the latter. But the important point to make is that intentionality is not the only alternative to thinking about emotions as mere sensations or feelings, especially if intentionality is thought to consist of propositional attitudes. But when we take a more comprehensive interpretation of intentionality, it becomes evident that some feelings have intentionality and some do not, as Anthony Kenny argued precociously many years ago. But what this implies is that intentionality is experiential. So between the analysis of emotions as feelings and the analysis of emotions as intentionality there is a better and more accurate phenomenological analysis of emotions as distinctive experiences of the world.8 Whatever else faith may be, insofar as it is an experience (and in particular an emotional, passionate experience), it cannot just be belief. So what we are looking for in religious emotions is what Galen Strawson (among others) has called experiential cognition, the “intentional content” of all emotions, including religious emotions. The emotions most involved in religious devotion—faith for instance—are neither sensations nor mere beliefs, but ways of experiencing the world. So, if I can revise Kierkegaard a bit, with all due respect, one might agree that some of the central beliefs of Christianity (and, perhaps, of virtually all other religions) are paradoxical if not incomprehensible to most devotees who nevertheless have passionate experiences that define their faith. Those passionate experiences are derived from the various religious traditions, rituals, practices, from sharing a world with others. These experiences may well refer to some set of beliefs, perhaps, but these provide only a more articulate form for describing what in fact may be a very complex and possibly inchoate experience. Yes, I would agree with Kierkegaard that religious experience is primarily passion, which must be emotional if it is to count as religious experience at all, but it is not passionate inwardness. Nor is it passion as opposed to reason or belief or cognition. Faith (and religious experience more generally) is also outward, about the world. Modifying Kierkegaard once again, I would say, ‘passionate outwardness’. I can understand why the notion of passionate inwardness would appeal to a recluse like Kierkegaard, but, again, I think his own descriptions of religious experience bear out exactly what I am arguing. One does not stand in “fear and trembling” before one’s inward self. One stands in fear and trembling before God. So, too, while Buddhism has much profound and paradoxical to say about ‘emptiness’, (s’unyata) and

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‘consciousness’ (vijñapti-matra), it is the world that we live in that is at stake when we are trying to understand the meaning of such exotic doctrines. (“There is no matter, but everything matters.”) But such extravagant beliefs are not what Buddhism is about. They may provide an underpinning, an explanation, a sophisticated rationalisation. But the Buddha’s point was how to live, not what to believe. “If your house is on fire, he said, you do not discourse on the nature of fire; you put the fire out!” Eight centuries later the brilliant Buddhist dialectician Nagarjuna launched a campaign against religious beliefs—demonstrating, like Kierkegaard, that these were nothing but intellectualist distractions from true devotion.

4. The phenomenology of religious emotional experience When Kierkegaard insists on faith as passion, it is not as if this is the sole emotion on which Christianity (or any other religion) depends. (James, for the most part, rests content with a more all-encompassing and less committal notion of ‘experience’). But Kierkegaard insists on far more than faith. He writes at length about the emotion of anxiety (angest), about fear and trembling, about love and its variations. All of these are religious emotions (or, if one wants to be obstinate about it, all of these might be construed as the diverse ingredients of faith). But the important point is that when we talk about religious emotion, we are not talking about a single emotion, such as faith or awe. Indeed, turning to the Old Testament and the Qu’ran, we might well find ourselves talking about wrath, jealousy, and even righteous hatred. But then we are in danger of finding ourselves dealing with any emotion that might find a place in one or another religion, no matter how eccentric or perverse. (Lust, for example, has made it into some theologies, and not just as a vice or a sin). But this is obviously not my intention, and I do want to restrict our attention, reasonably enough, to some small cluster of possibly very expansive emotions that form something of a core (but by no means a common core) of a good many of the world’s religions. I would suggest, with some trepidation, that that core of passions is what commonly goes by the name ‘spirituality,’ although I would admit that his increasingly au courant word means very different sorts of things in different religious traditions, not to mention what the ‘New Age’ has done with it. Spirituality, I have argued, has a lot to do with the passions.9 It often embraces such emotions as love, trust, and reverence, for example, but it neither entails nor exclusively refers to any of them. With this model in mind, I would argue that wrath, jealousy, and hatred, no matter how

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holy or righteous, would not be suitable candidates for the study of religious emotions. But neither is religious faith, in any one of the familiar Christian varieties, to be taken as the paradigm of a religious emotion, not only because it has been construed in so many different ways (Kant and Kierkegaard being but exemplary) but because when faith is held up as the very paradigm of a religious passion, a not so subtle ethnocentricity slips into the conversation. (Again, this is transparent in Kierkegaard, who talks at length about “the religious life” when in fact it is quite clear that he is thinking only of his own particular version of Lutheran faith). Spirituality, by contrast, seems to me to be much more inclusive, covering a range of Asian, tribal, and polytheistic religions as well as the ‘Big three’ monotheistic religions and western Unitarianism. Most important, perhaps, is the fact that the object of spirituality—unlike the objects of most particular religions—remains wonderfully ill-defined. William James captures this rather nicely, referring to his “Transcendentalist” friends, Emerson in particular. Writing of the object of religious emotions, he says, It is not only the ideas of pure Reason as Kant styled them, that have this power of making us vitally feel presences that we are impotent articulately to describe. All sorts of higher abstractions bring with them the same kind of implacable appeal. . . . The whole universe of concrete objects, as we know them, swims, not only for [a transcendentalist], but for all of us, in a wider and higher universe of abstract ideas, that lend it its significance. As time, space and the ether soak through all things so (we feel) do abstract and essential goodness, beauty, strength, significance, justice, soak through all things good, strong, significant and just. (Varieties, 71)

What James means by “higher abstractions” and “abstract ideas” might easily be disputed, but I think that his point is extremely important (even if it wholly contradicts his ‘official’ theory). What he is saying is that the objects of emotion (clearly distinct from their causes, which might well be neurological) are not simple objects in the world (snakes, bears, buckets of blood) but extremely sophisticated, highly conceptualised ideas and images (goodness, beauty, and justice). And although I rejected (above) the general interpretation of intentionality in terms of propositional attitudes, I would insist that these ideas and images, in particular, are permeated and essentially defined by a language with extremely complex concepts (whether or not we want to call these “abstract”10). We might say that words shape much of our emotional experience. They are not just ‘labels’ for them. But this is a way of elaborating on what several of my colleagues whose essays are included in this volume have already suggested in their own different ways. With Petri Järveläinen, I want to

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insist that religious emotions involve what he calls “depth cognition,” “the thought of the divine.” I think that “the divine” might still be too prejudicial to cover all religions, but I take it that what he is arguing here is very much like what James has argued. What makes an idea ‘deep’ is (ironically) the breadth of its implications, the subtlety of its consequences. But in any case, I certainly agree with both Järveläinen and with Mark Wynn that such emotions involve a “cognitive object.” There is no contradiction between cognition and emotion but rather a kind of identity and mutual dependence. But this tells us something, too, about the suggestion that religious emotions are sui generis. Järveläinen compares religious emotions, problematically I think, to aesthetic emotions and emotions in music in particular, but I do not think that this is quite right. There is, to be sure, a difficult question about the intentional objects of music, which might be compared with the difficulty in identifying the intentional objects of religious emotions. But what makes religious emotions special is not their obscurity but their profundity. (It’s not that music cannot have that property too, but this is not because its intentional objects are obscure). And it is their profundity that arguably makes them seem unique, or in any case special. But as James also suggests, these same ‘abstract’ ideas serve an essential role in secular philosophy, too, which (if practiced passionately) might well throw this claim to uniqueness into question. What is the difference, one might ask, between secular and sacred profundity? Is it a difference of objects or just a difference in attitudes? Or is it a difference of a different kind?

5. Religious emotions and reflective consciousness Human emotions do not just have objects. They also involve reflection, what Jean-Paul Sartre calls “reflective consciousness.” But reflection on our emotions has often been misconstrued as ‘thinking about our feelings’. Now there is a great deal to be said about ‘thinking about feelings’ in terms of various theories of emotion (what we have been considering here so far), but what I have in mind here is something quite different. That is the sense in which self-consciousness and reflection enter into and enhance emotions and thus do something more than present a commentary on them. The reflection is not wholly separate or distinct from the emotion. We should not think of a running conscious report paralleling our on-going emotional life, in other words, something like a sports announcer reporting what is happening down on the field below. Reflective emotions are more like on-going dramas in which the director is very much involved with the action. (Indeed, he or she is the leading actor). Insofar as

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emotions essentially involve judgments and are structured by judgments, judgments about one’s current emotion almost inevitably become tangled in the emotion. If getting angry involves blaming someone else for one’s frustration, for instance, reflecting on one’s anger means reconsidering the judgment that someone else is to blame for one’s frustration. One possible outcome is a diminution of the anger, as one comes to realise that there is in fact little warrant for one’s anger and one is oneself to blame. But another possibility is that the anger will become more intense as one realises just how frustrated one is and how much blame is due the other person, perhaps even more than one originally suspected. Anger is sometimes reflective, sometimes not. (The grandmotherly wisdom of counting to ten assures us a moment for such reflection, but reflection is by no means guaranteed). Some emotions, however, and in particular religious emotions, are inherently reflective. This is not just to say that they have cognitive contents, intentionality, and meaning and involve extremely complex and sophisticated concepts that depend on abstract language. It is also to say that religious emotions must, to some extent, be spelled out, articulated, verbalised. It is also true, of course, that devotion must have an object (whether that be God or Allah or the teachings of the Buddha or Brahman). But there is a reason why dumb animals do not have religious experience (no matter that we sometimes sentimentalise them as having such). Many of our emotional experiences are pre-or non-linguistic, but certain emotions, those that are distinctly human, require reflection. This is because the object is sufficiently abstract or sophisticated to require linguistic concepts for its very existence (e.g. money, the rules of citizenship, the loss of one’s right to vote). But it is also because the reflection alters the very emotion itself in such a way as to make it possible. An excellent example is love (for which for good reason is often considered a paradigmatically religious emotion). I have often quoted (with considerable enthusiasm) La Rochefoucault’s witty comment that most people would never have fallen in love if they had not learned the word. I am sure that the Frenchman had something considerable more cynical and sarcastic in mind than I have here, but I think that it points to something immensely important, and that is that the articulated belief that one is in love is not a belief about one’s feelings but an essential constituent of the emotion itself. Or to put it a slightly different way, saying that one is in love (“I love you”) is not just a report on one’s emotion but is an essential expression of love. It also signals a major change in the relationship, at least the first time one says it, whether for good (“Oh! I love you too!”) or for bad (“Why did you say that?! You just

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ruined everything.”) To love is to reflect on the fact that one loves and that reflection not only reinforces but also fuels and helps define the love. This is not to suggest, needless to say, that either thinking or saying that one is in love necessarily means that one is in love, but love is a reflective emotion in that being in love seems to include something like knowing (or at least believing) that one is in love. (The old cliché, that ‘when you are in love you just know it’, is a dubious recognition of the same principle). Love—unlike simple affection or attachment—not only involves some extremely sophisticated concepts that are intrinsic to the emotion but this reflective requirement as well. The notion that one can be in love and not know it, of course, provides one of the longest running plots in romance literature. But the revelation that, voila! one really is in love, is at least as revealing as the preceding denial. The discovery of love is not only accompanied but also identified by the revelation and recognition. Romantic love (again unlike simple affection or attachment) is a deeply cultural and cultivated emotion and it necessarily involves a narrative, with the self-discovery of love one of its most prominent plot markers. I think that religious devotion is like this too. Without language, reflection, and symbolism one cannot have the sort of abstract and sophisticated concepts that are elementary to even the most ‘primitive’ religions, much less those that have a theology and a long tradition behind them. (“This piece of wood is the spirit of your ancestor,” “this cross represents the Christ,” “This piece of bitter apple reminds of the sufferings of our forefathers in the desert.”) Nor could one have any sense of the story that lies behind and defines virtually every religious tradition. But these concepts and this story are not added to the feeling by means of religious beliefs and reflection. As I said, they are constitutive of them. To believe in God, to have an experience of the divine, one must believe that one has such an experience as well as have the requisite feelings informed by those beliefs. To have a mystical experience may leave us without the ability (or even without a clue) to say just what we are experiencing, but without a web of beliefs—even if not yet believed—that experience cannot possibly have a meaning for us. Saint Paul may have been knocked off his horse, but the very possibility of interpreting this as a religious revelation meant that all of the pieces of his belief in Christianity—and he certain knew a great deal about those beliefs since he was in the business of persecuting Christians at the time—needed to be in place. He needed a storyline to ploy his experiences into and concepts by which to understand it. Indeed, without that storyline (which he was in process of inventing) and those concepts (which he inherited from a rich

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line of pagan and Hebraic thinkers before him), his experience would have been practically nothing at all.

6. Religious emotions, religious practices, and ritual This brings me to one last major point of agreement with my co-authors, now including especially Desiree Berendsen, who makes a special point of emphasising religious actions and practices rather than just beliefs and cognitions. Petri Järveläinen, too, insists on what he calls the “pragmatic condition” of religious emotions. Again, I want to understand this not just in religious terms (for example, the familiar Buddhist emphasis on practice rather than metaphysics) but rather in terms of a general concern about the nature of emotions. I suggested above (and in many of my works) that the standard notion of intentionality in phenomenology is a bit too anemic to do the work required of it in emotion. An emotion is not just a cold perception or a thought or an idea (although it almost always includes all of these things). An emotion moves us. How does it do this? Is it simply a matter of cause and effect? (We have the emotion, ‘in us’, and it causes an outward ‘expression’). I have already insisted on my misgivings with this ‘Cartesian’ picture and all that it entails, but insofar as the phenomenological notion of intentionality cuts itself off from action, I think that it repeats the same mistake, imagining a metaphorical ‘inner’ separated from the ‘external’ world of action and expression. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, perhaps the most gifted of all of the phenomenologists, thus insists that we replace the concept of intentionality with what he calls “motility,” which includes an essential reference to the body and bodily movement. (So does James, one might object, but most of what he says about the body in emotion is not about action but the symptoms of bodily processes that are not actions—or even behaviour—at all). But the author on whom I would focus most of my attention here is the Dutch psychologist Nico Frijda, who has long insisted that “action tendencies” are a definitive part of every emotion. Religious emotions, too, despite appearances of passivity and submission, are also defined by their action tendencies. James sends us off in the wrong direction, I think, when he insists that emotions should be characterised by “vigorous action.” In sadness, however, the characteristic behaviour is withdrawal, and in shame it might be expressed as ‘shrinking away’. Thus if the characteristic behaviour of religious emotions were just “looking softly in awe and reverence,” that would constitute a significant part of the emotion. But, of course, there is much more to the behaviour expressing religious emotions than this. It is also expressed in all of those rituals and

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practices that we referred to earlier and which are essential to the religious feelings themselves. What this means, of course, is that we have to reverse the order of the usual account of emotional processing, not coincidentally, along the lines suggested by William James. Namely, it is not (just) that the emotion causes the bodily response. The bodily response may also trigger the emotion. More accurately, bodily response and emotion are not two distinct phenomena but radically entangled. Thus Confucius, in Chinese philosophy, rightly insists that proper ritual (li) must be done with reverence, with appropriate feeling. Otherwise, it is just ‘going through the motions’. But it is not as if the feelings come first which are then expressed in the appropriate gestures. The gestures evoke the feelings and thus the religious emotions are to that extent dependent on the rituals that are (misleadingly) said to ‘express’ them. It is easy enough to imagine this in certain instances, notably in a wedding ceremony or a funeral. Of course, some sort of emotion precedes the ceremony (love and grief, presumably), but the very purpose of the rituals is to evoke and enhance the emotions in a much more refined and focused way. Indeed, there is much to be said about this notion of refined emotion, which for the most part has been ignored in contemporary research on emotions insofar as the emphasis has shifted to neurology, “basic emotions,” and “affect programs” with minimal cognitive content independent of cultural shaping and constraints. But in traditional Indian aesthetics and religion, by contrast, a great deal of emphasis is placed on the refinement of emotions from rude reactions (bhavas) to cultivated ones (rasas), and there it is clear that this development is largely due to the rituals and practices that have been designed for this purpose (over many centuries, needless to say). It may well be that crude emotions are provoked by simple circumstances, but religious emotions are by no means crude and require considerable time to cultivate—both in the life of the individuals and in the traditions of the religion. The cultivation of rituals and practices is at least as significant as instruction in religious doctrines and beliefs in the production of religious emotions.

Notes 1

William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, A Study in Human Nature (1902), Penguin Books, Middlesex 1982.

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William James, The Principles of Psychology (1890), Harvard University Press, Cambridge MA 1983. 3 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, Lecture I, RELIGION AND NEUROLOGY. 4 Many years ago, I watched Dan Dennett utterly befuddle a distinguished group of biologists by explaining the (to them) novel notion of “intentionality” by way of the standard philosophical account (of intensionality) in terms of salve veritate, that is, the salvaging of truth values in sentences with the same or different reference. 5 Daniel Dennett, Consciousness Explained, Little, Brown and Company, New York 1991. 6 Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon, Vintage, New York 2006. 7 Dennett, Consciousness Explained, and ‘How Could I Be Wrong? How Wrong Could I Be?’, in Alva Noë (ed.), Is the Visual World a Grand Illusion? (Journal of Consciousness Studies Controversies in Science and the Humanities), Imprint Academic, Thorverton UK 2002, 13-16. This “as if” gets quite a workout in Dennett’s philosophy. 8 It has been argued that James does in fact build intentionality into his model of emotions by way of the initiating perception that triggers the physiological process. I find this overly generous, given James’ own definition of emotion, but I have no objection to a modified version of James’ theory that makes the emotion out to be a mode of perception (Ronald de Sousa and Jesse Prinz have both argued models along these lines.) 9 Cf. Robert Solomon, Spirituality for the Skeptic, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2001. 10 Hegel has an ironic essay, “Who Thinks Abstractly?” in which he argues that abstract ideas are those that rip a phenomenon out of context, while concrete ideas are those that consider phenomena as a whole.

CONTRIBUTORS

Desiree Berendsen studied philosophy and theology in Groningen and Amsterdam. She received her PhD in the field of philosophy of religion at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Between 2002 and 2005 she was as a FWO researcher involved in the project ‘Religious Passions and Emotions’ at the University of Antwerp. She is member of the editorial board of Theologisch Debat and currently pastoral and cultural coordinator at the Domkerk in Utrecht. She is co-editor of Bewogen hart, verstilde ziel. Filosofische essays over religie en emotie, Damon, 2006. Gábor Boros has been teaching at Eötvös University Budapest and University of Szeged. His main areas of research are philosophy of the Early Modern Period, and philosophy of emotion. He published monographies on as well as translated into Hungarian works of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, edited several proceedings of conferences and other scholarly volumes summarizing the results of research activities on these thinkers and fields of study. (http://minerva.elte.hu/gaboros) Javier Carreño is a doctoral candidate at the Husserl Archives: International Centre for Phenomenological Research, at the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven. He writes on Husserlian phantasy and holds an interest in the philosophy of religion and in the philosophy of literature. He has contributed to the monographs Transcendence and Phenomenology (ed. by C. Cunningham and P. Candler, London, SCM, 2007) and The Phenomenology of John Paul II (Pittsburg, Duquesne, upcoming 2008). John Corrigan is the Edwin Scott Gaustad Professor of Religion and Chair of the Religion Department at Florida State University. His books include The Hidden Balance (Cambridge University Press, 1987); The Prism of Piety (Oxford University Press, 1991); Religion in America (coauthor, Prentice Hall, 1992, 1998; 2003); Jews, Christians, Muslims (coauthor, Prentice Hall, 1998); Emotion and Religion (coauthor, Greenwood, 2000); Business of the Heart: Religion and Emotion in the Nineteenth Century (University of California Press, 2002); Religion and Emotion: Approaches and Interpretations, ed., (Oxford, 2004), French and Spanish Missions in North America, (co-author, California Digital

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Library/University of California-Berkeley 2005) and (ed.) the Oxford Handbook of Religion and Emotion (OUP, 2008), He is coeditor of the journal Church History: Studies in Christianity and Culture and editor of the Chicago History of American Religion book series published by the University of Chicago Press. His co-authored Religious Intolerance in America: A Documentary History (University of North Carolina Press) and co-edited Religion in American History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008) are forthcoming. Herman De Dijn is professor of Modern Philosophy at the Institute of Philosophy of the Catholic University of Leuven (Louvain). His international publications are mainly on Spinoza and Hume. He is the author of Spinoza. The Way to Wisdom (West Lafayette (Ind.), Purdue University Press, 1996) and Modernité et Tradition. Essais sur l'EntreDeux (Leuven-Paris, Peeters-Vrin, 2003). In 2007 he was holder of the Spinoza Chair (together with Jonathan Israel and Steven Nadler) at the University of Amsterdam. Peter Goldie is The Samuel Hall Chair and Head of Philosophy at The University of Manchester. Before moving to Manchester, he was Reader in Philosophy at King’s College London, and prior to that a Lecturer at Magdalen College Oxford. His main philosophical interests are in the philosophy of mind, ethics and aesthetics, and particularly in questions concerning value and how the mind engages with value. He is the author of two monographs, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000, and On Personality, London, Routledge, 2004. He is editor of Understanding Emotions: Mind and Morals, Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing, 2002, and co-editor of Philosophy and Conceptual Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. He is co-writing for Routledge a book on conceptual art, co-editing a collection for OUP on empathy, and is planning a book on narrative for OUP. Petri Järveläinen is adjunct professor of philosophy (Jyväskylä University) and adjunct professor of ethics and philosophy of religion (Joensuu University). He has acted as Academy Researcher at Helsinki University 1990-2000, rector of Portaanpää Christian Institute 2000- and professor of systematic theology at Joensuu University in 2007. He has published articles on the history of philosophy and theology. His main work is A Study on Religious Emotions (2000). Recently he is completing a study on Augustine's philosophical theology.

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Willem Lemmens is professor of Modern Philosophy and Ethics at the University of Antwerp. He received in 1997 his PhD at the Catholic University of Louvain with a dissertation on the moral philosophy of David Hume. He is co-editor of books in Dutch on Hume, Hobbes and Charles Taylor and published articles in English and Dutch on modern philosophy (esp. Hume and Spinoza) and contemporary moral psychology and ethics. He is co-editor of the Dutch translations of Hume’s Natural History of Religion (with Walter Van Herck) and Kant’s Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (with Walter Van Herck and Geert Van Eekert). He is co-editor of Bewogen hart, verstilde ziel. Filosofische essays over religie en emotie, Damon, 2006. Péter Losonczi is associate professor of philosophy at the University of West Hungary (Szombathely) and a research fellow at the Institute for Philosophical Research at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences (Budapest). His fields of interest are history of early modern philosophy, philosophy of religion, politics and religion. He is the co-editor of the book Reflecting Diversity (2007). Robert C. Roberts is Distinguished Professor of Ethics at Baylor University (Texas). He has published articles on moral psychology in such journals as The Philosophical Review, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Philosophical Studies, Philosophy, American Philosophical Quarterly, Journal of Religious Ethics, and Faith and Philosophy. His most recent books are Intellectual Virtues: An Essay in Regulative Epistemology (Oxford, 2007), Spiritual Emotions: A Psychology of Christian Virtues (Eerdmans, 2007), and Emotions: An Essay in Aid of Moral Psychology (Cambridge, 2003). Robert C. Solomon was until his untimely death in 2007 Dinstinguished Teaching Professor and Quincy Lee Centennial Professor of Business and Philosophy at the University of Texas, Austin. An award-winning teacher and international lecturer, he is the author of over forty books, including The Passions (Doubleday, 1976); From Hegel to Existentialism (Oxford University Press, 1987), About Love (Simon and Schuster, 1988), A Short History of Philosophy (with Kathleen Higgins, OUP, 1996), A Passion for Wisdom (with Kathleen Higgins, OUP, 1997), Spirituality for the Skeptic (OUP, 2001) and The Little Philosophy Book (OUP, 2008).

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Contributors

Louise Sundararajan received her Ph.D. in History of Religions from Harvard University, and her Ed.D. in Counseling Psychology from Boston University. Currently a forensic psychologist, she was president of the International Society for the Study of Human Ideas on Ultimate Reality and Meaning. A member of the American Psychological Association, and the International Society for Research on Emotions, she has authored over forty articles in refereed journals and books, on topics ranging from Chinese poetics to alexithymia. Katja Thörner is doctoral candidate at the Munich School of Philosophy. Since 2003 she was fellow of the Research Training Group of German Research Foundation titled: The Concept of Experience in European Religion and Theory of Religion and Its Influence on the Selfunderstanding of non-western Religions. The thesis of her disseration is about the topic of feeling in the philosophy of religion of William James and Charles S. Peirce. She is research assistant at the critical edition oft Ernst Troeltschs complete works. Beáta Tóth, born in Budapest, Hungary, holds the Doctor in Literature degree (1998) from the Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium, and is currently pursuing doctoral research in the Department of Systematic Theology at the same university. Since 2006, she has been Assistant Professor of Systematic Theology in Sapientia School of Theology, Budapest. Her doctoral dissertation explores T. S. Eliot’s literary critical account of poetic/metaphysical emotion (‘Undisciplined Squads’: T. S. Eliot’s Critical Approach to the Emotional Aspect of Poetry, Doct. diss., Leuven, 1998). Her essay ‘Theologia et Philosophia: Twin Sisters In Conversation’ won the prize offered by New Blackfriars and Blackwell Publishing in 2004. Ann Van Eechaute studied philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain. Between 2002 and 2005 she was as a researcher involved in the research project on religious emotions ‘Ex Abundantia Cordis’ (sponsored by the Research Board of the University of Antwerp). Her research interests concern contemporary philosophy of the emotions, philosophy of education, the study of C.S. Lewis and Harry Frankfurt on the themes of (religious) love and care and the relation between religion, culture and emotion. She is co-editor of Bewogen hart, verstilde ziel. Filosofische essays over religie en emotie, Damon, 2006.

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Walter Van Herck received his PhD in Philosophy from the Catholic University of Louvain. He teaches philosophy of religion at the University of Antwerp. His research interests concern mainly religious epistemology and religious language. He is co-editor of the Dutch translations of Hume’s Natural History of Religion (with Willem Lemmens) and Kant’s Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft (with Willem Lemmens and Geert Van Eekert). He is editor-in-chief of Bijdragen. International Journal in Philosophy and Theology. He is also co-editor of Bewogen hart, verstilde ziel. Filosofische essays over religie en emotie, Damon, 2006. Mark Wynn completed his undergraduate and postgraduate training at the University of Oxford. He has since held positions at King’s College London, the University of Glasgow, and the Australian Catholic University. He is currently senior lecturer in the Philosophy of Religion in the Department of Theology at the University of Exeter. He is the author of God and Goodness: A Natural Theological Perspective (Routledge 1999) and Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception, Conception and Feeling (Cambridge UP, 2005).