The Impassioned Life: Reason and Emotion in the Christian Tradition 978-1506410739

Table of contents :
Glossary of Moral Psychological Terms vii
Acknowledgments xi
1. Introduction 1
2. Reason and Emotion in Classical Philosophy 7
3. The New Testament and Some Jewish
Antecedents
49
4. Patristic Theology 97
5. Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine 119
6. Emotion and Reason in the Modern World 171
7. Emotion from a Scientific Perspective 197
8. Emotion and Human Morality 245
9. Emotion and Cognition 297
10. The Ecclesial Therapy of Emotion 341
11. Reason, Emotion, and Theology 373
Bibliography 397
Index 437

Citation preview

This emotional life— The Impassioned Life argues that theology’s task today is to rethink the nature of emotions and their relation to human reason. The Christian tradition contains the pastorally valid intuition that moderation and self-control are necessary virtues for the Christian life. At the same time, Christian theology attends to contemporary psychological research in order to achieve a more integrated understanding of emotions and reason. At its heart, this volume offers a holistic vision of the Christian life lived passionately in its full range of feeling as life in the Spirit.

“It may seem surprising that Christian thinkers would still elevate rationality and view the emotional life with deep suspicion, yet this tendency remains widespread. Samuel Powell here lays that myth to rest. With impeccable scholarship and an engaging narrative, he shows that Bible and theology, philosophy and science, all reveal emotion and reason to be interdependent. The result is a far richer and more attractive theological anthropology, with fascinating implications for our understanding of God.” Philip Clayton

Author of Transforming Christian Theology

Samuel M. Powell is professor of philosophy and religion at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. He is author of Discovering Our Christian Faith (2008), A Theology of Christian Spirituality (2005), Participating in God: Trinity and Creation (Fortress Press, 2003), and The Trinity in German Thought (2000).

Religion / Constructive Theology

Impassioned Life

Thomas Jay Oord

Author of The Uncontrolling Love of God

The

“Powell offers a wide-ranging yet insightful survey of how emotion and reason have been understood in Western thought. After assessing the major ideas he finds in Scripture, philosophy, historical theology, and contemporary science, Powell proposes ways that present-day people might best understand themselves. The Impassioned Life beautifully integrates theoretical and practical concerns to make it a must-read guide on the relationship between emotion and cognition!”

Reason and Emotion in the Christian Tradition

Praise for The Impassioned Life

POWELL

The

Impassioned Life

Reason and Emotion in the Christian Tradition

Samuel M. Powell

The Impassioned Life

The Impassioned Life Reason and Emotion in the Christian Tradition

Samuel M. Powell

Fortress Press Minneapolis

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE Reason and Emotion in the Christian Tradition

Copyright © 2016 Fortress Press. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Visit http://www.augsburgfortress.org/copyrights/ or write to Permissions, Augsburg Fortress, Box 1209, Minneapolis, MN 55440.

Cover Image: Temperantia, 1872 (w/c on paper), Burne-Jones, Sir Edward Coley (1833-98) / Private Collection / Photo © Christie’s Images / Bridgeman Images Cover design: Janelle Markgren

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Print ISBN: 978-1-5064-1073-9 eBook ISBN: 978-1-5064-0807-1

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences — Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z329.48-1984.

Manufactured in the U.S.A. This book was produced using Pressbooks.com, and PDF rendering was done by PrinceXML.

Contents

Glossary of Moral Psychological Terms

vii

Acknowledgments

xi

1.

Introduction

1

2.

Reason and Emotion in Classical Philosophy

7

3.

The New Testament and Some Jewish Antecedents

49

4.

Patristic Theology

97

5.

Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine

119

6.

Emotion and Reason in the Modern World

171

7.

Emotion from a Scientific Perspective

197

8.

Emotion and Human Morality

245

9.

Emotion and Cognition

297

10.

The Ecclesial Therapy of Emotion

341

11.

Reason, Emotion, and Theology

373

Bibliography

397

Index

437

Glossary of Moral Psychological Terms

Greek Terms akolosia

ἀκολοσία

excessive desire, intemperance, licentiousness

akousios

ἀκούσιος

involuntary

akrasia

ἀκρασία

lack of self-control

akratēs

ἀκρατής

a person lacking self-control

akuros

ἄκυρος

without authority, lacking power

anagkē

ἀνάγκη

necessity

aneleutheria

ἀνελευθερία

lack of freedom

apatheia

ἀπάθεια

lack of passion

aselgeia

ἀσέλγεια

licentiousness

askēsis

ἄσκησις

(self-) discipline

autarkēs

αὐτάρκης

self-sufficiency

autodespotos αὐτοδεσπότος sovereign (adjective) autokratōr

αὐτοκράτωρ

sovereign (noun)

basileuō

βασιλεύω

to be king, to rule

boulēsis

βούλησις

rational choice, deliberation

bouleuma

βούλευμα

resolution, purpose

vii

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

douleia

δουλεία

slavery

douleuō

δουλεύω

to be a slave, to serve

eleutheria

ἐλευθερία

freedom

eleutheros

ἐλεύθερος

free

enkrateia

ἐγκράτεια

self-control

eph’ hemin

ẻφ’ ἡμῖν

that which lies in our control

epikrateō

ἐπικρατέω

to rule over

epithumetikon ἐπιθυμετικόν the desiring part of the soul epithumia

ἐπιθυμία

desire

erōs

ἔρως

(erotic) love

gumnasia

γυμνασία

training

hēdonē

ἡδονή

pleasure

hēgemonikon

ἡγεμονικόν

the ruling part of the soul

hekousios

ἑκούσιος

voluntary

kurieuō

κυριεύω

to be lord

kuros

κῦρος

power

logismos

λογισμός

reasoning, calculative reasoning

logistikon

λογιστικόν

the reasoning part of the soul

logos

λόγος

reason, speech

lupē

λύπη

pain

nous

νοῦς

mind

oretikon

ὀρετικόν

the appetitive part of the soul

orexis

ὄρεξις

appetite

pathēma

πάθημα

suffering, passion

pathos

πάθος

passion

phobos

φόβος

fear

ponos

πόνος

pain

viii

GLOSSARY OF MORAL PSYCHOLOGICAL TERMS

porneia

πορνεία

sexual immorality

proairesis

προαίρεσις

choice

probouleuō

προβουλεύω to deliberate

sarx

σάρξ

flesh

sōphrosunē

σωφροσύνη

moderation

stoicheion (pl. stoicheia)

στοιχεῖον

element, principle

thelēma

θέλημα

will (noun)

thelō

θέλω

to will, to wish

thumoeidēs

θυμοειδής

passionate, hot-tempered

thumos

θυμός

emotion, anger

ix

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Latin Terms affectus

passion, affect

amare

to love

amor

love

appetitus

appetite, desire

caritas

love

concupiscentia

desire, lust

continentia

self-control

cupiditas

desire, lust

dilectio

love

deligere

to love

impassibilitas

lack of passion

incontinentia

lack of self-control

ira

anger

laetitia

joy

libertas

liberty

liberum arbitrium free choice libido

lust, pleasure

metus

fear

moestitia

sorrow

motus

emotion, movement, motion

passio

passion, suffering

ratio

reason

temperantia

moderation

voluntas

will, wish, choice

x

Acknowledgments

Even when a book bears one name, many people stand behind the author’s efforts. Accordingly, I gladly acknowledge the colleagues who provided help and encouragement along the way. These include Joe Bankard, Mark Bilby, Darrel Falk, Rebecca Flietstra, Linda Hasper, Brad Kelle, Paul Kenyon, Mike Leffel, Michael Lodahl, Mark Mann, Colin McAllister, Tom Phillips, Heather Ross, and Kevin Timpe. I am grateful also to Point Loma Nazarene University for granting me a sabbatical leave for work on this book, as well as Point Loma’s Wesleyan Center for additional support. Above all, because a book about emotion continually brings one’s thoughts around to family, love and thanks go to my wife, Terrie; to my children, Jason and Megan; and to my grandchildren, Matthew, Andrew, Audrey, and Juliette.

xi

1

Introduction

This book is an exercise in Christian theological anthropology. It is the result of many years of teaching undergraduate courses in philosophy and Christian history and theology. The confluence of these subjects has taught me that there are two narratives regarding the Christian view of the body and its passions and desires. One narrative is Christian-friendly and asserts that a few stalwart defenders of the faith, notably Irenaeus (second century ce), heroically defended the goodness of God’s creation against the world-hating, body-denying depredations of Gnostics. The other narrative received classic statement by Friedrich Nietzsche, who contrasted the overly ascetic, world-hating beliefs of early Christians with the worldaffirming religion of Dionysus. The mutual incompatibility of these narratives suggests that Christian attitudes about the material world and the body and, consequently, about passion and desire contain more than a bit of ambivalence. I will argue that the Christian tradition inclines more enthusiastically toward soul-body, reason-passion dualism than its 1

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

apologists would like to concede and that it has a decided preference for human rationality—hence the near-unanimous view that the image of God, in which humans are created, is rationality. This view fits nicely with the assumption that God is superlatively rational and that the Bible’s embarrassing way of ascribing strong, occasionally irrational emotions to God is best regarded as a literary device. And yet, other branches of the Christian tradition, especially Pietism, have argued to the contrary that true religion is a matter of the heart—affections, passions, and desires. So, the Christian tradition can’t quite decide whether, in our relation to God, reason or the nonrational passions take precedence. Having, over the years, written some books that used some of Paul Tillich’s ideas, I have decided that the word ambivalent best describes the Christian tradition’s views of the extra-rational elements of the soul. Because of the doctrine of creation, the tradition is committed to affirming the goodness of the body; with the body come passion and desire. However, the goodness of the body does not mean unqualified approval of passion and desire, for reasons I will explain in chapters 2 through 4. Human rationality, meanwhile, associated with the divine Logos, from the beginning received a more favorable, less ambivalent treatment. Christian ambivalence about passion and desire and its preference for reason reflect the fact that the Christian tradition arose in dialogue with Greco-Roman philosophies. Although the Christian tradition did not simply borrow its ideas about these matters from classical philosophy, there is a substantial measure of continuity as we move from the classical era to the Christian era. To help readers see this point, chapter 1 expounds the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism on reason, passion, and desire. To give further context and to show how classical and Christian concerns played out in the modern world, chapter 5 briefly summarizes the ways in which these matters were presented by some illustrative people and movements. 2

INTRODUCTION

This book, then, is an attempt to state clearly why and how the Christian tradition thinks about reason, passion, and desire. However, it is more than a historical recitation. It is also an attempt to recommend how the Christian community should think about these matters today. To that end chapters 6-8 consider the ways in which the scientific community thinks about these things. I include these chapters because, in our context today, a theological attempt at understanding human nature mandates an engagement with scientific theories and argumentation. Admittedly, the scientific community does not possess a monolithic view of human nature. Such a harmony cannot be expected on any subject, certainly not on a subject as complex as human nature. Nonetheless, scientific evidence can, I think, help determine questions that the Christian tradition has pondered, especially questions about the nature of passion and desire and their relation to rationality. Of course, scientific theories do not constitute the totality of all that can be said about human nature. On the contrary, there is a properly theological contribution to the quest for understanding; however, examples such as the Galileo affair and the rise of modern geology have taught us, or at least should teach us, that no theological affirmation can be both true and authentically theological if it contradicts reliably established scientific findings. It is also true that locating reliably scientific findings can be tricky, as scientific research is highly dynamic and its results dwell in a fluid state. Still, five hundred years after Galileo heliocentrism seems well established; after two hundred years of geology one is not going out very far on the speculative limb if one believes that the earth and, indeed, the entire universe is a bit older than six thousand years. Scientific debate will always rage on regarding this or that theory, but some matters do eventually get settled to a tolerable degree of assurance. As I argue in chapters 6, 7,

3

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

and 8, the scientific understanding of passion and desire seems to be on its way to having this degree of assurance. The final two chapters represent my recommendations for thinking about passion and desire (chapter 9) and reason (chapter 10) in ways that are sensitive to the affirmations of the Christian tradition and also to the results of scientific research. A brief word on terminology: over the centuries, terms for reason, passion, and desire change. In some eras, for instance, “passion” is more in vogue; in others, “affect” is more often used. As a convention, then, I have chosen to primarily use the word emotion to designate the extra-rational dimensions of human nature: passion, desire, appetite, affect, instinct, impulse, appetite, sentiment, feeling, drive, and so on. I am aware that each of these terms has its own distinctive meaning and that there is some danger in lumping them together under a generic term like emotion. My justification for doing so is that the Christian tradition has itself lumped them together by contrasting them all with rationality. Finally, I have included many transliterated Greek and Latin words in chapters 1 through 4. This is more than a show of erudition; I am trying to help the reader see the extent to which there was a common vocabulary of moral psychology in the classical and Christian eras, a common vocabulary that bore the weight of common concerns and modes of understanding. Where the Greek and Latin terms seem important, I have included in the notes a reference to the original text. For the sake of convenience, I have also included a glossary of the leading terms in the original languages, transliterated, and with conventional translations. Every exercise in theology is a prayer—an offering to God with the hope that the labor expended in the exercise will be used by God. Even a work of scholarship can be such an offering, if both the writer and the reader will consecrate their work together to the cause of 4

INTRODUCTION

God. May it be so as we together seek to understand the impassioned life of humankind.

5

2

Reason and Emotion in Classical Philosophy

Greek philosophers often saw in Euripides’s portrait of Medea the central problem of humankind’s moral existence. Medea was betrayed by her husband Jason and, in anger, sought revenge by killing her children. Her children’s nurse observes: “Your mother moves her heart, moves her anger [cholon] . . . she will soon kindle the cloud of lamentation with greater emotion [thumōi].”1 The chorus comments: “Excessive loves [erōtes] deliver neither good reputation nor virtue to men [andrasin]” (line 629). Having resolved to kill her children, Medea says, “I know what sort of evils I will endure, but emotion [thumos] is stronger than my resolve [bouleumata]” (line 1079). For Greek philosophers, Medea represented the essence of moral catastrophe—behavior driven by emotion, anger, and love resulting 1. Euripides, Medea, lines 98–108. This and the next two quotations from Medea are my translations, rendered very literally to highlight the role of emotion. For the full play in translation with enumeration of lines, see Euripides, Women on the Edge: Four Plays, ed. and trans. Ruby Blondell, et al., The New Classical Canon (New York: Routledge, 1999), 147–215. The Greek text can be found in Euripides, Euripides, vol. 1: Cyclops, Alcesti, Medea, ed. and trans. David Kovacs, Loeb Classical Library 12 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

7

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

in death and destruction precisely because emotion overrules the governance of reason. The ethical ideal of classical philosophy was thus one in which reason governs our life, liberating us from the rule of emotion. Plato Analysis of the Soul I begin with Plato because of his incalculable influence on the Christian tradition and because moral psychology before Plato is, by comparison, notably underdeveloped. As is well known, Plato thought of the human soul as possessing or comprising three functions: reason (logos or logismos or to logistikon), desire or appetite (epithumia or to epithumetikon), and spirit or emotion (thumos or to thumoeidēs).2 Plato illustrated these functions and their relations with his image of the soul as a chariot, with two horses and a driver.3 Reason is the driver, who has to contend with an unruly horse, desire. Reason’s natural function is to govern the soul but its task becomes difficult when desire intrudes. The second horse is emotion; its moral status is ambivalent, for it can be as much an obstacle to reason as is desire but can also help reason govern and control desire. Emotion should stand with reason and against desire by filling us with a sense of repugnance whenever we are overcome by desire.4 Elsewhere, Plato described the soul as a composite being,

2. See Plato, Republic, 434e–441c, in John M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1066–73, for the basic exposition from the middle dialogues. The Greek text can be found in Plato, Republic, 2 vols., ed. and trans. Chris Emlyn-Jones and William Preddy, Loeb Classical Library 237 and 276 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). 3. Plato, Phaedrus, 253c–254e, in Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works, 531–32 (hereafter PCW). For the Greek text, see Plato, vol. 1: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus, trans. Harold North Fowler, Loeb Classical Library 36, reprint ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999). 4. Republic, 440 (PCW, 1071–72).

8

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

with a human element (reason), a lion-like element (emotion), and a beast with many heads, some wild and some tame (the various desires).5 The point of these metaphors is that emotion and desire have no share in rationality, thus setting up the possibility of conflict if reason should fail to govern. Reason, Emotion, and Desire at War Reason, emotion, and desire exist in a hierarchy of value: logos is the best part of us and epithumia is the worst part,6 even though it is the biggest (pleistos) part of the soul.7 Thumos, as usual, is sandwiched between logos and epithumia in the scale of value. Plato emphatically denied that it is a sort of desire,8 but it likewise differs from reason.9 As Plato explained in the Timaeus, the sons of the demiurge placed the immortal soul in a mortal body and thus joined it with another form (eidos) of soul, the mortal form. This union invested the soul with passions (pathemata) such as pleasure (hēdonē), pain (lupē), fear (phobos), emotion (thumos) and love (erōs).10 Because these passions threatened to defile the divine and immortal part of the now composite soul, the sons of the demiurge located emotion and desire away from reason, in the chest and stomach.11 Sadly, their location in the lower regions has not prevented their dominating reason. Plato seldom complained about thumos, but epithumia is another matter entirely. Thumos is like a lion, but epithumia is a multiheaded beast, some of whose heads are of wild (agrioi) animals.12 That is why, 5. Ibid., 588c-d (PCW, 1196). 6. Ibid., 431a (PCW, 1062–63). 7. Ibid., 442a (PCW, 1073). 8. Ibid., 440e (PCW, 1072). 9. Ibid., 441a-b (PCW, 1072). 10. Plato, Timaeus, 69c-d (PCW, 1270–71). For the Greek text, see Plato, vol. 9: Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles, trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library 234 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929). 11. Ibid., 69d–70b (PCW, 1271).

9

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

at the beginning of the Republic, Sophocles is reported being glad to be rid of sexual desire, described as a raging and wild (agrios) despot.13 Plato reluctantly allowed that there are desires and pleasures that are simple and measured (metrios), but noted that these are characteristic only of the few who are well born and educated.14 Desire requires training if it is to be measured. The animalistic character of desire implies its unruliness. The pleasure associated with bodily desires puts us out of our minds (ekphrona),15 as desire constantly seeks to usurp its subordinate role and to become the soul’s governing principle, precipitating civil war.16 The extreme example of this is the tyrannical character, in whom there is a principal love, surrounded by a host of desires or loves (erōta, from erōs),17 which wash away one’s moderation (sōphrosunē) and drive one to madness (mania).18 Such a soul is a slave (doulē) because its best part, reason, is enslaved (douleuein) while the worst part, desire, plays the despot. The soul thus teems with slavery (douleia) and lack of freedom (aneleutheria).19 It languishes under the tyranny of desires, especially erōs. The tyrannical soul thus becomes an erotic (erōtikos) character—a soul taken over by this principal desire.20 Being enslaved, the tyrannical soul is therefore least able to do what it truly wishes to do.21 It never tastes true freedom (eleutheria),22 but is instead in a lawless state that it mistakenly calls freedom.23 Paradoxically, although epithumia is by nature the most 12. Republic, 588b-d (PCW, 1196). 13. Ibid., 329c (PCW, 974). 14. Ibid., 431c (PCW, 1063). 15. Ibid., 402e (PCW, 1039). 16. Ibid., 444a-b (PCW, 1075). 17. Ibid., 572e–573a (PCW, 1181). 18. Ibid., 573a-b; 578a (PCW, 1181; 1186). 19. Ibid., 577d; 579d (PCW, 1185; 1187). 20. Ibid., 573b-d (PCW, 1181–82). 21. Ibid., 577e (PCW, 1185–86). 22. Ibid., 576a (PCW, 1184).

10

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

greedy (aplēstotatos) element of the soul,24 the soul in the grip of desire is never sated (aplēstos)25 and attempts to satisfy desire produce, not the authentic and valid pleasures appropriate to these desires, but an alien (allotria) pleasure.26 So, the soul’s only hope is to cultivate reason and its capacity for governance. Plato went into considerable detail about the exalted status of reason. This was important to him because reason’s natural function, to rule, is a consequence of its being the best part of us. As the metaphor of the soul as human, lion, and many-headed beast shows, reason is the distinctively human part of us. Desires are intrinsically and unredeemably animalistic; we share such desires with animals.27 Reason alone is unique to humans. But it is more than merely human. It is that part of us that is divine28 and the part by which we have kinship with what is immortal and eternal.29 Reason is, therefore, the true human self; desire and emotion are (at least in some dialogues) accretions to the soul in its embodied condition. The existential self, therefore, is suspended between time and eternity and between mortality and immortality. By virtue of reason, it is single and immortal and enjoys kinship with the divine and eternal; but it is also composite, beset by various passions, pleasures, and desires, all of which it shares with animals. The hierarchy of value (reason as the best part of us, desire as the worst part) means that there is an ideal relationship among the three functions; when the three operate appropriately, the soul attains an inner harmony, moderation (sōphrosunē). Without moderation, turmoil and chaos result. Moderation is concord (sumphonia) or harmony (harmonia), and a 23. Ibid., 572e (PCW, 1181). 24. Ibid., 442a (PCW, 1073). 25. Ibid., 578a (PCW, 1186). 26. Ibid., 586e–587a (PCW, 1194–95). 27. Ibid., 441b (PCW, 1072). 28. Ibid., 590d (PCW, 1198). 29. Ibid., 611e (PCW, 1215).

11

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

kind of order (kosmos), which functions as a control (enkrateia) over various pleasures (hēdonai) and desires (epithumiai).30 In the condition of temporal existence, the composite soul experiences a kind of civil war,31 with desire wishing to go its own way, heedless of reason’s governance. Moderation is a state in which, reason having gained the mastery over desire, the soul experiences harmony.32 Moderation thus requires self-mastery. Plato puzzled over the concept of self-mastery, implying that one is simultaneously master and slave.33 However, the paradox is resolved once we acknowledge the composite nature of the existential soul. Because the composite soul comprises both reason and alien elements (desire and emotion), the possibility emerges of conflict and opposition. Harmony is attained by reason, aided by emotion, mastering desire.34 However, mastery of desire does not mean extirpation; some desires are good while others are worthless (more on this shortly). We should honor the good desires while punishing (kolazein) and enslaving (doulousthai) the worthless desires.35 Likewise, we should restrain the unnecessary—that is, good but excessive—desires and eliminate lawless (paranomoi) desires.36 Having trimmed away worthless and excessive desires, we need only practice moderation—neither starving nor indulging the necessary desires.37 In achieving mastery, reason must cultivate the help of emotion, its natural ally. It does so through a regimen of moral and physical training (mousikē and gumnastikē), which achieves the inner sumphonia that is moderation.38 Although

30. Ibid., 430e (PCW, 1062). 31. Ibid., 444a-b (PCW, 1075). 32. Ibid., 442c-d (PCW, 1073–74). 33. Ibid., 430e–431a (PCW, 1062–63). 34. Ibid., 439c-d, 441e (PCW, 1071; 1073). 35. Ibid., 561b-c (PCW, 1172). 36. Ibid., 571b (PCW, 1180). 37. Ibid., 441e-442a (PCW, 1073). 38. Ibid., 441e (PCW, 1073).

12

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

thumos can be morally troublesome—as in the case of Medea—Plato regarded it as a necessary condition of moral virtue. Everyone, he wrote, ought to be a person of thumos; resistance against evil and wrongdoing requires well-born (gennaios) thumos.39 That is why, in the metaphor of the chariot found in Phaedrus, thumos is said to be the good (agathos) horse, even if epithumia is said to be the bad (kakia) horse. Thumos is a lover of honor (timēs erastēs), accompanied by sōphrosunē.40 Closer to Plato’s interests in the Republic, thumos, when well trained, provides us with the sort of moral energy needed to resist the demands of epithumia. Thumos is, for Plato, naturally allied with (summachos) reason and uses its weapons on behalf of reason.41 That is why the would-be rulers of Plato’s ideal republic required extensive physical training, whose purpose is to tame thumos by means of harmony and rhythmic motion.42 Good Emotions So far we have been exploring Plato’s thoughts about passion and desire in their problematic sense. The textbook portrait of Plato exhibits him as a upholding a strict dualism between reason and the irrational parts of the soul. This portrait has a basis in Plato’s dialogues, especially Phaedo and Republic, but it represents just one side of Plato’s view. To arrive at the other side, it is helpful to have a closer look at pleasure and desire, since they are closely linked to each other and to humankind’s central moral problem. As noted previously, thumos has a positive function for Plato. But even epithumia does not bear a wholly negative sense in Plato’s 39. Plato, Laws, 731b-c (PCW, 1413–14). For the Greek text, see Plato, Laws, 2 vols., trans. R. G. Bury, Loeb Classical Library 187 and 192 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926). 40. Phaedrus, 253d (PCW, 530–31). 41. Republic, 440a-e (PCW, 1071–72). 42. Ibid., 441e–442a (PCW, 1073).

13

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

dialogues; after all, in the Phaedrus, the soul possesses epithumia even in its disembodied state.43 Admittedly, even in that state it seems a bit unruly, but the metaphor of the chariot seems to require us to think of the soul in its pure, disembodied state as somehow still possessing epithumia as well as thumos. To see how epithumia can enjoy a positive meaning we must attend to the distinction between necessary and unnecessary desires. Necessary desires are those that are unavoidable, whose satisfaction benefits us in some way, and for the satisfaction of which we have a natural tendency.44 Unnecessary desires are those that do us either harm or at least no good and which can be eliminated with effort. Plato illustrated his point with food: desire for food to sustain bodily health is a necessary desire; desire for luxurious food or an unduly varied diet is an unnecessary desire.45 The same analysis, he asserted, would hold good for other desires.46 Although necessary desires are obviously a function of our bodily existence and thus would not pertain to the soul in its pure, disembodied form, nothing suggests that for Plato necessary desires are evil. On the contrary, anticipating Aristotle’s idea of the mean, Plato held that we should neither starve nor indulge the necessary desires.47 They may be inconvenient, but they are not evil as long as the satisfaction of such desire is moderated. Plato, however, went beyond the grudging acknowledgment that the organic needs of the body are not evil. He argued additionally that each element of the composite soul—logos, thumos, and epithumia—has its own pleasures and desires. There are thus pleasures associated with good and noble desires besides the pleasures of 43. See Phaedrus, 246a (PCW, 524), where all souls, even those of the gods, are composite, and 249a, which describes the celestial journey of the disembodied soul, a journey that is affected by desire, the unruly horse (PCW, 526-27). 44. Republic, 558a (PCW, 1169). 45. Ibid., 559a-b (PCW, 1169–70). 46. Ibid., 559c (PCW, 1170). 47. Ibid., 571d–572b (PCW, 1180–81).

14

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

worthless (ponērōn) desires.48 Reason’s desires are satisfied by wisdom, which, Plato argued, is a truer mode of filling (plērōsis) than are food and drink precisely because wisdom partakes of pure being (kathara ousia).49 Wisdom also yields a truer sort of pleasure (alēthēs hēdonē), because with wisdom the soul is filled with real things (ta onta).50 Philosophical pleasures are consequently the best, since they relate to the mind’s pursuit of knowledge and not to physical desires.51 So, just as there is an ontological hierarchy within the composite soul, there is a hierarchy of value among pleasures; pleasures of the body are inherently inferior to those of the mind. Nonetheless, even thumos and epithumia receive the pleasures appropriate to them when reason governs the soul.52 Reason and Erōs The connection between reason and desire is deeper than the observation, in the Republic, that reason has its own pleasures. There is in fact a deep connection between reason and erōs. Affirming such a connection seems paradoxical, given Plato’s relentless critique of erōs in the Republic, especially (as indicated above) in the section describing the tyrannical character,53 but the connection is emphatic in the Symposium and Phaedrus. A turning point in the dialogues occurs in the Phaedrus. At first, Socrates, in his customary quest for definition, notes that everyone considers erōs to be a kind of desire (tis epithumia)54 and then goes 48. Ibid., 561b-c (PCW, 1172). 49. Ibid., 585b-c (PCW, 1193). 50. Ibid., 585d-e (PCW, 1193–94). 51. Ibid., 583a, 485d (PCW, 1190; 1109). 52. Ibid., 586e (PCW, 1194). 53. Drew A. Hyland, noting the varying depictions of erōs in the dialogues, observes that "Each dialogue, it is thus indicated to us, must be qualified by the other; neither is the whole story, much less the ‘Platonic view’ of eros” (Hyland, Plato and the Question of Beauty, Studies in Continental Thought [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008], 28).

15

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

on to offer an unflattering and at points repulsive portrait of an older lover pursuing a youth, concluding that erōs is an epithumia that lacks logos, is led toward the pleasure of beauty, and overrules any opinion about what is right.55 After this declaration, however, he is stopped by his inner sign and realizes that his speech has offended the gods and he resolves to expiate his offense by offering a suitable account of erōs.56 In his revised account, erōs is not identical with epithumia. The latter is the unruly horse of the chariot metaphor, whereas the former is actually (when it attains a purified, philosophical form) a kind of divine madness and possession.57 At the same time, erōs possesses an element of rationality, thus distinguishing it from epithumia. Within Plato’s philosophy, the argument for erōs’ rationality rests on two points: first, epithumia aims at pleasure (hēdonē), rational desire (boulēsis) aims at the good (to agathon), and erōs aims at the beautiful (to kalon).58 Second, the Symposium shifts the object of erōs from the beautiful59 to the good.60 Erōs, in other words, overlaps with rational desire (boulēsis). This judgment is confirmed when Plato asked, “Do you think that this boulēsis and this erōs are common to everyone?”61 showing that boulēsis and erōs are equivalent terms for our desire for

54. Phaedrus, 237d (PCW, 516). 55. Ibid., 238a-b (PCW, 517). 56. Ibid., 242c-d (PCW, 520–21). 57. Ibid., 249d-e (PCW, 527). 58. Plato, Charmides, 167e (PCW, 654). The Greek text can be found in Plato, vol. 12: Charmides, Alcibiades I and II, Hipparchus, The Lovers, Theages, Minos, Epinomis, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library 201 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927). Boulēsis is said to aim at the good also in Plato, Gorgias, 467c–468c; 499e–500a (PCW, 811–12; 844). For the Greek text, see Plato, vol. 3: Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias, trans. W. R. M. Lamb, Loeb Classical Library 166 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925). 59. Plato, Symposium, 204d (PCW, 487). 60. Ibid., 206a (PCW, 489). 61. Ibid., 205a (PCW, 488). For a fuller version of this argument, see Hyland, Plato and the Question of Beauty, 54; Drew A. Hyland, “ἔρως, ἐπιθυμία, and φιλία in Plato,” Phronesis 13, no. 1 (1968): 35–39; and David M. Halperin, “Platonic Erôs and What Men Call Love,” Ancient Philosophy 5 (1985): 171–72.

16

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

the good. So, whereas epithumia is a kind of blind drive for physical satisfaction that has no concern for the good,62 erōs, like boulēsis, seeks the good and thus partakes of rationality. Of course, Plato recognized the essential ambivalence of erōs; it may aim at the good by way of the beautiful, but, as he argued repeatedly in various dialogues, pursuit of the good depends on one’s perception of what is good, and it is exceedingly easy to mistake an apparent good for the real good or a subordinate good for the ultimate. In the Phaedrus this ambivalence is expressed as the difference between left-handed and right-handed erōs: the former is the low sort of love that cannot rise above the perception of bodies; the latter is the divine madness that is the source of blessing.63 Both the Symposium and the Phaedrus are premised on this distinction and aim at elucidating the nature of the higher erōs and at explaining the dangers to the soul of falling captive to the lower erōs. Plato’s point is that we have an instinctive drive toward what is beautiful and good. Because the path toward the forms of beauty and goodness begins with and passes through objects that are sensuously beautiful and physically good, the soul may get distracted by the sensuous and the physical, and thus succumb to the destructive madness. It’s not that the sensuous and the physical are evil; they are just distracting. Instead of seeing the beautiful and the good in them, the soul easily mistakes them for beauty itself and goodness itself. Plato’s philosophy thus rests on a careful appreciation of the ambivalent nature of phenomena such as erōs.64 62. As Plato stated in Republic, 437e–438a, a desire such as thirst is a desire simply for drink and not also a desire for the good (PCW, 1069). That is why in Charmides, 167e, the object of epithumia is said to be pleasure, not the good (PCW, 654). 63. Phaedrus, 266a-b (PCW, 542–43). 64. See Hyland, Plato and the Question of Beauty, 84; and James M. Rhodes, Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues, Eric Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003), 186.

17

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Because erōs, when properly directed, aims at the good, philosophy has an erotic character; authentic erōs, after all, is a desirer (epithumētēs) of prudence and philosophizes (philosophōn) throughout its entire life.65 Philosophy is thus driven by erōs. This is true even in the Republic, which takes up a pretty harsh attitude toward erōs. The philosopher is thus described as someone who always loves (aei erōsin) learning about being.66 The philosopher is one who perseveres on the path of dialectics and whose erōs does not falter along the way.67 With philosophy rooted in erōs, it was thus easy for Plato to connect philosophy with appetite (orexis) so that even epithumia can be redeemed for philosophy: the philosopher must desire (oregesthai) all truth and is a desirer (epithumētēs) of wisdom.68 One of the features that makes the Symposium significant is that the role played in the Republic by dialectics is played in the Symposium by erōs. In the Republic and later dialogues, it is dialectics that draws the mind from the particulars of sense experience to the knowledge of truth. The Symposium, however, lacks reference to dialectics and instead sees erōs as the means by which the soul traverses the distance between sensuous being and what is ultimate. It is our love inspired by a particular beautiful body that can be refined until its true character of being love of beauty as such is revealed. This is why it is so important, in the Symposium, that erōs is not a god but a daimon—a being between mortal humans and the immortal gods, an in-between (metaxu) being who connects heaven and earth.69 Mythologically speaking, erōs is a daimon; epistemologically considered, erōs is like dialectics.70 65. Phaedrus, 203d (PCW, 486). 66. Republic, 485b (PCW, 1108). 67. Ibid., 490a-b (PCW, 1112–13). 68. Ibid., 485d; 475b (PCW 1109; 1101–2). 69. Symposium, 202a–203e (PCW, 484-86).

18

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

We should not think of erōs as a formal method, however. Instead, erōs is said to be about reproducing and begetting.71 It is, in other words, creative. For the most part, the creative power of erōs manifests itself in physical reproduction;72 however, the erōs that engenders physical reproduction is the same erōs that produces philosophical words and thoughts as the soul comes to know beauty itself.73 What Plato is getting at is that philosophy, for all of its rationality, logical methods, and precise definitions, is at heart an expression of erōs inspired by beauty. Philosophy is not only logical (the quest for truth) and ethical (the quest for the good), but is also erotic (the quest for the beautiful). Philosophical wisdom is not only epistemological but also a matter of erōs.74 So, it is a mistake to overly separate reason from desire in Plato’s philosophy. It is true that in some dialogues, notably Phaedo and Republic, the emphasis falls on reason’s mastery of emotion and desire and this theme is never far from Plato’s attention. At the same time, reason is itself a form of desire, with its own distinctive pleasures and can even be described as a kind of divine madness. This point receives support if we consider what Plato said about the object of philosophical pursuit and the nature of the path toward that object. The main point here is that the good, the ultimate object of philosophical desire, is not being (ousia) and is, in fact, beyond being.75 That is why Socrates must speak metaphorically and why Glaucon is reduced to asking for a likeness of the good.76 In the 70. On this role of erōs, see Jerry Stannard, “Socratic Eros and Platonic Dialectic,” Phronesis 4, no. 2 (1959): 126–27. 71. Symposium, 206e (PCW, 490). 72. Ibid., 207–8 (PCW, 490–91). 73. Ibid., 210d (PCW, 493). 74. See Kyung-Choon Chang, “Plato’s Form of the Beautiful in the Symposium versus Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover in the Metaphysics (7),” The Classical Quarterly, new series 52, no. 2 (2002): 432–37; and Halperin, “Platonic Erôs,” 181–82, 188. 75. Republic, 509b (PCW, 1129–30).

19

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Parmenides, Plato argued similarly that the one (apparently the same as the good77) does not participate in being (ousia) and, consequently, “it is not.”78 Neither name, nor logos, nor knowledge, nor perception, nor opinion belong to the one.79 In these passages Plato indicated the utter transcendence of the good (or the one), to the point that it can be neither known nor named. So, even though (in the Republic) the good enables the mind to know the forms, it is itself not a direct, but at best only an indirect, object of knowledge—hence the necessity of metaphors and similes (such as that of the sun) to elucidate the good. The same point is made in a different way in the Symposium. Having described the upward path that leads to knowledge of beauty, Plato used mostly visual language to depict the seeker’s arrival at the summit of knowledge: [The philosopher] must be led towards the various sorts of knowledge [tas epistēmas], in order to see [idē] the beautiful. . . . And then [the philosopher] sees [kai blepōn] the beautiful in abundance. . . . Turning to the abundant sea of beauty and observing [theōrōn] it, [the philosopher] gives birth to many, beautiful, great logoi and thoughts. . . . Anyone who has been led hitherto like a child to the objects of love [ta erōtika], observing [theōrōn] beautiful things one after the other and correctly, will suddenly see [katopsetai] an amazing beauty.80

This visual language is not accidental or used merely for dramatic effect. Because what is ultimate lies beyond being, it cannot be 76. Ibid., 509c (PCW, 1130). 77. See ch. 2 of Dmitri Nikulin, The Other Plato: The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato’s InnerAcademic Teachings, SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), for an argument equating the good and the one. See also E. R. Dodds, “The Parmenides of Plato and the Origin of the Neoplatonic ‘One,’” The Classical Quarterly 22, no. 3/4 (1928): 134. 78. Plato, Parmenides, 141e (PCW, 375). The Greek text can be found in Plato, vol. 4: Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias, trans. H. N. Fowler, Loeb Classical Library 167 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 250-51. 79. Ibid., 142a (PCW, 375–76). 80. This is my literal translation of excerpts from Symposium, 210c-e (PCW, 492–93).

20

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

the object of discursive thinking, as the ordinary forms can. On the contrary, although the approach to the summit is orderly and rational, the knowledge of the ultimate itself is more intuitive than discursive. Reason thus has a twofold nature for Plato: (1) a formal and logical use by which we come to know forms by orderly methods of thought (hypothesis, dialectics, composition and division); and (2) a more intuitive use by which we grasp the highest. Admittedly, Plato did not elaborate on this second use in his dialogues; however, it became an important part of the Platonic tradition, especially in Neoplatonism.81 Reason and Sensuous Being There is one more point to be made regarding the relation of reason to the extra-rational elements of the soul—the role of sensuous being in the path to knowledge. The dialectical method, as Plato described it, begins with our everyday experience and finds in it elements that, when properly considered, lead us to knowledge. Knowledge acquisition is thus a journey that begins with the mundane and ends with an intuition of the transcendent in the mundane. The Symposium provides us with an illustration. The journey begins with the perception of the physical beauty of one body and the love that it inspires. The next step involves recognizing that physical beauty is one and the same in whichever body it appears, so that there is no reason to prefer one body to another—it is beauty that inspires love, not the material particularity of any given body. Following this, one should learn to value the beauty of souls more than the beauty of bodies and to love another because of this soulful beauty, even if 81. See Kevin Corrigan, Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism, Purdue University Press Series in the History of Philosophy (West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005), 162–88.

21

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

physical beauty is absent. From here, one should learn to recognize the beauty of customs and laws and to see that the beauty of one is identical to the beauty of another. Ultimately, one is able to perceive beauty itself. Here one is no longer erotically attached to any one particular.82 In this ascent, one uses sensuous objects as rungs on a ladder.83 This means that sensuous objects are an essential prerequisite of philosophical knowledge. The human mind cannot immediately leap to a knowledge of the forms; consequently, there can be no ascent to beauty that does not begin with the sensuous perception of beauty in a particular, material body. This is the assumption behind Plato’s doctrine of recollection: it is the perception of beauty in a physical body that stirs the soul to love of beauty itself.84 So, while it is true that knowledge of the forms involves, in some sense, transcending sensuous particulars, it is also true that dialectical knowledge necessarily involves seeing the forms in the sensuous particular. There is, accordingly, a dialectical relationship between the temporal and the eternal, between the finite and the infinite. They are, of course, distinct; Plato’s philosophy requires us to distinguish them. At the same time, we need the finite in order to arrive at the infinite. Sensuous knowledge of the finite mediates to us the intellectual knowledge of the infinite. Summary of Plato’s Views Plato’s philosophy is an attempt to deal theoretically and existentially with desire. It recognizes that desire is ambivalent. It can drag the soul down to the level of animals; it can raise the soul to the form of beauty. Hence the importance of moderation and self-control. Bad 82. Symposium, 210a-e (PCW 492–93). 83. Ibid., 211c (PCW, 493). 84. See also Phaedrus, 251 (PCW, 528–29).

22

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

desires must be purged; good desires must be moderated; desire for the beautiful and the good must be cultivated. Moderation and selfcontrol are required so that the soul can be free, avoiding the slavery of the tyrannical character. But freedom has more than the negative sense of freedom from passion and desire. Restraint of passion and desire allows the soul to realize its true nature as passionate, erotic reason. Freedom is, accordingly, an ontological concept—it is the state in which the soul achieves its best state and realizes what it truly is. Negatively, this requires denying those parts of the existential self that tie the soul to corporeal reality. Positively, it requires the soul to attain knowledge and in this way nourish itself on the good. As we will see, the ambivalence of passion, desire, and erōs in Plato’s philosophy passed over into Christian thinking, whose moral psychology lay within the parameters of classical philosophy and whose understanding of the relation of time to eternity and of the finite to the infinite owes much to Plato. In certain ways, then, the Christian theological struggle with passion and desire moves within the intellectual space first charted by Plato. Aristotle Analysis of the Soul Like Plato, Aristotle distinguished the rational from the extra-rational elements of the soul.85 The extra-rational encompasses several functions. One is concerned strictly with physiological functions such as nutrition and growth. Aristotle’s theory of virtue has little interest in this function, since there is no virtue associated with it.86 85. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1.13 (1102a) in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols., Bollingen Series 71.2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1741 (hereafter CWA). The Greek text is available in Aristotle, Vol. 19: Nicomachean Ethics, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library 73 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926).

23

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

There is, however, a extra-rational element that relates to virtue because it is subject to reason’s control—it shares, in a certain way, in reason, although in experience it often seems to be fighting against reason. This is the desiring (to epithumetikon) or, more generally, the appetitive (to oretikon) function of the soul. We observe (Aristotle asserted) in the self-controlled person (ho enkratēs) desire’s capacity to obey reason and in the person of moderation (ho sōphrōn) a harmony between desire and reason.87 At the same time, there is nothing inevitable about desire’s obedience to or harmony with reason; we share desire (epithumia) with animals, a fact that points unmistakably to the close connection between desire and the body.88 It is worth noting that, whereas Plato distinguished desire from emotion (thumos) and saw emotion as a sort of natural ally of reason in its quest to govern desire, Aristotle seemed to place desire and emotion in the same category of extra-rational elements. He thus argued that passion (pathē) includes epithumia, anger (orgē), and fear (phobos),89 anger and fear being phenomena associated with thumos. Similarly, courage, the virtue of thumos, is for Aristotle only one of several moral virtues and not particularly the ally of reason. Regardless of how we classify desire, Aristotle was clear that reason is that element of the soul that is the best part of us, the element that rules and governs us and has knowledge of what is noble and divine because it is the most divine thing within the soul.90 In comparison with the entire soul it may be small in size, but in activity and dignity it far surpasses the other elements of the soul.91 Indeed, for Aristotle the life of intellect itself constitutes human being,92 just as in a state 86. Nicomachean Ethics, 1.13 (1102b) (CWA 2:1741). 87. Ibid., 1.13 (1102b) (CWA, 2:1741–42). 88. Ibid., 3.2 (1111b) (CWA, 2:1755). 89. Ibid., 2.5 (1105b) (CWA, 2:1746). 90. Ibid., 10.7 (1177a) (CWA, 2:1860–61). 91. Ibid., 10.7 (1177b–1178a) (CWA, 2:1861).

24

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

or in any other composite thing it is the ruling element that is more identified with the whole.93 So, in spite of their differing ways of analyzing the soul (how to classify thumos, whether or not to think of desire as rational), Plato and Aristotle agreed on points of fundamental importance: the human person is reason (logos) or mind (nous). Reason (or mind) has a twofold function—to know eternal being and to govern our moral life by exercising rule over desire. Emotion and Choice One thing that Aristotle contributed to subsequent philosophy and to Christian thought was a careful discussion of the presuppositions of moral virtue—the features of the soul that make moral virtue possible. Aristotle went into considerable detail on this point because of his sensitivity to a problem generated in Plato’s dialogues: If we spontaneously pursue what we believe to be good, how do we explain cases where a person does something that is less than fully good? We all seem to know that physical pleasure is not the highest good, yet much of human behavior is driven by desire for such pleasure. Is the fault simply with our wrong belief? If so, vice rests on cognitive error. Aristotle believed that there was more to vice than just faulty belief and thus undertook to offer a careful analysis of moral agency. For an act to be moral it must be a matter of choice (proairēsis), which involves reason (logos) and thinking (dianoia).94 It is concerned with the selection of means to desired ends and is limited to what lies within our power.95 It is not the same as wishing (boulēsis) (since 92. Ibid., 10.7 (1178a) (CWA, 2:1861–62). 93. Ibid., 9.8 (1168b) (CWA, 2:1847). 94. Ibid., 3.2 (1112a) (CWA, 2:1756). 95. Ibid., 3.2 (1111b) (CWA, 2:1755).

25

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

we can wish for things that are realistically not objects of choice), but does involve deliberation (probouleuō).96 It is deliberative appetite (bouleutikē orexis) for things that lie in our power (eph´ hēmin).97 It may seem odd to classify choice as a type of appetite (orexis) (especially since Aristotle denied that choice is equivalent to epithumia,98 which is a species of orexis) but Aristotle argued that action requires desire; knowledge alone cannot motivate action.99 Yet desire alone, although capable of generating action (as in animals), does not suffice for purposive action, which requires reason. Choice, which combines desire and reason to yield purposive action, is thus absent in animals100 and may be regarded either as appetitive intellect or intellectual appetite.101 We deliberate about ends and so choice is about the good; however, the object of choice may be the good itself or something only perceived as good, for while mind (nous) is always right in its apprehension, appetite (orexis) is not always right and may well accept an apparent or lesser good for the real or higher good.102 Under what circumstances might someone mistake an apparent good for the true good? For Aristotle the answer lay in the effect of pleasure—and that means passion and desire—on our judgment;

96. Ibid., 3.2–3.3 (1111b–1112a) (CWA, 2:1755–56). 97. Ibid., 3.3 (1113a) (CWA, 2:1757). 98. Ibid., 3.2 (1111b) (CWA, 2:1755). 99. See Aristotle, On the Movement of Animals, 8 (702a) (CWA 1:1093), where he describes a causal sequence, whereby perception produces a mental representation (phantasia) of the desirable object, which in turn creates desire, which in turn creates passion, which prepares the body for movement toward the object. The Greek text can be found in Aristotle, vol. 12: Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals, trans. E. S. Forster and A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library 323 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937). 100. Nicomachean Ethics, 3.2 (1111b) (CWA, 2:1755). 101. Ibid., 6.2 (1139b) (CWA, 2:1798–99). 102. Aristotle, On the Soul, 3.10 (433a) (CWA, 1:688); Nicomachean Ethics, 3.4 (1113a) (CWA, 2:1757–58). The Greek text for the former is available in Aristotle, vol. 8: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath, trans. W. S. Hett, Loeb Classical Library 288 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957).

26

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

errors about the good usually involve pleasure.103 That is why, in order to aim at the true good, we must have developed a good character capable of making sound judgments. It is important, however, that we not overstate Aristotle’s suspicion of passion and desire. For one thing, as with Plato, not all pleasures are bad; some desires are concerned with things that are fine and good.104 But these sorts of desires and the attendant pleasures don’t seem to be morally problematic for Aristotle. What is problematic is bodily pleasures and desires—the sort that we share with animals.105 It is because of these that we need moderation.106 For another thing, as noted, intellect is not a source of action. It has nothing to do with practical activity (to prakton), and even when it contemplates an object of potential desire or avoidance, it does so without moving us to act, as when we think of something fearful without feeling fear.107 What is critical in the origination of action is appetite (orexis), which comprises wish (boulēsis), emotion (thumos), and desire (epithumia). As Aristotle said, the desirable object (to oretikon) moves, and because of this, thinking moves. So, whatever the ill effects of emotion, passion, and desire on humankind’s morality, Aristotle believed that they lay at the heart of action—without them, thought alone could never rouse our bodies into motion. Emotion, Desire, and Virtue Since passion and desire are neither categorically good nor intrinsically evil, and because appetite is the cause of action, and because the pleasures associated with passion and desire cause us 103. Nicomachean Ethics, 3.4 (1113a–1113b) (CWA, 2:1758). 104. Ibid., 7.4 (1147b–1148a) (CWA, 2:1813–14). 105. Ibid., 3.10 (1118a) (CWA, 2:1765). 106. Ibid., 3.10 (1117b) (CWA, 2:1764–65). See Giles Pearson, Aristotle on Desire, Cambridge Classical Studies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 91–110, on epithumia. 107. On the Soul, 3.9 (432b), 9 (CWA, 1:687–88).

27

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

to misapprehend the good, their place in the virtuous life requires careful analysis. Aristotle sought to provide such an analysis with his notion of the mean. Moral virtues are means lying between extremes of excess and deficiency. Like health and strength, the moral virtues, which have to do with passions (pathē) and actions,108 are destroyed by excess and deficiency and thus flourish only in a condition of harmony—not too much and not too little.109 Take courage, for instance, the virtue that relates to thumos and associated feeling of fear. There is such a thing as too little courage—cowardice or excessive timidity—as well as its opposite, an excess—perhaps rashness or foolhardiness. We can, in other words, feel fear too much or too little and the one is as bad as the other for the life of virtue. Courage is found between these extremes. To be courageous is to feel fear in the right amount, given the circumstances. We must thus feel fear, not only in due measure, but also toward the right object, at the right time, and in the right way. The emotion of fear, then, is not in itself something evil, although we must guard how and how much we allow ourselves to feel it.110 Aristotle thus offered the view that thumos and its related feeling, fear, are not in themselves moral categories. They are instead physiological states of human being. They acquire moral status only because the moral agent trains himself or herself how to engage thumos and how to feel fear. Aristotle devoted much more attention to moderation (sōphrosunē, traditionally translated temperance), the moral virtue that pertains to desire, especially desires for food, drink, and sex, and associated pleasures.111 Like courage and other moral virtues, sōphrosunē is a

108. Nicomachean Ethics, 3.1 (1109b) (CWA, 2:1752). 109. Ibid., 2.2 (1104a) (CWA, 2:1744). 110. Aristotle discussed courage in ibid., 3.6–3.9 (1115a–1117b) (CWA, 2:1760–64). 111. Ibid., 3.10 (1117b–1118a) (CWA, 2:1764–65).

28

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

mean lying between extremes of excess and deficiency. It turns out, however, that the deficiency side of this continuum is mostly a theoretical problem; Aristotle could hardly imagine people who were deficient in their desires—feeling too little pleasure from bodily desires.112 Such insensibility was not human (anthrōpikē).113 Aristotle’s incredulity about the existence of desire deficiency shows us that Aristotelian sōphrosunē is not an exercise in asceticism—the moderate person will disdain bad pleasures114 but will enjoy pleasant states moderately if they promote health or vigor. Even pleasures not thus conducive can be enjoyed as long as they do not hinder health or contradict the requirements of good character. The more realistic and urgent danger is the opposite extreme, excessive desire (akolasia, sometimes translated intemperance, licentiousness, or profligacy). Moderation thus lies between lack of desire and excessive desire. It is the right attitude toward bodily desires, satisfying them appropriately—to just the right degree—but not too much and, of course, not being ruled by such desires.115 As with thumos and fear, nothing in Aristotle’s philosophy suggests that these sorts of desires are evil. They become morally problematic only when the moral agent fails to practice sōphrosunē. Sōphrosunē is the virtuous alternative to akolosia and is a state of virtue because the moderate person does not feel the pull of untoward desires and pleasures. Desire has been so harmonized with reason that there is no felt conflict between reason and desire.116 Years of moral training have produced a character free of evil desires and excess desires. Consequently, the life of moderation is not a life of restraint.117 Those in a state of akolosia, lacking such training, seem 112. Ibid., 2.7 (1107b) (CWA, 2:1748–49). 113. Ibid., 3.11 (1119a) (CWA, 2:1766). 114. Ibid., 4.11 (1119a) (CWA, 2:1766). 115. Ibid., 2.7 (1107b) (CWA, 2:1749). 116. Pearson, Aristotle on Desire, 109.

29

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

clueless about the importance of moderating desires. They are so ruled by these desires that they feel pain when not able to obtain the desired pleasure, whereas the moderate person feels no pain when abstinence is required.118 They are like children, who are driven by the immediacy of desire and pleasure and are in no way ruled by reason.119 As a result, they think it is perfectly right to pursue pleasure120 and make the pursuit of pleasure a matter of deliberate choice.121 Moreover, the person of excessive desire so consistently abides by this choice and is so convinced of the utter goodness of pleasure that he or she never feels regret from satisfying desires. 122 The contrast of sōphrosunē and akolasia did not, for Aristotle, exhaust the subject of self-mastery, however, and Aristotle was actually more interested in that class of people who, unlike the moderate and those in the grip of akolasia, experience a conflict between the competing calls of reason and desire. The person of akolasia feels no conflict because he or she doesn’t hear reason’s claim to govern. The moderate person no longer feels the pull of excess desire. But many people are mindful of reason’s demand yet struggle to actualize this demand. They are described by the terms self-control (enkrateia, traditionally rendered as “continence”) and lack of restraint (akrasia, traditionally translated as “incontinence”).123 117. Nicomachean Ethics, 7.9 (1151b–1152a) (CWA, 2:1820). 118. Ibid., 3.11 (1118b) (CWA, 2:1766). 119. Ibid., 3.12 (1119a–1119b) (CWA, 2:1767). 120. Ibid., 7.9 (1152a) (CWA, 2:1820). 121. Ibid., 7.3 (1146b) (CWA, 2:1811). 122. Ibid., 7.8 (1150b) (CWA, 2:1818). 123. Aristotle’s remarks on enkrateia and akrasia are more than a bit confusing. In this book I am presenting a simplified version of his account in the Nicomachean Ethics. I recommend to readers wanting to explore this topic with greater analytical precision the following books and articles: the following chapters in Pierre Destrée and Christopher Bobonich, eds., Akrasia in Greek Philosophy: From Socrates to Plotinus, Philosophia Antiqua, vol. 106 (Boston: Brill Academic, 2007): Pierre Destrée, “Aristotle on the Causes of Akrasia,” 139–65; Marco Zingano, “Akrasia and the Method of Ethics,” 167–91; and David Charles, “Aristotle’s Weak Akrates: What Does Her Ignorance Consist In?” 193–214. Also Sarah Broadie, Ethics with Aristotle (Oxford: Oxford

30

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

Like moderation, enkrateia and akrasia have to do with pleasure and pain, that is, with bodily desires.124 Unlike the moderate person, the self-controlled person (enkratēs) and the person lacking restraint (akratēs) feel these desires excessively and feel not only strong but low or common (phaulē) desires.125 The enkratēs is someone who, feeling these excessive desires and knowing them to be bad, follows the restraining dictates of reason. Enkrateia is therefore a good and praiseworthy state, although not as good as moderation,126 since the enkratēs, unlike the moderate person, experiences some measure of struggle between the call of reason and the demands of desire.127 Freedom from excessive passion and desire, then, comes in two forms in Aristotle’s analysis. In the better case, upbringing and discipline bring us to a state (moderation) in which we do not feel excessive desire. In the less-ideal case (self-control), we feel the force of excessive desire and heroically resist it. Even more interesting to Aristotle is the person lacking restraint, the akratēs. Since self-control and its lack involve an experience of conflict between desire and reason, the person who lacks self-control pursues pleasure inordinately but does so with a guilty conscience as he or she continues to hear reason’s call. Those lacking moderation (in the state of akolasia) choose pleasure with no idea that doing so might be contrary to reason; the person lacking self-control (the akratēs) hears the voice of reason but unwillingly follows a different

University Press, 1993); Norman O. Dahl, Practical Reason, Aristotle, and Weakness of the Will, Minnesota Publications in the Humanities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984); Terence H. Irwin, “Aristotle Reads the Protagoras,” in Tobias Hoffmann, ed., Weakness of Will from Plato to the Present, Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008), 22–41; and Daniel P. Thero, Understanding Moral Weakness, Value Inquiry Book Series, vol. 183 (Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2006). 124. Nicomachean Ethics, 7.4 (1147b) (CWA, 2:1813). 125. Ibid., 7.10 (1152a) and 7.2 (1146a) (CWA, 2:1820; 2:1810). 126. Ibid., 7.2 (1145b) (CWA, 2:1810). 127. Ibid., 1.13 (1102b) (CWA, 2:1741–42).

31

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

path, knowing that the pursuit of pleasure is contrary to a life lived in accordance with right reason.128 Lack of self-control is therefore, Aristotle argued, not really a vice, because vice presupposes choice. Giving in to pleasure because of a lack of self-control is (for Aristotle) not a choice because those lacking self-control are acting contrary to what they know is good to do.129 They choose the good but are moved to action by feelings and not by reason.130 Such people come in two varieties: some of these (the rash or impulsive) allow themselves to be moved by feelings because they fail to deliberate and are overtaken by sudden desire. It’s as though some desire comes along and moves them before they have time to consult reason. Others (the weak) are more prepared: before desire comes they have deliberated—they resolve to pursue the true good and to resist desire—but then fail to maintain their resolve because of some pathos.131 Akrasia is a subject of considerable importance for Aristotle because its existence seems to contradict one of the enduring convictions of classical philosophy—that the good is so inherently attractive that knowledge of the good inevitably results in pursuit of the good. But the person lacking self-control, while knowing what is good and (at least in the case of the weak variety) resolving to pursue it and to resist desire, fails in his or her resolve and is overcome by desire. The akratēs seems to be a person who knows the good but ends up not pursuing it. Aristotle quickly dismissed the view that those lacking self-control possess, not knowledge, but only opinion, that is, the idea that the mental state which fails to restrain the impulse of desire is not steadfast knowledge of the good but only weak “opinion” of the good. This 128. Ibid., 7.10 (1152a) (CWA, 2:1820). 129. Ibid., 7.3 (1146b) (CWA, 2:1811). 130. Ibid., 7.8 (1151a) (CWA, 2:1818–19). 131. Ibid., 7.7 (1150b (CWA, 2:1818).

32

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

argument made no sense to Aristotle, since resolute action can result as well from mere opinion as from knowledge, even though opinion is a lower epistemic state than knowledge.132 The akratēs, then, possess knowledge, or at least an opinion, about the good; however, it does not profit them. Knowledge can be had without it being effective. This is because it is possible to possess knowledge without, we would say, having that knowledge immediately in our consciousness. One can know something without, in a given instance, using that knowledge. So, it would be strange for someone to choose evil while actively possessing knowledge of the good, but understandable if someone chooses evil while not in a conscious state of knowledge.133 Aristotle seemed to think that such lack of active knowledge would pertain especially to particulars. In his example, one may actively know the general truth that dry food is good for humans without knowing that the food before one is dry. In this case, one could fail to act rightly (i.e., eat the food) because, although possessing knowledge in one sense (actively knowing the general premise), one would lack knowledge in the other sense (actively knowing the particular premise).134 Then again, possession of knowledge does not mean that the knowledge is practically effective. Those who are asleep or drunk (Aristotle curiously added, “and mad”) may be said to possess knowledge, but their physical state prevents the knowledge from positively affecting their moral conduct. Similarly, those in the grip of passion suffer a similar state of bodily change and, although perhaps possessing knowledge,

find

it

practically

ineffective.135

From

these

considerations Aristotle concluded that lack of self-control results from ignorance of a particular sort—not ignorance of general 132. Nicomachean Ethics, 7.3 (1146b) (CWA, 2:1811). 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid., (1147a) (CWA, 2:1812). 135. Ibid.

33

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

premises, but ignorance of particular facts (e.g., this food before me is dry). It is also possible for the agent to fail to choose the good because of a knowledge of conflicting general premises. If one knows the general premise, “Sweet things should not be eaten,” one would normally be inclined to avoid sweet things. But if one additionally knows the general premise, “Sweet things are pleasant,” one would be inclined to eat something sweet. With conflicting general premises, the particular premise becomes important. If one perceives that this food is sweet and if this premise is active (in other words, this premise moves us), then desire leads us to eat, for desire is able to move us bodily.136 So, lack of self-control occurs when pleasure or pain turns our attention away from the dictates of reason. Although we may know what is good in a general sense, the immediacy of pleasure can cause that knowledge to be inactive.137 The result is that moral judgments are corrupted, even though there was not exactly a choice to turn away from the good. Summary of Aristotle’s Views Aristotle’s account of reason and emotion made some notable improvements over Plato’s, especially in its formal statement of the idea of the mean and in its careful analysis of moderation, selfcontrol, and their opposites. Aristotle, additionally, had a more analytical approach to phenomena such as choice and deliberation. There are also differences between Aristotle and Plato, particularly in the way in which each thought about emotion (thumos). At the same time, Aristotle for the most part agreed with Plato’s account of reason and emotion. Both agreed that reason is the highest and best part of us, that part of reason’s natural function is to control desire and limit 136. Ibid., 7.3 (1147a–1147b) (CWA, 2:1812). 137. Ibid., 6.5 (1140b) (CWA, 2:1800–801).

34

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

the pursuit of pleasure, and that human well-being depends in large part on reason’s successfully doing so. Both, in other words, conceive of freedom as the rule of reason. Freedom is not primarily freedom from something negative and it is not primarily freedom of choice. It is instead freedom from the tyranny of desire, where pleasure and passion may live in agreement with the highest, most divine part of our nature, allowing it to govern our passions and desires. Stoicism Although the greatest philosophical influences on Christian thought in the patristic, medieval, and Reformation eras were, by a wide margin, Plato and Aristotle, Stoicism made a notable contribution to the moral psychology of the New Testament and certain early Christian thinkers. Besides this, Stoic philosophy may have had more influence on medieval Christian thought than is sometimes recognized.138 There are some points of similarity between Stoic moral philosophy and that of Plato and Aristotle. They all agreed on the centrality of reason to moral conduct. They also agreed that desire, passion, and pleasure constitute the greatest threat to the moral life. Beyond these points, however, are substantial differences on fundamental matters. For one, Stoics were materialists. For them, even reason (logos) and spirit (pneuma) were material, in contrast to Plato and Aristotle, who affirmed the incorporeality of the soul, or at least of the rational part of the soul.139 As a result, for Plato and Aristotle, moral transcendence—reason’s mastery of the passions—was metaphysically grounded in the metaphysical difference of soul to body. The Stoics affirmed moral transcendence but did not conceive 138. Gérard Verbeke, The Presence of Stoicism in Medieval Thought (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982). 139. A. A. Long, “The Stoic Concept of Evil,” The Philosophical Quarterly 18, no. 73 (1968): 332.

35

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

of it within the framework of a duality of soul and body. Further, their materialism led the Stoics to think differently about the conflict between reason and passion. Plato and Aristotle thought of the soul as essentially rational and possessing desire and emotion only because of the soul’s connection with the body. Especially for Plato (at least in the Republic), the soul in its proper, unembodied state is pure reason. The soul experiences desire (at least sensual desire) and emotion only by virtue of its embodiment. When, upon death, the soul’s connection with the body is dissolved, the soul returns to its pure state of rationality. The Stoic view that the soul (i.e., pneuma) is material meant that the soul is unitary and without distinct parts.140 This is yet another reason why the conflict between reason and passion is not grounded in a dualistic opposition. There was indeed, for Stoics, a conflict between reason and passion; however, it was not a conflict between an essential part of the soul and a nonessential part or between a spiritual part and a material part.141 Perhaps the most important difference from Plato and Aristotle was the Stoics’ view that passions are not simply disturbances within the soul but are also essentially judgments, that there is an essentially cognitive aspect of passion. This meant that, for Stoics, dealing effectively with the passions could not be cast simply with the metaphor of mastery and slavery; moral therapy for the passions must include a cognitive dimension relating to beliefs. The Passions For the Stoics, passion, which in their reckoning includes desire, 140. Posidonius wanted to analyze the soul in Platonic fashion with rational and irrational elements and tension between them. Peter King, “Dispassionate Passions,” in Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro, eds., Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 12. 141. See Susanne Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon Press/ Oxford University Press, 1998), 286–87, for a discussion of this issue.

36

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

is implicated in two human problems: lack of freedom and psychological disturbance. To understand passion’s connection to our lack of freedom, we must grasp the relation of passion to belief and judgment. Diogenes Laertius reported that, according to the early Stoics, error (i.e., wrong judgment) produces a twisting or distortion (diastrophē) of the intellect. This distortion results in passions (pathē), which are irrational (alogos), excessive impulses (hormē) that are contrary to nature. This description makes the negative character of passion abundantly evident. Stoics typically enumerated four main categories of passions: pain (lupē), fear (phobos), desire (epithumia), and pleasure (hēdonē).142 In their traditional organization, pleasure is interpreted as the belief that something present is good; desire is belief that something future is good; pain is belief that something present is evil; and fear is belief that something future is evil.143 There is, then, an essential connection between passion and belief or judgment. For example, the belief that money is good and hence desirable simply is, or at least causes, the passion of greed.144 Or, take Stoic interpretation of desire and its subcategories. Hatred involves the judgment that someone deserves evil. Anger is a desire to punish someone based on the belief that he or she has done you wrong. Love for something is a desire for affection arising from the judgment that

142. Diogenes, 7.1 (110–11), in Diogenes Laertius, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R. D. Hicks, 2 vols., Loeb Classical Library 184 and 185 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931], 216–17 (hereafter Lives). According to King, “Dispassionate Passions,” “What passions themselves are, however, is unclear. Zeno seems to identify the passions with psychological ‘motion’ or turmoil, perhaps arising from or supervening upon falsehoods in some way, whereas Chrysippus explicitly declares passions to be judgments” (10). Later Stoics took Zeno and Chrysippus to be “offer[ing] complementary rather than competing views: passions involve on the one hand psychological ‘motion’ as emphasized by Zeno, and on the other hand a cognitive component as emphasized by Chrysippus” (ibid.). 143. King, “Dispassionate Passions,” 11. 144. Diogenes, 7.1 (111) (Lives, 216–17).

37

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

this something is beautiful.145 In each case, there is a powerful belief associated with the passion. The connection between passion and belief seems intuitively obvious and has been confirmed by modern scientific study. But why did the Stoics insist that passion is grounded in erroneous belief? To grasp their point, we must consider their concept of judgment. A judgment is, we would say, a way of experiencing an object. We may see wealth and experience it as good, or a person as beautiful, or death as frightening. We normally thus make judgments about the value of things. Such judgments are the connecting link of the causal chain between objects and behaviors. If we see wealth as good and therefore desirable, there is more than just perception at work—there is also judgment (wealth is good) and passion (desire). If we then (using Stoic terminology) “assent” to that judgment and the attendant passion, movement toward the wealth follows inevitably, as we can see in animals’ behavior. If we see it differently—if we form a different judgment of its value—then a different behavior results; if we do not lend our assent, then no action follows. Judgments thus induce action.146 For Stoics, this account of action was ethically problematic because it inscribes human behavior in a deterministic sequence of causes. We are, in other words, not at all free; our behavior is the inevitable and determined result of a series of prior causes, culminating in the causal link between judgment and action. Our only chance of escaping this nexus of causal determinism lies in our use of reason. By exercising rationality (logos) to control judgments, we can intervene and disrupt the causal chain that destroys freedom. What is required is awareness that our impressions contain a judgment of value—a belief that the object is desirable or fearful, for instance. Grasping this fact enables 145. Diogenes, 7.1 (114) (Lives, 218–19). 146. Long, “Stoic Concept of Evil,” 337.

38

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

us to withhold assent to the impression. To withhold assent is to put some cognitive distance between, on the one hand, the impression and the embedded value judgment and, on the other hand, the mind’s willingness to accept the judgment as a representation of truth. The intervention of reason makes us aware that our impressions and their judgments are merely subjective. We experience wealth as good, but the goodness is a matter of subjective judgment, not objective fact. This is what the Stoics meant by referring to passions as erroneous judgments: it is an error to believe that the goodness lies in the thing itself and not in the act of judgment. If we judge wealth to be good in itself, then the passion of desire arises and action inevitably follows. With that we are caught in the nexus of deterministic causes that rule the universe. But if we recognize that the perception of wealth as good is a subjective judgment, we gain the capacity to withhold assent to the impression. We can view the wealth in another way or simply refuse to regard it as good. By withholding assent, we prevent the appearance of passion—if we no longer see wealth as good, we will not desire it. Similarly, if we no longer judge death to be evil, we will not fear it. Without passions, there is no motive that drives us to act with the force of necessity. Without the necessity of action, we attain freedom from the causal determinism that characterizes the universe. The rational capacity to withhold assent to impressions is thus the key to understanding the Stoic conception of freedom.147 It is the one thing that we can control and the only way in which we can be exempt from the determinism that characterizes the whole of reality. It is therefore the one thing that makes us responsible moral agents. Borrowing a phrase from Aristotle, Stoics held that withholding assent is something that is in our power (eph´ hēmin).148 The point to realize about the Stoic concept of freedom is that it is 147. Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom, 288; Long, “Stoic Concept of Evil,” 340. 148. Ibid., 289–90; Long, “Stoic Concept of Evil,” 340.

39

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

freedom from passions—the freedom of reason from everything in us that is not reason. Because we are essentially rational beings, freedom is thus identical with self-realization and self-determination; because the cosmos is essentially logos, human freedom can also be thought of as life in agreement with logos and nature. At the same time, Stoics did not think of human freedom in any absolute way. They affirmed the reality of fate and of causal determinism. Consequently, Stoic philosophy asserts that only some are free, those, namely, who have achieved the full rationality of the Stoic sage. Everyone else exists in a state of slavery (douleia). Freedom is accordingly not an innate feature of human nature but is instead the result of philosophical discipline.149 Stoic discourse about freedom, in other words, explains human moral responsibility and is associated with the achievement of wisdom and virtue.150 The other human problem in which passion is implicated is psychological disturbance. Let us return to the early Stoic definition of passion as reported by Diogenes Laertius: they are irrational (alogos), excessive impulses (hormē) that are contrary to nature. The first and third parts of this definition are equivalent, for in the Stoic conception, nature (phusis) and reason (logos) are two terms for the same aspect of reality. Nature for them was not simply the sum total of things in the universe but instead the universe as it was governed by divine reason. Reason, in turn, was not merely the human faculty of thinking but instead the cosmic, divine rationality that pervades the cosmos and appears in humans as rational thinking.151 To say that passion is contrary to reason is to say that

149. Ibid., 340–42. 150. Ibid., 344. 151. See Diogenes, 7.1 (86–88) (Lives, 192–96) for discussion of the relation of reason to nature and virtue. See also Long, “Stoic Concept of Evil,” 335; and Michael Gass, “Eudaimonism and Theology in Stoic Accounts of Virtue,” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 1 (2000): 22.

40

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

passion contradicts the rationality by which the entire cosmos is governed. Passions are also excessive impulses. Impulses for Stoics were not in themselves evil; they lie at the heart of animal life, notably in the impulse toward self-preservation.152 For animals, action in response to impulse is the rule of nature. It is, in other words, perfectly appropriate for animals to act on the basis of impulse; however, humans are beings endowed with reason and for us, to live according to nature is to live according to reason. Reason thus relates to impulse as an artist (technitēs).153 Passions, however, are excessive, boundarytransgressing impulses. As such, they trouble (tarassō) the soul. That is why Epictetus equated the Stoic ideal of apathy (apatheia) with a lack of trouble (ataraxia) and with a state of psychological freedom (eleutheria) and peace (eirēnē).154 Those who are free from anger, grief, and envy are, like Zeus, at rest (hēsuchia).155 Apatheia, therefore, is important not only for achieving freedom from deterministic causation but also for finding inner peace and tranquility. This explains why Seneca regarded the passions as a sickness and dismissed the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean: to moderate the passions would amount to a half cure in comparison with Stoic determination to eliminate the passions altogether.156 At the same time, Stoics were sensitive to the accusation that they had evacuated human life of all emotional and affective substance.157 152. Diogenes, 7.1 (85) (Lives, 192–93). 153. Diogenes, 7.1 (86) (Lives, 194–95). 154. Epictetus, Enchiridion, 12 and 29 in Epictetus, The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, the Manual, and Fragments, trans. W. A. Oldfather, 2 vols. Loeb Classical Library 131 and 218 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926), 2:492–93 and 2:510–11; Discourses 3.13.9–13, in Epictetus, The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, 2:90–93 (hereafter The Discourses). 155. Epictetus, Discourses, 3.13.7 (Epictetus, The Discourses, 88–89). See also Diogenes, 7.1 (119) (Lives, 222–25), for the idea that the sage lives like the gods. 156. Seneca, Letter 116.1, in Seneca, Epistles, vol. 3: Epistles 93–124, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library 77 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 332–33. 157. On this point, see William O. Stephens, Stoic Ethics: Epictetus and Happiness as Freedom,

41

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

In response, they put forth two concepts. First, they allowed that although passionless, the sage would still have preferences. Fear, for example, is the passion related to an expectation of something evil happening. The sage will accept everything that happens as occurring through divine providence and as fated and so will not generate irrational passions that disturb the soul; however, the sage will also legitimately feel subjective preferences. Thus the sage will accept sickness without reactive passion, but will still prefer health.158 Second, at least some Stoics entertained the notion of good passions (eupatheia), which are rational responses to circumstances. The opposite of pleasure is joy. The opposite of fear is caution, a rational avoidance of danger. For instance, the opposite of desire is wishing (boulēsis), which is a reasonable appetite (eulogos orexis).159 Just as pathē are irrational, that is, contrary to reason and nature, the eupatheiai are eminently rational. As the pathē are (or are based on) incorrect judgments about what is to be pursued or avoided, the eupatheiai are based on correct judgments. Joy is the rational response to the experience of something that is truly good. Caution is a reasonable attitude toward an anticipated evil. Rational wish (boulēsis) is wanting something that is truly good, namely, virtue. This contrasts with desire, which normally is not directed toward virtue and which, additionally, disturbs the soul with its vehemence.160 Continuum Studies in Ancient Philosophy (London: Continuum, 2007), 95–96; John Sellars, Stoicism, Ancient Philosophies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 118–19; and Margaret Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 4, 51–52, 188, and 210. 158. Diogenes, 7.1 (105–6) (Lives, 210–13). 159. Diogenes, 7.1 (116) (Lives, 220–21). As King notes, “There is no counterpart to distress (pain) because the soul has no rational response to the presence of a genuine evil; the Stoic Sage accepts it as part of Fate and is not depressed by it—there is no rational ‘contraction’, much less ‘expansion’ or ‘shrinking’ or the like, of the soul. The Sage is neither pleased nor displeased at something evil, though of course preferring that it not be so” (“Dispassionate Passions,” 15). 160. For an Aristotelian and sarcastic critique of the Stoic notion of eupatheiai, see Plutarch, Moralia 449a–449b (“On Moral Virtue,” 9), in Plutarch, Moralia, vol. 6: 439a–523b, trans. W. C. Helmbold, Loeb Classical Library 337 [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957], 64–67.

42

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

The eupatheiai are actually generic categories; they comprise a host of more concrete eupatheiai. For instance, under joy are categorized such feelings as delight (trepsis) and cheerfulness (euthumia). Rational wish includes goodwill (eunoia) and love (agapē). Caution embraces reverence (aidō) and purity (hagneia). The wise person, accordingly, is not without feeling, even though he or she is without passion. As Epictetus noted, we should not be passionless in the manner of statues; doing so would not allow the wise person to maintain natural human relationships.161 For example, we have (he wrote) a natural affection (phusikē philostorgia) toward our children.162 Because such affection is natural—an important quality for Stoics—it does not conflict with reason.163 What makes the good passions good is their agreement with nature and the fact that they are not violent perturbations of the soul. As Cicero explained, rational wish (boulēsis), for which he used the Latin word voluntas (conventionally translated as “will”), is a natural response to the appearance of something good. We naturally want whatever is good. If the wanting is governed by prudence, it is a rational wish (quae quid cum ratione desiderat); but if the wanting is overly violent and contrary to reason it is lust (libido) or excessive desire (cupiditas). Similarly, joy is a calm movement of the soul in the presence of something good; the contrary is an unbridled joy (laetitia gestiens), an exaltation of the soul without reason. Caution is a reasonable attempt to avoid evil; fear, however, is contrary to reason and is characterized by a base and weak faintness (cum exanimatione humili atque fracta).164 For Epictetus, the sage will exercise caution 161. Epictetus, Discourses, 3.2.4 (Discourses, 2:22–23). 162. Ibid., 1.23.3-5 (Discourses, 1:148–151). 163. Ibid., 1.11.16–26 (Discourses, 1:82–85). 164. Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, 4.6.11–14, in Cicero in Twenty Eight Volumes: XVIII Tusculan Disputations, trans. J. E. King, Loeb Classical Library 141 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 338–43.

43

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

on those things that are within our control, and be confident about things out of our control, unlike the mass of humans who exhibit fear in the face of what lies outside our control.165 Later

Stoics

“prepassions.”

166

such

as

Seneca

developed

the

notion

of

With this notion Seneca was trying to distinguish

passions, which we can control, from physical responses, which we cannot control. Being dowsed with cold water causes shivering and looking down from a great height causes dizziness. Because these reactions are not under our control, but are purely physical responses, human reason is powerless to eliminate them.167 But anger is different. Anger involves assent to an impression (species). The impression of an injury, for example, is instrumental in generating anger, but the mind’s assent also plays an indispensable role. There is an unavoidable physical reaction to injury suffered, but the belief that one ought to be avenged does not occur without some volition on our part (sine voluntate nostra). The mind is moved by the physical processes, but anger as such requires the mind’s assent: we understand something, we become indignant, we condemn the act, and so on.168 Physical reactions are movements (motūs) in the soul but are not passions. They stand at the beginning of a mental process that, when joined with the mind’s assent, produces passions.169 Seneca thus preserved the original Stoic insistence on the cognitive nature of passions while allowing for a premoral category of physical responses.

165. Epictetus, Discourses, 2.1.1–7 (Discourses, 1:212–15). 166. This term was apparently coined by Origen or some later Stoic writer, although the idea was present in early Stoicism. See Graver, Stoicism and Emotion, 87–105. 167. Seneca, On Anger, 2.2.1, in Seneca, Moral Essays, vol. 1: De Providentia. De Constantia, De Ira, De Clementia, trans. John W. Basore, Loeb Classical Library 214 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970), 1:168–69. 168. Ibid., 2.1.3–4 (Moral Essays, 1:166–67). 169. Ibid., 2.2.5–6 (Moral Essays, 1:170–71).

44

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

Conclusion This short review of moral psychology in the centuries prior to the New Testament shows us there was a common understanding of humankind’s central moral problem (slavery to passion and desire) and the means of resolving that problem (moderation and the governance of reason). Of course, each school of philosophy had its distinctive beliefs; the philosophical tradition was not homogeneous. Nonetheless, the leading representatives of the philosophical heritage from which Christianity drew agreed on some fundamental issues. These fundamental commitments were transmitted to at least some segments of the Jewish community and from there exercised considerable influence on Christian thought. What the various philosophers of the Platonic, Aristotelian, and Stoic traditions held in common was a set of convictions about human nature: that, to whatever extent we are bodily beings, the highest and best and most divine part of the human person is logos; that passions and desires arise from some part of the soul that is metaphysically lower than logos; that our moral problems arise when passion and desire rule us; that the highest good requires that we act in accordance with logos; and that the rule of logos implies the subjugation of passion and desire. The tradition of Christian thought, beginning with the New Testament, accepted these fundamental beliefs, although it surrounded them with a theological frame inherited from Judaism—a Judaism, however, that had received substantial exposure to classical philosophy. Along with these shared and fundamental convictions, the classical philosophical heritage bequeathed to the Christian tradition a characteristic moral vocabulary: words denoting causes of worry (pathos, epithumia, thumos, erōs, hēdonē, hormē, libido, cupiditas); words signifying the noble elements of the soul (logos, nous); words for

45

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

desirable virtues, practices, and states (especially sōphrosunē, enkrateia, apatheia); and terms describing moral agency (proairēsis, hekousios, eph´ hēmin, boulēsis, voluntas). Some of these words appear in the New Testament; many do not, or appear only incidentally. But early Christian writers eagerly adopted the moral vocabulary of classical philosophy and joined its discourse about freedom, reason, and the emotions. What did freedom mean for this tradition? On one hand, the classical tradition, extending from Plato into the early Christian centuries, affirmed freedom in the sense of choice. Discourse about this understanding of freedom differed from much modern discourse about freedom because it was not about the capacity to choose alternatives and because it was not linked to any notion of indeterministic choice. Ancient philosophers acknowledged that we do in fact make choices among alternatives; however, they did not regard the essence of freedom as lying in the ability to choose. On the contrary, they placed the greatest importance on what the agent chooses. True freedom lay in choosing the good and not in the mere capacity to choose either the good or evil. Additionally, the classical tradition did not think of the free act as being undetermined by antecedent conditions. Instead, they saw the free act as being the more or less inevitable result of one’s character as that character has been shaped by prior choices and the effects of moral education.170 Moral freedom they uniformly saw as freedom from everything in the soul that would disturb the soul’s equanimity and goodness. 170. In Hellenistic philosophy, “The concept of moral responsibility [is never] connected with a belief after the deed that one could have done otherwise.” In other words, indeterminist notions of freedom are not affirmed by Hellenistic philosophers, who “all attach moral responsibility to the fact that the agent is the main causal factor of the action—not to the idea that the agent could have done otherwise” (Bobzien, Determinism and Freedom, 283). At the same time, classical discussions about choice and “that which depends on us” informed later discourse about freedom, determinacy, and indeterminacy. Already in late antiquity there was a developing notion of free will, i.e., human exemption from deterministic causes of all sorts.

46

REASON AND EMOTION IN CLASSICAL PHILOSOPHY

This meant freedom from disturbing passion and desire. Ancient philosophers debated just how to accomplish this freedom and exactly what were the disturbing passions and desires, but they agreed on the general features of moral freedom. At the same time, there are elements in the classical tradition that moderate the simple dichotomy of reason and emotion—the Stoic idea of eupatheia, Aristotle’s concept of the moral mean, but especially Plato’s view that reason is itself a form of desire, identical to other forms of desire except in its orientation toward transcendent good and beauty. So, we can also think of moral freedom as a state of being in which, to use later terminology, our concrete existence agrees with our essence. We are essentially beings with an affinity with the divine; we are truly free when we actualize that affinity in concrete, ethical life through acquiring virtues such as wisdom and moderation.

47

3

The New Testament and Some Jewish Antecedents

Classical philosophy’s anxiety about emotion exercised an effect on Jewish philosophy and thereby on the New Testament. Some qualifications are in order: one must be careful of overemphasizing putative parallels between, for instance, Philo and Stoicism; and, to be sure, talk of an earlier writer influencing a later writer invites skepticism; sometimes (as with 4 Maccabees) we do not know the identity of the authors, and even when we do, we rarely know just what they read from earlier writers. Nonetheless, there seems little doubt that some Jewish writings of the late second-temple period

exhibit

extraordinary

continuity

with

Greco-Roman

philosophy—common concerns and vocabulary, similar modes of argumentation, shared presuppositions, and so on. Moreover, recent and reliable study of the New Testament has shown that Paul and other New Testament writers were conversant with the common moral philosophy of the Hellenistic era. This does not mean that the

49

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

beliefs of New Testament writers were shaped by their reading the works of Plato or Aristotle; it is highly unlikely that they had that sort of direct exposure to sophisticated philosophical literature. It also does not imply that the New Testament’s writers shared all of the interests of Greco-Roman philosophical schools; the New Testament’s moral thought does not operate at the level of theoretical refinement and conceptual articulation that we find in classical philosophy or patristic theology. It has a pastoral, not an analytical, purpose. Additionally, the New Testament shows no interest in identifying mind or reason as the essential element of the soul, the element with an affinity to God that other elements of the soul lack. At the same time, research has shown that there was, in the first century ce, a widespread discourse about morality operating on the level of sophisticated philosophical analysis but also on a popular level. Early Christian writings, including the New Testament writings, participated in that discourse. Besides Hellenistic Jewish literature such as 4 Maccabees, another intellectual

stream

flowed

into

early

Christianity:

Jewish

apocalypticism. Early Christianity was, in many respects, an apocalyptic Jewish movement. Its commitment to the panoply of apocalyptic beliefs can be seen in many ways, including the way in which it associated passion and desire with the present, evil age. Jewish apocalypticism was characterized by a sharp distinction between the present age and the age to come. The present age is, at least ostensibly, controlled by spiritual forces opposed to God. This rebellion is reflected on earth in the form of sin and corruption. For New Testament writers, the path of discipleship led one from immersion in the present age to participation in the age to come. Such participation appeared in various forms such as rebirth, receiving God’s Spirit, freedom from sin, and the capacity to obey God. It also required a constant and intentional resolve to abandon 50

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

the patterns of ethical life characteristic of life in the present age. To that end, it was vital that Christian disciples attain freedom from untoward passions and desires. The moral life associated with such freedom was one of the visible signs of participation in the new age of the Spirit. So, although the New Testament’s writers shared in a common Greco-Roman discourse about morality, the New Testament’s teaching is not simply a popular, simplified form of philosophy—a sort

of

philosophy

for

the

masses.

Instead,

its

moral

teaching—undeniably Greco-Roman in many respects—is situated in an apocalyptic frame that affected both practices and rationale. Of course, Paul and other New Testament writers did not see a conflict between the practical side of Greco-Roman moral philosophy and apocalyptic convictions. On the contrary, they apparently regarded them as positively converging. Nonetheless, the New Testament does not make direct reference to Greco-Roman moral philosophy. So, although Paul (for example), like many Greco-Roman philosophers, counseled avoidance of passion and desire, his overt reasons for doing so were not those of Plato or Aristotle or the Stoics. Paul’s concern was not happiness (eudaimonia) but, instead, escaping the corruption and sin of the present, evil age and participating in the new age of the Spirit. Passion and desire, in the New Testament, were problematic not primarily because they hindered one’s acquisition of virtue but because they belonged to the present age, which was passing away and giving way to the new age. To put it differently (and with considerable over-generalization), for GrecoRoman philosophy the struggle against passion and desire was a struggle within the human person between the part of us that is divine and the part that is animalistic. For the apocalyptically oriented New Testament writers, the struggle with passion and desire was a

51

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

local instance of a cosmic struggle between light and dark, between the present age and the age to come. Passion and Desire in an Apocalyptic Frame The Jewish Apocalyptic Background Since it is largely the apocalyptic background that distinguishes the ethics and moral psychology of the New Testament from that of Greco-Roman philosophy, a few words about apocalypticism in ancient Judaism and Christianity are in order. The Old Testament writers knew that there is plenty of sin in the world and they certainly had harsh words for Israel’s oppressive neighbors; for the most part, however, the Old Testament portrays the world in positive terms, with a trust that the world is ethically rational (Proverbs) and that the heavenly and terrestrial powers obey God’s will (Gen. 1:1—2:4, for example). Humans may sin but the universe as a whole is governed by God’s moral order. At some point in Jewish thinking, however, a new, apocalyptic attitude appeared in which the cosmos was more malign. Take, for example, Jewish depiction of angels and other heavenly powers. The vast majority of Old Testament texts regard Israel’s enemies as terrestrial powers—the nations. Even if these nations have patron gods, they are typically subservient to Yahweh (as in Ps. 89:5-8). But in apocalypticism, even the heavenly beings are enemies rebelling against Yahweh, as in the combat between the prince of Persia and Israel’s patron angel, Michael (Dan. 10:13, 20-21). Related apocalyptic notions include fallen angels, sometimes represented as stars imprisoned until judgment, the development of demonology, the contrast between Beliar and the Prince of Light, and the opposition between the sons of light and the sons of darkness.1 We 1. For some helpful essays on these aspects of apocalyptic literature, see Dale Basil Martin, “When

52

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

observe as well belief in the destructive effects of the fallen heavenly powers on humankind and on the created world—not only temptation but every sort of human sin and suffering comes to be attributed to evil spirits. In the expressly dualistic literature, a portion of humankind is said to be in the grip of evil spirits controlled by Beliar, the symbol of the fallen heavenly powers.2 The world itself suffers from the effects of this cosmic sin and thus needs redemption.3 There are many other aspects of apocalypticism and it constitutes, of course, a diverse body of literature. But for the purpose of understanding the New Testament, it is sufficient to note that, in the apocalyptic culture in which the New Testament was written, the world in all of its aspects was regarded as the location of sin and evil caused by spiritual powers in the heavens (the stars, the angels) and on earth (demons and political authorities in service to the fallen powers). Although the New Testament regards the world as God’s creation, it also portrays it as abiding under the dominion of evil. Apocalyptic Themes in Paul’s Letters and the Deutero-Pauline Tradition Paul’s letters betray no doubt whatsoever that the world is God’s good creation; Paul the apostle remained Paul the Jew. He saw Did Angels Become Demons?” Journal of Biblical Literature 129, no. 4 (2010): 657–77; John J. Collins, “The Apocalyptic Technique: Setting and Function in the Book of Watchers” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1982): 91–111; Herbert G. May, “Cosmological Reference in the Qumran Doctrine of the Two Spirits and in Old Testament Imagery,” Journal of Biblical Literature 82, no. 1 (1963): 1–14; Carol A. Newsom, “The Development of 1 Enoch 6-19: Cosmology and Judgment,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1980): 310–29; Margaret Barker, “Some Reflections upon the Enoch Myth,” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 15 (1980): 7–29; Carol A. Newsom, “Models of the Moral Self: Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism,” Journal of Biblical Literature 131, no. 1 (2012): 14–23. 2. See The Community Rule 1QS, 3:13—4:25, in The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, trans. Geza Vermes (New York: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1997), 99–100. 3. See Harry Alan Hahne, The Corruption and Redemption of Creation: Nature in Romans 8.19-22 and Jewish Apocalyptic Literature, Library of New Testament Studies (London: T&T Clark, 2006), 153–68.

53

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

God’s power and nature displayed in the created world (Rom. 1:20), believed that nothing created is unclean (Rom. 14:14), acknowledged that marriage is morally acceptable (1 Cor. 7:28), vaguely spoke of the created world’s ultimate redemption (Rom. 8:19-23), and looked forward to the resurrection and salvation of the human body (1 Cor. 15:35-53). Later representatives of Paul’s theology believed that everything in heaven and earth would eventually be reconciled to God (Eph. 1:10; Col. 1:20) and that everything created by God, including marriage and food, is good (1 Tim. 1:1-5). At the same time, Paul experienced the world as the site of evil. First Corinthians 2:6-8 is a revealing passage: “We speak wisdom among the perfect, but a wisdom neither of this age nor of the rulers of this age, who are being abolished. But we speak God’s wisdom . . . which none of the rulers of this age have known, for if they had known it, they would not have crucified the lord of glory.”4 For Paul, the present, evil age (aeōn) was controlled by rulers (archontes), whose wisdom differed from God’s wisdom, who crucified Jesus, and whom God would destroy. In common with apocalyptic literature, Paul here was thinking of these rulers as both earthly powers (the Romans and perhaps Jewish authorities in Jerusalem) and the spiritual powers that control earthly events. These rulers were, for Paul, under the authority of a highest evil power, “the god of this world,” who prevents unbelievers from becoming enlightened (2 Cor. 4:4) and who, as Beliar, is opposed to Jesus Christ (2 Cor. 6:15). Jesus Christ came in order to deliver us from the present, evil aeōn, a deliverance actualized as disciples stop being conformed to this aeōn (Rom. 12:2). Using other language, Paul spoke of these spiritual powers as elements (stoicheia) of the world from which we need deliverance (Gal. 4:3, 8).5 4. All biblical quotations are my translations. 5. There is no agreement about the meaning of stoicheia in Paul’s letters. For a sampling of

54

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

The idea of bondage to spiritual forces was developed by Paul’s followers in subsequent literature. Gentile converts formerly walked according to the aeōn of this world and the archōn of the power of the “air” (the portion of the atmosphere closest to earth; Eph. 2:2), and even now the Christian’s wrestling opponents are the powers and world rulers (kosmokratores) of the present darkness in the heavenly realms (Eph. 6:12). Colossians cautions against submitting to the stoicheia (Col. 2:8, 20). For Paul and the deutero-Pauline tradition, the fundamental locus of our entanglement with the fallen world is the “flesh.” “Flesh” is a rather complicated term in Paul’s theology. Although sometimes it is simply equivalent to the body (1 Cor. 15:39) or a synecdoche for human being (Rom. 3:20), it often refers to the human being that is spiritually and morally weak and thus easily overcome by sin (Rom. 7:5) or even to a condition of overt hostility toward God and righteousness (Rom. 8:1-10). Because we are flesh, sin infects the totality of our being, including body and mind. Of these, the body is, in Paul’s theology, the more troublesome. As Paul put it, “When we were in the flesh, the passions [pathēmata] of sins, which existed through the law, were working in our bodily parts to bear fruit for death” (Rom. 7:5). In the condition of the flesh, sin, working through the law, stirs up sinful passions in our bodily parts and thus delivers us over to death. Sin has thus killed the body (Rom. 8:10), which subsists in a state of humiliation (Phil. 3:21). The body, then, is not evil, but just as sin has gained interpretations, see Clinton E. Arnold, “Returning to the Domain of the Powers: ‘Stoicheia’ as Evil Spirits in Galatians 4:3,9,” Novum Testamentum 38, no. 1 (1996): 55–76; Eduard Schweizer, “Slaves of the Elements and Worshipers of Angels: Gal 4:3, 9 and Col 2:8, 18, 20,” Journal of Biblical Literature, 107, no. 3 (1988): 455–68; Chris Forbes, “Paul’s Principalities and Powers: Demythologizing Apocalyptic?” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 82 (2001): 61–88; and idem, “Pauline Demonology and/or Cosmology? Principalities, Powers and the Elements of the World in their Hellenistic Context,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 85 (2002): 51–73.

55

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

control of God’s law and uses it for sin’s purposes (Rom. 7:8, 11, 13), so it has taken over the body. Eschatological salvation must therefore include rescue from this bodily state of death (Rom. 7:24). Meanwhile, apart from Christ we live according to the flesh, with its passions (pathēmata) and desires (epithumiai) (Gal. 5:24). The problem of passions and desires is more than just a matter of bodily existence; there is an apocalyptic dimension. Consider again Ephesians 2:1-3, where the Gentiles’ passion and desire result from their bondage to the archōn of the power of the air. By living lives devoted to passion and desire, we place ourselves in service to this archōn. The same point is patent when Paul contrasted life in the flesh with life in the Spirit. To live in the Spirit is to experience the power of the eschatological new aeōn. It requires that we no longer be conformed to the old aeōn (Rom. 12:2), from which Christ has rescued us (Gal. 1:4). This means we must crucify the flesh with its passions and desires (Gal. 5:24) because the flesh belongs to the old aeōn. Using the apocalyptic contrast of light and darkness, Paul similarly urged disciples to put off the works of darkness and put on the weapons of light, making no provision for satisfying the desires of the flesh (Rom. 13:14). Within the Pauline tradition, then, passion and desire are inseparably tied to the flesh, which belongs to the old aeōn and cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 15:50). Those who partake of the new aeōn have died to sin (Rom. 6:2) and been liberated from it (Rom. 6:18). The practical effect of this death and liberation is a life free of the passions and desires of the flesh. Paul and his tradition thus regarded the created world ambivalently. It is good but fallen; created by God yet alienated; God’s world yet spiritually dangerous. Everything in God’s creation—God’s law, the body, the mind, the elements, and the spiritual powers of the universe—has been overcome by sin and needs

56

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

redeeming. As creatures we participate in the world but we must maintain ethical distance from it and become freed from bondage to it (Rom. 6:18). But this requires effort: short of the eschatological renewal of all things, our freedom is fragmentary. Liberation is not yet complete; we must put freedom from the sinful world into practice. Our participation in the new aeōn thus takes place amid the world’s fallenness. Apocalyptic Themes Elsewhere in the New Testament Apocalypticism is found elsewhere in the New Testament, notably in the Johannine literature. Like the Pauline tradition, the Johannine tradition never doubts that the world is the creation of God (John 1:10) and, indeed, the object of God’s love (John 3:16). Jesus has come into the world precisely to take away its sins (1:29) and has given his life on behalf of the world (6:51). However, there is a rather predominant sense in which “world” is a symbol of the forces, spiritual and corporeal, that array themselves against God and constitute a system of evil and hatred. Although Jesus did not come to judge and condemn the world (12:47-48), the world is destined to pass away (1 John 2:17). That is why we must avoid the desires of the world—they are bound to a reality that is being replaced by the apocalyptically new community of the Spirit. Once Jesus establishes his community, based on love, it must endure the unrelenting hatred of the world (John 15:18-21; 17:14-16), being energized by the Holy Spirit, which the world absolutely cannot receive (14:15-17). Consequently, disciples must hate their life in the world (12:25) and, like Jesus (16:33), must overcome the world by their faithfulness (1 John 5:4) and by their refusal to love the world and the desires of the world (1 John 2:15-17). The New Testament’s apocalyptic framework has one important implication: unlike Greco-Roman philosophers, New Testament 57

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

writers could never regard freedom from evil passion and desire as a merely human accomplishment. It is true that the New Testament requires human exertion in the process of sanctification. At the same time, this exertion is joined to the conviction that human effort requires God’s grace; salvation is not simply moral renovation or selfmastery. It presupposes a divine act of deliverance, for we are held captive, not only by passion and desire, but by the fallen spiritual powers of the present, evil aeōn. Philosophical counsel to assert reason’s mastery over passion and desire does not suffice because bondage to them results from our membership in the fallen, old aeōn. What is required is not simply moral reformation but also liberation from cosmic forces—hence the importance of the resurrection of Jesus, which is the in-breaking of the new aeōn in the midst of the old aeōn. Participation in the resurrection of Jesus and the resulting incorporation into Christ is thus the foundation of our liberation from the old aeōn. In Christ God has set us free from this evil age (Gal. 1:3-4) and has effected a new creation (2 Cor. 5:17). As the risen Lord, Christ stands above every spiritual power and is the head of them all (Eph. 1:20-21), and in Christ God has disarmed these powers (Col. 2:15) and has rescued us from them (Col. 1:13-14). The moral renewal that the New Testament demands requires human exertion in the form of self-denial and renunciation; however, it presupposes the prior act of liberation accomplished in the resurrection and exaltation of Jesus Christ and our incorporation into the body of Christ. In summary, then, the New Testament sees the world as spiritually and morally ambiguous. It is God’s good creation and much in it remains good; however, sin has become a dominating force within the world. The world is thus the place where the fallen powers, especially Satan, hold humankind in bondage and where passions

58

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

and desires—unmistakable concomitants of the old aeon—lead us into corruption and death. Passion and Desire in Philosophical Judaism Early Christianity moved within intellectual circles populated by Jewish writings. It would be surprising if this were not the case, since Christianity began as a Jewish movement. As noted above, the New Testament fits comfortably within Jewish apocalyptic traditions; however, there was more to second-temple Judaism than just apocalypticism. There was additionally a vigorous engagement with Hellenistic philosophies. As a result, many Jewish writings share the anxiety about passion and desire that is found in Greco-Roman philosophies.6 Fourth Maccabees Fourth Maccabees is a discourse on reason, virtue, and self-control, illustrated by the story of the Jewish martyrs of the Maccabean revolt. The subject of the book is whether devout reason (eusebes logismos) is sovereign (autodespotos) over the passions (pathē).7 It thus shares the intellectual horizon of the moral philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics. Humankind’s problem is that there are certain passions (such as gluttony and desire [epithumia]) that stand in the way of exercising moderation (sōphrosunē); it is therefore necessary for reason to gain mastery over (epikratein) these passions as well as over malice, 6. For a good review of early Christian writing’s similarities to and differences from Philo’s writings and 4 Maccabees, see David C. Aune, “Mastery of the Passions: Philo, 4 Maccabees and Earliest Christianity,” in Wendy E. Helleman, ed., Hellenization Revisited: Shaping a Christian Response within the Greco-Roman World (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994), 125–58. See also Steven D. Fraade, “Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism,” in Arthur Green, ed., Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages, vol. 13 of World Spirituality: An Encyclopedia of the Religious Quest (New York: Crossroad, 1996), 253–88. 7. 4 Macc. 1:1, in The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament and Apocrypha (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972).

59

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

anger (thumos), fear (phobos), and pain (ponos) (1:3-4). We notice here the Stoic enumeration of the passions—epithumia, thumos, phobos, and ponos (standing for lupē [“grief”]). Fourth Maccabees, however, is not monolithically opposed to passion: Reason exercises mastery (kratei) only over the passions that are opposed to the virtues and even over these its goal is not to destroy those passions but only to ensure that we do not yield to them (1:6). To this end reason plays the role of guide (hegemōn) for the virtues and seeks to be sovereign (autokrator) over the passions (1:30), a sacred, governing mind (hieros hegemōn nous) enthroned above the passions (2:22). Desires receive special consideration. The appetites (orexeis) possess passions that must be restrained by the just mind (sōphrōn nous) and the movements of the body must be restrained by reasoning (logismos) (1:35). To be just is to practice mastery (epikrateia) over desires (epithumiai) (1:31) through reason (1:32). Fourth Maccabees is especially interested in exercising reason’s mastery over desire (orexis) by turning away from the pleasure (hēdonē) of forbidden, that is, nonkosher, food (1:33). Although 4 Maccabees takes a rather harsh view of desire and passion, its Jewish commitments require it to locate desire and passion within a doctrine of creation. Accordingly, we read that God has created us with passions (2:21). That is why the goal is not the eradication of all passion but only the subordination of passion to reason (1:6). Indeed, bodily desires cannot be eradicated. The most we can achieve is to avoid enslavement to desire (3:2). Similarly, we cannot be fully free from thumos, but reason can help us with it (3:3). This brief look at 4 Maccabees is enough to show that its horizon of moral concern merges with that of Greco-Roman philosophies. It shares with them a common vocabulary of virtues, desire, passion,

60

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

and reason and finds the soul’s good in reason’s ability to master the passions.8 Philo Philo’s philosophical anthropology fits comfortably within the general contours of classical philosophy.9 Metaphysically considered, the soul is superior to the body;10 ethically considered, the soul runs into problems when it pursues the things of the body.11 As with other philosophers, Philo saw a close connection between wickedness and desire, passion and anger (thumos), all of which belong to the part of the soul that lacks logos—thumos inhabiting the chest, desire dwelling in the belly—and which tend to corrupt the mind (nous).12 For Philo, foolishness results from failing to allow reason to function as the soul’s chariot driver, judge, and pilot. Those in whom reason does thus function have freed themselves from thumos and desire. In them, there is nothing in the soul contrary to reason, which is accordingly able to act on its free (eleutheros) and noble impulses toward the good.13 Such a life resembles that of God, who has no 8. See Robert Renehan, “The Greek Philosophical Background of Fourth Maccabees,” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 115 (1972): 223–38; and David Winston, “Philo of Alexandria on the Rational and Irrational Emotions,” in John T. Fitzgerald, ed., Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-Roman Thought, Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies (New York: Routledge, 2008), 201–20. 9. I will cite the Greek text and translation found in Philo, trans. F. H. Colson, et al., 11 vols., Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929–1962). Philo’s affinity for Stoicism can be seen in his view that passion, especially desire, is contrary to nature (On the Ten Commandments, 28.142 [Philo, 7:76–77]); his equation of living in accord with reason with living in accord with nature (Migration of Abraham, 23.128 [Philo, 4:204–5]); his focus on leading Stoic passions such as pleasure, fear, and sorrow (On the Ten Commandments, 28.143–145 [Philo, 7:78–79]); his use of the idea of good passions (eupatheiai) (On Abraham, 36.204 [Philo, 6:100–101]); and his counsel to accept whatever happens in life (Every Good Man Is Free, 4.24 [Philo, 9:22–23]). 10. Philo, On the Prayers and Curses Uttered by Noah When He Became Sober, 1.5 (Philo, 3:444–45). 11. Philo, Migration of Abraham, 12.4 (Philo, 4:166–67). 12. Ibid., 12.66 (Philo, 4:168–69). 13. Ibid., 12.67 (Philo, 4:168–69).

61

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

experience of passion.14 Achieving this freedom requires philosophy and energetic resistance, without which passion exercises dominion and overwhelms the soul.15 Only thus can we avoid being slaves to the passions.16 Philosophy is accordingly a sort of medicine for the soul, freeing it from the mastery of pleasures, passions, and desires. 17 Humans are poised between freedom (eleutheria) and slavery (douleia). Just as the body is in a state of slavery when it is mastered by another, so the soul exists in slavery when under the dominion of the passions.18 The wicked person is enslaved by desire for money, glory, and pleasure; the virtuous person resists love (erōs), fear, and pain for the sake of freedom.19 There is nothing worse than to be powerless (akuron) over oneself; the virtuous person, however, possesses the foundation of true power (kuros),20 and is accordingly free in the one important sense of freedom: exemption from the otherwise overpowering impulses of passion and desire. Achieving such freedom, according to Philo, requires us to adopt Stoic indifference to poverty, pain, and lack of reputation.21 Philo drew special attention to desire (epithumia) because of its appearance in the Ten Commandments (number ten, conventionally translated as “Do not covet”). Explaining why desire is singled out for attention in God’s law, Philo observed that desire is the passion that is most difficult to deal with. The other passions, according to Philo, seem involuntary (akousion) because they appear to come to us from outside the soul. But desire is voluntary (hekousios) because it finds its beginning within the self.22 14. Philo, On Contemplation, 1.6 (Philo, 9:116–17). 15. Philo, On the Ten Commandments, 28.150 (Philo, 7:80–81). 16. Philo, Migration of Abraham, 6.26 (Philo, 4:146–47). 17. Philo, On Contemplation, 1.2 (Philo, 9:114–15). 18. Philo, Every Good Man Is Free, 3.17 (Philo, 9:18–19). 19. Ibid., 3.21–22 (Philo, 9:20–23). 20. Ibid., 7.41 (Philo, 9:34–35). 21. Ibid., 4.23 (Philo, 9:22–23).

62

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

Summary The writings of Philo and documents such as 4 Maccabees show us that segments of the Jewish world were conversant with and appreciative of the ethics and moral psychology of the classical and Hellenistic philosophical schools. They shared with these schools a common vocabulary for describing moral phenomena—the language of desire, passion, mind, and voluntary act—as well as a common analysis of humankind’s fundamental moral problem: our slavery to passion and desire. Naturally, this common vocabulary and analysis were put to work on characteristically Jewish concerns about fidelity to the law of Moses; it would be a mistake to regard Philo or 4 Maccabees as simply products of Hellenization. On the contrary, we should think of them as finding in classical and Hellenistic philosophy concerns and intellectual tools that enabled them to engage in faithful Jewish theological reflection. At the same time, it is obvious that they are not simply working within an Old Testament intellectual context—their concerns show the influence of philosophy. Their awareness of philosophy has, in other words, led them to think about Judaism in a way that was new but that also exhibits substantial points of contact with the Old Testament traditions. This is all highly relevant to the New Testament, for many of the concerns and much of the vocabulary characteristic of Philo and 4 Maccabees recur in the New Testament. The New Testament, in other words, is a product, at least in part, of Hellenistic Judaism. It was thus that the heritage of classical and Hellenistic philosophy passed over into the New Testament and the early Christian tradition.

22. Philo, On the Ten Commandments, 28.142 (Philo, 7:76–79).

63

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Passion and Desire in Paul’s Letters The Problem with Passion and Desire Passion and desire do not always bear a negative connotation in Paul’s thought.23 Twice in Paul’s letters (1 Thess. 2:17; Phil. 1:23) desire bears a positive sense (desiring to see the Thessalonians and to depart and to be with Christ). In the deutero-Pauline literature, whoever desires (oregetai) to be a bishop desires (epithumei) a good work (1 Tim. 3:1). Moreover, passion bears a positive meaning when it denotes either Christ’s sufferings or Paul’s sufferings. However, passion and desire in the Pauline tradition often do bear a negative sense and are objects of censure. Accordingly, the Pauline literature shares some of the moral concerns of classical and Hellenistic philosophers.24 For instance, in exhorting the Thessalonians to avoid sexual immorality (porneia), Paul insisted that they also steer clear of the “passion of desire” (pathē epithumias) characteristic of the Gentiles (1 Thess. 4:5).25 Paul’s attitude toward passion and desire was no aberration. As noted above in the exposition of 4 Maccabees and 23. For a survey of studies on the idea of the passions in Paul’s letters, see David Charles Aune, “Passions in the Pauline Epistles: The Current State of Research,” in Fitzgerald, ed., Passions and Moral Progress, 221–37, and esp. 228–33. 24. There is some debate about whether traces of moral philosophy in Paul’s letters more closely resemble Platonic, Stoic, or some other philosophy. This is, to some extent, a moot point, since the popular philosophy that New Testament writers would have known was likely eclectic. Middle Platonism was itself quite eclectic, drawing on elements of Aristotle and Stoicism in its interpretation of Plato. Nonetheless, comparison of Paul’s theology with various ancient schools of philosophy helps illuminate features that might otherwise be missed. Representative participants in this discussion include Abraham Malherbe, Paul and the Popular Philosophers (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989); Emma Wasserman, The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Sin, Death, and the Law in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 2e. Reihe, Band 256 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008); Stanley K. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994); and Troels Engberg-Pedersen, Paul and the Stoics (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000). 25. See Ronald F. Hock, “God’s Will at Thessalonica and Greco-Roman Asceticism,” in Leif E. Vaage and Vincent L. Wimbush, eds., Asceticism and the New Testament (New York:

64

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

Philo’s thought, sexuality in Judaism around the time of Christianity’s rise was experienced in a deeply ambivalent way. On the one hand was the mandate to be fruitful and multiply; on the other was a deep distrust of sexual feelings.26 Attending this contradiction was a growing belief in some Jewish circles that the purpose of sexual intercourse was procreation. Intercourse without this express aim was suspicious, for it could result only from passion and desire, which were increasingly regarded as morally problematic.27 In Paul’s theology, desire and passion are linked to our fleshly status. As noted previously, “flesh” (sarx) is a complex word in Paul’s theology. It ranges semantically from neutral to negative meanings but, above all, flesh signifies weakness. Without God’s Spirit, humans are physically and morally weak and subject to corruption; with God’s Spirit, humans live and flourish physically and morally. Because we are flesh, we are susceptible to temptation and sin. So, although the flesh is not itself the condition of sin, its connection to moral weakness means that Paul could treat the flesh as the contrary of God’s Spirit (Gal. 5:17) and as inherently hostile to God (Rom. 8:7) when human beings resist the summons to live in the new age of the Spirit. Because the flesh is weak, it is sin’s point of entry into human life; we experience this entry concretely in the passions and desires of the flesh. Consider these passages:

Routledge, 1999), 159–70. Hock argues that Paul’s counsel in this passage corresponds to generally accepted Greco-Roman moral norms relating to marriage; see esp. 163–66. 26. Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity, Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 159–60. 27. See Dale C. Allison Jr., “Divorce, Celibacy and Joseph (Matthew 1:18-25 and 19:1-12),” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 49 (1993): 8–9; and idem, Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998), 200.

65

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

• When we were in the flesh, the passions (pathēmata) of sin (which come to be through the law) operated in the members of our bodies to bear fruit for death (Rom. 7:5). • Keep in step with the Spirit and you will never fulfill the desire (epithumia) of the flesh. . . . The flesh desires contrary to the Spirit and the Spirit desires contrary to the flesh, for they oppose one another with the result that you do not do what you want to do (Gal. 5:16-17). • Those who belong to Christ have crucified the flesh, together with its passions (pathēmata) and desires (epithumiai) (Gal. 5:24). • Put on the Lord Jesus Christ and do not make provision for the flesh—for its desires (Rom. 13:14). These passages connect flesh directly to the problematic passions and desire; consequently, the flesh is seemingly beyond redemption— flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 15:50)—and, with its characteristic passions and desires, must be killed off (Gal. 5:24). In fairness to the flesh, we should note that Paul laid the ultimate blame for unruly desire at the feet of sin: it is sin that has misused God’s commandment against desire (Exod. 20:17) by paradoxically using that commandment to create desire in me (Rom. 7:8).28 Regardless of the extent to which the flesh is a problematic state of 28. Austin Busch, “The Figure of Eve in Romans 7:5-25,” Biblical Interpretation 12, no. 1 (2004): 12–23, shows convincingly that Paul’s argument in Romans 7 is an interpretation of Genesis 3, the “I” of Romans 7 representing Eve. Stowers, in A Rereading of Romans, argues that “Philo, Paul, and 4 Maccabees all understand the tenth commandment as a prohibition of desire. . . . The tenth commandment showed that the law was concerned with the Greco-Roman ethic of self-mastery” (60). See also John A. Ziesler, “The Role of the Tenth Commandment in Romans 7,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33 (1988), who supports the thesis that, in Romans 7, Paul is making direct reference to the tenth commandment and that “the point of Rom. 7.13-25 is the difficulty of matching right desire with right performance, of conflicting desires, and of having right desire in the first place” (48).

66

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

existence, the real problem is sin—it is the sin that dwells within me that is responsible for my doing what I do not want to do (Rom. 7:20). There is thus an alien law present in the parts of my body, making me a captive to the law of sin (Rom. 7:23). The problem, then, is not so much flesh but sin that has seized control of my body. At the same time, so pervasive is sin’s grip that there is no good dwelling in “me, that is, in my flesh” (Rom. 7:18). Paul’s letters thus presuppose an eschatological dualism of flesh and spirit: flesh designates life in the old aeōn; spirit is life in the new, postresurrection aeōn. However, Paul also assumed a practical distinction between flesh and spirit. Admittedly, Paul did not develop this distinction into a theory or use it for dogmatic construction. Nonetheless, there does seem to be an anthropological dualism operative in Paul’s letters. Our present, earthly (epigeios) body is a tent (skēnos) that burdens (baroumenoi) us, causing us to groan. Paul’s hope is for a heavenly house with which we may be better clothed (2 Cor. 5:1-4). Paul’s words here are almost identical to Wisdom of Solomon 9:15: the corruptible body burdens (barunei) the soul, and the earthly tent (to geōdes skēnos) weighs on the mind. Although, in keeping with his Jewish heritage, Paul obviously regarded the natural human state to be an embodied state, he did here seem to distinguish the self from that with which the self is clothed. Further, Paul’s words in Philippians 1:22-24 about departing the world to be with Christ suggest a temporarily disembodied postmortem state, parallel to the words of 2 Corinthians 5:8 about being away from the body and at home with Christ.29 Besides these eschatological texts, 29. There is a considerable body of literature illustrating the various ways of interpreting these passages that suggest a temporarily disembodied state of being after death. Here are some helpful articles: D. W. Palmer, “‘To Die Is Gain’ (Philippians 1:21),” Novum Testamentum 17, no. 3 (1975): 203–18; C. J. De Vogel, “Reflexions on Philipp. I 23-24,” Novum Testamentum 19, no. 4 (1977): 262–74; N. Clayton Croy, “‘To Die Is Gain” (Philippians 1:19-26): Does Paul Contemplate Suicide?” Journal of Biblical Literature 122, no. 3 (2003): 517–31; Joseph Osei-

67

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Paul distinguished our inner anthrōpos, which is being renewed, from our outer anthrōpos, which is wasting away (2 Cor. 4:16; Rom. 7:22) and he could casually invoke the Platonic-sounding distinction of the temporal and the eternal (2 Cor. 4:18). So, there is no reason to deny that Paul assumed an anthropological dualism, just as many Jews of his day did, especially since this sort of dualism does not have to imply any denigration of the body.30 What exactly was Paul’s attitude toward desire and passion and especially toward sexual desire and passion? Some have argued that, in common with many ancient philosophers, Paul urged the elimination of passion and desire—not the elimination of sexual intercourse, but only the passion and desire associated with it.31 Others doubt that Paul went so far, arguing that the problem was not passion and desire as such but only excessive or otherwise improper passion and desire.32 However, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion Bonsu, “Does 2 Cor 5:1-10 Teach the Reception of the Resurrection Body at the Moment of Death?” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 28 (1986): 81–101; and W. L. Craig, “Paul’s Dilemma in 2 Corinthians 5.1-10: A ‘Catch-22’?” New Testament Studies 34, no. 1 (1988): 145–47. 30. Daniel Boyarin, in A Radical Jew, argues at length and convincingly that Paul’s anthropology is dualistic, that it thus fits comfortably within first century Jewish thinking, and that this dualism in no way implied for Paul a low view of the body and flesh; see 59–62, 77, 82–83, 85. On this point, see also Steven D. Fraade, “Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism,” 262. 31. See, for example, Dale B. Martin, “Paul without Passion: On Paul’s Rejection of Desire in Sex and Marriage,” in Halvor Moxnes, ed., Constructing Early Christian Families: Family as Social Reality and Metaphor (London: Routledge, 1997), 201–15, especially 202–3, and David E. Fredrickson, “Passionless Sex in 1 Thessalonians 4:4-5,” Word & World 23, no. 1 (2003): 23–30, esp. 26–29. The cautionary words of Kathy L. Gaca, Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity, The Joan Palevsky Imprint in Classical Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), are pertinent. She warns against assuming too much continuity between Philo, Paul, and other early Christian writers on one hand and Greco-Roman philosophers on the other. She argues that, for Philo and Paul, the meaning of terms such as desire (epithumia) must be sought in their interpretation of the Septuagint and not from any supposed influence on them by Greco-Roman philosophers (12–14). Gaca’s thesis is valuable as an admonition against attributing too much continuity between early Jewish and Christian writers and Greco-Roman writers. 32. J. Edward Ellis, Paul and Ancient Views of Sexual Desire: Paul’s Sexual Ethics in 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 Corinthians 7 and Romans 1, The Library of New Testament Studies (London: Continuum, 2007). Dale B. Martin has sought to refute Ellis’s thesis, convincingly I believe, in a review: Dale

68

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

that Paul did not have a positive estimation of sexual passion and desire; mention of them often appears when he is castigating such characteristic sins of Gentiles as porneia and idolatry.33 At the very least, Paul, in common with many Jewish and Greco-Roman writers, regarded passion and desire as dangerous. For Paul, sin has invaded every part of the human person, resulting in passion and desire at every level. Take the body, for instance. Because of the corrupting effects of sin, the body is dead (nekron) (Rom. 8:10) and we require deliverance from “the body [sōma] of death” (Rom. 7:24). This deliverance translates ethically into the injunction to put to death the deeds of the body (Rom. 8:13) lest we obey the body’s desires (Rom. 6:12). It is because of our past obedience to these desires that the former self (anthrōpos) must be crucified with Christ—such death is necessary to nullify the body (sōma) of sin and to free us from sin’s dominion (Rom. 6:6). The human body, then, has been corrupted by sin and given over to death; although our inner self (esō anthrōpos) is being renewed daily, our outer self (exō anthrōpos) is undergoing corruption (2 Cor. 4:16). This death and corruption are already at work in our ethical lives, in our servitude to the body’s desires.34 Consequently, in response to B. Martin, “Paul and Ancient Views of Sexual Desire: Paul’s Sexual Ethics in 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 Corinthians 7, and Romans 1,” Theology & Sexuality 15, no. 1 (2009): 124–25. 33. Martin, in “Paul without Passion,” links Paul’s linking of passion, desire, fornication, and idolatry to his fear of the church’s purity being defiled by Gentile-like behavior (202–3). For a discussion of the language of passion and desire in Romans 1:27-27 against the background of Greco-Roman philosophy, see David E. Frederickson, “Natural and Unnatural Use in Romans 1:24-27: Paul and the Philosophic Critique of Eros,” in David L. Balch, ed., Homosexuality, Science, and the “Plain Sense” of Scripture (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000), 197–222. 34. Busch, in “The Figure of Eve,” asserts that “in Romans 7 and 8 Paul does negatively valorize the body and its members, and not only the flesh. . . . In contrast to the soul or the mind, the body as Paul and other Hellenistic intellectuals understood it, is weak and defiant, often tragically submissive to its basest appetites” (34). See Robert Jewett, Paul’s Anthropological Terms: A Study of Their Use in Conflict Settings, Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums (Leiden: Brill, 1971), 290–98 for an interpretation of Paul’s remarks on the body and the way in which the body has become a spiritual problem because it has come under the power of sin. As a result, Jewett finds the meaning of body converging with the meaning

69

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

the Corinthians’ slogan that food is for the belly and the belly is for food, Paul could assert that God will destroy the belly along with its food (1 Cor. 6:13). The material body and its desires, signified here synecdotally as belly, have no place in the eschatological kingdom of God. The human mind, too, suffers from the effects of sin’s corruption: just as God delivered Gentiles over to impurity and disgraceful passion (Rom. 1:24, 26), so God has also delivered them over to minds filled with every sort of wickedness (Rom. 1:28-31). Paul could therefore speak of the mind (phronēma) of the flesh, which is hostile to God and neither does nor wishes to obey God (Rom. 8:6-7). That is why Christian disciples must undergo a transformation of the mind (Rom. 12:2). At the same time, the inner person delights in God’s law (Rom. 7:22) and agrees that the law is good (Rom. 7:16), while the alien law of sin operating in our bodies opposes the law of the mind (nous) that serves the law of God even as the flesh serves the law of sin (Rom. 7:23-25). The mind, then, seems a bit less corrupted by sin than is the body—at least it still wants to observe God’s law.35 Paul used the language of slavery to describe sin’s rule over mind and body just as Plato and Philo used this language to describe the soul’s servitude to passion and desire.36 Consider Paul’s argument in Romans: we are slaves of whatever we obey, whether of sin or of righteousness. In a pre-Christian state, we were slaves of sin, resulting in death (6:16-17), and we presented our bodily parts as slaves to impurity and iniquity (6:19).37 In that state, sin rules (basileuei) within of flesh in Romans 6–8. Jewett’s interpretation is sound in spite of his commitment to finding Gnostic theology in the first century. 35. Joshua W. Jipp, “Educating the Divided Soul in Paul and Plato: Reading Romans 7:7-25 and Plato’s Republic,” in Stanley E. Porter, ed., Paul: Jew, Greek, and Roman, Pauline Studies, vol. 5 (Boston: Brill, 2009): 231–57, argues for a basically Platonic setting for Romans 7. 36. Stowers, A Rereading of Romans, has an illuminating interpretation of Romans using the notions of mastery and self-control; see 43–44. 37. Compare this with John 8:31-36: “Everyone who commits sin is a slave to sin.”

70

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

our mortal bodies (6:12) and becomes our master (kurieuei) (6:14). We feel this servitude in various ways: we obey the desires of the body (6:12); we become slaves of the belly—a symbol of gluttony and sensual excess generally (16:18; see also Phil. 3:19);38 we serve (douleuō) the law of sin (Rom. 7:25); and we are unable to do what we know to be good and wish to do (Rom. 7:15-20; Gal. 5:17). Paul’s remarks about slavery remind us of Plato’s interpretation of moderation (sōphrosunē)—that it is a matter of becoming master of oneself39—and signal to us the importance of control. They remind us as well about Seneca’s view of the dangers of sexual love, which is an agitated state (commotam) in which we are powerless (impotentem) and are enslaved to another (alteri emancupatam).40 In ancient cultures, slaves were controlled by others. They were not autonomous, selfgoverning moral agents but were, instead, utterly subject to the will of others. For Paul, the rule of sin is a kind of slavery because under this rule we lose the capacity to act according to our wishes. Those in the flesh do what they hate and cannot do what they wish (Rom. 7:19), so that evil deeds are not really the work of one’s self but are actually the effects of sin that indwells (7:17). It is as though the moral self has been taken over by an alien power that leaves the mind intact (we know what is good and right) but has stripped us of the power necessary to do the good. Of course, Paul could also acknowledge that in a sense it is “I” who does what is evil (7:19-20), but the image of slavery is telling: sin is a master that reduces us to a state of powerless slavery.41 38. See Karl Olav Sandnes, Belly and Body in the Pauline Epistles, Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 162–64, 179–80, for a discussion of Paul’s references to the belly. 39. Plato, Republic, 431a, in John M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1062–63. 40. Seneca, Letter 116.5, in Seneca, vol. 6: Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales, trans. Richard M. Gummere, Loeb Classical Library 77 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971), 334–35. 41. Jacqueline E. Lapsey, Can These Bones Live? The Problem of the Moral Self in the Book of Ezekiel,

71

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Our slavery to sin and loss of control are manifested itself in the vice of akrasia (lack of self-control). Paul admonished those who wanted to abstain from sexual relations for purposes of prayer, warning them to make such abstinence temporary because they would not be able to endure Satan’s temptation due to their akrasia. Paul advised widows and the unmarried to stay in that condition unless they could not control themselves (enkrateuontai), in which case they had better marry. Self-control, then, was for Paul a very good virtue but one not universally attested among Christians—hence the importance of marriage. Marriage for Paul was not a sin but was, instead, a practical solution to an urgent problem, akrasia, which would inevitably lead to porneia. For Paul, there were three possible sexual states: celibacy with self-control, honorable marriage for those lacking self-control, and porneia for those lacking self-control and the good sense to marry. Paul was convinced that the state of self-control and celibacy is the best. As he argued in 1 Corinthians 7, although those who marry do not sin (7:36), better is he who, standing firm in his heart and being free of necessity (anagkē), has authority over his wishes (thelēma), and decides in his heart not to marry (7:37). For Paul, some people are driven by their akrasia—they lack self-control and act out of necessary impulse. Others do not feel the impulse of necessity and instead have authority over themselves. Freedom from Passion and Desire: Sanctification In spite of sin’s dominion, Paul’s letters suggest the possibility of freedom from sin’s grip and the development of a holy character. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft, Band 301 (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000), has an illuminating discussion of the way in which the book of Ezekiel represents a turn in the biblical tradition’s thinking about the moral self. In contrast to the previous tradition’s confidence human beings are fully capable of knowing and doing what is good, in Ezekiel we find a growing pessimism about this capacity and the growing conviction that humans requires God’s grace in order to do the good (6).

72

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

Since the mind is, to some extent, affected by sin, sanctification requires the mind’s renewal so that we can determine God’s will. Commentators have noted a sort of inclusio between Romans 1 and Romans 12: Since Gentiles have not acknowledged (edokimasan) God, God has given them up to a disreputable or discredited (adokimon) mind (1:28). Now, in sanctification, we are to undergo a renewal of the mind so that we can test or approve (dokimazein) God’s will (12:2). Sanctification thus describes the movement from a mind that is adokimon to one capable of dokimazein.42 As we have seen, however, the mind is not the principal problem of human existence. Even the person living in the flesh has a mind that knows and approves of God’s law and wants to do what is good (Rom. 7:21). The main problem is the body’s desires and passions. This problem requires a twofold solution: consecration and discipline. Paul used the language of consecration quite expressly: “Present your bodies to God as a living sacrifice, holy and acceptable” (Rom. 12:1). In a Jewish framework, presentation of a sacrifice on the altar constituted an act whereby the sacrificial animal was devoted to God. It belonged to God and was therefore holy. In Romans Paul wanted the readers to present their bodies to God as devoted sacrifices. Once consecrated, our bodies no longer belong to us, but instead belong to God. They are holy and devoted and therefore are not available for ordinary use but must be used in accordance with God’s purposes. Because of the connection between consecration and divine ownership, the metaphor of slavery becomes useful: “You are not your own; you were bought with something of value” (1 Cor.

42. Luke Timothy Johnson, “Transformation of the Mind and Moral Discernment in Paul,” in John T. Fitzgerald and Thomas H. Olbricht, eds., Early Christianity and Classical Culture: Comparative Studies in Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe, Supplements to Novum Testamentum (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 219–20.

73

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

6:19-20). This is the language of slave purchasing. Because we have been purchased, we no longer belong to ourselves but to God. The body is “for the Lord” (1 Cor. 6:13). We are now at God’s disposal and must act according to God’s wishes. Hence we must “glorify God with the body” (1 Cor. 6:20). The consecration of the body signifies the body’s holiness.43 Paul argued for this holiness in various ways: the body is the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit (1 Cor. 6:19), holy by virtue of the divine presence within; it is a part of Christ (1 Cor. 6:15), constituting, with the bodies of all disciples, the physical body of Christ on earth. Its status as a member of Christ’s body establishes ethical restrictions on the body. It cannot be used in just any way, but only in ways that accord with its holy status. Above all, it cannot be joined to a prostitute, for doing so would bring the holy Christ into physical contact with the defiled prostitute (1 Cor. 6:15) and would constitute a sin against the body (1 Cor. 6:18). Because the body is holy but can be misused, Paul prayed for its sanctification, that God might keep it blameless (1 Thess. 5:23). Paul’s concerns about the body and its holiness have two axes. First, the body is vulnerable to pollution, and sexual transgression—porneia—constitutes one of the principal ways in which the body’s holiness is compromised.44 Second, defilement of the individual’s body compromises the holiness of the community, the corporate body of Christ.45 Hence Paul’s insistence on excluding the man who had a sexual relationship with his stepmother (1 Cor. 5:1-8) and his horror at the thought of a Christian disciple uniting in his body the holy Christ and the defiled prostitute (1 Cor. 6:15-17). Besides consecration, the body requires discipline if we are to 43. See Naomi Koltun-Fromm, Hermeneutics of Holiness: Ancient Jewish and Christian Notions of Sexuality and Religious Community (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 77, for concern about the body’s holiness. 44. Ibid., 85. 45. Ibid., 84–85.

74

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

actualize our freedom from sin. There is talk of metaphorical crucifixion: the former self (ho palaios anthrōpos) must be crucified with Christ so that the body of sin may be annulled and so that our servitude to sin might come to an end (Rom. 6:6). The flesh must be crucified along with its passions and desires (Gal. 5:24). More broadly, disciples are to bear in their bodies the death of Jesus so that the life of Jesus may be manifested in those same bodies (2.Cor. 4:10). These passages point to Paul’s conviction that disciples’ dying with Christ happens in phenomenal experience. The death of the flesh (the former self) is actualized in the extinction of the flesh’s passions and desires. That is why Paul urged disciples to kill off the deeds of the body (sōma) (Rom. 8:13) or flesh (sarx) (Gal. 5:19), deeds such as porneia, impurity, licentiousness, and anger (thumos). Changing metaphors, Paul could express the same thought with an athletic image: like an athlete, “I strike my body and enslave it” (1 Cor. 9:25-27), thus exercising self-control (enkrateia), unlike the enemies of the cross, whose god is their belly (Phil. 3:18-19). Paul could thus contrast himself to these enemies by pointing to his selfsufficiency (autarkēs), a term associated in Greco-Roman philosophy with mastering desire.46 The most concrete example of such athletic discipline was the unmarried and virgins. Unlike the married, who are divided and necessarily exhibit care for things of the world, the unmarried and virgins are able to render to God wholehearted, undivided care for the things of God “so that they may be holy in body and spirit” (1 Cor. 7:34). Heroic asceticism in the form of voluntary celibacy restores one to the state of unity, past the division of the self caused by attachment to worldly concerns. Sanctification is thus the movement from lack of control and slavery to sin to 46. Sandnes, Belly and Body, 148. Martin, in “Paul without Passion,” cautions against interpreting Paul’s words about self-sufficiency in an overly Stoic manner, noting that Paul regarded himself as utterly dependent on God and disciples as dependent on each other (210).

75

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

regaining control of the body through rigorous, athlete-like discipline.47 The consecration of the body and the possibility of its holiness signify that the body, too, can participate in salvation—hence the concept of resurrection. For Paul, resurrection signifies that, while the inner person is being renewed daily now (2 Cor. 4:16), the body will also eventually experience renewal. In the eschatological future, Jesus will conform the body of humiliation to his body of glory (Phil. 3:21). The body we have now is a soul-ful body (sōma psuchon) but will, in the resurrection, be raised as a spiritual body (sōma pneumatikon) (1 Cor. 15:44). In that eschatological day, the body will no longer be flesh, but will be transformed into something corporeal yet spiritual. Whereas now the body is the place where sin exercises dominion and is characterized as flesh, in the eschatological state the body will be in the service of and in harmony with spirit. Just as the mind now participates in salvation by experiencing renewal, so the body will eventually be renewed and thus experience redemption (Rom. 8:23). The mind being renewed, the body consecrated, and ascetic discipline undertaken, our servitude to sin is ended. We are, in effect, freed slaves, having been emancipated (eleutherōthentes) from sin (Rom. 6:18), and thus enjoy the freedom that the rest of creation will enjoy in the eschatological future, when it, too, is freed from its servitude to corruption (Rom. 8:21). Passion and Desire in the Deutero-Pauline Letters The New Testament’s moral teaching lies on a trajectory of developing thought that stretches from classical philosophy to patristic theology and beyond. Within the New Testament we can 47. It is noteworthy that 4 Macc. 17:11-16 describes the Jewish martyrs in similar athletic terms.

76

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

find a smaller trajectory of development within the tradition inspired by Paul. In the generation or two after Paul, a considerable body of Christian literature arose seeking to lay claim to Paul’s teaching and authority. Some of these, such as The Acts of Paul and Thecla, were not incorporated into the canonical New Testament; others, such as the deutero-Pauline letters, namely Ephesians, Colossians, and the Pastoral Epistles (1 Timothy, 2 Timothy, and Titus), did enter the canon. As a generality, it may be said that the canonical deutero-Pauline letters represent an effort to present Paul’s theology as moderately but not radically ascetic, in contrast to writings such as The Acts of Paul and Thecla.48 We thus find in these letters positive words about marriage and direct criticism of those who reject marriage and advocate radical asceticism. To appreciate the moral standpoint of the deutero-Pauline literature, it will be helpful to have a quick look at some themes in The Acts of Paul and Thecla. In this work, the character Paul exhorts the Christians in Iconium on two main points, self-control and resurrection.49 After breaking bread with the household of Onesiphorus, Paul utters a series of beatitudes similar in some respects to the beatitudes in Matthew, but with a distinctively ascetic emphasis. Paul affirms that the pure in heart are blessed, but so are 48. Matthijs den Dulk, “I Permit No Woman to Teach Except for Thecla: The Curious Case of the Pastoral Epistles and the Acts of Paul Reconsidered,” Novum Testamentum 54, no. 2 (2012): 176–203, cautions against lumping 2 Timothy in with the other pastoral epistles, arguing that it is much more favorable to women and less committed to episcopacy than are either 1 Timothy and Titus, and that there is considerable affinity between 2 Timothy and The Acts of Paul and Thecla. 49. “The Acts of Thecla,” 5–6, in Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 114–15. The Greek text of The Acts of Paul and Thecla is available at http://www.patrologia-lib.ru/apocryph/novum/ a_paul.htm. For commentary, see Jeremy W. Barrier, The Acts of Paul and Thecla: A Critical Introduction and Commentary, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 2. Reihe, vol. 270 (Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009). It is noteworthy that the canonical Acts of the Apostles (at 24:25) portrays Paul as a preacher of self-control, although not, as in the Acts of Paul and Thecla, as a preacher advocating the dissolution of social conventions.

77

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

those who keep the flesh pure, those who practice self-control, those who renounce the world, those who have wives as though they did not have them (a reference to 1 Cor. 7:29), those who have the wisdom and the understanding of Jesus, those who keep their baptism, and those who leave the form of the world (echoing 1 Cor. 7:31). Additionally, Paul pronounces a blessing on the bodies of the virgins and promises that they will not lose the reward of their purity.50 After this exhortation, the main theme of the Acts is introduced: a virgin, Thecla, is betrothed to Thamyris; sadly for the unfortunate Thamyris, Thecla hears Paul preaching about purity and resolves to remain a virgin.51 Thamyris then asks two worthless companions of Paul about his message and its regrettable effects on betrothed virgins. They report that, according to Paul, no one can experience the resurrection unless one preserves oneself in a state of purity and avoids defiling the flesh.52 Paul is arrested and interrogated by the proconsul, to whom he declares that God sent him to separate people from corruption, impurity, and every pleasure.53 The Acts of Paul and Thecla represents the development of the Pauline tradition in a noticeably ascetic direction. The hero of the story is a woman who adopts exactly the position that Paul advocates in 1 Corinthians 7—she resolves to remain a virgin and unmarried. Paul’s note in 1 Corinthians about having wives as though not having 50. “The Acts of Thecla,” 6, in Ehrman, Lost Scriptures, 115. Peter Wallace Dunn’s dissertation, “The Acts of Paul and the Pauline Legacy in the Second Century,” argues that the purpose of narrating the story of Thecla is “to give narrative embodiment to Paul’s teaching in 1 Corinthians 6-7” (173). Dunn also distinguishes the Acts of Paul from second- century encratism, arguing that the Acts stands in continuity with the Pastoral Epistles, which prohibit a negative asceticism whereby sexuality is regarded as inherently sinful and allow a more moderate, positive asceticism that upholds “the idea of virginity and the benefit of abstinence from meat and wine” (81). The Acts of Paul is, accordingly, “not encratite but belongs to the Great Church with respect to its sexual ethic” (82). Dunn’s dissertation can be found at https://actapauli.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/pwdunn1996.pdf. 51. “The Acts of Thecla,” 7, in Ehrman, Lost Scriptures, 115. 52. Ibid., 12, in Ehrman, Lost Scriptures, 116. 53. Ibid., 17, in Ehrman, Lost Scriptures, 116–17.

78

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

them is here lifted up to the status of a virtual command. Moreover, Paul’s message has been emphatically presented with an ascetic stress. His unworthy companions report that purity, that is, virginity, is a requirement for being resurrected. Paul himself states that his goal is to free people from corruption, impurity, and pleasure. We are probably to think of these three as linked: desire for pleasure leads to impurity (loss of virginity), which in turn results in corruption. Purity (hagneia) is thus a supreme good and one of the foci of Paul’s preaching. The beatitude about keeping one’s baptism is probably a reference to the importance of virginal purity. The reference to those who have the wisdom and understanding of Jesus is likewise probably an exhortation to imitate the celibate Jesus. This document shows us that there were tendencies in early Christianity to demand, or at least urge, heroic levels of ascetic renunciation, even if doing so meant breaking social norms about marriage and the role of women. It shows as well that these tendencies had a basis in Paul’s letters. Of course, the theology of Acts of Paul falls short of the fullblown encratism of other second-century writers, who were said to have regarded marriage as absolutely incompatible with the Christian life. The Acts of Paul and Thecla at least depicts Onesiphorus, who has children, in a positive light, even if it does regard virginity as a preferable state. Early Christianity thus contained a rather wide array of views, including more or less radical messages of world renunciation that could lay some claim to being authentic inheritors of the tradition of Paul. The canonical deutero-Pauline literature seems to have arisen in response to the tradition of heroic, socially nonconformist asceticism. Its ethics is more in keeping with the tradition of Greco-Roman moral philosophy—moderately ascetic and definitely concerned about desire and passion, but at the same time not interested in heroic

79

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

forms of asceticism that would disrupt the form of the traditional household. In common with the authentic letters of Paul, the deutero-Pauline letters betray a marked anxiety about passion and desire. They agree in characterizing the pre-Christian state as one of slavery to passion and desire: we formerly walked in the desires of the flesh and performed the wishes of the flesh (Eph. 2:3); we were slaves to various kinds of desires and pleasures (Titus 3:3). In these letters, desire is frequently joined with a disparaging adjective: we are to mortify, among other things, passion and evil desire (Col. 3:5); we are to put off the former self, which is being deceived in accordance with the desires of deception (Eph. 4:22); those who desire wealth are beset with numerous foolish and harmful desires (1 Tim. 6:9); we are to deny worldly desires (Titus 2:12) and to flee youthful desires (2 Tim. 2:22). Of course, not all desires are bad, but there are plenty of bad desires and passions to avoid. Further, this literature shows no tendency to restrict wrong desire to the body; such desire is associated with the unredeemed mind as well. Readers are thus warned against being like the Gentiles, who conduct themselves in foolishness of mind (Eph. 4:17). The mind can be defiled (Titus 1:15) and can be presented in parallel with the problematic flesh (Eph. 2:2). Colossians can even speak of the mind of the flesh (Col. 2:18). As with the genuine letters of Paul, the deutero-Pauline letters present passion and desire as a problem, not simply of the body, but of the mind as well. What, then, should the Christian life look like in this tradition? For one thing, it involves (as in Paul) the renewal of the mind (Eph. 4:23) and putting off the body of flesh (Col. 2:11). It also involves training (gymnasia, a word with strongly athletic overtones) for piety (1 Tim. 4:7). However, whereas Paul employed the athletic metaphor to teach about the need to discipline the body (1 Cor. 9:25), 1 Timothy specifically declares bodily training to be of little value 80

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

compared to piety (1 Tim. 4:8). There seems to be a determined effort here to downplay the call to ascetic discipline of the body as we find in Paul. This intuition is confirmed by the critique of those who disparage marriage and urge abstention from certain foods. Against these reprobates, 1 Timothy teaches that all things have been created by God and can be received with thanksgiving (1 Tim. 4:3). 1 Timothy, it seems, is deliberately attempting to tone down any perceived impulse in the Pauline tradition toward what it regards as excessive asceticism.54 Knowing that Paul’s remarks on marriage could be taken to be a disparagement of marriage, 1 Timothy sets the record straight by presenting marriage as something to be received and sanctified by thanksgiving. This literature likely regards marriage as the appropriate way of practicing moderation, thus bringing desire and passion under an effective discipline that reflected mainstream Greco-Roman ideals.55 What has likely happened is that, in the late first or early second century, various groups regarded themselves as preserving and transmitting the authentically Pauline tradition of moral exhortation. One or more groups were moving in the direction indicated by the Acts of Paul and Thecla, with its steady impulse toward asceticism. Others, such as those represented by 1 Timothy, were trying to steer the Pauline tradition in a more socially conservative direction, with a milder form of asceticism of the sort advocated in the philosophical schools.56 Milder asceticism translates into sōphrosunē. In contrast to Gentiles, who lack self-control (akrateis) (2 Tim. 3:3), Christian disciples must 54. See the remarks of Gail Corrington Streete, “Askesis and Resistance in the Pastoral Letters,” in Vaage and Wimbush, eds., Asceticism and the New Testament, 300. 55. Ibid., 312. See also Margaret Y. MacDonald, “Citizens of Heaven and Earth: Asceticism and Social Integration in Colossians and Ephesians,” in Vaage and Wimbush, eds., Asceticism and the New Testament, 278. 56. Streete, “Askesis,” 306, argues forcefully for regarding the Pastoral Epistles as attempts to present an alternative vision of Christian asceticism in contrast to the more radical ascetic practices of the apocryphal acts of Paul.

81

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

practice moderation (sōphrosunē) and sobriety (nēphein), a word that means self-control with respect to alcohol (as in 1 Thess. 5:6-7) but can carry a broader meaning. Bishops and elders are thus to be sober as well as moderate (1 Tim. 3:2; Titus 1:8, 2:2) and Timothy is to be sober “in all things” (2 Tim. 4:5). In Titus moderation must be exhibited by elders (2:2), older women (2:4), younger women (2:5), and young men (2:6). 1 Timothy singles out wives for special consideration: they should adorn themselves with modesty and moderation, not with gold and pearls (1 Tim. 2:9), and with sobriety (1 Tim. 3:11), and will be preserved safe through childbirth if they persevere in moderation (1 Tim. 2:15). Of course, as in the authentic letters of Paul, a virtue such as moderation is not simply a result of human striving—God has given us the Spirit (or spirit) of moderation (2 Tim. 1:7).57 This is the context in which to examine Colossians. Colossians advocates its own form of ascetic denial: disciples are to set their minds on things above and not on earthly things (3:2) and are to put to death the earthly parts of the self, including the familiar trio porneia, impurity, and evil desire, joined in Colossians by passion (Col. 3:5). At the same time, Colossians 2 contains an extended critique of unnamed troublemakers who seem to be urging the Colossians to practice extraordinary asceticism. There is worry about being taken captive by philosophy, having something to do with the elements (ta stoicheia) of the world (2:8). There is likewise concern with being condemned in matters of food and drink (2:16) and moral regulations (2:20-21). These regulations are said to be merely human commands dealing with perishable things (2:22) and, despite giving the

57. See Stephen Charles Mott, “Greek Ethics and Christian Conversion: The Philonic Background of Titus II 10-14 and III 3-7,” Novum Testamentum 20, no. 1 (1978): 22–48, for an argument that Titus represents a union of Christian eschatology with the classical ethics of virtue and that the immediate background of Titus can be found in the writings of Philo.

82

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

appearance of wisdom that has something to do with severe treatment of the body, are actually without value regarding the satisfaction of the flesh (2:23).58 Colossians evidently regards the proper antidote to spiritual problems to be, not extraordinary asceticism, but baptism, which effects a form of realized eschatology: in baptism we have received a spiritual circumcision, which means putting off the body of the flesh, and have been raised up with Christ (2:11-12). Since we have been raised with Christ and, in effect, have experienced the resurrection, we must seek the things above and ignore earthly things (3:1-2). Admittedly, there remains the task of putting to death whatever remains in us that is earthly (3:5), but this can apparently be done without extraordinary asceticism. That is why Colossians, like Ephesians and 1 Timothy, can take the traditional household for granted, thus sanctioning and recommending marriage (3:18-19). Positive Emotions in the Pauline Tradition Although, in the Pauline tradition, passion and desire are problematic, emotions more generally are not—and some (especially faith, hope, love, and joy) are essential features of the Christian life. This tradition contains express commands to be compassionate (eusplangthnos) (Eph. 4:32), to live in love (Eph. 5:2), and to practice brother-love (philadelphia) and friendly affection (philostorgoi) (Rom. 12:9). More interesting than admonitions to exhibit this or that emotion are those places where Paul was dealing pastorally with emotions, especially in 2 Corinthians.59 Paul’s purpose in 2 Corinthians (or 58. It must be noted that the grammar and semantics of these passages in Colossians 2 are notoriously difficult and have given rise to various translations and interpretations. For a good discussion of the issues, see MacDonald, “Citizens of Heaven and Earth,” 269–98. 59. For an interpretation of 2 Corinthians in terms of ancient rhetoric, particularly the letter of consolation, see L. L. Welborn, “Paul and Pain: Paul’s Emotional Therapy in 2 Corinthians

83

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

at least in 1:1—2:13 and 7:5-16) is to effect reconciliation with the congregation. On a prior visit Paul had been insulted by, it seems, a member of the church (2:5; 7:12) and had departed without resolution of the conflict. Subsequently, Paul learned from Titus that the congregation had in some way disciplined the offender (2:6; 7:6-11). The purpose of 2 Corinthians seems to be to build on this act of the congregation and confirm its reconciliation with Paul. To this end Paul employed a wide range of emotional appeal. God is depicted as the God of consolation (paraklēsis) and mercy (or pity) (oiktirmōn) (1:3), who has consoled Paul in the midst of his trials so that he might be able to console others in the midst of their trials (1:4). Paul’s confidence rests on the conviction that this consolation has abounded to him in the same measure as had the sufferings (pathēmata) of Christ (1:5). The Corinthians, meanwhile, are experiencing the same sufferings (pathēmata) as Paul and thus receive a like consolation which works in their patience as they suffer (1:6-7). What were Paul’s sufferings? In Asia he experienced affliction (thlipsis), being weighed down and despairing of life (1:8-10). Paul had wished to visit the Corinthians (1:15-16) but did not and some in Corinth felt that Paul was unreliable—hence his protest that he does not make plans according to the flesh (1:17) and his calling upon God as a witness (1:23). His reason for not visiting was to spare the Corinthians another grievous visit (en lupēi) (1:23—2:1), referring to a visit in which he had suffered grief (lupē) as a result of being insulted. After the grievous visit, Paul had written a letter rising from many afflictions and distress and with many tears—not to cause the Corinthians grief but, instead, so that they might know of Paul’s abounding love for them (2:3-4). Paul then sought to make concrete 1.1–2.13; 7.5–16 in the Context of Ancient Psychagogic Literature,” New Testament Studies 57, no. 4 (2011): 547–70; and Laurence L. Welborn, “Paul’s Appeal to the Emotions in 2 Corinthians 1.1-2.13; 7.5-16,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 82 (2001): 31–60.

84

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

his earlier point about the Corinthians sharing in his suffering: he declared that the troublemaker had caused grief not for Paul but for the rest of the congregation (2:5). Paul had indeed suffered grief, but acknowledged that the Corinthians themselves had suffered the grief intended for Paul. Having then in some way punished the offender (2:6), the congregation was urged to offer him consolation and love lest he be swallowed by excessive grief (2:7-8). In chapter 7 (which, if canonical 2 Corinthians is composed of fragments, may have originally followed immediately after 2:13), Paul affirmed that the Corinthians are in his heart, that he was consoled because of his pride in them, and that in the midst of affliction he was abounding in joy (7:3-4). He then described the particulars of his affliction: no rest for his body, afflicted in all things, outward fighting, inward fears (phoboi) (2:5)—all relieved by the consolation he received when Titus appeared with news that the congregation had dealt appropriately with the troublemaker (2:6), reporting about the Corinthians’ longing (epipothēsis), lamentation, and zeal, resulting in Paul’s own rejoicing (2:7). Acknowledging that his previous letter may well have caused grief (2:8), Paul argued that it was all for the good, since their grief resulted in repentance—they were grieved according to God (kata theon), so they were not harmed by Paul (2:9). The lesson is that grief that is according to God produces repentance for salvation, in contrast to the world’s grief, which produces death (2:10). More concretely, their grief produced eagerness, indignation, fear, longing (epipothēsis), zeal, and vengeance (2:11). These extraordinary texts from 2 Corinthians abound with emotional language—Paul expressing his own emotions and celebrating the Corinthians’ emotional response and conduct to his painful letter. But there is more to 2 Corinthians than just an expression

of

common

emotions.

What

grounds

Paul’s

understanding of his sufferings and afflictions and the accompanying 85

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

emotions is his conviction that by undergoing them he is participating in Christ’s own sufferings—hence the prayer in Philippians 3:10 to know the sharing in (koinonia) Christ’s sufferings (pathēmata) so that he may also share in Christ’s resurrected life. In Colossians this idea is developed with the bold statement that he rejoices in his sufferings (pathēmata) and completes in his flesh, that is, in his bodily sufferings, whatever is lacking in the afflictions of Christ (Col. 1:24). The Pauline tradition thus understood his sufferings and afflictions as an expression and consequence of his participation in the body of Christ, where if one suffers every member suffers with that one (1 Cor. 12:26). That is why Paul unashamedly wrote about his grief and fear and could argue for a grief according to God that is efficacious for salvation. Such emotions were not, as for the Stoics, simply negative (although they were undoubtedly unpleasant). On the contrary, Paul’s experience of them was something positive insofar as the experience of them was a sharing in Christ’s suffering and affliction. In a way, Paul was offering a sort of theological therapy of the emotions—not by seeking to eliminate them in the Stoic manner but, instead, to place them in a theological context and in this way invest them with a positive meaning. Passion and Emotion Outside the Pauline Tradition Outside the extended Pauline tradition we find similar concerns about passion and desire. On one hand, the picture of Jesus that one gathers from the Synoptic Gospels is not the picture of an ascetic. Jesus is portrayed as an equal opportunity dinner guest, attending a “great banquet” with publicans (Luke 5:29) and eating with Pharisees (7:36; 11:37; 14:1). He does not, it seems, practice fasting (Mark 2:18-20). He hands out advice on appropriate behavior at wedding banquets (14:7-11) and how to construct a kingdom-of-God-

86

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

appropriate guest list (Luke 14:12-14). He is shown being a generous host of sorts, providing enough bread and fish for the multitude so that all were filled (Luke 9:17), and earns a reputation for being a glutton and drunkard (Luke 7:34).60 Finally, Jesus rebukes the Pharisees’ debates about divorce by grounding marriage in the original state of creation and declares that the married couple has been joined together by God (Mark 10:2-9); marriage is not an evil to be avoided. On the other hand, these Gospels, especially Luke, give us texts that point in a decidedly ascetic direction.61 Jesus sends out the twelve with instructions not to take bread or money (Luke 9:3), commands disciples to sell their possessions and give alms (Luke 12:33), requires self-denial (Luke 9:23), and prohibits would-be disciples from returning home, even to bury their parents (Luke 9:59-60). Indeed, for Jesus discipleship demands hatred of biological family (Luke 14:26).62

The

emphasis

on

renunciation

goes

beyond

the

requirements of discipleship, as when Luke’s Gospel depicts Jesus as exhibiting a Stoic-like freedom from passion. This is seen in Luke’s redaction of Mark’s garden-of-Gethsemane narrative. In Mark’s version, Jesus is deeply distressed and grieved (14:33-34). In this state 60. Allison, in Jesus of Nazareth, argues that talk of Jesus being a glutton represents a false charge with which Jesus’ enemies reproached him (173). 61. Susan R. Garrett argues that “Luke was familiar with some of the conventions of Hellenistic philosophy. In his gospel, Luke implicitly concurs with the widespread philosophical goal of mastering one’s passions: The Lukan Jesus is less prone to emotions than his Markan counterpart” (Garrett, “Beloved Physician of the Soul? Luke as Advocate for Ascetic Practice,” in Vaage and Wimbush, eds., Asceticism and the New Testament, 73); and that “Luke (like the [Hellenistic] philosophers described by Nussbaum) perceived a connection between incorrect belief on the one hand and arousal of the passions on the other. Thus Luke could not show Jesus as grief-stricken in Gethsemane, for to do so would have been to suggest that Jesus held an incorrect belief: the belief that the preservation of his own flesh was as important as doing God’s will” (80). Allison asserts that the ascetic impulse in Christianity goes back to Jesus himself (Jesus of Nazareth, 174–75). 62. See also Luke 18:29-30 (“Truly I tell you, there is no one who has left house or wife or brothers or parents or children, for the sake of the kingdom of God, who will not get back very much more in this age, and in the age to come eternal life”) and Synoptic parallels.

87

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

he throws himself to the ground and prays at least twice for the cup to pass from him (14:35-41). In Luke’s version (Luke 20:40-46), however, there is no mention of Jesus’ mental state, especially of the troublesome grief, regarded by Stoics as one of the negative passions. Instead of throwing himself to the ground, as if overcome by emotion, Jesus kneels down and prays. Additionally, Jesus needs to pray only once to discern and accept God’s will.63 Beside their depictions of Jesus, the Synoptic Gospels contain bits of teaching that support celibacy. In Matthew’s Gospel Jesus states that some make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 19:10-12).64 This enigmatic passage seems to be talking about those who take up the life of voluntary celibacy for the sake of the kingdom. Additionally, the Synoptic Gospels teach that those who share in the resurrection will not marry and will instead be like the angels. Luke’s version characteristically notes that those who marry belong to the present aeōn, strengthening the connection between celibacy and the eschatological kingdom of God (Luke 20:34-36). The theological point of this logion is that that the resurrection state is quite unlike the current state of human existence. The practical point, at least as understood by later Christians, is that celibacy in this life is a realized eschatological existence—an anticipation now of the life to come. As a result, those who would attain spiritual perfection must abstain from marriage.65 These texts 63. Admittedly, this way of seeing Luke’s narrative requires regarding the episode of the angel coming to strengthen Jesus and Jesus sweating like drops of blood (20:43-44) as a post-Lukan addition and thus a matter of textual criticism. On this see the arguments of Bart D. Ehrman and Mark A. Plunkett, “The Angel and the Agony: The Textual Problem of Luke 22:43-44,” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1983): 401–16 and Jerome H. Neyrey, “The Absence of Jesus’ Emotions—the Lucan Redaction of Lk 22 39-46,” Biblica 61, no. 2 (1980): 158–59. 64. Francis J. Moloney, “Matthew 19:3-12 and Celibacy: A Redactional and Form Critical Study,” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 2 (1979), sees in this episode Jesus’ defense of his own celibacy as well as an invitation to others to take up the celibate life for the sake of discipleship (51). Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 183–88, argues that the sayings on celibacy and the absence of marriage in the resurrection state are authentic sayings of Jesus. 65. See Giulia Sfameni Gasparro, “Asceticism and Anthropology: Enkrateia and ‘Double Creation’

88

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

testify to an early Christian capacity to envision a state of human existence that is pleasing to God and in which not only sexual practice but perhaps sexual identity as well have been renounced.66 Outside the Gospels, desire is regarded as the source of temptation and the mother of sin (James 1:14-15).67 First Peter admonishes the reader to be conformed no longer to the desires that claimed them in the pre-Christian state of ignorance (1:14) and to live for God’s will and not for human desires (4:2), noting that the pre-Christian past offered sufficient time to carry out Gentile-like licentiousness and desires (4:3). First Peter also urges disciples to abstain from fleshly desires that wage war on the soul (2:11), a passage that is noteworthy for its use of soul. In Paul’s letters and the deuteroPauline tradition, the basic opposition is between flesh and spirit (or perhaps Spirit, if we are to think in terms of the Holy Spirit), with a secondary opposition between flesh and mind in Romans 7. In 1 Peter, however, it is soul and not spirit that must strive with the flesh. This difference may signify 1 Peter’s greater acquaintance with Hellenistic moral philosophy.68 Second Peter and Jude take up the customary warning against desire, urging us to flee the corruption that pervades the world because of desire (2 Pet. 1:4) and warning that those who go after the flesh with defiled desire will be punished (2 Pet. 2:10). These warnings are urgent because the congregations have been infiltrated by sinners who seek to entice the faithful with licentious desires of the flesh (2 Pet. 2:18; see Jude 18). Meanwhile,

in Early Christianity,” in Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis, eds., Asceticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 315; and Turid Karlsen Seim, “Children of the Resurrection: Perspectives on Angelic Asceticism in Luke-Acts,” in Vaage and Wimbush, eds., Asceticism and the New Testament, 119–20. 66. See Allison, Jesus of Nazareth, 176–78, for helpful comments on these passages. 67. For a good review of concern about desire and passion in James, see John S. Kloppenborg, “James 1:2-15 and Hellenistic Psychagogy,” Novum Testamentum 52, no. 1 (2010): 37–71. 68. See ch. 4 of Torrey Seland, Strangers in the Light: Philonic Perspectives on Christian Identity in 1 Peter, Biblical Interpretation Series (Leiden: Brill, 2005).

89

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

pleasure is a problem as well: James castigates those who wish to spend money on pleasures (James 4:3), which are a source of conflict within the community (James 4:1). Meanwhile, counterfeit disciples threaten the Petrine community with luxurious living that they consider to be pleasure (2 Pet. 2:13). Where desire and pleasure abound, vice cannot be far behind. Licentiousness counts as a major concern in this literature: Lot was confronted by the licentiousness of his neighbors (2 Pet. 2:7), and the Christian community is likewise forced to live with counterfeit disciples who entice authentic disciples with licentious desires (2 Pet. 2:18) and transform God’s grace into licentiousness (Jude 4). Unfortunately, the future holds only more of the same, with a prediction that many will follow after the licentiousness of the infiltrators (2 Pet. 2:2). Disciples are thus warned against the twin perils of licentiousness and passion (1 Pet. 4:3) and reminded that licentiousness, as well as every other evil, arises from the human heart (Mark 7:21-22). In response to the dangers of licentiousness and in common with the deutero-Pauline tradition, moderation is enjoined (1 Pet. 4:7) and added to the list of other necessary virtues such as knowledge and endurance (2 Pet. 1:6). It can even be represented as one of the fundamental points of Paul’s preaching along with righteousness and the coming judgment (Acts 24:25). As in the Pastoral Epistles, moderation can be joined to sobriety, as in 1 Peter 4:7, or used as a general purpose word to describe the life of moral circumspection, as in 1 Peter 1:13, where disciples are to live in utter (teleiōs) sobriety. Positive Emotions Outside the Pauline Tradition Outside the Pauline tradition, the most significant mention of positive emotions lies in the Gospels’ descriptions of Jesus. Since everything about Jesus must be positive and exemplary, any emotion 90

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

ascribed to him is by definition positive, even if it might be regarded as negative when describing someone else. Here is a brief summary of the emotions attributed to Jesus in the Gospels:69 • Compassion (splanchnizomai), as in Matthew 15:32, where Jesus has compassion on the hungry crowds before miraculously multiplying bread and fish; or in Mark 1:41, where Jesus has compassion on a leper. • Grief (lupeō), in Matthew 26:37, Matthew’s account of the garden of Gethsemane. Also, in this verse Jesus is depicted as troubled or in anguish (adēmoneō). • Anger (orgē), for example in Mark 3:5, where Jesus is angered by the Pharisees’ hardness of heart. • Being grieved (sullupeomai), also found in Mark 3:5—Jesus is not only angered by the Pharisees but also grieved. • Being indignant or angry (aganakteō), for instance in Mark 10:14, where Jesus is indignant because disciples have forbidden the little children. • Love (agapaō), as in Mark 10:21, where Jesus loves the rich man. • Joy, as when Jesus rejoices (agalliaomai) upon the return of the seventy disciples (Luke 10:21) or when Jesus’ joy (chara) is said to be full (John 3:29). • Being constrained, distressed, or afflicted (sunechō): in Luke 12:50 Jesus says that he is about to be baptized, that is, killed, and announces that he is constrained or distressed until it is

69. For a fuller exposition, see Stephen Voorwinde, Jesus’ Emotions in the Gospels (London: T&T Clark, 2011).

91

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

accomplished. This same verb is used to describe Job’s distress (Job 3:24, 10:1, 7:11). • Crying (or wailing, lamenting) (klaiō), as when, in Luke 19:41, Jesus cries over Jerusalem. • Being troubled (or agitated, disturbed, or moved) (tarassō and embrimaomai ): for example, in John 13:21 Jesus is troubled (tarassō) in spirit before announcing betrayal and in John 11:38 he is deeply moved (embrimaomai) in the presence of Lazarus’s tomb. From these texts we can see that the Gospels do not hesitate to ascribe to Jesus a variety of emotions, some of them not always positive in different contexts, and others, especially grief, that Stoics regarded as irrational passions. As noted above, Luke’s Gospel seems to tone down Jesus’ emotional suffering, especially in the garden of Gethsemane.70 But even if Luke’s Gospel does present a portrait of Jesus more in harmony with Greco-Roman moral conventions, the Gospel tradition as a whole shows little reticence in picturing Jesus with strong and disturbing emotions. Such emotions do not stand in the way of Jesus’ perfect obedience to God. Some Conclusions The Christian tradition early on laid claim to the heritage of classical philosophy. Not uncritically, of course: that philosophy’s lack of an omnipotent, intrusive God was a problem and its supreme confidence in reason had to go. Secondary bits and pieces (Stoic pantheism, Aristotle’s mortal soul) likewise caused consternation. Nonetheless, as early as the second century Christians were avidly and expressly using 70. Ibid., 119. For a discussion of the hypothesis that John’s Gospel was in dialogue with Stoic moral philosophy, see Harold W. Attridge, “An ‘Emotional’ Jesus and Stoic Tradition,” in Tuomas Rasimus, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Ismo Dunderberg, eds., Stoicism in Early Christianity (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010), 77–92.

92

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

and associating themselves with the classical heritage. The roots of this use and association go back to the first century and the New Testament. Without engaging in anything resembling formal philosophy, the New Testament enters into the moral discourse of the classical world and ends up sharing some of its overriding concerns. Briefly put, it is anxious about passion and desire, it regards slavery to passion and desire as perhaps the central issue of the Christian life, and it abounds with the language of self-control, freedom, and mastery to express its understanding of sanctification. These are not merely superficial resemblances. New Testament writers were, with unspecifiable degrees of clarity and self-awareness, knowledgeable about and comfortable with the general features of Greco-Roman moral discourse. The New Testament as a whole does not express allegiance to any particular school of classical thought and instead makes eclectic use of that discourse for pastoral exhortation. One thing distinguishing the New Testament’s morality from that of classical philosophy is its apocalypticism. The New Testament’s various dualisms—light and dark, Spirit and flesh, and others—all step forth from an apocalyptic background. The pastoral problem of passion and desire is, accordingly, not just a cosmological problem or moral problem, but a historical problem—the problem of exchanging one historical mode of existence for another, all in the shadow of the turning of the ages in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus. Slavery to passion and desire is thus not simply attachment to the lower elements of the universe; it is bondage to the fallen, old aeon. Freedom is not only a conversion of the self toward what is higher but is also a stepping into what is newer. It is freedom from the old self, mired in the pre-eschatological world, and the freedom of the new self, born into the new world of God’s new creation. It is both release from the old, experienced concretely as the pull of passion and 93

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

desire, and a participation in the new. The moral task of the New Testament is to effect the movement from the old aeon to the new aeon. The other main thing that distinguishes the New Testament from classical moral philosophy has to do with the relation of slavery to ability. Because for Greco-Roman philosophers freedom and slavery are about our relation to what is higher and lower (in ourselves and in the cosmos), what is required to effect a conversion from the lower to the higher is resolve—the person must turn away from sensual pleasure and passion and desire and turn toward knowledge and virtue. But for the New Testament and its apocalypticism, more is required. We must indeed turn ourselves; however, our turning is possible only because God has already brought about a turn of the ages in the crucifixion and resurrection of Jesus, an event that is simultaneously revelation and grace. God has already closed the book on the old aeon. That is why Christian disciples may now turn away from the old self and the old aeon and toward the new. Additionally, that is why for the New Testament the solution to our problem is not only wisdom and virtue but also possession of God’s Spirit. It is not enough to practice virtue and pursue wisdom; we must participate in the new aeon by a sharing in the Spirit, which is the power of the new aeon effective in disciples. It is important to note, however, that the relation of old to new is not one of simple opposition. Although the world is a central symbol of the old, sinful aeon, it retains its Old Testament meaning: it is the object of God’s creative power and the site of God’s grace. The flesh symbolizes our weakness in the face of sin, but it is also the home of the Logos. So, the New Testament shows us, to a far greater degree than does Greco-Roman philosophy, the ambivalence of all created things, including passion and desire. As a moral category,

94

THE NEW TESTAMENT AND SOME JEWISH ANTECEDENTS

passion and desire are, as we have seen, quite problematic in the New Testament. But as a christological category, we are called to share in the suffering—the passion—of Christ. Desire is frequently given a negative connotation, but Paul could also desire to depart and be with Christ, and the New Testament commends those who desire to become bishop. There is, in other words, good passion and bad passion, good desire and bad desire, just as the world and the flesh are simultaneously the good creation of God but also symbols of sin. Christian theology, accordingly, necessarily moves around two foci: the doctrine of creation and apocalypticism. The ambivalence of created things and the tensed relationship between creation and apocalyptic means that Christian ethics must be two things at once: an ethics of transcendence and of participation. Disciples are summoned to transcend the fallen world and the flesh. This gives us the negative meaning of freedom: freedom from passion and desire that attach us to the old aeon. The ethics of transcendence requires an athletic striving to turn away from the old self and to embrace the new self. But, transcendence is not world abandonment. On the contrary, because disciples are creatures, they remain a part of the created world—participation in the world is part of what it means to be human. But participation is as well a summons; disciples are called to cooperate with God in the task of reconciling the world. What, then, did the New Testament bequeath to patristic theology? For one thing, the vocabulary of passion, desire, slavery, and freedom shared with Greco-Roman moral philosophy. For another, a conviction about the ambivalence of passion, desire, and all created things. Third, an apocalyptic framework within which to think more profoundly about passion and desire. Finally, an insistence that freedom from passion and desire and the eschatological freedom of the children of God are possible only because of God’s revelatory and gracious intervention into history. 95

4

Patristic Theology

Early Christian thought was conflicted about emotion. From the New Testament, Jewish literature, and Hellenistic moral philosophy came the conviction that the fundamental ethical problem facing humankind is passion and desire. To be sure, there were other concerns: baptismal liturgies show us that there was still a residual concern about demonic possession,1 and there was, as always, a sense that the social world remained a poor image of the kingdom of God. But early Christian writers were especially sensitive to the obstacle that the passions posed to spiritual perfection. At the same time, what was emerging as the mainstream voice of Christian thought was repelled by Gnostic cosmology and what some took to be its disdain for the body and the rest of creation. In response, numerous Christian thinkers proclaimed the body’s goodness. So, when the 1. Leonel L. Mitchell, “Baptismal Rite in Chrysostom,” Anglican Theological Review 43, no. 4 (1961): 399–400; idem, “Shape of the Baptismal Liturgy,” Anglican Theological Review 47, no. 4 (1965): 410–12; Cyril of Jerusalem, Catechetical Lectures, Prolog, 9, in The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem: Vol. 1, trans. Leo P. McCauley, S.J., and Anthony Stephenson, The Fathers of the Church 61 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1969), 77.

97

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

looming threat seemed to be Gnostic theology, Christians responded with affirmations of the body; when attention shifted to the ethical problem of the passions, these same thinkers endorsed ascetic discipline. The early church thus left to subsequent centuries a legacy of ambiguity rooted in the tensed relationship between the doctrines of creation and sin, resulting in an uncertain and at times confusing theology of the passions. In this chapter I will survey the thoughts of a few representative thinkers of early Christianity, preparing the way in chapter 4 for a more detailed examination of Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine. Affirmation of the Body in the Thought of Irenaeus and Tertullian One index of the Christian tradition’s ambivalence about emotion is the tension between its commitment to ascetic practices and its affirmations of corporeality. We’ll start with the affirmation of corporeality—of the goodness of the body and the material world. Christian discourse about the passions is part of a larger discourse about the status of the body and therefore of the created world, for it was a commonplace of ancient philosophy that emotion, passion, and desire result from the soul’s embodied condition. But it was just this condition of embodiment that was debated in the second century, with Marcion (c. ad 144) and Gnostic theologies arguing against, and Irenaeus (c. ad 177) and Tertullian (c. ad 200) arguing for, humankind’s essential corporeality. One stage on which this debate was enacted was the flesh of Jesus Christ; arguments about Christ’s flesh encoded larger debates about the body and the world. Marcion and at least some varieties of Gnosticism denied the incarnation, that is, they denied that Jesus Christ was a corporeal being. Unfortunately, given the paucity of primary sources, it is not always easy to know just what they did believe, but Irenaeus and Tertullian certainly understood them to be 98

PATRISTIC THEOLOGY

denying the incarnation. Irenaeus’s response to Gnostic theologies was to point to Jesus’ hunger, grief, and blood as proofs of his fleshly humanity.2 He also offered a soteriological argument: Christ had to be fully human in order to be the founder of a new human race, as Adam was the founder of original humanity.3 Arguments about Christ’s humanity encoded ethical and eschatological contentions, for one thing at stake in the debate with Gnosticism was the ethical status of the body and the prospects for its salvation. If, as some Gnostics taught, Christ was a spiritual being and not at all corporeal, then only the spirit and not the body could be saved. Opposing this, Irenaeus deduced the salvation of the flesh from Christ’s existence in the flesh. Indeed, it was precisely because flesh can be saved that the Son of God became flesh.4 Irenaeus here was asserting Paul’s teaching that the human body can, through resurrection, participate in salvation. This teaching stood in contrast to most Greco-Roman philosophies and at least some Gnostic views, according to which, upon death, only the highest part of the human soul (typically understood as mind or reason or spirit) could ascend to the divine realm, leaving behind the body and the extra-rational portion of the soul.5 Irenaeus contested these views by deducing the 2. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.22.2, in St. Irenaeus of Lyons: Against the Heresies Book 3, trans. Dominic J. Unger, O.F.M. Cap., and M. C. Steenberg, Ancient Christian Writers 64 (New York: Paulist, 2012), 103–4 (hereafter AH3). Tertullian went out of his way to emphasize not only that Christ was a being of flesh but also that his flesh was exactly like our flesh and that it was not a special sort of spiritual flesh. See Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, 9, in Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, eds., The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers down to A.D. 325, 9 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 3:530 (hereafter ANF). 3. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 3.22.1; 3.22.3 (AH3, 103; 104). 4. Ibid., 5.14.1 (ANF, 1:541). 5. See Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 1.21.5, in St. Irenaeus of Lyons: Against the Heresies Book 1, trans. Dominic J. Unger, O.F.M. Cap. and John J. Dillon, Ancient Christian Writers 55 (New York: Paulist Press, 1992), 79–80 (hereafter AH1), on the Gnostic belief that, upon death, the inner person invisibly ascends on high, while the body is left among created things and the soul goes to be with the demiurge. In Against Marcion, 1.24 (ANF, 3:289–90) Tertullian complained that Marcion affirmed salvation only of the soul and not of the body.

99

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

salvation of the body from the Word’s incarnation in the flesh and by asserting that the object of Christ’s salvation is flesh-and-blood humanity created from dust.6 Tertullian argued similarly against Marcion, who, he claimed, held the flesh to be unclean and thus unworthy of the Son of God. In response, Tertullian argued that the flesh as well as spirit is saved,7 is worthy of being incarnationally united with God, and is a fit instrument of salvation.8 He further inferred the resurrection of our bodies from the resurrection of Christ’s body.9 Answering the Gnostic emphasis on spirit led Irenaeus and Tertullian to emphasize the importance of the sacraments and other practices. Consider Irenaeus’s remarks on the Eucharist. Annoyed with the Gnostics for denying that Christ’s blood effected salvation, he denounced them for denying that in the Eucharist we share in Christ’s body and blood. On the contrary, he averred, in receiving the physical bread and the cup of communion we receive Christ’s body and blood.10 By receiving his body and blood, our flesh receives eternal life and we participate in Christ’s incarnated flesh and blood.11 Tertullian likewise argued that sacraments affect the soul through bodily practices such as baptismal anointing and receiving the sign of the cross.12 Irenaeus and Tertullian were asserting, in effect, that Gnostics had overspiritualized the instruments of salvation, both Christ’s historical body and his eucharistic body. Against this

6. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.7.1; 5.14.2 (ANF, 1:532–33; 1:541). See also Tertullian, Against Marcion, 1.24 (ANF, 3:289–90). 7. Tertullian, On the Flesh of Christ, 4 (ANF, 3:524). I include Tertullian’s responses to Marcion’s theology, even though Marcion was not a Gnostic Christian, since Tertullian objected to Marcion for the same reason that he objected to Gnosticism. 8. Ibid., 5 (ANF, 3:525). 9. Ibid., 1 (ANF, 3:521). 10. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, 5.2.2 (ANF, 1:528). 11. Ibid., 5.2.3 (ANF, 1:528). 12. Tertullian, On The Resurrection of the Flesh, 8 (ANF, 3:551).

100

PATRISTIC THEOLOGY

soteriology, they portrayed the sacraments as necessary instruments of salvation. In summary, the conflict between Gnostic theology and emerging orthodox theology was waged on many soteriological fronts. One was the incarnation; another was the necessity and efficacy of the sacraments; yet another was the salvation of the body. What resulted from this conflict was a deep and persistent affirmation of the material world and especially of the human body as a reality created by God and capable of salvation. The Ascetic Impulse in Early Christianity Affirmation of the material world and the body represent just one side of the Christian community’s complex intellectual and ethical relationship to the world and the body. Another, contrary side is revealed by Christianity’s ascetic impulse, which was unusually powerful in the patristic era but which has never lost its grip on Christian thought and practice. Christian Gnostic Theology Early Christian Gnostic theology may have lain outside the mainstream of Christianity, but its asceticism definitely overlapped with the ethos of early Christianity. Since a considerable number of early Christians had some affinity with Gnostic theology, we can get a good sense of early Christian commitment to asceticism by looking at its Gnostic form. Gnostic theology fits within the domain of ancient philosophies of emanation.13 Neoplatonism has given us the classical version of 13. This idea of emanation distinguishes Gnosticism from Manichaeism. The latter is a metaphysical dualism, with matter and spirit being eternal principles without beginning. For Gnostics and other believers in emanation, matter is not eternal, but instead has an origin and bears a metaphysical relationship to the primordial unity. Gnostics were thus metaphysical monists, holding that there is one sort of reality and that the world of daily experience is

101

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

this sort of thought, but there were other varieties. What they all have in common is the view that being is one before it is many. The primordial state of being is unity; it then undergoes differentiation. The resulting levels of differentiated reality—the higher ones more spiritual, the lower ones more corporeal—are increasingly fractured and remote from the primordial unity. The spiritual levels of this reality constitute the pleroma; everyday material substance is the lowest, most differentiated, pluralistic level of being and is hence the furthest removed from the original unity of being. Humankind’s predicament is that we find ourselves embedded in the differentiated world of matter and long for reunion with the primordial unity. Salvation is therefore a movement from differentiation to unity, from the world of matter to the highest, most spiritual level of being. This journey has a cognitive dimension (discovering the truth about being and our alienation from it) and an ethical dimension (distancing ourselves from anything that binds us to the world of matter). Although our spirits are incorporeal, we are attracted to the world of matter and must overcome this attraction in order to realize our union with the primordial unity. Gnostic cosmology meant that this world is not our natural home or destiny. The Old Testament’s comfort with this world, its somehow, even if remotely, grounded in that reality. Further, at least some Gnostics adopted Plato’s view that the cosmos was created by a demiurge, strengthening the notion that it is not eternal but instead has a beginning. Seeing Gnosticism within the context of emanationist philosophy helps us to get past a common stereotype, namely that Gnostics of all sorts saw the material world as implacably and intractably evil. Some may have seen it thus; however, others simply shared the view, common in the ancient world and among Christians like Paul, that the material world poses a spiritual problem and that we must strive for ethical freedom from it. See John D. Turner, “The Gnostic Threefold Path to Enlightenment: The Ascent of Mind and the Descent of Wisdom,” Novum Testamentum 22, no. 4 (1980): 324–51, esp. 332–33; C. J. de Vogel, “On the Neoplatonic Character of Platonism and the Platonic Character of Neoplatonism,” Mind, New Series 62 (1953): 48–49; and Joseph Katz, “Plotinus and the Gnostics,” Journal of the History of Ideas 15, no. 2 (1954): 289–98 for salutary efforts to locate Gnosticism within the framework of the Platonic tradition of emanation. See also J. Woodrow McCree, “Valentinus and the Theology of Grace,” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 55, no. 1–2 (2001): 143–44, for a positive assessment of Valentinus’s theology.

102

PATRISTIC THEOLOGY

conviction that human beings are at home in this world, is the antithesis of Gnosticism, which is instead characterized by a sense of longing, a desire to be reunited with something lost. The world, then, is not so much evil (as in the Manichaean view) as it is foreign to the human spirit and ethically problematic. Humankind’s task is to achieve ethical separation from the world of matter. We do so by avoiding passion and practicing self-control.14 Gnostic anxiety about passion is reflected in its basic myth, the fall of Sophia, one of the beings populating the pleroma. Although there are many versions of this myth, Christian Gnostics typically traced the origin of suffering and of the physical universe itself to Sophia’s becoming filled with passion. The result of passion (with complicated and variegated intermediate steps) was the begetting of the demiurge, the creator of the physical universe, and thus of human problems.15 For Gnostics, our experience of passion is the temporal reflection of Sophia’s primordial eternal fall into passion. Mired in the material world, human spirit is bound to the same passions that primordially and tragically resulted in the material world and the suffering in it. Cosmology thus explains why the passions are problematic: not only do they bind us to the material world, but they divide the human person and thus illustrate our state of alienation from the primordial unity.16 Salvation therefore is in large measure liberation from these 14. See Michael Allen Williams, Rethinking “Gnosticism”: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), for an extraordinarily helpful analysis of Gnostic views of the body and asceticism. Williams rightly warns against the assumption that we can infer Gnostic practices from Gnostic statements about the body (or statements about the body attributed to Gnostics). In other words, Gnostic Christians for the most part practiced a moderate form of ascetic self-control. Critics like Irenaeus who accused the Gnostics of harboring an astonishing hatred of the body cannot be taken at face value. 15. J. Zandee, “Gnostic Ideas on the Fall and Salvation,” Numen 11, no. 1 (1964): 40. 16. McCree, “Valentinus and the Theology of Grace,” 149. See also Kathleen E. Corley, “Salome and Jesus at Table in the Gospel of Thomas,” Semeia 86 (1999): 91, who argues that “In the context of Christian Gnostic soteriology . . . the notion of being ‘undivided’ or ‘whole’ reflects a return to a primordial unity. The first human (Adam) was neither male nor female, but was rather androgynous. . . . Humanity was then secondarily ‘divided’ into male and female, this

103

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

divisive, fragmenting passions.17 To become free from the passions is to be free from slavery to the material world born of passion and to achieve unity with the primordial unity. The quest to overcome the passions led Gnostics into ascetic selfcontrol, although reports give us a mixed picture. According to Clement of Alexandria, followers of Basilides (second century) discouraged marriage while Valentinians approved of it and believed in “spiritual” intercourse.18 Valentinians held that marital intercourse mirrors the generative emergence of the pleroma from the original unity; they accordingly honored marital intercourse if practiced without passion,19 a view similar to Paul’s in 1 Corinthians 7. Because intercourse within marriage reflects the spiritual reality of the pleroma, it was a proleptic means of achieving re-union with the primordial unity.20 So, while passion fragments the human person, mirroring the fall of Sophia that results in the differentiated world of matter, marriage and marital intercourse (if practiced without passion) mirrors the unity of the pleroma and provides a measure of realized eschatology.21 Christian Gnostic theology was too much at odds with Christianity’s Old Testament heritage to become a majority voice division being the reason for the current human condition. In the process of Gnostic salvation, then, one returns to this primordial state, being neither male nor female.” 17. Zandee, “Gnostic Ideas,” 59. 18. Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 3.1.1; 3.4.29, in Stromateis: Books One to Three, trans. John Ferguson, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 85 (Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1991), 256, 274. 19. April D. De Conick, “The Great Mystery of Marriage Sex and Conception in Ancient Valentinian Traditions,” Vigiliae Christianae 57, no. 3 (2003): 333–34. 20. Gilles Quispel, “The Original Doctrine of Valentinus the Gnostic,” Vigiliae Christianae 50, no. 4 (1996): 335, argues that for Valentinians, “Love is not to be (merely) condoned, but is valued in its own right, because it achieves wholeness and unites the opposites. Intercourse is a spiritual experience, yes, but for pneumatics only. As such it symbolizes the wholeness and fullness of the aeons, couples of males and females, separate but equal, compensatory of each other.” 21. See Adela Yarbro Collins, “The Female Body as Social Space in 1 Timothy,” New Testament Studies 57, no. 2 (2011): 173, for further discussion about the way in which the relation of human reason to passion is mirrored in Gnostic cosmology.

104

PATRISTIC THEOLOGY

in the church; the emerging catholic church could never reconcile itself to Gnostic cosmology and to Gnostic resistance to ecclesiastical authority. Nonetheless, Christian Gnostic theology represents an important variation on early Christian views of emotion and of humankind’s relation to the body. Christian Gnosticism was thus not a distortion of pure Christian teaching but instead lay somewhere between the center and the edge of a continuum, with its ethics being no more radical than the ascetic mainstream of patristic theology. Christian Monasticism Although catholic Christianity’s cosmology differed from that of Gnostic Christians, the mainstream church was no less anxious about humankind’s ethical relationship with passion and desire.22 The most salient lode of concern is found in monastic literature. Athanasius’s Life of Anthony (written c. ad 360) gives us an extreme but good example of the lengths to which some early Christians sought freedom from passion and desire. The protagonist, Anthony, undertook the life of solitary monasticism. Beset by the devil’s temptations, Anthony applied himself all the more rigorously to monastic discipline (askēsis). He more and more bruised his body and brought it under subjection. He slept on the ground and often forced himself to forgo sleep. He ate only once each day, sometimes 22. See the comments of Brooks Otis: “What we find if we penetrate beneath the thought of this whole era is an almost irreconcilable conflict between the biblical doctrine of creation and a Greek-Platonic dualism. This is accompanied and paralleled by a similar conflict between the biblical and the Greek views of sin. In fact, both conflicts are at bottom identical. Christians in the second century had rejected the Gnostic attack on creator and creation, and had in rebuttal asserted both the goodness of the Creator and the creation. But their Platonism nonetheless persisted in their attempts to explain the material creation as either a kind of immaturity (Irenaeus) or a penal and pedagogical necessity (Origen). This was fundamentally because they equated sin (or in Origen the consequence of sin) with bodily passion, and salvation or theosis with the unpassioned or impassible life. Had they conceived of sin as a really spiritual phenomenon they would have experienced much less difficulty either in explaining the angelic Fall or in dissociating evil from the body or its normal passions.” Otis, “Cappadocian Thought as a Coherent System,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 12 (1958): 114.

105

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

skipping a day or two, and when he did eat it was only bread, salt, and water. Such discipline was required because, as he related, the soul’s sinews are strong whenever the body’s pleasures are weak.23 After many years of such discipline, he finally attained a state of apathy: he felt neither grief nor pleasure; he neither laughed nor was dejected; he was not troubled and did not rejoice. Being free of these passions, he was guided only by reason and lived according to nature.24 In this state of perfection, he attended to bodily needs only as necessary and with shame, preferring to dwell on the intellectual element of the soul.25 It is true that later monastic movements moderated Anthony’s harsh treatment of the body; later monastic leaders such as Benedict of Nursia found it salutary to tone down the ascetic demands. Benedict’s Rule, for instance, stipulated two meals each day for monks, with at least two prepared dishes at each meal. Benedictine monks also got plenty of sleep, even if it was interrupted by worship in the middle of the night.26 Still, although he is not exactly representative or normative, there is something revealing about St. Anthony, who, Athanasius said, experienced a sense of shame when he compared his bodily state to his contemplation of the intellectual part of the soul and who attended to bodily functions such as eating and sleeping as matters of mere necessity.27 He provides us a telling illustration of the ways in which philosophical ideals swirled about in the streams of early Christian thought and practice. In his ascetic practices, Anthony was taking literally Paul’s admonition about 23. Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 7, in St. Athanasius, The Life of Saint Anthony, trans. Robert T. Meyer, Ancient Christian Writers 10 (New York: Newman Press, 1978), 24–25 (hereafter LSA). 24. Ibid., 14 (LSA, 32–33). 25. Ibid., 45 (LSA, 57–58). 26. The Rule of Saint Benedict, ed. Cardinal Gasquet, The Medieval Library (New York: Cooper Square, 1966), 73 (ch. 39), and 36 (ch. 8). 27. Athanasius, Life of Anthony, 45 (LSA, 57–58).

106

PATRISTIC THEOLOGY

keeping the body in subjection (1 Cor. 9:25-27); in his goal of attaining apathy and living strictly according to the dictates of reason and nature, he resembles the Stoic sage. In his embarrassment with the body, he even approaches the orthodox caricature of Gnostic theology. In Anthony, the moral ideals of classical philosophy and of the Christian tradition comfortably cohabit. Anthony’s mode of discipline was unquestionably extreme but its goal—detachment from passion and desire—was not. Take Gregory of Nyssa’s Life of Macrina, for instance. Gregory narrated Macrina’s dispassionate rationality at length. Macrina was not overtaken by grief when her brother met an untimely death. On the contrary, so steady was her emotional state that she was able to help her mother resist her own natural, grieving impulses and thus to avoid the customary sorrowful lamenting and the rending of clothes.28 Embarking on a life of household monasticism, Macrina, her mother, and the servants lived in imitation of the angels and were as removed from earthly matters as souls released by death from bodies. Night and day they devoted themselves to prayer and hymns, creating a life on the verge of pure spirituality, no longer weighed down by the body, falling short of the angelic life only because they still dwelt in bodies and needed sense organs.29 At length Macrina fell mortally ill; despite great suffering, her mind was undisturbed and she had no communion with the life of the flesh.30 Although extreme in their devotion and practices, people such as Anthony and Macrina were honored because their lives expressed a persistent aspect of the Christian faith, namely the denial of the flesh and victory over emotion. Repudiated in its Gnostic form, this aspect 28. Gregory of Nyssa, Life of Macrina, 970a, in Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Ascetical Works, trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 58 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 169–70 (hereafter AW). 29. Ibid., 970b-972b (AW, 170–71). 30. Ibid., 984a (AW, 179).

107

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

survived in the mainstream church in the various forms of heroic asceticism. Views of Celibacy and Marriage Both Anthony’s desert-style monasticism and Macrina’s more genteel household monasticism reveal the importance of the ideal of freedom from the passions and of ascetic practices as the means of achieving this freedom. Although comparatively few early Christians took up the monastic life, monastic freedom from passion found widespread commitment as an ideal. The value of celibacy and virginity was thus becoming normative even outside the monastic tradition. Irenaeus’s complaint about Tatian bears witness to the encratite movement (“encratism” coming from the Greek word enkrateia, self-control), with its condemnation of marriage.31 Gnostics like Basilides were not alone in discouraging marriage; extraordinary asceticism was not restricted to a small group on the fringe. On the contrary, secondcentury Christian literature shows us that ascetic themes found a welcome audience outside the confines of Gnosticism, monastic communities, and zealots like the encratites. As noted in chapter 2, the Acts of Paul and Thecla contains some rather ascetically oriented beatitudes for those who exercise self-control and for married Christians who keep the flesh chaste.32 Thecla embodies these practices, with her resolution to remain a virgin even though she is betrothed. One passage even seems to make one’s future resurrection depend on maintaining celibacy.33 The Acts of John likewise narrates the story of Drusiana, who, although married, did not engage in intercourse with her husband for the sake of greater piety, risking 31. Irenaeus, Against Heresies 1.28 (ANF, 1:353). 32. “The Acts of Thecla,” 5, in Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 114. 33. “The Acts of Thecla,” 12, in ibid., 116.

108

PATRISTIC THEOLOGY

death to avoid the pollution of intercourse.34 The communities that preserved various traditions about the apostle Thomas produced the work known as Thomas the Contender, which derides those who engage in sexual intercourse and who are thus in the grip of the body’s desires and powers. Salvation, according to this document, is attained by leaving behind the sufferings and passions of the body. 35 One might argue that documents such as the Acts of Paul and Thecla do not represent mainstream Christian thought; however, their evident popularity argues otherwise.36 Besides, catholic writers were just as committed to ascetic ideals.37 Justin Martyr insisted that Christians marry only for procreation and Menucius Felix that only one marriage in a lifetime is appropriate for Christians.38 With the first marriage presumably fulfilling the procreational rationale for marriage, the only conceivable reason for marriage after a spouse’s death would be a deplorable lack of sexual restraint. As extreme as Justin and Menucius may seem to us, the consummate representative of Christian apprehension about marriage was Jerome (c. 340–420), who notably argued that procreation was introduced after the first sin and the expulsion from paradise. Virginity is thus the natural state; marriage came into practice only in the state of guilt.39 From the 34. “The Acts of John,” 63, in ibid., 97. 35. The Book of Thomas the Contender in The Nag Hammadi Library (New York: Harper & Row, 1977), 188–94. 36. Stephen J. Davis, Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), shows how widespread ascetically oriented piety was in the patristic period. 37. For a fine account of early Christian controversies about marriage and asceticism, see David G. Hunter, Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy, Oxford Early Christian Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). 38. Justin Martyr, First Apology, 29, in St. Justin Martyr, The First and Second Apologies, trans. Leslie William Barnard, Ancient Christian Writers, no. 56 (New York: Paulist, 1997), 42–43; and Menucius Felix, Octavius 31.5, in Tertullian: Apologetical Works and Minucius Felix: Octavius, trans. Rudolph Arbesmann, O.S.A., Sister Emily Joseph Daly, C.S.J., and Edwin A. Quain, S.J., Fathers of the Church, vol. 10 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1950), 388. 39. Jerome, Letter 22, 19, in The Letters of St Jerome: Vol. 1, trans. Charles Christopher Mierow, Ancient Christian Writers 33 (New York: Newman Press, 1963), 150–51.

109

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

words of 1 Corinthians 7:1 (“It is good for a man not to touch a woman”) Jerome concluded that it must be bad to touch a woman. Further, since we cannot pray while engaged in sexual intercourse, sexual activity renders us unable to obey Paul’s command to pray without ceasing; abstention from intercourse is accordingly God’s will within marriage.40 He undertook a vigorous defense of Mary’s perpetual virginity, expressing shock at the very idea that Mary, the temple of the Lord’s body and the sanctuary of the Holy Spirit, could have been defiled by intercourse, either before or after the birth of Jesus.41 He insisted that Joseph was likewise a virgin his entire life.42 Relying on Paul’s argument for the superiority of virginity to marriage in 1 Corinthians 7, Jerome argued in great detail for the debilitating effects of marriage on true spirituality43 and about the advantages of menopausal married women imitating virginal chastity by abstaining from intercourse.44 The monastic tradition and discourse about celibacy and marriage reveal that Christian protests about the metaphysical goodness of the body and the material world are only half of the story. They travel uneasily together with ethical concerns about the body and its passions and practices such as marriage. Christian attitudes toward the body and its passions, then, were ambivalent. The doctrine of creation means that body and, by implication, emotion, passion, and desire are good; the incarnation and soteriology imply the salvation of the body. At the same time, there was an intense suspicion of

40. Jerome, Against Jovinian, 1.7, in Jerome: Letters and Select Works, vol. 6 in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, eds., A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Second Series, 14 vols. (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1892), 6:351. 41. Jerome, The Perpetual Virginity of Blessed Mary, 16, in Saint Jerome: Dogmatical and Polemical Works, trans. John N. Hritzu, The Fathers of the Church, vol. 53 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1965), 34–35 (hereafter DPW). 42. Ibid., 19 (DPW, 39). 43. Ibid., 20 (DPW, 39–42). 44. Ibid., 21 (DPW, 42).

110

PATRISTIC THEOLOGY

the passions and practices, like marriage, that seemed ineluctably connected with the passions. This suspicion impelled many Christians past the idea of moderation into an embrace of rigorous asceticism. The ascetic ideal thus became normative in early Christianity—not in the sense that everyone practiced it, but in the sense that it was a cultural ideal that many honored as an ideal. Good Passions and Desires As harshly as early Christian writers considered emotion, passion, and desire, they acknowledged another dimension to them. Origen (185–c. 254), for one, appealed to Seneca’s notion of prepassion to interpret certain troublesome Scriptures, such as Ephesians 4:26 (“Be angry and do not sin”).45 Puzzling over how the Bible could command anger, he observed that sometimes anger is something chosen (proairetikon), as when we have an appetite for revenge. But sometimes anger is something involuntary (aproaireton), a propatheia, which, under certain irritating conditions, can become anger in the first sense—something chosen. Anger as an unchosen propatheia is a “confused movement [klonos] and shaking [seismos] of the soul,” but it is not a sin.46 So, although passions such as anger (in the sense of something chosen) render us culpable, a “confused movement” of the soul—a propatheia—does not count as a sin. Such propatheiai are, it seems, an inevitable part of human experience. The critical thing for those who would advance in the Christian life is to withhold assent to them—to avoid dwelling on the “confused 45. See Richard A. Layton, “Propatheia: Origen and Didymus on the Origin of the Passions,” Vigiliae Christianae 54, no. 3 (2000): 262–82. 46. Origen, “Exegetica in Psalmos,” in J. -P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, 161 vols. (Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1857), vol. 12, cols. 1141d–1144b. Caution must be exercised in using these Exegetica since some writings of Evagrius of Pontus are mixed together with those of Origen. See Richard H. Bell, Provoked to Jealousy: The Origin and Purpose of the Jealousy Motif in Romans 9-11, Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen Zum Neuen Testament, 2e. Reihe, Band 63 (Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr [Paul Siebeck], 1994), 30n155.

111

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

movement” and thus transform it into a clear passion. For Origen as for Stoics, it is assent that develops a prepassion into a passion. 47 In a similar vein, Origen was worried by Matthew’s description of Jesus as grieved while in the garden of Gethsemane.48 Grief (lupē) was one of the principal negative passions enumerated by the Stoics, so its being attributed to Jesus was problematic. He found a resolution of his hermeneutical problem by emphasizing that, according to Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus began to be grieved. Although in its original context this locution likely had no special meaning, Origen found in it an important point: Jesus experienced the prepassionate beginnings of grief, but did not allow them to flower into actual grief. Origen thus employed the Stoic concept of propatheia to solve some exegetical difficulties. His use of this concept was recognized by others—Jerome made direct and positive reference to this concept, finding in it a useful tool for pastoral advice.49 Origen’s and others’ use of this concept shows us that the rather negative view of the passions articulated by patristic theologians was qualified by their recognition of premoral motions within the soul, which, though troublesome and potentially sinful, were not in themselves sin. Where Origen was willing to use Stoic ideas for Christian purposes, Lactantius (third century) adamantly opposed the Stoic notion of apatheia and thus endorsed a very positive view of the passions and emotions. To begin with, Lactantius refused to consider mercy (misericordia), desire (cupiditas), and fear (metus) as diseases of the soul in the manner of Stoicism. Taking up an Aristotelian

47. Layton, “Propatheia,” 267. 48. Ibid., 267–69. Origen was not alone in his concern. For a discussion of patristic and medieval writers who sought to come to terms with this difficult episode in the Gospels, see Kevin Madigan, “Ancient and High-Medieval Interpretations of Jesus in Gethsemane: Some Reflections on Tradition and Continuity in Christian Thought,” Harvard Theological Review 88, no. 1 (1995): 157–73. 49. See, for example, section 9 of Letter 79, Jerome: Letters and Select Works, 6:167.

112

PATRISTIC THEOLOGY

perspective, he argued that these goods indeed have their limits (fines) and that if they are stretched beyond their limits they become vices; however, this possibility does not diminish their intrinsic goodness. Additionally, it annoyed Lactantius that the Stoics sought to remove from the soul every affection (affectus) by whose impulses the soul is moved, an apparent reference to the Aristotelian opinion that all action finds its beginning in appetite. Lactantius directly challenged the Stoic view by identifying the fundamental affections responsible for movement with the four principal passions enumerated by Stoics: desire (cupiditas), joy (laetitia), fear (metus), and sorrow (moestitia). Without these affects, the argument seems to be, the soul would have no movement and hence no life.50 For Lactantius, these affections are not the result of choice (voluntaria), but are instead natural (naturalia), in contrast to the Stoic view that the passions are contrary to nature. The Stoics are therefore crazy (furiosi) for wishing to remove these affections instead of moderating (temperare) them. This is like wanting to remove poison from snakes and gentleness from cattle. 51 Lactantius had another argument for the affections: since virtue relates to affections such as anger, Stoic therapy that would remove anger would have the effect of removing virtue also. Virtue, in other words, lies in the act of restraining an immoderate affection and keeping it within appropriate bounds; there is no victor without an adversary. Thus anger (ira), lust (libido), and desire (cupiditas) are not in themselves evil, but become vice only when experienced excessively.52 To be sure, anger, lust, and desire can drive us into

50. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, 6.14, in Lactantius, The Divine Institutes: Books I–VII, trans. Sister Mary Francis McDonald, O.P., The Fathers of the Church, vol. 49 (Washington, DC, Catholic University of America Press, 1964), 432–34 (hereafter DI). The Latin text can be found in L. Caeli Firmiani Lactanti Opera Omnia, vol. 10 of Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (Vindobonae: F. Tempsky, 1890). Sections 14–19 of book 6 are on pages 534–55. 51. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, 6.15 (DI, 434–35). 52. Ibid., 6.15 (DI, 435–37).

113

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

crime. But all we need do is observe the limits to these affections that God has instituted and use them for their ordained purposes: desire, for providing us with the necessities of life; lust, for procreation; anger, for the correction of children.53 Except for its theistic elements, this is an Aristotelian account of virtue and articulates a fundamental point: for Lactantius, as for Aristotle, humans are not simply rational beings; the affections are an essential element of our nature. Of course, Aristotle believed that there is an important sense in which mind, without passion and desire, is our true essence, but Lactantius here departed from Aristotle. The main point is that the Stoic picture of humans as beings characterized by logos, free from passions, was, for Lactantius, a distortion of human nature. Lactantius was, accordingly, willing to regard the affections as a natural fruitfulness or richness (ubertas) of the mind, like a field abounding with growth. Without moral training, the mind is like a field abounding with weeds; with cultivation, the vicious weeds become virtues.54 Lactantius was particularly struck by the fact that, whereas Stoics identified a positive emotion corresponding to three of the principal passions (caution in place of fear, rational wish instead of desire, and joy in the place of pleasure), they had no positive emotion corresponding to grief (lupē). Since for Stoics grief was an irrational motion in the presence of something experienced as evil, and since the Stoic sage knew that all things were fated and hence nothing was evil, nothing was experienced as evil (except vice) and hence there was no need for a rational emotion in response to something evil. Lactantius, however, regarded this theory incredulously: “Who can fail to be grieved if one’s country is exhausted by pestilence or overthrown by enemies or oppressed by tyrants?” We inevitably grieve in the presence of evil.55 53. Ibid., 6.19 (DI, 449). 54. Ibid., 6.15 (DI, 435).

114

PATRISTIC THEOLOGY

As noted, Lactantius employed an Aristotelian perspective in order to refute Stoic principles; however, he had no interest in Aristotle’s idea of the mean. For instance, the critical thing in joy is (for Lactantius) not exercising moderation but rejoicing in the right thing. Virtue is therefore a function of the circumstances, not of moderation: a small bit of joy may be a vice if we are rejoicing in the destruction of an enemy, whereas an excess of joy may be a virtue if we are rejoicing because a tyrant is overthrown. Joy, in other words, is in itself neither virtuous nor vicious—all depends on the circumstances, on the cause and object of joy. Joy does not become morally virtuous simply because it is exercised with moderation; it is not vicious solely because it is felt too much or too little. Of course, Aristotle had made the same point with his belief that the moral mean is relative, not absolute;56 Lactantius ignored Aristotle’s teaching on this point and placed the emphasis elsewhere: what determines virtue and vice is not moderation abstractly considered, but whether we allow our natural affections to lead us to what is right or to what is wrong. For example, the critical thing with libido is whether or not it is oriented toward a lawful object (legitimus). If it is oriented toward an unlawful object, no practice of moderation can be virtuous. If it is oriented toward the lawful object, it is without fault, even if engaged in violently (vehemens). Similarly, we are not diseased if we are moved by anger, desire, and lust. These affections are natural and therefore unavoidable—their impetus cannot be inhibited. However, it is a disease to be irascible (iracundus), i.e., to be angry toward those not deserving anger; to be desirous (cupidus), i.e., to desire what is not necessary; and to be licentious (libidinosus), i.e., to pursue what is

55. Ibid., 6.15 (DI, 436). 56. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2.8 (1108b-1109a), in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed. Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols., Bollingen Series 71.2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1750–51.

115

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

forbidden by law. Hence the object of moral training is to steer these affections in the proper direction, toward the proper object.57 Lactantius went so far as to argue that certain emotions regarded by the philosophers as vice were in fact virtues. One example is fear, one of the four principal vices in the Stoic system. Lactantius asserted that although Christians had overcome many fears inspired by persecution, such overcoming was grounded in the fear of God, which is, accordingly, the greatest virtue. Neither Stoic apatheia nor Aristotelian moderation is adequate to understanding the fear of God. Likewise, desire is not a vice when it is directed toward heavenly things. Neither lack of such desire nor a moderation of such desire is virtuous. At the same time, the philosophers esteemed frugality (parcimonia) as a virtue, but if it is used to gain worldly goods and is grounded in love of possession, how can it truly be a virtue? It is instead a virtue to part with material goods for the sake of kindness and justice.58 Our humanitas, therefore, accords with the affections and the Stoic goal of eliminating them would render us insensible (stupor), for it is the nature of the mind to be in motion. The Stoic goal of tranquility is literally impossible, because we cannot stop the mind from moving. As still water becomes unhealthy, so the unmoving mind becomes useless, since thinking itself is nothing but an agitation of the mind.59 Conclusion Early Christian thinking about passion and desire was determined by its twofold commitment to the doctrine of sin and the doctrine of creation. The doctrine of sin proclaims that our relationship to the world and to the body has been distorted. Although the body retains 57. Lactantius, The Divine Institutes, 6.16 (DI, 437–39). 58. Ibid., 6.17 (DI, 439–41). 59. Ibid., 6.17 (DI, 442).

116

PATRISTIC THEOLOGY

its created goodness, human sin renders our relationship to the body problematic, to say the least. The passions and desires thus constitute moral and spiritual problems. At the same time, the doctrine of creation commits the Christian church to an affirmation of the world and the body; attempts such as Marcion’s to denigrate them must be stoutly resisted. The tension inherent in the doctrines of creation and sin demands resolution. Early Christian writers attempted to resolve this tension by carefully delineating the doctrines of creation and sin and by seeking to offer coherent ways of thinking about the world. Resolution was sought as well in practice, especially in the various forms of ascetic practice. Ascetic practice, of the sort we find in Anthony and Macrina and advocated by theologians such as Jerome, is an attempt to achieve moral transcendence over and freedom from the world. This practice differs from belief in the spirit’s metaphysical transcendence over the world—the belief that the spirit is not truly a part of this universe. The doctrine of creation prevented early Christian writers from embracing a strong form of metaphysical transcendence such as we find in Christian Gnosticism; however, as we will see in the next chapter, they came to affirm a weaker form of metaphysical transcendence in the form of a dualism of soul and body. Christian thought has thus persistently succumbed to the temptation to translate the demand for moral transcendence of the sinful self into a form of metaphysical transcendence of soul over body, of intellect over passion and desire. This commitment to body-soul dualism in turn justified ascetic practice and expressed Christianity’s anxiety about the body and other earthly things. Although catholic Christian thought would never affirm that the body is evil in the manner of Marcion, the body’s association with Paul’s concept of the flesh and its connection with the passions made it a spiritual problem, even if,

117

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

as the example of Lactantius shows, there was a case to be made for the necessity of certain passions.

118

5

Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine

Having looked briefly at some general contours of early Christian thought we turn now to a more detailed study of Gregory of Nyssa’s and Augustine’s thoughts on passion and emotion. Gregory of Nyssa Mind and Body Gregory (born c. 334, died after 384) grounded anthropology in humankind’s status as the image of God,1 by virtue of which we are unique and possess a special status among creatures, for in Genesis 1 only the creation of human beings involves divine deliberation (“let us make. . .”).2 Our uniqueness lies in our possession of mind and 1. See W. H. C. Frend, “The Doctrine of Man in the Early Church: an Historical Approach,” Modern Churchman 45, no. 3 (1955): 218, for commentary on the connection, in patristic thought, between the image of God, the soul’s immortality, and human freedom. See also A.G. Hamman, L’homme, Image De Dieu: Essai D’une Anthropologie Chrétienne Dans L’église Des Cinq Premiers Siècles, Relais-Études (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1987), for a survey of teachings about the image of God in the patristic era. 2. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 3.1, in Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, Select

119

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

speech, which single us out as bearers of the divine image. Here we resemble God most intimately, for God is mind.3 As a result, we have an array of divine-like qualities, including, potentially, freedom from passion as God is free.4 Of course, our resemblance to God does not nullify our difference from God. Our status as image is itself a proof of that difference, for to be an image is to reflect, not to be, an original reality. More concretely, we are mortal and mutable and thus differ from God.5 Nonetheless, the human soul is special among created things. It partakes of creaturely attributes (above all, mutability) but also of divine attributes. In spite of our creaturely status, however, we are essentially incorporeal beings. As God’s image, we are, like God, essentially minds and therefore incorporeal. Gregory thus contended against materialistic philosophies in which the soul is a subtle form of matter.6 He likewise rejected the view that we are a microcosm, for it implies that we participate in both the material and the spiritual domains.7 For Gregory, our essence lies not in embodied existence but in our status as the image of God—in being a mind, in other words. Writings and Letters, vol. 5 in Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, ed., A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, 14 vols. (hereafter NPNF2) (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1893), 390. 3. Ibid., 5.2 (NPNF2, 5:391). See Michael Gass, “Eudaimonism and Theology in Stoic Accounts of Virtue,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 61, no. 1 (2000): 22, for a description of the Stoics’ version of the belief that it is by virtue of our reason that we resemble God. 4. Gregory of Nyssa, The Great Catechism, 5 (NPNF2, 5:479); and On the Making of Man, 16.10; 5.1 (NPNF2, 5:405; 5:391). Gerhart B. Ladner, “The Philosophical Anthropology of Saint Gregory of Nyssa,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 12 (1958): 63–64, notes that unlike some other Greek theologians, Gregory did not distinguish being created in God’s likeness and being created in God’s image. Theologians who made this distinction regarded the former as a latent perfection to be realized only eschatologically and saw the latter as the qualities with which humankind was originally endowed. For Gregory, however, humans existed in the full likeness of God from the beginning of creation. 5. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 16.4; 16.12 (NPNF2, 5:404; 5:405). 6. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul and Resurrection,” in Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Ascetical Works, trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, Fathers of the Church 58 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 208. 7. Gregory of Nyssa, On The Making of Man, 16.1 (NPNF2, 5:404).

120

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

Although, for Gregory, we are essentially minds, he acknowledged the obvious fact that our minds are united with bodies.8 As embodied mind, human being encompasses (following Aristotle) three forms or principles: biological life, sensation, and reason.9 We are thus rational beings that, by virtue of our union with the body, participate in biological life and sensation. If we are in fact embodied creatures, why did Gregory maintain that humans are essentially incorporeal? That we are essentially incorporeal mind and not embodied mind? It is because the mind (the rational part of the soul) is capable of existing apart from the body.10 We enjoy organic life and sensation by virtue of the body, but the rational part of the soul (which represents God’s image), being incorporeal, is not a part of the physical world.11 Although the soul in its embodied state is a unity of reason, sensation, and life (and not three different kinds of soul merely co-existing), the true and perfect soul is in fact the rational and incorporeal element—the mind—which mingles with material nature through the senses.12 Indeed, the living and sensitive elements are called soul only by their association with mind, which is the true soul. In their own nature they are not really soul but are instead “living powers.”13 8. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul,” 221. 9. J. Warren Smith, Passion and Paradise: Human and Divine Emotion in the Thought of Gregory of Nyssa (New York: Crossroad, 2004), argues that Gregory’s psychology is that of Aristotle (three powers of the soul—vegetative, sensitive, rational) not that of Plato (desire, emotion, and reason). “Like Nyssen, Aristotle divides these faculties along a hierarchy of creatures from plants . . . to human beings. . . . Thus both Nyssen and Aristotle divide the human soul according to a taxonomy that reflects its relationship to the souls of other living creatures. . . . [Further] by speaking of the soul as one divided into three distinct powers, Nyssen has achieved a way of speaking of the soul as having essential unity in contrast with the awkward Platonic language of different parts of the soul” (71). 10. In the dialogue “On the Soul,” Gregory’s sister Macrina states that the soul is without body (asōmaton) (227–28). For the Greek text, see “De Anima et Resurrectione,” in vol. 46 of J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, 161 vols. (Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1857), col. 69. 11. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul,” 220, 222. 12. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 14.2 (NPNF2, 5:403). 13. Ibid., 15.2 (NPNF2 5:403).

121

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

The

mind’s

incorporeality

has

one

important

ethical

consequence—the distinction between mind and emotion. In Gregory’s dialogue, “On the Soul and Resurrection,” Gregory’s sister Macrina offers several arguments to establish this distinction. First, she argues that whatever is foreign to God must be foreign to the human mind; since God has no passions, they cannot belong to the mind.14 Second, she asserts that Moses was free of desire and anger (thumos). Moses thus functions as a paradigm of rational freedom from desire and passion and of those who preserved the image of God in a pure state.15 Human nature is, accordingly, incorporeal mind alone without the passions. Passions appear in the soul because of its union with the body. This union creates the task of achieving ethical separation from the passions, thus living according to our essential nature. There is, then, a tension between our embodied state and our essential nature as rational mind,16 a tension rooted in Christian theology’s deep ambivalence about humankind’s place in the world. From their struggle with Gnostic theology and Greco-Roman philosophies,

theologians

had

come

to

assert

humankind’s

corporeality; however, their affinity for the classical heritage and the influence of apocalypticism meant that they would always regard the soul as, in an important sense, otherworldly. The mind’s essential incorporeality means that it relates to the 14. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul,” 217. See also On the Making of Man, 18.1 (NPNF2, 5:407–8). 15. Ibid., 218 (“De Anima et Resurrectione,” col. 53). 16. Commentators have drawn attention to this tension: See Smith, Passion and Paradise, 37, 64; Susan Wessel, “The Reception of Greek Science in Gregory of Nyssa’s De hominis opificio,” Vigiliae Christianae 63, no. 1 (2009): 46, argues that Gregory’s use of Greek medicine curtailed his dualism, showing the dependence of mind on sensation. Abraham P. Bos, “‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Platonic’ Dualism in Hellenistic and Early Christian Philosophy and in Gnosticism,” Vigiliae Christianae 56, no. 3 (2002): 273–91, shows that besides the well-known Platonic dualism of body and soul, Aristotelian philosophy posited a dualism of intellect (which was incorporeal) and soul (which, at least in this life, was also joined to a corporeal body—although this body was spiritual (pneuma) and not physical. Gregory’s anthropology thus owes much to the Aristotelian view.

122

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

body as to an instrument. Because the mind uses the body as an instrument, it cannot be identified with any organ or sense, such as the heart or brain,17 and is not contained in any place.18 However, the mind’s relation to the body is more complicated than the metaphor of instrument may suggest.19 The mind can be affected by bodily states and the passions,20 and psychic states such as grief and laughter correspond to physiological conditions.21 Moreover, sometimes the body proves to be a faulty instrument and resists the mind’s control;22 conditions in the body can cause the mind to limp.23 Consequently, the embodied mind is effective only when the body is in a natural condition.24 17. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 12.1 (NPNF2, 5:397). Augustine made the same point in On the Soul and Its Origin, 4.6.5, in Anti-Pelagian Writings, vol. 5 in Philip Schaff, ed., A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, First Series, 14 vols. (hereafter NPNF1) (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1887), 5:356–57. 18. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul,” 226. 19. Rowan Williams, “Macrina’s Deathbed Revisited: Gregory of Nyssa on Mind and Passion,” in Lionel R. Wickham and Caroline P. Bammel, ed., Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy in Late Antiquity: Essays in Tribute to George Christopher Stead (New York: E. J. Brill, 1993), 234, argues that generally speaking, Gregory uses ousia to refer to the human soul as active and intelligent and phusis to refer to “the complex lived reality of soul as animating a body. . . . How does this self-moving power become the motive force in a complex material life subject to non-rational motivation? There is no human phusis free from passion . . . why should passion, passivity, be admitted into a life that should be purely active and self-motivated—for the vulnerable and passive body certainly affect, even though it does not determine, the soul’s existence (XII.3ff)?” 20. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 12.3 (NPNF2, 5:397). 21. Ibid., 12.4–5 (NPNF2, 5:397–98). 22. Ibid., 12.8 (NPNF2, 5:398). 23. Ibid., 15.3 (NPNF2, 5:403–4). See the comments of Enrico Peroli, “Gregory of Nyssa and the Neoplatonic Doctrine of the Soul,” Vigiliae Christianae 51, no. 2 (1997): 117–39, who argues that Gregory’s view of the soul-body connection has antecedents in Neo-Platonism: “That the soul, as intelligible substance . . . completely transcends every law of the physis; that, therefore, it is not in the body in a spatial way . . . in virtue of the energheia that communicates to it; that, as adiastatos, it is present, in virtue of its simplicity, in a united and undivided manner inside everything it joins to; that, finally, once we have stated such premises, the way how the soul-intelligible joins to body-sensible is completely different from any kind of physical union between bodies, as it takes place between natures that are quite different in their essence: all the above, when taken together, represents a view which was clearly outlined in Plotinus and in Porphyry, and, as the foregoing analysis has shown, was widely shared and used by Gregory of Nyssa” (126–27). 24. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 12.13 (NPNF2, 5:399). See Wessel, “The Reception of Greek Science,” 41, for a fuller discussion of the body’s natural condition.

123

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

What, then, is the nature of the mind’s union with the body? Gregory uses words such as communion (koinonia) and connection (synapheia) to denote this union, being otherwise content to say that the mind’s contact with the body is ineffable and incomprehensible (aphrastos),25 as mysterious as God’s contact with the universe.26 God is incorporeal and so is the human mind; each operates upon material reality in a way that we cannot understand. Our inability to understand the mind’s relation to the body is really just an illustration of our more general incapacity to understand the relation of spirit (whether infinite or finite) to matter. There is thus a direct analogy between God and the human mind; in spite of the mind’s close relation to the body and its capacity to be affected by the body, the soul transcends the body just as God transcends the world. The tension in Gregory’s thought between the soul’s embodied condition and its incorporeal essence appears in his view of the resurrection body. The doctrine of the resurrection is a good place to look for information about Christian views of the body because the doctrine affirms the goodness of the body while acknowledging that the resurrection body differs significantly from the physical body. It thus affords theologians plenty of opportunity to demonstrate their fidelity to the body’s goodness while speculating widely on the ways in which the future body is not like the current body. Gregory’s view is instructive. On one hand, he affirmed the resurrection of the body without equivocation, asserting that the resurrected body will be, atom for atom, identical with the current body. Knowing that in many cases death means the dispersal of these atoms, sometimes over long distances, he argued that the soul, after death, longs for the body, 25. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 12.6; 15.3 (NPNF2, 5:398; 5:403-4). Readers interested in examining the Greek text can consult “De Hominis Opificio,” in vol. 44 of J. P. Migne, ed., Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, 161 vols. (Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1857), cols. 160, 177. 26. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul,” 228.

124

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

retains signs of its connection with the body, and in fact remains nonspatially present with the body’s dispersed atoms.27 On the day of resurrection, the soul will gather the dispersed atoms and, as it did in gestation, form them into a body.28 On the other hand, Gregory made it clear that the resurrected body will be in many respects quite different from our earthly bodies. Following the resurrection we will not eat29 and will in fact be free from all physiological processes, including sexual intercourse, conception, and growth.30 The resurrected body will not weigh us down as the current body does; the quality of its material will no longer be gross and heavy but will instead be light, ethereal, and incorruptible.31 The resurrection state, in other words, will be identical to our original, created state.32 In its created state, the body was not at all a hindrance to the mind in its pursuit of the good. The resurrection is thus a restoration of our original condition. Although the resurrection body will be physical, it will no longer be an ethical problem for the soul, as the current body is. The resurrection state will be an embodied state, but one in which there is no ethical tension between mind and body. It will, in 27. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 27.2 (NPNF2, 5:418); “On the Soul,” 230. 28. Ibid., 27.5 (NPNF2, 5:418). Augustine’s view of the resurrection body is quite similar to Gregory’s. First, although we may eat (as did the resurrected Jesus), it will not be to satisfy appetite, for there will be neither hunger nor need of food (On the City of God, 13.22, in Saint Augustine: The City of God, Books VIII–XVI, trans. Gerald G. Walsh, S.J., and Grace Monahan, O.S.U., Fathers of the Church 14 [New York: The Fathers of the Church, 1952], 332–33 [hereafter CG]). Second, the resurrection body will be of the same material as it now is, but this material will have a different quality, being sustained by the Holy Spirit (ibid.). Third, the elements of our bodies will be reunited in the resurrection, even if in death they are widely scattered (Enchiridion, 23.88, in Saint Augustine, Christian Instruction; Admonition and Grace; The Christian Combat; Faith, Hope, and Charity, trans. John J. Gavigan, et al., Fathers of the Church 2 [Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002], 443–44 [hereafter CI]). Fourth, it will be made immortal, free of corruption and free of dullness (tarditas) (On the City of God, 13.24 [CG 345–46]). Fifth, it will in no way weigh down the soul but will be capable of light and easy movement (Enchiridion, 23.91 [CI, 445–46]). Finally, the soul waits for the resurrection with desire (desiderabiliter) (On the City of God, 13.20 [CG, 329]). 29. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 18.9 (NPNF2, 5:408-9). 30. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul,” 266. 31. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 22.6 (NPNF2, 5:412); “On the Soul,” 245. 32. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul,” 265.

125

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

other words, be the sort of body that ascetic practice was intended to provide in a preliminary and anticipatory way. Freedom and the Passions Besides incorporeality, our status as the image of God implies human freedom, for God is supremely free from necessity and dominion.33 Freedom is accordingly an essential and inalienable part of our nature—to be human is to possess freedom. Even our existence in the state of sin and corruption does not diminish our freedom of choice (proairesis). To whatever extent we have come under sin’s bondage and darkened our understanding, we remain capable of returning to God and practicing the virtues necessary for salvation.34 According to Gregory, freedom is “to be free [eleutheron] from necessity [anagkē] and not to be put under the yoke of any natural power, but instead to have, in our own power [autexousion], judgment about what seems good; for virtue is something voluntary [hekousion] and without a master [adespoton]. Virtue cannot be compulsory and forced.”35 This is an illuminating definition of 33. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 4.1; 16.11 (NPNF2, 5:391; 5:405), and The Great Catechism, 5 (NPNF2, 5:479). For commentary, see Smith, Passion and Paradise, 80. 34. Commentators have noted the importance for Gregory of humankind’s continued possession of freedom and its role in salvation, particularly in light of Augustine’s insistence on human impotence and absolute dependence on grace. See Johannes Zachhuber, Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical Background and Theological Significance, Supplements to Vigiliae Christianae 46 (Leiden: Brill, 2000), 175, 178, 187, 190; Casimir McCambley, “Against Fate by Gregory of Nyssa,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 37, no. 1–4 (1992): 316; Alden A. Mosshammer, “Non-Being and Evil in Gregory of Nyssa,” Vigiliae Christianae 44 (1990): 136–67, who argues that for Gregory humans cannot simply choose salvation in a stereotypical Pelagian fashion (155–57); and Mary Emily Keenan, “De Professione Christiana and De Perfectione: A Study of the Ascetical Doctrine of Saint Gregory of Nyssa,” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 5 (1950): 167, 169–207, who emphasizes the human role in Gregory’s soteriology (181–82). 35. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man, 16.11 (NPNF2, 5:405; “De Hominis Opificio,” vol. 44, col. 184). It is important to avoid the term free will when discussing Gregory’s thought because he did not think of will as a distinct faculty in the soul. As noted, freedom is simply a function of reason. Expositions of Gregory’s views on freedom include Jérome Gaïth, La Conception De La Liberté Chez Grégoire De Nysse, Études de Philosophie Médiévale, ed. Étienne

126

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

freedom because, in agreement with classical philosophy, it links freedom to virtue. Gregory’s point is that virtue results from the mind’s apprehension (judgment) of the good. If we correctly judge something to be good, we will pursue it and thus acquire virtue. So, virtue requires that the human mind be able to form correct judgments about the good.36 Freedom, then, is simply the mind’s ability to apprehend the good and to avoid having its apprehension influenced by external forces, whether in the world or in the embodied self. That is why freedom has the negative sense of exemption from necessity (anagkē). In the material world, natural forces operate with necessity throughout the cosmos and in our bodies. However, the mind can be free from the influence of these forces. It possesses its own power of self-governance (autexousion), which means that it is able to form judgments that guide its thoughts about moral matters. The practice of virtue is by definition a voluntary matter (hekousion), in the sense that the originating cause of both virtue and judgment is the mind and not any physical or external force. Of course, as we have seen, Gregory knew that an embodied mind like ours is affected by the body in various ways. He also Gilson, 43 (Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1953); and Verna E. F. Harrison, Grace and Human Freedom According to St. Gregory of Nyssa, Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity, vol. 30 (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992). 36. The comments of Smith, Passion and Paradise, are helpful here: For Gregory, will is not a distinct faculty but “a by-product of the soul’s rational nature. . . . The soul’s intellectual capacities for reasoning (logos), discriminating (diakrisis), and contemplation (theoria or dianoia) enable the soul to have knowledge of both the sensible goods of the material world and the intelligible goods of the divine and heavenly realm. From this knowledge the soul is able to judge the relative merits of these goods and thus determine which goods should be sought above all else and which are of secondary importance. . . . Human beings, by contrast (with animals), because they can know and compare a variety of goods, have the capacity to be selfcritical of their desires and impulses. Therefore, the rational soul is free in the sense that it is not subject to any external necessity” (23). See also Albrecht Dihle, The Theory of the Will in Classical Antiquity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 41–47, for a description of the belief, common among Greek philosophers, that choice is a function the mind’s perception of the good.

127

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

knew that we can and often do allow judgment to be determined by bodily emotions and impulses. Nonetheless, he strongly affirmed the possibility of self-determined judgment and virtue. Such selfdetermination is freedom. Because human freedom is voluntary (hekousion, in the Aristotelian sense of something that lies in our power), it involves choice (proairesis). In the Garden of Eden, humankind was able both to choose the good and to depart from the good. Nothing constrained this choice. At some point we departed from the good by “acting freely in self-governed movement.”37 If our judgment and actions are voluntary (hekousion) and we are self-governed (autexousion), what explains our failure to have sound judgment and thus become virtuous? In other words, what explains akrasia (lack of self-control)? In answering this question Gregory was joining a conversation about lack of self-control stretching back at least as far as Plato. In “On the Soul and Resurrection,” Gregory explained that because we are (in this life) by nature constantly in motion (kinēsis), we are carried by the impulse (hormē) of our choices (proairesis). We thus feel ourselves drawn in certain directions, toward certain objects. Everything depends on whether the object that attracts us is good by nature. If it is, all is well. But we can also find ourselves attracted to the false image of goodness,38 for along with the soul’s impulses toward the good we find the capacity to misjudge what is good—to be attracted to some lesser good.39 So, 37. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul,” 233 (“De Anima et Resurrectione,” col. 81). 38. Ibid., 238 (“De Anima et Resurrectione,” col. 92). See the comments of Ernest V. McClear, “The Fall of Man and Original Sin in the Theology of Gregory of Nyssa,” Theological Studies 9, no. 2 (1948): 186: “Thus Gregory, under the influence of a Platonic conception of good and evil, traces the sin of Adam to an error of judgment (i.e., choosing to turn away from the highest good). Although he should have known the more excellent value of intelligible goods, those proper to a nature related to the divine, Adam thought that the true good consisted in the pleasure of the senses. This, then, is the origin of sin, the choosing of that which in itself is not an evil (for the sensible creature is also from God) in preference to a greater good.” 39. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul,” 223–24.

128

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

although we invariably pursue what we judge to be good, judgment involves an element of weighing and deliberation and choosing which goods (or apparent goods) to pursue.40 And because of our unlikeness to God’s perfection, we find it easy to move away from the highest good.41 Gregory was here trying to give an account of one of the central conundrums of classical philosophy: given the mind’s ability to apprehend the good, virtue should automatically follow apprehension. Yet, it is a fact that human beings pursue many things (pleasure, wealth, and so on) that are not the highest good and do not lead to virtue. How are we to explain the fact that although it is our essential nature to be rational, we often act on irrational impulses? The ancient consensus was that the passions cloud our judgment and prevent us from apprehending the true good. In On Virginity, Gregory explained how the passions cloud our judgment. If we give ourselves over sensuality, passion becomes smeared over our spiritual vision so that we are unable to perceive the good and the beautiful.42 Those, on the contrary, who have been purified by celibacy enjoy a clear vision of these spiritual realities.43 So, our moral life is determined by our judgment about the good; those who perceive the good pursue virtue, but those who (because of the passions) cannot perceive the good cannot become virtuous. If we attain freedom from the passions through spiritual disciplines such as celibacy, we will rightly apprehend the good; if we fail to exercise self-control and thus allow the passions to affect our judgment, we 40. Smith, Passion and Paradise, 23; and Mosshammer, “Non-Being and Evil,” 164n1. See also Smith’s comments that, because Gregory drew from Aristotle as well as Plato, “He is able to present the passions, not simply in the dualistic terms of a conflict between the impulses of the body and those of the mind, but in terms of mistaken or corrupt judgments of the mind—failures of the intellect” (76). 41. Gregory of Nyssa, On the Making of Man 16.14 (NPNF2, 5:406). 42. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, 10, in Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Ascetical Works, trans. Virginia Woods Callahan, The Fathers of the Church 58 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967), 36–37 (hereafter AW). 43. Ibid., 11 (Saint Gregory of Nyssa, AW, 42).

129

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

will not rightly apprehend the good. It therefore lies within our power to clear away the filth that sin has imposed on the image of God. This image has been covered by the effects of sin, but it endures within the soul. All that we need do is turn our thoughts toward that image and, by acts of self-denial and moderation, allow it to shine forth as it did in Adam and Eve.44 If we do so, our judgment will be sound and we will attain virtue. Given the contradiction between our status as the image of God and the effect of the passions on our judgment, it is reasonable to ask how the passions came to be. As noted previously, Gregory believed emphatically that the passions are no part of our essential nature and have nothing to do with our likeness to God. On the contrary, it is in the passions that we are like animals.45 They were first introduced into human life when postlapsarian humans adopted the animalistic mode of generation. (A bit of explanation is necessary here: Gregory believed that the creation of humans was a twofold process. First, God created genderless humanity, a kind of pure, ideal human nature that directly reflected the image of God. Then, foreknowing that humans would sin and that reproduction in the originally intended spiritual fashion would not be possible, God created gendered humanity,46 which then began to reproduce in the way in which animals reproduce.47) The adoption of animal-style reproduction brought with it a host of motions (kinēmata) that we now share with animals. In animals, these movements support the instinct for selfpreservation; however, in the human soul they appear as passions such as anger (thumos), fear (phobos), and love of pleasure.48 In themselves, these movements are amoral artifacts of our animal-like existence. 44. Ibid., 12 (Saint Gregory of Nyssa, AW, 44–46). 45. Gregory of Nyssa, On The Making of Man, 18.1 (NPNF2, 5:407-8). 46. Ibid., 16.7–9; 16.14–18 (NPNF2, 5:405; 406). 47. See ibid., 17.1–4 (NPNF2, 5:406-7). 48. Ibid., 18.2 (NPNF2, 5:408; “De Hominis Opificio,” col. 192).

130

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

If reason controls the soul, the impulses become, not passions, but virtues: instead of anger, courage; instead of fear, obedience; and so forth.49 Unfortunately, our inclination, in our current state of existence, is to allow the governing part of the soul (the hēgemonikon) to be dragged down by the weight of the passions and irrational nature. When we do, the passions deface the image of God within us.50 Gregory, however, was quick to point out that the fault lies with us and not with the passions. We “drag down” (kathelkuein) the mind to the lower, animalistic side of our nature and we force (ekbiazein) reason to serve the passions in acts of free choice.51 As the case of Moses shows, however, it is possible to turn the mind to higher realities, to give reason control over the soul’s motions, and thus to allow the original image of God to shine forth. When we do so, we imitate Jesus’ detachment from passion and his immutable character.52 Freed from passion, we progress toward the goal of perfect Christlikeness. Although, as creatures, we are mutable and thus prevented from absolute perfection, we can use our mutable nature for good by engaging in perpetual movement toward perfection.53 The soul advancing toward perfection, then, is progressively freed from the passions and enabled to acquire the virtues that Jesus Christ embodied. Achieving Ethical Freedom from the Passions Gregory’s metaphysical analysis of the passions adds up to one ethical lesson—the need to free ourselves from attachment to the body and its passions in preparation for death. At death, the soul will disengage from the body. If in this life we have prepared for such 49. Ibid., 18.5 (NPNF2, 5:408). 50. Ibid., 18.6 (NPNF2, 5:408; “De Hominis Opificio,” col. 193). 51. Ibid., 18.3 (NPNF2, 5:408; “De Hominis Opificio,” col. 192). 52. Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection (AW, 117, 120–21). 53. Ibid. (AW, 122).

131

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

disengagement through ascetic discipline and self-control, our souls will rise unhindered to God. If, on the contrary, we have not practiced ethical detachment from the body, we will have to undergo a cleansing after death to effect complete detachment.54 Gregory elaborated his thoughts on freedom from the passions in his work On Virginity. Right off the bat he reinforced the distinction between divinity and passion: virginity is a divine-like state precisely because of its freedom from passion.55 He wrote as well on the contrast between the two possible types of life available, the life devoted to bodily pleasures and the life lived in imitation of heavenly spirits who refrain from marriage.56 Naturally, he did not denigrate marriage and regarded it as an honorable state, as long as we focus attention first of all on spiritual things, keep sexual passion under restraint, and indulge in intercourse sparingly. For Gregory, Isaac serves as a role model who married only because the promise to Abraham required descendants and not because of passion.57 Gregory also sternly warned those unable to exercise sexual restraint within marriage that they had best adopt the life of virginity, thus taking themselves as far as possible away from temptation.58 The practice of celibacy is, for Gregory, the method by which we turn the soul from its obsession with the senses and the emotions to an intellectual vision of heavenly and spiritual reality. Celibacy does so by helping us forget the natural impulses of embodied life and by freeing us from the needs of the flesh.59 As an example of practical counsel on obtaining freedom from passion, Gregory offered some thoughts on dealing with the pleasures

54. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul,” 235–36. 55. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, 2 (AW, 10–11). 56. Ibid., 4 (AW, 20–27). 57. Ibid., 7 (AW, 33). 58. Ibid., 8 (AW, 34). 59. Ibid., 5 (AW, 28).

132

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

of eating and drinking. Taking as our goal tranquility of body undisturbed by the suffering that comes from excess, we should measure our consumption by physical need instead of available pleasure, limiting ourselves to the amount necessary to satisfy hunger and thirst and forsaking anything desirable merely for pleasure.60 This precept provides him an opportunity to counsel ascetic Christians against overdoing things: moderation lies not in excessively denying the body but, instead, in satisfying the body’s authentic needs—although not our desire for pleasure. Moderation means training the flesh so that it is neither ungovernable because of indulgence in pleasure nor sickly because of excessive mortification.61 We may note, however, the difficulty of finding the mean of moderation for virginity, where satisfaction of some bodily needs is ruled out in principle. For Gregory, moderation may be the rule for eating and drinking and for marital intercourse, but abstinence is the ideal rule for sexual behavior. Good Emotions In common with other patristic theologians, Gregory spent considerable energy explaining how passion and desire are dangers to the soul. However, his Christian sensibilities also impelled him to consider the positive side of our emotional life. In the dialogue with Macrina, Macrina consistently maintains the position that the essence of the soul is mind and that passion and desire are only accidental elements of the soul. They are not essential to the soul;62 they are like warts growing on the soul,63 and they lie on the soul’s borderland (methorios) and come to the soul from outside

60. Ibid., 21 (AW, 65–66). 61. Ibid., 22 (AW, 66–68). 62. Gregory of Nyssa, “On the Soul,” 216–18. 63. Ibid., 219.

133

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

(exōthen).64 Our rational element struggles to eliminate passion and desire from the soul and there are some, such as Moses, who have succeeded in this struggle.65 Gregory, however, comes back to his sister with probing questions: If passion and desire are so problematic, why was Daniel noted for his desire (epithumia) toward God and why Phineas for his zeal? Why is fear the beginning of wisdom? Why did Paul commend the grief (lupē) that leads to salvation? Scripture, he notes, does not treat these emotions as weaknesses.66 In response, Macrina concedes that passion and desire may be put to either good or bad use, suggesting that they are in themselves premoral or in some sense morally neutral. The passions, she says, are a necessary accompaniment of the soul’s embodiment and therefore have been given to us by God. If there was some necessary connection between the passions and evil, then God would be responsible for evil. As it is, we make use (chrēsis) of these movements (kinēmata) according to our faculty of choice (proairesis) and they become instruments (organa) of virtue or of vice depending on our use of them. If reason governs these emotions, then they will be used for good: fear will produce obedience, anger will produce courage, and the impulse of desire (hē epithumētikē hormē) will bring us a pleasure (hēdonē) that is divine and perfect.67 Macrina uses the parable of the sower and the seeds to make her point. The seeds symbolize the soul’s impulses (hormai), which are good and with cultivation will bear the fruit of virtue. However (switching parables), bad seed, symbolizing erroneous judgment, has been mixed in with the good seed, with the result that the impulses 64. Ibid., 220–21 (“De Anima et Resurrectione,” col. 57). 65. Ibid., 218. 66. Ibid., 220 (“De Anima et Resurrectione,” col. 57). 67. Ibid., 222 (“De Anima et Resurrectione,” col. 60–61).

134

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

generally lead us to vice instead of virtue. The vinedresser, however, chooses to allow the seeds, both good and bad, to grow in the soul instead of eradicating them, for if the soul were utterly lacking these impulses, how could it love and thus be united with God? If we are devoid of anger, how would we oppose the adversary? So, Macrina declares, the emotions (kinēmata) of the soul are neither virtue nor vice. When put to good use, as with Daniel’s desire and Phineas’s zeal, they become praiseworthy. When put to bad use, they become vices and are called passions (pathē).68 Later in the dialogue, Gregory decides that they’ve fallen into a contradiction: if it is true that the emotions, when used well, play a vital role in the religious life and that desire (epithumia) brings us near to God, and if it is true (as Macrina had argued) that following death the irrational movements (alogos kinēsis), including the faculty of desire (to epithumētikon), will be purged from the soul, then in the heavenly state there will be no movement (kinēsis) in the soul that will generate appetite (orexis) for God. The soul in the heavenly state, it seems, would be devoid of movement and hence of desire; how, then, will it desire God?69 In response, Macrina identifies God as beauty itself. In the heavenly state, where we are free (eleutheron) of passions (pathai) and exist with no connection to irrational life (ta aloga), our contemplation (theōria) of the beautiful (to kalon) will persist. In this state, there will be no need of desire to draw the soul to God, because the beautiful exercises its own attractive power on those who see it. In this condition, enjoyment (apolausis) takes the place of desire and renders desire idle and useless (argē).70 The soul’s participation in God thus does not depend on the emotional movements it experiences in this life. In our 68. Ibid., 223–25 (“De Anima et Resurrectione,” col. 64–65). 69. Ibid., 236–37 (“De Anima et Resurrectione,” col. 89). 70. Ibid., 236 (“De Anima et Resurrectione,” col. 89).

135

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

mundane existence, we desire the good because we lack it. But in the heavenly state, where desire has withered away, there remains only love, which, for Macrina, is a condition (schēsis) or habit (diathesis), but certainly not a passion. Unlike desire, which can be satisfied and whose movement can come to an end, love (in the heavenly state) is a continuous capacity for enjoyment that knows no bounds.71 Reason and Erōs For Plato (in the Symposium), the philosopher’s quest for the good is grounded in love (erōs) inspired by beauty. The perception of beauty generates love, which is the drive to produce or create. When properly led toward transcendent beauty, this creative love ultimately produces philosophical wisdom. There is, accordingly, in the Platonic tradition a constellation of ideas that cling together: the good, the beautiful, reason, erōs, and the ascent from sensuous particulars to transcendent good and beauty. The presence of reason in this constellation signifies that reason, for Plato, is more than simply procedural logic or disciplined thinking or the exercise of pure rationality. Because of the deep connection between reason and love, reason is ultimately a participation in the highest good. Philosophical wisdom is not so much apprehending an object with logic as it is sharing in the being of the highest good through erōs. Consequently, the relation of reason to emotion is not simply a relation of opposition and difference. On the contrary, reason has its own desires and erotic character and is akin to erōs. These elements of the Platonic tradition are present in Gregory of Nyssa’s writings, integrated with Christian motifs.72 The best way 71. Ibid., 239 (“De Anima et Resurrectione,” cols. 92–93). 72. For helpful commentary on this theme in Gregory’s thought, see Richard A. Norris, “The Soul Takes Flight: Gregory of Nyssa and the Song of Songs,” Anglican Theological Review 80, no. 4 (1998): 517–32.

136

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

into this theme is a look at Gregory’s remarks on beauty in chapter 11 of his work On Virginity. This chapter begins by distinguishing those whose perception of beauty extends only to physical appearances and those who press beyond such appearances. The latter pass beyond the appearance of beauty in material things, using them as a ladder to ascend to the contemplation (theōria) of intellectual beauty (to noētos kallos), the beauty in which every other beautiful thing has a share (metousia) and which is the source of their being and beauty. Those who lack suitable training and are hence incapable of grasping transcendent beauty seek a variety of lesser objects: fleshy erōs, money, fame, art, and science. But those who can pursue transcendent beauty will forsake all these lesser objects and their transient pleasures. They will instead direct their faculty of desire (hē epithumētikē dunamis) to what is ultimate. Epithumia thus has a vital role in the quest for God and, indeed, epithumia never finds complete satisfaction, even in the heavenly state. Mundane epithumia is capable of satisfaction—enough water will quench thirst, at least for a time. But because God is infinite and cannot be comprehensively known, desire for God cannot be quenched. On the contrary, the further we progress in the knowledge of God, the greater our desire grows.73 In the search for God, then, the soul is neither idle (argē) nor motionless (akinēton). It only needs to be purified from earthly longings (prospatheia) and directed toward the transcendent. This done, the seeker is filled with erotic and desirous (erōtikōs kai epithumētikōs) feelings for the beautiful.74

73. See Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs, trans. Richard A. Norris Jr., Society of Biblical Literature Writings from the Greco-Roman World 13 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012), 171; and Gregory of Nyssa: Life of Moses, trans. Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson, Classics of Western Spirituality (New York: Paulist, 1978), 114–16. 74. Gregory of Nyssa, On Virginity, 4 (AW, 38–42).

137

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

The similarities between Gregory’s account in On Virginity and Plato’s in the Symposium are striking. In both there is the notion of ascent, of beginning with sensuous beauty and moving beyond this to grasp transcendent beauty. In both the particular beings of this world function for the seeker as steps on a ladder by which one may ascend to beauty. And for both, reason’s ascent is driven by desire and erōs. Admittedly, Gregory, like most Christian writers, was hesitant to use the language of erōs because, outside the philosophical schools, erōs normally designated sexual love and desire. That is why Origen spent several pages in his Commentary on the Song of Solomon explaining the difference between carnal and spiritual love75 and the reason that biblical writers typically maintained distinct terminology: epithumia and erōs designating carnal love, agape signifying spiritual love.76 He noted, however, that sometimes the biblical writers mixed their terms (as in the Song of Solomon, which, Origen was sure, described the soul’s love for God), so that whenever the Bible used the terms normally signifying carnal love, epithumia and erōs, the reader should understand them to mean spiritual love.77 Origen here was making the case that it is legitimate to use epithumia and erōs to describe the soul’s relation to God—to take the language of sensual and sexual love and use it to portray the soul’s love for God. Gregory followed suit, but still tended to minimize the use of erōs even as he freely employed epithumia. Nonetheless, Gregory does at points use erōs-related language, notably in his homilies on the Song of Solomon. Interpreting Proverbs 8:17 (where Wisdom says, “I love those who love me”) as an 75. Origen: The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies, trans. R. P. Lawson, Ancient Christian Writers: The Works of the Fathers in Translation, 26 (New York: Newman Press, 1957), 29–33. 76. Ibid., 30. Origen’s Commentary exists only in Latin translation. Cupido and amor presumably translate epithumia and erōs, respectively, while caritas and dilectio translate agape. 77. Ibid., 31–35.

138

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

expression of love between the soul and divine wisdom, he comments that wisdom’s love for the soul creates desire (epithumia) in the human lover (erastēs, related to erōs).78 Commenting on the Song, he finds divine wisdom urging the soul to love (agapaō), desire (epithumeō), and erotically love (eramai, related to erōs) wisdom. Gregory could use the language of erōs, because this passion (pathos) is actually passionless (apathēs) when directed toward incorporeal being.79 He thus acknowledged the rightness of using the language of erōs: the activity of greatest physical pleasure (hēdonē), the passion of erotic love (to erōtikon pathos), is used as a figure to teach the soul to love (eraō) the divine beauty. When this is accomplished, “our mind within us may boil with love.”80 So, like Origen, Gregory regarded erōs as capable of signifying the soul’s love for God. Knowing God Another important point of continuity between Plato and Gregory lies in their view of reason, with Gregory playing up the mystical dimension of Plato’s thinking. As we have seen, at the highest level of contemplation (theōria), knowledge seems to be more intuitive, with Plato using visual metaphors to indicate the soul’s knowledge of the good and the beautiful. After several centuries of development, this motif became enlarged in the Platonic tradition. In Gregory’s hands, it became a major theme and thus passed into the Christian tradition as a fundamental conviction.81 The metaphysical basis of Gregory’s apophatic theology is the 78. Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs, 23. 79. Ibid., 25. 80. Ibid., 29. 81. See Martin Laird, “Gregory of Nyssa and the Mysticism of Darkness: A Reconsideration,” The Journal of Religion 79, no. 4 (October 1999): 592–616, for a caution against overemphasizing the theme of darkness and apophaticism in Gregory at the expense of undervaluing elements of light and illumination in his mysticism.

139

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

idea that God’s being is without limits.82 Because of this infinite character, intellect cannot comprehend God. This does not mean that God cannot be known; it means instead that God cannot be known comprehensively. Progress in knowing God is unending; every stage of knowledge can be followed by a higher stage.83 Knowing God begins with purification. Gregory’s remarks are based on his allegorical interpretation of events in Exodus. In Exodus 19, Israel arrives at Sinai and is told to undergo purification before they encounter God. For Gregory this meant that the soul must be purified in order to begin the ascent to God. This purification consists in getting free of “sensual [aisthētikē] and irrational [alogos] emotion [kinēsis].”84 One then begins the upward path to God, a movement that leads beyond discursive reasoning. In Exodus, this is represented as Moses entering the thick darkness where God dwells (20:21). Although acknowledging that the path to God begins with the light of the intellect, he believed that at some point on the path one passes from light to darkness, from intellect to a state that surpasses intellect.85 To surpass intellect means that the mind cannot describe God or see—visually or intellectually—a form.86 It means that ordinary, grasping thinking (katalēptikē dianoia) cannot grasp God87 because God transcends the domain of beings (ta onta) and is ungraspable (alēpton, “hard to catch”).88 It means a kind of intellectual seeing that is not a seeing.89 82. Gregory of Nyssa: Life of Moses, 115 (coincidentally, p. 115 in the critical edition of the Greek text, Gregorii Nysseni De Vita Moysis, ed. Herbert Musurillo, vol. 7, part 1 of Gregorii Nysseni Opera [Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991]). 83. Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs, 192–93. 84. Gregory of Nyssa: Life of Moses, 92–93 (De vita Moysis, 84). 85. Ibid., 95 (86–87). 86. Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs, 41. 87. Ibid., 97. 88. Ibid., 99; see also Gregory of Nyssa: Life of Moses, 116 (De vita Moysis, 116). 89. Gregory of Nyssa: Life of Moses, 95 (De vita Moysis, 87).

140

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

It is also notable that, for all Gregory’s talk about leaving behind the senses and sensuous objects,90 in this life our desire for the hidden beauty is stimulated by what we see—the visible is an image of transcendent beauty.91 This is another way of saying (as Gregory did in the dialogue with Macrina) that the soul uses physical objects as steps of a ladder that lead the soul to the contemplation of God. So, although the soul must ethically separate itself from attachment to what is physical, the soul (in this life) is epistemologically bound to what is physical in its quest to know God. The soul’s necessary dependence on images is not confined to its perception of beauty in visible objects. Ordinary thinking itself (dianoia) can only think of God with images and likenesses—its thoughts of God are only images of God. The best it can do is to create a reflection of God, as in a mirror, darkly (here Gregory made reference to 1 Cor. 13:12).92 Similarly, the soul’s virtue is a kind of image of God, who is the archetype of goodness.93 Because God is infinite, there is no end to the soul’s progress as it seeks knowledge of and union with God. In a remarkable passage in On Perfection, Gregory argued that perfection consists, not in arriving at a spiritual destination, but instead in a perpetual growth (auxēsis) toward the good, even in the heavenly state. But this affirmation of growth seems to create a contradiction, for growth requires change and the soul’s heavenly state (he taught) excludes change. Seeing the potential contradiction, Gregory declared that humans have the capacity to change both for the good and for the bad. Capacity for change, therefore, is not something to be feared, but embraced since it yields the opportunity for daily growth in goodness. We are thus always being perfected and we never come to the limit of 90. E.g., ibid., 93 (84). 91. Ibid., 114 (114). 92. Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs, 97. 93. Ibid., 99.

141

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

perfection.94 However, in discussing the soul’s constant, perfecting movement in On Perfection, Gregory studiously avoided attributing motion (kinēsis) to the soul, employing instead a variety of alternative terms: growth (auxēsis), turning (tropē), alteration (alloiōsis), and altering (metapoieō). The soul, even in the heavenly state, thus perpetually changes for the good but does not experience any motion (kinēsis). Gregory’s apophatic theology is not simply the epistemological claim that God cannot be known via everyday thinking. It is also the assertion that knowledge of the transcendent cannot be separated from love and desire. Admittedly, such love and desire must be purified of everything sensual. Nonetheless, human reason, in its quest to know God, is not purely rational. It is driven by an unquenchable desire and aims at an everlasting increase in its participation in God.95 To conclude this short account of Gregory’s theology, a few points of summary may be helpful: • The soul is the image of God. • To be the image of God is to be rational, incorporeal mind. • As such, the soul, in its pure essence, has no passion and desire—or at least mundane desire. • In its embodied state the soul possesses premoral impulses. These are similar to the Stoic concept of propatheiai. • Our choice determines whether impulses become virtues or vices. Impulses governed by reason become virtues; impulses not so governed become passions.

94. Gregory of Nyssa, On Perfection (AW, 122). 95. Gregory of Nyssa: Homilies on the Song of Songs, 171.

142

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

• The soul should purge itself of passions via ascetic exercise. • In the heavenly state, the soul is free of all motion and passion, experiencing only love, the everlasting enjoyment of the good and the beautiful, in a process of perpetual growth. • The path to knowing God necessarily involves erotic love. Augustine Like Gregory, Augustine (354–430) argued for the incorporeality of the soul. One of Augustine’s major antagonists was Manichaean theology, which regarded even God as a corporeal substance.96 He therefore felt the need to assert the reality of incorporeal being and portrayed his journey toward truth as a journey away from materialist philosophy and toward the capacity to conceive of spiritual reality. The instrument of progress on this journey was his reading of Platonic literature, which provided him with the concept of being outside of space and time and not subject to change.97 Thus he was able to distinguish God from the material world. His final step was to grasp the soul’s incorporeality. Like God, the soul has no extension in space and is not divisible, as material things are.98 The soul’s power of thought is greater than and qualitatively different from corporeal reality; it stores images of things in its memory, but memory is not a spatial container.99 Most important for Augustine, we become aware of the power of thought not through a corporeal sense but 96. Augustine, Confessions, 7.1.1 in Saint Augustine: Confessions, trans. Vernon J. Bourke, Fathers of the Church 21 (New York: Fathers of the Church, 1953), 161–62 (hereafter SAC). The Greek text is available in Augustine, Confessions, Volume I, trans. Carolyn J. -B. Hammond, Loeb Classical Library 26 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014); and Augustine, Confessions, Volume II, trans. William Watts, Loeb Classical Library 27 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912). 97. Augustine, Confessions, 7.20.26 (SAC, 190–92). 98. Augustine, Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus, 16, in The Anti-Manichaean Writings, The Anti-Donatist Writings, vol. 4 (NPNF1, 4:136–37). 99. Ibid., 17–18 (NPNF1, 4:137-38).

143

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

only by the soul’s spiritual act of introspection. In the thought of Augustine and Gregory, then, Christian thought was moving toward an understanding of soul as a reality categorically different from material reality, although still created, mutable, and finite, a reality that, although bearing a relation to the material universe, transcends material categories such as space. The importance of this insight lies in the way in which it establishes a metaphysical distinction between the soul and the body, supporting the further distinction of reason from emotion. This metaphysical distinction was, for Augustine, Gregory, and later thinkers, the framework within which the ethical distinction between reason and the passions was explained and justified. In turn, the soul’s metaphysical transcendence to the body formed the basis of the ethical prescription to exercise self-control and to moderate the passions. Freedom from Passion and Desire Augustine agreed with Gregory and the classical tradition that two extra-rational elements of the soul, anger (ira, a synecdoche for thumos, the emotional element of the soul) and lust (libido, concupiscentia, the desiring part of the soul), should be controlled by reason.100 Spiritual perfection consists, in large part, of conquering the passions. For Augustine, the focus lay on overcoming concupiscentia,101 which (in his theology) is not simply desire, but a symbol of desire that has usurped the place of reason and led us into habitual sin. 100. Augustine, On the City of God, 14.19 (CG, 393–94). For the Latin text, see Augustine, City of God, trans. George E. McCracken, et al., 7 vols., Loeb Classical Library 411–17 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957–1972). For an overview of Augustine’s view of the passions, see Peter King, “Dispassionate Passions,” in Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro, eds., Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 9–31. 101. Augustine, On Man’s Perfection in Righteousness, 6.12 and 11.27, in Anti-Pelagian Writings, vol. 5 in NPNF1 (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1887), 162–63, 168.

144

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

Even those touched by God’s grace still have a weak will because sin has consigned us to the bondage of habit. God’s grace gives us a new and good will, but the new will does not immediately conquer concupiscentia and habit, but must instead strive with them.102 This was Augustine’s understanding of Paul’s talk about the struggle between flesh and Spirit in Galatians 5. For Augustine, the experience of Christian disciples is marked by the knowledge of good and a desire to do the good and even (aided by grace) some ability to do the good, but also by an inability to do the good consistently and with perfect love for God.103 Because the new, good will that God gives must strive with the residue of concupiscentia and habit, we must practice self-control (continentia)104 and the subjugation of the body (corporis castigationem), which place a bridle on concupiscentia.105 As long as there remains in us any concupiscentia—meaning, as long as we dwell in this fallen world106—we must apply the bridle by means of continentia.107 As God’s grace begins to effect our love for God, the power of concupiscentia is gradually overcome and we are able, not to escape it altogether, but at least to resist consenting to it.108 What does continentia look like in practice? Augustine’s rather (for the time) conventional remarks on eating and drinking provide an illustration. For Augustine, eating and drinking have just one purpose—the utterly utilitarian purpose of repairing the body’s daily 102. Augustine, Confessions, 8.5.10–11 (SAC, 206–7). 103. Ibid., 8.11.25–27 (SAC, 221–23). 104. Augustine, On Man’s Perfection in Righteousness, 5.11 (NPNF1, 5:162). 105. Ibid., 8.18 (NPNF1, 5:164). 106. Ibid., 8.17 (NPNF1, 5:164). 107. See The Way of Life of the Catholic Church, 19.35, in Saint Augustine, The Catholic and Manichaean Ways of Life, trans. Donald A. Gallagher and Idella J. Gallagher, Fathers of the Church 56 (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 1966), 30 (hereafter CMWL) where Augustine spoke of “temperance” (temperantia) instead of self-control (continentia). 108. Augustine, Enchiridion, 31.118; 32.121 (CI, 468–69; 470–71).

145

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

wasting away. This purpose is physically necessary and spiritually benign; unfortunately, eating and drinking are attended by pleasure and in this pleasure lies the snare of concupiscentia, for we too easily end up pursuing the pleasure of eating and drinking whether or not we need to satisfy hunger and thirst.109 Ideally, one would live as a monk, restraining concupiscence by subsisting on minimal amounts of food, abstaining from meat, wine, and delicacies.110 For the rest of us Augustine delivered the expected counsel to strive against excessive eating and drinking and the associated pleasure.111 His teaching on marriage followed suit: he expressed the usual preference for celibacy over marriage, likening the life of celibacy to angelic life,112 insisting that the celibate receive a heavenly reward superior to that of the married,113 and practically identifying the imitation of Christ with celibacy.114 Consistently, then, he encouraged married Christians to refrain from intercourse.115 Those who would not refrain were advised to use intercourse for the sole purpose of begetting children and to avoid concupiscentia in the conjugal act. Married Christians, in other words, should engage in intercourse (if they insist on doing so) just as Adam and Eve did, that is, without concupiscentia and lust (libido). However, Augustine’s moral realism told him not to expect much success in replicating the passionless sex of Adam and Eve. He accordingly advised his readers to make clever use of concupiscentia, keeping it under control until its stimulating physical effects were needed for procreation.116 His realism further 109. Augustine, Confessions, 10.31.43–44 (SAC, 301–2). 110. Augustine, The Way of Life of the Catholic Church, 31:67 (CMWL, 51–52). 111. Augustine, Confessions, 10.31.47 (SAC, 305). 112. Augustine, Of Holy Virginity, 13.12, in Saint Augustine, Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects, ed. Roy J. Deferrari, trans. Charles T. Wilcox, M.M., et al., Fathers of the Church 27 (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1999), 155 (hereafter TM). 113. Ibid., 1, 19, 24 (TM, 143, 162, 168–70). 114. Ibid., 27, 35 (TM, 173–74, 185–86). 115. Augustine, On the Good of Marriage, 3 (TM, 12). 116. Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, 1.9 (NPNF1, 5:267).

146

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

taught him about the unlikeliness of Christians engaging in intercourse strictly for procreation. He therefore taught that God indulgently permits sexual activity between husband and wife even if the purpose is not procreation but instead the satisfaction of desire. In such cases, the good of marriage seemingly legitimizes what would otherwise be a sin.117 What measure of freedom from passion may we hope for in this life? Augustine agreed with Gregory that the renewed life of salvation is a progressive movement with an eschatological goal, the perfection of love in the presence of God. And, like Gregory, Augustine conceived of sanctification in the meantime in terms (drawn from Matthew 6) of almsgiving, fasting, and prayer. Fasting, for Augustine, symbolized the disciplines necessary to keep our bodies in subjection and to overcome concupiscence. Almsgiving symbolized kindness of deed and intent in acts of generosity and forgiveness. Prayer implied the panoply of holy desires.118 Although a residuum of concupiscentia remains in us throughout our earthly days, we live blamelessly if we persevere in prayer, almsgiving, and fasting. Perfection in this life is impossible because only death will extirpate the final vestige of concupiscence, allowing us to love God with all our heart.119 In the meantime, we can increasingly love God and enjoy other holy desires and increasingly show love toward the neighbor. We can thus be blameless, even if not perfected, by persevering toward the eschatological goal of love. But why does perfection lie outside our reach in this life? Why can we not exercise continentia sufficiently to overcome concupiscentia? These questions relate to the problem of akrasia (Latin: incontinentia, lack of self-control), discussed by Plato, Aristotle, and probably every 117. Ibid., 1.16 (NPNF1, 5:270). 118. Augustine, On Man’s Perfection in Righteousness, 8.18 (NPNF1, 5:164). 119. Ibid., 8.19 (NPNF1, 5:165).

147

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

other ancient philosophy. The issue, the reader may recall, may be put in the form of a conundrum: if we know the good and know it as good, then we will spontaneously want to do the good; however, experience shows that people often know what is good but fail to do it, preferring either a lesser good or something harmful. As we have seen, Gregory offered a response to this puzzle that fits comfortably within the parameters of classical philosophy: we want to do what we perceive to be good and can freely choose it; unfortunately, passion and desire often intervene in our judgments about good and lead us to misapprehend, taking a lesser for a greater good or something bad for the good. So, we often end up freely choosing something to be good that is not entirely good. The only way to properly apprehend the good is to exercise self-control and thus cleanse the intellectual vision by which we perceive the good. There is much about this classical consensus with which Augustine agreed, including its teleological analysis (we instinctively desire the good) and its understanding that passion and desire cloud our knowledge of the good. However, Augustine moved beyond this consensus, not satisfied with its view that akrasia is fundamentally a matter of misapprehension. Augustine’s experience led him to conclude that we can very well know the good as good, in some way desire to do the good, but simultaneously not desire to do it. To explicate this phenomenon, he distinguished free choice from liberty. Let us begin with his view of free choice (liberum arbitrium). Like Gregory, Augustine employed the idea of free choice for purposes of theodicy: neither God nor God’s creation can be blamed for sin; the explanation of sin lies completely within human freedom. And, like Gregory, Augustine offered a strong defense of human freedom in response to deterministic philosophy; in Augustine’s case, this meant Manichaeism. Augustine thus agreed with Gregory about the importance of freedom: free choice is a part of our created nature.120 148

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

Finally, the notion of merit and reward requires that our actions be voluntary (voluntate) and not necessitated. That is why we were created with freedom in the first place.121 Indeed, the entire scheme of salvation, including divine judgment, forgiveness, and repentance, depends on the idea of freedom.122 However, Augustine’s experiences with Pelagius meant that the question of freedom was for him both more urgent and more complex than it was for Gregory, and he went much further than Gregory in exploring the effect of sin on free choice. For Augustine, free choice involves will or volition (voluntas), which is similar to Aristotle’s notion of voluntary (hekousion) action. To say that my act is volitional is to emphasize that it is my act—that I was the originating cause of the act. Acts such as faith and love, for instance, are acts of will because we cannot perform these acts accidentally or unintentionally or ignorantly or through necessity.123 Thus Jesus died voluntarily (voluntate) and not due to any necessity.124 This point seems elementary, but it ensures that moral responsibility for sin falls upon us and not upon God.125 It also ensures that action is rooted in human agency and not in natural necessity. Nature cannot explain sin, for nature is ruled by necessary, while the concept of sin

120. Augustine, Disputation against Fortunatus, 15 (NPNF1, 4:116). For the Latin text, see Sancti Aureli Augustini De utilitate credendi, De duabus animabus, Contra Fortunatum, Contra Adimantum, Contra epistulam fundamenti, Contra Faustum, Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 25 (Vindobonae: F. Tempsky, 1891), 83–112. See also On Two Souls, 12.17 (NPNF1, 4:105). The Latin text of On Two Souls can be found in vol. 25 of Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, 51–80. 121. Augustine, Disputation against Fortunatus, 15 (NPNF1, 4:116). 122. Ibid., 20 (NPNF1, 4:119–20). 123. Augustine, Enchiridion, 9.32 (CI, 396). 124. Augustine, On Nature and Grace, 24.26, in Saint Augustine: Four Anti-Pelagian Writings, trans. John A. Mourant and William J. Collinge, Fathers of the Church 86 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992), 41–42 (hereafter FAPW). 125. Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, 2.4, in Saint Augustine, The Teacher; The Free Choice of the Will; Grace and Free Will, trans. Robert P. Russell, O.S.A., Fathers of the Church, vol. 59 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968), 255 (hereafter The Teacher).

149

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

is incompatible with necessary causation.126 Indeed, it is by virtue of our nature that we are able to love what is spiritual instead of what is corporeal.127 For Augustine, will is closely related to free choice. It is not simply equivalent to doing; Romans 7 convinced him that willing to do good does not guarantee doing the good. Likewise, will is more than ability; Jesus had the ability to raise Judas from the dead, but did not will to do so.128 In the state of corruption, we may will to do the good, but we lack the ability to do the good.129 Will is more like wishing or desiring: in the eschatological kingdom of heaven, the redeemed will lack the will to sin, which suggests that they simply won’t have the desire to sin.130 In at least one place, however, Augustine asserts that infants lack will,131 so we cannot simply equate will with desire. It is better to define will as free choice.132 In his writings against the Manichaeans, Augustine delivered a strong defense of free choice. Like the tradition before him, he opposed freedom and necessity, building this opposition into his definition: free will is a movement of the mind toward an object, with nothing compelling us.133 This definition shows us that, for Augustine, free choice excludes necessity; the free choice of the 126. Augustine, Disputation against Fortunatus, 17 (NPNF1, 4:117). 127. Augustine, On Two Souls, 13.20 (NPNF1, 4:106). 128. Augustine, On Nature and Grace, 7.8 (FAPW, 27). 129. Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, 15.31, 16.32 (The Teacher, 285, 287). 130. Augustine, Enchiridion, 29.111 (CI, 463). See also On Nature and Grace, 57.67 (FAPW 74), where Augustine argues that it is because of our will that we are guilty before God, since (in the condition of sin) we prefer to do what we secretly desire. 131. Augustine, Enchiridion, 24.97 (CI, 449). 132. See Augustine, On Grace and Free Will, where he seems to interchangeably use the terms free choice (liberum arbitrium) (1.1) and free choice of the will (liberum voluntatis arbitrium) (2.1, 2.4) (The Teacher, 250, 251, 255). 133. “Voluntas est motus animi, cogente nullo, ad aliquid vel amittendum, vel adipiscendum.” Augustine, On Two Souls, 10.14 (NPNF1, 4:102–3). This definition shows that Augustine did not think of will as a distinct faculty but as an aspect of the mind. His concept of the divided soul in Confessions and elsewhere is not equivalent to the contrast of reason and will; it is a conflict within the mind itself.

150

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

will (liberum arbitrium voluntatis) is exempt from every bond of necessity.134

Against

the

deterministic

philosophy

of

the

Manichaeans, Augustine observed that if (consistent with their philosophy) Manichaeans who fell into sin were compelled to do so by necessity, then they would be blameless. If they could have resisted sin, then the cause of sin is not necessity but their will.135 In his anti-Manichaean writings Augustine thus offered a thoroughly conventional defense of freedom, contrasting it with necessity and defending it as the basis of moral responsibility. However, Augustine’s response to Pelagius (c. 360–c. 420) and his followers, in a protracted debate over grace and free will, required him to refine his view of freedom.136 It was no longer sufficient to affirm the reality of free choice in response to a philosophy of necessity, for it was the misuse of freedom that, he now argued, had plunged humankind into a condition of necessity and bondage to sin. Because of sin, which is an act of free choice, we have lost our liberty (libertas). Free choice (liberum arbitrium) or will (voluntas) thus differs from liberty (libertas), the state in which our will is good and rightly ordered to the love of God.137 Although in the state of sin we retain free choice, we lack liberty—we have choice but not the ability to obey God’s commands. In the state of necessity effected 134. Augustine, Contra Faustum, 2.5 (NPNF1, 4:158). Consider the Roman practice of liberum mortis arbitrium (free choice of death), i.e., allowing a condemned criminal to commit suicide. Free will in this sense is simply the ability to do something. See Richard A. Bauman, Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome (London: Routledge, 1996), 7, 36, 54. 135. Augustine, Contra Faustum, 22.22 (NPNF1, 4:281). 136. Augustine noted the change in his thinking occasioned by the Pelagian controversy in Retractations. See Saint Augustine, The Retractations, trans. Sister Mary Inez Bogan, R.S.M., Fathers of the Church 60 (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1999), 32–40, 64–66, and 94–95. 137. Augustine, Enchiridion, 9.30 (CI, 394–95). For the Latin text, see Augustinus, De fide rerum invisibilium, Enchiridion ad Laurentium de fide et spe et caritate, De catechizandis rudibus, Sermo ad catechumenos de symbolo, Sermo de disciplina christiana, De utilitate ieiunii, Sermo de excidio urbis Romae, De haeresibus, Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 46 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols Publishers, 1969), 49–114.

151

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

by sin, either we cannot understand what we will (if our desire is disengaged from our understanding) or we are not strong enough to do what we understand.138 Liberty is, in other words, freedom used rightly, the will that wills the good. Consequently, freedom in the sense of being able to choose between good and evil is only a formal sort of freedom, not true freedom. True freedom will be the eschatological state in which we so desire true happiness in God that (with God’s grace) it becomes impossible to sin.139 In the meantime before the eschatological state, earthly pilgrims enjoy a measure of restored liberty, the ability to love God. The state of sin is therefore drastically different from our original condition. Adam and Eve could have kept God’s commands; having failed to do so, they suffered loss of liberty. For Augustine, the loss of liberty was not only a biblical truth but also one that could be confirmed by direct experience.140 Each of us is free to do or not do, he argued, until our actions become habitual. Once habit has formed, we are no longer free. We may wish not to swear or smoke, but if swearing or smoking has become habitual, we cannot choose not to swear or smoke.141 What we now experience individually illustrates the consequence of Adam’s sin for human nature collectively. As a result of that sin and the consequent loss of liberty, we experience a host of evils: ignorance of God and God’s commands, desire for what hurts us, fear and other suffering, and so on.142 So, whereas in the writings against the Manichaeans Augustine argued that will and not nature was the origin of sin, in his writings against the Pelagians he argued that the wrong use of our will had adversely affected human nature and stripped it of liberty. 138. Augustine, On Man’s Perfection in Righteousness, 4.9 (NPNF1, 5:161). 139. Augustine, Enchiridion, 28.105 (CI, 458–59). 140. See Augustine’s account of his experience with habit in Confessions, 8.5.10–12 (SAC, 206–8). 141. Augustine, Disputation against Fortunatus, 22 (NPNF1, 4:121–22). 142. Augustine, Enchiridion, 8.24 (CI, 391).

152

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

The loss of liberty manifests itself most distressingly in the phenomenon

of

concupiscentia.

Concupiscentia

symbolizes,

for

Augustine, the collapse of order caused by the first sin. In Paradise, love for God ordered the human soul and body in a perfect harmony, manifesting itself especially in the rule of reason over the body and its appetites. The appearance of sin, however, inverted this order, so that now we are ruled by desires and appetites. Concupiscentia is the chief illustration of this disorder, especially when it bears its narrow, sexual meaning. Whereas our reason and will can still control many functions of our bodies (moving the hand and so on), they cannot control our sexual organs, which move at the behest of concupiscentia and ignore the command of reason. The soul itself is gripped by an irresistible passion that moves us, even against our will.143 Normally, action requires the consent of our will; however, in the experience of sexual lust our will is powerless.144 From these considerations Augustine concluded that in Paradise the bodies of Adam and Eve would have been under the sway of reason alone. Even their sexual organs would have been completely submissive to the commands of reason. The first couple would have engaged in sexual intercourse purely as an act of rational will and in no way motivated by lust. 145 The human condition is now such that, in spite of possessing free will, we do not possess liberty—we cannot obey God and practice virtue. In effect, all that is left of our original freedom is the freedom to sin. We can freely choose any of a number of ways of sinning; however, having become slaves of sin, we cannot freely obey God and pursue the good, even if we want to do so.146 Our only hope, then, is God’s grace, which supplies the ability to love and obey God

143. Augustine, On the City of God, 14.16 (CG, 388–89). 144. Ibid., 14.19 (CG, 393–94). 145. Ibid., 14.23–24 (CG, 399–404). 146. Augustine, Enchiridion, 9.30 (CI, 394–95).

153

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

that we currently lack. Grace is thus an operative power that does for us what we cannot do for ourselves, most of all by providing us with a good will to overcome the evil will that results from Adam’s sin.147 Grace liberates our nature by restoring liberty and delivering us from the power of the flesh.148 With grace comes good habits that begin to replace the vicious habits engendered by sin. Grace thus converts us to the path of righteousness and frees us from sin’s power and from death.149 It is Augustine’s view of operative grace that distinguishes him from theologians such as Gregory. Gregory and other acknowledged the difficulty of the soul’s return to God, but they did not believe that humankind had lost liberty. In other words, they equated liberty with free choice. For them, our possession of free choice includes the ability to turn to God; for Augustine, free choice does not imply ability. Before Augustine, philosophers had discussed the problem of human reason being enslaved to vicious passions. Augustine acknowledged this problem; however, he was also asserting something more radical—that the phenomenon of choosing evil or a lesser good is not a case of intellectual weakness or inattention or conflicting desires clamoring for attention but instead involves the entire self, conceived as voluntas, that deliberately chooses evil.150 Augustine had, in effect, introduced a new conception of the self—the self as singular moral agent. Previously, the self had been conceived as a bundle of competing elements, especially intellect and the passions. Moral evil was the result of a culpable but wholly understandable failure to establish the intellect’s rule over the passions. Although Augustine acknowledged that establishing such 147. Augustine, On the Grace of Christ and Original Sin, 25.24 (NPNF1, 5:226–27). 148. Augustine, Enchiridion, 9.30 (CI, 394–95). 149. Augustine, Disputation against Fortunatus, 22 (NPNF1, 4:121–22). 150. N. W. Gilbert, “The Concept of the Will in Early Latin Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 1 (1963): 23–32.

154

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

rule is an important aspect of the moral life, his understanding of sin as rooted in pride and as a conscious choice of a lesser good meant that moral evil was more than a victory of passion over intellect. It was an act in which the entire human self participated. Similarly, the good will is, for Augustine, the act of the entire self that has received God’s grace and cooperates with its sanctifying power. Grace, in other words, transforms the self from the existential condition of sin into the eschatological condition of liberty. Good Emotions Concupiscentia, then, is the enemy of the soul; however, like Gregory, Augustine conceded that emotions (motūs) and affections (affectūs) are not themselves evil. Like the Stoic concept of propatheiai, they are premoral motions in the soul that can become evil but which also can play a positive role in the soul’s embodied life. He thus allowed that Adam and Eve may have experienced something remotely similar to anger and lust before they sinned; however, in paradise these emotions did not resemble anger and lust in our present condition. On the contrary, prior to sin they were not (as they are today) contrary to a correct will (contra rectam voluntatem).151 So, it is not the emotions themselves that are problematic but, instead, the way in which they appear in the soul in our current condition of sin. This is an important point for Augustine, because the doctrine of creation committed him to affirming the goodness of humankind’s created nature, emotions and all. Sin is the result, not of the emotions and affections, but of the free choice of the will. Granting the desirability of freedom from passion (apatheia, for which Augustine coined the term impassibilitas),152 he acknowledged

151. Augustine, On the City of God, 14.19 (CG, 393–94). 152. Ibid., 14.9 (CG, 370).

155

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

that much depends on how we define passion. Freedom from passions contrary to reason is highly desirable; this is the sort of freedom experienced in the heavenly state. However (echoing Lactantius), the absence of affections such as love and joy is an unhuman state of numbness (stupor) worse than vice. Those touched by God’s grace will, accordingly, in this life experience emotions such as fear, desire, grief, and joy, but upright love will prevent these emotions from being the sort of passion that is contrary to reason by directing them to a proper object. Christian disciples will thus fear punishment and desire eternal life. They grieve in anticipation of final salvation and rejoice in hope. So, under the control of right reason (recta ratio) and love, these emotions are not vicious passions (vitiosas passiones) but are virtuous. This is why even Jesus “employed” (adhibere) these affections when the circumstances were appropriate. Having a true human soul, he had true human affections. To be authentically human is thus to experience these affections in the right way; however, in the eschatological state only love and joy will be experienced, not fear and grief.153 Augustine’s tepid acknowledgment that Jesus and prelapsarian Adam and Eve experienced nonpassionate movements of the soul does not do justice to the extent to which he portrayed the Christian life in terms of positive and dramatic emotions. The mother lode of reference to these emotions is Augustine’s Confessions. The Confessions is filled with dynamic images of the spiritual life, above all with the image of restlessness and seeking rest—hence the most famous line from this work: our heart is restless (inquietum) until it rests in God.154 This book abounds with images of Augustine wandering, restless, away from God,155 fatigued but unable to find 153. Ibid., 14.9 (CG, 366–73). 154. Augustine, Confessions, 1.1.1 (SAC, 3-4). 155. Ibid., 2.2.2, 2.2.4 (SAC, 34, 36).

156

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

rest,156 seeking rest by loving created things but finding therein no rest,157 resisting the call of God to return and find true rest,158 and instead stubbornly traveling the hard road of sin that utterly lacks a place of rest.159 The Confessions is the story of the soul that unwittingly plunges itself into disquietude through its love of created things, discovers that such love cannot yield authentic rest for the soul, and then undertakes the journey back to God, where it may finally find true rest. Confessions also presents the spiritual life as a struggle of need and desire: he looked for something to love, not realizing that only God is the one valid object of love. He hungered for the true food, God, but strangely was not aware of the soul’s true sustenance.160 Yet, he hungered on all the same.161 His heart lusted (concupiscebam) after immortal wisdom with an incredible ferment,162 but in his ignorance he did not know what he should love. This sense of need and blinded desire is expressed with images of spatial distance (such as running adrift163 and being exiled164) and arduous travel along a path that was hard (difficiles),165 dark and slippery,166 crooked (tortuosa),167 passing through a valley of tears.168 The overall impression is of great suffering, as the soul wanders along in alienation, seeking rest but finding none, hungry and thirsty but ignorant of the true source of satisfaction and where to find it. 156. Ibid., 4.7.12 (SAC, 83). 157. Ibid., 4.10.15 (SAC, 86). 158. Ibid., 4.11.16 (SAC, 87). 159. Ibid., 4.12.18 (SAC, 89). 160. Ibid., 3.1.1 (SAC, 49). 161. Ibid., 3.6.10 (SAC, 58). 162. Ibid., 3.4.7 (SAC, 55). 163. Ibid., 4.14.23, 6.5.8 (SAC, 93, 139). 164. Ibid., 4.15.26 (SAC, 96). 165. Ibid., 5.2.2 (SAC, 103). 166. Ibid., 6.1.1 (SAC, 129). 167. Ibid., 6.16.26 (SAC, 159). 168. Ibid., 9.2.2 (SAC, 229).

157

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Ultimately, the journey leads back to God but also, paradoxically, back to himself because God dwells in the heart.169 He could not previously find God because God is the God of the heart.170 Much of the emotional freight of the Confessions is borne by the image of the heart as the point of contact between God and the soul. This is one of the places where Augustine is far more indebted to the biblical tradition than to the philosophical tradition. For Plato, Aristotle, and other philosophers, humankind’s contact with the divine was through mind. That is why a description of humankind’s ultimate state (such as we find in Nicomachean Ethics171) seems, at least from a Christian perspective, to be existentially detached and one-dimensionally rational. Admittedly, there were elements of a different view in the Platonic tradition, but they never became the dominant thought. The overall thrust of classical philosophy’s view of humankind’s best state was in the direction of cerebral knowledge. By locating the junction of God and the soul in the heart, Augustine was reacting to the classical heritage and wanting to inject more of human nature into our relation to God. So, his heart lusted (concupiscebam) for eternal truth172 and, having found God, he found his heart struck (pulsatum)173 and filled with tears of joy.174 The emotional nature of true knowledge is revealed by the image of burning: reading the Psalms set him on fire,175 he was moved by a burning affection (ardentiore affectu), and could pray that God—the love that always burns (semper ades) and is never extinguished—might set him on

169. Ibid., 7.10.16 (SAC, 180–81). 170. Ibid., 6.1.1 (SAC, 129). 171. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 10.7 (1177a–1178b), in The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, ed., Jonathan Barnes, 2 vols., Bollingen Series 71.2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1860–62. 172. Augustine, Confessions, 3.4.8 (SAC, 55). 173. Ibid., 12.1.1 (SAC, 367). 174. Ibid., 5.2.2 (SAC, 103). 175. Ibid., 9.4.8 (SAC, 235).

158

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

fire.176 Finally, he observed that the upward ascent to God takes place as the Holy Spirit sets us ablaze, the fire carrying our hearts upward.177 In summary, for Augustine the path to God is existentially rich and emotionally varied. It is an affair of the heart, with its full panoply of emotions and not simply a matter of knowledge. Reason and Erōs The connection between reason and emotion can be seen further if we study Augustine’s account of the mystical ascent to the good. Throughout the Confessions, Augustine recounts how he set his love (amor) on various created things.178 Amor is the Latin equivalent of erōs. Augustine was thus describing his erotic attachment to created realities during his soul’s exile from God and could accordingly liken this amor to illicit sexual desire: “The soul commits fornication [fornicatur] when it turns away from you and seeks outside of you that which it cannot find . . . unless it returns to you.”179 However, just as Gregory was able to use the language of erōs to describe the impulse that drives the soul to God, so Augustine used amor for this same purpose. Augustine thus frequently spoke of loving (amare) God.180 Of course, Augustine used other words to describe the soul’s love of God, especially deligere (noun, dilectio). As we’ve noted, Augustine’s emphasis on the heart made it inevitable that the various words for love would find significant use in his theology. But it is especially noteworthy that, as in Gregory’s theology, an erotically charged

176. Ibid., 10.29.40 (SAC, 299). 177. Ibid., 13.9.10 (SAC, 416). 178. Ibid., e.g., 3.1.1 (“I came to Carthage . . . I was seeking something to love”) (SAC, 49) and 4.13.20 (“I was loving things of inferior beauty”) (SAC, 90). 179. Ibid., 2.6.14 (SAC, 44). 180. In Confessions, see, for example, 7.10.16, 7.17.23, 8.4.9, 10.6.8, 10.27.38 (SAC, 81, 186, 204, 269, 297).

159

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

word like amor could be put into service to describe the soul’s spiritual love. Accordingly, we find Augustine consistently presenting spiritual perfection in terms of love. As he wrote in On the Morals of the Catholic Church, we ought to love (deligere) and praise God—to the extent that praise is given out better and more extensively, God is loved (deligere) and erotically loved (amare) more ardently. When this happens, we journey persistently into the best and blessed life.181 Or, as expressed in On the Trinity, we make daily progress in the knowledge of God by turning our amor from created things to eternal things, by diminishing our desire (cupiditas) for earthly things, and by binding ourselves in love (caritas) to God.182 These passages show us that, just as Origen equated erōs and agapē when their object is God, so Augustine equated amor, dilectio, and caritas. In common with Gregory and other Platonic writers, Augustine grounded this love in God regarded as beauty itself (pulchritudo). Early in the Confessions Augustine asked, What is beauty? What is it that unites us to things that we love? and answered, They would not move us to themselves unless glory (or splendor, decus) and form (species) were in them.183 This statement establishes Augustine’s continuity with Gregory and the Platonic tradition: the soul is moved to love things as it finds beauty (and its components such as grace and form) in those things. But it is not just physical beauty that moves the soul—God is beauty itself, and Augustine regarded his long journey back to God as resulting from being drawn by God’s decus.184 More 181. Augustine, The Way of Life of the Catholic Church, 14.24 (CMWL, 21–22). 182. Augustine, On the Trinity, 14.17.23, in Saint Augustine, The Trinity, trans. Stephan McKenna, C.SS.R, Fathers of the Church 45 (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1970], 444–45) (hereafter Trinity). For the Latin text, see Augustinus, De Trinitate, ed. W. J. Mountain and F. Glorie, 2 vols., Corpus Christianorum Series Latina, 50 (Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1968, 2001). 183. Augustine, Confessions, 4.13.20 (SAC, 90–91).

160

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

concretely, he depicted beauty calling and crying out and finally forcing open Augustine’s deaf ears, emitting a fragrance that caused Augustine to pant for and taste beauty.185 The Image of God In order to grasp the full importance of Augustine’s teaching about love and its relation to reason we must examine his teaching about the image of God. Augustine’s account of the image of God was quite similar to Gregory’s in many respects; like Gregory, he employed the idea of the image of God to establish humankind’s uniqueness and difference from the animals and he frequently identified the image with human rationality.186 However, Augustine’s theology of the image also marked a considerable advance on Gregory’s and on that of every other early Christian theologian because he systematically connected the image of God with the Trinity. Whereas Gregory and most theologians simply identified God with infinite mind and interpreted the image of God in terms of rationality, Augustine began with the Trinity. Instead of portraying the image as the soul’s rational faculty, Augustine portrayed it as the trinitarian unity of memory, intellect, and will. In doing so, Augustine considerably broadened the idea of the image of God beyond the customary frontiers of rationality. Memory (memoria) is Augustine’s word for the mind’s of reservoir of preintellectualized thoughts. In the act of intellect, the mind forms a distinct conception from the contents of memory. Augustine did not have to do much original thinking about the trinitarian relation of memory to intellect; the Logos tradition within Christian thought had already mapped out the way in which the Logos emerges from 184. Ibid., 7.17.23 (SAC, 186). 185. Ibid., 10.27.38 (SAC, 297). 186. Augustine, On the Trinity, 14.4.6 (Trinity, 417–18); On the City of God, 12.24 (CG, 290).

161

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

the depths of the divine mind by an act of intellectual conception. It was a simple thing for Augustine to apply the trinitarian relation between the Father and the Logos to the relation between memoria and intellect within the human mind. The mind’s memoria and intellect thus constitute an image of the Father and the Logos and the relation between them.187 Augustine’s contribution to trinitarian thinking and to the idea of the image of God lies in his rethinking the procession of the Holy Spirit. Prior to Augustine, if theologians thought about the procession of the Spirit at all, they often subsumed it under the obvious and unimaginative notion of breathing—the Father breathes out the Spirit, in contrast to the Father’s speaking the Logos. The problem is that the notion of breathing out the Spirit fails to yield any systematic connection with the notion of speaking the Logos; they seem like completely different acts with no cohesive relation. Augustine advanced trinitarian analysis by connecting the procession of the Spirit to the phenomenon of will (voluntas), which he equated with love. The Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and Son analogously to the emergence of will or love within the rational soul from memoria and intellect.188 The advantage of this analysis is that it explains why the Spirit’s procession differs from the speaking of the Logos: the difference is analogous to the difference between intellect and will. The human mind, then, which is the image of God, comprises memory, intellect, and will together with their relations.189 A few more words on the difference of will from intellect may be helpful. Previous philosophers and theologians acknowledged the distinction of intellect from passions and desires. They also recognized the existence of choice and deliberation; however, they 187. Augustine, On the Trinity, 15.21.40 (Trinity, 506–7). 188. Ibid., 15.17.27, 15.17.29, 15.20.38, 15.21.40–41 (Trinity, 491–92, 493–94, 504–5, 506–8). 189. Ibid., 15.22.42 (Trinity, 508–9).

162

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

did not think of “will” as a distinct category of moral psychology as Augustine did. Of course, Augustine did not think of the will as an object existing independently of intellect. The will is not an independent subject of action; to speak of the will is to speak of the human person who acts volitionally. It is thus the human person who wills, not the will that acts. The will is, moreover, essentially united with intellect in the unity of the human person.190 Nonetheless, unlike previous theologians and philosophers, Augustine treated the will as a phenomenal reality on par with the intellect. They are united in the unity of the human person but are also analytically distinct—we can separate them in our thinking and consider the distinct properties of each. The relation of will to intellect is subtle for Augustine. In one way, the will presupposes intellect, for we can’t love something unless we know it.191 That is why, in the trinitarian analogy, the Holy Spirit proceeds from the Father and the Son—the procession of the Spirit from the Son parallels the dependence of will on intellect. But in another way, will precedes intellect, for knowledge is preceded by desire (appetitus) that finds satisfaction in achieving knowledge. Knowledge, in other words, is teleologically driven and finds its end in love, which is enjoyment of the object of knowledge. Will comprises the teleological movement from appetitus to love.192 Augustine’s identification of will and love is especially important for grasping his theological anthropology.193 By distinguishing will from intellect and identifying it with love, Augustine was arguing (in implicit contrast to much of the classical tradition) that intellect alone is insufficient for achieving human good. This is because it is 190. For a statement of the unity of will and intellect, see, for example, ibid., 10.11.18 (Trinity, 311–12). 191. Ibid., 9.12.17, 15.27.50 (Trinity, 286–87, 521–22). 192. Ibid., 9.12.18, 15.26.47 (Trinity, 287–89, 516–18). 193. See ibid., 14.6.8, 14.7.10, 15.20.38 (Trinity, 422, 424–25, 505), for the equation of will and love.

163

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

love (and therefore will) that connects us to the teleological realm of goods. Although it is necessary to know the good in order to attain it, knowing is not having. Besides knowing the good we must will the good—it must become an object of our love, since it is through love that we enjoy the good and find satisfaction in it. Knowledge, then, does not bring enjoyment and satisfaction apart from will.194 It is, accordingly, the will that accounts for the teleological character of human nature. It is because we are volitional creatures that we seek enjoyment and satisfaction. Of course, because of the unity of intellect and will, acts of knowledge are always accompanied by some form of love; known objects are always located in a teleological scheme of goods. Further, it is possible to love objects wrongly and so we must keep our eyes on the highest good and subordinate our love for lesser goods to our love for the highest good.195 Augustine’s account of the image of God marks an advance in Christian thought because it depicts God and the soul in terms that transcend mere rationality. Early Christian thought, with its affinity for classical philosophy, identified the highest and truest part of human nature with its rational mind. Although there are many places in Augustine’s writings that agree with this view, his teaching about the image of God is notable for ensconcing will and love into the nature of mind. Mind, in other words, is not simply rationality; it also embraces will and love. Moreover, in accordance with the analogy with the Trinity, the equality of trinitarian persons militates against any attempt to subordinate will to reason. At least in principle, this provided Augustine’s theology with a basis for affirming the existence of extra-rational elements of mind in the resurrection state and for defending a positive evaluation of the extra-rational elements, a basis that more classically oriented approaches did not enjoy. Not 194. Ibid., 10.10.13, 10.11.17 (Trinity, 307–8, 310–11). 195. Ibid., 11.6.10 (Trinity, 329–30).

164

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

surprisingly, Augustinians in the Middle Ages engaged in vigorous debate about the relation of rationality and will, especially with regard to human freedom and matters such as incontinence. Some, like Thomas Aquinas, veered toward Aristotle’s understanding of incontinence. Others, in the “voluntarist” tradition, argued that classical accounts of incontinence, in which the fundamental problem is reason’s failure to perceive the good, could not account for the radical nature of sin—the fact that the human person is able to choose a lesser good or even something evil in spite of knowing what is good. For them, lack of self-control is a failure not only of intellect but also of will. Conclusion Patristic theology inherited from the Bible a set of beliefs that bear on the question of reason and emotion. One such belief was that the body and the rest of the physical world remains the good creation of God, regardless of the effects of sin. This conviction was drawn from the Bible’s teachings about creation and the Creator; it was also drawn from belief in Christ’s incarnation and full humanity. This was sharpened and more fully articulated in the struggle with Gnostic cosmology. It meant that blame for sin must lie in human choice and not in any supposed defect of the created world. Another belief was the bundle of ideas and images associated with apocalypticism. Apocalyptic theology portrayed the created world as fallen and in the grip of Satan and demons, and thus prevented any easy optimism that the biblical idea of creation might have generated. Patristic writers continually affirmed the goodness of the created world but were also convinced that the entire cosmos had suffered the corrupting effects of sin. These two beliefs conferred an ambivalent character upon Christian views of the world and of the body. From the New Testament and its Hellenistic Jewish antecedents, 165

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

patristic theology absorbed worry about passions and desires and their metaphysical neighbor, the body. Although New Testament writers did not analyze the nature of passion and desire with philosophical acumen, the extent of their concern meant that patristic theologians would approach this matter with the utmost seriousness. They were especially inclined to take it seriously because New Testament anxiety about passion seemed to be continuous with the moral philosophy of the classical era. In the world of patristic thought, classical philosophy, Jewish literature, and the New Testament all seemed to name the passions as the central moral issue of human life. Besides the ethical issue of the passions, patristic theology also drew from classical philosophy a set of metaphysical distinctions, especially the distinction of soul from body and of reason (or mind) from desire and emotion. To patristic writers, these metaphysical distinctions seemed obviously true; they explained the moral philosophy to which they were committed (allowing reason to govern the passions) and seemed to be supported by Christian views of the afterlife, conceived as an incorporeal mode of existence. There thus came to be a fusion of two convictions: (1) belief in the soul’s difference from the body and in reason’s difference from the passions; (2) the moral imperative to exercise control over the passions and to allow reason to rule the self. The ethical prescription to be free from the passions was made intelligible by the metaphysical distinction of rational soul from bodily passions. Behind express discourse about freedom from the passions lay philosophical assumptions about freedom more generally considered. In agreement with classical philosophers like Aristotle, patristic theologians used the language of choice and will to describe humans as moral agents. Speaking of will and choice was a way of indicating that human beings are origins of intentional action and that human action is not caused by laws and forces external to the human mind. 166

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

Patristic theologians also, in common with classical philosophers, regarded the concept of choice as an indispensable element of human moral action. Finally, theologians accepted the thesis that ethical freedom means the rule of reason and some measure of control over the passions. Christian eschatology, however, contributed a new element to the notion of freedom: freedom as the incapacity to sin. For theologians such as Gregory and Augustine, human free choice had a history: prior to sin, our freedom included the ability to know and love God. After sin, our freedom to know and love God was compromised and we became enslaved to sin. In the eschatological state, our nature would be so transformed that freedom would consist in such perfect love for God that no possibility of sin would remain. Christian theology, then, while retaining the classical notion of freedom as choice, insisted that choice is not the ultimate definition of freedom; perfect freedom is not simply choice but is choosing the good perfectly and consistently. Freedom in this sense is neither choice nor freedom from passion. It is participation in the new self, restored to its original condition. Although the complete renovation of the human person awaited the resurrection of the body, the separation of the soul from the body at death would bring a penultimate experience of the perfected new self. In the meantime, the Christian life was understood to be an anticipation of that perfected new self, on the road to perfection and approaching it daily through the mortification of the flesh and the cultivation of the virtues. Christian eschatology also compelled theologians to think more positively about the passions. Just as Stoic philosophers had debated the possibility of good passions besides the problematic passions, so Christian theologians such as Gregory and Augustine saw that the importance of love for God in the eschatological state demands a revision of the simple formula by which the passions were regarded 167

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

as the antagonist of intellect. While largely remaining within the framework of Greco-Roman moral philosophy, they were working their way toward a more positive view of the passions. Finally, theological commitments led patristic writers to give free choice a greater role in moral philosophy than it enjoyed in classical philosophy. Philosophers such as Plato and Aristotle made a place for free choice, but it played a decidedly subordinate role for them. For them the critical issue in moral philosophy was not choice but the various ways in which we fail to govern the passions and desires. For them, choice was important because it grounded responsibility for moral character in the individual agent. Christian writers, however, wrestling with Genesis’s account of the first sin, felt that slavery to passion required a rather specific explanation and they identified the choice of Adam and Eve as the ultimate reason why we fail to govern the passions. Patristic ambivalence about the passions and the body was a function of the relation between two doctrines, creation and sin. The doctrine of creation affirms the continuing goodness of everything that God created. The doctrine of sin, especially as it developed under the impulse of apocalypticism, asserts that the created world subsists in a state of corruption and under the rule of Satan. The combination of these doctrines inserts certain tensions into Christian thought. In their struggle with Gnostic theology, theologians such as Irenaeus and Tertullian invoked the doctrine of creation to support belief in the goodness and redemption of the body. At the same time, ascetic and even encratistic tendencies were abounding in the early church, testifying to a heightened measure of anxiety about the body and its passions and desires, an anxiety rooted in the doctrine of sin. Christian theology is thus a delicate balance between differing intuitions about the world. The doctrine of creation locates human beings in the world and declares the whole thing to be good. It 168

GREGORY OF NYSSA AND AUGUSTINE

affirms our participation in the world. This participation is the theological meaning of bodily existence. To be a bodily creature is to participate in the created world. The doctrine of sin situates us in a fallen world and summons us to transcend this world. Transcendence is achieved through ethical practices of self-denial and also through the eschatological transformation of the body in the resurrection. The Christian life is, accordingly, a tensed balance of participation and transcendence. We can see this tension in Gregory’s and Augustine’s teaching about the passions. There are strong exhortations to achieve ethical transcendence by moderating or even extirpating the passions, but also acknowledgment that emotions such as love, joy, and grief are vital for the Christian life, acknowledgments that our participation in God’s good creation includes the experience of some passions (or at least prepassionate emotions). Regrettably, life in the state of sin introduces distortions that upset the balance. The upset typically assumes two forms: (1) failure to achieve ethical transcendence and (2) assertions of hypertranscendence. Failure to achieve ethical transcendence is the common, perhaps universal, tendency for Christian disciples to live according to the principles of the fallen world. This failure represents a participation, not in the good world of God’s creation, but instead in the fallen condition of the world. Its most common form is an undue devotion to desire, pleasure, and passion. A considerable amount of Christian preaching and exhortation over the centuries has aimed at raising the level of ethical transcendence. Hypertranscendence in one way is far less common than lack of transcendence. Monasticism, encratism, and other forms of heroic asceticism represent a kind of ethical hyper-transcendence. But hyper-transcendence assumes another form, not so much a matter of ethical practice as of thought—the metaphysical distinctions between soul and body and between reason and passion. Although these 169

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

analytical distinctions are useful for moral philosophy, theological danger looms when they are erected into a metaphysical edifice, when the unity of the human person is lost because soul and body are regarded as distinct things and reason is ontologically separated from passion. Patristic theology bequeathed to the Christian tradition a robust affirmation of world participation (in the doctrine of creation), a strong—sometimes too strong—assertion of ethical transcendence (in its ascetic theology and its warnings about the passions), and a commitment to the metaphysical transcendence of the soul and reason over the body and the passions. This bequest endured intact for many centuries; however, modern thought has generally sought to tone down the element of transcendence, especially the metaphysical transcendence of the soul and of reason. The theological task today accordingly requires us to revisit the tensed balance of participation and transcendence and to ask to what extent ethical transcendence requires the soul’s metaphysical transcendence.

170

6

Emotion and Reason in the Modern World

In a book of modest scope it is regrettably necessary to omit some important points; I thus reluctantly pass over the centuries of medieval and Reformation theology, allowing Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine to function as representatives of Christian thinking about reason and emotion. My purpose in this chapter is to argue that modern Christianity and modern Western civilization experience the same unresolved tension between reason and emotion that I have expounded in chapters 1 through 4. Thus, for every Descartes there is a Pascal; for every Hegel, a Kierkegaard. For every Apollonian impulse there is a corresponding Dionysian impulse. The Tension between Reason and Emotion It’s not news that ours is an age of abounding rationalism. From the rise of modern science to the bureaucratization of government, medicine, and education, modern cultures have, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and perseverance, sought to bring about the rationalization of every aspect of life. Of course, people in classical 171

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

and medieval cultures were committed to rationality as well, but theirs was balanced by plenty of veneration for tradition, antiquity, and local idiosyncrasies. The aim of the modern world seems to be a universal rationality that will govern all of the domains of life. The paradigm instance of this rationality is science; its principal symbol is Isaac Newton, whose stature among intellectuals is suggested by Alexander Pope’s famous tribute: Nature and Nature’s laws lay hid in night God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.1

Newton, a modern Prometheus bringing light instead of fire, had in the general estimation revealed the deepest secrets of the physical universe with a few simple formulas. Mathematical rationality thus triumphed over centuries of apparently idle speculation and theological obfuscation. The result today is a degree of discovery, understanding, and control unimaginable in previous epochs. The decoding of genomes and the landing of the spacecraft Rosetta’s Philae lander on a comet in November 2014 bear witness to the power of rational thinking. Not unwisely did Thomas Paine entitle his manifesto on religion The Age of Reason. The increasing dominion of science, however—a blank check in the seventeenth century, seemingly close to being cashed in the twenty-first century—is not the whole story and stands alongside its contrary: a sense that the torrent of enthusiasm for rationality was repressing something important. Consider public opinion polls, which indicate that, in the midst of science’s greatest intellectual triumphs and unparalleled public financial support, about one-third of the American public expressly rejects the theory of biological evolution.2 About one-quarter of Americans believe in reincarnation 1. Alexander Pope, Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. Robin Sowerby, Routledge English Texts (London: Routledge, 1988), 236.

172

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

and astrology, and almost as many have had firsthand experience with ghosts.3 Meanwhile, 88 percent of Americans give some credence to alternative forms of medicine not sanctioned by the medical community.4 The age of reason thus subsists alongside an abundance of what the scientific community regards as irrationality. Indeed, the harder the scientific community urges the necessity and good of science, the more such urging seems to cast up artists, writers, philosophers, and aberrant movements insisting on the limitations and dangers of rationalism and the importance of the nonrational domains of human nature. The simplest way to grasp the modern, unresolved tension between reason and emotion is to attend to eighteenth-century discourse about the reason and the passions.5 Alexander Pope’s (1688–1744) Essay on Man illustrates a popular way of thinking about these matters. This poem sees the passions as indispensable to human life: Better for us, perhaps, it might appear, Were there all harmony, all virtue here; That never air or ocean felt the wind; That never passion discompos’d the mind. 2. Pew Research Center: Religion & Public Life, “Public Opinion on Religion and Science in the United States,” http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/public-opinion-on-religion-andscience-in-the-united-states/. 3. Pew Research Center: Religion & Public Life, “Many Americans Mix Multiple Faiths,” http://www.pewforum.org/2009/12/09/many-americans-mix-multiple-faiths/. 4. National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Statistics, “Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Public Understanding Science: Fiction and Pseudoscience,” http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/seind02/c7/c7s5.htm. 5. Helpful and illuminating books and articles include: Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006); Christopher Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); various essays in Stephen Gaukroger, Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge, 1998); Kathleen M. Grange, “The Ship Symbol as a Key to Former Theories of the Emotion,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 36 (1962): 512–23; Albert O. Hirschman, The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph, Princeton Classics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

173

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

But ALL subsists by elemental strife; And passions are the elements of life.6

Passion discomposing the mind, we might wish for a passionless life, but passion’s disturbance is necessary, for strife is fundamental, even between mind and passion. Passion is therefore an element of life, like the ocean and air. At the same time, there is a tensed relation between passion and reason: Man’s superior part Uncheck’d may rise, and climb from art to art; But when his own great work is but begun, What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone.7

The passions’ aptitude for discomposing the mind can thus move past productive strife and give birth to chaos. Consequently, passion requires the guidance of reason: Passions, though selfish, if their means be fair, List under reason, and deserve her care; Those, that imparted, court a nobler aim, Exalt their kind, and take some virtue’s name.8

When reason governs, passion aims at something higher than selfish ends and becomes virtuous. Reason, accordingly, must keep to the straight and narrow: Suffice that reason keep to nature’s road; Subject, compound them [sc., the passions], follow her [sc., nature] and God. Love, hope, and joy, fair pleasure’s smiling train, Hate, fear, and grief, the family of pain, 6. The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963), 510 (Epistle 1, stanza 5, ll. 165–70). 7. Ibid., 517 (Epistle 2, stanza 1, ll. 39–42). 8. Ibid., 519 (Epistle 2, stanza 3, ll. 97-100).

174

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

These mix’d with art, and to due bounds confin’d, Make and maintain the balance of the mind. . . .9

The goal is thus balance and harmony, attained by reason’s artful mixing of the passions while keeping the passions confined within “due bounds.” Reason must thus “rectify, not overthrow, / And treat this passion more as friend than foe.”10 Pope’s Essay thus offers us a view of reason and passion whose goal is the harmony of contraries. If reason follows the way indicated by nature and God, it will artistically form the otherwise unruly passions into virtue. Pope’s vision of reason’s rule over passion contrasts with Thomas Hobbes’s (1588–1679) philosophy, in which desire has priority over reason. For Hobbes, rational deliberation and will were not a faculty of decision; action was instead determined simply by whichever desire or aversion proved strongest.11 Reason had the purely instrumental function of seeking how best to satisfy desires—it was the scout and spy acting on behalf of desire.12 David Hume (1711–1776) took this subordination of reason further. For Hume, reasoning deals with truth and falsehood with respect to either logical relations among ideas or to inferences from empirical experience. But passions and volitions, wherein lies morality, are neither true nor false; they are “original facts and realities” and therefore outside the domain of reasoning.13 “Morality, therefore, is more properly felt than judg’d of.”14 Reason, then, has to do with truth and falsehood, but not with good and evil, which are primitive perceptions and not the result of reasoning. Reason, in fact, had little to do with moral 9. Ibid., 519–20 (Epistle 2, stanza 3, ll. 115–20). 10. Ibid., 521 (Epistle 2, stanza 3, ll. 163–64). 11. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil, ed. Michael Oakeshott (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), 39 (ch. 6). 12. Ibid., 46 (ch. 8). 13. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 458 (book 3, part 1, section 1). 14. Ibid., 470 (book 3, part 1, section 2).

175

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

action for Hume. It “never influences any of our actions;” impulses toward action come from “emotion[s] of aversion or propensity.” At most, reason is able to direct “our judgment concerning causes and effects” once we have become emotionally engaged with an object.15 Reason, in short, is not a principle of action and “has no influence on our passions and action.”16 It is therefore a mistake, Hume argued, to oppose reason to passion in the traditional way. Since passion, and not reason, is the principle of action, there is no basis for an opposition. The true opponent of any passion is, instead, another passion.17 This is comparable to Hobbes’s view. For both Hume and Hobbes, our moral life lies in our emotional attraction to and repulsion from objects. Reason comes into consideration only if the passion is generated by a false belief (e.g., fear of an object that should not be feared) or if a means chosen to satisfy a passion proves to be inadequate. Otherwise, moral action lies entirely within the sphere of the passions and reason may be said to be “the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.”18 Hume thus opposed the traditional view that connected morality with acting rationally, that posited a tension between reason and passion, and that argued for the subordination of passion to reason. Against this view he asserted the priority (in moral matters) of emotion and passion and the subordination of reason. Pietism Attempts to blunt the force of rationalism were not confined to philosophy. The religious movement known as Pietism had,

15. Ibid., 414 (book 2, part 3, section 3). 16. Ibid., 462 (book 3, part 1, section 1). 17. Ibid., 415 (book 2, part 3, section 3). 18. Ibid., 415 (book 2, part 3, section 3).

176

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

generally speaking, the same aim as Hume—to subordinate reason to passion and affection. Of course, Pietists had an ecclesiastical and devotional aim that Hume lacked; their ultimate goal was the reformation of Christian life and practice. To that end, they expressed significant distrust of contemporary ministerial education, which they regarded as possessing an unduly cognitive emphasis, and of ministerial practice, which they felt wrongly emphasized polemical debate and dispute. In place of this education and practice they proposed a ministry founded on authentic regeneration, involving a transformation of the heart, that is, the affections. For Johann Arndt (1555–1621), true Christianity did not consist solely in intellectual knowledge; theology was not just a science or body of doctrines to be learned. What is essential for true Christianity is the consecration of our entire being, not just the mind but also the will and heartfelt love. There is, he asserted, a big difference between the understanding, by which we know Christ, and the will, by which we love him. Knowledge without love is worthless, whereas it is a thousand times better to love Christ than to be able to speak and dispute about him.19 Consecration, however, requires the new birth, in which we become new creatures in our heart, sense, temperament (Gemüt), understanding, will, and affections (Affecten).20 As we strive in the Christian life, the affections of the flesh such as self-love and wrath subside more and more and we experience renewal in Christ.21 Notable in Arndt’s theology is the way in which he grounded this teaching about affection in the being of God. Christian theology has felt uneasy about ascribing affections to God.22 For Arndt, however,

19. Johann Arndt, Fünff Geistreiche Bücher vom wahren Christentum (Leipzig, 1709), 725–26 (preface to the third book). 20. Ibid., 13 (book 1, ch. 3). 21. Ibid., 61 (book 1, ch. 11). 22. The Westminster Confession, for instance, affirms that God is without body, parts, or passions (ch. 2, section 1).

177

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

the image of God was reflected not only in our intellect and will but also in our heart (Hertz) and indeed in our entire being.23 Consequently, human affections (Affecten), desires (Begierden), wishes (Lüste), and every movement of the heart were (in the original state of creation) holy and similar to God’s own temperament and movements.24 God can act only according to God’s nature and so God purifies us of inordinate affections and replaces them with affections such as meekness and patience.25 For Arndt, the renewal of our affections in the image of God indicated that these affections are present in God’s own being. August Hermann Francke (1663–1727) invested holy affections with comparable importance. In a small work on interpreting the Bible, Francke taught that divine inspiration involved not only the illumination of the writers’ minds but also the inflaming of their wills with holy affections.26 In order to read the Bible rightly, he argued, one must possess those same affections. By receiving the writers’ holy affections, we are able to meditate on the truth revealed in Scripture, with the result that the Bible’s truth will be lodged in our hearts and not only in our heads.27 Agreeing with Arndt, Francke argued that this hermeneutics of the affections presupposed the new birth, for the unregenerate have no experience of holy affections and are thus unable to grasp the Bible’s revelation.28 The person who most put the affections on theology’s map was Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), whose book A Treatise concerning Religious Affections proved to be enormously influential on subsequent theology. Edwards forthrightly identified true religion 23. Arndt, Fünff Geistreiche Bücher, 3 (book 1, ch. 1). 24. Ibid., 271 (book 1, ch. 41). 25. Ibid., 780 (book 3, ch. 9). 26. Augustus Herman Franck [sic], A Guide to the Reading and Study of the Holy Scriptures, trans. William Jacques (Philadelphia, 1823), 129. 27. Ibid., 147–48. 28. Ibid., 132–34.

178

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

with holy affections such as fear, hope, love, hatred, desire, joy, sorrow, gratitude, compassion, and zeal.29 The affections are, accordingly, not only an essential element of human nature but constitute a very large part of it.30 The power of religion is manifest in the heart, which is “the principal and original seat” of religion.31 Religion is thus much more than cognitive knowledge: “He that has doctrinal knowledge and speculation only, without affection, never is engaged in the business of religion.”32 Of course, a fervent heart alone does not suffice for true religion, but intellectual light without emotional heat, “a head stored with notions and speculations, with a cold and unaffected heart,” is far from authentically spiritual knowledge.33 Like Hume, Edwards regarded the affections as the source of human action; without love, hatred, and other affections, the world would be largely bereft of motion and activity.34 Edwards accordingly virtually identified the affections with the exercise of will and did not regard will as a distinct mental power.35 The importance of the affections shows up in Edwards’s understanding of prayer, song, and sacraments. Prayer’s purpose is not to declare God’s greatness or to express our needs and wants. It is instead “to affect our own hearts with the things we express, and so to prepare us to receive the blessings we ask,” and the traditional postures and gestures of prayer exist to affect the hearts of those who pray.36 Similarly, singing hymns “seems to be appointed wholly to excite and express religious affections” and the sacraments use “sensible representations” of redemption the better to affect us.37 29. Jonathan Edwards, Religious Affections, ed. John E. Smith, The Works of Jonathon Edwards 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959), 95, 102. 30. Ibid., 100–101. 31. Ibid., 100. 32. Ibid., 101. 33. Ibid., 120. 34. Ibid., 101. 35. Ibid., 97. 36. Ibid., 114–16.

179

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Throughout the eighteenth century, then, there was a significant theological witness to the importance of the passions, emotions, and affections. The influence of this witness was widespread in later centuries—Ludwig Feuerbach’s philosophy was predicated on the distinction between philosophy, in which God is represented as mind, and religious belief, in which God is represented as the heart, as a being with emotions and feelings.38 So, while philosophers such as David Hume were putting reason in its place by subordinating it, in moral matters, to passion, theological voices such as Pietism were insisting that true religion is located in the heart. Romanticism Eighteenth-century philosophical impulses combined with Pietistic impulses yielded the complex movement known as Romanticism.39 Romanticism was a movement with many aspects; I will focus rather narrowly and selectively on Romantic writers’ penchant for feeling, affection, and other extra-rational dimensions of human experience. The theologian who exhibited most clearly the confluence of Pietism and Romanticism was Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). His family lived in a Moravian Pietist community when he was young and he attended Moravian schools from ages fourteen to eighteen. He later left the Moravians but always spoke warmly about his time with them and their piety. Their influence on him and his theology has been noted by many. But Schleiermacher the Pietist was also an intellectual with impeccable Romantic credentials. He 37. Ibid., 115. 38. Ludwig Feuerbach, The Essence of Christianity, trans. George Eliot (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1957), 33–43, 50–58. 39. Some helpful books on Romanticism are Isaiah Berlin, The Roots of Romanticism, 2d ed., ed. Henry Hardy, The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999); Tim Blanning, The Romantic Revolution: A History, Modern Library Chronicles Series (New York: Random House, 2012); and Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre, Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity, trans. Catherine Porter (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001).

180

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

was close friends with August Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel, and other members of the German Romantic movement. For a time he shared an apartment with Friedrich Schlegel and the two of them briefly collaborated on a plan to translate Plato’s works into German. (Schlegel quickly dropped out of the project; Schleiermacher labored on for years and translated most of the dialogues.)40 Above all, however, it was his book On Religion, with its emphasis on feeling, intuition, and the All-One, that confirmed his Romanticism. More than perhaps anyone else, Schleiermacher illustrated the way in which the Pietists’ valuation of the heart prepared the way for the Romantic valuation of feeling, intuition, mood, and sentiment. For both Pietists and Romantics, the modern, scientific view of human nature, especially its rationalism, was uncomfortably one-sided and overlooked the deepest and most truly human part of us. Schleiermacher agreed with one of the central tenets of Pietism, that true religion does not consist in knowledge, especially scientific knowledge: the measure of knowledge is not the measure of piety.41 Concepts and principles (Grundsätze) are one and all foreign to religion; religion is a matter of perception (Empfindung).42 It is a sense (Sinn) of and taste (Geschmack) for the infinite.43 It is immediate (i.e., pre-reflexive) consciousness (Bewußtsein) of and feeling (Gefühl) for the existence of the finite and temporal in and through the infinite and eternal.44 With this variety of terms, Schleiermacher sought to loosen the grip of the Enlightenment on religion. In particular, he sought to counteract the Enlightenment’s equation of religion with 40. See Julia A. Lamm, “Schleiermacher as Plato Scholar,” The Journal of Religion 80, no. 2 (2000): 206–39, for an account of the translation project and of Schleiermacher’s interpretation of Plato. 41. Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, trans. John Oman (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958), 35; Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1868), 33. 42. Ibid., 46; Über die Religion, 42. 43. Ibid., 39; Über die Religion, 93. 44. Ibid., 36; Über die Religion, 34.

181

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

belief and moral action. That is why his dogmatics, The Christian Faith, begins with the denial that piety is either knowing or doing.45 His thesis is not that religion has nothing at all to do with knowledge and moral action; later in The Christian Faith he defined Christianity as a teleological—that is, a moral—religion.46 However, religion is deeper than morality and has to do with our pre-reflexive consciousness; knowledge and action operate within reflexive consciousness. Religion is a feeling of the oneness of all things, prior to the reflexive awareness of objects in their contrast to the subject. Religion is not simply awareness or contemplation, however, as terms such as perception, sense, and consciousness might imply. On the contrary, for Schleiermacher, and for Pietists more generally, religion is affective: religion is about feeling an unsatisfied longing for the infinite, a longing that brings with it a holy sadness.47 Religion consists of such feelings as love, humility, and joy,48 and its goal is to love the World-Spirit and its works.49 These themes are enunciated in Schleiermacher’s dialogue, Christmas Eve. This dialogue portrays a group of people meeting for a Christmas Eve celebration, where each offers thoughts on the meaning of Christmas. What is notable is the Pietistic tone of the gathering. For Sophie, “Christ was the true surety that life and joy will nevermore perish in the world.”50 Ernest testifies to “a wonderful festal feeling of high joy [that] seizes upon me.”51 For Edward, the practice of exchanging gifts is “a pure exhibition of religious joy.” He thanks Ernestine for her music, remarking how it 45. Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith, trans. H. R. MacKintosh and J. S. Stewart, Fortress Texts in Modern Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 8–11. 46. Ibid., 42–44. 47. Schleiermacher, On Religion, 245; Über die Religion, 227. 48. Ibid., 84; Über die Religion, 76. 49. Ibid., 65; Über die Religion, 59-60. 50. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on the Celebration of Christmas, trans. W. Hastie (Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1890), 9. 51. Ibid., 11.

182

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

expressed their “Christmas feeling” of joy and “the return into the feeling of childhood.”52 Agnes states that “I am not able to describe in words how deeply and fervently I have felt that every cheerful joy is religion; that love, leisure, and devotion are tones of a perfect harmony which in every way can follow and accord with each other.”53 What made Schleiermacher a Romantic and not simply a theologian influenced by Pietism was his transcendentalism—his belief that there is a unity of all things behind the apparent plurality and that religious feeling is the intuition of this unity. The traditional language of Pietism was focused on Jesus and his wounds and blood. Schleiermacher’s Pietism was shaped by his philosophical learning and his affinity with the emerging Idealist movement. He saw particular emotions such as love and joy as concrete instances of the soul’s intuition of the transcendental All-One, the unity that underlies the plurality of ordinary experience. It is this relation of the concrete and the transcendental, the finite and the infinite that explains Schleiermacher’s positive assessment of Friedrich Schlegel’s novel Lucinde. This novel, describing the protagonist’s quest for romantic love, was almost universally disparaged upon publication; few had good words for it and many were scandalized by its candid sensuality. Schleiermacher, however, wrote and published a work of fictitious letters in which he defended the novel.54 In particular, Schleiermacher applauded the coincidence of love and sensuality celebrated in the novel. In the novel, the protagonist, Julius, extols the wonders of his beloved: “You feel completely and infinitely; you know of no separations; your being is one and indivisible. That is why you are so serious and so joyful. . . . 52. Ibid., 23–24. 53. Ibid., 45. 54. Friedrich Schleiermacher, Schleiermachers Vertraute Briefe über die Lucinde (Jena und Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1907).

183

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

You’re at my side at every stage of human experience, from the most passionate sensuality [or wildest, ausgelassensten Sinnlichkeit] to the most spiritual spirituality [geistigsten Geistigkeit].”55 Here we see one of the most vital of Romantic beliefs—the convergence of seeming opposites. The beloved combines wild sensuality and the highest spirituality—not as sequential moments in life but simultaneously; she is one and indivisible. So, in the novel the sensuality of romantic love is joined to spirituality in a way that Schleiermacher found compelling. In love, Julius loses himself in “spiritual voluptuousness [geistige Wollust] as well as sensual beatitude [die sinnliche Seligkeit].”56 “In the solitary embrace of lovers, sensual pleasure becomes once more what it basically is—the holiest miracle of nature.”57 Schlegel’s mixing of sensuality and spirituality did not impress the majority of his contemporaries. Schleiermacher, however, came to his friend’s defense. He decried the opposition of intellectual matters and love,58 and summoned his readers to acknowledge the holiness of nature and sensuality.59 We see here the characteristic Romantic complaint that the modern world divided what should be undivided. According to conventional morality, the only way to avoid a libertine attitude toward sensuality was to regard it as a necessary evil resulting from nature and indulged only as an act of obeying the divine command to be fruitful and multiply. In Lucinde, however, the reader sees the greatest sensuality and spirituality joined together most intimately. In other words, a true and high spirituality is found precisely in the sensuality of romantic love.60 For Romantic thinkers, 55. This and following are my very literal translations. See Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow, Minnesota Archive Editions (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971), 47. 56. Ibid., 44. 57. Ibid., 113. 58. Schleiermachers Vertraute Briefe, 105. 59. Ibid., 106. 60. Ibid., 14–16.

184

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

the infinite was intuited in the experience of finite things; but this intuition was not mediated by scientific rationality or everyday, unreflective experience, for these failed to grasp the unity of the finite and the infinite. Instead, Romantic writers stressed the importance of seemingly nonrational avenues, including physical sensuality. A similar valuation of the nonrational can be seen in William Wordsworth (1770–1850). For Wordsworth, poetry has to do with things as they appear to sense and passion, not as they are in themselves.61 Poetry, in other words, takes up a subjective relationship with things, not the sort of objectifying relationship that characterizes scientific knowledge. Wordsworth’s poem “The Tables Turned” bears witness to this distinction. Although the poet urges us to attend to the beings of nature—the sun, the woodland linnet, the throstle—we are also told just how we should attend: Not with the “toil and trouble” of books, with their “a dull and endless strife,” and not with the “meddling intellect / [that] Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things,” and not with the “barren leaves” of science, but instead with “a heart / That watches and receives.”62 Of course, Wordsworth was not adamantly opposed to science; in his 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, he acknowledged that science could be a force for human good and envisioned some sort of cooperation between the scientist and the poet.63 Nonetheless, “all good poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings,” not of thought, for thoughts are a representation, an image of past feelings.64 Poetry

61. William Wordsworth, “Essay Supplementary to the Preface [to Lyrical Ballads],” in Edward Dowden, ed., The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth, 7 vols. (London: George Bell & Sons, 1893), 5:251. 62. William Wordsworth, Poems of William Wordsworth, vol. 1: Collected Reading Texts from The Cornell Wordsworth, ed. Jared Curtis (Penrith, UK: Humanities-Ebooks, 2009), 366–67. 63. See Maurice Hindle, “Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth: A Mutual Influence,” Romanticism 18, no. 1 (2012): 16–29. 64. William Wordsworth, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, vol. 1, ed. W. J. B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser (Penrith, UK: Humanities-Ebooks, 2008), 146.

185

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

begins with emotion that is recollected, but in a state of tranquility, without its original intensity. The poet contemplates the emotion until its tranquility disappears and the original emotion-tone is felt. 65 Poetry’s basis in feeling and emotion does not, however, make its verse merely emotive expressions; the subjective attitude it adopts toward things does not reduce it to the level of mere subjectivity. On the contrary, poetry is true knowledge of things—different from scientific knowledge, but authentic knowledge nonetheless. Poetry’s object is “truth, not individual and local, but general, and operative; not standing upon external testimony, but carried alive into the heart by passion. . . . Poetry is the image of man and nature.”66 Poetry, we may say, aims at existential truth, the truth of importance to humans, “not as a lawyer, a physician, a mariner, an astronomer, or a natural philosopher, but as a Man.”67 Poetry, moreover, differs from science only in its viewpoint, for both are grounded in the pleasure that attends real knowledge. The poet studies humans, but “considers man and the objects that surround him as acting and reacting upon each other,”68 not with the detachment and abstraction with which the sciences proceed. Poetry is, consequently, “the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge; it is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science.”69 Wordsworth was here arguing that there are more ways of knowing than are provided by the sciences, more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. Feeling and passion are not irrational and subjective impulses lacking truth. They are, instead, the only way in which the human mind can truly grasp some truths.

65. Ibid., 176. 66. Ibid., 163. 67. Ibid. 68. Ibid., 165. 69. Ibid., 167.

186

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

Modernism I will end this short review with a brief look at Modernism, the period that witnessed such diverse early twentieth-century movements as Cubism, Dada, the beginnings of atonality in music, and Italian Futurism. Although diverse, these movements were in many ways continuations of Romanticism, especially in their attempts to articulate alternatives to the modern, rationalistic world. The anxiety that lay behind these attempts received classical articulation by Max Weber: [In modern scientific culture] there are no mysterious incalculable forces that come into play . . . one can, in principle, master all things by calculation. This means that the world is disenchanted. One need no longer have recourse to magical means in order to master or implore the spirits, as did the savage, for whom such mysterious powers existed. Technical means and calculations perform the service.70 Today youth feels rather the reverse: the intellectual constructions of science constitute an unreal realm of artificial abstractions, which with their bony hands seek to grasp the blood-and-the-sap of true life without ever catching up with it.71 ‘Science as the way to nature’ would sound like blasphemy to youth. Today, youth proclaims the opposite: redemption from the intellectualism of science in order to return to one’s own nature and therewith to nature in general.72

The Modernist rebellion against this disenchantment and the culture of “technical means and calculation” was prefigured in Friedrich Nietzsche.

Consider

Nietzsche’s

remarks

about

Germany’s

educational system. For Nietzsche, this system had lost its purpose.

70. Max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology, trans. and ed. H. H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946), 139. 71. Ibid., 140–41. 72. Ibid., 142.

187

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Sufficient attention and more was paid to the means, but thought of the end of was lacking. And what was the end? Culture (Bildung), and not, as commonly supposed, the state and government (das Reich). German universities, as Nietzsche saw it, aimed at one thing: churning out vast numbers of young men useful for service in the state, thus transforming them into machines.73 Education, like the rest

of

life,

was

thus

bureaucratization—Weber’s

becoming culture

of

subject “technical

to

rational

means

and

calculation.” Nietzsche located Germany’s spiritual problems within a rather large narrative about the decline of Western civilization, a precursor to later efforts such as those of Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the West and the later works of Martin Heidegger. For Nietzsche, Western civilization made a fatal misstep in the period of classical Athens and in the person of Socrates. Athens was suffering from social degeneration, manifest as the anarchy and tyranny of the instincts.74 In the face of this threat, Socrates proposed a solution: mastery of the passions by the exercise of reason, thus establishing reason as a countertyrant to the instincts and rationality as the basis of virtue and happiness.75 As far as Nietzsche was concerned, the entire course of Western civilization was thus determined; from Socrates onward, Western culture was at war with passion and instinct, employing reason as its weapon. The problem, for Nietzsche, is that human life is not principally reason but is, instead, passion and instinct. Reason’s attack on instinct is therefore an attack on life.76 Nietzsche’s alternative to rationality was to marry the passions and instincts to the spirit—to spiritualize (vergeistigen) them.77 Love is thus 73. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols and The Anti-Christ, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (London: Penguin Books, 1990), 73–74, 93. 74. Ibid., 42–43. 75. Ibid., 43. 76. Ibid., 52.

188

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

the spiritualization of sensuality (Sinnlichkeit).78 That is why hostility toward sensuality is the sign of disease within the soul.79 Healthy morality, then, is ruled by an instinct of life,80 not by rationality. Consider artists. The artist’s most basic instinct is not for art itself but for life; life—understood as passion and instinct—is the meaning of art and art is the great stimulant of life.81 Art is thus, for Nietzsche, a having-to-transform (Verwandeln müssen) things until they reflect the perfection that the artist sees in himself or herself.82 The Dionysian arts such as acting and music involve the arousal and discharge (Entladung, used commonly of electrical discharges) of the emotions (Affekte), in contrast to the Apollonian arts (such as poetry), which are more closely connected to vision.83 The Dionysian character is thus an excess of power (Kraft); in it was expressed the ancient Greeks’ will to life, their desire that life should continue endlessly.84 Reason, meanwhile, as employed in conventional philosophy comes in for serious critique: It is incapable of understanding anything living or historical and is regarded as contrary to sense perception.85 Moreover, it deals only with abstract, empty concepts and is obsessed with notions such as identity, unity, substance, and other supposed characteristics of being.86 Nietzsche’s writings were a sustained effort to invert the valuation of reason and nonreason in modern thought. To that end, he exalted the

senses,

instinct,

and

passion,

and

depicted

reason

as

epistemologically misunderstood when contrasted with sense and 77. Ibid. 78. Ibid., 53. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 55. 81. Ibid., 91. 82. Ibid., 82. 83. Ibid., 83. 84. Ibid., 118–19. 85. Ibid., 45. 86. Ibid., 47.

189

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

morally misused when contrasted with passion and instinct. As such, his thought was continuous with Romanticism. At the same time, his critique of the rationalization of society pointed toward some of the main themes of Modernism. One of the leading symbols of Modernism was the 1913 performance of Igor Stravinsky’s (1882–1971) Rite of Spring. This ballet was produced by Serge Diaghilev (1872–1929), with the intent of shocking audiences and creating a new pathway for dance.87 It certainly did shock at least part of its initial audience; reports of hissing and whistling abounded from those for whom Vaslav Nijinsky’s (1889 or 1890–1950) unorthodox choreography clashed excessively with tradition. However, it was not only the dance that broke with tradition; the music is commonly regarded as one of the most important works of the modern era. Just as Nietzsche sought to announce, or create, a new humanity of the future by disrupting Europe’s immediate past and returning to an ancient past (especially the cult of Dionysus), Stravinsky’s score created a new music that disrupted the canons of European music’s era of common practice (roughly 1600 to 1900) by ignoring strict rules of tonality (traditional scales and harmonies) and employing unusual scales and dissonant harmonies. Yet the score pointed not only to the future but also to the past, by incorporating Russian folk tunes and by setting the ballet in the pre-Christian, pagan Slavic past.88 This setting was an important inspiration of the original conception of the ballet; according to an interview on the day of its premiere, Stravinsky asserted that the ballet 87. For an account of Diaghelev’s relationship to Romanticism, see Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000), 31–34. 88. It is important not to overemphasize Stravinsky’s use of folk tunes. He seems to have used very few such tunes and transformed them musically far beyond their folk character. On this, see Richard Taruskin, “Russian Folk Melodies in ‘The Rite of Spring,’” Journal of the American Musicological Society 33, no. 3 (1980): 501–43; and Peter Hill, Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 35–39.

190

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

was all about nature and its annual renewal. In it he sought to express a primal “fear of nature” and “sacred terror” inspired by nature. He likened the orchestral instruments to buds growing on a tree, with the entire orchestra signifying the birth of spring.89 The Rite of Spring is historically significant for several reasons, not least because of its rebellion against the classical tradition of music.90 In so doing, Stravinsky symbolized the general tendency of Modernism in all of its artistic forms—to dissolve a culture increasingly seen as decadent and to create something new.91 Additionally, the original intent of the ballet—to express primitive feelings of terror and awe in the face of nature—paralleled another theme of the twentieth century, the revaluation of the nonrational. Modernist artists’ desire to create something new rested on their sense of historical crisis. They sensed that modern civilization (including its scientific culture) had produced a void of meaning. For Wassily Kandinsky (1866–1944), a leading Modernist artist, the chief manifestation of this cultural void was the predominance of materialism. In his essay “On the Spiritual in Art,” he complained that materialism has reduced the universe’s life to a useless game, plunging the human spirit into despair.92 In the modern situation, according to Kandinsky, we seek only the things of the body—material possessions 89. The interview is translated in Hill, Stravinsky, 93–95. It is worthy of note that, apparently because of the violent reception of the ballet, for which he blamed the choreography, Stravinsky increasingly sought to portray the score as an independent, purely musical entity with little connection with either the dance or the pagan setting, even to the point of disavowing the interview I’ve cited. See Robert P. Hughes, Richard A. Taruskin, and Thomas A. Koster, eds., Ars Rossica: Freedom From Violence and Lies: Essays on Russian Poetry and Music by Simon Karlinsky (Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013), 366; Hill, Stravinsky, 105–17; and Daniel K. L. Chua, “Rioting with Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of the Rite of Spring,” Music Analysis 26, no. 1/2 (2007): 59–61, 96. 90. Although Stravinsky later returned to classical forms, thus diverging from Arnold Schönberg’s path of consistently postclassical forms. 91. This is the thesis of Eksteins’s excellent book, Rites of Spring. 92. Wassily Kandinsky, On the Spiritual in Art: First Complete English Translation with Four Full Colour Page Reproductions, Woodcuts and Half Tones, ed. Hilla Rebay (New York: Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946), 10.

191

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

and technological advancement—while neglecting the things of the spirit.93 In this condition, science is reduced to a stultifying positivism, which allows only what can be weighed and measured to be real.94 And yet, in spite of this scientific-rationalist culture’s sense of security and infallibility, there is a growing sense of uncertainty, due to the very success of science: as one theory replaces another (this essay was first published in 1910, when Einstein’s theory of relativity was dramatically revising the scientific view of things), the feeling grows that today’s certainties will be replaced in the future.95 In such times of uncertainty, our only hope is to turn away from the soulless, external world and turn toward the inner world of the spirit.96 Kandinsky thus applauded those, in particular the Theosophical Society and other spiritualist movements, who had got themselves free of materialism and acknowledged the reality of things unseen. In these he saw a parallel with artists (like himself) who had abandoned traditional arts’ subservience to the imitation of nature and instead sought inspiration in primitive art.97 Early Modern Psychology The legacy of Romanticism and Modernism is the cultural context in which such leaders of early modern psychology as William James and Sigmund Freud questioned the importance of rationality and in certain respects subordinated reason to the nonrational elements of the mind. As we can see, their theories arose out of a long historical discussion about the rational and the irrational. Take, for example, Freud’s distinction between the id and the ego. The ego corresponds most closely to what we commonly understand 93. Ibid., 18. 94. Ibid., 22. 95. Ibid., 22–24. 96. Ibid., 26–27. 97. Ibid., 25–26.

192

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

to be the moral agent; it is the ego that negotiates the demands of the id and seeks to satisfy desires in socially appropriate ways. This corresponds roughly with the classical philosophical distinction between reason and the passions and desires. But Freud insisted that the ego is an extension of the id as the id comes into contact with the external world. The ego, in other words, is no longer transcendent, divine reason, but simply an extension of the id. One of the ego’s problems relates to satisfying the id’s desires. Because the id exists in a premoral state, its desires seek expression without regard to social custom. The id sometimes generates desires that the ego regards as threatening. The result is neurotic anxiety. The ego, faced with the impossibility of satisfying the id (as, for example, in the desires associated with the Oedipal phase of development), adopts defense mechanisms—sublimation, repression, and so on. The ego, then, engages in a task of negotiation, seeking self-preservation while dealing with the anxiety occasioned by the id. The ego is not the voice of rationality envisioned in the classical view of reason. To the extent that there is a voice of absolute morality in Freud’s mature system, it is the super-ego; however, the super-ego is likewise not the voice of reason. It is instead the internalized authority of the father (acquired at the resolution of the Oedipal phase), later incorporating the social and moral demands of society. What was important about Freud’s view is the way in which it subverted the classical understanding of the moral agent. Instead of a model based on the tension between reason and passions and desires, Freud posited a threefold source of anxiety (from the id, the superego, and the external world) with the ego attempting to balance these various demands while attending to its own tasks, including selfpreservation. In Freud’s model, there was little room for rationality, as classically conceived, in the moral life. William James’s approach to psychology was notably different 193

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

from Freud’s; however, James was just as little a rationalist as was Freud. Illuminating in this regard are James’s remarks in the essay “The Sentiment of Rationality.” The title of this essay is indicative: rationality is a sort of sentiment, linked to the passions. This is because we feel that we have grasped something rationally when we achieve a “strong feeling of ease, peace, [and] rest.” Rationality is, accordingly, the feeling that there is nothing further to explain.98 Rationality is, moreover, a balancing act between two distinct “passions”: the passion for simplicity (seeing patterns in complex phenomena) and the need to analytically distinguish one thing from another and focus on the particularities. Any theory will be seen as rational only if it satisfies these passions.99 And, there are other considerations. If there are two conceptions (James was thinking of metaphysical systems such as idealism and materialism) that are each logically coherent, the question of rationality comes down to which of the two better satisfies the practical and aesthetic demands of our nature.100 In particular, any theory that we would accept as rational must give us some certainty about the future; the “emotional effect of expectation” becomes a determinant of rationality. A theory that leaves the future ambiguous causes “mental uneasiness” and thus can never count as a rational theory—hence the endurance of belief in God and immortality, but also scientists’ rejection of miracles. In every case, the need to have a theory that guarantees a stable future defines a theory’s rationality.101 Additionally, a theory must be congruent with humankind’s deepest desires and powers. That is why (James opined) pessimistic philosophies (he named Arthur Schopenhauer) and materialism will never find wide acceptance.102 98. William James, “The Sentiment of Rationality,” in The Will to Believe: and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy (New York: Longman, Green and Co., 1912), 31. 99. Ibid., 32. 100. Ibid., 36. 101. Ibid., 37.

194

EMOTION AND REASON IN THE MODERN WORLD

James summarized his point by asserting, “It is far too little recognized how entirely the intellect is built up of practical interests.”103 But the practical nature of intellect means that there will be different forms of rationality, according to the differing temperaments of humans. “Idealism will be chosen by a man of one emotional constitution, materialism by another.”104 As a result, James was scornful of those who insisted that belief must rest on scientific evidence: disputes in the sciences show that people with the same evidence will infer differently. And this is not the result of a lamentable, epistemologically misguided subjectivity. On the contrary, “The whole man within us is at work when we form our philosophical opinions. Intellect, will, taste, and passion co-operate just as they do in practical affairs.”105 Conclusion In this all-too-brief survey I have argued that modern Western culture is characterized by an unresolved, perhaps unresolvable schism. On one hand, our unparalleled scientific progress and control of nature impress us with the promise of an unendingly progressive future; on the other hand, this progress has induced the widespread sense that modern culture is spiritually empty due to the very success of science for which we congratulate ourselves. In response, the last three centuries have witnesses a parade of movements that exalt the nonrational dimensions of life—emotion, passion, affection, feeling, instinct, nature, and so on, and find in them both something essential to human nature and also a way of escaping the pernicious effects of scientism and rationalism.

102. Ibid., 39. 103. Ibid., 39. 104. Ibid., 42. 105. Ibid., 43.

195

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

The ambivalent relationship of reason to passion and desire identified by Plato and articulated in the Christian tradition thus continues with full force in modern theology and philosophy. If anything, the relationship is more contradictory today than in the classical period, for rationality has been institutionalized in the various sciences. But as scientific rationality has become more powerful, countervailing forces have arisen to protest on behalf of the extra-rational elements of human life, resulting in an increasingly positive valuation of passion and desire. Hence an impressively diverse bunch—Hume, Pietists, Romantics, Modernists—who might agree on little else agree that reason is not the most important thing in human nature. In this cultural situation, the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have witnessed substantial scientific interest in rationality and emotion, with neuroscientists, cognitive scientists, biologists, and others adding a wealth of experimental data and refined conceptions to our understanding. As we consider some of this scientific research in the next three chapters, however, it will be good to remember that it did not occur in a cultural vacuum. Scientific interest in and study of emotion and rationality are part of an ongoing discourse in our culture about human nature, a discourse that theology is obliged to listen to as it seeks to fashion a theological understanding today.

196

7

Emotion from a Scientific Perspective

I have hitherto tried to support the thesis that the Christian tradition as a whole feels quite ambivalent about emotion, passion, desire, and other elements of the soul commonly regarded as nonrational. Some emotions, such as anger, lust, and jealousy, seem at first to be intrinsically and irredeemably evil; however, even Jesus was occasionally angry, so there must be such a thing as godly anger and, as Augustine argued, in our existential state, lust is a necessary concomitant of reproduction. Other emotions, such as love, and hope, are not only good but obligatory features of the Christian life, although there are debased and errant forms of love and hope can be misdirected toward an unworthy object. Meanwhile, the Christian tradition feels ambivalent about reason as well, although the volume and vehemence of concern is notably less than with emotion. It is, I suppose, possible to construct a theological account of emotion and reason that would rely only on divine revelation—the Bible, tradition, and whatever else one takes to be revelatory. Since emotion and reason are among the most empirically immediate 197

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

aspects of human nature, however, it makes sense to listen to the scientific community (or perhaps, communities), especially since the last fifty or so years have seen significant experimental and theoretical advances on a variety of scientific fronts. Although it would not be right simply to allow scientific views to determine the shape and content of theology, there is a long history of Christian theologians employing the results of philosophy, science, and other extratheological disciplines for the purpose of understanding the human condition. This chapter and the following two chapters will be exercises in listening to scientific discourse about emotion and reason in hopes of learning things that can be incorporated into a theological understanding. Two cautionary remarks are needed. The first pertains to the volume of research and topics in the scientific study of emotion and cognition.1 This and the next two chapters represent only a small selection of the topics and, within each topic, only a selection of representative and leading research. The second caution deals with terminology. This and subsequent chapters will discuss emotions commonly called negative—anger, jealousy, fear, and so on. In scientific literature, calling an emotion negative is not a moral judgment but simply registers the fact that these emotions are typically experienced by us as something unpleasant. Some Introductory Considerations As always seems to be true in matters of substance, it turns out to be difficult to define emotion. Consider our everyday language. Imagine that we see someone red in the face, swearing, and gesticulating madly immediately after someone has backed into his or her car. An observer states that he or she must be angry. None of us would think 1. In this and the next two chapters, I will use “cognition” instead of “reason,” since the former is the customary term in contemporary scientific discourse.

198

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

to question this utterance. Competent users of a language all know how to use emotions words like anger correctly. There doesn’t seem to be much to be puzzled about; however, our use of the term anger is actually varied. We use the word anger to cover both the shortterm rage that quickly passes with circumstances and also our sense of righteous indignation over things like injustice—an indignation that may endure for decades. We say that people are angry if they display the usual signs of anger—red face, swearing, and so on, but we also recognize anger in cases where the behavioral signs are absent. We recognize Othello as pathologically jealous, but we can also casually assert our own toned-down and evanescent jealousy if a neighbor gets a new car. People are said to be sad when they are crying inconsolably because of loss, but also when, without the tears, they feel a bit down because they’ve seen a sad film. Do all uses of anger or jealousy or sadness denote the same thing? If so, what? Does emotion denote something real or is it just a category word that is used loosely of things that have little to do with each other? In more precise terms, how does folk psychology—the collection of everyday words that we use—relate to scientific psychology? In philosophical terminology, this is the question of whether a generic term such as emotion or a specific term such as anger denotes a natural kind. Asking whether something is a natural kind is equivalent to asking (using philosophical jargon) whether there is an identifiable reality that emotion or anger names or whether there are instead just various phenomena, with little in common, that we casually and misleadingly lump together in our workaday folk psychology. Emotion is thus a fuzzy concept. Further, the state of scientific knowledge about emotion is fluid. New research tools and agenda abound, with a corresponding increase in volume, richness, and complexity of results. Nonetheless, it is possible to speak of a

199

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

consensus, if not regarding a definition of emotion, at least regarding the characteristic features of emotion. The consensus view embraces five points. • First, emotion involves a preconscious appraisal of information. Before we reflect consciously and deliberately, the brain has already processed information from an object or situation in the environment, made an initial determination about whether the organism should advance or flee, and initiated an emotional response. • Second,

emotions

are

associated

with

neurological

and

physiological signatures. Emotions register neurologically and can be detected by imaging studies of the brain. Emotions also register physiologically in phenomena such as trembling, change of heart rate, and increased attention. • Third, emotions are typically linked to distinctive facial expressions. There are, in other words, characteristic expressions, such as the contour of the mouth and the movement of eyebrows, that signal certain emotions to observers. • Fourth, emotions are connected to action tendencies. Emotions are not just something felt, but are also states in which the organism is primed for action. Examples include running (out of fear) and fighting (in the case of anger). • Fifth, emotion often involves some measure of conscious appraisal, as when we alter an emotion because of consciously held knowledge, for example, moving from fear to relief upon discovering that what we thought was a snake was only a rope. These five points constitute a core of theses that most scientific students of emotion would affirm; however, the importance of these

200

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

points relative to one another is a disputed matter. Some regard the first three as the most essential; their views constitute the theory of basic emotions. Others place special emphasis on the fifth point and couple conscious appraisal to socially influenced conceptual knowledge. Their position is often called social constructionism. Because each expresses important truths about emotion, truths that a theological account of emotion must take seriously, we will examine each. The Idea of Basic Emotions The central idea of the theory of basic emotions is that there is a small number of emotions that are identifiable, neurological realities and that the term emotion refers primarily to these. What are the characteristics of basic emotions? Most basically, they are biological systems. Using the language of cognitive science and evolutionary psychology, we can think of them as computational systems that process information. Most theorists identify them with particular neural networks in the brain, although some are agnostic about such an identification.2 Advocates typically hold that there is a small number of basic emotions. They often provide lists of six or seven emotions. Fear, anger, and sadness recur in these lists, joined, depending on the scientist, by emotions such as happiness, lust, and surprise. There seems little interest in compiling a definitive list; the main point is that evolution has fitted the human brain with a small number of fundamental emotional responses to the environment.3 Additionally, 2. Paul E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories, Science and Its Conceptual Foundations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 77. 3. R. B. Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences,” American Psychologist 35, no. 2 (1980): 170; Paul Ekman, “Are There Basic Emotions?” Psychological Review 99, no. 3 (1992): 550–51; Jaak Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions, Series in Affective Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 47.

201

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

theorists hold that, to whatever extent basic emotions are connected to neural networks, those networks are distinct from one another.4 In other words, basic emotions are defined and distinguished more by the neural networks in which they are instantiated than by our subjective experiences of them. The neurological basis of emotion means that emotion is first and foremost a state of the body. The modern roots of this premise lie in the thought of William James (1842–1910) and of Carl Georg Lange (1834–1900). Of course, the idea that emotions are closely connected with the body was not a new idea.5 Plato located passion in the chest and associated its arousal with the heart and its cooling with the lungs. He located the appetites in the belly.6 Thomas Aquinas similarly associated anger with the heating of the heart’s blood; other emotions are also connected with the heart’s physical movements.7 René Descartes argued that the soul’s passions are caused and strengthened by “animal spirits,” which in turn are rooted in the heating of blood in the heart.8 James and Lange, however, went farther, or at least stated with greater emphasis and precision that to feel an emotion is to feel a bodily state. For James, perception of an object as, for instance, dangerous, causes certain changes in the body, perhaps trembling or running. Our feeling of fear is exactly identical with our perception of trembling under these circumstances. Without bodily motions such as trembling or running, we might 4. Paul Ekman and Daniel Cordaro, “What Is Meant by Calling Emotions Basic,” Emotion Review 3, no. 4 (2011): 364, 367; Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, 99. 5. Christopher Tilmouth, Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 1–2, 79–80. 6. Plato, Timaeus, 69e–71c, in John M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1271–72. 7. Thomas Aquinas, On Truth, question 26, articles 2, 3, and 8. See Thomas Aquinas, Truth, 3 vols., trans. Robert W. Mulligan, S.J., James V. McGlynn, S.J., and Robert W. Schmidt, S.J. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994). 8. René Descartes, “The Passions of the Soul,” pt. 1, articles 9, 19 and 27, in The Philosophical Works of Descartes, trans. Elizabeth Haldane and G. R. T. Ross, 2 vols. [N.p.: Dover Pubs., 1955], 1:335, 340–41, 344.

202

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

cognitively know that the object is dangerous, but we would not feel afraid.9 Without motions such as a quickened heartbeat or shallow breath or “visceral stirrings” there is no emotion.10 James’s peers were not slow to offer critique of this theory.11 One argued that James’s theory could not account for situations in which the same emotion might be associated with very different bodily movements: if I am afraid of getting wet because I’m caught in the rain, I may run or I may go into a store to buy an umbrella. James conceded that his formula (that emotion simply is the feeling of a bodily state) was liable to misunderstanding and noted that fear of getting wet differs from fear of an oncoming bear, with the former having “a very minimum of properly emotional excitement.”12 This sensible response is a precursor of much of today’s debate about basic emotions and natural kinds: to what extent is one instance of a basic emotion such as fear biologically identical to another instance of fear, and to what extent do instances of the same emotion differ biologically because of the character of the eliciting object? If they do so differ, what justifies the concept of basic emotion? James argued that, even when the same emotion is felt with differing intensities in different individuals, these various instances of the emotion all possess enough “functional resemblance” to justify our calling each of them by the same name.13 He also acknowledged that not just any 9. William James, The Principles of Psychology, 2 vols. (New York: Henry Holt, 1890), 2:449–50. See also James’s article, “What Is an Emotion?” Mind, old series 9 (1884): 188–205. For Lange’s views, see Carl George Lange, “The Emotions,” in The Classical Psychologists, ed. Benjamin Rand (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912), 672–84, available also at http://psychcentral.com/ classics/Lange/. 10. James, Principles, 2:452. 11. A noted social-construction theorist argues that, besides James’s physiological theory of emotion, he had another view, one more congenial to social-construction interests: James R. Averill, “William James’ Other Theory of Emotion,” in M. E. Donnelly, ed., Reinterpreting the Legacy of William James (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1992), 221–29. 12. William James, “The Physical Basis of Emotion,” Psychological Review 1 (1894): 518–19. 13. Ibid., 520.

203

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

bodily change (a critic had mentioned hiccoughing) would be felt as an emotion. The critical thing in feeling an emotion, he believed, was the experience of “visceral factors.”14 At any rate, he argued, the attempt by introspection to identify emotion apart from bodily changes reveals only feelings that are “very mild and, so to speak, platonic affairs” that exist in the “subtler emotions.”15 What basic emotion theorists take from James and Lange is the notion that emotions are principally an event of the body, in particular,

the

brain.

The

leading

alternative

view,

social

constructionism, proposes that emotions are first and foremost conditioned by social norms and conditioning. The brain’s neural structure provides only a basis upon which culture erects the emotions themselves. The theory of basic emotions, on the contrary, argues that it is the brain that determines the fundamental nature of emotions. To explicate the relation of emotion to the brain, proponents of basic-emotion theory typically employ the language of cognitive science, describing emotions as neural systems for processing information, thus likening the brain to a computational system with processing programs. Consequently, proponents sometimes refer to emotions as affect programs16 or motor programs.17 The term program is deliberately chosen; the brain’s neural programs process information analogously to the way a computer’s programs do. With respect to basic emotions, the argument is that among the many information-processing systems found in the brain, some are emotion systems. Each system has evolved to receive or be activated by certain information from the environment and to produce a response—an 14. Ibid., 521–22. 15. Ibid., 524. 16. E.g., Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, 77–99. 17. Craig Delancey, Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal about Mind and Artificial Intelligence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 26.

204

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

emotion coupled to a behavior—based on the information. Visual perception of a predator, for instance, will result in fear and fearful behavior; visual perception of personal harm will result in anger and angry behavior. Basic-emotion systems are thus, in the language of biology, open systems. A closed system is one that operates invariably and in a reflex-like way—blinking of the eye, knee-jerk reactions, and so on. An open system is influenced by and activated by signals from the environment. With the acquisition of learning and language, the human species has significantly expanded the range of environmental inputs and also gained a measure of control over them.18 The connection between emotion and behavior in affect programs can be illustrated by considering feelings associated with libido, attraction, and attachment.19 Each of these systems has a characteristic emotion. For example, sexual desire differs from attachment feelings connected with bonding. Each system likewise has distinctive behaviors: libido motivates the individual to seek sexual intercourse; attraction moves the individual to seek intercourse with a preferred member of the species; feelings of attachment motivate us to engage in prosocial behaviors, especially those concerned with parental care toward offspring. An important feature of the theory is that the processing of environmental information and the resulting emotional-behavioral output are fast and automated.20 The system automatically registers

18. Ekman and Cordaro, “What Is Meant by Calling Emotions Basic,” 366; Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 61–63; Delancey, Passionate Engines, 27. 19. The following is taken from Helen E. Fisher, “Lust, Attraction, and Attachment in Mammalian Reproduction,” Human Nature 9, no. 1 (1998): 23–52. See also Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 48–49. 20. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 48; Ekman and Cordaro, “What Is Meant by Calling Emotions Basic,” 365; Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking,” 154–56; R. B. Zajonc, “On the Primacy of Affect,” American Psychologist 39, no. 2 (1984): 118–19; Delancey, Passionate Engines, 42, 46; Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, 117.

205

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

the information for which it is adapted and sets the response in motion. It is easy to see this in animals. An animal startled by the perception of danger immediately feels fear and engages whatever behaviors it has evolved to escape danger. Animals do not deliberate; they feel and act with immediacy. Natural selection has adapted us for fast processing of information and quick behavioral response. What is true of animals is true, theorists assert, of humans: the human mind possesses the same adaptation, the same quick processing of information, and the same quick emotional and behavioral responses. If we sense danger (perhaps we are on a dark, unfamiliar street at night and hear footsteps), our hearts race, we begin to sweat, we experience other physiological changes, we are filled with fear—all this in spite of whatever rational thoughts we may have about the situation. If we feel that we have been wronged, we may find ourselves immediately angry—without the intervention of conscious thought or deliberation. The theory of basic emotions, then, asserts that we respond emotionally to information gathered from the environment, processed by one of several systems, according to whether it represents a threat, an opportunity, or something else existentially important. These processes happen quicker than thinking, which works at a comparatively leisurely pace. Although we rightly value rational deliberation, animals and humankind in its earliest days did not have the luxury of leisurely deliberation; the environment did not favor slow processes and response. The connection between the theory of basic emotions and the theory of evolution helps us understand some of the more disputed features of the theory. As noted above, basic emotions are adaptations. This means that, via natural selection, certain brain structures evolved in response to recurrent problems faced by animals and protohumans: recognizing and responding to danger, the need to find sexual mates and food, and so on. Once primates came to be, with 206

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

their social organization, new issues arose calling for evolutionary solutions: caring for offspring, maintaining friendly social relations, facilitating cooperation, and the like. In its simplest form, the theory states that today we possess the emotions that we have because early in human history possession of these emotions conferred some advantage relevant to reproduction. Members of the species lacking one or more basic emotions were at a disadvantage; they were less successful at reproducing and hence their genes and the resulting brain structures did not get passed on through the generations. This all means that basic emotions are shared with animals, especially primates, that they are innate and not learned, and that they are found almost universally in humankind.21 That basic emotions are shared with animals follows directly from the evolutionary history that human beings share with animals. Although we have a highly evolved prefrontal cortex that allows us to have language and other elements of culture, we are still animals and our brains are developments of animal brains. Evolution, in constructing the human brain, has not deleted primitive functions found in animals and proto-humans but has instead preserved them with modifications.22 That basic emotions are innate and not learned is a consequence of their being shared with animals, whose emotions are (according to advocates) manifestly innate and not learned. Theorists concede that learning plays some role in the operation of basic emotions.

21. Delancey, Passionate Engines, 27; Ekman and Cordaro, “What Is Meant by Calling Emotions Basic,” 365–68; Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 48–50; Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking,” 156; John Deigh, “Primitive Emotions,” in Robert C. Solomon, ed., Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, Series in Affective Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 9–10. 22. Donald W. Pfaff, Drive: Neurobiological and Molecular Mechanisms of Sexual Motivation (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999), 170–88, provides examples of hormone systems, neurotransmitting systems, and brain structures (such as the hypothalamus) in animals that are conserved in the human brain.

207

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

For example, in our culture a child has to learn that a busy street is dangerous; it takes learning to find joy or pleasure in complicated music. But the mechanism that produces feelings of fear or anger or joy is not itself learned; it comes preset, so to speak, with a built-in recognition of some signals from the environment. Such mechanisms are sensitive to certain kinds of signals and not others.23 Because affect programs are innate and not learned, they are a permanent part of human nature, unless some trauma or pathology renders them inoperative. Although we can, with practice, learn to moderate and control our anger, the anger response is permanent. Fearful behavior can be overcome and fearful feelings can be lessened through knowledge and experience, but we cannot get rid of the fear mechanism.24 That basic emotions are found universally across human culture results from the biological character of these emotions. While culture varies across the world, basic biology does not, especially in the parts of the brain responsible for basic emotions. The brain’s structures have persisted largely unchanged for millions of years. As we will see, social-constructionist opponents of the theory of basic emotions contest these three claims and argue instead for the distinctly human character of human emotions, for the central role of cultural learning in the acquisition of emotions, and for the cultural distinctiveness of various emotions. The Argument for Basic Emotions Theorists offer several lines of evidence to support the theory that there are basic emotions that operate with some level of independence from culturally mediated cognitions: (1) facial 23. Griffith, What Emotions Are, 89. 24. Ekman and Cordaro, “What Is Meant by Calling Emotions Basic,” 367; Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 51.

208

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

expressions that are universal across human cultures; (2) the appearance of certain emotions in infancy, prior to the effect of culture; (3) emotions that are maintained in the presence of beliefs that seem to contradict the assumptions of the emotion; (4) the fact that emotions evolved in proto-humans and other animals before the appearance of cognition in Homo sapiens; (5) experiments showing that affective mechanisms operate without cognition; (6) the fact that some emotions can be elicited by direct electrical and chemical stimulation of the brain; and (7) the fact that emotions involve brain structures that differ from those involved in cognition. I will briefly review the evidence and argumentation for each of these. 1. Building on some observations by Charles Darwin,25 researchers (notably Paul Ekman) have performed experiments in which people are shown photos of other people exhibiting certain facial expressions. The observers are then asked which emotion the facial expression expresses. Ekman and others have reported that observers universally, regardless of culture, interpret the expressions in the same ways.26 From the evidence theorists conclude that there is a set of basic emotions that are rooted in biology, are found in every culture, and are expressed with the same facial expressions. Many of these expressions had already been noted by Darwin: In anger, “the mouth is generally closed with firmness . . . and the teeth are clenched. . . . [There is] a strongly-marked frown on the forehead.”27 In disgust we find “the mouth being widely opened” or movements around the mouth “identical with those preparatory to the act of vomiting . . . with the upper lip strongly retracted.”28 In depression, 25. Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (London, 1872). 26. Ekman, “Are There Basic Emotions?,” 550–53; Dacher Keltner and Paul Ekman, “Facial Expression of Emotion,” in Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, eds., Handbook of Emotions, 2d ed. (New York: Guilford, 2000), 236–49. 27. Darwin, Expression of the Emotions, 241–42. 28. Ibid., 258.

209

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

“The eyebrows not rarely are rendered oblique. . . . This produces peculiarly-formed wrinkles on the forehead. . . . The corners of the mouth are drawn downwards.”29 These sorts of experiments show, according to proponents, that emotion is precognitive (because the facial expression happens without conscious thought), innate (because the expressions are functions of the brain’s evolved structure and are not learned), and pan-cultural (because the same, stereotypical expressions recur in every culture and are consistently interpreted as expressing the same emotions). 2. Proponents argue that infants exhibit these universal facial features at a very early age, some as early as birth, others by the second month.30 Since at this age the infant has not been socialized and does not form cognitive beliefs, the appearance of these expressions argues for the existence of innate, precognitive emotions. 3. Basic-emotion theorists draw attention to seemingly irrational emotions—those where the belief implied by what we feel contradicts what we know to be true. An example often used is fear of flying. One may consciously know all the relevant facts about air travel and its safety record; however, one’s fear of flying may persist alongside the knowledge. Other instances include fear of snakes and spiders. This phenomenon suggests that the brain structures that process cognition differ from and may not interact with the brain structures that result in emotion. 4. The next argument is based on evolutionary history, namely that human cognition is a latecomer in evolution. Animals display emotions and therefore presumably proto-humans did so as well. This supports the theory that brain structures associated with emotions differ from structures associated with cognition. Of course, 29. Ibid., 179. 30. Carroll E. Izard, Christina A. Fantauzzo, et al., “The Ontogeny and Significance of Infants’ Facial Expressions in the First 9 Months of Life,” Developmental Psychology 31, no. 6 (1995): 997–1013.

210

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

this argument presupposes that human emotions are homologous with animal emotions (i.e., we share the same emotions) and that, once cognition emerged in evolutionary history, the evolutionarily early emotion structures did or could operate with some independence from the evolutionarily later cognition structures. Nonetheless, given these assumptions, evolutionary history does argue for some independence of emotion from cognition.31 5. R. B. Zajonc has performed experiments that test subjects’ preferences for, and therefore affective feelings about, objects, sounds, and so on. An element of the experiments was to evoke preference for an object by repeatedly exposing the subject to the object while also taking experimental steps to ensure that the subject did not consciously recognize that he or she had already been exposed to the object. Zajonc found that preference could indeed be induced by repeated exposure, even though the subject was not aware of the repeated exposure. He concluded that, although some level of object recognition was occurring (otherwise the repeated exposures would have no effect), the recognition took place unconsciously. Hence, there must be two systems, with the affective system operating independently of conscious, cognitive systems.32 6. Another argument offered for the existence of basic emotions is the fact that some emotions can be evoked by means of electrical stimulation of the brain and by introducing chemicals into the brain. For instance, an electrode implanted into the septal area (under the cortex, in front of the thalamus) will, when activated, produce pleasant feelings bordering on sexual orgasm, while stimulation of the midbrain tegmentum (under the thalamus, at the top of the brain stem) produces fearful feelings. Stimulation of the ventrolateral thalamus (on the bottom side of the thalamus) has produced sexual 31. Zajonc, “Feeling and Thinking,” 169–70; Delancey, Passionate Engines, 45. 32. Ibid., 160–63.

211

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

and other pleasant feelings.33 Experiments as early as the 1950s showed that rats will voluntarily and repeatedly—thousands of times daily—activate levers that electrically stimulate certain regions of the brain.34 It should be noted that some researchers have cast doubt on whether such stimulation produces true pleasure. In some cases, sexual feelings were aroused but without orgasm.35 Taking these cautions into consideration, however, it still appears that electrical stimulation of certain areas of the brain involves desirable feelings of some sort. Emotions of some sort can also be elicited by introducing drugs into the brain. Administering testosterone to castrated rats restores their sex drive; in humans, the occurrence of sexual desire and sexual thoughts correlates with levels of testosterone and androgen.36 Additionally, the hormones oxytocin and vasopressin seem to cause or facilitate feelings of attachment, as in mother-infant bonding and in male-female attachment.37 The salient point for our discussion is that if emotions, pleasures, and feelings can be artificially induced, then at least some emotions do not require cognitive content. This strengthens the case for basic emotions that evolved prior to cognitive systems and which operate, in at least some circumstances, independently of cognition. 7. Finally, basic-emotion theorists argue that the regions of the

33. Barry R. Komisaruk, Carlos Beyer-Flores, and Beverly Whipple, The Science of Orgasm (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 209–11. 34. Larry W. Swanson, Brain Architecture: Understanding the Basic Plan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 202–3. 35. Kent C. Berridge and Morten L. Kringelbach, “Affective Neuroscience of Pleasure: Reward in Humans and Animals,” Psychopharmacology, 3 March 2008, http://link.springer.com/article/ 10.1007/s00213-008-1099-6/fulltext.html. See also the following two chapters in Morton L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge, eds., Pleasures of the Brain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009): Alexander L. Green, Erlick A. C. Pereira, and Tipu Z. Aziz, “Deep Brain Stimulation and Pleasure,” 302–19; and Kyle S. Smith, et al., “Hedonic Hotspots: Generating Sensory Pleasure in the Brain,” 40–42. 36. Fisher, “Lust, Attraction, and Attachment,” 28. 37. Ibid., 40; Carol Sue Carter, Attachment and Bonding: A New Synthesis (Cambridge: MIT Press, in cooperation with Dahlem University Press, 2005), 89–90.

212

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

brain associated with emotion are not the regions associated with cognition. A rather strong version of this claim is found in the work of Jaak Panksepp, who subscribes to the view that the human brain consists of three identifiable major structures whose location corresponds to their evolutionary appearance. The phylogenetically (i.e., evolutionarily) oldest part of the brain is the basal ganglia, the center of movement and primitive responses such as fear and anger. Surrounding the basal ganglia (and therefore, in evolutionary terms, newer than the basal ganglia) is the limbic system, comprising structures such as the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, and the amygdala. Panksepp believes that this is the site where various social emotions such as social bonding occur. Finally, there is the most recent portion of the brain, the neocortex, which surrounds the limbic system. For Panksepp, although the neocortex can be influenced by emotions and can in turn influence them, it is not itself the source of emotion.38 Although this threefold division of the brain and the assignment of emotion to the basal ganglia and limbic system is not beyond dispute, there is evidence that there are specific neural networks principally responsible for emotion. For example, according to one researcher, there are separate neural circuits for wanting something and liking that thing, the separation being crucial for explaining phenomena such as addiction, where the object wanted is not necessarily liked. Wanting-circuits, it is claimed, lie in the subcortical portion of the brain, distinct from the conscious thinking occurring in the cortex.39 The importance of this line of argument for a theological appraisal of emotion lies in the twofold claim (1) that basic emotions are phylogenetically considerably more ancient than cognition and (2) 38. Panksepp, Affective Neuroscience, 42–43, 71–79, 95–96. 39. Morten L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge, “The Functional Neuroanatomy of Pleasure and Happiness,” http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3008353/#R5; published subsequently in Discovery Medicine 9, no. 49 (2010): 579–87.

213

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

that they operate, to at least some extent, precognitively. If these claims are true, then it follows that such emotions are ineradicable elements of human nature and also that they are only partially amenable to rationally guided self-regulation. They may, in fact, operate without our conscious awareness and with minimal input from our beliefs and conscious desires and thus determine some, perhaps much, of the substance of daily moral existence. We will explore these and other implications in subsequent chapters. The Social Construction of Emotion There is a long-running debate about what determines human nature. The terms change according to the epoch and mode of discourse—nature vs. nurture, biology vs. culture, innateness vs. learning—but the fundamental issue has been the same since Aristotle noted that nature creates the conditions for virtue but does not itself make us virtuous, that task being assumed by moral education. 40 Proponents of the theory of basic emotions acknowledge the role of learning and culture in the formation and experience of emotion; however, their enthusiasm lies confessedly on the side of nature, biology, and innateness. There is, inevitably, another side, populated by those who are impressed with the ways in which human nature is shaped by factors that are more social than biological. Not surprisingly, the term social construction has been coined to abbreviate the convictions of this other side. One way of getting at the social-constructionist theory is to ask, What is to count as the paradigm case of emotion? Biologists understandably select the emotions of animals as the paradigm, on the assumption that those emotions are homologies of human 40. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 2.1 (1103a-1103b), in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols., Bollingen Series 71 (Princeton.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1742–43.

214

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

emotions—that they are evolutionarily and genetically linked and are not merely analogous. Others are not so sure, drawing attention to the differences between human emotions (or at least adult human emotions) and those of animals. One thus finds complaints that biologists, taking animal fear to be paradigmatic of fear itself, relegate the complex feelings and thoughts that humans experience in fear to the category of uninteresting by-product.41 Biologically considered, an emotion such as fear or anger is momentary, experienced just long enough to evade danger or scare off a threat. But human emotion has a more varied relationship with time. Human emotions can be quick, burning intensely and briefly, but they can also smolder at low temperature for years.42 Animal desire may be satiated instantaneously upon finding the object of desire; human desire can be a protracted affair, characterized by insane lust, care, affection, and transcendent feelings of love and devotion. At least one social constructionist, Carl Ratner, has argued that, in the movement from infancy to adulthood, emotion sheds much of its natural and automatic character. The eliciting stimuli are no longer objects of nature in their naturalness but are instead those invested with social meaning. In adult humans, he argues, the animal emotions are “vestigial,” “empty shells” subsumed by social influences.43 What, then, is emotion? One salient feature is that emotions are about something—they have intentional objects. Fear is not simply a feeling, but is fear of something; anger is more than an agitated state but is directed toward an object (which may or may not be the actual cause of the anger).44 There may (in this view) be states 41. Robert C. Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 36. 42. Ibid., 8. 43. Carl Ratner, “A Cultural-Psychological Analysis of Emotions,” http://www.sonic.net/~cr2/ emotion.htm. The original and shorter version appeared in Culture and Psychology 6 (2000): 5–39. 44. Solomon, True to Our Feelings, 15, 19.

215

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

of brain and body that are connected with emotion, but without an intentional object (as might occur if certain parts of the brain receive electrical stimulation), they are not emotions.45 Emotions thus must be regarded as complex entities, possessing many parts. Social-constructionist theorists generally concede that there is always a physiological element but insist as well on the intentionality of emotion—its character of being about something, being concerned with some object in the world. Emotions have objects; however, social-construction theorists typically assert additionally that emotions involve beliefs and judgments about their objects.46 This does not mean that emotions involve consciously held beliefs and judgments; many of our beliefs are implicit—they condition our thinking and feeling, but lie below the level of conscious awareness.47 Nonetheless, the fact that emotions include belief and judgment means that objects are not just experienced, but are experienced in a certain way. The object is experienced as fearful or dangerous or attractive or annoying or in some other way. That is why seeing a lion in a zoo does not inspire fear while seeing a coyote while hiking does inspire fear (a pack of coyotes dwells within two hundred yards of my house). We believe that the enclosed lion poses no threat to us; we believe that the approaching coyote does pose a threat. But the beliefs that accompany emotions are a special kind of belief. They are evaluative judgments about how objects relate to us in ways that matter to us. Not all beliefs are like this. We believe that the earth is around ninety-three million miles from the sun, but it’s hard to imagine someone getting emotional about this. But if I believe that the looming coyote is dangerous, if I interpret what I see as a danger, 45. Ibid., 32. 46. Ibid., 18. 47. Robert C. Solomon, “Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings: Emotions as Engagements with the World,” in Solomon, ed., Thinking about Feeling, 77, 83.

216

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

then my belief is also an evaluation of the object’s importance to me. This is the sort of belief that, according to the theory, emotions involve. The beliefs and judgments associated with emotion involve concepts—dangerous and safe, attractive and repulsive, and so on. One of the central tenets of social constructionism is that the concepts employed in emotion are learned in social contexts and that, consequently, emotion is a function of social beliefs, values, and rules.48 The point can be expressed in terms drawn from the philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein: Is emotion a psychic entity, discoverable and identifiable by means of introspection?49 Or is it only as we interact with other human beings that we learn not only what anger is but also that we are actually angry? The theory of basic emotions could be taken to imply the former: if emotion is a bodily state, then it would seem to be an immediate feeling and nothing more—if one is in this state, then one knows that one is in this state and just exactly which state it is. Advocates of social constructionism argue that we don’t know what anger is apart from the social learning that tells us about intentionality and insult and harm.50 Or consider shame: it is difficult to imagine our feelings of shame without also considering the complex social rules that set forth expectations for proper behavior. A dog may behave abashedly if scolded, but is the dog feeling shame? Or joy: Does the sense of sublime joy inspired by a beautiful landscape make sense without a certain amount of social conditioning? Do animals get happy or weepy or ecstatic in the presence of a colorful sundown? The point is that without social learning, certain, perhaps all, emotions become 48. Claire Armon-Jones, “The Thesis of Constructionism,” in Rom Harré, ed., The Social Construction of Emotions (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 33, 37; Ratner, “A CulturalPsychological Analysis of Emotions.” 49. Armon-Jones, “Thesis of Constructionism,” 36. 50. Solomon, True to Our Feelings, 22-23; Armon-Jones, “The Thesis of Constructionism,” 35.

217

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

inexplicable: we may well fail to see an insult as an insult and thus not become angry; we might miss the signals that indicate looming harm and not respond with anger. Of course, the proponents of basic emotions might respond by noting that these cases of anger presuppose highly complex social relationships for which learning is indispensable, far different from the ancient and, we assume, simpler situations faced by proto-humans when emotions were first evolving: charging wild animals, raiding by other tribes, and so on. But this objection points us back to the main issue: for social constructionists, the paradigm of human emotion is what adults feel, not what animals and infants feel. What needs explaining is not the origin of emotion in early mammalian history, but the emotional phenomena of human life today. If emotion involves concepts, beliefs, and judgments, then it requires language. The relation of language to cognition has been the source of a considerable amount of philosophical discourse since the early twentieth century, occupying the efforts of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Martin Heidegger, and others. Social constructionism implicitly accepts that thesis that there is no cognition without language. This thesis has a great many implications and complications, but for our purpose the main point is that it decisively distinguishes human emotions from whatever animals experience. Human emotions are cognitive because humans are linguistic beings. Animals feel something, but not distinctively human emotions, which require concepts and hence language.51 But as one proponent of basic emotions has noted, if emotions require language, then it is difficult to account for the emotions that (according to the theory) we share with animals.52 51. Ronald De Sousa, “Emotions: What I Know, What I’d Like to Think I Know, and What I’d Like to Think,” in Solomon, ed., Thinking about Feeling, 63; Richard Joyce, Evolution of Morality (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 94, 104–5. 52. Deigh, “Primitive Emotions,” 10–11.

218

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

The Argument for the Social Construction of Emotion Proponents of social-construction theory argue for their position by, among other things, adducing cases of cultural diversity, cases typically

drawn

from

anthropological

research.53

Ugandans

purportedly do not distinguish anger from sadness with the precision with which Europeans and Americans do. Samoans combine hate and disgust, whereas European and American cultures distinguish them. Some Australian aborigines, it is claimed, have a single concept that embraces fear and shame, but some (the Pintupi) distinguish fifteen kinds of fear. Alternatively, one can examine the permutations of an emotion across time in a single geographical region. Romantic love in the Middle Ages was noticeably different from romantic love in contemporary American culture and, in general, the idea of love changes as we move from one historical epoch to another. More examples like these could presumably be offered by those familiar with anthropological studies. The point for social constructionists is that what counts as an emotion, how emotions are linguistically and experientially identified, and how they are behaviorally expressed varies across cultures. There is no single thing that corresponds universally to terms such as anger or joy.54 The experience of these emotions is inextricably linked to beliefs, practices, and values in each culture, each of which divides the emotional landscape in a unique way. To the extent to which this cultural diversity is found, it undermines the claim of basic-emotion theory that true emotions are universal. Another line of argument for the social-construction view is that

53. The following exposition summarizes arguments made in Ratner, “A Cultural-Psychological Analysis of Emotions.” 54. See Stephanie van Goozen and Nico H. Frijda, “Emotion Words Used in Six European Countries,” European Journal of Social Psychology 23, no. 1 (1993): 89–95 for evidence of cultural diversity in words used for emotion.

219

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

the brain systems relating to emotion are not localized in certain parts of the brain but are in fact integrated with the parts of the brain in which cognition occurs. Supporters of basic-emotion theory are usually careful not to simply identify the brain’s emotional systems with particular physical structures of the brain, acknowledging that these systems connect together various parts of the brain. Nonetheless, in the literature describing research into the brain and emotion, it is not uncommon to see incautious statements about some part of the brain being the brain’s emotion center.55 The limbic system, and especially the amygdala, is a favorite candidate. Of course, if human emotion is homologous with animal emotion, then (since animals lack the highly developed prefrontal cortex that humans have) emotion must indeed have a special relation to the parts of the brain that we share with primates and other mammals. So, the issue is about the extent to which the primitive parts of the brain (including the limbic system and its amygdala) are, in the human brain, integrated with (via neural connections) the parts of the brain responsible for cognitive thinking. This is the point that social-construction theorists insist upon. Carl Ratner (who identifies himself as a cultural psychologist) thus cites authorities to the effect that the limbic system is neurally connected to the parts of the brain that process language, facilitate planning, and process symbolic understanding, concluding that the amygdala’s function is not so much about feeling as it is about the meaning and value of stimuli and with processing information by integrating it with the associated meaning and value. He cites other authorities who affirm that, in the interaction between cortex and “lower brain centers,” the cortex is dominant, implying that, whatever the role played by the most

55. For a critique of overly simplified views of the amygdala, see Lisa Feldman Barrett, Maria Gendron and Yang-Ming Huang, “Do Discrete Emotions Exist?” Philosophical Psychology, 22, no. 4 (2009): 429–30.

220

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

ancient parts of the brain, the distinctively human part takes the lead.56 Research on chimpanzees’ displays of aggression indicates that there are problems with any version of basic-emotion theory according to which anger is a discrete module in the brain that responds to one sort of environmental stimulus and produces one sort of stereotypical behavioral response. Research suggests that aggressive behavior is founded on complex cognitive processes, as each chimp discerns the group’s hierarchy, keeps track of alliances, calculates the consequences of behavior, and even learns about the social norms that govern the group’s behavior. Aggression, in other words, is not an automatic and involuntary reaction, but depends on each chimp’s knowledge of a complex social system.57 As noted above, social-construction theorists try to support this view by arguing for the differences between human emotions and animals or infantile emotions. The arguments relate to two features of human emotions, their qualities and their functions. With regard to qualities, adult emotions presuppose a social context and social knowledge. As already stated, feeling anger (in contrast to, for instance, blind rage) attributes moral responsibility to the object of anger.58 Phenomenologically considered, adult human jealousy differs significantly from jealousy displayed by animals or infants, especially insofar as adult jealousy bears an expanded awareness of time. Animals, presumably, are concerned only with an immediate threat to what is theirs; they jealously guard their food, for instance, but (we assume) do not envision possible loss months and years in the future as adult humans do. The emotional experience of adults is also

56. Ratner, “A Cultural-Psychological Analysis of Emotions”; and idem, “A Social Constructionist Critique of Naturalistic Theories of Emotion,” Journal of Mind and Behavior 10 (1989): 211–30, http://www.sonic.net/~cr2/emotions.htm. 57. Chuck Stieg, “Bird Brains and Aggro Apes: Questioning the Use of Animals in the Affect Program Theory of Emotion,” Philosophy of Science 74, no. 5 (2007): 900–901. 58. Ratner, “Social Constructionist Critique.”

221

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

(at least in many cultures) conditioned by beliefs about property (in the case of things) and fidelity (in the case of marriage and friendship), beliefs absent in animals and infants.59 Accordingly, emotions such as sadness and feelings of attachment are far richer in humans than in animals. With expanded brain resources for memory and cognition, our sorrow and attachment can be far more extensive in both time and intensity.60 With respect to function, social-construction advocates assert that human emotions serve social purposes (such as restraining undesirable behaviors and reinforcing socially desirable behaviors) and not narrowly biological purposes. In other words, our social communities inculcate in us a system of feelings that steers us away from certain actions and toward other actions.61 An argument against the basic-emotion theory and in favor of social construction is that there is no one-to-one correspondence between emotion and behavioral expression. In humans, anger may manifest itself in a large number of ways: words, gesticulations, rising heart rate, redness of the face, and so on. Or, depending on the object of anger, none of these may be present. If I am angry at the state of injustice in the world, I may not exhibit any of these behavioral responses.62 Perhaps I am not truly experiencing anger, but, instead, something else. In our culture we call such a feeling anger, however, and we are thus returned to the issue of how our ordinary language of emotion relates to scientific views and whether an emotion term such as anger is a natural kind or is instead only a generic term that embraces a large variety of phenomena with, perhaps, little in common. At any rate, there are serious arguments to the effect that any emotion may be behaviorally expressed in a variety of ways, no one of which is essential to that emotion. Similarly, a 59. These examples are taken from ibid. 60. Ibid. 61. Armon-Jones, “The Thesis of Constructionism,” 34. 62. Barrett, et al., “Do Discrete Emotions Exist?,” 430.

222

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

given expression may express more than one emotion: redness of the face may indicate anger or embarrassment.63 Social-construction theorists have also weighed in on arguments from facial expression. As noted previously, researchers have adduced evidence that people, regardless of culture, consistently identify facial features with certain emotions. At the same time, there is also research that indicates the contrary. Here is a sample of results: in one experiment with Chinese subjects (building on a previous similar experiment with Japanese subjects), subjects were shown a standard set of photographed faces with stereotypical expressions and were asked to identify the corresponding emotion. Results were compared with similar studies using Caucasian subjects. The research team concluded that the Chinese and Japanese subjects, in interpreting the pictures, used visual cues different from the cues employed by Caucasian subjects and also judged negative emotion expressions differently from the Caucasian subjects.64 In another experiment, researchers examined eye movements of test subjects as they looked at pictures of emotion-expressing faces. The purpose was to determine the subjects’ internal representation of what they saw. The research team found cultural differences in observational patterns: Caucasians’ “internal representations distributed expressive features across the face (e.g., the eyebrows and mouth)” while East Asians “showed a consistent preference for the eyes.” The team concluded that cultural factors influence “visual systems used to select information for categorization,” probably yielding different experiences.65 In a third experiment, researchers asked a group of subjects to identify emotive

63. The example is Ratner’s, in “Social Constructionist Critique.” 64. Yueqin Huang, Siu Tang, et al., “Differential Judgement of Static Facial Expressions of Emotions in Three Cultures,” Psychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences 55, no. 5 (2001): 479–83. 65. Rachael E. Jack, Roberto Caldara, and Philippe G. Schyns. “Internal Representations Reveal Cultural Diversity in Expectations of Facial Expressions of Emotion,” Journal Of Experimental Psychology: General 141, no. 1 (2012): 19–25.

223

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

expressions when shown pictures of Caucasian faces. The researchers concluded that “Caucasian expressions of anger are less accurately recognized by Asian participants than by Caucasian subjects.” They also detected a difference between Japanese and Chinese subjects: the former “have a stronger tendency [than the latter] not to label negative emotional expressions as negative but tend to rather pick the neutral category.”66 These sorts of experiments tend to argue against the universality thesis of the theory of basic emotions. Another line of argument for social construction appeals to phenomenological considerations. Phenomenologically, one can doubt the equation of emotion with bodily states if one considers long-term emotions instead of momentary ones. Robert Solomon mentions such long-term emotions as fear about global warming and anger about governmental corruption. Is it logical to assume that these sorts of emotions simply are states of bodily agitation, especially if one does not feel particularly agitated in body?67 Study of chimpanzees indicates that aggressive behavior and struggles over control can endure over many years, raising the question of whether the anger associated with aggression likewise continues for years or whether it is possible for the behavior to persist in the absence of the emotion. The former possibility seems far-fetched; the latter conflicts with the equation of emotion and behavior found in basicemotion theory.68 There is, moreover, a distinct difference between a bodily state and an emotion: trembling because of cold and trembling because of fear are, possibly, the same bodily phenomenon but the former has no emotional significance. How, then, can emotion be equated with bodily states?69 66. Birgit Derntl, et al. “Culture but Not Gender Modulates Amygdala Activation During Explicit Emotion Recognition,” BMC Neuroscience 13, no. 1 (2012): 54–64. 67. Solomon, True to Our Feelings, 16. 68. Stieg, “Bird Brains,” 900. 69. Ratner, Social Constructionist Critique.

224

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

Mediating Positions I have hitherto presented the consensus view of emotion and the two alternative emphases (basic emotion theory and social constructionism) within the consensus view. In this section I will present attempts at softening the opposition between the theories of basic emotions and social construction. One thing to note is that proponents of each theory concede important points of the other theory. At least some advocates of basicemotion theory grant one of the main premises of social-construction theory, namely that the biological systems that produce emotion are responsive to learning and, hence, that emotion is a function not simply of biology but also of culture. Craig Delancey, for instance, allows that beliefs, even consciously held beliefs, can guide the expression of emotions and that the biological mechanisms underlying emotion do not always operate independently of socially trained cognition.70 Beliefs therefore can activate an affect program. Consequently, what people fear will, at least partly, depend on beliefs inculcated by their culture. Delancey mentions cultures in which fear of the dead is prominent, in contrast to the United States, whose citizens have instead a largely ungrounded fear of crime. There is, presumably, a single affect program for fear that is universal; however, the sorts of things that activate this program include beliefs that are culturally diverse. Similarly, the ways in which emotions get expressed can vary by culture.71 Some cultures are emotionally more demonstrative; others are more reserved. Delancey accordingly favors what he calls “weak cognitivism,” the view that emotions are often integrated with cognition, sometimes even with consciously held beliefs that can elicit emotions and partly determine their expression 70. Delancey, Passionate Engines, 43, 82. 71. Ibid., 84.

225

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

and intensity.72 Paul Ekman and Daniel Cordaro add that one’s one life experiences can significantly affect emotion. Psychological trauma such as post-traumatic stress disorder can lower the threshold at which an affect program is activated, increasing the frequency with which certain emotions are felt. Affect programs, in other words, are conditioned not only by the conditions under which they evolved millions of years ago, but also by our individual experiences today. The various traumas and rewards that we receive in life become part of each affect program. These learned responses become as automatic in operation as the inherited part of affect programs and can be just as intractable. Additionally, because the affect programs are realized in bodies and because each body is unique, the operation of affect programs will differ from one individual to another apart from considerations of differing culture and personal history.73 Proponents of the social-construction view have also given some ground, notably in acknowledging that there is an important physiological basis to at least some emotions, proved by the fact that such emotions are accompanied the same behavior that an animal with the same emotion exhibits. Further, some have conceded that some eliciting objects are natural (and thus not socially constituted) and related to primitive survival instincts. As Claire Armon-Jones argues, “No cultural significance need be attached by persons to a charging bull in order for it to be construed by them as dangerous and as warranting fear.”74 Robert Solomon grants that an emotion such as rage is mostly physiological with minimal levels of cognition and perhaps without much of a discernable object.75 We are not, then, forced to choose between biology and culture. The question is, How are we to think about their relation? We have 72. Ibid., 44. 73. Ekman and Cordaro, “What Is Meant by Calling Emotions Basic,” 367–68. 74. Arnon-Jones, “The Thesis of Constructionism,” 38. 75. Solomon, True to Our Feelings, 44–45.

226

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

to acknowledge that our social existence and its cultural products have a biological basis. Even highly complex, culturally conditioned emotions are made possible by biology, even if not every single emotion is a direct product of evolution. More likely, distinctly human emotions and morality represent extensions of capacities that did evolve. It is known that new biological forms and functions are sometimes not the direct result of natural selection and adaptation but instead arise, in a new or altered environment, from new use of preexisting structures and mechanisms being put to new use. This process is sometimes called exaptation. In a process known as neofunctionalization, for instance, a second copy of a gene allows one copy to perform original, adapted functions while the second copy evolves new functions. Additionally, parts of the DNA that previously had not directly coded for proteins can become coding genes, a process that essentially creates a functioning gene from previously nonfunctioning genetic material.76 Other examples of new function arising out of preexisting structures include a bacterium’s capacity to metabolize one type of sugar (xylose) with mechanisms that evolved to metabolize a different sort of sugar (arabinose);77 fish using their mouths to climb very tall waterfalls;78 and the evolution of tetrapod limbs from aboriginal fins.79 There is, accordingly, a conservative principle at work in nature, as preexisting forms and structures get used for new functions. Without this principle, each 76. Henrik Kaessmann, “Origins, Evolution, and Phenotypic Impact of New Genes,” Genome Research 20, no. 10 (2010): 1313–26, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC294 5180/. 77. Aditya Barve and Andreas Wagner, “A Latent Capacity for Evolutionary Innovation Through Exaptation in Metabolic Systems,” Nature 500, no. 7461 (2013): 203. 78. Joshua A. Cullen, et al., “Evolutionary Novelty versus Exaptation: Oral Kinematics in Feeding versus Climbing in the Waterfall-Climbing Hawaiian Goby Sicyopterus Stimpsoni,” Plos ONE 8, no. 1 (2013): 1–10. 79. Deborah A. McLennan, “The Concept of Co-option: Why Evolution Often Looks Miraculous,” Evolution: Education and Outreach 1 (2008): 247–58, http://download. springer.com/static/pdf/274/art%3A10.1007%2Fs12052-008-0053-8.pdf?auth66=1426609158_ ea8da6e5c32fe3cae5e32e6b046e5b8e&ext=.pdf.

227

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

new function would require the evolution of brand-new structures and mechanisms, a biologically costly route. Distinctly human emotions and morality, then, are built on the substructure of preexisting biological mechanisms, such as kin selection, altruism, and cooperation.80 At the same time, biology does not provide a full and complete account of human nature. Take schizophrenia, for instance. There is an obvious biological element to it, but it turns out that the social environment plays a role as well. In India (according to one study) schizophrenics have fewer and less severe symptoms, take less medication, and are better able to carry on daily life in areas such as work and family. Families are more involved with treatment and are less likely to treat the afflicted person as diseased. More generally, many of the risk factors for schizophrenia are social: being an immigrant, living in a city, being poor, and a history of being abused and neglected.81 Or, consider the effect of belief on physiology. In one experiment researchers tested the production of a hormone, grehil. Grehil helps regulate appetite. When levels rise, a signal is sent to the brain indicating hunger; after a large meal, levels drop. In the experiment, two groups each consumed a milkshake. One group drank from a container that identified the contents as “Sensishake,” a drink with just 140 calories; the other group’s container indicated the contents as “Indulgence,” with 620 calories. The milkshake itself contained 300 calories for both groups. After consumption, levels of grehil were measured. Those who believed they were drinking the 640-calorie Indulgence saw a decrease in grehil three times greater than the decrease in the group who thought they were drinking the 140-calorie Sensishake. Beliefs, it turns out, 80. For further discussion of this point, see Joyce, Evolution of Morality, 141; and Patricia S. Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 30–32, 46. 81. Tanya Marie Luhrmann, “Beyond the Brain,” The Wilson Quarterly 36, no. 3 (2012): 28–34.

228

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

have an effect on physiology.82 Finally, consider the fact that the immune system and the brain’s hormonal response to stress can be permanently altered if abuse and neglect are suffered at certain critical times in a child’s life.83 Maltreatment during childhood, in other words, changes the structure and function of the brain. The brain is thus not a fixed entity. On the contrary, its development is sensitive to its environment. The relation of biology to culture, then, is complex. That is why both basic emotion theory and social constructionism are worthy of consideration. To help us move past a simple opposition of these two views, I will briefly review two attempts to find a mediating position that does justice to the achievements of these two theories. Paul E. Griffiths Paul E. Griffiths is a philosopher of science with deep commitments to the idea of basic emotions. I will not rehearse his exposition and defense of it but will instead concentrate on his proposals for advancing beyond the limitations and problems of that theory. Griffiths accepts one of the foundational theses of basic-emotion theory, namely that the process by which an environmental stimulus activates an affect program is not integrated with cognitive systems associated with long-term action. The behavioral expression of basic emotions is therefore brief and highly stereotyped. But what, then, of emotions such as guilt, envy, and jealousy? These emotions are not expressed in a brief episode, as rage, for instance, typically is. On the contrary, they can often be connected to long-term planning and action—think of Iago’s complex and long-term plan against Othello.

82. Alia J. Crum, et al., “Mind Over Milkshakes: Mindsets, Not Just Nutrients, Determine Ghrelin Response,” Health Psychology 30, no. 4 (2011): 424–29. 83. Andrea Gonzalez, “The Impact of Childhood Maltreatment on Biological Systems: Implications for Clinical Interventions,” Paediatrics & Child Health 18, no. 8 (2013): 415–18.

229

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

They are thus quite unlike the reflex-like behavioral responses of basic emotions. Griffith acknowledges such long-term emotions as well as emotions that, although having a counterpart among the basic emotions, do not involve the affect programs of the basic emotions.84 For example, anger can signify both the basic emotion of anger but also other sorts of anger that do not arise from the affect programs that create basic emotions. Further, he concedes that basic-emotion theory cannot account for the cultural relativity of some emotions. Some emotions are present in one culture and not in others, a fact that makes no sense if all emotions are basic and are hence universal.85 Consequently, if we want to understand the full range of phenomena that are named emotions in ordinary language, we must look beyond the limits of basic-emotion theory. What is needed is an account of what Griffith calls higher cognitive processes—processes that will explain the existence of emotions that are not rooted in the affect programs of basic emotions. As cognitive processes, these higher processes receive informational input in the form of beliefs and desires and yield behavioral output in the form of long-term action.86 Consider, for example, some of the emotions in Shakespeare’s Othello. On one hand, Othello’s jealousy is inspired by a mistaken belief that Desdemona loves Cassio. But his jealousy does not immediately issue forth in action; Othello enlists Iago’s help to kill Cassio. Iago’s actions are explained by his hatred of Othello. But his hatred is not of the basic-emotion sort. If it were, he would have erupted in a rage-filled bout of violence early in the story. Instead, his hatred manifests itself in a long and complex plan to convince Othello that Desdemona loves Cassio. Such emotion requires higher cognitive processes. Nonhuman animals may well 84. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, 100. 85. Ibid., 101. 86. Ibid., 91–92.

230

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

feel jealousy and anger, but do not seem to engage in the sort of long, complex planning in which the play’s characters do. Higher cognitive processes have a complicated relationship with emotions. The elicitation of an emotion may require a considerable amount of reasoning.87 For many people, the nightly recitation of economic and financial data in news reports means little and causes no particular emotion except, perhaps, boredom. But for those who have knowledge of these matters, data about interest rates, trade balances, and commodity prices may issue forth in belief that causes any of several emotions. In other cases, something elicits an emotion not only without employing higher processes but in contradiction to the results of those processes. This is probably where seemingly irrational fears come in. For some people, no accumulation of reliable statistics can assuage their fear of airline travel. Or consider the common, overwrought fear of spiders, which seems completely out of proportion to the danger actually posed by the kinds of arachnids most of us encounter. Higher cognitive processes may be disengaged from emotions in another way: just as emotion can be evoked without belief, belief, as politicians, preachers, and others know, does not invariably evoke emotion. We can hold beliefs without thereby feeling anything in particular, even in cases where a belief might be expected to elicit an emotion. Nonetheless, some emotions do involve consciously held beliefs and desires and complicated reasoning about them; a complete theory of emotion must accordingly transcend the limits of basic-emotion theory. Discussion of belief raises the question of the connection between emotion and culture. Basic emotions are basic because they are biologically driven. Basic emotions are evoked by environmental information that signals immediate threats and opportunities. Neither beliefs nor language are needed to perceive these, a point proven 87. Ibid., 92.

231

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

by animals’ possession of basic emotions. But to the extent that some emotions are elicited by conscious beliefs, we have to bring human culture into consideration, for beliefs are linguistic realities and language is a cultural phenomenon. Some emotions, in other words, can occur only because of beliefs that are shared among members of a linguistic community. Think, for example, of the connection between the emotions of religious believers and their beliefs. Feelings of hope or guilt or joy are comprehensible only with reference to certain theological beliefs. These beliefs, however, are not the idiosyncratic possession of individuals as such. On the contrary, the individual comes to have these beliefs by becoming a member of the believing community. Griffiths’s

proposal

is

encapsulated

in

the

notion

of

a

“developmental system.” An organism’s developmental system is “the entire set of factors which are reliably present in each generation of that lineage of organisms and whose interaction reconstructs the typical life cycle of the lineage.”88 As noted previously, the “entire set of factors” includes not only the organism’s genotype but also the stable, recurring features of its environment. The environment, in other words, is as much a part of each organism’s inheritance as is its genes, and it is the combination of genes interacting with an environment, and not genes alone, that is the source of phenotypical stability across time. This is especially true in the case of mental capacities, which are evolved but nonetheless require “a richly structured environment” in order to develop.89 That is why social deprivation at critical stages in child development makes it impossible or very difficult for certain capacities to develop. Griffiths’s view possesses evident strengths. For one thing, his theory of the emotions assumes and operates within the parameters 88. Ibid., 127–28. 89. Ibid., 61.

232

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

of evolutionary theory, especially as this theory has been extended in evolutionary psychology and in the idea of affect programs. For another, he frankly acknowledges that the affect programs do not account for every emotion, particularly for those emotions that possess a significant cognitive dimension. So, on one hand, we should accept the notions of basic emotions and affect programs as ways of accounting for the universality of certain physiological-emotional reactions; on the other hand, we should concede that there is a host of emotions for which the theory of affect programs provides no insight. For these we need a sophisticated account of how humankind’s cultural environments interact with our genetic heritage. Griffiths’s view thus demonstrates that a simple dichotomy between a universal, innate, genetic structure and variable, learned cultural factors is unsatisfactory. A satisfactory account must regard the environment, including the cultural environment, as doing more than just evoking emotional and behavioral responses that were programmed into the brain in the Pleistocene era. Lisa Feldman Barrett The second mediating position I will present is that of Lisa Feldman Barrett, co-director of the Interdisciplinary Affective Science Laboratory at Northeastern University. Like Griffiths, Barrett is unsatisfied with current ways of thinking about the relation of biology to culture. In particular, she finds basic-emotion theory unable to explain the variability of emotion. There is, for example, emotional variation across cultures, of the sort already discussed above. Barrett, citing authorities, draws attention to an emotion, ligit, associated with “intense, euphoric aggression that occurs during head hunting” among a certain Philippine community.90 This illustrates 90. Lisa Feldman Barrett, “Variety Is the Spice of Life: A Psychological Construction Approach to Understanding Variability in Emotion,” Cognition & Emotion 23, no. 7 (2009): 1284–85.

233

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

emotions that are culture-specific; only people in this culture experiences this emotion. Even when there are cross-cultural emotions, the phenomenological experience differs across cultures. Barrett states that sadness is linked to physical suffering in Russia and to a sense of loss in the United States. One culture will also parcel out the emotional landscape differently from another culture: in the United States, sadness and anger are clearly distinguished, whereas in Turkey they are components of a single emotion. Within a culture, individuals may experience emotions quite differently: some experience sharp distinctions between emotions; others do not and instead have more generalized feelings of pleasantness and unpleasantness.91 All of these observations argue against the theory of basic emotions, according to Barrett. Basic-emotion theory, in her estimation, regards variation in emotion as a function of one thing, “epiphenomenal social factors,” which create variation by inhibiting what would otherwise be the uniform emotional-behavioral expression of each affect program.92 As with Griffiths’s exposition of alternative views, I will leave it to others to determine whether Barrett’s critique of basic-emotion theory is fair and on target. What is of interest in the present context is her judgment that basicemotion theory is incapable of giving a plausible account of the true nature of and extent of variation among emotions. Like Griffiths, Barrett is critical of the tendency of current scientific theories of emotion to overlook the diversity of emotional expression and to force emotions into an overly narrow theoretical framework that excludes much that is central to the lived experience of emotions. Barrett has a second line of criticism of basic-emotion theory. It relates to the way in which the theory correlates emotion with 91. Ibid., 1285. 92. Ibid., 1288.

234

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

physiological state. Recall that this theory posits a small number of emotions that are universal and are distinguished one from another because each is a distinct cognitive system (an affect program), presumably embodied in a unique neural network. For Barrett, there is no simple equation between having an emotion and a certain bodily state. Fear may or may not be accompanied by increased heart rate. A close call in traffic may involve an increase, but news of a terrorist bombing may not, even though it involves fear.93 Proponents of basic-emotion theory would likely object that there is considerable difference in intensity between these two cases, a difference that accounts for any difference in heart rate. Moreover, some of her examples of fear (e.g., fear of being criticized by a friend in front of a group) might not even count as instances of a basic emotion. Barrett’s response returns us to the discussion about natural kinds. For Barrett, the words that we use for emotions have a broad extension, that is, they include a large variety of phenomena, some of which are, or are close to, the basic emotions identified by Paul Ekman, others having little to do with these basic emotions. Her point of departure in this matter is the use of words for emotion in ordinary language. The words fear or anger therefore do not denote a single thing (as in the theory of basic emotions) but are category words that apply to various phenomena. There is, then, an important semantic dimension to the discussion surrounding emotion: Is there a narrow and proper sense of the word emotion? Or is emotion simply a term generated in ordinary language that denotes things with only loose relations of similarity? Proponents of basic-emotion theory will be attracted to the first option; theorists seeking to go beyond basicemotion theory and who are impressed by the diversity of emotional expression will find the second option persuasive.

93. Ibid., 1285.

235

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Barrett’s view does not lie within the social-construction camp, however. Like basic-emotion theory, she feels that socialconstruction theory has an inadequate account of emotional variation, attributing it exclusively to realities outside the individual’s mind. Like Griffiths’s view, Barrett’s is an attempt to combine the valid empirical basis and theoretical insights of basic-emotion theory and social-construction theory. From basic-emotion theory it draws a commitment to working within evolutionary theory; with socialconstruction theorists it sees emotions as “socially constituted artifacts of learning and culture,” and hence not as basic in the biological sense.94 Like Griffiths, Barrett’s account begins with the intuition that the scientific approach to emotion—especially classical evolutionary theory—is the right approach, except that it cannot account for everything that we call emotion. As Griffiths notes, possessing a fruitful scientific theory of emotion tempts its advocates to identify the theory’s understanding of emotion with the essence of emotion and to consider all that lies outside that understanding to be a nonessential accretion.95 The alternative to beginning with a scientifically refined definition of emotion is to begin with ordinary use of emotion terms in the manner of Griffiths and Barrett. For Barrett, emotion is to be distinguished from affect, which is a bodily state. As we have seen, basic-emotion theorists typically identify the two; each basic emotion is an affect program. Barrett, however, regards emotions as composite realities, comprising affect and cognition, conceding that cognition does not always consist in conscious deliberation.96 Barrett’s view is akin to the Stoic distinction between prepassion and passion proper. The former is essentially a bodily agitation while the latter requires cognition and judgment.

94. Ibid., 1290. 95. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, 100. 96. Barrett, “Variety,” 1291.

236

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

It is the composite nature of emotion that prevents our considering them basic. They are composed of basic “ingredients” such as affect but are therefore not themselves basic.97 Because emotions are composite, Barrett calls her theory psychological constructionism. It is a constructionist theory because it regards emotions as constructed out of something. It is psychological constructionism because emotions are constructed out of psychological phenomena. What are these phenomena? Barrett enumerates three components of emotion: (1) core affects, which are internal representations of physical states experienced as pleasant or unpleasant with some admixture of arousal; (2) a conceptual system, kept in memory, consisting of what we experientially know about emotion; and (3) “controlled attention . . . that helps to negotiate which conceptual elements are activated and which are suppressed in a given instance of conceptualisation.”98 With three components, there are many opportunities for emotions to vary from one culture to another and from one individual to another. Peoples’ core affects will differ because one body differs from another. The “size and complexity” of the conceptual system will differ from one person to another. And individuals will have varying capacities for controlling attention. The result is a “powerful and highly flexible” and, above all, varied system of emotions.99 According to Barrett, the center of psychological constructionism is its view of the mind’s conceptualizing activity.100 This activity is a process of categorizing the various stimuli received by the brain in order to arrive at an emotional interpretation of its experience.101 It is, in other words, trying to make meaningful sense of its experience, both internal and external. There are sensory stimuli (the experience 97. Ibid., 1289. 98. Ibid., 1294–95. 99. Ibid., 1295. 100. Ibid., 1291. 101. Ibid.

237

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

of the world outside the body), the body’s internal feelings of itself, plus core affects that are reactions to these sensations and feelings. To these sensations, feelings, and affects, the mind adds the work of categorizing. It doesn’t just receive the sensations and feel its affects; it draws on its memory to identify the sensation and to interpret its affect. Visual, auditory, or other cues are experienced as something dangerous or desirable. The affect (the bodily state) is interpreted in connection with the thing experienced.102 The work of categorizing thus transforms initially unidentified affects into specific emotions such as fear and anger.103 It does so by drawing on learned experience of these emotions and correlated experiences and, so to speak, subsuming the present experience under the correlations of affect and experience stored in memory. Thus, to feel angry is to have categorized or interpreted sensations and affect as an instance of anger. In this moment, the unpleasant affective state in combination with some suitably interpreted sensation is felt as anger.104 Of course, describing it this way makes it sound as though we first feel an affect and then go searching the memory for a concept by which to understand it. The reality is that, in our phenomenal experience, the affect is always experienced as already interpreted and categorized.105 Whence do we receive this capacity to conceptualize affects? On one hand, the ability to categorize is evolved, having conferred adaptive advantage. However, the categories themselves are not biologically evolved. What is evolved is the general-purpose ability to categorize.106 On the other hand, we are able to categorize because we have language and, hence, culture. Emotions, remember, are 102. Ibid., 1292. 103. Kristen A. Lindquist, Lisa Feldman Barrett, et al. “The Hundred-Year Emotion War: Are Emotions Natural Kinds or Psychological Constructions? Comment on Lench, Flores, and Bench (2011),” Psychological Bulletin 139, no. 1 (2013): 260. 104. Barrett, “Variety,” 1292–93. 105. Ibid., 1295. 106. Ibid.

238

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

not natural kinds; there is not a certain kind of thing, certainly not a biological thing, that emotion names. How an individual or a culture will categorize affects depends on cultural traditions. The underlying affects are presumably pan-cultural because biological, but what we call a certain emotion, as well as how and under which circumstances we apply a certain emotion-term to a given affect, depends on linguistic use and, hence, on culture and learning. Why, then, are there seemingly universal emotions? Because there are certain universal and recurring problems that human beings face in whichever society they live in. In this way Barrett believes that the psychological-constructionist model best accounts for the cultural variation of emotion.107 It also accounts for intracultural variation. Since an emotion term such as anger does not name a natural kind, the term gathers together a great many phenomena that may have little to do with each other.108 Hence, the many uses of terms such as love. These differ not only in intensity and object, but in quality as well. What, then, prevents terms such as love being entirely equivocal in meaning? What justifies our employing this term for its vast range of uses? Going beyond Barrett’s exposition, an analysis making use of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance would likely show us that, although there is no universal essence of love, any two instances in which we use the word have some resemblance, just as any two members of an extended family will have some resemblance, without our having to suppose that every member of the family looks just like all the rest. Concluding Theological Postscript Christian theology has a twofold task, which it exercises on behalf

107. Ibid., 1293–94. 108. Ibid., 1299.

239

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

of the Christian church. One is to help in the task of expounding the word of God; the other is to understand matters of importance. The second task involves the theologian in comprehending things like human nature, not only as they are proclaimed in revelation, but also as they are objects of human study. For some branches of the Christian tradition this task has the apologetic aim of studying scientific and other theories in order to defend the historic commitments of Christianity. But other branches of the tradition see the matter differently and believe that human study and research disclose truth, truth that theology is obliged to engage. This and the next two chapters proceed with the conviction that this latter understanding of the theological task is the right one. It is important for the theological community to attend to the theories surveyed in this chapter because the traditional Christian narrative that explained the nature of emotion and reason—a narrative anchored in the opening chapters of Genesis—can barely be sustained today. I say barely because there will always be Christians with intellectual ability who use that ability to defend the traditional narrative, even if doing so requires the use of increasingly outlandish, ad hoc hypotheses. For anyone with a modicum of confidence in the scientific enterprise, however, the traditional narrative, according to which human beings are the object of a special act of divine creation that endowed us with reason and emotions (at least the good ones), a creation that was shortly thereafter corrupted instantaneously because of an act of disobedience, leaving us in our current sad state, no longer carries either explanatory power or existential gravity. What has replaced that narrative? The theological community has had more than two centuries to come to terms with the effects of modern geology and biology and biblical criticism; however, it cannot be said that anyone has found a replacement narrative that shows any promise at all of attaining universal or even widespread 240

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

acceptance. One strategy is the politically astute but intellectually flabby view that formally accepts the theory of evolution, but then deflates all of its substance by limiting the sciences to the study of human being in its biological existence and reserving to theology the task of pronouncing on humankind’s spiritual being. This strategy has the appearance of intellectual seriousness, but in this case the appearance deceives because evolution is consigned to the study of a portion of human nature (a portion not of great theological interest to most people) and not allowed to pronounce on the whole of human nature. Another strategy is to appropriate social constructionism for theology, holding that the truly important aspects of human nature are social realities, whether we think of the struggle for liberation, as in liberation theology, or of the church as a society (the fashionable word of late has been polis) with its own culture. In this strategy, biologists are left alone to do their work, but theologians need pay no attention because the theological community receives infinitely more insight about human nature from the social sciences and humanities. As important as liberation theology is and as helpful as it has been to think of the church as a polis, social constructionism is not the entire truth that theology needs to hear. Social constructionism does indeed make important contributions to our understanding of human nature; biology is not the only way of understanding human nature. But theology must hear the claims of both biology and social theory, as well as the claims of every other field of study that can contribute to the theological task. Admittedly, there is a special challenge in listening to disciplines whose empirical research began comparatively recently and many of whose theories are incipient. Questions abound: Are there in fact discrete, basic emotions? If so, how are they instantiated in neural networks? How do they interact with the organism’s social and physical environment? What is their relation to complex emotions? How do complex emotions come to be? How 241

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

does affect relate to cognition? And so on. But we must listen nonetheless. Given the dynamic nature of scientific inquiry, theology cannot wait for fully settled results; they will never be forthcoming. We must simply try to understand as best we can given the current state of knowledge. Fortunately, as this chapter has shown, many in the scientific community have undertaken the task of achieving an integrated understanding of emotion. What, then, can the theological community take from the sort of research that has been briefly reviewed in this chapter? At the most general level, theology is obliged to take into account the reliable results of both biological study and social study. That means a commitment to the theory of evolution. But, as I noted previously, it is not enough for the theological community to formally accept the theory of evolution. It is possible to do so without allowing the theory to substantively affect theological anthropology. So, we must acknowledge not only that the body has evolved but also that the human mind—its emotional and cognitive processes—has evolved. They are adaptations in response to selection pressures, solutions to pressing and recurring problems in humankind’s evolutionary history. And, because human culture is grounded in the evolved brain, we cannot understand culture without a commitment to the evolutionary paradigm. Consequently, it is not legitimate to use biology to explain some aspects of human nature and culture to explain others. On the contrary, we have to think of biology and culture together as part of an evolved reality. More concretely, and in response to the question, What is emotion?, it seems likely that at least some emotions either are states of bodily agitation or are correlated with states of agitation. It is difficult to think of some emotions without thinking of characteristic bodily agitations. At the same time, it seems likely as well that culture, cognition, and learning have a large role to play in at least some 242

EMOTION FROM A SCIENTIFIC PERSPECTIVE

emotions. Further, if cognition is considered broadly enough to include nonconscious judgments, then all emotions have a cognitive dimension. Perhaps the best way to think about this is to range emotions on a continuum, whereby some emotions rest on quick, unconscious judgments and others employ more conscious, deliberative judgments. On the one end of the continuum, cognition is minimal (in, for example, the immediate recognition of danger) and response is largely physiological (shaking, sweating); on the other end, cognition is complex, reached through conscious deliberation (as, for instance, in fear of the consequences of global warming), and response may be minimally emotional. If every emotion lies somewhere along such a continuum, then the social-construction view is correct that emotion is inherently intentional—it is always directed toward something in the organism’s experienced world. As such, emotion verges on cognition, both being ways in which human beings engage the objects of our world. Finally, the research surveyed in this chapter shows conclusively that emotion is a fundamental element of human nature. Indeed, if temporal priority counts for anything, emotion is more fundamental to human being than is reason; considered from the perspective of evolution, we evolved from mammals, primates, and proto-humans in which even the rudiments of rationality were for long epochs merely latent and then only incipient. During these long ages the animals from which we evolved negotiated the struggles of life on the basis of emotional response. Problems of survival, mate selection, and food finding were solved at the level of elementary, emotionalbehavioral reaction to stimuli. Even today, with substantial cognitive resources at our disposal, much of human life transpires largely as a function of our emotional systems. So, in the theological question about human nature, we are obliged to include emotion. This means that any tendency in the Christian tradition to deny that emotion has 243

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

an integral place in human nature, such as Gregory of Nyssa’s notion of emotion as warts and growths on the otherwise rational soul, must be respectfully denied. Similarly, any tendency to define human being in primarily rational terms must be regarded as mistaken. Accordingly, as we think about humans created in the image of God, we should not identify this image with rationality. On the contrary, our creation in God’s image is a statement about the totality of human existence, a totality that includes emotion.

244

8

Emotion and Human Morality

We turn now from the question, What is emotion? to the question, What does emotion do with respect to morality? One nonscientific way of getting at this question is to imagine a community of people possessing moral norms (some formally stated in law and precept, others not) along with a system of rewards and punishments. As in other moral communities, most people abide by most of the norms most of the time; most people are thus conventionally moral. A few are unusually sensitive to rewards and punishments and so are especially virtuous; a few lack this sensitivity and are criminals. In all apparent respects this moral community is like all others. But imagine as well that the members of this community lack feelings such as love and empathy. Members display the usual distribution of intelligence, some with more, others with less. They are, therefore, truly moral agents: they act, deliberate, and are held responsible for their actions. It’s just that they have no particular feelings toward each other. Their behavior rests completely on a calculation of extrinsic rewards and punishments of the most egoistically utilitarian sort. 245

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

It is very difficult for us to imagine the possibility of such a community except as an abstract experiment of thought. There may be nothing impossible about agents motivated only by egoistic calculations of reward and punishment, but could they form a community? Without feelings of love and empathy, what would motivate parents to persevere in the difficult, seemingly endless round of child-rearing tasks? What extrinsic reward could be great enough? Without empathy, would individuals help one another in cases where reward was either not possible or not worth the effort? We do know of nations that have operated with a sort of collective psychopathy. Notable among these are the fascist regimes of the twentieth century, in which some classes of people were not regarded as members, or even as human, as with Jews in Italy and Germany. Love and empathy seem utterly absent, their place occupied either by moral indifference or by hatred. Abuse of out-groups brings no guilt or remorse; there are only practical considerations—how to hide the abuse so that negative consequences are not forthcoming from neighboring communities. What strikes us as monstrous about such regimes is their incapacity to feel empathy and guilt. We think of them as immoral not only because of their actions but because of their subhuman inability to feel as we ought to feel. We recognize that their dreadful and abominable actions are the consequence of a prior lack of human feeling. The point of this experiment in thought is to grasp the connection between emotion and morality, at least for embodied beings like us. For us, emotion is not something added to an already existing and well-functioning moral system, like an automobile motor to which one might optionally add an air-conditioning system or a computer to which we can hook up fancy speakers. No, emotion is an original element of our being; we have been emotional beings as long as we have been human; indeed, we were emotional beings before we 246

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

branched off from the original hominids and became Homo sapiens. And since to be human is to be a moral being, there must be an intrinsic and vital connection between emotion and morality. What, then, is morality? A way of abbreviating this big question is to begin with the observation that humans are social beings. Our daily lives revolve around our various forms of social organization (family, work, and so on). Additionally, the things that make us distinctively human, especially language, are intersubjective, transindividual realities. Our behavior is governed by norms and expectations that are as pervasive and influential as our music and food. Even if we did not want to be social beings, the fact that human infants require years of nurture in order to survive to adulthood demands that our existence be social. Morality, then, is the conduct of human life in communities, with their attendant beliefs, norms, duties, values, and virtues. In fact, the idea of morality makes sense only if we presuppose the social existence of humans. Whether we think in terms of duties or virtues, morality without community is an empty notion, if not a contradiction. To whom would we exercise duties? Whence would they come? As for virtues, they require a social context in which to be exercised. What would courage or generosity be without a social context? The importance of human community is not diminished if we bring God into consideration, for duties toward God are always exercised in tandem with acts of love toward the neighbor; the second table of the Ten Commandments (obligations toward the neighbor) is inseparably joined to the first table (obligations toward God). Further, divine law is given to the covenant people of God—to humans in community—not to individuals with an individualistic and abstract duty to God. The connection between morality and community implies that there is something natural about human morality. Scientific study reveals that human nature is built on a phylogenetically ancient and 247

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

extensive substructure. Human beings did not appear one day, fully formed and without antecedent. Anatomically considered, we share with other primates a common stock of internal organs and bones. Genetically considered, some 96 percent of chromosomal base pairs in the human genome are shared with chimpanzees, a figure that rises to 98 percent if we consider only the portions of chromosomes that constitute genes. Examples could be multiplied, but they would all point to the fact that human beings are animals. We result from an enormously long line of evolutionary development. As a result, every field of biological science—genetics, primatology, paleontology, ethology, and so on—and psychology as well as ancillary disciplines like chemistry have something to contribute to a theological understanding of human nature. At the same time, evolution, especially the evolution of the human brain, has enabled the actualization of features that are not possible in other animals. The enlargement of the brain, particularly of the neocortex, over the last two million years has allowed humans to enter into a new sort of experience, one mediated by language and symbols. With this sort of experience came new possibilities for abstract thinking, deliberation about the future, memory of the past, and so on. The result is human culture, which we may think of as the systems of symbolic meanings and ideas within which our experience transpires. At some perceptual level, a dog and a human, looking at a billboard, may receive the same sense impressions; however, the marks and images on the billboard will possess semantic meaning for the human and not for the dog. Humans do not simply have sensations; we have experiences. Our sense of history is a measure of this. Animals have forms of memory. Humans have memory, but for us memory often takes the form of history: we not only remember things but also link them together in more or less coherent narratives that explain. 248

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

We must thus think of human nature as fundamentally animal in character with the evolution of the brain creating some new domains comprised in the term culture. Not that human culture is discontinuous with what has preceded: it is well known that among primates we find the rudiments of culture—use of tools, social learning, social organization, and elementary forms of language. As is always the case in evolutionary history, human culture is built on and is a development of the brain structures that bestow on some primates incipient forms of culture. Nonetheless, the enlarged size of the human prefrontal cortex, with an exponential increase in the neural connections that such enlargement made possible, has resulted in the development of culture incomparably richer and denser than what we find among other primates. What this means for emotion and morality is that we must look for continuity and discontinuity between human and animal emotion and morality. On one hand, as the previous chapter showed, there are respects in which human emotion is simply animal emotion, at least at the physiological level. On the other hand, much of experienced human emotion is distinctively human by virtue of the integration of emotion and cognition—the way emotion registers in the domain of culture. The same can be said of morality: it is hard to avoid the conclusion that, for instance, the Greco-Roman obsession with social status and honor and the norms governing them were rooted in something evolutionarily ancient. The conclusion seems obvious when we observe social hierarchies, with strategies for enforcing them, exhibited by other animals. Of course, Greco-Roman moral behavior was not simply identical with animal behavior. It was governed by norms and expectations that were transmitted verbally (as well as by example) and that were topics of moral discourse. Still, there are elements of continuity between human morality and animal behavior. 249

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Moral Reasoning One way of grasping the connection between emotion and morality is to examine the processes involved in moral reasoning. One notable attempt in this regard is represented by Joshua D. Greene, Jonathan Haidt, and others and is associated with the notion of dual processing. This theory posits two distinct processes involved in moral reasoning: an intuitive, affective process and a rational, deliberative process. Haidt, responding to what he perceives to be the excessive rationalism of Lawrence Kohlberg’s psychology, believes that the intuitive-affective process is our default process, the deliberative system being employed only when there is a conflict between intuitions. It is cognitive because it involves judgments; however, it is not rational (i.e., deliberative), for the judgments of this process normally occur instantaneously and without conscious thought.1 To say that this is the default process is to say that our moral judgments usually result from our moral intuitions. Conscious reasoning can cause moral judgment, but Haidt believes that it does so only rarely.2 More often, rational considerations appear after a judgment has been made and serve to rationally justify the judgment resulting from intuition.3 Critics have questioned the sharp opposition between the two systems. Jilian Craigie has argued that moral intuitions may not be simply biologically primitive but may incorporate previous moral judgments attained by deliberation. There is an analogy with a skill such as playing chess. When first learning the game, the process of calculating the next move is laborious and requires much thought. If one becomes accomplished, calculating moves becomes more 1. Jonathan Haidt, “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment,” Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814, 820. 2. Ibid., 815, 819. 3. Ibid., 814.

250

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

intuitive. But the intuitive character of chess playing rests on acquiring the skill through habitual practice. By analogy, intuitive moral decisions may well rest on prior moral judgments, reached through laborious deliberation until formed into a habit. If this analysis is correct, then moral intuitions of the sort described in dualprocess theories are not to be radically distinguished from overt forms of cognitive moral reasoning; on the contrary, they incorporate some measure of such reasoning.4 Further, there is good evidence that, in concrete acts of moral decision making, there is a significant degree of integration of the two systems. Craigie refers to the work of Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick, who argue that the purpose of the slower, deliberative system is to monitor the response of the quicker, intuitive system and to “endorse, correct, or override” that response.5 Of course, many factors can intrude on deliberation, so that we often allow our intuitive judgments to stand when we should not.6 Nonetheless, their model indicates that the two systems normally operate simultaneously and in an integrated fashion.7 Greene’s version of dual-process theory grants a larger role to rational processes than does Haidt’s view. For Greene,8 the two processes express themselves in two distinctive sorts of moral judgment. In one, we operate with moral intuitions that are fast, unconscious, and emotional; in the other, we use rational and conscious deliberation. Evidence for these distinct processes comes from experiments in which subjects are presented with a moral dilemma relating to a hypothetical situation and asked for a decision. 4. Jillian Craigie, “Thinking and Feeling: Moral Deliberation in a Dual-Process Framework,” Philosophical Psychology 24, no. 1 (2011): 58–60. 5. Daniel Kahneman and Shane Frederick, “A Model of Heuristic Judgment,” in Keith J. Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison, eds., The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 267–68. 6. Ibid., 273–74. 7. Craigie, “Thinking and Feeling,” 68. 8. I refer to Greene for the sake of convenience; his writings are often co-authored.

251

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Two such situations that recur in Greene’s writings are the trolley dilemma and the footbridge dilemma. Each comes with variations designed to test more and more refined aspects of the two processes, but in their simple form, they purport to uncover the basic processes that govern moral reasoning. The trolley dilemma has the subject imagine that an out-of-control trolley is hurtling toward five unsuspecting people on the main track and will kill them unless something is done. An observer is standing near a switch that will divert the trolley from the main track, thus delivering the potential victims from certain death. Unfortunately, activating the switch sends the trolley onto a side-track on which stands a single unsuspecting person. Flipping the switch will save five but kill one. The dilemma is thus whether to save one or five. It is a forced dilemma, because not to act is equivalent to acting (since the five end up dead) and there are no alternatives besides flipping the switch and not doing so. Citing research, Greene reports that most people find activating the switch (thus saving five and killing one) to be morally justified through some moral calculation. The footbridge dilemma is similar to the trolley dilemma: a trolley rushing out of control, unsuspecting people in the trolley’s path, an observer who can save them by acting. The difference is that in the footbridge dilemma the mechanism by which people are saved is not a switch, but something more personal: the only way in which the observer can divert the trolley from the main track (with five people) onto the side-track (which, in this dilemma, is free of people) is by throwing a bystander onto the track, stopping the trolley before it can kill the five people, but killing the person who was thrown onto the track. Greene reports that most people regard this deed as morally impermissible, even though the exchange of life (one for five) is identical to the exchange made in the trolley dilemma. The salient difference between the two cases is that, in the trolley dilemma, 252

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

the observer effects deliverance by the impersonal act of throwing a switch; in the footbridge dilemma, the observer must physically push a bystander onto the track.9 From the results of these experiments, Greene concludes that moral judgments involve one of two distinct processes or a combination of the two. The footbridge dilemma reveals a deep-seated, intuitive sense that causing harm is wrong. When presented with a situation in which one is bidden to cause harm for some greater good (as in pushing the bystander onto the track in order to save the five people on the track), our moral intuition rebels. The trolley dilemma discloses another process, whereby we engage in a rationally lucid calculation of value, concluding in the decision that it is better to sacrifice one to save five than to allow five to perish through inaction. Greene calls the process based on moral intuition deontological reasoning and the process based on calculation of value consequentialist reasoning.10 This is a misleading way of labeling the two processes, especially in the case of the intuitive process. For Immanuel Kant (generally regarded as the principal architect of deontological ethics), there was nothing very intuitive about the moral principles that ought to guide our reasoning and action. On the contrary, Kant believed that it was actually consequentialism that is our intuitive, default mode of moral reasoning and that the intuitive approach falls short of true morality. Nonetheless, we can take Greene’s point, once it is stripped of its misleading historical references. There is something odd about peoples’ reluctance to push the bystander onto the track, given their willingness to flip the switch with exactly the 9. Fiery Cushman, Liane Young, and Joshua D. Greene, “Multi-System Moral Psychology,” in John M. Doris, et al., eds., The Moral Psychology Handbook (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 49–50. 10. Joshua D. Greene, “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul,” in W. Sinnott-Armstrong, ed., Moral Psychology, Volume 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Disease, and Development (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2007), 35–79.

253

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

same consequences. There must be something in the brain that utters a moral prohibition when the possibility of inflicting direct harm is presented to us, a process that runs contrary to our more utilitarian calculations. This conviction increases when brain activity is brought into consideration: regions of the brain that, according to Greene, are associated with emotion (he names the medial prefrontal cortex) increase in activity as test subjects consider the footbridge dilemma; regions associated with reasoning increase in activity during the trolley experiment.11 The prospect of directly causing personal harm activates the brain’s emotional circuits, while the somewhat more impersonal act of throwing a switch in order to save more lives involves conscious ratiocination. If these two dilemmas are presented independently, the two processes do not collide. We use the intuitive process when harm looms, consequentialist reasoning when our moral intuitions are not activated. However, Greene acknowledges that a simple distinction between these two processes is overly simplistic.12 In another experiment, in which brain activity in multiple regions was recorded, subjects were presented with a dilemma: soldiers invade a village; villagers hide; among the hidden villagers, a baby begins to cry. The options are to kill the baby and save the others or refuse to kill the baby and risk everyone being killed. Greene reports two main findings: first, there was increased activity in the brain’s anterior cingulate cortex, which Greene identifies as a region that “reliably responds when two or more incompatible behavioral responses are simultaneously activated, i.e. under conditions of ‘response conflict.’” For Greene, this brain activity signifies a conflict between the two systems: the intuitive system prohibits harming the baby while the consequentialist system calculates the greater good of protecting the 11. Cushman, et al., “Multi-System Moral Psychology,” 50–51. 12. Ibid., 54.

254

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

many at the expense of the one. Second, there was increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, identified by Greene as the place of executive function and control. Greene interprets this increased activity as signifying the consequentialist system’s attempts to override the intuitive system’s prohibition of harm.13 These sorts of dilemmas testify to the fact that the two systems interact. The sense of confusion that we feel when presented with these dilemmas is a subjective measure of the conflicting processes transpiring in the brain. A simple distinction between the two processes is overly simplistic for another reason. Greene reports results of research into subjects whose ventromedial prefrontal cortex has been damaged by lesions and who consequently have “reduced affect and diminished empathy” but whose cognitive powers are unimpaired. As expected by the dual-process model, these subjects seem to lack the moral intuition prohibiting harm and as a result usually judge along the consequentialist line.14 Greene notes, however, that the matter is more complex. If subjects with VMPC lesions are presented with moral situations that are hardly dilemmas (Greene mentions throwing one’s baby away to ease one’s financial burden), they respond the way in which people without such lesions respond—the moral intuition against harm overrides all other consideration. They judge with consequentialist reasoning only when the moral situation is truly a dilemma, when harming one person promotes the good for others.15 How can these subjects, otherwise missing affective responses, employ the intuitive-affective prohibition of harm? Greene speculates that these subjects arrived at the “deontological” conclusion (do not harm), not intuitively (since their affective

13. Ibid., 51–52. 14. Ibid., 53. 15. Ibid., 59.

255

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

responsiveness is impaired) but by a process of reasoning. For them, the prohibition of harm is no longer an intuition but is instead a moral principle that can be employed in discursive reasoning unimpaired considerations.

by

the

lesions,

alongside

consequentialist

16

Greene’s work contributes to our understanding of how emotion and cognition relate. It seeks to clarify the tension between emotion and cognition and also to lessen some of the emphasis on affect that we find in the theory of basic emotions. It helps us see that cognition does more than contribute inputs or triggers for affect programs; it does more than shape the expression of emotion. Cognition can also, if Greene is correct, operate in tension with the demands of our moral intuition. Greene’s research yields a picture in which the brain possesses multiple systems of reasoning, with the result that, in complex moral cases, conflict and negotiation are inevitable. As a consequence, we can expect that there will be a continuum of responses among humans, some operating predominantly from intuitive feelings, others from self-consciously rational deliberation. Biological Altruism Greene’s dual-process theory provides us with one way of appreciating the role of emotion in morality. Another way is given by evolutionary theory. As I have argued above, phenomena such as human emotion and morality have antecedents in nonhuman animals. Emotion and morality are functions of the brain, at least in the sense that, for embodied beings like us, there is no emotion and no morality without the brain. The human brain did not appear fully formed, however; it was built on the brains of our evolutionary predecessors. As a result, there are important respects in which human

16. Ibid., 59–60.

256

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

emotion and morality today are continuous with their evolutionary antecedents. Appreciating this fact will help us overcome two misconceptions about emotion. One is that emotion is inherently unruly and that it serves morality only when it is governed by reason. The other and related misconception is that the so-called negative emotions such as anger, fear, and jealousy are irrational—not just bereft of reason but in fact contrary to reason. On the contrary, evolutionary considerations reveal that emotion has important and positive roles to play in morality quite apart from expressly rational processes and that emotion is not inevitably contrary to the dictates of reason. Indeed, emotion contains its own sort of moral wisdom. This wisdom is, of course, far from perfect. Its basis in evolutionary history does not render its operation flawless. Nonetheless, it is a distinctive sort of wisdom that enters into a dialectical relationship with expressly rational forms of wisdom. How, then, did evolution bring about the emotions that play a role in morality? The question is simple, but the answer is difficult because the mechanism of evolution, natural selection, makes the existence of such emotions paradoxical. Of course, much rests on which emotions we consider and how we define them, but discussion usually focuses on emotions and behaviors associated with altruism. To see why these emotions and behaviors occupy a paradoxical place in evolutionary theory, we must keep in mind the rather idiosyncratic definition of altruism employed in evolutionary theory. Most of us think of altruism as doing good for someone else with no expectation of reward. In evolutionary thinking, however, this definition is refined because of the preponderant role played by the notion of reproductive fitness. Altruism is here not simply doing something that benefits another, but doing so in a way that is costly to the altruistic agent and reduces his or her reproductive fitness. Examples 257

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

include ground squirrels, vervet monkeys, and prairie dogs issuing vocal predator warnings that benefit others in the group but involve risk for the one issuing the warning. Another example is vampire bats feeding fellow bats who haven’t had a chance to feed. If, as evolutionary theory affirms, reproduction is the guiding principle, any behavior that costs the agent in energy or resources tends to reduce the agent’s reproductive fitness and consequently makes no sense. At this point it is important to observe that talk of reproduction and natural selection has been the subject of considerable discussion among biologists. At what level does selection operate? Is it individual genes? The organism? Groups? The entire species? Richard Dawkins has given an especially provocative defense of the view that everything in evolution is driven by the interests of individual genes.17 It is this interpretation of natural selection that makes altruism most paradoxical: a gene that contributed to altruistic behavior would increase the chances that the genes of the organism receiving the behavior would be reproduced in the next generation while decreasing the reproductive fitness of its host and, hence, of its host’s genes (including the gene for altruism) reproducing. If natural selection operates strictly at the level of individual genes of individual organisms, altruism would go extinct, since the genes leading to it would tend not to get reproduced. Only genes leading to selfish behavior would be selected. However, there manifestly is altruistic behavior among both humans and nonhuman animals. People undertake costly, sometimes life-threatening actions that benefit others without apparently increasing their own reproductive fitness. Such action sometimes 17. Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 147. One of the first to identify the gene as the object of selection pressures was George Williams in Adaptation and Natural Selection: A Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 33, 251–52.

258

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

reduces that fitness and occasionally even brings it to an end. Since there are altruistic actions, the question arises whether human morality is grounded in evolutionary history or instead stands in contradiction to evolution. Dawkins seems to argue that in order to be moral we must act contrary to the evolutionary impulses at work within us.18 One way in which biologists have sought to reduce the paradoxical character of altruism is by appealing to the related notions of inclusive fitness and kin selection.19 Let’s return to one of the examples of altruism offered above: Certain animals utter vocal warnings of predators. If we attend only to the reproduction of individual genes, the altruistic behavior makes no sense if it reduces the reproductive potential of the organism uttering the warning. But if we focus instead on the fact that copies of a gene will occur in the genomes of organisms who are related by blood, altruism makes more sense. Acting altruistically toward an individual to whom one is closely related genetically increases the fitness of that related individual and increases the likelihood that its genes, which are shared by the altruistic agent, will be reproduced. In kin selection, the focus of selection is still on genes; however, it’s not every individual gene competing with every other gene. Instead, genes are regarded as constituting part of the genome of numerous individuals who are related by blood. The idea of “inclusive fitness” means that we are attending to the fitness, not of a single gene in a single organism, but of the gene as it and its copies occur in many related organisms. It must be noted that the idea of kin selection has of late received serious critique within the community of biologists. For some years, some biologists, notably Eliot Sober and David Sloan Wilson, argued 18. Ibid., 215. 19. There are many expositions of kin selection and inclusive fitness. One helpful one is Tim Phillips, Jiawei Li, and Graham Kendall, “The Effects of Extra-Somatic Weapons on the Evolution of Human Cooperation towards Non-Kin,” Plos ONE 9, no. 5 (2014): 1.

259

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

that kin selection wrongly regarded the gene alone as the target of selection. They insisted that selection pressures operated at several levels, including the gene but also groups. In other words, selection pressure on individuals in two or more competing groups might be greater than selection pressures on individuals competing within a single group. In such cases, individuals (and, of course, their genes) in one group might evolve greater reproductive fitness than individuals in competing groups. Recently, E. O. Wilson, one the world’s most eminent biologists and one of the principal founders of the discipline of sociobiology, has declared himself in favor of the idea that selection operates at multiple levels and, more astonishing, has questioned the usefulness of the theory of kin selection, calling its results “meagre” [sic].20 Wilson’s about-face has provoked spirited opposition, to put it mildly.21 The mainstream of the community of biologists seems firmly committed to the theory of kin selection; however, biology is a dynamic field, so it is best for theologians appropriating biological theories to maintain a degree of dispassionate reserve. On the assumption that the mainstream is not wholly wrong, the theory of kin selection, to whatever degree it retains validity, offers an explanation of altruism and predicts that altruistic acts will be occur in proportion to the percentage of genes shared between agent and recipient because of common descent—there will be more altruistic behavior between siblings than between cousins, for instance. It predicts that altruistic behavior will be directed more frequently toward individuals recognized as kin and less frequently toward individuals not recognized as kin. Experience shows that, in itself, 20. Martin A. Nowak, Corina E. Tarnita, and Edward O. Wilson, “The Evolution of Eusociality,” Nature 466, no. 7310 (2010): 1058. For commentary and helpful historical background, see Abraham H. Gibson, “Edward O. Wilson and the Organicist Tradition,” Journal of the History of Biology 46, no. 4 (2013): 599–630, esp. 599–601 and 618–25. 21. See Vanessa Thorpe, “Richard Dawkins in Furious Row with EO Wilson over Theory of Evolution,” The Guardian (2012). http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/24/battle-ofthe-professors; and Gibson, “Edward O. Wilson,” 621–24.

260

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

kin

selection

cannot

provide

a

full

account

of

human

morality—sometimes we do behave altruistically toward strangers. Nonetheless, the theory makes two claims of great importance for our understanding of morality. First, it explains why we act for the good of those related to us more readily than for the good of those not related to us—why we feel an impulse to extend goodness to family before strangers. The theory of kin selection purports to explain the evolutionary origin of those feelings. Second, it shows that the beginnings of other-directed feeling and behavior have evolutionary roots. Admittedly, the others to whom this altruistic behavior is offered do not extend very far genetically from the altruistic agent. Nonetheless, the theory shows us that the world of nature is not simply a system of competition; there are other-directed feelings and behavior as well, even if they are limited in scope and are still grounded in the selfish gene. Cooperation and Reciprocal Altruism A step beyond the altruism of kin selection in the direction of human moral possibilities is reciprocal altruism (also known as cooperation), first articulated by Robert L. Trivers.22 The basic idea of reciprocal altruism is fairly simple, although its application to nonhuman animals is difficult.23 The idea is that evolution can produce individuals that act altruistically (in the biological sense) toward other individuals with whom there is a minimal genetic relationship and perhaps even toward individuals of different species.24 An individual, A, acts altruistically toward another individual, B, in a way that 22. Robert L. Trivers, “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism,” The Quarterly Review of Biology 46, no. 1 (1971): 35–57. 23. See Walter D. Koenig, “Reciprocal Altruism in Birds: A Critical Review,” Ethology and Sociobiology 9: (1988): 73–84, for a review of the difficulty of locating examples of reciprocal altruism in the behavior of birds. 24. Trivers, “Evolution,” 35.

261

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

enhances the reproductive fitness of B even though such acting exacts a reproductive cost on A. Such acting is evolutionarily selected because (if all goes well), the original altrusitic agent (A) will receive a like benefit from B or another individual. For example, consider the vampire bats mentioned previously. They can starve to death in as little as forty-eight hours without food. A seven-month study showed that these bats exhibited altruistic behavior (sharing regurgitated food) with fellow members of the colony, even in cases of low genetic relation.25 Or, consider vervet monkeys. When a fight occurs between two females, others, both relatives and nonrelatives, come to help. The help of relatives can be explained via kin selection, but what accounts for nonrelatives helping? It turns out that nonrelatives show up to help according to the amount of time since they received grooming from the monkey crying out for help.26 If the distressed monkey has recently engaged in grooming others, those others are willing to come to its aid. Reciprocal altruism, then, envisions a society of individuals who engage in mutual, altruistic help. Whatever cost in reproductive fitness is incurred by an altruistic agent is repaid later. A bit more exactly, a system of reciprocal altruism requires that the members have comparatively long lifespans (the members have to live long enough to receive the payback); show a low dispersal rate (they have to meet each other frequently enough to receive paybacks); and live in small and stable groups (the groups can’t be too big, otherwise an individual who acted altruistically might never again encounter the recipient to receive a payback).27 The obvious problem with any system of reciprocal altruism (assuming that the conditions just mentioned are met) is cheating. If one individual receives the benefit of an altruistic act, there will be 25. Lisa K. Denault and Donald A. McFarlane, “Reciprocal Altruism Between Male Vampire Bats Desmohs Votundus,” Animal Behaviour 49, no. 3 (1995): 855–56. 26. Phyllis Meek, “Altruism,” http://www-personal.umich.edu/~phyl/anthro/altruism.html. 27. Trivers, “Evolution,” 45.

262

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

a great temptation and an evolutionary impulse to avoid returning the benefit. A cheater would thus receive an enhanced reproductive fitness and avoid any altruistically incurred reduction in fitness acquired by returning the favor. Given the massive incentive to cheat, what could enable a reciprocally altruistic society to become evolutionarily stable? What would keep it from disintegrating into a world of cheaters? Theorists of reciprocal altruism often have recourse to game theory, in particular to what is called the iterated prisoner’s dilemma.28 Although the game is a bit artificial, it is thought by advocates to explain the stability of reciprocal altruism in the face of cheating. The game works thus: imagine two individuals (A and B) who have committed a crime and been apprehended. They are being separately interrogated. There are in the game three possible outcomes: • If both remain silent (if they cooperate with each other), each will serve one year (the number of years is immaterial and varies by expositor). • If each accuses the other (if each tries to cheat), each will serve two years in prison. • If one accuses the other and the other is silent, the accuser is freed and the accused serves three years in prison. If the prisoners were mind readers, they would know that the best outcome for the two of them considered together is to cooperate with each other by remaining silent, thus serving each one year. However, the prisoners are separated and neither knows what the other will do.

28. Trivers mentions the prisoner’s dilemma in ibid., 38. An elaborated articulation is offered by Robert Axelrod and William D. Hamilton, “The Evolution of Cooperation,” Science new series 211, no. 4489 (1981): 1390–96.

263

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

If each prisoner considers only his or her good, he or she will respond by accusing the other and thereby seek freedom. What if, instead of a one-time decision to accuse or remain silent, the game is changed so that numerous rounds are played and each prisoner has opportunities to make decisions to cheat or cooperate in the light of previous decisions of the other prisoner? Playing this iterated version under laboratory conditions shows that the best strategy, that is, the strategy that enables the system to continue, is to cooperate with the other player until he or she cheats, and then cheat. If the other player then cooperates, the first player cooperates as well. In other words, the first player always mimics the previous decision of the other player.29 Such a strategy encourages a maximum of cooperation and in effect punishes cheating. The use of game theory purports to show that and how reciprocal altruism can become evolutionarily stable in a population, even in the face of cheating and even if members of that population are only distantly related to one another. Applied to actual societies of animals or humans, it predicts that members of a society will simply stop cooperating with cheaters (if they can be identified as such) and will instead cooperate with other cooperators. Naturally, these strategies will encourage the evolution of brain systems designed to detect and punish cheaters as well as of systems for more adept, clever, and covert modes of cheating. But, as human society shows, a system of reciprocal altruism can sustain itself while tolerating a certain amount of cheating. 29. For a brief but more detailed discussion of game theory and its use in the theory of reciprocal altruism, see Lee A. Dugatkin, Cooperation among Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective, Oxford Series in Ecology and Evolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 10–13. For a critique of the application of the iterated prisoners’ dilemma to reciprocity, see Robert Boyd and Jeffrey P. Lorberbaum, “No Pure Strategy is Evolutionarily Stable in the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game,” Nature 327 (1987): 58–59; and Stuart A. West, Claire El Mouden, and Andy Gardner, “Sixteen Common Misconceptions about the Evolution of Cooperation in Humans,” Evolution and Human Behavior 32 (2011): 231–62.

264

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

Reciprocal altruism gets us a bit closer to the possibilities of human morality. Even though it is the result of evolutionary pressures, it does not require a close genetic relationship between altruistic agent and recipient. Additionally, it seems to be motivated by specific emotions: Trivers speculated that sympathy evolved to motivate altruistic behavior and gratitude evolved to regulate the response to altruism. These emotions, he argued, are the evolved mechanisms by which we are sensitive to the cost-benefit ratio of altruistic acts.30 Michael McCullough, Marcia Kimeldorf, and Adam Cohen support Trivers’s thesis that gratitude evolved to motivate altruism: Gratitude (they argue) is sensitive to the costs and benefits of altruistic acts; it prompts us to acknowledge benefactions and in turn to act altruistically toward benefactors. They found as well that gratitude is linked to reciprocating a favor to a much greater extent than are feelings of indebtedness or obligation.31 Generalized Reciprocity Reciprocal altruism still falls pretty far short of the vernacular meaning of altruism; the whole system operates on the basis of selfinterest, if not selfishness. The reciprocity involved means that individual A will help individual B only if B (or another agent) actually, at some point, returns the favor. Additionally, some researchers argue that reciprocal altruism is poorly attested in nonhuman animals or, at least, is difficult to document.32 Something more is needed to explain how humans can exercise altruistic 30. Trivers, “Evolution,” 49. 31. Michael E. McCullough, Marcia B. Kimeldorf, and Adam D. Cohen, “An Adaptation for Altruism? The Social Causes, Social Effects, and Social Evolution of Gratitude,” Current Directions In Psychological Science 17, no. 4 (2008): 283. 32. Raghavendra Gadagkar, “Rats Are Nicer than We Think, at Least to Each Other,” Journal of Biosciences 32, no. 6 (2007): 1223; and Claudia Rutte, Michael Taborsky, “Generalized Reciprocity in Rats,” PLoS Biology 5, no. 7 (2007): 1421–25; also available at http://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/journal.pbio.0050196.

265

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

behavior in large, anonymous societies where altruism happens sometimes without direct reciprocity. In response, some biologists have proposed a form of generalized altruism, in which individuals in a group are inclined to exhibit altruistic behavior if they have themselves benefited from such behavior. This is not reciprocal altruism, for the exhibition of altruism is not always directed to individuals from whom the altruistic agent has received some good. The point, instead, is that receiving an altruistic good inclines the recipient to bestow an altruistic good on an individual in need, not necessarily the individual from whom the initial good was received. Hence, it is sometimes characterized as indirect reciprocity. Evidence for generalized altruism comes from a study of rats. Placed in an experimental situation that allowed one rat to pull a stick and thereby provide some food for another rat, rats that had previously received such help were 21 percent more likely to help another, anonymous rat.33 From this evidence the researchers concluded that receiving altruistic help instilled some sort of positive feeling in the rats, which then inclined them to act altruistically toward others.34 Attributing this sort of mood to rats avoids the problem of wondering how rats and other animals keep track of donors and recipients and cheaters, as required in theories of reciprocal altruism.35 On this theory, no such cognitive mechanisms are needed; receiving altruistic acts disposes the rats emotionally to act altruistically. Alternatively, we can think of a system of general altruism as one in which agents know, on the basis of previous interactions, the level of cooperation that obtains within the group. 36 Among humans, the emotion that motivates general altruism, in 33. Gadagkar, “Rats,” 1223–24. 34. Ibid., 1224. 35. Ibid., 1223. See also Rutte and Tarbosky, “Generalized Reciprocity.” 36. Rutte and Tarbosky, “Generalized Reciprocity.”

266

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

the context of evolutionarily created mechanisms for cooperation, is gratitude.37 The central claim of the theory is not that gratitude creates cooperation.38 Instead, the theory claims that, if cooperation is found (because it has been selected through normal evolutionary means), general reciprocity increases cooperation; the evolution of cooperation is easier if the agents feel gratitude.39 Of course, nothing guarantees that members of a community will feel gratitude and will act in accordance with generalized altruism. Everything depends on the cost expended in the altruistic act being less (evolutionarily considered) than the benefit received. Modeling shows that if the cost is high enough, the evolution of generalized altruism “is totally suppressed,”40 and at least one study shows that among humans true generosity (giving more than one has received) occurs less than greed and less than equitable behavior (giving as much as one has received).41 So, no one is claiming that human beings are one and all altruistic or that any individual is consistently altruistic. The points are simply (1) that humans do sometimes, in some situations, exhibit altruistic behavior toward other humans to whom they are not genetically related; and (2) that gratitude may have evolved to facilitate this behavior. This survey of biological theories of altruism and reciprocity shows that the behavior and emotion that constitutes a basis of human morality has evolved. Many of the details of evolutionary mechanisms

37. Martin A. Nowak and Sébastien Roch, “Upstream Reciprocity and the Evolution of Gratitude,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 274, no. 1610 (2007): 605. See also Jorge Peña, Enea Pestelacci, André Berchtold, and Marco Tomassini, “Participation Costs Can Suppress the Evolution of Upstream Reciprocity,” Journal of Theoretical Biology 273, no. 1 (2011): 198. 38. Nowak and Roch, “Upstream Reciprocity,” 605. 39. Ibid., 607. 40. Peña, et al., “Participation Costs,” 204. 41. Kurt Gray, Adrian F. Ward, and Michael I. Norton, “Paying It Forward: Generalized Reciprocity and the Limits of Generosity,” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143, no. 1 (2014): 252.

267

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

remain matters of debate in the community of biologists; even if they were fully known, evolution would not provide a complete explanation of human morality. Nonetheless, it seems certain that morality and the emotions that underlie it have an evolutionary basis. Developments in evolutionary theory, especially the development of the theory of kin selection and of generalized selection, can be seen as progressive attempts to accommodate the theory of evolution to the known facts of altruistic behavior in humans and animals. Prosocial Emotions It is time now to consider prosocial emotions. To understand such emotions from a biological perspective, we will look at the work of the primatologist Frans de Waal. De Waal wants to overturn what he calls the veneer theory of morality, according to which humans receive nothing but selfishness and violence from our animal heritage. In this account, morality is not only not rooted in nature but is in fact contrary to nature.42 Against this theory he proposes that the roots of human morality, especially emotions such as empathy, can be found in animals. We are violent but also empathetic, competitive but we also seek social harmony.43 All of our tendencies result from our social nature, rudiments of which are found in other primates. De Waal thus traces human social organization and morality back to the existence of social hierarchies among primates, for it is in the power dynamics of hierarchies that inhibition of action appears.44 Morality accordingly derives from the social nature that we share with animals.45 42. Frans de Waal, The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism Among the Primates (New York: Norton, 2013), 157; and idem, Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are (New York: Riverhead, 2005), 21. 43. De Waal, Inner Ape, 6, 149. 44. De Waal, Bonobo, 150. 45. Frans de Waal, “Morally Evolved: Primate Social Instinct, Human Morality, and the Rise and

268

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

The duality of our moral nature is illustrated by chimpanzees and bonobos, two genera (along with gorillas and humans) in the family hominidae.46 Chimpanzees, de Waal relates, are almost unrelievedly violent

and

chimpanzees.

hostile, 47

particularly

toward

other

groups

of

Human nature has undoubtedly inherited a fair

amount of chimpanzee-like hostility; however, de Waal argues, we have inherited more than a propensity to violence from our animal ancestry—hence the importance of bonobos. Bonobos lie at the other end of the violence spectrum from chimpanzees; the characteristic behavior employed to negotiate social tension within a group is sexual activity.48 Bonobos do sometimes fight, so the abundance of sexual activity does not result from a lack of conflict.49 Instead, they tend to achieve conciliation first of all by sexual activity, violence being a sort of last resort. The importance of bonobo behavior for de Waal is that it indicates that early human behavior was not uniformly violent. On the contrary, it likely featured a range of behaviors as exhibited by chimpanzees and bonobos.50 It is significant that de Waal is a primatologist and not a geneticist. If one thinks of biology from the perspective of genes, one will incline to the view that altruism and cooperation are performed for the benefit of genes, as in Richard Dawkins’s view. The possibility of such acts will require a fairly direct connection to reproductive fitness. But if one approaches biology by examining organisms, especially organisms as socially developed as apes, one gets a different

Fall Of ‘Veneer Theory’,” in Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, ed. Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober, The University Center for Human Values Series (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), 4–6. 46. De Waal, Inner Ape, 148. 47. Ibid., 145. 48. Frans B. M. De Waal, Peacemaking Among Primates (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 214–27. 49. De Waal, Inner Ape, 17–18. 50. Ibid., 11.

269

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

view of altruism and sees it in broader terms. De Waal, at any rate, does view altruism in broad terms and believes that traditional biological views of altruism and cooperation have wrongly interpreted it to be an expression of selfishness. De Waal argues that cooperation requires empathy. Recall that cooperation was initially explained as a result of kin selection; however, kin selection did not explain cooperation between nonkin, so recourse was made to game theory, which showed how reciprocal altruism could become a stable evolutionary strategy. De Waal believes that there is more to be said about cooperation. In particular, he argues that systems of cooperation require that organisms be capable of knowing and feeling the emotional states of others in their group. Only with such knowing and feeling can primates engage in coordinated activity and cooperation.51 De Waal finds the evolutionary beginnings of empathy in phenomena such as emotional contagion, in which an emotional state travels from one individual to another, as when one baby’s crying gets another to cry. This is not true empathy, for it does not involve one organism knowing another’s emotional state; it just involves the transfer of the same emotion from one individual to another. Still, it is a sharing of the same emotion by two individuals and thus counts as an antecedent of empathy. Another step toward empathy was the evolutionary development of parental care for offspring, who by means of smiling and crying induce parents to respond. These actions signal emotional states that parents discern, resulting in appropriate action. Once evolved, de Waal argues, this ability to know another’s emotional state was extended to wider circles of social relationships.52 The next evolutionary step toward empathy is sympathy.

51. Frans B.M. de Waal, “Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy,” Annual Review of Psychology 59, no. 1 (2008): 282. 52. Ibid.

270

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

Sympathy (for de Waal) is emotional contagion combined with knowledge of the other’s situation and of the cause of the other’s emotion.53 As an example he offers instances of consolation, in which a third party, witnessing a fight, hugs the loser. Based on his observation of primate behavior, he notes that these third-party acts of consolation are directed more frequently to losers of fights than to winners and that offers of consolation increase with the severity of the fight.54 De Waal finds it to be particularly significant that consolation is found among apes (gorillas, chimpanzees, bonobos, and humans) but not among monkeys.55 The fact that we humans share consolation with other apes, our genetically closest relatives, and not with more distant relatives strengthens the case for an evolutionary basis of consolation. Sympathy is a prelude for empathy. Empathy, according to de Waal, adds two things to sympathy: perspective-taking and targeted helping. Perspective-taking is the cognitive skill of seeing from another’s point of view. It requires the ability to attribute mind (feelings, experiences, intentions, and so on) to another and, having done so, to see things from the perspective of that other. Targeted helping involves one individual helping another on the basis of grasping that other’s situation and goals. De Waal cites examples such as a mother ape (who is on a branch in one tree) helping her whimpering child (who is trapped in another tree) by moving her own branch toward the child’s branch.56 This sort of behavior requires the mother to understand the situation from the child’s perspective and to interpret the whimpering as a cry of distress caused by the situation. There seems to be a neural basis for empathy. The same neural 53. Ibid., 283. 54. Ibid., 284–85. 55. Ibid., 285. 56. Ibid.

271

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

circuits are activated whether we directly experience a state or observe someone else experiencing it. The term mirror neuron system has been coined to denote the neural mechanisms by which empathy occurs. For instance, in an experiment in which a wife observes her husband experiencing pain, the portions of the brain (the anterior cingulate cortex, immediately behind the frontal lobe) activated in the husband are activated in the wife as well. She, in effect, experiences the husband’s pain, at least neurologically if not phenomenologically.57 Similarly, the portion of the brain (the insula, in the central part of the brain) activated in the experience of disgust is activated when viewing faces that express disgust, the intensity of activation being proportional to the intensity of expressed disgust.58 This is what distinguishes empathy from sympathy: if I sympathize with another person who is, for example, grieving, I will feel various emotions such as pity or compassion, but I won’t feel grief. In the case of empathy, I feel what the other is feeling.59 For de Waal, the importance of empathy lies in its capacity to motivate altruistic acts.60 Recall that, according to the theory of kin selection, altruism has evolved to serve the interests of the gene. An individual is inclined to act altruistically toward another because altruistic behavior has allowed the genes linked to that behavior to be reproduced better than genes linked to nonaltruistic behavior. Altruism is thus a complicated scheme engineered, so to speak, by genes as a way of getting themselves reproduced. Many have pointed out that this account of altruism falls short of the everyday account, 57. Grit Hein and Tania Singer, “Neuroscience Meets Social Psychology and Integrity of Approach to Human Empathy and Prosocial Behavior,” in Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R. Shaver, eds., Prosocial Motives, Emotions, and Behavior: The Better Angels of Our Nature (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010), 113–14; De Waal, “Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism,” 286. 58. Antonella Corradini and Alessandro Antonietti, “Mirror Neurons and Their Function in Cognitively Understood Empathy,” Consciousness and Cognition 22, no. 3 (2013): 1154. 59. Hein and Singer, “Neuroscience,” 111. 60. De Waal, “Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism,” 289.

272

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

according to which altruism signifies a willingness to act for the good of another without consideration of personal gain. In other words, biological altruism is not authentic altruism because it is undertaken to benefit the agent’s genes. De Waal’s view of altruism amounts to taking the everyday understanding of altruism seriously and showing it to be a reality in apes, a reality grounded in empathy.61 He believes that apes truly have caring feelings for one another and that this motivates them to engage in costly behavior on the behalf of others. For example, noting that chimpanzees cannot swim, he cites instances of chimps jumping into water in order to save other members of their group. What could motivate such potentially selfsacrificial behavior? Cost-benefit analysis may explain examples of cooperation such as grooming, but the cost in these examples is quite low. De Waal believes that entering the water to save another can be explained only on the basis on empathic feelings.62 The chimpanzee observing the other in the water must, it seems, become emotionally involved in the other’s situation and thus feel something that induces the act; the act cannot be analyzed in terms of selfish behavior.63 Similarly, food sharing may be explained in terms of reciprocal cooperation, but such cooperation, with its built-in system of reward and punishment, cannot account for the fact that dominant members of an ape community can be the most generous sharers and that sharing occurs even when apes are separated by bars, ruling out the possibility of reward-punishment pressure.64 In summary, then, analysis of ape behavior indicates that unselfish altruism, grounded in empathy, genuinely occurs. Of course, these

61. For a comparable argument for the reality of authentic altruism see C. Daniel Batson, “Empathy-Induced Altruistic Motivation,” in Mikulincer and Shaver, eds., Prosocial Motives, 15–34. 62. De Waal, “Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism,” 289. 63. Ibid., 292. 64. Ibid., 289.

273

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

communities still exhibit plenty of biological altruism based in kin selection and reciprocal cooperation based on calculations of costs and benefits.65 Nonetheless, with the evolution of empathy and the possibility of authentic altruism, an enormous step toward fully human moral possibilities takes place. The lesson of all this for theology, especially pastoral theology, is that there is a necessary Christian task of inculcating certain emotions in members of the Christian community. If Christian disciples are to exhibit generous behavior, display gratitude, express joy, and practice love toward the neighbor, they must be disposed to do so. It is the various prosocial emotions that provide this disposition. Consequently, the cultivation of these emotions is a vital pastoral task. Problematic Emotions: Jealousy Phenomena such as altruism and reciprocity present us with things comparatively easy to assimilate into theology because they seem praiseworthy. Admittedly, there are dots to be connected between the biological concept of altruism and Christian ethics. Nonetheless, the dots can be connected and the connections yield insights into human nature that the theologian should take seriously. When it comes to emotions such as anger and jealousy, a theological appropriation of the phenomena seems more difficult, unless we content ourselves with denouncing these emotions as unChristian or psychologically damaging. However, scientific study of emotion has much to say about these so-called negative emotions and their function in human life. I will present some leading views of

65. See Joan B. Silk and Bailey R. House, “Evolutionary Foundations of Human Prosocial Sentiments,” in Joan E. Strassman, David C. Queller, and John C. Avise, eds., In the Light of Evolution, volume 5: Cooperation and Conflict, Sackler Colloquium Series (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2012), 350, 361, for cautionary words about the limits of primate altruism.

274

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

jealousy as an illustration, beginning with an exposition of David M. Buss’s theory of jealousy. The point of departure is the familiar evolutionary psychological thesis that recurrent behaviors and emotions are adaptive strategies, designed by selection to solve problems. Human nature (as well as animal natures) possesses a repertoire of sexual strategies that have evolved to solve certain problems associated with mating.66 Typical problems include identifying a potential and desirable mate and outcompeting rivals. Each strategy is associated with a computational program (of the sort described in chapter 6) that includes mechanisms for detecting environmental cues, for arousing emotions, and for launching behavioral responses. Jealousy is one such strategy.67 As noted in chapter 6, these strategies are ancient, having evolved in the earliest days of human and prehuman evolution. They are, therefore, adaptations to the ancient biological and social environment.68 They get activated today when the right cues are received. Because they are evolved adaptations, they are activated automatically and not as the result of conscious decisions. Jealousy, on this view, is a necessary adaptive strategy because it is not enough to find a mate and engage in mating; it is important as well to keep that mate. Infidelity thus constitutes a problem that requires an evolutionary adaptation. Individuals in the evolutionary past who exhibited jealousy (along with the perceptual and behavioral components of the associated adaptive program) thereby possessed greater reproductive fitness than individuals who didn’t possess jealousy or did so at ineffective levels.69 Over time those with jealousy 66. David M. Buss, The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating, rev. ed. (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 5. 67. Ibid., 6. 68. Ibid., 15. See also John Tooby and Leda Cosmides, “The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and Their Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables,” in M. Lewis, J. M. Haviland-Jones, and L. F. Barrett, eds., Handbook of Emotions, 3d ed. (New York: Guilford. 2008), 117.

275

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

succeeded more frequently in passing on their genes to the next generation than those with little or no jealousy, so that eventually the psychological mechanism giving rise to jealousy became evolutionarily stable in the human population. Jealousy, then, exists because of the human proclivity for infidelity.70 According to Buss, however, infidelity represents one threat to women but a different threat to men. For men, the threat is questionable paternity. Since human children take a long time to develop, involving a considerable investment of resources, men are anxious to ensure that the children in whom they are investing are in fact theirs. Women’s infidelity raises the possibility that one’s mate could be impregnated by another man. In that case, the man would end up expending resources on a child not his own. In evolutionary terms, his investment would not result in his genes getting passed on to the next generation.71 Women face a different threat from infidelity. According to Buss’s theory, woman invest far more costly resources in children than do men. Their interest in retaining a mate lies in the need for resources that the man can provide. Men’s infidelity threatens to divert these resources from the mother to another woman.72 Why does infidelity occur? Because it, too, is an adaptive strategy. Since men invest relatively less in children than do women, men’s repertoire of reproductive strategies includes, besides jealousy, the impulse to impregnate as many women as possible.73 Women’s infidelity, Buss has speculated, involves several factors. For one thing, if a woman can be impregnated by a man with better qualities than 69. Buss, Evolution, 10. 70. David M. Buss, The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2000), 5–6. 71. Buss, Evolution, 126; idem, Dangerous Passion, 7. 72. David M. Buss, “Sexual Jealousy,” Psychological Topics 22, no. 2 (2013): 167, http://homepage.psy.utexas.edu/homepage/Group/BussLAB/publications.htm. 73. Buss, Evolution, 76.

276

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

her mate and if she can retain her mate’s investment of resources—a strategic best of all possible worlds—she enhances the chances that her offspring will survive (thus ensuring that her own genes are passed on).74 Their chances of survival are increased because (1) they have better genes from their biological father than they would have received from their mother’s mate; and (2) their mother’s mate continues to supply resources needed for their upbringing. Another factor in women’s infidelity is the possibility that a dalliance with another man will be rewarded with some resources by the man, an important consideration if resources are scarce and life is harsh.75 Jealousy provides us with an important way of appreciating the potential

contribution

of

evolutionary

psychology

to

our

understanding of emotion. Without an evolutionary perspective, we are likely to regard jealousy as a purely negative and even damaging emotion. An evolutionary perspective shows us that, although jealousy can be damaging, it is not irrational and it exists for good reasons. So-called negative emotions such as anger and jealousy are adaptations to threats that recurred in humankind’s evolutionary history. Jealousy in particular is an emotion coordinated with threats to significant relationships.76 It has, throughout evolutionary history, served adaptive purposes by making us sensitive to cues that signal threats, by inducing physiological states of arousal, and by motivating us to action. Admittedly, the mechanism for detecting cues can be oversensitive, thus wrongly interpreting cues; the behavioral outputs can be overwrought and dangerous. Nonetheless, the argument goes, an emotion as ancient and pervasive as jealousy would not have persisted in human nature unless it served some adaptive purpose. Buss goes so far as to assert that jealousy is a form of emotional 74. Buss, Dangerous Passion, 160–61. 75. Ibid., 19–20. 76. Ibid., 35.

277

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

wisdom,77 passed down, via genetic inheritance, through the generations, providing humankind with a successful strategy for negotiating the social environment. Moreover, jealousy is actually a sign of commitment within a relationship;78 it signals that one has sufficient existential investment in the relationship to warrant powerful feelings when cues are detected that indicate a threat. Jealousy, accordingly, is not an irrational response. It may be painful, it may result in destructive behavior, it may be mistaken, but it is not contrary to reason. Admittedly, it may be contrary to utilitarian rationality; lovers’ commitment to a relationship may seem contrary to a means-ends calculation performed by someone outside the relationship. But the fact that relationships characterized by love and jealousy cannot be fruitfully analyzed with the logic of calculation does not render them irrational. On the contrary, like every emotion jealousy comprises information-processing mechanisms that are sensitive to certain cues (such as new scents on one’s mate, sudden changes in sexual desire in one’s mate, and unusual eye contact by one’s mate with another person) that process the resulting information, and that use it to motivate action. 79 The

tenets

of

evolutionary

psychology

have

not

gone

unchallenged. Several points of critique are relevant to an understanding of jealousy. One is that evolutionary psychologists are overly fond of the notion of adaptation—that they tend to identify every human trait as an adaptation brought about by natural selection.80 No doubt many human traits are adaptations, but is every one of them an adaptation? Critics find some alleged adaptations

77. Ibid., 6. 78. Ibid., 9, 47. 79. Ibid., 41. 80. See Paul E. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 71–72, 109–13, for an extended recitation of the shortcomings of evolutionary psychologists on this topic.

278

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

to be overly facile, it being too easy and tempting to identify a trait and infer from it a hypothetical situation in the evolutionary past for which it is a solution.81 Thus if (an empirically large “if”) men are attracted to beautiful, young women, this must have an adaptive explanation, the assumption being that young women offer the man greater chance of reproductive success. But if it turns out that men find mature women to be attractive, this will have an equally compelling adaptive explanation, for the typical mature women has a proven track record of successfully reproducing.82 As an explanation, adaptation thus has a protean quality–it seems to fit every possible circumstance. Critics have also noted that evolutionary psychology’s preoccupation with adaptation lies outside the mainstream of biology, which commonly traces traits back to any of several biological causes besides adaptation, causes including genetic drift and selection operating at levels beyond the gene.83 Another sort of criticism relates to the programs or mechanisms that evolutionary psychologists posit. Critics have questioned whether evolutionary psychologists have overemphasized the narrowness of the brain’s information-processing programs. Do we today have narrow programs adapted for specific environmental conditions millions of years ago (as Buss argues)? Or do we instead have more generalized programs capable of operating across a range of environments? The issue is the extent to which the brain operates with rather fixed, circumscribed programs with predetermined behavioral outputs or, on the contrary, with flexible programs in which learning plays a large role.84

81. This point was articulated with notable effect by Stephen Jay Gould and Richard C. Lewontin in “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme,” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B 205, no. 1161 (1979): 581–98. 82. Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, 110. 83. Kevin N. Laland and Gillian R. Brown, Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 131–32.

279

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

A third sort of criticism relates to the assumption that the brain’s programs evolved in response to environmental challenges of the Pleistocene era (from around two million years ago to the recent past). Critics have charged evolutionary psychologists with leaning too much on speculative theories about supposed conditions in the Pleistocene era instead of studying the actual conditions.85 It has been questioned whether we know all that much about the conditions humans faced in this era and suggested that the environment may have been more varied than some evolutionary psychologists seem to presuppose.86 Finally, evolutionary psychologists may have got some basic facts of our evolutionary history wrong. Many traits may have arisen, not in the Pleistocene era, but in previous evolutionary epochs. If so, the evolutionary psychological narrative about the evolution of traits, depending as it does on the reconstruction of the original environmental conditions, may require revision. Additionally, there is evidence that evolution may happen faster than evolutionary psychologists have assumed. If it can happen faster, then evolution of some traits may have occurred in the relatively recent human past and not in the ancient past.87 These points of critique relate to subjects of current debate in the community of biologists, anthropologists, and others. Although the debate is ongoing, there is enough sustained critique to warrant caution about accepting every assumption and conclusion of

84. See Griffiths, What Emotions Really Are, 116; and Laland and Brown, Sense and Nonsense, 128–31. 85. Edward H. Hagen and Donald Symons, “Natural Psychology, The Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, and the Structure of Cognition,” in Steven W. Gangestad and Jeffry A. Simpson, eds., Evolution of Mind: Fundamental Questions and Controversies (New York: Guilford, 2007), 42–44. 86. Laland and Brown, Sense and Nonsense, 124; and Eric Alden Smith, “Reconstructing the Evolution of the Human Mind,” in Gangestad and Simpson, eds., Evolution of Mind, 56. 87. Laland and Brown, Sense and Nonsense, 125–33.

280

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

evolutionary psychology. At the same time, it is likely that emotion has been the subject of evolutionary pressure. Further, the fact that each emotion seems to be triggered by distinct cues does suggest the cogency of at least some features of evolutionary psychology. To see how jealousy can be fruitfully studied from an evolutionary perspective without the complete theoretical apparatus of Buss’s evolutionary psychology, I turn to the work of David J. Buller. Buller is, admittedly, a philosopher and is critical of evolutionary psychology. Advocates have eagerly responded to his critique.88 Buller is, however, informed about and sympathetic to evolutionary theory; my interest in his work lies in his understanding of jealousy and his alternative to Buss’s understanding. Like Buss, Buller affirms unequivocally that jealousy is an evolved alarm to a perceived threat.89 He also acknowledges that there are significant differences between male sexual jealousy and female sexual jealousy.90 At the same time, Buller thinks that there is no warrant for positing separate, sexually differentiated psychological mechanisms (as Buss does). He argues instead for a single, more generalized mechanism shared by both sexes.91 Buller offers several lines of argument to support this view. He adduces data suggesting that men do not generally regard a mate’s sexual infidelity as more threatening than their mate’s emotional involvement with another man, as well as observations about cultural variation in the level of men’s anxiety over a mate’s sexual involvement with others.92

88. See, for example, Frank Miele, “Evolutionary Psychology Is Here to Stay,” Skeptic 12, no. 1 (2005): 58–61; Harmon R. Holcomb III, “Buller Does to Evolutionary Psychology What Kitcher Did to Sociobiology,” Evolutionary Psychology 3 (2005): 392–401; and Kevin N. Laland, “Life after Evolutionary Psychology,” Metascience 16, no. 1 (2007): 5–13. 89. David J. Buller, Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005), 305. 90. Buller, Adapting Minds, 308. 91. Ibid., 314-15. 92. Ibid., 317-19.

281

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

On the basis of an extended argument, a mixture of data, and theories borrowed from others, Buller proposes a “relationship jeopardy” hypothesis. According to this hypothesis, humans male and female have evolved the capacity to learn to distinguish cues signaling threats to their reproductive relationships. Men and women therefore do not have separate psychological programs. However, women will find men’s adulterous emotional involvement to be especially distressing and men will find women’s adulterous sexual involvement to be especially distressing because each sex picks up (via cultural transmission) certain beliefs about the other. Women gain culture knowledge that men are willing to engage in sex without love and commitment; men gain cultural knowledge that sexual activity for a woman implies emotional commitment.93 It is not necessary for the theological community to decide between Buss and Buller. The salient point of this review is that emotions such as jealousy are, at least in part, the result of evolution. Whether or not every claim of evolutionary psychology is valid, the fact that a noted critic such as Buller can agree with evolutionary psychologists on some fundamental issues indicates that evolutionary scientists are asking right questions. If the evolutionary approach is a correct one, then theologians can not simply attribute so-called negative emotions such as jealousy or anger to sin. In the early centuries of Christianity, it made complete sense for theologians such as Gregory of Nyssa and Augustine to regard these and many other emotions are symptomatic of our fallen state. It made sense because this interpretation fit within their view of human origins, according to which humans were created in a pristine state and then fell into corruption. It is, I propose, impossible to sustain belief in this view of human origins unless one is willing to engage in extraordinary, ad hoc 93. Ibid., 333.

282

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

strategies to discount scientific evidence. Most of the Christian theological community has accepted the theory of evolution; however, such acceptance has not necessarily altered our view of emotion. It is altogether too easy to accept the theory of evolution in a general or abstract sense and to continue to think of negative emotions as somehow rooted in an existential state of sin. An evolutionary analysis of emotion will not permit such an unqualified link between these emotions and sin. On the contrary, it demands that we recognize the ways in which these emotions are adaptations. None of this, of course, justifies just any sort of behavior resulting from anger or jealousy and it is sensible to recognize that there are pathological forms of anger and jealousy. Just because a trait results from evolution does not make it morally good or psychologically unproblematic. Nonetheless, a theological understanding of emotion should take into account the actual function of these emotions in daily life besides their pathological and destructive extremes. Emotion, Morality, and Pathologies So far in this chapter I have tried to show that the evolution of morality is tied to the evolution of emotion—that without emotion there would be no human morality. Another way of making this point is to consider people who lack typical emotions. The phenomenon of mirror neurons shows us that empathy is grounded in neural activity. What happens to empathy and other emotions and morality if the neural systems associated with emotion are defective? There are several neural conditions that answer this description. One is psychopathy. Not all psychopaths exhibit violent and antisocial behavior. Many live conventional lives; therefore, the following menu of traits associated with psychopaths should be considered a generalization. This menu of traits is lengthy, but among them are various problems related to emotion. Psychopaths 283

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

are typically described as self-centered; callous and indifferent to others’ feelings; lacking empathy; unable to form warm emotional relationships; lacking emotional responsiveness; deficient in emotion recognition and processing; lacking guilt, conscience, and remorse; impulsive; exhibiting persistent antisocial behaviors; dominant; manipulative; and lacking fear.94 This summary suggests immediately that the antisocial behavior characteristic of some psychopaths is linked to their deficiencies in recognizing and feeling emotion. What is notable is that psychopaths do not suffer generally from cognitive disorders. In fact, they seem able to engage in normal moral reasoning, cognitively conceding the moral wrongness of some of their acts. They can, in other words, give the right answers when asked about moral situations.95 At the affective level, however, they seem unable to recognize fearful and sad faces as expressing fear and sadness. Oddly, they seem able to correctly identify happy faces.96 To use the language of cognitive science and basic emotions, psychopaths appear to be lacking the cognitive and neural programs that process the environmental cues that, for the rest us, signal fear and sadness. The corresponding emotions and behaviors are therefore not activated. As a result, psychopaths do not find the fear and sadness of others to be distressful. They feel neither sympathy nor empathy in the presence of fearful or sad people. Consequently, they lack normal social referencing—they do not properly interpret certain

94. See, for example, Sherry D. Nickerson, “Brain Abnormalities in Psychopaths: A Meta-Analysis,” North American Journal Of Psychology 16, no. 1 (2014): 64; Carla L. Harenski, et al., “Aberrant Neural Processing of Moral Violations in Criminal Psychopaths,” Journal Of Abnormal Psychology 119, no. 4 (2010): 863; Jürgen L. Müller, et al., “Disturbed Prefrontal and Temporal Brain Function During Emotion and Cognition Interaction in Criminal Psychopathy,” Behavioral Sciences & The Law 26, no. 1 (2008): 132–33. 95. Harenski, et al., “Aberrant Neural Processing,” 872. 96. Lauren F. Freedman and Simon N. Verdun-Jones, “Blaming the Parts Instead of the Person: Understanding and Applying Neurobiological Factors Associated with Psychopathy,” Canadian Journal Of Criminology & Criminal Justice 52, no. 1 (2010): 33.

284

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

social situations and therefore do not act in ways that empathetic people act.97 Psychopathology lies in a disruption of certain parts of the brain. Although the study of the brain is still in a comparatively early stage, with the help of various imaging techniques enough is today known to substantiate the claim that psychopathy can be empirically predicted by examining the structure of individual brains.98 Psychopaths’ lack of socialization skills such as emotion- and attention-processing and moral decision making has been linked to the absence of interaction between the prefrontal cortex (just behind the forehead) and the limbic system (the central part of the brain).99 The consequence of this lack of interaction is a breakdown in the integration of cognition and emotion necessary for moral judgments and feelings. Researchers also report reduced activity in the anterior temporal gyrus (part of the temporal lobe, roughly parallel to the ears), which has to do with processing the meaning of words. As a result, although psychopaths may know the dictionary definition of words for emotion, they do not grasp their emotional value.100 Differences have also been found in the activation of the anterior temporal lobe and the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (part of the prefrontal cortex, behind the bridge of the nose). Most people, when shown pictures showing moral situations, show activation of these areas; psychopaths do not. Additionally, most people, when rating the severity of moral transgressions, show increased activity in the amgydala; psychopaths do not.101 97. R. J. R. Blair, “Aggression, Psychopathy and Free Will from a Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective,” Behavioral Sciences & The Law 25, no. 2 (2007): 327. 98. Nickerson, “Brain Abnormalities in Psychopaths,” 71–72. 99. Ibid., 65; Müller, et al., “Disturbed Prefrontal and Temporal Brain Function,” 143; Harenski, et al., “Aberrant Neural Processing,” 864. 100. Nickerson, “Brain Abnormalities in Psychopaths,” 66. 101. Harenski, et al., “Aberrant Neural Processing,” 868. Activation of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in normal brains while hearing descriptions of moral actions and situations was confirmed by Liane Young and Michael Koenigs, “Investigating Emotion in Moral Cognition:

285

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

What is true of psychopathy is true as well of acquired sociopathy, which embraces many of the same symptoms as psychopathy, but results from trauma or disease suffered by the brain. In other words, for a portion of their lives those with acquired sociopathy had normal emotional experiences and perceptions, but then disease or trauma severely affected their emotional capacities. For instance, people suffering brain lesions in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex typically exhibit emotion-related symptoms such as reduced emotional experience, apathy, and lack of concern; poor modulation of emotional reactions; and lack of empathy and poor decision making in social matters. People who grew up with unimpaired brains and suffered lesions later in life had already learned social conventions and typical moral practices; these features were not lost as a result of disease or trauma. Those who suffered the lesions early in life had difficulty learning moral rules and conventions.102 In people with frontotemporal dementia, in which there is a loss of function in the frontal and temporal lobes of the brain, we find the psychopathlike tendency to act impulsively and contrary to moral norms even while knowing cognitively it is wrong to do so. Similarly, they may lose the ability to process social cues and facial expressions.103 In one experiment, people with brain damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex were presented with the moral dilemmas used by Joshua Greene, the trolley and the footbridge, as well as with nonmoral dilemmas. Their responses to the nonmoral dilemmas did not differ from responses of people without brain damage; however, their responses to the moral dilemmas showed a greater tendency to a Review of Evidence from Functional Neuroimaging and Neuropsychology,” British Medical Bulletin 84, no. 1 (2007): 69–79, http://bmb.oxfordjournals.org/content/84/1/69.long. 102. Joseph Barrash, Daniel Tranel, and Steven W. Anderson. “Acquired Personality Disturbances Associated With Bilateral Damage to the Ventromedial Prefrontal Region,” Developmental Neuropsychology 18, no. 3 (2000): 369–73. 103. Mario F. Mendez, et al., “Acquired Sociopathy and Frontotemporal Dementia,” Dementia & Geriatric Cognitive Disorders 20, no. 2/3 (2005): 102.

286

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

authorize moral violations, that is, to push someone in front of the trolley car in order to save others. The researchers concluded that their brain damage prevented them from anticipating the emotional consequences of their hypothetical choice to push someone onto the tracks.104 The conclusion to draw from these facts is that, in order to be a social-moral agent, one must be able to feel emotions such as empathy and also to discern the emotional states of others. Pathological conditions such as psychopathy and acquired sociopathy reveal conditions in which most cognitive functions of the brain operate tolerably well but in which the emotive functions are disrupted. The result is persons who are, in extreme cases, amoral—simply incapable of feeling the emotions that allow morality to happen. Emotion, Morality, and Human Culture Having briefly reviewed some pertinent themes in biology, it is now time to consider the role of culture and social existence.105 Grasping the importance of social communities is necessary for understanding emotion, for emotions are relational entities: they connect the individual with the individual’s experienced environment. For most animals, this environment is fairly small, consisting of members of its immediate group (if it is a social animal) plus predators and sources of food that come within range of sight, smell, or sound. For humans, 104. Elisa Ciaramelli et al. “Selective Deficit in Personal Moral Judgment Following Damage to Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex,” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience 2, no. 2 (2007): 84–92, http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2555449/#. See also Young and Koenigs, “Investigating Emotion in Moral Cognition.” 105. In this section I have been guided especially by the following: Nico H. Frijda and Batja Mesquita, “The Social Roles and Functions of Emotions,” in Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Rose Markus, eds., Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence (Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1994; electronic ed. 2013), 51–88; and Carl Ratner, “A Cultural-Psychological Analysis of Emotions,” Culture and Psychology 6 (2000): 5–39, as well as other researchers mentioned in subsequent notes.

287

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

however, the environment to which we are emotionally related is immeasurably larger—not just our immediate community but also people we never have and never will meet, plus cultural realities such as beliefs, ideas, norms, values, and symbols. In the ancient past, emotion and morality were likely limited to face-to-face contacts. The social community was small; benefactions were easily calculated; cheaters were easily detected and remembered. Today, however, human society is not limited to face-to-face relationships; moral obligation may extend to the entire human species, its future members, and other species. To put it differently, the range and volume of information that the human brain has to emotionally process is vastly greater than it is for other animals. The development of complex social communities and cultures was enabled by the enlargement of the brain and the development of new brain structures, especially the frontal cortex. With this developed brain, cognitive powers appeared and were integrated with the brain’s emotional systems. These developments meant that morality and emotion could now be the objects of deliberation (Is it appropriate to feel this way? What should I do in this situation?) and reflection (What is emotion? What is good? What is right? What is morality?). We advanced beyond moral inhibitions to the capacity for moral judgment,106 with more refined analyses of costs and benefit, means and end, with better memory (for tracking benefactions and wrongs) and with an extended idea of the future (allowing a greater time to elapse between cost and benefit). Additionally, the brain developed a capacity for generalization, so that we are able to treat strangers with the benevolence that we direct toward friends and family and are able to be moved by abstract ideals, verbalized rules,

106. On this point, see Joyce, Evolution of Morality, 92–93.

288

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

and norms and laws, all of which become objects of critique and revision. With an enlarged brain came greater moral and emotional flexibility.107 We do not, as animals often do, invariably act out of sheer reflex. On the contrary, we have a capacity to delay action, to refrain from action, to choose an alternative action, and to modulate the intensity of our action. Of course, capacity is not the same as actuality. We are often rash and impulsive and remarkably inflexible in our emotional responses to events. Nonetheless, the capacity presents us with the possibility of alternatives to sheerly reflexive responses. We also have some cognitive flexibility. Our capacity for moral judgments means that we can distinguish imminent from remote threats and opportunities, conditional from unconditional threats and opportunities. These distinctions can alter the way we feel about situations (an imminent threat will generally evoke greater fear than will a remote threat; a dangerous situation with no alternatives is more emotionally grave than one with plenty of options). We can make judgments about intentionality that can modulate emotions such as anger and gratitude. We can project into the future and make complex plans that extend into that future. Our increased flexibility means that our emotional engagement with our environment is (or at least it can be) integrated with cognitive systems that can affect the tone and intensity of our emotions. Finally (in this overly short enumeration), our enlarged brain has (in tandem with certain physiological changes) created language. Language produces several results of relevance to emotions and morality. For one, it allows us to experience a larger repertoire and finer discrimination of emotions than would be the case without 107. For further thoughts about flexibility, see Patricia S. Churchland, Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011), 43–44; and Smith, “Reconstructing the Evolution,” 56.

289

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

language. Without language it is difficult to imagine that we would experience such distinct emotions are rage, anger, annoyance, and irritation; or fear, anxiety, and apprehension. These distinctions are morally consequential; the moral stakes of anger are far higher than for irritation. A second result of language for emotion and morality is that with it human existence and experience come to have a narrative quality. We experience our life in terms of past and future, a past and future that are neither static nor absolute. Not static, because, in the dynamics of daily existence, we are constantly revising our sense of our past and our future; not absolute, because we continually undertake the task of connecting the events of the past and the anticipated events of the future together in narrative form. We thus exert ourselves to ensure that our lives make some kind of sense. In this task of sense making, moral emotions have a special role to play for we largely define ourselves narratively in terms of our emotional constitution. I may think of myself as a person of hope and joy or of anger or despair. This representation will arise out of the history (which I am continually constructing) of my moments of hope, joy, anger, or despair. Finally, language brings us into a symbolic order. Without language, experienced reality would consist, it seems, of what is immediately present to us in experience, along with faint memory traces and perhaps opaque anticipations of a short-term future. With language, experienced reality is immeasurably enlarged, for language creates a world of ideas and beliefs as well as moral norms, rules, and exemplars. Without language, it seems that morality would simply be the expression of immediately felt emotions with whatever calculation the primate brain would allow. With language morality is liberated from the necessities of the immediate moment; deliberation about means and ends is possible, as is the capacity to think of others not simply in the categories of family-friend-other, but in more refined categories. Additionally, as 290

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

noted previously, language, with its effect on our conception of the future, opens up a world of new emotional possibilities, such as hope. Let us now look more particularly at how social existence affects morality and emotion. One thing to note is that we learn at least some emotions through our participation in communities. Basic emotions may be unlearned and instinctive; many emotions, however, such as pride, shame, and grief, have to be learned and becoming a functioning member of a community is in part the acquisition of such emotions.108 As we grow up, we assimilate the community’s repertoire of emotions and its usually unstated protocols for experiencing and expressing those emotions. We learn when to experience grief and how much to experience it, given the circumstances. We learn the contexts in which joy is appropriate and those in which fear is appropriate. And, as we grow, we encounter other people and situations and are thus thrust into the necessity of applying our repertoire of emotions to moral situations. We act emotionally and observe the results on others; we receive the emotional behavior of the other and become aware of our own response. Learning these emotions consequently requires a social context. Becoming a mature, well-adjusted person is partly a matter of practicing this application until we’ve got it right, according to commonly accepted community standards. A related point is that our social context affects the input side of emotional mechanisms. For example, a moral community of which we are a part will inculcate emotional triggers that activate ancient, evolved emotional mechanisms.109 This community may teach me, for instance, that global warming is something to worry about, eliciting fear or anxiety, or that unchecked illegal immigration poses 108. On this point, see Robert C. Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22–23. 109. See Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (New York: Pantheon, 2012), 144–46, for more on this issue.

291

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

a national danger, provoking anger or even rage. One community may sensitize me in such a way that photos of starving refugees provoke feelings of pity and compassion. Another community may cause me to feel disgust at the thought of homosexuals. Words (“duty,” “country”) and symbols (the national flag, a church steeple) become capable of arousing strong emotions. None of these things would have elicited emotion in our Pleistocene ancestors. In their social

context,

the

triggers

were

simpler

and

more

immediate—family, friends, strangers, enemies, food, physical dangers, and so on. While Pleistocene triggers still operate for us—seeing a friend differs emotionally from seeing an enemy—and in that sense human nature has not changed, modern societies create vast new types of emotional triggers inconceivable for our distant ancestors. Our communities also teach us the sorts of things that should and should not trigger emotions. Through verbalized teaching, through examples and through social reinforcement, we learn how to be, act, and feel. Is a certain gesticulation an insult? A curse? A blessing? No one is born with this knowledge; we learn it by enculturation. Similarly, we mostly have to be taught what is disgusting, what is beautiful, what is shameful. Is public failure something shameful? Or only a setback? Do we feel outrage if we see the national flag being burned in protest? Such a feeling could only be conveyed by cultural means; these sentiments are not innate. Admittedly, disgust may be a basic emotion that has universal and ancient triggers such as feces; however, there is also quite a bit of cultural variety in what people find to be disgusting (or beautiful or shameful). The ethos of shame and honor in strictly Muslim cultures requires more clothing for women than does the ethos of American and European cultures. A culture’s ethos, moreover, changes over time: things once regarded in America as shameful (public notoriety, public nudity) seem less 292

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

shameful now. Additionally, our communities teach us how easily each emotion should be triggered and how deeply we should feel emotions. In our culture, grief evoked by the death of a parent should greatly outweigh grief evoked by the death of a pet dog. A verbal insult should inspire less anger than physical assault. Our social context also affects the behavioral output side of emotion mechanisms. Through enculturation we learn which sorts of emotional behaviors constitute appropriate responses and which do not. Thus we teach children early not to hit but instead to find alternative ways of expressing emotion. We learn as well to modulate our emotional responses: moderate grief at the death of a colleague is appropriate; protracted, abject depression is not. This again accounts for quite a bit of cultural diversity in emotion. Even if some emotions are universal, their expression seems to be culturally regulated. Shame is thus keenly exhibited in some cultures but only in reduced measure in American culture. Finally, let us consider how emotion functions in a social context. Emotions are a part of social scripts by which those in moral communities live. There is a script for anger, for example. It specifies the types of things that rightly elicit anger, the degree to which anger should be felt in the context, and what sort of response is appropriate and with what intensity. This fact helps us understand at least one function of communal rituals: rituals are one way in which a community helps individuals manage emotions, especially negative emotions. Rituals surrounding death, for instance, provide people with approved ways of negotiating the myriad of emotions surrounding death.110 One function of these scripts is to enforce and 110. See, for example, Michael I. Norton and Francesca Gino, “Rituals Alleviate Grieving for Loved Ones, Lovers, and Lotteries,” Journal Of Experimental Psychology: General 143, no. 1 (2014): 266–72; Charles L. Briggs, “Since I Am a Woman, I Will Chastise My Relatives: Gender, Reported Speech, and the (Re)Production of Social Relations in Warao Ritual Wailing,” American Ethnologist, 19, no. 2 (1992): 337–61; Simon Mills, “Sounds to Soothe the Soul: Music

293

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

reinforce social rules. Anger is a socially approved way of publicly noting and characterizing a wrong, leading the community to expect some means of restoring the moral order. That is why it is more often the threat of anger, shame, or guilt that deters offending behavior without the need for actual anger, shame, or guilt. The threat alone is often sufficient to enforce the community’s sense of moral right. Emotions also create and sustain bonds of caring and attachment within a community. When we grieve with those who grieve or feel happy with others, we create and nurture social bonds. Without emotions, it is difficult to see how moral communities would be possible. Conclusion For embodied beings, there is no morality without emotion and without the emotional brain and its evolution. Although biology is not the final word in emotion and morality, it is their necessary condition. It establishes the possibility of moral emotions by creating the neural mechanisms that allow for emotion and morality. At the same time, the full actuality of human emotion and morality requires social community and culture. The importance of these points for theology is that any account of Christian ethics should incorporate not only the role of the emotions but also the insights of scientific research into emotion. This means, for instance, that theology cannot simply dismiss and denounce socalled negative emotions but instead should recognize the role they actually play in our social existence. It means as well that theology should emphasize the way in which emotion motivates behavior. and Bereavement in a Traditional South Korean Death Ritual,” Mortality 17, no. 2 (2012): 145–57; and Brad E. Kelle, “Postwar Rituals of Return and Reintegration,” in Brad E. Kelle, Frank Ritchel Ames, and Jacob L. Wright, eds., Warfare, Ritual, and Symbol in Biblical and Modern Contexts, Society of Biblical Literature: Ancient Israel and Its Literature 18 (Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014), 205–42.

294

EMOTION AND HUMAN MORALITY

Because of the importance of practicing Christian virtues, cultivation of appropriate emotions has a commensurate importance. We will return to these matters in chapter 8.

295

9

Emotion and Cognition

In chapters 6 and 7 I have tried to show that emotion, construed broadly and encompassing what previous eras called passion, desire, and affection, is an essential part of human nature and of morality. It is now time to ask about the connection between emotion and cognition. As I argued in chapter 5, movements in philosophy, literature, psychology, and music in the eighteenth through early twentieth centuries brought to a boil a debate that had been simmering for many centuries. In these decades powerful intellectual currents such as Pietism and Romanticism challenged the apparent hegemony of human reason and asserted the priority and value of the extra-rational dimensions of human nature. At the same time, the amazing success and proliferation of scientific research constituted a strong affirmation of the power of reason. The tension between these two movements, which registered in such diverse cultural phenomena as modernism, fascism, and logical positivism, is the latest episode in Western civilization’s attempt to get clear about the nature of reason and its relationship to the extra-rational or nonrational 297

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

elements of human nature. This ongoing attempt goes back at least as far as Greco-Roman philosophy and science, with the Christian tradition contributing its insights to the various episodes. Reason and emotion thus seem opposed. Opposition, however, need not be the final word. If ever there was a pair of concepts that cried out for dialectical treatment, it is reason and emotion. Dialectics, as G. W. F. Hegel (1770–1831) used it, begins with observing the tendency of the human mind to separate things that belong together. We love to create opposed pairs of concepts: body and soul, fact and value, and so on. Human thinking seems to be inherently dualistic. For Hegel, although it is important to make distinctions for purposes of analysis, we err if we project the results of our analysis onto reality, because the result of analytical thinking, the kind of thinking that separates, is an abstraction from reality. So, we can analyze the workings of the mind into emotional components and cognitive components, and doing so can aid the cause of understanding; however, the human mind itself is not a composite thing with two parts. If we consider emotion without cognition or cognition without emotion, we are trafficking in abstractions. On the contrary, cognition normally involves emotion and emotion normally involves cognition. In reality they jointly compose the mind, even if they can exist separately in our thinking. This chapter, then, is an attempt to illustrate the integration of cognition and emotion. As in chapters 6 and 7, my aim is not to survey the impossibly large bulk of scientific research. It is also not to align Christian theology with a particular way of understanding the relation between emotion and cognition or with a particular theory of emotion and cognition. Instead, I will draw on a variety of scientific considerations to make the much more general points (1) that emotion is not irrational or even arational but instead is a

298

EMOTION AND COGNITION

form of cognition and (2) that human cognition employs the brain’s emotional systems. A Brief Historical Prelude This chapter’s thesis is that cognition and emotion typically operate together. It is necessary to make this point because this thesis has not been the majority view in the Christian tradition and in the surrounding tradition of Western thought. The reader may recall that Plato, Aristotle, and Stoic philosophers distinguished reason from emotion. Admittedly, Plato spoke of reason as having its own distinctive pleasures and saw a connection between reason and erōs; Aristotle asserted the absolute importance of emotion for action; the Stoics thought of emotion as involving cognitive judgments. So, they did not posit a naïve distinction between reason and emotion. Nonetheless, they did affirm that reason is the part of us that is divine, in contrast to emotion, which we share with animals and exists in us because of our bodily condition. Even though they mitigated the dualism of emotion and reason, the fact remains that they unanimously regarded the true and best part of our nature as divine reason. For Plato and Aristotle, it was this alone that has immortality. It is reason by virtue of which we are able to know the best and highest truths; emotion plays no role in acquiring this knowledge and functions mainly as a distraction. For all of these thinkers, emotions are disturbances of the soul’s equanimity; because of them the soul experiences movements absent from the life of the gods. As we saw in chapters 3 and 4, Christian thinkers largely agreed with the overall thrust of Greco-Roman philosophy on this issue. This agreement appears most clearly in the long history of discussion regarding the idea of the image of God. With rare exception, Christian theologians have identified the image of God with 299

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

rationality. This identification makes perfect sense if one assumes that God is reason and not emotion, an assumption with prima facie authority for most theologians in the tradition. Armed with this assumption and with the sensible belief that the image is to be identified with whatever distinguishes humans from animals, it was perfectly logical to deduce the rational character of the image. Recent biblical scholarship has not been kind to this deduction. Although there is a variety of views about how we are to understand the Old Testament’s idea of the image of God, there is a near-consensus that it is not to be identified with human rationality.1 Additionally, the traditional assumption that God is pure rationality, with no element of emotion, seems to be more a function of certain questionable metaphysical commitments than the result of specifically Christian convictions. Finally, the success of science has augmented the Greco-Roman and Christian tendency to exalt reason at the expense of emotion. Science aims at objective, universal truth; it achieves it by means of reason, evidence, and logic. Although scientists may be individually emotional, there does not seem to be much room in scientific procedure for emotion; cool, detached, dispassionate rationality seems to be the key.

1. Here is a small sample of interpretations: Phyllis A. Bird, “‘Male and Female He Created Them’: Gen 1:27b in the Context of the Priestly Account of Creation,” The Harvard Theological Review 74, no. 2 (1981): 129–59; J. Maxwell Miller, “In the ‘Image’ and ‘Likeness’ of God,” Journal of Biblical Literature 91, no. 3 (1972): 289–304; Maryanne Cline Horowitz, “The Image of God in Man: Is Woman Included?” The Harvard Theological Review 72, no. 3–4 (1979): 175–206; Christian D. Von Dehsen, “The Imago Dei in Genesis 1:26-27,” Lutheran Quarterly, new series 11, no. 3 (1997): 259–70; Moshe Reiss, “Adam: Created in the Image and Likeness of God,” Jewish Bible Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2011): 181–86; and Paul Niskanen, “The Poetics of Adam: The Creation of ‘DM in the Image of ‘LHYM,” Journal of Biblical Literature 128, no. 3 (2009): 417–36.

300

EMOTION AND COGNITION

The Cognitive Dimension of Emotion Besides the historical conceit about reason’s epistemological superiority to emotion, the claim that emotion is a kind of knowledge seems unlikely if we factor in the ways in which emotion affects our thinking processes. For instance, if I am, over a length of time, in a good mood, I will find it comparatively easy to interpret others’ words and deeds either favorably or benignly. If they are curt, I assume they are busy; if obsequious or ingratiating, I regard them as gregarious and helpful. But if I am in a bad mood, I may well interpret solicitude as disingenuity, disinterest as malice. In this regard, Richard Lazarus has discussed the notion of schemas or scripts that guide our daily emotional appraisals. A schema or script is a general belief about something that guides particular judgments. For example, if I believe that all politicians are irredeemably corrupt, their misdemeanors and infractions will be for me evidence of their corruption. Their public service will be interpreted as merely a means to their own financial gain. In an experiment, people were induced, through hypnosis, to feel a sense of disgust when they heard the word often. Several stories about moral situations were then read to them, some containing often and others not. Researchers found that the test subjects judged stories containing often more harshly than stories without often. Their emotional state significantly affected their moral judgment.2 Nonetheless, there are good reasons to consider emotion to be a form of cognition and hence neither irrational nor arational. Although under some circumstances we can allow to emotion an undue motivational voice and consequently act irrationally or fail to exercise proper moral reasoning, emotion as such is not irrational. 2. Thalia Wheatley and Jonathan Haidt, “Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe,” Psychological Science 16, no. 10 (2005): 780–84.

301

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Perhaps we fail to see its cognitive character because it differs from forms of cognition typically regarded as paradigmatic. In what ways is emotion a form of cognition? Consider its similarities to perception. Like perception, emotion sometimes seems to be automatic and out of our control. If our eyes work properly, we see whether or not we want to see; in certain situations, such as those that induce fear, anger, and grief, we feel whether or not we want to feel. The volitional element is absent. At the same time, we do have more control over emotion than over perception. There is a limited number of ways to avoid seeing something, such as shielding our eyes or moving away from the object. But there are more possibilities with emotion. One option is to move away from objects that cause fear or anger. Additionally, if we are sad, we can think happier thoughts or distract ourselves with activity. If we are angry at someone, we can reappraise that person’s actions and try to see the matter from that person’s perspective. In the case of so-called negative emotions, we can try to regulate our physiological response—we can try to breathe more regularly and reduce our heart rate. Also, like perception, emotion is a way of apprehending something “out there”; emotions invariably seem to be about something. Of course, some emotions seem to lack orientation to an object. What is the object when we are joyful? Or in a state of rage? Or feeling bored? Some emotions, then, seem to be little more than immediate physical reactions to stimuli. Rage, for instance, will have a cause in the local environment but, phenomenologically considered, the intensity of rage may be so great that the feeling itself crowds out awareness of the object. However, if we direct attention to the object—if we identify the cause of our rage—rage is transformed into anger, with a direct object. Rage, then, has an object but it may be implicit and not express in our awareness. Other emotions are sufficiently subtle or long term that they may lack an immediate 302

EMOTION AND COGNITION

object. We may exist in a state of happiness, for example, for long periods during which we are only occasionally aware of being happy and probably not aware of any particular object that has elicited our happiness. But, as with rage, if we attend to our experience, we will surely be able to discern elements of our experienced world that are the cause of our happiness and constitute the “aboutness” of our happiness. In the case of mood-like emotions such as depression and joy, the object that the emotion is about is the totality of our experience—our experiential world experienced in a certain way. In cases of serious depression, we are not depressed about a single object, but about everything. Everything in our world has a depressive, affectless quality. The orientation of emotions to objects involves some sort of evaluation. We not only experience things; we experience things in a certain way. If we are walking at night in an unfamiliar area and hear the sound of footsteps, we do not simply register the sound and coolly note its footstep-like character. Instead, we interpret the sound, in the context of the total situation, as potentially dangerous. We hear the footstep as threatening. If we are returning from a long trip and see loved ones in a airport lobby, we do not merely note familiar faces; we experience the faces as welcoming. Contrast this with the sort of information with which we are bombarded each day: results of sports events, wars and calamities in far-off places, facts about international finance. If I am not a sports fan, news about results of a game are at most a matter of casual interest. If I am not invested in foreign markets or do not understand the significance of reported data, economic news from abroad will have no importance for me. Emotional cognition, however, concerns things that are existentially important to me. My perception of them is not simply an act of registering data but includes as well an appraisal of their importance. For so-called basic emotions such as fear, the appraisal may be little 303

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

more than an instantaneous, unconscious judgment about the likelihood of harm or good. In the case of more complex emotions (hope, pride, and so on) we move beyond the simple distinction of weal or woe and engage in a more refined process of appraisal. Anger, for instance, normally presupposes some assigning of blame. Shame and embarrassment assume a judgment about one’s behavior in relation to community norms. It is at the more complex levels of emotion that appraisal begins to take the form of consciously held, propositional belief, as when I become angry with the legislature because of my belief that their work fails to sufficiently protect civil rights or unnecessarily imposes a burden on businesses. Emotion is therefore knowledge of things insofar as they bear some value for us. It involves appraisals or judgments of value—about the goodness or badness of the situation; in one way or another, the object or situation is judged according to the interests of the subject.3 In the experiential world of emotional cognition, things that we notice are typically not value-neutral but are instead valueladen. Things that are value-neutral are generally just not a part of emotional awareness. We may be aware of them in a more objective way, but in order for something to enter our emotional world it must possess some relevance to us. In this respect, the theory of emotion bears a resemblance to Martin Heidegger’s (1889–1976) distinction between two ways in which things in our world can exist for us: 3. My exposition makes us of the appraisal theory of emotion. The elements of this theory are not uncontested, especially issues such as whether appraisal invariably precedes emotion and whether appraisal is a cause of emotion or instead a component of emotion. Resolution of these issues is not required for a theological appropriation of this theory. Readers interested in discussion and critique of some controverted points can consult Gerald L. Clore and Andrew Ortony, “Cognition in Emotion: Always, Sometimes, or Never?,” in Richard D. Lane, Lynn Nadel, and Geoffrey Ahern, eds., Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, Series in Affective Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 24–61; Brian Parkinson, Ideas and Realities of Emotion, International Library of Psychology (London: Routledge, 1995), 33–68; and Ira J. Roseman and Craig A. Smith, “Appraisal Theory Overview, Assumptions, Varieties, Controversies,” in Angela Schorr and Tom Johnstone, eds., Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research, Series in Affective Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 3–19.

304

EMOTION AND COGNITION

Zuhandenheit (usually translated “ready-to-hand”) and Vorhandenheit (usually translated “present-to-hand”). Things are zuhanden when we relate to them in unreflected immediacy. A tool is a part of my immediate world and available for me; I do not think reflectively about it or categorize it in theoretical ways. Things are vorhanden when we have objectified them into objects of express thinking with specific and identified properties. They are now available as objects, not of use, but of study.4 Of course, thinking of objects as possessing value differs in important respects from Heidegger’s analysis of things. Heidegger, however, makes a point that bears on the theory of emotion, namely that Zuhandenheit is humankind’s original way of relating to things; Vorhandenheit is secondary and derives from Zuhandenheit. In the same way, emotional cognition is the fundamental form of human cognition; objectifying forms of cognition are secondary and represent an abstraction from emotional cognition. The cognitive dimension of emotion provides a good reason for preferring “emotion” to traditional terms such as “affect” and “passion.” “Affect” suggests that we are being affected; “passion” derives from the Latin term for suffering (noun passio; verb patior). These terms characterize emotion as something that happens to us. Some emotions do, indeed, have this character. If I suddenly become angry or fearful, I may feel as though I have been overtaken by something out of my control. To the extent that emotion is cognitive, however, it is an activity.5 Admittedly, emotion is typically more automatic than is discursive thinking; we normally do not self4. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. Joan Stambaugh, SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996), 62-67. 5. On the active dimension of emotion, see also Martha Nussbaum, “Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance,” in Robert C. Solomon, ed., Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 183–99.

305

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

consciously evoke our emotions. On the contrary, we find ourselves in some emotional state. At the same time, most emotions do require some measure of directed attention: we can’t sustain anger if we don’t maintain consciousness of the object of anger and we can’t remain in a state of guilt if we forget what we did that made us feel guilty. Additionally, it is possible to stimulate an emotion by recollecting the object, person, or situation that evoked it, whereas we cannot stimulate a perception—we can remember seeing or hearing, but we cannot recreate the original sensation. But we can recreate an original emotion by persistently re-presenting whatever it was that elicited the emotion in the first place. These features make emotion more like active cognition and less like passive perception. Another perspective is contributed by Robert Solomon, who proposes that we regard emotions as strategies for dealing with interpersonal relationships.6 Socially oriented emotions such as anger, pride, shame, embarrassment, and admiration are not merely ways of registering information about the social environment. They are also ways of negotiating social relations. Indignation signals to others that one has been insulted, that the one issuing the insult is the sort of person who insults others. In short, an emotion can publicly signal a wrong. Alternatively, pride signals that one is the sort of person to whom esteem and honor should be directed. Finally, we are able to regulate our emotions by acts of reappraisal. Disappointment can become anger if we detect arbitrariness in a decision. Anger can become annoyance if we rethink the importance of the matter. Even if the original emotion was in a sense involuntary, we can affect the persistence of emotions by the ongoing process of appraisal and reappraisal. These considerations indicate that emotions are not

6. Robert C. Solomon, True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22–28.

306

EMOTION AND COGNITION

simply received passively but involve some degree of activity, even in cases where that activity is undertaken unconsciously. Emotion bears similarities to perception: it involves appraisals, it is more activity than passivity, and is thus a form of cognition. How then does it rate compared to such paradigms of cognition as scientific knowledge? In the Western intellectual tradition, the gold standard of knowledge has always included two principal features, objectivity and universality. Emotion seems to lack objectivity because of its frankly subjective character; in emotion we are interested in how things relate to us and our interests. Emotional knowledge also seems to lack universality, since it is focused on the here and now, on the particulars of concrete experience and not the generality of overtly rational thought. Does emotion count as objective knowledge? The first thing is to acknowledge that appraisal and evaluation, which are central to the cognitive dimension of emotion, are highly interpretive activities, guided by human interests. In this respect, emotion differs from the stereotype of rational knowledge, which presents knowledge as a mirror-like transcript of reality. I will not comment on the absurdity of this stereotype of knowledge, since a notable portion of twentiethcentury philosophy of science was devoted to demonstrating its impossibility. I will instead argue that the interpretive character of emotional knowledge does not rule out objectivity. Take the interpretation of ancient texts, for example. Admittedly, this can be tricky for a number of reasons, including cultural divides between then and now and uncertainty of authorship and transmission. Nonetheless, the fact that there are good interpretations, poor interpretations, and manifestly ludicrous interpretations reveals that those engaged in understanding an ancient text are studying the same object. The fact that dialogue takes place among these readers suggests the possibility of agreement. Of course, agreement by 307

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

readers in one context may not be shared by readers in another context. One of the merits of reader-response theories has been to show the ways in which understanding of texts varies over time and according to culture. Such variation, however, does not nullify the objective character of interpretation; it points only to the inescapable fact that interpretation involves both a common object and also the other factors that interpreters, as historical beings, bring to the act of interpretation. That is why interpreting texts does not achieve any sort of finality. In this respect interpretation may seem to differ from scientific knowledge, although we should not overestimate the degree of finality attained in science. At any rate, lack of finality does not imply a lack of objectivity. But, apropos of emotion, if two people are in the same situation and one feels fear while the other does not, how can we speak of objectivity? We can, if we recognize that the fearful person has, for no doubt complex reasons, perceived as especially salient certain fear-inducing features of the situation, and that the other person either has not perceived these features or has not perceived them as salient or has not perceived them as fear inducing. Both have objective knowledge—each has perceived something in the situation (unless it is a case of misapprehension, as if a rope were to be perceived as a snake). The fear-inducing element of the situation has not been projected into the situation by the fearful person. Instead, he or she perceives something in the situation as fear inducing. If two performers stand before the same crowd of people and one is fearful and the other is not, both have objective knowledge; however, each one’s disposition results in differing interpretations. Are the faces bored or expectant? Restless or excited? Hostile or supportive? In complex situations like this, it will always be possible to see the situation in more than one way. The reason that scientific inquiry seems less interpretive and more “objective” is that often scientists are dealing with artificially 308

EMOTION AND COGNITION

simplified objects. Scientific experiments are normally carefully constructed to control all factors regarded as extraneous so that the factor of interest can be studied apart from—that is, in abstraction from—its normal context. Scientists crafting experiments have the ability, within limits, to determine in advance what they will regard as salient and interesting. Salience and interest are often determined by the community of scientists studying the phenomenon. With extraneous factors excluded as much as possible, the chance of scientists agreeing on the information provided by the experimental phenomenon is considerably greater than in the experiences of everyday life. In daily experience, multiple observers often have differing emotional responses because there are so many features of the situation that may attain salience. Perhaps scientific experimentation is just as interpretive as daily emotional experience, the difference being that in science we have the leisure of being able to consider in advance which elements of the phenomenon will be matters of focus and attention. Of course, the interpretive character of emotion does not guarantee that every emotion is appropriate to the situation, that it results from a correct grasp of its object.7 As noted, it is easy to misapprehend the situation, with inappropriate emotions resulting. A rope that looks like a snake may elicit fear. The perception was truly fear inducing; however, the perception was a misapprehension. Given the perception of the rope as snake, it is right to fear, but because emotion involves interpretive perception, emotion is always subject to revision, just as the interpretation of a text is subject to revision if new information or perspectives become available.8 If we feel angry because we have been slighted or ignored by a colleague, 7. The following paragraph draws on the following essays from ibid.: Peter Goldie, “Emotion, Feeling, of the World and Knowledge,” 91–106; Cheshire Calhoun, “Subjectivity and Emotion,” 107–21; Patricia Greenspan, “Emotions, Rationality, and Mind/Body,” 125–34; and Jerome Neu, “Emotions and Freedom,” 163–80.

309

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

our emotion may be justified if we have correctly perceived the situation; however, our dispositions or inattention may incline us to focus on certain aspects of the situation and not others. We may notice and place great emphasis on the way in which a colleague avoids eye contact but be oblivious to the look of concern on the colleague’s face indicating that he or she has received devastating news. Because emotion is a response to perception and because perception involves appraisal and interpretation, emotion participates in the paradox that, phenomenologically speaking, perception is never wrong while epistemologically it can err. If we see a stick bent by the water, we see the stick as bent and cannot see it otherwise. But a more comprehensive experience of the stick reveals that its being bent lies strictly in the perception and not in the stick itself. So, emotions are responses to the way in which we perceive objects in the world. We cannot be faulted for responding emotionally to what we perceive; however, we can be faulted for failing to engage in the ongoing task of reappraisal. Emotions, then, are objective in the sense that they rest on perceptions

of

objects;

perceptions,

however,

can

be

misapprehensions. Reappraisal by more systematic experience of the object of a situation is required in order to ensure that our emotions are appropriate. From this analysis we can see that the difference between emotional knowledge and scientific and other rational forms of cognition is one of degree, not of kind, for the sciences and other forms of rational cognition face the same dependence on perception and the same need to ensure that perception is an authentic apprehension and not a misapprehension. The scientific method can be regarded as a systematic attempt to ensure the adequacy of perception. 8. On the importance of reappraisal for emotion-regulation, see Richard S. Lazarus, Emotion and Adaptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 112–15, 134, 141.

310

EMOTION AND COGNITION

But we must also consider the fact that emotional knowledge involves bias and interest. If emotional knowledge is knowledge of objects as they interest us or are perceived to existentially affect us, is there not a built-in bias that limits emotion to particular features of reality and prevents it from attaining the status of objective knowledge? The reality of bias and personal interest cannot be denied. Whether such things also afflict scientific and forms of rational cognition can be debated. As I write these words, there is news of scientific journals retracting forty-three articles because of untoward manipulations of the peer-review process.9 Even the sciences, it seems, are not immune to impure motives. Nonetheless, it seems obvious that bias and interest affect our daily emotional appraisals to a much greater degree than they affect scientific and other expressly rational enterprises—hence the need, as noted previously, of an ongoing process of reappraisal and a willingness to regulate our emotions accordingly. Such regulation happens all the time. Even deeply seated emotional biases can be changed with fresh considerations, experiences, and beliefs. Within the last twenty or so years, the United States has witnessed a rapid and extensive change of emotional feeling about homosexuality. A comparable, although slower, change has been underway with regard to feelings about race. If these emotional attitudes—part belief, part feeling—can be changed, then bias and interest are not ineradicable elements of emotion, and there is consequently no reason to deny the objective nature of emotional knowledge. Emotional knowledge may be objective, but it is universal? Universality seems to be an indispensable feature of knowledge; from the beginnings of Western philosophy, reason has been valued for 9. Fred Barbash, “Major publisher retracts 43 scientific papers amid wider fake peer-review scandal,” Washington Post, March 27, 2015, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morningmix/wp/2015/03/27/fabricated-peer-reviews-prompt-scientific-journal-to-retract-43-paperssystematic-scheme-may-affect-other-journals/.

311

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

its ability to apprehend universal features of reality and express them in the form of scientific laws and other generalizations. Although bias and interest may not disqualify emotion as a form of objective knowledge, they do seem to prevent it from grasping the universal features of things. It is indisputable that bias and interest are necessary concomitants of emotional knowledge. In order to know something emotionally, we must have an existential interest in it. But does existential interest count as something negative? Let us ponder that fact that disinterested, dispassionate knowledge of universals, the sort at which science is supposed to excel, is an extraordinary sort of knowledge. It is, in other words, unusual. The proof of its unusual character is that this sort of knowledge is acquired only with specific training and the expenditure of effort. It is a skill that must be learned; some people never seem to get the hang of it. This is because the original and natural human standpoint is the emotional one in which we relate to things according to their importance for us. Sun, moon, and stars were originally studied because they were needed to mark the points of liturgical calendars and because of a vague astrological sense that things in the heavens affect things on earth. People worshiped the gods not because of an abstract belief but because worship was the way in which humankind secured blessing and protection. This is why a rational approach to theological matters has always struck some in the Christian community as odd and perhaps misguided; such an approach seems to treat God with the same dispassionate tone with which scientists study bugs and flowers. Movements such as Pietism and Existentialism were protest movements valuing the particularity of experiential knowledge of God over the universality of rationalistic theology. What is extraordinary is that humans ever got around to developing more abstract, rationalized forms of reasoning, forms in 312

EMOTION AND COGNITION

which what is of interest is not things’ relation to and importance for us but instead the relations of things one to another. Instead of asking about the importance of this animal for us, as a source of food or clothing or as a source of danger, we developed a curiosity about how this animal is related to its environment—to other members of its species, member of other species, and so on. The value of this curiosity and the knowledge it has produced is beyond dispute, but we may still ask why this sort of knowledge has come to be regarded as the paradigm of knowledge, causing emotional knowledge, with its personal interest and bias, to be dismissed and regarded as unworthy of being counted as authentic knowledge. I press this issue because it gets us to the heart of theological anthropology: Are human beings fundamentally rational beings who happen to have emotions that are best suppressed? Or are we fundamentally emotional beings who have developed certain highly rational modes of thinking? Does our status as the image of God in the world include or does it not include our emotional being? Emotional knowledge, then, while objective, is not knowledge of universal properties. It is truly oriented toward objective reality, but its orientation is always to the particular features of this reality that are emotionally prominent and existentially significant. This issue also forces us to confront one of the central assumptions of the Western intellectual tradition, namely that authentic knowledge is of what is universal, not of what is particular, and that we arrive at universality by a process of abstracting the universal from the particular. This assumption has a long history, early achieving classical form in Plato’s philosophy, with its preference for form and disdain for matter. It is true that, for Plato, acquaintance with matter is required for knowledge of form, but the material possesses only instrumental value; once the mind knows form, it has no more epistemological need of matter. Aristotle largely agreed with Plato. Although 313

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

asserting, contrary to Plato, that form has no existence apart from matter (except in the case of the unmoved mover), Aristotle still regarded form as the subject of knowledge, attained by a process of abstracting the universal form from the particularities of matter. Modern philosophy has mostly followed the lead of Plato and Aristotle; the history of modern science may be regarded as a progressive refinement of methods for abstracting universal properties of objects from increasingly irrelevant particularities. With this in mind, it is easy to see the history of thought described in chapter 5, a history seeking to uplift the extra-rational, as a protest against the traditional emphasis on the universal and as a contrary valuation of the particular—this is one point on which thinkers as diverse as Søren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and even G. W. F. Hegel can agree. The question of the cognitive character of emotion, then, is not simply about emotion; at stake is the concept of knowledge—of Western civilization’s view of knowledge—and the metaphysics of universality and particularity. The protest of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries against rationalism and scientism was not a vote in favor of irrationality; it was instead an attempt to assert the importance of dimensions of human being and of things that seemingly have no place and are objects of suspicion in the modern world. The tension, within the Christian tradition and the Western intellectual tradition, between reason and emotion is thus symptomatic of a larger metaphysical tension. The Emotional Dimension of Cognition Emotion, then, is a form of cognition, objective but not universal. But is rational, deliberative cognition in any way emotional? If it is, how is it related to emotion? In this section I will present a short selection of research showing that cognition is routinely affected by 314

EMOTION AND COGNITION

emotion and that it typically works in an integrated fashion with emotion. Cognition is not a single function; it comprises several functions, such as attention, memory, and judgment. Let’s first consider attention, the common phenomenon of focusing on one feature of our experience. There is plenty of experimental evidence showing that anxiety and depression, when elevated to the level of disorder, powerfully affect attention. It might be argued that anxiety and depression are not emotions; however, they are closely related to emotion. Depression seems remote from emotion if we think of emotion as a quick, reactive affect, but if we consider emotion in terms of long-term moods and temperaments, then it is not difficult to see depression as a matter of how one feels about things. On one hand, it is characterized by an absence of positive emotions and moods—happiness, joy, and so on. On the other hand, it is a persistent state of sadness and hopelessness. Anxiety, likewise, may not immediately seem like an emotion, but its connection to emotion is more evident if we think of the varieties of anxiety—panic disorders, phobias, and so on—as elevated forms of fear.10 Researchers use several methods to determine the effect of emotions such as anxiety and depression on attention. Many are visually oriented: in the dot-probe task, test subjects are presented with two words, one above the other, for less than a second—enough time for the words to be recognized. One word is emotionally neutral; the other signifies a threat. When the words disappear, a probe appears where one of the words was. The subject is asked to indicate which word was replaced by the probe. Differences in response times are taken to indicate an attentional bias—a tendency 10. See Peter D. McLean and Sheila R. Woody, Anxiety Disorders in Adults: An Evidence-Based Approach to Psychological Treatment, Guidebooks in Clinical Psychology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 28–31.

315

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

to unconsciously notice the neutral or the threatening word. In the visual-search task, an emotionally laden target word is placed in the midst of emotionally neutral words. Measurement is taken of how long it takes to identify the target word, again indicating attentional bias.11 Experiments show that people with high-anxiety traits perceived emotionally laden stimuli quicker than those without high-anxiety traits. This held good for both positive and negative emotional stimuli. People with high anxiety, it appears, react to and locate these stimuli more quickly than others. Additionally, during the course of the experiement (keeping in mind that the entire experiment is over in about one second), they directed attention away from negative stimuli more quickly than others. So, on one hand, those with high anxiety showed greater attention bias toward emotional stimuli than did others; on the other hand, they were also quicker (unconsciously so) to try to reduce the distress caused by the emotional stimuli.12 The theory, then, is that those with high anxiety have an emotion-perception mechanism that is more sensitive to emotional stimuli than the mechanism possessed by others. This mechanism operates subliminally, with unconscious recognition of emotional stimuli later becoming a matter of conscious knowledge. 13 There seems to be a neurological basis for anxiety-related attentional bias. People without high anxiety, when presented with emotionally negative words, exhibited increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex, regions of the brain associated with executive control over the way 11. For further exposition of these and other methods, see Josh M. Cisler and Ernst H. W. Koster, “Mechanisms of Attentional Biases Towards Threat in Anxiety Disorders: An Integrative Review,” Clinical Psychology Review 30, no. 2 (2010): 204–5. 12. Manuel G. Calvo and Pedro Avero, “Time Course of Attentional Bias to Emotional Scenes in Anxiety: Gaze Direction and Duration,” Cognition and Emotion 19, no. 3 (2005): 446–50. 13. This is a point emphasized by Li Wen, Ken A. Paller, and Richard E. Zinbarg, in “Conscious Intrusion of Threat Information via Unconscious Priming in Anxiety,” Cognition and Emotion 22, no. 1 (2008): 44–62.

316

EMOTION AND COGNITION

in which stimuli are processed. Subjects with high anxiety did not exhibit increased activity and in fact showed decreased activity. The inference is that those with anxiety do not or cannot employ the mechanism(s) that others do in order to process emotionally negative stimuli. Put differently, anxious subjects are less able to inhibit response to negative stimuli.14 The situation is similar in some respects with those who suffer from serious forms of depression. In one experiment, depressed subjects, when shown pictures of sad and neutral faces, tended to focus on the sad faces, in contrast to the control group whose members showed no special preference for the sad or neutral face. On the basis of this experiment and others the researcher concluded that those with depression have difficulty disengaging their attention away from negative stimuli.15 Another study showed comparable results when subjects were shown neutral and angry faces. Depressed subjects were slower to disengage their attention from the angry faces than were the nondepressed control group. Unfortunately, this means that a state like depression tends to be self-reinforcing. Already perceiving the world in a depressive way, the tendency of depressed individuals to focus on negative stimuli and their relative incapacity to divert attention tends to reinforce the depressive state.16 The point to draw from these studies is that the emotions associated with anxiety and depression affect our thinking—at least the attention aspect of thinking. People who suffer from serious anxiety or depression experience a different world from those who do not. Theirs is a world more densely populated by threats and negativity; 14. R. B. Price, D. A. Eldreth, and J. Mohlman, “Deficient Prefrontal Attentional Control in Latelife Generalized Anxiety Disorder: An Fmri Investigation,” Translational Psychiatry 1, no. 10 (2011): 1–8. 15. Ian H. Gotlib, et al., “Attentional Biases for Negative Interpersonal Stimuli in Clinical Depression,” Journal Of Abnormal Psychology 113, no. 1 (2004): 133. 16. Lemke Leyman, Rudi De Raedt, Rik Schacht, Ernst H. W. Koster, “Attentional Biases for Angry Faces in Unipolar Depression,” Psychological Medicine 37, no. 3 (2007): 393–402.

317

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

they are quicker to notice something negative or threatening. They lack the means that others have to process negative stimuli and instead receive these stimuli in an apparently unfiltered way. Lest it be thought that cognition is affected only by negative emotions and moods, it should be noted that there is evidence that positive emotions exert a comparable influence. One review of scholarly literature listed the following aspects of cognition that are affected by positive emotions: increased verbal fluency and ability to produce word associations; increased ability to classify information; greater ability to see that apparent outliers may actually fit a category by noticing similarities; greater tendency to see an interesting assigned task as “richer and more varied” than did subjects in a control group, indicating a greater capacity to see associations; increased tendency to pursue problem-solving strategies that benefit both parties in experimental bargaining tasks; greater enjoyment of variety and possibilities; and greater facility at problem solving and tasks requiring innovation.17 So, just as anxiety and depression condition the overall shape of our perceptions and therefore our cognition, positive emotions yield a different experience. The emotions of those who are relatively free of anxiety and depression allow the brain to pick out some of the more positive aspects of the world and, if it registers something negative, to shift attention to something more positive. In summary, the phenomenon of attention and the role of emotion in it show us that cognition is not a simply matter of passively receiving sensations and then thinking about them. On the contrary, the mind is actively

17. F. Gregory Ashby and Alice M. Isen, “A Neuropsychological Theory of Positive Affect and its Influence on Cognition,” Psychological Review 106, no. 3 (1999): 530–31. For more information about the effect of emotion on flexibility of thinking, see Nicola Baumann and Julius Kuhl, “Positive Affect and Flexibility: Overcoming the Precedence of Global over Local Processing of Visual Information,” Motivation and Emotion 29, no. 2 (2005): 123–34.

318

EMOTION AND COGNITION

and unconsciously selecting certain features of the experiential field, using its emotional index as a selecting tool. Another aspect of cognition is memory. There seems to be enough evidence to state confidently that there is a connection between what is recollected and the emotional state of the person at the time of the recollection. Researchers use various methods to induce either positive or negative feelings in test subjects who are then asked to recall episodes from their past. Subjects in a positive mood tend to recall positive memories; subjects in a negative mood tend to recall negative memories.18 In one study,19 subjects suffering from depression were twice asked about their memories of being raised by their parents, once during times of depression and once before the onset of depression. Researchers found that their recollection of family life was far more positive when they were not depressed than when they were depressed. Admittedly, the mechanism that connects memory and mood is the subject of debate. A recent study concludes that the connecting mechanism is a combination of semantic priming (memories linked to words) and affect congruency.20 Affect congruency, it has been theorized (in the “associative-network model”), rests on a process by which the arousal of an emotion excites not only physiological and behavioral changes but also memories associated with the emotion—memories of events that evoked that emotion. Consequently, if one is asked to think about a friend while one is sad, one is more apt to remember a sad episode connected to one’s friend than a happy episode.21 Given all of the memories that one could conceivably recall, the likelihood is that those will 18. Sasa Drace, “Evidence for the Role of Affect in Mood Congruent Recall of Autobiographic Memories,” Motivation and Emotion 37, no. 3 (2013): 623. 19. Summarized by Gordon H. Bower and Joseph P. Forgas, “Affect, Memory, and Social Cognition,” in Eric Eich, et al., eds., Cognition and Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 94. 20. Drace, “Evidence for the Role of Affect,” 626–27. 21. Bower and Forgas, “Affect, Memory, and Social Cognition,” 95.

319

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

be remembered whose emotional tone resonates with one’s current emotional state. There is also evidence that positive emotion can enhance working memory (a type of short-term memory) and numerous cognitive systems that depend on this memory, including learning new information, problem solving, and decision making. A group of older adults were given a test involving working memory (they were read random samples of letters and numbers and then asked to say them back in numerical and then alphabetical order). Those in whom positive affect had been induced did noticeably better than a control group.22 There has also been research into the effect of stressful situations (and the emotions they evoke) on memory. One study compared reports of people involved in a bank robbery with police reports. Those most directly threatened in the robbery gave reports whose main details were closer to the police report than did those who were comparative bystanders. In another study, police trainees were divided into two groups, each experiencing a simulated crime. One group was placed in a stressful situation; the other was in a nonstressful situation. The trainees in the stressful situation were able to remember details longer and better than the trainees in the nonstressful situation. Researchers inferred from these studies that the strength and accuracy of memory is proportional to the intensity of the emotion associated with the memory. Stress, and the presumed emotional intensity of the situation, caused attention to be focused on certain salient features of the situation—perhaps the gun in the bankrobbery study—while leaving the peripheral features hazy.23 As with 22. Stephanie M. Carpenter, et al., “Positive Feelings Facilitate Working Memory and Complex Decision Making among Older Adults,” Cognition and Emotion 27, no. 1 (2013): 184–92. 23. Robin S. Edelstein, Kristen Weede Alexander, Gail S. Goodman, and Jeremy W. Newton, “Emotion and Eyewitness Testimony,” in Daniel Reisberg and Paula Hertel, eds., Memory and Emotion, Series in Affective Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 311–13.

320

EMOTION AND COGNITION

anxiety and depression, we can see that one’s emotional state can have a large role to play in how memory works. Let us now consider another aspect of cognition, judgments about the likelihood of future possibilities and risks associated with those possibilities. Research has suggested that emotions affect people’s sense of how likely future events are. More specifically, when sadness was induced, test subjects anticipated a greater likelihood of sad events happening; when anger was induced, subjects anticipated an increased probability of anger-evoking events.24 Conversely, subjects in a positive mood anticipated a greater chance of something positive happening.25 Emotion also affected the calculation of risk: in one study, induced fear increased subjects’ sense of risk while induced anger decreased the estimation of risk. This difference was theorized to rest on a difference in appraisal, fear being connected with uncertainty and anger not so connected. Anger thus gets evoked in situations of certainty while fear is elicited in situations involving uncertainty—hence the fearful see the future as riskier than do the angry.26 A distinct line of research in this regard is represented by the theory known as affect-as-information. Judgments require memory; my expectations about the future and my evaluations of the risk of making certain decisions rely on what I’ve learned and remembered from the past. In the associative-network model, discussed previously, emotion conditions judgment by affecting which memories are recalled. In the affect-as-information theory, emotions are thought to have a more direct role in judgment: when we make a judgment, we may well take what we are feeling at the time as information relevant 24. Isabelle Blanchette and Anne Richards, “The Influence of Affect on Higher Level Cognition: a Review of Research on Interpretation, Judgement, Decision Making and Reasoning,” Cognition and Emotion 24, no. 4 (2010): 574. 25. Ibid., 571–72. 26. Ibid., 574.

321

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

to the judgment to be made. In an experiment, a control group and a test group were each presented with the trolley dilemma. The experiment was administered to the test group in a room designed to evoke a sense of disgust (trash strewn about and so on). The control group was in a clean room. Test subjects who reported being aware of their bodily responses to the room judged the action presumed by the trolley dilemma (pushing someone into the path of an oncoming trolley car in order to save others) to be more immoral than those in the control group and those in the test group who did not report being particularly aware of their bodily responses.27 This sort of research suggests that one’s emotional state not only affects one’s judgment but acts as a sort of shortcut to judgment. People tend to accept how they feel as relevant information about the subject matter of the judgment.28 To summarize: although there may be moments in life when rational cognition operates with little or no interaction with emotional systems, most everyday cognitive functions are highly integrated with emotion. There is, accordingly, a continuum from raw, unthinking emotion to cool, abstractive intellect. In the midst of hard intellectual work, we may be operating at an almost exclusively rational level. There are times when emotion works without deliberative cognition—being startled and frightened by a sudden and loud noise, or finding ourselves inexplicably happy. And it takes

27. Gerald L. Clore and Janet Palmer, “Affective Guidance of Intelligent Agents: How Emotion Controls Cognition,” Cognitive Systems Research 10, no. 1 (2009): 22–23. 28. It should be noted that the associative network model and the affect-as-information model are not matters of universal agreement. Jeffrey Huntsinger, et al., have proposed expanding the affect-as-information view into an affect-as-cognitive-feedback model in order to take account of new experimental results (Jeffrey R. Huntsinger, Linda M. Isbell, and Gerald L. Clore, “The Affective Control of Thought: Malleable, Not Fixed,” Psychological Review 121, no. 4 [2014]: 600–618). Bowman has argued that the network model operates when we process information in an open and constructive way and that the affect-as-information model operates when we use simple, heuristic strategies to process information (Bower and Forgas, “Affect, Memory, and Social Cognition,” 129).

322

EMOTION AND COGNITION

no long argument to show that emotion and rational cognition can work against each other. Sometimes rationality overrules emotion, as when we convince ourselves that there is nothing to be afraid of. Sometimes recalcitrant emotion overrules reason—history and personal experience abound with relevant examples. Nonetheless, there is a substantial, everyday middle of the continuum that involves an integration of cognition and emotion. Cognition and Emotion: Music In order to show the integration of emotion and cognition as concretely as possible, let us consider our experience of music. By “experience” I mean listening, not merely hearing, because in our culture music has become part of the hazy background overloading us with information—music in parking lots and elevators, music behind voices on radio and television, music for advertising. We hear a great deal of music, but hearing is not listening. In this section I wish to focus on the experience of listening to music. My thesis is that such listening necessarily involves both cognitive and emotional elements, normally mixed together. Of course, sometimes one dominates the other. We may be struck by the emotional quality of a tune without expressly thinking about it; we can think analytically about music without feeling a particular emotion. But most experience of music will involve both emotion and cognition. Indeed, with music it is our capacity for cognition that allows us to feel the music’s emotional force. To get us into this subject, think of the ballet Swan Lake. As the reader may know, the narrative is somewhat flexible according to the predilections of the producers and choreographers. Still, there are persistent elements: Siegfried has fallen in love with Odette, who is changed into a swan by the evil Rothbart. The drama of the ballet revolves around whether Siegfried will be united with 323

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Odette. Productions vary in the ending they provide; many include some variation of a happy ending, signaled by a musical theme. Throughout the ballet there is a prevailing motif (or phrase), which is repeated many times. It consists of eight notes. These notes are taken from the first five notes of a minor scale (in the original, which is in the key of B minor, they are B, C#, D, E, and F#). The opening part of this motif includes these first five notes played in order (in other words, the orchestra plays B, C#, D, E, and F# in that order).29 The minor tone of this scale lends to the music a distinctive feel, an ominous tone. But, appproximately five minutes before the end of the ballet,30 as Siegfried overcomes Rathbart (in the happy-ending version), the theme for the first time is played, not in the customary minor key (B minor), but instead in a major key (Db major). The difference is immediately perceptible and signals the defeat of Rathbart and the union of Siegfried and Odette. It signals this by the change from minor to major (along with the use of brass instruments and a slower tempo). Although a change from minor to major does not in itself signal triumph and union, it does convey a transition from something somber to something brighter and thus is appropriate at this point in the ballet. Cole Porter’s “I Love Paris” uses the same shift from minor to major to similar effect. The first half of this short song is in the key of C minor; the first and second of its eight lines (“I love Paris in the springtime, I love Paris in the fall”) are simply the first three notes of the C minor scale (C, D, and Eb). The first half, with its minor key, is lugubrious and quite dirge-like. It does not sound as though the song’s subject loves anything. But then without transition comes the fifth line (“I love Paris every moment”) 29. I invite the reader to listen to this theme. Recordings of Swan Lake are readily available on the Internet. The theme occurs, among other places, in the second act (number 10 of the sequentially numbered sections). Alternatively, it can be found by doing a web search for Swan Lake’s main theme. 30. In the final scene (29th in the numbered sequence).

324

EMOTION AND COGNITION

in the parallel key of C major. The rest of the song, continuing in C major, reveals that the subject loves Paris because the object of his or her love lives in Paris. It’s as though the first half of the song is a dutiful paean to Paris but without enthusiasm, presumably because the subject is separated from his or her love. Then, upon recollecting that his or her love is in Paris, the mood changes from mournful to happy, a change signaled by and in fact created by the musical change from a minor key to its parallel major. The difference between the first five notes of a major scale and the first five of a minor scale is small—in the major scale the third note is a half step higher than in the minor scale. But this small change, a single note, alters the mood conveyed by the music. Of course, in Swan Lake the changed mood is reinforced by the dance and the orchestration as well, but even without these, a change from minor to major communicates a different feeling. At this point a few words about music and emotion may be helpful. Music possesses emotional, expressive qualities; however, the qualities reside in the music, not in the musician. In other words, to say that music is emotionally expressive is not to say that through music the musician expresses his or her emotions. A musician does not need to feel sad in order to perform music that feels sad. Similarly, the claim that music has emotionally expressive qualities does not refer to the music’s effect. A sad song may or may not make us feel sad, but its expressive quality does not consist in making us sad. Even if a song does make us feel happy or sad, these feelings will differ from typical emotions, which are normally directed toward an object. Music’s emotional effect is comparable to that of a story—we end up feeling a certain way, but not about the same object with which the characters in the story are emotionally engaged. The idea that music has emotional properties is old. In the Republic, Plato goes on at length about the modes31 and rhythms that are 325

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

suitable for educating the republic’s guardians and those that must be banned. Unsuitable modes convey softness and induce laziness; good modes beget a sense of bravery and steadfast character.32 Similarly, only rhythms (similar to poetic cadences) that are orderly and brave may be allowed.33 This idea was subject to considerable elaboration in the Middle Ages, with its proliferation of modes and a more precise system of musical notation. Certain modes were understood to be sad; others were joyful; still others were voluptuous and lascivious.34 In the Baroque period, certain rhythms connected with dances were thought to imply affections: The minuet was associated with delight, the gavotte with joy, and the bourrée with contentment. 35 Even without the authority of Plato and medieval theorists, we can grasp this point by considering music in our context. Think, for example, of a dirge or other funereal music. There are certain features it must possess if it is truly to be funereal. It must, for instance, be played slowly. It will probably be scored in a minor key, which we typically feel to be sad. The choice of instruments must support the somber feeling. Certain combinations would not work well. Imagine a dirge played quickly, on the harmonica, to the tune of “Happy Birthday to You” (“We just heard that you died / but you had a good life / You’ve made us all quite sad / especially your wife”). It just would not work. Or consider national anthems. Although there are no rules of genre that inflexibly govern their composition, it 31. Mode refer to the sequence of notes in a scale and in particular the interval between them. Modern Western music has two common modes, the major scale (e.g., C, D, E, F, G, A, B, C) and the natural minor scale, which lowers three notes by a half step from their value in the major scale (C, D, Eb, F, G, Ab, Bb, C). Other scales (and thus modes) are possible depending on how many and which notes get lowered by a half step. 32. Plato, Republic, 398e–399c, in John M. Cooper, ed., Plato: Complete Works (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 1036-37. 33. Ibid., 399e–400c (Plato, 1037). 34. Harold S. Powers, et al., “Mode,” Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online (Oxford University Press). 35. Dietrich Bartel, Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), 46–47.

326

EMOTION AND COGNITION

is not a coincidence that many contain ascending notes. Think of the opening phrases of “The Star-Spangled Banner” (“Oh say can you see?”), “La Marseillaise” (“Allons enfants de la Patrie”), and “O Canada” (“O Canada! Our home and native land!”). The ascending notes of their major scales feel stirring and hopeful. Finally, think of the wistful, mildly sad features of Harold Arlen’s tune “Over the Rainbow.” Of course, much of our feeling for the song comes from the lyrics and the setting of this song in The Wizard of Oz. But the tune itself, even without the words, feels wistful and sad, a feeling due to its use of descending notes in the main theme. As Dorothy sings about life beyond the rainbow, the tune descends step by step through a major scale. Additionally, the stanzas feels notably different from the refrain (“Someday I’ll wish upon a star . . .”); whereas the stanzas employ a descending scale (the notes go from high to low), the refrain is built on a pattern of ascending notes. In summary, then, tunes have distinct feelings. We feel dirges, sambas, marches, and Gregorian chants as possessing different emotional qualities. Composers and performers have a number of techniques available for imbuing music with emotion. I have already mentioned several, including the use of major and minor modes and the contrast between ascending and descending notes. Consider the results of an experiment designed to determine whether guitarists could play a tune several times, expressly attempting to play it with differing expressive qualities, in such a way that listeners could identify the intended mood. In the experiment the guitarists were asked to play several tunes, with varying melodic structures. They were asked to play each song so as to make it sound successively happy, sad, angry, fearful, and, finally, emotionally flat. The guitarists were free to vary things like the tempo, volume, rhythm, articulation, vibrato, and phrasing.36 Results showed that listeners with no special musical training were able to feel the music as the performers had intended. In 327

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

particular, tunes played legato (notes held to their prescribed length; the opposite of staccato), loudly, and with fast tempo were felt to be angry. Tunes played legato, slowly, and quietly were perceived as sad. Tunes played staccato (notes cut short), fast, and loud were experienced as happy. Finally, tunes played staccato, slowly, and softly were associated with fear.37 This sort of research shows us that music’s emotional quality is not simply in the experience of the listener; it is instead the result of properties that subsist in the music, which in turn are experienced by listeners. Of course, the experience of the listener is indispensable in this process; just as there is radiation but no color without perceiving eyes, so there are musical structure and properties but no emotion without perceiving listeners.38 But the emotion is not simply a subjective phenomenon; it is felt to be in the music and is a function of objective features of the music. This research shows us as well that music’s emotional content can be intentionally manipulated and adjusted by careful performers. Playing a tune at a tempo suitable for marches will give listeners a different feel from playing it at a tempo normally used for dirges. Playing “Happy Birthday to You” in a minor key makes the tune sound anything but happy.39 As one experiment showed, people without musical training can easily categorize tunes as happy or sad according to the tunes’ mode (major vs. minor) and tempo,40 and can perform this categorization without 36. Patrik N. Juslin, “Emotional Communication in Music Performance: A Functionalist Perspective and Some Data,” Music Perception 14, no. 4 (1997): 397–98. 37. Ibid., 412–14. See also Patrik N. Juslin and Petri Laukka, “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance: Different Channels, Same Code?” Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 5 (2003): 796. 38. Thomas Cochrane, “Shared Emotions in Music” (Ph.D. thesis, University of Nottingham, 2007), 124. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/10286/1/thesis.pdf. 39. Readers can find numerous performances of “Happy Birthday to You” in a minor key on sites such as YouTube. 40. Isabelle Peretz, Lise Gagnon, and Bernard Bouchard, “Music and Emotion: Perceptual Determinants, Immediacy, and Isolation after Brain Damage,” Cognition 68, no. 2 (1998): 133; see 134 for reference to comparable studies.

328

EMOTION AND COGNITION

conscious effort and very quickly, sometimes within half of a second and before the name of the tune can be identified.41 The ability to detect happiness and sadness in music appears at a very early age.42 Even something as elementary as pitch and pitch movement (or contour), which is the sequence of ascending and descending pitches that constitutes the tune, has emotional content. As noted previously, “The Star Spangled Banner” feels different from “Over the Rainbow” not only because of tempo (fast and stately vs. slow and languid), but because the former contains many ascending phrases; the latter’s verse is, as noted previously, essentially a descending scale. We feel high notes as energetic and bright, low notes as lacking energy and dark. Additionally, a descending movement will often feel emotionally negative or at least not happy, as though one’s spirit is sinking. Likewise, ascending notes may well feel energetic, as though one’s spirit is rising.43 One study showed that when children sing a song in happy and sad versions, they sing the happy version at a higher pitch than they do the sad version.44 Of course, many other factors are relevant to a tune’s emotional mood, including musical context. Descending pitch is not invariably felt as emotionally negative; many popular songs end with descending notes because in speech descending notes often signal the end of a phrase.45 Music’s emotional content is a function of these sorts of properties and technique. Some of these are cultural conventions; others are

41. Ibid., 134–35. 42. Ibid., “Music and Emotion,” 134. 43. Frank Griffith and David Machin, “Communicating the Ideas and Attitudes of Spying in Film Music: a Social Semiotic Approach,” Sign Systems Studies 42, no. 1 (2014): 78–79. 44. Joyce Jordan-DeCarbo and Jo Ann Nelson, “Music and Early Childhood Education,” in Richard Colwell and Carol P. Richardson, eds., New Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning: A Project of the Music Educators National Conference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 217. 45. William Forde Thompson and E. Glenn Schellenberg, “Cognitive Constraints on Music Listening,” in ibid., 471–72.

329

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

rooted in the brain’s cognitive structures.46 I will focus on cognitive structures. To grasp the importance of cognitive structures, reflect on the difference between sound and music. We can imagine a race of beings, otherwise intelligent, who heard music not as music but simply as sound or noise. Perhaps all of us experience this phenomenon in those times when there is background music of which we are not fully conscious. The acoustic sensation is being registered, but we may not hear it as music. In order to hear it as music we must identify, at some level of awareness, some kind of pattern or patterns. In order to apprehend the patterns that constitute music, the brain must operate in certain ways. The matter is analogous to Immanuel Kant’s analysis of experience. For Kant, sensation alone (Empfindung, such as colors, sounds, tactile impressions, and so on) is not experience (Erfahrung). There is no experience without sensations, but experience requires something that binds sensations into the continuous objects of experience. This something is the concepts (Begriffe) of the mind. These concepts generate experience by connecting sensations together in various relationships (such as cause and effect). By analogy, without the brain’s cognitive structures, music remains only sound. Hearing something as music requires, for example, that we hear a pattern such as repetition or theme and variation. It assumes that we can think in terms of group hierarchy, with small musical units combining to form larger ones. There is a variety of cognitive functions required if we are to hear sound as music. One of these is attention. In order to hear music as music, we must categorize it as a definite sort of music—there 46. Readers interested in cultural conventions will find further discussion with illustrations in Kathryn Kalinak, Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film, Wisconsin Studies in Film (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), especially ch. 4; and Griffith and Machin, “Communicating the Ideas,” 72–97.

330

EMOTION AND COGNITION

is no such thing as generic music. One must attend to things like meter and rhythm to bring order to the sounds: Is this a waltz? A tango? A twelve-bar blues? Each of these has a distinctive meter and rhythms. To recognize sound as music requires us to categorize it in certain ways, which in turn requires cognitive attention—the ability to pick out the conspicuous elements that establish things like tempo and meter. There is evidence that infants can distinguish twobeat from three-beat meters; young children attempt movements that are synchronized with music’s rhythms.47 There is also evidence that the brain comes to expect the pulse of a given rhythm; test subjects, even very small infants, are surprised when the expected beat is absent.48 These sorts of studies suggest very strongly that the brain possesses cognitive structures that enable us to perceive such musical properties as meter and rhythm. Since meter and rhythm are fundamental components of our experience of the emotional content of music, these studies show a rather clear connection between cognitive structures and the ability to perceive the emotional quality of music. There seems also to be an innate cognitive system for detecting consonant (i.e., harmonious) tones, which has a great deal to do with perceiving the emotional content of music. As the reader may know, sound is the way in which we experience vibrations in the air that strike the eardrum. Each musical tone corresponds to a distinct frequency. Two notes will be heard as consonant to the extent that their frequencies coincide and as dissonant to the extent that they do not. Notes on a scale can thus be ranked according to consonance and dissonance. In the major C scale, two Cs an octave apart will show perfect consonance. The next greatest consonance will be C and G 47. Summarized in Ray Jackendoff and Fred Lerdahl, “The Capacity for Music: What Is It, and What’s Special about It?” Cognition 100, no. 1 (2006): 44. 48. Henkjan Honing, Illiterate Listener: On Music Cognition, Musicality and Methodology (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011), 15.

331

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

(an interval called the fifth, since G is the fifth note of the C scale). After that will be C and F (the fourth note of the C scale), and so on until we arrive at notes that are quite dissonant, e.g., C and Db. Studies have shown that infants are able to detect consonant intervals but not dissonant intervals,49 suggesting that the brain has a bias for hearing consonance and that cultural learning is not the cause of this bias. The brain, it appears, has certain cognitive structures that are innately attuned to preferentially hear consonant intervals. A cognitive function related to attention is memory. Music has both a horizontal dimension (one note or chord following another, creating the melody) and a vertical dimension (notes played simultaneously, constituting the harmonic structure). Memory relates to the horizontal dimension. Because any note or chord has a limited duration in time and is thus evanescent, hearing sound as music requires the ability to hold notes and chords together in memory so that melodies and harmonic structure can be experienced. Without this memory of melody and harmonic structure, there is no experience of music. This is true even in the case of vocal music: without the recollective ability to remember the early parts of the lyrics, the later parts would make no sense. Studies show that people remember consonant intervals (for instance, between C and G or C and F) more easily than dissonant intervals.50 Likewise, we find it easier to remember pitch movement (i.e., the melody) than to remember the exact pitch of a tune’s notes. Researchers have speculated that this greater ability to remember pitch movement is related to the fact that when adults talk to infants they use greater variation in pitch than when they speak to other adults.51 Infants’ sensitivity to wide variation in the pitch of speech 49. Thompson and Schellenberg, “Cognitive Constraints on Music Listening,” 468. See also M. R. Zentner and J. Kagan, “Perception of Music by Infants,” Nature, 383, no. 6595 (1996): 29, for comparable results using a different experimental technique. 50. Thompson and Schellenberg, “Cognitive Constraints on Music Listening,” 467–68.

332

EMOTION AND COGNITION

directed to them is, presumably, an adaptive function of evolution. It seems likely that the ability to remember melodic pitch movement is grounded in this adaptive function.52 Memory works in other ways to condition the way in which we hear music as music. The fact that scales, regardless of culture, that are commonly used employ between five and seven notes is probably a function of the structure of our working memory, just as telephone numbers (in America) are seven digits.53 Music requires memory, but an expectation about the future is also involved. Let’s return to pitch movement and the construction of melody. Two things are characteristic of almost all popular music and much “classical” music: in such music the interval between any two notes of the melody is generally small and such music has a tonal center.54 Regarding interval, reflect on the fact that the interval between the first two notes of “Over the Rainbow” (“some-where”) is a full octave—an exceedingly rare interval. The interval between any two melodic notes is almost always much less than a full octave; it is frequently a half step (e.g., C to Db) or full step (C to D). Tonal center means that tunes tend to have either a single or a prevailing key signature that determines the frequency of notes. If a tune is in the key of C, some notes will occur in the melody more frequently than will other notes. There will be many Cs and, because melodic intervals tend to be small, notes close to C. Because of consonance, there is a high probability of hearing Gs and notes close to G. “Close to,” however, means close in terms of the key signature, not in terms 51. For an overview of infant directed speech, see Catherine Saint-Georges, et al., “Motherese in Interaction: At the Cross-Road of Emotion and Cognition? (A Systematic Review),” Plos ONE 8, no. 10 (2013): 1–17. 52. Thompson and Schellenberg, “Cognitive Constraints on Music Listening,” 468–70. 53. Ibid., 470. 54. I hasten to add that we are dealing here with the period of common musical practice, roughly 1600 until 1900. Music prior to 1600 often lacked a strong tonal center. The twentieth century saw, in movements such as serialism and bebop, deliberate attempts to subvert the by-now traditional commitment to tonality.

333

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

of sound. An example may help: in the key of C, the tonal center is the note C. The note Db (equivalent to C#) is sonically closer to C than is the note D; however, if we consider the tonality from the perspective of the key, D is closer to C than is Db, because D belongs to the key of C in a way that Db does not. In musical terminology, D is diatonic; Db is chromatic. In the key of C, the notes C, D, E, F, G, A, and B are diatonic and sound as though they belong. The notes C# (= Db), D# (= Eb), F# (= Gb), G# (= Ab), and A# (= Bb) are chromatic. They can certainly be included in the melody and their presence makes the melody more interesting than it would be if it contained only diatonic notes; however, a preponderance of chromatic notes would sound odd. It would also be odd if a tune were to linger on a chromatic note. Put differently, the introduction of a chromatic note introduces more tension into the tune than does the introduction of a diatonic note. A tune in the key of C can introduce a G without inserting any tension at all (because G is highly consonant with C). But if a C# is introduced, the hearer forms an expectation that this chromatic note will be shortly followed by a C or least some other diatonic note.55 Studies have shown that listeners form expectations about melodies and even young children can recognize a change of key—they notice when the tonal center shifts, as when a tune in the key of C shifts to the key of G or F. The fact that most people can sing reasonably well within the stipulated key indicates that we are able to intuitively grasp a tune’s tonal center. We form a mental picture of this center and use it to guide our expectation of which notes fit the melody and which notes are likely to follow a given melodic note.56 There is, accordingly, an important cognitive system at work when we 55. Jackendoff and Lerdahl, “The Capacity for Music,” 45–52. 56. Ball, “Schoenberg, Serialism and Cognition: Whose Fault If No One Listens?” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 36, no. 1 (2011): 29; and Thompson and Schellenberg, “Cognitive Constraints on Music Listening,” 472.

334

EMOTION AND COGNITION

recognize a melody, a cognitive system that allows us to form unconscious hypotheses about the tune’s melodic contours and frequencies of notes.57 It is this cognitive system that makes us feel something to be amiss if our expectation is not met. Think of the song “Happy Birthday to You.” Let’s say that the tune is in the key of C. The final two notes of the tune (“to you”) are D and C. If a performance failed to end on C—if “to you” were both sung on D, we would feel a sense of unrelieved tension. It is as though the D wants to fall back to the tune’s tonal center, C, that the tune wants to return to its tonal home. A concluding D would make the tune sound unfinished, even if the D were held for a long duration.58 The expectation generated by this cognitive system explains at least partly why some twentieth-century classical music sounds foreign and difficult to many people. After several centuries in which Western music was characterized by strong tonality, composers such as Arnold Schönberg worked to create music that lacked a tonal center. In other words, in this music no note would occur with greater frequency than other notes. In so-called twelve-tone music (so named because the number of diatonic notes plus the number of chromatic notes in an octave equals twelve), no note is played until the other eleven are played. In this way, the hierarchy of tonal frequency, whereby some notes are heard quite often and others rarely, is eliminated and a sort of musical democracy obtains. The problem for hearers is that such music violates our innate sense of expectation. In extraordinary forms of atonal music, there is no melody to speak of—any note can be followed by any other note. The cognitive system that creates a sense of expectation is thus continually frustrated.59 57. Ball, “Schoenberg, Serialism and Cognition,” 33. 58. For more commentary on this phenomenon, see Jackendoff and Lerdahl, “The Capacity for Music,” 52. 59. This is the subject of Ball, “Schoenberg, Serialism and Cognition,” 24–41.

335

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Finally, let us consider the sense in which a musical piece means something and how we perceive that meaning. By “meaning” I do not mean reference. It is true that occasionally a tune may evoke a certain physical object and in that sense possess a referential meaning. For example, George Gershwin’s An American in Paris includes the sounds of taxicab horns in order to evoke the sounds of traffic. Pyotr Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture typically includes the sound of cannons being fired because it commemorates a Russian military victory over Napoleon. The third movement of Ferde Grofé’s Grand Canyon Suite imitates the sounds of a pack animal. But this sort of referential imitation is rare in music. For the meaning of music we have to look not at points of reference outside music, but to the movement of chords and melodic notes within music. A comparison with language may be helpful. Languages have syntactical elements and semantic elements. Syntax refers to the way in which the parts of language (nouns, verbs, and other parts of speech) relate to one another; semantics is about the referential meaning of individual words. Music has syntax but only rarely does it possess semantic meaning. Music’s syntax is a function of the rules that govern melody, harmony, and rhythm, with individual notes and chords forming phrases, which in turn compose verses and other large units. In symphonic music there can be numerous layers of part-whole organization. It is thus possible to understand a piece of music in the same way in which we understand the syntax of a sentence. A musical piece is a coherent totality composed of parts that relate to each other in certain ways. We understand the piece when we grasp how the parts relate to each other and compose the unified totality, just as we understand a sentence when we grasp each part in its relation to the other parts and see how they all constitute the syntactically meaningful sentence.60 We can also think of a musical piece as possessing a narrative 336

EMOTION AND COGNITION

structure like a story. This structure is obvious and easy to apprehend in the case of vocal music, for the lyrics communicate the narrative, with its conflict and resolution. But the tune’s melody and harmonic structure also contain the narrative. Thus, throughout Swan Lake we hear the recurring theme in a minor key and then, at the ballet’s climax in the happy ending, the music changes to a major key. “I Love Paris” plods along dirge-like, with a minor key and a slow, turgid tempo until the moment when it changes to the parallel major key and is (typically) played with a more bouncy, energetic tempo. The key, mode, tempo, and other musical properties thus create a narrative structure.61 The basic form of musical narrative is tension and resolution, especially as embodied in a piece’s harmonic structure (its chords). In a given key, some chords will create tension and others will resolve the tension. Tension-creating chords contain some sort of dissonance. The most common tension-creating chord in modern popular music is the dominant seventh. In the key of C, the dominant seventh is G7 (the basic G chord [G, B, D] plus the minor seventh of G, which is F). This chord contains a tritone, the interval between B and F. Tritones are experienced as highly dissonant; this chord is thus inherently filled with tension. When a dominant seventh is followed by the root chord (when, in this example, a G7 is followed by a C chord), the hearer instantly feels that the tension has been resolved. This is because the B of the dominant chord has moved to C, forming the root of the C chord, and the F of the dominant chord has moved to E, which is the third of the C chord. This double movement eliminates the tension inherent in the tritone (B and F) chord and creates the essential notes of the root chord (C 60. Ibid., 30. 61. This topic is discussed in far greater depth by Lawrence M. Zbikowski, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis, AMS Studies in Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).

337

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

and E). This basic sequence of chords (called a cadence) in this way creates musical movement embodying tension and resolution. Such cadential movement is one of the fundamental components of musical narrative. Perhaps the outstanding example of musical narrative based on tension and resolution is Richard Wagner’s opera Tristan und Isolde. The opening three measures establish a basic tension that remains, in some respects, unresolved until the end of the opera four hours later. The opening tension is created by a chord62 in the third measure of the first act that, (1) like a dominant seventh, contains a tritone and is therefore inherently tensed and seeking resolution but (2) is not followed, as expected, into a resolution chord. The opera is filled with unresolved tension chords until the end, when, after a series of ascending variations on a theme, the unusual chord (F, G#, B, D#) from the opening reappears (in the fifth-from-the-last measure of the opera) and then, at the last, resolves nicely, if unorthodoxly, to a B major (B, D#, F#). In other words, the hearer is held in a state of musical suspense throughout the opera as Wagner repeatedly ignores the conventions about resolving harmonic tensions, until the end when the entire opera settles on a major chord that feels like a tonal center in more conventional music. The tension and suspense inherent in the music’s harmonic structure parallels the drama of the narrative, in which Tristan and Isolde are in love but Isolde is joined to another. The entire opera revolves around the question of how they will be united, a goal made difficult by Tristan’s death. The climax of the opera is Isolde’s vision of Tristan and her decision to die or be transfigured (Wagner was rather ambivalent about this) in order to join him. The point is that the music tells the story as much as the spoken narrative does. It tells the story by a strategy of creating 62. I refer the reader to the voluminous body of works that discuss this important chord and how best to interpret it.

338

EMOTION AND COGNITION

harmonic tension and then, finally, resolving that tension as Isolde dies or is transfigured and can thus be united with Tristan. In this section I have used music as an example of concrete, sometimes daily experience in which there is an integration of emotion and cognition. We feel music and its emotional substance, but we are able to do so because of cognitive powers such as attention and memory. Music thus affords an example of the way in which, in ordinary experience, emotion and cognition are integrated. It is true that we can study music in a way that appears to be purely cognitive, as in expert discussions of musical theory, which can seem quite abstract. But even in these cases, the seemingly abstract study stands in service of the emotional palette of the music. It is a technical way of understanding in precise terms how the music possesses its emotional substance. So, even in these cases emotion is not far from the deployment of cognitive skills.

339

10

The Ecclesial Therapy of Emotion

One of the pastoral tasks of the Christian church is to teach Christian disciples how to deal with human emotions in God-pleasing ways. For most of its history, the church was able to ground its moral teaching about emotion in a widely accepted metaphysics. According to this metaphysics, human beings are composite, made of body and soul. One part of the soul, reason, makes us like God; the other part of the soul consists of the nonrational elements, especially passions and bodily desires. These extra-rational elements make us akin to the natural world, for we share passions and bodily desires with animals but not with God. This metaphysics explained the commonsense morality that every culture inculcates, namely that passion and desire are morally problematic and must be controlled. Armed with this metaphysics, the Christian church developed a twofold strategy for achieving a Christian therapy of emotion, to adapt Martha Nussbaum’s phrase.1 One branch of this strategy flowed into the 1. Martha C. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

341

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

ascetic tradition of monasticism. The goal here (speaking in an overly general way) was the extirpation of emotions regarded as spiritually problematic by means of self-denial and discipline (askēsis). As a practical option for life, the ascetic strategy appealed to the few, the spiritual athletes and heroes. The other branch was characterized by the strategy of moderation and inevitably became the default pathway of the many. In both strategies, emotion was regarded as the fundamental human problem; the goal was to bring emotion under the governance of reason. As I have tried to show in the previous four chapters, the dualistic metaphysics of soul and body, of reason and emotion that explained Christian moral teaching and practice has become, to put it mildly, questionable. Scientific evidence and theory alone make it increasingly difficult to sustain belief in a substantial soul capable of existence apart from an organic body. Science makes it nearly as difficult to accept a hard-and-fast distinction between reason and emotion. Even theological considerations render suspicious the notion that human reason alone is that feature by which we resemble God. This picture of God as a passionless, purely rational being had obvious appeal for the intelligentsia of ancient times but has little to recommend it theologically. Finally, modern movements of protest such as Pietism and Romanticism remind us that we cannot regard the traditional view of reason as unquestionably true. In the final chapter I will offer some thoughts about the metaphysics of reason and emotion. The focus of the present chapter, however, is the question of what the Christian church should teach today regarding emotion. Regardless of how one understands the metaphysical status of emotion and its relation to reason, there is a practical task of conducting one’s ethical life and this means doing something with emotion. Which emotions should be encouraged and cultivated? Should some be extirpated? And by what means? 342

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

Which emotions should be moderated? And how do we achieve moderation? Examining Paul’s letters and those in the Pauline tradition, for instance, we find that a great deal of space is given to instructions regarding emotions and emotion-related conduct—think of the various catalogs of virtues and vices in these letters (for instance, Rom. 1:29-31; Gal. 5:19-23; 2 Tim. 3:2-4). Since emotion does constitute an important object of moral instruction, it is important to reflect carefully on how the church should counsel its members about emotion. But since intellectual developments have rendered traditional dualistic accounts of reason and emotion doubtful, the subject of emotion and morality needs fresh consideration; repeating traditional teaching is fruitless if it rests on a discredited metaphysics and cannot be fitted onto a better understanding of emotion. Some Preliminary Theses As a prelude to a theological and pastoral understanding of emotion, let’s review some of the leading conclusions of chapters 6, 7, and 8. First, emotion is an essential and ineradicable element of human nature. “Essential” in this context means that emotion is necessary for human well-being. Without emotion, something important is lacking, a point made vivid if we consider the life of criminal psychopaths. The fact that many people with some degree of psychopathy or autistic disorder are able to function in human society indicates as much. Nonetheless, I doubt that anyone would consider a life without emotional response to be a human life in the fullest sense of the word. It would not be necessary to mention this seemingly obvious point were it not for a conviction among early Christian writers (discussed in chapters 3 and 4) that at least some emotions are accidental and are present in the soul only because of the catastrophic first sin of 343

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Adam and Eve. This conviction is not entirely without merit insofar as it reminds us that human nature under the condition of sin is not identical with human nature in its created state, that is, in the state that God intends. It is, in other words, absolutely correct to insist that human nature in its current condition labors in a state of corruption that will be remedied only in the resurrection. Accordingly, we cannot simply identify the current state of human nature and its emotions with how we ought to be in an ideal sense. At the same time, the early Christian conviction that many, perhaps all, emotions are not a part of our created nature and that humans were originally beings of pure reason is of dubious merit for several reasons, not least being its dependence on an overly historical interpretation of Genesis 2–3, an interpretation that modern scientific research renders incredible. Regardless of how one wishes to interpret the doctrine of creation and Genesis 2–3, there is no compelling theological reason to exclude emotion from human nature, even in its created state. Second, we possess emotions, even so-called negative emotions, because they serve or at least have served purposes that are vital to our biological and social existence. I refer the reader to the argument for this point in chapter 6; here I will simply state that emotion is an essential part of human nature because it is a part of our evolutionary heritage. We have evolved as the sort of beings that we are as a result of natural selection operating on genetic mutations over long periods of time. Our brains have evolved with cognitive mechanisms and emotional mechanisms because those mechanisms best contributed to reproductive success, broadly considered. Third, apart from its adaptive function, emotion is important because it is a way in which we relate to the world around us. When we remember that emotion involves appraisal and action tendencies, then it becomes clear that emotion is the fundamental way in which we relate to our world, for it involves perception and cognition 344

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

(in appraisal) and behavior (in action tendencies). Although it is possible for us to relate to the world with something like emotionless thinking, it is difficult for us to do so and generally requires special academic training. Our experience, in other words, is usually determined by what we find to be emotionally salient. There being too much in our environment for the brain to process, a filtering takes place whereby attention is focused on what seem to be matters of importance. Importance is usually determined by our emotional state. Fourth, although emotion is (as argued in chapter 8) a form of cognition, it often operates automatically and bypasses the brain’s mechanisms for more deliberate forms of cognition. This feature is, presumably, a result of emotion’s function as an evolutionary adaptation—fast, unthinking responses presumably made a significant contribution to the organism’s fitness. This feature explains the possibility of conflict between emotion and deliberative forms of cognition, as when we find ourselves angry or fearful and then try to consider the propriety of those emotions. Fifth, with practice over a long period of time, we can learn to delay or prevent our behavioral responses and can even moderate how we feel in anger- or fear-inducing situations. A traditional analysis would describe this process in terms of reason’s increasing rule over emotion. This description is not wholly wrong as an approximation of what goes on in the brain; however, it is implicated in an untenable dualistic metaphysics that deters us from seeing what actually happens in moderation. The traditional view assumes that there are two processes, reason and emotion (collapsing passion and desire into the single category of emotion) and that the only significant relation between them is one of rule: either reason rules emotion or emotion rules reason. Instead of this view, we should picture the brain as having numerous systems. Some of these are expressly cognitive: memory, attention, speech recognition, and so 345

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

on. Others are expressly emotional, as in the systems for basic emotions. Each of these systems, but especially the emotional systems, form important connections with the rest of the nervous system—hence the physiological changes associated with emotions and the connection between emotion and behavior. Moreover, the emotional systems are connected in various ways with the expressly cognitive systems. That is why memory and attention are affected by emotion and why deliberately focusing memory or attention on a different object can bring about an altered emotional state. Moderation of emotion, then, is not the victory of reason over unruly emotion. It is instead a matter of forming neural connections between the various systems of the brain, some mainly cognitive, others mainly emotional. We may feel envious of a neighbor’s material goods, but we can also learn to direct our attention to our own goods or to consider the transience of all material things and in this way moderate our envy. In other words, we can enlist any of a number of mental systems, both cognitive and emotional, in order to arrive at an appropriate emotional state. Finally, human community requires emotion, especially prosocial emotions such as empathy and compassion. A community of people such as a family assumes care and concern. With prosocial emotions, members of a community are willing to expend resources and even to risk life for the sake of other members. Such behavior makes sense only if the members are bound together, not by calculations of interest, but instead by feelings of love and empathy. Of course, conditions within a family can deteriorate to the point that calculations of interest became the only rational course of action; however, such a family would no longer be a community based on care and concern. What about groups that are less than communities? In a business organization, for example, people may come together to pursue a common interest but may feel little in the way of care 346

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

for other members. But even these sorts of groups assume some kinds of prosocial feelings. At a bare minimum, members, no matter how selfishly inclined, will still need to regard other members empathetically as human beings. They may not love their neighbors, but any sort of organization will need at least some measure of friendly feelings. Contributions to a Theological Understanding of Emotion Perhaps the most important theological thesis bearing on emotion is implied by 1 Timothy 4:4-5 (“Every creature of God, being received with thanksgiving, is good, and nothing is to be cast aside, for it is sanctified through the word of God and by prayer”). If emotion is a part of our created nature, then it is capable of sanctification. Of course, it is far easier to sanctify food than the emotions. A simple prayer and a blessing suffice for the former; emotions require a much greater expenditure of spiritual energy. Nonetheless, emotion has the same status that any created reality possesses: it is good and not to be rejected as long as it is sanctified. At the same time, emotion’s status as something created reminds us that creation abides in a state of spiritual ambiguity. Creation remains God’s good work, but it also participates in the corruption of sin. That is why important New Testament symbols such as world and flesh can bear both positive and negative meanings. Thus, world is a common New Testament symbol for the cosmic system of sin and its earthly manifestations, but it retains at least a trace of its created status, as when God is said to love the world (John 3:16). Flesh, likewise, often bears a negative meaning, but can also be something positive, for the divine word becomes flesh (John 1:14). Under the conditions of existence, then, emotion, like every other finite thing, participates in the ambivalent tension between creation and sin, between the state of God’s intention and the state of corruption. 347

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

A second theological thesis must also be stated in the form of a paradox: although (as a consequence of the doctrine of creation) Christian theology takes human nature (including emotion) with full seriousness, the ethical life is not circumscribed by human nature. Ethics, in other words, is not a simple transcript of natural tendencies. The paradox lies in the tension between (1) the need to begin with a realistic understanding of human nature and (2) the impossibility of equating moral norms with what humans beings actually do. To put the matter differently, theology must acknowledge that we are beings of nature, like animals, but also that, unlike animals, we are moral beings, capable of acting on the basis of norms and ideals. So, human emotion is a natural phenomenon, with similarities to the emotions of other animals, especially other apes. At the same time, humans are moral beings; to some extent, we have control over our emotions. Accordingly, the ethical life to which we are called demands some measure of moderation; the otherwise natural expression of emotion must be subjected to limits. A third theological thesis is an expression of Christian eschatology. The participation of things in the tension between creation and corruption is mirrored in the eschatological tension between the presence of the kingdom of God in history and its future fulfillment. The historical reality of the kingdom of God is, in other words, another instance of the fundamental paradox to which Christian theology bears witness. The kingdom of God was powerfully present in the life and work of Jesus Christ, in his resurrection from the dead, and in the gift of the Holy Spirit. This presence was signaled by Jesus’ power over disease and the demonic. At the same time, at no point in history has the fullness of the messianic age been realized; Christianity remains a religion of hope. The kingdom of God, then, is a present reality but one whose fullness lies in the future. This means that human salvation transpires in the space between the present and 348

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

the future. In particular, although the sanctification of emotion is a real possibility, and not a mere ideal, it remains fragmentary and its complete realization awaits the future fullness of the kingdom of God. A final theological thesis concerns the relation between emotion, sanctification, and Christian community. As noted previously in this chapter, human community requires emotion, especially the prosocial

emotions.

This

requirement

applies

to

Christian

community, including the church. The well-being of the church rests on the sanctified emotions of its members. Conversely, the church suffers the effects of sin to the extent that its members resist the power of sanctifying grace. However, there is a two-way street between emotion and community, for the church functions as a culture that inculcates in its members the appropriate expression of emotion. It is because of culture that we feel emotion to whatever degree of intensity we feel them and express them in whatever ways we express them. Insofar as the church is a culture, it shapes the way in which we feel emotions, the intensity with which and the circumstances in which we feel them, and the contours of the behavioral expression of emotion. Emotion and Sin If emotion requires sanctification, this implies that something is amiss and we are thus led to consider sin. Human emotion is experienced under the condition of sin; it participates in the corruption that afflicts all creation. Sanctification is the process by which God’s grace disentangles human nature from sin and restores its created state. A theological account of emotion must therefore move beyond the conceptualizations of science and consider emotion from the perspective of eschatological salvation. Much depends on how we think of sin, however. In the Christian tradition, sin is often conceived as an act of disobedience against 349

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

divine law. Although this is a vital dimension of sin, it is not the most useful for thinking about emotion’s implication in sin, for disobedience is a matter of volition and emotions are not willed. We normally do not choose to be angry or happy or fearful or envious. It is true that we may deliberately choose not to moderate an emotion or to limit our behavioral expression, but these are failures to act with regard to emotion; they are not failures of emotion as such. It is also true that repeated failure to moderate emotion may result in an unhealthy disposition. We may become an angry person or a jealous person as a matter of character. But as bad as such character dispositions are, sin lies in the failure to cultivate proper dispositions, not in the emotions themselves. Sin has also been conceived as a state of alienation or corruption. This conception is more useful for understanding emotion’s entanglement with sin because it locates the problem, not in particular emotions and their expression, but instead in the fallen condition of human nature. Instead of having to identify particular emotions as sinful, we can form a general conception of human nature in a state of alienation from God and from its created condition. Emotions, then, are no more or less problematic than other aspects of human nature but instead share in the corruption that attends every aspect of human nature. The sanctification of emotion, in this conception, is part of the more general sanctification of human nature, begun in principle in baptism and actualized throughout life through acts of devotion and discipline. As useful as the sin-as-corruption conception is, we need something more to lend concreteness to our understanding of the sanctification of emotion. It is true that emotion requires sanctification because it is an element of corrupted human nature, but this truth gives us little help in knowing what such sanctification would look like. This is because the concept of human nature is 350

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

necessarily general and a bit abstract. The idea of our nature being sanctified is a grand notion but lacking in specificity. In the interests of greater concreteness, then, Augustine’s notion of sin as disorder is helpful. For Augustine, the created state is above all a state of order, in which the human person is subservient to God, and the powers of the soul are ranged in their proper hierarchy: reason ruling, passions and desires subservient. Sin is the state in which this order is inverted, with passions and desires governing the person. Sanctification is the restoration of created order. Of course, there is much in Augustine’s account that is problematic, especially its commitment to a hierarchical view of emotion’s relation to reason. Nonetheless, the notion of disorder—that sin disrupts something good and well ordered—is an exceedingly useful one once we expunge the dualistic excrescence clinging to it in Augustine’s theology. All that is necessary is to move the emphasis from the internal order of the soul to the threat of disorder that sin poses to Christian community. Sanctification, Emotion, and Christian Community If we begin with the premise that human community requires emotion and join to it Augustine’s insight that sin is a disordering of relations, then we have a way of thinking concretely about emotion’s entanglement in sin. Considered biologically, emotion is neither good nor bad. It is an evolutionary adaptation and as such may be more or less effective in particular circumstances. But if we think of humankind’s social existence and the role of emotion in it, then emotion acquires a moral dimension. Some emotions such as empathy and compassion create and nurture community; others such as envy and jealousy can introduce disorder into human relationships and thus endanger community. If the first way of conceiving of sin (sin as act) emphasizes sin in relation to God and as a violation of the first great commandment (to love God), conceiving of sin as that 351

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

which disorders human community portrays sin as a violation of the second great commandment (to love one’s neighbor). Thinking of emotion and sin in this way helps us understand why so much of the New Testament’s moral teaching relates to emotions and deeds that either threaten or sustain the Christian community. It is true that there is plenty of moral instruction about emotions such as hope and joy with no obvious connection to the community. And, of course, there is considerable teaching about emotions relating to God, such as love and faithfulness. Nonetheless, a very large portion of what the New Testament has to say about emotion and related deeds concerns the relation between these emotions and the wellbeing of the church. The early Christian church was to be a community and not simply a casual gathering of people with a common interest. Many of the New Testament’s metaphors for the church testify to this. The church is God’s people (Eph. 1:14; 1 Pet. 2:9), Christ’s body (Eph. 1:23; 1 Cor. 2:12, 27), the new anthrōpos (Eph. 2:15), God’s household (Eph. 2:19; 1 Pet. 4:17; 1 Tim. 3:15), a new family for disciples (Mark 3:31-35; Mark 10:28-30), and a kingdom of priests (Rev. 5:10; see also 1 Pet. 2:9). These metaphors, when seen against the background of the Old Testament, speak powerfully about the church as a corporate body in which, if one suffers, all suffer, and if one rejoices, all rejoice (1 Cor. 12:26). But the church’s existence as a community must be realized in practice; the members of the church must actually form a community. This requires certain emotional and behavioral dispositions. These include: kindness (ēpios, 2 Tim. 2:24; chrēstotēs, Gal. 5:22; 2 Cor. 6:6; Col. 3:12; Eph. 4:32); gentleness (prautēs, Gal. 5:23; 6:1; Col. 3:12; praupathia, 1 Tim. 6:11); patience (makrothumia, Gal. 5:22; 2 Cor. 6:6; Col. 3:12; Eph. 4:2); peace (eirēnē and eirēneuō, Gal. 5:22; Rom. 12:18; 14:19; 2 Cor. 13:11; Eph. 4:3); forgiveness (charizō, 2 Cor. 2:7; Col. 3:13; Eph. 4:32); bearing with one another 352

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

(anechō, Eph. 4:2; Col. 3:13; bastazō, Gal. 6:1; Rom. 15:1); compassion (sumpathēs, Heb. 10:34; splanchthnos and variations, Col. 3:12; Eph. 4:32); humility (tapeinophrosunē, Col. 3:12; Eph. 4:2; Phil. 2:3), sibling-love (philadelphia, Heb. 13:1); and, above all, love (agape, numerous passages). These emotional characteristics would be necessary in any community, but were especially needed in the firstcentury church, which was a mixed society in which Jews and Gentiles mingled and in which there could easily be, in the same congregation, members of the elite and slaves worshiping side by side. Given the Greco-Roman elites’ valuation of status and honor and the centuries-old enmity between Jews and Gentiles, it could not have been easy to achieve concord and love. The elites would not naturally exhibit kindness and gentleness to their social inferiors, even in the church. It cannot be assumed that Jews and Gentiles would automatically extend peace and compassion to each other. Nonetheless, these were the feelings and actions that had to be cultivated if the church were actually to become a community. The necessity of feelings such as forgiveness and compassion meant that other emotions and actions must be banned because they would destroy the church’s existence as a community. These include anger (orgē, 1 Tim. 2:8; Col. 3:8; Eph. 4:31), wrath (thumos, Gal. 5:20; Col. 3:8; Eph. 4:31), bitterness (pikria, Eph. 4:31; Heb. 12:15), envy (zēlos, phthonos, Gal. 5:20-21, 26; Rom. 1:29), boastfulness or pretentiousness (alazōn, Rom. 1:30; 2 Tim. 3:2), pride or arrogance (huperēphania, Rom. 1:30; 2 Tim. 3:2; Mark 7:22), lack of human affection (astorgos, Rom. 1:31; 2 Tim. 3:3), lack of mercy (aneleēmōn, Rom. 1:31), and being vain or conceited (kenodoxia, Gal. 5:26; Phil. 2:3). Some of these (anger, bitterness, envy) are obvious community killers, at least when practiced openly; others may be important because of the differing social classes in the church: in a culture in

353

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

which there was a fundamental social and legal distinction between honestiores (the nobles) and humiliores (everyone else) and in which superbia (pride) was a virtue of the first order, Christian members of the elite would have to be reminded not to feel pride or to exhibit arrogance and to avoid vanity. Their culture outside the church taught them to feel exactly these emotions and to act in exactly these ways. But if the church were truly to be a community of brothers and sisters, then the feelings and actions characteristic of the elite had to be put aside in favor of feelings and actions conducive to the building of such a community. If we accept the premise that many of the emotions about which the New Testament is concerned are of importance because of their relation to the well-being of the church as a community, then we possess a criterion for determining the good or bad of any given emotion. From the perspective of the Christian faith, emotions are to be avoided, minimized, or moderated if they are potentially harmful to Christian community. Emotions are good if and to the extent that they nurture and sustain community. With this criterion we shift attention away from the traditional perspectives of evaluation, namely, the internal dynamics of the soul, the soul’s relation to God, and scriptural texts. Regarding the internal dynamics of the soul, the Christian tradition has asked about the conflict of emotion with reason and to what extent the expression of emotion is consistent with the governance of reason. Regarding the soul’s relation to God, the question has been how a given emotion relates to the soul’s love for God. Finally, the Christian tradition has looked for specific scriptural texts that command or prohibit emotions. I have discussed the first of these perspectives at length in previous chapters and so will not elaborate here. The second evaluative perspective (How does this emotion relate to the soul’s love for God?) is a foundational element of Augustine’s 354

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

theology. Here, our good lies in loving God above all else, indeed to the exclusion of all else. Everything else in human life has moral worth only if it can be subsumed under the love of God. Thus, even love of spouse or family is legitimate only if we love them for the sake of our love for God. Similarly, Augustine reduced the four cardinal virtues (wisdom, courage, moderation, and justice) to the more fundamental concept of love for God. In spite of their origin as social virtues directed to human affairs, they are in truth, Augustine argued, different ways of understanding our love for God. That is why, for Augustine, pagans cannot be truly virtuous. There is something compelling about Augustine’s theocentric interpretation of love and virtue; however, it may be a bit too theocentric. Apart from the vexing and disputed question of pagan virtue, one wonders what it means to love family and neighbor for the sake of God. Augustine’s main point is clear and well taken: we must love God above all else; no other love can compete with love for God. But Augustine was not content with this principle and he argued that only love for God deserves the name love. Because of the connection between love and desire, only love of God is authentic love because only God should be categorically desired. At some point in this train of logic Augustine has gone beyond what is required for Christian piety. Can it really be true that love for family and neighbor is not true love? Would it not be better to talk about degrees of authentic love? At any rate, what is needed is a way of understanding the relation of the finite to the infinite. In Augustine’s understanding, this relation is one of exclusion: love of something finite, desire for something finite, threatens exclusive love and desire for the infinite God. Love for God, then, excludes authentic love and desire for finite things. I will take up this subject again in the next chapter; at this point I will merely state that Augustine’s understanding of the

355

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

relation of the finite to the infinite is unsatisfactory, at least as it relates to love. The third evaluative perspective (Are there specific scriptural texts that command or prohibit the emotion?) is, likewise, far from unproblematic. The issue may be stated plainly: Does the teaching of Jesus and the apostles present us with a new divine law? If so, then whatever it says about emotion must be followed as a divine revelation; departure will be sin. There is evidence that at least some parts of the New Testament want us to think in this way. The letter of James, for instance, speaks of a royal law that we are obliged to keep (James 2:8). Matthew’s Gospel presents Jesus rather clearly as a new Moses who teaches a law that supersedes Moses’ law. This statutory approach to the New Testament, however, is fraught with difficulties. Paul insisted, as a matter of the utmost seriousness, that women must wear a veil when they pray publicly (1 Cor. 11:2-16) and declared that it is contrary to nature for a man to have long hair (1 Cor. 11:14). First Peter and 1 Timothy teach categorically that Christian women must not braid their hair (1 Peter 3:3; 1 Tim. 2:9-10). Numerous passages accept the fact of human slavery at face value with no substantial theological critique. Examples of similar cultural artifacts on which ethical prescriptions are erected could be multiplied. These commands can be mandates for us today only by assuming a theory of verbal revelation—that God’s will has been translated directly into verbal commands and lodged in the Bible. This approach makes no sense whatsoever, however, once we recognize that teachings regarding the veiling of women and braided hair are highly contextualized in GrecoRoman culture. Only in that kind of culture does it make sense to urge women to wear a veil or to avoid braiding of hair. We should likewise see the Gospels’ teaching on divorce (actually teachings, since Matthew and Mark disagree on whether or not there is a 356

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

condition that will allow for remarriage after divorce) in the firstcentury context: the prohibition of remarriage and the restriction on divorce that it implies are best interpreted, not as statutory laws, but as a way of protecting women in a society in which they had few rights and little recourse. While no one supposes that God is delighted with the idea of divorce, we err if we turn the dominical logia into a new law that applies categorically in every time and culture, just as we err if we insist that no Christian woman in any culture may ever braid her hair. Apropos of emotion, then, how should we think of New Testament prohibitions of anger (as in Matt. 5:22 and Eph. 4:31)? If we use the statutory approach, then we will regard anger as a sin—a violation of divine law. The alternative, I propose, is to judge emotions on the basis of their capacity to nurture or damage Christian community. Anger is thus morally problematic, not because it violates a divine decree, but to the extent that it frustrates God’s plan to bring all humankind together in one community, the church. Anger has the potential to tear the community apart instead of building it up. This does not mean that every feeling of anger is prohibited. There are, indeed, occasions in God’s church when anger is not only justified but demanded. Paul certainly felt so in Antioch when (as he saw it) the authenticity of the gospel was at stake because of the hypocrisy of certain Jewish Christian leaders. With perhaps more fervor than prudence, Paul’s anger expressed itself dramatically, even explosively (Gal. 2:11-14). Whether or not we today agree with Paul’s assessment of the situation, the fact remains that Paul felt his anger to be justified.2 A similar case is Jesus’ act of driving the money changers from the temple (John’s Gospel, mentioning that Jesus used a whip, has the most violent of the accounts [2:14-16]). Like Paul’s anger in Antioch, Jesus’ anger was directed not at an 2. I pass over in silence Paul’s wish that bodily harm befall his enemies in Galatia (Gal. 5:7-12).

357

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

abstract condition of injustice, but at particular individuals. Finally, it is hard not to detect more than a bit of anger in some of John the Revelator’s letters to the seven churches. Even as the voice of Jesus, John seems fairly angry. Armed with these examples, we cannot simply and categorically declare that there is a divine law against anger and that every instance of anger is a sin. On the contrary, we must judge anger, and every emotion and related behavior, from the perspective of the well-being of the community of God’s people. We must, in other words, approach the pastoral issue of emotion not with the notion of divine law but instead with the tools of practical reasoning, using the well-being of the church (as well as other human communities) as the norm by which we offer counsel about emotions. Using the tools of practical reasoning, we no longer have to distinguish, in the ancient manner, between higher (rational) and lower (emotional) impulses, urging cultivation of the former and control or even extirpation of the latter. Instead, we distinguish those things, rational or emotional, that build up the church and sustain its well-being from those things, rational or emotional, that might destroy the church or diminish its well-being. Coming to Terms with Christian Asceticism It is a matter of everyday and universal experience that a life of unrestrained emotional expression is not an optimal life. People who are perpetually angry, who fly into sudden rages with little provocation, may be admired if they have other good qualities, but we commonly acknowledge something to be wrong with such a person’s character. Our culture permits and encourages a certain amount of pride in accomplishments, but most of us are repelled by people who talk about themselves endlessly and measure everything by their own accomplishments. Similarly, we feel pity for and sorrow over those who live continuously or for long periods in the grip of 358

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

anxiety or depression or despair. There is a common folk wisdom to the effect that feeling an emotion too much for too long is injurious to one’s well-being. It is also a matter of common experience that there is no natural, automatic process by which we regulate our emotions. On the contrary, the fact and antiquity of moral training tell us that learning to regulate emotion is a task that requires time and labor. Desires must be denied; pleasures must be postponed. Christian theology has nothing novel to add to the details of moral training. Even the doctrine of grace, as expounded by its most ardent expositors, was never thought to obviate the need of selfdenial and moral training. Divine grace may prompt us to discipline ourselves and supply help in doing do, but sanctifying grace does not work without our working and does not take the place of human effort. Christian disciples must labor at regulating emotions just like those outside the church. The Christian church does have something distinctive to say about which emotions are commendable and how they should be expressed, but being a Christian is no shortcut to moral virtue. One of the critical questions that the Christian tradition has had to face with regard to moral training is, How can the church impress on its members the moral necessity of regulating the emotions, passions, and desires without implying that these emotions are morally problematic? As I pointed out in chapters 2, 3, and 4, the Christian tradition has felt rather ambivalent about emotion and the body that houses them; this ambivalence is reflected in Christian moral instruction. Broadly speaking, there are two traditions of moral instruction in Christian history, extraordinary asceticism and moderate asceticism. Extraordinary asceticism was typically found in monastic movements. I offered a brief account of St. Anthony’s ascetic practices and theology in chapter 3. There I noted the extremes to which 359

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Anthony is reported to have gone in an effort to overcome the desires of the body—frequent fasting, eating just a bit of bread and water, sleeping infrequently and on the ground—and the shame that he felt at the thought of everyday bodily needs and functions. But even if we look at a less extreme example, the Rule of St. Benedict of Nursia, for example, we still see a commitment to extraordinary and heroic asceticism. It is true that Benedict allowed his monks more food and a greater variety of food than Anthony consumed.3 He grudgingly allowed monks to drink wine under supervision,4 and specifically intended for his rule to avoid the harshness of earlier forms of monasticism.5 At the same time, Benedict did not compromise at all when it came to emotion and virtue. His remarks on attaining humility are instructive. Humility requires the monk to be content with whatever happens, no matter how bad, because he should consider himself to be an unworthy and bad worker.6 It demands that the monk feel deeply (intimo cordis affectu) that he is lower than everyone else.7 It mandates monks to embody humility in their demeanor: they must always have head bowed, constantly meditating on their sin and the prospect of divine judgment.8 It is also notable that the Rule rules out laughter as inappropriate for monks.9 However, it is not only in the monastic tradition that heroic asceticism is honored. The dangers of worldly amusements were majors themes in the theology of Puritans and Pietists. American Protestantism has long possessed an ascetic tendency, illustrated by the popularity of the temperance movement and the behavioral 3. The Rule of Benedict, ed. Cardinal Gasquet, The Medieval Library (New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1966), 72–73 (ch. 39). 4. Ibid., 74–75 (ch. 40). 5. Ibid., 6 (the prologue). 6. Ibid., 33 (ch. 7). 7. Ibid. 8. Ibid., 34–35 (ch. 7). 9. Ibid., 20, 26, 34 (chs. 4, 6, 7).

360

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

restrictions characteristic of Methodism and the American Holiness Movement. The chief characteristic of extraordinary asceticism is the belief that anything untoward in the soul can and should be eliminated. The means of elimination are self-denial and ascetic practices. Now, there is no doubt that Christian discipleship requires abstinence from a great many things, especially things that are clearly immoral. But with respect to emotion, passion, and desire it is relevant to ask to what extent we must eradicate emotions that are spiritually problematic. Is the goal of the spiritual life to become free from anger, fear, sadness, jealousy, and other seemingly negative emotions? No one wants to be anxious or depressed, but does the spiritual quest require freedom from boredom and worry? And what of desire? Although Protestant ascetics have dissented, the monastic tradition has consistently urged the extinction of desires of all sorts, except, of course, the desire for God. Recourse to the Bible does not provide much help in deciding the good of and limits of extraordinary asceticism. The Old Testament barely entertains such a notion and counsels moderation, assuming that people will be angry, fearful, and desirous. The New Testament, however, occasionally presents us with an example of extraordinary asceticism. As previously noted, Matthew 5 calls on us to feel no anger. First Peter 2:11 urges us to abstain from fleshly desires that wage war on the soul. Paul wished (in 1 Cor. 7:7) that everyone could practice self-control in sexual matters and had a decidedly negative view of “the passion of desire” that characterized the Gentiles’ sexuality (1 Thess. 4:5). At the same time, Paul’s life did not lack troubling emotions. I have already mentioned anger, but there was also fear: he noted that his presence among the Corinthians was marked by weakness, fear, and trembling (1 Cor. 2:3); he experienced fear again in Macedonia awaiting Titus (2 Cor. 7:5). So, as argued 361

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

in chapter 2, the tradition of extraordinary asceticism finds substantial warrant in the New Testament; however, it is not at all clear that the New Testament as a whole assumes the importance of eradicating negative emotions. The problems with extraordinary asceticism are theological and scientific, not moral and spiritual. All Christian disciples will agree, at least in principle, that we must not be mastered by emotions, passions, and desires and that a life of subservience to them is not a properly human life. All Christians accordingly are called upon to engage in self-denial and discipline. Theologically, however, it is difficult to sustain the claims of extraordinary asceticism without also implying that the body’s emotions are inherently and irredeemably corrupt. St. Anthony’s sentiments about the body and its desires may be extreme, but they say something important about the impulses at work in this tradition. Scientifically considered, emotions are an intrinsic element of human nature; they perform vital functions. Anger and jealousy and fear are the organism’s way of perceiving threats or potential threats and preparing the body to act. Admittedly, sometimes the appraisal that launches the emotion is a misapprehension (as when we are angered by what we perceive to be but is not actually a slight). Further, there is no doubt that behavioral consequences of our emotional feelings can be out of proportion to the actual threat. But neither of these considerations signifies that these emotions are inherently evil and inconsistent with the life of discipleship. Theological and scientific considerations thus yield diminished support for heroic asceticism. One issue requires further attention, however, namely desire, especially sexual desire and its concomitant, sexual pleasure. As argued in chapter 2, the New Testament exhibits much less ambivalence about desire than it does about other emotions. To put it differently, the New Testament displays a considerable amount of 362

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

concern about desire, thus providing the tradition of extraordinary asceticism plenty of support. I have covered this topic in chapter 2, so here I will simply emphasize a few points. First, it should be noted that the word for desire (epithumia) bears an ordinary and positive sense, as when Paul stated that he desired to depart and be with Christ (Phil. 1:23; see also 1 Thess. 2:17; Luke 17:22; 22:15). Second, many of the passages in which desire has a negative connotation qualify the sort of desire that is negative. In Colossians 3:5 it is evil desire that is the problem; in Galatians 5:16 it is the desire of the flesh. In Titus 3:3 the problem is being enslaved to desire. In other cases, the context mitigates the New Testament’s unease. Romans 7:7 is a quotation from Exodus 20, where desire has reference to wanting what belongs to a neighbor. In Matthew 5:28, the context indicates that looking at a woman with desire is about desiring another man’s wife in a way that would lead to adultery. In these sorts of passages, the qualification of desire points away from the need to eradicate desire as such. It’s just the bad sort that needs extirpation. In spite of the first two points, it is, third, difficult to escape the impression that at some level desire itself is regarded as a problem in the New Testament. It is true that Paul qualified his prohibition of the “passion of desire” by associating such desire with the Gentiles; however, it is not at all clear why being a Jew or follower of Christ would exempt one from feeling the “passion of desire” in sexual matters or why Gentiles alone would feel such passion. Similarly, 2 Peter 1:4 asserts that the world’s corruption comes from desire. This verse does not qualify desire in any way. While it is not difficult to imagine a great many evil things arising from desire, the rather onesided way in which desire is here presented gives the impression that desire itself is problematic. The same issue attaches to Romans 6:12, 363

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

where the problem is obeying the body’s passions. Certainly, there is great pastoral wisdom in counseling us not to be subject to such passions or to anything else in the created world. But the absoluteness with which Paul discusses the matter suggests that the body and its passions are inherently problematic. Admittedly, it is sin that is the ultimate problem, but the mortal body with its passions is the site of sin’s attack on us. One gets the impression that we would be better off without this body, which is why Paul said that living in this body caused him to groan and to long to be clothed with his heavenly body (2 Cor. 5:2). When these sorts of passages are considered along with Paul’s clear preference for celibacy and the Gospels’ words about those who make themselves eunuchs for the sake of the kingdom of God, it is easy to sympathize with the tradition of extraordinary asceticism. However, sympathy does not imply unqualified approval. With regard to desire, the historical options may be generalized under three categories. First, we may think of sexual desire as an unqualified good. This is an unlikely thesis since only God is unqualifiedly good. Second, we may think of sexual desire as so irredeemably

problematic

that

the

only

right

course

is

abstinence—the tendency of extraordinary asceticism. Apart from the practical difficulties of getting widespread adoption of this view, it lacks a compelling biblical basis. As I noted above, it has some basis in the Bible, but even the New Testament for the most part presupposes that Christian disciples will carry on with sexual life. Additionally, there is the assertion in 1 Timothy 4:4-5 that everything created is good and capable of sanctification. Unless, after the fashion of early Christian writers, we imagine that sexual desire is not a part of humankind’s essential nature, we must acknowledge the goodness of sexual desire and its potential for sanctification. This consideration yields the third option, that sexual desire is a relative, not an absolute, good. 364

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

I have urged sympathy for the tradition of extraordinary asceticism, but I have also argued that it cannot be the fundamental principle governing Christian moral life. What, then, is its role in the Christian community? I suggest three roles: First, we may think of practitioners of extraordinary asceticism as analogous to athletes. The medical community advises us to be physically healthy and fit. Some of us heed that advice; some do not. Of those who heed the advice, a fraction do so with great diligence—not only professional and amateur athletes but others who habituate fitness centers and enter running events. These people function as non-normative objects of admiration and emulation. We admire them and may even wish to be like them to some extent, insofar as their industry may inspire us to greater efforts. However, their function as role models carries no normative weight; there is no moral imperative to practice as assiduously as they. So, in the Christian tradition there will be some who desire to excel in the matter of ascetic practice. They will be objects of admiration and, to some extent, emulation, but there is no moral imperative, for the demands of the kingdom of God do not require this degree of ascetic practice. Second, an individual or group may wish to undertake one or more forms of extraordinary asceticism as a form of witness or protest. As noted, the temperance movement in the United States aimed at raising consciousness about the abuse of alcohol and enacting legislation to control the production of alcohol. It is plausible to interpret third-century desert monasticism as in part a protest against what its adherents regarded as an overly lax urban Christianity. Like other movements of protest, movements of extraordinary asceticism usually enunciate, perhaps with some exaggeration, truths that the church needs to hear. As Flannery O’Connor once remarked, “To the

365

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

hard of hearing you shout.”10 Movements such as desert monasticism are a collective shouting to the church. Third, it makes sense for one to undertake extraordinary asceticism during certain seasons of life or during Lent. The ancient practice of regular fasting was a sort of temporary asceticism. Similarly, the ancient Jewish phenomenon of the Nazarite vow involved some measure of ascetic practice. For any of a number of good reasons, a Christian disciple may be prompted to become a temporary spiritual athlete. The Moderation of Emotion Christianity is a religion of moral seriousness. If extraordinary asceticism is not the norm, except for movements of protest and athletically inclined individuals, then Christianity’s morality must be the morality of moderation. There is plenty of support in the Bible, even the New Testament, for the strategy of moderation (e.g., “Do not get drunk with wine,” Eph. 5:17); it is practically the main theme of the Pastoral Epistles. The only problem with moderation is our sense that, as a moral strategy, despite its eminently practical approach to emotion, passion, and desire, it is hopelessly pedestrian and falls short of the heroic demands of the kingdom of God. When Jesus called the disciples, he was surely calling them to something more radical than moderation of passion and desire. The tension between moderation, as Christianity’s sensible moral path, and the rigorous demands of kingdom discipleship parallels other tensions in the New Testament. For example, in Paul’s circle of churches women had pastoral status and authority; contrary to this was the tendency of the post-Pauline tradition to consign women to traditional roles. Or consider the New Testament’s odd sentiments 10. Flannery O’Connor, “The Fiction Writer and His Country,” in Collected Works (New York: Library of America, 1988), 806.

366

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

about slavery: New Testament writers, it is clear, understood that slavery as it existed in the Greco-Roman world contradicted the gospel; however, the most they could offer was fairly tepid advice about being good slaves and masters. We can generalize by saying that the New Testament embodies two moralities, one socially radical and the other socially conservative. In the socially radical morality, disciples were called on to leave family and work and to find their identity in the new family constituted by the church. In the church there was a dramatic equality brought about by the collapsing of ancient social hierarchies. Here slaves were siblings and women could be apostles. It was in this morality that extraordinary asceticism found a natural home. In the socially conservative morality, the structure of the Greco-Roman household was maintained; Christians were counseled to find ways of being disciples within that structure. There was a partial collapse of social hierarchies, but some degree of hierarchy remained. In this morality, the ethics of moderation made the most sense and those who “forbid marriage and demand abstinence from foods” (1 Tim. 4:3) became objects of suspicion. The tension between these two moralities is patent in Paul’s letters. On the radical side, Paul acknowledged the apostolic authority of women (Rom. 16:3, 7), but he also regarded the husband and not the wife as the image and glory of God (1 Cor. 11:7-10). A permanent tension seems to exist in Christianity between these two moralities. The reason for this is not that there are two spiritual paths, one for the masses of Christians and the other for the athletes (as some in the monastic tradition have occasionally implied), but because of the structure of Christian eschatology. The world is passing away (1 John 2:17), but it is not at all clear how this eschatology is to be realized in practice. Does it mean that we should all maintain our current social, economic, and familial status (1 Cor. 7:17, 20; 21-24; 25-27)? Should some be counseled to marry 367

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

(1.Tim. 5:14)? It is fashionable to dismiss the Pastoral Epistles for their bourgeois mentality, but how long could early Christians maintain the ethics of eschatological expectancy? Sooner or later everyday life, with its demands of work and family, becomes a priority. When it does, the strategy of extraordinary asceticism is, for most disciples, necessarily replaced by the strategy of moderation. The world may be passing away, but as long as it is around and we are in it, most of us will have to work and it is understandable that even Christians will fall in love and want to have children. The life of moderation, then, is not a compromise but is, instead, the necessary result of the need to find a workable moral strategy in an eschatologically tensed world. As to the details of moderation, little needs to be said; there is a vast literature stretching back thousands of years that discusses the fine points. Armed with insights from science, it is possible to say old truths in new ways. Because emotion involves appraisal, one way of regulating emotion is to attend to its intentional object: Is the frightening object truly frightening? Is the intensity of fear commensurate with the reality of danger posed by the object? Is the ostensible object of the emotion the real object—does my anger toward X really disguise my anger toward Y? Emotion also involves action tendencies; consequently, we should monitor our behavioral reaction to emotion-inducing situations. Was I so overcome by anger that I spoke harshly? Did my envious state cause me to hurt another? Did my sense of pride cause me to belittle someone else? Besides these considerations, the collective wisdom of humankind tells us that emotional maturity involves learning appropriate contexts: there are times when modest pride is appropriate and times when it is not. There is an appropriate season for grief, but all of one’s life cannot be consumed by grief. Desire has objects that are good and appropriate but also objects that are not. Christian theology has little to add to the details of moderation 368

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

considered as a moral strategy; however, theology does have something theological to say about the life of moderation. This theological framework results from considering emotion, passion, and desire in relation to Christian community. If we ask why we should moderate desire or pride or anger or jealousy, the answer is that by doing so we nurture Christian community. At one level, this is common sense: humans are social animals and what we do and how we feel has an effect on our social relations. At another, theological level, we must keep in mind that the church is God’s principal project in the world, the manifestation of God’s wisdom (Eph. 3:8-10). That is why we must strive to “keep the oneness of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4:3) and why Paul regarded the divisions at work in Corinth as disastrous. As previously noted, if we are to maintain the oneness of the Spirit, then certain emotions and associated behaviors are enjoined: humility, gentleness, patience, love, kindness, forgiveness. Others are inconsistent with preserving peace: bitterness, wrath, anger, slander. Ultimately, the well-being of Christian community is the criterion that determines the good or bad of every emotion. Why is humility good and unchecked pride bad? Because the former sustains and the latter undermines the church’s task of being a community of brothers and sisters. Is there such a thing as excessive humility? Yes, if it is grounded in a wrongful denigration of oneself. Is there such as thing as measured pride in accomplishments? Yes. But these things must all be judged by their effect on community. Obviously, there is a class of emotions such as depression and grief that, although having a social dimension, must be evaluated by other criteria, including (in cases such as depression) imbalances in the brain’s chemistry. But if we limit the discussion to overtly moral emotions, then it makes sense to regard the well-being of Christian community as the criterion by which we make judgments about emotions, passions, and desires. 369

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

But if we think along these lines, are we not potentially legitimizing feelings like resentment and jealousy? Or even anger and hatred? If someone feels jealousy or anger but without behavioral expression and thus does not harm community, why does it deserve opprobrium? Are feelings themselves destructive and worthy of blame? There is a twofold response to these questions. First, it is not enough that we abstain from harming Christian community; we are also obliged to nurture it. Nurture requires feelings of love, friendship, and compassion. If we are consumed with feelings of jealousy, anger, and hatred, then we do not feel love and compassion. We may not be destroying community in any express way, but we are also not sustaining it. And, given the pressures that any community faces, failure to nurture has the effect of harming by neglect. Second, although we may not blame one another for momentary feelings of jealousy and anger, the danger is that unchecked feelings, feelings that we dwell upon, will calcify into fixed dispositions of character, so that the associated behavior becomes inevitable. An instant of unexpressed anger or jealousy may be no danger to community, but anger or jealousy that becomes an element of our character will surely manifest itself in communitydestroying behavior sooner or later. Employing community as the criterion for judging moral emotions helps us understand the New Testament’s emphasis on love (e.g., Col. 3:14). Love is a shorthand term for the panoply of emotions that nurture community—patience, kindness, and so on (1 Cor. 13:4-7). So, while love can be thought of as one emotion alongside others, it can also be regarded as the emotion that embraces everything necessary for Christian community to flourish. Love is, accordingly, the supreme community-forming principle, the one that determines the good of every moral emotion. This is why love will

370

THE ECCLESIAL THERAPY OF EMOTION

endure even when prophecy, miracles, faith, and hope are no longer needed (1 Cor. 13:13). The Sanctification of Emotion The premise of this chapter is that human emotions, passions, and desires can be sanctified. This premise is puzzling only for certain emotions—those normally regarded as negative. What does it mean to sanctify anger or jealousy? Or desire? Perhaps the puzzle lies in the meaning of sanctification. Sanctification implies more than moral probity; a person may be morally upright without being sanctified in the biblical sense of the word. Sanctification is the act of bringing something into the sphere of the holy. God is holy, but things can acquire holiness by acts of consecration. It is easy to see how a physical object can be consecrated—a devotee simply brings it to the temple and places it on the altar. It thus comes to belong to God; it is no longer profane (pro-fanum, that which is before or outside [pro] the temple [fanum], hence unconsecrated) but holy. Sanctification is effected by physically transferring the object to God via the altar. But how can emotions, especially the so-called negative emotions, be brought into the sphere of the holy? We get some help if we consider that it is not only things that can acquire holiness; Israel is the holy people of God. Its status as the holy people signifies not only that Israel belongs to God in a special way, but also that Israel must conduct itself in ways that do not contradict its holy status.11 Inasmuch as the Christian church is a continuation of Israel, it, too, is a holy people whose conduct is ruled by its status as a holy people (see 1 Peter 2:9). To change the metaphor slightly, we are 11. See Deut. 14:1-2, where Israel is forbidden certain foreign funereal practices because it is a holy people, and Leviticus 19, where a long series of moral commands are enjoined because of Israel’s holy status.

371

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

God’s slaves because God has bought us; we therefore do not belong to ourselves and must accordingly glorify God with our bodies and, presumably, the emotions of the body (1 Cor. 6:20). To sanctify the emotions, then, is to allow God to own them, to allow God to acquire glory through them. Equipped with this insight, the salient question becomes, How can God use my anger? My fear? My love? My desire? In practice this means loving what God loves and being angry at what angers God. It means, in other words, conforming our thoughts, feelings, and actions to God—becoming imitators of God (Eph. 5:1). We, with our emotions, thus enter the sphere of the divine and the holy by becoming like God. Through acts of devotion and discipline it is possible for us to share in God’s nature, for our emotions, passions, and desires to be godly. But godly does not mean spiritual in contrast to bodily or earthly. This is not the spirituality of the God who united with flesh. God’s being encompasses the physical, the earthly, the bodily. To say that our passions and desire are godly does not negate their bodily character. Instead, it means that my anger conforms to God’s anger and my love conforms to God’s love. Besides the practical meaning of sanctification, however, the sanctification of emotion bears an ontological meaning, for emotion, passion, and desire are ways in which I participate in both the world and in God. The ontological meaning of such godliness forms the subject of the final chapter.

372

11

Reason, Emotion, and Theology

Theological discussions of reason and emotion go beyond matters of morality. Such discussions are, finally, about how the Christian community should think about human being and about God. That is why theologians such as Augustine and Gregory of Nyssa puzzled over the relation between emotion and the image of God and why they readily associated the image with rationality. It also explains why they wondered about the place of emotion in the resurrected body. They sought to locate these phenomena in the structure of Christian belief from creation to eschatology, from morality to ecclesiology. Accordingly, the Christian tradition’s pastoral counsel to control or eliminate certain passions and desires is not simply a piece of moral advice based on practical experience. It is also a statement about humankind’s orientation to God and to the world and, additionally, a statement about the world’s relation to God. Do we belong in and to the world? What is the theological meaning of world in these discussions? Are we like God? If so, in which respects? Do passions and desires relate us to God? Or are they only the way in which 373

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

human being participates in the world of nature? Is it by virtue of rationality that we are like God? Does our rationality connect us to the world? Reason, Emotion, and Our Orientation to the World The Christian tradition’s ambivalence about emotion and its elevation of rationality is a reflection of its ambivalence about the world. Ambivalence about the world results from the intersection of the idea of divine creation and the apocalyptic belief that the world lies in a state of rebellion and corruption. Because of the doctrine of creation, the tradition had to exclude Gnostic and Marcionite theologies that refused to identify the Creator with the Father of Jesus Christ. It was vital to maintain a coherent and positive connection between creation and redemption instead of, as in Marcion’s theology, opposing the God of redemption to the God of creation. Even less tolerable was the later Manichaean equation of evil with sensuous, material substance. But the tradition’s apocalyptic convictions also meant that the created world must be regarded as flawed and thus in need of redemption. This in turn implied that certain features of the world must, prior to eschatological restoration, be avoided. Certain human passions and desires seemed to be obviously the features of the world that are so morally and spiritually problematic that either abstinence or rigorous self-control is required. At the same time, there are other passions and desires that are not only good but necessary implications of the redeemed life. The tradition’s apocalyptic convictions enabled it to assimilate the moral psychology of Greco-Roman philosophy and thus to portray reason as the natural governor of life, fitted to rule over the unruly passions and desires. It took little adjustment for early Christian thinkers to see a convergence between this moral psychology and the apocalyptic view of the world’s condition. Moral practice was thus 374

REASON, EMOTION, AND THEOLOGY

grounded in a theological-metaphysical understanding of the world and of humankind’s place in the world. It might appear that our situation today differs from that of the tradition’s early centuries. We do not today debate the relative importance of reason and emotion as Gregory and Augustine did. However, our ambivalence about the world remains and with it follows necessarily some ambivalence about human nature. That the Christian community still feels ambivalent about the world is evident in contemporary eschatology. On one hand, the world’s fallen condition is a major theme of the dispensationalist eschatologies that dominate evangelical theology; on the other hand, the idea of the kingdom of God that characterized twentieth-century liberal theology was decidedly world affirming, at least insofar as it considered the social domain capable of reform. These contrasting eschatologies encode very different ways of understanding and relating to the world: Is the world so hopelessly corrupted by sin that it must be replaced by new heavens and a new earth? Or is the church’s task to improve the present order of things? This sort of ambivalence is a consequence of the Christian tradition’s commitment to a strong doctrine of creation and an equally strong commitment to apocalyptic eschatology. The task for theology today is to honor both of these commitments while trying to achieve a consistent moral teaching. The doctrine of creation demands that we recognize and value our place in the world. To use the language of Genesis, we are dust, even if we are dust that can receive the breath of God. The New Testament’s apocalypticism, without denying our status as dust, proclaims that we have a glorious, transcending destiny: although we have borne the image of the man of dust, we will bear the image of the man from heaven (1 Cor. 15:49). Theology must, then, honor the fact that human beings have

375

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

an essential orientation to the world while also doing justice to our eschatological orientation to God. The traditional way of accounting for humankind’s twofold orientation was to correlate our orientation to the world with our passions and our orientation with God to reason. Such an understanding made a lot of sense in the ancient world, with its tendency to distinguish soul from body and reason from emotion. This path is not open to us today, however. Modern biological study shows how intimately reason is connected with the brain and with emotion. It’s hardly possible any longer to separate reason from emotion in the ancient manner. Moreover, as I showed in chapter 8, our everyday use of reason is thoroughly integrated with emotion. So, there is no scientific justification for maintaining the ancient distinction between reason and emotion. This means that we must regard both reason and emotion as ways in which we are oriented to the world. The Western intellectual tradition has never had difficulty seeing emotion as such an orientation, since we share at least some passions and desires with animals. Reason, however, has been a different matter, being traditionally seen as the God-like element within us. The way out of this problem is to think of the ways in which reason and emotion function. Instead of thinking of reason as a metaphysical property that we possess by virtue of our kinship with the divine, consider the ways in which reason is like emotion. Emotion, as argued previously, has an epistemic dimension—it is a way in which we experience the world around us. Emotion often involves attention selectively directed toward things in the environment to be pursued or avoided. Emotion is thus a way of perceiving or experiencing the world, a way that is focused on the value of things in relation to the experiencing subject. Without emotion it is difficult to see how experience would be possible, since nothing in the environment would be experienced 376

REASON, EMOTION, AND THEOLOGY

as having greater importance than anything else. Emotion is thus a hermeneutical phenomenon—an interpretation of our world. Reason operates in much the same way, although with notable differences. Reason is not correlated with physiological reactions as are many emotions, and its connection with behavior is not nearly as strong as is emotion’s connection. Nonetheless, like emotion, reason is a way of perceiving or experiencing the world around us. Admittedly, with rationality comes an expansion of the world that can be experienced. At the level of animal emotion, the object of concern is usually, perhaps always, whatever is immediately perceived or recalled in short-term memory. Fear is caused by this particular threat, anger by that particular annoyance. But with rationality comes an enlargement of experience. The world for us is not only what stands before us in the immediacy of experience but also the remembered past and the anticipated future, as well as events and people of which we have knowledge but no personal experience (as when we learn about contemporaries in distant parts of the globe). Our world additionally includes nonconcrete realities that are objects of knowledge: natural laws and regularities, moral norms and values, and social customs. In spite of the enlargement of our world, reason still performs a function similar to that of emotion—it interprets our world for us. There is a long tradition in philosophy, beginning with Immanuel Kant, of expounding just how human rationality interprets the world. In our context, the details can be ignored in favor of the main point, that what we experience as the world is largely the result of the operation of human rationality, keeping in mind that rationality is more than conscious, discursive thinking. Thus, whether we think of the categories of rational thought as transcendental (in the manner of Kant) or linguistic or social or in some other way, the point remains that these categories fashion the world of our experience in a preconscious mode of operation. Of 377

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

course, in some cases we consciously employ rational thinking to fashion categories and deploy them for the purpose of understanding, as when (for example) scientists create taxonomies of living beings (species, genera, etc.). However they come about, the categories of rationality function by allowing us to experience the extended world in just the ways in which we do experience it. We experience the world as orderly and coherent because we have, or have developed, categories of thought that enable us to experience the world in that way. Like emotion, human reason selects certain features of the environment and makes them available for experience and it is thus, like emotion, an interpretation of the world. Of course, reason differs from emotion in notable ways: knowledge gained through rationality readily lends itself to abstraction and generalization; emotional knowledge is far more subject-centered. But the Christian tradition has made too much of this sort of difference, leading it to overlook the way in which reason resembles the hermeneutical character of emotion. The common hermeneutical function of reason and emotion is a function of their bodily status. We know emotionally and rationally because our material brains have evolved in ways that enable us to interpret our environment. Without such interpretive mechanisms, our species would never have lasted long in the quest for survival. In comparison with other animals, we have evolved highly refined mental mechanisms that allow us to process enormous amounts of information and, when these prove insufficient, to create machines that carry some of the processing load. But we are still animals with brains that have evolved to interpret information from the environment. Reason, Emotion, and Our Orientation to God We are beings of the world; it is our home. Through us flow the 378

REASON, EMOTION, AND THEOLOGY

nuclear, electrical, evolutionary, social, and other forces of the universe. We are, each of us, transit points that receive these forces and in turn transmit them. Our evolved rational and emotional functions are ways—not the only, but prominent, ways—in which we participate in the universe of material forces. But in human being the universe also finds a voice and selfconsciousness. In human being material stuff and its forces have attained a level of organization, if that is the right word, that creates being who are aware, not only of their environment, but of their awareness of that environment, beings who ask about themselves and their place in the world. With the appearance of human beings the universe comes to self-knowledge. And these beings who seek to know themselves are driven to ask the question of God. So, reason and emotion not only relate us to the world but relate us to God as well. Reason and emotion are ways in which the world is opened up to us, ways in which we can experience the world. They are similarly ways in which God is opened up to us, ways in which we experience God. The traditional metaphor for our orientation to God is that we are created in God’s image. Whatever else this means, it signifies that human beings stand in a relationship to God in which other creatures do not stand. So, although we are dust into which God has breathed the divine breath, we are also the image of that God. We are turned toward the world and also toward God. Unfortunately, the Christian tradition has confused the idea of the image of God by identifying it too quickly with rationality. Such identification makes a lot of sense if we begin with the premise that God is rational mind. The result, however, is a truncated view of human nature, according to which we are rational beings who unfortunately found ourselves stuck with emotional bodies that prevent us from actualizing our rational potential and that wreak 379

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

moral havoc. If instead we begin with the premise that human nature in its concrete totality is the image of God in the world, then we must allow that emotion is part of what constitutes us as the image of God and thus orients us to God. We must also think about how reason orients us to God. We will begin with emotion. Although, from a traditional perspective, it may be difficult to see how emotion is an essential component of our nature and part of what makes us the image of God, it is not at all difficult to see how emotion orients us toward God; the heavy lifting on this task has already been accomplished in the biblical tradition. It is no exaggeration to say that in the Bible emotion is the predominant way in which we relate to God. Predominant, of course, does not mean exclusive. We relate to God by deeds, such as worship and loving the neighbor. We relate to God as well by rational thought, as when Psalm 8 invites us to consider the heavens as works of God. But the semantic burden of relating us to God falls on emotion words. Think, for instance, about wisdom. Although it is clearly important in the world of the Bible, its beginning is the fear of God. No fear, no wisdom. This does not mean that wisdom is reducible to emotion, but it does mean that a certain emotional disposition is needed if we are to attain true wisdom. Because true wisdom is the knowledge of God, it can be acquired only by those with the proper emotional disposition to God. The Bible abounds with emotions by which we are oriented to God. We hope but also despair. We are bidden to show gratitude. We are to rejoice in God’s works. We are to revere God and feel a sense of awe. Above all, we are to love God. As with our orientation to the world, emotions related to God are ways in which God becomes accessible to us, ways in which we experience God. We experience things and situations in the world as peaceful or threatening or joyous or tedious. In the same way, in the biblical 380

REASON, EMOTION, AND THEOLOGY

world the people of God experience God as angry or blessing or aweinspiring. Without an emotional apparatus, our experience of God would be dispassionate, perhaps like Aristotle’s discussion of the first mover. Meditation on the first mover may be intellectually thrilling but it doesn’t inspire the sorts of feelings that are characteristic of the experience of God related in the Bible. The first mover is too cosmic, the idea of it too preoccupied with cosmic order to inspire emotional connection. The biblical God, however, although performing some cosmos-maintaining functions, appears as an agent in human history, acting with emotion and inspiring emotion. Let us now turn to reason. It ought to be easy to see how reason gives us an orientation to God. There is a long history, longer than the history of Christianity, of employing reason to learn about God. The structure of the argument seems simple: if God is truly rational mind, then it should be possible for us, who possess rational minds, to know God, once suitable allowances are made for the difference between infinite mind and finite mind. This long history deserves to be honored; however, in the shadow of Kant’s critical philosophy and the numerous intellectual projects that have continued with its momentum, we must doubt that rational theology can deliver on its ostensible promise to deliver theological knowledge. There are several reasons why this account of reason in relation to God is amiss; the history of philosophy and theology in the last two centuries is a catalog of these reasons. Even if we want to think of God as rational mind—and this is a highly questionable conception of God—finite reason’s incommensurability with God stands in the way. The basic problem of rational theology is thus the assumption that there is some symmetry between God and humans, that the structure of human thought or rationality reveals something about God—that the same rationality that we employ in studying the universe or

381

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

solving crossword puzzles can be used to gain knowledge about God. It is thus necessary to reconsider reason in relation to God. Aristotle’s distinction between practical reasoning (phronēsis) and wisdom (sophia) provides a point of departure. The principal difference between these forms of reasoning lies in their respective objects: Phronēsis is the use of reason for mundane human affairs such as politics and household management; sophia’s object is eternal being.1 There are other differences (sophia makes use of demonstration; phronēsis does not), but they all depend on the differing objects. We do not have to accept every aspect of Aristotle’s philosophy, especially his absolute distinction between eternal and temporal being, to recognize the usefulness of distinguishing different uses of human rationality according to their object. Reason functions in one way when we are trying to determine the best means to an end; it functions in another way, with different rules of operation, when its object is the eternal. Aristotle’s notion of sophia in itself does not offer much help in coming to a theological understanding of human reason, however; it is essentially knowledge of the metaphysical structure of the universe, and as useful as this may be in certain contexts, a theological understanding of reason must go farther. We get more help if we consider the parallel that Aristotle describes between thinking and desire. Desire (or appetite, orexis) is about pursuit and avoidance: to desire something good is to want to pursue it; the opposite of desire is avoidance. In intellectual matters (he stated), there is something that corresponds to pursuit of the object of desire, namely affirmation of

truth.

Similarly,

negation—that

is,

recognition

of

falsehood—corresponds to avoidance. In other words, the good is 1. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 6.5 and 6.7 (1140a–1140b and 1141a–1141b), in Jonathan Barnes, ed., The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols., Bollingen Series 71.2 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), 2:1800–1802 (hereafter CWA).

382

REASON, EMOTION, AND THEOLOGY

to desire what truth is to intellect.2 Setting aside the differences in object (the true and the good), this remarkable statement posits a fundamental similarity between intellect and desire. Both have an intentional structure; desire aims at the good while intellect aims at truth. As Aristotle stated elsewhere, the object of desire (to orekton) and the object of thought exercise causation (or movement, kinēsis) in the same way, namely without being moved. He can even say that the first things of both desire and thought are the same, since desire ultimately depends on thought—the object of epithumia being that which appears to be good and the object of boulēsis being the true good.3 Intellect, then, has a desire for truth, just as appetite and practical deliberation have a desire for the good. Moreover, the true and the good coincide in the first mover: as noted, the object of sophia is eternal being and this applies especially to the first mover, for the first mover is also the highest good.4 Armed with this insight from Aristotle, we can now return to Plato. Despite numerous displays of anxiety about the senses, desire, and pleasure, Plato’s dialogues Symposium and Phaedrus argue strongly for the erotic character of reason. Reason, for Plato, is not simply or even primarily an instrument for calculating or inferring. Reason is instead that within us that seeks to know being. Because under the conditions of existence we are estranged from being, reason is characterized by striving—hence its kinship with erōs. The various methods that Plato described in the soul’s quest for knowledge—elenchos, dialectics, composition and division—are not the essence of reason for Plato; reason cannot be reduced to a procedural method. Instead, reason is a way of being. It is the way in which the soul participates in eternal being. But, as noted, in 2. Ibid., 6.2 (1139a) (CWA, 2:1798). 3. Aristotle, Metaphysics, 12.7 (1072a) (CWA, 2:1694). 4. Ibid., 12.10 (1075a) (CWA, 2:1699).

383

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

our present existential state our participation in eternal being is, in a sense, incomplete; it is not fully actualized as knowledge. The soul is therefore characterized by lack and by striving for union with eternal being. Reason is thus a manifestation of love, erōs. Aristotle’s and Plato’s ruminations about reason help explain the medieval concept of will (voluntas) as a rational appetite, the rough equivalent of Aristotle’s notion of boulēsis (rational desire or deliberation). For Thomas Aquinas, will combines elements of desire and reason. Like desire (which Thomas called sensitive appetite), will is appetite; it desires the good. But unlike sensitive appetite, which knows only particular goods (such as tastes and sights), will (rational appetite) is an intellectual apprehension of the good itself.5 Like intellect, will is a form of knowledge. But will is not intellect pure and simple: the object of will is the good and the object of intellect is the true. Although the good and the true are one and the same, namely, God, they are formally distinct. Hence intellect apprehends God, the highest good, as true; and will desires God, truth itself, as good.6 Thomas’s understanding of will, following the lead of Aristotle, shows us that the Christian tradition was able to produce a moral psychology in which reason is not utterly opposed to emotion, passion, and desire. For Thomas, the fundamental distinction is not between reason and desire but instead between intellect and will on the one hand and sensitive appetite on the other. This is an improvement over the rationalistic approach of classical philosophy, with its simple opposition of reason and emotion. It still regards desire (sensitive appetite) as humankind’s main problem, but at least it regards reason as possessing an appetitive dimension. The movement in thought from Plato to Thomas explains the 5. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.59.1. See Thomas Aquinas, The "Summa Theologica" of St. Thomas Aquinas, 22. vols. (London: Burns, Oates & Washburne, 1912-25), 3:96. 6. Ibid., 1.59.2 ad 2 and 3 (Summa Theologica, 3:99).

384

REASON, EMOTION, AND THEOLOGY

importance of Augustine’s understanding of the image of God. For Augustine, the image is not only intellect but also will, which Augustine identifies with love. Augustine’s trinitarian understanding of the image, according to which analogies exist between the Father and the soul’s memoria, between the Son and intellectus, and between the Holy Spirit and voluntas, and his emphasis on the unity of the trinitarian persons, means that there can be no fundamental difference between intellect and will. Although they are distinct, they must enjoy an underlying unity, just as the Son and Spirit are one in the divine nature. Intellect, then, must be a form of love. This dialectical understanding of intellect’s relation to will is an attempt to articulate a theme found in the Bible, particular in the Johannine tradition. It is well known that love plays a central role in this tradition. What is sometimes not noted is the way in which this tradition connects love and human knowledge of God. First John tells us that, because God is love, those who do not love do not know God; those who love are born of God and know God (4:7-8). In the dualistic fashion typical of the Johannine tradition, humankind is organized into two exclusive groups, those who love and those who do not. Only the former know God; the latter cannot know God. The unexpressed premise of the argument is that because there is an underlying unity of love and knowledge, those who lack love cannot know. The Johannine tradition, then, portrays knowledge, in its truest sense, as an expression of love. There is, then, a trajectory of thinking, both inside and outside the Christian tradition, that depicts reason as a striving for what is highest and best—God, the good, the true. But the striving in question is not a striving for acquisition. It is instead a striving for union. For Aristotle, sophia is not a gathering of information or an exercise in discursive knowledge. On the contrary, sophia is the one way in which humans can share in eternal being.7 This is because the life of 385

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

the gods can only be conceived as a life of theōria, whose virtue is sophia.8 In those brief moments of life when we engage in theōria, we participate in the divine, eternal life. Similarly, for Plato the goal of reason is not acquisition of facts or information, but a state of being: through the exercise of reason, we are able to achieve a postmortem existence with the forms. Meanwhile, in this life, the employment of reason enables us to actualize, to some extent, our participation in the forms of goodness, beauty, and justice. The Christian counterpart to the quest for union and participation is expressed most explicitly in the concept of theosis (or deification)—our becoming like God in the process of sanctification. This concept is prefigured in the notion of becoming partakers of the divine nature set forth in 2 Peter 1:4. But Christian interest in union and participation goes beyond sanctification, narrowly conceived, to include expressly intellectual motifs. Thomas Aquinas, for instance, held that humankind’s ultimate beatitude consists in the intellectual vision of God.9 It is an intellectual vision because reason is the highest power of the soul, intellect being a participated likeness (participata similitudo) of God, who is the first intellect.10 Of course, not every theological trajectory interpreted union with God in such intellectual terms. Bonaventure (1221–1274), for example, argued that, at the highest level of union, we leave behind intellect; only affect remains.11 But even for Bonaventure, the path to union involves reason, as when memoria and intellectus are portrayed as preparatory steps toward mystical union.12 7. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 10.7 (1177a–1177b) (CWA, 2:1860–61). 8. Ibid., 10.8 (1178b) (CWA, 2:1862–63). 9. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.12.1 (Summa Theologica, 1:121-22). 10. Ibid., 1.12.2 (Summa Theologica, 1:123-24). 11. Bonaventure, The Mind’s Journey into God, 7.4, in Bonaventure, The Journey of the Mind to God, trans. Philotheus Boehner, ed. Stephen F. Brown (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 38. For the Latin text, see S. Bonaventurae Opera Theologica Selecta, tomus V: Tria Opuscula, Sermones Theologici (Quaracchi: Collegio S. Bonaventura, 1964), 212–13.

386

REASON, EMOTION, AND THEOLOGY

In summary, both the Christian tradition and the classical tradition that influenced it know of mundane, pedestrian uses of reason but also of a transcending use whereby humans strive, by an erotic power, to achieve union (variously understood) with the divine. Within the Augustinian tradition, this understanding is symbolized by the connection, in the image of God, between intellect and will. Reason, then, alongside its obvious usefulness in mundane matters, is a way in which we are oriented toward God, a way in which we participate in God. To be rational is, theologically considered, to be drawn toward union with God by means of thinking. On the Relation between Our Two Orientations The Christian tradition has always recognized that humans have a twofold orientation, one toward the world and the other toward God. I have argued that it is best not to assign the former to emotion and the latter to reason, even though one can find such assignment within the tradition. On the contrary, both reason and emotion orient us toward the world and both orient us toward God. This symmetry within our twofold orientation raises the question of the relation between these two orientations. How do our emotional responses to people and events in the world relate to our emotional response to God? How does our knowledge of things in the world relate to our knowledge of God? This question is connected with one of the most seemingly intractable issues in Christian theology, the relation of God to the world. The matter is complicated by the fact that world can be taken in a metaphysical sense or in a spiritual sense. Thus, God created the world (in its metaphysical sense) but the world (in its spiritual sense) hates Jesus and his disciples (John 15:18). Each sense brings its own 12. Ibid., 3.2–3.3 (Journey of the Mind, 18–20; Opera Theologica, 194–97).

387

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

dynamics and problems. I will focus first on the spiritual sense, which has special relevance to emotion and the sanctification of emotion. The New Testament writers never weary of admonishing readers to avoid love of the world. In the New Testament’s implicit dualism, the world stands spiritually opposed to God, so that whoever would be saved must forsake the world. When worldly things are allowed, it is always with qualifications (marriage and food are acceptable if they are sanctified by prayer; wealth is permitted if it is not sought and is shared; 1 Tim. 4:3-5; 6:6-10; 6:17-19) or with an attitude of perplexed resignation (marital intercourse is not forbidden because at least it solves a problem with fornication; 1 Cor. 7:2-9). Augustine systematized the spiritual opposition of God and world with his concept of love. For Augustine, one and only one thing can be the object of love and that is the highest good. Or, to put it differently, whatever we love is for us the highest good, that in which we seek happiness. But since only God truly is the highest good, only God may be loved in the proper sense of the word.13 Love directed toward anything created constitutes idolatry, since by loving a created thing one treats it, and not God, as the highest good. There is a secondary sense in which we can be said to love our neighbors or our bodies, but this is strictly a secondary meaning of love. In these cases, finite things are loved because of (propter) God and not for their own sake.14 This is Augustine’s interpretation of the command to love God with all of our heart, soul, mind, and strength. The moral-spiritual issue associated with the opposition of God and world maps nicely onto the ethics of self-control and abstention. If we are to love God alone and, in a secondary sense, love things only 13. Augustine, On Christian Doctrine, 1.5.5; 1.22.20-21, in Augustin’s City of God and Christian Doctrine, vol. 2 of Philip Schaff, ed., A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: First Series, 14 vols. (New York: Christian Literature Co., 1887), 524, 527–28 (hereafter NPNF). 14. Ibid., 1.22.21; 1.27.28 (NPNF, 2:527–28, 530).

388

REASON, EMOTION, AND THEOLOGY

propter God, then many things in life cannot be loved at all. Love for something finite must be capable of being somehow brought under the concept of the love of God. The best advice for following this rule is to abstain from finite things as much as possible—in other words, to adopt the ascetic life. We can grant with Augustine that there is much in the world that we must not love and that love must be ordered and not excessive. We can even agree that some pleasures in life, especially those related to food, drink, and sex, are so easy to love for their own sake that either abstention or rigorous self-control is required if we are to love God supremely. There is something odd, however, in teaching that family and neighbors must not be loved for themselves but only propter God. At one level, there is nothing amiss in Augustine’s logic: finite things cannot really make us happy; that is why they should not be loved for their own sake. But Augustine’s argument is questionable when it asserts that the proper object of love is what is eternal and unchangeable.15 Only the eternal can satisfy the soul’s true desires and bring happiness. What is questionable about this analysis is its implication that whatever is finite is irrelevant to human happiness, unless it happens to play some instrumental value by giving us something eternal, as when martyrs used the wickedness of their persecutors to attain a reward.16 Augustine’s is the sort of theory that sounds commendable until we try to make it concrete. Is the happiness and joy that a child brings to a parent or a beloved to a lover truly ephemeral, not deserving the name love? What does it actually mean to love one’s child propter God and not for the child’s own sake? Does loving something finite for its own sake really require us to identify that thing as the highest good? Can’t we acknowledge the existence of lesser goods that are 15. Ibid., 1.22.20 (NPNF, 2:527). 16. Ibid., 1.23.22 (NPNF, 2:528).

389

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

nonetheless truly good and therefore capable of providing real if transitory and imperfect happiness? Does authentic happiness have to be eternal and perfect? Finally, does the New Testament’s mandate that we not love the world demand the metaphysical solution—the metaphysics of time and eternity—that Augustine’s theology supplies? Let us return to the Johannine tradition, which is very concerned with how love for God relates to love for members of the community. The first letter of John poses this penetrating question: “Whoever has the goods of the world and sees his brother in need and closes his compassion—how does the love of God abide in him?” (3:17)—and offers this observation: “Whoever does not love the brother whom he has seen cannot love God whom he has not seen” (1 John 4:20). These texts imply that there is no love for God that is not concretely manifested in love for others. More strongly, they suggest that we love God precisely by loving others. After all, “No one has ever seen God; if we love one another, God abides in us and God’s love is perfected in us” (1 John 4:12). God cannot be known in the manner of finite objects. On the contrary, the knowledge of God that is available to us—God living in us—is made actual by mutual love. So, loving God and loving the neighbor are not distinct acts. They are one and the same act. Perhaps this is what Augustine meant by saying that we must love finite things propter God (or, alternatively, in God17). But his mode of expression lends itself to the implication that the soul’s good is found only in what is eternal and not at all in the finite world, a sentiment surely out of step with the New Testament. So, with respect to love and perhaps other emotions, our emotional orientation to God and our emotional orientation to the world are not really two opposed orientations, and not even two distinct orientations. If it is true that we love God by loving the other, the 17. Augustine, Confessions, 4.9.14, in Saint Augustine: Confessions, trans. Vernon J. Bourke, The Fathers of the Church 21 (New York: The Fathers of the Church, 1953), 85.

390

REASON, EMOTION, AND THEOLOGY

neighbor, the enemy, then our emotional orientation to God is none other than our emotional orientation to beings in the world. Let us now consider the metaphysical sense of world, a sense that is especially pertinent to human reason. The Christian tradition has always been anxious about preserving the metaphysical distinction between God and the world. From prohibitions of idolatry (which seemed to attribute physical status to God) to philosophical arguments against pantheism, the tradition has worked tirelessly to assert God’s transcendence to the world. At the same time, the tradition has no use for a one-sided affirmation of transcendence in the manner of Deism, which would render meaningless important theological concepts such as providence and the incarnation. The task, then, has been to articulate a finely tuned account of God’s relation to the world that compromises neither God’s transcendence nor God’s presence in the world. One way of getting at this issue is to ask how we know God. The concept of revelation implies God’s transcendence; the word of God cannot be reduced to a human word or anything created. But revelation is always mediated to us by something created. Whether we think of revelation as the incarnate Logos or the prophetic word or mystical visions or in some other way, the word of God is always given by means of some created reality. There is no such thing as revelation that simply falls out of heaven onto earth and that would be an unmediated declaration from God. And if there could be such a thing, we would not be able to receive it as revelation; at the very least, it would have to be given in human words. The event of revelation therefore necessarily involves a conjunction of something transcendent and something created. This conjunction is similar to Plato’s understanding of the relation between the form of beauty and particular beautiful objects, an understanding that grounds the notion of recollection in his 391

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

philosophy. For Plato, beauty itself is an eternal reality whose being in no way depends on the being of finite objects. At the same time, we come to know beauty itself only by meditation on finite things that are beautiful. Plato envisioned a hierarchy of such finite beauties, the soul’s attention moving up the hierarchy from one to another, an image borrowed by Christian theologians such as Bonaventure in The Mind’s Journey into God. The central insight is that the eternal form, itself lacking every sensuous property, is revealed to us in and by means of sensuous, concrete things that embody that beauty to one degree or another. To souls that are attentive, apprehension of sensuous beauty can lead to knowledge of the form of beauty. Admittedly, for Plato, once the soul is liberated from the body it is able to know the form in a direct and unmediated way; but under the conditions of existence, the sensuous nature of bodily perception is the beginning and indispensable condition of our knowledge of the form of beauty. So, for Plato as with the Christian idea of revelation, the disclosure of what is eternal requires the mediation of sensuous, concrete realities and, of course, a sensuous body to receive the disclosure. This means that any attempt to overplay the distinction between orientation to the world and orientation to God is mistaken. Reason is, as previously affirmed, a way in which we are oriented toward God and toward the world; however, these are in fact not two distinct orientations. We may distinguish them for analytical purposes but in concrete human experience the orientation of our minds to God requires a simultaneous orientation to the world, for it is in and through worldly realities that God is revealed to us. I have argued, in effect, that it is salutary to resolve certain traditional oppositions: reason and emotion, orientation to the world and orientation to God. If we think dialectically about these matters, we see that reason and emotion are not two opposed phenomena but 392

REASON, EMOTION, AND THEOLOGY

are instead analytically distinct but concretely integrated. Likewise, there is no orientation to God, rational or emotional, without a corresponding orientation to the world; for sanctified reason and emotion, there is no orientation, rational or emotional, to the world that is not simultaneously an orientation to God. Indeed, sanctification may be defined as the process of orientating ourselves to the world as the actualization of our orientation to God. Reason, Emotion, and God This book has been an exercise in theological anthropology, a book about human reason and emotion. But it is also thereby a book about God. Augustine’s understanding of the image of God points the way: if there is indeed some analogy between the Son and human intellect and between the Holy Spirit and human will, then there is an important sense in which intellect and will are found in God. Of course, the Christian tradition had all along affirmed the presence of intellect in God—that was the thrust of the Logos theologies of the second and third centuries. And the tradition had acknowledged God’s will. Augustine’s contribution to this line of discussion was to subvert the classical priority of intellect, according to which will should always follow the lead of intellect. Augustine argued to the contrary that will may sometimes legitimately lead intellect, an argument that generated a centuries-long discussion about the relative priority of intellect and will. However one decides the matter, Augustine decisively altered the course of Christian discourse by setting will on a level with intellect in moral psychology. Doing so was necessary with the trinitarian analogy employed in his understanding of the image of God. Any subordination of will to intellect would be correlated with a theologically unsatisfactory subordination of the Spirt to the Son. Even if one chooses not to follow Augustine’s interpretation of 393

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

the image of God, there is still plenty of theological warrant for finding in God some reflection of human intellect and emotion. Thomas Aquinas, distinguishing between image and likeness, argued that while human beings contain the image of God, every creature, each in its own way, participates in the likeness of God’s essence.18 If each species of being thus stands in a relation of analogy to God, then surely human reason and emotion do as well. Of course, due to the importance of the idea of the divine Logos, there was never any doubt that something like intellect is found in God. More questionable was the presence of emotion in the divine nature. Here the Christian tradition has struggled to reconcile two impulses. One comes from the biblical portrait of God, with its frankly over-the-top episodes of divine emotional expression; the other comes from the assumption, variously expressed, that God is absolutely rational, in control, and therefore never emotionally overwrought. True, love and compassion were ascribed to God, and wrath as well, but in no sense could God be represented as being overcome by emotion in the manner of humans. The hermeneutical ingenuity of theologians has often been tested by their attempts to negotiate between Aristotle’s utterly impassive first mover and the emotionally capricious God occasionally found in the Bible. The assumption that, whatever else God is, God is rational, encouraged theologians to subsume divine emotions like anger to God’s rational character. If, however, Augustine was correct about the role and nature of voluntas in God, then we should avoid the temptation to make God’s rationality the one and only consideration. We must consider the propriety of ascribing something like emotion to God. Of course, emotion in the divine nature would not be like emotion in human

18. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, 1.15.2 (Summa Theologica, 1:219-21).

394

REASON, EMOTION, AND THEOLOGY

nature, just as intellect in God is surely different from human intellect. Nonetheless, if God is the creator of all things, then all things must find their basis in God. This does not necessarily mean that God is like creatures, although it is difficult to know just what it does mean, but as a formal principle, it must be acknowledged that whatever realities are found in creatures must somehow exist in God. The long history of discourse about theological language–discourse about negative theology, analogy, accommodation, and symbol–is an attempt at finding a satisfactory way of elucidating this formal principle. What is at stake is not only the doctrine of God but also our view of reality as a whole. Ancient Christians (at least the ones who wrote books) saw the universe as pervaded by God’s Logos—God’s rationality. With the possible exception of divine love, there was no comparable inclination to view the universe as pervaded by divine emotion. This was consistent with the ancient philosophical prejudice in favor of rationality and suspicion of emotion. I have tried to make the case, however, that there can be no neat separation between reason and emotion in human nature. On the basis of Augustine’s view of the image of God, we can say as well that there is no such separation of reason from emotion in God’s essence—not that we know all about God’s essence, but proceeding from the analogical nature of the image of God, we can state as a formal principle that reason and emotion must exist in an integral unity in God. If so, then there is no reason to assign a privileged role to reason in the universe as a whole. One way to think more concretely about the emotional dimension of God is to reflect on the primordiality of emotion. From an evolutionary perspective, reason is a recent newcomer and still present (so far as we know) in only a small portion of the universe’s beings. This means that for most of the history of life (at least on 395

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

earth and we assume elsewhere) beings subsisted in states of emotion, passion, and desire. Even today, most of human life is lived at that level. If intellect represents the light of conscious thought and awareness, then we have to say that the universe has existed in the dark and subterranean regions of the unconscious for most of its history. Perhaps, then, there is in God something like an unconsciousness, something other than Logos, something in which the primordial, passionate, and desiring forces of the universe find their basis just as human rationality finds its basis in the divine Logos. Perhaps this is what biblical writers were talking about when they ascribe seemingly irrational anger to God but also surprising compassion. If so, then our theology—our logos of theos—should portray God, not as pure rational spirit, but as the God in whom both rationality and the primordial, emotional forces of life and being find their beginning and end.

396

Bibliography

“The Acts of John.” In Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament, 93–108. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. “The Acts of Paul.” In Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament, 109–12. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. “The Acts of Thecla.” In Bart D. Ehrman, Lost Scriptures: Books That Did Not Make It into the New Testament, 113–21. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Allison, Dale C. Jesus of Nazareth: Millenarian Prophet. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1998. ______. “Divorce, Celibacy and Joseph (Matthew 1:18-25 and 19:1-12).” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 49 (1993): 3–10. “Altruism.” http://www-personal.umich.edu/~phyl/anthro/. Aristotle. Aristotle, Volume VIII: On the Soul, Parva Naturalia, On Breath. Translated by W. S. Hett. Loeb Classical Library 288. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. ______. Aristotle, Volume XII: Parts of Animals, Movement of Animals, Progression of Animals. Translated by E. S. Forster and A. L. Peck. Loeb Classical Library 323. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1937. ______. Aristotle, Volume XIX: Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H.

397

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Rackham. Loeb Classical Library 73. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926. ______. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. 2 vols. Bollingen Series 71.2. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984. Armon-Jones, Claire. “The Thesis of Constructionism.” In Rom Harre, editor, The Social Construction of Emotions, 32–56. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Arndt, Johann. Fünff Geistreiche Bücher vom Wahren Christentum. Leipzig, 1709. Arnold, Clinton E. “Returning to the Domain of the Powers: Stoicheia as Evil Spirits in Galatians 4:3,9.” Novum Testamentum 38, no. 1 (1996): 55–76. Ashby, F. Gregory, and Alice M. Isen. “A Neuropsychological Theory of Positive Affect and Its Influence on Cognition.” Psychological Review 106, no. 3 (1999): 529–50. Athanasius. The Life of Saint Antony. Translated by Robert T. Meyer. Ancient Christian Writers 10. New York: Newman Press, 1978. Attridge, Harold W. “An ‘Emotional’ Jesus and Stoic Tradition.” In Tuomas Rasimus, Troels Engberg-Pedersen, and Ismo Dunderberg, editors, Stoicism in Early Christianity, 77–92. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2010. Augustine. “Against the Fundamental Epistle of Manichaeus.” In The AntiManichaean Writings, The Anti-Donatist Writings, vol. 4 of Philip Schaff, editor, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: First Series, 129–50. Translated by Richard Stothert. 14 vols. New York: Christian Literature Co., 1887. ______. City of God. 7 vols. Trans. George E. McCracken, William M. Green, David S. Wiesen, Philip Levine, Eva M. Sanford, William Chase Greene. Loeb Classical Library 411–17. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957–1972.

398

BIBLIOGRAPHY

______. Confessions, Volume I. Translated by Carolyn J. -B. Hammond. Loeb Classical Library 26. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014. ______. Confessions, Volume II. Translated by William Watts. Loeb Classical Library 27. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1912. ______. “Contra Faustum.” In The Anti-Manichaean Writings, The AntiDonatist Writings, vol. 4 of Philip Schaff, editor, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: First Series, 155–345. Translated by Richard Stothert. 14 vols. New York: Christian Literature Co., 1887. ______. “Disputation against Fortunatus.” In The Anti-Manichaean Writings, The Anti-Donatist Writings, vol. 4 of Philip Schaff, editor, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: First Series, 113–24. Translated by Albert H. Newman. 14 vols. New York: Christian Literature Co., 1887. ______. “Enchiridion.” In Saint Augustine: Christian Instruction; Admonition and Grace; The Christian Combat; Faith, Hope, and Charity, 329–472. Translated by John J. Gavigan. Fathers of the Church 2. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2002. ______. “Of Holy Virginity.” In Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects, 135–214. Translated by John McQuade, S.M. Fathers of the Church 27. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999. ______. “On Grace and Free Will.” In The Teacher, The Free Choice of the Will, Grace and Free Will, 243–308. Translated by Robert P. Russell, O.S.A. Fathers of the Church 59. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1968. ______. “On Man’s Perfection in Righteousness.” In Saint Augustin: AntiPelagian Writings, vol. 5 of Philip Schaff, editor, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: First Series, 153–76. Translated by Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, rev. Benjamin B. Warfield. 14 vols. New York: Christian Literature Co., 1887.

399

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

______. “On Marriage and Concupiscence.” In Saint Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings, vol. 5 of Philip Schaff, editor, A Select Library of Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church: First Series, 257–308. Translated by Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, rev. Benjamin B. Warfield. 14 vols. New York: Christian Literature Co., 1887. ______. “On the Good of Marriage.” In Treatises on Marriage and Other Subjects, 3–54. Translated by Charles T. Wilcox. Fathers of the Church 27. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1999. ______. “On the Grace of Christ and Original Sin.” In Saint Augustin: AntiPelagian Writings, vol. 5 of Philip Schaff, editor, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: First Series, 213–55. Translated by Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, rev. Benjamin B. Warfield. 14 vols. New York: Christian Literature Co., 1887. ______. “On Nature and Grace.” In Saint Augustine: Four Anti-Pelagian Writings. Translated by John A. Mourant and William J. Collinge, 22–90. Fathers of the Church 86. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1992. ______. “On the Soul and Its Origin.” In Saint Augustin: Anti-Pelagian Writings, vol. 5 of Philip Schaff, editor, A Select Library of Nicene and PostNicene Fathers of the Christian Church: First Series, 311–71. Translated by Peter Holmes and Robert Ernest Wallis, rev. Benjamin B. Warfield. 14 vols. New York: Christian Literature Co., 1887. ______. “On Two Souls.” In The Anti-Manichaean Writings, The AntiDonatist Writings, vol. 4 of Philip Schaff, editor, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church: First Series, 95–107. 14 vols. New York: Christian Literature Co., 1887. ______. Saint Augustine: Confessions. Translated by Vernon J. Bourke. Fathers of the Church 21. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1953. ______. Saint Augustine: The City of God Books VIII-XVI. Translated by

400

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Gerald G. Walsh, S.J. and Grace Monahan, O.S.U. Fathers of the Church 14. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1952. ______. The Retractations. Translated by Sister Mary Inez Bogan, R.S.M. Fathers of the Church 60. Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 1999. ______. The Trinity. Translated by Stephen Mackenna, C.SS.R. Fathers of the Church 45. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1970. ______. “The Way of Life of the Catholic Church.” In The Catholic and Manichaean Ways of Life, 3–62. Translated by Donald A. Gallagher and Idella J. Gallagher. Fathers of the Church 56. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press, 1966. Augustinus. De Fide Rerum Invisibilium, Enchiridion Ad Laurentium De Fide Et Spe Et Caritate, De Catechizandis Rudibus, Sermo Ad Catechumenos De Symbolo, Sermo De Disciplina Christiana, De Utilitate Ieiunii, Sermo De Excidio Urbis Romae, De Haeresibus. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 46. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1969. ______. De Trinitate. 2 vols. Edited by W. J. Mountain and F. Glorie. Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 50. Turnhout, Belgium: Brepols, 1968, 2001. Aune, David Charles. “Mastery of the Passions: Philo, 4 Maccabees and Earliest Christianity.” In Wendy E. Helleman, editor, Hellenization Revisited: Shaping a Christian Response within the Greco-Roman World, 125–58. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1994. ______. “Passions in the Pauline Epistles: The Current State of Research.” In John T. Fitzgerald, editor, Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-Roman Thought, 221–37. Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies. New York: Routledge, 2008. Averill, James R. “William James’ Other Theory of Emotion.” In M. E. Donnelly, editor, Reinterpreting the Legacy of William James, 221–29. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1992.

401

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Axelrod, Robert, and William D. Hamilton. “The Evolution of Cooperation.” Science new series 211, no. 4489 (1981): 1390–96. Ball, Philip. “Schoenberg, Serialism and Cognition: Whose Fault If No One Listens?” Interdisciplinary Science Reviews 36, no. 1 (2011): 24–41. Barbash, Fred. “Major Publisher Retracts 43 Scientific Papers Amid Wider Fake Peer-Review Scandal.” The Washington Post, March 27, 2015. http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/03/27/ fabricated-peer-reviews-prompt-scientific-journal-to-retract-43-paperssystematic-scheme-may-affect-other-journals/. Barker, Margaret. “Some Reflections Upon the Enoch Myth.” Journal for the Study of the Old Testament 15 (1980): 7–29. Barrash, Joseph, Daniel Tranel, and Steven W. Anderson. “Acquired Personality Disturbances Associated with Bilateral Damage to the Ventromedial Prefrontal Region.” Developmental Neuropsychology 18, no. 3 (2000): 355–81. Barrett, Lisa Feldman. “Variety Is the Spice of Life: A Psychological Construction Approach to Understanding Variability in Emotion.” Cognition & Emotion 23, no. 7 (2009): 1284–306. ______, Maria Gendron, and Huang Yang-Ming. “Do Discrete Emotions Exist?” Philosophical Psychology 22, no. 4 (2009): 427–37. Barrier, Jeremy W. The Acts of Paul and Thecla: A Critical Introduction and Commentary. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum neuen Testament, 2e. Reihe, Band. 270. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2009. Bartel, Dietrich. Musica Poetica: Musical-Rhetorical Figures in German Baroque Music. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Barve, Aditya, and Andreas Wagner. “A Latent Capacity for Evolutionary Innovation through Exaptation in Metabolic Systems.” Nature 500, no. 7461 (2013): 203–6. Batson, C. Daniel. “Empathy-Induced Altruistic Motivation.” In Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R. Shaver, editors, Prosocial Motives, Emotions,

402

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and Behavior: The Better Angels of Our Nature, 15–34. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010. Bauman, Richard A. Crime and Punishment in Ancient Rome. London: Routledge, 1996. Baumann, Nicola, and Julius Kuhl. “Positive Affect and Flexibility: Overcoming the Precedence of Global over Local Processing of Visual Information.” Motivation & Emotion 29, no. 2 (2005): 123–34. Bell, Richard H. Provoked to Jealousy: The Origin and Purpose of the Jealousy Motif in Romans 9-11. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum neuen Testament 2e Reihe, Band 63. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr (Paul Siebeck), 1994. Berlin, Isaiah. The Roots of Romanticism. 2nd ed. Edited by Henry Hardy. The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999. Berridge, Kent C., and Morten L. Kringelbach. “Affective Neuroscience of Pleasure: Reward in Humans and Animals.” Psychopharmacology. 3 March 2008. http:// link.springer.com/article /10.1007 /s00213-008-1099-6/full text.html. Bird, Phyllis A. “‘Male and Female He Created Them’: Gen 1:27b in the Context of the Priestly Account of Creation.” Harvard Theological Review 74, no. 2 (1981): 129–59. Blair, R. J. R. “Aggression, Psychopathy and Free Will from a Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective.” Behavioral Sciences & the Law 25, no. 2 (2007): 321–31. Blanchette, Isabelle, and Anne Richards. “The Influence of Affect on Higher Level Cognition: A Review of Research on Interpretation, Judgement, Decision Making and Reasoning.” Cognition & Emotion 24, no. 4 (2010): 561–95. Blanning, Tim. The Romantic Revolution: A History. Modern Library Chronicles Series. New York: Random House, 2012.

403

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Bobonich, Christopher, and Pierre Destrée. Akrasia in Greek Philosophy: From Socrates to Plotinus. Philosophia Antiqua vol. 106. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Bobzien, Susanne. Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy. Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1998. Bonaventure. The Journey of the Mind to God. Translated by Philotheus Boehner. Edited by Stephen F. Brown. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993. “The Book of Thomas the Contender.” In James M. Robinson, general editor, The Nag Hammadi Library, 188–94. New York: Harper & Row, 1977. Bos, Abraham P. “‘Aristotelian’ and ‘Platonic’ Dualism in Hellenistic and Early Christian Philosophy and in Gnosticism.” Vigiliae Christianae 56, no. 3 (2002): 273–91. Bower, Gordon H., and Joseph P. Forgas. “Affect, Memory, and Social Cognition.” In Eric Eich, John F. Kihlstrom, Gordon H. Bower, Joseph P. Forgas, and Paula M. Niedenthal, editors, Cognition and Emotion, 87–168. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Boyarin, Daniel. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity. Contraversions: Critical Studies in Jewish Literature, Culture, and Society. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994. Boyd, Robert and Jeffrey P. Lorberbaum. “No Pure Strategy is Evolutionarily Stable in the Repeated Prisoner’s Dilemma Game.” Nature 327 (1987): 58–59. Briggs, Charles. L. “‘Since I Am a Woman, I Will Chastise My Relatives’: Gender, Reported Speech, and the (Re)Production of Social Relations in Warao Ritual Wailing.” American Ethnologist 19, no. 2 (1992): 337–61. Broadie, Sarah. Ethics with Aristotle. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993. Buller, David J. Adapting Minds: Evolutionary Psychology and the Persistent Quest for Human Nature. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2005. Busch, Austin. “The Figure of Eve in Romans 7:5-25.” Biblical Interpretation 12, no. 1 (2004): 1–36.

404

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Buss, David M. The Dangerous Passion: Why Jealousy Is as Necessary as Love and Sex. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000. ______. The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating. Rev. ed. New York: Basic Books, 2003. ______. “Sexual Jealousy.” Psychological Topics 22, no. 2 (2013): 155–82. Calhoun, Cheshire. “Subjectivity and Emotion.” In Robert C. Solomon, editor, Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, 107–21. Series in Affective Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Calvo, Manuel G., and Pedro Avero. “Time Course of Attentional Bias to Emotional Scenes in Anxiety: Gaze Direction and Duration.” Cognition & Emotion 19, no. 3 (2005): 433–51. Carpenter, Stephanie M., Ellen Peters, Daniel Västfjäll, and Alice M. Isen. “Positive Feelings Facilitate Working Memory and Complex Decision Making among Older Adults.” Cognition & Emotion 27, no. 1 (2013): 184–92. Carter, Carol Sue. Attachment and Bonding: A New Synthesis. Cambridge: MIT Press (in cooperation with Dahlem University Press), 2005. Charles, David. “Aristotle’s Weak Akrates: What Does Her Ignorance Consist In?” In Christopher Bobonich and Pierre Destrée, editors, Akrasia in Greek Philosophy: From Socrates to Plotinus, 193–214. Philosophia Antiqua, vol. 106. Leiden: Brill, 2007. Chua, Daniel K. L. “Rioting with Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of the Rite of Spring.” Music Analysis 26, no. 1/2 (2007): 59–109. Churchland, Patricia S. Braintrust: What Neuroscience Tells Us about Morality. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011. Ciaramelli, Elisa, Michela Muccioli, Elisabetta Làdavas, and Giuseppe di Pellegrino. “Selective Deficit in Personal Moral Judgment Following Damage to Ventromedial Prefrontal Cortex.” Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience 2, no. 2 (2007): 84–92.

405

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Cicero. Cicero in Twenty Eight Volumes: XVIII Tusculan Disputations. Translated by J. E. King. Loeb Classical Library 141. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. Cisler, Josh M. and Ernst H. W. Koster. “Mechanisms of Attentional Biases Towards Threat in Anxiety Disorders: An Integrative Review.” Clinical Psychology Review 30, no. 2 (2010): 203–16. Clement. Stromateis: Books One to Three. Translated by John Ferguson. Fathers of the Church 85. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1991. Clore, Gerald L., and Andrew Ortony. “Cognition in Emotion: Always, Sometimes, or Never?” In Richard D. Lane, Lynn Nadel and Geoffrey Ahern, editors, Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion, 24–61. Series in Affective Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Clore, Gerald L., and Janet Palmer. “Affective Guidance of Intelligent Agents: How Emotion Controls Cognition.” Cognitive Systems Research 10, no. 1 (2009): 21–30. Cochrane, Thomas. “Shared Emotions in Music.” Ph.D. thesis. University of Nottingham, 2007. http://eprints.nottingham.ac.uk/10286/1/thesis.pdf. Collins, Adela Yarbro. “The Female Body as Social Space in 1 Timothy,” New Testament Studies 57, no. 2 (2011): 155–75. Collins, John Joseph. “The Apocalyptic Technique: Setting and Function in the Book of Watchers.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 44, no. 1 (1982): 91–111. “The Community Rule (1QS, 4Q255–64, 4Q280, 286–7, 4Q502, 5Q11,13).” In Geza Vermes, translator, The Complete Dead Sea Scrolls in English, 98–117. New York: Allen Lane/The Penguin Press, 1997. Corley, Kathleen E. “Salome and Jesus at Table in the Gospel of Thomas.” Semeia, no. 86 (1999): 85–97. Corradini, Antonella, and Alessandro Antonietti. “Mirror Neurons and Their Function in Cognitively Understood Empathy.” Consciousness & Cognition 22, no. 3 (2013): 1152–61.

406

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Corrigan, Kevin. Reading Plotinus: A Practical Introduction to Neoplatonism. Purdue University Press Series in the History of Philosophy. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press, 2005. Craig, William Lane. “Paul’s Dilemma in 2 Corinthians 5:1-10: A ‘Catch-22’?” New Testament Studies 34, no. 1 (1988): 145–47. Craigie, Jillian. “Thinking and Feeling: Moral Deliberation in a Dual-Process Framework.” Philosophical Psychology 24, no. 1 (2011): 53–71. Croy, N. Clayton. “‘To Die Is Gain’ (Philippians 1:19-26): Does Paul Contemplate Suicide?” Journal of Biblical Literature 122, no. 3 (2003): 517–31. Crum, Alia J., William R. Corbin, Kelly D. Brownell, and Peter Salovey. “Mind over Milkshakes: Mindsets, Not Just Nutrients, Determine Ghrelin Response.” Health Psychology 30, no. 4 (2011): 424–29. Cullen, Joshua A., Takashi Maie, Heiko L. Schoenfuss, and Richard W. Blob. “Evolutionary Novelty Versus Exaptation: Oral Kinematics in Feeding Versus Climbing in the Waterfall-Climbing Hawaiian Goby Sicyopterus Stimpsoni.” PLoS ONE 8, no. 1 (2013): 1–10. Cushman, Fiery, Liane Young, and Joshua D. Greene. “Multi-System Moral Psychology.” In John M. Doris and The Moral Psychology Research Group, The Moral Psychology Handbook, 47–71. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. Dahl, Norman O. Practical Reason, Aristotle, and Weakness of the Will. Minnesota Publications in the Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Darwin, Charles. The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. London, 1872. Davis, Stephen J. The Cult of Saint Thecla: A Tradition of Women’s Piety in Late Antiquity. Oxford Early Christian Studies. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Dawkins, Richard. The Selfish Gene. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976. De Conick, April D. “The Great Mystery of Marriage: Sex and Conception

407

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

in Ancient Valentinian Traditions.” Vigiliae Christianae 57, no. 3 (2003): 307–42. De Sousa, Ronald. “Emotions: What I Know, What I’d Like to Think I Know, and What I’d Like to Think.” In Robert C. Solomon, editor, Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, 61–75. Series in Affective Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. de Vogel, C. J. “On the Neoplatonic Character of Platonism and the Platonic Character of Neoplatonism,” Mind, new series 62 (1953): 43–64. de Waal, F. B. M. The Bonobo and the Atheist: In Search of Humanism among the Primates. New York: Norton, 2013. ______. “Morally Evolved: Primate Social Instinct, Human Morality, and the Rise and Fall of ‘Veneer Theory’.” In Stephen Macedo and Josiah Ober, editors, Primates and Philosophers: How Morality Evolved, 1–58. The University Center for Human Values Series. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. ______. Our Inner Ape: A Leading Primatologist Explains Why We Are Who We Are. New York: Riverhead, 2005. ______. Peacemaking among Primates. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989. ______. “Putting the Altruism Back into Altruism: The Evolution of Empathy.” Annual Review of Psychology 59, no. 1 (2008): 279–300. Deigh, John. “Primitive Emotions.” In Robert C. Solomon, editor, Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, 9–27. Series in Affective Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. DeLancey, Craig. Passionate Engines: What Emotions Reveal about Mind and Artificial Intelligence. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. DeNault, Lisa K., and Donald A. McFarlane. “Reciprocal Altruism between Male Vampire Bats, Desmodus Rotundus.” Animal Behaviour 49, no. 3 (1995): 855. Derntl, Birgit, Ute Habel, Simon Robinson, Christian Windischberger, Ilse

408

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Kryspin-Exner, Ruben C Gur, and Ewald Moser. “Culture but Not Gender Modulates Amygdala Activation During Explicit Emotion Recognition.” BMC Neuroscience 13, no. 1 (2012): 54–64. Descartes, René. “The Passions of the Soul.” In The Philosophical Works of Descartes, 329–427. 2 vols. Translated by Elizabeth S. Haldane and G. R. T. Ross. N.p.: Dover Pubs., 1955. Destrée, Pierre. “Aristotle on the Causes of Akrasia.” In Pierre Destrée and Christopher Bobonich, editors, Akrasia in Greek Philosophy: From Socrates to Plotinus, 139–65. Philosophia Antiqua vol. 106. Boston: Brill Academic, 2007. Dihle, Albrecht. The Theory of the Will in Classical Antiquity. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982. Diogenes Laertius. Lives of Eminent Philosophers. 2 vols. Translated by R. D. Hicks. Loeb Classical Library 184 and 185. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1931. Dixon, Thomas. From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Dodds, E. R. “The Parmenides of Plato and the Origin of the Neoplatonic ‘One’.” The Classical Quarterly 22, no. 3/4 (1928): 129–42. Drace, Sasa. “Evidence for the Role of Affect in Mood Congruent Recall of Autobiographic Memories.” Motivation & Emotion 37, no. 3 (2013): 623–28. Dugatkin, Lee Alan. Cooperation among Animals: An Evolutionary Perspective. Oxford Series in Ecology and Evolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Dulk, Matthijs den. “I Permit No Woman to Teach except for Thecla: The Curious Case of the Pastoral Epistles and the Acts of Paul Reconsidered.” Novum Testamentum 54, no. 2 (2012): 176–203. Dunn, Peter Wallace. “The Acts of Paul and the Pauline Legacy in the Second Century.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1996. https://actapauli.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/pwdunn1996.pdf.

409

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Edelstein, Robin S., Kristen Weede Alexander, Gail S. Goodman, and Jeremy W. Newton. “Emotion and Eyewitness Testimony.” In Daniel Reisberg and Paula Hertel, editors, Memory and Emotion, 308–46. Series in Affective Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Edwards, Jonathan. Religious Affections. Edited by John E. Smith. The Works of Jonathan Edwards 2. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959. Ehrman, Bart D., and Mark A. Plunkett. “The Angel and the Agony: The Textual Problem of Luke 22:43-44.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 45, no. 3 (1983): 401–16. Ekman, Paul. “Are There Basic Emotions?” Psychological Review 99, no. 3 (1992): 550–53. ______, and Daniel Cordaro. “What Is Meant by Calling Emotions Basic.” Emotion Review 3, no. 4 (2011): 364–70. Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2000. Ellis, J. Edward. Paul and Ancient Views of Sexual Desire: Paul’s Sexual Ethics in 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 Corinthians 7, and Romans 1. Library of New Testament Studies. London: T&T Clark, 2007. Engberg-Pedersen, Troels. Paul and the Stoics. Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2000. Epictetus. The Discourses as Reported by Arrian, the Manual, and Fragments. 2 vols. Translated by W. A. Oldfather. Loeb Classical Library 131 and 218. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926. Euripides. Euripides Volume I: Cyclops. Alcestis. Medea. Edited and translated by David Kovacs. Loeb Classical Library 12. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994. ______. Women on the Edge: Four Plays. Translated by Ruby Blondell, MaryKay Gamel, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, and Bella Zweig. The New Classical Canon. New York: Routledge, 1999. Feuerbach, Ludwig. The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot. New York: Harper & Brothers/Harper Torchbooks, 1957.

410

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Fisher, Helen E. “Lust, Attraction, and Attachment in Mammalian Reproduction.” Human Nature 9, no. 1 (1998): 23–52. Forbes,

Christopher.

“Pauline

Demonology

and/or

Cosmology?

Principalities, Powers and the Elements of the World in Their Hellenistic Context.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 85 (2002): 51–73. ______. “Paul’s Principalities and Powers: Demythologizing Apocalyptic?” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 82 (2001): 61–88. Fraade, Steven D. “Ascetical Aspects of Ancient Judaism.” In Arthur Green, editor, Jewish Spirituality: From the Bible through the Middle Ages, 253–88. Vol. 13 of World Spirituality: An Encyclopedia of the Religious Quest. New York: Crossroad, 1996. Franck, Augustus Herman [sic]. A Guide to the Reading and Study of the Holy Scriptures. Translated by William Jacques. Philadelphia, 1823. Fredrickson, David E. “Natural and Unnatural Use in Romans 1:24-27: Paul and the Philosophic Critique of Eros.” In David L. Balch, editor, Homosexuality, Science, and the “Plain Sense” of Scripture, 197–222. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2000. ______. “Passionless Sex in 1 Thessalonians 4:4-5.” Word & World 23, no. 1 (2003): 23–30. Freedman, Lauren F., and Simon N. Verdun-Jones. “Blaming the Parts Instead of the Person: Understanding and Applying Neurobiological Factors Associated with Psychopathy.” Canadian Journal of Criminology & Criminal Justice 52, no. 1 (2010): 29–53. Frend, W. H. C. “Doctrine of Man in the Early Church: An Historical Approach.” Modern Churchman 45, no. 3 (1955): 216–31. Frijda, Nico H., and Batja Mesquita. “The Social Roles and Functions of Emotions.” In Shinobu Kitayama and Hazel Rose Markus, editors, Emotion and Culture: Empirical Studies of Mutual Influence, 51–88. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 1994; electronic edition. 2013. Gaca, Kathy L. The Making of Fornication: Eros, Ethics, and Political Reform

411

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

in Greek Philosophy and Early Christianity. The Joan Palevsky Imprint in Classical Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Gadagkar, Raghavendra. “Rats Are Nicer Than We Think, at Least to Each Other.” Journal of Biosciences 32, no. 6 (2007): 1223–25. Gaïth, Jérome. La Conception De La Liberté chez Grégoire de Nysse. Études de Philosophie Médiévale 43. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1953. Garrett, Susan R. “Beloved Physician of the Soul: Luke as Advocate for Ascetic Practice.” In Leif E. Vaage and Vincent L. Wimbush, editors, Asceticism and the New Testament, 71–95. New York: Routledge, 1999. Gass, Michael. “Eudaimonism and Theology in Stoic Accounts of Virtue.” Journal of the History of Ideas 61, no. 1 (2000): 19–37. Gaukroger, Stephen. The Soft Underbelly of Reason: The Passions in the Seventeenth

Century.

Routledge

Studies

in

Seventeenth-Century

Philosophy. London: Routledge, 1998. Gibson, Abraham H. “Edward O. Wilson and the Organicist Tradition.” Journal of the History of Biology 46, no. 4 (2013): 599–630. Gilbert, N. W. “The Concept of the Will in Early Latin Philosophy.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 1 (1963): 17–35. Goldie, Peter. “Emotion, Feeling, of the World and Knowledge.” In Robert C. Solomon, editor, Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, 91–106. Series in Affective Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Gonzalez, Andrea. “The Impact of Childhood Maltreatment on Biological Systems: Implications for Clinical Interventions.” Paediatrics & Child Health 18, no. 8 (2013): 415–18. Gotlib, Ian H., Elena Krasnoperova, Dana Neubauer Yue, and Jutta Joormann. “Attentional Biases for Negative Interpersonal Stimuli in Clinical Depression.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 113, no. 1 (2004): 127–35. Gould, Stephen Jay, and Richard C. Lewontin. “The Spandrels of San Marco

412

BIBLIOGRAPHY

and the Panglossian Paradigm: A Critique of the Adaptationist Programme.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Series B 205, no. 1161 (1979): 581–98. Grange, Kathleen M. “The Ship Symbol as a Key to Former Theories of the Emotion.” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 36 (1962): 512–23. Graver, Margaret. Stoicism and Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007. Gray, Kurt, Adrian F. Ward, and Michael I. Norton. “Paying It Forward: Generalized Reciprocity and the Limits of Generosity.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143, no. 1 (2014): 247–54. Green, Alexander L., Erlick A. C. Pereira, and Tipu Z. Aziz. “Deep Brain Stimulation and Pleasure.” In Morten L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge, editors, Pleasures of the Brain, 302–319. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Greene, Joshua D. “The Secret Joke of Kant’s Soul.” In W. SinnottArmstrong, editor, Moral Psychology, Vol. 3: The Neuroscience of Morality: Emotion, Disease, and Development, 35–79. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2008. Greenspan, Patricia. “Emotions, Rationality, and Mind/Body.” In Robert C. Solomon, editor, Thinking about Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, 125–34. Series in Affective Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Gregory of Nyssa. “De Anima et Resurrectione.” In vol. 46 of J.-P. Migne, editor, Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, cols. 12–160. 161 vols. Paris: Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1857. ______. “De Hominis Opificio.” In vol. 44 of J.-P. Migne, editor, Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca, 123–256. 161 vols. Paris: Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1857. ______. “The Great Catechism.” In Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, Select Writings and Letters, vol. 5 of Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, editors, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church.

413

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Second Series, 471–509. 14 vols. New York: Christian Literature Co., 1892. ______. Gregorii Nysseni De Vita Moysis. Edited by Herbert Musurillo. Vol. 7, pt. 1 of Gregorii Nysseni Opera. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1991. ______. Homilies on the Song of Songs. Translated by Richard A. Norris. Writings from the Greco-Roman World 13. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2012. ______. Life of Moses. Translated by Abraham J. Malherbe and Everett Ferguson. Classics of Western Spirituality. New York: Paulist Press, 1978. ______. “On Perfection.” In Ascetical Works, 93–122. Translated by Virginia Woods Callahan. Fathers of the Church 58. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967. ______. “On the Making of Man.” In Gregory of Nyssa: Dogmatic Treatises, Select Writings and Letters, vol. 5 of Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, editors, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Second Series, 387–427. 14 vols. New York: Christian Literature Co., 1892. ______. “On the Soul and Resurrection.” In Ascetical Works, 195–274. Translated by Virginia Woods Callahan. Fathers of the Church 58. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967. ______. “On Virginity.” In Ascetical Works, 3–75. Translated by Virginia Woods Callahan. Fathers of the Church 58. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1967. Griffith, Frank, and David Machin. “Communicating the Ideas and Attitudes of Spying in Film Music: A Social Semiotic Approach.” Sign Systems Studies 42, no. 1 (2014): 72–97. Griffiths, Paul. What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Science and Its Conceptual Foundations. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Hagen, Edward H., and Donald Symons. “Natural Psychology, the

414

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Environment of Evolutionary Adaptedness, and the Structure of Cognition.” In Steven W. Gangestad and Jeffry A. Simpson, editors, The Evolution of Mind: Fundamental Questions and Controversies, 38–44. New York: Guilford, 2007. Hahne, Harry Alan. The Corruption and Redemption of Creation: Nature in Romans 8:19-22 and Jewish Apocalyptic Literature. Library of New Testament Studies. London: T&T Clark, 2006. Haidt, Jonathan. “The Emotional Dog and Its Rational Tail: A Social Intuitionist Approach to Moral Judgment.” Psychological Review 108, no. 4 (2001): 814–34. ______. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon, 2012. Halperin, David M. “Platonic Erôs and What Men Call Love.” Ancient Philosophy 5, no. 2 (2008): 161–204. Hamman, Adalbert G. L’Homme, image de Dieu. Essai d’une anthropologie chrétienne dans l’Eglise des cinq premiers siècles. Relais-Études. Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 1987. Harenski, Carla L., Keith A. Harenski, Matthew S. Shane, and Kent A. Kiehi. “Aberrant Neural Processing of Moral Violations in Criminal Psychopaths.” Journal of Abnormal Psychology 119, no. 4 (2010): 863–74. Harrison, Verna E. F. Grace and Human Freedom according to St Gregory of Nyssa. Studies in the Bible and Early Christianity 30. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time: A Translation of Sein und Zeit. Translated by Joan Stambaugh. SUNY Series in Contemporary Continental Philosophy. Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 1996. Hein, Grit, and Tania Singer. “Neuroscience Meets Social Psychology and Integrity of Approach to Human Empathy and Prosocial Behavior.” In Mario Mikulincer and Phillip R. Shaver, editors, Prosocial Motives,

415

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Emotions, and Behavior: The Better Angels of Our Nature, 109–25. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 2010. Hill, Peter. Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Hindle, Maurice. “Humphry Davy and William Wordsworth: A Mutual Influence.” Romanticism 18, no. 1 (2012): 16–29. Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1977. Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan: Or, the Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiastical and Civil. Edited by Michael Oakeshott. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946. Hock, Ronald F. “God’s Will at Thessalonica and Greco-Roman Asceticism.” In Leif E. Vaage and Vincent L. Wimbush, editors, Asceticism and the New Testament, 159–70. New York: Routledge, 1999. Holcomb III, Harmon R. “Buller Does to Evolutionary Psychology What Kitcher Did to Sociobiology.” Evolutionary Psychology 3 (2005): 392–401. Honing, Henkjan. Illiterate Listener: On Music Cognition, Musicality and Methodology. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011. Horowitz, Maryanne Cline. “The Image of God in Man: Is Women Included?” Harvard Theological Review 72, no. 3–4 (1979): 175–206. Hughes, Robert P., Richard A. Taruskin, and Thomas A. Koster, editors. Ars Rossica: Freedom from Violence and Lies: Essays on Russian Poetry and Music by Simon Karlinsky. Brighton, MA: Academic Studies Press, 2013. Hume, David. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by L. A. Selby-Bigge. Oxford: Clarendon Press/Oxford University Press, 1973. Hunter, David. Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity: The Jovinianist Controversy. Oxford Early Christian Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Huntsinger, Jeffrey R., Linda M. Isbell, and Gerald L. Clore. “The Affective

416

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Control of Thought: Malleable, Not Fixed.” Psychological Review 121, no. 4 (2014): 600–618. Hyland, Drew A. Plato and the Question of Beauty. Studies in Continental Thought. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. ______. “῎Ερως, ᾿Επιθυμία, and Φιλία in Plato.” Phronesis 13, no. 1 (1968): 32–46. Irenaeus. Against Heresies. In Apostolic Fathers, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, vol. 1 of Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, editors, The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A. D. 325, 309–567. 9 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903. ______. St. Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies Book 1. Translated by Dominic J. Unger, O.F.M. Cap., and John J. Dillon. Ancient Christian Writers 55. New York: Paulist Press, 1992. ______. St. Irenaeus of Lyons Against the Heresies Book 3. Translated by Dominic J. Unger, O.F.M. Cap., and M. C. Steenberg. Ancient Christian Writers 64. New York: Paulist Press, 2012. Irwin, Terence H. “Aristotle Reads the Protagoras.” In Tobias Hoffmann, editor, Weakness of Will from Plato to the Present, 22–41. Studies in Philosophy and the History of Philosophy. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2008. Izard, Carroll E., Christina A. Fantauzzo, Janine M. Castle, and O. Maurice Haynes. “The Ontogeny and Significance of Infants’ Facial Expressions in the First 9 Months of Life.” Developmental Psychology 31, no. 6 (1995): 997–1013. Jack, Rachael E., Roberto Caldara, and Philippe G. Schyns. “Internal Representations Reveal Cultural Diversity in Expectations of Facial Expressions of Emotion.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 141, no. 1 (2012): 19–25. Jackendoff, Ray and Fred Lerdahl. “The Capacity for Music: What Is It, and What’s Special About It?” Cognition 100, no. 1 (2006): 33–72.

417

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

James, William. “The Physical Basis of Emotion.” Psychological Review 1 (1894): 516–29. ______. The Principles of Psychology. 2 vols. New York: Henry Holt, 1890. ______. “The Sentiment of Rationality.” In The Will to Believe: And Other Essays in Popular Philosophy, 57–89. New York: Longman, Green, and Co., 1912. ______. “What Is an Emotion?” Mind old series 9 (1884): 188–205. Jerome. “Against Jovinian.” In Jerome: Letters and Select Works, vol. 6 of Philip Schaff and Henry Wace, editors, A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church. Second Series, 346–416. 14 vols. New York: Christian Literature Co., 1892. ______. The Letters of St. Jerome: Vol 1. Translated by Charles Christopher Mierow. Ancient Christian Writers 33. New York: Newman Press, 1963. ______. Works. Translated by John N. Hritzu. Fathers of the Church 53. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1965. Jerusalem, Cyril of. The Works of Saint Cyril of Jerusalem: Volume 1. Translated by Leo P. McCauley, S.J., and Anthony Stephenson. Fathers of the Church 61. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1969. Jewett, Robert. Paul’s Anthropological Terms: A Study of Their Use in Conflict Settings. Arbeiten zur Geschichte des antiken Judentums und des Urchristentums. Leiden: Brill, 1971. Jipp, Joshua W. “Educating the Divided Soul in Paul and Plato: Reading Romans 7:7-25 and Plato’s Republic.” In Stanley E. Porter, editor, Paul: Jew, Greek, and Roman, 231–57. Pauline Studies, vol. 5. Boston: Brill, 2008. Johnson, Luke Timothy. “Transformation of the Mind and Moral Discernment in Paul.” In John T. Fitzgerald and Thomas H. Olbricht, editor, Early Christianity and Classical Culture: Comparative Studies in

418

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Honor of Abraham J. Malherbe, 215–36. Supplements to Novum Testamentum. Leiden: Brill, 2003. Jordan-DeCarbo, Joyce, and Jo Ann Nelson. “Music and Early Childhood Education.” In Richard Colwell and Carol P. Richardson, editors, The New Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning: A Project of the Music Educators National Conference, 210–42. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Joyce, Richard. The Evolution of Morality. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006. Juslin, Patrik N. “Emotional Communication in Music Performance: A Functionalist Perspective and Some Data.” Music Perception 14, no. 4 (1997): 383–418. ______, and Petri Laukka. “Communication of Emotions in Vocal Expression and Music Performance: Different Channels, Same Code?” Psychological Bulletin 129, no. 5 (2003): 770–814. Kaessmann, Henrik. “Origins, Evolution, and Phenotypic Impact of New Genes.”

Genome

Research

20,

no.

10

(2010):

1313–26.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2945180/. Kahneman, Daniel, and Shane Frederick. “A Model of Heuristic Judgment.” In Keith James Holyoak and Robert G. Morrison, editors, The Cambridge Handbook of Thinking and Reasoning, 267–94. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Kalinak, Kathryn Marie. Settling the Score: Music and the Classical Hollywood Film. Wisconsin Studies in Film. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. Kandinsky, Wassily. On the Spiritual in Art: First Complete English Translation with Four Full Colour Page Reproductions, Woodcuts and Half Tones. Edited by Hilla Rebay. New York: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation, 1946. Katz, Joseph. “Plotinus and the Gnostics.” Journal of the History of Ideas 15, no. 2 (1954): 289–98.

419

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Keenan, Mary Emily. “De Professione Christiana and De Perfectione: A Study of the Ascetical Doctrine of Saint Gregory of Nyssa.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 5 (1950): 167–207. Kelle, Brad E. “Postwar Rituals of Return and Reintegration.” In Brad E. Kelle, Frank Ritchel Ames and Jacob L. Wright, editors, Warfare, Ritual, and Symbol in Biblical and Modern Contexts, 205–42. Society of Biblical Literature Ancient Israel and Its Literature. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature, 2014. Keltner, Dacher, and Paul Ekman. “Facial Expression of Emotion.” In Michael Lewis and Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, editors, Handbook of Emotions, 236–49, 2nd ed. New York: Guilford, 2000. King, Peter. “Dispassionate Passions.” In Martin Pickavé and Lisa Shapiro, editors, Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, 9–31. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012. Kloppenborg, John S. “James 1:2-15 and Hellenistic Psychagogy.” Novum Testamentum 52, no. 1 (2010): 37–71. Koenig, Walter D. “Reciprocal Altruism in Birds: A Critical Review.” Ethology and Sociobiology 9 (1988): 73–84. Koltun-Fromm, Naomi. Hermeneutics of Holiness: Ancient Jewish and Christian Notions of Sexuality and Religious Community. New York: Oxford University Press, 2010. Komisaruk, Barry R., Carlos Beyer-Flores, and Beverly Whipple. The Science of Orgasm. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Kringelbach, Morten L., and Kent C. Berridge. “The Functional Neuroanatomy of Pleasure and Happiness.” Discovery Medicine 9, no. 49 (2010): 579–87. Kyung-Choon, Chang. “Plato’s Form of the Beautiful in the Symposium Versus Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover in the Metaphysics (Λ).” The Classical Quarterly new series 52, no. 2 (2002): 431–46.

420

BIBLIOGRAPHY

L. Caeli Firmiani Lactanti Opera Omnia. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum, vol. 19. Vindobonae: F. Tempsky, 1890. Lactantius. The Divine Institutes, Books I–VII. Translated by Mary Francis McDonald. Fathers of the Church 49. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1964. Ladner, Gerhart B. “The Philosophical Anthropology of Saint Gregory of Nyssa.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 12 (1958): 59–94. Laird, Martin. “Gregory of Nyssa and the Mysticism of Darkness: A Reconsideration.” The Journal of Religion 79, no. 4 (1999): 592–616. Laland, Kevin N. “Life after Evolutionary Psychology.” Metascience 16, no. 1 (2007): 5–13. ______, and Gillian R. Brown. Sense and Nonsense: Evolutionary Perspectives on Human Behaviour. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Lamm, Julia A. “Schleiermacher as Plato Scholar.” The Journal of Religion 80, no. 2 (2000): 206–39. Lange, Carl George. “The Emotions.” In Benjamin Rand, editor, The Classical Psychologists, 672–84. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1912. Lapsley, Jacqueline E. Can These Bones Live? The Problem of the Moral Self in the Book of Ezekiel. Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für die alttestamentliche Wissenschaft. Band 301. Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2000. Layton, Richard A. “Propatheia: Origen and Didymus on the Origin of the Passions.” Vigiliae Christianae 54, no. 3 (2000): 262–82. Lazarus, Richard S. Emotion and Adaptation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991. Lemke, Leyman, Rudi De Raedt, Rik Schacht, and Ernst H. W. Koster. “Attentional Biases for Angry Faces in Unipolar Depression.” Psychological Medicine 37, no. 3 (2007): 393–402. Lindquist, Kristen A., Erika H. Siegel, Karen S. Quigley, and Lisa Feldman Barrett. “The Hundred-Year Emotion War: Are Emotions Natural Kinds

421

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

or Psychological Constructions? Comment on Lench, Flores, and Bench (2011).” Psychological Bulletin 139, no. 1 (2013): 255–63. Long, A. A. “The Stoic Concept of Evil.” The Philosophical Quarterly 18, no. 73 (1968): 329–43. Löwy, Michael and Robert Sayre. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. Translated by Catherine Porter. Post-Contemporary Interventions. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. Luhrmann, Tanya Marie. “Beyond the Brain.” The Wilson Quarterly 36, no. 3 (2012): 28–34. MacDonald, Margaret Y. “Citizens of Heaven and Earth: Asceticism and Social Integration in Colossians and Ephesians.” In Leif E. Vaage and Vincent L. Wimbush, editors, Asceticism and the New Testament, 269–98. New York: Routledge, 1999. Madigan, Kevin. “Ancient and High-Medieval Interpretations of Jesus in Gethsemane: Some Reflections on Tradition and Continuity in Christian Thought.” Harvard Theological Review 88, no. 1 (1995): 157–73. Malherbe, Abraham J. Paul and the Popular Philosophers. Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1989. Martin, Dale B. “Paul and Ancient Views of Sexual Desire: Paul’s Sexual Ethics in 1 Thessalonians 4, 1 Corinthians 7, and Romans 1.” Theology & Sexuality 15, no. 1 (2009): 124–25. ______. “Paul without Passion: On Paul’s Rejection of Desire in Sex and Marriage.” In Halvor Moxnes, editor, Constructing Early Christian Families: Family As Social Reality and Metaphor, 201–15. London: Routledge, 1997. ______. “When Did Angels Become Demons?” Journal of Biblical Literature 129, no. 4 (2010): 657–77. Martyr, St. Justin. The First and Second Apologies. Translated by Leslie W. Barnard. Ancient Christian Writers 56. New York: Paulist Press, 1997. May, Herbert G. “Cosmological Reference in the Qumran Doctrine of the

422

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Two Spirits and in Old Testament Imagery.” Journal of Biblical Literature 82, no. 1 (1963): 1–14. McCambley, Casimir. “Against Fate by Gregory of Nyssa.” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 37, no. 1–4 (1992): 309–32. McClear, Ernest V. “The Fall of Man and Original Sin in the Theology of Gregory of Nyssa.” Theological Studies 9, no. 2 (1948): 175–212. McCree, J. Woodrow. “Valentinus and the Theology of Grace.” Union Seminary Quarterly Review 55, no. 1–2 (2001): 127–59. McCullough, Michael E., Marcia B. Kimeldorf, and Adam D. Cohen. “An Adaptation for Altruism? The Social Causes, Social Effects, and Social Evolution of Gratitude.” Current Directions in Psychological Science 17, no. 4 (2008): 281–85. McLean, Peter D., and Sheila R. Woody. Anxiety Disorders in Adults: An Evidence-Based Approach to Psychological Treatment. Guidebooks in Clinical Psychology. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. McLennan, Deborah A. “The Concept of Co-Option: Why Evolution Often Looks Miraculous.” Evolution: Education and Outreach 1 (2008): 247–58. http://download.springer.com/static/pdf/274/art%253A10.1007%252Fs 12052-008-0053-8.pdf?auth66=1426609158_ea8da6e5c32fe3cae5e32e6b 046e5b8e&ext=.pdf. Mendez, Mario F., Andrew K. Chen, Jill S. Shapira, and Bruce L. Miller. “Acquired Sociopathy and Frontotemporal Dementia.” Dementia & Geriatric Cognitive Disorders 20, no. 2/3 (2005): 99–104. Menucius Felix, “Octavius.” In Tertullian: Apologetical Works and Minucius Felix: Octavius, 313–402. Translated by Rudolph Arbesmann, O.S.A., Sister Emily Joseph Daly, C.S.J., and Edwin A. Quain, S.J. Fathers of the Church 10. New York: Fathers of the Church, 1950. Miele, Frank. “Evolutionary Psychology Is Here to Stay.” Skeptic 12, no. 1 (2005): 58–61.

423

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Miller, J. Maxwell. “In the “Image” and “Likeness” of God.” Journal of Biblical Literature 91, no. 3 (1972): 289–304. Mills, Simon. “Sounds to Soothe the Soul: Music and Bereavement in a Traditional South Korean Death Ritual.” Mortality 17, no. 2 (2012): 145–57. Mitchell, Leonel L. “Baptismal Rite in Chrysostom.” Anglican Theological Review 43, no. 4 (1961): 397–403. ______. “Shape of the Baptismal Liturgy.” Anglican Theological Review 47, no. 4 (1965): 410–19. Moloney, Francis J. “Matthew 19:3-12 and Celibacy: A Redactional and Form Critical Study.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 2 (1979): 42–60. Mosshammer, Alden A. “Non-Being and Evil in Gregory of Nyssa.” Vigiliae Christianae 44, no. 2 (1990): 136–67. Mott, Stephen Charles. “Greek Ethics and Christian Conversion: The Philonic Background of Titus 2:10-14 and 3:3-7.” Novum Testamentum 20, no. 1 (1978): 22–48. Müller, Jürgen L., Monika Sommer, Katrin Döhnel, Tatjana Weber, Tobias Schmidt-Wilcke, and Göran Hajak. “Disturbed Prefrontal and Temporal Brain Function During Emotion and Cognition Interaction in Criminal Psychopathy.” Behavioral Sciences & the Law 26, no. 1 (2008): 131–50. National Science Foundation, Division of Science Resources Statistics, “Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Public Understanding Science: Fiction and Pseudoscience.” http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/ seind02/c7/c7s5.htm. Neu, Jerome. “Emotions and Freedom.” In Robert C. Solomon, editor, Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, 163–80. Series in Affective Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. Newsom, Carol A. “The Development of 1 Enoch 6-19: Cosmology and Judgment.” Catholic Biblical Quarterly 42, no. 3 (1980): 310–29.

424

BIBLIOGRAPHY

______. “Models of the Moral Self: Hebrew Bible and Second Temple Judaism.” Journal of Biblical Literature 131, no. 1 (2012): 5–25. Neyrey, Jerome H. “The Absence of Jesus’ Emotions: The Lucan Redaction of Lk 22:39-46.” Biblica 61, no. 2 (1980): 153–71. Nickerson, Sherry D. “Brain Abnormalities in Psychopaths: A MetaAnalysis.” North American Journal of Psychology 16, no. 1 (2014): 63–77. Nietzsche, Friedrich Wilhelm. Twilight of the Idols and the Anti-Christ. Translated by R. J. Hollingdale. London: Penguin, 1990. Nikulin, D. V. The Other Plato: The Tübingen Interpretation of Plato’s InnerAcademic Teachings. SUNY Series in Ancient Greek Philosophy. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. Niskanen, Paul. “The Poetics of Adam: The Creation of ʼDM in the Image of ʼLHYM.” Journal of Biblical Literature 128, no. 3 (2009): 417–36. Norris, Richard A. “The Soul Takes Flight: Gregory of Nyssa and the Song of Songs.” Anglican Theological Review 80, no. 4 (1998): 517–32. Norton, Michael I., and Francesca Gino. “Rituals Alleviate Grieving for Loved Ones, Lovers, and Lotteries.” Journal of Experimental Psychology: General 143, no. 1 (2014): 266–72. Nowak, Martin A., Corina E. Tarnita, and Edward O. Wilson. “The Evolution of Eusociality.” Nature 466, no. 7310 (2010): 1057–62. Nowak, Martin A., and Sébastien Roch. “Upstream Reciprocity and the Evolution of Gratitude.” Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences 274, no. 1610 (2007): 605–9. Nussbaum, Martha. “Emotions as Judgments of Value and Importance.” In Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions. Edited by Robert C. Solomon. Series in Affective Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 183-99. Nussbaum, Martha C. The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.

425

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

O’Connor, Flannery. “The Fiction Writer and His Country.” In Collected Works, 801–6. New York: Library of America, 1988. Origen. Exegetica in Psalmos. Vol. 12 of J.-P. Migne, editor, Patrologiae Cursus Completus: Series Graeca. 161 vols. Paris: Lutetiae Parisiorum, 1857. ______. Origen: The Song of Songs: Commentary and Homilies. Translated by R. P. Lawson. Ancient Christian Writers 26. New York: Newman Press, 1957. Osei-Bonsu, Joseph. “Does 2 Cor 5:1-10 Teach the Reception of the Resurrection Body at the Moment of Death.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament 28 (1986): 81–101. Otis, Brooks. “Cappadocian Thought as a Coherent System.” Dumbarton Oaks Papers 12 (1958): 95–124. Palmer, D. W. “To Die Is Gain (Philippians 1:21).” Novum Testamentum 17, no. 3 (1975): 203–18. Panksepp, Jaak. Affective Neuroscience: The Foundations of Human and Animal Emotions. Series in Affective Science. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Parkinson, Brian. Ideas and Realities of Emotion. International Library of Psychology. London: Routledge, 1995. Pearson, Giles. Aristotle on Desire. Cambridge Classical Studies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Peretz, Isabelle, Lise Gagnon, and Bernard Bouchard. “Music and Emotion: Perceptual Determinants, Immediacy, and Isolation after Brain Damage.” Cognition 68, no. 2 (1998): 111–41. Peroli, Enrico. “Gregory of Nyssa and the Neoplatonic Doctrine of the Soul.” Vigiliae Christianae 51, no. 2 (1997): 117–39. Peña, Jorge, Enea Pestelacci, André Berchtold, and Marco Tomassini. “Participation Costs Can Suppress the Evolution of Upstream Reciprocity.” Journal of Theoretical Biology 273, no. 1 (2011): 197–206. Pew Research Center: Religion & Public Life. “Many Americans Mix

426

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Multiple Faiths,” http://www.pewforum.org/2009/12/09/many-america ns-mix-multiple-faiths/. ______. “Public Opinion on Religion and Science in the United States,” http://www.pewforum.org/2009/11/05/public-opinion-on-religionand-science-in-the-united-states/. Pfaff, Donald W. Drive: Neurobiological and Molecular Mechanisms of Sexual Motivation. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999. Phillips, Tim, Jiawei Li, and Graham Kendall. “The Effects of Extra-Somatic Weapons on the Evolution of Human Cooperation Towards Non-Kin.” PLoS ONE 9, no. 5 (2014): 1–8. Philo. Philo. 11 vols. Translated by F. H. Colson, G. H. Whitaker, and Ralph Marcus. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929–1962. Plato. Laws. 2 vols. Translated by R. G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library 187 and 192. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1926. ______. Plato, Volume I: Euthyphro, Apology, Crito, Phaedo, Phaedrus. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Loeb Classical Library 36. Reprint ed. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1999. ______. Plato, Volume III: Lysis, Symposium, Gorgias. Translated by W. R. M. Lamb. Loeb Classical Library 166. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1925. ______. Plato, Volume IV: Cratylus, Parmenides, Greater Hippias, Lesser Hippias. Translated by Harold North Fowler. Loeb Classical Library 167. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977. ______. Plato, Volume IX: Timaeus, Critias, Cleitophon, Menexenus, Epistles. Translated by R. G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library 234. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1929. ______. Plato, Volume XII: Charmides, Alcibiades I and II, Hipparchus, the Lovers, Theages, Minos, Epinomis. Translated by W. R. M. Lamb. Loeb Classical Library 201. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1927. ______. Republic. 2 vols. Edited and translated by C. J. Emlyn-Jones and

427

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

William Preddy. Loeb Classical Library 237 and 276. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013. ______. Complete Works. Edited by John M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Plutarch. Moralia Volume VI: 439a–523b. Translated by W. C. Helmbold. Loeb Classical Library 337. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1957. Pope, Alexander. The Poems of Alexander Pope. Edited by John Butt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1963. Pope, Alexander. Selected Poetry and Prose. Edited by Robin Sowerby. Routledge English Texts. London: Routledge, 1988. Powers, Harold S., Frans Wiering, James Porter, James Cowdery, Richard Widdess, Ruth Davis, Marc Perlman, Stephen Jones, and Allan Marett. “Mode.” In Grove Music Online. Oxford University Press. Subscription required. Price, R. B., D. A. Eldreth, and J. Mohlman. “Deficient Prefrontal Attentional Control

in

Late-Life

Generalized

Anxiety

Disorder:

An

Fmri

Investigation.” Translational Psychiatry 1, no. 10 (2011): 1–8. Quispel, Gilles. “The Original Doctrine of Valentinus the Gnostic.” Vigiliae Christianae 50, no. 4 (1996): 327–52. Ratner, Carl. “A Cultural-Psychological Analysis of Emotions.” Culture and Psychology 6 (2000): 5–39. http://www.sonic.net/~cr2/emotion.htm. ______. “A Social Constructionist Critique of Naturalistic Theories of Emotion.”

Journal

of

Mind

and

Behavior

10

(1989):

211–30.

http://www.sonic.net/~cr2/emotions.htm. Reiss, Moshe. “Adam: Created in the Image and Likeness of God.” Jewish Bible Quarterly 39, no. 3 (2011): 181–86. Renehan, Robert. “The Greek Philosophical Background of Fourth Maccabees.” Rheinisches Museum für Philologie 115 (1972): 223-38. Rhodes, James M. Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues. Eric

428

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Voegelin Institute Series in Political Philosophy. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2003. Roseman, Ira J., and Craig A. Smith. “Appraisal Theory Overview, Assumptions, Varieties, Controversies.” In Klaus R. Scherer, Angela Schorr, and Tom Johnstone, editors, Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research, 3–19. Series in Affective Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. The Rule of Saint Benedict. Edited by Cardinal Gasquet. The Medieval Library. New York: Cooper Square Pubs., 1966. Rutte, Claudia, and Michael Taborsky. “Generalized Reciprocity in Rats.” PLoS Biology 5, no. 7 (2007): 1421–25. S. Bonaventurae Opera Theologica Selecta. Tomus V: Tria Opuscula, Sermones Theologici. Quaracchi: Collegio S. Bonaventura, 1964. Saint-Georges, Catherine, Mohamed Chetouani, Raquel Cassel, Fabio Apicella, Ammar Mahdhaoui, Filippo Muratori, Marie-Christine Laznik, and David Cohen. “Motherese in Interaction: At the Cross-Road of Emotion and Cognition? (A Systematic Review).” PLoS ONE 8, no. 10 (2013): 1–17. Sancti Aureli Augustini De Utilitate Credendi, De Duabus Animabus, Contra Fortunatum, Contra Adimantum, Contra Epistulam Fundamenti, Contra Faustum. Volume 25 of Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum. Vindobonae: F. Tempsky, 1891. Sandnes, Karl Olav. Belly and Body in the Pauline Epistles. Society for New Testament Studies Monograph Series. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Schlegel, Friedrich von. Friedrich Schlegel’s Lucinde and the Fragments. Translated by Peter Firchow. Minnesota Archive Editions. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1971. Schleiermacher, Friedrich. The Christian Faith. Translated by H. R. MacKintosh and J. S. Stewart. Fortress Texts in Modern Theology. Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976.

429

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

______. Christmas Eve: A Dialogue on the Celebration of Christmas. Translated by W. Hastie. Edinburgh: T&T Clark, 1890. ______. On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers. Translated by John Oman. New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1958. ______. Schleiermachers vertraute Briefe über die Lucinde. Jena und Leipzig: Eugen Diederichs, 1907. ______. Über die Religion: Reden an die Gebildeten unter ihren Verächtern. Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1868. Schweizer, Eduard. “Slaves of the Elements and Worshipers of Angels: Gal 4:3, 9 and Col 2:8, 18, 20.” Journal of Biblical Literature 107, no. 3 (1988): 455–68. Seim, Turid Karlsen. “Children of the Resurrection: Perspectives on Angelic Asceticism in Luke-Acts.” In Leif E. Vaage and Vincent L. Wimbush, editors, Asceticism and the New Testament, 115–25. New York: Routledge, 1999. Seland, Torrey. Strangers in the Light: Philonic Perspectives on Christian Identity in 1 Peter. Biblical Interpretation Series. Leiden: Brill, 2005. Sellars, John. Stoicism. Ancient Philosophies. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006. Seneca. Epistles, Volume III: Epistles 93–124. Translated by Richard M. Gummere. Loeb Classical Library 77. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971. ______. Moral Essays, Volume I: De Providentia, De Constantia, De Ira, De Clementia. Translated by John W. Basore. Loeb Classical Library 214. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1970. The Septuagint Version of the Old Testament and Apocrypha. Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1972. Sfameni Gasparro, Giulia. “Asceticism and Anthropology: Enkrateia and ‘Double Creation’ in Early Christianity.” In Vincent L. Wimbush and Richard Valantasis, editors, Asceticism, 127–46. New York: Oxford University Press, 1995.

430

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Silk, Joan B., and Bailey R. House. “Evolutionary Foundations of Human Prosocial Sentiments.” In Joan E. Strassman, David C. Queller, and John C. Avise, editors, In the Light of Evolution Volume V: Cooperation and Conflict, 10910–17. Sackler Colloquium Series. Washington, D.C.: National Academies Press, 2012. Smith, Eric Alden. “Reconstructing the Evolution of the Human Mind.” In Steven W. Gangestad and Jeffry A. Simpson, editors, The Evolution of Mind: Fundamental Questions and Controversies, 53–59. New York: Guilford, 2007. Smith, J. Warren. Passion and Paradise: Human and Divine Emotion in the Thought of Gregory of Nyssa. New York: Crossroad, 2004. Smith Kyle S., S. V. Mahler, s. Pecina S, and K. C. Berridge. “Hedonic Hotspots: Generating Sensory Pleasure in the Brain.” In Morten L. Kringelbach and Kent C. Berridge, editors, Pleasures of the Brain, 40–42. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Solomon, Robert C. “Emotions, Thoughts, and Feelings: Emotions as Engagements with the World.” In Robert C. Solomon, editor, Thinking About Feeling: Contemporary Philosophers on Emotions, 76–88. Series in Affective Science. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ______. True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Stannard, Jerry. “Socratic Eros and Platonic Dialectic.” Phronesis 4, no. 2 (1959): 120–34. Stephens, William O. Stoic Ethics: Epictetus and Happiness as Freedom. Continuum Studies in Ancient Philosophy. London: Continuum, 2007. Stieg, Chuck. “Bird Brains and Aggro Apes: Questioning the Use of Animals in the Affect Program Theory of Emotion.” Philosophy of Science 74, no. 5 (2007): 895–905. Stowers, Stanley Kent. A Rereading of Romans: Justice, Jews, and Gentiles. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994. Streete, Gail Corrington. “Askesis and Resistance in the Pastoral Letters.” In

431

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Leif E. Vaage and Vincent L. Wimbush, editors, Asceticism and the New Testament, 299–316. New York: Routledge, 1999. Swanson, Larry W. Brain Architecture: Understanding the Basic Plan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Tang, Sui, Yueqin Huang, Daiga Helmeste, Toshiki Shioiri, and Toshiyuki Someya. “Differential Judgement of Static Facial Expressions of Emotions in Three Cultures.” Psychiatry & Clinical Neurosciences 55, no. 5 (2001): 479–83. Taruskin, Richard. “Russian Folk Melodies in ‘The Rite of Spring’.” Journal of the American Musicological Society 33, no. 3 (1980): 501–43. Tertullian. Against Marcion. In Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, vol. 3 of Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, editors, The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A. D. 325, 271–475. 9 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903. ______. On the Flesh of Christ. In Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, vol. 3 of Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, editors, The AnteNicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A. D. 325, 521–43. 9 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903. ______. The Resurrection of the Flesh. In Latin Christianity: Its Founder, Tertullian, vol. 3 of Alexander Roberts and James Donaldson, editors, The Ante-Nicene Fathers: Translations of the Writings of the Fathers Down to A. D. 325, 545–95. 9 vols. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903. Thero, Daniel P. Understanding Moral Weakness. Value Inquiry Book Series, vol. 183. Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi, 2006. Thomas Aquinas. The “Summa Theologica” of St. Thomas Aquinas. 22. vols. London: Burns, Oates & Washburne, 1912-25. ______. Truth. 3 vols. Translated by Robert W. Mulligan, S.J., James V. McGlynn, S.J., and Robert W. Schmidt, S.J. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994. Thompson, William Forde, and E. Glenn Schellenberg. “Cognitive Constraints on Music Listening.” In Richard Colwell and Carol P.

432

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Richardson, editors, The New Handbook of Research on Music Teaching and Learning: A Project of the Music Educators National Conference, 461–86. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Thorpe, Vanessa. “Richard Dawkins in Furious Row with E. O. Wilson over

Theory

of

Evolution.”

The

Guardian,

2012,

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2012/jun/24/battle-of-theprofessors. Tilmouth, Christopher. Passion’s Triumph over Reason: A History of the Moral Imagination from Spenser to Rochester. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Tooby, John, and Leda Cosmides. “The Evolutionary Psychology of the Emotions and Their Relationship to Internal Regulatory Variables.” In Michael Lewis, Jeannette M. Haviland-Jones, and Lisa Feldman Barrett, editors, Handbook of Emotions, 114–37. 3rd ed. New York: Guilford, 2008. Trivers, Robert L. “The Evolution of Reciprocal Altruism.” The Quarterly Review of Biology 46, no. 1 (1971): 35–57. Turner, John D. “The Gnostic Threefold Path to Enlightenment: The Ascent of Mind and the Descent of Wisdom.” Novum Testamentum 22, no. 4 (1980): 324–51. Van Goozen, Stephanie, and Nico H. Frijda. “Emotion Words Used in Six European Countries.” European Journal of Social Psychology 23, no. 1 (1993): 89–95. Verbeke, Gérard. The Presence of Stoicism in Medieval Thought. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1982. Vogel, C. J. de. “Reflexions on Philippians 1:23-24.” Novum Testamentum 19, no. 4 (1977): 262-74. von Dehsen, Christian D. “The Imago Dei in Genesis 1:26-27.” Lutheran Quarterly new series 11, no. 3 (1997): 259–70.

433

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Voorwinde, Stephen. Jesus’ Emotions in the Gospels. London: T&T Clark, 2011. Wasserman, Emma. The Death of the Soul in Romans 7: Sin, Death, and the Law in Light of Hellenistic Moral Psychology. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum neuen Testament 2e Reihe, Band 256. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008. Weber, Max. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. Translated by and edited by Hans Heinrich Gerth and C. Wright Mills. New York: Oxford University Press, 1946. Welborn, Laurence L. “Paul and Pain: Paul’s Emotional Therapy in 2 Corinthians 1.1-2.13; 7.5-16 in the Context of Ancient Psychagogic Literature.” New Testament Studies 57, no. 4 (2011): 547–70. ______. “Paul’s Appeal to the Emotions in 2 Corinthians 1.1-2.13; 7.5-16.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 82 (2001): 31–60. Wen, Li, Ken A. Paller, and Richard E. Zinbarg. “Conscious Intrusion of Threat Information Via Unconscious Priming in Anxiety.” Cognition & Emotion 22, no. 1 (2008): 44–62. Wessel, Susan. “The Reception of Greek Science in Gregory of Nyssa’s De Hominis Opificio.” Vigiliae Christianae 63, no. 1 (2009): 24–46. West, Stuart A., Claire El Mouden, and Andy Gardner. “Sixteen Common Misconceptions about the Evolution of Cooperation in Humans.” Evolution and Human Behavior 32 (2011): 231–62. Wheatley, Thalia, and Jonathan Haidt. “Hypnotic Disgust Makes Moral Judgments More Severe.” Psychological Science 16, no. 10 (2005): 780–84. Williams, George C. Adaptation and Natural Selection: a Critique of Some Current Evolutionary Thought. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Williams, Michael A. Rethinking Gnosticism: An Argument for Dismantling a Dubious Category. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996. Williams, Rowan. “Macrina’s Deathbed Revisited: Gregory of Nyssa on

434

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Mind and Passion.” In Lionel R. Wickham and Caroline P. Bammel, editors, Christian Faith and Greek Philosophy in Late Antiquity: Essays in Tribute to George Christopher Stead, 227–46. Leiden: Brill, 1993. Winston, David. “Philo of Alexandria on Rational and Irrational Emotions.” In John T. Fitzgerald, editor, Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-Roman Thought, 201–20. Routledge Monographs in Classical Studies. New York: Routledge, 2008. Wordsworth, William. “Essay Supplementary to the Preface.” In vol. 5 of The Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. 7 vols. London: George Bell & Sons, 1893. ______. Poems of William Wordsworth, Volume 1: Collected Reading Texts from the Cornell Wordsworth. Penrith, UK: Humanities-Ebooks, 2009. ______. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth: Volume 1. Edited by W. J. B. Owen and Jane W. Smyser. Penrith, UK: Humanities-Ebooks, 2008. Young, Liane, and Michael Koenigs. “Investigating Emotion in Moral Cognition: A Review of Evidence from Functional Neuroimaging and Neuropsychology.” British Medical Bulletin 84, no. 1 (2007): 69–70. http://bmb.oxfordjournals.org/content/84/1/69.long. Zachhuber, Johannes. Human Nature in Gregory of Nyssa: Philosophical Background

and

Theological

Significance. Supplements to Vigiliae

Christianae 46. Leiden: Brill, 2000. Zajonc, R. B. “Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences.” American Psychologist 35, no. 2 (1980): 151–75. ______. “On the Primacy of Affect.” American Psychologist 39, no. 2 (1984): 117–23. Zandee, Jan. “Gnostic Ideas on the Fall and Salvation.” Numen 11, no. 1 (1964): 13–74. Zbikowski, Lawrence M. Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis. AMS Studies in Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

435

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Zingano, Marco. “Akrasia and the Method of Ethics.” In Pierre Destrée and Christopher Bobonich, editors, Akrasia in Greek Philosophy: From Socrates to Plotinus, 167–91. Philosophia Antiqua, vol. 106. Boston: Brill Academic, 2007. Zentner, Marcel R. and Jerome Kagan. “Perception of Music by Infants.” Nature 383, no. 6595 (1996): 29. Ziesler, John A. “The Role of the Tenth Commandment in Romans 7.” Journal for the Study of the New Testament, 33 (1988): 41–56.

436

Index

Acts of Paul and Thecla, 77–79, 81, 108–9

form 313–14; Moderation and its opposite, 24, 27, 28–31;

Acts of John, 108–9

Nature and nurture, 214;

Alexander Pope, 172–75

Practical reasoning and

Altruism: And kin selection,

wisdom, 382–83, 385; Reason

256–61; Reciprocal altruism

and intellect, 24–25, 26–27,

and cooperation, 261–65;

34–35, 299; Relation to

Generalized altruism, 265–67

Stoicism, 35–36; Self-control

Anthony, 105–8, 117, 359–62

and its opposite, 30–34; Virtue,

Apocalypticism, 50–59, 93–95,

23–24, 25, 27–29

122, 165, 168, 374–75 Aristotle, 23–35; Analysis of the

Arndt, Johann, 177–78 Asceticism, 29, 75, 76, 77–83,

soul, 23–25; And Augustine,

86–89, 98, 101–11, 117, 126,

148–49, 158; And Gregory of

132, 133, 143, 168–70, 342,

Nyssa, 121; And Lactantius,

358–66, 366–68, 389

114–15; And Patristic

Augustine, 143–65; Adam and

theology, 166–68; Choice and

Eve, 146–47, 152–54, 155–56;

deliberation, 25–27, 384;

Anger, 144, 155; Beauty,

Courage and fear, 28;

160–61; Concupiscentia,

Goodness and the good,

144–48, 153, 157–58;

25–27, 32–34; Knowledge of

Incorporeality of the soul,

437

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

143–44; Fear 152, 156; Free

Critique of, 219–24, 229–33,

choice, 148–54, 167; Freedom

233–35

from passion, 144–47, 156;

Basilides, 104, 108

Good emotions, 155–59;

Benedict of Nursia, 106, 360

Goodness and the good, 145,

Bonaventure, 386, 392

148, 150, 152, 154, 155, 159,

Buller, David J., 281–82

164–65; Grace, 145, 152, 154,

Buss, David M., 275–78, 281–82

155, 156; Heart, the, 147, 156–59; Image of God,

Cicero, 43

161–65, 385, 387, 393–95; Joy

Clement of Alexandria, 104

156, 158; Liberty, 148, 151–54;

Created world, 1, 53–54, 56–57,

Libido, 144, 146; Love, 145,

57–58, 95, 159–60, 165,

147, 151–52, 156–57, 159–60,

168–70, 240; Ambiguity and

161–64, 354–55, 388–90;

ambivalence, 1–2, 56, 58,

Marriage and celibacy, 146–47;

94–95, 98, 122, 166, 347,

Mind and body, 123n17;

374–75; Corruption, 50–51,

Perfection, 144, 147–48, 160;

59, 78–79, 89, 168, 240,

Pleasure, 146; Reason, 144,

347–49, 363, 374–75; Good, 1,

145, 153–54, 156, 159–61,

53–54, 56, 58, 95, 98, 105n22,

164–65; Resurrected body,

110, 165, 168–69

125n28; Self-control and its opposite, 144–45, 148, 156;

Darwin, Charles, 209

Sin, 351; Trinity, the, 161–64;

Descartes, Rene, 202

Will, 145, 149–54; Will and

De Waal, Frans, 268–73

intellect 162–65

Diogenes Laertius, 37–42 Doctrine of creation, 2, 60, 98,

Barrett, Lisa Feldman, 233–39

110, 116–17, 155, 168–70, 344,

Basic emotion theory, 201–8, 214,

347–48, 373–75

217–18, 225–26, 229, 236–37, 256, 284, 291, 303–4, 346; Arguments for, 208–14;

438

Dualism, 1, 13, 67–68, 93, 101n13, 105n22, 117, 299, 388

INDEX

Empathy, 245–46, 255, 268,

302–3; Irrational fears 210;

270–74, 283–87, 346, 351; And

Language, 218; Relation to

sympathy, 265, 270–72, 284;

animal emotion, 206–7,

And mirror neurons, 272, 283

221–22; Relation to behavior,

Edwards, Jonathon, 178–79

222–23; Relation to the brain

Emotion and morality: Acquired

and body, 200, 201–8, 211–13,

sociopathy, 286–87; Brain

220–21, 224, 234–35, 236–37,

damage, 255–56, 285, 286–87;

271–72; Role of evolution in,

Dual process models, 250–56;

206–8, 210–11, 257–83;

Humankind’s biological

Scientific consensus, 199–201

nature, 247–49; Jealousy,

Emotion and cognition, 210–11,

274–83; Psychopathy, 283–85;

212–13, 230–31, 256, 298–99,

Role of the brain, 288–90;

299–300, 322; Emotion and

Social and cultural learning,

attention, 315–19; Emotion

247, 287–94; Studies of apes,

and bias, 311–14; Emotion and

221, 224, 269–73; Trolley

memory, 319–21; Emotion and

dilemma and footbridge

judgment, 321–22; Emotion

dilemma, 252–54, 286–87, 322

and objectivity, 307–10;

Emotion, scientific analysis of:

Emotion as a form of

Appraisal, 200, 303–5; As affect

cognition, 301–14; Emotion’s

programs, 204–6; Belief and

effect on cognition, 301

judgment, 216–18, 225;

Epictetus, 41, 43–44

Cultural diversity, 219,

Euripides, 7

233–34; Culture and learning, 214, 217–18, 225, 231–32;

Feuerbach, Ludwig, 180

Difficulty of defining, 198–99,

Flesh, the, 55–56, 65–67, 70, 71,

214–15; Electrical and

73, 75, 76, 78, 80, 83, 84, 86,

chemical stimulation of the

89, 93, 94–95, 107, 108, 117,

brain 211–12; Facial

132, 133, 137, 145, 154, 167,

expression, 200, 209–10,

177, 347, 361, 363, 372;

223–24; Intentionality, 215–16,

Christ’s flesh, 98–100

439

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Fourth Maccabees, 49, 50, 59–61, 63, 64–65, 66n28 Francke, August Hermann, 178 Freud, Sigmund, 192–94

Haidt, Jonathon, 250–51 Heidegger, Martin, 188, 218, 304–5 Hobbes, Thomas, 175–76 Hume, David, 175–77, 179, 180,

Gnosticism and Gnostics, 1,

196

97–105, 107, 108, 117, 122, 165, 168, 374

Image of God, 2, 119–22, 126,

Greene, Joshua D., 250–56, 286

130–31, 142, 161–65, 178, 244,

Gregory of Nyssa, 119–43; God:

299–300, 313, 367, 373,

free, 120, 126, goodness, 141, incorporeal, 120, 124, infinite, 137, 140–41, mind, 120,

379–80, 385, 387, 393–95 Irenaeus 1, 98–101, 103n14, 105n22, 108, 168

transcendent, 124, 140, without passion, 122; Beauty 129, 135, 136–141, 143; Free

James, William, 192, 193–95, 202–4

choice, 126–28; Freedom from

Jerome, 109–10, 112, 117

passion, 126–33; Good

Jesus Christ: Acts of Paul and

emotions, 133–36; Image of

Thecla, 78–79; Asceticism,

God, the 120, 122, 126,

86–88; Flesh of, 98–100; Good

130–31, 141, 142; Marriage

emotions, 90–92; Passion,

and celibacy, 132; Mind and

87–89, 112, 131, 156, 197,

embodiment 119–26;

357–58, 366; Role in salvation,

Moderation, 130, 133; Origin

54, 57–58, 76, 93–94, 348

of passion, 130–31; Passion and

Justin Martyr, 109

judgment, 128–30; Reason and eros, 136–39; Resurrection

Kandinsky, Wassily, 191–92

body, the, 124–26; Self-

Kant, Immanuel, 253, 330, 377,

control, 128, 130, 132

381

Griffiths, Paul E., 229–33, 234, 236

440

Lactantius, 112–16

INDEX

Lange, Carl Georg, 202–4

Nietzsche, Friedrich 1, 187–90, 314

Macrina, 107–8, 117, 121n10, 122, 133–36 Manichaeism, 101n13, 103, 143,

Origen, 44n166, 105n22, 111–12, 138, 139, 160

149, 150–52, 374 Marcion, 98, 100, 117, 374

Paine, Thomas, 172

Medea, 7, 13

Paul: Anger, 357; Body, the,

Menucius Felix, 109

69–70, 73–76, 99, 106–7, 117,

Moderation: Aristotle, 28–29, 31,

364; Consecration, 73–76;

34; Fourth Maccabees, 59;

Deutero-Pauline tradition,

Gregory of Nyssa, 130, 131; In

76–82; Fear, 361; Flesh, 55–56,

the Christian life, 366–69;

65–67, 71, 73, 75–76, 84, 89,

Lactantius, 115–16; New

145; Good emotions, 83–86;

Testament, 81–82, 90, 111;

Marriage and celibacy, 54, 72,

Old Testament, 361; Plato,

75, 110, 364; Mind, the, 70–73;

10–12, 22–23, 24, 27, 71

Passion and desire, 56, 64–76,

Modernism, 197–92

104, 363–64; Self-control and

Music: Attention, 330–32;

its opposite, 70n36, 72, 75, 361;

Cognitive expectation, 333–35;

Slavery, 70–72; Virtue and

Consonance and dissonance,

vice, 343; World, the, 53–57

331–34, 337; Meaning and narrative, 336–39; Memory, 332–33; Music and cognition, 330–39; Music and emotion, 323–30; Pitch, 329, 332–33

Philo, 49, 61–62, 63, 65, 66n28, 68n31, 70, 82n57 Pietism, 2, 176–80, 180, 181, 183, 297, 312, 342 Plato, 8–23; Analysis of the soul, 8–9; Beauty, 16–23, 391–92;

Negative emotions, 257, 274, 277,

Emotional properties of music

282–83, 293, 294, 302, 318,

325–26; Free choice, 46;

344, 361–62, 371

Freedom and slavery, 10, 12,

Newton, Isaac, 172

23; Good emotions, 13–15;

441

THE IMPASSIONED LIFE

Knowledge 313–14; Passions

Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 180–84

and desire, 9–13, 202; Reason

Schoenberg, Arnold, 335

and eros, 15–21, 47, 196, 299,

Self-Control: Acts of Paul and

383–86; Reason and sensuous

Thecla, 77–78, 108; Aristotle,

being, 21–22; Reason as

30–34; Ascetic abstinence 374,

governor of passion, 8–9,

388–89; Augustine, 144–45,

11–12, 15; Relation to Aristotle

148; Deutero-Pauline

23, 24, 25, 27, 34; Relation to

literature, 81–82; Encratism,

Augustine, 143, 148, 158, 160,

108; Fourth Maccabees, 59;

168; Relation to Fourth

Gnosticism, 103; Gregory of

Maccabees, 59; Relation to

Nyssa, 128, 130, 132; New

Gnosticism, 102n13; Relation

Testament, 93; Paul, 72, 75,

to Gregory of Nyssa, 121n9,

361

128, 136, 138, 139; Relation to

Seneca, 41, 44, 71, 111

Paul, 68, 70–71; Relation to

Sin: As alienation, 350; As

Stoicism, 35–36; Relation to

disobedience, 349–50, 356–57;

the New Testament, 50, 51

As disorder, 350–51; Threat to

Pope, Alexander, 172–75 Prosocial emotions, 205, 268–74, 346–47, 349 Psychopathy and acquired sociopathy, 246, 283–87, 343

community, 351–58 Social-construction theory of emotion, 201, 204, 208, 214–19, 225–27, 236, 241, 243; Arguments for, 219–24 Stoicism, 35–44; Analysis of the

Romanticism, 180–86, 187, 190, 192, 196

soul, 35–36; Apathy, 47, 107, 112, 113–14, 116; Belief and judgment, 37–40, 299;

Sanctification, 58, 72–76, 81, 93,

Freedom, 37–40; Good

147, 155, 347, 349, 350–51,

passions, 42–43, 167; Nature,

359, 364, 371–72, 386, 388,

37, 40–44; Passions, the 37–44;

393

Preferences, 42; Prepassions,

Schlegel, Friedrich, 181, 183–84

442

INDEX

44, 142, 155, 236; Spirit

Thomas the Contender, 109

(pneuma), 35–36 Stravinsky, Igor, 190–91

Wagner, Richard, 338 Weber, Max, 187–88

Tatian, 108 Tertullian, 98–101 Thomas Aquinas, 165, 202, 384,

Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 217, 218, 239 Wordsworth, William, 185–86

386, 394

443

This emotional life— The Impassioned Life argues that theology’s task today is to rethink the nature of emotions and their relation to human reason. The Christian tradition contains the pastorally valid intuition that moderation and self-control are necessary virtues for the Christian life. At the same time, Christian theology attends to contemporary psychological research in order to achieve a more integrated understanding of emotions and reason. At its heart, this volume offers a holistic vision of the Christian life lived passionately in its full range of feeling as life in the Spirit.

“It may seem surprising that Christian thinkers would still elevate rationality and view the emotional life with deep suspicion, yet this tendency remains widespread. Samuel Powell here lays that myth to rest. With impeccable scholarship and an engaging narrative, he shows that Bible and theology, philosophy and science, all reveal emotion and reason to be interdependent. The result is a far richer and more attractive theological anthropology, with fascinating implications for our understanding of God.” Philip Clayton

Author of Transforming Christian Theology

Samuel M. Powell is professor of philosophy and religion at Point Loma Nazarene University in San Diego, California. He is author of Discovering Our Christian Faith (2008), A Theology of Christian Spirituality (2005), Participating in God: Trinity and Creation (Fortress Press, 2003), and The Trinity in German Thought (2000).

Religion / Constructive Theology

Impassioned Life

Thomas Jay Oord

Author of The Uncontrolling Love of God

The

“Powell offers a wide-ranging yet insightful survey of how emotion and reason have been understood in Western thought. After assessing the major ideas he finds in Scripture, philosophy, historical theology, and contemporary science, Powell proposes ways that present-day people might best understand themselves. The Impassioned Life beautifully integrates theoretical and practical concerns to make it a must-read guide on the relationship between emotion and cognition!”

Reason and Emotion in the Christian Tradition

Praise for The Impassioned Life

POWELL

The

Impassioned Life

Reason and Emotion in the Christian Tradition

Samuel M. Powell