Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800

Juanita Ruys, Michael Champion, Kirk Essary, Juanita Feros Ruys, Michael W. Champion, Kirk Essary

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429662836
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Before Emotion: The Language of Feeling, 400-1800 advances current interdisciplinary research in the history of emotions through in-depth studies of the European language of emotion from late antiquity to the modern period. Focusing specifically on the premodern cognates of 'affect' or 'affection' (such as affectus, affectio, affeccioun, etc.), an international team of scholars explores the cultural and intellectual contexts in which emotion was discussed before the term 'emotion' itself came into widespread use. By tracing the history of key terms and concepts associated with what we identify as 'emotions' today, the volume offers a first-time critical foundation for understanding pre- and early modern emotions discourse, charts continuities and changes across cultures, time periods, genres, and languages, and helps contextualize modern shifts in the understanding of emotions.

1 The Failure of affectus

Affectiones and constantiae in Augustine of Hippo

Jonathan D. Teubner

‘Longing for the other world puts people to sleep in this world.’¹ Echoing Nietzsche, Martha Nussbaum presents what is the most common criticism of Augustine’s theology of the affections: an otherworld-directed appetite that disregards commitments to this world.² Nussbaum is not alone in her disapproval. Thomas Dixon offers a more pointed censure. Because Augustine, according to Dixon, theorized the affections as a single movement to God, ‘not a drop of affection was to be spilled on barren earthly terrain.’³ One must admit that these ethical criticisms of Augustine’s theology of the affections can sting, if not wound, an Augustinian account of the affections. Recent scholarship on the affections in Augustine’s thought has attempted to rescue Augustine from Nussbaum, Dixon, and Hannah Arendt.⁴ While there is value in this programme of rehabilitation,⁵ most scholars ignore the deep ambivalence towards the affections in Augustine’s thought. Nussbaum and Dixon (as well as Hannah Arendt) are picking up on a perplexing aporia in Augustine’s account: affections are both necessary and necessarily a failure. In light of this, I don’t think Augustine really needs saving, but rather needs clarification of how and why he thinks the affections fail and to what extent he sees their failure as intrinsic to human ways of knowing, loving, and living. In other words, how is it that Augustine is both a champion of the affections and a pessimist for their ultimate utility?

Notwithstanding the responses to Nussbaum et al., scholarship on Augustinian affections has turned to questions regarding ‘therapies’ for those unreliable things called ‘emotions.’ One of the most philologically and philosophically developed contributions has been Sarah Byers’ Perception, Sensibility, and Moral Motivation in Augustine.⁶ Byers weaves together reflection on Augustine’s psychology with what she takes to be the practices Augustine offers as ‘affective therapies,’ or the ways in which the human is supposed to respond to, and with, human affections.⁷ Byers rightly places Augustine in a broader late-antique problematic of affections as unpredictable and unreliable but still somehow the essential ‘stuff’ of human existence.⁸ Byers finds further continuities in Augustine’s attempt to provide therapies for these wayward affections. But, as James Wetzel has argued, this approach can ignore the profound break that Augustine experienced in the mid-390s from all programmes of self-improvement that are not initiated and sustained by divine gift.⁹ For Wetzel, Augustine’s evolution included a steady rejection of the Stoic psychology, largely taken from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, that entails human ability to consent to wise desires. The conditions, motives, and sources of consent are far too complex to credit the human with anything like straightforward consent. Wetzel, it seems, matches Byers’ optimism for rehabilitation with pessimism born from world-weariness: the first and most profound affection in the life of the human is the grief over the soul’s loss of God.

Byers’ ‘optimism’ and Wetzel’s ‘pessimism’ represent two (heuristic) poles around which most reflection on the affections in Augustine’s thought can be organized. In this essay, I want to pivot off this heuristic and propose a middle way between the two: I do not think that Augustine ever fully abandoned programmes or therapies to rehabilitate the affections, but that the form these programmes take after the 390s, and most poignantly after 410 when so much in Augustine’s world could be seen as unstable and in flux, is almost unrecognizable as a ‘programme’ or ‘therapy.’ The form of this programme of rehabilitation is illustrated, I believe, by the practice of prayer, theologically understood. Despite the preponderance of affective language in Augustine’s reflections, prayer has not yet become a focus in the scholarship on the affections. A case in point is that Byers asserts that ‘Prayer itself is not one of Augustine’s recommended affective therapies.’¹⁰ I shall argue instead that prayer, for Augustine, is a privileged site of the work of the Holy Spirit, who moulds human affectiones into constantiae, that is, into affections corresponding to the perfected state of reason.

Locating Augustine’s Discourse on the Affections

The contention at the centre of this essay is theological in nature and has two components. First, Augustine’s discussion of affections is illuminated by the context of his teaching on prayer. The basis for this is that Augustine locates the discourse on prayer in both the body and the soul,¹¹ a dual focus that Augustine stipulates for the affections as well.¹² And second, Augustine’s theory of the affections cannot be reconstructed without recourse to his doctrine of the Holy Spirit. The upshot of this is that Augustine’s account of the affections must be considered as a theological account, a consequence of which is that when we try to parse what he means by this or that term, we should not lose track of the fact that Augustine was ultimately driven by his vocation as bishop, pastor, and monk.

It is nevertheless still helpful to locate Augustine’s use of constantia within the broader Latin philosophical tradition. The immediate provenance of constantia in Augustine’s thought is Cicero’s Libri tusculanarum disputationum, 4.6.11, and De officiis, 1.111 and 1.125.¹³ For Cicero, constantiae are the positive motions of the soul that correspond to the negative perturbations.¹⁴ Another possible source is Seneca, who largely follows Cicero’s usage of constantia.¹⁵ For Seneca, inconstantia as a kind of disorder is arguably just as important.¹⁶ Despite its conceptual importance, there is relatively little written that directly discusses constantia in Augustine’s thought. Gerard O’Daly argues for its importance in Augustine’s commentaries on Genesis and glosses it as ‘ethical stability’ and ‘consistency.’¹⁷ Beyond this, there is very little philological reflection on constantia in Augustine’s thought.

Most interpreters choose to reflect on the affections in Augustine’s thought by engaging his theological anthropology. This theological location of Augustine’s discourse does not, however, dissolve any of the complex terminological issues.¹⁸ As with so many other areas of Augustine’s thought, there is very little stability in the precise terminology he uses. However, by looking at the nexus of the affections, prayer, and pneumatology, we might be able to observe how affectus and affectio interrelate with other ‘affective’ terms such as amor and concupiscentia. In approaching Augustine’s affective language in this way, we will also be able to see that Augustine’s seemingly erratic borrowing of peripatetic and stoic language from Cicero’s Tusculanae Disputationes in his De civitate Dei, 14, is in service of a more general theological or ‘spiritual’ project.

A Stoic-Biblical Synthesis

Augustine’s early reflections on the affections are, as I have already intimated, indebted to Cicero’s efforts to Latinize some Hellenistic psychological theories in his Tusculan Disputations. In these reflections, one senses that Augustine is attempting to tame the affections and make them sensible. In the first book of De libero arbitrio (388), Augustine offers an account that reveals just such an effort to control the affections: an involuntary impression that something has or is about to happen is followed by a judgement about that impression. The judgement is distinguished from the impression by the act of consent (consentio), and Augustine uses this caesura between impression and judgement to locate human agency: while we cannot control the impressions that happen to us, we can choose to consent or dissent from them. Augustine will later find fault with this view as it is based on a fiction or, at least, a naive rendition of human consent (can we really just so simply accept or reject these impressions without being deeply impacted by our history of encounters over which we have had very little, if any, control?). Augustine’s sustained attempt to discredit this view comes in his City of God (De civitate Dei), 9.4, and is based, as Wetzel points out, on a deliberate misreading of an anecdote from Attic Nights, a journal of the second-century amateur philosopher Aulus Gellius.¹⁹

It is important not to overemphasize the extent to which Augustine unhooked himself from a ‘stoic construct,’ as Augustine was never deeply committed to one philosophical camp over another.²⁰ In response to Richard Sorabji’s criticisms of Augustine’s reconstruction of Stoic arguments,²¹ Wetzel denominates the Stoicism Augustine seeks to refute as a ‘construct,’ which ‘allowed Augustine to construct a sinful experience of temptation out of what counts, for Stoics, as simply bodily agitation.’²² This promiscuity allowed Augustine to pick up many aspects of Stoicism through his lifelong reading of Cicero.²³ But whatever engagement Augustine had with Cicero in particular, or Stoicism in general after 410, must be balanced by the greater role biblical categories play in his thinking.

A case in point is how Augustine handles the concept of the will (voluntas) in City of God, 14. Much has been made of Augustine’s theory of the will in general and its application to his discussion of the affections in particular. While it is far from clear whether Augustine did in fact provide a critical clarification of the will (it could equally be argued that he helpfully obscures a notion of the will), the will (voluntas) would indeed be central to any psychological reconstruction of Augustine’s account of the affections in City of God, 14. ‘Universally, as a man’s will (voluntas) is attracted or repelled by the variety of things which are pursued or avoided,’ Augustine argues, ‘so it changes and turns into affections (affectiones) of one kind or the other.’²⁴ As Augustine goes on to say, ‘For if the will is perverse, the movements of the will (motus) will be perverse; but if it is righteous, they will not only be blameless, but praiseworthy.’²⁵ Augustine goes on to stipulate that desire (cupiditas) and joy (laetitia) are simply voluntas in consent with what we want, and fear (metus) and grief (tristitia) are voluntas in dissent with what we do not want.²⁶ At the bottom of it all is the quality of a person’s will.

Unfortunately, pushing the issue towards the quality of voluntas does not solve much, for it falls short of anything that might secure a position from which a person can properly classify an impression as worthy of consent. Augustine himself seems discontent to allow voluntas to have the final word:

A righteous will (voluntas), then, is a good love (bonus amor); and a perverted will is an evil love (malus amor). Therefore, love striving to possess what it loves is desire (cupiditas); love possessing and enjoying what it loves is joy (laetitia); love fleeing what is adverse to it is fear (metus); and love undergoing such adversity when it occurs is grief (tristitia). Accordingly, these feelings are bad if the love is bad, and...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• List of Contributors
• Introduction: The Language of Affect from Late Antiquity to Early Modernity
• 1 The Failure of affectus: Affectiones and constantiae in Augustine of Hippo
• 2 Affectus in Medieval Grammar
• 3 Affectio-affectus in Latin Rhetoric up to c. 1200
• 4 The Old English Vocabulary of Emotions: Glossing affectus
• 5 Before the Affective Turn: Affectus in Heloise, Abelard, and the Woman Writer of the Epistolae duorum amantium
• 6 Desire to Enjoy Something Thoroughly: The Use of the Latin affectus in Hugh of Saint Victor’s De archa Noe
• 7 Affectus in the De spiritu et anima and Cistercian Writings of the Twelfth Century
• 8 Affectus from Hildegard to Helfta
• 9 Affect, Affections, and Spiritual Capital in the Thirteenth Century
• 10 Affectus and passio in the Summa theologiae of Thomas Aquinas
• 11 Accidentia anime in Late Medieval Medicine
• 12 Affeccioun in Middle English Devotional Writing
• 13 The Renaissance of affectus? Biblical Humanism and Latin Style
• 14 Augustinian, Aristotelian, and Humanist Shaping of Medieval and Early Modern Emotion: Affectus, affectio, and ‘affection’ as Travelling Concepts
• 15 Meta-, Mega-, and Multiple Emotions in Early Modern English Terminology
• 16 Reconceptualizing Affect: Descartes on the Passions
• 17 Defining the Emotions in the Post-Cartesian Humanism of Giambattista Vico
• 18 Unprincipled by Principle: On Hume’s Use of ‘Affection’
• 19 From affectus to Affect Theory and Back Again
• Index