This is part 5 of a series on the book The Logic of the Body by Matthew La Pine. For the others, see the top of Part 1. Consider these posts as lightly polished reading notes!
Where did it all go wrong?
The title is somewhat tongue-in-cheek. The Logic of the Body is too nuanced to present a simplistic decline-and-fall narrative, from the lofty clarity of the Angelic Doctor to the muddle of present day evangelicalism. Nonetheless, it is arguing that something has been lost. In the middle three chapters of the book (3-5), Matthew La Pine traces developments in theological psychology in the medieval period, through the influence of John Calvin, to modern Reformed authors that directly precede the emotional voluntarism that he identifies as the “generically Reformed evangelical perspective” on emotions.
I will not lay out the whole history that La Pine walks through, for although it is important to show how things got to where they are, the point is really where it ends up. The key stop on the road is Calvin, not because Calvin defines Reformed, but because his thinking about the emotions seems to exemplify major modifications to the earlier theories that come subsequently to be the more common approach in the Reformed tradition.
Features of Calvin’s approach
In La Pine’s judgment, “Calvin’s psychology was not holistic.”1. His primary interest was in the faculties of the soul, and not the contribution of the body. For Calvin, the body is a wonderful thing, but the soul is the principal part of the human (and the seat of the image of God), and has a fairly instrumental relation to the body. The body has to do with sickness, the soul with sin.
Calvin numbers the faculties of the soul as two, intellect and will. The faculty of sense exists, but is merely bodily. Because his account is more dualistic, these are distinctly separate (compare what we saw in Aquinas, where all the faculties operate holistically and are functions of the whole body-soul composite).2 Crucially, the affections are operations of the will. They are a phenomenon of the soul (and must be to be morally significant). Or at least, the relation of soul to body is always top-down, for Calvin does “seem to assume emotions involve bodily changes”3. La Pine notes that for Calvin, affections are often negative, or disordered, and his characteristic focus is on the need for restraint or regulation of the affections. Nonetheless, God calls for the affections of the heart, for love with all faculties. Calvin speaks mostly negatively about virtue, employing the notion of habitus negatively to explain the corruption of the heart.
Head vs. Heart
One of the implications of Calvin’s psychology that La Pine particularly notes is that it leads to difficulty in fully understanding inner conflict. This problem may be illustrated by the common parlance of head vs heart.
What do we mean by “my heart says yes but my head says no”? Probably that our feelings incline us towards one course of action, whereas our reason suggests the opposite. In Calvin’s psychology, the affections are motions of the will, and therefore this scenario is a conflict between the will and the intellect. But such a characterisation seems to treat both will and intellect as possessing in themselves powers of reasoning and willing, making them into quasi-agents, rather than complementary capacities of one agent. For Aquinas, on the contrary, the will simply is the power of inclining towards the object recognised as attractive by the intellect. Conflict between them is not possible.
Much as we might sympathise with Calvin’s desire not to attach too firmly to intricate psychological speculation, there seems to be a real problem of incoherence here. Aquinas, in contrast, can account for inner conflict on multiple levels. It seems to me that there is still a place for conflict at Aquinas’ rational level, in that two conflicting objects of choice may provide different reasons for being attractive, though this is then not a conflict between faculties, but a wrestle of the united operation of will and intellect to grasp the preferable object. But true conflict between faculties can also be accounted for, between the rational and sensitive faculties. The sensitive faculty, possessing both (sense) cognition and (sense) appetite, can independently incline the person towards an agent that the rational faculties incline away from. 4
Gethsemane as perfectly regulated emotion?
The implications of Calvin’s approach to the emotions are also, perhaps most acutely, displayed in his exegesis of the accounts of Christ in Gethsemane. To be consistent, Calvin must characterise Jesus’ struggle in the garden as one throughout which he perfectly regulated his emotions. A state of obedience requires feelings restrained and put into order, damped down within “due bounds.”
To be consistent, Calvin must characterise Jesus’ struggle in the garden as one throughout which he perfectly regulated his emotions.
For La Pine, this minimisation of the emotive extremes of Jesus’ experience indicates there to be something wrong in Calvin’s psychology. As he puts it, it is “difficult to swallow that Christ’s emotion was within due bounds and with restraint when he was sweating drops of blood (Luke 22:44). What would excess look like?”5 Better, surely, to find a more flexible account of the morality of emotions that is able to account for sinless experience of extremes.
It would be easy to mischaracterise Calvin in such a short summary and do him a disservice. The Logic of the Body rightly takes the space to engage more fully. Part of the difficulty of summarising his approach is that he does not reflect at length in any one place on the relation between the body and the soul, or the place of the body in psychology – but arguably therein lies the problem. Calvin simply is not much interested in the body with regards to ethics. La Pine’s conclusion is that Calvin overlooks the way in which the body can contribute limits to agency that are not negative. For Calvin, “negative emotions are guilty until proven innocent” and “the body plays little to no role in Christian formation.”6
The historical picture is completed by tracing these themes through modern Reformed theologians up to Bavinck, whose untranslated works on psychology La Pine concludes to be much more (fruitfully!) Thomist than most Reformed psychology, both in unity of body and soul and nuanced location of the emotions.
- p.190
- La Pine is careful to show that Calvin was not arguing directly against Thomist views of the soul, but does end up taking different positions owing the influence of his context (especially the shifts that had taken place in the two centuries prior).
- p. 144
- And because the rational faculties exercise a political power over the sensitive, this is still an arena of moral responsibility, but not straightforwardly so.
- p.183
- p.170-1