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The Logic of the Body – part 1

Are emotions bodily changes or mental states? Do we have active control over our emotions, the exercise of which is a question of obedience, or are they physiological changes we passively experience? How do we approach something like anxiety from a pastoral angle: is it a sinful mindset to be repented of and changed, or a bodily affliction to be treated and possibly medicated away? Answering such questions well requires a coherent understanding of the nature of our emotions as a function of our existence as bodily creatures and rational, moral agents. We need to know what kind of creatures Scripture tells us human beings are created to be, and how to marry this with what we find ourselves to be in our own experience.

The Logic of the Body seeks to give just this kind of account of human nature – a theological psychology. It is not a easy read, owing mostly to long sections working through the psychology of Thomas Aquinas and later medieval scholastics, which require a reasonable grasp of metaphysical terminology. The questions it raises and seeks to answer touch on complex and long debated theological issues, especially the nature of the soul and the relation of feelings/emotions/affections (the terminology alone requires extensive unpicking).

It is no criticism that a treatment of complex matters is complex, but the consequence is that a significant investment of effort is required to comprehend and engage with it. For my part I have found that effort has been worth it. I’ve found it stimulating to grapple with, and it’s had relevance for my own preaching already. I’ll be thinking over the issues raised for years to come. In this series, I’ll summarise the content and argument of the book as I understand it, and share how I have already found it helpful in practice. It’s mostly an exercise in working out my own understanding, but I hope it may also help some to appropriate some of the insights of the book or encourage others to take up and read.

Originally this was going to be one post but it became far too long, so now it will be (God-willing) several. They will be, tentatively:

Part 1 – Why this book is worth the effort to engage

Late on in The Logic of the Body, Matthew LaPine quotes with disapproval C. H. Dodd:

“[Love] is not primarily an emotion or affection; it is primarily an active determination of the will. That is why it can be commanded as feelings cannot.”

I think Dodd’s way of putting the matter should strike us as wrong immediately and yet I think it probably does not. It is, after all, rather similar to the received pastoral wisdom that “love is a choice, not a feeling.” Resisting reducing love to emotion may be just as well, but the oddness of defining love over against affection or passion (words that have enough overlap to sometimes serve as synonyms) should give us pause.

What emerges fairly swiftly upon lifting the lid of that evangelical saying is that we will not progress very far without a clear conception of what feelings, emotions, or affections are. Dodd uses all three interchangeably, and opposes them all to an “active determination of the will”. This is directly the opposite move to Jonathan Edwards, who famously located “affections” in the will, as in fact simply being another name for “more vigorous exercises of the will”. The modern concept of emotions we perhaps vaguely think to have some overlap with this, but seems to accent their bodily or passive nature. “Passions” sounds either medieval or faintly Mills and Boon.

I’ll come on to how LaPine decides to clear up this terminology in the next post, but the point at this stage is to see that we need a view on what emotions/affections/passions/feelings are, and how they fit into our nature as embodied souls of a rational kind with moral responsibility.

We need the kind of work The Logic of the Body sets out to give us.

We need it because otherwise we are in danger of blunt reactions to real world complexities. LaPine’s central worked example throughout the book is an imagined anxiety sufferer called Mary, the possible pastoral reactions to whom illustrate the implications of either approach. The physiological/passive approach (“emotions are bodily changes”) will see Mary’s anxiety as a non-moral bodily condition, to be treated via therapy and possibly medication. The cognitive/volitional view (“emotions are mental states”) will see her anxiety primarily as a sin of which she needs to repent. LaPine argues that secular psychology has most often represented the first pole, and Reformed evangelical soul care the second. I think this conceptual division of approaches will be familiar to many, even if the real complexity of trying to help someone with anxiety (or any similar complex condition) means that wise counsellors (in a non-technical sense) will rarely fall squarely on one side. Wise, experienced soul-carers will know that the bodily and the mental, the physiological and the volitional belong together in an integrated unity. But they will also see, I think, the immense value of laying out clearly, coherently and theologically how this is so. We cannot care for souls-without-bodies because that’s not what we are.

We need it because we need to know how to exercise that responsibility with respect to the commands of Scripture that apply to our affections. God requires our love as as obedience to a (the!) command, “You shall love the Lord your God.” Should our love for him be only a decision of the will? Or does it include an emotional layer – which would imply our affections are things which we can disciple? Again it is obvious we cannot get very far with such questions without some kind of psychological map that locates where feelings are with respect to will, emotions and thoughts, body and soul.

And in a different way, we need The Logic of the Body because it is an example of a Reformed thinker engaging critically but fruitfully with medieval theology, advancing a coherent theological proposal via careful reasoning from the books of Scripture and nature. LaPine is interested in recovering older resources of theological psychology, and bringing these into dialogue with contemporary neuroscience. The older sources are treated respectfully, with the expectation they will have much to teach us. But so are the insights of the body of scientific and medical knowledge that we now possess. And above both, in a guiding, shaping and norming role is Scripture. His approach, he says, is a transdisciplinary one “which gives biblical reasoning the priority.” That kind of thing, we need a lot.

Better understanding our own complex nature puts us in a better position to appreciate the goodness of human emotional life, and affords both realistic pastoral expectations and insightful strategies for discipling our affections. That is why I’ve spent time wrestling through this book, and I think I have seen fruit from that already in my own preaching.