Following on from my series on the book The Logic of the Body, I want here to very briefly point out some implications for the contemporary debate over the sinfulness of concupiscence and the nature of Jesus’ temptations. As a thick and demanding book it can be hard to remember what the practical relevance is while trying to keep up with the argument, no matter how well those practical implications were signaled at the beginning. But the theological analysis of human psychology offered by Logic of the Body has real value for pressing pastoral and doctrinal questions, and this is one.

Are our desires for sin themselves always sinful, or should a distinction be maintained between temptation (never sinful) and sinful acts? Can you have a desire for evil that is not an evil desire? Did Jesus have an emotional desire for sin, which he sinlessly resisted? It should be obvious that a clear understanding of what emotions are is important to answer these questions.

If emotions are matters of the will

Let us assume, with Jonathan Edwards, that emotions are motions of the will. It follows that they are voluntary (not involuntary), and that they reveal our deepest beliefs. This is hard to square with the etymology, let alone our experience, in which emotions come upon us – but put that aside for a moment and run with this view of emotions. (For the whole argument on this read the series).

In application to Jesus’ temptations, this implies that if Jesus had an emotional desire for a sinful course of action, he willed sin. This willing, we would have to argue, he overrode by some other part of his will, such that he never committed a sinful act, either mental or physical.

LaPine argues that this makes no sense of internal conflict. At best, what we have is an oscillation of the will between objects. But in relation to Jesus it is far worse, for it implies that his human will was not always in line with the divine will, and sometimes (even if briefly) inclined towards sin.

We also have to ask how Jesus’ intellect viewed sin. Did it seem rational to him to chose sin? Undoubtedly sin sometimes seems rational to us, but only because our intellect is clouded by sin itself. Jesus, being sinless, was not in this position. But if emotions are revelations of our deepest beliefs, do we not end up saying Jesus had a deep heart belief that sin was an attractive course of action? Can we really hold such a position?

Emotions as motions of the sensitive appetite

But we have argued that emotions are better understood as motions of the sensitive appetite – in modern terms, matters of the nervous system and the subconscious.

With this construct in place, we can indeed say that Jesus had an emotional attraction to a sinful course of action, but not because of its sinfulness. His sensitive appetite inclined toward e.g. food when starving (Luke 4:2-3). This was a deeply felt and powerful desire. You could say it pulled at his mind and heart, putting huge pressure on his will to incline in the opposite direction to obedience.

Yet the glory of Jesus’ sinless obedience is that his will did not vary, not one iota, not for one moment, in the face of the natural pull of his flesh against it. His intellect was never clouded by confusion as to the sinfulness of sin. He looked it in the face, and overcame. Only if we separate will from emotions, as La Pine’s model allows, can we make these twin claims.

Under this way of viewing things, Jesus’ temptations are therefore, in a sense, fully internal. This sense perhaps can be lost when we (rightly!) refuse to allow that he had sinful desires that were a cause of temptation: that by which Jesus was tempted were only natural external goods. But the motions of the sensitive appetite towards these goods are internal motions. Jesus did experience inner conflict, of the most agonizing variety.

So Jesus’ temptations involved his sensitive appetite inclining him towards a natural good (not-death). If that act were viewed rationally, in full context, it is a sinful act (because in the specific case against God’s will). In this way Jesus did desire a sinful course of action, but not as sin, for the sensitive appetite which desired it is not rational, and so does not consider it under this aspect. Viewed at the level of the reason, the act is sinful, and hence Jesus did not desire it with his rational appetite, the will.

In my view this analysis of the nature of emotions is absolutely essential for specifying the nature of Jesus’ temptations for those who argue Jesus’ temptations never arose from sinful desires (with which I agree). If we cannot identify the difference between appetites, we have no coherent way of claiming Jesus could desire (sensitively) an act that was in isolation natural, but rationally sinful, without having a (rational) desire for sin.

A further thought

Here also there is a benefit in separating affection from passion (as anachronistic as it may be to do so). The suggestion is to use passions to label motions of the lower appetites, and affections to label corresponding motions of the will.

According to this analysis, love is both a passion and an affection: an act of will that sees the object of love and seeks it, and a complementary inclination of the sensitive appetite. An affection, for an embodied soul, is perfected by a passion: love is both a choice and an emotion.

Not so for God, who has no body and no sensitive appetite, affections but not passions: he loves wholly actively, with his will.

Jesus did not love sin (!), for he had no affections, no inclination of the will towards it, even while he could be tempted by his passions inclining towards natural goods.