This is part 6 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 lightly polished reading notes.
Chapters 6-9 of The Logic of the Body are constructive work that attempt to demonstrate how the Thomist theological psychology provides a consistent framework that can explain theologically what we find in the book of nature (here, contemporary neuroscience) and the book of Scripture. These chapters are our focus in this post.
No to physicalism
Chapter 6 is an argument from nature in favour of Aquinas’ view of the soul against the possible alternatives, primarily physicalism, represented by Nancy Murphey. Physicalism considers the body to be totally constitutive of a human: there is no second metaphysical component to us. “Soul” doesn’t name something separate from the body, but only the higher capacities that give to us personal identity (consciousness and so on).
To evangelicals, the arguments against this position from Scripture are probably intuitive. The intermediate state (between death and the resurrection) implies the continued existence of the soul apart from the body, requiring a certain kind of dualism. There are ways around this for the physicalist, but none are very satisfying (e.g. divine action “fast-forwarding” people to the last day upon death). Some kind of dualism (that the body and soul, while intimately linked, are distinguishable metaphysical parts) is the default Christian position, and rightly so. Many of the critiques of dualism, as LaPine points out, have been of crude versions. The Thomist version of dualism espoused by J. P. Moreland also has some interesting correlations with contemporary neuroscience, which LaPine explores in this chapter. These are good book-of-nature supports for the existence of the soul as something more than just the emergent properties of advanced brain chemistry.
This is all worthy material to consider, given that the existence of the soul as a separate metaphysical part of our human existence is a widespread intuition that is terribly awkward for pure materialism. A theological explanation for a reality observable but not explained by natural science is a useful apologetic tool.
The body in Biblical theology
Chapter 7 has less apologetic and more pastoral implications, as LaPine starts to characterise the place of the body in Scripture. It is now commonplace in evangelical circles to say that our bodies matter and that we should think about this. But relating this to Paul’s “body ruled by sin” in Romans 6:6 is perhaps less commonly managed.
LaPine relates Thomas’ habitus, neuroscience’s plasticity and Paul’s flesh. We should understand the flesh as the “vicious dispositions of the body”: the habitus of sin. Flesh “captures the way sin and evil leave their mark on the embodied agent” (261). Matter isn’t evil and having a physical body isn’t bad (contra gnosticism), but it is the plasticity of the body (particularly the brain and nervous system) that makes it possible for human beings to be in this disposed-to-sin posture.
it is the plasticity of the body that makes it possible for human beings to be disposed-to-sin
We know from experience that repeated acts condition us such that future instances of that type of act come more easily: this lies behind habit, practice, addiction. Brain physiology has explained some of the mechanics behind the process (“neurons that fire together wire together”). But this is not a morally-neutral process in the case of sinful acts. We can speak of our body-soul unity being deformed because habituated to sin.
In LaPine’s Thomist account this makes metaphysical sense because the soul is the principle of life of the whole body. If the soul is a spiritual substance separate from the body, in what way can spirit be shaped? But if the soul is the form of the body, the materiality of which gives individual existence to the form, then the plasticity of the body enables the disposition of our body-soul unity.
Here’s the cash value: perhaps, contra evangelical intuitions, the body isn’t morally neutral. It’s the body of sin, the body that (in a sinful state) disposes us to sin. But the body’s moral dimension is not only negative: those with the mind of the Spirit can present our members to righteousness, leading to sanctification. The body can be put (partially) into a new state, a disposition towards righteousness (though the full re-disposing of our bodies to righteousness is not possible in this life, hence Paul’s cry for deliverance from the body of death in Rom. 7:24).
We can unify, then, the psychological/medical and the theological/moral. An anxious response to a situation can become habituated. If so, a future anxious response may be almost wholly precognitive, triggered prior to raciocination. But is anxiety a sin? Yes (verse). Is it wholly voluntary? No. Can an act be a moral matter if not voluntary? Yes, if the habituation itself is the response of moral choices (and of course the voluntary choice of Adam lies at back of all human habituation to sin).
So how do I view my habitual anxiety? As a deformation of body and soul caused by sin, original and my own. As overall a moral matter, and yet not necessarily a voluntary choice in the state in which I find myself now. The body may be limiting my agency and disposing me towards sin. And I will need to pay attention to the body as I attempt to combat that.
Commanding emotion
So the body is also a source of hope. For the plasticity of the body means my dispositions can be changed for the better, and what is an instinctive response now can be retrained over time. What’s more, because the body and soul are not distinct layers, the treatment for my disposition is still aimed at the rational faculties, even while the movements I am trying to train are those of the lower faculties.
So just as we can harmonise the theological descriptions of sin and the flesh with our experience of anxiety, depression and so on, so we can harmonise the experience of the passivity of the emotions (and the role of the subconscious) with the moral dimension of emotions and their “commandability” in Scripture.
Hence the repeated Scriptural commands to give an emotional response (considered in Logic of the Body chapter 9). The metaphor that our emotions are under the political control of reason neatly captures our experience in which we know our emotional responses are not simply reasoned, and yet we also know our feelings to be not wholly out of our control.
What’s more, this allows us to find a positive function for the emotions in sanctification. For if the motions of the lower faculties are separate but designed to work alongside acts of will and intellect, we can imagine a situation in which a right “feeling” enables or eases a right choice. If I am disposed virtuously to love justice, to choose the just act will be more natural. To say it another way, “one might cultivate an emotion precisely in order to make an act of will easier and more intense” [Mark D. Jordan, ‘Aquinas’s Construction of a Moral Account of the Passions’, Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie Und Theologie 33, no. n/a (1986): 92.]
“one might cultivate an emotion precisely in order to make an act of will easier and more intense”
Mark Jordan
This is all very much what (the Thomist!) Robert Barron suggests in his excellent talk on freedom, which he defines as “the disciplining of desire so as to make the achievement of the good first possible and then effortless.”
Summary
I think LaPine persuasively argues that Aquinas’ map of the powers of the soul theologically complements contemporary neuroscience’s suggested maps of human agency in terms of the interaction between conscious and subconscious, body and mind. The definition of an emotion as a motion of the sensitive appetite fits very well with modern definitions of emotions as “embodied judgments,” “beliefs registered and expressed in our bodily organs.”
This is a better theology of the emotions than has typically been offered (at least in Reformed accounts) since the Puritans.
Coda
Here’s another place this theology of the emotions has practical and pastoral relevance: the temptations of Christ. Recent debates over the doctrine of concupiscence have highlighted how crucial it is to distinguish the ways in which Christ’s temptations are and are not like ours (as Hebrews 4:15 implies). LaPine himself applies his theology of the emotions to Christ’s experience in Gethsemane.
If we consider the emotions to be acts of the will, and hence revelations of our inner most desires, then Christ’s agony reveals a deep desire not to do God’s will. But this, according to the post-Reformation understanding of concupiscence, would be sinful (even if he had a simultaneous conflicting and overriding rational desire to do God’s will). And indeed it is very hard to understand it otherwise. What would attract Christ at the level of his rational faculties to the choice to disobey, if he had (as we must say he did) a clear-eyed view of the necessity of the atonement and the glory to be achieved by it – even in the context of his necessary death to achieve these things?
(And besides this LaPine has argued earlier that inner conflict makes no sense at all without two sources or layers of appetite.)
If, however, emotions are understood as motions of the sensitive appetite, we understand Christ’s inner struggle quite differently. The conflict is between his rational appetite, desiring the will of God, and his sensitive appetite, by which he wholly rightly and sinlessly desired not-to-die. He felt, body and soul, the natural and right sensitive (emotional/pre-cognitive) desire to not-die (note the overtly bodily descriptions of the experience of Gethsemane), and yet had to override this by his rational desire to do God’s will. This conflict could reach the uttermost heights of intensity without the slightest flinching of his rational will to desire otherwise than the (eternally covenanted!) plan of redemption.