This is part 3 of a series on the book The Logic of the Body by Matthew La Pine. For the others, see the top of Part 1.

Part 3 – Emotional voluntarism

The main section of the book commences with an analysis of what LaPine calls a “generically Reformed evangelical perspective” on emotions, which he summarises as the view that “we are responsible for emotions as intrusive mental states that show what we truly believe” (24-25). This he terms “emotional voluntarism”.

The key components he identifies are:

1. Emotion as judgement. Emotions are construals of the world in relation to me – revealing whether I see some aspect of the world as threatening or pleasant etc.
2. Emotions of the heart. Emotions come from the heart which is the centre of human agency and is equivalent to the soul. This does not include and is in contrast to the body, which is not at all moral.
3. Deep belief associationism. Emotions reveal deep beliefs as opposed to surface ways of thinking about the world (ways that we think we think about the world). The body can be diagrammed, as in the books of Ed Welch, as a circle around the heart: what is going on at the heart level works out in the body.
4. Mental voluntarism. By mental choice, emotions can be controlled.
5. Emotional duty. If we think differently, we will feel differently – so we are responsible for changing the mental states that have led to sinful emotions.

He illustrates these elements via his worked example of Mary’s anxiety. For the emotional voluntarist, anxiety is fundamentally a mental state that has been chosen (even if at some deep level) and thus there is a moral responsibility attached. Mary’s anxious response to a given situation reveals that at the heart level she has wrong beliefs, probably about God’s sovereignty and/or goodness, which are causing her to judge her situation wrongly. These kind of deep beliefs may well work themselves out in bodily manifestations: anxiety may trigger elevated blood pressure, sweating, reduced gut muscle movements (stomach “butterflies”), and other symptoms associated with fight or flight type systemic responses.

The issue is not whether soul and body are related, but how. For the emotional voluntarist the emotions or affections themselves are located in the soul, or the heart, the centre of personal agency; the “real you”. This is the realm of moral agency. The body is not included in this inner zone, but surrounds it as the means by which the soul can exist and act in the physical world. I think LaPine is right to conclude that this implies a map of human nature in which the soul is equivalent to the mind, and stands in instrumental relation to the body; the body is like a tool that our rational minds use. There is an essentially top-down order to the human person.

LaPine is right to conclude that this implies a map of human nature in which the soul is equivalent to the mind

Therefore, although the inner life can and should impact the body, any traffic in the other direction is probably a bad thing. Ideally my body would obey the dictates of my mind simply and immediately. Faced with a potentially anxiety-inducing situation, were my heart-level beliefs correct they would “command” my body to react with calm composure, and my body would respond obediently. When the body resists the dictates of the mind, that is due to the impact of the fall. Any condition in which physiological factors play a role, such as where depression may be linked to hormonal or chemical factors (controversial as that may be), are an instance of our fallen condition being an occasion for temptation.

In the case of emotions that are good, that flow from right beliefs, the associated bodily responses can also be good – a feeling of warmth towards a right object of love, for example. Either way our moral responsibility is to have those correct deep beliefs, of which the bodily components of emotion are an overflow. The body is a wonderful tool given to us with which to serve God, and is the proper means by which my soul and its activity is manifest in the physical world. In my fallen condition, it may make my moral life more difficult because being physically disordered may lead it to resist the command of my mind, and thereby occasion temptation. Where that physical disorder is extreme, in severe depression or mental illness, moral responsibility can be diminished or completely removed, as the body is no longer under the control of the heart/soul.

Is emotional voluntarism a fair description?

Is emotional voluntarism in the form laid out by LaPine a fair representation of “the generically Reformed evangelical perspective” on emotions? It’s an important question to ask, not least because many of the names quoted in this section of The Logic of the Body are well respected in evangelical circles; including a number from the CCEF/Biblical Counselling stable, whose materials I and many others have read and used and deemed helpful. It is always right to seek to represent a position as fairly and charitably as possible; it requires even greater accuracy and sensitivity when the view is imputed to writers and organisations that have been of great benefit to the church.

I’m afraid I’m going to cop out of answering it. If I analyse the quotes LaPine chooses, they seem to say what he says they say. When I got down the CCEF and similar books from my shelf and flicked through, I saw plenty of instances of the kind of themes LaPine pegs as emotional voluntarism (the heart is the centre of the person and is equivalent to the mind/soul, this is the location of the emotions, emotions reveal heart beliefs, and our responsibility is to correct our heart-level thinking).

But at the same time many of these writers are experienced counsellors who know humans to be complex body-soul unities, and whose writing demonstrates that nuance. I can point to at least one recent popular-level book that draws extensively on CCEF sources, and yet seems to me to do a fine job of representing the intertwined nature of body and soul (in a way quite compatible with the theological psychology LaPine lays out later in his book). I wonder if emotional voluntarism is not an idealised construct compared to the reality of these materials, but without a longer study I’m not willing to judge.

What I can verify, however, is that emotional voluntarism does roughly fit my own instinctive approach to the emotions and how they should fit into discipleship. Whether or not it is a fair description of a given stable or writer, I recognise it as sufficiently close to what I have ended up with to be interested in a critical analysis. Emotions are mental states, that reveal the deep beliefs of the heart, which can impact the body, which is a tool of the mind, which is equivalent to the soul – roughly, these would be my instincts. Where they are not, I certainly would not have had a thought-through alternative.

In other words, I recognise emotional voluntarism in my own thinking enough to justify the way in which The Logic of the Body uses it as a foil for the view of Aquinas and the more holistic theological psychology that it seeks to retrieve, and to find a critique valuable.

So what’s the problem?

What is wrong with emotional voluntarism? As I see it, according to The Logic of the Body there are a number of manifestations of gaps between it as a theory and the way in which emotions are experienced in the real world, which suggest the more fundamental issue that it is simply not an accurate account of the mind/body relationship. Emotional voluntarism “has not adequately accounted for how the body qualifies agency” (p.37), and therefore falls down in practice.

In the case of anxiety or other such deep-rooted conditions, it is the experience of sufferers that emotional states cannot be straightforwardly corrected by right thinking. It is possible for an anxiety sufferer to disapprove of her own anxiety, and yet still experience it – and as La Pine points out, being told her anxiety is a moral issue can “add iniquity to injury” making a difficult situation worse. Emotions are “quasi-independent of conscious mental activity” (37), because they are bodily phenomena in the sense of involving neural configuration. The formation of emotional habits involves the forging of neuron pathways that are lasting, pathways that can be triggered by instinctive reactions to situations that bypass rational reflection.

This kind of complexity is evidenced in the way psychologists treat such disorders. Rather than purely focussing on the cognitive work needed (know, realise, focus – as an emotional voluntarist might) a psychologist would look at the anxiety triggers and try to recondition the responses with (depending on their view of how cognitive emotions are) a combination of drugs and cognitive therapy. The goal is reconfiguring the system (which may involve cognitive work). ¹

Nor does it seem adequate for an emotional voluntarist to posit that emotion comes from the soul or heart unless it comes from the body, as with mental illness – positing some physiological/mental line that can be crossed such that emotions become no longer voluntary. On the contrary, our experience is that the body is always involved in emotions. And that involvement is two-directional. Emotions can be the result of thinking, of mental states, but they can also be responses to instinctive body-level judgments that are not rational reflection.

Furthermore, La Pine argues that whatever theological psychology we end up with should incorporate a positive moral role for the body, for which emotional voluntarism seems to leave little place. If the body necessarily “qualifies agency”, then unless we think this an entirely disordered state of affairs, we should expect some positive good to emerge from this kind of constitution. La Pine will argue later that in previous eras of thought the notion of habitus was just such a way of expressing how the body played a positive role in moral life.

From a physiological/bodily point of view, and the possible standpoint of a secular psychologist, the response of anxiety is a result of unconscious processing and thus not moral. This is not the avenue down which La Pine wishes to lead us: anxiety (for example) clearly is a moral issue in Scripture. So the strength of the evidence for a nuanced relationship between mental states and emotions, encompassing a significant and bi-directional role for the body, yields the need for an account of human psychology that can explain how emotions can be both a matter of moral responsibility and bound up with bodily states that are not straightforwardly voluntary. It is this that La Pine thinks Thomas Aquinas can help with, whose view of human psychology we will examine in the next post.

But in case that all sounds rather dry so far, let me try and keep you on board with a glimpse of where this is all heading. Can there possibly be not merely practical value, but heart-warming beauty in a more accurate and more biblical theological psychology? Here is another way that La Pine states what he is after in his project: “we need a theological anthropology that sees a mother rocking her baby as a deeply spiritual act that knits shalom into the brain and nervous system of the child.” (307). It seems to me that is a profound and worthy goal.

1. La Pine uses Joseph LeDoux as his example of a physiological approach here, an example of someone quite nuanced towards the cognitive end and wary of antidepressants. The point, I guess, is to show that accounting for emotions as partially non-cognitive does not imply treating them as completely subconscious and therefore passively experienced rather than under any level of mental control.