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“The Emotions” in Biblical Anthropology? A Genealogy and Case Study with

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 September 2017

Phillip Michael Lasater
Phillip Michael Lasater*
Affiliation:
Universität Zürich
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In the late nineteenth century, the British writer Lewis Carroll published a nonsensical poem called The Hunting of the Snark in which an unlikely alliance hunts a fictional animal, which Carroll named the “snark.” Despite the alliance's intense search for the snark and their questions about how to describe and classify it (apparently, “a Boojum”), they do not find it. I want to suggest that any effort to locate “emotions” in the Hebrew Bible or the ancient Near East is comparable to hunting the snark. If we want our hunt to be successful, we will turn away from “the emotions” and toward something more like the psychological taxonomy that the emotions displaced in the late-modern period: namely, the taxonomy of “passions and affections.” “The emotions” are simply not to be found in the Hebrew Bible or in the historical contexts behind its emergence.

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Harvard Theological Review , Volume 110 , Issue 4 , October 2017 , pp. 520 - 540
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Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 2017 

In the late nineteenth century, the British writer Lewis Carroll published a nonsensical poem called The Hunting of the Snark in which an unlikely alliance hunts a fictional animal, which Carroll named the “snark.”Footnote 1 Despite the alliance's intense search for the snark and their questions about how to describe and classify it (apparently, “a Boojum”), they do not find it. I want to suggest that any effort to locate “emotions” in the Hebrew Bible or the ancient Near East is comparable to hunting the snark. If we want our hunt to be successful, we will turn away from “the emotions” and toward something more like the psychological taxonomy that the emotions displaced in the late-modern period: namely, the taxonomy of “passions and affections.” “The emotions” are simply not to be found in the Hebrew Bible or in the historical contexts behind its emergence.

This paper makes three core claims. First, modes of classification affect how we understand the subject matter under discussion. Second, as a psychological category, “the emotions” are a surprisingly recent mode of classification (i.e., eighteenth to nineteenth centuries CE). And third, the taxonomy of “the emotions” is not interchangeable with the older, originally Greek, taxonomy of “passions and affections,” which, for the most part, has been forgotten. As they relate to historical-critical work, these points should make us seriously reconsider applying the idea of “the emotions” to antiquity in general and to the Hebrew Bible in particular. A case study with derivatives of (“to fear, be afraid”) in the Hebrew Bible will follow and reinforce the concept-historical analysis of “the emotions.”

Biblical Studies and the Study of the Emotions

Understandably, contemporary philologists classify the substantive form (“fear”) as a term for an emotion. At first glance, it seems unproblematic to assume that the psychological category of the emotions is relevant to antiquity. After all, how else could one classify or other words in the Hebrew Bible like (“love”), (“hate”), (“desire”), (“anger”), (“jubilation”), and so on? Do these words not denote “feelings,” and are feelings not matter-of-factly equatable with “emotions”?

The topic of emotions is presently in vogue in various disciplines,Footnote 2 including biblical studies.Footnote 3 Most of the time, a detectable assumption within and beyond biblical studies is that talk of the emotions—and illuminatingly, the catch-all idea of “emotions in general”—is applicable to antiquity and the contemporary world alike.Footnote 4 In studies of the emotions, the main questions are often, on the one hand, whether people share the same emotions by nature or whether emotions are heterogeneous products of social construction and, on the other hand, to what extent these two theoretical poles may coincide. For present purposes, it will suffice to examine the opening statement of an article by Wolfgang Zwickel, a statement in which one may discern a note of puzzlement with respect to what Zwickel sees as a lack of attention to the emotions of the ancient Near East's inhabitants. His statement is instructive not because it is unique, but because it is characteristic in drawing no clear distinction between words like “feelings,” “emotions,” “passions,” and “affects.” The heading of his introductory section is “Problems with interpreting emotions in ancient iconography”:

The iconography of emotions has probably never been thoroughly researched for the ancient Near East and ancient Egypt. Only in the Lexikon der Ägyptologie can an article about emotions be found, in contrast to the Reallexikon für Assyriologie. In newer biblical dictionaries like Das Neue Bibellexikon, the Anchor Bible Dictionary, the Calwer Bibellexikon or Herders Neues Bibellexikon no entry exists at all about emotions in general, though a few articles deal with specific emotions.

In the Old Testament we do not really have a specific word that denotes feelings, emotions or affects in general. But certainly the ancient Israelites had feelings, as did the people from ancient Mesopotamia or ancient Egypt. We only have words in the Hebrew Bible for specific emotions. Yet emotions can be expressed not only in words but also in art. Hence the main question of my article shall be: Which kind of emotions could be expressed by art in ancient times?Footnote 5

Zwickel appears comfortable assuming that the emotions are a universal category. But four questionable points in his argumentative logic deserve mention. First, Zwickel uses not only “feelings,” but also “emotions” and “affects” interchangeably, as if they were all different words for one and the same thing. Second, these interchangeable terms are said to belong to the “emotions in general,” a psychological umbrella category thought to be relevant to the ancient Near East by virtue of the fact that its residents “had feelings.” Third, there is the fact that the Old Testament contains no psychological umbrella term for “feelings, emotions or affects in general,” a point that Zwickel curiously glosses over in favor of speaking “only” of “specific emotions”—i.e., phraseology that only makes sense if one is already presupposing the expansive concept of “emotions in general.”Footnote 6 Fourth and finally, Zwickel proceeds under the assumption that, despite the lack of corresponding terminology in antiquity and despite the absence among psychologists of any “consensus at the moment about [how to define] feelings, affects, and emotions,”Footnote 7 the concept of “emotions in general” is appropriate in reference to the ancient Near East and the Hebrew Bible.

Indeed, the third and fourth points suggest that Zwickel, like many other scholars focusing on antiquity, takes it for granted in the case of “the emotions” that the terminological incongruity between antiquity and modernity does not imply a conceptual incongruity.Footnote 8 In a number of cases, similar arguments based on a word-concept distinction could be sound—but not in the case of “the emotions.” The reason is that the history of the word itself is tied to conceptual changes, which the following pages will trace. Even if the editors of the reference works that Zwickel names did not consciously exclude “the emotions” from consideration, there is good reason for this exclusion: indeed, there were neither natural nor socially constructed emotions in the ancient Near East, a claim that I will now clarify.

In order to make a strong historical-critical case about the psychological concepts in biblical texts, a concept-historical genealogy of the emotions as a psychological category is indispensable. If the genealogy seems disproportionately to privilege philosophy and theology, it is because what is now deemed the separate investigation of human affectivity (i.e., emotions; passions and affections) in psychology was formerly a branch of philosophical and theological inquiry.Footnote 9 In what follows, the word “feelings” will serve as a base term in contrast to “emotions,” on the one hand, and “passions,” on the other. These latter two are specific, and conflicting, conceptions of the former.

The Recentness of “the Emotions”: The Impact of David Hume (1711–1776) and Thomas Brown (1778–1820)

In the Hebrew Bible, a word like does not constitute “one of” the emotions. Why? “The emotions” as an all-inclusive categorization of feelings only very recently (i.e., eighteenth to nineteenth centuries CE) displaced the originally premodern and more differentiated taxonomy of “passions and affections” and sometimes “sentiments”—terms that were not different ways of saying the same thing but rather described movements of the soul's higher and lower levels or parts.Footnote 10 When we consider the history of the English word “emotion” as a psychological category,Footnote 11 one of the earliest yet inconsistent usages of “emotion” in this sense is in Book 2 of David Hume's Treatise of Human Nature (1738). In this complicated history, some of the most influential figures are early- to late-modern, anti-Aristotelian thinkers who, in various and even incompatible ways, sought to draw “a strong analogy between the physics of matter and the science of the mind.”Footnote 12 Hume is one such influential figure and thus provides a sensible starting point because of his use of the word “emotions.”

A. David Hume and “the Emotions”/“the Passions”

Hume's more established terminology was not “the emotions” but rather “the passions” and “affections” (Book 2 of the Treatise is entitled, “On the Passions”). Yet he wrote the Treatise while living in France from 1734–1737, a period either before or during which he would have read Descartes's work on the passions of the soul (Les passions de l’âme, publ. 1649),Footnote 13 where Descartes on occasion uses the French émotions to indicate specifically “confused perceptions caused by the action of the body upon the soul,” so Hume may well have adopted Descartes's usage of this French noun into English as “emotions.”Footnote 14 While Hume may have been informed by Descartes's terminology, their usages of the word are not identical. But like Descartes, Hume presents emotions as one type of perception (the two types being “impressions” and “ideas;”Footnote 15 see Treatise, I.i.1), at times contrasting “emotions” with cognitive “passions” and at other times drawing little or no distinction between the two.Footnote 16 Any given “emotion”/“passion” is what Hume called a “secondary impression,” and the “emotions”/“passions” are differentiated not in virtue of their objects or intentionality but rather in virtue of “distinct feeling[s]” that operate deterministically.Footnote 17 Guiding Hume was his commitment to a strong analogy between psychology and the Newtonian physics of matter as he understood it.Footnote 18

Important to note is how substantially Hume's account differs from the Aristotelian and classical Christian views (i.e., the psychologies of Augustine, Aquinas, etc.) of passions and affections as active movements of the soul (cf. Hume's work, where they are passive perceptions). Passions and affections were the soul's movements, which needed to be governed by reason and brought into alignment with reason so that, through habituation (Aristotelianism) and the workings of grace (Augustinianism), people may develop a rational desire for the good and thereby move toward the telos of a human life.Footnote 19 Aristotle and Aquinas argue that “good” is that which things desire (even if not consciously) in the sense of a natural goal-directedness,Footnote 20 so that, in the case of human beings, in order to move toward the good, the will and its affects must be shaped to accord with the good, thus drawing both the will and the intellect to their natural and rational final telos.Footnote 21 Clearly, when Aristotle and Aquinas wrote about the faculties and passions of the soul, the content of their arguments was not only psychological but also ethical and theological (see Summa Theologiae I–II.1.8).

By contrast, for Hume, “emotions”/“passions” are not movements of the soul but passive perceptions. And crucially, they are not perceptions of anything in particular but are instead autonomous entities, since Hume's psychology does away not only with the will (Treatise II.iii.1),Footnote 22 but also with reason as traditionally conceived. That is, Hume famously considered reason to be not the proper governor of the passions but rather the instrumental “slave of the passions” (see Treatise II.iii.3),Footnote 23 meaning that reason functions subordinately to enact or pursue whatever is desired, with desire detached from any telos for human life as such.Footnote 24 Indeed, Hume's non-teleological psychology was no less infused with ethical implications than Aristotle and Aquinas's thought, the Humean implications being that morality cannot in principle be decided upon rationally, nor can “the emotions”/“passions” be governed through rationality and the will.Footnote 25 With no faculties of will or intellect to direct unruly passions and affections toward the good (i.e., toward an exterior telos), the authority of the good was transformed and transferred elsewhere: that is, the authority of the good was on its way to being equated with individual, human subjective desire per se.Footnote 26 For Hume, such desire rules reason.Footnote 27 By severing the link between “emotions”/“passions” and classical faculty psychology,Footnote 28 as well as by inverting the relationship between “emotions”/“passions” and reason, Hume's use of the word “emotions” helped set the stage for thinking of feelings as non-cognitive and involuntary—that is, as exempt from the rule of reason and the role of the will.

It should already be clear that what Hume meant by “emotions”/“passions” is not interchangeable with what Aristotle (384–322 BCE), Augustine (354–430 CE), or, much later, Aquinas (1225–1274 CE) meant by “passions and affections.” The introduction of the word “emotions” into psychology overlaps with conceptual shifts. Although Hume is an early example of someone who persistently used the word “emotions” as a psychological category, he heralded an even more consequential Scottish figure from the same century: the philosophical psychologist Thomas Brown (1778–1820 CE).

B. Thomas Brown, the Academy of Physics, and the Emotions

Brown marks a key turning point, on the one hand, toward establishing the emotions as a dominant, de-theologized psychological category and, on the other hand, toward the now widespread dichotomy between emotions and rationality (e.g., “So-and-so behaves not rationally but merely emotionally.”). Having gone through twenty editions between 1820–1860, Brown's highly popular book Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind played a major role in this respect.

One should immediately note that Brown held Hume in high regard and was an anti-Scholastic (and thus, an anti-Aristotelian) of sorts. He aligned himself with the Humean empiricist tradition of psychology and rejected its rival from the Scottish Common Sense tradition, where different thinkers continued to speak of the mind's “fundamental powers or faculties (i.e., reason, will, consciousness)” over against the Humean tendency to speak of “only a succession of different ‘states’ or ‘affections’ of the mind.”Footnote 29 Together with like-minded students in Edinburgh, Brown formed a philosophy club called “the Academy of Physics,” whose aim was to apply “the Newtonian philosophy” to all subjects for which induction and reasoning are relevant. The historian of psychology Thomas Dixon comments that their goal was “to construct a tolerant and de-Christianised mental science modelled on the physics of matter,” -a move that, within a generation, resulted in physicalist reductionism.Footnote 30 The “passions” of the soul were on their way to being transformed into the “emotions” in the body, with the body pragmatically redefined to fit into the early-modern mechanistic conception of nature, which, by definition, excluded from the outset anything like the soul with its “passions.”Footnote 31 Proceeding from these methodological starting points and sharing the Academy of Physics's interests in formulating a deeply revised psychology, Brown can accurately be described as “the inventor of the emotions.”Footnote 32

Brown placed all mental “states” (as he called them) into three separate categories—sensations, thoughts, and emotions—implying that emotions are something quite other than thoughts (i.e., rationality) and further solidifying the portrayal of emotions as non-cognitive and involuntary.Footnote 33 This three-part schema of mental “states” deserves some comments about how it relates to the older idea of passions and affections. First, anything formerly considered “passions and affections” was seen as fundamentally the same and placed into a single, homogenizing category called “the emotions” (cf. the modern concept of “religion”), a revisionary move stemming from Brown's positivist epistemology.Footnote 34 Second, the idea of “passions and affections” as movements is markedly different from Brown's description of “emotions” as “states,”Footnote 35 reflecting embedded claims about natural teleology in general and in human nature in particularFootnote 36 or, in the Humean tradition, the dismissal of any such teleology. Third, it is worth restating that “passions and affections” were not just movements, but were movements of the soul, so that classical psychological theorists had, at some basic level, a shared understanding of the terms and what they covered. The situation is different with Hume and Brown's “emotions,” which were autonomous entities—i.e., mental “states” of nothing in particular. Indeed, Brown never did give a clear definition of “emotions,” effectively anticipating what Dixon calls “a perennial problem” for theories of emotion.Footnote 37 Hence, already in 1884, William James wrote an essay with the open-ended, interrogative title, “What is an Emotion?”Footnote 38 The passions of the soul had been displaced by the emotions in the body, which, in due time, were understood as “mere feelings.”Footnote 39 This type of positivist equation with roots in eighteenth and nineteenth century Scotland and, secondarily, in nineteenth century America, seems close to what Zwickel and others use as a basis for pursuing a study of the emotions in ancient Near Eastern iconography.Footnote 40 Furthermore, when biblical scholars refer to the difficulty of even defining the word “emotions,” they are continuing the legacy of a concept that has had no clear definition ever since its emergence. Fourth and finally, with the invention of the emotions, the relationship between feelings and rationality became dichotomized to an unprecedented degree, since, even though most premodern contributors to the issue believed there was tension between the passions and reason and even though the passions needed to be governed by reason, some passions were in fact on the side of reason (see sect. 3 below). With the late-modern invention of the emotions, this kind of relationship fades away. Relatedly, in view of the recent emergence of this reason-emotion dichotomy, one must conclude that premodern talk of opposition between the passions and reason is not the same as the modern talk of an opposition between the emotions and reason.Footnote 41 The nature of the contrast itself changed.

The cumulative point that should by now be clear is that we should speak of emotions, on the one hand, and passions and affections, on the other. They are not the same thing (πάθος ≠ emotion). They are conflicting psychological taxonomies, situated broadly within divergent anthropologies and even conceptions of ethics.Footnote 42 The category of “the emotions” is not part of a timeless psychology but, on the contrary, is firmly traceable to eighteenth and nineteenth century Scottish thinkers in the Humean tradition who consciously rejected classical or Aristotelian faculty psychology (i.e., the faculties of intellect and will) and sought, on pragmatic as well as ideological grounds,Footnote 43 to replace it with a mechanistic (i.e., non-teleological) explanation of the body and its parts. When Brown described his three-part classification of mental “states,” one type of which was the “emotions,” he himself acknowledged in Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind that his terminological shift away from the mind's “active powers” could lead to more than a mere change in wording. In Lecture 16, entitled “On the Classification of the Phenomena of Mind,” Brown states the following: “A difference of words is, in this case, more than a mere verbal difference. Though it be not the expression of a difference of doctrine, it very speedily becomes so.”Footnote 44 At a time of aggressive secularization in Western states, this new Humean and Brownian “doctrine” of the emotions began as one theory among others and, in a matter of decades, became the default starting point for psychology.Footnote 45 Thus, in key ways, this new default starting point amounted not to a renaming of the passions but to a rejection of the passions (e.g., dismissing reason as the governor of feelings; the relevance of the intellect and will to feelings; and feelings as subject to exterior, normative evaluation).

Passions and Affections of the Soul

Expecting to find the emotions before the modern period is anachronistic. How then should we speak of feelings prior to nineteenth century Scotland? Throughout this paper's discussion of Hume and Brown and their roles in inventing the emotions, I have tried at the same time to help us acquaint ourselves with the passions and affections of the soul. I now turn directly to a brief summary of this older psychological taxonomy.

As has already been stressed, the category of the soul's passions has roots in ancient Greece, and it continued as the norm among Platonic, Aristotelian, Stoic, and Christian thinkers, with highly influential representatives in what one could broadly call the Aristotelian-Scholastic tradition. The passions and affections persisted well into the modern period through the likes of Descartes (but see n. 12–13), Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), Thomas Reid (1710–1796), and others, though I will focus on premodern thinkers prior to the early-modern turn against Aristotle: primarily, on Thomas Aquinas and Augustine of Hippo.

A. Thomas Aquinas

A significant part of Aquinas's legacy is the synthesis of Augustinian and Aristotelian thought, the latter of which had become newly available to the Latin West in the twelfth century CE. Accordingly, while one finds much continuity with Augustine, Aquinas's anthropology and his conception of soul (Lat. anima) were also strongly, and consciously, Aristotelian. When Aquinas writes of “soul,” he does not mean what substance dualists like Descartes mean by “mind” or “soul”—something ghost-like and immaterial within the body yet contrasted with the body's (mechanistic) materiality, so that the “mind” or “soul” is the non-material “real person” or the “I,” so to speak. For Aquinas, “soul” or anima fundamentally means “the first principle of life”: that by virtue of which a material body is alive as an intelligible composite of matter and form (Summa I.75.1), whether it be the body of a rose, a dog, or a human. Aquinas would say that roses, dogs, and humans all have souls because they are living (De anima II.7–10ff.),Footnote 46 where “living” means that something has the capacity not only to be moved, but also to move itself, in contrast to the non-living body of a rock.Footnote 47 To presuppose here a soul-body contrast akin to Descartes's anthropology is therefore to misunderstand Aquinas's conception of soul, which, even in the case of the human rational soul, is intimately related to and even dependent upon—though not identifiable with—the operation of material, bodily organs like the brain, the eye, the heart, and so on.Footnote 48 The rational soul is the single form of the human body, the form that “gives a human being its specifically human mode of existence.”Footnote 49

Aquinas's understanding of the rational soul divides into his notions of intellect and will, which, respectively, are the soul's cognitive and appetitive faculties.Footnote 50 Operating with the help of sensation (Summa I.78.4), the intellect sub-divides into the mental “powers” of “agent intellect” (the active or productive element) and “possible intellect” (the receptive element).Footnote 51 Accompanying and informed by the intellect is the will (Summa I.19.1),Footnote 52 which fundamentally has to do with essence-based inclination, whether the inclination is cognitive, such as a human's volitional inclination toward low-carbohydrate food, or non-cognitive, such as a plant's inclination toward light. Indeed, for Aquinas, not everything with inclination has the faculty of will, the latter of which is distinctively human. That is, the universal feature of inclination or natural teleology subdivides into appetite, and appetite into will (see Summa Ia.80.1c–81.1c). For the human soul, appetites can be natural, sensory, or rational. Notably, in this context of cognition and appetites, talk of the passions becomes relevant as part of a teleological anthropology and a eudaimonistic ethic.

All animal life, which includes humans, displays sensory cognition and, therefore, passions (Lat. passiones animae) of the sense appetite (Lat. appetitus),Footnote 53 the lower appetite of the rational soul.Footnote 54 The passions, to which humans are subject by their specific nature, are the soul's inclinations or movements (Lat. motus) toward sense-goods and away from sense-ills. Such passions arise through one's being situated in the world, through being acted upon therein, and through having needs according to one's nature.Footnote 55 Hence, the passions presuppose dependence and privation.Footnote 56 In response to this dependence and privation, the rational soul's lower and upper appetites seek completion, and that which completes them is a good. Aquinas differentiated between the sense appetite's “irascible” (e.g., for pursuit and avoidance) and “concupiscible” (e.g., for competition, aggression, defense) powers, each with corresponding passions. On their own, these powers and their passions are “underdetermined”Footnote 57 and pulled in various, incompatible directions, dividing the human moral agent, inhibiting practical reason, and evincing the internally divisive power of sin (Summa I–II.50.5). But unity between rationality and the passions is possible and indeed necessary for mature moral character and action.Footnote 58 Accordingly, Aquinas held that habituation in the virtues was critical if human beings are to arrive at their true plural ends, their teloi, and their singular ultimate end, their final telos, in the divine fullness of Being (Summa I–II: 1.4). Such training in the virtues involved learning to tutor the passions via reason, so that the soul's lower and higher appetites could together be properly directed toward and find enjoyment in goods as well as in the good. Indeed, the soul's higher appetite—namely, the will (Lat. voluntas)—interacts with the sense appetite and has its own inclinations or movements that Aquinas called not “passions” but “affections” (affectiones, affectus). Prime examples of affections are rational joy and love, with love being that which precedes all other passions as an apprehension of goodness.Footnote 59 Affections have intellectual rather than sensory goods as their object (Summa Ia.2ae.27, 4). Among these intellectual goods is the good or goodness as such, as well as beatitudo (cf. Grk. eudaimonia) as an objective state toward which the will by nature inclines.Footnote 60 According to Aquinas, the rational appetite needs not to overcome but rather to achieve harmony with the sense appetite, in order that reason, action, and desire can find their ultimate completion, their graced beatitudo, in the final end of God, who is actus purus, Pure Act, ipsum esse subsistens, Being Itself (Summa I.12.1).

B. Augustine of Hippo

Augustine's anthropology involved a basic distinction between the “inner” and “outer” man, each of which was relevant to the notion of “soul” inasmuch as all created, living things are animated and therefore, by definition, exhibit soul(s) (Lat. anima). He distinguished between ensouled things (i.e., anima) in general and the rational soul (Lat. animus or mens), which has the intellective and moral capacities of memory, understanding, and will (altogether, the imago Dei).Footnote 61 Like all anima, the rational soul is also the product of divine creation and is therefore neither eternal nor immortal nor unchanging.Footnote 62 To the contrary, the rational soul does change, as is clear through the very fact of its movements—that is, the passions and affections. Furthermore, the way that people experience the passions and affections in connection with the will and intellect is symptomatic of sin's power, since the human soul is plagued by conflict between its intellective and sense-oriented parts. According to Augustine, human beings on their own are not unified but disordered and divided within themselves.Footnote 63

When generalizing about his psychology, Augustine refers in Latin to “movements of the soul” (motus animae) or “passions of the soul” (passiones animae), each of which was used to translate the Greek term πάθος (City of God, IX.4). He agreed with Cicero that one should speak of four principal passions: desire (cupiditas), fear (timor), joy (laetitia), and sorrow (tristitia). But Augustine argued that what unites these four passions is the single principle of love (amor),Footnote 64 which may be rightly or wrongly directed depending on the condition of one's will. When left to its own devices without the antecedent power of grace, the will fosters disordered loves. But when the will is properly directed, it fosters proper “affection” (affectus)—that is, properly ordered love. A major function of reason was the governance, but not the elimination (City of God, XIV.9), of the passions: since God is dimly accessible to reason, reason ought to guide the passions away from obsession with worldly things and toward the love of God, who alone is perfectly good. The will's desire for God, for goodness itself,Footnote 65 is still passion or desire: a superior, rational desire enabled by grace.Footnote 66 We have here no categorical separation between rationality and the passions (cf. Brown's taxonomy above). Nor is talk of the passions separate from ethics and teleology. The normative and rational quality of passions depends on their relationship to the will and its direction of love toward the final telos, the divine source of being.Footnote 67 Identifying love as the thread that unites the four chief passions, Augustine argued that people's loves should be directed toward the final end of human beings and all created things. Learning to act rightly and to reason rightly are inter-defined with learning to feel rightly—where “rightly” means in dependence upon, in accordance with, and in response to the final telos and the one source of true eudaimonia. Augustine's thought again illustrates how the passions and affections were frequently at home within a teleological anthropology and a eudaimonistic ethic.Footnote 68

in the Hebrew Bible: If not an Emotion, then a Passion? Or Something Else?

Zwickel writes that ancient Hebrew had no term for “emotions in general” but only for “specific emotions.” It would be more accurate to say that ancient Hebrew had no word whatsoever that could be translated as “emotions,” whether emotions in general or specific emotions.Footnote 69 Rather, ancient Hebrew had words that, after the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries CE, biblical scholars and laypersons have classified and proceeded to interpret as emotions. But as a catch-all psychological classification, the word “emotions” has a conceptual history that makes it highly questionable for historical-critical work on the Hebrew Bible, if the aim of that work is to reconstruct ancient Near Eastern anthropologies in ways that, one hopes, would have been intelligible to the ancient writers themselves.

A good case study is the ancient Hebrew word (and generally, -derivatives), though scholars like Gary A. Anderson have observed comparable features in other words usually classified as emotions.Footnote 70 To repeat a statement from above, my research on suggests that the noun is not “one of” the emotions. Because of the way that relates to rationality and intentionality, including at a behavioral level, to equate with an emotion or mental state of fear risks distorting our understanding of ancient Jewish anthropological and psychological concepts from the outset. At least that is the case if we use the psychological term “emotions” in accordance with its actual history of denoting non-cognitive and involuntary bodily stirrings. While it may still be questionable to speak of as a passion (< Grk. πάθος), this label in reference to antiquity seems more historically and conceptually appropriate than emotions. In Greek-speaking contexts, πάθος was not only passive, but also active in terms of “desire,” and πάθος had a complex, nuanced relationship to rationality and the soul (the former of which was generally an element of the latter). (On the relationship between rationality, passions, and the virtues, see, e.g., 4 Macc 1:10–20.)Footnote 71

Similarly, the Hebrew Bible and other ancient Jewish literature repeatedly suggest that the passion of is something complementary to, even inseparable from, rationality through statements like “ is the beginning of knowledge” or “ is the beginning of wisdom” (Prov 1:7; 9:10; etc.).Footnote 72 It may be worth noting that these statements in Proverbs 1–9 bear a striking resemblance to Plato and Aristotle's statements from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE that the πάθος of “wonder” (τὸ θαυμάζειν) is the “beginning of φιλοσοφία” (ἀρχὴ φιλοσοφίας),Footnote 73 a comment from a Greek perspective that demonstrates how certain passions were on the side of reason (for Plato, see Theaetetus 155d; for Aristotle, see Metaphysics 982b). In Proverbs 1–9, one's access to has its starting point as well as its end point in , specifically , so that, in the pursuit of , passions like fear and desire cooperate with reason (e.g., note the use of , “desire;” , “love;” , “hate;” , “delight”).Footnote 74 Moreover, this text block suggests that human beings are impoverished without this Wisdom that begins with .Footnote 75 That is, Wisdom concludes her second speech by saying, “For whoever finds me finds life and obtains favor from Yhwh, but whoever misses ( ) me does violence to his ; all who hate ( ) me love ( ) death” (8:35–36). This wisdom, which is accessible via and practiced as (8:13), is crucial for the wellbeing of the , the soul, which needs to be in harmony with divinely-generated (8:22). It seems clear that there is interaction here between passions, rationality, the soul, and normative evaluations of human life as such, in ways comparable to what we find in a number of Greek- and Latin-speaking contexts (i.e., passions, the soul, the good). What also seems relatively clear is the very real difference from Brown's de-theologized and quasi non-ethical category of the emotions, which he separated sharply from rationality.

In addition to rationality, intentionality also plays a large role in the use of -derivatives. In a number of texts from different literary layers in Deuteronomy and in Psalm 34, consists of content that is deliberately taught, learned, and practiced (Deut 4:10; 14:23; 17:19; 31:12, 13). Whether in connection with Yhwh's “words” (4:10), Yhwh's (31:12) or in the context of a festive meal (14:23), is here not so much a spontaneous experience as much as it is something that one must “learn” and “teach” to one's descendants (note both the Qal and Piel of in Deut 4:10). Likewise, in Ps 34:12, one reads, “Come, my children, listen to me. I will teach (Piel impf. ) you .” The standard reading of such texts as presupposing a development away from an originally “real,” “spontaneous” feeling and toward behavior is not at all compelling,Footnote 76 since it depends on the problematic premise that the proper framework for interpreting -derivatives is a flattened conception of feelings that amounts to the category of the emotions—a premise portraying the emotions as part of a timeless psychology. These examples from Deuteronomy and the Psalter do not preclude the notion that something was felt with ; they only illustrate the incongruity between in the Hebrew Bible and the Scottish category of the emotions, which, among other things, eliminates intentionality.Footnote 77

The role of intentionality further illumines the place of normative evaluation in conceptions of . A number of the scribes who composed the Hebrew Bible clearly had no problem with the idea that people can and should in a particular way,Footnote 78 so that it was possible to properly or improperly. In other words, one could be said to fail in the doing of . Accordingly, the modern idea of fear as an “emotion,” an involuntary “mental state,” does not line up easily, if at all, with a statement like the following:

So the king of Assyria commanded, “Send there one of the priests whom you took into exile from there; let him go and live there and teach them (Hif. impf. ) the custom of the god of the land.” So one of the priests whom they had exiled from Samaria came and lived in Bethel. And he taught them (Hif. part. ) how they should Yhwh ( ) (2 Kgs 17:27–28).

Here in 2 Kings 17, occurs twelve times and denotes the worship either of Yhwh or “other gods” ( ).Footnote 79 Throughout the Hebrew Bible, this usage—proper action in the presence of a deity—is the most common one, with God as the object in 80 percent of all cases. For present purposes, 2 Kgs 17:27–28 is particularly interesting, since it shows how could matter-of-factly signify not only a mode of conduct but an overtly normative one: that is, is mandated by a Mesopotamian ruler, taught (Hif. ) by a priest, and intended for embodiment in the presence of Yhwh. Especially instructive is the wording that the people must be taught “how they should Yhwh” ( ), implying that must be measured, even judged, by a standard exterior to the one who performs it. Like the above examples from Deuteronomy and the Psalter, this normative evaluation of does not exclude feelings, since, after all, derivatives of can and do mean “to be afraid, to fear.” But the idea that one must learn to fear in one way rather than another is unquestionably dissonant with Hume and Brown's idea of “the emotions,” which are deterministic, automatic processes. Fear as a passion would still involve a feeling. But the question of whether feelings, by virtue of being feelings, merit descriptions like “non-cognitive” and “involuntary” is only answered in the affirmative based on the modern category of the emotions. Although there is no elaboration in the narrative of 2 Kings 17 about the psychological or anthropological dynamics of , the normative elements and the role of intentionality highlight its place within a conception of feelings other than the Scottish category that most of us today assume.

One further but related point merits brief attention. The interplay between -derivatives and exterior, normative evaluation helps to explain the positional nuances of as well as the semantically similar (“to fear, tremble”).Footnote 80 Especially , but also forms of , can express hierarchical relations, often with royal language but also without it (see in Deut 2:25; 11:25). Fittingly, then, the root most regularly juxtaposed with is (“to be great”; seventeen times).Footnote 81 Consider the following two examples from the psalms:

For Yhwh is and highly praiseworthy; he is over all the gods ( ), for all the gods of the peoples are worthless entities, but YHWH made the heavens (96:4–5).

For who in the skies can face Yhwh, and who among the divine beings

compares to Yhwh? El is dreaded in the council of the holy ones, great ( ) and over all around him ( ) (89:7–8).

Building on the word , which is often used predicatively (i.e., x is ), the formulaic expression , “to be over [all],” is a marker of hierarchical standing that associates the quality of with the figure at the top of a hierarchy. Importantly, in the Hebrew Bible and other Second Temple literature,Footnote 82 the phrase does not draw a comparison (e.g., x is more than y, which implicitly is also ), in which case one would expect the preposition prior to the surpassed grammatical object (i.e., ).Footnote 83 Rather, the phrase conveys singularity and preeminence for the one of whom is predicated, so that the one who is does not but is instead the logical object of , the one to whom the verb is directed by those positioned lower on a normative, hierarchical scale.Footnote 84 Particular “passions” have particular objects or kinds of objects, which, in the case of -derivatives, shows again that intentionality or “aboutness” was hardly foreign to this pre-Brownian conception of fear.

These examples could be multiplied. In sum, the point is that what we find in the Hebrew Bible is at odds with the modern Scottish, strongly homogenizing concept of the emotions. Major points of conceptual incongruity involve issues of the soul, rationality, intentionality, and normative evaluation. When taken together, the texts discussed above indicate that we are not dealing with emotions in the Hebrew Bible and the ancient Near East but, I submit, something chronologically and conceptually closer to the passions and affections, which originated in ancient Greece and which in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries CE were displaced—and then largely forgotten—in the modern period. If this argument is correct, then one can very plausibly say that there were no “emotions” in the ancient Near East. There were feelings, of course; passions, quite possibly; but no emotions. Trying to find emotions there will affect, perhaps even distort, how we understand biblical and ancient Near Eastern anthropologies, and it traps us in an inevitably frustrated hunt for the snark.

References

1 Carroll, Lewis, The Hunting of the Snark: An Agony in Eight Fits (London: Macmillan, 1876)Google Scholar.

2 For recent philosophical discussions, see Nussbaum, Martha, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Taylor, Charles, “Reason, Faith, and Meaning,” Faith and Philosophy 28 (2011) 5–18 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 For case studies in Josephus and the Testament of Zebulun, see Mirguet, Françoise, “Emotional Responses to the Pain of Others in Josephus's Rewritten Scriptures and the Testament of Zebulun: Between Power and Vulnerability,” JBL 133 (2014) 838–57Google Scholar; and the responses by Pearce, Sarah Judith, “Pity and Emotion in Josephus's Reading of Joseph,” JBL 133 (2014) 858–62Google Scholar; Lateiner, Donald, “Pain and Pity in Two Postbiblical Responses to Joseph's Power in Genesis,” JBL 133 (2014) 863–68Google Scholar; Konstan, David, “The Varieties of Pity,” JBL 133 (2014) 869–72Google Scholar. See also the essays in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook 2011: Emotions from Ben Sira to Paul (ed. Renate Egger-Wenzel and Jeremy Corley; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2011); and Anthropologische Aufbrüche: Alttestamentliche und interdisziplinäre Zugänge zur historischen Anthropologie (ed. Andreas Wagner; Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009) 297–358.

4 See the detailed discussion of Andreas Wagner, “Emotionen in alttestamentlicher und verwandter Literatur – Grundüberlegungen am Beispiel des Zorns,” in Deuterocanonical and Cognate Literature Yearbook 2011, 27–68. See also Wolfgang Zwickel, “The Iconography of Emotions in the Ancient Near East and in Ancient Egypt,” in ibid., 1–25; and Gillmayr-Bucher, Susanne, “Emotion und Kommunikation,” in Biblische Anthropologie: Neue Einsichten aus dem Alten Testament (ed. Frevel, Christian; Freiburg: Herder, 2010) 279–90Google Scholar.

5 Zwickel, “The Iconography of Emotions,” 1.

6 In Wagner's discussion of the Hebrew Bible, the same must be said of his ability to speak of “eine Einzelemotion,” which he uses interchangeably with “Einzelgefühlen” (“Emotionen,” 33).

7 Zwickel, “The Iconography of Emotions,” 3. As the discussion below will show, to say that there is no consensus “at the moment” is a major understatement when it comes to defining “the emotions.”

8 E.g., Mackie, Scott D., “The Passion of Eve and the Ecstasy of Hannah: Sense Perception, Passion, Mysticism, and Misogyny in Philo of Alexandria, De ebrietate 143–52,” JBL 133 (2014) 146 Google Scholar and n. 11. Mackie translates πάθος as “emotion.” Likewise, Kruger, Paul A., “On Emotions and the Expression of Emotions in the Old Testament: A Few Introductory Remarks,” Biblische Zeitschrift 48 (2004) 213–28Google Scholar, at 216–18, transitions all too seamlessly between purely physiological theories of “emotions” (e.g., Darwin) to Aristotle's theory of “emotions,” even though Aristotle spoke of the πάθη (“passions”). At the beginning of the article, Kruger calls “emotions” a “fundamental characteristic of human nature [without which] no culture, including that of the Old Testament, can be fully comprehended” (at 213).

9 See Ryan Patrick Hanley, “Review of James A. Harris's (ed.) The Oxford Handbook of British Philosophy in the Eighteenth Century,” Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews: An Electronic Journal (cited online 11 June 2015), http://ndpr.nd.edu/news/the-oxford-handbook-of-british-philosophy-in-the-eighteenth-century/.

10 The soul was addressed and described differently, but one rather consistent feature was its division into higher and lower elements, each of which had specific relationships to, for example, willing, understanding, and desiring. See the tables and charts in Dixon, Thomas’s very helpful book From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003) 29–52 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 32, 34, 37, 44, and 48.

11 Indeed, in English, the word became a psychological term. Its earlier usages were not psychological. See the diachronic overview in the Oxford English Dictionary (available online at www.oed.com); and Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 62–66.

12 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 107. Not to be overlooked is that way that the very conception of “matter” changed in early-modern Europe via the theories of people like Galileo (1564–1642) and Descartes (1596–1650), so that matter, at least methodologically, became an exclusively quantitative concept that by definition rules out the qualitative. This methodological exclusion of the qualitative meant bracketing out first-person human experience of the world (i.e., the mind), a move leading eventually, in some circles, to an ontological denial of first-person experience. On these changes and their links to early-modern anti-Aristotelianism, see Feser, Edward, Scholastic Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction (Heusenstamm: editiones scholasticae, 2014) 12–18 Google Scholar; Nagel, Thomas, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature is Almost Certainly False (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012) 35–36, 66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Gregory, Brad S., The Unintended Reformation: How a Religious Revolution Secularized Society (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2012) 56–64, 181CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 Importantly, Descartes altered the traditional meaning of “passions” in tune with his dualistic anthropology and his more literal talk of the body-soul distinction (Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 76–77).

14 Charland, Louis C., “Reinstating the Passions: Arguments from the History of Psychopathology,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (ed. Goldie, Peter; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 238–60, at 240–43Google Scholar; Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 76–77, 107–8.

15 Hume argued that “passions”/“emotions” belong to the former category (Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 104). See further Broadie, Alexander, “The Human Mind and its Powers,” in The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment (ed. idem; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) 60–78 Google Scholar, esp. 66–70. According to Hume, both impressions and ideas follow from sensation, differing chiefly in the degree of “liveliness” and in the chronological relation to the moment of sensation (66).

16 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 104–9, at 104.

17 Penelhum, Terence, “Hume's Moral Psychology,” in The Cambridge Companion to Hume (2nd ed.; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 238–69Google Scholar, at 243, 247.

18 Ibid., 243; Broadie, “The Human Mind and its Powers,” 62–70. Broadie observes that Thomas Reid likewise aimed to construct a mental science by relying on Newton's work, though the results of Reid's work differed substantially from Hume's (74–76). Broadie states, “Arguably Reid's grasp of Newtonian methodology was more profound than Hume's, and if indeed it was then a likely explanation for this would be that Reid, in contrast to Hume, had spent many years in close study of Newton's scientific writings, and in working intensively in the mathematical and natural sciences” (74).

19 See classically, MacIntyre, Alasdair, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory (3rd. ed.; Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2007 [orig. 1981]) 147–49Google Scholar. Also, Herdt, Jennifer A., Putting On Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008) 3, 25–30CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 For Aristotle, see Nicomachean Ethics I.1, 1094a3; for Aquinas, see Summa theologiae Ia.6.1. For both of these writers, the statement that “good is that which things desire” does not mean that “Whatever people desire is therefore good.” “Goodness” here has to do with realizing a natural and specifically a final telos.

21 Discussing the related conception of the soul as involving the faculties of intellect and will, Edward Feser writes that “That is just what will is on Aquinas's account: a power to be drawn toward (or away from) that which is apprehended by the intellect (SCG IV.19).” (Aquinas [London: Oneworld Publications, 2009] 149–51, at 149).

22 See sect. 3 below. In Aquinas's psychology, the will—a faculty of the rational (i.e., human) soul—was the seat of affections.

23 In Hume's words: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” For a contemporary Humean treatment of morality, see Haidt, Jonathan, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided By Politics and Religion (London: Penguin, 2012) 3–106 Google Scholar, at 28, 51, with n. 40.

24 On Hume's account of the passions and their relation to reason, see Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 107; Penelhum, “Hume's Moral Psychology,” 250; MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2008 [orig. 1988]) 303–4Google Scholar; Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 135. For Hume's non-teleological conception of desire and human life, see Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 307 and n. 4.

25 MacIntyre, After Virtue, 49–50.

26 On early-modern rejections of teleological anthropology, see Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 223.

27 On Hume's 18th-century upbringing as a Scottish Calvinist, see MacIntyre, After Virtue, 54; and Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 308–12.

28 By classical faculty psychology, I mean conceptions of the soul with the faculties of intellect and will. Importantly, this conception of the soul is neither interchangeable with Descartes's early modern conception of the “mind” nor with the popular idea of the soul as something wholly separate from the body. See Feser, Aquinas, 132–42.

29 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 121; Broadie, “The Human Mind and its Powers,” 70–76.

30 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 117; see also 115.

31 See n. 12 above.

32 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 109.

33 Dixon, Thomas, “‘Emotion’: The History of a Keyword in Crisis,” Emotion Review 4 (2012) 338–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 341; idem, From Passions to Emotions, 122.

34 “Brown's positivist epistemology, derived from his view of the physics of matter, created a mental ontology in which the only solid features were states or feelings of the mind. The mind disappeared from the picture and the reader was left with free-standing thoughts and emotions” (Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 122).

35 In view of the etymology of the word “emotion,” which has to do with “movement,” one should not miss the irony of this point. The idea of “movement” fades away with Brown's classification of “emotions” as mental “states.”

36 See nn. 12 and 24 above.

37 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 119; idem, “Keyword in Crisis,” 340–42.

38 James, William, “What is an Emotion?,” Mind 9 (1884) 188–205 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 124–25; see further Stocker, Michael, “Intellectual and Other Nonstandard Emotions,” in The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Emotion (ed. Goldie, Peter; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009) 401–24Google Scholar, at 405.

40 Zwickel, “The Iconography of Emotions,” 1. Zwickel is of course not alone in making this move. The idea of a very close, if not actually interchangeable, relationship between “the emotions” and “feelings” clearly sets the stage for some of the comments in Gillmayr-Bucher, “Emotion und Kommunikation,” 279–90, at 279, 280 n. 6. Additionally, in Wagner, “Emotionen,” there seems to be little if any distinction between what Wagner calls “eine Einzelemotion” and “Einzelgefühlen” (33).

41 Moreover, it indicates that the accompanying conception of reason itself is likewise different between, e.g., Hume and Brown, on the one hand, and Aristotle, on the other. On the issue of the Enlightenment's having produced rival rationalities, see MacIntyre, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, 1–11, at 6: “So, it was hoped, reason would displace authority and tradition. Rational justification was to appeal to principles undeniable by any rational person and therefore independent of all those social and cultural particularities which the Enlightenment thinkers took to be the mere accidental clothing of reason in particular times and places. . .. Yet both the thinkers of the Enlightenment and their successors proved unable to agree as to what precisely those principles were which would be found undeniable by all rational persons. One kind of answer was given by the authors of the Encyclopédie, a second by Rousseau, a third by Bentham, a fourth by Kant, a fifth by the Scottish philosophers of common sense and their French and American disciples. Nor has subsequent history diminished the extent of such disagreement. It has rather enlarged it.” See further Thomas Dixon, “Revolting Passions,” Modern Theology 27 (2011) 298–312, at 299; and Taylor, “Reason, Faith, and Meaning,” 17–18, who discusses how Hume's conception of reason largely had to do with “the enquiry as to what makes for utility.”

42 For a historical treatment of this connection between early modern transformations of anthropologies and the consequences for ethics in the West, see Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 180–234, who argues that “a transformation from a substantive morality of the good to a formal morality of rights constitutes the central change in Western ethics over the past half millennium” (at 184). The dismissal of teleological anthropology played no small part in this transformation. See further MacIntyre, After Virtue, 49.

43 The ideological motivations behind the early-modern rejection of Aristotelianism have received acknowledgement in various disciplines. E.g., the idea that human life has a normative telos—i.e., the idea that one can and should speak of the good for human beings as such—was seen as a violation of the modern ideal of individualized freedom (= self-determination). Politically, this rejection amounts to a practical denial that there is such thing as the good for human beings as such. See Taylor, Charles, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2007) 184 Google Scholar; MacIntyre, After Virtue, 54–55, 109–20; Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 117; Gregory, The Unintended Reformation, 180–234; and Kołakowski, Leszek, Metaphysical Horror (rev. ed.; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001 [orig. 1988]) 13–22 Google Scholar.

44 Thomas Brown, Lectures on the Philosophy of the Human Mind (3 vols.; Flagg and Gould: 1822) 1:247. Accessible online at www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/43116.

45 Dixon, “Revolting Passions,” 308. See also the discussion in Asad, Talal, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003) 1–66 Google Scholar, at 16, 23 n. 6.

46 The rose has a “nutritive” soul; the dog has a “sensory” soul; and the human has a “rational” soul, which builds upon, and thus stands in continuity with, the previous two kinds of soul (on these distinctions, see Feser, Aquinas, 137–38).

47 Kretzmann, Norman, “Philosophy of Mind,” in The Cambridge Companion to Aquinas (repr.; ed. Kretzmann, Norman and Stump, Eleonore; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999) 130 Google Scholar; Feser, Aquinas, 134–35.

48 See further Kretzmann, “Philosophy of Mind,” 128–33.

49 Ibid., 131. Note also Kretzmann's comment that, according to Aquinas, “The union of soul and body may more accurately be thought of as a human soul's constituting some matter as a living human body, something like the way a quantity of electricity (which needs no bulb or wire to exist) constitutes some matter as a lighted lamp” (136, original italics).

50 Ibid., 136.

51 Ibid., 139.

52 Feser, Aquinas, 148.

53 This compound Latin noun reflects the associated Thomistic-Aristotelian idea of natural teleology: ad (“toward”) + petere (“to aim at, desire”).

54 The sense appetite is situated metaphorically “between” the natural and the rational appetite. By “rational appetite,” Aquinas means the will (Lat. voluntas). See Miner, Robert, Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae Ia2ae 22–48 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009) 13 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 15.

55 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 41–42.

56 Miner, Aquinas on the Passions, 16. Importantly, though, Aquinas would not understand this fact to imply that the passions themselves are something negative (in the sense of bad), even though the passions do imply the incompleteness of human moral agents. See further Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 22.

57 See here Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 83; and Miner, Aquinas on the Passions, 107 n. 24.

58 Miner, Aquinas on the Passions, 94; see also Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 91–97 for a discussion of Duns Scotus and Ockham's medieval revision of the relation between intellect and will—and with it, the revision of the notion of freedom and the value of habituation and the virtues.

59 Miner, Aquinas on the Passions, 113 with Table 5.1, and 126–32. Aquinas argues that such apprehensions of goodness may be either perfect, true, or merely apparent. Love, then, may be either rational or irrational, depending on its directedness, the condition of one's will, and one's instruction in the virtues. On the interaction between the sense and rational appetites in Aquinas, see ibid., 95–96.

60 Kretzmann, “Philosophy of Mind,” 146. This point highlights the problem of translating either beatitudo or eudaimonia with “happiness,” which in contemporary English usage is largely equated with a subjective sense of “pleasure” that can differ from one person to another in the sense of “individual taste.” See further Miner, Aquinas on the Passions, 6, who notes that beatitudo for Aquinas is a teleological matter of final causality. It is not interchangeable with the feeling of pleasure, which is not one's telos but rather one passion among others. Similarly, Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 31.

61 See Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 32.

62 Teske, Roland J., “Augustine's Theory of Soul,” in The Cambridge Companion to Augustine (repr.; ed. Stump, Eleonore and Kretzmann, Norman; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) 116–23Google Scholar, at 116–18.

63 Augustine's dualism is not interchangeable with Cartesian or even Platonic dualisms. A crucial caveat in Augustine's thought is that he contrasted “human nature (body and soul) with the perfection of God, rather than [contrasting] body with spirit” (Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 33; see further Teske, “Augustine's Theory of Soul,” 122). For Augustine, perfect unity belongs exclusively to God, whereas human nature, which includes soul, is conflicted and divided.

64 Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 40.

65 See City of God, XI.10. Like Aquinas after him, Augustine advocated the idea of divine simplicity, meaning that God is absolute, immutable unity, without any divisions whatsoever. Accordingly, for Augustine, there is no distinction between God and God's attributes: e.g., God does not have the attribute of goodness; rather, God is goodness itself. See Davies, Brian, An Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (3rd ed.; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) 158–80Google Scholar.

66 See the comments in Couenhoven, Jesse, Stricken by Sin, Cured by Christ: Agency, Necessity, and Culpability in Augustinian Theology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013) 65–70 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 70.

67 On Augustine's eudaimonism and its relation to teleology, see Herdt, Putting on Virtue, 45–71, at 50–58.

68 While Augustine's teleology was in ways quite Platonic (i.e., external teleology), Aquinas's teleology was more Aristotelian (i.e., intrinsic teleology). What matters for present purposes is that each thinker portrayed the passions and affections as at home within a conception of people as having a definite end or telos. See further Feser, Edward, “Teleology: A Shopper's Guide,” Philosophia Christi 12 (2010) 142–59, at 149Google Scholar.

69 The same must be said to apply to ancient Greek, including especially the word πάθος itself, which, as the above discussion has hopefully shown, cannot be translated as “emotion.” Translating πάθος as “emotion” depends on assuming that “passions” and “emotions” are interchangeable terms. This assumption is not uncommon: Mirguet, “Emotional Responses,” 845; and Mackie, “The Passion of Eve,” 146 and n. 11. Note also the index entry for “passions” in Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, which clearly equates the two.

70 Anderson notes that a similar conceptual disconnect characterizes the conceptions of “joy” and “grief” in the Hebrew Bible. See Anderson, Gary A., A Time to Mourn, A Time to Dance: The Expression of Grief and Joy in Israelite Religion (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991) ix–xiiGoogle Scholar and 1–18.

71 Whether the Hebrew Bible contains conceptions of “soul” is a long-debated question that often focuses on individual terms like and . Biblical scholars’ hesitance toward adopting language of the soul often has to do with arguing that the , for example, can only exist with a body and is therefore not a “soul.” However, what is less often noted is the fact that presuming the soul's utter separation from the body likely reflects the modern influence of Descartes (who coined what is called the “mind-body” problem, not the “soul-body” problem) more so than premodern thinkers like Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, and perhaps even Plato. The Cartesian and Platonic conceptions of soul are not the only conceptions of soul (nor are these two even the same), so that rejecting their relevance to the Hebrew Bible is just that and no more. It would therefore be a non sequitur to say that, since the Hebrew Bible may not entertain the idea of bodiless souls, the concept of soul was altogether foreign to the writers of the Hebrew Bible. On issues of the soul with reference to the Hebrew Bible, see Schüle, Andreas, “The Notion of Life: and in the Anthropological Discourse of the Primeval History,” HeBAI 1 (2012) 483–501 Google Scholar, at 485–88 and n. 10; Krüger, Thomas, “ach ja die Seele: Der Verlust der Seele - ein Gewinn für die theologische Anthropologie?,” in Das Menschliche Herz und die Weisung Gottes: Studien zur alttestamentlichen Anthropologie und Ethik (Zürich: TVZ, 2009) 83–89 Google Scholar; Wolff, Hans W., Anthropologie des Alten Testaments (Munich: Gütersloher Verlagshaus, 2010) 43–44 Google Scholar, who notes that the is the subject of words like “love,” “hate,” “joy,” etc., an observation with fairly obvious similarity to the passions of the soul. See also Barr, James, The Garden of Eden and the Hope of Immortality (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1992) 56 Google Scholar. Barr notes that “the Old Testament provides thoughts and aspects out of which ideas of the immortality of the soul could naturally and easily develop.” In this book and elsewhere, Barr criticized the still influential tendency to presume a gulf between “Hebrew” and “Greek” ways of thinking (ibid., 46–47). See earlier, idem, The Semantics of Biblical Language (repr.; London: SCM Press, 1983 [orig. 1961]) 8–20. One should point out that refusing to presume this gulf between Hebrew and Greek thought is not the same as conflating the two: rather, a case by case approach is necessary. Given the premodern (and thus non-Cartesian) dualism in classical Greek sources, one should also note the argument of Steiner, Richard C., Disembodied Souls: The Nefesh in Israel and Kindred Spirits in the Ancient Near East, with an Appendix on the Katumuwa Inscription (ANEM; Atlanta: SBL Press, 2015) 1–22.Google Scholar

72 See further Prov 15:33; Job 28:28; Ps 111:10; Sir 1:14, 16, 18, 20, 27, 19:20, 21:11.

73 I do not claim that Grk. φιλοσοφία is synonymous with Heb. . The important point is that in both ancient Jewish and ancient Greek contexts, one finds statements about wisdom, knowledge, and philosophy as having their “beginning” in , on the one hand, and in τὸ θαυµάζειν, on the other. Each demonstrates the complex yet complementary relationship between passions and rationality. Still, select usages of (i.e., ) were translated in LXX as forms of τὸ θαυµάζειν. See Ex 15:11, 34:10; Ps 44:5 [MT 45:5], 64:5 [MT 65:5–6], 67:36 [MT 68:36]; Dan 9:4.

74 On as the starting point and end point of , see 1:7; 2:5 (with the verb ); and 9:10. On “desiring” ( ) Wisdom, see 1:25, 30; on “loving” ( ) knowledge, see 12:1; by contrast, on “hating” ( ) knowledge, see 1:29. And for Wisdom's desire for love of ( ) and delight in ( ) human pupils, see 8:17 and 8:30–9:1, 4.

75 An interesting question here is whether one should speak of an implicit teleological anthropology in Prov 1–9, according to which human life finds its telos in the embrace of divinely-generated Wisdom. Barton, John, Ethics in Ancient Israel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014) 174–79CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a focus on Ben Sira, see further Kaiser, Otto, “Die Furcht und die Liebe Gottes – Ein Versuch, die Ethik Ben Siras mit der des Apostels Paulus zu vergleichen,” in Gott, Mensch und Geschichte. Studien zum Verständnis des Menschen und seiner Geschichte in der klassischen, biblischen und nachbiblischen Literatur (BZAW 413; Berlin: de Gruyter, 2010) 305–40, at 306–12CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

76 Becker, Joachim, Gottesfurcht im Alten Testament (Rome: Päpstliches Bibelinstitut, 1965)Google Scholar: “Im Zuge dieser Entwicklung geht das Moment eigentlicher Furcht fast ganz verloren; Gottesfurcht wird Äquivalent für Religion und Frömmigkeit” (75).

77 See Dixon, From Passions to Emotions, 133–34. On the issue of intentionality in Stoic thought, see Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought, 24–32. For a comparable Neo-Aristotelian view, see MacIntyre, After Virtue, 149, who notes that “Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways.” For a contrasting Neo-Humean view, see Haidt, The Righteous Mind, 51–56 and n. 40.

78 One should also add in a particular role, i.e., as the lesser party.

79 The specific verses in 2 Kgs 17 along with the objects of are as follows: v. 7 ( , “other gods”), v. 25 ( , “YHWH”), v. 28 ( , “YHWH”), v. 32 ( , “YHWH”), v. 33 ( , “YHWH”), v. 34 ( , “YHWH”), v. 35 ( , “other gods”), v. 36 ( , “YHWH”), v. 37 ( , “other gods”), v. 38 ( , “other gods”), v. 39 ( , “YHWH your God”), v. 41 ( , “YHWH”).

80 For a recent recognition of these positional nuances of with a focus on iconographical connections, see Strawn, Brent A., “The Iconography of Fear: Yirʾat Yhwh ( ) in Artistic Perspective,” in Image, Text, Exegesis: Iconographic Interpretation and the Hebrew Bible (ed. de Hulster, I. J. and LeMon, J. M.; New York: T&T Clark, 2014), 91–134 Google Scholar, at 96–98, 124–29.

81 Among the 44 occurrences of in the Hebrew Bible, it is associated seventeen times with . See Deut 7:21, 10:17, 21; 2 Sam 7:23; Joel 2:11, 3:4; Mal 2:23; Ps 96:4, 99:3, 106:21, 145:6; Dan 9:4; Neh 1:5, 4:8, 9:32; 1 Chr 16:25, 17:21. This collocation continues at Qumran in the non-biblical scrolls. See e.g. 1QM 10:1; 1QHa 5:31; 4Q286 frag. I 2:5; 4Q364 frag. XXI a-k 5; also 4Q372 frag. I 29.

82 For as a marker of hierarchical standing, see Zeph 2:11; Ps 47:2–4, 66:5, 89:7–8, 96:4–6; 1 Chr 16:25–27; 4Q405 frag. 23 1:13. For marking hierarchy even without this prepositional phrase, see Exod 15:9–11. And for overlapping with royal , see Ps 45:4–7 (additionally, Ps 96:1 and 1 Chr 16:27). On both and as resembling Akk. melammu, see Aster, Shawn Zelig, The Unbeatable Light : Melammu and Its Biblical Parallels (AOAT 384; Münster: Ugarit-Verlag, 2012) 173–78, 255–57.Google Scholar

83 Instructively, in Ps 89:7–8 cited above, the expression actually emerges in a context explicitly denying comparability.

84 Discussing different aspects of that relate to its positional nuances, Strawn makes the following comment: “It is worth noting at this point that Yhwh is never said to fear any other entity, a point that is in contrast to the comparative data where the gods are often said to fear other gods” (“The Iconography of Fear,” 126 n. 51, with citations of relevant primary sources).