The Impassioned Life: Reason and Emotion in the Christian Tradition

Juliette.

1

Introduction

This book is an exercise in Christian theological anthropology. It is the result of many years of teaching undergraduate courses in philosophy and Christian history and theology. The confluence of these subjects has taught me that there are two narratives regarding the Christian view of the body and its passions and desires. One narrative is Christian-friendly and asserts that a few stalwart defenders of the faith, notably Irenaeus (second century ce), heroically defended the goodness of God’s creation against the world-hating, body-denying depredations of Gnostics. The other narrative received classic statement by Friedrich Nietzsche, who contrasted the overly ascetic, world-hating beliefs of early Christians with the world-affirming religion of Dionysus. The mutual incompatibility of these narratives suggests that Christian attitudes about the material world and the body and, consequently, about passion and desire contain more than a bit of ambivalence.

I will argue that the Christian tradition inclines more enthusiastically toward soul-body, reason-passion dualism than its apologists would like to concede and that it has a decided preference for human rationality—hence the near-unanimous view that the image of God, in which humans are created, is rationality. This view fits nicely with the assumption that God is superlatively rational and that the Bible’s embarrassing way of ascribing strong, occasionally irrational emotions to God is best regarded as a literary device. And yet, other branches of the Christian tradition, especially Pietism, have argued to the contrary that true religion is a matter of the heart—affections, passions, and desires. So, the Christian tradition can’t quite decide whether, in our relation to God, reason or the nonrational passions take precedence.

Having, over the years, written some books that used some of Paul Tillich’s ideas, I have decided that the word ambivalent best describes the Christian tradition’s views of the extra-rational elements of the soul. Because of the doctrine of creation, the tradition is committed to affirming the goodness of the body; with the body come passion and desire. However, the goodness of the body does not mean unqualified approval of passion and desire, for reasons I will explain in chapters 2 through 4. Human rationality, meanwhile, associated with the divine Logos, from the beginning received a more favorable, less ambivalent treatment. Christian ambivalence about passion and desire and its preference for reason reflect the fact that the Christian tradition arose in dialogue with Greco-Roman philosophies. Although the Christian tradition did not simply borrow its ideas about these matters from classical philosophy, there is a substantial measure of continuity as we move from the classical era to the Christian era. To help readers see this point, chapter 1 expounds the thoughts of Plato, Aristotle, and Stoicism on reason, passion, and desire. To give further context and to show how classical and Christian concerns played out in the modern world, chapter 5 briefly summarizes the ways in which these matters were presented by some illustrative people and movements.

This book, then, is an attempt to state clearly why and how the Christian tradition thinks about reason, passion, and desire. However, it is more than a historical recitation. It is also an attempt to recommend how the Christian community should think about these matters today. To that end chapters 6-8 consider the ways in which the scientific community thinks about these things. I include these chapters because, in our context today, a theological attempt at understanding human nature mandates an engagement with scientific theories and argumentation. Admittedly, the scientific community does not possess a monolithic view of human nature. Such a harmony cannot be expected on any subject, certainly not on a subject as complex as human nature. Nonetheless, scientific evidence can, I think, help determine questions that the Christian tradition has pondered, especially questions about the nature of passion and desire and their relation to rationality. Of course, scientific theories do not constitute the totality of all that can be said about human nature. On the contrary, there is a properly theological contribution to the quest for understanding; however, examples such as the Galileo affair and the rise of modern geology have taught us, or at least should teach us, that no theological affirmation can be both true and authentically theological if it contradicts reliably established scientific findings. It is also true that locating reliably scientific findings can be tricky, as scientific research is highly dynamic and its results dwell in a fluid state. Still, five hundred years after Galileo heliocentrism seems well established; after two hundred years of geology one is not going out very far on the speculative limb if one believes that the earth and, indeed, the entire universe is a bit older than six thousand years. Scientific debate will always rage on regarding this or that theory, but some matters do eventually get settled to a tolerable degree of assurance. As I argue in chapters 6, 7, and 8, the scientific understanding of passion and desire seems to be on its way to having this degree of assurance.

The final two chapters represent my recommendations for thinking about passion and desire (chapter 9) and reason (chapter 10) in ways that are sensitive to the affirmations of the Christian tradition and also to the results of scientific research.

A brief word on terminology: over the centuries, terms for reason, passion, and desire change. In some eras, for instance, passion is more in vogue; in others, affect is more often used. As a convention, then, I have chosen to primarily use the word emotion to designate the extra-rational dimensions of human nature: passion, desire, appetite, affect, instinct, impulse, appetite, sentiment, feeling, drive, and so on. I am aware that each of these terms has its own distinctive meaning and that there is some danger in lumping them together under a generic term like emotion. My justification for doing so is that the Christian tradition has itself lumped them together by contrasting them all with rationality.

Finally, I have included many transliterated Greek and Latin words in chapters 1 through 4. This is more than a show of erudition; I am trying to help the reader see the extent to which there was a common vocabulary of moral psychology in the classical and Christian eras, a common vocabulary that bore the weight of common concerns and modes of understanding. Where the Greek and Latin terms seem important, I have included in the notes a reference to the original text. For the sake of convenience, I have also included a glossary of the leading terms in the original languages, transliterated, and with conventional translations.

Every exercise in theology is a prayer—an offering to God with the hope that the labor expended in the exercise will be used by God. Even a work of scholarship can be such an offering, if both the writer and the reader will consecrate their work together to the cause of God. May it be so as we together seek to understand the impassioned life of humankind.

2

Reason and Emotion in Classical Philosophy

Greek philosophers often saw in Euripides’s portrait of Medea the central problem of humankind’s moral existence. Medea was betrayed by her husband Jason and, in anger, sought revenge by killing her children. Her children’s nurse observes: "Your mother moves her heart, moves her anger [cholon] . . . she will soon kindle the cloud of lamentation with greater emotion [thumōi]."[1] The chorus comments: "Excessive loves [erōtes] deliver neither good reputation nor virtue to men [andrasin] (line 629). Having resolved to kill her children, Medea says, I know what sort of evils I will endure, but emotion [thumos] is stronger than my resolve [bouleumata]" (line 1079).

For Greek philosophers, Medea represented the essence of moral catastrophe—behavior driven by emotion, anger, and love resulting in death and destruction precisely because emotion overrules the governance of reason. The ethical ideal of classical philosophy was thus one in which reason governs our life, liberating us from the rule of emotion.

Plato

Analysis of the Soul

I begin with Plato because of his incalculable influence on the Christian tradition and because moral psychology before Plato is, by comparison, notably underdeveloped.

As is well known, Plato thought of the human soul as possessing or comprising three functions: reason (logos or logismos or to logistikon), desire or appetite (epithumia or to epithumetikon), and spirit or emotion (thumos or to thumoeidēs).[2] Plato illustrated these functions and their relations with his image of the soul as a chariot, with two horses and a driver.[3] Reason is the driver, who has to contend with an unruly horse, desire. Reason’s natural function is to govern the soul but its task becomes difficult when desire intrudes. The second horse is emotion; its moral status is ambivalent, for it can be as much an obstacle to reason as is desire but can also help reason govern and control desire. Emotion should stand with reason and against desire by filling us with a sense of repugnance whenever we are overcome by desire.[4] Elsewhere, Plato described the soul as a composite being, with a human element (reason), a lion-like element (emotion), and a beast with many heads, some wild and some tame (the various desires).[5] The point of these metaphors is that emotion and desire have no share in rationality, thus setting up the possibility of conflict if reason should fail to govern.

Reason, Emotion, and Desire at War

Reason, emotion, and desire exist in a hierarchy of value: logos is the best part of us and epithumia is the worst part,[6] even though it is the biggest (pleistos) part of the soul.[7]Thumos, as usual, is sandwiched between logos and epithumia in the scale of value. Plato emphatically denied that it is a sort of desire,[8] but it likewise differs from reason.[9] As Plato explained in the Timaeus, the sons of the demiurge placed the immortal soul in a mortal body and thus joined it with another form (eidos) of soul, the mortal form. This union invested the soul with passions (pathemata) such as pleasure (hēdonē), pain (lupē), fear (phobos), emotion (thumos) and love (erōs).[10] Because these passions threatened to defile the divine and immortal part of the now composite soul, the sons of the demiurge located emotion and desire away from reason, in the chest and stomach.[11] Sadly, their location in the lower regions has not prevented their dominating reason.

Plato seldom complained about thumos, but epithumia is another matter entirely. Thumos is like a lion, but epithumia is a multiheaded beast, some of whose heads are of wild (agrioi) animals.[12] That is why, at the beginning of the Republic, Sophocles is reported being glad to be rid of sexual desire, described as a raging and wild (agrios) despot.[13] Plato reluctantly allowed that there are desires and pleasures that are simple and measured (metrios), but noted that these are characteristic only of the few who are well born and educated.[14] Desire requires training if it is to be measured.

The animalistic character of desire implies its unruliness. The pleasure associated with bodily desires puts us out of our minds (ekphrona),[15] as desire constantly seeks to usurp its subordinate role and to become the soul’s governing principle, precipitating civil war.[16] The extreme example of this is the tyrannical character, in whom there is a principal love, surrounded by a host of desires or loves (erōta, from erōs),[17] which wash away one’s moderation (sōphrosunē) and drive one to madness (mania).[18] Such a soul is a slave (doulē) because its best part, reason, is enslaved (douleuein) while the worst part, desire, plays the despot. The soul thus teems with slavery (douleia) and lack of freedom (aneleutheria).[19] It languishes under the tyranny of desires, especially erōs. The tyrannical soul thus becomes an erotic (erōtikos) character—a soul taken over by this principal desire.[20] Being enslaved, the tyrannical soul is therefore least able to do what it truly wishes to do.[21] It never tastes true freedom (eleutheria),[22] but is instead in a lawless state that it mistakenly calls freedom.[23] Paradoxically, although epithumia is by nature the most greedy (aplēstotatos) element of the soul,[24] the soul in the grip of desire is never sated (aplēstos)[25] and attempts to satisfy desire produce, not the authentic and valid pleasures appropriate to these desires, but an alien (allotria) pleasure.[26]

So, the soul’s only hope is to cultivate reason and its capacity for governance. Plato went into considerable detail about the exalted status of reason. This was important to him because reason’s natural function, to rule, is a consequence of its being the best part of us. As the metaphor of the soul as human, lion, and many-headed beast shows, reason is the distinctively human part of us. Desires are intrinsically and unredeemably animalistic; we share such desires with animals.[27] Reason alone is unique to humans. But it is more than merely human. It is that part of us that is divine[28] and the part by which we have kinship with what is immortal and eternal.[29] Reason is, therefore, the true human self; desire and emotion are (at least in some dialogues) accretions to the soul in its embodied condition.

The existential self, therefore, is suspended between time and eternity and between mortality and immortality. By virtue of reason, it is single and immortal and enjoys kinship with the divine and eternal; but it is also composite, beset by various passions, pleasures, and desires, all of which it shares with animals. The hierarchy of value (reason as the best part of us, desire as the worst part) means that there is an ideal relationship among the three functions; when the three operate appropriately, the soul attains an inner harmony, moderation (sōphrosunē). Without moderation, turmoil and chaos result.

Moderation is concord (sumphonia) or harmony (harmonia), and a kind of order (kosmos), which functions as a control (enkrateia) over various pleasures (hēdonai) and desires (epithumiai).[30] In the condition of temporal existence, the composite soul experiences a kind of civil war,[31] with desire wishing to go its own way, heedless of reason’s governance. Moderation is a state in which, reason having gained the mastery over desire, the soul experiences harmony.[32]

Moderation thus requires self-mastery. Plato puzzled over the concept of self-mastery, implying that one is simultaneously master and slave.[33] However, the paradox is resolved once we acknowledge the composite nature of the existential soul. Because the composite soul comprises both reason and alien elements (desire and emotion), the possibility emerges of conflict and opposition. Harmony is attained by reason, aided by emotion, mastering desire.[34] However, mastery of desire does not mean extirpation; some desires are good while others are worthless (more on this shortly). We should honor the good desires while punishing (kolazein) and enslaving (doulousthai) the worthless desires.[35] Likewise, we should restrain the unnecessary—that is, good but excessive—desires and eliminate lawless (paranomoi) desires.[36] Having trimmed away worthless and excessive desires, we need only practice moderation—neither starving nor indulging the necessary desires.[37] In achieving mastery, reason must cultivate the help of emotion, its natural ally. It does so through a regimen of moral and physical training (mousikē and gumnastikē), which achieves the inner sumphonia that is moderation.[38] Although thumos can be morally troublesome—as in the case of Medea—Plato regarded it as a necessary condition of moral virtue. Everyone, he wrote, ought to be a person of thumos; resistance against evil and wrongdoing requires well-born (gennaios) thumos.[39] That is why, in the metaphor of the chariot found in Phaedrus, thumos is said to be the good (agathos) horse, even if epithumia is said to be the bad (kakia) horse. Thumos is a lover of honor (timēs erastēs), accompanied by sōphrosunē.[40] Closer to Plato’s interests in the Republic, thumos, when well trained, provides us with the sort of moral energy needed to resist the demands of epithumia. Thumos is, for Plato, naturally allied with (summachos) reason and uses its weapons on behalf of reason.[41] That is why the would-be rulers of Plato’s ideal republic required extensive physical training, whose purpose is to tame thumos by means of harmony and rhythmic motion.[42]

Good Emotions

So far we have been exploring Plato’s thoughts about passion and desire in their problematic sense. The textbook portrait of Plato exhibits him as a upholding a strict dualism between reason and the irrational parts of the soul. This portrait has a basis in Plato’s dialogues, especially Phaedo and Republic, but it represents just one side of Plato’s view. To arrive at the other side, it is helpful to have a closer look at pleasure and desire, since they are closely linked to each other and to humankind’s central moral problem.

As noted previously, thumos has a positive function for Plato. But even epithumia does not bear a wholly negative sense in Plato’s dialogues; after all, in the Phaedrus, the soul possesses epithumia even in its disembodied state.[43] Admittedly, even in that state it seems a bit unruly, but the metaphor of the chariot seems to require us to think of the soul in its pure, disembodied state as somehow still possessing epithumia as well as thumos. To see how epithumia can enjoy a positive meaning we must attend to the distinction between necessary and unnecessary desires. Necessary desires are those that are unavoidable, whose satisfaction benefits us in some way, and for the satisfaction of which we have a natural tendency.[44] Unnecessary desires are those that do us either harm or at least no good and which can be eliminated with effort. Plato illustrated his point with food: desire for food to sustain bodily health is a necessary desire; desire for luxurious food or an unduly varied diet is an unnecessary desire.[45] The same analysis, he asserted, would hold good for other desires.[46] Although necessary desires are obviously a function of our bodily existence and thus would not pertain to the soul in its pure, disembodied form, nothing suggests that for Plato necessary desires are evil. On the contrary, anticipating Aristotle’s idea of the mean, Plato held that we should neither starve nor indulge the necessary desires.[47] They may be inconvenient, but they are not evil as long as the satisfaction of such desire is moderated.

Plato, however, went beyond the grudging acknowledgment that the organic needs of the body are not evil. He argued additionally that each element of the composite soul—logos, thumos, and epithumia—has its own pleasures and desires. There are thus pleasures associated with good and noble desires besides the pleasures of worthless (ponērōn) desires.[48] Reason’s desires are satisfied by wisdom, which, Plato argued, is a truer mode of filling (plērōsis) than are food and drink precisely because wisdom partakes of pure being (kathara ousia).[49] Wisdom also yields a truer sort of pleasure (alēthēs hēdonē), because with wisdom the soul is filled with real things (ta onta).[50] Philosophical pleasures are consequently the best, since they relate to the mind’s pursuit of knowledge and not to physical desires.[51] So, just as there is an ontological hierarchy within the composite soul, there is a hierarchy of value among pleasures; pleasures of the body are inherently inferior to those of the mind. Nonetheless, even thumos and epithumia receive the pleasures appropriate to them when reason governs the soul.[52]

Reason and Erōs

The connection between reason and desire is deeper than the observation, in the Republic, that reason has its own pleasures. There is in fact a deep connection between reason and erōs. Affirming such a connection seems paradoxical, given Plato’s relentless critique of erōs in the Republic, especially (as indicated above) in the section describing the tyrannical character,[53] but the connection is emphatic in the Symposium and Phaedrus.

A turning point in the dialogues occurs in the Phaedrus. At first, Socrates, in his customary quest for definition, notes that everyone considers erōs to be a kind of desire (tis epithumia)[54] and then goes on to offer an unflattering and at points repulsive portrait of an older lover pursuing a youth, concluding that erōs is an epithumia that lacks logos, is led toward the pleasure of beauty, and overrules any opinion about what is right.[55] After this declaration, however, he is stopped by his inner sign and realizes that his speech has offended the gods and he resolves to expiate his offense by offering a suitable account of erōs.[56] In his revised account, erōs is not identical with epithumia. The latter is the unruly horse of the chariot metaphor, whereas the former is actually (when it attains a purified, philosophical form) a kind of divine madness and possession.[57] At the same time, erōs possesses an element of rationality, thus distinguishing it from epithumia.

Within Plato’s philosophy, the argument for erōs’ rationality rests on two points: first, epithumia aims at pleasure (hēdonē), rational desire (boulēsis) aims at the good (to agathon), and erōs aims at the beautiful (to kalon).[58] Second, the Symposium shifts the object of erōs from the beautiful[59] to the good.[60]Erōs, in other words, overlaps with rational desire (boulēsis). This judgment is confirmed when Plato asked, "Do you think that this boulēsis and this erōs are common to everyone?"[61] showing that boulēsis and erōs are equivalent terms for our desire for the good. So, whereas epithumia is a kind of blind drive for physical satisfaction that has no concern for the good,[62]erōs, like boulēsis, seeks the good and thus partakes of rationality.

Of course, Plato recognized the essential ambivalence of erōs; it may aim at the good by way of the beautiful, but, as he argued repeatedly in various dialogues, pursuit of the good depends on one’s perception of what is good, and it is exceedingly easy to mistake an apparent good for the real good or a subordinate good for the ultimate. In the Phaedrus this ambivalence is expressed as the difference between left-handed and right-handed erōs: the former is the low sort of love that cannot rise above the perception of bodies; the latter is the divine madness that is the source of blessing.[63] Both the Symposium and the Phaedrus are premised on this distinction and aim at elucidating the nature of the higher erōs and at explaining the dangers to the soul of falling captive to the lower erōs. Plato’s point is that we have an instinctive drive toward what is beautiful and good. Because the path toward the forms of beauty and goodness begins with and passes through objects that are sensuously beautiful and physically good, the soul may get distracted by the sensuous and the physical, and thus succumb to the destructive madness. It’s not that the sensuous and the physical are evil; they are just distracting. Instead of seeing the beautiful and the good in them, the soul easily mistakes them for beauty itself and goodness itself. Plato’s philosophy thus rests on a careful appreciation of the ambivalent nature of phenomena such as erōs.[64]

Because erōs, when properly directed, aims at the good, philosophy has an erotic character; authentic erōs, after all, is a desirer (epithumētēs) of prudence and philosophizes (philosophōn) throughout its entire life.[65] Philosophy is thus driven by erōs. This is true even in the Republic, which takes up a pretty harsh attitude toward erōs. The philosopher is thus described as someone who always loves (aei erōsin) learning about being.[66] The philosopher is one who perseveres on the path of dialectics and whose erōs does not falter along the way.[67] With philosophy rooted in erōs, it was thus easy for Plato to connect philosophy with appetite (orexis) so that even epithumia can be redeemed for philosophy: the philosopher must desire (oregesthai) all truth and is a desirer (epithumētēs) of wisdom.[68]

One of the features that makes the Symposium significant is that the role played in the Republic by dialectics is played in the Symposium by erōs. In the Republic and later dialogues, it is dialectics that draws the mind from the particulars of sense experience to the knowledge of truth. The Symposium, however, lacks reference to dialectics and instead sees erōs as the means by which the soul traverses the distance between sensuous being and what is ultimate. It is our love inspired by a particular beautiful body that can be refined until its true character of being love of beauty as such is revealed. This is why it is so important, in the Symposium, that erōs is not a god but a daimon—a being between mortal humans and the immortal gods, an in-between (metaxu) being who connects heaven and earth.[69] Mythologically speaking, erōs is a daimon; epistemologically considered, erōs is like dialectics.[70]

We should not think of erōs as a formal method, however. Instead, erōs is said to be about reproducing and begetting.[71] It is, in other words, creative. For the most part, the creative power of erōs manifests itself in physical reproduction;[72] however, the erōs that engenders physical reproduction is the same erōs that produces philosophical words and thoughts as the soul comes to know beauty itself.[73] What Plato is getting at is that philosophy, for all of its rationality, logical methods, and precise definitions, is at heart an expression of erōs inspired by beauty. Philosophy is not only logical (the quest for truth) and ethical (the quest for the good), but is also erotic (the quest for the beautiful). Philosophical wisdom is not only epistemological but also a matter of erōs.[74]

So, it is a mistake to overly separate reason from desire in Plato’s philosophy. It is true that in some dialogues, notably Phaedo and Republic, the emphasis falls on reason’s mastery of emotion and desire and this theme is never far from Plato’s attention. At the same time, reason is itself a form of desire, with its own distinctive pleasures and can even be described as a kind of divine madness. This point receives support if we consider what Plato said about the object of philosophical pursuit and the nature of the path toward that object.

The main point here is that the good, the ultimate object of philosophical desire, is not being (ousia) and is, in fact, beyond being.[75] That is why Socrates must speak metaphorically and why Glaucon is reduced to asking for a likeness of the good.[76] In the Parmenides, Plato argued similarly that the one (apparently the same as the good[77]) does not participate in being (ousia) and, consequently, it is not.[78] Neither name, nor logos, nor knowledge, nor perception, nor opinion belong to the one.[79] In these passages Plato indicated the utter transcendence of the good (or the one), to the point that it can be neither known nor named. So, even though (in the Republic) the good enables the mind to know the forms, it is itself not a direct, but at best only an indirect, object of knowledge—hence the necessity of metaphors and similes (such as that of the sun) to elucidate the good.

The same point is made in a different way in the Symposium. Having described the upward path that leads to knowledge of beauty, Plato used mostly visual language to depict the seeker’s arrival at the summit of knowledge:

[The philosopher] must be led towards the various sorts of knowledge [tas epistēmas], in order to see [idē] the beautiful. . . . And then [the philosopher] sees [kai blepōn] the beautiful in abundance. . . . Turning to the abundant sea of beauty and observing [theōrōn] it, [the philosopher] gives birth to many, beautiful, great logoi and thoughts. . . . Anyone who has been led hitherto like a child to the objects of love [ta erōtika], observing [theōrōn] beautiful things one after the other and correctly, will suddenly see [katopsetai] an amazing beauty.[80]

This visual language is not accidental or used merely for dramatic effect. Because what is ultimate lies beyond being, it cannot be the object of discursive thinking, as the ordinary forms can. On the contrary, although the approach to the summit is orderly and rational, the knowledge of the ultimate itself is more intuitive than discursive. Reason thus has a twofold nature for Plato: (1) a formal and logical use by which we come to know forms by orderly methods of thought (hypothesis, dialectics, composition and division); and (2) a more intuitive use by which we grasp the highest. Admittedly, Plato did not elaborate on this second use in his dialogues; however, it became an important part of the Platonic tradition, especially in Neoplatonism.[81]

Reason and Sensuous Being

There is one more point to be made regarding the relation of reason to the extra-rational elements of the soul—the role of sensuous being in the path to knowledge.

The dialectical method, as Plato described it, begins with our everyday experience and finds in it elements that, when properly considered, lead us to knowledge. Knowledge acquisition is thus a journey that begins with the mundane and ends with an intuition of the transcendent in the mundane.

The Symposium provides us with an illustration. The journey begins with the perception of the physical beauty of one body and the love that it inspires. The next step involves recognizing that physical beauty is one and the same in whichever body it appears, so that there is no reason to prefer one body to another—it is beauty that inspires love, not the material particularity of any given body. Following this, one should learn to value the beauty of souls more than the beauty of bodies and to love another because of this soulful beauty, even if physical beauty is absent. From here, one should learn to recognize the beauty of customs and laws and to see that the beauty of one is identical to the beauty of another. Ultimately, one is able to perceive beauty itself. Here one is no longer erotically attached to any one particular.[82] In this ascent, one uses sensuous objects as rungs on a ladder.[83]

This means that sensuous objects are an essential prerequisite of philosophical knowledge. The human mind cannot immediately leap to a knowledge of the forms; consequently, there can be no ascent to beauty that does not begin with the sensuous perception of beauty in a particular, material body. This is the assumption behind Plato’s doctrine of recollection: it is the perception of beauty in a physical body that stirs the soul to love of beauty itself.[84] So, while it is true that knowledge of the forms involves, in some sense, transcending sensuous particulars, it is also true that dialectical knowledge necessarily involves seeing the forms in the sensuous particular. There is, accordingly, a dialectical relationship between the temporal and the eternal, between the finite and the infinite. They are, of course, distinct; Plato’s philosophy requires us to distinguish them. At the same time, we need the finite in order to arrive at the infinite. Sensuous knowledge of the finite mediates to us the intellectual knowledge of the infinite.

Summary of Plato’s Views

Plato’s philosophy is an attempt to deal theoretically and existentially with desire. It recognizes that desire is ambivalent. It can drag the soul down to the level of animals; it can raise the soul to the form of beauty. Hence the importance of moderation and self-control. Bad desires must be purged; good desires must be moderated; desire for the beautiful and the good must be cultivated. Moderation and self-control are required so that the soul can be free, avoiding the slavery of the tyrannical character. But freedom has more than the negative sense of freedom from passion and desire. Restraint of passion and desire allows the soul to realize its true nature as passionate, erotic reason. Freedom is, accordingly, an ontological concept—it is the state in which the soul achieves its best state and realizes what it truly is. Negatively, this requires denying those parts of the existential self that tie the soul to corporeal reality. Positively, it requires the soul to attain knowledge and in this way nourish itself on the good.

As we will see, the ambivalence of passion, desire, and erōs in Plato’s philosophy passed over into Christian thinking, whose moral psychology lay within the parameters of classical philosophy and whose understanding of the relation of time to eternity and of the finite to the infinite owes much to Plato. In certain ways, then, the Christian theological struggle with passion and desire moves within the intellectual space first charted by Plato.

Aristotle

Analysis of the Soul

Like Plato, Aristotle distinguished the rational from the extra-rational elements of the soul.[85] The extra-rational encompasses several functions. One is concerned strictly with physiological functions such as nutrition and growth. Aristotle’s theory of virtue has little interest in this function, since there is no virtue associated with it.[86] There is, however, a extra-rational element that relates to virtue because it is subject to reason’s control—it shares, in a certain way, in reason, although in experience it often seems to be fighting against reason. This is the desiring (to epithumetikon) or, more generally, the appetitive (to oretikon) function of the soul. We observe (Aristotle asserted) in the self-controlled person (ho enkratēs) desire’s capacity to obey reason and in the person of moderation (ho sōphrōn) a harmony between desire and reason.[87] At the same time, there is nothing inevitable about desire’s obedience to or harmony with reason; we share desire (epithumia) with animals, a fact that points unmistakably to the close connection between desire and the body.[88]

It is worth noting that, whereas Plato distinguished desire from emotion (thumos) and saw emotion as a sort of natural ally of reason in its quest to govern desire, Aristotle seemed to place desire and emotion in the same category of extra-rational elements. He thus argued that passion (pathē) includes epithumia, anger (orgē), and fear (phobos),[89] anger and fear being phenomena associated with thumos. Similarly, courage, the virtue of thumos, is for Aristotle only one of several moral virtues and not particularly the ally of reason.

Regardless of how we classify desire, Aristotle was clear that reason is that element of the soul that is the best part of us, the element that rules and governs us and has knowledge of what is noble and divine because it is the most divine thing within the soul.[90] In comparison with the entire soul it may be small in size, but in activity and dignity it far surpasses the other elements of the soul.[91] Indeed, for Aristotle the life of intellect itself constitutes human being,[92] just as in a state or in any other composite thing it is the ruling element that is more identified with the whole.[93]

So, in spite of their differing ways of analyzing the soul (how to classify thumos, whether or not to think of desire as rational), Plato and Aristotle agreed on points of fundamental importance: the human person is reason (logos) or mind (nous). Reason (or mind) has a twofold function—to know eternal being and to govern our moral life by exercising rule over desire.

Emotion and Choice

One thing that Aristotle contributed to subsequent philosophy and to Christian thought was a careful discussion of the presuppositions of moral virtue—the features of the soul that make moral virtue possible. Aristotle went into considerable detail on this point because of his sensitivity to a problem generated in Plato’s dialogues: If we spontaneously pursue what we believe to be good, how do we explain cases where a person does something that is less than fully good? We all seem to know that physical pleasure is not the highest good, yet much of human behavior is driven by desire for such pleasure. Is the fault simply with our wrong belief? If so, vice rests on cognitive error. Aristotle believed that there was more to vice than just faulty belief and thus undertook to offer a careful analysis of moral agency.

For an act to be moral it must be a matter of choice (proairēsis), which involves reason (logos) and thinking (dianoia).[94] It is concerned with the selection of means to desired ends and is limited to what lies within our power.[95] It is not the same as wishing (boulēsis) (since we can wish for things that are realistically not objects of choice), but does involve deliberation (probouleuō).[96] It is deliberative appetite (bouleutikē orexis) for things that lie in our power (eph´ hēmin).[97] It may seem odd to classify choice as a type of appetite (orexis) (especially since Aristotle denied that choice is equivalent to epithumia,[98] which is a species of orexis) but Aristotle argued that action requires desire; knowledge alone cannot motivate action.[99] Yet desire alone, although capable of generating action (as in animals), does not suffice for purposive action, which requires reason. Choice, which combines desire and reason to yield purposive action, is thus absent in animals[100] and may be regarded either as appetitive intellect or intellectual appetite.[101]

We deliberate about ends and so choice is about the good; however, the object of choice may be the good itself or something only perceived as good, for while mind (nous) is always right in its apprehension, appetite (orexis) is not always right and may well accept an apparent or lesser good for the real or higher good.[102] Under what circumstances might someone mistake an apparent good for the true good? For Aristotle the answer lay in the effect of pleasure—and that means passion and desire—on our judgment; errors about the good usually involve pleasure.[103] That is why, in order to aim at the true good, we must have developed a good character capable of making sound judgments.

It is important, however, that we not overstate Aristotle’s suspicion of passion and desire. For one thing, as with Plato, not all pleasures are bad; some desires are concerned with things that are fine and good.[104] But these sorts of desires and the attendant pleasures don’t seem to be morally problematic for Aristotle. What is problematic is bodily pleasures and desires—the sort that we share with animals.[105] It is because of these that we need moderation.[106] For another thing, as noted, intellect is not a source of action. It has nothing to do with practical activity (to prakton), and even when it contemplates an object of potential desire or avoidance, it does so without moving us to act, as when we think of something fearful without feeling fear.[107] What is critical in the origination of action is appetite (orexis), which comprises wish (boulēsis), emotion (thumos), and desire (epithumia). As Aristotle said, the desirable object (to oretikon) moves, and because of this, thinking moves. So, whatever the ill effects of emotion, passion, and desire on humankind’s morality, Aristotle believed that they lay at the heart of action—without them, thought alone could never rouse our bodies into motion.

Emotion, Desire, and Virtue

Since passion and desire are neither categorically good nor intrinsically evil, and because appetite is the cause of action, and because the pleasures associated with passion and desire cause us to misapprehend the good, their place in the virtuous life requires careful analysis. Aristotle sought to provide such an analysis with his notion of the mean. Moral virtues are means lying between extremes of excess and deficiency. Like health and strength, the moral virtues, which have to do with passions (pathē) and actions,[108] are destroyed by excess and deficiency and thus flourish only in a condition of harmony—not too much and not too little.[109]

Take courage, for instance, the virtue that relates to thumos and associated feeling of fear. There is such a thing as too little courage—cowardice or excessive timidity—as well as its opposite, an excess—perhaps rashness or foolhardiness. We can, in other words, feel fear too much or too little and the one is as bad as the other for the life of virtue. Courage is found between these extremes. To be courageous is to feel fear in the right amount, given the circumstances. We must thus feel fear, not only in due measure, but also toward the right object, at the right time, and in the right way. The emotion of fear, then, is not in itself something evil, although we must guard how and how much we allow ourselves to feel it.[110] Aristotle thus offered the view that thumos and its related feeling, fear, are not in themselves moral categories. They are instead physiological states of human being. They acquire moral status only because the moral agent trains himself or herself how to engage thumos and how to feel fear.

Aristotle devoted much more attention to moderation (sōphrosunē, traditionally translated temperance), the moral virtue that pertains to desire, especially desires for food, drink, and sex, and associated pleasures.[111] Like courage and other moral virtues, sōphrosunē is a mean lying between extremes of excess and deficiency. It turns out, however, that the deficiency side of this continuum is mostly a theoretical problem; Aristotle could hardly imagine people who were deficient in their desires—feeling too little pleasure from bodily desires.[112] Such insensibility was not human (anthrōpikē).[113] Aristotle’s incredulity about the existence of desire deficiency shows us that Aristotelian sōphrosunē is not an exercise in asceticism—the moderate person will disdain bad pleasures[114] but will enjoy pleasant states moderately if they promote health or vigor. Even pleasures not thus conducive can be enjoyed as long as they do not hinder health or contradict the requirements of good character. The more realistic and urgent danger is the opposite extreme, excessive desire (akolasia, sometimes translated intemperance, licentiousness, or profligacy). Moderation thus lies between lack of desire and excessive desire. It is the right attitude toward bodily desires, satisfying them appropriately—to just the right degree—but not too much and, of course, not being ruled by such desires.[115] As