The Spirit, the Affections, and the Christian Tradition

By Dale M Coulter and Amos Yong

The essays in this volume explore the role of emotions and affections in the Christian tradition, focusing also on the importance of pneumatology in Christianity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Oct 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780268100070

Book preview

PREFACE

This collection derives from ongoing discussions between the editors about how to develop the theoretical underpinnings of renewal Christianity for the study of Christian history and the history of Christian theology. Each of us has either taught in (Amos) or continues to teach in (Dale) the relatively new and emerging field of renewal studies, uniquely situated at Regent University School of Divinity. Regent University itself is deeply shaped by neo-pentecostal and charismatic renewal, leading in 2003 to the establishment of a PhD program in the School of Divinity with a methodological focus on renewal and renewal movements in the history of Christianity.

Because of the history of the institution in which this program is situated, its central focus has always been the global pentecostal and charismatic renewal. Yet the seminary is also explicitly transdenominational, broadly evangelical, and even ecumenical in its ethos, including faculty and students from Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox traditions. What binds together faculty and students is a shared commitment to promoting the renewing work of the Holy Spirit.

Hence, while renewal studies surely includes the pentecostal and charismatic movements derived from the Azusa Street revivals at the beginning of the twentieth century, it is also much more than that. The faculty has adopted an explicitly methodological definition of renewal for its programmatic self-understanding.

The Regent University School of Divinity Ph.D. program understands Renewal Studies as a methodological approach to global Christian engagement with discourses in the academy, church, and world as informed by critical reflection derived from charismatic movements and their practices throughout the history of God’s people.

Note here that renewal is not reducible to the twentieth-century pentecostal or charismatic revivalist traditions; rather, it is committed to researching, studying, and reflecting on charismatic renewal movements throughout the history of God’s people—which means not only going behind the twentieth century to the broader history of Christianity, but also behind the first century into the history of ancient Israel. As one Old Testament faculty member pointed out, the main plot lines of the Hebrew Bible are also uniquely shaped by themes of renewal, restoration, and revitalization.

How then to theorize renewal in the history of Christianity and the field of historical theology? More precisely, how does foregrounding the renewing work of the Holy Spirit shape scholarship in these arenas? What kinds of research projects and questions emerge when such a renewalist and pneumatological lens is focused historiographically in these areas? One such area was the intersection between the divine and human in the Christian notion of salvation. To put it in Gerhart Ladner’s terms, it meant a return and deeper exploration of the idea of reform within the human person through a specific focus on the affections. The benefit of this area was that it opened up a broader exploration of moral psychology, the erotic and ecstatic dimensions of the divine-human encounter, and the development of notions of affectivity in the history of Christianity. The chapters in this book offer some preliminary analyses of these topics in the context of an ecumenical exchange of ideas about the Christian tradition that draw on a range of discourses in the academy.

Many of the chapters in this book were first presented as special lectures at Regent University in 2011–12 or as plenary presentations at our conference The Holy Spirit and the Christian Life, held March 1–2, 2013. We are grateful to former School of Divinity deans Michael Palmer and Tammie Wade for supporting the lectureships and the conference and to Wolfgang Vondey, former director of the Regent University Center for Renewal Studies, for hosting them. Thanks also are due to the School of Divinity staff and graduate assistants who helped with the events: Katie Lohmann, Robert Smith, and Vince Le. Enoch Charles, Paul Palma, and Donald Bufford, other graduate assistants, also worked hard on the formatting of the book. Hoon Jung, Amos’ graduate assistant at Fuller Theological Seminary, helped with the indexing of the volume.

Last but not least, the staff at the University of Notre Dame Press also deserve kudos: Charles Van Hof, Robyn Karkiewicz, and Stephen Little and their team have been great to work with. Two anonymous reviewers for the Press helped strengthen the chapters and connect the dots. Needless to say, we as editors are indebted to our authors for their contributions in the following pages.

The editors dedicate this volume to our former colleague, Dr. Stanley M. Burgess, recently retired from the School of Divinity. Stan, an encyclopedist extraordinaire of contemporary renewal movements, has long been at the forefront of asking what we call renewalist and pneumatological questions regarding Christian historiography, and he was instrumental in helping establish the PhD program at the School of Divinity. His ongoing scholarly output remains a staple for students in the history of Christianity doctoral track. Stan has been a mentor and exemplary renewal scholar and scholar of renewal. We trust that this volume, only a small token of our appreciation for his work, will be received as the meager complement to his oeuvre that it is intended to be.

INTRODUCTION

The Language of Affectivity and the Christian Life

DALE M. COULTER

Over the past several decades there has been a virtual renaissance in the study of emotion and desire occurring in different disciplines and for diverse purposes.¹ Part of the challenge of this resurgence is that many of these scholarly trajectories remain confined to particular traditions of inquiry or religious traditions without significant interaction.² There is a need to bring together investigative analyses that span historical periods, Christian traditions, and scholarly agendas, which this current volume attempts to do. The chapters in this volume offer a more or less chronological exploration of affectivity within Christian tradition by scholars who inhabit different parts of that tradition. It is the most straightforward way to follow various developments within the tradition. In this sense, as a whole, this volume represents an initial effort at a kind of ecumenical and interdisciplinary conversation through ressourcement.

What results from this endeavor is not only a closer inspection of affectivity in relationship to inward change and the work of the Spirit but also what may be termed a renewal historiographical lens. As a burgeoning approach, renewal historiography underscores the methodological import of sensitivity or orientation to the charismatic dimension of Christian existence that informs the critical reading and interpretation of texts and ideas. This basic understanding branches out into three general areas of concern for those engaged in renewal studies: (1) the historical phenomena surrounding and giving rise to social and ecclesial reform and renewal, including a focus on religious populism and popular modes of communication; (2) the role of the charismatic in relation to internal renewal that facilitates ongoing conversion; and (3) theological reflection upon the Holy Spirit as the central factor in such an encounter. While not all the writers in this volume consciously operate by means of this method, as Amos Yong’s conclusion attempts to demonstrate, their contributions collectively exemplify the interpretive sensibilities and modalities embodied in it.

All religious traditions experience periods of decline in which the foundational ideas become blurred or the growth of the religion stagnates. On the social level, renewal refers to the way in which movements within religions recover central concerns that revive the commitment of individuals and propel the tradition into further phases of growth. Such renewal movements more often than not derive from the forms and concerns of populist religiosity, which subsequently gives rise to deeper theological reflection. This reflection can remain at the level of folk theology or spirituality, such as the advice of John Climacus, the visions of Hadewijch of Brabant, or the sermons of John Wesley. It can also exist in the tradition’s basic religious or liturgical practices. Several of the chapters in this volume thus explore affectivity in the folk theologies and spiritualities of important writers, thereby underscoring the importance of sensitivity to religious populism as part of a renewal approach. Moreover, with chapters directed to the nonspecialist, this volume also embodies popular modes of communication that a renewal method attempts to exemplify. Some chapters are more general, and others dive deeply into affectivity; nevertheless, all retain the nonspecialist approach. Thus this volume seeks to contribute to the renewal of the study of affectivity, as well as retain a sensitivity to forms of populist religiosity that have given rise to movements of renewal and folk theologies.

Christian existence has as its central concern the salvation of the human person through an inward renewal that both heals and elevates the soul. While this conversio to God as the final end occurs in the cognitive and affective dimensions, it is the latter that became the focus of Christian writers. Personal renewal was associated with practices that integrated the reorientation of human love, the therapy of desire, and the encounter with God through the Spirit in its sanctifying and charismatic dimensions. With its goals of ecstatic embrace and union, the mystical life attested to the fusion of the charismatic, internal transformation and affectivity. Ecstasy, in particular, referred to modes of charismatic encounters as well as sanctifying moments. Many of the chapters in this volume explore how particular writers in the tradition understood this relationship, revealing how a sensitivity to the charismatic can provide a new window onto the development of Christian ideas about the affective life.

By retrieving the complex discussion about affectivity in Christian tradition and bringing its diverse voices into dialogue in a contemporary ecumenical context, these chapters also point toward a number of research trajectories that fill out the picture of a renewal method and need further exploration. One particularly important theme that emerges from the whole is the need to get back behind the shift in the analysis of emotion and desire that occurred in the late eighteenth century. From the emergence of a sentimental culture that McClymond highlights to Clapper’s desire to tame the dominance of a feeling theory of the emotions, several chapters address the conceptual challenges that arose at the turn of the nineteenth century. In addition, they illuminate the diachronic shifts in the language of affectivity, which remains an important area of further investigation. They point to the need for additional work on the psychology of conversion as a feature of charismatic existence, especially with respect to analyses of sin and salvation as a therapeutic enterprise in which the Spirit heals and empowers the soul. Finally, several chapters underscore how probing the role of affectivity in relation to union with God, ecstasy, and the erotic remains important throughout Christian tradition.

This introduction sets the tone for the chapters that follow by briefly noting research trajectories on affectivity in the past forty years, exploring developments in the terms used to describe the affective life, and identifying the important ideas that flow through the book as a whole.

Research on Affectivity

The past three decades have witnessed a proliferation of studies reexamining the intellectual history of affectivity. In many respects, Robert Solomon’s argument in 1976 that emotions are constituting judgments that shape human identity and supply meaning to life launched a discussion of the philosophy of emotion in Anglo-American circles.³ Central to Solomon’s project has been an effort to overcome the divide between emotion and rationality as though the former has little to do with the latter. Simultaneous with this development and influenced by it, a retrieval of ancient philosophical views on the emotions began in the late 1970s that set the stage for a deeper exploration of emotion in relation to human flourishing and the therapy of desire.⁴ The use of historical analysis in constructing philosophical accounts of emotion and their relationship to human action and flourishing has now become a cottage industry with a body of literature so large that it is difficult to keep pace. The resurgence of cognitivist accounts of the emotions has opened the door to studies in diverse historical periods as well as those of an interdisciplinary nature.

Within scholarship specifically devoted to an exploration of the Christian tradition, there are similar trends at work. In the past decade alone a number of studies have appeared that trace out broader trends in Christian writers and their efforts to provide accounts of emotion and desire in light of the Christian doctrines of sin and salvation and the psychology of conversion. Some studies, such as Simo Knuuttila’s, follow Richard Sorabji by analyzing philosophical accounts of emotion and desire in ancient and medieval thinkers.⁵ Representing a second approach, Thomas Dixon has argued that the history of emotion in the West involves a slow separation of theological and philosophical accounts buttressed by the rise of psychology and the feeling theory of William James.⁶ Thomas Dixon describes this feeling theory as involving a turn to more materialist accounts in which emotions are visceral and involuntary movements that begin in parts of the body and are felt passively.⁷ Dixon’s work affirms Solomon’s desire to recover cognitivist accounts of emotion by offering a critique of the historiography supporting that account. Whereas Solomon had argued that the antagonism between emotion and reason stemmed from antiquity, Dixon counters that it was primarily a result of nineteenth-century developments. What emerges from studies like Knuuttila’s and Dixon’s is that Christian thinkers had complex discussions of emotion and desire that tracked more with views of emotion as cognition rather than of emotion as feeling.⁸

There have also been studies that focus on a cultural history of emotion and how diverse communities understood the roles that emotions play. Barbara H. Rosenwein’s work, for example, examines the early Middle Ages with a focus on how communities describe and shape emotional life.⁹ More specifically, she attempts to counter Nussbaum’s overly negative assessment of medieval ideas about emotion. As Dreyer’s chapter in this volume indicates, analyses like Rosenwein’s combine a focus on spirituality, gender, the body, and mysticism.¹⁰ The result of such studies is to reveal a deeply affective piety in the Middle Ages with broad cultural roots that hold together the Occitania culture of the troubadours and fin’amor, the rise of courtly love in Anglo-Norman culture, and the spirituality of love characteristic of male and female medieval religious writers. To study this history of emotion scholars must wrestle with notions of ecstasy, the erotic, love, and union with God more than with philosophical accounts of emotion and desire.

Finally, a number of trajectories have emerged in the past several decades that study emotion and desire in the context of a specific tradition of Christianity. His effort to capture John Wesley’s focus on experience led Theodore Runyon to coin the term orthopathy to describe how right affections fuse right beliefs (orthodoxy) and right practices (orthopraxis) within Wesley’s thought.¹¹ Runyon’s suggestion was picked up by a number of Wesleyan and pentecostal historians and theologians to describe the dynamics at work within revivalist settings and the connection between divine encounters and the process of Christian development.¹² Moreover, Samuel Solivan’s effort to bring the transformation of the affections (orthopathos) into dialogue with Latino/a theology has borne fruit among liberation theologians whose interest has been the praxis of Christian faith.¹³ These efforts signal a trend across pietist, Wesleyan, and pentecostal traditions of greater attention to the formation of right affections as the center of Christian existence.

The focus on affectivity over a range of studies in Christian scholarship raises the question of pneumatology in a way that challenges prevailing assumptions among constructive theologians about a pneumatological deficit in Western Christianity. These charges began to appear in a series of criticisms by Orthodox émigré theologians such as Vladimir Lossky and Nikos Nissiotis, both of whom referred to a Christomonism in Western theology that stemmed at least in part from the perceived implications of filioque.¹⁴ Sweeping claims to a pneumatological deficit first surfaced in ecumenical dialogue, but these tracked with German concerns over Barth’s focus on Christology, which centered on what Moltmann described as a forgetfulness of the Spirit.¹⁵ The Orthodox and German concerns found a receptive home in the work of a number of theologians who became connected with the Research Institute in Systematic Theology at King’s College, London, in the early 1990s and who tended to favor a social model of the Trinity. Colin Gunton, Robert Jenson, John Zizioulas, and Christoph Schwöbel, each in his own way, advanced the criticism. Among these thinkers Gunton’s claims were the most extreme, laying the entire problem at a depersonalizing of the Spirit in Augustine, while Jenson offered a much more nuanced position that saw the problem more in terms of a failure to emphasize Pentecost as a distinct event coupled with the thirteenth-century shift toward an infused disposition at baptism (created grace).¹⁶ By the early part of the twenty-first century Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen could summarize these streams as leading to the recognition that the Western tradition suffered from a deficient pneumatology.¹⁷ While the criticisms surrounding filioque have been subjected to a sustained critique, the question of pneumatology in the Western tradition beyond the patristic period remains outstanding.

This volume underscores the need for an ecumenical and crossdisciplinary exploration of affectivity in relationship to pneumatology and the transformation of the human person. Examining the Western tradition through a renewal lens shows how discourses on the affections became connected to trinitarian discourse because, as Peter Abelard succinctly put it in his Romans commentary, the gift of God, which [Paul] calls grace, is called the Holy Spirit.¹⁸ Augustine forged a strong connection between grace, love, and the Spirit when he argued that the Spirit formed Christ in the soul by transforming the affective life. For Augustine, original sin is a hardening of the initial disobedient motion in the first humans, which is how human nature becomes vitiated.¹⁹ The death that occurred when grace forsook the original parents resulted in their being bound by their own delight (delectatio) to created realities. As Augustine states elsewhere, "The soul can be changed, not indeed spatially [localiter], but nonetheless in time [temporaliter] by its affections [suis affectionibus].²⁰ As a kind of weight in the soul, delight impacts the affective dimension, introducing order or disorder. Thus, Augustine calls the delight of the carnal senses" (carnalium sensuum delectatio) a habit of the soul made with the flesh by means of carnal affective states (animae consuetudo facta cum carne, propter carnalem affectionem), which occurs through the punishment of mortality.²¹ The initial impetus to disobedience through delight engendered by the suggestion of the devil, once consented to, prompted a hardening in the soul from which it can no longer escape. The remedy is the therapy of desire through the Spirit who, as divine charity, draws forth a delight in the law of God. The Spirit serves as the intersection between divine affectivity (Spirit as bond of love) and human affectivity. This places pneumatology front and center in the discussion of affectivity.

The Language of Affectivity

We aspire in this volume to an ecumenical and interdisciplinary dialogue that draws on a number of research trajectories; however, we recognize that exploring affectivity across the Christian tradition brings into stark relief the problem of terminology. Introductions to English translations usually catalog the difficult choices translators must make in rendering original-language terms into good English. Much of the philosophical discussion about affectivity has occurred under the category of emotion as a concession to current nomenclature, even though scholars recognize that there is no Greek or Latin term that strictly translates into emotion. Many of the chapters in this volume echo Boyd’s pronouncement at the outset of his analysis of Aquinas that what we call ‘emotions’ or ‘affectivity’ is problematic for us. Moreover, as McDermott’s and Clapper’s chapters make clear, the problem of interpretation is not simply reducible to issues of translation. Interpreters will misunderstand Edwards’s and Wesley’s use of affections apart from a careful analysis of what they meant in the eighteenth century. The shifts in meaning are difficult to track because of the complex development of vocabulary in the Christian tradition, which means that hermeneutical issues begin with the problem of translation.

While the volume as a whole signals a preference for affectivity and affective movements as overarching descriptors of emotion and desire, individual authors have made decisions as to how best to achieve terminological and conceptual clarity. The problem of finding an overarching descriptor stems in part from the lack of any rigid division between emotion and desire as internal movements in many ancient and medieval thinkers. Instead, the divisions have more to do with the origin of these movements in the body or different dimensions of the soul. Even here care must be taken to avoid misleading suggestions that imply these internal movements form self-contained units (parts) when they are more like the deep currents found in the world’s oceans, observably distinct and yet flowing in and out of one another. It is for this reason that one can understand why Augustine would gravitate toward psychological analogies to describe the perichoretic nature of trinitarian relations. To describe these movements as affective is a heuristic move designed to maintain a critical distance between modern and premodern accounts.

It is also the case that the language of affections was paramount in eighteenth-century revivalist literature and continued to serve as the primary conduit of older traditions in the subterranean channels of nineteenth-century holiness movements. Using descriptors like affections and affective movements maintains the connection between accounts of emotion and desire by revivalists like John Wesley and Jonathan Edwards and the early modern, medieval, and ancient use of affectus on which they draw.

While the terms identifying affective movements seem rather straightforward in Greek (pathē) and Latin (perturbatio, affectio/affectus, passio), they form a small sample of the words employed by ancient and medieval writers to describe the affective dimension of the human person. These writers also employed a second set of terms that in general referred to fundamental impulses or drives (hormē, orexis, impulsus, appetitus) and the movements or mental events to which they gave rise (kinēsis, motus animi/motus animae), as well as a third set of terms to refer to various kinds of desire (boulēsis, epithumia, voluntas, cupiditas/libido, concupiscentia, desiderium). On top of this vocabulary, one might introduce a further set of overlapping terms that describe internal movements as various forms of love or affection for something or someone (eros, agape, amor, caritas). What holds these diverse ways of describing the affective dimension together is that they all begin with the assumption that humans have sets of internal movements (physiological and psychological) that work together to produce action and yet can become defective in some way. These movements emerge from basic dispositions in the human constitution related to the unique relationship between the body and the soul.

Determining precisely how persons coordinate these internal movements into action separates one thinker from another. Aristotle, for example, employs orexis to refer to the fundamental inclination or drive found in all animals because internal movements are forms of objectdirected, active inner reaching-out.²² At the same time, orexis remains a desire; indeed, it is desire in its most basic sense of an internal movement of attraction toward something. Because Aristotle concludes that orexis is a single, basic drive, he locates it in all forms of desire. Rational wish (boulēsis), appetite (epithumia), and irascibility (thumos) are all forms of reaching-out (orexis).²³ The rational (reasoning and calculative) and the nonrational (appetitive and irascible) sources of action express this drive and translate it into forms of reaching-out that include passions. This occurs through phantasia, which functions both to present perceived images to the mind and to interpret them.²⁴ It is important to note that for Aristotle, as well as Plato, the soul had rational (logos) and nonrational/irrational (alogos) sources of action within it. By the second century CE Plutarch and Galen would postulate that the rational and nonrational sources were in reality different features of the soul that came into conflict with one another, at times associating these features with bodily organs. While such movements were foundational to action, in human persons they became voluntary when combined with deliberative choice in the form of some sort of consent, which could be implicit or explicit.

Stoic accounts, conversely, begin with impulses (hormai) to mental events that happen on the basis of impressions to which consent is given.²⁵ This consent corresponds to some belief about the impression that takes the form of a syllogism in the mind. As Margaret Graver states, To act is to endorse a certain kind of proposition like X is good or X is bad.²⁶ Stoic writers saw passions (pathē) as excessive impulses because they were powerful interior movements that overwhelmed the person. This is why Cicero rendered pathē as perturbatio (disturbances) and commotio animi, whereas he remained content to describe impulse simply as a motion of the soul (motus animi).²⁷ For Cicero, Stoic hormē pointed to a natural appetite (naturalis appetitio) that was itself a good of nature. The entire role of practical reason (prudentia) was to determine the ends that awakened hormē (appetitus animi) and from such proximate ends to discern an ultimate end.²⁸ As a basic dispositional appetite for the good, hormē became synonymous with orexis in Cicero’s mind and thus could be rendered into appetitus, appetitio, and motus animi.²⁹ Passions, conversely, were negative impulses when they were excessive, and this excessive quality stemmed from false ascriptions of value about the world.

Since passions denoted a generic category, Stoics came up with large classification systems that identified various species of passion. Cicero summarizes the four primary passions, which Wilken labels cardinal passions in his chapter: "those arising from goods are desire [libido] and gladness [laetitia], gladness being directed at present goods and desire at future goods; while those arising from evils are fear [metus] and distress [aegritudo], fear being directed at future evils and distress at present ones.³⁰ In all of these categories, value judgments grounded in beliefs about the world give rise to emotional explosions in the soul. These emotional explosions are beyond the boundaries of reason taking the form of unbridled desire" (cupiditas effrenata) in Cicero’s mind.³¹ The complex metaphor fuses an untamed animal with the image of a horse that has broken free of its reins and bolts across the landscape.³² Yet these same movements can occur in accordance with reason, in which case Cicero classifies them as voluntas, which is his translation of boulēsis (rational wish). The goal is to make the movements consistent or harmonize with reason so that the interior dimensions flow as a unified whole. It is to achieve a kind of tranquillitas or constantia mentis with its evocations of calm winds and the steady ripples across a serene body of water.³³

Alongside biblical texts, this rich vocabulary of the interior life became the basis on which Christian writers developed their accounts of human action. Clement of Alexandria, for example, employs many of these terms:

Impulse [hormē] is then the movement of the mind [phora dianoias] to or from something. A passion [pathos] is an excessive impulse [pleonazousa hormē] that exceeds the measures of reason [ta kata ton logon metra], or an impulse [hormē] that is unbridled and disobedient to reason. Passions [ta pathē], then, are a movement in the soul [kinēsis psuchēs] contrary to nature, in disobedience to reason. This rebellion, this disaffection, this disobedience is in our control, just as obedience is in our control. This is why acts of the will are subject to judgment. If anyone were to pursue each of the passions individually, he would find them all non-rational impulses [alogous orexeis].³⁴

While Clement operates with a basic Stoic vocabulary, he interchanges the terms with Aristotelian vocabulary so that hormē and orexis are different ways of referring to the same mental movement that can become excessive and unbridled or not, depending on whether there is a harmonious correspondence with reason.

When one examines the dialogue between Gregory of Nyssa and Macrina, passions are clearly negative but impulses (hormai) that arise from a fundamental appetite (orexis) can become virtuous or vitious.³⁵ Belonging to the natural constitution of the human person, these impulses must be directed by the power of reason or choice toward their proper end. Macrina will employ Plato’s image of the rational dimension of the soul as the charioteer who must preside over the natural impulses by turning them into virtue instead of allowing them to become uncontrolled passions as with animals. She refers to such impulses as movements within the soul (kinēseis) that can become rational or nonrational. When they become the latter, Macrina associates them with the passionate movements of brute beasts, thereby employing a common image of the untamed animal. While impulses remain natural movements in the human constitution, they can become passionate when they break the boundaries of reason in an immoderate motion toward ends unbefitting the whole human person, such as when love becomes solely directed toward the enjoyment of sensory delights. Nevertheless, to understand Gregory’s thought on affectivity requires that one investigate the role of appetite in relation to impulses, desire, and love. Gregory and Macrina fuse Stoic and Aristotelian vocabulary in their conversation and the interior movements of the person.

One finds something similar occurring in Augustine’s thought. Recently Sarah Byers has made a strong case that Augustine uses voluntas for hormē, which he fuses with Platonic notions of love as eros, and thus his theory of action is a Stoic-Platonic synthesis.³⁶ This would mean that Augustine largely rejected Cicero’s translation of boulēsis as voluntas, preferring instead to think of voluntas in terms of a dispositional appetitus (hormē). An early definition of will Augustine offers may buttress Byers’s case in which he defines it as "a movement of mind (motus animi) that no one compels either not to lose something or to obtain something."³⁷ Will is an interior movement that results from the way the mind hovers between the two impulses of fear (metus) and desire (libido/cupiditas), which points toward the analysis of sin as inordinate desire (culpabilis cupiditas) in the first book of De libero arbitrio. As Byers notes, Augustine translates hormē as impulse or appetite for action (impulsus vel appetitus actionis).³⁸ It could be that Augustine associates voluntas with motus and appetitus if those terms are synonymous and equal to hormē.³⁹ At the same time, Augustine defines a good will as "a will [voluntas] by which we desire [appetimus] to live rightly and honorably [recte honesteque] and to attain the highest wisdom," which seems closer to boulēsis as a rational appetite.⁴⁰ What remains clear is that affections emerge from the will as a dispositional impulse. Augustine will describe these affections in terms of the love for some object and the delight that arises in concert with this love.

The terminological mixing that begins with Clement, coupled with the theological challenges Christians faced, prompted a need to gain some control of the various terms inherited from ancient writers. One can begin to see this control in the thought of John of Damascus, who mediates the Greek tradition and whose On the Orthodox Faith was translated into Latin by Burgundio of Pisa in the twelfth century and retranslated by Robert Grosseteste in the thirteenth century. The Damascene is less important for his originality than his effort to systematize and transmit an understanding of affectivity, centered on a notion of will, which he inherited from the Greek patristic tradition that flowed to him from the Cappadocians and Nemesius of Emesa through Maximus the Confessor.

To understand how John views the affective dimension requires an examination of his view of the will and the passions. He identifies the passions of the soul as desire (epithumia/concupiscentia) and anger (thumos/ira).⁴¹ These passions are movements of the appetitive power (kinēsis tēs orektikēs/motus appetitivae virtutis) while also stemming from the sensory side of the human person. For this reason, John will call the passions nonrational movements that even animals possess, noting that they are particularly intense motions although in humans reason can control them. In addition to the passions, humans possess a natural will (psukē thelēsis/naturalis voluntas) that John identifies as a rational impulse (orexis logikē/appetitus rationalis). He also refers to the will with the Aristotelian term for rational desire (boulēsis). The appetitive power (orektikōn/appetitivis) can be divided into passionate movements that are nonrational and a rational movement also called the will. It is because of the latter that humans remain naturally attracted to what is good for them, which prompts John to indicate that boulēsis always concerns the end as an object of desire such as good health, not the means to that end. To speak of the appetitive is to identify how John understands affectivity, and this encompasses the will as a rational appetite, nonrational movements, and the passions that can erupt from them.

Given John of Damascus’s terminology, one can understand why Boyd follows Nicholas Lombardo’s work in distinguishing between the affections and the passions in Aquinas.⁴² This is in part because Thomas was attempting to fuse Augustinian vocabulary with the more Aristotelian description he inherited from the Damascene, Nemesius of Emesa, and the Latin translations of Aristotle. While Aquinas operates with Latin terms (passio, affectio/affectus) that were originally a translation of pathē, he attempts to make sense of the tradition as it has come down to him through multiple trajectories.

By the time the discussion reaches Luther in the early sixteenth century, there is a decided preference to move away from the carefully formulated technical distinctions of scholasticism and return to a more simplified vocabulary. In his analysis of Luther’s thought, Zahl spells out how Luther fuses together affectus, impetus,