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Living like common people: emotion, will, and divine passibility
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 July 2009
Abstract
This paper explores the perennial objection to passibilism (conceived as susceptibility to or capacity for emotion) that an omnipotent being could not experience emotions because emotions are essentially passive and outside the subject's control. Examining this claim through the lens of some recent philosophy of emotion, I highlight some of the ways in which emotions can be chosen and cultivated, suggesting that emotions are not incompatible with divine omnipotence. Having concluded that divine omnipotence does not exclude emotional experience in general, I go on to address an objection to the idea that God experiences the emotions involved in suffering in particular, suggesting one possible way of arguing that God's suffering is chosen while also maintaining the authenticity of divine suffering.
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Notes
1. See Marcel Sarot God, Passibility and Corporeality (Kampen: Kok Pharos Publishing House), 30, who defines impassibility as ‘immutability with regard to one's feelings, or the quality of one's inner life’, and Richard E. Creel Divine Impassibility: An Essay in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 3–9, who defines impassibility as ‘imperviousness to causal influence from external factors’ with respect to nature, will, knowledge, or feelings.
2. See Thomas G. Weinandy Does God Suffer? (Notre Dame IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2000), 1–2.
3. Ibid., 1.
4. Jürgen Moltmann History and the Triune God (London: SCM Press, 1991), xvi; Sarot, Marcel ‘Suffering of Christ, suffering of God?’, Theology, 95 (1992), 113.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
5. Paul Helm ‘On the impossibility of divine passibility’, in N. M. de Cameron (ed.) The Power and Weakness of God: Impassibility and Orthodoxy, Scottish Bulletin of Evangelical Theology series (Edinburgh: Rutherford House Books, 1989); Robin Cook ‘Divine impassibility, divine love’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Cardiff University, 2006).
6. Weinandy Does God Suffer?, 123.
7. Ibid., 132–134.
8. Ibid., 127.
9. Ibid., 159.
10. Ibid., 160, n. 25.
11. Helm ‘Impossibility of divine passibility’, 139.
12. Weinandy Does God Suffer?, 168.
13. Cook ‘Divine impassibility’, 3.
14. Ibid., 52.
15. These and other examples can be found in Robert Solomon True to Our Feelings: What Our Emotions Are Really Telling Us (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 190.
16. For other accounts that support the view that emotions are primarily cognitive and therefore partly voluntary (in opposition to purely physiological accounts of emotion), see Martha Nussbaum Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); Ronald de Sousa The Rationality of Emotion (London: MIT Press, 1987); Jerome Neu A Tear is an Intellectual Thing: The Meanings of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000); Antonio Damasio Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason and the Human Brain (London: Picador, 1995), and idem The Feeling of What Happens: Body, Emotion and the Making of Consciousness (London: Vintage, 2000).
17. Robert Solomon Not Passion's Slave: Emotions and Choice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), vii.
18. Ibid., viii. For more on Stoic ‘first movements’ or ‘pre-passions’, see Richard Sorabji Emotion and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).
19. Solomon Not Passion's Slave, 202.
20. Ibid., ix.
21. Ibid., 191.
22. Ibid., 195.
23. Ibid., 199.
24. Ibid.
25. Ibid.
26. William James, cited in Solomon Not Passion's Slave, 199.
27. Solomon Not Passion's Slave, 201.
28. Ibid., 201.
29. Ibid., 210.
30. Ibid.
31. Ibid., 222.
32. This conclusion presupposes an allegiance to perfect-being theology, and may also be objected to on the grounds that it is not clear whether God should be regarded as ‘moral’ or whether God's emotions would have to be ‘morally interesting’. As I do not have space to defend these presuppositions here, I refer the reader to Sarot God, Passibility and Corporeality.
33. See Cook ‘Divine impassibility’, 58.
34. Ibid., 62–63.
35. Ibid., 71.
36. Ibid., 74.
37. However, we may note that by the same criteria, and by Cook's own admission, beliefs and attitudes (in short, thoughts) are also beyond our control and passive. As Solomon recognizes, if we want to change our beliefs and attitudes we have to open ourselves to new influences, rethink related beliefs, revisit the evidence, and so on. Presumably Cook nevertheless attributes beliefs and attitudes (correct ones) to God in line with the rest of Christian theism.
38. Solomon True to our Feelings, 191.
39. Cook ‘Divine impassibility’, 74.
40. Ibid., 75.
41. That an emotion is long-term and ongoing does not entail that it is mild – though it is not likely to be felt with equal intensity all the time.
42. B. W. Helm Emotional Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 65 [Helm's emphasis].
43. Cook ‘Divine impassibility’, 75.
44. Ibid., 78.
45. Ibid., 83.
46. Ibid., 84.
47. Moltmann, quoted in Richard Bauckham ‘In defence of The Crucified God’, in N.M de S. Cameron (ed.) The Power and Weakness of God (Edinburgh: Rutherford House Books, 1990), 106.
48. Paul Fiddes The Creative Suffering of God (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), 62.
49. Simone Weil Gateway to God (London, 1974), 87–88.
50. Origen Contra Celsum 2.23, Henry Chadwick (ed. and tr.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1965), 88.
51. See Sarot God, Passibility and Corporeality, 56, 70; David Brown ‘The problem of pain’, in Robert Morgan (ed.) The Religion of the Incarnation (Bristol: Bristol Classical Press, 1989), 55–56.