Table Of ContentThinking Through Feeling
Continuum Studies in Philosophy of Religion
Series Editor:
Stewart Goetz
Editorial Board:
Thomas Flint, Robert Koons, Alexander Pruss, Charles Taliaferro,
Roger Trigg, David Widerker, Mark Wynn
Titles in the Series
Freedom, Teleology, and Evil
by Stewart Goetz
Image in Mind: Theism, Naturalism, and the Imagination
by Charles Taliaferro and Jil Evans
Actuality, Possibility, and Worlds
by Alexander Robert Pruss
God’s Final Victory: A Comparative Philosophical Case for Universalism
by John Kronen and Eric Reitan
The Rainbow of Experiences, Critical Trust, and God
by Kai-man Kwan
Philosophy and the Christian Worldview: Analysis, Assessment and
Development (forthcoming)
edited by David Werther and Mark D. Linville
The Moral Argument (forthcoming)
by Paul Copan and Mark D. Linville
Goodness, God and Evil (forthcoming)
by David E. Alexander
Well-Being and Theism: Linking Ethics to God (forthcoming)
by William A. Lauinger
Free Will in Philosophical Theology (forthcoming)
by Kevin Timpe
Thinking Through Feeling
God, Emotion and Passibility
Anastasia Philippa Scrutton
Continuum International Publishing Group
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© 2011 Anastasia Philippa Scrutton
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Scrutton, Anastasia Philippa.
Thinking through feeling : God, emotion, and passibility / Anastasia Philippa
Scrutton.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN-13: 978-1-4411-6275-5 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 1-4411-6275-5 (hardcover : alk. paper) 1. Emotions (Philosophy)
2. Emotions—Religious aspects—Christianity. I. Title.
B105.E46S37 2011
128’.37–dc23
2011032814
EISBN: 978-1-4411-8414-6
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India
Printed in the United States of America
The principle of apathy, according to which the wise man must never suc-
cumb to emotion, not even to that of sympathy for the evils that befall his
best friend, is a correct and sublime moral principle of the Stoic school, for
emotion makes a person (more or less) blind.
Immanuel Kant, Anthropologie
I want to know whether anyone of us would consent to live, having
wisdom and mind and knowledge and memory of all things but having no
sense of pleasure and pain and wholly unaffected by these and like feelings.
Plato, Philebus
Contents
Acknowledgements ix
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on
Emotion and Impassibility 12
Chapter 2 Passiones and Affectiones in Augustine and
Aquinas 34
Summary of Chapters One and Two 53
Chapter 3 Emotion, Intelligence and Divine Omniscience 55
Chapter 4 Compassion 75
Chapter 5 Anger 102
Chapter 6 Jealousy 122
Overview of Chapters 3 to 6 139
Chapter 7 Emotion, Will and Divine Omnipotence 140
Chapter 8 Emotion, the Body and Divine Incorporeality 165
Conclusion 188
Notes 190
Bibliography 217
Index 225
Acknowledgements
Writing this book would have been impossible without the help and support
of many people. My thanks go particularly to my Ph.D. supervisor Colin
Crowder for all his encouragement and wise and perceptive comments on
my thesis, and for being an exemplary friend throughout. Thanks also go
to Mark Wynn and Stephen Holmes, who examined my thesis, for their
very helpful suggestions on how best to turn it into a book, and to Marcel
Sarot for graciously sharing his wisdom, knowledge and insight about pas-
sibilism and emotion in numerous valuable conversations at conferences over
the years. Thanks to those who read and commented on various drafts of
chapters, particularly Stephen Cherry, Beatrice Meager, Graham Harvey,
Theodora Hawksley and Theodore Harman. Thanks to friends who very
helpfully became linguists; namely Stuart Weeks, for help with Hebrew
transliterations, and Samantha Newington, for helping me with my Greek.
I am indebted to the Department of Theology and Religion at Durham
University, and particularly to Andrew Louth, for introducing me to the
complexity of different concepts of emotion in the early church. I am grate-
ful to the brothers of Alnmouth Friary, whose hospitality provided me with
the opportunity to read and to refl ect. My thanks also go to the AHRC, who
funded this project from 2005 - to 2006.
I am also grateful to friends who have helped to shape the ideas and inter-
ests inherent in this book, or who have offered me personal support and
encouragement in writing it. It would be impossible to provide an exhaustive
list but a few can be mentioned here. My thanks go to Peter Brown for helping
me to think theologically and religiously about emotions, and to Jonathan
Lawson, for so frequently pushing the boundaries of the way I think, and
particularly for conversations on the relationship between forgiveness and
compassion. Thanks also to Mathew Guest, for his patient support, guid-
ance, and advice on writing books. I am also grateful to my grandmother,
Henrietta Hick, for fostering a love of reading and encouraging me to think
for myself from an early age, and proud to be able to follow her book-writing
footsteps. Thanks also to my mother and stepfather, Margaret and Sebastian
Yorke, for their support and encouragement over the years.
Most of all, my thanks go to Stuart Foyle, for his patience and love, and
for teaching me so much about the value and intelligence of emotions over
the years, to whom this book is dedicated.
Description:Contemporary debates on God's emotionality are divided between two extremes. Impassibilists deny God's emotionality on the basis of God's omniscience, omnipotence and incorporeality. Passibilists seem to break with tradition by affirming divine emotionality, often focusing on the idea that God suffe
