Overcome with emotion?

In October 2004, my mother-in-law died of breast cancer at the age of 62, not much more than a year after being diagnosed. Being the only member of the family experienced at public speaking – and indeed, at running funerals - I was quite willing to take on the duties of giving the eulogy at the funeral service when I was asked to by my father-in-law. In addition, since I was Jackie’s son-in-law and not directly related to her, I could be expected and indeed expected myself to maintain my composure in the delivery of the task in a suitably controlled tone, allowing the mourners to grieve in quiet privacy.

The tears, then, took me quite by surprise. I was not far into retelling Jackie’s life story – from her childhood in London to her arrival in Australia in the 1960s and her conversion to faith in Christ. At some point in this narrative, I was quite overcome by the occasion. My voice quavered; I could feel myself flushing red; and my face contorted itself. I could barely continue to read, because I couldn’t see the page in front of me. What words I could get out were squeezed out through my throat, and I found myself gasping for breath in between watery sobs. Afterwards my six year old son said to me ‘your face was all screwed up, Dad’.

I retell this story not because I am hoping to elicit sympathy but rather because of its ordinariness as an episode of the human emotions at work. The strong emotion seemed to come to me in a way that I couldn’t predict. It was as if there were a force outside of me working on me and causing me to lose self-control of my body in a way that was understandable but still within Anglo-Saxon culture somewhat shameful, especially for men. I am not normally conscious of doing things with my body that I don’t directly will. Yet in this moment, normal operations seemed to be suspended and the emotion took control of me.

It is an ordinary episode, but no less complicated for being so. It illustrates how troublesome emotions are in thinking cohesively about human being. This difficulty pans out in three overlapping ways, to do with agency, the body and reason.

The first difficulty is best explained by asking: in what sense was I an agent of my own sobs? Can I really speak in this way, of an emotion controlling me, since the emotion could not be anyone else’s? The sobs certainly emanated from my mouth and in my voice. They happened to and in my body. But I was not intending or willing to sob; in fact, I was willing the opposite. Yet I sobbed, and not some demon that had entered me, or some ventriloquist pretending to be me.
Second, at the moment of intense emotion, the human being seems to become almost alienated from his own body. Because these emotions are exhibited in such an obviously visceral fashion and yet carry with them unwanted consequences such as the stigma of cultural shame, the human subject may feel that ‘I’ am other from my physical body. There must be then a purer, non-physical form of ‘me’ – to which perhaps I can ascend once I am free of the untrustworthiness of my flesh. Even a more honourably perceived emotion like the feeling of loss shares enough in common with the more base desires of our bodies – feelings like hunger, sexual desire, need for sleep – that in experiencing it we still frequently experience this otherness from our bodies. Indeed, if I am to speak of some ‘higher’ set of emotions, where do I ‘feel’ them if not in my body?

Third, my perception of myself as a primarily rational creature is disturbed by the experience of strong emotion. But this is because of a hidden assumption that ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’ are discrete centres of my person, with reason the more nearly ‘spiritual’ or more distinctly human of the two. Yet my strong emotion was in fact tied to rational propositions about the occasion. I did not feel at all the same way about the funeral, at which I had ministered, for a woman in her early forties who had committed suicide even though the circumstances were arguably more tragic. I knew Jacky as my friend and mother-in-law, and as my wife’s mother and the granny of my own children. I could calculate what her loss would mean for us. In fact, the more I thought about it, the more I felt about it.

These difficulties are enough to engender a philosophical, psychological and anthropological discussion of the emotions, such as philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum provides in her masterful work Upheavals of Thought – The Intelligence of the Emotions. The task of a theological anthropology, however, is to begin analysing questions like this in the light of a particular context, namely God. For a Christian anthropology, that context is framed by the themes of the creation of man and woman in the image of God on the one hand and the presence of sin in human life on the other. These two themes are set in tension with one another not just in the Biblical story, but in the existence of every human person. To what degree is this or that feature of my humanity reflect my likeness as a creature made in the divine image to the creator? Or is it in some way a result of that disorder of personhood that stems from my participation in human fallen-ness? But Christian anthropology will also speak of a destiny for human beings. The two themes of theological anthropology have their resolution however in the person and work of Jesus Christ. Theological anthropology, like all properly Christian theology, must speak an evangelical word, in which the image of God humankind is redeemed and perfected. It has, in the resurrection of Jesus from the dead, a pattern to which human creatures will one day be conformed (Rom 8:29).

Returning to my troublesome emotions, then: was this event God’s will for creatureliness in me? If God has no ‘body, parts or passions’, and yet my emotions are an irreducibly physical component of me, ought I in seeking to be more like him look to some future beyond or without my body? Or must I think of myself dualistically, as most of the Christian tradition has done, having a distinct ‘soul’ for the purer emotions like joy and hope as well as a body for my appetites like hunger and thirst? Has ‘reason’, or the ‘rational soul’ a more exalted seat in me? What would an account of the human emotions look like in the light of the resurrection of the dead? In what sense can the three problematic aspects of human emotion – to do with agency, body and reason – be addressed from a theological perspective?