Abstract
Should we value emotions or treat them with caution? Humanity has wrestled with this question since the time of antiquity, and the ambivalent answers that emerged continued in the early modern world. On the one hand, most conventional treatments affirmed that the passions performed an essential function in motivating behaviours that were necessary to human survival and flourishing. On the other hand, there was an alertness to the dangers they posed, that to grant the passions a free hand could enslave or corrupt the soul and thereby undermine well-being and morality.2 Central to these discussions was the place of reason in moderating the passions and promoting virtue. The Stoics held that the good life was a state of ataraxia, or tranquillity, attained when all passion was overcome by reason. For the Aristotelians, the passions contributed to virtue, but required the direction of reason to restrain them and ensure they responded appropriately to their objects. Then there was the perspective of the Platonists, who believed that some emotional responses should be intense while others should not be felt at all.3 Philosophical enquiry in the early modern period drew upon this classical heritage, but made various modifications in the light of ongoing intellectual developments.4
I would like to thank to my colleague, Andrew Leslie, and my son, Michael, for reading an earlier draft of this chapter.
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Notes
S. James, ‘The Passions in Metaphysics and the Theory of Action’ in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998), I, 913–14.
S. James, ‘Reason, the Passions, and the Good Life’ in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998), II, 1360, 1373–4.
See the two articles by Susan James already noted. See also R. Strier, ‘Against the Rule of Reason: Praise of Passion from Petrarch to Luther to Shakespeare to Herbert’ in G.K. Paster, K. Rowe and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds), Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 23–42.
Augustine, The City of God, trans. Marcus Dods (New York: Modern Library, 2000), Book 14, sects 6–7, 447–9. See James, ‘Passions in Metaphysics’, 920; Elena Carrera, ‘The Emotions in Sixteenth-Century Spanish Spirituality’, Journal of Religious History, XXXI (2007): 237.
For this contrast between Scotus and Aquinas, see R. Muller, ‘Fides and Cognitio in Relation to the Problem of Intellect and Will in the Theology of John Calvin’ in The Unaccommodated Calvin: Studies in the Foundation of a Theological Tradition (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 162, 171.
R. Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, Volume One: Prolegomena to Theology, 2nd edn (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2003), 354.
For a recent overview, see J. Coffey and P.C.H. Lim, ‘Introduction’ in J. Coffey and P.C.H. Lim (eds), The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism (Cambridge University Press, 2008).
Note, for example, the claim of M. Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. T. Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1930), 105: ‘the entirely negative attitude of Puritanism to all the sensuous and emotional elements in culture and in religion, because they are of no use toward salvation and promote sentimental illusions and idolatrous superstitions’. Other scholars who hold similar views are noted by
N.H. Keeble, Richard Baxter: Puritan Man of Letters (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), 104–5.
The expression was used by the pamphleteer P. Wilburn, A Checke or Reproofe of M. Howlet’s Untimely Schreeching, (1581) quoted in P. Collinson, The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (London: Jonathan Cape, 1967), 27.
A. Ryrie, Being Protestant in Reformation Britain (Oxford University Press, 2013), 3; Coffey and Lim, ‘Introduction’, 3.
J. Spurr, English Puritanism 1603–1689 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 5 (emphasis added).
For biographical details, see N.H. Keeble, ‘Baxter, Richard (1615–1691)’ in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford University Press, 2004).
S. Nye, The Explication of the Articles of the Divine Unity, the Trinity, and Incarnation, commonly receiv’d in the Catholick Church, Asserted and Vindicated (London: John Darby, 1703), 86; quoted from D.S. Sytsma, ‘Richard Baxter’s Philosophical Polemics: A Puritan’s Response to Mechanical Philosophy’ (PhD thesis, Princeton University, 2013), 17.
D.S. Sytsma, ‘The Logic of the Heart: Analyzing the Affections in Early Modern Orthodoxy’ in J.J. Ballor, D.S. Sytsma and J. Zuidema (eds), Church and School in Early Modern Protestantism: Studies in Honor of Richard A. Muller on the Maturation of a Theological Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 471–88 identifies the following works: J. Weemes, The Portraiture of the Image of God in Man (1627); T. Cooper, The Mysterie of the Holy Government of our Affections (1620?); W. Fenner, A Treatise of the Affections; Or the Soules Pulse (1641); J. Ball, The Power of Godlines (1657); and E. Reynolds, A Treatise of the Passions and Faculties of the Soul of Man (1640).
P. Miller, The New England Mind: The Seventeenth Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, Harvard, 1939), 242–3. Note also Isabel Rivers’ warning concerning the reading of early modern religious texts: ‘the reader needs to be aware of what is taken for granted, the unstated moral and theological assumptions to which the preacher appeals’.
I. Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment: A Study of the Language of Religion and Ethics in England, 1660–1780, Vol. I: Whichcote to Wesley (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 7–8.
For key discussions of Baxter’s doctrine of justification, see H. Boersma, A Hot Pepper Corn: Richard Baxter’s Doctrine of Justification in its Seventeenth-Century Context of Controversy (Zoetermeer: Uitgeverij Boekencentrum, 1993); Packer, Redemption, Chapter 10;
J.V. Fesko, Beyond Calvin: Union with Christ and Justification in Early Modern Reformed Theology (1517–1700) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2012), Chapter 16;
J.J. Ballor, ‘The Shape of Reformed Orthodoxy in the Seventeenth Century: The Soteriological Debate between George Kendall and Richard Baxter’ in J.J. Ballor, D.S. Sytsma and J. Zuidema (eds), Church and School in Early Modern Protestantism: Studies in Honor of Richard A. Muller on the Maturation of a Theological Tradition (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 665–78.
D.D. Hall (ed.), The Antinomian Controversy 1636–1638: A Documentary History, 2nd edn (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990), 219.
T. Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge University Press, 2003). See also
D. Thorley, ‘Towards a History of Emotion, 1562–1660’, The Seventeenth Century, 28(1) (2014): 3–19, who argues that the meaning of the word ‘emotion’ was in flux during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and, while ‘it has certainly not ... acquired the amorality and autonomy that Dixon found in its later use’, emotions did begin to be distanced ‘from the physical’ and become more associated with ‘the mental realm’ (4, 15).
J. Edwards, Religious Affections, J.E. Smith (ed.), The Works of Jonathan Edwards Vo l . 2 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959 [1746]), 96, 98.
See T.D. Bozeman, The Precisianist Strain: Disciplinary Religion & Antinomian Backlash in Puritanism to 1638 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); and
D.R. Como, Blown by the Spirit: Puritanism and the Emergence of an Antinomian Underground in Pre-Civil-War England (Stanford University Press, 2004).
See G.F. Nuttall, The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience (University of Chicago Press, 1992 [1947]).
Rivers, Reason, Grace and Sentiment, 87–8; R. Popkin, ‘The Religious Background of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy’ in D. Garber and M. Ayers (eds), The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 1998), I, 400–01.
D.D. Wallace, Jr., Shapers of English Calvinism, 1660–1714: Variety, Persistence, and Transformation (Oxford University Press, 2011), 174–5.
C.R. Trueman, ‘A Small Step Towards Rationalism: The Impact of the Metaphysics of Tommaso Campanella on the Theology of Richard Baxter’ in C.R. Trueman and R. Scott Clark (eds), Protestant Scholasticism: Essays in Reassessment (Carlisle: Paternoster, 1999), 181–95.
Baxter, Reasons of the Christian Religion, Part II, Chapter 10 (PW3, 137). See the careful argumentation on this point in Sytsma, ‘Philosophical Polemics’, 149–51. Note also W. Lamont, Puritanism and Historical Controversy (University College London Press, 1996), Chapter 9, especially 165–8.
On the Puritan perspective on reason, see J. Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes Towards Reason, Learning, and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge University Press, 1986), Chapter 3. For the Reformed perspective, see Muller, Post-Reformation Reformed Dogmatics, 398–405.
For a thorough analysis of the particularities of Baxter’s approach to the pastoral task, see J.W. Black, Reformation Pastors: Richard Baxter and the Ideal of the Reformed Pastor (Carlisle: Paternoster, 2004).
See K. Condie, ‘The Theory, Practice, and Reception of Meditation in the Thought of Richard Baxter’ (PhD thesis, University of Sydney, 2010). For discussion of the relationship between emotions and spiritual health in Baxter’s pastoral practice, see A. Searle, ‘“My Souls Anatomiste”: Richard Baxter, Katherine Gell and Letters of the Heart’, Early Modern Literary Studies, 12(2) (2006); and Condie, ‘Meditation’, Chapter 5. For discussions on the demands and disciplines of the Puritan conception of the Christian life, see Bozeman, Precisianist Strain; and Como, Blown by the Spirit.
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Condie, K. (2016). ‘Light Accompanied with Vital Heat’: Affection and Intellect in the Thought of Richard Baxter. In: Ryrie, A., Schwanda, T. (eds) Puritanism and Emotion in the Early Modern World. Christianities in the Trans-Atlantic World, 1500–1800. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137490988_2
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