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No Orthopathy without Orthoaesthesis: On the Necessity of Negative Effort
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 May 2024
Abstract
Theologians have become increasingly attentive to the role emotion and experience must play in theological reflection. Several thinkers have recently done so by appropriating and developing Jon Sobrino’s understanding of orthopathy, or “right affect.” A close examination of these efforts, however, reveals inconsistencies in the way the category is understood and deployed. This article redresses these inconsistencies by complementing orthopathy with orthoaesthesis, or “right perception.” The article opens by considering various appeals to orthopathy before suggesting how William James’s theory of emotion might provide the category with clarifying content. The second stage engages Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch as practitioners of orthoaesthesis. Special attention is given to Murdoch’s “techniques” aimed at transforming how practitioners perceive reality. With Murdoch’s guidance, the article contends that orthopathy is ineluctably bound to and not possible without orthoaesthesis. The article concludes with a constructive proposal to show how orthoaesthesis-orthopathy contributes to a Christian theological anthropology.
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- © The Author(s), 2024. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of the President and Fellows of Harvard College
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1 Theologians trail philosophers in addressing this topic, but its literature grows. Classic treatments include Thomas Aquinas on the “passions” in Summa Theologiae 1a, 2ae; Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (ed. Catherine Kelsey and Terrence Tice; Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2016); Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections (ed. John Smith; The Works of Jonathan Edwards 2; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1959); Rudolf Otto, The Idea of the Holy (trans. John Harvey; New York: Oxford University Press, 1958); Edith Stein, On the Problem of Empathy (trans. Waltraut Stein; Washington, DC: ICS Publications, 1989); Martha Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989); Peter Goldie, The Emotions: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). More theological engagements are found in Simeon Zahl, “On the Affective Salience of Doctrines,” Modern Theology 31 (2015) 428–44; Ole Riis and Linda Woodhead, A Sociology of Religious Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Gregory S. Clapper, John Wesley on Religious Affections: His Views on Experience and Emotion and Their Role in the Christian Life and Theology (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1989); Diana Fritz Cates, Aquinas on the Emotions (Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2009); Nicholas Lombardo, The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2011).
2 Steven Land, Pentecostal Spirituality: A Passion for the Kingdom (New York: Sheffield Academic, 1994) 43.
3 Runyon’s Catholic counterpart is George P. Schner, “The Appeal to Experience,” TS 53 (1992) 40–59.
4 Theodore Runyon, Exploring the Range of Theology (Eugene, OR: Wipf & Stock, 2012) 142. In a note in The New Creation (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1998), Runyon recounts coining the term “orthopathy” in 1984 at an Emory University Ministers’ Week in an address titled “Conversion—Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow,” later published as “A New Look at ‘Experience,’ ” Drew Gateway 51.3 (1987) 44–55.
5 Runyon, Exploring, 141 (italics in original).
6 Ibid., 146–55. Runyon develops them also in The New Creation, 146–67.
7 Runyon, Exploring, 155.
8 Examples of thinkers influenced by Runyon can be found in Hal Knight, “John Wesley and the Emerging Church,” Preacher’s Magazine, Lent/Easter 2010, https://web.archive.org/web/20110131223242/http://www.nph.com/nphweb/html/pmol/use.htm; Noel B. Woodbridge, “Living Theologically—Towards a Theology of Christian Practice in Terms of the Theological Triad of Orthodoxy, Orthopraxy and Orthopathy as Portrayed in Isaiah 6:1–8: A Narrative Approach,” HvTSt 66.2 (2010) 1–6.
9 Jon Sobrino, Christ the Liberator (trans. Paul Burns; New York: Orbis Books, 2001).
10 Ibid., 210.
11 Ibid., 212.
12 Ibid., 210.
13 Ibid., 214.
14 Jon Sobrino, “Orthodoxy When the Christ Is Jesus,” Concilium (2014.2) 92–101, at 98.
15 Annie Selak, “Orthodoxy, Orthopraxis, and Orthopathy: Evaluating the Feminist Kenosis Debate,” Modern Theology 33 (2017) 529–48.
16 Ibid., 530.
17 Ibid., 541.
18 D. Glenn Butner, Jr., “Orthodoxy, Orthopraxis, and Orthopathy: Trajectories for Collaborative Scholarship between Economists and Theologians,” Faith and Economics 67 (2016) 85–104, at 88.
19 Ibid., 88–89.
20 Ibid., 94.
21 Edward Vacek, “Orthodoxy Requires Orthopathy: Emotions in Theology,” Horizons: The Journal of the College Theology Society 40 (2013) 218–41.
22 Ibid., 219.
23 Ibid., 220.
24 Ibid., 221.
25 Ibid., 223.
26 John Kaag addresses the relationship between James’s theory of emotional states and mirror neurons in “Getting Under My Skin: William James on the Emotions, Sociality, and Transcendence,” Zygon: Journal of Religion & Science 44 (2009) 433–50. James’s contribution to the emerging field of neurophenomenology and the attention James continues to receive from neuroscientists is discussed in Eugene Taylor, “William James and the Humanistic Implications of the Neuroscience Revolution: An Outrageous Hypothesis,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology 50 (2010) 410–29. Bernard J. Baars describes how current studies in contemporary neuroscience are returning to traditional insights such as James’s in “How Brain Reveals Mind: Neural Studies Support the Fundamental Role of Conscious Experience,” Journal of Consciousness Studies 10.9-10 (2003) 100–114.
27 William James, “What Is an Emotion?,” Mind 9.34 (April 1884) 188–205, at 189–90 (italics in original).
28 Phoebe Ellsworth, “William James and Emotion: Is a Century of Fame Worth a Century of Misunderstanding?,” Psychological Review 10 (1994) 222–29, at 223 (italics in original). Ellsworth’s interpretation of James has not gone unchallenged. For a critical response, see Rainer Reisenzein, Wulf-Uwe Meyer, and Achim Schützwhol, “James and the Physical Basis of Emotion: A Comment on Ellsworth,” Psychological Review 102 (1995) 757–61.
29 James, “What Is an Emotion?,” 190.
30 Ibid., 194.
31 Ellsworth, “William James and Emotion,” 223.
32 C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: Harper One, 1994) 3.
33 W. L. Worcester, “Observations on Some Points in James’s Psychology. II. Emotion,” The Monist 3.2 (1893) 285–98, at 287.
34 William James, “The Physical Basis of Emotion,” Psychology Review 1 (1894) 516–29.
35 Ellsworth, “William James and Emotion,” 224 (italics in original).
36 James, “Physical Basis,” 518 (italics added).
37 Lisa Feldman Barrett, How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2017) 30 (italics in original).
38 John Dewey, “The Theory of Emotion I: Emotional Attitudes,” Psychological Review 1.6 (1894) 553–69.
39 Barrett, How Emotions Are Made, 161. Barrett offers a critique of neuroscientist Antonio Damasio for hewing too closely to Dewey’s James-Lange theory and failing to realize James’s unique approach. I forgo a discussion of the vast secondary literature because it exceeds the scope of the article. My goal here is to provide an account of the emotions that could be serviceable for an understanding of orthopathy. It is not the only account, and it may not be the best. Given the pioneering work of Lisa Feldman Barrett and her recognition of how James’s theory has often been misrepresented, I opt for giving James a chance to contribute to our understanding of the emotions.
40 James, “What Is an Emotion?,” 191.
41 Barrett, How Emotions Are Made, 141.
42 James, “Physical Basis,” 520.
43 Simone Weil, “Essay on the Notion of Reading” (trans. Chris Fleming), The Journal of Continental Philosophy 1 (2020) 9–15, at 12 (italics added).
44 John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (ed. Roger Woolhouse; New York: Penguin Classics, 1998) bk. 2, ch. 1, par. 23.
45 Thomas Aquinas, Questiones Disputatae de Veritate (trans. Robert Mulligan; Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952) q. 2, art. 3, 19.
46 Lisa Feldman Barrett supports James’s theory in “Emotions Are Real,” Emotion 12 (2012) 413–29.
47 James, “Physical Basis,” 520.
48 On Barrett and Gendron’s “theory of constructed emotion,” see Maria Gendron and Lisa Feldman Barrett, “Emotion Perception as Conceptual Synchrony,” Emotion Review 10 (2018) 101–10.
49 Edmund Husserl, Ideas Pertaining to a Pure Phenomenology and to a Phenomenological Psychology, Second Book (trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer; Boston: Kluwer Academic, 1989) 70–80. I develop this in Ryan Duns, Spiritual Exercises for a Secular Age: Desmond’s Quest for God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2020).
50 Husserl, Ideas II, 61 (italics in original).
51 Drew Leder, The Absent Body (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) 26–27.
52 Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin Books, 1992) 315.
53 Ibid., 175.
54 Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature (New York: Penguin Books, 1997) 342.
55 Ibid., 293.
56 Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good” and “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited,” in Existentialists, 205–20 and 261–86.
57 Murdoch, Existentialists, 216.
58 Margaret Holland, “Obstacles to Moral Freedom,” in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (ed. Justin Broackes; New York: Oxford University Press, 2014) 259.
59 Murdoch, Existentialists, 341.
60 Ibid., 417.
61 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 10.
62 Ibid., 321–22.
63 Murdoch, Existentialists, 215.
64 Ibid., 375 (italics in original).
65 Ibid., 321.
66 Ibid., 357.
67 Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Murdoch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000) 115–23. Murdoch challenges the fact-value distinction in “Vision and Choice in Morality,” in Murdoch, Existentialists, 76–98.
68 Simone Weil, Waiting for God (trans. Emma Crawford; New York: First Perennial Classics, 2001) 57–65.
69 Ibid., 62.
70 Ibid.
71 Ibid., 61.
72 Ibid., 100.
73 Murdoch, Existentialists, 327.
74 The idea of “unselfing” has met criticism, especially due to the way Weil’s “decreation” influences Murdoch. Nora Hamalaien responds to Sabina Lovibond’s concerns in her essay “Reduce Ourselves to Zero? Sabina Lovibond, Iris Murdoch, and Feminism,” Hypatia 30 (Fall) 743–59. Eric Springsted, in Simone Weil for the Twenty-First Century (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2021) 66–67, develops the connection between apophatic theology and decreation.
75 Maria Antonaccio, A Philosophy to Live By: Engaging Iris Murdoch (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012) 168.
76 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 17.
77 Ibid., 475.
78 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace (trans. Emma Crawford and Mario van der Ruhr; New York: Routledge, 2002) 145.
79 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 38.
80 Justin Broackes, introduction to Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (ed. Broackes), 59. Murdoch (Metaphysics, 475) writes, “Plato’s view of the good and virtue are not to be understood in any supernatural sense.”
81 Antonaccio, Picturing, 127.
82 Murdoch, Existentialists, 369. This example has theological precedent in Weil, Waiting, 125.
83 Mark Freeman, “Beholding and Being Beheld: Simone Weil, Iris Murdoch, and the Ethics of Attention,” The Humanistic Psychologist 43 (2015) 160–72, at 167.
84 Murdoch, Existentialists, 369.
85 Ibid., 373.
86 Ibid., 331.
87 Ibid., 329.
88 Bridget Clarke, “Iris Murdoch and the Prospects for Critical Moral Realism,” in Iris Murdoch, Philosopher (ed. Broackes), 251.
89 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 215.
90 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 463.
91 Johann Baptist Metz, A Passion for God: The Mystical-Political Dimensions of Christianity (trans. J. Matthew Ashley; New York: Paulist, 1989) 163.
92 Weil, Waiting, 64.
93 William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2004) 240.