“Common sense tells us that emotion and everything that leads the heart captive proves a hindrance instead of a help to the discovery of truth.”
I groaned as my attention was called to this passage from Pascendi, the famous encyclical of Pope St. Pius X. I mentally yelled out, “The emotions were created by God! They’re good! This is basic Catholic philosophy. Jesus had emotions. They are part of what makes man man, and isn’t, as St. Irenaeus said, the glory of God man being fully alive?”
But here was not just a pope, but a saint seemingly confirming anti-Catholic stereotypes about how the Church stifles emotion.
Fortunately, it did not end there. A frustrated email to a friend who is a priest (and not a at all a shabby thinker!) resulted in a dialogue that ultimately vindicated Pius X.
As it turns out, in this case, to render the Latin word perturbatio as “emotion” is a mistranslation! Although Latin writers before Christ had used perturbatio with this meaning, such as Cicero, who himself mistrusted emotion, Catholic writers such as St. Thomas Aquinas clearly distinguished it from emotion, or passio. Perturbatio is a diseased emotion and therefore unhealthy, whereas Aquinas agrees with St. Augustine about passio: “Emotions are right in those whose love is rightly placed” (Ia.IIae, Q.24, a2, Sed contra).
The mistranslation is still a mystery. It shows up in all the translations I found online, from the Vatican’s translation to the Society of Pius X’s translation. It is a stunning situation, that both those who dismiss Pascendi and those who defend it rely on a document that gives a false impression: that Pius X, along with Catholic tradition, denies the goodness of the emotions!
The situation is doubly strange because Catholicism, and religious belief in general, is often characterized as being based too much on emotion. There are the studies that purport to prove this, with the backhanded compliment that although religious believers overall are stupider than atheists, they’re nicer people. There is also this fun commercial that uses emotional images and pretty girls to convince viewers that truly logical people reject God. Sometimes practicing Catholics fall into the trap of relying too much on their emotions.
The situation is very much like the one summed up by the great apologist and champion of both reason and emotion, G.K. Chesterton: “On practically every single point on which the Reformation accused the Church, the modern world has not only acquitted the Church of the crime, but has actually charged it with the opposite crime” (The Catholic Church and Conversion, 19). In a similar way, the world seems to take turns accusing the Church of being excessively reliant on the emotions and bashing it for repressing them.
There are many important explicators of this Catholic tradition who have fought to clear up the latter misapprehension. One of these is the psychologist Conrad Baars. Against both lazy mischaracterizations from outside and undue suspicion of the material world within the Church, Baars argued for Catholics to embrace the emotions of our God-given nature. They are fallen, like our reason and senses, but still part of God’s plan: man being fully alive.
One of Baars’s insights is to go to the origin of the word emotion: the Latin word motus, having to do with moving or being moved. Emotions are motors, our bodily reactions to good and evil, and as such, they are necessary for our survival, helping us avoid or overcome evil and attain or enjoy the good. This teaching is in accord with St. Thomas, who not only points out that the emotions are not evil, but even maintains that the emotions are necessary for the perfection of a good work (Ia.IIae, Q.24, a3, Sed contra)!
Nevertheless, there is one big proviso here: the emotions are not meant to work by themselves. Rather, they must follow reason’s directions. For one thing, they are motors. Reason, in a sense, holds the key to the ignition. As Baars conceptualizes the relationship, it is a matter of not domination by reason, but direction.
A particular hard-hitting example from Baars of how this should work is appropriate here. He considers a married man being attracted by a beautiful woman who is not his wife. Reason states that the attraction is natural, toward an object that, having been created by God, is good. Next, reason allied with faith points out that gratification of this desire is wrong because it violates a greater good. The suitable refusal of sin here lies not in condemning the attraction, but in subjecting it the greater good.
Because of the Fall, our emotions are unruly in this way, that they recognize good, but not always the hierarchical ordering of goods. This is precisely what Pius X was addressing in Pascendi, since people in his time, as in our own, denied that reason could access religious truth and were instead proposing the emotions as our guide in religious matters. But Pius X, just like Thomas Aquinas and Conrad Baars, recognized that to remove reason from its role in guiding the emotions is like getting rid of a respected and trusted counselor. Motors aren’t built to make decisions on their own, whatever claims people might make regarding AI. Emotions aren’t, either. Nevertheless, if they are cultivated rightly, emotions can become friends who greatly help us in attaining the good we see with our reason.
To finish with a beautiful example from Baars, he compares a human being’s virtuous emotional life to a girl becoming a good horse-rider. As a child, she is not really able to ride, and she has to learn to treat her horse with respect. As she gets older, however, she begins to practice riding, falling off less and less, learning more and more to guide the horse with love and care. Finally, she and the horse become one being, which can move farther, faster, and more intelligently than either of them alone. This is the kind of relationship with our emotions that the moral teaching of the Church asks us to develop, and that the intellectual tradition of the Church holds forth as the paragon.