Question:
Answer:
God is the cause of the human nature, which has emotions that always and necessarily flow from our knowledge, which for us is dependent on the senses. Emotions are the impulses that flow from knowledge in a bodily nature. Without a body, there are no emotions in the strict sense, since emotions are bodily reactions toward or away from the things we sense as good or bad. Thus, neither God nor angels (who are pure spirits), nor the human soul separated from the body in death, properly have emotions.
What non-bodily beings do have, however, is an appetite for what is good and an aversion to what is evil. So, in order to speak of how God and the angels “feel” about good and evil, we necessarily use the language of the emotions.
We must remember, however, that the attitude of spiritual beings is more intense about good and evil than our emotions are. When we say that God and the angels do not have feelings, what we really mean is that their nature gives them an even more intense experience of good and evil than the one we have in our bodies. So God is not “unfeeling” because he has no emotions; rather, he loves the good and hates evil with an infinitely greater intensity than we do.
When Sacred Scripture speaks of God being angry or sad or rejoicing, what it means is that we experience God’s actions as though they were the actions of one who has emotions as we do. But in a true sense, we could say that our anger or sorrow or joy are weak in comparison to his love of justice and the good and his hatred of evil.