[Warning: This post ended up approximately 5 times longer than I had intended it to be.]
The other day I was reading once more through The Abolition of Man (as I must do at least every couple of years) and came to one of the key passages, not quite as famous as some of its neighbors but still well-known. Before I do anything with it, I’ll just quote most of it here:
We were told it all long ago by Plato. As the king governs by his executive, so Reason in man must rule the mere appetites by means of the ‘spirited element’. The head rules the belly through the chest—the seat, as Alanus tells us, of Magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments. The Chest—Magnanimity—Sentiment—these are the indispensable liaison officers between cerebral man and visceral man. It may even be said that it is by this middle element that man is man: for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.
Lewis here (and in the surrounding texts) sketches a simple, helpful, classical anthropology. Man is the unique creature of both rational spirit and animal flesh. He has an immaterial mind that can know truth, think about it, and produce conclusions about what to do or to believe. This power, as an imitation of divine wisdom, naturally has a guiding and ruling role over the body, which is caught up in simple natural processes, unable alone to make judgments, decide, or “steer” itself with a purpose beyond what it directly senses. We know what is good or bad, and then our bodily members stand as servants, either to this good or to this bad as directed by our thought and will. Lewis then represents the reasoning mind here as the head, and the body generally, but especially in its most basic animal operations, as the belly.
The attention, of course, lands on neither the head nor the belly but the area in between: the chest. Lewis identifies the chest with the seat of emotions, sentiments, and the like. This is where we have feelings. Feelings, in this account, serve as an intermediary between knowledge and will on the one side and raw flesh on the other. If it is not quite obvious how, I will turn to an illustration.
The Chests within Us
In our minds, we see things as good or bad under various aspects. Take the example of a girl you’ve been trying to win. You perceive the girl, you judge a marriage with her to be a good thing, and you take note of the current state of that good in your life, e.g. “It’s here!” (you’re married now), “It’s not here” (you’re not married), “It will soon be here” (the wedding is tomorrow), “It will never be here” (you’ve blown it big time), or “It may come if I don’t give up” (you’re not marrying her so far, but you envision a bright future).
With each of these judgments in your mind comes a different feeling, to these examples respectively joy, sadness, anticipation, despair, or hope. These feelings in turn wind up our bodies in different ways, and indeed this “wind up” feeds back upon the mind to incline us to different choices. When you have joy, tense muscles ease, eyes light up, the chest may swell, and the smile will creep across the face, as dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin, and/or endorphins work throughout your system to fill you with a generally pleasurable sensation, and these pleasures feed back into the mind to heighten and strengthen the existing perception that “life is good” at this moment, in turn often disposing you to treat people more kindly, to laugh off offenses, or to well-wish even a Scrooge.
By contrast, sadness comes to us in tension and swelling in the throat, pressure in the sinuses or tear ducts, loss of energy, a decrease in those aforementioned hormones, and often a dullness or slowness of every sense or muscle. These feed back into the mind to intensify the sense of the present as bad, in turn often disposing you to withdraw from people, to mull over your sufferings, to step back from ordinary habits and pleasures, and the like.
Building on this, though, feelings are rarely one-off events but form broader habits of mind and body. Lewis refers to “emotions organized by trained habit into stable sentiments,” and this is where the role of the chest grows large indeed in daily life. Our habitual feelings are what grease the wheels of daily behavior and action. What we feel about something one day and then the next comes to determine how we feel about that thing in general, and thus motivates us to act toward it in certain ways.
Take, for example, childhood obedience. As small children are disciplined, their minds begin to perceive that certain actions frequently result in bad experiences, e.g. throwing blocks at your sister often ends in sadness, lots of crying and pain and whatnot, after you are punished. Over time the mind and body together form a habit of seeing the action in connection with the feeling that follows it, so that you end up with a permanent posture of negative feeling about throwing blocks at your sister. In the future, then, this permanent posture―which spans both mind and body―stabilizes a general habit in your behavior: throwing blocks itself feels like a bad thing that you habitually avoid. The first feelings of sadness have solidified into a permanent sentiment that block-throwing is undesirable, so that as soon as you think of it, you feel repelled to some degree.
The Meeting of Head and Belly
As a clarifying note, we often fail to note just how physical our feelings are. When we say we “feel” repelled, we sometimes don’t notice that there are actual nerves and muscles activating in the inconspicuous corners of our bodies. If you try to imaginatively subtract every physical sensation from, say, sadness, including all the ones connected to the “gut” or to hormones or out-of-the-way nerves, besides the more obvious things like tearing up or your energy dropping, you will be hard-pressed to identify anything left besides simply knowing “something bad is happening.”
This deep physicality of emotion is key to Lewis’ picture of the chest. What we know and will (immaterial acts of spirit) produces a certain state in our flesh, and only in taking both sides of this together, the perception and evaluation from spirit and the condition of response in flesh, do we have human emotion.1 An immaterial being can know and will, judge things to be good or bad, but there’s no bodily state to react to this. On the other end, animals can experience feelings of basically the same range that we do, but they do not respond to intellectual judgments and conscious understanding of good and bad, instead only instinctively pursuing what they feel and sense as desirable or not in their immediate experience.
I also want to draw attention to Lewis’ statement that by this “middle element,” i.e. the chest, “man is man.” For Lewis, this unique role of emotion and developed sentiment is what sets humans apart from the angels and the animals. Angels don’t need chests because they don’t have bellies to control, while animals don’t have chests in our sense because their feelings follow directly from physical sensation and not from perceptions and judgments in the mind, i.e. they have no head.
By contrast, man’s whole experience is characterized by this intersection point of spirit and flesh. We hardly think or decide anything without feeling something, even if it’s just a few nerves activating or an awkward turn in the gut or a tightening of the throat or a quickening of the pulse or a crook of the eyebrow or a grin on the lips or a steadiness in the limbs or a slight increase in dopamine triggering a mild euphoria. We rarely, if ever, think of any great values, like patriotism or piety or patience, without some few body parts responding and certain brain regions kicking into gear, engaging the habits of feeling we’ve been trained in. To be human is to be constantly feeling something, however subtle. Human life is a perpetual ebb and flow of feelings, and indeed its most important or significant moments are usually the most emotionally charged. Moreover, these feelings often serve as our autopilot guides, the arrows that direct our actions when we don’t stop to deliberate on them. When we try to imagine life without all this, our imaginations quickly hit their limits.
Beyond the Chest
Having belabored a general account of the chest in man, I want us to turn to God, where we do run into a limit of imagination. If we turn to God, we should be immediately struck with one major difference from our own case: God has no belly.
Given that there is no animal flesh in God, the role Lewis ascribes to emotions becomes radically relativized for Him. If men are set apart from other beings because we have chests that mediate between head and belly, this situation has no analog in God. Our human emotions are defined by the intersection of spirit and flesh, mind and body, but God is pure spirit, pure mind. There is no body to govern, nor members to instrumentalize. God is simply Himself, “a Spirit, infinite, eternal, and unchangeable, in his being, wisdom, power, holiness, justice, goodness, and truth.”2 We have hormones and nerves and muscles that can grow more or less present, in the process determining what we feel and how much, but God has no body or any of its attendant features.
This reality, basic as it might sound, is strong among the original motives for the classical tradition denying passions, or “feelings,” of God, that is, the historic claim of the Church that God is impassible. The God without belly is necessarily a God without chest, not because He fail to value the things that our emotions respond to, but because He is able to make His evaluations matters of pure intelligence and goodwill from a place of perfect freedom, unencumbered by the need to train and guide a hunk of useful meat or respond under the conditions of finite knowledge and experience. God does wisdom and goodness in their most pure forms effortlessly, with perfect knowledge of the beginning, middle, and end of all things. He has no need of help from tangible sensations or stabilized sentiments to carry Him along or keep Him motivated. But this is a psychology far unlike our own, for it is one free of any accompanying physiology.
Imagination Hates a Void
On this point it is crucial to chasten our imaginations. Lewis is right. The “chest” is in large part what makes humans distinctively human, and our whole lives are shot through with the experience of human emotion as our heads and bellies negotiate via the chest. We are not, I suspect, even capable of imagining the life of a head that thrives naturally without a belly, and therefore also without a chest. This limitation tends to mislead us, though, tempting us to confuse privation with negation.
If that sounds opaque, note for a moment the difference between saying “He has no tail” about a dog and about a man. About a man, this statement is not meaningfully bad. It is indeed trivial and rather uninteresting. Men do not need tails, and it is no insult to say one of them doesn’t have one. For a dog, on the other hand, tails belong to their nature and perfection. A dog without a tail has something amiss. There is an aberration there, a failure or malady of some sort. For the dog, “no tail” is a privation, a subtraction from what a dog really ought to be. For the man, “no tail” is a negation, a mere statement of “not,” with no special significance because a man doesn’t need a tail anyway.
It is far too easy, feelings being such a massive and ubiquitous part of the human experience, to slip into thinking of claims about God’s “chestlessness” as a privation, as a subtraction from some model of a healthy psyche. But God doesn’t need a healthy psyche as we know it, one calibrated to life as a being with both head and belly, needing a chest in between. For God, to be without chest is thus most rightly a bare negation, a simple statement that this does not apply to Him, not because He is lacking in any way, but indeed the reverse. God’s perfection is so great that He has nothing to gain from a middleman to assist creatures in a peculiar situation full of potential weaknesses.
The problem with a bare negation of this sort is that imagination hates a void. Imagination, like much of human life, is inextricable from our physical sensing and feeling, basically a power of rearranging sense memories to form new hypothetical sensory scenes. Those who pay a lot of attention to its hyperactivity in, for example, prayer may recognize what I mean. It is difficult to pray, if you are paying attention while doing so, without forming some sensory impression of where your prayer is going.3 Some people have a full-fledged mental image of God, often as an old man or something. Others might be more remote, picturing a void surrounded by cherubic lights, or, conversely, picturing an incomparable brightness. You might think of praying to Christ and vaguely imagine a throne to the right of Something bigger, or, simply enough, picture the old rugged cross. Some imaginations are fairly abstract, just getting a feeling for unlimited “up-ness” beyond the earth toward the heavens or the sensation of God as “lying beyond” (but still viewed somewhat spatially) the whole universe.
Similarly, we cannot really imagine a head truly independent of a chest, and when we try, we usually lapse into imaging a head with a defective or inactive chest. When we apply this to the notion of God without passions, this can lead us to frightening images of sociopathy or casual indifference. All attempted images tend to suggest a God who doesn’t care. Indeed, the term “impassibility” has a history going back to the Greek apatheia, which is, perhaps obviously, the source for our word “apathy.” Yet apathy is a vice, a human dysfunction in which our chests fail to operate as our rational animal natures need them to, often because our mind fails to judge things rightly and value the right things in the right order. The transfer of this picture to the notion of God being impassible is all too easy but utterly erroneous. We fundamentally struggle to grasp what it means that God is not one of us. Knowing that a man without feelings would be a defective man, we are quickly confused when we approach God, in whose image we are made, and try to distinguish how He differs from us as an uncreated spirit. We too easily think only of a man without a chest, something repulsive in every way.
God with Chest After All?
For God, then, the situation is wholly different. God’s will, His valuations, and most of all His love are pure and real and stronger than ours. God cares more than we do, but with effortless tranquility unaltered by time, circumstance, or digestion.4 God also always cares in perspective, with the whole picture in place, most importantly with the cosmic happy ending He has ordained from before the foundation of the world. God is always in control, never at the mercy of nerves, hormones, digestion, or even reaction in general. He always knows what was, what is, and what is to come, having played an active and definitive role in writing the whole story. In short, God is not a man; He is incalculably superior to one.
In this sense, we can make a clarification. Though God has no chest, since He has no belly, He does have all goodness, and for us, the chest is a good thing. So in a certain mode the good that our chests are for us is in fact in God, just not as a chest. In us, it is by the chest that the head rules the belly; the chest, when working rightly, stabilizes our lives so that we can act more easily in accord with right values as we work out the balance of head and belly. For God, who acts directly by His omnipotent power without need of a body, and who has no physical parts to coordinate and control, His perfect being has the same outcome: He acts always and effortlessly according to the right value of things, perfectly and consistently doing what is wise and good. God does care, and does act, and does love, all without the help of developing certain neural pathways and hormonal habits.
And to go further, we have repeated the commonplace that God does not have a body, but of course this is not the whole story. While the divine essence is not itself something embodied, God has in the Person of the Son taken human nature to Himself. In the humanity of God as Jesus of Nazareth, we do find God’s chest, a real chest that is properly His own. As the Son is the perfect image of the Father and does nothing but what He sees the Father doing, the emotions of Jesus are the perfect translation of God’s wisdom and goodness, and especially His love, into the distinctive life of the rational animal. We can perhaps say that God doesn’t have a chest, but if He did, it would be full of the emotions we know and live by, and this hypothetical has come true in the person of Christ. Christ has wept and joyed and longed and raged along with the rest of us, always in the right amount at the right time making the right choices.
This ultimately peculiar revelation of God in the Incarnation is also precisely what we needed as God’s children. As we noted above, imagination hates a void, but in Christ God has supplied that void, replacing the emptiness of thinking about God as “without body, parts, or passions” with the pathos of Jesus. We do not need to imagine divine love in its transcendent chest-free form, for God has given to us the concrete picture of that love in the chested form it takes in the Gospels. For He knows our frame. He remembers that we are dust. Our chests of dust cry out to see a heavenly chest, and God has supplied our need as He always does. For in the end, though we speak of the impassible God, the impassible God is the one who loves His creatures, made us for Himself, and, in the strangest sense, fit Himself for us.
I’ve seen people challenge this before, but close attention to when we do or don’t say that someone is feeling something should clarify it. The “pure mind” side of things, just perceiving or evaluating something as desirable or undesirable under some condition, is not enough for anyone to call it feeling. I can affirm in passing that I was a very awkward teenager who made a number of strange and regrettable choices while I am having a smiling, chuckling, and dopamine-maxxing conversation with my students, and this would not be sufficient to say that I am feeling shame or regret or chagrin, though if I were to stop and dwell on examples perhaps I would begin to. But if I get a feeling in my gut or tension in my nerves that seems to flow with the niggling in the mind about how I wish I had been less weird, then you might say I’m feeling one of these things. On the reverse end, if my allergies are bad so that I have a constricted throat, limited energy, and even pressure on my tear ducts, but I am only thinking about making breakfast, you will not call me “sad.” That said, if my body lingers in this state, it does increase the likelihood that my mind, upon running into something it judges to be bad (e.g. “We’re out of coffee”), will fixate on it, “sync up” with my body, and lead me into a state you would call “sad.” By these and many similar possible examples, I think it is not only defensible but fairly certain that we only in the strict sense call things “emotions” when both the mental side and the bodily side are active.
Westminster Shorter Catechism, q. 4.
Mind you, some people, especially in the Reformed tradition, are very critical of this, though I am not sure most people can completely eliminate it.
The last of these playing a surprisingly large role in our actual emotional lives.
How should we think of God's joy, or, the experience God has of being God (is that identical to Himself), of being good?