Passions,Affections,or Emotions? On the Ambiguity of 16th-Century Terminology

The History of Emotions and Emotion Terms

A brief preliminary note may be in order on the scholarly context of the history of emotions. If there is a substantive difference between the contemporary scientific psychology of emotions (or the affective sciences, as the field is sometimes called) and the history of emotions, it is that practitioners of the former are attempting to discern what emotions actually are, while historians of emotion generally eschew this sort of ambition in favor of trying to understand what emotions were to a group of people or to a single thinker in the past. This is because, whether or not there is a discernible universal biological component to affective experience, historians operate on the assumption that conceptions of emotion and often, at least to some extent, emotions themselves—whether general affective categories or specific emotions like anger—are highly dependent upon cultural circumstance and change over time. At the very least, their cultural significance if not their biological register is always undergoing modification and reinterpretation and, as Anna Wierzbicka noted as late as 2010, “the importance of such a perspective is still often grossly underestimated” (2010, p. 269). And even if many historians of emotion have not adopted Wierzbicka’s “Natural Semantic Metalanguage,” most would agree that “habitual construals [here, descriptions of emotion], embedded in a society’s ways of speaking, change in time (in response to other historical and cultural changes), and as a result habitual feelings change too, together with shared ways of thinking and feeling” (2010, p. 272). Thus, to avoid anachronism to the best of our ability, historians of emotion generally tend to work from the ground up, as it were, poring over texts or works of art in order to discern emotional discourses or expressions that are beholden to any number of contingent social, cultural, philosophical, political, and religious circumstances depending on the time and provenance of the texts or artefacts under consideration. ³

This does not mean that researchers who work on the history of emotions do so with anything like a monolithic methodology or even a common set of presuppositions about what the enterprise should look like. Indeed, despite the relative youth of the subfield, there have already been histories of the history of emotions written (see e.g., Plamper, 2015), indicating that this field, like so many others, is itself beholden to shifts over time and across intellectual milieux. And this is fine: because emotions were expressed in the past in a variety of ways, the history of emotions is and should remain a thoroughly interdisciplinary subfield. Indeed, it is the subfield not only of history, but of literary studies, philosophy, art history, sociology, religious studies, music, classics, and so on. The Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for the History of Emotions, where I happen to be a postdoctoral research fellow, employs dozens of researchers from a broad swath of intellectual backgrounds, working on emotions in Europe roughly from the beginning of the 12th to the end of the 18th century. This means that Shakespeare scholars collaborate with historians of medicine, students of Aquinas work with art historians, and Neolatinists break bread with Chaucerians. Despite the potential for territorial squabbling or interdisciplinary infighting, however, the various nodes of research across Australia which constitute the Centre make for a remarkably collegial and highly energetic and collaborative atmosphere, and it all has something to do with the fact that we imagine ourselves to be doing more or less the same thing even if from radically different angles: studying the history of emotions.

So while there have been calls to abandon the term “emotions” for its culturally specific baggage or anachronistic implications in historical research, and while it might even be that the vast majority of the sources that my colleagues in the Centre work on never employ the term “emotions” at all (whether because they are writing in a language different from English, or whether they were writing at a time before “emotions” came onto the Anglophone scene), for the most part we continue to describe our work in these terms. This is partly due to the relatively simple (although often made overly complicated) fact that historical description demands a certain sort of pragmatism in that it is always an approximation and in that it always involves translation—whether of words or concepts—into the discourses of a contemporary setting. Historians are trying to come up with useful approaches that illuminate affective experience and description in the past without doing violence to past texts and traditions in service of contemporary concerns, but while making these texts and traditions understandable to contemporaries. The map is not the territory. From this perspective, the history of describing emotion(s) is itself subject to historical analysis, and several works have come forth in recent years attempting in one way or another to sort out the emotional lexicons of the past. This brings us back to our main purpose: Thomas Dixon’s From Passions to Emotions is a prominent and influential example of such a work, which, along with two articles published in its wake, also happens to paint a portrait of a long history of Christian usage of emotion terms that is complicated by a close consideration of 16th-century Christian usage.

“Passions” and “Affections”

Dixon’s insistence that into the 18th century reflective thinkers were dividing emotional types into two categories, “the more violent and self-regarding ‘passions’ and ‘appetites’ on the one hand, and the milder and more enlightened ‘interests,’ social ‘affections,’ and ‘moral sentiments’ on the other,” is grounded in a history that passes over the roughly 400 years that lay between Aquinas and Descartes (Dixon, 2012, p. 339). While tracing this distinction isn’t the main purpose of the 2004 book (he is trying, ultimately, to trace the development of the term “emotions” as a secular psychological category as it develops in the modern period), Dixon argues for a pervasive tendency there and elsewhere in the premodern Christian tradition of distinguishing between “affections” and “passions” (affectus and passiones), and he implies that this tradition was somehow more accurate in employing a variety of terms in attempts to describe various psychological categories, all of which now (unfortunately, to Dixon’s mind) are anachronistically lumped under the category of “emotions.” He describes a “central distinction between affections and passions, a classical Christian distinction that was repeated, in various forms, at least until the eighteenth century” (2004, p. 46). The “contrast between the rational virtuous affections and vicious passions” (reflected in the terms affectus/affectiones and passiones respectively; 2004, p. 47) he finds to be especially prominent in Augustine and Aquinas, and while he is certainly correct in arguing that the long Christian tradition did not judge all affective states to be irrational and/or sinful, his suggestion that the “demise of distinctions” (2004, 243ff.) in emotional vocabulary occurred in the late modern period can—if it is not to be done away with altogether—be moved back several hundred years. To demonstrate this, let us first consider several 16th-century dictionaries, and then move on to religious texts and biblical translations from the same period.

Dictionary Entries

Period dictionaries (Latin, Greek, and vernacular) reflect a muddled usage and a complex of synonyms, and the purpose of what follows is to list several dictionaries’ relevant entries. The 16th century represents the early days of development for what would become the modern lexicon. Even though not all dictionaries edited and published in these decades provide the full semantic range of a given term, and nor should we blithely assume that dictionaries reflect popular usage in a thoroughly consistent way, they are nevertheless useful for approximating normative usage within a specific intellectual context in the period, especially when multiple dictionaries from different editors and for different vernaculars are collated and compared. This is true a fortiori in the case of humanist Latin usage for the simple reason that humanists were often the ones editing and compiling these dictionaries—or at least urging editors to compile them—which dictionaries were determined by usage in classical and humanist texts and not by everyday colloquial speech (which, in any case, did not typically take place in Latin). That is to say, if they do not reflect vulgar discourse, they are perhaps more reflective of the particular idiom of classicizing humanistic Latin and other learned vernacular usage than a modern general dictionary would be of any specific dialect. Moreover, from the perspective of historical semantics or linguistics, what a lexicographer thought a word meant is also an important aspect of the history of the usage of that word, irrespective of whether it conforms to broader trends in usage (although the cases below do reveal substantial conformity). At any rate, while the evidence presented here ought not to be extrapolated and applied universally to Latin or vernacular texts in the 16th century, and even less to familiar conversation in a 16th-century pub, there are enough cases to show the slippery nature of affective terms in this period and to illuminate some general trends in usage.

Other Examples From the Sixteenth Century

While the expansion and repeated printing of dictionaries like Calepino’s and Estienne’s demonstrates that there was a market for them, and implies that they would have some influence on the way Latin and vernacular terms were employed, a few examples from prominent 16th-century writers will show further that these dictionaries reflect current usage as well. Sixteenth-century Christian humanists much prefer affectus to passio to describe a vast range of emotional phenomena, both sinful and not, and there is rarely the explicit value distinction between these terms that Dixon assigns to the classical Christian tradition. To be clear, the conceptual distinction between useful and harmful emotions that may be found in Augustine and Aquinas does manifest itself prominently in the 16th century, as it had done since antiquity; but it does not manifest itself consistently in the form of a semantic distinction between affectus and passio. Rather, one has to attend very closely to the context of the use of these terms in this period to determine their meaning, and often they are quite simply synonymous. Affectus in the 16th century regularly covers both the “sinful passions” and the more permissible “religious affections,” among other things—indeed, it looks as suspiciously wide in its semantic scope as our term “emotions.” ⁷ Moreover, while there is much semantic overlap with “emotion,” affectus is employed by Erasmus and others to describe a range of psychological and more explicitly affective dispositions which often extend beyond the typical semantic range of the modern English term. Drunkenness, for example, and also the tendency in someone to vomit upon seeing someone else vomit, count for Erasmus as affectus, although we would hardly consider either of these an “emotion” in English usage (see Erasmus, 1535/2015, CWE 68:641; ASD V-4, 396). Passio, while narrower in scope than affectus, is much less common in several prominent writers, and does not even appear in some Latin dictionaries from the period.

We gain some insight into the reasons for Erasmus’s (and perhaps other 16th-century writers’) rejection of passio as a useful term in a passage from his 1516 Annotationes (Erasmus, 1516/1995) on the New Testament, specifically on Romans 1:26, which we opened the article with. In the original text, Paul uses the Greek phrase πάθη ἀτιμίας (shameful emotions/passions/desires), which the Vulgate translator had rendered as passiones ignominiae. Erasmus, however, in his own Latin rendering of the New Testament, translates the Greek as cupiditates ignominiosas (shameful desires), and provides the accompanying annotation in defense of his reasons for the change: “The Greek πάθη sometimes means ‘disturbances of the soul’ [perturbationes animi] or ‘movements’ [motus] or ‘diseases’ [morbos] or (a word that Fabius [i.e. Quintilian] strongly prefers) ‘affections’ [affectus]. In such a great abundance of acceptable terms, where was the need for the new and artificial word passio?” (Erasmus, 1516/1995, p. 56). ⁸ Thus Erasmus, who was more than an average Hellenophile, considers the word passio to be a bastardization of the Latin language: Latin, to his way of thinking, has plenty of expressive emotion terms and no need for such neologisms. This sentiment may go some way towards explaining the (prima facie surprising) absence of the term passio from dictionaries as well as its less common appearance in other 16th-century works.

Erasmus, after this point in his career, primarily uses affectus to describe all affective states (and then some). In his 1535 manual for preachers, the Ecclesiastes, describing “the sort of violent passion that tortures us and deprives us of judgment and peace of mind,” Erasmus uses the Latin vehementem affectum (Erasmus, 1535/2015, p. 794). Also in the Ecclesiastes, and in the earlier De Copia, Erasmus writes (following Quintilian) that there are “two kinds of emotions” (affectus): the vehement kind, which the Greeks called πάθη, and the gentler kind, which the Greeks called ἔθη. He continues to write that the Latins call the former sort mores, but they do not have a single term to describe the πάθη; instead they use the following approximate terms: affectus, perturbationes, motus animorum, cupiditates, and morbos (Erasmus, 1535/2015, pp. 518–519). Note, first, that affectus is an equivalent given for πάθη and, second, that passiones is not mentioned at all. This is important because, while it is clear that Erasmus and most premodern Christian thinkers did recognize the sort of distinction that Dixon is after (between, say, “the troubling desires and passions on the one hand and milder affections and sentiments on the other” [2012, p. 339]), this distinction is not made clear through a consistent usage of specific terms corresponding to one or the other sort of affective experience.

Erasmus does, however, use the term passio to describe emotion earlier in his career, although again not in the way that we might expect, for it often does not have any connotation of unruliness or sinfulness as it may have in Augustine and Aquinas. In his 1503 De taedio Iesu, a reconstructed debate he had had with John Colet over Christ’s emotional agony in the Garden of Gethsemane, Erasmus describes Christ’s fear of death alternately as an affectus and a passio, making no firm distinction between the two. Describing Christ’s agony, Erasmus “does not hesitate” to call those feelings which “violently overwhelmed Jesus’ mind” passiones (1503/1998, p. 56). ⁹ Earlier in the same text it was an affectus which “wrenched from him the cry of a man filled with dread: ‘My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me’” (1503/1998, p. 14). ¹⁰ Erasmus gives examples of the passiones naturales in this text: grief, joy, hatred, fear, and anger in the mind, and hunger, thirst, drowsiness, weariness, suffering, and death in the body (1503/1998, p. 23). Christ, he says, took on a “sensible body and a sensible soul subject to the natural passions (naturalibus passionibus obnoxiam)” (1503/1998, p. 23). This very same fear, however, is described, in Erasmus’s Paraphrase of Matthew 26:39 (of 1522) as a “bodily affection vehemently recoiling from death” (corporis affectum vehementer abhorrentem a morte [my translation]; 1535, fol. 174). Thus, in precisely the same exegetical situation, although two decades apart, Erasmus uses passio and affectus interchangeably multiple times in describing Christ’s emotions. Indeed, it seems that by the time of the 1522 Paraphrase of Matthew Erasmus had largely eschewed using passio altogether (in the wake of his rejection of it in 1516 as a legitimate Latin term).

We see already that Erasmus, the most widely renowned Latin writer in the whole of the 16th century, complicates a rigid linguistic distinction between passio and affectus. But Erasmus isn’t alone. Melanchthon, the great Lutheran humanist, in his long medico-theological treatise on the soul, Liber de anima (1553/1846), writes that there are affectus that aid nature and affectus that destroy nature, the former which include joy, hope, and love, and the latter which include hatred, sadness, and anger. ¹¹ Indeed, never in his extensive and close analysis of the function of emotions in humoral-medical and ethical/theological contexts does he use passio/passiones. Like Erasmus and Melanchthon, John Calvin too typically uses affectus to describe all emotions, and he does not primarily “focus. . . on Augustine’s negative teaching of the passions,” despite Dixon’s suggestion (2004, p. 27). Calvin in fact defined faith itself as a kind of affectus in his magnum opus, the Institutes of the Christian Religion (see, e.g., 1559/1960, p. 552), which is intimately bound up with what Dixon would call the “religious affections.” But he also uses the term to describe human emotions after the fall of Adam. In distinguishing between Christ’s emotions and ours, Calvin describes our affections as bound up in sin: “there is no emotion (affectus) in us that is devoid of sin, because they all exceed proper limits and moderation” (my translation; Calvin, 1863, Vol. 46, p. 720). In his commentary on Seneca’s De Clementia, the first work he published, he equates affectus and passio as equivalent to the Greek πάθος, in accord with 16th-century lexical usage: glossing the ancient understanding of the emotions, he writes, “a tranquil soul is composed, and subject to no emotions (affectibus), which the Greeks call πάθη, that is, passions (passiones)” (1532/1969, pp. 40–41).

Calvin also translated the Bible, into both Latin and French in his commentaries, and a brief overview of how he and other 16th-century translators rendered πάθη at Romans 1:26 is revealing of the varied usage of the period. Erasmus, again, had modified the Vulgate’s passiones to read cupiditates. In his own commentary on Romans 1:26, Calvin keeps the Vulgate reading of passiones ignominiae, indicating that he perhaps did not share Erasmus’s aversion to this particular Latin neologism. Calvin would have read Erasmus’s Annotationes closely, as would have Calvin’s successor in Geneva Theodore Beza, whose own Latin version of 1565 departs from both Erasmus and the Vulgate+Calvin reading with foedis affectibus (loathsome emotions). It should be kept in mind that in the Greek original, Paul is discussing expressly problematic and sinful emotions (dishonorable πάθη), and thus the use of affectus and its cognates reveals the broad semantic range of these terms. Interestingly, in Calvin’s 1543 French translation of his own Latin commentary on Romans, he eschews the French word passion which would have directly rendered his Latin with its French cognate and uses affections vilaines. Likewise, in the Genevan French Bible of 1544, a revision of Pierre Olivetan’s 1533 version that Calvin himself revised, the text also reads affections vilaines. Thus, even where Calvin does find it appropriate to use (or at least retain) the Latin passiones, he quite clearly does not think that it should always be rendered with the French cognate term.

These terms can all be synonymous and interchangeable at this time, their meaning dependent more upon context than used with a singular valence. This is further made clear in a marginal gloss printed in later versions of the Genevan French Bible (the 1563, for example), which reads, “passions infames, concipiscences ignominienses” as an expansion of the textual reading of affections vilaines. Recently on a trip to Geneva, I looked at a 1576 Greek New Testament, printed by Henri Estienne (the son of Robert, who left passio out of his dictionaries altogether, and the editor of the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae), and at Rom. 1:26 someone had written in a 16th-century hand affectibus ignominiosas foedis in the inner margin glossing Paul’s Greek. ¹² The English Geneva Bible, for what it’s worth, has “shamful lustes,” but the 1583 English translation of Calvin’s commentary on Romans, by Christopher Rosdell, follows the French more closely with “vile affections.” This general ambiguity spills over into Calvin’s own composed French as well: in a single section of a sermon on Christ’s agony at Gethsemane from 1558, he uses passion, affection, and even esmotion, all as synonymous with respect to the same psychological situation.

Nous ne pouvons pas appercevoir cela en nous: comme en eau trouble on ne iuge rien. Voyla donc les affections humaines qui sont pour nous faire flotter et de coste et d’autre, pour nous donner telles esmotions que nous avons besoin d’estre retenus de Dieu: mais celles qu’ont les hommes estans descendus d’Adam sont comme un bourbier ou il y a de l’infection meslee tant et plus, en sorte que nous ne pouvons pas contempler quelle a est ceste passion de nostre Seigneur Iesus Christ, si nous l’estimons par nos personne (1863, 45:839-840). ¹³

While the use of the French esmotion here is technically ambiguous—the phrase could either be read as “to give us such emotions” or “to move us so much”—it could be read as synonymous with affections humaines, which (given that the sermon was delivered as early as 1554) would mark it as one of the earliest known uses of the French term with this valence. ¹⁴ That Calvin is now known for his contributions to modern French as well as the use of French neologisms, as Francis Higman has shown, makes this an even more intriguing proposition (Higman, 1967, 47ff.). In either case, the “esmotions” are psychological and clearly to be understood as affective movement, whether metaphorical or not.

It should be clear from these few examples that there is not consistent usage of affectus and passio or their cognates in some of the most prominent and influential writers of the 16th century, in their translations of the New Testament, nor in the dictionaries that may have sat on their shelves. The evidence from dictionaries taken together with evidence from the writings of prominent Christian authors of the same period makes it clear that any easy distinction between affectus and passio is not sustainable for 16th-century usage. Even where an exception can be made, as in the case of Juan Luis Vives, a 16th-century writer who does make a prescriptive distinction between the unruly passiones and the morally neutral affectus in his treatise De Anima et Vita (1538), in practice he goes on to use affectus in the same treatise exclusively or almost exclusively to describe the full range of human emotions. ¹⁵ Dixon laments that fact that “Many writers have persisted in referring to the view of ‘emotions’ held by ancient, medieval or early-modern thinkers who wrote about pathe, passiones animae, or ‘passions’,” and further laments the fact that translators of Augustine and Aquinas use “emotions” to render motus, affectus, and passiones (2004, p. 40). The implication, it would seem, is that one ought, in translating Latin texts, to abide a one-to-one correspondence between the Latin or Greek “emotion” term and its English cognate (affectus becomes “affection,” passio becomes “passion,” and so on). But if this is accurate for Augustine and Aquinas, it does not hold for their readers in the 16th century. Indeed, it is more likely—although this can only be demonstrated with future research—that consistent distinctions like those found in scholastics like Thomas Aquinas represent a minority in the history of (Christian) Latin usage of emotion terms. Humanist writers preferred rhetorical flexibility to dialectical precision, and Erasmus routinely referred to the scholastics as quibbling and sophistical for their discourse. Indeed, given Erasmus’s rejection of the term passio, it is perhaps a bit ironic that the Dutchman described Aquinas himself as apathes, lacking in pathos, for employing the sort of dry and sterile discourse that did not move his readers (Erasmus, 1512/1971, p. 660).

Conclusion

Describing an unfortunate result of the demise of distinctions in emotion terminology, Dixon writes,

The Christian psychologist would talk about fear of God, the physicalist about fear of a bear. If the distinction between passions and affections had been available, it could have been acknowledged, perhaps, that the physicalist definition was more appropriate to appetites and passions such as fear of a bear, and that the cognitive definition was more fitting for affections such as the fear of God and for sentiments such as apathy. (2004, pp. 245–246)

He suggests later that a rejuvenation of the “classical Christian” categories would benefit current emotions research (2012, p. 343). The purpose of what I’ve presented here is to show that, when looking at the 16th century and translating its texts, such a distinction becomes untenable. It would be misleading to render affectus and passio by their English cognates when assessing texts from this period if the assumption is that these terms designated different things. While historians of emotion and contemporary psychologists may want to argue about whether or not we should apply certain emotion terms as second-order concepts in order to describe what we now think are different types of emotional phenomena, we cannot agree that this normative approach can be grounded in any sort of monolithic tradition from the past. Nor can we think that at the descriptive level it would be recognized by premodern Christian thinkers far and wide. While there was a multitude of affective terms applied in Latin texts, in many prominent Renaissance writers they were most often applied rather haphazardly, as synonyms rather than as distinguishing affective categories—or, better, they were applied rhetorically rather than systematically.

What is the historian of emotions to do, then, when coming up with a lexicon to translate emotion terms in the 16th century? Employing the term “emotions” in doing historical work may be anachronistic, but it isn’t any more anachronistic (and it’s just as arbitrary) as any number of other modern English words that we must use in order to help make the past understandable. As historians we must remain aware that the language we use to describe the past is culturally and historically specific, that there is always both heuristic and linguistic translation going on in historical work, and that we have to be sensitive both to the past that we describe and to the present for which we describe it. With this in mind, it may be that, given the lexical latitude of Renaissance Latin writers with respect to emotional vocabulary, the term “emotion(s)” is a perfectly viable option for historians today, and that it in fact gets the most work done when trying to navigate what in many cases would be an artificial distinction between passions and affections.