Hector’s death in the Iliad. Mary appearing to the Saxon army with six swords in her heart and one in her hand. Rhett and Scarlett’s breakup in Gone with the Wind. Sam’s defense of Frodo in Shelob’s lair. What do all of these moments have in common? Each one represents a time when I was moved to tears by a book or poem. These instances and others like them make up my defense for why I read great books today. I am committed to reading great books not because someone told me to but because I have fallen in love with them, and I have fallen in love with them because they have pierced me with their beauty. I have feasted on true food and I cannot go back. But this is not an essay about reading great books.
As a teacher at a classical school, I have the honor of stirring up in my students a love for the transcendentals. I have found the best way to inspire in them a commitment to the good is to first get them to fall in love with goodness. They will not love it simply because I tell them they should (as if that’s a good tactic for getting a teenager to do anything). Instead, the goal is to give them a personal encounter with the beauty of virtue. Once they have become captivated with Socrates’ commitment to truth; once they have lamented the death of a beloved literary character; once they read a line of poetry over and over again simply because it delights them, only then will they care about the realities these works are pointing to. Then they will fall in love with virtue. Why? Because we have taught them to delight in it.
One way to reveal this double standard is to look again at the example of teaching.
It strikes me as ironic that oftentimes—especially among the crowd that champions an almost ecstatic, at times emotional, love of good academia—there exists an attitude of disregard for the role of emotion in religious expression. Being moved to tears while reading Dante is fine, but being moved to tears in prayer is immature. If we want to make a gesture of gratitude at a supra feast, accompanied by tears or raucous laughter, then raising our glass with gusto is commended. But if we dare to raise our hands in praise during the eucharistic feast, we are called at worst irreverent and at best poorly formed. Either way, we are made to feel that we ought to be ashamed for our spontaneous acts of love toward God. There is a place for the heights and depths of human emotion in academia, it seems, but when it comes to the thing that academia points to—Christ—we are told to sober up, to put our emotions in a box and shelve them. This seems not only logically fallacious but also dangerous.
One way to reveal this double standard is to look again at the example of teaching. Imagine if a student shared that they had cried while reading a passage of Shakespeare. In response, the teacher looked at them with a sober expression and replied, “Well, that’s fine. Most people have that experience when they are still young in their literary life. But just remember, the important thing isn’t to feel like you love it. The important thing is just to read it.” Any teacher would (rightly so) laugh at the idiocy of such a response. A good teacher would be thrilled to hear that a student was profoundly touched by an assigned book! More importantly, they would look at the emotional response as valid proof of a genuine encounter with beauty. They wouldn’t disparage or discourage it. So why is it seen as acceptable to disparage or discourage emotions in the realm of religious experience?
Now, this isn’t to say that in our walk with the Lord, just as in education, there will never be times that feel dry. Everyone will experience times when walking with God doesn’t feel good. These desert moments are valuable. They build character and discipline. Thank the Lord that our love for him is not measured by the intensity of our emotions. However, some folks in the Christian community have taken this point so far that they are now in danger of snuffing out the value of emotion altogether. In our fear of a culture that idolizes passion, we have veered to the other extreme; we have idolized Stoicism. But idolatry is still idolatry, no matter how you slice it. The people who would rather have us all become statues than living, breathing, laughing, crying saints have forgotten that we do not serve a God of the dead but of the living.
Aquinas argued that emotion can actually be a sign of greater virtue.
As a classical educator who also happens to be a Christian, I find myself often wondering: Why are we so affirming of the whole gamut of human emotion when it comes to falling in love with good education, and yet we are so bent on discouraging these very same emotions when it comes to prayer? Somewhere along the line we have forgotten that Christians are not meant to be Stoics. In fact, the Stoic position is one that is condemned by many of the great Christian saints, including St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas argued that emotion can actually be a sign of greater virtue. He explained that when the will, being a higher power, acts most perfectly, that act overflows into the lower powers, bringing them into harmony with the act of reason. He wrote this in response to the Stoics, who believed emotions were a sign of a lack of virtue. “[The will overflows] into the sensitive appetite; in so far as the lower powers follow the movement of the higher. . . . Wherefore by reason of this kind of overflow, the more perfect a virtue is, the more does it cause passion.”1
I call this strange phenomenon of banishing emotions in religious expression “the death of emotion in religion.” I mourn for it the same way I mourned over Hector’s body being dragged behind Achilles’ chariot. I mourn because in both situations, goodness is being thrown in the dirt. Something beautiful is being exiled as if it were worthless. If we devalue the role of emotion in religion, we lose a powerful tool for helping people to fall in love and stay in love with God. Just as a teacher in the classroom uses delight and passion to captivate a student’s heart and teach them to love the things of heaven, so too we should value the role of our passions in leading us toward God. Do we need them all the time? No. Should we idolize them? Of course not. But should we discourage emotion in religious expression? Not if we take seriously God’s command to praise him with our entire nature. Sanctification does not mean eradication. And Stoicism is not the same as spiritual maturity.
As much as some people may want to treat religion as if it were a pure act of the will, the fact is we are human. We are not machines or calculators, able to crunch out actions like data points. We live, we breathe, and whether we like it or not, we feel. Having emotions is part of the human experience. God commanded us to call upon all of our faculties to love him, not only our minds. “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind” (Matthew 22:37). The Psalms tell us time and again to shout our praise to the Lord. We don’t want to get to the end of our lives and be found guilty of outward obedience but hardened hearts.2
It’s time to recover an appreciation of emotion in religious experience, not at the expense of reason but guided by reason, as Aquinas says. If we ignore this need, we run the risk of reaching the end of the long, fruitless road of Stoicism only to find that our motivation to love has also dried up. We will have become Stoics in the truest sense, in that we will have lost our human nature and redefined “love” to mean something dry and cold. We will then cry out over our lack of love as St. Francis of Assisi did, when he wandered through the woods of Assisi lamenting, “Love is not loved! Love is not loved!” Except he was able to weep while he cried out. Our tears will be gone because we banished them.
1. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1-2.59.5, at Isidore, www.isidore.co/aquinas.
2. See Matthew 7:21–23 for Jesus’ harrowing words for those who spend their lives doing externally righteous deeds but without the necessary interior conviction of heart.