Passions and Moral Progress in Greco-Roman Thought

John T. Fitzgerald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9780415280693
• eBook ISBN: 9781134463015
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This book contains a collection of 13 essays from leading scholars on the relationship between passionate emotions and moral advancement in Greek and Roman thought.

Recognising that emotions played a key role in whether individuals lived happily, ancient philosophers extensively discussed the nature of "the passions", showing how those who managed their emotions properly would lead better, more moral lives.

The contributions are preceded by an introdution to the subject by John Fitzgerald. Writers discussed include the Cynics, the Neopythagorians, Aristotle and Ovid; the discussion encompasses philosophy, literature and religion.

1

THE PASSIONS AND MORAL PROGRESS: AN INTRODUCTION

John T. Fitzgerald

This essay is an introduction to the emotions and moral progress in ancient discourse. These two topics were intimately related in Greco-Roman thought, so it is important to consider them together. The essay itself is divided into four unequal parts. Part I is a discussion of terminology for emotions, focusing on the three major English translations of the Greek terms pathos and pathē. Part II is a survey of ancient works On Emotions, with attention also given to treatises on specific emotions, such as anger. Part III is a brief treatment of myth and morality, and Part IV is an introduction to the topic of prokopē and the Greco-Roman concern with moral progress, which was deemed possible only if the emotions were properly managed. A brief indication of the arrangement of other essays in the volume concludes this introduction.

Introduction

The current interest in the emotions is as widespread as it is interdisciplinary.¹ From the cognitive and natural sciences to the humanities and social sciences, there is hardly a field of study that is not being invigorated or at least affected by ongoing research into the emotions. The number of new studies published each year in all disciplines is almost mind-boggling, and this research has created renewed interest in how different cultures and previous generations have viewed the emotions and their various manifestations.² The reprinting in 1998 of Charles Darwin’s pioneering The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, first published in 1872, is but one instance of contemporary interest in earlier investigations and theories.³

This explosion of interest in the emotions has affected both classics and biblical studies, with scholars from both disciplines making important new contributions to how the emotions were viewed in classical antiquity. To give only one example, M. Nussbaum’s highly influential The Therapy of Desire (1994b)⁴ was not only a response to the growing interest in the emotions⁵ but also a powerful catalyst for new research. Since Nussbaum’s book appeared, no fewer than ten book-length studies on “ancient emotions” have been published, as well as countless articles in journals, chapters in books, and other forms of publication. Some of these more recent studies have been devoted to the emotions in general, whereas others have focused on specific emotions, such as anger, and still others on particular ancient authors or philosophical schools. The most significant of the book-length treatments include those by C.A. Barton (2001), M. Graver (2002), W.V. Harris (2001), R.A. Kaster (2005), S. Knuuttila (2004), D. Konstan (2001; 2006), R. Sorabji (2000), T. Tieleman (2003), and P. Toohey (2004). Since 1997, at least five significant collections of essays on ancient emotions have appeared: those edited by S.M. Braund and C. Gill (1997), S. Braund and G.W. Most (2003), Konstan and N.K. Rutter (2003), J. Sihvola and T. Engberg-Pedersen (1998), and, in the area of biblical studies, T.H. Olbricht and J.L. Sumney (2001). Collectively, if not individually, these investigations have underscored the importance and demonstrated the veracity of the premise of Konstan’s recent book on ancient Greek emotions, namely “that the emotions of the ancient Greeks were in some significant respects different from our own, and that recognizing these differences is important to our understanding of Greek literature and Greek culture generally” (Konstan 2006: ix). The same is true of the Romans and their understanding of the emotions, as Kaster (2005) has convincingly shown. Furthermore, the ancients’ “conception of the emotions has something to tell us about our own views, whether about the nature of particular emotions or the category of emotion itself” (Konstan 2006: ix).

The standard Greek terms and their English translations

The differences between the modern and ancient understandings of the emotions are already signaled by the linguistic and conceptual difficulty of translating the standard terms that the Greeks used for “emotion” as a general concept and for the various “emotions” collectively, namely πάθος (pathos) and πάθη (pathē).⁶ Both terms derive from πάσχϵιν (paschein), which fundamentally indicates “to experience something,” whether positive or negative (Michaelis 1968: 904; BDAG, s.v. πάσχω, 785; cf. Graver 2002: 79). The latter implication was far more common than the former, so that the verb, especially in early Christian literature, often has the meaning “to suffer.” The Greek verb is thus distantly related to the Latin verb for suffering, patior, from which the English words “passion” and “passive” derive (Konstan 2006:3). Precisely how to render the Greek term into English is difficult; indeed, “no translation of the term is adequate, for pathos is a technical term whose meaning is determined by the theory in which it functions” (Inwood 1985: 127).

Yet even restricting the translation to how the term was used by one philosophical school, such as the Stoics, does not settle the issue. Cicero already had (or feigned) difficulty translating the Stoic term into Latin when used of grief, fear, pleasure, and anger, and he was tempted to use morbi, “diseases,”⁷ arguing that it would be a word-for-word translation of pathē and that the Greeks also used it not only of pity (misereri) and envy (invidere) but even of exultation (gestire) and joy (laetari). He finally settled for perturbationes animi, “mental disturbances” (Tusc. 3.7; see also 4.10; Fin. 3.35), though he does use morbus for pathos at Tusc. 3.20.⁸ On occasion, Augustine was to make the same equation: “perturbatio is what is called pathos in Greek” (Civ. 8.17).

There are three translations of pathos that are popular in English-language scholarship. Of these, the most popular is “emotion,” which has the overwhelming advantage of being the standard term used in the general population and in other academic disciplines. It was the word chosen, for example, by Sorabji (2000: 7, 17), with regard to the Stoic theory of the pathē. The least popular of the three translations, on the other hand, is “affection,” preferred by M. Frede and Tieleman, though not entirely for the same reasons. Although Frede uses the term “affection” when discussing the Stoics, he employs it primarily for the Platonic–Aristotelian tradition and conjectures that “perhaps the term ‘pathos’ originally was restricted to … flagrantly irrational emotions, and only later came to refer to the emotions quite generally… . In this tradition the term ‘pathos’ takes on the connotation of ‘passio’, ‘affect’, ‘purely passive affection.’” The Stoics, by contrast, “think that it is grossly misleading to think of the affections of the soul as pathē in the sense of passive affections. They are rather pathē in the sense of illnesses, diseases” (Frede 1986: 96–7, 99, italics added). Tieleman, by contrast, chooses “affection” as the term “perhaps best suited to preserve the different shades of meaning of πάθος in its Stoic usage” (Tieleman 2003: 16).

There are, of course, Latin precedents for translating the Greek words by terms belonging to the affectio (adfectio)/affectus (adfectus) word group. Aulus Gellius, for example, reports a speech that he heard Herodes Atticus deliver in Greek at Athens about Stoic apatheia, which Herodoes attacked as follows: “no one, who felt and thought normally, could be wholly exempt and free from those adfectionibus of the mind, which he called πάθη, caused by sorrow, desire, fear, anger, and pleasure” (Noct. att. 19.12.3).⁹ Similarly, in the context of a discussion of anger, Gellius refers to “all the rest of the emotions, which the Latin philosophers call affectus or affections, and the Greeks pathē” (Noct. att. 1.26.11). Cicero includes joy, desire, and fear as belonging to the category of affectio at Inv. 1.36, and at 1.41 he calls annoyance, anger, and love “affectionem animi” (see also Tusc. 4.14). This usage is one of the factors that prompts J. Wisse to say, “Affectio is … roughly equivalent to Greek πάθος in its general sense” (Wisse 1989: 100n. 102). Indeed, many if not most post-Ciceronian authors preferred to “render pathos by adfectio or adfectus” (Graver 2002: 80). For example, Quintilian, who presents pathos and ēthos as two emotional modes that can be used by the orator, says that “the Greeks call the one [mode] pathos, which we correctly and properly translate as adfectus” (Inst. 6.2.8). He goes on to link pathos with tragedy and says that it is almost entirely concerned with anger, hatred, fear, envy, and pity (6.2.20).¹⁰ M. DiCicco (1995: 147 n. 243) claims that adfectus is “coined” here by Quintilian as the Latin equivalent of the Greek pathos, but it would be more accurate to say that Quintilian is perhaps the first Latin orator explicitly to equate the two terms in discussing rhetoric. Adfectus in Latin was well established as a term for both “emotion” and “strong emotion” or “passion” long before Quintilian was active (OLD, s.v. affectus) and in equating the two terms he is drawing on a common meaning of adfectus.¹¹

The third English translation of pathos is “passion,” which is the term used by B. Inwood (1985: 127–8), A.A. Long and D.N. Sedley (1987: 1.410–23, §65), Braund and Gill (1997) in the title of their volume, and many others. “Passion” is derived from the Latin noun passio, which also was a popular ancient term used to render the Greek word pathos. Augustine, for instance, says that “the word passio for the Greek word pathos means a mental agitation (motus animi) that is contrary to reason” (Civ. 8.17, trans. Wiesen 1968: 79, modified). By Augustine’s time, however, Christian usage already had imparted its own negative connotation to the word; as Augustine himself says, “passio, the Latin equivalent [of pathos], especially in its ecclesiastical use, is usually a term of censure” (Nupt. 2.55 = 2.33 PL 44: 469).¹²

In short, there was not one Latin word or word group used to render pathos and pathē. Augustine refers to this phenomenon in his City of God:

There are two opinions among the philosophers concerning the mental emotions [animi motibus], which the Greeks call pathē, while certain of our fellow countrymen, like Cicero, describe them as disturbances [perturbationes], others as affections [affectiones]or affects [affectus], and others again, like Apuleius, as passions [passiones], which renders the Greek more explicitly.

(Civ. 9.4, trans. Wiesen 1968: 157)¹³

This linguistic situation naturally had implications not only for philosophical debates but also for biblical exegesis. Augustine, for instance, refers to debates about the precise meaning of Paul’s words in 1 Thess 4:5 as follows:

The phrase in the Greek text,

[en pathei epithymias], is by some rendered in Latin, in morbo desiderii or concupiscentiae, in the disease of desire or of concupiscence; by others, however, in passione concupiscentiae, in the passion of concupiscence; or however it is found otherwise in different copies.

(Nupt. 2.55 = 2.33 PL 44: 469)¹⁴

Inasmuch as there is no one English word that corresponds exactly to all of the meanings or nuances of the Greek word pathos, many modern scholars eschew the practice of consistently translating the same Greek wo...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 The passions and moral progress: an introduction
• Part I Philosophy
• Part II Philosophy and Literature
• Part III Philosophy and Religion
• Selected Bibliography
• Index of Ancient Authors and Texts
• Index of Mordern Scholars