Two Views of Feeling: Hume & Augustine
Over the fifteen months of Becoming Human’s short history, emotions have emerged as a central theme. (At the end of this post, I’ll point you to some of the places where I’ve discussed these things, for those interested in exploring further.) The reason for this is simple: our modern world is unknowingly committed to a deeply problematic picture of emotions. This picture has a number of features, but the most important are these:
Emotions constitute our core selves. My patterns of emotion make me who I am.
Emotions are fundamentally feelings.
Emotions just are. If I find myself feeling something, I ought not evaluate that feeling as right or wrong, good or bad.
Emotions are independent of thoughts. Indeed, where mind and emotion relate, it is feeling that drives thought.
Emotional change happens through experiential conditioning—most often, in therapy—not through understanding. Changing my mind doesn’t change my heart.
None of these features are ones people consciously believe. Most have never so much as considered these ideas explicitly. But this view should be recognizable as at least implicit in vast swaths of the conversation around personal growth and even spiritual formation.
Hume & Augustine
What few people notice is that this picture derives from the Enlightenment-era Scottish philosopher David Hume. To be clear, I don’t mean that Hume held to those five points. I mean that Hume’s views—in particular, his views of the relationship between thought and feeling, and of how and why humans act—serve as a substrate for our contemporary picture of emotions. More generally, a Humean vision of reality and our place in it lend plausibility to this picture of emotions.
I will not, in this context, make the case that this is so. It is something I’ve gestured toward in other places, most notably “The Elephant & the Rider” (which I’ve linked below). And a more thorough unpacking of Hume’s views would need to get into some gritty textual details that I don’t intend to subject you to. Not yet, anyway!
However, Hume’s famous idea from the Treatise of Human Nature (1739-40) that “reason is and ought only to be the slave of the passions” expresses the fundamental thought. This is the underlying idea behind Jonathan Haidt’s elephant-rider metaphor, and it is why Haidt self-describes in The Righteous Mind that “Hume was right” about emotions and their relationship to reason.
What is important for now is that Hume believed that value derives from emotion. James Harris says in Hume: An Intellectual Biography (Cambridge, 2015):
Quite generally, Hume believed, something’s mattering to us, something’s being of importance in life, something’s being a goal to be pursued, depended upon its being the object of passion. Reason, when it acted alone, could make nothing matter. Not only did some of the most basic concerns of human beings—for companionship and status and wealth—issue from our passions but so did morality, politics, art, and also, according to Hume, religion. (pp. 102-3)
It is important to reckon with how radical this claim is. Hume, according to Harris, believed that emotions are not responses to value. Emotions make value.
This is, to put it mildly, not the view of more classical thinkers. Hume was very clear about this, actually. He was self-consciously endeavoring to upend what he described as “the greatest part of moral philosophy, ancient and modern” (Treatise of Human Nature III.3). To see at least some of the difference, consider this passage from St. Augustine’s City of God:
5. For Christians, the passions offer a training in virtue, not an inducement to sin
It is not at this point necessary to expound in copious detail what is taught about these passions in the divine Scriptures, which contain the syllabus of instruction for Christians. Scripture subjects the mind to God for his direction and assistance, and subjects the passions to the mind for their restraint and control so that they may be turned into the instruments of justice. In fact, in our discipline, the question is not whether the devout soul is angry, but why; not whether it is sad, but what causes its sadness; not whether it is afraid, but what is the object of its fear.
To be indignant with the sinner with a view to his correction, to feel sorrow for the afflicted with a view to his release from suffering, to be afraid for one in danger so as to prevent his death — those are emotions which, as far as I can see, no sane judgement could reprove. … What is compassion but a kind of fellow-feeling in our hearts for another’s misery, which compels us to come to his help by every means in our power? Now this emotion is the servant of reason, when compassion is shown without detriment to justice, when it is a mater of giving to the needy or of pardoning the repentant. (Bk IX, ch. 5, Penguin Classics edition, trans. Henry Bettenson)
Augustine here makes clear that our feeling, our emotions, our passions are meant to be responsive to reason. Crucially, Augustine does not mean by this that our intellect ought to control our feelings. What he means is that our feelings are answerable to reason—that they can be discerned as apt or inapt, and that they can be trained to respond better to the world as God has made it than they sometimes do given the fallen state of our humanity. This shows up most clearly, in this passage, in Augustine’s insistence on the importance of the why question—why is this particular soul is angry or afraid or sad. It is not whether we feel but why that truly mattes. And the why ought to be the appropriate, the right why. Not just any why will do.
Hume’s answer to the why question is different: a particular soul is angry or afraid or sad because it has been conditioned to be so in certain situations. This is, in my estimation, a deeply unsatisfying answer. Not, though, because it is all by itself wrong. In fact, I doubt Augustine would object to the claim that we feel as we do because of all sorts of factors outside of our control. What is dissatisfying is that Hume’s answer is only an answer to a shallow form of the why question. It’s an answer to a why that is about the etiology of feeling, its causes in history and experience.
Augustine, though, is interested in a deeper why, the why of reason. Augustine cares about the causes of feeling, but also about whether those causes are the right sorts of causes to give rise to that particular feeling. We should want, in Augustine’s thinking, to have our anger caused by sin, our compassion to be rooted in another’s misery, our joy to be in God’s presence. If God’s presence causes anger, another’s misery causes joy, and sin causes delight, we are wretched. No citing of a feeling’s cause or the history of experience could make it otherwise.
When we subject our feelings to reason in the way Augustine suggests, when we work toward feelings which are prompted by the right things and which motivate the right responses, our passions can become “instruments of justice.”
Hume, alas, can offer no such account. For as Harris points out, whether something matters is a function of what sorts of feelings it causes. They cannot be evaluated because, fundamentally, feelings are the fundamental source of evaluation.
Once you notice this difference, you’ll begin to notice Hume-adjacent thoughts and pictures all over the place. One place I’ve seen them is in my students: they think of spiritual formation as fundamentally a reorientation of feeling. But what they do not understand is the role that their mind ought to play in that process. They do not believe that coming to see the world as a Christian—to see the world as Jesus believed it to be—can be part of that process. To give oneself to a spiritual vision of reality prior to a change of feeling would be, for them, a sign of inauthenticity. Further, they think our feelings need to be reoriented not because their patterns of feeling are inapt, but because such a reorientation makes it easier to say “no” to things they think God has forbidden. They are seeking to avoid the pain, the suffering, the loss of resisting temptation.
This perspective on formation, implicit as tends to be, is thin. Not only does it ignore the mind, which is biblically a central aspect of the human heart (for more, check out the two “Mind Your Heart” posts linked below), it offers as a fundamental logic of formation the avoidance of suffering and the pursuit of some sort of pleasurable or peaceful experience of ourselves in the world. I know of nowhere in Scripture where formation is held out as the easy path. And while there are no doubt happy experiences that emerge as byproducts of taking up our crosses and following Jesus, these experiences are not central to the conception of the good life Christianity offers in the midst of this fallen world. They are barely even described as things we should expect. Our expectations for this life are generally described in terms of the fruit of the Spirit, and only one of those—joy—is amenable to description in experiential terms. (Peace, which you might think would be experiential as well, is far more likely describing something relational, the peace that we mean when we talk about the “peace and purity of the church.”) So while we should have experiential expectations for the Christian life, we should not center those expectations in our account of formation, much less root our account of formation in experience of this sort. And we might even expect that the experiential fruit of union with Christ is something hard-won and perhaps even missing throughout much of a Christian’s life.
Think of it this way: few of us balk at the idea that a Christian must grow in patience, much less in self-control. But almost all of us wonder where God is when our Christian experience lacks joy. That this is so is odd, given that all three are fruits of the Spirit, none more than the others. Why is this? The answer, I submit, is bound up with the legacy of David Hume.
We might call this implicit, Hume-inspired approach to formation the therapeutic approach. On a therapeutic approach, formation is fundamentally about reshaping feeling. Reshaping thought is, at best, secondary. More importantly, reshaping thought is a product of reshaping feeling. After all—recalling the picture of emotion we began with—our thoughts don’t make us who we are, and so should not be at the center of formation. Instead, our patterns of emotion make us who we are. Feeling constitutes our core selves. Our core selves are fundamentally separate from our thoughts, since our emotions are disconnected from our minds. And so formation, which is fundamentally about changing our deepest selves, is concerned first and foremost with feeling.
Postscript
I hope to return to these themes in the near future. I started writing this post after I read Kyle Strobel’s recent post about a difference between John Mark Comer and Dallas Willard. It got me thinking about some things, and there’s more to say about how Comer and Willard relate to historical figures like Hume and Augustine.
In the meantime, if you’re interested in reading more of my work on emotions and some related issues, here are some links:
“Jesus as Educator” (May 2024)
“The Crisis of Empathy” (May 2024)
“Mind Your Heart” (July 2024)
“The Elephant & the Rider” (August 2024)
“Mind Your Heart: New Testament Version” (October 2024)
“Emotions & Your Mind” (November 2024)
“On Having Chests” (December 2024)
“Parts of Stories” (January 2025)
“Finding Yourself in God” (April 2025)
Enjoy!