TWO

RHETORICAL AND BODILY FEELINGS

In this chapter we traverse the ancient world, ending up in early Christendom, with episodes from classical Athens, imperial Rome and North Africa. The focus, however, shifts from questions of definition and experiential categories to the power of rhetoric to make affective experience. In turn, we will examine how rhetorical knowledge has implications for both bodily and social practices, such that what people thought they knew about human passions directly influenced how those passions were experienced, created and dispelled. In Thucydides in the last chapter we saw the power of rhetoric used as an expression of an understanding of ‘human things’, to double down on affective beliefs and practices. Here I want to go a stage further and look at the way in which rhetoric did not merely invoke such things, but was the affective practice itself.1 Put another way, my argument here is that certain feelings are aroused not, as it were, spontaneously, but rather because they are justified, and that the justification is realized rhetorically. This is about the power of words, where an invocation is also an evocation. Emotions – if we call them that – can be purposeful, situational and, in many instances, reasonable. For this reason I advise that we do not call them emotions at all. In some cases, as with Plutarch and Plato here, rhetorical practice is actually designed to evoke feeling at a distance, as it were, to look at and enter into an experience through its absence, in the rhetorical imagination. Again, I want to avoid giving the reader the impression that this chapter is about things called ‘anger’ or ‘disgust’, because this privileges a contemporary understanding that actually gets in the way of understanding the rhetorical passions that are here invoked.

Summoning Anger

Robert A. Kaster has shown the lengths one has to go to in avoiding casual translations of ancient ‘emotions’ into recognizably English ones. By reducing emotional experience to its lexical form and then translating it, we lose the whole drama of what it is/was to emote in context. An emotional process is ‘registered’ by a lexical reference – an emotion word – but also involves evaluation and response: the

emotion properly understood . . . is the whole process and all of its constituent elements, the little narrative or dramatic script that is acted out from the evaluative perception at its beginning to the various possible responses at the end. Subtract any element of the script, and the experience is fundamentally altered: without a response (even one instantly rejected or suppressed), there is only dispassionate evaluation of phenomena; without an evaluation (even one that does not register consciously), there is mere seizure of mind and body that is about nothing at all.2

It is precisely for the reason that much of this process tends to happen unconsciously or with instantaneous, or as if natural, responses, that I reject his allusions to acting or performing, though I fully endorse the tenor of his argument and completely agree with the notion of a cultural ‘script’. The thing is, cultural scripts are not like screenplays: people learn cultural scripts without necessarily knowing that they are part of what looks, only from the outside, like a drama; an actor learns a script fully intending to ‘read’ it as if naturally, but the process and the drama are always already telegraphed. Hence an emotional drama is more of an improvisation: the reading of scripts that everyone knows but which are invisible; the practice of culture as if it is nature; a dynamic set of interacting cognitive processes that seem unconscious.³

This insight has the potential to unlock one of the oldest mysteries of the classical period, concerning the way in which Thucydides deploys speeches. In his explanation in book 1 of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides notes that it ‘has been difficult to recall with strict accuracy the words actually spoken, both for me as regards that which I myself heard, and for those who from various other sources have brought me reports’. This has been lauded as a kind of scientific honesty: a confession that nevertheless demonstrates his intent to maintain accuracy and objectivity. But Thucydides provides a solution to the vagaries of memory by reference to cultural and rhetorical scripts. ‘Therefore the speeches are given in the language in which, as it seemed to me, the several speakers would express, on the subjects under consideration, the sentiments most befitting the occasion [emphasis added].’4 The Greek is more compelling even than the emphases I have added, suggesting that the speeches record what was needed (δέοντα – deonta) to have been said. The circumstances of encounter, which involved dynamics of power and culturally embedded demands for anger, fear, compliance and domination, meant that, rhetorically, procedurally and experientially, situations had to unfold in a certain way, according to an unwritten script that all parties nonetheless knew how to read, however unconsciously. The affective content of speeches was intertwined with, formative of, and at the same time representative of, what was being felt. Insofar as they utter ‘emotion’ words, they include also the emotive evaluation thereof, and encapsulate the responses thereto. In the Thucydidean exchange of rival speeches, we also see how such scripting is modulated and modified by debate.⁵

The particular speeches to which I want to draw attention here (3.37–49) are exemplary of things that needed to have been said. They concern the Athenian response to the revolt of the Mytileneans in 428 BCE.⁶ The city of Mytilene on Lesbos had been an ally of Athens, but which then sought to unite all of Lesbos in a revolt against Athenian power. The Athenian response to this challenge was to dispense with the Mytileneans according to the just anger of the betrayed, killing all of the male citizens and selling all of the women and children into slavery. Curiously, we learn of this decision, the result of speeches in the Assembly, without any speeches being recorded by Thucydides. All we know of the exchange is that there was a debate, ‘and in anger’ a determination to kill and enslave the Mytileneans. This ‘anger’ – ὀργή (orge) – had been encouraged both by the fact of the Mytileneans revolting even though they were not under the Athenian yoke, as other ‘allies’ were, and the fact that the revolt seemed to have been well planned, with the Peloponnesian fleet offering support. The revolt was a calculated affair, making the betrayal all the more complete.⁷

The passage, and the speeches that follow, have been well studied. It is worth pausing to reflect, however, on how an assembly can act ‘in anger’. It is perhaps conceivable that a debate can whip up anger in each individual, such that a decision is reflective of an anger held in common. Yet here the context seems to suggest that the anger was necessary given the provocation: not the provocation of one individual against another, but the actions of a city against another, more powerful one. It was the city – Athens – whose anger was justified, as represented by its citizens in the Assembly. Yet the next day, Thucydides tells us that the Athenians had a change of mind (μετάνοιά – metanoia), determining that their resolution had been ὠμός (omos).8 Figuratively, the word is usually translated as ‘cruel’, but it might just as easily be rendered ‘uncivilized’, for the recanting seems to have to do with the spirit of democracy, of the projection of Athenian values. It is just this that is attacked by Cleon, who demands that Athens return to its original decision.

Cleon reminds the Assembly that while Athens is a democracy, its empire depends on Athenian might, subjection, despotism. It has to be ruled with the fist, not with the niceties of democracy. Thus, according to Cleon, it can only hurt Athens if it waits until its anger is blunted before proceeding against an enemy.⁹ Anger is not a passionate accompaniment to debate that, in the cold light of the next day, can be recanted. Anger is the whole essence of the decision to punish, and punishments meted out in the heat of anger are justified by that anger. To revisit such punishments and decide, on reflection, that if it were not for the anger then the punishment might not have been so severe, is to miss the whole point of being wronged. Justice, according to Cleon, demands anger as integral to its administration. He calls on the Athenians to remember how they felt at having suffered (πάσχειν – paskhein) at the hands of the Mytileneans and to channel the resulting anger into the delivery of justice. He bids them not to soften or flinch (μαλακισθέντες – malakisthentes) at the distress of their enemy, nor show them pity.¹⁰

For all that Thucydides records what Cleon would have said, he nevertheless demonstrates, in the adjoining speech of Diodotus, that he should not have said it. A number of scholars have pointed out that Cleon speaks as if in court, persuading a trial judge to dispense justice, and mobilizing anger as the vehicle of that justice.¹¹ As Harris has documented, the summoning of anger in legal proceedings was an accepted and expected rhetorical device that rationalizes punishment. Cleon’s speech is the kind of speech that would be made in court. Injustice makes anger (remade in court by the reconstruction of the injustice before a judge), and justice is therefore appropriately measured by and through that anger.12 Yet Cleon is not in court, but in the Assembly, and as such his attempt to summon anger to the Athenians’ cause is out of place. For this reason, Cleon earns the ridicule of his culture by being caricatured in the plays of Aristophanes (c. 446–c. 386 BCE), specifically both Knights and Wasps, where the arousal of anger is his métier.¹³ We have to assume, given that Cleon claims to be recapitulating his own arguments from the original speeches that Thucydides does not record, that Cleon had initially succeeded in summoning the anger of the city by treating the Mytileneans’ rebellion as if they were being tried. The change of mind, therefore, comes not from pity, as Cleon charges, but on the basis of a point of order. It is, after all, explicitly a change of mind not a change of heart. Cleon’s words and actions are not the kinds of things that can be said and done in the Assembly. Anger is an anomaly in a place of reason. The anger was wrong.

Diodotus’ speech in response, therefore, is the kind of thing that would be said to someone who had abused the institution of democracy.¹⁴ Its purpose is not to argue against anger or in favour of pity, but to reject entirely the premise that such a forum was a place in which such passions could be evoked. He identified two things detrimental to decision making in the Assembly, namely haste and ὀργή (orge).¹⁵ In Diodotus’ speech, this word, which was ‘anger’ in Cleon’s speech, becomes ‘passion’ in most translations of Thucydides, and is coupled by Diodotus with ‘an undisciplined and shallow mind’. Here ‘mind’ is γνώμη (gnome) and could equally mean ‘opinion’ or ‘decision’, which in fact makes more sense in the context.¹⁶ Diodotus is directly condemning the opinion of Cleon because it is limited or narrowed by anger. This critique is then broadened as a warning to the Athenians: Cleon’s speech may appeal because of a shared anger at the Mytileneans.¹⁷ Again, in many translations the word for ‘anger’ (ὀργή – orge) is here translated as ‘temper’ or even embitterment. It seems to me a fundamental misdirection of the debate to change the terms of it in this way. Cleon summons anger; Diodotus waves it away. This is not a legal case, where anger would be relevant. In the Assembly the question of right and wrong, of justice, is immaterial and out of place. The only question is what is to be done that is most advantageous to the city, and in such work anger has no place. The attempt to create it, through rhetoric, corrupts the city’s decision-making abilities.

While Thucydides marks that the vote was close, it was Diodotus who prevailed. With this victory, a mitigated punishment was handed out (only a few more than 1,000 Mytileneans were killed).18 But we must also infer an affective outcome of the procedure of debating and showing hands. Since Diodotus rejected both anger and pity, and instead proposed only wise counsel in the city’s best interests, we must assume that the triumph of his rhetoric also diminished or even eliminated the anger of the Athenians. Remember Kaster’s dictum about emotion scripts: ‘Subtract any element of the script, and the experience is fundamentally altered.’ Diodotus fundamentally alters the experience of Athenian deliberation in two ways: first, he considers the ‘emotion’ words in the abstract, discussing the merits of their involvement in the debate; second, he denies the Assembly any chance to respond to the invocation of anger in angry terms. Without response, as Kaster remarks, there is merely dispassionate evaluation, which indeed is the whole point of Diodotus’ speech. It is a flip side to the Mytilenean debate that is seldom considered: if the power to summon anger through rhetorical means is granted, then presumably rhetoric also has the power to banish anger, or any other passion. How the city felt, with the city understood to be an aggregate feeling entity in its own right, depended on how the city deliberated. Passion control was a rational instrument of civic institutions.

In a Bloody Temper

The Mytilenean debate is remarkable for the way in which it disembodies passions, tying them up with procedure and rhetoric. Yet central to any history of feelings, sensations or emotions are epistemologies about the body’s role in affective behaviour. The experience of emotional life has always prompted philosophers and medical professionals (most often men) to theorize about what emotions or passions are, how they work, what they do to the body and how to control or treat them physiologically. Passions in particular were linked to pathology for centuries, with the dividing line between disease and distress being a modern contrivance. I include various strains of such theories in this book, sometimes implicitly, but my intention is not simply to provide an intellectual background. On the contrary, the intellectual history of what emotions, passions or affections are is an essential ingredient in discerning how those phenomena were experienced. For what we know about a thing influences what we do about and because of that thing. It influences how we reflect on that thing when it is happening to us. And it influences how others reflect on us, and how we reflect on others, when that thing is perceived to be happening to us or them. Institutions, policies and practices all emerge and are reinforced by what we know, and this puts a huge emphasis on systems of knowledge.

Of paramount importance, therefore, is to enter into the history of knowledge according to the terms of the contemporary knower.19 Those intellectual strands of the history of medicine and the history of science that construct teleological narratives showing how we got here from there, looking for the development of successful ideas that turned out to be correct, have to be jettisoned from the beginning. We are not interested, as historicists, in whether historical knowledge was accurate. We are only interested in the extent to which that knowledge was known to be true and beyond the status of belief. Systems of knowledge become essential ingredients in the building of historical contexts, so that practices relating to feeling can be understood.

There are perhaps few systems of knowledge that have had more traction and more influence than that of humoralism. Humoralism ought not to be understood as a theory of the emotions, for such would be a gross anachronism. Rather, it is a theory that encompasses the whole of the human, at the level of character and disposition, health and disease, feelings and fitness for life. It connected the fluids or moisture of the body with the natural elements of the environment, thereby situating the human in the world and the world in the human. It accounted for every kind of disorder, and the remedies to disorders were also defined by it.

Humoralism is ancient, being given formal medical implications by Hippocrates (460–370 BCE) and later receiving canonical treatment by Galen of Pergamon (130–210 CE).²⁰ The body’s humours (χυμός – khumos in Greek; hūmōrēs in Latin) comprise blood, phlegm, yellow bile (choler) and black bile (melancholy). The temperament of a person (from the Latin tempere, to mix) comes from the particular balance of humours in the body. Blood is moist and warm, like the spring. It relates to the element of air. Its predominance in the body makes for a sanguine temperament. Yellow bile is warm and dry, like the summer. It relates to the element of fire and makes for a choleric temperament. Black bile is dry and cold, like the autumn, and relates to the element of earth. It makes for a melancholic temperament. And phlegm is cold and moist, like the winter, and relates to the element of water. It makes for a phlegmatic temperament. The language of humoralism contains many a lexical false friend. Whatever we may currently mean by humour or temperament, or by those characterized as melancholic, phlegmatic, sanguine or choleric, will have to be ejected if we are to understand the meaning of disease and cure in ancient Rome. Doubtless, these categories are all familiar to contemporary speakers of English. We use them to denote what kind of emotional disposition a person has, or how their emotions are likely to manifest in certain situations. ‘Humour’ itself is perhaps the most commonly invoked: having a good or bad ‘sense of humour’ comes from this field. Young sportsmen whose ‘nerves’ get the better of them under pressure, causing them either to fail or to lash out, are said to lack the temperament required to win. We think of temperament as a quality, a thing in itself, which is immaterial. Yet, as with all these qualities, they are rooted in a definite material and substantial presence in the body. For more than 2,000 years humoralism defined both the affective character of individuals and races more broadly, as well as being the major factor in the definition of diseases. When the temperament became imbalanced, or was imbalanced by nature, medical treatment was aimed at restoring it. Essential to understanding this, however, is the ejection of a contemporary psychological understanding of the word ‘temperament’. Disposition, in humoral terms, is entirely physical, though it may manifest in what seem like moods, passions and so on. It is important to remember that, in the time of Hippocrates and, later, of Galen, to be diagnosed as ‘melancholic’ was to say something about the temperature and moistness of the blood (melancholics are cold and dry).21 What we have inherited, very loosely, as temperamental, was initially bodily, elemental, physical. Temperament was in the world.

Hippocrates made the connection of climate and temperament explicit in ‘On Airs, Waters, and Places’, noting, for example, that the Scythians had humid (ὑγρότητα – ugroteta, literally wetness) constitutions, for which reason they cauterized their ‘shoulders, arms, wrists, breasts, hip-joints, and loins’, in order to dry up their humidity through heat.22 The aim was to improve their physical prowess for hunting and war. Such a people were constitutionally lax, the men having a ‘softness and coldness’ of belly, which, combined with spending a life on horseback, dulled their sexual appetite. The women, meanwhile, were humid such that the womb malfunctioned, and their humidity also made them ‘indolent and fat’. In comparison, European races were said to vary according to the seasons due to the variable coagulation of the semen. Hence Europeans could be ‘wild’ and unsociable due to excitement of the mind, as well as passionate. For a ‘changeable climate’ induced ‘laborious exertions both of body and mind’, from which ‘courage’ was derived. Seasonal change made the Europeans more warlike, for physical changes caused by fluctuating temperature made the temper wild (ὀργὴν ἀγριοῦσθαί – orgen agriousthai) and senseless (ἀγνώμονος – agnomonos).²³

Since disease hinged on temperament, so its cure often depended on bleeding to restore balance. Consider Galen’s advice: ‘For those going about their normal activities, who have a sense of heaviness or of tension, either in one of the vital parts or in the whole body, evacuation [of blood] is necessary.’²⁴ I am particularly interested, in this dictum, in the affective experience of ‘a sense of heaviness’ or ‘tension’, for here as in many places the sign of a disease or disorder is indistinguishable from its affective experience. The Latin translator of Galen rendered it as gravatur tenditurve (weighed-down tension) and Galen’s Greek reads: βαρυνομένοις – barunomenois (literally being weighed down or depressed) ἤ τεινομένοις – e teinomenois (or stretched).²⁵ One may have a physical, humoral problem – a plethora of blood – but the sign of this is a sensation, a feeling. When afflicted with ‘crude humours’, the patient, in addition to ‘a leaden tint of the complexion’, will have ‘a sense of heaviness of the body . . . with mental sluggishness and a dulling of consciousness’.²⁶ Again, these are sensations, affective experiences, feelings, rooted in the body, and in stuff. The bloodletting, insofar as it is a physical cure for a physical problem, also inevitably alters the affective experience: one feels better.

What follows from the absolute dominance of such theories according to medical expertise is that the expectation of successful treatment must accord with an appreciation of the understanding of the problem. How one feels relates, on the one hand, to what one knows, and, on the other, to what one does about it. Bloodletting was not merely a medical cure, but an affective practice: a mode of altering one’s senses, one’s feelings, one’s mental state. For this reason, we ought to take bloodletting seriously as a medical practice that worked. Of course, such an assessment goes against the grain of medical history and current medical practice, for bloodletting has no currency in current medical training. Its existence is regarded as a marker of past ignorance, and of medical incompetence. At best, experts may say, it was a placebo.

It is precisely in its efficacy as a placebo that I become interested in it, and claim it as a valid area of inquiry for the history of emotions. In everyday parlance, placebo is understood as an effect of something that does not have any intrinsic medicinal qualities. It is used as a control to see whether new medications are effective and can be released to the market. The pharmaceutical industry is in a constant battle to outperform placebo.27 What do people commonly understand the placebo effect to be? A kind of self-delusion? A sign that there was nothing really wrong in the first place? A mysterious psychological phenomenon that has no explanation? I think some mixture of all three would be commonly enough reported, but this is despite a fascinating new research agenda that both takes placebo seriously and has determined to find out how it works, why it works and what makes the effect variable.

Rather wonderfully, for the purposes of the historian of the emotions, pharmaceutical companies are finding their task increasingly difficult. The placebo effect, especially in the United States, appears to be growing stronger, because of a variety of factors related to the anticipation of success. The atmosphere of the physical spaces in which clinical trials take place, as well as blanket coverage of advertisements promising amazing cures, has boosted expectations such that placebo has become more powerful. Some have even called for a redesign of controlled trials, with the introduction of a no-drug control, since the supposed placebo control has become so unreliable (and so high-performing). In part this is due to an apparent genetic variability in the neurotransmitter pathways that allow placebos to take effect, and to a distortion of the body’s endogenous systems caused by placebo–drug interactions.²⁸ In short, the existence of the body in the world, in culture, has demonstrably changed how the body responds to placebo. While placebo researchers try to tackle the implications of this for the pharmaceutical future, the historian is left to wonder about the endless possibilities for speculating on the kinds of placebo–drug interactions of the past, and of the level of the placebo effect in historical cultures. All kinds of factors emerge as tenable analgesics, from prayer in an age of piety, to strange brews and concoctions.

For people suffering pain, a context of reassurance is known to be something of a relief. ‘Rubbing it better’, taken literally or figuratively, in many cases, actually works.29 The electrical and chemical signals that go from a sore spot to the brain, and the cascading chemical and electrical response of the brain, can be modified by other signals – such as rubbing – that communicate control or safety and that lessen anxiety or fear. In any given time or context, a person will expect a certain response to the report of a problem, be it a reassuring phrase, a pill, a tonic or a touch. The power of this aspect of placebo lies in expectations being met. It does not matter what the palliative is, so long as the afflicted party believes it will work. The human body contains a powerful internal painkilling system, and much of the history of medicine has unwittingly involved a search for methods to recruit this system to do its job more efficiently. Whereas doctors for centuries and pharmaceutical companies more recently have tended to look at the intrinsic qualities of a drug or practice – trying to understand what it is about a particular chemical compound or procedure that numbs pain – recent placebo research has shown that often the efficacy of a drug lies in its ability to enhance what the human body does by itself. This is thought to be the power of paracetamol (acetaminophen), for example. It actually inhibits the extent to which the body can process an endogenous cannabinoid – an onboard painkiller – causing the body to produce a whole lot more of it in response. Anything that activates the human central nervous system to kill pain is an effective placebo.

In other words, there is a science of placebo that explains how expectation of success has physiological implications. What we do, according to what we know, will often work because we know it will. That the pharmaceutical effect is entirely endogenous – that is, it is part of the internal physiological functioning of the human organism – is irrelevant. For those feeling weighed down or tense in an era when bloodletting was best practice, chances are bloodletting would make them feel better. The fact that the placebo effect cannot be tied to an intrinsic quality of the method or medicine in question does not discount it from historical medical analysis. On the contrary, when we are looking at the placebo effect in the past, we are looking at the working of the historical body, at its biochemical intertwining with social and cultural practices. It is a subject of the history of feelings, or of neurohistory, par excellence.

The use of cups or leeches for bleeding is an ancient practice with global reach, and was a central part of Western medicine until well into the nineteenth century. Usually, cupping is thought of as a treatment for pain. The purpose was to draw blood to the surface of the skin by applying a cup and then creating a vacuum using heat in order to draw the skin (and therefore the blood) upwards into the cup. In wet cupping, this process was combined with bleeding, to release the excess blood at the site of the cupping. The cup would be applied to wherever the problem was perceived to lie, be it back or breast or knee. The use of leeches is mentioned by Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) in his Natural History as having a similar effect to the use of cupping glasses, ‘their effect being to relieve the body of superfluous blood’. Used once, he claims, and an individual tends to need to use them again annually. He reports that they also help with pain caused by gout.30

Every kind of pain gets a remedy in Pliny, and it should be remembered that in all cases the intended effect was physical. For phlegmoni – painful inflammation under the skin caused by blood stagnation – he prescribed pounded radishes.³¹ For headaches, the root of wild rue (Peganum harmala) should be applied topically with polenta. For a more serious headache it could be mixed with barley-meal and vinegar.³² If mixed with beaten polium (Teucrium polium) in rainwater, it was supposed to be effective against the venom of an asp.³³ Attaching dittander (Lepidium latifoliuim) to the arm will draw the pain of toothache to it, though pricking the gum with the root of mallow (Malva silvestris, perhaps) was also supposed to help.³⁴ Meanwhile, halimon (Atriplex halimus) was said to work against pain caused by sprains of the feet and affections of the bladder.³⁵ There are, in sum, dozens of remedies for pain and suffering in Pliny, drawn from medical knowledge and popular folk knowledge. It is not so much the point that, in some cases, there may have been an appropriate medicinal agent in the compounds he prescribed. For even though wild rue, for example, might actually have an intrinsic analgesic effect, my premise is that it would probably have indeed been more potent when applied with the barley-meal, or with the rainwater. The power of placebo in context should not be underrated as an affective modifier. Pain states, which are affective states – feeling states – par excellence, depended for their remedy on knowledge of what worked. It was part of what Javier Moscoso calls the ‘moral economy of hope’, which I would augment by reference to the historicity of the biocultural body-mind system.³⁶

Glass bleeding cup, Roman, 251–450 CE.

Blood and Gore: A Feast for the Eyes

Plutarch (46–120 CE) was a Roman citizen of Greek origin. A Platonist, he was a famous man in the empire, becoming a priest of Apollo in later life at Delphi. He is most famous for his works on the lives of the Roman emperors, on Parallel Lives (biographies of eminent Greeks and Romans) and for his Moralia. Within the Moralia are three essays nominally on animals, but cleverly constructed with human morality as their subject. The one that interests me here, in particular for the way it handles blood and guts, is On the Consumption of Flesh, or De esu carnium.37

Plutarch expresses a kind of dismay about the state of the soul of the man who first slaughtered an animal and put the dead flesh to his lips. He seems implicitly to be describing the historicity of disgust. It is to him a given, a commonplace, that to kill and eat an animal is horrifying, or else would take a great degree of steeling or hardness to pull off. Whereas in the person who did it first, Plutarch can only try to imagine the necessary absence of revulsion, which is indicative of a different kind of soul. The soul’s capacity to suffer passions is, by such reasoning, not fixed. Yet for all that the consumption of flesh appals Plutarch, he nevertheless espouses that its consumption is unshakeably customary, and that if animals should be eaten and then killed, then the act of slaughter must be framed as an affective practice, lest killing denote a brutal soul. He therefore recommends that animals are eaten because of hunger, not because of ‘wantonness’, and that they are killed with ‘sorrow and pity’, and not by ‘abusing and tormenting’. At least, such are the standard translations. But the Greek for ‘wantonness’ here is τρυφῶντες (trufontes), which refers to a somewhat luxurious and effeminate sumptuousness of living: decadence. This equates decadence, which we might normally associate with a certain refinement of feeling, with a wilful heartlessness. Moreover ‘sorrow and pity’, which are employed because they are idiomatic in English, are here translations of ἀλγοῦντες (oikteirontes kai algountes). The first word here denotes a kind of pity, but as David Konstan has explained, oiktos refers more often to the ‘expression of audible grief or lamentation rather than pity’, suggesting that the killing of animals be done through wails and tears.³⁸ Indeed, the second word here comes from algos – bodily pain – suggesting that the process of killing should cause the killer pain and anguish.

This accords with a general rule I have found for expressions of pain in antiquity, which conflates what we might be tempted to separate out into physical and emotional pain.³⁹ While contemporary pain science is busy joining the two back together, in the Greek and Roman worlds there is no physical pain that is not also suffering, and there is no suffering that is not somehow registered in the body as pain. Hence Plutarch, lamenting that animals will still be killed and eaten, recommends that humans share in the pain that is part of the process of consumption.

Yet for all that Plutarch seems to register his disgust (though he does not use any of the words typically associated with the English ‘disgust’), he strangely seems to delight in recounting the monstrous or frightening (τερατῶδες – teratodes) all the same.40 For his exhortation to kill and eat only with wails and pain is followed by a series of recipes for making meat taste better, listed in horror, but listed all the same:

some run red-hot spits through the bodies of swine, that by the tincture of the quenched iron the blood may be to that degree mortified, that it may sweeten and soften the flesh in its circulation; others jump and stamp upon the udders of sows that are ready to pig, that so they may trample into one mass (O Piacular Jupiter!) in the very pangs of delivery, blood, milk, and the corruption of the crushed and mangled young ones, and so eat the most inflamed part of the animal; others sew up the eyes of cranes and swans, and so shut them up in darkness to be fattened, and then souse up their flesh with certain monstrous mixtures and pickles.

This might be taken as an example of one essential dynamic of disgust as we know it, for that which is meant to repel also has an inescapable allure. There is nothing fixed about the objects of disgust, and no predictable responses to the sight of the disgusting. Disgust has to be made somehow, in order to be intelligible as disgusting. Plutarch seems to be constructing that which is disgusting by describing the consumption of meat in terms that make it strangely new. He compels us not to look away, but to look closely at what we consume, not as fine cuts and joints, but as dead flesh and sores, the product of slaughter. Plutarch marvels at the first man who ‘touched slaughter’ with his mouth, and who ‘set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts’, wondering how ‘his sight could endure the blood of slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies; how his smell could bear their scent; and how the very nastiness happened not to offend the taste, while it chewed the sores of others, and participated of the saps and juices of deadly wounds’. This is a radical reimagination of a feast, seeing stinking dead animals instead of food. It foregrounds a scene common to all and demands that it be looked at again in a raking and horrific light. In order to be horrified, and in order to be able to be disgusted and to turn away, one first has to come close, engage all the senses, comprehend the scene of death and defilement, reflect on one’s past experience of doing such things without thinking or without conscious contemplation of the frame in which the scene is now presented, and only then, turn away in disgust.

Yet I return to the nagging sense of disquiet I have that Plutarch does not refer to disgust (or what we are assuming to be the Greek correlates of disgust), σικχός – sikkhos, or ἀηδής – aedes. Are we reading Plutarch correctly when we read an account of disgust at the ghastly feast? The answer lies in whether we need the word for the experience or whether, in fact, the word blinds us into looking for an experience with which we are familiar, when the particularities might suggest something else entirely. Richard Firth-Godbehere has noted that contemporary neuroscientists tend to assume that disgust is both universal and automatic, not really an emotion but an affective state (like hunger). He has also noted that the meaning of the word has shades of difference in different languages. It is hard to maintain that x = universal when people disagree about the definition of x. Moreover, the very disagreements themselves do something to the experience of x that connects the experience to the specific word choice. When x = disgust, Firth-Godbehere points out, then x = a particularly nauseating impulse to turn away. When x = Ekel, the standard German correlate of ‘disgust’, there ‘is no gag reflex’. It is more neutrally an aversion. He points out that it ‘may be that a sensation of revulsion is an evolved trait that is felt by all, and that all cultures have words that relate to that trait’, but ‘it is not the case that this can always be understood through the lens of modern English disgust’.41 Furthermore, even if there is some automatic revulsion state, the objects that elicit that response are by no means fixed. What people find disgusting has been shown to vary enormously from culture to culture and across time. Looking through the lens of the history of emotions and to findings about iterations of other emotions in the past, it makes sense to say that whatever revulsion experience a person has, the experience of it is directly and fundamentally intertwined with the meaning of the specific thing that elicited it, in context. To say that this ‘evolved trait’ is shared by all is, in fact, to say very little about what it is, or what it is like to experience it.

I have challenged that kind of universalizing tendency in the past, pointing out the neurohistorian Daniel Lord Smail’s mistake in calling disgust a universal, while at the same time documenting cultural change:

Starting with a known concept of ‘disgust’, usually in English, the physiological and gestural signs of this concept are mapped onto people of other cultures who, when representing similar physiological signs and expression, are said to be ‘disgusted’, even if the local concept in question is worthy of a rich conceptual analysis of its own and does not bear any contextual or experiential resemblance to ‘normative’ representations of disgust in anglophone contexts. To concede that social emotions ‘do different things in different historical cultures’ makes it meaningless, even an obfuscation, to say that, ‘disgust’ is nevertheless ‘universal’, irrespective of its different contexts, signs and experiences. To quip, ‘Same disgust, different object’, as Smail does, is to impose a preferred and a priori conceptual definition on a physiological process that does not, in fact, need to be defined by the label of its associated emotional experience in some cultures. Bare physiology does not carry any meaning.42

On the contrary, I pointed out, a different object must mean a different disgust, with a different name, a different set of consequences, a different form of interaction with the world and the things in it. The examples of ‘disgust’ I am particularly fascinated by in the ancient world seem not to be commensurate with ‘disgust’ in contemporary English terms. In a way, it is just as well that Greek ‘disgust’ words are missing in Plutarch’s account of the consumption of flesh, for if they were there they might make it all the easier to label them ‘disgust’ and move on.

The challenge, then, is to reconstruct the affective experience in the source without privileging a contemporary one. In the case of Plutarch, the revulsion he feels at the engagement of the senses in the processes of killing and of eating flesh is situated in a Pythagorean cosmology. What makes it monstrous? When I first read Plutarch on the consumption of flesh, I assumed that the appeal was to a general aversion to blood and gore. This turns out to be a superficial reading. The context is of the risk, given a Pythagorean belief in the transmigration of souls, that in killing and eating animals one is consuming that which belonged to a human, perhaps even a friend or a relative. Why, Plutarch asks, would you risk it? Even if you do not believe in the transmigration of souls, if you at least admit of the possibility then surely the gamble is too great. The monstrousness of the feast is in the imaginary that all these dead bodies are human, or at least that the bodies had contained the transmigrated souls of once-were-humans. The scene becomes horrific. Plutarch needs us to look closely at it, to scrutinize it carefully, in order for us perchance to see it the way he does, as a kind of cannibalism at one stage of remove. His whole point is that killing and eating animals, even in the most elaborately excruciating procedures, is not at all repulsive to most people. People who eat flesh are inured by custom to anything untoward in any of its processes. It is hard to argue with people’s stomachs, Plutarch says, for bellies do not have ears. And in general, he says, consumption of flesh depends upon an emergence of a habituation to killing – a certain bloodthirst (μιαιφονίας – miaifonias). While he is implicitly condemnatory of such things, he is also resigned that the inertia of custom is irresistible. Bellies are blameless. Again, what he is describing is a form of desire, not revulsion. Insofar as he is trying to point to the possibility of revulsion, he has to actually provide a context for a new construction of horror. To succeed, we have to desire to see this too.

In English translation it is easy to conflate Plutarch’s text with an aversion to cruelty, and indeed most translations include the Plutarchian exclamation, ‘Oh horrible cruelty!’, but the exclamation does not make sense as a concern for either animals themselves or as a concern about human behaviour in the abstract. In my reading, the line ὠμότητος δεινὸν (omotetos deinon) does not mean ‘horrible cruelty’, but rather something like ‘fearful rawness’, wherein a certain savage disposition is figuratively aligned with uncooked meat. It is a pun. Nineteenth- and twentieth-century translators can hardly be blamed for choosing to overlook the apparent lexical overlap here, since aversion to cruelty to animals has, since the nineteenth century, been a particularly popular public cause. Here, however, Plutarch is recoiling both from dead flesh and the rich people whose tables bespeak refinement, but whose souls are crude. Some of these people happen to be Stoics, whose dietetics seem to him at odds with their general principles of control. The rest are Epicureans, whom Plutarch is known to reject out of hand. His wonder at the first man to put gore to his lips can be understood in similar terms. Most translations have Plutarch ask something like ‘why did the pollution not offend his taste?’, but here ‘pollution’ is μολυσμὸς (molusmos) – defilement – which singles out what is happening to the eater, as well as what has happened to the body of the eaten. His tirade against the consumption of flesh, which relies so much on rhetorically confronting the senses – confronting them in the imagination of the reader – with blood, shrieking death and stinking gore, is therefore a philosophical and political vehicle, and at the same time an expression of a firm conviction about the immortality of the soul. As such, it is a piece ultimately that beckons rather than repulses, for if it is to persuade it depends upon a close examination of the flesh and the eaters of flesh from his point of view. If, in translation, the mode is disgust, it is because it is difficult to grasp the spiritual affective disposition he takes up. In conclusion, the Greek word for ‘disgust’ is not present because disgust is not the response Plutarch is going for. When we give in to the temptation to read for disgust, we will surely find it, but we will not understand.

The problem, that when one looks for disgust one inevitably finds it, even if technically it is not disgust, leaches into even the best studies of disgust in history. In The Ancient Emotion of Disgust, edited by Donald Lateiner and Dimos Spatharas, for example, there is a clear and worthy purpose to try to explicate ancient concepts that pertain to disgust in their particular historical and lexical contexts. Contemporary definitions of disgust are shown to be limited in their usefulness for historical study and also historical products in their own right. Yet, despite all this, such a work sets out to look for disgust, to mark out how ancient iterations and experiences of it relate to or differ from contemporary English disgust. All care and attention to historicity notwithstanding, the teleology of such a study is in the end irresistible. Ultimately, the lens used for looking at disgust in the past is a new one. By situating an inquiry within the framework of a contemporary category we are always dancing perilously close to anachronism.43 Consider, for example, the observation that ‘Affect responses to loathsome creatures or substances gather in the expressive face. One usually averts the face from a disgust-eliciting source.’44 Here, and throughout, is an unshakeable assumption that some things are simply and intrinsically ‘loathsome’, and that the reaction to such things is, at it were, built-in, with the built-in-ness revealing itself on the timeless face. Here the editors append a note: ‘Drive-by gawkers at automobile accidents and fatalities deliver a rule-proving exception, but perhaps the facts that passers-by are insulated by their cars and that only a quick glimpse is possible buffers their curiosity. See Socrates’ Leontius below.’⁴⁵ This is a stunning piece of subtextual sleight of hand, as well as an astonishing intellectual leap between the contemporary ambulance chaser and a character in Plato’s Republic. In the interest of showing how wrong this is, and in light of what I have said about Plutarch, I will pursue both ends of this linkage at once.

Francisco de Goya, ‘One Can’t Look’, plate 26 from The Disasters of War, c. 1810–20, etching and drypoint.

There is no substance to the claim that drivers who slow to look at an accident are an exception to rules about disgust that in fact proves rules about disgust. The throwaway explanation – that they are somehow shielded by their cars – simply will not do. Susan Sontag, in Regarding the Pain of Others, took a completely different view on this subject. The mutilated bodies of other people are, in her estimation, profane. We look at them precisely because we know we are not supposed to. Taboos conflate powerful forces of attraction and proscription. Those proscriptions define the guilt that comes with giving in to the desire to see that which is supposed to disgust. In Sontag’s opinion, drivers slow to look at accidents because they genuinely desire ‘to see something gruesome’. There is nothing about it that is particular to being inside a car. In my own foot-powered peregrinations around Montreal I have often come across large gatherings of people, craning to see a mangled cyclist or unlucky pedestrian. The phrase ‘I cannot look’ often accompanies the act of looking, as if body and mind are in opposition. Think of Francisco de Goya’s depictions of The Disasters of War (1810–20), and in particular plate 26, of an unseen firing squad (unseen save for the ends of gun barrels and fixed bayonets) at the moment the bullets hit the men, women and children. Goya inscribed the image with the words ‘No se puede mirar’ (one cannot look), yet clearly he looked, and remembered, and in putting the work on paper he made the image, precisely so that it could be looked at. Not being able to look is a dynamic part of the act of looking. Moreover, there is, however much we might wish to deny this in public, a pleasure in it. As I pointed out in Pain: A Very Short Introduction:

Disgust at the aesthetics of pain, and the fear aroused by putting oneself in the place of the sufferer, ought to drive us from the scene. But disgust and fear, insofar as they are visually inspired, demand to be looked at. How else are we to know what disgusts or frightens us? Thus we are rooted, enquiring, but also enjoying the pain of others.46

It is a complex admixture of delight and distress – the sublime, perhaps – that might inspire us to helpful action, but it might also simply have us whisper to ourselves that we are glad it is not happening to us. In Sontag’s estimation, our indifference to most images that should disgust us is guaranteed by the massive amount of exposure we have, through television and other media, to war, to pain, to injury. Our eyes have cataracts when looking at mangled bodies that should inspire revulsion and/or sympathy. The argument – about the rise of indifference – is hardly new. I will say much more about it in Chapter Five. But it does demonstrate that disgust is complex. It cannot be reduced either to the objects that inspire it, or to the facial and bodily signs of it. It will not fit into a timeless schema of revulsion or nausea.

Let us look at the dead bodies in front of Leontius, that car-crash analogy put forward by Lateiner and Spatharas. Let us look with Socrates at this gruesome feast for the eyes and the difficulties of understanding ancient desire. In the translation of Plato’s Republic that I have read most often – the text with which I have taught – the passage in question (439e–440a) reads as follows:

Leontius, the son of Aglaeon, was on his way up to town from the Piraeus. As he was walking below the north wall, on the outside, he saw the public executioner with some dead bodies lying beside him. He wanted to look at the bodies, but at the same time he felt disgust and held himself back. For a time he struggled, and covered his eyes. Then desire got the better of him. He rushed over to where the bodies were, and forced his eyes wide open, saying ‘There you are, curse you. Have a really good look. Isn’t it a lovely sight?’47

The passage occurs as part of a discussion of how the soul is divided between the rational, the spirited and the desiring. Socrates uses the example to show how anger (ὀργὴν – orgen) allies with reason to wage war on the desires. It occurs ‘whenever people are forced into doing things by their desires against the advice of their reason – when they curse themselves, and are furious with the bit of them which forces them to do these things. It’s as if there’s a civil war going on inside someone like this, with spirit acting as an ally of reason’. The formulation of Leontius can therefore be rendered thus: reason says, do not look at dead bodies, turn away; desire says, look at dead bodies; spirit angrily chastises the whole self for having given in to desire. If this is accurate, and I do not see any great dispute about this, then the reference to disgust seems odd, out of place, and difficult to reconcile with the divisions of the soul as presented. After all, the part of Leontius that has him want to recoil is his reason, which is set at odds with his desire to see. In the Greek, he is said to be ‘at the same time desirous [ἐπιθυμοῖ – epithumoi] to see and unable to endure [δυσχεραίνοι – duskherainoi], turning himself away’. The word here that gets translated as disgust is δυσχεραίνοι (duskherainoi), which might denote a kind of distress, but which I give here as ‘unable to endure’. In the way the argument is set up by Socrates, the part of Leontius that cannot endure and turns away is reasonable, not part of his thumos, or spirit. Something like ‘emotion’ only arises when his spirit is activated in anger against his desire to see dead bodies. He is struggling, at war with himself, yes, but the struggle is between reason and desire.

What this tells us is that there is a cultural script running for Leontius that proscribes the desire to gawk at the dead. It is unreasonable to do so. Yet the desire is too strong and wins out. The expression, of himself to himself, of that cultural script manifests in anger. There is, in short, no disgust in this scene at all, let alone a ‘paradox of disgust’ as Lateiner and Spatharas put it. While there are countless contemporary examples of a paradox of disgust, where in our own terms we feel the tension of an emotional pull towards at the same time as an emotional push away, to reduce what is happening to Leontius to the vagaries of disgust is misleading. Having contextually eliminated disgust from the discussion here, we are left instead with the questions of why it was unreasonable to look at dead bodies in the first place, and why anyone might desire to see them.48

Plenty of ink has been spilt on these questions, and it seems to be something of a philological sport to find interesting pathologies and perversions to apply to Leontius.⁴⁹ In this case, this seems to be overstriving. As Carolyn Korsmeyer has pointed out,

Leontius is not presented as a person of unusual disposition; he is just a man walking home. The discomfort of the divided soul filled with conflicting desires is a phenomenon Plato expects us to recognize readily . . . [W]hat draws him to the corpses is just the grisly sight itself . . . There is no greater purpose that the sight of the bodies serves; Leontius is attracted to something that is just plain nasty.⁵⁰

This seems right to me. We do want to look at dead bodies. It is not more difficult to conceive of than gawking at a car crash, or, as in medieval and early modern Europe, attending a scene of capital punishment. Then, as now, we might fight with ourselves over our wish to see the grisly, but whereas we might think about the complexities of our experience of disgust, Plato wanted us to think about the way the soul is divided, and the way in which reason, spirit and appetite interrelate. The history of emotions is nothing if we arrogate to ignore the experience being described by Plato (through the character of Socrates) and favour instead a contemporary neurobiological reading of disgust. It matters that Leontius’ soul is torn. It matters that his affective experience is understood, by himself and by the assembled interlocutors in Plato’s dialogue, as anger at his own desires, and that the experience is carried out in the mode of self-admonishment. The struggle for mastery of one’s desires defines the Platonic corpus, the ethics of Aristotle, and thereafter both Platonic and Stoic schools of philosophy. We have to take Leontius’ experience, as it is recounted, at face value.

To round out this discussion, let us return to what is happening at the level of rhetoric here. Leontius only exists for us as a Socratic anecdote, part of a conversation recorded by a fourth party (assuming Socrates to be the third, and Plato the fourth). What is fascinating about such a passage is that it both visualizes a scene for us, into which we can readily enter, and tells us not merely how Leontius felt, but how we also should feel. It tells us how we too are managing our response to the sight of dead bodies. The justification for including a story about dead bodies, as opposed to a more quotidian desire like hunger, is that we cannot seem to avoid seeing those bodies too. The mere mention of them, and the description of where they were and who was there (the executioner), means that we have also seen them. They are called to mind by the power of rhetoric, but in the context of a discussion about control. Indeed, reason is master in this rhetorical invocation of desire, such that the desire is satisfied without debasing the rational soul. We safely look at the dead bodies without becoming angry. It is a wonderful paradox, not of disgust, but of the power of an image, or sight. In our mind’s eye we safely and dispassionately look at Leontius looking at dead bodies and at him becoming angry at himself. And in so doing, we feel nothing at all. As such, the dialogue itself becomes the rhetorical vehicle of control – the platform for the master of reason in the soul – that is at the heart of the Republic. In diminishing affect to the point of undetectability, it is an affective practice par excellence.

Sense, Sin and the Fear that Endures Forever

Augustine (354–430 CE) knew the heart of one who would look on dead bodies, ripped up ones at that. We can infer from his Confessions that he had looked at them, and that he knew it as a pleasure (voluptatis). The celebrated Church Father, theologian and philosopher exercised a dominant influence on the nature of Christianity. From his bishopric of Hippo Regius (now Annaba, Algeria), he wrote prolifically. For historians of emotions he has proven enormously influential, for his modifications of Cicero (106–43 BCE) provided a working model for the conceptual range of affective life in the Middle Ages.51

For Augustine, pleasure and curiosity were ‘functions of physical sensation’ (agatur per sensus).⁵² What appears to be a craving for knowledge or understanding is actually a desire to know the physical world by means of the senses, and through the eyes in particular (and through the metaphor of seeing when talking about the actions of the other senses).⁵³ Curiosity (curiositas) craved (libidine) experience and understanding, which explained the ‘inherent pleasure in looking at a rent corpse (laniato cadavere)’, even though it ‘makes you shudder (quod exhorreas)’. After all, he observed, if there happens to be a mangled body

lying there, people flock to it to be appalled, to turn pale. Then they are afraid that they will see the corpse in their sleep, as if someone had forced them to look at it when they were awake, or some rumour had convinced them that it was a beautiful sight . . . Monstrous sights are paraded in public shows to pander to this disease of desire (morbo cupiditatis).⁵⁴

It seems that Augustine was rather taken by morbid spectacles, with curiosity challenging the singular focus of his heart on a daily basis. In particular, he confesses to being rapt by a hound’s pursuit of a hare in the field; he is equally absorbed by the sight of a lizard catching flies, or of a spider consuming its prey in its web. His life, he confessed, was ‘full of such moments’, and his ‘only hope’ (spes) was the ‘overwhelming mercy’ (misericordia) of God. Such sights were his heart’s desire and it was his eyes’ propensity to seek for them. Unless intercepted and turned to reflection, they were the cause of vanity.⁵⁵ So what scope was there in Augustine’s philosophy and theology for the affective life? Was all feeling a pull towards sin, towards flesh, and away from God?

Augustine’s affective language is generally translated into the language of ‘emotions’, but it loses its clarity in the bargain, as we see in a reappraisal of the ninth part of book fourteen of The City of God.56 Augustine directly impugned Cicero, for the movement (arousal, perhaps) (motus) and feeling (affectus) he describes are derived from the love of the good (amore boni) and from holy charity (sancta caritate). To call them vices (vitia) is to be categorically confused. To call them diseases (morbos) or vicious passions (vitiosas passiones), as Cicero did, is to overlook the fact that the feelings followed right reason (rectam rationem) when they were appropriately expressed.⁵⁷ Indeed, to be without bodily feeling, or without bodily pain, would come at a great cost: monstrousness of soul (inmanitatis in animo) and numbness, or unfeelingness, of body (stuporis in corpore).⁵⁸ The body is an inescapable part of being human, and its feelings are inherent. Here, drawing a parallel with Cicero, who made an obscure translation of pathos as disease, Augustine translates the Greek ἀπάθεια (apatheia) as inpassibilitas, and says that it would be a ‘good and extremely desirable state’ only as it applies to the soul and not to the body. If it were to mean living ‘without those feelings (affectionibus vivatur) that are contrary to reason and disturb the mind’⁵⁹ then so much the better. This would hardly be an everyday feeling of ‘apathy’, but rather an existential and essential equanimity. It was clear that, in the present state of humanity – that is, in the world of flesh and sin – such an apathy at the level of the soul was impossible and undesirable.⁶⁰

If (some) human bodily feelings and, importantly, their expression were really virtuous, which ones counted, and in what way were they virtuous? Only those disturbances of the soul (perturbationibus animi) and feelings (affectus) that are ‘right’ (rectos) are to be found in the lives of the righteous (vita iustorum). Those ‘citizens of the holy City of God’, so long as they ‘live in God’s fashion’, will rightly feel ‘fear, desire, pain, joy’ (metuunt cupiuntque, dolent gaudentque).⁶¹ Augustine is directly quoting Virgil’s Aeneid (6.733), who in turn is said to have been summarizing the four principal perturbationes of Cicero: voluptas (pleasure), cupiditas (desire), aegritudo (sorrow) and metus (fear).⁶² Yet whereas Augustine otherwise condemns desire and fear, here they are re-treated so as to come together as living in the manner of God.63

To be sure, Augustine provides scriptural examples for Christians to experience each of the four categories of feeling, but he reserves distinct meanings for compounds of fear and desire that seem paradoxically to make certain feelings derived from their opposites, a construction that makes sense only in the context of a belief in God and in original sin. Citing the Apostle Paul’s fear (timor) that the Corinthians might succumb to the Devil, Augustine claims that this fear is ‘felt by love and can only be felt by love’ (Hunc enim timorem habet caritas, immo non habet nisi caritas). This is ‘true fear’ (timor vero) and, he forecasts, it will ‘endure forever’. This fear does not lead to flight from possible evil, but keeps a man ‘in a good that cannot be lost’. When sin is kept in mind it is feared so that it may be avoided, and this kind of fear, Augustine says, is securus: fearless! This kind of fear is an act of will (voluntas) – it is, in a sense, desired, for to refuse to sin and to guard against sin are the result of desiring those things. They are desired without concern (sollicitudine) that we may succumb to sin, but rather with a calmness (tranquillitate) that comes from love. Hence the conjunction of fear and desire is clarified and defined as an awareness of the inescapability of sin, the fear of this, the desire to avoid this, in the context that all this derives from the love of God and from God’s love. Hence the phrase, ‘The holy fear of God that lasts forever’ (Timor Domini castus permanens in saeculum saeculi). Its reward is endless blessed joy (perpetuorum feliciumque gaudiorum) in the hereafter.⁶⁴

From here, a second compound, pain–joy, is explained, for Augustine connects the above dictum with another: ‘The patience of the poor shall not perish forever’ (Patientia pauperum non peribit in aeternum). Patience as a virtue will sound familiar to contemporary ears, but its origins are in the word patior – to suffer – which also gives us passio. Patience implies the presence of pain, sorrow or grief that is endured (hence, in medical parlance, the ‘patient’). The reward of patience in a world of evils is also everlasting joy. Pain itself is therefore virtuous. Since it is God-given, it is a sign of God’s love – a theological position that was maintained as far as the twentieth century – and therefore a reason for, in fact a source of, joy.⁶⁵

Ultimately, Augustine’s approach to the passions and feelings is to wrest them away from those who would casually intellectualize or disembody them, putting them in purely rhetorical categories that have no bearing on the experience of sinners and believers. By connecting a theory of passions with the lived reality of the passions, Augustine united rhetoric and bodily experience. Humans are crude, physical, fleshly beings. That they feel is inevitable. By rhetorically guiding that feeling in the way of God, Augustine was not merely shaping the words of experience, but the character and the meaning of experience itself.66

Here the analysis chimes with the rhetorical evocations we have seen in Thucydides, with the power of naming a medicine or medical practice to improve one’s health, and with the rhetorical beckoning of Plutarch to conjure up an image of the mangled flesh. Words, once in the world, are embodied. That body is itself subject to rhetorical and discursive knowledge of what a body is or was, and of what it is or was comprised, both in terms of its material stuff and its immaterial essence. In sum, these episodes conjure up a history of feelings that bundles together body, soul, mind, words and world into a single script. If we were to extract any one of these elements and treat them separately we would be led astray.