## 1. History of emotion in Christianity


### 1.1. Emotions in the New Testament



For theologians and Christian thinkers, the New Testament, read
against the background of the Hebrew Bible, is in some sense
authoritative. So it is the place to begin a discussion of emotions in
the Christian tradition. The New Testament features, in varying
degrees of prominence, a number of attitudinal phenomena that in
modern parlance would be called emotions and the practices in which
emotions are expressed: joy and rejoicing, gratitude and thanksgiving,
remorse (grief) or regret and repentance, compassion, anger, fear,
sorrow, envy, pride, shame, contempt, and others. Instances of these
attitudinal phenomena vary in how theology-laden they are, and in this
sense vary as to whether they count as "religious"
emotions.



Perhaps the most prominent of these attitudinal phenomena is joy
(*chairein*, *chara*, and to a much lesser extent
*agalliasthai*, *agalliasis*). It is especially
prominent in the writings of the apostle Paul, who includes joy in his
list of the "fruit of the [Holy] Spirit" in Galatians 5:22-3.
The idea seems to be that when joy is a fruit of the Spirit, it is
about what God has done, God's identity or attributes, or the
believer's relation to God. That is, the "content" of the joy is a
theological belief. Strikingly, the object of joy sometimes includes
suffering. For example, the Acts of the Apostles (chapter 5) reports
that the apostles had been gaining a considerable following in
Jerusalem and the high priest reacted by throwing them in prison.
They escaped, and the next day they were back preaching and teaching.
The authorities picked them up again and warned them to stop their
public activities, but the apostles were defiant, saying that God had
ordered them to do this. So they were flogged and again admonished to
cease their activities. "As [the apostles] left the council, they
rejoiced (*chairontes*) that they were considered worthy
to suffer dishonor for the sake of the name [of Jesus]" (Acts 5:41;
New Revised Standard Version; hereafter all New Testament quotations
are from this translation. See also Romans 5:3 and Colossians 1:24).
These instances of joy are thoroughly theological, for the believer's
joy is about his or her service to and identification with Jesus, the
Son of God.



In the following passage, Paul rejoices about somebody *else's*
suffering, though not maliciously, but out of love for the sufferer.
"Now I rejoice (*chairo*), not because you were grieved
(*elupethete*), but because your grief
(*lupe*) led to repentance (*metanoian*); for you
felt a godly grief (*elupethete gar kata theon*), so
that you were not harmed in any way by us. For godly grief (*kata
theon lupe*) produces a repentance that leads to salvation
and brings no regret (*ametameleton*), but worldly grief
(*tou kosmou lupe*) produces death. [For discussion of
emotions belonging to the family of regret, remorse, and repentance,
see Bash 2019).] For see what earnestness this godly grief has
produced in you, what eagerness to clear yourselves, what indignation,
what alarm, what longing, what zeal, what punishment! At every point
you have proved yourselves guiltless in this matter" (II Corinthians
7:9-11). Here Paul the pastor rejoices over the Corinthians'
sorrow, not simply because of their emotional pain, but because of the
*character* of their pain -- that it was about something
genuinely lamentable (some inappropriate attitude or action of theirs,
considered in the light of God's will). This grief was not a harm to
the Corinthians, but an expression of their spiritual health and
wellbeing. This sorrow is something to rejoice about, because it was a
good thing for them and for the whole church. This might be an example
of a joy that is a fruit of the Holy Spirit, a joy that
betokens harmony of mind with the mind of God. So Paul's joy, as well
as the Corinthians' grief, is heavily theology-laden: both emotions
are situational construals that incorporate Christian beliefs.



Consider now an episode of joy that is attributed to a Christian in
the New Testament, but which may be more mundane, or even "secular."
King Herod is persecuting the church and has the apostle Peter
thrown in prison and kept under heavy guard. But, the night before
Herod is planning to bring Peter out of prison and encourage something
bad to happen to him, Peter escapes miraculously and goes to a house
where members of the church are meeting and fervently praying for
Peter. "When he knocked at the outer gate, a maid named Rhoda came to
answer. On recognizing Peter's voice, she was so overjoyed that
(*apo tes charas*), instead of opening the gate, she ran
in and announced that Peter was standing at the gate" (Acts
12:13-14). How theology-laden is Rhoda's joy? I think that will
depend on the depth of Rhoda's catechesis. In any case, it is probably
shallower than Paul's. It is possible that Rhoda is simply caught up
in the church's enthusiasm to get Peter back and is a beneficiary of
emotional contagion. It is also possible that, given that she has just
stepped out of a meeting heavy into prayer for Peter's rescue, Rhoda
is at the moment theologically primed to construe the situation in
Christian terms. And it is also possible that Rhoda's joy arises from
a deep piety -- a thorough-going personal integration of the
Christian vision of God's purposes -- that she rejoices
spontaneously out of these character-resources, and that her joy is
specifically gratitude to God.



And last, consider a joy which, if theology-laden, is, according to
the New Testament, laden with bad theology. Judas Iscariot has
conceived the wish to betray Jesus to the hostile authorities.
"[Judas] went away and conferred with the chief priests and officers
of the temple police about how he might betray [Jesus] to them. They
were greatly pleased (*echaresan*) and agreed to give him
money" (Luke 22:4-5). Perhaps the religious authorities, like
some crazed terrorists, thought they were doing the will of God in
getting Jesus judicially murdered. In that case, their joy was
theology-laden and thus religious. But Mark's Gospel (15:10) comments
that Pilate knew that it was out of envy (*phthonos*) that the
religious authorities wanted to be rid of Jesus. If this is right,
then their joy at Judas's offer was not religious at all, but
motivated by a vicious secular defensiveness of their own power
and glory.



Joy is a paradigmatic emotion in the New Testament, and the New
Testament is the originary document of Christianity. A thorough
treatment of emotions in the New Testament would take several other
emotion-types into consideration, and go much deeper into joy than we
have done here. But this brief treatment of joy should serve our
purposes in this article.


### 1.2 Passions, affections, and emotions



Is 'emotion' the right term for the experiences under
consideration? In Thomas Dixon's well-known study (2003) of the
history of the concept of emotion, he argues that the term
'emotion' was coined in the early 19th century, by
psychologists impressed with physics, as a secular replacement for the
morally, religiously, and metaphysically freighted distinction between
'passion' and 'affection.' In the older
Christian psychology (which still had distinguished representatives in
the late 19th century), the phenomena that we call emotions were
called passions and affections, these two categories being
distinguished from one another. Aquinas is a paradigm thinker in this
psychology of "emotions." Passions (*passiones*)
are feeling-responses such as humans share with animals, responses to
bodily and sensory occurrences (e.g. sense perceptions of danger, of
food, of sexual opportunity). They are marked by visceral commotion
and are associated with moral temptation or turpitude. Affections
(*affectiones*), by contrast, are generated not in the sensory
appetite, but in the will or intellectual appetite, a psychological
capacity peculiar to human beings. Human beings share
*affectiones* not with the animals, but with higher beings such
as angels and God. Passions, however, are not always sinful, and a
passion can be transformed into an affection if the person feeling it
endorses it by an act of the will or intellectual appetite. Dixon
argues that 'emotion' was coined by physiological
psychologists Thomas Brown, Herbert Spencer, and Alexander Bain. It
was later adopted by William James (1884), though his work on
religious experience (1901-02) was more phenomenological and less
focused on physical causation. In "What Is An Emotion"
(1884) James famously proposed that an emotion is just an awareness of
a bodily perturbation that is directly produced by objects (for
example, a large bear advancing toward you on a lonely path). In
psychology even today 'emotion' tends to have this
physicalist connotation and is less discriminating than the earlier
vocabulary of passions and affections, with its openness to spiritual
"emotions." Rather than call the briefly sketched biblical
responses of joy and so forth emotions, would it not be more
discriminating and less confusing to follow the earlier Christian
vocabulary and call them affections? If gratitude can succeed, as
religious people think it can, in being to God, and if Paul's joy can
be about the moral status of the Corinthians' remorse, then they
seem clearly not to be simple responses to physical or
sensory stimuli. Indeed, most human emotions fail to
qualify as emotions in the original historical sense of the word. The
kind that does plausibly qualify -- "the startle response"
(see Robinson 1995) -- is only controversially an emotion in
our ordinary sense of the word. Our ordinary sense is very far from
its historical origin as Dixon has traced it. Dixon is right that
'emotion' blurs the distinction that 'passion'
and 'affection' once embodied. But arguably that
distinction is well lost. Fears marked by strong physiological
commotion can be evoked by objects inaccessible to animals without an
intellect, for example, a fall in the stock market. And it seems to
take more than the mere sensory "stimulus" of a large bear
coming toward me on a lonely path to arouse fear. For example, I may
recognize her as my pet, and her rapid advance as her enthusiasm in
greeting me. Nor is the moral dividing line between passions and
affections valid. Passions may be morally beautiful (for example, a
woman's erotically tinged joy upon seeing her husband after an
absence) and affections despicable (the cool cruel joy of humiliating
a colleague as you dismantle his pet argument). The very indifference
of the concept of emotion to whether the object is simple or
intellectually complex, sensory or not, whether accompanied or not by
bodily perturbations, and whether it merits moral evaluation or not,
seems to recommend it in preference to the older vocabulary.
Gratitude, contrition, compassion, joy, hope, and all the other
religious emotions fit quite commodiously in the category of
emotion.


## 2. Essentialism in the conception of religious emotions



Essentialism in the conception of religious emotions is the view that
there is some universal religious emotion -- an emotion or
emotion-like affection that is the single universal essence of all
religious experiences, and the feature that makes them
properly religious.



In the first section of this article, we have assumed diversity among
the types of emotion that might be called "religious." Joy,
compassion, remorse, and so forth, are different
emotion types. The unity we find among them, in
contradistinction from "secular" emotions, is their theological
reference or "content." Insofar as they are distinctively Christian,
they all draw on Christian doctrine. Yet they pick from that body of
doctrine different bits and deploy them to different purposes.
The terms in which the believer construes the object of
compassion will differ from the terms in which, when she feels
gratitude to God, she construes herself, a benefit, and God.
Indeed, what differentiates one emotion type from another seems to
*be* the terms of the construal.



Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768-1834) was a Christian theologian,
but he sought to understand the essence of religion in general, of
which Christianity was presumably an instance. He held that the
essence of religion is piety and that piety consists in the feeling of
absolute dependence. What is the feeling of absolute dependence, and
how is it related to more specific religious emotions?



Feeling is "immediate" self-consciousness as contrasted
with "that consciousness of self which is more like an objective
consciousness, being a representation of oneself, and thus mediated by
self-contemplation" (*The Christian Faith*, SS3.2).
For Schleiermacher 'immediate' contrasts with
'analytic'; he seems to have in mind something like what
people mean when they say that feelings are
'non-cognitive': that they precede and cannot be captured
in articulate thought. Joy, he says, is a genuine state of feeling,
but self-approval "belong[s] to the objective consciousness of
self" (*ibid*.). One might feel joy without knowing why,
but presumably self-approval requires that one have reasons; thus the
former is immediate, the latter analytic.



Schleiermacher says that at a certain stage of cultural and individual
development all human beings have two feelings (states of
self-consciousness) with respect to *the world*: the feeling of
freedom and the feeling of dependence. The feeling of freedom
corresponds to *Activity*, and is the feeling of being
effective with respect to changes in the world. This will include
not only bringing about physical changes (say, digging a hole in the
earth) but also perceiving things (perceiving is a sort of activity
with respect to the thing perceived) and thinking about them. By
contrast, the feeling of dependence corresponds to
*Receptivity* and is the feeling of being acted upon by things
in the world (say, being affected by the food one eats or helped by
fellow human beings). *Vis-a-vis* the world and the
things in the world, people always have a mixture of the feeling of
freedom and the feeling of dependence. One never has a feeling of
absolute (unqualified, *schlechthinig*) freedom with respect to
anything, for no matter how active one is with respect to it, there
will always be an element of receptivity or dependence on it or some
aspect of it or something closely associated with it.



The same is true of dependence, as far as the relation to things in
*the world* is concerned. You are never purely or absolutely
dependent on things in the world. If, for example, you were completely
paralyzed but still conscious, you would be very dependent, but
presumably could still focus your attention or this or that thing on
which you were dependent, and to that extent would engage in free
activity and have the corresponding feeling. It is another matter,
however, if your thought ventures beyond the world. If you think, not
of anything *in* the world, but of the world *as a
whole* (including yourself as part of the world) and then think
what is beyond that, then the feeling you have with respect to that
absolute Beyond is absolute "dependence," in the sense of being
conscious of having no power with respect to it, being utterly unable
to affect it (even by perceiving or thinking it). On this account, the
object of the feeling of absolute dependence is what is utterly beyond
the world or universe, regarded as everything that exists, and it is
the feeling of your own impotence with respect to that
"object."



Our natural cognitive equipment suffices to bring about the feeling of
absolute dependence. It requires only the idea that existing things
have causes and the idea of all existing things taken together. From
this we get the idea of God as the cause of all that is. But then
we think, if God exists, then God is *part* of all that is, and
the urge for a causal explanation recurs: where did God come from?
Theists put a stop to this line of thought by declaring that God has
necessary existence, and so God, unlike everything else, doesn't need
to be caused. But the very question has projected the mind beyond the
whole of what exists, to the radical other side of being,
and that other side is not only absolutely uninflenceable, it is
not even thinkable. And so the feeling generated by this thought is
the feeling of absolute dependence.



How is the feeling of absolute dependence related to episodes of the
particular religious emotion-types, such as joy, gratitude, hope,
contrition, compassion, and sorrow? The short answer is that for
Schleiermacher the feeling of absolute dependence is the essentially
religious element in these emotions (see *ibid*.,
SS5.4-5). Without that element, no emotion would be
religious. The feeling of absolute dependence is, in itself, not about
events taking place in the world; it is about what is beyond
everything that exists, so its "object" is completely
unchanging. The particular religious emotions, by contrast, are
responses, some pleasant and some unpleasant, to changes in the finite
or sensible self-consciousness. Gratitude, for example, is a response
to a particular kind of situation in which the subject is the
recipient of some benefit; contrition is a response to a situation in
which the subject has committed some fault; and so forth. In a more
traditional theology, the difference between gratitude to a kind
neighbor for a benefit and religious gratitude would be that in the
latter case the subject is grateful *to God* for the benefit.
The subject would causally attribute the benefit to God. Similarly,
the difference between feeling guilty for having lied to one's
neighbor and religious contrition would be that the subject would
think of his fault as having offended *God*. Something like
this idea is behind Schleiermacher's claim that the feeling of
absolute dependence is the religious element in every religious
emotion. However, he certainly does not think of the Beyond as
actually supplying worldly benefits to people, or as being actually
offended when they perform nasty actions. This would bring the Beyond
smack into the world and thus destroy the feeling of absolute
dependence. Schleiermacher does not give a careful account of the
relation between the feeling of absolute dependence and the particular
emotions, but just says that the feeling "unites with a sensibly
determined self-consciousness, and thus becomes an emotion
(*Erregung*)..." (*ibid*., SS5.5). I
offer the following as a possible clarification, using the example of
gratitude: some impressive good befalls me, and I recognize it as
such. This recognition is an empirically ascertainable consciousness
of myself, thus a "sensibly determined
self-consciousness." Then, in conjunction with this sensibly
determined consciousness of being "moved" with gratitude,
I have the feeling of absolute dependence; and thus my ordinary
gratitude becomes religious, or in traditional terms I am moved with
gratitude to God.



One might think that *mood* would be a better category than
*emotion* for interpreting Schleiermacher's comments about the
feeling (*Gefuhl*) of absolute dependence. (On the
differences between emotion and mood, see Beedie, Terry, and Lane,
2005.) Feeling is a broader category than emotion. Both moods and
emotions can be felt, and the diffuseness of the feeling of absolute
dependence might be thought to warrant this change of category.
Furthermore, we might see in this change an opportunity to explain
better the relation between the feeling of absolute dependence and the
particular religious emotions. Moods, it seems, predispose emotions:
if you're irritable, you're more likely to get angry upon being
insulted; if you're cheerful, you're more likely to feel joy upon
being told good news; and so forth. And this, we might think, is due
to the fact that the particular emotions not only are predisposed by
moods, but themselves embody moods: joy is cheerful, sorrow is
depressed, anger is irritable, and so forth. Similarly, if you're
feeling absolutely dependent, you're more likely to feel
*religiously* contrite, joyful, grateful, and so forth, and
each of these particular emotion types embodies the feeling of
absolute dependence. This is perhaps a useful suggestion, inasmuch as
Schleiermacher takes the feeling of absolute dependence to be implicit
in all religious emotions. One objection to assimilating the feeling
of absolute dependence to mood would be that
intentionality seems to be a feature of emotions that
distinguishes them from moods, and Schleiermacher clearly specifies
the intentionality of the feeling of absolute dependence.



The feeling of absolute dependence, conceived as Schleiermacher
conceives it, presents him with several problems that he does not seem
to resolve. 1) Despite his claim that the feeling is
"immediate" in the sense of non-cognitive, we have just
given a quite cognitive account of the feeling. It seems to depend on
a particular way of thinking about the world and what is beyond the
world. Both world and agent need to be thought of in terms of effect
and receptivity to effect; and then the Beyond needs to be conceived
in analogy and contrast with this aspect of the world, in its relation
to the agent (subject of the feeling). A person who did not engage in
this process of thought, at least covertly or subconsciously, would
never get to the feeling of absolute dependence as Schleiermacher
describes it. 2) Schleiermacher is a Christian theologian and thinks
he has given an account of the most basic experience of God. But any
God who existed would be part of the "world" on
Schleiermacher's conception and thus could not be the object of the
feeling of absolute dependence. Furthermore, the God of Christian
tradition is not utterly incapable of being affected by human beings.
God responds to states of the world with actions and emotions, and
hears and answers prayer. 3) Absolutizing the dependency relationship
in the way that Schleiermacher does seems to evacuate
'dependency' of its usual meaning. The "other"
towards which one feels absolutely "dependent" in
Schleiermacher's conception must be predicateless to protect it
against any influence (in particular, epistemic contact) from the side
of the world; but that move eliminates any positive sense in which we
depend on it. Absolute dependence in the object comes to equal
absolute incapability of being affected, and the feeling of absolute
dependence amounts to a feeling of complete lack of effective agency
*vis-a-vis* the other -- that is, it becomes a
purely negative conception. So the feeling of absolute dependence
might better be called the feeling of absolute impotence.



A prominent representative of the essentialist thinking about
religious emotion of which Schleiermacher seems to be the
originator is Rudolf Otto in *The Idea of the Holy*
(published 1923). The feeling basic to religion is that of the
numinous, of the *mysterium tremendum et fascinans* (roughly,
"the mysterious presence of the wholly other that inspires awe
and devotion"). "There is no religion in which it does not
live as the real innermost core, and without it no religion would be
worthy of the name" (p. 6). This feeling is not in itself
ethical; it is not, for example, the feeling of being in the presence
of a moral judge or command-giver. Thus religion is not just a kind of
ethics, as Kant tended to think. The numinous feeling is "a
unique original feeling-response, which can be in itself ethically
neutral and claims consideration in its own right"
(*ibid*.). The feeling bears some resemblance to, but also
differs from, a sense of dread, of horror, of the uncanny, the eerie,
the weird; it also corresponds to a kind of "wrath" of the
divine, a divine demeanor that has about it something incalculable and
arbitrary, a kind of unpredictable majestic overpowering fearsomeness.
However, one can have a feeling of the *mysterium* that is not
fear-like; a feeling not of *tremor*, but of *stupor*.
"Stupor is plainly a different thing from tremor; it signifies
blank wonder, an astonishment that strikes us dumb, amazement
absolute" (p. 26).



Otto does not attempt to give us a straightforward grammar of the
numinous feeling, and says in fact that this cannot be done. Instead,
he approaches it by comparing it with other experiences and trying out
various terms that might approach to it in meaning, without exactly
getting it; then the idea is that the reader will find the feeling
among his own experiences, and thus be informed. Otto chides
Schleiermacher for making the feeling of absolute dependence a mode of
self-consciousness and for leaving the non-subjective object of the
feeling uncharacterized (p. 10). Contrary to Schleiermacher, Otto says
the concept of causation is absent from the most basic feeling.
"The point from which speculation starts is not a
'consciousness of absolute dependence' -- of myself
as a result and effect of a divine cause -- for that would in
point of fact lead to insistence upon the reality of the self [which
on Otto's construction virtually disappears in the confrontation with
the *mysterium tremendum*]; it starts from a consciousness of
the absolute superiority or supremacy of a power other than myself,
and it is only as it falls back upon ontological terms to achieve its
end -- terms generally borrowed from natural science -- that
that element of the *tremendum*, originally apprehended as
'plenitude of power', becomes transmuted into
'plenitude of being'" (p. 21).



We can see two tendencies in Otto's thought: his striving to make the
numinous feeling *sui generis*, to protect it from
encroachments of other spheres such as ethics and science; and his
striving to make it do justice to the variety of the emotions that
actually occur in religious life. These tendencies are hard to combine
in a consistent account, especially if the supposed encroachments of
the "other spheres" are actually native to the religion
whose emotions are being examined. For example, Christianity is a
religion whose theology is an ethics, an ethics of justice,
truthfulness, compassion for the poor and suffering, and of mutual
love in the community. In the ideal case, the emotions that are
generated from thinking, caring, and acting by the standards of
Christian theology are emotions that express ethical character.



Commenting on the kind of essentialism about religious experience that
Schleiermacher and Otto represent, William James says:



> 
> Consider ... the 'religious sentiment' which we see
> referred to in so many books, as if it were a single sort of mental
> entity. In the psychologies and in the philosophies of religion, we
> find the authors attempting to specify just what entity it is. One man
> allies it to the feeling of dependence; one makes it a derivative from
> fear; others connect it with the sexual life; others still identify it
> with the feeling of the infinite; and so on. Such different ways of
> conceiving it ought of themselves to arouse doubt as to whether it
> possibly can be one specific thing; and the moment we are willing to
> treat the term 'religious sentiment' as a collective name
> for the many sentiments which religious objects may arouse in
> alternation, we see that it probably contains nothing whatever of a
> psychologically specific nature. There is religious fear, religious
> love, religious joy, and so forth. But religious love is only man's
> natural emotion of love directed to a religious object; religious fear
> is only the ordinary fear of commerce, so to speak, the common quaking
> of the human breast, in so far as the notion of divine retribution may
> arouse it; religious awe is the same organic thrill which we feel in a
> forest at twilight, or in a mountain gorge; only this time it comes
> over us at the thought of our supernatural relations; and similarly of
> all the various sentiments which may be called into play in the lives
> of religious persons. As concrete states of mind, made up of a feeling
> plus a specific sort of object, religious emotions of course are
> psychic entities distinguishable from other concrete emotions; but
> there is no ground of assuming a simply abstract 'religious
> emotion' to exist as a distinct elementary mental affection by
> itself, present in every religious experience without exception
> (*The Varieties of Religious Experience*, Lecture II, p. 46).
> 



James here assimilates religious emotions to emotions more generally,
and eschews the project of trying to identify some particular
emotion-type to which every instance of religious emotion belongs and
which makes it religious. But a few pages later (p. 49) he
"arbitrarily" for purposes of his exposition says that
religion is the feelings, acts, and experiences of individuals when
they apprehend themselves to be in the presence of the divine.
Supposing that diversity among conceptions of the divine will engender
diversity among emotional experiences of the divine, and the diversity
among types of emotions will reflect differences in ways experiences
of the divine bear on the diverse situations of life, the Jamesian
picture seems compatible with our brief exposition of emotions in the
New Testament at the beginning of this article.



A question can be raised whether the famous Jamesian theory of
emotions, referred to in this quotation, is the best account for
understanding religious emotions. That theory holds that the emotion
itself is a "quaking of the human breast" or an
"organic thrill," where such physiological perturbations
are caused (aroused) by "objects." The cause of the
quaking may be a bear approaching on the forest path, or it may be the
thought of divine retribution. The quaking is religious just in case
it is caused by a divine object -- or at least a thought
thereof.


## 3. Some Christian emotions



Christianity is the religion with which Otto and Schleiermacher are
most deeply concerned. Christian theology ascribes to God a variety of
attributes, both attributed qualities and attributed actions. These
attributes determine the type-identities of the believer's diverse
emotions by providing, in turn, the various considerations to which
the emotions are diverse responses. Let us look at some examples.


### 3.1 Gratitude



We may begin with the emotion that is perhaps closest to
Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute dependence, that of gratitude.
The grateful person willingly, even gladly, acknowledges his
indebtedness to -- dependency on -- a benefactor. The
central sentence from the General Thanksgiving in the *Book of
Common Prayer* is,



> 
> We bless thee for our creation, preservation, and all the blessings of
> this life; but above all, for thine inestimable love in the redemption
> of the world by our Lord Jesus Christ; for the means of grace, and for
> the hope of glory (p. 19).
> 



The attributes of God that especially come into play in the emotion of
gratitude are God's creation and providence for our present life and
God's work of redeeming us from sin in the life, death, and
resurrection of Jesus Christ. It is true that in this standard
Christian gratitude the believer does not feel "absolutely
dependent" in Schleiermacher's peculiar sense of that phrase; as
we have seen, the feeling of absolute dependence does not allow for
God to have *any* positive attributes. But the believer
certainly does feel *very* dependent on God in the ordinary
sense of 'dependent.' She construes her own existence as
having not been, had God not willed and worked it. In so feeling, the
believer attributes causality to God as the creator, preserver, and
redeemer of the believer's life; and this concept of causality is not
"borrowed from natural science," as Otto suggests, but
antedates natural science by several millennia. It is a concept of
causation that is embedded in the Jewish-Christian tradition. (Notice
that gratitude, as a construal of what God has done for *us*,
also has the Schleiermacherian property of self-consciousness.) The
thought of these attributes of God and of God's relation to the
grateful party seems to be more than a Jamesian trigger or stimulus of
some physiological perturbation in the body of the believer. It seems
better to think of it as a *consideration* that "speaks" to the
believer's concerns about the good things in her life and about the
attitude of God toward the believer that those blessings express. No
mention is made of physiological perturbation, nor does the "feeling"
of such figure prominently in the typical believer's experience. The
thought seems to be internal to the emotional experience in a way that
thought cannot be internal to a physiological sensation.


### 3.2 Contrition



Next, consider contrition. Again, we can get a good idea of the
qualities and actions that this emotion attributes to God by
considering a prayer from the *Book of Common Prayer* (in this
emotion, much of what the believer attributes she attributes to
herself; however, attributes of God, such as God's holiness and
status as judge, and God's redeeming action, are essential posits of
the believer's construal):



> 
> Almighty God, Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, Maker of all things,
> Judge of all men; we acknowledge and bewail our manifold sins and
> wickedness, which we, from time to time, most grievously have
> committed, by thought, word, and deed, against thy Divine Majesty,
> provoking most justly thy wrath and indignation against us. We do
> earnestly repent, and are heartily sorry for these our misdoings; the
> remembrance of them is grievous unto us; the burden of them is
> intolerable. Have mercy upon us, have mercy upon us, most merciful
> Father; For thy Son our Lord Jesus Christ's sake, forgive us all that
> is past... (p. 73).
> 



This emotion again fits very well Schleiermacher's characterization of
religious emotion as a "self-consciousness," but it is at
the same time, as Otto suggests, a consciousness of a God who has
definite, positive features. Salient in the consciousness of the
contrite person are her misdoings and her sullied moral status before
the divine judge. Contrary to Otto's isolation of religious experience
from ethics, in contrition God is thought of as an eminently moral
figure. But if we take this prayer as canonical for the emotion, then
both the notion of God as creator (opening sentence) and Otto's
privileged attribute of the divine majesty are also in the believer's
construal of God, though they seem to be less salient than the
attribute of moral judge. Another attribute that is very much in the
content of Christian contrition is God's mercy. Thus a serenity and
honesty about the grievousness and intolerable burden of sin are
characteristic of contrition that are not characteristic of a plain
feeling of guilt. The contrite believer feels herself, in her sin, to
be welcomed and embraced by a loving and forgiving God, a merciful
Father.


### 3.3 Compassion



The following prayer was composed by Mother Teresa of Calcutta for
daily use in her Home for the Dying:



> 
> Dearest Lord, may I see you today and every day in the person of your
> sick, and while nursing them, minister to you.
> 
> 
> Though you hide yourself behind the unattractive disguise of the
> irritable, the exacting, the unreasonable, may I still recognize you,
> and say:
> 
> 
> 
> "Jesus, my patient, how sweet it is to serve you."
> 
> 
> 
> Lord, give me this seeing faith, then my work will never be
> monotonous. I will ever find joy in humoring the fancies and
> gratifying the wishes of all poor sufferers.
> 
> 
> 
> O beloved sick, how doubly dear you are to me, when you personify
> Christ; and what a privilege is mine to be allowed to tend you.
> 
> 
> 
> Sweetest Lord, make me appreciative of the dignity of my high
> vocation, and its many responsibilities. Never permit me to disgrace
> it by giving way to coldness, unkindness, or impatience.
> 
> 
> 
> And O God, while you are Jesus, my patient, deign also to be to me a
> patient Jesus, bearing with my faults, looking only to my intention,
> which is to love and serve you in the person of each of your sick.
> 
> 
> 
> Lord, increase my faith, bless my efforts and work, now and for
> evermore. Amen.
> 
> 
> 



Note the prevalence in this prayer of "cognitive"
metaphors in the description (prescription) of the moral emotion of
compassion: 'see,' 'recognize,'
'appreciate.' In compassion the primary focus is on the
sufferer -- someone who is in trouble and in need of help. But as
Mother Teresa expresses the emotion in this prayer, it is very much a
religious emotion because of the *way* in which the sufferer is
seen. She sees Christ in the sufferer, and in doing so takes herself
to be seeing something true about the sufferer, a truth that risks
being obscured by the outward repulsiveness, both sensory and
behavioral, of many of those to whom she ministered.



The religious character and distinctiveness of Christian compassion
can be brought out by comparing it with an emotion that we might call
tragic compassion, since it is central to the ethos and teaching of
the Greek tragedians. Aristotle neatly summarizes the grammar of this
compassion:



> 
> Let compassion then be a kind of pain excited by the sight of evil,
> deadly or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, an evil
> which one might expect to come upon oneself or one of one's friends,
> and when it seems near. For it is evident that one who is likely to
> feel pity must be such as to think that he, or one of his friends, is
> liable to suffer some evil... (*The Art of Rhetoric*
> 1385b).
> 



Aristotle analyses tragic compassion as involving three propositions,
so to speak: (1) the sufferer's suffering is serious; (2) the sufferer
does not deserve his suffering; 3) the sufferer's suffering is of a
kind that could well touch me [the subject of the emotion] too (Martha
Nussbaum devotes Part II of her *Upheavals of Thought* to this
emotion-type). We might say that compassion is a construal of the
situation -- the sufferer, his suffering, the etiology of the
suffering, and the emotional subject's own condition compared with
that of the sufferer -- in terms of these three formal
propositions.



Perhaps the most obvious difference between tragic compassion and
Mother Teresa's is the fact that the latter involves the proposition
*the sufferer is a type (brother, sister, beloved) of Christ*.
This has the implication that Christian compassion is not primarily a
"kind of pain." It is uncomfortable certainly, and the
subject of this compassion is moved to alleviate the suffering as she
can; but it is also a joy, and the work is "sweet," and
the poor sufferers are "doubly dear" -- dear on their
own account and on Christ's. Mother Teresa expresses an almost erotic
enthusiasm for the people she serves, and it is because she loves
Christ above all. The prayer exudes not just compassion, but also
gratitude and devotion, and the compassion derives its character in
part from these other emotions, which in turn have their character
because of the belief-system in which Mother Teresa lives.



An equally significant departure from the grammar of tragic compassion
is the denial of the necessity of proposition 2) *the sufferer does
not deserve his suffering*. This denial comes out in one of the
paradigm texts for Christian compassion, the Parable of the Prodigal
Son in Luke 15.11-32. The younger of two sons asks his father
for his share of the inheritance ahead of time, and the son takes the
money and goes abroad where he "squander[s] his property in
loose living" (vs. 13). When the money is depleted a famine
descends on his country of residence, and he is destitute. He gets a
job feeding pigs, and is miserable and hungry. He has the bright idea
of returning to his father in the role of a common laborer on the home
farm.



> 
> And he arose and came to his father. But while he was yet at a
> distance, his father saw him and had compassion
> (*esplanchnisthe*), and ran and embraced him and kissed
> him. And the son said to him, "Father, I have sinned against
> heaven and before you; I am no longer worthy to be called your son;
> treat me as one of your hired servants." But the father said to
> his servants, "Bring quickly the best robe, and put it on him;
> and put a ring on his hand, and shoes on his feet; and bring the
> fatted calf and kill it, and let us eat and make merry; for this my
> son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found."
> And they began to make merry (vss 20-24).
> 



The father can hardly be ignorant of the proposition *my son
deserves this suffering that he has brought on himself*; and the
son himself dins the proposition into his father's head. But the
father's compassion is unaffected by the knowledge. The father in the
parable is of course God, whose nature as gracious and forgiving is
indicated in the parable. So Mother Teresa, unlike the characters in
the Greek tragedies, is not interested in the question whether the
sufferer brought his woes on himself through his choices. It is this
gracious and forgiving God whose Son Mother Teresa sees and loves in
each of her poor sufferers.



As to the third proposition, the Christian would no doubt generally
acknowledge it, but it seems to figure differently in Christian than
in tragic compassion. It does not seem to be a major consideration in
Mother Teresa's compassion that the same thing might happen to her as
has happened to her poor sufferers. The difference turns on the phrase
"might happen." It is part of Mother Teresa's spiritual
discipline -- her self-cultivation in the Christian emotions
-- that she deliberately puts herself, as much as practicable, in
the position of those she ministers to. Early in her ministry she had
to be *persuaded* to provide herself and her fellow nuns a bit
more food than the average Calcutta street person consumed, so as to
maintain her health well enough to continue her ministry. In this
aspiration to identify with sufferers she imitates Christ, who lowered
himself to the status of a servant and died the death of a criminal,
out of compassion for humanity. In the nervous "it might happen
to me too" of tragic compassion there is an aloofness from the
sufferer and his suffering that is absent in the most paradigmatic
exemplars of Christian compassion.



Christian compassion, like contrition and gratitude, does have an
element faintly reminiscent of Schleiermacher's feeling of absolute
dependence. And again, it comes from the gratitude that is in the near
vicinity of compassion. Unlike the subject of tragic compassion, the
subject of Christian compassion construes herself as having been first
the object of God's compassion. One might say that Mother Teresa's
compassion towards poor sufferers springs from her gratitude to Christ
for his compassion towards her and all humankind. But the reminiscence
is only faint. Gratitude is not what Schleiermacher calls the feeling
of absolute dependence. Indeed, the feeling of absolute dependence
does not seem to be the essence of any of the Christian emotions.
Rudolf Otto's stress on fear (*tremor*) or blank wonder
(*stupor*) also seems not to express the essence of Christian
compassion. Christian doctrine does teach that God is fearsome and
wonderful, but other attributes of God are much more to the fore in
the emotion of compassion: God's fatherly nurturing tenderness and
forgiveness, his long-suffering love. William James's critique of the
essentialist tendency in the religious philosophy of the emotions
seems on target: God has a variety of attributes, and these are
reflected in a variety of emotion-types, none of which has any more
claim than the others to constitute the essence of religious emotion.
The diverse emotion types have in common that their grammar makes
reference to God, but the attributes of God that they cite vary with
the emotion types.



Otto states that the response to the *mysterium tremendum* is
not necessarily moral and explains this by saying that the emotion
does not necessarily posit God as a moral judge or law-giver. But
compassion does seem to be necessarily moral, though it is true that
the idea of God as judge or law-giver is not particularly in the
picture. The moral attribute of God that is quite directly posited by
the emotion is that of mercy or compassion. The sufferer is construed
as one with whom Christ has identified and for whom Christ has
suffered. The other two emotions that we have looked at are also
essentially moral: contrition is a construal of oneself as morally at
fault and spoiled, and here the idea of God as judge is involved; and
gratitude, as a construal of oneself as indebted for a gift, has
reference to a kind of justice (though it is clearly not standard
retributive justice [see Roberts 2004]).


## 4. Are religious emotions "cognitive"?



Both Schleiermacher and Otto hold that the most basic religious
emotions are unsusceptible of propositional definition. Yet both
theologians specify, in propositions, the object of the religious
emotion in question. Our accounts of gratitude, contrition, and
compassion have likewise treated the emotions as having a
propositional structure, one deriving from the teachings of the
Christian tradition. Let us think for a moment about the sense in
which these emotions are and are not propositional. The Christian
emotions are given their distinctive character by their doctrinal
content: The three cited prayers expressive of the distinctively
Christian emotions all trade on propositional beliefs of the kind that
the Christian community routinely teaches its members in catechesis.
The situation of the emotional subject is then seen (felt) in terms of
the teaching; for example, the sufferer on whom the subject has
compassion is seen as one for whom Christ died; the object of
gratitude is seen as a gift from the hand of God; and so forth. The
particular character of each religious emotion-type would be
impossible apart from this doctrinal content. This is the sense in
which the Christian emotions are propositional. But still, the
emotions themselves escape reduction to their propositional content
because emotions are a sort of concern-based *impression* or
*perception* or *construal* of the situation in these
terms. Emotions transcend propositionality in the same way that any
actual perception (e.g. visual perception) does. A Rembrandt painting
can be truly characterized in many propositions, and in individual
cases some of the propositions may need to be made explicit as a
condition for seeing some things that are in the painting. But no
amount of discourse or discursive thought about the content of the
painting is a substitute for *seeing* the painting. This
immediate acquaintance with the canvas is analogous to the actual
having of the emotion (religious or otherwise). (For more on the view
of emotions taken here, see Roberts 2013, chapters 3-5; for an
excellent discussion of the relationship between religious feelings
and religious doctrines, see Wynn, 2004, especially chapter 5. For
more, and more extended, accounts of particular religious emotions,
see Roberts 2007.) So religious emotions are no less propositional
than other standard adult human emotions; and like the other emotions,
they cannot be reduced to their propositional content.



When James says that the religious emotions are just like all other
emotions in being "made up of a feeling plus a specific sort of
object," the specific sort of object is just the situational
object specified in propositional terms such as the examples in this
article have illustrated. But the peculiarity of the Jamesian theory
comes in the reference to "a feeling." The feeling he
refers to (1884) is a bodily sensation, which he takes to be the
element that makes the mental state into an *emotion*, and is a
"quaking of the human breast," an "organic
thrill," or the like. This account of affect seems to many
to fail to capture the meaning that the object has for the subject
- meaning that is conveyed through the emotion. Schleiermacher,
with his talk of feeling dependent, and Otto, with his talk of awesome
mystery, are closer to capturing the kind of affect in question. A
sensation of quaking or a contraction of the gut are not the same kind
of thing as the sense that the sufferer before one is a brother for
whom Christ died, or that one's sins are an intolerable burden. There
may indeed be organic thrill or quaking, but if so, such sensations
are incorporated into a perception of personal meaning wrought by the
subject's caring about the object.



Jesse Prinz (2004) tries to introduce correct intentionality into the
Jamesian idea that emotional experience is awareness of a gut reaction
by making the gut reaction indicate the instantiation of a "core
relational theme". The notion of a core relational theme, which
originates with Richard S. Lazarus (1993), is the idea of a way that
benefit or harm is mediated to the emotional subject from the
environment. Lazarus gives a list of 15 core relational themes (see
1993 p. 122), among which are *a demeaning offense against me and
mine* (anger), *facing uncertain*, *existential threat*
(anxiety), and *having failed to live up to an ego-ideal*
(shame). Such themes seem to be types of events or states of affairs
that impinge on some concern of the subject. Prinz envisions the
sequence that characterizes an emotion episode as follows: An
eliciting event triggers a thought (say, Aaron tells me that my real
father is not the man I have taken him all my life to be, but the
Fuller brush man who used to visit the house; which triggers a
characteristic reaction in my gut; which triggers my perception of the
reaction in my gut; which I read as indicating a core relational
theme, namely, *a demeaning offense against me and mine*; which
triggers my socking Aaron in the jaw. But why would the identification
of my father with the Fuller brush man trigger that reaction in my gut
(which is characteristic of anger), unless I already heard it as a
demeaning offense against me and mine? Prinz's construction seems to
misplace the gut reaction in the emotional process. The gut reaction
seems, rather, to *presuppose* some emotional awareness of the
core relational theme, which gives rise to the gut reaction (for
discussion, see Roberts 2013, 73-75).



Mark Wynn (2013, 27-33) points out that in James's
discussion of religious emotion, it is not the gut reaction that is
primarily felt, but a sensory awareness of "the world"
under a certain description. In other words, religious feelings are
instances of what Peter Goldie (2000) calls
"feeling-towards". And in still other words, the James
of *The Varieties of Religious Experience* isn't a
Jamesian in the standard sense. As Wynn points out, it doesn't
follow from religious emotions' not being primarily gut
reactions that gut reactions are not involved in their phenomenology;
but their involvement would be in the nature of a feedback loop or
integrated non-focal awareness. I would also add that, while gut
sensations are frequently included in the phenomenology of emotions,
they may not be necessary or universal. James himself, in a
postscript to his 1884 article, cites the case of a 15-year-old
shoemaker's apprentice who, being entirely without bodily
sensations (though otherwise aware of the world around him),
nevertheless exhibited shame, grief, fear, and anger, as his situation
warranted. In acknowledgment of the possibility of emotions without
bodily sensations, the Jamesian neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1994)
posits the existence of an "as-if" bodily feedback loop in
the brain to provide for the "somatic markers" required,
on the theory, by emotions.


## 5. The importance of religious emotions



The foregoing helps us to answer the question about the importance of
religious emotions. Aristotle points out that the character virtues
are dispositions of the appetitive (desiring, caring) part of the soul
as shaped by *logos* (see *Nicomachean Ethics*, Book
One, Chapter 13). The three Christian emotions used as examples in
this article are episodes that arise out of dispositions of caring
shaped by beliefs (each of the emotion-types gives its name to a
Christian virtue). The episodes are important, from the viewpoint of
the Christian tradition, because they express a character that is
attuned to the way things are: to our nature as creatures, to God's
nature as God, to the relations we bear to the goods and evils of
life. In an article titled "Why Christianity Works: An
Emotion-Focused Phenomenological Account," Christian Smith
appeals to the character of religious emotions in explaining the
tenacity of Christianity in the face of various secularizing
influences.



As dispositions of caring, the virtues of gratitude, contrition, and
compassion have the value of motivating appropriate actions: acts of
that special gracious justice that is an appropriate response to gifts
and their givers, acts of self-correction and atonement for wrongs
committed, and acts of helping those who suffer. As dispositions of
perception, these virtues have the value of putting their possessor in
direct perceptual acquaintance with moral aspects of reality: her
indebtedness for gifts, the evil of her actions and the forgiveness of
God, and the distress of her fellows and the relation of that distress
to the life of Christ. And the emotions themselves are the episodes in
which these motives and perceptions are particularized to the concrete
circumstances of daily life.



So one epistemic value of Christian emotions is that of bringing the
subject into perceptual acquaintance with truths as the religious
tradition conceives them. Another potential epistemic value is that of
providing evidence for those purported truths. The more concretely one
treats the religious emotions -- moving in the direction of James
and away from Schleiermacher and Otto, as this article has done
-- the less evidential value the religious emotions have. The
reason is that the perceptions are so shaped by the propositions that
they might be called upon to provide evidence for, that the
"evidence" is undercut by circularity.



So the value that the particular religious emotion-types have for
adherents of any particular religious tradition is very great. They
are a *sine qua non* for genuine adherence to the tradition,
and the degree to which they are actual in the life of any adherent is
an index of the depth with which that adherent represents his or her
tradition and is a successful human specimen by its lights. No wonder,
then, that one strand of philosophical reflection about religious
emotions, differing even more from the Schleiermacher-Otto and James
axes than these differ from each other, is self-consciously
criteriological or regulative. Clarificatory reflection about
religious emotions serves a purpose of buffering the tradition against
the demoralizing corrosions of the spirit of the age. One thinks of
the work of Jonathan Edwards and Soren Kierkegaard. (See the
entry on
 Soren Kierkegaard.)


## 6. Criteriological work on religious emotions



In a book that Kierkegaard didn't publish but rewrote many times
(*On Authority and Revelation*), he reflected about the case of
a Hegelian pastor, a certain Adolph Peter Adler, who claimed to have
had a revelation from Jesus Christ. By comparison with most of his
contemporaries in the Danish Lutheran Church, Adler was a man of
strong religious passion / feeling, and Kierkegaard respected him for
that. But he also noted that Adler's religious emotion was entirely
generic, having no just claim to be especially Christian. Adler's
emotion was not Christian emotion because it did not show the
distinctive conceptual marks.



> 
> ...it was Magister Adler's advantage that he was deeply moved,
> shaken in his inmost being.... But to be thus profoundly moved is
> a very indefinite expression for something so concrete as Christian
> awakening or conversion ... emotion (*Grebethed*) which is
> Christian is checked by the definition of concepts ... to express
> oneself Christianly there is required, besides the more universal
> language of the heart, also skill and schooling in the definition of
> Christian concepts, while at the same time...the emotion is of a
> specific, qualitative sort, the Christian emotion (pp. 163, 164).
> 



Kierkegaard goes on to point out that using the distinctively
Christian terms is no guarantee that the emotions themselves will
display the Christian conceptual structure, because such terms as
'sin,' 'redemption,'
'forgiveness,' and 'Holy Spirit,' have
"become in a volatilized sense the conversational language of
the whole of Europe" (p. 166). In other words, the terms are
used in a different sense from the one they have in original
Christianity, because they have been dissociated from Christian
thought and practice.



A major aim of Kierkegaard's writings as a philosopher (or
"dialectician" as he usually describes himself) is to
offer analyses of emotion concepts (which are at the same time virtue
concepts) that can function in a regulative or criteriological way.
That is, they specify the conceptual shape of these emotions when they
are authentically Christian. The analyses are written in a richly
literary way (for besides being a "dialectician,"
Kierkegaard is, as he says, a "poet"), and this is
important for Kierkegaard's regulative purpose, since he aims not just
to inform people about the logic of religious emotions, but to move
them to see the world in their terms and to take action in their
terms. Examples of such emotion-regulative discourse are the
following: *Works of Love* about the virtue of love; "The
Expectancy of Faith", "Patience in Expectancy", and
"The Expectancy of an Eternal Salvation", all about the
virtue of hope and found in *Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses*;
"Every Good and Every Perfect Gift Is from Above" and
"One Who Prays Aright Struggles in Prayer and Is Victorious
-- in That God Is Victorious" about the virtue of gratitude
and also in *Eighteen Upbuilding Discourses*; "On the
Occasion of a Confession: Purity of Heart Is to Will One Thing"
about contrition and found in *Upbuilding Discourses in Various
Spirits*; and the discourses in Part Three of the same book, which
are all about joy. These are just a few of many examples of religious
emotion-regulative thought in Kierkegaard's writings.



Another well-known author whose work on religious emotions is
regulative is Jonathan Edwards. In *A Treatise Concerning Religious
Affections*, Edwards aims to correct both a passionless
Christianity and a revivalist "enthusiasm" that confuses
emotional intensity with the work of the Holy Spirit. Edwards begins
by discussing the nature and importance of emotions in the Christian
life, and then turns to a systematic treatment of twenty-four supposed
"signs" or criteria for the genuineness of religious
emotions. The first twelve signs turn out not to be genuine criteria:
They do not rule out the emotion's being a work of the Spirit, but
neither are they specific marks of it. Thus, for example, a person's
emotions in a revival meeting might be extremely intense (sign 1), or
attended by great bodily perturbations (sign 2), or might dispose the
subject to talk volubly about religion (sign 3), but these marks show
nothing one way or the other about the Christian character of the
affection.



Edwards then turns to the twelve signs that do indicate the gracious
work of the Spirit in the believer's life. Sign 5 is that one's
emotions involve an immediate conviction that the great things of the
gospel are true, and sign 6, "evangelical humiliation," is
a strong disinclination to judge oneself better than others or to
believe that one's spiritual attainments entitle one to some claim on
God. Sign 12 is Christian practice: affections that dissipate
themselves in excitement and feelings without leading to Christian
action are bogus; genuine spiritual affections motivate characteristic
Christian action. Sign 7 is that such action is persistent: genuine
spiritual affections signal a lasting change of character. Edwards
endorses the signs not as criteria by which to discern how well one's
neighbor measures up in the kingdom of God, but as criteria to be used
in self-examination and self-discipline.



Kierkegaard and Edwards agree that religious emotions are diverse,
that they embody religious teachings, that they are important
epistemic and ethical indicators of character, and that in consequence
there are conceptual criteria for their rightness that can and should
be carefully clarified.


## 7. Conclusion



James seems to be right in claiming that there is no
emotion type that is distinctive of religion as such. Religious
emotions come in the usual types -- contrition, gratitude, joy,
fear, anxiety, anger, and so forth -- and what makes them
distinctive of one religion or another is their shaping by the
teachings of the religion about God or the transcendent. Emotions are
important to adherents of a religion because, like the actions that
they sometimes motivate, they are expressions of the moral and
spiritual life enjoined by the religion. They constitute an important
part of the substance of the religious life. For this reason, teachers
of the religion, as guardians and regulators of the life in question,
sometimes formulate criteria of genuineness of religious emotions.