The Faith & the Feels
The feels…nowadays, it is used to describe two things at once.
More literally, it is used to describe your feelings, your emotional state. However, a whole slew of “Right in the Feels” memes demonstrating that there is also a more figurative meaning.
This second layer of meaning usually refers to some part of your person that you cannot express in words or more likely, forgotten how to. It usually refers to a deep, pondering part of the self which one’s feelings or emotions touch upon but never fully grasp. It forms a dimension of what St. John Paul II called the mystery of the human person: that the human person itself can never be really comprehended.
There are some who suggest that “the feels” may be the threshold of the soul itself. If not that, a number of New Age practitioners, astral guides, and trance music DJs suggest that “the feels” marks this strange borderland where one is on the cusp of taking leave of temporal existence and entering a transcendent plane.
And postmodern culture is capitalising on it.
In shops, billboards and on our phones, we are now flooded with “the feels” coming in various forms of packaging. From milk to deoderant, from shampoo to cars, from political rallies to online-generated dates, the product or event seems almost secondary to the swoon of emotion one acquires in the process of acquiring the product.
How might the Christian respond to “the feels”? Condemn it outright in a meme? Embrace it with a meme? I suggest we delve into the deep wells of the Christian tradition, where we might discover a number of surprising nuances.
One starting point can be the Praktikos, written by the fourth century Egyptian monk, Evagrius of Pontus (I have written and spoken about Evagrius elsewhere in the context of speaking about the vice of sloth, which was picked up by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and the Catching Foxes podcast).
The Praktikos is striking for its incisive understanding of psychology. Yet, what is also striking is that Evagrius does not seem to make any distinction between psychology and demonology. When looking at his most oft-quoted section in the Praktikos, concerning the “demon of Acedia”, Evagrius wrote about how one’s feelings of restlessness, despair and isolation constitute a demonic attack. “The feels” for Evagrius were thus an important part of one’s discipleship as a hermit in the desert, over which the hermit should exercise vigilance as a zone of the spiritual.
Before Evagrius, Aristotle used the word eudaimonia to denote the state of a person’s full flourishing, which includes the flourishing of one’s emotional life. Yet, rather than use “emotion”, Aristotle incorporated the word daimon – meaning spirits – into his concept of flourishing.
In the medieval period, Thomas Aquinas had also written on the emotions. Drawing on Aristotle, Aquinas spoke more appreciatively on the emotions in his Summa Theologiae. Thomas described the emotional life as an indispensable part of virtuous living, when set within a proper order. This is because the emotions were what stirred the person to act and, more importantly, act rightly.
What is noteworthy for Aquinas is that the virtues are not simply good actions. They are also actions that ennoble one’s nature, preparing them for one’s end, ultimately located not in this world, but in the Beatific Vision. Left disordered, left disconnected from the use of one’s reason, however, “the feels” can become an obstacle to the practice of virtue. Because they constantly shift in accordance with changes in circumstance, “the feels” can actually lead one on an erratic chase of one temporal thrill after another, anything other than the pursuit of one’s heavenly end.
Both Evagrius and Thomas indicate for us that “the feels” cannot be dismissed as mere fluff, details that Christians can dispense with in order to focus on the life of faith. Instead, they direct our attention to an important part of our life, what Aquinas calls our “affective life”. Like all walks of life, these can lead to our flourishing or to our doom. Where they lead very much depends on the extent to which one receives proper formation from someone outside of the individual.
As part of our embodied personhood, they are as much a part of the life of faith as the intellect. Yet, the attention to one’s “feels” should not give way to an emotionalism, a primacy of emotion over the intellect which could serve the ends of demons, insofar as the demons are charged with putting obstacles in our path towards our transcendent heavenly home.
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