Emotions—the elephant in the exegete’s bedroom
Emotions—the elephant in the exegete’s bedroom
Emotions create feelings in the innermost sanctuary of our being, the bedrooms of our hearts. Chiefly concerned with the heart, Christian spirituality has thus long included calls to meditate on the internal experiences of Biblical characters, such as the anguish of Christ, the joy of the Psalmists, and the coming wrath of God. Despite this heritage, many approach emotional exegesis with great hesitancy. “How can we know what they felt? Is emotional exegesis going beyond what the Bible says?” Emotions are the elephant in the exegete’s bedroom.
Emotions are “smarter” than reflexes and faster than deliberative rational thought (Adolphs and Anderson 2018; Smith and Lazarus 1990). Emotions, unlike reflexes, can become associated with any stimuli through experience. They activate to direct our actions for the benefit of what matters most to us, whether that be fear for personal safety or joy because our child scored the winning point. Our brains draw upon our vast reserves of implicit memory to recognize when situations touch upon what we value most. The brain subsequently engages our emotions to propel us toward the next logical step. Our emotions, then, guide our intentional, deliberative thought processes to discern what action the scenario warrants. These thought processes then feed information back to our emotions, and so the cycle continues (Tyng et al. 2017).
Stated simply: the role of emotions in our brains is to propel us to the next “logical” step, faster than our deliberative reasoning processes could dictate.
Scholars also agree that the emotional categories humans develop are largely dependent upon the culture(s) in which they live (Adolphs and Anderson 2018). As of 2016, most scientists believed at least some emotions, such as fear and disgust, are innate (Ekman 2016). In her pioneering work How Emotions are Made, Lisa Feldman Barrett represents a growing camp that strongly believes emotions are entirely constructed through experiences (Barrett 2018, cf. Boddice 2020, 131). The existence of emotions unique to cultures supports the idea that some emotion concepts may be entirely the product of the cultures we live in.
Take the famous findings of the anthropologist Catherine Lutz from the late 1970s. She found Ifaluk Atoll people in Micronesia differed from English speakers even in their basic set of words for emotions (Lingis 2022, 166-174). They also had several emotions with no conceptual corollary in English. For example, people have fago for something that suffers, or will soon suffer. The emotion fago might only be captured by a combination of English ideas of compassion and love with a heavy overlay of sadness. Regardless of whether emotions are entirely constructed or partially innate, the most accepted theories of emotion agree that human emotions develop through our lives according to experience.
What are the implications for Bible translation? The research I've encountered so far, only a taste of which I have cited above, leads me to the following conclusion: The emotions the text was intended to convey and to elicit from its audience are essential to its meaning.
How can we exegete, let alone translate, these emotions? Can we befriend the elephant in the exegete’s bedroom? That’s what we’ll be diving into for the foreseeable future. The short answer is: Yes, we can absolutely uncover a range of emotions the author intended to communicate to the original audience.
We must befriend the elephant one (admittedly giant) step at a time:
- Catalogue the emotional categories/concepts within the Biblical culture in question. This includes as much information as we can gather about what the emotions were associated with: body language, morals, gender roles, etc.
- Reconstruct as much of the setting described in the text as possible, relying first on the text itself and then on historical accounts and insights from cultural anthropology.
- Using the reconstruction, determine what values were at play and thus which emotional concepts and categories the author wanted their audience to perceive.
Sources
- Adolphs, Ralph, and David J. Anderson. 2018. The Neuroscience of Emotion: A New Synthesis. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
- Barrett, Lisa. 2018. How Emotions Are Made. Main Market Ed. edition. London: Mariner Books.
- Boddice, Rob. 2020. “History Looks Forward: Interdisciplinarity and Critical Emotion Research.” Emotion Review 12 (3): 131–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073920930786.
- Ekman, Paul. 2016. “What Scientists Who Study Emotion Agree About.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 11 (1): 31–34. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691615596992.
- Lingis, Alphonso. 2022. “Emotions as Discourse.” In Exploring the Translatability of Emotions: Cross-Cultural and Transdisciplinary Encounters, edited by Susan Petrilli and Meng Ji, 165–78. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Cham: Springer International Publishing. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-91748-7_6.
- Smith, Craig, and Richard Lazarus. 1990. “Emotion and Adaptation.” In Contemporary Sociology, 21:609–37. https://doi.org/10.2307/2075902.
- Tyng, Chai M., Hafeez U. Amin, Mohamad N. M. Saad, and Aamir S. Malik. 2017. “The Influences of Emotion on Learning and Memory.” Frontiers in Psychology 8. https://www.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01454.
- Photo thanks to Hu Chen in unsplash