Saving Fear in Christian Spirituality

<p>The moral value of any given emotion is decided not by what each one is in itself but by the character of a person's will. And since that which directs a person's will is love the true criterion for evaluating the emotions is the order or disorder of the love that they reflect. Indeed each of the emotions can be redefined in terms of love: a love which strains after the possession of the loved object is desire; and the love which possesses and enjoys that object is joy. The love that shuns what opposes it is fear while the love that feels that opposition when it happens is grief. Consequently these feelings are bad if the love is bad and good if the love is good. Augustine backs up his claim that each of the emotions can be rightly ordered by adducing scriptural texts that present each in a positive light. In the case of fear he offers three Pauline texts that carve out three slightly different dimensions of fear in the Christian life: Philippians 2:12 which admonishes believers to work out their salvation with fear and trembling; Romans 11:20 where Gentile Christians are warned not to become proud but to fear lest they be cut off; and 2 Corinthians 11:3 where the Apostle professes his own fear in behalf of the believers at Corinth. Here Augustine does not explicitly distinguish these kinds of fear by identifying the beloved object with whose possible loss the will disagrees. His only concern at this point is to demonstrate that space must be made for a truly Christian fear. A division of two fears does appear however a bit later in City of God 14.9. Augustine begins by restating the point that Christians feel fear and desire pain and gladness in conformity with the holy Scriptures and sound doctrine; and because their love is right all these feelings are right in them. Leaving aside fear of the loss of temporal goods such as health wealth or influence Augustine now names four distinct objects of appropriate Christian fear coupling each with a corresponding desire: fear of eternal punishment and desire for eternal life fear of sin and desire for perseverance fear of succumbing to temptation and desire for overcoming it fear of others' perdition and desire for their liberation. Not only may such emotions rightly be found in Christians they even find a model of them in Jesus himself: Hence when the Lord himself condescended to live a human life in the form of a servant [cf. Phil 2:7] though completely free from sin he displayed these feelings in situations where he decided that they should be shown. For human emotion was not illusory in him who had a truly human body and a truly human mind. Augustine then finds scriptural evidence of Jesus's experience of each. Interestingly he comes just short of actually ascribing fear to Jesus. He mentions gladness and desire once each and sadness three times.It seems clear however that Augustine intends the final instance of sadness as an example of fear. Jesus's soul is sad in view of his impending passion an event that has not yet happened. So while the biblical text constrains him to use the word for sadness Augustine's technical vocabulary of emotion would identify it rather as fear the soul's disagreement with something that has not yet happened. Indeed in his second treatment of Psalm 30 Augustine makes it clear that he sees fear as the operative emotion in Matthew 26:38. Nonetheless it is noteworthy that when it comes to Jesus fear is listed so to speak with an asterisk. We shall return to this problem later. In the final paragraphs of the chapter Augustine adds one more asterisk. In addition to the fear which love feels which in truth only love can feel there is the fear that is not prompted by love. This is the sort of fear that John says love casts out (1 Jn 4:18) and that Paul contrasts with life in the Spirit (Rom 8:15). In the following chapter Augustine suggests that servile fear is in fact sinful: For it