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(2012) Reason, will and emotion, Dordrecht, Springer.
Dietrich von Hildebrand claims that the "unfortunate heritage from Greek intellectualism' encompassed the exclusion of the entire affective life from the higher or spiritual dimension of human existence. What, then, could Christian thinkers, so deeply influenced by this tradition, say about the New Testament conception of love? Their starting point, he says, was to follow the Greeks in excluding affectivity from the sphere of spirituality. On the other hand, they could not suppose that the love proclaimed in their sacred writings was anything but spiritual. So, in von Hildebrand's view, they took the disastrous step of stripping love of affectivity in order to save its claim to spiritual status. In a word, they conceptualised love "as something non-affective and as an act of will' (von Hildebrand, 1966, 12). The original flaw in this reconstruction, as I have argued, is that it misconstrues the place of affectivity in Greek thinking about the mind. The question now is whether Christian thinkers were nevertheless misled in some way by Greek philosophy into excluding affectivity from the higher states of mind, as von Hildebrand alleges. Could this view be a fair rendering, for instance, of Augustine's impassioned account of love and the will?
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Crittenden, P. (2012). Augustine: "will transformed into love', in Reason, will and emotion, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 141-156.
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