ABSTRACT
Saint Augustine of Hippo, philosopher and church father, was the most important and influential theorist of emotion in the West. His model of spiritual ascent in stages to a level of transcendence has influenced countless emotional narratives, from Dante’s Divine Comedy to Romantic and modernist texts, such as Wuthering Heights and Ulysses. Affection is divested of the negative, physical qualities of love moored in sexuality, such as pain, sadness, and anger, and yet it remains an emotion, albeit of a more contemplative kind. Augustinian emotion is essentially individualist, a fact epitomized for Nussbaum by how the Saint struggled to distance his feelings of grief for the death of his own mother. The image of swerving particles colliding with each other captures an essential quality of emotion in Renaissance music. The upsurge of rhetorical manuals, culminating in music with the taxonomies of Zarlino and Burmeister in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, reflects a practical, case-by-case approach.
