Purity and Temperance: Shame and Honestas, Catharsis, and Aristotle's Rules for Acquiring Virtue

Orientation #

He begins “starting at one fifty-four” of the numbered text (his printed volume, DHB Vol III p. 1318) and says the two mistakes (Empedocles, fire) occupy “seven, eight, two lectios in Thomas” and set the stage; at 159 Aristotle “determines about the living soul, the first soul” down to the end of the chapter. He closes: “maybe next time we’ll go on to… sensing here, chapter five, page sixteen.” The previous class treated nutrition and generation and the soul as threefold cause; the next takes up chapter 5 on sensing as being acted upon.

The class, in order #

1. Empedocles: growth up by fire, down by earth (“Empedocles does not speak properly”) #

Point: reducing the plant to elements moving to their natural places gives no unity to the plant.

• Modern parallel: Heisenberg (Gifford lectures) says the stability of the living organism “doesn’t make much sense from physical principles alone”; hundreds of chemicals acting independently do not fit. Aside on Bohr: the atom imagined as a miniature solar system should have no stable orbits (solar systems in collision would go “wacky”); so Bohr saw a stability not explicable mechanically. Aside: undiscovered planets were predicted from perturbations of known orbits, showing how delicate the solar system is.
• Empedocles: roots go down because earth is born downward; growth goes up because fire is born upward.
• First reply: up and down “are not the same in everything and in the all.” Roots are to plants as heads to animals: the plant takes in nourishment through roots, so its “up” is down. Man’s head is up, looking to the sky (the astronomer falling into wells); animals’ heads turned to earth; the plant is “completely upside down.” “So man is again a macrocosm” [ed.: probably “microcosm”]: what is up in man is up in the universe.

2. What keeps fire and earth together? The soul (“what is that keeps together things born to contrary places”) #

Point (156, “the more serious thing”): fire and earth would be torn asunder unless something prevents it; that is the soul, cause of both growth and feeding.

• Nature (narrow sense, as distinguished from soul) is limited to one of two opposites: earth goes down, fire up, never both. Even the plant soul grows in opposite directions; the higher the soul, the more it transcends contrariety, until man has the same knowledge of contraries: medicine, grammar, Politics V (how to corrupt and how to preserve a government, “can’t really know one without the other”); Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, nature “not able to be more than one thing.”
• Corollary: this is one way they see the understanding soul is immortal. (1) Corruption is change from one contrary to another. (2) Contraries are not contrary in the soul (virtue and vice, health and sickness are understood together, understood to be contrary in themselves). “The way we know is not the way things are.”

3. Second mistake: fire as the cause of feeding and growth (“the nature of fire is the cause of feeding and growth simply”) #

Point (157): fire may be a joint cause, an instrument, but not the cause simply.

• Digression on the four elements as candidates for the soul: hardly anyone says Mother Earth or water (Thales) is soul; Homer’s soul is air-like (Anaximenes), and people still imagine it so; fire (Heraclitus) metaphorically: Othello and the candle (“put out the light” vs. snuff out her life, no “Promethean heat” to relume it). Air and fire seem less material than earth and water, as today “matter and energy,” de Broglie’s Matter and Light: the gross keeps the name matter, the subtle gets “light” or “energy.” So fire is a kind of anticipation of the soul’s immateriality; fire seems to consume, digest and grow.
• Boundary question: does fire grow, or generate another fire (the Colorado forest fires, “same fire or a new fire generated by the old”)?
• Argument: (1) The growth of fire is unlimited so long as there is fuel (it burns to the Pacific). (2) Living things have a limit and a ratio of magnitude and growth, a fixed height and shape (thousands of leaves, each the shape for that tree; fire’s shape is wherever the fuel happens to be). Conclusion: limit and ratio come from the soul, “from the account or definition,” i.e. from form, not from matter.

4. Turning to the first soul: food as object (“it is necessary to determine about food first”) #

Point (159): order is object, then powers, then soul; “the same power” feeds and generates in general, though feeding, growing and reproducing are particular powers under it; food is the object separating this power from the others.

• Evidence that we all take food as the object, from metaphor: Much Ado, Beatrice’s disdain has “such meat to feed it, Signor Benedick” (he is the object of her disdain); “feeding” anger by giving reasons to be angry; “food for thought” (a student: it is the object of thinking); Socrates’ “feast of reason”; Thomas on the beatific vision as convivium ineffabile [ed.: his “convivium in a fabula” garbled]; “you’ll sit at my Father’s table” means the same object God has in knowing himself; hunger and thirst for God, three psalms of thirst, one in each fifty; Thomas’s Adoro te devote, sitio (inferred from “Seicho”); Christ’s “my food is to do the will of my Father,” the metaphor bringing out the intensity of the desire (hunger and thirst are our most intense desires).
• Aside: Charles I called the play “Beatrice and Benedick.”

5. Is food contrary or like? Undigested vs. digested (“the contrary is food for the contrary”) #

Point (160-162): both parties are partly right.

• First sight (160): food is contrary, because (1) change is between contraries and (2) contrary acts on contrary (hard on soft, hot on cold); not every contrary but those with mutual generation, as water is food for fire in a candle.
• Difficulty (161): some say like is fed by like, as it grows by like (more flesh from like, “I’m not a cannibal”). Also food suffers from the feeder, not the reverse.
• Solution (162): as undigested, contrary by contrary; as digested, like by like.
• His imitation: is philosophy a search or reasoned-out knowledge? A search (zetesis, historia) in the beginning, episteme in the end.
• Mind as digestion: a difficult thought of Aristotle or Thomas is at first unlike your thoughts; digested, it becomes like them. Father Boulay: Greek krino is tied to digestion; people who can’t judge have “constipated minds.”
• Judgment defined: genus separation; separation of the true from the false by some beginning. Example, Euclid I.6 (equal angles, equal sides): suppose one side longer, cut off an equal, join to the opposite corner; two equal triangles, but the part equals the whole, contradicting the axiom that the whole is more than the part; the axiom separates true from false. First beginning is the senses: “Berquist is standing / is not standing” separated by looking. Practical matters: good from bad, as the body assimilates the useful and rejects the rest.
• Making it your own: Osterrieth, read even Aristotle and Thomas “with a grain of salt”; Augustine, Confessions, truth is neither mine nor yours but common.

6. The acts compared to food: preserve, grow, generate (“to be food and to be able to cause growth are different”) #

Point (163-166): nothing feeds that does not share in life (“feeding the fire” is really generating fire); food is relative to the ensouled as such.

• Distinction: food as “this something” (an individual substance) preserves the substance, the object of feeding; food as “so much” (quantity) causes growth. He must eat all his life to preserve Duane Berquist; growth stopped. Immigrants’ sons taller than fathers; Big Ten “corn-fed farm boys.”
• Reproduction as from the excess of food (“charity begins at home”), which makes sense of fasting cutting concupiscence, though “more complicated maybe than Aristotle and Thomas saw.”
• Feed and grow yourself vs. generate another like yourself: tree soaking things in vs. brick wall that does not build itself.
• 166: the principle conserves its possessor; deprived of food it cannot exist. Three things: fed (body), by which (food), one feeding (first soul).
• Aside: catchphrases “fed up,” “too much on my plate.”

7. Defining the first soul by its ultimate act (“generative of one like itself”) #

Point (167-169): the first soul is defined not as feeding or growing but as generating one like itself, because a power is defined by its ultimate.

• Shakespeare’s reason as “large discourse, looking before and after”: “large,” not “small,” shows the full extent (universal, not only singular). Weight-lifting: defined by 200 pounds, not 100.
• So: reproducing soul, sensing soul (the animal soul, which includes reproducing), understanding soul (Shakespeare’s phrase).
• 169 summarizes; food to be treated more particularly later (a treatise on food attributed to Aristotle, material constituents). He has said food is unlike then like the fed, and that by which one is preserved, but not its material constituents.

8. Where theology uses the three powers: the sacraments (“the sacraments… food for the soul”) #

Point: Thomas manifests baptism, confirmation, Eucharist by likeness to generation, growth, feeding; sacraments are sensible, fitting man’s nature and their being tools of the Word made flesh.

• Eucharist = food; confirmation = growth (given at maturity, soldier for Christ, the slap on the cheek); baptism = generation (Nicodemus, “born again,” entering the mother’s womb). Loaves prepare for the Eucharist, water into wine for wine into blood.
• Real presence from the symbolism: fed by the very substance, not merely the power (as Aristotle said); other reasons exist too.
• Contrast: to manifest the Trinity Thomas goes to the rational soul (reason’s thought about itself, then love), not plant soul, nor sense (acted on from outside) but thought that remains within; one cannot imagine one’s imagination.
• Catechism Part Two, Section Two: initiation (baptism, confirmation, Eucharist), healing (penance, anointing), service of communion (orders, matrimony); the old tradition and the Orthodox keep the three together; he grew up pairing confession and Eucharist.

9. Student question: why “purity” for chastity (“the integral parts of chastity, or of temperance”) #

Point: Thomas’s integral parts of temperance are verecundia (shame) and honestas (spiritual beauty, “a kind of light”; Shakespeare’s “honest” = chaste in As You Like It).

• Why shame belongs to temperance: lust is more shameful than anger because in lust reason is more extinguished; the angry man has a reason, he punishes (perhaps exaggerated); the lustful is “moved like an animal.” Lear’s “noble anger”; Achilles’ wrath (Polydamas alone “looked before and behind”); Coriolanus. A defect of reason is what shames: Socrates in the Apology opens and closes with “you did something stupid,” wickedness only in the middle; call a man stupid, not wicked, to start a bar fight; the White Castle robber and the Worcester bank robber outsmarted by clerks.
• Objection: spiritual beauty is in all virtues, so why a part of temperance? Reply: where reason is most often extinguished, its shining is more striking. Sonnet “more lovely and more temperate”; Othello’s “chaste stars” (beautiful because the sky is black); diamond on black velvet, by candlelight; Heraclitus, “from opposites the most beautiful harmony.”
• Purity likewise: the higher nature is most soiled there, so purity is most striking. Hamlet, “the blush and grace of modesty”: blush a metonym for verecundia, grace = spiritual beauty (gracious hostess aside on White House state dinners).
• “Chaste” from “chastise”: these emotions especially need it. Temperance matters for the life of the mind (Augustine). Proclus: geometry purificat oculum mentis; Dionne: logic even more, being more immaterial; Plato’s turning of the soul from sensible things. Dark night; Paul’s third heaven (Augustine and Thomas: saw God face to face in passing, as Moses). Thomas’s inaugural lectures (Weisheipl on the occasion): Proverbs (human virtue using material things reasonably), Ecclesiastes (contempt of the material world, Paul’s “trash”), Song of Songs (the purified soul), like the stages in John of the Cross and Teresa.
• Concupiscence, not anger, attaches us to material things (perfume ad “can’t get you out of his mind”; gourmet club friend’s near-tragedy over an ingredient; Don Giovanni not simply comic). Dionysius: higher angels cibus for the lower, purified from ignorance, not error.

10. Mixed up vs. pure: four kinds of catharsis (“a catharsis of the what emotions”) #

• “Mixed up” = mistaken or nearly; opposite: pure. Scripture and Aristotle: the sinner is always mistaken, so needs catharsis. Purgation and purification are two sides of one coin.
• Kinds: (1) body, the medical origin (poison, vomiting); (2) emotions, Aristotle’s tragedy, pity and fear; his own article on comedy, catharsis of melancholy (Shrew induction: “melancholy is the nurse of frenzy”; De Koninck’s Punch cartoon, computer printing “I think therefore I am”); the simplest case, a good cry, letting off steam; (3) reason, Plato, Socrates purging errors; (4) will, purgatory, purging attachment not enough to go to hell (Screwtape’s “peculiar clarity” of hell); not body, emotions (bodily) or reason.

11. Aristotle’s three rules for acquiring virtue (“watch out for pleasure”) #

End of Ethics II: (1) bend toward the vice less opposed to the virtue, since virtue is not equidistant: courage nearer foolhardiness (soldiers, Washington, Churchill, Mad Anthony), temperance nearer the defect (puritanical less opposed than intemperance; the old Dominican: seminarians must be a bit puritanical), liberality nearer extravagance; (2) bend against your own inclination (Francis de Sales, irascible, became mild; drinkers go to women or fights; the shy must speak up), like bending metal past straight; (3) watch out for pleasure, which most corrupts judgment (Susanna and the elders; scandals). So purity in temperance: not led astray by pleasure. Closing aside on Texas bishops in Mexico.

His words #

• first soul / living soul / plant soul: the nutritive soul [ed.: vegetative]
• nature vs. soul: nature limited to one of two opposites, soul transcends contrariety
• “the account or the definition”: what the form gives, vs. matter
• this something: an individual substance
• so much: quantity
• food: object of the feeding power; unlike the fed undigested, like digested
• judgment: separation of the true from the false by some beginning
• zetesis, historia, episteme: search, investigation, reasoned-out knowledge
• krino: judging, tied to digestion (Boulay)
• understanding soul, sensing soul: Shakespeare’s names
• verecundia: shame; honestas: spiritual beauty, a kind of light
• catharsis: purgation/purification; of body, emotions, reason, will
• purificat oculum mentis (Proclus): purifies the eye of the mind
• cibus: food (Dionysius on angels)

Texts #

Read in class: Aristotle, De Anima II (his text nn. 154-169): Empedocles on up and down; what holds fire and earth together; fire as joint cause; food as object; contrary vs. like; food as substance and as quantity; three things in feeding; the generative soul. Much Ado (Beatrice/Benedick). Taming of the Shrew induction. Catechism Part Two, Section Two headings. Mentioned: Thomas’s lectios on this chapter; Heisenberg, Gifford lectures; Politics V; Coriolanus; Othello; de Broglie, Matter and Light; Euclid I.6; Augustine, Confessions; John 3 (Nicodemus), John 4 (“my food”); Thomas on the Eucharist and on integral parts of temperance (Summa); Lear; Iliad; Plato, Apology; Sonnet 18 (inferred); Hamlet; Heraclitus fragment; Proclus; 2 Cor 12 (inferred, third heaven); Thomas’s inaugural lectures, Weisheipl; Dionysius; Poetics; his article on comedy; Screwtape Letters; NE II end; Susanna.

His questions #

• Is the fire growing, or generating another fire? Left open; used to show similarity but not identity with living growth.
• How is “food for thought” related to thinking? As its object.
• Why does Christ say “my food is to do the will of my Father”? To bring out the intensity of the desire.
• Is philosophy a reasoned-out knowledge or a search? Both: a search in the beginning, reasoned-out knowledge in the end.
• What is judgment? Separation of the true from the false by some beginning.
• Where is the distinction of the three powers used in theology? The sacraments: baptism, confirmation, Eucharist.
• What soul does Thomas use to manifest the Trinity? The rational soul.
• Why is lust more shameful than anger? Reason is more extinguished in lust; the angry man has a reason.
• To start a bar fight, call a man wicked or stupid? Stupid.
• Is purgatory a catharsis of body, emotions or reason? None; of the will.