Powers of the Separated Soul: Article 8, Love and Emotion, and Mozart's Music

Orientation #

He begins after “a little break between the two articles,” so a.7 was just finished (prev. lecture). A student’s question about Augustine’s memory–intellect–will is deferred: “we’ll get into that next… next week.” The previous class treated a.6–7 on the soul’s essence as prior to its powers, and the next opens q.78 a.1 on the five genera of powers.

The class, in order #

1. Objections 1–3: a book falsely ascribed to Augustine, properties, the old man’s eye (“this book is not of great authority”) #

Point: he reads the first three objections that all powers remain in the separated soul, and previews the reply-strategy (as in a subject only understanding and will; the rest “as in a root”).

• Obj. 1 from the book De spiritu et anima: the soul receding from the body “draws with itself” sense, imagination, reason, understanding, concupiscible and irascible. Aside: many books are falsely attributed (some to Aristotle, some to Thomas); his footnote gives an anonymous Cistercian, others Alcher of Clairvaux (1169). Thomas always says this book lacks authority, though people quote it thinking it is Augustine.
• Obj. 2: powers are natural properties of the soul, and a property (in the strict logical sense) is never separated from its subject: half always belongs to four [he says “half of what four… natural property of two”], interior angles equal to two right angles always belong to a triangle. Reply previewed: some properties fall on the soul by itself, some on soul united with body.
• Obj. 3 from De Anima I: if an old man had a young man’s eye he would see as well as a young man; weakness is the way to corruption; so the powers, not being weakened, are not corrupted with the body.

2. Objection 4: memory and the rich man in hell (“the wise man… existing in hell”) #

Point: objection 4 rests on the equivocation of “memory” — a sense power in one sense, something in reason (tied to the universal) in another.

• Memory is a power of the sensing soul (On Memory and Reminiscence), yet the rich man in Luke 16 [ASR “wise man”] is told “remember that you received good things in this life.” Gospel read in church “last Sunday or the Sunday before.” He wants water on his tongue — “of course he wouldn’t have any tongue, would he?”

3. Objection 5 opened: names of emotions borrowed for acts of the will (“Is falling in love and choosing to love the same thing?”) #

Point: joy and sadness, like love, name emotions first; the names are then borrowed for acts of the will, with the bodily aspect dropped, and students find the difference very hard.

1. Because we are the animal with reason, the sensible is more known to us; so we name emotions before acts of will and borrow rather than coin new names.
2. Summa Contra Gentiles I on God’s will: a third step — some emotion-names carried to our will (dropping the body), some of those to God’s will, some properly, some only metaphorically; Thomas sorts which are which.

• Love-and-friendship course: students say love is an emotion; “so is hate, so is anger” — but there is a love that is not an emotion.
• Logic-class student: falling in love (no choice; emotion) vs choosing to love (chosen love). Latin has two words English lacks: amor (originally an emotion; cf. “amorous”) vs dilectio (tied to choice) — he translates the pair as “sense love” vs “chosen love.”
• As You Like It: Phoebe’s love at first sight; her “dead shepherd” tribute to Marlowe’s line “whoever loved that loved not at first sight” — sense love. Hamlet to Horatio: “since my dear soul was mistress of her choice… her election hath sealed thee for herself” — chosen love, in the will; the reason given (“a man that fortune’s buffets and rewards hast ta’en with equal thanks”; “give me that man that is not passion’s slave”). He links this to Thomas on Philippians: the good man is not overly depressed by bad fortune nor carried away by good (lottery winners end up more miserable).
• Marriage: the priest does not ask “have you fallen in love?” but “do you choose this person?” — choice is something different.
• The philosopher differs from the sophist by his choice of life (Aristotle; Metaphysics IV inferred): the philosopher would rather be wise than appear wise, the sophist the reverse — he has chosen fame.
• Anecdote: a Polish philosopher colleague asked “Do you have an emotional attachment to the syllogism?” — “I could have an emotional attachment to a girl, but not to a syllogism.” Likewise “love your neighbor” means love in the will: “that’s really where charity is.”
• Student: doesn’t Augustine divide the soul into intellect, will, memory? — “we’ll get into that next week.”

4. Objections 5–6 read; the sed contra (“Man is constituted from two substances”) #

Point: the remaining objections and the authority against them.

• Obj. 5: joy and sadness are in the concupiscible, a power of the sensing part; separated souls are sad at punishments and rejoice at rewards. His gloss: the concupiscible is the ability following on sensing the agreeable or disagreeable — pleasure/pain, joy/sadness, wanting/avoiding; “more a bodily thing.”
• Obj. 6: Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram XII (“to the letter — no loose commentary that Jerome accused him of”): as the soul sees things by imaginary vision when the body lies senseless, so when separated. Parallel: Hamlet’s “what dreams may come” — dreams are imagining, a kind of sensing; if dreams came after death, sensing powers would remain.
• Sed contra, De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus (he compares it to a medieval catechism): man is constituted of two substances, the soul with its reason and the flesh with its senses. Student: “root just means potential?” — yes; joined again to the body, the power flows from the soul.

5. The respondeo: subject vs source (“in virtue or in power only”) #

Point: the distinction that settles the article.

1. All powers are compared to the soul alone as to their source (principium).
2. Some are compared to the soul alone as subject — the immaterial powers, understanding/reason and will; these necessarily remain when the body is destroyed.
3. Others have the soul-body conjunction as subject — all sensitive powers and the feeding power (he prefers “feeding” to “nutritive”: “I like to be more concrete”).
4. When the subject of an accident is destroyed the accident cannot remain; so these remain not in act but in virtue/power only, “as in a beginning or root.”

• Aside: the separated soul understands differently from the embodied soul, more as angels do — to be taken up later (“ask your guardian angel”).
• Student: “root” is used of charity among the theological virtues; he thinks so, though charity is also called their form; student cites Ephesians “rooted in love”; agreed that no virtue is a virtue without charity. Notice the difference between being there as a root or principle and being there as a subject, where the thing exists in act.
• “Thus it is false” that these powers remain, and more false that their acts remain, since such powers act only through a bodily organ. Applied to himself: he now has the ability to digest, grow (“might be the most doubtful”), reproduce; the separated soul has none, and a fortiori digests nothing; likewise no seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching — only understanding and willing, “until I get my body back again.”
• Hence the psalm “for you my flesh pines and my soul thirsts” — the flesh wants in too; hence the resurrection; Thomas says explicitly there will be laus vocalis in heaven.

6. Music, poetry, and comedy (“there won’t be any mistakes in heaven”) #

Point: music is in some way the origin of poetry, will remain in heaven, whereas tragedy and comedy, which reflect fallen man, will not.

• Etymologies: tragedy = goat song (ode); comedy from a word for song; lyric poetry; Dante’s cantos (his count: 33, 33, and 34 “to make up a hundred”); Spenser’s cantos.
• No fiction in heaven: tragedy and comedy each reflect man’s fall. Music remains: Paul VI’s speech on the feast of St. Cecilia, a “golden chain” from Augustine on music and love; Shakespeare “music be the food of love, play on”; we sing about whom we love; liturgy as service of charity should have music; music is the most perfect way to honor someone (marches for returning soldiers, “Hail to the Chief”).
• Student: tragedy is simply to be avoided, but comedy/laughter is a mixed bag — hopes for laughter in heaven. His reply: Aristotle says comedy’s object is something ugly but not painful. Falstaff in Merry Wives of Windsor (hidden in the basket of filthy clothes and dumped in the water) is ridiculous partly for his fatness; ugliness has no place in heaven. Much comedy depends on mistakes: Shakespeare’s first comedy, Comedy of Errors, from Plautus, twins mistaken for each other. Tragedy is also about mistakes, but ones with terrible consequences; comic mistakes do no harm and make us laugh — none in heaven.
• Anecdotes of harmless mistakes: congratulating the wrong sister after a play; rolling down the window to a stranger he took for his colleague Dan in Worcester; the Quebec parishioner’s overflowing toilet in the parish house; his brother Mark humming the national anthem so he would jump out of bed to attention; brother Richard’s “definitive fight” in a roped-off backyard with the neighborhood invited.

7. Replies to the six objections (“what is written there can be rejected with the same facility”) #

Point: each objection is turned by the subject/root distinction or by equivocation.

• Ad 1: the book lacks authority (not Augustine, whom one does not blatantly neglect); what is written there may be rejected as easily as it is said — cf. “what is gratuitously asserted can be gratuitously denied.” Yet the soul does “draw with itself” these powers, not in act but in power: as fire does not burn paper unless the paper is brought to it, so these powers do not flow from the soul unless the body is there — another reason to want the body back, “to be complete man.”
• Ad 2: the powers that do not remain in act are properties not of the soul alone but of the conjunction — two ways of being a property.
• Ad 3: the powers are not debilitated with the body because the soul, their virtual source, remains unchangeable.
• Ad 4 and 5: equivocation (as with his students on “before”). The memory that remains is the memory in reason itself, not the sense memory — to be made explicit when reason is treated; important later for memory and the image of the Trinity, found in the intellectual part, not in the soul as form of the body. Joy and sadness remain not in sense desire (emotions) but in intellectual desire (will), as in angels.
• Ad 6: Augustine there speaks “inquiring, not asserting,” and retracts it in the Retractions. He praises the Retractions: every intellectual should be required to write one at life’s end. Student: Thomas changes opinion too (“though I said otherwise elsewhere”) — yes, but far more rarely; Thomas had Augustine, Boethius and Aristotle before him, Augustine was more on his own.

8. Major and minor keys as representing the emotions in Mozart (“you represent sadness in a minor key”) #

Point: Baroque and classical music represent the emotions by key, in a way subordinate to reason, which is why 18th-century music is superior to Romantic.

• Major key: joy, hope, boldness/confidence; minor: sadness, despair, fear, anger — other things (rhythm) being equal. Mozart’s “heavenly twins,” the C major and G minor quintets, written together (K. 515 and 516), represent joy and sadness; some tie the G minor to his father’s death. Plato to the tragic and comic poet: if you know what you’re doing you can write both. Being “in C major” means dominated by it, not every movement.
• Fear in D minor: his old professor disliked the Requiem and Don Giovanni going down to hell; the D minor piano concerto (No. 20) represents anger, turning to major near the end; the B minor Adagio moves from moderate sadness to tranquil joy. In sonata first movements the returning melodies come back in minor, representing changed emotion.
• Key associations: marches in D or C major, love arias in G or B flat (B flat “in between”).
• John Oesterle [ASR “Ostling”]: logician (author of Logic: The Art of Defining and Reasoning), taught at his college and Notre Dame, musically gifted; his brother Richard and cousin Donald took his Poetics course where he showed at the piano how Mozart’s pieces have beginning, middle and end at every level. A book on Le Nozze di Figaro: the whole opera, like Don Giovanni, is harmonically one whole with beginning, middle, end, each part likewise. Oesterle’s essay “Towards the Evaluation of Music” (The Thomist): Baroque and Mozart/Haydn superior to Romantic because emotions are represented in harmony with reason — ruled as a father rules a son, not as a tyrant a slave; the one thing the Romantic cannot allow is that subordination (Tchaikovsky’s turmoil, fleeing to Mozart). Articles at the 1956 Mozart bicentennial influenced him to listen to Mozart.
• Power of music: Boulay’s collection of ancient texts; Thomas on Matthew (“we played music, you did not dance”): “nothing so changes the soul of man as music”; Hitler’s use of music; Homer’s sirens — Odysseus waxes the crew’s ears, has himself tied to the mast, orders them to tie him tighter if he begs release: even the wisest man would be undone by music; Shakespeare on music provoking good to bad or bad to good; Dryden’s Cecilia ode, Alexander swung from martial to amorous mood, “putty in the hands of the musician”; martial music in the War of Independence recruiting village boys; his own marches (“feeds my delusions of grandeur”; his wife: “one of those moods”); Nazi marching music, Mozart’s Masonic music. Machiavelli (as he reports): persuasion, literally “through the sweet,” is found first in music, then fiction, last rhetoric. Humming a melody is taken up by others — “we’re taken over.”
• Student: can he explain what makes major differ from minor? — “I wouldn’t try to give the reason why”; he only says that it is so.
• Mozart vs Haydn: Haydn modulates almost as exercise; Mozart modulates more sparingly, so it is always significant, like Shakespeare setting a whole mood in a few words; his counterpoint represents intensity, not mere Baroque style. Ranking: 18th > 19th > 20th century. 19th-century composers looked back to Mozart (Tchaikovsky’s Mozartiana, Chopin’s variations on a Mozart theme, Brahms on Figaro: “no one has ever done this before”; a French composer: “all my ambition turns to dust”).

9. Teachers surpassed by pupils (“the mind of the school was here”) #

Point: the great teachers recognized their pupils’ superiority without envy.

• Haydn to Leopold Mozart: “before God, as an honest man, your son is the greatest composer known to me”; late Haydn imitates Mozart. Albert the Great arranged the debate Thomas won, “this dumb ox will be heard around the world,” and in his eighties went to Paris to defend Thomas’s teaching after Thomas died at 49. Plato, finding only Aristotle present: “the mind of the school is here.” Modern philosophers’ pupils by contrast break away with their own systems — “pathetic.” Student: Jesus says a pupil never surpasses his teacher, yet these were humble enough to say otherwise. Washington Irving, who replaced Addison as master of English prose and was the first world-recognized American author, told his nephew it is idle to boast with Shakespeare in mind.
• Baroque too is very good: Corelli buried in the Pantheon, rightly; a little Corelli “rectifies” him. Closing on the corruption of music today; a student: rap has no rhythm.

His words #

• root (radix), principle, “in virtue or in power only”: how sensitive and feeding powers remain in the separated soul — potential, not in act. [ed.: virtualiter]
• subject: where a power exists in act; soul alone for understanding and will, composite for the rest.
• feeding power: his rendering for the nutritive power.
• sense love vs chosen love: his English for amor vs dilectio.
• concupiscible (concupiscibilis): the ability following on sensing the agreeable or disagreeable.
• “inquiring, not asserting”: Augustine’s mode in De Genesi ad litteram XII.
• “what is gratuitously asserted can be gratuitously denied”: his gloss on Thomas’s “rejected with the same facility.”
• laus vocalis: vocal praise in heaven.
• persuasion “through the sweet”: his etymology, attributed to Machiavelli.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 77, a. 8 (objections, sed contra, respondeo, replies)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (Hamlet to Horatio on his choice; “what dreams may come”); As You Like It (Phoebe, “dead shepherd”) Mentioned
• pseudo-Augustine, De spiritu et anima; Aristotle, De Anima I; De memoria et reminiscentia; Luke 16; Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram XII and Retractationes; De ecclesiasticis dogmatibus; Summa Contra Gentiles I; Thomas on Philippians; Thomas on Matthew; Ephesians (“rooted in love”); Psalm (“my flesh pines”); Aristotle on comedy; Merry Wives of Windsor; Comedy of Errors (Plautus); Dante, Spenser (cantos); Paul VI, St. Cecilia speech; Homer, Odyssey; Dryden, Cecilia ode; Oesterle, “Towards the Evaluation of Music” and Logic: The Art of Defining and Reasoning; Machiavelli on persuasion; Summa Theologiae I q. 78 (next).

His questions #

• Do all the powers of the soul remain in it when separated from the body? Only understanding and will remain in act; sensitive and feeding powers remain as in a root, not in act.
• Is falling in love and choosing to love the same thing? No: falling in love is emotion (amor), choosing to love is in the will (dilectio).
• What does the priest ask at a marriage — have you fallen in love? No; he asks whether you choose this person.
• How does the philosopher differ from the sophist? By choice of life: he would rather be wise than appear wise.
• Would a separated soul digest, grow, see or hear? No; it understands and wills only, until it gets its body back.
• What is the object of comedy? Something ugly but not painful; comedy lives on harmless mistakes, absent in heaven.
• Which key represents which emotions? Major: joy, hope, boldness; minor: sadness, despair, fear, anger.
• Can you explain what makes major differ from minor? Left open — he says only that it is so.
• Does a pupil ever surpass his teacher? Haydn/Mozart, Albert/Thomas, Plato/Aristotle show great teachers admitting it.