Aquinas, Summa I, Q.81 a.1: Sensuality as a Desiring Power — Knowing as Rest, Loving as Motion

Orientation #

He does not refer back to last time. He says the two lower desiring powers are “the ones we’ll be talking about in the second article” and proposes a break “before we do the article two.” The previous class treated q. 80 a. 2 (sense appetite vs. will), and the next treats the division of sense desire into concupiscible and irascible.

The class, in order #

1. The word sensualitas and the word “anger” (“you don’t want to translate this as sensuality”) #

Point: do not transliterate sensualitas as “sensuality”; in English that word suggests disorder or excess in the emotions, which the Latin does not necessarily carry.

• Parallel with “anger”: he learned it as a capital vice in the catechism, but anger names an emotion, not necessarily a vice. Examples: if someone uses “my kids for target practice,” anger is not a vice; in the Gospels our Lord chases the money-changers out of the temple and is said to be angry at the stiff-necked.
• His explanation of the shift: because people most often go astray through their emotions, strong emotions take on a bad sense, so “anger” becomes the name of a vice “when it isn’t really.”
• Thomas will explain the word in the body; it will be applied to “the ability for emotions,” what English calls feelings and Latin passiones.
• Aside, before the prayer: a fragment of a story about St Francis de Sales refusing to throw away a virtue he had worked twenty years to build, in order to control anger.

2. The three objections: sensualitas a knowing power? (“It seems that sensualitas … is also a knowing power”) #

Point: the objections argue from the word’s kinship with “sense.”

1. Augustine, De Trinitate XII: the sensible motion of the soul, directed towards the senses of the body, is common to us and the beasts; the senses of the body fall under the knowing power; so sensualitas is a knowing power. He notes Thomas will read Augustine’s words otherwise.
2. Things under one division are of one kind; Augustine divides sensualitas against higher and lower reason, which are knowing; so sensualitas is knowing. Aside: the four cardinal virtues are put together though justice is in the will, fortitude and temperance in sensualitas, prudence (“foresight”) in reason — they go together because they deal with the same matter, prudence directing the matter of the others.
3. Sensualitas in the temptation of the first parents is symbolised by the serpent, who announces and proposes the sin (“you’ll be like gods”); proposing belongs to knowing.

3. Sed contra and Peter Lombard (“desire of things that pertain to the body”) #

Point: the sed contra rests on the definition of sensualitas as “desire of bodily things,” given by Peter Lombard, whom Thomas always calls magister, “the teacher.”

• The Sentences: “famous sayings” of the Church Fathers, mainly Augustine, gathered and distinguished by Lombard into four books and distinctions (here II, d. 24). Thomas commented on nearly the whole; when he came to write the Summa he first thought of revising that commentary, then chose his own order — better in some ways, but the Sentences commentary is sometimes more explicit.
• For several centuries whoever wanted a degree in theology lectured on the Sentences (Thomas’s commentary “undoubtedly the best”); only closer to our time did the Summa become the standard text.
• Student exchange on editions: the Marietti edition footnotes the source and italicises the definition; other editions have quotes but no footnote. An unidentified quotation is not always the Sentences, though it is common there.
• Augustine’s writings are ad hoc, written against heretics, so less ordered than the Summa; Lombard digests them, raising and solving questions. Thomas does not always agree with the magister.

4. The body: a power is named from its act, and motion belongs to desire (“is not so properly called motion”) #

Point: sensualitas is named from a “sensible motion” (Augustine, De Trin. XII), and a sensible motion is desire following upon sense grasping.

• Powers named from acts: we say man has “understanding and will” (understanding names the ability by the name of the act); vision from sight; taste may name the act before the ability.
• Thomas “seizes upon the word motus.” The argument:
  1. The act of the grasping (apprehensiva) power is perfected in the things grasped being in the one grasping — hence “grasp,” from the hand: what I grasp is contained in my hand.
  2. The act of the desiring power is perfected in the desirer being inclined towards the desirable thing, going out to it.
  3. Therefore knowing is more like rest, desiring more like motion; and motion applies more to the desiring power. Sign: “understanding,” the highest knowing, is named from standing; “emotion” is named from motion, and the emotions are the desiring acts most known to us.
• Conclusion: if sensualitas means a sensible motion, that is the operation of a desiring power; carried over to the power, it names a sense desiring power — desire falling upon sense knowledge, but still desiring.
• Application from his love-and-friendship course: readings say love is a giving, others that it is a suffering (undergoing), and Thomas says it is an undergoing. Resolution by the same difference: in giving, the heart goes out to the thing (“I left my heart in San Francisco”; “my heart is not in it”; “where your treasure is, there your heart shall be”; Augustine: the soul is more ubi amat than ubi animat, more where it loves than where it animates). “It’s always bad to lose your mind. Is it always bad to lose your heart? No, depends upon to whom.” The undergoing side: you begin to like something because it is sensed or known and impresses you, its good pressed upon the heart; liking results from the heart being acted upon by the perceived good.

5. Aside: Heraclitus, Cratylus, Plato (“how can you understand something that doesn’t stand still”) #

Cratylus, a student of Heraclitus, was one of Plato’s early teachers (Plato’s dialogue Cratylus has Cratylus and Socrates converse); Aristotle says Plato in old age still held things from Cratylus, who exaggerated Heraclitus’s “everything is changing.” The contrast: understanding needs something standing still; emotion is motion — “I was moved to do this”; hunger and thirst are a seeking, going out.

6. Reply to the first: senses as preamble (“pertain to sensualitas as a preamble”) #

Augustine’s “aims at the senses of the body” does not place the senses under sensualitas; the motion of sensualitas is an inclination to the senses of the body because we desire what the senses grasp. So the senses “walk before” — preamble — as what desire is inclined to what they have grasped.

7. Reply to the second: divided together because both are movers (“they come together in the act of motion”) #

Point: sensualitas is divided against higher and lower reason because knowing power and desiring power both communicate in the act of motion — Aristotle, De Anima III.

• The food is the unmoved mover; the moved movers are the sense that knows the food and the desire for it. They come together because what is sensed and what is desired are the same thing (not that to be known and to be desired are the same). Also: I understand wisdom and desire wisdom. He admits he finds this “very confusing.”
• Student: does the mind knowing there is food also operate? Answer: both are involved — I see the apple and want the apple; both are responsible, unified through the unmoved mover, which is object of sense in one way and of desire in another.
• Cat Muppet: she sniffs the offered wine and walks away (smells, no desire); with meat she smells and desires, and “you got to watch your hands.” You must both smell it and desire it.
• Order of De Anima at a student’s request: plant powers (nourishing, growth, reproduction); outer senses; inner senses like imagining (start of Book III); reason; desire (some following sense, some following reason); finally the motive power, which follows knowing and desiring. Two movers: knowledge and desire — e.g. reason should say you’ve had enough wine.
• Plato, Republic: three parts of the soul — reason compared to the rulers of the city, the irascible (thumos) to the soldiers, the concupiscible (epithumia) to the crowd; reason and two desiring powers in one division, “in reference to action.”
• Objection restated and generalised: hope and charity are in the will, so faith divided against them must be too? No — faith is in reason. They are divided not as being in one power but as related to one end: “by faith we know the end, by hope we tend towards the end, by charity we join to the end” (Thomas). Hence charity greatest (St Paul), hope greater than faith.
• Geometry: triangle divided into isosceles, scalene, equilateral; quadrilateral into square, oblong; you don’t expect a triangle among the quadrilaterals. Normally a division is of things the same in kind; sometimes things of different kinds are divided because ordered to one end.
• Bacon: lying in bed I smell bacon and feel hungry for it; smelled salmon, I’d open the windows; if stuffed, I smell it but don’t pursue. What’s involved in my pursuit divides smell (knowing) against hunger (desire), not smell against hearing and seeing. If you took that as a division of senses, hunger would be a sense — the objection’s error.
• Aristotle’s definition of moral virtue as the same pattern: a habit with choice, in the middle between two extremes, but the middle towards us, as determined by right reason — habituation of the heart plus direction from reason. Middle of the thing vs. middle towards us: not half the roast, not half a gallon of whiskey, but neither too much nor too little for me; only reason weighs circumstances (no meal till dinner, physical work, Thanksgiving). Right reason is foresight, prudence.
• Anger by circumstance: bumped in the hall — accident, carelessness, or on purpose like the high-school bullies? Kids used for target practice — reasonably far more anger. Someone hits my car — drunk, driving stupidly, or what anyone could do?

8. The contrariety of knowing and loving (“the same knowledge of opposites”) #

Point (flagged as “the most interesting thing” between desiring and grasping powers): in things opposites exclude each other; in knowing they go together; in loving they exclude again.

1. In things: normal and high blood pressure, healthy and overactive thyroid, cannot coexist.
2. In knowing: to know high blood pressure I must know normal; knowing virtue as a habit in the middle helps me know vice as excess or defect. Wise guy in California: don’t teach ethics, since it teaches how to be bad too. Aristotle, Politics V, teaches how to preserve and overthrow a government — the same knowledge, used by tyrants. Plato, end of the Symposium: Socrates with Aristophanes and Agathon — one who knew what he was doing could write both tragedy and comedy; Homer’s lost comic Margites stands to comedy as the Iliad to tragedy (he attributes this to Aristophanes); Shakespeare wrote great comedies and tragedies.
3. In loving: not the same love of opposites — loving health excludes loving sickness, wealth poverty (for oneself), beauty ugliness, virtue vice; love of one impedes love of the other. Love respects the condition of things in themselves because it tends to the thing; knowledge has both opposites in the mind “in the way of the mind” (normal is in the definition of abnormal).

• Signs in language: the thing known is in the knower (“take” the genus, then the differences; “you grasp what I’m saying”); love is in the thing loved (Antony to Cleopatra: I go back to Rome, my heart stays here; “love isn’t love until it’s given away”). Student: this is behind “you cannot love God and money,” no man can serve two masters — you can know both though.
• Second side: knowing the bad is good and doesn’t make you bad; loving the bad makes you bad. Goethe: we are shaped and fashioned by what we love — love disgusting things, become disgusting. If knowing bad made you bad, knowledge would be bad, since it is the same knowledge of good and bad. Hence it’s good to know human nature. Student: so we can make only one thing our end; those who make money their end have no chance at happiness. He: yes, tending towards the thing in itself, one excludes the other. Loving God, you are already godly and joined to God.

9. Reply to the third and break (“he also inclines them to the effect of the sin”) #

The serpent not only shows and proposes the sin but inclines them to it, and in that respect sensualitas is signified by the serpent. He proposes a break before article two.

His words #

• sensualitas; left in Latin; the ability for emotions / to feel the passions; not “sensuality”
• passions; Latin name for what we call feelings or emotions
• magister, the teacher; Thomas’s name for Peter Lombard, by antonomasia
• sensible motion (motus sensualis); desire following upon sense grasping
• grasping power (apprehensiva); his rendering of the knowing power, from the hand [ed.: apprehensive power]
• rest vs. motion; knowing has the known in the knower; desiring is inclined towards the thing
• understanding; from standing, a rest
• emotion; named from motion
• preamble; the bodily senses “walk before” sensualitas
• unmoved mover / moved mover; the food; sense and desire (De Anima)
• foresight; his rendering of prudence
• thumos, epithumia; irascible and concupiscible in Plato
• middle towards us; neither too much nor too little for me, as determined by right reason
• same knowledge of opposites, not the same love of opposites
• ubi amat / ubi animat (Augustine); the soul is more where it loves than where it animates

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I, q. 81, a. 1: objections, sed contra, body, replies 1-3
• Augustine, De Trinitate XII (as quoted in the objections and body)
• Peter Lombard, Sentences II, d. 24 (definition of sensualitas)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima III (unmoved and moved movers; order of the work)
• Plato, Republic (three parts of the soul); Cratylus; Symposium (ending)
• Aristotle, Politics V; Nicomachean Ethics, definition of moral virtue (inferred)
• Homer, Margites; Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (inferred); Goethe on being shaped by what we love
• Gospels: cleansing of the temple; where your treasure is; no man can serve two masters; St Paul on charity
• Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on the Sentences (his own remarks on its history)

His questions #

• Why is the act of the knowing power not so properly called motion as the act of desire? Because knowing is perfected in having the thing in the knower (rest); desiring in being inclined towards it (motion).
• Why do we use the word “give” for love if love is an undergoing? Giving expresses the heart going out to the thing; undergoing expresses how the perceived good first impresses the heart.
• Is it always bad to lose your heart? No, it depends on to whom or to what.
• Why divide sensualitas against higher and lower reason if they are not the same kind of power? Because both are movers, coming together in the act of motion on one object, known and desired.
• If hope and charity are in the will, must faith be in the will too? No; faith, hope and charity are divided as ordered to one end, not as in one power.
• Should I get angry when bumped in the hall or when someone hits my car? Depends on the circumstances, which only reason weighs.
• Is there the same knowledge of opposites? the same love of opposites? Yes for knowledge (one helps you know the other); no for love (one impedes the other).
• Does knowing the bad make you bad? No, knowing the bad is good; loving the bad makes you bad.