Why Love Is Undergoing Yet Called Giving: Aristotle on Truth and Good, and Love in the Concupiscible Appetite

Orientation #

He opens by saying the little text from the Sentences “is kind of anticipating” the first article of the Prima Secundae they will look at, and refers back to “most of these passages we had about love” as showing love to be a receiving, a wound (prev. lecture). He says he must stop around four-thirty but will look at article one; he notes “the second article, whether love is an undergoing” is on page eleven and will be treated later; distinctions of kinds of love “we’ll meet later on.” The previous class set up love as gift against love as wound from Shakespeare, Thomas and the Carmelite mystics; the next continues into whether love is a passio and how amor relates to dilectio. Verified sources: handout “Nature and Kinds of Love” pp. 1–15 (he reads from pp. 9 and 11); printed volume DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, pp. 1106–1120.

The class, in order #

1. The Sentences text: love as transformation of the heart (“a metamorphosis, right? Of the affection”) #

Point: Thomas already treats love as an undergoing before the Prima Secundae. He reads the handout passage:

1. Love pertains to the desiring power, “the heart,” which is an undergoing ability; hence Aristotle, On the Soul III: the desirable moves as an unmoved mover, desire as a moved mover.
2. Everything undergoing is perfected when formed by the form of what acts on it, and its motion ends in rest there. Understanding: before it is formed by the understandable it inquires and doubts; once informed, investigation ceases and it “adheres firmly.”
3. Likewise when affection is filled with the form of the good placed before it, it agrees with it, adheres to it as made firm in it — and “then it is said to love it.” Conclusion: love is “nothing other than a transformation, a metamorphosis, of the affection of the heart into the thing loved”; later he will say love is a conformity of the heart with its object. So love is more a receiving than a giving. The problem he puts: if loving is undergoing — being wounded, transformed — why is love called “the first gift,” why do we say loving is giving? Giving is not receiving (“more divine to give than to receive,” but we are talking of human love). One may give as a result of love; that is an effect, not the loving itself.

2. Student answers, and the direction of the solution (“Where Christ loved me and gave himself”) #

• A student cites Paul, “loved me and gave himself for me.” His reply: what you give because you love is an effect of love, not the love. But is the loving itself somehow giving?
• Juliet gives her heart to Romeo — yet Romeo tells Friar Lawrence “I was wounded, and someone else was wounded by me”: she began to love when wounded by him. A student offers “an active receptivity.”
• His answer: Aristotle, “sixth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VI], contrasting truth and goodness: truth is chiefly in the mind (though measured by things); good is chiefly in things.

3. Truth chiefly in the mind; knowing is a grasping (“Do you grasp what I’m saying”) #

Point: where truth is found explains why knowing is called taking or grasping.

• Dig in the ground, swim the ocean, walk through the air: no truth found there. Truth is in statements (“you are sitting” — I am true), which are primarily in the mind.
• The thing known must be in the knower before it is known: recognizing people means their shape and colour are already inside me (Alzheimer’s aside: he’ll still recognize you).
• Hence “grasp” = understand: the chalk grasped is contained in my hand, like the thing known in the mind. Defining square: take the genus quadrilateral, the differences equilateral and right-angled, and now I have grasped what a square is.
• Is loving a grasping? “No, we don’t say that.”

4. Good chiefly in things; same knowledge of opposites, not same love (“there is the same knowledge of opposites”) #

Point: love attaches me to the thing as it is in itself, so the condition of things governs love in a way it does not govern knowledge.

1. Good and bad are in things: virtue is good, vice bad; so loving virtue is good and loving vice is bad — love joins me to the thing (virtue, God, Mozart’s music, vice).
2. Plato and Aristotle stress the same knowledge of opposites:
   • Symposium’s last conversation: Socrates tells Agathon (tragic poet, prize-winner) and Aristophanes that if they knew what they were doing each could write the other’s kind of play.
   • Nicomachean Ethics: moral virtue defined as a habit with choice in the middle relative to us, determined by right reason; vice as excess or falling short (courageous between foolhardy and coward; generous between stingy and extravagant) — knowing one helps know the other.
   • The doctor’s knowledge of high blood pressure is knowledge of normal; “nobody knows better than a doctor how to make you sick.”
   • Logic: knowing how to reason correctly is knowing how to deceive; when he writes a logic exam he knows which bad forms will look good.
3. But there is not the same love of opposites: love of virtue prevents love of vice, love of health prevents love of sickness, “you can’t love God and mammon.”
4. Why: good and bad are in things, and in things one opposite excludes the other, so tending by the heart to one excludes tending to the other; but in knowing they enter the mind as thoughts, and the thought of one helps understand the reverse. Conclusion: knowing pulls things into the mind; love tends toward the thing in itself. “The thing known is more in the knowing; love is more in the thing loved” — a contrariety between knowledge and love reflected in “take/grasp” for knowing and “give” for love.

5. Illustrations of the heart in the thing loved (“I left my heart in San Francisco”) #

Point: ordinary speech confirms that love is placed in the object.

• “I left my heart in San Francisco” (love) vs. “I’ll keep you in mind” (knowing); “where your treasure is, there also shall your heart be.”
• Always bad to lose your head or your mind; whether it is bad to lose your heart depends on to whom or what.
• Shakespeare’s lovers and madmen with “seething brains”: love compared to heat, which overflows and goes out; reason “cool,” “keep your cool” — cold does not go out to things.
• Aside: a California student’s argument against required ethics: same knowledge of opposites, students learn vice too, and being inclined to vice are made worse — “the best argument I heard against teaching ethics.” Point stands: you can’t know one without the other (grammar lets me know “I is your professor” is wrong; Mozart’s Musical Joke, Köchel 522, teaches how not to write music, obvious and subtle mistakes alike; Aristotle showing how a science’s way should and should not be determined).
• Romeo banished: how go forward when my heart is here; Antony leaving his heart with Cleopatra; Augustine, the soul is more ubi amat quam ubi animat — more where it loves than where it animates.
• So “give” is said not because in loving you originally give something, but because the loved acts on and transforms your heart, and, the good being in things, the heart is said to be in the thing loved. “My heart’s not in it” when doing what you dislike. True from romantic love up to Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux, who both speak of love as a wound — something received, not given.
• Further cases of exclusion in things vs. sameness in knowledge: normal vs. abnormal blood pressure, overactive vs. inactive thyroid (“tonic cocktail” aside), the doctor cannot know I’m overweight without knowing what my weight should be, though in things I cannot have both. Ignorance defined as lack of knowledge, so knowledge of ignorance is knowledge; blindness defined as lack of sight, but sight and blindness exclude each other, and loving sight means hating blindness. Summary he gives: suffering, wound, metamorphosis, transformation — all show love to be, as Thomas teaches, an undergoing. Break.

6. Epithumia and thumos; the eleven emotions (“Thumos is really the fighter and defender”) #

Point: the framework the article presupposes.

• Plato and Aristotle distinguished epithumia and thumos; Latin: concupiscible appetite (named from its best-known emotion, desire for what pleases the senses) and irascible appetite. “Appetite” originally means desire but here names the ability for certain emotions.
• Concupiscible, regarding what pleases the senses: candy or Mozart’s music — I like/love it; lacking it, desire; having it, joy/pleasure/delight. Regarding what is disagreeable: salmon — I hate it, avoid it, and if forced to eat it at a host’s table, sadness/pain. Six emotions.
• Will has like acts: knowing wisdom, I love it, want it, delight in it (Augustine: heaven is gaudium de veritate); knowing vice, I hate and avoid it, and am saddened seeing my vices in the mirror. So love, desire, hate, sadness name emotions or the “more bodiless” acts of the will.
• Thumos, fighter and defender of the concupiscible, arises with difficulty: hope or despair of overcoming difficulty in getting a good; fear (the grade-school bully) or boldness in avoiding an evil; anger, arising from pain/sadness when one thinks one can remove its cause (you step on my toes, I inform you, you say “so what?”). No irascible emotion arises from joy: no difficulty in enjoying yourself. Five emotions.
• Mozart uses keys for these: major for desire and joy, minor for sadness (the two quintets K. 515 in C major, K. 516 in G minor); anger, despair, fear in minor; hope and boldness in major.
• Four principal passions recognized by Aristotle, Thomas, John of the Cross, Vatican II: joy and sadness (concupiscible), hope and fear (thumos). Comedy moves to mirth (joy and hope), tragedy to pity (sadness and fear); the Constitution on the Church in the Modern World names joys, sorrows, hopes, fears together; John of the Cross has treatises on the four; Thomas articles on them.
• This treatise on love sits in the treatise on the emotions in the Prima Secundae, but mutatis mutandis applies to the will. Question of the article: does love belong to epithumia or thumos? Good/bad as such pertains to the concupiscible; difficulty brings in thumos.

7. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“whether love is in the concupiscible appetite”) #

Read from page 9. The Latin is amor, naming more the emotion; dilectio later for the will’s love.

• Obj. 1: Wisdom 8:2, “I have loved and sought this wisdom”; the concupiscible, part of the sensible desiring power, cannot tend to wisdom, not grasped by sense. He anticipates the reply will distinguish emotion from act of will — “we’ll see.”
• Obj. 2: love seems the same as every passion (Latin “passion” well names an undergoing; “emotion” implies being moved by the object). Augustine, City of God XIV: love longing for what is loved is desire; having and delighting is joy; fleeing the opposed is fear; sensing it forced on you is sadness. But fear is irascible. His gloss: Augustine means love is root and cause of the others — if I didn’t love my body I wouldn’t hate sickness; a student: “everything’s moved by love.”
• Obj. 3: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4, lays down a natural love, which seems to belong to the powers of the plant soul (the nursery man: this plant loves sunshine; broccoli “is a big feeder”).
• Sed contra: “the Philosopher,” Aristotle by antonomasia (aside: Matthew’s Greek has Christ call God ho agathos, “the good one,” where other Gospels say “God alone is good” — antonomasia), says in Topics II — a book of logic, dialectical reasoning — that love is in the concupiscible (Aristotle would say epithumia).

8. The body: three desires, love as beginning of motion (“connaturality of the one desiring”) #

1. Love pertains to the ability to desire, since both have the good as object; hence love differs as desire differs.
2. Natural desire: follows not the grasping of the desirer but of another — the plant wants sun or water not by grasping what they are but by an inclination put in by its maker, “the one instituting nature” (reference back to the first book of the Summa).
3. Sense desire: follows the desirer’s own grasping but by necessity, not free judgment — the beasts (the cat at the table who walks off when the wine glass is set down); in men it partakes of freedom insofar as it can obey reason.
4. Rational desire, willing: follows free judgment. Reason is free because it knows the universal: nothing in this world so good that reason cannot find it bad, since it prevents some other good (Sunday Mass prevents another hour of sleep) — one can judge good bad and bad good, the witches’ “fair is foul, foul is fair.”
5. In each, love is the beginning of the motion tending to the end: in natural desire the connaturality of the desirer to what it tends to (old physics: heavy body’s connaturality to the middle place through heaviness); the fitting of sense desire or will to a good is sense love or reasonable love.
6. Love is concupiscible because said with respect to good absolutely, not under difficulty, the irascible’s object: a bowl of peanuts within reach — no irascible emotion; pull it away (“you’ve had enough”) and I get angry, you being now an impediment. Aristotle: animals fight over food and sex (two dogs and one piece of meat).

• Note: the theological virtue of hope is named from a thumos emotion because it deals with a difficult good; charity from love, naming no difficulty.

9. The replies, and how “love” is carried to the will (“Do you have an emotional attachment to the syllogism”) #

• Ad 1: the love of wisdom is not an emotion. Story: a Polish philosophy professor in college, frustrated by his syllogizing, asked in class whether he had an emotional attachment to the syllogism; he replied he could have one to a girl, hardly to the syllogism, but his reason respects it as an argument whose conclusion follows necessarily (“and that’s why it gives you so much difficulty” — not added at the time). Love of God is primarily an act of will: as a grade-school boy hearing sermons on love of God he thought of girls. Sometimes one is unsure which love one has — a bit of both; Augustine and Thomas on music: does it move the will through the emotions? Some ambiguity.
• Naming: we name the emotions first and carry the word to the will’s acts by likeness, dropping the bodily aspect, the will being immaterial like reason; emotions we share with beasts, will with guardian angels and God. Greek has several words for love (C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves: philia, storge, eros, agape), all rendered “love” in our Bibles.
• Ad 2: love is said to be fear, joy, desire, sadness not essentially but as their cause.
• Ad 3: natural love is not only in the plant powers but in all powers of the soul, all parts of the body, all things, since (Dionysius) the beautiful and good is lovable for all, each thing having connaturality to what suits it.
• His summary: the article settles which group the emotion of love belongs to — the first, regarding good without qualification; the irascible needs difficulty in getting the good, avoiding the bad, or ridding oneself of a bad already forced on you (mosquito on the finger, brushed off without hate; the bully on my feet calls for anger). Anger in Our Lord chasing the money-changers. Mozart’s anger: mainly the D minor and C minor concertos; his letter to his father on Osmin in The Abduction from the Seraglio — an angry man loses control and the music must represent it, but not so as to displease the ears and cease to be music.

His words #

• undergoing: his rendering of passio; love is an undergoing, a receiving, being wounded or transformed [ed.: passion]
• undergoing ability / desiring power / the heart: the appetite as subject of love [ed.: appetitive power]
• transformation, metamorphosis of the affection into the thing loved; later, conformity of the heart with its object
• grasping / taking: knowing, as truth is chiefly in the mind [ed.: apprehension]
• sixth book of Wisdom: Aristotle’s Metaphysics VI
• the same knowledge of opposites vs. not the same love of opposites
• ubi amat quam ubi animat (Augustine): soul more where it loves than where it animates
• epithumia / thumos: Greek names of the two emotional powers; Latin concupiscible and irascible appetite; “appetite” here an ability for emotions
• gaudium de veritate (Augustine): heaven as joy of truth
• amor: the word naming more the emotion; dilectio: love of the will
• passion / emotion: undergoing; being moved by the object
• natural love / natural desire: inclination put in by the instituting nature; connaturality
• free judgment: of reason, because it knows the universal
• antonomasia: “the Philosopher” for Aristotle; ho agathos, “the good one,” for God in Matthew
• the four principal passions: joy, sadness, hope, fear
• mutatis mutandis: applying the treatise on the emotions to acts of the will

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Sentences passage on love as transformation of the affection (handout; locus not stated)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, first article on love, “whether love is in the concupiscible,” objections, sed contra, body, replies (handout p. 9; q. 26 a. 1 inferred)
• Wisdom 8:2 (in obj. 1); Augustine, City of God XIV (in obj. 2); Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4 (in obj. 3 and ad 3); Aristotle, Topics II (sed contra) Mentioned
• Summa I-II second article, “whether love is an undergoing” (handout p. 11); Summa I on natural desire and the instituting nature
• Aristotle, On the Soul III (unmoved/moved mover); Metaphysics VI (truth in mind, good in things); Nicomachean Ethics (definition of moral virtue); Aristotle on animals fighting over food and sex; on the method of a science
• Plato, Symposium (Socrates, Agathon, Aristophanes)
• Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet (Friar Lawrence, banishment), Antony and Cleopatra, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (lovers and madmen, inferred), Macbeth (witches)
• Scripture: Paul “loved me and gave himself for me”; “where your treasure is”; “God and mammon”; Matthew, “the good one”; money-changers in the temple
• Augustine on the soul where it loves, on joy of truth, on music; Thomas on music; Teresa of Ávila and Thérèse of Lisieux on love as wound; John of the Cross on the four passions; Vatican II, Constitution on the Church in the Modern World
• Mozart: Musical Joke K. 522; string quintets K. 515 and K. 516; D minor and C minor concertos; letter to his father on Osmin in The Abduction from the Seraglio
• C. S. Lewis, The Four Loves; “I left my heart in San Francisco”

His questions #

• Why do we say love is a giving, when everything shows it is a receiving, a wound, a transformation? Because the good is chiefly in things, so the heart goes out to and is said to be in the thing loved; the loving itself is still an undergoing.
• Where do you find truth — in the ground, the ocean, the air? In statements, which are primarily in the mind.
• Is loving a grasping? No; knowing pulls things into the mind, love tends to the thing in itself.
• Is there the same love of opposites as there is the same knowledge of opposites? No: love of one opposite prevents love of the other, because in things one excludes the other.
• Is it always bad to lose your heart? Depends to whom or what; losing your head or mind is always bad.
• Does love belong to the concupiscible or the irascible? Concupiscible, since it regards the good absolutely, not under difficulty.
• Why is the theological virtue of hope named from a thumos emotion, charity from love? Hope deals with a difficult good; charity names no difficulty.
• Is the love of wisdom, or of God, an emotion? No; an act of the will called love by likeness to the emotion (though one may sometimes have a bit of both).
• Does music move you to the love of God through the emotions? Left open — “some ambiguity.”