Love as an Undergoing: Conformity of the Heart, and Sense Love in Shakespeare

Orientation #

He opens by recalling “we had a lot of texts on love being an undergoing… and being wounded” and the explanation of why love is nonetheless called a giving (prev. lecture). He says “next two articles” will divide love in two ways, and the class stops in the objections of the second of these. The reading is from the handout “Nature and Kinds of Love” (pp. 9–20, “look on page eleven now”) and the Shakespeare page (p. 25). The previous class treated love as an undergoing in the first article and the giving/receiving tension via Metaphysics VI; the next continues with amor, dilectio, caritas, amicitia and the love of friendship against the love of wanting.

The class, in order #

1. Opening aside: Thomas on Matthew (“did they die again”) #

Before the text: Thomas, commenting on Matthew, holds that those who rose after Christ’s resurrection and appeared in the city did not die again but went with Christ to heaven, unlike Lazarus, who did die again; they were witnesses to the resurrection, and there would be no benefit in rising only to die twice. He says he was surprised by this, does not think the Church has decided it, and does not know what Augustine or the other Fathers say.

2. Recap: why love, an undergoing, is called a giving (“why should love be said to be a giving”) #

Point: love is received in us, yet common speech makes it a giving (“giving your love”, “I left my heart in San Francisco”, “where your treasure is, there your heart is”).

1. Knowing is a taking or grasping; the true is primarily in the mind (Aristotle, “sixth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VI]). Hence learning is getting things into your head; Augustine trying to understand the Trinity is like putting the ocean into a little hole.
2. The good is primarily in things. Sign: there is the same knowledge of contraries, and even knowledge of the bad is good; but there is not the same love of good and bad, and love of the bad makes you bad, because in loving you go out to the thing as it is in itself.
3. Conclusion: love is called a giving because its object is in things, not in the mind. But originally our love, especially the emotions and even the will, is an undergoing: the heart is acted upon by its object (hence the texts on the wound of love, romantic and in the saints). Contrast: God’s love causes the good in creatures; ours is aroused by the good in creatures or in God.

3. Objections two and three, and the sed contra (“love is not an undergoing”) #

• Obj. 2 (Augustine, De Trinitate): love is a union or binding, so the Holy Spirit is spoken of as a bond between Father and Son; but union is a relation, not an undergoing.
• Obj. 3 (Damascene, De fide orthodoxa II): undergoing is a motion; love is not the motion of the desiring power (that is desire) but its origin. He recalls: love gives rise to desire when the object is not had, to joy or pleasure when it is had; desire is a pursuit, pleasure a resting. The Latin appetitus names first the desire, then the power to desire (popularly “the heart”): the power is named from the act most like motion, since what moves is most noticed — Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs” (stand still at the station if you want to be passed by). Reason is named the same way, from the motion of reasoning.
• Sed contra: the Philosopher, Nicomachean Ethics VIII, says love is an undergoing. Aside on words: English “undergoing” / “act upon” and “overcome” (Mark Antony on Caesar’s mantle “the day he overcame the Nervii”) carry an above/below etymology — his little nephew knocking over whatever was lower than him; hammering down easier than hammering into the ceiling. Latin actio/passio and Greek poiein/paschein lack this etymology.

4. The body of the article: love as conformity of the heart (“the first change… is called love”) #

1. Undergoing is the effect of the agent in what is acted upon.
2. A natural agent gives a twofold effect: first the form, then the motion that follows the form. Example from ancient physics: the generator gives weight, and then the falling to a natural place. The weight, source of motion to a fitting place, can be called natural love — the likeness Thomas sees: by weight the body moves down and rests there; by the love in my heart I move toward the good I lack and rest in it (Augustine: “our hearts are restless until they rest in thee”).
3. So the desirable gives the desiring power first an adaptation or fitting with it, which is the agreeableness of the desirable — the good conforms your heart to itself; from that conformity follows movement to the desirable.
4. This is a circle: the desirable moves the power, puts itself in its aim, and the power tends to achieve it, so the end of the motion is where its beginning was; in a straight line beginning and end differ. Parallels: the circle of knowing (Aristotle and Einstein: knowledge begins in the senses and returns to them to judge); Anaximander, the second natural philosopher, beginning of things is also their end, materialistically (“dust thou art”); later one sees God as beginning (as maker, not matter) and end (as good, purpose), “alpha and omega” — reality is circular, and better so in God’s sense than in matter’s, where the end is destruction.
5. Conclusion: the first change of the desiring power by the desirable is love, “nothing other than” agreement or conformity of the heart with its object; from it follows movement to the desirable if not had (desire, “wanting”), and last rest (joy). Example: a square peg in a round hole — even the practical man says “it doesn’t want to go”, because it is not conformed to the hole; the conformed peg “wants to go”. So the conformed heart wants its object and rejoices on getting it. He notes he substitutes “heart” colloquially for “desiring power”, which renders appetitus as the power, not the act. Love is an undergoing most properly in the concupiscible (the emotions), by extension of the name in the will too: when I begin to love wisdom my heart is conformed to wisdom. Goethe: “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love” — conformity means being shaped by the thing.

5. The three replies (“union follows upon love”) #

• Ad 1 (Dionysius calls love a virtue, which seems an excellence of power, a mover): virtue signifies the origin of motion; love, once the heart is conformed, is the source of movement toward the object, so it is called virtue by attribution from this effect. But first the object impresses the heart: Christmas cookie press; the wax seal stamped with a form. “If the object made no impression upon your heart, then your heart has not been conformed” — a hard heart is slow to be impressed and so slow to love.
• Ad 2: union pertains to love because the lover, through the agreement of his heart, has himself to the beloved as to himself or something of himself; so love is not the relation of union, but union follows love. Dionysius: love is a uniting power; Aristotle, Politics II: union is the work of love. Boundary case: I am united with wisdom, which does not love me, because I love it. Thomas says more when treating union as the first effect of love.
• Ad 3: love does not name the motion of the power tending toward the desirable, but the motion by which it is changed by the desirable so that it becomes agreeable to it. Example: is the glass pushing paper across the table mover or moved? A moved mover — moved (in causality, if not in time) before it moves. So my love gives rise to desire for candy because candy has already impressed itself on my heart. “So you all convinced that love is an undergoing now?” — the second article, he says, is what really brings out the nature of love.

6. Looking ahead: the two divisions of love and their order (“a very contracted knowledge of the good”) #

Next two articles divide love (a) into the emotion and the act of the will, and (b) into amor concupiscentiae and amor amicitiae, the love of wanting and the love of wishing well. Why (a) first: emotions follow the senses (so other animals have them), and the senses know good and bad only as agreeable/pleasing or disagreeable/painful to the senses — that is, my pleasure. If I pursue my pleasure, I do not love you in the sense of wishing you well; at best you are the good I want to please me. So the love of wishing well is not in the emotions as such; division (b) is “really almost like a subdivision” of the love in the will, with perhaps the love of wanting applying to sense love. He flags this as “kind of a subtle thing”.

7. Shakespeare on sense love: lovers, madmen and poets (“reason and love keep little company together”) #

Point: the first two Shakespeare readings (A Midsummer Night’s Dream) name a love contrasted with reason, following the senses and imagination — the love best known to us because closest to where knowledge begins.

• “Reason and love keep little company together nowadays”: love of want/desire, not the love following reason. Beauty appeals to the eyes, charm to the imagination (an internal sense power); romantic love is partly both. His boyhood memory: hearing “love of God” in church and thinking of girls — stuck on the first meaning. At weddings St Paul’s text on love is read, though he means the love in the will (probably agape in Greek); Latin and Greek have more distinct words.
• “Lovers and madmen have such seething brains, such shaping fantasies, that apprehend more than cool reason ever comprehends”: fantasy is the Greek word for imagination, to which romantic love (as distinct from mere sexual attraction) is tied; reason is “cool” (“keep your cool”). Charm: a quality appealing to the imagination, recognized (e.g. in a little girl) but hard to define; the poet writes charmingly, appealing to imagination over sense or reason (Keats: when the philosopher gets hold of something all the charm goes out). Contrast his flat “these young people will get old and die” with “Golden lads and girls all must, as chimney sweepers, come to dust” and “thou art thy mother’s glass, and she in thee calls back the lovely April of her prime”; Washington Irving as a charming prose writer.
• “The lunatic, the lover, and the poet are of imagination all compact”; “what eyes hath love put in my head that have no correspondence with true sight”. Plato before Aristotle (in the book on the poetic art): no one is a poet until moved by love; Shakespeare: not till he has dipped his pen in love’s sigh; Kierkegaard: men become poets through the woman they didn’t get (Dante’s Beatrice). Aristotle also likens the poet to the madman: entering his characters he is not himself — Dickens grimacing at the mirror as his characters while his sick daughter watched; a Catholic actor who, as Shylock, really hated the Christians on stage. Aristotle: the poet must be mad or euplastos, easily mouldable; Keats: the poet has no personality; Alec Guinness imitating whoever walked ahead of him in London.

8. Hamlet to Horatio: chosen love (“since my dear soul was mistress of her choice”) #

Point: the Hamlet speech exemplifies dilectio, “chosen love”. Setting: Hamlet, unsure whether to trust the ghost (or a devil impersonating his father), has the players enact the poisoning and wants Horatio, his one close friend, to watch the king with him; here he says why he chose Horatio.

• Dilectio derives from electio, choice; Shakespeare uses “election” and “choice”. A small child’s soul is not “mistress of her choice” — reason not developed (“seven is the age of reason”, maybe later now). Choice began when the soul “could of men distinguish”, i.e. see which man was better as a friend; her election “sealed thee for herself”.
• What he saw: one “in suffering all that suffers nothing” — most men go to pieces in adversity; one who takes “fortune’s buffets and rewards with equal thanks” — a study of Canadian lottery winners: almost all less happy afterwards, divorces and the rest; men go crazy at good fortune as at bad. “Blood and judgment… so well commingled”: blood = emotions, judgment = reason; emotions moderated by reason, not “a pipe for fortune’s finger”. “Give me that man that is not passion’s slave”: an almost negative description of the virtuous man — not slave to hunger, thirst, sexual desire, fear (the coward), anger (the irascible), even sadness; the virtues of temperance, mildness, courage. “Something too much of this”: we don’t like to talk much of our love; people show love by what they do rather than say.
• Application: “philosopher” = lover of wisdom; that is chosen love, since the senses don’t know what wisdom is; the love follows reason’s seeing wisdom’s excellence. So dilectio = “chosen love” (one word made two in English), amor / eros = “sense love”; English “love” is ambiguous but in daily life usually means the emotional, sometimes sexual, love.

9. Whether amor is the same as dilectio: the objections (“just as four and twice two”) #

He left the Latin in the text. Objections:

1. Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4: amor (probably eros in his Greek) and dilectio (philia, or agape if charity) are as four and twice two, or rectilinear and having straight lines — which signify the same.
2. Motions of the desiring power differ by their objects; amor and dilectio have the same object, the good.
3. If they differed it would be that dilectio is taken in a good sense, amor in a bad, as some say according to Augustine, City of God XIV. Digression on why: eros, being strong, usually leads men astray, as anger does (given sometimes as a capital vice) — yet there is reasonable anger, Christ driving out the money-changers and angry with the Pharisees; and self-love (Aristotle, NE IX) sounds bad in daily speech, yet “love your neighbor as yourself” commands a good self-love; these take a bad connotation because in practice they are often disordered or excessive. But (Augustine, same place) each is taken in both a good and a bad way in Scripture; so, he concludes, it is not different to say amor and dilectio.

• Sed contra: Dionysius, ch. 4: to some of the saints the name amor (eros) seems more divine than dilectio. His gloss: eros carries an intensity dilectio lacks (dilectio sounds “bland”); the saints’ and the Church’s love for God is compared to husband and wife; and eros, being the emotional love, is more a being moved — one loves God more through God moving one to love him than by one’s own power, so we pray that he inflame our hearts; “falling in love” means no control, the beloved responsible; so God is more responsible for our loving him than we are (we can be responsible for rejecting him); “caritas Christi urget nos”. The recording ends here, before the body of the article.

His words #

• undergoing; his rendering of passio, correlative of “act upon” [ed.: passion]
• desiring power; appetitus as the power, named from desire, the act most like motion [ed.: appetite]; “heart” as his colloquial substitute
• sixth book of wisdom [ed.: Metaphysics VI]
• natural love; the weight by which a body moves to and rests in its fitting place
• adaptation or fitting; the desirable’s first effect on the power, the agreeableness of the desirable [ed.: coaptatio]
• love; the first change of the desiring power by the desirable, conformity of the heart with its object
• wanting; his English for desire, the movement to the good not had
• joy; rest in the good had
• concupiscible; the emotions, where love is most properly an undergoing
• sense love vs chosen love; amor (eros) vs dilectio (from electio, choice)
• love of wanting vs love of wishing well; amor concupiscentiae vs amor amicitiae
• fantasy; Greek word for imagination
• charm; quality appealing to the imagination, as beauty to the eyes
• moved mover; what moves another only because it is itself moved
• euplastos; easily mouldable (the poet, per Aristotle)

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, article on whether love is an undergoing: objections 2–3, sed contra, body, three replies (inferred: q. 26 a. 2); handout pp. 9–20
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, article on whether amor is the same as dilectio: objections 1–3 and sed contra (inferred: q. 26 a. 3)
• Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream (“reason and love keep little company”; “lovers and madmen”; “the lunatic, the lover, and the poet”); handout p. 25
• Shakespeare, Hamlet, Hamlet’s speech to Horatio (“since my dear soul was mistress of her choice”) Mentioned
• Thomas Aquinas, commentary on Matthew (those risen after the resurrection)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics VI (true in the mind, good in things); Nicomachean Ethics VIII (love an undergoing); Politics II (union the work of love); Nicomachean Ethics IX (self-love); Poetics (poet mad or euplastos)
• Augustine, De Trinitate (love a union); City of God XIV (amor and dilectio in good and bad sense); Confessions (inferred) “restless until they rest in thee”
• John Damascene, De fide orthodoxa II
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4
• Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida; Julius Caesar (inferred) “overcame the Nervii”; Cymbeline (inferred) “golden lads and girls”; sonnets (inferred) “thy mother’s glass”
• Goethe; Keats; Kierkegaard; Dante (Beatrice); Anaximander; Washington Irving; St Paul on love; “caritas Christi urget nos”

His questions #

• Why is love said to be a giving rather than a taking, if the heart is moved by the good? Because the good, unlike the true, is in things, and love goes out to the thing as it is in itself.
• Why is the desiring power named from desire? Because desire is the act most like motion, and things in motion catch the eye.
• What is love, in the body of the article? The first change of the desiring power by the desirable — the conformity of the heart with its object.
• Why compare love to a circle? The desirable that begins the motion is also its end; in a straight line beginning and end differ.
• Is my glass the mover or the moved? A moved mover; likewise love moves to desire only because the heart was first impressed by the object.
• Are you all convinced that love is an undergoing now? Yes (left as assent; he moves on).
• What kind of love is “reason and love keep little company together”? Want, desire — the love following the senses and imagination, not reason.
• What kind of love is the philosopher’s love of wisdom? Chosen love, since the senses do not know what wisdom is.
• Why do eros, anger and self-love take on a bad connotation? Because in practice they are often excessive or disordered, though each can be good.
• Why does amor seem more divine than dilectio to some saints? It carries intensity and being moved: God is more responsible for our loving him than we are.