Knowledge as Cause of Love (q.27 a.2) and Likeness as the Third Cause of Love

Orientation #

He refers back to “the distinction I was making before for you” between what is so simply and what is so in a qualified way (prev. lecture), and to “the scene that we quoted before” (Lady Capulet to Juliet) (prev. lecture). He hands out “the second part here, four articles altogether”, and starts the third cause of love, likeness, saying he will go on through it. Verified sources: handout “Causes of Love” pp. 9-20 is read for most of the hour; the text-matcher reports ST II-II q. 1 a. 2, but the transcript itself is the article on knowledge as cause of love, so the notes follow the transcript. The previous class treated the good as cause of love (ST I-II 27.1) with Shakespeare examples; the next treats likeness as cause of love.

The class, in order #

1. “Fancy” and “fond”: the imagination and the eyes (“Tell me, where is fancy bred”) #

Point: the very words for liking someone come from knowing powers, and the song says love is bred in the eyes.

• “fancy” originally = the imagination; because the imagination is so important in romantic love, it came to mean “you like somebody” (Mother Goose: “Do you fancy Nancy?”). “fond” originally = foolish: to be fond of a girl is to act foolishly over her.
• Merchant of Venice song: “where is fancy bred, or in the heart or in the head?” Answer: “engendered in the eyes, with gazing fed” — hence the Latin custodia oculorum, custody of the eyes.
• Aside: Shakespeare says “or … or” and “nor … nor” where we say either/or, neither/nor.

2. Love begins in sight even by magic; reason as marshal to the will (“The will of man is by his reason swayed”) #

Point: even Shakespeare’s magic love-potion must be applied to the eyes, and Lysander’s rationalisation states truly that the will follows reason.

• Twelfth Night, Duke and Curio (“Will you go hunt? — the hart”): a play on the two senses of “hart/heart”; seeing Olivia, “that instant was I turned into a hart, and my desires like fell and cruel hounds e’er since pursue me” — allusion to the man who peeked at Diana and was hunted by his hounds; what happens when love is not returned.
• Midsummer Night’s Dream: Oberon’s juice dropped in Titania’s eyes; she loves the first thing she sees (“lion, bear, or wolf”); Puck anoints the wrong Athenian (“some true love turned, and not a false turned true”). Even magic love has to “go through” the eyes.
• Lysander, wrongly anointed: “Not Hermia, but Helena I love.” He justifies the new love by reason: “The will of man is by his reason swayed … reason becomes a marshal to my will.” His point: the difference between will and emotion — emotions follow the senses or imagination (shared with beasts), the will follows reason (shared with angels); so knowledge moves the will to love.
  • Shakespeare puts true things in the mouth of someone who does not exemplify them (Lysander here; “Brevity is the soul of wit” in the mouth of tedious Polonius) — that makes the point doubly.
• Hamlet choosing Horatio: “Since my dear soul was mistress of her choice” — i.e. at the age of reason; he goes on to give reasons (Horatio is not passion’s slave), so reason saw the difference and chose the friend.
• Asides: love/dove rhyme; dove a symbol of love even in Greek myth, which helps understand the Holy Spirit descending as a dove since he proceeds as love. Rhyme and alliteration (“full fathom five thy father lies”) do not survive translation, which is why Samuel Johnson says poets preserve languages; an Assumptionist learned Italian just to read Dante.

3. The first two causes taken together: the good as known (“like her most, whose merit most shall be”) #

Point: he groups good and knowledge as the first two causes because the object of love is the good as known — sensed, imagined, or understood; the texts show the two coming together.

• Capulet to Paris: “hear all, see all … and like her most, whose merit most shall be” — seeing and merit together. Aside: “in number though in reckoning none” — one is not a number.
• Romeo and Benvolio (before Juliet): Romeo “live[s] dead” because Rosaline forswore love; Benvolio (“good will”, opposite of Malvolio in Twelfth Night) prescribes a nail to drive out a nail: “give liberty unto thine eyes, examine other beauties”; “take thou some new infection to thy eye” — Thomas later asks whether love makes you better or worse, and an infection obviously does not. The eyes as “crystal scales” in which Rosaline is weighed against another maid: judging by weighing, as in Scripture.
• Lady Capulet: “Read o’er the volume of young Paris’ face” — knowing powers; Juliet: “I’ll look to like, if looking liking move.”
• Romeo seeing Juliet: “she doth teach the torches to burn bright” — St Ambrose: without light all things are ugly; Dionysius makes light part of the beautiful (rainy days depress, fall foliage is more beautiful on a bright day). “As a rich jewel in an Ethiop’s ear” — from opposites the most beautiful harmony. The lines he emphasises: “Did my heart love till now? … I ne’er saw true beauty till this night” — beauty seen gives rise to love, as Thomas says.
• Olivia: “even so quickly may one catch the plague” — infection through the eyes again; “this youth’s perfections … creep in at mine eyes”: perfection = the good, and it is the good as known that moves her.
• Lorenzo on Jessica: “wise, if I can judge of her; fair, if that mine eyes be true; true, as she hath proved herself” — each line names a good and then the knowing of it; hence “I love her heartily” and “like herself … shall she be placed in my constant soul”.
• Proteus (named from the shape-changer), betrothed to Julia, seeing Sylvia: “Is it mine eye, or Valentine’s praise, her true perfection or my false transgression” — the good (her perfection) as known (his eye, and his friend’s praise). His love is “thawed, like a waxen image ‘gainst a fire”: the good impresses itself on the heart, hence “women’s waxen hearts”, which receive the image better than men.
• Lucentio (Taming of the Shrew): “while idly I stood looking on, I found the effect of love in idleness”; “sacred and sweet was all I saw in her” — the two causes together. Men do say of their wives “the first time I saw her…”; a friend: “our eyes just locked”.

4. Thomas’s article, the objections and sed contra (“It seems that knowledge is not a cause of love”) #

Point: the three stock objections against knowledge as cause of love.

1. Love makes something sought; but sciences are sought unknown, since in them to have is to know (Augustine, Eighty-Three Questions): if known, had, not sought. His forecast: it must be known in some way without being possessed.
2. If knowledge were the cause, love should be proportioned to knowledge (as more sugar makes coffee sweeter); but some things are loved more than known — God in this life can be loved in himself but not known in himself. So we love him as he is without knowing him as he is; charity remains while faith and hope give way to vision (St Paul); the washerwoman may love God more than the theologian. He calls this “very interesting”, “the stock objection”.
3. Love is in all things (Dionysius, Divine Names IV), knowledge is not — nursery talk: “this plant loves a lot of light”.

• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate X — no one can love what is unknown. Aside: Augustine and Thomas are the greatest minds of the Church; the Catechism and papal documents are full of them (the latest Pope Speaks issue opens with a quote from Thomas’s commentary on John).

5. The body: the good moves love only as grasped (“knowledge is a cause of love for the same reason as the good”) #

Point: the article’s argument and his manifestation of it.

1. The good is the cause of love by way of object (a. 1).
2. But the good is not an object of desire except as grasped or known in some way.
3. Therefore love requires some grasping of the good loved.

• Manifested not by syllogism but by division of the two loves: bodily sight is the beginning of sense love (Aristotle, Ethics IX — all the “love at first sight” examples); contemplation of spiritual beauty or goodness is the beginning of spiritual love — which is why faith precedes charity in the order of generation. Child loves candy because he tasted it; the man loves wisdom because reason grasped what wisdom is.
• The last sentence, “and this is why I put those two together”: knowledge is a cause “for the same reason” as the good, because it pertains to the object — candy as tasted, wisdom as understood, Shakespeare as read, Mozart as heard. Not knowing Shakespeare I would not dislike him, but I would not like him.

6. Reply 1: foreknowing a science in some way (“he who seeks a science is not entirely ignorant”) #

Point: one who seeks a science foreknows it in general, or in some effect, or by hearing it praised (Augustine, De Trin. X); to know it thus is not to have it, to know it perfectly is. This is the earlier distinction between what is so simply and what is so in a limited, qualified way (prev. lecture).

• Digression, Plato’s Protagoras: the young man wakes Socrates to be introduced to the fashionable Protagoras without knowing what Protagoras has; the dialogue teaches whom to believe — first criterion fame or position, the better criterion “does he know how to proceed?” (student who dissected frogs vs. professor with a deck of cards and four hearts). Socrates demands short answers; Protagoras makes speeches, then contradicts himself and gets angry.
• Augustine and Jerome wanted rhetoric knowing only that it is the art of persuasion; medicine makes sick men healthy; wisdom is knowledge of God — “I’d like to have that”, knowing only something about it.

7. Reply 2: why something can be loved more than known (“something is required for the perfection of knowledge”) #

Point: Thomas does not deny loving more than knowing; he explains it by a difference between knowing and loving.

• Knowledge belongs to reason, whose work is to distinguish what is joined in the thing and to put together what is diverse by comparison. Logic teaches definition, division, distinction; he has been teaching the four kinds of distinction made everywhere, each answering to a kind of mistake:
  1. senses of a word (“Chianti is dry, what is dry is not wet”; “Roger Maris hit 61 homers on the bat; the bat is a flying rodent”); also phrases with two senses: “wisdom is the knowledge of God” = knowledge about God and knowledge God alone fully has — both true;
  2. (three others named: per se vs. per accidens; simply vs. in some respect; the fourth not spelled out here.)
• So to know perfectly you must take the thing apart, one by one — parts, powers, properties (to know yourself, divide soul and body and compare); love is in the desiring power, which regards the thing as it is in itself, so it suffices to love the thing grasped as a whole — you do not divide a person to love him. Hence something can be perfectly loved though not perfectly known, most clearly in the sciences loved from slight knowledge (rhetoric as the science by which a man persuades), and likewise God.
• Illustrations: Thomas in the Sentences on divine names — names of the essence (essentia), of persons (Father, Son, Spirit), and, surprisingly, of both, e.g. potentia generandi, the divine nature insofar as it is the same as the Father; “very subtle distinctions” someone can lack and still love God more than I do. Paul VI making Teresa of Avila a doctor: not a doctor as Augustine is (defining, dividing, arguing, modus disputativus), and he quotes Francis de Sales on women’s greater capacity to love — a complementarity of male theologians and female saints (Teresa vs. the logical Dominican Báñez examining her visions; Catherine of Siena dictating her letters; de Sales’ Treatise on the Love of God taking examples from such women).
• Much more is required for knowing than for loving; people who love a science hesitate when they see what knowing takes: Euclid to the king, “no royal road” — the Pythagorean theorem is I.47, you need the 46 before it.

8. Reply 3: natural love (“the natural love, which is in all things”) #

Point: natural love is also caused by knowledge — not in the natural things but in the one who instituted their nature.

9. The third cause, likeness: handout and the question it raises (“The third cause of love is likeness”) #

Point: unlike knowledge, which was close to the good, likeness is something quite different; the handout gathers texts on it.

• Wuthering Heights (reread after buying a gift edition at the Passionist monastery sale in Shrewsbury): the woman is drawn to one man because he is good, to the other because he is like her — the two causes separated, raising the question which is stronger when they compete; left open, “it’s not necessary to say which is stronger” here.
• Applied to loving God: because of his known goodness, or because you are in his image (more so by grace, most in vision — 1 John: “we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is”), or both? Either way, love of God in vision must exceed love here, since both the good known and the likeness increase.
• Msgr Dionne on students drawn to a professor because he is like them rather than because he is wiser — a danger; his mother on doctors: do not choose the consoling one who is like you but the one who knows the body.

10. Portia reasons from love back to likeness; Richard, like no brother (“must needs be like my lord”) #

Point: two texts read from the handout — likeness as cause shown by reasoning from effect to cause, and its absence by Richard.

• Merchant of Venice: Portia sends Bassanio off to Antonio at once; Lorenzo praises her “true conceit of godlike amity” (conceit = understanding; Shakespeare calls friendship amity, godlike). “How dear a lover” = friend, not the modern sense; Greek philos from philein (not eros), Latin amicus from amare. Portia, who never met Antonio, infers that in companions “whose souls do bear an equal yoke of love there must be needs a like proportion of lineaments, of manners and of spirit” — Sherlock Holmes to Watson, reasoning backwards from effect to cause: Antonio must be like Bassanio, whom she loves, so she would love him; “the semblance of my soul” = the likeness of her better half.
  • His wife, from St Paul, meeting two of his three closest friends (a Golden Gloves boxer, a cigar-smoking politician): puzzled by the differences, because she expected friends to be like him.
• Richard killing King Henry: born legs forward and with teeth (“snarl and bite and play the dog”), body shaped by heaven so let hell make crooked his mind; the reason it is in the handout: “I have no brother, I am like no brother; and this word love, which greybeards call divine, be resident in men like one another, and not in me: I am myself alone” — no likeness, so no love. Greybeards = metonym for the wise.

His words #

• fancy: originally the imagination; later “to like someone”.
• fond: originally foolish.
• custodia oculorum: custody of the eyes.
• the good as known: his statement of the first two causes taken together; the object of love.
• “manifesting by division”: how Thomas shows the body, dividing sense love from the love in the will.
• the four kinds of distinction: senses of a word; per se vs. per accidens; simply vs. in some respect (fourth not named here).
• analysis: taking apart, what knowing requires and loving does not.
• desiring ability [ed.: appetitive power]: where love is.
• names in divinis: of the essence, of persons, of both (potentia generandi).
• modus disputativus: Augustine’s way as doctor.
• amity: Shakespeare’s word for friendship; “lover” = friend.
• semblance of my soul: likeness of her husband, her better half.
• reasoning backwards: from effect to cause (Sherlock Holmes).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q. 27 a. 2 (inferred) — objections, sed contra, body, three replies.
• Shakespeare, Merchant of Venice: “where is fancy bred”; Lorenzo on Jessica; Lorenzo and Portia on Antonio.
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night: Duke and Curio; Olivia “catch the plague”.
• Shakespeare, Midsummer Night’s Dream: Oberon, Puck, Lysander.
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet: Capulet to Paris; Romeo and Benvolio; Lady Capulet to Juliet; Romeo seeing Juliet.
• Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (inferred): Proteus on Sylvia.
• Shakespeare, Taming of the Shrew: Lucentio and Tranio.
• Shakespeare, Henry VI Part 3 (inferred): Richard after killing Henry.
• Handout “Causes of Love”, pp. 9-20. Mentioned
• Hamlet on Horatio; Polonius “brevity is the soul of wit”; The Tempest “full fathom five”.
• Aristotle, Ethics IX; Augustine, De Trin. X, Eighty-Three Questions; Dionysius, Divine Names IV (all via Thomas).
• Plato, Protagoras; Thomas, Sentences (divine names); Thomas, commentary on John; Paul VI’s document on Teresa of Avila; Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God; Teresa of Avila (Peers translation); Euclid I.47; Wuthering Heights; 1 John (“we shall be like him”); Sherlock Holmes.

His questions #

• Where is fancy bred, in the heart or in the head? In the eyes: “engendered in the eyes, with gazing fed.”
• Why is love, even magic love, made to go through the eyes? Because the good moves love only as known; bodily sight begins sense love.
• If knowledge is the cause of love, why isn’t love proportional to knowledge (more sugar, sweeter coffee)? Knowing requires dividing and comparing part by part; love takes the thing whole, so it can be perfect where knowledge is not.
• Why does Thomas say knowledge is a cause “for the same reason as the good”? Because knowledge pertains to the object: it is the good as known (candy as tasted, wisdom as understood) that moves the heart.
• How can you desire a science you do not have? You foreknow it in general, in an effect, or by hearing it praised; to know thus is not to have it.
• Which is stronger, love from goodness or love from likeness, when they compete (Wuthering Heights)? Left open; it suffices here to see they are separate causes.
• Do you love God because he is good as known, or because you are like him? Both, and both increase in the beatific vision, so love then must exceed love now.
• How does Portia know she would love Antonio, whom she never met? Reasoning backwards from the strong love to its cause: he must be like Bassanio, whom she loves.
• Why does Richard say he is “myself alone”? Love is resident in men like one another, and he is like no brother.