Hope, Desire and Being Loved: Other Causes of Love, and Whether Love's Capacity Has a Limit

Orientation #

He opens on “the fourth cause of love” and refers back to the earlier articles (good, knowledge, likeness) and to “a long time ago” when he distinguished the love of wishing well from the love of wanting (prev. lecture) for likeness. He hands out sheets on “the first three effects of love”, saying the first effect (union) will be treated next time. Verified sources: the handout “Causes of Love” pp. 32–37 is read for much of the class; the text-matcher lists ST II-II q. 27 a. 1, but the article he actually reads is by his own description the fourth of the four articles on the causes of love. The previous class treated likeness as a cause of love; the next treats union as the first effect of love.

The class, in order #

1. Literary evidence that hope and difficulty feed love (“Hope is a lover’s staff”) #

The point: before the article, he collects texts showing that some emotion other than love seems to cause or increase love.

• Two Gentlemen of Verona, “Hope is a lover’s staff”: hope supports love.
• Fox and grapes: the fox loves the grapes, despairs of reaching them, then runs them down (“probably sour”). Same with the man who can’t win the woman (“who’d want to be married to her anyway?”). Despair turns love against its object.
• Moderns: they despaired of knowing the truth, and so began to run down the truth; originally they wanted it, but losing hope their love weakened. He promises someday to give “the three major sources of the modern world”.
• “She knew her distance and did angle for me, madding my eagerness with her restraint”: playing hard to get increases love. Aside: “fancy” originally meant imagination, then carried over to mean love.
• Prospero on Ferdinand and Miranda: “lest too light winning make the prize light”. Difficulty of getting makes us more attached.
• Aristotle: the man who worked hard for money is more attached to it than the man born wealthy.
• Augustine, De Trinitate: one sees in the light of truth how good it is to know all languages, but loves this “tepidly or not at all” without hope of mastering it; the closer he comes in hope, the more ardently he loves; so, despairing of all languages, each becomes proficient in his own. His own case: would he love to speak Chinese? Yes, but he despairs of learning it, so the love is not intense.
• Significant for the theological virtues: there hope generates love. So the question: can some other emotion, or other act of will, cause love?

2. The objections and the sed contra (“some are loved because of pleasure”) #

The point: three objections say yes; Augustine says all affections come from love.

1. Philosopher, Ethics VIII: some are loved because of pleasure; pleasure is an emotion.
2. Desire is an emotion, and in friendships of usefulness we love someone because of what we want from him (“I like you because I want something from you”).
3. Augustine, De Trinitate X: one loves lukewarmly or not at all what one has no hope of obtaining; so hope causes love.

• Aside: the recent synod document / the Pope’s speech stresses the bishops’ role in hope — “the age of despair”.
• Plato, Phaedo: Socrates gives three arguments for the soul’s immortality; Simmias and Cebes object; the arguments seem to collapse and the friends fall into despair of ever knowing; Echecrates has “that sinking feeling”; Phaedo says “I never admired Socrates more” as he leads them out of despair and then answers the objections. While in despair, love of the truth goes down. Applied: if men despair of obtaining God, they will love him lukewarmly or not at all — “so hope is very important”.
• Sed contra: Augustine, City of God XIV, all affections of the soul are caused by love. How put the two together?

3. Thomas’s reply: every other emotion presupposes love (“no other emotion of the soul which does not presuppose some love”) #

The point: no other emotion can be the universal cause of love, but one emotion can cause some love, as one good causes another.

1. Every other emotion implies motion toward something or rest in something.
2. All motion toward or rest in proceeds from some kindredship or fittingness — which belongs to the notion of love. Example: unless his heart agreed with candy he would neither seek candy nor rest once he had it; the kid who gets his candy is quiet for a while.
3. So no other emotion is universally the cause of love; but some emotion can cause some love, “just as one good is the cause of another”.

• Applied to acts of the will: no act of will that does not presuppose a love.
• Worked example: I love wisdom → I want wisdom → I meet Monsignor Dion or Charles De Koninck and see he is wise → I begin to like him. Wanting caused the liking; but the wanting was caused by a prior love (of wisdom). Two goods: wisdom, and the man who leads to wisdom.

4. The three replies (“no one takes pleasure except in the thing loved”) #

• Ad 1: love caused by pleasure, but that pleasure comes from a preceding love. His daughter in grade school: “Who do you love? Daddy. Why? He gives me candy” — love of candy came first; he is a means to candy.
• Ad 2: desire of a thing presupposes love of it, but desire of one thing can cause love of another: he who wants money loves the man he receives it from. Bernard of Clairvaux on the love of God (as he recalls): we first love our own happiness, get into difficulty, want God’s help, and in turning to God come to know and like God. So one love causes another love through some other emotion or act of will.
• Ad 3: hope causes or increases love both because it causes pleasure (hope of winning the girl, of making money, pleases) and because it strengthens desire (“we do not so intensely desire what we do not hope for”); and hope itself is also a love of some good.
• Application to faith, hope, charity: Augustine (quoted in a text he cites as “Credo … De Verbo” [unclear in recording]): by believing come to hope, by hoping come to love. So in via generationis hope precedes charity. Student difficulty: how can hope precede love? Answer: some love precedes hope — the love of one’s own good, one’s own happiness; we hope in God to get us to heaven; only as we become familiar with God do we begin to love him because he is God and not because useful. The love before hope is not the theological virtue of charity, which comes after.
• Break.

5. Augustine, De Catechizandis Rudibus: nothing invites love more than being first loved (“to be beforehand in loving”) #

The point: a cause of love “worthy of special mention” — being loved — and the question how it fits Thomas’s four articles.

• Occasion: a friend asked Augustine how to give catechetical instruction; Augustine says it should aim above all at bringing the audience to love God, by narrating what God has done for us.
• Read: the Lord’s coming manifested God’s love (“when we were yet enemies, Christ died for us”, from Paul); the key sentence: nothing invites love more than to be beforehand in loving, and the heart is overhard that would not return love though unwilling to bestow it.
• Augustine goes “all the way down to sensual love” to make the point: seducers display and even counterfeit affection to claim a return of love; passion is more inflamed on perceiving the other is moved by the same fire; so the callous heart is aroused on sensing it is loved, and the inflamed heart more inflamed on learning it is loved in return. If in base passions, how much more in friendship — what we most guard against is that a friend should think we do not love him, or love him less; if he believes it, he cools, or falls back to affection for utility rather than enjoyment. (“very, very understanding”)
• Superiors are moved by the affection of inferiors, but the inferior is fired even more on finding himself loved by the superior: love not burnt with the draught of want but from the overflowing stream of beneficence — the former from misery, the latter from mercy. He glosses: love of friendship vs. “need love” (love of wanting). Highest: God when he judges, most helpless: man when he sins; the inferior who despaired of being loved is “unspeakably moved”.
• Our Lord died on the cross partly to gain our love: “greater love than this hath no man”.

6. Thomas, Contra Gentiles IV 54, says the same (“Nothing, however, leads us to love someone”) #

The point: Thomas gives the same cause as a reason for the Incarnation.

1. Man’s perfect beatitude is enjoyment of God, so his affection must be disposed to desire it; desire of enjoying is caused by love; so man must be induced to love God.
2. “Nothing leads us to love someone as the experience that he loves us” (his emphasis: “that’s pretty strong”).
3. God’s love can be shown no more efficaciously than by being united to man in person — since it belongs to love to unite lover and loved as far as possible (the first effect of love, next time).
4. So for man tending to beatitude it was necessary that God become man.

• The more unselfish the love — wishing well, not need — the more it moves us. Two questions to the class: do you agree with Augustine and Thomas? and how does this cause fit the four articles?

7. Aristotle on being loved: honour, and seeking to be loved (“Does friendship consist more in loving or being loved”) #

• Aristotle (Ethics, treatise on friendship): friendship consists more in loving, but since it requires mutual love, being loved is part of it. Why do we rejoice in being loved? Being loved is a sign of some goodness in oneself (“You’re nobody till somebody loves you”). Human love vs. God’s: God’s love causes goodness.
• To be loved is in a way to be honoured, a testimony to one’s worth (interesting for theology: loving God and praising/honouring God are close). But honour is not sought for its own sake: as confirmation (Monsignor Dion praising his idea makes him think it good) or to get something out of someone; to be loved is good by itself.
• Aristotle: people seek more to be loved than to love. St Francis’s prayer asks to seek to love more than to be loved — a saint praying so is a sign of our disorder.

8. Where being loved falls: under the good and under likeness (“You love me the way I love myself”) #

The point: being loved is a cause of love under the good and under likeness, so Thomas’s four articles hold.

• First proposal: since being loved is good, it falls under the good. Student: it involves knowledge too. Answer: yes, knowledge of something good — that you love me unselfishly.
• Student: the lover sees you as another self, so it is likeness. He develops: you love yourself most rootedly — more than like yourself, you are yourself (“Richard loves Richard: I’m I”). The Delphic maxims of the seven wise men: “know thyself” and “nothing too much” — why not “love thyself”? Men don’t know themselves, but no question they love themselves; the advice needed is “not too much”. Amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei is pride. The commandment is love your neighbour as yourself; we are not urged to love ourselves but not to love ourselves too much. Recalled distinction: for oneself only the love of wishing well; for candy only the love of wanting; for another human either — hence ambiguity. If I perceive you have the love of wishing well for me, you love me just as I love myself: likeness. “In some ways it seems more the likeness.”
• His own note: Aristotle compares friendship to justice; if you have given me love I owe you love in return, so returning love is just and therefore good (Catherine of Siena: pay the debt of love to your neighbour; scripture: owe nothing except love). Even at the “monetary” level, a favour or dinner invitation is owed in return.
• Aside: people today say there is no true friendship, all pretending; maybe much of it is, but when you find real goodwill you are “pressed” as by justice to return it.
• Conclusion: worthy of special mention because the two greatest minds of the Church note it, but it comes under the good in two ways (being loved is good; returning love is just, hence good) and under likeness (you love me as I love myself). That is what charity is; neighbours should return the love given as if lent. St Alphonsus on meditating the Passion — for the good of the heart, not the mind — quoting Augustine: this is the way to gain love of God.
• He is “defending Thomas’s four articles”: every cause of love is the good, knowledge, likeness, or another emotion going back to a prior love.

9. Handout on the first three effects of love; likeness on the side of the lover (“more than like myself, I am myself”) #

• Hands out the first three of the six effects (Thomas’s third question). In treating union Thomas will add that identity, not only likeness, causes love.
• Reflection: good vs. likeness as causes. Why love wine over beer? Wine is better — the good is on the side of the loved. Why love myself more than others? Not because I am better than everyone; self-love is stubborn (“I can’t get rid of it”; Shakespeare’s sonnet on the sin of self-love). So likeness/identity seems more on the side of the lover; the good altogether on the side of the loved. Love is “in between” lover and loved as seeing is between seer and seen; Augustine: nothing is loved but the good; yet no love without a lover, and the lover naturally loves himself (God naturally loves himself). Student: does the good generate the likeness? Answer: no; good is under the loved, likeness or identity goes back to the lover.
• Self-love natural to all things: the tree seeks water and sun; every animal its good. Aristotle: self-love usually has a bad sense because most love themselves too much, but there must be a good way, else “love your neighbour as yourself” fails. Bernard of Clairvaux’s letter to one appointed to high office: cast the beam out of your own eye first. You can love yourself too much, never God too much — “very, very subtle”. Heraclitus’s Bias of Priene (“most men are bad”); nothing too much applies to eating, drinking, sex, anger, money, power — and all men love themselves too much; “nothing too little” is less the problem (eating disorders not a normal human problem). Christ’s “hate your father and mother, even yourself” — “almost the wrong way of putting it”. Wuthering Heights: not that Heathcliff is like her, “he is myself” — the friend as another self.

10. No limit to charity’s growth: Aristotle on the senses, Averroes on numbers (“Is there any limit as to how much charity can grow”) #

The point: from Thomas’s article in the Commentary on the Sentences, charity in a creature can grow without limit.

1. Aristotle, De Anima: a material ability is limited — very bright light blinds, very loud sound deafens, very pungent taste (hot Chinese food) numbs — but the understanding, after understanding the very intelligible (God), finds the triangle easy; ability increases with what is understood (TAC juniors looking back on Euclid).
2. Averroes’s comparison to numbers, on his reading: strictly, one is able only for what is one step away. A student who never learned plane geometry cannot learn solid; finding a circle’s centre (draw a chord, bisect it, draw a perpendicular, bisect that, prove the point is the centre) requires already knowing how to bisect and draw perpendiculars — he stumped a colleague with it. Two is able to be three, not four; having three, a new ability to be four. Each theorem learned enables another; with every ability actualised a new ability arises, so it never ends.
3. So with an immaterial power: each degree of love of God makes one capable of more; no limit. Material: the shower can get only so hot before it destroys you; the light eventually causes snow blindness; hot food burns the tongue (his own Chinese dinner; the English Indian-restaurant contests, “not my way of enjoying the meal”).

• Extension to will vs. emotions: the emotions break down at a level. Brother Marcus: the first sip of beer tastes best, downhill after; “hunger is the best sauce”; gorging on popcorn disgusts, small amounts never tire; pie contests; leftover turkey after Thanksgiving. Ability to enjoy decreases with more — “but the more I understand God…” (recording ends).

His words #

• kindredship / fitting — his rendering of the connaturality that belongs to the notion of love [ed.: connaturalitas]
• love of wishing well vs. love of wanting — his names for the two loves [ed.: love of friendship vs. love of concupiscence]; “need love” as others call the latter
• fancy — originally imagination, carried over to love
• via generationis — the order of generation/time, in which hope precedes charity
• amor sui usque ad contemptum Dei — love of self to contempt of God: pride
• “nothing too much” — the Delphic maxim, applied to self-love
• ability — for potency [ed.: potency]; “one step away” as the strict sense of being able
• material vs. immaterial ability — the former limited by its organ, the latter growing with each act

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, fourth article on the causes of love: whether another emotion (act of will) can cause love (I-II q. 27 a. 4, inferred; verified sources list II-II q. 27 a. 1)
• Augustine, De Trinitate (bk. X), the languages passage
• Augustine, De Catechizandis Rudibus, on being beforehand in loving
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles IV c. 54
• Shakespeare, Two Gentlemen of Verona (“Hope is a lover’s staff”); “She knew her distance and did angle for me”; Prospero on Ferdinand and Miranda (plays not named) Mentioned
• Aristotle, Ethics VIII (treatise on friendship: loving vs. being loved; friendship and justice; self-love); Aristotle on the poor man and money
• Augustine, City of God XIV
• Plato, Phaedo
• Thomas, Commentary on the Sentences, article on charity’s growth; Aristotle, De Anima; Averroes on numbers
• Bernard of Clairvaux (on love of God; a letter on self-knowledge); Catherine of Siena; St Francis’s prayer; St Alphonsus, meditation on the Passion
• Shakespeare’s sonnet on the sin of self-love; Wuthering Heights; Heraclitus on Bias of Priene; synod document / Pope’s speech on hope; Augustine “by believing come to hope” (source unclear)
• Handout: “Causes of Love” pp. 32–37; new handout, first three effects of love

His questions #

• Can some other emotion, or act of the will, cause the love that is love? Some love, yes (as one good causes another); universally, no — every emotion presupposes a love.
• How put together “hope causes love” and “all affections are caused by love”? The hope that causes charity is itself rooted in a prior love of one’s own happiness.
• How can hope come before love in the theological virtues? A love of one’s own good precedes hope; the charity that loves God as God comes after.
• Do you agree with Augustine and Thomas that nothing moves us to love more than being loved? And how does it fit the four articles? Under the good (being loved is good; returning love is just) and under likeness (you love me as I love myself).
• Is it more the goodness of being loved or the likeness that moves me to return your love? “In some ways it seems more the likeness”; both are involved.
• Why did the wise men write “know thyself” but not “love thyself”? Men don’t know themselves but certainly love themselves; the needed advice is “not too much”.
• Does the good generate the likeness? No: the good is on the side of the loved, likeness/identity on the side of the lover.
• Is there any limit to how much charity can grow in a creature? No — an immaterial ability gains new ability with each act, like numbers.
• How do you find the centre of a circle? Draw a chord, bisect it, draw a perpendicular, bisect that; the point is the centre — possible only one step from prior theorems.