Aquinas on Love: Review of the Treatise's Divisions and Union as the First Effect of Love

Orientation #

He opens by saying “next week we’ll talk about the first three effects of love,” then proceeds to treat the first effect (union) in this class; the second and third (mutual indwelling, ecstasy) are described only in the overview. Verified sources: the class works from the handout “Effects of Love,” pp. 1–6 (Shakespeare passages and Thomas’s article), printed in DHB Vol. III, pp. 1171–1176. The previous class treated the fourth cause of love (another emotion or act of will), which he recalls here as “on the side of the lover.”

The class, in order #

1. The rule of two or three (“I uphold the rule of two or three”) #

Point: every word is logically divided (or divisible) into two or three; a division into more is a division with subdivision, or two divisions crisscrossed. Example: good men, bad men, good women, bad women — “two and two” (men/women crossed with good/bad). Applied to the treatise on love, divided into three questions: (1) nature and kinds of love, (2) causes, (3) effects.

• Q. 1, four articles (“who could understand that?”): aa. 1–2 nature of love vs. aa. 3–4 kinds of love — two and two.
• Q. 2, four articles: aa. 1–2 (the good, knowledge) go together on the side of the loved — the object of love is its cause; the good is the object; knowledge is the condition of the good being an object (“the good as known”). Aa. 3–4 (likeness, another emotion or act of will) are on the side of the lover: I love you because you are like me and I love myself; I love antihistamines because I love health. Example: “I love God because He is good and because I know He is good” (side of the loved).
• Q. 3, six articles: he splits them three and three on the handout only “because of the multitude of words.” The real division: aa. 1–4 are effects of love in comparison to the loved [ed.: ASR gives “love”; the contrast he draws is loved vs. lover]; aa. 5–6 in comparison to the lover.
  • a. 5: am I a better or worse person from the fact that I love? Nuanced by what I love: loving candy vs. loving God, truth, wisdom; love called a disease in poetry (Shakespeare). Aside: Harry Truman used to quote “better to have loved and lost”; Goethe: we are shaped and fashioned by what we love.
  • a. 6: love as cause of all I do — because I love wisdom I read Thomas; because I love candy I go to the drugstore; a Christian’s love of God could cause all he does.
  • Within aa. 1–4: three and one. Aa. 1–3 regard the loved itself: union (love attaches me to what I love); mutual staying-within (I try to get into what I love with mind and heart, and keep it in me); ecstasy (I go out of myself into the loved — more in the love of friendship than in the love of wanting: I go out for the candy but bring it back to my mouth; wishing well to another, I go “entirely out of myself”). A. 4, zeal/jealousy (one word in Latin, two in English), regards what could harm the loved (love of friendship: I move against what could harm my children) or what could impede my getting or enjoying it (love of wanting: you want the same woman, I move in jealousy against you).
• Reasons for the rule: we divide into two because we divide by opposites (good/bad, male/female, odd/even); into three because beginning, middle and end are complete — “the likeness that we have of the Trinity.” He defends the rule “mainly from my experience.”

2. As You Like It: love as sudden as the fight of two rams (“never anything so sudden but the fight of two rams”) #

Point: Shakespeare’s picture of love at first sight illustrates love uniting. Rosalind tells Orlando that Celia (her cousin) and Oliver (Orlando’s brother) fell in love at first sight: “no sooner met but they looked … looked but they loved … loved but they sighed … asked the reason … sought the remedy”; “a pair of stairs to marriage” climbed “incontinent”; “clubs cannot part them.” He glosses: looking is a cause of love (the danger of looking); they sighed because they did not yet have each other.

• The war metaphor (“wrath of love,” two rams, clubs): compare Thomas attaching mildness, which moderates anger, to temperance, which moderates bodily pleasure — after the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance) he takes up other virtues by their likeness to them. In anger you come together to fight, in love to make love, but “there’s a likeness there.”
• Aside: “Caesar’s thrasonical brag” — Thraso the boaster in Roman comedy; Caesar’s “veni vidi vici” alliterates, which English cannot do, so Shakespeare rhymes: “I came, saw, overcame.” His old teacher Kasurik could not believe the church pronunciation “veni vidi vici.”

3. Sonnet 36: loves one, persons twain (“we two must be twain”) #

Point: previews Thomas’s distinctions among unions. “Let me confess that we two must be twain / Although our undivided loves are one”: they have the union that love itself makes, but circumstances deny them the union sought as love’s ultimate effect.

4. All’s Well: Helena, Bertram and love bridging distance (“a bright particular star”) #

Point: love’s proper effect, to unite, reaches over any distance. Helena, a doctor’s daughter, loves the countess’s son — in that society a gap you cannot cross. Read: “‘Twere all one that I should love a bright particular star and think to wed it”; “the ambition in my love thus plagues itself” (love unreturned is a plague, a disease); “the hind that would be mated by the lion must die for love”; “a heart too capable of every line and trick of his sweet favour” — loving is an undergoing (recalled from the first question); “my idolatrous fancy must sanctify his relics.” Then her resolution: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven”; “the mightiest space in fortune nature brings to join like likes” — likeness as cause of love; “the king’s disease”: her father left her a cure; she will cure the king and claim Bertram as reward (the plot complicates because he resents being got this way). Application: the distance from Helena to Bertram, from the prince to Cinderella, is less than from God to us — “man is further from God than even the angels” — and only love explains crossing the whole distance: “why should God become a man?” Love’s first and proper effect is to unite lover and loved.

• Aside: All’s Well is one of the six mercy-and-forgiveness plays; As You Like It one of the second three love-and-friendship plays.

5. The Phoenix and the Turtle: two are one, and one is not a number (“Number there in love was slain”) #

Point: reason cannot make sense of two being one; love does it. “So they loved as love in twain had the essence but in one; two distincts, division none.” “Number there in love was slain”: the two became one, and one is not a number — Euclid defines number as a multitude composed of units, Aristotle as a multitude measured by the one; “that’s really the first meaning of number.” Example: I have a number of hands, not a number of heads; if one were a number I’d have “a number of wives.” Continues: “hearts remote yet not asunder,” “either was the other’s mine,” “single nature’s double name,” “reason in itself confounded saw division grow together,” “love hath reason, reason none.” Reason says contradiction; “beautiful example of Shakespeare’s understanding of how union is the effect of love.”

• As You Like It’s ending: Hymen (goddess of marriage) — “when earthly things made even atone together” (at-one), joining “her hand with his whose heart within his bosom is.”

6. The article: objections and sed contra (“Whether union is an effect of love”) #

• Obj. 1: absence is opposed to union, yet “the apostle” (Paul — antonomasia) tells the Galatians to be zealous for the good “not only when I am present.” His gloss: “absence makes the heart grow fonder” — how is union the effect if love is more in absence?
• Obj. 2: every union is either by nature (form to matter: soul to body; accident to subject: health to body; part to whole: liver to body; part to part) or by likeness (genus: you and the cat; species: you and another man; accident: you and another monk). Love does not cause natural union (else no love for those divided by nature), and union of likeness causes love rather than being caused by it. He anticipates Thomas’s answer: one union causes love, one is almost love, one is pursued as love’s result.
• Obj. 3, “a different kind”: sense in act is the sensible in act, understanding in act the understood in act, but the lover in act is not the loved in act; so union is more knowledge’s effect. He glosses: knowing you, I get your shape and colour in my head.
• Sed contra: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4, “any love is a uniting power.” Aside: Thomas thought Dionysius was Paul’s Athenian convert (we no longer do), which was part of his authority; Gregory the Great brought his works from Constantinople to Rome; Thomas commented on the Divine Names, Albert the Great on the Celestial Hierarchy, and both knew both.

7. The body: union in things and union by affection (“there is a twofold union of the lover with the loved”) #

Point: love makes one union formally and another efficiently.

1. Union “according to things” (real): the loved present to the lover. Union by affection: “I have a union with my wife right now by affection, but not in things; she’s somewhere in the state.” The affective union follows the preceding grasping, since desire’s movement follows apprehension.
2. Two loves, wanting and friendship, each from a grasping of the loved’s unity with the lover: loving something as wanted, I grasp it as pertaining to my well-being (food for the body, wisdom for the mind); loving someone with friendship, I will him good as to myself — hence “a friend is another self.” Greek proverb from his course at College St. Thomas: philos estin allos autos; Shakespeare’s “second self”; Augustine, Confessions bk. 4, “half of my soul” — not only spouses (“better half”) but friends.
3. Love makes the real union as efficient cause, mover, because it moves to desiring and seeking the loved’s presence as suitable and pertaining to oneself. It makes the union of affection formally, “because love itself is such a union or binding”: the bond of mother and child persists when the child is drafted and sent to war — no union in things, still a bond of the heart. So two unions are effects of love: one automatic (“the fact I love you means I am attached to you”), the other sought and impedable by circumstances.
4. Augustine, De Trinitate bk. 8: love is “a certain life joining together, or desiring to join together, some two, the lover and the loved.” “Joining together” = union of affection, “without which there is no love”; “desiring to join” = union in things. “Life” in the singular, as in the Prologue to Romeo and Juliet.

8. The replies: union to love in three ways (“union is to love in three ways”) #

• Ad 1: the objection concerns real union, which pleasure requires as its cause; desire is in the real absence of the loved, love in both absence and presence — I like candy whether or not I have it; without it, desire; with it, pleasure.
• Ad 2 — “this is very important to see” — adds to the causes of love: (a) some union causes love: union of substance/identity for self-love (I love myself “not because I am like myself but because I am myself” — “Richard loves Richard, that is, I am I,” King Richard III), union of likeness for love of another (“birds of a feather”); this is why likeness was placed on the side of the lover: it makes the two one in kind. (b) some union is essentially love itself: the fitting-together of affection, like a union of substance — the lover to the loved as to himself (friendship) or as to something of himself (wanting); “to love you or candy is to be attached to you or to candy.” He notes the body said love makes this “formally,” the reply speaks as if it were “almost the same thing as love.” (c) some union is love’s effect: the real union the lover seeks — e.g. union with God in the beatific vision, while charity already attaches us to God in sense (b). This union is according to what befits love: Aristotle, Politics bk. 2, reports Aristophanes saying lovers desire from two to become one; since one or both would be corrupted, they seek a fitting union — staying together, talking together, and such.
• Ad 3: knowledge is perfected by the known being united to the knower by its likeness; love makes the thing itself united in some way to the lover; hence love is more unifying. Example: knowing what badness is does not make me bad; loving what is bad unites me with it. Application: of the theological virtues, faith gives knowledge of the end, hope tends to it, charity already unites with it — so charity is greater than hope, hope than faith; and charity remains in the next life (perfected), whereas faith is replaced by vision and hope by possession.

His words #

• rule of two or three: every word is logically divided into two or three; more is subdivision or crisscrossing
• love of wanting vs. love of friendship (wishing well) [ed.: amor concupiscentiae / amor amicitiae]
• mutual staying within [ed.: mutua inhaesio]: I get into what I love and keep it in me
• ecstasy: going out of oneself into the loved
• zeal/jealousy: one Latin word, two in English [ed.: zelus]
• grasping [ed.: apprehensio]; undergoing [ed.: passio] (loving as undergoing)
• union according to things / real union vs. union by affection
• love makes the affective union formally, the real union as efficient cause (“mover or maker”)
• another self / second self / half of my soul: the friend
• the apostle: Paul, by antonomasia
• one is not a number: number = multitude composed of units (Euclid), measured by the one (Aristotle)
• atone: at one

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, “whether union is an effect of love” (I-II q. 28 a. 1, inferred), objections, sed contra, body, replies
• Shakespeare, As You Like It: Rosalind on Celia and Oliver (“fight of two rams”); Hymen’s song at the end
• Shakespeare, Sonnet 36
• Shakespeare, All’s Well That Ends Well: Helena’s two speeches (Bertram as star; “our remedies oft in ourselves do lie”)
• Shakespeare, The Phoenix and the Turtle
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4 (via sed contra)
• Augustine, Confessions bk. 4; De Trinitate bk. 8 (via the article)
• Aristotle, Politics bk. 2 (via the reply)
• Paul, Galatians with the gloss (via obj. 1)

Mentioned

• Summa Theologiae on the cardinal virtues, temperance and mildness
• Thomas, commentary on the Divine Names; Albert the Great on the Celestial Hierarchy
• Euclid, definition of number; Aristotle on number
• Shakespeare, Richard III (“Richard loves Richard”); Romeo and Juliet, Prologue
• Goethe (we are shaped by what we love); Harry Truman quoting “better to have loved and lost”
• Cinderella

His questions #

• How does dividing human beings into good men, bad men, good women, bad women give four? It is two crossed with two: men/women and good/bad.
• Why is knowledge a cause of love for the same reason the good is? The object of love is its cause; the good is the object, and knowledge is the condition of the good being an object.
• Am I the loved or the lover when I love you because you are like me and I love myself? More the lover — so likeness and the other emotion are on the lover’s side.
• Am I a better or worse person from the fact that I love? Nuanced by what I love: bad things make me bad; good, especially the better, may make me better (a. 5, still to come).
• Do I have a number of heads? No; one is not a number, hence “number there in love was slain.”
• How can two be one? Reason is confounded; only love does it (“love hath reason, reason none”).
• Why should God become man across an infinite distance? Only love explains it: love’s first and proper effect is to unite.
• Is union more an effect of knowledge than of love? No: knowledge unites the known by its likeness, love unites the thing itself; so charity is greater than hope and faith and remains in the next life.