Mutual Indwelling, Ecstasy and Zeal: Aquinas and Shakespeare on the Effects of Love

Orientation #

He begins with “the second effect of love,” saying the first three effects (union, mutual staying-within, ecstasy) go closely together and the second brings out what the first (union, prev. lecture) does not. He refers back to passages “we read about earlier” (Oliver and Celia; Portia calling her husband her soul). Near the end he says the fourth effect, zeal/jealousy, is something “we’re just beginning to look at.” The previous class treated union as the first effect of love, the next continues with the fourth effect, jealousy/zeal. Verified sources: the class works from the handout “Effects of Love” (pp. 6-20) and the corresponding pages of DHB Vol. III.

The class, in order #

1. Shakespeare on the mutual staying-within (“I have begun to plant thee”) #

Point: before the article, a run of texts showing lovers dwelling within each other, with the recurrent metaphor of rooting.

• Latin: he first says adhaesio (“like adhesive, gluing together”), then corrects himself: “I think Thomas’s text is mutual inhaesio.”
• Antony leaving Cleopatra for Rome: “our separation so abides and flies” — he goes to Rome yet stays; she stays yet goes with him: each is within the other.
• A sonnet: “happy I that love and am beloved where I may not remove nor be removed” [ed.: transcript garbled] — same point.
• Hermione [ed.: as heard]: “a foolish heart that I leave here behind”; aside: “I left my heart in San Francisco” — the heart left with the thing loved.
• Oliver and Celia (read earlier): “heart in heart” — Shakespeare’s conciseness.
• “You know my inwardness and love is very much unto the Prince and Claudio”: inwardness (or “intimacy”) is the effect, love the cause.
• “I could not have owed her a more rooted love”; “an eternal plant whereof the root was fixed in virtue’s ground”; “you do so grow in my requital as nothing can unroot you” — the loved grows into the lover “like a transplant.”
• Duncan to Macbeth and Banquo (Macbeth): “I have begun to plant thee… let me enfold thee and hold thee to my heart” — same metaphor, the loved enclosed in the heart.
• All’s Well: “I grow to you, and our parting is a tortured body” — separation from one who has become part of you is like being torn apart on the rack.
• Don Pedro: “made her half myself” — the loved as half of oneself.
• Antony married to Octavia but “his affection is where it is,” in Egypt; Romeo: “it is my soul that calls upon my name” (as Portia earlier called her husband her soul); “can I go forward when my heart is here?” — Our Lord: “where your treasure is, there your heart shall be.”
• A sonnet (inferred): “my spirit is thine, the better part of me… this of thee remains” — the mutual staying-within survives even death of the body.
• Asides: Washington Irving to his nephew Pierre: “Shakespeare and maybe one or two others said it all” — humility, and (St Teresa) “humility is the truth”; De Koninck to him about his doctoral thesis: “what are you asking me for?”

2. Article on mutual staying-within: the objections (“the same cannot be container and contained”) #

Point: three objections to love causing lover to be in loved and loved in lover.

1. What is in another is contained by it; the same cannot be container and contained — water in the glass, the glass not in the water. He notes this already shows the difference between spiritual and material being-in: I can be in your mind and you in mine, but not one body in another.
2. Nothing penetrates the inside of a whole without division, and dividing belongs to reason, not to the desiring power where love is. He connects this to Shakespeare’s definition of reason as “large discourse, looking before and after” (nothing is before or after itself, so reason distinguishes) and Hamlet’s “since my dear soul was mistress of her choice and could of men distinguish.” His answer in advance: knowledge causes love, so if the mind gets inside, love follows — “like the needle: if that can penetrate, the thread goes along.”
3. If lover is in loved and loved in lover, the loved is joined to the lover as the lover to the loved; but that union is love itself; so the lover is always loved back — clearly false. He flags that Thomas will defend a mutual staying-within even when love is not returned, and more so when it is.

• Sed contra: 1 John, “who remains in charity remains in God and God in him”; charity is a love, so every love makes this.

3. The response: on the side of knowing and on the side of the heart (“strives to search into everything”) #

Point: the mutual staying-within is found in the knowing power and in the desiring power, each way.

• Knowing power: the loved is in the lover as remaining in his knowledge (Philippians, “I have you in mind”) — I keep you in mind, don’t forget you. The lover is in the loved as not satisfied with superficial knowledge but searching everything that belongs to the loved (1 Cor: the Holy Spirit, who is the love of God, “searches even the depths of God”). Examples: loving Shakespeare’s plays you enter all the details; Mozart’s music, the particular parts; a salad dressing [ed.: “cell-dressing” in transcript], you want to know what is in it.
• Desiring power: the loved is in the lover as in his affection “through a certain agreement” of heart to object, delighting in it when present, tending to it (love of wanting) or to its goods (love of friendship) when absent, not because of something else but because the agreement is “rooted within” — he stresses that this is the very word Shakespeare used four or five times: “the greatest of the poets and the greatest of the theologians.” Love is said to be intimate (Latin for inward); the “bowels of charity.”
• The lover in the loved, two ways: by the love of wanting he does not rest in extrinsic or superficial enjoyment but seeks the intimate parts (savouring a food, trying to get inside it); by the love of friendship he takes the friend’s goods and evils as his own — when something bad happens to my friend or my child I feel it as if it happened to me (“it hurts me more than it hurts you” — in a sense true); so friends wish, sorrow and rejoice in the same things (Aristotle, Ethics IX, Rhetoric II).
• Aside: De Koninck in his introductory essay: Thomas “the most faithful and the most humble student of Aristotle.”
• Thus the lover, counting the loved’s things as his own, is in the loved; conversely, willing and acting for the friend as for himself, the loved is in the lover. None of this depends on being loved back.
• Third way, in the love of friendship only: by way of returning love, friends mutually loving and doing good to each other.

4. The replies, and a digression on pagan witness (“as the genus is contained in the species”) #

• Reply 1: the loved is contained in the lover as impressed on his affection; the lover is contained in the loved as pursuing what is intimate in it; nothing prevents container and contained in diverse ways, as genus in species and species in genus. He sends the class to Physics IV (Natural Hearing), where Aristotle distinguishes eight senses of “in”: animal is in man (in the definition), man is in animal (in the genus); and to “the fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V], where two things can be parts of each other by different senses of part — man cannot be part of the definition of animal nor animal a kind of man “except metaphorically.” “Otherwise Thomas would be lost without his teacher Aristotle.”
• Aside: the dinner honouring De Koninck and Jacques de Monléon [ed.: “de Molion” in transcript]: “you shouldn’t have been praising me but Thomas”; De Koninck: “you shouldn’t have been praising Thomas but Aristotle.”
• Digression by analogy: the unconverted Jews who opposed the early Church were witnesses to the authenticity of the Old Testament books the Christians reasoned from; likewise Plato and Aristotle, thinking these things out without the faith, witness that they are naturally knowable (Romans 1:20 speaks of the pagan philosophers). Plato in the Laws proposes a law against homosexuality “against nature” (contra naturam), against the customs of his time — so opposition to it is not “just because I happen to be a Catholic.” His cousin, amazed at what Aristotle knew of God.
• Reply 2: the knowledge of reason precedes [ed.: “receives” in transcript] the affection of love; so as reason inquires within, love enters deeply — the thread follows the needle. Aside: a “diligent” student penetrates the subject, and the word comes from a word for love.
• Reply 3: even unreturned love has mutual staying-within — I keep the girl in mind and try to know her details though she doesn’t love me — and more when returned [ed.: he mis-speaks “if she doesn’t”].

5. Shakespeare on ecstasy (“This is the very ecstasy of love”) #

Point: after the break, texts on love putting one outside oneself.

• Portia [ed.: “Sonia” in transcript] watching Bassanio choose the right casket: “O love, be moderate, allay thy ecstasy, in measure rein thy joy… I feel too much thy blessing” — compare the Greek wise men, “know thyself” and “nothing too much.”
• Polonius on Hamlet, mad for Ophelia’s unreturned love: “the very ecstasy of love, whose violent property foredoes itself” — beside oneself = outside oneself; ekstasis = to stand outside oneself. Question raised in passing: does love make you better or afflict you? (left open). Another: “the ecstasy hath so much overborne her” that a daughter would do “a desperate outrage to herself.”
• Proteus: “I leave my friends, myself, and all for love”; Romeo: “I have lost myself, I am not here, this is not Romeo.”
• Ferdinand to Miranda (Tempest): “if a virgin, and your affection not gone forth” — affection going forth out of oneself.
• Leonato on Hero: “mine I loved, mine I praised… that I myself was to myself not mine” — note the link of love and praise (heaven: loving and praising God); parents so attached they forget themselves.
• Capulet over Juliet apparently dead: “my soul and not my child” — same as the spouses saying “my soul.”

6. Article on ecstasy (“someone is said to undergo ecstasy when he is placed outside himself”) #

Objections: (1) ecstasy implies alienation of mind, but lovers are sometimes in possession of their powers (joke: “once in a while”); (2) the lover draws the loved to himself rather than going out — he previews the answer: the love of wanting brings the object back to me, so ecstasy only in a qualified sense; the love of wishing well goes entirely out, “where the saints are in respect to the love of God”; (3) if the lover goes into the loved he loves it more than himself, false — “can one love the loved more than oneself? that’s a question.” Sed contra: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4, divine love makes ecstasy, and God himself undergoes it — becoming man, “taking on the form of a slave” (St Paul); every love participates the divine love. Response:

1. Ecstasy on the side of knowing: placed outside one’s proper knowledge either upward, to what is above sense and reason (Paul carried to the third heaven, Corinthians — “whether in the senses or not, I don’t know”), or downward, in fury or madness — acting out of imagination: the bad sense.
2. On the side of the heart: desire carried into another, going forth outside oneself.
3. Love causes the first by way of disposition: intense meditation on the loved withdraws from other things (loving God disposes for ecstasy of the knowing powers). It causes the second directly — the love of friendship simply, the love of wanting only in some respect.

• Distinction haplos / simpliciter vs secundum quid (“fully and without qualification” vs “in a very qualified, limited, imperfect way”), “the kind of distinction we make in every part of philosophy”: murdering someone who annoys you removes an annoyance — good only secundum quid; abortion to save a career, likewise.
• Love of wanting: not content with the good it has, it seeks something outside — candy, steak, chips — but for itself, so the affection is in the end enclosed within oneself. Love of friendship: wills good to the friend “as having care and foresight over him” for his own sake — the parents willing the child’s good — goes out simply. Replies: (1) that holds of ecstasy downward, to something less than a man — Nebuchadnezzar eating grass; not every love produces that. (2) holds of the love of wanting: stopping at stores for candy is going out only to bring it back to mouth and stomach. He stresses that the two loves and the two ecstasies are “nicely tied together.” (3) “Greater love than this hath no man”: in laying down my life I choose for my friend the continuation of his mortal life, for myself the most noble deed — the greater good; only a materialist thinks mortal life is greater; so even Christ, dying a most painful and shameful death, chooses the better thing for himself (Dickens, Tale of Two Cities: “a far, far better thing”). Thomas: the lover wishes and does the friend’s good, but does not wish the friend’s goods more than his own, so does not love him more than himself — “a subtle point… Thomas could expand more on this.”

7. The fourth effect: zeal / jealousy (“moving against what threatens to harm”) #

Point: the first three effects regard the loved itself; the fourth regards something in addition — what threatens to harm the loved (love of friendship → zeal) or what impedes getting or enjoying it (love of wanting → jealousy). One Latin word covers both; English needs two, so he uses both. “It belongs to the wise to order” (Aristotle).

• Our Lord casting out the money-changers, “zeal for my father’s house”; using my children for target practice, insulting my wife — I move against you; someone pursuing his wife — jealousy.
• Shakespeare’s grammar: “jealous love” (Troilus and Cressida) puts the effect as adjective; “proud contempt” puts the cause; Romeo’s “loving hate” — class answer: love is the cause of the hate (each loves his own house, so hates the rival house). “Brevity is the soul of wit.” Two Gentlemen: “love thou knowest is full of jealousy.”
• Three plays of a wife falsely believed unfaithful: Othello (tragedy), Cymbeline and Winter’s Tale (mercy and forgiveness plays).
• Scripture: God jealous when we love something more than him — the jealous husband as metaphor for understanding God’s jealousy.
• “Disturbing jealousy doth call himself affection’s sentinel” — something other than love, but supporting it in getting or defending what it loves.
• Grushenka (Brothers Karamazov): “I would be offended if you were not jealous” — reasoning from effect back to cause, as Portia earlier reasoned from love to likeness. Thomas’s four discourses of reason from one thing to another: cause to effect, effect to cause, like to like, opposite to opposite — “no other way” since without dependence, likeness or opposition nothing leads from one to the other (discourses that stay within one thing set aside). His own early example: Aristotle’s Poetics on comedy being lost, he reasoned from tragedy (pity and fear) to its opposite.
• Smollett, Roderick Random, the ball scene: pride at Narcissa’s triumph, then “the pangs of jealousy” at the nobleman’s attentions — the love of wanting.
• Cooper: “the keen eye of jealous love” — Shakespeare’s exact phrase borrowed; Smollett too uses Shakespearean phrases.
• Antonio following Sebastian, “jealousy what might befall your travel,” though himself in danger in that town — jealousy in the other sense, moving against what would harm one you wish well to; today the word is used almost only for the love of wanting. His brother-in-law telling a man bothering his sister to “beat it” — love of wishing well.
• King John: the apparent murder of the little prince “shall cool the hearts of all his people to zeal” — zeal to defend the king lost as love for him is lost. Aside: Shakespeare tones down the conflict of John with Rome, unlike other Elizabethans — a point in the debate over his Catholicism. (Transcript ends here.)

His words #

• mutual staying within: his rendering of inhaesio (first heard as adhaesio, self-corrected) [ed.: mutual inhesion, mutua inhaesio]
• inwardness / intimacy: the effect of love, as distinct from its cause; intimate = Latin for inward
• knowing power / desiring power (the heart) [ed.: apprehensive and appetitive powers]
• love of wanting / love of friendship (wishing well) [ed.: amor concupiscentiae / amor amicitiae]
• agreement, conformity of heart to object, “rooted within” [ed.: complacentia]
• ecstasy: to stand outside oneself (ekstasis), on the side of knowing (upward or downward) or of the heart
• haplos / simpliciter vs secundum quid: fully and without qualification vs in a qualified, limited, imperfect way
• by way of disposition vs directly: how love causes the two ecstasies
• zeal / jealousy: one Latin word; zeal = against what harms the loved (friendship), jealousy = against what impedes (wanting)
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]; “fifth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]
• four discourses of reason: cause to effect, effect to cause, like to like, opposite to opposite
• diligent: from a word for love, “penetrates the subject”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, the article “whether mutual staying within is an effect of love” (second effect) and “whether ecstasy is an effect of love” (third), objections, sed contra, body, replies (Summa Theologiae I-II q.28 aa.2-3, inferred)
• Shakespeare passages from the handout: Antony and Cleopatra; Macbeth (Duncan); All’s Well; Much Ado (Don Pedro, Leonato); Romeo and Juliet (Romeo, Capulet); two sonnets (unnumbered); Merchant of Venice (Portia at the caskets); Hamlet (Polonius); Two Gentlemen (Proteus, Valentine’s rival); Tempest (Ferdinand); Troilus and Cressida (“jealous love”); Antonio and Sebastian; King John
• Smollett, Roderick Random (ball scene); Cooper (“keen eye of jealous love”); Dostoevsky, Brothers Karamazov (Grushenka)
• 1 John (sed contra); Philippians (“I have you in mind”); 1 Corinthians (Spirit searches the depths of God) Mentioned
• Aristotle, Physics IV (eight senses of “in”); Metaphysics V (parts of each other); Ethics IX and Rhetoric II; Poetics (comedy lost)
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4; Paul on the third heaven (Corinthians) and the form of a slave; Romans 1:20; Daniel on Nebuchadnezzar (inferred)
• Plato, Laws (law against homosexuality); De Koninck’s introductory essay; Dickens, Tale of Two Cities; Othello, Cymbeline, Winter’s Tale; St Teresa of Avila; Washington Irving

His questions #

• How can I be in you and you in me, if the same thing cannot be container and contained? In different senses of “in” — as genus is in species and species in genus (Physics IV).
• Isn’t getting inside a thing the work of reason, which divides — not of love? Yes, but knowledge precedes love, so love follows reason inside, as the thread follows the needle.
• Is there mutual staying-within when my love is not returned? Yes, on the side of knowing and of the heart; more when it is returned.
• Does love make you better, or afflict you (Polonius)? left open
• Am I in ecstasy over candy? Only in a very qualified sense — I go out only to bring it back to myself.
• Is it good to murder someone who annoys you? Only secundum quid, in a very limited way; not simply.
• In dying for my friend, do I love him more than myself? No: I choose the noble deed for myself, the continuation of mortal life for him — the greater good is mine; only a materialist thinks otherwise.
• In “loving hate,” is love the cause of hate or hate of love? Love is the cause: each loves his own house and so hates the rival.
• Why would Grushenka be offended if he were not jealous? Because she reasons from the effect (jealousy) back to its cause (love).
• Why is jealousy called “affection’s sentinel”? It is other than love but supports it, in getting what it wants or defending the one it wishes well.