Does Love Make the Lover Better or Worse? Love's Effect on the Lover (Aquinas ST I-II q.28 a.5)

Orientation #

He opens by contrasting “the last two effects” with “the first four” already treated, of which the fourth (the previous class, per his own back-reference) looked to the effect in relation to the loved (prev. lecture). He announces the sixth article as “what he does” for later. Verified sources: the handout “Effects of Love”, pp. 22–29, and DHB Vol. III pp. 1192–1199 are the texts read. The neighbouring classes treat zeal/jealousy (art. 4) and whether love is the cause of all the lover does (art. 6).

The class, in order #

1. Dividing the six articles (“the effect upon the lover himself”) #

The first four effects (especially the first three) look toward the loved and the effect in comparison to it; the last two look at the lover: is he made better or worse by loving (a. 5), and what does he do (a. 6).

• Thomas will give no simple answer: it depends on what you love. Examples: “I love to torture people” makes me worse; loving God makes me better; loving rock and roll “probably makes me worse”, loving Mozart “a little better”.
• Aside: “Is it better to have loved than lost?”

2. His own added text: knowledge vs. love (“a good love is a perfection of the lover”) #

A good love perfects the lover; a bad love corrupts him. He builds this by comparing love with knowledge.

1. Aristotle, beginning of the first book “about the soul” [ed.: De Anima]: all knowledge is good, but one knowledge is better than another either because it is about a better thing or because in it you know the object better. Beginning of Parts of Animals: most of all because of what you know; later Aristotle says to know a better thing imperfectly is better than to know an imperfect thing perfectly.
2. So all knowledge as such is good; all ignorance and error as such bad.
3. Objections from the class handled: sex education — what’s bad is “how they present it”, not the knowledge as such. Knowing the combination to your safe, or how to make a bomb: bad only per accidens, by reason of a bad will toward people, not the knowledge as such.
4. Supporting reason: there is the same knowledge of opposites (health and sickness, virtue and vice), so if knowledge of a bad thing were bad, all knowledge would be bad. Socrates at the end of the Symposium; Aristotle and Thomas bring it out more fully.
5. But there is not the same love of opposites: knowing virtue helps you know vice, but the love of one impedes the love of the other. “That’s very important to see.” Hence all love as such is not good — “a big difference between knowledge and love.” Distinction: a love can be bad (a) because the object is bad (murder), or (b) because the way it is loved is bad (loving wine or food too much, or before everything else). For a love to be good, both object and way must be good. Likewise one love is better than another because the object is better (love of wisdom vs. love of candy — his candy did not make him a better person) or because the way is better (loving someone by the love of wishing-well rather than the love of wanting).

3. Two Gentlemen of Verona: Proteus (“Julia, thou hast metamorphosed me”) #

First literary reading: love making the lover worse.

• Valentine goes to court to finish his education (“he after honor hunts, I after love”); he leaves his friends “to dignify them more”; Proteus leaves “myself, my friends, and all for love” — the effect of ecstasy, going out of oneself.
• “Thou hast metamorphosed me”: metamorphosis is a change of form; love was defined as a transformation of the heart, conformity of the heart with its object — “very well said”.
• Effects listed: neglected studies, lost time, “war with good counsel”, set the world at naught, “made wit with musing weak” (his mind is weak now), heart sick with thought.

4. Romeo and Benvolio: love as a tyrant (“so tyrannous and rough in proof”) #

Second reading, same lesson, with a metaphor by proportion.

• Setting: Romeo in love with Rosaline [transcript: "Rosalind"], who won’t give him the time of day; wanders at night, shuts himself in dark by day; his father sends Benvolio. Benvolio is well named: bene volo, one who wishes well (contrast Malvolio in Twelfth Night).
• “Sad hours seem long”; in love, “out of her favor”; love “so gentle in his view, so tyrannous and rough in proof”.
• A tyrant rules not for the good of the ruled but for his own; so one ruled by a tyrannous love does not benefit, “no more than the city benefits from being ruled by a Stalin”. Metaphor based on proportion: this love is to Romeo as a tyrant to the city. Traced back to Plato’s Republic, comparing three parts of the soul with three parts of the city and knowing one by the other. Being ruled by any emotion (love, anger) is being ruled by a tyrant, in a sense.

5. Love must be measured by reason (“above the bounds of reason”) #

The second condition of a good love (the way it is loved) illustrated: Julia’s love for Proteus and her companion [ed.: Lucetta, inferred; transcript garbled "the son"] who tries to moderate it.

• Julia: “as soon go kindle fire with snow as seek to quench the fire of love with words.” Reply: not to quench it but to “qualify” (modify, moderate) “the fire’s extreme rage, lest it should burn above the bounds of reason.”
• That is what the romantics won’t admit. Against those who quote “love and reason keep little company nowadays” to ask how a philosopher can discuss love reasonably: romantic love often has something unreasonable, excessive, disordered about it.
• Anecdote: a girl who climbed to the top of her high-school building to jump because her boyfriend dropped her; the boyfriend talked her down.

6. “Love is blind”; the lover made a fool (“destructive of the logical faculty”) #

The common sayings framed as an objection: blindness is bad, so love makes the lover worse.

• Sherlock Holmes on Watson falling in love: love is destructive of the logical faculty.
• “Fond” in Shakespeare means foolish (“a fond thing to say”); only later came to mean liking the girl — its original sense is acting foolishly about her. Man is man by his reason; if love makes a fool, how can it be good?
• Merchant of Venice: as Bassanio is about to choose the right casket, Portia, overwhelmed, prays “O love be moderate, allay thy ecstasy, in measure rain thy joy, scant this excess; I feel too much thy blessing, make it less, for fear I surfeit” — one cannot fall outside oneself so much.

7. Ennobled or narrowed by what one loves (“we are shaped and fashioned by what we love”) #

Love going out to the thing itself joins the lover to its goodness or badness.

• Cooper, The Spy, introduction: at the residence of an illustrious man (identified as John Jay, one of the three authors of the Federalist Papers), the conversation turns on “the purifying consequences of a love of country”; the Revolution gave “a new and honorable direction” to multitudes formerly engrossed in vulgar concerns; Jay attests the anecdote of the original of the spy. Shows a man ennobled by love of the common good (“I regret that I have but one life to give…”).
• Opposite: Silas Marner — clinging to his loom and gold, “like all objects to which a man devotes himself, they had fashioned him into correspondence with themselves”; his gold “gathered his power of loving together into a hard isolation like his own.” Narrowed and lowered by the defect of the good he loves.
• Goethe: “We are shaped and fashioned by what we love.” Loving noble things ennobles; loving disgusting things makes one disgusting. Knowing disgusting things does not; loving them does. “If I love wisdom, I’m already a bit wise; if I love foolishness, I’m a bit of a fool already.”
• Reason: love goes to the thing in itself — Aristotle, sixth book of the “Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics]: good and bad are in things, truth and falsity in the mind. So one is joined to the goodness or badness of the thing itself when loving it. Back to “thou hast metamorphosed me”.
• Much Ado About Nothing (one of Shakespeare’s six love-and-friendship plays: earlier Merchant, Two Gentlemen, Midsummer Night’s Dream; later Much Ado, As You Like It, Twelfth Night last): Claudio “the sweet youth’s in love”; “the greatest note of it is his melancholy”; “she loves him with an enraged affection, it is past the infinite of thought” — an excess.

8. Article 5: the objections and sed contra (“love is a harmful passion”) #

The common opinion set out as three objections, after a break.

1. Weakness is a harming of the one weakened; love causes weakness (Song of Songs 2:5, “I faint with love” — “the devil can quote scripture”; cf. Proteus made weak). So love is harmful, makes you soft.
2. Melting is a dissolution, a way of destroying; love melts (Song 5:6, “my soul melted when my beloved spoke”). So love is corruptive.
3. Raging or boiling is an excess of heat, which corrupts; boiling is caused by love (Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 7, properties of the seraphim’s love: hot, acute, boiling over; Song 8:6, “the lamps thereof are fire and flames”).

• His gloss: St. Teresa of Avila and the angel piercing her heart (effects reportedly found on the physical heart); the “wound of love” from the earlier passages on love as undergoing. But it’s not good to be wounded — ask any soldier. Joke: a soldier should marry a nurse (his son Paul did).
• Sed contra: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4: individual things love themselves “in a containing way”, that is a conserving way; so love is conserving and perfecting, not harmful.

9. Thomas’s answer: the formal and the material (“fitting of the desiring power with some good”) #

Argument of the body:

1. Love signifies the fitting (conformity, agreement) of the desiring power with some good.
2. Nothing fitted to what is suitable to it is harmed thereby, but advanced and made better; what is fitted to the unsuitable is harmed (shoes that don’t fit are not good for the feet).
3. So love of a suitable good perfects the lover; love of an unsuitable good harms him. His own way of putting it: love unites you with the thing in itself, so you are perfected or contaminated by it.
4. Hence man is most perfected by the love of God, who is goodness itself (our Lord: “God alone is good, why call me good?”), and most harmed by the love of sin — Hosea 9:10, “they are made abominable as the things they have loved”. You are not made abominable by knowing the abominable and avoiding it, only by loving it. Distinction: this holds of what is formal in love, from the desiring power; as regards what is material in the passion, the bodily change, love can harm by excess of change — as in every act of a power exercised through a bodily organ. Examples: snow blindness; a sound that deafens the ear — the change is too great for the organ. This, he notes, already gives the solution to the objections.

10. Reply: four proximate effects of love (“melting, enjoyment, faintness, and raging”) #

Thomas adds four proximate effects: melting, enjoyment, faintness, raging.

• Melting first, opposed to hardening. Hardened things are drawn together in themselves and cannot easily admit another (the stone); love requires the desiring power to be fitted to receive the loved, since the loved is in the lover — “love is basically an undergoing, that’s the first thing we learned about love”; the soft undergoes, the hard resists. So freezing or hardness of heart is a disposition opposed to love; melting is a softening by which the heart shows itself suitable for love to enter. Scripture: heart of stone taken away, heart of flesh given.
• Asides on assumed hardness: Andrew Jackson, irascible but sometimes putting it on to be tough; General Patton in Germany staging a rage at a Russian general over a dispute, then asking his subordinate “How was that?” — the Russian never bothered him again.
• If the loved is present and had: delight or enjoyment. If absent, two passions: (a) sadness over the absence, signified (metaphorically) by faintness or weakness — Tully (Cicero), Tusculan Questions bk. 3, names sadness a kind of sickness; the lover is properly made melancholy, “faint” is metaphor; yet sadness does weaken — boredom (a kind of sadness) in class or in reading means you don’t apply the mind intensely; (b) intense desire of obtaining the loved, signified by raging — Juliet waiting for Romeo that night.
• These are effects of love taken formally, in the relation of the desiring power to its object; in the passion of love there follow proportional bodily effects according to the change of the organ. Sadness can be in the will primarily, then in the emotions, then the bodily change, so one even feels bodily weak.
• Examples of the weakness of sadness: Henry Clay’s life — lost the presidency three times, five of six daughters died young, one at about twenty-eight in childbirth, a son with a head injury confined to an asylum, another a drunkard, one killed in the Mexican War after West Point; “so sad he just can’t do anything”. His godmother collapsing at the cemetery when her little boy was killed in a train accident. “So I know all about melting.”
• Close: no simple answer — does love make you better or worse? It depends on what you love. (Love of money? “I think so” [that it makes you worse — his sense in context].) The love of God most of all, then the love of wisdom, of justice, “things of this sort” make you better.

His words #

• “the last two effects” — effects on the lover himself (a. 5 better/worse; a. 6 what he does), against the first four on the loved.
• “the same knowledge of opposites” but “not the same love of opposites” — the ground of the difference between knowledge and love.
• “per accidens” — how knowledge (safe combination, bomb) is bad only by a bad will.
• “the love of wishing-well” vs. “the love of wanting” [ed.: love of friendship vs. love of concupiscence] — the better and worse way of loving.
• “ecstasy” — leaving oneself, “I leave myself, my friends, and all for love”.
• “metamorphosed” — change of form; love as transformation of the heart.
• “tyrannous” love — rules the lover for its own good, not his; metaphor by proportion.
• “qualify” — modify, moderate the fire of love within the bounds of reason.
• “fond” — in Shakespeare, foolish; later, liking.
• the sixth book of the “Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics] — good and bad in things, truth and falsity in the mind.
• “fitting of the desiring power with some good” [ed.: coaptatio appetitus] — Thomas’s definition of love used in the answer.
• “formal” vs. “material” in love — the desiring power’s relation to its object vs. the bodily change.
• “melting, enjoyment, faintness, raging” — the four proximate effects; “melting” opposed to hardening; “faintness” a metaphor for sadness; “raging” for intense desire.
• “undergoing” [ed.: passio] — love as reception; the soft undergoes, the hard resists.
• “Tully” — Cicero.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, article 5 “whether love is a passion harming the lover” (ST Ia-IIae q. 28 a. 5, inferred): objections, sed contra, body, reply — from handout “Effects of Love”, pp. 22–29 / DHB Vol. III pp. 1192–1199.
• Shakespeare, The Two Gentlemen of Verona: Proteus’s speech on Valentine and Julia; Julia’s “kindle fire with snow” exchange.
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet: Benvolio–Romeo, “sad hours seem long… tyrannous and rough in proof”.
• Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice: Portia, “O love be moderate”.
• Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing: Claudio’s melancholy; “enraged affection”.
• J. F. Cooper, The Spy, introduction (John Jay anecdote).
• George Eliot, Silas Marner (loom and gold).
• Song of Songs 2:5, 5:6, 8:6; Hosea 9:10 (as cited in the article).
• Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 7; Divine Names ch. 4 (as cited).

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima bk. 1 beginning (“about the soul”); Parts of Animals beginning; Metaphysics bk. 6 (“Wisdom”).
• Plato, Republic (soul/city proportion); Symposium, end (Socrates on knowledge of opposites).
• Cicero, Tusculan Questions bk. 3.
• Shakespeare, Twelfth Night (Malvolio); Midsummer Night’s Dream, As You Like It (list of six plays); “love and reason keep little company” (unnamed play).
• Conan Doyle, Sherlock Holmes on Watson’s love.
• Goethe, “we are shaped and fashioned by what we love”.
• St. Teresa of Avila, the transverberation; a life of Henry Clay.

His questions #

• Is he made better or worse by the fact that he loves? Depends on what you love — no simple answer.
• Is knowledge as such ever bad (sex education, the safe combination, the bomb)? No; bad only per accidens, by a bad will; there is the same knowledge of opposites.
• Is all love good, like all knowledge? No — the love of one opposite impedes the love of the other; love is good only if object and way are both good.
• If love is tyrannous, is one benefiting from it? No, no more than a city ruled by a tyrant.
• How can a philosopher have a reasonable discussion of love? Romantic love is often unreasonable, but love should be moderated by reason (“qualify the fire”).
• Does knowing disgusting things make me disgusting? Does loving them? Knowing, no; loving, yes — love goes to the thing in itself.
• Is it good to be wounded, as by love? Not as such (any soldier) — the objections’ point; answered by the formal/material distinction.
• Does sadness make a man weak? Yes — boredom, Henry Clay, his godmother; faintness is a metaphor for sadness over an absent good.
• Does love of money make you good? “I think so” is heard; his conclusion names God, wisdom, justice as loves that make you better.