Is Love the Cause of All That the Lover Does? Love as the Root of All Passions

Orientation #

He opens by contrasting this article with “the last article”: that was the effect of love upon the lover; this is the effect of love upon what the lover does (prev. lecture). He does not say what comes next. Verified sources place the class in the handout “Effects of Love”, pp. 29–31 (read for about 22 minutes), corresponding to DHB Vol. III, The School of Aristotle, pp. 1199–1201. The previous class treated love’s effect on the lover’s own character and the four proximate effects; the next opens Aristotle’s treatise on friendship.

The class, in order #

1. Cleopatra: love as what the other passions are “made of” (“finest part of pure love”) #

Point: the sixth effect is love’s effect on the lover’s actions, and the poets already speak of love as that out of which the other feelings come.

• Cleopatra’s passions “are made of nothing but the finest part of pure love”: Shakespeare speaks as if love were the matter out of which feelings are made.
• Strictly, love is not a cause as matter but as mover or producer; the poet “goes back to the most known cause”, matter.
• Examples: my fear for my children is “made out of” my love for them; my hatred of those who oppose what I love is made out of my love for those things.

2. Romeo: “much to do with hate, but more with love” (“here’s much to do with hate”) #

Point: the cause of the cause is more the cause, so the feud, though fought from hate, is more from love.

1. The adherents of Capulet and Montague fight because they hate each other.
2. They hate because each loves his own house and wants it supreme in Verona; love causes the hate.
3. So “the cause of the cause is more the cause”: more with love than with hate.

• This answers in advance the objection Thomas will face: fighting seems the effect of hate, not of love.
• Grammar of cause and effect in “brawling love” vs. “loving hate”: in brawling love the noun (love) is the cause and the adjective (brawling) the effect; in loving hate it is reversed, the adjective (loving) is the cause and the noun (hate) the effect. Shakespeare usually puts the cause in the adjective (“proud contempt”, “proud scorn”); Romeo can reverse it because he “looks before and after” and sees love as the original cause, hate as the immediate cause of the brawling.
• Aside: his family in Verona at “Juliet’s house”; his father on the balcony, Italians below calling “we love you”.

3. Cressida: love as the centre of the earth (“drawing all things to it”) #

Point: everything the lover does is drawn by the love, as all things are drawn to the earth’s centre.

• Cressida, about to be sent to her father in the Greek camp, disowns kin, blood and soul for Troilus; “the strong base and building of my love is as the very centre of the earth, drawing all things to it”; so “I will go in and weep.”
• She later proves false (the old story, in Chaucer too); the play is Shakespeare’s black satire on humanity, against his white satire (Love’s Labour’s Lost).

4. David Copperfield and Augustine: the energy love gives (“forest of difficulty”) #

Point: love makes labour light or loved.

• David, in love with Dora, is “not dispirited now”: he takes his woodsman’s axe to the forest of difficulty, wants his coat already shabby, would borrow a stone-breaker’s hammer to beat a path to Dora out of granite — “great was the labor, priceless the reward”. All because of love of Dora.
• Augustine says the same more succinctly: where there is love, either no labour is felt, or the labour itself is loved.
• Asides: Dickens probably the greatest English novelist, David Copperfield his masterpiece and somewhat autobiographical; the proposal scene is very funny; the marriage not so fortunate.

5. Thomas’s article: the objections and the sed contra (“whether love is the cause of all”) #

Point: the three objections and the authority against them.

• Obj. 1: love is a passion (emotion); but man does not do everything from passion, some from choice and some from ignorance (Ethics V). He notes this is where college students start: asked “what is love?”, they say an emotion.
• Obj. 2: desire (wanting) is the beginning of motion in animals (On the Soul III); if all were from love the other passions would be superfluous. His examples: I hit you from anger, run from fear, drink from thirst, eat from hunger.
• Obj. 3: nothing is caused by contrary causes, but some things come from hate. “Obviously he’s never read Romeo and Juliet.” Those blowing people up in Baghdad act from hate, not love — “they can’t look before and after enough”.
• Sed contra: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4: all things do whatever they do through love of the good.

6. The body: end, good, and love as the fundamental act (“every agent acts for some end”) #

Point: since every agent acts for an end, the end is the good, and love is the first act toward the good, every action is from some love.

1. Every agent acts for some end (a principle Thomas gives a whole chapter in the Summa contra Gentiles).
2. The end is the good desired and loved by each.
3. Therefore every agent does any action from some love.

• Definition of end: “that for the sake of which” something is or is done (I study for the sake of knowing; the chair is for sitting). Definition of good, the first: “what all desire”.
• Socratic illustration: a boy calls candy, pizza, baseball, vacation, a bicycle “good”; Socrates asks what they have in common (“you can’t eat the bicycle”); the answer: all are what he wants. The further Euthyphro-style question (“good because you want it, or want it because it is good?”) he sets aside for now; Aristotle opens the Ethics with this common notion.
• Good and end are not the same definition but basically the same thing: if something is good people act for it, so it is an end; if they act for something, that is a sign they take it as good (or apparent good; they may be deceived). Means are called good because of the end (study good because knowing is good).
• Two cases of the end: apart from what I do (aspirin for a headache) vs. the doing itself (understanding God, a sunset, Mozart — not for anything beyond).
• Why love is fundamental — the derivation, in his order: I want only what I first like or love, so desire arises from love in the absence of the thing; joy or pleasure from love in its presence. Hate presupposes love: I hate what opposes or takes away what I love (love health, hate sickness; love virtue, hate vice; beauty/ugliness; wealth/poverty; wisdom/folly), not a love of the same thing. From hate: turning away (opposite of desire), or sadness if unavoidable. Hope and despair from desire of a difficult good (the girl other men want: hope if I can outwit them, despair if not); fear and boldness from turning away from a difficult evil; anger from sadness when I think I can do something about it (you step on my toes, say “so what”, and I get angry). So all trace back to love, since good is more fundamental than bad.

7. Reply to obj. 1: love taken commonly (“love taken commonly”) #

Point: the objection holds of love as a passion; Thomas speaks of love commonly, comprehending intellectual/rational, animal (emotional) and natural love.

• Feeling implies connection with the senses (the sense-desiring power); natural love is the nursery’s “the plant likes sun or water”; rational love is in man and angels.
• Dionysius so speaks (ch. 4); the medievals took him for Paul’s convert at the Areopagus; we no longer think so, but he was very wise; Thomas commented on Divine Names, Albert the Great on the Celestial Hierarchy, both knew both.
• His childhood puzzle in the Nativity church in St Paul: he knew what it is to love a girl, not what it is to love God. Continuing-ed adults are stuck in the same first, narrow meaning (emotion, even sexual love). A student’s story: a retreat preacher insisting we must “fall in love with the Blessed Mother”, and the student wondering what was wrong with him for lacking the emotion — the same confusion.

8. Reply to obj. 2: the proximate causes are not superfluous (“proceeds also from love as from a first cause”) #

Point: every action from any passion proceeds from love as first cause, but the proximate causes remain necessary.

• From love come desire, sadness, pleasure, and consequently all the others — “or brawling love, or loving hate; even hate does”.
• Not enough to want wisdom: you need hope of getting it; most people in the life of the mind despair of knowing the truth and give up.
• Judas and Peter both sinned; Judas despaired and hanged himself, Peter wept with hope of being redeemed.
• Pole example: I push you off a cliff with a pole; the pole touched you, I did not — we punish me, not the pole; both caused the death, “but more caused by Berquist”. So Romeo’s “more with love”.
• Reply to obj. 3 is not reached before the recording ends.

9. Faith, hope, love: how can hope come before love? (“hope begot what? Love”) #

Point: the article’s truth forces a distinction between the love before hope and the charity after it.

• Abraham begot Isaac, Isaac Jacob: faith begets hope, hope begets love; Dei Verbum’s proemium quotes Augustine, by believing come to hope, by hoping to love. Is this a contradiction, since love is basic?
• Student: to know comes first; you can’t love what you don’t know. He: that is why faith is first; but if hope precedes love, some other love precedes hope.
• The love before hope is a love of wanting (I want to see God); charity is a love of friendship, wishing well, more perfect, later. One is “forced to make distinctions” between them.
• Bernard of Clairvaux’s four stages: love myself for my own sake; turn to God in difficulty, loving him to satisfy my desires (prayer involves hope); come to know him and love him for his own sake (friendship); love myself only for God’s sake, hardly realised in this life. Loving my own happiness and hating my misery turns me to God, not being self-sufficient.
• Human parallel: I first need a plumber, electrician, teacher (usefulness), then may come to love the person for his own sake; his father and the man who sold him paint for his wagons, mutually useful, then baseball games together.

His words #

• effect of love on what he does; the sixth effect, against the last article’s effect on the lover.
• cause of the cause is more the cause; his gloss of “more with love”.
• look before and after; seeing the remote cause behind the immediate one.
• black satire / white satire; Troilus and Cressida vs. Love’s Labour’s Lost.
• passion; “in English, an emotion”, “a feeling”, which implies the senses.
• desire, wanting; the two English words for the objection’s appetitus [ed.: concupiscentia/desiderium].
• end: “that for the sake of which”; the good: “what all desire”.
• love of wanting vs. love of friendship, love of wishing well; the distinction that saves “hope begets love”.
• natural love; the plant “liking” the sun.
• caritas, agape; the love that hope gives rise to.

Texts #

Read in class

• Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra (Cleopatra’s passions of pure love)
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (Romeo: “much to do with hate”)
• Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (Cressida: “I will not, Uncle”)
• Dickens, David Copperfield (the forest of difficulty)
• Augustine (where there is love, no labour felt)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, “Whether love is the cause of all the lover does”: objections, sed contra, body, replies 1–2 (inferred: I-II q. 28 a. 6); handout “Effects of Love”, pp. 29–31 Mentioned
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics V (choice, ignorance); Ethics opening (the good, what all desire)
• Aristotle, On the Soul III (desire the beginning of motion)
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4; Thomas’s commentary; Albert the Great on the Celestial Hierarchy
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles (every agent acts for an end)
• Plato, Euthyphro (the form of the question)
• Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde
• Vatican II, Dei Verbum, proemium, quoting Augustine
• Bernard of Clairvaux, treatise on love (four stages)

His questions #

• Why does Romeo say “much to do with hate, but more with love”? Because love is the cause of the hate, and the cause of the cause is more the cause.
• In “brawling love” and “loving hate”, is the adjective the cause or the effect? Reversed between them: noun is cause in the first, adjective in the second.
• Does anybody know the definition of end? That for the sake of which something is or is done.
• What is the first definition of the good? What all desire.
• Is there a connection between the good and the end? Yes: what is good is acted for, hence an end; and what is acted for is taken as good.
• How can Dionysius say all things act through love of the good? Every agent acts for an end, the end is the good, so from some love.
• If I push you off a cliff with a pole, do we punish me or the pole? Me; the pole caused death but I caused it more.
• How can hope give rise to love, if love is the basic thing? A love of wanting precedes hope; the love of friendship (charity) follows it.