Concupiscence, Ignorance and the Circumstances of Human Acts (Q.6, aa.7–8; Q.7, aa.1–2)

Orientation #

He opens mid-stream on q. 6 a. 7 (“Now, but concupiscence causes the involuntary, right?”) and refers back to fear causing the involuntary “in some way” and to the two ways of the voluntary “above laid down” (prev. lecture). He closes q. 7 a. 2 asking “time for one more, or not?” and does not announce the next class. The previous class treated violence and fear (q. 6 aa. 5-6); the next continues the circumstances and begins the will’s acts regarding the end.

The class, in order #

1. Objections: does concupiscence cause the involuntary? (“concupiscence causes the involuntary, right?”) #

Point: three objections read from q. 6 a. 7.

1. Fear is a passion and causes the involuntary in some way; concupiscence is a passion; therefore so does concupiscence.
2. The timid man acts against what he proposed; so does the incontinent man, who cannot contain himself on account of concupiscence.
3. Knowledge is required for the voluntary, and concupiscence corrupts knowledge: the Philosopher in Ethics VI says pleasure corrupts the estimation of prudence.

• Aside: a student cites Father Merkelbach: concupiscence makes something more voluntary. Berquist’s running joke through the article: Thomas will be “a tough confessor”.
• Aside: in Italy the husband who kills his wife’s lover is excused; the California cement-truck story (husband finds the convertible, backs up and lowers cement into it; judge dismisses the case; “temporary insanity”).

2. Sed contra and body: concupiscence makes it more voluntary (“concupiscence does not cause the involuntary”) #

1. Damascene: the involuntary deserves pity or indulgence and is done with sadness; neither belongs to what is done through concupiscence.
2. Body: something is voluntary because the will is borne towards it; concupiscence inclines the will to will what is desired; therefore concupiscence makes the act more voluntary, not involuntary.

• Comparison he draws: whether an act done from virtue or habit is more praiseworthy than one done without it. Thomas’s example of the monk under vows vs. the man who abstains “on an ad hoc basis”: more that inclines you, more voluntary. “Something most people get mixed up on.”
• Student example: the fireman who jumped into the Potomac to save the drowning stewardess and said “anybody would have done that” — the praiseworthy act was fully his, though he disowns it.

3. Replies 1 and 2: fear regards evil, concupiscence the good (“fear is of the evil”) #

• Reply 1: fear is of evil, concupiscence of the good; evil as such is contrary to the will, good agrees with it; hence fear has more to it to cause the involuntary. (“Interestingly said.”)
• Reply 2: in what is done through fear the will’s repugnance to the thing considered in itself remains; in the incontinent man the prior will by which he repudiated the object does not remain — he is changed to willing what he before repudiated. So fear’s act is involuntary in some way; concupiscence’s in no way. The incontinent man acts against what he proposed before, not against what he now wills; the timid man acts against what he wants even now.
• Aside: Father Hardon’s account of colleagues hiring a woman to seduce him; he did not consent. Spies work “the weak link in the chain.”

4. Reply 3: knowledge, out of mind, and willful non-consideration (“if concupiscence wholly takes away knowledge”) #

1. If concupiscence wholly took away knowledge (those who become out of mind), it would take away the voluntary — but properly there is no involuntary either, since without the use of reason there is neither.
2. Usually concupiscence does not take away the power of knowing but only the actual consideration of this particular thing being done.
3. This is still voluntary, in the sense that it is in the will’s power not to act and not to will — likewise in its power not to consider; for the will can resist the passion.

• Aristotle’s description: the man knows “adultery is bad” and “this is pleasant”; when he sins he adheres to “this is pleasant” — he could have considered the other.
• St Alphonsus (student): “willful inconsideration.” Berquist: abortion — one doesn’t want to consider what is actually being done; Obama’s “nobody really likes abortion” and his opposition to the partial-birth abortion law.

5. Objections: does ignorance cause the involuntary? (“Whether ignorance causes the involuntary”) #

1. The involuntary merits forgiveness (Damascene); but 1 Corinthians: “if someone is ignorant, he will be ignored.” Aside on the English “ignored” (“put on ignore”).
2. Every sin is with ignorance (Proverbs 14, “they err who do something bad”; Aristotle too); if ignorance caused the involuntary every sin would be involuntary, against Augustine, every sin is voluntary.
3. The involuntary is with sadness; but one may kill an enemy he sought to kill, thinking he killed a stag — ignorantly, but without sadness.

• Sed contra: Damascene and the Philosopher say a kind of involuntary is what is from ignorance.
• Aside: an English war film where agents kill the wrong man and only then feel guilt — sadness follows discovery.

6. Body: concomitant, consequent, antecedent ignorance (“before, after, and with”) #

Point: ignorance causes the involuntary only insofar as it removes the knowledge required for the voluntary (the definition given before: with knowledge, vs. nature, without); not every ignorance does.

• Concomitant: ignorance of what is done, but it would be done even if known (the stag/enemy case). Such ignorance makes the act not voluntary but not involuntary: not-voluntary is a mere negation; involuntary is opposed to the will. What is not known cannot be willed — nor is killing the man against your will, since you didn’t know he was there. Joke: disguise yourself as a stag and you may be killed.
• Consequent: ignorance itself voluntary, in the two ways of the voluntary laid down above: (a) the act of the will bears on the ignorance — one wishes to be ignorant to have an excuse for sin or not be withdrawn from sinning; Job 21, “we do not wish the knowledge of your ways”: affected ignorance. Examples: Catholics who “didn’t know” what the Church says; the Pharisees on John’s baptism who “studiously reply, ‘we don’t know’” — they considered the options and preferred ignorance. (b) ignorance of what one is able and ought to know — since not to act and not to will is voluntary. Ignorance of bad choice, of passion, of habit, or negligence in acquiring knowledge one ought to have; ignorance of the universal things of law one is held to know. “Ignorance of law is no excuse.” Such ignorance cannot cause the involuntary simpliciter, only secundum quid, insofar as it precedes the will’s motion to something that would not be done if knowledge were present. Joke: drop the simpliciters and the Summa would be shorter.
• Antecedent: not voluntary, yet cause of willing what one otherwise would not — ignorant of a circumstance one was not bound to know. Oedipus marrying his mother and killing his father, forgiven in Oedipus at Colonus; Shakespeare’s history plays, a father who has killed his son and a son his father in battle; the stock case of the man using diligence who shoots an arrow and kills a passer-by. This causes the involuntary simpliciter.
• Aside: old teacher nervous about “free-shooting hunters.”
• Replies: obj. 1 about ignorance of what one is held to know (no forgiveness); obj. 2 about ignorance of choice, voluntary in some way; obj. 3 about concomitant ignorance. “You have to see all these distinctions.”

7. Question 7: what is a circumstance? Objections (“circumstantial evidence”) #

The prologue announces “four things” but he reads three: what a circumstance is; whether the theologian should consider them; how many and which are chief. [ed.: count as read differs from the stated four.] Objections to a. 1 (a circumstance is not an accident of the act):

1. Tully (Cicero), Rhetorica: a circumstance is that from which speech adds strength to an argument; but strength comes especially from the substance — definition, genus, species (all three tell what a thing is, the definition most distinctly).
2. It is proper to an accident to be in a subject; what stands around is outside.
3. Of an accident there is no accident; human acts are accidents.

• Sed contra: particular conditions of a singular thing are individuating accidents; the Philosopher, Ethics III, calls circumstances particularia.
• Asides: Cicero called Aristotle’s Rhetoric “a golden river”; Plato set Aristotle to rhetoric against the sophists. “Persuasion” is “through the sweet”; he used to say persuasion is found first in music, then fiction, then speech: Dryden’s Alexander moved by music, Hitler and Wagner (unperformed in Israel for years), marches, West Point cadets.

8. Body: names carried over from place; circumstances are accidents (“names are signs of things understood”) #

1. Names are signs of things understood (the Philosopher); so naming follows the order of our knowing, from more known to less known: names are transferred from the more known.

• translatio nominis: translation and metaphor share an etymology, “carry over”; in English metaphor carries over the name not the meaning (“honey” for a wife), translation the meaning not the name. Here transferunt means carrying over the name.

2. Metaphysics X: from place the name “distance” passes to all contraries — contraries are the species furthest apart in a genus (white/black in colour; virtue/vice in habit, continence and incontinence between: the incontinent man has conflict, Don Giovanni with the vice has none).

• Greek diaphora / Latin differentia: to carry apart, from place, though in logic it separates species under a genus. “Going forward,” face going from white to red, “he’s gone” for dead: all from locomotion.

3. Names of locomotion are used for other notions because bodies circumscribed in place are most known to us. The early Greeks treat change of place as the only change, quality change as disguised: his Berkowitz example (coffee “changes” from bitter to sweet — no, the sugar changed place from the bowl to the cup); Einstein’s Evolution of Physics on caloric flowing from hot to cold body; the oldest part of modern science is mechanics; only “forced by the truth itself” do they see other kinds of change. Aristotle in Physics IV orders the meanings of “in” from in-place first.
4. Hence “circumstances” is carried from place to acts: what stands around is extrinsic yet touches; so conditions outside the substance of the act yet attaining to it are circumstances — and what is outside the substance but pertains to it is an accident. Circumstances are accidents of human acts.

9. Replies to a. 1 (“speech gives strength to an argument, first”) #

• Reply 1: speech draws strength first from the substance of the act, secondarily from circumstances — which in court augment or lessen: accusable first for killing a man, then for doing it by deceit, for money, in a sacred time or place. Robbery vs. armed robbery; kill a man, bad; kill your father, worse.
• Reply 2: accident in two ways: in it (white in Socrates) vs. with it in the same subject (white and musician; “a white philosopher” — whiteness not in the philosophy). Circumstances are accidents of acts the second way.
• Reply 3: accident of an accident by coming together in a subject, either without order (white and musician to Socrates) or with order, the subject receiving one by means of another (colour by means of surface; so colour is said to be in the surface). Circumstances both ways: some pertain to the agent not by means of the act (place, condition of the person); others by means of the act (the way of acting).

10. Article 2: should the theologian consider circumstances? (“It’s an unusual article, isn’t it?”) #

Objections: (1) the theologian considers acts only as good or bad, but nothing is qualified formally by what is outside it; (2) circumstances are accidents, and an infinity can happen to a thing; Metaphysics VI, no art or science of being per accidens except sophistry; (3) circumstances belong to the rhetorician, and rhetoric is not part of theology. Student: a confessor must take circumstances into account — “something’s wrong with this objection.” Sed contra: ignorance of circumstances causes the involuntary (Damascene, Gregory of Nyssa), which excuses from guilt, the theologian’s concern. Body, three reasons:

1. The theologian considers acts as ordering man to beatitude (why the Prima Secundae began with beatitude); what is ordered to an end must be proportioned to it, by a measure that comes through suitable circumstances. Smoke while you pray or pray while you smoke; “theology on tap.”
2. He considers acts as good and bad, better and worse, diversified by circumstances (to come below). Orestes: can a son avenge his father by killing his mother? — the circumstance that she is his mother. Student: a TV story of a boy who killed a brutal father protecting his sister.
3. He considers acts as meritorious, which requires the voluntary; acts are voluntary or involuntary by knowledge or ignorance of circumstances (Oedipus ignorant that the woman was his mother). Replies:

• Reply 1: the good ordered to an end is the useful, which implies relation (Ethics I); relatives are denominated from what is adjacent — right and left, equal and unequal. Since acts are good as useful to the end, nothing prevents goodness from proportion to what lies outside. “The reality of the relative.”
• Reply 2: purely accidental accidents are left aside by every art for their uncertainty and infinity (the butcher-knife maker need not consider that someone may kill his spouse with one); but these lack the definition of a circumstance, which touches and is ordered to the act; per se accidents fall under art (the geometer knows the triangle’s angles equal two right angles).
• Reply 3: circumstances belong to the moral philosopher (the mean of virtue is found or missed by them — eat more on Thanksgiving; don’t drink so much if driving; some can hold theirs), the politician and the rhetorician (acts rendered laudable or vituperable, excusable or accusable), but diversely: the rhetor persuades, the politicus judges. The theologian, whom all the arts serve, considers them all these ways: virtuous and vicious with the moral philosopher; meriting punishment or reward “with the rhetorician… the politician” [as read; the transcript gives both].
• Aside: Aristotle’s three kinds of rhetoric — political, courtroom, “Fourth of July”; campaign dirt-digging (Bush’s old arrest, the reward offered against Perry).

His words #

• concupiscence; the passion that inclines the will to the desired good; makes an act more voluntary
• incontinent man; acts against what he proposed before, not against what he now wills [ed.: incontinentia / akrasia]
• actual consideration; what concupiscence removes, not the power of knowing
• not voluntary vs. involuntary; mere negation of the voluntary vs. opposed to the will
• concomitant, consequent, antecedent ignorance; “with, after, before”
• affected ignorance; willed so as to excuse sin or not be withdrawn from it
• simpliciter / secundum quid; simply vs. in some way
• circumstance; what stands around, outside the substance of the act yet touching it
• transferunt, translatio nominis; carrying over of a name; his contrast of metaphor (name) with translation (meaning)
• diaphora / difference; “to carry apart,” from place
• contraries; the species furthest apart in a genus
• per se vs. per accidens accidents; only per se accidents fall under art
• particularia; Aristotle’s word for circumstances, particular conditions of singular acts
• laudable/vituperable, excusable/accusable; the rhetor’s and politician’s pairs
• rhetor persuades, politicus judges

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 6, a. 7 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 6, a. 8 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 7, prologue and a. 1 (whole)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 7, a. 2 (whole) Mentioned
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VI (pleasure corrupts the estimation of prudence); III (circumstances as particularia); I (the useful)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics X (distance and contraries); VI (no science of being per accidens)
• Aristotle, Physics IV (meanings of “in”); Aristotle, Rhetoric (three kinds)
• Cicero (Tully), Rhetorica; John Damascene; Gregory of Nyssa; Augustine (every sin voluntary)
• 1 Corinthians (“if someone is ignorant he will be ignored”); Proverbs 14; Job 21
• Sophocles, Oedipus and Oedipus at Colonus; Shakespeare’s history plays; Dryden’s Alexander poem; Einstein, The Evolution of Physics; Merkelbach, Hardon, St Alphonsus (students)

His questions #

• Is an act done from virtue or under vows less voluntary than the same act done without them? No — more inclination, more voluntary.
• Why does fear have more to it to cause the involuntary than concupiscence? Fear regards evil, contrary to the will; concupiscence the good, agreeing with it.
• If concupiscence takes away knowledge wholly, is the act involuntary? Neither voluntary nor involuntary: no use of reason.
• In shooting at the stag, did you will to kill that man? Is it against your will? Neither: not voluntary, but not involuntary, since you did not know.
• What kind of ignorance causes the involuntary simply? Antecedent ignorance of what one was not bound to know.
• What are contraries? The species in a genus furthest apart, “distance” carried over from place.
• Does whiteness reside in my philosophy when I say “white philosopher”? No — both are in the same subject.
• Can a son avenge his father’s death by killing his mother? Left open; shown as a circumstance that changes the act.
• Should the theologian consider circumstances? Yes, for three reasons: proportion to the end, good/bad and better/worse, merit through voluntariness.