The Eleven Passions and Moral Good and Bad in the Emotions (ST I-II Q.23 a.4 – Q.24 a.1)

Orientation #

He says “article four is where we left at the beginning today,” i.e. the class resumes at I-II q. 23 a. 4 and goes on into q. 24, ending inside the replies of q. 24 a. 1 (verified sources: q. 23 a. 4 and q. 24 a. 1). He refers back to the “sixth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VI] on good and bad being in things, and to “when we talked about love” (prev. lecture). The previous class treated the contrariety of the passions and why anger lacks a contrary; the next continues q. 24 (aa. 2-4) and begins q. 25.

The class, in order #

1. Why the passions are distinguished by contraries and the acts of reason are not (“there’s the same what knowledge of opposites”) #

Point: the sense appetite’s acts come in contrary pairs (love/hate, joy/sadness, desire/fuga, hope/despair, fear/boldness, anger with only a privative opposite, “calm down”), whereas the three acts of reason (understanding what a thing is; understanding true or false, which Thomas after Aristotle calls composition and division; reasoning) are not distinguished as contraries.

1. The good and the bad are in things (from the “sixth book of wisdom”), whereas true and false are in the mind.
2. There is the same knowledge of opposites (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle), but not the same love of opposites: if I know courage I know cowardice, know justice I know injustice; but if my team wins I have joy, if it loses sadness, and “you just can’t put those two together.”
3. Hence the appetite is distinguished by its contrary objects; the only opposition in reason is knowing vs. being mistaken, and the mistake is a defect, not a contrary. Examples: sadness at a child’s illness and joy at recovery are not bad, because they go out to what is in the child; sadness about my sins. Loving virtue prevents loving vice, but knowing virtue helps you know vice: the difference lies not in the things but in how the mind receives them. Aside: the same knowledge of opposites is one way of showing reason is immaterial, since in matter one opposite excludes the other (the body cannot be at normal and high blood pressure, hot and cold, at the same time; yet I know both together; to read a page you see white and black at once). Aside: the canon of the new Mass prays for those who “have died in the mercy of God”; he suggests as a morning prayer “may I die in the mercy of God.”

2. q. 23 a. 4, objections and sed contra (“passions differing in species or kind that are not”) #

Point: the same fact, good and bad in things, is found in the article’s last distinction: passions of one power that differ in species without being contrary.

• Obj. 1: passions differ by objects; the objects are good and bad, by which they are contrary; so no passions of one power differ in species without contrariety. His comment: Thomas has to explain how love and desire, and desire and joy, differ in species yet are not contrary; love is the cause of desire in the object’s absence and of joy in its presence, “so it’s not contrary; it’s a cause of it.”
• Obj. 2: difference of species is difference by form, and every formal difference is by contrariety, per Metaphysics X (“the book on the one and the many,” with Aristotle’s long discussion of contrariety).
• Obj. 3: every passion is either approach or withdrawal (excess/recess) toward good or bad; the first two differences (good/bad, approach/withdrawal) induce contrariety; the third, more or less, does not diversify species, otherwise the species would be infinite.
• Sed contra: love and joy differ in species, are in the concupiscible, and are not contrary; rather one is the cause of the other.

3. The body: the object acts on the appetite like a natural agent (“a likeness to the what natural agents”) #

Point: passions differ according to their activa, their objects, and the objects’ difference can be noted in two ways.

1. The object is the cause of the passion: the first cause of love is the good; a man coming in with a gun causes fear, with a tray of goodies the opposite (“comes in with lox and bagels and we turned off”).
2. Agents differ (a) in nature, as fire from water; (b) in active power. On (a): God, and Scripture, are called both fire (inflames the heart) and water (adapts to every situation), which must be metaphorical, since nothing can be both fire and water.
3. On (b), by a likeness to natural agents: everything moving either draws the thing undergoing it to itself or repels it. In drawing, it does three things: gives an inclination or aptitude (as lightness generated in a body gives it an aptitude to be above; heaviness, to be below); if the body is outside its place, gives it motion to that place; when it arrives, gives it rest. The same for repulsion.
4. Applied to the appetite: the good has a drawing power, the bad a repelling power. The good first causes an inclination, aptitude, connaturality (Thomas speaks of love as a conformity of the heart to the good): love, with hate opposite. Second, if the good is not yet had, motion to obtain it: desire or concupiscence, opposed by aversion, flight, “abomination.” Third, rest in the good obtained: pleasure or joy, opposed by pain or sadness.
5. Conclusion he stresses: this is again tied to the good and bad being in things: something out there you want to get, which acts on us and we undergo; if you obtain it you have joy, if the bad is forced upon you, sadness or pain. Love is the cause of both desire (absence) and joy (presence); hate of both flight and sadness. Aside: he doubts “abomination” is a good translation of the third concupiscible passion, since it could be taken for hate too, and means to look up its etymology (students pun on Obama).

4. Digression: wonder, not love of wisdom, as the beginning of philosophy (“wonder is the beginning of philosophy”) #

Point: since desire arises from love, why does Aristotle (proemium to wisdom, beginning of the Physics; also Socrates in the Theaetetus) make wonder, a kind of desire to know, the beginning of philosophy rather than the love of wisdom?

• A student: because you do not yet know wisdom. He: but you can love a thing both in its absence and in its presence; when you get wisdom you do not cease to love it but love it more, being more conformed to it (Thomas: if you get what you love, you love it more, insofar as it is lovable). So love of wisdom is found in the man who has wisdom, more at the end than at the beginning, and cannot be used to distinguish beginning from end; wonder can, since at the beginning you lack wisdom and pursue it out of wonder.
• Student: still, desire presupposes love, so love must precede. He grants that in a sense love is the beginning, but it is found more at the end.
• Parallel: among the theological virtues hope is put before charity in the order of generation; hope is like desire; charity remains in the next world, hope does not (“we’ll be hopeless in the next world”). He wonders whether “abandon all hope” should be written over the gate of heaven as well as hell; those in hell presumably still have despair.

5. The irascible passions and the count of eleven (“all the passions, differing in species, are eleven”) #

Point: the irascible presupposes the concupiscible’s aptitude toward good or bad taken absolutely, and regards them as arduous.

• Toward a good not yet obtained: hope and despair. Toward a bad not yet upon one: timor and boldness. Toward a good obtained: no irascible passion, since it no longer has the note of the arduous. Toward a bad now lying upon one: anger, with no contrary passion, only a privation.
• Three conjugations in the concupiscible (love/hate, desire/flight, joy/sadness), three in the irascible (hope/despair, fear/boldness, anger alone): eleven, six and five, an even and an odd number. He knows no place other than Thomas where all eleven are laid down so clearly (something like it in the De Veritate).
• Why it matters: a beginning for the virtues about emotions (mildness moderates anger; temperance desire and joy; courage fear and audacity; magnanimity concerns hope), hence for the matter of Nicomachean Ethics III (courage, temperance) and the lesser virtues of IV, before justice in V, which is in the will; for rhetoric, the part that moves by emotion; for the Poetics, both representing people under emotion and the emotional effect of tragedy and comedy; and for biography. Aside: Ron Chernow’s biography of Washington shows his self-control and the eruptions beneath it (raging at raw soldiers fleeing the British in New York, paralysed until aides turned his horse; “always had like a death wish”; Valley Forge). Students add Caesar in his fifties on the front line (Dr. Carroll’s account) and Washington’s many near-misses; he adds MacArthur (“they haven’t made the bullet yet”) and stories of strafing, a captured soldier, and his son in Kuwait.

6. q. 24, the four articles (“about the good and the bad and the passions”) #

Point: q. 24 asks (1) whether moral good and bad can be found in the passions; (2) whether every passion is morally bad, against the Stoics; (3) whether passion adds to or diminishes the goodness or badness of the act; (4) whether some passion is good or bad by its very species.

• On (3), a student: they ran away because they were afraid, does that diminish guilt? He: it depends on circumstances, e.g. a first battle; a student notes dread of battle grows with age (“bullet with my name on it”).
• On (4): as a boy he was told anger is a capital sin, which needs clarification, since even our Lord is angry at the hardness of their hearts.

7. q. 24 a. 1: objections, sed contra, body (“nearer is the sense-desiring power to reason”) #

Objections: (1) moral good and bad are proper to man, mores being properly human (Ambrose on Luke), but passions are common to other animals; (2) man’s good is to be in accord with reason (Dionysius, Divine Names 4), but the passions are in the sense appetite, not in reason; (3) Aristotle, Ethics II: by the passions we are neither praised nor blamed, but by moral good and bad we are. Sed contra: Augustine, City of God XIV: the passions are bad if the love is bad, good if good. Body:

1. Passions can be considered in themselves, or as subject to the command of reason and will. (A newborn’s emotions are not so subject; “haven’t met one yet. Maybe our Lord.”)
2. In themselves, as motions of the appetite that is without reason (not against reason, just not reason), they have no moral good or bad, which depends on accord with reason.
3. As subject to reason and will, moral good and bad are in them.
4. The argument he flags as interesting: the sense appetite is propinquior, nearer, to reason and will than the exterior members, hands and feet, whose acts are nevertheless morally good or bad (a man just sentenced to life for strangling a woman, with hands, not feet). Unde multo magis: much more can the passions, insofar as voluntary, be called morally good or bad. They are voluntary either as commanded by the will or as not prohibited by it. Student objection: if the sense appetites are nearer to reason, why do we not control them better than the members? His reply: Aristotle would say reason rules the hands tyrannically, as master over slave, but the emotions politically, as a father rules a son who has something to say about where he goes to college or what he eats; and the emotions are moved by their own objects independently. Student adds (St. Alphonsus or Fr. Hardon): with age we conceal our reactions but they go on inside, which is not maturity. He: our Lord says it is one thing not to kill, another not to be angry at your brother; you can not kill him and hate his guts, kill him a hundred times inside, which is worse than once outside.

8. Music and fiction as the bridge between reason and the emotions (“moved in harmony with the music”) #

Point: Aristotle in the Politics makes music part of moral education because it appeals to the senses and moves the emotions in harmony with itself.

• Osterley, “Towards an evaluation of music”: Baroque and Mozart’s classical music represent the emotions in harmony with reason, so emotions moved by it are moved reasonably, a disposition for reason.
• Aristotle’s definition of tragedy includes catharsis of pity and fear; catharsis is a medical term for removing a harmful substance (induced vomiting after poison, bleeding after snakebite), so catharsis of emotion removes a disorder from it. He took a friend angry at his brother to As You Like It, with its conflict of brothers, to make him gentler.
• Bad music and bad fiction move the emotions badly (pornographic stuff): cousin Donald at the Newport navy base, sailors throwing collapsible chairs at rock and roll; a horn player smashing his horn; his brother Mark: “the only thing I can think of doing with that music is fornicating.” Mozart and Handel do not dispose one to throw chairs.
• Plato in the Republic likewise; Fr. Boulay’s collection of Church Fathers on music. Education now cultivates the opposite, even Catholic grade schools (“what’s your favorite band?”). Asides: asking for Gregorian chant in a 1980s record store (“name some of the groups”: “monks of Solesmes”); not knowing the Grateful Dead was a band, and “Deadheads”; a student’s story of a son pounding his parents’ door with a flashlight and knocking himself out, “good example of the emotions.”

9. Replies to the objections (“not praised or blamed, who simply fears or is angry”) #

• Ad 1: passions in themselves are common to men and animals; as commanded by reason, proper to man. Aside: he played Mozart for the cat with no interest, but the cat heard the sandwich-meat paper and the tuna can opener; the boyhood cat that heard the back door however quietly opened.
• Ad 2: the lower appetites are said to be rational in some way as partaking of reason, Ethics I. To get a vivid sense of emotions partaking of reason, listen to Mozart, which fits the mood of a man who has been thinking rationally, whereas some music irritates after philosophy. Aside: Fr. Boulay paying restaurant performers to stop; “sometimes we’re too shy to do what we should do.”
• Ad 3: Aristotle means we are not praised or blamed for passions absolutely considered; whether a man is praised for anger depends on what he is angry about and how much (using my kids for target practice; the neighbour’s kid smashing a flowering plant, “Pow!”). It does not remove that they are praiseworthy or blameable as ordered by reason or not; hence he adds not “who simply fears or is angry” but qui aliqualiter, in some way, according to or outside reason. Asides (students): one can do violence without anger, Leonardo da Vinci’s grandfather knocking him ten feet so he would remember something, “great mnemonic device”; Padre Pio throwing people out of the confessional with external signs of anger while not upset, to put the fear of God in. Class ends here.

His words #

• composition and division: understanding true or false, putting together in affirmation, separating in negation
• fuga: turning away from, aversion; he prefers it to “abominatio” [ed.: abominatio is Thomas’s word for the third concupiscible passion]
• privative: what opposes anger; “calm down”
• sixth book of wisdom: where good and bad are shown to be in things [ed.: Metaphysics VI]
• activa: the objects of the passions, the agents that move the appetite
• excess and recess: approach to and withdrawal from good or bad
• conjugations: Thomas’s word for the pairs of passions
• timor: fear
• propinquior: nearer, of the sense appetite to reason
• unde multo magis: “hence much more,” the a fortiori step
• tyrannical vs. political rule: master over slave vs. father over son, reason’s rule of hands vs. emotions
• catharsis: medical purging, removing a harmful substance; applied to emotions
• qui aliqualiter: “who in some way,” i.e. reasonably or unreasonably fears or is angry

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 23, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 24, prologue and a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, ad 1-3)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Metaphysics X (cited in obj. 2); “sixth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics VI]
• Aristotle, Physics, proemium (wonder); Plato, Theaetetus
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I, II (cited in ad 2, obj. 3); III, IV, V (virtues and justice)
• Aristotle, Rhetoric; Poetics (definition of tragedy, catharsis); Politics (music in education)
• Augustine, City of God XIV; Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4; Ambrose on Luke
• Thomas, De Veritate (a similar list of passions)
• Plato, Republic (music)
• Osterley, “Towards an evaluation of music”
• Shakespeare, As You Like It
• Ron Chernow’s biography of George Washington; Washington Irving’s biography

His questions #

• Why are the acts of the sense appetite characterized by contrariety, and the acts of reason not? Because good and bad are in things and one excludes the other, while there is the same knowledge of opposites.
• Why does Aristotle say wonder, not love of wisdom, is the beginning of philosophy? Love of wisdom is found more in the man who has wisdom, so it cannot distinguish beginning from end; wonder, a desire, belongs to the beginning.
• With respect to the good obtained, is there any passion in the irascible? No, it no longer has the note of the arduous.
• How many passions differing in species are there? Eleven: six in the concupiscible, five in the irascible.
• Are the emotions of a newborn subject to the command of reason and will? “Haven’t met one yet.”
• If the sense appetites are nearer to reason, why don’t we control them better than the external members? Reason rules the hands tyrannically but the emotions politically, and they are moved by their own objects.
• Should you blame or praise a man for being angry? It depends on what he is angry about and how much, i.e. whether it accords with reason.
• Is anger a capital sin, as he was told as a boy? Needs clarification, since even our Lord is angry; left open for a. 4.