Aquinas on the Order of the Passions: Love First Among the Concupiscible, Hope First Among the Irascible (ST I-II q.25 a.2-3)

Orientation #

He refers back to “the first article” of q. 25 (irascible vs. concupiscible order) with its “nuanced answer” (prev. lecture), and to last night’s reading of Topics book VII. He does not announce next time; the session breaks before continuing. The previous class worked through the articles on passions and morality and began q. 25; the next covers the four principal passions and begins the treatise on love.

The class, in order #

1. Thomas as the man who could understand Aristotle (“proportion him to us”) #

Point: Aristotle has the greater mind, but Thomas is the one who could understand him and proportion him to us, so with only one language you learn more from Thomas in Latin than Aristotle in Greek.

• Albert’s Physics commentary makes the subject of natural philosophy corpus mobile; Thomas at the start of his Physics commentary says ens mobile, “because no science proves its own subject”: that mobile being is a body is shown in Book VI, so it is a property, not the subject. Thomas corrects Albert unnamed and Averroes named (Averroes took Aristotle’s account of the order of consideration/determination as the order of demonstration, which “doesn’t put it under one intention”).
• Greek commentators only paraphrase, with difficulty, let alone unfold the text.
• Aside from last night (Topics VII): a property is, for the most part, a sumploke, a combination, i.e. speech not a name, and definition is always speech; hence the error of the man who mixed the four problems of the Topics with Porphyry’s five predicables, which are all names.

2. Two composed ways of speaking of the simple God (“pure act” and “first act”) #

Point: truth does not require that our way of knowing be the way things are.

1. God knows composed things simply (by knowing himself); we know simple things in a composed way; neither is false, since what you say of things must be with them.
2. The two most fundamental things said of God after that he exists: pure act (composed of “pure,” a negation, i.e. no ability to be moved or formed, no passivity) and first act (a relation, real on the creature’s side, of reason on God’s). So both use beings of reason, negation and relation.
3. Pure act serves as middle term for nearly all the attributes: unchanging (change involves potency); altogether simple (Thomas: in everything composed either one part is to another as act to ability, or all parts to the whole as ability to act, so no composition without potency); altogether perfect (act is the perfection of the thing, Metaphysics IX); infinite (not limited by any potency).
4. Which is before in our knowing? Warren on the phone said pure act; he argues instead from Met. IX part 3 (act is simply before ability, since what goes from ability to act does so through something already in act): God is the first act; the first act is pure act; therefore God is pure act.

• Structure of Met. IX: part 1 mainly on ability, part 2 on act (more universal), part 3 comparing them in order of knowledge, definition, causality.
• Aside: a logic student asked his favourite part of philosophy; to say logic is like saying grammar; logic is a tool, not a chief part (Thomas). His favourite course at college was Kasurik’s “Natural Theology” (the Summa articles before the Trinity, knowable by natural reason): “once you get a little taste of God, you realize how tasty He is.”

3. Thomas looking before and after: love first of the concupiscible (“it seems that love is not the first”) #

Point: after ordering irascible against concupiscible, Thomas now asks what is first within each. Objections of a. 2, as he reads them:

1. The concupiscible is named from concupiscence, the same passion as desire; denominatio is from the more potent (De Anima II; as episteme names the whole of thinking from its ultimate kind, reasoning); so desire is more potent than love. (Aside: “bon appetit” annoys him, it means “have good desire”; the Lebanese wish the meal be for twice your health; “I want the food.”)
2. Love implies union (Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4, love as unitiva, concretiva); desire is motion towards union; you pursue union before you have it, so desire is before love.
3. Cause before effect; pleasure is sometimes cause of love (Ethics VIII, friendship for pleasure), so pleasure is before love. “There’s more truth in this third objection than in the first two.” Sed contra: Augustine, City of God XIV: all passions are caused from love; desire is love seeking what it loves, joy is love having it.

4. The body: two orders, and the good before the bad (“either according to intention or according to”) #

Point: love is first in the order of achieving; in the order of intention the order is reversed.

1. The object of the concupiscible is good and bad; the good is naturally before the bad because the bad is a lack of good (Met. IX); so passions whose object is the good are before those whose object is the bad, each before its opposite (one refuses the evil because one seeks the good).
2. The good has the notion of end (Aristotle; secondarily the means are called good); what is before in intention is after in obtaining, so the passions can be ordered either way.
3. In achieving, what comes first in the thing tending to the end: (a) an aptness or proportion to the end (nothing tends to what does not fit it), (b) motion towards it, (c) rest in it. Mozart: I like his music, move towards the CD, rest in hearing it.
4. The proportion of the desiring power (appetitus, itself named from desire) to the good is love, “a complacence with the good”; the motion is desire or concupiscentia (the sense desire); the rest is joy (more spiritual in meaning) or delectatio. So love before desire before pleasure.
5. In intention it is reversed: the pleasure intended causes desire and love, since pleasure is enjoyment of the good, which in some way is the end. Ethics X: after pleasure, which seems for its own sake, happiness is the operation of knowing God, which perfects and so pleases the mind; pleasure is to the end “like beauty is to youth”, not its essence but covering it.

• Aside: the morning gospel had the Lord eat fish before the apostles; he would hate to prove his resurrection by eating salmon; Kasurik: compared to Aristotle “I got the mind of an angler” [ed.: as heard].

5. Why the philosopher is named from love (“why is the philosopher named from love”) #

Point: love of wisdom underlies both the desire for wisdom (wonder) and the delight in having it, so the name comes from the fundamental thing; this love is in the will, not a passion.

• Bishop Theodoric [ed.: likely Theodoret] called the Syrian monks (Simeon Stylites and others) philosophers and their life philosophy.
• “Taste and see how sweet is the Lord”: being moved by delight in God. Bernard of Clairvaux’s stages of love: loving only one’s earthly things; turning to God for help when they fail (the neighbours’ father got cancer, suddenly the family was at daily mass); delighting in the Lord for himself; loving oneself for and in God, hardly realised in this life. Human parallel: you turn to someone for help, then come to like the person for their own sake.

6. Reply 1: named as known, and desire is like motion (“new improved edition”) #

Point: things are named as they become known to us (vocal sounds are signs of things understood, the Philosopher); we know the cause through the effect, and desire is the more sensible effect of love.

• Categories ch. 12: four senses of before: in time, in being (one before two), in knowledge/reason, in goodness. His old question: in what sense of before does one sense of before come before another? Answer: the third, “because we name things as we know them.”
• Effect of love when the thing is had: pleasure; when not had: desire. Augustine, De Trinitate X: love is more sensed when need prompts it; so concupiscence is the most sensible passion and names the power.
• His addition (“I think Thomas could be a little bit better”): desire is more known because it is more like motion. Shakespeare: things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs; Met. IX: act is first known from motion; hence sports and movies; Quebec newsreels called actualités. Likewise reasoning is more known than understanding: “discourse” is from running, understanding is a stand, a rest; Thomas’s own text says secundo movetur ad finem. C. S. Lewis’s poetic image of God moving quickly everywhere.

7. Replies 2 and 3: two unions, two orders (“have to see distinction before you can see order”) #

Reply 2, distinction: real union (conjunction to the thing itself; pertains to joy or pleasure, following desire) vs. affective union (aptitude or proportion; one who is inclined already partakes in some way; this is love). Love implies the union that precedes: the man pursues the woman because he is attached to her by love; he would not pursue Mozart’s music or the food unless already attached. “Have to see distinction before you can see order.” Reply 3: pleasure causes love as before in intention; “last in intention is first in execution”: intend to be rid of the headache, then aspirin, then the drugstore; execute in reverse. Same with logic, last intended and first studied as tool; wisdom is first in intention for the lover of wisdom.

• Laval: De Koninck taught natural philosophy, Mgr Maurice Dionne logic, to emphasise learning these first. Natural theology proof that God is unchangeable presupposes Physics I, whatever moves is composed; without it he could not have followed the argument.
• Reading Aristotle needs Thomas: a philosopher went off on Met. V’s senses of “beginning”; second sense is where you begin because you are along the road (you pick up the highway to Boston, not the road’s beginning), which Aristotle only compares to knowing, not the fifth sense about beginning and knowing; Dionne: “look what Thomas says.” De Koninck on Cajetan going off when commenting Aristotle directly; as an angel is illuminated by the one just above it, we need De Koninck or Dionne to read Thomas, Thomas to read Aristotle.
• Moerbeke translates both methodos and episteme as scientia at the start of the Physics; Aristotle uses them convertibly there, but sometimes the difference matters.

8. Philomuthos (“the lover of plots”) #

Point: in the proemium on wonder Aristotle compares the philosopher not to the poet but to the philomuthos, lover of plots or fiction, also named from love, because the myth is composed of wonders (the child’s glass mountain).

9. Hope first of the irascible: objections (“it seems that hope is not the first”) #

Point: the names of passions are carried to the will and its habits, and the two theological virtues are named from love and hope; this article remotely prepares that connection.

• Topics VII: in all the problems it is easier to destroy than establish; hence Thomas’s twenty objections and his own St. Mary’s student who came to class with an objection hoping “to have me today.” Objections: (1) irascible is named from anger, denominatio fit a potiori, so anger is more potent than hope. (2) The arduous is the irascible’s object; overcoming a contrary evil, imminent (audacity) or present (anger), is more arduous than acquiring a good, so anger before audacity before hope. (3) Recess from the term precedes access (John the Baptist: repent, then the kingdom; fear of the Lord the beginning of wisdom); fear and despair imply recess, hope and audacity access. Sed contra: the nearer to the first, the more before; hope is nearer to love, first of the passions. Shakespeare’s lover: “can I hope?”, she hopes all men hope, so she has more choices.

10. The body: order of generation among the irascible passions (“hope is the first among all the passions of the irascible”) #

1. All irascible passions imply motion towards something, caused either from aptitude/proportion to the end alone (love or hate) or from presence of good or bad (joy or sadness). Presence of the good causes no irascible passion; presence of the bad causes anger (someone stepping on your toe or twisting your arm and saying “so what”). Since in the way of generation proportion precedes obtaining, anger is last.
2. Among the rest: hope and despair have as object a good difficult to obtain (hope if you think you can overcome, despair if not); fear and boldness a bad difficult to avoid (fear if you may not avoid it, boldness if you can easily overcome it). Football: a big hole and a little pipsqueak in it, “run right over,” but a big heavy guy would give him second thought; tackling the big guys through the centre when the others fled was “a little bit of audacity”; brother dislocated his shoulder at first practice.
3. Passions about the good before those about the bad (as love, desire, joy before hate, aversion, sadness): love of happiness is more principal than hatred of misery; you hate loneliness because you love friendship.
4. Hope before despair: hope is motion towards the good under the notion of good, which is attractive, per se; despair recedes from the good on account of something else, per accidens. Fox and grapes: a good difficult to get, “probably sour anyway”; the man who cannot get the girl says she’d be spoiled anyway. “It’s a good difficult to achieve, not a difficulty good to achieve.”
5. The order changes here: audacity resembles hope in going towards its object, but since the bad is naturally repulsive, fear (receding from the bad) is naturally prior to boldness. On the battlefield fear is more natural; Washington’s orders shot the man neglecting his duty (dead coward or dead hero); Shakespeare’s battle scenes: wound in the front or the back.
6. Hope and despair before fear and boldness: desire for the good is the reason for avoiding the bad (both teams desire victory); boldness follows hope of victory, fear follows despair of overcoming; anger follows boldness, for no one gets angry desiring revenge unless he dares to vindicate himself (Avicenna, Sixth Book of Natural Things).
7. Order of generation of all the passions: (1) love and hate (or like and dislike), (2) desire and aversion/flight, (3) hope and despair, (4) fear and boldness, (5) anger, (6) joy and sadness, which follow all (Ethics II); and in each pair the good-side member first.

• Aside: Thomas often corrects Avicenna in the Sentences but takes much from him; Warren in Argentina told a Muslim student that Thomas thought highly of Avicenna and Averroes, now counted heretics by Muslims.

11. Replies of a. 3 (“the arduous is not the reason”) #

Reply 1: anger, caused from the other passions, is the more manifest effect and so names the power; he adds again that it is the more manifest motion. Shakespeare, As You Like It: “in the very wrath of love, clubs cannot part them,” a metaphor resting on the likeness of anger and concupiscence; in the Secunda Secundae mildness (better than “meekness”), the virtue moderating anger, is attached to temperance, both moderating vehement, bodily emotions; the newspaper is full of men in trouble from women, drink, or a blow struck in anger; drink weakens reason and makes some amorous, others angry; you can tell an angry man faster than a frightened one. Reply 2: the arduous is not the reason for acceding to something but the good is; so hope, regarding the good directly, is before, though audacity or even anger sometimes concerns something more arduous. Fear makes one take counsel if not too severe; a politician has to run scared. Reply 3: desire is first and per se moved towards the good and thence recedes from the bad; the motion of appetite is proportioned to the intention of nature, which intends the end before the removal of the contrary.

• Application: he is a lover of wisdom, not a hater of folly; wonder, not flight from error, is the beginning of philosophy (Socrates in the Theaetetus; Aristotle), though Socrates thought most men think they know what they don’t. Wanting truth to avoid error makes no sense; Augustine: if someone doubts he loves truth, ask if he likes to be deceived. Likewise one avoids pain because one wants pleasure. Break.

His words #

• corpus mobile / ens mobile: Albert’s vs. Thomas’s subject of natural philosophy.
• sumploke: a combination, speech; what a property for the most part is.
• pure act / first act: negation vs. relation of reason; two composed ways of knowing the simple God.
• “ability” [ed.: potency]; “ninth book of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]; “book of places” [ed.: Topics]; “natural hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• denominatio (fit a potiori): naming from the more potent.
• appetitus: the appetitive power, named from desire; concupiscentia: sense desire.
• love: “complacence with the good,” the aptitude or proportion of desire to the good.
• delectatio / joy: rest in the good, joy “a little more spiritual.”
• “looking before and after”: Thomas ordering the passions.
• affective union vs. real union.
• “last in intention is first in execution.”
• actualités: newsreels, act in its first sense, motion.
• philomuthos: lover of plots/fiction.
• spes, desperatio, audacia, timor: hope, despair, boldness, fear; ratio timoris et audaciae.
• per se / per accidens: hope’s relation to the good vs. despair’s.
• mildness: the virtue moderating anger, attached to temperance.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 25, a. 2 (whole article, translated) and a. 3 (whole article, translated).
• Handouts (verified sources): “Shakespeare’s Exhortation to Use Reason,” p. 5; “Effects of Love,” p. 4 (Shakespeare lines quoted).

Mentioned

• Albert the Great, commentary on the Physics; Thomas, commentary on the Physics, beginning; Averroes on the Physics.
• Aristotle, Physics I and VI; Topics VII; Metaphysics IX (three parts), V (senses of “beginning”), I proemium (wonder); Categories ch. 12; De Anima II; Ethics II, VIII, X.
• Augustine, City of God XIV; De Trinitate X; on loving truth (no locus given).
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4; Avicenna, Sixth Book of Natural Things; Plato, Theaetetus.
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I (treatise on God, simplicity, unchangeableness); Secunda Secundae (mildness under temperance); Sentences commentary.
• Bernard of Clairvaux on the stages of love; Theodoret [as “Theodoric”] on the Syrian monks; Shakespeare, As You Like It; a Washington biography; C. S. Lewis.
• Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15: flagged by the verified-source match, but nothing in the transcript shows it being read.

His questions #

• Who’s smarter, Aristotle or Thomas? Aristotle has the greater mind; Thomas alone could understand him and proportion him to us.
• Is there an order in our knowing between pure act and first act? First act comes first: God is the first act, the first act is pure act, so God is pure act.
• In what sense of before does one sense of before come before another? The third, in knowledge, because we name things as we know them.
• Why is the philosopher named from love rather than from desire for wisdom (wonder)? Love underlies both the desire and the delight; it is the fundamental thing.
• Why is the concupiscible named from concupiscence and not love? Desire is the more sensible effect of love, and (his addition) more like motion.
• Which kind of union precedes: real or affective? Affective; the man pursues the woman because already attached by love.
• Which is more principal, love of happiness or hatred of misery? Love of happiness; you wouldn’t hate misery unless you loved happiness.
• On the battlefield, which is more natural, fear or boldness? Fear, since the bad is naturally repulsive.
• Why is he called a lover of wisdom and not a hater of folly? Wanting truth is more fundamental than avoiding error; “ask him if he likes to be deceived.”