The Four Principal Passions, Comedy and Hope, and the Start of the Treatise on Love (ST I-II q.25 a.4; q.26 a.1)

Orientation #

He begins directly at “Article four” and refers back to “a twofold order as we’ve seen before” (order of intention and of carrying out) (prev. lecture). Near the end he asks “shall we go into love or not?”, checks that a student is coming back next week, and starts q. 26. Verified sources place the class at ST I-II q. 25 a. 4 and q. 26 a. 1, with a handout “Nature and Kinds of Love”, p. 2. The previous class treated the ordering of love and hope among the passions; the next continues q. 26 (whether love is a passion) and the distinction amor / dilectio / caritas / amicitia.

The class, in order #

1. Objections: are there four chief passions? (“there are not these four”) #

Point: he reads the three objections against joy, sadness, hope and fear as the chief passions.

1. Augustine, City of God XIV, puts cupidity or desire in place of hope. Aside: “Augustine is not as careful as he should be sometimes”; Thomas will excuse him — “he’s a busy man after all, and a bishop.”
2. There is a twofold order in the passions, of intention and of carrying out (generation). By intention only joy and sadness, the last, are chief; by generation love is the chief passion. So “in no way” these four.
3. As boldness is caused from hope, so fear from desperation. So either hope and desperation should be chief (as causes), or hope and boldness (both approaching their object: hope the difficult good, boldness the difficult evil).

• Sed contra: Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy, enumerates the four: gaudia, timorem, spem, dolor. Student asks about the verb (“pellant”?); he takes it as a command, driving them out — Lady Wisdom says “forget about your emotions.”
• His footnote at the reply refers to Cicero (De finibus boni et mali), Gregory of Nemesius [ed.: Nemesius, De Natura Hominis], Jerome and Ezekiel: “some other great minds” hold the same four.

2. Reply: two ways of being “completing” (“completing and final simpliciter”) #

Point: the four are chief in two different senses, so the objections’ dilemma is false.

1. Joy and sadness are chief because completing and final simpliciter with respect to all the passions; all the passions issue in them (Ethics II). Example: I get angry, I get revenge, and I have joy.
2. Hope and fear are chief not as completing simply but as completing in the genus of motion, the appetitive motion toward something. Toward the good: love → desire → hope; toward the bad: hate → aversion → fear.
3. Hence the number is customarily taken by present vs. future: motion regards the future, rest is in the present. Present good: joy; present evil: sadness; future good: hope; future evil: fear.
4. All other passions about good or bad, present or future, are reduced to these as completing.
5. Some call these four principal because they are general; true, he notes, if hope and fear designate the appetite’s motion generally toward what is to be desired or fled.

3. Replies to the objections (“praecidens cannot be said to be chief”) #

• Ad 1: Augustine puts cupidity for hope because both pertain to a future good — “Augustine has some part of truth there.”
• Ad 2: “principal” is said by the order of intention and of completion; hope and fear are not last simply (joy and sadness are), but last in the genus of passions tending toward something future. The only possible instance is anger, which is not principal because it is an effect of boldness (aside: “there’s some boldness in anger — I think I can get rid of you who are causing me this pain”).
• Ad 3: desperation implies receding from the good, which is praecidens (the good is what all desire); audacity implies approaching the bad, also praecidens — “tell this to the poor soldier.” What is praecidens cannot be chief, so neither desperation nor boldness, and hence not anger, which follows on boldness.
• Aside: MacArthur, “the soldier above all prays for peace, because he was there”; the late Leo Albert, a Marine in Korea, had both the Marine sticker and “Pray the rosary for world peace” on his car.

4. Gaudium et Spes names the four (“joys and hopes, and the sorrows and anxieties”) #

Point: the first paragraph of Vatican II’s pastoral constitution on the Church in the modern world twice lists joys, hopes, sorrows, anxieties — the four principal passions. Joy and hope by name (gaudium et spes); luctus is sorrow, i.e. sadness; anxiety refers to fear (“I fear they might get re-elected”). Shakespeare too sometimes puts the four together.

5. Digression: comedy moves us to mirth and hope (“hope rather than boldness”) #

Point: how he came to define comedy from the principal passions.

1. Aristotle’s Poetics: the part on comedy is lost, though there are some remarks. Without knowing it he used a dialectical place: tragedy and comedy are contraries, so their definitions and the emotions they move us to should be contrary.
2. Tragedy moves to pity (a form of sadness) and fear — clear in Aristotle; the prologue of Romeo and Juliet gives exactly these two (“fearful passage of their death-marked love”; “piteous … overthrows”).
3. So comedy should move to some joy, called mirth (merriment its exterior manifestation), and, he first said, boldness as the opposite of fear — “that doesn’t fit perfectly.”
4. Meeting the teaching of the principal passions (De Veritate q. 26 a. 5, the same as here), he saw the list has hope, not boldness. Tragedy and comedy are the chief forms of fiction, the rest a mixture in between; so the chief forms should move to the chief passions: comedy to mirth and hope.
5. Further evidence: a translator of Terence’s comedies (Thomas quotes Terence in moral matters), citing Paul’s “faith, hope and charity remain,” said that in comedy the principal thing seems to be hope — he saw hope, not boldness, on the irascible side.
6. Comedy also purges melancholy, but as an effect of moving us to mirth and hope.

• Student: modern comedy is really despair; George Carlin, very funny but very bitter.
• “It’s a mistake when they say tragedy should make us melancholic”: pity and melancholy are different kinds of sadness; melancholy a bad sadness, pity a good one. When a great man falls (Coriolanus) it is a noble pity. Death of a Salesman (Arthur Miller; Dustin Hoffman production) is just grim and depressing. Student anecdote: a confirmation penance service with candles and forlorn love songs to “get in the mood” — simply making the kids melancholy; “you can make teenagers cry at the drop of a hat.”
• Asides: Catch-22 (two bad options in a loop; the author’s favourite work said to be the Iliad, which surprised him); depressing school reading lists (For Whom the Bell Tolls, The Pearl, Flowers for Algernon, etc.); Hardy novels leave one depressed — “not the Hardy Boys.”

6. Prologue to q. 26 and the amor / dilectio question (“love that’s an act of the will”) #

Point: the plan of the passions in particular and the vocabulary of love.

• Passions in particular: first concupiscible, then irascible; the concupiscible in three pairs: love and hate; concupiscence and flight (fuga — he would rather say “aversion”; cf. “fugue”); pleasure and sadness. On love: love itself, its cause, its effects — “looking before and after.” Four articles: in the concupiscible? a passion? same as dilectio? divided into love of friendship and of concupiscence? Articles 3 and 4 are two different divisions of love.
• “Passion” in English: we say emotion; fitting that the passions are named from what is most like motion, e.g. desire.
• Amor (cf. amorous) keeps more the sense of sense love; dilectio, from the word for choice, is the love in the will. College students, and even priests in sermons, have a hard time seeing the difference between love as emotion and love as act of will — “love of neighbour” does not mean a warm feeling.
• Aside: a parish where the priest tells people to greet each other “Hi, brother,” “Hi, sister.”
• Aside developing this: someone asked him the difference between the gifts pietas and fear of the Lord, both from reverence for God. Objection: the gift should be called religio, since religio (rendering God what is due in justice) is higher than pietas (toward one’s earthly father), and the gifts are higher than the moral virtues. Thomas grants religio is the higher virtue but the gift is pietas: it regards God as Father, which is higher than regarding him as Lord and Creator. Gifts direct the cardinal virtues yet are below the theological virtues. The Our Father, explained with hope, teaches regarding God as Father; pietas extends to fellow parishioners as brothers and sisters. Alphonsus notes “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me” addresses him as God, “Father, into thy hands” as Father; a student adds the first petition of forgiveness begins with “Father.”

7. q. 26 a. 1, objections: love not in the concupiscible (“I have loved wisdom”) #

1. Wisdom 8: “I have loved wisdom and sought it out from my youth” (Solomon, in his old age — aside: no fool worse than an old fool; “you’re old before you’re wise”). The concupiscible, part of sense appetite, cannot tend to wisdom, which sense does not grasp; so amor is not in the concupiscible. He adds: Dionysius applies eros, the Greek corresponding to amor and seeming more sensual, even to the love of God, because of its intensity.
2. Augustine, City of God XIV: love seeking what is loved is desire, having it is joy, fleeing is fear, sensing loss is sadness (“your sadness under the cross is your love”). But fear is in the irascible; so love should not simply be said to be in the concupiscible.
3. Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4, lays down a natural love, which pertains rather to the powers of the plant soul (nurserymen say a plant “likes” sunlight; broccoli is “a big feeder”).

• Sed contra: Aristotle, Topics II, love is in the concupiscible. Thomas “scrounges around Aristotle,” even the Rhetoric, for the emotions.
• Aside: a phone call with Warren about Thomas as commentator; his ruling principle, from experience with crazy modern theses: “Aristotle means what Thomas says he means, period.”

8. Reply: three appetites, love as the beginning of motion (“the beginning of the motion tending towards the end loved”) #

1. Love pertains to the appetitive power, since the object of both is the good; so love differs as appetite differs.
2. Three appetites:
   • natural: desire not following the apprehension of the one desiring but of another, the one who instituted nature (cf. Book I); a bolt that “doesn’t want to go” in the wrong hole;
   • sense appetite: following the desirer’s own apprehension but from necessity, not free judgment (liberum arbitrium), as in brutes; in men it partakes of freedom insofar as it obeys reason;
   • rational or intellectual appetite, the will: following the apprehension of one with free judgment.
3. In each, love is the beginning of the motion tending toward the end loved. In natural appetite this is connaturality: the heavy body to the middle of the universe, its weight — natural love (“my love is my weight,” Augustine). In sense appetite or will it is the adaptation or agreement [ed.: coaptatio] to some good: sense love, and intellectual or rational love.
4. Sense love is in the sense appetite as intellectual love is in the intellectual appetite; it pertains to the concupiscible, which regards the good absolutely, not the good as arduous (the irascible). Boundary: the object of love or liking is “a good, period”; the irascible’s good is the good as difficult to achieve.

9. Replies (“not essentially, but causally”) #

• Ad 1: Wisdom 8 speaks of intellectual, rational love — easily solved.
• Ad 2: love is called fear, joy, desire, sadness not essentially but causally, as Aristotle speaks by causality: understanding or sensing is called an undergoing because the undergoing (something of the thing impressed on you) is the cause of knowing.
• Ad 3: natural love is not only in the plant soul’s powers but in all parts of the soul, all parts of the body, all things, since each has a connaturality to what suits it; Dionysius: to all the beautiful and the good is lovable.
• Asides: a Smithsonian article on why some birds have blue crests — the female finds it beautiful; he thinks man is unique in seeking the beautiful for itself: his cat ignored Mozart but was at his side when the sandwich meat came out. “I guess we’ve got to stop here.”

His words #

• twofold order: of intention and of carrying out or generation
• completivae simpliciter: completing simply — joy and sadness; vs. completing “in the genus of motion” — hope and fear
• principal / chief passions: his rendering of principales
• praecidens: receding from the good or approaching evil; what is praecidens cannot be chief
• cupiditas: cupidity, desire (Augustine’s substitute for hope)
• luctus: sorrow, i.e. sadness (Gaudium et Spes)
• dialectical place: tragedy and comedy contraries, so their definitions contrary
• mirth: the joy comedy moves to; merriment its exterior manifestation
• fuga: flight; he prefers “aversion”
• passion / emotion: emotions named from motion, e.g. desire
• amor: keeps the sense of sense love; dilectio: love in the will, from “choice”
• pietas (gift): regards God as Father; religio: renders God what is due in justice
• eros: Dionysius’s word corresponding to amor, applied even to God for its intensity
• natural appetite: following the apprehension not of the desirer but of the instituter of nature
• liberum arbitrium: free judgment
• connaturality: the agreement with nature that is natural love; “adaptation” / “agreement” for sense and rational love [ed.: coaptatio]
• the good absolutely vs. the arduous: concupiscible vs. irascible object
• predication by causality: love called fear etc. as cause; sensing called an undergoing

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q. 25 a. 4 (objections, sed contra, reply, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II q. 26, prologue and a. 1 (objections, sed contra, reply, replies)
• Vatican II, Gaudium et Spes, opening paragraph (quoted from memory)
• handout “Nature and Kinds of Love”, p. 2 (verified source)

Mentioned

• Boethius, Consolation of Philosophy (sed contra of q. 25 a. 4)
• Augustine, City of God XIV; Augustine “my love is my weight”
• Cicero, De finibus boni et mali; Nemesius, De Natura Hominis; Jerome; Ezekiel (footnote)
• Aristotle, Ethics II; Topics II; Rhetoric; Poetics (comedy lost); ST I-II Book I on natural appetite [ed.: reference as he gives it]
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4
• Thomas, De Veritate q. 26 a. 5
• Wisdom 8; Matthew and Mark (cry from the cross); Paul, “faith, hope and charity remain”
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (prologue), Coriolanus; Terence’s comedies; Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman; Catch-22; Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; Hardy; Steinbeck, The Pearl; Flowers for Algernon
• Alphonsus (on the words from the cross); Smithsonian magazine on bird colour
• printed volume: DHB Vol III, The School of Aristotle, p. 1107 (verified source)

His questions #

• Why are joy and sadness chief among the passions? Because they are completing and final simply; all the passions issue in them.
• In what sense are hope and fear chief, since they are not the last passions? They complete the appetite’s motion toward a future good or evil.
• Why is anger not a principal passion? It is an effect of boldness, which is praecidens and so cannot be chief.
• Does comedy move us to boldness, as the contrary of fear? No — to mirth and hope, since the chief forms of fiction move to the chief passions.
• Should tragedy make us melancholy? No; pity is a good sadness, melancholy a bad one.
• What do we call passions in English? Emotions — named from what is most like motion, such as desire.
• If Solomon loved wisdom, how is love in the concupiscible? That is intellectual love; sense love is in the sense appetite and the concupiscible.
• Is love the same as fear, joy, desire and sadness, as Augustine says? Not essentially but causally.
• Is natural love only in the plant soul? No, in all parts of soul and body and in all things, by connaturality.