Aquinas on Love (ST I-II q.26, aa.2-3): Love as a Passion, and Amor vs. Dilectio

Orientation #

He opens straight into q. 26 a. 2 with a remark on “one of the objections” (Basil/Chrysostom on the Father as cause of the Son) apparently carried over from the preceding discussion; he says nothing explicit about next time. The previous class ended partway into the article on whether love is in the concupiscible, and the next continues into a. 4 and q. 27.

The class, in order #

1. Beginning is wider than cause (“Not every beginning is a cause”) #

Point: Basil and Chrysostom (and Thomas after them) call the Father the “cause” of the Son, using the word loosely; Aristotle is “pretty good on that”: beginning (principium) is more universal than cause.

• Aside: Thomas would have “transferred to Paris” for Chrysostom’s commentary on John.

2. Article 2, objections: is love a passion? (“Whether amor is a passion”) #

Point: three reasons say love is not an undergoing (passio), against Aristotle’s plain statement that it is.

1. Dionysius (Divine Names 4): every love is a virtus; no virtue is a passion. “But what does Dionysius mean, huh, Thomas?”
2. Augustine (De Trinitate): love is a union or connection; but union is a relation, not a passion. He recalls the Sentences article on whether the Holy Spirit is the nexus of Father and Son: not as essential love is their connection, but as husband and wife are united in their offspring, the Spirit proceeding from both. A student links this to Kolbe’s “uncreated immaculate conception” and Bonaventure’s Holy Spirit as conceptio of the Father and Son; he accepts the comparison (“not a natural procession, but like the parents united”).
3. Damascene (bk. 2): passion is a certain motion. He notes that Aristotle takes up motion in Physics III and attaches to it acting-upon and undergoing (if you move because I push you, your motion is a pushing and a being-pushed); Thomas stops there to say “we’ve got to understand the whole categories for this.” But love is not the motion of the desiring power (that is desire) but its beginning; so love is not a passion.

• Sed contra: the Philosopher, Ethics VIII: amor est passio. “Yeah, that’s pretty good.”

3. Body: the twofold effect of the desirable (“motion of the appetite is done in a certain circle”) #

Point: love is the first change the desirable produces in the appetite, so it is a passion.

1. Passion is the effect of the agent on the patient (Latin actio/passio, Greek poiein/paschein; his English: “acting upon” and “undergoing / being acted upon”).
2. A natural agent has a twofold effect on the patient: first it gives the form, second the motion that follows on the form. Example from the old science: the generator of a stone gives it weight (gravity) and then the motion toward its natural place that follows on the weight; this weight can be called a natural love. Hence Augustine’s “my love is my weight.”
3. Likewise the desirable (appetibile) first gives the appetite a coaptatio (his gloss: “a coordination… fitted to it”), the agreement with the desirable; then motion toward it follows when you do not have it.
4. De Anima III: the appetite’s motion is in a circle. The thing makes an impression on me, I am adapted to it, then I go out to pursue and possess it: the end of the motion is where its beginning was; the desirable that acted upon me is the good I pursue.
5. So: the first change of the appetite by the desirable is amor, nothing but agreement with the desirable (“it’s pleasing you”); from it follows motion, desire; and last rest, joy. “Beautiful is restful.” Conclusion: love is a passion properly as in the concupiscible (sense) appetite, and by extension of the name as in the will.

• Illustration: someone at a party “makes an impression” on you. He dwells on the phrase: a hand pressed on something soft leaves an impression, hard on a hard-hearted person; the impression is like a form by which the heart is conformed to the object.
• Student: isn’t desire also an undergoing? Answer: yes, both are passions, but desire follows upon the heart having been conformed to the object. “It’s hard to distinguish.”
• Aside: Mozart’s music “just fits my heart,” so he plays it every morning (rationed to one or two CDs by Rosie); the student who put Bach and Mozart on the same level; Mozart as a “separated substance.”

4. Reply 1 and the senses of “beginning” (“the beginning is in that of which it is the beginning”) #

Point: Dionysius calls love virtus because virtue signifies a beginning of motion or action, and love is the beginning of the desiring motion. Digression on translating principium/arche (Metaphysics V):

• First three senses have the beginning in that of which it is the beginning: (1) the point of a line, line of a surface, surface of a body; (2) where you begin on the line, perhaps halfway; (3) the fundamental part, the foundation of a house. English “beginning” covers these.
• Fourth sense: an exterior beginning. “Am I the beginning of my son?” sounds odd in English, because I am not in my son as the point is in the line; so the English word must be extended. Fifth sense: principles of a science (definitions, axioms).
• Grade-school “principal (-pal) vs principle (-ple)”: prince/principal of the school = later senses, principles of science = fifth; it sounds funny to say the principal is the “beginning” of the school. Diagnosis: when we take over the Greek or Latin word only in its later meanings without the first, “our mind is out of order.” He is “all in favor of moving the word”: I am the beginning of my son, the carpenter of the table, the tailor of my shirt.
• Parallel: the word “birth” for what a thing is (last sense of phusis/nature): Shakespeare’s “revolts from true birth, stumbling on abuse” = revolting from one’s true nature; Shakespeare has moved the word, whereas some minds “are clogged.”
• So virtus as principium motus vel actionis may be an exterior beginning. He adds that when Aristotle passes from beginning to cause, the first two causes, matter and form, are intrinsic: the wood is in the table, the form of the table in the wood; matter defined as that from which something comes to be, existing within it; the maker is not in the thing made.
• Student confusion about “cause and effect” vs beginning; he clarifies: the maker is the beginning of the table in one way, the wood in another: different kinds of causes.
• How he teaches the four causes: write CAT on the board. Erase C, A, T: the word is gone, so it depends on its letters (matter). Write ACT beside it: same letters, so “forced by the truth itself” to admit something beyond the letters (form). Did the letters get in that order because they are those letters? No: the mover. Does my ability to order them explain why C-A-T rather than A-C-T? No: I wanted to talk about my favourite animal, or about ability and act in metaphysics (end). Likewise the carpenter’s roof: his ability extends to both shapes; snow and rain explain why one is better. The order matter, form, mover, end is Aristotle’s, and also the historical order: the first Greek philosophers said water, or Mother Earth, is the beginning of all things, showing the natural movement of the mind from what is most known, unlike “whatever Professor X was talking about the first day of class.”
• Aside: Thomas Aquinas College graduates always say “TAC.”

5. Replies 2 and 3: union and motion (“union is the work of love”) #

Point: union follows on love; love does name a motion, the one by which the appetite is changed by the desirable.

• Reply 2: union pertains to love in that the lover, by the appetite’s agreement, is toward the beloved as toward himself or as something of himself (aliquid sui; his mother’s remark that fathers look on wives and children as “part of their establishment of life”). So love is not the relation of union; union follows love: Dionysius, love is a virtus unitiva; the Philosopher, Politics II, union is the opus of love. He notes Thomas’s “great respect” for both.
• Reply 3: love does not name the motion of the appetite tending toward the desirable, but it does name the motion by which the appetite is changed by the desirable: the impression on the heart conforming it, so that it is pleased with the desirable. “So love is something passionate. Now we know that.”

6. Article 3, objections: is love the same as dilectio? (“as four and twice two”) #

Point: he renders dilectio “chosen love” (from its root in choice) and reads the objections that make it a mere synonym of amor.

1. Dionysius (Divine Names 4): love and dilectio are as four and twice two, rectilinear and having straight lines (“twelve inches or one foot”): same thing.
2. Motions of the appetite differ by objects; dilectio and amor have the same object.
3. If they differed, it would be that dilectio is taken in good and amor in bad, “as some say” (Augustine, City of God XIV); but Augustine says Scripture takes both in good and in bad. He compares concupiscentia: the English “concupiscence” carries a bad connotation.

• His standing question to students, “which is better, love or knowledge?”: they all say love, but love can be good or bad (love to torture people), while knowledge is always good — an advantage knowledge has over love, “at least over bad ideas.”
• Sed contra: Dionysius says to some of the saints the name of love seems more divine than dilectio; the Greek there is eros, which more clearly than Latin amor has the sense of sense-love (cf. English “amorous”). He is “not sure” Dionysius is talking about the meaning of the word.

7. Body: four names (“amor, dilectio, caritas, and amicitia”) #

Point: four names pertain to the same thing but signify differently.

• Amicitia (friendship): per the Philosopher, Ethics VIII, more like a habit; books VIII–IX are on friendship, which belongs to ethics as a virtue or effect of virtue.
• Amor and dilectio signify in the manner of an act or passion.
• Caritas (Greek agape) can be taken for the habit (charity is a theological virtue, virtues are habits) or for the act.
• Amor is the most general: every dilectio or caritas is a love, not conversely. So translating agape as “love” is “not altogether wrong”; the trouble is “charity” has been downgraded to exterior things (the charitable tax write-off).
• Dilectio adds a choice preceding it, “as the name itself sounds” (electio); choice involves reason, so dilectio is in the will only, not in the concupiscible or irascible, and only in a rational nature. (Aside: rigged elections give no choice; “if God wanted us to have a democracy, He’d give us choices.”)
• Caritas adds a perfection of love: what is loved is estimated to be of great worth, as the name shows (carus, dear). Shakespeare’s “dear”; the Irish “it’s very dear” for costly; “cost him dearly”; buying his first new car and being “relieved of all your money,” no longer “a man of substance” — hoping not to be “a man of accidents.”

8. Reply 1: same in the intellectual appetite (“do you choose this person”) #

Point: Dionysius speaks of love and dilectio as both in the intellectual appetite, where they are the same.

• Illustration: at the wedding the priest does not ask whether you have a warm feeling but whether you choose this person as husband or wife: you express your irrevocable choice, not your feelings.
• Asides: Boswell’s Johnson writing to Baretti in Milan that a few things disturb the judgment of reason, like the prospect of long life with an amiable woman; Johnson touched by the king; the film October Baby (the Baptist girl in the Catholic cathedral, the priest quoting St Paul on forgiveness; “I’d buy Obama a ticket”); the handicapped girl who wanted a children’s programme on lying sent to the president; a string of conversion stories exchanged with students (the young communist hit with an umbrella who became a Dominican; St Alban’s debauchee who heard the monks’ bell; the court actor who slipped on stage and later joined Edmund Campion; St Alphonsus losing a case over a mistaken detail; the Roman comedian mocking Christians who asked for baptism and was killed): “You never know how God will wake you up. How humble God is.”

9. Reply 2: love of wisdom is a chosen love (“by his choice of life”) #

Point: the object of love is more common than that of dilectio because love extends to more.

• Student: is the love of wisdom a dilectio? Yes. Aristotle, comparing philosopher, sophist and dialectician (sophist seeks apparent wisdom and refutes whatever you say; dialectician has a method for all things but probability not certitude), says the philosopher differs from the sophist “by his choice of life.” So philosophy is a chosen love: you must know what wisdom is and deliberate to choose it; yet the philosopher is still called a lover of wisdom. Every dilectio is amor, not every amor dilectio.

10. Reply 3: good and bad love (“If you love what is bad, that makes you bad”) #

Point: amor and dilectio do not differ as good and bad; in the intellectual part they are the same, so Augustine says a rectified will is a good love and a perverse will a bad love; but because amor as a passion of the concupiscible inclines many to bad, some had occasion to assign that difference.

• Examples of strong passions leading astray: the Secret Service prostitutes scandal in Colombia and the GSA parties in the news; the Baltimore Catechism treating anger as a big sin. Correction: anger names one of the strongest passions and can be rectified (our Lord’s anger at hardness of heart; Pilate knew they delivered him out of envy), so “anger is a sin” is a misnomer, though one sees why people speak so. Colin Bennett called the bad kind “L-U-V.”
• Strictly, love is good or bad depending on what you love: Scripture, “they became abominable as the things they loved,” showing love goes out to the thing itself. If you love disgusting things you are disgusting; knowing what is disgusting does not make you disgusting, but loving what is bad does, because it conforms you, makes an impression on you. Contrast: Kant’s complications about what makes a bad will, versus this simple point.

11. Reply 4: why “love” seems more divine (“undergoing divine things”) #

Point: some hold, even in the will, that amor is more divine than dilectio because amor implies more a passion, being moved, especially as in the sense appetite, whereas dilectio presupposes the judgment of reason. Man can tend to God by being moved and drawn by God, more than his own reason can lead him; and this love is stronger.

• Reason-led love pertains to dilectio: hence the love of wisdom is very much a chosen love.
• Dionysius’s Hierotheus “undergoing divine things”; the prophets likewise: the Hebrew of “the word of the Lord came to Jeremiah” reportedly means the word “happened to him.” Student: Thomas later on states of perfection: the bishop does perfection, the religious undergoes it. Pentecost as being moved, drawn, attracted.
• Student: St Francis de Sales was criticised for titling his treatise amour rather than charité; this article is the reason, and (Msgr Dionne on this text) de Sales distinguishes the meanings of love, probably on the basis of this article.
• Aside on “pro-choice”: dilectio is real choice, “not about being informed to make a choice.”

His words #

• passio — “undergoing”, “suffering”, “being acted upon” [ed.: passion]
• actio / passio, poiein / paschein — “acting upon” and “undergoing”
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• appetibile — “the desirable”; “desiring power” [ed.: appetite]
• coaptatio — “a coordination… fitted to it”; agreement with the desirable
• “make an impression upon” — the desirable giving the heart a form by which it is conformed
• principium / arche — “beginning”; “prince”, “principal”, “principle” are later senses
• “ability” [ed.: potency]; “act”
• aliquid sui — “something of himself”
• virtus unitiva — “a power that unites”
• dilectio — “chosen love”
• concupiscentia — “concupiscence”, with its bad connotation
• caritas — charity, from carus, “dear”; Greek agape
• amicitia — friendship
• eros — the Greek behind Dionysius’s “love”, nearer to sense love
• “beautiful is restful” — joy as rest in the desirable

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 26, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 26, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, four replies)

Mentioned

• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4 (love as virtus; four and twice two; eros more divine; Hierotheus)
• Augustine, De Trinitate (love as union); City of God bk. 14 (amor/dilectio in good and bad); “my love is my weight”
• Damascene, bk. 2 (passion a motion)
• Aristotle, Physics bk. 3 (motion, acting upon and undergoing); De Anima bk. 3 (appetite’s circle); Nicomachean Ethics bk. 8 (amor est passio; friendship, bks. 8–9); Politics bk. 2 (union the work of love); Metaphysics bk. 5 (senses of arche, then cause) (inferred: “fifth book of wisdom”); comparison of philosopher, sophist, dialectician
• Thomas, Sentences article on the Holy Spirit as nexus (inferred locus); Thomas on states of perfection (student)
• Basil, Chrysostom (Father as cause of Son); Chrysostom on John
• Kolbe, Bonaventure (student, Holy Spirit as conceptio)
• Shakespeare (“revolts from true birth”; “dear”; “the very wrath of love”)
• Boswell, Life of Johnson (letter to Baretti)
• Scripture: “abominable as the things they loved”; Jeremiah “the word happened to him”; Pentecost
• Francis de Sales, Treatise on the Love of God, Introduction to the Devout Life (student)
• Kant on the bad will

His questions #

• “Is your motion pushing and being pushed in some way?” Yes; acting upon and undergoing attach to motion.
• “But desire also is an undergoing, right?” (student) Both are passions; desire follows on the heart being conformed to the object.
• “Would you say that I’m the beginning of my son?” Sounds odd in English; the word must be extended to the fourth, exterior sense.
• “What does this word on the blackboard depend upon for its existence?” Its letters (matter), then the order (form), the mover, and the end: the four causes in Aristotle’s order.
• “Which is better, love or knowledge?” Love can be good or bad; knowledge is always good.
• “Is the love of wisdom a dilectio?” Yes; the philosopher differs by choice of life, yet is called a lover of wisdom.
• “If you know what is bad, does that make you bad?” No; loving what is bad does, because love conforms you to it.
• “Why should that way of speaking [anger is a sin] arise?” Because people are often led astray by the strong passions.