Aquinas on Love (ST I-II q.26 a.4, q.27 aa.1-2): Love of Friendship vs. Love of Wanting, and the Good, Beauty and Knowledge as Causes of Love

Orientation #

He opens “let’s look at the fourth article now,” noting the third article was “touching upon” the difference between love as an emotion and love as an act of the will (prev. lecture). At the end of the class he stops mid-way through q. 27, having read a. 2; he says the third article (likeness) is “fundamentally different” and treats a. 4 (another passion as cause) only in preview. The previous class covered q. 26, aa. 2–4 on love as passion and the names of love; the next takes up q. 27, a. 3 on likeness as cause of love.

The class, in order #

1. Q. 26, a. 4: the objections and the sed contra (“the love of friendship and the love of concupiscence”) #

Point: the received division of love into amor amicitiae and amor concupiscentiae, which he renames “the love of wishing well” and “the love of wanting.”

• Obj. 1: love is a passion (the Philosopher), friendship a habit; a habit cannot divide a passion. He notes this is “probably in the naming.”
• Obj. 2: nothing is divided by what is numbered with it (man is not numbered alongside animal); concupiscence is a passion numbered alongside love, so love cannot be divided by wanting.
• Obj. 3: friendship is threefold, useful, pleasant, honorable (Ethics, book VIII; he corrects his book’s “third”); the useful and pleasant already involve concupiscence (“I want your money, I want the pleasure of your company”).
  • Example: Leo Alvarez in Korea, whose friends pulled him off a transport truck to “tell some of your stupid jokes”; the truck hit a mine. Their love of friendship “comes out of their love for wanting his entertainment”; an aside on how God works “in condescension.”
• Sed contra: we are said to love things because we desire them, as one loves wine for the sweetness he desires in it (Topics II), but we have no friendship toward wine. So there is a love of wanting and a love of friendship. Aside: dry vs. sweet wine; Johnson and Boswell over port; fortified wines.

2. Why Thomas quotes the Rhetoric (“a golden river of words”) #

Point: Thomas starts the body from Aristotle’s Rhetoric II because there Aristotle treats the emotions in detail, since the orator must arouse or calm them; the Rhetoric holds distinctions “fundamental for practical philosophy or theology,” even on natural law.

• Diana (as he reports): persuasion is found first in music, then fiction, then rhetoric. “Persuasion means through the sweet.”
• Coleridge on Shakespeare’s early works (Venus and Adonis, Rape of Lucrece): the melodiousness is the sign of the coming poet; tragedy = “goat song,” ode and lyric are musical terms.
• Paul VI (via Fr. Owen Bennett): the artist persuades by letting the reader identify with the protagonist; the preacher is always an antagonist appealing to conscience; Uncle Tom’s Cabin more persuasive than speeches.
• Shakespeare’s lines on death (Horatio on Hamlet; Capulet on Juliet, “like an untimely frost”) and Mozart’s melodies; Beethoven on the 24th concerto, Gieseking “there is only Mozart,” Brahms on his perfection. Mozart is “the musician” by antonomasia, as Shakespeare “the poet.”

3. The body: to love is to will good to someone (“the motion of love tends towards two things”) #

Point: since to love is to will good to someone (Rhetoric II), love has two objects, and the two loves follow.

1. Love tends to (a) the good one wills for himself or another, and (b) the one to whom he wills it.
2. To (a) one has the love of wanting; to (b) the love of friendship, “wishing well.”

• Example: at the mixer, seeing a good-looking girl, “am I wishing good to her, or do I want it?” She is the good you want for yourself; “I might be bad for her.” Contrast: a former student who saw her parents’ marriage stable because “they really wished well to each other”; Horatio and Hamlet; “not that you’re good for my bank account.”

3. The division is secundum prius et posterius, not univocal, like being into substance and accident, or into act and ability [ed.: potency].
4. What is loved by love of friendship is loved simpliciter and per se (these usually go together; simpliciter means “fully something”); what is loved by love of wanting is loved secundum quid, for another. Just as being simply is what has being (substance) and being secundum quid is in another.

• Example: being clothed this morning vs. coming to be when generated and God created his soul: only the second is coming to be simpliciter.
• Shakespeare’s sonnet “love is not love which alters when alteration finds” and its couplet (“I never writ, nor no man ever loved”) is about love simpliciter.

5. Likewise for the good, convertible with being: good simply is what itself has goodness; the good of another is good secundum quid; so the love of the second is love secundum quid.

• His gloss: this distinction belongs more to love in the will. The love that is strictly an emotion is ordered to what pleases the senses, so love of Mozart’s music or Shakespeare’s plays is the love of wanting: “that’s the good I want for myself.”
• Why children first become friends: someone to play baseball with. Aside: “poet” means maker; Homer “made a world in verse” (he attributes to Democritus), Homer named poet by antonomasia; to be used in one of his dialogues.

4. The replies (“falls short from the ratio of true friendship”) #

• Ad 1: love is divided not into friendship and concupiscence but into love of friendship and love of concupiscence; a friend is properly one to whom we wish good, and we are said to want what we will for ourselves. Same answer serves obj. 2. He imagines a girl asking a suitor “what kind of love do you have for me?”: “so fundamental to marriage and friendship,” yet rarely explained.
• Ad 3: in useful and pleasant friendship one does wish some good to the friend (so far, the ratio of friendship), but refers it further to his own use or pleasure; insofar as they are drawn toward the love of wanting they fall short of true friendship.
  • Cicero would call only amicitia honesta friendship; Aristotle says use words as men use them, then distinguish.
  • His father and the paint seller: began useful, grew to enjoy each other’s company at ball games.
  • St. Bernard’s four stages of love of God: first the love of wanting (“you need him”), then something like the friendship of pleasure (“taste and see”), working up to the friendship of charity.

5. Passing to q. 27: looking before at the causes (“the causes before the effect”) #

Point: q. 26 treats the nature of love, q. 27 its causes (“looking before”), q. 28 its effects (“looking after”): “the most well-ordered and complete fundamental consideration of love that I know of,” more fundamental than Plato’s Symposium.

• The four articles previewed: (1) whether the good is the sole cause; (2) whether knowledge; these two are not really distinct, since it is the good as known that causes love, both on the side of the object. (3) Likeness is “fundamentally different”: his class question, “are you more attracted to someone who is good, or someone who’s like you?”; is “I like you because you’re like me” equivocal? Likeness sometimes seems the stronger cause. (4) Another passion as cause: one love arising from a more fundamental love, “my love of logic caused by my desire to be wise.” Asides: Jane Austen’s early “Love and Friendship” (unread); Warren’s joke about years of logic before philosophy, like years of grammar before reading “In the beginning was the word”; “what a mighty man” who lays this out “even for numbskulls.”

6. Q. 27, a. 1: objections and sed contra (“nothing is loved except the good”) #

• Obj. 1: the good causes love only because it is loved; but the bad is loved, Ps. 10 “who loves iniquity hates his own soul”; otherwise every love would be good as every knowledge is good. Aside on Aristotle at the start of the Ethics: all knowledge good and desirable, some more so, either about a better thing or more certain; better to know a little about God than that one has five fingers.
• Obj. 2: Rhetoric II, we love those who say bad things about themselves. Johnson asked about a dictionary error: “Sheer ignorance, madam.” “It’s not good to be ignorant, but you love the guy for speaking of his own mistakes.”
• Obj. 3: Dionysius, not only the good but the beautiful is lovable to all.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate VIII, certainly nothing is loved except the good. Augustine and Thomas “the two greatest minds we’ve had in the church”; Augustine had little of Aristotle beyond the Categories.

7. Body of a. 1: the object as cause of the appetitive power (“does the object act upon the power”) #

1. Love belongs to the desiring power, a power that undergoes, true even of the will; so its object stands to it as cause of its motion or act.

• Aristotle distinguishes powers by acts, acts by objects; the fundamental divide: powers that act on their object (digestion on food) vs. powers acted on by their object (hearing: grammatically “I hear,” but the sound is active, the ear passive). If neither held, nothing would be called the power’s object. The desiring power is like the ear: first impressed, then motion toward the object. He links this to Francis de Sales’ love of complacency (acted upon) and love of benevolence (going out).

2. So the proper cause of love is its object; the proper object of love is the good, since love implies connaturality or complacency of lover with loved, and what is connatural and proportioned to each thing is its good.

• Gloss: love is an agreement of the desiring power with its object; the agreeable is what fits; what fits is good for it. Plants that want much water have “a natural love of water”; some want sun, some shade. Aside: his attempt to grow grass; birds, cold nights, the tree damaged in the early snowstorm.

8. Replies of a. 1: the bad, self-accusers, the beautiful (“the beautiful is the same as the good”) #

• Ad 1: the bad is never loved except under the aspect of good, insofar as it is good secundum quid and grasped as simply good; so some love is bad, tending to what is not simply the true good; iniquity is loved for pleasure or money. The bad is object of love per accidens. Students’ constant mistake is confusing simply and secundum quid; abortion chosen for the sake of a career or to avoid embarrassment.
• Ad 2: self-accusers are loved not for the bad things but for saying them, which excludes fiction and simulation, a sign of humility (a student: like Augustine’s Confessions); Aristotle’s virtue of truthfulness. His woodworking friend who “never makes mistakes” vs. the instructor who shows you how mistakes happen.
• Ad 3: the beautiful is the same as the good, differing in ratio: the good is what all want, in which the appetite rests; the beautiful is that in the seeing of which the appetite rests. Larry Brown’s sweater: “it’s restful”; Kasurik on romantic composers who “tear you out.” Hence sight and hearing, the most cognitive senses serving reason, have beautiful objects; we do not speak of beautiful tastes or odors (the steak “looks” beautiful, wine and tea have beautiful color, but “tastes beautiful? Nobody says that”). So the beautiful adds to the good an order to a knowing power: the good simply pleases the appetite; the beautiful is that whose apprehension pleases.
• Open question he raises: is the beautiful more the object of love or of knowledge? Spenser’s hymns pairing earthly/heavenly beauty and love, and “lovely” as synonym of beautiful, suggest love; but texts tie the beautiful to knowledge, and “the beautiful is what pleases when seen.” His painting: “do you want to love it or want to see it?” Heisenberg’s essay on beauty in the discovery of theories; discoverers reject theories as “ugly.” Left for discussion.

9. Q. 27, a. 2: objections and sed contra (“no one is able to love something unknown”) #

• Obj. 1: what is sought is sought from love; sciences are sought yet unknown, for in them to have is to know (Augustine); if known they are had, not sought.
• Obj. 2: same reason for loving the unknown and loving more than one knows; God is loved in himself in this life but not known in himself. His gloss: if knowledge caused love they would be proportional, but “the theologian might not love God as much as the charwoman.”
• Obj. 3: love is in all things (Dionysius, Divine Names 4) but knowledge is not.
• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate X, proves no one can love the unknown. “Can you love wine if you don’t taste it?” Aside: the saying that a marriage made in heaven is root beer and vanilla ice cream; a friend who takes ice cream in soda.

10. Body and replies of a. 2: loved more than known (“something is more loved than is known”) #

1. The good causes love as object; but it is object of the desiring power only as grasped; so love requires some grasp of the good. Ethics IX: bodily vision is the beginning of sensible love (Romeo and Juliet); contemplation of spiritual beauty or goodness, of spiritual love. So knowledge causes love for the same reason the good does, on the side of the object, “a continuation of the previous article,” unlike likeness (a. 3).

• Ad 1: the seeker of a science is not wholly ignorant; he foreknows it in general, in an effect, or by hearing it praised (Augustine, De Trin. X); to know it thus is not to have it, to know it perfectly is. “Medicine cures disease; I’d like some of that.”
• Ad 2, “a beautiful thing for understanding the spiritual life”: knowledge belongs to reason, which distinguishes what is joined in the thing and compares what is diverse, so perfect knowledge requires knowing part by part (parts, powers, properties); love is in the desiring power, which regards the thing as it is in itself, so for perfect love it suffices the thing be grasped in itself. Hence something can be loved more than known.
  • Salad dressing enjoyed without distinguishing ingredients; wine without knowing the grape percentages; the Jupiter Symphony, which Warren told him combines five melodies at the end; enjoying vs. analyzing music (Heisenberg, a fine pianist); Mozart said some of his music is fully appreciated only by connoisseurs but written so everyone likes it.
  • Thomas’s case: sciences loved on a summary knowledge, as rhetoric loved as the science of persuading (Augustine a teacher of rhetoric); and so of the love of God.
• Ad 3: natural love in all things is caused by knowledge, not in the natural things but in the one who establishes nature: God “knows that broccoli is a big feeder, made it that way.” He stops here.

His words #

• love of wishing well / love of wanting; his renderings of amor amicitiae and amor concupiscentiae (“concupiscence is kind of a word for wanting”).
• ability; used for potency in “being divided into act and ability” [ed.: potency].
• secundum prius et posterius; division by prior and posterior, “not univocal.”
• simpliciter vs. secundum quid; simply/fully vs. in some respect, “for another.”
• antonomasia; naming by the common term as if proper: Mozart “the musician,” Shakespeare/Homer “the poet.”
• looking before and after; his phrase (from Shakespeare) for causes and effects, and for reason’s work of distinguishing.
• power that undergoes; the appetitive power as passive, acted upon by its object.
• connaturality / complacency; the agreement of lover with loved; what fits a thing.
• love of complacency vs. love of benevolence; attributed to Francis de Sales: being acted upon vs. going out.
• ratio; the notion or definition by which good and beautiful differ.
• restful; his gloss on the beautiful, in which the appetite rests in the seeing.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 26, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 27, prologue and a. 1 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 27, a. 2 (whole article)
• Shakespeare, sonnet “love is not love which alters when alteration finds” (final couplet quoted)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Rhetoric II (to love is to will good to someone; we love those who speak ill of themselves)
• Aristotle, Ethics VIII (three friendships), IX (bodily vision beginning of love), and the opening of the Ethics (all knowledge good)
• Aristotle, Topics II (wine loved for sweetness)
• Augustine, De Trinitate VIII and X; Confessions (student)
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4
• Psalm 10 (love of iniquity)
• Cicero on friendship; St. Bernard’s four stages of love; Francis de Sales; Plato, Symposium; Coleridge on Shakespeare; Spenser’s hymns to earthly and heavenly beauty and love; Heisenberg’s essay on beauty; Jane Austen, “Love and Friendship”; Uncle Tom’s Cabin

His questions #

• At the mixer, seeing a good-looking girl, am I wishing good to her or do I want it? You want her; she is the good you want for yourself, so it is the love of wanting.
• Did I come to be when I came to be clothed this morning? Only secundum quid; I came to be simpliciter when generated and my soul was created.
• What kind of love do I have for the music of Mozart or the plays of Shakespeare? The love of wanting: the good I want for myself.
• What does “poet” mean in Greek? Maker.
• Are you more attracted to someone who is good, or someone who is like you? Left open (likeness sometimes seems stronger; treated in the next article).
• Is the desiring power like the ear or like the digestive power? Like the ear: acted upon by its object, then moving toward it.
• Do we say a taste or an odor is beautiful? No; only the objects of sight and hearing, so the beautiful adds an order to a knowing power.
• Is the beautiful more the object of love or of knowledge? Left open; language (“lovely”) suggests love, texts and “what pleases when seen” suggest knowledge.
• Can you love wine if you don’t taste it? No; nothing unknown is loved.
• How can something be loved more than it is known? Knowledge must distinguish part by part; love takes the thing as it is in itself, so a summary grasp suffices.