Aquinas on the Causes of Love: Likeness and the Other Passions (ST I-II q.27 a.3-4)

Orientation #

He opens with “now we get to the third article” of the question on the causes of love, and closes by saying that having considered love in itself and its kinds, then its causes, “it remains to look after love at its” effects (next time). He also notes that the distinction of love of wanting and love of friendship “came in the previous question” and is presupposed here (prev. lecture). Verified sources: I-II q. 27 a. 3 and a. 4, handout “Causes of Love” pp. 25–32. The previous class ended partway into q. 27 on knowledge as cause of love; the next treats the effects of love (q. 28).

The class, in order #

1. The four objections to likeness as cause (“likeness is not the cause of love”) #

Point: he reads the four objections of a. 3 and praises their design: each “singles out for special consideration just that aspect of the truth,” proportioned to a student who cannot see the whole at once; “the moderns never write this way.”

• Obj. 1: the same is not the cause of contraries; but likeness causes hate — Proverbs 13 (“among the proud always there are fights”), Ethics VIII (potters are rivals). His examples: one carpenter complaining of what the other did last year; his widowed mother and her widowed sister not moving in together — Warren Murray: two women can’t do things the same way; likewise two professors (he and Warren) who agree on everything yet don’t teach the course the same way.
• Obj. 2: Augustine, Confessions IV: a man loves another whom he would not want to be — loves the actor, wouldn’t want to be the actor; so likeness is not the proper cause.
• Obj. 3: each man loves what he lacks or needs — sick man loves health, poor man wealth; so unlikeness causes love.
• Obj. 4: Rhetoric II: we love the beneficent (in money and in safety) and those who keep friendship toward the dead; but not all are such. His examples: a coward likes the brave man, a scrooge likes the generous man, a melancholic likes the jokester.
• Sed contra: Ecclesiasticus, every animal loves what is like itself. “Thomas is going to have to see some distinctions.”

2. Two kinds of likeness, two kinds of love (“likeness between things can be of two kinds”) #

Point: likeness is properly the cause of love, but likeness is twofold.

• A: both have the same thing in act (two white things are alike). vs. B: one has in ability and inclination what the other has in act (the heavy body outside its place is like the heavy body in its place); also ability itself has some likeness to act, “for in the ability itself in some way is the act.”
• Examples of B: a critic on Shakespeare’s early narrative poems (Venus and Adonis) — the melodious rhyme and meter show a poet who will be great; “beware the man that hath no music in his soul”: the young poet has it in potency and inclination. The older man in an art or science sees ability and inclination in a younger: Bohr (best on the atom then, on his German “Bohr Festival” tour) answering young Heisenberg’s question, then taking him for a two-hour walk that shaped all his later thinking; a musician encouraging a young pianist or violinist who may succeed him.
• Argument: (1) likeness A causes love of friendship (wishing well, benevolence), because two having the same form are one in that form (two men in the species humanity, two whites in whiteness), so the affection of one tends to the other as to himself, “another self,” wishing him good as to himself. (2) Likeness B causes love of concupiscence (wanting), or friendship of the useful or delightful: the other has in act what I have in ability, and that ability can be actualized by contact with him; “to each thing existing in ability as such there is a desire for its own act,” and it delights in attaining it if it senses and knows. (3) In love of wanting the lover properly loves himself, wishing that good for himself.

3. Why the like can become hateful: per se vs. per accidens (“not in so far as he is like”) #

Point: hatred among the like is only accidental.

• One loves himself more than another: with himself he is one in substance, with another one only in likeness of a form. Aside: only in God is the nature one in number — “imagine the intensity there” — while we are one in species.
• So if one like me impedes the good I love, he becomes odious, “but not per se,” not as like, but as impeding my good. Examples: if we both like a Mozart piece, your liking it doesn’t impede mine, so I like you; if we both pursue the same girl, we get in each other’s way; a movie actress we won’t pursue brings us together (we talk and enjoy her more); two PhDs and one opening, two doctors and one hospital post.
• This solves obj. 1 without repeating it: potters impede each other’s gain, the proud each other’s excellence (two men both wanting to be president).

4. Reply to obj. 2: likeness of proportionality (“a likeness in proportionality”) #

Point: loving one you don’t want to be rests on likeness of proportion.

• Digression on the word: in Euclid 2:3 is a ratio, “4:6 as 2:3” a proportion; Thomas follows the later use where “proportion” means ratio, so likeness of proportions gets the clumsy name “proportionality.” He’d rather follow “my master there in Euclid,” but words “are slaves to the custom.”
• Further digression on words declining: “perpetrate” in the Golden Chain on Mark has no bad sense in Latin; “imitation” in Aristotle’s definition of tragedy is not a cheap copy (the poet represents men as they are, as they should be, as they are thought to be), so translators say “likeness”; “conspiracy” means only breathing together, yet sounds sinister.
• The reply: as one is to what he loves, so the other is to what he wants — a good singer loves a good writer, each having what belongs to him by his art. His examples: a truly masculine man wants a truly feminine woman — not the same, but “for a man to be masculine is like for a woman to be feminine”; Washington Irving on true friendships between poets and painters. Boundary: Dickens and Thackeray, competing all their lives for the best novel, reconciled only when one turned on the stairs and offered his hand — likeness in the same art breeds competition; poet and painter, painter and musician, or the cook, are close enough for friendship but don’t compete. If the girl we both loved dies young, we both weep at her grave and are no longer rivals (aside: a story of a man who saw the corrupting body of a beauty he loved and realized how passing things are).

5. Reply to obj. 3: potency to act (“the sick man wants to be healthy”) #

Point: loving what one lacks is the second likeness, of ability to act.

• Physics I: does something come from its opposite as such? If the sick man becomes healthy, that destroys the sick man; health is a perfection of the body, an elimination of sickness, not a perfection of sickness. So it is not the sick as such but the body capable of health that wants health; the ignorant as ignorant don’t want to know, but the ability to know wants knowing — a more distant affinity, still likeness. Summary: obj. 2 concerns likeness in act but proportional; obj. 3 likeness of ability to act.

6. Reply to obj. 4: expectation, or the seeds of reason (“seed-like things of reason”) #

Point: the vicious love the virtuous by the same likeness of ability to act.

• First way: the non-liberal loves the liberal insofar as he expects something from him; the unfaithful loves the one who keeps friendship — a friendship of usefulness. Second way: not all have the virtues as a complete habit, but all have “seed-like things of reason” by which the man without virtue loves the virtuous as conformed to his natural reason, not to his present cowardice. Example: prisoners’ righteous indignation when Fr. Benedict Groeschel was jailed for praying the rosary outside an abortion clinic — unjust men, yet incensed.
• Aside on racism: if likeness causes love, unlikeness causes hate, and small differences stand out more than the essentials we share. Chesterton’s essay: ethnic jokes are justified like laughing at a man who sits on his hat — the disproportion between a man’s real value and the trivial things (eyes, skin, voice, size) that occupy our attention; justified so long as one doesn’t mean the other is not one’s equal. Garlic aside.

7. Which is stronger, the good or likeness? (“stronger cause of love, the good or likeness”) #

Point: two fundamental causes, in some way distinct.

• Students suggest likeness sometimes seems stronger. Monsignor’s example: attached to a teacher’s personality though another teacher knows more. Sunni and Shia, Kurds and Turks, the Balkans: people hate more because others are unlike them than because they are bad.
• God is very unlike us, loved because He is goodness itself; but as one becomes like Him (made in His image, then by grace and virtues) that is a further reason to love Him. Theology imitates God who knows all things by knowing Himself (considering God first and others as from Him or toward Him), so we become like Him. Of the three causes, knowledge could be subordinated: the good as known, and likeness. Left open which is stronger.

8. Article 4: whether another passion causes love (“no other passion of the soul”) #

Point: every passion presupposes love, so none causes love universally.

• Obj. 1: Ethics VIII, some are loved for pleasure (Boswell’s delight in an hour with Johnson, “his mind infused with a greater mind,” causing love of the man). Obj. 2: desire — friendship of usefulness (“I want money, you have plenty”; his father: for the dog “love means food”; “no permanent friends, only permanent interests”). Obj. 3: Augustine, De Trinitate X: what one has no hope of obtaining he loves tepidly or not at all though he sees how beautiful it is; so hope causes love. Sed contra: City of God XIV, all other affections are caused by love.
• Argument: (1) every other passion either implies motion toward something (desire, hope) or rest in it (joy, pleasure); (2) all motion toward or rest in proceeds from some connaturality or adaptation to the thing; (3) that belongs to the ratio of love; so no other passion can be the universal cause of love. “But this is the distinction he wants”: another passion can cause the love of something, as one good is the cause of another.
• Reply 1: love may be caused by pleasure, but that pleasure is caused by another love — “no one delights except in the thing he loves in some way.” Reply 2: desire always presupposes love of that thing (“you never want something you don’t like”: salmon, Brussels sprouts; food digression on lobster, walleye pike, shark and swordfish steak); but desire of one thing can cause another to be loved — he who desires money loves the one from whom he gets it. Reply 3: hope causes or increases love, by the pleasure it causes and by fortifying desire (sour grapes: losing hope, the desire cooled); yet hope itself is of some good loved.
• Student: doesn’t hope come before love among the theological virtues? He: the Dei Verbum proemium quotes Augustine — by believing we come to hope, by hoping to love — but that is the order of generation; some love must precede hope, and once you love God you hope more (Paul: charity believes all, hopes all). The love behind that hope is love of wanting; charity is love of friendship. This prepares a later discussion of the order of hope and love.

9. Closing: what love for one’s teachers? (“a love of wanting, right?”) #

Point: the two kinds of love show in the causes.

• Having seen what love is and its kinds, then its causes, next come its effects; the previous question’s distinction is presupposed since different likenesses cause the different loves. His love for De Koninck and Msgr. Dionne was love of wanting: “I wanted to know, and this man can illuminate me” (De Koninck’s lecture tours, his brother Mark’s first hearing him; an older student who threatened to walk out if taught as in the States, then grew attached). Only as one grows wiser might wishing-well enter. The reverse case, older to younger: J. C. Bach with the boy Mozart in London, on his lap at the keyboard, encouraging him; Mozart’s first four concertos reworked J. C. Bach sonatas; Einstein’s “pre-established harmony” between them; J. C. Bach “Mozart with something missing.” Asides: Mozart playing the violin part unpracticed; Mozart writing for every instrument and above all the human voice.

His words #

• love of wishing well / benevolence — his name for the love of friendship (amor amicitiae)
• love of wanting — his name for the love of concupiscence
• ability — Thomas’s potentia [ed.: potency]
• per se vs. per accidens — the like as like vs. the like as impeding my good
• proportion / proportionality — Thomas’s use (proportion = ratio) vs. Euclid’s (proportion = likeness of ratios)
• ratio of love — the notion of love (connaturality, adaptation)
• seed-like things of reason — Thomas’s phrase for natural inclinations to virtue in all men
• connaturality / adaptation — what every motion toward or rest in proceeds from
• order of generation — the sense in which faith precedes hope precedes charity

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 27 a. 3 (objections, body, replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II q. 27 a. 4 (objections, body, replies)

Mentioned

• Proverbs 13; Ecclesiasticus (every animal loves its like)
• Aristotle, Ethics VIII (potters; loved for pleasure); Rhetoric II (the beneficent); Physics I (coming from an opposite); Poetics, definition of tragedy (inferred)
• Augustine, Confessions IV; De Trinitate X; City of God XIV
• Thomas, Summa Contra Gentiles (reasons for the study)
• Dei Verbum, proemium (quoting Augustine)
• Paul, “charity believes all, hopes all”
• Catena Aurea on Mark; Chesterton essay on jokes; Boswell, Life of Johnson; Washington Irving; Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis

His questions #

• Why do carpenters, potters, professors who agree on everything still quarrel? Because they impede each other’s gain or excellence — per accidens, not as like.
• If I’m a coward, why do I like the brave man? By likeness of ability to act (I expect something from him), or by the seeds of reason conformed to natural reason.
• Is it the sick man as sick who wants health? No; the body capable of health wants it, since health eliminates sickness.
• Why does a masculine man want a feminine woman? Likeness of proportion: he is to masculinity as she is to femininity.
• Which is the stronger cause of love, the good or likeness? Left open; they are distinct causes, and unlikeness seems the stronger cause of hate.
• Can another passion be the cause of love? Not universally; but of the love of some particular thing, as one good causes another.
• Does hope come before love in the theological virtues? In the order of generation, yes; but some love precedes that hope, and charity increases hope.
• What kind of love did I have for De Koninck and Monsignor Dionne? A love of wanting — wanting to know; wishing well only as one grows wiser.