The Effects of Love: Union and Mutual Indwelling (ST I-II q.28 a.1-2)

Orientation #

He opens with “now we get to the effects of love,” i.e. moving on from the causes of love treated before (prev. lecture). Nothing said about next time. The previous class treated likeness as a cause of love (q. 27), and the next continues with ecstasy, zeal and whether love injures the lover (q. 28, aa. 3-6).

The class, in order #

1. Dionysius’s “virtus unitiva” and the Trinity (“they’re all one in account of the Father”) #

Before the prologue, an extended aside prompted by Dionysius’s phrase that love is a uniting power.

• Thomas in the Sentences, commenting on Augustine: the three persons are one on account of the Father, equal on account of the Son, connected on account of the Holy Spirit. Thomas explains this first by number (one thing alone is very much one; equality needs two, so it comes with the Son; connection needs three, two to be joined and one to join them), then by the properties of each (Father as beginning, which is one; the Son’s names Son, Image, Word all carry equality; the Spirit is love, which joins).
• Appropriation: power, wisdom, goodness are the common appropriations, but Hilary appropriates beauty (species) to the Son. The objection is that beauty and goodness should go together as in Dionysius; Thomas replies that beauty is good insofar as it takes on the clothing of the good, but in itself it consists in what Dionysius names, consonance (he does not translate this “harmony”) and clarity, plus magnitude, which Thomas adds from Aristotle (“a beautiful body can’t be a shrimp”). All three are found in the Son as perfect image and word of the Father.
• His own retraction: as a young thinker he took “lovely” as a synonym for “beautiful,” and Spenser’s hymns to earthly and heavenly love and beauty, as a sign that beauty is more the object of love than of reason. Hilary’s appropriation to the Son (not the Spirit) shows beauty is more the object of the reason. Warren Murray conceded to him that Mozart is more beautiful than Shakespeare.
• A student offers Augustine’s definition, aequalitas numerosa; he links the equality to consonance and the numerosa perhaps to magnitude.
• Aside: St Alphonsus, arguing for the Immaculate Conception before it was defined, proceeds through the Trinity: daughter of the Father, mother of the Son, spouse of the Spirit.

2. The prologue: six effects of love and their order (“Deinde considerandum est de effectibus amoris”) #

The point: the first four effects concern the lover’s relation to the loved, and Thomas orders them.

1. Union.
2. Mutual inhaesio (he renders “dwelling within,” “mutual indwelling”): like union but stronger, more inward.
3. Ecstasy, being outside oneself. Illustrated by Moses and Elias at the Transfiguration speaking of Christ’s coming excessus; Dr. Bratlinger notes the Greek is exodos, the only place the word occurs in the New Testament: his way out, dying for us. Also the father in Much Ado About Nothing (the pun of nothing/noting, a false noticing), so identified with his disgraced daughter that he can no longer live without her.
4. Zeal: comes fourth because it regards what opposes the loved, whereas the first three unite you to the loved. He warns the word also carries “jealousy.”
5. Whether love is a passion harmful to the lover (“after all this wonderful buildup”): Romeo at the play’s start, shutting himself in his room over Rosalind; his friend Benvolio (“wishing well,” against Malvolio in Twelfth Night).
6. Whether love is the cause of everything the lover does.

• Aside: a colleague once said of another professor, “he doesn’t order things the way you do”; Thomas is superior even to that.

3. Article 1, objections: union not an effect of love (“absence is repugnant to union”) #

1. Absence is repugnant to union, but love is compatible with absence (Galatians 4: emulate the good not only when I am present). Romeo exiled from Juliet; “absence makes the heart grow fonder.”
2. Every union is either through essence/nature/substance (form to matter, accident to subject: his soul to his body, his geometry to his substance; part to whole or part to part: flesh and bones), or through likeness of genus, species or accident (a cat and his love of beef; another human, another philosopher, another lover of Mozart). Love does not cause the first, otherwise there would be no love of things divided in nature; and the union of likeness causes love rather than being caused by it. “Dionysius must have been mistaken, I don’t see any way out of it.”
3. Sense in act is the sensible in act, understanding in act the understood in act (knowing defined as receiving the form of another as other), so knowing makes you one with the thing; but the lover in act does not become the loved in act. So union is more an effect of knowledge. Test case: is he more attached to Mozart by hearing him or by loving the music? A student: attached, but “attached is not perfection”; he recalls playing the old Glyndebourne Marriage of Figaro discs, enjoying Mozart “through my ear, not through my heart?”

• Sed contra: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4, love is a virtus unitiva.

4. Article 1, body: two unions, formal and efficient (“twofold is the union of the lover”) #

Thomas answers by a distinction: union secundum rem (the loved present to the lover) vs. union according to affection.

1. The affective union is to be considered from the preceding grasping, since appetitive motion follows apprehension: Romeo must see Juliet first (Shakespeare “very explicit”).
2. Both loves proceed from some grasping of the loved as one with the lover: in the love of concupiscence (his rendering “wanting”) one grasps the thing as pertaining to one’s well-being; in the love of friendship (“wishing well”) one wills good to the other as to oneself, grasping him as another self. Greek quoted: ho philos esti allos autos; Shakespeare’s “second self” (“can’t be the first self”); Augustine, Confessions IV, his friend was “half of my soul” (“my wife is my better half”).
3. The first (real) union love makes as efficient cause: it moves us to want and seek the presence of the loved as suitable to oneself. His resolve in college to own a complete Mozart collection.
4. The second union love makes as form, “a very subtle distinction”: it is not properly an effect, but love itself is such a union or connection; an effect only in the way a form is. So merely loving someone unites you, even when separated (Romeo and Juliet; Boswell depressed at returning to Scotland, losing Johnson’s superior mind).
5. Augustine, De Trinitate VIII: love is a life joining two, or desiring to join them (duo aliqua copulans vel copulare appetens). Copulans names the affective union without which there is no love; copulare appetens the real union. Student asks whether “couple” comes from this; the copula in logic joins subject and predicate.
6. Summary he draws from the class: love causes two unions, not in the same way; one formally and with necessity (if I love you I am in some way united with you), the other effectively (“but not really”), and the first drives the seeking of the second.

• Asides: his three brothers spread over both coasts and Minnesota “by chance,” one job lost through a misread letter (“divine providence”); Boswell introduced to Johnson in Davies’s bookshop, Johnson’s prejudice about Scotland; cousin Don in the navy, shipmates fanatic for their radios (one drilled a hole in the hull for reception), forced music as a kind of brainwashing or torture.

5. Article 1, replies: three relations of union to love (“union has itself to love in three ways”) #

• Ad 1: the objection concerns the real union, which pleasure requires as its cause. Desire is in the real absence of the loved; love is in both absence and presence. He flags this as important for charity, which remains; and for philosophy, the love of wisdom, which one has when desiring wisdom and even more when having some. Love in absence gives desire, in presence delight.
• Ad 2: the objection assumes union is the cause of love (two lovers of Mozart discovering each other). Thomas: union relates to love in three ways: (a) as cause, the substantial union for self-love, the union of likeness for love of another; (b) as essentially love itself, the union according to coaptatio of affection (translations floated: “power of affection,” “fit,” “being adapted to”), which is like the substantial union insofar as the friend is related to as oneself and the object of wanting as something of oneself; (c) as effect, the real union, according to what is suitable to the love: Aristophanes’ lovers desire both to become one, but since both would be corrupted they seek a fitting union, living and speaking together. “Shouldn’t hug the girl too much,” or the child, “almost out of breath.”
• He notes the different manner of speaking from the body: here the affective union is treated as love itself rather than an effect, because cause and effect are clearer for the real union you must pursue. Compare: one is healthy by health, wise by wisdom, a geometer by geometry; formally an effect, yet it is the thing itself.
• Ad 3: knowledge is perfected by the known being in the knower by its likeness (“I have played the painter”); love makes the thing itself loved be united in some way to the lover, so love unites more than knowledge. His test: if you love disgusting or stupid things you are disgusting or stupid; if you know bad things you are not thereby bad. The known is in the knower according to the mode of the knower; love tends to the thing as it is in itself. Plato and Aristotle: the same knowledge is of opposites (ethics knows both virtue and vice), but not the same love.
• Asides: a California student objected that teaching ethics teaches vice and we incline more to vice; a parent asked whether sex education is good knowledge, given Aristotle’s opening of De Anima that all knowledge is good; his answer: all knowledge is good as such, bad only per accidens, because of a disposition in the knower (knowing where you hide your money; knowing how to shoot a gun). He finds sex education disgusting himself.

6. Article 2, objections: mutual indwelling (“the same thing cannot be containing and contained”) #

1. What is in another is contained by it; the same thing cannot be both container and contained. Wine in bottle, present in box. He notes the objection rests on imagination and on the different senses of “in.”
2. Nothing penetrates to the inside of a whole except through division, and dividing what is really joined belongs to reason, not to the desiring power. Thomas says distinction is presupposed to order; Shakespeare’s “reason looks before and after” includes looking for distinctions (as logic is full of twofold, threefold, fourfold distinctions).
3. If the lover is in the loved and the reverse, the loved is joined to the lover as the lover to the loved; but the union itself is love; so every lover would be loved in return, “which is clearly false” (Rosalind does not love Romeo).

• Sed contra: 1 John 4:16, who remains in charity remains in God and God in him; charity is a love, so any love does this.

7. Article 2, body: indwelling on the side of knowing (“the loved continues to dwell in the grasping”) #

The effect is understood both on the side of the grasping power and of the desiring power.

• Loved in lover (knowing): the loved dwells in the lover’s apprehension, as Paul in Philippians, “I have you in my heart.” If I love you I keep you in mind. A perfume advertisement: wear this and he won’t get you out of his mind.
• Lover in loved (knowing): the lover is not content with a superficial grasp but strives to seek out the singulars that pertain to the loved and enter inside. Warren Murray pointed out Mozart combining four melodies at the end of a fourth movement [ed.: work name unclear in recording]; he went back to listen for it; the three dances combined in the ball scene of Don Giovanni; studying a painting and noticing new things. Hence 1 Corinthians: the Holy Spirit, who is the love of God, searches the deep things of God; his own scrutinising of the Trinity articles in the Sentences, resting the mind and returning.

8. Article 2, body: indwelling on the side of desire (“love is said to be inward”) #

• Loved in lover (desiring): through a certain complacency (a student: “agreement”) the loved is in the lover’s affection; he delights in it or its goods when present, tends to it by desire when absent, either to the thing itself by the love of wanting or to the goods willed for it by the love of friendship; not from an extrinsic cause but from a complacency interiorly rooted (Macbeth’s king: “I have begun to plant thee”). So love is called intimus, and Scripture speaks of the bowels of charity; a student: the Hebrew root for mercy refers to the inner parts, literally the womb. He adds the image of an impression made on the heart.
• Lover in loved (desiring), differently in the two loves. Love of wanting: not content with any outside or superficial enjoyment but seeks to have the thing perfectly, reaching its inside. Wine tasting: his brother Mark naming the grapes in a blend and being taken to the back room to try combinations; a lady wanting the salad-dressing ingredients; a student, a connoisseur of incense blends. Love of friendship: the lover regards his friend’s goods and evils as his own and the friend’s will as his own (“your will is my command”), as if he himself were affected; Alphonsus in Glories of Mary: what Christ suffered in body Mary suffered in heart, “on the cross with him.” Hence it is proper to friends to will the same things and rejoice and grieve in the same, per Aristotle, Ethics IX and Rhetoric II. Insofar as he counts the friend’s things his own, the lover is in the loved; insofar as he wills and acts for the friend as for himself, the loved is in the lover.
• A third way, in the love of friendship only: mutual return of love, friends loving each other and doing good for each other. This is what the third objection touched; “the pangs of unrequited love” in Hamlet.

9. Article 2, replies (“nothing prevents, in a diverse way”) #

• Ad 1: the loved is contained in the lover as impressed by complacency (“she made a big impression”); the lover is contained in the loved as seeking what is inward to it. Nothing prevents a thing being contained and containing in diverse ways: Aristotle’s genus in species and species in genus. He adds: genus in species is the third sense of “in,” species in genus the fourth; “you all know the eight senses of in, and the order of them.”
• Ad 2: the grasping of reason precedes the affection of love, so as reason searches into the inside, the affection of love enters after it. His image: reason is the needle, the heart the thread following it in; the thread cannot enter alone, love cannot enter without knowledge. His brothers bringing home The Magic Flute: at first he heard nothing, then by listening more the excellence became “unbelievable.”
• Ad 3: the argument proceeds from the third way of indwelling, not found in every love. Romeo has the first ways (knowledge and love) toward Rosalind, but mutual love only from Juliet.

His words #

• virtus unitiva / “vis unitiva”: Dionysius’s phrase, love as a uniting power.
• consonance: Dionysius’s element of beauty, which he declines to translate “harmony”; with clarity and (from Aristotle) magnitude.
• species: beauty, as appropriated to the Son by Hilary.
• aequalitas numerosa: Augustine’s definition of beauty (student).
• mutual inhaesio / “dwelling within,” “mutual indwelling”: his rendering [ed.: mutual inherence].
• ecstasy: being outside oneself; excessus / exodos.
• love of wanting / love of wishing well: his renderings [ed.: love of concupiscence, love of friendship].
• grasping: his rendering [ed.: apprehension].
• secundum rem: union in the thing itself, the real union.
• another self / second self: ho philos allos autos.
• copulans / copulare appetens: Augustine’s two participles for the two unions.
• coaptatio of affection: the union that is love itself (glossed “fit,” “being adapted to”).
• as such / per accidens: how knowledge is good in itself and bad by a disposition in the knower.
• complacency: agreement, the loved resting in the lover’s affection.
• intimus: love as inward.
• eight senses of “in”: genus in species the third, species in genus the fourth.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 28, prologue (six articles listed and ordered).
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 28, a. 1 (whole article).
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 28, a. 2 (whole article).
• Augustine, De Trinitate VIII, “love is a life joining two, or desiring to join them” (as quoted in a. 1).

Mentioned

• Thomas, Sentences commentary (Trinity: one/equal/connected; appropriations, Hilary on beauty).
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4 (love unites; beauty as consonance and clarity).
• Augustine, Confessions IV (friend as half my soul).
• Galatians 4 (obj. 1); 1 John 4:16 (sed contra a. 2); Philippians, “I have you in my heart”; 1 Corinthians, the Spirit searches the deep things of God.
• Aristotle, Ethics IX; Rhetoric II; De Anima beginning (all knowledge good); “last books of wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics (inferred)] on beauty; Plato’s Symposium Aristophanes speech (via Thomas).
• Shakespeare: Romeo and Juliet, Much Ado About Nothing, Twelfth Night, Macbeth, Hamlet; Spenser, hymns to earthly and heavenly love and beauty.
• Alphonsus de Liguori, Glories of Mary; Boswell’s Life of Johnson; Gospel of the Transfiguration (Luke, excessus).

His questions #

• Is beauty more the object of love or of reason? More the object of reason, since Hilary appropriates beauty to the Son, not the Spirit; his youthful view was mistaken.
• Am I more attached to Mozart by hearing him or by loving his music? A student: by loving it; hearing unites but “attached is not perfection.”
• What does Thomas say in the body: love is a cause of two kinds of what? Two unions, one formally and necessarily (affection), one effectively (real presence).
• What is the best way to translate coaptatio? “Fit,” “being adapted to”; the class settled on union of affection, left loose.
• If you know disgusting things, are you disgusting? If you love them? Knowing does not make you so; loving does, so love unites more than knowledge.
• If the wine is in the bottle, can the bottle be in the wine? Not in the same sense; contained and containing in diverse senses of “in,” as genus in species and species in genus.
• Is the same love of opposites, as the same knowledge is of opposites? No; ethics knows both virtue and vice, but one does not love both.
• How does love enter into the inside of the loved if division belongs to reason? Reason precedes and searches; love follows like thread after the needle.
• Does Romeo have mutual indwelling with Rosalind? In the first ways (knowledge and love) yes; the third way, mutual love, only with Juliet.