Aquinas on the Effects of Love: Ecstasy, Zeal, and Whether Love Harms the Lover (ST I-II q.28 aa.3-5)

Orientation #

He opens at “Article Three, the third effect of love,” counting union and mutual indwelling as the first two effects treated already (prev. lecture). He does not announce what comes next time. The previous class covered union and mutual indwelling as effects of love; the next turns to whether all action stems from love and to hatred.

The class, in order #

1. Article 3: does love put you “beside yourself”? (“going outside yourself is not the effect of love”) #

The point: he reads the three objections and the sed contra on ecstasy (Greek ekstasis, “out of yourself”).

• Obj. 1: ecstasy implies alienation of mind, but lovers are sometimes sui compos — “get hold of yourself,” “they get their wits about them.”
• Obj. 2: the lover draws the loved to himself, so he does not go out of himself (extra se exiens).
• Obj. 3: if the lover goes out to the beloved, he would always love the other more than himself — clearly false.
• Sed contra: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4: divine love makes ecstasy, and God himself on account of love has undergone ecstasy; every love partakes of divine love.
• Aside on the footnote giving the Greek: Latin/English keep an S after the X; the Latin gloss is excessus / exitus. Excessus reminds him of our Lord speaking with Moses and Elijah about his coming “excess” — his ecstasy in dying for us.

2. Thomas’s answer: two powers, two loves (“placed outside himself”) #

The point: ecstasy happens both by the knowing (grasping) power and by the desiring power, and love causes each differently.

1. By the knowing power one is placed outside the knowledge proper to him, either (a) elevated to things above sense and reason — St Paul carried to the third heaven; “that must have happened to Thomas before he finished the Summa” — or (b) depressed to lower things, fury and amentia — Nebuchadnezzar eating grass like an ox.
2. By the desiring power one undergoes ecstasy when desire of something carries him into another thing.
3. Love makes the first ecstasy only by disposing: intense meditation on the loved draws one away from other things (the body goes “almost stiff”). The second it makes directly. Distinction within the second: love of friendship makes one go out of oneself simpliciter (“my old friend simpliciter”); love of wanting (concupiscence) only secundum quid.

• Love of wanting: not content with the good he has, the lover seeks something outside — Rip Van Winkle [ed.: apparently a candy or treat], Mozart’s music — but seeks it for himself, so the affection “is concluded within himself”: “the candy in my mouth, Mozart in my ear.”
• Love of friendship: the affection goes out simply, since he wills good to the friend and acts for it, having care and providence over the other for the friend’s own sake — “that’s what our Lord had on the cross.”
• Example for secundum quid: “I need something,” going into the store, the fast-food double cheeseburger — “not really ecstasy,” but going out in a qualified way to get something back to oneself.

3. Replies, and the soldier who dies for his friend (“loves the other one more than himself”) #

Reply 1 concerns the first (cognitive) ecstasy; reply 2 concerns love of wanting, which makes ecstasy only in a qualified sense. Reply 3: the lover goes out of himself in willing the friend’s good, but this does not mean he wills the friend’s good more than his own.

• Student exchange on the soldier giving his life: does he love the other more than himself? “Not necessarily more, but certainly as much.” Is he choosing the greater good for himself or the friend? For himself — the act itself is the greater good. To one who considers only bodily goods it would seem he loves the other more. Recap of the order: first effect union, second mutual indwelling, third going outside oneself.

4. Article 4: zeal, jealousy, envy — one Latin word (“zeal is not an effect of love”) #

The point: the Latin zelus covers what English splits into zeal, jealousy and envy, so part of the article turns on equivocation.

• Obj. 1: zeal is the beginning of contention (1 Cor 3: “zelus et contentio”), and contention is repugnant to love.
• Obj. 2: the good communicates itself, but jealousy refuses consortium — men jealous of their wives. “God says I am a jealous God.”
• Obj. 3: zeal is not without hate (Ps 72, “I was jealous over the wicked”), so no more an effect of love than of hate.
• Sed contra: Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4: God is called zelotes because of his great love for existing things. He notes the ordering: the first three effects concern the loved good itself; zeal concerns what impedes or threatens it — “if you’re using my kids for target practice … I move against you, proceeding from my love of my children, not my love of you.”
• Asides: the two kinds of neighbour (one helps with the ball, the other curses); the American Legion neighbour who greeted a friend cutting through his woods with “I shoot trespassers.”

5. Thomas’s answer on zeal, in the two loves (“arise from the intensity of love”) #

1. Whatever way zeal is taken, it arises from the intensity of love: the more intensely a power tends to something, the more it repels what is contrary.
2. Love is a motion in the lover toward the loved (Augustine, Eighty-three Questions), so intense love excludes what is repugnant to it. Love of wanting: the intense wanter moves against what impedes achievement or quiet enjoyment — political campaigns, two men who both want to be president; men jealous of their wives lest the singularity they seek be impeded; those seeking excellence move against those who excel — this is the zeal of envy (invidia), Ps 36, “don’t emulate the doers of iniquity” (“they make their money the bad way — don’t worry about it”). Love of friendship: intense love moves against whatever is repugnant to the friend’s good — supporting a candidate and striking back when he is attacked; zeal for God repels what is against his honour or will (3 Kings, “I was zealous for the Lord of hosts”; John, “the zeal of your house has eaten me up,” with the gloss: good zeal seeks to correct the evils it sees, and if it cannot, tolerates and groans over them).

• Aside: Warren Murray says he will give up his citizenship if Obama is re-elected — “I won’t blame him.”

6. Replies: envy is for goods that cannot be shared (“no one envies another the knowledge of truth”) #

Reply 1: the Apostle speaks of the zeal of envy, which causes contention — not against the loved but for it, against its impediments. He stresses this is why article 4 comes after the first three: a different object, something opposed to the good, moved against for the good’s sake. Reply 2: the good is loved insofar as it can be communicated to the lover, so whatever impedes that communication becomes odious — hence zeal from love of the good. Envy comes from the defect of small goods that cannot be wholly possessed by many; not from goods that can be possessed whole by many, e.g. knowledge of truth.

• Pythagorean theorem: your knowing it does not prevent my knowing it, it helps. But envy can arise about excellence in the knowledge — “you get hired to teach it and I don’t.”
• Movie, Shakespeare play, Mozart opera: your enjoying it does not diminish mine, probably heightens it; truth is like that.
• Aside: critics who think Shakespeare can only be appreciated in the armchair, gestures distracting from the lines.

7. Article 5: does love injure the lover? (“whether love is a passion that is injuring”) #

The point: after effects regarding the loved (aa. 1–3) and its impediments (a. 4), this article is about the effect on the lover himself. He walks through the objections, all drawn from the Canticles.

• Obj. 1: languor (faintness, feebleness) is an injury, and love causes it — Cant 2:5, “prop me up with flowers, compass me with apples, for I languish with love.”
• Obj. 2: liquefactio, melting — Coriolanus, hard against all his friends, melts when his mother kneels; the king in Shakespeare [unclear which play] melting like a snowman in the sun of his successor; his sister’s kids’ “meltdown.” Melting is resolutio, opposite of compositio, a taking-apart; “my soul melted when my beloved spoke.” Therefore harmful.
• Obj. 3: fervor, an excess of heating (boiling, ardor), and excess is corruptive; Dionysius, Celestial Hierarchy ch. 7, lists among the seraphim’s properties hot, sharp, super-fervid; Cant 8:6, love’s lamps are lamps of fire and flames.
• Sed contra: Dionysius — every love is “contentive,” conserving; so love conserves and perfects. Aside on why the Canticles is called Song of Songs, like King of Kings: it is the book most exclusively about love (charity), and the title shows the link between music and love — Augustine, cantare amantis est; Mozart understood it; Twelfth Night, “music be the food of love, play on”; hence music’s place in the liturgy.

8. Thomas’s answer: better or worse depends on what you love (“does love make you better or worse”) #

1. Love signifies an adaptation (fitting, “conformity of the heart”) of the desiring power to some good — “kind of a definition of love.”
2. Nothing is injured by being adapted to what is suitable to it; rather it is made better. What is adapted to the unsuitable is injured and made worse.
3. So love of a suitable good perfects the lover; love of an unsuitable good injures him. “They don’t make these distinctions even in church very much.” Most of all man is perfected by love of God, and made worse by love of sin — Osee 9, “they became abominable as the things they loved.”

• Application: the February Journal of Medical Ethics article approving the killing of newborns; those who pursue this as if a real good “are getting worse … more abominable.”
• Student exchange: a better man for loving truth? Yes. For loving candy? Not necessarily; root beer floats “on occasion helpful” — such things are in between, good for something other than themselves, “good for festivity.”

9. Reply: the four proximate effects, formal and bodily (“four proximate effects”) #

Thomas distinguishes love formally from love as bodily passion. Four proximate effects: melting, fruition (enjoyment), languor (weakness), fervor.

• Melting is opposed to congealing (hardening): the hard, stony heart. Congealed things are constricted and do not admit the entrance of another — you can’t put a spoon in a rock, but you can in ice cream. Love requires the appetite be adapted to receive the loved, the loved in the lover: “the girl made an impression upon my heart,” Mozart’s music, even “wounded.” Hardness of heart is a disposition repugnant to love; melting is softening — “he’s a softy,” the monk who can’t refuse the cat at his door (whereas “I’m hard-hearted”); the stray dog or kitten that leaves the pack and comes to you, the puppy that ran to one of the brothers (“this is the one”).
• If the loved is present and had: pleasure or fruition.
• If absent: sadness over the absence, signified by languor (Tullius, Tusculan Questions bk. 3, calls sadness a sickness; Shakespeare’s sonnets on absence); and intense desire to obtain, signified by fervor. These are effects of love taken formally, by relation of appetite to object. In the passion of love as bodily emotion follow effects proportioned to the change of the organ, which can be harmful. “The main point”: love makes the lover better or worse depending on what he loves, with a footnote that the bodily changes can be harmful; the article could be re-put as “does love make you better or worse?”

10. Digression: the ascent of love in the Symposium (“the love of the beautiful”) #

Socrates’ ascent: love of one beautiful body, then all beautiful bodies, then beauty of soul, up to the beautiful itself, which is the good itself, God — an ascent by the heart taking the mind along. So does love of the beautiful make one better? If one ascends this way. The “lesser love matters”: love of the beautiful makes one want to reproduce the beautiful — Shakespeare’s sonnets, “from fairest creatures we desire increase, that thereby beauty’s rose might never die”; man is naturally more attracted to the beautiful woman to perpetuate the beautiful.

• Same with the teacher who must teach the violin or a science lest it die: German scientists leaving under Hitler, Heisenberg staying so that German science not die, talking to Hitler in vain. Jim Berquist: “the world is full of beautiful women, you haven’t seen half of them.” Closing joke: “Let me finish one first, and then I’ll reproduce.”

His words #

• ecstasy; ekstasis, “out of yourself,” “beside yourself”; Latin gloss excessus, exitus
• sui compos: in control of himself, “get hold of yourself”
• grasping power, knowing power [ed.: apprehensive power]; desiring power [ed.: appetitive power]
• amentia: without mind
• simpliciter vs secundum quid: without qualification vs in a qualified sense
• love of wanting [ed.: love of concupiscence]; love of friendship
• zeal / zelus: covers zeal, jealousy and envy (invidia); zelotes
• consortium: sharing, joining in the loved
• languor: faintness, feebleness, “I languish”
• liquefactio: melting; resolutio opposed to compositio
• fervor: boiling heat, ardor
• “contentive”: containing, conserving (Dionysius)
• adaptation, fitting, “conformity of the heart” [ed.: coaptatio]
• congealing: hardening, the stony heart
• fruition: enjoyment
• cantare amantis est (Augustine): singing belongs to the lover

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 28, a. 3 (ecstasy), a. 4 (zeal), a. 5 (whether love injures the lover), objections, sed contra, body and replies
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4; Celestial Hierarchy ch. 7 (as cited by Thomas)
• Canticles 2:5, 8:6, “my soul melted” (as cited in a. 5 objections)
• 1 Cor 3; Ps 72; Ps 36; 3 Kings; John, “zeal of your house”; Osee 9 (as cited)
• Augustine, Eighty-three Questions; Tullius, Tusculan Questions bk. 3 (as cited) Mentioned
• Luke, transfiguration conversation about his “excess” (inferred locus); St Paul’s third heaven; Nebuchadnezzar
• Shakespeare: Coriolanus; a king melting like a snowman [unclear which play]; Twelfth Night; sonnets on absence and on increase
• Plato, Symposium (Socrates’ ascent)
• Journal of Medical Ethics article on infanticide (February)
• Augustine, cantare amantis est

His questions #

• Does love make you go outside yourself? Simply, in love of friendship; only in a qualified way in love of wanting, which ends in oneself.
• Does the soldier who dies for his friend love him more than himself? Not necessarily more, but as much; he chooses the greater good, the act, for himself.
• Why is article 4 ordered after the first three? The first three regard the loved good itself; zeal regards what is opposed to it, moved against for the good’s sake.
• Can I envy you the knowledge of the Pythagorean theorem? No, your knowing it does not prevent mine; but there can be envy about excellence in knowing it.
• Why is the Canticles called the Song of Songs? Left open, with his suggestion: the link between music and love (Augustine, cantare amantis est).
• Does love make you better or worse? Depends on what you love: suitable good perfects, unsuitable injures; most of all love of God vs love of sin.
• Am I a better man for loving truth? For loving candy? Yes for truth; candy not necessarily — such things are in between, good for festivity.
• Does the love of the beautiful make one better? If one ascends as in the Symposium, to the beautiful itself.