Concupiscence I: Is It Only in the Senses, and Is It Its Own Passion? (ST I-II q.30 a.1–2)

Orientation #

He reminds the class that Thomas is going through the emotions one by one (“way back in the spring”), and this is one of the emotions of the concupiscible appetite; the question has four articles, of which he promises the third and fourth hold “some delightful surprises for the mind” (not reached in this class). Verified sources: ST I-II q. 30, aa. 1-2 read in class; a handout page (“Shakespeare’s Exhortation to Use Reason”, p. 5) and DHB Vol. III p. 682 are matched to the audio but not named in the transcript. The previous class treated hatred through the per se / per accidens distinction, and the next continues q. 30 on natural vs. non-natural concupiscence and whether concupiscence is infinite.

The class, in order #

1. The four articles of the question (“whether concupiscence is infinite”) #

Point: the question asks (1) whether concupiscence is in the sense desiring power only, (2) whether it is a special passion, (3) whether some concupiscences are natural and some not, (4) whether concupiscence is infinite.

• Word note: appetitus in Latin can name desire or the desiring power; appetitus sensitivus here means the sense desiring power, the one “that falls upon the senses,” against the intellectual or rational desiring power.

2. Article 1, objections (“a certain concupiscentia of wisdom”) #

Point: three objections that concupiscence is not only in the sense appetite.

1. Wisdom 6: the concupiscentia of wisdom leads to the perpetual kingdom (Thomas’s “ordered society of those who seek God”); but sense desire cannot be borne toward wisdom. Aside: the college professor who asked “Mr. Berquist, do you have an emotional attachment to the syllogism?” — one might be emotionally attached to a girl, not to a syllogism; reason may like its rigor, but emotion does not go toward such things.
2. “The Apostle” (Romans 7: good does not dwell in my flesh) — the common name given to one who stands out, as Aristotle calls Homer “the poet”; the desire of God’s commands is called concupiscence (Psalm 118) yet is not in the sense appetite.
3. To each power its own good is desirable (concupiscibile); so concupiscence is in every power. He notes the objection turns on how particular the word signifies.

3. Sed contra and the body of a. 1 (“the will is not in the brain”) #

Point: Damascene divides the irrational part that obeys reason into concupiscence and thumos (Greek epithumia and thumos, Latin concupiscible and irascible); it is rational only by partaking, and it undergoes. Thomas’s answer as he gives it:

1. Per Aristotle, Rhetoric I, concupiscence (epithumia) is desire for the pleasant.
2. Pleasure is twofold: in the understandable good (wisdom, virtue, justice — the good of reason) and in the good as known by sense.
3. The first is of the soul only, since reason and will are not in the body (De Anima). Jokes: the neurologist who could poke the brain and get “I taste steak” but never “I just willed something,” so concluded the will is not in the brain — “a good step forward”; and the man whose arm rose under stimulation: “I didn’t do it, you did it.”
4. The second is of soul and body together, since sense is a power in a bodily organ.
5. Such desire for pleasure is what the word concupiscence means, “as the name itself sounds” in Latin (togetherness of soul and body); so concupiscence properly is in the sense appetite, and in the concupiscible power in particular, which is named from it.

• He observes on the “Apostle”/“Philosopher”: he goes into downloaded texts and restores the capital A and P — “it’s not just any philosopher.”

4. Why the two powers are named from concupiscence and anger (“things in motion sooner catch the eye”) #

Point: the concupiscible and irascible powers are named from one passion each; why these two of the eleven (he lists them: love, concupiscence, pleasure/delight, hate, aversion, sadness/pain; hope, fear, despair, boldness, anger)?

• A student: because they are causes or first among the others? No — love is more fundamental (I want steak because I like steak). Another: more visible? Yes.
• Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs” — you wave to be noticed; you hold still to hide from a creditor, and in movies the hidden man is caught when he moves.
• Aristotle, “ninth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]: ability is known through act, and the act first called act is motion.
• Thomas’s principle on words equivocal by reason: we name things as we know them, so the order in naming follows the order in knowing (his favourite question: in what sense of “before” does one sense of before come before another? — before in our knowledge).
• Concupiscence is more like motion than love or pleasure: pleasure is a resting in the object possessed; concupiscence a seeking of what you like but do not have; love can be with either. Anger likewise: when Mozart imitates anger (Osmin in Abduction from the Seraglio, letter to his father) it is very clear — the music must imitate his losing control, yet not cease to be music. Shakespeare, As You Like It: the lovers are “in the very wrath of love,” clubs cannot separate them — a metaphor from one species to another that has some similarity.
• Thomas sums up: the concupiscible is named from concupiscence but includes the other emotions distinguished before.

5. Reply to obj. 1: likeness and overflow (“a redundancy in the lower appetite”) #

Point: desire for wisdom or other spiritual goods is sometimes called concupiscence for two reasons.

• By likeness: both are a kind of wanting. As “see” is taken from the eye, carried to imagination (Hamlet: “in my mind’s eye”), and finally to understanding (“you see what I mean”); so with “love,” and could be with “concupiscence,” though the Latin word stuck more with the sensible.
• By intensity (“very interesting”): the intensity of the desire of the upper part produces a redundancy in the lower appetite, so that the sense appetite in its own way tends toward the spiritual good, following the higher desire, and the body itself serves spiritual things. Examples: the Greek jumping from the bath shouting “Eureka”; Teresa of Avila coming out of her cell and dancing; even rocking up and down when trying to understand something hard. Psalm 83: “my heart and my flesh exult in the living God.”
• Aside from ST I q. 12 (read that day): can the senses see God? Augustine’s ambiguous passage explained: we “see” God with the senses as we see that our neighbour is alive — the eye sees him moving and talking, reason perceives he is alive; so in the next world the mind grasps God there in what is sensed — the sensibile praeter sensibile, grasped by another power when you sense.

6. Reply to obj. 2: “desire” vs. “concupiscence” (“does not imply some consociation”) #

Point: the word desire extends properly to the higher appetite too, because it does not imply a consociation (living-together — soul with body) as concupiscence does, but only the simple motion toward the thing desired; this glosses ipsum nomen concupiscentiae sonat in the body.

• Augustine on music: the pleasure of fiction is not the highest but the most proportioned to man, involving body and soul, so it moves us more forcefully — appeals to the whole man.
• Back to obj. 1: is it only by overflow that “concupiscence” is applied to reason’s desire? Dion (prev. teacher, as he recalls) on eros: sensual, yet applied to the love of God because of intensity; the Song of Songs, to be read last, “about marriage,” St. Bernard’s first sermon on it warning not to give it to the girls too early; C. S. Lewis calling angelic love “ferocious,” more intense because not divided between sense appetite and will as ours is.
• Wedding aside: took As You Like It, Twelfth Night, Merchant of Venice (no tragedies); applied Portia’s lines to the bride — “she is fair, and fairer than that fair, of wondrous virtue”: two attractions, one more in sense appetite, one more in the appetite of reason.
• Further aside: Lucia’s book on the apparitions, the “angel of Portugal”; Thomas takes the princes (principalities) as heads of nations; the feast is a national holiday in Portugal; “pray to that angel who’s over the United States for this election.”

7. Reply to obj. 3: natural desire, animal desire, concupiscence (“simple apprehension”) #

Point: three levels of desiring.

1. Each power desires its own good by natural desire, without any grasping — found even in plants (the nurseryman: “it likes a lot of water”; broccoli “is a big feeder”).
2. To desire good by animal desire (from anima, soul), following some grasping, belongs only to the desiring power; sense and intellectual appetite are named from the knowing they follow.
3. To desire under the notion of the good pleasant to sense — concupiscere strictly — belongs to the concupiscible.

• On “apprehension”: Latin apprehendere = grasp; the known is in the knower (as what I grasp is in my hand), whereas in love the lover is in the thing loved — “just the reverse.” “Simple apprehension” should be “simple grasping”: grasp what a square is, what a circle is, then grasp that a square is not a circle, or is a quadrilateral.
• He closes a. 1: much of it is understanding the words, and more, what they signify.

8. Article 2 opened; passio and “understand” (“the word understand comes from”) #

Point: Thomas calls the emotions passio; English names them from motion (the speaker “moves” the audience), so passion and emotion are connected.

• Digression on words richer in one language: Shakespeare’s pun on “understand” (Twelfth Night, Two Gentlemen of Verona) fixes attention on “stand under.” Latin substantia corresponds etymologically, and substance means what a thing is or the individual underlying; so the understanding understands what a thing is, or what stands under the accidents the senses know (special application to the Eucharist); to understand an effect is to know its underlying cause (“ground” = cause: “grounds for divorce”); to understand a word is to know what stands under it (Thomas’s impositio, putting a label on); to understand a word equivocal by reason is to know its meanings and their order — the four meanings of “before,” the eight of “in” ordered in “the fourth book of Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics IV]. “Apprehension” is no better than “grasp.”

9. Article 2, objections (“fear is not in the concupiscible”) #

1. Passions are distinguished by objects; the object of the concupiscible is the pleasant to sense, which is also the object of concupiscence (Rhetoric I). He notes: good and bad for the sense appetite mean agreeable/disagreeable to sense, not good as “what all desire” — his son judging “a good dinner” by liking it; salmon “is bad,” Warren Murray likes it. Aside: the Wisconsin priest’s standing confession joke about the Packers.
2. Augustine, Eighty-Three Questions: cupidity is love of transient things, so not distinguished from love. “Augustine is always getting us in trouble.”
3. Every concupiscible passion has an opposed special passion (love/hate, pleasure/pain, joy/sadness); Damascene: the expected good constitutes concupiscence, the present good joy (laetitia), the expected evil fear, the present evil sadness; so fear opposes concupiscence, but fear is irascible. He adds we lack an English name for the passion opposed to concupiscence; as Aristotle in the Ethics finds no name for the man who pursues sense pleasures too little, because it is so rare — sometimes a name must be invented.

• Student (Dr. Bruce): why should fear be counter to concupiscence, a movement to pleasure? Answer: Thomas is quoting Damascene and will explain why he said it; there are contexts — fear that the wine will run out (Cana); Warren Murray quitting the gourmet society because the members were agitated with fear that a delicacy would not arrive. Left as an illustration, not a resolution.

10. Sed contra and body of a. 2 (“adapts the desire to itself”) #

Sed contra: concupiscence is caused by love (I want steak because I like it — “like” a weaker word for love) and tends toward delight (bring the steak, now I have pleasure); distinct from its cause and from what it tends to, so a special passion. Body:

1. The pleasant good to sense is in common the object of the concupiscible; its differences distinguish the passions. He contrasts the irascible: the fighter, the defender of what you like — you fight from anger or boldness, run from fear, not because it is pleasant.
2. Diversity of object can be by the nature of the thing (material difference) or by the power of acting (formal difference, by which passions differ in species).
3. The good moves differently as present or absent (“absence makes the heart grow fonder”): present, it makes one rest in it — we call Mozart, a painting, mountain scenery “restful” (the Hudson Highlands, West Point’s “million dollar view,” Dickens, a friend’s piano by the river); absent, it moves one toward it — so concupiscence is like motion and more known to us: you are more aware of being hungry than of being contented (the Comfort Inn: aware of the comfort, or of looking for something to eat?).
4. Hence the pleasant, insofar as it adapts and conforms the appetite to itself, causes love — “you could almost say that’s what love is”: the conformity, the agreement of the heart with its object (“that fits me”); insofar as absent, it attracts, causing concupiscence; insofar as present, it makes rest, causing pleasure. So concupiscence differs in species from love and from pleasure.

• The restless lost kid in New York quieted with an ice cream cone; three bags of candy for the children on the drive across country (“practical knowledge”; a student: “your love bombs”).

11. Concupiscences diverse in number; kinds of sadness; music (“sadness over the good fortune of another”) #

• To desire this delightful thing or that makes concupiscences diverse in number (steak vs. wine), a subdistinction; one can like, desire, enjoy each.
• Parallel from his work on the definition of comedy: kinds of sadness differ by object — envy is sadness over another’s good fortune (bad kind), pity sadness over another’s misfortune (good kind), loneliness sadness over a friend’s absence, melancholy sadness over one’s own or the world’s miserable condition. Aside: “Obama’s been elected, very melancholy” — or angry, or nervous.
• Moral application: Aristotle, Politics VIII, says which music children should hear; Augustine [as he says] points out that Baroque music and Mozart, Haydn represent the emotions in conformity with reason, so liking them moves the emotions in sympathy — a remote, not sufficient, disposition to moral virtue. Closing banter about a student out of practice at the piano.

His words #

• appetitus / appetitus sensitivus: desire, or the desiring power; the sense desiring power, “the one that falls upon the senses.”
• concupiscentia sapientiae: concupiscence of wisdom (Wisdom 6).
• “the Apostle,” “the Philosopher”: common name given to the one who stands out (Homer “the poet”).
• epithumia, thumos: Greek for the concupiscible and irascible; rational only by partaking; the part that undergoes.
• understandable good: the good of reason — wisdom, virtue, justice.
• the whole combination: soul and body together, subject of sense pleasure.
• “ability is known through act” [ed.: potency].
• “ninth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics IX]; “fourth book of Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics IV].
• words equivocal by reason: we name things as we know them; naming follows knowing.
• redundancy / overflow: intensity of the higher desire overflowing into the lower appetite and the body.
• sensibile praeter sensibile: grasped by another power when you sense (life of the neighbour; God in the next world).
• consociation: living-together of soul and body implied by “concupiscence,” not by “desire.”
• natural desire vs. animal desire: without grasping (plants) vs. following grasping.
• apprehension: grasp; the known in the knower, the lover in the loved; “simple grasping” for simple apprehension.
• concupiscere strictly: desiring under the notion of the good pleasant to sense.
• passio: undergoing; English “emotion,” from being moved.
• understand / substantia / ground / impositio: to know what stands under.
• laetitia: joy, the present good.
• material vs. formal difference of passions: by nature of object vs. by the power of acting.
• adapts, conforms: love as conformity, agreement of the heart with its object; concupiscence the attraction of the absent good; pleasure the rest in the present good.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 30, a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 30, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body)
• Wisdom 6; Romans 7; Psalm 118; Psalm 83 (as quoted by Thomas)
• Damascene, Orthodox Faith (as quoted in sed contra and obj. 3)
• Augustine, Eighty-Three Questions (obj. 2)
• Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida (“things in motion sooner catch the eye”); As You Like It (“the very wrath of love”); Merchant of Venice (Portia “fair, and fairer than that fair”); Hamlet (“in my mind’s eye”)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Rhetoric I (concupiscence = desire for the pleasant); Metaphysics IX; Physics IV (eight senses of “in”); Ethics (nameless vice of too little pleasure); Politics VIII (music for children); De Anima
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I, q. 12 (senses seeing God; Augustine’s passage); Thomas on the orders of angels (princes as heads of nations)
• Mozart, letter to his father on Osmin in Abduction from the Seraglio
• Augustine on music and the pleasure of fiction (locus not given)
• Song of Songs; St. Bernard, first sermon on it; C. S. Lewis on angelic love; Dickens, American Notes (West Point); Shakespeare, Twelfth Night and Two Gentlemen of Verona (pun on “understand”); Lucia’s book on the apparitions
• Handout “Shakespeare’s Exhortation to Use Reason”, p. 5, and DHB Vol. III p. 682 (verified sources, not named in transcript)

His questions #

• Why are the two sense appetites named from concupiscence and anger rather than from love? Because they are more visible — more like motion, and things in motion sooner catch the eye; we name as we know.
• In what sense of before does one sense of before come before another? In the sense of before in our knowledge.
• What word should we use in English for apprehensio? Grasp — “simple grasping,” not “simple apprehension.”
• Why is “desire” more extendable than “concupiscence”? It implies only motion toward the thing, not the consociation of soul with body.
• What do good and bad mean to the sense appetite? Agreeable and disagreeable to the senses, not good as what all desire.
• Why does Damascene say fear is opposed to concupiscence? (student: isn’t a movement to pleasure opposed by something else?) Thomas will explain Damascene; he gives contexts (fear the wine runs out) — left open.
• Am I as aware of being comfortable as of being hungry? No — desire, like motion, is more known to us than rest.
• How does concupiscence differ from love and pleasure? Love is the conformity of the heart to its object; concupiscence the attraction of the absent good; pleasure rest in the present good.
• How do envy, pity, loneliness, melancholy differ? By the object of the sadness.