Summa I-II q.31 a.5: Are Spiritual Pleasures Greater Than Bodily Pleasures? (Understanding, Curiosity, and the Natural Starting Point)

Orientation #

He opens by picking up “Article five here, in question thirty-one, on the emotion pleasure,” after an aside from his rereading of the prima pars on God’s will. He says of last time only “this has been said” (that pleasure arises from the joining of something suitable that is sensed or known) and refers back to “as you said earlier” on sensible pleasure not being all at once (prev. lecture). The text-matcher also finds ten minutes of Summa Contra Gentiles IV ch. 15 in the audio; the transcript never names it, and it most plausibly corresponds to the opening aside on will and wanting in God (inferred). The previous class treated pleasure and time and the subject of pleasure; the next moves on to the following articles on sensory pleasures.

The class, in order #

1. Aside: no wanting in God (“there’s no desire or wanting in God”) #

Point: an objection against will in God shows how appetitive powers are named.

1. The will is an appetitive power; “appetitive” is named from desire or wanting.
2. There is no wanting in God, since wanting implies lacking (the English “want” has both senses: the salad dressing “wants something”).
3. Therefore, the objector says, no will in God. Thomas’s reply as he recalls it: the appetitive power is named from the act most known to us (hunger, thirst, wanting), but it has other acts — love/liking and joy/pleasure — and those are in God, “but not the middle one.” He draws the corollary: heaven as partaking God’s life is a life “where there’s no wanting,” strange for us who always want more. He likes such an objection because it brings you back to how the thing is named. Student: Scripture says God desires all men to be saved — a metaphor? He answers yes, and notes the passage adds “and come to the knowledge of the truth”: love is not what you seek but the vision, given only to those who love God.

2. Aside: bad translations (“translate one of the texts of Aristotle, the exact opposite”) #

Reading the Sophistical Refutations with his students last night with the Loeb: a Loeb edition once rendered a text of Aristotle as its opposite. A doctoral dissertation he examined cited Thomas with a “not” that is not in the Latin, saying the opposite of what the author wanted. A Marietti text had “ab” where it should be “ad.” Such errors are “very common.”

3. The objections and sed contra (“bodily pleasures and sensible pleasures are greater”) #

Point: three reasons why bodily pleasure seems greater, against Scripture and Aristotle.

• Obj. 1: all seek some pleasure (Aristotle, Ethics X, where he considers pleasure); more people follow sensible pleasures; therefore they are greater.
• Obj. 2: the magnitude of a cause is known from its effect; bodily pleasures have more potent effects — they change the body and make some insane (Ethics VII); therefore stronger.
• Obj. 3: bodily pleasures must be tempered and restrained on account of their vehemence; spiritual ones need not be. (His brother Mark’s joke: the pleasure of Euclid’s theorems is so great “we’ve got to restrain the vehemence.”)
• Sed contra: Psalm 118, “how sweet to my throat are your words, above honey to my mouth” — measured against a bodily pleasure (bears breaking into cabins for honey and jam; his dog eating blackberries). And Aristotle, Ethics X: the greatest pleasure is that according to the operation of wisdom.

4. Respondeo, first comparison: pleasure in the acts themselves (“perfections of the one acting”) #

Point: acts of the sensing and understanding soul stay within the agent, so we take pleasure in the acts and not only in their objects; and the act of understanding is the greater pleasure.

1. Pleasure arises from the joining of something suitable that is sensed or known (already said).
2. Acts of the soul (to understand, sense, will) do not go forth into exterior matter like making a chair or dinner; they are acts or perfections of the one acting. Actions that go into outside matter are rather perfections of the matter changed: “motion is the act of the movable thing from the mover,” so motion is in the moved, not the mover.
   • Student objection: then it is more a perfection of me to listen to Mozart than to make a chair — so I should just sit and listen? He: making a chair perfects the chair; listening perfects you. “At least don’t make any chair” (but make dinner).
3. Hence these actions are a good of the one acting and are also known by sense or understanding, so pleasure arises from them and not only from their objects.
4. Comparing pleasures as we delight in the actions themselves (he translates “actions,” not “operations”), the understandable pleasures are much greater: a man delights more in knowing something by understanding than by sense. (Kosserich telling him, when he “babbled” about what Mozart’s music represents, “you’d think it has more meaning than it does.”) Three reasons: intellectual knowledge is (a) more perfect; (b) more known, since understanding reflects on its own act more than sense does — in Shakespeare’s education to use reason you learn what reason is, while the senses don’t know what it is to use the senses; (c) more loved: no one would rather lose intellectual sight than bodily sight and become as the beasts (Augustine, City of God). “Would you rather go blind or go mad?” — King Lear, Gloucester’s eyes put out versus Lear fearing to lose his mind. Student: you can still rejoice over having learned something forty years ago, but not over a special meal thirty years back. He agrees: “it’s gone, but you can still enjoy that.”

5. Second comparison, as such: three things required for pleasure (“secundum se and simpliciter”) #

Point: spiritual pleasures are greater simply speaking, by each of the three things required for pleasure. (He notes secundum se and simpliciter are near synonyms, secundum se closer to per se.)

1. The good joined: the spiritual good is greater and more loved. Sign: men abstain even from the greatest bodily pleasures to keep honor, an understandable good — and honor is not even the highest such good.
2. The part it is joined to: the understanding part is more noble and “knows more” (magis cognoscitiva). Student says the object is truth; he pushes to the fundamental object, being, “what it is.” The eye may recognize a square but doesn’t know what a square is. (Aside: after the debate, “what was that?” is the question people asked.)
3. The joining itself is more intimate, more perfect, more firm.
   • More intimate: sense stops at the exterior accidents; so our first knowledge of things is outward (you know a person outwardly first, then “in the moment of truth” — Parolles in All’s Well, named from the French for words, disgraced when it comes). Hence we think about a thing before we understand it. Etymology: intellectus/intelligere, “to read within”; English “insight,” to see within; “outward” is nearly a synonym for sensible (the Baltimore Catechism’s sacrament, “an outward sign instituted by Christ to give grace”). Understanding penetrates to the nature or essence; the first act of reason is grasping what something is (point, line, square, circle in geometry).
   • More perfect: the joining of sensible to sense is joined with motion, an imperfect act (even listening to Mozart involves motion); so sensible pleasures are not all at once (tota simul): something passes, something is expected — food and venereal pleasures. Understandable pleasures are without motion, hence all at once. Greek episteme means coming to a halt; Boethius: reasoning is to understanding as motion to rest; English “understanding” from “stand”; reasoning names a movement of reason (“discourse” in Shakespeare’s definition, but “looking,” trying to see, and coming to rest in contemplation).
   • More firm: bodily pleasures are corruptible and pass quickly (brother Mark: only the first sip of beer tastes good); spiritual ones are incorruptible — the more you understand, the more wonder and pleasure (De Koninck, teaching Physics IV since the 1930s, stopping him in the hall in the late 50s: “Isn’t this wonderful?” — more delight than anyone in the class).

6. Quoad nos: why bodily pleasures are more vehement to us (“a little secundum quid”) #

Point: in regard to us, bodily pleasures are more vehement for three reasons; the class then argues about the third.

1. Sensible things are more known to us (why Scripture speaks in metaphors, “the Lord is my rock” — as far as some can go).
2. Bodily pleasures, as passions of the sense appetite, come with bodily change (Aristotle, proemium to De Anima I); spiritual pleasures have this only by overflow from the higher desire to the lower.
3. Bodily pleasures are sought as medicines against bodily defects from which sadnesses follow; coming upon sadness they are more sensed and so more accepted, whereas spiritual pleasures have no contrary sadnesses. Socrates in the Phaedo: bodily pleasure is always tied with some pain; “hunger makes good sauces”; eat too much and you get pain.
   • Student: is ignorance painful? Is he saying there are no spiritual pains? Exchange: pleasure seems greater by opposition, “kind of an optical illusion”; is ignorance of the Pythagorean theorem a pain? “If you don’t know it, you don’t miss it” — with bodily goods you lack what you want and feel it; total ignorance is not felt, though knowing that you don’t know something you should is felt; ignorance is “more like a privation” than a contrary, and doesn’t enhance the pleasure the way hunger makes food taste better (a student’s best-ever cheeseburger after starving all day to see the Pope in Toronto). He allows the first understanding after wondering has a joy that later thinking lacks, but the opposition is clearer with the senses — you get hungry every day. A student adds: sense deprivation yearns for something already experienced; with the intellect you don’t know what you’re missing — “ignorance is bliss.” Consequence he draws: Aristotle and Thomas both say no man can live without pleasure, so those who don’t acquire a taste for the higher pleasures go to excess in the lower — “you see a lot in our society.” “Acquired taste” (classical music, Shakespeare; Thomas’s “non-natural pleasures”) — he half dislikes the phrase but grants you must become accustomed and concentrate (his ear up to the old 78 Glyndebourne Mozart records that left out the talking). Someone who knows only sense pleasures asks how he could enjoy heaven. Socrates in the Phaedo on graveyard ghosts as souls of lovers of the body cut off from their only pleasures, trying to get back in — “there could be some truth to that.” Asides: ghosts around hidden treasures (Washington Irving’s Dolph Heyliger); the dying miser mocking the lecherous priest who brings him the sacraments; the cartoon lawyer reading the will: “he took it with him.” Music relieving bodily tiredness: dancing all night with music but not without; putting on marches to stay awake driving Paul home from West Point at 2 a.m.; French canoe paddlers singing.

7. Replies to the objections (“more follow the bodily pleasures”) #

• Ad 1: more follow bodily pleasures because sensible goods are more known to many, and men need pleasures as medicines against the many pains and sadnesses of life; and most cannot attain spiritual pleasures, which are proper to the virtuous (virtues of reason as well as moral virtues), so they decline to bodily ones — “a lot of understanding of the human condition here.” (The working man’s beer; Archbishop Laval bringing the beer industry to Canada so workmen could relax with something less harmful than whiskey — “a work of mercy.”)
• Ad 2: the bodily change happens more with bodily pleasures because they are emotions of the sensitive appetite, which is in the body (feeling anger, fear before speaking to a crowd, the cat gripping your shoulder when a dog comes). Aristotle: a full definition of anger must state the bodily change as well as the formal aspect.
• Ad 3: bodily pleasures belong to the sensitive part, which should be ruled by reason, hence need tempering and restraint (temperance named from that; some say moderation); spiritual pleasures are according to the mind, itself the rule, so are of themselves sober and moderate. Students raise John of the Cross on “spiritual lust” and curiosity; he: curiosity (treated in the Secunda Secundae) is a vice, a disordered desire to know.

8. Digression: causes of error and the natural beginning (“start first from the natural beginning”) #

Point: pride, not curiosity, is the chief cause of error, and both lead to knowing things out of order. From Thomas’s commentary on St. Paul, found while working with Monsignor Dionne on the will’s role in the life of the mind: causes of error on the part of appetite and of reason; pride causes error (1) by attempting what is beyond your powers, (2) by not learning from wiser men, since a good teacher keeps you from error — modern philosophers believe none of each other and don’t go back to the great men before them. Curiosity errs by seeking to know out of order: Introduction to Philosophy textbooks starting with “does God exist”; someone asking him to prove the Pythagorean theorem when the only proof he knows is Euclid I.47 with 46 propositions before it; college professors each starting somewhere different, so you must find the natural beginning. Aristotle is explicit in the Sophistical Refutations and the Poetics that you must start from the natural beginning. The Greeks tended to start naturally because nobody was before them; moderns start where the previous man left off (Hegel from Spinoza, Spinoza from Descartes). Student: isn’t Spinoza fair to start there when talking to other philosophers? He: you must go back to what is naturally known to have the foundation for all the rest. Meno: Socrates makes it look as if the slave boy already knew how to double a square (the diagonal is the side of the double square), but Socrates does most of the work by asking in the proper order; the discoverer must order it himself. Reading Kant, Descartes, Locke he never felt he learned about things, only what they said, then suspected the mistake — “I wonder what this guy’s mistake is”; Aristotle, Plato and the early Greeks talk about things and start with what comes first: “things in motion sooner catch the eye,” from motion to the unmoved mover. The natural beginning for the arts: epic, tragedy, comedy, opera, symphony, painting have in common that they are likenesses (imitation), differing in what they make the likeness in, what they imitate, and how. Hamlet’s “hold the mirror up to nature” says this properly and metaphorically — Shakespeare says best what he himself is doing. Shakespeare a poet with philosophical gifts, Plato a philosopher with poetic gifts, an unusual combination. Caution: meter doesn’t make poetry; “the Lord is my rock” is not an imitation.

9. Closing: Shakespeare’s learning, Plutarch, Mozart (“he certainly knew Plutarch”) #

Student asks Shakespeare’s educational background: probably the local school; not the study of Thomas; largely self-taught but very well read — Plutarch’s Lives and Moralia (the essay on profiting from your enemies, who tell you your faults, echoed by the clown in Twelfth Night: “the better for my enemies and the worse for my friends”); the Roman plays are full of Plutarch. Borrowing is no fault (no copyright then; Brahms’s Variations on a Theme by Haydn; Mozart’s first four concertos are orchestrations of J. C. Bach, so his book counts 23 concertos where the catalogue has 27). Aside: a stink bug appears — “a marvelous creation by God,” don’t crush it.

His words #

• want — English word carrying both desire and lack (“the sauce wants something”); hence no wanting in God.
• appetitive — named from the one act most known to us (hunger, thirst, wanting), though love and joy are also its acts.
• understandable pleasures — his rendering for the intellectual/spiritual pleasures [ed.: intelligibiles].
• actions — his deliberate word for operatio in the article.
• motion is the act of the movable thing from the mover — hence in the moved, not the mover.
• secundum se / simpliciter — “as such” and “simply speaking,” near synonyms; secundum se nearer to per se.
• magis cognoscitiva — the understanding “knows more”: knows what a thing is.
• intellectus / intelligere — to read within; English “insight,” to see within.
• outward — near synonym for sensible (Baltimore Catechism: sacrament, “an outward sign”).
• tota simul — all at once, said of understandable pleasures, not of sensible.
• episteme — Greek: coming to a halt or stop; Latin scientia lacks the etymology.
• understanding — from “stand”; reasoning is a movement of reason (Shakespeare’s “discourse”).
• quoad nos / secundum quid — in regard to us, in a certain respect: how bodily pleasures are more vehement.
• medicines — bodily pleasures as remedies against bodily defects and sadnesses.
• acquired taste — his hesitant phrase for Thomas’s “non-natural pleasures.”
• curiosity — a vice: disordered desire to know.
• natural beginning — where thinking must start (motion in natural philosophy; imitation in the arts).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 31, a. 5, objections, sed contra, body and replies (read and translated).
• Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 (found by text-matching in the audio; not named in transcript).

Mentioned

• Summa Theologiae I, the question on the will of God, objection from the appetitive power (q. 19 a. 1 inferred).
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics X (pleasure; operation of wisdom) and VII (pleasures that make insane).
• Aristotle, De Anima I proemium (anger’s bodily change); Physics IV (De Koninck’s course); Sophistical Refutations and Poetics (natural beginning).
• Augustine, City of God (losing bodily vs intellectual sight).
• Psalm 118 (sweeter than honey); “God desires all men to be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth.”
• Boethius (reasoning : understanding :: motion : rest).
• Plato, Phaedo (pleasure tied with pain; ghosts as lovers of the body); Meno (doubling the square).
• Thomas, commentary on the Epistles of St. Paul (causes of error); Secunda Secundae on curiosity; De Ente et Essentia.
• Shakespeare: King Lear, All’s Well That Ends Well (Parolles), Hamlet (mirror up to nature), Twelfth Night (the clown on enemies); Plutarch, Lives and Moralia.
• Euclid, Elements I.47; Baltimore Catechism; John of the Cross on spiritual lust; Washington Irving, “Dolph Heyliger.”

His questions #

• Is there wanting in God, and so an appetitive power and a will? No wanting (that would be lacking); but love and joy are in God, so will is, named from the act most known to us.
• Is it more a perfection of me to listen to Mozart than to make a chair? Yes — the immanent act perfects the agent, making the chair perfects the chair.
• Would you rather go blind or go mad? No one would rather lose intellectual sight than bodily sight (Augustine).
• What is the object of the understanding part? Truth, and fundamentally being — what a thing is; the senses don’t know what a thing is.
• What is the etymology of intellectus? To read within; cf. English “insight.”
• Is there really an opposite to the pleasure of understanding the Pythagorean theorem, as hunger is to eating? Ignorance is more a privation than a contrary pain; if you don’t know it, you don’t miss it — left partly open.
• Why do bodily changes accompany the lesser pleasures more? Because they are emotions of the sensitive appetite, which is in the body.
• What do epic, tragedy, comedy, opera, symphony and painting have in common? They are all likenesses (imitations), differing in medium, object and manner.
• What was Shakespeare’s educational background? Probably the local school; largely self-taught but very well read, especially in Plutarch.