Aquinas on the Effects of Pleasure: Expansion of the Heart, Thirst for More, and How Pleasure Hinders Reason (ST I-II q.33, a.1–3)

Orientation #

He opens by recalling that Thomas “looks before and after” for both love and pleasure: the thing itself, then its causes (done), now its effects. He stops before the last article of the question (“Okay, time for the last article… You want to stop now or what?”). The previous class treated the causes of pleasure (q. 32, aa. 6 and 8) and the next takes up a. 4 (pleasure perfecting operation) and the goodness of pleasure.

The class, in order #

1. Why love and pleasure get the full treatment (“looking before and after”) #

Point: Thomas gives love and pleasure alone a threefold treatment (in itself, causes, effects), and one reason is theological.

• In God there is love and pleasure but no desire: he lacks nothing, “the one who has everything.” So these two passions “carry over” to God.
• Student: the Father himself names the two — “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased” (he thinks Thomas notes this in the commentary on Matthew).
• The prooemium’s four questions: whether pleasure dilates; whether it causes thirst of itself; whether it impedes the use of reason; whether it perfects operation (Aristotle, Ethics X, “as beauty youth”). He jumps ahead into a. 1 before finishing the list, is caught by a student, and “stand[s] corrected, as my mother would say” (“I’m 76 years old”).
• Aside on thirst: he once found only three “Psalms of thirst,” apparently one in each of the three groups of Psalms (“my flesh pines and my soul thirsts”).

2. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“Latum mandatum tuum nimis”) #

Point: dilation seems to belong to love or to desire rather than to pleasure.

1. Ps 118, “your command is exceedingly wide” — spoken of the precept of charity. Pleasure is a different passion from love; so dilation is an effect of love, not pleasure. Aside: love enlarges the heart even physically — a saint whose ribs broke; Paul VI, asked what it is like to be pope, spoke of a “sense of universal fatherhood”; a bishop’s heart must expand. Narrow hearts can’t love many, narrow minds can’t know much.
2. What is dilated is made more capable of receiving; reception pertains to desire, which is of a thing not yet had. So dilation belongs to desire.
3. Constriction is opposed to dilation; but we constrict or grasp what we firmly wish to retain, which is the affection of the bodily appetite toward the delightful. So dilation does not pertain to pleasure.

• Sed contra: Isaiah 60, “you will see and become affluent, and marvel, and your heart will be dilated” — said as an expression of joy; and laetitia is named from dilation (as said above).
• Student question, is beauty the object of reason or of the will? He has wondered, since “lovely” (a synonym for beautiful) is named from love and Dionysius takes beauty together with goodness; but he still thinks reason, “Thomas says so,” and Aristotle’s geometry and mathematics have no goodness in them yet have beauty — “so it’s obviously … the mind there.”

3. Article 1, body and replies (“a motion to broadness”) #

Point: dilation is said of the soul by metaphor, and belongs to pleasure on two sides.

1. Latitude is a dimension of bodily magnitude; in the affections it is said only metaphorically, dilation being “as it were a motion to broadness.”
2. Pleasure requires two things: (a) on the side of the grasping power, which grasps the union with a suitable good, and from this a man grasps himself to have obtained a perfection, a “spiritual magnitude” — so the soul is magnified through pleasure (“my soul magnifies the Lord”); (b) on the side of the desiring power, which ascends to the delightful thing and rests in it, “lending itself to grasping it inwardly,” so the affection is dilated as if handing itself over to contain the delighting thing. He remarks it is “kind of interesting” that both the grasping power and the will are needed.

• Reply 1: in metaphor the same word is attributed to diverse things by diverse similitudes — “lion” of the devil (cruelty, seeking whom he may devour) and of the tribe of Judah. Love dilates by extension: the lover’s affection extends to others, caring for their things and not only his own. Pleasure dilates by rendering someone “more capacious” in himself. Both dilate, “in different ways.”
• Student aside: somewhere in St. Bonaventure [ed.: name garbled in recording] it is said that in the Old Law the good of the Messiah was promised but delayed, so that it would be more desired.
• Reply 2: desire has some amplitude from the imagination of the thing desired, but much more from the presence of the thing now delighting; the soul gives itself more to what it has than to what it lacks, since pleasure is the end of desire.
• Reply 3: the one delighting constricts the delighting thing when he adheres to it strongly, but widens his heart so as to enjoy it perfectly.
• Aside: a line repeated by a printer’s error — “cheap Spanish editions falling apart,” though he likes them (his students gave him a Spanish De Trinitate).

4. Article 2, objections and sed contra (“pleasure often causes disgust”) #

Point: it seems pleasure does not cause thirst or desire of itself.

1. Every motion ends at rest; pleasure is the rest of the motion of desire (said above). He notes that the appetitive powers are named from desire because motion “catches the eye” more than rest. Quick reply: you want to have it again — “all good things must come to an end,” as said to children at bedtime.
2. An opposite does not cause its opposite; desire is of a good not had, pleasure of a good had [ASR “not had”].
3. Fastidium — the class settles on “boredom” or “disgust” over dictionary senses (tedium, loathing, squeamishness, scorn); it is more than diminished pleasure — too much chocolate, too much pizza and you don’t even want to smell it, enough ice cream and “don’t even talk to me about it.” Disgust is opposed to desire, and pleasure often causes disgust.

• Sed contra: John 4, “who drinks from this water will thirst again”; the water, according to Augustine, signifies bodily pleasure (the Samaritan woman).

5. Article 2, body (“who drink me will still thirst”) #

Point: pleasure in act causes thirst only per accidens, unless “thirst” means intensity; pleasure in memory causes it per se.

• Distinctions: pleasure in act vs. in memory; thirst properly (desire of a thing not had) vs. commonly (exclusion of disgust).
• Pleasure in act, thirst taken properly: not per se, since pleasure is of a present thing; but per accidens when the present thing is not perfectly had, either (a) on the side of the thing, not totum simul but received successively — music, a play; Augustine, Confessions IV: hearing the first part of a verse with delight, one desires the rest; so almost all bodily pleasures cause thirst until consumed, following some motion (you can’t eat the ice cream sundae all at once); or (b) on the side of the one having, who acquires paulatim, bit by bit — the way our mind gets truth (he recalls Thomas using this in the opening of the commentary on Job, comparison forgotten); so imperfect divine knowledge in this life delights and arouses thirst for perfect knowledge: Ecclus 24:29, “who drink me will still thirst.”
• Thirst as intensity, excluding boredom: spiritual pleasures most of all cause thirst of themselves. Bodily pleasures, grown too great or too long, exceed the natural habitude and become disgusting or painful (foods): “diminishing returns,” one then desires other pleasures. Spiritual pleasures perfect nature and do not exceed it, so at their consummation they are more delightful — except insofar as bodily powers joined to contemplation grow weary by continued operation; so the same Ecclesiasticus text, and 1 Peter 1: the angels who perfectly know God still desire to look upon him.
• Student: won’t heaven be like seeing the same movie every time? — “Little do you know.”
• Pleasure in memory: per se apt to cause desire if one returns to the disposition in which the thing was delightful; if changed from it, the memory brings disgust, as the full man’s memory of food. Story: Roland Chouinard, clearing out his uncle’s house, at the bed where his parents used to stay: “the longer they’re gone, the more I miss them” — desire grown from past memory.

6. Article 2, replies (“I’m dying because I do not die”) #

• Reply 1: perfect pleasure has rest in every way and the motion of desire toward the not-had ceases; imperfectly had, the motion does not altogether cease. Student: this is why hope is not in heaven. His example: thinking he understands a text fully vs. sensing he does not — De Koninck taught the Physics from the 1930s, still saw something new in the late 1950s, sometimes pointed out by Msgr. Dionne (“how could I have taught this twenty years and not seen that”); De Koninck’s humility.
• Reply 2: what is had imperfectly is had secundum quid and so secundum quid not had (the famous simpliciter / secundum quid distinction); hence desire and pleasure together about the same thing. Student: John of the Cross (Teresa has her version), “I die because I do not die” — “dying to die.”
• Reply 3: pleasure causes disgust in one way, desire in another; as in the treatment of the four kinds of causes, the same thing causes opposites by its presence and absence — the ship captain, cause of the ship’s safety and of its destruction; the guard, of the camp’s safety by diligent watching (aside on “the administration … in Libya”).

7. Article 3, objections and sed contra (“corrupts the estimate of prudence”) #

Point: it seems pleasure does not impede the use of reason.

1. Rest most contributes to the use of reason: Physics VII (“Natural Hearing”), in calming down and coming to rest the soul becomes knowing and prudent — note “understanding” comes from “stand,” not from motion; Wisdom 8:16, “going into my house, I rested” with wisdom. Pleasure is a rest; so it aids reason. Students: lying down, one gets out what one couldn’t before; a thought in the lab kept one awake.
2. Things not in the same subject, even contraries, do not impede each other; pleasure is in the desiring part, the use of reason in the grasping part. He notes Thomas’s consistent term “grasping power” rather than “knowing power” — “who else would do that?” Joke: does digesting food impede thinking? “Depends on what you eat. If you had salmon…”
3. What is impeded by another is changed from it; but the use of the grasping power moves toward pleasure rather than away, being its cause.

• Sed contra: “against all this nonsense,” Ethics VI (the book on the virtues of reason): pleasure corrupts the estimate of prudence — “watch out for pleasure.”

8. Article 3, body: proper pleasures aid, bodily pleasures impede for three reasons (“this is the heart of the matter”) #

1. Ethics X: proper pleasures increase their operations (delight in hearing, seeing, understanding makes you do it more intensely); extraneous pleasures impede. Pleasure in the very act of reason (“some odd guy delights in contemplating or reasoning”) aids it, since we attend more to what we delight in, and attention is operation. Aside: students who took no pleasure in these things had such a hard time.
2. “This is the heart of the matter now”: bodily pleasures impede the use of reason for a threefold reason.
   • (a) Distraction: we attend more to what delights us; intention cleaving strongly to one thing is weakened or wholly called back from others; so a great bodily pleasure wholly or “much” impedes. Digression: de Tocqueville named distraction the greatest vice of the mind in democratic times (“he didn’t even know about cell phones”); tied by students to the instability of democratic vs. aristocratic society, to unrestricted competition, and (from Belloc) to Protestantism’s isolation of the individual; everything in our society competes for attention. Student: the three steps of every sin — distraction, attraction, contraction, as with Eve. Beelzebub, “lord of flies,” flies as the devil’s image of distraction.
   • (b) Contrariety: some pleasures, especially excessive ones, are against the order of reason; so (Ethics VI) they corrupt the estimate of prudence, not speculative estimation (“a little saving for me there”) — eating too much won’t corrupt my judgement that the triangle’s angles equal two right angles. Alcoholics deny not the principle but that they drink too much. Boundary with (a): Shakespeare on TV or Mozart playing distracts one from reading, though not contrary to reason. Student: Heraclitus, moderation the greatest virtue; the Greek name for temperance means “saving reason” [ed.: sōphrosynē]. Aside: the boy in seminar distracted by the girl who is “drinking in your words.”
   • (c) Binding: bodily pleasure brings a transformation of the body, more than any other passion, since the appetite is more vehemently affected toward a present than an absent thing (hence avoiding “occasions of sin”); such disturbances bind the use of reason, as in vinolenti, drunks. Student: Thomas says certain sins of the flesh so blind the mind that a man who knew that touching the object would send him straight to hell would not stop.

9. Article 3, replies (“entirely in his ear”) #

• Reply 1: bodily pleasure has rest of the appetite in the pleasant thing, a rest sometimes contrary to reason; and on the body’s side always some change; on both counts it impedes. Example: the angry man in a disagreement “sees the light” only after calming down — “for the time being they can’t, because of the body.”
• Reply 2: desiring and grasping powers are diverse parts, but of one soul; intention vehemently applied to one act impedes the other. Mozart “entirely in his ear” (first hearing Bach, little played then); his brother Marcus on Detroit artists — “I’ve never seen a shade of blue just like that,” entirely in their eyes; a student on Anthony Weiler and shades of colour; “I’m just dull.”
• Reply 3: the use of reason requires the suitable use of imagination and the other sensitive powers, which use a bodily organ; so bodily change impedes reason by impeding them. Hence fiction “to refresh the imagination,” the slave of reason; his cardboard cutouts of the regular solids hung from the lights to help imagine solid geometry.
• Class stops before a. 4.

His words #

• “looking before and after”: Thomas’s order — the passion itself, its causes, its effects (attributed to Shakespeare).
• “premium”: the prooemium of the question.
• “Natural Hearing” [ed.: Physics].
• “grasping power” / “grasping part”: Thomas’s term for the cognitive power, as against “knowing power” [ed.: vis apprehensiva].
• “spiritual magnitude”: the perfection a man grasps himself to have obtained.
• laetitia: pleasure named from dilation.
• fastidium: rendered “boredom” or “disgust,” not “tedium” or “scorn.”
• thirst “properly” (of a thing not had) vs. “commonly” (exclusion of disgust); “intensity of the affections.”
• per se loquendo / per accidens.
• totum simul: all at once, as opposed to successive reception.
• paulatim: “bit by bit,” how the mind acquires truth.
• “diminishing returns”: his gloss on bodily pleasures becoming disgusting.
• simpliciter / secundum quid: “there’s a famous distinction there.”
• “estimate of prudence” vs. “speculative estimation.”
• distraction, contrariety, binding: the threefold impediment.
• vinolenti: the drunks.
• “saving reason”: the meaning of the Greek name for temperance [ed.: sōphrosynē].

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 33, prooemium; a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, replies); a. 2 (whole); a. 3 (whole).
• Psalm 118, latum mandatum tuum nimis (in obj. 1 of a. 1).
• Isaiah 60 (sed contra a. 1); John 4 (sed contra a. 2); Ecclesiasticus 24:29; 1 Peter 1; Wisdom 8:16.
• Aristotle, Ethics VI (pleasure corrupts the estimate of prudence); Ethics X (proper pleasures increase operations).
• Aristotle, Physics VII (the soul becomes knowing in coming to rest).
• Augustine, Confessions IV (the first part of a verse).

Mentioned

• Thomas, commentary on Matthew (“in whom I am well pleased”).
• Thomas, commentary on Job, opening (paulatim).
• Thomas on the four kinds of causes, “third corollary” (locus unclear; the ship captain).
• Dionysius (pseudo) on beauty with goodness.
• Bonaventure (name uncertain) on the delayed Messiah.
• Augustine, De Trinitate (his Spanish edition).
• Thomas on sins of the flesh blinding the mind (student, no locus).
• De Tocqueville on distraction; Belloc on Protestantism; Heraclitus on moderation; John of the Cross / Teresa, “I die because I do not die.”

His questions #

• What do you have in God among the passions? Love and pleasure; no desire, since God lacks nothing.
• Is beauty more the object of reason or of the will? Reason, he thinks (“Thomas says so”; geometry has beauty without goodness), though “lovely” pulls toward the good.
• Can both love and pleasure dilate us? Yes, in different ways: love by extension to others, pleasure by being made more capacious.
• What is the best translation of fastidium? Boredom or disgust; “scornful” too hard.
• Does digesting my food impede my thinking? “Depends on what you eat.”
• Won’t you get bored in heaven, the same sight over and over? “Little do you know” — spiritual pleasures perfect nature and cause more thirst at their consummation.
• Can you be at rest and in motion at the same time? Not if completely at rest; when the good is imperfectly had, desire’s motion does not wholly cease.
• What did de Tocqueville call the greatest vice of the mind in democratic times? Distraction.
• Why do you need fiction? To refresh the imagination, on which the use of reason depends.