Summa I-II q.35 a.7-8: Is Inner Sorrow Greater Than Bodily Pain? The Four Species of Sadness

Orientation #

He does not say anything about last time or next time; the class moves straight into “the seventh” article after the opening prayer, and ends mid-sentence in the corpus of “the eighth.” The previous class treated earlier articles of q. 35 (contemplation and sadness; desire for pleasure vs. flight from pain), and the next continues with the species of sadness and q. 36 on its causes.

The class, in order #

1. The three objections: exterior pain seems greater (“exterior pain is greater than the interior pain”) #

Reads the objections of a. 7 with running comment.

1. Exterior pain is caused by something repugnant to the good constitution of the body, “in which there is life”; interior sorrow comes from “the imagining of the evil”; life is more loved than an imagined good, so exterior pain is greater. Aside: Hamlet’s “nothing good or bad but thinking makes it so”; he takes “thinking” there in the sense of imagining one’s situation. Joke: the man asking the doctor for “13 pills” for post-election depression.
2. Things move more than the likeness of a thing; exterior pain comes from a real joining of a contrary (“my fist hitting you… my knife into your flesh”), interior pain from an apprehended likeness; so exterior is greater.
3. A cause is known from its effect; exterior pain has stronger effects, since more men die of exterior pains than of interior sorrow. Aside: Shakespeare’s character — men have died from time to time, “but not from love.”

2. Sed contra: Ecclesiasticus 25 (“Every plague is the sadness of the heart”) #

Reads “omnis plaga tristitia cordis est, et omnis malitia nequitia mulieris.” He notes the Latin is “nequitia” (wickedness), and that omnis modifies plaga, so the sense is that the sadness of the heart is every plague, exceeding every exterior plague. Asides on the second half: “Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned,” a new Anna Karenina film, Jezebel, Lady Macbeth “propping him up to the deed.”

3. The corpus: how the two pains agree and differ (“in one thing and in two things they differ”) #

The point: both are motions of the appetitive power; they differ in the two things required for pleasure and sadness — the cause (a good or evil now joined, “conjunctum”) and the apprehension of it.

• On “joined”: in pleasure and pain the thing is joined to you; in desire it is absent; love can be with or without the thing (“absence makes the heart grow fonder”).
• Cause: exterior pain’s cause is an evil joined that is repugnant to the body (knife, brand, torch); interior sorrow’s cause is an evil repugnant to the appetite (the election was contrary to what they wanted, not to the body).
• Apprehension: exterior pain follows the sense, “especially touch” — even a jab or speck in the eye is felt “since it touched”; interior pain follows imagination or reason itself.

4. Why interior sorrow is greater: per se before per aliud (“what is per se is before that which is to another”) #

Argument, as he gives it:

1. The cause of interior sorrow is repugnant to the appetite per se; the cause of exterior pain is repugnant to the appetite only because repugnant to the body, i.e. per aliud.
2. “Always, what is per se is before that which is to another” — “That’s a very important ‘before.’” His examples: water is wet before the cloth is wet; sugar before the sweetened coffee; fire is hotter than the air around it. Other uses of the same principle: Aristotle showing the friendship of virtue is better than friendships of use and pleasure because the person is loved per se, not per aliud; and the argument to the unmoved mover — the moved mover moves through another, the unmoved mover per se, hence God is before the moved mover.
3. Therefore on the side of the cause interior sorrow is preeminent.
4. On the side of the apprehension, reason and imagination are higher knowing powers than touch. Conclusion: simply and per se speaking, interior sorrow is greater. Sign: a man will voluntarily undergo exterior pains to avoid interior ones — fighting and being injured rather than lose honor or the woman; losing sleep to make more money. Insofar as the exterior pain is not repugnant to the interior appetite, it is “in a way pleasurable” by the interior joy; when both coincide, the sadness is increased.

5. Interior sorrow is also more universal (“not only is the interior pain greater”) #

Point: whatever is repugnant to the body can also be repugnant to the interior appetite (the Civil War amputations), and whatever sense apprehends imagination and reason can apprehend, “but it is not convertible”: reason can know somewhat the pleasure of wine or of sleep when tired, but touch cannot know the joy of a theorem of Euclid, nor immaterial evils such as loneliness, “caused by the absence of a friend.” Hence the omnis plaga of the sed contra is significant: exterior plagues are comprehended under sadness of heart (he supposes this holds even in the damned). His recap: two things involved, joining and apprehension; the per se is “more so” than the per aliud; then the second point, universality. Aside: a tooth pulled is losing “part of myself.” Editorial remark on the text: he would set the non solum apart to mark the second point.

6. The replies (“the comparison of the interior sorrow to the exterior”) #

• Ad 1: interior sadness can also be about things contrary to life; so the comparison is not by the diverse evils but by the diverse relation of the cause to the appetite, per se vs. per aliud.
• Ad 2: Thomas “denies the premise.” Interior sadness is not about the likeness apprehended but about the thing of which it is a likeness — the dream that someone has died: you are sad about the person, not the dream, and relieved on waking. And the more immaterial and abstract the likeness, the more perfectly the thing is known (immateriality is the basis of knowing), so the interior sorrow is as it were about a greater evil, the evil being more known — the doctor’s “six months to live” is known more than the senses know.
• Ad 3: bodily changes are more caused by exterior pain, because its cause corrupts the body and requires the apprehension of touch, and because the exterior sense is more bodily than the interior, as the sense appetite is more bodily than the intellectual. Aristotle in the proem of the De Anima: emotions involve the body, so a complete definition of fear must bring in the body; when the names of the emotions are carried over to the will, the bodily aspect drops off. Examples: fear of the big dog in the car and the shaking hands; people dying of anger, of fear, and “of joy” (overcome and collapsing — a student queries “dying of love”; he distinguishes).

7. Article 8: Damascene’s four species (“four species of sadness”) #

Reads the list: acedia, achthos or anxiety “according to Gregory of Nyssa,” misericordia (pity or mercy), invidia (envy).

• Acedia: sadness about spiritual things — “I’m tired of praying, tired of going to mass.” The Church’s translators often rendered it “laziness,” which is more bodily; Damascene keeps it as its own thing. Story: the priest who said “we’ll be all churched out”; Father Robert’s homilies against acedia.
• Footnote: the “Gregory of Nyssa” cited is really Nemesius, “a different guy.” Digression on equivocation: words equivocal by reason deceive in philosophy; words equivocal by chance (two men with one name) deceive in history — Gertrude the Great confused with the abbess Gertrude of Hackeborn; Thomas Anglicus with Thomas Angelicus; Cardinal Guevara. Not strictly a philosopher’s problem, “he’s dealing with the universal.”

8. The objections to the division (“insufficient is the fourfold division”) #

1. Sadness is opposed to pleasure, and no species are assigned to pleasure; so none should be to sadness.
2. Penance (sadness over one’s sin), nemesis (indignation) and zelus (jealousy) are species of sadness not included. Aristotle distinguishes envy, sadness at another’s good fortune, from indignation, sadness that the good is unworthy — “I’m indignant that Obama’s reelected.”
3. Every division should be through opposites, but these four are not opposed. Per “Gregory”: acedia stops (amputates) the voice, anxiety weighs one down, envy is sadness at another’s goods, pity at another’s evils; one can be sad at another’s goods and at the same time be weighed down and lose his voice. He wonders aloud what Thomas will say about the authority of this division. Sed contra: the authority of “Gregory” (probably not him) and Damascene. Digression on envy: charity is a kind of friendship, and envy is the vice opposed to it — applicable to human friendship too: a friend rejoices in the good of the friend, so sadness at his good is a sign of not loving, or at least a defect and a temptation that, if habitual, destroys the friendship. Examples: the roommate’s fine boyfriend; the classmate who lands a job first; the novelist’s saying that success is hard on a man “but even harder on his friends”; lottery winners who end up less happy (his advice: spend nothing for six months).

9. Corpus: how something is added to a genus (“to a genus, something can be added in two ways”) #

Point: a species is what it has from addition to the genus (cf. Porphyry’s definitions of difference, including “what the species has in addition to the genus”); but addition is twofold. He “points out a distinction” rather than “makes” one, which sounds arbitrary.

• Per se addition, making true species (Metaphysics, “seventh… eighth book”): rational added to animal; triangle divided into equilateral, isosceles, scalene — different ways of being three lines.
• Extraneous addition, not making true species in the usual sense: white added to animal, green to triangle. Yet things are called species of a genus because the ratio of the genus is applied to something extraneous: coal and flame as species of fire (fire applied to exterior matter); astronomy and perspective as species of mathematics (mathematical principles applied to natural things). The Pythagorean fourfold of arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy: music and astronomy apply number and geometry to sounds and the heavens; the truly per se division of quantity (Categories) is discrete and continuous. Conclusion: the species of sadness are assigned in the second way, by applying the notion of sadness to something extraneous, either on the side of the cause (he asks whether this means the object, since the object of a passion is its cause) or the effect.

10. The four species derived (“the proper object of sadness is one’s own evil”) #

On the side of the object: sadness is properly of one’s own evil.

• Extraneous as to “one’s own” only: sadness at another’s evil, estimated as one’s own — mercy/pity. “I don’t strictly pity myself”; the friend is another self.
• Extraneous as to both (not one’s own, not even an evil): sadness at another’s good, perversely thought one’s own evil — envy. Examples: two scratch tickets, yours wins; “you got the girl.” Contrast stressed: mercy is about another’s evil; envy not even about an evil but about a good. Aside: suspicion of psychologists; a student says a few build on Thomas. On the side of the effect: sadness’s proper effect is flight of the appetite.
• Flight taken away, no refuge seen: anxiety, also called angustia, being narrowed. Aside on “predicament”: from praedicamentum, a category; what is in one category cannot pass to another (a virtue cannot become a substance or a quantity), hence “in a predicament” — no way out.
• Weighing down so great that it immobilizes the exterior members: acedia, extraneous as to both flight and appetite; hence it “amputates the voice,” the voice being the exterior motion that most expresses interior conceptions and affections, in animals too (the dog barks, the cat meows; his orange tabby Lucy). Recording ends here.

His words #

• “consistency of the body” — Thomas’s bona consistentia corporis, the body’s good constitution.
• “joined” (conjunctum) — the good or evil present, as distinguishing pleasure/sadness from desire and love.
• “per se / per aliud” — “through itself / to another”; the per se is “more so” and “before.”
• “grasping” — apprehension (apprehensio), of sense, imagination or reason.
• “the sense-desiring power” — the sensitive appetite.
• “acedia” — being tired of spiritual things; not “laziness.”
• “achthos” — anxiety, angustia, “being narrowed.”
• “misericordia” — pity or mercy; “invidia” — envy.
• “nemesis” — indignation; “zelus” — jealousy.
• “equivocal by reason / by chance” — the two kinds of equivocation from Sophistical Refutations.
• “points out a distinction” — his preferred phrase over “makes a distinction.”
• “predicament” — from praedicamentum (category).

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 35, a. 7 (whole article: objections, sed contra, corpus, replies).
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 35, a. 8 (inferred; “to the eighth”), objections, sed contra and corpus up to acedia.
• Ecclesiasticus 25 (the sed contra of a. 7). Mentioned
• Aristotle, De Anima, proem (emotions involve the body).
• Aristotle, Metaphysics “seventh/eighth book” (true species).
• Aristotle, Categories (discrete and continuous quantity; praedicamenta).
• Aristotle, Sophistical Refutations (equivocation), Ethics on friendship (locus not stated).
• Porphyry, Isagoge (definitions of difference).
• Damascene; “Gregory of Nyssa” / Nemesius.
• Shakespeare: Hamlet, Macbeth; Anna Karenina; Gertrude the Great.

His questions #

• Is exterior pain greater than the interior pain of the heart? No: simply and per se speaking, interior sorrow is greater, and more universal.
• In what do the two pains agree, and in what differ? Both are motions of the appetite; they differ in the cause joined and in the apprehension.
• Is the man sad because of his dream or because of the thing the dream is a likeness of? Of the thing; he wakes relieved that the person is alive.
• Is the good or bad thing joined in every passion? Only in pleasure and sadness; in desire it is absent, love can be either.
• What is envy, and how does it differ from indignation? Envy is sadness at another’s good fortune; indignation is sadness that the good is unworthily had.
• Does “ex parte causae” mean the object? He suggests yes, since the object of a passion is its cause; left open.
• Will Thomas accept Damascene’s division as sufficient? Yes, by the second kind of addition, applying sadness to something extraneous.
• Why does acedia especially “amputate the voice”? Because the voice most expresses interior conceptions and affections, in men and animals.