Melancholy, Loneliness and the Replies of a.8; q.36 a.1: Is Sadness Caused More by Evil Present or Good Lost?

Orientation #

The class picks up mid-discussion of Damascene’s four species of sadness (acedia, anxiety, mercy, envy) from the previous article, finishes its replies, then begins Question 36 on the causes of sadness. He looks ahead to “a new question on the causes of sadness and the effects.” The previous class worked through exterior vs. interior pain and Damascene’s fourfold division; the next continues q. 36 on the causes of sorrow.

The class, in order #

1. Are Damascene’s four species exhaustive? Melancholy and loneliness (“Melancholy is not mentioned here, is it”) #

Point: Thomas explains the four species but does not claim the division is exhaustive; two important kinds of sadness are missing.

• His own definition of comedy: comedy purges melancholy, as tragedy (Aristotle) purges pity. Tragedy purifies pity of its superficiality and inappropriateness: the parent annoyed at the whining child (“I’ll give you something to cry about”) vs. Oedipus the King, Othello discovering he was deceived — real reasons for pity. So pity and melancholy must be distinguished; calling tragedy’s effect “melancholy” is a mistake. English comic poets know their job is to drive out melancholy (and purify merriment).
• Loneliness: sadness over the lack or absence of a friend — no friend, or the friend away, separated by distance. Aristotle: no man would want to live without friends.
• Melancholy vs. pity: melancholy is sadness over one’s own misfortune, or the miserable state of the world one is part of (the daily newspaper; “the collapse of the country with the election of Obama”); pity (misericordia, “miserable at heart”) is sadness over the misery of another.
• Student: “It sounds like he’s defending them.” Reply: he is expressing what they are; the body does not say these are the only kinds.
• Illustrations of melancholy and its cure: in Shakespeare’s time it was fashionable for a gentleman to be melancholic; De Koninck melancholic at moderns who see no difference between computer and human mind (Charlie Rose interviewing a computer expert who dated when computers would surpass the mind; the checkers program that beat him — “can’t beat other things, do you?”); the Punch cartoon of two scientists reading the computer’s printout “I think, therefore I am” — the right joke relieves a friend’s melancholy; the girl at the mixer nobody asks to dance (his friend Jim always asked her).
• Why it matters: the connection between melancholy and despair is dangerous — people commit suicide. “It’s really, really important to talk about those things.”

2. Reply to obj. 1: why species of sadness and not of pleasure (“pleasure is caused from the good”) #

Point: pleasure is caused by the good, which happens in one way; sadness by the bad, which happens in many ways (citing Dionysius) — hence more named species of sadness.

• We lack names for kinds of pleasure (pleasure in a theorem, in wine, in Shakespeare) — no such vocabulary.
• Example: how many species of good health? One — everything has to be good. But heart trouble, cancers of every kind, all have names. No species of good health, many named diseases. “Nice little things that Thomas is saying, and you reflect upon them.”

3. Reply to obj. 2: penance, and where melancholy would go (“penance is about one’s own evil”) #

Point: penance is about one’s own evil (the sins committed), which is per se the object of sadness, so it is not among species taken from something extrinsic.

• If he asked “what about melancholy, Thomas?” in class, the answer would be the same: not extrinsic; likewise loneliness.
• Jealousy or nemesis are contained under envy in some way (to be made clearer later). So the division may be exhaustive only of the extrinsic kinds.

4. Reply to obj. 3: not a division by opposition; the mathematical sciences aside (“according to the diversity of extraneous things”) #

Point: the division is not by opposition of species in the strict sense, but by the diversity of extraneous things to which the ratio of sadness is drawn.

• Aside on the body’s comparison to mathematical sciences (perspective, music, astronomy): medieval liberal arts — trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric), quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music; not perspective) — “a little give and take,” Pythagoras’s authority behind it. Astronomy included for nobility: it arouses wonder, heavenly bodies seemed eternal and superior to bodies here. Music for virtue — Aristotle in the Politics on the right music for the young, “not paid too much attention nowadays.”
• His verdict: “I think he should have talked about melancholy. We’ll give him a pass on this.” He should have divided the per se kinds.

5. Question 36: the four articles on the causes of sadness (“whether concupiscence, desire, I suppose, wanting”) #

Point: q. 36 asks (1) whether the cause of sadness is the good lost or more the evil joined; (2) whether concupiscence is a cause; (3) whether desire for unity is a cause — “a strange one”; (4) whether a power one cannot resist is a cause.

• Aside on art. 4: Aristotle says one thing to be feared is to be in the power of another man, “for as a rule men do evil whenever they can” — “not too optimistic a view.”

6. Q. 36 a. 1: objections and sed contra (“Am I sad about my sickness or my loss of health”) #

Point: three objections argue the good lost is more the cause of pain than the bad joined.

1. Augustine, Eight questions of Dulcitius (a proper name): there is sadness over loss of temporal goods (1929 crash, jumping out of windows); so every sorrow is from loss of some good. (“Better to have loved and lost.”)
2. Sadness, contrary to pleasure, is about the same thing pleasure is about; pleasure is about the good; so sadness is chiefly about the loss of the good. His probe: what is contrary to good — the loss of the good, or the bad? Is the loss of the good also something bad (“in a negative way”)? Are my sickness and my loss of health the same?
3. Augustine, City of God XIV: love is the cause of sadness as of the other affections; the object of love is the good. His gloss: I must love something before I am sad at what takes it away. Boundary case: if I love virtue, am I sad at loss of virtue or at vice? Not the same — the absence of virtue is not necessarily vice.

• Sed contra: Damascene, book 2 — the evil expected constitutes fear, the present evil sadness.

7. The body: privation as a being of reason, and natural motion (“this question would be of no moment”) #

Point: because sadness follows apprehension, in which privation has the ratio of a being, it matters whether sadness chiefly regards the bad joined or the good lost.

1. If privations were in the soul’s grasp as they are in things, the question would be of no moment: the bad is the lack of the good (as in the first part), and a lack in rerum natura (“in reality,” he glosses) is nothing but lacking the opposite thing that could be had; so being sad at the good lost and at the bad had would be the same.
2. But sadness is a motion of the appetite following on apprehension; in apprehension the privation has the notion of a certain being — a being of reason.
   • Kasurik: “philosophy is the only subject where you can get paid for talking about nothing.” Is nothing something? In reality nothing; in reason, something. Aristotle, fifth book of “Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics], one sense of being is being as affirmation and negation, which includes beings only in the mind.
3. So the bad, though a privation, has itself by way of a contrary; hence for appetitive motion it differs whether it chiefly regards the bad joined or the good lost.
4. Animal appetite is in the soul’s works as natural motion in natural things, so truth is taken from natural motions: approach per se regards what suits the nature, receding what is contrary; the heavy recedes from the higher place and approaches the lower. But the cause of both, heaviness (“what we call gravity”), first inclines to the lower place, and then withdraws from above — it withdraws in order to tend downward.
   • Parallel: the man seeking knowledge withdraws from ignorance, but is more seeking than fleeing; Aristotle’s proemium of the Metaphysics says the first philosophers were fleeing ignorance, “therefore seeking knowledge.”
5. Conclusion: sadness is by way of flight, pleasure by way of pursuit; as pleasure first regards the good obtained, sadness regards the evil joined; but the cause of both — love — regards the good first, then the bad. So in the way the object is cause of a passion, the evil joined is more properly the cause of sadness than the good missed.

• Student asks whether it is “per modum fugae vehementius”; he: because it is by way of fleeing, it is more fleeing the evil joined than approaching.

8. Replies to the three objections (“under the ratio of something bad”) #

• Ad 1: loss of the good is apprehended under the ratio of something bad, as loss of the bad is apprehended under the ratio of something good (your cancer disappears — apprehended as good, causes joy). So the bad is more the cause: the loss of a good causes sadness only because grasped as bad; the good is more per se to pleasure than the loss of the bad.
• Ad 2: pleasure and the sadness contrary to it regard the same thing but under a contrary ratio — presence vs. absence — since each contrary includes the privation of the other (tenth book of the Metaphysics, “the book on the one and the many”).
• Ad 3: when many motions come from one cause, not all chiefly regard what the cause chiefly regards, only the first of them; each other regards what suits its proper definition. Love is fundamental (I love my children, so I fear they get hurt); its object is good, but the object of sadness and fear is the bad. Rejoicing at the loss of a bad and grieving at the loss of a good are “for contrary reasons.”

9. Second pass through the body (“grasping in terms of knowing”) #

Point: re-reading to absorb the terms.

• “Grasping” (apprehension) for knowing, because the known is in the knower; in logic the first act of reason was called simplex apprehensio. Contrast love, which is more in the thing: “I left my heart in San Francisco”; “where your treasure is, there your heart will be.”
• “Habit” in the privation definition means the thing had, not virtue.
• Animal appetite as opposed to natural desire.
• What the reply to obj. 3 does not carry over: whatever is the primary object of love need not be the primary object of everything caused by love. General rule: the object of any passion is its cause (what I fear causes my fear).
• Other side of the coin: the good lost is not a cause of sadness except insofar as it takes on the ratio of something bad, as the bad lost is not a cause of joy except as apprehended as good. “He’s a pretty smart guy.”

10. Closing aside: spiritual and material food (“the higher is the food of the lower”) #

A student had asked him about the Eucharist; his three differences: (1) in material food the lower is food of the higher (I eat the cow, the carrot); in spiritual food the higher feeds the lower; (2) material food is dead (cousin ordering steak so rare it says “moo”); spiritual food is alive; (3) material food is changed into the one fed (I don’t turn orange eating carrots); spiritual is the reverse — Thomas’s communion prayer (Omnipotens sempiterne Deus) asks to be incorporated into the mystical body. Other spiritual food: Dionysius on higher angels as food for lower by enlightenment; Socrates’ feast of reason; Thomas feeding our minds — his mind more alive than ours, assimilating us to his way of thinking.

His words #

• purges melancholy: his definition of comedy, parallel to tragedy purging pity
• loneliness: sadness over the lack or absence of a friend
• melancholy: sadness over one’s own misfortune or the miserable state of the world one is part of
• misericordia: pity, “miserable at heart” over another’s misery
• lack: his English for privation
• in rerum natura: “in reality,” in things
• being of reason: what a privation is in apprehension
• grasping / grasp: apprehension, knowing (simplex apprehensio, “simple apprehension”)
• recess, excess: withdrawal and approach in natural motion
• heaviness: “what we call gravity”
• animal appetite: the soul’s desire, as opposed to natural desire
• per modum fugae: sadness as by way of flight
• Wisdom: his name for the Metaphysics [ed.: Metaphysics]

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 35, a. 8 (inferred): replies to objections 1-3
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 36, prologue and a. 1: objections, sed contra, body, replies

Mentioned

• Augustine, questions to Dulcitius (obj. 1); City of God, book 14 (obj. 3)
• Damascene, book 2 (sed contra)
• Dionysius (reply to obj. 1 of q. 35; higher angels feeding lower)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (senses of being), X (contraries), proemium (fleeing ignorance); Politics (music); Aristotle on friends and on being in another’s power (no locus)
• Shakespeare, Othello; Sophocles, Oedipus the King
• Thomas’s prayer before communion

His questions #

• Does Thomas try to argue that this division is exhaustive? No — he explains what the four are, not that they are the only kinds.
• How do you distinguish pity and melancholy? Pity is over another’s misery; melancholy over one’s own misfortune or the world’s.
• How many species are there of good health? One; but diseases have many names.
• What’s contrary to good — the loss of the good, or the bad? The bad; the loss of the good is bad “in a negative way.”
• Is the absence of virtue always vice? No.
• When you talk about nothing, are you talking about something? Something in the mind — a being of reason.
• Is the man seeking knowledge more withdrawing from ignorance or seeking knowledge? Seeking knowledge — that is first.
• Is the good the main cause of sadness or fear? No, the bad; love’s object is good, but not everything caused by love has good as its object.