Why the Emotions Matter, and How Desire Causes Sorrow (Summa I-II, Q.36, Arts. 1-2)

Orientation #

He says “we left off last time” at Question 36, Article 2, “whether concupiscence is a cause of sorrow”; the class ends with the reply to the third objection, so the rest of q. 36 remains for next time (he does not say so). Verified sources place the episode within I-II q. 36, between a. 1 and a. 3, with a. 2 read in class. The previous class treated the species of sadness (q. 35) and the beginning of q. 36 on its causes; the next continues q. 36 and touches q. 37.

The class, in order #

1. The natural road, senses to reason (“the road is from the senses to reason”) #

Point (fragment before the prayer): the order of learning follows nature. 1. The nature of a thing is what is first in it; 2. man is an animal with reason, so he has senses because an animal, and reason besides; 3. the general comes before the particular in time; so the road is from the senses to reason, “a basic syllogism” to be applied to what Thomas does.

2. Why the treatise on the emotions matters: the will (“the emotions are more known to us”) #

Point: the names of the emotions are carried over to name acts of the will, dropping the bodily (material) aspect and keeping the formal.

• Why carry the names over instead of coining names for the will? A student asks whether any language has done so (like the Eskimo seven words for snow); he knows of none. Answer: the emotions are more known to us because sensible; we are led from the more known and sensible to the less known and not sensible, the first road of §1.
• Anecdote: as a boy at Nativity of Our Lord, St. Paul, hearing a priest on “the love of God” and trying to work out what it meant, knowing love of candy (and maybe of girls) but no such feeling for God; the love of God is an act of the will, not an emotion.
• He notes that Thomas, while treating the emotion, sometimes alludes to what corresponds to it in the will. So the treatise is useful not only for emotions but for understanding acts of the will.

3. Carried over to God: only joy and love (“only two of them can be properly carried over”) #

Point: from the Summa Contra Gentiles (chapter that there are no passions in God), of the eleven emotion-names only two carry over properly to God.

1. None carry over as to the bodily aspect.
2. Even formally, some are excluded by the object: if the object is something bad (sadness), nothing bad can happen to God.
3. Emotions are distinguished not only by object but by how they stand toward it: joy and desire both have the good as object, but joy is in the presence and possession, desire in the absence and lacking. God is universally good, has every good (“I will show you every good,” which Thomas takes as “Myself”); so desire cannot be said of God, but joy can, since both object and way of being toward it fit.
4. Fear is excluded for two reasons: its object is bad, and it regards something that could still happen to you, implying changeability; God is unchangeable. Desire is excluded for one reason only.

• Student: can any other name carry over? Love, because love can be both in the presence and in the absence of the good.
• Example: the philosopher is called a lover of wisdom, not one who wonders, since wonder is a kind of desire for wisdom that ceases when wisdom is acquired, while love remains whether pursuing or possessing (he adds he is mostly still desiring it).
• He is stressing this: “such a beautiful treatise”, “see how basic it is”: eleven emotions (six concupiscible now, then five irascible: hope, despair, fear, anger, etc.), useful for the will and for knowing why there is love and joy in God “but that’s it, properly speaking.”

4. Other uses: human beings, fiction, rhetoric, ethics, music (“how universal this is and important”) #

Point: the treatise is a foundation for several sciences and arts.

• Human beings: they live somewhat, sometimes very much, on the level of the emotions, especially the young; women perhaps, but men too.
• Fiction, epic and drama, in two ways: (a) understanding characters, e.g. Othello’s emotion when he kills Desdemona, Coriolanus angry turning against Rome; (b) understanding the emotional effect of the work. Aristotle’s definition of tragedy: a likeness of a serious, complete action of some magnitude, acted not narrated, in sweetened language, moving us to pity and fear so as to purge them. The prologue to Romeo and Juliet (a 14-line Shakespearean sonnet) touches pity (“piteous overthrows”) and, in the third quatrain, fear (“fearful passage”). He says he has been trying to work out a definition of comedy, which emotions it moves and what purgation it works (left open).
• Rhetoric, the art of persuasion, has three means: the image the speaker projects of himself, moving the hearers’ emotions, and the arguments. Aristotle treats the emotions in Rhetoric book II, aimed at jury and political assembly; this treatise is the background. Anecdote: his mother on jury duty, a taxi-cab accident where the cab driver seemed not responsible, but the jury wanted to vote against the cab company because it “can afford to pay,” out of pity for the other man. Angry jurors find a man more guilty, pitying ones less. A student adds that law schools teach an advocacy writing course in putting emotional spin on facts you may not ethically change.
• Ethics: many virtues and vices are about emotions: courage and magnanimity about irascible ones, temperance about concupiscence, mildness about anger.
• Poetic art joined to music, since music represents (at least in part) the emotions: in classical music the minor key, other things equal, suits sadness, fear, anger (Mozart’s D-minor and C-minor concertos have anger; the sad quintet is in G minor); major keys for joy and hope; when Mozart turns a melody from major to minor, it turns from hope to a kind of despair.

5. Q. 36 a. 2: the objections and sed contra (“it seems that concupiscence… is not the cause”) #

Point: he reads the article; like the treatment of love, Thomas goes into causes and effects after the thing itself.

• Obj. 1: sadness regards the bad; concupiscence (wanting) is a motion of the appetitive power toward the good; motion in one contrary is not the cause of motion toward the other.
• Obj. 2 (Damascene): sadness is about a present bad; wanting is about the future.
• Obj. 3: what is per se delightful is not a cause of pain; desire is in itself pleasant (Aristotle, Rhetoric I). Example: the man anticipating his beer or favourite food takes pleasure in the wanting.
• Sed contra, Augustine, Enchiridion [Latin unclear in recording]: ignorance of things to be done and desire of bad things bring on their followers error and pain; ignorance causes error, so concupiscence causes pain.

6. The response: two causes of desire, love the first beginning (“a twofold cause of the natural desire”) #

Point: sadness is a motion of the animal (i.e. sensing) desiring power; appetitive motion has a likeness to natural desire, which has two kinds of cause.

• Natural desire: we say even a plant “wants” sunlight or water (you can hear a dry plant absorbing water); the psalm “O God, you are my God… my flesh pines, my soul thirsts like parched earth” compares the soul’s thirst for God to soil thirsting for water.
• Twofold cause: (a) by way of end (finis), that for the sake of which; (b) whence the motion begins (principium; though principium can name any cause, one thinks first of the mover). Example: the heavy body’s descent has the place below as end and its natural inclination as beginning.
• Aside on Apocalypse “I am the Alpha and the Omega… the beginning and the end”, Greek arche and telos: God is a cause in two ways, which is how Thomas divides the Summa Contra Gentiles: book I God in himself, II God as principium of creatures, III God as end, with providence directing things to him.
• Applied to appetite: the cause in the manner of end is the object, and for sadness that is (as said before) the bad joined to you; the cause as beginning is the interior inclination of the desiring power, which is first inclined to the good and only consequently repudiates the contrary evil. Examples: you desire health before you reject sickness; you flee ignorance because knowledge is desirable, so desiring knowledge is more fundamental than fleeing ignorance.
• Hence the first beginning of the motion is love (first inclination to attaining the good); the second beginning is hate (first inclination to fleeing evil).
• Since concupiscence (cupiditas taken as synonym here) is the first effect of love, the one in which we most take pleasure, Augustine frequently puts concupiscence for love; taken so, concupiscence is the universal cause of sadness, because you first love the good and then reject what opposes it. Example: if something happens to my wife or children I am sad because of my love for them; reading of a stranger’s death in the newspaper gives only a little of something, not that sadness.

7. Digression: Augustine, Plato, and Socrates’ syllogism on love (“Is God really love?”) #

Point: he warns “be careful what Augustine is saying,” since Thomas says Augustine follows Plato as far as he can without conflict with the faith; the Symposium shows the Platonic root.

• Symposium order: six speakers, speeches improving around the table; Socrates last, before him the tragic poet Agathon (host, prize-winner), before him the comic poet Aristophanes, before these the rhetoricians. He used to ask students: who is more profound about love, comic or tragic poet (everyone thinks of Romeo and Juliet, so tragedy), and poets or rhetoricians (poets: love is their subject).
• Socrates on the amphiboly of “speaking well”: praising vs. speaking truly, here and in the Apology, where he is not a good speaker as the persuasive prosecutors are, but if a good speaker means one who tells the truth, he is a very good one.
• Socrates’ argument, put as a syllogism: if you love something you want it; if you want something you lack it; so the lover of the good and beautiful lacks goodness and beauty. (English “want” means both desire and lack, and they go together.) He used it to ask students “Is God really love?”: granting the premise, God would lack goodness.
• The mistake, per Thomas in this article: love is followed by joy if you have the thing, by desire if you do not; so love is not necessarily followed by desire. God loves himself, his own goodness, and does not lack himself. Augustine’s putting concupiscence for love is “a little platonic there” and could be a problem.

8. Concupiscence properly: sometimes, not universally, a cause (“cannot be the universal cause of sadness”) #

Point: taken in its proper notion, wanting is sometimes a cause of sadness.

1. Whatever impedes a motion from reaching its term is contrary to the motion; 2. what is contrary to the motion of the desiring power saddens; so 3. concupiscence causes sadness insofar as we are saddened by the retarding (delay) or total absence of the good desired. Examples: wanting to understand something and being unable; wanting a beer with none available; wanting a friend with none available.

• But not the universal cause, as love is (there is always some love behind sadness, since the evil inflicted is contrary to something loved): we are more saddened by the subtraction of present goods we delight in than by future goods we desire.
• He notes the parallel with the first article (on causes of sadness, like the first on causes of love): the first cause of love is the good, of sadness the bad, and more the bad joined to you than the good lost, since the good lost saddens only as understood as something bad. “Kind of a subtle thing.”

9. The replies (“in some way present, insofar as it is hoped”) #

• Ad 1: the objection misses that love and desire of the good lie behind opposition to its contrary evil; the inclination to attaining the good is the cause of the inclination to fleeing the bad. Examples: if I did not love life I would not flee death; health / sickness; wisdom / folly.
• Ad 2: what is desired, though really future, is in some way present insofar as it is hoped (Paul on “things hoped for”); in hope strictly you see the good as possible and coming, so you rejoice. Example: the man told by his wife he holds the winning lottery ticket, checking the numbers himself, then feeling as if he has the money before collecting; some call the police to escort them. Or: though the good is future, the impediment opposing and delaying it is present, and that causes sadness: thirst can cause pain, especially prolonged (Brother Mark: in the desert you first want an ice-cream soda, then just water).
• Ad 3: desire is pleasant, as Aristotle says, as long as hope of attaining remains; when hope is lost through the impediment, the desire causes pain. “Pangs of unrequited love, as Hamlet says” [ed.: he gives it as “unrequited”].
• Student: Buddhism says desire is the cause of all pain. He: it admits the truth of this, but not universally, since the same desire is also a cause of pleasure when not prolonged and hope remains; kill all your desires and you deprive yourself of possible pleasure.
• Asides: TV interviews about “the cliff” (the debt) with people who had no idea what it was, and campaign interviews asking whether Obama did well to take Ryan as running mate, showing how ignorant people are; a brother-in-law’s friend in a governor’s race amazed that supporters did not know the candidate opposed what they stood for. The break-in at St. Anne’s, Shrewsbury, where the children’s Christmas presents were stolen and toy manufacturers offered to replace them (his own parish is St. Mary’s).

His words #

• “Feelings”, “emotions”: his rendering of passiones.
• “wanting”, “desire”: concupiscentia, cupiditas (taken as synonyms in this text).
• “the bad joined to you”: malum coniunctum, the object of sadness.
• “animal desiring power” = “sensing desiring power” [ed.: sensitive appetite].
• principium: “beginning”, “whence there is a beginning of motion”, the mover; finis: end, “that for the sake of which”; arche, telos (Apocalypse).
• “repudiates”, “goes against”: the appetite’s secondary movement against the evil contrary to the good.
• “speak well”: amphiboly, to praise vs. to speak truly (Socrates).
• “want”: English sense both desire and lack.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 36, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, response, replies 1-3).
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, prologue (lines on pity and fear). Mentioned
• Summa Contra Gentiles: chapter that there are no passions in God (book I, inferred); division of books I-III.
• Aristotle, Rhetoric I (desire pleasant); Rhetoric II (the emotions).
• Aristotle’s definition of tragedy (Poetics, inferred).
• Augustine, Enchiridion (sed contra); Damascene (obj. 2).
• Plato, Symposium; Apology.
• Psalm “O God, you are my God… my soul thirsts” (Ps. 62/63, inferred); Apocalypse “Alpha and Omega”; Paul on things hoped for.
• Shakespeare, Othello, Coriolanus, Hamlet.
• Mozart concertos in D minor and C minor; G-minor quintet.

His questions #

• Why do we carry over the names of the emotions to the acts of the will instead of naming those acts independently? Because the emotions are more known to us, being sensible; we go from the more known to the less known.
• Of the eleven emotion-names, which can properly be carried over to God? Only joy and love; desire fails by its mode (absence), sadness by its object, fear by both object and changeability.
• Why is the philosopher called a lover of wisdom rather than one who wonders? Wonder is a desire that ceases with acquisition; love remains in presence and absence.
• Who is more profound about love, the comic or the tragic poet, the poets or the rhetoricians? The tragic poet; the poets, since love is their subject.
• “Is God really love?” if the lover wants and the wanter lacks? The premise is faulty: love is followed by joy when the good is had; God loves himself and lacks nothing.
• Is it because you desire knowledge that you flee ignorance? Yes; desiring the good is more fundamental than fleeing its contrary.
• Is concupiscence the universal cause of sadness? Only when Augustine’s “concupiscence” means love; properly, it is sometimes a cause, by delay or absence of the good.
• What are the emotions comedy moves us to, and what is its purgation? Left open.