Summa I-II Q37 a3–4 & Q38 a1: Whether Sadness Hinders Action and Harms the Body, and Whether Any Pleasure Eases It

Orientation #

He says only “So we’re up to thirty-seven, I guess. Article 3”, picking up the effects of sadness; the body of a. 3 opens with “as has been said” (prev. lecture, the weighing-down of the soul). Next time is set by the prologue of q. 38 he reads: five remedies, the class getting through the first. The previous class treated the effects of pain (q. 35-37) and the next continues the remedies of sorrow (weeping, friends, contemplation, sleep and baths).

The class, in order #

1. Does sadness impede every operation? (“it seems that sadness does not impede every operation”) #

The point: sadness impedes the operation it is about but spurs the operation it causes; so the objections each hold in one respect.

• Objections as read: (1) solicitude is caused by sadness, and solicitude helps doing well (Apostle, 2 Timothy 2, “be solicitous”); (2) sadness causes desire in many (Ethics VII), and desire intensifies operation; (3) some operations are proper to the sad, e.g. weeping, and each thing is increased in what suits it — “I can cry better when I’m sad.” Aside: paid actors who wept less the more they were paid; Liberace’s brother, “he cried all the way to the bank.”
• Sed contra: Ethics X, pleasure perfects operation, sadness impedes it.
• “Thomas is going to see… a simple distinction” and will not answer the objections one by one, since the distinction shows the truth in them. Operation compared to sadness in two ways:
  1. as that about which the sadness is: then sadness impedes any operation. Reason: the will is the cause of human operation; if the operation is what one is sad about, the action is necessarily debilitated. Example: sad about studying something, the studying suffers; acedia, a kind of sadness, so that if praying makes you sad, the prayer is impeded. “Never that which we do with sadness do we do as well as that which we do with delight, or at least without sadness.”
  2. as beginning and cause: then such operation is increased. The sadder a man is, the more he tries to expel the sadness, as long as hope of expelling it remains — otherwise no motion at all would come from sadness.
• Aside on “beginning” (Metaphysics V, “the fifth book of wisdom”, end of the chapter on beginning): every cause is a beginning, not every beginning a cause — the point is the beginning of the line but not its cause; Thomas sometimes uses “beginning” almost as a synonym of cause.
• The old Dominican rule: “never affirm, rarely deny, always distinguish”; or “don’t say yes, don’t say no, say distinguo.”

2. Does sadness harm the body most? Objections and sed contra (“sadness does not most of all infer harm to the body”) #

The point: the three objections set up the reply — spiritual being, bodily change common to all passions, and the greater harm of madness.

• Obj. 1: sadness has spiritual being in the soul; what has spiritual being causes no bodily change, as the intentions of colour in the air colour no body. His gloss: red coming to the eye through air has “a kind of spiritual existence” and does not make the air red; he is unsure about smells, which “stink up the place.”
• Obj. 2: bodily harm comes only through a joined bodily change, and that is in all passions (Aristotle in the proemium of the De Anima: a complete definition of an emotion must include the bodily change).
• Obj. 3: anger and concupiscence make some insane (Ethics VII), the greatest bodily harm since reason is most excellent in man; and desperation, cause of sadness, seems more harmful than sadness.
• Sed contra: Proverbs 17:22 (“a rejoicing soul makes a flowering age, a sad spirit dries out the bones”) and Proverbs 25 (as moth to the garment and worm to the wood, so sadness harms the heart; death hurries from sadness). Aside: the life of Columbus, worms boring through wooden ships in warm Caribbean waters. Literary parallels: Washington Irving’s woman who died of being abandoned; Dickens’s Great Expectations, the old woman who stopped the clocks and went mad after being left at the altar.

3. Body of a. 4: repugnant in species, not only in quantity (“repugnant to human life as regards the very species”) #

The point: sadness harms the body most because it opposes the vital motion in its kind, whereas the other passions oppose it only by excess.

1. Human life consists in a motion diffused from the heart to the other members, according to a determined measure. (Asks a student whether that is good biology; aside on the church-counting friend with a new pacemaker.)
2. A motion that exceeds the measure is repugnant to life according to quantity, not species; one that impedes the process of the motion itself is repugnant according to species.
3. In every passion the bodily change (material) is conformed and proportionate to the appetite’s motion (formal), as matter to form everywhere. Aside: hence Pythagoras is wrong about transmigration — the soul recognised in a dog — since body and soul are relative to each other.
4. Passions of pursuit (love, joy, desire) are not repugnant in species, only possibly in quantity: they aid the body by their kind, harm by excess. Examples: people who died of joy — not joy as such but excess; Francis de Sales on the Blessed Mother dying of excessive love; Portia at the caskets in The Merchant of Venice, fearing to be overcome by joy at Bassanio’s right choice.
5. Passions of flight or retraction (fear, desperation, and before all sadness) are repugnant in species and therefore simpliciter — “not qua too much, but simply whatever amount.” Sadness most of all: it weighs down the soul from a present evil, of which the impression is stronger than that of the future evil in fear and despair.

• “You convinced with that argument?” — a student is still thinking; he finds it interesting and “it seems to somewhat agree with experience.” Aside: Shaw on Frances Chesterton’s death — “was it widowhood?”

4. Replies of a. 4 (“because the soul naturally moves the body”) #

• Ad 1: the soul naturally moves the body, so its spiritual motion is naturally a cause of bodily change — unlike the colour-intentions in the air, which have no order to moving bodies not apt to be moved by a soul (the soul as first act of a natural body with organs). Examples: Archimedes’ “Eureka!” leaping from the bath and running down the street; Thomas at dinner with the king, pounding the table, “that’s how to solve the Manichees” — the king: “write it down.”
• Ad 2: the other passions’ bodily change is conformed in species to the vital motion; sadness’s is the contrary. Example: the doctor’s remark that a man crushed by sadness who has lost the will to live will not live long.
• Ad 3: from a lighter cause (levior causa) is the use of reason impeded than life corrupted — many sicknesses remove reason without removing life. Fear and anger do their greatest bodily harm from the admixture of sadness in them (absence of what is desired); and sadness itself sometimes removes reason, as in those who fall into melancholy or madness. His modern gloss: sounds like bipolar — melancholy down, mania up.

5. Digression: which emotion-names carry over to God (“you can go all the way back to God”) #

The point: understanding the eleven emotions lets one say which names are said of God properly, which metaphorically, which not at all.

• Properly, with a new meaning: love and joy only.
• Metaphorically (metaphor = “carried over” in Greek), by likeness of effect: anger — the angry man punishes (toe-stepping example), so when God punishes he is said to be angry; pity — the one who pities relieves suffering, so God relieving by his will is said to pity; repentance — “I regret that I made man”: God does not change but does something different, as we do after a change of heart.
• Not even metaphorically: fear, despair — no likeness. Hope of a sinner’s salvation: he “wouldn’t even say” it of God, but is less sure. Student: hard to transplant emotions from time into eternity.
• Student: do all eleven carry over to the human will? Yes — the names carry to acts of our will with the bodily aspect dropped and the formal kept (sensible fear vs. the will’s fear); to God’s will, only love and joy. Where: Summa Contra Gentiles I, toward the end, after the will.
• Why joy comes before love there: joy’s object is a good possessed, so joy in God is more obvious; love can be of a good not yet had, hence Socrates’ tangle in the Symposium (love → want → lack, so love lacks goodness and beauty; applied to God, God would lack). Thomas points out one can love what one has, and argues from joy in God to love in God.
• The last three of the 102 chapters, on God’s beatitude: a surprising argument — happiness involves joy; other things equal one loves one’s own good more than another’s (kin, associates); God is beatitude itself, so has more joy in it than we, who partake of it (Adoro Te Devote, blessed in the sight of his glory). Examples: more joy in one’s own child’s success; Thomas asking about a dead sibling’s fate.
• Aside: one cannot study ethics without knowing the emotions, since some virtues concern them.

6. The remedies of sadness: prologue of q. 38 (“the remedies of pain or sadness”) #

Five questions: whether sadness is mitigated by any pleasure; by weeping; by the compassion of friends; by contemplation of truth; by sleep and baths. Asides: Shakespeare’s sleep that “knits up the raveled sleeve of care”; his grandmother given something to sleep after his grandfather died; Aristotle somewhere: the pleasures of the bath are those of a freeman; singing in the shower as a sign of joy.

7. Q. 38 a. 1, objections (“not just any pleasure mitigates just any sorrow”) #

• Obj. 1: pleasure mitigates only as contrary, since medicines work through contraries (Ethics II; too hot, cool him); but not every pleasure is contrary to every sadness — loneliness is opposed to friendship, so the lonely man seeks a friend. Aside: Aristotle’s father a doctor to the king, whence Philip chose Aristotle for Alexander; the book on Homer for Alexander; Plutarch’s story of Alexander’s complaint at the publishing of the Metaphysics and Aristotle’s reply that only those who already understand will understand it; Homer at Alexander’s bedside; historians say Homer inspired the Athenians against the Persians — Thomas: poetae student inducere ad virtuosum per delectabilem repraesentationem.
• Obj. 2: what causes sadness does not mitigate it; some pleasures cause sadness — the bad man is saddened because he is pleased (Ethics IX).
• Obj. 3: Augustine, Confessions IV, fled the country where he was used to being with his now dead friend, “for his eyes sought him where they were not accustomed to see him” (“subtle Augustine”); dead or absent friends become onerous, and they communicated with us most in pleasures, so those pleasures become onerous. Example: some cannot bear music for a while after a death.
• Sed contra: Ethics VII, pleasure expels sadness — the contrary one, and even one not contrary if it is strong. “So it’s not only the contrary pleasure… but any pleasure, especially if strong.”

8. Body: pleasure as rest, sadness as fatigue (“pleasure is a certain rest of the appetite”) #

1. Pleasure is rest of the appetite in the suitable good; sadness is from what is repugnant to the appetite.
2. So pleasure : sadness in the appetite as rest : fatigue in bodies — fatigue coming from some unnatural change; sadness implies a certain fatigue or sickness of the appetitive power. Example: the sick, sad Don John who tries to ruin the wedding (first placed in Twelfth Night, corrected to Much Ado About Nothing).
3. As any rest of the body remedies any fatigue from any unnatural cause, so any pleasure remedies sadness from whatever it proceeds — though he expects Thomas to grant the contrary does so more.

• Aside on “restful”: we call the beautiful restful (a restful view). The beautiful is what pleases when seen, like the good as what all want; Augustine (De Vera Religione, he thinks) raises the Socratic question — beautiful because it pleases, or pleases because beautiful? — and answers the latter without doubt, like “good because wanted or wanted because good.” Student: contemporary art has left beauty aside and is not restful, “explosions all the time,” stirring emotion unpleasantly.

9. Replies of a. 1 (“contrary in genus”) #

• Ad 1: not every pleasure is contrary to every sadness in species, but it is in genus; so on the part of the subject’s disposition any sadness can be mitigated by any pleasure. Boundary: the lonely man may call a friend (contrary in species, works more) or have a bowl of ice cream. Asides: the high-school friend from the rough minor seminary (wormy bread, spastic stomach) being fattened with huge bowls; his brother, “it melts, it goes right through you.”
• Ad 2: the pleasures of bad things cause sadness not in the present but in the future, insofar as the bad repent of the evils they enjoyed; that sadness is aided by a contrary pleasure.
• Ad 3 (“very subtly,” “a difficult one”): when two causes incline to contrary emotions, each impedes the other, but the stronger and longer-lasting finally conquers. The man sad in the places he enjoyed with his dead or absent friend has two causes: the friend’s absence, when thought of again (cogitata), inclines to sadness; the present good, to pleasure; each is diminished by the other. But the sense of the present moves more than memory of the past, and love of oneself is more enduring than love of another; hence pleasure finally expels the sadness — Augustine adds shortly after that his sorrow gave way to the earlier pleasure. Aside: associating a piece of music with a place (San Francisco, Quebec) or a person, with no necessary connection. “Kind of hard to digest” — break.

His words #

• solicitude: care, caused by sadness, aiding good operation (2 Tim.)
• acedia: a kind of sadness, e.g. about praying, that impedes the operation
• beginning vs. cause: every cause is a beginning, not every beginning a cause [ed.: principium]
• distinguo: the Dominican rule, “never affirm, rarely deny, always distinguish”
• spiritual being / intentions of colour in the air: what does not colour the air on its way to the eye
• vital motion: human life as a motion diffused from the heart to the members, in a determined measure
• species vs. quantity (measure): repugnant in kind vs. by excess
• simpliciter: opposed “not qua too much, but simply, whatever amount”
• levior causa: the lighter cause that removes reason before life
• melancholy / madness: his gloss, “sounds like bipolar”
• metaphor: “carried over,” in Greek; said of God by likeness of effect
• pleasure: rest of the appetite in the suitable good; sadness: from what is repugnant to it
• fatigue: “fatigazione,” from an unnatural change; sadness a fatigue or sickness of the appetitive power
• the beautiful: what pleases when seen; also “restful”
• contrary in genus vs. in species
• cogitata: the friend’s absence “when you think about it again”
• poetae student inducere ad virtuosum per delectabilem repraesentationem (Thomas, as he quotes it)

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 37, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 37, a. 4 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 38, prologue and a. 1 (whole article)
• 2 Timothy 2 (in obj. 1 of a. 3); Proverbs 17:22 and 25 (sed contra of a. 4)
• Augustine, Confessions IV (in obj. 3 and ad 3 of q. 38 a. 1)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics VII, X (a. 3); VII (a. 4); II, IX, VII (q. 38 a. 1)
• Aristotle, De Anima, proemium (bodily change in the definition of emotion)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (“fifth book of wisdom”), chapter on beginning
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles I, chapters on the will, joy, love and beatitude (last three of 102)
• Augustine, De Vera Religione (he thinks), on the beautiful
• Plato, Symposium (Socrates on love and lack)
• Francis de Sales on Mary’s death; Plutarch on Alexander and the Metaphysics
• Shakespeare: Merchant of Venice, Much Ado About Nothing, the “raveled sleeve of care”; Dickens, Great Expectations; Washington Irving; the Adoro Te Devote

His questions #

• Does sadness impede every operation? No: it impedes the operation it is about, increases the operation it causes (so long as hope of expelling it remains).
• Does sadness harm the body more than the other passions? Yes: it is repugnant to the vital motion in species, not only in quantity as love, joy, desire are.
• Is life as a motion diffused from the heart “good biology”? Put to a student; left open.
• “You convinced with that argument?” A student is still thinking; he judges it interesting and agreeing somewhat with experience.
• Which emotion-names can be said of God? Properly love and joy; metaphorically anger, pity, repentance (likeness of effect); fear and despair not at all; hope doubtful.
• Do all eleven names carry over to the human will? Yes, dropping the bodily aspect and keeping the formal.
• Is it beautiful because it pleases, or does it please because it is beautiful? With Augustine: it pleases because it is beautiful, as things are wanted because good.
• Does any pleasure mitigate any sadness? Yes, since pleasure is rest and sadness fatigue of the appetite; any pleasure is contrary in genus, though the contrary in species may do more.
• Why does pleasure finally win over the sorrow of the dead friend’s places? The present moves more than memory and love of self endures more than love of another.