Aquinas on Sadness: Whether Sorrow Can Be Good, Honorable, or Useful, and Whether Pain Is the Greatest Evil (ST I-II q.39)

Orientation #

He says nothing about last time. At the end he announces the break “between the concupiscible and the irascible”: the next class begins the irascible passions. The previous class treated the remedies for sorrow (q. 38), the next opens q. 40 on hope.

The class, in order #

1. The four questions of q. 39 (“the goodness and badness of sadness”) #

The question asks: (1) whether all sadness is bad; (2) whether it can be a bonum honestum, the honorable good; (3) whether it can be a bonum utile; (4) whether bodily pain is the summum malum. The good divides into the useful, the pleasant and the honorable; Thomas does not even ask whether sadness is a pleasant good, “it’s obviously not.” The moderns tend to think bodily pain is the greatest evil (taken up in a. 4).

2. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“what is naturally bad is always and everywhere bad”) #

• Obj. 1: Gregory of Nyssa (the footnote says Nemesius: “check his sources”) says all sadness is bad by its very nature; what is naturally bad is bad semper et ubique; so every sadness is bad. Student: so no sadness in heaven, “all tears wiped away.”
  • Aside on the fallacy of equivocation in names: rereading Washington Irving’s Life of Columbus, the uncle and nephew also named Columbo confuse historians; same with scriptural genealogies. The Pope (Benedict) reportedly says the Hebrew letters of “David” add up to fourteen, hence Matthew’s 14-14-14, stressing Christ’s kingship; Thomas does not talk about the number of the name, he surely had another account of 14, 10 and 4.
  • Aside on Shakespeare tying nature to good and the unnatural to bad: in Hamlet, “hold the mirror up to nature, show virtue’s own face, scorn’s own image, and the very age and body of the time its form” is ordered: nature is the measure, then virtue and scorn (scorn the effect of pride, “queen of vices”), then the age judged by its predominant virtues and vices; Romeo and Juliet, “revolts from true birth”: birth is the original meaning of nature; Hamlet’s “what is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed, a beast, no more” ties man’s chief good to what it is to be a man.
• Obj. 2: what everyone, even the virtuous, flees is bad, as the good is what all want; Ethics VII: the prudent man does not always intend to be pleased, but does not intend to be sad.
• Obj. 3: as bodily evil is object and cause of bodily pain, spiritual evil is object and cause of sadness; every bodily pain is an evil of the body, so every sadness is an evil of the soul. He notes the vocabulary: dolor for the body, tristitia for the soul, sadness being “a little more spiritual.”
• Sed contra: sadness about evil is contrary to pleasure about evil; pleasure about evil is bad (Proverbs 2, “they rejoiced when they did evil”); so sadness about evil is good: “it’s good that you’re sad about what you did.”

3. Article 1, corpus and replies (“something is said to be good or bad from the supposition of another”) #

Point: Thomas, “like Houdini,” unties himself with a two-way distinction.

1. Simply and secundum se (“almost the same thing, a little difference”): every sadness is something bad, because the appetite’s being anxious about a present evil impedes its rest in the good.
2. On supposition of something else: as shame is good on supposition of something ugly committed (Ethics IV). Supposing something worthy of sadness is present, it belongs to goodness to be sad; for one who is not sad either does not sense the evil or does not regard it as repugnant to himself. Examples: one should be sad about the election (people spoke of how many days it took to get over it); a friend, parent or child dying; our Lord wept at the death of Lazarus though he would raise him, and over Jerusalem.
3. Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter VIII: it is good that one sorrows over a lost good, for unless some good remained in nature there would be no sorrow over a good lost.
4. Since moral sermons [ed.: sermones morales, moral discourses] are about singulars, what is good on supposition ought to be judged good, as what is voluntary on supposition is judged voluntary (Ethics III): the merchant jettisons his goods so the ship will not sink. Thomas uses the same example asking whether our bad deeds sadden our guardian angel: in general no, he wants you saved (absolute consideration); if you sin and do not repent, then he is sad. Student parallel: shooting down a hijacked airliner, “hard to estimate that one.”

• Reply 1: Gregory spoke of sadness on the side of the evil that saddens, not of the one sensing and repudiating it. Reply 2: all flee sadness insofar as they flee the evil, not the sensing and refusing of evil. Reply 3: the same for bodily pain; sense and refusal of bodily harm attest to the goodness of nature (“even our Lord was sad unto death”).
• Exchange on the merchant: at port, loading, you do not want to lose your investment; in the storm, given those circumstances, you do.
• Why a. 2 follows: if all sadness were bad “that’s the end of the book”; only now can one ask which kind of good it can be.

4. Article 2, honorable good (“proceeds from the rightness of reason and of the will”) #

• Obj. 1: to descend to hell is contrary to the honorable; Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter XII: Jacob feared lest by excessive sadness he go not to the rest of the blessed but to the hell of sinners. He notes Thomas will answer in terms of excess: the Greek saying of the seven wise men, mēden agan [nothing too much].
• Obj. 2: the honorable good is praiseworthy and meritorious; sadness diminishes praise and merit (2 Corinthians: each gives as he determined in his heart, “not from sadness or necessity”). Student: “if you’re sad to study, is that bad?” — “it’s bad that you’re sad.”
• Obj. 3: Augustine, City of God XIV: sadness is about what happens to us against our wish; not to will what happens is to have a will repugnant to divine providence; so sadness is against rectitude of will. Aside: the argument “no bad things happen to good people if you conform to God’s will”: “I’m not sure I like that argument.”
• Sed contra: whatever merits eternal life is honorable; Matthew 5, blessed are those who weep. “Can’t argue with that” (Benedict XVI’s book on the beatitudes mentioned).
• Corpus: for the reason sadness can be good, it can be honorable. It is good as it denotes knowledge and refusal of evil (recusatio; the English gives “rejection”; cf. judges “recusing” themselves). In bodily pain these two attest to nature’s goodness: the sense senses, nature refuses what injures — your finger in the fire or the door, you sense it and pull away. In inward sadness, knowledge of evil is through right judgment of reason and refusal through a will detesting evil; every honorable good proceeds from these two. Student: pity? — a kind of sadness, can be good; “wouldn’t say that about envy.”
• Reply 1: all passions are ruled by the rule of reason, root of the honorable good; immoderate sadness, which Augustine means, transcends it. Jacob avoids this; cf. Hamlet accused of too much sadness for his father (“the course of nature… why seems it so particular with thee”), which he answers by his mother’s remarriage and the rest.
  • Aside: John XXIII called the future Paul VI “Amleto” (Hamlet) for being so interior; Paul VI just declared venerable, now a miracle is needed; the alternation of outgoing popes (John XXIII, John Paul II) with more scholarly, withdrawn ones; “there was a man sent from God named John” applied to John XXIII, as also to John Hardon.
• Reply 2: sadness over evil proceeds from a will and right reason detesting evil; sadness over good from perverse reason and will, and impedes merit, as one who gives alms sadly (“I want to keep the bottle of wine”). Aside: Warren’s relative publicly rebuked by a priest for giving too little left the church for years; he thinks the rebuke was a good idea, though there are other things he’d rebuke publicly.
• Reply 3: some present things come about not by God willing but by God doing them [ed.: text has permitting], as sins; a will repugnant to sin, in oneself or another, is not discordant from God’s will (“that’s interesting”). Penal evils happen God also willing, yet rectitude of will does not require that man will them as such, only that his will not be contrary to the order of divine justice. His gloss: repudiating the Connecticut shooting is not against God’s will; I need not will a criminal’s imprisonment, but God can will the wicked punished. Student exchange: the prisoner should accept God’s will but need not like being in jail, “the food, the company.” Does the confessional penance aim at sadness? Over the sins, not over the penance; yet part of the medicine is repugnance to what is undergone so he hesitates to sin again; Bonaventure: if sin is a willful pleasure, penance is a willful affliction. Left somewhat open: “I’m just trying to figure this out.”

5. Article 3, useful good (“the heart of the wise is where there is sadness”) #

• Obj. 1: Ecclesiasticus 30, sadness kills many and there is no use in it. Obj. 2: choice is of the useful; sadness is not choosable, for the same thing without sadness is more choosable (Topics III). Obj. 3: everything is for its operation (De Caelo II); sadness impedes operation (Ethics X).
• Sed contra: the wise man seeks only the useful; Ecclesiastes 7, the heart of the wise is where there is sadness, of fools where there is joy (“party”). “Amazing text.”
• Corpus: from a present evil a twofold appetitive motion. (a) The appetite is contrary to the present evil: no usefulness here, since what is present cannot not be present. (b) The motion to flee or repel: here sadness is useful, if about something to be fled. Something is to be fled in two ways: (i) on its own account, from contrariety to the good, as sin; sadness about sin is useful for fleeing sin, 2 Corinthians “I rejoice not because you were sad but because you were saddened unto penance” (“happy that you’re sad”); (ii) as an occasion of evil, either because one clings too much to it by love or because from it one falls into evil, as temporal goods; so sadness about temporal goods is useful, Ecclesiastes 7, better the house of mourning than the house of feasting, for there the end of all is remembered.
  • A Desert Father: Abraham was promised the land and never got any until at the end he bought a grave for his wife; so he entered the promised land as a place of mourning, “very wise.” Student priest: better to officiate a funeral than a wedding? “Always.” Aside: nowadays everyone is canonized “right out of the box”; Ralph Martin’s Will Many Be Saved?, on a Vatican II passage mistranslated: ut saepius, a comparative, “more often,” rendered “very frequently.”
• Sadness about what should be fled is “doubly” useful: the evil is fled as such, and sadness as such is fled by all; as pleasure over the good makes one seek it more eagerly (avidius), sadness over evil makes one flee it more vehemently (vehementius), both comparatives.
• Reply 1 (Ecclesiasticus is now called Sirach): the authority means immoderate sadness, which absorbs the soul; as a child told anger is a sin must learn our Lord was angry, “excessive” is meant. Excessive sadness immobilizes the soul and impedes flight from evil. Student: his mother, threatened and unable to escape, froze, could not speak; her dog Charlie Brown sensed her fear and drove the man off. He: fear too can immobilize; Pericles in Shakespeare is immobilized by sadness; line he likes from it, “truth can never be confirmed enough, though doubts did ever sleep.”
• Reply 2: everything choosable becomes less choosable through sadness, and what is to be fled more to be fled [student says “pleasurable”; text: fled]. Reply 3: sadness about an operation impedes it; sadness about ceasing from operation makes one operate more.

6. Article 4, is bodily pain the greatest evil? (“impossible for some sadness or pain to be the worst”) #

People asked “what’s the worst thing that could happen?” say being killed; Thomas asks about pain. The objections’ position is that of the English philosophers, Epicureans, Jeremy Bentham.

• Obj. 1: to the best is opposed the worst (Ethics VIII); some pleasure is best, pertaining to happiness; so some sadness is the greatest evil. Obj. 2: beatitude is the last end; Augustine’s definition, having whatever one wants and wanting nothing bad (“be careful of that”); so the highest good is fulfilment of the will; sadness is what happens against the will; so sadness is the greatest evil. Student: in hell the loss of the vision is greater than the sadness over it — “I think so.” Obj. 3: Augustine, Soliloquies: we are composed of soul and body, body the worse part; the greatest good is that of the greater part, the worst evil that of the worse part (“I don’t think that’s so”); best in the soul is wisdom, worst in the body pain; so the greatest good is to be wise (sapere, “to savor”), the greatest evil to be pained. Aside: in asking whether the whole soul is in each part of the body Thomas distinguishes quantitative parts from essential parts (matter and form); parts here are in the second sense. Augustine’s toothache in the Confessions.
• Sed contra: guilt is a greater evil than punishment (Augustine, On Free Choice I (inferred)); pain pertains to punishment, as enjoying changeable things for their own sake is the evil of guilt (Augustine, On True Religion: what is pain of soul but lack of the changeable things one enjoyed or hoped to enjoy; guilt and punishment are the whole of evil). Student recalls his earlier board diagram of virtue and reward, sin and punishment.
• Corpus (read twice, “very subtle”): it is impossible (“a strong statement”). Every sadness is either about what is truly bad or about an apparent evil that is truly good. About the truly bad: not the greatest evil, since worse would be not to judge bad what is truly bad, or not to reject it (“fair is foul and foul is fair” is worse). About an apparent evil truly good: worse would be altogether alienated from the true good. Hence no sadness or pain can be man’s greatest evil.
  • Aside: our culture does not recognize the truly bad; Obama weeping over the Connecticut shooting while more children were killed in abortion clinics that day.
• Reply 1: two goods common to pleasure and sadness: true judgment about good and bad, and due order of the will approving good and refusing evil; so in sadness there is some good whose privation would be worse; but not every pleasure has some evil whose removal would make it better; hence some pleasure can be the greatest good, sadness cannot be the greatest evil. Aside: the woman on the plane alienated from the Church because her family made her feel guilty for living with her boyfriend: guilt is good, like pain (“hand in the fire, no pain, you’ve got a problem”); her lack of right judgment made it worse.
• Reply 2: the will’s being repugnant to evil is itself good; so sadness has an admixture of good.
• Reply 3: worse is what harms the better thing, for bad is so called because it harms (Augustine, Enchiridion (inferred; transcript “Critium”)); so the evil of the soul is greater than that of the body; Augustine’s argument is not efficacious and is given not from his own opinion but another’s. “A very useful argument.”
• Break here, “between the concupiscible and the irascible.”

His words #

• bonum honestum: the honorable good; the good divided into useful, pleasant, honorable
• summum malum: the greatest evil
• semper et ubique: always and everywhere
• dolor / tristitia: pain of the body / sadness of the soul, “a little more spiritual”
• simply and secundum se vs. on supposition of another: how sadness is bad and good
• mēden agan: nothing too much, the saying of the seven wise men
• recusatio: refusal (English “rejection”); cf. judges recusing
• avidius / vehementius: more eagerly / more vehemently, comparatives
• ut saepius: “more often,” the mistranslated Vatican II comparative
• sapere: to be wise, “to savor”
• essential parts (matter and form) vs. quantitative parts, from Thomas on the whole soul in each part

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 39, proemium and aa. 1-4 (whole articles, Latin with English)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (mirror up to nature; “what is a man”), Romeo and Juliet (“revolts from true birth”), quoted from memory Mentioned
• Aristotle, Ethics III, IV, VII, VIII, X; Topics III; De Caelo II
• Augustine, On Genesis to the Letter VIII and XII; City of God XIV; Soliloquies; On True Religion; Confessions (the tooth); the sed contra source on guilt and punishment, book I
• Proverbs 2; 2 Corinthians (two passages); Matthew 5; Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 30; Ecclesiastes 7
• Thomas on the guardian angel’s sadness; on whether the whole soul is in each part
• Washington Irving, Life of Columbus; Shakespeare, Pericles; Benedict XVI on the beatitudes; Ralph Martin, Will Many Be Saved?; Bonaventure on penance

His questions #

• If all sadness is bad, why does Thomas ask the next question at all? Because if all sadness were bad “that’s the end of the book”; the second article is a second thought once some sadness is good on supposition.
• Did the merchant want to throw his goods overboard or not? At port, no; in the storm, given the circumstances, yes; moral matters are in singulars.
• If you’re sad to study, is that bad? Yes, it is bad that you are sad; sadness over the good comes from a perverse will.
• What about pity, a kind of sadness? It can be good; not so envy.
• Does the prisoner have to will his punishment? He must accept it as not contrary to divine justice, but need not will it as such or like it.
• Is the penance given in confession supposed to make the sinner sad? Sad over his sins, not over the penance; though repugnance to it is part of the medicine — left partly open.
• Is it better for a priest to officiate a funeral than a wedding? Always (house of mourning).
• In hell, which is worse, the loss of the vision or the sadness over it? The loss of the vision.
• Is the good of the greater part the greatest good and the evil of the worse part the worst evil? No; the argument is Augustine reporting another’s opinion, not efficacious.