The Irascible Passions Begin: Hope, How It Differs from Desire, Where It Sits in the Soul, and Hope in Animals (ST I-II q.40)

Orientation #

He does not refer explicitly to the previous class; he closes by saying “we have a class next week.” Verified sources place this class at Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 40, aa. 1-3, with the prooemium of q. 40 read at the start (he first says “question forty one,” then corrects himself: fear begins in 41, q. 40 is on hope). The previous class treated q. 39 on the goodness and badness of sadness, and the next takes up q. 40 a. 4 on whether desperation is contrary to hope.

The class, in order #

1. The prooemium: order of the irascible passions (“hope is a primary thing”) #

Point: the irascible passions are treated in the order hope and desperation, fear and audacity, then anger, and this reflects that hope and fear are principal.

• Q. 40 is “almost all about hope”; despair appears officially only in a. 4.
• Hope is one of the four principal passions Thomas names: joy, sadness, hope, fear.
• His comedy research as illustration: tragedy (Aristotle’s completed part; prologue to Romeo and Juliet) is about pity and fear, a form of sadness and a form of fear. Proceeding through “the place of opposites,” he first guessed comedy should be about joy and boldness; but boldness is not prominent in comedy the way fear is in tragedy. Reading Thomas’s four principal passions, hope “made more sense for comedy”; a Latin scholar on Terence quoted Paul (“faith, hope, and charity”) and said that in comedy it is hope that is greatest. “More and more evidence.”
• Hope also names a theological virtue and an act of the will; fear, “fear of the Lord.”

2. Contrariety differs in the irascible (“a good that is difficult to achieve”) #

Point: irascible contraries are not contraries by object as concupiscible ones are.

• Concupiscible: joy vs. sadness, contrary because about good vs. bad (contrariety in the object).
• Irascible: hope vs. despair are both about the good, but a difficult good; if you think you can overcome the difficulty, hope; if not, despair. Fear vs. boldness both about the bad; boldness when you think you can avoid it, fear “the more natural thing.”
• Because good and bad are the more fundamental objects, the irascible emotions arise from the concupiscible and terminate in them.

3. The eight questions, and why hope’s power is asked about (“eight things are asked”) #

Point: running through Thomas’s list of eight, he pauses on the surprising ones.

• (1) Is hope the same as desire (cupiditas)? Close, since both are motions toward a good; hope toward a difficult good.
• (2) In the apprehensive or the desiring power? “Kind of surprising,” but Thomas says elsewhere the irascible is closer to reason than the concupiscible.
• Mozart aside as illustration of that closeness: of the five last symphonies, 36 and 41 (C major) imitate magnanimity, which concerns hope and achieving great things; 38 (D major, “going towards the dangerous”) and 40 (“more like patience”) concern courage and fear; only 39 is somewhat concupiscible, but in E flat, “still elevated,” not the concupiscible keys G major and B flat. “Beethoven sounds feeble compared to Mozart.” The pianoforte’s prominence also struck him as irascible.
• Plato’s picture: reason, then thumos (the word behind “irascible”), then epithymia; the rational uses the thumos to control the concupiscible (courage as “jumping in the bush”).
• (3) In brute animals? “Why is that even a question? These are things we have in common with the animals.”
• (4) Contrary to desperation. (5) Cause: experience. (6) In the young and the drunk hope abounds (“I can fly”); Aristotle in the Rhetoric contrasts the hopeful young man, easily deceived, with the cautious, fearful old man. (7-8) hope confers to operation. [ed.: he does not read each of the eight distinctly; roughly seven are named.]

4. Article 1, objections (“hope is the same thing as cupidity”) #

• Obj. 1: hope is one of the four principal passions (he notes Vatican II’s Church in the Modern World opens with them; Shakespeare sometimes puts all four together), but Augustine, City of God XIV, puts cupidity in hope’s place; therefore they are the same. His remark: “I don’t know about that, Augustine… more in rhetoric sometimes.”
• Obj. 2: passions differ by object; hope and desire share the object, a future good. His aside: so there is no hope in heaven, the good being present forever; “abandon all hope” applies to hell, but in a sense entering heaven you abandon hope too.
• Obj. 3: if hope adds possibility of obtaining, that is per accidens to the object and does not vary the species. His comment: “maybe you are not thinking of what the irascible really is.”
• Sed contra: diverse powers, diverse passions; hope is in the irascible, desire in the concupiscible.
• Naming of the powers: irascible and concupiscible are named from one passion each (ira is one of five, concupiscence one of six), and one must be careful about the names. Why those? Shakespeare: “things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs”; anger and desire are the strongest motions, comparable in strength. As You Like It: in “the very wrath of love” clubs cannot part them, so marry them off at once.

5. Article 1, body: the four conditions of hope’s object (“about the object of hope, there are four conditions”) #

Point: species of passion are taken from the object, and four notes of the object distinguish hope from four other passions.

• Principle: Aristotle in the De Anima, we know the soul through its powers, the powers through their acts, the acts through their objects. Example: colour vs. sound gives seeing vs. hearing, then the ability to see vs. to hear, then what kind of soul (sensing or not). Plant soul known through food. Joke: “some monks must be plants.”

1. Good: no hope except about a good; so hope differs from fear, about the bad.
2. Future: not something present already had. “I don’t hope to understand the Pythagorean theorem once I’ve understood it.” So hope differs from joy, about a present good.
3. Arduous: attainable with difficulty; one does not hope for something minimal at once in one’s power. “I hope to have a drink of water here now”: no difficulty in reaching over, “don’t hope for that, just do it.” So hope differs from desire or cupidity, which is about the future good absolutely; hence desire is concupiscible, hope irascible. “So to do philosophy, you need hope, and not just desire.” Aside: English has no good word to render cupiditas distinctly.
4. Possible to be obtained: one does not hope for what he cannot attain at all; so hope differs from despair. Story: a bad violinist told it was impossible for him to play: “if it was impossible, I wouldn’t start”; hence “if something’s worth doing, it’s worth doing badly,” with hope of doing better.

• Conclusion: hope differs from desire as irascible from concupiscible passions; hope presupposes desire, as every irascible passion presupposes a concupiscible one. Hope and despair presuppose desire; fear and boldness presuppose aversion (“I suppose”); anger arises from sadness or pain. Example: stepping on your toe and saying “so what?” should arouse anger. If you think you can do nothing, only sadness (continuing pain) and fear (that it will continue).
• From joy nothing irascible arises (he says “concupiscible,” then “irascible rather”): no difficulty arises from possessing the good, “just enjoy it.” That is why the irascible has an odd number, five, and the concupiscible an even six (good and bad, with the middle) — “if you want to be Pythagorean.”

6. Article 1, replies, with the digression on the love of reason (“handle Augustine with reverence”) #

• Ad 1: Augustine puts cupidity for hope because both regard a future good, and a non-arduous good is regarded “as it were as nothing”; so cupidity most of all tends to the arduous good. He compares Bonaventure calling the soul beatificabilis: you would not be blessed if it were easy; glory is for a difficult thing. And a religious magazine defining virtue as “the perfection of operation”: strictly wrong, but one can see why, and “you got to kind of interpret what these people say.” Whether Augustine is let off the hook: “if he’s reverent towards him, I guess I’ll be reverent.”
• Ad 2: the object of hope is not the future good absolutely but with arduousness and difficulty. Their likeness is a cause of deception: hope and desire are both about a future good, so one confuses them, which is how Augustine’s inadvertence arose.
• Digression, Augustine’s marvellous use of words: De Trinitate speaks of an “immature and perverse love of reason.” His old teacher put Albert the Great’s line at the head of his translation of Physics I-II: to study these things for anything other than knowing God is a perverse attitude toward learning. A student asks how to distinguish the two loves. His answer: perverse: studying the lowest things without using them as stepping-stones to higher; immature: not realising reason’s weakness and its need of help (logic, a good teacher), so one runs off judging things one is not ready to judge; also youthful immoderation, not knowing the measures of things. Thomas on John (which Pius XII said a Thomist must know): the Jews do not accept the word because they are not humble enough to be taught; “no wisdom without a teacher”; even Thomas needed Augustine and Albert.
• Aside: comparing the Summa contra Gentiles chapter with five arguments that sense is not reason with Shakespeare’s definition of reason, which touches most of Thomas’s reasons and adds others.
• Ad 3: hope adds not only possibility but loftiness/arduousness, which makes it pertain to another power, the irascible. Plato and Aristotle already used thumos and epithymia, so they knew the difference; Plato’s schooling develops the irascible (athletics; MacArthur’s words at West Point about “fields of friendly conflict”) and tempers it with music so the soul is not beastly. Moreover, possible and impossible are not entirely per accidens to the object of the appetite, since the appetite is the principle of motion (Aristotle takes it up in De Anima III as source of the animal’s motion), and nothing is moved to what it judges impossible: “why didn’t the Greeks go to the moon?” So hope differs from despair by possible vs. impossible. Mozart’s sonata developments put a melody in major, then in minor “when it goes into despair.”

7. Article 2: hope in the knowing or the desiring power (“hope seems to be a certain expectation”) #

• Obj. 1: hope is expectation (Romans 8: what we do not see we hope for, and expect by patience), and expecting belongs to knowing. Etymology: “looking out for,” like Columbus’s men looking out for land; “looking before and after.”
• Obj. 2: hope seems the same as confidence (the hoping are called confident), and confidence, like faith, is of the knowing power (“I’m confident I’ll be elected” means I think so).
• Obj. 3: certitude is proper to knowing, but is attributed to hope.
• Sed contra: hope is about the good, and the good as good is the object of the desiring power.
• Body: hope implies an extending of the appetite toward the good, so it is in the desiring power, for motion toward things is proper to appetite, whereas knowing is perfected by the known being in the knower. But since knowing moves appetite by presenting its object, diverse aspects grasped (good/bad, present/future, absolute/arduous, possible/impossible) yield diverse motions. Definition to be memorised: Spes est motus appetitivae virtutis consequens apprehensionem boni futuri ardui possibilis adipisci — the four conditions of a. 1.
• Ad 1: something is possible either by one’s own power or by another’s. What one hopes by one’s own power one is said only to hope; what one hopes from another’s aid one is said to expectare, as if ex alio spectare, “look for from another,” because the apprehension regards both the good and the one by whose power one hopes. Ecclesiasticus 51 (“looking for the aid of a man”); the psalm of lifting eyes to the mountains whence help comes. Student: Francis de Sales’s letter to a bishop wanting to resign: time agonising over stepping down is time not spent doing the job; eyes on the Lord, then work; like a man agonising over putting away his wife instead of loving her.
• Ad 2: what a man desires and judges himself able to obtain, he believes he will obtain; from that preceding faith the appetitive motion is called confidence, since appetite is named from preceding knowledge as an effect from a better-known cause: the knowing power knows its own act better than the appetite’s. Discussion: the adverb “hopefully” means something like expecting, “more with the mind”; students note English “I believe I’ll be able to do that”; he was annoyed when people confused faith and hope: “Jesus, I trust in thee” (confido in te), is it faith or hope? “I trust Thomas in these matters” is faith; trust can also mean hope. Left there.
• Ad 3: certitude is attributed to motion of the sensitive and even natural appetite, as a stone tends downward with certitude, on account of infallibility from the certitude of the preceding knowledge. He returns to the point: the question would not have arisen for the concupiscible; it arises here because the irascible is closer to reason (Plato’s ordering again).

8. Article 3: hope in brute animals (“in the brute animals there is not hope”) #

• Obj. 1: hope is of a future good (Damascene), but animals have only sense knowledge, not of the future. Example: the dog with the broken leg had no idea of X-ray or surgery, “no hope,” and thinks he is stuck with the cast.
• Obj. 2: possible and impossible are differences of true and false, only in the mind (Metaphysics VI).
• Obj. 3: Augustine, on Genesis ad litteram: animals are moved by what is seen, but hope is not of what is seen (Romans 8:24).
• Sed contra: hope is an irascible passion and animals have the irascible (the dog gets angry). “You can see how this question kind of falls from the other one.”
• Body: interior passions of animals are apprehended from their exterior motions. A dog seeing a hare or bird too far off does not move, as not hoping to reach it; if near, it moves as under hope. His cat under the tree does not jump at the mocking birds, but goes to the neighbour’s bird-bath among the flowers, where it is possible. The sensitive appetite of animals and the natural appetite of insentient things follow an apprehension, as the will does; but the will follows an understanding joined to it, natural appetite the apprehension of a separated intellect that instituted the nature, and animals act by natural instinct, whose works resemble those of art (art imitates nature). So animals have hope and despair. Student: the fox and the grapes, despairing after jumping.
• Ad 1: animals do not know the future but by instinct move toward it as if foreseeing, the instinct being from the divine understanding. Aristotle in the De Anima gives man the sense of time; student: Francis de Sales says animals cast themselves toward the good, we can forecast.
• Ad 2: the object of hope is not the possible as a difference of the true (the relation of predicate to subject: “possible for a triangle to be green,” not to be a circle), but the possible said according to some potency; Aristotle’s distinction of the two senses of possible in Metaphysics V.
• Ad 3: though the future is not seen, from present things seen the appetite moves to something future, to pursue or avoid; “so they go down south.”

His words #

• irascible / concupiscible: the two sensitive appetites, named each from one passion (anger, desire) because those motions are strongest.
• contrariety by object vs. by difficulty: concupiscible contraries differ in object (good/bad); irascible contraries share the object and differ by whether the difficulty can be overcome.
• four principal passions: joy, sadness, hope, fear.
• cupiditas: desire, the concupiscible motion toward a future good absolutely; no good English equivalent.
• arduous: attainable with difficulty; the note that puts hope in the irascible.
• thumos / epithymia: Plato’s and Aristotle’s words for the irascible and the concupiscible.
• beatificabilis: Bonaventure’s word for the soul as able to be blessed.
• immature vs. perverse love of reason (Augustine): not knowing reason’s need of help vs. not ordering learning to higher things.
• Spes est motus appetitivae virtutis consequens apprehensionem boni futuri ardui possibilis adipisci: Thomas’s definition of hope.
• expectare as ex alio spectare: to look for a good from another’s power.
• confidence: hope named from the preceding belief that one will obtain.
• possible according to potency vs. possible as a difference of the true (predicate to subject).
• cast vs. forecast (Francis de Sales): animal vs. human relation to the future good.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 40, prooemium
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 40, a. 1 (whole)
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 40, a. 2 (whole)
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 40, a. 3 (whole)

Mentioned

• Augustine, City of God XIV (four principal passions); De Trinitate (“immature and perverse love of reason”); Super Genesim ad litteram
• Romans 8:24-25; Ecclesiasticus 51; a psalm on lifting eyes to the mountains (Psalm 120/121, inferred)
• Aristotle, De Anima (soul known through powers, acts, objects; book III on appetite as source of motion; sense of time); Rhetoric (young vs. old); Metaphysics V (senses of possible) and VI (true and false in the mind); Poetics (tragedy as pity and fear, inferred)
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet prologue; As You Like It (“wrath of love”); “things in motion sooner catch the eye” (Troilus and Cressida, inferred); his definition of reason
• Thomas, Summa contra Gentiles chapter on sense not being reason; Commentary on John
• Albert the Great, prologue passage on studying for the sake of knowing God; Bonaventure, beatificabilis; Damascene; Vatican II, Church in the Modern World; Francis de Sales (letter to a bishop; cast/forecast); Terence commentator on hope in comedy; Mozart symphonies 36-41

His questions #

• Why is the contrariety of hope and despair different from that of joy and sadness? Because both are about the same object, a difficult good, and differ by whether one thinks the difficulty can be overcome.
• Why would it even be asked whether hope is in the apprehensive power? Because the irascible is closer to reason than the concupiscible, as Thomas says elsewhere and Plato’s ordering shows.
• Why are the two appetites named from anger and desire, one passion each? Because “things in motion sooner catch the eye”: these are the strongest motions, comparable in strength.
• Why does hope differ from desire, and from despair? From desire by arduousness (hence a different power), from despair by possibility.
• Why does the irascible have five passions and the concupiscible six? Nothing irascible arises from joy: no difficulty attends possession of the good.
• What is the difference between an immature and a perverse love of reason? Immature: not seeing reason’s need of help (logic, a teacher) or of measure; perverse: not ordering lower studies to higher things.
• Is “Jesus, I trust in thee” faith or hope? Left open; trust can mean either.
• How do we know animals have hope? Interior passions are apprehended from exterior motions: the dog moves to the near prey, not the far.
• In what sense is hope’s object “possible”? According to some potency, not as a difference of the true (predicate to subject).