Hope and Action; Is Fear a Passion? (Prima Secundae Q40 a8, Q41 a1)

Orientation #

He says at the start “we’re up to Article Eight here, in Question Forty”, and after the reply to the third objection announces “now we’re going on to fear”, i.e. Question 41; he closes with “should take a little break now”. Verified sources match the second part of the class to I-II q. 41 a. 1. The previous class treated the articles on hope (experience, youth, and hope causing love); the next continues with fear as a special passion and the species of fear.

The class, in order #

1. The objections: hope seems to impede operation (“hope does not what. Help”) #

The point: three objections that hope hinders action rather than aiding it, and the sed contra.

1. Security pertains to hope; security begets negligence, which impedes operation. He adds Shakespeare: “Security is mortal’s chiefest enemy” — and the joke that when you run for office you should be scared.
2. Sadness impedes operation; hope sometimes causes sadness — Proverbs 13, “hope deferred afflicts the soul”. Aside: the souls in purgatory are impatient to see God as He is, so pray for them.
3. Desperation is contrary to hope, and desperation in war aids operation (2 Kings 2, “a dangerous thing is desperation”; “to sell our lives at a good price”); contraries have contrary causes, so hope should impede. Sed contra: 1 Corinthians 9, the one who plows should plow in hope of receiving the fruit.

2. Thomas’s answer: two reasons hope intensifies action (“hope per se has that it aids operation”) #

The point: hope per se aids operation by intensifying it (“intendendo”), for two reasons; the “per se” is flagged because per accidens it can be otherwise.

1. From its object, the bonum arduum possibile (three words, he notes the reversed order in English: possible, difficult good): the estimate of difficulty arouses attention; the estimate of possibility does not retard the attempt; hence a man operates intensely from hope.
2. From its effect: hope causes delight, and delight aids operation (as said before). He calls these “two very interesting reasons”.

3. Reply to the first: security belongs to fear, not hope (“hope regards the good to be obtained”) #

The point: hope regards a good to be obtained, security an evil to be avoided; so security is opposed to fear, not to hope.

• Example: social security — avoiding penury in old age, a bad thing to be avoided (the Shakespeare line quoted against it belongs to a different context).
• Security does not cause negligence except insofar as it diminishes the estimate of difficulty — which also diminishes the notion of hope, since hope is about a good difficult but possible. Things in which one fears no impediment are no longer regarded as difficult.
• Applied to knowing: Monsignor Dionne’s “principal passion is fear” (of being wrong), so he could never be negligent in thinking; the reading chain De Koninck read Thomas more carefully than Kasurik, Dionne even more carefully. Socrates: the fear that I might think I know what I don’t — “did you ever have any fear that you might not know what you thought you knew?” — yet joined to hope. If truth were just a good, desire would be enough; because it is a difficult good you need hope, and you must regard it as a difficult good able to be obtained.
• Euclid: Dillon (former TAC president) said Euclid cures people of despair of coming to know the truth — “I’m really knowing something”, so maybe elsewhere too. Freshmen stumble over it; juniors laugh at them. His son-in-law had him teach Euclid to two granddaughters: one liked it, one didn’t.

4. Reply to the second, and the universality of per se / per accidens (“per se causes what delight”) #

The point: hope per se causes delight, since through hope one regards a good, difficult but possible, and so has a pleasure of anticipation; the sadness is per accidens.

• Example: as long as you hope the groom or bride will show up for the wedding there is pleasure — unless, like Miss Havisham, the groom doesn’t come.
• He asks where the per se / per accidens distinction sits among the fallacies (fallacy of accident) and in the study of being: the first distinction of being in the fifth book of “wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V] is per se vs. per accidens; per accidens then divided into three, per se into being by the figures of predication, being as true, being as act and ability [ed.: potency].
• It enters the distinction of causes: good has a per se cause and sometimes a per accidens one (digging to plant a tree, finding Captain Kidd’s treasure); the bad has only a per accidens cause — Thomas goes through the kinds of causes to show this (he says he is “going through the parts in the Summa Contra Gentiles on good and bad”).
• Aristotle’s first definition, “the good is what all want”: people object that most people want bad things — but not the bad as such; they want it for some little good in it or its appearance of good. The good as such is wanted, the bad only per accidens. “If you can’t see that distinction … you don’t understand the first definition of good.”

5. Reply to the third: desperation fights from a joined hope (“desperation in war becomes dangerous”) #

The point: desperation in war is dangerous because of a hope joined to it: those who despair of flight are weakened in fleeing, but hope to vindicate their death, and so fight more sharply and become dangerous to the host.

6. Transition: the five irascible passions and why five (“pass to the other chief passion”) #

The point: the principal passions are joy and sadness in the concupiscible, hope and fear in the irascible; q. 40 treated hope with despair, next comes fear with audacity, then anger — five irascible emotions against six concupiscible. Why odd? Each irascible passion arises from a concupiscible one, the concupiscible being more basic:

• Hope and despair arise from desire: if the desired good is not difficult, no irascible passion is needed at all (the American with popcorn in front of the football game); if difficult, estimated possible gives hope, impossible gives despair.
• Fear and audacity arise from aversion: salmon on a menu is mere aversion when you order freely; served at someone’s house there is difficulty in avoiding it — if you think you may not escape it, fear; if you can overcome it, boldness/courage.
• Anger arises from sadness or pain (a student suggested hatred of the bad; he grants love and hate underlie all, but anger comes more from sadness): the man on your toe who says “so what?”; an insulting name. Anger is about a present bad already upon you, whereas fear (like hope) is about the future; and anger needs difficulty plus the estimate you can do something — a mosquito bite gives little anger because it is easily dealt with. Example: his friend spanking the neighbour’s kid who smashed a potted plant — a present evil; a student asks whether there was any difficulty, and he allows a parent can punish without anger, but some effort is required.
• Nothing arises from enjoyment: there is no difficulty in enjoying a good you already have — hence the odd number. If the bad is imposed and you can do nothing, no anger either. Aside: he and Warren Murray once made a tape of Mozart passages to pick out the different emotions.

7. Prologue to q. 41: four things about fear (“first about fear itself”) #

The point: fear is treated before audacity because it is the principal passion; about fear four things: itself, its object, its cause, its effect — a question for each.

• He wonders why a separate question for object and cause, since the object of an emotion is its cause (good causes love because it is love’s object); emotions are the appetite being acted upon by the object — that is why they are called passions, “being acted upon, undergoing”; Aristotle extends “passion” to sensing and understanding in a less full sense.
• Four articles on fear itself: whether fear is a passion of the soul (“strange, he says this”); whether a special passion; whether there is some natural fear (“I’m convinced there is”); the species of fear — a question he did not ask of the other passions. Asides: Thomas praying on the floor when stumped; the joke about Zigliara flying to Rome and returning by boat — he’d rather sail himself, no jet lag.

8. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“It seems that fear is not a passion”) #

1. Damascene (Orthodox Faith III) calls fear a virtus, a power, “secundum systolen”, contraction (he links it to “systolic”; pre-meds learned such Greek words); but no virtus is a passion (Ethics II).
2. Every passion is an effect of a present agent; fear is about the future (Damascene II) — he notes the same could have been urged against hope.
3. Every passion is a motion of the sense desiring power (appetitus here names the power, as “understanding”/intellectus can name act, power or virtue); sense apprehends only the present; fear is of a future evil. He says this touches the idea that the irascible is closer to reason. Sed contra: Augustine, City of God XIV, enumerates fear among the passions — “that’s enough, and who is Augustine?”; Thomas calls him among the greatest minds; John Paul II wrote an encyclical on him; the Catechism quotes him most after Scripture. Aside: Mozart’s last five symphonies — 36 and 41 on magnanimity (hope), 38 and 40 on courage (fear); John Paul II on “the genius of Salzburg”.

9. Response: the degrees of “passion” (“after sadness, fear has more the aspect of a passion”) #

The point: among the emotions, after sadness, fear most has the notion of passion — because “passion” originally names the bad more than the good.

• Words: English “suffering” — Shakespeare’s “you suffer love for me” is already an extension, yet still an undergoing; his own word “undergoing” (“he’s undergone a lot in life”, “under the weather”) implies at first something bad; the student who asked his professor “why are you doing this to me?”.
• Thomas’s ladder: (1) to the notion of passion pertains first that it is the motion of an undergoing power to which its object stands as an active mover, the passion being the effect of the agent; by extension sense and understanding are said to undergo (De Anima II-III). Difference he draws from De Anima III: a strong sensible (bright light, very hot food) weakens the sense for lesser objects, but understanding something very understandable makes one understand lesser things better — hence great minds (De Koninck, Dionne) judged well of music, which is reasonable only by participation (as the emotions partake of reason, Ethics), and of fiction (Shakespeare, Homer — “the poet” for Aristotle; Pope’s preface to the Iliad); his wife on bad church music in El Paso. As you move away from the body the receiving is a perfecting (Mozart in the ear, Thomas in the mind); a kick does not perfect you.
• (2) magis propria: the motion of the desiring power — even the will is more “moved” than reason (“moved by someone’s misery” vs. “moved by arguments”). (3) adhuc magis proprie: the desiring power with a bodily organ, involving bodily change. (4) propriissime: motions implying some nocumentum — the first meaning of the name, since being acted on contrary to nature (a pen jab) is more evident than being acted on by sound or light. English “suffering” stopped at the first meaning; Latin passio was carried over — some people “can’t move a word”.
• Tragedy: he gives Aristotle’s definition (likeness of a serious complete action of some magnitude, in sweetened language, acted not narrated, moving to pity and fear so as to purge them), the second and third quatrains of the Romeo and Juliet prologue (“piteous overthrows”, “fearful passage”), the Women of Trachis pitying the captive princess and then fearing for herself. The two emotions Thomas says most have the notion of passion — sadness (pity) and fear — are the ones tragedy works on, and why Shakespeare’s love is remembered from the tragedies.

10. Fear meets every degree; the bodily change (“comes to be with a certain change in the body”) #

The point: fear is about the bad, so belongs to the desiring power (which per se regards good and bad, as reason regards true and false); to the sensitive desiring power, since it comes with bodily change — the contraction Damascene names; and implies a relation to the bad as in some way victorious over the good. Hence most truly the notion of passion — but after sadness, since sadness is about a present evil, which moves us more than a future one.

• He recalls why the desiring power is named from desire: motion catches the eye (“things in motion sooner catch the eye than what not stirs”); the strongest emotions, love and anger, stand out.
• Aristotle in the proemium of the De Anima: you don’t know the emotions fully without the bodily change. Examples: feeling a kitten’s fear in its body when a dog came; the lake cat that hid under the bed for a day from a harmless dog; animals raised together (his childhood cat and the neighbour’s dog, his son’s dog, cat and rabbit, a video of kittens crawling over a mild old dog).

11. Replies to the three objections (“virtus names a certain beginning of action”) #

1. Virtus names a source of action; inward motions of the appetite, as sources of exterior actions, are called virtues; the Philosopher denies passion is a virtue in the sense of habit. A student names the fallacy: accident; he corrects — the same word in two senses is the most common fallacy [ed.: equivocation], which Aristotle puts first in the Sophistic Refutations, not the deepest but the most common.
2. As a bodily passion comes from the bodily presence of the agent, a passion of the soul comes from the “animal”, soul-ish presence of the agent, even without bodily presence: an embarrassing past moment relived; the future present through imagination — the saint who complained Christ was on the cross only hours, answered that He had it before Him from the beginning (why Christ is not as jovial as people would like); the man in the St Paul library music room replaying wedding marches, as happy as the anticipated marriage.
3. Sense does not apprehend the future, but from the present the animal by natural instinct is moved to hope a future good or fear a future evil — birds flying south, “snowbirds” to Florida. Asides: the St Paul Public Library music room (six records for two weeks; the librarian who thought his Prokofiev was at the wrong speed; first hearing Mozart’s 36th against a blue sky — “if only its opening survived it would establish his greatness”).

His words #

• bonum arduum possibile; the difficult but possible good, the object of hope (he reverses to “possible, difficult good”)
• intendendo; “intensifying” — hope aids operation by intensifying it
• security; regards an evil to be avoided, so opposed to fear, not hope
• per se / per accidens; the first distinction of being and of causes; the bad has only a per accidens cause
• the good is what all want; Aristotle’s first definition, defended by per se/per accidens
• irascible / concupiscible; five vs. six emotions; the irascible arises from the concupiscible
• passion; “being acted upon, undergoing”; he also uses “suffering” and “undergoing” in English
• appetitus / potentia appetitiva; “desiring power”, named from desire because motion catches the eye
• virtus; “power”, in Damascene a source of action, in Aristotle a habit
• systole / contractio; “contraction”, the bodily change of fear
• magis propria, adhuc magis propria, propriissime; the degrees in which “passion” is said
• nocumentum; harm — the most proper passions imply some harm
• animal presence; presence of the object “according to the soul” (apprehension) vs. bodily presence
• fifth book of wisdom; [ed.: Metaphysics V]

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q. 40, a. 8 (objections, sed contra, response, three replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae I-II, q. 41, prologue and a. 1 (objections, sed contra, response, three replies)
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet, prologue, second and third quatrains Mentioned
• Proverbs 13 (hope deferred); 2 Kings 2 (desperation); 1 Corinthians 9 (plowing in hope)
• Shakespeare, “security is mortal’s chiefest enemy” (play not named); “you suffer love for me” (play not named)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (inferred; “fifth book of wisdom”), division of being; Sophistic Refutations, the first fallacy; Nicomachean Ethics II (no virtue a passion) and on emotions partaking of reason; De Anima proemium, II and III; Poetics (inferred), definition of tragedy
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, on good and bad — verified sources match SCG IV, ch. 15 for about 10 min; he gives no chapter
• John Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith II and III; Augustine, City of God XIV
• Sophocles, Women of Trachis (inferred); Alexander Pope, preface to the Iliad; Dickens, Miss Havisham (Great Expectations, inferred)
• Euclid; Mozart symphonies 36, 38, 40, 41; John Paul II on Augustine and on Mozart; Catechism of the Catholic Church

His questions #

• Does hope help or impede operation? Per se it aids it by intensifying it, from its object and from the delight it causes.
• What does security regard, and what does hope regard? Security an evil to be avoided (so opposed to fear); hope a good to be obtained.
• Did you ever have any fear that you might not know what you thought you knew? Socrates did; that fear, with hope, is needed because truth is a difficult good.
• What is the first distinction of being in the fifth book? Per se and per accidens.
• What kind of cause can the bad have? Only a per accidens cause.
• Why an odd number of irascible passions against six concupiscible? Each arises from a concupiscible one; nothing arises from enjoyment, since there is no difficulty there.
• What passion in the concupiscible does anger arise from? Sadness or pain over a present evil one thinks one can do something about.
• What kind of fallacy is in Damascene’s “virtus” objection? A student said accident; he corrected: the most common kind, the one Aristotle puts first [ed.: equivocation].
• How can you be acted upon by something that isn’t there? By the presence of the object according to the soul, through imagination, as with the future and the past.
• Why a separate question on the object and on the cause of fear, if the object is the cause? left open.