Fear as a Special Passion, Natural Fear, and the Six Species of Fear (Q41 a2–4)

Orientation #

He picks up q. 41 at the second article; the fourth part of hope’s object and Damascene’s virtus desiderativa are recalled as “the thing we quoted in the last passage” (prev. lecture). He closes by announcing “we’ll start with question forty-two, the object of fear.” The previous class ended q. 40 and began q. 41 a. 1; the next opens q. 42.

The class, in order #

1. Article 2, objections: is fear a special passion? (“fear is not the name of a special passion”) #

The point: three objections make fear look general or misplaced.

1. Augustine (Eighty-three Questions): the man whom fear does not take away, cupidity does not waste, sadness (aegritudo) does not tear, vain joy does not “ventilate” — remove fear and the other passions seem removed; so fear is general, “like a condition of passions.”
2. Aristotle, Ethics VI: pursuit and flight are in the appetite as affirmation and negation in the understanding; negation is nothing special in the intellect but common to many; fear is only a flight from evil; so not special.
3. If special, fear would be in the irascible only; but Aristotle (Rhetoric II) calls fear a kind of sadness, and Damascene calls it a virtus desiderativa; sadness and desire are in the concupiscible; so it belongs to diverse powers. He notes: “strange thing that Aristotle doesn’t say that.” Sed contra: Damascene (Orthodox Faith II) divides fear against the other passions.

2. Article 2, body: the four-part object of fear (“defining is like spelling”) #

The point: passions take their species from their objects, and fear’s object has four parts, just as hope’s does.

• Hope’s object: bonum, futurum, arduum, possibile. Each part excludes something: bonum futurum alone would fit desire (I want to eat: eating is future and good); add arduum; and if you thought you could not overcome the difficulty there would be no hope, so add possibile.
• Fear’s object: malum futurum difficile cui resisti non potest. Malum alone would fit hate (which is indifferently of present or future); malum futurum would fit aversion, the opposite of desire; futurum separates it from sadness, which is about the present. Then the difficulty, then that one cannot resist.
• Student: does the order matter? — Yes, the order Thomas gives.
• Definition as spelling: leave one letter out and it is misspelled; the order of letters matters too (“i before e except after…”); the Assumptionists lowered a paper one grade per misspelling. “You’re forewarned” — grade lowered if a part is missing or out of order. Conclusion: fear is a special passion because its object, so defined, is a special object.

3. Article 2, replies (“all these things are arising from love”) #

• Ad 1: all passions derive from one beginning, love, and are connected in an order (love before all the rest); removing fear removes others by that connection, not because fear is general (said of many). Steak: I love steak, want it when I lack it, enjoy it when I have it, am angry when the dog gets it — all arise from love but are not love; after eating I still love it without desiring it.
• Ad 2: not every flight of the appetite is fear, but flight from a special object; fuga is general, fear special.
• Ad 3: fear is “in no way” in the concupiscible, since it regards not evil absolutely but evil with difficulty that one can hardly (vix) resist. But irascible passions derive from concupiscible ones and terminate in them: hope and despair from desire, fear and boldness from aversion, anger mainly from sadness or pain; if you fail to escape what you fear, sadness follows. Hence concupiscible names get attributed to fear: it is called sadness because its object would sadden if present (Aristotle: fear proceeds from imagining a future evil that is corrupting or saddening); Damascene attributes desire to it because flight from evil arises from desire for the good (I want to save my life, so I flee the murderer). We name things by cause or effect: a “vicious blow” proceeds from vice or causes it.

4. Article 3, objections: is any fear natural? (“the soul not wishing to be divided from the body”) #

• Obj 1: Damascene (bk. III) — a natural fear, the soul not wishing to be divided from the body. He connects it with Thomas on John’s Gospel: Christ’s fear of death is natural, letting the body’s natural emotion arise.
• Obj 2: fear arises from love; some love is natural (Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4); so some fear is natural. His gloss: “error is magna pars miseri” — one loves truth naturally and so fears error.
• Obj 3: fear is opposed to hope; some hope is of nature (Romans 4:18, Abraham believed “against the hope of nature… in the hope of grace”); so some fear is natural.
• Sed contra: what is natural is found in both animate and inanimate things; fear is not found in inanimate things.
• Nursery talk: a plant “wants” sun or water, broccoli “is a big feeder,” this plant “doesn’t like” a lot of sun — but nobody says a plant fears the sun, and no farmer hopes the plants will produce; he suggests this is because the irascible is closer to reason.
• Aside: is he going to deny natural fear? Laziness is a kind of fear (“work fascinates me; I can watch other people working all day long”).
• Aside: Thomas at St Louis’s table slapping the table, “that finishes the Manichaeans”; the king has it written down; compare Aristotle and Alexander, “much worse for Alexander.”

5. Article 3, body: two senses of “natural” (“some motion is said to be natural”) #

The point: a motion is natural because nature inclines to it, in two ways.

1. Perfected by nature without any operation of a knowing power: fire moving up, plants and animals growing.
2. Nature inclines to it but it is perfected only through apprehension, since the motions of knowing and appetitive powers are reduced to nature as to a first beginning; so understanding, sensing, remembering and the animal appetite’s emotions are “sometimes called natural” — “but they’re not just natural.” Digression on “apprehension” (grasp, in the hand): knowing takes place by the known being in the knower, love by the lover being in the loved (“I left my heart in San Francisco”); we say take for the mind, give for love — contraries, showing the contrariety between the movements of knowing and loving; love is ecstasy, going outside oneself. Augustine and the boy on the seashore: you cannot fit the ocean in the hole, nor the Trinity in your mind — but you can jump into the ocean; the will is more proportioned to God. “Enter into the joy of the Lord”: we cannot get it in us, but we can get into it; in the beatific vision God is joined to the mind as that by which we see, not only what we see (“we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is”).

• In the second sense there is natural fear, distinguished from non-natural fear by object. Why Thomas goes to Rhetoric II: rhetoric is the art of persuasion; Aristotle’s three means are the image of the speaker, moving the emotions and prejudices, and the arguments (“the least important”); so Aristotle there says how each emotion is aroused and quieted, which the De anima does not do in detail. Fear of an evil corruptive of oneself, which nature refuses on account of the natural desire of being, is natural; fear of a saddening evil repugnant only to the desiring power is “not natural in the fullest sense” — as love, desire and pleasure were divided into natural and not natural above.
• In the first sense: love, desire and hope can be called natural even in natural things (love and hate, desire and flight imply an inclination to pursue good and flee evil, which belongs to natural appetite — though “strange to say hope there”). Other passions cannot: (a) those whose notion requires sense or knowledge — pleasure and sadness: a tree “likes” or “wants” water (the drooping houseplant; willow roots seeking water through your pipes and foundations), but is never delighted or sad; (b) those against the notion of nature — despair refuses the good with difficulty, fear refuses fighting an evil, to which there is a natural inclination; so these are in no way attributed to inanimate things.
• Boundary talk: vineyards in poor soil “making an effort” — a little like hope; but no pleasure or pain in sawing off a branch or cutting back a plant that “wants to grow out there.”

6. Article 4, objections: Damascene’s six species (“six species of fear”) #

The six named, with the class’s translations: segnities (slow, sluggish — laziness), erubescentia and verecundia (the versions give “shamefacedness” and “shame” — “that’s helpful”), admiratio (wonder), stupor (overwhelming?), agonia (Greek “struggle” — anxiety).

1. Fear is about a saddening evil (Rhetoric II); sadness has four species (said above); so fear should have four.
2. What consists in our act is subject to our power; fear is about what exceeds our power; so laziness and shame, which regard our operation, are not species of fear (a student: they concern what we are able to do — “I can do the shameful act or not”).
3. Fear is about the future; verecundia is about a shameful act already committed (iam commissum) — “I’m embarrassed to confess my sins, but sins are in the past.”
4. Fear is only of evil; wonder and stupor are about the great and unaccustomed, good or bad.
5. Philosophers are moved from wonder to inquiring the truth (beginning of the Physics); fear moves not to inquire but to flee. “What are we going to do with this?” Sed contra: the authority of Damascene and Gregory of Nyssa — the footnote says Nemesius. Student asked to name the fallacy: equivocation. Mistaken identities are common even among scholars (a friend with the same name as a dead man, “Joplin has died,” D. Berquist and M. Berquist confusing students).

• Aside: “I hate to be involved in a debate with Thomas”; Berkeley asking St Mary’s to stage a medieval debate.

7. Article 4, body: dividing the six (“the rule of two or three”) #

The point: evil, like good, is considered either in a man’s own operation or in exterior things — three species each. In one’s operation two evils are feared:

• labor weighing down nature → laziness (segnities): refusing to operate for fear of excess labor, “too hard”;
• turpitude destroying reputation → if feared in the act being committed (in actu committendo), erubescentia; if about a deed already done (iam facto), verecundia. Student exchange on English: embarrassment is present (“caught with your hand in the cookie jar”), shame is of the past (“I’m ashamed of my past”); a student proposes fear of messing up an answer as future embarrassment, and a printed translation says “a deed yet to be done” — he says “that’s not what it says here”: it is in actu committendo vs. iam facto. Settled: erubescentia embarrassment, verecundia shame — “may not be the best translations.” The difficulty naming them is a sign they are closer: laziness divided against the pair, then the pair subdivided. Politics: always hunting for something shameful in a man’s past. Exterior evil exceeds one’s power to resist for three reasons:
• magnitude — a great evil with no way out considered → admiratio (the study of Shakespeare’s emotional effect titled “Woe or Wonder,” from the end of Hamlet: wonder at all the bodies on the stage);
• unaccustomedness — an unaccustomed evil seems great in our estimate → stupor, from unaccustomed imagination. Msgr Dionne on the intellectual life: admiration helps it, stupor stops it. The Minnesota undergraduate who read authors A, B, C, got confused, junked it and refuses to pick up a book on the farm (“maybe he should have read Euclid first”); the stupor a beginner would feel at twenty or thirty objections in the disputed questions; his cousin bothered by all the opinions in the Catena Aurea — “like being upset because there’s too many desserts”;
• improvision (lack of foresight) — future misfortunes one cannot foresee → agonia, anxiety. Women of Trachis: the princess enslaved when her husband stormed her father’s palace — “this could happen to me.”

8. Article 4, replies (“wonder is a beginning of philosophizing”) #

• Ad 1: the species of sadness above are taken by effects and certain special rationes, not by diversity of object; the species of fear are by a proper division of fear’s object; so they need not correspond.
• Ad 2: operation as done or coming to be is subject to the agent’s power, but something about it can be considered as exceeding his ability, on account of which he refuses it; so laziness, embarrassment and shame are species of fear. His son’s book on how many WWII generals were removed for hesitating — “strike while the iron’s hot.”
• Ad 3: about a past act a future opprobrium or reproach can be feared ("convicium," he is unsure of the word) — one fears the past sins may be revealed (bringing up a candidate’s past at his press conference; the women Clinton was involved with).
• Ad 4: not any wonder or stupor, but wonder about a great evil and stupor about an unaccustomed one; or, as laziness refuses the labor of exterior operation, wonder and stupor refuse the difficulty of considering a great or uncustomary thing, good or bad — standing to the act of understanding as laziness to the exterior act.
• Ad 5 — “the text Thomas [ed.: his Laval teacher, name unclear in recording] used to always point to”: the wonderer refuses for the present to judge, fearing a defect, but in future inquires; the stupefied fears both to judge now and to inquire later (“goes back to the farm”). Hence wonder is a beginning of philosophizing, stupor an impediment.
• Aristotle’s universal doubt in Metaphysics III comes in the last part of philosophy, once the mind is formed in lower, more proportioned disciplines; Descartes puts it at the beginning — and then you have stupor, “frozen.” A Laval teacher mocked “father of modern philosophy”: “he has no children.”

His words #

• bonum futurum arduum possibile: the four parts of hope’s object, in that order.
• malum futurum difficile cui resisti non potest: the four parts of fear’s object.
• “defining is like spelling”: a missing or misordered part misdefines.
• aegritudo: sadness (Augustine’s word).
• fuga: flight, general; fear a special flight.
• vix: “hardly” able to resist.
• “vicious blow”: adjective naming cause or effect.
• magna pars miseri (error): his gloss on why we fear error.
• apprehension / “grasping”: knowing as the known in the knower; “take” vs “give” for knowing vs loving.
• ecstasy: love goes outside oneself.
• “natural” in two senses: perfected without a knowing power; inclined by nature but perfected through apprehension.
• segnities: laziness; erubescentia: embarrassment (class translation); verecundia: shame; admiratio: wonder; stupor; agonia: anxiety.
• in actu committendo vs iam facto: the two shames.
• “improvision”: lack of foresight (improvisio [ed.: inferred Latin]).
• opprobrium, convicium (uncertain): future reproach for a past act.
• “rule of two or three”: Thomas’s way of dividing.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 41, a. 2 (objections, body, replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 41, a. 3 (objections, body)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 41, a. 4 (objections, body, replies) Mentioned
• Augustine, Eighty-three Questions; Augustine and the boy on the seashore
• Aristotle, Ethics VI; Rhetoric II; De anima; Physics (beginning); Metaphysics III
• Damascene, On the Orthodox Faith II and III; Nemesius (footnote, for “Gregory of Nyssa”)
• Dionysius, Divine Names ch. 4
• Romans 4:18; John’s Gospel with Thomas’s commentary on Christ’s fear of death; “Enter into the joy of the Lord”; “we shall be like him, because we shall see him as he is”
• Shakespeare, Hamlet (“Woe or Wonder”); Sophocles, Women of Trachis; Thomas, Catena Aurea; Descartes

His questions #

• If the object were just bonum futurum, what else would that fit? Desire.
• Would there be hope if you thought you couldn’t overcome the difficulty? No — so possibile is the fourth part.
• If you stopped with malum futurum, what would that fit? Aversion; malum alone would fit hate, and futurum separates fear from sadness.
• Would you say this plant fears the sun? No — we speak of natural desire in plants, not fear or hope.
• Why does Thomas go to the second book of the Rhetoric for the emotions? Moving the emotions is one of the three means of persuasion, so Aristotle treats how each is aroused and quieted.
• Is the tree ever said to be joyful or sad? No; it “likes” or “wants” water, but pleasure and sadness require awareness.
• What fallacy is it that Thomas cites Gregory of Nyssa where the footnote says Nemesius? Equivocation.
• What’s the difference between erubescentia and verecundia? Embarrassment in the act being committed vs. shame over a deed already done (translations provisional).
• How can I have fear about the past? One fears the future reproach or revelation of the past act.
• Where does universal doubt come, for Aristotle and for Descartes? Last part of philosophy for Aristotle; the beginning for Descartes, which produces stupor.