Aquinas on Fear, Part 1: Fear's Object: Good or Evil, Death, and Guilt (Summa I-II Q.42 a.1–3)

Orientation #

He begins by looking “back at question forty-one, the previous question, and the first article” on the senses of passio before taking up q. 42 on the object of fear (prev. lecture). The class ends mid-sentence (“Okay, now with…”) after a. 3; aa. 4-6 are listed but not reached. The previous class treated q. 41 (fear as a special passion, Damascene’s six kinds); the next continues q. 42 aa. 4-6 and the causes of fear.

The class, in order #

1. Look back at q. 41 a. 1: four senses of passio (“fear has more the notion of a passion”) #

The point: sadness and fear are most properly passions, sadness most of all.

1. Most generally, passio is the motion of an undergoing power whose object is compared to it as an active mover; the undergoing is the effect of the agent — so even sensing and understanding are “undergoings” (De Anima).
2. More properly, the motion of the appetitive power. Scripture: “they became abominable just as the things they loved” — you can know disgusting things without becoming disgusting, but loving them makes you ipso facto disgusting (this is about the will).
3. More properly still, the motion of an appetitive power having a bodily organ, with bodily change (the emotions).
4. Propriissime, motions that imply some harm: fear and sadness. Of these sadness (present evil) is most a passion; fear (future evil) moves less, since the future does not move as the present does.

2. John 13: Jesus troubled in spirit (“Jesus is disturbed, id est tristatus”) #

The point: Thomas’s commentary on turbatus est says the same thing as q. 41 a. 1.

• Christ’s emotions do not surprise him as ours do; they come into play only when he allows them, to show he has true human nature. At Judas’s betrayal “turbatus est… in spiritu.”
• Thomas: turbatio designates a commotion, as water moved in the temple pool, the sea turbatum when commotum. Acts of the understanding part are without bodily commotion; acts of the sensitive appetite are with it, whence they are called passiones.
• Among them sadness most has the vim commotionis. Pleasure, being rest in a present good, has more the notion of rest than commotion (“he said beautiful — how restful”). Fear, about a future evil, moves less than sadness. So turbatio of the soul is especially called sadness: “Jesus is disturbed, id est tristatus.”
• Aside: as Leo XIII says, the scholastics through their theology were able to explain things in Scripture.

3. Q. 42: the six articles (“the object of fear, and about this six things”) #

He lists them: (1) whether the object of fear is good or bad; (2) whether the malum naturae is its object; (3) whether fear is about the evil of guilt (culpa); (4) whether fear itself can be feared; (5) whether repentina, sudden things, are more feared; (6) whether things against which there is no remedy are more feared.

• Aside on a. 4: his mother’s small Minnesota town, people terrified at public meetings — “it seems like you’re afraid you’re going to be afraid.”

4. A. 1: is the object of fear the good or the bad? (“fear implies a certain flight”) #

The point: fear regards evil primo et per se; the good only in relation to evil. Objections: (i) Augustine, 83 Questions: we fear nothing except that which we love, lest we lose it or not attain it; but the loved is good. His gloss: at most remote — “if I love my body, I fear the bullet; I’m not loving the bullet.” (ii) Rhetoric II: power over another is terrible (he recalls Aristotle: fearful to be in the power of another, for men do bad whatever they can — “not a low estimate, a real, experienced estimate”); but power is a good, one of Boethius’s five goods of false happiness, taken up before true happiness because more known to us. (iii) Nothing bad in God, yet Ps 33 commands “fear the Lord, all you his saints.” Sed contra: Damascene II, fear is about a future evil. Respondeo:

1. Fear is a motion of the desiring power, to which pertain pursuit and flight (Ethics VI); pursuit is of good, flight from evil.
2. Fear implies flight; therefore evil is its per se object.
3. But it can regard the good in two ways: (a) as that of which the evil deprives one — evil is privation of good, so fleeing evil because evil is fleeing it because it deprives of the good loved (this saves Augustine — “a remote cause”); (b) as the cause of evil, a good which by its power can inflict harm on the good loved.
4. As hope regards two things (the good tended to, and that through which one hopes to obtain it), so fear regards the evil fled and the good that can inflict it — “you fear the judge.” Applications: God feared as able to inflict spiritual or bodily punishment; another man’s power feared especially when harmful or unjust; one fears to be under another’s power; one conscious of a crime fears its being revealed. Student’s summary accepted: the immediate fear is the punishment, its cause is God.

• Small correction in reading: “over someone” — “you think it’s under?” — “Under.”

5. A. 2: is the evil of nature feared? (“apprehended as near, with some hope of evasion”) #

The point: the malum naturae is feared only when it appears as a future evil near at hand and yet evadable. Objections: (i) Rhetoric II, fear makes us take counsel (like fear of being mistaken making one think carefully), but no counsel about what comes by nature (Ethics III). (ii) Natural defects (death) are always imminent, so man would always be in fear — “not actually, maybe habitually.” (iii) Nature does not move to contraries; the evil of nature is from nature, so natural fear is not about it — “I don’t understand the objection very well.” Sed contra: Ethics III, death is the most terrible thing, and it is a malum naturae. Aside: his text capitalizes Philosophus; editions that don’t are “disrespectful… impious.” Respondeo:

1. Rhetoric II: fear arises from the image of a future evil, either corrupting or saddening. The saddening evil is contrary to the will; the corruptive is contrary to nature — this is the malum naturae. So there can be fear about it.
2. But “evil of nature” is amphibolous, two senses of the genitive: an evil that deprives of nature’s good, or one that is also nature’s effect — as “wisdom is the knowledge of God” means knowledge about God and knowledge God alone has most of all. Death by a persecutor is an evil of nature not from a natural cause. (Aside: the pro-life prayer “from birth to natural death.”)
3. In both ways the evil of nature is somehow feared and somehow not, because whatever removes the appearance of future evil removes fear. Two ways it fails to appear future: (a) distance — the young think themselves immortal (“under thirty you think you’ll live forever; by forty you think about it”); Rhetoric II, things valde longe are not feared; all know they will die but don’t care; (b) necessity, which makes it seem present — Rhetoric II, those already condemned do not fear. So to fear at all there must be some hope of salvation/evasion. Examples: you don’t fear a roller coaster unless you think you can get off; the first 3-D movie roller coaster, everyone screaming; his nephew in virtual-skateboard goggles, motionless in the house, fell off — “too dangerous, to be feared.” Replies: (1) the evil of nature, though not entirely avoidable, can be deferred, and under this hope there is counsel — the 103-year-old; (2) always imminent but not always near, so not always feared — a man goes through the day: “other people die; I’ve got too many things to do”; (3) death arises from universal nature, to which particular nature is repugnant so far as possible; hence pain and sadness when present, fear when future. Exchange: “if you are dying now, are you afraid?” — you’d fear the future judgment, not death; about death you’d be sad, a present evil.

6. A. 3: is fear about the evil of guilt? (“difficult and not easily avoided”) #

The point: guilt, caused by the human will, is not properly terrible; it is feared only as from an exterior seducing cause. Objections: (i) Augustine on the Epistle of John: by chaste fear man fears separation from God; only guilt separates (Isa 59, “your sins divide between you and your God”) — “good argument, isn’t it?” (ii) Tully (Cicero, a man of two names as in Scripture), Tusculan IV: we fear when future what we are sad about when present; the contrite are sad about guilt. (iii) Hope, opposed to fear, can be about the good of virtue (Ethics IX; Galatians, “I am confident about you in the Lord”). (iv) Verecundia (shame; erubescentia is embarrassment) is a species of fear and is about an ugly deed. Sed contra: Rhetoric II, not all evils are feared, e.g. becoming unjust or slow. Respondeo:

1. As hope’s object has four notes (future good, difficult, obtainable), fear is about an evil, future, difficult, not easily avoided. Aside on Latin word order following logical order (genus before difference: animal rationale, “a man wise”). He pauses: “difficult and not easily avoided — I didn’t think of those two together.”
2. Hence what is altogether subject to our power and will lacks the notion of the terrible; only what has an extrinsic cause is terrible.
3. Guilt has the human will as its cause; so properly it is not terrible. Student objection: can you fear taking your own life? — a woman given medication that gave her suicidal thoughts and terrified her. His answer: yes insofar as it is outside your power; and Thomas continues:
4. Since the will can be inclined to sin from outside, if that has great power to incline, there can be fear of guilt as from an exterior cause — fearing to dwell with the wicked lest one be induced to sin; parents worrying about their kids’ company. Student: St John of the Cross to a prostitute — he’d rather spend the night in hell with the devil, since with the devil he wouldn’t be sinning. “He knew what to fear.”
5. But properly such a man fears seduction more than guilt in its proper definition, i.e. as voluntary. Student: this bears on addictions — people subject themselves to seduction, then habituate; hard but not impossible. Anecdote of an alcoholic who reasoned out for himself to route around the street with the bar: “if I went by it, I’d be in it.” Replies: (1) separation from God is a punishment following sin, and every punishment is somehow from an exterior cause; (2) sadness and fear agree in being about evil but differ twice: present vs future; sadness in the concupiscible regards evil absolutely, small or great, fear in the irascible regards it under arduousness, which is removed insofar as a thing is subject to the will — so not everything we’d be sad about is feared; (3) a good is obtainable through oneself or another, so hope can be about an act of virtue in our power, but the feared evil is always from an extrinsic cause; (4) shame is not fear of the act of sin but of the ugliness/ignominy falling on it, from an extrinsic cause — the politician caught with another woman: “he’s just sorry he got caught.”

• Asides: how many murders would there be if there were no punishment for murder; “the existentialist, in the end, dies stupid” (Father Peter) — keep in mind when reading Sartre.

His words #

• passio, undergoing; four degrees, general to propriissime.
• turbatio, disturbance/commotion; turbatus est… id est tristatus.
• vim commotionis, the power of commotion, most in sadness.
• malum naturae, evil of nature; culpa, guilt; repentina, sudden things.
• amphibolous — two senses of the genitive [ed.: amphiboly].
• valde longe, very far off — not feared.
• verecundia — shame; erubescentia — embarrassment.
• “difficult and not easily avoided” — the two notes of fear’s object.
• “the Philosopher” capitalized — Aristotle.

Texts #

Read in class: ST I-II q. 41 a. 1 (senses of passio); Thomas on John 13, turbatus est (inferred locus); ST I-II q. 42 prol., a. 1, a. 2, a. 3 in full. Mentioned: Aristotle, De Anima (sensing and understanding as undergoing); Rhetoric II (power of another; fear makes counsel; image of future evil; far-off things; the condemned; not all evils feared); Ethics III (no counsel about nature; death most terrible), VI (pursuit and flight), IX (hope of virtue); Augustine, 83 Questions; Augustine on the Epistle of John; Damascene II; Cicero, Tusculan IV; Boethius, Consolation (false before true happiness); Ps 33; Isa 59; Galatians; Leo XIII on the scholastics.

His questions #

• You’re more affected by the things you love than the things you…?
  Know — knowing disgusting things doesn’t make you disgusting; loving them does.
• Fear makes us take counsel — where is that in philosophy?
  The fear of being mistaken makes one think carefully.
• Are you always fearing death?
  Not actually, maybe habitually; it’s not always near.
• Malum naturae is what kind of expression?
  Amphibolous — two senses of the genitive, like “knowledge of God.”
• If you are dying now, are you afraid?
  You’d fear the future judgment; about death itself you’d be sad, not afraid.
• Can you fear that you might take your own life?
  Only insofar as it’s outside your power (medication example); as voluntary, guilt isn’t terrible.
• Why is Thomas writing this article?
  Because one properly fears seduction from outside more than guilt as voluntary — helpful for addictions and occasions of sin.
• Is that a good answer (St John of the Cross)?
  Yes — he knew what to fear.