Emotions, Virtue and Music; Q.44 a.4 Whether Fear Hinders Action; Q.45 Audacity, Its Contraries and Its Relation to Hope

Orientation #

He opens by looking ahead (“when we go on to the virtues”) and closes with “we’ll meet again next week here.” He refers back to “what we said before” on the fear of divine justice and hope in divine mercy (prev. lecture, not resolved by the context block). The verified sources place the class between q. 44 a. 2 and a. 4, then q. 44 a. 4, q. 45 a. 1 and a. 2. The previous class worked through q. 44 on the effects of fear; the next continues q. 45 on the causes of boldness.

The class, in order #

1. Emotions, virtues and music (“the music of Mozart, say, and the music of the Baroque”) #

Point: the emotions matter because virtues are seated in the different powers and because music represents the emotions.

• Looking ahead to the virtues: temperance in the concupiscible, courage in the irascible, justice in the will, wisdom (and prudence) in reason itself. So the difference between emotions and acts of the will must be understood.
• Music is basically a representation of the emotions. Mozart and the Baroque are better than Romantic music because they represent the emotions sharing in reason; the Romantic does not believe the emotions should be subject to reason. Emotions moved in harmony with such music are remotely disposed toward temperance; hence Plato in the Republic and Aristotle in Politics VIII on what music children (and adults) hear.
• Aristotle’s stranger claim: music represents the virtues concerned with the emotions. Mozart’s 36th and 41st symphonies (among the last five) both represent magnanimity, the virtue concerned with aspiration/hope, and both are in C major. Anger: C minor (24th concerto) and D minor (20th concerto); fearful scenes in Don Giovanni in D minor; sadness more in G minor. Minor keys for anger, fear, sadness; major for joy, love, hope. When Mozart changes key there is a reason; Haydn modulates for “variety, the spice of life.”
• Aside: at the end Haydn imitates Mozart, as Albert the Great went down to Paris after Thomas’s death to defend his teaching.

2. How reason should rule the emotions (“like a father rules his son”) #

Point: moral virtue can be in the emotions because they can partake of reason, and they must be accustomed to listen.

• Man and horse comparison: Washington Irving’s Western narratives on taming wild prairie horses; the horse first throws you off, but tamed it obeys and is a better horse for its spirit. Emotion first throws reason off; keep coming back and you may tame it. Good parents tame the child’s emotions so that when reason comes the emotions are apt to listen.
• Aristotle: should reason rule the emotions as master rules slave or as father rules son? Father–son, because the master rules for the master’s good and the slave has no say, while the father rules for the son’s good and the son has something to say. Story: his father’s business friend whose son slunk out of Amherst and was set up with a filling station, everyone happy; his own father never forced him into farm equipment.
• Because of their bodily aspect the emotions are not fully subject to reason and must be accustomed to it. Thomas calls the sins of intemperance “childish vices” (article title as he recalls it): an uncorrected child becomes uncontrollable, as do emotions let go to excess. Converted prostitutes of Paris relapsing: the standard example of accustoming. Aristotle in the Ethics: upbringing makes a great deal of difference, “or rather all the difference.” Households without a father.
• His father’s “sit in that chair”: the ruler must be somewhat separate from the ruled; parents who become playmates lose authority.
• “The truth on the emotions here is a key thing” for understanding music, fiction, rhetoric, and in this context moral theology: the four cardinal virtues anchor in four powers (prudence–reason, justice–will, courage–irascible, temperance–concupiscible).
• The bodily change in the emotions (obvious in anger and fear) is not to be detailed now, though it may have to be discussed. Short break.

3. q. 44 a. 4: whether fear impedes operation (“fear impedes what operation”) #

Point: fear always impedes on the side of the body, but moderate fear helps on the side of the soul. Objections: (1) operation is impeded most by disturbance of reason, which directs our doings, and fear disturbs reason. (2) Those acting with fear fail more easily: a man on a beam set on high falls from fear, but would not fall on the same beam laid on the ground. His example: walking the backyard fence as kids was fun; the same width between two New York skyscrapers and you would fall from fright (the TV tightrope walker he would watch but never do). (3) Laziness is a species of fear and impedes operation. Sed contra: the Apostle (St Paul, “the apostle” for Thomas as Aristotle is “the philosopher”), Philippians 2: work out your salvation with fear and trembling. He notes the importance of “tremor” appearing in Paul. Body, as he reads it:

1. Exterior operation is caused by the soul as first mover and by the bodily members as instruments.
2. Operation can be impeded by defect of the instrument or of the chief mover.
3. On the side of the bodily instruments, fear as such always impedes, through defect of heat in the exterior members. Example: a pianist so rattled, in a cold hall, that the recording had to be edited to get the right notes (he cannot recall the name).
4. On the side of the soul, moderate fear does not much disturb reason and conduces to operating well, since it causes solicitude, more attentive counsel, and more intense operation. Sport: a little fear of losing makes you play your best and take your chances. Philosophy: fear of being mistaken so great you do not use reason at all is bad; moderate fear makes you use it more carefully.
5. Fear grown so great that it disturbs reason impedes even on the part of the soul; of such fear the Apostle does not speak. Student: does Thomas discuss elsewhere that moderate fear conduces to working well? Answer: it is general to the emotions—moderate ones do not much disturb reason, strong ones do; the same for anger. Aside: Pope Benedict, a very mild man, can be very strong when someone acts against him, and has to be (also as Cardinal Ratzinger). Replies: (1) clear from the above (excessive fear). (2) Those who fall from the beam suffer a disturbance of imagination from the imagined fall—the fear comes through the imagination, as a student put it. (3) Everyone fearing flees what he fears; laziness is fear about the operation itself as laborious, so it draws the will away; fear about other things aids operation by inclining the will to what avoids the feared thing. His example: reading a difficult chapter of the commentaries or the Contra Gentiles today, fearing you are not up to it, so you familiarize yourself and leave full digestion till tomorrow; “sleep on it,” and sometimes you wake with the solution.

4. q. 45 a. 1: whether audacity is contrary to fear (“audacity or boldness is contrary to what fear”) #

Point: contraries are the most distant, and what is most distant from fear is audacity. Translation note: “audacity” or “boldness”; four things asked in q. 45: contrary to fear? how related to hope? its cause; its effect. Objections: (1) Augustine, 83 Questions: audacity is a vice; vice is opposed to virtue; fear is a passion, not a virtue. Aside: as a kid he was taught anger is a sin, but our Lord is angry in the Gospels—watch how words are used. (2) To one thing one contrary (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle): contraries are the species furthest apart in the same genus; on a line only the two endpoints are furthest apart, many points may be equally distant; black and white. But hope is contrary to fear (people go from hoping to fearing). His own thinking on comedy as contrary of tragedy is flagged here and taken up below. (3) Each passion excludes its opposite; what fear excludes is security (Augustine, Confessions II: fear warns against security; Shakespeare, “security is mortal’s chiefest enemy”), so security, not audacity, is fear’s contrary. Sed contra: the Philosopher, Rhetoric II, audacia est timori contraria. Body: (1) it is of the ratio of contraries to be most of all distant (Metaphysics X, “the book on the one and the many,” where contrariety is taken up); (2) fear flees the future harmful thing because of its victory over the one fearing, audacity approaches the imminent danger because of its victory over the danger; (3) hence fear and audacity are manifestly contrary. Illustrations: Goliath going boldly against David while David has some fear he might not win [transcript: “David and Chris”, likely Goliath]; Caesar’s veni vidi vici, Shakespeare’s “I came, I saw, I overcame” not quite matching Caesar’s brevity; Washington Irving on the boldness of Spanish captains, Cortez, outnumbered.

5. Reply 1: names of passions and names of vices (“the names of all the passions”) #

Point: the names of the passions are taken in two ways.

• A: as implying absolutely the motion of the sense appetite toward some good or bad object—names of passions. B: as implying with that motion a recess from the order of reason—names of vices.
• Catechism’s anger as vice vs. Christ angry at the hardness of the Jews: different meanings of “anger.” Augustine speaks of audacity in the second way; here it is taken in the first.
• He stresses the order: this objection is put first not because most important but because it turns on the meaning of the word; without the same meaning “you’re going to be all messed up.”

6. Reply 2: twofold contrariety in the irascible; comedy and hope (“comedy is not so much concerned with boldness”) #

Point: many things may be contrary to one thing according to diverse respects.

• According to the same respect there are not many contraries, but according to diverse respects nothing prevents it. The irascible passions have a twofold contrariety: (a) good vs. bad—fear contrary to hope; (b) approach vs. recess—fear contrary to audacity, hope contrary to desperation. “That’s interesting.”
• His comedy digression: he had sought the contrary of fear for comedy and thought it boldness (true in one way), but comedy is concerned with hope. A translator of Terence’s comedies twisted Paul’s “faith, hope and charity” to say comedy’s virtue is hope; that stood out. Influenced by Thomas’s principal passions (joy, sadness, fear, hope): the two principal forms of fiction, tragedy and comedy (others in between), deal with the principal passions—comedy with hope and mirth (a kind of joy), tragedy with pity (a kind of sadness) and fear; comedy also purges melancholy, a sadness. “A beautiful thing.”
• Between love and hate, by contrast, there seems to be only one contrariety.

7. Reply 3: security is a privation, not a contrary (“the contrary and the lack”) #

Point: security signifies only the lack of fear, not another emotion.

• The secure man is one who does not fear; security is opposed to fear as a privation, audacity as a contrary. Contraries are forms/species furthest apart; privation is lack of a form; the contrary includes the privation, as vice implies lack of virtue but is not merely the lack—vice is a real habit, a real inclination to do what you should not. So audacity includes security.
• “A very important distinction”, with his examples: easier to win a voter who has not decided than one convinced for the other candidate; the one who does not know a theorem vs. the one with a false opinion, who resists more; easier to bring up to chastity the child with neither virtue nor vice than one who has the opposite vice. His teaching joke: the student who has read a few books and picked up errors is “even further away from the truth” than those who have not started; bad teachers left him mistakes that took long to remove.
• Student: how does contrariety imply privation? Answer: a false opinion lacks the true one, but not everyone lacking the true opinion has the false; the newborn has neither chastity nor the contrary vice, though for an adult, by Thomas, lacking the virtue you have probably got the opposite habit.

8. q. 45 a. 2: whether audacity follows hope (“audacity follows upon what hope”) #

Point: pursuit of the bad follows pursuit of the good, so audacity follows hope as its effect. Objections: (1) audacity regards bad and terrible things (Ethics III), hope the good; diverse objects, not one order. (2) As audacity is contrary to fear, desperation to hope; but fear does not follow desperation, rather desperation excludes fear (Rhetoric II). (3) Audacity intends a good, victory; tending to a difficult good is hope; so audacity is the same as hope, not its follower. Sed contra: Ethics III, those of good hope are bold. Body:

1. All passions belong to the appetitive power; every motion of it reduces to pursuit or flight.
2. Pursuit and flight are per se or per accidens (the famous distinction, from “the fifth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V] on being per se and per accidens): per accidens one pursues a bad for a good joined to it, or flees a good for a bad joined to it.
3. What is per accidens always follows what is per se; so pursuit of the bad follows pursuit of the good, flight from the good follows flight from the bad.
4. Four passions: pursuit of good—hope; flight from bad—fear; pursuit of a terrible bad—audacity (“that’s kind of tragedy”); flight from the good—desperation (something unnatural in fleeing the good or pursuing the bad).
5. So audacity follows hope: hoping to overcome the imminent terrible thing, one boldly pursues it; desperation follows fear: one despairs because he fears the difficulty about the good hoped for. Aside from Thomas’s commentary on the Psalms: fear and hope both needed, in balance—excessive fear of divine justice leads to despair of salvation, excessive hope in divine mercy to presumption, “quite audacity”; tied to their being principal passions. Replies: (1) the argument would hold if good and bad had no order; but bad is posterior to good as privation to habit, so audacity, pursuing the bad, is after hope. (2) Though good is simply before bad, flight is owed per prius to the bad as pursuit to the good; so hope is before audacity and fear before desperation (fear moves from the bad, desperation gives up the good—the fox and the grapes); desperation does not always follow fear but only intense fear, and audacity follows hope only when it is vehement. (3) Audacity regards the bad, though the good of victory is joined to it in the estimate of the bold; hope regards that joined good; desperation regards the good it gives up, fear the bad joined to it. So boldness is properly not a part of hope but its effect, as desperation is the effect of fear, and so cannot be the same thing. Story: Minnesota in the Big Ten at the Rose Bowl, built up for weeks in the papers; once ahead, the California team feared, then despaired and gave up, and the second and third stringers “beat the heck out of” them. Closing: “very important to see that hope and fear are the principle”; the virtues (fear of the Lord; hope as a theological virtue) tie in. Next week.

His words #

• irascible / concupiscible appetite: seats of courage and temperance respectively
• magnanimity: the great virtue concerned with aspiration, with hope
• childish vices: his recollection of Thomas’s title for sins of intemperance
• the apostle / the philosopher: Thomas’s names for St Paul and Aristotle
• first mover / instruments or tools: soul and bodily members in exterior operation
• solicitude: what moderate fear causes, making counsel more attentive
• audacity: his preferred rendering; “boldness” also used
• ratio of contraries: to be most of all distant; species furthest apart in a genus
• twofold contrariety: good vs. bad; approach vs. recess
• privation vs. contrary: lack of a form vs. the furthest form; the contrary includes the privation
• per se / per accidens: pursuit or flight of a thing for itself or for something joined to it
• “the fifth book of Wisdom” [ed.: Metaphysics V]
• “the tenth book of the metaphysics … on the one and the many”: where contrariety is treated
• per prius: flight owed first to the bad, pursuit first to the good
• presumptuous: the excess of hope in divine mercy

Texts #

Read in class:

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 44, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 45, prologue and a. 1
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 45, a. 2 Mentioned:
• Paul, Philippians 2 (fear and trembling)
• Augustine, 83 Questions (audacity a vice); Confessions II (fear warns against security)
• Aristotle, Rhetoric II; Ethics III; Metaphysics X; Politics VIII; the Ethics on upbringing
• Plato, Republic (on music)
• Thomas, commentary on the Psalms (fear and hope); Contra Gentiles; article on intemperance as childish vices (locus not given)
• Shakespeare (“security is mortal’s chiefest enemy”; “I came, I saw, I overcame”)
• Washington Irving, Western narratives and on the Spanish captains
• Terence’s comedies (translator’s introduction)
• Mozart, symphonies 36 and 41, concertos 20 and 24, Don Giovanni; Haydn

His questions #

• Should reason rule the emotions like a master his slave or like a father his son? Like a father, who rules for the son’s good and leaves him something to say.
• On a line, how many points can be furthest apart? Only the endpoints; hence one contrary to one thing.
• Is it the fear or the imagination that makes the man fall from the beam? The fear, caused by the imagined fall.
• Which is easier to convince: the undecided voter or the one supporting the other candidate? The undecided, who merely lacks conviction.
• Does everyone who lacks the true opinion have the false one? No; a newborn has neither the virtue nor the vice.
• Do you pursue the good or the bad, flee the good or the bad, per prius? Pursue the good, flee the bad; so hope precedes audacity, fear precedes desperation.
• Why is the objection about the meaning of the word put first? Unless the word is taken in the same meaning the whole matter is confused.
• Does Thomas elsewhere say moderate fear conduces to working well? Generally of the emotions: moderate ones do not much disturb reason.