Shakespeare on the Effects of Fear, the Death of Saint Ferdinand, and the Causes of Boldness (Question 45, Articles 2–3)

Orientation #

He recalls “question 44, which is on the effects of fear” and its four articles, then says “we left off here in question forty-five … article two … we looked at a little bit of article two” (prev. lecture). He does not say what comes next; the class breaks after finishing article 3. The previous class treated fear and audacity in relation to hope and reason; the next continues with q. 45 a. 4 and begins the question on anger.

The class, in order #

1. Recap of q. 44 and Shakespeare’s Venus (“touches upon almost all the causes or effects”) #

The point: the four effects of fear in q. 44 are all packed into a few lines of Shakespeare.

• The four articles recalled: fear makes for contraction (of the emotions and also of the body); fear makes us take counsel; fear causes trembling; fear impedes operation.
• Shakespeare’s two narrative poems, Venus and Adonis (Venus, goddess of love, in love with the mortal Adonis) and The Rape of Lucrece (from Roman history). When Venus hears Adonis will hunt the boar, her passion is not jealousy but fear that he will be hurt.
• The lines he reads: “they that thrive well take counsel of their friends” = counsel; “my joints did tremble” = trembling; “was it not white?” and “signs of fear lurk in mine eye” = contraction/bodily effect; “were I not faint, and fell I not downright” = impeding of operation. “So you can read Venus and Adonis better for having known this.”
• Aside: news photos of an “angel” in the Florida sky, associated with the new pope.

2. The death of Fernando the Saint (“the chronicle of Fernando the Saint”) #

The point: an edifying reading, with a plug for old Spanish romance as a tonic.

• Fernando, the great Spanish king who conquered Seville, died at Seville of dropsy in 1242 (“during Thomas’s life”); he confessed, received the sacrament kneeling with a rope round his neck, had the royal ornaments removed, blessed his heir Alfonso, saw angels in a trance, made a profession of faith holding a candle, and died as the Te Deum was begun, which angelic voices continued; the Moorish king of Granada mourned him and yearly sent Moors with wax tapers to his exequies.
• Washington Irving’s covering letter (signed “Geoffrey Crayon”): old Spanish chronicles as “mental tonics” against “modern utilitarianism,” like the hero of La Mancha with his books of chivalry, or Falstaff’s sack.
• Asides: Irving’s house on the Hudson with dusty Spanish volumes; Daniel Webster recommended him as ambassador to Spain; Sleepy Hollow’s gloomy weather as inspiration for the headless horseman.

3. Q. 45 a. 2, objections and sed contra (“audacity does not follow upon what hope”) #

The point: three arguments that boldness does not follow hope, and Aristotle against them.

1. Audacity is about bad and terrible things (Ethics III), hope about the good; diverse objects, so not of one order, so no following.
2. As boldness is contrary to fear, so desperation to hope; but fear does not follow desperation — rather desperation excludes fear (“nothing to lose now … sell our lives dearly,” Rhetoric II); so boldness does not follow hope.
   • He restates the fourfold scheme (prev. class): from desire for a difficult good arise hope (if you think you can overcome the difficulty) or despair (if not); from aversion to a difficult evil arise fear (if you may not avoid it) or boldness (if you can overcome it). To answer the objections one must see that hope and fear are the chief passions of the irascible, two of the four principal passions.
3. Boldness intends a good, victory; tending to a difficult good is hope’s; so boldness is the same as hope and does not follow it.

• Sed contra: Ethics III, “those who are of good hope are bold.”
• Aside: “Pericles says the thing worth saying is worth saying twice.”

4. The body: per se and per accidens (“this famous distinction”) #

The point: every passion is pursuit or flight; pursuit and flight are per se or per accidens, and the per accidens follows the per se, so boldness follows hope and desperation follows fear.

• Digression on the universality of the distinction: in Metaphysics V Aristotle treats the names most used in wisdom and the axioms, including being and one; the first distinction he gives of being is per se vs. per accidens; only then does he divide being per se three ways (figures of predication; true/false; act and ability) — “very universal … but not as universal as per se and per accidens.”
• Example: “my being a man” is being per se; “my being a Christian geometer” is being per accidens, because there is nothing by which one is a Christian geometer (no “Christian geometry”): he was not always one, there is a way to become a Christian (baptism) and a way to become a geometer (his teacher: “get Euclid”), but no way to become a Christian geometer — yet if a Christian academy wants one, “here is one right here” (joke: Pope Francis stuck teaching high-school math).
• Argument:
  1. Pursuit per se is of the good (worthy of pursuit); flight per se is from the bad.
  2. Per accidens one pursues something bad on account of a good joined to it (David going out against Goliath), or flees a good on account of a joined evil.
  3. The per accidens follows the per se (as being per se is before being per accidens: one can be a geometer without being a Christian, like Euclid of Alexandria, or a Christian without being a geometer, “like maybe my wife” — “before” in the second sense, if this can be without that but not vice versa).
  4. Four passions: pursuit of good = hope; flight from evil = fear; pursuit of a terrible evil = boldness; flight from a good (giving up) = desperation.
  5. Hence boldness follows hope: hoping to overcome the imminent terrible thing, one boldly pursues it (David, hoping for victory, approaches Goliath — the Florence statue with the sling); desperation follows fear: one despairs because he fears a difficulty about the good he hoped to have.
• Why hope and fear rather than despair and boldness are principal passions: why would anyone run from the good, or toward the bad? Not as such — only per accidens.
• Aside on tragedy and comedy: he once took comedy, as contrary to tragedy, to move to boldness (since tragedy moves to fear); but comedy is more concerned with hope; the two principal forms of fiction fit the four principal passions — sadness and fear, joy and hope.

5. Student exchange: has boldness a per se cause? (“everything has a per se cause”) #

The point: boldness has the bad as its object; the good of victory is what hope regards, so hope is the principle.

• Student: isn’t the victory sought the per se cause of boldness? He: in boldness you pursue something bad, which as such you should not seek; the king crossing the battlefield to slay the other king has hope of victory, and that gives the boldness to pursue him — but boldness’s object is the bad, so it is not a principal passion as hope is.
• Student: but everything has a per se cause? He: no — Thomas is precisely distinguishing per se from per accidens; that one pursues the bad is per accidens, since the bad as such is repulsive; the per se is always before.
• Student: like the Christian geometer? He: being a Christian geometer depends on being a Christian and being a geometer; if there were Christian geometry it would be per se, “but there ain’t such an animal.”
  • Application: be careful when popes speak of “Christian philosophy” — it must be explained, as Thomas explains texts of Augustine; there is a way to become a Christian and a way to become a philosopher, not the same, and nothing by which one is a “Christian philosopher” — though one can contribute to the other.
  • Augustine and the Manichaeans (via Monsignor Dionne): unable yet to judge the great Manichaean teacher, Augustine saw he lacked the liberal arts — how trust a man on things above him who lacks the fundamentals? Like a man doing solid geometry who does not know plane geometry. “If a person had a training in the liberal arts, he would not have been taken in by the Manichaeans.” (His kids’ school “Trivium”; TAC.)
• Student: so boldness and despair have per se converses? He: yes, the per se comes before — hope and fear; clearer for boldness following hope, but Thomas points out that desperation follows fear. Example: the suitor afraid to ask the girl lest she say no is not yet in despair, but if the fear becomes too great it falls into despair.

6. Digression: masters of both tragedy and comedy (“master of both tragedy and comedy”) #

• Venus and Adonis is comic (not for Venus), Lucrece tragic — Shakespeare has both forms. Aristotle says Homer’s lost Margites is to comedy as the Iliad to tragedy, so Homer too mastered both; Shakespeare likewise (his brother Richard: “I didn’t realize it was so funny”); most of the comedies come earlier. Molière lacks this universality — his attempt at something tragic “doesn’t really work.”
• Homer excels in plot, character and diction: Aristotle says Homer taught the Greeks plot; Hegel praises Homer’s many-sided characters (“like a diamond”) against French tragedy’s one passion personified; Aristotle and Hegel praise his diction and similes. Shakespeare “is one of everything”; Irving: “Shakespeare said it all.”

7. Replies to the three objections (“as the per se is before the per accidens”) #

• Ad 1: the argument would hold if good and bad had no order to each other; but bad is posterior to good, as privation to habit; so boldness, which pursues the bad, is after hope, which pursues the good.
• Ad 2: though the good is simply before the bad (“if you didn’t love life, you wouldn’t hate death”), flight is owed before to the bad, as pursuit is owed before to the good; so as hope is before boldness, fear is before desperation; and as desperation does not always follow fear but only intense fear, so boldness follows hope only when it is vehement. Seeing this shows what the chief passions are, and vice versa.
• Ad 3: boldness, though the good of victory (in the bold man’s estimate) is joined to its object, regards the bad; hope regards the joined good; likewise desperation regards the good it refuses, fear the adjoined evil. So boldness is not a part of hope but its effect, desperation not a part of fear but its effect; hence boldness cannot be a chief passion.
  • What he stresses: “distinction is before seeing order” — only when you see boldness is really distinct from hope can you see that hope is before.
• Mozart aside (before ad 3): the last five symphonies are 36, 38, 39, 40, 41 — no 37, since the “37th” was Mozart’s introduction to a symphony by Michael Haydn (Joseph’s brother), and the numbering was kept. Parallel: whether to say “Pope Francis” or “Francis the First” (correct: Francis; we never say Peter the First; John Paul I story: “you don’t get called first until you’re second”); and the pope who died before inauguration, so the count is uncertain.
• After ad 3: the 36th and 41st symphonies represent magnanimity, a virtue concerned with hope; the 38th and 40th courage, concerned with fear; the 39th joy; sadness also in the 40th — so the four principal passions stand out in the last five.

8. Q. 45 a. 3, objections and sed contra (“some defect is the cause of boldness”) #

• Obj. 1: Problems — lovers of wine are strong, brave and bold; but from wine follows the defect of drunkenness (men off the bar stool ready to fight, before they notice the other’s muscles).
• Obj. 2: Rhetoric II — those without experience of dangers are bold. Examples: teenagers driving too fast, the girl who went off the highway; ice each winter (his father: “when winter comes, you have to learn how to drive again” — the man of experience); the driver who passed his wife on ice and went round the corner; “there’s always some jerk behind you”; young Washington writing that the whiz of bullets is exhilarating, and as an old man: “I was young then.”
• Obj. 3: those who have undergone unjust things are more bold, like beasts when struck (his brother Mark’s companion kicked a barking dog — dangerous, makes the dog more bold); suffering injustice pertains to a defect.
• Sed contra: Rhetoric II — the cause of boldness is when in the imagination there is hope of salvation as near and the terrible things are absent or far off; what pertains to defect pertains to the remoteness of what saves or the nearness of the terrible; so no defect causes boldness.

9. The body of a. 3: two sides of the passion (“on the part of the bodily transmutation”) #

The point: since boldness follows hope and is contrary to fear, whatever causes hope or excludes fear causes boldness, on the side of the desiring motion or of the bodily change.

• The two aspects (Aristotle, proem to the three books On the Soul): the formal aspect of anger is desire for revenge; but there is also a bodily change — “literally hot under the collar,” turning red.
• On the side of the desiring motion, which follows apprehension: hope is called forth by whatever makes us estimate victory possible — one’s own power (bodily strength, experience of dangers, multitude of bodies), or others’ power (friends, helpers), and especially confidence in divine things (David; Rhetoric II: those well disposed to divine things are more bold). Fear is excluded by removal of approaching terrible things: having no enemies, having harmed no one, seeing no danger imminent — those who have harmed others feel danger nearest (“Stalin didn’t trust anybody”).
• On the side of the bodily change: what makes heat about the heart calls forth hope and excludes fear. Parts of Animals: those with a small heart are more bold, animals with a large heart timid, because natural heat cannot heat a large heart as it can a small one — “fire cannot so much heat a large house as a small one.” Problems: those with a large, bloody lung are more bold from heat of the heart; wine-lovers likewise from the heat of wine. Heat repels fear, which is tied to coldness (one goes cold and trembles in fear, as one shivers to warm up in cold weather), and causes hope by the expansion of the heart.
• Anecdote: faculty dinners at Saint Mary’s College (Christian Brothers wine and brandy) left him wanting to attack a liberal professor; Ron MacArthur cancelling a colleague’s vote.
• Aside: arguing with a liberal historian over Roosevelt at Yalta (“Can we trust the Russians?” — “Why not?”); Alger Hiss and other advisers as Stalinist agents, confirmed from Russian files (Venona).

10. Replies and a student’s remark (“no defect causes boldness except per accidens”) #

• Ad 1: drunkenness causes boldness not as a defect but as expanding the heart and making one estimate oneself of some magnitude.
• Ad 2: the inexperienced are bold not from the defect but per accidens: not knowing their weakness nor the presence of dangers, the cause of fear is subtracted and boldness follows.
• Ad 3: Rhetoric II — those who have suffered injustice are bolder because they estimate God will aid them.
• Conclusion: no defect causes boldness except per accidens, insofar as some excellence, true or estimated, on one’s own part or another’s, is joined to it.
• Student: the wine reply must come from a culture where everyone drank daily; today we would say drunkenness lowers inhibitions. He: that is a different kind of thing altogether; here the point is that you overestimate your ability. Break.

His words #

• contraction; the first effect of fear, of emotions and of the body
• audacity / boldness; his two renderings of audacia
• desperation; contrary of hope [ed.: despair]
• aversion; the opposite of desire, trying to avoid something bad
• chief / principal / beginning passions; hope, fear, joy, sadness
• per se / per accidens; “this famous distinction,” the first division of being in Metaphysics V
• being according to the figures of predication; being as true or false; being as act and ability [ed.: potency]; the three divisions of being per se
• before in the second sense; this can be without that but not vice versa
• fifth book of wisdom; his name for Metaphysics V
• desiring power; the appetitive power; “repetitive motion” in the transcript is ASR for appetitive
• ebrietas; drunkenness
• inexperti; those without experience of dangers
• “distinction is before seeing order”

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 45, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 45, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, body, replies) — verified source match
• Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis (Venus’s speech on the boar)
• Washington Irving, chronicle of Fernando the Saint and the “Geoffrey Crayon” letter to the editor (inferred: from Irving’s Spanish papers)

Mentioned

• Thomas Aquinas, ST I-II, q. 44 aa. 1–4 (recalled)
• Aristotle, Metaphysics V (being and one, per se / per accidens); Ethics III; Rhetoric II; Problems; Parts of Animals; On the Soul, proem; Poetics (inferred, for Homer’s Margites and plot)
• Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece, Hamlet, Macbeth, Romeo and Juliet
• Homer, Iliad, Odyssey, Margites; Hegel on Homer’s characters; Molière
• Augustine (liberal arts and the Manichaeans, via Monsignor Dionne)
• Note: the verification system also matched Summa Contra Gentiles IV, ch. 15 to this audio, but nothing in the transcript corresponds to it; the class follows ST I-II q. 45 throughout.

His questions #

• What were the four articles of q. 44 on the effects of fear? Contraction, counsel, trembling, impeding of operation.
• What is the first distinction Aristotle gives of being? Per se and per accidens — before the three divisions of being per se.
• Is there a way to become a Christian geometer? No: a way to become a Christian and a way to become a geometer, but none to become both, since there is no Christian geometry.
• Why would anyone run away from the good, or go toward the bad (Goliath)? Not as such — only per accidens, for a joined evil or good.
• Isn’t the victory the per se cause of boldness? No; boldness has the bad as its object; hope regards the joined good and is the principle.
• Do boldness and despair have per se converses? Yes, hope and fear come before them; desperation follows fear when fear is intense.
• Is boldness a part of hope? No, its effect; hence not a chief passion.
• Why are those with a small heart more bold? Natural heat can heat a small heart as fire heats a small house better than a large one.
• Should you kick a barking dog? Never — it makes the dog more bold.
• Does drunkenness cause boldness as a defect? No, per accidens: heat expands the heart and one overestimates one’s magnitude.