Summa I-II Q.48: The Effects of Anger – Pleasure, Fervor, Impeded Reason and Silence

Orientation #

He opens by placing q. 48 as “the last question on anger here, and the last question on the emotions”: Thomas has looked at anger in itself, then its causes and remedy, and now its effects, just as he did with love. He refers back to “last week” for Aristotle’s example of the man angry at an attack on philosophy (prev. lecture). The class ends at the break after Article 4; he does not say what comes next. The previous class covered the causes and remedies of anger (q. 47); the next opens the treatise on habits (q. 49).

The class, in order #

1. The shape of q. 48 and its four articles (“looking before and after”) #

Point: Thomas treats anger formally as he treated love — the thing in itself, then its causes, then its effects — and asks four things: whether anger causes pleasure, whether it most of all causes fervor in the heart, whether it most of all impedes the use of reason, and whether it causes taciturnity (he gropes for the fourth: “being kind of silent and not talking”).

• Aside: “Don’t get angry, just get even.”

2. Article 1, objections and sed contra (“anger much sweeter than honey”) #

Point: three reasons say anger cannot cause pleasure; the proverb says it is sweeter than dripping honey.

1. Sadness excludes pleasure (contraries); but anger is always with sadness — Ethics VII: everyone who acts through anger acts being pained, since anger is caused by an injury that saddens. So no pleasure.
2. Ethics IV: punishing quiets the impetus of anger, making pleasure for sadness — so pleasure comes to the angry man from punishing; but punishing ends the anger, and you cannot have the effect without the cause. So pleasure is not an effect joined to anger.
3. No effect impedes its cause, since an effect is like its cause (“what a marvelous mind this guy has”); but pleasures impede anger, Rhetoric II. He adds: “maybe some pleasures do.” Sed contra: the Philosopher, Rhetoric II, citing the proverb that anger, much sweeter than dripping honey, increases in the hearts of men — “the sweetness of revenge.”

• Aside: some readers unused to this think Thomas only shows off by attacking what he holds.

3. Article 1, body and replies: revenge hoped and thought about (“no one gets angry except hoping”) #

Point: pleasure follows on revenge as remedy to the sadness of injury; before revenge is really present it is present in two ways, so the pleasure is real but imperfect.

1. Ethics VII: pleasures, especially sensible and bodily, are medicines against sadness; the greater the sadness a pleasure remedies, the more the pleasure is perceived — as water is more delightful to one who thirsts.
2. Anger arises from a saddening injury; revenge is the remedy applied to that sadness; so pleasure follows the presence of revenge, the more so as the opposites are clearer to each other.
3. If revenge were really present, the pleasure would be perfect, exclude sadness wholly, and quiet the anger.
4. Before that, revenge is present to the angry man (a) through hope — “no one gets angry except hoping to get revenge,” as said above — and (b) through continual thought, since to one desiring something it is pleasant to dwell in thought on it, which is why the imaginings of dreams are pleasant. Conclusion: the angry man, thinking much about revenge, delights now; but the pleasure is not perfect, since it does not take away sadness and so does not take away anger. Replies: (1) he is sad and rejoices about different things — sad at the injury inflicted, glad at the revenge “thought about and hoped for” (cogitatum, speratum); sadness is to anger as beginning, pleasure as effect or end — “looking before and after again.” (2) That objection concerns the pleasure from the real presence of revenge, which does take away anger; the other pleasure is in the thinking about it. (3) Pleasures preceding impede the sadness and so the anger; the pleasure about revenge follows on anger.

• Thirst example enlarged: the three psalms of thirst, the soul thirsting for God; purgatory as a thirst of that intensity — a student adds that with no body and no business there is no distraction, so the desire is focused; Brother Mark’s desert man who dreams of an ice-cream soda, then just water; his own “terrible” thirst when Monsignor Dion’s class began before he could get in.
• Dreams: Shakespeare’s sonnet, “as if I had thee, as a dream doth flatter; in sleep a king, but waking no such matter.”
• Iago: is he pleased even before he succeeds in rousing Othello’s jealousy? (asked, not answered here).
• Asides: Thomas “always quoting” St Paul’s bene sperantes — hope of a good gives anticipatory delight; “there’s no alternative to rationality,” against the deconstructionists — “can you give me a reason for not being reasonable?”; “don’t get angry about the solution, just think about the revenge.”

4. Article 2, objections and sed contra (“fervor is not most of all an effect”) #

Point: three objections deny anger is the chief cause of fervor; Damascene’s definition affirms it.

• “Fervor”: water at a “rolling boil” is fervent.

1. Fervor pertains to love (the saints fervent in love); love is beginning and cause of all the passions; the cause is more potent than the effect.
2. What of itself excites fervor increases with time, as love is strengthened in time; but anger is weakened by time — Rhetoric II, time quiets anger (“leave him alone until he cools off”; “forget and forgive”).
3. Fervor added to fervor increases fervor; but a greater anger supervening makes the lesser quieter (Rhetoric II). Sed contra: Damascene — anger is the fervor of the blood around the heart, arising from the evaporation of bile (gall). “Good old biology.”

5. Article 2, body: pursuit of a present contrary heats the heart (“the bodily change … is proportional”) #

Point: because appetite tends most strongly against a present contrary, and anger pursues rather than withdraws, it causes a fervor of blood and spirits about the heart that shows in the outer members.

1. The bodily change in a passion is proportional to the motion of the appetite (a “much simpler understanding than we have nowadays”).
2. Every desire, even natural, tends more strongly toward what is contrary to it if that is present — water heated is more congealed, as it were the cold acting more vehemently on the hot. He finds the example hard; a student recalls that a pot of hot water put out in freezing weather freezes faster than cold — “is that true?” Left as an experiment for “next winter”: “you go and prove it empirically, and we’ll believe you.” His own example: teams fighting for victory desire it more when the enemy holds up strongly — last night’s game, Boston ahead 5–4 in the ninth, bases loaded, home run, Baltimore wins.
3. The motion of anger is caused by an injury inflicted as a contrary acting on you; so the appetite tends most strongly to expel the injury through revenge; hence great vehemence and impetus.
4. Anger’s motion is not by way of withdrawal, to which cold is proportioned, but of following something up, to which heat is proportioned — cold is contraction, heat expansion. Conclusion: anger causes a fervor of the blood and spirits around the heart, “the tool of the passions of the soul”; because the disturbance of the heart is great, signs appear most of all in the exterior members of the angry.

• Fear too is felt at the heart: trembling; a kitten shivering in your hands.
• Signs students name: blood vessels in the eyes, the vein bulging and pulsing on the forehead (“then you know you’re in real trouble”), perspiration; the congressman around the Civil War who beat another with his cane in the House.
• Gregory, Moralia V, read with the class supplying words: the heart palpitates, kindled by the stimulus of anger; the body trembles; the tongue stumbles; the face is inflamed; the eyes grow fierce; the mouth forms a clamor and the sense of what is said is not known. “He has a great understanding of human nature.”

6. Article 2, reply 1: love is felt more when what is loved is hurt (“the love is more sensed”) #

Point: love is not much felt until need brings it forth; injury to the beloved makes the love more sensed and the heart more fervent — and the two fervors differ in kind.

1. Augustine, De Trinitate X: love is not so much sensed as when need brings it forth (he compares another translation: “not felt so keenly as in the absence of the beloved”).
2. So when a man suffers loss to the loved thing or excellence through injury, the love is more sensed — attack a man’s wife, girlfriend or child (“you leave my boy alone”); last week’s Aristotle example of the man attached to philosophy: when it is attacked, the attachment becomes more felt, “kind of strange, but that seems to be true.”
3. Hence the heart is moved more fervently to remove the impediment to the thing loved; so the fervor of love itself increases and is more sensed through anger. Distinction: fervor of love vs. fervor of anger. Love’s fervor is with a certain sweetness and gentleness (lenitate), since it is in the thing loved — likened to the heat of air and blood, whence sanguine people are more loving (“lovers, not fighters”; he will ask Warren Murray, an expert on the four temperaments). Anger’s fervor is with bitterness, tending to consume, since it tends to the punishment of the contrary — likened to the heat of fire and of cholera (cholos, bile), which is why Damascene says it comes from the evaporation of bile.

• Examples of attack strengthening attachment: the coach filmed shoving his players, fired, yet defended by some players; the woman with prejudices against the Catholic Church who read a Chick publication’s seething attack and was turned toward the Church — a student: Chesterton called being offended when the Church is attacked “the beginning of the end,” the start of conversion.
• The liver: the Latin note says the liver compels love (iecur … cogit amare), seat of the feelings, where there is a generation of blood; he had thought it only got rid of alcohol; divination read animals’ livers.
• Shakespeare’s “in the very wrath of love, clubs cannot part them” — put as a question against the distinction.

7. Article 2, replies 2 and 3: memory, and power divided (“anger is caused from the memory”) #

Point: anger fades because its cause, memory of injury, fades; a second anger diminishes the first. Reply 2: whatever’s cause is diminished by time is diminished by time; memory is diminished by time (ancient things fall from memory — “living proof”; they said Thomas never forgot anything); anger is caused by the memory of an injury; so its cause is bit by bit (paulatim) diminished until taken away — the injury seems greatest when first sensed and its estimate lessens as one recedes from the present sense. Likewise love if its cause remains in memory only: Ethics VIII, long absence of a friend seems to cause forgetfulness of friendship, while in his presence the cause of friendship is multiplied through time. So too anger would grow if its cause were continually multiplied — “he kept on insulting me, kept stepping on my toe.” That anger is quickly consumed attests its vehement fervor: a great fire is quickly extinguished, the matter consumed. Reply 3: every power divided into many parts is diminished; angry at a second person, one’s anger at the first is lessened, especially since the second injury, estimated greater, makes the first seem small or nothing — Aristotle on punishing the generals, severe with the first, lighter with the second, the anger appeased.

• “Impotent rage” (Brother Mark’s phrase) becomes laughable: parents dousing a screaming child with cold water only made him angrier; a student’s TV example of a men’s camp where a man sat with a stick hitting the ground and crying to “get his anger out” — “was it impotent anger? I don’t know.”
• Divided anger: older children complain the younger are not disciplined as much; teachers tough in their first years, and tough at the start of the year, ease off later — his sister, strict at first in a rough high school, controlled the class all year while soft starters “were in trouble all year long.”

8. Article 3, objections and sed contra (“anger subtracts against the light”) #

Point: three objections say anger, being with reason and manifest, does not impede reason; Gregory says it darkens intelligence.

1. What is with reason does not impede reason; anger is with reason (Ethics VII) — one has a reason to be angry, though it may not be reasonable.
2. The more reason is impeded the less it is manifest; but Ethics VII says the angry man is not insidious and does not conceal himself, unlike concupiscence, which is insidious.
3. Reason’s judgment is clearer from the joining of contraries, since contraries side by side shine forth more; but anger increases from the same — Rhetoric II, men are angrier if contraries pre-exist, as the honored when dishonored. So the same thing increases anger and aids judgment. Sed contra: Gregory, Moralia V — anger subtracts the light of the intelligence when it confounds the mind by commotion (“I blacked out”).

• Asides: Karl Marx seething against capitalism in the very reading of his words — can such a man have the full use of reason?; a student’s environmental speaker controlled and corrected mid-talk by an angry group head; the Southern California professor’s vitriol against Republicans.

9. Article 3, body and replies: bodily disturbance and the judgment of reason (“does not use a body organ”) #

Point: reason needs sense powers whose acts are impeded by bodily disturbance; anger disturbs the body most, so most manifestly impedes judgment.

1. The mind does not use a bodily organ in its own act, but needs certain sense powers for its act; their acts are impeded when the body is disturbed; so bodily disturbances impede reason’s judgment — as in drunkenness and sleep, “where you don’t have control of your images.”
2. As shown in the previous article (“that’s why he did the article before”), anger most of all disturbs the body around the heart, even out to the exterior members. Conclusion: anger among the passions most manifestly impedes the judgment of reason — Psalm 30, “my eye is disturbed in anger” (he also finds “a line here in Psalm six,” “my eye is troubled”). Reply 1 (formal vs. material): the beginning of anger is from reason as regards the desire, the formal aspect; but the passion preoccupies the perfect judgment of reason, not perfectly hearing reason because of the commotion of heat impelling it — the material aspect — and in this respect impedes judgment. Applied to God metaphorically, anger keeps the formal aspect, drops the bodily; as when the names of the emotions are carried over to acts of the will. Reply 2: the angry man is manifest not because what he ought to do is manifest to him, but because he acts openly, seeking no secrecy — partly from the impediment of reason, unable to discern what to hide or to think of ways of hiding (“a bull in a china shop”); partly from the expansion of the heart, which pertains to magnanimity, which anger makes — Ethics IV, the magnanimous man is a manifest hater and lover and speaks and acts openly, as Coriolanus does. Concupiscence is hidden and insidious because the delightful things desired have a certain turpitude and softness a man wants hidden, whereas things of virility and excellence, like revenge, he wants manifest. Reply 3: anger begins from reason, so laying contrary beside contrary both aids judgment and increases anger: one who has honor or wealth and then incurs loss sees the loss as greater, both from the vicinity of the contrary and because unexpected, causing greater sadness (as unexpected great goods cause more pleasure); the growth of sadness grows the anger — the Wall Street window-jumpers of 1929.

• Iago revisited: motivated more by hate than anger — Stalin: you must hate your opponent to overcome him; anger would impede his plans, hatred can “measure everything”; he is not manifest to Othello, only later through his wife’s testimony; “better to have somebody angry with you than hating you”; Buckley on his enemies’ “tenacious ill will,” more hate than anger.
• Aside: Thomas’s De malo is “the greatest understanding of evil that exists,” from evil in general as a lack down to the capital vices, each a tyrant with its own army.

10. Article 4: taciturnity (“anger closed off through silence”) #

Point: anger, being both with reason and an impediment to reason, causes taciturnity from both sides.

• Term: a student’s translation “taciturnity” vs. “silence” — taciturnity is a judicious withholding of speech, silence just no speech. The Polish priest’s “prefer, prefer” as an aside on the word. Objections: (1) taciturnity is opposed to much speaking; but anger’s increase reaches speech, as in the grades the Lord assigns in Matthew 5 — angry with his brother, then “Raca,” then “Fatue,” fool; people angry say what they wish they hadn’t. (2) When the custody of reason fails, a man breaks out in disordered words — Proverbs 25, like a city without walls is the man who cannot restrain his spirit in speaking; anger most impedes reason, so most causes disordered speech. (3) Matthew 12, from the abundance of the heart the mouth speaks; anger most disturbs the heart. Sed contra: Gregory, Moralia V — anger closed off through silence burns more vehemently within the mind; students: closing up a fire can make it burn more intensely, as charcoal is made by burying burning wood — “we should test that out.” Body: anger is with reason and impedes reason, “that’s not a contradiction,” and from both sides can cause taciturnity. On reason’s side: when judgment is vigorous enough that, though it cannot stop the disordered desire of revenge, it prevents disordered speech — Gregory, sometimes anger, the soul disturbed, as it were from judgment indicates silence (Jefferson: if angry count to ten, if very angry to a hundred). On the side of impeding reason: the disturbance extends to the exterior members, most to those where a vestige of the heart shines out — eyes, face, tongue: the tongue falls over itself, the face ignites, the eyes exasperated; the disturbance can be so great it wholly impedes the tongue, and taciturnity follows. “Watch yourself around this Thomas — he’ll see right through you, whether you erupt in words or are taciturn.” Replies: (1) anger’s growth sometimes goes as far as impeding reason’s use, sometimes further to impeding the motion of the tongue and other members; (2) solved by the same. (3) The disturbance of the heart can abound so that the disordered motion of the heart impedes motion of the outer members — taciturnity, immobility, “sometimes even death” (the old man too angry who collapses; Jonah, “I am angry enough to die”); with less disturbance, the abundance of the heart’s disturbance issues in speech. “Thomas distinguishes: it makes you silent, and it makes you say too much.”
• Aside: Shakespeare’s sonnet where reason, angry that its advice is not taken, abandons the man, who is then a madman — anger applied almost to reason itself.
• Break follows.

His words #

• “looking before and after”: Thomas’s formal order — the thing in itself, its causes, its effects (love, then anger).
• “tristitia”: sadness; anger is always with it.
• “cogitatum / speratum”: revenge “thought about and hoped for,” the two ways revenge is present before it is real.
• “bene sperantes”: St Paul’s phrase Thomas “always quotes”; hope of a good brings delight.
• “fervor”: boiling; “a rolling boil.”
• “gall / bile / cholos”: what evaporates about the heart in anger (Damascene).
• “tool of the passions of the soul”: the heart.
• “lenitate”: gentleness, of love’s fervor.
• “cholera”: the heat of fire and bile, to which anger’s fervor is assimilated.
• “iecur … cogit amare”: the liver compels love (from the Latin note).
• “paulatim”: bit by bit, how the cause of anger diminishes.
• “impotent rage”: Brother Mark’s expression; it becomes laughable.
• “formal aspect / material aspect” of anger: the desire from reason vs. the bodily commotion of heat.
• “manifest” (of the angry man): acting openly, seeking no secrecy — not clear-sighted.
• “taciturnity”: withholding speech, judicious silence, vs. mere “silence”; opposed to “locutio,” speaking much.
• “verba inordinata”: disordered words.

Texts #

Read in class:

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 48, a. 1–4 (objections, sed contra, body, replies of each).
• Gregory, Moralia V, the description of the angry man (within a. 2) and on anger closed by silence (within a. 4). Mentioned:
• Aristotle, Ethics VII (anger acts with pain; anger with reason; the angry man not insidious); Ethics IV (punishing quiets anger; the magnanimous man a manifest hater and lover); Ethics VIII (absence and forgetfulness of friendship).
• Aristotle, Rhetoric II (pleasures impede anger; anger sweeter than honey; time quiets anger; greater anger quiets lesser; contraries pre-existing).
• Damascene, definition of anger as fervor of blood about the heart.
• Augustine, De Trinitate X (love felt when need brings it forth).
• Psalm 30 (“my eye is disturbed in anger”); “a line in Psalm six.”
• Matthew 5 (Raca, Fatue); Matthew 12 (abundance of the heart); Proverbs 25 (city without walls); Jonah (“angry enough to die”).
• Shakespeare: a sonnet on dreams; Othello (Iago); Coriolanus; “in the very wrath of love”; a sonnet where reason abandons the man.
• Thomas Aquinas, De malo; St Paul, bene sperantes; Chesterton on the beginning of conversion; the “three psalms of thirst.”

His questions #

• Is Iago pleased even before he succeeds in rousing Othello’s jealousy? Left open here; later the class decides Iago is moved more by hate than anger, and hate does not impede his plans as anger would.
• Is it true that hot water put outside in freezing weather freezes faster than cold? Nobody knows; to be tested “next winter” — “prove it empirically, and we’ll believe you.”
• Can you tell when somebody’s really angry? Yes: blood vessels in the eyes, the vein bulging on the forehead, perspiration — Gregory’s list of signs.
• What about the objection that the cause (love) is stronger than the effect? Love is not much felt until injury brings it forth, so anger makes love’s fervor greater and more sensed.
• Is Iago motivated more by anger or by hate of Othello? By hate — hate can measure everything, anger would impede him; he is not manifest to Othello until his wife’s testimony.
• When “anger” is said of God metaphorically, what aspect of anger is meant? The formal aspect, the desire from reason; the bodily aspect drops out, as when emotion-names are carried over to the will.
• Is taciturnity the same as silence? No: taciturnity is a judicious withholding of speech; silence is simply no speech.
• Anger is with reason and impedes reason — is that a contradiction? No; and from both sides it can cause taciturnity.
• Does anger make you silent or make you say too much? Both: reason may hold the tongue, or the heart’s disturbance may stop the tongue and members, even to death; with less disturbance, speech pours out.