Aquinas on Virtue II (ST I-II q.58 a.5 – q.59 a.2): Prudence Needs Moral Virtue; Virtue and the Passions, Stoics vs. Peripatetics

Orientation #

He begins mid-question, “to the fifth” of q. 58, and refers back to “another article” where moral things were seen to be the matter of prudence (prev. lecture). He ends after the replies of q. 59, a. 2, saying “I better stop now,” with articles 3-5 of q. 59 (sadness, whether every moral virtue is about passion, whether some moral virtue is without passion) announced in the proemium as still to come. The previous class treated q. 58’s earlier articles on the division of virtue and whether moral virtue needs intellectual virtue; the next takes up q. 59, aa. 3-4.

The class, in order #

1. Objections: can intellectual virtue be without moral virtue? (“the perfection of the before does not depend”) #

Point: q. 58, a. 5 asks whether intellectual virtue can be without moral virtue; he reads the three objections and the sed contra.

• Obj. 1: the perfection of the before does not depend on the perfection of the after; reason is before the sense-desiring power and moves it; so intellectual virtue (perfection of reason) does not depend on moral virtue (perfection of the appetitive part).
• Obj. 2: moral things are the matter of prudence as makeable things are the matter of art; but art can be without its matter (the metal-worker without iron); so prudence, “which among the intellectual virtues most of all would seem to be joined with the moral virtues,” can be without them.
• Obj. 3: prudence is bene consiliativa (Ethics VI); but many take counsel well who lack the moral virtues.
• Sed contra: to will to do the bad is directly opposed to moral virtue; but it is also opposed to prudence, that one should sin willingly (Ethics VI). So prudence is not without moral virtue.
• Example on the sed contra: the artist who knowingly makes a bad work does not thereby unmake his art (“the cook who knowingly ruins the meat”), but the man who knowingly does something immoral is worse than the one who does it unknowingly; St Paul excuses himself a bit for persecuting the Church because he did it unknowingly.

2. Corpus: why prudence cannot be without moral virtue (“such as a man is, so does the end seem”) #

Point: the other virtues of reason can be without moral virtue; prudence cannot.

1. Prudence is right reason about things to be done, not only in universal (that would be “the science of ethics or something”) but in the particular, “in which are actions.”
2. Right reason presupposes the beginnings from which it proceeds; about particulars it must proceed from particular as well as universal beginnings.
3. About universal beginnings a man is rightly disposed by the natural understanding of beginnings (that nothing bad should be done) or by some practical science (“you study the Nicomachean Ethics”).
4. This does not suffice for reasoning rightly about particulars: the universal beginning known by understanding or science is sometimes corrupted in the particular by some passion. Example: the one who has concupiscence; when concupiscence conquers, what one desires seems good even against the universal judgment. His gloss: “an offer I couldn’t resist.”
5. So, as a man is disposed to universal beginnings by understanding or science, he must be perfected by some habit that makes it “in a way natural” to judge rightly about the particular beginnings of things to be done, which are the ends; this is moral virtue, “because such as a man is, so does the end seem to him.” Conclusion: right reason about things to be done requires moral virtue. “So Socrates didn’t quite see that.”

• Aside: Thomas will go back to “such as a man is” when he talks about damnation: “can’t change your habits there.”

3. Replies 1 and 2; marriage digression (“reason, according as it is grasping the end”) #

• Reply 1: the before/after runs two ways. Reason grasping the end comes before the desire of the end (you cannot desire what you do not know); but desire of the end comes before reason reasoning about choosing what is for the end, which is prudence’s work. “Just as in speculative matters the understanding of beginnings is the beginning of reason syllogizing.” He notes Thomas drawing “distinction, distinction”: the way reason is before appetite and the way appetite is before reason.
• Reply 2: the beginnings of artificial things are not judged well or badly according to the disposition of our appetite, as the ends of moral matters are, but only by the consideration of reason; so art does not require a virtue perfecting appetite, as prudence does.
• Student: is Thomas contradicting what he said earlier? His answer: art does not need a virtue perfecting the (sense) appetite, but there must be some intention of the end; one intends to make. The cook who did not intend to make the food tasty “would be a cook?” (left as a question).
• From intention to marriage: people intending something other than marriage—are they married? Anecdotes: his brother Richard’s priest, glad to marry couples he thought would stay together, who don’t; a survey of an archdiocese’s clergy naming wedding preparation the most distasteful part of ministry (“they’re on another planet,” concerned about flowers and hair); his temptation, were he a pastor, to say “go to a JP and we’ll talk later.” Principle drawn: “if there isn’t the moral virtue there, you’re not going to be disposed to make a good choice”; shotgun weddings were more stable. “Love child” (the Supremes song). Peggy Noonan at a play where the audience cheered a line about abortion meant to horrify: “we have no judgment about these things at all”; DeMarco’s term “inculturation” for being closed in on one’s own system. His Worcester acquaintance whose wife was contracepting with no intention of children, and the canon lawyer who demanded witnesses beforehand—“there’s a call of judgment there.” Older practice requiring the husband’s signed agreement for a contraceptive implant: “at least they had some sense of what the purpose of marriage is.”

4. Reply 3: counsel, judgment, command (“not only is bene consiliativa”) #

• Prudence is not only bene consiliativa but also bene iudicativa [ASR: “educativa”] and bene praeceptiva; especially the last cannot be unless the impediment of passions corrupting judgment and command is removed. His gloss: passion affects the judgment and command of prudence, “not so much the counsel.”
• Example: the diplomat who worked for Napoleon (name not recalled in the recording; he says “the Italian man”), good at counsel, got his friends off in deliberations with the victorious powers, “but kind of a scoundrel in personal life.”

5. Proemium to question 59 (“five things are asked”) #

Point: to distinguish the moral virtues from one another, and since those about passions are distinguished by the diversity of passions, one must first compare virtue to passion (q. 59), then distinguish the virtues by the passions (next question). The five: (1) whether moral virtue is a passion (“just ask kids, what is love? A feeling”); (2) whether it can be with passion—“an attack upon the Stoics,” with Shakespeare’s pun on “stocks”; (3) whether it can be with sadness (“very interesting”); (4) whether every moral virtue is about passion; (5) whether there can be a moral virtue without passion. “Never met anybody so thoughtful.”

6. Article 1 objections and sed contra (“the middle is of the same genus with the extremes”) #

• Obj. 1: the middle is in the same genus as the extremes; moral virtue is a middle among the passions; so it is a passion. His question to the class: is virtue a middle in the passions, or does it establish a middle? (“I have to see.”)
• Obj. 2: virtue and vice, being contraries, are in the same genus; some passions are called vices, envy and anger; so some passions are virtues. Aside: the grade-school catechism said anger is a vice, “then we find out that Christ was angry.”
• Obj. 3: mercy is a passion, sadness about the evils of others; but Cicero, “a marvelous speaker,” does not hesitate to call it a virtue, as Augustine says (City of God IX). Aside: his six “mercy and forgiveness romances” of Shakespeare.
• Sed contra: Ethics II, passions are neither virtues nor vices.
• Aside: Thomas, not Lombard, should be called the Master; Thomas the Commentator.

7. Corpus: moral virtue is not a passion, for three reasons (“passion is a certain motion”) #

1. Passion is a motion (the English “emotion” contains “motion”; Aristotle’s actio and passio in Physics III—“my kicking you and your being kicked, kind of the same thing”); moral virtue is not a motion but a beginning of appetitive motion, existing as a habit.
2. Passions of themselves have no character of good or bad, since man’s good is to be according to reason (Dionysius says so too); passions are good or bad as they convenire, “come together with,” reason or not—he links this to Shakespeare’s line that love and reason keep little company nowadays. But virtue is only to the good.
3. Even granting that some passion is only to the good (pity) or only to the bad (envy) “in some way,” secundum aliquem modum, the motion of passion as passion begins in the appetite and ends in reason, to whose conformity the appetite tends; the motion of virtue is the reverse, beginning in reason and ending in the appetite as moved by reason. Hence the Ethics II definition: a habit electivus, consisting in the middle determined by reason “as the wise man would” (“not many men are wise”).

8. Article 1 replies; envy (“no passion is a vice”) #

• Reply 1: virtue is not a middle among passions by its essence but by its effect, because it constitutes a middle among them. He ties this to Shakespeare’s “sick that surfeits with too much” and “starve with nothing”: no happiness in either extreme, so it must be constituted in the mean.
• Reply 2: if vice means a habit by which one acts badly, no passion is a vice; if a vice means a sin, a vicious act, nothing prevents a passion from being a vice or running together with an act of virtue, as it is contrary to reason or follows reason. His gloss: envy and anger are called vices because they incline us to something bad—“every time you pick up the daily newspaper” someone got angry and shot someone; the end of Julius Caesar, where the others acted from envy of Caesar and Brutus alone for the common good; true of Christ too—Pilate knew it; Fr Elias’s older translation of a hymn had “the envious crucified,” later dropped. Envy in the academic world (“half the faculty gone now”); the Polish cardinal story (Wyszynski as “two-thirds of the cardinals of Poland”). The likeness: passion like vice and virtue inclines—pity to something good, envy to something bad. The woman who makes herself miserable to look good for a moment; the woman at the White House turning her hat upside down on seeing the president’s wife in the same hat, against his own indifference when the president of Thomas More College wore the same suit: “we’re both conservatives.”
• Reply 3: mercy is called a virtue as the act of a virtue (“justice will be done” means a just act), insofar as that motion of soul serves reason—when mercy is bestowed with justice conserved, to one in need or one who is penitent (Augustine). If mercy names a habit by which a man is perfected to take mercy reasonably, nothing prevents it being a virtue; the same for similar passions.
• Example of false mercy: the parishioner complaining that criticism of abortion makes some woman feel bad; the pastor: “they should feel sorry about it, it’s a serious sin.” A student adds Charles [name unclear in recording]’s “impious kind of piety,” treating fornicating young couples easily because “they’re just in love”—“you’re not helping them.”
• Aside: the neighbour’s kindergartner who took off his mask “so he wouldn’t scare you.”

9. Article 2 objections and sed contra (“the mild one is the one who does not”) #

• Obj. 1: Ethics IV, the mild one is he who does not suffer [passion], the patient one he who suffers and is not led astray; the same reason for all moral virtues. Aside: “you won’t find anything like this in Descartes”—they never object to their own thinking.
• Obj. 2: virtue is a right habitudo (he weighs “relation” but settles on disposition) of the soul, as health of the body (Physics VII, his “natural hearing”); so virtue is health of soul, vice its sickness; but Tully (Tusculan Questions IV) calls the passions sicknesses of the soul; health does not suffer sickness with itself.
• Obj. 3: moral virtue requires perfect use of reason even in the particular; passion impedes this—Ethics VI, pleasure corrupts the estimate of prudence (“watch out for pleasure”); Sallust on the Catiline conspiracy: the soul does not easily see the true where passions are active.
• Sed contra: Augustine, City of God XIV—if the will is perverse its passion-motions are perverse; if right, they are not only inculpable but praiseworthy; virtue excludes nothing praiseworthy. A student adds Mother Teresa on felt compassion making a good deed more generous; and “a shame that’s praiseworthy and a shame that’s shameful.”

10. Corpus: Stoics and Peripatetics (“discord between the Stoics and the Peripatetics”) #

• The Stoics held no passion in the wise or virtuous man; the Peripatetics (“named because they walked around when he lectured”) held passions can be together with moral virtue, reduced to the middle. “Aristotle’s more human”: Peripatetics between Stoics and Epicureans, one eliminating the passions, the other giving in to them—Oscar Wilde, “I can resist anything except temptation,” “very funny, but very wicked.”
• “Notice this caution here now”: Augustine says the difference is more secundum verba than in position. The Stoics did not distinguish the intellectual appetite (will) from the sense appetite (irascible and concupiscible, thumos and epithumia), nor the passions of the soul (motions of the sense appetite) from the other human affections (motions of the will), as the Peripatetics did; they called “passions” only affections repugnant to reason—a disagreement in words, not in thing.
• Passions from deliberation cannot be in the virtuous man; sudden ones can, since the “things seen of the soul,” fantasms, are not in our power, and from terrible things the wise man is necessarily moved by fear or contracted by sadness—but these come before the work of reason, and he does not approve or consent (Augustine, City of God IX, reporting Aulus Gellius).
• Conclusion: if “passions” means disordered affections consented to after deliberation, not in the virtuous man, as the Stoics said; if any motion of the sense appetite, they can be, as ordered by reason. Hence Ethics II: those who define the virtues as impassibilitates and rest do not define well, because they speak simply; they should say rest from passions as they ought not to be and when they ought not to be.

11. Article 2 replies (“does not undergo a disordered passion”) #

• Reply 1: Aristotle brings that example, as many in the logical books, according to the opinion of others (the Stoics), not his own—a point Thomas makes more than once; he excludes it in Ethics II. Or: the mild man does not undergo a disordered passion. On translating impassibilitas: “not being able to be moved by passion.”
• Reply 2 (Tully): it proceeds about passions as they signify disordered affections. His caution: maybe Thomas is too kind to the Stoics, who sometimes talk as if, your wife and children being killed and you unable to help, you should feel nothing; against pacifists: should the man whose wife is beaten say “offer it up, dear”? No.
• Reply 3: a passion coming before reason’s judgment, if it prevails so that one consents, impedes counsel and judgment; if it follows as commanded by reason, it aids in carrying out the command. Examples: anger from his considered judgment at someone using his kids for target practice; “a little bit of anger” when told “so what?” after “you’re on my toe.” He stops here.

His words #

• foresight; his usual rendering of prudentia [ed.: prudence]
• bene consiliativa, bene iudicativa, bene praeceptiva; taking counsel well, judging well, commanding well
• beginnings; principia [ed.: principles], universal and particular; the particular beginnings of things to be done are the ends
• “such as a man is, so does the end seem to him”; the reason moral virtue is needed for prudence
• passion; emotion, a motion of the sense-desiring power
• convenire; “come together with” reason; how a passion is good or bad
• secundum aliquem modum; “in some way,” of pity being only to the good
• habit electivus; a choosing habit, or a habit with choice
• habitudo; disposition (sometimes relation) of the soul
• Natural Hearing [ed.: Physics]
• Tully; Cicero, the Tusculan Questions [ed.: Disputations]
• epithumia and thumos; concupiscible and irascible
• fantasms; the things seen of the soul, not in our power
• impassibilitates; being without passions, “not being able to be moved by passion”
• Stoics / “stocks”; Shakespeare’s pun

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 58, a. 5 (objections, sed contra, corpus, three replies)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 59, prooemium
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 59, a. 1 (whole)
• Thomas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 59, a. 2 (whole, replies briefly)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Ethics II (definition of virtue; passions neither virtues nor vices; virtues not impassibilitates), IV (the mild man), VI (prudence bene consiliativa; pleasure corrupts the estimate of prudence)
• Aristotle, Physics III (action and passion), VII (virtue as health)
• Augustine, City of God IX (Cicero on mercy; Stoics and Peripatetics; Aulus Gellius), XIV (perverse and right will)
• Cicero, Tusculan Questions IV
• Sallust, on the Catiline conspiracy
• Dionysius (man’s good according to reason)
• Shakespeare: “stocks” pun (Taming of the Shrew, inferred); love and reason keeping little company (Midsummer Night’s Dream, inferred); surfeit and starving (Merchant of Venice, inferred); end of Julius Caesar; the “mercy and forgiveness romances”
• Descartes; Oscar Wilde; Mother Teresa; Peggy Noonan and Donald DeMarco in the Wanderer

His questions #

• Is intellectual virtue able to be without moral virtue? The others are; prudence is not, since right reason about particulars needs a right end, given by moral virtue.
• Is Thomas contradicting himself in saying art needs no virtue perfecting appetite? No: art needs some intention of the end, not a virtue of the sense appetite.
• Is moral virtue a middle in the passions, or does it establish a middle? It is not a middle by essence but by effect; it constitutes the middle.
• Why does Thomas pick envy and anger as the passions called vices? Because they incline us to do something bad, as pity inclines to something good.
• Is mercy a virtue? As an act serving reason, yes; as a habit of taking mercy reasonably, nothing prevents it.
• How would you translate impassibilitates? Not being able to be moved by passion.
• Is Thomas too kind to the Stoics? Left open; he suspects they sometimes really mean feel nothing.
• Should the man whose wife is beaten and children killed “offer it up”? No; an ordered anger following reason’s judgment helps carry out its command.