Summa I-II Q.60 Aa.2–4: Virtues of Operations and Passions, Justice and Its Kinds, Padre Pio on Suffering, and Being True to Oneself

Orientation #

He opens by connecting a passage on Padre Pio to the previous question (“suffer like a stoic, or… in a more human way”), then says “we’re up to Article Two here in Question Sixty.” At the end he defers several problems (whether temperance is generic with species; whether distributive justice is a species distinct from commutative) “later on,” “maybe in the Secunda Secundae.” The preceding class ended with whether perfect moral virtue can be without passion and the first article of q. 60; the next takes a. 5 and the list of moral virtues.

The class, in order #

1. Padre Pio and suffering “humanly, not stoically” (“I am an egoist where suffering is concerned”) #

Point: a saint’s suffering shows the previous class’s thesis, that virtue does not abolish passion.

• He reads from a biography of Padre Pio by a Capuchin, Alessandro of Ripabottoni (named as a leading historian of the Capuchin province of San Angelo / Padre Pio). Padre Pio “does not deny his sufferings,” cries before his spiritual director Father Agostino, then “takes a grip on himself and begins to joke,” even about his own problems (“I annoy my brothers… I joke as before, and even better than before”). Berquist: “He’s his own best audience.”
• The author’s comment he wants copied: “marble and bronze heroism arouse astonishment, but they do not warm the heart”; Christian heroism “dwells in hearts of flesh,” saints “are not made of stone” and have none of the Stoic ambition to “make all feelings die.” The Curé d’Ars found it hard to rise before dawn and entered the confessional with reluctance. Padre Pio “suffered humanly and not stoically,” yet wanted to suffer without comfort to lighten the sufferings of Jesus, and kept choir, altar, confessional to the end, in a wheelchair.
• Asides: a student’s photos of the Eucharistic miracle at Lanciano, Loretto, the burial place of St Matthew at Salerno, Assisi.

2. Article 2: virtues about operations vs. about passions — the objections (“moral virtue is what pleasures”) #

Point: the objections say the same virtue handles both, since passions are the beginnings of operations.

1. Aristotle, Ethics II: moral virtue is “operative of the best things about pleasures and sadnesses,” which are passions; so the virtue about passions is also about operations.
2. Passions are the beginnings of exterior operations; rectify the one, you rectify the other.
3. To every exterior operation the sensitive appetite is moved well or badly; his illustration: you discover something intellectually you were looking for, and “you feel good.”

• Sed contra: Aristotle lays down justice about operations; temperance, fortitude, mildness about passions. He recalls a text of Thomas on the moral virtues not being the end of life, which takes the greatest of them: fortitude (passions) and justice (actions).

3. Article 2, corpus and replies: effect vs. matter (“as what effects… as the matter about which it is”) #

Point: Thomas solves all three objections by one distinction rather than one by one.

• Distinction: operation and passion compared to virtue (A) as effect: every moral virtue produces some good operation and some pleasure or sadness; vs. (B) as matter: here the virtues must differ.
• Reason: in some operations good and bad are taken according to the things themselves, whatever way the man is affected. Example: “if I pay my debts happily or sadly, I’m a just man.” Good is taken by commensuration to another (“you agree to paint my house, I agree to pay you”); buying and selling; wherever there is the aspect of debt or non-debt to another. So justice and its parts are about operations as their proper matter.
• In other operations good and bad are taken only according to how they measure with the one operating, i.e. how the man is well or badly affected; such virtues are chiefly about the interior affections, the passions: temperance and fortitude.
• Boundary case: one operation, two corruptions. Someone strikes another out of anger: the unsuitable percussion corrupts justice; the immoderate anger corrupts mildness (a student offers “meekness” for mansuetudo).
• Replies: obj. 1 takes operation as effect, not matter; objs. 2 and 3 note that operation and passion run together, but virtue is chiefly about the one or the other.
• He notes there are virtues “kind of hard to see which one it is,” e.g. liberality and magnificence, and leaves that aside.
• Aside: Vicks VapoRub on the soles of the feet, with heavy socks, for a cough.

4. Article 3, objections and corpus: one virtue about operations? (“the notion of debt”) #

Point: all virtues about operations share a general notion of justice but differ by the notion of debt.

• Obj. 1: rectitude of all exterior operations pertains to justice, one virtue. Obj. 2: acts ordered to the good of one vs. of many differ most, yet Aristotle, Ethics V, says legal justice differs from the virtue ordering a man to one only in ratione (“a difficult text, I’m afraid”). Obj. 3: commutative and distributive justice are one virtue though the operations differ.
• Sed contra: religion is another virtue from piety (he takes piety here as towards parents), and both are about operations.
• Corpus: in exterior operations the order of reason is set not by proportion to the man’s affections but by the suitability of the thing in itself, whence the notion of debt and of justice, “each one render what he owes.” But the debt is not of one notion: to an equal, a superior, a lesser; from agreement, promise, or benefit received. Examples: in religious life what you owe the abbot you do not owe the novice, and the reverse. Obedience is owed to father and mother (even Christ was subject to Joseph and Mary), not to grandchildren; his granddaughter Sophia (“what is wisdom? the knowledge of God, she says”) — he has a duty to teach her he does not have towards his parents; something different again towards brothers.
• Shakespeare digression: Hamlet’s uncle killed his brother (Cain and Abel); which is worse, to kill your father or your brother? Your father — the greater debt, since you get your life from him. King Lear “hits more upon nature”: two fathers plagued by two daughters and by one son, with a faithful daughter and a faithful son. He adds that Shakespeare “rarely has anything altogether original,” some fifty or sixty King Lears before him; a wise way to proceed, taking what has resonated for thousands of years.
• The diverse virtues: religion renders debt to God (“the virtue closest to the theological virtues”); piety to parents or country; thanks to benefactors (you cannot pay back what you received, so gratitude; the Mass: “let us give thanks… it is right and just,” which he calls a very dignified usage).
• Plato: in the Euthyphro piety is a broad thing, parents, country, maybe God, and one cannot give back to God equal to what one received; in the Crito, Socrates refuses the plan to spring him, out of piety to Athens, as if you owe more to your country. Nathan Hale [ASR “Ethan”] on one life to give for his country; Cicero: always in debt to your father. Student: today these concepts seem turned upside down.

5. Article 3, replies: justice proper and justice “ampliato nomine” (“Justice, properly speaking”) #

Point: justice strictly is one special virtue; in the wide name it is many.

• Reply 1: justice properly is one special virtue with the perfect notion of debt, restored by equivalence (“an eye for an eye”); ampliato nomine it covers any debt and is not one special virtue. He notes Aristotle devotes the whole fifth book to justice; a student recalls a Dominican moral theology whose treatment of justice ran to some 700 pages.
• Reply 2 (“touching upon something very difficult”): justice for the common good differs from justice for the private good; Tullius (Cicero) makes piety a special virtue ordered to the fatherland (patria from father). Justice ordering to the common good is general by way of command, since all acts of virtue are ordered to the common good; a virtue as so commanded takes the name justice, and differs from legal justice only in ratione, not really. Comparison he draws: charity is “the whole law,” all virtues can be commanded by it; the same virtue acting on its own and under charity’s command differ in ratio.
• Reply 3: in all acts of special justice the same notion of debt, especially in exchanges (commutative); perhaps distributive is another species, “we will inquire later on.”
• Student question: is God’s justice commutative or distributive? He: distributive, not commutative, since that is exchange; the Euthyphro problem of an exchange with God, and whether you can give God anything; Avicenna: God alone is liberal in the full sense, getting nothing out of it, “even if we all went to heaven.”

6. Article 4: one virtue for all passions? (“about opposite passions there is one and the same moral virtue”) #

Point: not one virtue for all passions, but not one per passion either.

• Obj. 1: all passions have one beginning (love) and one end (pleasure or sadness), and one beginning and end make one habit, as in the sciences. Obj. 2: otherwise as many virtues as passions, which is false: courage is about fear and boldness, temperance about pleasure and pain (his case: not too pleased with food, not too sad when I don’t get what I want tonight). Obj. 3: love, concupiscence, pleasure differ in species, yet temperance is about all three (my love of food, desire for food, pleasure in food).
• Sed contra: fortitude about fears and boldness, temperance about concupiscence, mildness about anger.
• Corpus, first: passions belong to diverse powers, irascible and concupiscible — “what’s most obvious,” as a virtue in reason and one in the will cannot be the same.
• But not every diversity suffices, for two reasons:
  1. Contrary passions (pleasure/sadness, fear/boldness) have one virtue. Compare knowledge of opposites (Plato, Aristotle): not one ethics of virtue and another of vice, not one medicine of health and another of sickness. Since virtue is a mean, the mean between contraries is set by the same reason: wanting wine too much and being too sad when there is none is the same reason (“ruining your meal and everybody else’s”); in natural things the same mean between white and black; a steak cooked too much or too little.
  2. Passions are repugnant to reason in the same way, by impulse against reason or withdrawal from it. The concupiscible passions follow each other in order toward one thing: from love, desire; from desire, pleasure. The irascible are ordered to diverse things: boldness and fear to great danger, hope and despair to a difficult good, anger to overcoming what harms. Hence temperance, fortitude, magnanimity, mildness.
• His recap: six concupiscible passions in three contrary pairs (love/hate, wanting/fleeing, pleasure/pain), joined by contrariety and by order; five irascible, fear/boldness and hope/despair as pairs, anger “kind of an odd thing,” so different virtues. “Opposites and then order.”

7. Digression: anger, and being true to oneself (“to thy own self be true”) #

Point: the reasonable choice is more oneself than the passion.

• Powerful men have anger: LBJ as Vice President at Saint Mary’s (California) centennial, chewing out supporters in a side room before speaking. Drink makes some irascible, others amorous, by natural inclination. In Shakespeare, Coriolanus has anger.
• Proteus (Two Gentlemen of Verona), always changing shape as his name says, engaged to Julia with “twenty thousand soul-confirming oaths,” sees Sylvia and says he cannot be true to himself without being false to Julia and to Valentine. He is true to his passion, not to reason and will.
• Marriage: the priest asks not “do you have wonderful feelings” but “do you choose this person”; pursuing another afterwards is being false to your choice. Crime of passion vs. premeditated murder: students always rate the premeditated worse, “because it’s more that you’ve done it”; blowing up at a friend vs. sitting down to write a letter saying “I never want to see you again”; Hamlet: “that’s not me, it’s my madness.” The alcoholic who joins AA and is tempted, the dieter and the donut: true to himself if true to his choice. Student: addiction is the culture, “victims of whims of passion.”
• Polonius vs. Proteus: who is right? Answer from Aristotle, Ethics X: reason more than anything else is man; so true to reason is true to oneself, true to passion against reason is false to oneself — the truth of Polonius. A student asks about the four temperaments; he grants they are winds and storms, but the objective self is reason.

8. Loose ends and the replies (“proceed paulatim… little by little”) #

Point: what is settled so far and what is deferred.

• So far three virtues in the irascible (courage, magnanimity, mildness) and at least one in the concupiscible. Whether temperance is one virtue or generic with species (chastity, sobriety, moderation in eating) is for later, maybe the Secunda Secundae. Aristotle: virtue is about the good and the difficult, so a different kind of difficulty may mean a different virtue: the alcoholic vs. the glutton vs. sexual desire (anecdote: the man who eats little but drinks a case or two of beer alone at Thanksgiving). Thomas proceeds paulatim, imitating nature; a student places the phrase in the commentary on Job.
• Reply 1: passions share a common beginning and end (as happiness is common), not a private one; insufficient for unity of virtue. Reply 2: as in nature the same principle goes from one contrary to the other, so in rational things one reason of contraries; virtue consents to reason “in the manner of nature,” a second nature. Reply 3: love, desire, pleasure are ordered to one object in order, so one virtue: if I like a food too much I will want it too much and enjoy it too much.
• Aside: beer commercials; he has lost his taste for beer. Break.

His words #

• “suffer humanly, not stoically”: the saint feels the pain; virtue does not turn flesh to stone.
• “as what effects” vs. “as the matter about which”: operation/passion as effect of every virtue vs. as proper matter of some.
• “commensuration to another”: the measure that grounds debt and justice.
• “unsuited percussion”: the unjust striking [ed.: percussio indebita].
• “mildness” / “meekness”: mansuetudo, the virtue about anger.
• “the notion of debt”: varies with equal, superior, lesser; agreement, promise, benefit.
• “ampliato nomine”: justice in the amplified name, rendering any debt.
• “legal justice… general by way of command”: differs from a commanded virtue only ratione.
• “knowledge of opposites”: one science of contraries, applied to virtue over contrary passions.
• “opposites and then order”: his summary of why contrary and ordered passions share a virtue.
• “reason more than anything else is man”: Aristotle, Ethics X, the ground of “true to oneself.”
• “paulatim”: little by little, Thomas’s way to the truth.

Texts #

Read in class

• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 60, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 60, a. 3 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 60, a. 4 (objections, sed contra, corpus, replies)
• Alessandro of Ripabottoni, biography of Padre Pio (passage on his last years)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics II (virtue about pleasures and pains), V (legal justice; whole book on justice), X (reason is man)
• Thomas, a text on the moral virtues not being the end of life (fortitude and justice); commentary on Job (paulatim, student’s suggestion)
• Plato, Euthyphro; Crito
• Cicero (Tullius) on piety and debt to one’s father
• Avicenna on God alone as liberal
• Shakespeare: Hamlet, King Lear, Macbeth, Coriolanus, Two Gentlemen of Verona
• Cicero-style commonplace “it is right and just” from the Mass; a Dominican moral theology (student)

His questions #

• Which is worse, to kill your father or your brother? Your father: the greater debt, since you get your life from him.
• Do you have to pay back your benefactor what you received anew? No; it is gratitude, thanks.
• When you say God is just, is it commutative or distributive justice? Distributive; commutative is exchange, and there is no exchange with God.
• Is the one ethics about virtue, another about vice; one medicine about health, another about sickness? No, the same knowledge of opposites.
• Is a married man who pursues another woman being true to himself? No; he is false to his choice, which is more himself than his feeling.
• Which do you look upon more seriously, a crime of passion or premeditated murder? Premeditated, “because it’s more that you’ve done it.”
• Who is right, Polonius or Proteus? Polonius, given Aristotle’s “reason more than anything else is man.”
• Is temperance one virtue or a generic virtue with species (chastity, sobriety)? left open, deferred to later.
• Is distributive justice of another species from commutative? left open, “we will inquire about this later on.”