Summa I-II q.74, Part 2: Sin in the Passions and in Reason (Arts. 2–5); Mozart, Memory, and Mortal vs. Venial Sin

Orientation #

He opens mid-article (“how does he reply to the first objection?”), continuing the replies of a.2 from the previous class (prev. lecture), and says the point about the hand “will come out when he gets talking about sexuality… in the next couple articles.” The previous class began q. 74 aa. 1–2 and the next continues with aa. 6–8.

The class, in order #

1. Replies of a.2: will as first mover, other powers as moved (“as by a first mover”) #

Point: the will is the subject of sin as first mover; the other powers as moved by it.

• Reply 1: one sins by the will “as by a first what — mover”; by the other powers “as moved by it.” He notes Thomas is again “looking before and after.”
• Reply 2: good and bad in general are the per se objects of the will; the other powers have a determined particular good and evil, and so can have virtue, vice and sin “according as they partake of will and reason.” He ties this to the end of Nicomachean Ethics I: virtues must involve reason, but there are not only virtues of reason itself but of “that which partakes of reason.”

2. Reply 3 of a.2: members as tools, emotions as free (“only the what — tools”) #

Point: the bodily members are tools, not beginnings of acts, so they cannot properly be subjects of sin; the interior desiring powers can.

• Members are compared to the moving soul “as a slave,” which is acted upon and does not act; the interior desiring powers are compared to reason “as it were free,” since they both are acted upon and act (Politics I).
• Distinction from Politics I: should reason rule the emotions as a master rules a slave (the Stoic caricature; “some psychologists say that’s where you get into psychological problems,” it crushes the emotions) or as a father rules a son? Aristotle concludes: like a father. The son must obey but has some choice; the father listens “within reason.”
  • His father’s story: a business friend sent his son to Amherst, the son flunked out, said he wanted a filling station, the father bought it and the son was happy. He thinks his father told it because his own sons would be philosophers rather than businessmen.
• Music and fiction (Politics VIII on education and what music to listen to): Baroque and Mozart move the emotions “in a reasonable way” and so dispose one for moral virtue without making one virtuous; using Mozart to rule the emotions is not treating them as a slave but giving them what they naturally rejoice in. Marriage of Figaro: attachment to Figaro and Susanna against the Count, the Countess’s aria “Dove sono,” the Count on his knees asking forgiveness — Mozart “leading her along” to something suitable. Thomas on good fiction: it should lead one into something virtuous “through a suitable representation,” what Shakespeare and Mozart do. Contrast: his cousin’s account of a rock-and-roll riot at a naval base (folding chairs thrown) — music not disposing to reason. Symphonies, he says, are most of all the moral education in instrumental music; Tchaikovsky went back to Mozart “to escape from the romantic period… all this disorder.”
• Student question: can the hand be a subject of sin at all? Answer: only in “a very, very diminished sense” compared with the emotions, which can partake of reason; the hand “just obeys, kind of automatically.” A student adds: our Lord tells St. Gertrude that when a father strikes a child the hand has no choice — those God uses to punish us are not responsible; he agrees.
• Second reason in reply 3: acts of the exterior members are actions passing over into exterior matter, so they are not “in” the member: “I’m kicking you — it’s more in you than in me”; fire heating water is more in the water. Thomas’s example: striking, in homicide. So there is “not a similar reason” as with the interior parts.
• Aside: break taken here.

3. a.3 objections and sed contra: can there be sin in sensuality? (“sensuality is common to us and the brutes”) #

Point: sensuality (his gloss: the sense appetite, irascible and concupiscible) seems unable to be a subject of sin.

1. Sin is proper to man, who is praised or blamed from his acts; sensuality is common to brutes — “there’s not sin in the beasts.”
2. No one sins in what he cannot avoid (Augustine, on free will); sensuality is “of perpetual corruption” as long as we live, signified by the serpent (Augustine, De Trinitate XII) — “you have no control of that.”
3. Only what is done with deliberation of reason counts as our doing (Ethics IX). He illustrates: premeditated murder is more serious than a murder of passion; a spoken insult can be apologized for, a written one is hard to take back; the man whose Christmas letter ranted for a page and then said his fingers “got carried away on the keyboard” — “I don’t think so.”

• Sed contra: Romans 7, “not the good that I will, this do I do, but the evil that I hate,” which Augustine expounds of the evil of concupiscence, a motion of sensuality.

4. a.3 corpus and replies: voluntary, cogitativa and reminiscence, the fomes (“apt to be moved by the will”) #

Point: sin can be in any power whose act can be voluntary and disordered; sensuality’s act can be voluntary because it is apt to be moved by the will.

• On inordinatus: reason is defined by order, “before and after, as Shakespeare says”; disordered means opposed to reason.
• Reply 1: some powers of the sensitive part, though common with brutes, have in us an excellence from being joined to reason — as we have the cogitativa (Aristotle’s “particular reason,” bringing together individual images) and reminiscence.
  • Distinction: brute memory vs. reminiscence. Reminiscence is “a kind of discourse of reason, but in the memory,” one thing leading to another, not a syllogism in the strict sense (Aristotle’s On Memory and Reminiscence, after the De Anima and the book on sensation). Examples: reconstructing what you did last Sunday at four o’clock; lying awake trying to recall his three good-natured Shakespeare comedies — Comedy of Errors and Merry Wives came back (words “comedy” and “merry”), Taming of the Shrew did not, until he saw the contrast (Falstaff the man made fun of, the shrew the woman) — “that’s completeness… I’ll remember it.”
  • So the sense appetite in us has an excellence: it is naturally apt to obey reason, hence can be a beginning of the voluntary act and a subject of sin. This is the part of the soul that “can partake of reason without being essentially reasonable” — what Mozart and good fiction dispose.
• Reply 2: the perpetual corruption concerns the fomes, “the tinder,” never wholly taken away in this life; original sin goes away as guilt (baptism) but its effect remains. Still, by reasonable will man can repress individual disordered motions by diverting thought. His story: a Frenchman on the Route du Président Kennedy in Maine (potholes) passed him and a stone marked his new car; “I’m a philosopher, I don’t get upset at such things” — he repressed the feeling. Fr. Hardon: one of the most important uses of the will is to direct your mind. But diverting thought can itself raise another motion: turning from delectables of the flesh to speculation of knowledge, a motion of inane glory (a capital sin) breaks forth, unpremeditated. So one cannot avoid all such motions, but it suffices for voluntary sin that one can avoid singular ones. He points to a footnote citing the Council of Trent: we cannot avoid all venial sins except by a special privilege of God, as in the Blessed Virgin.
• Reply 3: what is done without deliberation is not perfectly done, since not by what is principal in man; so not perfectly a human act, nor perfectly virtue or sin, but imperfect in the genus — a motion of sensuality preceding reason is a venial sin. “Some truth in those objections, but not the whole truth.”

5. a.4: can mortal sin be in sensuality? Objections and sed contra (“mortal sin is contrary to virtue”) #

Point: three objections for mortal sin in sensuality; Augustine against.

1. Acts are known from their objects (De Anima: powers by acts, acts by objects — “by the music of Mozart, I know what hearing is”); one can sin mortally about the objects of sensuality (delectables of the flesh).
2. Mortal sin is contrary to virtue; temperance and fortitude are virtues of the irrational parts (Ethics III), and contraries are about the same. Aside on the Ethics: Book III fortitude and temperance, Book V justice, Book IV the lesser virtues — liberality, magnificence, magnanimity, philotimia, mildness, friendliness, and eutrapelia (“easily turning,” turning anything said into a joke; Shakespeare describes it in one of the plays).
3. Venial sin disposes to mortal, disposition and habit are in the same subject, and venial sin is in sensuality. He: “I ain’t gonna solve that… put that in my pipe and smoke it.”

• Sed contra: Augustine, Retractations, and the gloss on Romans 7:14 — the disordered motion of concupiscence exists even in those in grace, where mortal sin is not.

6. a.4 corpus and replies: ordering to the end belongs to reason (“only of what — reason, the orderer”) #

Point: as corruption of the principle of bodily life causes bodily death, disorder from the last end causes spiritual death; but ordering to the end belongs only to reason, so mortal sin is in reason, not sensuality.

• Aside: as a boy he thought everyone died of a heart attack; the heart as principal organ.
• He wonders whether “only in reason” means to exclude the will: “I don’t think he means that… sometimes will is said to be in reason.”
• Reply 1: the act of sensuality can concur with mortal sin, but the act is mortal sin not from being of sensuality but from reason, to which ordering to an end belongs. “That’s a very subtle thing he’s saying there.”
• Reply 2: the act of virtue is not perfected by sensuality alone but by reason and will, to whom choice belongs; Aristotle’s definition of moral virtue (Ethics II) has choice in it — “a habit, with choice, in the middle towards us, determined by right reason.” So with every act of moral virtue perfecting the desiring power there is an act of foresight [ed.: prudence] perfecting the rational power; likewise with mortal sin.
• Reply 3, a threefold distinction of disposition: (a) same and in the same — begun science disposes to perfect science; (b) in the same but not the same — heat disposes to the form of fire; (c) neither — as goodness of imagination disposes to science in the intellect (“true especially in geometry”). Venial sin in sensuality disposes to mortal sin in reason in the third way: disordered emotions dispose to a bad judgment, but reason is a different faculty.

7. a.5: can sin be in reason? (“reason has a twofold act”) #

Point: reason sins both in its own act of knowing and in directing the other powers.

• Objections: (1) reason’s defect is ignorance, which excuses; (2) reason comes before the will, the first subject of sin, since it directs it — “it’s interesting”; (3) sin is only about what is in our power, but some are naturally deficient in reason, others solertes (“does it mean quick?” — a student: yes).
• Sed contra: Augustine, De Trinitate XII — sin in both lower and higher reason.
• Corpus: reason has a twofold act — toward its own object (knowing truth), and directing the other powers. Sin in the first when it errs about what it is able and ought to know; in the second when it commands disordered acts of lower powers (“I’m going to seduce this young lady”), or after deliberation does not coerce them.
• Reply 1: a defect about what one cannot know excuses (acts of the furious); about what one can and ought to know, it is imputed; a defect in directing the other powers is always imputed, because reason can interject its own act.
• Reply 2: the will in some way moves and precedes reason, and reason the will; so the will’s motion can be called reasonable and reason’s act voluntary. Sin is in reason either as its defect is voluntary or as its act begins the act of the will. Reply 3 clear from the foregoing.
• Aside: a Jesuit priest who “didn’t like that at all” [unclear in recording]; closing joke on “intellectual indigestion.”

His words #

• first mover; the will as that by which one sins, other powers as moved by it.
• looking before and after; his tag for reason/order, attributed to Shakespeare.
• tools (organa); the bodily members, compared to the soul as a slave.
• father rules his son vs. master rules his slave; Politics I on reason over emotions.
• sensuality; “a name for the sense appetite,” irascible and concupiscible.
• inordinatus; disordered, opposed to reason’s order.
• cogitativa; “particular reason,” gathering individual images.
• reminiscence; “a discourse of reason, but in the memory,” vs. brute memory.
• fomes; “the tinder,” the corruption remaining after original sin.
• inane glory; his rendering of vainglory, a capital sin.
• peccatum veniale; venial sin, imperfect in the genus of sin.
• eutrapelia; “easily turning,” the social virtue of wit.
• foresight [ed.: prudentia]; the act of reason accompanying moral virtue.
• solertia / solertes; the naturally quick.
• furious; the insane, whose ignorance excuses.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 74, a. 2, replies 1–3
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 74, a. 3 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 74, a. 4 (whole article)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 74, a. 5 (whole article)

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Politics I (reason ruling emotions); Politics VIII (education, music)
• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics I (end), II (definition of moral virtue), III, IV, V, IX
• Aristotle, De Anima; On Memory and Reminiscence; book on sensation
• Augustine, De Trinitate XII; on free will; Retractations; gloss on Romans 7:14
• Romans 7
• Council of Trent (footnote on avoiding venial sins)
• Shakespeare: Comedy of Errors, Merry Wives of Windsor, Taming of the Shrew
• Mozart, The Marriage of Figaro (“Dove sono”)

His questions #

• Should reason rule the emotions like a master rules a slave, or like a father rules his son? Like a father: the son obeys but has choice, and the father listens within reason.
• Is the dog sinning there in biting you, or barking at you? No — “that’s what he’s supposed to do”; sensuality in us has an excellence from being joined to reason.
• Which is more serious, a murder of passion or a premeditated murder? Premeditated — you had time to think about it.
• What’s the difference between us and the beasts? Our sense appetite is naturally apt to obey reason, so it can be a subject of sin.
• Does “only in reason” mean to exclude the will? He thinks not; will is sometimes said to be in reason.
• How does Aristotle define moral virtue? A habit, with choice, in the middle towards us, determined by right reason.
• Does solertia mean quick? Yes (student).
• Was that enough to chew on? Left as a joke — “intellectual indigestion.”