Aquinas on Passion and Sin (Summa I-II, Q. 77, Arts. 1–2): Can Passion Move the Will and Overcome Knowledge?

Orientation #

He opens a new question, on the cause of sin on the side of the sense-desiring power, and lists its eight articles; he reads articles 1 and 2 and stops in the middle of the replies of article 2 (“so I have to stop there”). He notes in passing that the chapters on law will come “eventually.” The neighbouring classes treat ignorance as cause of sin (before) and the later articles of this same question (after).

The class, in order #

1. The eight articles, and Thomas’s prayer (“by the sins of weakness”) #

He frames the whole question by Thomas’s prayer before confession, where the three causes — weakness, ignorance, malice — offend Father, Son and Holy Spirit respectively, “the whole Trinity.” Strength is appropriated to the Father, so sin of infirmity is sinning against the Father.

The eight articles as he lists them:

1. whether passion can move or incline the will (“Can hunger move my will? I wonder. Can’t move mine”);
2. whether it can overcome reason against its own knowledge;
3. whether sin from passion is sin from infirmity;
4. whether self-love is the cause of all sin (“Don’t they try to teach you to love yourself?”);
5. the three causes of 1 John 2 — concupiscence of the eyes, concupiscence of the flesh, pride of life;
6. whether passion diminishes the sin;
7. whether it wholly excuses — he notes “the order is reversed here” compared with ignorance;
8. whether sin from passion can be mortal.

Aside: a Psalm putting three kinds of animal under man — birds = superbia vitae, fish = concupiscentia oculorum (“because that’s where you trade by the sea”), beasts = concupiscence of the flesh. John of the Cross treats these three at length.

2. Three objections: the will cannot be moved by passion (“no passive power is moved except by its own object”) #

1. A passive power is moved only by its own object. The will is passive and active together — a moved mover. But its object is not passion, it is the good of reason. So passion does not move it. (He notes the “antonomasia” in the philosopher, as one says “the king of kings,” Shakespeare “the poet of poets,” Mozart the musician.)
2. The higher mover is not moved by the lower — as the soul is not moved by the body. The will, appetite of reason, is higher and moves the sense appetite, as the higher sphere moves the lower and not the reverse (De Anima III).
3. Nothing immaterial is moved by something material. The will uses no bodily organ, being in the rational part; the sense appetite is founded in a bodily organ. — “I’m convinced, for the time being, aren’t you?”

Sed contra: Daniel 13, “Concupiscence subverts your heart” (Susanna: Daniel had the two elders interrogated separately and they contradicted each other). He offers Bathsheba as the standing example of sense-desire moving the will.

3. The body of a. 1: indirectly, in two ways — first, by distraction (“according to a certain abstraction”) #

Passion cannot draw the will directly, but can indirectly, in two ways. First way, by distraction/abstraction, for three reasons:

1. All the powers are rooted in the one essence of the soul, so when one is intensified in its act, another is remitted or wholly impeded;
2. every power dispersed toward many becomes less, so intensified about one it is less dispersible to others;
3. the works of the soul require intention, and intention vehemently applied to one cannot attend to others.

Examples, all of the same point: Mozart’s ears so sensitive that “the whole man is in the ear”; his brother Mark’s artist friends in Michigan wholly taken up with their eyes (“I’ve never seen a green just like that”); poets wholly in their imagination — the Welsh mountain where sleeping at the foot wakes you “either mad or a poet” (“there isn’t too much difference”), and his teacher Kasurik’s definition, “a poet is a man with his brains kicked out,” which the history department said was the first definition of a poet it agreed with; De Koninck stopping breathing as he worked through a sentence; the Dominican friar so intense on St. Thomas that he used the piece of salted fish, his whole supper, as a bookmark and never noticed (“I don’t know if they’re true”). Also Thomas being operated on while thinking. And: “when you get angry, it kind of occupies you, doesn’t it?”

4. The second way: on the side of the object of the will (“the judgment of the estimative power”) #

The will’s object is the good apprehended by reason; reason’s judgment is impeded through vehement and disordered apprehension of the imagination and judgment of the estimative power — two internal senses that reason’s use depends on and that the sense appetite affects. So passion reaches the will even on the side of its object.

• Clear in those out of their mind (amentes): apprehension follows the passion.
• Analogy he gives: as the judgment of taste follows the disposition of the tongue, so the estimative judgment follows the passion.
• Men in passion cannot easily turn the imagination away from what affects them; so the judgment of reason plerumque follows the passion, and the will follows the judgment.
• Aristotle, Rhetoric: if you are angry at someone you want to say the whole class of them is bad. A student: “assassination by association.” Shakespeare’s Cymbeline: thinking his wife unfaithful, he denounces all womankind — “they’re not even faithful to their vices,” always changing one for another. His brother’s landlady at Notre Dame, frightened of all black people because her husband had been beaten by one.

Aside on attention (from a student exchange): his cousin Dow used baroque music as background to study, but found he had to give Mozart his full attention to appreciate him — Mozart played for nobility half-listening at cards.

5. Replies of a. 1 (“not directly, but by this distraction”) #

• ad 1: through passion there comes a change in the judgment about the object of the will, even though the passion itself is not the will’s object (the good known by reason is). Bathsheba: “his judgment was telling him this is no sin” — “the painters don’t do justice to her.”
• ad 2: the higher is not moved by the lower directly, but indirectly, by this abstraction.
• ad 3: likewise for the immaterial moved by the material.

6. Article 2, objections: reason cannot be overcome against its knowledge (“that’s kind of the way Socrates spoke”) #

1. The stronger is not conquered by the weaker; knowledge, by its certitude, is strongest in us; passion is weak and quickly passing.
2. The will is only of the good or apparent good. If passion draws to a true good, it does not go against reason’s knowledge; if to an apparent good, that is how it appears to reason — so passion never inclines reason against its knowledge.
3. If one says reason knows in universal but judges the contrary in particular: universal and particular opposed are contradictories (“every man”/“not every man”), and contradictory opinions are contraries (Peri Hermeneias II, “the second book in logic”); so he would have contrary opinions at once, impossible — “like being sick and healthy at the same time.”
4. Whoever knows the universal knows the particular he knows contained under it: whoever knows the mule is sterile knows this animal is sterile, so long as he knows it a mule (Posterior Analytics I). So knowing “no fornication should be done” and that this act is fornication, he knows in particular. — “What about David? He must have known adultery is wrong, and this is adultery.”
5. Spoken words are signs of what is in the soul; a man in passion frequently confesses that what he chooses is bad even in particular.

Sed contra: Romans 7:23, “I see another law in my members, repugnant to the law of my mind, holding me captive to the law of sin” — the lex fomitis, concupiscence, and concupiscence is a passion. Note the use of the word “law” here; law comes later in the Summa. Aside: a friend said “I’m conflicted”; “I said, join the club — St. Paul was conflicted.”

7. The body of a. 2: Socrates partly right, and the distinction to memorize (“it is necessary to distinguish”) #

Socrates (via Ethics VII) held science can never be overcome by passion, whence all virtues are sciences and all sins ignorances. He judged rightly in some way: since the will is of the good or apparent good, it is never moved to evil unless the not-good somehow appeared good to reason; so the will never tends to evil without some ignorance or error of reason — Proverbs 14, errant qui operantur malum.

But experience shows men act against what they know — “that’s where we start in ethics” — confirmed by divine authority: Luke 12, the servant who knows his lord’s will and does it not is beaten with many stripes; James 4:17, to him who knows to do good and does it not, it is a sin. So Socrates non simpliciter verum dixit: “it’s necessary to distinguish” — “that should be memorized as a passage right there.” Note that the philosopher is Aristotle, not Socrates, though “Socrates is very often the model for the philosopher.”

The distinction: man is directed to right action by a twofold knowledge, universal and particular; defect of either suffices to impede the rightness of the work and the will. So one may know universally that no fornication is to be committed, and not know in particular that this act is not to be done.

Further: nothing prevents what is known in habit from not being considered in act. “You see that in the students all the time” — a student gives a solution he thinks correct, though he knows habitually that from a universal affirmative and a universal negative minor in the first figure nothing follows (reversed, it works). His exam trick: “every mother is a woman, no man is a mother, therefore no man is a woman” — people who have studied logic still pass it, because they do not recall in act what they hold in habit. Hence the prayer to the angel: strengthen the light of mind, ordain the images, arouse us to consider more correctly.

Why a man fails to consider in act what he habitually knows: (a) sole defect of intention — as a geometer not intending the conclusions he could consider at once; (b) some impediment — external occupation or bodily weakness.

Passion impedes such consideration in three ways:

1. by distraction, as expounded above;
2. by contrariety, since passion inclines to the contrary of what universal science holds;
3. by a bodily change binding reason so it does not freely go into act, as sleep does (“one’s often deceived in dreams”). Hence when passions are much intensified a man loses the use of reason entirely — “many, on account of abundance of love and anger, are converted to insanity.” Coriolanus under anger. “So Socrates is kind of ignoring experience.”

8. Replies of a. 2, as far as the fifth (“action is in the singular”) #

• ad 1: universal knowledge, though most certain, has no principality in operation, since operations are about the singular; hence the senses and sense appetite have great force. “You don’t commit adultery with married women in general, but with Bathsheba in particular.” Not so in geometry, where the conclusion is universal too. No wonder, then, if in things to be done passion acts against knowledge when the particular consideration is absent.
• ad 2: that something not good seems to reason in particular to be good happens from passion — “make an exception with Bathsheba… he’s worthy an exception” — and this particular judgment is against the universal knowledge of reason. Example of the same: people buy a sack of candy and eat the whole thing because it is really good — the Williamsburg “cherry sours,” where he bought a package meaning them for each grandchild and would have stuffed himself; he bought two packages, and by nine grandchildren there wasn’t much left. A student: “a man is known by his examples.” Further aside, the Oktoberfest: a chicken dinner with a liter of beer apiece, which they passed back to the thirsty young men behind them; he had a little over a liter from a man who could not finish his second.
• ad 3: one cannot have together in act a true opinion about the universal affirmative and a false one about the particular negative, or the reverse — “the famous square of opposition”; but one can well have the true universal knowledge habitually and the false particular opinion in act, for act is not directly contrary to habit but to acting.
• ad 4: passion impedes the man from placing the particular under that universal and drawing the conclusion; he assumes under another universal which passion suggests. Aristotle, Ethics VII: the incontinent man has four propositions, two universal — reason’s, “no fornication is to be committed,” and passion’s, “pleasure is to be followed”; passion binds reason from concluding under the first, so he assumes and concludes under the second: pleasure is to be pursued, this is pleasant, therefore… “Syllogisms can be dangerous.” (His old formula: “everything I like is either sinful or fattening.”)
• ad 5: as a drunk sometimes utters words signifying profound opinions which he cannot judge by his mind per ebrietatem, so the man in passion says with his mouth “this should not be done” while inwardly in his soul he senses it should be done (Ethics VII — “a very profound book of Aristotle’s. Every book of Aristotle is profound”).

His words #

• “sense-desiring power” [ed.: sensitive appetite / appetitus sensitivus]
• “passio, the emotion of the soul” — passion as cause of sin
• “antonomasia” — naming by eminence, “the philosopher,” “the king of kings”
• “moved mover” — the will, both passive and active
• “abstraction/distraction” — his two renderings for the first indirect way passion moves the will
• “estimative power,” “imagination” — the two internal senses passion disorders
• amentes — “those who are out of their mind”
• plerumque — “often, many times”
• lex fomitis — the law in the members, concupiscence
• errant qui operantur malum — “they err who do something bad”
• non simpliciter verum dixit — Socrates did not speak the truth simply
• “principality” — chiefness in operation, which universal knowledge lacks
• bene potest / simul in act — habit vs. act in the reply on contradictories
• “the incontinent man” — has four propositions, two universal

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 77, prologue and a. 1 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies)
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I-II, q. 77, a. 2 (objections, sed contra, body, replies 1–5)
• Daniel 13 (sed contra of a. 1); Romans 7:23 (sed contra of a. 2); Proverbs 14; Luke 12; James 4:17

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima III; Nicomachean Ethics VII; De Interpretatione II; Posterior Analytics I; Rhetoric
• 1 John 2 (the three concupiscences); an unnamed Psalm on beasts, fish and birds
• John of the Cross, on the three concupiscences
• Thomas Aquinas, prayer before confession
• Shakespeare, Cymbeline; Coriolanus

His questions #

• Can hunger move my will? — Not directly; the will is moved by the good apprehended by reason.
• What are the two ways the will can be influenced by the sense appetite? — By distraction (the powers rooted in one soul, intention fixed on one), and on the side of the object, by passion disordering imagination and the estimative power.
• Why does intensifying one power weaken another? — Because all the powers are rooted in the one essence of the soul, power dispersed to many is less, and intention vehemently applied to one cannot attend to others.
• Can reason be overcome by passion against its own knowledge? — Yes; Socrates denied it, but “it is necessary to distinguish” universal from particular knowledge, and habit from act.
• If he knows the universal and knows this act falls under it, does he not know in particular? — Passion impedes him from placing the particular under that universal; he concludes under another universal suggested by passion.
• Can one hold the true universal and the false particular at once? — Not both in act; but well the universal habitually and the particular falsely in act, since act is contrary to acting, not to habit.
• Why has universal knowledge no “principality” in action? — Because operations are about the singular — not adultery with married women in general, but with Bathsheba.
• Why does a man in passion say aloud that what he does is wrong? — As a drunk utters profound sayings he cannot judge, so he says it with his mouth while inwardly sensing it should be done.