Summa III q.15 a.4–5: The Passions of Christ's Soul and His True Bodily Pain (with notes on 'undergoing', Logos and Hilary's hard text)

Orientation #

He begins directly at Article 4, having been on the preceding articles of the same question; at the end he says “I found that he’s sad. There’s sadness in him next,” pointing to the article on sadness. The previous class worked through the earlier articles of III q. 15 on defects in Christ’s soul (prev. lecture).

The class, in order #

1. The three objections of Article 4 (“whether the soul of Christ was possible”) #

Point: whether Christ’s soul was able to undergo.

• Obj. 1: nothing undergoes except from something stronger, since the agent is more outstanding than the patient — Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram XII, and Aristotle, De Anima III. No creature was more powerful than Christ’s soul; so it could suffer from nothing, and the ability to suffer would be in him in vain. Aside: he notes Augustine and Aristotle reach the same solution to the same difficulty independently of each other, which “from our point of view” is the more interesting fact; Thomas has the advantage of reading both.
• Obj. 2: Cicero (“Tully”), Tusculan Questions: the passions of the soul are certain sicknesses; sickness of soul follows sin (Ps. 40:5, “Heal my soul, because I have sinned before you”); so no passions in Christ.
• Obj. 3: the passions of the soul seem the same as the fomes of sin — the Apostle calls them “the passions of sins”; Christ had no fomes.
• Sed contra: Ps. 87:4, “my soul was filled with evils” — not sins but human evils, i.e. sorrows, as the gloss expounds. He notes this article is the general one leading into the next series of articles on particular passions.

2. Bodily and animal undergoing (“in one way, a bodily undergoing”) #

A soul constituted in a body undergoes two ways.

• Bodily undergoing: through wounding of the body. Reason: the soul is the form of the body, so the being of soul and body is one — he glosses this with perichoresis, the body sharing in the existence of the soul, though the soul’s existence is not entirely immersed in the body (it has activities not in the body). So the body disturbed, the soul must be disturbed as regards the being it has in the body. Christ’s body was passible and mortal; therefore his soul too was in some way able to suffer.
• Animal (soul-like) undergoing: according to an operation proper to the soul, or more of the soul than of the body.

3. How “passion/undergoing” is carried over (“the word suffering has stuck on the first meaning”) #

Point: a long digression on words moved from a first to a later sense.

• Three stages: (1) suffering proper — receiving what is harmful and destructive; (2) drop “harmful,” keep “received in the body” — sensing; (3) drop the body, keep receiving — Aristotle says even understanding is a kind of undergoing.
• English “suffering” is stuck at stage (1); his preferred English carry-over is “undergoing” — evidence: “under the weather” (the weather acted on you harmfully), “he’s undergone a lot” (never good things). And “understand” has “under” in it, yet without the bad sense.
• Boundary case: in sensing there can be a bad undergoing (too loud sounds, a light that blinds) but really the eye is perfected by color, the ear by sound.
• Why this is hard: we learned philosophy and theology from Greeks and Romans, so instead of moving an English word we transliterate the Greek or Latin one, and then use the word in its later sense without knowing the earlier — “your mind doesn’t know what it’s talking about anymore.”
• Example: John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word.” Greek logos first means the spoken word, then the written, then the thought signified. English “word” has not moved to mean thought, so a translator must either move it or go back to the Greek; he notes Latin verbum likewise has not moved as far as logos.
• Student exchanges: a student recalls Cardinal Ratzinger relating verbum to “verb,” action — the action of the liturgy is the Word coming to dwell on the altar; another recalls that in Hebrew “the word of the Lord came to the prophet” literally means it happened to him, he underwent it.
• Example: Shakespeare carries “birth” over to mean what a thing is (Romeo and Juliet); and Friar Lawrence’s “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast” — running of legs, then of action, then of the mind (“let me run through this once more,” “jump to conclusions”). Shakespeare’s definition of reason uses the transliterated Latin discourse (from “to run”) because English “running” had not moved enough.
• Aside: a student notes contemporary redefining of words that muddies rather than clarifies; this turns into a joke about computer vocabulary — “What’s your domain?” “Who’s your server?” “Nobody serves me.”

4. Passions most properly the affections of the sensitive appetite (“if I say somebody’s passionate”) #

Point: Thomas restricts the word. Though the soul is said to undergo in understanding and sensing, most properly passions are the affections of the sensitive appetite — what English calls the emotions. Test of usage: calling a man passionate does not mean he understands a lot; it means he is not thinking. These were in Christ, as other things pertaining to man’s nature; Augustine, City of God XIV: the Lord took on those human affections he judged should be taken on, and in one who had a true human body and soul there was nothing false.

• Aside: in devotion to the Sacred Heart you ascend from Christ’s emotion, to the love in his human will, to the love in his divine will. He wept over Lazarus. Did Christ have emotions? Yes.

5. Three ways his passions differed from ours (“in a different way than in us as regards three things”) #

1. Object: in us the emotions are often born toward illicit things; not in Christ. (Growing up one hears anger is a sin — but our anger usually has the wrong object.)
2. Beginning: in us emotions frequently precede the judgment of reason; in Christ all movements of sense desire arose according to reason’s disposition (Augustine, City of God XIV: by the grace of a most certain disposition, he took them on when he wished, as he willed to be made man).
3. Effect: in us they sometimes do not stop in the sense appetite but draw reason after them; in Christ they remained in the sensitive appetite and in no way impeded reason.

• Jerome, on Matthew: Christ was truly saddened (contristatus), but lest passion dominate the soul he is said by the tender word propassio to have begun to be sad. Full passion = when it dominates the soul, i.e. reason; propassio = begun in the sensitive appetite, not extending further.
• Student exchange: Thomas makes the same point about the temptation — “he fasted forty days and was hungry” because he willed to be hungry; and the devil would not have approached unless Christ went out to the desert and let him. Likewise the sadness in Gethsemane: “he began to be sad” because he willed to be sad; he was not overwhelmed or unhinged. Joke: politicians are worse than the devil, they dare approach our Lord and aren’t even hungry.

6. Replies to the objections of Article 4 (“he subjected himself to the passions”) #

• To 1: Christ’s soul could have resisted the passions so they would not come upon him, especially by divine power, but by his own will he subjected himself to them, both of body and of soul.
• To 2: Cicero speaks according to the Stoics, who called passions not every movement of the sensitive appetite but only the disordered ones; such were plainly not in Christ.
• Digression on the Stoics and the rule of reason. He flags a lot of ambiguity about the Stoic position: sometimes they seem to deny emotions altogether (“they’re going to kill my wife and children — out of my hands, I shouldn’t feel anything”), sometimes only the excessive ones; and Thomas sometimes speaks as if all Stoics were the same. Shakespeare’s pun: let’s “be no stocks” — you can hit a chair and it takes it without complaining.
• Aristotle’s question: should reason rule the emotions as a father rules a son or as a master rules a slave? Two differences: the master rules for the good of the master and the slave has no say; the father rules for the good of the son and the son has something to say. Example: when I give my emotions Mozart I give them something they want, and they have a say — though if they want other music I say no. Boundary case from his cousin Downs: psychologists traced certain disorders to reason ruling the emotions tyrannically, so that people snap. A student recalls Father (Brother) Owen Bennett: we rule the emotions not as a tyrant but “diplomatically.” Further example: a father’s friend insisting on a degree — some people don’t belong in college; if a boy loves cars, to some extent you listen to what the son wants and what suits him.
• Students note Christ’s anger is reported: he upbraided the disciples after the resurrection for not believing the witnesses; in the synagogue (Mark) he looked at them with anger at their hardness before healing.
• To 3: the passiones peccatorum are emotions of the sensitive appetite tending to illicit things; these were not in Christ, nor the fomes.

7. Dolor and tristitia: pain against sorrow (“what is this Latin word dolor?”) #

Point: fixing the vocabulary before Article 5. Dolor = pain, tied to injury of the body, i.e. passio corporalis; sadness/sorrow answers rather to passio animalis. Likewise pleasure is sometimes said of the sensitive, touch, while delight or joy is more spiritual.

• Example: C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy — not sensual; discovering truth and great literature. Students add the joke that he later married Joy, a divorced American, and was surprised how much he loved her; an Anglican bishop refused the marriage because she was divorced, so he went to an evangelical/charismatic Anglican.
• Aside: at Laval, after a long list of the dangers of women, the line they always remembered — “If I said everything I know about women, the whole world would be stupefied.”

8. Article 5: objections against true sensible pain (“as a dart piercing the water”) #

• Obj. 1: Hilary, De Trinitate X: when for Christ it was life to die, how should he be estimated to have suffered in the sacrament of death, who bestows life on those who die for him? And: the Only-begotten God took on a true man, not failing from himself as God; blows fell, wounds went in, he was suspended — “these brought the impetus of passion, but did not infer pain.” The translation at hand renders: as a dart piercing the water, he had no pain. He calls it “quite a text,” and says he will have to explain it.
• Obj. 2: necessity of pain seems proper to flesh conceived in sin — there would have been no pain in the garden before sin; Christ’s flesh was conceived of the Holy Spirit.
• Obj. 3: the pleasure of contemplating divine things diminishes pain — martyrs bore pain the better for considering divine love; Christ’s soul was in the highest way delighting in the vision of God through his essence. (He anticipates: Thomas will answer that he did not allow this to overflow into the body.)
• Sed contra: Isaiah 53, “truly he bore our sicknesses and our pains” — the chapter Alphonsus uses almost as a gospel account of the passion.

9. The body of Article 5 (“it is not doubtful at all”) #

Two things are required for true sensible pain: injury of the body and the sense of the injury.

1. Christ’s body could be injured, since it was passible and mortal — which is why he is still in part a viator.
2. The sense of injury was not lacking: the sense of touch, since his soul perfectly had all the natural powers. Therefore there was true pain in Christ. He adds Aristotle’s point that the better the sense of touch, the better the mind — so Christ’s touch being more sensitive, he could feel pain more than anybody else.

10. Replies of Article 5 (“he does not exclude the truth of pain, but the necessity”) #

• To 1: Hilary excludes from Christ’s flesh not the truth of pain but its necessity. Hilary continues: when the Lord thirsted, hungered, wept, he is not shown to have drunk, eaten or sorrowed by necessity, but to demonstrate the truth of his body he took on “the custom of the body.” He glosses custom as used in an unusual sense, for the nature of it — and notes, citing Warren Murray, that even Aristotle speaks of the custom of nature, though custom is distinguished from nature. Hilary takes necessity in relation to the first cause of these defects, sin, which was not in Christ (his body was not from the vices of human conception nor of a human father, but subsisting in the form of our body by the power of his virtue). But as regards the proximate cause — the composition of the body out of contraries, so that it can suffer from what is too hot or too cold — Christ’s flesh was subject to the necessity of these defects. A student notes this Hilary passage is in Lombard’s Sentences, which is why Thomas and Bonaventure all have to explain it at length: it is a difficult passage.
• To 2: flesh conceived in sin is subject to pain both by necessity of the body’s natural principles and by necessity of the punishment/guilt of sin; in Christ only the former.
• To 3: by virtue of his divinity Christ disposed that the beatitude of his soul was contained and not derived to the body, so that passibility and mortality were not taken away; for the same reason the pleasure of contemplation was contained in the mind and not derived to the sensible powers, so that sensible pain was not excluded. Illustration: the Transfiguration, where he does let the glory of the soul flow into the body — our ultimate state, bodies shining like the sun — showing the overflow is subject to his will; as that is not what he usually allows, so he does not allow the overflow that would take away pain, “because he wouldn’t be able to do what he wants to do.”

11. Closing on sorrow, and tragedy (“that’s not sorrow; it’s pain”) #

Announcing sadness as the next article, he returns to tristitia vs. dolor: when someone I love dies I feel sorrow; when I run into something sharp I feel pain — a real difference, as with pleasure and joy. Aristotle puts pity into the definition of tragedy; pity is a form of sadness, as are melancholy and envy — all passiones animales, against pain like an ulcer, an infection, a toothache. So tragedy does not purge pain but purges pity, “so you feel pity for what is really pitiful.”

His words #

• undergoing — his chosen English for passio, because it keeps the first, bad sense (under the weather; he’s undergone a lot) yet can be moved to sensing and understanding.
• Natural Hearing — [ed.: Aristotle’s Physics], where acting-upon and undergoing are first treated, of motion.
• perichoresis — his gloss on the one being of soul and body: the body shares in the existence of the soul, the soul not entirely immersed in the body.
• passiones animae — what English calls the emotions, the affections of the sensitive appetite.
• propassio — Jerome’s “tender word”: a passion begun in the sensitive appetite that does not extend further; against perfect passion, which dominates reason.
• passiones peccatorum — emotions of the sensitive appetite tending toward illicit things.
• dolor / tristitia — pain (injury of the body, passio corporalis) against sorrow (passio animalis).
• viator — Christ still in part a wayfarer, since his body was passible and mortal.
• custom of the body — Hilary’s word, used for the nature or way of the body.

Texts #

Read in class:

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 15, a. 4 — objections, sed contra, body, replies.
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 15, a. 5 — objections, sed contra, body, replies.
• Augustine, De Genesi ad litteram XII; Aristotle, De Anima III (agent more outstanding than patient) — quoted in obj. 1.
• Cicero, Tusculan Questions (passions are sicknesses); Psalm 40:5; Psalm 87:4 with the gloss.
• Augustine, City of God XIV (two citations).
• Jerome on Matthew (propassio).
• Hilary, De Trinitate X, quoted in obj. 1 and extended in the reply.
• Isaiah 53 (sed contra of a. 5).

Mentioned:

• Aristotle, on the definition of tragedy (pity); on touch and intelligence.
• Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet (“Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast”; “birth”); his definition of reason (discourse); the pun on “stocks.”
• John 1:1; Peter Lombard, Sentences (Hilary’s text); Bonaventure.
• Alphonsus (on Isaiah 53); Cardinal Ratzinger (verbum/action in the liturgy); C. S. Lewis, Surprised by Joy; Warren Murray; Father Owen Bennett.

His questions #

• Whether the soul of Christ was able to undergo? Yes — his body being passible and mortal, his soul had to be in some way passible.
• Did Christ have any emotions? Yes, passions in the proper sense of the sensitive appetite — he wept over Lazarus.
• In what does the difference lie between his passions and ours? In object (never illicit), beginning (always following reason’s disposition), and effect (never drawing reason after them).
• How would you translate dolor into English? Pain — sensible, tied to injury of the body, against tristitia, sorrow.
• Should reason rule the emotions as a father rules his son or as a master rules a slave? As a father: for their good, and they have something to say.
• Did the Stoics deny all emotions or only the disordered ones? Left open — he says there is real ambiguity, and that Thomas speaks both ways.
• Was there true sensible pain in Christ? Not doubtful at all: his body could be injured and his sense of touch was perfect — indeed he could feel pain more than anybody.
• How can Hilary say the blows brought no pain? He excludes not the truth of pain but its necessity, i.e. the necessity that comes from sin as first cause.
• Why did the beatitude and delight of his soul not exclude pain? He disposed by his divine power that it not be derived to the body and the sensible powers — the Transfiguration shows the overflow is at his will.