Aquinas on Christ's Emotions: Sadness and Fear (Summa III, Q.15, Arts. 6–7)

Orientation #

He opens Article 6, referring back to the three qualifications on Christ’s passions given “when we spoke in common about the passion of Christ” — he places this at article 4, then corrects himself to article 3 (prev. lecture). The previous class treated Articles 4 and 5 on the passibility of Christ’s soul and sensible pain.

The class, in order #

1. Opening aside on St Catherine of Siena (“Christ appeared to her with Saint John”) #

Her feast was the day before. She was given the miraculous gift of writing, Christ appearing with St John and St Thomas — fitting, since John is famous for the Word and Thomas is “the master of the word,” so Thomas comes down to help her put things into words. The Dominican image of the Trinity: Dominic the Father, Thomas his Word, Catherine of Siena the Holy Spirit or love.

2. What the passiones animae are (“What do we call them in English?”) #

• Passio in Greek and Latin carries undergoing, hence being moved.
• “Emotion” comes from motion — we say “I was moved to anger.”
• “Feeling” has more meanings, but shows there is something bodily in them, knowable even by touch: you feel the bodily change in anger or fear.
• “Passion” in English tends to mean the excess of them.
• Article layout noted: sadness (6), fear (7), admiration (connected with fear, though not fear in the ordinary sense), anger — and none on joy, which he finds interesting; perhaps because obvious.

3. Article 6, the four objections (“it seems that in Christ there was no sadness”) #

1. Isaiah 42: he was “neither sad nor disturbed.” (Aside: Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch reading Isaiah in the chariot — a different passage, the one about the sheep — who needed a teacher to explain it.)
2. Proverbs 12:21, the just man is not saddened whatever happens; the reason given is the Stoics’ — no one is sad except at the loss of his own goods, and the just man counts nothing his own but justice and virtue, which he cannot lose; otherwise he would be subject to fortune. Christ was most of all just (Jeremiah 23:6, “the Lord our just one”). He notes the Church’s attraction to the Stoics, and the inhuman Stoic line on a son’s death (“I always knew he was mortal”); against it, the Aristotelian division of goods of soul, body and exterior, all genuinely goods — “my chair is good,” and without his car he could not get up here. Catherine of Siena says something similar: what happens comes from God, so why be upset?
3. Aristotle, Ethics VII: all sadness is bad and to be fled; nothing bad should be in Christ. He calls this an interesting argument.
4. Augustine, City of God XIV: sadness is about things that happen to us unwillingly; but nothing Christ underwent was against his will — Isaiah 53, “he was offered up because he willed.”

Sed contra: Matthew 26, “My soul is sad usque ad mortem”; and Ambrose, On the Trinity II — as God he could have no sadness, as man he took on my sadness, “and with confidence I call it sadness.”

4. The body of Article 6: pain and sadness distinguished by their motive (“notice the word motivum”) #

The delight of divine contemplation was by divine dispensation kept from overflowing into the sense powers, so that sadness and sensible pain were not excluded. Both pain and sadness are in the sensitive appetite, but differ in motive — and motivum is exactly the word for what we mean by the object of an emotion:

• Pain (dolor): object is an injury perceived by touch, as in a wound.
• Sadness: object is something harmful apprehended inwardly, by reason or by imagination — more spiritual. Hamlet: “there’s nothing good or bad in this world, but thinking makes it so” — thinking here is more imagining than reason; imagine a thing one way and it seems terrible, another way good, and sometimes we end up laughing at the awful thing that happened. (Asides: nearly running out of gas driving back from the south, and the same in New Brunswick with Fr John Marini, distracted by the autumn leaves.) Examples of sadness’s object: loss of grace, or of money. Christ’s soul could apprehend evil inwardly both as regards himself (his passion and death) and as regards others (the sin of his disciples, of the Jews killing him). Hence true sadness in him, as there was true pain — but in a different way, by the three qualifications given earlier: (1) as regards the object (no illicit objects), (2) as regards the beginning (in us they precede the judgment of reason, not in Christ), (3) because in us they often draw us outside the path of reason.

5. Reply 1: propassion (“he began to be saddened and to be disturbed”) #

Sadness is excluded from Christ as complete passion; there was in him an initiated one, secundum propassionem. Matthew 26: “he began to be saddened” — “for it is other to be saddened, another to begin to be saddened,” as Jerome says. He connects this with English “passionate” as denoting excess, which is not in Christ.

6. Reply 2: the Stoic good passions, and the three kinds of goods (“the goods of the soul, the goods of the body, and exterior goods”) #

Augustine, City of God XIV: for the three perturbations — cupidity, joy (laetitia), fear — the Stoics substitute three eupatheiai, “good passions”: will, joy, caution. But for sadness they allow nothing at all in the wise man’s soul, since sadness is about an evil already present, and they hold no evil can befall the wise man — because they count nothing good but the bonum honestum (the goods of the soul, the honorable good that makes men good) and nothing bad but the dishonest.

Thomas grants the bonum honestum is man’s chief good and its opposite his chief evil, since these pertain to reason, chief in man (“man is the animal that has reason, just like Shakespeare teaches us”; Shakespeare also puns, “let’s not be like stocks” — Stoics/stock). But there are secondary goods pertaining to the body or to exterior things serving the body. He expands on the threefold division:

• It appears in Socrates in the dialogues (Phaedo); in the Apology Socrates examines men chiefly for preferring goods of body and exterior goods to goods of the soul. The Athenians act as if it were the reverse.
• Aristotle, Politics VII: two points of agreement between philosophers and most men — there are these three kinds of goods, and we need some of all three; the disagreement is which are better, hence which to get most of, hence where the purpose of life lies.
• Ben Franklin: “early to bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise” — wealth the excellence of exterior goods, health perhaps the greatest bodily good, wisdom the greatest good of the soul.
• Thomas uses the division of Christ after his death: descent into hell giving the beatific vision to the prophets (good of the soul), resurrection (good of the body), ascension (exterior good) — in the Compendium, on the articles of the faith; to be returned to later.

So sadness can be in the wise man’s soul as regards the sensitive appetite, apprehending these secondary evils, without disturbing reason. That is how “the just man is not saddened whatever happens” is to be understood — not that he goes crazy, as when in the 1929 crash people jumped from skyscraper windows. Christ’s sadness was secundum propassionem, not the full passion that deranges a man.

7. Reply 3: all sadness is an evil (“the evil of punishment, not always of guilt”) #

He first poses it himself: that is why there is no sadness in heaven — if sadness were good there should be some there. Answer: all sadness is the evil of punishment, but not always of guilt; only when it proceeds from a disordered affection. Augustine, City of God XIV: when these affections follow right reason and are shown where necessary, who dares call them morbid or vicious? Hence it was fitting for our Lord to show sadness at the death of his friend Lazarus.

8. Reply 4: the bitter medicine (“willed by reason of the end”) #

Nothing prevents a thing being contrary to the will in itself and yet willed for the end to which it is ordered — a bitter medicine is not willed in itself but as ordered to health. So Christ’s death, considered in itself, was involuntary, contrary to his will (“not my will”), and causing sadness, though willed in order to the redemption of the human race. (Asides: the cinnamon coating on his childhood medicine that ran out too soon; the preparation drink before a colonoscopy; his dislike of milk traced to milk of magnesia — a student asks why it is so called, and the guesses offered are the place Magnesia in Asia Minor and the element magnesium; left unresolved.)

9. Transition to Article 7: tragedy purges pity and fear (“sadness here and now fear”) #

Aristotle’s definition of tragedy in the Poetics includes that it purges pity — a kind of sadness — and fear; “purge” does not mean eliminate but purify. Shakespeare names the same two passions in the prologue to Romeo and Juliet: “piteous overthrows” in the second quatrain, “the fearful passage of their death-marked love” in the third.

10. Article 7, objections and sed contra (“the just one, like a bold lion, will be without terror”) #

1. Proverbs 28: the just is bold as a lion, without terror; Christ was most of all just. (Aside: Catherine of Siena telling the men sent to kill her “come, kill me, let my people go” — he was so bewildered he could not do it, and she was upset because she wanted to be a martyr.)
2. Hilary, On the Trinity X: he expelled all fear of death from the apostles, exhorting them to glory; so it is not reasonable that he had fear.
3. Fear seems only of an evil a man cannot avoid; but Christ could avoid both the evil of punishment he underwent and the evil of guilt, which befalls others than him. Sed contra: Mark 14, Jesus “began to fear and to be heavy.”

11. The body of Article 7: fear is of a future evil still escapable (“where there is some hope of getting away”) #

Sadness comes from apprehending a present evil, fear from apprehending a future one — but apprehension of a future evil that is certain does not induce fear. A student presses why not; answer: because it is then apprehended as already present. Aristotle, Rhetoric II: there is no fear except where there is some hope of getting away; with no hope of escape the evil is apprehended as present and causes sadness rather than fear. Two ways of considering fear:

1. As the sensitive appetite naturally refusing injury of the body — by sadness if present, by fear if future. In this way fear was in Christ, as sadness was.
2. As regards uncertainty of the future coming, as when at night we fear a sound, not knowing what it is. In this way there was no fear in Christ, as Damascene says in book III — he knew very well what was going to happen to him.

12. Replies of Article 7 (“only according to propassion”) #

1. The just man is without terror as terror signifies the complete emotion turning a man away from the good of reason; fear was in Christ only secundum propassionem, which is why “Jesus began to fear,” as Jerome expounds. He asks the class how their texts translate propassio and notes there seems to be no English word for it.
2. Hilary excludes fear from Christ in the same way he excludes sadness — as regards any necessity of fearing; but to prove the truth of human nature Christ voluntarily took on fear, as he took on sadness. So: did Christ necessarily fear? No — voluntarily.
3. Christ could avoid the future evils by the power of his divinity, but they were inevitable, or not easily avoidable, according to the weakness of the flesh — the flesh left to itself.

His words #

• passiones animae — the passions of the soul; in English, emotions or feelings; “passion” in English suggests excess.
• undergoing — what passio means in Greek and Latin.
• motivum — the motive of an emotion, i.e. what we call its object.
• dolor — pain, whose object is an injury perceived by touch; distinguished from sadness.
• propassio / secundum propassionem — an initiated, incomplete passion that does not derange reason; he notes there is no English equivalent.
• eupatheiai — the Stoics’ “good passions”: will, joy, caution, replacing cupidity, joy and fear.
• bonum honestum — the Latin name adopted for the goods of the soul, the honorable good that makes men good; its opposite “the dishonest” [ed.: he notes the English word now means something different].
• usque ad mortem — “even unto death” (Matthew 26).

Texts #

Read in class

• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 15, a. 6 (objections, sed contra, body, four replies)
• Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 15, a. 7 (objections, sed contra, body, three replies)
• Isaiah 42; Isaiah 53; Proverbs 12:21; Proverbs 28; Jeremiah 23:6; Matthew 26; Mark 14
• Augustine, City of God XIV (twice); Ambrose, On the Trinity II; Hilary, On the Trinity X; Damascene, book III; Jerome (on “began to be saddened”)
• Aristotle, Ethics VII; Rhetoric II

Mentioned

• Aristotle, Politics VII (the three goods); Poetics, definition of tragedy
• Plato, Phaedo and Apology (inferred for the Apology description)
• Aquinas, Compendium / on the articles of the faith (descent, resurrection, ascension)
• Shakespeare, Hamlet; prologue to Romeo and Juliet; the “stocks/Stoics” pun
• Acts, Philip and the Ethiopian eunuch (inferred locus)

His questions #

• What do we call the passiones animae in English? Emotions, and sometimes feelings.
• Why does Thomas treat sadness, fear, admiration and anger, but have no article on joy? Left open — “maybe it’s kind of obvious that you have that.”
• How do pain and sadness differ? By their motive: pain’s object is an injury perceived by touch, sadness’s an evil apprehended inwardly by reason or imagination.
• Why is there no sadness in heaven, if sadness could be good? Because all sadness is an evil — of punishment, though not always of guilt.
• Was it appropriate for our Lord to show sadness when Lazarus died? Yes; affections following right reason, shown where necessary, are not vicious.
• Why does the apprehension of a certain future evil not cause fear? Because it is then apprehended as present, and so causes sadness rather than fear.
• Did Christ necessarily fear? No — Hilary excludes the necessity; he took fear on voluntarily, to prove the truth of human nature.
• How does your text translate propassio? There seems to be no English word for it.
• Why is it called milk of magnesia? Left open (guesses: the place Magnesia; the element magnesium).