Christ's Sense Desire (ST III, q.18 a.2): The Emotions, Reason, Mozart and the Arts

Orientation #

He opens straight into “the second one” of question eighteen, i.e. ST III q.18 a.2, and refers back to the sed contra of Ambrose (“that’s what we saw before”) already met in the previous article (prev. lecture). He ends mid-stride: “Okay, we have to stop there.” The previous class covered q.17 and q.18 a.1 on the two wills in Christ.

The class, in order #

1. The article stated; “sensuality” is not a bad word (“Sometimes I’ll translate sensuality by sense desire”) #

The article: it seems there is no other will of sensuality in Christ. He warns at once that Latin sensualitas has no pejorative sense; he will render it sense desire. Objection 1 rests on the Philosopher, De Anima III: the will is in reason — Thomas takes this as the rational part of the soul — whereas sensuality is in the sensitive appetite, the irascible and concupiscible.

2. The eleven emotions (“Thomas… unfolds the emotions… most fully”) #

Point: Thomas unfolds the emotions more fully than Plato or Aristotle, who have the distinction but do not break the emotions down.

• Concupiscible — about what is agreeable or disagreeable to sense; three and three. Agreeable: like/love; then, not having it, desire; having it, pleasure or joy. Disagreeable: dislike/hate; aversion (trying to avoid); and if you cannot avoid it, sadness or pain. Six.
• Irascible — arising when there is difficulty in getting or avoiding. Difficult good: hope, and despair. Difficult evil: fear, and boldness (if you think you can overcome it). Fifth: when the evil is already inflicted and you think you can do something about it — anger. Five.
• Greek names: epithymia for the concupiscible, thymos for the irascible; each named from the most manifest emotion in it — anger, and sense desire (hunger, sexual desire).

3. Mozart, tragedy, rhetoric, ethics: four arts that need the emotions (“important for at least three or four arts”) #

Point: knowing the emotions is fundamental to several arts and sciences. Examples, each attached to its use:

• Music: Mozart’s key-changes are always significant (unlike Haydn’s variety for variety’s sake) — major to minor for hope to despair; D or C major more for the irascible, G or B-flat for the concupiscible, though rhythm and melody count too. The letter to his father on Osmin’s anger in The Abduction from the Seraglio: the angry man loses control of himself, so Osmin must be represented as losing control — but “not in a way that becomes displeasing to the ear,” i.e. not ceasing to be music. Anger also in the 24th piano concerto.
• Poetics: tragedy is a likeness of an action serious, of some magnitude, in sweetened language, moving us to pity and fear so as to purge these; pity is a form of sadness. Comedy (the part we lost) moves to mirth, a form of joy, and hope. Revenge plots are built on anger — the Odyssey (the suitors eating his food and courting his wife, the doors closed), Electra.
• Rhetoric: Rhetoric II has a whole section on arousing and calming emotions. Defending you in court, I move them to pity; to get you punished, to anger; in the political assembly, to fear, so as to get money for defence.
• Ethics and theology: moral virtues are distinguished partly by the emotions they are about — temperance about desire and pleasure, courage about fear and boldness, magnanimity about hope; and more accidental differences within one emotion (pity, envy, melancholy are all kinds of sadness).
• Aside: in the Secunda Secundae Thomas attaches to temperance the virtue of mildness, which moderates anger, because both passions strongly move you. Hence Shakespeare’s metaphors from species to species: “the very wrath of love” in As You Like It (suddenness, and “clubs cannot part them” — you need a club to part fighting dogs, and a father needs one for the daughter on the porch); and “drunk with choler,” drunk belonging to temperance’s matter, choler to mildness’s.

4. Objections 2 and 3 (“signified by the serpent”) #

• Obj. 2: Augustine, De Trinitate XII: sensuality is signified by the serpent. But there is nothing serpentine in Christ — though Augustine on John says Christ is like the serpent Moses raised in the desert, a serpent without poison. Therefore no will of sensuality in Christ.
• Student exchange on this image: what is the venomous animal? Answer reached with the students — human nature with the poison is the serpent; Christ has the sensuality (the likeness) without the poison. He adds that “sensuality” in English carries the bad sense as “self-love” does: a man must love himself, but self-love means loving himself too much.
• Obj. 3: will follows nature; in Christ there is only one nature besides the divine; therefore only one human will.
• Sed contra: Ambrose, second book to the Emperor Gratian — “mine is the will which he calls his own,” because as man he took on sadness; sadness pertains to sensuality (treated in the Second Part). Note: ordering the Incarnation after the Second Part lets Thomas use what was settled there.

5. The body: human nature includes animal nature (“as in a species is included the genus”) #

Argument as he gives it:

1. The Son of God took human nature with everything pertaining to the perfection of that nature.
2. In human nature the nature of an animal is included, as the genus is included in the species (“animal is divided into man and beast” — “What is a man, if his chief good and market of his time be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more”).
3. Therefore he assumed also what belongs to the perfection of animal nature, among which is sense desire, sensualitas. Aside on translation, illustrating the same danger: sensus literalis he renders “sense of the letter,” because “literal sense” nowadays excludes the metaphorical, whereas for Thomas metaphor falls under the sense of the letter — “The Lord is my rock.”

6. Will by participation (“reasonable by what — partaking”) #

Sense desire, so far as it is naturally apt to obey reason, is reasonable by participation — NE I, where Aristotle distinguishes a part reasonable essentially and a part reasonable by participation, i.e. able to listen to and obey reason. Since the will is in reason, for a like reason sensuality can be called will by participation. So Thomas had good reason for saying it.

7. How reason should rule: father and son, not master and slave (“as a father rules his son”) #

Aristotle’s question in NE I: should reason rule the emotions as master rules slave (the Stoic position, or its caricature) or as father rules son? He concludes: as a father rules his son. Two differences:

1. The master rules for the good of the master; the father rules for the good of the son.
2. The slave has nothing to say about what he should do; the son has something to say.

• Aside: his cousin Donald explaining this to a woman psychologist, who said the root of some psychological problems is reason ruling the emotions despotically — it shows up in the person sooner or later.
• Example of a father who did listen: his father’s business friend got his son into Amherst; the son flunked out, was not suited to college at all; asked what he really wanted, he wanted a gas station, and his father bought him one. His own father likewise would not force his sons into business.
• Hence Mozart’s is perhaps the most reasonable music ever written — not reasoning, but representing the emotions as moving in accordance with reason. He first read this in a little essay “Towards an evaluation of music” by Austerly [ed.: name uncertain in recording] in The Thomist, on the superiority of 18th-century music to the Romantic: the Romantics did not accept that reason should rule the emotions. Tchaikovsky going into the middle of the river to drown himself and failing; listen to Mozart and you say “that’s not you.” Good sign that Benedict XVI likes to play Mozart.
• Student: do animals have sense desire in a way that does not preclude reason? — Yes, but you would not speak of them as having voluntas per participationem.
• Plato’s analogy: reason to emotions as man to horse — at first it wants to throw you off; you give up and it goes its own way, or you keep getting back on and tapping it until it obeys. Easier to see who should command there than in reason and emotions, but analogous.
• Thomas on intemperance as a childish vice, with a precise reason: an uncorrected child becomes unmanageable; likewise, always giving in to emotions makes them rule you — you become a slave of your emotions, habituated, a second nature.

8. Digression: the three kinds of pleasure (“too high for the beasts, and too low for the angels”) #

• Pleasures shared with dog and cat (Tabitha seeming to know steak was coming, coming round the table for tidbits).
• Pleasures of understanding — God, geometry — shared with the angels, but partaken by us in a way inferior to theirs.
• Pleasures of the fine arts — music, painting, literature: as Austin Farrer said, too high for the beasts and too low for the angels (“what’s he listening to Mozart for again? what’s he reading, Cymbeline?” — which he had just finished that morning). Reason: they involve reason, emotions and senses, the whole man, and so are most pleasingly proportioned to us.
• The pleasures we share with animals we have in a more refined way: cooking, seasoning, wine, table, fork, French sauces.
• What animals do not share is that the emotions partake of the will — except so far as a man trains them: a dog’s attachment to its master, even fighting or sacrificing itself.
• Student: her sister’s pony would do nothing she asked, knowing she was not the rider; horses sense your muscle tone and nervousness and know you are not the boss.

9. The three replies (“where there is one on account of another”) #

• Ad 1: will taken essentially is only in the understanding part; will by participation can be in the sensitive part, insofar as it obeys reason. He notes this way of speaking is a little unusual for Thomas, modelled on Aristotle’s “reasonable by participation,” and that Thomas wants it here because Christ’s emotions very much partook of will and reason.
• Ad 2: the serpent signifies sensuality not as to the nature of sensuality, which Christ took on, but as to the corruption of the fomes — lex fomitis, St Paul’s “I find another law in my members,” the rebellion due to original sin; in Christo non fuit fomes. Attached explanation: before sin Adam and Eve’s emotions were fully obedient to reason and will, so their sin could not have been a sin of the flesh but a spiritual one (“you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil”), the angel appealing to their spiritual nature; afterwards their shame at nakedness is the sign that the emotions are no longer subject to reason — the punishment being that when reason and will revolted against God, what is below them revolted against them. Compared to the father and son again: David suffering his son’s revolt and death.
• Ad 3: where there is one thing on account of another, there seems to be only one — reference to Aristotle’s Topics; as surface, visible through colour, is one visible with the colour. Since sensuality is called will only because it partakes of the will of reason, then as there is one human nature in Christ, so one human will is posited in Christ, because of their conformity.

His words #

• sensuality / sense desire — sensualitas; the sense appetite, with no bad connotation in Latin, unlike English.
• concupiscible — appetite for what is agreeable or disagreeable to sense; six emotions.
• irascible — appetite arising where there is difficulty; five emotions; Greek thymos, named from anger.
• reasonable by participation — of the emotional part, able to listen to and obey reason [ed.: from NE I].
• will by participation — voluntas per participationem; sensuality called will because it obeys the will of reason.
• sense of the letter — his rendering of sensus literalis, which includes metaphor.
• lex fomitis / fomes — the corruption of the law in the members, from original sin; absent in Christ.

Texts #

Read in class

• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae III, q. 18, a. 2 — objections 1–3, sed contra, body, replies 1–3 (verified).
• Ambrose, second book to the Emperor Gratian — “mine is the will which he calls his own” (in the sed contra).
• Augustine, De Trinitate XII, and Augustine on John (Moses’ serpent) — in objection 2.

Mentioned

• Aristotle, De Anima III (the will is in reason); Nicomachean Ethics I (reasonable by participation; father/son vs. master/slave); Poetics (definition of tragedy; lost book on comedy); Rhetoric II (the emotions); Topics (one on account of another).
• Thomas, Secunda Secundae (the virtues; mildness annexed to temperance); Secunda Pars on sadness.
• St Paul, “another law in my members”; Genesis (Adam and Eve, nakedness); David and his son.
• Homer, Odyssey; Electra; Shakespeare, As You Like It, Cymbeline, “drunk with choler”, “what is a man…”
• Mozart, letter to his father on Osmin’s anger; Abduction from the Seraglio; 24th piano concerto. Austerly (inferred spelling), “Towards an evaluation of music,” in The Thomist.

His questions #

• Is there in Christ another will, that of sensuality, besides the will of reason? — Yes: human nature includes animal nature, so he took on sense desire.
• Why does Augustine’s serpent image not exclude sensuality from Christ? — The serpent signifies not sensuality’s nature but the corruption of the fomes, which was not in Christ.
• If will follows nature, and Christ has one human nature, how can there be two human wills? — There is only one human will: sensuality is called will only by participation, and so is one with it by conformity.
• Should reason rule the emotions as the master rules the slave, or as the father rules the son? — As the father rules the son: for the son’s good, and the son has something to say.
• Do the animals have sense desire in a way that doesn’t preclude reason? (student) — Yes, but you would not call it voluntas per participationem in them.
• What is the venomous animal in the image? (student) — Human nature as poisoned; Christ has the likeness without the poison.
• Why are the pleasures of the fine arts proper to man? — They involve reason, emotions and senses — the whole man — too high for beasts, too low for angels.