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Passionalist or Rationalist? The emotions in Aquinas’ moral theology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2024

Leonard Donald Gordon Ferry
Leonard Donald Gordon Ferry*
Affiliation:
Regis College
*
100 Wellesley St. W, Toronto ON, Canada, M5S 2Z5. [email protected]
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Abstract

Interest in the passions and their contribution to the moral life is enjoying a resurgence in the study of Thomas Aquinas. But much of that interest assumes that Aquinas’ position is simply propassion. This is certainly true of Robert Miner's exhaustive study, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions. In this essay, however, I question the adequacy of this assumption on two related grounds. First, I examine the implications for Aquinas’ account of the morality of the emotions of his use of the political analogy to account for the structural relation between passion and reason. Second, I suggest that accounts of the passions must consider the experiential differences in the passions of post-lapsarian agents. I conclude that Aquinas’ account of the role of emotion in the moral life is decidedly less positive than Miner's presentation suggests.

Keywords

emotionsAquinasRobert Minercontrolethics
Type
Original Articles
Information
New Blackfriars , Volume 93 , Issue 1045 , May 2012 , pp. 292 - 308
Copyright
© 2011 The Author. New Blackfriars © 2011 The Dominican Council

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References

1 Aquinas, Thomas, Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Christian Classics, 1948, rpt. 1981), I–II 60, 1Google Scholar.

2 Miner remarks his discomfort with referring to QQ. 22–48 of the prima pars secundae as a “Treatise”: “I am using “treatise” under erasure, since Thomas does not, strictly speaking, write treatises”[Thomas Aquinas on the Passions (Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 1Google Scholarn.1]. Two other recent treatments of the passions in Aquinas suggest the timeliness of the topic: Diana Fritz Cates, Aquinas on the Emotions: A Religious-Ethical Inquiry (Georgetown University Press, 2009) and Nicholas E. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire/Aquinas on Emotion (Catholic University of America Press, 2011), that both of which focus on the “Treatise on the Passions” in the Summa Theologiae.

3 As Miner himself points out he is not the first to notice the neglect: “Nothing is more commonplace for readers of Aquinas, and especially of what has come to be known as his “moral theology,” than to pay close attention to the Questions on happiness, virtue, and natural law in the 1a2ae. For many of the same readers, nothing is more habitual than to skim through, or skip entirely, the “Treatise on the Passions.” This neglect has not gone entirely unnoticed. Servais Pinckaers observes that the twenty-seven Questions containing 132 Articles on the passions comprise “une oeuvre unique, classique…et trop negligee” (RSPT 74 (1990): p. 379). Pinckaer's observation raises a simple question: Why are Questions 22–48 of the 1a2ae so strangely neglected” (5).

4 Aquinas is not above concentrating his efforts on the intellectual side of things: “The theologian, however, has only to inquire specifically concerning the intellectual and appetitive powers, in which the virtues reside” (ST I 78, prologue). Aquinas is here, of course, only subordinating the sense powers to the intellectual and appetitive, but insofar as the theologian's concern is with virtue and virtue involves reason, the extension of such a focus to the subordination of the sensitive appetite to the rational appetite is not without some support.

5 Stump, Eleonore, Aquinas (Routledge, 2003), p. 22Google Scholar. She elaborates thus: “What makes an action morally bad is its moving the agent not towards, but away from, the agent's ultimate goal. Such a deviation is patently irrational, and Aquinas's analysis of the moral badness of human action identifies it fundamentally as irrationality, since irrationality is an obstacle to the actualization of a human being's specifying potentialities, those that make rational the differentia of the human species. In this as in every other respect, Aquinas's ethics is reason-centered” (24).

6 Sweeney, Eileen, “Restructuring Desire: Aquinas, Hobbes and Descartes on the Passions,” in Brown, Stephen F., ed., Meeting of the Minds: The Relations between Medieval and Classical Modern European Philosophy. Recncontres de Philosophie Medievale, VII (Turnhout: Brepols, 1999), p. 222Google Scholar.

7 Miner may be inadvertently carried away. He approvingly cites a passage from Elisabeth Uffenheimer-Lippens’ essay where she seeks to qualify the concept of control by introducing this very substitution of extirpation or exclusion for control. This is a peculiar usage of the concept of control. I doubt that most idiomatic uses of the concept in English bear this sense of exclusion. When I want to control my appetite, I don't mean that I intend to eliminate it. I may also speak of controlling my tongue in certain social circumstances without ever wishing to convey the idea that I intend to eliminate my tongue. If my dog is barking and a neighbour asks me to control him, I don't respond with outrage at the suggestion because I don't assume that control means exclude, eliminate, or extirpate. Hence, the leap from control to exclusion requires some justification, though this is not provided by Miner. The passage in Uffenheimer-Lippens’ essay runs as follows: “It is very important, however, to understand what Thomas means by this ‘control’ of reason. We must stress that Thomas speaks always of the ‘mitigation’ of the passions and never of their total exclusion. When he does use the verb ‘to suppress’ in relation to the passions, he refers only to the lack of rational order that must be repelled, not to the passions as such”[“Rationalized Passion and Passionate Rationality: Thomas Aquinas on the Relation Between Reason and the Passions,”Review of Metaphysics 56 (2003):548Google Scholar. Qt. by Miner at p. 106n.23.].

8 Consider in this light the following remarks by Miner: “a primary task in the moral life (perhaps even the primary task) is to make the ascent from the condition where the sensitive appetite is an obstacle for the will to overcome, to a better condition where the passions gladly serve reason” (94). That this type of service is not characteristic of despotic rule, as Miner goes on to state, is somewhat confusing. It may simply be that the political metaphors are less helpful than is normally thought. But it does strike me as odd to say that free citizens aim to arrive at a point where they “gladly serve” their leader or leaders. I would agree with Miner, however, that this doesn't sound odd of the reason/passion relation. It is precisely the arrangement that is to be sought, but I’m not sure that it makes sense to speak of that relationship as political. Also, I should point out that this is something that takes time and effort. Along the way, this means that the passions present the wayfarer with obstacles to his or her flourishing. In that sense, the emotions are a negative force.

9 Miner does not agree, but he does hold that the passions in fallen humanity are altered by sinfulness: “What exists naturally in animals is deformed in human beings by both fallen nature and bad acquired habits” (76). As I shall argue in the following section of the paper, this is more important than Miner's account of the morality of the passions will allow.

10 I confess that I do not see why Miner speaks of a control as a metaphor.

11 It is probably worth pointing out that even Aristotle must have been aware of the fact that the analogy was intended to touch on ideal relationships: are we to believe that even natural slaves never resisted or that subjects of a despot obeyed without qualm? The limitations of the analogy may, that is, work in both directions, but I am primarily concerned with suggesting that its implications shouldn't be drawn too broadly with respect to the emotions’ free agency.

12 Aquinas, Thomas, Commentary on Aristotle's Politics, trans. Regan, Richard J. (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2007), p. 29Google Scholar. I have throughout the passage quoted replaced Regan's use of will to translate “appetitus” because the passage simply does not call for the introduction of the idea of will. In fact, the use of will actually confuses the point of the passage.

13 Aquinas, Thomas, Disputed Questions on Virtue [Quaestio Disputata de Vertutibus In Communi and Quaestio Disputata de Virtutibus Cardinalibus], trans. McInerny, Ralph (St. Augustine's Press, 1999)Google Scholar.

14 Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 257. What Pasnau has in mind is the intermediate position of passion when contrasted with both the “body's limbs”– which obey reason – and the external senses – which do not obey inasmuch as we cannot not see when our eyes are open and there is adequate ambient lighting. The passions have the power to “resist” reason, but can also be made subject to reason. Hence the description of the “in-between status” (257).

15 See ST I–II 58, 2, where Aquinas writes of the rule of reason over the passions as constrained by the latter's “right of opposition.”

16 In ST I–II 73, 5 he observes that “carnal sins” are less grievous than spiritual ones because the former exercise a greater power over human agents: “A third reason [for thinking carnal sins less grievous] may be taken from the motive, since the stronger the impulse to sin, the less grievous the sin… Now carnal sins have a stronger impulse, viz. our innate concupiscence of the flesh. Therefore spiritual sins, as such, are of greater guilt.”

17 Aquinas, Thomas, Truth [De Veritate], trans. Schmidt, Robert W. (Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 1954, rpt. 1994), 25.6Google Scholar.

18 Aquinas, Thomas, Questions on the Soul [Quaestiones de Anima], trans. Robb, James H. (Marquette University Press, 1984), Question 8Google Scholar.

19 Ibid., Q. 8ad7.