St. Thomas refers to man as the horizon of creation, the meeting point
of the spiritual and the material.
And while much of our study focuses on the spiritual dimension here we continue with
an important material dimension, namely the passions.
For all the ins and outs of reality a human person is furnished with the emotional resources
to respond accordingly.
In this video, we will distill the basic passions that serve as the ingredient parts of our
emotional life.
The sensitive appetite is composed of the concupiscible and the irascible powers.
The concupiscible power is the seat of those passions which engage with good or evil simply apprehended.
Let's start with those passions that concern the good.
The first response to the good is love.
Love is just the passion which registers that a thing out there is fitting.
St. Thomas cites a few causes of love. First, goodness, but that comes as no surprise.
The object must present itself as a perfection.
Second, knowledge. You can't love what you don't know.
And third, likeness. It has to be akin to the lover in order to kindle love.
St. Thomas also describes a few effects of love.
First, love causes union since it seeks the presence of the beloved.
Second, he says it causes mutual indwelling,
since the lover searches the beloved intimately and the beloved takes up a kind of dwelling
in the lover's mind.
Third, it causes ecstasy since the lover stands outside of himself in pursuit of the beloved.
Finally, it causes zeal.
Since the lover opposes all impediments to his enjoyment of love.
Now two passions follow immediately on the heels of love:
One, if the good is absent and one of the good is present.
If the good is absent, love gives rise to desire.
Desire is just love in motion.
You'll sometimes see St. Thomas refer to desire as concupiscence.
That just comes from the Latin word for desire concupiscere, and isn't necessarily
associated with original sin.
Now if the good is present, love gives rise to pleasure, sometimes called delight or joy.
Pleasure is just love at rest.
It is the contentment with an object loved and enjoyed.
These then are the three passions of the concupiscible power which concern the good.
So let's turn now to the three passions of the concupiscible power which concern the evil.
First there is hatred.
Hatred is just the passion which registers that the object is unfitting.
Because I am what I am the thing that I encounter does not represent a perfection for me, but
rather a diminishment or loss.
It is dissonant with my being, contrary to my good.
Thus it gives rise to hatred.
A quick word of clarification.
Hatred is not on the same footing as love.
Love comes first and hatred as a subsequent movement of the soul.
Because I am this kind of thing, I am inclined to certain goods, and because I am inclined
to certain goods, I am disinclined from others.
Because certain goods cause in me a kind of complacence, as Saint Thomas says, I can recognize
as evil those things that undermine, impede, or imperil that love.
Now two, passions follow immediately on the heels of hatred.
One, if the evil is absent, and one if the evil is present.
If the evil is absent, hatred gives rise to aversion.
Like we said with desire, aversion is just hatred in motion.
It's the movement away from a hated object.
And if the evil is present, hatred gives rise to sorrow, sometimes called pain.
Sorrow is just hatred at rest.
It's the sadness that we experience when an evil thing is visited upon us or when a good
thing is lost to us.
St. Thomas devotes quite a few questions to sorrow and the final one is especially
charming: the remedies of sorrow.
Among those things that assuage our pain, he lists pleasure, weeping, friends, the contemplation
of truth, sleep, and baths.
These then are the three passions of the concupiscible power which concern the evil.
Let's turn to the passions of the irascible power.
Again, the irascible power concerns the same good or evil as before, but in as much as
it is difficult to achieve or avoid.
In the concupiscible power, we observed a pretty straightforward division: love, desire,
and pleasure, concern the good.
Hatred, aversion, and sorrow concern the evil.
With the irascible power we have the same division as before, but with an added dimension.
Not only is there opposition of good and of evil, but also of approach and withdrawal.
For since the good or evil is seen as difficult or arduous the question is whether one attacks
or flees before the difficulty.
The first of the passions to be found in the irascible power is hope.
Hope, concerns a good, which is difficult but possible to attain.
Hope is what spurs on the heart to achieve its goals, even when encountering trials and tribulations.
Opposed to hope we find despair.
Despair also concerns a good which is difficult, but now impossible to attain.
Rather than spurring on the heart,
it causes one to draw back from what simply cannot be.
It's what happens when we recognize a certain good is utterly beyond us.
Another word of clarification.
Recall we're talking here about passions and not about virtues and vices.
In the emotional sense hope operates at the level of an animal response.
It's like the desire to get delicious food with the recognition that you have to wait
in line or pay for delivery.
So too of despair.
It's like the desire to be the greatest basketball player of all time with the recognition that
it'll never happen.
Moving on then to daring.
Daring concerns a difficult evil and thus a hated object that has to be overcome through confrontation.
Daring is a kind of violent impulse to surmount the obstacle that keeps us from the good.
So just as hope spurs us on for love of the thing, daring conjures the energy to confront
the various evils that impede us.
Opposed to daring we find fear.
Fear concerns a difficult evil, again, a hated object,
but one which we judge to be unavoidable or unable to be overcome.
The evil threatens us and fear has drawback and cower.
Finally, there is anger.
Anger is a complex passion.
Anger arises from a present evil visited upon us, but unlike sorrow which simply rests
in the experience of evil, anger incites us to vengeance.
So in one sense it regards the present evil, but in another sense it regards the rectification
of this situation by redress of the wrong.
These then our five most basic passions of the irascible power, hope, despair,
daring, fear, and anger.
Notice that there is no passion for a present arduous good because the good ceases to be
arduous when it is truly possessed.
With these in place, St. Thomas builds out his concept of human nature as the passions
are taken up into the full ambit of human striving.
As we turn to the virtues, we'll see how these passions are healed and elevated by reason
and grace.
Ultimately, we will come to find that they assume their full dignity and light of what
is highest in man.
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