Passions and Emotions: Motives for Reading Summa 1–2.22–48

Precisely because passiones in Thomas’s sense are so critically dependent on his larger conceptual network, it is unclear how they are related to “emotions” as later thinkers understand them. Some would take Thomas’s passiones to be anticipations or precursors, if not direct equivalents, of what we mean by “emotion.” One might be so bold as to translate passio by “emotion,” supposing that what Aquinas means by passio and what we mean by emotion are close enough. As a caution against such boldness, there is Thomas Dixon’s proposal that “passio” is a theological category, and that the term “emotion” does not come into its own until the nineteenth century. It does so, Dixon argues, to meet the demand for a secularized concept that lacks the theological overtones of passio. However convincing one judges Dixon’s argument (his critics have observed the prominence of passio and its cognates in Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, and Hume, who seem to have little trouble secularizing the term), there are other compelling reasons not to assimilate Aquinas’s passio to what we mean by “emotion.” For one thing, what “we” mean by “emotion” is hardly clear. As Robert Solomon observes, “emotion” is something of a grab-bag term, one that indicates different and mutually incompatible conceptions.Footnote ⁸ Another reason is that for contemporary theorists of emotion, the question of whether emotions necessarily have objects or whether there are also (or exclusively) “objectless emotions” is a live issue. For Thomas, however, the idea of a passion without an object borders on the nonsensical. In short, translating passio by “emotion” risks anachronistically imposing onto Aquinas assumptions and questions that belong to later models.

Emphasizing the divergences between “passion” in Aquinas and whatever modern thinkers mean by “emotion” raises the question: Can Aquinas be relevant for later inquirers for whom “emotion” is the central category? Given that Aquinas had methodological and theological sensibilities that diverge from those of many philosophers, psychologists, and scientists today, why study his work at all? Can the Questions of Summa 1–2.22–48 be of anything more than antiquarian interest?

One answer to this question would simply insist that his texts are of perennial relevance. If we are persuaded that our lives aim for a good that infinitely surpasses the horizon of finite experience, then Aquinas’s motive in writing Questions on the passions will be isomorphic with our purpose in reading them. If we are not persuaded by Aquinas’s theologically inflected teleology, we may still benefit from “throwing ourselves into the mental position of those who think differently” from us, and thereby know our own view better than we did before, as John Stuart Mill argues in On Liberty.Footnote ⁹ Much of what Aquinas says about the transmutatio corporalis involved in a passion will be outdated, since contemporary neuroscience gives us access to data that Aquinas necessarily lacked. But that does not by itself suggest the irrelevance of his work. Aquinas writes about the passions not as a natural scientist, but as a theologian who is not intending to compete with natural-scientific accounts.

This response, one might protest, has missed the point. Since Aquinas composed Summa 1–2.22–48, we have made progress not only as natural scientists but also as philosophers. Aquinas’s conception of a passio, as my own argument suggests, depends heavily on its relationship to the other elements of his conceptual network. If many thinkers today, including twenty-first century philosophers who share Aquinas’s own confessional affiliation, find these elements implausible or indefensible, then it seems that we return to the position that Aquinas’s writing can be of interest only for those who work in the history of ideas.

To this objection, I can only reply that its plausibility is proportionate to the intensity with which one believes that articles published in today’s philosophical journals represent an overall advance on earlier modes of thinking. Do they? The answer may depend on which inquiry one has in mind. In particular cases, one can find technical advances that can be interpreted as progress. But the necessity of interpretation – and “progress” is an interpretation – cannot be avoided. If skepticism about “progress in philosophy” is tenable, the ground disappears for supposing that later conceptions have necessarily superseded Aquinas’s thinking about the passions. His thought can be of interest to the contemporary philosopher for whom presentism is not an article of faith, and who can accommodate his own habits of rapid reading to the slower rhythms of a quaestio disputata.

Part of what is intriguing about Aquinas, on philosophical grounds, is precisely the distance of his thinking from our typical assumptions. As Anthony Kenny writes: “Aquinas was an intellectual giant, and those of us who try to interpret him to a twenty-first century audience are like Lilliputians trying to tie him down with our own conceptual netting.”Footnote ¹⁰ What needs questioning – and perhaps therapy of a broadly Wittgensteinian sort – is not the lack of fit of Aquinas’s thinking with present categories, but the psychological need to make it fit. If Kenny is right, we need not be unduly anxious about whether or not Aquinas can be accommodated to twenty-first-century prejudices about what counts as respectable methodology or ontology. We can endeavor to read Thomas on his terms, without trying to “tie him down with our own conceptual netting.”

But, one might rejoin, Kenny’s point applies perfectly to the domain of philosophy. It is, however, inapplicable to passions and emotions. These are empirical entities whose discovery and knowability have nothing to do with philosophy and everything to do with what has become known as “affective science.” Through observation and experiment, using advanced instruments, we are now able to measure exactly what happens at the micro-level of neural transmission in any instance of fear, surprise, anger, disgust, sadness, or joy. From the measurement of these instances, we can reach empirically grounded conclusions about the nature of the basic emotions, as well as other secondary affects that are compounds of “basic emotions.” The thinking of Aquinas, or any other philosopher whose main activity is to theorize rather than measure, is simply irrelevant for anyone who wants to know what emotions really are.

This view of emotions, as plausible as it might sound, is questionable. Natural-kind theorists suppose that ordinary experience gives us a set of distinct emotions, categorized according to familiar names. The job of modern “affective science” is to accept these givens and inquire into their neurological substrate, unearthing their causal mechanisms in the brain. The cluster of symptoms we experience as anger will be explained by an anger mechanism, the cluster we experience as fear by a fear mechanism, and so on. Somewhat embarrassingly for the natural-kind theorists, the major proponents of natural-kind views of emotion have been unable to reach any consensus about just what the natural kinds of emotion are. (Moreover, as Margaret Watkins has trenchantly observed, they do not agree about what a “natural kind” is.Footnote ¹¹) One theorist (Paul Griffiths) discovers six basic “affect programs”: fear, surprise, anger, disgust, sadness, joy. Another (Jaak Panksepp) finds seven: seeking, rage, joy, distress, care, lust, and play.Footnote ¹² That natural-kind theorists cannot agree among themselves about the nature of “basic emotions,” their precise number, the criteria for identifying an emotion (basic or otherwise), or the very idea of a natural kind, is revealing. It suggests that boundaries between various emotions, along with their naming, are a function of the overarching conceptual scheme in which they are embedded. Here as elsewhere, observation is theory-laden.Footnote ¹³ It is not a matter of merely opening one’s eyes and seeing what is there, evident to any careful observer. Any division of the emotions will be guided by presuppositions, acknowledged or not.

A recent survey of the evidence by the neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett argues that efforts to correlate observable phenomena (reports of emotional experiences, production of distinctive vocal or facial cues, physiological measures of emotions) with discrete emotions and associated causal mechanisms have largely failed. Even recent neuroimaging techniques (fMRI and PET), Barrett contends, have not revealed “a specifiable and separate neural circuit or brain marker that corresponds to each emotion category (in particular, anger, sadness, fear, disgust, and happiness).”Footnote ¹⁴ Despite the optimism of natural-kind theorists, Barrett concludes that “strong correlations among self-report, behavioral, and physiological measures of emotion do not consistently materialize as expected, calling into question the idea that anger, sadness, fear, and so on are homeostatic property clusters that can be identified in observable data.”Footnote ¹⁵ Barrett’s negative conclusion is hospitable to my contention that recent natural-kind theories have no tendency to suggest that Aquinas’s conception is obsolete. If we have little reason to believe that emotions fall into natural kinds, then Aquinas’s scheme of the passions is not superannuated merely because it diverges from the categories of contemporary natural-kind theorists.

But, one might wonder, does not Aquinas take himself to be offering a theory of the passions that falls into natural kinds? And if Aquinas does not track natural kinds any more or less cleanly than a contemporary theorist, then what is the point of studying Summa 1–2.22–48? This section will give one answer to this question; the next will suggest a different approach. Even if Aquinas naively imagined his own scheme of the passions to carve nature at its joints, it would not follow that Summa 1–2.22–48 is not worth reading. On a broadly constructivist view, the passions experienced by the inhabitants of a particular epoch will be a product of the interaction between a neural substrate (to which our epistemic access is itself theory-laden) and the conceptions available to these inhabitants for interpreting, constructing, and naming their affective experience. Summa 1–2.22–48 gives us an exceptionally rich and detailed knowledge of what those conceptions once were, at least as seen through the eyes of a medieval magister. Such knowledge is particularly valuable for research programs animated by the idea that emotions have a history. It can be a potent means of dislodging the idée fixe that emotions have always and everywhere been the same.

The reason for reading Summa 1–2.22–48, then, is not that Aquinas hands us the truth about the passions, taken as natural kinds that he describes with peerless precision. It is that studying his texts enables us to overcome “the historical innocence of most philosophical analyses of the emotions,” as Amélie Rorty put it in 1984.Footnote ¹⁶ This justification also entails that one should read any number of later authors who write about the passions, such as Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Hume, or Rousseau. One might, however, privilege Summa 1–2.22–48, since a knowledge of Aquinas can help one become a more informed reader of early modern thinkers who consider the passions. The view to which they are responding is frequently Aquinas’s conception or some neo-scholastic modification thereof.Footnote ¹⁷ Moreover, what Rorty says about Aristotle has equally direct application to Aquinas: “the metaphysics is gone, but since its distinctions defined the phenomena, the questions that stem from those distinctions remain.”Footnote ¹⁸ Several of the Questions that Rorty names – the causality of passions, the connection of passions to the body, the relationship of the passions to reason, our responsibility or lack of responsibility for our passions – are taken up by Thomas in Summa 1–2.22–48. Adopting Aquinas as a means by which one might overcome “historical innocence” about passions and emotion is certainly one valid motive for reading his texts.

Passions and Blessedness

The argument I have just made for reading Summa 1–2.22–48 is aimed to dislodge a prejudice that prevents some from encountering Aquinas – namely, that his texts can interest only antiquarians because “we” know so much more than he did. One limitation of this argument, as formulated above, is that it proceeds from a basis external to Aquinas’s texts. In this section, I want to articulate a more internal rationale for studying the Questions on the passions, one that begins where the Summa itself begins.

In the very first Article of the Summa, Thomas argues that we need instruction beyond what the philosophical disciplines can give, because we are finite creatures with a thirst for the divine, which infinitely exceeds the comprehension of reason. In Summa 1–2 qq.1–5, Thomas argues that human desire strives for a goal that exceeds any finite good, no matter how noble. In the absence of wisdom, we gravitate toward two primary strategies for satisfying our desires. One is to immerse ourselves in finite goods. If only we can acquire enough of these, we suppose, our desire will come to rest and we will “be happy.” The second strategy begins by recognizing that the first is an illusion, destined to fail since no finite good (or collection of finite goods) is adequate to satisfy our infinite desire. But it proceeds to condemn or ignore the passions, supposing them irrelevant for attaining the “goal beyond.” Proponents of this strategy tend to reject the passions and other aspects of our animal nature, in the name of “transcending” our humanity in favor of a higher goal.

Thomas rejects both strategies. He does so, in part, by constructing a lengthy account of the passions which, as Eileen Sweeney notes, exhibits no fundamental distrust of them.Footnote ¹⁹ The passions are “acts that are common to human beings and other animals” (Summa 1–2 pr.6). For Thomas, we are animals with bodies and everything that implies: “real, not pretend, animals,” as Denys Turner remarks.Footnote ²⁰ In giving so much space to the passions, Aquinas writes this conviction into the heart of Summa 1–2. Had Summa 1–2 included only the Questions on the acts of the will, skipping the treatment of the passions, it might foster the illusion that we are primarily rational choosers, autonomous beings fully in control of our destinies. Thomas’s decision to place Questions 22–48 just where he does, between acts of the will and later questions on the virtues and vices, is a way of dispelling this illusion. We achieve our perfection as rational animals not by trying to leap over our own humanity, but by entering more deeply into it – by being fully and naturally human. Our being limited finite animal creatures is not something to be dismissed in light of “higher truths.”

If the passions are an intrinsic part of our humanity, then we must know them well in order for our nature to be fulfilled. Accordingly, Thomas spends about a quarter of Summa 1–2 on the passions. Many who specialize in what they take to be Thomas’s “ethics” regard the passions as a mere digression. Proceeding as if the passions were extraneous to scientia moralis, they fix their gaze on happiness, virtues, sins, natural law, or other topics judged to be more urgent. But Thomas himself is convinced that sustained attention to the acts of sensitive appetite is required, if we are to understand what is required for “the motion of the rational creature into God” (Summa 1, q.2 pr: “motus rationalis creaturae in Deum”). In order for this motion to reach its telos, due attention must be given to the flourishing of our bodily nature as finite bodily creatures, located in space and time. No real advance toward beatitude is possible without psychological health, the attainment of which requires knowing and cultivating the passions. This is one reason, at least, for Thomas’s decision to spend the time he does on them in Summa 1–2. The treatment is anything but an incidental digression.

But how does Thomas construct a positive account of the passions that affirms embodiment and refuses to reject our “lower nature”? He does so most clearly by drawing upon the texts that he inherits, placing them in any number of mutual relations: “quotation, allusion, annotation, revisionist imitation, eclectic incorporation, tense repression, direct refutation, or silent correction.”Footnote ²¹ The most frequently cited auctoritas in the Questions on the passions is Aristotle. It would be easy to infer that Thomas’s strategy is to use Aristotle to correct the Platonizing tendencies of a theologian like Augustine, in whose writings one can easily find dualistic separations of body and mind. In fact, the matter is not nearly so simple. Summa 1–2.22–48 contains a large number of passages from Augustine, particularly in Books 9 and 14 of City of God. Anyone who reads these two books will quickly see that Augustine has his own way of making the fundamental point about embodiment. Though the task for him is to live “according to God” (secundum Deum) and not “according to man” (secundum hominem), this cannot mean hating the body and loving the soul. On the contrary, Augustine declares: “There is no reason to insult the creator by putting the blame on fleshly nature, which is in fact good in its kind and in its order.”Footnote ²²

The affirmation of embodiment, then, is not a simple reversal of Augustine. Thomas’s use of Augustine is more interesting and complex. He seeks both to appropriate Augustine, in order to underscore a fundamental point about the passions that he takes to shine most clearly in his texts, and to subject Augustine to gentle but firm correction. Let us first consider the correction.

In the very texts of Augustine that Thomas privileges, the reader can witness two reductions of the passions to something else. Augustine’s first reduction holds that all of the passions are nothing but willing. In CG 14.6, he begins by asserting that whether a passion is good depends entirely on the moral quality of its possessor’s will (voluntas), whether it is “good” (bona) or “misdirected” (perversa). In all the passions, he says, voluntas is present. Indeed, “present” is too weak: the passions “are all nothing other than willings (voluntates).”Footnote ²³ As evidence for this startling claim, Augustine asks: “For what are yearning (cupiditas) and gladness except the will in its consent to the things that we will? And what are fear and sorrow except the will in its dissent from the things that we will?”Footnote ²⁴ In the next chapter, Augustine performs a parallel reduction of the passions to love. Here Thomas takes Augustine to require correction.

The first aspect of the correction is structural. Thomas constructs an account that includes eleven primary passions, none of which are reducible to the Ciceronian quartet that Augustine adopts. As acts of sensitive appetite, the passions differ in character from the acts of the will or rational appetite. Second, Thomas acknowledges the interest of Augustine’s reduction. He does so by quoting it directly, putting the passage into the mouth of an objector and then giving a succinct reply: “Love is said to be fear, joy, cupidity, and sadness not essentially but causally” (26.1 ad 2). Third, Thomas proceeds to rehabilitate the very distinction that Augustine brusquely sets aside in CG 14. Dilectio is a kind of amor, he argues at 26.3, but it is not just a synonym – he says against Augustine, while leaving him unnamed. Dilectio adds something to amor – namely, the note of rational choice (electio). The passions are neither modes of dilectio, nor affectus proper to voluntas. They are acts that humans have in common with other animals, proper to the sensitive appetite. They are not so many modes of willing or rational loving. (What holds for the passions can also be seen in the virtues. In Summa 2–2, Thomas will argue that the multiplicity of virtues defies reduction to the single virtue of charity, even as charity is required for any virtue to be a virtue in the most proper sense of the term.Footnote ²⁵)

Augustine cannot, then, be taken as a sure guide to the number or nature of the passions. Thomas wants to construct a more finely grained picture of the passions than he finds in Augustine, a picture that preserves their multiplicity and avoids reducing them to volitional acts. But the correction is no simple negation. In the very act of correcting Augustine, Thomas is determined to preserve his deeper insight that every passion has its root in love. No matter what the passion is, its cause can be traced back to a primal love for the good.Footnote ²⁶ All the passions aim at the preservation and flourishing of an embodied being. Even despair has its proper role to play; at times it is appropriate to give up on some finite good. Accordingly, the passions are grounded in love. This is not just an isolated fact or an interesting aside, but a fundamental insight into our nature as human beings. Though Aquinas makes the point in his own name, he chooses to honor Augustine throughout the Questions on the passions by making him the auctoritas most conspicuously associated with the grounding of the passions in love.

Though Augustine’s importance for Summa 1–2.26–48 must be appreciated, it should not be overstated. Regarding specific qualities of the particular passions considered by Thomas, the place of Augustine appears marginal. He appears only once in Question 31 on the nature of pleasure, only three times in Question 40 on hope (all within the opening arguments), only twice in Question 41 on the nature of fear, and twice again in the single Question on daring. It might seem that his relevance increases in the concluding trio of Questions on anger (Questions 44–46), which mention him five times. But in these very Questions, Cicero, Gregory the Great, and John Damascene collectively receive eighteen citations. As for Aristotle, the Questions on anger cite him fifty-five times – more than twice the citations given to all the other authorities combined, including Scripture. As a whole, Summa 1–2.22–48 includes over 300 citations of Aristotle.

Though hardly decisive, the above census of authorities is enough to suggest Aristotle’s importance for the Questions on the passions. Any adequate grasp of this importance can be discovered only by reading. But here I can briefly mention three aspects of Thomas’s use of Aristotle: (1) The fundamental division of the sensitive appetite into two powers depends heavily on Aristotelian materials, even if Aristotle does not himself originate the Platonic distinction between the desiring and the spirited parts of the soul; (2) Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics concludes with arguments for the superiority of the pleasures of contemplation over other pleasures. Thomas develops this theme in both the Questions on pleasure and the Questions on sorrow, particularly in the climax of Question 38 on the remedies for sorrow; (3) Though the Nicomachean Ethics is the most cited Aristotelian text (118 citations), the Rhetoric is cited almost as much (96 citations). Thomas knew the Rhetoric only late in his authorship, since William of Moerbeke produced his translation in 1270, around the time that Aquinas was composing Summa 1–2. Thomas cites the Rhetoric in all twenty-three Questions on the particular passions (Questions 26–48), without exception. The Rhetoric is especially important for Thomas’s understanding of four passions: pleasure, fear, daring, and anger. To give an idea of the relative prominence of the Rhetoric over other Aristotelian texts in Summa 1–2.22–48, one may consider that Aquinas cites the Rhetoric exactly six times as often as he cites the De anima. This is perhaps not what one might expect from a treatise in Thomistic philosophical psychology. (But then, Thomas is not writing a treatise. His project in the Summa is less doctrinaire, less premeditated, than the overtones of “system” audible in the term “treatise.”)

However important Aristotle may be for Thomas, it is not true that he is merely performing a set of variations on Aristotelian themes. Certain teachings of Aristotle can be incorporated within a picture that Thomas judges helpful for creaturely flourishing. But Aristotle himself can only glimpse the grounding of the passions in love. About the ultimate goal (“complete blessedness”) and our relationship to this goal, he cannot say much. From Thomas’s standpoint, Aristotle knows a good deal about what lies in the middle, but little about the beginning or the end. Therefore, Thomas must place his thinking within a larger frame.

What is this larger frame? Any full answer to this question would amount to an interpretation of the Summa itself. Here I can only gesture toward the frame with the aid of two terms: “crucifixion” and “resurrection.” Thomas weaves into the Summa a trajectory that begins with the particular passions of Summa 1–2 and culminates in the Passion of Christ at Summa 3. The Questions translated in this edition point beyond themselves toward the Summa’s third (unfinished) part. They do so in several ways. One such way: their insistence that the most acute instance of pati, “suffering” or “being acted upon,” is sorrow (see 22.1, 35.1, 41.1). By writing the passions into human anthropology, Thomas prepares us for that to which even Christ was susceptible, the prospect of being acted upon in the most violent of ways. We can escape neither sorrow nor fear – the passion that, just after sorrow, is most evidently an instance of pati. The embodied creature cannot escape subjection to the “sad” passions. Nor should she, if she aspires to what is highest through the imitation of Christ, no matter how excruciating.

To read Aquinas’s ethics well, one must remember that “motus in Deum” passes through a renunciation that is cruciform. Human flesh cannot escape the realities indicated by “crucifixion.” There is no shortcut. But the cross is not the final word. The self-knowledge gained by reflecting on the passions, especially those connected most directly to pain and death, reminds us of their grounding in love. Pain and death seem terrible only because by nature we love our own being, our own preservation and flourishing. Sorrow and mortality themselves suggest that love of the good is the primary fact of our being. Where can such a primal love come from? Can there have been a moment at which my finite ego willed it into existence, as if it were an autonomous self-creator? Any such hypothesis, Thomas would reject as absurd. As beings whose “I” is constituted, at the deepest level, by love of the good, our “I” is nothing other than an expression of that good. Our “I” is a finite image of unlimited conscious being. Apart from infinitely creative consciousness, we have no being at all – just as a ray of light has no being apart from its source. This view receives articulation very early in the Summa (see Summa 1 15.2). As constitutive elements of our natures as embodied creatures, the passions are a microcosm of the boundary between spirit and matter.

The passions are responses to what is apprehended by the senses. As such, their typical function is to promote our creaturely preservation. Yet Aquinas does not overlook the possibility of a deep connection between the passions and the ultimate goal, union with the divine. In one of the few instances in which he replies not only to the opening appearances but also the argument sed contra, Thomas writes:

The “motion into God” is a motion that culminates in union with the divine. Does such union imply theosis – that is, humans becoming divine? (In Latinate terminology, “deification.”) Thomas knows the possibility in several ways – not just as an Athanasian commonplace, or as inference drawn by Boethius (Consolation of Philosophy 3.10, 4.3), but also from the very Augustinian texts that he reads in considering the passions. The last sentence of CG 14.4 asserts: “You are living according to man, not according to God, for if you were living according to God, you would yourselves be gods.”Footnote ²⁷ There may be a deep connection between the full actualization of our potentialities (total participation in the good) and deification. But as usual, Aquinas is more careful than Augustine. Though his liturgical texts speak expressly of deification, the Summa hesitates to commend the possibility of becoming God in this life.Footnote ²⁸ Thomas may have feared that promulgating any such teaching in the Summa would encourage its intended audience (incipientes, “beginners”) to suppose they can overleap their humanity. It might lead them to try losing themselves in mystical possessions and ecstasies – the very thing that Montaigne finds himself unable to stomach in the life of Socrates – or otherwise disparage the goodness proper to the embodied creature.Footnote ²⁹ This is the goodness of participating in the world of experience, the world as extended in space and time. It is the goodness capable of loving the taste of a single-malt Scotch, or savoring the taste of a beautiful English strawberry.

Strawberry: the very word leads the mind to “straw,” the humble reality to which Thomas compared his own writings. What prompted the comparison was a vision. We know little about this vision, except its most dramatic effect: Aquinas did not finish the Summa.Footnote ³⁰ But for those of us who continue to write, and to grow strawberries in our gardens, the task is to be as naturally and deeply human as we can. One aspect of this task is to grow in self-knowledge by knowing our passions, setting them in order so as to develop a healthy initial sense of our finite being, akin to what Nietzsche means by being “healthy at bottom.” Such health is a necessary prologue to the growth in love that culminates in blessedness, an expanded experience of self (spiritual growth) in which one may know oneself as “not-other” than God.Footnote ³¹

Our passions are neither everything nor nothing. As guides or promptings to an individual’s flourishing in the world of space and time, the passions must be known. Merely reading the Summa cannot substitute for our individual performance of this task. We need not only to know the passions in general – love, hatred, desire, hope, anger – but also our idiosyncratic passions: our love, our hatred, our desire, our hope, our anger. That we have no access to the “divine microscope” that Nietzsche sought for such a task (GS 8) seems plain enough. But we do have some old texts that can help us, if we can slow down and try to read them well, savoring their pleasures. Among them is Summa 1–2.22–48.

Reading the Summa: Note on the Text and Translation

The passions are both mundane realities, experienced by embodied creatures, and hylomorphic signs that point beyond themselves toward union with the divine. That is one frame into which Thomas’s treatment of the passions can fit. As helpful as a frame might be, the greatest benefits for any reader of Thomas will come through multiple acts of slow and careful reading. Any attempt to “fly” through Summa 1–2.22–48 is unlikely to bear fruit. Nietzsche is not the only writer to “booby-trap” his texts (as Bernard Williams put it) in a way that will frustrate readers who are in a hurry and cannot bear to slow down. As Ignatius Eschmann reminds us: “the Summa was meant to be a textbook in school. The Articles are meant to be read slowly. The medieval professor had to read his text slowly: lighting conditions were poor, parchment expensive, ink not easily carried around, pens needed frequent sharpening.”Footnote ³²

To read an Article slowly, it is helpful to bear in mind the structure of an Article from Summa 1–2.22–48. Any Article in the Summa is an abbreviated version of a medieval quaestio disputata, an event where students would present arguments on the first day for one side of a question, and on the second day for another side. On the third day, the magister would make a determinatio. Every Article contains these five sections:

1. 1. The opening “query,” usually beginning with “whether” (utrum). Neither completely open-ended nor entirely obvious, the query can be resolved in a limited number of ways.

2. 2. The opening set of “appearances,” beginning with “IT SEEMS that” (videtur quod). These are not so much objections to be vanquished as they are dialectical arguments. They show how the appearances present themselves, as the matter’s first “look.”

3. 3. A counter-appearance, starting with “BUT TO THE CONTRARY” (sed contra). Thomas never proposes the sed contra as though it were a satisfying argument. Its function is simply to counter the opening appearance, in order to show that the query is a real question. In the words of Gilbert of Poitiers (1075–1174): “Not every contradiction makes a question … but where both sides appear to have arguments, there you have a question.”Footnote ³³

4. 4. The “magisterial” determination, introduced by “I ANSWER THAT IT SHOULD BE SAID THAT” (respondeo dicendum). In this section, the “body” or “response,” Thomas gives a determination that strives to combine adequacy with brevity. The response should be read as a response to the play of appearance and counter-appearance that has come before, rather than as a decontextualized, allegedly self-sufficient statement of “Aquinas’s view.”

5. 5. The “Replies” to the opening arguments – and occasionally to the argument sed contra. Here Thomas attempts to show what has gone wrong in the opening arguments and to save whatever truth in them can be saved. Most Articles include this fifth section, but some do not. Sometimes Thomas decides that an Article’s body is sufficient for addressing the opening arguments.

Slow reading of Articles is the habit necessary for any serious study of the Summa. Another valuable habit is that of trying to discern the principle by which the Articles of a Question are sequenced. No Question in the Summa is a random collection of queries, put together haphazardly. Some would like Thomas to have privileged the kind of orderly movement whose paradigm is geometrical demonstration. That is rarely his preference. More typically, he opts for a dialectical ordering, where later Articles address an issue that emerges from the previous Articles, or qualify points that were made earlier. Sometimes the ordering is “narrative”: a Question can tell a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Or it can build to a climax, followed by a dénouement. There is no single principle of ordering to which all Articles conform. In every case, the ordo articulorum must be discerned by close reading. Attempting this discernment is a valuable way to gain a handle on a Question. It is the foundation of later discernments of connections between individual Questions, and then clusters of Questions.

By virtue of its very form, the Summa makes stern demands on its readers. Reading Thomas slowly may be regarded as a kind of spiritual discipline. It can function as a corrective to our desire to pluck out discrete arguments or conclusions, or to mine the Summa for materials to use in current debates.

The present translation strives to be faithful to Thomas’s Latin. But fidelity is a complicated affair, and the challenges faced by any translator of Aquinas are formidable. Thomas writes in an extraordinarily terse Latin, one that conveys many things in few words and deploys a number of technical vocabularies that are alien to us. Often the translator is faced with an unhappy choice between (1) attempting to emulate Thomas’s style by using few words, while risking a significant loss of clarity, and (2) aiming for an increase in clarity by using many words, thereby ensuring that the reader will be unable to experience the brisk tempo of Thomas’s own Latin – a tempo that, as Josef Pieper observes, is continuous with the southern Italian speech that was his mother tongue.Footnote ³⁴ This translation has attempted a compromise between these two extremes, while giving some priority to his tempo. But no attempt can succeed entirely. As Mark Jordan remarks, no translation of Thomas into English can simultaneously preserve “his rhythm, his brevity, his simplicity, his precision, and his fidelity to traditional vocabularies.”Footnote ³⁵ On a small number of occasions, when a Latin term or phrase seems especially resistant to translation, I will flag the term or phrase parenthetically, or briefly describe the issue in a footnote. For the most part, however, my translation simply attempts to make Aquinas speak brisk, accessible English. In what follows, I will offer a brief explanation of my two boldest choices, prefaced by some reasons for concluding that several entities which appear reliably in traditional “Thomistic” scholarship are best consigned to what Vico calls the “museum of imposture.”

First, the title. Summa 1–2.22–48 is not accurately known as the “Treatise on the Passions.” Alasdair MacIntyre has called the questions on law in Summa 1–2 – the alleged “Treatise on Law” – a “fictitious treatise.”Footnote ³⁶ His remark applies with equal force to Summa 1–2.22–48. Whatever the Summa is, it is not a compilation of separate treatises that Thomas has taped together. That Thomas never prefaced clusters of Questions with the word “tractatus” is indisputable. Eileen Sweeney observes a formal kinship between the works of Ockham and Buridan, on the one hand, and, on the other, “the modern treatise, such as that of Hume or Locke on human nature or understanding, because of their exhaustive consideration of their topic and the presentation of the single voice of the author, rather than a dialogue or set of authorities from the tradition.” Summa 1–2.22–48 is less like a “treatise” and more like a dialogue between voices from multiple traditions. “Treatises” can be safely left to neo-scholastic authors, or to Locke and Hume. (It is worth noting that Hume quickly abandoned the treatise, opting to write essays, inquiries, dialogues, and histories.)

A second candidate for inclusion in the museum of imposture is the view that the Summa has a single “critical edition.” Piety toward the editio Leonina of Thomas’s complete works (commissioned by Pope Leo XIII, the first volume appeared in 1882) has led some to speak of its version of the Summa (volumes 4–12) as “the critical edition.” It is true that the Leonine Summa takes account of readings from multiple manuscripts – specifically, eleven manuscripts housed at the Vatican Library. But these eleven are only a small portion of the surviving manuscripts. As surprising as it might seem, there is still no text of the Summa that has been edited to the standards of a modern critical edition.Footnote ³⁷

Returning to what is particular to the Questions on the passions, I want to mention two other entities that have no actual existence in the Summa’s text. First, it may come as a shock to discover that the Summa never speaks of the “concupiscible appetite” or the “irascible appetite.” The vis irascibilis (or “potentia irascibilis”) and vis concupiscibilis (or “potentia concupiscibilis”) are not two appetites, but two powers of a single appetite. If one searches for the occurrence of “appetitus irascibilis” and “appetitus concupiscibilis” in the Summa, one will come up empty. For the author of the Summa, the sensitive appetite is composed of two powers, not two sub-appetites.Footnote ³⁸

Second, it may come as a still greater shock to learn that the Summa never speaks of “concupiscible passions” or “irascible passions.” Nothing in Aquinas’s text is accurately translated by either phrase, despite their outsized place in the scholarship (including some of my own). Often Thomas mentions “passiones concupiscibilis” and “passiones irascibilis.” The correct translation of these terms, however, is not “concupiscible passions” and “irascible passions.” Rather, they mean “passions of the concupiscible [power]” and “passions of the irascible [power].” Here the point is not merely semantic. Saddling Thomas with “irascible passions” and “concupiscible passions” makes it appear as though he posits one set of passions whose members have in common a mysterious quality called “irascibility,” and another set whose members share the yet more mysterious quality of “concupiscibility.” His actual view is that the sensitive appetite is divisible into two powers. Both powers can be moved in a variety of ways. These “ways” are its passions.

English translations of Aquinas have frequently labeled the two powers of the sensitive appetite as the “concupiscible power” and the “irascible power.” Unlike the four items I have proposed for donation to the museo dell’impostura, these terms are not obvious errors. Nevertheless, they are far from optimal. To begin with the first power: the Latinate term “concupiscible” is not so much a translation as a transliteration of concupiscibilis. For most English readers, the word signifies nothing; it is nothing other than a mouthful of syllables, hard to pronounce. The transliteration conveys little, and what it does convey is seriously misleading. Those familiar with the term “concupiscence” often think of “sexual craving” or “erotic desiring.” But Thomas does not generally use the term in this narrow sense. “Vis concupiscibilis” is an inclusive name for an animal’s power for desiring (in various degrees of intensity and duration) anything that it apprehends as pleasant according to its senses. With minimal distortion, the terms “to desire” and “desiring” capture Thomas’s meaning. They avoid the imposition of erotic overtones – while allowing for them when applicable.

Therefore, an English phrase that is both vivid and accurate as a rendering of “vis concupiscibilis” is the “Desiring Power.” Every occurrence of the phrase vis concupiscibilis (or potentia concupiscibilis) receives “Desiring Power” as its translation. (The small caps are meant as a reminder that the phrase designates a technical term.)

Similar considerations apply to the sensitive appetite’s second power, the vis irascibilis. Though the word “irascible” is more meaningful to English speakers than “concupiscible,” it remains that “irascible power” is misleading as a translation of “vis irascibilis.” Ira, anger, is only one passion of this power. Thomas does not suppose that its four other passions (hope, despair, fear, daring) can be reduced to anger, or collapsed into it. The function of the vis irascibilis is not to inflame its possessor with anger, but to supply the level of energy required to confront matters that present themselves as arduous. Without this energy, not itself supplied by the Desiring Power, an animal will quail in the face of overwhelming difficulties. Aquinas’s second power of the sensitive appetite equips it to rise to such challenges, whether they involve our relation to goods difficult to attain (hope, despair, daring) or evils difficult to avoid (fear) or both (anger). To capture this power’s essential relation to the energy required to deal with these challenges, vis irascibilis has been uniformly rendered as the Energizing Power.Footnote ³⁹ (Again, the small caps signify its status as a technical term.) Another possibility is the “thumotic power,” which has the merit of suggesting the power’s link to Greek thumos, “spiritedness.” Readers may substitute these options as they wish.

As unorthodox as they might appear, Desiring Power and Energizing Power are more faithful to Thomas’s meaning than the customary transliterations. On a small number of occasions, when a Latin term seems especially resistant to translation, I will flag it parenthetically – though I try not to distract the reader with Latin parentheticals. For those interested in my translation choices for terms that are particularly important and recurrent, a brief guide follows:

amor

“love.” The first passion of the Desiring Power, and the root of all the other passions.

appetere

“to strive toward” or “to strive for”; sometimes “to seek” (passive appetitur, “sought” or “striven for”).

appetibile

“desirable thing.”

appetitus

“appetite.”

audacia

“daring” (not to be confused with the vice bearing the same name).

coaptatio

“bond.”

cognitio

“awareness” or “apprehension,” sometimes “knowledge.” “Cognition” is usually misleading, since it tends to connote advanced mental operations. In many cases, the Latin is closer to simple awareness, possible for any being with sensation. Often Thomas will use apprehensio and cognitio as near-synonyms.

complacentia

“pleasing affinity.” A key term for the description of amor (along with coaptatio and connaturalitas). English “complacency,” with its connotations of smugness or uncritical self-satisfaction, is misleading.

concupiscentia

“desire.” Every occurrence of “desire” as an unmodified noun translates concupiscentia.

concupiscere

“to desire.” Every occurrence of “desire” as a verb translates a form of concupiscere.

connaturalis

“connatural.”

connaturalitas

“affinity.”

conveniens

“suitable.”

convenientia

“suitability.”

cupiditas

“covetous desire.” Often the term means “desire” in a narrowly self-seeking sense, as when Augustine contrasts it with caritas and claims that it is turpis amor (Book of Eighty-Three Different Questions, 35.1). But in other authors (and even in Augustine), it can mean “desire” in a neutral or positive sense, as when one has cupiditas for cultivating the virtues.

defectus

“deficiency” or “lack.”

delectare

“to take pleasure.”

delectatio

“pleasure.” The related terms gaudium and laetitia are consistently “joy” and “gladness.”

desiderare

“to long” or “to long for.”

desiderium

“longing.” The consistent translation of desiderium as “longing” will enable the reader to distinguish Thomas’s use of this term from the more frequent concupiscentia, rendered by “desire.” “Longing” also has the advantage of emphasizing the absent character of the desired good.

desperatio

“despair.” The negation of spes, “hope.” As a passion, “despair” is withdrawal from a good judged as impossible to attain. The passion must not be confused with the vice opposed to the theological virtue of hope.

dolor

usually “pain” but in some contexts “grief.” Never “sorrow” (reserved for tristitia).

fuga

typically “flight,” but sometimes “aversion.”

gaudium

always “joy” and never “pleasure.”

ira

“anger.”

malitia

“evilness.” As awkward as “evilness” sounds in English, Aquinas uses the term as a substantive corresponding to malum. English “malice” is bound up with the language of motive, and so inevitably misleading.

malum

“evil” or “an evil,” depending on context. In some contexts, “bad” fits as well, but “evil” is always suitable.

odium

“hatred.” Idiomatic but in some cases misleading. As the name of a passion, odium is a repugnance for what is apprehended as malum. It need not carry the overtones of being particularly intense or entrenched – overtones that sometimes accompany “hatred.”

operatio

“activity” (in some contexts “operation”). Operatio is the Latin Aristotle’s translation of Aristotle’s term “energeia.”

passio

“passion” (never “emotion”).

pati

“being acted upon.” In some contexts “to suffer” or “to undergo.” The connection to passio should always be kept in mind.

per se/per accidens

a logical distinction left untranslated. “Per se” means “through itself” or “of itself”; per accidens means “contingently” or “non-essentially” or “improperly.”

perfectus

“complete” or “perfect.” Usually the former, since English “perfect” has connotations of “faultless,” as well as other moralistic resonances not necessarily shared by perfectus. Frequently the sense of perfectus (“per” + “facere”) is “completely or thoroughly made” or “fully achieved.” But some contexts call for “perfect” rather than “complete.”

principium

typically “starting point” but no single translation is possible. Sometimes “origin,” “beginning,” or “source.” Rarely “principle,” since “principle” in contemporary English is too close to “rule” or “conviction” (“she has principles”) and too distant from the core meaning of the Latin (“what comes first”).

ratio

“reason” in some instances, often “aspect” or “character.” Other possible meanings: “account,” “argument,” “definition,” “essence,” “nature,” “notion,” “reasoning.” Ratio has as many meanings as Greek logos, and multiple meanings may be intended at once.

sentire

either “to sense” or “to feel,” depending on the context. Often the Latin carries both meanings simultaneously.

simpliciter

untranslated. Its meaning is “absolutely” or “as such,” as distinct from secundum quid, “relatively” or “in a certain respect.”

spes

“hope,” the first passion of the Energizing Power (not to be confused with the theological virtue bearing the same name).

terribilis

“dreadful.”

timor

“fear.”

tristitia

“sorrow.” Other possibilities: “sadness” and “grief.”

vindicta

“vengeance,” though the term might be heard as denoting something between “revenge” and “setting things right.”