Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilL’Atelier du CRH16Penser les émotions en Occident :...Who Cared about Thomas Aquinas’s ...

Penser les émotions en Occident : de l'Antiquité à nos jours

Who Cared about Thomas Aquinas’s Theory of the Passions?

Barbara H. Rosenwein

Résumés

À qui importait la théorie des passions de Thomas d’Aquin?
Est-ce que les théories des émotions affectent les “pratiques” émotionnelles? C’est à dire, est-ce que les théories affectent les manières de décrire et de comprendre les émotions, même quand les gens ne pensent pas de façon théorique ? Il n’y a pas de doute, la réponse dépend de la théorie dont on parle et des circonstances de sa diffusion. L’article s’intéresse à la théorie des passiones animae de Thomas d’Aquin et à son influence sur les écrits de deux disciples de Thomas, Remigio dei Girolami et Guillaume de Tocco. La théorie de Thomas semble avoir quelque impact sur les façons dont ses disciples pensaient et écrivaient à propos des émotions, mais seulement de manière atténuée.

Haut de page

Texte intégral

  • 1 I thank Damien Boquet, Douglas Cairns, Blake Dutton, Thomas Rosenwein, Daniel Lord Smail, and parti (...)

1Do theories of emotion affect emotional “practice”? That is, do theories affect the ways in which people describe and understand emotions even when they are not thinking theoretically? No doubt the answer depends on which theory one is talking about and the circumstances of its diffusion. This paper’s focus will be on Thomas Aquinas’s theory and its possible influence on the writings of two of Thomas’s disciples, Remigio dei Girolami and William of Tocco. To anticipate my conclusions: Thomas’s theory very likely did have some impact on the ways in which his disciples thought and wrote about emotions, but only in attenuated fashion.1

Old and new in Thomas’s theory

  • 2 Many of my observations here are borrowed from Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Phi (...)
  • 3 John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima 106, in Jacques Guy Bougerol (ed.), Paris, Vrin, 1995, p. 255: (...)
  • 4 John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima 107, p. 256-262 lists more than 20 passions. See Simo Knuuttila (...)
  • 5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae [henceforth ST] I-II, q. 23 a. 2 co. However, note that within the (...)

2Thomas did not, to be sure, talk about “emotions.” Rather he wrote about the passions: the passiones animae (passions of the soul). His ideas were most fully worked out in the so-called prima secundae (the first section of the second part) of his Summa theologiae. Was there anything distinctive about his discussion? (If not, then the question of its effect on practice in non-theoretical works would be moot.) Certainly much of it was derivative.2 Like Albert the Great, and following Aristotle, Thomas treated emotions as belonging to the “faculties” or “powers” of the soul. The passions were, with few exceptions, in the appetitive power. This had two parts: the intellective appetite (the will) and the sensitive. Although the two appetites were connected, the sensitive part was the “home” of the passions. These in turn were divided into two sorts: the concupiscible and the irascible passions. This taxonomy went back at least to Plato. Among the scholastics it was developed in the mid 1230s by John of La Rochelle (d. 1245), who asserted that the two kinds of passions pertained to different things but were nevertheless complementary: “The concupiscible [power] is the appetite for pleasurable things … while the irascible power is the appetite to be free of difficult things.”3 The names of the passions were also fairly well worked out by the time of Thomas. Again, John of La Rochelle may serve as a precedent.4 Table 1 gives Thomas’s six concupiscible and five irascible passions.5

Table 1: The concupiscible and irascible passions

Concupiscible Passions

love (amor) vs. hate (odium)

desire (desiderium) vs. avoidance (fuga)

pleasure or joy (delectatio or gaudium) vs. pain or sorrow (dolor or tristitia)

Irascible Passions

hope (spes) vs. despair (desperatio)

fear (timor) vs. boldness (audacia)

anger (ira) [no opposite]

  • 6 ST I-II, q. 41 a. 2 ad 3.

3Thomas’s discussion of the relationship between the passions was, however, new in being most carefully worked out. He saw the passions working in a sequence. First came the concupiscible. As they encountered difficulties in their striving to gain or to flee an object, the irascible emotions came into play. Thus, the irascible could not take form without the concupiscible, but the concupiscible could not get their work done without the irascible.6 We will return to this.

  • 7 The intellective appetite was the seat of “affections” that did not involve bodily changes. Peter K (...)
  • 8 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 2, 68, n. 2: “Relinquitur quod anima humana sit intellectual (...)
  • 9 ST I-II, q. 22 a.1 co. See Italo Sciuto, « Le Passioni dell’anima nel pensiero di Tommaso d’Aquino  (...)

4Thomas’s theory had other innovative features. He connected all the passions to bodily changes. 7Even though he said that passions were “of the soul (animae),” he disagreed with many of his scholastic predecessors about the nature of the soul. For Thomas, the soul was the substantial form of the body.8 The body without it was just a corpse. Indeed, body and soul were a composite (compositum), a unity.9

  • 10 Mark D. Jordan, “Ideals of Scientia moralis and the Invention of the Summa theologiae”, in Scott Ma (...)
  • 11 Augustine, De civitate dei, in B. Dombart and A. Kalb (eds.), Turnhout, Brepols, 1955 (Corpus Chris (...)
  • 12 Civ. dei, 14.6, p. 421: “Interest autem qualis sit voluntas hominis; quia si perversa est, perverso (...)

5According to Mark Jordan, Thomas was the first scholastic to integrate the passions within a discussion (at least implicit) of an Aristotelian scientia moralis, or moral science.10 This Thomas was inspired to do so by reading St. Augustine, especially the City of God, where he found some thoughts on the moral potential of the passions and their connections to the human will. However, Thomas’s notion of the will was quite different from that of Augustine. For Augustine, the emotions were themselves manifestations of the will: “the will is certainly in all of them, or rather, all are nothing other than wills.”11 And Augustine continued: “If [the will] is turned the wrong way, it will turn these emotions (hos motus) awry (perversos); but if [the will] is straight (recta), the emotions will be not only blameless, but even praiseworthy.”12 Augustine thought that after man’s Fall from the Garden of Eden, the will could turn the right way only by the grace of God.

  • 13 See ST I-II, q. 82 a. 2 co.

6Unlike Augustine, Thomas did not think that the will was the equivalent of the passions. As we have seen, he theorized two appetitive faculties – the sensitive and the intellective. The intellective was the will, but the passions were in the sensitive appetite. While in Augustine’s view, the Fall perverted the will – and hence the passions –, Thomas thought that the passions remained perfectly natural and as they had been created, even after the Fall. However, the Fall disrupted the natural order, which had subjected the will to God and human passions to will.13 The passions themselves remained, as they had been before the Fall, a necessary part of human virtue. That is why they belonged in a key place in a work on moral science.

  • 14 ST I-II, q. 23 a. 2 co.
  • 15 Thomas read Aristotle’s Physics in Latin translation and commented on it in 1268-69, just before wr (...)

7Note that Augustine had used the word motus – motion – as one of the terms to refer to what we today call “emotions.” Thomas, too, said that “passion is a kind of motion (motus).”14 But because Thomas knew Aristotle’s Physics (while Augustine did not), he had some precise notions of how motion worked, as we shall see as we turn to love.15

Love

  • 16 ST I-II, q. 46 a. 1: “amor enim est prima radix omnium passionum.” See also q. 41, a. 2 ad 1: “omne (...)
  • 17 ST I-II, q. 23 a. 4 co.: “Bonum ergo primo quidem in potentia appetitiva causat quandam inclination (...)

8Animating Thomas’s entire discussion of the passions was love (amor). Thomas called it the first of the passions, “the taproot (radix) of all the others.”16 That is because when the senses apprehended something good or something evil, that perception activated the sensitive appetite to desire or to flee it. And the first passion to be activated in this way was amor, love. (After the Fall, the apprehension of what was good or evil might be mistaken, since the right order of the faculties was disrupted. But that did not change the important role of love or the sequence of the rest of the passions.) As Thomas put it: “the good causes, in the appetitive power, a certain inclination or aptitude or affinity for the good, and this pertains to the passion of love.”17

  • 18 Geoffrey of Poitiers, Summa, BnF cod. lat. 15747 fol. 23: “Dilectio voluntaria dividitur in duas: p (...)
  • 19 ST I-II, q. 26 a. 4 and ST I-II, q. 40 a. 7. See David M. Gallagher, “Thomas Aquinas on Self-Love a (...)

9Thomas identified two kinds of amor: desire’s love (amor concupiscentiae) and friendship’s love (amor amicitiae). The idea came from earlier scholastics. Geoffrey of Poitiers, for example, writing c. 1214, named two forms of “voluntary love (voluntas dilectio)”: concupiscent love and friendship.18 Friendship’s love is “simple” – it is love of something for its very self. Desire’s love is love for something else – e.g. usefulness or pleasure. Both are necessary and natural. A person first loves himself for himself and then he sees that he needs others, and first desires them with the amor concupiscentiae before coming to desire them simply for themselves.19

10Amor’s special place as the root of the passions had two important consequences for Thomas that I wish to raise here. It set off a sequence of emotions leading (in the best circumstances) to pleasure or joy; and it meant that love had a rich range of effects.

  • 20 ST I-II, q. 25 a. 2 co.: “motus autem ad bonum est desiderium vel concupiscentia; quies autem in bo (...)
  • 21 Ibid.
  • 22 Ibid.

11Consider the sequence. First, as we have seen, came love. But love could get nowhere without desire, (desiderium vel concupiscentia), which moved to attain the good. Finally, when the good was attained, the resultant quiet or repose was felt as delectatio or gaudium – pleasure or joy. As Thomas put it, “desire or concupiscence is movement toward the good; joy or pleasure is repose in the good.”20 If the perceived object is evil, then hate follows (also activated by love, since “good naturally comes before evil.”21) Love or hate are followed by two other concupiscible passions: desire (desiderium) if following upon love; avoidance (fuga) if following upon hate. Then the irascible passions are activated. For the good not yet obtained, hope and despair (spes et desperatio) enter the pursuit; for the evil not yet present, fear and courage (timor et audacia) help resist. Once the beloved is obtained, no further irascible passion is needed. But anger (ira) is aroused if the evil has become present, and it sets off its own sequence, driven by vengeance.22 Thomas summed up the sequence this way:

  • 23 ST I-II, q. 25 a. 3 co.: “Et si ordinem omnium passionum secundum viam generationis, scire velimus, (...)

If we wish to know the order of all the passions according to the path of their generation, then [here it is]: first love and hate present themselves; second desire and flight; third, hope and despair; fourth, fear and boldness; fifth anger; sixth and last, joy and sorrow, which follow on to all the passions.23

12One way to consider this sequence is as a kind of struggle to attain the good, that is the object of love (or to flee the object of hate). It is not quite a psychomachia, the battle of virtues and vices invented by Prudentius. Rather it involves overcoming obstacles. It makes the passions part of a dynamic narrative. Table 2 sets out a way to visualize it:

Table 2: The sequence of passions as an obstacle course

love (amor) or hate (odium) (confronted by obstacles)

desire (desiderium) or flight (fuga) (confronted by obstacles)

hope (spes) or despair (desperatio) (confronted by obstacles) →

fear (timor) or boldness (audacia) (confronted by obstacles) →

[anger (ira) →vengeance]

pleasure or joy (delectatio or gaudium) or pain or sorrow (dolor or tristitia)

  • 24 James A. Russell, “In Defense of a Prototype Approach to Emotion Concepts”, Journal of Personality (...)
  • 25 Stephen D. White, “The Politics of Anger”, in Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social (...)
  • 26 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, London, MacMillan, 1969, p. 41: “In the long run it is t (...)
  • 27 See the section on « Discordances cognitives, intentions, et émotions » in the paper by Bernard Rim (...)
  • 28 See Keith Oatley and P. N. Johnson-Laird, “Towards a Cognitive Theory of Emotions”, Cognition and E (...)

13There had been nothing like this sequence of all emotions in earlier theories. Nor does it look much like the emotional “scripts” psychologists speak of today, since they generally think of an emotional narrative that involves just one emotion. James Russell, for example, presents a script for anger: it begins with an offense that a person considers unjust and ends with the person losing control, and “harming the offender.”24 The historian Stephen D. White’s notion of emotional script is a bit more like Thomas’s, for it involves several emotions. But in White’s scheme, these arise in the context of a social drama in which the emotion of one protagonist elicits (or at least is meant to elicit) an emotional reaction on the part of another.25 Closer to Thomas’s notion of the unfolding of the passions, psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross writes about the “stages” of emotional transformation undergone by a dying person who must confront his or her impending death. But Kübler-Ross makes another person – the therapist – the catalyst of the transformations.26 Finally, distantly echoing Thomas’s argument about the role of obstacles in marshalling new emotions, some cognitive psychologists think that emotions emerge as the result of “interruptions” in the pursuit of goals.27 But in their view the interruptions signal changes in goals – for example, if your goal of watching television is checked by the sound of a creaking door, the interruption will prompt fear and a new goal, such as flight.28 By contrast, for Thomas the pursuit of just one goal – gaining the object of your love – entails all of the emotions.

  • 29 Thomas discussed these effects in ST, as below. He also spoke of them, albeit briefly, in his Scrip (...)
  • 30 ST I-II, q. 28 a. 1 ad 2: “quaerunt unionem quae convenit et decet; ut scilicet simul conversentur,(...)

14The attainment of the love object resulted, for Thomas, in three extraordinary “effects”: union, mutual indwelling, and ecstasy (extasis).29 In elaborating on “union,” Thomas noted that “lovers seek a union, that is appropriate and fitting, namely that they spend time together, talk together, and in other ways of this sort be joined together.”30 When this is the result of desire’s love, the union is about the particulars – perhaps rejoicing in the conversation. When it is the result of friendship’s desire, the union is with the very being of the beloved whether or not he (or she) is talkative.

15Closely connected to this idea was that of mutual indwelling. This enlisted not only the appetitive faculty but also the intellective:

  • 31 ST I-II, q. 28 a. 2 co.: “Amans vero dicitur esse in amato secundum apprehensionem inquantum amans (...)

As to the intellective faculty, the lover is said to dwell in the beloved insofar as the lover is not content with superficial knowledge of the beloved but strives to investigate everything that intimately pertains to the beloved, and thus he enters into his very interior.31

Indwelling works in the opposite way in the appetitive faculty. There the beloved (amatum) is said to be in the lover (amante)

  • 32 ST I-II, q. 28 a. 2 co.: “amatum dicitur esse in amante, prout est per quandam complacentiam in eiu (...)

[…] as she is in his affection through a certain ‘complacency,’ such that when [the beloved] is present, [the lover] takes pleasure in her [in the case of desire’s love] or in her good [in the case of friendship’s love].32

  • 33 Ibid.

And when the beloved is not present? Then the beloved is in the lover through longing (desiderium), either tending toward the beloved through desire’s love or toward the good that he wishes for her through the longing of friendship’s love.33

  • 34 See Barbara Faes de Mottoni, “Excessus mentis, alienatio mentis, estasi, raptus nel medioevo”, in E (...)
  • 35 Ibid., p. 173.
  • 36 Ibid., p. 176.
  • 37 Ibid., p. 181.
  • 38 ST I-II, q. 28 a. 3 s.c.:”quilibet amor causet extasim.”

16Finally, love was the cause of extasis, transport beyond oneself. The word itself is in the Vulgate in Acts 3:10: “et impleti sunt stupore et extasi (and they were filled with wonder and rapture),” as are the words stupore mentis (Acts 22:17), mentis excessu (Ps. 67:28) and raptus (II Cor. 12:2-4), where St. Paul is snatched up to the third heaven.34 But the Bible did not connect these experiences with love, and, indeed, Augustine tended to connect them with fear.35 Love’s role in generating ecstasy was the invention of the neo-Platonists, especially Pseudo-Dionysius, whose words “divine love produces transport (extasim)” became a favorite passage of thirteenth-century theologians in Paris.36 Thomas’s writings on the topic were, however, more “explicit and complete” than others.37 In his treatise on the passions, Thomas argued that “every sort of love causes ecstasy.”38

  • 39 ST I-II, q. 28 a. 3 co.: “intensa autem meditatio unius abstrahit ab aliis.”
  • 40 Ibid.: “sed talis affectio in fine infra ipsum concluditur.”

17Again, as in the case of mutual indwelling, Thomas distinguished between the ecstasy of the intellective faculty and that of the appetitive. When intellective love dwells on the beloved, “intense meditation on one thing draws him away (abstrahit) from other things.”39 By contrast, the second kind of ecstasy, that of the appetitive faculty, is the effect of love directly (directe): simply (simpliciter) in the case of friendship’s love and not simply in the case of desire’s love. In this “non-simple” instance the lover, dissatisfied with the good that he has, “goes out from himself” to find something beyond him. Yet, because his love is ultimately self-interested, “the affection is, in the end, confined (concluditur) within him.”40

  • 41 ST I-II, q. 24 a. 1 s.c.; Civ. dei, 14.7, p. 422: “Mala sunt ista, si malus est amor; bona, si bonu (...)
  • 42 ST I-II, q. 24 a. 2 s.c.: “quod rectus amor omnes istas affectiones rectas habet. Metuunt enim pecc (...)

18Thus for Thomas love was very complex and very fruitful. But it was also the source of the morality of the passions. “[Passions] are evil if our love is evil; good if our love is good,” Thomas wrote, quoting Augustine;41 and “right love (rectus amor) keeps all the emotions right: they fear to sin; they desire to persevere, they grieve in sinning, they rejoice in good deeds.”42

The order of love

19Thomas drew on – and modified – a long tradition of commentary on the “order of love” in order to connect morality to the sequence that he postulated for the passions. Let us consider that tradition briefly.

20In the Song of Songs 2:4 the lover says,

  • 43 Robertus Weber (ed.), Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, Stuttgart, Württembergishe Bibelanstal (...)

He led me into the wine cellar; he ordered love (caritas) in me. Support me with flowers, surround me with apples, for I languish in love (amore).43

Patristic writers took up the theme, glossing it as a set of priorities for love: love should turn first to one object, and only then to another. Augustine first clearly formulated ordered love’s priorities:

  • 44 Augustine, De doctrina christiana 1.22, in Joseph Martin (ed.), Turnhout, Brepols, 1962 (Corpus Chr (...)

Four things are to be loved: first, that which is above us; second, we ourselves; third, that which is next to us; fourth, that which is below us.44

  • 45 Peter Lombard, Sententiae lib. 3, dist. 28, c. 2, in Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas (ed.) (...)
  • 46 Teresa [Pugh] Rupp, “Damnation, Individual and Community in Remigio dei Girolami’s De bono communi(...)
  • 47 Isaac of Stella, Epistola de anima, in Jacques-Paul Migne (ed.), Patrologia Latina 194, col. 1879: (...)

In the twelfth century this construction was adopted by Peter Lombard, who helpfully added that God is above us, our neighbor is at our side, and our body is below us.45 Canonists borrowed the idea, as did John of Salisbury.46 The Cistercian Isaac of Stella (d. c. 1169) added other emotions – in addition to love – to the mix. He said that all the affects were responsible for the “motion of the mind (animi motus) by which it is caused to choose or reject, love or hate something above it or below it, in it, or next to it.”47 This was the old Augustinian formulation, but now grafted onto a whole raft of emotions. At about the same time, Aelred of Rievaulx (d. 1167) made a more radical change by switching the order. First came love of self, then of neighbor, finally of God. Each necessitated the other:

  • 48 Aelred of Rievaulx, De speculo caritatis 3.2.5, in A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot (eds.), Opera Omnia, 1 (...)

[…] these three loves (amores) are engendered by one another, nourished by one another, and aroused by one another.” With the completion of the sequence, the three loves were “brought to perfection together (simul omnes perficiuntur).48

  • 49 ST I-II, q. 62 a. 2 ad 3: “omnis virtus est ordo amoris … ad quamlibet cardinalium virtutum requiri (...)
  • 50 ST I-II, q. 24 a. 2 ad 3: “passiones animae … inquantum autem sunt ordinatae a ratione, pertinent a (...)
  • 51 Richard of Saint-Victor, Les douze patriarches (Beniamin minor) c.7, in Jean Châtillon, Monique Duc (...)
  • 52 Regula Benedicti, chap. 7, spoke of the way of perfection as the path from fear to love: see Italo (...)
  • 53 Isaac of Stella, Sermo 17, 12, p. 318. Isaac traced two separate sequences: ibid.: “De amore gaudiu (...)
  • 54 Leonard E. Boyle, “The Setting of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas”, in James P. Reilly (ed.), (...)

21Thomas used the idea of the order of love to explain the emotional foundations of virtue and vices.49 Considered simply as themselves (secundum se), as motions of the sensitive appetite, the passions are neither good nor evil. They are involuntary, irrational, and natural. But we cannot, in the real world, consider them “simply as themselves.” The sensitive faculty is subject to sensations and to cognitions about them. “Insofar as the passions of the soul are regulated (ordinatae) by reason, they pertain to virtue.”50 Here Thomas was drawing on ideas, elaborated in the twelfth century, about virtue itself as ordered affect. Richard of Saint-Victor (d. 1173), for example, wrote that “virtue is nothing other than the affects of the mind ordered and moderated.”51 Richard named a variety of affects and said that each had to be properly ordered and tamed. He began with fear, turned to sorrow and hope, and ended with love. That movement – from fear to love – was utterly monastic, and thus it is hardly surprising that not only Richard but also the Cistercians elaborated on it.52 Even so, for Isaac of Stella not fear but love and hate, as the progenitors of the four affects, were the foundation of all the virtues and vices.53 In the thirteenth century, William Peraldus (d. 1271), whose treatise on the virtues and vices may have been “the chief target of [Thomas’s] strictures” on Dominican moral teachings,54 related ordered love to the virtues and disordered love to the vices:

  • 55 William Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, 7.3.14, Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 794, fol. 113rb: “[super (...)

[pride, wrath, and envy] refer our disordered love to a fellow human being; the four preceding ones [gluttony, lust, avarice, and sloth] refer this disordered [love] to ourselves.55

  • 56 See the discussion in Alain Dubreucq, « Autour du De virtutibus et vitiis d’Alcuin », Annales de Br (...)
  • 57 Alcuin, De virtutibus et vitiis liber ad Widonem comitem, in Jacques-Paul Migne (ed.), Patrologia L (...)

Even before the twelfth century, commentators on the virtues and vices had postulated a sort of sequence for them. The scheme of the vices outlined by Gregory the Great (d. 604) had pride at its root: from pride came vainglory; from vainglory, envy; from envy, anger. And so on.56 When Alcuin (d. 804) wrote about the virtues and vices he treated them, in effect, as emotions.57 Sometimes he noted a sequence, as in his discussion of tristitia (sadness):

  • 58 Alcuin, De virtutibus c. 33, PL 101, col. 635: “Tristitiae duo sunt genera: unum salutiferum, alter (...)

There are two sorts of sadness, one salvific, the other destructive. … [The destructive sort is] the sadness of this world, which brings about the death of the soul, which does not manage to produce anything good, which perturbs the mind and often drives it to despair (desperationem), so that it takes away the hope (spem) of future good things. From [this sort of sadness] are born malice, rancor, weakness of mind, bitterness, and despair. Often there is even no delight (delectatio) in the present life.58

Here sadness led to despair and other negative emotions.

Thomas built on these traditions. In his De malo (written at Rome 1266-67), he neatly summed up the relationship between well-ordered love, virtue, and emotion:

  • 59 Thomas Aquinas, De malo q. 11 a. 1 ad 1. “Amor est principium omnium affectionum, ut patet per Augu (...)

Love (amor) is the principle of every affect, as Augustine shows in the fourteenth book of the City of God, and therefore when he says that virtue is the order of love (ordo amoris), the predication is due to the cause, not the essence. For not every virtue is love (amor) essentially, but every virtuous affect (affectio virtutis) is derived from some well-ordered love (ex aliquo amore ordinato), and similarly every sinful affect (affectio peccati) is derived from some disordered love (ab aliquo inordinato amore).59

22For Thomas, love was the cause of all emotions. Ordered or well-ordered love pertained to virtuous emotions; disordered love pertained to sinful ones. Once love was pointed in a particular direction, all the other emotions followed. With Thomas, love’s right order became an order of feelings. His focus was on a dynamic sequence of emotions induced by love and its effects. By treating love in detail as a passion of the soul – with its implications worked out in unprecedented detail in his treatise on the passions – Thomas’ “order of love” became a sequence both fully moral and utterly emotional. Let us see how that script manifested itself outside of his Summa.

Who Cared?

  • 60 ST pr.: “secundum quod congruit ad eruditionem incipientium.”
  • 61 See Torrell, Aquinas the Person…, op. cit., p. 144-45.
  • 62 See Thomas Marie Charland, Artes praedicandi. Contribution à l’histoire de la rhétorique au moyen â (...)
  • 63 See Beverly Mayne Kienzle, ed. The Sermon, Turnhout, Brepols, 2000. For Latin sermons see Johannes (...)
  • 64 See Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, « L'efficacité religieuse de l'affectivité dans le Liber (passu (...)

23We thus now arrive at the crucial question: Did Thomas’s treatise on the passions affect how people who were not writing theoretical materials thought about emotions? We need first to decide on which people to investigate. In the prologue of his Summa theologiae Thomas said that he wrote “according to what is fitting for the instruction of beginners.”60 It seems that he began the work as he was setting up a modest studium in Rome, a place for him to try out his ideas about educating friars in moral as well as practical theology, prepare them for the pastoral work of confession and penance, and give them ammunition for preaching.61 We might find evidence of his influence, therefore, in Dominican artes praedicandi, instruction manuals for preachers.62 It follows that we might expect to see his influence in the sermons that the Dominicans gave in both Latin and the local vernacular.63 We might find it also in the hagiographical accounts produced by Dominicans – although in fact the clearest parallels to the sort of emotional sequences Thomas described in his treatise on the passions have been identified above all in Franciscan sources.64

24I have here chosen to limit the discussion to two of Thomas’ disciples, Remigio dei Girolami and William of Tocco. I seek to assess the influence of Thomas on one of Remigio’s sermons and on William of Tocco’s biography of Thomas. Initially, I expected the discussion of the passions in the Summa theologiae to have had considerable impact on how these two disciples described emotions. Instead (to anticipate my conclusions), I found that the influence of his treatise was only partial. As we have seen, Thomas’s theory was innovative in a number of ways. Remigio seems to have been swayed by Thomas’s emphasis on emotional sequences, while William was more impressed with his discussion of the ecstatic potential of love.

  • 65 On the chronology of Remigio’s life, see Emilio Panella, Per lo studio di fra Remigio dei Girolami (...)
  • 66 Some are printed, but in truncated form, in Giulio Salvadori and Vincenzo Federici (eds.), I sermon (...)
  • 67 The husband and wife of the sermon, Remigio dei Girolami, De mortuis, De uxore comitis novelli, are (...)

25The Florentine Remigio dei Girolami (d. 1319) probably studied with Thomas in Paris during the years 1269-1272.65 As master at Santa Maria Novella in Florence, Remigio gave numerous sermons.66 Let us consider one of them: a sermon he preached in c. 1315 upon the death of Beatrice of Anjou, wife of Bertrand de Baux.67 Here Remigio tapped into Thomas’s sequence of emotions.

  • 68 “Potest dicere vir eius modo illud [Hos. 2:2]: ‘Iudicate quoniam ipsa non uxor mea et ego non vir e (...)
  • 69 I thank Riccardo Cristiani for alerting me to this reading of Remigio’s “ordo caritatis.”

26The sermon began almost in media res. Speaking past Bertrand, addressing all hypothetical husbands, Remigio started abruptly by giving this advice. “He can say these words of Hosea: ‘Judge because she is not my wife, and I am not her husband.’”68 In its context in Hosea, the words damned God’s wayward people. But Remigio took them as an opportunity to describe the effects of death on any conjugal couple: it dissolved the laws and obligations that bound them to one another. This led Remigio to expound on the “three ways (per triplicem modum)” in which Hosea’s words applied to Bertrand. He cited the traditional objects of the “order of love” as he traced those ways, beginning with the self, moving on to neighbor, and turning finally to God.69

27But to this traditional scheme Remigio added an emotional dimension beyond love and its proper objects. He talked about the “ways of feeling” that accompanied each object. Thus, when he spoke about the husband (the “self” in the traditional scheme), Remigio implied that husband had loved his wife and then turned to the proper “way of grieving (per modum indolitionis).” Grief had to contend with the words of Ecclus. 22:11, “Cry but little.” Next, taking up the “neighbor” of the traditional order of love, Remigio sounded the fearful warning that no one can evade death. Finally, his object at last God, he spoke of the “way of gratitude (per modum regrationis).” Here he made clear that Bertrand should thank God for the death of his wife, for although marriage is good, celibacy is far better.

28Table 3 summarizes Remigio’s emotional sequence. It certainly has a few similarities to the one postulated by Thomas, as presented in Table 2. Remigio’s (at least implicitly) starts with love, as Thomas’s did. And it shows the irascible emotions overcoming obstacles. But it ends with gratitude, not joy. Did Thomas’s theory have impact on Remigio? It seems very probable, but in a modified form.

Table 3: Remigio’s emotional sequence

[love (implied, not stated) (confronted by the obstacle of death)] →

grief (indolitio) (confronted by the obstacle of Ecclus. 22:11,“Cry but little”) →

[fear, (implied, not stated) (confronted by the impossibility of evading death)] →

gratitude (regratio)

  • 70 See the introduction by the editor of William of Tocco, Ystoria sancti Thome de Aquino de Guillaume (...)

29Let us now turn to another of Thomas’s disciples, William of Tocco. William was in Naples during Thomas’s final years and heard the master teach and preach there. After Thomas’s death in 1274, he gathered stories about his hero to put into his Ystoria sancti Thome.70

30Many emotions were expressed in the Ystoria, but only rarely did they follow Thomas’s sequence. Perhaps because William was dealing with a saint, he tended to avoid speaking of emotional transformations. Instead, he ordinarily presented Thomas as the unwavering exemplar of a lover whose beloved – in Thomas’s case, the Wisdom of God – was utterly permanent and sometimes even attainable.

  • 71 Ystoria, chap. 8, p. 106. On the topos of the mother wishing to gaze on the cloistered son, see Bar (...)
  • 72 Ystoria, chap. 8, p. 106: “Fratres autem ignorantes bone matris tam ordinatum affectum, quem credeb (...)
  • 73 Ibid.: “Fratres autem supra vires maternalis animi credentes matrem affectum alium non habere, tant (...)

31Thus the first part of the Ystoria was in effect a narrative of clashes between Thomas’s perfect love and the disordered loves of those around him. The story began when Thomas decided to become a friar in Naples. Giving a new spin to a very old topos – a mother longing to see her cloistered child – William of Tocco made clear that when Thomas’s mother, Theodora, rushed to Naples to see her son, who was newly installed in the Dominican friary, she did so with “well-ordered affect (ordinatum affectum).”71 The friars at Naples, however, wrongly assumed that her feelings were “disturbed (turbatum) by maternal affection.”72 Unable to believe that maternal love might not be disordered, the friars took the boy with them to Rome and hoped to continue toward Paris.73

  • 74 Ystoria, chap. 9, p. 107.
  • 75 Ibid.

32Confrontations of different sorts of loves ensued. Theodora was at this point indeed “disturbed (turbata),” both because she could not see her son and because the friars had misconstrued her well-ordered feelings (de tam ordinato suo affectu).74 Now overcome by “carnal affection (affectione carnali)” she asked her other sons, who were then in Tuscany serving Emperor Frederick II, to capture Thomas on the road to Paris. Wanting to fulfill their mother’s command and to show the resolve of their own love (proprie affectionis) they asked the emperor’s permission to carry this out.75

  • 76 Ibid., p. 108-109. For Joseph, see Gen. 37:20 and 33.

33Disordered passions now played out around the captured Thomas. Thomas kept his friar’s garb on, despite his brothers’ attempt to disrobe him, so that he would not be turbatus. Even though Thomas’s feelings remained ordered, his fellow friars were conturbati, and went to the pope to complain that “the affection (affectio) of [Thomas’s] carnal brothers had ... devoured Joseph.” Hearing this, the pope himself became perturbatus.76

  • 77 Indignatio was in effect another word for ira, anger, as in Eph. 4:31, “omnis … ira et indignatio … (...)
  • 78 In ST I-II, q. 28 a. 5 ad 1, Thomas said that if the loved object is possessed, the result is “dele (...)
  • 79 Teaching his sisters: Ystoria, chap. 10, p. 111; expelling the “puellam pulcherrimam” and the emoti (...)

34Still firm in his untroubled love, Thomas taught his sisters “sacred letters” and led them “to the love of God (ad amorem Dei).” Only when his brothers sent a pretty girl to Thomas to tempt him did his calm desert him for a moment: he who was “fragrant with the love [of the Wisdom of God]” felt the prick of temptation. He expelled the girl from his room “with indignation (cum indignatione).”77 Then, retreating to a corner of the room “in fervor of spirit (in spiritus fervore),”78 he petitioned God with tears (cum lacrimis) for a chastity belt. While he was sleeping, two angels granted him his wish. While the belt itself gave him “bodily pain (dolorum sensibilem),” the fact that he had it was cause for rejoicing: “O felix clausura carceris! (O happy imprisonment!).”79 Here, then, is William’s emotional sequence for this singular moment in Thomas’s life:

Table 4: William of Tocco’s Emotional Sequence

love (amor [Sapientiae Dei]) (confronted by the obstacle of the pretty girl) →

indignation (indignatio) (confronted by the obstacle of sexual desire) →

fervor and tears (confronted by his need for of a chastity belt) →

bodily pain, but a happy outcome (felix) as well

  • 80 See Catherine Peyroux, “Gertrude’s furor: Reading Anger in an Early Medieval Saint’s Life”, in Barb (...)

35This sequence seems very close to that of Thomas’s (in Table 2). Was that because William had been influenced by Thomas’s theory? Or was he simply elaborating on the very old theme of the saint who becomes furious when confronted with an alternative spouse – as we already see, for example, in the seventh-century Vita of Gertrude of Nivelles?80 Or might he have been simply repeating the sequence as reported to him by Thomas, thus showing not so much his adherence to Thomas’s theory as his fidelity to his source?

  • 81 Ystoria, chap. 16, p. 123: “sicut ille Rebeccam, sic iste in sponsam Dei sapientiam habere meruit.” (...)
  • 82 Ibid., p. 125: “Qui cum frequenter raptum a sensibus pateretur, supra humanum intellectum divina vi (...)
  • 83 Ibid., chap. 29, p. 154.
  • 84 Ibid., chap. 16, p. 125: “Qui cum frequenter raptum a sensibus pateretur, supra humanum intellectum (...)

36More clearly reflective of Thomas’s treatise was William’s emphasis on the results of Thomas’s love for the Wisdom of God. William understood that love as producing union, mutual indwelling, and rapturous transport. Thomas, William said, was like the heroes of the Old and New Testaments. Like Rebecca, “he merited to have the Wisdom of God as his bride (sponsa)”;81 he was like Moses, who, since he was “frequently transported from his senses, is believed to have seen beyond human intellect to the divine, by which his spirit was absorbed.”82 The same thing happened during the Mass.83 And again, as he wrote his books, “[Thomas] frequently seemed to be totally alienated from his senses (a sensibus alienus), always intent on divine revelations.”84 It seems, then, that William saw Thomas’s love for his sponsa as of a piece with his transports and union with the divine intellect. This was very likely influenced by Thomas’s theory of the passiones animae, with its emphasis on the rapture of love. But, as with Remigio, the impact of the theory as a whole was relatively weak.

Conclusion

37Thomas’s discussion of the passions drew on many prior ideas. Its originality lay largely in its thoroughness, its strategic placement within a theological summa, and its insistence that love be not just a virtue but also the emotion that led all the others. Because of these things, Thomas made human virtues and vices depend on sequences of emotions powered by love. The power and drive of that passion was so great that it resulted in union, mutual indwelling, and rapturous transport.

38These breakthroughs mattered only somewhat to two of Thomas disciples. Remigio dei Girolami described not one correct feeling for grieving but rather a sequence of emotions. But it was not quite the sequence that Thomas theorized. William of Tocco wrote about a lover, albeit not of an earthly spouse. The love that he attributed to Thomas did have the extraordinary effects that Thomas had postulated, but then again, these effects were pre-figured in pseudo-Dionysius. This seems a rather poor haul for a major theorist.

  • 85 This represents the average of percentages inventoried by Boyle in “The Setting of the Summa theolo (...)

39At first glance, the manuscript tradition of the Summa theologiae seems to point in the same direction. The Summa was rarely copied as a whole; rather it largely circulated in its constituent parts. The secunda secundae – the second section of the second part, which focused on the individual virtues and vices – was the most popular. The prima secundae – containing the treatise on the passions – constitutes only some 16 % of the extant manuscripts.85 Nevertheless the prima secundae, taken by itself, is one of the first works to treat the virtues and vices as a whole, working thus as an introduction to the moral life of man. Thomas’s point about the place of the passions in ethics would not have been lost even in a text of the prima secundae detached from the rest of the Summa.

40Thus, it would seem that some people did – or at least potentially would have – cared about Thomas’s theory of the emotions. Certainly his treatise seems to have influenced some of the ways in which two of his disciples thought about emotional practice. Remigio considered emotions not as separate entities but as part of a transformative script, and William focused on the ecstatic powers of love.

Haut de page

Notes

1 I thank Damien Boquet, Douglas Cairns, Blake Dutton, Thomas Rosenwein, Daniel Lord Smail, and participants at the Colloque international Ve Rencontre EMMA for their comments on this paper. Above all, I thank Riccardo Cristiani for his helpful critiques of every draft. For further discussion of Thomas’s theory, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Generations of Feeling : A History of Emotions, 600-1700, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, p. 144-168.

2 Many of my observations here are borrowed from Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2004, p. 239-255. Recent writers on Thomas’s theory of the passions include Robert Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae 1a2ae 22-48, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009 and Nicholas E. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire: Aquinas on Emotion, Washington, D. C., The Catholic University of America Press, 2011. For a useful overview see Silvana Vecchio’s introduction to Tommaso d’Aquino, Le Passioni dell’anima, trans. and intro. Silvana Vecchio, Florence, Le Lettere, 2007, p. 5-18. Alain Boureau, « Un sujet agité. Le statut nouveau des passions de l’âme au XIIe siècle » in Le Sujet des émotions au moyen Âge, ed. Piroska Nagy and Damien Boquet, Paris, Beauchesne, 2008, p. 187-200, emphasizes the important change that Thomas’s work signals in attitudes toward the passions: rather evanescent things to be avoided, they became – in his work and that of John of La Rochelle – permanent elements of human nature.

3 John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima 106, in Jacques Guy Bougerol (ed.), Paris, Vrin, 1995, p. 255: “Est ergo vis concupiscibilis appetitiva boni delectabilis … Vis vero irascibilis appetitiva boni ardui expedientis.” According to Knuuttila, Emotions..., op. cit., p. 178, the idea was fairly new at Paris when John wrote, having been introduced there c. 1230.

4 John of La Rochelle, Summa de anima 107, p. 256-262 lists more than 20 passions. See Simo Knuuttila, “Models for Emotions in Medieval Philosophical Psychology” in this collection (https://acrh.revues.org/7402).

5 Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae [henceforth ST] I-II, q. 23 a. 2 co. However, note that within these categories Thomas named over forty passiones animae; see Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Christianizing Cicero’s Perturbationes”, Quaestiones Medii Aevi Novae, t. 17, 2012, p. 42, Table 7. The edition of Thomas’s works used in this paper is that ed. Roberto Busa, published in 1981 and now on the web at the Corpus Thomisticum, www.corpusthomisticum.org.

6 ST I-II, q. 41 a. 2 ad 3.

7 The intellective appetite was the seat of “affections” that did not involve bodily changes. Peter King, “Aquinas on the Passions”, in Scott MacDonald and Eleonore Stump (eds.), Aquinas’s Moral Theory: Essays in Honor of Norman Kretzmann, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1999, p. 101-132, at 105 n. 7 calls these affectiones “pseudo-passions.” On these affections, see Lombardo, The Logic of Desire..., op. cit., chap. 3 and Miner, Aquinas on the Passions..., op. cit., p. 35-38.

8 Thomas Aquinas, Summa contra Gentiles, 2, 68, n. 2: “Relinquitur quod anima humana sit intellectualis substantia corpori unita ut forma. (It remains that the human soul is an intellectual substance united to the body as its form.)” See B. Carlos Bazán, « The Human Soul: Form and Substance? Thomas Aquinas’ Critique of Eclectic Aristotelianism », Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen Âge, t. 64, 1997, p. 95-126, esp. p. 116-117.

9 ST I-II, q. 22 a.1 co. See Italo Sciuto, « Le Passioni dell’anima nel pensiero di Tommaso d’Aquino », in Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio (eds.), Anima e corpo nella cultura medievale, Florence, SISMEL Edizioni del Galluzzo, 1999, p. 73-93. The idea that the passions were not just of the soul but also the body was thoroughly Aristotelian. See Aristotle, De anima, 403a15, in On the Soul, trans. by Walter S. Hett, Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1935: “It seems that all the passions [pathé] of the soul are connected to the body.” I thank Douglas Cairns for the reference.

10 Mark D. Jordan, “Ideals of Scientia moralis and the Invention of the Summa theologiae”, in Scott MacDonald and Eleonore Stump (eds.), Aquinas’s Moral Theory..., op. cit., p. 88-90.

11 Augustine, De civitate dei, in B. Dombart and A. Kalb (eds.), Turnhout, Brepols, 1955 (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 48) [henceforth Civ. dei], 14.6, p. 421: “Voluntas est quippe in omnibus; immo omnes nihil aliud quam voluntates sunt.”

12 Civ. dei, 14.6, p. 421: “Interest autem qualis sit voluntas hominis; quia si perversa est, perversos habebit hos motus; si autem recta est, non solum inculpabiles, verum etiam laudabiles erunt.”

13 See ST I-II, q. 82 a. 2 co.

14 ST I-II, q. 23 a. 2 co.

15 Thomas read Aristotle’s Physics in Latin translation and commented on it in 1268-69, just before writing his section on the passiones animae in ST. For the dates of Thomas’s writings, see the catalogue of the works of Thomas by G. Emery in Jean-Pierre Torrell, Saint Thomas Aquinas, vol. 1: The Person and His Work, trans. Robert Royal, Washington, D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 2005 (rev. ed.), p. 330-361.

16 ST I-II, q. 46 a. 1: “amor enim est prima radix omnium passionum.” See also q. 41, a. 2 ad 1: “omnes passiones animae derivantur ex uno principio, scilicet ex amore, in quo habent ad invicem connexionem (all passions of the soul are derived from one principle, namely from love, to which they are connected in turn).” The notion of amor as radix was already adumbrated by Thomas’s teacher Albertus Magnus, De bono, in H. Kühle, C. Feckes, B. Geyer, and W. Kübel (eds.), Monasterii Westfalorum, Aschendorff, 1951, 73.48-52: “quod licet sint quattuor passiones naturales, tamen amor fundamentum et radix est aliarum. Non enim speratur, nisi quod amatur, nec timetur, nisi quod separat ab amato, nec aliquid contristat, nisi inquantum amato contrariatur (For although there are four natural passions, nevertheless love is the foundation and root of the others. For only that which is loved is hoped for, nor is a thing feared unless it separates from the beloved, nor does anything make one sad except insofar as it is opposed to that which is loved.)” The idea was anticipated by the Victorines. E.g. Hugh of St. Victor (d. 1141), De substantia dilectionis, chap. 2, in Roger Baron (ed.), Hugues de Saint-Victor. Six opuscules Spirituels, Paris, Cerf, 1969 (Sources chrétiennes 155), p. 86: “amor est delectatio cordis alicuius ad aliquid propter aliquid. Desiderium in appetendo, et in perfruendo gaudium; per desiderium currens, requiescens per gaudium (love is the delight of the heart of someone toward something for some reason. It is desire in appetite and joy in fruition; it hastens out of desire, and it rests out of joy).” Hugh’s sequence of affects from love to desire to joy may have influenced monastic writers, e.g. Isaac of Stella, Sermo 17, ad 11, in Anselm Hoste and Gaston Salet (eds.), Sermons I (Sermons 1-17), Paris, Cerf, 1967 (Sources chrétiennes 130), p. 318: “Affectus quoque, sive affectio, duplex intelligitur. Duobus enim modis cor afficitur ad omnia, … scilicet amore, vel odio; ex quibus ... illi nominati et noti quatuor oriuntur affectus (the affects are understood to be twofold. For, the heart is moved to everything that is offered to it … in two ways, namely by love and by hate. From those ... arise those well-known and named affects [i.e. pleasure, pain, desire, and fear]).”

17 ST I-II, q. 23 a. 4 co.: “Bonum ergo primo quidem in potentia appetitiva causat quandam inclinationem, seu aptitudinem, seu connaturalitatem ad bonum, quod pertinet ad passionem amoris.”

18 Geoffrey of Poitiers, Summa, BnF cod. lat. 15747 fol. 23: “Dilectio voluntaria dividitur in duas: prima dicitur concupiscentia. ... Secunda est amicitia (Voluntary love is divided in two: the first is called concupiscent; the second is friendship.)” quoted in Artur Landgraf, “Studien zur Erkenntnis des Übernatürlichen in der Frühscholastik”, Scholastik, t. 4, 1929, p. 376 n. 2. On the date of this Summa, see Paul Anciaux, « La date de composition de la Somme de Godefroid de Poitiers », Recherches de Théologie ancienne et médiévale, t. 16, 1949, p. 165-166.

19 ST I-II, q. 26 a. 4 and ST I-II, q. 40 a. 7. See David M. Gallagher, “Thomas Aquinas on Self-Love as the Basis for Love of Others”, Acta philosophica, t. 8/1, 1999, p. 23-44 and Daniel Schwartz, Aquinas on Friendship, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2007.

20 ST I-II, q. 25 a. 2 co.: “motus autem ad bonum est desiderium vel concupiscentia; quies autem in bono est gaudium vel delectatio.”

21 Ibid.

22 Ibid.

23 ST I-II, q. 25 a. 3 co.: “Et si ordinem omnium passionum secundum viam generationis, scire velimus, primo occurrunt amor et odium; secundo, desiderium et fuga; tertio, spes et desperatio; quarto, timor et audacia; quinto, ira; sexto et ultimo, gaudium et tristitia, quae consequuntur ad omnes passiones.”

24 James A. Russell, “In Defense of a Prototype Approach to Emotion Concepts”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, t. 60, 1991, p. 37-47, at p. 30, Table 1 gives a five-step script in which anger unfolds, starting with the initiating situation and ending with a punch.

25 Stephen D. White, “The Politics of Anger”, in Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past: The Social Uses of an Emotion in the Middle Ages, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 1998, p. 127-152.

26 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, London, MacMillan, 1969, p. 41: “In the long run it is the persistent nurturing role of the therapist … that helps the patient overcome the anxiety and fear of his impending death.”

27 See the section on « Discordances cognitives, intentions, et émotions » in the paper by Bernard Rimé in this collection (https://acrh.revues.org/7293).

28 See Keith Oatley and P. N. Johnson-Laird, “Towards a Cognitive Theory of Emotions”, Cognition and Emotion, t. 1, 1987, p. 29-50.

29 Thomas discussed these effects in ST, as below. He also spoke of them, albeit briefly, in his Scriptum super Sententiis, lib. 3 d. 27 q. 1 a.1 ad 4.

30 ST I-II, q. 28 a. 1 ad 2: “quaerunt unionem quae convenit et decet; ut scilicet simul conversentur, et simul colloquantur, et in aliis huiusmodi coniungantur.”

31 ST I-II, q. 28 a. 2 co.: “Amans vero dicitur esse in amato secundum apprehensionem inquantum amans non est contentus superficiali apprehensione amati, sed nititur singula quae ad amatum pertinent intrinsecus disquirere, et sic ad interiora eius ingreditur.” Thomas found the idea of mutual indwelling in 1 John 4:16: “He who abides in charity abides in God and God in him.” But Thomas generalized this indwelling to every sort of love (quilibet amor). See ST I-II, q. 28 a. 2 s.c.

32 ST I-II, q. 28 a. 2 co.: “amatum dicitur esse in amante, prout est per quandam complacentiam in eius affectu, ut vel delectetur in eo, aut in bonis eius, apud praesentiam.”

33 Ibid.

34 See Barbara Faes de Mottoni, “Excessus mentis, alienatio mentis, estasi, raptus nel medioevo”, in Eugenio Canone (ed.), Per una storia del concetto di mente, Florence, L.S. Olschki, 2005, p. 167-184, and in particular p. 170-171 for further biblical passages.

35 Ibid., p. 173.

36 Ibid., p. 176.

37 Ibid., p. 181.

38 ST I-II, q. 28 a. 3 s.c.:”quilibet amor causet extasim.”

39 ST I-II, q. 28 a. 3 co.: “intensa autem meditatio unius abstrahit ab aliis.”

40 Ibid.: “sed talis affectio in fine infra ipsum concluditur.”

41 ST I-II, q. 24 a. 1 s.c.; Civ. dei, 14.7, p. 422: “Mala sunt ista, si malus est amor; bona, si bonus.”

42 ST I-II, q. 24 a. 2 s.c.: “quod rectus amor omnes istas affectiones rectas habet. Metuunt enim peccare, cupiunt perseverare, dolent in peccatis, gaudent in operibus bonis,” a paraphrase of Civ. dei., 14.9, p. 426.

43 Robertus Weber (ed.), Biblia sacra iuxta vulgatam versionem, Stuttgart, Württembergishe Bibelanstalt, 1969, vol. 2, p. 997: “introduxit me in cellam vinariam ordinavit in me caritatem/ fulcite me floribus stipate me malis quia amore langueo.”

44 Augustine, De doctrina christiana 1.22, in Joseph Martin (ed.), Turnhout, Brepols, 1962 (Corpus Christianorum Series Latina 32), p. 18: ”Quattuor sint diligenda, unum quod supra nos est, alterum quod nos sumus, tertium quod iuxta nos est, quartum quod infra nos est.” To be sure, patristic writers were working not only within a biblical tradition but also within the pagan view that the ordered soul was essential to virtue. See Jennifer A. Herdt, Putting on Virtue: The Legacy of the Splendid Vices, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2008, p. 59.

45 Peter Lombard, Sententiae lib. 3, dist. 28, c. 2, in Collegii S. Bonaventurae ad Claras Aquas (ed.), Sententiae in IV libris distinctae, Grottaferrata [Rome], Collegii S. Bonaventurae, 1971-81, vol. 2, p. 168.

46 Teresa [Pugh] Rupp, “Damnation, Individual and Community in Remigio dei Girolami’s De bono communi”, History of Political Thought, t. 21, 2000, p. 217-236, esp. p. 224-225.

47 Isaac of Stella, Epistola de anima, in Jacques-Paul Migne (ed.), Patrologia Latina 194, col. 1879: “animi motus, quo afficitur ad aliquid supra se, vel infra se, in se, vel juxta se eligendum aut reprobandum, amandum vel odiendum.” Of the concupiscible affects he named propensio (inclination), titillatio (titillation), delectatio (delight), dilectio (love) and of the irascible, he named zelus (jealousy), ira (anger), indignatio (indignation), and odium (hatred).

48 Aelred of Rievaulx, De speculo caritatis 3.2.5, in A. Hoste and C. H. Talbot (eds.), Opera Omnia, 1: Opera Ascetica, Turnhout, Brepols, 1971 (Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Mediaevalis 1), p. 107: “hi tres amores et ab invicem concipiuntur, et ab invicem nutriuntur, et ab invicem accenduntur, porro simul omnes perficiuntur.”

49 ST I-II, q. 62 a. 2 ad 3: “omnis virtus est ordo amoris … ad quamlibet cardinalium virtutum requiritur ordinata affectio, omnis autem affectionis radix et principium est amor.”

50 ST I-II, q. 24 a. 2 ad 3: “passiones animae … inquantum autem sunt ordinatae a ratione, pertinent ad virtutem.”

51 Richard of Saint-Victor, Les douze patriarches (Beniamin minor) c.7, in Jean Châtillon, Monique Duchet-Suchaux, and Jean Longère (eds.), Paris, Cerf, 1997 (Sources chrétiennes 419), p. 108: “Nichil aliud est virtus quam animi affectus ordinatus et moderatus.”

52 Regula Benedicti, chap. 7, spoke of the way of perfection as the path from fear to love: see Italo Sciuto, L’etica nel Medioevo. Protagonisti e percorsi (V-XIV secolo), Turin, Einaudi, 2007, p. 48-49. I thank Riccardo Cristiani for the reference.

53 Isaac of Stella, Sermo 17, 12, p. 318. Isaac traced two separate sequences: ibid.: “De amore gaudium et spes, de odio timor et dolor oriuntur. (From love arise joy and hope; from hate come fear and pain.)”

For other Cistercian discussions of the relationship between the affects and virtue, see Damien Boquet, L’ordre de l’affect au Moyen Âge. Autour de l’anthropologie affective d’Aelred de Rievaulx, Caen, Publications du CRAHM, 2005, p. 248-249.

54 Leonard E. Boyle, “The Setting of the Summa theologiae of Saint Thomas”, in James P. Reilly (ed.), The Gilson Lectures on Thomas Aquinas, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2008 (The Etienne Gilson Series 30), p. 37.

55 William Peraldus, Summa de vitiis, 7.3.14, Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine MS 794, fol. 113rb: “[superbia, ira, et inuidia]…amor nostrum inordinatum reddunt ad proximum; quatuor uero precedentia inordinatum reddunt ad nos ipsos.” I am grateful to Richard Newhauser for transcribing the passage and for his comments on it in “Sin, the Business of Pleasure, and the Pleasure of Reading: Exemplary Narratives and Other Forms of Sinful Pleasure in William Peraldus’ Summa de vitiis”, paper presented at the International Medieval Congress, 1-4 July 2013, Leeds, U.K.

56 See the discussion in Alain Dubreucq, « Autour du De virtutibus et vitiis d’Alcuin », Annales de Bretagne et des Pays de l’Ouest, t. 3/3, 2004, p. 269-288, at p. 275.

57 Alcuin, De virtutibus et vitiis liber ad Widonem comitem, in Jacques-Paul Migne (ed.), Patrologia Latina 101, cols. 613-638 and Barbara H. Rosenwein, “Rereading Askese und Laster: The Case of Alcuin”, in Andreas Schwarcz (ed.), Urkunden - Schriften - Lebensordnungen. Neue Beiträge zur Mediävistik, Vienna, Böhlau, 2014, forthcoming. Edward Peters, “Vir inconstans: Moral Theology as Palaeopsychology”, in Richard Newhauser (ed.), In the Garden of Evil: The Vices and Culture in the Middle Ages, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2005, p. 59-73 argues that works like Alcuin’s were, in effect, psychological treatises.

58 Alcuin, De virtutibus c. 33, PL 101, col. 635: “Tristitiae duo sunt genera: unum salutiferum, alterum pestiferum. [...] [Pestiferum est] tristitia hujus saeculi, quae mortem operatur animae, quae nihil in bono opere proficere valet, quae animum perturbat, et saepe in desperationem mittit, ut futurorum spem abstollat [Ms., auferat] bonorum. Ex ipsa nascitur malitia, rancor, animi pusillanimitas, amaritudo, desperatio. Saepe etiam et praesentis vitae nulla delectatio.”

59 Thomas Aquinas, De malo q. 11 a. 1 ad 1. “Amor est principium omnium affectionum, ut patet per Augustinum XIV de Civit. Dei: et ideo cum dicitur quod virtus est ordo amoris, est praedicatio per causam, non per essentiam; non enim omnis virtus essentialiter est amor, sed omnis affectio virtutis derivatur ex aliquo amore ordinato; et similiter omnis affectio peccati derivatur ab aliquo inordinato amore.” Augustine, Civ. dei 14.7, p. 422 does not quite say that “amor est principium omnium affectionum,” but he does say that “recta itaque voluntas est bonus amor et voluntas perversa malus amor. Amor ergo inhians habere quod amatur, cupiditas est, id autem habens eoque fruens laetitia (A rightly directed will is a good love and a perverted will is a bad love. Therefore, love longing for that which is loved is ‘desire’; that which has [what is loved] and is enjoying it is ‘pleasure’ [and so on through the four principal Stoic pathé]).” For the place and date of De malo, see James A. Weisheipl, Friar Thomas d’Aquino: His Life, Thought and Works, Washington, D.C., The Catholic University of America Press, 1983 (corr. ed.), p. 363.

60 ST pr.: “secundum quod congruit ad eruditionem incipientium.”

61 See Torrell, Aquinas the Person…, op. cit., p. 144-45.

62 See Thomas Marie Charland, Artes praedicandi. Contribution à l’histoire de la rhétorique au moyen âge, Paris, Vrin, 1936. See also Marianne G. Briscoe, Artes praedicandi, Turnhout, Brepols, 1992.

63 See Beverly Mayne Kienzle, ed. The Sermon, Turnhout, Brepols, 2000. For Latin sermons see Johannes Baptist Schneyer, Repertorium der lateinischen Sermones des Mittelalters für die Zeit von 1150-1350, 11 vols, Münster, Aschendorff, 1969-1990; for vernacular sermons by Dominicans, see Eliana Corbari, Vernacular Theology: Dominican Sermons and Audience in Late Medieval Italy, Berlin, De Gruyter, 2013.

64 See Damien Boquet and Piroska Nagy, « L'efficacité religieuse de l'affectivité dans le Liber (passus priores) d'Angèle de Foligno » in Il Liber di Angela da Foligno: temi spirituali e mistici, ed. Domenico Alfonsi and Massimo Vedova, Spoleto, CISAM, 2010, p. 171-201, where the authors speak (172) of an “emotional navigation,” in the sense that “les émotions ressenties et exprimées se métamorphosent, se succèdent et se répondent selon leur rationalité propre.”

65 On the chronology of Remigio’s life, see Emilio Panella, Per lo studio di fra Remigio dei Girolami (†1319). Contra falsos ecclesie professores cc. 5-37, Pistoia, Memorie Domenicane, 1979, p. 206-233; M. Michèle Mulchahey, “First the Bow is Bent in Study...”: Dominican Education before 1350, Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1998, p. 389-396, and further bibliography at p. 389 n. 140; see also eadem, “Education in Dante’s Florence Revisited: Remigio de’ Girolami and the Schools of Santa Maria Novella”, in Ronald B. Begley and Joseph W. Koterski (eds.), Medieval Education, New York, Fordham University Press, 2005, chap. 10; and most recently eadem, “The Dominican Studium Romanae Curiae: The Papacy, the Magisterium and the Friars”, in Kent Emery, William J. Courtenay, and Stephen M. Metzger (eds.), Philosophy and Theology in the Studia of the Religious Orders and at Papal and Royal Courts, Turnhout, Brepols, 2012, p. 577-599, esp. p. 595-599. Important work by Emilio Panella on Remigio is published on the web: http://www.e-theca.net/emiliopanella/remigio/index.htm. Mulchahey, “Education in Dante’s Florence...”, op. cit., p. 171, n. 23, points to the possibility “that Remigio studied under Aquinas closer to home in Naples, 1272-73, during Thomas’s last year of active teaching before his death.” I thank Professor Mulchahey for helpful e-mails on Remigio.

66 Some are printed, but in truncated form, in Giulio Salvadori and Vincenzo Federici (eds.), I sermoni d’occasione, le sequenze e i ritmi di Remigio Girolami Fiorentino, Rome, Forzani, 1901.

67 The husband and wife of the sermon, Remigio dei Girolami, De mortuis, De uxore comitis novelli, are identified by Panelli at http://www.e-theca.net/emiliopanella/remigio/8150.htm, where the sermon is transcribed in full in Latin and translated into Italian.

68 “Potest dicere vir eius modo illud [Hos. 2:2]: ‘Iudicate quoniam ipsa non uxor mea et ego non vir eius.’”

69 I thank Riccardo Cristiani for alerting me to this reading of Remigio’s “ordo caritatis.”

70 See the introduction by the editor of William of Tocco, Ystoria sancti Thome de Aquino de Guillaume de Tocco (1323), in Claire Le Brun-Gouanvic (ed.), Toronto, Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1996 [henceforth Ystoria], p. 9-16.

71 Ystoria, chap. 8, p. 106. On the topos of the mother wishing to gaze on the cloistered son, see Barbara H. Rosenwein, Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages, Ithaca, N.Y., Cornell University Press, 2006, p. 151-155.

72 Ystoria, chap. 8, p. 106: “Fratres autem ignorantes bone matris tam ordinatum affectum, quem credebant materia affectione turbatum (But the brothers, not realizing that the affection of the good mother was so well-ordered, believed it disturbed by maternal affection).”

73 Ibid.: “Fratres autem supra vires maternalis animi credentes matrem affectum alium non habere, tantam supra juvenem apposuerunt custodiam ut ipsum de Rome sine timore captionis educerent. (The friars, however, believing about the powers of the maternal spirit that the mother did not have a different affect [than the disturbed one] placed a great guard over the youth so that they might lead him from Rome without fear of capture.)”

74 Ystoria, chap. 9, p. 107.

75 Ibid.

76 Ibid., p. 108-109. For Joseph, see Gen. 37:20 and 33.

77 Indignatio was in effect another word for ira, anger, as in Eph. 4:31, “omnis … ira et indignatio … tollatur a vobis.” Thomas was well aware of the pairing; see, for example, ST II-II, q. 158 a. 2 s.c.

78 In ST I-II, q. 28 a. 5 ad 1, Thomas said that if the loved object is possessed, the result is “delectatio sive fruitio (pleasure and enjoyment)” but if it is not, the result is “intensum desiderium de consecutione amati, quod significatur per fervorem (intense desire for the attainment of the beloved, which is signified by the word ‘fervor’).” In ST I-II, q. 28 a. 5 arg. 3 he says “fervor causatur ex amore (fervor is caused by love).”

79 Teaching his sisters: Ystoria, chap. 10, p. 111; expelling the “puellam pulcherrimam” and the emotions connected with that, ibid., chap. 11, p. 112-113; the pain and the rejoicing, ibid., p. 113-114.

80 See Catherine Peyroux, “Gertrude’s furor: Reading Anger in an Early Medieval Saint’s Life”, in Barbara H. Rosenwein (ed.), Anger’s Past..., op. cit., chap. 2.

81 Ystoria, chap. 16, p. 123: “sicut ille Rebeccam, sic iste in sponsam Dei sapientiam habere meruit.” For Rebecca, see Gen. 24.

82 Ibid., p. 125: “Qui cum frequenter raptum a sensibus pateretur, supra humanum intellectum divina vidisse creditur, quibus eius animus sorberetur.”

83 Ibid., chap. 29, p. 154.

84 Ibid., chap. 16, p. 125: “Qui cum frequenter raptum a sensibus pateretur, supra humanum intellectum divina vidisse creditur, quibus eius animus sorberetur.”

85 This represents the average of percentages inventoried by Boyle in “The Setting of the Summa theologiae...”, op. cit., p. 36 and n. 36. See, however, cautionary remarks by Jocelyn N. Hillgarth, “Who Read Thomas Aquinas?”, in James P. Reilly (ed.), The Gilson Lectures..., op. cit., p. 46-72, esp. p. 47-48, who notes the problems involved in a partial count of extant manuscripts.

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Barbara H. Rosenwein, « Who Cared about Thomas Aquinas’s Theory of the Passions? »L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques [En ligne], 16 | 2016, mis en ligne le 17 mai 2016, consulté le 28 mars 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/acrh/7420 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/acrh.7420

Haut de page

Auteur

Barbara H. Rosenwein

Barbara H. Rosenwein is professor emerita, Loyola University Chicago. She is the author of Generations of Feeling: A History of Emotions 600-1700 (Cambridge, 2016) and Emotional Communities in the Early Middle Ages (Cornell, 2006). She is currently working on a new edition of her textbooks, A Short History of the Middle Ages and Reading the Middle Ages: Sources from Europe, Byzantium, and the Islamic World (both University of Toronto Press) as well as (with Elina Gertsman) The Middle Ages in 50 Objects (Cambridge) and (with Riccardo Cristiani) What is the History of Emotions? (Polity Press). E-mail address: brosenw@gmail.com

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-SA-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY-SA 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search