Cates, Diana Fritz. Aquinas on the Emotions: A Religious-Ethical Inquiry. Washington, D.C.: Georgetown University Press, 2009. (original) (raw)
Related papers
Aquinas and Emotional Theory Today: Mind-Body, Cognitivism and Connaturality
Acta Philosophica, 2000
The treatise on the passions of the soul in the Summa Theologiae reflects interests which are still with us, notably the unity of the person, soul and body, as shown in emotions and their bodily and intentional dimensions. This article also looks at the difficulty which this unity can pose for cognitivist theories of emotion and concludes with the effect of emotion on our knowledge, highlighting Aquinas distinction between the intentionality of knowledge and that of emotion and how the connaturality forged by emotion can influence our knowledge.
The Shifting Prominence of Emotions in the Moral Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas
Diametros, 2013
In this article, I claim that emotions, as we understand the term today, have a more prominent role in the moral life described by Thomas Aquinas than has been traditionally thought. First, clarity is needed about what exactly the emotions are in Aquinas. Second, clarity is needed about true virtue: specifically, about the relationship of acquired virtue to infused, supernatural virtues. Given a fuller understanding of both these things, I claim that emotions are not only auxiliary to the life of flourishing, specifically with regard to moral motivation and morally relevant knowledge. In fact, at the highest stage of moral development, emotions have a more prominent role than at lower stages. Pointing this out helps us to resist over-intellectualizing interpretations of Aquinas's moral philosophy.
St. Thomas Aquinas: The Unity of the Person and the Passions
One of St. Thomas Aquinas's most ingenious, yet underappreciated, philosophical innovations is his synthesis of Plato's dualism and Aristotle's hylomorphism in his theory of the human person. Aquinas's view of the person expresses itself in a number of aspects of his thought. In this paper, I explore how his understanding of the passions is a reflection of his account of the unity of the human person. Just as Aquinas's view of the person reconciles elements of dualism and hylomorphism, his explanation of the passions steers a middle course between intellectualist and physicalist accounts of the human emotions and resists the reductionism characteristic of these dominant kinds of theories. Because Aquinas depicts the passions as engaging the whole person, I conclude the paper with a brief sketch of the significance of the passions for his moral theory.
PASSION AND BEATIFIC CONNATURALITY ACCORDING TO ST. THOMAS AQUINAS
According to St. Thomas Aquinas, love is the overarching principle of dynamic receptivity at work between mover and moved in every human action; it brings the affects of attraction, union, mutual indwelling, ecstasy, and zeal all the while changing the patient, toward its good, into the form of the other (knowledge). Passion is the principle of affectivity in created being; that something ‘may be done’ to anything is proper to the capacity for passion. For St. Thomas Aquinas, passion (passio) is not only the capacity to be affected by like being corporally, but also in the soul. It is a principle of love (connaturality) which makes intellection possible. But we cannot speak of “passion” as proper to God; for He is not movable by another. The connaturality that shall enable our beatific vision, however, is made possible by, in a certain sense, a gratuitous act of Divine passio, namely, the Passion of the Incarnate Word: the nature of the relationship between the two senses of passio will be of central importance to our project. Thesis Statement: Using the teachings of St. Thomas Aquinas as a conceptual framework and foundation, we will show that the passibility of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, in His Incarnation and Passion, is a constitutive element of the saints' Beatific Vision. Description of Methodology: Taking the Doctrine of St. Thomas as our framework for this project in systematic theology, we will study those texts of St. Thomas that contain his teaching about beatitude, moral action, and the Incarnation. This will involve principally the works by Aquinas listed below in the Preliminary Bibliography, although occasional references to some of his other works will be included. We will draw our conclusions through a synthetic reading of Thomas’s teaching on these matters. Besides explicating certain syllogisms at work in the Gospel of John and letters of St. Paul, we will use secondary sources to help provide insights on the context and meaning of the writings of St. Thomas, and to compare our results with scholars who have considered closely related issues. A Description of the Project: Our thesis will investigate the mode by which Divine self-knowledge is communicated to and received by the blessed in the essential vision of God. Paying particular attention to supernatural charity, as the formal principle and medium which unites man to God mutually “in affection,” we will explicate the mechanism of connaturality in the teachings of St. Thomas. We shall then investigate the Thomistic doctrine of passio: the principle of receptivity which enables being to be affected by like being and which draws us toward God lovingly in this life. Showing that beatific connaturality is produced through God, insofar as He allows the Son to be affected as patient and undergo the same passio by which He has affected our wills to reach out to Him, we shall show that the Incarnation (consummated in the dolorous Passion) is the locus of co-naturality by which God is formally knowable to the human mind and that, consequently, the passibility of the Eternal Word is a constitutive mode of our beatitude. Whereas prior to this beatific vision, we pursue God ecstatically, in the beatific vision, we intellectually receive God, in lumen gloriae, formally in our passive intellects. Our beatitude consists in God making his dwelling with us: hence, we shall shed light on the full implications of the Incarnation in the context of Thomistic epistemological principles. Significance: Our investigation will offer a systematic account of the relationship between the Incarnation and the blessed’s connatural knowledge of God, an account which is only implicit in the teachings of the Angelic Doctor and which has received too little attention in secondary literature of the past century. Exploring the mechanism of connaturality in light of the Thomistic doctrine on love and passio may hold substantial implications for our understanding of the nature of the incarnation, the beatific vision, and the moral action itself.
More than a feeling: the despotic rule of the passions in Christ according to Aquinas
In this paper we will address the question whether Christ had a political or despotic rule over his passions. We will argue that Jesus' reason exercised a despotic rule over his passions, not a political rule. His "propassions" were totally under the control of his reason and could not resist it; they did not retain “something of their own'', which is the ability to resist reason. The case of Mary's passions make this point even more clear. The Blessed Virgin, according to Aquinas, was conceived with original sin and sanctified in the womb of her mother. Hence, the fomes was present in her but fettered, so that Mary never mortally and venially sinned. After she conceived Christ, she was totally free from original sin and the fomes. However, despite never having sinned, Aquinas argues that she did experience spontaneous movements of the sense appetites outside reason. He claims that this is a consequence of her being conceived with original sin5. We can conclude that because her emotions had “something of their own”, they were under a political rule. This is extremely important to our argument, because the difference between Christ and Mary’s passion in Aquinas reinforces the idea that Christ had despotic rule over his passions.
Today’s educators have far more to deal with than problems of attention or classroom motivation. The 2022 UNICEF Country Report notes that Filipino youth experience ‘a substantial burden of poor mental health,’ i.e. depression, anxiety, eating disorders, and self-harm. Recent reports from the Department of Education and the UP Population Institute show that the rates of suicide attempts are rising. Clearly, the young are overwhelmed not just by problems, but by their own sadness, fear, anger or frustration. If the goal of education is not just academic achievement, but the good of the whole person, educators need to approach the student as such—and this means concerning themselves with the field of emotions. This paper presents St. Thomas Aquinas’s philosophy of the passions (Summa Theologica I-II, QQ. 22-48) as a rich source of insights that can inform efforts to help the youth navigate their own social-emotional landscapes. A practical advantage of Aquinas’s account is its compatibility with modern psychology, thanks to its Aristotelian foundation. Thomas follows the Stagirite in thinking that the affective is dependent on the cognitive, and therefore that the affective can be shaped by the cognitive. This is consistent with the work of psychologists such as Magda Arnold and Paul Ekman, and with current practices such as Social-Emotional Learning (SEL) and cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). An even more important advantage is that Thomistic anthropology features an expanded, systematic, and unified account of the emotions. Aquinas identifies eleven basic passions and defines each as a movement in the general arc of the appetite’s tending towards a good and away from an evil, highlighting the order among these passions and fundamentally rooting all of them in love. This systematization allows one to decipher the meaning and logic of each emotion, ultimately allowing one to make sense out of one’s feelings and understand what one holds important. This means that the Thomistic account of the passions can provide points of reference to help us understand what students may be going through, aid them in processing emotions, support them through their distress, and identify their needs. Ultimately, it equips us to accompany them in understanding and helping themselves. Finally, Aquinas’s anthropological framework can offer more than just pointers to navigate tough times; as it is centered on love, it also has the potential to help students find motivation, eventually integrate emotion into virtue, and build up a path to a flourishing life.
The Passions of Christ in the Moral Theology of Thomas Aquinas: An Integrative Account
New Blackfriars, 2018
Link to free access "read-only" version: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nbfr.12286/epdf?author\_access\_token=woAN0jQZ3djc\_\_k4-Cg\_b4ta6bR2k8jH0KrdpFOxC67xEDI8SkF89gkd9JH8RIzBos9Idzz5X3AWnNW7aL8zTzFJ-aw45telccVMVyKIMz8Jnpba5Du8qhqoDgsc3Frt In recent scholarship, moral theologians and readers of Thomas Aquinas have shown increasing sensitivity to the role of the passions in the moral life. Yet these accounts have paid inadequate attention to Thomas’s writings on Christ’s passions as a source of moral reflection. As I argue in this essay, Thomas’s writings on Christ’s human affectivity should not be limited to the concerns of Christology; rather, they should be integrated into a fuller account of the human passions. One upshot of this approach for Thomists is that it sharpens our vocabulary when describing human nature and the conditions for the moral life. By considering the rubrics of creation, fall, and redemption – as Thomas does – we find that our resources for analyzing the passions are greatly enriched.
eHumanista, 2022
Aristotle’s psychological theory about the passions of the soul, transmitted through his own and through Aquinas’s writings, had a decisive influence on the representation of passions in late medieval literature. Although theoretically morally neutral, passions’ connotations of passivity were widely illustrated in medieval literature with negative connotations. This is exemplified in a reading of Diego de San Pedro’s Cárcel de amor in light of Aquina’s Summa and XV century Compendio de ética nicomáquea.