Aquinas on the Emotions

A Religious-Ethical Inquiry

Diana Fritz Cates

• Publisher: Georgetown University Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9781589015050
• eBook ISBN: 9781589017184
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

All of us want to be happy and live well. Sometimes intense emotions affect our happiness—and, in turn, our moral lives. Our emotions can have a significant impact on our perceptions of reality, the choices we make, and the ways in which we interact with others. Can we, as moral agents, have an effect on our emotions? Do we have any choice when it comes to our emotions?

In Aquinas on the Emotions, Diana Fritz Cates shows how emotions are composed as embodied mental states. She identifies various factors, including religious beliefs, intuitions, images, and questions that can affect the formation and the course of a person's emotions. She attends to the appetitive as well as the cognitive dimension of emotion, both of which Aquinas interprets with flexibility. The result is a powerful study of Aquinas that is also a resource for readers who want to understand and cultivate the emotional dimension of their lives.

CHAPTER ONE
Religious Ethics

There are many ways to approach the study of emotion. This book takes a religious ethics approach to the study of Aquinas on emotion. There is disagreement among scholars about how to define religious ethics. Hence, it would be good to set out a working definition. It is important to indicate what I take to be “religious” about religious ethics. It is important also to signal the openness and flexibility with which I approach the religious dimension of life and thought. In this chapter I clarify the subject matter of religious ethics and the sort of inquiry that is appropriate to that subject matter.

My conception of religious ethics takes its bearings from two markers. The first is a pair of essays in an issue of the Journal of Religious Ethics (JRE) devoted to reflecting on the brief history of the journal in a way that involved thinking about how to define the discipline. The second marker is the self-understanding I have sought over many years in an effort to define religious studies and religious ethics for various people in my professional life. These people include colleagues in religious studies departments who disagree with each other about how to define religion as an object of study; colleagues who study and teach ethics in departments of philosophy and have little interest in the relationship between ethics and religion; colleagues from religiously affiliated institutions who identify in their work as ethicists with a particular tradition (usually Christianity) and direct their writing and teaching primarily to other members of their tradition; colleagues who study religion and ethics in a comparative mode; colleagues from the sciences who believe that religious ideas are unworthy of serious academic attention; and other people who, for various reasons, are concerned about how religion and ethics are taught at institutions of higher learning in the United States, especially public ones.

THE SUBJECT MATTER OF RELIGIOUS ETHICS

In an essay for the issue of the JRE just mentioned, Jeffrey Stout considers how best to define religious ethics: “The phrase religious ethics is ambiguous, depending on what we take the adjective religious to modify. If we take it to modify the mode of inquiry instead of the subject matter of that inquiry, we might define religious ethics as ethical inquiry undertaken from the perspective of someone who has religious commitments. Then religious ethicists would themselves have to be religious.”¹ Stout thinks we should define religious ethics instead with respect to its subject matter. He construes the subject matter of ethics, in general, as ethical discourse, which is a “social practice in which individuals give and demand reasons of one another” for their views concerning “right and wrong conduct, virtuous and vicious character, and good and bad forms of community.”² Ethics, in this view, is the activity of reflecting critically on ethical discourse.³ Religious ethics is the activity of reflecting on “religious varieties of ethical discourse: their historical development, the similarities and differences among them, and the similarities and differences between them and secular varieties.”⁴

In an essay for the same issue of the JRE, John P. Reeder Jr. considers what makes religious ethics religious.⁵ He identifies the subject matter of ethics, in general, as morality or moralities. In his view, a morality is a “a set of prescriptive practices that shape character and conduct and serve certain social functions, for example providing norms for the distribution of the benefits and burdens of cooperative activity.”⁶ Reeder would agree with Stout that a morality includes the practice of giving and demanding reasons, for it is partly in the exchange of reasons for moral beliefs and choices that communal norms are defined, tested, and refined. Reeder makes explicit that a morality includes also a “set of prescriptions” that specify how people ought to be and behave.⁷ These prescriptions often take the form of a moral code.⁸ In this view, ethics is the critical investigation of moralities. Religious ethics is the investigation of moralities that are connected to religious worldviews.

MORALITY

Let us examine more closely the idea of morality, taking up the specific idea of religious morality in the following section. It can be useful to think of ethical discourse or morality as a social practice in which the members of a community give and demand reasons of one another for their commitments regarding what is right and wrong and the like.⁹ For our purposes, however, I want to make explicit some of what is implicit in this conception.

First, morality is partly a practice in which persons give and demand reasons of one another; yet this implies that it is also a practice in which persons give and demand reasons of themselves or hold themselves accountable for their own attitudes and actions. Morality is, in part, an ongoing activity of thinking about what is important in life, trying to make good choices, and taking responsibility for one’s choices and for the person one is becoming partly through the choices one is making. Exercising this sort of reflective moral agency prepares one to answer to the inquiries of others; yet much of the activity of morality does not involve answering expressly to others’ demands for the reasons for one’s choices, particularly if most of one’s choices are not obviously off the mark.

Second, to the extent that one acquires good habits of character one is likely to take many of one’s moral commitments as given, not needing to be subjected to constant reflection. Just as the typical scientist does not regularly rehearse the reasons for holding to the fundamental principles of physics, so the typical moral agent does not regularly rehearse the reasons for holding to the basic principles and norms of his or her community. By a certain point in moral development, one regards most of these norms as basic, and one builds on that foundation.¹⁰

Third, the power to participate in the explicit exchange of reasons comes relatively slowly to humans, developmentally. It is realized by adults to different extents. It also takes different cultural forms. It is important that readers not overintellectualize the practice of morality, thinking of it as an exchange that necessarily takes highly articulate forms. Nearly all humans follow moral rules and aspire to moral goods, yet many of us find it difficult to explain and justify what we take to be most important in life. When asked to defend our values, we might be at a loss to do much more than to raise the volume of our voices. Yet even when we respond in this way, most of us are trying, in effect, to respond to a question that we understand and take seriously. We are participating in a morality, and our participation is a worthy subject for ethical inquiry.

Fourth, much of what counts as morality does not involve the exchange of reasons between persons who are already committed to certain views. When we challenge ourselves and each other to articulate our views concerning what is right or wrong, with respect to a particular issue or situation, we often do so as persons who are not yet sure what to think. Those of us who are still wondering and struggling are not in a position to express our moral commitments, let alone give reasons for them. For many of us, the practice of morality consists partly in being morally disturbed in ways that can be painfully opaque; having moral worries that we cannot fully articulate; trying to ask ethical questions that we do not yet know how to ask; and caring enough to puzzle over ethical matters slowly, even if this requires being stranded for a long time on an island of doubt and indecision. In other words, much of the moral life is not about defending particular moral views and challenging others to do the same; it is about trying to form our views in the first place and trying to figure out what to do with those views as we gain additional information and perspective.

Finally, a morality typically includes explicated or codified norms by which persons orient themselves as they seek to hold themselves and others accountable to a common way of life. A morality includes people’s ways of interpreting, reinterpreting, embodying, expressing, reproducing, and encouraging adherence to these norms, not only through standard forms of argumentation but also through education, habituation, codification, cultural production, social sanction, and so forth. It includes also people’s ways of wrestling with, resisting, and sometimes violating norms with which they disagree.

RELIGIOUS MORALITY

The subject matter of ethics is morality. The subject matter of religious ethics, in particular, is religious morality. What sorts of social practices count as religious moralities? Reeder urges us to think of religion and the religious more broadly than most of us are prone to do. He suggests, for example, that it is possible to characterize some forms of secular humanism and scientific materialism as religions.¹¹ Some versions of these seemingly nonreligious philosophies and forms of life offer people some of the same things as traditions such as Judaism and Buddhism. They offer an account of the fundamental nature of reality and a vision of what is possible for humans, in life and death, given the way things are. They offer also a vision of the good, a view of what is truly worth wanting and seeking—again, given the way things are.¹²

Reeder construes a religion partly as a worldview that concerns what is “really real”¹³ and of the highest importance in life.¹⁴ This way of approaching religion is helpful for our purposes, as long as it is interpreted with care. Note that a worldview is not simply a set of propositions, explicitly formulated, to which a person or group of people voluntary assents—something that can be captured well in the form of a creed. A worldview includes beliefs and intuitions about the real and the good, which can be expressed in various forms, but it includes more than this as well. Shifting the focus from the content of a worldview to the person who holds the view, we can say that a worldview includes a way of perceiving, envisioning, or construing events in the world in light of an (often partial and opaque) image or narrative of the cosmos and one’s place in it.¹⁵ A worldview can be largely implicit. It can be part of the general cultural wherewithal with which one encounters reality. A worldview can be so much a part of one’s basic interpretive framework that it can be difficult to recognize it as a framework—as a way of looking, noticing, and finding-meaningful that is in some respects contingent.¹⁶

The notion of the really real is also in need of careful interpretation. As I use it, the idea presupposes the possibility or the actuality of a certain “difference.” The difference can be—and is—specified in many different ways, each of which has a loose family resemblance to the others. It is sometimes specified as a difference between the way things appear to be (to the ignorant or the uninitiated) and the way things really are (the way things appear to the wise or initiated). It is sometimes specified as a difference between the relatively meaningless and the meaningful, or the powerless and the powerful. It is sometimes specified as a difference between the way things are and the way they used to be, before the fall of humanity—or the way things will be at the end of time, when the problem of suffering is resolved. Sometimes the difference is specified as a difference in the ontological (and related psychological) states of various persons or communities (saved or damned, liberated or enslaved) or as a difference in the states of objects or places (sacred or profane). Sometimes it is specified as a difference between various aspects of the self (flesh or spirit, ego or Higher Self); a difference between the way things are in “this world” (or “this life”) and the way they are in the “other world” (or “the afterlife”); or a difference between the natural and the supernatural. The difference is sometimes specified as a difference between the (in principle) empirically observable properties of things and the hidden or underlying cause, nature, structure, principle, or order of things, which is not directly observable and may exceed the grasp of the human mind.¹⁷

Each of these is a distinct way of characterizing what is believed or imagined to be an actual or possible difference in states of being, levels of consciousness, or dimensions of reality, but it is helpful to consider that together they reflect a propensity on the part of many people to wonder and to care, at least once in a while, about what (if anything unusual) is really going on beneath the surface or the ordinary appearance of things.¹⁸ Many humans have a propensity to believe—or to entertain the possibility—that there is more to reality than meets the eye, even when the eye is aided by scientific instruments. They want to know what, if anything, the underlying nature of things makes possible for them or demands of them with respect to the way they live. I would call this, broadly speaking, a religious propensity.¹⁹ For many people, this propensity is mostly about trusting the worldview that currently organizes their perceptions. For other people, the religious propensity is more about questioning reality (wondering what is really happening) while standing in a questioning relationship to various views or narrative accounts of reality; it is about following such questions (for periods of time) wherever they lead.

I am especially interested in Aquinas’s worldview, but I want to encourage readers with different worldviews to bring them into the conversation. When I refer to a religious worldview, I refer to a way of construing reality which considers that there are or could be certain dimensions of being, consciousness, or reality that are “more real” than others, where more real might mean (in a given case) more subtle, insightful, meaningful, actual, powerful, free, original, central, or the like. I appeal to the notion of some such difference without limiting myself to a particular interpretation or representation of the difference.²⁰ I refer also to a view of what is or might be possible and most worth seeking and enjoying, given the fundamental principles, laws, or intentions that are at work in the universe.

As Reeder puts it, “a religious worldview is one that answers basic metaphysical questions a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter One Religious Ethics
• Chapter Two Religious Ethics and the Study of Emotion
• Chapter Three Approaching Aquinas on the Emotions (I)
• Chapter Four Approaching Aquinas on the Emotions (II)
• Chapter Five Approaching the Human Sensory Appetite from Below (I)
• Chapter Six Approaching the Human Sensory Appetite from Below (II)
• Chapter Seven Approaching the Human Sensory Appetite from Above (I)
• Chapter Eight Approaching the Human Sensory Appetite from Above (II)
• Chapter Nine The Formation of Distinctively Human Emotions
• Chapter Ten The Religious-Ethical Study of Emotion
• Appendix Aquinas on the Powers or Capabilities of a Human Being (Relevant Selections)
• Bibliography
• Index