Prima Secundae
Lecture 81: Love as Passion: Injury, Melting, and Universal Cause

Transcript
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Okay, now, whether love is a passion that is injuring the beloved, right? I mean, the lover, right? It's interesting you should stick this in, right? And it's kind of different, because he's talked first about the effect of love with respect to the love itself, right? That's the first, what? First two, I guess, huh? Or first three, right? First three, yeah. And then the, what? The next to the, what is, prevent anyone from getting to love, right? Or could harm the loved, right? Now he's talking about the effect on oneself, right? In just oneself, right? So, languor, huh? What's the word they use for that in the song of songs? We have the word languid, yeah, languid. What do you have? For love causes languor. Langor, okay. It says, faintness, feebleness, or apathy, or faintness of feebleness. So, languor signifies a certain injury, right? Of the one that is languid. But love causes this, right? For it is said in the cancels to five, prop me up, I guess. With flowers, huh? With apples there. What's that? Stepate. Compassing about apples. Apples. Because I languish with love, right? Therefore, love is a passion that is, what? Injurious, I guess, huh? Moreover, liquefaxio, right? Melting, I suppose, right, huh? So, Coriolanus, right? He melts there, right? With his mother, kneels down there and intercedes for Rome, right, huh? Otherwise, he was hard, even though his friends came out and, you know, something about his mother kneeling down. Something wrong here, right? So, melting, I guess you could say liquefaxio, huh? Turning into a, making a liquid, I guess, it means, huh? But I think the English word would be melting, right? Yeah. Oh, we're having a meltdown. I see this word now. I think meltdown when the kids have a breath, you know? Yeah. I don't know if she actually plays there with the guys in prayers, which is the second thing, because he's losing his throne and everything, you know? It could be like a, you know, a snowman, I would say, like that, you know, he melt away in the sun and succeeding him. So, melting is a certain, what? Dissolving or resolution, right, huh? Resolutio is the opposite of what? Composite seal, right? So, it's kind of, what, taking apart, right, huh? So, when the snowman melts, that's the end of his days, right? That's it. But love is, what? Melting things, right? It makes one melt. And this also is taken from this famous work, the chemicals, right, huh? My soul, what? Yeah. As when my love, what? Spoke to me. Spoke to me, right? But love is, what? Therefore, it is, what? Yeah. And also, in all of these objections, he's going to quote the, what? The chemicals, right? So, the chemicals is called, what? The Song of Songs, right, huh? But it's the book of the Bible that is most uniquely about, what? It's about love. So, why is, you know, Song of Songs, like King of Kings, right? When we see the King of Kings, right? The Lord of Lords, right? 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Most of all, man is perfected, right? And made better by the love of what? God. But he is injured and made worse by the love of sin. According to that of O.C. chapter 9. They were made abominable just as the things which they, what, loved, huh? What is it, you know, you've heard this article now, in case it came out in February, you know, the Journal of Medical Ethics, right? And saying, you know, that they should be allowing newborn babies, you know, that are out of the womb to be killed, right, you know, if it seems for the, you know, to the parents, to their better good, right? Even if they're perfectly healthy. It specifies that, right? I mean, you're wrong with them, you know? And somebody's saying, you know, we're going to start off by, you know, proving abortion, you know, and now they're proving this, right? And of course, Obama voted for it, this, this, this, the Illinois Senate, and so on. But they're just getting worse, right? You know, they're not getting better, you know, they're getting worse. More abominable. Yeah. But they're kind of, like, pursuing it as if it was a real good, you know? Yeah. It's not just, you know, a couple of college kids, you know, getting, what are they going to do now, you know, you know, in a mess like that. But, yeah, this is important. Yeah. But it's a positive good now they're trying to maintain, you know, just terrible. You know, they get really, they're really ill. I've been alive in the world, you know, really, really. Now, Thomas, in the reply to the objections, right, is going to distinguish between what love is formally speaking, right, and what it is in the body, right, huh? Because there it could be harmful, right, huh? Okay. To those things which are objected in the contrary, it should be said that to love can be attributed four proximate effects, huh? To wit, melting, right? Fluorition, which is enjoyment, right? Langer, which is what, kind of a weakness, huh? And effervescence, right? Among which the first, I know it's the order he sees here, right, is melting, right? Which is opposed to? Congealing. Congealing, what would you say? Yeah. Hardening, right? Yeah. Because the hardening of the heart, right, huh? The hard heart. The stony heart, huh? Now, those things which are congealed are constricted in themselves, right? That they do not easily admit the, what, entrance into, right, of another, right, huh? That they're not able to easily undergo, right, the entrance of something else, right? So you can't put your spoon very well in the rock, right? But you can in the ice cream, huh? So, to love, however, it pertains that the desiring power be adapted to a certain receiving of the good loved, right, huh? Insofar as the loved is in the, what, lover, right? So the loved has to make an impression upon my heart, right? So we can say that the, what, the girl made an impression upon my heart, right, huh? Or even the music of Mozart made an impression upon my heart, right? And sometimes they use even the word wounded, right, huh? Okay. Whence the congealing of the heart, or the hardness of the heart, right, is a disposition that's repugnant to love, right, huh? So you ever know any hard-hearted people? But melting, liquefaxio, as he's translating it, implies a certain softening, huh? Okay. Soft-hearted, huh? Soft-touch. He's a little, you know, he's a little softy, he's a softy. Yeah, soft-touch, yeah. That's what one of the monks, when the cat, he's outside his door, he's got to go in. Whereas me, I can tell her, go away. I'm hard-hearted. So, but melting implies a certain softening of the heart, which shows itself as a heart able that the love can go into it, right? Into it, huh? Make an impression upon it. I used to go to the dog or cat place where they get the ones, the stray ones, something like that, you know. Some little dog there makes a little impression upon you, you know, huh? When I was getting cats when I was in high school there, you know, I'd go to this woman who had maybe, you know, six, seven kittens over there. It's a cat who's had kittens. I used to go in there and, you know, we'll pick one out, you know, and so on. I used to kind of, you know, leave the pack and come over to you, you know, and kind of make an impression upon you, you know. That's what happened with our dog and the guy that bred them. He brought a whole bunch of them over and one of them just ran to one of the brothers. This is it! This is the one! This is the guy! This is the one we're going to take! Yeah. Right there. If, therefore, the love that is present and had, right, huh? It causes pleasure, right, huh? Or, by another word, fruition, right? So that's, again, an effect of love, right? But we have the thing now, right? If, however, it were the absent, it would follow to, what? Two passions, to wit, sadness over the absence, which is signified by what? Right. Yeah. When Stilius, in the third book of the Tuscant questions, most of all calls, what? What? Sadness, a, what? Sickness. Sickness, huh? But Shakespeare has that in the sonnets, right, huh? You know, when it puts this absent, right, huh? It's kind of a weakness for a language there, huh? Do you see, huh? And it also, the absence, has an intense desire for the, what, obtaining of the love, which is signified to, what, fervor, right, huh? In these, he said, are effects of love taken formally according to the relation of the desiring power to its object. But in the passion of love, that is, in the emotion, right, which is a bodily thing, right, there follows some effects which are, what, proportioned to this according to the changing of the organ. And they can be, what, armed for, right, huh? It's kind of interesting how many times he says, all right, correct, but he's saying, the main point he's making is that love. Thank you. What makes the lover either better or worse, depending upon what he loves, right? With this footnote about the bodily chains, right? They may be harmful, right? So it seems to me, if you could restate this article a little differently and say, you know, who raised it in the form of the question, you know, does love make you better or worse, right? And it's talking about the effect of love, right? Upon the lover himself, huh? To have loved and lost. As they said, but is it, uh, make you better or worse, right? Am I a better man for loving truth? What'd you say? Yeah, I think so. Am I a better man for loving candy? Not necessarily. Although you may enjoy it. Wouldn't you have it? Yeah, but, um, I don't think I'm a better man for having loving candy, I don't think. No, I don't think I'm a bad man. At least not good for my character, huh? Well, all things in moderation. I love to rip your floats. I mean, is that, uh... Well, one, on occasion, because it's healthy, believes the stress of ordinary life. Those things are kind of in between, though, aren't they, you know? I mean, I don't say they make it as bad, but they don't know if they make them very good, either, you know? They're good for, I say, they're good for something other than themselves. They're good for the festivity, you know? See, in the symposium, Socrates speaks of the love of the beautiful, right, huh? And he says it begins with the love of a beautiful body, right, huh? And then the next step is the love of all beautiful bodies, right, huh? And then there comes about the love of the beauty of the, what, soul, right, huh? It keeps on going up for you. Until it comes to the beautiful itself, which is really, what, the same as the good itself. It's God, right, huh? He's kind of, you know, speaking of kind of an ascent, you know, in the love of the beautiful, right? So does love the beautiful make one better? Or if you ascend in this way, right, huh? You know? So if I was really in love with some beautiful girl, you know, I'd frame Jim and say, Berkwist, he says, the world is full of beautiful women. You haven't seen half of them. So he's trying to get into the second stage of Pedro Has, right, and so on. But there is, you know, two parts of Socrates' discourse, and I don't know if you've read the symposium, but the first one is the lesser of love matters, right, huh? And then when I was just talking about it, it's the higher of love matters, right, which is how you can ascend to the love of the beautiful itself, right? And he's kind of exposed to the ascent by the heart, right? But taking the mind along with it, right? But the lesser ones are the ones where the love the beautiful makes one want to, what? Reproduce, right? The beautiful, right? And that's something that Shakespeare hits upon in the sounds, right? So, you know, other things being equal, a man who are attracted to the beautiful woman, right? That's, in a sense, natural, because you want to perpetuate, right? The beautiful. So Shakespeare, you know, says, some fairest creatures we desire increase. That thereby, beauty's wrong, whose might never die, right? The same way, you know, a teacher, you know, maybe wants to teach someone else to play the violin, or, you know, or teach the science of everything that he has, right? Because if he doesn't teach it to somebody else, then this knowledge will disappear, right, huh? You know, with Max Planck there, you know, and the German, the German scientists were leaving Germany when Hitler came to power, right, huh? Especially the Jewish ones, right? Like that's boring and so on, right? And Heisenberg said, should I go, too? And he said, well, if all you guys go, German science will be, you know, will die, right, huh? You know? And he had a conversation with Hitler, you know, he said, you can't force these guys out, Hitler won't listen at all, you're just a mad man, you know, huh? I mean, it's like he's destroying, you know, you know, Germany's kind of, you know, the science of the 20th century was kind of an invention, almost the German mind, you know, some help from other people, but, you know, you hear this thing die, it's a great thing, you know? The same way, you know, people would teach, you know, in art, you know, you have to play the piano and the violin, they don't have, I die off, don't we be here to play Mozart's not, you know, or play these, you know, these violin pieces and so on. Yeah. Hmm? Okay. Shall we do another one here? This is quite a title here. For the love is the cause of all things which the lover does, right? To the sixth one, then, one goes forward thus. It seems that the one loving does not do all things from what? Love, huh? For love is a certain, what, passion, right? Emotion. But not all things that a man does, does he do from passion, right? But some of them he does from choice, huh? Some things he does from ignorance. Therefore, not everything that a man does, does he do from what? Love, huh? Moreover, desire, or the desiring power, is a beginning, right? Of motion and action in all the animals. As is said in the third book about the soul. So, if, therefore, carry all things which someone does, he does from love, then all the other passions of the desiring part would be, what, superfluous, right? Moreover, nothing is caused together from contrary causes, right? But some things come to be from hate. Therefore, not all things are from, what, love, huh? People do some awful things from hate, right? You know what did Stalin say, you know, to overcome your enemies, you have to really hate them, you know? You know, really. So, you know, and then, of course, demons, of course, are doing things because they hate us, right? But against all, this is what Dionysius says, huh? In the fourth chapter, the divine names, that an account of love, of the good, all do what? Whatever they do, right? You know what the Ketitian said there in the Summa? Here's the famous Leonine, you know, commentary. Thomas seems to have inherited the mind of all the church fathers because he's venerated them, right? So, when you read Thomas, who are you reading? In a way, you're reading Aristotle, and you're reading Dionysius, and you're reading Augustine, right? And you're reading Boethius, you know? You're reading all these people, huh? You're reading one man, right? When you read a modern philosopher, that's who you're reading. It's kind of funny. I was thinking about the way the modern philosophy is, you know, they're all reading their intro to each other. But they're like, you know, two balls that strike each other and go off in two directions. You know, okay, so he had some influence because, you know, Locke was reacting to Descartes, right? And Descartes had said this, and he was off in this way, and he was off in this way. But, you know, Aristotle was very clear about, you know, one should be thankful to his predecessors, right? Both those to whom one has gained some part of the truth, right? But also one should be thankful to those who were mistaken, right? Because in arguing against them, right, or judging what they said, we developed our mental powers, right? So we're indebted, you know, for them to their errors, right? You know, in Deconic's first lecture done, the beginning of the first book of natural hearing, the physics. And, you know, so clear are the mistakes of what Descartes, right, huh? But considering the mistakes of Descartes, you know, makes you understand, in a sense, much better the fact that the confused is more known and more certain than the, what, distinct, right? Because Descartes is identifying certitude with, what, distinction, right, huh? Well, if you give me a nice glass of red wine, and don't let me see the bottle, and I say, hmm, this is good. And you say, well, what is that? Well, the more precise I get, right, the less sure I'll be, right, huh? I can probably tell you that it's dry red wine, pretty sure of that, right? But then as I get more particular, right, I'm not so sure, right, huh? Especially as you get older, your taste buds. And I was teaching in California there in the 60s there. I could tell the difference between the carbonation, so, you know, north and south of the bay, you know. They really had different, you know. It's kind of tricky. You could notice the difference in that problem with the noise of it all, you know. But just in the less sure, right, huh? Sometimes, you know, you turn the radio on, and there's a piece of classical music on, and you say, who's that by, you know? It's funny, there's some pieces of Haydn and Beethoven that kind of resemble each other. You don't think of that, but there's some pieces, right? And some pieces of Haydn, they don't seem like Mozart, right? There are pieces of Johann Christian Bach, you know, that are described as Mozart. There's something missing. But, you know, sometimes you really seem like him, you know. So you try to be more precise and say, who's this by, right? And you're not so sure, right? But I know it's not the rock and roll band. Well, Thomas says, the answer, it should be said, that every agent acts in account of some end. But the end is the good desired and loved by each one, right? Whence it is manifested, every agent, whatever he be, acts whatever action from some love. That's a great example. Yeah. The student I had at the house there, you know, and Aristotle was saying, in dialectic there, he had two kinds of arguments, the syllogism and induction, right? And Aristotle was saying in the text there, one should use the syllogism against dialecticus, right? The dialecticians, right? But with the whole hoi polloi, right, you use more what? Induction, right, huh? And so I was talking about that. And he says that same thing earlier in the book, in the first book, he talks about syllogism and induction, right? So syllogism is more forceful, right, huh? But induction is more proportioned to us because it deals with the sensible, right, huh? Now, I was taking an example last night of my favorite theorems in Euclid, right, which is theorem 5, 0, 2, right? And you've heard that one, right? Now, I'm not going to go through the downstairs there because I might lose you, you see? The theorem says if you cut a straight line into equal sections, right, and into unequal sections, right, the rectangle or square contained by the equal sections will be always greater, right? Then the rectangle contained by the, what, unequal ones, right? Okay? But not only will it always be greater, but you know by how much it will be greater? By the square on this line between the points of section. Oh, how beautiful that is, right? Okay? Very beautiful. Now, in developing that, I went forward and I said, you know, it's possible then, because of the difference in size, right, here you have the same, what, perimeter, but not the same area. So it's possible, actually, because of that, you can make a rectangle with less perimeter but more, what, area, right? But what's interesting here is that the square, which is the simplest of rectangles, right, contains the most area for the same perimeter and sometimes even more area for less perimeter, right, which is kind of anticipates what you find later on in, what, physical sciences, right, where the more universal a, what, theory is, the simpler it is, right? So the father of modern physics, Max Planck, right? So he discovered the quantum. He believed then, as he does now, right, that the more universal a theorem is the simpler it is, right? And you have something like this then, you know, that the most universal cause of all, God, is what? Yeah. Just can't anticipate this, right? The symptoms contained wherever, right? And I used to, you know, make a nice analogy, right? And say that a man's words are to what he says as to the area contained, right? And it's possible to say more with what? Yeah, if you read wise, right? And so this is what Shakespeare does, you know, Aristotle does, Thomas does, they say a lot in a few words, right? And people can, you know, go out and talk about love, you know, very little, you know? And anyway, if I wanted to be a rigorous here, I would give you a demonstration of this, right? I say, take an example and I say, well, let's say the line is called here, right? So if you divide it into six, even, it would be six by six. If you divide it in unequal, let's say, you suppose you divide it in eight and four, right? Well, six times six is what? Six times eight. And four times eight is what? Two. Yeah. And 36 and 32 differ by four. And six and eight differ by two. And two squared is what? Four. Right. Now, if I'd done it even more and made three and nine, the area would be what? 27. 27. And now it would differ from 36 by nine. And the difference between nine and six is three. And three squared is... Isn't that much more clear? You see? And easier to follow, but it's not as rigorous as if I gave a demonstration, right? This sort of thing, right? My wife, Rosie, has been giving talks in some of the Catholic high schools, you know, about abortion and so on, right? And it's kind of interesting. She uses examples, you know, and so on. And this is what sticks in the kids' minds, right? Because I told her one thing that my sister-in-law told me. At the end of one of these pro-life, you know, sessions, this young man was kind of lost in thought, you know, and she got talking to him, right? He'd always used in it to his mother, right? Because she had, you know, given him up for adoption and that, you know, you know, his mother. Of course, in seeing, you know, this pro-life presentation, you know, you're talking about women having abortion all the time, right? Well, now you realize that his mother had, you know, despite whatever circumstances were, you know, she had had him, right? She had brought him into it. She had given him life, right? And it's true. This is stuck in the kid's mind. These stories, you know? Because it's so different, right? You know? Well, you know, there's a reason why abortion is wrong, you know? You know, they don't get that, you know, huh? So here, you see, Townsend, simplicity is invigorate, right? But it may be hard for somebody, you know, you know, because it's not, it's a soldierism, right? Every agent acts in account of some end. The end is the good desired and loved by each one, right? Therefore, every agent, whoever he be, acts whatever action he does from some, what? Love, right? This goes back to what Aristotle pointed out, that the good is primarily the end, right? What about the first objection, right? People don't always act from the passion of love, do they? So that objection proceeds about the love, which is a passion and emotion existing in the sense, desire, and power. But now we speak, and this is the more universal aspect he's seeing, about love, communitary chapter taken in January, insofar as it comprehends under itself the intellectual love, which the angels have, the rational love, right? The animal love, the emotion, and even the, what? Natural love, right? For thus, Dionysius speaks about love in the fourth chapter of the divine needs. It's kind of beautiful this traducy, it's also for the passion of love, it's ending all the time on universal considerations of love. Now, what about the other passions being, you know, irrelevant now if they're superfluous, right? The second should be said that from love, as has been said before, are cause, desire, and sadness, and pleasure, right? So I love somebody and they're absent and I'm sad, right? So my sadness is caused by love, right? And consequently, all the, what? Other passions. Whence every action that proceeds from any passion proceeds from some love, right? Just as from a first cause, right? So I do something to you out of my anger, right? That anger is not love, but it proceeds from some love, right? Excessive love of my own dignity or something, you know? Whence the other passions are not superfluous because they are the approximate causes, right? And to the third should be said that hate also is caused from love, right? So I hate rock and roll because I love the beautiful or I hate salmon because I love what tastes good. That's what they, somebody said, you know, they expect digustibus nonestis but not when somebody modified that for the case that you would use would be salmon. They used to say disgustibus nonestis but not it's funny, when we go to mass the morning we go by a certain house that's got kind of an odd ink, you know? And what would you call the color of pink, right? Well I guess you know, wives or women or the authorities put the names for all these things there and it's salmon, right? There you go. Now you know. And so, that's what I thought too, you know, but I just, you know, my wife confirmed this, we call this house, it's kind of an odd bean for a house, right? And, but, I'll say, you know, just seeing that house makes me sick to my stomach. Can you imagine living in a house? Salmon painting? I'll even think of when you go into your house, every time you go into your house, they come up with salmon. Maybe somebody likes salmon. Whenever I meet them, I'll ask them. You people like salmon. See if they get the reference. I don't know. Why do you give it that name? Maybe they're in salmon country or something. We'll take a little break here now, right? Sure. Sure. I don't know. I don't know.