Aquinas on Anger, II

More needs to be said about the role of 'contraries.' This is a fundamental concept for Aristotelian philosophy. The basic explanation is in Physics I. For Aristotle, contraries explain the possibility of any kind of change or motion at all. This comes out of an inquiry into what is necessary for change or motion to be possible. By Aristotle's time this inquiry had been going on for a while, and he gives an account of what his predecessors had thought about the subject.

(Some of them thought that motion and change just weren't possible. Aristotle has an account of why Zeno et al were wrong, in his opinion.)

The basic idea is that change from one thing into another thing requires that there be two states that are opposed -- contrary -- to each other. A favored example is white and black. A thing can start out as white and eventually become black. But white can't become black: they're contraries. Thus, the universe must contain at least things that are contraries to each other, and also things that are substrates which can move between the contraries. This gives us the basic view of the universe: there are substances (substrates), and accidents (things which they happen to have, but could gain or lose or move between).

The problem that Aquinas is wrestling with in the first article is that anger doesn't seem to have a contrary
I answer that, The passion of anger is peculiar in this, that it cannot have a contrary, either according to approach and withdrawal, or according to the contrariety of good and evil. For anger is caused by a difficult evil already present: and when such an evil is present, the appetite must needs either succumb, so that it does not go beyond the limits of "sadness," which is a concupiscible passion; or else it has a movement of attack on the hurtful evil, which movement is that of "anger." But it cannot have a movement of withdrawal: because the evil is supposed to be already present or past. Thus no passion is contrary to anger according to contrariety of approach and withdrawal.

In like manner neither can there be according to contrariety of good and evil. Because the opposite of present evil is good obtained, which can be no longer have the aspect of arduousness or difficulty. Nor, when once good is obtained, does there remain any other movement, except the appetite's repose in the good obtained; which repose belongs to joy, which is a passion of the concupiscible faculty.

Accordingly no movement of the soul can be contrary to the movement of anger, and nothing else than cessation from its movement is contrary thereto; thus the Philosopher says (Rhet. ii, 3) that "calm is contrary to anger," by opposition not of contrariety but of negation or privation.
NB that "The Philosopher" in this work is always Aristotle, and "The Commentator" is Averroes (i.e. the Islamic Aristotelian philosopher Ibn Rushd). Avicenna, who is of fundamental importance to Aquinas, gets mentioned by name and only once.

This is a weird position, which you can see in part because of the rejection of it in the last paragraph. It would make perfect sense to talk about a movement from calm to anger, and then back to calm as a difficulty is worked out. The presence of the difficulty -- 'the hurtful evil' -- is supposed to produce anger naturally, and it is only by eliminating (or accepting) the evil that you eliminate the anger. 

This is further complicated by the fact that Aquinas has to work it out not in ancient Greek terms but in terms of St. Augustine's account of evil. According to Augustine, evil is a privation rather than something that really exists in its own right. (This is why God can be the all powerful force of Creation, and all Good, but apparent evils still haunt us here.) Thus, the presence of a 'real and hurtful evil' is a sort of impossibility, though one can speak that way about the absence of a longed-for good. 

That's the way to make sense of anger, anyway, according to this tradition. This is also why experiencing anger is appropriate when motivated by real injustice: you're talking about a natural reaction to the failure to live up to God's intent, which a just soul ought to find ugly and outrageous. 

5 comments:

Elise said...

(This is why God can be the all powerful force of Creation, and all Good, but apparent evils still haunt us here.)

This ties in with a line of inquiry a friend and I are just starting to consider. Can you direct me to somewhere this explanation is expanded on?

Grim said...

You're in the right place now. Start here, and I'll expand upon it to whatever degree you desire. If you want, we can go through Augustine's writing together.

https://grimbeorn.blogspot.com/2022/02/enchiridion-xxvii.html

Grim said...

If you want to start with a formal analysis, though, try Stanford.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/augustine/#WillEvil

Elise said...

Thank you, Grim. It's going to take me a day or two to get to these and comment.

Elise said...

Hey, Grim. I’m sorry it’s taken me so long to get back to this - I hope I’m not past the comment window. On thinking this through, I realize the question is not about why there is evil - free will explains that and I think that’s what the 2 links are saying: we have free will and so we can choose to do evil rather than “living up to the good”/resisting temptation “due to a free, spontaneous and irreducible choir of the will”.

So then if God is good, why did He give us free will knowing - I assume - that it could lead us to evil? Rabbi Shais Taub says:

[God has] a will - a will to be in a relationship with us.

Okay, one cannot be in a relationship with automatons so free will it is.

Now the problem is that if I choose to use my free will to do evil, someone else pays the price. So the issue my friend and I are actually looking at is not “if God is good why is there evil” but “if God is good why is there suffering”. IIRC, CS Lewis explains that if God steps in to stop the consequences of doing evil, then we really don’t have free will. Yes, but that leads to things like this story about a man’s move away from Christianity:

His first step away from orthodoxy occurred while doing inner-city ministry near Philadelphia. Bart encountered a girl who had been gang-raped at age 9 and who rejected Christianity after her Sunday school teacher said God could have stopped the act but allowed it for a reason.

Bart decided that if he was going to remain a Christian, he had to believe that God did not authorize that child’s rape and was not in control of the world. He began to imagine God as engaged in a battle with good and evil rather than a cosmic marionette pulling the universe’s strings.


I do not believe the Sunday school teacher was correct in what she said but I cannot articulate in what way she was wrong. Perhaps this is simply the idea of miracles: they happen; they’re rare; God has His own reasons for deciding where to intervene and where not to intervene; we cannot understand them because we’re not God.

I do not believe Bart was correct in his decision but again I cannot articulate exactly how he was wrong. Perhaps we are simply back to free will and God’s decision to give us free will and have all of us live with the consequences.

My friend and I are reading The Problem of Pain by CS Lewis. His title makes more sense to me after thinking through this - thanks.

Links (can’t seem to embed them):
Rabbi Taub: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1602801533/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?smid=ATVPDKIKX0DER&psc=1
Bart’s story: https://web.archive.org/web/20160802183444/http://religionnews.com/2014/10/06/tony-campolos-surprise-reaction-son-came-humanist/