Aquinas on Anger, V

I have time for a second round of this today, and I find I'm warming to the subject. So, Article 4: Does Anger require an act of reason? Passions usually don't, because --as mentioned -- they were thought to be things that you experience passively. They come upon you, and you experience them. 

Anger seems to be a passion, and thus it shouldn't require an act of reason. If that were true, it means several important things in the Aristotelian system. Most crucially, it means it is a lower thing that is more animal than human (this is raised directly in the article). Reason is the human quality; we share many sensations and passions with animals, but they were not thought to share our access to the order of reason. (This was held to be true through the Modern era, which in philosophy means the 18th century. There are strong reasons to doubt it now; but see the reply to objection 2, where even Aquinas creates some doubt.) 

Aquinas quotes Aristotle's discussion to show that anger is at least amenable to reason.  

...anger is a desire for vengeance. Now vengeance implies a comparison between the punishment to be inflicted and the hurt done; wherefore the Philosopher says (Ethic. vii, 6) that "anger, as if it had drawn the inference that it ought to quarrel with such a person, is therefore immediately exasperated." Now to compare and to draw an inference is an act of reason. Therefore anger, in a fashion, requires an act of reason.

That's a funny argument for Aristotelian psychology. Romantic love, the most canonical of passions, also seems to be amenable to reason in that way. You can (and we all do) reason about people you've fallen in love with, and if it's a really bad idea, you can often decide not to pursue your love. It doesn't make as good a novel, but it happens every day.

The answer to that objection is 'reply to objection one.' Aquinas has a part of the rational soul that was absent in Aristotle. The will -- which is Biblical and Christian rather than ancient Greek -- allows human beings to subject even their passions to reason. In that way it improves and perfects even the strongest passions, by making them subject to rational thought.

This cuts against the idea that anger and vengeance are per se good, however: if God gave you the capacity to moderate these feelings with reason, and if (as Aristotle had argued, and Aquinas agrees) reason is a higher faculty than sensitive emotions, then it is only proper to be angry if and insofar as reason agrees with anger. But reason is not a passion, but an activity; and it is not irrational, but rational by nature. A human being was given the faculty for a good cause, and it isn't wrong to experience anger or even to act upon it. Yet we see here why we are morally obligated to subject any sort of anger or desire for vengeance to our rational nature. 

Or, I suppose, we can go to Confession. As Captain Thomas Bartholomew Red said, "What do you think Confession's for?" That line, from a very immoral man's film about the very immoral business of piracy, always struck me as intensely pragmatically wise.