The Passions and the Moral Life: Appreciating the Originality of Aquinas

The Thomist 71 (2007): 419-50 THE PASSIONS AND THE MORAL LIFE: APPRECIATING THE ORIGINALITY OF AQUINAS1 PAUL GONDREAU Providence College Providence, Rhode Island THEANCIENT GREEK DRAMAOresteia recounts the story of how the young Orestes, after avenging his father's murder by slaying the killer, Orestes's own mother, must flee from the relentless pursuit of the dreadful Furies. These latter are the pre-Olympian earth goddesses who avenge the killing of one's kin. Eventually, the Olympian goddess Athena convinces the Furies to suspend momentarily the pursuit of blood vengeance and allow a trial by jury to settle Orestes's fate. During the trial, the Furies, not without due cause, make their case for just retribution. After a tie vote results in a hung jury, Athena, mindful that blood vengeance leads to unending carnage, intervenes and casts the deciding vote in favor of Orestes, thereby acquitting him. Pointing out that the tie vote legitimates the Furies' case, Athena follows by offering the Furies a place, albeit a subservient one, among the Olympian gods, where they will serve no longer as goddesses of blood vengeance but as protectors of households. They accept, and become transformed into the Eumenides-in Greek, "the friendly ones." That is, they take their place as earth goddesses who subordinate their lower instinctive desires for blood vengeance to the wise judgment of the higher gods, like Athena. Dwelling in the sky on the top of Mount Olympus, these 1 This paper was offered at a conference honoring the eightieth birthday of Fr. Servais Pinckaers, O.P., in October 2005, at the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. 419 420 PAUL GONDREAU higher gods follow the guidance of reason and enlightened wisdom. One of the many lessons to be gleaned from Aeschylus's drama is the invaluable insight it imparts on the nature of human emotion and its relation to reason. The lower instinctual drives, the emotions, exemplified in the Oresteia by the desire for just retribution on the part of the Furies, are not bad in themselves and might be quite legitimate. For this reason, they should not be eradicated from human life. Movements of the lower appetites, the emotions play an integral and essential role in our lives, paralleling the way the Furies, once transformed into the kindly Eumenides, go on to play an integral and essential role in the Olympic pantheon as protectors of households. But because the emotions belong to the lower, impulsive dimension of the human person, they are by nature subordinate to our higher faculties and ought to be subservient to the commanding role of human reason, of our higher cognitive power, represented in the Oresteia by Athena and the other Olympian gods. Reason's role, as Aeschylus understands it, is harmoniously to integrate the lower drives, the emotions, into human life in a balanced way, neither suppressing them outright nor giving them free reign over our actions. Aeschylus provides us with a view of human emotion and its relation to our overall good that resonates well with St. Thomas Aquinas's vision of the role of the passions in the moral life (and thus with a view, we should add, that helps offset the infamously one-sided read on Greek tragedy offered by Sigmund Freud). If one can look to Aquinas as the standard-bearer for a genuine morality of human affectivity, it is because of his almost singular affirmation of the essential role the passions play in the pursuit of moral excellence. On this score, the noted moral theologian Servais Pinckaers asserts that Aquinas's regard for the role of the passions in the moral life, particularly as he outlines it in his Summa Theologiae, marks a "unique" achievement "of remarkable genius."2 2 Servais Pinckaers, The Sources of Christian Ethics, trans. Mary T. Noble (Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 224; and idem, "Reappropriating Aquinas's Account of the Passions," in The Pinckaers Reader: Renewing Thomistic Moral THE PASSIONS AND THE MORAL LIFE 421 In what follows I shall attempt to corroborate Pinckaers's claim. To this end, I shall focus on two particular points: (1) the moral vision of human affectivity implied in Aquinas's...