75. Will vs. passions
75. WILL VS. PASSIONS
Isn’t passion just strong will? Isn’t will just another name for passion?
Or is passion just another name for bodily desires?
No to both questions. Passions are neither acts of will nor acts of the body. Passions are feelings or desires. They are in the soul, not the body. But they are not acts of will. Will is an aspect of reason rather than passion. St. Thomas makes this clear by distinguishing the way the soul rules the body and the way the will and reason rule the passions:
As The Philosopher (Aristotle) says, the reason, in which resides the will, moves, by its command, the irascible and concupiscible powers, not, indeed, by a despotic sovereignty, as a slave is moved by his master, but by a royal and politic sovereignty, as free men are ruled by their governor, and can nevertheless act counter to his commands. Hence both irascible and concupiscible powers can move counter to the will; and accordingly nothing hinders the will from being moved by them at times (I-II,9,2).
St. Thomas divides the passions (feelings, emotions) into “irascible” and “concupiscible”. Irascible passions hate or fear their object and desire to move away from it. Concupiscible passions love and desire their object and desire to move toward it.
Plato believed that the will had to obey the reason because there was no other source of guidance for it. But St. Thomas notes, commonsensically, that the will can obey the passions instead of the reason, and this accounts for the fact that we often know what is good and what is evil—even what is good for us, what is truly best for us, for our own ultimate happiness—and yet choose evil over good, choose what we know is not in our own best interests. We can choose misery over joy if our will, led by our passions, commands our mind to focus on the short-range pleasures and ignore the long-run miseries.
The passions are neither impotent nor omnipotent; they are potent. Plato’s rationalism treated the passions as impotent. Emotionalism (probably the single most popular and most common psychological error of popular modern thought) treats them as omnipotent.
This not only explains, in theory, why Plato was wrong but also, more importantly, in practice, shows us how to avoid sin: subject the passions to the reason. The passions are not evil but they are stupid. They need a teacher. They are like horses who need a rider for their own good. Or, to change the analogy, the soul is like a school: the will is like the headmaster of the school; the reason is the teacher; and the passions are the students. The headmaster should always send the students to the teacher and send the teacher to the students. When the master (the will) allows those two powers (the reason and the passions) to go their separate ways, chaos results.
It is Christ, the Logos, the Word of God, the Mind of God, Who is the ultimate source of all teaching. So the “bottom line” of this point, as of the previous one, is to surrender all our students, all our passions, to Christ. Trust the Teacher: He loves you even (especially!) when He gives you hard lessons.