Dispassionate Passions

c Peter King, in Reason and Emotion in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy
DISPASSIONATE PASSIONS
I want to trace the Hellenistic origins and medival career of the idea that
there can be emotions that do not have the disagreeable baggage with which
ordinary emotions travel emotions that are neither turbulent nor disruptive,
emotions that lack any somatic component, emotions that are the product of
reason rather than opposed to it: in a word, dispassionate passions of the soul.
The medival motivation behind the idea of dispassionate passions is not
far to seek. It is a fundamental article of faith that immaterial beings such
as God and His angels, as well as postmortem human souls, enjoy bodiless
bliss in Heaven as the highest state of which they are capable. Hence the
transports of delight experienced there must be independent of the body;
they are the final fulfillment of rational nature, not its annulment, and they
contribute to a stable and settled state of eternal blessedness. Yet while the
medival motivation for adopting dispassionate passions seems clear, such
reasons of faith do not apply to the Stoics. More pressing, the doctrine itself
stands in need of clarification. How could passions be dispassionate, emotions
unemotional, feelings unfelt?
Our sources for early and middle Stoicism permit us to have a clear view
of the main outlines of the doctrine of dispassionate passions in the Hellenistic period, though not about the motivation behind it, despite its being one of
the aspects of Stoicism heavily criticized in Antiquity (). Medival philosophers tried to transplant the doctrine of dispassionate passions from its Stoic
origins to different philosophical environments: Augustine into Platonism
(), Aquinas into Aristotelianism ().
. THE STOICS
The Stoic doctrine of dispassionate passions has three constituent parts:
(a) the account of the passions, ; (b) the view that the Sage is passionless,
; (c ) the further view that the Sage experiences , literally
goodpassions. The paradox is apparent, since (b) should entail that (c ) is
impossible, or, if not impossible, then to the extent that the of (c )
fall under (a) they must be drained of their affective content by (b), rendering
them no more than the passionless passions of the Sage. Yet the Stoics were
All translations are mine.

1
THE STOICS
not averse to couching their theories in paradoxes. A closer look at (a)(c )

should tell us whether the paradox of dispassionate passions is real or merely
apparent.
Unfortunately, a closer look at (a) is not straightforward, for our sources
are fragmentary and they do not always clearly agree. Diogenes Lrtius introduces his discussion of the Stoic theory of the passions as follows:1
Turmoil, extending to the rational faculty, arises from falsehoods; from
it come many passions and causes of instability. According to Zeno, a
passion is an irrational and unnatural motion of the soul, or an excessive
impulse. . . They hold the passions to be judgments, as Chrysippus says.
The broad brushstrokes in this passage link the acceptance or endorsement
of falsehoods to mental upheaval, disruptive to the point of affecting rational thought; passions are an effect of such an upheaval, if not the upheaval
itself, and in their turn bring about instability most likely unsteady or unreliable reasoning in the case of human beings, though that is not explicit.
The causal connections described here, though their nature is not spelled out,
are clear: human passions are produced by accepting falsehoods, and they
contribute to psychological disequilibrium.2 What passions themselves are,
however, is unclear. Zeno seems to identify the passions with psychological
motion or turmoil, perhaps arising from or supervening upon falsehoods in
some way, whereas Chrysippus explicitly declares passions to be judgments.
Yet even whether there is disagreement is itself unclear. In his lost treatise
, Chrysippus is said to have offered an interpretation and analysis of Zenos remarks3 as merely giving a sketch () of the pas1
Diogenes Lrtius, uit. .:
k d tn yeudn pignesqai tn diastrofn p tn
dinoian, f' j poll pqh blastnein ka katastasaj atia.
sti d at t
...
. Compare the parallel
introductory remarks in Cicero, tusc. ..: Est igitur Zenonis haec definitio, ut
perturbatio sit, quod pqoj ille dicit, auersa a recta ratione contra naturam animi
commotio. Quidam breuius perturbationem esse appetitum uehementiorem. . . ,
slightly amplified at ... See also Stobaeus, ecl. (.), and Chrysippus
ap. Galen, plac. ...
See B. Inwood and P. Donini, Stoic ethics in K. Algra, J. Barnes, J. Mansfeld, and
M. Schofield (Eds.), The Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press ): What distinguishes the Stoic theory most clearly is
the conviction that passions are causally dependent on intellectual mistakes about
values, that in principle one eliminates passions and the underlying psychological
instability by correcting ones beliefs ().
Galen, plac. .., .., .., and ... For discussion see R. Sorabji, Emotion
and Peace of Mind: From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford University
pqoj kat Znwna logoj ka par fsin yuxj knhsij rm pleonzousa
doke d' atoj t pqh krseij enai, kaq fhsi Xrsippoj
c Peter King, in Reason and Emotion in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (OUP 2011)

THE STOICS
sions a sketch presumably capable of being further elaborated by providing

a more thorough account, which is what Chrysippus did. For the next several centuries, the first and second founders of Stoicism were understood to
offer complementary rather than competing views: passions involve on the
one hand psychological motion as emphasized by Zeno, and on the other
hand a cognitive component as emphasized by Chrysippus. On the Zenonian psychological side, when experiencing passions the soul is said to undergo
contraction ( = contractio) and expansion ( = elatio), as well
as swelling, stretching, shrinking, and a variety of other related states.4 On
the Chrysippean cognitive side, the agent holds that something good or evil
is present or anticipated, and further that it is appropriate to react to the circumstances in a particular way the former usually construed as a belief (
= opinio) about something that appears good or evil,5 the latter a judgement ( = iudicium), either implicit or explicit. Their two approaches
are reported together by Pseudo-Andronicus:6
Press ) , and T. Tieleman, Chrysippus On Affections: Reconstruction and

Interpretation (Leiden: Brill ) .
The Stoics held that the mind (really the gemonikn) is material, so this Zenonian terminology may be more than metaphor: changes in mental states should be
reflected in changes in material states, however the two may be correlated. Note
that these changes are not the somatic changes usually associated with passions:
the type of physiological responses characteristic of anger faster respiration, increase in heartbeat, and so on are not the expansion or swelling mentioned
here, though presumably there is a causal link from the psychological state to the
somatic effects. See Chrysippus ap. Galen, plac. .. and ...
There are complexities here that require delicate handling. The belief might be
about a state of affairs or be an evaluation of a state of affairs; in either case it
may involve or bring about assent, which is required for a judgment, though the
assent need not take the form of a judgment: for various intricacies see B. Inwood,
Ethics and Human Action in Early Stoicism (Oxford University Press ) ;
M. Frede, The Stoic doctrine of the affections of the soul in M. Schofield and
G. Striker (Eds.), The Norms of Nature (Cambridge University Press ) ;
Sorabjii, Emotions and Peace of Mind Part ; T. Brennan, Stoic moral psychology
in B. Inwood (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Stoics (Cambridge University
Press ) ; M. Graver, Stoicism and Emotion (University of Chicago Press
).
Pseudo-Andronicus, Per paqn (SVF .): lph mn on stin logoj sustol;
d a prsfatoj kako parousaj, f' oontai den sustllesqai. fboj d logoj
kklisij; fug p prosdokwmnou deino. piquma d logoj re ij; dw ij prosdokwmnou gaqo.
don d logoj parsij; d a prsfatoj gaqo parousaj,
. See also Stobaeus, ecl. .. (perhaps derived

from Arius Didymus); Diogenes Lrtius, uit. .; and especially Cicero,
tusc. .. (cfr. .. and ..), the main source for Augustine, disf' oontai den paresqai

THE STOICS
Distress is an irrational contraction, namely the fresh7 opinion of the presence of something evil about which people think they should undergo a
contraction. Fear is an irrational shrinking away, namely avoidance of an
anticipated danger. Desire is an irrational stretching forth, namely pursuit of an anticipated good. Delight is an irrational expansion, namely
the fresh opinion of the presence of something good about which people
think they should undergo an expansion.
Pseudo-Andronicus does not choose these passions at random. For the Stoics
these four passions distress ( = aegritudo), fear ( = metus), desire
( = libido or alternatively appetitus or cupiditas), delight ( =
laetitia) are the most generic kinds of passions, the categories under which
all others may be ranged.8 They are traditionally presented in a table, based
on the cross-cutting distinctions good/evil and present/future, as follows:
good
evil
present
future
delight
distress
desire
fear
Traditional it may be, but the table does not include the psychological state
(associated with Zeno) or the judgment of appropriateness (the second cognitive component associated with Chrysippus). A pity, for the most striking
feature of the presentation of Pseudo-Andronicus is that the psychological
state and the cognitive components are listed side-by-side without any apparent consciousness of tension: the psychological expansion of delight
think of feeling elated, or buoyant, or even expansive simply is the lively
awareness of an apparent good to whose possession such a reaction is thought
cussed in .
Fresh ( prsfatoj = recens): not determined by the clock or the calendar (Inwood, Ethics and Human Action 48), but a sign of its liveliness to the agent see
Cicero, tusc. ...
The Stoics deliberately pressed ordinary language into philosophical usages, and
claimed to offer senses that were extensions of ordinary meanings but continuous
with them. Such is the case here: lph and don are the ordinary Greek words for
pain and pleasure respectively, but the Stoics use them in extended ways so that
these translations would be misleading. The sense of pain is that in which you
can be pained at the good fortunes of your rivals, which has nothing to do with
the jabs and stabs beloved of contemporary philosophy. Likewise the pleasure
in question is like the pleasures of good conversation, not like a sensual massage.
Better to use words that do not have such misleading connotations: distress and
delight.

THE STOICS
proper.9 Mistakenly, of course; the passions are not rational responses to their
circumstances,10 or at any rate their motivating powers are excessive (
). These formulae arguably amount to the same thing: passionate impulses exceed the control of reason, and so prompt behaviour that is
not reasonable.
The delicate balance among the parts of the Stoic theory of passions was
upset by Posidonius, who, it seems, wanted to adopt a platonic division of
the soul into rational and irrational parts, ascribing passions to the latter; his
criticism of the traditional Stoic account is rehashed with relish and at length
by Galen, and to a lesser extent by Plutarch, who make use of it to reject Stoicism altogether. Yet while their purposes are clearly polemical, often setting
Zeno against Chrysippus, and their reports untrustworthy, the philosophical
points they raise are worth pressing. Is passion a psychological state? Is it
cognitive? If so, is it a belief, or a judgment, or something compounded of
these? What is the connection between psychological states and cognitive
factors? Between either of these and somatic manifestations? How are these
elements excessive, at variance with reason, constitutive of turmoil, the product of falsehood? Good questions all, to which the earlier Stoic confidence
that the various parts of their theory all fit together might seem philosophically nave. The later Stoics address these questions, usually in the form of
what Zeno and Chrysippus really said, or meant, in their writings, a dialectical strategy that need not countenance any real disagreement or philosophical problem. To the extent there was consensus, later Stoics maintained that
Chrysippus explained and elaborated Zenos doctrines, which, after all, were
Stoic passions are therefore response-dependent evaluative concepts, much as

some contemporary philosophers have argued about the emotions generally; see
for example A. Gibbard, Wise Choices, Apt Feelings (Oxford University Press );
J. DArms and D. Jacobson, Expressivism, morality, and the emotions in Ethics
: .
10
The sense in which a passion is not rational ( logoj) is disputed, as indeed is

whether there is a dispute here. Zeno is said to have held that passion does not
conform (peiqhj = non obtemperans) to reason, presumably keeping the agent from
fulfilling the injunction to live in accordance with nature, t fsei zn (Stobaeus
ecl. .. and Cicero off. .). Chrysippus, perhaps by contrast, catalogues the
kind of errors that could be made reasoning badly, making a mistake, overlooking something, and the like (Galen plac. .., .., .., ..). Sorabji,
Emotion and Peace of Mind holds there to be genuine and deep disagreement
here. By contrast, Inwood, Ethics and Human Action argues that an agent
fails to conform to (right) reason precisely by the kinds of epistemic failures listed
by Chrysippus.

THE STOICS
often formulated orally rather than written down in detailed fashion.11

Given the ancient controversy, it might seem presumptuous to try to settle
now what wasnt settled then. Yet certain features of the Stoic theory are
clear. First, the psychological states described by Zeno and elaborated by
others, namely the expansions and contractions of the soul, are the (purely
mental) feelings associated with the passions. This fits with ordinary usage:
we have sinking feelings, we may be expansive, we feel the bite of conscience.
These states are to be sharply distinguished from the somatic manifestations
associated with the passions: the queasy stomach and flop sweat associated
with stage fright are distinct from the internal feeling of shrinking away from
the spotlight. Second, for the Stoics the passions are, or at least essentially
involve, cognitive components; they are more than mere feelings. Whether
the cause of the passions or part of their definition, beliefs and judgments
are central to the Stoic analysis. Hence it is wrong to identify the passions
with visceral reactions, be they somatic or purely psychological.12 Third, all
Stoics agree in thinking that passions fail to conform to reason, whatever the
explanation for the failure may be. (There may be different causes in different
cases.) This is more than the claim that there are norms of propriety for the
passions, criteria with which to assess the reasonableness of an emotional
response to a given set of circumstances, which they might, in principle, fail
to satisfy. To put it bluntly, for the Stoics there are no circumstances in which
passions are rational. The passions are, instead, failures of reason.
This last point leads to another on which all Stoics seem to be united,
namely that the only way to avoid the failings of the passions is to extirpate
them altogether the goal of passionlessness, .13 This deliberately
11
Galen, plac. ..: tn paqn p te Znwnoj erhmnoi ka prj to Xrusppou

.
Such visceral reactions are taken into account by the (perhaps middle) Stoic theory of pre-passions ( propaqeiai) clearly attested by Epictetus ap. Aulus Gellius,
noct. .. (there attributed to Zeno and Chrysippus as the founders, conditores), and by Seneca, ep. . and de ira ....; Cicero identifies them
with Zenonian psychological states in the absence of the relevant Chrysippean
judgment, tusc. ..: Hoc detracto [sc. iudicio], quod totum est uoluntarium,
aegritudo erit sublata illa maerens, morsus tamen et contractiunculae quaedam
animi relinquentur. The same analysis can be brought into play for non-human
animals, who cannot, strictly speaking, have passions, a claim Posidonius strongly
objected to: see Galen, plac. .. and ... At best, non-human animals are
pre-emotional, capable of states that are merely analogous to human emotions,
much the same way they have only rudimentary language or reasoning abilities.
Diogenes Lrtius, uit. .: fas d ka paq enai tn sofn, di t nmptwton
enai.
gegrammnoi
12
13

THE STOICS
constrasts with the strategy of moderating the passions, , endorsed by Platonists and Peripatetics. Seneca, at the start of one of his letters
to Lucullus, expresses the Stoic position sharply:14
The question is often raised whether it is best to have moderate passions
or no passions. We get rid of them; the Peripatetics regulate them. For my
part, I do not see how any moderateness of a disease could be wholesome
or useful.
A passion is literally a disease ( ).15 This is more than a rhetorical
metaphor. The passions are excessive impulses contrary to nature, disorders
of the whole human personality (); the condition they induce is
note the etymology pathological. If so, Seneca is surely correct to see no
moderate amount of a disease to be healthy; health at a minimum demands
the absence of disease. Likewise mental health.
The Stoics offer a variety of therapeutic techniques to assist in the quest to
attain , ranging from slogans and sayings to repeat to oneself (in the
vein of Epicurus), to behavioural modification, to moral training, to subtle
argumentation.16 Some of the exercises are directed towards strengthening
the mind, others to counteracting the passions directly, but the goal of all of
the exercises is to become passionless.
Even in Antiquity there was confusion over the meaning of and
whether it should be counted as a legitimate ideal.17 It was often (and not
merely polemically) understood as a deliberate repression of emotions, or a
14
Seneca, ep. .: Utrum satius sit modicos habere affectus an nullos saepe quaesitum est. Nostri illos expellunt, Peripatetici temperant. Ego non uideo quomodo
salubris esse aut utilis possit ulla mediocritas morbi.
15
Cicero even proposes morbus as a literal translation of pqoj, though in the end
he adopts disturbance (perturbatio), in which he is later followed by Augustine;
fin. ..: Nec uero perturbationes animorum, quae uitam insipientium miseram
acerbamque reddunt, quas Graeci pqh appellant? poteram ego uerbum ipsum
interpretans morbos appellare, sed non conueniret ad omnia. . . See also tusc. ..
and ...
16
See M. Nussbaum, The Therapy of Desire: Theory and Practice in Hellenistic Ethics
(Princeton University Press ) Chapters (especially Chapter ), Sorabji,
Emotion and Peace of Mind Part ; and Tieleman, Chrysippus Chapter for a survey
of Stoic therapies. Most notorious is Epictetuss advice to say to yourself as you
kiss your loved ones that one day they will die, in order to become sufficiently
accustomed to the idea that you can bear its coming to pass: ench. .
17
Even among Stoics! Panaetius is reported to have rejected insensibility and passionlessness (Aulus Gellius, noct. ..: nalghsa enim atque pqeia). The
point is directly addressed in Diogenes Lrtius, uit. ..

THE STOICS
wooden insensitivity, or an inhuman denial.18 Yet it is none of these. It is

neither repression nor denial, since in each of these cases the agent still has
the passions but tries to avoid the fact. Nor is it insensitivity. An agent who
becomes insensitive or numb does not experience passions, it is true, but in a
way that misses the mark. Passions are irrational responses to circumstances;
the goal is not to get rid of all responses, which would throw out the baby with
the bathwater, but to rid oneself of irrational responses and have instead only
rational responses to circumstances which by definition are not passions.
Yet the Stoic goal is feasible only if rational responses are possible, so that the
agent replaces the passions with the correct responses.
Are there such rational responses?
The Stoic doctrine of (constantia) describes how the wise person
ought to respond to circumstances that would, among the non-wise, elicit an
emotional reaction.19 The responses of the wise person take three forms, we
are told, each of which is rather than , rational rather than
irrational, being the offspring of virtue:20
[The Stoics] say that there are three : elation, caution, wishing.
They declare that the opposite of delight is elation, being a rational expansion; the opposite of fear is caution, being a rational shrinking away. For
the wise man will not be afraid in any way, but he will be cautious. They
declare that the opposite of desire is wishing, being a rational stretching
18
19
20
See T. Irwin, Stoic inhumanity in J. Sihvola and T. Engberg-Pedersen (Eds.),

The Emotions in Hellenistic Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer ). Misreadings aside,
pqeia was criticized for being unattainable by mere mortals, a claim given support by the Stoic insistence that in this regard the Sage is godlike (Qeouj, Diogenes Lrtius, uit. .) a theme taken up by Plotinus, enn. .., and thereafter by Augustine, as described in .
I take the epqeiai to be central to Stoic thought from its origins. For its likely
origins with Chrysippus, and scholarly disagreement with that claim, see the admirably succinct survey in Inwood, Ethics and Human Action n. . Its centrality is downplayed in Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind , who calls them
largely an ideal true enough, but so is the Stoic Sage, whose centrality and importance are undeniable. For their connection with passionlessness, Inwood offers
the memorable slogan apqeia is epqeia ().
Diogenes Lrtius, uit. .: enai d epaqiaj fas trej, xarn, elbeian, bolhsin.
ka tn mn xarn nantan fasn enai t don, osan elogon parsin; tn
d'elbeian t fbw, osan elogon kklisin.
fobhqsesqai mn gr tn sofn
odamj, elabhqsesqai d. t d' piquma nantan fasn enai tn bolhsin, osan
. The same trio are given in Pseudo-Andronicus, Per paqn

(SVF .), and Cicero, tusc. ... See the references in Inwood cited in
the preceding note for other candidates for epqeiai. For the link to virtue, see
Diogenes Lrtius, uit. ..
elogon re in

THE STOICS
forth.
Each of the three is the counterpart to one of the basic passions,
described in terms of its psychological states: elation ( = gaudium) is the
rational version of delight; caution ( = cautio) the rational version
of fear; wishing ( = uoluntas) the rational version of desire. Like
the basic passions, they are the most generic forms under which subtypes are
ranged, and they too may be presented in a table:
good
evil
present
future
elation
wishing
caution
There is no counterpart to distress because the soul has no rational response

to the presence of a genuine evil; the Stoic Sage accepts it as part of Fate and
is not depressed by it there is no rational contraction, much less expansion or shrinking or the like, of the soul.21 The Sage is neither pleased nor
displeased at something evil, though of course preferring that it not be so.
The most striking fact about the Stoic is not the absence of a
counterpart to distress. It is rather that there is no discussion of an associated
cognitive component, in this case inerrant judgment(s), unlike the case of
the passions. The reason is not far to seek. To get things right, as the Stoic
Sage does, is not a matter of any single judgment or cognitive attitude, but
to have a life in which beliefs, judgments, dispositions, actions, etc. are all in
accordance with nature: .22 An automobile may have a single
point of failure, so that it wont run because of a faulty alternator. But to run
smoothly, all its parts have to be in good working condition and mesh well
with the rest. So too with the good life, the life of the Sage, in which the
have their proper place as concomitants of virtuous which is to
say rational action.
21
22
J. Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press ) : It would have

been unnecessarily paradoxical, not to say foolish, of the Stoics to argue that any
[distress] is per se even a preferred state. . . Nor, obviously, can [distress] be any
kind of natural accompaniment of virtuous activity.
A point made well by Seneca, ep. .: Actio recta non erit nisi recta fuerit uoluntas; ab hac enim est actio. Rursus uoluntas non erit recta nisi habitus animi
rectus fuerit; ab hoc enim est uoluntas. Habitus porro animi non erit in optimo
nisi totius uitae leges perceperit et quid de quoque iudicandum sit exegerit, nisi
res ad uerum redegerit. Non contingit tranquillitas nisi immutabile certumque iudicium adeptis: caeteri decidunt subinde et reponuntur et inter missa appetitaque
alternis fluctuantur.

THE STOICS
We are now in a position to return to the question with which we began

this section. Is the Stoic position on dispassionate passions paradoxical? More
exactly: Are the Stoic instances of dispassionate passions?
The Stoics deny that they are: differ from passions precisely in
not being irrational, which is why the Stoic goal can be described as .
We might be tempted to treat this as merely a verbal point. Surely the
elation felt by the Sage is as much an emotion as the delight felt by the Fool;
the Fool may make a mistake about whether something is good, but surely his
(mistaken) emotion of delight is no different in kind from the Sages (correct)
emotion of elation. The psychological state involved in each is described
in the same terms as an expansion of the soul. From the point of view
of feelings delight and elation may be indistinguishable. For all the Stoic
insistence that passions are irrational, their account of shows that
the difference is extrinsic to the emotion. False beliefs do not systematically
differ from true beliefs; the same should hold for false emotions (passions)
and true emotions ().
This line of objection treats emotions as being largely a matter of the
psychological states (the feelings) that the agent experiences. There is something to it, but it overstates the case. Emotions, as the Stoics insist, are more
than mere feelings; they are bound up with cognition, sensitive to attitudes
and beliefs, permeable by reasons and arguments. Likewise, Stoic passions
are not merely engendered by or targeted at falsehoods: they are excessive,
the sort of psychological state that results from rushing to judgment, leaping
to conclusions, not taking the time to weigh and balance evidence, and so on.
Above all they are hasty, rather than measured, responses to their circumstances. Indeed, delight and elation may differ by no more than this. But that
is no small difference. The Fool who does not pause to consider alternatives
may yet leap to the correct conclusion, which he hastily believes to be true;
the Sage, who does consider the alternatives, arrives at the same result, and
yet has knowledge rather than mere belief once he arrives. Passions are immoderate; are not. The latter are dispassionate precisely in not
being passionately held or felt.
For all that, there is something of false advertisement about the Stoic
claim that the Sage is passionless. For the Sage does have affective responses
to situations, as does the Fool; to mark the difference between them as a matter of being passionate or passionless doesnt quite hit the target. It is a substantive thesis that in order to live rightly the Sage will have to keep ordinary
emotional responses at arms length, and to insist on the excessive character
of ordinary emotional responses only goes half the distance: we need an ar-

AUGUSTINE
gument that Stoic rationality entails a form of emotional detachment,23 which

seems to fly in the face of the doctrine of goodpassions (). In most
situations the Sage will not react as the Fool does. But that is not to say the
Sage does not have emotions in a perfectly straightforward sense, only that
his values have become systematically different from those of others.
The Stoic position, then, is philosophically suspect. Working through the
detailed analyses of the passions, it is not clear that passionlessness is at all
incompatible with what we would call emotion. (Above and beyond any
disagreement with the Stoic cognitivist approach, that is.) Yet even if the
Stoics did not in the end put forward a philosophically adequate account of
dispassionate passions, they certainly were taken to have done so, and so
bequeathed to philosophical posterity the not entirely compatible ideals of
and .
. AUGUSTINE
Augustine discusses the Stoic theory of passions in his De ciuitate Dei
twice, in Book . and throughout Book . He has a clear working knowledge of late Roman Stoicism, derived primarily from Cicero but also from
Seneca, Aulus Gellius, and other Latin sources:24 he sketches the general
Stoic account of the passions (ciu. .), the four basic passions (.), the goal
of (.), and the (.). Augustines knowledge of Stoicism is neither scholarly nor technical, but it is enough to convince him to
reject their account of the passions and as Augustine went, so went the
Middle Ages.
Augustine begins by endorsing Ciceros claim that the Stoic account of
the good differs from the Platonist and Peripatetic accounts merely in their
terminology of goods and indifferents and preferred (ciu. .).25 He cites
an anecdote about a Stoic reacting badly to dangers at sea to prove that even
the Sage experiences passions.26
23
24
25
26
See J. Rist, The Stoic concept of detachment in J. Rist (Ed.), The Stoics (University
of California Press ) .
For Augustines knowledge and use of classical literature, see M. Testard, Saint Au
gustin et Ciceron (Paris: Etudes
Augustiniennes ), and H. Hagendahl, Augustine
and the Latin Classics (Goteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis ).
Cicero, fin. .. et passim; see also tusc. ...
Augustine takes the anecdote from Aulus Gellius, noct. ., paraphrasing Epictetus; Augustine cites it again in hept. . to prove the same point. But Augustine
is mistaken. The original anecdote seems to have concerned not the passions but
the prepassions and to have been garbled by Gellius in transmission: the details

AUGUSTINE
More to the point, Augustine holds that the Stoics are wrong about the
passions. Some of their views are objectionable: counting mercy as a passion to be extirpated (.), for instance, and the potential encouragement of
insensitivity through the ideal of (.). But his disagreement runs
deeper. For one thing, Scripture bids us to feel passions:27 to love our enemies, to fear God, to be angry at sinners, to be distressed when faced with
temptation. Even Jesus wept: et lacrimatus est Iesus ( jn. :). His emotion
was not feigned, but a function of his assumption of human nature; as such,
Jesus clearly felt emotion (particularly at the Passion), and as simultaneously
divine it follows that His experience of the several emotions He felt was altogether fitting and appropriate.28 These Biblical references clinch the point
for Augustine. We might hope for argument.
We get it when Augustine carries his battle into the Stoic camp in ciu. .
First, Augustine radically reduces the four basic Stoic passions to forms of
willing (uoluntas):29
What matters is what a mans willing is like. For if it is perverse, he is
going to have perverse emotions; if on the other hand it is upright, they
are going to be not only blameless but even praiseworthy. Willing is in
them all or rather, they are all nothing other than kinds of willing. What
27
28
29
are untangled in R. Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind ; see also S. Byers,
Augustine and the cognitive cause of Stoic preliminary passions (propatheiai) in
Journal of the History of Philosophy (): .
A claim initially made at ciu. . and reiterated with citations at ..
Augustine, ciu. .: Quam ob rem etiam ipse Dominus in forma serui agere uitam
dignatus humanam, sed nullum habens omnino peccatum adhibuit eas, ubi adhibendas esse iudicauit. Neque enim, in quo uerum erat hominis corpus et uerus
hominis animus, falsus erat humanus affectus. See also Augustines discussion
of Christs fear of death in in Ioh. eu. ., and the analysis in G. ODaly and
A. Zumkellar, Affectus (passio, perturbatio) in C. Meyer (Ed.), Augustinus-Lexikon
Vol. (Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe & Co. A. G. BB), especially A
A.
Augustine, ciu. .: Interest autem qualis sit uoluntas hominis; quia si peruersa
est, peruersos habebit hos motus; si autem recta est, non solum inculpabiles,
uerum etiam laudabiles erunt. Voluntas est quippe in omnibus; immo omnes nihil aliud quam uoluntates sunt. Nam quid est cupiditas et laetitia nisi uoluntas in
eorum consensione quae uolumus? Et quid est metus atque tristitia nisi uoluntas
in dissensione ab his quae nolumus? Sed cum consentimus appetendo ea quae
uolumus, cupiditas; cum autem consentimus fruendo his quae uolumus, laetitia
uocatur. Itemque cum dissentimus ab eo quod accidere nolumus, talis uoluntas
metus est; cum autem dissentimus ab eo quod nolentibus accidit, talis uoluntas
tristitia est. Et omnino pro uarietate rerum, quae appetuntur atque fugiuntur, sicut allicitur uel offenditur uoluntas hominis, ita in hos uel illos affectus mutatur et
uertitur.

AUGUSTINE
is desire and delight but willing with consent the things we will for? What
is fear and distress but willing in dissent from the things we will against?
Rather, when we consent in pursuing the things we will for, it is called
desire; when we consent in enjoying the things we will, it is called delight.
And again, when we dissent from what we will against happening, such
willing is called fear; when we dissent from what happens to us who will
against it, such willing is distress. On the part of the things pursued or
avoided, in every case just as a mans willing is attracted or repelled, so
too it changes and turns into different affections.
The Stoics especially Late Roman Stoics made much of the minds ability
to assent, or to refrain from assenting, to impressions. Augustine wants to
turn this thesis against them by arguing that it makes all emotions into forms
of (free) assent, or the withholding of it.30 He concludes that what a mans
willing is like is what matters. To the Stoic condemnation of all passions,
Augustine replies that it all depends: an upright will is thus a good love, and
a perverse will an evil love (.: recta itaque uoluntas est bonus amor et uoluntas
peruersa malus amor).31 The wills choice of object determines the moral value
of an emotion; there is nothing objectionable in emotion per se.
Second, what holds for Stoic passions also holds for Stoic goodpassions,
the . In ciu. . Augustine argues from Scriptural and classical
authority that ordinary people (not only Sages) experience elation, caution,
and wishing [ = willing]. He concludes:32
Hence good men and evil men will, are cautious, are elated. To put the
point another way, good men and evil men desire and fear and delight.
But the former do so rightly and the latter wrongly, corresponding to each
as the will is upright or perverse.
Even distress may occur in a good way, as when someone becomes distressed
30
Augustines thesis here is even more radical than it appears at first glance. He is not
merely reducing the four basic passions to distinct types of volition, which would
be radical enough; his claim is that each is a form of willing, that is, of uoluntas =
bolhsij (rendered wishing above), one of the epqeiai. This is part and parcel
of his claim in . that the latter are not restricted to the wise but common to all,
to be taken up shortly.
31
Augustine further reduces the four basic Stoic passions to forms of love (.):
Amor ergo inhians habere quod amatur, cupiditas est, id autem habens eoque
fruens laetitia; fugiens quod ei aduersatur, timor est, idque si acciderit sentiens
tristitia est. Proinde mala sunt ista, si malus amor est; bona, si bonus.
Augustine, ciu. .: Proinde uolunt cauent gaudent et boni et mali; atque ut eadem aliis uerbis enuntiemus, cupiunt timent laetantur et boni et mali; sed illi bene,
isti male, sicut hominibus seu recta seu peruersa uoluntas est.
32

AUGUSTINE
over his sins and repents of them.33 The moral is clear: there is nothing
special about the Stoic . Augustine then poses a rhetorical question
to put the nail in the Stoic coffin:34
Yet since, when these affections are exhibited where they are appropriate,
they are in accordance with right reason, who would then dare to declare
that the passions are diseases, or full of vice?
The passions are appropriate and in accordance with right reason and
therefore are not diseases Stoic terminology used against the Stoics. Augustine then rehearses a long list of appropriate emotions: fear of God,
distress at ones sins, and so on.
Yet despite Augustines complete rejection of Stoicism, he tries to retain
their notion of dispassionate passions. After rehearsing his list of proper emotional responses, he then offers an unexpected observation:35
Well, it has to be admitted that the affections we have, even when upright
and in accordance with God, belong to this life, not to the one we hope
for in the future, and that we often give in to them unwillingly.
This admission is meant to call to mind Augustines earlier discussion of the
issue:36
We can still properly raise the question whether affections of this sort, felt
even while doing good works, belong to the weakness characteristic of
our present life. Well, the holy angels should punish without anger those
whom they receive to be punished by Gods eternal law; they should minister to the sorrowful without any shared feeling of sorrow; they should
33
34
35
36
In ciu. . Augustine cites the story of Alcibiades from Cicero, tusc. ... For a
sense of just how radical Augustines claim is, see J. Wetzel, Augustine and the Limits
of Virtue (Cambridge University Press ) .
Augustine, ciu. .: Sed cum rectam rationem sequantur istae affectiones, quando
ubi oportet adhibentur, quis eas tunc morbos seu uitiosas passiones audeat dicere?
Augustine, ciu. .: Proinde, quod fatendum est, etiam cum rectas et secundum
Deum habemus has affectiones, huius uitae sunt, non illius, quam futuram speramus, et saepe illis etiam inuiti cedimus.
Augustine, ciu. .: Sed adhuc merito quaeri potest, utrum ad uitae praesentis pertineat infirmitatem etiam in quibusque bonis officiis huiusce modi perpeti affectus,
sancti uero angeli et sine ira puniant, quos accipiunt aeterna Dei lege puniendos, et
miseris sine miseriae compassione subueniant, et periclitantibus eis, quos diligunt,
sine timore opitulentur; et tamen istarum nomina passionum consuetudine locutionis humanae etiam in eos usurpentur propter quandam operum similitudinem,
non propter affectionum infirmitatem, sicut ipse Deus secundum scripturas irascitur, nec tamen ulla passione turbatur. Hoc enim uerbum uindictae usurpauit effectus, non illius turbulentus affectus. Augustine makes much the same point in
en. Ps. . and ciu. ..

AUGUSTINE
aid without fear those whom they love when the latter are in danger. Yet
the names of those passions are taken over from ordinary human usage
for them as well, not due to the weakness of the passions, but due to a certain likeness in the deeds. Likewise, God Himself is angered, according
to Scripture, yet He is not disturbed by any passion; this word is taken
over from the effects of His vengeance, not His turbulent affections.
So much for the evidence from ordinary usage Augustine appealed to earlier,
we might say, but his point could hardly be more clear: God and His angels
act dispassionately, unmoved by any emotions; even morally appropriate
emotions have no place in Heaven.37 This is the Stoic ideal of passionlessness
reborn with a vengeance.38
Augustine recognizes this explicitly: Accordingly, if is understood. . . as a life without the affections that arise contrary to reason and upset
the mind, it is clearly good and highly desireable, but it does not belong to
this life.39 It seems that heavenly bliss is Stoic passionlessness, in which
we are free from all emotions even from morally praiseworthy emotions.
This gets half the equation, the blessed life being dispassionate, but it seems
to recommend mere insensitivity (to which we attribute emotional states on
analogy with our own).
However, Augustine leaves himself a loophole. Notice that he declares
worthwhile if it frees the mind not from all emotions, but from those
that are contrary to reason and upset the mind. Similarly, the emotions
he rules out of Heaven are the sorts of emotions we experience in this life.
But there are other passions that are unlike those we experience in this life,
reserved for the blessed; they are Augustines own . He describes
it thus:40
37
38
39
40
The Afterlife is not symmetric: sinners and devils feel passions deeply in Hell
(ciu. .).
In his early writings, Augustine talks about pqeia using the Latin term tranquilitas, as for instance ord. .. and .., as well as acad. ... M. Colish, The
Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages (Leiden: Brill )
maintains that Augustine abandoned the ideal of passionlessness after this early
period. I disagree, as will be evident shortly.
Augustine, ciu. .: Quocirca illa, quae pqeia Graece dicitur (quae si Latine
posset impassibilitas diceretur), si ita intellegenda est (in animo quippe, non in
corpore accipitur), ut sine his affectionibus uiuatur, quae contra rationem accidunt
mentemque perturbant, bona plane et maxime optanda est, sed nec ipsa huius est
uitae. In serm. . Augustine declares that only saints can reach pqeia, and
not in this life.
Augustine, ciu. .: Potest ergo non absurde dici perfectam beatitudinem sine
stimulo timoris et sine ulla tristitia futuram; non ibi autem futurum amorem gaudic Peter King, in Reason and Emotion in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy (OUP 2011)

AUGUSTINE
Therefore, it can be said, not absurdly, that complete blessedness will be

without any pang of fear and without any grief; but who would claim
that there will not be love and elation there, except someone wholly shut
away from truth?
The difference between blessed love and elation on the one hand, and ordinary love and elation (which Augustine has said is open to ordinary mortals),
seems to be largely a difference in their objects:41
For where there is the unchangeable love of the good that has been obtained, surely the fear of an evil to be avoided is carefree (if it can be
so called). By clean fear42 is signified the will by which it shall be necessary that we will against sinning: not by anxiety over weakness, lest
perhaps we sin, but to avoid sin by the tranquillity of love. . . Furthermore, a blessed and eternal [life] will have love and elation that are not
only upright but also assured, and no fear or distress.
The good that has been reached in Heaven is, of course, God; love for God,
Who is eternal and unchangeable, is itself thereby eternal and unchangeable
a constant theme in Augustines writings. In Heaven there is no fear, strictly
speaking; it would have to be carefree and clean, involving no anxiousness.
In short, it would not be fear at all. Instead, it would be an attitude based on
tranquillity, Augustines earlier preferred rendering of . The ordinary passions of love and elation are transformed by their eternal certainty,
and take the well-deserved place of temporal cares and worries, including
beneficial emotions such as the fear of the Lord.
For Augustine, a final question remains. Are the ordinary passions natural
to human beings? Or as he puts it, did Adam and Eve, in their prelapsarian
condition, experience delight, distress, fear, and desire? Augustine explores
this question at tedious length in ciu. ., but his results can be summarized briefly. Fear and distress are not part of sinless human nature, which
is presumably how they can be absent from us in Heaven (.); it is with
Original Sin that humans became disturbed by conflicting and fluctuating
affections (.), and in particular by the two uncontrollable emotions of
umque quis dixerit, nisi omni modo a ueritate seclusus?
41
Ibidem.: Ubi enim boni adepti amor inmutabilis est, profecto, si dici potest, mali
cauendi timor securus est. Timoris quippe casti nomine ea uoluntas significata
est, qua nos necesse erit nolle peccare, et non sollicitudine infirmitatis, ne forte
peccemus, sed tranquillitate caritatis cauere peccatum. . . Beata uero eademque
aeterna amorem habebit et gaudium non solum rectum, uerum etiam certum;
timorem autem ac dolorem nullum.
42
A reference to ps. :, where Augustine has castus for the Vulgates sanctus.

AUGUSTINE
anger and lust (.),43 which operate largely independent of our will. In
our prelapsarian state even these were under conscious control, so that sexual
arousal, for instance, did not involve strong feelings, any more than farmers
seeding their crops would (.). Blessedness will consist in a restoration of
our sinless state and thus freedom from the unruly emotions to which we are
now subject.
Take stock. Augustine rejects the Stoic account of the passions, but he
retains their ideal of a state in which there are only dispassionate passions.
But are there? Augustine maintains that (a) in Heaven there are no disorderly
passions; (b) in Heaven there are emotional states unattainable in this life; (c )
elation and love as found in Heaven are qualitatively different from elation
and love in this life, due to the assured eternality of their object. From (a)
we may infer that heavenly elation and heavenly love are not tumultuous,
and from (c ) that the assured eternality of their object makes them settled and
tranquil rather than tumultuous as they are in this life. This conclusion, too,
is authentically Augustinian: throughout his works he aligns emotional turmoil with the lack of a constant and reliable object. When in his youth an
unnamed close friend died unexpectedly, Augustine describes how upset he
was and concludes that the problem was in loving mortal, and hence transitory, things (conf. ....). The shock of loss, the anxiety over keeping
possession of a good that can be lost against ones will, the successive attachments to different objects all these make up the tumultuousness of ordinary
emotional life. Augustine insists that the presence of an assured eternal loving
relationship would in fact transform the emotions into something that is calm
and settled, or, in a word, dispassionate; he is arguably correct.
We might of course reject Augustines thesis that the only cure for desire is
something eternal. If we do reject it, the possibility of mundane blessedness,
or of emotional turmoil even in Heaven, become live possibilities. Yet even
if we accept his thesis, it is unclear how dispassionate heavenly love and
elation are. For Augustine wants them to do the job of explicating the reward
of the Beatific Vision, to justify suffering in this life, and to make Heaven a
plausible ethical ideal. He cant easily do that if the saints are never more
than quietly pleased about their lot in the afterlife.
Assessing the degree to which Augustine is successful in forging a theory
of dispassionate passions isnt easy, since he does not usually give precise
accounts or technical details. Whether we find it philosophically adequate or
not I for one would like a lot more detail first Augustine was taken to
43
Augustine takes these two passions, anger (ira) and lust (libido or concupiscentia) to
be paradigmatic of two parts of the soul distinct from and often opposed to reason,
in good Platonic fashion (ciu. .).

THOMAS AQUINAS
be authoritative on these points in the Middle Ages. No need to engage the

Stoic arguments; Augustine has disposed of them. And it became a part of
Christian dogma that human nature, prior to Original Sin, is free of desire
and fear; that in Heaven there are dispassionate passions, which, even more
paradoxically than anything the Stoics came up with, are passionately felt
there; that human emotions have to be situated between love and will. Such
was Augustines legacy.
. THOMAS AQUINAS
The Augustinian view of dispassionate passions is part of the philosophical/theological inheritance of the Middle Ages. As such, it is assumed more
often than argued for, and generally treated as one of the many background
truths that helped define the medival intellectual landscape. But that landscape underwent a seismic shift with the recovery and gradual assimilation
of Aristotle; old wine had to be poured into new bottles, including the Augustinian heritage. Thomas Aquinas is one of the few who directly address
dispassionate passions, trying to fit Augustines conclusions into his adopted
Aristotelian framework.
Begin with Aquinass general account of the passions. Once he has established that there are passions in the soul, the first order of business to which
Aquinas turns is whether the passions are appetitive or cognitive (uer. .
and sum. theol. a .). Citing Augustines remarks in ciu. . as precedent, Aquinas argues that the passions can only motivate action as they
unquestionably do if representations of their objects occur in a context in
which they move the agent (as in the appetite) rather than one in which such
representations are merely assessed for their informational content (as in cognition). Hence the passions belong to the appetitive part of the soul.
Given the division between parts of the soul, Aquinass conclusion about
dispassionate passions is foregone. But in the course of replying to an objection, he offers a radical departure from Augustine and the Stoics. There
are two ways in which bodily organs used by the soul may undergo change
(sum. theol. a .): immaterially, when it receives the representation (intentio) of the object in the organ, and materially, when the organ itself undergoes
a physical change. In visual perception the immaterial reception of the representation is essential, whereas any change in the eye is merely incidental
(the eye does not itself become coloured). Matters are different with the passions:44
44
Aquinas, sum. theol. a . ad : Sed ad actum appetitus sensitiui per se ordinatur huiusmodi transmutatio: unde in definitione motuum appetitiuae partis

THOMAS AQUINAS
The actualization of the sensitive appetite is essentially an instance of the

second sort of change. Accordingly, in the definition of the movements of
the appetitive part, some natural change in an organ is materially given.
Anger, for example, is said to be the boiling of blood around the heart.
For Aquinas, the somatic manifestations of a passion are an essential part of
the passion. Or, to put the point another way, only an embodied person
can have emotions. This contrasts sharply with Augustine, who was careful
to insist in his discussion of the passions that he was concerned with them
primarily as mental events.45 The Stoics were committed to thinking that
all psychological events have material explanations in the end, but they are
clear that the Zenonian psychological states of expansion, contraction, and
so on, are not essentially somatic but rather mental. Aquinas breaks with
tradition in holding that both immaterial and material changes are essential
to the passions.
Aquinas begs the question, though. His claims are directed to the sensitive
appetite, but at this point he has argued only that the passions belong to the
appetitive part of the soul; whether they belong to intellective or sensitive
appetite has not yet been settled, and it is in fact the next question he takes
up (sum. theol. a .). Passions do have a somatic component, but for all
we yet know this could be no more than a contingent causal effect of their
being an intellective appetite; Aquinas owes us an argument for his radical
conclusion, but we do not get one. If anything, he makes matters worse by
relying on his question-begging reply to argue that the passions belong to the
sensitive appetite:46
As we have remarked, a passion is strictly found where there is a physiological change. This is found in actualizations of the sensitive appetite:
it is not only immaterial, as it is in the case of sensitive apprehension, but
also natural. Yet in actualizations of the intellective appetite a physiolog-
45
46
materialiter ponitur aliqua naturalis transmutation organi: sicut dicitur, quod ira
est accensio sanguinis circa cor [De an. . b ].
The burden of ciu. . is to establish that the Platonists are mistaken in thinking
that emotions are due solely to the souls entanglement with the body; part of
Augustines argument is that the four basic types of passion are not intrinsically
connected to the body, and can be experienced purely as mental phenomena.
Aquinas, sum. theol. a .: Dicendum quod, sicut iam dictum est, passio proprie inuenitur ubi est transmutatio corporalis. Quae quidem inuenitur in actibus
appetitus sensitiui; et non solum spiritualis, sicut est in apprehensione sensitiua,
sed etiam naturalis. In actu autem appetitus intellectiui non requiritur aliqua transmutatio corporalis, quia huiusmodi appetitus non est uirtus alicuius organi. Unde
patet quod ratio passionis magis proprie inuenitur in actu appetitus sensitiui quam
intellectiui.

THOMAS AQUINAS
ical change is not required, since this kind of appetite is not the faculty
associated with an organ. Accordingly, it is clear that the passions are
more strictly found in the actualization of the sensitive, rather than the
intellective, appetite.
Why are the passions not phenomena of intellective appetite, that is, of the
will? Aquinass reply boils down to the claim that the passions necessarily
involve somatic changes. That is to travel in a small circle indeed; no wonder
his reasoning was challenged in short order.47
Aquinas does not hesitate to draw the consequences of his view, questionbegging or not. If the passions are restricted to the sensitive appetite, then
they can only exist in beings that have sensitive appetite, namely animals and
human beings. By the same token, there can be no passions in beings that
lack sensitive appetite: God, angels, and discorporate human souls. There is
no mistaking Aquinass clear language. Passions are essentially physiological
phenomena, and thus are not possible for bodiless beings.48 Indeed, Aquinas
explicitly declares that when a human being dies, the hope or the fear he
may have had regarding his postmortem existence do not remain in his soul,
dependent as the passions are upon the body (uer. . ad and . ad ).
Given the strict separation of psychological faculties and the requirement that
passions have a somatic component, there seems little prospect for dispassionate passions. In particular, Aquinas cannot adopt Augustines strategy of
finding a pure delight that is qualitatively transformed in Heaven by dint of
being directed to an eternal object. There are no grounds in Aquinas for any
kind of delight, or other passion, in a bodiless state, no matter the object or
the surrounding circumstances. Yet Aquinas is just as committed as Augustine
in no small measure because of Augustine to heavenly happiness and to
Gods love for all of creation. These must be dispassionate; the question is
how they can be passionate at all.
Aquinass strategy is to identify something that is analogous to the passions which can be attributed to bodiless beings, a line he finds support for in
47
48
For example, when Duns Scotus takes up in his ord. d. q. the question
whether moral virtues have their seat in the will, he recites Aquinass argument
that they do not, because they regulate the passions which are restricted to the
sensitive appetite (n. ), and replies that there are passions in the will strictly
speaking (nn. ) citing Augustines reduction of the four basic passions to
the will in ciu. . (described above) as support. There is a parallel discussion in
Scotuss Reportatio, in which Scotus declares that the will is prone to take delight
along with (condelectandum) the sensitive appetite.
See, for instance, uer. . and .; sum. theol. a . ad , . ad , .;
sum. theol. a . ad , . ad ; c. gent. .. There are many other passages
to the same effect.

THOMAS AQUINAS
Augustines remarks in ciu. . about how we attribute emotions to God and

angels based on a certain likeness in the deeds they perform (cited above).
While Augustines intent was deflationary, meant to explain how God and angels do not really have passions, Aquinas draws instead the moral that there
is a likeness between the passions and something in God and angels that licenses talk of passions in their case.
Now Aquinas holds that cognitive and affective psychology differ in virtue
of their distinct primary objects: the former is concerned with the true, while
the latter is concerned with the good (sum. theol. a . ad ).49 This intensional difference reflects the fact that on the one hand the cognitive powers
assimilate and process information, while on the other hand the appetitive
powers move the agent toward the good and away from evil, whether at
the level of sensitive appetite (the passions) as passive powers, or at the level
of intellective appetite (the will) as an active power. This motive aspect is
what characterizes affective psychology generally, making it a distinct branch
of inquiry apart from cognitive psychology. When he wants to speak of an
action of the appetitive power generally, Aquinas uses the term affection (affectio).50 Passions and volitions are equally affections, since they are appetitive
acts that move their subject to action. Some volitions might therefore be analogous to passions. This is in fact the line of thought Aquinas pursues: when
love or elation or the like are attributed to God or angels, or even to human
beings with respect to the intellective appetite, they signify a simple act of the
will with similar effects but free of passion.51 The dispassionate analogue to
passion, then, is a simple act of the will.
The faculty of intellective appetite, the will, is not in general similar to
the sensitive appetite, domain of the passions. For one thing, it is not divided
into concupiscible and irascible parts the burden of sum. theol. a ...
The will is a single psychological faculty. Like its cognitive counterpart, the
49
50
51
See P. King, The Inner Cathedral in Vivarium (), , for Aquinass

account of the distinction between cognitive and affective psychology (especially
).
See R. Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions (Cambridge University Press ),
for Aquinass use of affectio and . for the sense in which affections have
motive power.
Aquinas, sum. theol. a . ad : Amor et gaudium et alia huiusmodi, cum
attribuuntur Deo uel angelis, aut hominibus secundum appetitum intellectiuum,
significant simplicem actum uoluntatis cum similitudine effectus, absque passione.
The same suggestion is offered in sum. theol. a ., where Aquinas describes
pleasure occurring in the intellective appetite as a simple act of will and declares
(ad ) that it is not a passion strictly speaking, but is rather a simple movement
(simplex motum), just as it is in the case of God and angels.

THOMAS AQUINAS
intellect, the will is not essentially bound to the physiology of its subject. It can
therefore be possessed by bodiless beings, and, like the intellect, is retained
by the human soul even when the soul becomes separated from the body.
Unlike the sensitive appetite, however, the will is an active potency. It is the
intellective principle of motion in the agent, directed to the good in general
as its object, and its particular acts are volitions, each of which moves the
agent in some way.
At a minimum, simple acts of will are analogous to passions in that they
are principles of movement within the agent, that is, in that each is an affection. But that seems too thin a basis to claim any genuine similarity between
passions and (simple) volitions. At the least, Aquinas owes us an account of
which volitions are properly analogous to the passions. He admits as much
when discussing what affections are present in the postmortem human soul:
Elation and fear, which are passions, do not remain in the separated soul,
since they are involved with physiological change; but there do remain acts
of the will that are similar to these passions (uer. . ad ).52 But what is it
for an act of will to be similar to the passion of fear (say)? Aquinas proposes
the following account:53
Love, desire, and so on are taken in two ways: (a) in that they are certain
passions, that is, occurring along with some mental commotion, and taken
generally in this way they exist only in the sensitive appetite; (b) they
signify a simple affection free of passion or mental commotion, and in
this way they are acts of the will, and also are attributed to angels and to
God.
These affections, act of will that are not associated with mental commotion
(animi concitatio), are not passions by definition. They are dispassionate passions, the volitional correlate to passions call them pseudopassions.54
Were Aquinas to leave matters at that, his notion of dispassionate passions
would hardly be compelling; it is not very enlightening to be told that dispassionate fear is just like passionate fear except that it is an act of will which does
52
53
54
See also uer. . ad .

Aquinas, sum. theol. a . ad : Dicendum est quod amor, concupiscentia, et
huiusmodi dupliciter accipiuntur. Quandoque quidem secundum quod sunt quaedam passiones, cum quadam scilicet concitatione animi provenientes. Et sic communiter accipiuntur, et hoc modo sunt solum in appetitu sensitiuo. Alio modo
significant simplicem affectum, absque passione vel animi concitatione. Et sic sunt
actus uoluntatis. Et hoc etiam modo attribuuntur angelis et Deo.
See the discussions in P. King, Aquinas on the Passions in S. MacDonald and
E. Stump (eds.), Aquinass Moral Theory (Ithaca NY: Cornell University
Press ); R. Miner, Aquinas on the Passions ..

THOMAS AQUINAS
not involve mental commotion. How is fear a choice, or at least relevantly

like a choice? What is fear if there is no commotion, turmoil, upset? Fortunately, Aquinas does not leave matters at that. His considered response has
three parts: an account of how dispassionate passions are possible; the ground
on which they are legitimately the analogues to passions; and the grounds for
attributing them to various bodiless beings.
In sum. theol. a .. Aquinas takes up the question whether there is love
in God. In replying to and objection, Aquinas points out that in the passions
of the sensitive appetite there may be distinguished something quasi-material,
namely the physiological change, and something quasi-formal, which is on
the side of the appetite (ad ). Anger, for instance, involves blood boiling
around the heart as its material element, and the desire for revenge (appetitus uindictae) as its formal element; each is essential to the nature of fear qua
passion. In the case of dispassionate passions the material element is left out,
of course. It is rather the formal element that provides the ground for the
analogous dispassionate passion. Very roughly, in the analogue to a passion,
the will adopts the object of the passion. So, for example, Aquinas argues that
God experiences elation (c. gent. .) and love (c. gent. .), in their dispassionate form, expanding on his earlier abbreviated reference to simple acts
of the will:55
Now the operations of the appetite are classified into kinds according to
their objects. Hence in the intellective appetite, the will, we find operations that are similar in respect of their kind to the operations of the
sensitive appetite; but they differ in that they are passions in the sensitive
appetite, due to its connection with a bodily organ, whereas in the intellective appetite they are simple operations. For just as someone avoids a
future evil through the passion of fear, which is in the sensitive appetite,
so too the intellective appetite does the same thing but without passion.
The volitional analogue to love is targeted at the same object as passionate
love, without passion (and certainly without a somatic component). But
what is love without passion? It is to wish another well (uelle bonum alium)
in a simple act of the will (sum. theol. a . ad ), such as God or angels
55
Aquinas, c. gent. .: Sed operationes appetitus speciem ex obiectis sortiuntur.

Inueniuntur igitur in appetitu intellectiuo, qui est uoluntas, similes operationes secundum rationem speciei operationibus appetitus sensitiui, in hoc differentes quod
in appetitu sensitiuo sunt passiones, propter coniuncionem eius ad organum corporale, in intellectiuo autem sunt operationes simplices: sicut enim per passionem
timoris, quae est in appetitu sensitiuo, refugit quis malum futurum, ita sine passione intellectiuus appetitus idem operatur. N. Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of
Theism (Oxford University Press ) has an insightful discussion of this
passage, and of dispassionate passions generally.

THOMAS AQUINAS
might have. So too for the pseudopassion of elation, which is a simple act
of the will reposing (quiescere) in some possessed good, a point he reiterates
in c. gent. .. By contrast, the pseudopassion of distress is experienced by
demons or the damned as a simple act of the wills resistance (renisus uoluntatis) to what is or to what is not (sum. theol. a .).56 The basis for calling
pseudopassions similar to passions is thus twofold. On the one hand, like any
affection, passions and pseudopassions are principles of movement within the
agent. On the other hand, they share the same object, although that object
is the target of different faculties. Hence these pseudopassions are genuinely
analogous to the passions, while systematically differing from them.57 Human beings are perfectly capable of having dispassionate passions in this life,
since they are simple acts of will, alongside ordinary passions; it is only after death, in the absence of the body, that human souls are limited to the
pseudopassions.
As the example of distress suggests, Aquinas, unlike Augustine or the Stoics, holds that all passions have dispassionate analogues. The whole panoply
of the passions found in the sensitive appetite is replicated at the level of the
intellective appetite. This means that Aquinas has to find some way to differentiate between dispassionate passions that can occur in God or angels,
and those that cannot but may occur in us. He sketches his account briefly
in sum. theol. a . ad , and presents it at greater length in c. gent. .,
where he takes up the question whether there are affective passions (passiones
affectuum) in God. As we should expect, Aquinas is careful to note that there
cannot literally be passions in God, since passions are necessarily accompanied by physiological changes, as well as being passive potencies. But now
Aquinas draws a distinction. Some passions must be absent from God not
only because of the kind of thing they are, namely physiological, but because
56
57
Aquinas devotes uer. . to the question how a separated human soul can be said
to suffer, and in particular how the damned suffer in Hell if they have no bodies.
The solution he finds most plausible, though as a matter of faith rather than proof,
is that discorporate human souls are (unnaturally) united to physical fire as their
substantial form, and so are imbued with its heat. It is not clear that the same
view can be applied to fallen angels, though; human souls are fit by nature to be
the substantial form of an associated body, though not the fire to which they are
joined, whereas the fallen angels, like all angels, are purely immaterial beings.
To the best of my knowledge Aquinas does not use the term analogy in any of
his discussions of dispassionate passions. His technical theory of analogy seems
quite well-suited to clarify and illuminate his account, however, despite his avoidance of its terminology. The precise details of Aquinass theory of analogy have
been a matter of controversy since the Middle Ages. For a recent account, see
R. McInerny, Aquinas and Analogy (Catholic University of America ).

THOMAS AQUINAS
their objects are unsuitable. Distress, for example, by its very nature cannot
be present in God, since it is directed at an evil that one possesses but God
cannot have evil present in Himself in any form.58 Similar reasoning applies
to hope (spes): the eventual transformation of Stoic is inappropriate
for God, since there is no good that He lacks. Likewise for desire, fear, and
anger. But the Augustinian , elation and love, are not ruled out by
their objects or by the relation in which the subject stands to their objects. As
Aquinas remarks, these pseudopassions can be properly predicated of God
though without attributing passion to Him (sum. theol. a . ad ). Other attributions of passions to God, even analogously, are improper or in some way
metaphorical, as when God is described as angry (not literally or analogously
possible but so-called in light of the effects of His actions: sum. theol. a .
ad ). The upshot is that, as Aquinas puts it, human beings have elation
in common with brute animals and with angels (sum. theol. a . ad ).
Even more: elation in its intellectual (dispassionate) form is more intense
and far greater than any mere bodily pleasure, as Aquinas goes on to argue
(sum. theol. a .).
Aquinas takes his account of dispassionate passions to improve on the Stoics (sum. theol. a .). While arguing for Aristotelian moderation, rather
than Stoic extirpation, of the passions, Aquinas approvingly cites Augustines view that the Stoics differ only verbally from Aristotle, as can be seen
from their endorsement of dispassionate passions. Proof that the difference
is merely verbal is found in calling only inordinate affections passions: then
Aristotle also holds that they are not to be found in the virtuous person. The
Stoics, Aquinas charges, failed to distinguish the passions from other human
affections, and so conflated pseudopassions with passions, not keeping the
sensitive appetite distinct from the intellective appetite.
While Aquinass criticism has some justice to it, his own account of dispassionate passions might fall victim to a similar charge of verbal trickery. It is
all well and good for Aquinas to claim that the human experience of elation is
common to animals and to angels, but strictly speaking his claim is false, since
it equivocally conflates passions with pseudopassions: humans have passions
(acts of the sensitive appetite) literally in common with other animals, and humans may also have pseudopassions (acts of the intellective appetite) literally
in common with angels, but the two kinds of acts are distinct, even if they are
analogous to one another. We could as well say that the human experience
58
Aquinas, c. gent. .: Quaedam autem passiones remouentura Deo non solum ratione sui generis, sed etiam ratione speciei. Omnis enim passio ex obiecto speciem
recipit. Cuius igitur obiectum omnino est Deo incompetens, talis passio a Deo remouetur etiam secumdum rationem propriae speciei.

THOMAS AQUINAS
of cognition is common to animals and angels, on the grounds that human

beings have sense-perception (like animals) and also reasoning (like angels).
Philosophical doubts raised about the accounts of dispassionate passions
offered by the Stoics and Augustine had to do with whether the approved
emotions, the Stoic or Augustinian , were properly dispassionate.
For Aquinas the difficulty is rather in seeing how the pseudopassions are emotions at all, rather than merely being volitional directives to the same ends
to which the passions move us. Consider his prized dispassionate passions,
namely elation and love. Elation, Aquinas declares, is a matter of the wills
resting in its object (c. gent. .: quaedam quietatio uoluntatis in suo uolito).
There is, arguably, an appropriate intellective attitude to have toward a good
in ones possession not an occurrent feeling, but more like the satisfaction
one might take in a job well done. It is even harder to map out a volitional
equivalent to love. We might see it as an extension of the intellective attitude
of benevolence, that is, of wishing another well for his or her own sake; more
difficult is to understand the unifying and binding aspects of love on a pure
volitional level (c. gent. .).59 The difficulty is whether such intellectualized
volitional responses should count as emotions. They seem to leave out the
feeling that is essential to emotion. A well-programmed android could likewise evaluate situations are likely to cause damage and therefore take action
to avoid them without having any feelings about it. We can recognize that the
android evaluates and responds to its circumstances in an appropriate way,
but then, so does a well-designed thermostat. The philosophical question at
issue here is whether Aquinass pseudopassions have enough of the features
we might associate with emotions to be deserving of the name in their own
right. Clearly Aquinass pseudopassions provide their subject with motivational force, though of a different character and order from that provided by
the passions namely to motivate dispassionately and hence are analogous
to the passions in being affections, in Aquinass technical sense. But this may
not be enough. At best, we might think, Aquinas can only offer a pale volitional counterfeit of the real thing. No matter how he tries to disguise the fact,
holding the view that it would be a good thing for Adam to prosper seems a
far cry from loving Adam.60 Yet Aquinas is committed not only to this, but
59
60
See Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Theism , for an analysis of Aquinass

account of Gods love.
Aquinas may have a loophole. The conclusions of the Summa theologiae and the
Summa contra gentiles include only results established by natural reason. Therefore,
Aquinas could maintain that the supernal delights of Heaven are a matter of faith
rather than reason, and this might be true even if to us it seems simply impossible.
It need not be any more impossible or contrary to reason than the doctrine of

CONCLUSION
to the further claim that his immaterial pseudopassions are better than their
material counterparts. It is hard to see why we should think so. Intellectual
benevolence is a fine thing, but hardly to be confounded with passionate love,
and no match for the latters intensity.
CONCLUSION
We have now seen what two medival philosophers have done with the
paradoxical notion of dispassionate passions inherited from the Stoics. In
each case the results are mixed, as indeed they are in the case of the Stoics themselves; none of the three accounts examined here is philosophically
satisfying. That may be no more than the best a paradoxical doctrine can
hope for. The alternative is to give up the paradox entirely. This road was
taken by a distinct tradition stemming from Augustine, one that starts with
the notion Aquinas has so arduously laboured to devise: the affections of
the will.61 Anselm of Canterbury picks up on Augustines claim that the
passions are all forms of willing, and, in his De casu Diaboli, postulates two
fundamental affections: (a) willing justice; (b) willing advantage. These are
not two distinct faculties in each agent, but two orientations or directions in
which the agents single faculty of will is pulled; indeed, it is constitutive of
individual moral agency. Anselm himself does not try to align (a)(b) with
the passions of the soul, but as his work came to be read during the period
of High Scholasticism, particularly by Franciscan philosophers, there came
to be a distinct augustinian strain in the philosophy of psychology in which
the passions were not narrowly confined to the sensitive appetite, as Aquinas
would have it, but are themselves ways of willing that is, affections of the
will. Scotus and Ockham, for example, talk about (ordinary) passions as being in the will: not in Aquinass pickwickian sense, but such that anger (say)
has a physiological and a volitional component. To take this approach, however, is to discard the need for dispassionate passions. The passions can be
only materially and accidentally connected with their somatic manifestations,
and be capable of existing in full-blooded form as passions in the intellective
appetite alone. Spelling out how this is possible is not easy; it is very close to
Aquinass task of constructing volitional counterparts of the sensitive passions.
But with a difference, for on this alternate anselmian approach there can be
61
the Trinity. The rapturous delights of Heaven are part of revealed theology, not
natural theology.
For a further discussion of this tradition, as well as an attempt to summarize the
several trends of thought about the emotions in the course of the Middle Ages, see
P. King, Emotions in Medieval Thought in P. Goldie (ed.), The Oxford Handbook
of Philosophy of Emotion (Oxford: Oxford University Press ).

CONCLUSION
phenomenal qualities associated with acts of volition, and these feelings (the
medival reinvention of Zenonian psychological states) might provide the
joy in heavenly joyfulness.
For all that, this anselmian tradition could not avoid the doctrine of dispassionate passions, with its paradoxical character. For after Augustine the
doctrine passed into the framework of Christian thought, becoming standard
and part of the intellectual furniture of the untidy warehouse that was the
medival mind. Aquinass attempt to underwrite the doctrine, however successful we might find it, certainlly added further legitimacy to dispassionate
passions. How the doctrine passed from its unlicensed ubiquity in the Middle Ages into early modern philosophy, if indeed that is the route the idea
traveled on its way to Spinoza and others, remains to be explored.
Peter King University of Toronto

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c Peter King, in Reason and Emotion in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy

All translations are mine.

not averse to couching their theories in paradoxes. A closer look at (a)(c )

Diogenes Lrtius, uit. .:

k d tn yeudn pignesqai tn diastrofn p tn

dinoian, f' j poll pqh blastnein ka katastasaj atia.

sions a sketch presumably capable of being further elaborated by providing

Press ) , and T. Tieleman, Chrysippus On Affections: Reconstruction and

don d logoj parsij; d a prsfatoj gaqo parousaj,

. See also Stobaeus, ecl. .. (perhaps derived

Stoic passions are therefore response-dependent evaluative concepts, much as

The sense in which a passion is not rational ( logoj) is disputed, as indeed is

often formulated orally rather than written down in detailed fashion.11

Galen, plac. ..: tn paqn p te Znwnoj erhmnoi ka prj to Xrusppou

wooden insensitivity, or an inhuman denial.18 Yet it is none of these. It is

See T. Irwin, Stoic inhumanity in J. Sihvola and T. Engberg-Pedersen (Eds.),

ka tn mn xarn nantan fasn enai t don, osan elogon parsin; tn

d'elbeian t fbw, osan elogon kklisin.

odamj, elabhqsesqai d. t d' piquma nantan fasn enai tn bolhsin, osan

. The same trio are given in Pseudo-Andronicus, Per paqn

There is no counterpart to distress because the soul has no rational response

J. Rist, Stoic Philosophy (Cambridge University Press ) : It would have

We are now in a position to return to the question with which we began

gument that Stoic rationality entails a form of emotional detachment,23 which

Therefore, it can be said, not absurdly, that complete blessedness will be

be authoritative on these points in the Middle Ages. No need to engage the

The actualization of the sensitive appetite is essentially an instance of the

Augustines remarks in ciu. . about how we attribute emotions to God and

See P. King, The Inner Cathedral in Vivarium (), , for Aquinass

See also uer. . ad .

not involve mental commotion. How is fear a choice, or at least relevantly

Aquinas, c. gent. .: Sed operationes appetitus speciem ex obiectis sortiuntur.

of cognition is common to animals and angels, on the grounds that human

See Kretzmann, The Metaphysics of Theism , for an analysis of Aquinass

Peter King University of Toronto

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Ennarationes in Psalmos . Verlag der osterreichischen

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Testard, M. (). Saint Augustin et Ciceron. Paris: Etudes

REFERENCES AND FURTHER READING

Wetzel, J. (). Augustine and the Limits of Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge

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k d tn yeudn pignesqai tn diastrofn p tn

dinoian, f' j poll pqh blastnein ka katastasaj atia.

don d logoj parsij; d a prsfatoj gaqo parousaj,

Galen, plac. ..: tn paqn p te Znwnoj erhmnoi ka prj to Xrusppou

ka tn mn xarn nantan fasn enai t don, osan elogon parsin; tn

odamj, elabhqsesqai d. t d' piquma nantan fasn enai tn bolhsin, osan