Passions:
Everything has a label and a category in theology. Most of the saints managed very well without them; the promptings of the Holy Spirit were sufficient, nevertheless, here are the passions.
The passions are a bit more proactive than the emotions.
In example, we do not merely sense the passion of hope, we must create it. The passion of hate (much maligned), has its emotion, but is more like a virtue, in which we reject what is not good. Passions direct us to use some virtue. If we hate evil, we use virtues such as fortitude or moderation to avoid a specific evil. Passions are principles which activate the virtues.
Saint Thomas Aquinas identified eleven passions or
appetites, and we use this excerpt from the book, “The One Minute Aquinas.”53
53 Paperback, ISBN 978-1-622821-58-7, by Kevin Vost.
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“We are made for what’s good. Indeed, we love and
desire it with our concupiscible appetite. This affinity, this
“certain inclination, aptitude, or connaturalness in respect of the good”, is called love, and it is the overruling human passion. When some good we have perceived has not yet been attained, we experience that bittersweet passion called desire; sweet because it is directed toward the object of our love, bitter because it is beyond our reach.
When we have finally attained the good that we seek, we rest in a state of joy. Thank God that we are all ultimately made to rest in the ultimate joy that he brings. We have a natural inclination to love the good and to hate what is evil. When the evil has not yet been experienced, we feel an aversion, or dislike for it; when we experience an already present evil, we experience sadness or sorrow.”
“When difficulties lie between us and the good that we seek, our irascible appetites are called into play. We experience that positive feeling of hope, when we believe that the good is attainable, and the bleakness of despair,
when we see the obstacles as insurmountable. When we
perceive that a difficult evil may be conquered, we experience the passion of daring, and when we believe we are not up to the task of conquering an evil, we experience fear. When we have already experienced a difficult evil, it raises the ire of our irascible appetite with the passion of anger.”
The passions are part of God’s design of a human person;
the passions are good things which may be misused for evil.
They may be described as ‘emotions requiring a response’. To view a beautiful, or even ugly painting requires on further action…but if we view a mass killing, some further action is required. What do we direct the passion of hope toward?
What do we have desire or aversion to?
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The passions, emotions and virtues all existed as part of
God’s design for humanity before the onset of sin. The passion of hate for instance only took on harmful elements after sin.
Hate in its original form did not include vengeance, venom, or ill will. Hate would have been repulsion from evil, a sort of arms distance choice of non participation.
The irascible passion of despair would not have its modern form. Despair might have been a sort of constructive resignation to the fact that some distant good was not to be; it was simply not part of God’s plan.
Jesus Christ himself, used his passions. From the free online Catholic Encyclopedia article on passions, we read,
“Christ Himself, in whom there could be no sin nor shadow of imperfection, admitted their influence, for we read that He was sorrowful even unto death (Mark 14:34), that He wept over
Jerusalem ( Luke 19 :41), and at the tomb of Lazarus H e groaned in the spirit, and troubled Himself (John 11: 33). St. Paul bids us rejoice with them that rejoice, and weep with them that weep
(Romans 12: 15). 54
Emotions:
There exist long lists and categories of emotions and drives, but we will make only a brief discussion, and two rules regarding them.
Virtues are proactions which we have control over.
Emotions are reactions to virtues or events. The unpracticed beginner often has little control over his emotions, and emotions often assume control over the beginning student.
The experienced student of life and spiritual advancement is the master of his emotions, their occurrence, and his participation in them.
54 Later, at the last supper, Jesus would contract the effects of sin. See the next footnote for details.
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Virtues and emotions can have the same name, but one is
proactive and the other reactive. Love is usually spoken of as the emotion of affection, but it is in fact a willed commitment to good. Joy is a cultivated virtue, but usually thought of as an emotion; the proper terminology would be the virtue of joy, creating the emotion of joyfulness. What creates the joy, which causes the joyfulness? It is fulfillment in virtue, the human moral virtues and the theological virtues which are participatory virtues in God.
Emotions in themselves are not moral acts, as are the virtues, but prolonged participation in an emotion (good or bad) does become a willed act and therefore a moral act.
Emotions do have a real link to their virtue or vice. If we dwell and dwell on the bitterness of an injustice for instance, the vice of revenge will be strengthened in our will, and it may become a willed goal. If we dwell inordinately even on a positive emotion, it may become our goal, or our attempted fulfillment. In both cases we are driven by emotions which we have failed to relegate or to reform.
The saints who have reformed sadness or anger into the
virtues of hope and prayer (for instance), have made rapid spiritual advancement. They are not ruled by the emotion and they do not simply wait out the emotion, by moral effort they make the emotion into a legitimate virtue. They might even choose the heroic option and perfect the emotion into the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. In morally reforming the emotion, they have reformed their very soul, and in doing this as a habit, spiritual advancement in Christ is made.
The two rules for emotions are:
1. Control them, do not let them control you; the longer
you dally with emotions the more they lead you. Even
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good emotions are not supposed to drive a person, virtues of the will should drive a person.
2. Remediate negative emotions into positive virtues, make sadness into strength and hope, make insult
into prayer, make your emotions into virtues.55
Emotions are senses for the virtues and the vices. An
emotion arising from a vice is not legitimate and it must not be allowed to reinforce the vice, instead make the negative emotion into a virtue.56
Finally, we give brief discussion of the three moral faculties of the soul: intellect, will and memory.57
The intellect is our reasoning ability in matters of logic and morality. The intellect conceives, evaluates, judges ideas, including ideas of moral action. The intellect proposes and 55 This is what Jesus did at Gethsemane and on the cross. Every human element of Jesus was corrupted by sin, “he became sin for us”, (2Cor 5:21). Jesus’ emotions, logic, body were all assaulted by sin, the divine will of Jesus alone remained uncorrupted. The wil of Jesus was distinct and human, but also a subset, or contained within the divine will, and necessarily remediated the assaulting sin into virtue. By moral effort, Jesus made every evil assaulting him into virtue of faith, hope and love.
These vices which assaulted Jesus were the apostles’, he took on the virtue and sin of the apostles via the Eucharist at the last supper. Recall also that virtue has both individual and communal natures, Jesus in some way took on the sins of the world. By moral effort, Jesus made their sin into his own virtue. Both remediation of sin and union with Christ were obtained.
56 We observe here that the emotion of sorrow or repentance resulting from sin, actually arises from virtue, not sin. Sin does not encourage repentance, moderation or other virtues, but further stimulation, just for the sake of stimulation. Such selfishness carves away a piece of a goodness as desired by a self orientated will. The will should be orientated toward God, via the ideals of God, with an ultimate end of participation in the very person of God.
57 The soul is the totality of a person’s immaterial being and the operating principle of the soul. The soul has non moral faculties such as consciousness and life, but these are not wil ed by the soul, but given to the soul.
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deliberates, but the will decides. The moral conscience is a faculty of the will; it is moral reasoning, rather than logical reasoning. The will may or may not make the action.
The will decides what, when and how to act. The will decides to do or not to do, the many proposals made by the intellect.
The memory produces not just the recollection of facts and events, but phantasms, images and day dreams.
All three of these faculties affect one another. To produce a better act of will, the intellect must present better ideas to the will. Habits of the will, elevate the entire person, including the intellect.
Idle thoughts and images are one way to evaluate spiritual advancement. This willed memory advances as the will advances.
A final observation is that anyone may advance to perfection. We know that intelligence or memory is fixed by one’s upper limit, or even by health, and these two attributes have a limited meaning in this limited, present life. Virtue (an act of will, not intellect or memory), is unlimited, as God is unlimited. God gives any person a limited intellect or memory in this life, but one’s participation in God, (specifically Christ), is as unlimited, as Christ is unlimited.
In the spiritual life, the will is primary, not the intellect or the memory, (will, intellect, memory, are traditionally the three components of the soul). Consider that any virtue is a form of love; God is love and God forms creation selected from selected portions of his own person (minus divinity). This idea is confirmed in physics which speaks of creation (from the Big Bang) as “unrolling” super dimensions into sub dimensions. In this, Love (commitment to good) is unrolled into specific human dimensions: family, generosity, reverence, humility 51
(lack of self), religion (commitment to God), justice, patience and more. From this we see that anyone of any intellect may perfect his or her virtues, which are far more vital than an accidental intellect.
Three Stages of Spiritual Advancement:
Purgative, Illuminative, Unitive