Medieval Scholasticism · 1225–1274
Passions are natural movements of embodied appetite; they become ethically good or bad as they enter the order of reason, choice, and virtue.
Aquinas builds one of the most systematic medieval accounts of emotion. Love and hatred, desire and aversion, hope and fear, pleasure and sorrow, daring and anger form an intelligible map. Reason governs these passions politically—through attention, imagination, habit, and persuasion—rather than like a tyrant commanding inert subjects.
Why organize hundreds of objections and replies about passion like one immense work of architecture?
The scholastic method makes inquiry public. It states objections in strong form, introduces authorities, offers a reasoned answer, and replies point by point. Aquinas uses this structure to test how each passion relates to objects, judgment, body, and action.
How do emotions change when good or evil appears easy to approach versus difficult to attain or avoid?
Concupiscible passions concern good and evil considered directly: love, desire, pleasure, hatred, aversion, and sorrow. Irascible passions respond when difficulty appears: hope, despair, fear, daring, and anger.
Can reason order passion by command, or must it lead as a statesperson persuades citizens?
Aquinas says the sensitive appetite obeys reason politically rather than despotically. Emotion has bodily momentum, memory, and imagination of its own. Reason guides it indirectly by reframing objects and forming habits.
Why can pleasure, tears, friendship, contemplation, sleep, and bathing all count as philosophical responses to sorrow?
Aquinas treats sorrow as both psychic and bodily. Appropriate pleasure can restore movement, tears express pressure, friends share the burden, contemplation widens perspective, and sleep or bathing supports an exhausted body.
Is a virtuous person someone who feels less, or someone whose whole being moves toward the good?
Aquinas argues that well-ordered passion can increase the excellence of action. Courage with fitting confidence and generosity with genuine delight may be more fully human than correct conduct performed through total inner resistance.
Primary guide: Summa Theologiae I–II, qq. 22–48, especially qq. 24, 25, 38, and 40–48.
Pathos Editorial · Reviewed 2026-09-12