Two Families of Passion: Attraction and Difficulty

The chapter's central question

Concupiscible passion is a movement toward or avoiding good and evil in itself, and irascible passion is a movement that wrestles with objects that are difficult to obtain or avoid. A difficult good that is still possible gives rise to hope, and a good that seems impossible gives rise to despair. If you think you can overcome the difficult evil that comes your way, you will feel bold, but if you think you cannot overcome it, you will feel fear.

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Thomas clearly divided human emotions (passions) into two major rooms. This classification is also strikingly similar to the emotion classification in psychology today.

�️ Pillar 1: Passiones Concupiscibiles

These are the six most direct basic emotions that attract us towards the ‘good’ we like and avoid the ‘evil’ we dislike.

① Love (Amor) ↔ ② Hate (Odium) / ③ Desire (Desiderium) ↔ ④ Disgust (Fuga) / ⑤ Joy (Gaudium) ↔ ⑥ Sorrow (Tristitia)

️ Pillar 2: Passiones Irascibiles

But life is not just a flowery path. When a great obstacle stands in the way of achieving the good you want, or when it is difficult to avoid a terrible danger, the soul enters a state of desperate struggle. These are the five emotions that arise at this time.

① Hope (Spes) ↔ ② Despair (Desperatio) / ③ Courage (Audacia) ↔ ④ Fear (Timor) / ⑤ Anger (Ira)

Thomas justified that anger is not simply a bad emotion, but 'a strong energy of resistance that seeks to destroy the obstacles and injustice that confront me and restore the original good.'

Context and nuance

Thomas Aquinas deals with the passions in the detailed format of question-rebuttal-answer in Summa Theologiae, Part 1, Part 2 (I–II), questions 22-48. By reconstructing Aristotle's theory of the soul and ethics within the Christian understanding of human beings, we see that for humans with bodies, emotions are not accidental defects but natural movements of sensuous desires.

Because of the name anger system, it is easy to misunderstand all emotions as aggression, but the key is the difficulty. Anger is a special movement aimed at restoring justice in the face of harm that has already been done, so it has no counterpart, an opposing passion. This structure shows that emotions contain judgments about the potential as well as the value of an object.

Do not oversimplify it this way

Medieval ‘passion’ does not exactly overlap with the passive passion of modern Korean. Also, the categories of desire and anger should not be treated as if they were two brain circuits or personality types. This is a system that logically divides the movement of desires according to the way good or evil comes to them with ease or difficulty.

Philosophy in life

Have you ever felt guilty because of the emotions rising like fire in your heart, even though your head said, ‘I need to forgive, I need to stay calm’?

Exploring the direction of emotion: Distinguish whether my mind is simply likes and dislikes (desire world) or a struggle against obstacles (anger world)

Primary-source guide

Primary guide: Summa Theologiae I–II, qq. 22–48, especially qq. 24, 25, 38, and 40–48.

Pathos Editorial · Reviewed 2026-09-12