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The Roots of Despair 831 THE ROOTS OF DESPAIR Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung Abstract: This paper is an exploration of the Thomistic vice of despair, one of two vices opposed to the theo- logical virtue of hope. Aquinas’s conception of despair as a vice, and a theological vice in particular, distances him from contemporary use of the term “despair” to de- scribe an emotional state. His account nonetheless yields a compelling psychological portrait of moral degeneration, which I explain via despair’s link to its “root,” the capital vice of sloth. Cases in which sloth and its offspring vices progress into full-fledged despair raise interesting issues about whether and how despair might be remediable. I conclude by considering puzzles regarding despair’s disor- dered effects on the intellect and will and weighing three possible means of remedying it. My purpose in this paper is to understand despair—despair, that is, in its technical Thomistic sense, as a vice opposed to the theological virtue of hope. Aquinas’s conception of despair as a vice, and a theological vice in particular, distances him from contemporary use of the term “despair” to describe an emotional state. Nonetheless, his account yields a compelling psychological portrait of moral degeneration and raises interesting issues about whether and how despair might be remediable. In this paper, my focus will be to explain despair’s link to its “root,” the capital vice of sloth. The conclusions I draw will thus be my attempt to reconstruct Aquinas’s view of the connection and character of these two vices. By way of preliminaries, I should be clear that I will not attempt to offer a comprehensive account of the vice of despair, and while I will be drawing from the questions on the passions in the Summa theologiae (discussed by Aquinas at ST 1–2.40), his work there will chiefly serve to illuminate despair as a vice.1 Secondly, I should note that my task is made difficult 1 Summa theologiae (1948) (hereafter ST), trans. Fathers of the English Dominican unless indicated otherwise. The Latin critical edition of all Aquinas’s works cited in this essay can be found at http://www.corpusthomisticum.org/. I will only hint at connections between Aquinas’s account to Kierkegaard’s account of despair in The Sickness Unto Death (1983) (another extensive treatment of despair as a vice by a Christian thinker), and will forego making connections to other philosophical accounts of despair, for example, those of twentieth-century existentialists. I leave the exploration of these connections as a further task and extended application of the project I undertake here. Res Philosophica, Vol. 92, No. 4, October 2015, pp. 829–854 http://dx.doi.org/10.11612/resphil.2015.92.4.2 c 2015 Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung • c 2015 Res Philosophica 830 Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung by the paucity of texts on the vice of despair in Aquinas’s work. My focus will mainly be on the Summa theologiae, with a nod to the Disputed Questions on Evil. In ST, there is one question on the vice of despair (and one on presumption) in the questions on hope.2 In that discussion, there is one article on the relationship between despair and sloth. There is also one article at the end of the question on sloth (ST 2–2.35) on the same relationship. Lastly, there are a few sentences on despair in the question on the irascible passions of hope and despair in the questions on the passions (ST 1–2.40 of qq. 22–48). So the account of the relationship between sloth and despair I offer may best be viewed as a sympathetic and imaginative attempt to fill out an account which Aquinas at best sketches in outline. I first briefly consider Aquinas’s account of despair as a vice opposed to hope by way of deficiency. Next I will explain the general structure of the relationship between pride, the capital vices, and their offspring. With that background in place, I will turn to the specific case of despair as an offspring vice of the capital vice of sloth. This will require explicating what sloth is and why the tradition associated it with certain offspring vices, including despair. From there I will construct a Thomistic account of sloth’s degeneration into a particular kind of despair. I will conclude by considering what this account implies about the curability of those with the vice. 1 Situating Despair among the Passions and Virtues Although I am not discussing despair as a passion, it will be useful to see what Aquinas says about despair in the questions on the passions, because his account of the virtues and vices intentionally builds on the moral psy- chology he articulates in his discussion of the passions. Hope and despair are an opposed pair of irascible passions. According to Aquinas, the irasci- ble power of the sensory appetite is directed toward “arduous or difficult” goods (ST 1–2.23.1). Irascible passions thus have a complex object, namely, a good or evil toward which one’s attractions and aversions are complicated by some difficulty attending its attainment. So Aquinas defines hope’s object as a future good which is difficult but possible to obtain (ST 1–2.40.2 and 2–2.17.1), while the object of the passion of despair is the same future good, now construed as so difficult as to be impossible to obtain (ST 1–2.40.4).3 2 Q. 20 of the questions on the theological virtue of hope: ST 2–2.17–22. In the Sentences Commentary (1929) his main topic is whether despair is a sin against the Holy Spirit, and in the Disputed Question on Hope (in Aquinas 2005) his remarks about despair are considerably more brief; hence my focus on the ST as a representative text, especially regarding the question of the connections between the virtues and vices. His remarks on despair as a passion in other texts parallel his discussion in ST 1–2. 3 The objects of the passions are specified not as they are in themselves but according to the subject’s intentiones. For an outline of Aquinas’s cognitivist theory of the emotions (and by analogy, of the will’s affections), see, for example, King 2012, 214–216. The Roots of Despair 831 Whereas hope is an energizing passion,4 one that moves its possessor to strive for the desired good even if this means overcoming difficulty, Aquinas describes the passion of despair as a dampener of desire and activity. It is an appetitive response to an attractive good that looks impossible to attain—or at least whose attainment looks sufficiently daunting as to deflate significantly one’s desire to try, even to the point of complete resignation. Turning to Aquinas’s discussion of the virtues and vices, I will first briefly outline despair’s relation to the virtue of hope (spes). Despair (de-spe- ratio) is a vice of deficiency opposed to the theological virtue of hope.5 Presumption is the vice of excess opposed to hope on the other extreme. Neither vice, however, should be understood as a straightforward deficiency or excess of hope itself (either the passion or the virtue).6 Rather, hope’s distinction from its opposing vices is defined in terms of possibility. In the case of the theological virtue, the future good to be attained with difficulty is union with God (human beings’ supernatural end), which can only be reached with God’s assistance.7 Both despair and presumption close off the possibility of attaining this arduous, as-yet-unattained good. They do so by treating this good as something other than a possible good. In presumption, the appetite stands toward the future good as if that good had been already attained or is somehow otherwise secured; despair’s appetitive stance, on the other hand, treats the future good as closed off forever, as wholly unattainable now and always. In both cases, the will “rests” in a false end, rather than being inclined and moved toward an end not yet reached. Those with presumption or despair orient themselves toward the 4 See Cates 2009, 150: the one with hope “finds it invigorating to rise to a challenge” and approaches the object “with high energy”; and Miner 2009, 226–227: “hope promotes activity.” As I will show later, sloth that gives rise to despair is defined as a kind of sorrow, which is characteristically inimical to initiative, movement, and energy (hence the perennial confusion of sloth and laziness). See Aquinas’s discussion of “torpor,” the fourth species of sorrow, in ST I–II 35.8. 5 The closest candidate for a natural or acquired virtue of hope, for Aquinas, is the virtue of magnanimity (ST 2–2.129–133). For an excellent treatment of that topic in relation to hope, see Miner 2009, 226–227. For a fuller treatment of the virtue of hope and its practices of resistance against despair, see DeYoung 2014. 6 Aquinas offers a tricky application of the Aristotelian doctrine of the mean. Technically, one cannot have too much hope in God, according to the meaning of hope as a theological virtue (not, say, as a passion, the case in which the doctrine of the mean was originally meant to apply); rather, one can have the wrong relationship to the object of hope, made possible on the side of excess by one’s overestimation of and over-reliance on God’s power and mercy. In other words, it is presuming too much of God to count on him to assist even sinners who refuse to repent.
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