Moved by the Spirit: Patterning the Gifts on the Passions in Aquinas

Abstract

Moved by the Spirit: Patterning the Gifts on the Passions in Aquinas Monica Marcelli-Chu WHAT IS HIGHEST is grasped according to what is lowest.1 It is fitting, St. Thomas Aquinas affirms, that Scripture teaches spiritual matters by comparison to what is bodily, for the human person “comes to what is intelligible by means of those things that are sensible.”2 What is “more removed from God” is a means by which we come to know God, and so draw nearer to God: “for it is clearer to us what is not of God, than what is.”3 Following this principle, I present the movement of the Holy Spirit in the gifts according to an analogical patterning on the movement of the passions, which ground an understanding of receptivity in human agency. This consideration of passion-movement discloses a mode of activity that emphasizes external agency, and specifies the divine wisdom that undergirds both natural and spiritual instinct. In an essay on the gifts, re-visioning them as being at the center of Thomistic morality, Servais Pinckaers describes instinctus [End Page 273] as needing “to undergo a major transformation” from its use in the broader animal world for use in relation to the Spirit.4 He also notes that spiritual spontaneity is “very different, in its relationship to freedom, from the spontaneity of the senses or of external nature”; and of the instinct of the Holy Spirit he says, “there is obviously nothing blind about such an instinct.”5 The question is thus raised about the relationship between natural and spiritual instinct: can a so-called “blind” instinct of nature be analogically appropriated to spiritual movement? In order to specify this relationship, I investigate passion-movement and its underlying receptivity as the paradigm for being moved by the Spirit in the gifts. This approach considers human activity in terms of movements that reflect the intellectual nature of the human person, even if they are not “properly speaking” rational. “Properly speaking” is a phrase Aquinas often uses to differentiate properties that belong essentially to the nature of a thing or power from those that belong in an extended or accidental sense. In reading Aquinas on human action and virtue, it may be tempting to rely on the former, namely, the essential attributes indicated in a definition.6 Such an approach, however, limits Aquinas’s thought to the realm of the “proper,” leaving aside all other elements as questionable or conjectural.7 Strictly limiting [End Page 274] the meaning of a term in this way is inconsistent with Aquinas’s multivalent use of terms, as well as the limits of particular terms themselves which, in their own limited fashion, signal realities that a term does not (and cannot) fully encapsulate.8 The movement toward precision in understanding the meaning of a term is then also a movement toward grasping its limits.9 In grasping the limits of a term for understanding a reality, the reader grasps the divine mystery and agency that surpasses her reasoned grasp, even as it governs and moves her seeking. The term “human action,” properly speaking, refers to the movement of will under reason’s deliberation of the end and of means to the end; hence the definition of will as “rational appetite.”10 “Passion,” on the other hand, refers to an appetitive movement as “the effect of the agent on the patient,” or as the result of “being drawn to the agent,” namely, the experience of being moved by an agent-object, especially when it involves bodily change; hence passion “properly speaking” belongs to the sensitive appetite.11 While the term “human action” primarily describes the person as a self-mover and bears a direct relation to reason, the term “passion,” as a movement of the sensitive appetite, primarily describes the person as one who is [End Page 275] moved, and is considered a movement that is below reason.12 At the same time, Aquinas uses the term “passion” to describe human action; an extended meaning of the term “passion” is needed to understand the fullness of the reality he calls “human action.”13 The emphasis in Aquinas’s treatment of the virtues is on...