Servais Pinckaers, O.P., Passions and Virtue. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2015.

Long before he was a household name, Thomas Alva Edison filled his day (and his head) with designs, inventions, and projects. It all began with a simple exercise: do I understand this device well enough to take it apart? Nothing helps decode a complex system better than opening it up and seeing what makes it tick.

It does not require much skill to crack something open—the real feat is putting it back together. In Passions and Virtue, the last book he wrote before his death, Fr. Servais Pinckaers, O.P., tries to reinsert a part of the moral life that has sat decrepit for modern Westerners—the essential role of the passions. To do this, he pits St. Thomas Aquinas against the reductionist project of René Descartes, who, Pinckaers argues, left much of this mess behind.

Descartes sought to shift the evaluation of the passions (commonly called the emotions) from the experiential to the physiological. Much like his project in epistemology, he aimed to ground his account in ideas that were simple, clear, and (most importantly) certain. For this reason, he only accepted data gathered from external observation, rejecting all subjective experience. In so doing, Descartes forged his own path, as he had little regard for his predecessors, whose accounts he dubbed skimpy and implausible.

Pinckaers, on the other hand, believes that our ancestors—particularly St. Thomas—had a healthier understanding of the passions that merits our attention. In Pinckaers’ account, Descartes indeed serves as Aquinas’ primary foil, but this is no dialogue: it is an exposition centered on Aquinas’ thought that seeks to faithfully recapitulate St. Thomas’ moral teaching. To do so, Pinckaers organizes the central part of his book around Aquinas’ classification of each of the passions and its respective object, the object being that which would elicit this passion in us. For example, we naturally learn to love delicious food and to hate the pain caused by injuries.

St. Thomas treats the passions at the beginning of his work on the moral life because, in contrast to the Stoics (both ancient and modern), he sees the passions as essential to living a moral life. In order to choose the good, we first have to find it desirable and even enjoy it! St. Thomas understands morality as girded not by duty to dry obligations, absent any sort of purpose, but grounded upon the acts and virtues conducive to human happiness. The truly virtuous man is distinguished from others by his joy, not by his sense of duty or his subjective contentment. We can identify those who would consider themselves content but are nevertheless not happy: the drunk who is in denial, or the arrogant thinker who is out of touch with what goes on around him. For such individuals, and for all of us, “do whatever makes you happy” is not very helpful advice. This is because certain virtues are needed for happiness, and certain vices would hinder the pursuit of this happiness. If this were not true, we could not regret our missed opportunities. And also, this is why good people arrange interventions for alcoholics, and good friends strive to encourage each other to do good and to overcome faults.

With St. Thomas’ basic schema established, Pinckaers can confidently forage amongst human acts for ones that garner scant notice from Descartes and his heirs. Here Pinckaers devotes time to seldom-considered topics of moral concern such as silence and piety. Furthermore—and perhaps surprisingly to many people today—he shows how humor and anger can positively contribute to the virtuous life.

The chapter on humor is a good example of the difference between St. Thomas’ thinking and that of our day. For St. Thomas, the virtuous person is humorous. We may scoff at this, thinking that no one can be obliged to be funny since forced humor is not funny. But in reality, humor can motivate someone to choose the good and to spurn, even mock, options (and attitudes) that would be counterproductive or even vicious. And this is certainly beneficial.

Camille Pisarro — Haymakers Resting

Furthermore, humor is a form of authentic recreation, the rest one finds in play. In the face of a culture that reinforces the “virtue” of hard work, his reminder that rest is part of the moral life is certainly salutary (59). This appraisal takes something that our current moral language would judge as merely entertaining and elevates it to moral significance, reuniting (in a small way) the morally good with the desirable. The modern cleavage had been introduced by Descartes, after whom “the good has hardened into an imperious and resistant object. Delectation has become soft, merely a subjective and changing impression” (45).

Given that we are men, not machines, our rest and recreation has a substantial impact on our daily lives. This extends both to the quantity and quality of rest. That we need a certain amount of rest should be obvious to all, especially to those laboring under deadlines. But Pinckaers takes the need for substantial and satisfying recreation (such as that which humor affords) to reflect on another dimension of our moral lives. We can choose to rest, but that does not always guarantee that our choices will be restful. So-called periods of rest can often be exhausting: a stressful vacation, some forced humor, an incident of drawn-out small talk, or a TV binge.

Authentic recreation, then, does not come about simply by choosing to pursue it. In fact, to be too earnest in provoking laughter is the death knell for any career on the standup circuit. What makes humor effective, even moral, is the intellect, which has to identify what concrete act (or joke) provides the joy we seek (60). The moral life is not simply about choices, but choices informed by reason.

The book ends with an evaluation of the modern psychological account of morals, which, similar to Descartes, treats morality as a set of internal preferences divorced from the external, material world. In contrast to St. Thomas’ account found earlier in the book, quite a bit has been lost. Gone from the moral life is the conception that God works on us and through us by means of the gifts and fruits of the Holy Spirit. Pinckaers goes out of his way to evaluate and praise a particular, popular psychology textbook for its balance and depth. But, he finds one glaring absence: the virtues. Challenging this omission, Pinckaers appeals solely to our reasoned experience:

Whatever be the scientific considerations, the existence of virtues and vices is a recognized part of our common experience and of major importance to each person. We are all aware of the faults that trouble us and that are the opposite of the qualities that we appreciate, the virtues of which we approve. . . . This is a sign of a general experience; it militates in favor of a renewal of a virtue ethics. (127)

Back to Edison. It seems that our modern conception of morality has more than a few screws loose, and it fails to incorporate the totality of human experience. Like Edison’s approach, we realize that reconstructing a sufficient account of the moral life demands far more ingenuity than its deconstruction. However, Pinckaers’ book provides us with an excellent starting point for beginning to address the gaping holes in the modern account of morality.

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Dominicana Journal, Winter 2015, Vol LVIII, No. 2, CLICK HERE.