Las pasiones en Tomás de Aquino: entre lo natural y lo humano

Abstract

The article’s proposal is to show that the Aristotelian origin, somehow physicallistic, from which Aquinas considers the passions, presents some difficulties, particularly in the moment in which he explains them, we could say phenomenologically, in the same way as these occur in the human person endowed with rationality. The first chapter analyzes the Aristotelian antecedents of the term passion, considered in itself and applied to the sensible beings, within the context of the so called “Treatise of the Passions” in The Summa Theologica. The second studies the passions of the soul in the dynamic of human action, closely linked in this point to the higher faculties of the human person. As a way to illustrate the difficulty already mentioned, in the third chapter we have chosen the passion of sadness as the one that best expresses the sense of subtraction that occurs in the passion physically considered. Finally, in the fourth chapter, we examine the experience of sadness in Jesus Christ to reinforce the thesis that the perspective adopted by Aquinas does not allow us to solve certain problems so as to state that Christ really experienced such passion.