Thomas Aquinas on the Emotions

Despite its enormous historical influence, Thomas Aquinas’s account of the emotions has been neglected since the early modern period. Recently however, it has been drawing renewed attention from scholars in a number of disciplines. This paper gives an overview of Aquinas’s account of the emotions and the state of contemporary scholarship. It describes his fundamentally positive attitude toward desire and emotion, and then it shows the centrality of his theory of the emotions to his ethics and his understanding of virtue. In the course of its argument, the paper examines the relationship between reason and emotion, the inseparable link between emotion and virtue, the influence of Christology on Aquinas’s understanding of the emotions, and the moral normativity of unspecified passion. It also compares Aquinas to David Hume. Finally, it proposes a tentative explanation for why Aquinas was motivated to give more attention to emotion in his writings than any previous philosopher or theologian, and it discusses Aquinas’s hidden influence in contemporary philosophy and theology of emotion.