The moment of decision is the crucible of human freedom. According to St. Thomas Aquinas, it is not a cold calculation of the intellect alone, but a dramatic interior contest in which reason, will, and the sensitive appetite confront one another.

Passions and Virtue

Aquinas distinguishes two classes of passions. The concupiscible passions concern goods or evils taken simply: love and hatred, desire and aversion, joy and sorrow. The irascible passions concern goods or evils that present difficulty: hope and despair, fear and daring, anger.

Rightly disposed—that is, following the judgment of reason and moderated by the virtues—they become powerful allies of the will. A rightly ordered desire for health strengthens the resolve to forgo an immediate pleasure; a rightly ordered hope sustains perseverance through hardship.

Temperance is precisely the virtue that disposes the concupiscible appetite rightly. It does not extinguish desire; it orders it. The temperate person still feels the pull of the cake, yet that pull no longer tyrannizes his judgment.

Interior Control and the Virtuous Life

Interior control, then, is not the suppression of passion but its education. Through repeated acts of choosing the greater good, the passions themselves are gradually reformed. What once required intense effort becomes, over time, almost connatural.

The struggle does not disappear—Aquinas never promises a life free of interior conflict this side of heaven—but it grows less violent and more readily resolved in favor of reason.

Thus the drama of human choice, as Aquinas presents it, is neither tragic determinism nor effortless autonomy. It is the free yet embattled exercise of a will that stands between the pull of disordered concupiscence and the call of the greater good.

Original reporting: Must Read Alaska (Anchorage) — read the source article.