St. Thomas in Love: The Emotional Community of a Scholastic

This paper considers St. Thomas’s theory of the emotions (or passions) and attempts to situate it in Thomas’s “emotional community.”  An emotional community is similar to a social community, except that the focus of research is on its shared norms of emotional expression and on its valuations of various emotions.  In Thomas’s case, the emotional community was a group of Dominicans with whom he worked. The paper’s goal is to explore the interface of these men’s theories of emotion with their emotional expression as evidenced in their other writings.  Theoretically, they eschewed even the first stirrings of emotion, but they could not avoid expressing some emotions, above all the emotion of love.