ICLE [I-II, Q. 59, Art. 2]

Whether There Can Be Moral Virtue with Passion?

Objection 1: It would seem that moral virtue cannot be with passion.
For the Philosopher says (Topic. iv) that "a gentle man is one who is
not passionate; but a patient man is one who is passionate but does
not give way." The same applies to all the moral virtues. Therefore
all moral virtues are without passion.

Obj. 2: Further, virtue is a right affection of the soul, as health
is to the body, as stated _Phys._ vii, text. 17: wherefore "virtue is
a kind of health of the soul," as Cicero says (Quaest. Tusc. iv). But
the soul's passions are "the soul's diseases," as he says in the same
book. Now health is incompatible with disease. Therefore neither is
passion compatible with virtue.

Obj. 3: Further, moral virtue requires perfect use of reason even in
particular matters. But the passions are an obstacle to this: for the
Philosopher says (Ethic. vi, 5) that "pleasures destroy the judgment
of prudence": and Sallust says (Catilin.) that "when they," i.e. the
soul's passions, "interfere, it is not easy for the mind to grasp the
truth." Therefore passion is incompatible with moral virtue.

_On the contrary,_ Augustine says (De Civ. Dei xiv, 6): "If the will
is perverse, these movements," viz. the passions, "are perverse also:
but if it is upright, they are not only blameless, but even
praiseworthy." But nothing praiseworthy is incompatible with moral
virtue. Therefore moral virtue does not exclude the passions, but is
consistent with them.

_I answer that,_ The Stoics and Peripatetics disagreed on this point,
as Augustine relates (De Civ. Dei ix, 4). For the Stoics held that
the soul's passions cannot be in a wise or virtuous man: whereas the
Peripatetics, who were founded by Aristotle, as Augustine says (De
Civ. Dei ix, 4), maintained that the passions are compatible with
moral virtue, if they be reduced to the mean.

This difference, as Augustine observes (De Civ. Dei ix, 4), was one
of words rather than of opinions. Because the Stoics, through not
discriminating between the intellective appetite, i.e. the will, and
the sensitive appetite, which is divided into irascible and
concupiscible, did not, as the Peripatetics did, distinguish the
passions from the other affections of the human soul, in the point of
their being movements of the sensitive appetite, whereas the other
emotions of the soul, which are not passions, are movements of the