“Pain at the loss of something good shows the goodness of the nature of that which was lost.” – St. Thomas Aquinas

 

   Both thoughts go very deep. 

Aquinas Thought

   It is the heart and not the intellect that reveals the deepest levels of nature, of Being. It is not your head that tells you that your children are precious, and thus other people’s children are precious. You know that through joy, but also through the pain of grief when you lose them, or the anxiety you have at the thought of losing them. Your intellect is probably needed for you to be able to extend what you feel for your children to humanity. I pity the broken person partly because I can imagine him as some mother’s child, some father’s child.

  Emotions that spring from love – or the imagined love that others have – are self-authenticating in one sense but not in another. I watched the mini-series Holocaust as a young teenager. The show presented a young German lawyer whose life was damaged by the Great Depression. It allowed the viewers to feel with him and understand his feelings when, after an interview with Heydrich, he had good prospects again. It was humanly understandable how a person could be happy about that: going from being down and out to having an important position and being someone again. But the price was to bracket out his feelings of humanity for his Jewish neighbors and indeed all German Jews.

    And compared to the compassion we feel for the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, the emotional response to the young lawyer become SS administrator of the Holocaust means nothing. Why? When we put the two emotional responses side-by-side, why is the compassion – the form love takes when confronted with the misfortune of fellow human beings – absolute and the happiness of the lawyer nothing? By what standard can one judge? There is no standard. The happiness means nothing compared to the evil done and the compassion for victims of evil. This is self-evident. The lawyer had to do all kinds of self-delusion and subject himself to brainwashing so as not to face that.

Hopkins Thought

    Hopkins helps to understand Aquinas, Aquinas Hopkins. Here is another passage from Aquinas: “… everything is good insofar has it has being.” Being is a continuous act of creation emanating from God, who is Being and Goodness (two words with the same referent). And every kind of substance (a particular, concrete, really existing creature i.e. an entity created by God) has an essence (core properties that make it the kind of creature it is) and telos (a perfection to which it aims, so as I human being my perfection or telos would be to become a loving, virtuous man). The essence and telos of anything emanate from Ideas in the mind of God, and are also part of the creature's goodness. So, now just talking about human beings in this theological-philosophical sense, there are two levels of reality, two levels of goodness: our existing, which is an active process emanating from existence itself, God; and our actualizing our potential to become like the Idea of us in the mind of God – to come to be, to see ourselves, to see others, as God thinks us, or sees us in a metaphorical sense.

    Love is the purest expression of the affirmation of the being, the sheer existence, of what or whom is loved. It discloses the deepest meaning of goodness: good that you exist; wonderful that you are here. Being and Goodness are the same.

  Evil is the negation of reality, again in two senses: the undoing of being, or preventing the creature from actualizing its goodness, its potential, which implies a failure to actualize one’s own being, which is to say a failure of love.

  Abstract stuff. Will have to unpack it later. But Goethe's Mephisto said it well:

Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint! und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht, ist wert, dass es zugrunde geht; Drum besser wär's, dass nichts entstünde.

[I am the spirit that negates! And rightly so; for everything that comes to be deserves to perish most wretchedly. It would have been better had nothing existed.] 

That is the negation of Aquinas and Manly, and with its help we can understand the meaning of their thoughts.