INTRODUCTION: Abomination, Aversion and Disgust.

Sometime between 1265 and 1274, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summa Theologeae. In the Prima Secundae Partis, he placed some of Aristotle’s rather unstructured passions into a framework first suggested by Plato: the concupiscible and irascible.  To the concupiscible, or easily felt, powers he added the pairs of Love/Hate, Desire/Aversion (also Flight) or Abomination, Joy and Sorrow. If we love something, we desire it, and if we attain it, it brings joy. Conversely, if we hate something, we wish to avoid it or run away from it and if we do not do so, we feel sorrow. But if this sequence becomes difficult, the irascible passions move in to help us struggle. To help us attain what we desire we use hope and courage, and the route from aversion to sorrow becomes littered desperation, fear and anger. These passions are clear; they are seemingly obvious to us, they use words we understand to this day in a structure that remained dominant for centuries. But there is  one exception to this otherwise clear set of emotional labels: what on Earth is aversion or abomination? Aquinas used these descriptive terms because he didn’t really know what to call it; he wasn’t quite sure what it was, only that there was some type of 'opposite to desire' and involved avoiding evil, or that which we think can harm us. These two terms, aversion (or flight) and abomination, describe its properties: the first describes our reaction, the effects of the passion, the avoiding of the evil. The second, abomination, describes the properties of the object that causes the passion, the evil itself, and the feeling we get on sensing this evil. As with anything not nailed down in the world of ideas (and plenty of things that are), this passion was debated and altered and updated for centuries. Then, at some point in the late 17^th Century, a new word appeared, a word describing something similar to aversion/abomination, but not exactly the same. This new word, borrowed from French, seemed to fit; it seemed to work to simplify this complex passion; it seemed to finally give it a name. That name was Disgust.

I am Richard Firth-Godbehere, The Abominable History Man, and I have decided to make it my life’s work, using history, psychology, anthropology, linguistics, philosophy and anything else I need, to find out how these passions were understood, described and felt  and what influence they had throughout history up to the present day. My main, initial, focus is the early modern period in Europe, but that net will widen. In this blog, I will be sharing what was thought abominable, detestable, and what caused flight, aversion and eschewing, as I research into the deeper understandings of aversion, abomination and disgust in mind and body. The hard stuff, the deep stuff, the working out, will go into my thesis. The fun extras, I want to share with you here.