passions

in my struggles to find passion as preceding and perfecting intellective movements, how do I regard the unthinkingness of the passions - that the suggestibility which is so rich also means that one can be pulled away towards unfitting things, becuase the slightest hint of the good which is present is enough to draw one in without considering the elements that make other goods more desirable?

This is where the "antecedent" and "consequent" to reason come in - While I resisted this passionately at the intellectual level becuase I thought that it meant a long rational process came in before we ever loved anyone/anything - I guess I thought it meant that every love had to be a dilection. But it is more simple than that. Much of the time we are rightly oriented in our passions - in our love for other people, in our care for our body. In coming to reflect upon these things, we don't necessarily change them into willing these things nstead of loving, but we become willingly passionate - the will simply gives a little reflective assent to everything that is already going on as opposed to being causally at the root of everything that is going on (and this is already thinking habituated people - becuase morality is about pleasures as Aristotle and as Aquinas - whether pleasure is the measure and rule of human acts) No unreasonable passions or poorly trained habits are so strong that good habits cannot replace them - unless we need God's help for this, which I think we do, even to be natural.

So reason in this case would be the reflective - the second moment - the check, the query, the question which may end us up on the other side or bring us to a third term or back to wehre we were with the differance.
And will.... how come he said reason and not will? Because it is about being consequent to reason. How do the passions partkae "somewaht" in voluntariety? Voluntariety, I have to remember, is not just about the passivity of the will towards the good which I remembered from working on charity. We have free judgment - and something is moral insofar as it is free - otherwise there is no or diminished responsibility (It is not that something is free insofar as it can do otherwise, it is that something is moral insofar as it can do otherwise??? becuase it concerns opposites, reason. but angels are moral but opposites still happen to them - they can oppose the will) - this is why Aquinas speaks not only of rewards but of punishments and exhortations - it is free judgment (which would be different in us than in angels).