Pag-unawa and the Thomistic Virtue of Mercy

This paper explores the relationship of pag-unawa, the Filipino notion of "understanding" with Aquinas' discussion of the virtue of mercy. For the Angelic Doctor, knowledge is considered to take precedence over love except in cases when the lover considers the beloved under the gaze of mercy or when the other is higher than the person knowing. It is by examining Aquinas' nuanced development of the relationship of love and knowledge that we can arrive at a better understanding of pag-unawa. For Aquinas, mercy can only be a virtue if it is a movement of the intellective appetite regulated by right reason. Intriguingly, he perceives mercy as a kind of "defect" in human beings in so far as they look upon another's distress as their own. In other words, there is a union with the object loved similar to how the soul becomes one with the object known. In my view, pag-unawa can be understood in terms of the knowledge-precedinglove dynamic when applied to things that we can know ordinarily, i.e., knowledge derived through abstraction mediated by sense experience. Moreover, I propose that the dynamic of love-preceding-knowledge (una ang awa) can be applied to the virtue of pag-unawa when it becomes an imitation of God's merciful action. In this sense, right understanding of someone or something presupposes a merciful gaze. This allows for a Thomistic appreciation of pagunawa that respects the Filipino psyche while remaining faithful to Aquinas' principles.