Category Archives: Virtue

Happiness and the Good Life

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Happiness is one of the most enduring ideas in the history of the world. One could go all the way back to the ancient Greeks and their idea of happiness as human flourishing, or eudaimonia. In our time, happiness is still a fundamental idea in the lives of ordinary people. You would be hard pressed to find a person who does not want to be happy. In fact, since the human will is inclined to work towards the good that it perceives, a man cannot help but act towards his own happiness. Or, at the very least, his perceived happiness. Herein lies the issue in many of our modern day conversations about happiness, for as much as it is talked about it is almost never defined. Postmodernists did away with the idea that there was any uniting narrative for humanity, and it seems that as a consequence the idea that happiness had any objective basis was thrown out as well. The prevailing notion in our age is that the question of what makes a person happy is up to each individual to decide for him or herself. So what is happiness? And how should we go about obtaining it?

Happiness as an Activity

In Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle defines happiness as an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue. Thus, happiness is not merely a feeling or something that can be subjectively defined. It is an activity which we participate in. A person is happy insofar as they are virtuous. This view is more robust than our modern conception of happiness. Our modern conception of happiness is based around how a man feels about his life, or the external circumstances of his life, but if we view happiness as an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue then it is not dependent on the external circumstances of one’s life. In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl, a Holocaust survivor, makes the case that meaning and happiness are not found in one’s external circumstances. He observes that those who were able to survive the concentration camps were not necessarily the most physically fit, but the ones who had a strong interior life. This fits with Aristotle’s further commentary on happiness in Book X of Nicomachean Ethics. He writes, “If happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, it is reasonable that it should be in accordance with the highest virtue; and this will be that of the best thing in us… That this activity is contemplative we have already said.” So for Aristotle, happiness is a contemplative activity. This does not mean that in order to be happy we need to withdraw from society and go live a life of contemplation in the wilderness. We are social creatures, we need relationships to flourish, and have obligations to our families and society. However, true happiness cannot be found unless we take intentional time to spend in contemplation and reflection. The man who lives only for his shallow external circumstances will find that his happiness is not enduring and can be stripped away in a moment’s notice.

Man’s Final End

Aristotle’s vision of happiness is a natural happiness. It is a happiness that we can achieve by our own nature. However, there is a happiness promised to us as Christians that we cannot achieve by our nature: supernatural happiness. For Aquinas, this supernatural happiness finds its completion in the Beatific Vision which is the vision of God enjoyed by those in Heaven. Christ speaks of this happiness when He says, “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love, just as I have kept my Father’s commandments and remain in his love. I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete” (Jn 15: 10-11). Natural happiness is not a complete picture of human happiness. We were not created for this life alone. The beginning of the Baltimore Catechism sums this up well: “God made me to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world, and to be happy with Him forever in heaven.” Supernatural happiness cannot be achieved separate from natural happiness. Grace perfects nature and does not destroy it as Aquinas famously stated. We ought to seek virtue in this life, and by cooperation with God’s grace and the sacraments obtain everlasting happiness in the next. Any other view of happiness will be incomplete.

Aristotle correctly posits that in order for happiness to be our final end it must be self-sufficient and not lacking. However, if we restrict our happiness to things of this life we will run into the problem of desire which C.S. Lewis speaks of in Mere Christianity when he says, “I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy.” Therefore, seek virtue and happiness in this life, but never despair of our ultimate happiness in the next. Let us always keep in mind the closing lines of the serenity prayer: “Trusting that He will make all things right if I surrender to His will; that I may be reasonably happy in this life, and supremely happy with Him forever.”

In Defense of Honor

Culture, Faith, God's Will, Virtue, , , , ,

In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Edmund Burke comments on the loss of honor that came as a result of the French Revolution. Concerning Marie Antoinette, Burke writes,

Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone. That of sophisters, economists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex, that proud submission, that dignified obedience, that subordination of the heart, which kept alive, even in servitude itself, the spirit of an exalted freedom. The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.

Honor once lost, like any other virtue, is not easily regained. It is especially hard to regain in a culture that is actively hostile to it.

Honor, as St. Thomas Aquinas defines it, “is the reward of every virtue… it follows that by reason of its matter it regards all of the virtues” (ST II-II Q. 129 Art. 4). Thus, it is clear that honor comes from virtue. In order to be truly honorable, a man must be virtuous. Our culture has, in large part, rejected the traditional idea of virtue. There is much talk about rights and what we are owed, but little discussion about duty. Men are encouraged to extol the virtues of kindness and inclusivity, and women, on the other hand, are told that expressing traits like “nurturance” and “family-oriented values” are just mere preferences and not virtues. As always, the devil is in the details. A man should be loving and caring, but if he places kindness and inclusivity above all other virtues then the family and, by extension, society, will suffer. Certainly, kindness and inclusivity would not have saved Marie Antoinette from the guillotine. And families do not need women who prefer to be nurturing and selfless, but women who are nurturing and selfless. There will be, however, some who will object to this and say that traditional notions of honor and virtue are outdated and bigoted. So, naturally, the question becomes, “Why should we care about honor, aren’t we better off without it?”.

There are a couple of approaches one could take towards answering this question. The first would be to ask what will replace the role that honor had in society? What is beyond honor and virtue? Alasdair MacIntyre explores this question in his book After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Of a society that has lost its vision of honor and virtue he writes,

In a society where there is no longer a shared conception of the community’s good as specified by the good for man, there can no longer either be any very substantial concept of what it is to contribute more or less to the achievement of that good. Hence notions of desert and of honor become detached from the context in which they were originally at home. Honor becomes nothing more than a badge of aristocratic status, and status itself, tied as it is now so securely to property, has very little to do with desert.

A society that abandons honor does not get egalitarianism. Instead, it gets aristocracy and credentialism.

For the second approach, one might ask if tearing down virtue and honor would also threaten other societal goods. Failing to examine this question would be like removing a wall in a house without first determining if it is load-bearing. Unfortunately, leaving honor in the past has not been without consequence. Honor is the basis for magnanimity. Aquinas identifies this connection: “Now a man is said to be magnanimous in respect of things that are great absolutely and simply, just as a man is said to be brave in respect of things that are difficult simply. It follows therefore that magnanimity is about honors” (ST II-II Q. 129 Art. 1). In 2020, Ross Douthat wrote a book called The Decadent Society: How We Became the Victims of Our Own Success about how and why our society has, in many ways, stopped advancing. While his hypothesis is beyond the scope of this article, the phenomenon he is discussing is germane to the point. There has been a societal decline in the desire to do great things. This stems directly from a change in societal value. As MacIntyre pointed out, society values the vain status associated with honor rather than the virtue from which honor is derived. Not only is magnanimity a virtue and therefore necessary for human flourishing, but society needs it. Magnanimity landed on the moon, it sailed to new worlds, it wrote poems and epics, it built planes, and made countless discoveries and inventions. So rather than resent success and laugh at honor, we should have the courage to ask ourselves if we are here on this earth for something great. Perhaps there really is something great in store for each and every one of us if we would but have the courage and magnanimity to pursue it. And even more terrifying is the possibility that part of the greatness God wishes to bring to the world can only be brought through you. Sure, God can bring goodness out of anything, but there may be good that never comes if you abandon honor and magnanimity. In closing, I would like to turn to Pope Benedict XVI who so eloquently reminds us of this truth: “The ways of the Lord are not easy, but we were not created for an easy life, but for great things, for goodness”.

Faith and the Suspicion of God

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Are you suspicious of God?  This is a rather strange question to open an essay, especially one written by a believer.  It seems to be the question of the skeptic.  If we are honest, we will admit that, yes, on some level, I am suspicious of God. That level of honesty is difficult because it shatters the image each of us has of himself as a Christian.  Nevertheless, it is there.  God has willed it (even if only permissively) as an effect of the Fall.  We have each inherited from Eve a suspicion that God might not totally have our best interest at heart.  Satan placed the question of whether God was holding out on her in her heart and its echoes have been heard in the hearts of her progeny ever since.

There is further proof that suspicion is part of our default condition.  In those children whom He has adopted in Baptism, God has placed the remedy—Faith.  Without it we will eternally go on questioning God’s motives.  With it, suspicion is wiped away.  The point is that Faith is not natural, not something we can obtain or, once we have it, even increase on our own.  It is beyond our natural capacities and is totally supernatural.  Upon hearing of the power of Faith (Lk 17:5, Mt 17:20), the disciples do not say “Lord we will try harder to believe”, but “Increase our Faith.” 

Despite its supernatural origin, it is nevertheless a habit infused into our souls that we have the power to use.  But in order to use it properly, we must become more aware of its mode of operation. 

Natural vs Supernatural Faith

Oftentimes we equate supernatural Faith with human faith and think it simply means trust.  Like supernatural Faith, natural faith is a form of belief based on trust.  We might have faith that a pilot has been properly trained and therefore get on a flight even if we are anxious about flying.  Natural faith is based on reasons—the airline would not want to put inexperienced pilots in the air because it is too great of a liability, we know someone who is a pilot and he went through years of flight school, the FAA unlike most government agencies is effective in monitoring airlines, etc.  Ultimately there is a leap of faith involved, but the leap is based upon solid reasoning.

Supernatural Faith is not quite the same.  Like natural faith it involves first believing someone (trust) before believing in his testimony.  But with Faith there is no leap of faith involved.  God has picked us up and placed us across the chasm of mistrust and doubt.  He has given us a share in the trust that Christ had in the Father.  Now, Christ did not have Faith because He had the Beatific Vision from the moment of His conception, but nevertheless He merited for us the foundation of Faith—trust.  The problem is that we often put the cart before the horse and focus on what is revealed before we address the issue of trust in the Revealer.

There truly is no such thing as an “intellectual conversion”.  You can think all of the doctrines of the Faith are reasonable and still not have Faith.  You simply have right opinion.  That is a good thing, but it is not Faith.  Faith consists first in trusting the Divine Person and then, knowing that He cannot deceive or be deceived, you believe everything that He says. 

There is a great recent example of this in an interview Jordan Peterson gave.  Anyone following him over the last few years will see that he is coming to think like a Christian.  He even admits to seeing Christ as an important historical figure who lived.  But he does not, and never will be able to, convince himself that Christ lives.  He still sees Him as living in the past and only influencing today through some natural progression of His doctrines.  This is natural faith, but, as I have said previously, one does not graduate from natural faith to supernatural Faith.  Pray that he receive the gift of Faith.

Disposing Ourselves to Receive Faith

We can detect our own tendency to naturalize Faith by how we respond to the interaction between Christ and the Apostles when He tells them it was because of little Faith that they could not cast out the demons (Mt 17:20).  Most of us read that as a rebuke.  But how can He rebuke them for something that they don’t naturally have?  Instead He is making them aware both of the power of Faith (it can move a mountain) and their need to ask and ready themselves to receive an increase (Lk 17:5). 

Because Faith is the foundation of the spiritual life and thus the deeper the foundation the taller the edifice that can be built upon it—but we said it was a gift and thus we cannot strictly speaking increase our faith we can ask for more faith and do certain things which dispose us for a reception of stronger Faith.  As St. John Henry Newman says :

“…with good dispositions faith is easy; and that without good dispositions, faith is not easy; and that those who were praised for their faith, were such as had already the good dispositions, and that those who were blamed for their unbelief, were such as were wanting in this respect, and would have believed, or believed sooner, had they possessed the necessary dispositions for believing, or a greater share of the them.”

St. John Henry Newman, Dispositions for Faith, Sermons Preached on Various Occasions.

There are two things in particular we can do to dispose ourselves to receive an increase in Faith.  First and most importantly is to ask.  Admit your unbelief and ask for an increase in Faith (Mk 9:24).  Second, exercise the virtue of Faith.  When you exercise the “muscle” of faith through its exercise, you will be ready for the Divine Spotter to add more weight on the bar of Faith.  The three exercises that are particularly helpful are:

  1. Make acts of faith, especially by reciting the Creed.  But also in general by affirming that you believe any particular doctrine you happen to come across in your spiritual reading or discussion.  I find this practice particularly helpful during homilies that otherwise would not move me.
  2. Study the Faith.  When you also understand you are able to make a firmer assent to what is believed.
  3. Teach the Faith or openly profess the Faith in front of others.  This requires first a trust in God that He rewards those who proclaim Him and then a trust that He has spoken truthfully.

Redeeming Work

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Nearly every large company presents itself to potential employees as deeply concerned with helping the new employee achieve “Work/Life Balance.”  The particulars might be different for each company, but the promise is the same—we will teach you the calculus by which the scales of life can be balanced.  But in truth they offer little more than guilt management techniques enabling the employee to decide how much of his life he is willing to trade in order to be professionally successful.  This balancing act always feels like a compromise because balance really isn’t the problem.  The problem is work itself.  Or, at least the way we experience it living as we do in our post-Edenic world. 

Man the Worker

By examining the nature of work itself, we can also see how it can be integrated into a rich and full life.  Work is, as John Paul II said, “a fundamental dimension of man’s existence on earth” (Laborem Exercens, 4).  It is fundamental because it is part of his nature to work and be perfected by it.  The Book of Genesis reveals this through God’s commandment to “fulfill the earth and subdue it” (Gn 1:28).  Man is a worker because he is made in the image of God the Creator.  He Who made all things, made those things so that man could bring them to their completion.  In perfecting things, man himself would be perfected.   

But we know that is not the end of the story.  In choosing to “become like God” (Gn 3:5) on his own terms, man damaged his true God-likeness.  Work was infected by the curse of the Fall and work became labor.  Work itself became disintegrated.  Plagued by thorns and thistles, man becomes overly focused about the perfecting of things and forgets that work is primarily meant to perfect him.  As Pius XI put it, “for dead matter comes forth from the factory ennobled, while men there are corrupted and degraded” (Quadragesimo Anno, 135).

Even this is not the end of the story however.  The Son of God made Himself a worker so that work would get caught up in the Redemption.  Rather than succumbing to the heavy burden of work, we can submit to the yoke of Christ.  Work is still labor, but by laboring in the Spirit of Christ, it is no longer an obstacle but a means of sanctification.  Christ was, as John Paul II called Him, “a man of work…Who preached the ‘gospel of work’” (LE 26).  Now by accepting the labor associated with work as punishment for our sins and offering it as reparation, work becomes redemptive.

The Two Dimensions

Work then has two dimensions—objective and subjective—and both must be good in order for the “gospel of work” to penetrate our work.  In the objective sense, work is the practical manner in which man “subdues the earth.”  This means that the work itself must in a very real way facilitate the Common Good.  The good produced must be good for society and the work done on the “intellectual toolbench” must be ordered to the truth.  For many of us, our professional work will be the place where we fulfill our obligation to the Common Good.  It must in some way help others to truly thrive.  That is the only way to ensure a proper return for the talents that the master gave to the servants.

John Paul II had great concern for the changes to the nature of work that were coming about because of technology.  He was not a troglodyte who feared technology but thought that efficiency was a dangerous measure.  He saw technological development as a great good if it facilitated man’s work and enabled him to grow in virtue.  But, “technology can cease to be man’s ally and become almost his enemy, as when the mechanization of work “supplants” him, taking away all personal satisfaction and the incentive to creativity and responsibility, when it deprives many workers of their previous employment, or when, through exalting the machine, it reduces man to the status of its slave” (LE, 5).

The subjective meaning of work is the pre-eminent dimension.  Works gains its value from the fact that it is a person who is doing it and not primarily by the work done.  Some work is objectively better than other, but good work is that work which makes the worker morally good.  The best work for any individual is the work that will make him grow in virtue.  This is why the work itself, as long as it is good, does not matter so much as its character building effect on the person.  If more emphasis is placed on the subjective dimension of work, then we will cease to value work merely for its pay.      

Realizing that the most important thing we make in work is ourselves, we can see why “Work/Life Balance” goes about the problem of disintegration in the wrong way.  It is a subtle attempt at redeeming work on our own, rather than allowing God’s original vision for work to permeate our actions.

Becoming Men with Chests

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CS Lewis once described modernity as being inhabited by “men without chests.”  His pithy characterization highlights the fact that men no longer are educated to have a healthy emotional life.  Lewis describes how in reviewing an elementary textbook, he came across a description of a waterfall as “sublime”.  The authors insist that the speaker is “not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.”  Lewis is concerned that such language, even in what appears to be a mere throwaway remark, betray a certain universal prejudice towards sentiments as nothing more than private feelings that have no objective basis in reality.  Devoid of any real meaning attached to emotions, modern man suffers from a shrinking of his heart.

Lewis gives a sketch of man as having three parts: head, belly, and chest.  By head he is referring to our spiritual faculties and by belly our bodily sensations.  For most of us, that would be a sufficient description.  But in order to be more than mere parts, they must be an integrated whole—they must be connected in the middle by the chest.  To ignore the chest is literally disintegrating, you might even say dehumanizing.  “It is by this middle element that man is man; for by his intellect he is mere spirit and by his appetite a mere animal.”  It is the heart that makes humanity unique and it is through its proper integration that we become fully human.

The heart is the “place” where man’s hybrid nature meets and where man is most properly himself.  But most of us have learned to be suspicious of our own hearts—and rightly so.  But we cannot remain masters of suspicion without doing great harm to ourselves.  We must confront this suspicion head on if we are to be authentically happy.  After all happiness is not just a feeling, but a happiness that isn’t felt isn’t true happiness either.

Lewis thought part of the problem was in education.  Although he doesn’t go into details about a proper pedagogy, it most certainly would begin by defining what we mean are talking about when we speak of the Heart.  For modern man, the heart is really the place where our feelings reside.  But this is far vaguer and narrower than the classical and Biblical notion of the heart.  There are different kinds of feelings that we experience and these feelings are on different levels according to the unique powers of the human soul.  There are the mere vegetative feelings like hunger and thirst.  There are the animal feelings like contentment and anger.  Finally, there are the spiritual feelings like peace and joy.  When we speak of a heart that is fully alive, then we are speaking about a heart that has the capacity for the animal feelings (under the control of reason and will) and the spiritual feelings.

Men without Chests

At the end of his first chapter in The Abolition of Man, Lewis sums up the modern dilemma as follows: “We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”  His point is that without a healthy emotional life, we will never be able to be virtuous—it is like asking a castrated horse to reproduce.  Notice what he is saying—neither the Stoic nor the Sentimentalist can be truly virtuous.  To see why this is we need to reflect briefly upon the nature of virtue and its relationship with the emotions.

Temperance and fortitude and all their sub-virtues are ordered to the proper use of our emotions, or to use a more Thomistic term, the concupiscible and irascible passions.  Notice the italics are use.  Our emotions are not something that are to be killed or to be allowed to run free, but something that, when properly put to use, enable us to enjoy the good. 

An example will help.  All too often we hear “Courage is not the absence of fear; it is the making of action in spite of fear.”  This is not the virtue of courage.  The truly courageous person does not feel fear, but daring.  Daring, when moderated by courage, gives him a motor by which he can energetically fight against the evil he must not avoid.  Without it, he will succumb to fear or only fight back only weakly.

Virtue conditions the passions to act in accord with reason.  When the courageous man is faced with evil, he does not need to deliberate or wait to stir up daring, it is automatically conditioned to arise in the face of some threat.  In fact it may arise before he is even conscious of a threat and act as an alarm for the person. 

Passions not only make the act easier then, but also make it better. St. Thomas says that when the passions are involved in a morally good act then it makes the act more meritorious.  This is because the entire person—head, heart and hands—is involved in the act as opposed to simply white knuckling it.  White knuckling is still good but doing so fervently is better.  The less interior resistance we have to doing the good, the better the action is.  So, despite popular misconceptions, there are moral reasons why we should be emotionally healthy as well.

Feeding Our Nature

Returning to Lewis’ point, education in the emotions is important because it is the thing that makes virtue easier.  But this education must be aimed not so much on the feeling, but on the object that invokes the feeling.  This cannot be emphasized enough.  As long as the student is focused on the waterfall and not on the pleasure of the feeling of awe or wonder that can only be described as “sublime” he is focused on the good before him.  The minute he turns to the pleasure as his focus, the pleasure is gone and the object is deemed boring.  But if he remains focused on the object, he can learn to contemplate it to find out why it evokes such a response and if the response is, in fact, the appropriate one.  This is one of the reasons why we must always protect and promote children’s capacity to wonder. 

It is by taking in reality that they begin to grow in self-knowledge as well.  Combined with education from parents especially, the child learns that there are right and wrong emotions.  The right and wrongness depends upon the object that causes it.  A young girl touching a cobra because she is charmed by it, needs to be shouted at so that she associates fear with it instead.  All too often parents attempt to diffuse children’s emotions rather than guide them.  This only causes moral problems later on down the road as Lewis points out “By starving the sensibility of our pupils we only make them easier prey to the propagandist when he comes. For famished nature will be avenged and a hard heart is no infallible protection against a soft head.”    

Cancelling Anger

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Virtuous men are rarely, if ever, prone to propaganda.  That is because they can ascertain when to “fight the good fight”.  Vicious men, on the other hand, are extremely prone to it.  They have no idea which are the good fights and so they must be told.  But simply telling them is not enough.  Lacking any real control over their anger, they need someone else to stir it up for them by turning events that fit the narratives catastrophes.   Having no way to turn it off, they are absolutely unforgiving and must find offense around every corner.  Discerning ears will recognize this scenario for what it is—our modern society and its incessant need to cancel other people.

In truth then, at the heart of cancel culture, is the inability to discern the difference between wrath and anger.  These terms, even if they are often used synonymously, are not truly referring to the same thing.  Anger is, first and foremost, a passion or an emotion built into human nature to deal with the presence of evil.  More specifically, it is the emotion that provides an interior motor to fight against a specific evil that acts as an obstacle to achieving some good thing.  When a man discerns some good thing is being blocked, he wills to be angry in order energize him to fight the good fight.     

Fighting the Good Fight

The virtuous man knows the good fight when he sees it because he has the virtue of justice.  He is habitually desiring that each person receives what is due to him.  When some obstacle is placed in the way of that being achieved, he grows angry in order to move him to fight to restore justice.  This is why St. John Chrysostom thought that: “He who does not get angry, when there is just cause for being so, commits sin. In effect, irrational patience sows vices, maintains negligence, and encourages not only bad men to do wrong, but good men as well.”

Not only does the virtuous man grow angry when he should, he also directs his anger at the source of the injustice and does not just “vent”.  Likewise, he also filters it through the virtues of clemency and meekness to avoid becoming excessively angry and aim it at the injustice first and then the cause of it.  He truly knows how to “hate the sin, but not the sinner” because he is just.

Our Lord, Who referred to Himself as “meek and humble of heart” is the example par excellence.  When He cleaned the Temple, it was because His Father was not being rendered what was due to Him.  So, fueled by anger, the Just Man removed the obstacle.  With meekness He whipped the tables but with clemency avoided whipping the money changers.

The reason why anger is such a strong emotion is because it must often supply enough fuel for us to fight for justice for other people.  When that fuel turns inward and ignites a fire in us because of how we perceive we are being treated then it is truly wrath.  This is why wrath has been considered one of the Seven Deadly Sins—it turns what should be an outward-facing passion into a selfish one.  The wrathful man sees red, not because of an offense against justice, but because he has been slighted in some way.  To use modern parlance, he has been offended by the words or actions of another person.  Because anger must always be justified, he must also search for a reason why his own personal offense is really unjust.  In essence wrath turns anger off of justice onto my feelings and directs it not towards rectifying an injustice, but mercilessly punishing the offender.

A simple example might help us discern the difference.  A man is getting on to a crowded bus and he steps on your foot.  You feel anger arise, but look at him and realize he had tripped over someone else’s foot a few feet ahead of you and it was merely an accident.  In that case the just response is clemency because it was an accident.  Now suppose that same man enters the bus looks you in the eye, smiles and stomps on your foot.  Now the anger is justified, but the meek man would temper his response such that it did not include punching him in the face.  But the anger would be directed towards the action and not just the fact that it was done to you.  The way to know the difference is by imagining after stepping on your foot he goes and steps on an old lady’s foot.  If you are just as angry (or more) about that as you are about your own foot being stepped on, then you know the anger is justified.

This scenario also highlights an important point that is often a source of confusion regarding anger.  The Christian in imitation of Our Lord, when He is the sole victim of the injustice, will often suffer it in silence and not be angry.  But when there are other victims, including those who might be scandalized by you not confronting the evil, then zealous anger will confront the wrong directly.  The “others” include the offender because he needs to know that he has done evil in order to repent—and will need to be justly punished as part of that repentance.

Back to the Cancel Culture

Every passion, when not properly wedded to virtue, needs increased stimuli in order to get an equivalent response.  Related to the question at hand, wrath needs to be constantly fed, especially when it is being used to keep the vicious fighting.  It no longer becomes about justice, but about keeping them angry.  There is no need to discern whether something is actually unjust or not, because the anger will make it “feel” that way.  There is no need to make the distinction between victim and perpetrator because the object of that anger will tell which is which.  There can be no forgiveness until the perpetrator is “cancelled” and is no longer exists, either literally or figuratively. 

Thankfully, history has many examples of cancel cultures that always end with the cancellers eating their own.  When there is no one left to be angry at, when there is no one left to cancel, wrath demands that you execute the executioner.  For those who are trapped in this vicious circle the only option is for the virtuous to step up and restore justice.  Fear, masquerading as prudence, is never the solution.  Neither is the ersatz anger that we call “outrage.”  Nor is any attempt at cancelling the cancellers.  Only true zealous anger for justice can repair our decadent culture.

The Second Sin

Moralilty, Virtue, , , ,

It was, St. Paul said, through one man’s sin of pride that death entered the world (c.f. Romans 5:12).  It was through another man’s envy that death was realized.  Cain killed Abel out of envy.  This pattern, pride followed by envy, is the same path followed by Lucifer.  First pride in defining how he would be like God, then through envy he attacks mankind (c.f. Wisdom 2:23-24).  It is one of the Seven Deadly Sins and is perhaps the deadliest of these vices because of the way in which it addicts us to misery. 

Envy is, according to St. Thomas Aquinas (who cites St. John Chrysostom), is “sadness at another’s good” (De Malo, q.10 art.1).  And herein lies the reason for its deadliness.  Properly speaking, sadness is oriented towards evil and should only be experienced in its presence.  For the envious, it is good that causes it.  This is because the man with the vice of envy experiences someone else’s good as a threat to himself.  More specifically the good of the other person is thought to detract from his own excellence.  And since he experiences sorrow, sorrow that can only be mitigated by removing the evil cause, they will for the person’s excellence to no longer below to him.  They don’t really care if they receive the excellence, they only want the other person not to have it.  Victor Hugo, in his poem, Envy and Avarice, captures the envious heart.  When God offers envy anything he wants with the only condition that his neighbor will get double, he says “I would be blinded of one eye!”.   

The Evil Eye

What Hugo is subtly pointing out is how envy has its punishment built in.  The misery the envious experience never really lets up as long as envy lives in their heart.  Their sadness never subsides while the vice is still present.  In this way some have called it the “just vice.”

The blindness that comes from only one eye is also particularly descriptive because, although envy is in the will, it stems from the inability to see correctly.  The envious see everything in terms of competition.  Their self-worth is predicated upon being better than someone else.  Their self-love is only possible when they hate their neighbor since envy renders them unable to “will the good of the other.” 

As a culture addicted to self-esteem, we are particularly vulnerable to envy.  This is why when someone does or achieves something good, there are always people who go searching out, usually through old social media posts, evidence that the person is deeply flawed.  Apologizing to the envy mob only has the effect of inflaming them further.  There can be no forgiveness for wrongs, real or perceived, when it is the good that the person has done that is experienced as the evil.  Cancel culture is not just about controlling thoughts, but also, and maybe primarily, about indulging envy.

The Second Greatest Commandment, according to Our Lord, is to “love your neighbor, as yourself” (Mark 12:31), but the envious find this command impossible because they do not grasp what the love of self means.  This connection between love and self and love of neighbor often causes us to confuse envy with jealousy.  Although they are often used synonymously, jealousy means that you love something that you possess, but fear that that it might be taken away.  Envy has no such desire to possess, only to see the other not have it.  Jealousy regards sadness at the prospect of losing something good that you already have while envy is sadness in reaction to someone else’s good.

The envious also are rendered incapable of fulfilling the First Commandment as well.  The hatred of neighbor necessarily spills over to God who is “the Giver of all good gifts” (James 1:23-24).  He ultimately bears the blame for unequally distributed His gifts and excellencies among His creatures.  Envy makes us like the younger brother in the story of the Prodigal Son.

Like all vices, envy is baked into our fallen nature and can only be removed by intentionally acting against it.  This, of course requires that we are able to identify it in our pattern of thoughts.  Envy is tricky because it hides in the dark.  Unlike the other vices, no one wants to admit to being so petty.  As Rebecca Konyndyk puts it in her book Glittering Vices, envy shuns open warfare mostly because of the feeling of inferiority—to declare one’s envy is to admit one’s inferiority.  And so, it normally is exercised through sins of the tongue such as detraction, slander and calumny.  We use all of these to keep others from holding the person in such high esteem.  It also manifests itself through belittling and “roasting” the other person.

De-programming Envy

Just as Sloth is the vice by which we fail to love God, envy is the vice though which we fail to love our neighbor.  So, one of the opposing virtues is charity.  Properly understood, charity is loving another person for God’s sake.  By loving the excellence of the other because it ultimately comes from God, we develop the habit of rejoicing in the good of others. 

In practice it consists in the virtue of kindness which is a fruit of the Holy Spirit (c.f. Gal 5:22).  Kindness flows from a burning desire to do good for one’s neighbor in a specific and concrete way.  As an example, St. Martin de Porres who often was the subject of severe ridicule because of his mixed-race complexion, would run after someone when they made fun of him in order to do some kindness for them.

St. Thomas also mentions that because envy regards two objects—namely the sadness and the prosperity of a good person, it has two contrary virtues.  First there is pity by which one grieves, both affectively and effectively, the misfortune of a good person.  Likewise, zealous anger is the opposing virtue by which one is saddened at the prosperity of the wicked.

The Gateway Vice

Anthropology, Eucharist, Fasting, Virtue, , , , , ,

As Eve twisted the apple from its stem, little did she grasp that she was also twisting the desires of her progeny for all time.  By mingling good and evil, their desires would no longer be the North Star that God intended them to be.  For He had willed that man, in pursuing those things that were truly good for him, would be rewarded with pleasure.  Reason commanded the will towards the good and pleasure was its reward.  Adam seized the reward instead by choosing that which was “pleasing to the eye and good for food,” Adam truly upset the apple cart.  In choosing pleasure over reason, reason no longer ruled but instead wrestled with pleasure.  In seemingly becoming “like unto the gods” he became like unto a beast. 

God did not leave mankind unaware of its fundamental brokenness but instead left an orientation towards those things that are truly good for them intact.  It became difficult, but not impossible.  Generation after generation knew this and sought to root out vice and find fulfillment in virtue.  But few of those generations have embraced this brokenness with such gusto as our own.  Virtue is something to be signaled, not actually owned, and vice is to be rationalized away as, at worst, a “bad habit” akin to cracking your knuckles or clicking your tongue before you speak.  If virtue is to be more than signaled, then we must restore a proper understanding of vice. 

Following in the footsteps of the desert monks, St. Gregory the Great and St. Thomas Aquinas, Tradition has left us with Seven Deadly Vices.  St. Thomas called them Capital Vices because these seven vices are usually the source or head of all of the sins we commit (see ST II-II, q.153, art.4).  The reason why this is important is that these vices remain hidden to us as subconscious motivations for the sins we do commit.  They cause us to steal pleasure where none should be found.  Only once they are recognized can we restore pleasure to its rightful place as a side effect. 

A Useless Vice?

One of these vices, gluttony, at least on the surface does not seem to be a big deal.  How could a little overeating or carrying a little too much have anything to do with our spiritual life?  But, as St. Gregory the Great said, “unless we first tame the enemy dwelling within us, namely our gluttonous appetite, we have not even stood up to engage in the spiritual combat.”  His point is that gluttony is a gateway vice that, left unconquered, will most certainly lead to hell.  It trains us in the practice of self-indulgence and causes us to more and more of it.  Likewise, when we abandon reason when it comes to eating, we are almost certainly going to abandon it in other areas too.

Now I mentioned the connection between being fat and gluttony, but we would err greatly if we thought gluttony is all about whether we are fat or not.  The skinny woman who drinks a six-pack of Coke Zero a day is likely to be far more gluttonous than the man whose six pack is buried beneath 25 pounds of fat.  The latter might recognize that the purpose of eating is to provide nutrition while the former has no such awareness.  She merely wants the pleasure of Coke without the caloric consequences.  She is limited only by the amount of pleasure she craves, not by any bodily need or capacity.  And herein lies the vice of gluttony: “the sin of gluttony is when the desire for such pleasures goes beyond the rule of reason.  And so there is the saying that ‘gluttony is the intemperate desire to eat.’” (St. Thomas Aquinas, On Evil).  

The problem is not the pleasure attached to eating—God has attached that pleasure to eating because eating fulfills our nature.  Nor is it necessarily that we choose a food we like better than another to eat.  Gluttony is deeper than that, it resides interiorly in that it is the pleasure, rather than the reason for eating, that drives us.  Right reason says that food is necessary for humans in two ways: first as nutrition and second as a means of sharing life with others.  Anytime we go beyond those reasons, we are operating under the vice of gluttony. 

As proof that gluttony is more than just about girth, there are five ways in which it tends to manifest itself.  These can be remembered by invoking the acronym FRESH—fastidiously, ravenously, exceedingly, sumptuously, and hastily.

In the Screwtape Letters, Wormwood complains to Screwtape about how useless gluttony is for capturing humans.  Screwtape quickly corrects him and says that fastidious gluttons are often very easy to ensnare.  The Fastidious Glutton is the one who suffers from the “‘All-I-want’ state of mind.”  Its hiddenness makes it quite useful in capturing her in a diabolic net because she is so particular about her food and how it is prepared that she is miserably attached to the pleasure of eating foot that is “made your way.”  The taste is all that matters for the fastidious glutton.  The pleasure dominates her eating rather than coming as a side effect.  It also makes all those who have the misfortune of eating with her or preparing her food positively miserable.

There is also the glutton who eats sumptuously.  He is preoccupied with the pleasure of being full.  He will only choose those foods which are substantial enough to leave him with the feeling of fullness.  Reason should dictate when we have eaten enough to sustain ourselves and not the feeling of fullness.  When we eat to be full, we are again chasing pleasure rather than being controlled by reason.  Again there is no concern for what they are being filled with, only that they experience the pleasure of being full.   This is, by the way, the reason the Church in her wisdom traditionally recommends fasting from sumptuous foods during Lent and restricting the menu to bread and vegetables instead.

The ravenous glutton is the one who must eat as much as they can, regardless of whether there is enough food for anyone else and how full they are.  Their eyes might be bigger than their stomachs, but their stomachs will soon be bigger than their belts. 

Similar to the ravenous glutton there is the glutton who eats hastily.  This glutton treats his utensils like a shovel and must always have his mouth full without chewing or eating slow enough for digestion to occur.  The glutton who eats excessively.  He will eat past the point of fullness in order to indulge the tastes even if it leads to bloating and upset stomach later.

The Only True Antidote

The antidote ought to be obvious and something we have spoke about numerous times in the past—cultivating the virtue of fasting.  There is one particular aspect of fasting however that bears mentioning and that is the Eucharistic Fast.  We spoke of the reason for food and for eating being nutrition and sharing of life.  But the reason from God’s perspective is more expansive than that.  God gave us food as a sign of the only true Food that is the Bread of Life.  Therefore, we should forego the sign for the reality. 

The Church has us fast before receiving the Eucharist so that in experiencing bodily hunger we might recognize what that hunger actually points to.  By receiving the Eucharist in a state of hunger, it is Real Food that nourishes us.  To show us the truth of this, God gave a grace to the Saint of the Eucharist, St. Catherine of Siena by which she ate only the Eucharist for 7 years prior to her death.  This miraculous sign enabled her to eat only the Bread of Life and to suffer no ill effects from what would otherwise be a severe fast.  In order to truly hunger for the Eucharist then it becomes necessary to fast for more than just the obligatory hour before receiving.  We may choose to do something similar to what the Church had previously held that you could not eat anything during a day until you had received the Eucharist that day.

In his book Victory Over Vice, Venerable Fulton Sheen says that Christ’s cry of “I thirst” was His definitive destruction of the power of gluttony to rule the lives of Christians.  What better place then than the Mystical Foot of the Cross of the Eucharistic Sacrifice to receive those hard won graces to finally overcome the Gateway Vice of Gluttony.

Masking and the New Religion

Apologetics, Church and State, Church Authority, Conscience, Culture, Human Dignity, Magisterium, Marxism, Moralilty, Natural Law, New Age, Paganism, Politics, Sacramentals, Sacraments, Virtue, , , ,

We have been hearing for decades that we are living in a post-Christian society.  This has mostly been a way to describe the fact that Christian values have been in decline.  But Christianity has still been the dominant religion; dominant, that is, until the Covid-19 crisis hit.  The arrival of the Covid-19 pandemic in our society marked the official changing of the guard.  While we have been hearing about the emergence of a post-Christian society for decades, Christianity was still the dominant religion.  No longer is this true, however.  Christianity has been toppled and replaced by a new Gnosticism that we call Science. 

To be clear, the issue is not against science per se, but what is more accurately described as religion masquerading as science.  After all, as Aquinas says “He who neglects the experimental order in natural science falls into error” in all aspects of knowledge.  To solve the Covid-19 crisis, natural science plays a necessary, although not sufficient, role.  The peddlers of the new religion, would have us believe that it is sufficient because all we need to do is “trust the science.”  We are saved by faith, not in Christ, but in Science.

The New Priesthood

Nor should we be quick to dismiss expert opinion.  But expert opinion is not fact, it still must be based on solid reasoning.  The problem is that expert opinion is often treated like dogmatic truth because the Scientific Elite are the new priests.  Based on their secret knowledge that only “experts” such as themselves can understand, they dictate religious dogma.  Spoken word becomes fact.  Thus says the Scientist—“Masks don’t work” and it is so.  Thus says the Scientist two months later—“Masks do work” and it is so.  The Shepherds have spoken and the Sheeple must follow suit.  Laws are made to punish heretics who dare to question the spoken word.

This, by the way, is why masks have elicited such a strong response.  The High Priest initially said that they don’t work.  Then he spoke again saying they did and that the Priests lied because they were worried about a shortage.  But if a person unapologetically lies once, how do you know they are telling the truth now?  Actually, a leading Priest at Johns Hopkins says, it wasn’t lying but that “[A]t first, researchers and scientists did not know how necessary mask wearing would be among the general public. Now we are aware that wearing masks is an effective way to help prevent spread of this coronavirus” (Emphasis added).  Given the timeframe and the rather dramatic shift from no-mask to mask, where did this awareness come from? Changing your mind is fine. But changing your mind without a change in the data is based not on science, but fiat.  If you search prior to the dogmatic declaration, scientific opinion for the most part deemed them ineffective.  The fact is that the Priests exercised their hidden knowledge (because there was no new data) and declared them so.  I would probably be clothed in a scarlet mask for this statement alone, but let me go a little further as a statistician and speak about what a reasonable approach to this question would look like.

The Statistician Speaks

First, proving a negative is extremely difficult.  To conclusively say “masks don’t work” is a practical impossibility.  Having said that, there is little data to suggest that they do work (a complete summary that is thoroughly documented can be found here).  There have been studies in the last few months that have suggested they might, but these are inconclusive at best.  They are all very poorly done because they are being done in the midst of the crisis.  To study the problem properly you need to set up what would be something akin to a clinical trial in which you had a placebo group to compare it to.  But you also have the problem that mask usage is almost certainly confounded with social distancing.  Is social distancing the thing that helps, or is it masks, or is it both?  You’d have to set up a study to separate them.  Secondly, not all masks are created the same or are equally effective.

Carnegie Mellon tracks (among many other things) mask compliance here.  Notice that many places are in the high 80ish% for compliance and yet “cases” continue to increase in all of those areas.  If any intervention works, then you should expect the slope of the line of increase to decrease (“flatten the curve”).  But the data suggests that the lines are actually steeper.  For example, see the plot below of my home state of North Carolina which instituted a Mask Mandate on June 26th and has had above an 85% mask compliance rate (currently 91%).  North Carolina is far from unique in this regard and you can find similar data for all your favorite states.

If we were true to “Science” we would look at this medical intervention and determine that it does not work.  A drug company running a clinical trial (where they are using their own money) would stop the trial and might even decide that the intervention is actually making it worse.

This might mean that…wait for it…masks are making it worse.  You would again need to study this, but it is a reasonable supposition given the data.  It also makes sense in that it could easily be creating a false sense of security or become a petri dish of germs just waiting to be deposited on someone else or an aritficial barrier suppresses the body’s natural barrier of the immune system.  To be sure though, if we were testing a drug and the data looked like this, we would stop giving it to people.

This tangent was necessary because it speaks to the reasonableness of mask mandates.  Law, according to St. Thomas, is “an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community and is promulgated.”  Any law that does not fulfill those four requirements—reasonable, aimed at the common good, proper authority, and made known—is not, properly speaking, a law.  Therefore, because they are not reasonable (or at least can not be proven to be at this point reasonable) we have no obligation to obey them.  As true Shepherds of the Flock, Bishops and Priests need to stop being so deferential to mask mandates precisely for this reason.

The New Sacrament

The revolt against masks then is really a revulsion to what they symbolize.  They have been made into sacraments through the words of the New Priests.  They are said to protect and so therefore they do.  Those who do not want to subscribe to this religion therefore will not want to wear them.  It seems like a small thing to do, but it plays a key role in the overall narrative that Science can save us.  As a sacrament it symbolizes the fact that the Coronavirus is a serious threat to our overall well-being.  If you are tempted to think “well 99.99% of people that get this will survive”, then you only have to look around at everyone wearing a mask to tell you that you should be scared anyway.  The smiling face of your neighbor, which would normally comfort you, is now hidden from your sight.  The masks will permanently disfigure us because when the next virus comes along, and it will, they will tell us “this is more serious than the Coronavirus (which it likely will be) you must put the mask back on.” 

By blessing the mask, the Priest also makes it into a Secular Scapular.  Through the words of Mary to St. Simon Stock, we know that the Brown Scapular helps to save you eternally.  Through the words of the Scientist, the mask saves us from Covidoom.  The Brown Scapular is an aid to our growth in virtue, the Covid Scapular signals that we have virtue.

One of the things that the totalitarian regimes of the 20th Century was their exaltation of Science as the new religion.  Lenin, Stalin, Chiang Kai-Shek, and Hitler all committed their atrocities using “Science” as their justification.  Had someone stood up to them early on, one has to wonder whether things would have been different.

The Rehabilitation of Chastity

Anthropology, Contraception, marriage, Moralilty, Sexual Ethics, Theology of the Body, Virtue, , , ,

In his book Love and Responsibility, the future Pope John Paul II lamented the demise of virtue, and in particular, the virtue of chastity.  A spirit of resentment has emerged in the modern psyche towards high moral standards and anyone who practices them.  What was once admirable, even if very few people could master it, is now met with scorn and rationalization.  Chastity is viewed as repression and psychologically harmful, especially in young people.  But in truth, without chastity there can never be any true love.  That is why John Paul II thought modernity needed a “rehabilitation of chastity” and set out a program in Love and Responsibility for accomplishing it.

An Elusive Definition of Chastity?

Part of the reason that such a rehabilitation is necessary is because chastity is rarely defined in positive terms.  St. Thomas Aquinas defined chastity as a sub-virtue of temperance, the virtue that controls the concupiscible appetite.  He points out that chastity “takes its name from the fact that reason ‘chastises’ concupiscence, which, like a child, needs curbing” (ST II-II, q.151, a.1).  Of course, modern sensibilities being what they are, any whiff of restraint, is seen as an assault against freedom. If chastity is to be revived then we must expand our view of it as “a purely negative virtue. Chastity, in this view, is one long ‘no’” (L&R, p.170).  What Fr. Wojtyla hoped to accomplish then is to see chastity as “above all the ‘yes’ of which certain ‘no’s’ are the consequence” (ibid).

Chastity’s alleged violation of freedom really seems like an assault on love.  But this is only because our view of love, especially between the sexes, is far too narrow.  When the love between a man and a woman is viewed as primarily based on the subjective emotional and sexual experiences of the individuals then chastity will always be something negative.  This is not love, but use.  The two people use each other in order to “feel” like they are in love.  They do not love the other person but they love the feeling of being in love.  And they will be “in love” with the other person only so long as they are able to cause the emotional response. 

As opposed to its counterfeit, love is something objective because it is based not upon on an emotional and sexual response that the other caused, but on the objective value of the other person.  Love must always be directed towards the person and the value that they have as persons.  As good and as powerful as the sexual value of a person is, it does not exhaust their value.  Love between the sexes incorporates that sexual value into the total value of the person as a person.

When use is substituted for love, then chastity “feels” like it is holding love back and keeping it from blossoming.  In truth, chastity is an indispensable ingredient for love because “its function is to free love from the utilitarian attitude” (p.169).  Chastity is not a ‘No’ to sexual pleasure but a ‘No’ to treating the other person as an object of sexual gratification.  It is a steady and habitual refusal to use the other person.  It is a habitual readiness to affirm the full value of the other person.  Returning to JPII’s words, “only the chaste man and the chaste woman are capable of true love. For chastity frees their association, including their marital intercourse, from that tendency to use a person” (L&R, p. 171).

Pleasure Freed by Chastity

The traditional definition of chastity, true as it is, does not exhaust its full meaning.  Chastity does not just moderate our sexual desire, but “liberates love from the attitude of use.”  It is then both a ‘No’ and a ‘Yes’—no to use, yes to love.  No longer under the sway of unbridled emotion, sexual desire is liberated to roam free and be directed towards the full value of the person.  Only the chaste man and woman experience true pleasure of sexual desire because it is governed by reason and directed towards its natural end. 

This is the great lie of those who would have us believe that chastity is mere repression.  Sinners always love company and seek a way to rationalize their own vices.  On the surface, and at least initially, it is easier to yield to sexual desire.  But pleasure is always fleeting and when chosen as an end always operates under the law of diminishing returns.  But John Paul II encourages his readers to persevere because virtue takes time and suffering because of our fallen nature.  Once it matures pleasure is restored to its natural place and, surprising to our untrained minds, actually increases.  The “in-between” time in which chastity feels like repression is certainly difficult, but once it grows, like a fully mature tree, it provides the sweet fruit of pleasure.  This reality only comes about however when chastity is seen as worthwhile.    

Fully rehabilitated chastity enables us to see that it is, like every decision that we make, both a no and a yes.  It is a no to a utilitarian relationship and a yes to the full blossoming of both spousal love and friendship.

The Tyranny of the Hopeless

End of Life, Grace, Heaven, Last Things, Virtue, , , , , , ,

Around the year 251, the Roman Empire began to be ravaged by a plague.  Historians estimate that up to 5000 people died per day in Rome alone.  As Eusebius recounts, the pagans of Rome ran, quite literally, for their lives, shunning “any participation or fellowship with death; which yet, with all their precautions, it was not easy for them to escape” (Book VII, Ch. 22).  It was the Christians that stepped forward and were “unsparing in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness. They held fast to each other and visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually, serving them in Christ. And they died with them most joyfully, taking the affliction of others, and drawing the sickness from their neighbors to themselves and willingly receiving their pains. And many who cared for the sick and gave strength to others died themselves having transferred to themselves their death…Truly the best of our brethren departed from life in this manner, including some presbyters and deacons and those of the people who had the highest reputation; so that this form of death, through the great piety and strong faith it exhibited, seemed to lack nothing of martyrdom” (ibid).  Despite being viewed as the scourge of the Roman Empire, the Christians were the only ones who stepped forward when Rome was scourged.  This event was no historical accident but instead a blueprint for how Christians should respond in a time of plague.  Throughout history, we find similar responses.  Whether it was Justinian’s Plague of the late 6th Century plague in Rome that Pope St. Gregory expelled with some help from St. Michael and friends or the Black Death in which the mortality rate for priests was 47%, the Church has always viewed plagues as a time to let her light shine before men.

One might be quick to dismiss these historical precedents as irrelevant to our own times.  Society is structured such that plagues and their treatment are very different.  Christians are no longer needed to be de facto First Responders.  The State provides those.  Instead Christians should get out of the way and let the professionals do their job.  It is time to put said light under the bushel basket so that the contagion not spread.  But this would be a misreading of the events and a misunderstanding of what it means to be a Christian.

The Christian Response

Playing armchair epidemiologists, we might comment that the Christians probably made the problem worse.  That many of them died along with the sick would naturally support this fact.  And herein lies the problem.  A natural reading of these events reveal them to be failures, but a supernatural reading of them changes everything.  It is precisely in times of calamity that Christians need to become supernatural storytellers, not primarily by their words, but in their actions.

What made the Christians during those catastrophes exemplars was not that they ran to the front lines and tended to the wounded, but that they were beacons of hope.  They were beacons of true hope, not the optimism of only “two more weeks” but the hope that says “death is not the end”.  The light that they shone was Christian hope, a light that enabled everyone in society to realize that dying well is the meaning of life.  They tended to the spiritual wounds, they were really a Field Hospital and they remained open. 

They didn’t just talk about Christian hope, but they showed it by their actions.  The difference between true Christians and those who are not comes down to one thing—fear of death.  It is the fear of death that keeps people trapped within the clutches of the devil.  But it is Christ Who “freed those who through fear of death had been subject to slavery all their life” (Hebrews 2:15).  Each one of the cornerstones upon which the Church has been built did not fear death and each stone that is added to the edifice is free from the same fear.  The Apostles had seen their Teacher and Lord die, but then He was alive.  Freed from death, He promised them the same power.  That was the basis of their hope and it was the source of their freedom to live for the Glory of God and the salvation of souls even if it cost them their lives.

The Cost of Hope

Like the Apostles and Martyrs, sometimes witnessing to hope cost the Christians living in the times of plague their lives.  That too was necessary because it testifies to the fact that the world can offer no fountain of youth, no immortality.  Still its inhabitants remain locked in fear of death.  Only the Christian is truly free from the fear of death and it is this that sets them apart.  But it wasn’t that they “visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually,” but also that they “held fast to each other.” 

In short, hope was made manifest by the fact that they continued to meet with each other.  They showed no fear of death because spiritual death is far worse.  The danger of spiritual death is ever-present, plague or not.  They met because they needed to constantly feed the hope that was in them.  Only a hopeless lot would give up the Sacraments or treat that only as a life insurance policy. 

You might think they were naïve, but they were far wiser than we; they knew that if Christians were going to rebuild society after the plague, they would need to build up the spiritual strength now.  They knew they would only build as reservoirs of grace, filling up society with the overflow of divine life they received from the Church and her Sacraments.  With greater knowledge they may have taken more precautions, but they would have ultimately thrown caution to the wind because of the value of a single soul. 

Living as we now do under, what Bishop Schneider has dubbed, the “dictatorship of the sanitary” the Church needs to shine forth as a beacon of hope.  What this might look like once prudent precautions are taken isn’t entirely clear, but it has been made abundantly clear both by history and the present moment what it wouldn’t look like.  When the Church responds exactly the same way the world does to a crisis then something is wrong.  The tyranny of the hopeless shuts down everything, the liberality of hope opens wide the doors.  Christians must be witnesses to hope, especially in ages such as we are living.

Catching Zeal

Apologetics, Evangelization, God's Love, God's Will, Grace, The Life of Jesus, Virtue, , , , , ,

In summarizing His mission to the Apostles, Our Lord tells them plain and simply that He “came to cast fire upon the earth; and would that it were already kindled” (Luke 12:49).  He came to set the world ablaze with divine charity and, so ardently does He desire the conflagration that He would offer Himself as tinder.  To set the world aflame with a single kindle would take a highly combustible fuel, a fuel mixed with equal parts of the glory of God and the salvation of souls.  In fact, we could say that everything Jesus said and did was for those two ends.  It drove Him to clean the Temple and it drove Him up the hill of Calvary.  When it was bottled up, it erupted out of the tomb and propelled Our Lord to ascend into Heaven.  It is this fuel that drove Himself in the Eucharist (c.f. Lk 22:15) and it is this fuel that shines forth from all the monstrances on the earth. 

This fire can never be extinguished.  When asked by St. Catherine of Siena what His greatest pain was, Our Lord said it was the pain of desire:

“My child, there can be no comparison between something finite and something infinite. Consider that the pain of My body was limited, while My desire for the salvation of souls was infinite. This burning thirst, this cross of desire, I felt all My life. It was more painful for Me than all the pains that I bore in My body. Nevertheless, My soul was moved with joy seeing the final moment approach, especially at the supper of Holy Thursday when I said, ‘ I have desired ardently to eat this Pasch with you, ‘ that is, sacrifice My body to My Father. I had a great joy, a great consolation, because I saw the time arrive when this cross of desire would cease for Me; and the closer I felt Myself to the flagellation and the other torments of My body, the more I felt the pain in Me diminish. The pain of the body made that of desire disappear, because I saw completed what I had desired. With death on the Cross the pain of the holy desire ended, but not the desire and the hunger I have for your salvation. If this love that I have for you were extinguished, you would no longer exist, since it is only this love that maintains you in life.” 

This habitual desire, this “predominant virtue” of Our Lord as Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange describes it, is zeal.  Our Lord was not only meek and humble, but also zealous.  And it is this zeal that sets the world ablaze.  But we must be absolutely clear on how the fire of Christ’s zeal is spread. 

Christ’s Zeal

We might initially think that it is spread via imitation of Christ.  We would, of course be correct, but only in a secondary way.  Christ’s virtues are not primarily taught to us, but caught by us.  His Messianic mission was not simply to shed His blood on the Cross, but to have that blood touch every aspect of human life.  Messiah was not just a mission, but an identity and His act of redemption is continuous.  He came not just to show us how to live, but to empower us to live that way.  He does not give us an example, but a share in all of His virtues so that if Fr. Garrigou-Lagrange is right, then He wants us to predominantly share in His zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.

We have spoken previously on what zeal is and isn’t  so rather than revisiting that, we should examine how by true zeal we already are.  The Church has long taught that one of the distinctive marks of Catholics is the practice of the Works of Mercy.  But there is always a danger in examining ourselves against these because they can easily be animated by a humanitarian spirit.  When this is the case, they become merely signs of activism rather than evangelism.  Therefore we must examine the spirit in which we perform these acts.  To be truly acts of mercy, they must be zealously done for the glory of God and the salvation of souls.  When we feed the hungry we must do so for the glory of God and the salvation of the hungry man’s soul.  Any other reason is superfluous and draws us towards humanitarianism.  This remains a serious temptation because activism often masquerades as zeal. 

Fr. Jean-Baptiste Chautard in his book The Soul of the Apostolate calls this the “heresy of good works” and describes “activistic heretics” as those who, “for their part, imagine that they are giving greater glory to God in aiming above all at external results. This state of mind is the explanation why, in our day, in spite of the appreciation still shown for schools, dispensaries, missions, and hospitals, devotion to God in its interior form, by penance and prayer, is less and less understood. No longer able to believe in the value of immolation that nobody sees, your activist will not be content merely to treat as slackers and visionaries those who give themselves, in the cloister, to prayer and penance with an ardor for souls equal to that of the most tireless missionary; but he will also roar with laughter at those active workers who consider it indispensable to snatch a few minutes from even the most useful occupations, in order to go and purify and rekindle their energy.”

Catching Zeal

If it is not in external works that we catch Christ’s zeal, then how do we catch it?  Fr. Chautard tells us that we become infected in prayer.  All of our exterior works are simply overflow from our interior lives.  The more time we spend in prayer, close to the Heart of Jesus, the greater will be our love for Him.  The greater our love, the more we will desire what He desires—the glory of God and the salvation of souls.  An apostle without an interior life is no apostle at all but simply a social worker.  We must first be committed to a deep prayer life before we should set out into the world to save souls.  Only in slaking our thirst for Jesus can we quench His thirst for souls.

As Fr. Chautard puts it, “I must seriously fear that I do not have the degree of interior life that Jesus demands of me:   If I cease to increase my thirst to live in Jesus,  that thirst which gives me both the desire to please God in all things, and the fear of displeasing Him in any way whatever. But I necessarily cease to increase this thirst if I no longer make use of the means for doing so: morning mental-prayer, Mass, Sacraments, and Office, general and particular examinations of conscience, and spiritual reading; or if, while not altogether abandoning them, I draw no profit from them, through my own fault.”   

It is this principle in action that has left the Church with a co-Patroness of missionaries that never left the convent.  St. Therese of Lisieux is, along with the great missionary St. Francis Xavier, the co-Patroness of Missionaries.  Her great zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls was formed and then poured out in prayer.  In fact, it was revealed to St. Therese that through her prayer she had converted as many souls as St. Francis Xavier, the great missionary to the East.  The point is that zeal must always be formed first in prayer and then exercised in the manner in which God chooses.

In Defense of Fanaticism

Bible, Virtue, , , ,

It is perfectly OK to be a fan, but not a fanatic—especially a religious fanatic.  Better to be moderate than to be zealous.  At least that is what the spirit of the world tells us.  But if we trace the contours of salvation history, especially in the low spots marked by corruption, it was always the zealots that brought about health and reform.  The Old Testament gives us numerous examples.  Moses, Phinehas, Samuel, David, Elijah, Jael, and Judas Maccabeus are but a few.  Though times changed, these men and woman’s jealousy for God drove them to heroic perseverance in restoring God’s glory among the peoples of the world.  So deep was their hatred of all things opposed to God’s glory being made manifest that they were even willing to take up the sword (or even a tent spike).  They were fanatics in the truest sense of the word.

“Killing in the name of God”—that is exactly the reason why fanaticism is a bad thing.   But that misses the point completely.  These stories were “written for our admonition and our learning” (Romans 15:4) so that we would stir up the same zeal, even if it is to be made manifest differently.  When Peter zealously picked up the sword to defend Our Lord he was rebuked not for the zeal, but for the use of the sword.  Armed with the “sword of the Spirit” it is no longer necessary to wield an actual sword.  The thickness of the Blood of Christ makes the enemies of God nothing more than potential friends. It may be true that “those who live by the sword die by the sword” but this does not absolve us from the duty to become fanatics.

What is Zeal?

St. Thomas defines zeal as an effect of intense love (ST I-II q.28, a.4).  An intense love seeks to remove everything that opposes it.  The more vigorously we love, the more vigorously we oppose resistance to that thing.

We can imagine then that zeal is a most necessary virtue in times of corruption.  When there is much that opposes a good, it takes an intense love of that good to fight against the obstacles to that good being made manifest.  In fact, we could say that it is only men and women of zeal who can lead to true reform.  Church history is marked with fanatics, moved by intense zeal, for God’s glory to shine through His Church.  Our time is no different.  We can look back in time and see figures like St. Athanasius, St. Francis of Assisi, St. Catherine of Siena, and St. Alphonsus Liguori who were consumed with zeal for God.  But for every one of these saints, there were many more who were consumed with a false zeal.  The temptation is ever-present, St. Paul even cautioned the Romans about synthetic zeal, that is, “zeal for God but without discretion” (Romans 10:2).   In order that we not succumb to this counterfeit, it behooves us to make the distinction between true and false zeal.

Drawing on a distinction made by St. Thomas can help us clarify the distinction.  The Angelic Doctor says that zeal comes about according to the type of love we bear.  First there is the love of concupiscence or self-love.  He does not necessarily mean “self-love” as in selfishness but in the sense that we desire our own good.  Zeal manifests itself in two ways: jealousy and envy.  Jealousy is the zeal we experience when something hinders us gaining the object of our love.  We tend to think of jealousy as an exclusively bad thing, but it is not necessarily so.  A husband may jealously protect his wife from other suitors (assuming they are actually trying to take her from him otherwise his jealousy is a bad thing).  Likewise, God is said to be a “jealous God” because there are enemies that are trying to take His beloveds from Him.  The zeal of envy is always bad in that we are moved to envy those who seem to excel and by doing so seem to hinder us from excelling.

Love of friendship on the other hand seeks the friend’s good and zeal in this regard seeks to remove anything that opposes that friend’s good. Aquinas says that, “a man is said to be zealous on God’s behalf, when he endeavors, to the best of his means, to repel whatever is contrary to the honor or will of God.”

True and False Zeal

It is the zeal motivated by the love of God that marks true zeal.  God’s will, put simply, is that His glory be made known.  Anything that acts as an obstacle to this, especially evil and sin, is zealously opposed.  The zealot hates sin first and foremost because it is an offense against God.  Aquinas again: “a man is eaten up with a good zeal, who strives to remedy whatever evil he perceives; and if he cannot, bears with it and laments it.”

Notice that when Aquinas’ man is unable to remedy an evil, he tolerates it, but he also laments  it.  The man of good zeal, in imitation of Christ, takes the sin as if it was his own, grieves over it, and, united with the Passion of Christ, offers the Father penance for it.  He does not attack the other person, but instead wields the sword of the Spirit which penetrates into the evildoer’s heart.  This is a sure test as to whether you have true zeal or false zeal—are you willing to do penance for the person simply because you do not want God to be offended?  False zeal would rather “flame” the person because it is always tainted with self-love.

The true fanatic also knows zeal for the glory of God and the salvation of souls are two sides of the same coin.  God is never more glorified than in the conversion of sinners.  We usually utter trite sayings like “hate the sin, love the sinner” to remind us of this, but sinners are nearly impossible to love.  Instead it should be “hate the sin, but love God who wants to redeem the sinner.”  This is the discretion that the Israelites lacked and St. Paul warns about.  We must love our neighbor for God’s sake first knowing that even the most unrepentant of sinners is powerless against the flood of the Precious Blood.  It is fanatics that open the floodgates.

A Boring Holiday?

Leisure, Virtue, Work, , ,

Each year, from sea to shining sea, our nation sets aside the first Monday of September as a day of great festival.  People gather together by the tens and celebrate Labor Day, a day that “constitutes a yearly national tribute to the contributions workers have made to the strength, prosperity, and well-being of our country” (Department of Labor History of Labor Day).  Labor Day is remarkable indeed, but not for the reasons for the Central Labor Union first envisioned when they celebrated the first Labor Day back in 1882.  Instead, Labor Day is significant because it serves as a sign of a different achievement of modern man—the erasure of what Thomist philosopher Josef Pieper once called the “Festive Principle.”

This festive principle is written into the nature of mankind.  One might even say that it is festival that man is made for.  At the end of the first creation account, the seventh day, God invites man to celebrate a festival with Him, a time to not just to reflect and rest but to revel in the fact that all that is, is good.  Therefore, each man and woman finds buried in his and her heart a desire to celebrate the eternal festival; a desire that is fanned into flame by the great feasts of this life.

This desire cannot be wholly stamped out, but it most certainly can be squashed.  We can and, in fact, have become most un-festive, a truth marked by the “celebration” of Labor Day.  An experiment that began with the founders of the French Revolution has failed because, as Pieper says, “while man can make the celebration, he cannot make what is to be celebrated, cannot make the festive occasion and the cause for celebrating.  The happiness of being created, the existential goodness of things, the participation in the life of God, the overcoming of death-all these occasions of the great traditional festivals are pure gift. But because no one can confer a gift on himself, something that is entirely a human institution cannot be a real festival” (In Tune with the World, p. 46).

Labor Day, like the other National Holidays including Thanksgiving where no one will name Whom it is we are thanking, are about celebrating gifts we have bestowed upon ourselves.  As the Department of Labor reminds us, “It is appropriate, therefore, that the nation pays tribute on Labor Day to the creator of so much of the nation’s strength, freedom, and leadership — the American worker.” Dramatic pause aside, the fact that there is a most of suspense as we mention not the real Creator of those things, but man, is most telling.  Once God is removed from our festal vocabulary our festivals naturally fall flat.  Labor Day is a completely flat holiday.

Labor Day in a particular way ends up in the orbit of the absurd because it is a celebration based upon something wholly material.  It no longer has the eternal festival in view.  It loses its sacramental meaning and therefore is boring.  Because of its materiality (along with Thanksgiving and secular Christmas especially) its “celebration” also has an interior spirit of competition.  Men and women cannot unite around a common material good.  The limited nature of material things leads away from unity and always end in competition.

If we peel back the layers of secularization, then we can see why Labor was chosen as worthy of festivity.  Along with procreation, it is the way in which we most image God.  In both cases we image God the Creator.  So it should not surprise us that the Fall, in bruising the image of God in mankind, turned these two things into labor.  The work of Christ the Laborer was to dial back these effects so that work now becomes a source of grace.  Now that is something that is worthy of festival.  That the One Who simply speaks things into existence should allow mere creatures to use their strength and freedom to co-create with Him.  Worker bees have no dignity, man the worker has dignity because and only insofar as he works as the image of God.  To flatten Labor Day out also flattens each one of us making us mere cogs in an economic machine.  Celebrate Labor Day in a spirit of awe and thanksgiving to God the Creator and each man is elevated to his rightful place in the cosmos.

Nietzsche, who was no friend of transcendent values, once said that “the trick is not to arrange a festival but to find people who can enjoy it.”  For all of the reasons above, Christians should enjoy Labor Day and truly celebrate it for everything that it should be.  “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us rejoice in it.”

On Being a Jerk

Sin, Spiritual Life, Spiritual Warfare, Virtue, , , ,

One of the funniest scenes in one of the funniest all-time movies is from The Jerk.  The protagonist , Navin R. Johnson, played by Steve Martin, gets into an argument with his wife (played by Bernadette Peters) and tells her “Well I’m going to go then.  I don’t need any of this, this stuff and I don’t need you.”  As he leaves the room he eyes an ashtray and says “except this ashtray.”  As he plots his course out of the room he picks up several more exceptions (including a chair) until his hands are completely full.  What makes this scene particularly funny is not that Johnson is acting like a jerk, but that it makes all of us look like jerks.  Creating our own list of exceptions to what we truly need is at the root of most of our unhappiness.  That is why it takes a truly wise man like St. Thomas to tell us that there are really only two things we need to make us happy, neither of which is a chair or an ashtray.  In the midst of describing the perfect political regime in his treatise On Kingship, the Angelic Doctor reminds the reader that only  virtuous action and “a sufficiency of material goods, the use of which is necessary for virtuous action” are needed for a good life.

The reason for the first one, virtuous action, is rather easy to grasp.  Only the man who is capable of truly governing himself has the power to use his freedom to pursue goodness, truth and beauty.  The virtuous man is a free man.  The vicious man is a slave—to his pride, his vanity and his passions.  Enslaved to the egotistical trinity, he is easily drudged to other men.  Profound unhappiness ensues.

Becoming a Jerk?

But even if we get the first one right, there is always a risk that we will get the second one wrong.  It is the second one that keeps us from becoming jerks.  Given that the good life consists in virtue, then everything else is evaluated by its capacity to foster the life of virtue.  To be fair, St. Thomas does not say this exactly.  Absent the rare man who has the capacity to practice heroic virtue, most men truly need material support to become virtuous.  These things include food, water, clothing, and shelter for the man and those in his care.  In St. Thomas’ day and age the scant material condition of many men made it extremely difficult to become virtuous.  He thought that it was the King’s job to foster an environment in which men were able to obtain these things with relative ease.  That is his point.

But there is an important corollary to what the Dumb Ox is saying.  What St. Thomas did not envision however was a time when material conditions had changed so drastically that a “regular” man’s virtue would be threatened because of an excess of material goods.  We live in such an age where the material comforts of even the poorest are beyond the wealthiest aristocrats of earlier ages.  Virtue now is threatened not so much by a lack of needs, but because of an excess power to obtain our wants.

We might be tempted to a knee-jerk reaction and think that the response is to only focus on those things we absolutely need.  To be clear, there is nothing wrong with wanting things we do not absolutely need.  It is not a matter of either/or.  A rich life includes wants as well as needs.  The problem is that the jerk wanders about grabbing what he can.  He wants things for the wrong reason.  What are the wrong reasons?  All of them, save one, that the thing helps him in some way to live a life of virtue.  Virtue causes in us the habit of wanting the right things.

True Wisdom of the Saints

The wisdom of St. Thomas is perennial.  He has given us a rule to live by in both lack and plenty.  In this age of plenty there are many Christians struggling not to get caught up in the economic materialism of the age.  This rule guides us in deciding what we will buy and what we won’t.  It keeps us from falling prey to the trappings of the world that are meant to lull us to sleep.  And, most importantly, it gives us a rule to pass along to our children.  Life is about wanting the right things for the right reasons and avoiding becoming a jerk.

St. Ignatius of Loyola in his Spiritual Exercises introduces the concept of indifference which serves as a perfect complement to St. Thomas’ principle.  We should, according to the saint, be indifferent to the means that God uses to make us holy.  All that we care about is that a thing is making us holy.  Everything else in this world is just a means—instruments used for our growth.  When they cease to serve that purpose, we let them go.  Lacking something?  Thank divine Providence because your need for virtue is being filled in that lack.  It is this holy indifference that also keeps us from becoming attached to things we already have.   St. Paul likewise tells the Philippians that this indifference is a key to unlocking joy: “Now I rejoice in the Lord exceedingly, that now at length your thought for me hath flourished again, as you did also think; but you were busied. I speak not as it were for want. For I have learned, in whatsoever state I am, to be content therewith. I know both how to be brought low, and I know how to abound: (everywhere, and in all things I am instructed) both to be full, and to be hungry; both to abound, and to suffer need” (Phil 4:10-13)

The Gatekeeper said that only those who live out the evangelical command of poverty can enter the Kingdom of Heaven.  And herein lies the great value in the teachings of the three saints—it gives us a means to live a life contrary to the anti-poverty of the age.  Might it take heroic virtue to turn away from the excess material pleasures our world offers?  Perhaps. One of the conditions of sainthood is heroic virtue.  And in the end, that leaves us with a true either/or; either we will be saints or we will be jerks.  Don’t be a jerk.

Losing the Weight of Vice without Dieting

Fasting, Virtue, , ,

“Lose weight without dieting!”  In a culture that is obsessed with diet and weight loss, headlines like this immediately catch our eye.  Most of these are fads, just like the diets they pledge to avoid, except for the latest trend—fasting.  Fitness articles and health gurus are now proclaiming the power of fasting to help lose weight.    That fasting has incredible health benefits should not surprise us as Catholics.  These cutting-edge scientists are really just regurgitating what the humblest of monks in the 6th and 7th Centuries already knew—that the spiritual benefits of fasting spill over to the body.  What they don’t recognize however is why this is so.  And in truth, neither do most of us.

This maxim that spiritual benefits of certain acts like fasting can spill over into the body is important for us to grasp.  Not only does it witness to our hylomorphism, but more to the point it sheds light on the fact that acts of virtue are good for the whole person.  We tend to see virtue as “a spiritual thing” that really only leads to frustration of our bodily powers.  But properly understood virtues perfect our powers and restore the soul as rightful governor of the body, enabling us to more fully enjoy our freedom.

Fasting, Virtue and Freedom

An example might help us see the truth in something we may unconsciously already know.  All things being equal, a man who is patient is also a man whose blood pressure is lower than a man’s who isn’t patient.  The reason we don’t grasp it at first is because conquering a vice like anger is very difficult at the beginning and, rather than calming the body, can have the opposite effect.  The man not schooled in patience is going to be further frustrated by the fact that he is holding back his frustration.  It can be downright painful in proportion to our viciousness.  So painful in fact that modern psychology tells us it is unhealthy repression.  In truth, pain is vice leaving the body.  But once the virtue matures in us, its fruits are felt in the body.  And like the fruit from a mature tree, it brings us pleasure, a pleasure that will be reinforced in the body.

At this point the reader may feel they have become victim to a little “bait and switch.”  We started out talking about fasting but somehow moved to virtue, using the example of patience.  The analogy was made because most of us don’t fast and most of us don’t realize that fasting is a virtue.  Fasting as a virtue means, that when habitually cultivated, it actually perfects our nature.  Put another way, we will never be perfect unless we fast.  Thus St. Thomas Aquinas says that fasting is a precept of the natural law.

Fasting is a virtue because it perfects our will power especially with respect to our concupiscible appetites.  Recall that the concupiscible appetite or emotions are those that draw us to bodily goods like eating and sex.  Because these pleasures are so closely related, fasting not only governs our use of food but also, St. Thomas Aquinas says, is the guardian of chastity.  When we can habitually control our desire for food which is an absolute necessity, we can control the other desires of the flesh which are not.  Once our powers of eating are controlled by the will, we actually enjoy it more—we are able to feast without splurging and experience true joy.  In other words, eating becomes not just a bodily act but an act of the whole person.  We come to eat the right things, in the right way at the right time and thus increase our pleasure.  So too with the other powers of the flesh when the virtue of fasting comes full bloom.

Those experienced in fasting will develop a power of will that enables it to choose independent of the desires of the flesh.  Until that experience comes we should expect it to be hard and expect to fail.  The untrained body will rail hard against the spirit that attempts to bridle it.  But like a man trying to train a horse and not necessarily break it, it is always better to start at a level that is parallel to our starting point.  A bread and water fast for someone who does not fast will only lead to failure.  Instead begin by fasting at each meal, making one small sacrifice (leaving a bite on the plate, no salt, eating what is before you, etc.) each time you come to the table.

Additional Benefits of Fasting

Our intellectual powers also are perfected through fasting.  St. Thomas says that fasting enables the mind to “arise more freely to the contemplation of heavenly things.”  What he means by this is that through fasting our minds are freed from the day to day clutter that inhibits us most of the time.  Again anyone who has dabbled in fasting knows that all you can think about at first is how hungry you are.  But as time goes on you gain greater control over your thoughts and are no longer as concerned with the needs of the body.  Your body may be saying “I’m starving” but the will is telling it “stop whining, you are not starving.”  Eventually the will wins out and the body relents; creating a calmer atmosphere for thought.  Those schooled in fasting all can attest to a certain clarity in thinking that is not there when they are not fasting, but the habit of raising their minds above the humdrum remains even after fasting is over.

St. Thomas adds a third reason why we should fast and that is to satisfy for sins.  Catholics are well aware of the penitential value of fasting, or at least they ought to be.  But there is a related point that is worth examining because it goes to the heart of sacrifice in general.  Which is more pleasing to God, a fast that is hard or a fast that is easy?  I don’t mean hard or easy in the sense of rigor but more in how freely (without interior resistance) we are able to accomplish it.  Most of us would say that a sacrifice that is hard is more pleasing.  But that is not true.  The greater the person’s virtue, the greater their freedom in making the offering.  The person who does not yet have the virtue of fasting goes back and forth but the person with the virtue sets their will on fasting and never deviates.  The latter offers a greater sacrifice even if the rigor of the former is greater.

Want to lose weight without dieting?  Not just body weight, but also the dead weight of the vices of the “old man” (c.f Romans 6:6).  There is no better way than to develop a virtuous life of moderation that includes the virtue of fasting.  Like all the virtues fasting is hard at first, but with maturity it produces sweet fruits that are more enjoyable than the palatable pleasures passed up.  Why not begin today?

You Betcha

Freedom, Money, Moralilty, Virtue, ,

Last month the Supreme Court struck down a federal law that prohibited sports gambling, paving the way for states to fabricate their own legislation regarding sports betting.  What each of the states end up doing is still to be decided, but before political expediency takes over, we should take an opportunity to consider the morality of gambling.  The topic of gambling and games of chance is not foreign to the moral teachings of the Church.  It has been a part of her Magisterium from very early on.  And so we can look at the principles that have been articulated in order to shine some light upon the subject of betting.

Over the past century, the Church has seen a profound shift in her pedagogical methods.  Gone are the days of the manualists, paving the way for more positive virtue-based pedagogy.  Fr. Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange described the prevailing views of the two schools as “the science of virtues versus the science of sins to be avoided.”  Whether this change in emphasis is a good thing or not is a question for another time, but what is not questionable is the fact that the “science of the virtues” approach has brought with it an open antagonism towards the science of “sins to be avoided.”  The manuals were very useful at the time because of the manner in which they taught.  They would first articulate general moral principles and then give examples of applying those principles to concrete examples.  It gave the readers (who were mostly confessors and theologians) a moral vocabulary that enabled them to navigate the practical realm with greater ease.  These manuals still retain their use today, even if in a complementary way.

The point of this digression, and how it relates to gambling, is that one would be hard-pressed to find an adequate discussion of gambling in today’s moral theology books.  The emphasis may be on developing the virtue of temperance, but without concrete situations in which the virtue is formed leaves us without any frame of reference.  Even if half the story is positive, it is still only half the story.  Discussing the virtue without discussing how the stop the opposing vice from forming is not enough.  Virtue isn’t only formed by facing a temptation head on, but also in the speed in which we flee from those moments of trial.  In other words, virtues are positive things that are formed by avoiding the near occasion of sin, a concept we hear very little about today.

Moral Approach

With that being said, we have to return to one of the most popular manuals of moral theology (partially because it was the first that was written in English) to find a thorough discussion of gambling.  In his Manual of Moral Theology, Fr. Thomas Slater, S.J. briefly treats the subject of gambling and games of chance.  He says that gambling, when it is framed within the realm of recreation and entertainment, is morally legitimate with some obvious caveats.  First, on the part of the gambler he must be acting freely and betting what is at his free disposal.  This means that he is not betting money that would otherwise be necessary for living and providing for his family.  Likewise both parties must clearly understand the rules of the game and that the outcome of the game is uncertain.

The reason why it is helpful to examine this issue from the “old” schema of moral theology is that this is one of those situations where just because you can do something, doesn’t mean you should.  Gambling is fraught with moral danger because it is a highly addictive form of entertainment that very quickly gets out of control, paving the way for moral ruin.  Neuroscientists have recently discovered, what St. Thomas and the Scholastics already knew, certain behaviors by arousing our passions, can become addictive.  Specifically they have found that certain behaviors like gambling produce similar chemical responses in our brains as some of the most addictive drugs like cocaine.  These neurotransmitters (of which dopamine is the primary one) are produced in response to certain stimuli and produce a feeling of pleasure.  This release is not just in the actual winning of the bet, but in the anticipation of the winning.  This means the pleasure comes not so much in winning but in betting.  And like all physiological pleasures we must “up the ante:’ (pun intended) in order to reproduce the same response.  The stakes must become higher and higher to produce the same feeling.  We do not need to look to far to find examples of men (mostly) and women whose lives have been ruined because of this addiction.

We are Catholics and that means we do not flee from things simply because their abuse can lead to addiction.  As Chesterton once said, “In Catholicism, the pint, the pipe, and the Cross can all fit together.”  But recall that gambling was a morally legitimate means of recreation. Once it ceases to be that, either because we do as a source of income, or it becomes an addiction, it no longer serves its purpose.  In fact one must ask how exactly this type of recreation, even when engaged in as such, re-creates us especially given the obvious dangers.  Still it remains legitimate, even if I cannot personally see its merits.

Legal Approach

Chesterton’s quote also reminds us of a related historical failure in which laws were made to curb abuse by prohibiting all use—Prohibition in the 1920s.  At the time, drunkenness was a social problem that needed to be dealt with.  Unfortunately by prohibiting “the production, transport and sale of (though not the consumption or private possession of) alcohol” (18th Amendment), it opened the door to even greater social ills.  This was because they were not good Thomists, failing to recognize that you cannot outlaw every vice.  The Angelic Doctor thought that laws should only treat “the more grievous vices from which it is possible for the majority to abstain; and chiefly those that are to the hurt of others…”  In essence, the Angelic Doctor is saying that when a law prescribes acts that are far beyond the virtue of the average person in society, then there ought to be no laws against it.  One of the reasons for this is that the law may become a pathway to further vice.  What instead should have happened at the time was further support of the Temperance Movement, even through legislation.  The law cannot create virtue, but it can clear the way for it.

The parallels to sports gambling are obvious, even if it does not quite effect the same percentage of society as Prohibition did in the 1920s.  There should be no laws prohibiting sports betting, but instead the aim should be towards forming and fostering the virtue of temperance, even if this requires oversight and rules that limit the amount of gambling a person may engage in.

The Worker

Anthropology, Economics, Redemption, The Life of Jesus, Theology, Virtue, Work, , ,

Was man made to work or was work made for man?  The modern answer, enlightened of course by the strange amalgam of Marxism and liberalism is that made was made for work.  The Christian, and therefore the true answer, is that work was made for man.  In the beginning God made man and placed him in an earthly paradise.  Despite declaring creation “good, very good” (Gn 1:31), God left it completely incomplete and commanded man to finish it, to “cultivate and care for it” (Gn 2:15), because man himself was completely incomplete.  God commands only what is for our own good so that it is natural for man to work because work is a means of perfecting him.  With the Fall, man became incompletely incomplete so that work, while still essential to his fulfillment, lost its sweetness and became labor (c.f. Gn 3:17-19).  The effects of this curse are still felt today—especially today—when man is plagued by compartmentalization leaving him alienated from himself.  Given the key role that work plays in the integrated life then we must strive to see it in its proper context.

If we are to be honest, absent the Christian message as a whole, the secular response is the best we can come up with.  Even the pre-Christian pagans thought that all men were made to work, or, at least some men were made for servile work so that others didn’t have to.  That is because all they can see is the bad news—the curse of the Fall.  But the Redeemer of Mankind came spending most of His earthly life as a manual laborer redeeming work itself.  He came preaching, as St. John Paul II reminded us, “the Gospel of Work.”  And just as His mother Mary received the first fruits of His redemptive act, it is His earthly father Joseph, the man who worked beside Him those many years, that first reaped the fruits of the redemptive gift of work.  It is for this reason that the Church puts forth St. Joseph as “The Worker.”  If we are to see work in its proper context then we should look to St. Joseph as the model.

First a word about the seeming necessity of compartmentalization.  Most of us spend more time at work than anywhere else.  It becomes a compartment because it seems to only be related to the material.  Man applies his labor and ingenuity on creation in order to produce something that he can use.  The emphasis really seems to be on the finished product so that we can stockpile just enough to take a break (even if indefinitely) and do the really meaningful things including the compartment of “religion and God.”  While we may hear niceties about “praying while you work,” avoiding compartmentalization seems a practical impossibility.

The Finished Product

But this is where the emphasis on work as made for man is important.  The finished product of him work is not just the material thing produced, it is himself.  Good work is that which makes us good men.  Work ought to be judged first and foremost on what it turns us into.  Work that helps us grow in virtue is good work regardless of the actual task.  Seeing work in this subjective sense, the person produced, rather than solely in the exterior production can free us from compartmentalization because it is a means of forming the whole person.  The interior fruits of our labor are carried throughout the rest of our life.

Still man is confronted with the challenge of integrating work with his relationship to God.  There is always a gravity of work that pulls man towards creation, even if it is towards his own virtue, and away from God.  And this is why we need St. Joseph as our intercessor and model.  He, quite literally, worked for and with God.

Working For and With God

All of the work that St. Joseph did was, even if indirectly, for Jesus.  The “righteous man” sought always to serve God especially through his work.  What this means for us is that we can redeem our work by setting our intention.  At the beginning of any of our work we should make of it an offering to God.  Then all that we accomplish becomes a gift to Jesus.  We can also willingly accept, like St. Joseph did, the toilsome-ness of work.  Because work became labor through mankind’s sin, our acceptance of the burdens is an offering for our sins.  It was in this way that St. Joseph shared in Christ’s redemptive act and so can we.

Work also helps us to pay the debt of gratitude to God for the gifts, especially the special skills, He has given us.  Gratitude, properly speaking, carries with it not just the obligation to say “thank you” but also the obligation to repay the benefactor.  The fruit of our labor then becomes a means by which we repay to God this great debt.

There also needs to be a paradigm shift in order to see our work as working with God.  We should see it as a means of not only completely creation, but also as distributing it to all of mankind.  Just because you are getting paid to work doesn’t mean it isn’t also an exercise of charity towards our neighbor.  All workplaces can be charities when we take upon ourselves the spirit of St. Joseph.  This desire not only to give someone what they have paid for but also to go “above and beyond” by making manifest the love of God can sanctify the most secular of work environments.

When Pope Pius XII instituted the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker in 1955 it was in response to the dehumanizing effects of Communism; offering an alternative to their May Day celebrations for workers. In the subsequent sixty-three years we have seen work became a source of further disintegration in the lives of mankind.  By seeing work through the eyes of the Church and the illumination offered by St. Joseph the Worker we can restore work to its rightful place in the lives of all of us.

St. Joseph the Worker, pray for us!

The Natural-Supernatural Distinction

God's Will, Grace, Heaven, Spiritual Life, Virtue, , ,

In his latest Apostolic Exhortation, Pope Francis cautions the faithful to avoid what he sees as two re-emerging Christian heresies, Gnosticism and Pelagianism.  I will speak on the former another time, but today I would like to address the latter—Pelagianism.  Thanks to the hammer of over-correction, this whack-a-mole heresy is perpetually popping up within the history of the Church.  Now that Pope Francis fixed the crosshairs upon this heresy, we need to also guard against its over-correcting counterpart, Quietism.  In order to do this we must find the spiritual middle ground.

To begin, a few definitions are in order.  Pelagianism has a number of principal tenets but its essence consists in a denial of the supernatural order and the necessity of grace for salvation.  Despite condemnations from numerous Popes and Councils, it still persists to this day.  Likewise with the heresy of Quietism which puts forth the position that to become perfect one must be totally passive in the spiritual life waiting for God to act.  Quietism rejects not only prayers with any specific content (like acts of love, petition or adoration) but also sees mortification and the sacraments as useless.  Despite coming from a different starting point, notice how this heresy comes to the same practical conclusions of Pelagianism.  Left unchecked, these heresies leave us dangling on a pendulum mostly due to a failure to make a crucial distinction.  It is a failure to make what we might call the “Natural-Supernatural Distinction” that lay at the heart of the re-emergence of Pelagianism along with the seemingly endless “Faith vs Works” debate that has plagued Catholic and Protestant discussion for centuries.

The Important Distinction

This distinction comes into focus once we examine the following proposition—“Free will, without the help of God’s grace, acts only in order to sin.”  How should we respond to this?  In order to condemn Pelagianism, we want to accept the proposition.  The problem however is that the Church condemns this one as well.  Pope St. Pius V in his 1567 Papal Bull Ex Omnibus Afflictionibus anathematized this proposition as contrary to the Faith.  How can both Pelagianism and this proposition be false?  It hinges on what we mean by good when we ask the question, “can we be good without God’s grace?”.

A morally good act is one that is in accord with right reason and fulfills our nature.  Thus a man, without being under the influence of grace can act prudently by doing what is just, temperate, and courageous in specific situations. He may even do so habitually so that he grows in virtue and becomes a “good” man.  History is replete with examples of good pagans and other non-Christians so it seems undeniable to think one cannot be good without grace.  But no matter how many good things he does, a man cannot do a single thing that will merit him everlasting life.  In the face of that end, he is like a cow reading Shakespeare, utterly incapable.  But unlike the cow, man can have a super-nature grafted onto him that enables him to perform God-like actions.  Once he receives this nature, that is, once he becomes a “partaker of the divine nature” (c.f. 2 Peter 1:4) and is given sanctifying grace can he now do things that will fulfill his gifted supernatural end.

The Holy Spirit comes to dwell within us and brings with Him a new set of human powers.  First He brings infused virtues that enable the man to direct his actions to God.  No longer does he act for some particular good, His actions can be habitually directed towards the ultimate Good, God Himself.  And he is rewarded accordingly.  He is given the power to be moved directly by that same Spirit with His seven-fold gifts.  And he is rewarded accordingly.  He is, day by day, made not just good but holy.  No longer are his actions merely good in the natural sense but now they are supernaturally good.  St. Thomas sums it up well when he says “without grace man cannot merit everlasting life; yet he can perform works conducing to a good which is natural to man” (ST I-II q.109 a.5).

Becoming More Human

As the Supernature becomes more and more operative in the man, he becomes more human and not less.  “Christ came to fully reveal man to himself and make his supreme calling clear” (Gaudium et Spes, 22).  Grace most certainly perfects nature, but only to the extent that we cooperate with it.  How do we nurture this super-nature?  By becoming naturally good.  Cooperation really means that remove the obstacles that we place in the way.  Growth in the infused virtue of prudence, for example, is directly related to growth in the acquired virtue of prudence.  This is not because the infused virtues are somehow grafted on top of the natural virtues, but because the natural virtues facilitates the removal of any obstacles to the infused virtue being completely operative.  This is why we must never forget the truth that we are capable on our own of growing in natural virtue.

This is important because we often remain rather passive in our attempts to grow in holiness.  Avoiding any traces of Pelagianism, we have a tendency to be rather passive in our attempts to grow in holiness and move towards an equally spiritually impotent habit of Quietism.  We wait for God to provide the growth but forget that we have the power to till and fertilize the soil in the meantime.  We should be at all times working diligently to grow in the natural virtues so that when the grace of growth comes, there is nothing stopping it.  And this is why the “Natural-Supernatural Distinction” is so important for us to grasp.  Naturally we cannot achieve any merit, but we can (naturally) remove the impediments by actively cultivating the acquired virtues.    We must constantly be at work fertilizing our soil.  No saint ever reached the heights of holiness without going through a stage of active purgation.  We are still fallen creatures so that our efforts at natural perfection will always fall short.  This is why each of the saints also went through a stage of passive purgation in which God, through the workings of Providence and actual graces, completes the growth in perfection.

The problem with most heresies is not so much that they are false, but that they tend to overemphasize one aspect of the truth at the expense of other aspects.  In this regard, Pelagianism is no different with its over-emphasis on human effort.  But the response is not then to become a Quietist, passively waiting on God to act.  Instead, we must live the “both/and” doctrine of the Faith in which we follow the rule of St. Ignatius, “pray as if everything depended upon God and work as if everything depended on you.”

Music and Morality

Culture, Moralilty, Music, Virtue, , ,

When Plato set out to write the Republic, he was attempting to present a blueprint for a just society filled with just men.  You might be surprised then to find several sections in which he discusses music.  Plato, like many of the ancients, thought music was not invented but discovered; a sacrament that made the order and rhythm of the universe felt.  “Rhythm and harmony,” he thought, “find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful.”   In other words, music, because of its power to captivate us and bring us pleasure, also has to be evaluated morally.  And in this, we moderns would think him entirely backward.  Maybe the lyrics matter a little, but music itself is entirely neutral.  Good music is in the ear of the listener.  Plato himself would group us moderns with the fools of his day who “[I]n their mindlessness [they] involuntarily falsified music itself when they asserted that there was no such thing as correct music, and that it was quite correct to judge music by the standard of the pleasure it gives to whoever enjoys it, whether he be better or worse” (The Laws 700e).

This is not an attempt to empirically verify what Plato thought as true, but only to set the table by asking a simple question—what caused the sexual revolution?  Put more precisely, why did things change so drastically in the mid-60s and 70s?  It would be hard not to connect it to the revolution in music that preceded it.  In fact we can do this for many periods of recent and not-so recent history; from the nihilism of the late 19th Century and its connection to the denial of tonality in music to the denial of tradition in the Romantic composers, Plato seems particular prescient—“ [A]s Damon says, and I am convinced, the musical modes are never changed without change in the most important of a city’s laws” (Republic 424c).

The Moral Aspect of Music

Although we could continue to trace the music-cultural connection, it is more instructive to examine the nature of music and its effects on morality to show why this will always be the case.  What makes this particular topic difficult to discuss is that most of us have a fundamental misunderstanding regarding morality.  We have come to see it mainly as following rules, that is, as a training exercise of the intellect.  But the moral man is one who trains his will such that he learns to take pleasure in the right things.  It is no unlike the man with a healthy diet in that he learns to like the taste of food that is healthy for him.  When driven by pleasure alone he will consume only those foods that are sweet to his palate, treating health as, at best, a secondary concern.  When he is concerned with his health and sees food as necessary to maintaining it, he will develop his palate such that he finds pleasure in foods that are truly good for him.

The food analogy is a helpful aid to understanding music.  Music naturally has a capacity to move us and bring us pleasure.  It is able to target specific emotions or evoke certain images.  Military men were able to cover much greater distances when marching to music.  They were able to go bravely into battle on the heels of the otherwise unarmed military drummers and buglers.  Movies add to the suspense of the scenes by playing music.  Try watching the shower scene in Psycho without the music and see if it elicits the same response from you.  Music clearly feeds the soul and therefore we should ask how to separate the healthy music from junk food.

This inherent capacity of music to move us is where music takes on a moral component.  Emotions are part of the constitution of man and are meant to be bodily responses to good and evil.  They can be stirred up (or permitted to endure) interiorly through reflection or they can be stirred from contact with something exterior to us.  When they are stirred up from the outside prior to any moral reflection, there is no moral aspect per se.  But once we choose the particular emotion, then it becomes subject to moral evaluation.  The morality of emotions is something most of us already grasp.  What we may not realize however is that when we choose a thing because it will stir up an emotion, this too is subject to moral norms.

When we choose a song that we “like” what we are really saying is that “I like the emotion this music causes me to feel.”  Fallen as we are, without reflection we tend towards those things that stir up base emotions.  To continue to feed certain emotions develops in us a habit for those emotions to arise on their own with ever greater frequency.  These unbridled emotions then dispose us towards vice, making it easier and more pleasurable.  Music that is rhythm-heavy with a syncopated beat (like modern popular music and rock) for example, tends to stir up the base emotions associated with anger and lust.  Train the body enough in these emotions and acts will follow.  The angry teenager who only wants to listen to his music (he is addicted to the pleasure of feeling angry) and the “bumping and grinding” that sets the scene of the dance club are both caused by the accompanying music.

Evaluating Music

Because of the melody, harmony and rhythm, music has the capacity to bring us pleasure; and not just bodily pleasure.  The melody and harmony can bring pleasure to our souls while the pleasure of rhythm can be felt bodily.  Music that respects this ordering, placing rhythm at the service of the other two, will bring us spiritual pleasure.  This gives us a way in which we might evaluate the quality of the music.  Music that corresponds to the ordering of the soul, when the artistic primacy of melody and harmony above rhythm is respected, is objectively good music.  Classical, folk and liturgical music are all examples of genres in which this hierarchy is respected.

Notice that I have said nothing about the lyrics.  In truth, lyrics serve only, at best, a secondary role.  To say “you don’t listen to the lyrics” doesn’t really change anything.  Even if you don’t understand German, you know that Beethoven’s Ninth is an Ode to Joy.  Much of the music in vogue today, you can’t understand the lyrics anyway.  Regardless, lyrics are meant to serve the other aspects of the music.  They are meant to make clearer the artist’s intent.  In rhythm heavy rock and pop music, the lyrics are supporting the beat and the song would have the same effect (maybe not as deeply) without the lyrics.  This is why Christian rock is an absurdity.  The rhythm is saying one thing and the words another.  There is no due proportion and the result is ugly in the truest sense of the word.

In a world where arguments are ignored(especially when someone might be addicted to the thing you are arguing about), there is value in personal experience.  The easiest way for us to evaluate our own musical choices is to simply observe ourselves when we listen to a particular song.  Where does your mind go and what emotions are stirred in you?  What is it that you like specifically about the song?  Conversely when you think of the “anti-one hit wonders” like Mozart, Bach, Palestrina and the like, what is it you don’t like about their music?  Is it boring?  That might be because you have been feeding on junk food for so long that you need to refresh your musical palate.  With a steady diet of only music that uplifts your soul, you will come to draw pleasure from objectively good music.  Trust me, if I, with the steady diet of crappy music I used to listen to, can do it then so can you.  And you will be that much the better for it.  In fact, society as a whole will be that much better for it.