Category Archives: Virtue

Watching without Seeing

Virtue

“Curiosity killed the cat,” the proverb goes, “but satisfaction brought him back.”  Throughout Christian history, from Augustine and Jerome to Aquinas, curiosity has been viewed as a serious vice.  In contrast, today, it represents little more than an annoying habit.  The problem is all the more acute in an age where we have access to endless hours of entertainment, social media, and the internet filled with information.  Far from being just a minor fault, curiosity represents a serious problem that, if left unchecked, can put our souls in just as must danger as the cat.  But rather than satisfaction, it is the virtue of studiousness that will bring us back.

It must first be admitted that because of our rational nature, we each have a great desire for knowledge of the truth.  As Aristotle said, “all men have a desire to know.”   Just as the body is fueled by food, so the intellect is fueled by truth.    Because knowledge of the truth leads to our fulfillment as rational creatures, it is a fundamental good.  This is why curiosity is such a temptation and ultimately harms us.

But like the natural desire for food, the desire for knowledge must be moderated by our reason.  This is where the virtue of studiousness comes in.  By fostering studiousness, or the habit of study, we will refuse to feed the intellect with the junk food of mere facts, but the nutrition of truth.  Just as a steady diet of junk food will leave us sluggish, a steady diet of facts leads to the sluggishness of curiosity.  If we recall that acedia or sloth is a spiritual laziness by which we see a spiritual good as not really worth the effort it takes to get it, we can see why St. Thomas thought that curiosity was a daughter vice of acedia.

Curiosity is the desire for knowledge simply for the pleasure that it brings as opposed to knowing for the sake of knowledge itself (which is the virtue of studiousness).   Gossip, which brings the pleasure of knowing something bad about someone else is a prime example of curiosity.  On the other hand, study is the keen application of the mind to something.  The studious person has no desire to gossip.

Gossiping women

But how can we know the difference, especially when the desire for knowledge is a good thing?  St. Thomas says the learning of the truth can be inordinate in four ways.  First, “when a man is withdrawn by a less profitable study from a study that is an obligation incumbent upon him.”   Although he did not live in an era of social media and the internet, St. Thomas is particularly prophetic here.  It is curiosity that drives the social media phenomenon.  A recent study by the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that the average American spends almost an hour a day on Facebook.   To carry the food analogy further, this is about the same amount of time we spend eating each day.  While we are there, we are bombarded with facts—both news items and personal—but it is curiosity that drives us to scroll through the feeds.  That time could be better spent studying, especially given that the same study found that the average person spends less than 20 minutes a day reading.  Curiosity always leads to ignorance because we do not study those things we should be studying.  It is curiosity that has left us “educated” yet ignorant.

The second way in which curiosity manifests itself is through knowledge of things that are not licit.  St. Thomas gives the example of fortune telling.  Under the guise of harmless curiosity, many have been sucked unwittingly into the traps of the Evil One through fortune telling, Ouija boards and Tarot cards.  Many young men are sucked into pornography mainly out of curiosity—hearing about it from friends or wondering what the allure is for their dad and all the time he spends on it.

Aquinas also says that curiosity rears its head when we “study about creatures without reference to the due end namely God.”  By this he means that much of our modern scientific inquiry is rooted in curiosity.  All science has become mechanistic rather than teleological.  We collect facts through the scientific method, but do not study (or more accurately contemplate) the purpose.   Studiousness is needed for science because it requires the self-discipline to exclude frivolous pursuits and those that contradict the moral law.  Instead, we act without any reference to the moral law and equate the technically possible with the morally permissible.  Science when governed by studiousness allows us to see how all things are connected as part of a whole, a whole that is meant to reveal the Creator.

Finally Aquinas says curiosity seeks to know the truth above the capacity of our own intelligence.  All too often we fall into the Cliff Clavinesque habit of regurgitating facts merely to impress.  Curiosity is about replacing the desire for truth with empty shows.

What makes curiosity so soul-deadening is that it acts as a gateway vice, leading to worse things. Earlier we used the example of pornography, but it ultimately leads to an inability to love.  Recently, I witnessed a car accident when the driver hit the gas instead of the brake while pulling into a parking space and drove through a store front.  Rather than rushing to help the driver, nearly all of the bystanders stood there, phones in hand, taking pictures.  Deadened by curiosity, what else could they do but post photos of this poor woman’s misery to their social media accounts?  No compassion or even respect, just entertainment.

It is the stoking of curiosity too that drives the news media.  Each “major” event in the news cycle gets reported in painstaking details and then is quickly replaced with the next event.  Curiosity drives our consumption and it leads to a profound change in us.  It’s not just that we become desensitized to the suffering of others or that we waste time.  It is that we lose the ability to examine things deeply.  Life becomes episodic and we do not know how it all fits together because we watch rather than see.

“Curiosity killed the man and no amount of satisfaction can bring him back.”

Know Thy Temperament

Moralilty, Virtue

In 2014, Americans spent over $10 billion on self-help books, CDs and seminars.  Although these techniques promise change, very often they fail to make any lasting impact on our lives.  The problem oftentimes is that the programs themselves have a different definition of happiness or perfection and so we end up dissatisfied even when we reach our goals.  More often however is that we lack the self-knowledge necessary to really affect change in our lives.  When we begin to confront our shortcomings, a certain amount of sadness arises in us.  In order to avoid this sadness, we develop blind spots to our true faults.  We then embark on some self-help program to fix faults we don’t really have or ones that are minor at best.  This is not to say these programs have no use in our lives, after all, only that they will be entirely ineffective unless we have self-knowledge.  Placing ourselves before God in prayer by which we come to know ourselves as He knows us is remains the most effective way to grow in self-knowledge and to heal those defects that we have.  But many people may not be aware that in the Catholic tradition there are other objective means to growing in self-knowledge, namely by relying on the knowledge of our temperament.

Fr. Jordan Aumann defines a temperament as, “as the pattern of inclinations and reactions that proceed from the physiological constitution of the individual. It is a dynamic factor that determines to a great extent the manner in which an individual will react to stimuli of various kinds.”  Within this definition we can see two factors, namely that our temperaments are based on our material makeup (physiological constitution) and represent a pattern or a natural way to reacting to a given situation.  These reactions can be quick or slow and short in duration or long lasting.  Each of these four combinations maps to a specific temperament.

What makes knowledge of one’s temperament extremely helpful when it comes to self-knowledge is that it enables us to see both are natural strengths and weaknesses.  It also makes some virtues easier while others are harder.

There are two caveats that are important for us to understand as well.  First we must never use our temperament as an excuse for our bad behavior or as a way to minimize our faults.  We use it to understand our tendencies and as a means to view our weaknesses—but this is always done so that we can open the windows of our souls and allow the transforming light of Christ to shine on them.  Second, just because it is a natural tendency does not mean that we are stuck with our temperament.  As Aumann’s definition suggests, temperaments are dispositions which means they can be molded and changed.  Our goal ought to be to for the perfection of all four temperaments rather than thinking we are stuck with our own.

In looking at each of the four temperaments, we begin with the choleric.  The choleric temperament is easily and strongly aroused, and the impression lasts for a long time.   Because of this, the choleric tends to show great zeal for whatever he sets his mind to.  He tends to be strong willed and highly emotional and a man of principles.  The virtues of perseverance and justice tend to come rather easily and this temperament naturally lends itself to leading others.

On the other hand, the choleric because he is highly emotional often acts quickly and is imprudent in his haste.  He must actively work to cultivate patience, prudence, and humility.  Because he is principle based he tends to put principles ahead of people and rarely does things just to be nice.  So, on a natural level they need to practice charity in dealing with others.

The passionate partner of the choleric is the melancholic.  The melancholic reacts slowly but once aroused the impression is strong and long lasting.  By nature the melancholic is inclined to reflection, piety, and the interior life. They are compassionate toward those who suffer, attracted to the corporal works of mercy, and able to endure suffering to the point of heroism in the performance of their duties. They have high ideals and a commitment to perfection.  They also tend to analyze their projects thoroughly.

The melancholic tends to be overly critical of themselves and others, dismissive and overly judgmental.  They lack self-confidence and often have difficulty starting tasks.

Those with a Sanguine temperament tend to react quickly and strongly to almost any stimulation or impression, but the reaction is usually of short duration.   The sanguine is optimistic, sometime overly so and are usually fairly outgoing. This means that compassion usually comes rather easily to them, but they have trouble being impartial because their feelings are so strong.  They tend to be impulsive as well.

Because the deep passion in their initial response quickly fades they tend to lack perseverance.   Vanity can be a great temptation for the sanguine as well as envy. One of the greatest challenges that a sanguine faces is making impulsive decision.  One way to overcome this is by striving to cultivate the virtue of prudence.  They also need to cultivate the virtue of perseverance since they can easily lose focus on tasks that require long commitments.

Finally, we have the phlegmatic temperament.  The phlegmatic is rarely aroused emotionally and, if so, only weakly. The impressions received usually last for only a short time and leave no trace. The fundamental disposition of the phlegmatic is that he is reserved, prudent, sensible, reflective, and dependable.  He is not easily provoked to anger or prone to exaggeration.  Phlegmatics are well known for their easy going nature.  They also tend to be clear and concise in their speech.  The phlegmatic however does not like conflict and will avoid it at all costs.  In fact they have a tendency to avoid not only conflict but anything that is physically or mentally demanding.

four_temperaments

Because they tend towards laziness and even sloth, the root sin of the phlegmatic is most often sensuality.  Other ways that sensuality manifests itself in the phlegmatic person include anger and impatience in the face of anything hard, disorganization because they seek whatever is immediate, and the consistent tendency to put off prayer.  The phlegmatic then needs to cultivate fortitude and temperance.

Hebrews 10:24 says, “We must consider how to rouse one another to love and good works.”   If we reflect on this for a moment we realize that knowledge of our own temperament and of others can be used to help motivate others.

As we set out on the journey of self-knowledge, we quickly realize that, like St. Paul, we do not do the things we want to do but what we do not want to do.  There is an execution gap in our lives.  Not only that, but understanding the temperament of those around us helps to overcome a great deal of conflict in our lives, especially those we live with and work with.

In accomplishing any task, there are four key areas to consider.  They are

  • Setting the Right goals
  • Getting Started
  • Overcoming Obstacles
  • Persevering to the End

Each of the temperaments then has a characteristic weakness associated with one of these areas.  Understanding how to strengthen these weaknesses and the proper way to approach the person will help anyone’s motivation.

As I mentioned earlier, the choleric is a self-motivated leader who is driven to complete his objectives.  However because the choleric is quick to respond and slow to receive advice, he often sets imprudent goals or no real goals at all.  The choleric then needs to learn to take the time to choose goals properly.  The key then as a choleric is to be patient, and set the right goals.  In dealing with a choleric, motivation is normally not the key but we need to slow them down.  We can ask them if they have buy-in from others on their ideas or help brainstorm with them.  We must also help them to remain charitable because they often see others as stumbling blocks and will try to steamroll over them.

The melancholic, due to his naturally reflective nature, does not have trouble setting proper goals.  Instead, he will often struggle with actually getting started.  This manifests itself also by being overly focused on the small details because they want everything to be perfect.  The key for a melancholic is to prioritize goals.  In working with them they need a kick start—but this cannot be in the form of you doing it for them.  Instead ask what you can do to help them get started or ask them for a solution to specific problem you are having.  If you can keep them focused on the individuals steps they won’t get bogged down in the details.

Sanguines, like Cholerics, tend not to have any problems getting started.  They are usually eager to get going.  Instead they struggle with persevering to the end.  Their optimistic nature causes them to overlook true difficulties or minimize them.  The best thing for a Sanguine is to set and schedule.  They can be helped by regularly following up with them to see their progress.  Setting interim goals will keep them from getting bored.

The Phlegmatic is perhaps the most difficult to motivate because of their laid back nature.  They struggle with setting goals like the Choleric, but the main struggle for them is overcoming obstacles.  They need both encouragements throughout the process and to be held accountable at all stages of the process.  It also helps to remind them of past successes.

In conclusion, it bears repeating that the purpose in understanding temperament is to grow in understanding both of ourselves and others.  This is much more than mere self-improvement on the natural level—it should have as its goal to fulfill God’s will as a loving and joyful spouse, parent, and friend.  Understanding temperament not only helps us become more capable of controlling our emotions and moods, it helps us identify the most effective means to grow in virtue and obedience to God’s will.

***If you are interested in taking a temperament test for yourself, here is a link to one that is contained in the book The Temperament God Gave You***

Circumstantial Sainthood

Virtue

There is a familiar spiritual maxim that goes something like this—“the saints all know they are sinners, but the sinners all think they’re saints.”  The lesson of the saying is one of humility and like all things related to this most necessary virtue we tend to like pithy sayings like this.  But if we are honest, we will admit that we don’t actually believe this to be true.  Perhaps compared to the great saints, our sins are great, but our sins are relatively small compared to most people.  Also, could it be true that all the saints knew they were sinners?  For example, Chesterton tells of St. Thomas Aquinas and how the priest “listening to the dying man’s confession, he fancied suddenly that he was listening to the first confession of a child of five.”  We could multiply the examples of saints with similar confessions, but the point is that if they were honest they could hardly label themselves as sinners.

The confusion comes in the use of the term “sinners.”  It is not so much in their actions that the saints see themselves as sinners, but in their capacity.  In other words, they are absolutely convinced that they are capable of committing any and all horrible acts.  Not only that, they are convinced that given different circumstances they would in fact do so.  It is only by the grace of God that they did not.  And therein we find their great humility.

This is why the most humble people are also the most merciful and slowest to judge.  When they meet someone who is in the depths of sin, they realize that the situation could very easily be reversed.  In fact they realize that given the concrete circumstances of the other person’s life, they probably would have done worse.  An honest person would see that it is by chance that it is the way it is.  A person who is striving for holiness will realize that it was God’s grace that kept them from being in those circumstances and it is He who has preserved them.  By repeatedly recognizing this, the saints come to be more and more dependent upon God’s grace and less and less “capable” of sinning.  This is Chesterton’s point about Aquinas’ confession—it was the confession of a five year old because the Dumb Ox was humble.

Aquinas--Chasing prostitute

In a world marked by the cult of celebrity, we are scandalized regularly by the actions of politicians, athletes and actors.  We like to read about their indiscretions and downfalls.  But I wonder how quick we would be to do so if we were truly humble.  These are real people who live in a vastly different world than the rest of us do with a set of temptations that most of us cannot even begin to imagine.  Are we absolutely sure that given the power politicians have, that we wouldn’t actually do worse things than them?  Are we absolutely sure that given the number of women who throw themselves at professional athletes that we could remain chaste?  Instead we often sit in judgment based upon our own situation.  It is easy to say you wouldn’t be corrupted by power when you have none.  It is easy to say you would be faithful to your spouse when the worst you deal with is a neighbor who is a little flirty.  It is only humility that will save us from the glamour of the world so much so that we will thank God for preserving us.  This is why all the saints also desired to be hidden—they saw how easy others were trapped and knew they would easily get pulled in as well.

The key then to humility is the recognition of this capacity for depravity.  But it is not just in moments of honesty about our situation that we realize this.  It can also be in moments when we are able to glimpse the depravity in our own hearts that usually comes about through suffering some humiliation.  For many years, I would sit in judgment of other people about the behavior of their kids.  Thanks be to God it mostly remained an interior attitude, but there were many times when I asked “why won’t they control their kid?”  It never even occurred to me that there were, in fact, times when you can’t control your kid.  It never occurred to me, until that is, I was on the receiving end of that and actually had a child of my own that at times simply could not be controlled.  Now there are a lot of people who are supportive and understanding, but for the most part I receive stares, direct judgments on my parenting, and parenting advice.  It is hard not to experience that as hatred and see them as an enemy.  I could even lash out at them, but I know they are merely expressing what was in my heart for many years.  It took being unfairly judged for me to stop condemning in my heart.  It took humiliations for me to grasp that without humility I would never be free from the trappings of my own heart.

The point is that until we learn humility and see it as truly good for us we will never experience true spiritual growth.  We will never become saints without it.  Humility is the habit of recognizing our total dependence upon God to save us from ourselves.  It is the only weapon we have with which to fight ourselves and our own pride.  For many of us, the daily cross that we must pick up and carry is our own weakness.  Humility is the fulcrum by which we raise this cross and carry it.

It doesn’t just take moments of humiliation to grow in this virtue.  St. Thomas says that humility is truth and what he means by this is that our growth in humility is proportional to our love of the truth.  This idea is captured perfectly in Adam Smith’s companion to The Wealth of Nations, called The Theory of Moral Sentiments.  He centers the treatise on what he calls the moral judgements of an “impartial spectator” which is really the virtue of humility.  According to Smith the key to happiness is to be loved for being truly lovely.  His point is that while we may seek the esteem of others, we should do so based only upon the truth of what we are.  We should not seek to be praised for those things that we are not, but only for the things that the impartial spectator of ourselves would say we are.

How easy it is then to grow in humility simply by ceasing to pretend to be what we are not; to accept praise graciously, but only for those things that are true.  We don’t need to blow trumpets for our faults, only cease to pretend they are not there.  To love the truth so much that you don’t want others to believe good things about you that are false.

Of course it is this relation to the truth that ultimately causes the devil to flee in the face of humility and thus it is a great spiritual weapon.  But in order to use this weapon we must first understand how it works.  To quote CS Lewis’ Screwtape Letters in which Screwtape tells Wormwood that the key to destroying humility is to:

…make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible. To anticipate the Enemy’s strategy, we must consider His aims.

Holiness really is circumstantial, but humility is the only path we can take to set those circumstances in our favor.

Shattering the Delusion

Autism, Natural Law, Virtue, ,

One of the hardest things for people on the Autism Spectrum Disorder is coping with the speed at which the world comes at them.  Hyper-sensitive to stimuli most of us can ignore, they will try to control the world around them by inventing their own explanations of reality.  Our youngest son does this often.  Usually he starts off on the right track, but at a certain point he will go off the rails.  We might indulge him a little, but once he hits a certain point, we have an expression to help bring him back—“you are now orbiting Mars.”  Some may think us cruel for not sharing his delusions, but it is love that refuses to leave him in an alternate reality.  By steadily refusing to join him in his delusions he is better able to cope with the world and his Autism.

There is a similar point to be made regarding people who identify themselves as transgender that unfortunately has been lost amidst the long drawn out debate over which bathrooms they should use.  The Family Policy Institute of Washington state released a video  that quickly went viral.  In this video, they interview a number of University of Washington students about their stance on Transgenderism.  They then try to make a reductio ad absurdum argument when the 5’9 male interviewer asks them whether they would agree that he is a 6’5 Chinese woman.  One gets a sense from the video of the inner struggle of the young men and women because they felt trapped by their own logic to the point that they are willing to agree to the absurd.

Certainly it is entertaining to watch, but what is most disturbing is their reasoning for agreeing with the interviewer—“No, that wouldn’t bother me,” “Um sure, I don’t have a problem with that.”  Put more pointedly, “it doesn’t affect me, so why should I care?”  Herein lies the underlying problem to the whole debate—mass indifference.  If a man wants to say he is a woman, then who am I to judge?  When I detect no harm to myself or those I actually do care about, then why should I object?

Miriam Webster defines a delusion as “a persistent false psychotic belief regarding the self or persons or objects outside the self that is maintained despite indisputable evidence to the contrary.”  Now read the Human Rights Campaign definition of Transgender: “one whose gender identity and/or expression is different from cultural expectations based on the sex they were assigned at birth.” In every other aspect of life, we would label someone delusional who says that their inner belief as “identifying” themselves as one sex when all of the objective biological evidence suggests otherwise.

When confronted with a person who is delusional, you can do one of two things.  You can either shatter the delusion in an effort to bring them back to reality or you can share the delusion with them.  As is the case with my son with Autism, it is much easier to share the delusion with the person than to actually step into their mess and help them sort it out, especially when I see their delusion as presenting no harm to me.

Bathroom Sign

But, can we even begin to imagine the inner turmoil of someone who looks like a boy, but feels like a girl?  Or is it simply easier to help their gender feelings visible?    There is a lot of data (see here and here for two studies) suggesting that something like gender reassignment surgery doesn’t actually make them feel any less conflicted.  The American College of Pediatricians has recently said that Gender Ideology does great harm to children.  In fact individuals who undergo gender reassignment surgery are 20 times more likely to commit suicide than the general population.  When a person realizes that the surgery that everyone said would help doesn’t, they can only conclude one thing—that they are beyond help.

This argument from apathy spreads like wildfire.  We can mutually agree to your delusions provided they don’t cost me that much personally—“to each his own.”  First it was gay marriage.  Now it is transgenders in the bathroom they identify with.  What will be next and when will the insanity stop?  When people are actually willing to stand up and help others wrestle with their brokenness instead of agreeing to embrace it.  When your ideology conflicts with biology, it is your ideology that needs to change.  Anyone who tells you differently is really apathetic.

Christians are often met with contempt as “haters” by LGBT supporters.  Hate in many ways is better than indifference.  In fact, hate is not the opposite of love—indifference is.  To love or hate someone means that they matter in some way.  Even hate recognizes the other as a person.  Apathy says the person does not matter and that they are on the level of a mere thing.  We tolerate things only as long as they do not present a real obstacle to my well-being.  Certainly we should not hate them, but hate is much easier to convert to love and compassion than apathy is.

Often when I confront my son with reality, it is met with hostility and name-calling.  In pointing out an alternate view to his reality, I have become a threat.  I know this, and yet I am willing to help him to come to grips with reality as it is.  Is this easy?  Absolutely not, but it is necessary for his own well-being.  Similarly we need to let those people suffering from gender dysphoria know that we oppose these bathroom bills not just because it opens the door for sexual predators and not just because it can create a great deal of personal confusion and angst for our children when they have to use the bathroom or change in front of a stranger of the opposite sex (even if there is no malice on their part).  We need to let them know we oppose it because we want to help keep them rooted in reality.  The shame they feel in using the bathroom can be good—it can help them recognize their true identity, the one that God gave them and stamped into their very being.  On our part we have to be willing to take the hostility and name calling.  That is the only real way to fight apathy—through self-giving love, which is what they most desperately need anyway.  We are now orbiting Mars, who will bring us back to reality?

What’s so Funny?

Virtue

In the days leading up to the eventual execution of his former chancellor, Henry VIII would daily send a courier to St. Thomas More asking him over and over to change his mind.  One evening the Saint finally said, “Yes, I have changed my mind.”   The King told the courier to return to find out the particulars of his change of heart, to which the eventual martyr replied “I have changed my mind in this sense: whereas yesterday I intended being shaved before execution, I have now changed my mind and intend that my beard shall go with my head.”  Because of his mirth, his friend Erasmus called him the “one of the happiest men I ever met” and he is by no means unique among the saints.  St. Francis (de Sales and of Assisi), St. Philip Neri, St. Theresa of Avila and the Little Flower are all known for a lively sense of humor.  To look around at Christians today, however, we would say that the virtue that St. Thomas (borrowing from Aristotle) called eutrapelia or “wittiness” has been forgotten.

As to why this might be, GK Chesterton offers an explanation in his book Heretics.  A master of paradox and witty one-liners, he was often accused of not being a “serious” writer.  He defended himself by reminding his critics that the opposite of funny is not serious, but instead “not funny.”  The opposite of serious is frivolous so that you can be both funny and serious in telling the truth.  A man can tell the truth in long sentences or short jokes just as he can choose to tell the truth in French or German.  Chesterton was serious in telling the truth, even if he chose to do it in a funny way.  There is nothing frivolous about using humor to tell the truth.  Point of fact this is often a powerful way to present something as serious as the Gospel because humor tends to gently disarm people.

Although we might have an “apostolate of the funny”, we should not look upon a sense of humor as merely an ad-on to an evangelical tool belt.  St. Thomas calls it a virtue and therefore something that every serious Christian ought to cultivate.  A Christian is naturally light-hearted, not taking things of this world too seriously and so it is fitting that he should have a sense of humor.  Humor  at its core consists in pointing out incongruities in reality.  Who better than a Christian, who knows reality as it is, can truly laugh in this vale of tears?  True laughter is a foretaste of eternal joy.

There is a philosophical maxim that applies here, namely that “the Good diffuses itself.”  When something is truly good, it tends to spread out.  The funny is part of the Good in that when we witness something funny, we look for someone to tell about it.  In fact in most social settings, it is the man who can look upon events with a sense of humor who draws the most people towards him.

JPII acting silly

If the funny is part of the Good, then this means that the devil is active in trying to pervert it.  In CS Lewis’ The Screwtape Letters, Screwtape cautions Wormwood about using humor to his advantage because it is so closely related to joy.  Nevertheless, Screwtape tells him that once he turns the patient to flippancy the battle will be won. Flippancy takes what is inherently good (like virtue) and makes it seem ridiculous.  Think of all the jokes we have around virtue today, like a “goody two-shoes” or calling a chaste person a “prude” and we see that virtue has now become a source of mockery.

In the Summa (ST II-II, q.168, a. 2-4), St. Thomas guides us in how this virtue is to be practiced.  Interestingly enough, St. Thomas says that playful conversation is absolutely necessary for relaxation of the soul.  It is the mean between the buffoon who cannot resist a joke and the stoic who is of no use in playful conversation and takes offense at everything.

The buffoon is one who “employs words or deeds that are injurious to his neighbor.”  This is the person who is funny at other people’s expense.  Because there is an inherent pleasure in humor, we must always be careful that those who share in the conversation also share in the pleasure.  Our playful conversation ought to not only bring us pleasure, but pleasure not at someone else’s expense.   We should laugh with and not at someone else.

St Thomas also cautions about using the indecent as a source of humor.  This is not because he is some high minded saint, but because there is also the danger of using humor to mask cynicism.  Because the cynic is not enchanted by reality, they will often resort to vulgar (or even blasphemous) language to invoke humor.  Again this is like Screwtape’s flippancy in that rather than pointing absurd things found in reality, they make reality itself absurd.  This only leads to further cynicism and discontent.  Just because you can laugh, doesn’t make it funny.

At the other extreme is the stoic.  This is particularly appropriate for our age where people take offense at everything.  The stoic doesn’t so much take reality too seriously, but themselves.  Again nearly all the saints (and therefore most happy people) laugh at themselves and don’t mind when others share in it.  St. Thomas says this type of stoicism is contrary to reason (i.e. sinful) because it is burdensome to others by not offering pleasure to others or hindering their enjoyment.

In the Gospel, we find Christ angry at the money changers and crying at the death of His friend Lazarus, but we never find Him laughing.  We should in no way take that to mean He never laughed.  I am sure that He was not accused of being a “drunkard and a glutton” because of His stoicism.  The Redeemer of Mankind is also the Redeemer of Laughter.  As Christians we should share in His mirth.  Venerable Fulton Sheen summed it up well: “The only time laughter is wicked is when it is turned against Him who gave it.”  Let us learn how to laugh again.

God and Commitment Phobes

Leisure, Sin, Spiritual Life, Virtue

In an address on the New Evangelization to Catechists and Teachers in 2000, then-Cardinal Ratzinger said the greatest obstacle modern man faced in accepting the Gospel was “an inability of joy.”   Although this aversion to joy is particularly acute in our time, it is certainly nothing new.  In fact it is something that is captured quite beautifully in Dante’s Purgatorio.  At the midpoint of his ascent of the Mount of Purgatory, Dante encounters those who are being purged of sloth and its effects.  The slothful race about the terrace shouting out famous examples of the vice and its opposing virtue, zeal.  The souls appear to be enjoying their punishment of the breathless race they are on.  This is not because they find joy in punishment so much as the joy is their punishment.  Dante believed that the slothful are marked by an inability to joy.

Because of his reliance on the moral theology of St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante’s Divine Comedy has often been called the “Summa in Verse.” By returning to the teachings of St. Thomas on the Capital Sin of sloth or acedia, we may be able to learn a great deal about not only the world’s aversion to joy, but why it remains so elusive for many of us.

To begin, there is an important point to be made regarding the Seven Capital Sins.  St. Thomas rarely referred to the Seven Capital Sins as sins but instead as vices.  His reason for this is because something like sloth is not usually the actual sin the person commits, but the disposition or habit that leads to other sins.  The term “capital” derives from the Latin word caput, meaning head.  The point is that 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 because they act as subconscious motivations for the sins we do commit.  Unless we are in the habit of examining our motivations along with our sins, they will almost always remain off our spiritual radar.  Understanding the vices and how they tend to manifest themselves allows us to work at the virtues directly opposing the vice of sloth.

Certainly one of the reasons why sloth is particularly hidden is because most people view it as simply laziness.  One of the fruits of the Protestant Reformation was that sloth became associated with laziness and neglect in doing one’s duty.  The opposing virtue was seen to be diligence or industriousness and “busyness” became a cardinal virtue.  But for St. Thomas and the Desert Fathers that went before him, sloth is a spiritual vice.  There is a link of sorts to effort, but not primarily to bodily effort.  It is not an aversion to physical effort but an aversion to the demands of love.  It causes us to see the burden of love to be too great.

In order to fully capture how this vice ensnares us, it is helpful to look at the two parts of the definition that Aquinas gives for acedia in the Summa.  He says that acedia is “sorrow about spiritual good in as much as it is a Divine good” (ST II-II q.35, a.3).

The second part of the definition describes what is the cause of our sorrow—namely the “spiritual good in as much as it is a Divine good.”  For St. Thomas this “spiritual good” that is internal to the person and yet also a “Divine good” is friendship with God.  This friendship with God is the virtue of charity by which we participate in the love God has for Himself.

The sorrow itself need explanation as well.  Sorrow is analogous to sadness but it rests in our soul.  It is more like a pain of soul that makes joy impossible.  This sorrow is experienced because what should be experienced as a good (namely the love of God) is instead viewed as bad.  Not bad in itself, but too much work and too demanding.  The word acedia literally means “a lack of care” meaning that it simply is not worth the effort.  In this way then it is not so much a rejection of God Himself, but of friendship with Him.  This partial rejection of God is what makes sloth so deadly.

Dante seems to capture this lack of love by placing sloth in the middle of the Mount of Purgatory.  The first three terraces are meant to heal love that has been perverted by being directed towards an evil object or end (pride, envy, and wrath).  The three terraces above (greed, gluttony, and lust) are directed to healing love that is excessively directed towards a good object.  Sloth sits alone in the middle because it shows a lack of love that begins with loving God less than we should and spreads to everything else.

Dante

Without delving deeply into psychological motivations, why would we do this?  To understand sloth, the fact that love is demanding cannot be forgotten.  There is a sweetness that comes from love, but for the most part it makes demands upon us.  In fact sloth makes us “commitment phobes” with God because of the burden of commitment.

Of course any explanation must include the given of Original Sin.  St. Paul tells the Galatians that “the flesh lusts against the spirit” (Gal 5:17) which means that without virtue the flesh will be dominant in us and we will loathe spiritual goods as somehow bad for us.  It is sort of like how we crave junk food and have to force ourselves to eat wholesome foods.  Acedia as sorrow at the thought of being in relationship with God because of the “burden of commitment.”

An analogy might help to better understand it.  Think of a married couple who argues and rather than doing the work of apologizing and forgiving, they would rather take the “easier” route of going off to separate rooms and sulk.  They both know of the goodness that follows from reconciliation, but refuse to do the work of getting there.

In looking at the sins that are caused by sloth or “daughters of acedia” as St. Thomas divides them into two types.  The first are those sins which represent our attempts to escape from the sorrow.  The most common way in which it manifests itself is through curiosity.  Most people would say that curiosity is a good thing and it is insofar as it represents a desire for knowledge.  But St. Thomas says we cannot look at only the desire but also must consider the motive and the effects the knowledge has on the knower and others.  Curiosity is the desire for knowledge simply for the pleasure that it brings as opposed to knowing for the sake of knowledge itself (as in the truth) which is the virtue of studiousness.  From curiosity flows listening to gossip.  There is also a fear of missing out on something interesting that will help divert us from the sorrow.  This fear is what truly drives the almost obsessive nature in which many people are constantly checking social media.

St. Thomas also says it manifests itself through an aimless wandering after illicit things.  Drinking excessively, promiscuity, drugs often represent attempts to escape the sorrow of sloth.  But it is not just illicit things but an excess of busyness too.  This busyness blocks us from seeing the reason why we have no joy is because we are slothful.  After all, how could one be slothful when they are constantly involved in activity?  St. Thomas recognized this temptation and presented acedia as primarily a sin against the Third Commandment because it is an avoidance of doing the “work” of the Sabbath rest.

At a certain point the realization that the sorrow is inescapable sinks in and a new level of vices arise.  The most obvious would be despair, but I would like to focus on a second one that is not so obvious—boredom.

To prove that the overwhelming majority of Americans is at this point, what other explanation could there be that the average person watches 4 hours of TV (25% of their waking time) than that they are bored?  What about the obsession with celebrities?  Out of boredom the cult of celebrities arises because when one’s own life lacks meaning, you become obsessed with others’ lives.

In essence for those with despair and boredom life loses its pilgrim character.  For the bored they become tourists instead of pilgrims. What we do when we are bored really doesn’t matter only that it alleviates the boredom.  Everyone knows that there is no happiness in the endless diversions, parties, drinking and promiscuity.  But at least one is less empty for a while.

There is a great spiritual principle that comes into play when we are trying to root out vices like sloth.  We cannot simply stop doing it.  Certainly identifying the root cause is important, but the only way for us as fallen creatures to overcome evil in our hearts is by replacing it with good.  I already mentioned how sloth is truly opposed to charity but there are two other virtues that we should strive to cultivate.

First is the virtue of gratitude.  One desert father said that sloth is ultimately a hatred of being.  Everything seems hard and meaningless.  By viewing everything through what St. John Paul II called the “hermeneutic of the gift” we find everything charged with meaning through its bestowal upon us.  With gratitude comes to the desire to repay that gift by making a gift of ourselves.  To quote from JPII’s favorite line of Vatican II, “man, who is the only creature on earth which God willed for itself, cannot fully find himself except through a sincere gift of himself” (GS, 24).

The second is the virtue of magnanimity.  Literally magnanimity means “large-souledness.”  It is a generous acceptance of the missionary character of our lives.  It is a response to Blessed John Henry Newman’s a clarion call:

God has created me to do Him some definite service; He has committed some work to me which He has not committed to another. I have my mission—I never may know it in this life, but I shall be told it in the next. Somehow I am necessary for His purposes, as necessary in my place as an Archangel in his—if, indeed, I fail, He can raise another, as He could make the stones children of Abraham. Yet I have a part in this great work; I am a link in a chain, a bond of connection between persons. He has not created me for naught. I shall do good, I shall do His work; I shall be an angel of peace, a preacher of truth in my own place, while not intending it, if I do but keep His commandments and serve Him in my calling”

As Dante enters the Fifth Circle of Hell, he encounters two groups confined to the River Styx—the wrathful and the slothful.  The wrathful fight each other above the surface, while the slothful simply stew beneath the swampy surface.  By Dante’s standards their punishment is rather light, but that is because they really didn’t do anything.  They simply slid into hell through a lack of effort.   Please God that we might overcome the “noonday devil” and avoid a similar fate.

 

Standing on Three Legs

Fasting, Spiritual Life, Virtue

Shortly after the Second Vatican Council, Pope Paul VI surveyed the pastoral landscape and found a number of “grave and urgent” problems that plagued the Church.  Among these problems was a laxity that had crept into the hearts and minds of the faithful with respect to the divine precept of fasting.  St. John Paul II echoed Paul VI’s concern and called for catechesis on fasting in his 1984 Apostolic Exhortation on Penance and Reconciliation.  Fasting is one of the three main pillars of the spiritual life along with prayer and almsgiving.  For many, this third leg of the spiritual life has atrophied greatly making balance difficult.  Therefore it is helpful to examine anew why the Church calls us to fast regularly.

Our Lord was once asked by the people why the Pharisees and the disciples of John fasted and His disciples did not.  He responded that “as long as they have the bridegroom with them, they cannot fast. The days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them, and then they will fast” (Mk 2:18-22). Now that the Bridegroom has been taken away, Christians ought to be fasting and not just in Lent.  Rather than viewing themselves as a fasting people, most Christians instead identify fasting with the followers of Mohammed or Gandhi.

In the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas lists three reasons why fasting ought to be practiced: it bridles the lusts of the flesh, serves as satisfaction for sins and frees the mind for the contemplation of heavenly things.  Because these three things lead to the fulfillment of our human nature, the Angelic Doctor says that the practice of fasting belongs among the precepts of the natural law.  Despite the obligation to fast, its practice has diminished primarily because each of the goods attached to fasting has been threatened.

The first obstacle is related to the same reason that people have not fasted throughout the ages—the capital sin of gluttony.  According to the CDC 36% of all American adults are obese.  To combat this epidemic we have developed zero calorie drinks and food, gastric bypass surgery, diet pills, and diet plans that allow you to “eat as much as you want and still lose weight.”  After all, if I can get zero calories by eating, why should I feel hungry while I am fasting?

But these are mere band aids.  We fail to acknowledge the oversized elephant in today’s “super-size me” culture that prides itself on “all you can eat”.  We are a bunch of gluttons.  Back when gluttony was a sin the medicine was fasting.  The remedy remains the same today.

Dante_Purgatory_Gluttons

Because of our fallen nature we often find that our gods are our stomachs.  Through its medicinal effect fasting helps to break the chains to our senses.  In this way it combats the other capital sins of the flesh; sloth (more on this in a moment) and lust.  It serves as the foundation of the virtue of temperance.  This much needed virtue not only moderates our eating and drinking but also the particularly dangerous vice of lust.  Our Lord suggests that some demons only come out through prayer and fasting and the demon of porneia is one of them.  With the rise in pornography addiction, fasting offers both a remedy and a shield against it.  By fasting we gain greater control of our passions and emotions and by this increased in self-possession we are more able to give ourselves to God and others.  This is why St. Thomas listed calls fasting the “guardian of chastity.”

The second obstacle that the practice of fasting encounters is the loss of a sense of sin.  For many people using fasting to atone for sin is akin to using an extra blanket to protect you from the boogeyman.  Sin, like the boogeyman, does not exist and the Church simply uses the idea of sin to keep us in line.  In a 1946 radio address to members of the US National Catechetical Congress in Boston, Pope Pius XII declared that “the sin of the century is the loss of the sense of sin.”  Recognizing this, John Paul II thought that restoring a proper sense of sin is the first way of facing the grave spiritual crisis looming over man today.  This loss of a sense of sin has become a major evangelical obstacle.  If we do not accept the “bad news” of our sinfulness then we have no need for the “good news” of the Gospel.  The Gospel is reduced to just “news” which we already have plenty of.  Fasting helps to restore the lost sense of sin.  It serves as a reminder that our desires have gone astray.

This is why most people see fasting merely as a disciplinary regulation that is “suggested” by the Church rather than something that belongs to the natural law.  With the widespread disdain for ecclesiastical authority many simply choose to ignore what the Church has to say about fasting.

Finally, the practice of fasting has been threatened because man has lost the desire to raise his mind to the contemplation of heavenly things.  Classically understood, this is the vice of sloth or acedia.  St. Thomas defines acedia as “sadness in the face of a spiritual good.”    Oftentimes sloth is confused with laziness and then summarily dismissed because we are “busy.”  But sloth is not laziness.  Many of the busiest people are also the most slothful because they suffer from a “roaming unrest of spirit” as St. Thomas says.

Sloth seems to be ever-present in our culture and it most clearly manifests itself through its first-born daughter, curiosity.  Curiosity is the desire to know simply for the pleasure that it brings and not in order to understand the nature of things.  Our information hungry society is driven by curiosity.  The voyeurism of reality TV shows, the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter, and a growing addiction to smartphones all exist to feed our curiosity.  They simply serve as distractions from contemplating heavenly things.  Our minds are made to rise to heavenly things and when they do not the result is a pervasive boredom.

St. Thomas compares curiosity with the virtue of studiousness.  Studiousness serves as a check on our curiosity by studying first those things which are most important and relating what we discover to God.  It is a most necessary virtue in developing the habit of contemplation.  The studious person develops the habit of seeing all of creation through a sacramental paradigm.  Fasting helps to cultivate this virtue by reminding us  that man does not live on bread alone and excites his intellect to investigate those things that truly bring life to man.

Practically speaking, how do we fast and how often should we do it?  There are two kinds of fasts.  There is a total fast which means abstaining from all food and drink (this is linked to the Eucharist) and a partial fast which is penitential in nature.  While there is no one “right” way to observe a partial fast, the Church suggests that it consists in one normal sized meal and two small meals that are the equivalent of the first meal.  The idea is not to starve ourselves, but to stir just enough hunger so as to have to fight the temptation to break the fast.  One normally finds that they cannot stop thinking about eating when they first start this practice.  That is to be expected when we do not yet have the virtue of fasting and will diminish over time.  What also normally happens is that the bodily hunger awakens in us a certain amount of spiritual sensitivity so that we find great pleasure in both prayer and receiving the Eucharist.

As far as frequency, most spiritual masters would suggest once a week either on Friday (in union with Our Lord’s Passion) or on Saturday (with Our Lady on Holy Saturday).  One could easily however find ways to fast daily by not eating between meals, always leaving the table a little bit hungry or always eating what is placed in front of you.  Again it is not so much the how, but the spirit in which one fasts.  The intention ought to be as penance for sins and as an offering for favors from God.

While climbing Mount Purgatory, Dante encounters a group of emaciated penitents in the ring of gluttony.  Because the gluttonous abstain from the “gratification of the palate” as part of their penance, Dante sees that the “sockets of their eyes seemed rings without gems.  Whoso in the face of men reads OMO would surely there have recognized the M.”  For those who know Italian, they will recognize that OMO is a variant of the Italian word for “man”, uomo.  What the poet is suggesting is that the inner form of man is restored through fasting.  Following his lead, we too should include fasting as part of our regular spiritual diet and stand on all three spiritual legs.