These are not my friends' dogs.

Last week, I did a little housesitting for some friends. These friends have two boys, two dogs, and two cats. They took the boys with them on their vacation.

My own family didn’t keep pets. We had a short-lived experiment with gerbils. Then a little grey kitty hung around for a little while. But we never sought pets, nor strove to keep them.

Frankly, I’ve never seen the point of pets. I mean, on a farm, sure: you need some help with guarding the cattle and depopulating the rodents. But in a city, in a suburb, what purpose do they serve?

Still, I know how much my friends love these animals, so I did my best to take good care of them. Food, water, opportunities to fertilize the lawn, etc.

They repaid me with presents, always surprises, in the least expected places. I know they were left for me, because no sooner had I cleaned them up than they left more for me, sometimes in exactly the same spot. Such affectionate creatures.

I admit that my canicidal impulses arose far too quickly. The poor dogs probably just missed their masters. Still, violence tempted me constantly in the couple days I watched their house.

What held me back was the memory of a few months ago, when my friends were teaching their youngest how to pet the dogs.

“Gently,” they said, holding his hand and stroking it softly across the longhair’s furry belly.

“Gently,” my godson repeated. “Gently.”

This little boy was learning that his actions were capable of harming others, even when he didn’t mean them to. He learned that he had to control himself in relating to the world around him, to touch, but gently, lest he provoke violence in return.

He was learning the first gestures of charity.

Meanwhile, my own meditations had revolved solely around the inconvenience to myself that these animals caused.

But what if, I thought, I used these creatures as my own teachers in charity? What if I took this opportunity to practice doing good for them, and for my friends through them?

I can’t say I’ve become a lover of pets, but if I ever have children, I might get one or two, because I think they’ll be better instructors in virtue than I will.

Virtue, according to the Greeks

You don’t even have to be Christian.

Huh?

So, at this point, I expect there are two groups of reactions to that sentence. First, from the Christians, I expect some flavor of “What do you mean you don’t have to be Christian?” And from the non-Christians (whether atheist or adherents of other religious traditions), “Why would you even ask that question? What does Christianity have to do with it?”

Here’s the thing. The virtues I’ve been studying arose in what’s called the Western philosophical tradition. Greeks like Plato and Aristotle wrote about them, and the early Christians picked up their ideas and ran with them. In developing the older, pagan ideas of virtue – ideas, by the way, which don’t fit neatly with the Jewish heritage of Christianity – they connected them to their theological notions, and significantly added three new virtues that were mentioned in the Bible: Faith, Hope, and Love.

The original Greek virtues were called Cardinal Virtues, since (like the cardinal directions on a compass) they point you in the right direction. The new ones were called Theological Virtues, because they are seen as gifts of God.

So I’m a Catholic myself, and I have no problem with some virtues being gifts from God. But I have big questions about how it works.

To start with, the virtues seem to overlap one another, or even replace one another. The obvious example is Charity trumping Justice: do you really need duty if you’re always going above and beyond duty?

At a slightly deeper level, it’s a little hard to see what’s particularly “theological” about the new virtues. After all, the goal is the same, isn’t it? All the virtues aim at making our lives more fully human, at helping us become who and what we’re meant to be. And you don’t have to believe in Jesus or have the life of the Holy Spirit in your heart to see that love is a good thing, that hope is important, even that faith – in the sense of trust and faithfulness – is central to living a properly human life.

And since I’m trying to build a career as a teacher of this stuff, shouldn’t I be able to explain it in some crystal clear way?

So here’s what I came up with.

The perfect cup

Maybe a royal Greek's coffee mug?

Now the goldsmith takes the cup to the king’s steward, who admires the cup. And the goldsmith is proud, and says, “It’s the perfect cup. You can’t get a better cup than this.”

But the steward says, “It’s excellent, no doubt. But it’s not perfect yet.”

The goldsmith is, understandably, heartbroken. “I can’t do anything more to improve it!” he cries.

“Of course you can’t,” says the steward. “But come with me.” And the steward leads the goldsmith to the palace’s cellars, where the royal vintner is maintaining the casks of wine. The steward hands the chalice to the vintner, and commands him to fill it with wine.

“Now,” says the steward, “it is a perfect cup.”

But the vintner laughs. “It’s beautiful, but it’s not perfect yet!” And he hands the cup full of wine to the steward, and tells him to drink. And as the steward tastes the wine, the vintner says, “Now that is a perfect cup!”

Perfection pointing to further perfection

So the cup itself has a kind of perfection in itself, but that perfection is directed toward the further perfections of being filled up, and being drunk from, even though it cannot achieve those perfections without something beyond itself.

Likewise, I can become a good human being in myself and by my own power; but being a good human individual is directed toward being a member of a community, toward receiving from others and giving to others. But these are not things I can accomplish without those others.

To go further, from the Catholic point of view, this shows how theologians can say that we are both created to share God’s life in heaven, and also utterly incapable of achieving that communion by our own power. A cup can’t be full unless wine is poured in from outside; but it first has to be a good cup, so that it will hold the wine that is poured in.

I hope this image is useful to someone else. It’s certainly been useful to me.

This is not how I want to face every day.

I know some people who don’t get started on a task or deal with a problem until it becomes a crisis. They wait and procrastinate and put off until further inaction will result in disaster. Then, most of the time, they scramble everything together and get done what needs doing.

They say, “I thrive under pressure.”

Maybe this is true for them. For me, the pressure, the anxiety and the fear, can become overwhelming. I get paralyzed. I drop the ball.

That doesn’t stop me from procrastinating. It just means my threshold for crisis is much lower. A deadline a week or a month away produces as much urgency in me as a tomorrow morning deadline provides for them. I know (from sad experience) that if I put it off any longer, I’ll freeze up and utterly fail.

This gives me the reputation as someone who is responsible, who plans ahead, who is organized. If only.

I’m just as crisis-driven as anybody else. The only difference is my tolerance for anxiety. I hate the stuff. And it’s taken a while for me to learn how to get moving before the pressure crushes me.

Currently, my goal is to head off anxiety at the pass. Deal with life before it reaches the crisis stage. This means real planning, and real organization. But that’s stuff I’ve known all my life. There are lots of books, and I’ve read a bunch of them.

None of that does any good, though, if I don’t take responsibility for my own actions.

After all, that’s really the root of my procrastination: I don’t want to move myself, I want something else to move me. My great temptation is passivity. I don’t want to be responsible.

If I’m not really responsible, then maybe I can’t be blamed if something goes sideways.

So I’ve started making some changes. I don’t know if they’re perfect changes, or the best decisions in the world. But they’re mine. I am making these choices, and if something goes wrong it’s my fault. There’s no one else to blame.

The big surprise, to me anyway, is that I’m not feeling all that anxious about it. Or rather, my anxiety is all on the surface, and it’s in proportion to the actual risks or dangers. I’m thinking about how much lasagna I need to make to feed my guests; I’m not worried about whether I’ll be alone forever and hated by all if I disappoint my guests. My fears have become realistic and, therefore, manageable.

And the bonus is, I’m actually getting more done than I planned, in less time. It doesn’t take three hours to clean my kitchen, as my imagination fears. It takes about half an hour, or forty-five minutes if I have some scrubbing to do. Likewise, it doesn’t take all my time and resources to pound out a thousand words on my novel; it takes about an hour of putting my butt in the seat and my fingers on the keyboard.

In philosophical terms: good does not require evil to be good. I don’t need a crisis to drive my life. I can find a real good, and drive myself toward it.

When: 10:30am, Sunday 20 March 2011
Where: 5062 9th Avenue NE, Seattle – the downstairs room in the school across from the church

Here’s a chart I’m putting on the handout:

I expect that’s perfectly clear to anyone who thinks exactly as I do. The above organization is (as far as I know) my own invention. If anyone out there actually knows stuff about virtue ethics and thinks I’m barking up the wrong tree, or am just barking mad, please drop me a line and correct me. I’m working stuff out as I go.

Anyway, if you want to know what I’m talking about, come hear me talk!

Second, and far less importantly: I’ve had tech troubles with my old computer for the past few months. Random crashes and so on. It finally became intolerable, so I have a shiny new laptop. (Okay, it’s actually a matte finish.) Now I have to constantly remind myself that cool new toys do not equal happiness.

“Yes, I love technology / though not as much as you, you see / but still, I love technology / always and forever…”

So here is where I’ve drawn the line in the proverbial sand:

• No computer games whatsoever
• No TV except on weekends
• No internet before noon

I’m giving these things up, not because they’re bad in themselves, but because in me they are areas of life entirely controlled by the enemy. I’m not capable of playing computer games in moderation, or turning away from TV when I have work to do. And if I start surfing or answering emails before I do more localized work, well, I never get around to the work that needs doing here and now. So I have to fortify my headquarters; I have to build a barricade to insure that my life is not further invaded. Perhaps one day I’ll regain freedom from Sloth in those areas of my life; but that day is not today.

Meanwhile, I’m trying to go on the offensive. The best way to defeat vice is by developing virtue, and the virtue that Sloth opposes is Charity. So I’m trying to fill my time with activities done to benefit others. Yes, there’s a certain amount of self-care that’s important, especially getting enough sleep. But most of my time is spent focusing on my own needs and desires. That’s what leads to Sloth in the first place. The cure, the solution, the victory, is only found in recognizing that all I have is given me so that I can serve others with it. And then actually using my gifts to serve.

This is not the only bar that matters

I am, tragically, that all-too-common combination of lazy procrastinator and idealistic perfectionist. This means that whenever I want to do something, I am both overwhelmed at the size and/or difficulty of the undertaking, and despairing of ever being satisfied with what I have done.

This applies, depending on my mood, from tasks as great as writing a twelve-volume epic novel (which really is a gargantuan task) to duties as tiny as brushing my teeth. Most of the time, thankfully, my ambitions range through more middling territory: cleaning my apartment, writing a decent blog post, finishing a chapter or a short story. That sort of thing.

Even so, I have this irrational expectation that I should somehow achieve some ultimate and final perfection. There’s a part of my that truly believes, if I have brushed my teeth well, I should never have to brush my teeth again, because I shall have achieved dental perfection.

Did I mention that this expectation is entirely irrational?

Fear of lowering my standards

Now, when someone points out to me the insanity of this notion of perfection – even when the someone who points it out to me is me myself! – a defense springs up. That defense is: “I don’t want to lower my standards.”

This is a logical fallacy. It’s known as the Red Herring. That is, it’s a distraction from what’s really going on. Specifically, at least in my case, it’s the argumentum ad superbiam, or, an appeal to pride. I want to think that I’m capable of things that are in fact beyond me. I want to believe that I’m some sort of super-hero or Herculean demigod who can brush his teeth so well that he never has to brush them again.

The problem with the standard isn’t that it’s too high; the problem is that the standard is impossible. It’s not a proper human standard. It doesn’t conform to reality.

And this is the case even with the more apparently plausible expectations I have: that I should be able to write a stunning blog post in less than half an hour every day of the week; or that I should be able to act with perfect charity toward all my friends and family all the time without ever giving offense. Jesus Christ himself gave offense to many of his friends and family (and never, ever, wrote even a fair-to-middling blog post); so who am I to believe I can do better?

Correcting my standards

This is not to say I should just give up and allow my slacker instincts to take over. But it is to say that there are options besides attempts at the impossible and giving up in despair.

I don’t need to lower my standards; I simply need to trade my impossible fantasy standards for genuinely human ones. As I’ve said before, the core of virtue is getting in touch with reality.

So, rather than beating myself up because I’ve been unable to compose the most brilliant blog post for the beginning of 2011 on the whole internet, I need to remind myself that writing even a bad blog post is good for my psyche – and might actually help someone out there. Rather than despairing because, if I vacuum the carpet it’ll just need another vacuum in a week or two, I can recognize that vacuuming regularly makes my apartment more amenable to guests. Rather than ignoring my friends, I can accept their forgiveness for the times I’ve hurt their feelings, and continue to seek what is good for them as best I know how.

And I can practice this sort of reminder, building up a habit of seeing real goods that are really present – or possible – rather than focusing on the impossibility of impossible “goods”. I can do something from my list of things to do, and I can build that into a good habit, a small kind of virtue. Perhaps it’s the virtue of prudence. Perhaps it’s the virtue of hope.

The twenty-fifth day of December.
In the five thousand one hundred and ninety-ninth year of the creation of the world from the time when God in the beginning created the heavens and the earth;
the two thousand nine hundred and fifty-seventh year after the flood;
the two thousand and fifteenth year from the birth of Abraham;
the one thousand five hundred and tenth year from Moses and the going forth of the people of Israel from Egypt;
the one thousand and thirty-second year from David’s being anointed king;
in the sixty-fifth week according to the prophecy of Daniel;
in the one hundred and ninety-fourth Olympiad;
the seven hundred and fifty-second year from the foundation of the city of Rome;
the forty second year of the reign of Octavian Augustus;
the whole world being at peace,
in the sixth age of the world,
Jesus Christ the eternal God and Son of the eternal Father,
to sanctify the world by his most merciful coming,
conceived by the Holy Spirit,
and nine months having passed since his conception,
was born in Bethlehem of Judea of the Virgin Mary,
being made flesh.
The Nativity of our Lord Jesus Christ according to the flesh.

Now, what you heard in church was probably a slightly different version, updated with somewhat contemporary science (“unknown ages from the time when God created the heavens and the earth,” etc.) which is good in that it dodges the presumption that we have exact knowledge of the history of the universe but bad in that it loses a great deal of the poetry of the traditional version. Such is life: we can’t have all good things all the time.

But what I love about the Proclamation is that it places Jesus Christ in the very midst of history and fact. As the time of Jesus’ birth draws near, the revised and the traditional versions are almost identical, because these are historical events we know with much greater accuracy and certainty. And the point is that the Christmas miracle is not some unknown philosophical idea or moral code or community feeling.

The Christmas miracle is that an infinite God of pure spirit entered into full union with the material world he created in the person of Jesus, son of Mary.

The Christmas miracle is that Creator and creation are no longer divided, but are related.

And the Christian religion stands or falls on the truth or falsehood of this concrete historical claim. Christianity is not a moral code, though Jesus Christ does offer moral teachings. It is not a philosophical system, though philosophers have built systems on its foundation. It is not a a social or political ideology, though knowledge of Christ expresses itself in some social and political ways. Rather, Christianity at its heart is a relationship between the God who is Love and the world that he loved into being. Love always seeks the good of the beloved; so God gave the greatest good he could, his infinite self, in the only way a finite world could truly receive him, in a simple human being.

That is the great mystery and miracle and true spirit of Christmas. May yours be blessed!

How could you not love that face?

Don’t worry, I’m not going all gushy on myself. Nor do I expect you to.

So one of the things I do to escape from stress is to read about the history of philosophy. So far I have a rough knowledge of Western thought from the Greeks up through about the beginning of the fourteenth century, and a couple bits of Muslim, Indian, and Chinese philosophy from various parts of history.

Anyway, I was reading about John Duns Scotus (ca. 1265 – 1308) in Frederick Copleston’s masterpiece, and I came across the following provocative passage:

Scotus often gave a peculiar stamp or emphasis to the elements he adopted from tradition. Thus in his treatment of the relation of the will to intellect he emphasized freedom rather than love, though he held, it is true, to the superiority of love to knowledge….

This helped me to articulate something I’ve known for some time but have never quite managed to say clearly.

Let me ask you a question. What does your will do? What is the action of your will? What is its purpose?

Okay, that was three questions, or at least, three ways of asking one question. Sorry about that. But I hope you have an answer.

I’m guessing your answer is something like, “My will chooses things. It’s purpose is to choose freely, to be free.” And that is a typical modern answer. In fact, in the twenty-first century, it’s hard to consider that there might be another way to answer the question.

But, as you might guess if you’ve read enough of this blog, the medievals would have answered very differently. They would have said, the act of the will is to love, that is, to pursue what is good. And they would have had almost as much trouble understanding our emphasis on freedom as we have understanding their emphasis on the necessity of choosing good.

Getting medieval on you

Here’s how it works, from a medieval point of view: the human mind has certain powers or “faculties” that perform different tasks. The senses apprehend particular objects – colors, textures, sounds, etc. – and understand the objects of the physical world. The intellect apprehends the essence of those objects, that is, it understands that this four-legged yapping creature is in some way the same kind of thing as that four-legged yapping creature; they are both dogs, even though they are distinct individuals. In other words, the intellect sees the nature of a thing.

The intellect also sees the implications of nature. Just as it makes connections between individual things in the physical world, it makes connections between ideas. This aspect of the intellect is called reason, and it allows us to form an argument and to examine our ideas logically. The intellect is able to evaluate both things in the world and ideas in our minds.

Now, both the senses and the intellect have a power that the medievals called “appetites”. The appetite of the senses is, well, the things we call appetites today: desires for things like food, pleasure, comfort. Sensible appetites motivate us to pursue sensible goods. The intellectual appetite, though, motivates us to pursue intellectual goods, like truth and beauty and the common welfare of society. This appetite is the will. The will, by its very nature as an appetite, is necessarily ordered toward choosing good things. In fact, it was taken for granted in ancient and medieval times that we are incapable of choosing evil for its own sake; it is impossible to choose anything unless we see something good in it.

In other words, to know something, anything, led immediately to a desire for the good of that thing. That’s the sense in which to know me – or anyone else, for that matter – is to love me.

Freedom!

But because the will is a power of the intellect, it is able to use rational argument and to see different ways of achieving the good that it necessarily desires. This power is called liberum arbitrium, which is Latin for “free choice” but has traditionally been translated “free will.” It is the ability to choose the means to pursue the good.

For example, it is good for me to be healthy. One necessary aspect of health is regular exercise. But there are lots of ways to exercise: I could ride a bicycle, do pilates, swim laps in a pool, lift weights, take a walk with a friend, and so on. My will is bound to desire health; unless I’m obtuse, I recognize that exercise is necessary to health, but I’m free to choose how I’ll go about getting exercise based on what I enjoy, and what works best for my body type.

I’m also free to choose some other aspect of health as more important, such as getting my diet under control or making my sleep schedule regular. Maybe I need to focus on mental health before physical health. And maybe I’ve twisted my understanding of health so much that all I see is the need for pleasure and comfort. The point is, the will seeks what is good; freedom seeks the ways to achieve that good.

That’s how the medievals saw things, up until John Duns Scotus. Since then, the idea has been growing that freedom, rather than love of the good, is central to the will. It wasn’t long before people began to claim that the will could choose either good or evil with equal freedom, even though the only way medieval people could see to choose something evil was if the will was bound by a kind of slavery. Eventually, the idea that civil laws, and even moral teaching, would try to impose goodness on the will became repugnant to the ideal of freedom. Freedom was exalted as the highest value, even over good.

I can see some reasons for this line of argument; it’s not entirely irrational. But I think it makes a small mistake at the beginning, and leads to disastrous consequences. Freedom cannot itself be good without being one good among many; and freedom is not the standard or definition of good. Rather, the only way freedom can truly be free is to place itself at the service of love.

This is not a natural love

I don’t like to talk much about sex, partly because I’m ashamed of my own weaknesses in this area, and partly because any restriction on sexual “expression” or activity is seen as “backward” (and I’m vain enough to want to be seen as progressive), and partly because sex is just plain everywhere already and I don’t particularly want to add to the mess.

But what with the foolish hooplah over Pope Benedict’s out-of-context statement on condoms, and in light of some personal questions from a few different friends, and considering a fascinating conversation over at Just Thomism, I thought I’d toss my tuppence into the ring.

Human nature

The human person is made for love.

That sentence has many meanings, because “love” has many meanings. Love could mean, broadly, fellowship or relationship with others. Love could mean, figuratively, sexual intercourse. Both these – as well as other senses of love such as philanthropy or friendship or romance – have some truth to them, but it is important not to confuse them.

The fact is that individual people are dependent on one another, both physically and socially. Love allows those dependencies to fulfill our nature, to build us up both individually and together. In terms of virtue, love directs us toward a good that is at the same time personal and universal.

Our interdependence can be abused, though. We can treat each other in ways that denigrate human nature, usually by pitting one need against another, or by substituting one kind of love for another. That is what the vices do, and particularly the vice of lust.

Lust kills love

Lust does for sex what all the vices do: it reduces the world to some small, solitary good, and refuses to acknowledge the connections of that good to everything else. It reduces a person to an object of sexual satisfaction. That sexual satisfaction may be emotional as well as, or instead of, physical; but it still “objectifies” a person, reduces him or her to a mere thing to be used.

Now, it’s one thing to become momentarily lost in the enjoyment of some good thing. For example, when I’m savoring a truly fine wine, or a perfectly spiced pasta sauce, I take a minute to ignore everything else in the world and simply float in that fullness of flavor. But such moments are gifts, and I soon return my attention to my companions at the table.

Lust seeks to control and command the pleasures of sexual interactions, rather than receive them as gifts. It treats a companion as an excuse or as a tool to achieve a solitary ecstasy.

Where natural, virtuous sex profoundly unites a couple, lust isolates. It refuses to relate the pleasure of sex to the joy of communion.

Sex au naturale

Now, one of the first things lust ignores is the intimate connection between sexual intercourse and procreation. This is, of course, where all the controversy around birth control and homosexuality and so on comes from. None of those approaches to sex are conceivable until the bond between intercourse and childbirth are broken.

I have a great deal of sympathy for couples who can’t see how they could afford the expense of a child, or for people attracted to members of their own sex. I have very good friends who fit into both those categories, and their longing for affection and understanding and security is both deep and genuine. I mentioned above my own vulnerability to sexual temptations as well, and (without going into any detail) I will admit that I have myself sought to avoid the natural course and consequences of sex.

The temptation makes sense: sexual passion is intense and is rooted in the depths of both body and soul. It is easy to let it take over.

But human nature is not meant to be dominated by any single passion, no matter how powerful or profound. Freedom lies exactly in being able to say both “yes” and “no”, and in knowing the best time for each. Reason lies, neither in suppressing nor indulging our passions, but in bringing those passions to their fulfillment in the whole person, and in each other.

True love lies in welcoming and respecting every aspect of others, including their minds, their personalities, and even their fertility. Love, when it meets another, always creates something new and beautiful.