Virtue Quest

The view from the top makes it look so easy!

More goodness from Pinckaers’ The Sources of Christian Ethics!

Following St. Thomas Aquinas, Pinckaers gives three basic stages of growth in virtue:

1. Beginner / childhood
2. Proficient / adolescent
3. Perfect / mature adult

Each of these stages essentially follows the growth in freedom of a person, and challenges the person to become more free in his or her life. Here’s how each stage works:

Beginning in virtue

The beginner needs to learn how the world works. This is the stage of getting to know – to know oneself, to know one’s abilities, and to know the world and the moral basis of one’s life in the world. The primary work of this stage is learning or, to use a more traditional word, discipline.

Now, it strikes us that discipline is something opposed to freedom, but when the freedom we seek is to live a fully human life, we start out in need of knowledge and in need of practice. Human beings need to be raised and trained and taught.

The goal of education is to lead the child to understand (and the educator must first understand this himself) that discipline, law, and rules are not meant to destroy his freedom, still less to crush or enslave him. Their purpose is rather to develop his ability to perform actions of real excellence by removing dangerous excesses, which can proliferate in the human person like weeds stifling good grain, and by guarding him against unhealthy errors that could turn him aside and jeopardize his interior freedom.

Moreover, this is only the initial stage of growth, just as practicing scales is the beginning and not the end of playing the piano.

Progress in virtue

The second stage involves internalizing the rules by seeing and acting on the reason the rules exist in the first place. It involves a certain testing of the rules – not to destroy them, but to understand them, just as a pianist might try out different formations of a chord or ask what happens when you add this note to it. This is the stage where virtues become, not actions that one follows because they’re imposed, but a kind of “second nature,” an ability that really is one’s own.

Virtue is not a habitual way of acting, formed by the repetition of material acts and engendering in us a psychological mechanism. It is a personal capacity for action, the fruit of a series of fine cations, a power for progress and perfection.

In other words, freedom and goodness cease to be mechanical exercises and become organic parts of us.

Perfect virtue

First off, Pinckaers warns (and I warn with him) that “perfect” here doesn’t mean the end of the road; rather, it means the fulfillment, and the completion of development. Probably a better word for today would be “mature” but St. Thomas used “perfect” so Pinckaers explains what he meant by it.

We can characterize this stage by two features: mastery of excellent actions and creative fruitfulness.

This is the ultimate goal: to be able to do whatever we do well, and to do it creatively. This is what Thomas Edison meant by saying that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” The virtuous person has gained the freedom and the ability to bring inspiration to reality in spite of the difficulty or obstacles in the way.

This does not mean the end of learning or of growth; rather it means that learning and growth continue almost naturally, without great effort – because the virtuous person has learned how to learn, and has rooted him- or herself in good soil for growth. Virtue has become a stable foundation for the freedom to do what really leads to happiness.

And that’s a goal worth striving for!

Overlooking Vancouver

I’ve always preferred playing sports to watching them. In fact, I’ve only ever enjoyed watching sports that I’ve had at least some minimal experience at playing before I’ve watched them.

For me, at least, there’s a level of understanding, a kind of sensual, visceral understanding, that I can’t get from watching someone else or hearing the rules explained.

But beyond this, I think it’s safe to say that the primary purpose of sports is not to be watched; the raison d’etre of sport is playing.

Victory: a common goal

It’s no coincidence that both the Olympic games and the idea of virtue were born in the same place. Both are different ways of striving for excellence, for the best one is able to achieve. They are both about doing something well.

In a sense, the Olympics are about reaching the heights of human ability as it is expressed in the body. It is a delight in the body, a rejoicing in strength and speed and skill. And, in the ancient games, it was an offering of this glory for the honor of the gods. Even today, the victory of any particular athlete or team is bestowed upon the whole nation to which the victor belongs.

In other words, sports teach us that even our greatest achievements are not entirely our own. My glory, my victory, is something that I receive from others, and that I hand on to others.

Virtue and victory

This is the kind of knowledge I feel when playing sports, rather than just watching them. I feel connection – to my teammates, to my opponents, to the field or the court I played on, to my own body. It is a strange kind of finding myself by losing myself in the action.

And, strangely enough, this is the kind of knowledge I sometimes gain when I know I am acting virtuously. I feel connected to the people around me, whether friends or clients or strangers. I feel … how do I put it? I feel my self doing the acts of virtue, whether it’s an act of my mind (like making a good choice) or an act of my body (like doing hard work).

It’s a kind of victory: victory over the temptations of fear or laziness or illusion. This is why we sometimes talk about treating life like a game, or a sport: we’re evoking that sense of challenge and striving for victory. We’re calling on that knowledge that goes beyond the brain to every cell in our bodies.

The moral dimension

The difference, of course, is that a person can be a gold-medal athlete and still be a real jerk. The excellence that virtue seeks is excellence at being human. It’s not about any one action or kind of action; it’s about how we act. Virtue is about doing everything we do in the most humane or human way possible.

The victory of virtue, the prize and the glory, is not what we claim or achieve: it is what we become. Our prize is ourselves.

A many-splendored thing

I suppose Valentine’s day is as good a time as any to talk about lust.

The other day, I was working with a client who happened to be a good-looking woman about my age, and I found myself tripping over my words trying to be witty, trying to impress her, wondering how I could shift the conversation away from professional topics and toward more … intimate sharing.

I also made a greater-than-average number of typos. And I completely forgot about the main question she’d come to resolve. So I had to scramble to correct a fairly major error. And she walked away, doubtless thinking me a fool.

Such are the wages of lust.

The difference between love and lust

The thing about my actions and reactions is that they really had nothing to do with her. They had to do with my response to her physical appearance. That’s the core of lust: it clings to the surface and cannot survive at any depth at all. This is because lust is all about pleasing the senses – both the physical senses, like sight and touch, and the psychological senses, like self-esteem and emotions.

Love, on the other hand, considers the other person first and foremost as a person. It doesn’t disregard the surface or the appearance, but it seeks the fulness of life that animates that surface, that expresses that appearance. Love also recognizes that the other person is looking back, is seeing the appearance that I show. So love reflects the beauty and goodness it sees back to the beloved. Love treats the other person as someone to be served, not as an object that serves my desires.

Love as a virtue

Love has many levels and kinds and degrees. I love my friends. I love my mother. I love my neighbor. If I had a sweetheart, I would love her. These all are different kinds of love, and some loves are “greater” or “stronger” than others.

But what they all have in common is that they seek what is good in the one I love. When love finds something good in someone, it rejoices. When it finds a lack of good, it tries to help or remedy that lack. But love always focuses on the good of the other.

And that takes practice: sometimes, the good in another is not all that obvious. My brother and I are so different, that I spent several years just trying to avoid him, because I couldn’t see anything good in him. For that matter, a spouse’s annoying habit, or a friend’s inconvenient imposition, or even just one’s own bad mood can blind us to what is good in those we love.

At times like that, I’ve found the best thing to do is stop, look at the person, and look specifically for any little thing to appreciate. It will always be there, if you’re willing to search for it.

Now, if only they were topped with bacon....

One of my friends is a young priest at my parish, Fr. Raphael Mary. He preached the homily this morning on the Beatitudes – Luke’s version, with the “woes” as well as the “blesseds”.

He started with Krispy Kreme donuts. (No, I won’t link to their site!) He described an occasion on which he thought such a donut too good to pass up. Repeatedly. At least seven times. And as he lay on a sofa with a stomach-ache, seven donuts congealing into a blob of greasy sugar in his belly, a friend asked him, “Why did you do that?”

Temporary and permanet goods

Fr. Raphael Mary’s answer was, basically, “It seemed like a good idea at the time.” In other words, he chased after the immediate pleasure rather than the long-term good.

He then used TV as another example. While you’re actively watching a show, he said, it gives you pleasure. But when the show is over, that pleasure doesn’t last. In fact, it leaves you feeling rather empty.

Now, this is where I have to disagree with my friend.

No, I don’t disagree that television is all-too-often a superficial pleasure – if it’s a pleasure at all. Actually, I disagree that it’s something that disappears as soon as it’s over, or as soon as one leaves it behind.

Those images, those thoughts, those repetative themes from the soundtrack all stay with me long after the show is gone. They sit in my mind like the remnants of those donuts sat in Fr. Raphael Mary’s gut.

And, to some extent or other, so does everything else. At a bare minimum, the time spent on an activity – whether skiing or feeding the poor or napping in front of a “Gilmore Girls” marathon – has fixed itself permanently in one’s past. It has become part of one’s history, and no one can undo what has been done.

There may be other effects that last beyond the event as well: one can never not cheat on that one test, or take back those words to one’s mother, or not eat those seven donuts. We can’t change the past, and we have to deal with the ramifications of the past in the present and the future.

Real and apparent goods

Our actions and choices don’t just change the world around us; they change our very selves. They form habits. I become accustomed to eating lots of donuts, or to watching telly for three straight hours, or to lying to my friends, or to ….

This is why the real question is not, How long will the pleasure last? The question is, Is this pleasure really good?

Maybe more accurately, the question is, What kind of good is this thing that I desire? Is it an important good? Is it something that will help me be more myself? Or is it only good for a part of me – my tongue, or my eyes, or my self-image? Is it good for a part, but bad for the whole of me?

These are the questions that lead to virtue.

Just get it done

One of my friends describes her life as “the daily grind.” She’s worried that she doesn’t have the joy or enthusiasm for things that she used to. She feels tied down, restricted by the work of just maintaining stuff in her life: job, home, relationships, and so on.

My experience is totally different: I’ve been bouncing all over the place so much in the past few years that I’m soaking up stability and regularity wherever I can find it. It’s comforting to me to punch the clock at work, to have a morning routine, to do things like fill the car with gas or hit the grocery store on the way home.

But I have some distance from the chaos of the last couple years, well, I’ll probably get tired of the daily grind myself. And maybe my friend will find some new inspiration in her life.

The only constant is change

The trick is to find some way to happiness, some way to excellence, regardless of mood or life circumstances or whatever. And this is where virtue comes in.

Virtue is constancy in the midst of change.

Virtue holds up the goal, the ideal, the good, and shows the path to strive for it. The good, happiness, never changes; even though the way to pursue it often does.

Sometimes it takes courage; sometimes it takes self-restraint. Sometimes it means stepping back to a more objective distance; and sometimes it means jumping into immediate action.

Sometimes virtue is sticking with a person through thick and thin, even when you don’t feel like it. And other times, virtue is making a change, even when you’re overwhelmed by fear.

How to know the right thing to do

It’s easiest to see right and wrong in the rear-view mirror: hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. But there are a few things we can do in the moment to make better decisions – even if they’re not always the best:

1. Know the goal: take some time regularly to sort through your priorities. Check your list with someone you trust. Give yourself a clear, concrete image of what you’re aiming for
2. Take inventory: before making a difficult decision, look around and double-check the facts of the situation. Ask if there’s anything you’re missing. Ask if you’re assuming something that isn’t really there.
3. Listen to your heart: if something feels very right, or very wrong, there’s got to be a reason for it. Look for that reason. Don’t dismiss it.
4. Follow your head: your heart can give you good information, but it makes lousy decisions. Leave the actual decision to your reason. Ask yourself how you can move toward your goal, toward happiness, toward excellence, in this situation here and now. And, if you’ve gathered all the facts, trust your reasoning. Do what you have concluded is good, no matter how you feel about it.

For me, it’s the last two that always are the hardest. My feelings cloud my thinking; or my thinking pushes down my feelings. But I keep trying to learn from my mistakes, to go back and try to do better next time. Even small progress is better than no progress at all.

I hate to give an unconfirmed quotation, but the sentiment is apt. My spiritual director told me that someone once asked Robert Frost how he became such a great poet. He answered:

The first thing I do in the morning is to make my bed.

Unfortunately, I haven’t found a reliable citation. Even so, it’s worth noting that great virtue has its seed and root in small virtue.

What I usually look like in the afternoon...

My doctor tells me that it’s not uncommon to feel drowsy in the mid-afternoon, and that either a little snack or a bit of exercise is a decent alternative to a nap. For myself, the soporific tendencies begin around 3:00pm, and a snack will at best delay the lowering of the eyelids.

But today has been a particularly productive day in a number of ways. I solved a tricky network problem for my uncle’s insurance business, reviewed my parents’ taxes from last year in preparation for filing this year’s, finished reading Book IX of Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics, and accomplished a few other little household tasks.

By three in the afternoon, I was certainly feeling sleepy, but I also wanted to keep rolling on this productivity streak. At the very least, I wanted to write a blog entry … but I knew if I sat down at my computer I’d sooner or later drift off into the Land of Nod.

Prudence to the rescue!

So I took stock of my situation. I was sleepy, but not really tired; I wanted to get some more work done, but didn’t have the energy. I wasn’t hungry. I wasn’t even feeling particularly lazy, for once!

Moreover, I’d just been talking with my mother about the taxes, and I knew that both she and I were trying to incorporate exercise as a regular part of our lives.

So I asked her, “How about a walk around the neighborhood?”

As we walked, she asked about this blog and I said that I was planning to write today about the relationship of prudence and justice. I described prudence as the virtue of being in touch with reality, with one’s place in that real situation, and making decisions in accordance with one’s nature.

And it only occurred to me at that point that I had used exactly that process in deciding to ask my mom to take a walk with me.

An action and then a habit

For a long time, I’ve been thinking about prudence, thinking about how to practice it, thinking about how it fits in with the other virtues, thinking … thinking …

Today is the first time I’ve actually caught myself being prudent. I don’t think it’s bragging to say that I’m happy about it. After all, it’s a fairly small act of prudence, and it’s still a long ways from being “second nature” to me. But every action helps to build the habit; and I’m going to remember this little action when I’m faced with future temptations to nap or to do anything else that avoids facing the real world.

After all, I know that I can do it, at least in a small way. And if I can do it, you certainly can as well!

Building a habit of faith

It’s easy to see how faith is a theological virtue; but I think there is also a natural virtue of faith. It is the habit of believing or trusting in anyone’s ability to do any good.

I bring this up because I sometimes get depressed about my own failures or, more accurately, my not living up to my own expectations. I think, “By this time, I should be making six figures” or “Why haven’t I found Miss Right?” or “Holy crap, am I still living with my parents?”

When I’m in such a mood, it’s hard to trust anyone else. I reject compliments. I turn all Scrooge-and-Grinch-like. I get into arguments way too easily.

Faith and trust

It’s hard to trust others when I feel like I can’t trust myself. When I cease believing in my own ability to do good – or even to do any better than I have in the past – then I lose any basis for believing that anyone else can do good either.

I think there are two reasons for this. The first is that any experience of others I have is based on my own past experience; so, if I only have experience of disappointment, then I don’t really know how to believe or hope for something good.

The second reason is that I myself am the standard that I measure the world against. Sound kind of egotistical, but I think it’s just the nature of being a subject, of having a first-person perspective. So I look at others and I compare what I see of them to how I feel inside myself and then extrapolate to how that other person must feel or think or whatever.

So, if I’m feeling like a disappointment in myself, like I’m untrustworthy, then I don’t really remember those times when I actually fulfilled a trust placed in me, and I can only see people around me as better than me or the same as me.

Envy and lack of faith

When I see people as the same as me, or even as worse than me, it’s easy to understand why I don’t trust them. They’re even less trustworthy than I am!

But those I see as better than me, because I see them acting in good and noble ways, I tend to regard with envy. I tell myself that they’ve received some benefit, some gift or ability that has been denied to me. I envy them, and don’t trust them because of spite.

And I think that’s the ultimate problem I have in practicing natural faith: I keep referring to myself as the standard. But faith requires me to open up and let other people be other than I am – to let them be themselves. And to trust that they really can be themselves without conforming to my standard for myself. Moreover, to trust that they might have some insight into the world, even into me, that I don’t have.

Faith means remembering that the world does not revolve around me.

Theological faith

The gift of faith, as the Christian tradition articulates it, forms the basis for relating to God as a person. But it is not all that different from the natural virtue I’ve been describing. As Thomas Aquinas says somewhere, “Grace builds on nature.” (Anyone know where he says that? I admit I don’t know!)

Faith is the foundation of any personal relationship: trusting another to be him- or herself. And trusting that they also trust me to be myself: just one person among billions … yet still unique.

The wheel of time turns round again...

A beginning is the time for taking the most delicate care that the balances are correct.

I think this is the instinct behind such things as new year’s resolutions. I know that the ending of one calendar year and the beginning of another is arbitrary. It is no more significant, in and of itself, than a birthday or a full moon. But it brings with it a number of opportunities to make a fresh start.

Financially, for example, the calendar year and the tax year coincide. So it provides a good opportunity to make some major changes in working or spending habits.

Or, there are opportunities for re-connecting with family and friends; Christmas and other holidays have just passed, and most people are thinking fondly – or trying to, anyway – about friends and relations.

And then there is the whole self-improvement culture: already there are countless people trying to make this year the year when they’ll lose some weight, learn Chinese, get on top of the housework, or whatever. This provides a strong social support, and maybe some direct accountability, for making a few changes.

Balance and virtue

In my experience, what causes all these resolutions to fizzle out before January is through is the lack of balance. As the Bene Gesserit wisdom admonishes us, if the beginning is out of balance, the rest will topple over easily.

Here is where the virtues come to the rescue: a little prudence now, in deciding just what changes to make this coming year, will make it clear what actions are truly just (and, for that matter, loving) and will prepare us to act with courage and/or moderation when needed.

Prudence, remember, is the virtue of recognizing what the situation really is, and what my particular place in that situation is; it is the virtue of being in touch with reality.

The first step of prudence is to look at the practical, concrete, feet-on-the-ground situation. Here’s mine, in a nutshell:

• I have a temporary, part-time job that doesn’t quite cover all my expenses
• I’m therefore somewhat financially dependent on family, but I’m not homeless or starving
• I have the luxury of free internet access and affordable transportation
• I have some very good friends who care deeply for me
• I’m free of any major debt
• I have a ton of ideas for articles and stories, but have so far lacked the discipline to complete them

How I plan to grow in virtue next year

So, based on the situation, it seems to me that I need to man up and act with a little more self-discipline this coming year. I need to focus on finding full-time employment so that I don’t have to mooch off the fam. And I need to focus on putting the time and effort into research and writing. (These fit in nicely, actually, with last year’s resolutions: pray, learn, serve.)

Grand ideals! Now, how to do it? I think I’ll use a few primary tools that have worked well in the past:

1. Make a schedule
2. Be accountable to a friend
3. Expect progress, not perfection

The schedule is itself a tool of prudence: it’s a concrete look at the situation and the needs of each particular day. The accountability to a friend acknowledges that I’m pretty weak in the self-motivation category; it’s easier when I know that someone else knows my goals and successes and failures. And keeping expectations realistic should cut off the elation of a new idea as well as the despair of a failure.

So, I plan to grow in virtue, mainly in prudence, by practicing prudence. I invite you to do the same!

A New Year's Toast

About a year ago, I wrote a post about New Year’s resolutions on another, now-defunct, blog. The truth is, I’d been debating whether I should repost it here, and I’ve been afraid to because (like so many people) I didn’t really keep my resolutions very well. But a friend asked me about the post, so … here ’tis. It’s a reminder of where I was a year ago, and of the kind of progress I still want to make.

A quick disclaimer: the other blog was more explicitly aimed at my fellow Catholics than this one is, so in the post my assumption was that the readers were or knew something about Catholics.

For the Church, today, the First Sunday of Advent, is the beginning of the new year. It is also a penitential season, a time to repent, reform, and renew. Which puts me in mind of a more secular tradition: new year’s resolutions.

I’m going to make a new year’s resolution, and I’m going to begin now, at the beginning of the Church year. This is my resolution: to grow in my life in Christ. This resolution has three simple parts: pray, learn, and serve.

And I invite anyone to join me in this resolution. Grow in life with Christ: pray, learn, serve. After all, this is what we should be doing as Christians anyway.

Now, as for me, I know I’d fail by tomorrow morning if I left it as vague as that. So here are some concrete steps I’m going to take to fulfill this resolution.

Pray. I’m going to schedule half an hour of private prayer every day. I’m putting it in my schedule so that the time is protected, and so that I don’t come up with excuses to avoid it. I know myself well enough to know I’ll take any excuse I can find.

Learn. I’m going to read through at least one article of St. Thomas’ Summa Theologica every day. St. Thomas is still regarded as the most comprehensive theologian in the history of the Church, and he has a certain pride of place in the Dominican order. And moreover, he has a way of surprising me every time I read him closely. This will be a good way for me to make sure I’m growing in my knowledge of Christ.

Serve will be a bit trickier, since most of the Christian life can be seen as some kind of service. But the part I struggle most with is time management: I spend time I should be working for other people on distracting or entertaining myself. So I’m creating a fairly comprehensive schedule for myself, to hold myself accountable to actually spending my time serving other people. I’m also making sure that my leisure time is protected, and plan to use it in truly recreational activities — but more on recreation vs. distraction in another post.

In short, I’m focusing on one simple way I can improve my prayer, my learning, and my service. It won’t make me into the perfect Christian, but that’s not my goal right now. My goal right now is to grow in my life in Christ. Maybe I’ll grow more than I’m laying out here; but at least I’ll do this much. And I will trust that God will use all my efforts — and even my failures, since I know I’ll fall short from time to time — to draw me deeper into his life.

I’ll try to reflect on how it’s going for me over the course of the coming year. And I’ll welcome comments from you if you decide to join me. I’m doing it now, but maybe you’ll try it at some other point: for Lent, or starting on your fortieth birthday, or whenever. Just remember, the goal is simple:

Grow in life in Christ.

1. Pray
2. Learn
3. Serve