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March 22 - April 1, 2025
The attentiveness necessary for deep reading (the kind of reading we practice in reading literary works as opposed to skimming news stories or reading instructions) requires patience.
To read well is not to scour books for lessons on what to think. Rather, to read well is to be formed in how to think.
Reading literature, more than informing us, forms us.
literary language encourages habits of mind, ways of perceiving, processing, and thinking that cultivate virtue by reminding us of the meaning that cannot be found apart from telos.
Great books offer perspectives more than lessons.
virtue picks up where rules leave off.
Prudence is wisdom at work on the ground, doing good and avoiding evil in real-life situations.
Satire is the ridicule of vice or folly for the purpose of correction.
Perfectionism is the foil of prudence.
Temperance is not simply resisting temptation. It is more than merely restraint.
One attains the virtue of temperance when one’s appetites have been shaped such that one’s very desires are in proper order and proportion.
The virtue of temperance keeps us from bursting at either end.
Even the mean of an intemperate life is intemperate.
Consumerism sells the idea that material things will make us happy.
“Economic plenty seems to impose materialistic limits on imagination and people devote themselves to recreation, entertainment, and physical pleasure. Freedom consequently becomes trivial. . . . Everyone lives in about the same way, and it may be difficult even to think of a different way.”
Consumption does indeed consume us.
Yet temperance is more than merely restraining from vices. While restraint is one aspect of temperance, there is more to it than simply negation. Inherent to temperance is balance, as evident in the Old English word temprian, which means to “bring something into the required condition by mixing it with something else.”30 This is why the process of strengthening a metal is called “tempering.” Evenness or balance brought about through mixing diverse elements can be seen in many spheres: the truth spoken in love, vegetation that flourishes in receiving both sun and rain, the one-flesh
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Origins of the word "temperance."
intemperance is “a disease of the imagination.”
Justice is, in this sense, its own measure.
Excess, the novel shows, was both cause and symptom of the perilousness of the times. It was an age of superlatives, of disproportion, of absolutes, and of absolute power. Absolute power by its very nature is unjust,13 for it lacks the relational proportionality that defines justice. Set in a time so full of injustice, A Tale of Two Cities dramatizes the horrible consequences that attend justice too long delayed.
“There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”
Justice avoids both selflessness and selfishness.
Really?
Competing injustices
The word courage comes from the same root word that means “heart.” To be encouraged is to be heartened or made stronger.
They are called theological virtues because their object is God, they assist us in seeking and finding God, and they come to us by God’s grace alone.
Too often, in our tendency to make heroes out of faith leaders, “we fall into a false dichotomy of seeing faith only in terms of victory or failure, which leads us to dismiss and discard the weak,”29 Fujimura points out. This seems particularly true within modern American evangelicalism.
Indeed, literary reading—reading that makes on the reader more demands of time, attention, and thought than casual reading—requires the same conditions that Aquinas finds in hope. The four conditions of hope are that it regards something good in the future that is difficult but possible to obtain. The practice of hope, Aquinas says, is “a certain stretching out of the appetite towards good.”10
Aquinas on hope.
But the hope that is a theological virtue, the hope spoken of in the Bible that is regarded as akin to faith and love (1 Cor. 13:13), is not a natural passion but a supernatural gift conferred by God. This virtue of hope cannot be understood apart from God.
two kinds of hopelessness: presumption and despair.
Hope is inherently humble.
For Plato such transcendence referred to the Ideal. But for Christians this transcendent desire—whether rooted in sexual desire for another person or in the longing caused by an object of beauty or visions of the good life cast by literature, film, or even advertising—points to God as the source of all beauty and goodness.
To have compassion is, literally, to “suffer with” someone (com meaning “with” and passion meaning “suffer”).
“In the absence of faith, we govern by tenderness. . . . When tenderness is detached from the source of tenderness, its logical outcome is terror.”
How we die will depend on how we live and how we love,
Chastity is the proper ordering of one good thing (sexual desire) within a hierarchy of other good things.
chastity is a form of community, and chastity depends on community.
represent
“All this is true, and much more which thou hast left out; but the Prince whom I serve and honor is merciful, and ready to forgive.”8
“such as a man could not live on.”
lieu of death, be kind to one another.
The ancient root from which we get the word, along with its sister humble, means “earth” or “ground.”
Julian characterizes his mother’s morals as small and narrow, yet he does not recognize his own immorality in his treatment of her.
typical
Because he lacks humility, Julian lacks love.
In Mystery and Manners, O’Connor says, “To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks.
It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around. The first product of self-knowledge is humility.”
The awkward, pigeon-toed, sickly O’Connor beautifully demonstrated the exaltation of humility in her own life and work. Once, when asked by a student at a lecture, “Miss O’Connor, why do you write?” she answered, “Because I’m good at it.”49 At first glance, this reply might seem conceited or proud. But the truth is that knowing what we are good at and what we are not, doing what we are supposed to do and not what we aren’t, being what we are supposed to be and not what we aren’t, is the essence of true humility.
The good life begins and ends with humility.
writing-a solitary rooted in community
