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August 1 - August 3, 2020
“Since therefore the knowledge and survey of vice is in this world so necessary to the constituting of human virtue, and the scanning of error to the confirmation of truth, how can we more safely, and with less danger, scout into the regions of sin and falsity than by reading all manner of tractates and hearing all manner of reason? And this is the benefit which may be had of books promiscuously read.”
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. The skills of interpretation and evaluation require prudence. Even the simple decision to set aside time to read in a world rife with so many other choices competing for our attention requires a kind of temperance.
Reading well is, well, simple (if not easy). It just takes time and attention.
Practice makes perfect, but pleasure makes practice more likely, so read something enjoyable.
If a book is so agonizing that you avoid reading it, put it down and pick up one that brings you pleasure. Life is too short and books are too plentiful not to.
even as you seek books that you will enjoy reading, demand ones that make demands on you: books with sentences so exquisitely crafted that they must be reread, familiar words used in fresh ways, new words so evocative that you are compelled to look them up, and images and ideas so arresting that they return to you unbidden for days to come.
Don’t be discouraged if you read slowly. Thoughtfully engaging with a text takes time. The slowest readers are often the best readers, the ones who get the most meaning out of a work and are affected most deeply by literature.
Read books you enjoy, develop your ability to enjoy challenging reading, read deeply and slowly, and increase your enjoyment of a book by writing words of your own in it.
GREAT BOOKS TEACH US HOW (NOT WHAT) TO THINK
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 well adds to our life—not in the way a tool from the hardware store adds to our life, for a tool does us no good once lost or broken, but in the way a friendship adds to our life, altering us forever.
Just as water, over a long period of time, reshapes the land through which it runs, so too we are formed by the habit of reading good books well.
In other words, plot reveals character. And the act of judging the character of a character shapes the reader’s own character.
Similarly, we can hardly attain human excellence if we don’t have an understanding of human purpose. Human excellence occurs only when we glorify God, which is our true purpose. Absent ultimate purpose, we look for practical outcomes.
Great books offer perspectives more than lessons. Literature shows us “how a different character, a situation, an event seems from different angles and perspectives, and even then how inexact our knowledge remains.”
Richard Baxter: “Good books are a very great mercy to the world.”
No matter what, adhering to rules is much easier than exercising wisdom.
Virtue requires judgment, and judgment requires prudence. Prudence is wisdom in practice.
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.
As Martin Luther King Jr. would exclaim a century later, in response to the societal admonition to “wait” longer for justice: “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.”
With the endless injustices and causes that overwhelm us today, it’s common for us to set these concerns against one another as though one cause must compete against another: we must choose the cause of women or the poor, of religious liberty or the environment. We often think of justice as parcels of land, and we concern ourselves with the size and distribution of its lots. But justice is less like finite land and more like the wildflowers that grow there, continually spreading as they bloom and re-seed themselves. Justice—like beauty—is rooted in infinity.
It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.
There’s a little bit of the prosperity gospel in all of American Christianity, and this has been true ever since the country was founded upon the very idea of that pursuit of happiness we call the American Dream.
The false bravery of a mob doesn’t constitute courage because the nature of a mob is one that reduces risk for the individuals that form it. Their “courage” is “borrowed from their mass.” No risk means no difficulty. And no difficulty means no courage because, for an act to be truly courageous, it must entail a known risk or potential loss.
A brave act must be for a noble end in order to constitute the virtue of courage.
Courage must always be connected to a just end.
Aristotle puts it this way: “So the courageous person is the one who endures and fears—and likewise is confident about—the right things, for the right reason, in the right way, and at the right time; for the courageous person feels and acts in accordance with the merits of the case, and as reason requires.”
Dietrich Bonhoeffer: “When a man takes guilt upon himself in responsibility, he imputes his guilt to himself and no one else. He answers for it. . . . Before other men he is justified by dire necessity; before himself he is acquitted by his conscience, but before God he hopes only for grace.”
“Thus, rather than having faith in faith itself, as a point of certainty that relies on our volition only, true faith is a childlike trust in God, who allows his children to question him as they might question their earthly parent, and to do so in the certainty of the relational knowledge and trust of the Father.”
The virtue of faith, if God has given it, might be diminished by lack of exercise and nourishment like any other virtue, but that decrease does not mean that one never had it or that it has been lost.
Reading virtuously, reading faithfully, depends greatly on accepting a text on its own terms and attending to how it is told as much as, if not more than, what it tells.
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.”
Hope is “a desire for something good in the future,” as well as “the thing in the future that we desire” and “the basis or reason for thinking that our desire may indeed be fulfilled.”35 Because hope is oriented toward the future, it is, in a certain way, “the basis of morality,”36 since moral choices incur future consequences.
Charity perfects all the other virtues and contains all the virtues. The definition of charity given by Paul in 1 Corinthians 13 encompasses the virtues of patience, kindness, contentment, humility, temperance, justice, purity, honesty, wisdom, courage, faith, generosity, and perseverance. The definition reflects the very character of God.
Only when we love as God loves can we heed the beautiful exhortation of Augustine: “Love, and do what you will: whether you hold your peace, through love hold your peace; whether you cry out, through love cry out; whether you correct, through love correct; whether you spare, through love do you spare: let the root of love be within, of this root can nothing spring but what is good.”
There is no tyranny like the tyranny of a desire that draws us away from God.
“Ivan Ilych’s life had been most simple and most ordinary and therefore, most terrible.”
Chastity is the proper ordering of one good thing (sexual desire) within a hierarchy of other good things.
Chastity is a positive discipline that involves the whole person and affects the whole person. As one philosopher explains, chastity “is a quality of one’s character, evident in all areas of life.” It is a discipline oriented toward “becoming a person with an outlook that allows one to selflessly appreciate good and attractive things—most especially bodies and the pleasures they afford—by keeping those goods ordered to the good of the whole person and his or her vocation to love.”7 If sex “is about persons being bodies together,”8 then chastity is about the right bodies being together at the
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Love seeks the good of the other. Lust does not.
apathy. One of the seven deadly sins, sloth was nicknamed by the early monks as the “noonday devil,”
The most significant sense of progress in Pilgrim’s Progress is its overarching theological theme: sanctification. While there are various debates about the exact point in the story at which Christian is saved, this question misses the larger concern of the story. Bunyan wasn’t writing in a time in which the evidence of salvation was in the documentation of the exact day and hour at which one “receives Jesus in one’s heart.” Bunyan’s Calvinist belief emphasized not the moment of salvation but the work of ongoing sanctification that is evidence of salvation. Anyone can raise a hand, repeat a
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N. T. Wright says that patience is required in order to attain the other virtues.33 “Patience is one of the places where faith, hope, and love meet up,” he writes.34 Augustine describes patience as the virtue by which “we tolerate evil things with an even mind.” The patient person, he continues, chooses to bear evil rather than to commit further evil in response to it. Patience keeps us from yielding to evils that are “temporal and brief” and from losing “those good things which are great and eternal.”
Kindness is like love. The love we have for family members takes different forms. It is not all Christmas mornings and movie nights. But it is always seeking and celebrating the good of that person. The same is true of kindness.
“What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness.” Such failures include, Saunders goes on to explain, “those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering, and I responded . . . sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.”
“Kindness is a way of knowing people beyond our understanding of them.”29 It is “the ability to bear the vulnerability of others, and therefore oneself.”
Kindness “opens us up to the world (and worlds) of other people in ways that we both long for and dread.”32 Kindness makes us vulnerable. It’s an acknowledgment of our interdependence and therefore risky.33 Yet the very thing “we have in common is our vulnerability.”
For those so sick or scared or depressed that they think their loved ones would be better off without them, I so wish for them to know what Don Eber came to know: caring for these bodies we inhabit for a while—whether that care is of our own or someone else’s body—isn’t a distraction from what life is all about. It is what life is all about. In lieu of death, be kind to one another.
But do we know what true humility is? “Nothing is more deceitful,” says Fitzwilliam Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, “than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.”
Implicit in the word humility is the acknowledgment that we “all come from dust, and to dust all return” (Eccles. 3:20). Like the earth itself, the humble person is lowly. The person of humility is—literally and figuratively—grounded. Thus humility is the recognition that we are all human—another word that comes from the same root—and that none of us are God.
