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January 16 - January 28, 2024
Hope is, like all virtues, a practice. It is autobiographical, the story of the one who possesses it, “stretching [that story] forward to its best possible ending.”84 Like the unity and direction of a good narrative—or a pilgrimage—hope leads one to consider oneself within the context of one’s story, stretching it forward to its best possible ending. The man in possession of merely the hope that is a natural passion does not see the hope that comes only from God: participation in the new heaven and the new earth.
In A Secular Age, Charles Taylor describes three senses of transcendence, three ways of reaching beyond the flatness of the here and now: through belief in God or some higher power, through the extension of natural or mortal life, and through agape love.85
Progress is not the same as hope. The modern idea of progress is founded on a belief in the perfectibility—or at least the unbounded improvability—of humankind. Progress is an Enlightenment idea, grounded in the obvious and measurable progress of science but erroneously applied to the human condition.
Although human manners and morals shift and change, and human cultures exchange one systemic sin for another, human nature does not change, let alone progress.
Among other shortcomings in its account of the nature of reality, the myth of progress cannot account for evil.88 Hope, however, takes evil into account. The “fundamental structures of hope” are built upon belief in the goodness of creation, the nature of evil, and the plan of redemption.
Aristotle says friendship “is an absolute necessity in life.” No one “would choose to live without friends, even if he had all the other goods” that life offers.
Agape is sacrificial and self-giving love, and has come to be associated with godly love because it reflects the “triune God who is a communion of persons in self-giving love [who] created all things out of love. All persons are created to be in union with God in ultimate happiness.”
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.15
“He will give us feelings of love if he pleases. We cannot create them for ourselves.”
Most of us connect the word cupidity with its source, Cupid, the god of desire and erotic love in classical mythology. We associate Cupid with romance and Valentine’s Day, but this sort of desire is not all that cupidity entails. Within ancient Christian tradition, cupidity was associated with lust and ambition, the counterpart of the virtue of charity or godly love.
While charity is desire that moves us toward God, cupidity is desire that moves us away from God.
The love between friends is called philia in Greek (from which we get the word filial). This kind of love refers to the mutual affection, respect, and interconnectedness that “seeks the well-being of humanity”27 that marks deep friendship.
Many think that we in modern Western culture have lost much of the richness of this kind of brotherly love or deep friendship, particularly in the church, where both opposite and same-sex friendships are surrounded by anxiety because of our culture’s tendency to equate nearly all forms of love with sex.
The Greek term for the kind of love at the center of a romantic or sexual relationship is eros, from which we get the English word erotic. In Greek, the word refers to deep desire and is usually associated with sexual love.
the love of family members for one another, which the Greek language calls storge.
compassion is more than empathy.42 Empathy allows someone to imagine what the experience of the sufferer might be like, but compassion goes beyond empathy. Compassion characterized Jesus’s earthly ministry, leading him time and time again to heal or help those suffering. To have compassion is, literally, to “suffer with” someone (com meaning “with” and passion meaning “suffer”). Compassion involves “a sense of mature judgment and an understanding of the relatedness of life” and “directs our attention to life and the suffering of others.”
compassion—love, concern, and motivation to help others in their suffering—is more helpful and healthy than empathy—the ability to feel another’s pain.44 Charity is the bridge between mere empathy and compassion.
Without truth, charity degenerates into sentimentality. Love becomes an empty shell, to be filled in an arbitrary way. In a culture without truth, this is the fatal risk facing love. It falls prey to contingent subjective emotions and opinions, the word “love” is abused and distorted, to the point where it comes to mean the opposite.
How we die will depend on how we live and how we love, as The Death of Ivan Ilych helps us see. Its vision of charity—love given and received—is the image of the servant who, by tending the feet of others, bears their suffering.
Temperance disciplines all the human appetites. As a kind of temperance, chastity tempers in particular the part of human vitality related to our desire to reproduce and to experience companionship. Temperance moderates according to the dictates of reason, which is why Augustine calls chastity, or purity, “a virtue of the mind,”5 locating it in desire rather than action.6 Like temperance, chastity demands more than mere suppression or denial for healthy discipline. Chastity is the proper ordering of one good thing (sexual desire) within a hierarchy of other good things.
Chastity is not the same as virginity or celibacy. Within Christianity, it is something both married and single people are called to. The person who is raped is not guilty of being unchaste. On the other hand, the consumer of pornography is. Chastity, most simply, is fidelity.
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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Undisciplined sexual desire is lust. Living in a modern culture in which sexual lust is so rampant and its destructiveness so woven into the social fabric, we see this vice a bit differently than earlier Christians did.
the Bible warns against: “the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the pride of life” (1 John 2:16). David L. Allen explains that the Greek term for lust that is used in this passage carries the sense of being “hot after something,” and it denotes things sought apart from God. “Lust of the flesh” refers to the worldly desires of our corrupted human nature as opposed to the will of God. The phrase “describes what it means to live life dominated by the senses” and neglectful of spiritual things. “Lust of the eyes” refers to desires for the things we can see—whether material possessions,
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The marital relationship is singular in the way each partner shapes and forms the other. The good habits practiced by one partner contribute to the positive formation of the other. The same is true of bad habits. This mutuality doubles the effects of one person’s habits, whether positively or negatively.
Caring for one’s spouse as one would care for oneself makes it possible to fulfill the purpose of marriage, described earlier in this same chapter of Ephesians, which is to love your wife “just as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her to make her holy, cleansing her by the washing with water through the word, and to present her to himself as a radiant church, without stain or wrinkle or any other blemish, but holy and blameless” (vv. 26–27).
But at some point in the modern age, people were led to think that while some things might be hard and so must be worked at—things like work, school, raising children, maintaining health, even life itself—a marriage that is hard must be quit.
While chastity is formed in and sustained in community, lust “thrives in privacy and alienation, and lustful people often feel alone.”44 Alienation is the opposite sense of knowing another and being known.
“the hunger to know someone sexually is the hunger to know and be known by that person humanly.”45 Lust derives from a feeling of lack, and nothing feels more lacking than a sense of isolation. It is probably not coincidental that the technology that makes pornography omnipresent is the very technology that is isolating human beings from one another more and more and generating greater loneliness.
The word diligence comes from a Latin word that once meant “to single out, value highly, esteem, prize, love.” From this meaning, diligence later came to mean “attentiveness” or “carefulness.” This evolution in meaning is logical since one usually renders care and attention to things one values and esteems. From this intermediate meaning, it is a short skip to our current sense of diligence as “steady, persistent effort.”
It’s easy to see how insufficient diligence is a vice, but an excess of effort is also a vice. Such excess could take various forms. One form might be the workaholic. Working too hard at one good thing (e.g., a job) while neglecting other important things (e.g., family) is a vice.
It is a mortal sin in “robbing us of our appetite for God, our zest for God, our interest and enjoyment in God. Sloth stops us from seeking God, and that means we do not find him.”
diligence is necessary to a virtuous life but is insufficient apart from the work of Christ.
The virtue of diligence is necessary, therefore, to persevere. If perseverance is successfully staying afloat in the water, diligence is the treading feet that make floating possible. Perseverance is the what; diligence is the how.
In simple terms, an allegory is a story that is symbolic. Allegory doesn’t just contain symbols, as many literary works do, but it is wholly symbolic. Allegory works on two levels, the literal and the symbolic.
Because allegory does not make up a fictional story but uses symbols that correspond directly with truth, allegory (before the existence of our modern literary categories) was not considered fiction in the way that we think of fiction today.
The essence of patience is the willingness to endure suffering.
the willingness to endure suffering is the meaning of the word patient.
we “applaud patience but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.”
Patient character has everything to do with our will, as opposed to our circumstances.
Patience is a virtue, not in overlooking wrong, but in refusing to do wrong in overcoming wrong.
When faced with suffering or wrong, the virtuous person responds neither with wrath nor with stoicism but with patience. A person who has true patience is “angrily virtuous,”3 whether that means giving time for the emotional heat to subside before acting or simply waiting for the slow wheels of justice to turn.
A world of many rules and expectations lends itself to outward conformity that makes an impression—an impression that need not be in agreement with internal nature. The more appearances matter, the more counterfeits abound.
The nature of the world is that it is fallen—but will be created anew. Because it is fallen, the world is filled with people who are fallen—but who have the possibility of redemption. Nevertheless, pain, suffering, wrongdoing, and injustice are, because of this fallenness, inevitable. Failure to recognize either the current condition of the world or the promise of its future will lead to either of the vices that patience moderates: wrath owing to an unwillingness to accept this reality of the world or dispiritedness that is a form of withdrawal from this reality.
Recognizing the true character of the world requires recognition of the God who made it and his character. The most perfect patience grows out of not only teleology but eschatology too. “The end of a matter is better than its beginning, and patience is better than pride. Do not be quickly provoked in your spirit, for anger resides in the lap of fools” (Eccles. 7:8–9).
“all patience or impatience is ultimately patience or impatience with someone.” This fact helps to explain how impatience is ultimately rooted in egocentrism. Patience is difficult because it “concerns what philosophers call the ‘egocentric predicament,’ which is the natural human condition of being immediately aware only of one’s own thoughts and feelings.” He further explains: “I know, however, only my own thoughts and am intimately aware of only my own needs, which naturally incline me to put myself first. The result is frustration that I’m not first, and this strongly tempts me to be
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Patience keeps us from yielding to evils that are “temporal and brief” and from losing “those good things which are great and eternal.”35 Patience is a high virtue, that’s certain. No wonder patience is traditionally understood to be a subvirtue of courage.
Kindness is unlike other virtues in that “we know exactly what it is, in most everyday situations; and yet our knowing what it is makes it easier to avoid.”2 We “are profoundly ambivalent about kindness” in that we “are never as kind as we want to be, but nothing outrages us more than people being unkind to us.”
The ones who give such kindness, particularly to “the least of these,” will be even more blessed than the ones who receive it.
In its etymology, kind means something radically different from mere agreeableness. Indeed, kind, rightly understood, can include all sorts of disagreeableness. Kind comes from the same root from which we get the word kin. To be kind, then, is to treat someone like they are family. To possess the virtue of kindness is to be in the habit of treating all people as if they were family.
