Before going on to discuss chastity, we should pause briefly to offer a few words in defense of virtue in general, a concept that is at least as throughly misunderstood as the virtue of purity in particular. Most of us probably associate virtue with rule keeping; being virtues, we typically think, means ‘playing by the rules.’ Genuine virtue, by contrast, is not about the legalistic observance of rules, but about the kind of person you are. In a word, virtue is an interior quality, and its presence transform us from the inside out into better people. In order to understand how we become virtuous persons, we can think of the way a person is educated by the influence of good friends. A true friend does not sit in judgement of his fellows. Rather, he lifts them up; not by being patronizing and lecturing them, but just by being the kind of person he is and sharing with them his own life. True friends teach us by their very presence to reject evil and to embrace the good; they themselves embody the good for us as a living law that we can follow. As Saint Gregory of Nazianzus said of his friendship with Saint Basil, ‘if this is not too much for me to say, we were a rule and standard for each by which we learned the distinction between what was right and what was not.’ Friendship starts with affective union; a good friend shares our emotions and feelings. By the same token, his educative influence touches our emotional life on the inside. Consider the following illustration: If we scatter iron filings over a sheet of paper and place a magnet underneath, the tiny shaving regroup into a new pattern along the lines of force emanating from the magnet. In the same way, the love of our friends ‘magnetizes’ our desires and affections, drawing all the feelings and movements of our hearts into a well-ordered pattern. Friendship integrates all the dimensions of our being and empowers us to become agents of our own interior integration in turn. Saint Thomas Aquinas describes the virtues as the fruit of friendship. Thomass terms for this friendship is ‘charity.’ Here is yet another misunderstood word. Whereas we nowadays tend to associate ‘charity’ mainly with philanthropy, on behalf of the ‘less fortunate,’ for Saint Thomas charity goes much deeper than donating money (important as that is). Charity, as Saint Thomas understands it, is actually a friendship with God that ‘has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit which has been given to us’ (Rom. 5:5). Charity, in its turn, is like a ‘mother’ that gives birth to all the other virtues. Karol Wojtyla says in the same vein that charity is ‘a virtue, and the greatest of virtues’ (LR, 74). Long before Saint Thomas and John Paul II, Saint Agustine made a similar point about the four ‘cardinal virtues’ of temperance, fortitude, justice, and prudence that, according to the sages of Greece and Rome, are the hinges (‘cardinal’ domes from the latin ‘cardo’, meaning ‘hinge’) on which every other virtue turns. For Saint Augustine, even these four basic virtues are themselves expressions of loves: For the fourfold division of virtue I regard as taken from four forms of love. For these four virtues... I should have no hesitation in defining them: that temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object; justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly; prudence is love distinguishing with sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it [Saint Agustine, De Moribus Ecclesiae Catholicae]. The upshot of this traditional teaching about the primacy of charity is that we cannot even think about acquiring virtue⎯and virtue just means the integration of the various dimensions of the heart⎯ unless we already stand within the magnetic field of true love. The gift of love has to come first and take us by surprise, otherwise we lack the wherewithal even to start the work of integrating our hearts. By the same token, every effort to attain virtue (if its real virtue we are after) flows from love and strengthens in turn. Striving for real virtue has nothing to do with egoistical perfectionism or self-realization; the true goal is a richer capacity of love and an enhanced ability to give ourselves to others. Carl Anderson and Jose Granados, Called to Love #felizdía ^_^
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 15:00:17 +0000
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