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- Author: Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
- Full Title: Glittering Vices
- Category: #books
- Philosophers describe the perfect achievement of virtue as yielding internal harmony and integrity.
- Are they both faithful? In a technical sense, at least, yes. Jane successfully exercises self-control over her wayward desires. But only Joe embodies fidelity as a virtue. His faithfulness is deeply rooted in who he is.
- The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle called this the difference between acting according to virtue—that is, according to an external standard which tells us what we ought to do whether we feel like it or not—and acting from the virtue—that is, from the internalized disposition which naturally yields its corresponding action.17 The person who acts from virtue performs actions that fit seamlessly with his or her inward character. Thus, the telltale sign of virtue is doing the right thing with a sense of peace and pleasure. What feels like “second nature” to you?18 These are the marks of your character.
- Tags: #favorite
- Note: cf. Dallas Willard
- When good things are wrongly pursued, sin happens.46 And when sin accumulates, our character becomes warped and misshapen as well.
- part of unlearning envy (or better still, preventing it) must involve investing ourselves deliberately and deeply in activities with shared or common goods. Common goods are such that one person’s increase in having them does not diminish anyone else’s share.
- we learn to appreciate goods outside a competitive frame of mind. If successful, it can also teach us how it feels to rejoice in something good and to rejoice in that good as shared with others.
- The focus of this discipline remains on doing little things for those with little status that would likely not catch others’ attention. Why? Because the envier needs to learn what it feels like to do something good for another, without her usual frame of reference in which these acts will be noted, tallied up, and made the basis of comparisons between persons. It also develops a habit of acting for others’ sake that is not instrumental to engineering superiority or status for oneself.
- shirking one’s spiritual duty—whether this involves devotional practices or manual labor on behalf of one’s brothers in the monastery—is slothful only if it is linked to inner discontent and resistance to the monk’s religious identity as a member of the monastic community.
- it can seem that staying at arm’s length and not engaging or investing would be easier and safer—even if ultimately unhappier—than risking openness to love’s transforming power and answering its claims on us.
- Sometimes marriage or other friendships feel euphoric and energizing; other times, they are tedious, empty, wearying routines, or just plain work. The point is that being committed to any love relationship takes daily nurturing, daily effort, and daily practices that build it up. Neglecting these will slowly break the relationship down.
- Kathleen Norris once said that married love is “eternal, but it’s also daily, about as daily and unromantic as housekeeping.”
- It is through daily practices and disciplines, whether we feel like doing them or not, that the decision to love is renewed and refreshed, and the commitment of love is kept alive. The slothful person, in this sense, is one who resists the effort of doing day after day after day whatever it takes to keep the bonds of love strong and living and healthy, whether he or she feels particularly inspired about doing it or not.
- the human will is sanctified through many choices and actions over a lifetime. Our love for God, our choice to be like him, must be lived out over and over, day after day. The need to persevere in one’s commitment over time is what yields an opportunity for sloth.
- We were made for relationship with God. If we are slothful, we have chosen to reject that relationship as the way to find fulfillment and chosen to try to make something else do its work instead.17 We are trying to make ourselves content with being less than we really are.
- slothful people often pour great physical effort and emotional energy into the difficult task of distracting themselves from the unhappiness of their real condition.
- the slothful person can be either a couch potato or a person who is very busy and active—very busy, that is, trying to get what he wants without having to change or give of himself.
- Love transforms us. The real work Phil resists, then, is not the physical effort itself (of seducing Rita or of helping the townspeople), but the commitment to love that effort represents.
- “the secret is that God loves us exactly the way we are … and that he loves us too much to let us stay like this.”
- The slothful like the comforting thought of being saved by love, of being God’s own, but balk at facing the discomfort of transformation—the slow putting to death of the old sinful nature—and the discipline it takes to sustain that transforming relationship of love over the long haul.
- The trouble with gluttony is that it reduces eating to an exercise in gratifying my own desires for physical pleasures, consuming whatever I think will make me full and satisfied. Rather than simply enjoying food, we are using it to give ourselves a needed “pleasure fix.”
- As Aquinas puts it, “Gluttony primarily and intrinsically signifies the intemperate desire to consume food, not the intemperate consumption of food.” “It is a case of gluttony,” he says, “only when we knowingly exceed the measure in eating from a desire for the pleasures of the palate.”1
- As Augustine put it, “Virtuous people avail themselves of the things of this life with the moderation of a user, not the attachment of a lover.”