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- Author: Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
- Full Title: Vainglory
- Category: #books
- if Augustine is right that only God himself can fulfill our deepest longings, this attempt to substitute love of created goods for the Creator’s love is a mistake that also dooms us to dissatisfaction.
- Note: i.e. cultivating attachment
- Vainglory bears all the hallmarks of a capital vice. It’s a disposition — a pattern of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors — that results from putting a happiness-like good at the center of our lives and seeking it without attention to the ways in which that goodness could bring us into closer relationship with God.
- Aristotle calls this possible gap between action and motive in moral education the difference between acting according to virtue and acting from virtue.
- the virtue I’m calling “truthfulness” (with Aquinas) is primarily concerned with how we appropriately display ourselves to others, focusing on sincere but socially appropriate self-disclosure.
- In Aquinas’s words, the virtue of truthfulness concerns “only that truth where a person, both in life and in speech, shows oneself to be such as one is, and the things that concern one to be not other, and neither greater nor less, than they are.”
- As will also be shown to be true of magnanimity and humility, truthful presentation of yourself depends on having an accurate assessment of yourself, including a true assessment of your own goodness (or lack thereof) and your desires concerning what you want others to think about you.
- For those who have glory-worthy goods, the temptation is sliding from real striving after virtue into living off their past reputation.
- A person with magnanimity is Aquinas’s reshaped and rehabilitated version of Aristotle’s “great-souled man,” a paragon of the virtues.2 Such paragons have glory-worthy goods — truly monumental and magnificent achievements in virtue.
- Aquinas adopts the following logic: If virtue’s natural reward is honor and glory, and greater virtue elicits greater honor and glory, and if God calls us to perfect (i.e., great) virtue, then we’d better confront the task of handling honor and glory well.
- the magnanimous person shows us a model of detachment — or, more positively, freedom — in the same way that the generous person shows us detachment or freedom from holding onto money, or thinking of it as something she ultimately owns or is owed.
- a better definition of this virtue, however, one that highlights what it shares with magnanimity. They describe humility as “an unusually low concern for status coordinated with an intense concern for some … good” and a “relative lack of concern to appear excellent to others.”20
- What magnanimity and humility share is a preoccupation with the good in view (finding the truth, or the beauty of some great virtuous action) rather than with the self as seen by others. “Status-relevant appearances”21 are simply on the mental back-burner, if they are in one’s awareness at all.
- As Augustine says, “If admiration is the usual and proper accompaniment of a good life and good actions, we ought not to renounce it any more than the good life which it accompanies.”8
- Outer silence eventually silences our inner monologues and the fantasies about ourselves they prop up. When we silence our egos, we can hear God’s voice more clearly in prayer, in conversation, in nature, in reading — in everything we do. As Josef Pieper notes, “Only [the one] who is silent can hear.”