Review of Virtues

Look at these cards for some of the vocabulary used in this unit.



Cards on Virtues

There was a lot of terminology to do with virtue here.   Some of it might have been confusing.  This has been a quick introduction.   You have been practicing various virtues in your life since you were old enough to remember.   Still, it's important when you get older to know the terminology the Church has used since early days, for these reasons:

1. For understanding -- so that when you read books about your faith throughout your life, as you should do, you aren't puzzled by strange words.
2. For practice --  Christians should be examining their behavior regularly (really, every night or at the very least, before confession and when you have reason to suspect you are heading the wrong way in your Christian life).  Knowing the outlines of the virtues helps us know ourselves better -- what we need to work on, where we are lacking.
3. For philosophy -- because our reason can tell us about virtue, humans since early days have discussed what virtue is and how to practice it.   So some of this language you will find in Socrates and Aristotle, and in many non-Christian sources.   

There are probably other reasons, but these are three I can think of. 

Try the Scatter!

More on Habits

Whether you eat or drink, or do anything else, do all for the glory of God.  St Paul, 1 Corinthians 10:31

Good moral habits are called virtues.   The word virtue comes from a Latin word meaning excellence or that which is appropriate to a man ("man" meaning human rather than animal or plant, not meaning "man" vs "woman").

You can see that it might be appropriate to an animal simply to spend its life searching for food, eating,  and eventually having children, but for a human it would not be enough.   Humans have been given the power to choose between better and worse. 

An animal might run to protect itself from danger or alternately, it might stay and fight an attacker to protect its young or its pack.    Either way, natural instinct decides what it chooses.   But humans are diferent because while they might feel the same instincts to protect itself or others, the human has to choose which would be better in this situation, and then try to do it.

Such choices come up all the time in the life of any human, and habit helps us do easily what would be better to do.   It would be difficult to live for even a day if you had to think through every single thing -- how to do it, whether it would be better to do it this way or another way.

Yet it's also important to sometimes think through things and decide whether to replace an old habit with a new one.   This is another thing that animals don't do, but humans have to do to avoid staying immature forever.  Maybe you used to be afraid of going to sleep in the dark, so you always had a nightlight, but one day you decided you were too old for that.  You start switching off the light at night and pretty soon you have a new habit.  

Some habits are more important than others.   If you have a habit of lying or sneak-attacking people, this matters more to your ultimate human life than whether you put on your left or right sock first.    Habits that are objectively bad, contrary to virtue, are more important to deal with than habits that are just useful or useless.   

St Paul, in the quote above, reminds us that all actions should be measured as to whether they are for the glory of God.   Maybe it doesn't seem important how you eat or drink, but offering every action to God can give worth to even the smallest action.

St Therese said :

To pick up a pin for love can convert a soul."

To DO:

If you haven't finished reading OUr Goal and Our Guides pages 48-66. read some more.

Natural and Supernatural Virtues

Thomas Aquinas teaches that there are seven basic virtues.   

The theological virtues are infused by God through Baptism, are strengthened by the Holy Eucharist, and are restored when lost or weakened by the Sacrament of Reconciliation.    They are faith, hope and charity.  All of these are given to us by His grace but it is our job to encourage them and practice them (there is more on this later).

The cardinal virtues help us practice and make use of what God has given us.  

But to reach our destination we must also have prudence to choose the best means of getting there, justice to fulfill our obligations to God and man on the way, fortitude to overcome the difficulties we encounter, and temperance not to be sidetracked on the way by passing pleasures and satisfactions.

To remember:

By faith we know God, by Hope we trust His goodness and promises, and by Charity we love Him.   Light and Life

Go on to Next Section

Four Natural Virtues

Read, then go on to next section

The four cardinal virtues -- justice, wisdom (prudence), courage (fortitude), and moderation (self-control, temperance) -- come not just from Plato or Greek philosophy. You will find them in Scripture. They are knowable by human nature, which God designed, not Plato. Plato first formulated them, but he did for virtue only what Newton did for motion: he discovered and tabulated its own inherent foundational laws. These four are called "cardinal" virtues from the Latin word for "hinge". All other virtues hinge on these four. That includes lesser Virtues, which are corollaries of these, and also greater virtues (the three "theological virtues"), which are the flower of these.

These four cardinal virtues are not the only virtues, or even the highest ones. As Einstein surpassed Newton, Jesus most certainly surpassed Plato. But just as Einstein did not contradict Newton but included him, presupposed him, and built on him, so Jesus’ supernatural virtues do not contradict Plato’s natural virtues but presuppose them. Plato gives us virtue’s grammar; Jesus gives us virtue’s poetry.


...These four cardinal virtues are not the only virtues, but they are the cardes, the "hinges", on which all the other virtues turn. They are the necessary foundation and precondition for all others. If a person is not courageous, for instance, he will not overcome the difficulties inherent in the practice of any virtue. If he is not wise, he will not understand what he is doing, and his virtue will sink to the level of blind animal instinct.

There are many more virtues than these -- there is always more -- for "there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy." But never less. -- Peter Kreeft: 

Review

Look through these flashcards on the Virtues, then try the Scatter

Credo ut intelligam... I believe in order to understand

St Anselm of Canterbury wrote,

"Neque enim quaero intelligere ut credam, sed credo ut intelligam. Nam et hoc credo, quia, nisi credidero, non intelligam. "

("Nor do I seek to understand that I may believe, but I believe that I may understand. For this, too, I believe, that, unless I first believe, I shall not understand.")
He held that faith precedes reason, but that reason can expand upon faith.

If you think back on the earlier lessons about St Thomas Aquinas, you see that this is true even outside of religion.   A small child believes that what he sees and touches is real.   He believes that what his parents tell him is true.  As he gets older, he may question things his parents and teachers have told him.  This is part of growing up and if it is done well, the young person comes to know truth by reason rather than by simple belief.    He finds out answers for himself.   This is always, according to the Catholic Church, a good thing when done properly.

Pope John Paul II, writing about the relationship between faith and reason, said:  

What is distinctive in the biblical text is the conviction that there is a profound and indissoluble unity between the knowledge of reason and the knowledge of faith. The world and all that happens within it, including history and the fate of peoples, are realities to be observed, analysed and assessed with all the resources of reason, but without faith ever being foreign to the process. Faith intervenes not to abolish reason's autonomy nor to reduce its scope for action, but solely to bring the human being to understand that in these events it is the God of Israel who acts. Thus the world and the events of history cannot be understood in depth without professing faith in the God who is at work in them.

Faith sharpens the inner eye, opening the mind to discover in the flux of events the workings of Providence. Here the words of the Book of Proverbs are pertinent: “The human mind plans the way, but the Lord directs the steps”  This is to say that with the light of reason human beings can know which path to take, but they can follow that path to its end, quickly and unhindered, only if with a rightly tuned spirit they search for it within the horizon of faith. Therefore, reason and faith cannot be separated without diminishing the capacity of men and women to know themselves, the world and God in an appropriate way.

There is thus no reason for competition of any kind between reason and faith: each contains the other, and each has its own scope for action.

Go on to next section

Faith

The book makes the distinction between natural faith and supernatural faith.

Natural faith is belief in what is said by a human being, without actual personal knowledge that it is true.  Examples:  the distance of the Sun from the Earth; that the American Revolution took place historically; that our friends really are our friends; that the doctor knows what he is doing when he prescribes some treatment.  Of course, we don't just believe people randomly -- our belief is usually supported by our reasoning that the source is credible, that the information is generally thought to be true, and other such things.

You can see that this kind of faith is necessary to us in order to function and learn.   If we distrusted everything we did not absolutely KNOW we would not be able to live.   Even the floor we stand on would be suspect because we didn't KNOW the builders knew what they were doing, or even if our minds were deceiving us by telling us there was actually a floor.  

Supernatural faith is greater than this natural faith, though.   It is defined as: 

A theological virtue, a free gift of God, consisting in an infused supernatural habit or capacity for believng, by which man is disposed to accept as true everything God has revealed solely because of the authority and truthfulness of God who reveals it.

We are given this gift in our Baptism and it is strengthened in Confirmation and through practicing our faith, particularly by receiving the Sacraments of Reconciliation and the Eucharist. 

This supernatural gift allows us to go much farther towards the truth than anyone could go without it.  Since God is invisible to our senses, we would find it impossible to come to know what He is like without this gift of seeing what is beyond our minds. 

Go on to Next Section