Conferences on the Virtues
By Fr. Bruno Cocuzzi, ocd
Number 18
The Virtue of Moderation
As stated in last month’s conference, I
hope to finish up the teaching on the virtues allied or annexed to
Temperance. We begin with the virtue of
Moderation (Latin:
Modestia).
In ordinary usage the adjectives
“temperate” and “moderate” mean practically the same thing: neither too much nor too little, as in
“temperate climes” and “moderate amounts”.
As pointed out in earlier conferences, Temperance has to do with
moderate enjoyment of lawful pleasures of sense that by nature tend to
be rather intense, whereas Moderation has to do with temperate enjoyment of
both those sense pleasures that by nature are not intense, and those that are
“spiritual” pleasures, that is, pleasures “enjoyed” by the ego, or the rational
appetite.
Thus, Moderation, like Temperance, is a general
virtue, and is the “genus” which includes various “species”: virtues that regulate the desire for and
experience of, various and distinct kinds of “lesser” sense pleasures and
pleasures of “spirit”. Last month we
spoke of the virtues of Clemency and Mildness as being subdivisions of the
virtue of Restraint. They could just as
easily have been included under Moderation.
As a matter of fact, St. Thomas does treat of them as species of
Moderation, whereas my textbook places them under Restraint. [This would be a good “exam question”: What are the distinct “pleasures” regulated
according to right reason by Clemency and Mildness? Are they pleasures of sense or of spirit?]
*
* *
The first of the Virtues
that St. Thomas treats of under Moderation is Humility. But in order to appreciate humility better,
let us consider first its opposite, which is the vice of Pride.
According to one definition, Pride
is the inordinate appetite for personal excellence. This, however, leaves unsaid what causes Pride to be a vice,
namely, the “ego satisfaction” that accompanies awareness of personal
excellence. Let us keep that in mind as
we continue to talk about Pride.
Appetite: Pride resides principally in the Will (the
rational appetite) and only in the Will when spiritual excellence is
sought. It resides secondarily in the
Irascible Appetite also when the excellence sought is both difficult to obtain
and is somewhat appreciated by the senses as well as by the understanding.
Inordinate: To have a desire for excellence is not evil
in itself. What is contrary to reason
and due order in Pride is the desire to be recognized as having an excellence
that surpasses what the proud person, in all truth, actually possesses, or is
capable of attaining. When we remember
the parable of the talents in the Gospel, and the exhortation to “Be perfect as
your heavenly Father is perfect”, we must conclude that God expects us to make
generous, good faith efforts, according to reason governed by Faith, to achieve
the excellence we have the “potential” to “realize”.
Excellence: either relative or absolute; that is, in
comparison with others and desiring to surpass them all, or simply to go beyond
what is “possible”, even when no others are in the picture.
Personal: It is most proper to Pride that the proud
individual desires that his PERSON be exalted above all other persons, not
merely in regard to this or that particular talent, or quality or ability, but
in every and all respects. Thus
pride differs from presumption, ambition and vainglory, which
seek some particular excellence in, respectively; works, honorable offices,
dignity, and fame.
Considered in the abstract, pride causes
one to be separated from God because, by it, one rejects TRUTH and adheres to
FALSEHOOD. The proud person exalts
himself or herself above and beyond what is real and actual, above what is
eternally prefixed by God, and amounts to contempt of God by refusing to acknowledge
the rules and the limits established by God’s Will. This turning away from God is, in itself alone, a “mortal” sin in
concrete circumstances; however, it is often a “venial” sin (does not include a
turning from God nor extinguish Charity) because of levity of matter or, when
grave matter is involved, without sufficient reflection on the part of reason
or without full consent of the Will.
According to St. Gregory in his Morals,
there are four ways one can commit a sin of Pride:
1. by attributing the good
things one possesses to oneself as author, rather than recognizing that one has
received them from God, or at least acting as if that were the case;
2. when acknowledging that
one has received them from God, by attributing them to one’s own merits, or
acting as if that were so;
3. by attributing to oneself
good things which one does not possess; and
4. in regard to the goods
one does have, by despising the goods that others possess and wanting one’s own
goods to be preferred to everyone else’s.
The author of my textbook states that (1)
and (2) above include formal contempt of God, and therefore extinguish the life
of Grace in the soul. He also says that
(3) and (4) can co-exist with a willingness to be subject to God provided they
remain merely an “affection” for being praised and exalted beyond just measure,
and thus not a serious want of due order and subordination. Should they be accompanied by grave
irreverence toward God, contempt for one’s neighbor, render one ready to commit
serious sin or do serious harm to one’s neighbor, then they, too, would extinguish
Charity in the soul.
Some observations about
Pride…
1. In one respect, Pride is
the most serious of all sins, because it is a direct “turning away” from
God by refusing to be subject to Him and to the “Reality” willed by Him. The turning away from God that is found in
all other serious sins is just the consequence or the result of “turning
toward” the created good that is directly willed in other sins.
In sins of Pride, the
“turning toward self” is the consequence of directly “turning away from God”,
and in this regard it is not the greatest of sins, because one’s own
excellence is not a good which is very repugnant to virtue.
Also, considered in the
abstract, Pride is not the most serious of sins because sins against the
Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity are the most grievous of all
sins, since they represent a turning away from God as He is in Himself”,
whereas Pride represents a turning away from God as He is found in the
immutable order He has established in the hierarchy of creation.
2. Pride is the beginning
of all sin both indirectly and directly.
Indirectly, Pride despises, or at least does not respect, the
divine Law, which prohibits (and inhibits) sinful conduct. The turning away from God that is implicit
in every sin (insofar as sin is a turning toward a created good in deliberate
violation of divine Law) is characteristic of Pride. Directly, in so far
as all other sins are ordered to Pride:
the inordinate desire to delight in one’s own excellence or
importance. Thus it is at the root of
every inordinate turning to created good, since it is one’s Pride that tells
the individual that he is so excellent, so important, that he has a right
to do or to enjoy whatever he wishes merely because he so desires.
3. Because Pride is the
ultimate reason for all sins, it is not merely a Capital Sin; it
is the Capital of all the Capital Sins, the mother and queen
of all vices. Nevertheless, there are
certain sins which more frequently and more immediately are born of Pride
because they seek a special kind of excellence closely allied to the excellence
sought for by Pride, and these particularly are called her children. We have already mentioned them above, and
they are defined in particular, as follows:
Presumption is the inordinate desire
to have the pleasure of accomplishing great things that, in all truth, surpass
one’s abilities. It involves excessive
reliance upon one’s own abilities and powers.
The proud person has such an exalted opinion of himself that he thinks
he has the ability to accomplish any great thing. This presumption IS NOT the same
presumption that is a sin against the Theological Virtue of Hope. They resemble one another only in their unrealistic
reliance.
Ambition is the inordinate
appetite to occupy a position of honor and to enjoy the dignity
that goes with the office. One may fall
into the sin of ambition in at least four ways: by (a) seeking high office on the basis of an excellence which
one does not possess, (b) achieving high office by methods that are sinful or
dishonorable, (c) accepting a merited high office but failing to refer the
underlying excellence to God, it’s author, and (d) failing to use the
excellence for which one is placed in high office for the good of others,
because God has no other motive in giving excellent talents, abilities
and qualities than that they be used to benefit others.
Vainglory is the inordinate
appetite for glory and fame, that is, for the enjoyment of being praised. Glory and fame are pretty much the same
thing, since glory is the “clear knowledge of excellence” accompanied by
“expressions of praise” on the part of others, and fame is being well
known far and wide for that very reason.
It is possible to be guilty of vainglory in at least three ways: by (a) seeking glory for something that does
not deserve it, or at least does not deserve it to the degree one thirsts for
it, e.g., something evil, false, fictitious, or for any fragile or corruptible
good, (b) seeking glory from individuals who are incapable of discerning what
really merits praise and what does not, and (c) seeking glory and
fame that is deserved but without referring it either to God, the author of the
excellence which underlies it or without using it for the good of others.
We will have occasion to
see these three again when we are discussing some of the virtues allied to the
Cardinal Virtue of Fortitude.
* * *
Having substantially
covered the basic Catholic moral teaching on the sin of Pride, we can now turn
our attention to HUMILITY. How
appropriate, since we are in the Holy Season of Lent, and it was the Pride of
Adam, in the first place, that got us humans into the mess we are in before
Jesus, the Incarnate Son of God, turned it around by His Humility. During Lent we have the opportunity to
acknowledge that we have imitated the Pride of Adam and to make diligent
efforts to imitate the Humility of Jesus.
Humility (humilitas) gets its
name from the Latin humus, which means the earth or the ground, and the
adjective humble (humilis) in its native sense means “low” or “close to
the ground”. Metaphorically, humble
means “wretched” or worthless. Morally
speaking, humble means having a “low” opinion of oneself, and this can be
imposed from without, as when one is humiliated against his will, or
from within, as when one’s “perceptions” are the “cause” of the lowly
opinion. The latter can be both contrary
to and in accord with right reason:
Contrary to when the “perceptions” either are not evaluated
properly and accurately, or fail to accord with “truth”, and in accord with
when the perceptions are truthful and accurate.
Humility has been
defined in a number of ways, probably because words tend to have a restrictive
effect, and humility seems to have something “indefinable” about it. Pursuing the thought of two paragraphs ago,
we might say that it is everything about Jesus which alone accurately
“defines” Humility. (What extraordinary
honor does this thought not bestow upon His Mother, because even before She had
Jesus to study and meditate upon, and in that way “perfect” her understanding
of humility, she had already approximated it so closely in Her own life). Here, then are two definitions:
Humility is the virtue
by means of which an individual, in consideration of his faults and defects,
maintains a lowly opinion of himself in accordance with his condition in
life.
Humility is the virtue
by means of which one checks his appetite for “exalted things” which are beyond
him. (Combining the two somewhat):
Humility is the virtue
that, negatively, prevents one’s appetite for excellence from becoming
inordinate, i.e., from reaching for an excellence that surpasses his potential,
and, positively, which inclines one to acknowledge his “wretchedness” or
“nothingness” in accordance with truth.
Our Holy Mother “St.
Teresa defines Humility as “walking (or standing) in truth.”
It may seem at first
that Humility is not a virtue, since we stated many, many conferences ago that
a virtue is a “habitual, quasi-automatic inclination toward conduct that is
morally good”. Since a “humble” man has
a lowly opinion of himself in accord with right reason, it would seem humility
is a state of mind. After all,
St. Paul does tell us: “Have that mind
in you which was in Christ Jesus, Who, though he was in the form of God, did
not esteem divinity something He should cling to…” And we had said,
further, that the virtue of Temperance and those affiliated with it, are the
Moral virtues that reside in the “concupiscible appetite”.
Well, it turns out that
the esteem (or opinion) that is characteristic of the humble
person as well as the virtue of humility both have the same foundation: knowledge of self. And really, the virtue of humility resides
in all three appetites: the
concupiscible, the irascible and the rational (Will). The self-knowledge that is the ground or
support of humility is best acquired by our comparing our own “littleness” with
the infinite perfection of God (which prompted St. Bernard to say: Humility is the virtue, by which, through
accurate and truthful knowledge of oneself, one becomes “wretched” in his own
eye). It resides principally in the
Will (the rational appetite) insofar as the “highest” excellence we can desire
is of a “spiritual” nature; it resides in the irascible appetite insofar as
there are formidable obstacles to overcome in attaining our “true” greatness
and excellence; and finally, it resides in the concupiscible appetite because
it is the mere (and simple) apprehension of the “goodness” of the true
greatness and excellence to which all of us are, in all truth, called to by God
that “causes” us to hunger for it and move toward it.
The specific conduct
that characterizes the humble person is: submission to God, and
submission to others for God’s sake.
The reverence toward God that underlies that “submissions” is
the root out of which grows the proper object of humility: to insure that one’s hope (expectation) of
achieving greatness and excellence remains realistic. Humility keeps one from attributing to
himself gifts and talents and “potential” that God has not granted, and
from proposing to oneself the attainment of an “excellence” and “degree of
greatness” that exceeds God’s Will for the individual.
At this point let us
again appeal to the quotation from St. Paul that “defines” the Humility of
Jesus (Phil. 2, 5-11):
“Have this mind in you
which was also in Christ Jesus, who though he was by nature God, did not
consider being equal to God a thing to be clung to, but emptied Himself, taking
the nature of a slave and being made like unto men. And appearing in the form of man, He humbled Himself, becoming
obedient to death, even to death on a cross.
Therefore God also has exalted Him and has bestowed upon Him the name
that is above every name, so that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend
of those in heaven, on earth and under the earth, and every tongue should
confess that the Lord Jesus Christ is in the glory of God the Father”. (Confraternity version).
What can we find in this
statement of St. Paul that is corroborative of what we have been saying about
humility, and its opposite, pride?
(Before we begin
looking, let us remember that there is but ONE PERSON in Christ, and TWO
NATURES. And further, let us keep in
mind that the knowledge, the activity, and the attributes that are found in,
proceed from, and belong to any rational nature are predicated of, or
attributed to, the “person” to whom the nature “belongs”. Thus, Christ, the PERSON, at all times
KNEW what was in the Divine Intellect; and to that same PERSON which is Jesus
Christ, must be attributed everything that had to do with the growth and
development, knowledge and activity of the HUMAN NATURE that belonged to Him,
as well as all those things endured and suffered, i.e., “experienced”, by that
same Human Nature given to Him by His mother, the Blessed ever-virgin Mary).
Knowing that He was both
Divine and Human, Jesus understood that He was the only Person who could redeem
the fallen human race. Thus, in Him
alone existed the “potential” to be the Savior of the World. He could then realistically, without any
taint of untruth, ASPIRE to the “dignity” of high office as given by God for
the benefit of others. Thus He
understood that God the Father “wanted” this of Him; that His accomplishing the
Salvation of humanity was part of the ORDER or ECONOMY willed by His eternal
Father. He also understood that in His
humanity He was inferior to His Father, and that, as possessing a human nature,
He OWED due submission (obedience) to His Father and due submission also to His
fellow human beings for the sake of His Father, who “wills that all men be
saved”. He could also legitimately seek
that “glory and fame” that would serve to make his Name known to all peoples,
which glory and fame would constitute an invitation given to every human being
to accept the salvation achieved by Him.
As part of His knowledge
of His “status” as Divine Son of the Father, He was well aware that He might
legitimately have sought a mitigation (reduction in amount) of the “sufferings”
he would have to endure (as part of the due submission to human agents for the
sake of His Father that would redeem the human race) to just that amount
that was absolutely necessary.
At the same time, as an
element of His obedience to the Father, He could rightly esteem Himself, in
regard to the bodily component of His Humanity, to be “wretched” as
compared to the “sublime worth” of a human soul in the “state of grace” that He
would make available to those who would be saved. Thus, in choosing to suffer to the full extent “possible” as a
means of making known His Love for the Father and His and His Father’s Love for
His human brethren, He would reveal the Infinite Mercy and Compassion which was
the highest expression of the Love which is God.
In this way the
“knowledge with praise” (Glory) of God the Father also belongs to Jesus
Christ. He is thus IN the Glory of God
the Father because of the ineffably exalted degree to which His human will
shared in the LOVE of His Father as a result of His perfect obedience.
The Perfection of
Humility…
Humility is not the
greatest of Virtues. That distinction
belongs to the Theological Virtues. But
also ranking ahead of humility are the Intellectual Virtues, Prudence, and Justice. Humility is more perfect, however, compared
to all the other moral virtues.
Humility is, however,
the foundation of the Spiritual Edifice in so far as it must be the
first of the virtues to be acquired since it alone removes the obstacles to the
influx of Divine grace into the soul.
(God resists the proud and gives His grace to the humble, says St.
James).
It is not, however, the
actual foundation of the virtues (the spiritual edifice comprises more than the
virtues). That distinction goes to the
Supernatural Gift of Faith, since the “norm” of all the virtues “Reason
informed by Faith”.
* * *
There is just a bit more
that can be said about Humility. My
textbook contains several paragraphs on both the Practical Rules for the
Exercise of Humility and the Degrees of Humility. Since I have still to cover the virtues of Diligence
(Latin: Studiositas) and Moderation: in comportment, recreation, personal
appearance and furnishings, I will leave them for the next conference. After that we will go on to the cardinal
Virtue of Fortitude.
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