Moving from Vice to Virtue

We have reflected on the three powers of the soul: the intellect, will and passions. The passions are the God-given desires, feelings, or emotions designed to propel us toward what is good and away from what is evil. There are eleven fundamental passions: Love, desire, joy, hate, aversion, sorrow, hope, despair, fear, courage and anger. Because of Original Sin we have a fallen human nature. Now, instead of our feelings and desires propelling us toward good and away from evil they do just the opposite – we have a strong attraction to sin and an aversion, a dislike for the things of God. This is one reason it is so hard to spend time in prayer and we would almost like to do anything else. This condition puts us in great danger. God will not force us to choose him. We must freely choose friendship with him. But in our fallen state, we have this aversion to the things of God and a strong attraction to sin. If we do not reverse this trend it will grow stronger until we see God at death, at which time we still have an aversion to Him, and we might reject Him. Well, how could someone see God and not want him? The rich young man in Matthew 19, the Samaritan Village in Luke 9 and the Pharisees upon seeing with their own eyes Jesus raise Lazarus from the dead, all rejected Him. Why? Because they had the habit of an aversion for the things of God and a stronger attraction to sinful things of this world. Vice is to be attracted to sin and an aversion to good, to the things of God. Virtue is the habit of being attracted to good and an aversion to evil. So how do we change our vice to virtue – that is the point to today’s meditation.

So how do you get virtue? How do you get your feelings to pull you the right way? There are two complementary techniques: The first is resisting misdirected feelings. This is sometimes called checking the passions, or, more commonly, “fake it till you make it.” If you do the right thing, over and over, eventually your urges will get in line. Most people don’t start out liking exercise, but if they keep at it they begin to look forward to their morning run. People usually don’t start out enjoying prayer, but if they pray anyway, day after day, they get to the point where they can’t do without it. The same goes for abstaining from bad behavior you’re inclined to: if you have a habitually dirty mouth, you’ll want to say horrible things when you get angry – but if you resist that urge long enough, you’ll get to the point where you’re accustomed to clean speech, and where you hate the sound of profanity and vulgarity.

The second technique is to mentally focus on pleasing aspect of what's good and displeasing aspects of what's bad. This is sometimes called commanding the passions. You can use St. James’ image, about how a small flame – unworthy talk – can burn down a whole forest of good. Whatever image works to help you realize how deadly gossip is, use that, focus on that, picture that. And eventually your desire to gossip will wane.

In any case what you want to remember is that your emotions are, to some degree, under your control. They are voluntary “either from being commanded by the will, or from not being checked by the will.” So it doesn’t work to just say, “Well, that’s just the way I feel,” or “There’s nothing I can do about how I feel.” The whole point of virtue is that there is something you can do about how you feel, which means you can come to delight in both the fruits and the process of acting well.

Then read, reflect, and resolve. If you practice meditation and a resolution every day, you will grow in your desire for God and the habit of choosing Him. If you don’t, you will grow in your aversion for God and you will choose sin and reject God. Now you choose!