Being Human, Part II:The Virtuous Life

Here at the Dominican priory where I live, there are two coffee mugs that I'm partial to; one of them is picture above.  I like the shape of the handle, the thinness of the ceramic, and the amount of coffee it holds is juuust right.  More often than not, it is kept hostage in my monastic cell so that, should I desire to imbibe yet again, "my" coffee mug is right there.

The mug is at its best when it is full of the good stuff.  When it's been drunk to the halfway point, I begin to be sad, because it needs to be downed before it gets too cold.  And when it's empty, my life falls apart.

Now, watch my language:  When the cup is empty, it has the potential to be filled with coffee again.  When it's filled with coffee and ready to be drunk, it has reached its full potential--it is actually full of coffee.

Between the mug's absolute potentiality for coffee (and my joys) and it actually being full of the Eighth Sacrament, there are degrees, as it were, from potentiality to actuality:  Between buying the beans at The Bridgehead, to grinding them, putting the right amount in my Aeropress, brewing, then adding a bit of milk (don't judge me, Fr Kristopher Schmidt); once all that is done, it has reached its full potential; in other words, it is actually full of coffee.  Then the cycle repeats after I've taken my first sip and my covetousness for coffee begins anew.

Potentiality in the Soul

We're often told that we "hold a lot of potential."  A friend of mine, himself both deaf and blind, has begun doctoral studies in mediaeval history at the University of Toronto; I've seen his work and held conversations with him about, say, the Plantagenet Kings or the merits of Edward Gibbon's theory why the Roman Empire collapsed or how St Brendan the Navigator may have been the first European to have discovered what is now North America.  Last year, someone who could name names and date dates was, as I told him, "not reaching your full potential."  Now that he's passed his entrance Latin exam, his potentiality will continue to be reached, until (please, Notre-Dame de la Belle-Verrière!) he earns his Ph.D. degree.  Even then, there's some potential left to be met:  Becoming a professor or an author or whatever the case may be.

Where is his potentiality to be found?  In his intelligence, obviously, and in a whole set of skills that go along with it.  By putting his intelligence to work, he increasingly comes to actualise his potential.

The same can be said of auto mechanics, bookbinders, store merchants.  In these cases, there is an innate skill with machinery, with handicraft, with enterprise.

In the previous post, I mentioned the "sensitive soul" and the "intellectual soul."  For ease of conversation, let's call them "sensitive part" and "cognitive part."  We have seen, too, how the sensitive part of the soul has to do with the emotional life, and the cognitive part has to do with the mental life.  And we have seen, finally, how these parts of the soul need to be "ordered" properly for human nature to function properly.

We might say, rather, "for human nature to reach its full potential."  Not quite, but that'll do for now--there's a surprise coming.

Each of these parts of the soul--the sensitive and the cognitive--have faculties.  In his commentary on St Matthew's gospel, the Angelic Doctor relies heavily upon St Jerome.  Following Jerome, he interprets the Parable of the Leaven at Matthew 13:33 in a very curious way:  "The kingdom of heaven is like a leaven which a woman took and hid in three measures of meal [or leaven or yeast], till it was all leavened."  About this, St Thomas Aquinas says:

Jerome explains it as about the evangelical teaching, which a woman, i.e., wisdom, hid in three measures, which are the spirit and the soul, or the irascible, concupiscible, and rational powers (Commentary on Matthew, §1168).

Since these are essentially lecture notes,  St Thomas' words need to be "unrolled," as it were.  He speaks of "the spirit and the soul," as we talked about in the previous post.  Bear in mind that the "spirit" refer to the mental powers where rationality takes place, and that the "soul" in the narrower sense means the emotions.  Now watch how he unrolls the spirit and the soul:  "or the irascible, concupiscible, and rational powers."  The "rational powers," obviously, have to do with the spirit or the mind or the cognitive part.  As for "irascible" and "concupiscible" powers, we meet something new:  They belong to the soul.

To be irascible is to be liable to anger; to be concupiscible is to be pleasure-seeking.  Liability to anger and seeking pleasure are faculties of the sensitive part of the soul.  The question, then, becomes:  What is the full potentiality of pleasure-seeking and being liable to anger?  What good does it serve, like my mug's good is to be full of coffee?  These are not inherently bad things:  Liability to anger erupts when we sense danger to life and limb; it's the innate "fight or flight" faculty interiorly engineered to preserve life.  Seeking pleasure surfaces when we're hungry or when we've reached puberty or when we want to be as snug as a bug in a rug; it's also a bit of interior engineering to preserve life.

So what's the "full potential" to the irascible and concupiscible faculties?  Hold on, we'll come back to this.

Turning to the cognitive faculties, we ask:  What are they?  We're getting a bit ahead of ourselves, but I think you've earned it:

Now men are said to be perfect in two ways: first, in regard to the intellect; second, in regard to will. For among all the powers of the soul these are peculiar to man. Consequently, man’s perfection must be reckoned in terms of these powers. But the perfect in intellect are those whose mind has been raised above all carnal and sense-perceptible things and can grasp spiritual and intelligible things. Of such it is said: solid food is for the perfect, for those who have their faculties trained by practice to distinguish good from evil (Heb 5:14). The perfect in will, on the other hand, are those whose will, being raised above all temporal things, clings to God alone and to his commands. Hence after setting forth the commandments of love Christ added: be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect (Matt 5:48) (Commentary on 1 Corinthians, §79).

As we saw in the previous post, it is "spirit" or the "mind" or the cognitive part of the soul that sets the human race apart from the rest of the animal kingdom--as St Thomas said above.  But the cognitive part of the soul, like sensitive part, is again subdivided into two faculties:  The intellect and the will.  The intellectual faculty knows, and the will commands.  If we're going to be human, we need to mentally flourish and be purpose-driven.  Our full potentiality lies here, too:  To collect and use information and to put it to good use.  Intellect and will.  

But how do we actualise the full potentiality of irascibility and concupiscence, of intellect and will?  My coffee mug isn't a coffee mug unless there's actually coffee in it; likewise, our human nature isn't completely human unless irascibility, concupiscence, intellect, and will are all put to good use.

Virtue:  Actualizing Potential!

In Wisdom 8:6, we read:

And if a man love righteousness:  her labours have great virtues; for she teacheth temperance, and prudence, and justice, and fortitude, which are such things as men can have nothing more profitable in life.

These four are called the cardinal virtues, because our moral excellence hinges (Latin:  cardo, cardinis) on these four virtues, or powers or strenths (that's what the Latin virtus means).

St Thomas applies each of these four virtues to each of the powers of the soul, following the classical tradition.  But he has a very interesting way of interpreting Scripture in correlating the virtues to the faculties of the human soul, retrieving Matthew 4:12-22, in the Biblical story of the call of Peter and Andrew, James and John:

By these four is indicated the teaching of the four Gospels, or the four virtues; because by Peter, who is interpreted as ‘discerning’, the virtue of prudence is indicated; by Andrew, who is interpreted ‘manly’, or ‘most courageous’, the virtue of fortitude; by James, who is interpreted ‘supplanter’, the virtue of justice; by John, on account of virginity, the virtue of temperance (Commentary on Matthew, §376).

Common sense tells us which virtue guides which faculty:  prudence guides the intellect to discern; fortitude guides irascibility to be courageous in the face of fight-or-flight instinct; justice does what is right, obviously something the will does; temperance tempers concupiscence.

Or, to visualise:

SENSITIVE part of the soul:

Fight-or-flight faculty governed by fortitude;

Pleasure-seeking faculty governed by temperance

 

COGNITIVE part of the soul:

Thinking faculty governed by prudence;

Willing faculty governed by justice

The virtues, then, help us to maximise our potential for excellence.  Or, better, the virtues actualise our full potential to be human.  Surprise!

Again using my earlier analogy, what coffee is to my (really, "our"--it belongs to the Dominican friars') mug, virtues are to the soul.  To increase in virtue is to increase in humanity.

Have you noticed that a cruel person is called "inhumane" and where abandoned pets are cared for by good people is called the Humane Society?  The way we use language speaks what we innately know about being good, about being human.  That's why it's a mistake to excuse inexcusable behaviour by saying "Well, I'm only human"--because to behave inexcusably is to be unvirtuous and, therefore, less-than-human.  In fact, that's what we mean by "vicious"--having vice, which is the opposite of virtue.

"But it's so hard," you may object.  

Of course it is!  But we'll talk about that in the next post.