Category Archives: Deep Thoughts

What does it mean to be “Spiritual”, Part IV

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I’m continuing to respond to Lindsay’s comment on Part II of this series.

At one point Lindsay says,

The body can sin, when the Ego is what is driving the “bus” but the Ego is not the true nature of the person themselves. I don’t believe that God makes junk. The soul is perfect, but an intellect that identifies itself with the Ego will miss the mark again and again.

Here Lindsay is drawing a distinction between the Ego on the one hand, and the Intellect, the Soul, and the Person on the other. Here’s what I draw from this passage:

  • The Ego is not the true nature of the person.
  • When the Ego is given free rein, the person cannot help but sin again and again.
  • The Soul is perfect, and cannot sin, except that the Ego gets in the way.

The difficulty is that I’m not sure quite what Lindsay means by the Ego. I don’t think in Freudian categories, and I’m not at all sure the Lindsay using the word in the Freudian sense anyway. So what follows is pure conjecture on my part.

She might mean my conscious self, that is, the I that can say, “I think, therefore I am.” Alternatively, she might mean ego in the colloquial sense, i.e., arrogance and selfishness.

If she means the latter, then yes, when Ego is driving the bus, everything goes wrong. If she means the former, which is, I think, more likely, then I’m puzzled. I mean, there’s only me in here. I am a conscious agent, responsible for my actions, which I choose. I am, sadly, afflicted by a tendency to sin, and by a plethora of vices and bad habits, including a hearty serving of selfishness garnished with a dollop of arrogance. But if you get rid of that “I”, there’s nothing left of me to be moved to either vice or virtue.

I can’t allow a distinction between the “I” and the Soul, either. The soul is the form of the body: when the soul departs the body is so much meat. In one sense, everything I do is spiritual, in that my soul is involved in even the slightest movement of my little finger. But, per St. Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, my Intellect and Will are wholly spiritual, aspects or functions of my soul, and though I hope they are perfectible they are most assuredly not perfect as I write. (Your mileage may vary, I suppose.)

I agree that the “Ego is not the true nature of the person”, but probably not in the way that Lindsay means. I am I; it is my nature to be human. In fact, it is my nature to have an I, to have an intellect, to be rational, to have a body, to need to eat, and so on. It is not my nature to be a sinner; sin is deeply unnatural, a perversion of what we are meant to be.

Pope Benedict points out over and over again in his writings that what God wants of every creature is that it be fully itself, that it be entirely true to its God-given nature. It is in this sense that the very stones cry out with praise for God: they are most perfectly and entirely stones, just as God made them. It is our task, with Christ’s help, to be most perfectly and entirely human. It is precisely this that we fall short of when we sin. And what it means to be perfectly and entirely human is to attain our true and final end, that which will crown our lives with true happiness: union with God in the body of Christ Jesus, with Christ himself as our head, a union of love in which we become one with God while remaining wholly and completely ourselves, and wholly human.

What does it mean to be “Spiritual”, Part III

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In an extended comment on Part II of this series, Lindsay gives her (I believe it’s “her”; if not, I apologize) understanding of the Intellect, the Will, and organized religion.

It’s immediately clear that Lindsay and I have very different views on the matter, a conclusion supported by a quick survey of her blog. I’ve no intention of giving her comment a righteous fisking; that’s not my way, and anyway it seems inhospitable after I specifically asked for comments of this kind. Nevertheless, she provides considerable fodder for contemplation, and it would be a shame to waste it.

Let’s begin with the low-hanging fruit. Lindsay says, speaking of organized religion:

I think religion teaches you that the body is evil and the person is innately sinful.

Many people think this, but it is certainly not what the Catholic Church teaches. Nothing created by God is innately, that is, naturally evil. It is true that we are sinful, but this is not part of our nature; it is more like a chronic illness that limits both our growth and the growth of those around us. It is the nature of an acorn to grow into a glorious oak tree; but a tree that is blighted cannot do so. It is our nature to grow into union with God as members of the body of Christ Jesus, but sin blights us, and, in a manner of speaking, poisons the soil around us as well. We need Christ’s healing to be free of this.

As for the body in particular being evil: according to John Paul II’s Theology of the Body, the marital act is a sacred image of the love of the Father and the Son in the Holy Trinity, and of Christ’s love for his bride, the Church. (The whole of scripture is shot through with this kind of imagery.) Casual sex is not sinful because sex is sinful, or because the body is evil; it’s sinful because it profanes something holy.

It’s true that scripture occasionally opposes the Spirit and the Flesh, as in “the Spirit is willing, but the Flesh is weak”: we do have a tendency to sin, and to do things we know we should not, and in fact choose not to do. Anyone who has struggled with a besetting sin knows how true St. Paul’s words are, that I do not do what I wish to do, but that which I do not wish to do, I do.

Lindsay also says (I’ve corrected typos),

WILL is not will-power (because that is the intellect rationalizing a desire, the Will is the part of you that instructs in desire and I don’t mean that as anything sinful, but if someone checked into themselves with honesty and no judgment and asked, “what is it that I feel to do right now?” the answer might be, to go for a walk, take a nap, have a drink of water, pray, or even: “I want that piece of chocolate cake.” The Will when intact and functioning properly does not instruct you towards destructive ends. Maybe your body really needs the high magnesium content in the chocolate and by not acquiescing, you are depriving your body of a nutrient it currently needs.

I believe that what Lindsay is here calling the “will” is in fact what St. Thomas Aquinas would call the “appetite”; or, at least, she’s conflating the two. And here we strike a major point of disagreement. Lindsay appears to me to be saying that we only desire that which is good for us, when the will, or appetite, is intact and functioning properly–that our desires are, in fact, a good guide as to what we should do. There are a number of points to be made, here. What is good for us? What does it mean for our will and appetite to be intact and functioning properly?

It is certainly true that we only desire what is good–that is, what we sense to be good (the appetite) or understand to be good (the intellect). No man seeks evil purely for its own sake. But I know from my own experience that this apparent good is often illusory, or, at least, extremely limited. Chocolate cake is good; but too much chocolate cake is bad. My understanding of what is good is also limited; there is much that I don’t know, and some of what I know is wrong. My appetite frequently wants more than is good for me (I’m not speaking solely of food, here). And then, sin darkens the intellect.

If I were in a perfect state, which is to say, if I were Christ, things would be simpler. My appetites would be properly ordered; my understanding of what is good would be correct; and what I willed, that I would do. I’m not him. Christ leads me in this direction, but it is not a speedy process.

Part IV

What does it mean to be “Spiritual”, Part II

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A week or so ago, I posed the following question:

When you hear someone say that they are “spiritual”, what does that convey to you? And if you have ever said something like, “I’m not religious but I’m spiritual,” what did you mean by it?

Of the five comments I received, none were from people who would currently describe themselves as spiritual rather than religious. I’m not sure what that means. Possibly, no such people read my blog. Possibly they do, but, not being religious, felt no need to respond. Perhaps they were afraid of being held up to ridicule, which a reasonable concern, I suppose, but far from my intent.

One commenter, now a Catholic, says she used to describe herself as spiritual but not religious. I was glad to see this, because it’s the only comment that gives an inward view. She says:

It meant that I believed in things other than this material world, including deities, non-human spirits, and souls of dead humans. I also believed that I had a great inner, spiritual power.

But I was never beholden to anything or anybody, including deities. I had no special love or devotion to any of them. That would have been “religion,” and I just saw as an unnecessary restriction. I just wanted to do my own thing.

Now, the second half of this matches the outward view of the other commenters. I’m more interested in the first half. What Heather meant by “spiritual” was, effectively, the following two things:

  • She believed in a supernatural reality.
  • She believed she had a “great inner, spiritual power.”

I don’t know what power Heather had in mind; but according to Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas she was right on both counts. There is a supernatural reality beyond this material world we see, and we do each have a great inner, spiritual power. In fact, we have two such powers.

Before I tell you what they are, let’s ponder the word “spiritual” for a minute. “Spiritual”: having to do with the spirit. If I possess a spiritual power, then it must be either a power over spirits, or a power that derives from my own spirit, that is, from my soul. An “inner spiritual power” certainly sounds more like that latter than the former, so let’s go with that. What kind of power can derive from my soul?

The ancients and the medievals didn’t think of the human mind as a single unified thing, as we do. They spoke of the mind as being divided into the Sense, the Imagination, the Appetite, the Intellect, the Will, and Memory. The Sense is simply our ability to sense things: not merely our Five Senses, but our emotions as well. The Imagination is our ability to recreate images, or “phantasms”, that is, to bring into mind from our Memory images of things we’ve previously sensed, and to create new images from them. The Appetite is that faculty we have of desiring those things we sense: that chocolate cake, for example. These faculties we share with the animals: your dog or cat can sense and remember and imagine and desire. The can opener turns on; the cat senses it, remembers, imagines food, desires it, and runs into the kitchen.

The Intellect and the Will, on the other hand, derive not from our bodies but our souls. Men and women have rational souls that exceed the “sensitive” souls of the beasts by being immortal, and by having Intellect and Will.

Intellect is our power of understanding, of conceptualizing. Contemplate, for a moment, the smallest house in Paris in the year before you were born, to use an example I ran into the other day. That’s an extremely clear concept; and no matter what year you were born you can easily see that in the previous year there were many houses in Paris and some one of them must have been the smallest. And yet, although you can conceive of this house, you can’t form an accurate picture of it. In so conceiving, you are using your Intellect rather than your Imagination.

The Will is our power of choosing from among the various goods present to our Imagination and Intellect. Unlike the beasts, we need not pursue that which is desirable to our senses. We can choose. We can recognize that the chocolate cake is good, and that it would be better in the long run to leave it alone.

So, two spiritual powers: the Intellect and the Will. And so what does it mean to be “spiritual”?

To know what is good, and to act accordingly.

Part III

A Reviewer, or a Critic?

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For most of my time on-line I’ve been a reviewer of books. I greatly fear that I’m mutating into a critic.

These two jobs distinct and separate. A reviewer’s job is to tell you enough about the book so that you can decide for yourself whether or not you’d like to read it. As a reviewer, I try to talk about what kind of book it is; whether I enjoyed it or not (and if not, why not); and in general, whether it contains an interesting tale, well-told. These are fairly modest goals.

A critic, by contrast, is all about evaluating a book from some other point of view. And I find that when I come to review a book these days, I can’t help pondering the degree to which it is consistent with Catholic teaching. That phrase, “consistent with Catholic teaching,” covers a vast world of things, which I can’t do justice to in this short post; I hope to have some things to say about in the future. At present, I’ll simply say that I’m not talking about whether or not the book has explicitly Catholic themes, or whether or not the characters behave according to Catholic moral teaching; it’s more complicated than that.

And then, of course, if the book does say something explicit about the Catholic Church, I feel like I need to address it.

I can’t seem to help any of this; and I’m not at all sure it’s a bad thing. But after having worn a pretty smooth and comfortable groove in the area of writing book reviews, it’s unsettling. I hope the results will be no less useful.

What does it mean to be “Spiritual”?

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We’ve all heard people say, “I’m not religious but I’m spiritual,” or “So-and-so is a very spiritual person.”

I’ve been pondering what is meant by the word “spiritual” in this context. I’m not ready to share my ponderings quite yet, in part because I don’t want to assemble (in Lilek’s phrase) a “clone army of strawmen”. So I’m asking for a little help from my readers.

When you hear someone say that they are “spiritual”, what does that convey to you? And if you have ever said something like, “I’m not religious but I’m spiritual,” what did you mean by it?

I’m genuinely curious.

Part II

Freedom

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I was at the mall this weekend, and I saw a sweat jacket with these words:

“Freedom is the ability to do what I wish.”

And it occurred to me that although many people would define freedom this way, it isn’t so. Rather, freedom is the ability to do what I ought to do. This is a notion that causes most of us to recoil in horror. What I want to do and what I ought to do often seem all too firmly opposed. So let’s look at that.

First, what ought I to do? Per Aristotle, I ought to do that which will make me truly happy. I ought to pursue the Good, the True, and the Beautiful in all of their fullness, rather than chasing after the apparently good, the apparently true, and the apparently beautiful. Should I have a double-size hot-fudge sundae right before I go to bed tonight? Sounds good…but (in my case, at least) it’s not a good idea.

So what prevents me from pursuing the Good, the True, and the Beautiful, from doing what I ought? Two things: lack of knowledge, and concupiscence. First, I don’t know what I ought to do; and second, when I do know what I ought to do my sinful nature leads me astray. As a fallen man, I am manifestly not free to pursue my ultimate happiness.

In Christ, however, there is true freedom. For God is the summit of all that Good, True, and Beautiful, and Christ Jesus is God’s most perfect revelation of Himself to us. And in Christ, and through His sacrifice, I receive the grace to follow Him, to avoid sin, to grow in virtue, and, in short, to pursue the Good He shows me. And that is freedom.

Question of the Day

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There’s a question I need to start asking myself, when I’m reading a book or an article or a blog post or what have you:

What do I take away from this?

There are two good reasons I can see to read anything: to be entertained, and to be edified. All too often, especially when running down the posts in Google Reader, I find myself reading to fill time: I achieve neither. We’ve all done that, it’s a waste of time, and it’s not what I’m talking about.

When I read something that is worthwhile, what is that makes it more than simply filling time? Surely it must be because something about the work sticks with me. And yet, I can’t presume that just because I read a post/essay/chapter carefully, and understood what it was saying, that I will retain it. Perhaps I used to be able to, but they say that memory is the first thing to go.

Having read a worthwhile passage, and understood it, I need to stop, and reflect, and savor, and say, “What do I take away from this? What have I learned? What do I want to remember?” I need to do this, not simply when something strikes me, but as a conscious, explicit decision. Otherwise, while not necessarily wasting my time, I’m not making the best use of it. I’m like a man who sees a beautiful painting, recognizes that it’s a beautiful painting, and forgets it the moment he turns away. Choosing not to respond to the Good, the True, and the Beautiful deadens one’s ability to respond in the future.

Sometimes there will be nothing to take away, and that’s useful information as well. One can at least avoid the author/blog/subject in the future.

(But what about reading for pleasure: surely one can read simply for fun? Sure…but even there, there ought to be something to take away, if only the memory of the enjoyment and the desire to share it with others. And sometimes, there can be quite a bit more than that.)