MM#359--Foundations in Flourishing, pt6 - Three Theological Virtues

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Welcome to the Theory to Action podcast, where we examine the timeless treasures of wisdom from the great books in less time, to help you take action immediately and ultimately to create and lead a flourishing life.

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Now here's your host, david Kaiser flourishing life.

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Now here's your host, david Kaiser.

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Hello, I am David, and welcome back to another Mojo Minute and welcome back to another installment in our series and this is part five of the Foundations in Flourishing, where we are unpacking how to create a flourishing life for ourselves and our family and friends.

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And in our last Mojo Minute we talked about why the four cardinal virtues came about and how very smart people came before us and we can learn from them, because they wrote the great books to help us to understand how the world works.

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If you missed that episode, be sure to check it out.

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But today we're going to kick off our discussion again about this very thing called human nature, that it can be studied and learned from, and that human nature has these specific acts and habits that we routinely do and carry out and we call some of those acts, we call them, cardinal virtues.

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Now the four cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.

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But more importantly, today we're going to learn about the three theological virtues that are built upon those natural virtues, those cardinal virtues.

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Sometimes they're called natural because they are not of going towards the vertical, going towards God, but they are called cardinal, meaning that they are the hinges Cardes is the root word that they're coming from, meaning the hinge virtues.

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They are so paramount that they influence a lot of other virtues, so they are therefore called cardinal.

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Now, the theological virtues are sometimes called supernatural virtues, meaning above nature.

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Now, what are we talking about there?

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These are the three theological virtues are faith, hope and love, sometimes called charity.

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These virtues are considered theological because, like I said, they directly relate to God and are infused by God into the souls of the faithful.

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Now, faith is the theological virtue by which we believe in God and all that he has revealed to us.

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It allows us to see clearly and well, to see reality clearly and to understand life through the lens of God's truth.

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Faith has been described as the light for our feet that guides our path.

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Hope is a theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life, placing our trust in Christ and his promises.

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It helps us to rely not on our own strength but on the grace of God, and hope sustains us during difficult times and keeps us from discouragement.

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Now, charity, or love, is the theological virtue by which we love God above all things for his own sake, and we love our neighbor as ourselves for the love of God.

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This is considered the greatest of the theological virtues.

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Charity, or love, animates and inspires the practice of all the other virtues.

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Theological virtues are the foundation of Christian moral activity and it gives it a special character.

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They are infused by God in the souls of the faithful to make them capable of acting as his children and meriting eternal life.

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Now, regarding the relationship between the theological virtues and the other virtues, the four cardinal virtues, namely prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance, we talked about earlier and on the previous podcast.

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They're rooted in the theological virtues.

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The fruits of the Holy Spirit and the gifts of the Holy Spirit flow from these three main theological virtues, particularly from charity.

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Charity is seen as the superior of all the virtues and it binds them together in a perfect harmony.

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So how do we know these things?

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Well, st Paul mentions them in 1 Thessalonians 1, 3, and in 5, 8.

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But the most well-known reference is in 1 Corinthians 13, where Paul states so faith, hope and charity abide these three, but the greatest of these is charity.

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Now let's go back to our book of the day, back to Virtue, by Peter Kreef, to begin to understand these virtues a little bit deeper.

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And plus, I like Peter Kreef to begin to understand these virtues a little bit deeper, and plus, I like Peter Kreef's commentary on it.

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So let's go to that book to hear what he has to say about the three theological virtues.

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As St Paul argues in Romans, from the beginning faith was our justification with God, and he traces it back to Abraham in Romans 4.

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He could have traced it all the way back to Eden.

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The fall was first of all a fall of faith.

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First of all, eve believed the serpent when he told her she would not die if she ate the forbidden fruit, rather than believing God when he told her that she would.

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Only because of her lack of faith did she disobey.

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Faith, or its lack, is the root cause of obedience or disobedience.

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Disobedience, faithfulness or sin?

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Sin is faithfulness, faithlessness and infidelity.

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Faith is first, but what is it?

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Is it not mere belief or mere trust, though it includes both.

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Belief is an intellectual matter.

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I believe the sun will shine tomorrow.

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I believe I'm in good matter.

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I believe the sun will shine tomorrow.

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I believe I'm in good health.

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I believe the textbooks.

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Trust is an emotional matter.

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I trust my psychiatrist or my surgeon or my architect.

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Faith is more.

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It flows from the heart, the center of the person, the pre-functional root out of which both the intellectual and the emotional branches grow.

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Faith is the yea saying of the eye, the commitment of the person.

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The object of faith is God, not ideas about God.

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It is essential to know things about God, but it is more essential to know God.

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St Thomas Aquinas, that most rational, not the most rationalistic of theologians, insists the primary object of the act of faith is not a proposition but a reality God himself.

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Just as the object of moral fidelity is not the law but the law giver, law being a description of fidelity, so the object of faith is not the truths about God but the God who is truth.

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The creedal truths about him are a description of faith, a defining, a statement of its structure.

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The creeds are like accounting books.

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God is like the actual money.

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Later on we read Faith is more active than reason.

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Faith runs ahead of reason.

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Reason reports like a camera.

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Faith takes a stand like an army.

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Faith is saying yes to God's marriage proposal.

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Faith is extremely simple.

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Saying anything more would probably confuse it.

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Most of what is written about faith is needlessly complex.

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Most of what is written about faith is needlessly complex.

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The word yes is the simplest word there is.

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So faith is the first thing, it's our yes to God.

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It's not an intellectual assent, it is in fact not even a rational or a reason-based assent.

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It is faith first, then understanding, where for some thousand years the operative slogan throughout Christendom was faith seeking understanding.

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That glimmer of faith was there to take that step, that ascent, that yes to God.

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Then understanding came.

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For the Jewish people it was to follow Moses to the promised land.

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For the Christians it was the God-made man saying follow me.

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First the step of faith, then yes to wanting to understand.

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I've always liked what Fulton Sheen, the great bishop, catholic bishop, said about faith in his wonderful book that we quote from often from this microphone Life of Christ.

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Let's go to that book for a quick quote on faith.

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The first of the three contacts which our Lord had with pagans, and therefore with the foreign missions, was with the Roman centurion, the second with the daughter of the Syro-Phoenician woman and the third with the young man possessed of a devil in the land of the Generations.

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There were many elements common to all three miracles.

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The first two miracles were performed at a distance.

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Probably the centurion was a member of the Roman garrison stationed at Capernaum.

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By birth, therefore, he must have been a heathen.

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It is very likely that he, like the centurion Cornelius whom Peter baptized, and like the eunuch in the court of the Queen of Ethiopia, had become, at least sentimentally, attached to the worship of Yahweh.

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This Roman official had been in the country long enough to know that there was a strong wall of partition between the Jew and Gentile.

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This explains the fact that when his servant lay sick, even to the point of death, he did not directly approach our blessed Lord but said sent some Jewish elders with the request that he would come and save his servant's life Luke 7.3.

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Our blessed Lord must have shown some reluctance to work this miracle, because Luke says that those who interceded pressed their petition earnestly Luke 7.4.

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While our Lord was on his way to the servant, the centurion sent word to him through messengers not to trouble himself.

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It is not for me to have you under my roof.

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Luke 7.7.

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St Augustine would later say of this, counting himself unworthy that Christ should enter under, should enter into his doors.

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He was counted worthy that Christ should enter into his heart.

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The pagan centurion compared our blessed Lord's power to his own authority over his soldiers.

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He himself was a sergeant with a hundred men under him who did his bidding, but the Lord was the true Caesar or King, the supreme commander of the highest hierarchy with angels, to obey his orders.

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Surely then he would not have to enter the house to perform the miracle.

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The pagan suggested that he should give an order from where he was.

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The miracle was performed, as the centurion requested, at a distance.

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Reflecting on the faith of this pagan and anticipating the faith that would come from foreign missions, which he contrasted with his present home mission, our blessed Lord said I tell you, nowhere, even in Israel, have I found faith like this.

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Luke 7.10.

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This first pagan, who received such praise from our divine Lord for his faith, was one of those chosen, was one of those children of God scattered abroad in the world who were eventually to be brought into unity through the redemption.

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Now, what about hope, our second theological virtue?

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What do we have to say about that?

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Let's go back to Peter Kreeft and back to virtue for that explanation.

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Hope is the forgotten virtue in our time, for hope means hope for heaven and modernity's nose to the grindstone, this worldliness dares not lift its eyes to the open skies.

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Hope means that our heads do not bump up against the low ceiling of this world.

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Hope means that the exhilarating, wonderful and terrifying winds of heaven blow in our ears.

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More concretely, hope is faith directed to the future.

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God is the object of hope, just as God is the object of faith.

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Just as God's revelation, summarized in the church's creeds, defines or expresses the structure of faith, so God's revelation in the form of his many promises there are over 300 different promises in scripture defines and expresses the form of his many promises.

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There are over 300 different promises in Scripture defines and expresses the structure of hope.

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Neither faith nor hope is a vague, inchoate, subjective sentiment.

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Both are definitive responses, affirmative responses to God's initiative, god's revelation, god's very definite, specific and verbal word to us.

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It is not just I believe, but I believe God, the God revealed in Scripture, the God revealed in Christ.

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It is not just I hope, but I hope in God, the God revealed in Scripture.

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I hope for all the promises God has given us.

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I hope has been terribly trivialized today, just as I believe.

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I believe often means merely I'm of the opinion of, or I hope often means merely I wish or I would like it.

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If, however, christian hope is certain and sure in the certain hope of the resurrection.

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God's promises will come true.

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There is no if and or but about it, for God is truth itself.

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God said it, I believe it, and that settles it.

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The scriptural notion of truth is not an abstract, static, timeless formula, but is something that comes true in time as the fulfillment of a divine promise.

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Truth happens in history.

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How dramatic, how dramatic indeed.

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But I love how Kreeft frames this notion of hope.

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He connects the dots for us when he writes this.

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Let's go back there, however.

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Christian hope is certain.

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He italicizes the words In the sure and certain hope of the resurrection.

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God's promises will come true.

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There is no if and or but about it, for God is truth itself.

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God is truth itself.

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He cannot contradict himself.

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What a wonderful nugget of theological wisdom there.

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It's a wonderful connecting of the dots for us.

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And lastly, let us turn to love or charity.

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Let's go back to the book.

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And now comes the greatest thing in the world love.

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Agape is what is meant, of course, that new, specific, radical kind of love that the world simply is not seen before Christ, not natural, human love.

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Agape is not storge affection, the love mothers naturally have for babies, that pen owners have for pets that natives have for their native land.

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It is not liking.

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Also, it is not eros or desire, sexual or otherwise, for that proceeds from the need and from emptiness, while agape proceeds from fullness.

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It is not even philiae, friendship, the highest of the human loves, the love praised by the ancients and forgotten by the moderns.

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No, agape is the love that created the universe and sent Christ down to suffer hell on the cross to save us rebels.

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The love that kissed the traitor Judas, suffered the soldier's slaps and sneers and prayed Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.

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Was that love ever seen before Christ?

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Could that love ever be confused with ordinary, humanly attainable, natural loves?

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It is true, as the Beatles said, that all you need is love.

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But this leaves two crucial questions unanswered what kind of love?

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And, even more important, how do you get it?

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What kind of love?

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And, even more important, how do you get it?

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Again, peter Kreef shows us in his writing how good this is framed and structured in terms of the three theological virtues.

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There's no better book that I've come across to give us this depth, this width of talking about the three theological virtues.

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Now, this next quote is quite long, but I think it is warranted.

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After all, love is the highest and most ideal of anything and everything in this world.

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God is love and love is God.

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Let's go back to the book.

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We need grace, we need God, we need to be loved despite our sin.

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This is infinitely more than what secular psychology says, that we need human positive strokes, that we are okay.

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We are not okay and we know it even as we repeat for the millionth time the most attractive lie the devil has ever hooked us on, that sin is superstition, that we are intrinsically good.

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Modernized Christianity, in its desperate attempt to be accepted by the world, compromises its bad news of sin and thus trivializes its good news of salvation.

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This modernized Christianity will never get what it wants the world's acceptance.

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Even as it taunts us for our puritanism, it envies us for telling the truth that it knows deep down inside it has covered up.

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The patient likes to be told by the nice doctor that there's nothing seriously wrong, but the patient knows all nice doctor that there's nothing seriously wrong.

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But the patient knows all the time that both are fooling themselves.

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Dying people in America are usually told they're going to be just fine and they play along to spare the family the grief and honesty it cannot endure, thus plunging both into a conspiracy of lies.

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The same is true with regard to the greater illness of the spirit.

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When we indulge in the conspiracy of lies that everything is going to be all right, that's the song the people sing as they march to hell.

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We need God's love, not just man's.

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Man's love is fickle.

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Half of our marriages are lies and betrayals, with promises, broken pledges, pledged fidelity scorned, sacred vows sacrificed on the altar of the God of I gotta be me.

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Family bonds break Nevertheless, even when my mother and my father forsake me that then the Lord will take care of me.

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Psalms 27 10.

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Agape must be supernatural because only God has no needs.

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Human love is not enough because it is always mixed, always flowing partly from need and from emptiness.

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We cannot build on a foundation that has holes.

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We cannot build on emptiness, and we are emptiness, we are need.

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We are like a little child crying in the night man.

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That is good writing.

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I mean that is nailing the head of that nail.

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That's nailing.

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You're just hammering the head of that nail.

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That's nailing.

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You're just hammering the head of that nail.

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I mean like one after the other, after the other after the other.

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So what is this agape love?

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Where do we find it?

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Let's go back to the book for that answer.

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If you want to know what agape is, look at Christ dying for us on the cross.

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That is the best definition of the love in the world.

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St Bernard of Clairvaux said that whenever he looked at the crucifix he saw Christ's five wounds, his lips, speaking to him the words I love you.

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Agape is not mere pity, mere compassion.

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We hear a lot about compassion today, but compassion is not enough.

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A Hindu or a Buddhist practices compassion, karuna, but he leaves the dying in the street to fulfill his karma.

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He does not want to interfere with karma, he does not want to be a busybody.

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Agape is a busybody.

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It's active, demanding, revolutionary.

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It is not a feeling, it is an action, for it is the nature of God who is action, not feeling.

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Feelings are passivities, passions pushed around by the wind, weather, digestion, heredity, environment or whatever.

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God cannot be pushed around.

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God has no passions.

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God is infinite activity.

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His love is like the sun, like a billion burning suns.

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The three theological virtues are a single plant.

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Faith is its root, hope is its stalk, it's life thrust.

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Love is its root, hope is its stalk, it's life thrust, love is its fruit.

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The plant is God's own life in us.

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This is the only thing necessary.

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Life offers us only one failure To miss this, to miss God.

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Faith, hope and charity are the hands that receive God.

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This life, god, this God, life in us is most perfectly described by Jesus in the Beatitudes.

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Wow, such great writing.

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I hope you found that writing as good, as reflective, as meditative as I did, especially about that three-fold word picture of the three theological virtues as a single plant.

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Faith is the root, hope is its stock, its life thrust and love is its fruit.

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What a word picture.

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Now we will talk about the Beatitudes on a later podcast, because they do indeed amount to what many have called the greatest sermon to have ever been preached.

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But for today, today, let us stop and contemplate and meditate on the three theological virtues faith, hope and love.

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In today's Mojo Minute, let us do just that meditate and contemplate those three theological virtues, building on our knowledge of the virtuous life.

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Those cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.

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Those cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance.

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We know those are good, but we know those are the only the basics.

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They don't give us the completeness, the fullness of a flourishing life.

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The cardinal virtues don't give us that fullness of a flourishing life.

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They don't get us to eternal life.

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They fall short.

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The three theological virtues do get us to heaven if practiced.

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We read in the good book, he causes his son to rise on the evil and the good and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.

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So we know that we, as fallen creatures, we need the theological virtues of faith, hope and love.

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And that is all the more reason to study and say yes, every day, every moment, to these virtues.

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So for today, let us dive deep to ask for those, repeatedly ask for those, and in the asking it is called prayer, and in prayer it is the first act of love, it's the response of the movement of God in the heart, your heart and my heart.

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As the great Christian and Catholic bishop, apologist and speaker Fulton Sheen once said about prayer prayer is not getting something, Prayer is becoming something.

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Oh how true.

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And prayer will be our next topic to tackle.

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And as we conclude, let's keep fighting the good fight.

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Talk soon.

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Thank you for joining us.

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We hope you enjoyed this Theory to Action podcast.

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Be sure to check out our show page at teammojoacademycom, where we have everything we discussed in this podcast, as well as other great resources.

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Until next time, keep getting your mojo on.

MM#359--Foundations in Flourishing, pt6 - Three Theological Virtues

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