If you’re in Washington, D.C. and you want to get to New York under your own power,
how would you go? You could walk or jog, of course, but would be even faster if
you went by bicycle – assuming that you’ve developed the habitual skill of riding a bike.
Natural or acquired virtues, like justice and courage, are a bit like this.
We develop them by repeated action – by practice – and they become stable
dispositions that help us make progress towards the goal of human excellence.
Now suppose that you want to go to the moon.
To get there on your own power is simply impossible. In fact, not even a train
or an airplane would help. No earth-bound vehicle can get you there. You need something
vastly beyond yourself to propel you beyond earth’s atmosphere and escape earth’s gravity.
St. Thomas Aquinas thinks the theological virtues are even more powerful than that – they are
stable powers of the soul infused into us by God himself that raise us up beyond this natural world
and empower us to penetrate into the heavens – indeed,
to live the beginnings of the supernatural life of heaven, here and now.
We read in Sacred Scripture about three theological virtues – faith,
hope, and love. St. Paul’s letters are especially eloquent about them. He wrote to
the early Christian communities in cities like Corinth and Rome, in order to hand on to them
the divine revelation made in and through Jesus Christ:
that being a disciple of Jesus means living according to the virtues of faith, hope, and love.
If it weren’t for this divine revelation, which began in the Old Testament and reaches
its culmination in Christ, we wouldn’t know about the promises of heaven, or about the supernatural
virtues that we need in order to live the kind of supernatural life that will take us there.
Reflecting on this, St. Thomas teaches that there are two kinds or levels of happiness that we can
reach. The first is on the natural level – a happiness that a human being can obtain,
at least in theory, by his own natural powers, by practicing the natural virtues.
It’s a bit like an athlete who grows in skill and endurance by repeated training and practice,
so that he can reach his goal of completing a difficult race with excellence. Similarly,
the natural virtues (like the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and courage)
can be acquired by repeated good human actions, and make the human being into the kind of person
who is just, prudent, temperate, and courageous – and thus someone who can
reach the goal of living a flourishing and happy life on the natural level.
But the happiness of heaven, of eternal life with God, is something vastly higher than
this natural happiness. Jesus teaches us that, by being configured to him, we become
adopted sons and daughters of God, sharing in the divine nature. Our own natural powers
are not sufficient to raise us up to this, and no amount of human training or moral effort will
get us there without the help of God’s grace. We still need the cardinal virtues, of course,
but we also need something more – something that directs us to and makes us capable of living a
supernatural life, of attaining to supernatural happiness, which is to be united to God himself.
This is why the theological virtues are so important. According to Aquinas, there are three
reasons they are called “theological virtues” – based on the Greek word for God, “theos.”
First, their object is God himself, and they direct us to God. Second,
we cannot obtain the theological virtues by our natural powers – they must be directly infused in us by God himself.
And third, we only know about the theological virtues because God has revealed them to us in Sacred Scripture.
Understanding the theological virtues helps us to avoid two major errors about the Christian life.
The first error is to think that we can somehow get to heaven by our own natural powers,
or that the life of heaven will be like a life of earthly happiness.
St. Thomas Aquinas is very clear that this is a very big mistake.
It is a bit like thinking that you could fly to the stars by flapping your arms.
It seriously misunderstands that the life of God is infinitely above us. Jesus promises us a share
in this divine life, which we can only obtain through the gift of his grace. It is totally
out of proportion to our human nature. We do not deserve it, and we cannot reach it on our own.
The second error is to think that, because it is given to us as a gift, therefore it is a
kind of prize bestowed on us after we die, totally unrelated to how we lived our lives in this world.
But that is not what Jesus taught, either. In fact,
God bestows the beginnings of eternal life on us even as we live in this world. By his grace,
he infuses his divine life into our souls, he configures our minds and our hearts to Christ,
and empowers us to live as his disciples here and now. That is why St. Paul teaches
that Christians live no longer as men and women of earth, but as citizens of heaven, according to
the power of Christ’s resurrection, which makes us die to sin and alive to God through faith,
hope, and love. In short, we are supposed to live our lives as Christians in this world
according to the theological virtues, which really do elevate and transform our lives from the inside
out. The theological virtues are in a sense the very substance of the Christian life. Growing in
them in our daily actions is the measure of our growth in holiness as disciples of Christ.
The theological virtues each perfect a different aspect of what is highest in the human being:
our capacities of knowing and of loving, or what Aquinas calls our powers of intellect and of
will. We’ll have more to say about this in future videos. For now, we can say briefly that the
virtue of faith perfects our intellect. By the light of natural reason, we are able to know and
understand the things we encounter in this world. Faith bestows a new and higher light on our minds,
so that we are able to judge rightly about divine things, and above all, so that we believe what
God has revealed to us in Christ. Faith thus allows us to attain to the truth about God,
and makes us adhere to him as we believe what he tells us. In fact, Aquinas says that faith
makes us like the divine Son who proceeds from the Father by way of intellect, as the Father's Word.
The virtue of hope also has God as its object and makes us adhere to God,
but it is not about our intellect grasping the truth. Rather, hope elevates our will, so that
we place all our trust in God’s help, since he is perfectly good and the source of all goodness.
By hope, we dare to reach for God himself, and we hope to obtain this happiness from God alone.
We rely entirely on him, and place our lives and our futures completely in his hands.
Finally, the virtue of love or of charity purifies and raises up our will, so that it
ceases to love the things of this world as final ends, and begins to love God for his own sake and
above all things. This supernatural virtue of love makes us like the Holy Spirit who proceeds
from the Father and the Son as their mutual love. This virtue, above all others, reorders
all of the priorities of the Christian’s life, all of the Christian's loves, even here and now in this world.
If we act by this charity, then everything we do as Christians should point us back to God.
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