There is nothing new under the sun, including experts. No ancient court would have been complete without an astrologer on hand to predict next year’s grain harvest or the outcome of a military campaign. Experts have been loitering in the wings since antiquity, but in our time they have increased both in number and apparent authority, not always for the better. Before March 2020, experts could be kept at bay. Now we cannot step out our front door without consulting the experts about masks, travel from home, borders, and what “essentializes” one occupation over another. Experts, Sheldon Vanauken once observed, despite their assured tones, rarely agree with one another. As a result, increasingly we do not trust any of them.
Contrast the expert with the wise man. Wise men (and women) are in short supply these days, drowned out by the pronouncements of experts and relegated to the archives by the insecurity of our times. “To be wise,” Vanauken writes, “is to be discerning between the false and the true, to be balanced in judgement, to be, in fact, very sane.” The wise man serves as a guide amongst the experts and transcends the limits his age. We ponder wisdom, not expertise. As Christians, we understand the difference: the expert supplies limited solutions for particular circumstances, but the wise man reaches beyond the constraints of the present. The wise man’s answers are infused with faith, hope and charity.
Ubrian painter 1500 Italy
St. Thomas Aquinas teaches that the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity are stable powers of the soul infused into us by God. The theological virtues raise us beyond this world and enable us to live the beginnings of the supernatural life, even as we make our way through the vicissitudes of life on earth.
The cardinal or moral virtues: prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, also contribute to our flourishing here on earth. We need them to live a happy, ordered life. St. Thomas reminds us that the grace we receive in baptism equips us for more than a happy, ordered earthly life. We are made for much more! Grace is the beginning of glory within us, which means that the rational end of this gratuitous grace is union with God in this life and in the life to come. At the moment of our baptism, the beginnings of eternal life are infused into our soul along with the theological virtues which direct our mind and heart to their end, which is God. A deep and clear understanding of the theological virtues helps us to avoid the mistaken, oft repeated error in the Church’s history that somehow we get to heaven by our own natural powers. Curiously, even a life of piety can become disconnected from its supernatural end if our devotion is not securely anchored in God alone.
The theological virtues transform our lives from within and continually point us back to God. In our desire to follow the path of holiness we naturally have questions for God. Why did this happen that way? What is your will in this moment? But if we search the Gospels, we find that God has questions for us, too: Who do people say that I am? Do you believe that I can do this? What do you want me to do for you?
The questions Jesus asks of his disciples, and of us, confront us with the central question of whether we have more faith, hope and love for God than for ourselves. Matters of moral observation the Lord saves for the Pharisees and Sadducees, experts whose words and actions reveal an atrophied relationship with God that is evidenced in the stone-cold sepulchres of generational blindness, misuse, and abuse. For the publican, the widower, the prostitute, the tepid disciple, the rich young man and even the tax collector, Jesus wants to know: do you have faith? Do you have hope? Do you have charity in your heart? Are these stable in you?
As Dante ascends through the celestial realms of heaven in the Paradiso, he stops but does not remain in the sphere of the cardinal virtues. He presses forward to the fixed stars of the theological virtues, a stable state that lies just beyond the cardinal virtues. In our earthly life, we have to exercise the cardinal virtues. We must be just and temperate. We should exercise prudence and fortitude. But in our desire for holiness, we can easily settle for the middle tier of self-improvement that is slightly better than the status quo.
Do not the pharisees do as much? Faith, hope and charity inform the cardinal virtues and prevent them from disintegrating into a sugary narcissism. The theological virtues focus our gaze on the end which is God. They remind us that we are made for more.
~ Sr Mary Sarah Galbraith OP
Sr Mary Sarah is a Dominican Sister of St Cecelia in Nashville. She currently lives in the community in Bacchus Marsh, Victoria.