When the Internet fails

The practice of the virtues, and the help of the Virtues, will lead us from temptation into greater freedom.

We are far more dependent upon technology than we care to admit. Yesterday our home was without internet. We have several projects underway against water intrusion and its effects in the home we bought last year. As fall is in the air, already, we are feeling an urgency to get these projects wrapped up soon so that we can settle in, and, when need be, hunker down.

Internet in the mountains can be spotty. Even with routers and extenders and all sorts of doodads provided by a top-notch local company, internet wires could not withstand all the banging and hammering of a floor installation team. And that’s the way it goes: “internet,” “wireless,” “wifi,” even radio and television sooner or later really upon the appurtenances of physical reality to function. So there it is: technology does not give us freedom from the limits of physical reality, it just gives the illusion that it does. That’s the essence of magic. Magic is an illusion. It is deception meant to delight as it separates you from your money, or, better, from your power. That makes magic, and the technology we currently use, an invitation into powerlessness under the guise of exercise of power. Does technology necessarily bring us into powerlessness? It does not: but it will, unless we are in control of it.

So much of the modern understanding of freedom is rooted in an error, the notion that freedom means freedom from restraint. That is sort of an adolescent view, isn’t it? The man-child or woman-child eager to stretch wings and taste all that life offers grows restive against parental restraint, increasingly unwilling to accept the limitations of childhood that parents want to leave in place or withdraw at a far slower pace than the adolescent is willing to accept. Perhaps the unwillingness is at least partially rooted in parental sadness at “seeing my baby grow up.” This happens much more frequently than parents care to admit. It is also, and more largely, rooted in the understanding that the world with all its delights is a dangerous place, and unless one is willing and able to navigate the dangers, the pursuit of delights, of “that which pleases me,” will lead to wreckage recovery from which will be far harder and take far longer than the pleasure-seeker can see or acknowledge. We are meant to enjoy and even make use of beauty and all the other good things of life, but within limits, limits the recognition of which is hard-won.

We are constantly being pushed to push our limits. Here again, there is a yes-and-no quality to that. We are all capable of far more than we think — for good or for ill. We can and should seek to grow not just in technical capacities which are necessary for the provision of the means we need for living. We should endeavor to grow in the virtues, those habitual capacities that enable us to live well, which is to live humanly by living humanely. In our technological, technocratic age, too often growth in virtues is placed at the service of growth in technical capacity, as though the goal were to be virtuous so as to be the more technically proficient and therefore “successful.” This has it exactly backwards. By making the virtues means to lesser ends, we vitiate them and turn ourselves into monsters. The tools are at our service; we are not at the service of the tools. When we push ourselves to be and to have “more” in response to the demands of those who seek to make us more useful for them, we do not grow in freedom: we render ourselves slaves, even if well-paid and well-entertained.

Prudence is the virtue that comes to mind: that virtue which allows us to perceive reality as it is and then to act in accord with reality and its demands. Only when we do so are we free. Reality proposes possibilities, but it also imposes restraints. Seeking those possibilities within those restraints is the way we grow in virtue, and also the way we grow in freedom. As we live this way, we become freer to become who we really are, who we are meant to be. 

Prudence is called the mother of the virtues, as a proper recognition of reality leads us to understand that we must give to others what is their due, we must be brave, but not foolhardy, when bravery is required to attain the arduous good, and we must be temperate, using neither too much nor too little of the means at our disposal to secure the goods we seek. Prudence also calls us to ask for the assistance of others that we need in order to live as we ought, without annoying them by shirking from asking them for help, or by not asking forthrightly, or else overburdening them by asking them to do for us what we can do for ourselves.

While prudence is the mother of virtues, she is not the greatest of virtues. Look at 1 Corinthians 13. The virtues listed at the end of the chapter are not prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, but rather faith, hope, and love. These are supernatural virtues that we really need in order to perfect the moral virtues; “and the greatest of these is love.” Love alone allows us to see both the best that a person and situation can be and that person and situation as they currently really are; only love shows us the path from what is to what should be, the traversing of which path is freedom. The supernatural virtues are gifts; while there is natural faith, natural hope, and natural love, they are frustrated when they are limited by the constraints our wounded nature imposes upon them. The supernatural virtues perfect the natural virtues, just as grace perfects nature. The practice and enjoyment of all the virtues lead to a happy, fulfilled life, which Aristotle tells us, rightly, is what all humans desire. Love, divinely infused love, is the source and summit of the virtues. The echo of this truth is that the greatest things we do, we do for love.

Consider Tobit’s burial of the dead. He did so in accord with the demands of prudence: it is right to bury the dead. They are, after all, worthy of the respect, and respect for those who precede us is respect for ourselves. More importantly, the burials show love of God and neighbor, as burial of the dead is a commandment, and to fulfill the commands is to love, whether the fulfillment is easy or not. Nevertheless, his neighbors think him imprudent, because he is risking his life by fulfilling the command. Exhausted from his endeavors, he sleeps in the open at night in such a way that blindness is the result. It would seem that though he loved, he was highly imprudent in the way that he did. I would suggest that though he was blinded, he was the one who really saw things as they are and acted in accordance with reality’s demand, even though it cost him much. He was heroic; and the heroic man or woman is the truly virtuous one.

We shrink away from the heroic, because technology and advertisement have brainwashed us to believe that life is supposed to be easy and convenient so that we may the more easily enjoy its good things. Confusion enters when we conflate “good” with “pleasurable.” Some good things are pleasurable, and some pleasurable things are good: but not always. We make the mistake at our peril. Today’s Gospel, from Matthew, has Jesus telling the disciples of the great difficulty of entering the Kingdom of Heaven. It is not simply a one-and-done acceptance of an offer, or regular reception of Holy Communion and then off you go to do whatever you want because you can always be forgiven. Entrance into heaven requires us to give up everything and to accept the hardship that such surrender entails, in order that we may inherit eternal life and all that such life entails. The path to salvation is the path of delayed gratification par excellence. It is also the path of freedom, for it entails giving up all that ensnares and deceives us by delighting us: we give up delights so that we may be free, and the giving up of them is the act of freedom.

We do not walk this path or make this act alone. As the Lord accompanied the Israelites in their journey to freedom in the Cloud by day and the Pillar of Fire by night, so we have his accompaniment in the Blessed Sacrament, which is both food for the journey and Real Presence in the Tabernacle. We also have the assistance of the holy angels. The Chaplet of St. Michael teaches us that the choir of Powers will protect us against the snares and the temptations of the Devil — the temptations to ease, to rest, and to knowledge we think will help that instead ensnare us in sin, sadness, and frustration. The Chaplet also teaches that through the intercession of the choir of Virtues, the Lord will deliver us from evil.

Stop and think for a moment that in order to help us grow in the acquisition and exercise of virtue, the Lord has assigned an entire choir of Virtues to assist us. Appeal to this Choir will readily help us in our usage of technology and all else that can and does ensnare us; appeal to the Powers will help us see the snares and temptations and then to avoid them. The acid test for knowing whether this is true is to call upon them and see what happens. You should experience an increase in your powers of discernment, and greater ease in turning away from evil in order to do good, which in the end is the only ease that really matters.

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