By Joseph R. Wood
This is the week in which we contemplate, more than any other week, how much we are loved.
This is the week in which the words of the Gospel of John, that we are «given power to become children of God,» reach their fullness.
This is the week in which we are given back the possibility of having a great soul.
God is love, affirms Saint John. At the Last Supper, Christ repeatedly tells us to love him by knowing his commandments and keeping them. Such is the person who «loves me, and he who loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and manifest myself to him… This is my commandment: that you love one another as I have loved you.»
That emphatic call to love as Christ prepares to suffer follows his teaching after his entry into Jerusalem. When asked what the greatest commandment is, He replies: «You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like this: You shall love your neighbor as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.»
Christ has come to fulfill the law in every one of its details, the law that is love.
Of the three theological virtues that must be given to us by grace—faith, hope, and love—Saint Paul tells us that love is the greatest.
If God is love, and the fundamental commandments are love of God and of others, then every sin must be a failure to love well, a love that is absent or misdirected that withers our soul.
The crucified Christ saw every sinner in all of history, and became every sin, every failure of all time to love our neighbor properly—acts of theft, murder, adultery, lies, injustice against parents—and every failure to love God as we were created to love him.
All those failures derive from original sin that divided the divine and supernatural from the human and natural, separating our logos or human reason from the Logos itself.
After that catastrophe, but without divine revelation, philosophers reasoned about what an excellent human life would entail. Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle identified the excellences of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
These habits allow a good life in human or natural terms, and are the result of a rightly ordered reason. Failures in these virtues derive from failures of reason or prudence, failures either by not knowing reality or by not acting in accordance with it. Prudence, writes Josef Pieper, is the mother and guide of the other three virtues. Without prudence, a person cannot be just, nor brave, nor moderate.
Aristotle also described the virtue of magnanimity, or greatness of soul. The magnanimous man is dissatisfied with modest achievements. He is not concerned with money, but especially with «matters of honor and dishonor.» He desires the highest honors his community can offer, because he deserves them rightly by his great deeds.
He knows that he is made to be great.
Philosophers have wondered what Aristotle meant, or if he was serious, or even if he really wrote those passages. And Aristotle himself is perplexed. «For we reproach the ambitious person, on the grounds that he aspires to obtain more than he ought.» We consider some people excessively ambitious when they seek honors greater than their souls deserve. «We reproach the person lacking in ambition, on the grounds that he chooses not to be honored [even] for what is noble.» He annuls himself wrongly.
However, «sometimes we praise the ambitious person for being manly and a lover of the noble, and we praise the unambitious person as measured and moderate.» Aristotle seems to conclude that our discourse and opinion on ambition are confused. We must desire great things in proportion to the greatness of our souls, but we fail to make our praises and reproaches about this greatness coherent and clear.
My pastor, Fr. Paul Scalia, recently preached on «holy ambition,» two words whose association we might find as confusing as it would be to Aristotle. He was referring, I believe, to the fact that we are supposed to be ambitious for a true greatness of soul.
The person of truly great soul, Aristotle says, «would be the best… and worthy of the greatest things. He… must be good, and what is great in each virtue would seem to belong to the great-souled man.» The magnanimous man possesses all the human excellences of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. But that is not enough for holy ambition.
The confusion about ambition is resolved this week, when the supernatural and natural virtues—divine love and human prudence understood by reason—are reconciled as God and man. That only happens with an act of love, an act of a love so great that only God could perform it.
Josef Pieper writes that Christianity clarifies the «preeminence of charity over prudence… It is an unfathomable event in any natural way… All our works are elevated by charity to a plane that would otherwise be unattainable and totally inaccessible.» So we might forgive Aristotle his confusion.
Christ’s suffering opens the way for us to exercise our power to become children of God, through love. His suffering makes it conceivable that we live on that higher plane, that we live, as Saint Charles de Foucauld says, «only in the thought of God’s love… in the heights.» Living the hopes of the Beatitudes, where humility is the key to greatness.
This is the week for greatness of soul, for our deification (theosis) of which the Eastern churches speak, to be as divine as we are destined to be. A time, as Saint John Henry Newman says about the nobility of our faith, to have a heart that dares something.
Holy Week is the week of holy and high ambition.
About the author
Joseph Wood is an affiliated assistant professor in the School of Philosophy at The Catholic University of America. He is a pilgrim philosopher and an accessible hermit.