Making habits of love

The philosopher John Stuart Mill argued 150 years ago in On Liberty that “the human faculties of perception, judgment, discriminative feeling, mental activity, and even moral preference, are exercised only in making a choice. The mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used. He who lets the world, or his own portion of it, choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.”

In short, it is through freely choosing—through acting freely—that we exercise perception and judgment, and become truly moral and morally responsible beings.

Mill was not necessarily concerned with the wisdom of God coming to assist our judgment, what is called phronesis. Phronesis is the mind of the man working with the assistance of God’s eternal wisdom. In fact the Bible refers to phronesis as the wisdom God granted Solomon.

Phronesis promotes the habits of love which are acquired in solitude but have to be practised/tested in community with others.

This is what Ecclesia and other faith-building programmes in the Southern African Church are trying to teach us: to live our faith not only privately, but also in communion with others, starting with our biological family and extending to our spiritual family, which is the Church and the world at large.

Habits of love teach us not to hate even those who hate us; and not to be dishonest, especially about our intentions. Sometimes people use truth to be dishonest. This is a very insincere way of lying. Phronesis, because it is informed by the spirit of discretion, teaches us not to use even truth, or what is termed “frankness”, to be dishonest.

Those familiar with the concept of bad faith will know that it is not necessarily wilful deception. Bad faith is when people, under social or peer pressure, adopt the values and attitudes of the moment, and in the process disregard their own intuition. Hence it is when we disregard phronesis—the inner wisdom of the conscience—that we commit sins and grieve the Holy Spirit.

Habits of love teach us not to be intolerant to others’ shortcoming, for as St Peter’s letter teaches us: Love hides a multitude of sins. This is what sometimes is referred to as “having a heart in the right place”. Habits of love put our hearts in a right place, teaching us not to seek gain in charity, not to impose our attitude (life belief) by always insisting on our own way.

Ecclesia is about teaching us how to live our faith to its fullest potential, and avoiding the temptations of embracing what historian Christopher Lasch called a Culture of Narcissism, the retreat to purely personal preoccupations, most involving the maintenance of self-centredness. “The contemporary climate is therapeutic, not religious.”

Lasch (1932–94) describes a typical person of our age as someone who “depends on others to validate his self-esteem” and who “cannot live without an admiring audience”. In the narcissist’s world, he argues, confession and self-absorption become “the moral climate”. And being authentic is to be outdated or out of sync with the times.

To those imbued with the wisdom of phronesis, putting on the mentality of Christ is the gate to the power and wisdom of God. It is learning what real authenticity is and how to be truly in communion with others in a life of self-giving friendship, which is a life of concern for their and our flourishing through growth in the virtues of love.

Obviously the habits of love can be maintained only by grace, a life in which God shares his friendship with us.

As Aquinas put it, in this way the charity we have been given becomes the form of all our virtues, and our whole life becomes a sharing in divinity.