Virtue as a Natural State

February 3, 2006

Courtesy of a generous answer to a question of ours at the echt-theological blog Pontifications, we found this in a paper on St. Maximus by Daniel Jones at a scholarly Orthodox blog.

[quoting] Maximus [quoting Maximus]: Asceticism, and the toils that go with it, was devised simply in order to ward off deception, which established itself through sensory perception. It is not [as if] the virtues have been newly introduced from outside, for they inhere in us from creation, as hath already been said. Therefore, when deception is completely expelled, the soul immediately exhibits the splendor of its natural virtue.

That is, virtue remains our natural state, although our access to it and our identification with it are confused and darkened by sensory illusions plus the voice-over of the agendas of our darkened reason; but virtue is not foreign to us. We have an intuition of its beauty. As Aristotle said somewhere, "Beauty is a kind of motion of the soul, and a settling, sudden and sensible, into our proper nature."  We were made to align with virtue, hand-and-glove, happily, easily, naturally.

And finding ourselves positioned to do that just may take a bit of attention, habituation, effort, apparent sacrifice.

In other words, in the terms of my question, Mr. First Adam, inchoate, fully-developed but still an infant as to Life on a Planet, was offered without impediments the opportunity to do well, to refrain from that which was forbidden, to tend to that which was indicated. He was offered the necessary first step toward a manifest habit of virtue.

But...

[GONG!]

Poor Adam and Eve. Poor mankind.

Rich remedy.