Aristotle's Silence on Piety?

Sarah Brodie has a paper on this ("Aristotelian Piety," Phronesis, 2003). Here three closing considerations correspond roughly to three of my four hypotheses.https://t.co/YSDc7nOoTK pic.twitter.com/BvLKyzx5GQ

— Josh Hochschild (@JoshHochschild) April 15, 2021

"Conservatism"

Gratitude is a central virtue for the noble life in general. It is time to stop talking about "conservatism"; others have already been talking about virtue ethics and the natural law, and the label "conservative" no longer means anything.

"Conservatism is built on gratitude. The conservative prioritizes the wisdom of tradition. He understands that he does not know more than the wealth of knowledge that has been passed down to him." - @mrJSDavenport for @ubookman: https://t.co/JCq9T0Ezmx. pic.twitter.com/EdJ0zJ7Ub9

— Russell Kirk Center (@KirkCenter) March 23, 2021

Cowardice and Magnanimity

Of Cowardice And Magnanimity https://t.co/JVPaCU0kNb via @QuintusCurtius

— QuintusCurtius (@QuintusCurtius) December 28, 2020

A Saint Said It

Does that mean he is right? This could be used as a prooftext for Christian meekness or even pacificism. How does gentleness relate to mercy and benevolence? And is it always warranted? There is Jeremiah 11:19, but Christ had already decided to surrender Himself. Is this surrender always warranted?

“Call often to mind that our Saviour redeemed us by bearing and suffering, and in like manner we must seek our own salvation amid sufferings and afflictions; bearing insults, contradictions and troubles with all the gentleness we can possibly command.” — St. Francis de Sales

— C.C. Pecknold (@ccpecknold) December 6, 2020

Eucharistia and Gratitude

Being thankful is the characteristic Way of the Christian. That’s what the Eucharist indicates: giving thanks. Is there any time, ever, that we cannot give thanks to God? Never. https://t.co/291SRISInl

— Orthodox Ethos (@frpeterheers) December 5, 2020

Eucharistia

"Eucharist Means Thanksgiving"

Check out this week's episode of Church Life Today, which features five reflections on the exchange of thanksgiving in the Eucharist.

via @McGrathND and @RedeemerRadio https://t.co/bZtDKefZ6m

— Leonard J. DeLorenzo (@leodelo2) November 23, 2020

Eucharist means "thanksgiving." This simple lesson can help us live with gratitude all year. #BeTheBee https://t.co/PvocIg67Px pic.twitter.com/HjFAoFqqeQ

— Steven Christoforou (@scchristoforou) November 23, 2020

Gratitude and Thanksgiving

Lord, thank You for Your many blessings in my life. Fill my heart with gratitude. Lead my heart to thanksgiving. Inspire my thanksgiving to offer acts of service to others this day. Amen.
Show your gratitude towards God by doing something self-less today. https://t.co/WyVYyzIeBp

— OCN (@MyOCN) November 10, 2020

My OCN

Foraging and Gratitude

Mark Lewis believes food should be hard work. “People need to be more thankful for the things they have," says the forager and retired professor. https://t.co/wMCbokoLpS

— Modern Farmer (@ModFarm) October 20, 2020

Diligence

A playful and compelling piece by @NotoriousTIB. I especially appreciate that she ends with the inimitable Gerard Manley Hopkins, who really is the most attentive poet I've read, both to language and to the realities language seeks to describe.https://t.co/5GrZwyj66U

— Onsi A. Kamel (@onsikamel) June 12, 2020

"A Look at the Virtue Tradition"

Metropolitan Kallistos Ware on Prayer

Public Orthodoxy: What Is Prayer? by Kallistos Ware, Metropolitan of Diokleia

On the contrary, before bringing before Christ the suffering and pain of the world, and before looking downward at our own ugliness and failings, we should look upwards at the beauty and glory of God. All too often our prayer can take the form of grumbling before God, of complaining and expressing regret. But that, so Climacus assures us, is not true prayer.
 
It is significant that in the Divine Liturgy we do not commence with an act of penitence but with a proclamation of the kingly rule of the Holy Trinity: “Blessed is the Kingdom of Father, Son and Holy Spirit.” Only after receiving a glimpse of this heavenly Kingdom can we then begin to repent as we should. In prayer we should start not with our own neediness but with the divine plenitude. The same priority is to be found in the daily prayers that we say at home each morning and evening. After the opening invocation “In the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit,” it is customary to continue: “Glory to You, O God, glory to You.” Thanksgiving, doxology, are where we start. As St John of Kronsdtadt used to say, “Prayer is a state of continual gratitude.”

This pattern of prayer, with thanksgiving and doxology in the first place, is to be found also in the cycle of liturgical prayer throughout the twenty-four hours of the day. According to the ancient Hebrew understanding of time, which is still followed by the Church, the new day commences not at midnight and not at dawn but in the evening. That is why in the Genesis account of creation it is said, “There was evening and there was morning, the first day” (Gen. 1:5): the evening comes before the morning. In this way Vespers is not the concluding but the opening service of the day, not an epilogue but a prologue. How, then, does the daily cycle of liturgical prayer commence?

Throughout the year, except in the week after Pascha, it begins in precisely the same way, with the reading or singing of Psalm 103 [104]. This is a hymn of praise for the variety and wonder of the created order: “Blessed the Lord, O my soul! Blessed are You, O God …. O Lord, how marvellous are Your works! In wisdom have You made them all.” In the words of Fr Alexander Schmemann, Vespers “begins at the beginning, and this means in the ‘rediscovery,’ in adoration and thanksgiving, of the world as God’s creation. The Church takes us, as it were, to that first evening on which man, called to life by God, opened his eyes and saw what God in His love was giving to him, saw all the beauty, all the glory of the temple in which he was standing, and rendered thanks to God. And in this thanksgiving he became himself … And if the Church is in Christ, its initial act is always this act of thanksgiving, of returning the world to God.”

Latins who have been well-catechized may know these 4 types of prayer: Adoration, Contrition, Petition, Thanksgiving.

This list is repeated in the following essays:
What are the four types of prayer in Christian tradition? Sr. Maria Veritas Marks, OP
Adoration by Paul Grutsch, Ph.D.
Adoration, Confession, Thanksgiving, Supplication by R.C. Sproul (not Catholic, but a Western Christian)


The last part of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, written by Fr. Jean Corbon, O.P., lists five purposes of prayer: Blessing and Adoration, Petition, Intercession, Thanksgiving, and Praise. (Scott Richert gives a summary of the CCC.)

So with regards to these different lists, I'd ask some questions.

1. Is adoration an act of the intellect or of the will? If of the will, how is it distinct from agape?

Aquinas holds that adoration is an act of the virtue of religion, and it is twofold: the devotion of the mind (moved by the will)  and a devotion shown through bodily gestures. Aquinas notes that the bodily gestures are signs of humility which can prepare us for internal devotion. The link between adoration and the virtue of humility, which is of the will, should seem obvious, and a point with which the author of the part of the CCC on prayer agrees (2628). But whether "infused" humility is really distinct from the virtue of charity or only notionally so, I'll have to consider some other time.

I also note that for Aquinas adoration is a distinct act of religion from prayer. Is it possible under Aquinas' schema for adoration to motivate prayer? Or is it only possible for it to be simultaneous with prayer?

2. Praise and blessing don't really seem to me to be distinct. For that matter, it is not clear to me that thanksgiving is really that distinct from praise and blessing in traditional prayer formulae, whether of the pre-Christian Jews or of the early Christians. How do we know God? Through His wonderous deeds, which we acknowledge both to praise and bless Him but also for which we must render thanks for the good things He has done for us. In mental prayer it might be easy to miss one of these elements; I wouldn't assume that they are implicitly present. But in traditional vocal prayers meant for use by the individual and the community ?

Similarly, can one remember and acknowledge the deeds of God without humility, or being humbled as a result? It may be possible to pray mechanically but if one is striving for authentic prayer?

3. One could ask whether the element of thanksgiving is missing from the Lord's Prayer, or if it is implicit as it is in other blessings. (Is there a bountiful record of pre-Christian Jewish prayer formulae? I can only think of the blessings that Fr. Bouyer examined in his book Eucharist, and iirc, those prayers were not pre-Christian.)

The Jesus Prayer, whether in its simple form or one of the longer forms, doesn't seem to have the element of thanksgiving, but maybe thanksgiving can be an implicit part of the prayer.

4. I am not sure if I would say that these should be 4 types of prayer; rather I might make the claim that they are 4 elements of prayer, especially if the prayer is to be complete, and even if they are not verbally explicit, they should be manifest in how we order ourselves to God in prayer. Do we train ourselves first through spoken words, which shape our minds and souls? Isn't that one of the purposes of reciting the Psalter, so that we can assimilate the mind of Christ?

While it might seem that humility may be more linked to our being servants of God than sons of God, as we are both, I think that it is possible for humility to encompass both aspects of our relationship to God, just as our participation in the Divine Agape has both aspects as well.

Edit. 5 I was reminded later today that another way the 4 types of prayer are differentiated is according to motive, which is another way of saying that they differ according to the purpose or term of the act. So it's not really a different way of differentiating the 4 (or 5 types) of prayer as it is usually done, but a more "technical" way, that is, a more theologically developed way.

Fr. Gregory Pine on Studiositas

Related:

Battling Over Latin Christianity

Latin traditionalists and "conservatives."

1P5: Bishop Barron and the ‘Unhappy’ Renewal of the ‘Trad’ Movement by Timothy Flanders

Pope Benedict would later write concerning his formative years before the Council about his “anti-Roman resentment … imparted to us by our studies” [1] and that “we all had a certain contempt for the nineteenth century; it was fashionable then, somewhat kitsch piety and over-sentimentality — we wanted to overcome all that. We wanted a new era of piety” [2].
He recalls that when he saw the original document on revelation at Vatican II (on behalf of which Ottaviani had pleaded), he wished to circumvent the Magisterium in order to impose his own interpretation of Tradition upon it [3]. He “wanted out of classical Thomism[.] … Thomas’s writings were textbooks, by and large, and impersonal somehow[.] … I didn’t want to operate only in a stagnant and closed philosophy, but in a philosophy understood as a question — what is man, really? — and particularly to enter into the new, contemporary philosophy” [4].
Such castigation of the fathers of the immediate past and the imposition instead of their own interpretation of Tradition seems to be the defining characteristic of the Nouvelle Théologie party. This was the party that, in Barron’s words, “won the day at Vatican II.” This attitude on display by these men appears to run contrary to piety, opening up questions about the continuity that is claimed.

Is the reference to piety here when talking about Tradition and its expressions misplaced? Is a particular linguistic and theological expression of Tradition more important than the Person of Christ?

But at Vatican II, the conservatives switched sides and allied themselves with the liberals in order to overcome the prior Magisterium. They successfully convinced enough bishops to throw out all the original documents (save one, written by Bugnini). They suppressed all the warnings from Ottaviani and others, who stated that their dreams of a springtime were naïve. But after the Council was done, Barron notes, the liberals and conservatives immediately broke into two warring parties, represented in the journals Concilium and Communio.

 But was reconciling the Church with modernity or the modern world the only goal of these "conservatives" or these reformers aligned with or following Ressourcement?

This crisis will be overcome when conservatives renounce forever their alliance with the liberal heretics and unite themselves in charity to the traditionalists they once shunned. They must renew their filial piety toward the pontificates of Bl. Pius IX and St. Pius X.

This is to be stuck in an ecclesiological and theological rut, and of course merely re-confirms the Latin belief that Magisterium of the Church is to be centered in the person of the bishop of Rome.

Holy Fear

Cyril O'Regan

Fr. Stephen Brock - Aquinas the Conservationalist

"Compassion" and "Mercy"

Pope Francis' mentions the Sacred Heart devotion but in connection with his own language of "compassion" and "mercy," which may be compatible with sentimentalism but may not be compatible with law or the good. Charity separated from truth.







CNA: ‘The heart of the Church’s mission is prayer,’ Pope Francis says

Catholic Herald: The time is ripe for a revival in devotion to the Sacred Heart by Fr Alexander Lucie-Smith

Can the devotion to the Sacred Heart be separated from Latin soteriology and its concepts of merit, atonement, expiation, and reparation that are logical consequences of it? (It has also been linked to the modern Latin devotion to Christ the King, cf. the reference by Pius XI to Quas Primas in Miserentissimus Redemptor.)

Consecration to the Sacred Heart. Pope Leo XIII - 1899 - Vatican.VA
Miserentissimus Redemptor (May 8, 1928) | PIUS XI
CARITATE CHRISTI COMPULSI Pope Pius XI 3 May 1932 Sacred Heart - EWTN - Vatican.VA
Haurietis Aquas (May 15, 1956) | PIUS XII

Values or Goods?

Gratitude

Rabbi B: "The Hebrew word for gratitude is 'hakaras hatov' which, when roughly translated, means 'recognizing the good.' Recognizing the good that someone does for us requires humility, a trait which doesn't come easy to the Gamma. Humility and gratitude do not come easy when you're a secret king who is convinced that he is not only superior to everyone else and misunderstood, he is also someone who people underestimate to their peril."

More on Worship

This past Sunday the Gospel was the story of Christ's encounter with the Samiritan woman at Jacob's well, which features the word "worship." In Greek: προσκυνεῖν (proskynein). The Latin word used in the neo-Vulgate is adorare.

For Aquinas, he discusses the virtue of religio, under which he talks about latria (and adoratio) in (II II ae) Question 84.

There is no Latin for Gaudete et Exsultate yet, so I am not sure what the English word "worship" is translating. In the CCC, worship translates adorare/adoratio. But in the CCC, worship is also used to translate the word cultus. (Similar to how the English word was used to refer to any form of reverence and also to that which is due to God alone?)

Edit. I remembered to check the Italian text for Gaudete et Exsultate: "worship" corresponds to both culto and adorazione in the Italian text.

Hyperdulia

Old Catholic Encyclopedia: Christian Worship

Acquired Mental Handicaps

If overuse of the internet and other electronic media leads to some sort of mental impairment with respect to attention and focus and other acts of the mind, then might it be the case there will be consequences on a person's ability to participate in liturgical prayer? How many of our young people can sit through the praying of a Psalm, or the Anaphora/Roman Canon, without being distracted? Has modern technology exacerbated our natural weaknesses or deficits?

With a Psalm least one can prayer/sing the Psalm and that will help one regain focus. But with an anaphora? One should be listening attentively, and not praying. Though perhaps repeating the words silently might be permissible.