The soul, like fire, rises by nature.[1] On the Mountain of Purgatory, the Roman poet Virgil explains to Dante that as a flame strives upward, so too does the soul strive to God.[2] The soul bears a “natural love” that desires to delight in beauty and be happy.[3] The soul hears the call to climb from lesser beauties to greater beauties until it is satiated in Beauty-itself, God. It is a primal desire kneaded into the nature of man that works in him to rise to God, his Maker. Every human soul has this love, this “desire for beauty.”[4] Yet, a thick forgetfulness, like a pall upon the heart, smothers modern man. Though called to ascend, he hates greatness and turns in his timidity to bestial pleasures and artificialities. We proclaim ourselves gods but live a life like cattle. We are called to ascend. We are called to shed the demon of our day and become beautiful in pursuit of Beauty.
I. On Ascending the Ladder of Love
A beautiful woman is an icon of the cosmos. In the Symposium of Plato, the woman Diotima teaches Socrates about natural love, or eros in the Greek.[5] Eros is the resounding desire in man to be satiated in beauty and be happy. It is the primordial impulse to be fulfilled, loved, and at rest.[6] Diotima believes eros finds its rudimentary awakening in the beauty of the beloved.[7] It is a certain madness, a “being in love,” as C.S. Lewis notes, intertwined with physical attraction and the satisfaction of sex.[8] As Pope Benedict XVI holds, eros finds “its deepest purpose” in marriage.[9]There is an eroticism “rooted in man’s very nature” that reveals its purpose in Adam uniting with Eve as “one flesh.”[10]Man possesses the beauty of the beloved and is happy. The problem, however, is that man wants to be happy all of the time and not just some of the time.[11] Our erotic appetite for beauty and happiness is infinite but our beloved is finite. Many often place an unfair erotic expectation upon their spouse, believing their finite beloved can satisfy their infinite desire for happiness and fulfillment. Other men, experiencing the disproportionality between their eros and any single woman, turn to an endless pattern of consumption of the feminine. It is the thesis of Diotima, however, that the beauty of the beloved is an enticement to the beauties of the soul.[12] A beautiful woman is not the final object of erotic desire, she rather solicits the soul to ascend to that which is.[13] She is an icon of the hierarchal beauties of creation. She is a living window into the higher realities to which eros may ascend and find rest.
Eros aches for the Beauty ever-ancient and ever-new.[14] It has been said that “beauty is a particular type of radiance which seizes the human soul and entices it to itself.”[15] Every act of the soul is motivated by the love of beauty.[16] Now the soul has three parts: the appetitive, the spirited, and the rational,[17] and each part of the soul loves a corresponding beauty: the appetitive loves pleasure, the spirited loves nobility, and the intellect loves wisdom.[18] It is thus the teaching of Diotima that our eros that seeks the beauty of pleasure can be led to delight in the higher beauties of honor, glory, truth, and wisdom.[19] The soul ascends from lesser to greater beauties, step-by-step, like the rungs of a ladder.[20] At the top of the ladder of love is Beauty-itself, God.[21] The soul, in satiating its infinite erotic appetite upon the infinite divine beauty, delights in the happiness for which it was made. “Love,” it is said, “is a good circle” in which the soul made in love by God is drawn by love back to Him.[22] Every beauty is an invitation to the divine, as Archbishop Fulton Sheen comments: “There is a suggestion of Divine Love in every form of erotic love.”[23] Eros is a gift to return to the One who enkindled it.
Virtue sculpts us into an image of the Divine. “Beauty is the flowering of goodness,” and “it is through the charms of this flower” that the soul is drawn to what is good.[24] For beauty calls to that which is ugly and invites it to become beautiful.[25] The soul is made beautiful by virtue, as Socrates tells us: “virtue is a certain health, beauty, and good condition of the soul.”[26] As Virgil tells Dante on Mount Purgatory, man “retain[s] the power to rein” in his eros.[27] Each part of the soul and its corresponding love may be made beautiful by its corresponding virtue: the appetitive love of pleasure by temperance, the spirited love of nobility by fortitude, and the intellectual love of wisdom by prudence. The virtue of justice adorns the whole soul by perfecting its order and moving its parts in harmony.[28] As the soul ascends the ladder of love, virtue forms and firms it into an image of the Supreme Beauty. “Our acts are like steps that either bring us closer to the vision of God or else distance us from it,” writes Abbot Jean-Charles Nault, “depending on whether they are good or bad.”[29] This is what it truly means to be “skilled in erotics”—to become beautiful in pursuit of Beauty by climbing the ladder of love.[30]
II. On Descent and the Demon of our Day
Socrates observes that “vice is a sickness, ugliness, and weakness” in the soul.[31] Amongst pride, the Queen of Sin, and her seven capital vices, there is one vice that is particularly virulent against the ascent of the soul.[32] We should note well that Dante the Poet has Virgil give his explanation of natural love on the fourth terrace of Mount Purgatory: the ring that purges sloth. Dante the Pilgrim sees souls “in whom the fiery sting of love” now causes them to run, unable to rest, being purged of the sin of sloth.[33] Sloth or acedia, however, is not reducible to mere laziness. It is a “sadness about God” and a “disgust with activity.”[34] At its heart, however, acedia is a sin against love.[35] If love is the root of all our action, then acedia lulls the soul into inaction.[36] Acedia smothers our primal desire for beauty. Acedia is anti-erotic. It disheartens the soul from climbing the ladder of love and draws it into an unnatural indolence. Acedia leads each part of the soul into deformity, suffocating the desire to ascend and leading the soul into a descent of bestial release.
The acedious soul falls into unrealities. The intellectual part of the soul loves truth, and truth is the conformity of the mind to reality.[37] The ladder of love is the natural path of the soul’s ascent to God. Acedia, however, stifles the intellect’s love of wisdom, numbing the mind to the beauty of reality. The intellect becomes thick and deadened to its own love—unmotivated by beauty and unfeeling toward the divine call to ascend. Acedia is the “sin against memory,” as the soul forgets who it is and the purpose of its ascent.[38] Unable to see the ladder of love in the cosmos, acedia leads to nihilism.[39] In nihilism, the fire in the soul, its eros, has no Enkindler. The intellect is tempted to create its own artificialities and unrealities, to make a cosmos in its own image, and to feed the fire of its soul according to its own will.[40] However, as Pope Benedict XVI observes, “Man does not create himself.”[41] He grinds against his own nature to his own detriment. Acedia leads to nihilism and nihilism to despair—a daughter of acedia according to St. Gregory the Great.[42]
The acedious soul hates magnanimity. The spirited part of the soul loves nobility, honor, and glory. Perfected by fortitude, it provides the necessary grit to conquer what is arduous and delight in the beauty attained. Acedia is a “rejection of one’s own greatness.”[43] There is no ladder of love, the acedious souls says, or if there is it is not worth ascending. Like despair, “faint-heartedness” is a daughter of acedia.[44] The acedious soul breeds pusillanimity and indifference.[45] It is unaware of any beauty worth sacrifice. The acedious soul would rather wallow at the bottom of the ladder than climb toward glory. It becomes unspirited, weak, and ugly, suffering a spiritual obesity that tires the impulse of ascent. Soft and fat-souled, man not only disbelieves in his own greatness but begins to hate greatness in others. It is his fate to wallow, pallid and corpulent, deadened to eros and untouched by courage. Acedia may even push the soul—and even whole cultures—to hate greatness to such a degree that it becomes an “enemy of life” and believes it better to “not exist.”[46]
Lust is a descent into the subhuman. The appetitive part of the soul loves pleasure. Purposeless and wallowing in effeminacy,[47] the acedious soul, starved of the greater beauties of wisdom and nobility, turns to an insatiable consumption of the lesser beauty of pleasure. The feminine form is no longer an icon to celestial delights but raw material for irrational consumption and bestial release. Lust is a descent; “lust drags men to excess and thus to disharmony.”[48] The lustful soul, sloshing in its own passions, pursues what is ugly and thus becomes ugly. For lust “draw[s] men to deformity and ugliness, just as love draws them to beauty.”[49] Now, the lustful soul, the soul of disordered eros, is deprived of the infinite Beauty-itself; thus, it turns its infinite appetite upon the finite female form that, under the new technologies of man, may be presented to him under an artificial and false infinity: online pornography. Porn is a false god of beauty. It apes the endless quality of the Divine by offering lust an abyss of dehumanizing pleasure. Eros is a “self-love.”[50] It loves beauty and, in turn, feels loved, affirmed, and satisfied. Eros is intimately intertwined with our self-identity. When man sates his eros in God, the Supreme Beauty for which he was made, he becomes only more human, more his true self. When eros satiates on the demonic mockery of the divine, pornography, he becomes a mockery of man—receiving a warped and deformed identity. Porn is a meatgrinder for man’s erotic imagination. It will take what is beautiful in man and make it ugly, churning new identities for him that pervert the most primal aspects of his nature. Disorder begets disorder. The acedious soul, having fallen from the ladder of love, falls into the inhuman.
III. The Crisis of our Age
The acedious man is a tyrant who enslaves the higher parts of his soul to his irrational pursuit of pleasure. Man, who is called to ascend the ladder of love toward Beauty-itself, chooses to live the life of a cow. Socrates explains: “they don’t look upward toward what is truly above… they aren’t filled with what really is nor do they taste of a pleasure that is sure and pure; rather, after the fashion of cattle, always looking down and with their heads bent to the earth and table, they feed, fattening themselves and copulating.”[51] Man, as Aristotle taught, is the worst animal when it comes to sex and food.[52] Acedia dehumanizes man. The world sets before man a trough of perversions and unrealities to keep him from ascending toward God. With a dull and callused mind unmotivated by the beauty of reality, the fat-souled and effeminate man descends into bestial gratification.
Acedia is the demon of our day. It is particularly pernicious in its effect on men, as it takes the spirited part of the soul that seeks greatness, the part so associated with the masculine, and swells it into a soft, safe, fat-souled waste. Nor are clerics immune from this devil, as observed: acedia “is perhaps the root cause of the greatest crisis in the Church today.”[53] Our crisis is that we are unspirited. We bear a fear of greatness for ourselves and a hatred of greatness for others. The demon of acedia, the noonday devil, however, may be defeated by zeal, diligence, and fortitude. Tempered by courage, eros can lead the soul to the beauties that sculpt it into a firm image of the Divine. The soul that defeats this demon, says Evagrius, finds “peace and ineffable joy.”[54] We cry out with St. John Climacus: “Ascend, brothers, ascend eagerly, and be resolved in your hearts to ascend.”[55] We must slay acedia and ascend.
Dcn. Harrison Garlick is a deacon, husband, and father who serves as the chancellor and legal counsel for the Diocese of Tulsa & Eastern Oklahoma. He also serves as a tutor for the Alcuin Institute for Catholic Culture teaching in its Great Books program.
[1] Marsilio Ficino, trans. Arthur Fardell, On the Nature of Love (Shepheard-Walwyn Publishers, London, 2016), 46; Anders Nygren, Agape and Eros(Westminster Press, Philadelphia, 1953), 431, 445.
[2] Dante Alighieri, trans. Anthony Esolen, Purgatory (Random House, Inc., New York, 2004), 191 (18.28).
[3] Dante, 191 (18.19-28).
[4] Ficino, 11.
[5] Plato, trans. Seth Benardete, Symposium (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001). The Greek term eros is our natural love and finds its Latin equivalent in amor. See, Josef Pieper, Faith, Hope, Love (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1997), 260, stating: “Thomas Aquinas… says that were natural love (amor) or eros, not something good in itself, then caritas (agape) could not perfect it.” Thomas M. Osborne, Jr., Love of Self and Love of God in Thirteen-Century Ethics (University of Notre Dame Press, Notre Dame, 2005), 15, stating: “The Neoplatonists had removed the morally dubious connotations from the word eros, which was translated by the Latins are amor.” Plato, trans. R.E. Allen, The Symposium (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1991), 96-97.
[6] What is eros? Eros is a “Need-love:” C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Harcourt Books, Inc., Orlando, 1988), 1-2; 91-115; eros is the “desire for full existence, for existential exaltation, for happiness and bliss:” Pieper, 222; it is an “ecstasy” of the soul, an upward movement of love toward God: Pope Benedict XVI, Deus Caritas Est, 2006, n. 5; “Eros… is the clearest and most powerful inclination toward lost wholeness:” Benardete, 107 (Allan Bloom’s essay, “The Ladder of Love”); “eros is love for the sempiternal possession of the good:” Leo Strauss, On Plato’s Symposium (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2001), 205.
[7] Benardete, 40 (210B).
[8] C.S. Lewis, The Four Loves (Harcourt Books, Inc., Orlando, 1988), 91.
[9] Deus Caritas Est, n. 11.
[10] Deus Caritas Est, n. 11.
[11] Benardete, 35 (204E), 36 (205D).
[12] Benardete, 40-41, 147, 151 (210B); beauty draws us out of ourselves and into another.
[13] Benardete, 151, also 40 (210B); Strauss, 233, 237; Archbishop Fulton Sheen, Way to Happiness (Garden City Books, New York, 1954), 67-68; Josef Pieper, Divine Madness (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1995), 42; Ficino, 24, 27; Allan Bloom, Love & Friendship (Simon & Schuster, New York, 1993), 15; St. John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent (Harper Brothers, 1959) 62 (Step 15, n. 60), praising the monk who upon seeing a beautiful body, glorified the Creator. Also, consider our the common eros of sexuality and marriage is used as an analogue of our heavenly eros toward God in both the Old Testament and New Testament, see “In Defense of Erotic Love” (Alcuin Institute, 2022).
[14] St. Augustine, trans. F.J. Sheed, Confessions (Hacket Publishing Company, Indianapolis, 2006), 210 (X.27.38).
[15] Ficino, 32.
[16] “Love is at the root of action,” Abbot Jean-Charles Nault, O.S.B., The Noonday Devil: Acedia, the Unnamed Evil of Our Times (Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 2015), 67.
[17] Plato, trans. Allan Bloom, The Republic of Plato (Basic Books, 1991), 120 (IV.441a); cf. St. Augustine, 332-33.
[18] Republic, 262 (9.581c); St. Augustine, 21, 332-33.
[19] Bernedete, 40 (210B); cf. Strauss’ six stages, Strauss, 237.
[20] The tradition speaks of this love as an ascent. It is sometimes spoke of as an upward ecstasy (Deus Caritas Est, 5) or a “Divine frenzy” by which “God unerringly draws the soul” back to Him (Ficino, 152, cf. 154). Some speak of the wings of the soul soaring through celestial joys toward God (Nygren, 443; Ficino, 155). Others tell of the soul ascending a mountain (Nygren, 444, 432). The upward inclination of this love has been described as an arrow, a flame, or even a great “chain which draws us up from earth toward God (Nygren, 446). The classic image, however, is the ladder. The image of the ladder is drawn from Plato’s Symposium, which describes the ascent of the soul by our natural love, eros. The Christian tradition has seen this pagan image perfected in the relationship between eros and agape as presented by the biblical image of Jacob’s ladder. See, Deus Caritas Est, n. 7; Climacus, 47, 129. For more on the harmony of eros and Catholicism, see Dcn. Harrison Garlick, “In Defense of Erotic Love” (Alcuin Institute for Catholic Culture, 2022).
[21] Bernedete, 42 (211E).
[22] Ficino, 16.
[23] Sheen, 67.
[24] Ficino, 55.
[25] Ficino, 9.
[26] Republic, IV.444d; it said even Plato, a pagan, was able to pray to God that his soul may become beautiful in pursuit of wisdom and not be distracted by pleasure or riches, see Ficino, 127.
[27] Dante, 195 (18.71); see also, Deus Caritas Est, n. 4.
[28] Republic IV.443d; Aristotle and Aquinas would see this as “metaphorical justice,” see ST.II-II.58.2.
[29] Nault, 74.
[30] Bernedete, 38 (207c).
[31] Republic, IV.444e.
[32] Dcn. Harrison Garlick, “Knowing and Fighting the Queen of Sin” (Catholic Answers, 2021).
[33] Dante, 197 (18.106, 96).
[34] Nault, 72,
[35] Nault, 80.
[36] Nault, 80.
[37]ST.I.16.2.
[38] Nault, 141. Cardinal Razinger once opined that the pope was the “Advocate of Christian Memory,” thus, the papacy is antidote to acedia, calling the Church to remember who she is. If acedia was ever to infect the Chair of Saint Peter, to whatever degree Providence would allow such a thing, the Church would forget who she is and suffer greatly.
[39] Nault, 109-110. Arguably, the greatest source of acedia in the modern world is liberalism, as liberalism is predicated off an artificial and reductionist understanding of natural law and anthropology. These artificialities, present in Locke, habituate man to relativism by separating the politics of man from even his natural final end. Relativism, in turn, leads to nihilism; thus, liberalism serves as the instrument by which man forgets who he is and his telos, his purpose. Liberalism presents acedia as our cultural default.
[40] Nault 110; see Dcn. Harrison Garlick, “Contraceptive Speech” (The Josias, 2023).
[41] Pope Benedict XVI, “Address of His Holiness Benedict XVI,” (Reichstag Building, Berlin 2011): “Man too has a nature that he must respect and that he cannot manipulate at will. Man is not merely self-creating freedom. Man does not create himself.”
[42] Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Book XXXI.87.
[43] Nault, 117.
[44] Nault, 117.
[45] Nault, 116-117; the “pusillanimous man” is the little souled man, as Aquinas remarks: “For just as the magnanimous man tends to great things out of greatness of soul, so the pusillanimous man shrinks from great things out of littleness of soul.” ST.II-II.133.2.
[46] Nault, 118-19, citing Cardinal Ratzinger: “Today there is a remarkable hatred among people for their own real greatness. Man sees himself as an enemy of life…”
[47] The term effeminacy denotes a “softness” or “mollities,” as the effeminate man is one who, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is “unable to endure toilsome things” for a good. He will “forsake a good on account of difficulties which he cannot endure” (ST.II-II.138.1). Effeminacy and feminine are distinct concepts, and though it is wrong for a man to be like a woman, a woman may also suffer effeminacy if she is unwilling to undergo hardship for a good. She too is called to be spirited, and effeminacy would be a disorder of her true femininity. It would be hard to imagine motherhood, for example, without courage perfecting the spirited part of the soul.
[48] Ficino, 12.
[49] Ficino 12, cf. 157.
[50] Pieper, 222; Osborne, 19.
[51] Republic, 268 (IX.586a). A man may be spirited but still live a life like cattle if he places the spirited part of his soul in service to the appetitive (pleasure). He will seem courageous and masculine to the effeminate man, but ultimately he is still bestial—maybe a more bullish, brash cow but a cow nonetheless.
[52] “This is why, without virtue, [man] is the most unholy and the most savage [of the animals], and the worst with regard to sex and food.” Aristotle, trans. Carnes Lord, Politics (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984), 38.
[53] Nault, 18.
[54] Nault, 13.
[55] Climacus, 129.