Virtues: An Extensive List

Lest after reading the Extensive List of Passions  of St Peter of Damaskos one wonders, ‘did he have nothing better to do than list sins?’, he also provided a list of everything he considered to be a virtue, though he acknowledges the list is not exhaustive.   Peter says he derived his list of passions from the Scriptures and the list of virtues from the fathers  – those earlier generations of monks and teachers of the church, many considered to be saints.  While he came up with 298 passions, he only listed 228 virtues but admits the list is not complete.   If you are wondering what virtue you should work on next in your spiritual life, here are some virtues you can consider.

It is from the fathers that I myself have learned about the virtues, and I will give a list of them, so far as I can, even though it is not complete because of my lack of knowledge. The virtues are:

moral judgment, self-restraint, courage, justice, faith, hope, love, fear, religious devotion, spiritual knowledge, resolution, strength, understanding, wisdom, contrition, grief, gentleness, searching the Scriptures, acts of charity, purity of heart, peace, patient endurance, self-control, perseverance, probity of intention, purposiveness, sensitivity, heedfulness, godlike stability, warmth, alertness, the fervor of the Spirit, meditation, diligence, watchfulness, mindfulness, reflection, reverence, shame, respect, penitence, refraining from evil, repentance, return to God, allegiance to Christ, rejection of the devil,

keeping of the commandments, guarding of the soul, purity of conscience, remembrance of death, tribulation of soul, the doing of good actions, effort, toil, an austere life, fasting, vigils, hunger, thirst, frugality, self-sufficiency, orderliness, gracefulness, modesty, reserve, disdain of money, unacquisitiveness, renunciation of worldly things, submissiveness, obedience, compliance, poverty, possessionlessness, withdrawal from the world, eradication of self-will, denial of self, counsel, magnanimity, devotion to God, stillness, discipline, sleeping on a hard bed, abstinence from washing oneself, service, struggle, attentiveness, the eating of uncooked food, nakedness, the wasting of one’s body, solitude, quietude, calmness, cheerfulness, fortitude, boldness, godlike zeal, fervency, progress, folly for Christ, watchfulness over the intellect, moral integrity, holiness, virginity, sanctification, purity of body, chasteness of soul, reading for Christ’s sake, concern for God, comprehension, friendliness, truthfulness, uninquisitiveness, uncensoriousness, forgiveness of debts, good management, skilfulness, acuity, fairness, the right use of things,

cognitive insight, good-naturedness, experience, psalmody, prayer, thanksgiving, acknowledgment, entreaty, kneeling, supplication, intercession, petition, appeal, hymnody, doxology, confession, solicitude, mourning, affliction, pain, distress, lamentation, sighs of sorrow, weeping, heart-rending tears, compunction, silence, the search for God, cries of anguish, lack of anxiety about all things, forbearance, lack of self-esteem, disinterest in glory, simplicity of soul, sympathy, self-retirement, goodness of disposition, activities that accord with nature, activities exceeding one’s natural capacity, brotherly love, concord, communion in God, sweetness, a spiritual disposition, mildness, rectitude, innocence, kindliness, guilelessness, simplicity, good repute, speaking well of others, good works, preference of one’s neighbor, godlike tenderness, a virtuous character, consistency, nobility, gratitude, humility, detachment, dignity, forbearance, long-suffering, kindness, goodness,

discrimination, accessibility, courtesy, tranquility, contemplation, guidance, reliability, clearsightedness, dispassion, spiritual joy, sureness, tears of understanding, tears of soul, a loving desire for God, pity, mercy, compassion, purity of soul, purity of intellect, prescience, pure prayer, passion-free thoughts, steadfastness, fitness of soul and body, illumination, the recovery of one’s soul, hatred of life, proper teaching, a healthy longing for death, childlikeness in Christ, rootedness, admonition and encouragement, both moderate and forcible, a praiseworthy ability to change, ecstasy towards God, perfection in Christ, true enlightenment, an intense longing for God, rapture of intellect, the indwelling of God, love of God, love of inner wisdom, theology, a true confession of faith, disdain of death, saintliness, successful accomplishment, perfect health of soul, virtue, praise from God, grace, kingship, adoption to sonship

– altogether 228 virtues. To acquire all of them is possible only through the grace of Him who grants us victory over the passions.”

(THE PHILOKALIA, Kindle Loc. 29993-30050)

Replacing Vices with Virtues

 

“As the other passions come to birth, we must curb them and make our minds tranquil; we must banish anger, passion, grudges, enmity, malice, evil desires, all licentiousness, all the works of the flesh, which, according to St. Paul, are adultery, fornication, uncleanness, licentiousness, idolatry, witchcrafts, enmities, contentions, jealousies, drunkenness and carousingings.

It is fitting, therefore, to force out of our souls all these vices and to be eager to acquire the fruit of the Spirit: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, modesty and continence. If we shall thus purify our minds by constantly chanting the lessons of piety, we shall henceforth be able, by preparing ourselves beforehand, to make ourselves worthy to receive His gift, great as it is, and to guard the good things which are given.

(St. John Chrysostom, Baptismal Instructions, p. 36)

Can You Be Too Virtuous?

Is it possible to be excessively virtuous?  The question might seem ridiculous and yet one can find in the Church Fathers comments saying even in practicing virtue moderation is a virtue.

Humorously, the question reminds me of a Dilbert cartoon in which Dogbert asks Dilbert, “Do you think I have too much false humility?”   Which of course begs the question, can a person have too much false humility?  If it weren’t for false humility, Dogbert would have no humility at all.

St Gregory of Sinai did think there was a danger in exceeding the limits of virtue.  Virtues are lived out on a continuum or scale and one needs to know where the precise midpoint for that virtue is, for that is where the wise person will be.  He comments:

The cardinal virtues are four:

courage,

sound understanding,

self-restraint and

justice.

There are eight other moral qualities, that either go beyond or fall short of these virtues. These we regard as vices, and so we call them; but non-spiritual people regard them as virtues and that is what they call them.

Exceeding or falling short of courage are audacity and cowardice,

of sound understanding are cunning and ignorance;

of self-restraint are licentiousness and obtuseness;

of justice are excess and injustice, or taking less than one’s due.

In between, and superior to, what goes beyond or what falls short of them, lie not only the cardinal and natural virtues, but also the practical virtues. These are consolidated by resolution combined with probity of character; the others by perversion and self-conceit. That the virtues lie along the midpoint or axis of rectitude is testified to by the proverb, ‘You will attain every well- founded axis’ (Prov. 2:9. LXX).   (THE PHILOKALIA, Kindle Location 41411-41423)

Wisdom Justice Divine Inspiration Truth

It is a vice in St. Gregory’s teaching not only to fall short of a virtue but also to exceed what is the midpoint of the range of behaviors associated with the virtue.  An excessive amount of courage becomes the vice of audacity, an excessive amount of understanding becomes cunningness, an excessive amount of self-restraint becomes the vice of obtuseness, and even justice can be taken to an excess which becomes injustice.  Balance in the spiritual life is needed, moderation in all things is a good spiritual rule.  As. St. Gregory also says one can even read Psalms to an excess:

In my opinion, those who do not psalmodize much act rightly, for it means that they esteem moderation – and according to the sages moderation is best in all things [emphases not in the original text].  In this way they do not expend all the energy of their soul in ascetic labor, thus making the intellect negligent and slack where prayer is concerned. On the contrary, by devoting but little time to psalmodizing, they can give most of their time to prayer. On the other hand, when the intellect is exhausted by continuous noetic invocation and intense concentration, it can be given some rest by releasing it from the straitness of silent prayer and allowing it to relax in the amplitude of psalmody. This is an excellent rule, taught by the wisest men.   (THE PHILOKALIA, Kindle Location 42480-42487)

Ilias the Presbyter also writing in THE PHILOKALIA confirms the same teaching:

Neither one who falls short of virtue because of negligence nor one who out of presumption oversteps it will reach the harbor of dispassion. Indeed, no one will enjoy the blessings of righteousness who tries to attain them by means of either deficiency or excess.”  (Kindle Loc. 25349-51)

Correcting Vices with Virtues

“When the unclean spirit has gone out of a man, he passes through waterless places seeking rest, but he finds none. Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes he finds it empty, swept, and put in order. Then he goes and brings with him seven other spirits more evil than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man becomes worse than the first.”  (Matthew 12:43-45)

Repentance has as its goal spiritual healing as we endeavor to overcome the sickening affects of the Fall.  Confession is not mostly about enumerating sins but rather about finding healing for our spiritual ills.   Fr Alexis Trader reminds us that in penance we are trying to find an antidote for our sins and the church fathers did suggest specific virtuous behaviors to replace sinful ones.  He writes:

“Ascetic tradition singles out eight principal bad thoughts that encompass and engender all the other sins that the mind can commit. The eight bad thoughts include gluttony, unchastity, avarice, anger, dejection, listlessness, vainglory, and pride. They are the conceptual analogues to specific behaviors, for “what the body acts out in the world of things, the nous acts out in the world of conceptual images.” Hence, the thoughts can be formulated in behavioral terms as the gluttonous behavior of someone overeating, the unchaste conduct of someone having illicit sexual relations, the avaricious actions of someone gambling, and for forth. This patristic connection between thought and behavior links the subjective reality of the eight bad thoughts to the objective reality of concrete actions that can be observed and measured by an external observer. 

Furthermore, if bad thoughts can be formulated in behavioral terms, their antidotes can also be framed in like manner. For example, in a text attributed to St. John of Damascus, the author notes that

“gluttony can be corrected by self-control;

unchastity by desire for God and longing for future blessings;

avarice by compassion for the poor;

anger by goodwill and love for all men;

worldly dejection by spiritual joy;

listlessness by patience, perseverance, and offering thanks to God;

vain-glory by doing good in secret and by praying constantly with a contrite heart;

and pride by not judging or despising anyone in the manner of the boastful Pharisee, and by considering oneself the least of all men.”

(Ancient Christian Wisdom and Aaron Beck’s Cognitive Therapy, p. 79)

It is not enough in confession to simply catalog one’s misdeeds.  If we don’t replace our sinful behaviors with virtuous ones, we will find the momentary gain of emptying our sins in confession is confounded by the fact that the same behaviors will continue and become worse.  Healing takes place as we rid ourselves of our sins by replacing bad behaviors with good deeds.  We have to fill our time and our hearts with good things or the empty heart will remain the haunt of our sinful thoughts which also are our demons.

Put Off the World to Put on Christ

As we continue our sojourn through the Nativity Fast to the celebration of Christmas, the birth in the flesh of our Lord, God and Savior Jesus Christ, we are called upon to think about ourselves in terms of why do we need Christ, and why is His Birth of any importance to our daily lives.  This requires us to think about ourselves as God created us to be, and what we have become as humans interested in our own wills more than in God’s will.

We have become sinners, separated from God. God for His part, continues to love us and to invite us come back to Him. To accept God’s loving invitation, we realize though we are created in God’s image and likeness, we have become unlike God – we are sinners beset by passions and temptations which lead us down the steps away from God into death.  And then we realize but then also the steps of the ladder which raise us up to heaven – which God has set before us – Jesus Christ.   St. Gregory Palamas writes:

“If anyone wishes to be . . . delivered from outer darkness, deemed worthy of the unfading light of God’s kingdom and to live for ever at rest with the saints in heaven, let him put off the old man, who is corrupt with deceitful lusts (cf. Eph. 4:22), these being

drunkenness,                                                         

fornication,                                                  

adultery,                                            

impurity,                                      

covetousness,                                

love of money,                          

   hatred,                    

anger,               

slander,         

and every evil passion.

And through his deeds let him put on the new man renewed in the image of his Creator (cf. Col. 3:10), in which is

                              charity,

                       brotherly love,

                purity,

        self-control and

every type of virtue.

Through these Christ dwells within us, reconciling us with Himself and one another, to His glory and the glory of His Father without beginning, and of the co-eternal, life-giving Spirit, now and forever and unto the ages of ages. Amen.”  (St. Gregory Palamas: The Homilies p 459)

Striving to Rejoice in God

“Strive by every means constantly to rejoice the Heavenly Father by your life; that is, by your

meekness, humility,

gentleness, obedience,

abstinence, right judgment,

love of peace, patience, mercy, 

sincere friendship with worthy people,

kindness to everybody,

cordial hospitality,

universal benevolence,

accuracy in business,

simplicity of heart and character,

and by the purity of all your thoughts.

Teach and strengthen us, O God, to live in accordance with Your Will, for You are our Father, and we are Your children in Jesus Christ our Lord.”

(St. John of Kronstadt, My Life in Christ, pp 243-244)

Faith is to Be Happy

“…Faith in the trust that forms friendship, hope in the vision of a future where God will finally prevail, and love in the forgiveness that is a human possibility only because it is first a divine reality. Working together to complete and perfect the classical virtues, these new virtues enable us to ‘become partakers of the divine nature’ (2 Pet. 1:4). When St. Paul declares that ‘[h]e who through faith is righteous shall live’ (Rom. 1:17) and that ‘by grace you have been saved by faith’ (Eph. 2:8), he is not speaking of an abstract doctrine that we are called to affirm as a bare intellectual proposition. To have faith is not to credit a set of ideas that await either proof or disproof. Certainly it is true that faith has real cognitive content – namely, the articles of belief set forth in the various creeds and confessions. Summarily stated, these statements of faith affirm that the triune God has acted in Israel and Christ to create his unique people called the church and, through it, to redeem the world.

Even so, faith is not the same thing as knowledge. Nor is faith something that we are required morally to do – to perform meritorious acts, for example, that win the favor of God. Surely Christian faith issues in a distinctive way of life; indeed, it is a set of habits and practices – of worship and devotion, of preaching and the sacraments. Faith is always made active and complete in good works, says the Epistle of James; in fact, ‘faith apart from works is dead’ (Jas. 2:22,26). Yet faith is not first of all to be understood as exemplary action. At its root and core, faith is always an act of trust if it is to possess true knowledge and to produce true works. People having simple minds and accomplishing small deeds can have profound faith. Whether old or young, bright or dim, mighty or weak, we are all called to be childlike before God. Faith is the total entrustment of ourselves to the God who has trustworthily revealed himself in Israel and Christ. It is the confidence that this true God will dispose of our lives graciously, whereas we ourselves would make wretchedly ill use of them. This means that faith entails a radical risk, for God both commands and grants faith without offering material threat of punishment or earthly promise of reward. To be sure, the life of disobedience incurs divine wrath, just as the life of faith springs from divine mercy. The right relation between God’s anger and pity is defined in the fine phrase of Jeremy Taylor, a seventeenth-century Anglican divine: ‘God threatens terrible things if we will not be happy.’ To have faith is to have the life of true felicity already within us, as we learn gladly to participate in God’s own Trinitarian life of trusting self-surrender. Because God’s communal life centers upon the perfect and unconditional self-giving of each person of the Trinity to the other, so does the life of faith entail the complete offering of ourselves to God and our neighbors. Such an astounding act could never be a human achievement: it is a miraculous divine gift. There is nothing within our human abilities that could produce faith. On the contrary, it is our free and trusting response to the desire for God that God himself has planted within us.

God is utterly unlike Melkor and Sauron because he never coerces. We are never forced but always drawn to faith, as God grants us freedom from sin’s compulsion. We are invited and persuaded to this act of total entrustment through the witness to the Gospel made by the church. Even when faith is an act of knee-bent confession alone in one’s own room, it is not a solitary and individual and private thing: faith is both enabled and sustained by the body of Christ called the church, the community of God’s own people.” (Ralph C. Wood, The Gospel According to Tolkien, pp 117-119)

Meeting our Vices with Virtues

In the desert fathers, a certain St. Isaiah presents the temptations as something that meet us along the paths of life.  As we walk through life in the things we normally do, we can encounter these temptations which are looking for opportunities to influence us.  We have to be practiced in the virtues to know how to resist them.

“Let us remember love for the poor, that this love might save us from greed, when the sin of greed shall come to meet us.

Let us acquire peace with all, the humble and the great, that this might guard us against hate, when it shall come to meet us.

Let us acquire patience before all and in all things, that this might guard us against hate, when it shall come to meet us.

Let us love all of our brothers and sisters, without hating anyone or repaying anyone any ill done against us; for this shall guard us against envy, when this demon too shall come to meet us.

Let us love the endurance in humility of our neighbor’s word, even if this word should bring upon us hurt and derision; for humility will guard us against pride, when it too shall come to meet us.

Let us seek to honor our neighbor and not to condemn or hurt anyone; for this shall protect us from gossip, when it shall come to meet us.

Let us despise the cares of this world and its honor, that we might be saved from its bewitching evil, when it shall come to meet us.

Let us teach our tongues to be unceasingly occupied with the commandments of God, righteousness, and prayer, that we might be protected from falsehood, when it shall too come to meet us.”

(St. Isaiah, The Evergetinos: A Complete Text, Vol. 2, p 38)

 

Building Upon the Virtues

“Abba John said: ‘Personally, I would like a person to participate a little in all the virtues. So when you arise at dawn each day, make a fresh start in every virtue and commandment of God

with greatest patience,

with fear and long-suffering,

in the love of God,

with all the spiritual zeal and much humiliation;

enduring affliction and constriction of the heart,

with much prayer and intercession,

with groans,

in purity of the tongue and restriction of the eyes,

being reviled and not getting angry,

living peaceably and not giving back evil for evil;

not noticing the faults of others;

not measuring oneself (being beneath the whole of creation),

having renounced material goods and the things that pertain to the flesh;

on a cross,

in combat,

in poverty of spirit,

in determination and spiritual asceticism;

in fasting,

St. Maria Skobtsova

in repentance,

in weeping,

in the strife of battle,

in discretion,

in purity of the soul,

in generous sharing…’ ”

(John Colobos in Give me a Word: The Alphabetical Sayings of the Desert Fathers, p 139)

Post-Apostolic Writings on Virtue

In the generation of Christians which followed the first apostles, we can find some of the ethical teachings and concern which were emphasized by these new converts to Christianity.

The Didache (1^st C  AD) teaches:

“Commit no murder, adultery, sodomy, fornication, or theft. Practise no magic, sorcery, abortion, or infanticide. See that you do no covet anything your neighbor possesses, and never be guilty or perjury, false witness, slander or malice. Do not equivocate in thought or speech, for a double tongue is a deadly snare…you must resist any temptation to hypocrisy, spitefulness, or superiority. You are to have no malicious designs on a neighbor.”

In the Epistle of Barnabas (2^nd C AD) we are taught:

“ Practise singleness of heart,  and a richness of the spirit….Abhor anything that is displeasing to God, and hold every form of hypocrisy in detestation. Be sure that you never depart from the commandments of the Lord. Do not exaggerate for your own importance, but be modest at all points, and never claim credit for yourself. Cherish no ill-natured designs upon your neighbor. Forbid yourself any appearance of presumption. Commit no fornication, adultery, or unnatural vice…Never be in two minds…Love your neighbor more than yourself. Never do away with an unborn child.” (Frances Young, Biblical Exegesis and the Formation of Christian Culture, pg.132)