“July 22. Thursday. Fast day. Rose not till seven o’clock. This is the usual fate of my resolutions…”

St. Gregory the Great, Pastoral Care

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The book works antidotally against identifying feelings with spiritual acts. One source of this confusion is the word ‘feeling’ itself, which is crucially ambiguous. Consider: love is a feeling and pain is a feeling. But pain is a different kind of feeling than love is. Pain can be timed: it can begin at a particular, clockable time and end at another. It can last for quite a short time—a few seconds or a minute. Folks have first-person authority over their pains. Typically, if a person says he is in pain sincerely, then he is. But love is not a feeling like this. Love cannot be timed—or if it can, it cannot be timed as pain can. I can be in pain for a few seconds, but not in love for a few seconds. And folks do not have first-person authority over their pains. Typically, if a person says he is in love sincerely, then maybe he is or maybe he isn’t. Delusions of love make sense in a way that delusions of pain do not. (Puppy love.  There is no similar pain category.)  We are also all familiar with the fact that others may be better judges of whether we are in love or not than we are. We can be in love and fail to know it. But can we be in pain but fail to know it? Of course, we can be anesthetized; but that, though a complication, points up yet another difference between pain and love.

When we recognize that feelings are of more than one sort, saying that a spiritual act is a feeling requires caution.

We have not only failed to observe the ambiguity of ‘feeling’, we have assimilated love-sorts of feelings to pain-sorts of feelings, with the result that we have lost any sure grasp of what love-sorts of feelings are. We now think of love, for instance, as a feeling like pain, but not as a pain—rather, we think of it as a variety of clockable pleasure (like the pleasant feeling produced during a massage). So we think we love God when we feel a specially strong or otherwise effectual variety of clockable pleasure in, say, a particular place—like church—or during a particular activity—say, listening to music or looking at a painting.

But none of the theological virtues—indeed, none of the virtues whether theological or cardinal—are pain-sorts of feelings. If they were, for example, we would have first-person authority over them: but we don’t. This is made clear in many places in Unseen Warfare, but especially in the 42nd chapter. There Scupoli writes about the signs of progress in virtue. Considering the signs shows that virtue could not be a pain-sort of feeling.

To say that virtue is a love-sort of feeling is not yet to have gotten clear on virtue–in part because love is multiform. But it is to make progress. Further progress requires distinguishing between pathological and practical love-sorts of feelings, between acts and states, etc. That’s a post for another day.

It is strange and saddening to find, when one sits with leisure and entire freedom of choice, that one has nothing whatever to put down, or nothing but the despairing statement of an utter emptiness. What sort of a thin life is it, what a chilly soul, that can give in twelve waking hours no thought or feeling that a man may write for his merely technical exercise? For a great part of our life we are merely animal or quite dead: immortality in another sphere does not seem so certainly a boon as would immortality during our present life. It may be that a good working guide to conduct might be framed on this ideal of living to the fullest here and now: it is likely that the soul seeking admission among the bodiless immortals in another world would be elected at once on the strength of having kept itself from death in days here below.