No Wonder

Someone asked Fr. Schall --who knows a few things about the topic, being one who writes books faster than most people can read them--about self-discipline.

Question #1: "How does one start to develop the type of discipline necessary in being responsible for one's own formation in regards to the highest things?"

Schall: Aristotle said that if we have good upbringing in which we learned about and practiced the basic virtues, we would recognize more easily the highest things and how to achieve them once we were old enough to be concerned with them. The question is curiously posed: "How to start, responsible for our own formation." We need the basic habits, courage, temperance, justice, prudence, liberality, control of our anger, wit, sociability, manners. We have to learn to see something besides ourselves. The first step is to be fascinated by even one thing besides ourselves that we would like to know about for what it is. Yves Simon has a wonderful section at the end of his A General Theory of Authority, entitled, "Freedom from the Self." This is the first step. Only then can we begin to know things "for their own sakes," that great classical advice to enable us to know more than ourselves.

Control of our anger? No wonder we're in such an ignorant age. %$!*@!