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You are made for greatness. Not mediocrity. Not mere goodness. Greatness. The structure of your life, your human nature, your unique body, your emotions-everything about you is oriented to your perfection. But how are we to reach greatness? In this thought-provoking book, Father Ezra Sullivan provides the forgotten key to discovering the soul's potential for greatness: heroic habits. A habit is what makes us into saints or sinners. Just as the body can become stronger through exercise and effort, or weaker through wounds or neglect, so the entire person can develop an almost permanent state of goodness or evil through habituation to virtue or vice. Habits both reveal and shape who you are; they speak about what you have been, and they predict what you will be.Unique for a spirituality book, Heroic Habits explores and combines three realms of thought: The psychological science of habits St. Thomas Aquinas's theory of habits Practical advice on habits Utilizing humor, everyday examples, and serious scholarship, Fr. Ezra gets to the root of one of the things most mysterious to us-ourselves. Because habits are biological, psychological, and spiritual realities, Heroic Habits provides a panoramic vision of the whole human person. Front and center are why we are the way we are, how we make habits, how habits influence our lives, and how to develop good ones and eradicate bad ones, all with the help of God, as well the saints, who lived out their good habits heroically and provide a blueprint for you to do the same. Heroic Habits will help you achieve long-lasting insight about yourself, to open yourself to the transforming grace of Christ, and to develop the good habits you have always desired.

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Catholic Church

Philosophie et théologie

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Publié par	TAN Books
Date de parution	07 septembre 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781505117493
Langue	English

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Heroic Habits
Discovering the Soul’s Potential for Greatness
Fr. Ezra Sullivan, OP
TAN Books Gastonia, North Carolina
Nihil obstat
Basil Cole, OP
Censor deputatus
Imprimi potest
Ken Letoile, OP
Prior Provincial, Dominican Province of St. Joseph
The nihil obstat and imprimatur are official declarations that a book or pamphlet is free of doctrinal or moral error. There is no implication that those who have granted the nihil obstat and the imprimi potest agree with the content, opinions or statements expressed therein.
Heroic Habits: Discovering the Soul’s Potential for Greatness © 2021 Ezra Sullivan, OP
All rights reserved. With the exception of short excerpts used in critical review, no part of this work may be reproduced, transmitted, or stored in any form whatsoever, without the prior written permission of the publisher. Creation, exploitation and distribution of any unauthorized editions of this work, in any format in existence now or in the future—including but not limited to text, audio, and video—is prohibited without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Unless otherwise noted, Scripture quotations are from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible—Second Catholic Edition (Ignatius Edition), copyright © 2006 National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Cover design by Caroline K. Green
Cover image: The last judgment: detail of the Saints in Paradise, (tempera on wood, 1432-1435), Angelico, Fra (Guido di Pietro/Giovanni da Fiesole) (c.1387-1455) / Italian, Luisa Ricciarini / Bridgeman Images
Library of Congress Control Number: 2021937283
ISBN: 978-1-5051-1747-9 Kindle ISBN: 978-1-5051-1748-6 ePUB ISBN: 978-1-5051-1749-3
Published in the United States by TAN Books PO Box 269 Gastonia, NC 28053 www.TANBooks.com
Printed in the United States of America
To the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mater Misericordiae
C ONTENTS
Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: A Saint’s Habit
Why This Book Is Different
Why This Book Will Help You
What to Expect
Chapter 2: Habit Models
Circular Thinking: Habits and Loops
Habit Loops and Habit Change
Linear Thinking: Actions and Arrows
The Best of Both Models
Chapter 3: Emotional Habits
Lower Animals and Non-Emotional Habits
Higher Animals and Purely Emotional Habits
The Human Animal and Intellectual-Volitional Habits
Emotional Habits for Humans
Taming Your Habits
Chapter 4: Mindful Habits
Distinctions and the Act of Judgment
Reasoning and Logic
What Shapes the Mind
Mental Habits and Schemas of Falsehood
Mental Habits and Schemas of the Truth
Chapter 5: Heroic Habits
Heroism and Power
Principles of Heroic Habits
Developing Heroic Habits
Heroic Habits in Different Shapes and Sizes
Chapter 6: Devilish Habits
Becoming Wicked: the Six Stages of a Bad Habit
Evil Thoughts
Evil Words
Evil Deeds
Incontinence and Vice
Despair or Presumption
Climbing Out of the Pit
Chapter 7: Habits for Life
The Habitual Readiness to Flourish
Good Habits Feel Bad at First
The Habit of Prayer
Epilogue
Notes
F IGURES AND T ABLES
Science, Theory, and Practice
Basic habit loop
Antecedent, Behavior, Consequent
Thomistic habit loop
Lower animal powers (basic)
Lower animal powers
Lower powers in a human
Higher animal powers
Kinds of emotions
Human powers
Events, beliefs, and consequences
Chained habit loops
Habit loop of faith
Habit loop of holiness
Hell-bound path of sin
Thoughts, behaviors, consequences, and remedies
Vice, Incontinence, Continence, and Virtue
Planting, bearing fruit, conservation
A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
W ith sincere gratitude, I would like to thank the many people who helped this book come about: Fr. Ken Letoile, OP, Prior Provincial of the Province of St. Joseph; Fr. Glenn Morris, OP, Prior of the Convent of Saints Dominic and Sixtus in Rome (the Angelicum community); Fr. Basil Cole, OP, a good friend and the censor for this work; John Murdock, an unfailing friend and brother-in-arms; Michael Sullivan, my biological brother and dear friend, who read every word of this book and gave sage advice (when are your books coming out?); the Dell’Aira, Sheaf, and Umberg families, for their friendship and support; many other religious brothers and sisters, and family and friends, not least the Carmelite Monastery in Georgetown, California. A special word goes to John Moorehouse (+2020), who called me out of the blue to solicit a book for TAN Books, and to Brian Kennelly and the staff at TAN Books, whose hard work helped realize Moorehouse’s dream.
C HAPTER 1
A S AINT’S H ABITS
H e hurriedly dipped his quill in the ink-pot, trying to remember the last words that echoed in his ears. Almost without thinking, the scribe allowed the wisdom to flow from his hand onto the yellow vellum. In a glance, he assessed his progress: his writing trailed more than half-way down the animal skin that had been scraped and stretched and now bore the marks of a miniscule script. He took a breath and blocked out the sound of the three other scribes scribbling away; he forced himself not to consider what the speaker was saying to the fellow next to him. Instead, he focused on what he had to write: “Therefore, there can be such a disturbance of anger that the tongue is entirely impeded from the use of speech. The result is being tight-lipped.”
“I’m almost there myself,” the scribe thought.
He had been sitting on the unpadded bench in the unheated room for three hours. The skin on his knuckles was cracking from the dry cold, and his foot felt itchy. His stomach growled: it was a fasting day. With his peripheral vision, he could see the speaker, dressed in white, overflowing with buoyant energy and sober passion.
“Doesn’t he ever get tired? Isn’t he hungry? The sacristan told me he was up all night praying. He’s probably forgotten to eat again. God, come to my assistance!”
From his wandering thoughts, the friar brought his attention back to the page. Just as he was finishing up a paragraph, the speaker approached the scribe’s desk.
“Brother Reginald, mark a new section. Prologue. Now that we have considered human acts and passions, we will now consider the principles of human acts. The first of these is the intrinsic principle of human acts—namely, habits.”
Making small marks on the parchment, Reginald replied, “Yes, Brother.” He took another breath, flexed his fingers, and felt his heart lighten from being closer to his friend. Then he plunged back into the text that would become known as the Summa Theologiae of his fellow Dominican, Thomas Aquinas.
***
Aquinas’s impact on the world can hardly be calculated. His contemporary Bernard Gui would write, “The teaching of Thomas has become an object of admiration for almost the entire world. It instructs the studious, corrects the wayward, guides the wanderer. For he teaches divine matters in the way which most aptly and discreetly employs all those human means which can serve in the work of men’s salvation.” Gui argued that the brilliance and subtlety of Aquinas’s intellect was manifest in “his vast literary output, his many original discoveries, his deep understanding of Scriptures.”
At the height of his powers, Aquinas was phenomenally prolific. In terms of a sheet of today’s printer paper, Aquinas was writing an average of nearly twelve and a half pages of words a day, every day, all year long. Many scholars would be content if even one of their books were read by specialists in a hundred years. By the end of his short life—less than fifty years—Thomas Aquinas had composed a series of lengthy treatises that are still considered among the most important and profound works of theology and philosophy ever written. Nearly eight hundred years later, they remain influential around the world to specialists and amateurs alike.
What was the secret of Thomas’s productivity?
We can quickly dismiss the idea that he wrote so much simply because he had secretaries at his disposal. Assistants may have multiplied Aquinas’s strength, but it was his strength . According to Gui, “His memory was extremely rich and retentive: whatever he had once read and grasped he never forgot; it was as if knowledge were ever increasing in his soul as page is added to page in the writing of a book.” In Thomas’s language, he was the “primary” human cause of the text, and the scribes were collaborative “secondary” causes. Thousands of pages, tens of thousands of objections and replies, and millions of words were written because there was something in Thomas Aquinas that gave him the power to harness his mnemonic energy, as well as that of his secretaries, to produce an astounding result.
What was in him?
We have already seen his answer: habits. For Aquinas, a good habit was not a mere repeated pattern of behavior but also the principle underlying them. A habit is the coiled spring of interior strength, the source of personal flourishing, the “intrinsic principle of human acts.”
Aquinas was able to do what he did because of his habits. More than that, he was able to be who he was because of his habits. “A minimum of time allowed to sleeping and eating,” Gui notes, “and all the rest given to prayer or reading or thinking or writing or dictating.” While every great person has at least some great habits, Aquinas went a step further than nearly all of them. He unlocked the secret of habits. In addition to developing and exercising his habits to an extraordinary degree, he gave us his own insights about how we might achieve greatness in our own way—and he did so above all in his Treatise on Habits .
Aquinas’s Treatise on Habits in his Summa Theologiae is one of his greatest and most unique contributions to Catholic ethics. No other great Catholic writer has a treatise on habits—not Augustine, nor John Chrysostom, nor Bonaventure; not Scotus, nor Robert Bellarmine, nor Alphonsus Liguori; no Chur