Dr. John Tamilio III, Pastor

 © 2024, Dr. Tamilio

One of the great philosophers in antiquity is Aristotle.  His teacher was Plato.  Plato’s teacher was Socrates.  Aristotle became the tutor to Alexander the Great.  Suffice it to say, Aristotle is a rock star as far as philosophy goes.  He is part of an intellectual lineage that rivals royalty.  Aristotle started a school in Athens called the Lyceum.  It was the forerunner to the modern-day university.  People would come from all over the known world to share ideas, research, you name it.  Aristotle himself is someone who was interested in many subjects.  His work had a deep influence on the fields of aesthetics, biology, ethics, linguistics, literary criticism, metaphysics, physics, rhetoric, theatre, and even zoology, among numerous other disciplines.  (The list literally goes from A to Z!)  I have long been interested in Aristotle’s moral philosophy known as virtue ethics.

According to Aristotle, virtue is not something any of us are born with.  We acquire virtues.  We do so by emulating people who are virtuous and by practicing virtuous acts.  I used the word practice deliberately here because it is a practice.  The Greek word for all of this is phronesis, which, translated into English, means practical wisdom.  This is wisdom developed through repetition, cultivated by engaging in virtuous acts over and over again until they become second nature.  You do not learn virtue by reading a book.  It does not happen overnight.  You learn it by doing it.

The theologian Edward Farley writes about this in his book Theologia: The Fragmentation and Unity of Theological Education.  Farley looks at the Latin word habitus, which has many parallel meanings in English, the most obvious one is habit.  When many of us hear the word habit, we think of bad habits.  Habits can be good as well.  Smoking is a bad habit.  Adopting a regular exercise routine is a good habit.  Phillippa Lally, a psychologist and researcher at University College in London, Lally and her colleagues examined how long it takes for a practice to become a habit.  In an article she published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Lally and company claim that, “On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact.  And how long it takes a new habit to form can vary widely depending on the behavior, the person, and the circumstances.  In Lally’s study, it took anywhere from 18 days to 254 days for people to form a new habit.”[1]

So, in other words, you can start a new habit today, but it isn’t going to become a habitus for two-and-a-half weeks to eight-and-a-half months.  That is how practical wisdom works.

Do not confuse wisdom with knowledge.  Knowledge is factual information that you typically learn in school or through self-study.  If you know, for example, that “On September 2, 1945, representatives from the Japanese government and Allied forces assembled aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay to sign the Japanese Instrument of Surrender, which effectively ended World War II,” then that is a bit of knowledge you have.[2]  Wisdom is different.  It is a way of thinking.  It is a way of processing information.  It happens over time.  You can’t learn this from a book.  You learn it by doing it.

Aristotle died about 320 years before Jesus was born.  What does any of this have to do with what the Bible teaches?  Were the biblical writers familiar with the great, Hellenistic philosophers?  Was Aristotle familiar with biblical material that predated Jesus?  It’s hard to say.  According to William Smith, “Greek philosophy arose just after the Hebrew prophets closed their oracles, Malachi being contemporary with Socrates.”[3]  Therefore, the Greeks probably were not conversant with what the Hebrew prophets wrote.  However, if Aristotle did read the prophet Jeremiah, I think he would nod in agreement with today’s lesson.

Here, the prophet talks about a covenant that is quite different than the one that God established with the Hebrews.  That covenant was established with the Torah (the Law).  This new covenant will also be a “written” covenant, but it will not be penned on papyrus or chiseled onto stone tablets.  Jeremiah tells us that it will be written upon our hearts.

Oh, the heart!  We see this as the seat of our emotions: the organ responsible for love and a sundry of other feelings.  Even the word “heart” means the center or crucial point, as in the saying, “We need to get to the heart of the matter.”

The heart is also seen as the seat of the soul (to some).  Consider, for example, that beautiful quote that appears on the first page of Saint Augustine’s Confessions: “Thou hast made us for thyself, O Lord, and our heart is restless until it finds its rest in thee.”  In other words, our hearts have a natural desire to know God, to be in relationship with God, to find solace in the presence of the sacred.

Voltaire once said, “If god did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him.”  He meant several things by this.  Voltaire was interested in how humans justified all kinds of evil on account of it must be part of God’s plan.  He argued against philosophers like Leibniz who believed that we lived in the best of all possible worlds and that everything that happens does so for a reason.  If you’ve ever read Voltaire’s Candide, then you may remember the debate.  It is not unlike the idea put forth by Sigmund Freud that we created God in our image as a sort of wish fulfillment: we need God as a Father figure to give order to our lives.  Karl Marx, a contemporary of Freud, thought that religion was a type of drug: an opiate for the masses to justify their existence.  It keeps us in check.  Workers are less likely to rebel against their masters if they feel as if class structure is ordained by God.

We do have a desire for God, but not for the secular reasons Freud, Marx, Jean-Paul Sartre, and others suggest.  We long for a relationship with God, because God reached out to us first.  He has placed that desire in us.  We were created with it.  As the writer of the First Letter of John (4:10) states, “This is love: not that we loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as an atoning sacrifice for our sins.”  God loved us so much that he sent Jesus to absolve us — and the new covenant in Christ does not consist of hard and fast rules that need to be learned by heart, because they are already in our hearts.  The new covenant about which Jeremiah speaks will be written on our hearts.

The heart.  The organ of love.  The center of who we are.  That which keeps our lives pulsating forward.  People can be cold-hearted, warm-hearted, or soft-hearted.  They can be open-hearted, faint-hearted, or light-hearted.  Some are broken-hearted, heavy-hearted, or lion-hearted.  Others are kind-hearted, half-hearted, or whole-hearted.  We are God-hearted, because our hearts are filled with the love of God.  The law of God has been etched on our hearts.  It contains a promise.  That promise is that we are loved and cherished beyond words.  It shapes our entire being into a way of being: a habitus.  We were created with a purpose: created out of love to love.  That is our habitus — and there is nothing better than that!  Amen.

[1] James Clear, “How Long Does It Actually Taketo Form a New Habit (Backed by Science),” taken from jamesclear.com.

[2] “Japanese Instrument of Surrender,” from the National Archives Foundation, taken from archivesfoundation.org.

[3] William Smith, Smith’s Bible Dictionary, rev. ed. (London: J. Murray, 1863), 95.