Virtues are those dispositions that incline us to act as our best selves
according to our highest nature, which is to say, to act for truth and goodness and
ultimately for God.
But if we consistently choose against that, well, that's how we grow in vice.
St. Thomas says that vice happens in us when we follow the inclination of our animal
nature against the order of our reason.
We were created to be men and women following our reason because our reason is to be aligned
with a reality that is created and sustained by God who is truth, goodness and love itself.
We become enamored with vice and imprisoned to vice when we commit sins routinely, usually
in one or two areas of our life.
These other temptations we face.
Our temptations are all of them.
They're all individualized according to our own carnal dispositions.
St. Thomas holds that some people might be tempted more to gluttony, others might
be tempted more to drunkenness or sins of the flesh.
Every sin for St. Thomas is an inordinate act, an act that is not properly ordered,
an act that is not lined up with the reality of truth and goodness in its intention, its
object, or the activity, or in its circumstances.
St. Thomas draws all sorts of distinctions in the ways we sin.
We can sin against God.
We can sin against our neighbor.
We can sin against ourselves.
He also says that some sins are sins of thought.
Some sins are sins of word and some sins are sins of deed.
We sin in thought, word, and deed.
We sin also by doing something or failing to do something, which is to say
we commit sins of commission or sins of omission.
If we sin by omitting care for a loved one who depends on us, a child or an elderly grandmother,
that's a sin of omission against God and against neighbor.
And the more often we omit the care, we don't do the things we're bound to do, we should
do to take care of someone, the more we ignore the pangs of conscience, calling us to amend
ourselves and to care for those we love and those for whom we're responsible, the more
we grow in a vice, a vice of inhospitality or maybe even the vice of greed.
Routine sins develop vice within us.
Even though it is vice that disposes us to commit those same sins all the more.
Still, it is worse for St. Thomas Aquinas to sin than to have a vice because a vice
may be overcome.
A sin is done when it's done.
Not all sins are equal, of course.
St. Thomas knew and agreed with the distinctions of mortal and venial sin that the Church still
teaches today.
Mortal sins are those sins that turn us directly away from God, when we choose something serious
with full intent and freedom in place of God as our highest and best good.
Venial sins are those small sins.
We're not really turned away from God when we sin venially, but we're just slightly off,
slightly askew in some choice that doesn't keep us away from God but keeps us from going
straight away to God.
One of the examples St. Thomas uses is inordinate laughter.
Dominicans are a laughing bunch.
We're a joyful order.
But inordinate laughter, Sat. Thomas feared, the sort of laughter that is always at somebody's
expense, is often also cruel and mocking.
That's a venial sin for St. Thomas.
For St. Thomas, every lie that we speak are at least venial sins.
Even if you lie because you're afraid to tell the truth or because you're afraid to hurt
someone's feelings.
You may have a good intention there, but the activity of lying is always wrong for St. Thomas.
It's a venial sin to lie even to spare someone's feelings.
Virtues that are acquired through a long series of choices--here's the good news--
they don't get destroyed by one sin.
The courageous man doesn't become a coward because he sins once or twice.
It takes a lot of choices repeatedly to tear down a virtue, but the same thing is true
of a vice.
It takes a lot of good choices to turn a vice around.
Vice is the condition St. Paul was referring to when he said, "I do not do the good that
I want to do, but I do the very evil that I hate."
St. Thomas doesn't think vice can coexist with grace.
If you have a vice, but you've come to believe in the incarnation of Jesus Christ and his
suffering, death, and resurrection, you've come to believe in the mercy of God.
You're drawn to confession and you receive absolution.
You may still have strong carnal cravings.
You may even have what we call an addiction, but you don't have the vice.
The person stuck in a vice doesn't see it as a vice.
The person stuck in vice continues to sin and justifies that sin.
But when you're living in grace, grace frees you to see your vice clearly and to see that
it must go.
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