Good morning! Happy Thursday! Thanksgiving is a week from today so buy your turkeys and load up your Black Friday lists. The season of consumption is upon us; but you’ll make up for it a month later, with the season of giving.

Today, for our main course, we’ll see how Augustine pivots after his fig tree breakthrough. On the side we’ll munch on the Plato-inspired Harness Paradox. For dessert, we’ll shift lenses and open up Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Today’s breakfast should be tasty, since we’ve been building up this whole week through Augustine’s “not yet” prayer and now we get to see his action. So let’s dig in! Thought Breakfast is served!

We left off yesterday with Augustine’s plea to God underneath the fig tree. At that very moment, Augustine decided he was no longer going to tolerate his divided will. He decided once and for all to give up what he’d been holding onto, and start anew.

Pay attention to this: it’s not a simple decision that ignites Augustine’s action. If it were that simple, then his will would’ve been aligned long before this point. It’s the feeling inside him when he cries out to God that ignites this change. Hitting that rock bottom to the point where he’s begging God to deliver him from his divided will rewires his motivation. That’s the point where “not yet” hurts more than “finally now.”

So what does he do?

Notice how he didn’t do away with his desire altogether, he simply redirects it. Before, the idea of chastity felt like loss to Augustine. Now, chastity feels like alignment. He’s more satisfied by controlling his desire than fulfilling it, because he knows it’s better for him. The desire is still there, but the aim changes.

Aristotle explains what’s happening here very logically. Aristotle’s virtue ethics include the principle called the Golden Mean. The Golden Mean states that virtue does not come from an absence of desire. Instead, virtue comes from desire in its right measure and direction. This perfectly describes Augustine’s shift; moderating and redirecting his impulses.

Aquinas does a great job of explaining this, too, with his ordo amoris (rightly ordered love). Aquinas says that sin comes from disordered love; loving lower things too much and higher things too little. Virtue, according to Aquinas, is what just happens when someone loves appropriately. Aquinas would say that Augustine’s chastity is not a relinquishment of his desire, but a reordering of his desire toward the good.

The Stoics (Aurelius, Seneca, Epictetus, etc.) also give this notion a lot of emphasis. The stoics would say that discipline gives clarity to the mind. Releasing your grip on things you can’t control helps to guide your true will toward the higher good. Passion is not the problem, but misguidedness and confusion are.

To bring this to a more modern place, we can look to James Clear, author of Atomic Habits. James Clear’s Atomic Habits is all about this concept; forming new habits by reshaping what’s underneath, rather than forcing new habits into practice. Augustine doesn’t “cut off” his old habits but replaces them with disciplinary structures that support what he really wants in life. At the neurological level, we know that pathways in the brain (especially dopamine pathways) are built through repetition, not suppression. Modern psychologists would say that Augustine withdrew from public life because he understood that changing his environment would proportionately change his identity.

In modern behavioral science, true change begins when you no longer want to be your old self. When your current state becomes intolerable even to yourself. Augustine stopped tolerating his old self and we saw that in real time under the fig tree.

Discipline isn’t repression, it’s harmony. Augustine didn’t become disciplined by rejecting his desires, but by teaching his desire where to go. This is the actual unification of the will. You can’t kill your compulsions… but you can re-aim them.

You can’t control a wild horse by fighting it; only by harnessing and guiding it.

In other words: You overcome desire not by killing it, but by giving it something better to serve.

What seem like obstacles in our path are actually there to help us, but they can’t help if we resist them. If you fight the horse, the horse will fight you back. If you guide the horse, it will bring you to where you want to go.

This brings us back to Plato’s example of the charioteer from a few days ago. When our will is split, we have two different horses to guide; the orderly and the unruly. After his transformation, Augustine isn’t dealing with two competing horses anymore; his desire has been unified. This doesn’t mean you stop guiding the horse. Rather than falling asleep at the reins, you learn to steer.

For today’s Book Nook we’ll be diving into Book II of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Aristotle claims that virtue is formed by habit, not by nature or sudden insight. He says, “We become just by doing just acts…” This is a short but powerful and practical phrase, showing that it doesn’t take deep or complex logic to apply. He shows that virtue arises out of training desire rather than suppressing it and that we are “adapted by nature to receive virtue” but we perfect it through practice.

Let’s see how Aristotle describes the Golden Mean in Book II Ch4:

“Virtue is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency.”

“It is possible to fail in many ways… but to succeed is possible only in one way.”

Aristotle is saying that virtue is destroyed by excess or deficiency. If Augustine never sought to fix his bad habits, his indulgence would’ve been vicious by way of excess. However, if he attempted to fix his habits by forcing himself, then he would’ve been vicious by deficiency. Let’s take a practical example; the virtue of courage. If you lack courage, you’re a coward. If you have so much courage that you rush headlong into danger, then you’re no longer courageous; you’re just reckless. That’s what Aristotle means when he says you can fail in many ways but only succeed in one. Virtue is found at the mean between cowardice and recklessness. The same spectrum can be drawn for any of the other Aristotelian virtues.

Today’s breakfast was a lot to digest. If you take anything away from it, have it be this: the Golden Mean is not realized by simply reading about it. It definitely helps to identify what’s going on, but practicality comes from experience. I often think of the proverb: “Tell me and I’ll forget. Teach me and I’ll remember. Show me and I’ll learn.” Augustine felt the pain of his excess and deficiency, and because he allowed himself to feel that pain, he could align his will, love properly, and his virtues subsequently fell into the Golden Mean.

Consider your own virtues and vices:

Munch on that for today. Tomorrow, we’ll close this week’s series out with thoughtfulness, mindfulness, and prosperity when we find out where St. Augustine’s life went after he decided to take action. Have a great day, and come back tomorrow for a steaming hot plate of Thought Breakfast!

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Chef Ricky - Thought Breakfast

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