Use your gifts and be happy

While I'm thinking of it, here are the virtues, gifts, and beatitudes St. Thomas associates with each other:

1. The gift of wisdom corresponds to the virtue of charity and to the beatitude, "Blessed are the peacemakers."
2. The gift of understanding corresponds to the virtue of faith and to the beatitude, "Blessed are the pure of heart."
3. The gift of counsel corresponds to the virtue of prudence and to the beatitude, "Blessed are the merciful."
4. The gift of fortitude corresponds to the virtue of fortitude and to the beatitude, "Blessed are they who hunger and thirst after justice."
5. The gift of knowledge corresponds to the virtue of faith and to the beatitude, "Blessed are they who mourn."
6. The gift of piety corresponds to the virtue of justice and to the beatitude, "Blessed are the meek."
7. The gift of the fear of the Lord corresponds to the virtue of hope and to the beatitude, "Blessed are the poor in spirit."

Some of the connections seem pretty straightforward. Fortitude and counsel are pretty obviously related to fortitude and prudence.

Some connections are more obscure. Wisdom, for example, "sets things in order," and peace, in St. Augustine's famous phrase, is the tranquility of order.

Some, I have to say, are stretches of the sort you wind up making when you're trying to build these parallels. Sure, peacemakers will be called children of God, and sure, we are children of God insofar as we bear the likeness of His only-begotten Son, and sure, His on;y-begotten Son is Wisdom Begotten. So the reward is "fittingly ascribed" to the gift, or at least not unfittingly ascribed, but that particular reward could be fittingly ascribed to most or all of the gifts.

The most curious one, to my mind, is the association of the gift of knowledge with, "Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted." For St. Thomas, the gift of knowledge is a certitude of judgment about created things, and he suggests that, when you judge rightly about created things, you realize how often you sin through them, which causes sorrow, and then you are consoled, because you start using created things properly. He gets this -- and much of the above list -- from St. Augustine, who simply says that, with knowledge of created things, "the loss of the highest good is mourned over, because it sticks fast in what is lowest."

Labels: Charisms and Gifts

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