To love virtue...

Repeatedly, I've observed a well-established culture of loving "creatures comfort" in some Christian circles and I'm somewhat ambivalent towards it. I'm referring to liking good food, good wines, good hotels, trips abroad, great jewelry and that sort of stuff. Virtue, it seems, is something that is done because we have to, but deep down, we think it sucks.

Wait a minute, I thought: does anyone here love virtue? It seems to me that engaging in the messy business of being fully alive is way more interesting than many of the things just mentionned. People, this is the Holy Grail, this is the Life Abundant, wake up!

On the same day, I opened one of my most questionnable and devilshly uber-Machiavellian books, Robert Greene's The Art of Seduction. On some levels, I really like this book because it brilliantly exposes many the motivations of modern Western women and men. Seduction, then, simply amounts to fulfilling the desires for which people long, and Robert Greene has quite an extensive catalogue, full of trenchant observations.

Yet, each time I open The Art of Seduction, I'm reminded of C.S. Lewis' answer when asked if he would write some more Screwtape letters. He said no. What's more, he said, pinpointing the operative logics of Hell is fairly easy and it's not productive to the Christian agenda. The real art would be to make an equally compelling book about the operative logics of Heaven.

Anyway, in one chapter, Robert Greene was discussing the longing to escape virtue. He argues that most people are reluctantly leading moral lives, but they wish they didn't. What is seductive is the impression of a person (or an environment) that doesn't follow the moral life of being reasonnable, of giving to charity and that kind of stuff, but instead just indulges.

So now, the moral life has been reduced to a guilt-trip-inducing shadow constantly hovering over us. Things we should do... things we really should do... but keep pushing into some undefined future.

So my question remains: does anyone out there love virtue? Like C.S. Lewis's unwritten book about the logics of Heaven, I find it relatively easy to pinpoint the problem, and much harder to write down the solution. So the post stands unwritten. I read these lines and I'm thinking about the post that should be. I'm pregnant with things to say, but I don't know what they are. I guess I'd like to write the operative logics of Heaven. This is my closest attempt so far.