Training the Soul

Pietas Quest Question: What is the role of training the soul and community in sustaining pietas?

Direct Answer
Before pietas, the soul is left untrained and enthusiasm for virtue fades under the weight of the mundane and our baser appetites. After pietas, regular soul-training combined with mutual encouragement in community becomes the full-time discipline that sustains the fusion of duty and contentment, keeping us ready for moral action.

I notice that as those who do not train the body cannot perform the functions proper to the body, so those who do not train the soul cannot perform the functions of the soul… - Xenophon

Just yesterday, I heard a general officer whom I very much respect say, “Being brilliant at the basics is a full-time job.” He was referring to keeping Army formations ready for combat, but the same can be said of the cultivation of pietas.

Keeping one’s soul in a constant state of readiness to choose the right over the seductive and the good over the expedient is also a full-time job.

I’m sure we can all remember a time when we’ve come away from an uplifting conversation or an especially encouraging passage in a book feeling invigorated to do good and live well. But, over time, that enthusiasm bleeds away. We become bogged down in the mundane. We’re discouraged by our own failings and the imperfections of others. Our zeal threatens to give way to apathy or outright surrender to our baser inclinations.

The only answer to this problem that has ever proven effective for me is to spend time with those who share my same goal of cultivating pietas. Whether it be engaging with flesh-and-blood comrades or immersing ourselves in the writings of a fellow traveler, mutual encouragement has a compound effect and is perhaps the only force strong enough to overcome our primal appetites.