The Disciplined Heart - Chapter 2

This chapter, " Love and Self-Knowledge", deals in large part with the danger of self-deception. She uses two stories - "The Lame Shall Enter First" by Flannery O'Connor and "Father Sergius" by Leo Tolstoy - to illustrate the depth and power of a person to deceive themself about who they are, and how this filters outward and colors the way in which other people and the world are interpreted. It is a destructive fiction-making that prohibits love. For example, in the O'Connor story the main character, Sheppard, believes himself to be a good father who provides everything his son, Norton, could need or want after his mother passed away. So when he witnesses Norton counting his coins, he interprets this hoarding behavior as selfishness, rather than "pathetic attempts of a grieving child to build some fragile security." (44) His desire to perceive himself in one way causes him to think and act in ways that generate the exact opposite perception of him by other people.

How often do we all do this? I know I certainly have some deeply held beliefs about myself that lead me to some less than generous conclusions about other people's behavior!

So how do we get to this point? Self-deception seems terribly incoherent, as we would be "both believing and not believing the same proposition at the same time." (45) Simon points to the philosopher Alfred Mele, who says that self-deception occurs when the desire for a false belief to be true causes one to look only at/for evidence that confirms the truth of the belief, or to interpret evidence only in such a way as to support the belief. It's all very subtle, really. And so convoluted and deeply entrenched in our minds that it is quite difficult to know when we're doing it!

Given the immensity of the task of knowing ourselves and the sometimes overwhelming reality of self-deception, what can we do? Well, for one thing, we must engage in the task of reflection. Self-knowledge, she claims, is intimately connected with progress in virtue. (Virtue being defined here "character traits that enhance one's ability to live out one's destiny." (41) ) To become more virtuous is to face our vices - the evil in us - and "[t]he more we reflect, the more we shall transform ourselves from being the instruments of [evil] to being [its] controllers." (58)

But reflection on its own can be a dangerous thing; our vices can influence our introspection. For example, "[m]alicious people who engage in reflection are likely to become adept at insight into other people's weaknesses, especially those whom they dislike, but may be unable to see this as itself an instance of their own maliciousness." (58) Reflection alone could in this way increase our self-deception rather than draw us closer to truth.

At this point in the chapter, I felt a wee bit despairing... how in the world can we ever cut to the truth of it all if all of our tools are dull and dangerous? Happily, there is more. Here we begin to clearly see some of the connections between love and humility: as we allow ourselves to become vulnerable enough to hear critique from our community, and also start taking steps of both personal and communal confession, that dynamic relational interplay hones us. It starts becoming easier to see where our thinking diverges from reality, and community support can be a major factor as we begin the hard work of change.

We also can't underestimate the value of the traumatic moments when we fail in a spectacular fashion. Those times disallow us the luxury of pretense, as we are faced with an obvious display of our weakness and sin. Augustine actually believed that overt sin is less spiritually dangerous than pride hidden beneath a veneer of good behavior. That makes sense to me.

I feel as though I've skipped through this chapter so quickly, I hope I pulled out at least some of the main points. I'd be really curious to hear anyone's thoughts about self-knowledge and how well we can actually know ourselves, particularly any thoughts on the good/bad points of introspection.

I'll finish it up with one last quote from the chapter:

In order to know who we are, we do not need to strive for unemotional objectivity, but rather to cultivate the correctives to pride: the faith that allows us to face the truth about ourselves because the depth of our brokenness finds its answer in grace; the hope that, though we often wander from the path, grace will make straight what we have bent; and the love, compassion, and gratitude that follow from seeing our own and others' stories as part of God's story. (65)