Salesian Literature

Chapter 2:  How the will controls the soul’s powers

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The will undoubtedly has an utterly despotic control over our powers of external movement; and obedience is unfailing, unless some outside thing prevents it.  We open and shut our mouths, move our tongues, feet, eyes – any part of the body whose motion we can control – and we do so easily, freely, as we please.

 

In the case of our sense, as well as our powers of nutrition, growth and reproduction, however, control is not so easily exercised; here, we need to use ingenuity, skill.  We cannot forbid our eyes to see, our ears to hear, our hands to touch, our stomachs to digest, our bodies to grow; they have no intelligence, those faculties, so they cannot yield obedience.  The man who is bent on using these powers must use his head!  Useless, obviously, to issue regulations about abstinence or moderation to throat or stomach; control the supply of food and drink from hand to mouth.  What each individual faculty will feed on, what its aim or intention will be, all that is given or withheld as reason dictates.  To prevent your eyes from seeing something, turn them away or close them – contrivances that compel them to the point of satisfying the will.  This is the meaning of our Lord’s teaching that some eunuchs have made themselves so for the love of the kingdom of heaven (Mt. 19:12).  Theirs is no case of natural impotence, but the result of ingenuity; and the will plays on this for the preservation of chastity.

 

Then, too, the will has some control even over intellect, over memory.  Of the many things that the intelligence can grasp, or the memory can recall to mind, the will decides which to attempt, which to avoid.

 

It is true that the will cannot govern intellect or memory, or entirely keep them in order, as it does hands, feet or tongue; the sensitive faculties, particularly the imagination, are not prompt, unfailing, in their obedience to the will – yet intellect and memory cannot function without them.  However, the will moves, uses and directs these intellectual faculties as it pleases, even though its authority finds itself undermined by the fickleness of the imagination (now misusing them, now subverting them) so that, as the apostle exclaimed: It is not the good my will prefers, but the evil my will disapproves, that I find myself doing (Rom. 7:15).

 

We are often forced, in this way, to bemoan that it is not the good our wills love, but the evil they hate, which fills our thoughts.

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