The Three Humble Values

The traditional trio of poverty, chastity and obedience can be repictured and extended as simplicity, continence and submission. And rather than taking these as vows, we can adopt them as values - which, without intending a pun, may be more valuable.

The three together make up what I can only call humility, for lack of a better overarching term, and so I refer to them as the Three Humble Values.

Renaissance writers referred to the three graces of life as Beauty, Restraint (or Love or Chastity) and Pleasure. I am told that some scholars believe the three figures dancing in Botticelli's painting Primavera represent these figures. There is a clear correspondence between Continence and Restraint, and I believe that there is also a correspondence between Simplicity and Beauty. Perhaps if we understood Submission better we would see its correspondence to Pleasure?

Vows vs Values

The monastic orders which arose in the Middle Ages vowed poverty, chastity and obedience. St Francis of Assisi extended similar vows to "lay" people - the so-called "third order of St Francis" or "tertiaries" (the first two orders are the monks of St Francis and the nuns of St Clare). This is still active today, in the Roman Catholic Church, the Anglican Church, and the Order of Ecumenical Franciscans or OEF (for those neither Catholic nor Anglican). The vows of tertiaries are to simplicity (rather than poverty), chastity (which for married tertiaries means faithfulness to their marriage partner, and for unmarried tertiaries means what it means for monks and nuns), and obedience - to the Order, the Church, and ultimately to God. Part of the rule is that obedience may not override the individual's conscience.

I was considering, at one time, becoming a postulant in the OEF, but decided against it partly because I felt that the vows and the Rule held the danger, for me, of becoming legalistic - not merely (as one tertiary, John C.G. Sturdy, puts it) "a helpful guide and a backstop against backsliding". I thought about a hypothetical situation (this was before I was engaged or had any idea that I would ever marry) where I would say to someone, "I'm not going to have sex with you before we get married because I made a vow" - which is an extrinsic reason. Intrinsic reasons, reasons which arise out of my values and the situation of being with someone I love and want to marry, would include "because I respect you and want to demonstrate to you that I value you in terms other than sexual", "because that would reduce the significance of our relationship", "because that would violate your trust in me", "because that would indicate a lack of ability to wait, endure and practice self-control". Even though the Rule is written by the person concerned, it still seemed extrinsic.

I don't necessarily oppose the taking of vows if that is a helpful practice for people, and if the vows arise out of pre-existing, deeply held values rather than attempting to impose these values on an unwilling heart which looks to the vows as an artificial means of reinforcement of less than wholehearted decisions. Not that important decisions don't need all the reinforcement they can get. There will be times, I'm sure, when my wedding vows in their bare selves will be a great help in reinforcing the decision to stay married through difficulties and struggles. "I won't because I made a vow" can be a good reason. But I saw taking the tertiary vows as a risky thing for me, because (I now realise) I wasn't fully committed in my own heart to what they were about. I felt I should be, but I wasn't. This would have made my vows into instruments of death, constricting me instead of helping me grow.

This is why I prefer to speak of deeply held values, perhaps expressed in a prayer commitment before God (which is subtly different from a "vow"), perhaps reinforced by writing them down and keeping them somewhere prominent, perhaps resembling a vow very closely, perhaps even put in the form of a vow if I'm sure that's what I want to do.

I also want to extend the traditional trio. The tertiaries already have one change of words and a second change of application: "simplicity" rather than "poverty", and "chastity" extended to include marital sexual expression. I would like to go further and speak of simplicity, continence and submission.

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