Vice: Sadness
Petition: Give us today our daily bread
Gift: Fortitude
Virtue: Hunger for Righteousness
Beatitude: Satiety (Well Fed)
The fourth vice, sadness, entails the transition from a perverse interior affectivity to its exterior manifestation. Fittingly, this stage of the remedy begins with the fourth petition: “Give us today our daily bread.” Hugh will now capitalize on the metaphor of eating and tasting food. Expanding on his initial description of sadness, Hugh notes that it “is weariness of soul from grief, when the mind, in a certain manner dissolved and embittered by its vice, no longer has an appetite for internal goods.” More forcefully than before, Hugh stresses, here how this vice entails the suppression of interior affectivity construed as spiritual appetite: “with all its vigor deadened,” he says, “the soul is no longer cheered with the desire for spiritual refreshment.” Such a soul is admonished to invoke “the mercy of the Lord” and his “habitual tender pity” that Jesus “may nourish the languishing soul with spiritual food.” Then, observes Hugh, “what the soul does not know how to seek when it is absent, it may begin to live by being aroused by a taste of its presence.” To the one who prays for this spiritual daily bread is given the Spiritual gift of fortitude, which “creates in the heart the hunger for righteousness.” Such a hunger, if consistently “enkindled” in this life, will be rewarded with “the full satiety of beatitude” in the next.
Material from Jeffrey P. Greenman, Timothy Larsen and Stephen R. Spencer, editors, The Sermon on the Mount: Through the Centuries from the Early Church to John Paul II (Grand Rapids: Brazos Press, 2007) 74-75.