Rosso agrodolce

 

Jean Guitton and the return to what truly matters

We live in an era where we know how to measure almost everything, yet I believe we have lost the meaning of some of the most essential things. We measure success, productivity, efficiency, speed. We count days, commitments, missed opportunities. We search for tools to improve ourselves, strategies to achieve more, methods to manage our time better.

And yet, when faced with the fundamental questions of existence, we often find ourselves unprepared.

How do we learn to love without seeking possession? How do we remain faithful without turning fidelity into mere habit? How do we find the courage to confront what we fear? How do we preserve hope when reality seems to offer no sufficient reasons to hope?

Il libro della saggezza e delle virtù ritrovate, by Jean Guitton with Jean-Jacques Antier, brings our attention back to these questions. Love, friendship, courage, hope, fidelity, humility, simplicity, and perseverance are not ornamental relics of an outdated moral vocabulary, but invitations to question how we live.

To me, the profound meaning of such a reading lies precisely in its invitation to reclaim what seems obvious—and which, precisely because it is obvious, we risk no longer seeing.

Wisdom is not an archaeological relic

The word virtue can evoke a certain mistrust. It sometimes conjures an ancient world of rigid rules, moral prescriptions, and images of perfection that are difficult to reconcile with the complexities of being human. But perhaps this mistrust stems from the fact that we have confused virtue with respectability.

Being virtuous should not mean appearing blameless, boasting an unblemished biography, or concealing one's contradictions behind proper behavior. One can observe every convention without knowing how to be generous, how to listen, or how to truly understand another person.

Virtue is not a moral badge; it is a disposition born of choices and manifested in facing concrete situations.

Courage is not the absence of fear. It is refusing to grant fear the exclusive right to decide.

Humility does not mean self-contempt. It means knowing one's limits without reducing all that we are to them.

Perseverance does not consist in being stubborn at all costs. It is the ability to distinguish what deserves to be abandoned from what is truly worth continuing to build.

Wisdom, then, is not something that belongs only to great thinkers or an idealized past. It is a daily possibility, at once accessible and demanding. It does not necessarily call for heroic deeds. Rather, it demands constant attention to what we do with our days and with the people who walk through them.

Fidelity, or the art of remaining

Fidelity has always held a special place among the virtues that provoke my reflection. Our culture glorifies novelty: the new seems to promise more, while what endures risks appearing tired, outdated, devoid of emotion. Even in relationships, we are tempted to confuse intensity with depth, believing a feeling is authentic only as long as it sparks excitement—as if the fading of initial intoxication signaled something broken.

Yet fidelity often begins precisely when excitement is no longer enough.

To remain does not mean ignoring wounds, tolerating the intolerable, or surrendering one's dignity. Not all relationships should be preserved; not all promises deserve to be kept at any cost.

Authentic fidelity is far more demanding: it is the ability to recognize the value of what we have chosen, and not to treat it as a disposable commodity whenever it stops gratifying us. This holds true for our affections, but also for our ideas, our responsibilities, and our relationship with ourselves.

How often do we abandon a project not because it has lost meaning, but because it no longer provides immediate gratification? How often do we seek new sensations just to avoid the effort of deepening what we already have? Fidelity grants life what the mere pursuit of pleasure cannot guarantee: endurance.

And in endurance, sometimes, things finally reveal what they truly are.

Hope without naivety

Hope must not be confused with optimism—that spontaneous confidence that everything will turn out well—which is far too fragile a view for real life. Sometimes, demanding optimism can even feel insulting. Suffering does not always teach, loss does not always open up better possibilities, and some questions remain unanswered. The deepest hope does not deny any of this.

It is not the certainty that the future will fulfill our desires, but the refusal to believe that life's meaning has been exhausted, even when part of it seems shrouded in darkness. To hope is to still recognize a possible good, without demanding its guarantee in advance.

It is a disposition closer to trust than to prediction.

In this sense, hope does not detach us from reality: it prevents us from identifying reality entirely with what we are capable of seeing at any given moment.

Perhaps this is precisely its strength. It does not promise to erase pain, but it helps us not to surrender the entire definition of our existence to it.

The humility of not being the center of the world

Humility is another word we risk misunderstanding. It is neither the surrender of one's personality nor the obligation to make oneself small so as not to disturb anyone.

Rather, it is the ability to step away, at least occasionally, from the illusion of being the center of everything.

The ego possesses an extraordinary talent: it manages to turn even the most ordinary experiences into affirmations of its own importance. A slight becomes an unforgivable offense, a critique becomes an assault on our identity, a disagreement becomes a matter of principle from which we cannot retreat without feeling defeated.

How much energy do we expend trying to be right, when perhaps it would be far more fruitful to understand?

Humility opens a space where we can admit not knowing, acknowledge an error, and listen to someone unlike ourselves. It allows us to change our minds without experiencing every shift as a personal defeat.

It does not diminish dignity. It makes dignity less dependent on approval and the need to prevail.

And there is, in this, a liberating form of irony: the world manages to function quite well even when we do not have the final word.

Sometimes, especially then.

Rediscovering the measure of things

Reading Guitton returns me to a simple conviction: knowing what is good is not enough to live well. We can understand the value of friendship and act with selfishness. We can admire courage and let ourselves be ruled by fear. We can appreciate simplicity and spend our days chasing useless complications. The distance between what we recognize as right and what we actually manage to live is one of the deepest challenges of moral existence. This is why virtues are not merely concepts to be understood. They are possibilities to be practiced, dispositions to be cultivated, and balances to be rebuilt whenever circumstances pull us away from what we hold dear.

We do not become wise because we have read many books on wisdom. We do not become just because we can define justice. Knowledge is necessary, but it is not the same as transformation.

A book can point out a direction. The journey remains our own.

Perhaps that is also why certain readings leave a deeper mark on us: not because they reveal unknown truths, but because they return to us, with greater clarity, truths we had already encountered and that, through haste, weariness, or distraction, we had let slip away.

Wisdom as a form of attention

To sum up what I take away from this book, I would speak of attention, rather than a solemn definition of virtue.

Attention to the word we utter in anger. To the promise made lightly. To the person speaking to us who cannot find the right words. To the fear that keeps us from taking a necessary step. To the opportunity to acknowledge a mistake before pride hardens it into conviction.

Perhaps wisdom begins with this ability to not live completely distracted by ourselves. We do not need to become flawless—and that is likely impossible anyway. What is necessary, instead, is learning to recognize our inconsistencies without using them as an excuse to give up on bettering ourselves.

The title speaks of virtues rediscovered. And rediscovering is different from inventing.

It means that something, despite having faded from view, has not necessarily lost its worth. It means returning our gaze to what seemed too simple to deserve attention, and discovering that right there lies an essential part of life.

Perhaps wisdom does not lie in accumulating increasingly sophisticated answers, but in reclaiming the ability to distinguish what truly matters from what merely occupies our time.

Love, friendship, loyalty, courage, hope: these are not ornaments to be added to an already accomplished existence. They are some of the fundamental conditions through which life becomes humanly richer.

This is why this book enriched me so deeply within. It reminded me that the good life is not necessarily a spectacular life, nor one in which we manage to satisfy every desire. It is a life in which we strive, with all our limitations, for a certain coherence between what we recognize as important and the way we choose to exist in the world.

It is not a definitive conquest. There is no day when we can finally declare ourselves wise and retire from the toll of living. Wisdom demands daily upkeep, often quiet and unassuming, and almost never rewarded with applause. But perhaps that is precisely the point: the most essential things are not always those that make the most noise.

Sometimes life asks only that we remember what matters, and that we act accordingly.

Which, when all is said and done, is already a task demanding enough to fill an entire lifetime.