A CatholicG33k Reflection on The Training of the Will by Fr. Johannes Lindworsky, S.J.
We live in the age of the productivity stack.
Habit trackers. Focus modes. Pomodoro timers. Cold showers. Dopamine detoxes. Morning routines. Notifications reminding us to ignore our other notifications.
And beneath much of it is a familiar diagnosis:
I know what I should do. I just need more willpower.
I need to pray, but I scroll.
I need to get up, but I snooze.
I need to stop committing the same sin, but somehow I end up back in Confession saying nearly the same thing.
I need to start the difficult work God seems to be asking of me, but there is always something easier available.
So perhaps my problem is that my will is weak.
Fr. Johannes Lindworsky, S.J., turns that assumption on its head in The Training of the Will.
His central insight can be stated in four words:
“Values move the will.”
(The Training of the Will, p. 64)
That sounds simple. It is actually devastating.
Because if Lindworsky is right, the fundamental problem is not always that I am incapable of choosing.
Sometimes the problem is that, at the moment of choice, something else looks better.
And that has enormous consequences for the spiritual life.
Your Will Is Not a Muscle With a Morality Setting
We often imagine the will as something like a mental bicep.
Exercise it enough and it becomes stronger. Deny yourself dessert. Take cold showers. Wake up earlier. Force yourself through unpleasant tasks. Eventually, supposedly, you develop a giant spiritual will capable of crushing temptation.
Lindworsky is suspicious of this idea.
He does not deny the usefulness of practice, discipline, habit, or self-control. He devotes considerable attention to all of them. But he argues that sheer repetition does not create some mysterious reservoir of generic “willpower.”
What moves us is the good—or what appears to us as good.
That is remarkably compatible with classical Catholic teaching.
The will is ordered toward the good. We choose things because, under some aspect, they appear desirable to us. Even sinful choices involve pursuing some perceived good—pleasure, comfort, revenge, approval, power, escape—while rejecting the proper order of goods.
That is why temptation works.
The devil generally does not walk into your imagination saying:
“Hello. Would you like to destroy your soul today?”
The temptation presents something that looks good.
Relief.
Pleasure.
Recognition.
Control.
Comfort.
Just five more minutes.
One more click.
One more drink.
One more angry reply.
One more compromise that does not seem particularly serious right now.
The intellect may know something better. But at the moment of temptation, the lesser good can become enormous in our field of vision while the greater good fades into the background.
Lindworsky therefore writes:
“The most compelling motive is of no avail, unless it is present in the mind at the right moment.”
(The Training of the Will, p. 73)
That sentence is worth sitting with.
The Spiritual Battle Is Often a Battle of Memory
I can believe that God is my final end.
I can believe that mortal sin is infinitely worse than losing some temporary pleasure.
I can believe that Christ died for me.
I can believe that holiness is worth infinitely more than whatever a screen, appetite, ambition, or fantasy is offering.
But none of those truths helps much in the decisive moment if I have allowed them to become practically absent from consciousness.
This helps explain something Catholics have known for centuries: we need reminders.
A crucifix over the desk.
A holy card in the wallet.
The Angelus at noon.
The Rosary in the pocket.
The Brown Scapular.
Morning prayers.
An examination of conscience before sleep.
Friday abstinence.
Liturgical seasons.
Church bells.
Sacramentals.
A Scripture verse memorized well enough to appear when temptation appears.
These things are not Catholic clutter.
They help bring eternal realities back into consciousness.
They interrupt the illusion that the immediate moment is all that exists.
The modern world understands this principle extraordinarily well. Your phone is deliberately designed to make certain values present to your mind.
A red notification badge says: Someone may have noticed you.
An email alert says: Something may require your attention.
A shopping notification says: There is something you might enjoy owning.
An app streak says: Do not lose your progress.
Our devices are constantly resurfacing motives.
And then we wonder why our attention follows them.
The Church, in a profoundly deeper way, has always surrounded Christian life with reminders of the things that actually matter.
“Remember, man, that thou art dust.”
“Do this for a commemoration of me.”
“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.”
“Memento mori.”
The battle for the will is partly a battle over what we remember when it matters.
You Become Free by Loving Better
Catholic freedom is not the ability to select randomly between alternatives.
The Catechism describes freedom as “the power, rooted in reason and will, to act or not to act” and thereby to perform deliberate actions on our own responsibility. But it immediately directs freedom toward its perfection: “The more one does what is good, the freer one becomes” (CCC 1731, 1733).
That is very different from the modern idea that freedom means keeping every option perpetually open.
The saint is not less free because certain sins have become practically unthinkable to him.
He is more free.
Imagine saying that St. Thérèse would have been freer if she had experienced a stronger desire to rob a bank.
Absurd.
Freedom reaches maturity when the person sees the good clearly, loves it deeply, and can pursue it steadily.
So the ultimate goal of Catholic formation cannot simply be:
Become better at forcing yourself to do things you hate.
Christian formation must eventually transform what we love.
Virtue itself points in this direction. The Catechism defines virtue as “an habitual and firm disposition to do the good” (CCC 1803). Human virtues grow through education, deliberate acts, and persevering effort, while grace purifies and elevates them (CCC 1810).
The mature Christian life is therefore not endless white-knuckling.
Grace and virtue gradually bring the intellect, appetites, habits, and will into greater harmony.
We begin, however imperfectly, to want what God wants.
This Changes How We Fight Sin
Suppose I keep falling into the same sin.
My usual strategy may be:
Next time, try harder.
But Lindworsky makes me ask better questions.
What good am I actually seeking when I commit this sin?
What value does the temptation promise me?
Comfort?
Intimacy?
Escape?
Rest?
Vindication?
Excitement?
Control?
Then comes the more important question:
What greater good have I failed to keep before my mind?
This does not excuse sin. Lindworsky explicitly defends human freedom and responsibility (The Training of the Will, pp. 79-83).
But it helps us fight intelligently.
If temptation continually presents a vivid, immediate, emotionally charged good while my reasons for resisting remain vague abstractions stored somewhere in the theological attic of my brain, I should not be surprised that the battle is difficult.
The answer is not to invent a fake emotional high around religion.
Lindworsky warns against that too.
The answer is to make the true good more deeply understood, more personally possessed, and more intimately connected with the concrete situations of life.
Instead of merely saying:
“I shouldn’t gossip.”
I need to know why: because the person before me bears the image of God; because charity refuses to delight in another’s humiliation; because my tongue belongs to Christ; because I want to become the kind of person whose presence makes others safe rather than vulnerable.
Instead of:
“I have to pray.”
Perhaps:
God is actually here. He created me, redeemed me, sustains me, and desires communion with me—and I am being invited to speak with Him.
Now we are talking about values.
The Ignatian “Architecture” of the Soul
This is where The Training of the Will becomes particularly Catholic.
Lindworsky sees something psychologically brilliant in the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius Loyola.
The Exercises do not merely provide disconnected resolutions:
Be patient.
Be pure.
Be humble.
Pray more.
Control your temper.
Instead, they gradually organize the person’s life around a central value.
God.
And from that center comes another great organizing principle:
vocation—the concrete form in which this person will love and serve God.
Lindworsky describes the result as an interconnected “value complex,” in which the various motives of the Christian life reinforce one another (The Training of the Will, pp. 160-166).
Everything begins to connect.
My work connects to my vocation.
My vocation connects to service.
Service connects to Christ.
Christ leads me to the Father.
My struggle against sin protects that relationship.
My sacrifices become participation in Christ’s sacrifice.
My virtues become ways of imitating Him.
My daily duties become material for sanctification.
The Christian life stops looking like forty-seven unrelated spiritual tasks.
It becomes one life.
One direction.
One Lord.
That insight seems especially important now because fragmentation may be one of the characteristic diseases of modern life.
We have a work identity.
An online identity.
A family identity.
A parish identity.
A political identity.
A hobby identity.
A private identity.
Sometimes they barely speak to each other.
Lindworsky insists instead upon a unified life ideal.
For the Catholic, God cannot merely be one value competing alongside fitness, career, entertainment, relationships, money, and reputation.
God is the center according to which every other genuine good finds its proper place.
That is not fanaticism.
That is the First Commandment.
And Then Comes the Necessary Catholic Correction: Grace
There is, however, a danger in reading any book about training the will.
We can turn Christianity into self-optimization.
Build the right habits. Install the right mental framework. Optimize the inputs. Configure the environment. Execute the holiness protocol.
Congratulations: Saint v2.0 deployed successfully.
Except Christianity does not work like that.
Lindworsky himself repeatedly brings the reader back to supernatural realities, especially in his treatment of the Spiritual Exercises, prayer, the sacraments, and the action of the Holy Ghost.
And Catholic doctrine is emphatic: grace is necessary.
Our salvation is not an impressive project in self-engineering.
“Without me you can do nothing,” Our Lord says (John 15:5, Douay-Rheims).
And St. Paul gives us one of the most beautiful descriptions of grace and human action working together:
“For it is God who worketh in you, both to will and to accomplish, according to his good will.”
(Philippians 2:13, Douay-Rheims)
Notice both verbs.
To will.
And to accomplish.
God’s grace does not merely stand at the finish line applauding after we successfully manufacture holiness.
He acts within us.
The Catechism teaches that grace is God’s “free and undeserved help” enabling us to respond to His call (CCC 1996). Even our preparation to receive grace is already a work of grace (CCC 2001). And grace does not destroy freedom; it perfects it (CCC 1742).
So yes, train the will.
Build habits.
Remove occasions of sin.
Keep good motives before the mind.
Meditate.
Make concrete resolutions.
Practice virtue.
But underneath all of it must remain the prayer:
Lord, I need You even to desire You rightly.
That is Catholic asceticism.
Not passivity.
Not Pelagian self-salvation.
Cooperation.
Grace moves; we respond.
God gives; we act.
And gradually our freedom becomes more truly itself.
The Real Question: What Is Big Enough to Move Your Life?
Near the end of the book, Lindworsky writes one of his most striking sentences:
“The whole capital of the will lies in the motives.”
(The Training of the Will, p. 172)
If that is true, then perhaps the deepest examination of conscience is not merely:
How strong is my will?
Maybe it is:
What do I really see as valuable?
What occupies my imagination?
What do I repeatedly place before my eyes?
What good am I building my life around?
What do I remember when temptation comes?
What do I forget?
What motivates my career?
My marriage?
My friendships?
My use of technology?
My prayer?
My sacrifices?
My plans?
And at the center of all those questions stands Christ.
The Spiritual Exercises culminate not in the autonomous self finally mastering itself, but in surrender.
Lindworsky quotes the great Ignatian prayer:
“Take and receive … all my will.”
(The Training of the Will, p. 164; cf. St. Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, Contemplation to Attain Love)
There is the great paradox.
We spend all this time training the will only to discover what the will was ultimately made to do:
give itself away.
Not to an algorithm.
Not to appetite.
Not to ego.
Not to productivity.
Not even to our own carefully constructed image of the person we hope to become.
To God.
And perhaps that is the final secret of a strong Christian will.
Not endlessly repeating,
“I will. I will. I will.”
But learning, with Christ, to say:
“Not my will, but thine be done.”
(Luke 22:42, Douay-Rheims)
And meaning it a little more today than we did yesterday.
Sources
Johannes Lindworsky, S.J., The Training of the Will, trans. A. Steiner and E. A. Fitzpatrick (Roman Catholic Books), especially pp. 64-84, 149-172.
Catechism of the Catholic Church, nos. 1730-1742, 1803-1811, 1996-2001.
Holy Scripture, Douay-Rheims: John 15:5; Luke 22:42; Philippians 2:13.
St. Ignatius Loyola, Spiritual Exercises, especially the Principle and Foundation and the Contemplation to Attain Love.