Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE Elizabeth Gilbert spent the year after a devastating divorce and a failed rebound relationship doing something most people only fantasize about: she negotiated a book advance, packed a bag, and assigned herself four months each in Italy, India, and Indonesia. In Italy she ate. In India she prayed. In Bali she tried to find a way to have both pleasure and devotion without destroying herself. The premise sounds like a fantasy itinerary, but the book earns its emotional weight through Gilbert's refusal to make the journey look easy. The collapse that preceded the trip — nights on the bathroom floor, a marriage she could not sustain, a grief she could not name — is rendered with enough specificity that readers who have never left their zip code recognize the interior territory. The book's core audience is women in their thirties and forties who have found that the life they built does not fit the person they have become, and Gilbert writes to them with the directness of someone who has been there and returned. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The Italy chapters rest on the conviction that pleasure, appetite, and beauty are not morally suspect — that learning to eat well in Naples, to sit in a piazza without a purpose, to let the body recover its capacity for delight is a form of restoration, not indulgence. This resonates with the CCMMP's premise that the body-soul composite is the site of human flourishing, not an obstacle to it. - **Fallen**: Gilbert is specific about the disordered desire at the root of her suffering — not just sadness, but an inability to be alone, a compulsive need for romantic attachment that she describes as indistinguishable from addiction. This is a recognizable account of concupiscence as structural disorder, not mere moral failure, and the book's honesty about this mechanism gives it clinical as well as personal interest. - **Fallen**: The dissolution of her marriage is treated almost entirely from the vantage point of her own unmet needs. The other party in the vows recedes. This is not a small gap — it represents the book's most serious anthropological blind spot, a reduction of justice to sentiment. - **Redeemed**: The ashram section in India, whatever its theological framework, presents sustained ascetical practice — hours of silent meditation, physical discipline, communal liturgy — as producing genuine interior change. Gilbert discovers that the self does not heal by attending to itself but by being broken open through a practice larger than itself. The movement is structurally consonant with what ascetical theology calls the purgative way, even if the vocabulary is Yogic rather than Carmelite. - **Prudence (personal wisdom)**: The Bali section adds an unexpected dimension: Gilbert's healing becomes outwardly directed when she raises money to buy a local woman a house. The book's most mature pages are here, where the protagonist stops narrating her inner life and starts acting for someone else's concrete good. SECTION THREE Margaret Archer[^1], in *Being Human*, argues that the human subject cannot survive a life of contradictory emotional demands without moving to second-order reflection — without learning to ask which of one's competing concerns deserves priority.[^2] Gilbert's memoir is, at bottom, an account of exactly this movement: she could no longer live inside the collision between her need for solitude and her need for attachment, and the year abroad is the crucible in which she works out a liveable order. Where Archer frames this philosophically as a structural necessity of human consciousness, Gilbert lives it as memoir, and the two accounts illuminate each other without either reducing to the other. Henri Nouwen[^3], by contrast, locates the same loneliness Gilbert describes — the terror of being unloved for oneself rather than for what one provides — in a movement toward God that the community makes possible, not in a solitary journey the self undertakes alone; Gilbert's resolution, achieved largely without ecclesial accompaniment, is precisely where a Catholic reader will feel the book's limits most sharply. ## References 1. Archer, Margaret (n.d.). *Being Human*. — "the human subject cannot live with a welter of contradictory first-order emotional commentaries, that is, ones whose heeding would damage other concerns" 2. Archer, Margaret (n.d.). *Being Human*. — "what it entails is striking a liveable balance within our trinity of inescapable concerns" 3. Nouwen, Henri (n.d.). *A spirituality of fundraising*. — "the roots of loneliness are very deep and cannot be touched by optimistic advertisement, substitute love images or social togetherness"
✓ Strengths
- ✓Gilbert's account of breakdown and rebuilding takes the interior life seriously as a real domain of human experience, not merely a symptom to be managed — the year-long journey across Italy, India, and Indonesia treats attention to the self as a legitimate form of moral labor.
- ✓The India section, centered on an ashram and disciplines of silent meditation, presents disciplined spiritual practice as genuinely transformative, not decorative — Gilbert discovers that sustained prayer and stillness change behavior, not just feeling.
- ✓The book takes embodied life seriously: pleasure in Naples, physical exhaustion in the ashram, sensory recovery in Bali are not presented as distractions from the inner life but as its proper medium, resonating with the CCMMP's insistence on the unity of body and soul.
- ✓Gilbert is honest about the disordered desire — compulsive romantic attachment, the inability to be alone, the frantic seeking of consolation in relationships — that drove her initial collapse, giving the narrative real diagnostic weight.
- ✓The Bali section, in which Gilbert serves a toothless medicine man and helps a local woman escape poverty, shows that genuine personal healing begins to orient a person outward, pointing toward the redeemed state's characteristic movement from self-absorption to gift.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book's operative framework is eclectic and syncretic: Hindu ashram practice, Balinese shamanism, and a loosely Christian background are treated as interchangeable routes to the same destination, which sits in direct tension with the Catholic Christian understanding that redemption is not a generic spiritual achievement but a participation in the specific grace of Christ.
- ⚠Gilbert frames the dissolution of her marriage primarily as self-actualization — she leaves because she no longer wants what she had — and the book offers no account of marital vows as binding commitments or of the other person's moral standing in that rupture, raising a direct concern under justice-commitment.
- ⚠The therapeutic anthropology beneath the memoir tends toward a Romantic individualism: the self is the primary arbiter of its own good, and spiritual directors, gurus, and medicine men are useful insofar as they confirm what the self already intuits. This is almost the inverse of the docility (prudence-teachability) that Aquinas identifies as integral to practical wisdom.
- ⚠Readers seeking frameworks for Catholic discernment of spirits, examination of conscience, or vocation will find nothing here that maps onto those categories — the book's account of 'God speaking' lacks any norm of interpretation beyond subjective consolation.