Laxity

Laxity is a lack of rigorousness or strictness.

Whatever tends to lighten one's burden must be examined carefully. For although such alleviation is sometimes justified and reasonable, it is most often a deceitful prescription of the evil inclination. ~ Moshe Chaim Luzzatto

Quotes

• The very beginning of the soul’s purgation is tranquility, in which the tongue is not given to discussing the affairs of men, nor the eyes to contemplating rosy cheeks or comely bodies, nor the ears to lowering the tone of the soul by listening to songs whose sole object is to amuse, or to words spoken by wits and buffoons—a practice which above all things tends to relax the tone of the soul.
  • Basil of Caesarea, Letter to Gregory, Saint Basil: The Letters, R. Deferrari, trans. (1926), vol. 1, p. 13

• Culture is at once the expression and the reward of an effort, and any system of civilization which tends to relax effort will suffer a corresponding depreciation of culture.
  • Georges Duhamel, In Defense of Letters (1937), E. Bozman, trans. (1939), p. 22

• As the peculiar faculty of the eye is to see form and color, and of the ear to hear sweet tones and voices, so is aspiration peculiar to the soul. To relax from ceaseless aspiration is sin.
  • Meister Eckhart, Sermons, Sermon 7, "Outward and Inward Morality"

• Whatever tends to lighten one's burden must be examined carefully. For although such alleviation is sometimes justified and reasonable, it is most often a deceitful prescription of the evil inclination, and must, therefore, be subjected to much analysis and investigation.
  • Moshe Chaim Luzzatto, Mesillat Yesharim (1738)

• ... that Jesuitry of mediocrity, which spontaneously works for the destruction of the uncommon man and seeks to break every arched bow or—even better!—to relax it.
  • Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, I. Johnston, trans., § 206

• In World War Two, the worst cases of collaboration weren’t among the real collaborators, that official Militia, but among the people at large, who were collaborators without knowing it, by a sort of laxity, an apathy.
  • Paul Virilio , Pure War (2008), p. 183

• The very possibility that there may exist timeless truths is a reproach to the life of laxness and indifference which modern egotism encourages. … Ideas which have their reference to the periphery or individuum, to the particular in space and time, are false and stand in the way of integration.
  • Richard Weaver, Ideas Have Consequences (Chicago: 1948), p. 68

See also

• Diligence
• Rigor