There’s this funny revival of Aristotelian virtue ethics going on in the Church today, typified by N. T. Wright. The Nicomachean Ethics, while more approachable than most Greek philosophy, is as dry as the Metaphysics, so I’m going to pass over my due diligence here and throw out an interesting anomaly.
The virtues we like to take up from the Greeks are not quite the same ones they would have clung to. Wright’s After You Believe (Virtue Reborn, before they decided to market it to Americans) is a little choosy about its use of virtue ethics. After deploying Hamlet’s suggestion that we put on virtue even when we lack it against Luther’s skepticism (an unfortunate choice, this weak-willed king who pressures himself right into suicide), Wright waxes on transformation, renewal, and the like. There are a few suspicious steps in his application of Aristotle to Christianity – first, that he glosses over Aristotle’s concern for contemplation (more here), but also he’s a little vague on which virtues we should prize.
For instance, what about courage? Of the three segments of the Greek city – craftsmen, warriors, and rulers – each had its own arete, a word originally meaning roughly “excellence in one’s role” which later formed the basis of the concept of virtue (analysis here based on History of Ethics, MacIntyre). The craftsman’s arete was exceptional handiwork, but the soldier’s was courage. In early twenty-first century capitalism, it’s not hard to guess which of these two would best survive in a Christian appropriation of “virtue ethics.”The more intellectual churches now in American Protestantism place a high value on excellence in vocation, but you don’t often hear churches talking about courage, apart from perhaps evangelism or “reproof.”
There are other moral ideas and virtues necessarily left behind. Flatterers were despised in premodern times, and one might instead try to cultivate a habit of frank, honest opinions. Treachery was the lowest circle of Dante’s hell, but we now call it “whistleblowing” or “freedom fighting,” and are perhaps right to do so. You still hear churches preaching about the dangers of lust, one of the Seven Deadlies, but rarely about gluttony, sloth, or wrath. Prosperity Gospel is not the only Christianity too pervaded by the concerns of its age. Take churches which extol vocational excellence, and compare this theme to the Rule of St. Benedict’s statement that any monk becoming proud of his craft must cease practicing it until he regains humility. It’s genuinely confusing, and it lends credence to Francis Spufford’s statement that God’s love “knows the best of me, which may well be not what I am proud of, and the worst of me, which is not what it has occurred to me to be ashamed of.” It may be helpful to occasionally judge ourselves by the alien priorities of times past (e.g., if gluttony is as bad as greed, I’m in rough shape), and to let the past’s concerns expose the ways Christianity has been too determined by zeitgeist. But these concerns are also confusing – where to turn?
There are three distinctly Christian virtues with a privileged place in our religion: faith, hope, and love. Wright places them above the pagan virtues, but he never quite indicates why, apart from the Bible saying so. For him, we learn them the same as how we learn pagan virtues – practice, like a musical instrument – but they’re just, you know, better than things like courage or temperance. But perhaps one reason these “virtues” are prized (not virtues; the Bible calls them “spiritual gifts,” in borderline intentional contrast to practiced virtues) is that they are not developed within or mastered like a skill. They are not a habit of controlling mind and body (prudence, temperance), controlling policy or people (justice, sort of) or mastering fear (courage), but they are outward-focused. They have an object and perhaps they acquire them from that object, rather than from practice. All three look to God: courage and temperance stand on their own, but faith is always faith in; hope, hope in; love, love of. They take us outside ourselves, thank God, and what is their source? Faith is a natural response when someone proves herself trustworthy and reliable; hope is hope in a reliable promise, and love both reaches out toward what is lovely and naturally reciprocates when someone first loves us.
I want to play guitar, and grace won’t get me there. Neither will it (necessarily) make me prudent, courageous, or temperate. Those skills, inhering in me, will pass away. Wright never mentions the reason love endures; it joins us to God, an object eternally lovely. Thank God, my faith, hope and love comes from not from myself, nor discipline, nor actions, nor habits, but from the One who elicits them.
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21 responses to “All the Lonely Virtues, Where Do They All Belong?”
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Very nice short treatment of this. Much appreciated.
So good, love that Spufford quote too, thanks!!!
Thank you Will.
I really appreciate you taking the time to say this because I was rather annoyed by Wright’s use of Aristotle in relation to living out the Christian life. My only objection is referring to the NE as being as dry as his Metaphysics! I struggled to get through Metaphysics but the Nicomachean Ethics held my interest.
I second that on the Spufford quote. Wow.
Thanks for this Will. Excellent!
Yes. Thanks Will.
You get it right about ‘selectivity’ in choosing the virtues. However, courage, temperance, prudence, etc. are also always courage ‘for’, temperance ‘for’. It depends how the object of pursuit is interpreted.
The virtues pursue the beautiful, as you have said elsewhere. If we pursue it with courage (with a willingness to die), than we ultimately pursue something beyond the self. Such desire is ultimately other oriented.
Faith, Hope, and Love, gifts of God are also practiced. Those classical virtues act as a framework. I practice faith in temperance or kindness, but I need courage to follow through….without courage (heart), I halt my practice because of fear and practical doubt (i.e., lack of faith at work).
A low anthropology should still get the human structure of action or soul correct, which is to say that the framework of action, action which poses any threat to the ego is partly informed by courage.
Ultimately, the gifts of the Spirit orient and guide the overall structure. The pursuit of virtue takes the form of desire to continually draw near to God. Contemplation becomes not an abstracted looking at Beauty, but at the Beauty of God and neighbor.
I would put it this way, that we pursue virtue, not to become excellent, though this might be part of the struggle, but because it is the mode in which we pursue the vision of God, even if we do experience this pursuit “under the sign of struggle”. Without that struggle, faith becomes a fairytale. We willingly undergo cruciform failure in love of God and Neighbor, not as a project of the self, but to continue to ask, knock, seek. In faith, our efforts appear in their selfish imperfection and yet help to facilitate the experience of repentance, forgiveness, and living in community.
It is not enough to think, we want to eat and taste. I
Will,
I’d love to know if you think we are on the same page or not. I agree with you that the idea of the NE as a success structure is inauthentic to our cruciform sanctification, but also see NE as a correct anthropology or analysis of the nature of the soul. That is, the Holy Spirit enlivens us through the gifts of Faith, Hope and Love, and our response is enabled too by the Spirit. We must than live out the response in the forms of Courage, prudence, justice, temperance…each which aid each other and which too me seem quite biblical.
What are your thoughts?
Totes on that, Brandon. I think we need more clarification because there seems to be an almost kneejerk reaction to oughts and the telos of human existence in some of these ethics meditations. And now I probably sound like a caricature of third use proponents, but hell… Maybe there’s something to that after all?
There’s a serious danger here that the actual gifts of the Holy Spirit end up sidelined, important only as preliminaries. Consider the role of faith in medieval piety. It was, in essence, the least of the virtues. Ok, Holy Spirit grants faith–and then what? It is unformed, and needs formation. So start piling on other virtues, which are increased through practice–all with the help of grace, of course. Sanctification is at this point synergistic, the whole scheme edging towards semi-Pelagianism.
It’s also hard to square with the cruciform concern you mention. The cross isn’t merely a sign of “struggle,” if by struggle we mean any project of the self (however we suppose it to be oriented)–the old Adam doesn’t need to try harder, to practice. He needs to die. The struggle is the experience of the yawning gap between the death of the old and the birth of the new–it is an attack, a sickness unto death.
Sorry, last thought. Would it be fair to say the virtues have the structure of law. Through faith, hope, love, a new relationship is established, not in the Ben Franklin Checklist manner, but in a new living and stumbling manner. I am trying to get a grip on what y’all mean here by low anthropology.
As a Christian I have always thought we need to have the Brother’s K low & high anthropology…The grandeur of the human person and his calling; the depravity of the individual and his state; the grandeur of the Love of He who loved us first; the possibility of giving back a small response, which itself is the Father’s life in us.
Brandon,
“A low anthropology should still get the human structure of action or soul correct, which is to say that the framework of action, action which poses any threat to the ego is partly informed by courage.”
This is a great reminder to us, I think. The Law expresses the structure of reality; things like “the structure of human action”, which tend to work in the Law’s purview (speaking vaguely, don’t mean to hypostasize it too much) can too easily be forgotten. And ‘low anthropology’ needs an ‘anthropology’ to make sense: the soul’s structure sets its failures and disorders into sharp relief and lends precision to our diagnoses of them.
I agree with the sign of struggle too, as I think Romans 7 makes clear. Two things I wouldn’t quite agree with are (1) the Greek virtues were other-oriented. Courage and Justice I can get on board with, though they still seem less responsive than Faith, Hope, and Love. Temperance is the ruling and proper ordering of one’s appetitive faculties, no? Though a long monastic or ‘mystical’ tradition would likely suggest that temperance can prepare the affections to be ordered toward God.
I think I also would diverge from you on Faith, Hope, and Love being practiced. The bulk of thought on this comes from the Roman Catholic and Orthodox traditions, but I’ve always read those traditions (simplifying a lot) as holding sacraments and liturgy in privileged places. One problem for me with Protestant appropriations has been that they use historical sources for legitimation, but often fail to take the totality of those sources’ thought into account. Without a Roman Catholic sacramental theology or soteriology, how can pursuit of God through virtue hold up? Shorn of that context, the historical sense of Christian life becomes Wright’s comparison to learning a new instrument or how to ride a bike. It’s hard not to see that as a distortion. So I agree that they’re practiced in the word’s broad sense, but how?
Hard to say whether they have the structure of law. My knee-jerk thought is yes, inasmuch as we yearn for them, but only provisionally (post-Fall, pre-restoration). Anyway, thanks for the comments, really appreciate them.
This was a good check for me. I am working on a few posts concerning human vocation and personhood. Our discussion helped me lean away from social prescription and instead focus on diagnosis and gospel orientation.
http://sameandother.com/2015/05/10/a-word-of-hope-vocation-in-light-of-the-baltimore-riots-part-i-of-iii/
I would argue that intemperance actually reveals itself over time as anti-social (anti-other). Eating in the face of the uncomfortable other; eating and then being irritable toward one’s neighbor–it is a means to keep at bay otherness (God, self, neighbor, feelings).
Plato was much clearer on love of neighbor, where as Aristotle certainly gets onto the project of self, or can be read that way. When we read the NE at New College Franklin, we pick and choose which virtues are helpful and truly virtues. Scripture certainly call us to the big four (Courage, Temperance, Justice, Wisdom) and it does not do it merely to defeat us, but to show they exist only in reliance upon God.
I read them as useful in the way the law provides a dialectical partner in our journey. It is not enough to pursue love of neighbor, but have a framework to work within which helps contextualize our relationships.
I think of it alongside something like a twelve steps program. When we aim at mere sobriety (the law), we fall dreadfully short, but when we aim at love (service), somehow we discover a joyful sobriety that is of use to self and others. Ultimately, sobriety is not ‘achieved’ nor is our ‘usefulness’, but at the same time, in the surrender to God, the person begins to live as a person. The virtues might be something more like the promises than the steps, though the steps make the promises possible in as much as they are a way of daily living which puts the old man to death. There is a kind of triangulation, in which we take our eyes off the self and the promises, focus on the steps and others, and the promises happen, sometimes quickly, sometimes s…l…o….w…….l………….y
The difference for me is that it is no longer a project of ego. The ego dies in saying I can’t live sober; I can’t live drunk. We serve our neighbor, not because we are great guys, but because it keeps us sober, but the thing is, we discover it is the sobriety we longed for all along. The new self is a self contextualized in God (the Other), His glory and His people (our others).
It was easier in my imaginary and idyllic youth when I could just say, “I like you, let’s play!”
Thanks for your responses.
It is easy to get a bit lost in abstractions when discussing “the virtues”, whatever they may be. It helps me to ground things in concrete events in Scripture where it is claimed that the Holy Spirit was at work, producing amazing acts of love, faith and hope. One of the most profound examples of this is seen in Act 2, when Peter, full of the Holy Spirit, preaches a sermon full of the most devastating judgment, and the most freeing grace:
36 “Therefore, let all the house of Israel assuredly know that God has made this Jesus, whom you have crucified, both Lord and Christ.”
37 When they heard this, they were stung in the heart and said to Peter and to the rest of the apostles, “Brothers, what shall we do?”
38 Peter said to them, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of sins, and you shall receive the gift of the Holy Spirit. 39 For the promise is to you, and to your children, and to all who are far away, as many as the Lord our God will call.”
If you have just crucified the “Author of Life”, the solution is obviously not a plan to achieve a more virtuous self through developing better habits. You are way beyond that. It was obvious to them, as it should be to us. The amazing thing is that this message of radical guilt coupled with radical forgiveness, freely given by the love of the One you had killed, produced the immediate fruit of the outpouring of selfless sharing and love we see in Acts 4: 32. They did not seek to be more loving, it simply burst forth out of the great gift of unearned love and forgiveness they had all experienced. This pattern was also the foundation for the work of God in every single disciple, all of whom abandoned Jesus at the end, and yet were loved and forgiven, and, most of all for Paul. For that matter, it is the pattern for the murderers Moses and David as well.
Yes, and not to detract from your point, the passage you highlight culminates in v. 42 which identifies the disciples’ praxis, a praxis which 2 Peter 1 asserts will cultivate virtue. Yes, the grace which sweeps individuals up into its economy is unilateral, monergistic even, but recognizing the legitimacy of discipline as the laying hold of redeemed, corporate existence isn’t tantamount to Pelagianism. Grace precludes earning, but not effort, so long as that effort is confessed to be what it is: the grace of Christ instantiated by the Spirit in the life of a redeemed creature.
Ian, I agree with you. This is what Paul was talking about in “disciplining his body” in 1 Corinthian 9:27 and elsewhere. We strive, we struggle with the Old Adam, but in the struggle we are secure in the love of Christ and the Holy Spirit, our Comforter, knowing that the source of any love we have is His love for us, working through us, not our good character or efforts at attaining “virtue”. A Christianity that teaches “self-discipline” as the foundation for the Christian life, and a Christianity that teaches “let go and let God” both have a massive amount of the Bible to explain away. But for many Christians of course, that simply doesn’t matter, really. It is all about the “word” one gets personally, which trumps everything.
Groovy.
Ian, really helpful. I guess I think of praxis as discipleship, not utterly separate from, but a day by day way of directing our responsive love.
I completely agree with Michael about the love being from the monergistic work of Christ. It is now a matter of finding a way to direct that love.
Will, we actually had a student today linking contemplation in NE and Edward’s Religious Affections for her final. She claimed that contemplation of Christ increases the affections and reciprocally cause further seeking of God.
As you noted in your other article, the political context of the NE and its two book focus on friendship, and its conclusion in contemplation does point toward otherness or love of neighbor. Christianity is very clear in the connection of the two commandments (neighbor and God). It sounds like what you are responding is the disconnect. I haven’t read any NT Wright, so I guess I wasn’t tracking earlier.
I completely agree: praxis is discipleship, and discipleship is no less than (but a little more than) praxis; an open system with a source, context and telos, not a closed anthropocentric loop.