The Pursuit of Virtue
“Between friends, there is no need for justice, but people who are just, still need the quality of friendship; and indeed friendliness is considered to be justice in the fullest sense. It is not only a necessary thing but a splendid one.”
The words are those of Aristotle1 and they came to mind in the context of this week’s meeting of the parish Men’s group, at which Fr. Thompson was characteristically eager to facilitate “outside the box” thinking in discussion. The pre-prandial deliberations were certainly wide ranging, but came to rest for some time upon the challenges and importance in life of the pursuit of virtue. This was highly apropos, given the opening quotation, which affirms that it is within a community that individuals find friendship, and within relationships between friends, virtue.
We were further reminded that some have supposed Aristotle to advance twelve specific virtues ranging from courage to magnificence. At this point, not unfittingly, Mr. Gearhart averred that the followers of St Thomas Aquinas had arrived at no less than 87 virtues. This caused the present writer to reflect that, to his certain knowledge, the former Warden practices at least 86 of them on a regular basis. However, one of our number, having a mild impediment of hearing, then enquired if we were discussing the products of the Heinz food company with all of its 57 varieties, a suspicion which was entirely unfounded.
Aquinas does indeed make a number of helpful points in this domain, to wit his observation that “That which completes the definition and is ultimately formal in the definition of virtue is the good, for virtue is defined, in the widest sense, as that which renders the possessor and their work good… Therefore, human virtue, …should be differentiated as a kind according to how it is differentiated by an aspect of the good” (Quaestiones Disp. Virt 1.12c).2 And because virtues make both the possessor and their actions good, distinguishing different kinds of virtues must also involve identifying different aspects of the good.
His short discussion of kindness (beneficentia) and its relationship to charity is illuminating here, since he points out that kindness is not of itself a distinct virtue, apart from charity; rather, it is an act of charity, being one that enables a person to love both God and their neighbor (Summa Theol II.II 27.8).3
This view is ultimately based on the understanding that charity is a specific type of love and that being kind to those whom you love is part of being charitable. Consequently, kindness is not a separate virtue but an act of charity.
This view stands in contrast with Aquinas’s analysis of mercy, which he holds to be indeed a separate virtue, owing to its specific aspect of the good that is associated with the demonstrating of mercy. As he puts it, “joy and peace add nothing to the aspect of the good that is the object of charity, and so they do not require virtues other than charity. But mercy regards a specific aspect, namely, the unhappiness of the individual to whom mercy is shown” (ST II.II 30.3 ad 34). Aquinas seeks thus to differentiate between the act of a virtue and the distinct virtue itself. And in this case, mercy is a distinct virtue, therefore, owing to its unique concern for the unhappiness and suffering of others.
However, while aspects of the good provide an appropriate starting point for understanding Aquinas’s overall account, merely focusing solely on aspects of the good is still problematic. (Courage and perseverance are both enumerated under firmness for example; yet Aquinas nonetheless regards them as distinct virtues (ST II.II 137.2)). Resolving such issues requires attention to the close connection Aquinas establishes between virtue and the attributes for which we receive praise. As he puts it: “… honor is owed to someone by some reason of excellence that he has, and the excellence is not of the same notion in diverse things; therefore, it must be that there is a different notion of honor for them, and specifically different virtues that show diverse honors” (III Scriptum super Sententiis 9.2.2sc).
Yet we need still to remember the Aristotelian perspective in the background here, which held that virtues cannot be taught outright. Aristotle, in common with the later Christian view of the world after the Fall, rejected the notion that the capacity for living a virtuous life is innate yet also held that the young do not have the life experience (as we would now put it) to understand how ethics work to create the good life. Instead, for Aristotle, virtue is a practical state of affairs that is acquired through habitual practice
All of which brings us to the appropriately local and American case of John Adams….
John Adams originally came from a churchgoing family and was baptized in the parish church of Quincy, Massachusetts. Yet he was ultimately the first American president who was a Unitarian and thus denied the divinity of Christ, even though he did apparently believe in his Resurrection. He was highly critical of such anti-religious radicals as Tom Paine, believing that Christianity ought to be focused on creating:
“good men, good majestrates [sic], and good Subjects, Good husbands and good wives, good Parents and good Children, good masters and good servants.”4
For all that, he recognised that on account of his unitarianism there were many who would say, “… I am no Christian” he said nonetheless that, he would reply, “Yet I believe all the honest men among you, are Christians in my sense of the Word.”5
After the break with Britain, Adams felt that whereas, under monarchy, evil could be restricted by force, in a democracy, citizens needed to be voluntarily good.
In his Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States he observed that, “The best republics will be virtuous,” even though he also held that virtue could not thrive because “When men are given up to the rule of their passions, they murder like weasels for the pleasure of murdering, like bulldogs and bloodhounds in a fold of sheep” (Cf. Founding Faith, p. 35). Hence it was for highly pragmatic reasons that he believed that religion was essential to subdue the beastly inclinations of humanity in its natural estate.
For advancing this analysis into the realm of policy, Adams saw his close analysis of his own life as a helpful propaedeutic for the yet more difficult task of judging the virtue of others.
In the middle of the Continental Congress, he thus found time to write to James Warren on the importance “of a Faculty of Searching Hearts,” for “There is a Discernment competent to Mortals by which they can penetrate into the Minds of Men and discover their Secret Passions, Prejudices, Habits, Hopes, Fears, Wishes and Designs, and by this Means judge what Part they will act in given Circumstances for the future and see what Principles and Motives have actuated them to the Conduct they have held in certain Conjunctures of Circumstances which are passed….. Such a facility for “unraveling Men’s Thoughts and a Faculty of governing them by Means of the Knowledge we have of them” together constituted nothing less [he concluded] than the principal “Part of the Art of a Politician.”
Yet for all the fact that this yielded the bleak view that humanity is driven by selfish and even wicked motives, he still returned, in the end, to the view that virtue was ultimately essential to the American Experiment for: “The Preservation of Liberty depends on the intellectual and moral Character of the People. As long as Knowledge and Virtue are diffused generally among the Body of a Nation, it is impossible they should be enslaved.”
All of which left, as the fundamental political problem, just how to cultivate a virtuous people who could sustain America’s republican government, a problem he felt to have been compounded by the legacy of pre-independence times when there had been a “…universal Spirit of Debauchery, Dissipation, Luxury, Effeminacy and Gaming” when moreover, “There is not a Sin which prevails more universally,” he complained to Abigail, “than Prodigality, in Furniture, Equipage, Apparell and Diet. And I believe that this Vice, this Sin has as large a Share in drawing down Judgments of Heaven as any.”
Just as Adams had tried to sustain his own virtue through self-discipline, he seems first to have hoped that the hardships of the revolutionary war might reform his fellow citizens, on the basis that “it will have this good Effect, at least: it will inspire Us with many Virtues, which We have not, and correct many Errors, Follies, and Vices, which threaten to disturb, dishonour, and destroy Us.” For, “The Furnace of Affliction produces Refinement, in States as well as Individuals. And the new Governments we are assuming, in every Part, will require a Purification from our vices, and an Augmentation of our Virtues or they will be no Blessings. The People will have unbounded Power. And the People are extreamly addicted to Corruption and Venality, as well as the Great.”
But what of the virtue of the people themselves?
As the French Revolution grew more radical and violent, Adams worried about the breakdown of public character. Adams therefore argued that the French revolutionaries (and many of his fellow Americans) fatally misunderstood man’s true nature and thus misunderstood the kind of government necessary to create a virtuous society.
Here, his work published in 1790 as a Discourse on Davila, on the understanding of the psychological foundations of human behavior, is of particular interest, as it offered an extended analysis of the “passion for distinction,” with which his own struggles against vanity had made him intimately familiar.
For Adams, no quality was more crucial to understanding human nature than: “A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows, [which] is one of the earliest, as well as keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.” But, while he had prescribed stern self-discipline to subdue his own passion, his personal struggles convinced him that a different remedy was necessary for the masses.
His underlying views of them were certainly bleak, as when in 1813, he wrote to Jefferson saying: “When I consider the weakness, the folly, the Pride, the Vanity, the Selfishness, the Artifice, the low craft and meaning cunning, the want of Principle, the Avarice the unbounded Ambition, the unfeeling Cruelty of a majority of those (in all Nations) who are allowed an aristocratical influence; and on the other hand, the Stupidity with which the more numerous multitude, not only become their Dupes, but even love to be Taken in by their Tricks: I feel a stronger disposition to weep at their destiny, than to laugh at their Folly.”
But it was his ultimately psychological analysis that led him to propose that the state should enlist the human passion for distinction, “on the side of virtue.” As he wrote, “It is a principal end of government to regulate this passion, which in its turn becomes a principle means of government”, since, it was the “only adequate instrument of order and subordination in society . . . without it neither human reason, nor standing armies, would ever produce that great effect.”
Following the example of the Romans, Adams hoped to channel the desire for distinction to positive ends in America by using titles of distinction to make various virtues the object of emulation. “As virtue is the only rational source and eternal foundation of honor,” he wrote, “the wisdom of nations, in the titles they have established as the marks of order and subordination, has generally given an intimation, not of personal qualities, nor of the qualities of fortune; but of particular virtues, more especially becoming men in the high stations they possess.”
Properly managed by the government, such distinctions could spread virtue throughout the young republic. “The wisdom and virtue of all nations have endeavored to regulate the passions for respect and distinction, and to reduce it to some order in society, by titles marking the gradations of magistracy, to prevent as far as human power and policy can prevent, collisions among the passions of many pursuing the same objects, and the rivalries, animosities, envy, jealousy, and vengeance which always result from them.”6
No longer an essentialized internal quality, virtue was thus to be promoted by channelling the passion for distinction, which would persuade citizens to choose virtuous roles – even though this was not the same as embodying them. And here is the problem, in the end, can the appearance of virtue be enough? Is it adequate to do what is right for wrong reasons for virtue to remain?
Ultimately, Adams seems then to have proposed a politics of appearance of which we arguably still see the rather doubtful fruits, a political system in which institutional mechanisms created the incentives for virtuous action, even by individuals possessed of little intrinsic virtue.
His deeply pragmatic perspective seems to have been that, if thus properly governed, in effect, people would still play roles, and they would at least choose virtuous ones, entailing that even if America could not be a truly virtuous nation, it could at least act like one.
But then again, was not virtue earlier defined in the widest sense, as “that which renders the possessor and their work good?” And was it not Aristotle, for whom virtue is a practical state of affairs that is acquired through habitual practice? But what now of the intrinsic relation formerly held of virtue to the good? The successive moves from Christianity to Unitarianism to Pragmatism have not been without cost!
[1] In The Nicomachean ethics. (W. D. Ross (Ed.) & L. Brown (Trans.) Oxford, .2009, p. 35
[2] Aquinas held a realist metaphysical view of the relationship between a definition and the defined object , upon this see, Brower, Jeffrey E. Aquinas’s ontology of the material world: Change, hylomorphism, and material objects. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014
[3] He argues that there are no differences in the aspect of the good which applies to both kindness and charity, asserting that: “virtues are diversified according to diverse aspects of the object. The formal aspect of charity and kindness is the same, for, as is clear from what was stated above, both regard a common aspect of the good. Kindness is not a distinct virtue from charity but is the name of a certain act of charity.” (ST II.II 31.4c)
[4] Steven Waldman, Founding Faith: Providence, Politics, and the Birth of Religious Freedom (New York:, 2008, P.35)
[5] Lester J. Cappon, The Adams- Jefferson Letters, Chapel Hill, NC:1959, .373.
[6] Adams to James Warren (?), Apr. 27, 1777, quoted in Shaw, The Character of John Adams, 235. See Defence of the Constitutions, in Adams, ed., Works of John Adams, 4: 242-46. More widely here it can be noted that Dissecting the passion for distinction, Adams found it to be composed of many natural human drives. Thus, “Emulation” produced a desire to excel another by fair industry in the search of truth and the practice of virtue; while, “Ambition” caused one to seek power. “Jealousy” fostered the fear that an inferior would become superior, while “Envy” incited one to bring the other down. “Vanity” produced in men a false impression of their own importance. Nonetheless, Adams sought to direct the passion for distinction toward emulation and virtuous action, and to this end he drew upon history and cited the use of the passion for distinction employed in ancient Rome where in his view it was deftly employed to “attract the attention, to allure the consideration and excite the congratulations of the people.”