Complete Book of Everyday Christianity
An A-Z guide to following Christ in every aspect of Life. Here in one book, is the complete guide you need for every part of your life—family, money, relationships, job, church, entertainment and more. The editors, Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens, combine decades of ministry, scholarship, church leadership, parenting, and other sorts of practical wisdom.VIRTUES
Virtue is a term that is being recovered from Greek philosophy to become part of contemporary discussions on ethics. There is good reason for this: both in ancient literature and in the Bible, virtue is a fundamental dimension of ethical living and moral character development. While the concept of virtue predates Christianity, it has been greatly influenced and deepened by the Christian faith. It is also true to say that the thinking of Christians, especially in the Western church, has been influenced by these Greek sources.
Few would deny that moral education is a pressing need today. Unfortunately the concept of virtue has, over the years, deteriorated and, like a host of other terms (tradition, heritage or even right and wrong) has lost its vibrancy. More commonly we now tend to speak of personal “values” rather than virtues. And we create our own “values” rather than conforming ourselves to “virtues” as the categorical “given” aspects of an overall (therefore shared) goodness. So the questions of what virtue is and how we can and why we should become virtuous are crucial considerations for everyday life.
Virtue in the Classical Tradition
For the Greek philosophers, virtues (arete4) related to the nature of the noble-minded, culturally developed person. For the Roman, virtue (virtus) signified the firmness and solidity that one who was noble maintained in public and private life. In the Middle Ages, virtue was the conduct of the chivalrous person.
The classical tradition (epitomized by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle) developed an understanding of the natural virtues that could be perceived by the exercise of natural reason. They had various lists of virtues. Aristotle, for example, divided all the virtues into those that were moral (having to do with character) and those that were intellectual (having to do with the mind). Crucial to this approach is the concept of the mean, sometimes called “the golden mean.” All errors with respect to the virtues involve either an excess or a deficiency of the virtue in question. Thus the virtue of courage means that we ought to avoid the extremes of rashness or cowardice. Some of the difficulties of this pre-Christian understanding can be seen in such views as this: all virtue is knowledge and all vice is ignorance (Socrates). Along this line Socrates proposed that by attaining insight into the good we would be able to do it. In short, virtue could be learned.
While “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” has remained an abiding question throughout church history, there is no doubt that our understanding of Christian character has been profoundly shaped by these Greek influences. For example, the Christian thinker Thomas Aquinas grouped four key virtues together as the cardinal virtues: justice, wisdom (prudence), courage (fortitude) and moderation (temperance or self-control). The term cardinal comes from the Latin word cardio (a hinge), because all the other virtues pivoted on these four. The fundamental assumption in much of this thinking is that “grace perfects nature.” What is surprising, however, when we turn to Scripture, is the relative absence of preoccupation with virtues in the Greek sense.
Virtues in the Bible
There is no equivalent Hebrew word for the Greek arete4 even though the so-called cardinal virtues are often mentioned as part of the righteous lifestyle of God’s covenant people. Not surprisingly, in the Old Testament, the righteous do justice and live by wisdom.
In the New Testament the term arete4 is used sparsely: once in the writings of Paul (Phil. 4:8) and four times in Peter’s letters (1 Peter 2:9; 2 Peter 1:3, 5), though it is usually not translated in English as “virtue.” Nevertheless, it is indisputable that early Christians were aware of the good qualities found outside the family of God, and they interpreted the Christian life partly in the categories of Greek thought. The list of commendable virtues Paul gives in Philippians-true, noble, right, pure, lovely, admirable, excellent, praiseworthy-seems reminiscent of virtues commended by the Greek philosophers. This is no more surprising than the fact that Paul frequently uses the Greek concept of “conscience” to communicate our moral responsibility and accountability in the Greek world when no such word was given him from his Jewish and biblical heritage.
So both Testaments contain many parallels with the Greek virtues. Wisdom (also called prudence) has been called the “charioteer of the virtues” because it, in a sense, steers our choices (Proverbs 14:15; 1 Peter 4:7). Justice is the moral virtue that consists in the constant and firm will to give one’s due to God and neighbor (Col. 4:1). Courage is the moral virtue that ensures firmness in difficulties and constancy in pursuit of the good (Psalm 118:14; John 16:33). Moderation is the moral virtue that tempers the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods. It ensures mastery by the will over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable (Titus 2:12).
Nonetheless, three observations can be made of the biblical treatment of this subject. First, there is nothing in the Bible comparable to the cataloging of virtues, especially the four “cardinal” virtues. In fact other virtues are offered as the “hinges” of the spiritual life. Second, all the lists in the Bible are ad hoc-representative and exemplary but not definitive. And third, the discussion of theoretical versus practical virtues-fundamental to Greek philosophy-finds no place in the New Testament, where doing and being are fully united in the righteous life. The reasons for these differences are profoundly theological and stem from the distinctiveness of the Christian way.
The Three Theological Virtues: Faith, Hope and Love
In the New Testament the fundamental character virtues (if they may be called such) are faith, hope and love, often mentioned singly and sometimes as a triad (1 Cor. 13:13; 1 Thes. 1:2-3; Col. 1:5). These are sometimes called the “theological virtues,” because they are gifts of God and have God as their primary object. These virtues dispose Christians to live in relationship with the Holy Trinity. They have the One and Triune God for their origin, motive and purpose. They are also the spiritual foundation for all other virtues: faith, hope and love are fundamental to being in right relation to God and neighbor. Or to put the matter in another biblical way, the other virtues are part of the manifold fruit of Spirit-living (Galatians 5:22-23) that comes from faith in Christ and hope in God’s purpose and through loving and being loved by God.
Thus Christian character is primarily, though not exclusively, a byproduct of living with faith, hope and love. For example, self-control (Galatians 5:23) is not simply the result of reason or human volition but is dependent on God’s primary act of creation. It is God who keeps us moment to moment by his grace, and for this reason charity, the supreme goal of all virtues, is not something of which we can boast but something within which we humbly cooperate with God’s prior and gracious gifts to us (Galatians 5:22; Ephes. 4:32-5:2; Col. 3:12). The greatest is love itself (1 Cor. 13:13).
Virtue in Past and Present Christian Thought
So we can understand why Christian writers after the first century did not accept the classical account of virtue as a complete view of the matter. Since the ultimate end of humanity is a supernatural one, it is necessary for us to be endowed with supernatural powers so that we may attain our destiny. A crucial issue in this matter is the way the revelation of virtues relates to the best of the pre-Christian tradition of virtues.
The understanding that grace perfects nature has been offered by Roman Catholic theologians such as Ambrose, Augustine, Aquinas, Catherine of Genoa and Philip Neri and such modern writers as Josef Pieper, Romano Guardini and Alasdair MacIntyre. In recent years and in the Protestant tradition, people such as Wesley, Wilberforce, Bonhoeffer, C. S. Lewis and Stanley Hauerwas have stressed the importance of virtue in relation to character. The Christian tradition of the virtues developed an understanding that grace (the gift of God) perfected what we could perceive with our unaided reason. As has been said by one current writer on the virtues: “Plato gives us virtue’s grammar, Jesus gives us virtue’s poetry” (Peter Kreeft).
C. S. Lewis understood the importance of understanding the virtues and said that “right actions done for the wrong reason do not help to build the internal quality or character called a `virtue’ and it is this quality or character that really matters” (Mere Christianity, III, chap. 2). Cardinal John Henry Newman noted that “the very problem which Christian duty requires us to accomplish is the reconciling in our conduct of opposite virtues.”
Education in the Virtues
True education, as Augustine noted, is to learn what to desire. Since much of education over the past hundred years or so has been marked by a jettisoning of the teaching about virtue, it is not surprising that so many are rather lost with respect to what the virtuous life entails. With God’s help the virtues forge character and give facility in the practice of the good. The virtuous person is happy to practice them and gradually form good habits. Aristotle observed that an understanding of particular virtues was more helpful than simply being urged to “do good and avoid evil.” Character is influenced by habits, and habits are formed by choices. The virtuous life is a life in which the acquired habits are in harmony with one another.
Biblical revelation offers something substantially different that appears to be “foolishness” from the perspective of Greek philosophy (1 Cor. 1:22-25). The gospel declares that God gives what he requires, that the grace of the new creation accomplishes what never can be obtained by reason or moral effort alone. Virtues are not obtained solely by “pulling ourselves up by our own bootstraps.” They are gifts of God.
But they are gifts that invite and even require human cooperation. That is surely what is behind New Testament exhortations to “think about such things” (Phil. 4:8) in the context of a list of commendable character qualities, “get rid of” vices like slandering (Ephes. 4:31), “make every effort to add to your faith goodness” (2 Peter 1:5) and “live a life of love” (Ephes. 5:2). The virtuous life engages the whole person in what must be seen as active prayer. But it is not autonomous activity. Rather than simple human achievements, certainly not ones we might boast about having attained, Christian living is essentially responsive and always God-centered. Faith, hope and love keep us focused on the source-the God of all true virtue. Peter says that God’s divine power “has given us everything we need for life and godliness through our knowledge of him who called us by his own glory and goodness [arete4]” (2 Peter 1:3). Paul reminds the Colossians that it is as “God’s beloved” that they are to clothe themselves with goodness and patience (Col. 3:12). What Athens requires, Christ inspires. All virtue depends upon charity and humility as the opposites of selfishness and pride. The virtues may be seen as the working out of love, for no one can be truly loving without being, at the same time, virtuous.
References and Resources
M. Adler, ed., Syntopicon, inGreat Books of the Western World (Chicago: Encyclopedia Britannica, 1952); R. Guardini, The Virtues: On Forms of the Moral Life (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1967); S. Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue: Essays in Christian Ethical Reflection (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974); P. Kreeft, Back to Virtue (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992); C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (London: Bles, 1943); C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (London: Bles, 1956); A. MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984); J. Pieper, A Brief Reader on the Virtues of the Human Heart (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1991); “The Virtues” and “The Moral Law” in Catechism of the Catholic Church (1993), para. 1803-45 and 1950ff.
-Iain Benson
Originally published in The Complete Book of Everyday Christianity by Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens. ©1997 by Robert Banks and R. Paul Stevens. Used by permission of InterVarsity Press, P.O. Box 1400, Downers Grove, IL 60515, USA. www.ivpress.com
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