Why Virtues are not Enough

     The other day while I was reading I found this translation of a poem, which I'd like to share with you.  Comments to follow:

     When your mother has grown older,
     And you have grown older,
     When what used to be easy and effortless
     Now becomes a burden,
     When her dear loyal eyes
     Do not look out into life as before,
     When her legs have grown tired
     And do not want to carry her any more--
     Then give her your arm for support,
     Accompany her with gladness and joy.
     The hour will come when, weeping, you
     Will accompany her on her last journey!
     And if she asks you, answer her.
     And if she asks again, speak also.
     And if she asks another time, speak to her
     Not stormily, but in gentle peace!
     And if she cannot understand you well,
     Explain everything joyfully;
     The hour will come, the bitter hour
     When her mouth will ask no more!

It's nice, isn't it?  I mean at a glance, because it doesn't bear close scrutiny.  It's certainly mawkish -- almost mawkish enough for Hallmark.  I'll bet anything the author was playing a riff on Ecclesiasticus, and on the beautiful "Wanderer's Nightsong" by Goethe (this time I am the translator):

     Upon all the mountaintops
     there is peace;
     from the high crowns of these trees
     you can sense
     hardly a breath.
     The little birds in the woods are silent.
     Wait a while, and soon
     you too will rest.

So the man had a trace of culture, and if his poem plunges into sentiment, at least he had the good sense to catch a bit of the grand elegaic from one of the masters.  Apparently he loved his mother deeply, and watched her die in the agonies of cancer, made the more painful by a horrific experimental treatment: the application of an iodine compound to the raw tumor.

     He also, as I was disconcerted to learn, was possessed of tremendous courage, many times risking his life to the point of recklessness when he fought for his country at war.  He had no particular use for wealth, and willingly suffered privations of food and drink and shelter and decent clothing, rather than give up his dreams (and he had many dreams, obsessive dreams).  He genuinely liked dogs (his favorite was a camp-mutt he named "Foxie") and would regale children with boisterous play and renditions of great battles.  By all accounts he was a mesmerizing speaker.  He had some artistic talent; he couldn't draw a human figure any better than I can, which is to say not at all, but in architectural drawing and painting he was actually not bad.  He loved his country, or he thought he did.

     And he thought he was the new Messiah, come to finish the job that the true Messiah had left incomplete, as he saw it: to rid the world of the Jews.  The writer of that elegy, as you may have guessed, was Adolf Hitler.

     Which leads me to conclude with an old, old observation.  The virtues, alone, are not enough.  If you are brave, so, in their way, the fallen angels are brave.  If you speak well, Satan spoke well enough to deliver a third of the sons of God to their damnation.  When our virtues are unmoored from Christ -- or, if we do not know or acknowledge Christ or the Father, from that natural law that shines its light upon the mind of every man, until by his own corruption he extinguishes it -- then our virtues do not counterbalance our vice.  They give it ammunition.  We can then, if we persist (and that poet was nothing if not persistent) become brave, or eloquent, or even self-denying, in the service of a consuming wickedness.  If only the ghastly Margaret Sanger, an admirer of our poet above, had had less capacity to sympathize with the poor, she would not have sought to destroy them so utterly.

     But even if we do not possess the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, there is one virtue, treading the border between the human and the divine, that should keep us honest.  Humility reminds us that we do not create the good; we submit to it.  Humility also reminds us that, since Nature endows each of us with at best a modest intellect, which can be improved but also vitiated by education, we had better not trade on our own stock but instead bank upon the wisdom of our collective forebears, a wisdom encapsulated in tradition.  Hitler forgot that humility.  He forgot the golden rule taught by the Savior.  He forgot the very person of the Savior.  He forgot the simple natural law, if he ever really knew it, and in the spare cells of his insecurity and boundless political ambition he fashioned his own law out of the rags of Darwin, Nietzsche, Wagner, and Schopenhauer.  He thought, like many a less capable politician then and now, that he was "forging ahead" and "striking out in a new direction" and "making a difference."  He was right about that last one, anyhow.

Comments

[Daniel Propson]

Aristotle, I believe, saw justice as the central virtue, toward which all the other virtues must be pointed. But never does Aristotle encounter the problem that justice is predicated on understanding, and understanding is not perfectly fostered by temperence, prudence, and courage.

If you're already pointed in the right direction, a sense of justice will get you there. If you're pointed in the wrong direction, however, your sense of justice will -- allied with your other virtues -- lead you (and perhaps your country) into the abyss.

I don't recall that Aristotle deals with that issue. Jesus does, though. "I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit..."

[James A. Altena]

Elegant as always, Tony.

I have often said (and I surely am not original in this) that our greatest virtues are at the same time our greatest vices. E.g. principled conviction can degenerate to sheer stubbornness. Whether these traits are expressed as virtues of vices indeeds depends on their being moored to Christ. Without that, even humility can descend to unwitting and unq2uestioning subservience to evil.

[Reid]

Dr. Esolen, thank you for a moving and instructive post.

James, your comment makes me think of the donkey, Puzzle, in The Last Battle.

[Brad C]

I normally agree with Dr. Esolen, but I disagree on this. I agree that "The virtues, alone, are not enough" if by that you mean that the natural virtues alone are not enough to make us TRULY virtuous, i.e. holy. For that, we need the supernatural virtues. So if you are talking about the theological concept of justification, it is true that natural virtues are not enough.

But I deny that natural "virtues" can be perverted in the way that you suggest. For instance, Aristotle and Aquinas would both deny that Hitler possessed the virtue of courage. Both argued that in order for an action to be virtuous it had to have something good as its object and it had to involve the choice of appropriate means to achieve that good and it had to proceed from a settled state of character. Hitler's goal was evil, and his choice of means was also evil. It is not true that anyone who risks his life to accomplish some goal has the virtue of courage. That is why both Aristotle and Aquinas would deny that the 9/11 highjackers are courageous.

Hitler and Sanger had disordered desires, so what appeared good to them was in fact evil. Although achieving their goals might have involved exercising some skills that they had in common with virtuous people (e.g. perseverance in the face of danger), they were certainly not virtuous actions. If Hitler had in fact possessed the virtues, he would not have been Hitler but someone else.

While I agree that it is impossible to consistently live the life of virtue without God's grace, I also don't want to devalue purely natural virtue. A virtue of character is good in itself and cannot lead one to do evil, even if it does not lead to actions that, through God's grace, have supernatural merit.

[Ethan Cordray]

We ought to remember the old meaning of the word "virtue," which is power or ability. The virtuous are the strong, those who master their own passions and gain full possession of their own intellectual and physical faculties.

What one does with this power is an entirely different matter. And while possessing strength per se is more noble than weakness, it does not in itself make us good. The most "virtuous" of all created beings became the great rebel.

Yet the Possessor of all virtue laid much of it aside to take on the diminished state of man, and in so doing he has completed true virtue as only He can.

[Michael R]

I am reminded of Oliver O'Donovan's critique of virtue in "Begotten or Made?"; in particular, the virtue of compassion. O'Donovan argues that in our modern culture (especially in the medical field) compassion has become THE governing virtue and that this is very dangerous. Compassion is a virtue which demands immediate action. If it is not checked by the other virtues (which require moral reflection and deliberation) then compassion spurs us on to action which may be anything but virtuous.

On another note, Hitler's poem brought to mind Yeats' "When You Are Old" which begins:
WHEN you are old and gray and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;

[Neil Gussman]

And in confirmation of Tony's insight, my oldest daughter is one of the starting forwards on her basketball team. She was the sixth man as a freshman and got the starting job as a sophomore. I brought all of my kids up to be brave, respectful and reverent. They raced bikes from age six on and by her freshman year 5'10" Lauren was not afraid to mix it up under the net. Did I mention she is very protective of those she cares about. So her coach knew this and started subbing her in when one of the players on the other team was too rough. Lauren would cover the opposing player one-on-one until the other player backed off or Lauren fouled out. By leaving humility off the list of top virtues, I gave Lauren the necessary virtues to be the team enforcer. CSLewis warned me of the dangers of a closed group. She is still very sweet off the court, and off the soccer field. But clearly virtues unrestrained by humility can have outcomes we never anticipate.

[Tony Esolen]

Brad,

Yours is a just and well-reasoned response. I wonder if we could tease things out some more. I too blanch before I assign the name of "courage" to the suicide pilots who destroyed the World Trade Center. But what, then, should we call it? I had expected, in reading about this repulsive man, that he would be at bottom a base and cringing figure, and maybe that's what he was reduced to in his bunker in Berlin, but that is not how he started -- and there are all kinds of chilling lessons to learn from that. I mean, it does give one pause, to read about the man's throwing his body in the line of fire to protect a superior officer. If only the wicked were reliably craven ...

Can we say that sometimes a virtue can have a proximate end that is good, even though the person is utterly oriented toward wickedness?

I'm reminded of Milton's wise verses, also a warning to us. Quoting now from memory:

For neither do the spirits damned
Lose all their virtue, lest bad men should boast
Their specious deeds on earth, which glory excites,
Or close ambition varnished o'er with zeal.

[James A. Altena]

"I too blanch before I assign the name of 'courage' to the suicide pilots who destroyed the World Trade Center. But what, then, should we call it?"

How about blind fanatical determination?

I agree with Tony over Brad, who I think missed the point that Ethan recognized about the root meaning of virtue (cf. Jesus healing the woman with dysmenorrhea, per the KJV: "I perceive that virtue has gone out of me"); but what the 9/11 terrorists demonstrated was not courage.

[Ethan Cordray]

Maybe to undermine my own point, but I actually tend to think of true virtue as being an Aristotelian balance of a particular faculty. A superabundance of some property, like courage or zeal, is just as much a vice as weakness in that property.

It certainly takes great amounts of fearlessness and fervency of belief to crash one's plane into a building, or to detonate a suicide bomb. But the strength of these properties does not by itself make them virtues. One ought not to be too quick to volunteer for suicide, and one ought not to be too quick to believe every appealing ideology. Both these powers become true virtues only through moderation and self control.

And the Christian view adds something that even Aristotle does not seem to very strongly develop: virtue must also have a teleological element. Right action, to be truly right, must be ordered to objectively right ends. "Virtue" becomes "goodness" when it is directed toward good rather than evil.

Even balanced, controlled virtues become vicious when they are used to do evil. Courage becomes criminal audacity. Zeal becomes ideological ruthlessness. Justice becomes mechanical rigidity.

Wisdom, then, directs the virtues toward good ends. The ancients called this direction of virtue "temperance." The unwise, though they be ever so brave, just, or temperate, will come to employ their virtues in the service of Satan. And the refinement of those other virtues, lacking direction, will only increase their owner's power to do evil.

[Dirk Van Glabeke]

>>>When our virtues are unmoored from Christ -- or, if we do not know or acknowledge Christ or the Father, from that natural law that shines its light upon the mind of every man, until by his own corruption he extinguishes it -- then our virtues do not counterbalance our vice. They give it ammunition. <<<

tell that to a Buddhist

[Ethan Cordray]

>>tell that to a Buddhist<<

ok I will

[Tony Esolen]

Dirk, I would tell it to a Buddhist. A dear friend of mine, a Buddhist who died recently, would have accepted that claim in a heartbeat. The noblest of the paganisms are that family of beliefs that emphasize detachment from worldly goods; a certain self-denial; a wise and sometimes humble understanding of one's own place; a willingness to exercise some very severe discipline in the acquisition of such virtues as temperance and fortitude ... All of which falls under the heading of following, by the light one is given, the natural law. The Stoic and the Buddhist -- not to mention the followers of Lao-Tzu and Confucius -- do seek to anchor their talents, their virtues if you will, on the rock of justice as perceived by right reason. That is why C. S. Lewis included copious quotations from them in his appendix to The Abolition of Man....

[Dirk Van Glabeke]

I made my statement because Buddhism is a viewpoint that doesn't believe in God or abolute morality. It is
a form of atheism. Religious atheism, but still atheism.
As you probably know, there were a number of forummembers that associated in previous posts, atheism with the possibility of racism, nazism and even the possibilty of murder and cannibalism in times of famine.
Several times the view was also taken that without God, everything is allowed.

Now, no one would see the Dalai lama kill someone for a tasty bite, would they?

I don't state that any of these things are excluded if one is an atheist, but neither are they excluded if one is a christian. Although Hitler was probably not a christian, Germany was a christian nation.

So the automatic link between: no God so everything is allowed, doesn't seem valid.

One could always take the view that when it comes down to it, the essence of Buddhism and the christian God are one and the same. But that is, when one goes a bit deeper than the superficial, a mistaken idea. It's much the same as many new-age adherents who throw, hinduism, buddhism, taoism, all on the same heap.
There are profound differences between all these viewpoints, and between these and the christian.

[Yaknyeti]

Dirk, are you a Buddhist? I don't think you are... and if you aren't, their existence is incidental to this discussion. If you aren't Buddhist, that suggests that you think that there is something deficient in their belief system - irrational, as you've said before. At that point, bringing them up as a counterexample to my perceptions of atheists is pointless, since neither you nor I think their views are ultimately defensible as truth. You can discuss them as an example of moral atheism, but who cares if they're poor or incoherent atheists?

If you are a Buddhist, or find something deficient in my arguments, please correct me.

[Dirk Van Glabeke]

Yaknyeti,

I still have to anwer your post and questions on the other thread(about Belgium). I had to pauze my posts for a while. Too little time, too much work. : (
Sorry, but I will answer it.

I don't think that what my view on buddhism's thruth is, is what matters (in this particular discussion).

What matters in this discussion is, the view that people who don't believe in God can get up to anything.

Buddhism, as a form of atheism, is a counterexample to this. I think most people, including me, don't see Buddhists running concentration camps. To mention just one thing.

I don't have to agree with the beliefs of the Yanomani indians. But knowing their beliefs I can make a good guess what they will do or not do.

The christians on this forum speak in general terms about all atheists, so if I find a group of atheists, that obviously, disprove these general statements, I have made my point.

The discussion on how to arrive at a rule system without the authority of a God, or the discussion on how to make such a rule system work, are other discussions.

The question, in a way, is rather: what makes one think that a buddhist will, when it comes down to it, not resort to evil deeds. While some don't think this of other kinds of atheism. What is the difference? Is this difference really unique to buddhism?
Why do some christians, who are just as convinced as other christians of hell, do commit evil deeds?

[Tony Esolen]

The answer is simple: human beings are sinners. But their sins are small change compared to what they will do once they lose the very notion of sin.

Buddhism is not a form of atheism, Dirk. It is a philosophy of life, like Stoicism. In practice, Buddhists believe in all kinds of things about God or gods. Nor is Buddhism a form of relativism; the Buddha did believe in the existence of objective good discoverable by reason. It is not clear to me that the Dalai Lama is an atheist; he seems much closer to the belief system of an old Stoic, who would have held to a divine impersonal mind governing the universe.

As for atheists, sometimes (Albert Camus) they do indeed behave courageously -- they are then better than their philosophy. The difference is that an atheist who also denies the existence of objective Good (please read that sentence carefully) may well sacrifice his life in a good cause, but cannot do so according to the reasons of his own thought. We will all freely admit that many faithless Christians behave as if there were no God or as if "good" and "evil" were mere words; and we will admit that some atheists (I know a few of this sort) behave as if there were a God and hold to the right, even if their own philosophy cannot rationally justify it. We Roman Catholics, among our prayers every Easter vigil, pray for those who do not believe in God, that they may find Him by following all that is right.

That said, it is wholly unfair to characterize Nazism as somehow Christian -- Hitler was no Christian. The elite salons of decadent Munich, Vienna, and Berlin that gave rise to the "isms" of the early twentieth century were united in their disdain for Christ. Come to think of it, the whole twentieth century is littered with the corpses of people who had to suffer because of one utopian atheistic fantasy after another: Mao's Cultural Revolution, Hitler's worship of Das Volk, the purges of Lenin, the mass starvation of the Ukraine by Stalin (while the intelligentsia in the west, cozying up to atheistic communism, looked the other way; a shameful betrayal of millions of people), the unleashing of a bloodbath of innocents by the atheistic abortion-proponent and Hitler admirer, Margaret Sanger (the title of whose autobiography, "My Fight for Birth Control," is a conscious echo of Hitler's Mein Kampf). Should I go on? The attempt to corrupt the morals of a nation, by Alfred Kinsey, a pervert, a liar, and a pedophile?

If you drew up a list of the ten most malignant people of the twentieth century, trying to avoid choosing all politicians, you'd be hard pressed to find anybody who was NOT an atheist, unless it should be the Ayatollah Khomeini:

1. Stalin
2. Hitler
3. Mao-Tse Tung
4. Lenin
5. Tojo
6. Khomeini
7. Kinsey
8. Goebbels
9. Mussolini
10. Sanger

Come now, Mr. Van Glabeke. Give us a break. There has not been a genuinely religious war in Europe since the Thirty Years' War almost 400 years ago, and even that one was a war of nationalism more than a war of religion. Meanwhile, we've had such "religious" figures as Napoleon, Bismarck, Kaiser Wilhelm, Lenin, Stalin, Hitler ... And not a single corrupt Pope since the Borgias and Medicis, almost 500 years ago.

[Dirk Van Glabeke]

>>>Buddhism is not a form of atheism, Dirk. It is a philosophy of life, like Stoicism. In practice, Buddhists believe in all kinds of things about God or gods.<<<

on buddhism:

Buddhism is a dharmic, non-theistic religion, which is also a philosophy and a system of psychology.[1]

What is deemed as "Creation of the world" by an all-powerful God in many other religions is not accepted by any school of Buddhism.

Sir Charles Elliot in his Hinduism and Buddhism: An Historical Sketch correctly describes God in early Buddhism as:

The attitude of early Buddhism to the spirit world—the hosts of deities and demons who people this and other spheres. Their existence is assumed, but the truths of religion are not dependent on them, and attempts to use their influence by sacrifices and oracles are deprecated as vulgar practices similar to juggling.
The systems of philosophy then in vogue were mostly not theistic, and, strange as the words may sound, religion had little to do with the gods. If this be thought to rest on a mistranslation, it is certainly true that the dhamma had very little to do with devas.

from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/God_in_Buddhism

So although not a-theistic but rather, non-theistic, in buddhism, God is not seen as the foundation of absolute law. Which is what the present discussion is about.

on Buddhist morality:

The five precepts (Pali: Pañcasīla, Sanskrit: Pañcaśīla Ch: 五戒 wǔ jiè, Sinhala: පන්සිල්, Thai: ศีลห้า) constitute the basic Buddhist code of ethics, undertaken by lay followers of the Buddha Gautama in the Theravada and Mahayana traditions.

The Buddha is said to have taught the five precepts out of compassion, not out of any desire to control his followers, and so they are to be undertaken voluntarily rather than as commandments from a god. They are to be seen as guidelines to how one who is awakened lives, not as mere moral injunctions imposed from outside and to be obeyed literally at all times.

see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sila

So, the Buddhist morality is not based on absolutes. Again, what this discussion is about.

[craig]

Dirk, Buddhists may not see God as the foundation of absolute law, but they do believe some foundation exists. The five precepts you mention may be voluntary, but no-one would follow them unless he either (a) thought them personally useful (which would make them merely utilitarian and not a philosophy of life at all), or (b) were convinced that they are in accord with some objective understanding of reality beyond that of the zeitgeist.

You and Prof. Esolen disagree less than you think -- after all, he attributed to Buddhism "a philosophy of life, like Stoicism" believing in "the existence of objective good discoverable by reason"

[Yaknyeti]

Dirk,

Go ahead and ignore that earlier post. I would rather that you focus on a few conversations, get in depth, and try to approach some sort of consensus than that you spread yourself thin trying to answer every Christian's questions.

As it is, I submit that you haven't strictly answered my objection above. Let me rephrase it. There are a number of people who call themselves Christians but don't live consistently with Christianity. In that case, I would not include them as examples of the benefits of Christianity.

In your case, I'm asking whether you think Buddhists are consistent atheists. Perhaps only a few of them are. Already, I'm reading that Buddhism isn't so much atheistic as compatible with a multitude of religious beliefs, which suggests to me that it would be very easy for philosophical contamination to keep the behavior of a few atheists from being truly consistent with atheistic philosophy. Thus, I see little reason to worry about Buddhists as a counterexample to the problems that I think are inherent in atheism.

[Tony Esolen]

I'd like this discussion to return to the point of the original post -- which was on the danger that natural talents, even "virtues," if you will, can pose when they are unmoored from Christ, or at the least from a firm grasp upon an objectively existent Good. I think a few of the presidential candidates right now amply illustrate the point.

[Dirk Van Glabeke]

Yaknyeti,

let me try to rephrase your post, just to see if I understand you correctly:

are you stating that, if Buddhists live a morally good life, without what a christian would call sin, that this is due, not to the Buddhist way of thinking and practices, but (in abscence of a authoritative God or absolute values) due to philosophical contamination from other beliefs?
And if so which beliefs would that be?
I'm maybe reading you completely wrong.

[Dirk Van Glabeke]

Mr. Esolen,

On Nazism: there is no doubt that Hitler and his party had the support of many Germans. And although we can discuss the religious beliefs of the top of the Nazi party, there is no doubt that the majority of the German nation was christian.

>>If you drew up a list of the ten most malignant people of the twentieth century, trying to avoid choosing all politicians, you'd be hard pressed to find anybody who was NOT an atheist, unless it should be the Ayatollah Khomeini:<<

Sanger is unknown over here

1) there is no logical causal connection between their atheist beliefs and their atrocious acts

also christians commited atrocious acts. Are we therefore allowed to see their acts as a consequence of their religion?

2) the statement merely shows that in the twentieth century religion was no longer, in most parts of the world, the ideology that motivated enough people to build totalitarian power positions
other totalitarian ideologies had replaced it

As ideologies, it's the totalitarian absolutist aspect that is the link with
the atrocities. The idea that they have the absolute and only thruth.
Atheism is relativistic versus ethics.

an example of the fact that there is no necessary link between atheism and these totalitarian ideologies:

Traditionalism also dominated Nazi philosophy, such as it was. Though science and technology were lauded, the overall thrust opposed the Enlightenment, modernism, intellectualism, and rationality. It is hard to imagine how a movement with that agenda could have been friendly toward atheism, and the Nazis were not. Volkism was inherently hostile toward atheism: freethinkers clashed frequently with Nazis in the late 1920s and early 1930s. On taking power, Hitler banned freethought organizations and launched an “anti-godless” movement. In a 1933 speech he declared: “We have . . . undertaken the fight against the atheistic movement, and that not merely with a few theoretical declarations: we have stamped it out.” This forthright hostility was far more straightforward than the Nazis’ complex, often contradictory stance toward traditional Christian faith.

also communism on one hand and freethinking and relativity of values on the other, don't seem to mix very well either

[Tony Esolen]

Read Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov.

Name for me a single atheist of any prominence who opposed both Nazism and Communism. I can name one: but he was a believer in the natural law, and was deeply friendly to religion. Other than Friedrich von Hayek, nobody.

Atheists on the right in this country cozied up to Hitler; that was H. L. Mencken's undoing. Atheists on the left cozied up to Stalin. The British atheist Malcolm Muggeridge blew the whistle on the Ukrainian famine and was blackballed for it by the European intelligentsia. He converted to Roman Catholicism much later.

But stick to the issue at hand. I was not talking about atheists in this original post. You want to wrench everything back to your preoccupation. The issue of the harm that pseudo-virtues can do is an important one. Dirk, I really must insist on this.