Virtue Quest

The view from the top makes it look so easy!

More goodness from Pinckaers’ The Sources of Christian Ethics!

Following St. Thomas Aquinas, Pinckaers gives three basic stages of growth in virtue:

1. Beginner / childhood
2. Proficient / adolescent
3. Perfect / mature adult

Each of these stages essentially follows the growth in freedom of a person, and challenges the person to become more free in his or her life. Here’s how each stage works:

Beginning in virtue

The beginner needs to learn how the world works. This is the stage of getting to know – to know oneself, to know one’s abilities, and to know the world and the moral basis of one’s life in the world. The primary work of this stage is learning or, to use a more traditional word, discipline.

Now, it strikes us that discipline is something opposed to freedom, but when the freedom we seek is to live a fully human life, we start out in need of knowledge and in need of practice. Human beings need to be raised and trained and taught.

The goal of education is to lead the child to understand (and the educator must first understand this himself) that discipline, law, and rules are not meant to destroy his freedom, still less to crush or enslave him. Their purpose is rather to develop his ability to perform actions of real excellence by removing dangerous excesses, which can proliferate in the human person like weeds stifling good grain, and by guarding him against unhealthy errors that could turn him aside and jeopardize his interior freedom.

Moreover, this is only the initial stage of growth, just as practicing scales is the beginning and not the end of playing the piano.

Progress in virtue

The second stage involves internalizing the rules by seeing and acting on the reason the rules exist in the first place. It involves a certain testing of the rules – not to destroy them, but to understand them, just as a pianist might try out different formations of a chord or ask what happens when you add this note to it. This is the stage where virtues become, not actions that one follows because they’re imposed, but a kind of “second nature,” an ability that really is one’s own.

Virtue is not a habitual way of acting, formed by the repetition of material acts and engendering in us a psychological mechanism. It is a personal capacity for action, the fruit of a series of fine cations, a power for progress and perfection.

In other words, freedom and goodness cease to be mechanical exercises and become organic parts of us.

Perfect virtue

First off, Pinckaers warns (and I warn with him) that “perfect” here doesn’t mean the end of the road; rather, it means the fulfillment, and the completion of development. Probably a better word for today would be “mature” but St. Thomas used “perfect” so Pinckaers explains what he meant by it.

We can characterize this stage by two features: mastery of excellent actions and creative fruitfulness.

This is the ultimate goal: to be able to do whatever we do well, and to do it creatively. This is what Thomas Edison meant by saying that “Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.” The virtuous person has gained the freedom and the ability to bring inspiration to reality in spite of the difficulty or obstacles in the way.

This does not mean the end of learning or of growth; rather it means that learning and growth continue almost naturally, without great effort – because the virtuous person has learned how to learn, and has rooted him- or herself in good soil for growth. Virtue has become a stable foundation for the freedom to do what really leads to happiness.

And that’s a goal worth striving for!

The original effect

Tim Burton appears to have lost his imagination.

He’s come a long way since the joy of “Beetlejuice” and the genius of “Edward Scissorhands.” Even his adaptation of “Batman” brought an originality to the superhero movie that had been sorely lacking.

But at least since “Sleepy Hollow” his films have followed a steady trend away from character and plot and toward a desperate attempt to recreate the curlicue atmosphere of the classic “The Nightmare Before Christmas”. He hasn’t bothered coming up with interesting stories, relying instead on twisting other people’s tales to suit his vertiginous vision. He’s put Johnny Depp in all sorts of white makeup (none of which matches the beauty of Edward) and he’s papier-mached or CGI-ed trees imitating the Mandelbrot set or the Golden Ratio (depending on his mood). And he’s sacrificed some truly beautiful stories to these visual allusions to his own better work.

“Alice in Wonderland” is no exception. Naturally, he had to start by making Alice older – nineteen – in order to add a touch of sex appeal and to develop a loose and unconvincing coming-of-age story in an attempt to add depth. (As if a story about a girl falling down a mile-deep rabbit hole needed to go any deeper!) He then gives Depp some erratic antics, and his muse Helena Bonham Carter (does anyone else cast her anymore?) her standard sneer-pout-sneer-pout, and his special effects department a blank check to put as many curlicues as they can into the set dressing.

To their credit, Depp as the Mad Hatter and Mia Wasikowska as Alice turn in solid performances, almost covering over the unwarranted shifts in character and the gaping plot holes. Anne Hathaway, on the other hand, was unable to transcend the absurd role of the White Queen with humanity or believability. Or maybe it was just frustration with Burton’s demand that she keep her hands constantly in the air.

Ultimately, the film fails on the level of imagination. (And yes, this is where I make the virtue connection.) Imagination requires a freedom of mind, as well as a solid grounding in reality – neither of which Burton seems able to muster any more. The closest to reality he comes is the idea that international trade is a way to get rich. But his grasp of courtship, of the tension between social expectation and personal expression, and of the nature of authority all fail to consider the human person anything other than a plot-point to be manipulated into a special-effects sequence.

Ultimately, he has no notion of the difference between good and evil. The Red Queen is arbitrary and unpleasant. The White Queen is arbitrary and (so we’re told) pleasant. But the White Queen also brews a witch’s potion without moral qualm – though she’s made some vague vow against taking life; and she shows no virtue or reason she should merit Alice’s loyalty any more than the Red Queen. Well, except that she is albino and her body is not distended by CGI.

Mr. Burton would have done much better had he taken the time to meditate on Lewis Carroll’s works, rather than mutilating them.

"But I shot a man in Reno..." or did I?

Have I mentioned how much I love the book I’m reading? The Sources of Christian Ethics by Servais Pinckaers. And it’s not just because the author’s last name sounds just like “pink hairs,” either!

A history lesson

The middle section of the book gives a quick history of major ideas in morality from Plato to the present. The very short version is that in the fourteenth century (that’s AD 1301-1400) an English Franciscan named William of Ockham (famous for “Ockham’s razor”) began pushing the theory that the will was more important than the intellect, and that freedom was the greatest of all goods – greater even than truth.

Ockham’s ideas caught on, and in the next couple hundred years transformed the way people thought about ethics and morality.

Instead of being about the pursuit of goodness, happiness, and excellence, morality became a struggle between freedom and law, between choice and obligation.

Don’t impose your morality on me!

There’s a lot packed into that history, but something that struck me very personally was that law is something imposed on me from outside, whereas virtue is something I develop from within myself.

Now, being a basically lazy man, I’ve spent vast portions of my life waiting for somebody else to make me do things. I’d put off homework till the teacher sat me down and watched me do it. At work, I would only get things done if the boss was around to make me look busy. Heck, even at home, I only bother to pick the place up if there’s company coming over.

In other words, I’ve been defining my freedom as avoiding the imposition of law – and I associated doing anything at all with the obligation of law. Even things I know are good for me, I need someone to “make” me do them.

The approach of virtue is altogether different. It recognizes that freedom is at the service of a person’s ability to act, to do stuff. And it is a person’s mind that figures out what’s good to do. The will follows the mind and moves us into action.

Right, totally abstract. Let me see if I can give an example.

An example

So I’m sitting on my bed looking at the mess that is my bedroom. Papers piling up on the desk. Clothes strewn all over the chairs and the corner of the bed – not yet on the floor, but that’ll come soon if I don’t do anything about it. A bowl and a glass from when I ate lunch in my room a week and a half ago.

But something in me says, I don’t have to clean my room. Nobody’s going to make me. You’re not the mom of me!

So, instead of cleaning my room, I read a book. Yep, The Sources of Christian Ethics. And it occured to me that I could choose to clean my room – not because someone was forcing me to, but because it was good to. I could clean my room simply because I enjoy having a clean room.

So I stood up and started clearing off my desk.

Those who cling to freedom will lose it

It’s ironic that, by clinging to a false freedom – refusing to let anybody “make” me clean my room – I actually lost a true freedom: the ability to clean my room and to enjoy it. But that’s what happens when a good thing gets put in the wrong place.

Freedom is not the highest good, and is not something to be grasped with both hands. If we hold it lightly, and use it to grow in virtue, then it blossoms itself and makes everything we do truly free.