Virtue Quest

I was talking with a friend this weekend, and she said that she was a little confused when she first visited my blog because it wasn’t clear what kind of virtue I was talking about. So I took another look at the page, and I realize that the words “classical” and “cardinal” are entirely missing from the page.

I’ll rectify that soon, but in the meantime I realized that it never hurts to take another look at the big picture.

The classical virtues

The main reason I’m writing this blog is as a kind of public self-improvement exercise. I’ve found that the classical philosophy of virtue describes my strengths, my faults, and my potential. It also gives a very practical structure to work on overcoming my weaknesses and to work toward my potential.

These virtues are traditionally grouped under the four “cardinal” virtues and the three “theological” virtues: (more…)

I just returned from breakfast with George Weigel – he happened to pick my table to sit at – who was this morning’s speaker for the Catholic Professionals of Seattle. The basic gist of his talk was to promote his newest book: The End and the Beginning, which is a “sequel” and a completion of his 1999 biography of Pope John Paul II, Witness to Hope.

There was a bit of cold war spy drama, and a bit of “Lifestyles of the Holy and Famous,” and a bit of Vatican inside baseball; but one detail from his presentation jumped out at me. He said that he took part of the structure of his book from the process of canonization – the Catholic Church’s process of declaring someone a saint. One of the stages asks witnesses to describe the potential saint’s life in terms of the theological and cardinal virtues: Faith, Hope, and Charity; Prudence, Justice, Courage, and Temperance. Mr. Weigel noted, as an aside, that it’s an interesting exercise to look at life through the lens of the virtues, but that most people don’t do it.

A life out of focus

The virtues really form the only lens that has been able to bring my own life in to focus. But I only stumbled upon them by accident, myself. The classical model of virtue runs almost directly counter to most of twenty-first century American culture.

Now, Americans tend to value daring, or initiative, or valor; and that quality is similar to courage. Americans appreciate cleverness and foresight; those are certainly aspects of prudence. And it goes almost without saying that Americans are passionate about rights, which are a part of the virtue of justice.

However, American culture takes these values for granted, as a collection of qualities whose importance is assumed to be self-evident. In fact, it’s a kind of jumble that ultimately serves another purpose: one’s own interests.

Following the more-or-less normal course of life, I always found myself confused: should I take a risk or should I follow the safe course? Should I insist on my rights or make sure I’m not trampling someone else’s? Should I pursue my own interests or those of my employer/family/country?

Putting life in focus

When I discovered the idea of the virtues, I finally found a principle to help me answer all those questions. Like putting on my glasses, it brought all the fuzzy shapes into focus, and I could see more clearly what to do – and, more importantly, why to do it.

The virtues depend on one another. Love, or Charity, shows us what is good, and drives us to pursue it. Prudence shows us what is real, and sorts out the details of the situation as it really exists. These two virtues form the bedrock and cornerstone of our lives.

Justice and Faith both guide us in knowing what to do: we give to everyone what belongs to them, and we recognize them as fellow children of God, infinite in dignity and worthy of profound respect. These virtues form the framing structure that gives shape to our lives.

Hope, Courage, and Temperance all give us the strength or the stamina to follow through on the loving and prudent actions that Justice and Faith guide us to do. They support us in the face of despair, or fear, or temptation. They are like cross-braces that give a building strength and stability.

Taken together, the virtues describe the whole form of a person’s life.

An end and a beginning?

As Mr. Weigel points out in the life of Pope John Paul II, the virtues allow us to understand the depth and complexity of a man whose actions sometimes appeared confusing or contradictory to American eyes.

But I find virtue is as important at the beginning of each day as it is at the end of a life. I ask, how can I understand my own life; and how can I bring it to be the best life I can carry out, the kind of life I was created to live?

Pardon me while I get all philosophical for a bit.

Those who have known me a while know that I suffer from clinical depression. The meds and some good therapy have that pretty well under control; but it’s linked to something that is beyond the scope of medical science. I have a bad habit of asking, “What’s the meaning of life?” or, “What’s the point of it all?” or, closer to home, “What’s the point of my life?”

Yes, I’m a Catholic; and I do buy the whole “know, love, and serve God in this life so that I may be happy with him forever in the next” idea. But it’s an idea: it’s words that I assent to in my mind, but that don’t always reach to my heart, or my gut – which is where those questions of meaning come from. In other words, I still ask, “What’s it mean to be happy with God?” or even, “Why did God make me in the first place?”

The questions “Why?” and “What does it mean?”

A good friend once suggested to me that most people – me included – put much more stock in what something means than what something is, and that this is a backwards way of living life. A person, or an experience, or even an object is only “significant” because it first exists in reality. A relationship has to be lived before it can “mean” anything.

He has an excellent point. I tend to over-think just about everything in my life, and on a cultural level it’s much easier to find “analysis” than it is to find “news.” There’s a certain cart-preceding-horse-ness about this whole approach.

At the same time, the question of meaning is one that just doesn’t go away. And, in terms of “what my life means,” anyway, I’m looking for something deeper than explanation or analysis. But it’s hard to say exactly what it is I am looking for. What am I asking when I ask “why?” or “what’s the point?”

What’s behind these questions, at least for me, is a sort of “what’s worthwhile about it?” or “is it any good?” And I think that’s what “a meaningful life” or an answer to “why?” would entail: I want to see and recognize what’s good about the world, and about my being in the world. I want to know that my life is good.

Not just a moral good

Now, this isn’t quite the same thing as, “I want to make the world a better place.” Of course, I want to be a morally good person: I want to be the kind of person who does kind and loving things, who makes living better for those around me, and so on.

But there’s something that comes first: there’s the very fact that I’m alive, that I exist in the world at all.

Or, in more philosophical terms, is goodness convertible with being? Is existence itself good?

Now, for some people, that’s an absurd question. It’s obvious to them that it’s good to exist. But that’s not universally true. Besides quirky people like me, there’s the whole tradition of Buddhism. If I understand it correctly, Buddhism teaches that existence is an illusion, and that we can escape from the illusion – not into a greater reality, but into nothingness, into not-being. The way to save oneself from suffering is to escape from existing.

And yet, I have real experiences of the goodness of being. For me, being something of a nerd, the paradigmatic moment was sitting in high school chemistry when I suddenly understood the structure of the periodic table. It was beautiful. It was profound. It opened up the world to me. I just wanted to stare at the chart on the wall for hours on end.

I’ve heard normal people describe similar experiences in watching a sunrise, or hearing music. Sometimes, it takes the form of awe at another person. Sometimes it’s falling in love.

The point is, it almost doesn’t matter that I’m there to see it; what matters is that this beautiful, wonderful thing exists. And if the periodic table is good – indeed, if anything at all is good – then that goodness is a part of the real world. In other words, the world has a “meaning,” a “point,” it’s “worthwhile,” at least as far as the periodic table goes.

And if I can recognize it, that recognition is also good. That means that, as far as my ability to recognize something good goes, I am good, worthwhile, and my life has some kind of meaning.

Ditto for everybody else in the world.

Now, this isn’t an air-tight proof that any- and everything that exists is good by its very existence (though I think it’s a step toward that), but it does remind me that the burden of proof lies with pessimism. I have the ability to recognize good in all sorts of things, including myself.

And that’s not bad.

Today, Ash Wednesday, begins the season of Lent in the Catholic Church. It’s a season of prayer and fasting and almsgiving, imitating Christ’s forty days in the desert, and preparing to celebrate his passion and resurrection at Easter.

Some Christian traditions, such as the Orthodox, have a very strict discipline for Lent. We Catholics have it fairly light in terms of required discipline: two days of actual fasting – Ash Wednesday and Good Friday – and no meat on any Fridays. But we’re encouraged to take on other penances ourselves.

So, here’s how I’m going about the whole Lenten thing.

Prayer, Fasting, Almsgiving

Prayer is the foundation and the heart of Lent. But not just any prayer. It’s a prayer of testing. Jesus went into the desert to be tested, so this prayer is for strength and endurance in the face of testing, in the face of temptation. It’s also a prayer of abandonment to God. It’s giving him permission to test me, and to challenge me in ways I haven’t necessarily planned for.

So, I’m taking up an old form of prayer: the Liturgy of the Hours. I’ve prayed this way before, and I’ve taken a break from it for a little while. But it’s very appropriate for Lent because it constantly recalls me to the very basics of my dependence on God.

As for fasting, I’m going to give up salty snacks (like chips and peanuts and such) as well as desserts at home. These are things that I really do long for, that I’ll notice are gone from my diet, and that will remind me that “man does not live on bread alone.” And that’s the main point of fasting: to rely on God’s care at a fundamental level. I don’t make my own food. God, ultimately, is the one who feeds me.

Also, on the not-so-foodlike-stuff level, I’m giving up computer games. I enjoy the heck out of them, but they too easily distract me from what’s truly important in life.

I’ll be honest: I don’t quite know what to do about almsgiving. I do make regular charitable donations from my income. I probably could devote a bit more money to it, but I don’t have all that much to give. So I’ve been thinking about doing some kind of volunteer work. I know there’s plenty that needs doing. Just not quite sure where to focus.

If you have any ideas, I’m open to them. I figure I’ll talk it through with my spiritual director when I next see him.

In any case, giving alms is like the other two Lenten disciplines: it forces me to put my trust in God. Not only that I can make do with less, but that God can give great things to others through me.

I don’t know how many of my readers celebrate Lent, but if you want to share what you’re doing, I think it would make great conversation in the comments box!

Siobhan asked me if I was ever going to write about anything besides prudence. My short answer is, yes-and-no.

The long answer is that, the way I see it, writing about any one of the virtues really entails writing about them all. Every virtue implies every other, ultimately. The names are simply a matter of focus.

… from a certain point of view…

As far as I know, this approach to virtue is something I made up on my own, so I welcome anybody to correct or refine what I’m saying here.

It seems to me that the virtues are not exactly separate things from each other, but distinct aspects of a virtuous action.

So, any given action – for example, eating a bowl of ice cream (one of my favorite actions!) – can be seen from the perspective of prudence, or justice, or fortitude, or temperance. For that matter, you can look at it from the point of view of faith, or hope, or love.

My thinking is still a bit muddy, but I find the cardinal virtue / theological virtue distinction to be valuable here, showing two major lenses to use in looking at actions.

Cardinal virtues

So, in deciding about eating a bowl of ice cream, one can ask whether it is prudent. That is, is eating ice cream really a good thing for me in my current situation?

One can also ask, is it temperate? That is, are my desires within me in harmony with the truth and facts I’ve prudently discovered? Or, is it courageous? That is, must I overcome obstacles in order to achieve the good that I have prudently discovered?

Finally, one acts. And one asks, is this action just? That is, am I pursuing good in accordance with reality, opposing my false desires and overcoming obstacles?

So, prudence discovers the good; fortitude and temperance clear the way to pursuing that good, one by overcoming external obstacles and the other by opposing internal disorders; and justice acts to pursue the good. All the virtues collaborate in the process of taking action, and any given action is virtuous to the extent that it conforms to all the cardinal virtues.

Theological virtues

I see the theological virtues as a kind of parallel. Faith discovers the good – not merely relying on my own reason, but trusting in the testimony of others. Hope clears the path to the good by putting false desires and external obstacles in proper perspective. And love acts for the good, even by laying down one’s life for one’s beloved.

So the theological virtues build upon the cardinal virtues and express them, not merely from my own individual and human perspective, but from a higher perspective, even a divine perspective.

What about the ice cream?

I understand that the greatest question here may be, “Yeah, but did you eat the ice cream?”

How could you be in any doubt? Ice cream is a form of pure concentrated goodness.

Of course I ate the ice cream!

I’ll admit it: I like my instant gratification to be both instant and gratifying.

It’s tough for me to recognize good things at much of a distance. And I’m often blind to the good in the things that are right in front of my face. Heaven and religion is a great example of my struggle with the virtue of hope.

Lacking the virtue of hope

When I was a kid, I didn’t think much about heaven. I considered it “pie in the sky” and figured I could always worry about it later. And, at the same time, I looked at religion (I was raised Roman Catholic) as a bunch of useless words and gestures that often involved men wearing dresses.

In high school, I took a turn as an atheist for a couple years. I started out by searching for “truth”, but eventually said that I was looking for “meaning” or “purpose” in life. Now that I’ve returned to the religion of my youth, I think a more proper word is hope.

The irony is that I’ve found hope in exactly the place that I could not find it as a child, in God, in Jesus and his Church.

This doesn’t mean I like everything about the Catholic Church. I find some parts of the Mass to be boring, and I find some priests to be embarrassments, and I find some devotions or aspects of spirituality to be silly.

But I’ve come to see that they all are directed toward the ultimate object of hope: union with God, aka, heaven. And I understand this clearly in my mind, even if my heart or my gut don’t like it or don’t get it.

I have two major obstacles to hope: I don’t recognize something as good, or I’m impatient and unwilling to work for something in the future. Both these obstacles show up in spades with regard to hoping for perfect union with God.

Is heaven really good?

I long ago dropped the childish notion of heaven as a kind of eternal amusement park or (worse) lounging endlessly in a toga on a cloud practicing the harp. But even the profound mystical descriptions of heaven: gazing on the face of God, intimate communion in Love, the glorification of my mortal body… all of these, well, kind of leave me cold.

I mentioned in another post that great hopes are built upon smaller hopes. It’s hard to hope for success in a career if one has no experience of success from a game or a musical instrument. And I think this is part of my problem: I tend to be hyper-critical of everything. Go ahead, ask my friends: I can find fault in a sunset or a view of the mountains.

So I’ve been practicing by reminding myself of how good things are around me: how delicious is this food, or how delightful is the time I spend with that friend, or how satisfying it is to get that bass lick down just so. I remind myself of these good things whenever I’m tempted to say that life just sucks and nothing is worth anything.

And I try connect those small feelings in my gut or my heart with the knowledge in my head that God is the ultimate source of all these undeniably good things. It’s an uphill battle, but (as with all virtue) it’s getting a little bit easier as I keep on practicing.

Why can’t I have it right now?

The dieter’s slogan, “A moment on the lips, forever on the hips!” strikes very close to home here. Ice cream and bacon are my particular weaknesses in the realm of gluttony. And overwhelming emotion – usually anger or sadness – is the fix I seek in the realm of “meaning” or “purpose.”

But the union with God that hope truly seeks, like the health of the dieter, means refusing to indulge in emotional fixes. It means overcoming my desire to feel … not so much to feel “good” as to feel intensely or “importantly.” Instead, I have to recognize that the true good, the true importance, is found in God rather than in the feelings I’m seeking.

By indulging myself now, I’m actually moving away from the source of what is good and important.

So, to practice hope, again I remind myself of how false and unnecessary these immediate pleasures are. And then, as soon as possible, I focus my attention on some good activity (like listening to my friend, or cleaning my room, or praying) that really will bring me more fully into union with God.

As I said, I’m definitely rowing upstream here. I fail far more often than I succeed. But I think I have an glimpse of what success looks like.

Kelly seems to have been reading my mind. How did you know I was going to follow up by talking about hope in the big picture?

Here’s the thing: I think we’ve had so many of our hopes dashed that we Americans have become fairly cynical about placing hope in anything. But this also means that we have had an intensifying craving for something to hope in, because hope is a natural way of relating to the world.

So, when something claims to be, well, worthy of hope, we tend either to mock it or to cling irrationally to it.

Irrational hope

All we have to do is rewind a year.

(As a disclaimer, I don’t intend to say anything about President Obama, except that he is a human being. He has done some good, and some evil, and has made some mistakes. History will judge his reputation and God will judge his soul and the only judgment I can make is whether or not I vote for him when he next runs for election.)

Then-Senator Obama ran one of the most memorable political campaigns in recent history, and one of the main features was the iconic poster of him with a single word under his upward-gazing face: “HOPE”.

This poster polarized opinions of the candidate, and most people I know took it either as A) a sign that Obama brought a new and better approach to politics, or that B) a confirmation that Obama’s ego had outstripped all sense of reality.

The fact is that, like most politicians throughout history, Obama the candidate promised all sorts of things, some of which were beyond his power to deliver – at least, without the aid of Congress.

In other words, his campaign encouraged people to place an irrational hope in him: a “hope” beyond the realm of possibility.

Rational hope

The virtue of hope, on the other hand, is grounded in reason. As I noted before, hope as a virtue pursues a future good that is difficult but possible. That is, whatever we hope for has to be a real good, and it has to be really possible.

Strictly speaking, we cannot hope for a fantasy, or for something impossible.

And that is where most big “hopes” go awry. Politicians, and salespeople, and coaches, and journalists, and … you get the picture: they all try to raise people’s hopes toward fantasies or impossibilities. And they do this because it works. Many people do raise their hopes to these things, and act accordingly – whether with their votes or their dollars or their actions.

And, when inevitably these hopes fail, these people find it more difficult to satisfy the yearning for good, for something better than all this.

True hope prevails

The solution is to hold fast to the virtue of hope: to insist on reality, on truth. This means sometimes calming the emotions – stepping back to take a more objective view of the promise – and sometimes it means overcoming resistance – especially when we discover a groundless prejudice.

It means putting the right hopes in the right places.

Kelly said:

I just find it so much more exhausting to have hope in, say politics or the state of the world, or an end to hunger.

It’s entirely rational to hope that political action will result in a more orderly or fair society. It’s irrational to hope that politics will make us all better people or make the world a better place. It’s entirely rational to hope for a better distribution of the world’s goods, so that fewer people suffer from hunger. It’s irrational to hope that no one will ever again face malnutrition or starvation.

Growing in hope

Hope for greater things builds on hope for smaller things. If I have no experience of success in learning to play the bass guitar, then I have very little to base a hope for a career (or for politics, or for global reform) on.

This doesn’t mean I don’t desire those great things; it means I’m unable to really understand the difficulty of the task, or to estimate whether it is possible. I’m liable to be suckered in by a fantasy, or to wear myself out striving for an impossibility.

Strangely enough, the best way I’ve found to grow in hope is to constantly seek a reality check. I’ve found that playing bass and political action are easier in some ways than I feared, and challenging in ways I didn’t expect. So, I revise my expectations, and take the next step forward.

I was going to confession once, and the priest pointed out to me that what my sins had in common was that they were sins against hope.

Not to excuse myself, but more to say “it takes one to know one,” I think I see a lack of hope – or even an opposition to hope – all around us in the American culture. And I think this “sinning against hope” is at the root of many problems in the world today.

Hope … for what?

Thomas Aquinas says that the object of hope is a future good, difficult but possible to obtain. This deceptively simple definition has four parts:

• Hope seeks a good - i.e., it looks for something truly desirable and worthy
• The good that hope seeks is in the future - it is not something we can have here and now, or even immediately
• This good is difficult to achieve – it is not something that will simply come to us, that we can take for granted
• Yet, it is possible - it is not a fantasy, or a daydream, but is something real and within the grasp of those who strive for it

For myself, I find I fail on every one of these points. For example, I hope to be a good bass guitarist. But there are times I just don’t feel that playing music is very important or worthwhile. Or I grow impatient and figure if I can’t be a rock star right now then I’d rather not play at all. Or I give up in frustration, not wanting to endure the effort and pain of practice. Or, worst of all, I despair of ever improving, imagining that I am missing some vital talent or gift.

In all these cases, though, the objection is summed up easily: “Why bother?”

Why bother?

I hear variations of this objection all the time. I hear it from co-workers: “Who’s going to find out?” I hear it from friends: “Eh, whatever.” I hear it from my own heart: “I’d rather just watch TV.”

The problem here is that we lose touch with reality. Whether we wallow in a wishful fantasy or settle for a lesser or easier goal, to lose hope is to let go of the truth that good things are worth pursuing. It is to forget that music really is beautiful, and that there is a unique beauty that can only come through my own fingers.

It is to believe the lie that this – whatever situation we’re in, whether personal or political or practical – that this is as good as it’s going to get, and nothing we do can make it any better.

Despair says: “It’ll never be perfect.” But hope says, “It can always be better.”

And the virtue of hope is repeating, reminding, building the habit in myself and others of always doing things even a little bit better.

I am well acquainted with failure. I’ve failed tests, failed whole courses. I’ve been fired from jobs, lost friends, burned bridges. Heck, I’ve even made my mother cry.

And yet, I find real hope and insight in that old saying, “The only real failure is the one who fails to try.”

Progress in Virtue

Virtue is not an either/or proposition. It’s not something you can “succeed” or “fail” at. It’s a journey of sorts. The real question is, how far along the road are you? The 90-year-old master still is walking the same road as the 13-year-old beginner, and both can stumble or turn the wrong way. And they both have the same choice to make, every day and in every action: to stay on the road, or to abandon it altogether.

So I keep reminding myself that virtue is something I make progress in, not something I succeed at. Even attempting to be more thoughtful, or more courageous, or more self-controlled – even if I fail in achieving some goal at the time – still is a step along the road. It’s a step toward greater prudence, greater fortitude, greater temperance. In short, it’s progress.

Practicing Virtue

Whenever I remember this, I look for opportunities to take another step, even a small step, along the road. It’s like practicing the piano (or, in my case, the bass guitar). If I take the time to practice scales and chord patterns, then it’s easier to play a song with other people.

And if I take the opportunity to think before I speak, or to face some small fear, or to let pass one bowl of ice cream, then I’m better prepared for bigger challenges, and for challenges that catch me by surprise. I’m a little further down the road, and even if I face a setback, it won’t set me back so far.

Learning from Experience

Saturday was not really a great day for me. I stayed in bed longer than I planned to. I didn’t finish the chapter I wanted to finish, didn’t call the friend I wanted to call, didn’t make it to the library or get the bathrooms cleaned. But I did get a little bit done. And yesterday, Sunday, I remembered how I just never got started on Saturday. So I learned from that: I got started right away, and Sunday turned out pretty well: made breakfast for my housemates, finished the chapter, met some new friends, and so on. Neither day was perfect, but both days saw me on the road. That’s the goal: just stay on the road.

Walking the road of virtue yourself? Join me and we’ll walk it together!