Get In The Habit

One impetus behind this post is a link sent in a comment to a post of mine on Ghulf Genes. The link is to an essay by Alasdair MacIntyre (accessible here) on The Nature of Virtues. The second is a post on Siris yesterday (here) addressing the question Is Faith a Virtue? Sometimes comments on blogs are just not the way to present one’s own response to highly stimulating ideas of enormous complexity, hence I thought I’d sort out my own thoughts on the matter of virtue here.

In one sense virtue and morality are very closely linked—or indeed synonymous. I find this in Webster’s first definition of virtue, rendered as “a conformity to a standard of right: Morality.” In an earlier posting I’ve at least touched on the subject of morality (here) focusing on its ambiguities. Virtue, by contrast, although very slippery (for reasons that follow), turns out to be simple and straightforward.

As MacIntyre shows, the word is rooted in the Latin vir, man, and is therefore manliness—a concept that different times define in different ways. It also carries the meaning of excellence—and when we speak of the virtue of a plant, say in a medical context, it means efficiency or efficacy. By way of example MacIntyre discusses the meaning of virtue in Homer, Aristotle, the New Testament’s so-called theological virtues (faith, hope, and charity), in Jane Austen’s work, and in Benjamin Franklins. The contrasts are quite striking. MacIntyre’s essay is well worth reading just to see how he parses apart two motivations behind virtue, which he labels external and internal. External motivation comes from rewards you hope to gain; internal motivation arises from the inward experience of some practice, e.g., the sheer pleasure of doing a job right. My own view of the external/internal split has been to deny the presence of virtue if the motive is external, to recognize it when it is internal. Rabia al-Adawiyya’s saying always comes to my mind. “If I worship you from fear of hell, condemn me to hell. If I do so in the hope of paradise, deny me paradise.” I’m with her.

So long as we view virtue through the lens of qualities, tendencies, or endowments (like “manly strength” in Homer), the concept remains slippery. Natural endowments lack the immediate sense of a moral quality I tend to associate with the word. It helps me a great deal to define it more sharply from actual experience—always my tendency. And here I get real help from Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. Augustine defined virtue as “a good habit consonant with our nature.” Aquinas calls it “an operative habit essentially good.” Here I footnote the Catholic Encyclopedia (link). As a habit virtue loses its mystery and becomes straight-forward. Habits are acquired by repeatedly doing something—and if a difficulty must be overcome, thus a higher good must be preferred over a lower, it involves an act of the will. Thus virtue becomes, you might say, a record of repeatedly choosing right. Experience teaches that we naturally tend toward the good; the difficulties arise when we become aware of an ascending scale of goods and realize that lower goods often have more immediate and sensory rewards. A realization, thus a conscious mental grasp of these differences must first arise before a choice even faces us. And before virtue, the habit, is present, our naked will must form it by repeating what at first are relatively painful choices.

Now here I underline that a recognition is necessary—a kind of inward knowing. In my experience this is not an intellectual operation. My word for it is intuitive. I know the difference, for me, but I cannot speak for others. I don’t know what Aquinas really meant by intellect; the internal experience of that concept, for him, might have been be quite different from mine; for me it ranks lower than intuition and, therefore, unless the intellectual formulation gets intuition’s nod, I view it with a certain reserve.

Here then arises the issue of faith as a virtue. Faith in a structure of doctrines—which includes faith in the authority on which they rest—absolutely demands an intuitive assent. We are dealing here with matters that cannot be confirmed in the usual ways. Faith has a much closer relationship to truth than to goodness. Once I believe that something is thus and so, must I continuously repeat that affirmation? The reason why faith plays such a gigantic role in Christianity, it seems to me, is because its fundamentally very complex doctrine does not meet with intuitive assent as readily, say, as belief in God. Hence, perhaps, the affirmation must be repeated—because it’s not genuinely believed; in that context it can become a virtue. Further, faith in God does not by any means logically and automatically produce the Christian doctrines unless we first accept a very particular formulation of how God relates to man. But fear of hell or hope for paradise should not compel a person to act against the movements of his heart.