Faith Works 3-17-18
Jeff Gill
The mystery of virtue
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Today is St. Patrick's Day, but I've written that column a few times before; Monday the Christian calendar honors St. Joseph, and I'm not sure I have anything new to say about him just now.
What has been on my mind lately is virtue. Or rather, the mystery of virtue.
Where does it come from? What exactly is it? How does a person live a virtuous life?
As a pastor, I know I'm supposed to tell you to find the right worldview, to accept by faith a vision of what your ultimate values are going to be, and to confess that faith by living out those values. And yes, for me, as a Christian believer I find security and certainty in the faith I hold, about the world and what lies beyond it.
What is much more up for grabs is the question of what my faith, or anyone's faith, tells me about virtue. The life of a believer, most faith traditions would affirm, my own included, should show the positive effects of your faith, but what exactly does that look like?
For the Amish, the externals are simpler; if your belief system isn't quite so prescriptive, what does it mean to answer the call to be a virtuous person? Should everyone on their confession of faith sell all that they have and give it to the poor, or is that a particular teaching to certain persons like the Bible's rich young ruler? Or does virtue just mean following the Ten Commandments, not murdering or lying or committing adultery?
The Good Lord knows that we'd probably all be better off if we could just get more people to follow those ten timeless instructions, but actually most of us think of virtue as going beyond just not killing or not telling fibs. The description of "a virtuous person" evokes something bigger, broader, and honorable in their context even beyond their religious community. We know what it means, but find it hard to describe.
And cynically, as a society, we've long accepted it as a given that it's well-nigh impossible for a politician to be virtuous, nor do we really expect it of celebrities or sports figures. It's considered unusual for them to even try, and in fact it makes us all the more suspicious when someone in the public eye tries to appear virtuous. This has been true for a while.
Alasdair MacIntyre in 1981 wrote a major work of moral philosophy entitled "After Virtue." His pessimistic take was that the modern age had become incoherent in what he calls "moral discourse" and worse yet, we refused to admit the internal inconsistencies or disconnects in what we said was of lasting importance and how we were choosing to live, even as we try to force our public discussions around these awkward corners of individualism and human destiny. MacIntyre was an academic and philosopher, but his main critique of modernism was how from the Enlightenment forward it has been the loss of a sense of lasting, ultimate purpose in the lives of individuals that left philosophical and social debate about morality floundering for a solid footing.
Can someone be virtuous if they have no hope or sense of life beyond the earthly sense of living? I know they can, because I have seen it. What is more under debate is how to teach virtue, to support virtue broadly in a culture without any shared transcendent meaning to ground it in. Manners do not require a heaven, nor does good taste insist on God as the final arbiter, but virtue evokes something more, a larger quality of humanity that extends from everyday courtesy to willing self-sacrifice.
How then can we teach virtue, if it is not a code or a style guide or a list of commandments, ten or more? Perhaps the best way to understanding virtue is through stories that tell us about people who display it, whatever "it" is.
The American writer Flannery O'Connor spoke in a way about the struggle to talk coherently about virtue, in her posthumous book of essays "Mystery and Manners," when she said that "a story is a way to say something that can't be said any other way . . . You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate."
What I love about Lent is how every year it takes me back directly to the story of Jesus. It's in the Gospels, and the personal accounts of how he lived, that I read about a life that speaks as clearly as can be about what virtue is.
Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and pastor in Licking County; tell him about where you see or hear virtue afoot around us at knapsack77@gmail.com, or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.
