Psychology and Virtue

Extract

Virtue is not in fashion. Not even the word appears in most catechetical or theological writings. For us today it carries a musty smell of moralizing; it suggests a puritanism which we have good reason to mistrust, for we no longer want the prohibitions and obligations imposed on us by society to be the immediate criteria of our conduct. Even when it is the prohibitions and obligations imposed on us by the Church which are in question, we no longer feel that the quality of our Christian lives is to be judged according to our capacity to conform to the patterns of behaviour imposed on us in this way.

This is, however, not the only reason for our mistrust of virtue. We also react against its suggestion of the cultivated soul, the ideal of the ‘righteous man’ whose virtues are his adornment. And that is indeed what virtue meant at the beginning of our culture: the Greeks were so taken by virtue because it was the spiritual equivalent of physical beauty. Against this, on the one hand, we feel that this ideal is too self-centred: other people and the mystery of being and of the world seem to become mere pretexts or instruments for our personal perfection. On the other hand, we have also learned to distrust the clear conscience: Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, Heidegger and Sartre have all, in their turn, unmasked the illusions of the cultivated soul. And Christians have reason not to turn deaf ears to these voices,