The Other Side of Virtue: Where Our Virtues Come From, What They Really Mean, and Where They Might Be Taking Us

by Brendan Myers

Using ancient heroic epics and sagas like Beowulf, the Illiad and Odyssey, the Eddas, the Tain Bo Cuailnge, and literature inspired by them including the works of the Renaissance and Romanticism, Shakespeare, Tolkien, and J.K. Rowling, this book explains the world-view that gave birth to our virtues. In that world-view, life involves inevitable confrontations with inexplicable events like fortune, nature, other people, and death itself.

Genres: Philosophy, Paganism, Nonfiction, Spirituality, Mythology, Religion

320 pages, Paperback

First published July 25, 2008

About the author

By day, Brendan Myers is a professor of philosophy at Cegep Heritage College, in Gatineau, Quebec. By night, he composes thought-operas. And sometimes he publishes them.

Reviews

[Sable · Rating 5 out of 5]

I've had a signed copy of this book sitting on my "to read" shelf since I saw Brendan at the Western Gate Festival a couple of years ago, but only now finally got around to finding time to read it. I'm sorry I waited.

This book could be a modern manifesto for humanistic Paganism; but its theories can also be applied to most modern Pagan practice. And it could also be read and enjoyed by humanists and naturalists of any faith. It could possibly even be held up to Neil deGrasse Tyson and Stephen Hawking as an answer on the value of philosophy. Philosophy is not dead, Myers argues. It has merely changed form. A hard-core rationalist might ask "What use does philosophy have in the modern scientific and rational world?" The answer is "to teach us how to live a good life without faith to fall back on." But that being said, it does not challenge the existence of faith; rather, it suggests that ethics and values are essential and positive driving forces that cross the boundaries of religion or spirituality, and are equally applicable to everyone.

Myers postulates that classical heroic values are as relevant to the modern world as they were in the classical and heroic ages. He makes a good case for this by explaining modern humanist values as a natural outgrowth of classical values. Then he applies these values in the process of confronting what he calls "The Immensity." I have spoken of these things in previous articles as "the big human questions" and I have postulated that the degrees of Wicca are intended as rituals to help us to confront three of the Immensities that Brendan names: Life, Death, and Love; or as he puts it, The Earth, Death, and Other People. He suggests that our virtues teach us how to confront these Immensities; and by answering their challenges positively, we exemplify a virtuous life.

I love Brendan's way of articulating this concept in what I have previously described as "his liquid prose." His education is apparent through his choice of phrasing; but unlike many other academics, he does not write in technicalities and field-specific terminology. It is easily (and enjoyably) accessible to the layperson. And, I might add, he addresses how classical virtues, though grounded in patriarchal cultures, apply equally to women as well as men; and he uses figurative "he" and "she" interchangeably, giving me (as a woman who identifies as a feminist) a warm glow. When I first started reading the relevant section I was wondering why it was necessary to mention the subject at all; by the end of it I had realized it that it was because others often don't. The gesture was appreciated.

Brendan also covers the influence of the Romantic movement, Machiavelli, Shakespeare, and Nietzsche (while at the same time addressing the flaws in their arguments). He also presents us with two well known modern examples of tales of heroic virtue: Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. Perhaps that is why these stories appeal to most of the Pagans I know; it's because they speak to the virtues we value. He assures us that living a virtuous life is not about doing everything right; it's about how we meet the events and circumstances that cause us to call our beliefs and our sense of self into question.

Myers lays down his final challenge on the last few pages:

"Imagine that you are at home alone, preparing for bed. Then a messenger appears in your room, and says to you: 'Every part of your life, as you have lived it until this moment, has been prepared for you right from the beginning. The many millions of events, all the accidents and coincidences that had to happen so that you could be standing here, were all planned from the very start . . . . Since the world was made especially for you, therefore your experience of life shall stand as the paragon of all experience. And every measure has been taken to ensure that the quality of your life becomes the most beautiful, most fulfilling, most near to the divine, that any human life can be. The very purpose of civilization and history has been all along to produce the experience of life that you are having right now. Your life shall henceforth stand as the greatest achievement of any God or mortal man, the exemplar of all pleasure and worth, the model of the highest happiness that anyone anywhere can achieve. In this way the purpose and destiny of the world, the very meaning of the world, has been fulfilled in you. And henceforth all people shall look to you as their model.'"

So, if this happened to you, would you be satisfied that how you have acted in your life is an ideal to which other people should aspire? I considered this at length. And that, to me, is the purpose of philosophy in the modern world. As Socrates is credited as saying, "The unexamined life is not worth living."

Needless to say, I loved it. And I'm going to ask my students to read it. I think you should too.

[B.t. Newberg · Rating 4 out of 5]

Brendan Myers, a.k.a. Brendan Cathbad Myers, tackles the subject of virtue ethics in the ancient and modern world. He investigates the ethics of Heroic and Classical peoples of ancient Europe, charts the history of virtue through the Renaissance and into modern times, and advocates a modern ethics informed by ancient forms of virtue. In addition to these things, he offers a counter to passive forms of virtue, a critique of modern individualism, and a new way to understand the spiritual experience. All this he delivers in a book accessible to the general reader.

Unifying Myers' approach are two basic convictions: first, that we must find the source of our ethics in ourselves, and second, that community is also indispensabe.

The first point is rooted in the ancient Delphic maxim "Know thyself." The way we ought to act in the world is intimately related to who we are, or rather who we discover and create ourselves to be. Often when we act, it is not out of any rule-based obligation, but rather because "I am/am not the kind of person who would do that." To put it simply, ethics finds its foundation in our characters.

The second point is that community is vital. Contrary to the assumptions of modern individualism, community is essential to who we are and how we ought to act. The roles we fill, the crowds with whom we associate, and the responsibilities we take on in relationships--these things condition what we do and how we define ourselves. Therefore to fulfill the maxim "Know thyself," you must consider your social relations: friends, family, colleagues, and so on. Self-awareness is incomplete without these vital relations.

These two anchors ground Myers' virtue ethics. It is a philosophy not of rule-based obedience, but of character-based action. The emphasis falls not on the laws or commandments we follow, but rather on the qualities in which our characters may excel. These qualities are called virtues.

A virtue may be moral. For example, the four cardinal virtues of the Classical era, justice, courage, temperence, and prudence, are moral qualities. But a virtue may also be half-moral, half-aesthetic. Qualities like nobility or beauty involve such an aesthetic element. One may even excel in non-moral qualities, such as luck or strength. These various ways that a character may excel make up the kind of virtues that Myers has in mind.

This is not the same as what Myers calls the "familiar side" of virtue. We have inherited, largely from Christian tradition, a host of "passive" and "self-denying" qualities: faith, hope, charity, humility, chastity, and most of all docility. Myers claims this kind of virtue, though it may involve willpower and strength, serves to "police the passions" and "prevent anything from stirring up the delicate serenity of docilitas" (p. 3). This is not the side of virtue with which Myers is concerned, except to steer away from it.

Of greater interest is the "other side," the one discussed earlier. Here Myers invokes a more ancient and original usage, derived on the one hand from the Latin virtus, rooted in the word vir ("man"), and on the other hand from the Greek arete ("virtue" or "excellence"). In short, this usage refers to the ways in which a person's character excels. Myers' ethics is not about docility, but about excellence of character. He sums it up this way:

The 'familiar' side of virtue has to do with a predisposition to follow laws and commandments. The 'other side' asserts that who you are is much more important than the rules you follow, and at least as important as the things you do, when it comes to doing the right thing, and finding the worth in your life. (p. 6)

Myers articulates the "other side" of virtue in five segments called "movements." The First Movement is a collection of brief aphorisms, inspiring themes to play through the reader's imagination. The Second Movement begins Myers' course through history.

He begins with what he calls "Heroic" peoples: "the Celts of Ireland, Britain, and Western Europe, Germanic and Scandinavian people, the Greeks of the time of Homer, as well as the Macedonians" (p. 29). He makes heavy use of these peoples' literature, especially Beowulf, the Iliad, the Tain Bo Cuailnge, and the Eddas. With these peoples he finds the earliest European expressions of virtue. True to his philosophy, he finds the roots of virtue in the roots of identity: in storytelling, the communal feast, and the construction of homes and public buildings (especially the feast-hall). Myers then goes on to develop numerous common themes of Heroic literature. He finds honor to be the chief virtue, the one by which all others may be measured. Other virtues include loyalty, generosity, hospitality, and courage. For women he finds the same virtues also expressed, and in addition special virtues like constancy. Friendship is also a major theme, which played no small part in definining Heroic peoples' identities. Other important features of Heroic ethics are trust in Fate, a pattern of atonement for wrongdoings consisting of exile followed by a a quest and finally readmission to society, and a type of immortality through storytelling called apotheosis. The seizure of the "Last Chance," by which a person finds a way to hold to virtue even in the face of immanent death, is also a significant theme. Throughout all this, Myers gives particular attention to the way Heroic peoples learned from their social roles who they were and what they ought to do. For example, a leader was supposed to be generous to his vassals, and in return the vassals were supposed to be loyal. Individual glory was also a concern, but it was always in a context of social roles and relationships. Community defined identity in the Heroic age.

This is compared and contrasted in the Third Movement with what Myers' calls "Classical" peoples. Here he quotes Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, Plutarch, Heraclitus, Euripides, Aristotle, Plato, and Boethius. For these "civilized" peoples, honor continues to be important, but it is transformed into a semi-private quality, where honor is pursued for its own sake rather than for public praise. Public opinion is in fact called into question, so that immortality through storytelling is no longer credible. Fate is no longer trusted either, but comes to be seen rather as the fickleness of Fortune. In place of honor, fame, and Fate, the faculty of reason rises to the role of chief virtue. Through trust in reason, one may achieve the worthwhile life, eudaimonia, which for the first time is explicitly defined as happiness and human flourishing. One may also achieve a new kind of apotheosis, through aligning oneself with the divine Reason. Despite these innovations in Classical ethics, many themes continue Heroic modes. Basic virtues like courage maintain their authority, though now courage is virtuous only if deliberately chosen in service of a noble cause. The seizure of the Last Chance theme also perseveres, with a strong emphasis on doing what is noble and right even unto death. The importance of friendship is carried on by a particular emphasis on human concerns, especially the social and political. The communal dimension remains important. However, Classical peoples also move in the direction of a more individual, atomistic view, such that certain writers can claim that one doesn't need others at all to be virtuous, but that virtue rests entirely on one's own integrity.

The course of virtue's history is then interrupted by a period of "passive," law-based ethics, due largely to the influence of Christian values. Myers picks up the story again in the Fourth Movement with Renaissance thinkers who return to Classical ideas of virtue. He draws on writers such as Pico de Mirandola, Shakespeare, and Machiavelli (recall that virtues need not necessarily be moral). With the Renaissance comes the rediscovery of virtue through one's own efforts, rather than through God's grace. Reason is once again the chief virtue. The trail continues beyond the Renaissance and into the Romantic movement, with figures like Rosseau and Goethe. There we encounter a loss of faith in reason as the sole guide. Instead there is an elevation of love and passion, and a return to trust in Fate through amor fati. The chief virtues are passion and beauty. In the wake of this comes Nietzsche. His philosophy of will, power, master morality, and pride pushes human self-worth to new heights. In so doing, however, Nietzsche misses entirely the significance of community, and tumbles into self-absorption. After this tragic crescendo, Myers finishes out his history with a close look at virtue in two very modern pieces of literature: Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy and J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series. With these works, Myers brings the discussion up to date and grounds virtue in familiar imagery.

What follows in the Fifth Movement is an exploration pushing the foregoing ideas into new ground. So far, Myers has presented the skeletal framework of "Know Thyself" plus the importance of community, and fleshed it out with history. Next, he asks in what kind of situation one comes to self-awareness. He finds that such knowledge arises via situations that call one's self into question. His name for these situations is "the Immensity." Three major instances of the Immensity confront us all: the Earth, insofar as we all must face this world we live in, other people, insofar as we must deal with others and all the challenges presented by society, and death, insofar as we all must inevitably face our demise. There are also less-universal instances of the Immensity. They can be small or large, but they always cause one to question one's identity, and always demand a response. In other words, they cannot be avoided or ignored. An encounter with the Immensity demands a response, and in our response we discover who we are. At the same time, we also create who we are. So encounters with the Immensity are opportunities to take responsibility for our own characters. They are chances to display and cultivate virtue.

Of course, responses can vary, and these can be called excellent in greater or lesser degrees. The excellent response is one that manifests excellences of character, virtues of the like encountered throughout history but also including responsibility, wonder, respect, sympathy, integrity, and love. More generally, an excellent response "affirms a positive reason beyond the self to live" (p. 232). By contrast, the wretched response is one that manifests weaknesses of character, and does not manage to affirm anything good in life or the world. Still worse than this is the viscious response. Myers writes:

A true vice, it seems to me, is not simply a poor response to the Immensity. It is a refusal to respond at all. It is a disposition to ignore the call of the Immensity, to deliberately block it out of your world, to willfully deny its presence. ... Such a person... ends up cutting himself off from the possibilities for self-discovery and life-enjoyment which the Immensity offers. (p. 236)

So the worst response of all is apathy, and the result is stagnation. Against this Myers upholds an ethic of aroused energy and responsible action. Virtue, rooted in character, is both revealed and created through excellent responses to the Immensity. He summarizes:

The virtues, then, can be defined as the qualities of character one needs to arouse the energy of life, use that energy to have a fruitful dialogue with the Immensity, and to find in the conversation something positive and valuable to live for. A virtue is a way to affirm the goodness of life. The creation of a life worth living, and a world worth living in, is the virtuous person's reward. (p. 233)

This, then, is Myers' virtue ethics in brief. It is an engaging philosophy, rooted in ancient values yet flowering in the modern world. As such, it is particularly appropriate to modern pagan and polytheist ways of life, but it also addresses a more universal audience. The Other Side of Virtue speaks to our times, countering modern individualism and "passive" forms of virtue while championing self-worth and community. It teaches us new things about ethics, spirit, and the spiritual experience. Finally, it sets a new standard for quality pagan writing.

At the same time, it is not without problems. There are critiques I would make, and a few things I would like to see discussed in works to come.

The foremost problem is Myers' distinction between active and passive virtue. He advocates an active response to the Immensity, as opposed to passively letting it blow you here and there with indifference. This does well to convey the energetic character of his philosophy. But a problem arises when this is distinguished against whole traditions labeled "passive." Christian virtue is dimissed out of hand. Faith, hope, and charity are disposed of in less than a page. And their proponent, Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest theoreticians ever to engage virtue, is not even mentioned in Myers' tour through history. He gets a mere cameo appearance in the introduction. Why, I must ask, are faith, hope, and charity necessarily "passive?" Choose any one of the stories of the saints and it will be immediately apparent that these virtues can be quite active. Certainly the saints believed in different ideals than Myers--they staked their hopes on the next world rather than this one, and lived not for the enjoyment of this life but for the glory of the next--but that is no reason to call them passive. Myers' also levels the charge that they are "self-denying," but this makes sense only from a non-Christian perspective, and anyway does not affect the question of passivity. Certainly these virtues can be passive, just as a Heroic-age chief can be "generous" by passively letting his retainers take whatever treasures they demand. But they can also be active responses to the Immensity. Was the faith of Soren Kierkegaard a passive response to uncertainty in the world? What about the hope of Dietrich Bonhoeffer in a Nazi prison? And did Mother Theresa, with all her charitable efforts, respond passively to suffering? All this amounts to a failure to genuinely engage the voices which speak for the other side of the "other side" of virtue.

Other problems with the book are fairly minor. There are numerous typographical errors, the most annoying of which casts Myers' key concept variously as the Immensity, The Immensity, or the IMMENSITY. In addition, the book opens with a sentimental invitation to read it by candlelight as a "ceremony," and closes with a thought experiment more appropriate to Rhonda Byrnes' The Secret. I prefer to think of these pages as dull, ugly bookends supporting on either side an illuminated masterpiece. The Other Side of Virtue ultimately rises above its problems.

What I would like to see engaged in the future is a fundamental problem facing any modern person wanting to live a more Heroic way of life: if Heroic peoples derived their identities from their society, how can we do the same today when our society does not share the same values? Anyone who chooses against modern individualism makes an individual choice against it. The paradox deserves exploration.

Another thing I would like to see investigated is the notion of shame, which goes along with the value of honor. Whereas law-based ethics instill guilt, character-based ethics inspire shame. This feeling, though ugly, may serve a positive role in our modern world. Can shame be an active, affirmative response to the Immensity? Can a sense of shame mediate the lack of accountability in our increasingly compartmentalized, anonymous modern world? An in-depth study is called for (The Other Side of Shame?).

Of course, these topics need not be taken up by Myers himself. If his book does its job, it will inspire other pagan authors to their own explorations of virtue--hopefully rivaling Myers'in quality and scope. And this is something that I think it can and will do. This is a book that can be taken seriously by pagans and non-pagans, academics and general readers alike. It does not simply re-present ancient lore, but also teaches us something new. And it achieves clarity without sacrificing rigor. With The Other Side of Virtue, pagan writing has found a new standard.

I'll conclude with a final quote:

You are what you do. Therefore do that which will transform you into the person you wish to be. (p. 21)

[Bryn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very readable philosophical book full of relevant ideas for how we approach modern life. I couldn't put it down.

[Scarlet Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

I liked this book.

I tried... I really tried to finish it. I tried.
It sat on my coffee table ready to pick up at any time for about nine months. I would, sometimes, and get through a chapter and feel very chuffed that I'd done so. But I've had readers-block for two years now, haven't been able to finish a single book, and I realized that it was just time to let this one go.
Like a sad breakup where you know the person is really, really great, but they're just... not for you... not now, anyhow. And you wish them well.

It's not overly dense, as far as I've seen. It mines myths and history to pull out what cultural values dictated behavior during various periods and how things changed.
I liked it. Maybe someday I'll pick it back up to finish.

[Brent Ranalli · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Other Side of Virtue is a welcome addition to the burgeoning literature on virtue ethics. Two virtues (if I might be permitted) of the book stand out: (1) It is ambitious in scope, encompassing historical understandings of virtue in Western culture from the heroic age through the present day. So much of what is written about virtue ethics starts and ends with Aristotle, that peculiar features of Aristotle’s ethics (virtues as means between paired vices, phronesis as a “keystone” virtue) threaten to limit our imagination. It is refreshing to get the sort of comparative perspective that Myers provides. I have not seen a better account of the virtue ethics of premodern warrior cultures. (One hopes that some ambitious scholar will similarly treat the virtue ethics of indigenous non-warrior cultures and Eastern civilizations.) (2) The book is comfortably scholarly while also firmly grounded in the real world of writers’ and readers’ lives. So much literature on virtue ethics by professional philosophers takes the form of so much dry academic woodchopping. Virtues inhere in flesh and blood people with lives and dreams and struggles, and the subject demands to be written about in that spirit. Myers does it justice.

The book is not without its flaws. Given the ambitious whirlwind historical sweep and the fact that the writer is a philosopher and not an intellectual historian, it is perhaps not surprising that some errors and infelicities have crept in (e.g., suggesting that Pico della Mirandola’s Apologia was an “apology” in the modern sense of the world rather than a defense, and misidentifying “Thrones” as the godhead rather than third-tier angels, and misspelling Michelangelo’s “Bacchus” . . . a Tolkien geek might also point out that elves, when slain, don’t regularly reincarnate on Middle Earth, and that Gandalf’s return from death was of an entirely different nature).

But such flaws are not of great significance, and they do not detract from the force and originality of the work. The highlight is the final section of the book, where Myers offers a virtue ethics for the modern world--or rather a universal template for virtue ethics, a schematic accounting of the existential basis for any lived system of virtue ethics. Myers does not offer a cookie-cutter ethical system to the reader. He does something much more profound: he demonstrates that even in a modern and post-modern world, where tradition has lost authority and ethics and meaning appear to be entirely up for grabs, there is in fact a reliable existential foundation on which each of us may seek to construct a Good Life: namely, our contact with what he calls “Immensity”—that which is larger than us and endlessly mysterious and invites or demands a response—including the Earth around us, other people, and death. Though it is up to each of us to build our own Good Life, with similar foundations we are likely to find convergent solutions, and in broad strokes Myers offers some suggestions of what those might be. He also deals thoughtfully (though probably not offering the final word on the subject) with the problem of vice--responses to Immensity that are authentic and possibly even heroic, but nevertheless dysfunctional in one way or another.

Myers is affiliated with the Celtic revival and the modern pagan and Druidic movements. This is clearly an important source of interest, insight, and inspiration for the work. But the book stands tall on its own merits, and it does not proselytize. At most it stakes out and cogently defends a this-worldly approach to ethics and spirituality, while acknowledging the otherworldly strain in historical Christianity and respectfully taking issue with the limiting passivity of the set of virtues (humility, patience, etc.) it engenders. (And if popular conceptions of virtue are mostly of this passive sort, Myers’ task is to demonstrate an alternative--hence the “other side” of virtue in the title.)

I encountered The Other Side of Virtue by chance, looking for scholarship on comparative virtue ethics. I found that and more, and I look forward to exploring more of what Myers has written.

[Lynne Cantwell · Rating 4 out of 5]

Myers has a Ph.D. in philosophy. He's also a Druid. So he approaches his subject from an angle that may be unfamiliar -- even perhaps uncomfortable -- for readers steeped in the Judeo-Christian tradition.

He begins by tracing the evolution of the notion of virtue, from Heroic societies (primarily the Norse and the ancient Celts) through Classical Greece and Rome, the humanist side of the Renaissance, the Romantics, and Nietzsche. He rounds out this survey course with a discussion of the qualities of virtue in two recent fantasy series, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings and Rowling's Harry Potter novels, and looks at how these two authors have implemented some of the great ideas on the subject into their works.

He then talks about modern life, and how we respond to what he calls the Immensity. In the final analysis, he argues, there is no overarching meaning to our lives; instead, each of us determines, moment by moment, our reason to continue living. And we make the determination with our actions. "For it is what we do," he says, "more than anything else, that creates a worthwhile life."

As a writer, I was especially heartened by his support of storytelling as critical to that worthwhile life. He says, "It is through storytelling that life can make sense: life as recounted in stories is intelligible, structured, unified, and one's own." (Italics are in the original.)

I found The Other Side of Virtue to be very readable, despite the plethora of big ideas packed into it. I'll be keeping this one on my bookshelf.
***
Originally published at http://hearth-myth-rursday-reads.blog...

[R. C. · Rating 3 out of 5]

A valuable book, but not as enjoyable a read as I'd hoped from my previous experiences with the author.

The first "movement" (the authors word for "part") of the book is painful to read. His method of listing excerpts from many sources but listing those sources in the back of the book made it hard for me to tell who was speaking to me and therefore difficult to put any of what I was reading in context. That chapter felt like watching a slideshow of random images going by too fast to process consciously. I tried flipping back and forth from page 20 to page 245 so I could identify what I was reading, but that felt like the worst sort of tedious homework.

The second movement I found most helpful in analysing and reforming my own concept of virtue. This is the part I will read and reread when I need help with my own issues.

The third movement helped me put my studies of the humanities -- history, literature, art through the ages -- into a Pagan context. Any paragraph one might open up to in that part of the book will take some random bit of knowledge you've held from your schooldays and snap it into the large puzzle of a worldview you've developed as an adult learning Paganism. I'll recommend it to the three or four homeschoolers I know who are Pagan and are teaching a Great Books sequence to their high schoolers.

The fourth movement felt like a thesis on Myers' own experience of ethics. It was interesting, but not as relevant as the rest of the book.

[Mariah · Rating 4 out of 5]

The title refers to heroic virtue, rather than the conventional idea of Christian virtue. Myers' premise is that virtue originates from storytelling and hospitality. I thought this was an odd explanation.
He traces the evolution of virtue from the heroic era of Homer and the Eddas, to classical Greece & Rome, Renaissance humanism, and its expression today in Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter. He points out that even as what virtues were emphasized changed, common themes tie them all together.

[Nimue Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It's an incredibly accessible but idea-laden approach to Pagan valuing and ethics, looking at the history of Pagan values, and comparing them to what's considered virtue in more christian influenced mainstream culture. It opened up whole new ways of thinking for me, that have become very much part of my personal world view and approach. Highly recommended for those interested in Paganism and philosophy but not steeped in the language of academia.

[Maya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this very slowly and very much enjoyed the second and third movements. These two parts are what I will be going back too time and again.