Tending the Heart of Virtue: How Classic Stories Awaken a Childs Moral Imagination

by Vigen Guroian

Mere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues.

a compelling vision of the goodness of goodness itself needs to be presented in a way that is attractive and stirs the imagination.

There are real and very important differences between what we now call values and the virtues as they had traditionally been understood.

The virtues define the character of a person, his enduring relationship to the world, and what will be his end. Whereas values, according to their common usage, are the instruments or components of moral living that the self chooses for itself and that the self may disregard without necessarily jeopardizing its identity.

human morality is substantial, universal, and relational in character, founded and rooted in a permanent Good, in a higher moral law, or in the being of God.

education is bound to indoctrinate and bound to coerce.

So long as self-deception lies at the source of a person’s perception of things, he or she cannot mature into the fullness of being human

The complete truth about being a human being is often falsified or at least partially obscured by a young child’s subjective experience. A person has to grow as a moral self in order to transcend this childlike subjectivity and primitive narcissism. He must begin to take a view of the world that is conditioned by an internal discipline of the passions and a “receptivity to teaching [and] … willingness to accept advice.”9 It is certainly what Pinocchio’s pilgrimage toward maturity is about.

the phantasmagoria of unrestrained appetite and wild passion arise as if willing themselves into existence. The moral imagination is different. The analogies and sentiments of the moral imagination need to be nurtured and cultivated.

We all must at some time or another face forthrightly the tragedy of love and death, so that one day the pain of separation might be replaced by the joy of reunion with the beloved one.

The wisdom of evil is this: that it uses our personal suffering as well as our greatest hopes and fears to tempt us to sin.

play is the necessary condition for the establishment and health of a truly social world and the role that friendship plays in it.

we cannot make even those whom we love most believe as we believe, and that, if we truly love them, then we must permit them to come freely to that belief.11

Patience is the practical fruit of faith and is a natural ally of courage.

Irene ceases fearing for Curdie, not because she no longer cares for him, but because she believes in someone who cares for him even more.

When we trust in our bodily eyes we see what we desire, and normally (in our sinful and spiritually immature condition) that which we immediately desire is not God.