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

by Vigen Guroian

Perhaps this is because, like so many others, ethicists too subscribe to the falsehood that childhood is more about socialization than moral formation.

“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.”

Deprive children of stories and you leave them unscripted, anxious stutterers in their actions as in their words.

Moral living is about being responsive and responsible toward other people. And virtues are those traits of character that enable persons to use their freedom in morally responsible ways.

Mere instruction in morality is not sufficient to nurture the virtues. It might even backfire, especially when the presentation is heavily exhortative and the pupil’s will is coerced. Instead, a compelling vision of the goodness of goodness itself needs to be presented in a way that is attractive and stirs the imagination.

impression.

The paradoxical truth that the story portrays is that unless virtue is present in a person she will not be able to find, appreciate, or embrace virtue in another.

Yet, only a pedagogy that awakens and enlivens the moral imagination will persuade the child or the student that courage is the ultimate test of good character, that honesty is essential for trust and harmony among persons, and that humility and a magnanimous spirit are goods greater than the prizes won

by selfishness, pride, or the unscrupulous exercise of position and power.

Otherwise, it will atrophy like a muscle that is not used.

We are living in a culture in which metaphor is discarded for these so-called facts. We train minds to detect these facts much as one breaks in a baseball glove. Meanwhile, the imagination is neglected and is left unguarded and untrained.

We easily assume that personal freedom is about choosing values for oneself in an unregulated and ever-expanding marketplace of moralities and lifestyles.

We suddenly run into the ghost of Friedrich Nietzsche.

The virtues define the character of a person, his enduring relationship to the world, and what will be his end.

Teaching reasoning skills, and not the virtues, is considered the means to a moral education; values-clarification, not character, is regarded as the goal.

instructor pokes where he likes, and the educator pulls where he likes.

Whether we admit it or not, education is bound to indoctrinate and bound to coerce.

“the truth of our human tradition and handing it on with a voice of authority, an unshaken voice. That is the one eternal education; to be sure enough that something is true that you dare to tell it to a child.”

Exactly the same intellectual violence is done to the creature who is poked and pulled. Now we must all accept the responsibility of this intellectual violence. Education is violent because it is creative. It is creative because it is human. It is reckless as playing on the fiddle; as dogmatic as drawing a picture; as brutal as building a house. In short, it is what all human action is; it is an interference with life and growth.

Fairy tales lead us toward a belief in something that if it were not also so veiled in a mystery, common sense alone would affirm: if there is a story, there must surely also be a storyteller.

His good heart with its innate capacity to love finally dominates over his wooden head.

Pinocchio is sidetracked by the allurements of quick gain and easy pleasure.

But what God did about us was this. The Second Person in God, the Son, became human Himself.”6 In this way God not only has called us into the full maturity of being human but he has shown us the way and given us his own strength to see us through.

This episode of hidden and revealed identity clarifies the providential and nurturant role of the blue-haired fairy.

“It was love for you that told me”

A status as son or daughter, brother or sister, and mother or father deeply defines our humanity.

“Brave Pinocchio! In return for your good heart, I forgive you all your past misdeeds. Children who love their parents, and help them when they are sick and poor, are worthy of praise and love, even if they are not models of obedience and good behaviour. Be good in the future, and you will be happy”

“A man is wise when all things taste to him as they really are.”

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 or lead a successful course through life.

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.”

It is an intersubjective and relational way of experiencing and knowing. It is a way of interpreting the world that requires memory and a moral imagination; otherwise a moral self cannot come into being.

“But where was I when I looked for you? You were there before me, but I had deserted even my own self. I could not find myself, much less find you.”

We all must experience the nearness of despair, otherwise, how can we know when to celebrate the triumph of hope? 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.

but by the inner working of a grace that converts the heart and moves the self toward acts of real love.16

The Boy’s love for the Velveteen Rabbit is analogous to the love shared between two “real” persons in a relationship of mutual affirmation and responsibility. This, in turn, is analogous to the love of God that gives each one of us being and, according to biblical faith, draws us through our own response to his love into immortal life.

Love lends encouragement to the heart’s desire for immortality. Williams believes in that yearning and beckons children—and also willing adults—to freely exercise their imaginations in such a way that the metaphor of becoming real expands into an allegory of immortality.

“What the soul cries out for is the resurrection of the senses.”

Friendships bring a goodness and grace into our lives whose value transcends material measure.

“It is more characteristic of a friend to do well by another than to be well done by,” Aristotle continues.

Aristotle argues that a friendship may be called perfect not because the friends are perfect, but because the existence of the friendship itself makes possible their moral perfection.

He has perfected a special sixth sense of knowing or anticipating when that rhythm is going to be interrupted by the hunters and the death that they rain upon its inhabitants.

Bambi’s desire to go deep into the woods is not a mere impulse to escape. He is driven to be truly free and not be a captive to the blinding and incapacitating fear that he has observed in the other deer and inhabitants of the woods.

If you wanted to preserve yourself, if you understood existence, if you wanted to attain wisdom, you had to live alone” (pp. 175–76).

“Good-bye, my son, I loved you dearly” (p. 188). Never before did the old stag state his love in such words; yet in all of his actions toward Bambi he manifested this love. The mentor is a special “friend.” What makes the friendship special is that the stag reserves it in his heart until his role as mentor is completed.

Children need parents who are good mentors; but they also need mentors who are not parents, who like Charlotte and the old stag are able to keep a studied distance from their young charges. In either instance, these special cases of “friendship” are essential both for the maturation of the individual and for the health and growth of community and culture.

There is truth, and there is falsehood. There is good, and there is evil. There is happiness, and there is misery. There is that which ennobles, and there is that which demeans. There is that which puts you in harmony with yourself, with others, with the universe, and with God, and there is that which alienates you from yourself, and from the world, and from God. These things are different and separate and totally distinguishable from one another.

“The devil is fighting with God and the battlefield is the human heart.”

how the heart becomes dark and hardened when it follows evil, as well as how redemption from this “fall” is possible through the power of active goodness and love.

They hold each other’s hands and kiss the roses and look “up towards God’s bright sunshine” and speak “to it as though the Christ Child were there Himself” (p. 233). They are like Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden before the Fall, when the first couple walked with God and were in unbroken communion with each other and with creation.

“Whosoever shall not receive the Kingdom of God as a little child shall not enter therein” (p. 262).