On Reading Well: Finding the Good Life Through Great Books

by Karen Swallow Prior

It would be possible for a contemporary reader to revel in this book while being ignorant of the age-old tradition of literary criticism that it represents and also the debate over that tradition in the modern era. The premises that literature makes moral statements, that these statements can strengthen the moral life of a reader, and that literary criticism should explore the moral dimension of literary texts began in classical antiquity and held sway until the twentieth century. For Aristotle, a mark of good literature is that it “satisfies the moral sense.”1 The Christianized version of this classical tradition reached its climax in the Renaissance author Sir Philip Sidney’s treatise A Defense of Poetry. Sidney claimed that the very purpose of literature is the “winning of the mind from wickedness to virtue” and inflaming a reader with a “desire to be worthy.”2

Reacting against this rejection of moral criteria for literature, a towering literary scholar named F. R. Leavis wrote a famous book entitled The Great Tradition (1948). What is this “great tradition” championed by Leavis? It is both a literary tradition, represented by great authors and works that portray the moral life, and a type of literary criticism that explores the moral dimension of literature. Karen Swallow Prior’s book is squarely within this great tradition.

this is a book of literary criticism. It is based on what I call “good old-fashioned example theory,” which was particularly prominent in the English Renaissance. What this means is that it is in the nature of literature to place examples before us—examples of virtue to emulate and vice to repudiate. In our day, this is stigmatized as “surely a very simplistic view of literature,” to which my comeback is, “Tough—this is demonstrably how literature works.” On the self-evident nature of this, I am reminded of C. S. Lewis’s comment in regard to Sir Philip Sidney that “the assumption . . . that the ethical is the aesthetic par excellence is so basic to Sidney that he never argues it. He thought we would know.”5

A central theme of Booked is reading promiscuously. This phrase is drawn from one of the books that proved most formative for me, John Milton’s Areopagitica. In this treatise, published in 1644, the Puritan poet most famous for his epic poem Paradise Lost makes an argument that would become a building block for the modern notions of freedom of speech and freedom of the press. In the tract, Milton inveighs against parliamentary licensing orders requiring all publications to be approved by the government before being printed (a legal concept that would later be called prior restraint). Significantly, it was Milton’s own political faction that was in power at the time, his own people whom he thought to be in error and hoped to persuade to reject censorship. Areopagitica makes a deeply theological argument, one that Christians today, particularly those nervously prone to a censoring spirit, would do well to consider. Grounded in Protestant doctrine (as well as the polarized political situation surrounding the English Civil War), Milton associates censorship with the Roman Catholic Church (the political as well as doctrinal enemy of the English Puritans) and finds in his Reformation heritage a deep interdependence of intellectual, religious, political, and personal liberty—all of which depend, he argues, on virtue. Because the world since the fall contains both good and evil, Milton says, virtue consists of choosing good over evil. Milton distinguishes between the innocent, who...

Reading virtuously means, first, reading closely, being faithful to both text and context, interpreting accurately and insightfully. Indeed, there is something in the very form of reading—the shape of the action itself—that tends toward virtue. The attentiveness necessary for deep reading (the kind of reading we practice in reading literary works as opposed to skimming news stories or reading instructions) requires patience. The skills of interpretation and evaluation require prudence. Even the simple decision to set aside time to read in a world rife with so many other choices competing for our attention requires a kind of temperance.

Practice makes perfect, but pleasure makes practice more likely, so read something enjoyable.4 If a book is so agonizing that you avoid reading it, put it down and pick up one that brings you pleasure. Life is too short and books are too plentiful not to. Besides, one can’t read well without enjoying reading. On the other hand, the greatest pleasures are those born of labor and investment. A book that requires nothing from you might offer the same diversion as that of a television sitcom, but it is unlikely to provide intellectual, aesthetic, or spiritual rewards long after the cover is closed. Therefore, even as you seek books that you will enjoy reading, demand ones that make demands on you: books with sentences so exquisitely crafted that they must be reread, familiar words used in fresh ways, new words so evocative that you are compelled to look them up, and images and ideas so arresting that they return to you unbidden for days to come.

Don’t be discouraged if you read slowly. Thoughtfully engaging with a text takes time. The slowest readers are often the best readers, the ones who get the most meaning out of a work and are affected most deeply by literature.6 Seventeenth-century Puritan divine Richard Baxter writes, “It is not the reading of many books which is necessary to make a man wise or good; but the well reading of a few, could he be sure to have the best.”7

The true worth of books is in their words and ideas, not their pristine pages. One friend wisely observed that “readers are not made for books—books are made for readers.”9 (The sheer delight to be found in reading other readers’ marginalia is unforgettably rendered in Billy Collins’s poem, “Marginalia.”10) Read books you enjoy, develop your ability to enjoy challenging reading, read deeply and slowly, and increase your enjoyment of a book by writing words of your own in it.

Reading well adds to our life—not in the way a tool from the hardware store adds to our life, for a tool does us no good once lost or broken, but in the way a friendship adds to our life, altering us forever.

One of the earliest works of literary aesthetics—the study of literature’s form and how its form affects readers as an aesthetic experience—was Aristotle’s Poetics. In Poetics, Aristotle introduces the notion of literature’s cathartic effect, an idea that has had widespread influence, referring to the way literature trains emotions by arousing and then resolving them through the structure of a well-crafted plot, the element of literature that Aristotle identifies as the most important. Aristotle’s emphasis on plot also bears fruitful insights into character. This is because plot, according to Paul Taylor in his essay “Sympathy and Insight in Aristotle’s Poetics,” “centers on the fact that the individual actions of characters follow with probability or necessity from a combination of three factors: the characters’ humanity, their individual personalities, and their involvement in the circumstances depicted in the plot.”14 In other words, plot reveals character. And the act of judging the character of a character shapes the reader’s own character.

In his important work A Defense of Poetry, Renaissance poet and courtier Sir Philip Sidney offers one of the first Christian arguments for the power of poetry, saying that it surpasses the power both of history, which teaches by example, and of philosophy, which teaches by precept. “Now doth the peerless poet perform both, for whatsoever the philosopher saith should be done, he giveth a perfect picture of it by someone by whom he pre-supposeth it was done, so as he coupleth the general notion with the particular example. A perfect picture I say, for he yieldeth to the powers of the mind an image of that whereof the philosopher bestoweth but a wordish description.”21 Since history is restricted to what was and philosophy to what could be, Sidney argues, literature exceeds both by offering a picture of what should be. And because “the end of all earthly learning is virtuous action,”22 poetry is more likely than either philosophy or history to cultivate virtue.

A famous passage on the relationship of virtue, or excellence, to practice comes from Will Durant’s The Story of Philosophy in his chapter on Aristotle, in which Durant quotes from Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics: Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these because we have acted rightly; “these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions”; we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit: “the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in a complete life . . . for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or short time that makes a man blessed and happy.”23

a persistent question about virtue arises in most contemporary discussions, a question that will be examined more in chapter 1. This question centers on whether virtue is an end in itself or a means to some other end. The evidence that many think of it as the latter can be seen in the pervasive belief today that if one simply does a certain thing right, the reward will be a particular desired outcome. This way of thinking about virtue owes in part to the fact that we no longer have a sense of our larger purpose. Without knowing what the purpose of a bicycle is, we cannot determine its excellence. Similarly, we can hardly attain human excellence if we don’t have an understanding of human purpose. Human excellence occurs only when we glorify God, which is our true purpose. Absent ultimate purpose, we look for practical outcomes.

Apart from a unifying whole, virtues are like lifeless limbs severed from the body that once gave them purpose. Severed from an understanding of human purpose, virtue becomes mere emotivism. MacIntyre describes emotivism as the belief that “moral judgments are nothing but expressions of preference, expressions of attitude or feeling.”24 In other words, without an external, objective source of meaning and purpose, we are left with only our internal and subjective feelings. Emotivism isn’t simply having and expressing emotions but being overwhelmingly informed and driven by them. And because emotivism appropriates the language of morality, it appears in the guise of virtue, despite the fact that the true foundation of virtue—a transcendent absolute—has crumbled.25 Because the language of morality has been hijacked by emotivism, giving us a “simulacra of morality” (a mere image or reflection in place of the real thing), talking about virtue and morality is nearly impossible in a life “after virtue.”26

Literary language, inherently resonant with layers of meaning, reminds us what fullness of language looks like. The language of literature can fill this gap between meaningful language about virtue and empty gestures toward it. The ability to understand figurative language, in which “a word is both itself and something else,” is unique to human beings and, as one cognitive psychologist explains, “fundamental to how we think” in that it is the means by which we can “escape the literal and immediate.”27 We see this quality most dramatically in satire and allegory. Although very different, both satirical and allegorical language employ two levels of meaning: the literal meaning and the intended meaning. In satire, the intended meaning is the opposite of the stated words; in allegory, the intended meaning is symbolized by the stated words. Satire points to error, and allegory points to truth, but both require the reader to discern meaning beyond the surface level. In this way, allegory and satire—and less obviously, all literary language—reflect the transcendent nature of the human condition and the “double-willed self” described by Paul in Romans 7:19.28

Words carry resonances that spill beyond the bounds of logic and even conscious thought. Ward says of literary texts that “their acts of naming and our acts of reading” cannot but conjure the possibilities of transcendence, “particularly when we attend to experience rather than dictionary definitions, as either a writer or a reader.”30 The fullness of literary language echoes meaning—and reminds us that there is, in fact, meaning.

literary writing—all literary writing, not just poetry—uses language in a way that relies on layers of memory, meaning, and associations that can be objectively supported once explicated. In this way, literary language encourages habits of mind, ways of perceiving, processing, and thinking that cultivate virtue by reminding us of the meaning that cannot be found apart from telos. To read a literary work well, one must attend not only to the parts but also to the way in which the parts support the whole and meaning accrues. Literary language, as Sir Philip Sidney says, “figures forth good things.”32 In so doing, it is virtuous in and of itself, and it figures forth virtue in the reader as well. “Figuring forth” refers to the use of the imagination, which in its most literal sense refers to our ability to create a picture or image in our mind’s eye. The stories in which we are immersed project onto our imaginations visions of the good life—as well as the means of obtaining it.33 We must imagine what virtue looks like in order to act virtuously.

literature has a particular power in forming our visions of the good life. “Once past the issue of sheer physical survival, human lives are about feeling, believing, and judging, and stories profoundly map themselves onto this agenda of human concerns, because at the core of every story is a set of invitations to feel, to believe, and to judge as the story dictates,” explains Marshall Gregory.39

Rules rule. We do like our rules. Some rules are strict, some unspoken; some apply to everyone, some to only a few. Some of us like rigid moral rules. Some of us like unwritten rules of political correctness. No matter what, adhering to rules is much easier than exercising wisdom. A society couldn’t exist without the rule of law, of course. And a civilization wouldn’t be civil without its informal expectations. The Christian faith is built on laws that Jesus came not to abolish but to fulfill. Yet, because no number of rules or laws could cover every moral or ethical choice we face, virtue picks up where rules leave off. And where rules abound, virtue, like an underused muscle, atrophies. Virtue requires judgment, and judgment requires prudence. Prudence is wisdom in practice. It is the habit of discerning the “true good in every circumstance” and “the right means of achieving it.”1 In other words, it is “applied morality.”2 A person possesses the virtue of prudence when “the disposition to reason well about what courses of action and emotion will best bring about our own and others’ well-being” becomes an acquired habit.3 Perhaps Cicero puts it most clearly and succinctly in saying, “Prudence is the knowledge of things to be sought, and those to be shunned.”4 Prudence is considered the mother of the other three cardinal virtues.5 While temperance, fortitude, and justice are moral virtues, virtues related to doing, prudence is an intellectual virtue, a virtue related to kn...

The literary battle between Fielding and Richardson changed the course of literature. Their skirmish reflected—and shaped—not only differences in literary form but also the ongoing cultural transition from the classical virtues to modern individualistic morality. The debate reflects a modern cultural shift whereby, as Alasdair MacIntyre explains in After Virtue, morality was severed from theology, replacing it with the modern notion of autonomy.10 Pamela, drawing on an earlier tradition of conduct books, promotes individual morality based on what MacIntyre calls “rules of conduct,”11 while Tom Jones is built on what was even then a crumbling theological foundation for virtue.12 The dispute between the two novelists mirrors the Enlightenment-era debate that has ultimately led to our current state of moral discourse. MacIntyre describes this state as the replacement of a transcendent basis for shared moral principles with mere individualistic emotivism.13 Paralleling this philosophical development, contemporary Christian practice, particularly as expressed in American evangelicalism, has largely experienced the replacement of orthodox doctrine with what sociologist Christian Smith terms “moralistic therapeutic deism.”

While philosophers rightly hold that virtue is developed through actual practice—by which habits become tendencies, which become instincts, which then become essential nature—literature provides a vicarious practice of virtue. After all, as Fielding explains further into his dedication, “an example is a kind of picture, in which virtue becomes as it were an object of sight,” one that “strikes us with an idea of that loveliness, which Plato asserts there is in her naked charms.”

In fact, the word prudence comes from the word providence, which means, literally, the ability to foresee.17 Cicero, a classical orator held in high regard by the neoclassical Fielding, said that what instinct is for animals, prudence is for human beings; and what prudence is for human beings, providence is for the gods.18 Because it means foreseeing, providence has come to refer to the actions of God based on his all-seeing and all-knowing power. The word prudence developed an analogous meaning within the human realm, referring to the actions of human beings based on foreseeing the consequences of a course of action and choosing accordingly. Prudence is in human affairs what God’s sovereignty is over all of creation.

in Fielding’s view, Richardson’s message in Pamela is that virtue is not a good in and of itself but is proven in being rewarded—by marriage, wealth, advancement, or praise (or in the case of Pamela, all four). Pamela offers a more complicated picture than Fielding gives it credit for, but his reading of the novel effectively demonstrates how easily morality slips into moralism, how finely drawn the line is between the law and legalism, and how readily the promise of blessings is mistaken as a contract for material prosperity.

The word prudence appears dozens of times throughout Tom Jones, and the reader must prudently discern the tone with each use, for the narrator can rarely be taken at face value. Most often, the word is used satirically in order to correct various forms of false prudence. Fielding believed that “it is much easier to make good men wise than to make bad men good.”23 Teasing out what true prudence consists of advances Fielding’s hope “to make good men wise.”

This fact points to an interesting quality of vice: it is just as likely to be accidental as intentional. In this way, virtue opposes vice not only in its moral content but in its acquisition as well. Vice is natural to human beings in their fallen state. But virtue must be practiced, become a habit, and be inhabited by a person in order to attain excellence.

As “the perfected ability to make decisions in accordance with reality,”36 prudence requires some knowledge of the world. In classical art, the goddess Prudentia is often depicted with a mirror (to represent self-knowledge or conscience) and a serpent (an ancient symbol of wisdom). The image conveys the understanding that prudence requires knowledge of both universal principles and the particulars of a given situation, along with the idea that, as Aquinas says, a prudent person is one who sees from afar.37 Prudence concerns the “realities of a life lived within a specific and communal history, wisdom which proceeds to act.”38 It is exercised “within the mix of specific relations and goods that give the moral life of any person its texture. . . . Hence prudence responds specifically to the concrete particularities of one’s life.”39 In other words, applying wisdom requires the ability to discern truth and then to act rightly based on truth.

Tom Jones is a traditional bildungsroman, a novel of development. Thus, as Tom’s love for Sophia (wisdom) grows, so too does his prudence. Because “the virtue of prudence is dependent upon the constant readiness to ignore the self,”47 the more Tom puts Sophia’s interests ahead of his own, the more he is able to cultivate prudence (such as by learning to decline the wealthy and worldly women who offer themselves to him). Tom eventually applies wisdom by pursuing all its components—seeking counsel, deliberation, judgment, coming to resolution, and action.48 The novel paints a vivid picture of Fielding’s own belief that a good-natured soul is capable of great good once virtue is cultivated. This question of human nature—whether it is essentially good or corrupt—is a strong undercurrent in the larger debate between Fielding and Richardson and among their contemporaries. Fielding’s more liberal theology emerges in Tom Jones in his emphasis on Tom’s essential good nature, which triumphs over his moral failures. In contrast to Fielding’s high-church Anglicanism, Richardson’s theological view of human nature was influenced by the Methodism of John Wesley and George Whitefield and thus reflects the doctrine of human depravity. The question of whether human nature is essentially good or bad was a pressing one among Enlightenment philosophers and, not surprisingly, made its way into the most influential literature of the day. This philosophical, and essentially theological, debate pl...

Temperance is unique among the virtues. Unlike other virtues that are revealed under pressure, temperance is “an ordinary, humble virtue, to be practiced on a regular rather than an exceptional basis.” It “is a virtue for all times but is all the more necessary when times are good.”1 It is also unlike the other virtues in centering not on actions but on desires. Since we desire what is pleasurable, temperance is “the virtue that inclines us to desire and enjoy pleasures well.”2 It helps us to desire pleasures in a reasonable manner,3 desiring them neither too much nor too little, the virtuous mean between the vices of self-indulgence and insensibility.4 For Aristotle temperance concerned the physical appetites we share with animals: the desires for food, drink, and sex.5 For both humans and animals, these appetites are necessary to perpetuate life (whether individually or as a species), but they are also the source of pleasure. The Catholic Church, following Aristotle’s understanding, teaches that temperance “ensures the will’s mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable,” but expands the role of temperance as governing “the use of created goods.”6 Temperance is not simply resisting temptation. It is more than merely restraint. Aquinas uses the example of a miser who eschews extravagance because of its expense: such a man is not temperate,7 for the temperate man would not desire extravagance. One attains the virtue of temperance when one...

Temperance is the virtue that helps us rise above our animal nature, making the image of God in us shine more brilliantly. For humans, unlike animals, pleasure is tempered by understanding. Developing desires for the good requires understanding. Human beings are creatures who are rational as well as spiritual and who, as such, do not approach pleasurable activities purely physically. The temperate person is one who “understands these connections between bodily pleasures and the larger human good, and whose understanding actually tempers the desires and pleasures.”8 Temperance is liberating because it “allows us to be masters of our pleasure instead of becoming its slaves.”9

temperance is more than merely restraining from vices. While restraint is one aspect of temperance, there is more to it than simply negation. Inherent to temperance is balance, as evident in the Old English word temprian, which means to “bring something into the required condition by mixing it with something else.”30 This is why the process of strengthening a metal is called “tempering.” Evenness or balance brought about through mixing diverse elements can be seen in many spheres: the truth spoken in love, vegetation that flourishes in receiving both sun and rain, the one-flesh relationship formed by the marriage of a man and a woman, or the distinct satisfaction of a salty snack chased down by a sweet beverage.

Justice is the morality of the community. The morality of a community shapes individual thinking, values, and behavior. Aristotle calls justice “anything just that tends to produce or preserve happiness and its constituents for the community of a city.”2 In The Republic, Plato says that virtue in an individual is “a certain health, beauty, and good condition of a soul.”3 Justice, therefore, can be understood as the virtue of a community, the harmony of all the souls that form it. But although justice is enacted in community, each community is made up of individuals who together make a society just or unjust. The just society is the one that frees people to do good. In other words, a just society allows all of its members to cultivate the virtue of justice, for even individual ethics “are much affected by the ethos” of the community in which one lives.4 The virtue of justice is the habit of desiring and doing what is just.5 In “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” poet Gerard Manley Hopkins says, simply, “the just man justices.”6

justice also takes its measure from the relationship of one thing to another. In On Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry defines justice as “a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other.”7 Justice is “an absolute good in itself” and is the measure of the other virtues since prudence, courage, and temperance can be virtuous only when oriented toward just ends.8 All external acts are socially consequential and therefore connected to justice in some way.9 Indeed, justice is “the whole of virtue,” according to Aristotle. The most excellent person, Aristotle says, is the one whose virtue is perfected in relationship to others, and justice is always expressed “in relation to another person.”10 Justice is the mean between selfishness and selflessness. That mean has implications within political, economic, social, and racial realms, just as it has implications for the inner life of the soul. Justice orders a person within herself as well as the lives of people together.11

the injustice of one person against another cannot be contained. Injustice, no matter how seemingly private, always has public consequences.

Like the fatal overcorrection of a wayward car, the revolutionaries, so long oppressed, prove more unjust than those who had wronged them: “The men were terrible, in the bloody-minded anger with which they looked from windows, caught up what arms they had, and came pouring down into the streets; but, the women were a sight to chill the boldest. From such household occupations as their bare poverty yielded, from their children, from their aged and their sick crouching on the bare ground famished and naked, they ran out with streaming hair, urging one another, and themselves, to madness with the wildest cries and actions.”29

Plato says that justice is the proper balancing or proportioning of all parts of the soul.48 The Christian view of the well-ordered soul identifies how to have all parts of the soul in proper order: by first loving God with all one’s heart, soul, strength, and mind. Justice concerns the right ordering of not only the relationships within a community but also the parts of a person’s soul.

The truth about justice in this world is that it can never set things exactly right. We never will, whether on the personal, the public, or the cosmic scale, be able to bring those delicate scales of justice into perfect balance.

Although the words just and fair are often used interchangeably, justice usually involves objective, universal standards of judgment, while fairness is often felt subjectively as a sense of right proportion within particular circumstances. In a perfect world, what is just is also fair. In a fallen world, however, justice does not always feel fair. In our fallen humanity we often bristle at the holiness of a God whose justice does not always strike us as fair. The parable of the workers in the vineyard, all of whom are paid the same agreed-upon wage although some worked fewer hours, is a perplexing example of this (Matt. 20:1–16).

Recall Elaine Scarry’s definition above of justice as a symmetry of our relations to each other. Symmetry is a factor of both beauty and justice. And while beauty and justice have objective qualities, they must be observed in order to be appreciated and cultivated. Both require, Scarry says, “constant perceptual acuity,” and in this way the perception of beauty can assist in the perception and correction of injustice.53 “It is as though beautiful things have been placed here and there throughout the world to serve as small wake-up calls to perception, spurring lapsed alertness back to its most acute level. Through its beauty, the world continually recommits us to a rigorous standard of perceptual care.”54 A “rigorous standard of perceptual care” is required to seek and uphold justice as well. Moreover, there is not one way of achieving justice any more than there is one way of being beautiful.

justice is less like finite land and more like the wildflowers that grow there, continually spreading as they bloom and re-seed themselves. Justice—like beauty—is rooted in infinity.

the purpose in reading this novel—or any novel—is not to find definitive answers about the characters. It is rather to ask definitive questions about ourselves. To read about an experience of faith as it falters is an opportunity to seek resolution not in the work of fiction but in the work of our own faith.

Reading virtuously, reading faithfully, depends greatly on accepting a text on its own terms and attending to how it is told as much as, if not more than, what it tells.

the hope that is a theological virtue, the hope spoken of in the Bible that is regarded as akin to faith and love (1 Cor. 13:13), is not a natural passion but a supernatural gift conferred by God. This virtue of hope cannot be understood apart from God. It is supernatural in both origin and sustenance, the gift of grace, not the result of mere human effort, although the Christian’s careful cultivation of hope may, like the exercise of all virtues, bring about its increase. Theological hope “is a steadfast turning toward the true fulfillment of man’s nature, that is, toward good, only when it has its source in the reality of grace in man and is directed toward supernatural happiness in God.”15 As with all spiritual gifts, its source can be nourished or quenched.16 Thus, while it originates in God, theological hope is a “habit of the will.”17

Theological hope is an implicit surrender to the help of another—God—in obtaining a good. Theological hope requires a similar recognition of one’s own limitations as required by the natural passion of hope. The magnanimous seek greatness that is within their power based on a rational assessment of what is and is not within that power.70 The presumptuous, on the other hand, “habitually regard ourselves as capable of attaining through our own powers things that in fact are impossible without help from others. Untruthfully exaggerating our own capacities . . . we render ourselves unlikely (if not unable) to lean on the help of God.”71 Theological hope requires humility in the same way that the natural passion does.

the theological virtue of hope is manifested not merely in eternity, but in the implications of eternity for present realities74—in other words, here and now in the relationship of the transcendent to the immanent. Only in the immanent can we as embodied creatures encounter transcendence. Transcendence meets human needs, one moral philosopher argues, only when understood “as a person—as a Thou.”75 Modern secular apocalypses—those that reveal a telos, or end, apart from the transcendent meaning and purpose—express even so a yearning “for Revelation—to make the deep pain and difficulties of our lives meaningful and finished.”76 In the absence of a “Thou,” the best a secular apocalypse can offer is a “thou.”

I vividly remember the first time I heard the word chastity. I was about ten years old. Arriving home after school one day, I walked into the living room where the television was tuned in to an afternoon talk show. That day’s guest was Cher, a singer who made up one half of the popular seventies folk duo Sonny and Cher. She and the show’s host were discussing the couple’s young daughter, whose name was Chastity. I’d never heard that name or word before, but it didn’t strike me as odd—not, that is, until the host asked Cher, with a sly voice, “Have you explained to your daughter what her name means?” Cher laughed, and I realized that the adults seemed to be sharing some kind of a naughty joke. As soon as I had a chance, I looked up chastity in the dictionary and still didn’t get the joke. But I felt sorry for the little girl whose name the adults treated like something dirty.

Temperance disciplines all the human appetites. As a kind of temperance, chastity tempers in particular the part of human vitality related to our desire to reproduce and to experience companionship. Temperance moderates according to the dictates of reason, which is why Augustine calls chastity, or purity, “a virtue of the mind,”5 locating it in desire rather than action.6 Like temperance, chastity demands more than mere suppression or denial for healthy discipline. Chastity is the proper ordering of one good thing (sexual desire) within a hierarchy of other good things.

Diligence is the most humble, perhaps even the most boring, of virtues. Diligence is so humdrum that it doesn’t get nearly as much attention in moral philosophy as the other virtues. Some of its near cousins, such as perseverance and constancy, get more coverage, but neither of these mean quite the same thing. On the other hand, the Bible mentions diligence a considerable number of times (particularly in the King James translation). And as with all the virtues, diligence is not virtuous unless it is put toward a virtuous end. Persistence in planning a robbery or harassing strangers on the internet isn’t a virtue any more than loyalty is virtuous when it’s given to a mobster or a Klansman. Diligence must also, like other virtues, represent a mean between an extreme of excess and an extreme of deficiency. It’s easy to see how insufficient diligence is a vice, but an excess of effort is also a vice. Such excess could take various forms. One form might be the workaholic. Working too hard at one good thing (e.g., a job) while neglecting other important things (e.g., family) is a vice. Perfectionism is another example of caring to a detrimental degree. Another form of excessive effort might manifest as obsessive-compulsive disorder. Too much care and attention given to social media notifications might be another example of excessive care and attention that constitutes a vice. (Guilty!)

In the context of everyday life, we think of patience in more mundane terms. Being patient is what we aim for (or fail at) when sitting in traffic, standing in line, or waiting for a table. But the virtue of patience entails much more than merely waiting. The essence of patience is the willingness to endure suffering.

That “suffering” is the meaning of the root word for patience1 is made clear by the fact that we also use the word patient to refer to someone under medical care. The patient is someone “suffering” from an ailment—not merely waiting. Patient shares the same root as the word passion, which also means “suffering.” Someone who has a passion—a passion for music, a passion for soccer, a passion for a person—suffers on behalf of that love. When we speak in the church about “the passion of Christ,” it literally refers to the suffering of Christ on the cross on our behalf. The overlap between the words suffering and patience can be seen in another meaning of both words: “permit.” When Jesus said, “Suffer little children . . . to come unto me” (as Matthew 19:14 is rendered in the King James), he meant “permit” them to come. And when we speak of women’s suffrage, we refer to women being permitted to vote. The word permit in these contexts suggests willingness; the willingness to endure suffering is the meaning of the word patient. The expression “the patience of Job,” describing the great test of faith Job underwent in the Bible, refers to Job’s suffering, not merely his endurance. As connected as patience is to suffering, it is no wonder that, as theologian N. T. Wright points out, we “applaud patience but prefer it to be a virtue that others possess.”

N. T. Wright says that patience is required in order to attain the other virtues.33 “Patience is one of the places where faith, hope, and love meet up,” he writes.34 Augustine describes patience as the virtue by which “we tolerate evil things with an even mind.” The patient person, he continues, chooses to bear evil rather than to commit further evil in response to it. Patience keeps us from yielding to evils that are “temporal and brief” and from losing “those good things which are great and eternal.”35 Patience is a high virtue, that’s certain. No wonder patience is traditionally understood to be a subvirtue of courage. Indeed, all the virtues, Aquinas says, “are directed to the good of the soul.” He continues: “Now this seems to belong chiefly to patience; for it is written (Luke 21:19): ‘In your patience you shall possess your souls.’ Therefore patience is the greatest of the virtues.”36