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January 16 - January 28, 2024
Today in the secular literary guild and public school classroom there is a sustained assault on Christian morality.
The Aristotelian philosophy of virtue is tied to a sense of human purpose or telos—in other words, humanity’s ultimate end or purpose. In this understanding, virtues are parts of a whole that is oriented toward one end. For Aristotle, this end is living well, or (as his Greek term is often translated) happiness. Today we might refer to this as human flourishing. For the Christian, however, the ultimate end or purpose of one’s life is to glorify God and enjoy him forever. This end does not always translate to our own happiness or flourishing.
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.
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.
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.
Literature is birthed from our fallenness: without the fall, there would be no story. “Only desire speaks,” writes Jacques Ellul in The Humiliation of the Word. “Satisfaction is silence.”34 Thus it is the nature of literature to express—and cultivate—desire.
Reading well entails discerning which visions of life are false and which are good and true—as well as recognizing how deeply rooted these visions are in language.
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.
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.
Prudence is “at the heart of the moral character, for it shapes and directs the whole of our moral lives, and is indispensable to our becoming morally excellent human persons.”
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.
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.
Tom Jones is a book full of surprises and multiple colorful (sometimes bawdy) threads woven together by a masterful author-narrator whose highly visible presence reflects a worldview founded on belief in the active presence of an Author-God in the world of human affairs.
One notices this often with pundits and commentators who are wont to spout platitudes that sound wise in theory yet prove disastrous when applied to an actual situation.
This points to a problem in the purity culture popular today in some strains of Christianity. The movement’s well-intentioned attempt to encourage believers to remain virgins until marriage unfortunately misses the mark by inadvertently making sexual purity a means to an end (such as alluring a fine marriage partner or being rewarded with a great sex life once married) rather than being a virtue in itself.
Vice and even folly are more and more seen as being “in the eyes of the beholder.” Absent agreement on these, satire just seems mean. On the surface, ridicule doesn’t seem kind, of course. But to ridicule what is wicked or foolish in hopes of preventing more of the same is much kinder than letting wickedness or folly continue along their merry, destructive way.
Yet the truth is that the satirist, someone who tries so hard to improve the world, must, I think, love people very much. Even God’s inspired Word contains plenty of irony and satire, such as when Job mocks the worldly-wise friends who’ve taunted his faith, saying, “Doubtless you are the only people who matter, and wisdom will die with you!” (Job 12:2). The satirist loves in the way of God, who chastens those whom he loves.
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.”
But when such knowledge is used toward unjust or evil ends, it transforms from the virtue of prudence into the vice of cunning. The word cunning is etymologically connected, not coincidentally, to the word knowledge. The just use of knowledge that constitutes prudence devolves into mere cunning when that knowledge is used for unjust ends.
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.
prudence is “the duty which we owe ourselves. . . . If we will be so much our own enemies as to neglect it, we are not to wonder if the world is deficient in discharging their duty to us; for when a man lays the foundation of his own ruin, others will, I am afraid, be too apt to build upon it.”
In other words, applying wisdom requires the ability to discern truth and then to act rightly based on truth.
The pickles he gets himself into demonstrate how prudence is an intellectual virtue based in the rational ability, first, to distinguish between competing goods (for Tom, too often, these competing goods are women); then to foresee the consequences of possible actions; and finally, to take the best course of action accordingly.
Perfectionism is the foil of prudence.
“the virtue of prudence is dependent upon the constant readiness to ignore the self,”
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.
One attains the virtue of temperance when one’s appetites have been shaped such that one’s very desires are in proper order and proportion.
Yet, so often in human affairs, balance seems unnatural, prone as we are to careen from one extreme to another, both as individuals and collectively within culture. The ancients showed wisdom in understanding how foundational temperance is to human excellence.
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
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In previous ages, it was common, even among some Puritans, to imbibe mild wine, mead, and beers from breakfast till nighttime with little effect. However, what had long been a healthy and relatively harmless social and gustatory custom turned into an addictive and dangerous habit for many when modern means of producing alcohol increased the potency of alcoholic beverages.11 In addition, the Industrial Revolution’s increasingly rigorous and dehumanized systems of labor prompted more workers to seek even more relief in alcohol, and an epidemic began.
Efforts to address the problem culminated in 1920 with the Eighteenth Amendment to the US Constitution, which made the manufacture, transportation, and sale of intoxicating liquor illegal. The law was so intemperate that it could only result in vice. Prohibition was an ill-fated but short-lived social experiment that, in effect, replaced virtue.
Between the end of the Civil War and the turn of the century, capitalist ventures birthed a new ethos in America. This “consumer capitalism” created “a culture almost violently hostile to the past and to tradition, a future-oriented culture of desire that confused the good life with goods . . . one moving largely against the grain of earlier traditions of republicanism and Christian virtue.”22 This old culture, based on values rooted in tradition, community, and religion, was replaced by a new culture that promoted “acquisition and consumption as the means of achieving happiness.”
Temperance is, for many of us raised in a culture birthed by consumerism, a virtue difficult to attain.
Consumption does indeed consume us.
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.
For the Puritans, virtue could not exist apart from God—specifically, faith in Christ. For Franklin, Christ was not so much a source as an example worthy of emulation, no different from Socrates. By the time we get to Gatsby, God—or religion or faith—is utterly effaced, replaced by the gods of materialism and self.
intemperance is “a disease of the imagination.”
Consumerism has created a society, Debord argues, in which appearance has replaced both being and having.48 “The satisfaction which no longer comes from the use of abundant commodities is now sought in the recognition of their value as commodities,” Debord explains. Consequently, “the consumer is filled with waves of religious fervor for the sovereign liberty of the commodities.”
In showing us Nick’s choice to erase the insult to Gatsby, the novel reminds us that we too are unreliable narrators of our own stories. And therefore the judgments made by our own limited perspectives must be tempered against the all-seeing eyes of God.
Justice is the morality of the community. The morality of a community shapes individual thinking, values, and behavior.
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.
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.
Absolute power by its very nature is unjust,13 for it lacks the relational proportionality that defines justice.
The impossibility of pure disinterestedness is why justice is considered the hardest virtue to attain
“a law that is not just does not seem to me to be a law.”
An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”21
When the justice system becomes a form of entertainment, it surely is unjust. This is as true of the ancient Roman coliseum as it is of twentieth-century American public lynchings and of today’s trials by public shaming on social media.
The vice that opposes the virtue of justice is anger. Anger in and of itself is not wrong, of course. The Bible tells us to “be angry and do not sin” (Eph. 4:26 ESV), making clear that anger itself is not sin. But excessive anger distorts justice, turning it into vengeance.
The novel’s vision exposes the truth that prolonged systemic injustice inevitably bears the bitter fruit of violence.
Yet even such excessive injustice cannot extinguish the light of goodness. From such a vast and dark ocean of wrong, bright rays shine forth from small towers of fortitude, lighthouses in the dark.
