Catholic Virtues,
American Virtues
This conference was one of a series being sponsored by the Faith & Reason Institute as part of its program on "Catholics and the American Public Square," which is supported by the Pew Charitable Trusts of Philadelphia.
| The Catholic Virtue Tradition and the American Prospect |
| The Philosophical Background |
| Recent Theological Developments |
| Character Education and Psychological Models of Virtue |
| Political and Social Questions |
Character Education and
Psychological Models of Virtue
Dr. Kevin Ryan
Teacher Education’s
Muddled Models of Character Education
The topic I was
assigned is “character education and the psychological
models of virtue.” Since most of my work for the last
forty years has been in teacher education, my response will be
from the purchase of what teachers are taught about character
education and what if anything they learn about the acquisition
of virtue.
While the
formation of one’s character is influenced by many factors
[parents, the siblings, friends, neighbors, church, clubs],
formal schooling undoubtedly has a mighty effect. Anyone
who is a parent knows the impact of teachers and the school
culture on their children. It is close to “all
consuming.” Durkheim would have fully
appreciated the core idea behind that 1980’s books, “Is
There Life After High School?” Schools present us with
the culture’s vision of itself, what we should be and what
we should guard against becoming. Much of our moral
heritage is delivered to our children through the school
curriculum’s stories and history texts. Also, the
moral lives of the teachers are on daily display, as are those of
classmates. As Edmund Burke once told us, “Example is
the school of mankind and he will learn at no other.”
In subtle, and
not so subtle, ways, our schools tell us who we are and what we
should become; what is a good person; what habits define a
successful person, an unsuccessful person; what is a worthy life,
what is an unworthy life. And, particularly, what is the
moral code by which we ought to live. It is my belief,
however, that in the last half century that mission, that role,
of schools has changed dramatically.
When I presented
myself to Columbia University’s Teachers College in the
summer of 1955 to be prepared as a high school English Teacher,
this teacher training institution was quite confident letting me
and the others know what we were to become “moral
educators,” that we had an almost sacred responsibility to
teach the nation’s core moral ideas and principles. And,
while the training to actually teach was dreadful in the extreme,
the mandate was quite clear. We were educators of the
culture’s moral heritage. And, as such, for better or for
worse, we felt that as public school teachers we had a good deal
of moral authority and we were expected to exercise it. While
largely unarticulated, the psychological models for the character
education of those post WWII and pre-Age of Aquarius classrooms
were, first, modeling [or Burkian good example] and second, what
we have come to call, behavior modification. Regarding,
modeling, the teacher, of course, was expected to be a good
example, but also to present to children good examples, real and
literary, to fill their minds and to alight their moral
imaginations. Second, there was behavior modification or
behavior shaping through a combination of direct instruction in
the code, what is right and wrong in civic life, and the
attendant consequences for good or bad behavior. All of
this was given labels and theoretical support later on by B.F.
Skinner and his many followers in education.
All of this was
pretty well swept away, though, by the cultural upheaval of the
late Sixties and Seventies. Moral education was seen as the
handmaiden of a repressive, exploitive elite which was using the
school to turn out conforming worker drones, conditioned to live
out sexually repressed lives in ticky-tacky box-like homes in
scrawling, faceless suburbs and so on and so on. The
leading educators of the period warned teachers not to lay on
children “the cold hand of orthodoxy,” but rather to
facilitate students’ efforts to clarify their own values.
Not their parents’ or society’s moral values, but to
discover and clarify their own moral values. Behind all
this is the long and, in educational circles, enormously
influential hand of Jean Jacques Rousseau. Rousseau’s
Sixties spokesman was the psychotherapist, Carl Rogers, who
developed Client-center therapy. The core idea behind
client-center therapy is profoundly anti-authority and as a
technique continually directs the patient to answer his own
questions [Why don’t I have any friends? Why has my
third wife walked out on me?]. This entire set of
techniques, in turn, was infused with the warm balm of the
I’m-okay-you’re-okay movement. Together values
clarification and client-centered therapy quickly and enduringly
filled the space left when moral education retreated before the
relativism that engulfed the Sixties.
In an era of
moral confusion, the idea of simply letting children clarify
their own personal values, moral and otherwise, had great appeal
to educators. Amid the widespread sense among educators
that they had no right, let alone mandate, to impose their values
or, Good Heavens, indoctrinate students with our nation’s
core moral values, this seemed to be a good solution. And so,
values clarification won and won, in the words of Vice President
Cheney, it won “big time!’ This in spite of the
fact that the research demonstrated clearly that the positive
claims of its advocates were unsupported and that many thoughtful
observers worried about the strong possibility that in the name
of moral education values clarification was promoting mortal
relativism among our young. Although the term has in recent
decades gone underground in educational circles, still for
twenty-five years the dominant model of moral education has been
and continues to be values clarification. It is in the deep
structure of teacher education and our public schools.
Until recently,
with the rise of what is called “the character
education” movement, the only serious challenge to the
predominance of values clarification has been Cognitive
Developmental Moral Education, championed by the late Lawrence
Kohlberg. Building on the earlier work of Jean Piaget, the
Swiss psychologist, Kohlberg’s research claimed that human
beings are capable of moving through six distinct stages of moral
thinking, and that while movement is related to maturation and
intellectual development, there are things that educators can do
to help students move from one stage or habituated way of
thinking about moral questions to next higher [meaning more
complex and inclusive] stage of thinking. Prominent among
the recommendations to teachers was to have students engage early
and often in moral discussions, grappling among themselves over
ethical dilemmas. This moral cognitive clashing is supposed
to help children free themselves from other lower stage and move
sequentially to the next higher stage. While this stage
bumping approach was popular in some educational circles during
the 70s and 80s, its popularity was primarily among
psychologists. Subsequent research dealt harshly with
Kohlberg’s claims for his methods, plus the fact that
classroom teachers found dilemma discussions difficult to manage.
By the time Kohlberg took his own life, some ten years ago, his
influence was difficult to discern.
In the mid
1980s, educators moved away form the term “moral
education” because it sounded overly religious or
indoctrinative and because it was associated with failed and
dubious efforts, such as values clarification and cognitive moral
developmental approaches. “Character education”
became the new flag under which some educators concerned with the
transmission of our moral heritage rallied. As a term,
“character” seemed fresh and evocative, but at the same
time traditional and substantial. Fueled by soaring rates
of out-of-wedlock births, promiscuity, rising school violence and
falling student performance, everyone started talking about the
need for schools “to address issues of character.”
Politicians, parents and finally educators seemed to be for
“character education.” Even the White House
got into the act with President and then First Lady Clinton
hosting and participating in five annual White House Conferences
on Character Education.
As the
‘character education movement’ picked up steam, some of
us wondered what teachers and teacher educators thought were
their responsibilities, if any, to prepare teachers to responds
to and deal with the ethic and moral domains. At our center
at Boston University, the Center for the Advancement of Ethics
and Character, we did two related studies. The first was a
doctoral thesis by Professor Jane Wells of Gordon College. Wells
wanted to know what professors of education taught their students
about issues of morality, civic values, and ethical
decision-making. She developed a lengthy interview protocol
and then carried on taped interviews, running between one and two
hours with 31 professors in 31 different colleges and
universities. Some small; some large; some religious; some
private; most state supported secular institutions. All
interviewee were professors of education involved directly with
teacher education. She made transcriptions of all these
interviews and then analyzed and eventually categorizing their
responses. Wells found a riot of understandings around what these
teacher educators thought they ought to pass on to their
students. After much sorting, she found she could group
this great range of responses into several categories. We,
then, used Wells categories as the basis for an Olin supported
study we conducted with the Character Education Partnership of
what the leadership in teacher education thought was their
institution’s responsibility to prepare teachers as
character educators. In this 1997 study we defined
the leadership as deans of school of education and chairpersons
of teacher education departments We surveyed half of
the 1200 plus colleges and universities, which prepare teachers
and had a very respectable 35% response rate to a long
instrument.
| Here is some of what we
found. First, more than 90% thought the public
schools should teach our nation’s core values.
Nevertheless, when these deans and directors of teacher
education were asked if they were satisfied with what
their institutions were doing to prepare teachers for
their responsibilities as character educators, only 13%
indicated satisfaction. However, and this
goes to the heart of the trouble, when asked what they
thought character education was and how they taught it to
prospective teachers, deep disagreements and confusion
surfaces. Table 1 (right) captures the
range of responses. There is not only no consensus,
but there is extremely wide disagreement about what
character education is and how it should be taught.
Table 2 (below) indicates the more popular approaches with Caring Community garnering the most votes. On the other hand, of all the available choice, this term is the most slippery and illusive. On the other hand, as a term, caring community resonates with the idea that schools and teachers should be nutrient and supportive of feminine virtues, such as cooperation and empathy.
Table 3 (below) breaks down the responses by type of institution: public, secular private, and religious. Again, we see that Caring Community is the most popular across all three types of institutions. Not surprisingly, religious institutions, the majority of which were Catholic, had “religious education” as the second most dominant approach. Finally, “moral education/virtue, ” the approach to character education most prominently addressed and presumably supported at this conference, was only cited as a dominant approach by religious schools.
What these two studies
indicate to me is that very little is being done and the
psychological models behind the little that is being done
are quite varied. Anyone looking to schools of
education to aid children’s understanding of what is
a good and worthy life and then, help them in the
formation of good habits that underline a good life is in
for a disappointment. Teacher education is the soft
underbelly of this character education movement, and
certainly a character education based on the acquisition
of virtue. |
|
This moral
education/virtue approach is the practiced in the Boston
University teacher education program and it is the model
developed and advocated by Karen Bohlin, director of the Center
For the Advancement of Ethics and Character. Table 4 (below),
Internalizing Virtue: An Instructional and School Framework, is
an attempt to describe economically the process which we attempt
to have teachers go through and, in turn, for them to put their
students through. Crucial to the process is to help the
individual see what constitutes a virtuous life and to see that
the proper aim of an education is the acquisition of a virtuous
life. And, again, the curriculum and the person of the
teacher are fundamental to this process.
Table 4
For fifteen years, as I spoke to teachers
and teacher education groups I have defined character education
as “what we as teachers do to help our students know
the good, love the good and do the good.” While
simple, this definition speaks to the head, the heart and the
hands; to the acquisition of moral understanding, to the school
of our desires, and to ethical actions. It was only in the
preparation of this paper that I uncovered the possible root for
this definition. In the first grade at St. Augustine’s
Parochial School, Sister Mary Ambrose, O.P., asked us from the
Baltimore Catechism, “Why did god make us?”
The proper answer then and now is “God made us to know Him,
to love Him and to serve Him.” In our tradition,
the quest for character and the quest for God are parallel
tracks, which, of course, meet in Infinity.
Kevin Ryan is Director Emeritus of the Center for the Advancement of Ethics and Character at Boston University.
The Rev. Benedict Ashley, O.P.
Is “Virtue” a Scientific Concept?
The concept of “virtue” plays little or no role in modern psychology because psychologists suppose that it is a “philosophical” term foreign to psychology as an empirical science.[i] Hence before this concept and the extensive tradition of study of human behavior in which has been used can play a role in scientific psychology this semantic problem must be overcome. In fact the distinction between a philosophical or rational psychology and an experimental or empirical and scientific psychology was first introduced by Christian Wolff in the 18th century. Wolff, a Cartesian dualist, identified “philosophy” with “metaphysics,” an identification originated by the medieval scholastic Duns Scotus. Hence for Wolff rational psychology was an application of metaphysics.[ii]
The main tradition, however, in which the concept of “virtue” was developed is that of Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas. For Aquinas the term “philosophy” was used to distinguish disciplines based on reason from theology based on faith. Hence it included the entire range of human thought that we call “the sciences.” Since for Aristotle and Aquinas human reason is always empirically based on sense experience, physics, chemistry, biology, and psychology, as well as mathematics, ethics and politics are all “philosophy.”[iii] It is true that for this tradition metaphysics was philosophy par excellence but it was not, as for Wolff, a kind of deductive a priori science of the conditions of the possibility of knowledge presupposed to the inductive empirical sciences and independent of them, but was a reflection on all the special sciences that it presupposed and correlated.
Thus today the term “philosophy,” if used at all, should be restricted to metaphysics and the concept of “virtue “ needs to be empirically verified in scientific psychology and must be freed of all a priorism. Aristotle and Aquinas were in fact true behaviorists in psychology; though they did not assume, as did B. J. Skinner. that human behavior can be reduced to the same factors sufficient to explain the behavior of rats! [iv]
What does the terms “virtue” and “character” in the Aristotelian non-dualist tradition mean? For Aristotle human beings are a special kind of animal that behave in such a way as to deal satisfactorily with certain objects necessary for their survival and full development. Hence a science of psychology begins from the observation of these objects and then moves to an understanding of the actions by which humans deals with these objects. It then logically infers that humans have certain powers that enable them to perform these actions. Finally it analyzes human nature in terms of these powers and the needs these powers enable humans to satisfy. Thus psychology is structured on an object, action, power, need, nature basis. Only objects and actions, i.e., behavior, can be observed empirically, but the powers, needs, and nature of any animal including the human animal, can be logically inferred from these observations and further verified by more observation of such behaviors in varying situations.
Aristotelian and Thomistic psychology had its shortcomings not by being a priori and deductive, as histories of psychology often mistakenly assert, but by the primitive character of its observational techniques that remained at what we today would call the uncontrolled clinical level. Aristotle based his views on acute observations of Greek political behavior and Aquinas drew on centuries of observation of human virtues and vices by spiritual directors in monasteries and by confessors of the laity. Sigmund Freud himself has recently been severely criticized because his theories rested only on very limited and not always honestly reported clinical experience. [v]Psychology today must move beyond the clinical level to more precise techniques of observation, verification, and, if you will, falsification, without, however, neglecting the heritage of clinician and confessor.
How then did the notion of “virtue” arise? The tendency in Plato’s dualistic psychology was to explain all human behavior by a single factor, namely, reason. In Plato’s ethics there was a classification of the major virtues as “prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance” but justice, fortitude, and temperance were then reduced to prudence and prudence was identified with “wisdom,” that is, with the perfection of reason. [vi] Plato thought reason was a spiritual entity existing prior to the body and only by some strange fate entombed for a time in the body from which it hoped eventually to escape, perhaps after many cycles of reincarnation. Hence for him the virtue of wisdom, to which all other virtues were reduced, was innate to the eternal soul, not acquired from experience.
Aristotle rejected these views of his teacher because he believed that our knowledge arises only from experience. We acquire this experience through our bodily sense organs, process it in imagery, etc. and then analyze it in abstract, essential concepts.[vii] Thus we can infer that the human being has not just one power but a number of distinct powers specified by the objects with which they are able to deal. W we have five sense powers, touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. But our behavior demonstrates that we must also have some internal powers of imagery, we must have a memory of things already sensed, we must combine the images of these experiences, and we must evaluate their relevance, positive or negative, to the satisfaction of human needs.[viii] This imaginative process results in the bodily states we call emotions that manifest themselves not only in behavior but in physiological changes, such as when one blushes when frowned on by a superior. From this we can infer the existence of a set of several powers at several levels: the five external senses, the four kinds of internal senses, and the intellect that distinguishes human behavior from that of chimpanzees and manifests itself in language.[ix]
Virtue
Presupposes Freedom
Human beings invent languages and highly diversified cultures instead of following fixed instinctual patterns as other animals do. This remarkable fact is best explained by inferring that humans must have the power of choosing among possible means to satisfy their ends, that is, they have free will. Some psychologists still seem to think that the scientific method implies a rigid determinism in nature. Modern quantum physics, however, has shown that natural science can work well enough without the assumption of absolute determinism in nature. That of course does not prove we have free will, since the alternative to deterministic causality may also be chance. In modern cosmology and evolutionary biology the synthesizing type of explanation is more and more historical narrative of chance events rather than deterministic law that only predicts a range of possibilities.[x] That we have free-will, however, is not contrary to the fact that human choices have to be made within a range of possibilities and this is done not by mere chance but by the human agent intelligently and deliberately weighing one possibility against another.[xi] Since such practical deliberation seldom shows the absolute superiority of one means over the others, the actual choice must be attributed to the freedom of the chooser.[xii] Thus the very concept of psychotherapy rests on the assumption that this therapy will free the client from rigid and unreasonable behavior for reasonable, free choice of behavior.
Models
of Human Personality
According to Salvatore Maddi [xiii] modern psychological theories of personality can be classified in three types: the conflict Model of Freud and Jung, the Fulfillment Model of Curran and Maslow, and the Consistency Model Maddi himself favors. The model used by Aristotle in his anthropology and ethics and followed by Aquinas is closest to the Fulfillment Model, but can easily assimilate the features of the other two models. Thus the Aristotleian methodology in psychology furnishes, just as empirically as does modern psychology, an account of the human person and human behavior. It concludes that human beings universally have certain basic needs that must be satisfied for survival and full development. Hence they also have a number of hierarchically ordered powers by which these needs can usually be met. In this classification of powers a fundamental distinction must be made between cognitive powers and affective powers, the objects of the first being various kinds of information and of the second being positive or negative reactions to this information. Moreover a cross distinction must be made between powers, whether cognitive or affective, that deal with concrete objects, namely, the objects of the sense powers, and those that deal with abstract analysis of this sense data, namely, the intelligence and the will.[xiv]
Virtues
and Character
The concepts of
“virtue” and “character” become necessary in
such a psychology when we observe that human behavior is modified
by learning to a far greater extent than is the behavior of other
animals. Furthermore this learning is not simply the acquisition
of information but of skill in using that information in
ways that are effective in satisfying human needs. [xv]
Thus intellectual education is not just learning facts and
explanatory theories, it is also acquiring skill in using this
information for various freely chosen purposes, for example to be
a lawyer or a doctor. Such skills are needed not only to solve
the more difficult problems people meet in satisfying their
needs, and especially the needs that are fixed in human nature
but also to do so consistently and without undue stress
and strain on the human organism.
Human beings are
complex, bodily organisms that undergone constant change and
variation. Consequently it is quite difficult for any of us who
have made a choice of behavior to carry that through to the goal.
We are easily distracted, discouraged, act impulsively, fail to
adjust and adapt to change, etc., etc., and consequently often
end by frustrating ourselves. We need therefore, a set of skills
that enable us to behave consistently in an appropriate manner
throughout the course of whole career, indeed of a whole life. It
is all too obvious that many people lack such skills and get in a
life time get nowhere. A virtue, therefore, is a learned
skill, acquired by repeated practice, to deal with the problems
of life effectively so as to satisfy a human need intrinsic to
human nature.[xvi]
Thus two kinds of virtue need to be distinguished: (1) those that are intellectual, and (2) those are acquired by the will or the sense appetites (it seems the external senses are not subject to skills). Aquinas distinguishes three kinds of intellectual skill that differ as regards the kind of intellectual problems with which they deal. [xvii]The first two are intuition (intellectus) and logical reasoning. Some people have skill in grasping the basic assumptions of any field of learning, others in making logical inferences from such assumptions. Every science requires both kinds of skill, since in every science there are basic principles not evident to the unlearned. It is on these principles that explanatory theories are built. Against Plato who tried to reduce all science to a single great Idea, [xviii] Aristotle defended the autonomy of a number of sciences with quite different kinds of principles. [xix] For example, the axioms of mathematics are quite different in character and based on different facts than are those of natural science.
The reasoned kinds of knowledge we call the sciences are divided into theoretic sciences which attempt to explain observed facts, and the practical sciences which consider the various possible means to achieve given ends. Every practical science presupposes at least one theoretic science. For example, engineering presupposes physics. Practical sciences, again, are of two types. Some practical sciences seek the means to freely chosen ends. These are the technologies of which there can be as many as we can invent and develop. Second, there are the ethical sciences that seek the means to satisfy basic human needs that we do not chose but which are given in our natures. Thus there must be at least three ethical sciences of individual, of family, and of communal living.
All these theoretic and practical sciences or intellectual virtues are acquired by learning and practice in critical thinking and are served by the arts of logic. Yet we do not usually speak of them as forming a person’s character, since you can be a a great scientist or engineer and still be a very bad person. The exception to this is the intellectual virtue of ethics or prudence that requires further discussion.
Since human beings have intelligence and free will they can use these to guide their actions to satisfy realistically and effectively not only to meet freely chosen goals, such as to make a million dollars, but also to satisfy those needs that are so much a part of our human nature that if they are not met we will be miserable and eventually will not survive. For example, our need to eat and drink is not something we choose, although we can choose within a certain range the kind of food and drink that we will use to meet this need and we can devise various technologies to produce these kinds. We must, however, eat and drink and we can do this in a way that truly satisfies our fixed need for proper nourishment and enables us not only to survive but also to be healthy. On the other hand, sadly enough, we can eat too little or too much or foods that do not make for health.
Thus for all of us, whether we be thick or thin, what, how much, and when is one of the fundamental problems of human life that each of us has the ethical responsibility to solve and this solution is not always easy. To consistently make good decisions about our eating we need an intellectual virtue that helps us realistically and cautiously yet with ingenuity decide how, what, and when to eat. This is in part a problem that a skilled dietician who has acquired the technology or practical science of dietetics can help us with. But even after we have the dietician’s advice we have to apply it intelligently to the concrete situations we meet in life; for example, to choose or not to choose to have some desert at a party. To do this consistently requires the intellectual skill or virtue of prudence, skill in practical thinking about satisfying our innate nutritional needs. [xx]
Prudence is a virtue that especially requires a great deal of experience beyond any book learning or set of rules. It can be assisted, however, by a systematization that resembles a scientific theory since it is based on the life sciences and this is called ethics from the Greek ethos, “character.” To have a fully developed virtue of prudence at least an intuitive kind of ethics is required and for difficult problems in life a systematic, scientific ethics itself or the advice of those who know such an ethics. Thus prudence is the guide of human life and in practical living serves the same governing role as wisdom does in the theoretical order. It is practical wisdom. Thus it is primarily an intellectual virtue and yet it governs the ethical or moral order. Aquinas argues that it is, therefore, the greatest of the four cardinal moral virtues.
We cannot think realistically about our needs, however, if we do not take two other kinds of problems into consideration, namely, our relations with other people, and the control of our own emotions. Since human beings, as Aristotle said, [xxi] are “political animals,” that is, social beings who cannot achieve their personal goals except in cooperation, communication and sharing with others in a common good, nothing could be more imprudent than to lack respect for the rights of others. Thus skill in thinking of the needs and rights of others is the second cardinal virtue, justice [xxii]. It is difficult for us to be either prudent or just, however, if our emotions or rather the drives that produce these emotions prevent us from thinking clearly and objectively. Aristotle and Aquinas concluded from experience that we have two basic sets of such drives, a view to which Sigmund Freud also finally came, at least if his notion of the “death wish” is interpreted in the better way advocated by many of his disciples.[xxiii] One of these sets of drives are those that move us to seek what gives us physical pleasure, for example our pleasure in food and sex; and another that moves us to seek power over our environment or other persons who raise difficulties for us in attaining our goals. The pleasure drive is Freud’s libido and the power drive his aggression that he called a “death wish” only because he first observed it in its morbid form of aggression turned agaisnt the self. The cardinal virtue that controls the pleasure drive is moderation (temperance) and the one that controls the power drive is courage (fortitude).[xxiv]
Psychology observes the effects of these drives and how they can interfere with human social relations and with realistic thinking about the fulfillment of human needs. It then tries to find therapies that will remove whatever prevents clients from acquiring the skills they need to deal with these life problems. The obstacles that need to be overcome can be at two levels. The first level is that of sense cognition in which imagery and emotion, whether unconscious, subconscious, or conscious determine behavior. In mentally healthy people these do not so powerfully restrict realistic intellectual thought that freedom of choice is radically impaired. But for persons with neuroses, compulsions, or addictions this freedom is radically restricted and in psychosis it is blocked. There is, however, a second level of behavior that is possible for mentally healthy people who have acquired skills not in good but in bad behavior, and we call these counter-skills, “vices.” For every virtue, Aquinas argues,[xxv] there can be two vices, skills in failing to do what is realistically needed to meet basic human needs either by excessive defect, such as the vice of doing violence to the rights of others and its opposite the vice of not standing up for human rights.
Among the four cardinal moral virtues, therefore, there is a hierarchy. Prudence guides the use of the other virtues. Justice makes human society possible. Courage and moderation free individuals from disordered affective drives to make prudent and just decisions, and also to support these decisions. Aquinas groups with these four cardinal moral virtues many other lesser virtues that deal with less urgent human needs. [xxvi]
Because my aim in this paper is only to show the empirical basis proper to scientific psychology of the concepts of “virtue” and “character,” I will not enter here into a theological discussion of how the goal of life or form of imperfect happiness proper to human nature as such has been elevated by God’s gracious invitation to a life of grace. The goal of such a life is a perfect happiness utterly beyond the demands of human nature yet congruent with it. [xxvii] As Aquinas so often emphasizes, “Grace perfects nature.” [xxviii] Hence Aquinas argues that each of the natural virtues is elevated to the order of grace in view of its goal of blessedness with the Trinity and is directly united to the Trinity by the special “theological” virtues of faith, hope, and Christian love. These “infused” virtues, [xxix] given by the Holy Spirit to Christians in Baptism and Confirmation, heal the weakening of their natural virtues caused by original and personal sin and maintain in them the life of grace, or restore it to them whenever they are converted by repentance from serious sin and receive the Sacrament of Reconcilation.
The title of our conference is Catholic Virtues, American Virtues. Since as free persons we cannot live a virtuous life except in a community where virtue is strongly operative, and since as free persons we also invent a variety of customs and revise them from time to time, our empirical study of virtue has to be within a particular culture, or cross-culturally by comparison of human behaviors in different contexts. I would argue that the same basic virtues are needed in every culture, since the basic human needs are universal to the species homo sapiens sapiens that has not radically change in the 150,000 or so years of its existence. [xxx]There is nothing wrong with a given culture placing special emphasis on particular virtues particularly needed at a given time, but no culture will flourish unless all the ennumerated virtues are sufficiently developed to meet basic human needs.
The history of the United States of America show that its founders knew the necessity for a virtuous citizenry for the nation to fulfill its ambition to be the “Land of Freedom.” Many Americans are in fact people of virtuous character or we would not have survived, but our institutions today so emphasize certain lesser skills, and particularly technological rather than ethical skills, that we are faced with what seems an American culture in decline. It may even be approaching the collapse suffered by other great cultures.
Our greatest moral danger, in the opinion of many persons of virtue, is the corruption of the natural institution of the family which evolution, as an instrument of God, has constructed as the milieu in which the child best acquires the fundamental virtues and in which cultural traditions that favor these virtues are passed on. This corruption has been promoted by the sexual revolution that denied the importance of the virtue of moderation in the control of our appetites for physical pleasure. It has been falsely claimed that sensual indulgence in sex and drugs is essential to human freedom when it fact these are vices that lead to addictive slavery. We have been blinded to this corruption of moral virtue by a related corruption of intellectual virtue by an educational system permeated by post-modern relativism.
The particular failure of American culture to support the virtue of moderation and the virtue of courage that is also needed to resist the temptations to sensual indulgence is concealed by a blanket of rationalization spread by the public media that obliterates that moral vision that it is work of the virtue of prudence to reveal. One has only to think of the way the American Association of Psychologists has supported the rationalizing gay propaganda. This propaganda first led to our AIDS epidemic and is now trying to replace the natural family institution by social approval of all kinds of pseudo-families. Finally, all of this decadence is supported by our individualism and consumerism that for the sake of profit exploit these vicious tendencies while neglecting genuine social justice.
If the Christian community, and especially the Catholic Church, is to fulfill its mission of announcing the Good News to the world along with its promise of the grace of God that heals and elevates the human person and human communities, it must be united in its witness. The Catechism of the Catholic Church Part III contains a summary of the Christian tradition on the life of virtue, natural and graced, that systematizes the teachings of Vatican II and will, I hope and pray, be stated in plain American terms in the U.S. national catechism now in preparation. [xxxi] Renewal must began by making sure that every Catholic knows that teaching and the reasons that make it so helpful to the pursuit of true freedom and true happiness both for themselves and for our nation.
Notes
[i] On this whole subject see N.H. Dent, The Moral
Psychology of the Virtues (Cambridege: Cambridge University
Press, 1984) with its bibliography pp. 215-220.
[ii] On Wolff’s influence John E. Gurr, S.J., The
Principle of Sufficient Reason in Some Scholastics Systems,
1750-1900 (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1965).
[iv] For a survey and critique of present views on
Behaviorism in psychology see Salvatore R. Maddi, Personality
Theories: a Comparative Analysis (Pacific Grove, CA:
Brooks/Cole, 1996), Chapter 13, pp. 427-446.
[v] Se Frederick Crews, Memory Wars: Freud’s Legacy
in Dispute (New York: New York review of Books Reprint, 1997
and the twenty essays edited by Crews, Unauthorized Freud:
Doubters Confront a Legend (New York: Penguin, 1998).
[vi] Plato, Republic IV, 427d-434d; cf. S. Th.,
q. 60, a. 1.
[vii] Aristotle, Metaphysics I, 980a 20-982a 4.
[viii] See George Klubertanz, S.J., The Discursive Power
(St.Louis: Modern Schoolman, 1952) for a thoroughly documented
study of the four internal senses of memory, imagination, common
sense and the discursive sense ( vis estimative or vis
cogitativa (particular or animal intelligence) according
to Aquinas.
[ix] See the work of the noted semanticist Thomas A. Sebeok
and Robert Rosenthal, The Clever Hans Phenomenon:
Communication with Horses, Whales, Apes, and People (New
York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1981).
[x] Modern scientific cosmology
and biological evolutionary theory no longer claim to predict the
future by deterministic laws but only to explain past events and
these explanations are only in terms of a range of probabilities.
Thus Ian G. Barbour, Religion and Science (San Francisco:
HarperSan Francisco) rev. ed., 1997) p. 173, paraphrases Werner
Heisenberg, “[T]he probabilities of modern physics refer to
tendencies in nature that include a range of possibilities.
The future is not simply unknown, it is ‘not
decided.’” and the evolutionary biologist Stuart A.
Kauffman, The Origin of Order ((New York: Oxford
University Press, 1993) favorably quotes Jacques Monod’s
phrase, “evolution is chance caught on the wing”
(p.25).
[xi] S.Th., I, q. 116
explains that God is the first cause of natural, chance, and free
events in the universe. That their secondary causality depends on
his primary causality does not change their character as
determined, chance, or free.
[xii] See Yves Simon, The
General Theory of Authority (Notre Dame, IN: University of
Notre Dame Press, 1962) for Aquinas’ theory of the
indeterminancy of the judgments of the practical reason and free
choice..
[xiii] See op.cit, note 3
above, pp. 18-22.
[xiv] S.Th. I, q 78, aa. 3
and 4; q. 78, a.1; q.82, a. 3.
[xv] Ibid., I-II, q. 49.
the Latin habitus is not correctly translated as
“habit” but better as “skill” since it is not
a fixed manner of response to stimulus but an intelligent manner
of response that takes in to account the special character of
each practical problem in its uniqueness.
[xvi] Ibid. q. 55. In my book,
Living the Truth in Love: A Biblical Introduction to Moral
Theology (Staten Island, NY, Alba House, 1996) I give a
detailed treatment of the Thomistic theory of the virtues.
[xvii] S. Th., q.57.
[xviii] In the Myth of the Cave all
knowledge flows from the vision of the Idea of the One &
Good, Republic, VII, 503e-504a.
[xix] Metaphysics, VI, c. 1,
1024a seq.
[xx] S. Th. I-II, q. 57, a.
4.
[xxi] Politics, I, c.2,
1253a 1.
[xxii] .S. Th.. II-II q. 58.
[xxiii] See Karl Menninger, Man
Against Himself (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1938) for the
development of a two-drive theory by psychoanalysts.
[xxiv] S. Th., II-II, q. 123
and q. 141.
[xxv] Ibid., I-II, q. 64, aa
1-2.
[xxvi] Ibid., I-II, q. 61, aa
3-4.
[xxvii] On the famous controversy
about whether there is a natural as well as a supernatural end
for the human person raised by the Surnaturel of Henri de
Lubac S.J., see J .H. Nicolas, O.P., Les profondeurs de la
grace (Paris: Beauchesne, 1968), pp. 334-399.
[xxviii] For Aquinas’ meaning
see, S. Th. I-II, q. 110, a. 2.
[xxix] Ibid. I-II, q. 51,
a.4.
[xxx] Ian Tattersall, Becoming
Human: Evolution and Human Uniqueness ( (New York: Harcourt
& Brace, 1998), pp. 189-216.
[xxxi] The 2nd edition of the The
Catechism of the Catholic Church, (Rome: Libreria Editrice
Vaticana) according to the authorized Latin edition appeared in
1989 and the bishops of the Untied States are now studying the
issuance of a national catechism for which this is to be the
basis.
Fr. Benedict Ashley is Emeritus Professor of Moral Theology at the Aquinas Institute of Theology, St. Louis, and Adjunct Professor at the Center for Health Care Ethics at St. Louis University in Missouri.
Right Reasons is an occasional publication of the Faith & Reason Institute. Please do not reproduce without permission.
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