Virtue ethics as Christian humanist recovery of the Real - part III (final)
The theological story and conclusion
What this revolutionary, retrieved ethics looked like in contradistinction to modern Christian ethics once it was absorbed and informed by a full Christian humanism is illustrated in the work of Belgian Dominican professor of moral theology Servais Pinckaers.
In his monumental 1985 volume The Sources of Christian Ethics, Pinckaers looks back at the rich biblical, patristic, and medieval development of Christian ethics, then describes in sorrowful detail the modern cul-de-sac into which the field immobilized itself in the modern period—unmoored from human experience as well as from Scripture and captive to Kantian idealism. As a positive program, he presents the retrieval of a premodern Christianized classical virtue ethics: a kind of escape route back to biblical fidelity, not to say sanity.
Along the way, Pinckaers presents a view of decline in Christian ethics that significantly predated Isaac Newton, let alone Immanuel Kant. In his chapter “Moral theology in the modern era of the manuals,” Pinckaers identifies “the beginning of the modern period of moral theology with Ockham in the fourteenth century. Nominalism,” he writes, “made a profound break with the previous tradition of moral theory and laid the foundations for the concepts and systems of subsequent centuries, focusing moral theory upon the idea and sense of obligation.”[1] “Nominalism,” he explains, “stressed the idea of law and obligation in morality, to the detriment of interior spontaneity and the vitality proper to love—qualities that form the very basis of the spiritual and mystical life.” This separation of ethics from spirituality was part of a larger modern separation, “between theology and pastoral concerns.”[2]
In short, after Ockham, “moral theory dealt essentially with precepts, which determined obligations in various sectors of human activity and were imposed on all without distinction.”[3] Gone was the premodern emphasis on each person’s loving practice of habituated virtues, anchored in a Christianized Aristotelian anthropology. That moral tradition was exemplified in what might be called a personalist reading of the sermon on the mount, and in particular the Beatitudes—laid out by Pinckaers in one of the most powerful sections of his book.
By the seventeenth century, the older, richer virtue-ethical tradition in Catholic moral theology (for example, in Thomas Aquinas) had been entirely replaced by rigorously systematized modern manuals of moral theology, structured according to the commandments (265). In these manuals, “including the Thomist ones,” moral reflection was now taken captive to a framework of freedom and law, with freedom now interpreted as “the will’s self-determining power to act for or against the law, reason, or conscience.”
In a word, this was a voluntaristic system. The premodern virtues were now “reduced to good habits that facilitated free action” rather than “provid[ing] the interior motivation that would have given the action full value.”[4] All moral theology now seemed to be summed up in the question, “What might one do or not do?” and “a human act became moral through its relationship to the law.”[5]
And this reduction of scope posed the danger of legalism, shrinking all of morality into the achievement of the minimal requirements of the law. In Pinckaer’s words,
“One could easily believe all moral duties fulfilled, once the law’s demands were met. [The premodern] upward thrust toward perfection and excellence was replaced by a sense of satisfaction in duties done, along with the temptation to reduce all duties to the minimum.”[6]
The triumph of the new system in Catholic moral theology from the seventeenth to the twentieth century was complete, as the manuals became the almost exclusive basis of the church’s moral teaching. As Pinckaers put it, the manuals have been
“imposed [in preaching, teaching, and catechesis] to such an extent [through those centuries] that many imagine that throughout the entire course of Church history, no other concept of moral teaching could have, or ever did, exist.”[7]
Gone now, and in desperate need of retrieval, were the moral models of Augustine and Thomas, in which “the question of happiness, answering to our natural longings for truth and love, with their own demands far surpassing the requirements of obligation, is a decisive question for every person”[8] (this is the “ethical eudaemonism” typical of the long line of Christian humanists, and exemplified in such modern Christian humanists as CS Lewis).
All of this historical account was prolegomena, leading to Pinckaers’s cogent and powerfully humanist retrieval for the Catholic Church of that premodern, eudaemonistic, virtues-based model for Christian ethics that had already by his time been taken up by teachers as diverse as Elizabeth Anscombe, Alisdair MacIntyre, and Stanley Hauerwas—each in their own way, and among many others.
Denouement: Retrieval of education as paideia (training in virtue)
To summarize, the question raised in philosophical and theological ethics in the second half of the twentieth century was this: If “the good” is in alignment to “the real” (what is true, including what is true about ourselves), rather than a subjective category defined by each for themselves, then can we be formed for the good, as Aristotle and Aquinas had argued, through education as paideia, habituation in virtue? The Oxford circle of mid-century philosophers, along with those working in theological ethics such as Pinckaers, concluded that we could – and indeed, that moral life required such formation.
In conclusion, this movement in twentieth-century ethics was in line with modern Christian humanism’s many-layered address to the divisions and alienations of modernity. By returning to belief in a moral Real, it has addressed the fact-value or object-subject divide in ethics, which put law and the Kantian categorical imperative on the objective side and personal morality (now purely a matter of individual conscience) on the subjective. The Christian humanist answer to this fact-value divide was realist: we become good not through alignment to rational calculations that we make in purely idiosyncratic ways—values with no reference to facts—but through alignment to the givens of the moral Real regarding the world and ourselves. In the Christian humanist tradition, which had adapted classical models of education grounded in Aristotle and expanded in Aquinas, this alignment is to occur through exemplars and habituation, after the model of the Incarnation which “shows us the father” through the son (exemplar) and conscripts us into discipleship—that is, the project of theosis as the graced regaining of the moral image of God in ourselves (the moral Real) aided by various disciplines (habituation).
The cash value of this “virtue ethical turn” to the work of Christian study centers is that it pushes back effectively against the Weberian insistence that academic study is to be purely empirical and that the university must therefore be a place where we cannot be formed as moral selves. Virtue ethics becomes one facet of a larger Christian humanist retrieval of the Real in our universities, riven as they are with the four divisions of modernity.
[1] Pinckaers, Sources, 254.
[2] Op cit., 257.
[3] Op cit., 256.
[4] Op cit., 269.
[5] Op cit., 270.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Op cit., 277.
[8] Op cit., 279.