The nature of virtue, its acquisition, and the role it plays in the realization of our vocations are matters poorly understood today. For many people, virtue commonly evokes the idea that it limits human freedom, creativity, and spontaneity, that virtue is a chain that restricts, a burden that oppresses, a static conformity detrimental to human happiness. And yet Christian writers, like Josef Pieper, commonly declare that virtue is integral to human authenticity, that it is the very utmost best a person can be, the fulfillment of human potential, integral to a clear and accurate understanding of things, and that the virtuous naturally and most assuredly exude truth, goodness, and beauty in their persons and the lives they live. This most certainly must give us pause, particularly as we readily discern the salubrious effect that the Christian understanding of virtue would have upon the practice of our vocations. This post explores this vision of virtue, how it is realized in our lives, and the impact that this has both upon our vocations and the exalted purposes to which our work is directed.

Let’s begin with the fact that virtue, its importance, and the impact that it has upon our vocations are poorly understood today. Although people generally understand that virtue designates excellence associated with our moral activities, this in itself does not attract people to take up the challenge. The reason for this is that they often consider that the price to be paid is too high, that virtue is achieved only through the limitation of human freedom, the restricting of one’s creativity, and the elimination of spontaneity from one’s life. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Consider, first, what our Christian heritage has to say about virtue. The story that it tells begins with the conviction that virtue is integral to human authenticity. The practice and acquisition of virtue is the very best life that a person can live and is, in fact, integral to the fulfillment of human potential. It is, moreover, essential to a clear and accurate understanding of the world that we face daily. Virtue, therefore, is not something restricted to the concerns of morality. Those who pursue and practice virtue are found to exude truth, goodness, and beauty in their persons and the lives they live. The practice of virtue is a most welcome gift to the world, conducing most assuredly to its fullness and right governance.

“The virtuous person is a person of character, a whole person, a fully realized person. Virtue...is the health, strength, and excellence of a soul in communion with reality. It is virtue more than anything else that fills a person with a sense of himself, his vitality, his purpose, and his happiness.” (Donald DeMarco, The Heart of Virtue, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, p. 17)

Why, then, is there such a great difference between the common vision of virtue and that put forth by our Christian tradition? It comes down to three things:

1) The common vision of virtue is something that is radically incomplete, a fact that is clear not only to those who come from the Christian tradition but also from outside of it, particularly the great philosophers of ancient, pre-Christian times: philosophers like Aristotle, Plato and Socrates all of whom wrote extensively, passionately, and brilliantly upon virtue and its importance to human culture.

2) An understanding of virtue is something that is directly influenced by our understanding of what it is to be a human being. The modern conception of our humanity is indeed markedly different from that of the Christian, a difference that immediately impacts how virtue is understood and evaluated. The Christian tradition sees the common vision of virtue as founded upon a defective or deficient view of humanity, one that is not up to the task of describing the human condition and what is required for its betterment.

3) An understanding of virtue is again something directly influenced by our understanding of the purpose of our humanity. The common vision holds that the purpose of our humanity is not something that can objectively be described, and that, as a result, human purpose and happiness are the subjective business of each individual: one man’s pleasure is another’s pain, one’s man’s treasure is another’s trash. In this view, the responsibility to decide one’s purpose and happiness and to bring them about becomes the project of one’s life. In so doing, we utilize whatever tools we have at our disposal to take control of the forces that up until this point had controlled our lives: “no fate but the one I make.” Transcendence, spirituality, the arts, and our faith are all secondary to the primacy of the making of our world.

The Christian vision, on the other hand, is one that is not entirely opposed to what has just been stated. It incorporates this desire to determine and bring about our destiny within a much larger vision of reality, our humanity, and its purpose. Thereby, it softens the extremes to which the common vision is inclined. In brief, the Christian begins with the fact that God is the Creator of all things, and that God is at the heart of the structures, operations, and intelligibility of reality. God is the one who brings order from chaos, understanding from incoherence, being from nothingness. The human person is a part of God’s creation, who in his nature includes both the material and immaterial aspects of reality. The human person is a microcosmos, or to use another image, is the horizon at which both the spiritual and the corporeal meet. The human person is thus subject to the principles governing material reality but not in a wholesale way. Unlike my dog, who is fully, completely, and perfectly a dog at every instant of its life, the human person is a work in progress, always open to further realizations of his humanity brought about through the life that he lives and the choices that he makes. If my dog could understand these matters, he would be quite envious that at the heart of the human person is both the capacity and the necessity to understand and to develop his humanity.

What an unusual creature the human person is!

We are not determined wholly and completely but instead find ourselves in many ways to be merely inclined, and in a few ways completely free to determine ourselves as we see fit. In this regard, being human is both a blessing and a curse, a blessing insofar as we are importantly released from the sheer determination of the principles that govern material reality. The curse consists, however, in the fact that having been so released, we have to figure out who and what we are, and what our purpose as a species is.

In the Christian tradition, we discover that our unique status within God’s Creation is predicated upon the fact that we are made to the image and likeness of God, that we have reason and free will, but also and most importantly are drawn into kinship with God, and are called to realize in our lives and our persons an imitation of the divine life. This is brought about not just through our faith, but also in our engagement with the arts and the sciences, seeing the world not as something to be conquered and subjected to a will guided by a utilitarian calculus, but rather as an opportunity to peer into the mind and heart of our Creator through investigating His handiwork. In doing this, we honor the beauty and integrity of His creation which extends to our proper use of it, adhering to all that is truly good and beautiful in our thought, moral activity, and productivity.

We can see that virtue is the means whereby we bring excellence to our actions, that we realize our nature, and that we achieve the purpose for which we exist. We also see that virtue is not restricted to the moral realm, but is applied to all areas of our humanity, specifically to the intellectual and productive areas of our lives. This means that there will be intellectual and productive virtues in addition to those well-known moral virtues like prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. It is in this light, that our Catholic tradition considers the human person to be an animal that can affect the good, the true, and the beautiful in and with his life, and as the human person advances in virtue, he becomes increasingly effective in bringing these about.

It should be clear that one does not simply become excellent. There is a training involved to acquire this excellence, something that every musician, sportsman, physician, lawyer, teacher, in short, every professional understands. Everyone knows that the first time you try to play the piano, you simply don’t do all that well. It is only through practice and repetition over an extended period that we can aspire to a certain musical training, formation or habit. Excellence builds upon these habits, fine-tuning them so that one might begin to realize this excellence in one’s performance but also in the very capacities involved in realizing this performance. This is something with which we are most familiar: habits of thought, of morality, and of productivity are all acquired slowly over time through practice and repetition.

St. Thomas has a succinct way of addressing this issue. He states that this excellence is brought about through right reason applied to our habits of thought, morality, and productivity. What does this mean?

First, a habit becomes excellent only to the degree that our intelligence has been rightly trained and that it becomes the guiding force of the shaping and the directing of our actions. We are very familiar with this point. For example, anyone can work with wood. Some of us can actually do this well through practice and repetition. However, only a few will do this with excellence, that is to say, in accordance with the art of carpentry and the aesthetic principles at its heart. There’s a reason we refer to some violinists as virtuosos (like Yehudi Menuhin) or virtuosas (like Hilary Hahn); they possess the virtue of playing the violin. In their respective performances, it is readily realized that they are certainly well beyond the habit of playing the violin that comes from practice and repetition. They have aspired to a fineness of performance wherein through their practice under the tutelage of masters, they have mastered the art and play beautifully out of it. Lastly, the beautiful mind of a logical thinker is something that is envied by many but of which they often despair of possessing as this excellence is seen as a gift from God, or that the one they envy has won the genetic lottery. This may be true, to a degree: there will always be prodigies like Mozart, those who effortlessly and without any apparent practice manifest their talents to an amazed crowd. These, however, are the exception. Most of us are like Beethoven who struggled over every aspect of his art, seeking ever to bring the very best of composition to bear upon his own native talent and energies, and through the application of his life to his craft, succeeded brilliantly. The production of a beautiful mind through acquiring the virtues of right reason is something within the grasp of most people as the mind’s natural operations are identified and then ordered by the logical methods that are essential to our investigations of reality. The hope that we have in acquiring the virtue of right reasoning and ultimately of a beautiful mind, then, is founded upon the same basis wherein we hope to acquire the virtue of playing football, or playing the violin, or any of the virtues of the intellectual, moral, and productive life. Excellence is ours to enjoy if we but apply ourselves dedicatedly, lovingly, and intelligently upon our work.

Now one can begin to see that the views expressed earlier concerning virtue as limiting human freedom, creativity, and spontaneity, are pretty much off the mark. The boundless energies and capacities that arise from our humanity are not crushed by virtue. Rather, they are developed and perfected and put to the service of the good for our humanity and the purpose to which we are directed. Left undisciplined or untrained, these boundless energies threaten simply to gush out upon the landscape of our lives and thereby lose their power as they dissipate upon the horizon that we are. These torrents need banks, so to speak, if these waters are to be guided and rendered most effective. The virtues of our Catholic tradition are these banks that discipline and channel our capacities, perfecting and uniting them in the playing out of our lives and vocations. Such a life is far from the limitation of freedom that some fear. In fact, the true and ultimate freedom experienced by the violinists mentioned earlier is in becoming so habituated to their art and their instrument that they realize one of the great and admirable marks of virtue, namely that capacity to perform effortlessly, having mastered their art, their instrument, and the pieces that they play, suggesting in the unity that results the beauty and fineness of the piece itself, the art from which it springs, and that to which both the music and the art point, namely the source of all beauty and fineness. Virtuosic performance, excellence in the crafts, a well-argued defense, a judge’s prudent and fine balancing of competing goods in his decision, a beautiful mind displayed in close debate, all point wondrously to the art and to those things for which they exist, as well as to the one from which the activity flows, and who has been caught up in these things incarnating them in his life, marked by their excellence.

So, in the course of these displays of virtue, a certain height has been attained in the performance of our humanity, and a certain beauty has been unveiled, opening to us, however briefly, a window into what is truly ours as human beings, namely a communion with what is good, true, and beautiful and the incarnating of these in the lives we lead. In the experience of this, we are reminded of the nobility that we are, the calling to which we are beckoned, and the joy and peace that come with these. It has often been said that all great music reminds us of what it is to be human. By extension, virtue in its dynamic realization displays the fullness and the dignity of our persons and reveals to us what it is to be truly, beautifully, human.