A to Z with C.S. Lewis: V is for Virtue

It is a sad thing that our modern world has redefined virtue in negative terms.  Rather than define a virtuous man as someone who actively practices the positive virtues of prudence, courage, justice, and temperance, we turn things on their head and celebrate the goodness of those who don’t succumb to folly, don’t betray an excessive amount of cowardice, don’t violate anyone’s rights, and don’t drink or smoke.

Such is the case with the four classical virtues, but it is even more so with the three theological ones.  We celebrate those who stay true to the course, who press on, who don’t give up, not those who have put their faith in an unseen Creator and their hope in his promises.  Even when we do praise faith and hope, it is generally a vague, non-creedal faith in humanity or fate or the universe and a hazy, content-less hope in, well, something or other.

As for love, Lewis was fond of critiquing his age for replacing the positive love (caritas, agape) of the Bible with a negative form of unselfishness.  Although the highest pagans (Aristotle) and the great Christian ethicists (Aquinas) taught that virtue is a habit gained by practicing virtuous actions, we of a more “enlightened” age have embraced a distinctly “hands off” ethos.

Rather than actively love our neighbor, we unselfishly allow him to live whatever way he wants to, even if his life choices are self-destructive.  Had Lewis lived today, I think he would have said that the reigning virtue is not unselfishness but tolerance—a pseudo-virtue that also manifests itself, not in active charity, but in a negative acquiescence to the “rights” of others.

In Screwtape Letters (#26), junior tempter Wormwood is counseled by his more experienced uncle to teach his human patient “to surrender benefits not that others may be happy in having them but that he may be unselfish in forgoing them.”   Though this strategy of replacing love with unselfishness may look the same on the outside, it has a very different effect on the soul of the one surrendering the benefits.  Far from moving out of himself toward the other (which is what love calls us to do), the practitioner of the negative virtue of unselfishness uses the other person as a way of bolstering his own sense of piety and self-righteousness.

Actually, if truth be told, love and unselfishness are also received in a radically different way by the object of the proffered charity.  In the former case, the recipient is assured that another human being cares deeply about him; in the latter, he feel manipulated and used.

G. K. Chesterton once defined a humanitarian as someone who loves humanity but hates human beings.  The person who is on the receiving end of unselfishness knows instinctively, to paraphrase a line from Letter 26, that he is being treated as a sort of lay figure upon which the would-be humanitarian exercises his petty, self-centered altruisms.

When the virtues are enacted in a positive, healthy spirit, they draw us closer to God and our neighbor.  But when they are turned back upon themselves as a method for bolstering our ego and self esteem, they ensnare and isolate us.  The false humanitarian ends up feeling contempt for his fellow man because he cannot move outside his own desperate need to feel good about himself.  But the virtuous man who practices true love comes to truly love the people he serves.