For most westerners, “politics” is just the stuff that happens in DC, London, Paris, and other capitals. Local politics is merely a smaller and less important derivative of what really matters, that which is happening in the capitals. But what is the point of politics? Why do we sacrifice so many hours to learn and discuss what is happening thousands of miles away from us in these cities? Why is it so important?
President Joe Biden gave his answer to this question back in November: “The purpose of our politics, the work of the nation, isn’t to fan the flames of conflict, but solve problems. To guarantee justice. To give everybody a fair shot. And to improve the lives of our people.” The end (ie. the goal) of politics, for Mr. Biden, is to cease violence, to aid the material life of citizens, to allow people to achieve the liberal dream.
I want to offer a different answer. Following St. Thomas Aquinas, I want to claim that, “The end of politics is to live according to virtue.” [1] But instead of arguing that virtue is indeed the end of politics—which will be done in another essay—we must first ask, what are virtues, why are they important, how do we acquire them, and what do the liberals think they are?
What are Virtues? [2]
Virtues are good moral habits, but they aren’t habits as we think of them today. Habits are usually thought of as inclinations to act in the same way, acquired by repetition of the same actions, resulting in regular behavior. Brushing my teeth before bed is one such habit: I hardly think about it, I just grab the brush, squeeze the tube, and start scrubbing. My mom had me do this over and over as a child—now the action is ingrained in me. For others, sitting at their laptop and opening YouTube or Netflix is a habit—an almost unconscious reflex. Virtues, unlike habits, do not render us like Pavlov’s dogs. If we were merely habituated toward doing materially good actions, like sharing with our siblings or driving slowly in a neighborhood, then the virtues would hardly be a cause of moral perfection; of a move from the law of the Old Testament to the grace of the New. The dynamism of the Christian life could not be accounted for. There must be room within our understanding of the virtues for further reflection before mere habitual acting. A man conditioned by tasers to be kind to his mother might have an ingrained habit, but we would not call this habit a virtue, nor his mother’s use of tasers a Christian education. Virtues can’t just be automatic habits because such actions do not merit eternal life nor do they produce a person who is free.
To make this objection simpler, consider this example: the brave man is not the one that charges headlong into a battle whenever he gets the chance. In some situations that could describe a fool, not a courageous soldier. The idea of doing a good action out of habit lessens the moral character of the action itself. If the virtues were mere habits, the virtuous man would appear to be so perfectly regulated, so profoundly automatized that he would appear almost robotic. His freedom would actually have become useless to him. This obviously strikes us as far from moral perfection; it is mechanistic, not human. It describes a well-trained dog, not a human to whom St. Paul says, “For freedom Christ has set us free” (Gal 5:1).
Virtues are not habits; they are constant dispositions (what St. Thomas confusingly called habitus in the Latin) toward doing good things with great pleasure. To make this idea easier, consider a chess player and say that chessitus [3] is the virtue of being very good at chess. The superior chess player is not the one who repeats the same moves over and over but, through practice, skill, and free ingenuity, the one who invents new moves to outdo his opponent. His mind is fully engaged but he is not necessarily thinking through the next move: he just knows what to do. That is what real moral virtue is like: it is a mix of practice, disposition, and freedom. Should the man fight his enemy with fortitude or restrain himself with temperance? He is not necessarily the first one into the line of fire but the prudent judge of his enemy and the situation. As St. Thomas says, “The rational powers, which are proper to man, are not determinate to one particular action, but are inclined indifferently to many: and they are determinate to acts by means of habitus.”
In his creative freedom, the virtuous soldier knows what to do based upon his cultivated disposition, not his uncomprehending pavlovian response trigger. Jason Bourne (before he lost his memory) and the Winter Soldier (before he regained his) demonstrate that the more programmed we are, the less human we are—and clearly the less virtuous. Cultivating the virtues leads a person to create and invent good works. The more virtue we cultivate in our society, the more diverse everyone’s actions will become. Engendered by his own unique will and intellect, the virtuous person will be less conformist and more ingenious. Think of St. Francis or St. Benedict or St. Ignatius—each lived such different lives from one another—all because they had cultivated great virtue. Or even consider the story of St. Jane Frances, which may at first seem mundane. Monsignor Bougaud’s hagiography of her recorded: “For thirty years she had had the good fortune to receive Holy Communion every morning, without this holy action never ceasing to be a new experience for her each time. It never became a mere habit for her.” [4] The virtuous person is profoundly creative, even if repeating the same thing; they experience everything anew with great wonder and pleasure, which itself breeds spiritual renewal. It is thus in his capacity to invent perfect novel actions, born from the marriage of his redeemed intellect and will, that man shows himself to be the image of God the Creator. Ultimately, the dispositions become so ingrained in us that the marriage between the intellect and the will is fully restored and we begin to comprehend the world as God Himself does.
Just because the virtues demand that man’s intellect is fully awaken does not mean that he is logically thinking through things all the time. It seems clear that the person who is confused and has to think through a problem has some growing in virtue to do. Thomas, speaking of moral conduct, says that moral first means, “in the sense of a natural or quasi-natural inclination to do some particular action. And the other meaning of “mos,” i.e. “custom,” is akin to this: because custom becomes a second nature, and produces an inclination similar to a natural one.” This would not only be exhausting but also discouraging: we are to enter into God and so comprehend as he comprehends—to see what a thing actually is, to inherently know what must be done as ordered by love and to do it.
Why the Virtues?
St. Maximus the Confessor said that the virtues engrave God on our soul. Virtues are divine dispositions; they conform us more to the likeness of God. The more we develop them, the more we resemble Christ himself. Growing in the virtues is the way that we obey St. Paul, who commands: “clothe yourselves with the Lord Jesus Christ.” The virtues are our way to unite with Christ—who is Himself our way to Heaven. As St. Thomas said, “By living according to virtue, human beings are ordained to a further end, which lies in divine enjoyment.” [5] We are to become Christ through the sacraments and through the virtues and Christ is our way to Heaven.
At the moment of creation, we shared a great intimacy with God, being made in His image and likeness. At the moment of the Fall, that image was tarnished and our relationship with God distanced. But so was our relationship with one another. Friendships are based upon sharing things in common. The greatest thing we shared prior to the Fall was the image and likeness of God. Cultivating the virtues, through the help of divine grace in the Sacraments, is a return to the divine likeness we once lost—and likewise a return not only to a right relationship with God but also a right relationship with one another.
So to return to Thomas on politics: if the purpose of politics is to grow in virtue and the purpose of virtue is to get to Heaven, then politics is about helping one another get to Heaven. If God is real, and Christianity true, politics is a theological project, one that cannot work without the grace of the sacraments and the goodness of God. God set forth the charge for a perfect political order in Eden: Adam and Eve were to have free dominion over the land, as they also walked alongside God. After the Fall, God had to once again give us a law that would orient us toward living in right accord with Him and with one another. Now in the New Testament, the Age of Grace, as all scholastics called it, we are to internalize that law, have it written on our hearts, and assume the freedom of original innocence through the proper formation of virtue. Obviously, none of this is possible without grace. But from the point of view of our human participation in this divine plan of redemption, how are we to help others grow in virtue?
How Do We Get Virtuous?
St. Thomas says that, “The end of all legislation is that man love God.” [6] After all, everything we do is a mere footnote to our holiness, a proximate end to our true end, which is Heaven. Because human beings are free by nature, an education in virtue must be freely received. St. Thomas tells us that a totally voluntary action “proceeds from an internal principle along with knowledge.” [7] A person acts freely when he is wholly convinced of and understands well a concept that drives his action. Thus, no one can force another to be virtuous. By definition, such force is never freely received as an internal principle of action.
The truth of the matter is that the father cannot perfectly inculcate his son in virtue; he can lead and guide him through repetition, through preaching, instructing him in the principles of right action, the justifications for why he should act in a certain way. But ultimately, it is the son himself who must embrace the external principles and internalize them and so orient his will to perfection. Misunderstanding this profound reality often leads to abusive fathers: they apply such restrictions on their children that the child either rebels, for his will cries for freedom, or the pressure of constraint so injures and weakens his personality that he grows timid, hardly daring to express his will at all. The father’s external coercion has damaged the divine spark within the child, inhibiting his growth in virtue and thus his union with God. The son acts, not out of freedom, but out of a fear of his father. It renders the acquisition and development of true, interior virtue doubtful, because it has weakened the will, having treated him as an animal in training, not a person in formation.
Certainly there is a time for spanking and redirecting. St Thomas makes clear that the threat of external force often convinces one to reform his will. Take for example the child who does not want to come out of his room. If he comes out based upon the threat of a spanking, then, simply speaking, he acted voluntarily; only if he is dragged out does he maintain the integrity of his resolve to stay inside. Virtuous action is action for the right reasons. Coercion, by which people act for the wrong reason, that is, for self-preservation, can never on its own lead to virtue unless it is accompanied by teaching which helps to reform the will to seek goodness rather than to merely avoid pain.
Liberals do not share this same concern as Catholics do. Part of the reason they prefer the state over real solidarity is that they have a different conception of virtue than the Catholic tradition exposits. Thomas Hobbes, for example, thought that virtues did not correspond to any natural good, let alone a divine disposition of soul. Rather, he believed in manners, which are,
Those qualities of mankind that concern their living together in peace and unity… For there is no such Finis ultimus nor Summum Bonum as is spoken of in the books of the old moral philosophers… Felicity is a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another, the attaining of the former being still but the way to the latter. [8]
Because there is no transcendent good that we must achieve, our actions are not for anything. Our actions must be tempered for living life with others. As is commonly known, Hobbes believes that man in the state of nature is violent and depraved. It is only “fear [that] disposeth a man to anticipate or to seek aid by society” [9]—and once in that society, it is only fear that allows him to play nice with others: “The passions that incline men to peace are fear of death, desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living, and a hope by their industry to obtain them.” [10] In other words, the cause to act well is not based in the search for the good and the life of holiness, but rather in a self-centered fear. As a result, the threat of violence by the hand of the sovereign can operate as a way to get people to behave in particular ways:
I define civil law in this manner. Civil law is to every subject those rules which the commonwealth hath commanded him, by word, writing, or other sufficient sign of the will, to make use of for the distinction of right and wrong; that is to say, of what is contrary and what is not contrary to the rule. [11]
Again in Freud we find the same phenomenon: socialized behavior only comes through the threat of exclusion. As he put it, “Originally, renunciation of instinct was the result of fear of an external authority.” [12] While the desire for a good is strongest when it is untamed, there is a need to control oneself to be incorporated into society. Taming one’s natural inclinations, says Freud, lessens the amount of pleasure one feels from finding them met. Thus, in a real sense,
Virtue forfeits some part of its promised reward; the docile and continent ego does not enjoy the trust of its mentor, and strives in vain, it would seem, to acquire it. The objection will at once be made that these difficulties are superficial ones, and it will be said that a stricter and more vigilant conscience is precisely the hallmark of a moral man. [13]
Socialized behavior, what Freud calls “virtue,” has led one to surrender its true desires and cravings in order to flee the threat of violence. As he says again, the “virtuous continence is no longer rewarded with the assurance of love. A threatened external unhappiness—loss of love and punishment on the part of the external authority—has been exchanged for a permanent internal unhappiness, for the tension of the sense of guilt.” [14] Virtue is thus something that works against our nature. Our self-interest is the only instinct within us strong enough to motivate our actions. As a result, threat is the means by which to motivate a change in behavior, while the positive drive toward the good is not: “So long as virtue is not rewarded [materially] here on earth, ethics will, I fancy, preach in vain.” [15]
Thus, within these liberals we find a fundamental division between ethics and politics—a division that then inherently keeps true Christianity and its sacramental redemption of the world out of public consideration. [16]
The inculcation of virtue may begin with the temporal power correcting wanton actions—training the son, imprisoning the thief—but the person cannot be on the right path until hearing the preaching of the spiritual power. St. Thomas addresses this situation: “Now this kind of training, which compels through fear of punishment, is the discipline of laws. Therefore in order that man might have peace and virtue, it was necessary for laws to be framed.” [17] The temporal sword cannot be separated from the spiritual preaching. The purpose of law must be explained to those who break it. By no means does this imply that we are to have a complex apparatus of laws that merely need to be explained. Rather, the call to freedom means that laws must only be remedial teachings. As Thomas justifies:
Since some are found to be depraved, and prone to vice, and not easily amenable to words, it was necessary for such to be restrained from evil by force and fear, in order that, at least, they might desist from evil-doing, and leave others in peace, and that they themselves, by being habituated in this way, might be brought to do willingly what hitherto they did from fear, and thus become virtuous. [18]
“Willingly” is no light addendum. The convict cannot merely have his will broken; it must be redeemed. He must not be suppressed; he must be enlivened. Love cannot be habituated like a dog can be habituated to come to his bowl at the ringing of a bell. If virtue, and love most of all, is the end of politics, then law must lead to freedom and to understanding. In fact. St. Thomas says,
Now it is difficult to see how man could suffice for himself in the matter of this training: since the perfection of virtue consists chiefly in withdrawing man from undue pleasures, to which above all man is inclined, and especially the young, who are more capable of being trained. Consequently a man needs to receive this training from another, whereby to arrive at the perfection of virtue. And as to those young people who are inclined to acts of virtue, by their good natural disposition, or by custom, or rather by the gift of God, paternal training suffices, which is by admonitions. [19]
So what does St. Thomas say but that a father’s admonition is a law. It is preaching, exhortation toward the love of God. All of a sudden we see that this analogy of father:son to the law:citizen is no analogy at all: it is part of a real legal phenomenon. All training in the fulfillment of the law must come from another: from a person who inspires the other to love God and neighbor.
The father will certainly play a great role in his child’s formation, telling the son nearly every single action to make in his early years. But the father must slowly efface himself little by little—“he must be greater, I must be less”—up until the point when the child has acquired enough maturity to willingly seek the counsel of his father as he has fully assumed responsibility for his own moral formation. Thus St. Thomas’ conviction that “the law can be rightly changed on account of the changed condition of man, to whom different things are expedient according to the difference of his condition.” [20] But notice two things about this newfound autonomy. First, it is not a negation of hierarchy. The person on the path of virtue will always submit himself with docility to the wisdom of those above him. His maturity does not destroy real hierarchies, it is merely his ascent within them, as one who has taken responsibility for that which he is responsible. Second, the newfound autonomy does not lessen the relationship between father and son; it binds them closer together in friendship as they move closer and closer to the celestial gates. Virtue Politics, as we may so name this Christian conception of political teleology, demands the constant, free, and creative engagement, exhortation, and admonition of such friendships. The wider implications for the just construction of the law will be taken up by one greater than me, but the ends of politics cannot be usurped by the legal mechanism meant to be serving that end.
If virtue is the end of politics, then politics looks nothing like what we see in the modern era. It is smaller, personal, and requires faithful preaching.
The Path Ahead
The temptation is to say that the liberals are correct: people never change their ways. And they are correct: without the help of grace, that is. This is why our politics must be infused with the sacraments. They provide for us the essential help to be able to live a profoundly human life, a life modeled to us by Christ Himself. If virtue is indeed the goal, and getting to Heaven the prize, then our collective path toward that end is not based in fear. “Fear not”—Christ’s most frequent command. A politics of fear is a politics of vice. A politics of love is the only path forward into the light of our redemption.
Footnotes
[1] Thomas, De Regimine 1.15.6
[2] The argument in this section borrows that in Servais Pinckaers’ article, “Virtue is not a Habit” in Cross Currents 12.1 (1962): 65-81. The examples used herein are his.
[3] Would it actually be scaciludium?!
[4] Msgr. Bougaud, Histoire de Sainte Chantai, Paris, 1892, Vol. II, p.
[5] Thomas, De Regimine 1.15.7
[6] Sum. Cont. Gent. 3.116
[7] STh., I-II q.6 a.1 resp.
[8] Leviathan I.xi.11
[9] Leviathan I.xi.9
[10] Leviathan I.XIII.14
[11] Leviathan II.XXVI.3 Not all liberal theorists, however, operated by the threat of state power. Adam Smith, for instance, saw that economic stability could breed a type of non-violence in people. “It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker, that we expect our dinner, but from regard to their own interest,” Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations I.ii. Fit behavior for society is, again, not fixed by the ascent to the good but by the motivation of self-preservation. In this case, it is the desire for wealth that drives one to good behavior.
[12] Sigmund Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, trans. James Strachey (New York: W.W. Norton & Co, 1961), 89.
[13] Ibid, 87.
[14] Ibid, 89.
[15] Ibid, 109.
[16] The same is true if we consider the Pharisees. The law was given so that man’s “heart may not be lifted up above his brethren.” But Christ condemned the Pharisees for following the law for the sake of control and not for the sake of holiness: “Woe to you Pharisees!” says Christ, “You pay tithes of mint, rue, and every herb, but you disregard justice and the love of God. You should have practiced the latter without neglecting the former” (Lk 11:42). They ultimately did do the right thing but for a terrible incentive: for the sake of their own power and success. Josephus contends that the Pharisees learned the letter of the law so well in order to “have so great a power over the multitude, that when they say anything against the king or against the high priest, they are presently believed.” Antiquities, 13.10.4
[17] STh., I-II q.95 a.1 resp.
[18] STh., I-II q.95 a.1 resp.
[19] STh., I-II q.95 a.1 resp.
[20] STh., I-II q.97 a.1 resp.