“This is not the golden age of virtue.” So opens Professor J. Budziszewski’s “Vicious Circles, Virtuous Circles, and Getting from One to the Other,” one of the afternoon lectures at the Summons of Freedom Conference.
Budziszewski is interested in decline, and that of two sorts: personal moral decline, and (the related, but not necessarily attendant) social decline. He considers several ways of describing the process of change before settling on the intractable problem of circles. Parents fail to raise their children to be virtuous, those children (not knowing how to be virtuous) do the same, and the perpetual cycle continues. Budziszewski examines the nature of the virtues and their interdependence to more precisely understand this process.
Of course, it was precisely on the question of how we escape vicious circles–socially and personally–and become virtuous that Budziszewski declined to give an answer, musing instead that outside of special grace the process of moral and social change didn’t seem possible. But Budziszewski’s presentation critiqued those strategies that attempt to solve this dilemma through utilizing bad motives to keep worse ones down.
Consider, for instance, the classical notion of the pursuit of glory. Budziszewski pointed out that it had been deployed to motivate people to seek a higher and more virtuous way of life. Closer to our own time, Adam Smith might be said to foster a love of gain, and to subordinate and utilize morality to that end.
But such strategies of using glory, or gain, as motivations toward virtue have multiple problems: for one, they are incomplete insofar as they are not able to account for what merits glory. More importantly, as Augustine points out, by using these bad motives we eventually destroy the vestiges of virtue that we attempted to preserve. While they may offer a sense of stability or permanence, they are not structurally sound. As Budziszewski puts it, if you use dragons to keep wolves under control, you eventually have to reward the dragons. And eventually they get so large that they do what they want.
Budziszewski’s warning is worth bearing in mind. Insofar as the social order is not founded on the transformative grace of Jesus Christ—and hence has the perfection of virtue–it is faulty. And the virtuous circles that we attempt to build will inevitably be proximate.
November 15th, 2009 | 9:38 pm
Thanks for this helpful summation.
November 15th, 2009 | 10:58 pm
Have you ever considered that the teachings of the Church itself have contributed to the current obvious decline in virtue.
First we are taught that we are inherently fallen or sinful and therefore incapable of being consistently virtuous. The “devil” or “satan” made me do it!
Secondly, the process involved in the Confession.
No one is ever expected or asked or told to never ever do or commit whatever sin or collection of sins that they have confessed to.
All that is expected is that the sinner say a few Hail Marys and everything will be forgiven. There is thus no demand to be straight, to change ones actions and never ever do that again.
The “devil” and “satan” again.
The doctrine that we inherently separate from The Divine, which in effect cripples the being at the feeling-heart or the moral core of our being.
Why?
Because the only source of virtue is via ones Heart-felt connection to the Indivisible Unity of Existence.
The moment one dissociated from that Indivisible Unity of Being one instantly becomes double-minded and therefore full of yes-no conflicts.
And except in the case of rare Saints the negative or no half of the yes-no pair always overwhelms the yes side.This is true of both the individual and the collective.
On the collective scale we are now witnessing the inevitable loss of individual and collective virtue CAUSED by the above doctrines.
November 16th, 2009 | 7:51 am
Sue:
The Church actually teaches that we are inherently good–else how do we say we are created in God’s image? However, our inherent goodness is compromised by original sin, the inherited wound that we receive. This is the source of the inner turmoil you so poignantly describe. We are by nature attracted to the good, but also inclined to the bad.
Sin, then, is unnatural to human beings. We are attracted to the good because our nature was created for union with God, the all-good. You experience this, else you would not read First Things and you would not submit the comments you did. I would suggest reading Christopher West’s “Theology of the Body for Beginners”. Attend especially to the passages on “original man”, mankind before the fall. It lifts us out of our present experience of being entangled in a web of sin, to glimpse who we really are as emerging from God’s creative hand.
But we do violate our nature–we do sin. Sin seems to be inevitable. Yet we know that for each and every instance of our own sins, there was a choice we made that we could have made instead for virtue. Therefore, if honest with ourselves we know that the call to overcome sin is a radical possibility. We just lose heart because the task, while possible, is so very, very long and difficult. This is why despair, the temptation to which I hear in your cry of the heart, is such an insidious sin against the virtue of Hope.
We have Hope because a merciful God has given us Himself, in part in the sacraments of His Church. And so, in throwing ourselves on His mercy, we ask for His help in our daunting task of turning from sin. Receiving Jesus in the Eucharist and confessing our sins regularly are very great helps to the process.
The great encyclical letter of Benedict XVI, “Saved in Hope” (“Spe Salvi”) lays this out in loving detail.
You have a very fundamental misunderstanding of the contrition needed for the Sacrament of Reconciliation–confession. It is absolutely untrue that we are “never asked to…never do…that particular sin again.” Check it out in the Catechism of the Catholic Church. It is a condition of repentance to have a “firm purpose of amendment.” You have recognized the common-sense understanding that if one is “sorry” but has no plan for avoiding sin, the repentance is fatally flawed. Believe me, Church teaching also recognizes this. In the act of contrition which concludes the penitent’s part of the sacrament includes this passage: “I firmly resolve, WITH THE HELP OF YOUR GRACE, [my emphasis] to confess my sins, do penance, and amend my life.”
We humans often “shoot the messenger” when the news is not what we want to hear. They killed Jesus for revealing the truth of who we are and what we must do to be saved. They also departed in droves when he preached “hard sayings”, as in John 6. Will we also leave? My response, with Peter, is “To whom would we go? You have the words of eternal life!” Today, the Church, the Body of Christ, is killed and abandoned for all the same reasons. Please, don’t be party to this!
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