In their official Christian vestments, that is, Hope and Faith were often unwelcome after 1848 in the salons and ateliers of European and especially Continental sophisticates. So still. Even the excellent Rosalind Hursthouse seems embarrassed by the Transcendent Two. Her exposition of virtue ethics in 1999 mentions in its index the virtue of Love 90 times under various headings: benevolence, charity, compassion, generosity, kindness, loyalty, friendship.[1] The last two, I’ve said, have perhaps an element of Faith in them. The virtue of Justice, the male philosophical obsession, she mentions 28 times. Temperance (and self-control) 18. Courage 24. Moral wisdom, that is, phronēsis, that is, Prudence, which underlies all the virtues, 26 times. The typically modern and bourgeois philosopher’s virtue of Honesty (= Justice with Faith and Courage) 22 times. That covers five of the classical seven, reproducing the secular pentad analyzed by Adam Smith and others in the Scottish Enlightenment.
But where are the other two, sacred Hope and Faith? Hursthouse ends her book with an appeal to “Keep hope alive.” Her only other mention of the two is a page attacking “piety” as irrational, not characteristically human, “based on a complete illusion” from an atheist’s point of view.[2] One wonders: is the physicist’s pious but entirely atheistic faith in the orderliness of nature, which Hursthouse elsewhere notes is essential for a scientific world view, therefore also irrational? Is science, then, “based on a complete illusion”? Hursthouse’s own project—of justifying the virtues piecemeal from within a cultural set of them—is likewise undercut. It depends on philosophical Faithfulness and Hopefulness that such a procedure makes some sense, which she herself says are not justifiable philosophically, a mere piety.
That is, we humans live on air. My suggestion to my good colleagues of the modern clerisy is that they get used to it. The most characteristic virtues of humans are not a Rationality or a Persistence that one can see plainly in ants and bacteria as well. They are Hope and Faith. So late in the age of Banishment, I wish that the advanced members of the clerisy would recover from being embarrassed by the most characteristically human virtues.
In his recent, elegant book, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues (1996; English ed. 2001), the French philosopher André Comte-Sponville, for example, explicitly rejects both Faith and Hope from a place among his eighteen virtues. The pagan tetrad of Prudence, Temperance, Courage, and Justice he acknowledges as cardinal, and these begin his book.
In the last chapter he deals also with Love, along lines similar to mine in fact—he draws heavily there as I do on Simone Weil, and elevates agape to primacy, though skirting uneasily its religious content. His attempts to distinguish love from Compassion, Mercy, and especially Generosity are not wholly persuasive. He quotes his master the philosopher of music at the Sorbonne (d. 1985), André Jankélévitch, as admitting that “though the two are not the same, love and generosity, ‘at its most exalted,’ are hard to separate one from the other.”[3] And so they are. Distinguishing true generosity from possibly self-interested indulgence of family and friends, the care of children, for example, depends in Jankélévitch and Conte-Sponville precisely on generosity being exercised “at its most exalted.” The logic of classification would seem to require therefore that generosity be viewed, as it is in Aquinas for example, as a subspecies of love.
But with the other two of the theological virtues, Faith and Hope, Comte-Sponville has no patience at all. He attempts to exclude incense-smelling Faith from his virtues entirely. One device is to call it instead “Fidelity,” with a prominent chapter of its own, with no mention that faith in the transcendent might possibly include faith in God. The device does not work very well, since it merely substitutes the one faith-word for another, both derived from fides by longer or shorter etymologies.
Comte-Sponville writes wisely that “where there is mind there is memory. . . . Fidelity is . . . memory itself as a virtue.”[4] He quotes Montaigne on fidelity as “the true basis of personal identity.” But in the very quotation Montaigne declares a “fidelity to the faith [foi] I swore to myself,” which seems a sound way to think about it. “The past,” Comte-Sponville writes, “is in need of our compassion and gratitude; for the past cannot stand up for itself.”[5] That too seems right. The towering dead are indeed owed some backward-looking faith, or else we are nobodies ourselves, disloyal pleasure-machines with no sacred identity. We are not worthy even of self-love, if we have not faith.
Fidelity, Comte-Sponville writes beautifully, is “an always particular presence within us of the past,” our father, dead, our grandmother, the three men with the same last name from a village in Southwestern France, whose dates on the wall of the parish church record them killed successively in the very first month, a middle month at the time of Verdun, and the very last month of the Great War.[6] We should preserve, Comte-Sponville puts it, “love for the sake of what once took place.”[7]
But all this is precisely faith, foi, fides. It’s too bad—too bad at least according to the faith of French anti-clericals—that it’s gotten mixed up with faith in God. But there you are. “Faith,” writes A. N. Wilson about the decline of the Godly version of it in the 19th century, “was not something which could be gradually eliminated from the human scene. It was a vital component of the human make-up—personal and collective.”[8]
The plainest exercise of anti-theism in Comte-Sponville is reserved for Hope. Having taken occasional jabs at it in the previous 287 pages he finally admits the reason for his distaste: “Faith, hope, and charity are traditionally the theological virtues (because they have God as an object). The first two I have not included in this treatise because they have no plausible object, it seems to me, other than God, in whom I do not believe.” But Comte-Sponville has included Faith, as fidelity. He continues, “Moreover, one can do without these two virtues: courage suffices in the presence of danger or the future.” One might think that the second, forward-looking part of courage, “in the future,” is precisely Hope. But he is determined not to let the word in. He thinks Hope is a fool’s “virtue,” suitable for the soft-minded who merely hope and pray when a tough, masculine, existentialist courage is what is called for.
He is not here reading Aquinas very carefully. Aquinas makes plain that courage is about fear (in the present) but hope is about imagination (about a future)—which analysis Comte-Sponville himself concedes during his chapter on Courage: “the future is . . . an object of our imagination.”[9] Précisément. The courage to face a present pain is one thing. It is akin to Temperance in its presentness. Courage resists pain now, Temperance pleasure now. The Hope to face imagined future pains for some imagined future purpose is distinct from these.
A woman can have a stoic Courage in the face of the pain of chemotherapy yet lack the Hope that makes it work. Physicians are finding that encouraging a lucid, realistic Hope is therapeutic. The mind and body are connected. Jerome Groopman of Harvard Medical School argues that “Hope. . . does not cast a veil over perception and thought. In this way, it is different from blind optimism: It brings reality into sharp focus.”[10] Hope is not about fooling ourselves—or at any rate no more about fooling ourselves, after innocence, than are any of the other virtues. Hope, though a religious virtue, is not necessarily about religion,.
Comte-Sponville is quite correct to note that “all the barbarities of this [20th] century were unleashed in the name of the future, from Hitler’s thousand-year Reich to Stalinism’s promise of brighter and better tomorrows.”[11] But such a remark contradicts his assertion that the only plausible object for Hope is God, and shows the illogic in his case against counting Hope among the great, if dangerous, virtues. La Révolution or Das Deutsche Volk were plainly objects of Hope. Yet they are equally plainly not God. That is one reason we need to keep Hope firmly in view, because when unbalanced by the other virtues it produces evil, such as revolutionary socialism or revolutionary fascism.
Comte-Sponville attacks Hope, then, as utopian, “the seductions of hope and the dangers of utopia.” One can certainly agree that damage has been done in the world by hopeful “utopic” theorists, as the 10th Federalist Paper skeptically put it. And the theorists did so especially after 1789. In the same way a hopeful religious utopianism did damage in Europe for a thousand years before 1789.[12] Such for example was Oliver Cromwell’s rejection in the 1650s of the faithful precedent of the rule of law in favor of a hopeful vision of a city set upon a hill, and his arbitrary rule. But Hope does damage precisely because it takes all the future as its imaginative object and its ethical end. When unbalanced it justifies any number of broken eggs to make the imagined omelet. Hope is one of the characteristically human virtues—and when alone and unbalanced it is one of the characteristically human vices, too. The barbarities of the 20th century were hopes granted. Be careful what you hope for.
Comte-Sponville declares that “faith and hope have left us; we live without them.”[13] I do not think so. He and you and I do not in fact live without faith and hope. No one does for long, not really, or else she goes off and hangs herself. Comte-Sponville confuses God with the numerous other possible objects of Hope and Faith, showing in particular the atheist’s stony inability to grasp that these other objects, in which he does believe, are psychologically the same as the God in which he proudly does not. Similarly in 1902 Bertrand Russell declared that a free man’s worship was to be erected on “the firm foundation of unyielding despair.”[14] One wonders why; but especially whether: Russell was miserable as a child, but as an adult gave few signs of despair, yielding or not.
In a similar Schopenhauerian vein, Romantically attractive now for nearly two centuries but still dubious, Comte-Sponville declares that politics is a matter of “will . . . not hope.”[15] I think not. Will and prudence act to balance and complete hope, as do faith and the other virtues. Politics, like the economy, is a field for the exercise of all the virtues together, and the vices. The will itself is a mixture of courage and temperance. The unsystematic and one-by-one conception Comte-Sponville has of the virtues shows up here. He does not see how virtues talk to each other.
Comte-Sponville in the end simply doesn’t want Hope and Faith in his book. But after all they are part of human life, and keep barging in. The reason they do so—and here is something to be learned from the French clerisy’s three-century old distaste for religion—is that Faith and Hope are the verbal virtues. They require the symbolism of words. The invention of language and with it metaphor and other art made theorizable an imagined past and an imagined future. “The peculiar power of the human mind,” wrote Stuart Hampshire, following his master Spinoza, “is the power to think about its own states and processes, and, by this reflective thinking, to modify them.”[16] The cave painters of Lascaux, or the earlier painters of rocks in Ubirr in northern Australia, to give the usual interpretation, made hopeful images of the animal bodies they hoped to kill and the animal spirits they kept faith with. We cannot be sure of the details of their hope and faith precisely because we lack their words.
The other virtues can flourish without speech, even in non-humans. Think of White Fang in the team, or finally at home in California, exhibiting canine Courage, Justice, Prudence, Love, and even perhaps Temperance, though I suppose that one is a little hard to see in a dog. Aristotle noted that “so in a number of animals we observe gentleness or fierceness, mildness or cross temper, courage, or timidity, fear or confidence, high spirit or low cunning, and, with regard to intelligence, something equivalent to sagacity.”[17]
But not Faith or Hope. We say a dog is faithful; and is hopeful for the bone. But in a dog these are reducible to solidarity with the pack and pleasure in the marrow. Is human faith or hope so reducible? Marx and Freud to the contrary, I think not. The aborigine’s Dreaming or the tales of the Great Spirit, the holy text, the Johnny Cash song, the language in our lives spin out and out. Humans can’t leave ideas alone.
“The animals do not live in the world,” sang Edwin Muir,
Are not in time and space
From birth to death hurled.
No word do they have, not one
To plant a foot upon,
Were never in any place.
For with names the world was called,
Out of the empty air,
With names was built and walled,
Line and circle and square. . . .[18]
Think of a human mother before language who Courageously overcomes her fear of bears and so with Prudence finds some berries close to the bear’s cave, which she shares Lovingly with her child, exercising Temperance in not gorging on them all herself, and then gives some to her child’s playmate, too, in Justice. Yet without a language in which to symbolize the transcendent she cannot be said to exercise Faith in the historical identity of her Clan of the Cave Bear, or Hope for an afterlife in the sky. And she can’t pass on her faiths and hopes. Perhaps this is why recognizably modern customs of burial and art appear rather suddenly together, after 50,000 BC, worldwide, when language appears to have spread rather suddenly out of Mother Africa, worldwide.
The heroine of the David Lodge novel Thinks . . . (2001) faces a conference of confidently positivist and behaviorist brain scientists. She gently notes to them the literary axiom they may perhaps have overlooked, “that human consciousness is uniquely capable of imagining that which is not physically present to the senses,” instancing Marvell:[19]
The mind, that ocean where each kind
Does straight its own resemblance find;
Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds and other seas,
Annihilating all that’s made
To a green thought in a green shade.
There could be no religion without language. That is clear enough. What is not clear is the outcome of our two- or three-century old experiment in language without religion. Perhaps the two are inseparable. I think; therefore I believe.
* * * *
From the aborigines of the songlines and the cave painters of Lascaux to the plastic present, then, people have not lived without the transcendent. We are unique in this. Or at least so we imagine, lacking access to the spiritual world of whales and gorillas.
“If [faith] was not directed towards the true God,” A. N. Wilson points out, noting the logic of the First Commandment, “it would be directed towards idols.”[20] And therefore the modern Westerners rejecting God found other gods, in Will or Despair or History or Spiritualism or Science or the Environment. Giuseppe Mazzini had declared in 1835 that “the republican party is not a political party; it is essentially a religious party,” and he declared again in 1848 that Young Italy “was not a sect but a religion of patriotism. Sects may die under violence; religions may not.”[21] In the same revolutionary year he wrote: “Young men of Italy, it is time that you should comprehend how grand, how holy and religious is the mission confided to you by God.”[22] By the end of the century Puccini’s Tosca, who “lived for art, lived for love,” and her lover Caravadossi, similarly motivated—and somewhat accidentally a nationalist revolutionary, too—explore the limits of these substitute religions among the Italians.
The Age of Substitution begins among a handful of advanced European souls as early as 1700, is widespread among them in 1800, is a passion among a wider clerisy after 1848, and takes hold among the newly educated masses after 1880 and especially after 1968. Interestingly, Japan embarked on the first part of this history a little earlier. In the late 17th century it had its own secular phase, in a Japanese version of the Enlightenment, against Buddhism. And in the mid-18th century, somewhat in advance of similar Romantic nationalisms in Europe, some Japanese substituted National Learning for a China-worshipping and classicizing Confucianism.[23]
In Europe for about two centuries now a secular religion of Beauty has been fashioned out of one or another Art. Wagner’s remark that “I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven” is not merely a secular witticism. It is a serious invitation to beatitude through Art, a faith reaching its height in the early 20th century. It persists. Lucy bothers Schoeder over his piano with an earnest question: “I’m looking for the answer to life, Schoeder. What do you think is the answer?” Next panel, he replies with screaming capitals: “BEETHOVEN!” Next panel, more screaming: “Beethoven is it, clear and simple!! Do you understand?!” The fourth panel fills with notes from a piano piece, presumably by Beethoven, and Lucy’s subdued “Good grief!”[24]
And it is new. The musicians in Mozart’s time, or the painters in Vermeer’s, or the poets and playwrights in Shakespeare’s, had viewed themselves as crafts- and business-people, not as secular saints. All those craftspeople, further, were, most of them, believing Christians, if only because believing in Christianity was not viewed as optional. They did not need Art, capital A, or screaming block capitals, because they already had a transcendent, called God, capital G.
The shift comes with radicalism and Romance. Consider, for example, the modern public art museum, which begins in 1793 with the opening of the Louvre to all citizens. The Vatican had started occasional public exhibitions in 1773. But the Louvre was an aggressively populist project, a project transferred by the Bonaparte brothers to the Accademia of Venice in 1807 and to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in 1808.[25] The museum was transformed in a revolutionary age from a plaything for aristocrats into a democratic temple to Beauty, replacing God. In the early 20th century the museum came to be devoted to the admiring of Genius and in the late 20th century to the anticipation of Shock. But anyway “devoted.”
That is, museums since the late 18th century have been temples for the worship of some God-replacing transcendent. One is quiet in them, contemplative, worshipful, impressed by the presence of The Sacred. One carries home trinkets from the museum gift shop like crucifixes from the shops around St. Peter’s. “As people desert the churches to fill the galleries,” writes Nathalie Heinich, “art is no longer an instrument, but instead an object of sacralization. . . . Widely circulated reproductions are but substitutes . . . in those places where the ordinary person can experience the presence of the originals, preserved as relics.”[26] Indeed the literal churches of Christianity have been turned into museums, especially in Italy. The skeptical tourists swoon before Christian frescoes. How odd / Of God / To be crazy / About Veronese. But not so crazy / As those enticed / By Christian Veronese / Who spurn the Christ.
Charles Hutchinson, one of Chicago’s pork kings, and Martin Ryerson, a lumber baron, made the Art Institute in the 1890s a democratic cathedral of culture. The bourgeois Chicagoans acquired European paintings by the square yard—for example El Greco’s Assumption of the Virgin, urged on the Paris agent of the Institute by Mary Cassatt. Hutchinson replied, “We have made our money in pigs, but is that any reason why we should not spend it on paintings?” Hutchinson in fact spent fully half his large annual income from meatpacking on civic projects, such as the Art Institute, and on Jane Addams’ Hull House.
Addams herself is sometimes said to have used Art to raise the immigrant poor of Halstead Street. That was a typically Progressive project, the bourgeoisie bending down to impart bourgeois values to the poor. In truth Addams was skeptical of the notion favored at Toynbee Hall in London (1884-) that Art was elevating. But a mile away from Hull House and far up the social scale Hutchinson certainly did have in mind civilizing the millionaires of Prairie Avenue with the Art Institute.[27] Neither project in the short run would achieve its end, since art is not so powerful in the short run. But the point is that they tried, viewing Art as their god.
It is hardly surprising nowadays to find art museums very common in, say, the progressive Netherlands. Bookstores in the sophisticated neighborhoods of Rotterdam or Amsterdam or Gouda shelve their many books of poetry next to their few books on God. Until the 1960s half of the titles issued by Dutch publishers were religious. No longer. But the old stock of cultural capital, formerly religious, is re-appropriated now for non-religious ends of a secular and yet still transcendent Faith and Hope.
The Noordekerk was the first church built in Amsterdam for specifically Protestant worship.It is still used sometimes as a church in the sober fashion of the North Hollanders.But mainly it is now a meeting hall to celebrate secular faith and hope.On the day of remembrance for the Amsterdam Jews, at 8:00 p.m. exactly, a little band outside the Noordekerk in the yuppified neighborhood of Amsterdam’s Jordaan plays a few songs, the hymns so to speak for the largely gentile congregation, and then god’s service moves inside for communion with transcendent Faith and Hope, the reading of secular poems and the playing of classical music.
The text above is an excerpt from The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce, the first volume of Deirdre McCloskey’s trilogy on the ethical and historical origins of modern prosperity.
[1] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, index. I am counting multiple pages at their total: thus “benevolence, Humean, 99-102” countis as four pages in the sum
[2] Hursthouse, Virtue Ethics, 1999, p. 232f; compare 218: “But what could this fifth end be?”
[3] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 92.
[4] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, pp. 17, 19.
[5] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 21.
[6] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 25.
[7] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 28.
[8] E. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 59.
[9] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 53, italics supplied.
[10] Quoted from Groopman, Anatomy of Hope, 2003, in Publisher’s Weekly, itself quoted at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0375506381/002-8162323-5258406?v=glance.
[11] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 26.
[12] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 295n20.
[13] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 288.
[14] Russell, “A Free Man’s Worship,” 1903 (1957), p 106.
[15] Comte-Sponville, On the Virtues, 1996, p. 295n20.
[16] Hampshire, “Postscript,” 1982, in Hampshire, Thought and Action, 1959, p. 283.
[17] Aristotle, History of Animals, Bk. VIII, Part 1.
[18] Muir, “The Animals,” 1956.
[19] Lodge, Thinks. . ., 2001, p. 318.
[20] E. N. Wilson, God’s Funeral, 1999, p. 59.
[21] Mazzini in Ganulee, ed., Selected Writings, pp. 106, 103.
[22] Mazzini in Ganulee, ed., Selected Writings, p. 105.
[23] Collins 1998, pp. 349, 361-364, 369-70, 378
[24] Classic Peanuts, Chicago Tribune March 24, 2005.
[25] Johnson, Birth of the Modern, 1991, p. 600f.
[26] Heinich, Glory of Van Gogh, 1991 (1996), p. 148.
[27] Donald Miller, City of the Century, 1996, pp. 387-391, 422.