Nihil aliud scio nisi fluxa et caduca spernenda esse, certa et aeterna requirenda.
[Nothing else I know except that things perishing and transitory should be spurned and things certain and eternal should be sought.]
St. Augustine, Soliquia c. 386 AD, Bk. 5, Para. 5
The theological virtues are above the nature of man, whereas the intellectual and moral virtues belong to the nature of man. . . . Therefore the theological virtues should be distinguished . . . . The intellectual and moral virtues perfect the human intellect and appetite in proportion to human nature, but the theological virtues do so supernaturally.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia IIae., q. 62, art. 2.
The theological virtues are above the nature of man, whereas the intellectual and moral virtues belong to the nature of man. . . . Therefore the theological virtues should be distinguished . . . . The intellectual and moral virtues perfect the human intellect and appetite in proportion to human nature, but the theological virtues do so supernaturally.
Aquinas, Summa Theologiae Ia IIae., q. 62, art. 2.
To speak then of the profane world, the self-regarding virtues are Prudence, Temperance, and sometimes Courage—since the courage sometimes is directed to self-preservation. And the other-regarding virtues are Love, Justice, and sometimes Courage, the courage sometimes being on the behalf of others. Let’s be quantitative about it. The individual and the social virtues are by this reckoning 2 ½ + 2 ½ = 5. To do the sum the other way, they are the pagan 4 of Courage, Temperance, Justice, and Prudence, with the Christian virtue of Love added to them, reaching up to the transcendent, making 5.
Something’s missing. In the analysis of Aquinas and of other Western ethical thinking before Kant, and now sometimes in the revival of virtue ethics, there are seven: 5 + 2 = 7, the pagan four plus that Christian virtue of Love, eros, philia, agape. . . and two more: Faith and Hope, virtues six and seven. They complete the traditional ethical psychology of humans. Hope and faith are the other transcendent. “They have God not only for their end, but for their object”:[1]
The Three Theological Virtues
HOPE: Martin Luther King
FAITH: St. Peter
LOVE: Emma Goldman
In spiritual terms Faith, as St. Paul said in part, is “the argument for things not seen” (Heb. 11:1). St. Thomas Aquinas wrote a hymn defining Faith:
Quod non capis, quod non vides, What you do not grasp, not see,
Animosa firmat fides A lively faith affirms,
Praeter rerum ordinem. Beyond the order of [material] things.[2]
Even to look at nature one must affirm an order beyond the mere things. Facts without precepts are blind, a blooming, buzzing confusion. “No argument,” the political philosopher J. Budziszewski notes, “can be so completely drawn as to eliminate its dependence, conscious or unconscious, on undemonstrable first premises.”[3]
The discovery in the 19th century of non-Euclidian geometries and in the 20th of undecidable propositions should have taught the most scientific among us that faith grounds observation. The mathematicians Philip Davis and Reuben Hersh note that “underlying both mathematics and religion there must be a foundation of faith which the individual must himself supply.” Mathematicians, they observe, are practicing Neo-Platonists and followers of Spinoza. Their worship of mathematics parallels the worship of God. Both God and the Pythagorean Theorem, for example, are believed to exist independent of the physical world; and both give it meaning.[4] Faith in what Aquinas called the “eternal” law is nonetheless a faith. Admittedly the faith of the Christian has more. It comes from the grace of God.[5] But who is to say that scientific faith is not also God’s grace in action?
The physicist Stephen Barr puts it this way: “Even the atheist. . . asks questions about reality in the expectation that these questions will have answers . . . . It is not because he already has the answers. . . . [I]f he [did]. . . he would not be seeking them. Yet he has the conviction. . . . This is a faith.”[6] And a great faithman, Thomas Merton, once wrote that “Faith is first of all an intellectual assent.”
But the assent of faith is not based on the intrinsic evidence of a visible object. . . . The statements which demand the assent of faith are simply neutral to reason. . . . Faith brings together the known and the unknown so that they overlap: or rather, so that we are aware of their overlap. . . . The function of faith is not to reduce mystery to rational clarity, but to integrate the unknown and the known together into a living whole.[7]
Faith is not an attack on Science or a turn to superstition. Like the assent to the enterprise of Science as a whole, as against particular scientific propositions embedded in the enterprise, it is not based on the visible. Physicists affirm that ”God is a mathematician” or “God does not play dice.” Such faiths are not against rationality, but complete it.
The faith, in other words, need not be faith in God. Many secular folk believe in a transcendent without God, though approaching Him. “I think all poets are sending religious messages,” declared Richard Wilbur, “because poetry is, in such great part, the comparison of one thing to another; or the saying, as in metaphor, that one thing is another. And to insist, as all poets do, that all things are related to each other, comparable to each other, is to go toward making an assertion of the unity of all things.”[8]
But why then is faith a virtue? Why isn’t it sheer epistemology, a matter of how we Know, though concerning things not seen, such as a faith in the orderliness of the universe or in the power of reason or in a God of love? Because, C. S. Lewis explains, faith is a kind of spiritual courage, a willed steadfastness against the times when “a mere mood rises up against it.” Faithfulness is necessary for epistemology, “thinking with the giving of assent,” as Augustine put it. “Belief” in Germanic origin is cognate with “beloved,” from Indo-European *leubh-, whence “love.” It connoted faithfulness, and only later acquired the meaning of giving credence to a proposition. A physicist who was, as Lewis says, “just a creature dithering to and fro” about whether in designing the universe God, figuratively speaking, is a mathematician would be a poor physicist. An historian who has nothing of “the art of holding on to things [her] reason has once accepted, in spite of [her] changing moods” is going to dither to and fro about whether or not history is caused (figuratively speaking) by the class struggle or by a horseshoe nail. She will not really have tested the class struggle or the horseshoe nail. As a historical scientist she will not be wholly virtuous, because as Lewis observes, she will change her mind unreasonably.[9]
Faith is a backward-looking virtue. It concerns who we are; or, rather, italicized, who we are, “the mystic chords of memory.” In personal and modern terms it is called “integrity” or “identity.” “If we create a society that our descendants will want to hold on to,” writes Kwame Anthony Appiah, “our personal and political values will survive in them.”[10] The faith needs to be instilled, “because children do not begin with values of their own.” Though Appiah does not attach his notion of “identity” to religious “faith,” perhaps he should. In social and ancient terms it is the virtue of insisting on belonging to a community, such as a polis or a church. As Tillich put it, faith is “the courage to be a part of,” to share a social purpose. “I have fought a good fight, I have finished my course, I have kept the faith,” says the Christian, and does keep the faith steadfastly against many contrary moods.
The political scientist James Q. Wilson uses “duty” instead of faith, though he speaks of duty also as “fidelity,” from of course fides, faith.[11] That is: adhere to one’s commitments, do your duty in the face of temptations to take a free ride. As Wilson says, and Lewis said, faithful duty is akin to courage.[12] Indeed all the virtues require courage in the face of attack. But all courage requires faith, in turn, so that the courage is exercised for something enduring. Wilson’s leading example is Admiral James Stockdale’s leadership of the American POWs in the hands of North Vietnamese torturers. But he notes that the signs of faith lie all about. Faith is the who-you-are that finds you contributing to public radio, conserving water in a drought when no inspector will spot a defection, turning up to vote against George W. Bush when your vote was after all of no consequence.
Wilson adopts the view of the Scottish Enlightenment, and the Aristotelian tradition before it, that ethics is a matter of habit and character, not continuous decisions under a rule of Reason. Like other virtues, he argues, faith is behaviorally instilled, working in tandem with genetic predispositions. Once instilled it is a feeling, a complaining conscience, what Smith called the Impartial Spectator. That is why Hutcheson and Hume and Smith in 18th-century Scotland claimed that virtues arose from “moral sentiments”: virtues are matters of a prepared feeling rather than a decision on the spot.
You begin, though, with a decision to cultivate the moral sentiments. You enroll with a free will at Annapolis and train your ethical muscles. Like a body trained to a sport, the present performance is both forward and backward looking, hopeful and faithful, both. The rule of reason, by contrast, insists on disowning the past, extracting you from your history. Utilitarianism insists on faithlessness.
Fides was the term by which the Romans described their relationship with allies. In the Roman wars against Carthage, Inc.—so bourgeois as to distribute annually the “profits” of the state to its citizens, in the style of Alaska with its oil revenues—the rule of Faith repeatedly overcame a rule of mere Prudence. In the last stages of the first of three Punic Wars, for instance, the prudent Carthaginians decided to economize on their navy, in the very years in which the extraordinarily faithful if previously not very nautical Romans built and staffed additional war galleys to the number of two hundred. In the Second Punic War the Romans were defeated again and again in Italy by Hannibal, losing 50,000 dead in a few hours at Cannae. But they never ransomed captives, nor hesitated to free slaves to staff fresh legions. They kept the faith in Rome.
The Dutch have a somewhat heavy word expressing the tug of the past through faith, lotsverbondenheid, solidarity. It means the sharing with solidarity of a common fate, those bonden, bonds, to the lots—compare English “lot,” as in “your lot in life.” Aristotle’s phrase for it is “another self.” Such friendship is a combination of love and faith directed here below. Love without faithfulness would be called “inauthentic” or “phony” or at best “inconstant, flighty,” the crushes of adolescents or the serial polyamy of adults. In some families Faith without love would be called “having relatives.”[13] Friends of mere use or amusement, Aristotle’s first two types, do not have lotsverbondenheid: “such friendships . . . are easily dissolved if the parties become different; for if they are no longer pleasant or useful they cease loving each other.”[14]
Friends of the third type, who care for one another as for themselves, do have a bonded lot. The Dutch university students portrayed in Paul Verhoeven’s movie Soldier of Orange (1979) go through the Second World War in different ways, one dying as a German officer on the Eastern Front, another sitting peacefully at home and passing his exams to become a lawyer, another escaping to England and becoming an RAF pilot, while several others die in the Resistance to the German occupation. The hero of the movie, played by Rutger Hauer, keeps faith with them all, even with the traitor and the shirker, embodying lotsverbondenheid. In a scene on the beach at Scheveningen, for example, the others walk away from the fellow student who has traitorously joined the German army. The Hauer character, although himself by then leaning towards the Resistance, will not abandon him. Later the two verbonden friends, even though they have taken politically opposite paths, exchange postcards. Their lots are bound. You go to your high-school reunion. You say to yourself, “I have nothing in common with these people.” But you do, if you are a person, theologically speaking. You have Faith.
Lotsverbondenheid is made evident in the technique of psychological intervention called family-constellation therapy. The participants play roles of mother or son or cousin or dead grandfather or anyone else bound by life’s lottery to the person who is the main subject of the therapy. Even someone who murdered a former spouse may have a place in the constellation. It is not a drama viewed in detachment. Faith is called upon, performing a sort of public oath. The exercise of one’s will towards lotsverbondenheid is Faith, Geloof.
* * * * *
We are told by the Habits of the Heart authors that nowadays “The rules of the competitive market, not the love of families or the practices of the town meeting or the fellowship of the church, are the real arbiters of living.”[15] Bourgeois society is supposed to have undermined faithful friendship. The claim has been a theme in European thought since Bacon, perhaps an echo of the aristocratic and classical disdain for the bourgeoisie. But recent sociology has shown Bellah and Bacon and Plato are mistaken. Markets are consistent with real friendship.
An economistic way to make the point is a paper by Paul Ingram and Peter Roberts in the American Journal of Sociology in September, 2000, “Friendship Among Competitors in the Sydney Hotel Industry.” They find that the friendships among competing hotel managers in the 40 Sydney hotels in their study generate about $2.25 million more of gross revenues per year per hotel—for example, through recommendations of the competing hotel when fully booked—than would be generated by a hotel with friendless managers.[16] They add “the critical caveat that the instrumental benefits of friendships are inextricably tied to the affective element,” that is, you can’t successfully fake friendship.[17] The faithless ones get found out.
Considering the depth of skill among primates in performing and detecting falsehood, this is not surprising. Both Prudence and Solidarity work. “Individuals who try to form and maintain friendships solely as a means to material gain will fail to evoke trust and reciprocity.” That is, Prudence Only will not work, and so “those who would limit the intrusion of society into economy by . . . characterizing embedded relationships between buyers and suppliers as predictable outcomes of a repeated, non-cooperative game” are mistaken.[18]
One can show it historically, too. “Far from traditional society being suffused with brotherly gemeinschaftlich virtues,” the sociologist Ray Pahl has concluded,
the reverse appears to be the case. Counter to what the classical sociological tradition appears to suggest [Simmel, for example], Aristotelian styles of friendship [”for the friend’s own sake”] re-emerged with the coming of commercial-industrial society in the eighteenth century. . . . Counter to what is assumed in much modern social theory, it was precisely the spread of market exchange in the eighteenth century that led to the development of new benevolent bonds.[19]
Pahl believes, rather less persuasively, that friendship between men flourished unusually in 12th-century Europe. Peter of Blois declared in the 1180s, “Are not my friends my inner self, whom I cherish and who take care of me in a sweet commerce of services, in an identity of affection?”[20] But what is clearer than his medieval evidence from monks and heretics is that in early modern Europe people were by modern standards extraordinarily feckless. Shakespeare’s plots are filled with betrayals—far above the frequency in Ibsen’s or O’Neill’s, which on the contrary are often grim illustrations of lotsverbondenheid in a bourgeois society. Even in a Shakespeare comedy everyone is fooling someone else, lying, disguising, dissembling. Stephen Greenblatt traces the theme of perfidy in Shakespeare to his supposed secret Catholicism, in a world in which exposing such a secret was fatal.[21] Shakespeare is not alone in portraying an exceptionally shifty world c. 1600. Lawrence Stone concluded that “so far as surviving evidence goes, England between 1500 and 1660 was relatively cold, suspicious and violence prone.”[22]
Pahl cites the ironically named Boncompagno da Signa, who in his Amicitia of 1205 paints a similarly grim picture of faithless friends in Italy. One Paolo da Certaldo wrote a Book of Good Practices around 1360 with 388 precepts for merchants, among them “test [a purported friend], not once but a hundred times,” a sentiment repeated in the same words a half-century later by Giovanni Morelli, another Florentine businessman and moralist.[23] Certaldo quotes a proverb, “he who trusts not, will not be deceived,” and Morelli advises the novice merchant, “above all, if you wish to have friends or relationships, make sure you don’t need them. . . . Cash . . . [is] the best friend or relative you can have.”[24]
But Pahl argues, following Allan Silver, that the economistic exchange model beloved of tough-guy sociologists and anthropologists in the early 20th century fits even modern history poorly. And it was not favored by most of the ancients in theory. Cicero lambastes the Epicureans—the ancient Mediterranean’s version of Max-U economists—as “those men who in the manner of cattle [pecundum ritu, literally, “by the rite of the cattle”] refer everything to pleasure” and who “with even less humanity. . . say that friendships are to be sought for protection and aid, not for caring.” He calls them “men abandoned to pleasure,” who “when they dispute about friendship have understanding of neither its practice nor its theory.” [25]
Adam Smith, supposedly the inventor of a theory conserving on love, emphatically did not follow with such a theory in his work or in his life. Smith and his friends thought of sympathy as creating a trusting society as by an invisible hand, in the way that Prudence created an efficient one, an argument stressed by the economist Jerry Evensky.[26] As Daniel G. Arce M. put it, citing Evensky, “It is the coevolution of individual and societal ethics that leads to the stability of classical liberal society.”[27] Pahl concludes that “sometime in the eighteenth century friendship appeared as one of a new set of benevolent social bonds.”[28] It was not in modern times but in the olden times that the life of man was solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
This is no paradox. When a poor man can buy as much for his penny as a rich man, though he have fewer pennies, he is not required to doff his hat to get his daily bread. He does not need to pretend to be an ally of the butcher or the baker. This frees him when the occasion arises to be a real friend, an equal. Allan Silver notes that “the intense loyalties, coexisting with the frank expectation of reward, found in codes and cultures of honor before commercial society” were not nice and were not good for real, that is, bourgeois, friendship. Samuel Johnson described an aristocratic “patron” in his Dictionary as “a wretch who supports with insolence, and is paid in flattery,” in the fashion of Lord Chesterfield. Johnson found the relationship with his paying bourgeois readers more satisfactory: “No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.”
In a world governed by honor one makes friends to keep from being assaulted, Cicero’s “protection and aid.” In a world governed by markets one buys protection, one hopes, anonymously with taxes or with fees to ones condominium association, and then is at leisure to make friends for the sake of real friendship. Modern capitalism—though we must not suppose, as many people do, that markets did not “exist” before 1800—was supported by, and supported in turn, a trust in strangers that still distinguishes prosperous from poor economies. The division of labor in the modern world, as Paul Seabright has emphasized, is achieved through “honorary friends.”[29]
Trust and friendship, further, make possible speculative bubbles, from the tulip mania of the 1630s to the dot-com boom of the 1990s. The very fact of capitalism’s speculative instability, therefore, argues for an entirely new prevalence of belief in strangers. “Credit” is from creditus, “believed.” A business cycle based on pyramids of credit was impossible in the distrustful 16th century. The macro-economy could in earlier times rise and fall, of course, but from harvest booms and busts, not from credit booms and busts. In those pre-modern-capitalist days God’s hand, not human beliefs, made for aggregate ups and downs. Medieval and early modern people trusted only allies, and had wise doubts even concerning some of them: “How smooth and even they do bear themselves!/ As if allegiance in their bosoms sat,/ Crowned with faith and constant loyalty.”[30] Pre-moderns had to keep faith with God and with their lords temporal. Late moderns keep faith with the market and with their friends.
On this theory the episodes of disorder and unemployment in capitalism from the 1630s in Holland and from 1720 in Northern Europe arose from the virtues of capitalism, not from its vices, from its trustworthiness, not from its greed. To be more exact: the business cycle arose from trustworthiness breaking down suddenly in an environment of quite normal human greed for abnormal gain, the auri sacra fames which has characterized humans since the Fall. What is novel in capitalism is the faithful trust, lotsverbondenheid writ large.
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] Aquinas, Disputed Questions, 1269-72, “Virtues in General,” Art. 12, p. 89.
[2] Aquinas, Lauda, Sion, salvatorem, verse 6, at http:// www.ewtn.com/ library/ PRAYER/ LAUDA.TXT.
[3] Budziszewski, “Religion and Civic Culture,” 1992, p. 51.
[4] Davis and Hersh, Descartes’ Dream, 1986, for example p. 232.
[5] “Faith” in Cross, ed., 1957, Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, p. 491f.
[6] Barr, Physics and Faith, 2003, p. 266.
[7] Merton, New Seeds of Contemplation, 1962, pp. 127, 135f.
[8] Quoted in Kirsch, “Get Happy,” 2004, p. 97.
[9] Lewis, Mere Christianity, 1943-45, pp. 123-126.
[10] Appiah, Ethics of Identity, 2005, p. 137.
[11] J. Q. Wilson, Moral Sense, 1993, pp. 99-117.
[12] J. Q. Wilson, Moral Sense, 1993, p. xiii.
[13] Cicero, De amicitia, 44 BC, v, 20.
[14] Aristotle, Nich. Ethics, c. 330 BC, 1156a20, Broadie and Rowe trans.
[15] Bellah and others, Habits of the Heart, 1985.
[16] Ingram and Roberts, “Friendship among Competitors,” 2000, p. 417.
[17] Ingram and Roberts, “Friendship among Competitors,” 2000, p. 420; compare Mueller, Capitalism Democracy, 1999, p. 39.
[18] Ingram and Roberts, “Friendship among Competitors,” 2000, p. 418.
[19] Pahl, Friendship, 2000, p. 53f.
[20] Quoted in Pahl, Friendship, 2000, p. 30.
[21] Greenblatt, Will in the World, 2004, Chp. 3.
[22] Quoted in Pahl, Friendship, 2000, p. 53.
[23] Branca, ed, Merchant Writers, 1986, pp. 48, 68. Compare Cicero’s similar advice in De amicitia, for example xvii, 63 and xix, 67; and before him Hesiod, Works and Days, lines 371-72: “even with your brother smile—and get a witness; for trust and mistrust alike ruin men.”
[24] Branca, Merchant Writers, 1986, pp. 48, 73.
[25] Cicero, De amicitia ix, 32; xii, 46; xiv, 52.
[26] Evensky, “Ethics and the Invisible Hand,” 1993 and, Adam Smith’s Lost Legacy,” 2001.
[27] Arce M., “Conspicuous by Its Absence,” 2004, p. 263.
[28] Pahl, Friendship, 2000, p. 55.
[29] Seabright, Company of Strangers, 2004, p. 8.
[30] Shakespeare, Hen. V, II, ii, lines 3 ff.