A Christian Education in the Virtues

Character Formation and Human Flourishing

James Arthur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780367694548
• eBook ISBN: 9781000417142
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Theory & Practice

A Christian Education in the Virtues examines the connection between human nature and human flourishing. It draws on ancient and medieval sources to explore the formation of the person based on a Christian anthropology, emphasising the communal nature of the virtuous life and provides a richer approach to the question of contemporary character education.

The book argues that the only way to understand and construct our character virtues is to have a clear picture of what is the purpose and meaning of human life. It highlights the importance of engaging with moral issues and makes the case that, for Christian educators, human flourishing is inseparable from God's active relationship to human beings. The book also explores a teleological approach to character education goals. To educate the whole person in the light of an all-embracing Christian worldview is challenged by secular and liberal ideology and is often seen as irrational to the modern mind. Overall, the text seeks to demonstrate that many aspects of a Neo-Aristotelian-Thomist theoretical underpinning for Christian character education holds out a viable option for Christians. It therefore argues the case for the educational potential of Christian character education.

This important book will be essential reading for academics, researchers and students in the fields of character and virtue education, religious education and the philosophy of education.

The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com/books/oa-mono/10.4324/9781003141877, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Chapter 1

Character formation and theological challenges

DOI: 10.4324/9781003141877-1

The point of Christian character education or formation is primarily to enable faithful Christian living, and Christians have made use of the language of virtue to describe the Christian life. This Christian living is not simply a series of obligations and norms, but a relationship of knowing and loving God and this is only made possible through and in Jesus Christ. The formation of Christian character virtues therefore only makes sense within a faith community of which an individual is part. The fact that our secular culture is turning increasingly to the language of virtue ethics, or character ethics, can be observed in that we are no longer solely concerned with policies and social issues, but now link them to the character of those public figures who advocate them. There is growing popular concern for virtue and character, but we cannot assume that this language is in any sense Christian in inspiration. Yet the deepening of one’s moral character through belief in God and the transforming work of the Holy Spirit has always been important in Christianity, and the community that shapes the Christian virtues is the Church. However, secular culture, particularly in its more aggressive forms, can weaken the Christian’s intuition that religious belief in God is necessary for developing moral character. All education is normative to the extent that it cannot but embody some ideal of human flourishing together with some account of the role of parents and teachers in actively promoting this ideal of flourishing. Character ethics seeks to restore the coherence of moral virtues by providing a teleology (purpose, goal), and this teleology is revealed in Christianity – which is union with God.

If we claim that education prepares human beings for life, then it follows that we need to have some conception of what the purpose of that life is. The main goal of education is therefore to help human beings become more fully human. Teachers need to ask themselves what kind of person they are seeking to promote, for it is not sensible to pursue an educational aim without considering what its concrete realisations would involve. All teachers need to be conscious of the kind of formation they offer their students since we cannot escape the fact that all education is simply the practical expression of our philosophical convictions. Education, in the form of schooling, is intentional, structured and institutionalised with pre-determined learning objectives for teaching. Education is, of course, lifelong, and not completed in school. We need an anthropology that provides an account of human nature (see Maritain, 1943: 1): an anthropology that provides us with knowledge and understanding of our origins, nature and destiny. People are, deep down, alike in some fundamental ways. This basic truth is often overlooked in modern philosophies of education. Consequently, the account of the good life is not merely a disposition to action, but must lead to the pursuit of purpose: the goal and destiny of human life.

As Maritain (1943: 2) reminds us, education is about ‘Becoming who we are’ and is essentially a ‘human awakening’. Education in this sense is an endless process of ‘becoming’, and life, insofar as it is the life of human beings, is always moral because the weight of choosing morally is impossible to avoid. Maritain (1943: 9) uses Thomas Aquinas to define education as the process by which human beings are shaped and led towards fulfilment. We are human beings because we are made in the Image of God (Genesis: 1: 26–28) and this Imago Dei is central to the Christian understanding of anthropology. Imago Dei is the basis for our relational capacity with one another and God and therefore has ethical implications. Sertillanges (1989: 17) said that the ‘qualities of character have a preponderant role in everything’. Austin (2016) notes: ‘Christian formation refers, not to being forced to fit a pre-determined mould, but to the growth of the disciple into a unique image of Christ’ and ‘the process of Christian formation is therefore a process of becoming, through virtue’. In sum, God’s image is seen in our character and in what we are destined to ultimately become, which will fulfil God’s expressed purpose for humanity. As Palmer (2016: 117) says: ‘If character reflects one’s fundamental vision of reality, the ultimate vision for the Christian is a life centred on God and oriented in such a way that intellect, will, and affections are all aligned with God’s purposes’. It is therefore by good acts that human beings contribute to the formation of their character, and each person must decide whether they wish God’s image to be reflected in them by co-operating with God’s grace. Theology, for Christians, therefore, rather than educational philosophy, must primarily direct character formation.

Christian formation

Farley (1995: 163) says: ‘What a person believes and values, what he or she dares to become and be, or what communities he or she wills to support and cherish, have tremendous impact on shaping character.’ Therefore, in the Catholic Church, the sacraments, Christian fellowship and experience in the Christian community are invaluable resources for building character and making moral decisions. The Catholic Church has traditionally relied on formation, education and socialisation into the faith community after Baptism to produce moral citizens and good practising Catholics. Formation is what happens to a person living in community, but it is not simply about children in schools nor does it come to an end during life. The main elements of this Christian formation come from prayer and worship, listening to and reading Scripture and Christian doctrines, offering service to others, as well as teaching and learning. All of these elements inform, instruct, inculcate and ultimately seek to form our entire being because the self we become is largely determined by the commitments we make. A Christian anthropology views humans as material and immaterial, body and soul, not one or the other. This is why a Christian anthropology knows the limits of developmental theories arising from the social sciences, as those theories ignore the spiritual and theological dimensions of the person in Christian community. The Church has traditionally been understood as a school of virtue that helped shape character, not so much as through telling us what to do, as encouraging us to ask the question: Who shall I become? Formation therefore is not limited to the task of formal catechesis only, but is the formation of humankind into the image of Christ. Every aspect of the Church’s life is directed at formation, to create a formation that is a profound, comprehensive and dynamic immersion of the person in the traditions of the Church.

Christian character formation is distinct from non-religious approaches to character. There is no neutral starting point from which to think about the moral life. This is why Stanley Hauerwas (1983: 1) believes that all ethical theories are particular to certain historical communities, and why he suggests that ethics always requires a qualifier or adjective such as ‘Jewish’, ‘Christian’, ‘utilitarian’, ‘pragmatic’, ‘humanity’ or ‘modern’ to denote its social and historical nature as a discipline. Consideration of the moral life is an activity relative to particular times, places, commitments and communities. The Catholic Church, for example, understands reality as sacramental, which means God is real for everyone in the ordinary concrete details of their daily lives. God is reflected in our connections with each other and is the basis for human dignity, and God is ultimately the reason we are to be treated with mutual respect, regardless of background. Hauerwas emphasises in his writings the importance of character in the moral life, and of the distinctiveness of a Christian character.

Catholic moral theology, understood as an approach to Christian character and human action, is often complex, disputed and fraught with misunderstandings. The purpose of theology here is ‘faith seeking understanding’ in order to help people live good lives. In theology, reason clarifies faith, but in Christian philosophy, faith inspires reason. Christian character formation involves growth in knowing, which leads to moral relationships, moral living and human flourishing. When Hauerwas wrote Character and the Christian Life in 1975, few were writing about the formation of Christian character and virtues. Hauerwas noted that even Christians received any talk of character and virtues with suspicion. Not much has changed today, despite character and virtues being discussed and written about more widely with a growing recognition that virtues are beneficial to individuals and to humanity in general. We can agree with Hauerwas (1995: xiv) that ‘most of the work for understanding the moral life in terms of virtues and character is still to be done’. Character and virtues are also viewed with suspicion by many social scientists because they claim, with some justification, that there is too much focus on individuals, and the virtues they possess are qualities that fundamentally reside in individuals as opposed to society. However, in the end, the good is only realised through right human intention and choice, and this choice can only be made by an individual who is free and accountable. Modern psychotherapy has often focused wholly on the hurts and problems that people face resulting in a victim mentality. In other words, we are moved to believe that we are not responsible for our negative actions since these are caused, the therapist tells us, by what other people have done to us.

Catholic and Protestant perspectives on character and virtues as constitutive of the Christian moral life give first place to God’s grace and generally adopt a moral approach in which the will of God is a source of obligation. Protestant ethicists tended to reject what they saw to be an excessive Catholic focus on human action. They felt that Catholics focused too narrowly on the criteria when assessing the goodness of human actions and consequently made judgements regarding specific cases. This led, they believed, to individual guilt followed by the need for penance undertaken through confession to remedy sin. In contrast, Protestants focused more heavily on hearing Scripture and on accepting that we are brought into a relationship with Jesus, distinct from our own effort and work. The emphasis here is on faith and grace. However, it is a parody that Catholics were thought to have extremely high standards that were unachievable for the virtuous life, but which were enforced loosely, while Protestants had moderate moral standards with realistic prospects of achieving a virtuous life, but which were enforced strictly. Catholics, in fact, have viewed human action in the light of God’s grace. Today, there is growing convergence between Protestant and Catholic ethicists. Catholics have learnt to appreciate the role of Scripture in Protestant ethics, while Protestants have learnt to rediscover the understanding of the natural law and the role of worship in character and virtue formation (Svenson and Van Drunen, 2018). There has always been overlap between Catholic and Protestant positions, and today there is greater convergence on moral thinking in many areas (see Grobien, 2019; Nabers, 2005).

Secular approaches to moral philosophy predominate in the literature. Collicutt (2019: 3) begins her work on Christian character by observing that ‘[t]he use of the word “formation” to describe the Christian life is a bit like Marmite. It is beloved of some and loathed by others’. The same could be said of the words ‘Christian’, ‘virtue’ and ‘character’, with some believing these words are positive and liberating while others see them as repressive and restrictive of human freedom. For many, the whole idea of the Christian formation of character seems too severe and perhaps even unpleasant. The very idea of God being connected with our moral character causes Richard Dawkins (2006: 31) to exclaim:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it, a petty, unjust, unforgiving control freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.

Dawkins does not argue (what might be a reasonable case) that belief in God is not a necessary condition for morally good character, but rather he simply asserts that belief in God itself impedes moral progress and reasoning.

Bertrand Russell (1992: 595) said the same when he penned the line: ‘I say quite deliberately that the Christian religion, as organized in the churches, has been and still is the principal enemy of moral progress in the world.’ Both identify Christianity as the main offender here, but they also mean that religious belief is irrational, and they largely consider only the institutional aspect of religion. In contrast, Christian theism has traditionally maintained that the moral virtues of character are grounded in God, who is the source of these virtues. Contemporary secular humanism grounds these moral virtues exclusively in human beings, while the popular nihilism within modern culture maintains that moral virtues have no ground at all and are therefore illusory. Moral nihilism simply argues that there are no moral truths and that no beliefs, far less Christian beliefs, are reasonable or justifiable and so ought not to be believed. Modernity conceives of morality as either or both the creation of our times and places (our environment) or the product of our genes and neurons (our DNA) – both explanations effectively denying that we have potential free will or responsibility for the formation of our own character. Christian morality is also reduced to an ethical scheme that is offered as a practical morality of love and kindness, which does not require belief in a supernatural God. This view is effectively a secular Christianity, a worldview that anyone could adopt that helps us socialise and live in harmony with each other. Modernity’s many ideas of moral character offer us no good reasons why we should take them seriously. This ongoing debate has made the connection of moral virtues with God and religion intensely controversial.

The Christian rejects a purely secular account of virtue formation, but shares with various forms of Aristotelianism a recognition that character formation is a developmental cultivation of good habits, the shaping of conscience and the inculcation of virtue. For the Christian, character is not solely what we choose, but rather must be viewed in the light of what has been done to us and for us in Christ. The notion of Christian character envisaged in this text transcends the temporal, the material and the secular and points us towards the eternal, the spiritual and the religious (see J. F. Gilson, 1953: 270). I recognise at the outset that an Aristotelian-Thomist approach is profoundly at odds with modern secular culture and that not all Christians would accept such an approach. Indeed, Catholic moral theologians are not in agreement with each other over the content nor even on the authority of the Catholic moral tradition. No single approach to Christian ethics has gained acceptance among Catholic theologians because some believe there is more than one way of going about Christian character education. Nevertheless, an Aristotelian-Thomist virtue ethics, it will be argued, informed by complementary theoretical tools from social theory and developmental psychology, offers a tradition-based and pragmatic theoretical framework for conceptualising Catholic character education. It emphasises the connectedness between the moral virtues, moral character and the telos of a human being. It offers help in an age of impoverished moral vocabulary, in which the language of character and virtue is insufficiently rich enough to convey its full meaning to Christian and non-Christian audiences.

This text accepts that a Christian character formation in the virtues must be grounded in theology as well as an appropriate Christian philosophy of education, but, importantly, without the theology part, you cannot call it Christian. Theology ought to guide and direct the content, purpose and methods of character virtue formation in the sense that theology has philosophical implications for education. If Christian character formation aims to transform the whole person into the likeness of Christ, then a theology of education, which can explain how theology and philosophy relate to each other in addressing character formation, is necessary. Throughout this text, both theological and philosophical reflection are used to furnish the basic postulates of an understanding of character virtue formation. However, it is outside the scope of this book to provide a fully worked out theology of education. Notwithstanding, it is certainly the one thing that is largely missing from modern Catholic understandings of moral virtue education. We need an acceptable philosophy of education that builds on an appropriate theology of education.

How should I live?

For the Christian, ‘how should I live?’ prompts questions that are more fundamental: ‘Who am I?’, ‘What sort of person am I, and what sort of person am I meant to become?’, ‘What sort of person should I become because I believe in Christ?’ Searching for a path to the good life requires us to reflect on the way we live and to consider how we learned to live that way and whether or not we intend to continue living that way. To these questions, different intellectual traditions and different strands of Christianity give different answers. Many Christians who discuss the religious nature of morality think it is all about a focus on obligations; following rules and laws that either the Church delivers or God commands. In following these rules, the Christian seeks something – eternal life – but the reasons for following the rules are sometimes unrelated to the intrinsic good of living according to them...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. Character formation and theological challenges
• 2. Christian anthropology and Aristotle’s character ethics
• 3. Thomism and Christian moral character
• 4. Christian character and pedagogical virtue education
• 5. Integral human development and Christian character education
• 6. A theological framework for character formation
• Conclusion
• References
• Index