The Cardinal and the Deadly

Reimagining the Seven Virtues and Seven Vices

Karl Clifton-Soderstrom

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781610970013
  9781498221962
• eBook ISBN:
  9781630878016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Christian Theology
• Index: Social Sciences

What makes for a good life? The seven deadly vices and seven holy virtues, ingrained in our cultural imagination, help us answer this perennial question. For two millennia, these fourteen character traits have stirred our imagination of human nature and desire. Sometimes, however, lists like the seven deadly sins remain mere caricatures that shame and exclude. The world, however, is not divided up into priests and convicts, saints and sinners, virtuous and vicious people. Much of the time, we live between the boundaries of vice and virtue. The Cardinal and the Deadly challenges simplistic bifurcations in order to reimagine a more faithful, hopeful, and loving life. It adopts a unique approach to examining the virtues and vices by pairing them in unexpected ways to reveal something significant about being human. Hope redirects greed; wisdom corrects pride; faith enlivens sloth. Bringing ancient and contemporary authors into dialogue, the book offers a concrete and accessible introduction to virtue ethics for students, pastors, and churches. Its ultimate goal is to engage the reader's intellect and imagination, so that we may respond creatively to the ethical challenges of living together.

1

On Being Good

Victor Hugo’s classic novel and the now well-known theatrical piece Les Misérables recounts the fall and redemption of convicted thief Jean Valjean. Originally a good person of little financial means, Valjean is sentenced to five years for stealing a loaf of bread to feed his family. After several attempts to escape prison, however, he is kept behind bars for nineteen years.

Over those many years of incarceration, Valjean’s moral disposition and character change from virtue to vice, from one inclined to seek goodness to one habituated to do evil. He becomes a hardened criminal whose tattered countenance is mean, suspicious, and deceitful. Upon being released from prison, he is friendless, without money or food, and carries within himself an acute awareness of his own desperate and contemptible state. “I am not even a dog,” he laments to himself as person after person turns him away empty-handed.

At a crucial point in the story, Valjean is directed to a bishop in town who is known for his exceptional and long-standing humility, kindness, and good works for the poor and friendless in society. Without hesitation, and in full knowledge of Valjean’s past life and recent incarceration, Bishop Myriel receives the convict and bestows dignity upon him by looking Valjean in the eye, sharing a meal using the finest silver, and inviting him to sleep the night in a bed with clean sheets. Overwhelmed, Valjean’s countenance changes from gloom and resistance to gratitude and joy as he receives the bishop’s freely offered graces. His distant memory of experiencing these virtues in another human being is reawakened, and he receives and celebrates them with open arms and a full stomach.

Despite being returned to this long forgotten state of goodness, Valjean’s nineteen-year habituation into a life of desperation, deception, and criminality while in prison remains potent. In the middle of the night, awakened by the sheer novelty of sleeping in an actual bed, Valjean can’t help but think of the silver plates at the dinner table and the increasingly tempting possibility of stealing them to buy his own freedom. Daily bread is not enough for him, for he knows the long road ahead in his return to society. The newborn remembrance of his virtuous pre-prison life is no match for his now more hardened self-serving vices, and he steals the silver and flees the bishop’s house.

As the story stands so far, it is tragic. The grace shown by the priest, many would say, was foolish. His virtue was no match for vice. There is, of course, more to the story, and we shall return to the crucial second encounter between the bishop and Valjean. But let us pause here to examine what this brief narrative tells us about how we experience and understand the moral life.

Virtue and the Moral Imagination

If you were to examine the potential this story holds for teaching us about the Christian life, what questions would you use to evaluate it? As I teach my students, how you ask your questions determines the range of possible answers. If you’re not asking the right questions, you can’t count on getting the right answers.

But how do you learn to ask the right questions that will disclose the right answers? This chicken-and-egg problem has been with philosophers and theologians from the beginning. While it seems like a silly paradox that modern people should dismiss, its analog in the moral life is quite significant. The father of philosophy, Plato, asked it in ancient Athens in a famous dialogue—Meno. How does knowledge begin? If I am ignorant of something, why would I seek to learn about it, for I could not know about that which I seek? But if I know what it is that I seek, why would I need to learn about it, since I already know what it is I want to know. Saint Augustine, in the first page of his Confessions, asks an analogous question with regard to the life of faith. Should we first seek help from God in order to know who God is, or must we first know who God is before we seek help? The parallel in the moral life might ask the question like this: If I do not yet know what a good life entails, why would I desire to live one? But if I know what a good life entails, I need not desire it, since I already know. Beginnings are always difficult—in knowledge, faith, or ethics.

Our biblical and theological heritage provides us with many tools for enabling ethical practices and ennobling moral character. Our heritage gives us the Ten Commandments, the Beatitudes in the gospels, stories of the heroes and saints of faith in Acts, sensible advice for individual churches and individuals in the epistles, the life of Jesus himself, and others. We could expand these options by considering how we learn from the history of the church in the various forms of Christian community, the councils and creeds, the history of individual saints, and the various rules, virtues, and admonitions given throughout the church’s two-thousand-year history.

So let us begin more simply; by asking the right question. The two most basic questions that Christians face in the moral arena are “What should I do?” and “What kind of person ought I to become?” The first question focuses on specific actions and decisions; the second focuses on moral character and virtues.

If we are oriented by the fundamental task of doing the right thing, our reflections on the Christian life will focus on the particular actions and corresponding duties each of us should perform in a given context. Do not lie to your friend. Do not commit adultery against your spouse. Honor your father and mother. Give alms to the poor. In one framework of our contemporary moral imagination, a right action is determined by its coherence with a particular moral duty determined by some kind of moral law. This law might be given by God in the form of a command or mandate, as we have, for example, represented in the Ten Commandments. The law might also be given by the natural order of things, as for example, we have in the natural law tradition in ethics. Finally, the law might be given by Reason itself, as we have, for example, in the deontological tradition in ethics represented in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. In the case of Jean Valjean. What should he do? Should he not steal because such an action is irreconcilable with this duty to obey the commandment of God, or the natural law protecting private property, or the law of reason that reveals the contradiction in affirming the need for private property and the freedom to steal it?

But you could also ask, Is stealing in accordance with the kind of person Jean Valjean would want to become? Thus one question we may ask is whether the scene from Les Misérables teaches us more about right actions or about good character?

Framing the moral life in terms of right and wrong actions that either do or do not correspond to a moral law is not the only way to understand ethics or a life faithful to God. If, for example, we desire to become particular kinds of people, say the people of God, disciples of Christ, or simply good persons, we seek to possess praiseworthy, admirable, and desirable character traits. As such, our descriptions of the Christian life will appeal to a vision of both human virtues and vices, of human excellences and depravities, of individual saints and scoundrels. Now of course, saints make good choices and perform right actions, but the goal of such actions is not the action itself, but the formation of good character or the flourishing of a good community. Broadly speaking, the virtue ethics tradition in Christian ethics frames the moral life in terms of the formation and sustaining of good character.

One particular tool for examining ourselves and our communities, which Christians have employed over the years, considers our vices and our virtues. “Tool” is not really the right word here, as if thinking about the moral life was merely a skill-set, a techne. There are as many virtues and vices as there are human excellences and depravities, and so, given the complexity of the human person, there is no set list (theologically speaking). Nevertheless, the Christian tradition often names seven virtues and seven vices. The virtues are divided up into four cardinal virtues (courage, temperance, justice, and wisdom) and three theological ones (faith, hope, and love). The vices are often called the “seven deadly sins.”

But before we get ahead of ourselves, let us be a little more specific about virtues and vices. Broadly speaking, a virtue of a thing is what constitutes its distinctive excellence in view of its purpose or function. The virtue of a knife whose purpose is to cut is sharpness. Its vice is dullness. The virtues of a point guard in basketball whose purpose is to run the offense are agility and decisiveness. The virtue of a knife is not that of a point guard, which has different purposes and hence excellences.

The virtues of a human person are not as simple as those of a knife or a point guard. Our virtues are those distinct excellences of character through which we live into our moral and spiritual purposes well. According to broader Christian tradition, a moral virtue is a settled disposition of a person to act in excellent and praiseworthy ways, cultivated over time through habit. The constellation of virtues a person may embody provides for the organization of his or her moral desires, and hence, state of moral character.

For example, while a Christian may have a duty not to bear false witness in view of the commandment from God, God hopes for more than mere obedience to this commandment. Rather, God’s desire is that every believer possesses the moral virtue of honesty. Honesty, when it is a virtue of one’s character, is a basic, enduring, and identifying characteristic of the person. If you are honest, you don’t lie one day, tell the truth the next day joyfully, and on the third day tell the truth begrudgingly. To be honest is to be so habituated to being honest that in any given situation, one consistently lives honestly without regret. Keep in mind, however, that in developing moral virtue, our emphasis is not on any particular action or decision, but on the cultivation of a moral identity from which the action comes “naturally.” That last word, “naturally” is loaded philosophically, and we shall in the course of this book address the various meanings of acting “naturally.”

Given this framework, we can understand the nature of human vices as well. A vice is a settled disposition of a person to act in inferior and abhorrent ways, cultivated over time through habit. If your vice is greed, you are inclined to be greedy rather than fair or generous. You may not constantly choose to hoard for yourself, but your character has been so shaped that selfish acquisition comes “naturally” to you. The seven vices, or deadly sins, are pride, greed, gluttony, sloth, anger, lust, and envy.

The Bible, of course, speaks of a wider variety of vices and virtues. Consider Colossians 3:5–14 as it describes the whole person, from the “old self” and its vices to the “new self” and its virtues:

Put to death, therefore, whatever in you is earthly: fornication, impurity, passion, evil desire, and greed (which is idolatry). . . . But now you must get rid of all such things—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and abusive language from your mouth. Do not lie to one another, seeing that you have stripped off the old self with its practices and have clothed yourselves with the new self, which is being renewed in knowledge according to the image of its creator. . . . As God’s chosen ones, holy and beloved, clothe yourselves with compassion, kindness, humility, meekness, and patience. Bear with one another and, if anyone has a complaint against another, forgive each other; just as the Lord has forgiven you, so you also must forgive. Above all, clothe yourselves with love, which binds everything together in perfect harmony.

In Victor Hugo’s story, the bishop’s enduring character, cultivated over time through habit, is one of humility, kindness, and compassion. The convict’s moral identity is more complex because he has been formed by two narratives—his previous life as a virtuous and honorable man, and his nineteen years in prison as one habituated to deceit and selfishness that enabled him to survive a bad situation. The language of vice and virtue helps us to see that Jean Valjean’s conflict that night at the bishop’s house was less a choice between right and wrong actions—to steal or not to steal—than one between two moral identities. What kind of person would Jean Valjean become?

The real climax in this brief story occurs in their second encounter, where the bishop’s virtues seize hold of Valjean’s own soul, where a virtuous heart triumphs over a vicious one. After fleeing the bishop’s house with the silver, Valjean is apprehended by the police and returned to the bishop with his fate all but sealed as a repeat offender returning to prison. But the bishop’s virtue does not allow that to happen, for the bishop had seen the night before the memory of virtue sparked momentarily in Valjean, and he has compassion. In keeping with his virtue, the bishop forgives the convict.

Prominent Christian philosopher Jean Luc Marion writes that the essence of forgiveness is to give again that which was originally given but disregarded in ingratitude. But what is given again here from the virtuous priest to the vicious convict is Jean Valjean’s own virtue, his own good soul, which was lost in memory over the course of those nineteen years but is now given back. Upon granting forgiveness, Bishop Myriel says to Jean Valjean, “Now, go in peace. . . . Forget not, never forget that you have promised me to use this silver to become a better man. . . . Jean Valjean, my brother, you belong no longer to evil, but to good. It is your soul that I am buying for you. I withdrew it from dark thoughts and from the spirit of perdition and I give it to God!”1

In the end, human virtues and vices teach us several things about the Christian moral life. First, these character traits mark an enduring individual moral identity. The bishop’s virtues and the convict’s vices, once acquired, are difficult to lose. Second, our virtues and vices are contagious and shape the character of those around us. The convict’s character was shaped by his fellow prisoners, but it was also eventually converte...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: On Being Good
• Chapter 2: On Being Human
• Chapter 3: On Being Graced
• Chapter 4: On Being Temporal
• Chapter 5: On Being Embodied
• Chapter 6: On Being Sanctified
• Chapter 7: On Being Reconciled
• Chapter 8: On Being Loved
• Benediction
• Bibliography