We noted in the previous chapter that most theists contend, against materialism and its concomitant position of determinism, that human beings are free. This is especially the case with religious theists, who insist that human beings make morally significant choices and that choices can be morally significant only if human beings make them freely. Theists do not insist that human freedom is unlimited—we cannot choose to be eight feet tall, for example, or to have three arms—but they think we do make some important moral decisions that are free.
Of course, theists think that the most important choice we make is the choice for God. If God is the sort of being that theists think he is, then above all else we need to choose God. It is in making such a choice that human salvation and well-being—in a word, “happiness”—consist. In order to choose God, though, one has to love God; but if one loves God, one has to love what God loves, and God, it is claimed, loves everybody. Thus, we see, to cite one example, that in Christian theism love of God and love of neighbor are closely linked, and it is claimed that if we live such a life of loving God and neighbor, we are living the best life possible for a human being.
But theistic believers are not the only ones who have an answer to the question about the best life possible for man. Since the time of Socrates, philosophical reason has been interested in the same question. Indeed, the question about the best life possible for man seems to be the very question that animates the dialogues Plato wrote about Socrates, and Plato seems to answer that question by insisting that philosophy—loving wisdom—is itself the best life possible for man. The best life possible, Plato seems to make his Socrates say, is for serious persons to meet every day and discuss seriously the best life possible.
But this gives rise to a very interesting iteration of the question about the relationship between faith and reason. Faith seems to say that living a life of faith is the best way to live, but philosophy seems to say that the philosophical life is highest. Are the two accounts compatible? May they be integrated? This is the question with which we will be concerned in the final chapters of this book.
Studying the relationship between faith and reason as it pertains to the question about the best way to live means that we will be considering questions pertaining to ethics or morality. Another way to put this is to say that we will be considering the relationship between theological ethics (faith) and philosophical ethics (reason), or moral theology and moral philosophy. The problem we encounter immediately is that theistic believers do not all say the same thing about the best way to live (that is, about moral theology), and neither do philosophers all agree about moral philosophy.
With respect to a basic moral orientation, religious theistic believers do agree that all men were created to know, love, and serve God, and they agree that human well-being, salvation, and happiness consist in uniting ourselves to God by means of those very acts of knowing, loving, and serving; nevertheless, when it comes to more particular cases, the believers do not always hold the same things. To cite an obvious example, Jewish law, Islamic law, and Christian law do not always agree. Differences are perhaps even more marked among philosophers, including theistic ones, where it almost seems that no two agree with each other about anything at all! In speaking of faith, reason, and ethics in the next several chapters, then, we will be speaking about what is generally the case about believers or philosophers, or what is so most of the time. Painting with broad strokes, we will be offering a sketch that should help our readers find their bearings in pursuing the task of integrating reason and faith when it comes to matters of ethics and politics. Our treatment will not cover all the theological and philosophical complexities that arise when turning to these issues, for they admit of a great degree of variation and qualification. Rather, our goal will be to explain in outline how theistic faith and philosophical reason have been integrated to address the question of how best to live.
A. Happiness and the Virtues according to Faith
According to religious theists (that is, Jews, Christians, and Muslims), God is the sort of being who merits such things as worship, praise, fidelity, love, and obedience, for God is the greatest good for all that is, including and especially human beings. What we most need, then, is to draw nearer to God or even to seek a kind of unification with God, so that God’s will becomes our will. Thus, we hear Paul, for example, talking about the need to “put on Christ”, and he often refers to himself as a doulos, or slave, of Christ. The very word “Islam” means submission—submission to God’s will. Abraham follows God’s sudden call to leave his homeland and go to a place he does not yet know. Mary says, “Let it be to me according to your word.” Examples could be multiplied almost endlessly, but the point is clear enough to anyone who has encountered the teaching of a theistic religion: God is supremely worthy; therefore, we need to follow God, to will what God wills, to love what God loves, and, in uniting our wills with God, to become one with God.
In seeking to make our wills one with God’s, theistic faith says, we must develop certain inner dispositions or enduring qualities of character. In other words, we must develop “virtues”. Within Christianity, these virtues needed to unite us to God are usually understood as being three in number: faith, hope, and charity. The person who gave the Christians their triune list is Paul, and the most famous text in which he speaks of these is 1 Corinthians 13:13: “So faith, hope, love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love” (cf. 1 Thess 1:3). This text is key for Christian theists in that it not only provides the list of what would come to be known as the “theological virtues”, but it also ranks love, or charity, as the highest of the three.
These three words will of course be very familiar to those of our readers who are Christians, but their meanings are perhaps more complicated than we might think. The Christian tradition came to think of “faith” as being an intellectual virtue in the sense that, by means of the virtue of faith, Christians hold to certain claims about reality. Faith, however, as we saw in the very beginning of this book, is not identical to reason, and so it might be confusing to refer to faith as an intellectual virtue, or as a virtue pertaining to intellect. Faith seems to be more like opinion than reason in that it does not grasp fully the reasons why what is held by faith is so. While all this is surely true, nevertheless, faith is similar to reason in that faith makes claims about how reality is, and therefore faith is the theological virtue that most resembles intellectual virtue.
Sometimes fides, or faith, is divided into the fides quae and the fides a quo, which we could translate as “the faith that one believes” and “the faith by which one believes”. The former would be what we mean when we think of a set of propositions that “the faith” holds. Thus, Christian faith in this sense is what a believer accepts in reciting the creed’s articles. Notice how the creeds begin: “I believe in. . .” or “We believe in. . .” In the actual creeds, these words would be followed by a set of propositions stating what or who one believes in. Faith in this first sense is a noun.
The fides a quo, or the faith by which a person believes, is the act done by a person in believing. By means of faith or “faithing” or believing in this second sense, one accepts the doctrines of faith in the first sense. The virtue of faith, its inner disposition, is not the doctrines or articles or propositions, but the act within the soul whereby one accepts those doctrines or articles even though one does not understand perfectly the reasons why those doctrines or articles are true. Faith in this sense is more like a verb, for it names an activity.
Our contemporary usage of the word “hope” actually does not correspond all that well with Paul’s meaning. When we use the word in a sentence such as “I hope I win the lottery”, we actually mean something like “I wish I would win the lottery.” Such “wishing”, of course, may well be for what is not attainable. We wish for a lottery win, but we really do not anticipate winning at all. In the New Testament, on the other hand, the word “hope” has overtones of “trust” or even perhaps “fidelity”; but one usually trusts or has faith in a particular person. Thus, Christians do not simply “hope” in Christ as a sort of wish; rather, they are to have confidence in Christ as a suitable object of trust and fidelity. In hoping, they anticipate the future with confidence; they do not simply wish for something in the future that may well not happen at all.
Paul’s word for the third and greatest virtue is agapë, which is frequently translated simply as “love”. Love means so many different things today, however, that it seems better to stay with the more traditional translation of “charity”, which comes from the Latin word caritas, which can translate the Greek word agapë, which can translate the Hebrew word hesed. Christians are to have charity toward God and toward their neighbor, but their neighbor, the New Testament suggests, is every one. If we have caritas for God, we love God, but if we love God, we have to love what God loves, and God loves everyone. Hence, charity for God spills over, as it were, into the love of neighbor.
The meaning of the word “charity” has sometimes been restricted so that it refers only to material donations for our neighbor’s material well-being. To love or have charity for our neighbor, however, actually refers to something broader. To love another person is to want what is best for him, and what is best might include material well-being but would surely extend beyond it. Thus, the Hebrew word hesed, which could be translated in some contexts as “charity”, is often translated today with the broad phrase “loving-kindness”. Acts of charity would include, then, not only donations for the relief of the material wants of the poor, but also acts of kindness generally. Charity is said by Paul to be the highest of the three theological virtues, which would seem to imply that ultimately the affective aspect of the soul is more important than even the intellective aspect. Knowing God, it seems, is good; but loving God is better.
B. Happiness and the Virtues according to Reason
Within ancient Greek philosophy, the word for virtue was arête, which originally meant simply “excellence”. A great many ancient philosophers, beginning it seems with Socrates, asked questions about what the excellent qualities of the human soul are. Philosophical reflection on virtue therefore preceded Aristotle, but Aristotle, the student of Plato and, indirectly, of Socrates, wrote the most complete and most accessible analysis of the topic, and thus his principal book on virtue, his Nicomachean Ethics, came to be the most widely studied philosophical statement on the subject. Even today, Aristotle probably still holds the honor of being the most important philosopher of virtue. This is not to deny that a great many thoughtful people have also written on virtue, but if a single author had to be chosen to represent reason’s statement on virtue, Aristotle would be that one.
Aristotle divided the excellent qualities exhibited by man into two kinds, the moral virtues and the intellectual virtues. The latter are maybe easier to understand; the rational mind that exhibits excellence in the various rational activities has intellectual virtue. The supreme intellectual virtue Aristotle terms “wisdom”, or sophia. Such a quality can only be acquired through study and learning. Moral virtues belong more to the affective rather than to the rational aspect or “part” of the soul. Aristotle says that emotions and passions do not, strictly speaking, belong to reason, but they can be trained or guided by reason. Desires and fears can be habituated so that they contribute to the overall excellence of the human soul rather than detract from it, and the result of such habituation is the possession of moral virtue. These moral virtues are not simply learned through study like the intellectual virtues; instead, they must be practiced so that they become second nature, as it were.
Even prior to Aristotle, the Greeks had suggested that virtue was fourfold, consisting of bravery, moderation, justice, and prudence. Aristotle suggests in the Ethics that there are quite a number of virtues in addition to these four, but he still seems to give a certain primacy or at least emphasis to them. In his analysis, bravery and moderation are the first moral virtues man needs to acquire. The human soul experiences from a very young age certain primal fears and desires; bravery and moderation enable a person to control these fears and desires rather than to be controlled by them. Justice is the virtue whereby one acts with excellence toward others, so that one treats all others properly. Prudence is actually an intellectual virtue according to Aristotle, and therefore it is different from the other three cardinal virtues, which are moral virtues. Prudence differs from the highest intellectual virtue, wisdom, in that prudence is concerned with the question of what is good for man, whereas wisdom seeks to acquire the truth about everything there is to be known about the whole cosmos.
If one habituated oneself in the moral virtues, Aristotle suggested, one was well on the way to living well or living happily. One also needed to acquire the intellectual virtues, though, to be truly or supremely happy. To be sure, there could be interruptions or obstacles to one’s happiness, but the person possessing true virtue, Aristotle implied, could usually surmount those obstacles and still live well.
C. The Integration of Faith and Reason on the Question of the Virtues
We have already noted that Aristotle’s Ethics came to be accepted by many as philosophy’s supreme statement on how best to live. This widespread respect meant that the book eventually came to be read within Islam, within Judaism, and within Christianity. Thus, the question of how philosophy’s statement on human excellence should be understood in relation to the statement on human excellence provided by Sacred Scripture was a problem faced by all the theistic faiths. Within Christianity, the encounter between the philosopher Aristotle and the believer Paul was especially (though hardly exclusively) facilitated by Thomas Aquinas.
Thomas clearly saw that the sort of human excellence Paul and the New Testament talked about was different from the sort of human excellence Aristotle and the philosophers discussed. He termed the first sort of excellence “theological virtue” and the second sort “cardinal virtue”. Theological virtue consisted of the three virtues named by Paul: faith, hope, and charity. The name “cardinal” had been given to the four virtues of courage, moderation, justice, and prudence long before Thomas, but Thomas was happy to borrow it, noting that “cardinal” meant hinge and that the door to eternal life swung open upon such excellent qualities. Adding the set of three theological virtues to the set of four cardinal virtues (three of which were moral virtues and one of which was an intellectual virtue) totaled seven virtues, and seven was of course a number sacred to the Bible and thus a symbol of perfection in Thomas’ view. Thomas’ integrated classification of the virtues, then, looked like this:
The list of cardinal virtues does not appear directly in this diagram, for the list of cardinal virtues is a sort of “highlight” list drawn up by selecting key virtues from the intellectual and moral virtues. The four individual cardinal virtues are italicized in the diagram above.
We have already noted that the moral virtues, in Aristotle’s philosophical view, are acquired by practice. If one wants to become brave, for example, one practices acts of bravery, and eventually one develops the inner disposition or virtue of bravery. An analogy would be playing the piano. If one wants to develop the habit of being a good piano player, one practices playing the piano. The intellectual virtues, such as prudence, are acquired by learning and study. This is perhaps easiest to see with respect to, say, geometry. If one wants to develop the habit of being a good geometer, one studies geometry. Similarly, if one wants to have the habit of prudence, one will have to study human beings and how they act and figure out what is good for them.
What we need to notice now is that the so-called “natural” virtues, in Thomas’ view, are acquired by developing the abilities that man naturally has. Everyone who is not burdened by some particular disability possesses the natural ability to become brave, moderate, just, and prudent. Aristotle had pointed out, and Thomas seems to agree with him, that in fact most people for one reason or another do not develop the moral or intellectual virtues, or at least do not develop them very much. Instead of acting moderately with respect to pleasure and thereby developing the virtue of moderation, most people practice acts of immoderation and develop a corresponding vice. And so, there are actually very few people who have the human excellences about which philosophy speaks. In fact, Aristotle was quite willing to say flat out that good people—those who have moral and intellectual virtue—are very rare. Nevertheless, normally people have the natural ability to become good even if they rarely perfect those abilities.
According to Paul, the Christian theological virtues are acquired very differently. Indeed, the initiative for our acquiring faith, hope, and charity comes from God. It is the grace of the Holy Spirit that pours forth charity into our hearts; faith is something God gives to us rather than something we develop by exercising our natural abilities. This means that the theological virtues, unlike the moral or intellectual virtues, cannot be brought about all by ourselves. We need help from beyond the natural to acquire faith, hope, and charity; there is therefore something “supernatural” about them. In theory, at least, everyone can acquire the natural virtues (that is, the cardinal virtues, whether moral or intellectual), but only those who cooperate with God’s grace can possess faith, hope, and charity.
We can see, then, in outline at least, how Thomas integrates the natural and the supernatural virtues, the virtues known to natural reason or philosophy and the virtues truly understood only through the light of supernatural grace. His conclusion seems to be that Aristotle had understood the moral and intellectual virtues rather well; at least he seems to think that no one, using reason alone, had understood them any better. Thomas also thinks, though, that Paul had an advantage over Aristotle when it came to understanding the best life for man, for Paul had access to God’s revelation, which was especially visible through the Passion, death, and Resurrection of Christ. In light of this self-revelation of God, Paul was able to see that faith, hope, and charity were even higher than the other virtues, and he was able to see that charity was the highest of all. In Thomas’ view, Paul’s theological virtues are not opposed to the “natural” virtues; it is just that the theological are higher or “supernatural”. The very best people will need both sets of virtues; they will have to integrate the two sets in order to enable themselves to be perfected.
D. Conclusion
There are objections that have been raised against the integrative characteristics of Thomas’ treatment of the virtues. Not surprisingly, the main criticisms come from two camps: the rationalists and the fideists.
It is not hard to see why a rationalist is going to object to Thomas’ classification of the virtues. The committed rationalist, rejecting the doctrines of revelation, is going to think that natural virtue is sufficient for man. The rationalist will rest content with Aristotle’s statement on virtue, or at least with some other philosopher’s statement, and not have recourse to Paul or the Qur’an or any other text allegedly inspired by God.
The fideist objects to Thomas’ project because he thinks it better to rest content with the words of Sacred Scripture. Fideism lacks confidence in reason’s ability to tell men how they should live. Why worry about mastering Aristotle when the Scriptures are far superior? Fideism with respect to questions about ethics receives support from the ethical view known in modern times as “relativism” or perhaps “moral skepticism”. This view doubts that reason can tell us anything significant about the best way to live, for the difference between right and wrong is completely relative to each individual’s unique position in the world anyway. If reason cannot guide us in moral matters, however, perhaps revelation can, and if we should decide that reason is not helpful but revelation is, then we would easily become fideists.
Within the history of Christianity, the fideistic objections to Thomas’ integrationist understanding of the virtues especially came to the fore at the time of the Reformation. Some Protestant critics of Thomas especially argued against his attempt to integrate Aristotle’s notion of virtue based on natural abilities into his overall project. We will set aside for now the question of whether these critics were really fideists, but they at least exhibited fideistic tendencies in claiming that human nature, including human reason, is simply too distorted by sin to know anything very useful about virtue. Sinful people, they suggested, have no knowledge or at least so little knowledge of the best life for human beings that the only way out of the human predicament is to rely on the truths revealed in the Scriptures. Revelation itself speaks of the Fall or of the original sin of man, and as a result of this doctrine, we must recognize that natural human reason, even when attempts are made by philosophers to perfect it, just is not up to the task of recovering the truth about human excellence. True human excellence was revealed by Christ on the Cross, and Aristotle, for all his hard work, could not be expected to learn what Christ later revealed. Therefore, if we would live virtuously, we must rely upon the grace of God to grant us the virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
Defenders of Thomas had responses to such arguments, as one might expect. Among other things, they emphasized that the original sin of humanity did not so much destroy our natural ability to know moral virtue as it did our ability to will the virtues. In other words, the integrationists tended to say that man can know what virtue is, but that we have a hard time actually developing such virtues on our own. Aristotle himself had taught that acquiring moral virtue was hard; Thomas and his followers recognized that it was even harder than Aristotle had thought, but they still thought it possible.
As we might imagine, the arguments and counterarguments of this dispute were developed with great subtlety in the wake of the Reformation, and we cannot examine such arguments and counterarguments with anything even approaching the care they deserve in an introductory work such as this. Nevertheless, we should at least by now be able to begin to grasp the basic contours of the debate over the relationship between faith, reason, and virtue.