Reverence is an ancient virtue that survives among us in half-forgotten patterns of civility, in moments of inarticulate awe, and in nostalgia for the lost ways of traditional cultures. We have the word “reverence” in our language, but we scarcely know how to use it. Right now it has no place in secular discussions of ethics or political theory. Even more surprisingly, reverence is missing from modern discussions of the ancient cultures that prized it.
Reverence begins in a deep understanding of human limitations; from this grows the capacity to be in awe of whatever we believe lies outside our control—God, truth, justice, nature, even death. The capacity for awe, as it grows, brings with it the capacity for respecting fellow human beings, flaws and all. This in turn fosters the ability to be ashamed when we show moral flaws exceeding the normal human allotment. The Greeks before Plato saw reverence as one of the bulwarks of society, and the immediate followers of Confucius in China thought much the same. Both groups wanted to see reverence in their leaders, because reverence is the virtue that keeps leaders from trying to take tight control of other people’s lives. Simply put, reverence is the virtue that keeps human beings from trying to act like gods.
To forget that you are only human, to think you can act like a god—this is the opposite of reverence. Ancient Greeks thought that tyranny was the height of irreverence, and they gave the famous name of hubris to the crimes of tyrants. An irreverent soul is arrogant and shameless, unable to feel awe in the face of things higher than itself. As a result, an irreverent soul is unable to feel respect for people it sees as lower than itself—ordinary people, prisoners, children. The two failures go together, in both Greek and Chinese traditions. If an emperor has a sense of awe, this will remind him that Heaven is his superior—that he is, as they said in ancient China, the Son of Heaven. And any of us is better for remembering that there is someone, or Someone, to whom we are children; in this frame of mind we are more likely to treat all children with respect. And vice versa: If you cannot bring yourself to respect children, you are probably deficient in the ability to feel that anyone or anything is higher than you.
Reverence has more to do with politics than with religion. We can easily imagine religion without reverence; we see it, for example, wherever religion leads people into aggressive war or violence. But power without reverence—that is a catastrophe for all concerned. Power without reverence is aflame with arrogance, while service without reverence is smoldering toward rebellion. Politics without reverence is blind to the general good and deaf to advice from people who are powerless. And life without reverence? Entirely without reverence? That would be brutish and selfish, and it had best be lived alone.
It is a natural mistake to think that reverence belongs to religion. It belongs, rather, to community. Wherever people try to act together, they hedge themselves around with some form of ceremony or good manners, and the observance of this can be an act of reverence. Reverence lies behind civility and all of the graces that make life in society bearable and pleasant. But in our time we hear more praise of irreverence than we do of reverence, especially in the media. That is because we naturally delight in mockery and we love making fun of solemn things. It is not because, in our heart of hearts, we despise reverence. In my view, the media are using the word “irreverent” for qualities that are not irreverent at all. A better way to say what they have in mind would be “bold, boisterous, unrefined, unimpressed by pretension”—all good things. Reverence is compatible with these and with almost every form of mockery. The one great western philosopher who praises anything like reverence is Nietzsche, who is also the most given to mockery. Reverence and a keen eye for the ridiculous are allies: both keep people from being pompous or stuck up. So don’t think that this book is an attack on laughter. Far from it.
Another easy mistake to make about reverence is to confuse it with respect. Respect is sometimes good and sometimes bad, sometimes wise and sometimes silly. It is silly to respect the pratings of a pompous fool; it is wise to respect the intelligence of any student. Reverence calls for respect only when respect is really the right attitude. To pay respect to a tyrant would not be reverent; it would be weak and cowardly. The most reverent response to a tyrant is to mock him. All of this is because reverence is a kind of virtue. A virtue is a capacity to do what is right, and what is right in a given case—say, respect or mockery for an authority figure—depends on many things.
Reverence is one of the strengths in any good person’s character. Such strengths are called “virtues,” and the study of virtues forms an important branch of ethics. Virtue ethics makes a strong assumption: that some people are better than others because they have greater strengths of character—stronger virtues, in other words. Virtues are sources of good behavior. Moral rules and laws set standards for doing right, but there is nothing about a rule that makes you feel like following it. In fact, there is something about many rules that makes many of us feel like breaking them. According to virtue ethics, a good person is one who feels like doing what is right. People who do good are aware of moral rules, but so are people who do bad. The difference is virtue. Virtue is the source of the feelings that prompt us to behave well. Virtue ethics takes feelings seriously because feelings affect our lives more deeply than beliefs do.
Virtue ethics holds that you learn a virtue as your capacity for feelings is attuned over years of experience. You may learn rules intellectually, and therefore you may learn or forget them very quickly. But virtues are habits of feeling, and these are much harder to learn or to forget. A fine violin that has not been played for many years will not stay in tune, and when it is first played it will have an ugly sound. A superior instrument must be played well, year after year, for it to sound beautiful. So it is with moral character. You may have as good equipment as anyone, but if your feelings have not been well played upon over the years, you will not stay in tune, and you will not respond well to life’s challenges.
Virtues grow in us through being used, and they are used mainly by people living or working together. A family develops common virtues by the way its members live together, a team by the way its members play together, and so on. If you are surrounded by vice, you will find it hard to stay in tune with virtue. By the same token, a team or family will find it hard to cultivate virtues unless every member helps. Virtue ethics, then, deals with strengths that people develop in communities. Communities, in turn, depend on the strengths of their members.
I am interested in the virtues we should be cultivating today, as I write. But I begin my work from two classic models—one ancient Greek, the other ancient Chinese—because of their clarity, their beauty, and their apparent difference from each other. These two ancient civilizations were set too far apart to have had any communication (unlike India, which had early communication with both). If we find a common thread in Greek and Chinese ideals, we should take it seriously. It may well turn out to be a kind of thread that any society needs if it is to sew itself into an enduring shape. If so, reverenceis a cardinal virtue, like justice or courage, and not the particular property of this culture or that. I don’t think we should imitate ancient Greek or Chinese culture, but I believe we are better off for studying them. Both peoples cared deeply and thought long about the meaning of ceremonies in the texture of their religious and political lives, and in this meaning they saw the deeper value of reverence.
We have ceremonies in our own time too, but we try not to think about what they mean. In fact, I believe reverence gives meaning to much that we do, yet the word has almost passed out of our vocabulary. Because we do not understand reverence, we don’t really know what we are doing in much of our lives, and therefore we are in no position to think about how to do it better.
Reverence compels me to confess that I do not know exactly what reverence is. I can’t do any better for justice or courage or wisdom, though I have a pretty good idea in each case. Take courage. I would say that courage is a well-developed capacity for feeling confidence and fear in the right places, at the right times, and in the right degrees of intensity; that is, courage lies somewhere between fearlessness (which often looks like courage) and timidity (which no one would mistake for courage). This account of courage has a grand history—it comes from Aristotle—but is hardly a complete definition. I would call it a definition-schema—something like a form full of blanks that we need to fill in as best we can, after life experience and critical reflection. The schema for courage tells us that we can’t go wrong by being courageous, but it does not tell us how to be courageous. It points to a distinction between courage and fearlessness, but it does not spell out the difference between them—aside from the obvious point that one is always good while the other can go too far. Before filling in the blanks in the schema we would need to know the difference between right and wrong. That looks easy enough in some cases, but it seems to call for divine wisdom in others.
I cannot claim divine wisdom, and so I cannot offer a full account of any of the virtues, least of all reverence. My schema for reverence looks like this: Reverence is the well-developed capacity to have the feelings of awe, respect, and shame when these are the right feelings to have. This says that reverence is a good thing, but not much more, except by pointing to further questions. Sometimes it is right to be respectful and sometimes wrong; that’s obvious. Sometimes our feelings should rise to the level of awe, but not always. So when should we be respectful, and how deep should our respect be in each case? Of what should we be in awe? No capsule definition will tell you. Nor can any human wisdom give you a complete and final answer. The best answer I can give is this book.
Some writers use the words “reverence” and “respect” as synonyms, but these words are not synonyms in this book. I need one word for an ideal, “reverence,” and other words for the feelings—respect, awe, and shame—that may or may not serve that ideal. You can never follow an ideal too closely, but you can have too much—or too little—of the feelings to which it gives rise. You are too lavish with awe, for example, if you are in awe of your own wisdom and treat it as sacred. That’s arrogant, and it’s not much better if you feel that way about the accumulated wisdom of your own tradition, for both are human products. On the other hand, you are too sparing of awe if you never feel awe for a great whale, a majestic redwood, or a range of tall mountains. You need not enjoy these things—awe can be frightening, after all—and you need not be moved by them every time you encounter them. But if you do not have the capacity to be awestruck at the sight of the majesties of nature you are missing part of the usual human endowment.
The topic surprised me. I never expected to write a book about reverence, but I came to this as I explored material for a footnote to a chapter I was writing in a still unfinished tome on ancient Greek humanism. But I soon came to think that this abandoned topic deserves to have a new life.
My footnote was on Thucydides, the most thoughtful of the ancient Greek historians. Writing in the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Thucydides adopted the humanist position that gods do not intervene in human affairs. He believed that purely human currents in history would bring about most of the results that traditional thinkers expected from the gods: If a tyrant rises too far and too fast, or if he exercises his power with too much arrogance, other people will fear him and hate him, and they—not the gods—will unite to bring him down. But if the gods never punish human beings, why bother with reverence? I used to think that it was only fear of the gods that made the ancient Greeks reverent. Thucydides does not seem to fear the gods, but he fears human arrogance, and therefore he cares a great deal about reverence, which he treats as a cardinal virtue. Some scholars argue, in spite of appearances, that he does believe the gods punish human beings when they violate reverence. But then why doesn’t he say so? That was the puzzle I took on in my footnote.
The footnote exploded as I went deeper and deeper into the concept of reverence. I had been content in former years to accept Plato’s view that reverence is not a primary virtue at all. Plato taught that all you need do for reverence is to practice the other virtues that the gods favor, principally justice. Plato was afraid that the Greeks of his day were trying to use reverence to win over the gods, in the hope that the gods would forgive any kind of wickedness on the part of people who gave abundant sacrifices. That is why Plato treated reverence as a part of justice, so that no one would think you could be reverent without also being just. But if reverence is part of justice, then you will have it all if you cultivate justice as a whole—as you should—and you need not spend another moment’s thought on reverence.
After Plato, I turned to the ancient poets and became disenchanted with Plato’s simple theory. From Homer through Euripides, the poets treat reverence as a substantial virtue, and I began to see their point. More surprising, I began to suspect that reverence has more to do with power than with religion. I was struck by the fact that Thucydides prizes reverence while condemning credulity in people who persist in seeing a divine plan behind the natural consequences of their own mistakes. If Thucydides believes that reverence is good but that credulity is foolish, he is plainly thinking of reverence as a moral virtue that is detachable from traditional beliefs about the gods. Could this be possible? Could reverence be detached from belief? The answer turned out to be complicated. Reverence depends to some extent on belief, but not at all on formal creeds. And so I realized with shock and delight that reverence could—in theory, at least—be shared across religions. In fact, what religious people today admire in other religions cannot be faith (since they reject most of the content of other faiths), but reverence. So they know about reverence, though they don’t know to call it by that name.
I began to feel that something has been lost in modern times. This virtue, so important to the ancients, has fallen beneath the horizons of our intellectual vision. And yet reverence is all around us, even in the most ordinary ceremonies of our lives. It is as if we have forgotten one of the cylinders that has been chugging along in the vehicle of human society since its beginning. And now, because we do not know the cylinder is there, we have no idea how to tune it up, or even how we might gum it up completely by inattention. The more I pondered this, the more I wanted to know what reverence is, not just to the ancient Greeks, but for us—for all of us trying to live good human lives. If reverence is a cardinal virtue, it belongs to the family of justice and courage and wisdom, and those are ideals that bear study in their own right, not merely as they occur within the boundaries of this or that culture.
My quest for universal reverence took me out of ancient Greece and across to ancient China, then back to the European tradition and to writers of our own time. I soon found that I had been reading the wrong books. Most modern philosophers have forgotten about reverence. But poets are aware of it, as they have always been. I might have expected that Yeats would turn out to be a poet of reverence. And Tennyson. But Philip Larkin? This has all been a delightful surprise.
In studying reverence I have come to a new view about how ethics should be discussed and about how a book like this should be written. A writer who is serious about virtue can’t stay behind the boundaries of a single academic discipline; the subject brings together poetry and philosophy and the history of ideas and puts them all to work on a huge live-wire of a question—how we should live our lives. Also, a writer about virtue must not expect to deliver the sharp-edged definitions or the clear criteria that some philosophers crave. Aristotle urges us—with virtue in mind—not to ask the same precision of ethics that we would of mathematics. Poets often understand virtues better than philosophers, so that the wisdom of poets over time is essential to this subject. Also essential to the study of virtue is the experience that you, the reader, bring to the subject. Virtues are about emotions, and you can’t learn much about emotions from a book. I could write a volume ten times the length of this one, and it would still leave many questions for you to work out on your own. Reverent students of ethics will understand that this is a project not for a book but a lifetime.
Why write about reverence? Because we have forgotten what it means. Because reverence fosters leadership and education. Most important, because reverence kindles warmth in friendship and family life. And because without reverence, things fall apart. People do not know how to respect each other and themselves. An army cannot tell the difference between what it is and a gang of bandits. Without reverence, we cannot explain why we should treat the natural world with respect. Without reverence, a house is not a home, a boss is not a leader, an instructor is not a teacher. Without reverence, we would not even know how to learn reverence. To teach reverence, you must find the seeds of reverence in each person and help them grow.
Religious wars are endemic in our time, which is a time with little care for reverence. Perhaps these wars are cooling down in some places, but they are heating up in others, as they were when as I wrote this book in 1999, and even now as I update it in 2013. If a religious group thinks it speaks and acts as God commands in all things, this is a failure of reverence. A group like that may turn violent and feel they are doing so in good faith. Nothing is more dangerous than that feeling.
War is nothing new, and neither are killer strains of religion, pathogens that take hold of a people and send them into paroxysms of violence. War and religion will always be with us; we can’t expect to shake them off. But we can ask what it is in religion that might keep the dogs of war on leash, and what it is that whips them into a frenzy and lets them loose. It is reverence that moderates war in all times and cultures, irreverence that urges it on to brutality. The voices that call in the name of God for aggressive war have lost sight of human limitations. They have lost reverence, even when they serve a religious vision. So it is when a people believe that their god commands them to take land from others, or insists that they force others into their way of thinking. Even when the goal of war is something as noble as freedom or peace, it may be irreverent to think we can impose these goals by violence.
When Agamemnon waited on the beach with his ships and chariots and with the men who hungered to capture Troy, the winds remained hostile, and he asked a diviner what he should do. He had faith in his diviner, and the diviner had faith in his power to speak for the gods. He said he knew what the gods desired—the life of the king’s daughter. And so Iphigenia came, summoned to her wedding in all the veiled finery of a bride. At the altar stood her father with the priest. But there was no young husband, only the great sharp knife poised to end her life.
The poet Lucretius tells this tale, as I have done, to be the introduction for his work of philosophy. He ends with the strong line, tantum religio potuit suadere malorum (1.101)—“so great is the power of religion to lead us to evil.” He gives us Iphigenia to stand for all the huge unholy cost of war when it is driven by men who believe they know what the gods want. But he does not mean to condemn everything that falls under religion. Lucretius may be hostile to some kinds of faith, but he begins his work with an invocation to the goddess who stands for Nature. He too is a poet of reverence.
Reverence runs across religions and even outside them through the fabric of any community, however secular. We may be divided from one another by our beliefs, but never by reverence. If you desire peace in the world, do not pray that everyone share your beliefs. Pray instead that all may be reverent.