Feature
The Virtue of Marriage
Truly Authentic Sex & Rightly Ordered Love by Tracy Jamison
The classical understanding of virtue is remarkably absent from our modern world. We might consider the practical definition of virtue offered by St. Augustine in The City of God (Book XV, chapter 22), where he describes virtue as "the right order of love" and gives us some helpful examples. When people love to hoard money more than they love to use it for productive and worthwhile enterprises, we call them greedy, because their love of money is not rightly ordered. When they love physical beauty or strength more than spiritual beauty or strength, we call them vain, again because their love is disordered.
The same is true regarding every other kind of good we aspire to attain. Every good ought to be desired in proper balance and due proportion, neither too much nor too little, and with attention to the common good. As Augustine puts it, a good "is loved rightly whenever it is loved ordinately, and it is loved evilly whenever it is loved inordinately."
There is only one good that can never be loved too much, and that is union with God, because God is Love Itself and Goodness Itself. God is the source and perfection of all virtue. "Love Itself is always loved ordinately, because we do well to love that which, when we love it, makes us live well and virtuously," says Augustine. Of course, it is always possible to love God too little.
C. S. Lewis defends this classical understanding of virtue in The Abolition of Man (1947). Virtue is habitually loving things rightly. It can be acquired through imitation and repetition and can be taught through modeling and training. Lewis, following Plato and Aristotle, believes that the primary purpose of education is to habituate students to love things rightly: "Hence the importance, as Plato points out, of having been definitely trained from childhood to like and dislike the proper things; this is what good education means."
Lewis easily demonstrates that this classical concept of education is implicitly present in all cultures—indeed, is the very foundation of human culture. All traditional religions seek moral virtue and that which is divine, even when they are mistaken about its nature. Those who abandon the classical understanding of virtue inevitably fall into some form of subjectivism. They make their own feelings and preferences the standard of goodness, and thereby fail to lead fully human lives. They become self-designed artifacts of their own arbitrary construction.
Delectable & Perfective Goods
The truth of the classical understanding of virtue can be verified from human experience. As we mature, we learn that even though the satisfaction of our desires gives us pleasure, it is not necessarily good and often has negative consequences either for ourselves or for others. Thus, though we might not be familiar with the classical terminology, we all learn the difference between the delectable good and the perfective good. We intuitively recognize the moral distinction that is being made.
A delectable good is that which gives us immediate delight in the conscious satisfaction of a desire. An example is the pleasure of eating tasty food, which certainly gives us great delight. A perfective good, on the other hand, is that which makes us better as persons in some way. With regard to eating, the perfective good is the nutrition that good food provides for our bodies. One thing we quickly discover, even as children, is that the foods with greater nutritional value often do not taste as good as those with less. And so we learn a basic lesson: there is often a difference between what gives us delight and what makes us better.
As we develop morally and intellectually, we begin to recognize virtues, which make us better, and vices, which invariably get us into trouble. And we develop an implicit awareness that our main problem is that we consistently prefer the delectable good to the perfective good, and that this preference often leads us into vice. The awareness of this common human predicament forms the basis for the classical goal of education: to habituate us to take delight in what makes us better or, in other words, to teach us to like what is truly good for us.
This is not a matter to be taken lightly; our personal destiny hangs on our appreciation of this basic fact of life. If we are careless, as we often are, we can easily get confused and go through life drifting from one pleasure to the next, yet wondering why we are so profoundly unhappy. Our very happiness depends upon learning to choose the perfective over the delectable good habitually as a matter of discipline until we reach the point where we actually find the perfective good more delectable. In every aspect of our lives, we either learn this practical lesson and discover the true nature of goodness, or we fall into vice and make ourselves miserable.
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