The Art of Being Good

Uncovering the Basics of Virtue

Winslow Homer, “Snap the Whip,” 1872, via Wikimedia Commons.

The Need for Cultivation

I spent the morning watching our seven-month-old as he attempted to conquer the world—his bright eyes surveying with rapt attention, wonder exuding from every pore, muscles taut in exploration and discovery—everything in him reaching for understanding and achievement, striving toward truth and goodness. Watching our little boy, I was again reminded that our greatest drive—one might even say our primal instinct—is this inner impulsion toward truth and goodness. This powerful drive is evidently a most important feature of human life, perhaps the most important, and everything in our little boy strains forward as a result of its powerful thrust.

But this drive is also wild.

Wild, not in the sense of chaotic and messy, and therefore problematic, but in the entirely natural sense of not-yet-gardened. It is the wild of nature before the activity of a gardener, bold and intense, fierce and powerful—yet also good, with a goodness that is in need only of our intervention to bring it home. In the same way as the wilds of nature need a gardener to flourish, so too this interior drive requires our cultivation if it is to take its proper shape.

The reason for this is found in the fact that God does not create the human (or indeed, anything) “fully made,” but rather furnishes us with an aptitude to develop over the course of time—and thereby gradually attain our natural perfection. From this we see that from the outset of our lives we are established in the privileged position of being collaborators with God in our own creation, for, as St. Thomas notes, “the dignity of causality is imparted even to creatures” by God.

The Role of Virtue

Now, this is exactly where virtue comes in, for virtue is this very cultivation of the wild in our nature so that what is primitive in our being can assume its proper shape in our life. This intervention takes place through our choices and their related actions, insofar as these actions leave a trace upon us, so that slowly through time these same actions can be progressively encoded in our being.

This encoding is of the greatest significance.

Its significance is neatly summarized by St. Gregory of Nyssa in a quotation referenced by Pope St. John Paul II in the encyclical Veritatis Splendor (and which I never get tired of citing):

All things subject to change and to becoming never remain constant, but continually pass from one state to another, for better or worse… Now, human life is always subject to change; it needs to be born ever anew… But here birth does not come about by foreign intervention, as is the case with bodily beings… it is the result of a free choice. Thus, we are in a certain way our own parents, creating ourselves as we will, by our decisions.¹

This is evidently a characteristically modern sentiment, closely associated with contemporary existentialism, especially in its atheistic bent, even while St. Gregory was a Christian priest and bishop who lived in the fourth century. Yet, in similarity to atheistic existentialism, this Father of the Church claims that we are our own makers, creating ourselves as we will, over the whole of our lives, choice by choice.

However, lest this be misunderstood, what we find in St. Gregory is definitely not the same as that proposed by contemporary existentialism. Whereas such existentialism encourages us to create “what” we are, and thus disregard both nature and its Creator by attempting to determine our nature out of ourselves, St. Gregory reasons that we are fated by nature to determine “who” we are to become.

Who, not what, this is the genius of the Christian existentialism of St. Gregory, and this is precisely where virtue shows up, for the kind of self-creation commended by Christianity is achieved in a formation that comes to fruition in the excellence of virtue, and only in virtue. This fruition is simultaneously human perfection and union with God—for these are one and the same in the end—and this responsibility to rise toward God through gaining virtue is a primal dignity of being human.

Now, to rightly understand this superlative responsibility—that we are ordained to perfect God’s gift through our own free cooperation—then we have to develop a picture of virtue that builds from the ground up. And this means that we must begin with the already indicated seminal character of human nature, and the corresponding significance of self-formation toward bringing that nature to its proper completion.

A simple question forcefully illustrates this point: “What differentiates an adult from a baby, primarily and chiefly?” The answer is habit… but let us see why.

The Necessity of Habits

Though there are obviously many differences between adult and baby, since adults are bigger, heavier, and more well-developed, such naturally determined bodily differences are nowhere near as important as those determined by habit. These latter include all that makes up the basic abilities of human life, such as coordinated movement and everything that depends on such movement, like eating, dressing, and washing, walking, playing, and talking, and even counting, reading, and writing, even though many of the latter require a high degree of greater interior engagement. And they also include all those things we call skills, like craftsmanship and other technical abilities, playing games and sports, performing music and dance, and creating all kinds of artistic works, whether fine art or beautiful literature, all of which most certainly require profound interior engagement.

Now, despite the seemingly ordinary nature of these activities, whether those basic or those skill-based, the abilities immediately grounding their performance are actually habits. These abilities are learned, slowly and arduously over time, through the choices we enact and the actions we perform. Even though the seminal ground of such abilities exists in us by nature—in the various natural powers grounding our actions—this ground must be activated if our nature is to unfold toward its proper stature. And, as indicated, this activation happens through our choices and actions, after much repetition and a high measure of failure, before eventual success and final refinement.

Hard-won habituation is then the most important factor differentiating adult from baby, since habits are the shape the past takes in our being in the here and now, while habits also shape the possibilities available for our future actions. As St. Thomas notes, “habits are necessary that [our natural] powers be determined toward the good,” and “habits are perfections. But perfection is of the greatest necessity to a thing.”

Growing in Freedom

Now, let us be perfectly clear about the significance of all this. First, through habituation we are not only disposed to live a basically good life, but we are made capable of living that life well, with a high level of proficiency and self-mastery. Habits make us free and powerful in the attainment of all kinds of goodness. Then, while the process of acquiring habits requires much attention, focus, and concentration, when we finally acquire habits, our consciousness and energy are freed up for other things: the performance of other actions and the attainment of further habits. Since habits consign their associated actions to our rearview mirror, so to speak, they liberate us to follow through on our other interests toward the attainment of ever higher degrees of goodness.

Evidently then, from all that has been said, we see that the abilities we acquire through habituation are not natural in the strict sense of the word, since they do not follow directly upon human nature and its natural powers. Rather, they are connatural, both because their seeds are found already in our natural powers and because they represent the fitting development of these same powers.

Though we tend to think of coordinated movement and basic provision as proper to human nature, and though we often make the mistake of thinking that the activities of work and play are perfectly natural, raw and keen, these abilities are actually acquired with painstaking effort. Therefore, most of what we regard as natural in human life is actually habituation, and to live a fully human life one must be deeply and broadly habituated.

The reason we slip into these mistaken ways of thinking is because the effort we expend in habituation eventually becomes so encoded in our being that actions arising from our habits become “second nature” to us, and are thus experienced as all but entirely natural and free. This is part of the brilliance of habituation, their thorough integration with our being and their corresponding seamless connaturalness.

However, even should we have acquired all these significant habits—both those by which we accomplish the basics of life, and those by which we navigate life with creativity—we must still acquire the most important of habits, those we call virtues.

Certain human habits are called virtues because they are most closely tied to the perfection of the human as human, and because they are those that make us most free as human. Simply put, by acquiring virtue we learn to “do” human well, since we not only come to realize goods both basic and creative, but we also learn how to live a life charged with human goodness in all its dimensions. And, most importantly, we learn to live this very life with stability, readiness, ease, and joy, the four markers of all true virtue (or indeed, habituation more broadly).

Virtue then also enables us to orient all other habits toward goodness in a definitive way. Since basic habits and skills are indifferent to how we orient them and can be turned toward goodness or evil, we need virtues in order to orient these habits aright in our lives so that they can be deployed always only for the true good, and without ever reaping harm in our lives.

Now, in all these ways, we discover that the perfection of human nature is entrusted to each human individual, and indeed to the human community and human culture more broadly (for, as we will see in future essays, all of human life is co-educational). The intended determination of human nature takes time and passes through the cultivation of many habits before ideally coming to completion in virtue.

Virtue makes us fully human, fully free and fully powerful. And it is because of this that virtue disposes us toward realizing the destiny for which God has made us: our perfection, both individual and communal, as well as God’s own gifted presence. This is why the primal human instinct that drives us forward—the chief dynamism of baby and adult alike—comes to fruition only via the excellence of virtue.

And it is because of all this that Christ says, “unless your virtue surpasses that of the scribes and the Pharisees, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven” (Mt. 5:20).

Evidently then, we can learn a lot from babies, for we need only wonder at the glory of God’s image enfleshed in their little bodies to discover the character of the central dynamism of human life before the face of God.

Now that we have the basics of habituation in view and are on the threshold of understanding virtue, I leave off here in order to turn to an appropriately detailed understanding of virtue itself in the next installment.

About the Author: Dr. Robert McNamara is lecturer in philosophy and department head at St. Patrick’s Pontifical University, Ireland, adjunct professor of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville, USA, while also tutoring periodically at the ITI Catholic University, Austria, and the Maryvale Institute, England. Robert is an associate series editor of Edith Stein Studies, an associate scholar of the Hildebrand Project, a research fellow at the Institute for the Study of Man and Woman, and a founding member of the Aquinas Institute of Ireland (currently suspended). Having studied physics, computing, philosophy, and theology, Robert brings a multidisciplinary approach to his work while exploring anthropological and metaphysical themes in ancient, medieval, and phenomenological thinkers, with a defined focus on philosophical personalism in the Christian tradition. He currently resides in Carlow, Ireland, with his wife, Caroline, and their five children.

1. Veritatis splendor, § 71; citing De Vita Moysis, II, 2-3: PG 44, 327-328.