The Good Life, Part 3A

Originally posted 20 November 2017

So, after a break visiting Austin, a half-week enjoying a visit from my sister, Barbara, days catching up on grading for a class I am teaching online, and beginning a suspense novel just for the pure distraction (but since it concerns American politics, it has turned out not to be a distraction), now I return to Rev. Peter J. Gomes’ book The Good Life.  (Sorry, that sentence was an intemperate grammatical indulgence, but I couldn’t help myself.)  I sit with my sweet wife in The Rumor Mill, the coffee shop attached to the Valley Pike Farm Market.  Colleen works on a paper for one of her classes, and I begin reading Gomes’ book again. 

I am in Part III: The Great Virtues.  This is why I bought the book in the first place.  In retirement, I am returning to one of the first loves of my semi-intellectual life.  This part of the book is about 150 pages long, so I will not attempt to discuss much of it in any depth or detail.  But Gomes’ first sentence flummoxed me right away: “Why is it important, even essential, to know that there are rules, ways, and means, by which to achieve the good life?”  Rules?  Funny, I never thought of “virtues” as “rules.”  The connotation of that word is just too restrictive for my undisciplined and freedom-loving self.  I thought of the virtues more as “goals” or general “principles.”  Of course, as I worry about this I begin to recognize contradictions—such as, isn’t a “principle” also a “rule.”  Or I think of “rules,” border lines on the manuscript page, guides to warn you when your line of type is going beyond practical boundaries of the page.  Or perhaps I should think of “rules of the road,” both the laws and the practical wishes for good driving behavior.  Why as a writer—a person who lives and breathes rule upon rule—should the word “rule” bother me so much? 

This part of Gomes’ book is divided into four chapters.  The first chapter begins by continuing picking apart the concept of “happiness,” separating it from material success and sensual pleasure. In other words, he is writing to the typical American and his or her life ambitions.    Here, for me, Gomes is preaching to the choir, but sometimes it’s good to be reminded.  Gomes has a little equation:  The objective (goodness) is achieved through means (the virtues) expressing the content (faith, hope, and love) and all that has a personal result (happiness).  Then, finally, he approaches the four cardinal virtues (prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude), and employs Thomas Aquinas as his guide.

I am not going to explore each of these here.  I can’t say that I am totally satisfied or moved by Gomes’s work in this chapter.  Gomes is writing as a Christian, obviously, and I think he gives these more or less Greek virtues less attention than they deserve.  He wants to get on to his central concern with the theological virtues—Faith, Hope, and Love.  But also, at this point in my reading and thinking, I am not wanting to dive all that deeply yet into any individual virtue.  I am sort of in the refresher course stage of my studies.  I kind of want to finish this book and move on to other books.  This is perhaps not a good personal quality.  Which virtue contains patience?

Some quick definitions from Gomes, evolving from St. Thomas Aquinas:  1.  Prudence “causes us to do good or to refrain from doing evil.”  2.  Justice “requires rectitude in behavior and due process in human encounter.”  3.  Temperance “restrains the passions.” And 4.  Fortitude “strengthens the soul in the struggle with the passions.”

As read this chapter, I don’t experience these virtues as strict rules, but more as a somewhat flexible set of concepts to measure reality against.  They imply boundaries.  For instance, at what point do I become too inebriated to drive home from a Christmas party?  Is it one drink or three?  Or does the concept of Temperance prohibit me from driving at all, if I have drunk even a little alcohol?  Is it justice for me, as a teacher, to award a passing grade to a student who did not reach minimum passing standards, even if I know that she worked very hard while recovering from spousal abuse?  If so, have I been just toward those who achieved passing standards? 

These questions, residing within the concepts of the cardinal virtues, are why I find these ideas so compelling.  I don’t think they are rules that are correct always in every instance.  Now, that doesn’t mean I consider myself a relativist.  These concepts are like stripes on the highway.  We don’t drive on top of them, never veering right or left.  We drive between the stripes as best we can, correcting ourselves when our attention wanders. 

In Texas, the highway department has begun putting rough corrugated patches beneath the stripes that separate the two lanes going in opposite directions and also on the stripe indicating the outer reaches of the right side of the roadway itself.  If, while driving, you venture too far to the right or to the left, man, do you wake up to a rattle and shaking of the car!  The result is that you refocus and proceed down the middle of your lane.  When one exceeds the outer limits of the cardinal virtues, life provides its own rattling warnings, an arrest, a broken friendship, an illness, a bad evaluation at work, a bounced check.  The trick is to recover and get yourself pointed in the right direction.  Anyway, that is what I am thinking now.  But I started as “measure in all things” kind of guy.

Having said that I will offer my own simplified set of rules based on these virtues.

1.     Don’t be a fool.

2.     Be fair.

3.     Don’t overdo it.

4.     Be strong.

Next, the theological virtues.