On Virtue

I remember walking away from the theater after watching Pride and Prejudice two years ago and thinking, "How enormously our society would change, if this was the regular fare of young film-goers!" I had the same experience reading The Story of Ruby Bridges to my second graders when I was a teacher, and of reading Martin Luther King Jr.'s letter from a Birmingham jail to myself.

I think that many have the same experience when reading great literature or poetry, or watching great theater or film. These pieces provoke us to virtue; they expose the folly of sin. Over time, they earn the title classics.

I realize now that likely I will often be writing on virtue, particularly as it relates to parenting, and so have created a new tag to connect the thread. The impetus for my reflection is the Gospel; that impetus is focused by my desire to provide for my daughter (and other children, as God should provide) an education that extols and cultivates true virtue.

At the very moment I begin to explore virtue, I am conscious that this was the fantastic dream of the Greeks, and that many of them did not seek virtue through Christ, in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge. There is an allure to virtue that is prideful, in order to be highly regarded by those who apprehend virtue, and to be distinguished from those who lack it, or even simply to be the possessor of it without the regard of others. I feel that wicked temptation, and so at the outset want to battle against it by defining virtue in the way that Jonathan Edwards did in The Nature of True Virtue:

And it may be asserted in general that nothing is of the nature of true virtue, in which God is not the first and the last, or which, with regard to their exercises in general, have not their first foundation and source in apprehensions of God's supreme dignity and glory, and in answerable esteem and love of him, and have not respect to God as the supreme end. (The Nature of True Virtue, p16)

This is the virtue that I want to explore and extol, and in which I want to participate, not by pride, but by humble trust.