The Value of Vices
Contentious thoughts + updates, drafts, and other news!
MLA: My membership dropped by over half this weekend, as readers who migrated from Revue did not re-up. So I would especially welcome you becoming a member or telling a friend. Details about discounts are below (including how to become a member for free).
Now, on to it.
“The web of our life is a mingled yarn, good and ill together.” So says a fairly insignificant character in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well, a delightfully complicated comedy.
Such a description is uncontroversial: every life has its blessings and its burdens, its joys and its sorrows. Yet the character goes on to moralize the ‘mingled yarn,’ suggesting that there is some value to not being perfected from our sins :“Our virtues would be proud,” he says, “if our faults whipped them not; and our crimes would despair, if they were not cherished by our virtues.”
This is a hard principle, to be sure, as it means there are grounds for even the most seemingly sanctified among us to be wary about their own holiness. (It has long seemed to me that to think of our own holiness is probably a mistake from the outset—we are not Saint Paul, nor are we meant to be). There are shades in common between this imperfectionism and Augustine’s response to the virgins who were raped by the Romans, which is shocking (to the point of calloused) for many readers these days. Though not precisely answering why God permitted it to happen in the City of God, Augustine takes the opportunity to remind everyone that pride in one’s virginity is still pride, and floats the possibility that its loss might be grounds for a renewed humility.
This principle of ‘imperfected virtue’ also explains seeming failures in judgment that otherwise good people might have. The failure to discern is a real failure, and can even be a sin. There are mistakes in judgment, to be sure, but the ongoing failure to remedy those mistakes might signal a real inattentiveness to the world that is founded upon vice. “The eye is the lamp of the body,” Christ says in the Sermon on the Mount—which is to say, what we see and discern guides the whole of our lives. If the eyes are healthy, “the whole body will be full of light,” but if the eye is dark, “how great the darkness!” This is a hard saying, but one we cannot avoid: the repeated failure to discern good from evil is often a failure from within, which indicates some deeper pathology within a person’s character.
Again, it is hard to underscore how hard it is to believe that we might be responsible for our own failures of judgment. I once talked with a young woman who wondered why all the guys she was attracted to turned out to be bad. It is sometimes the case that bad men can hide their vices well, such that good people are taken in. Yet insofar as it becomes a pattern, we should be open to alternate explanations for the problem. Good people tend to find and congregate with good people—and bad people do likewise. If we routinely find ourselves in bad company, perhaps the ‘eye of the body’ has gone out—that is, perhaps our ability to discern is broken.
This explains why a character as virtuous as Shakespeare’s Helen might make such a disastrous decision in loving a man who turns out to be bad. Helen is described in glowing terms, and she shows an extraordinary sense of shrewdness (though not 'shrewness!’) in working to win the noble Bertram, despite their differences in station. Yet he proves himself cruel: he spurns her, then marries her under coercion, abandons her, solicits the extremely chaste Diana (who like Helen is not of his class), and then lies with impunity about the whole matter before the king. In short: he proves himself a bad man. Helen’s constancy to him is admirable, to be sure. Yet her decision to give herself to someone who proves himself a cretin should give us pause about her character.
Indeed, there are hints of problem in descriptions of her love. She has an “idolatrous fancy” for Bertram, she is “Indian-like” (never a compliment in Shakespeare’s England) and “religious” about him. She dotes upon Bertram with an affection that is itself questionable. She acknowledges that she is calculating in her efforts to win him: “Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie which we ascribe to heaven,” she famously says. Yet such machinations in service of winning one such as Bertram seem more like folly as the play unfolds.
To be clear, I think Shakespeare knows of characters who are almost entirely good. Not everyone for him has a ‘tragic flaw’ of ancient tragedy, in which the goodness of a life is marred by some singular vice or failure. Nor is someone like Helen necessarily an ambivalent character, at least in the sense that many of Trollope’s characters are ambivalent: she has no weakness of will (the opposite, in fact!), and has no shortage of confidence about her own virtue. To that extent, she comes from a different moral universe from many of us, whose virtues are more explicitly intermingled with palpable and obvious vices.
Yet the play highlights the dangers of folly, and gives us good reason why God would not want to remove from us the ‘sting of sin’ prematurely. We are either perfected in whole, or not perfect at all. So much of growth in sanctification involves learning to live with our virtues, which is harder that it seems for those who have become friends with their vices. When we make a little progress, it is tempting to presume that we are more sanctified than we in fact are, and to claim possession of the virtues as ours rather than regard them as gifts of God’s grace. The ongoing activity of vices within us checks that temptation, inducing us to see even our strengths as occasional, contingent moments of God’s ongoing kindness to us. That is, our vices keep our eyes fixed away from ourselves, toward God, and thus allow our virtues to endure.
News, Notes, and Happenings
I’m going to be in Washington D.C. this Friday for a noontime talk on gossip. If you are there, please do say hello!
I’ll be in Anaheim in early December for a day-long conference on gratitude, which Mirslov Volf is also speaking at. It should be a terrific time, and I will be around all day for it. So please do come out if you are in the area (and bring friends).
What you missed while not being a member: 10 Theses on Natural Law (and more! Become a member already!)
Pro et Contra is a format I’d like to revive. If there’s a practical situation you would like ‘advice’ on, send it to me by responding to this email and I will offer one practical course to take…and then argue for an alternate course.
I have an essay in this new volume on Protestant social teaching that is…spicy.
Halloween is a big deal on my street. Here’s what my house looks like.
From the Drafts Folder
I will have more to say about this project later, but here’s an excerpt from something I am working on.
Reorienting our questioning to include the good of those around us is difficult. Questions that grip us often turn our attention away from others. Thinking sometimes feels like a solitary act—and when it goes wrong, like Descartes alone in his room with a piece of wax, becomes a solipsistic one. Still, we want resolution to our inquiries because they are ours, and because we feel as though our happiness and lives are uniquely at stake. This is especially true when our questions arise out of suffering. Our doubts hold us captive, and keep us from serving others. We start exploring from where we are—and that usually means beginning with the questions that our histories and experiences thrust upon us.
But we cannot stay there. We are admonished to not only look to our interests (though we must do that!), but also to the interests of others. Real inquiry begins when we care about each others’ learning, not only our own. This movement can only be one of grace: the possessive power of our questions is too strong for anything but the sanctifying love of Jesus to break it. As long as our questioning is a form of self-justification, in which we vindicate ourselves by coming to see the truth, we will be incapable of setting aside ourselves to carry the cross of someone else’s questions. At the same time, the intense euphorias of our own discoveries can turn us inward, such that we neglect the vicarious joy that comes from seeing others light up with the joy of learning. Real teaching keeps alive our own love for real learning, by reminding us that the truth is seen only with others, or it is not seen at all.
Questioning with and for those around us can take any number of forms, depending on the need of the hour. Positively, it might mean entering into questions that others pose—and temporarily setting aside the questions that burn within us. Taking up other people’s questions expands our vision in ways that are often unexpected. Any college professor must, in one sense, set aside their own questions about the subject and allow students’ questions to come to the forefront. The questions we have after years of learning about a subject are often more subtle, more attuned to fine-grained details of the subjects “negative spaces” than students making their first encounter with it. Yet our questions are not always more difficult: sometimes, the “obvious” questions are the hardest, and have only been imperfectly answered before everyone moves on. Giving students’ questions precedence not only helps them learn, but sometimes draws professors’ attention to fundamental themes or ideas that have been neglected—or reawakens us to details that have become mundane due to our familiarity with them.
Around the Web
Here’s a situation I have not given much thought to: using sperm that has been frozen for fifty years to make life. None of us are prepared for the world that is to come.
My friend Dustin Benac’s categories for navigating crises have been very helpful for me in my own thinking about it.
Do we need ‘Covid amnesty’? I am strongly inclined to say “no.” The conditions of forgiveness are very different than what are outlined here—as we have often been reminded in recent years on matters of racial justice, where the thought of declaring amnesty for wrongs is a non-starter (and rightly so).
The Penultimate Word
“It is better to be silent and be real than to talk and not be real. It is good to teach, if one does what one says. Now there is one teacher, who spoke and it happened; indeed, even the things that he has done in silence are worthy of the Father. The one who truly possesses the word of Jesus is also able to hear his silence, so that he may be perfect, so that he may act through what he says and be known through his silence. Nothing is hidden from the Lord; even our secrets are close to him. Therefore let us do everything with the knowledge that he dwells in us, in order that we may be his temples, and he may be in us as our God-as, in fact, he really is, as will be made clear in our sight by the love that we justly have for him.” — Ignatius, martyr
The Discounts!
You can take 20% off the price of membership here (paid annually).
And if you’re a teacher or college student and want 75% off annually, get that here.
As always, if you want a free membership (no questions asked), just respond to this email.