What Virtue Is

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St John of the Cross writes: “At the evening of our life we shall be judged by our love.” Our lives will be measured by our virtue – love being the greatest of these. So if virtue is the measure then we should probably know what virtue is and how to get it, right? Recently we have reflected on what every human person desires and what motivates all human action, namely, certain goods such as friendship, love, accomplishment, health, etc…Further, we saw that if we pursue all these goods in the right way, it’ll lead to our happiness, whereas if we pursue them through bad means, it’ll lead to evil and self-destruction and the loss of happiness. In the latter case we’ll end up destroying certain goods instead of obtaining them.

So there’s a definite relationship between action and perfect happiness. The desire for happiness is what originally motivates our actions, and our actions are what determine whether we obtain happiness or not. Consequently, we need to perfect our actions and properly order them towards true happiness. Put simply, we need to learn how to do things the right way. That’s what it means to acquire virtue.

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So what is Virtue?

The Catechism of the Catholic Church defines virtue as “a habitual and firm disposition to do the good. It allows a person not only to perform good acts, but to give the best of himself.”[1] 

A Virtue is the perfection of a human ability. To perfect a human ability doesn’t just mean that you can do something well

but that you want to do something well. Virtue is both the ability and the desire to act well. A virtue allows you to spontaneously and easily do the right thing; it’s both a skill and the desire to use that skill properly.

The composer Johann Sebastian Bach is a good example of someone with a virtue, in his case a musical virtue. In choosing the notes for his compositions, his skills were so perfect and his taste so excellent that he always chose good notes. He had both the ability and the desire to make beautiful music.  That’s what virtue is: the ability and the desire to act beautifully, to make good choices.

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Changing the Way we Feel about things

On hearing that virtue is the both the capacity and the desire to act well, you may think to yourself, “Heck, much of the time I don’t have skill and definitely not the desire to act well.” Perhaps you don’t believe you can do the right thing, and even if you could, you wouldn’t want to. But that’s precisely what makes virtue so marvelous: virtue makes you want to do the right thing.  When you have virtue, you enjoy doing what’s good.

To explain how this is possible, we have to talk a little bit about the passions, (a term we’ll use interchangeably with desires, inclinations, emotions and even feelings). These passions propel us towards things which seem pleasing, and away from things which seem displeasing.  Traditionally eleven basic passions have been identified, and they are as follows:

If we’re confronted with something which seems pleasing, we experience attraction, desire, joy, hope, and courage.  If we are confronted with something that seems displeasing, we experience dislike, aversion, sorrow, despair, fear, and anger.

The problem is that most of us sometimes experience the wrong emotion at the wrong time.  We fear to do the good, or we desire what’s evil. We may actually hope for something we know will bring about our own downfall, for instance when a diabetic who knows that cake isn’t good for him desires it anyway. Or, to take a moral illustration, a Christian knows patience, or enduring some suffering joyfully is good, but he may dislike it very much. This disorder, this misdirection of our feelings, is the result of original sin; in our fallen state our emotions are often disoriented and pull us towards evil and away from good.

Yet virtue manages to take all these inclinations and reorganize them. It directs the passions in an integrated manner to incline us towards what’s truly beneficial for us and away from what’s bad. When you have virtue, you “feel like” doing good and avoiding evil. Those with virtue wouldn’t even enjoy sin, and they greatly desire the good. So basically, once you acquire virtue, doing what you’re supposed to becomes second nature. A virtue enables you to do the good quickly, easily, and joyfully. And doing the good is what makes you happy.

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So How Does One Acquire Virtue?

Unfortunately, acquiring a virtue demands a great deal of effort and commitment.  To look at the process of gaining virtue, let’s take two examples from Servais Pinckaers’ book, The Sources of Christian Ethics.[2]

The first is that of a child learning to play piano. Ever take piano lessons? Usually not too much fun at the outset. Some hired instructor comes over once a week, makes you hold your hands in an awkward position, makes you memorize letters A through G in connection to strange black marks on paper, and forces you to do drills which sound awful to you. Even when you get to play a song you like, it sounds stilted and unpleasant and you spend all your time trying not to make a mistake – which is completely unsatisfying. But if you stick to it – then you are in for something special. Then you can express yourself through music, allow the compositions of geniuses to pass through your body and mind, and perhaps even become a creative artist yourself.

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Let’s take another example – that of learning a foreign language. Also not too much fun initially: you have to memorize a huge vocabulary and learn the rules of grammar. It’s very taxing, and your communication skills feel restricted instead of enhanced.  You can’t express yourself clearly, the laws of the language don’t seem to make any kind of sense at first, and you spend most of your time trying not to sound completely ignorant by using a wrong word, or putting a verb in the wrong tense. But if you stick to it – if you practice, and submit to the grammatical structure and expose yourself to folks who’ve already mastered the language – then you’ll see improvement pretty quickly. You’ll be able to express yourself better, navigate yourself when you travel to strange and beautiful places, see the insights incarnated in other languages.

Now notice how similar the Church’s moral teaching is to these two activities. Beginners often find the Catholic principles restrictive, artificial, unnatural and arbitrary. But if they submit themselves, if they work at it and stick to it, then they realize that they are growing happier, freer, better able to love. They are becoming happy.

[1] #1803.

[2] Trans. Sr. Mary Thomas Noble, O.P. (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1995), 354-56.