Virtues and the Vision of God

By Gilbert Meilaender

In the deepest and most important sense we can think of virtues as those traits of character that fit us for life with God, that make us the sort of people who would really want to be in God’s presence. That, after all, is what the psalmist (24:3–5) says:

Who shall ascend the hill of the Lord?

And who shall stand in his holy place?

He who has clean hands and a pure heart,

who does not lift up his soul to what is false,

and does not swear deceitfully.

He will receive blessing from the Lord,

and vindication from the God of his salvation.

Not just doing—clean hands that serve neighbors in love—but also being—a pure heart that loves God above all else—makes one a person who could with a whole heart desire to be in the presence of a holy God. To put it that way is to raise important theological questions. . . . It may be useful, however, to start a little lower to the ground, considering the concept of virtue more generally.

What we mean by virtues

Trying to say what we mean by a virtue is not as straightforward as we might suppose. Probably the most useful way to describe virtues is to think of them as being rather like acquired skills. Suppose I am standing on a pitcher’s mound some 60’6” away from a batter at home plate, and I throw a pitch that goes just across the outside corner of the plate at the batter’s knees—­perhaps the most difficult pitch to hit. The fact that I do this does not by itself show that I am a skillful pitcher. After all, my next pitch may go sailing over the catcher’s head all the way to the backstop. But if, when I’m trying to, I can throw that low, outside strike time after time, I have acquired a certain skill. That ability has become habitual and engrained in me. No doubt I will not be able to do it every time I try, but, still, others will learn to depend on my ability to do it regularly.

The traits of character that we call virtues are a little like that—habits of behavior that we have acquired and, at least to some extent, mastered. They are not so much skills that are needed for just one  sort of behavior (such as pitching) but needed for the whole of life. They are less like an ability to pass the written test for a driver’s license than like learning to drive a car—learning to respond fittingly to whatever happens on the road. So, for example, at least since the time of Plato, prudence, justice, courage, and temperance have often been called cardinal virtues. They are always needed in life. They enable us to respond appropriately to new situations or unanticipated difficulties that we face in life.

A fuller description of the virtues will, however, require us to move beyond an example like that of the skilled baseball pitcher. We may assume that a pitcher wants to pitch effectively, even when he sometimes fails. With the virtues, however, the story is not quite the same. Sometimes I may not want to act virtuously—to be just or temperate, for example. Finding within myself contrary inclinations in need of correction, I will realize that becoming a person who can be relied upon to act virtuously will by no means be easy. In fact, it may sometimes be easier to become a person whose habits of behavior are vicious rather than virtuous.

Thus, part of the reason we need to become virtuous is a somewhat negative one: to correct our sinful inclinations. But even that does not tell the whole story. Put more positively, the virtues describe what human beings at their best can be. They mark people for whom virtuous activity has become habitual, people who can be depended on to act in certain ways—who, in the psalmist’s language, are characterized by clean hands and pure hearts.

This more positive understanding of virtue has very deep roots in the Western moral tradition. Aristotle begins his Nicomachean Ethics by asking a simple question: What is it that everyone seeks. His answer, eudaimonia, is a word for which there may be no perfect English translation. It means something like happiness or fulfillment—to be what human beings at their very best would be.  The next question, of course, is: What will fulfill me as a human being, what will really help me to flourish? To which Aristotle replies: Living virtuously. The virtues are excellences of character that are needed to live the kind of life that will truly fulfill us. Put more in the language of Christian faith, virtues are the traits needed to attain the vision of God. It is, as Jesus says, the pure in heart who will see God.

Who we are, what our character is like, determines what we can see. What a just person sees as an occasion for sharing with others an unjust person may see as an occasion for hoarding. What I see as lovable depends upon the sort of person I am. And so, in the end, without virtue, without the purity of heart of which Jesus and the psalmist speak, no one can see God.

Theological worries about a focus on virtue

What may seem straightforward is actually quite complicated, however, and there are at least two reasons why we might worry about a focus on virtue. Think first about how we acquire the virtues. Just as the pitcher learning to throw that low, outside strike consistently must practice it time after time, so also acquiring the virtues requires habituation over time. Only in that way can we become people who may be counted on to act justly, temperately, or humbly—not just sporadically, but regularly. It takes training for us really to possess such traits of character, to become people who habitually act virtuously.

True as this standard account of the process of acquiring the virtues is, putting it that way points to a theological problem. The novelist Christopher Beha clearly put his finger on the problem in an interview describing his return to the Roman Catholic faith (that he had left at an earlier point in life). “You can decide ‘It’s going to be good for my children if I raise them within the church,’ or ‘It’s going to be good for me if I display the outer signs of belief,’ but those are obviously something very, very different [from actually believing]. What needs to happen for one who has lost faith or did not ever have faith is a turning. A turning of the heart.”

The need for that “turning” points to something that goes deeper than the kind of habituation in virtue described by Aristotle. Every theory of the virtues, even those that are not particularly concerned with theological issues, will face this difficulty. How do I become virtuous? The standard answer is: by acting virtuously and thereby cultivating in myself the habit of virtuous behavior. That cannot really be a completely satisfactory answer, however. After all, Aristotle’s complete description of acquiring virtues through habituation goes like this: “Acts are called just and self-controlled when they are the kind of acts which a just or self-controlled man would perform; but the just and self-controlled man is not he who performs these acts, but he who also performs them in the way just and self-controlled men do.”

Thus, there is a paradox right at the heart of any ethic of character. In order to become virtuous I must do virtuous deeds in the way (with the spirit and the motivation) that a virtuous person does such deeds. But were I able to do this, I would already be virtuous, not in need of a process of habituation. It seems, then, that I cannot become virtuous unless I already am! There is no straightforward way to get from practicing virtuous deeds to becoming a virtuous person. As C. S. Lewis put it (in Mere Christianity), “there is a difference between doing some particular just or temperate action and being a just or temperate man.” What is needed in addition is a certain quality of character that goes beyond the action itself—Beha’s turning of the heart.

That is the problem—and the mystery—of all moral education. “Train up a child in the way he should go,” Proverbs says, “and when he is old he will not depart from it.” Yet, of course, some children do depart from it. Habituation alone is by no means foolproof. Perhaps grace, which is always a mystery and a gift that cannot be demanded, is needed. Not a grace that works like magic, but an empowering divine grace that, when and where the Spirit of Christ wills (as Jesus said to Nicodemus), gradually transforms us into people who genuinely long to be in God’s presence.

— Gilbert Meilaender is senior research professor at Valparaiso University and the Paul Ramsey Fellow at the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture.

image: Innocence between Vice and Virtue by Marie-Guillemine Benoist

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Excerpted from Christian Ethics: A Short Companion by Gilbert Meilaender (B&H Academic, 2024). Used by permission.

Jesus’s final command to his disciples at the Last Supper is a calling to an ethic of love. In Christian Ethics: A Short Companion, renowned ethicist Gilbert Meilaender makes the case that all Christian ethics are an outworking of this command to love one another.

Meilaender accordingly lays out a vision for the spirit and structure of the Christian life, while drawing directly upon theologians from the early church to the Reformation to today. He begins by examining the concept of sin and its profound impact on human life before moving to grace as an agent of pardon and power. He then lays out a framework for a Christian life characterized by a spirit of love, bound by wise limits and fostered through the community of the church. 

Find Christian Ethics: A Short Companion at B&H Academic, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and Christianbook.com.

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