Of Virtue

There are in the records of antiquity certain acts of virtue so complete, so perfectly accomplished, that they have the quality of something outside ordinary human possibility. The man who, having received a terrible wound, surveys it with the composed curiosity of a physician examining another man’s injury. The prisoner of war who refuses to beg for his life and meets his death not with defiance but with a kind of courteous indifference. The philosopher who drinks his hemlock in apparent serenity while his friends weep around him. We call these stories of virtue. But I ask myself: are they not also something else, something for which we have no good word — a kind of achievement beyond virtue, where virtue has been practiced so long it has ceased to require effort and become simply the nature of the man?

The virtue of philosophy is a thing described. It tells us what the virtuous man feels, what he prefers, how he comports himself in difficulty. But it tells us this in language — in maxims and arguments — which is a very long way from the actual experience of being tested. I can describe courage perfectly and be found wanting when the occasion arrives. Many men have been. The description is not the thing; the philosophical account of virtue is not the possession of virtue; and the gap between the two is where most lives are actually lived.

“Virtue is something other and nobler than the inclinations that lead us toward goodness; the name of virtue presupposes difficulty and resistance, and cannot be exercised without opposition.”

This is why I distrust the cheerful practitioner of virtue — the man who tells me he finds goodness easy, who has never been seriously tempted, who conducts his honest life in comfortable circumstances among honest companions. His virtue may be genuine, but it is untested, and we do not know whether it would survive a real test any more than we know whether a bridge will hold until something heavy crosses it.

I am not recommending we manufacture difficulties in order to prove ourselves. I am saying that the virtue which the ancient examples hold up is not something that can be adopted from the outside, learned from reading, or produced by resolution. It must be grown, by a long discipline of small choices, until the man and the virtue become indistinguishable. That is what we admire in those extreme examples — not that they decided to be virtuous in the moment of crisis, but that they had become, over a lifetime, the kind of men for whom no other response was possible.