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Virtues and Their
Vices
EDITED BY
KEVIN TIMPE AND CRAIG A. BOYD
1

3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
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First Edition published in 2014
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Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

To the philosophy department at Saint Louis University—which
instantiates many of the qualities that make a community ﬂourish,
and by whom we have been shaped. In particular, we’d like to thank
Fr Ted Vitali for his godfather-like leadership, Eleonore Stump for
being an exemplar of a devoted scholar, and Jack Doyle for his
meticulous ability to master the text.

Acknowledgments
As with any project this size, we have beneﬁtted greatly from the hard work
and expertise of numerous people. The idea for this volume came from one of
us (Kevin Timpe) teaching a course entitled ‘Virtues and Vices’ at the Univer-
sity of San Diego. It has taken numerous years to come to completion, and was
delayed by the unfortunate death of an original contributor, for whom we had
to secure a replacement. We’d like to express our gratitude to the staff at
Oxford University Press—especially Tom Perridge, Lizzie Robottom, and
Cathryn Steele—for their never-failing support, encouragement, and patience.
Nathan Maddix and Audra Jenson provided valuable editorial assistance
in preparing the ﬁnal volume. Earlier versions of some of the material
in this volume helped form the body of a 2012 summer seminar that Timpe
co-directed with Christina Van Dyke at Calvin College. We’d also like to
express our gratitude to our universities, Saint Louis University and Northwest
Nazarene University, for their support of our research.

Contents
List of Contributors ix
Introduction 1
Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd
SECTION I: THE CARDINAL VIRTUES
1. Prudence 37
W. Jay Wood
2. The Virtues of Justice 59
David Schmidtz and John Thrasher
3. Fortitude and the Conﬂict of Frameworks 75
Daniel McInerny
4. Temperance 93
Robert C. Roberts
SECTION II: THE CAPITAL VICES AND
CORRECTIVE VIRTUES
5. Lust and Chastity 115
Colleen McCluskey
6. Gluttony and Abstinence 137
Robert B. Kruschwitz
7. Avarice and Liberality 157
Andrew Pinsent
8. Sloth: Some Historical Reﬂections on Laziness, Effort,
and Resistance to the Demands of Love 177
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung
9. A Study of Virtuous and Vicious Anger 199
Zac Cogley
10. Envy and Its Discontents 225
Timothy Perrine and Kevin Timpe
11. Pride and Humility: Tempering the Desire for Excellence 245
Craig A. Boyd

SECTION III: INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES
12. Trust 269
Linda Zagzebski
13. Episteme: Knowledge and Understanding 285
John Greco
14. Sophia: Theoretical Wisdom and Contemporary Epistemology 303
Jason Baehr
SECTION IV: THE THEOLOGICAL VIRTUES
15. Faith as Attitude, Trait, and Virtue 327
Robert Audi
16. On Hope 349
Charles Pinches
17. Charity: How Friendship with God Unfolds in Love for Others 369
Paul J. Wadell
SECTION V: VIRTUE ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES
18. Virtue in Theology 393
Stephen Pope
19. Virtue in Political Thought: On Civic Virtue in Political Liberalism 415
Christie Hartley and Lori Watson
20. Virtue in Positive Psychology 433
Everett L. Worthington, Jr, Caroline Lavelock, Daryl R. Van
Tongeren, David J. Jennings, II, Aubrey L. Gartner, Don E. Davis,
and Joshua N. Hook
21. Moral Psychology, Neuroscience, and Virtue: From Moral
Judgment to Moral Character 459
James A. Van Slyke
22. Virtue and a Feminist Ethics of Care 481
Ruth Groenhout
Index 503
viii Contents

List of Contributors
Robert Audi, John A. O’Brien Professor of Philosophy, University of Notre
Dame.
Jason Baehr, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Loyola Marymount University.
Craig A. Boyd, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Saint Louis University.
Zac Cogley, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, Northern Michigan University.
Don E. Davis, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Georgia State University.
Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung, Professor of Philosophy, Calvin College.
Aubrey L. Gartner, Psychology Post-Doctoral Fellow, Durham Veterans
Administration Medical Center.
John Greco, Leonard and Elizabeth Eslick Chair in Philosophy, Saint Louis
University.
Ruth Groenhout, Professor and Chair, Department of Philosophy, Calvin
College.
Christie Hartley, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Georgia State University.
Joshua N. Hook, Assistant Professor of Psychology, University of North
Texas.
David J. Jennings, II, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Regent University.
Robert B. Kruschwitz, Professor of Philosophy and Senior Scholar in the
Institute for Faith and Learning, Baylor University.
Caroline Lavelock, Graduate Student in Counseling Psychology, Virginia
Commonwealth University.
Colleen McCluskey, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Saint Louis University.
Daniel McInerny, Independent scholar and editor, English edition of
Aleteia.org.
Timothy Perrine, PhD candidate, Indiana University.
Charles Pinches, Professor and Chair, Department of Theology, University of
Scranton.
Andrew Pinsent, Research Director of the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and
Religion, Faculty of Theology and Religion, University of Oxford.

Stephen Pope, Professor of Theological Ethics, Boston College.
Robert C. Roberts, Distinguished Professor of Ethics, Baylor University.
David Schmidtz, Kendrick Professor of Philosophy, University of Arizona.
James A. Van Slyke, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Fresno Paciﬁc
University.
John Thrasher, Post-doctoral fellow, University of Arizona.
Kevin Timpe, Professor of Philosophy, Northwest Nazarene University.
Daryl R. Van Tongeren, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Hope College.
Paul J. Wadell, Professor of Religious Studies, St. Norbert College.
Lori Watson, Associate Professor of Philosophy and Director of Women’s and
Gender Studies, University of San Diego.
W. Jay Wood, Professor of Philosophy, Wheaton College.
Everett L. Worthington, Jr, Professor of Psychology, Virginia Common-
wealth University.
Linda Zagzebski, George Lynn Cross Research Professor and Kingﬁsher
College Chair of the Philosophy of Religion and Ethics, University of
Oklahoma.
x List of Contributors

Introduction
Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd
RESURGENCE OF THE VIRTUES
The recent revival of philosophical work devoted to virtue ethics, and virtue
theory more generally, is well documented. Though there is always some-
thing rather artificial to drawing temporal and intellectual boundaries of this
sort, this resurgence can perhaps be seen as beginning in 1958 with
G. E. M. Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy.’1
In her article, Anscombe
criticizes the dominant deontological and consequentialist approaches to the
ethics of her day. One key problem, Anscombe claims, is that they wrongly
focus on legalistic notions of obligations and rules. The language these theories
employ appeals to an outdated moral context—a context that assumed a
divine law-giver as the one who established the order of the world or at least
a context that assumed a fairly stable human nature. She suggests that ethics
would benefit from an adequate moral psychology, such as that found in
ancient Greek ethics where one can ‘look for “norms” in human virtues’:
[J]ust as man has so many teeth, which is certainly not the average number of
teeth men have, but is the number of teeth for the species, so perhaps the species
man, regarded not just biologically, but from the point of view of the activity of
thought and choice in regard to the various departments of life—powers and
faculties and use of things needed—‘has’ such-and-such virtues: and this ‘man’
with the complete set of virtues is the ‘norm’, as ‘man’ with, e.g., a complete set of
teeth is a norm. But in this sense ‘norm’ has ceased to be roughly equivalent to ‘law’.2
1
Anscombe (1958). Speaking of the impact of Anscombe’s article on contemporary philo-
sophical reflection on the virtues, Crisp and Slote write that ‘Anscombe’s article anticipates
much of the recent development of virtue ethics in large part through having influenced that
development. But many present-day ethicists—including both defenders and opponents of
virtue ethics—would question some of Anscombe’s main assumptions in “Modern Moral
Philosophy.”’ (Crisp and Slote (1997), 4).
2
Anscombe (1958), 14f.

According to Anscombe, only a return to a virtue approach to ethics and the
notions of human flourishing and well-being that underscore such an ap-
proach will be able to provide for the future flourishing of ethics.3
Anscombe’s article didn’t initially receive much attention. However, in the
coming decades her critique of modern ethics would be continued, among
other places, in the work of Philippa Foot and Alasdair MacIntyre. Foot begins
her article ‘Virtues and Vices’ with a criticism of the modern ethical landscape
that is reminiscent of Anscombe:
For many years the subject of the virtues and vices was strangely neglected by
moralists working within the school of analytic philosophy. The tacitly accepted
opinion was that study of the topic would form no part of the fundamental work
of ethics. . . . During the past few decades several philosophers have turned their
attention to the subject.4
Foot then goes on to express the linguistic difficulty that such a rapproche-
ment would face, which she describes as
a lack of coincidence between their terminology and our own. For when we talk
about the virtues we are not taking as our subject everything to which Aristotle
gave the name aretē or Aquinas virtus, and consequently not everything called a
virtue in translations of these authors. ‘The virtues’ to us are the moral virtues
whereas aretē and virtus refer also to arts, and even to excellences of the
speculative intellect whose domain is theory rather than practice.5
As shall become clear below, this volume’s approach to the virtues is broad,
including not only the moral virtues but also (following Aristotle, among
others) intellectual virtues and (following Aquinas, among others) theological
virtues.
MacIntyre’s influential book After Virtue examines the historical roots of
thinking about virtue, diagnoses the reasons for its absence from the majority
of contemporary moral theorizing, and offers a proposal for its recovery. In
this work, he asks his audience to
Imagine that the natural sciences were to suffer the effects of a catastrophe.
A series of environmental disasters are blamed by the general public on the
scientists. Widespread riots occur, laboratories are burnt down, physicists are
lynched, books and instruments destroyed. Finally a Know-Nothing political
movement takes power and successfully abolishes science teaching in schools
3
A number of the main critiques Anscombe gives in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ were
anticipated in Schopenhauer (1841). Robert Adams notes that it is a ‘curious feature of
Anscombe’s paper that at the substantive, as distinct from the metaethical level, she seems
much more concerned with the ethics of actions than the ethics of traits of character. Concepts of
virtue are to provide the terminology of moral assessment, but it is actions that she seems
absorbingly interested in identifying as “untruthful,” “unchaste,” or “unjust”’ (Adams 2006, 5).
He also raises a similar criticism regarding MacIntyre’s After Virtue, which we discuss below.
4
Foot (1997), 163. 5
Foot (1997), 164.
2 Kevin Timpe and Craig A. Boyd

and universities, imprisoning and executing the remaining scientists. Later still,
there is a reaction against this destructive movement and enlightened people seek
to revive science, although they have largely forgotten what it was. But all they
possess are fragments: a knowledge of experiments detached from any knowledge
of the theoretical context which gave them significance.6
This dystopia is a world in which scientific terms have been radically altered
from their original context even though they appear to function in a scientific
way. People think that they are engaged in the practices of the sciences. But
since they have no coherent method to form their practices what they do is
more closely related to alchemy rather than genuine science. In a similar way,
the language of ethics, devoid of a coherent narrative of its practices as
grounded in moral psychology and the virtues, devolves into a series of
incommensurable language games. But MacIntyre was not advocating a return
to the virtue ethics of a previous era, for both the concepts of narrative unity
and practice have been lost.7
Those ‘practices’ are what primarily constitute
specific virtues.
In subsequent years, much of what Anscombe and Foot advocated for has
come to pass, and virtue theory has seen a resurgence. But this trend has also
been shaped by MacIntyre’s vision regarding the loss of narrative unity. Our
aim in this work is both to document this trend and to contribute to it. Merely
parroting the work of Aristotle, Aquinas, or some other historically important
figure in virtue ethics does not advance research. In this volume, like MacIn-
tyre we aim not to be slavishly beholden to the past. However, unlike some
recent books on virtue (you will hopefully forgive us if we fail to name names),
it is equally problematic to write on the virtues as if they have no historical
context. The treatment of the virtues in the subsequent chapters aims to be
sensitive to the historical heritage of the virtues, including their theological
heritage, without being beholden to this tradition. In what follows, we inten-
tionally engage contemporary philosophical scholarship as well as relevant
scholarship from related disciplines.
Contemporary Reflection on the Virtues
Largely as a result of the above developments, contemporary work on virtue
and virtue ethics more broadly is flourishing. It is, as David Solomon recently
put it, ‘an embarrassment of riches.’8
But it would be wrong to describe
contemporary philosophical reflection on the virtues as monolithic. It’s simply
not the case that there is a single, unified account of virtue theory, or even the
nature of the virtues themselves. Although there is a strong tradition of
6
MacIntyre (1981), 3. 7
MacIntyre (1981), 226. 8
D. Solomon (2003), 58.
Introduction 3

reflection on the virtues running from Plato and Aristotle through Augustine
and Aquinas down to contemporary thinkers such as Anscombe, Foot, and
MacIntyre, even within this tradition there is an on-going conversation about
the exact content and extent of that account. Furthermore, philosophical
reflection on the virtues isn’t restricted to this tradition. Christian Miller
notes this breadth in his recent The Philosophy and Psychology of Moral
Character:
Virtue ethical positions take the virtues to be among the central ethical concepts
and typically use them to ground an account of morally right actions. But even
consequentialists, Kantians, moral pluralists, and advocates of other competing
views have realized the importance that the virtues should play in their overall
normative ethical theories, even if it is not at the foundational or grounding
level.9
Nancy Sherman’s Making a Necessity of Virtue: Aristotle and Kant on Virtue,
for instance, explores Kant’s ethical writings on the virtues, with an eye
towards how his thought depends on ancient philosophy, including Aristotle
but most notable the Stoics. As she notes there, ‘Kant was self-aware of his
historical predecessors and in sympathy with important parts of the ancient
tradition of virtue. His own distinctive contributions cannot be underesti-
mated, but by his own telling, the account of virtues [he develops] owes clear
debts to “the ancient moral philosophers, who pretty well exhausted all that
can be said upon virtue”.’10
Other voices contributing to reflection on the
virtues include John Stuart Mill and select other consequentialists,11
Humeans
and other sentimentalists,12
and even iconoclasts such as Nietzsche.13
All of
these voices—to some extent—represent the language of virtue.
According to David Solomon, even within virtue ethics there are ‘disagree-
ments that are as deep, and sometimes as divisive, as those that arise across
normative theories.’14
For example, many virtue ethicists seek to follow
Aristotle quite closely, while Rosalind Hursthouse’s On Virtue Ethics is a neo-
Aristotelian approach and Julia Annas’ The Morality of Happiness draws more
on the Stoics. Solomon outlines two divergent ways one might pursue virtue
ethics, which he characterizes as ‘routine’ and ‘radical.’15
Routine virtue ethics
sees the revival of virtue in contemporary ethics as being fairly continuous with
much of nineteenth and twentieth century analytic ethics. It emphasizes ‘the
virtues while working comfortably within the conventions of contemporary
9
Miller (2013), 23. 10
Sherman (1997), 3.
11
Mill’s account of the virtues is developed in Semmel (1984). See also Kagan (1989) and
Driver (2001).
12
See, for instance, Dees (1997) and Taylor (2002).
13
Here see Hunt (1991) and R. Solomon (2001). 14
D. Solomon (2003), 58.
15
Hookway suggests that a similar difference between the routine and the radical can be
found in virtue epistemology as well; see Hookway (2003), 185.

ethical theory.’16
In contrast, radical virtue ethics involves a much greater
break with most of nineteenth and twentieth century analytic ethics. ‘Here the
question is not how to locate the concept of virtue within the local economy of
practical life, but rather how to accommodate certain fundamental commit-
ments of classical ethical theory within the relatively restricted—and
restricting—agenda of modern moral philosophy. . . . [On this second ap-
proach] there is a much grander conflict between the ambitions and agenda
of modern ethics—and its classical opponents.’17
What marks an approach to
virtue as routine, according to Solomon, is that it ‘attempt[s] to reduce the
difference between an ethics of virtue and its contemporary alternatives to a
single, crucial issue—the place of the notion of virtue in the overall justifica-
tory structure of a theory.’18
As examples of such approaches, he mentions
those modern neo-Kantian and consequentialist theories—some of which
were mentioned above—which attempt to accommodate the virtues within a
preexisting normative system. On such approaches, ‘virtue has been invited
into the house of contemporary normative theory, but told to stay in its
place—typically some subordinate or secondary place within the overall
structure of the theory.’19
Despite this contrast, Solomon also points out that
one can conceive of a spectrum of approaches to virtue ethics, some of which
are more routine or radical than others, and some of which may be intermedi-
ate between the two.
The essays that follow illustrate the multiplicity of approaches to virtue
mentioned above. Short of imposing a single tradition on all the essays (which,
we think, would lead to a narrower and less interesting work), we do not see a
way of eliminating this diversity from the volume. As a result, the essays that
follow contain a range of considerations and assumptions about the best way
to approach the virtues. Despite this breadth, however, the main thrust of the
majority of the essays is best understood as working within the general
tradition beginning with Aristotle, continuing through Aquinas and any
number of other medieval philosophers and theologians, and represented in
contemporary philosophy by Anscombe, Foot, MacIntyre, and Solomon,
among others. We want it to be clear that in this volume we neither develop
nor presuppose a particular account of virtue ethics. A crucial reason for this is
that the present volume focuses more on particular virtues than virtue theory
in general. But even here, it is not our aim to develop a theory of the nature of
16
D. Solomon (2003), 66. For this reason, Solomon is willing to include ‘routine virtue ethics’ to
include those deontologists and consequentialists who seek to find a place for virtue within their
own theories. At other times in this article, however, Solomon seems to exclude this approach from
the umbrella of ‘routine’ approaches, instead seeing it as a third approach altogether.
17
D. Solomon (2003), 76–7. 18
D. Solomon (2003), 69.
19
D. Solomon (2003), 70. In addition to using the language of such approaches ‘subordin-
ating’ virtue to their normative frameworks, he also describes these views as ‘condescending to
the virtues.’
Introduction 5

the virtues.20
Instead, our primary aim in this collection has been to bring
together treatments of particular virtues and, in many cases, the primary vices
opposed to them.
The Nature of the Virtues
As mentioned above, it is not the case that all work on the virtues and vices
reflects a single account of what they are. Aristotle’s discussion of moral
character, and virtue in particular, is the historically most influential treatment
of such issues. For this reason, his discussion will be used as a beginning point.
The Greek word used by Aristotle and most commonly translated as virtue is
aretē, which is perhaps better translated as ‘goodness’ or ‘excellence.’21
In
general, an excellence is a quality that makes an individual a good member of
its kind. For example, it is an excellence of an axe if it is able to cut wood
efficiently and effectively. An excellence, therefore, is a property whereby its
possessor operates well or fulfills its function. Aristotle, for instance, some-
times speaks of a good moral character as ‘human excellence’ or an ‘excellence
of soul’ (Nicomachean Ethics I.13). The idea here is the same as with the axe—
having a good moral character helps its possessor operate well and live up to
her potential, thereby fulfilling her nature.
Those approaches to the virtues that are heavily indebted to Aristotle’s
conception have been referred to as ‘the Traditional View of Moral Character,’
or the Traditional View for short.22
Different theories within the Traditional
View will, of course, fill out the details in diverse ways. So it will be helpful to
think of the Traditional View as a family of similar and related views, rather
than a fully developed and determinate view itself. Despite this variation, the
Traditional View holds that virtues are relatively stable, fixed, and reliable
dispositions of action and affect that ought to be rationally informed. Since
virtues are relatively stable and reliable dispositions, they should be reasonably
good predictors over time of an agent’s behavior if that agent is in a trait-
relevant situation. This does not mean, however, that such traits must be
exceptionless. For example, a single case of dishonesty need not mean that an
individual lacks a generally honest character. Thus, the dispositions should be
understood as involving a particular level of probability. Furthermore, while
such traits are malleable—individuals can change their moral character over
time—such changes are usually not immediate, taking both time and effort.
20
For two recent worthwhile attempts to construct a theory of virtue, see Annas (2011) and
Adams (2006). More on their views in ‘The Nature of the Virtues.’
21
The term ‘aretaic’ ethics has become more popular recently because it is a translation from
the Greek for ‘excellence.’ The English word ‘virtue’ comes from the Latin ‘vir’ and means
‘manly.’ Some object to this on the grounds of a kind of linguistic gender exclusion.
22
See Timpe (2008).

Moral character traits are not just dispositions to engage in certain outward
behaviors; they can also be dispositions to have certain emotions or affections.
For example, justice is often understood as the disposition to treat others as
they are due, while courage is the disposition to feel the appropriate amount of
fear called for by a situation. But in both cases one should feel the appropriate
kind of emotion (e.g. fear or anger) to the appropriate degree. Additionally,
insofar as they are dispositions, an individual can have a particular virtue and
not currently be manifesting trait-relevant behavior or affect. An individual
may be generous in her giving to charity, even if she is not engaged presently
in any charitable action. Finally, in order for a moral character trait to be a
virtue, it must not only be in accord with the relevant moral norms, but the
disposition must also be informed by proper reasoning about the matter at
hand. This is so because the virtues are excellences of character insofar as
they are the best exercise of reason. This connection between practical
reasoning and the other virtues is one that comes up repeatedly in the pages
that follow.
Proponents of the Traditional View also tend to endorse three further
claims about the virtues: the Robustness Claim, the Stability Claim, and the
Interconnection Claim.23
The first two are claims about the nature of the
virtues, while the third is a claim about the relationship among the virtues
within a particular individual. According to the Robustness Claim, an individ-
ual with a particular virtue will exhibit trait-relevant behavior across a broad
spectrum of trait-relevant situations. It is for this reason that virtues are said to
be ‘robust’ traits. Given that the virtues, as mentioned above, need not be
exceptionless, a single counter-instance doesn’t rule out an individual’s pos-
session of a particular trait and doesn’t contradict the Robustness Claim.
According to the Stability Claim, moral character traits are relatively stable
over time. The Stability Claim doesn’t preclude the possibility of an individual
changing his moral character over time. Rather, it holds that such changes take
time. A soldier who has courageously proven himself in battle situations over
the course of numerous years will not cease to be courageous overnight. If the
soldier does act non-courageously in a particular battle, the Stability Claim
suggests that we should still think of the soldier as possessing the virtue of
courage unless the soldier behaves non-courageously for a significant period of
time. Finally, according to the Interconnection Claim there is a probabilistic
correlation between having one virtue and having other virtues. We explore
this aspect of the Traditional View in greater detail in the next section.
Even within those who endorse a version of the Traditional View, there are
often important differences between exactly how the virtues are understood.
As evidence of this variety, consider what we think are two of the leading
23
All three of these claims find support in Gordon Allport’s work on the ‘psychology of
virtue.’ See, for instance, Allport (1960).
Introduction 7

accounts of virtue, those developed and defended by Julia Annas and Robert
Adams. A virtue, for Annas, is an active, developing, persisting, and reliable
disposition to act, feel, or respond in certain ways. These dispositions are
‘deep’ and ‘characteristic’ features of the person—‘that is, the virtuous (or
vicious) person is acting in and from character. . . . A virtue is a disposition
which is central to the person, to whom he or she is, a way we standardly think
of character.’24
According to Annas, what is distinctive about her account of
virtue are two ideas:
One is that exercising a virtue involves practical reasoning of a kind that can
illuminatingly be compared to the kind of reasoning we find in someone exercis-
ing a practical skill. . . . The other idea is that virtue is part of the agent’s happiness
or flourishing, and that it is plausible to see virtue as actively constituting (wholly
or in part) that happiness.25
Many of these aspects of Annas’ account can also be found in other neo-
Aristotelian approaches.
In contrast, Adams’ account is decidedly less Aristotelian. He defines a
moral virtue as a ‘persisting excellence in being for the good. . . . A virtuous
person, a morally good person, will of course be for good things and against
bad things—and not in just any way, but excellently.’26
Furthermore, he
understands being for the good to involve a disposition to favor the good in
action, desire, emotion, and feeling. While the central idea that a virtue is a
disposition towards excellence is one which ‘has never been seriously ques-
tioned,’27
Adams understands the excellence in question quite differently than
does Annas. One difference is that, unlike Annas, he doesn’t define a virtue in
terms of its being instrumental in promoting human flourishing or happiness.
His is an ‘excellence-based theory,’ according to which the virtues are worth
having primarily for their own sake. Although he doesn’t deny that a virtue
can contribute to flourishing or well-being, virtue is not to be measured by the
level of flourishing or well-being achieved. In fact, he defines what it means for
something to be an excellence in terms of intrinsic value: ‘excellence is the
objective and non-instrumental goodness of that which is worthy to be
honored, loved, admired, or (in the extreme case) worshiped, for its own
sake.’28
Second, Adams also rejects the unifying role of practical wisdom
among the virtues. (More on this issue in the next section.) A third difference
between their accounts illustrates another point of contention among virtue
ethicists: Annas seeks to develop her theory of virtue in a way that is largely
24
Annas (2011), 9. 25
Annas (2011), 1.
26
Adams (2006), 15. 27
Zagzebski (1996), 85.
28
Adams (2006), 24. The reader should also keep in mind that Adams differentiates the
‘ethics of virtue’ from ‘virtue ethics.’ The latter attempts to reduce the conception of rightness (or
obligation) to goodness as involving virtue; he intends his work only to be the former. See Adams
(2006), 6.

independent from a theory of human nature, and Adams is less optimistic that
this can be done.
It is not our goal in this section to adjudicate between these (or any)
conceptions of what a virtue is; nor have we imposed a single understanding
on the chapters which follow. But it is important to keep in mind that exactly
how a person understands the nature of a virtue will have an impact on not
only what virtues she thinks there are, but how individual virtues should best
be understood.
The Interconnection of the Virtues
Most virtue theorists have thought that there is a connection between having
one virtue and having others. The strongest form of this connection is the
unity of the virtues thesis, sometimes also called the ‘identity of the virtues
thesis,’29
which holds that all of the apparently different virtues are really just
one single thing overarching virtue. Plato is sometimes interpreted as endors-
ing the unity of the virtues in the Protagoras, where the single virtue is
‘knowledge of good and evil.’30
Gary Watson writes that ‘nowadays the
unity thesis is mostly ridiculed or ignored.’31
Not only does this thesis conﬂate
the plausible distinction between the moral and the intellectual virtues, it just
seems implausible on empirical grounds. For one, it would rule out cases of
weakness of will where the agent has the relevant practical wisdom about what
should be done yet fails to do it. Second, it appears to many that an individual
could have the virtue of, say, temperance, while not also having the virtue of
magnanimity.32
Peter Geach thinks the unity thesis is obviously problematic
for this kind of reason:
if a man is manifestly affected with one vice, then any virtue he may seem to have
is only spurious, and really he is vicious in this respect too. . . . The world would
present a very terrible aspect if we had to think that any-one who is morally faulty
by reason of one habitual grave defect must be totally devoid of virtue; that any
virtues such faulty people seem to have are worthless; that any-one who is morally
faulty by reason of one habitual grave defect must be totally devoid of virtue; that
any virtues such faulty people seem to have are worthless shams.33
29
See Devereux (2006), 325.
30
See, for instance, Penner (1973). For a different interpretation, see Vlastos (1972) and
Kremm (2009). Plato’s discussion of the cardinal virtues in the Republic, however, seems to be in
conﬂict with the unity of the virtues thesis.
31
Watson (1984), 57.
32
For an argument for the rejection of the unity of the virtues thesis, see Adams (2006),
172–5.
33
Geach (1969), 163.
Introduction 9

A slightly weaker claim than the unity of the virtues thesis is the reciprocity
thesis; according to this thesis, while there are multiple virtues, they come as a
necessary package.34
Raymond Devettere, for example, endorses this view:
If you have one virtue, you have them all. . . . Virtues cannot be separated—a
person lacking the virtue of temperance also lacks the virtues of justice, love, and
so forth. At first, this thesis appears counterintuitive, but once the central role of
practical wisdom in each and every moral virtue is understood, the unity of the
virtues emerges as inevitable.35
But even here, one might think this is too strong, for it certainly seems possible
that a particular individual could be temperate in her desires but not courage-
ous. One might even think that the having of one virtue, such as magnanimity,
might in fact disincline an individual toward having another virtue, such as
humility. Though we don’t have the space to pursue adequately these worries
here, these concerns over the unity of the virtues and reciprocity theses seem
fundamentally right to us.
One could reject the reciprocity thesis and yet still think that the virtues are
interconnected. Julia Annas, for example, gives the following reason to think
the virtues are interconnected:
Another important indication of the nature of virtue comes from the point that
we can’t teach the virtues in isolation, one by one, since they can’t be learned that
way. Generosity gives us a good example here. A child doesn’t learn to be
generous by just giving her things away, or sharing things whether they belong
to her or not. Generosity involves considerations of fairness and justice. For, as
Aristotle points out, generosity requires taking from the right sources as well as
giving to the right people in the right way. And ‘giving in the right way’ involves a
great deal. Giving a gift which is indifferent to what the recipient wants is not
generous. Generosity requires intelligence about what people both need and
want, and also about appropriate ways, times, and manners of giving, avoiding
obtrusiveness and condescension. Generosity thus requires, at the least, benevo-
lence, a real interest in other people, their needs, and their wants.36
Annas raises another reason to think that the vices are interconnected, this one
built on the role of practical wisdom. Annas thinks that it is obvious that
practical wisdom is unified over a person’s entire moral life; there are not
independent practical wisdoms each of which governs a distinct virtue or
34
Adams refers to this as ‘the mutual entailment of the virtues’ (2006), 171 and Devereux
calls it ‘the inseparability view’ (2006) 325.
35
Devettere (2002), 64. See also McDowell (1979).
36
Annas (2011), 84. To be clear, Annas herself thinks these considerations favor the reci-
procity thesis, as is made clear by the context of the quotation. Adams rejects even this unifying
notion of practical wisdom in his (2006), 184–9. MacIntyre (1999) seems to subscribe to a
version similar to Annas when he claims that in order for us to find another person ‘trustworthy’
there are a number of qualities that converge for us to make such a judgment.

virtue cluster. Such a view would, she writes, fail to ‘produce an integrated
view of the values in a person’s life as a whole.’37
Gary Watson, on the other
hand, thinks that the sensitivity that comes from practical wisdom only
establishes a weak interconnection among the virtues: ‘if you have any virtue,
you will have some sensitivity for considerations relevant to the others—you
will have, in one sense, all the virtues “to some degree.”’38
This unifying role of
prudence, in either the stronger version endorsed by Annas or the weaker
endorsed by Watson, is explored in a number of chapters in this volume.39
CONTEMPORARY CHALLENGES TO THE VIRTUES
Not only is there disagreement with the Traditional View about how best the
virtues and the relationship between them should be understood, but there is
also significant disagreement about whether or not the Traditional View is
even on the right track. One major source of criticism is motivated by the idea
that normative ethics ought to be constrained by the best currently available
psychological data. According to this view, theories of moral character ought
to be constrained in certain regards by what social and cognitive psychology
tells us moral agents are actually like. And recent empirical work suggests that
agents lack the kind of robust moral character at the heart of the Traditional
View. In this section, we lay out this challenge and indicated possible avenues
of response to the challenge. We certainly do not take the brief treatment here
to be exhaustive, but rather to simply raise criticisms to what seems to be the
historically dominant way of understanding the virtues.
Recently, a number of philosophers and social scientists have begun to
question the very presuppositions that robust theories of moral character
and moral character traits are based on; their concern is that it rests on an
empirically inadequate view of human agents. The following quotation by
John Doris captures this concern:
I regard this renaissance of virtue with concern. Like many others, I find the lore
of virtue deeply compelling, yet I cannot help noticing that much of this lore rests
on psychological theory that is some 2,500 years old. A theory is not bad simply
because it is old, but in this case developments of more recent vintage suggest that
the old ideas are in trouble. In particular, modern experimental psychology has
37
Annas (2011), 88. Annas argues, for this kind of consideration, for a ‘filter test’ which
would enable us to differentiate ‘traits which may well be admirable, popular, valued, and more,
but which are not virtues’ (97). The idea here is that, given her view of the interconnection of the
virtues, one can decide whether or not X is a virtue or merely otherwise admirable trait by
evaluating whether one could have the clear virtues without having X or vice versa.
38
Watson (1984), 60.
39
See, for instance, the chapters by Wood and Boyd in this volume.
Introduction 11

discovered that circumstance has surprisingly more to do with how people
behave than traditional images of character and virtue allow.40
This criticism of the Traditional View began with attributionism, a branch of
psychology that seeks to differentiate what is rightly attributable to an indi-
vidual’s character from what is rightly attributable to outside features. Much of
attribution theory attributes a significantly higher proportion of the causal
basis of behavior to external factors and less to moral character than tradition-
ally thought. According to such theorists, most individuals overestimate the
role of dispositional factors such as moral character in explaining an individ-
ual’s behavior, and underestimate the role the situation plays in explaining an
agent’s behavior. Gilbert Harmon expresses this idea as follows:
In trying to characterize and explain a distinctive action, ordinary thinking tends
to hypothesize a corresponding distinctive characteristic of the agent and tends to
overlook the relevant details of the agent’s perceived situation. . . . Ordinary
attributions of character traits to people are often deeply misguided and it may
even be the case that there . . . [are] no ordinary traits of the sort people think
there are.41
Philosophers such as Doris and Harman have used this work in the social
sciences to develop an alternative approach to moral character, commonly
known as ‘Situationism.’
Like the Traditional View, Situationism can be understood as comprised of
three central claims:
1. Non-robustness Claim: moral character traits are not robust—that is,
they are not consistent across a wide spectrum of trait-relevant situ-
ations. Whatever moral character traits an individual has are situation-
specific.
2. Consistency Claim: although a person’s moral character traits are rela-
tively stable over time, this should be understood as consistency of
situation specific traits, rather than robust traits.
3. Fragmentation Claim: a person’s moral character traits lack a strong
correlation between having a particular virtue (or vice) and having
others. There may be considerable disunity in a person’s moral character
among her situation-specific character traits.
Thus, Situationism rejects the first and third claims of the Traditional View,
and embraces only a modified version of the second claim. According to
Situationists, the empirical evidence favors their view of moral character
over the Traditional View. To cite just one early example, Hartshorne and
May’s study of the trait of honesty among school children found no cross-
40
Doris (2002), ix. 41
Harman (1999), 315f.

situational correlation. A child may be consistently honest with his friends, but
not with his parents or teachers. From this and other studies, Hartshorne and
May concluded that character traits are not robust but rather ‘specific func-
tions of life situations.’42
Other studies further call into question the Integrity
Claim of the Traditional View.
Some virtue theorists have responded to the challenge of Situationism.43
Some claim, for instance, that the attempt to base the normative claims of any
theory—whether it be a form of virtue ethics or not—runs the risk of illicitly
moving from ‘is’ to ‘ought.’ That is, simply because studies may—or may
not—indicate the relative consistency of character traits in different contexts,
it does not follow that the theory itself is in question. The transition from fact
to value cannot be made by a simple appeal to ‘empirical considerations.’
Others think that the empirical evidence doesn’t actually show that the virtues,
as traditionally conceived, don’t exist. Robert Adams, for example, writes that
while ‘this evidence . . . is significant for moral psychology, . . . it does not show
that there are not actually any virtues.’44
Others agree that the traditional
understanding of virtue ought to be modified in light of the empirical evi-
dence, but not to the degree that Situationists claim.
This is, of course, nothing more than a quick summary of a growing
exchange between social psychology and virtue ethics. Nevertheless, it is
important to keep in mind that if the virtues are to be examples of human
excellence, a proper understanding of them ought to take into consideration
all the relevant human sciences.
CLASSIFICATIONS OF VIRTUES AND VICES
The previous sections intend to, among other things, motivate the normative
focus on the virtues and vices, despite the various permutations that such a
focus can take. But even if one accepts the general constraints of what we’ve
been calling ‘a virtue-approach to ethics,’ that by itself does little to give
content to what the virtues that an individual should be pursuing are, nor
how they are to be understood. There are a number of different ways that
virtues and their corresponding vices can be classified. In what follows, we
consider the historically most common and influential classifications of
virtues. Sections I through IV each focus on one class of virtues: the cardinal
virtues, the virtues opposed to the capital vices, a number of epistemic virtues,
42
Hartshorne and May (1928), 379f.
43
See, for instance, Merritt (2000), Sreenivasan (2002), Miller (2003), Kamtekar (2004), and
Webber (2006).
44
Adams (2006), 12.
Introduction 13

and the theological virtues. Within each of these sections, the various con-
tributors not only discuss the nature of the virtue in question, but also address
some of the vices opposing those virtues. Section V deals not with particular
virtues and vices, but instead considers some of the ways that reflection on the
virtue extends beyond ethics to other related disciplines. As with the earlier
sections, our goal in this final section isn’t to develop a unified account of
virtue ethics or theory of virtue; rather, our aim is to make it clear how
treatment of particular virtues impacts not only moral theory, but a wide
range of related disciplines.
The Cardinal Virtues
The first section of the volume is dedicated to the cardinal virtues. The list of
virtues that have come to be known as ‘cardinal virtues’ goes back at least as far
as Plato. In the Laws, for example, Plato writes that ‘Wisdom is the chief and
leader [of the virtues]: next follows temperance; and from the union of these
two with courage springs justice.’45
And the discussion of the good soul in the
Republic also contains an extended discussion of these four virtues.46
Here,
Plato famously thinks that the virtues in individuals have their parallel in the
well-ordered city: ‘There will be more justice in the larger thing, and it will be
easier to discern. So, if you are willing, let’s first find out what sort of thing
justice is in cities, and afterward look for it in the individual.’47
So Plato also
thinks that the good city is one that must be wise, courageous, temperate, and
just.48
Although Aristotle retains all the virtues on Plato’s list of cardinal
virtues, he doesn’t single out these virtues as distinct from the other virtues,
and places prudence, as an intellectual virtue, as the chief among them. The
first use of the term ‘cardinal’ to refer to these four virtues appears to be found
in the fourth century ad in the writings of St. Ambrose: ‘Hic quattuor velut
virtutes amplexus est cardinales.’49
In Latin, cardo means ‘hinge’ or ‘that on
which a thing turns’ as its principal point. The cardinal virtues soon came to
be understood as the main virtues under which all the other virtues can be
subsumed.50
Aquinas, for instance, described the cardinal virtues as the ‘chief’
virtues, indicating that they ‘especially claim for themselves what commonly
belongs to all virtues.’51
These four virtues thus contain the common qualities
45
Laws I. 631.
46
Interestingly enough, in Protagoras, Plato adds another virtue to prudence, temperance,
courage, and justice: piety (or holiness); see 330b.
47
Republic, 368e–369b. 48
Republic, 427e.
49
Rickaby (1908). See also Ambrose (2001), 133.
50
That is, the intellectual and moral virtues. The theological virtues are usually taken to be
distinct insofar as they are infused by God, rather than acquired. See the relevant section below.
51
ST II-II 123.11, as quoted in Regan (2005), 111.

of all other moral virtues. According to Aquinas, since each of the cardinal
virtues perfects one of the various capacities of the soul (i.e. the intellect, the
will or intellectual appetite, the concupiscible appetite, and the irascible
appetite), each of the other virtues can be subsumed under one of these four.52
The volume begins with W. Jay Wood’s ‘Prudence,’ which is not only an
excellent introduction to the foremost of the cardinal virtues, but also illus-
trates a number of key themes the reader will find throughout the rest of the
volume: (a) how a particular account of a virtue will be tied to a larger theory
about what the virtues are and, in many cases, an account of the human good;
and (b) the close connection between the moral and intellectual virtues.
Regarding the first of these two issues, Wood approaches prudence primarily
through Aristotelian and Thomistic traditions, exploring ways in which the
theological framework of the latter is responsible for places where Thomas
disagrees with the Philosopher about the nature of prudence. For both of
them, prudence is practical wisdom about what is to be done, directing one to
the excellent human life, even though they disagree about the exact form that
the excellent human life takes. Prudence is defective when it is inconsistent
with genuine human flourishing. Regarding (b), Wood shows how, for both
Aristotle and Aquinas, while the moral virtues are not identical with intellec-
tual virtues, they must be joined with, and informed by, prudence. The moral
virtues cannot properly aim the individual at their objects without the indi-
vidual knowing, via prudence, what those objects are. But intellectual virtues
such as prudence are also informed and shaped by properly tuned desires,
emotions, and the will. In the discussion of the connection between the moral
and intellectual virtues, Wood also shows how moral vices can lead to
intellectual vices opposed to prudence, such as cunning, cleverness, and
negligence.
The second essay is David Schmidtz’s and John Thrasher’s ‘The Virtues of
Justice.’ Schmidtz and Thrasher do not attempt to delineate necessary and
sufficient conditions for the virtue of justice, in part because they think that
justice can be understood in a number of different ways: as a virtue of
individuals and as a feature of social institutions. They reject Plato’s claim
from the Republic that justice in a polis is simply justice in the individual ‘writ
large’; they do, however, think that the two conceptions of justice are closely
related in at least two ways. First, the just individual will want to be a
contributing part to a just polis. But Schmidtz and Thrasher argue that the
two are also related in the other direction as well: a just polis will be one which
helps to produce just individuals. Thus, while not endorsing the identity
between individual and communal justice that marks Plato’s view, they also
reject those modern views which seek to divorce the two conceptions of justice
52
See, for example, Aquinas (2005).
Introduction 15

from each other. In this regard, they argue for a third related conception of
justice that helps to bridge the gap between the two other conceptions, insofar
as the goodness of ‘mere’ justice as primarily a negative virtue can be in the
good of the community.
Daniel McInerny’s ‘Fortitude and the Conflict of Frameworks’ considers the
cardinal virtue of fortitude, or courage, from a variety of perspectives. His
ultimate purpose in doing so is to discover the conceptual connections that
hold between these perspectives in order to discern from them the truth about
the nature of courage. The first of the three accounts of courage that he
explores is the ancient conception of courage associated with the warrior.
While one can find this account in numerous places, McInerny takes Beowulf
as his paradigmatic expression. The second account of courage he examines is
that found in Thomas Aquinas, according to which fortitude is the disposition
which ‘binds the will firmly to the good of reason in face of the greatest evils:
because he that stands firm against great things, will in consequence stand firm
against less things.’53
McInerny thinks that fortitude involves not only the
disposition to endure evil, but that it ‘likewise demands that we attack evils
well, that is with moderation, in order to win safety for the future. Thus again,
fortitude has to do both with restraining fear and moderating acts of daring.’54
For Aquinas, fortitude thus has four integral parts: patience and perseverance
when it comes to enduring evil, and magnanimity and magnificence when it
comes to attacking it. Furthermore, Aquinas understands the ultimate act of
fortitude to be not a soldier’s death on the battlefield, but rather martyrdom.
The third conception of fortitude is found in Western modernity; Alasdair
MacIntyre has famously argued that it is characterized by the abandonment of
natural teleology. Deprived of a natural telos, which is integral to the two
previous conceptions, courage becomes reduced to a quest for authenticity.
We find this quest, McInerny suggests, vividly portrayed in Steve Jobs’ 2005
Stanford University commencement address. Drawing on the work of Ma-
cIntyre as providing a way of comparing competing frameworks, McInerny
ends by exploring comparative strengths and weaknesses of these three
approaches.
Robert Roberts’ chapter on temperance concludes the section on the car-
dinal virtues. Loosely following Aristotle’s treatment of sôphroneô in the
Nicomachean Ethics, Roberts takes temperance to be the virtue which governs
the appetites for food, drink, or sexual activity insofar as they are governed by
right reason. He shows how, given its connection to the flourishing of the
individual, an account of temperance needs to presuppose a conception of
human physical health, even though he does not wed his treatment of temper-
ance to any particular conception of human physical health. He then goes on
53
ST II-II.123.4. 54
This volume, page 84.

to show how it is possible to train the physical appetites involved in temper-
ance so that they can come to be controlled by right reason. With an account
of the virtue in hand, he then focuses his attention on the vice of intemper-
ance, differentiating it from the modern concept of an addiction. He ends by
showing temperance’s close connection with other virtues—not only pru-
dence, but justice as well. Roberts’ essay thus represents an excellent model
of the interconnection of the virtues we discussed earlier in this introduction.
The Capital Vices and the Corrective Virtues
A capital vice is a vice which directs a person towards an end and encourages
the development of other vices in a person to achieve that end.55
Rebecca
DeYoung’s Glittering Vices serves as an excellent introduction to the capital
vices, including the history of this particular grouping of vices. DeYoung’s
book recounts how the reflection on the capital vices and their corresponding
virtues originated in the Christian monastic tradition and developed into a
central element of medieval Christian ethics and spiritual formation. The list
appears to have originated with Evagrius on Pontus (346–399 ad). Cassian,
one of Evagrius’ pupils, treated the vices more systematically than did his
teacher and referred to them as ‘principia vitia,’ highlighting their ability to
serve as the source of other offspring vices: ‘There are eight principle faults
which attack mankind; viz. first gastrimargia, which means gluttony, second
fornication, thirdly philargyria, i.e. avarice or the love of money, fourthly
anger, fifthly dejection, sixthly acedia, i.e. listlessness or low spirits, seventhly
cenodoxia, i.e. boasting or vain glory, and eighthly pride.’56
Gregory the
Great’s treatment in the sixth century pared the list down to seven, replacing
dejection with envy, and treating pride as the root of the other seven. Gregory
describes the capital vices’ relationship to pride as follows:
Pride is the commander of the army of the devil, and its offspring are the seven
principle vices. All the vices that assail us are invisible soldiers against us in a
battle of pride which rules over them; of these, some precede as leaders, others
typically follow as the army. For not all vices take possession of the heart with
equal effect. Rather, after a few great faults enter a neglected soul, countless lesser
vices pour into the soul in waves. For pride itself is the queen of the vices, which,
once it has completely seized and vanquished the soul, hands the battle over to
the seven principle vices, as to its commanders. After these leaders of the army
55
Some vices, e.g. gluttony, do not simply encourage the development of other vices, but
produce other vices as effects of achieving their desired ends. For example, according to Aquinas,
restlessness and callousness are effects of greed, since trying to find satisfaction in one’s own
consumable and transient possessions tends to leave a person discontented, as well as more
inclined to selfishly overlook the needs of others in favor of one’s own accumulation of wealth.
56
As quoted in DeYoung (2009) 36.
Introduction 17

follow troublesome multitudes of vices, which undoubtedly arise from them. We
will understand this better if we enumerate these leaders and their armies as we
are able. Truly pride is the root of all evil. . . . Her first progeny are the seven
principle vices, which proceed from this venomous root, and they are: vainglory,
envy, anger, sorrow, greed, gluttony, and lust.57
The current list of seven—lust, gluttony, avarice, sloth, wrath, envy, and
pride—comes from Aquinas’ treatment in Summa Theologiae IaIIae 84.3–4
when Aquinas collapses sloth and dejection, and treats vainglory as a species
of pride. This list of these vices would come to be known more commonly as
the capital vices, a term derived from the Latin caput or ‘head,’ a metaphor
which can be seen in the description above of these vices as the principle and
director of other vices.58
According to DeYoung,
Capital vices are defined in the tradition as vices which serve as fertile sources of
other characteristic vices. They serve as final causes, orienting the person to a false
conception of happiness and organizing patterns of thought, desire, and action
around that end. The list of seven (or eight) vices was later designated the seven
deadly sins, but this title has a different meaning, since ‘deadly’ refers to the
distinction in Catholic moral theology between mortal and venial sin. Writers on
the sins such as Thomas Aquinas deny that every act of a particular vice
necessarily constitutes a mortal sin.59
Though often confused with ‘the seven deadly sins,’ the capital vices are better
thought of as a particular class of vices which serve as the root or source of
other vices, just as pride is often thought to be the root or source of all the
vices. Though the capital vices are primarily associated with medieval Catholic
accounts of virtue and vice, as the readings in this section indicate, both the
vices and the corrective virtues associated with them are fertile soil for
contemporary reflection.
The section on the capital vices opens with Colleen McCluskey’s ‘Lust and
Chastity.’ McCluskey’s chapter shows how a number of contemporary treat-
ments of sexual desire—such as that offered by Simon Blackburn—view lust
as the virtue and chastity as the vice, contrary to the capital vice tradition. She
begins by exploring the roots of the reflection on lust as a capital vice in the
desert monastic tradition mentioned above. Even those Christian monks who
took the strongest line against lust insisted that sexual desire in and of itself
was not vicious, but good. Sexual desire becomes lust when it becomes
inordinately strong and distracts one from higher goods. The monastic
fathers’ and mothers’ practical reflection on the dangers of sexual desire
57
Moralia in Iob 31.45.87–90.
58
Aquinas also writes that ‘those sins are capital which have ends chiefly desirable as such, so
that other sins are subordinate to such ends’ (De Malo VIII.1.ad).
59
This volume, page 178, note 5.

would be developed into a larger theoretical framework by the Middle Ages. In
general, for Aquinas, a human acts virtuously when she acts in a way that (a) is
in accordance with right reason and (b) which promotes flourishing. Sexual
desire, in particular, is in accord with reason when it contributes to the good of
the species, rather than the individual—that is, when it is aimed at procreation
within a properly ordered relationship (that is, marriage). Excessive sexual
desire, then, moves the individual to engage in sexual activities that are not
aimed at the good of the species’ procreation. As a result, those sexual activities
which are aimed merely at pleasure (even within what Aquinas would take as a
proper marriage relationship) are disordered. The virtue of chastity, on the
other hand, moderates sexual desire by keeping it aligned with the order of
reason. McCluskey distances herself from certain aspects of Aquinas’ account,
such as the claim that sexual desire needs to be aimed at procreation and not
just pleasure to be virtuous and that contraception is always immoral. But she
also rejects recent attempts to redefine lust as virtuous; her main foil here is
Simon Blackburn, though a number of others have developed similar views.
Part of the ostensible disagreement between the traditional view and the recent
proposals as exemplified by Blackburn is terminological; but she then argues
that Aquinas’ view can better account for how vicious sexual desire can result
in objectification. The desire for sexual activity apart from the love of friend-
ship objectifies one’s sexual partner; sexual activity solely for pleasure and not
aimed at the good for friendship (which includes commitment) between
individuals thus turns out to be vicious on McCluskey’s account. She thus
defends a modified version of the traditional account of lust and chastity,
though one which admittedly includes a wider range of acceptable sexual
activities and desires than Aquinas thought possible.
The next chapter also concerns a capital vice opposed to the cardinal virtue
of temperance. In ‘Gluttony and Abstinence,’ Robert Kruschwitz treats the
virtue of abstinence as more than just about our disposition to not eat too
much, but rather in a holistic orientation of the individual to know and rightly
desire the good. It is true that gluttony is the disposition for sensory pleasures
associated with eating and drinking that has become disordered because it is
directed toward something that is not good once all the relevant factors are.
But Kruschwitz also shows how gluttony and the behaviors that it leads to are
connected with justice and hospitality. The connection to justice is easily seen
when one considers the impact that the typical American diet’s over-reliance
on factory-farmed meat has on the environment and national health. Krusch-
witz also considers how gluttony is, and more importantly is not, related to a
number of biomedical issues, such as genetic predispositions towards exces-
sive appetites. He ends with a discussion of how certain practices associated
with abstinence, such as fasting, can help train one’s physical appetites.
Andrew Pinsent begins his ‘Avarice and Liberality’ by distinguishing the
capital vice of greed from the contemporary tendency to broaden its meaning
Introduction 19

to include its offspring vices, the general desire to have more, and various
forms of injustice. The restricted understanding of avarice Pinsent focuses on
is the disposition to overvalue money or possessions under the aspect of
financial value. He notes a number of ways in which the desire for material
wealth is unlike the desires for food, drink, and sex, a comparison that other
treatments of avarice often make. Largely because of these differences, exam-
ination of the vice of avarice faces what Pinsent calls ‘the failure of the rational
mean’: ‘namely the fact that any attempt to address the question, “How much
should I possess in order to live a virtuous life?” throws back a spectrum of
answers.’60
To help demarcate how and when the disposition for material
wealth is vicious, Pinsent draws on recent work on prosopagnosia, or face
blindness, and argues that avarice is vicious because it inhibits, or even
destroys, second-personal relatedness with others. Money is particularly
prone to such destruction because by its nature as a medium of exchange it
reduces goodness to a single quantitative assessment, thereby encouraging a
reductive outlook regarding value. Avarice thus counts against an individual’s
flourishing because it inhibits the individual’s relatedness to and love for
others.
In his treatment of the capital vices in the Purgatorio, Dante described lust,
gluttony, and avarice as involving excessive or immoderate desire or love for
things that we should love. In contrast, he thinks that sloth involves lax love, or
the failure to be properly moved by the love or desire of things that we should
be moved by. In her ‘Sloth: Some Historical Reflections on Laziness, Effort,
and Resistance to the Demands of Love,’ Rebecca Konyndyk DeYoung shows
how the capital vice tradition understands sloth to be much more—and much
worse—than mere laziness. Tracing the history of acedia from its desert
monastic roots through medievals such as Gregory the Great and Aquinas,
she shows how the original understanding of sloth as a failure of spiritual
commitment to what one knows one ought to do has been stripped and
secularized to mere inertia or lack of effort. The corrective virtue, diligence,
is also more than mere industriousness; it’s a sign of proper love and devotion,
ultimately to God and the loving relationships he calls us to. DeYoung also
shows how a certain kind of industriousness—which she describes as frantic
busyness and restless escapism—can itself be an expression of sloth insofar as
it is an attempt to avoid the demands of love. DeYoung advocates a return to
the historical conception of sloth, since this more robust understanding helps
us see how both inactivity and intentional diversion can express resistance to
charity.
Zac Cogley’s ‘A Study of Virtuous and Vicious Anger’ adopts a roughly
Aristotelian approach to the emotion of anger. Cogley’s goal is to develop an
60
This volume, page 164.

account of what differentiates virtuous anger from vicious anger in a way that
is informed by both philosophical psychology and recent empirical studies.
Cogley explores three functions that anger can serve. First, anger is an
appraisal that a particular situation is illegitimate, wrong, unjust, or otherwise
wrong. Anger is not only an emotional reaction to a situation, but it is also a
motivational source in response to that situation. Cogley argues that anger
often should produce motivation to work toward realizing a morally laudatory
purpose, such as fighting against injustice. (Two of Cogley’s recurrent
examples of virtuous anger are Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King,
Jr, who both used their anger to fight against social injustice and oppression.)
Finally, anger serves a communicative social function, providing for emotional
engagement with and transformation of others.
Within this understanding of the functions of anger, Cogley argues that
anger is virtuous only when it is excellent with respect to each of these three
functions: ‘her anger is fitting, it motivates her to take assertively resistant
actions, and she communicates her anger to others with nuanced attention to
social norms governing its display.’61
Anger which lacks excellence in any of
these functions will be vicious; there are thus a plethora of ways to be vicious
with respect to anger. Cogley’s chapter ends with a discussion of two charac-
teristic vices associated with anger: meekness and wrath. The meek person is
an individual who is deficient with respect to all three of anger’s functions: he
fails to feel sufficient fitting anger, his anger fails to motivate him to work to
change the situation, and he doesn’t express his own anger and experience the
anger of others properly. The wrathful individual, on the other hand, is
excessive with respect to each of these functions: she feel excessively angry
given the situation she is in, acts aggressively and impulsively on her anger,
and is quick to communicate her own and others’ anger in a way that is
socially inappropriate. Whereas the meek individual is disposed to not taking
himself seriously as a moral agent, the wrathful individual is morally overcon-
fident and insensitive.
Not only philosophers, but also psychologists and economists have devoted
energy to studying envy. The nature of envy, however, has been understood in
quite disparate ways, sometimes being understood primarily as a reason for
action, an economic and social force, an emotion, as well as a vice. In ‘Envy
and its Discontents,’ Perrine and Timpe seek to give an account of envy as a
capital vice and then show how that account is related to the range of
treatments of envy one finds in the literature. The vice of envy, most generally,
is the disposition to desire that another lose her good. But this description fails
to be a definition. They begin by examining Thomas Aquinas’ treatment of
61
This volume, page 217. Cogley prefers not to use the term ‘patience’ to refer to the virtue
perfecting one’s anger in order to avoid the contemporary connotations of passivity and quietude
which the term often evokes.
Introduction 21

envy in the Summa Theologiae and argue that Aquinas’ definition fails to
properly mark off the complete class of envy from other nearby dispositions.
They then modify Aquinas’ definition and they argue that envy should be
understood as the disposition to sorrow over another’s good because of a
perception of inferiority regarding the other’s good. They then draw on recent
work in economics and psychology to show how the divisiveness of envy
damages both the envious person and the larger community, treating a
number of the offspring vices of envy, such as jealousy, covetousness, greed,
and injustice. They end the chapter with a brief discussion of the corrective
virtues that help an individual overcome envy.
The final chapter in this section is Craig A. Boyd’s ‘Pride and Humility:
Tempering the Desire for Excellence.’ In this essay, Boyd argues that we can
see a sharp distinction between Aristotelian magnanimity and the Christian
virtue of humility. For Aristotle, the megalopsychos exemplified the pinnacle of
morality. He is the self-sufficient paragon of virtue who gives to others but is
reluctant to receive. In contrast to Aristotle’s depiction of the self-sufficient
megalopsychos, the Christian tradition of Augustine and Aquinas offers an
account of humility that sees this as a species of pride. To deny our reliance on
others—especially God—is to deny reality. It is ‘right reason’ that enables us
to see that we are part of an indispensible community wherein we depend
tremendously on the giving and receiving of assistance. But right reason also
takes into account all the relationships we have—including our relationship to
God and so it is a propaedeutic to the theological virtues of faith, hope, and
love. That is, the agent must first recognize her need for divine grace before
being able to receive these infused virtues. Boyd argues that the Thomistic
account of humility can be viewed as one of Alasdair MacIntyre’s ‘virtues of
acknowledged dependence.’62
Without the healing work of humility, our
relationship to God and to others remains irreparably severed.
Intellectual Virtues
The third section of the volume addresses a number of intellectual virtues. The
current interest in intellectual virtue is more recent than the revival of virtue
ethics. As mentioned above, Plato appears to have held that all the virtues are
identical, that ‘knowledge of good and evil’ is ‘the whole of virtue,’ thereby
turning all vice into ignorance.63
Aristotle’s differentiation between vice,
incontinence, continence, and virtue entailed that it was possible for a person
to possess intellectual virtue but not moral virtue. He also expanded the list of
epistemic virtues in book VII of the Nicomachean Ethics to include not only
62
MacIntyre (1999). 63
Laches 199d–e.

phronêsis (translated into the Latin as prudentia), but also sophia, technê,
epistêmê, and nous. Aquinas, following the Philosopher, endorsed this list:
[Aristotle] refers to his work on morals, that is Ethics 6, where he discusses the
way science and art and wisdom and prudence and understanding differ. To put
it briefly, wisdom and science and understanding are in the speculative part of the
soul, where he here calls the scientific part of the soul. They differ in that
understanding is the habit of the first principles of demonstration; science
concerns conclusions about lesser things, whereas wisdom considers the first
causes, so in the same place it is called the chief of the sciences. Prudence and art
are in the practical part of the soul, which reasons about contingent things that
can be done by us. But they differ, for prudence directs actions which do not pass
into exterior matter but are perfections of the agent; hence prudence is called
there right reason about things to be done. But art directs in making, which passes
into exterior matter, such as to build and to say; hence art is called right reason
about things to be made.64
For Aquinas, the intellectual virtues other than prudence (which, as seen
above, is a cardinal virtue) are only virtues in a qualified sense insofar as
they make individuals capable of good activities but are compatible with a bad
will. The only exception here is prudence which, insofar as it is also a cardinal
virtue as seen above, ‘is essentially connected with good desire and that is
therefore essentially ordered to a good use of the intellectual capacity.’65
However, despite this historical connection, the past three decades have
seen the development of explicitly virtue-based positions in epistemology, a
development that has reinvigorated the connections between ethics and epis-
temology. Virtue epistemology can arguably be traced to Ernest Sosa’s work in
the 1980s.66
Soon, Jonathan Kvanvig,67
James Montmarquet,68
and Linda
Zagzebski69
—among others—had devoted entire manuscripts to developing
and defending virtue epistemology. Though these approaches, like virtue
ethics itself, are diverse, there is a general unifying schema which Christopher
Hookway describes as follows: virtue epistemologies are ‘(1) approaches to the
most central problems of epistemology (2) which gives to states called “intel-
lectual” or “epistemic” virtues (3) a central or “primary” explanatory role.’70
That is, these approaches have at their heart a commitment to various
intellectual excellences in the process of belief acquisition and formation. As
Zagzebski and DePaul describe it, ‘at a minimum, virtue epistemology is
64
In Meta 1, lecture 1, n. 34; as quoted in Hoffmann (2012), 329. Aquinas’ treatment of the
intellectual virtues is significantly less tied to Aristotle in the Summa Theolgiae, both in terms of
how they are presented and how they are understood.
65
Hoffmann (2012), 328.
66
Many of Sosa’s early papers on intellectual virtue are collected in Sosa (1991), particularly
parts III and IV.
67
Kvanvig (1992). 68
Montmarquet (1993).
69
Zagzebski (1996). 70
Hookway (2003), 183.
Introduction 23

characterized by a shift in focus from properties of beliefs to the intellectual
traits of agents. The primary bearer of epistemic value is a quality of the agent
that enables her to act in a cognitively effective and commendable way.’71
Shortly thereafter they continue:
Virtue epistemologists understandably concentrate on the ways the idea of virtue
can help resolve epistemological questions and leave the conceptual work of
explaining value to ethics. Clearly, then, virtue epistemology needs virtue ethics.
But . . . virtue ethics also has something important to learn from virtue epistemol-
ogy. Perhaps due to historical accident, virtue ethicists have had little to say about
intellectual virtue. They generally take for granted that the moral and intellectual
virtues are not only distinct, but relatively independent.72
In part because of the collection that the above quotation comes from, recent
years have seen significant interaction between virtue ethicists and virtue
epistemologists that go beyond just the need for prudence in developing
moral virtues. This connection is addressed in a number of places in the
following chapters,73
but there are other relations between the epistemic and
moral virtues as well.
In this section, we have departed from the Aristotelian list of the intellectual
virtues. One reason is that phronêsis/prudentia is treated in the section on the
cardinal virtues. But we have also chosen to not include chapters devoted to
technê or epistêmê given that they, as described above, are only virtues in a
qualified sense. The section opens with an essay on trust by Linda Zagzebski.
According to Zagzebski, trust comes in both practical and epistemic forms, but
both forms are complex attitudes involving belief, feeling, and behavioral
components. Epistemic trust, both in terms of self-trust and as placed in
others, is pre-reflective and rationally inescapable if we’re to avoid skepticism.
However, epistemic trust, according to Zagzebski, isn’t an intellectual virtue, in
part because trust can be misplaced. But it is closely related to intellectual virtue in a
number of important ways.74
First, many of the intellectual virtues presuppose
epistemic trust and would not be virtues if it were not for the reasonableness of
epistemic trust. Furthermore, many of the intellectual virtues are either enhance-
ments of epistemic trust—as in the cases of intellectual courage, perseverance,
and firmness—or—as in the cases of intellectual humility and open-minded-
ness—constraints on it. Zagzebski also elucidates ways that the intellectual
virtues can help prevent trust from becoming either excessive or deficient.
The other two chapters in this section are traditional Aristotelian intellec-
tual virtues, and both draw on the connections with virtue epistemology
71
DePaul and Zagzebski (2003), 1. 72
DePaul and Zagzebski (2003), 2.
73
See not only the chapter on prudence, but also the chapter by Perrine and Timpe on envy
and Boyd’s chapter on pride and humility.
74
For another discussion of the close connection between trust and virtues, see Annas (2011),
73f.

mentioned above. First here is John Greco’s ‘Episteme: Knowledge and Under-
standing.’ Greco has two main goals in this chapter. The first is to argue that
epistêmê is better translated as ‘understanding’ than as either ‘knowledge’ or
‘scientific knowledge.’ Insofar as Aristotle claims that one has epistêmê only if
one can ‘give an account’ of the thing in question, epistêmê should not be
understood as knowledge insofar as one can have knowledge of some true
proposition even if one can’t give an account of why that proposition is true.
While scientific knowledge does involve ‘giving an account,’ epistêmê differs
from it in that one can have epistêmê of things that fall outside the scope of
science’s domain. Greco then defends a neo-Aristotelian account of the nature
of the intellectual virtue. Epistêmê, for Aristotle, requires that one ‘has the
appropriate sort of confidence, and knows the principles.’75
Greco argues that
Aristotle’s notion of ‘cause’ should be replaced with dependence relations
more generally (including, in addition to causal dependence, logical and
supervenient relations). More specifically, to understand a thing is to be able
to (knowledgeably) locate it in a system of appropriate dependence relations.
Greco then defends this account from two objections, both of which deny that
understanding is a kind of knowledge at all, and therefore cannot be under-
stood as knowledge of dependence relations.
Jason Baehr’s ‘Sophia: Theoretical Wisdom and Contemporary Epistemol-
ogy’ aims to shed light on the nature of sophia and why it should be seen as an
intellectual virtue. He begins by giving reasons for why contemporary phil-
osophers ought to care about sophia; he then delineates three different ways of
understanding the nature of sophia, each of which he claims has some prima
facie plausibility:
(a) as involving the grasp of fundamental metaphysical truths and of
various truths that follow from them, which he calls the ‘epistemic
state’ conception;
(b) as the cognitive faculty or capacity in virtue of which a person can know
or understand the content in question, which he calls the ‘cognitive
faculty’ conception; and
(c) as a kind of personal orientation or character trait that is directed at and
helps its possessor lay hold of these truths aimed at in the epistemic state
conception, a conception which he calls the ‘intellectual trait’ conception.
Baehr then shows how each of these conceptions of sophia figures relative to
various issues and debates in contemporary epistemology, such as epistemic
significance, understanding, the value problem, reliabalism, and responsibi-
lism. His goal in this section is to pave the way for renewed reflection on
sophia and related epistemic concepts.
75
NE 1139b 34–5.
Introduction 25

The Theological Virtues
The fourth section of the book addresses the most distinctive Christian
contribution to the virtues: faith, hope, and charity.76
Paul the Apostle men-
tions that ‘These three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is
love.’77
The Christian tradition latched onto these three ‘virtues’ as the key
point of differentiation between its own views on morality and those of the
surrounding pagan culture.78
This stemmed from basic theological beliefs
about human nature, sin, and grace.
In contrast to the pagan tradition of antiquity, the early Christians saw
themselves as fundamentally alienated from God and they could only be
reconciled through the divine grace offered by Christ. Sin, therefore, was not
merely ‘weakness of will’ or ignorance, but an alienation from God resulting
from a ‘turning away’ from the true human good. Although human reason, on
its own, was powerless to save the human soul, it could recognize its need for
the salvation that could come only through the grace of God. Some thinkers,
like Augustine, argued that there could be no virtue whatsoever without grace.
Others, like Aquinas, held that pagans could practice a kind of ‘imperfect’
virtue.
Augustine says, ‘No one can have true virtue without true piety, that is
without the true worship of God.’79
But for Augustine this meant that one ﬁrst
had to receive divine grace before any act whatsoever could be understood as
‘good.’ ‘Pagan virtue,’ such as it was, could not be considered true virtue
because there was no recognition that God must be the one to whom all
human activity is directed. Only by a conversio of the will (i.e. a ‘turning back
to God’) could a human agent’s actions become virtuous. As a result, true
beatitude could only be found in God.
Aquinas sees the distinction in terms of ‘imperfect’ and ‘perfect’ happiness.
Certainly, Aristotle’s virtuous person could achieve a certain kind of ‘happi-
ness’ in this mortal life by developing the cardinal virtues. But the problem is
that humans are destined for the ‘perfect’ happiness of communion with God.
Since sin prevents them from achieving this on their own they need the
theological virtues. He says,
76
Pieper (1986) notes that ‘the English word for love is inadequate as we use it to cover too
many activities. The Greek agapé or the Latin caritas better expresses the idea conveyed in the
sense of love as a theological virtue.’
77
1 Corinthians 13:13.
78
Wisdom 8:7 mentions the four cardinal virtues but they do not seem to play an important
role in Christian thought until late antiquity or the early Middle Ages. Augustine’s On Free
Choice of the Will brieﬂy develops each of the four cardinal virtues and follows Aristotle’s
ranking rather than Plato’s.
79
City of God V.19.213.

Certain additional principles must be given by God to man by which he can thus
be ordered to supernatural happiness, just as by natural principles he is ordered to
a connatural end, though not without divine help. The additional principles are
called theological virtues: first, because they have God as their object, inasmuch
by them we are rightly ordered to God; secondly, because they are infused in us by
God alone; and finally, because these virtues are made known to us only by divine
revelation in Sacred Scripture.80
Following Augustine, Aquinas contends that the agent needs to have God as
the object of these virtues in order to have our lives ‘rightly ordered.’ Secondly,
the agent acquires them not by her own efforts but by the ‘infusion’ of divine
grace. They each may grow as a habit—as all virtues can—but they must first
be given by God. Thirdly, we know of them only through the divine revelation
of the Scriptures. Again, unaided natural reason could not discover these
virtues on its own but needs the revelation of the Scriptures—as a witness to
the grace of Christ—in order to know that the truly virtuous life is one of faith,
hope, and charity.
These virtues were not merely ad hoc accretions to an already complete set of
‘secular Aristotelian virtues’ but transformed the moral and intellectual virtues
at their core.81
Christian prudence is shaped by charity and faith to the extent
that ‘right reason’ sees new relationships—e.g. with the divine trinity—that
unaided natural reason could not even imagine. Humility and magnanimity see
the tempering and striving for excellence in an entirely new way—with refer-
ence to one’s desire for the honors only God can bestow and with regard to one’s
place in the universe vis-à-vis God and one’s neighbor.
The first chapter in this section, ‘Faith as Attitude, Trait, and Virtue’ is by
Robert Audi who argues that we can distinguish faithfulness in three ways.
First, we can consider it as an attitude as when we speak of someone who has
‘faith in’ another person or an institution. This is not properly a moral use of
the term. A second use of the term can be one of a ‘trait.’ Here, we mean that a
person has a kind of loyalty to another person whether or not that other
person is morally good. The primary element here is that faith is a kind of
‘allegiance’ to another. And a third notion of faith is as a psychological virtue.
Audi believes there are six important conceptual dimensions to the idea of a
virtue of character: situational, conceptual, cognitive, motivational, behavioral,
and teleological. From this point he argues that there are two kinds of virtues:
moral and non-moral. Moral virtues are valuable in themselves and so we find
justice and honesty. Others are non-moral (or ‘adjunctive’) and here we
find courage and conscientiousness, which can be found in very immoral
individuals.
80
ST I-II.57.1.
81
For a worthwhile discussion of the relationship between the theology and moral virtues in
Aquinas, see Pinsent (2012).
Introduction 27

Faithfulness seems to be an adjunctive virtue as it adheres to persons—
while not necessarily judging the moral character of those persons. As directed
toward God and neighbor (i.e. as a ‘theological’ virtue) it is both a virtue of
character since it is grounded in love and a moral virtue in the sense that it has
an egalitarian concern for others. So religious faith can be a character trait or a
kind of attitude towards God. But it can also be construed as a virtue of
personality. In this last case, faith has God as the right kind of ‘object’ and
integrates the believer’s life accordingly.
Charles Pinches’ ‘On Hope’ develops the idea that hope is not merely an
animal or human emotion but a theological virtue that orients the self to God.
In a generic sense hope (1) is a ‘tensed’ emotion, and (2) aims at a ‘difficult
good.’ It is tensed in the sense that we recognize something we do not
presently have but wish to attain in the future and so there is a temporal gap
between our initial desire and the attainment of the object of our hope. It also
aims at a difficult good. I do not hope for air but I do hope for a long life. But
what distinguishes ‘natural hope’ from the theological virtue of hope is the
‘object.’ And the object of hope as an ‘emotion’ can be any end—good or
bad—that an agent may desire. However, the ‘object’ of hope as a theological
virtue is communion with God.
Hope ‘expects’ and ‘waits for’ what faith affirms. In this sense, faith is a
theological virtue of the intellect since it informs us of the truth about God.
But hope is a virtue of desire since it concerns the ‘difficult good,’ but what is
unique about hope is that it ‘leans on God’ for its help. This leaning on God
ties hope together with charity since we hope for communion with God in the
beatific vision. Yet, this hope is not only for the next life but applies to this one
as well. In the last section of this essay Pinches shows how theological hope
can shape and inform Christian politics by rejecting the ‘false hopes’ promised
by utopian societies or by ‘scientific progress.’
In the final essay of this section, Paul Wadell’s ‘Charity: How Friendship
with God Unfolds in Love for Others,’ the discussion once again focuses upon
an interesting comparison-contrast of Aristotle with Aquinas. Aristotle claims
that friendship plays a central role in the moral life but believes that friendship
with God would be absurd. Aquinas, however, takes the idea of friendship as a
‘participation’ in the life of the other and applies it to the triune God of
Christianity. For Aristotle there was an unfathomable gulf between the
human and the divine since ‘friendship’ could only be had between ‘equals.’
But Christ bridges that gulf in grace so that God draws the creature into
participation in divine beatitude. As a result, grace not only enables us to be
‘friends’ with God but elevates us so that we can become ‘participants’ in the
divine life itself.
Genuine charity does not merely love God for God’s own sake—which it
does—but also implies that we love others as we love ourselves. That is, we
come to love the neighbor as a ‘second self’ in that we come to desire the good

of ‘friendship with God’ for the neighbor. But we also love others because God
loves them. That is, when we love a friend we come to love those whom the
friend loves—and in this way love ‘unfolds’ to others—even for those whom
we may have a natural enmity. And so charity enables us to move beyond our
‘natural’ predilections for those whom we instinctively love to love for our
enemies. The ways in which love ‘unfolds’ for others is through the practices of
mercy, kindness, and almsgiving.
Virtues in Other Disciplines
Philosophy does not hold a monopoly on the study of the virtues. Other
disciplines, especially theology and psychology, have taken an interest in
these issues, as character traits seem pliable enough to function in a variety
of disciplinary contexts.
In the first essay in this section, ‘Virtue in Theology,’ Stephen Pope begins
by noting that theology is not like any other discipline because it requires the
participation of the practitioner in the subject. That is, theology is a discipline
that requires belief prior to its reflection; in this it follows the famous dictum
‘credo ut intelligam.’ It arises out of the life of the community’s reflection on
the covenantal relationship with God and the community’s ‘journey to God.’
As such, theology sees the virtues not only as helps for the present life but also
as habits that prepare us for a deeper communion with God in the life to come.
This communion with God is the source of true human happiness. As with
most contemporary philosophy of religion, Pope approaches God in light of
the Judeo-Christian tradition; while much of what he says may also be
applicable to other religious traditions, it is clear from his chapter that he is
allowing the particular theological tradition he’s working within to shape his
treatment. Although the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures speak more to list of
commands, admonitions, proverbs, and parable, they provide a rich tapestry
to draw upon for a study of the virtues.82
As mentioned above, the three most
important of the Christian ‘virtues’ are the Pauline virtues of faith, hope, and
love (1 Cor 13:13). Faith orients us to God on our journey; hope gives us
courage for the journey; and charity sustains us on the journey by ‘going with,
and to God’ with those whom we love. These ‘virtues’ for the journey also
reform the cardinal virtues in ways that are directed towards God and to
others rather than primarily to our own happiness. In this way, the theological
virtues paradoxically bring us happiness: we attain happiness not by seeking it
directly but by seeking it indirectly in the good for others. Pope’s essay, while
summarizing some of the materials dealt with in greater detail elsewhere in
82
See for example, Meeks (1995).
Introduction 29

this volume, also shows how a focus on virtue can shape much of one’s
theological reﬂection.
Christie Hartley and Lori Watson’s ‘Virtue in Political Thought: On Civic
Virtue in Political Liberalism’ advances the idea that civic virtues are those that
are central to social cooperation; as a result, any kind of political body requires
these sorts of virtues even though they do not require ‘moral virtues.’ They
contrast perfectionist and anti-perfectionist theories of the state. Perfectionist
models, such as Aristotle’s, posit an objective good for human life and orient
the society to that good. In contrast to these views, anti-perfectionist models
along the lines of John Rawls believe the state should be ‘neutral’ concerning
what constitutes an objective account of good life. Hartley and Watson defend
a liberal understanding of political virtues in the tradition of Rawls who
famously argued for a heteronomous account of the good.83
Because we can
reasonably disagree about what constitutes the good life, we should advocate
civic virtues such as fairness, civility, tolerance, and reasonableness. This
assumes two ideas that are central to political liberalism: the public use
of reason and reciprocity. The public use of reason concerns how people in
a pluralist society argue for the same basic freedoms and opportunities from a
political perspective and not those based on religious or other beliefs. Reci-
procity means that we allow others the same freedoms we allow ourselves in
their pursuit of the good and that they permit us the same freedoms. As a
result, some virtues will necessarily shape political organizations. These will
include fairness, tolerance, and reasonableness. But it is important to remem-
ber that on this view civic virtues are instrumental in a citizen’s pursuit of the
good and not constitutive of it.
The third chapter in this section is, ‘Virtue in Positive Psychology,’ by
Everett Worthington et al. They contend that positive psychology, the psych-
ology of religion, and spirituality are interested in the study of virtue. These
converging trends share a common core of concern with virtue and suggest
that our knowledge of both the psychology of religion and spirituality and
positive psychology could be enlarged by entering into more active dialogue
among these ﬁelds.
Positive psychology, a relatively new discipline, has focused on three main
areas: positive emotions, happiness, and character strengths. Religion, how-
ever, concerns the set of beliefs, practices, etc., of like-minded individuals.
Spirituality, though, focuses on the personal experiences an individual has
with a sacred object.
Although one can readily see that religion with its corporate concern for
morality—and spirituality with its personal response to the sacred—would be
83
Rawls (1971), 554. Rawls says, ‘Although to subordinate all our aims to one end does not
strictly speaking violate the principles of rational choice . . . it still strikes us as irrational, or more
likely as mad. The self is put in the service of one of its ends for the sake of the system.’

linked closely to the development of virtue, this has not been so for psychology
until recently. But psychologists have turned their attention to three areas
particularly—cognitive psychology, a non-rational understanding of will-
power, and a moral intuitionist model of moral emotion. These areas explore
the importance of emotional and moral ‘set points’ that people can develop
over time into positive character traits or virtues. In keeping with the trad-
itional religious and philosophical understanding of the virtues one must
practice the virtues repeatedly in order for them to develop appropriately.
James Van Slyke’s chapter on ‘Moral Psychology, Neuroscience, and Virtue:
From Moral Judgment to Moral Character,’ explores the recent scholarship on
the neuroscientiﬁc explanations of moral virtues. This work suggests a dual
processing model of moral deliberation that appeals to both cognitive and
affective mechanisms. But central to this work has been the discovery or
‘mirror neurons’ that enable humans (and other more developed animals) to
mimic the activities and emotions of others. This ability to mimic others serves
as a necessary condition for practical reason in the sense that our moral
deliberation is an acquired skill much like that of a musician who mimics
and then internalizes the processes of her craft. As the musician learns her
craft the ability becomes like a ‘second nature’ to her where she ‘knows’ and
‘feels’ what and how she should play.
Much of the data on moral decision-making come from the work of people
like Jonathan Haidt and Joshua Greene who have used fMRI techniques to
measure neural activity when subjects process moral dilemmas. The results
demonstrate that cognitive and affective responses vary according to the
relative personal or impersonal conditions the subject considers. Of course,
Van Slyke points out that there are serious limitations on what fMRIs can
indicate about ‘moral character’ from isolated thought experiments in a
laboratory context. Moreover, virtue theory considers the narrative of a
person’s life including how one’s character has been formed prior to any
particular moral decision.
In her chapter, ‘Virtue and a Feminist Ethics of Care,’ Ruth Groenhout
argues that attempts to categorize an ‘ethic of care’ are problematic since these
efforts assume the ‘standard taxonomy’ of ethics. This standard taxonomy
divides normative theories among consequentialist, deontological, and virtue
based approaches. The key problems with this taxonomy are that it unreason-
ably emphasizes individual decision-making and is reductionistic with regard
to thinking that one aspect of our lives is the one salient aspect of our moral
lives. That is, it places undue emphasis on agents, acts, and consequences. The
ethics of care, however, as well as Confucian ethics place emphasis on rela-
tionships, personal narratives, and the much neglected role of emotion in
moral decision-making. The ethics of care and virtue ethics do share a number
of similarities in that they highlight the importance of relationships and reject
the reason–emotion dichotomy. However, the excessive focus on the ‘agent’
Introduction 31

neglects the importance of the relationships that have shaped the agent. This
truncated view of normative theory fails to account for the complexities of
relationships in virtue ethics, an ethic of care, and Confucian ethics since the
standard taxonomy fails to consider issues beyond the consequences, the
agent’s motivation, and the isolated act in question.84
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84
We would like to thank Rebecca DeYoung, Audra Jenson, Christian Miller, Randie Timpe,
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remaining problems, of course, are ours, not theirs.

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Introduction 33

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Section I:
The Cardinal Virtues

1
Prudence
W. Jay Wood
INTRODUCTION
Virtues are acquired dispositions to excellent functioning in some generically
human sphere of activity that is challenging and important for human well-
being. Virtues bear upon both moral and intellectual activity, though all
virtues make use of good reason at some level. This essay explores practical
wisdom (phronesis to the Greeks, prudentia to the Latins), an intellectual
virtue connecting right reason with action.1
Practical wisdom, or prudence,
is thus a ‘bridge virtue,’ connecting reason with moral activity. Put briefly,
prudence is the deeply anchored, acquired habit of thinking well in order to
live and act well. Aristotle defines it as ‘a state of grasping the truth, involving
reason, concerned with action about things that are good or bad for a human
being.’2
When does courage tend toward recklessness, generosity toward
profligacy, satiating hunger toward gluttony? These judgments are the special
domain of practical wisdom. It is a cultivated habit of good judgment that
allows us to reason thoroughly and with finesse amidst the particularities of
our moral, interpersonal, emotional, political, and various other life circum-
stances, toward the end of human flourishing. Prudence is at the heart of
moral character, for it shapes and directs the whole of our moral lives, and is
indispensible to our becoming morally excellent persons.
Though an intellectual virtue, prudence is also first among the ‘four cardinal
virtues,’ three of which, justice, temperance, and fortitude, are moral virtues.3
Practical wisdom is due this pride of place because of its indispensible role in
1
I will use the terms ‘practical wisdom,’ ‘phronesis,’ and ‘prudence’ interchangeably through-
out, making plain at points where, say, Aristotle and Aquinas differ in their accounts of the
virtue.
2
NE 1140b5.
3
The word ‘cardinal’ derives from the Latin, ‘cardo,’ for hinge, thus signaling that these four
virtues are the hinges on which swings the whole of the excellent life.

all the other virtues. If, for instance, temperance in eating requires that one
avoid too much or too little suitably nutritious food, one must discern the
truth about the type and amount of food best suited to health and overall well-
being. Virtuous eating is what right reason prescribes.4
Aristotle argued that the faculties of mind and will separate us from the
beasts. We do not feed or reproduce at the command of our glands, the season
of the year, or in response to whatever chemicals may be currently coursing
through our bodies. Civilized humans do not yield to whatever impulse wells
up within them strongest at the moment: rather, they reason about whether a
particular action or emotion is conducive to their personal good and the good
of others. Prudence, then, is the acquired disposition to reason well about what
courses of action and emotion will best bring about our own and others’ well-
being. Practical wisdom is intellectual in that persons possessing it character-
istically make intelligent judgments regarding the overall trajectory of a
flourishing life as well as accurate judgments about how to achieve it. Pru-
dence is essential for moral virtue because it provides the ineliminable sound
judgment required to practice any of the virtues in our particular moral
circumstances.
One must acknowledge at the outset that definitions and analyses of
practical wisdom are contested among philosophers, as are other virtue and
vice terms. Conceptions of human nature, the conditions of human flourish-
ing, and the ultimate ends to be sought, all reflect one’s metaphysical commit-
ments that differ among philosophical outlooks. If practical wisdom is right
reason directed to the excellent human life, we can expect variations in the
analyses of practical wisdom to arise out of contrasting accounts of human
nature and contrasting visions of the good life. Differing accounts of the
excellent human life will also result in varying views about what intellectual
practices and habits of mind are constitutive of or productive of practical
wisdom. Among other virtues, Aristotle’s phronimos pursues magnanimity, a
greatness of soul and being that is fully self-conscious of and satisfied with its
own greatness, made all the greater insofar as free of debts or dependence on
others. Yet in the Judeo-Christian tradition, ‘Fear of the Lord is the beginning
of wisdom.’ On this view, we are created and conserved in being by a
maximally perfect and holy God, whose commands we have disobeyed and
from whom we stand in need of forgiveness. Humility and gratitude are thus
key virtues characteristic of the excellent Christian life. Not so for Aristotle,
nor for Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, a self-described inventor of a new virtue, the
virtues of the overman, who derides Christian prudence and other Christian
virtues as ‘sham-wisdom,’ ‘false knowledge,’ yielding lives of ‘wretched con-
tentment.’ What Christians construe as sexual immorality, selfishness, and a
4
See, for example, Bob Kruschwitz’s chapter on gluttony in this volume.
38 W. Jay Wood

prideful will to power are for the overman keys to personal greatness and the
highest kind of flourishing. Analogous remarks could be made for Stoic
wisdom, Confucian wisdom, and other traditions with developed accounts
of the requirements for human flourishing. This essay will, for reasons of
space, focus primarily on Aristotle and Aquinas as key representatives and
highpoints of both ancient and medieval accounts of practical wisdom.
Though Aquinas is reluctant to break with the Philosopher, we will see that
his Christian faith shapes and advances his account of prudence in ways that
differ crucially from Aristotle.
PRACTICAL WISDOM DISTINGUISHED FROM
OTHER INTELLECTUAL VIRTUES
Aristotle and Aquinas distinguished three major types of knowledge: theoret-
ical, productive, and practical knowledge, and five intellectual virtues that
enable the reliably successful pursuit of each sort of knowledge. Theoretical
knowledge has truth about the general structure of reality as its subject matter,
which Aristotle further divided into the sciences of theology, mathematics,
and nature. These sciences are modeled on the axiomatic system of geometry,
whose starting points, according to Aristotle, cannot be otherwise, and from
which we can infer knowledge that is universal, unchanging, and necessary.
Three intellectual virtues pertain to theoretical knowledge: understanding,
science, and wisdom. Understanding (nous, intellectus) is the science of first
principles, and its corresponding virtue is the mature power of natural intellect
by which one grasps self-evident axioms and universal truths that serve as the
foundations of the various sciences, such as mathematical axioms (e.g. a
triangle is an enclosed geometric figure with three sides) and moral first
principles (eudaimonia is our highest end). Understanding also makes pos-
sible our apprehension of universals by induction or abstraction from particu-
lars. Understanding plays a double role in ethical reasoning, allowing one to
apprehend first principles through induction, but also to apprehend a particu-
lar situation as falling under a moral universal.5
Understanding, not prudence,
apprehends life’s ultimate goods and ends. Prudence doesn’t determine that
happiness is our ultimate end; it determines the best means to bringing about
happiness.
Science (episteme, scientia) is the cognitive power to infer truths from
universal truths about a particular subject (or genus), together with middle
terms containing the particulars of a case. For Aristotle and the medievals,
5
See Reeve (1992), 59–60.
Prudence 39

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the war in Flanders, and it seemed as if he was destined to remain
at home with his family, fate and inclination were against this
arrangement. However, the first step he took in life was not in the
direction of the battle-field. An Italian cardinal took him to Rome in
quality of secretary. The brave Don John, half-brother of Philip II.,
was appointed general of the league arming against the Grand Turk
at the same time, and the young and ardent Miguel eagerly took
arms under him, and was present at the memorable naval
engagement of Lepanto. Philip did not enter with much good-will
into this strife, and prevented any advantages that might result from
the glorious victory by shortly withdrawing his brother from the
command of the allied forces of Christendom. The enthusiastic
young soldier received three wounds as well as a broken arm in the
fight. This was in the year 1571, and until 1575 we find Cervantes
attending Don John in his contentions with the Mohammedan
powers on the coast of Africa, in which the chivalric commander was
hampered by the ill-will of his brother, Philip II. He went into the
Low Countries much against his will, and after several victories met
a premature death there in 1578, when only thirty-two years old.
{20}
CAPTIVE IN ALGIERS.
Cervantes received from his great-souled commander written
testimonials of his valiant conduct and moral worth, and sailed for
Spain from Naples in the year 1578. On the voyage the vessel was
attacked by three Turkish galliots; those who fell not in the
engagement were made prisoners, and our hero became the slave
of a lame renegade called the "Cripple," in Arabic, Dali Mami.
The Algerians, rigid Mussulmans as they were, killed as few
Christians in these attacks as they could. Slaves and ransoms were
the cherished objects of their quests, and as soon as could be after
the landing in Algiers, the classification was made of "gentles and

commons." The captors were cunning in their generation, and this
was the process adapted for the enhancement of their live property.
The captive's owner proceeded with wonderful skill to raise the value
of his goods. While the slave declared his poverty, and lowered his
station in order to lower the terms of his ransom, the master
affected to treat his victim with the greatest respect. He gave him
almost enough of nourishment, and professed he was ruining
himself for the other's advantage through pure deference and good-
will; and slipped in a word as to his hopes of being repaid for his
outlay. The prisoner might undervalue himself as much as he chose,
"he was merely a private soldier." Ah, his master knew better; the
man of the ranks was a general, the man before the mast a
caballero, the simple priest an archbishop.
"As for me,' said the captive Dr. Sosa, 'who am but a poor clerk,
the need me bishop by their own proper authority, and in
plenitudine potestatis. Afterward they appointed me the
private and confidential secretary of the Pope. They assured me
that I had been for eight days closeted with His holiness in a
chamber, where we discussed in the most profound secrecy the
entire affairs of Christendom. Then they created me cardinal,
afterwards governor of Castel Nuovo at Naples; and at this
present moment I am confessor to Her Majesty the Queen of
Spain.' In vain Dr. Sosa renounced these honors. They produced
witnesses, both Christian and Turks, who swore to having seen
him officiating as cardinal governor."
The letters of of Don John of Austria having been found on
Cervantes, the poor soldier of Lepanto became at once a great lord,
from whom a large ransom might be expected. They began with
genuflexions, and frequently ended with the scourge, not in his case,
however. Many poor wretches, to save themselves from the horrible
treatment they endured, or expected to endure, became
Mohammedans, on which they immediately obtained their liberty,
were set on horseback, with fifty Janissaries on foot, serving as

cortège, the king defraying the expense of the ceremony, bestowing
wives on the hopeful converts, and offering them places among his
Janissaries.
Cervantes became the centre, round which the hopes of many poor
captives were grouped. He made several attempts at evasion, and,
strange to say, was not in any instance punished by his otherwise
cruel master.
Several Christians enjoying the benefit of safe conduct were free to
come and go among these Algerines, and the Redemptorist Fathers
enjoyed thorough freedom, as through them the ransoms were
chiefly effected. A Spanish gentleman being set at liberty, carried a
letter from our hero home to his family, and in consequence the
brave old hidalgo, his father, mortgaged his little estate, took the
dowries of his two daughters, and forwarded all to his son for the
liberation of himself and his brother, who was also in captivity. When
he presented himself to Dali Mami with his sum in his hands the
renegade cripple only laughed at him. He and Rodrigo were men of
too much importance to be ransomed for so trifling a sum.
{21}
The cruel viceroy of Algiers having spent his allotted time in charge
of that nest of vultures, was replaced by a governor still more cruel,
under whom Cervantes made a desperate effort to escape, and carry
off forty or fifty fellow-captives with him. He paid his brother's
ransom, and he, when set at liberty, managed to send a vessel near
the spot where Miguel had his companions in safety in a grotto of a
certain garden. Through some mismanagement the descent failed,
and the hiding-place was revealed by the treachery of a trusted
individual. All were brought before the new Viceroy Hassan, and
Cervantes avowed himself the chief and only plotter among them.
Hassan used flattery, promises, and threats to induce the intrepid
Spaniard to criminate a certain brother Redemptorist as privy to the
plot, in order that he might come at a much coveted sum of money

which he knew to be in his possession. All was in vain. Cervantes
was not to be turned from the path of loyalty, and when every one
expected sentence of death to be pronounced on him at the
moment, Hassan became suddenly cool, and merely ordered him to
be removed.
The bagnio of Hassan was a sufficiently wretched place, but while
our hero sojourned there, he made it as cheerful as he could by
composing poetical pieces and reciting them, and getting up a
Spanish comedy. There were forty priests in it at the time, and these
performed their clerical duties as if at liberty. They celebrated mass,
administered holy communion, and preached every Sunday. When
Christmas approached, he arranged a mystery, such as he had seen
performed in his native Alcala under the direction of the ingenious
Lope de Rueda. All were prepared,—the shepherds' dresses, the crib,
the stable, etc.; the guardian admitting outsiders at a small charge,
and a shepherd reciting the opening verses of the entertainment,
when a Moor entered in hot haste, and shouted out to all to look to
their safety, as the Janissaries were rushing through the streets, and
killing the Christians. Some clouds on the northern horizon had been
taken for the Christian fleet under Don John, and the terrible guards
determined to put it out of the Christian captives' power to aid the
attack. The massacre ceased on the clearing away of the vapors.
About that time, Philip II. was collecting a large naval force in the
Mediterranean for the ostensible purpose of storming Algiers, though
in reality his intent was merely to seize on the kingdom of Portugal.
Its romantic sovereign, Don Sebastian, the hero of one of Miss
Porter's romances, had just been slain in Morocco, and his successor
Henry, whose days were numbered, was unable to cross his projects.
The report of Philip's meditated descent inspired Cervantes with a
project of a general rising of the slaves. He even addressed to the
sombre king, through his secretary Mateo Vasquez, a remonstrance
and encouragement, of which we present a few extracts:

"High and powerful lord, let the wrath of thy soul be enkindled.
Here the garrison is numerous, but without strength, without
ramparts, without shelter. Every Christian is on the alert; every
Mussulman is watching for the appearance of the fleet as the
signal for flight. Twenty thousand Christians are in this prison,
the key of which is in your hands. We all, with clasped hands, on
bended knees, and with stifled sobs, and under severe tortures,
beseech thee, puissant lord, to turn your pitying looks towards
us, your born subjects, who lie groaning here. Let the work
courageously begun by your much loved father be achieved by
your hand."
Hassan employed the slaves in building fortifications for his garrison,
but he kept Cervantes strictly guarded. "When my disabled
Spaniard," said he, "is under guard, I am sure of the city, the
prisoners, and the port." But though well watched, the restless
captive made three other attempts at escape, for each of which he
was to receive, but did not, two thousand bastinadoes. In the fourth
attempt, two merchants who were compromised, and feared he
might betray them under the torture, offered to pay his ransom, and
thus secure his departure, but he did not accept the terms. He
braved the examination, and would {22} not reveal the names of
any accomplices except four who were already out of danger.
Strange to say, even this time he escaped without punishment. A
renegade, Maltrapillo, high in Hassan's confidence, and who seems
to have entertained great esteem for the fearless and generous
character of Cervantes, probably saved his back sundry stripes on
these different occasions. On this subject we quote some lines from
M. Chasles:
"Either through the interference of Maltrapillo or the influence
exercised by the noble character of Cervantes on all around him,
this time again he was spared by Hassan. How was he enabled to
many times to escape his master's rage? In following his fortunes
through these years of trial, I am struck by the mysterious
influence of his noble character on the events and the persons by

whom he was surrounded. In the mixed of a diverse population
incessantly changing, among a crowd of soldiers and captive
doctors, he occupied an exceptional station. Brothers of Mercy,
Christian merchants, renegades, all recognize in him a moral
superiority. 'Every one,' says the eye-witness Pedrosa, 'admired
his courage and his disposition.'"
The acts of kindness done by the renegades to the captives were not
small nor few. Nearly all of them had conformed through the
immediate prospect of promotion, or fear of punishment, and there
was scarcely a conscientious Mussulman among every hundred of
them. In general they were anxious to obtain from the captives
about to be ransomed certificates of their own good offices towards
them. These were intended to be available for some possible future
contingencies.
The poor sorrowful father continued to make unavailing efforts for
his ransom. He even disturbed the court officials with
representations of his son's services and sufferings; but
"circumlocution" was a word understood even in Madrid and in the
days of Philip II. The afflicted and impoverished gentleman died in
dragging his suit through the lazy and unpatriotic officials, and if
ever a death resulted from heartbreak his was one. Still his mother,
his brother Rodrigo and his sister Andrea exerted themselves, and
dispatched to Algiers 300 crowns. A strong representations at the
court insured in addition the amount of a cargo then consigned to
Algiers, which produced only 60 ducats, say £30. These sums were
not sufficient, and the heart sick captive would have been carried by
Hassan to Constantinople, his viceroyalty having expired, only for the
deficiency being made up by the Brothers of Mercy, Christian
merchants, etc., who were "tightly targed" for that purpose by the
good-hearted and zealous brother superior, Gil. This providential
redemption occurred in 1580.
Before he quitted his abode of little ease he had the forethought to
demand a public scrutiny of his conduct by the Christian authorities.

Witnesses in great number came forward to testify to his worth. The
following facts were irrevocably established. He had rescued one
man from slavery only for the treachery of Blanco. The pure morality
of his life was attested by a gentleman of high standing. Others
proved his many acts of charity to the unfortunate and to children,
all done as secretly as possible. He had contrived the escape of five
captives. A gentleman, Don Diego (James) de Benavides, furnished
this testimony:
"On coming here from Constantinople, I asked if there were in
the city any gentlemen by birth, I was told there was one in
particular—a man of honor, noble, virtuous, well-born, the friend
of caballeroes, to wit, Michael de Cervantes. I paid him a visit. He
shared with me his chamber, his clothes, his money. In him I
have found a father and a mother."
The declarations of Brother Gil and of Rev. Dr. Sosa solemnly
confirmed the facts brought forward by numerous captives. Sosa
wrote his declaration while still in irons, and avowed with a mixture
of dignity and feeling that his principles would have prevented him
from allowing himself such {23} intimacy with Cervantes, had he not
considered him in the light of an earnest Christian, liable to
martyrdom at any moment.
A scrutiny was also made in Spain at the request of the elder
Cervantes, in 1578, and both the justifying documents, signed by
notaries, are still in existence.
"Ah!" says Haedo (himself an eye-witness of the sufferings of the
Christians in that vulture's nest), "it had been a fortunate thing
for the Christians if Michael Cervantes had not been betrayed by
his own companions. He kept up the courage and hopes of the
captives at the risk of his own life, which he imperilled four
times. He was threatened with death by impaling, by hanging,
and by burning alive; and dared all to restore his fellow-sufferers
to liberty. If his courage, his ability, his plans, had been seconded

by fortune, Algiers at this day would belong to us, for he aimed
at nothing less."
Cervantes did not put his own adventures in writing. The captive in
Don Quixote said with reference to them, "I might indeed tell you
some strange things done by a soldier named Saavedra. They would
interest and surprise you, but to return to my own story." The
disinterested hero had more at heart the downfall of Islamism than
his own glorification.
HIS RESTITUTION TO HIS NATIVE LAND.
Cervantes touched his native land again with no very brilliant
prospect before him. His father was dead; his mother could barely
support herself, his brother was with the army, and his friends
dispersed. Still the first step on his beloved Spain gave him great joy,
afterwards expressed through the mouth of the captive in Don
Quixote:
"We went down on our knees and kissed our native soil, and
then with eyes bathed in tears of sweet emotion we gave thanks
to God. The sight of our Spanish land made us forget all our
troubles and sufferings. It seemed as if they had been endured
by others than ourselves, so sweet it is to recover lost liberty."
At the time of his arrival king and court were at Badajos, watching
the progress of the annexation of Portugal. He joined the army, and
during the years 1581, '2, '3, shared in the battles between Philip
and the Prior Antonio de Ocrato, the latter being assisted by the
French and English. In one of these fights the Spanish admiral
ordered the brave Strozzi, wounded and a prisoner, to be flung into
the sea. At the engagement of the Azores, Rodrigo Cervantes and
another captain flung themselves into the sea, and were the first to
scale the fortifications, thus giving their soldiers a noble example.

MARRIAGE AND SUBSEQUENT TROUBLES.
He lived in Lisbon a short time and composed his Galatea there.
Next year he returned to Madrid, and married the lady Dona Catalina
de Palacios y Salazar y Vomediano. She was of a noble family, but
her dowry consisted of a few acres of land. In the marriage contract,
signed in presence of Master Alonzo de Aguilera, and still in
existence, mention is made of half a dozen fowl forming part of the
fortune brought by her to the soldier and poet. The marriage was
celebrated 12th December, 1584, at the bride's residence, Esquivias,
a little town in the neighborhood of the capital.
He now betook himself seriously to literature, published the Galatea,
and began to write for the theater. At first he was very successful,
but on a sudden Lope de Vega came on the scene, and exhibited
such dramatic aptitude and genius and mental fertility, that
managers and actors and audience had no ears for any other
aspirant to dramatic reputation, and poor Cervantes found his
prospect of fame and independence all at once clouded. The pride of
the Spanish hidalgo and "Old Christian" [Footnote 16] had been
much {24} modified by his life in the army and bagnio, and his good
common sense told him that it was his duty to seek to support his
family by some civil occupation rather than indulge his family pride,
and suffer them and himself to starve.
[Footnote 16: One unsuspected of having Moorish or
Jewish blood in his veins.]
But oh, Apollo and his nine blue stockings! what was the occupation
dropped over our soldier-poet's head, and doing all in its power to
extinguish his imaginative and poetic faculties? Nothing more nor
less than the anti-romantic duties of a commissary. Well, well, Spain
was no more prosaic than other countries, and Cervantes had
brothers in his mechanical occupations. Charles Lamb's days were

spent in adding up columns of "long tots." Burns gauged whiskey
casks and kept an eye on private stills; Shakespeare adjusted the
contentions of actors, and saw that their exits and entrances did not
occur at the wrong sides; perhaps the life of the mill-slave Plautus
furnished as much happiness as any of the others. The mill-stones
got an occasional rest, and he was in enjoyment for the time, when
reading comic scenes from his tablets or scrolls, and listening to the
outbursts of laughter that came from the open throats of his sister
and brother drudges.
The Invincible Armada, while preparing to make a hearty meal on
England, had need meantime of provender while crossing the rough
Biscayan sea, and four commissaries were appointed to collect
provisions for that great monster, and for the behoof of the Indian
fleets. Cervantes was one of the four, Seville appointed his
headquarters, and his time most unpoetically employed collecting
imposts in kind from all tax-paying folk.
The regular clergy (houses of friars and monks) were at the time at
deadly feud with his Most Catholic Majesty, Philip II., and refused to
pay him tribute. They founded their refusal on a papal bull; and on
the other aide, the alcaids produced the royal warrant. Between the
contending powers the author of Galatea found himself sufficiently
embarrassed.
For some years Cervantes endured a troubled and wretched
existence in such employment as the above, in purchasing corn for
the use of the galleys, and in making trips to Morocco on public
business. He solicited the government for an office in the Indies, and
was on the point of obtaining it when some influence now unknown
frustrated his hopes. He describes his condition and that of many
other footballs of fortune in the Jealous Estremaduran:
"In the great city of Seville he found opportunities of spending
the little he had left. Finding himself destitute of money, and not
better provided with friends, he tried the means adopted by all

the idle hangers-on in that city, namely, a passage to the Indies,
the refuge of the outcasts of Europe, the sanctuary of bankrupts,
the inviolable asylum of homicides, paradise of gamblers who are
there sure to gain, resort of women of loose lives, where the
many have a prospect, and the few a subsistence."
Our poet not being born with an instinct for regular accounts and
being charged to collect arrears of tax in Granada to the amount of
two millions of maravedis, say £1,500, found his task difficult among
people who were slow in committing to memory the rights of the
crown. His greatest mistake was the intrusting of a considerable sum
to a merchant named Simon Freire de Luna in order to be deposited
in the treasury at Madrid. Simon became bankrupt, and Cervantes
was cast into prison for the deficiency in his accounts. He was soon
set at liberty, but the different appearances he was obliged to make
before the courts of Seville, Madrid, and Valladolid were sufficient to
turn his hair grey before its time. The judges reproached him for his
deficit, the people gave him no praise. The alcaids of Argamasilla in
La Mancha gave him particularly bad treatment. Perhaps he
recollected it when writing his romance.
{25}
Subjected to the interrogatories of the royal councillors, judges, and
even alcaids, a servant to all merely for means to live, and always
moving about, poor Cervantes appears at last to have given way.
From 1594, when sent to collect arrears in Granada, to 1598, little
can be gathered concerning him, but from this last date till 1603
nothing whatever is known of his fortunes. The probability is that he
spent part of the time in a prison of Andaluçia or La Mancha, and
there meditated on the vanity of human expectations, and wrote the
first part of Don Quixote.
HIS LITERARY LIFE.

Wherever he spent this interval his brain had not been idle—he had
passed in review the defects of the Spanish government and of the
Spanish character. He had been unable to rouse the king to crush
the power of the Algerine pirates, either by the memorials he had
consigned to his friend the secretary, or by the vigorous pictures he
had presented on the stage (after his return from captivity) of the
cruelties inflicted by them on their unhappy captives. He had failed
in his great and cherished object, but there remained one
reformation yet to be made, namely, of taste among those
Spaniards, ladies and gentlemen, to whom reading was a pleasure,
and who could afford to purchase books. To substitute a relish for
healthier studies was a darling object of our much worried poet for
years. It was cherished in prisons, and the first part of his great
work written, or nearly so, at the time when we find him again
mixing with society in Valladolid, where Philip II. held his court. This
was in the year 1603. The following extract concerning his residence
and his mode of life in that city, is taken from the work of M.
Chasles:
"There is at Valladolid a poor looking house, narrow and low,
hemmed in among the taverns of a suburb, and near the deep
and empty bed of a torrent called Esguéva. There Cervantes
came to live in 1603, in the fifty-seventh year of his age. With an
emotion which I cannot express I hare visited this dwelling,
which stands outside the city, and which remains unmarked by
stone or inscription. A well-used staircase conducts to the two
modest chambers used by Cervantes. One, in which he slept, no
doubt, is a square room with a low ceiling supported by beams.
The other, a sort of ill-lighted kitchen looking on to the
neighboring roofs, still holds his cantarelo or stone with three
round hollows to hold water jars. Here lived with him his wife,
Dona Catalina, his daughter Isabelle, now twenty years old, his
sister Dona Andrea, his niece Constanza, and a relation named
Dona Magdalena. A housekeeper increased the family. Where did
all sleep? However that was arranged, they all did their work
together. The ladies earned money by embroidering the court-

dresses. Valladolid, adopted for abode by the new king and by
the Duke of Lerma, was then incumbered, as was Versailles
afterwards, with gentlemen, with the grandees, and with
generals. Our impoverished family was supported by this
affluence. The Marquis of Villafranca, returning from Algiers to
the court, got his gala-suit made by the family of the soldier-
poet, with whom he had erewhile been acquainted. Cervantes
was occupied either with keeping the books of people in
business, or regulating the accounts of some people of quality, or
striving to bring his long lawsuit with the government lo a close.
"In the evening, while the needles of the women flew through
the stuffs, he held the pen, and on the corner of the table he put
his thoughts in writing. There it was he composed the prologue
of that work which had been a labor of love in the composition,
and in which he employed all the force of his genius. In bringing
it with him to Valladolid, he experienced alternations of hope and
fear, being fully sensible that it was his masterpiece. 'Idle reader,'
said he in the first page, 'you may credit my word, for I have no
need to take oath, that I wish this book, child of my brain, were
the most beautiful, the most brilliant, and the most witty that any
one could imagine.' He had published nothing since the Galatea,
which had appeared twenty years before and was an amiable
apology for the taste of the times. The book about to be printed
was a flagrant attack on the same literature."
Those who despise the old books of chivalry, and have probably
never opened one, are too ready to undervalue Cervantes'
apprehension about bringing out his book, and the service it
eventually rendered to society and literature. We recommend an
indifferent individual of this way of thinking to peruse about the
eighth of the contents of one of the condemned {26} volumes of
Don Quixote's library, and work himself into the conviction that the
body of the Spanish readers of 1603, ladies and gentlemen, not only
admired such compositions more than living readers admire the

most popular writings of our times, but in many instances believed
the contents to be true.
Let us hope that there is some mistake about the non-
accommodation afforded to the seven individuals of Cervantes'
family, six of whom were of gentle blood. It is easy to imagine what
delightful evenings they would have enjoyed if tolerably comfortable
with regard to furniture and space, the soldier-poet reading out
some passages from the Don, or the Exemplary Novels, or one of his
plays, and the well-bred women plying their needles, listening with
interest, and occasionally breaking out into silvery laughs at the
comic misfortunes of the knight, or the naive pieces of roguery of
the squire.
We can readily imagine the desolation of Cervantes' spirit during the
troubled years of his official wanderings, his superiors urging him to
grind the faces of his countrymen and fellow-subjects, and these
entertaining most unfriendly feelings toward himself. The ladies of
his family—where were they during this nomadic life of his, and how
were they situated? Separation from their society and anxiety about
their privations must have added much to the present suffering, and
forebodings of things still worse, the companions of his lonely hours.
A pleasant interruption to the monotony and privations of the family
life must have been the appearance of the first part of the Don in
1604, and the popularity it soon attained.
HIS LABORERS AND THEIR REQUITAL.
Some who merely neglected the author till found by fame, were
soon ready to do him disservice by passing censure on the execution
of the great work, and even searching for subjects of blame in his
past career. Lope de Vega, as we have seen, had put it out of his
power to turn his dramatic talents to account. Further, he did not act
in a kind manner towards him in private, though outwardly friendly.

But Lope's friends and admirers so deeply resented an honest and
judicious criticism on the works of the prolific dramatist by
Cervantes, that they ceased not during the remaining dozen years of
his life to do him every unfriendly act in their power. One was so full
of malice and so unprincipled, that towards the end of Cervantes' life
he wrote a second part of the Adventures of Don Quixote,
distinguished by coarseness, dullness, and inability to make the
personages of the first part of the story act and speak in character.
The impudent and talentless writer called himself Don Avellaneda of
some town in La Mancha, but one of De Vega's admirers was
supposed to be the real culprit. Suspicions fell on several, but the
greater number centered in Pere Luis de Aliaga, a favorite of the
Duke of Lerma, and the confessor of Philip III. He was call, meagre,
and dark-complexioned, and had got the sobriquet of Sancho
Panza, by antithesis.
The wretched attack, for it was no better, was published in 1614,
two years before the death of Cervantes, Though suffering from
illness, and overshadowed by the expectation of approaching death,
the appearance of the impudent and worthless production acted on
him as the bugle on the nerves of the old battle-steed. In the order
of Providence good is extracted from mere human evil, and to the
false Avellaneda the world is indirectly indebted for the second part
of Don Quixote, the wedding of Gamacho, the wise though
unsuccessful government of Barataria by Sancho, the
disenchantment of Dulcinea, and all the delightful adventures and
conferences that had place at the ducal chateau, province unknown.
{27}
But between the publishing of the first part of Don Quixote in 1605,
and the second in 1614, how had the great heart and head been
occupied? Probably with little pleasure to himself. On his return from
the wars of Portugal in 1584, he had the pleasure and profit of

seeing several of his plays acted, some expressly written to direct
public spirit towards a crusade on the Algerines. [Footnote 17] Of
these he thus speaks in the prologue to his dramatic works,
published 1613:
[Footnote 17: Between the days of Lope de Rueda and
those of Cervantes' debut, Naharra of Toledo had made
considerable improvement in the mechanics of the art.
The sack was rejected, and chests and trunks held the
properties. The musicians came from behind their
blanket, and faced their customers. He rejected the
beards except in the case of disguisements, and invented
or adopted thunder, lightning, clouds, challenges, and
fights. He himself was a capital personator of cowardly
bullies.]
"In all the playhouses of Madrid were acted some plays of my
composing, such as the Humors of Algiers, the Destruction of
Numantia, and the Naval Battle, wherein I took the liberty of
reducing plays to three acts which before consisted of five. I
showed, or, to speak better, I was the first that represented the
imaginations and secret thoughts of the soul, exhibiting moral
characters to public view to the entire satisfaction of the
audience. I composed at that time thirty plays at least, all of
which were acted without anybody's interrupting the players by
flinging cucumbers or any other trash at them. They ran their
race without any hissing, cat-calling, or any other disorder. But
happening to be taken up with other things, I laid aside play-
writing, and then came on that prodigy of nature, that
marvellous man, the great Lope de Vega, who raised himself to
be supreme monarch of the stage. He subdued all the players,
and made them obedient to his will. He filled the world with
theatrical pieces, finely and happily devised, and full of good
sense, and so numerous that they take up above ten thousand
sheets of paper all of his own writing, and, which is a most

wonderful thing to relate, he saw them all acted or at least had
the satisfaction to hear they were all acted."
Good-hearted, generous Cervantes, who could so dwell on that
success in a rival which condemned himself to the wretched life of
an inland revenue officer, to the hatred of non-payers of tax, to
prosecutions, and to the discomforts of an Andaluçian or Manchegan
dungeon, and separation from his niece, sister, daughter, and wife,
whom, in absence of data to the contrary, we take to be amiable and
affectionate women.
When the court returned to Madrid he and his family followed it, but
we find no employment given by him to the printing presses of that
city from 1604 to 1613, when he got published the collection of
plays and interludes before mentioned. In the same year he
published his twelve Exemplary Novels, [Footnote 18] dedicating
them to his patron, Don Pedro Fernandez de Castro, count of Lemos.
This nobleman, in conjunction with Archbishop Sandoval, and the
actor, Pedro de Morales, had succeeded (let us hope) in cheering the
poet's latter years. In the preface he gives a portrait of himself in his
sixty-sixth year, distinguished by his own charming style, always
redolent of resignation, good-will, and good-nature. He pretends
that a friend was to have got his portrait engraved to serve as
frontispiece, but, owing to his negligence, he himself is obliged to
supply one in pen and ink:
[Footnote 18: The Lady Cornelia, Rinconete and
Cortadillo, Doctor Glass-case, the Deceitful Marriage, the
Dialogue of the Dogs Scipio and Berganza, the Little
Gipsy Girl, the Generous Lover, the Spanish-English Lady,
the Force of Blood, the Jealous Estremaduran, the
Illustrious Scullery-Maid, and the Two Damsels.]
"My friend might have written under the portrait—This person
whom you see here, with an oval visage, chestnut hair, smooth
open forehead, lively eyes, a hooked but well-proportioned nose,

a silvery beard that, twenty years ago, was golden, large
moustaches, a small mouth, teeth not much to speak of, for he
has but six, all in bad condition and worse placed, no two of
them corresponding to each other; a figure between the two
extremes, neither tall nor short, a vivid complexion, rather fair
than dark, somewhat stooped in the shoulders, and not very
light-footed: this I say is the author of Galatea, Don Quixote de
la Mancha, . . . commonly called Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra.
He was for many years a soldier, and for five years and a half in
captivity, where he learned to have patience in adversity. He lost
his left hand by a musket-shot in the battle of Lepanto, and ugly
as this wound may appear, he regards it as beautiful, having
received it {28} on the most memorable and sublime occasion
which passed times have ever scene, or future times can hope to
equal, fighting under the victorious banners of the son of that
thunderbolt of war, Charles V. of blessed memory. Should the
friend of whom I complain have no more to say of me than this,
I would myself have composed a couple of dozen of eulogiums,
and communicated them to him in secret," etc.
THE CLOSING SCENE.
Cervantes' Voyage to Parnassus, in which he complains to Apollo for
not being furnished even with a stool in that poets' elysium, was
published in 1614, the second part of Don Quixote in 1615, and that
was the last book whose proofs he had the pleasure to correct. He
was employed on his Troubles of Persiles and Sigismunda, [Footnote
19] and wrote its preface, and the dedication to his patron the Count
of Lemos, while suffering under his final complaint, the dropsy, and
having only a few day to live. From the preface to the Persiles he
appears to have received extreme unction before the last word of it
was written. From the forgiving, and patient, and tranquil spirit of
his writing, even when annoyed by much unkindness and injustice
on the part of the Madrid coteries, from the spirit of religion and

morality that pervades his writings, and the care he appears to have
taken to meet his summons as a sincere Christian, we may
reasonably hope that his sorrows and troubles for time and eternity
ended on 23d April, 1616 the day on which a kindred spirit breathed
his last at Stratford-on-Avon.
[Footnote 19: It was published by his widow, Dona
Catalina, la 1617.]
And indeed in our meditations on the characteristics of the author
and man in Cervantes, we have always mentally associated him with
Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott. We find in all the same versatility
of genius, the same grasp and breadth of intellect, the same gifts of
genial humor and the same largeness of sympathy. The life of
Cervantes will be always an interesting and edifying study in
connexion with the literature and the great events of his time. We
find him conscientiously doing his duty in every phase of his
diversified existence, and effecting all the good in his power. When
he feels the need of filling a very disagreeable office in order to
afford necessary support to his family, he bends the stubborn pride
of the hidalgo to his irksome duties—and it is not easy for us to
realize the rigidity of that quality which he inherited by birth, and
which became a second nature in every gentleman of his nation. In
advanced years he still vigorously exerts his faculties, and endures
privations and disappointments in a resigned and patient spirit; and
when complaints are wrung from him they are neither bitter nor ill-
natured. Even his harmless vanity has something amiable and cordial
about it. When he has just reached his sixtieth year he effects a
salutary revolution in the corrupt literary taste of his countrymen and
countrywomen, and save a few coarse expressions separable from
the literature of his day, a deathbed examination would have found
few passages in his numerous writings which it would be desirous to
find omitted. He closed an anxious and industrious life by a Christian
death.

NOTE.
Towards the end of Cervantes' life he belonged to the third order of
Trinitarian monks, and was buried in their church with his face
uncovered. These brothers having quitted their convent in 1633, the
site of the interment could not be discovered when a search was
afterwards made. The house he occupied in Madrid being pulled
down about twenty years since, his bust has been placed in a niche
in front of the new building.
{29}

SILENT GRIEF.
You bid me raise my voice,
And pray
For tears; but yet this choice
Resteth not with me. Too much grief
Taketh the tears and words that give relief
Away:
Though I weep not, silent and apart,
Weeps and prays my heart
You like not this dead, calm,
Cold face.
So still, unmoved, I am.
You think that dark despair begins
To brood upon me for my many sins'
Disgrace:
Not so; within, silent and apart,
Hopes and trusts my heart.
Down underneath the waves
Concealed
Lie in unfathomed graves
A thousand wrecks, storm never yet—
That did the upper surface madly fret—
Revealed.
Wreck'd loves lie deep; tears, with all their art,
Ne'er could show my heart.
Complaint I utter not.
I know
That He who cast my lot,

In silence also bore His cross.
Nor counted lack of words or tears a loss
In woe.
Alone with Him, silent and apart,
Weeps and prays my heart.

Original.
THE GODFREY FAMILY;
OR, QUESTIONS OF THE DAY.
CHAPTER I.
MR. GODFREY AND HIS FAMILY.
About the time the events of the era 1792 were creating a panic
throughout the European world, an English gentleman sat at
breakfast with his wife and children in a noble mansion on the south
eastern coast of his native island. The newspaper was unfolded with
more than usual interest, for the Honorable Mr. Godfrey's sister had
married a French nobleman, and the daily accounts from France
struck every day new terror to the heart of this gentleman. Until
now, he had been what is termed a liberal in his politics, and, alas!
an unbeliever in his religion, and had prided himself on bringing up
his family free from all bigotry and superstition; he had kept up
correspondence with men of science all over the world, and fondly
hoped that the reign of intellect "would emancipate the world from
evil." His children had been brought up under all these influences,
and thus far with success to his scheme. Accustomed from infancy to
refinement, elegance, domestic happiness, and intellectual culture,
these young people felt that in their case goodness and happiness
were synonymous. All that was beautiful they loved, for they had
cultivated tastes; all that was noble in sentiment they admired, for
their father prided himself, and taught them to pride themselves, on
their noble ancestry, whose deeds of daring and renown he was

never weary of recounting. Fame, honor, and glory were their idols.
Brought up among such genial influences as foster agreeable
manners and bring out the most lovable of earth's dispositions,
together with an intellectual expression of beauty, and a poetic
appreciation of nature's charms, it was little wonder that they
mistook strong impulses for principle, thought themselves firm in
integrity of purpose, and were disposed fearlessly to launch their
vessel on the ocean of life, secure that intelligence and high aims
would guard them for ever against shipwreck. But now a change
seemed pending. The fear engendered by the French Revolution had
somewhat revolutionized Mr. Godfrey's mind, he was becoming more
cautious in his theories, and more morose in his temper than he had
ever been before. His wife hesitated ere she asked: "Any news of
the countess to-day?"
"No; though affairs are getting more desperate every hour. Would
she and the count were safe in England."
"But, in that case, their estates, would be confiscated, would they
not?"
Mr. Godfrey rose uneasily and paced the room. "What is the world
coming to?" he said.
A loud ring at the outer gate prevented reply; it was early for visitors
at the front entrance. They paused, and listened; soon a servant
announced "M. de Villeneuve."
"M. de Villeneuve! why, what can bring him here? Where have you
shown him to?"
"He is in the library, sir."
Mr. Godfrey hastened to receive his visitor. "I thought you were in
America," he said, after the first greetings were over.

"I went back to France to finish arranging some affairs for my father;
{31} and well for me that they were settled before these scenes of
blood had crazed the populace, or we should have lost everything."
"And now———"
"Now, everything of ours has been favorably disposed of, and my
father and his family are settled in America without loss of property;
my father is delighted at the prospects of the new world, where
every man is to be EQUAL before the laws; you know he is an
enthusiast."
"Yes, but it is an untried experiment yet, and France is presenting a
very fearful spectacle at this moment in endeavoring to follow in the
track."
"It is of that I came to speak to you. You have relations there?"
"My sister—do you know anything about her?"
"I and some other friends brought her and her husband's daughter
across the Channel last night."
"Last night! across the Channel! And her husband——"
"Has perished by the guillotine!"
"Great God!" Mr. Godfrey hid his face in his hands. "My poor sister!
how did she bear it? where is she? how did you come?"
"We came over in an open fishing boat—the Countess de Meglior,
Euphrasie, the priest of the old chateau, and myself; it was all we
could do to escape detection. I, of course, passed unnoticed, as an
American citizen; but the Countess of Euphrasie and M. Bertolot had
to disguise themselves and to suffer many hardships. The countess
now lies ill in the little inn at New Haven; she sent me on to tell you
of her situation."

"My poor sister! My poor sister! Has she lost all?"
"Nearly so. The estate is confiscated, and save a little money and a
few jewels she was able to save nothing; indeed she was too much
terrified to think. Mademoiselle de Meglior had been sent for on the
first alarm from the south of France, where she had been educated;
she arrived in time to throw herself into her father's arms as the
officers were taking him from his house; and in less than a week he
was no more. Secret intimation was sent to the countess that she
and her daughter were both denounced, and they fled, as I have
told you."
To hasten to his sister's aid was, of course, the first thing to be
thought of. It was some days before the countess was sufficiently
recovered to be able to be removed to her brother's house; and
even after removal she was for a long time confined to her room.
Euphrasie, her step-daughter, tended her most assiduously, but the
poor lady could scarcely be comforted. To have, lost everything at
once—husband, estate, wealth, power, and position, and to be
reduced to depend upon a brother's bounty—it was not wonderful
that she should feel her situation acutely. She had lived exclusively
for this world's honors; every duty of domestic life had given place
to her love of the court and its pleasures. Euphrasie, brought up at
the convent and under the guardianship of her paternal
grandmother, was almost as much a stranger to her as the nieces to
whom she was now newly introduced.
. . . . . .
It was a long time ere the Countess de Meglior rallied sufficiently to
appear in the drawing-room of the mansion, and meantime her step-
daughter, Euphrasie, was simply her slave. Madame never
considered her welfare, or seemed to think she was in any way
concerned in the misfortune that bad overtaken them; yet never,
perhaps, was a child more fondly attached to a father than had been

our heroine. Although since the death of her own mother she had
for the most part resided away from him, yet her father's frequent
visits to his ancestral chateau, and the still more frequent
correspondence with his mother and daughter, had kept up a warm
interest. At the death of her grandmother she had received her
education at a neighboring convent, for her step-mother {32}
declined taking charge of her. She was summoned home at last in
consequence of the troubles of the times; arrived in time to be torn
by force from the arms of her father, into which she had thrown
herself; passed days of agonizing suspense, which were terminated
only by hearing of his death.
Paris was no longer safe; advertised of her own proscription,
Madame de Meglior, almost in a state of frenzy, excepted the kind
offices of M. de Villeneuve, and, with the old family chaplain, had
fled the country, taking with her Euphrasie, with whom she so
suddenly became aware she was connected, though a stranger alike
to her character and disposition.
Euphrasie, though overwhelmed by the blow, was constrained to
hide her own emotions, the better to console one who seemed so
inconsolable as the countess, her step-mother. Truly, the poor girl
did feel she was as a stranger in a strange land. Until the storm
broke forth which drove the nuns from the convent, and let infidelity
and irreligion like "the dogs of war" loose over the fated kingdom,
Euphrasie had dwelt in happy ignorance of all grosser evil, and with
light and merry heart, chastened by earnest piety, pursued her
innocent way; but suddenly awakened by such horrors to the
knowledge of crime, vice, and their concomitant miseries, she shrank
from entering into a world which contrasted with the abode she had
left, seemed to her over-excited imagination filled with mysterious
terrors, and fraught with indescribable dangers.
She met, then, the advances of her entertainers with constraint;
kept the young people absolutely at a distance, and would more
willingly shut herself up in the apartment of her peevish, unloving

stet-mother, to whom she manifested the affection and paid the
respect of a daughter, than join with Adelaide or Annie either in
study or amusement.
Adelaide, the eldest daughter of Mr. Godfrey's family, was within two
months of her eighteenth year—Eugene, the only son and heir, was
then sixteen—while her sister Annie was but a year younger; and
the merry, laughing Hester had scarcely counted thirteen years. With
the compassionate eagerness of youth they crowded round
Euphrasie, whom they persisted in saluting as "cousin," and were
not a little chagrined to find their advances met in so chilling a
manner; they spared no pains to distract her from her moodiness, or
hauteur, or ill-temper, or whatever it might be, that made her so
different from themselves. Yet moodiness it scarcely could be, for
the young French girl was cheerful in society, so far as the
expression of her countenance went; and when surprised in solitude,
a calm serenity sat on her youthful brow, and she bore the ill-temper
of the countess with wonderful sweetness; her mother's impatience,
indeed, seemed but to increase her patience, and the harshness she
underwent served but to make her more gentle. She was a mystery
to her animated young friends, who, loving a life of excitement and
intellectual progress, could not understand how Euphrasie could
exist in so stupid and monotonous a course.
Yet was the young French girl far from being deficient in those
branches of accomplishments which are especially feminine. She
played and sang with taste and feeling, but I the airs were generally
of a solemn character. She loved, also, to exercise her pencil, but it
was to delineate the head of the thorn-crowned Saviour, of the
penitent Magdalene, or of, "Mary, highly favored among women."
Earthly subjects and earthly thoughts had no attraction for her, yet
there were moments when, as if unconsciously, she gave utterance
to fancies which startled her young companions. She would walk
with them by the sounding shore, and while they were busy
gathering and classifying shells and sea-weed and geological
specimens, she, too, would seem to study' and listen and learn a

lesson, but a far {33} different lesson from the one they sought. The
young ladies Godfrey were scientific, though in a playful way; there
was aim, object, utility, in short, in all their seekings. "Knowledge is
power," was the axiom of the family; and the members of it might
fairly challenge the world for the consistency with which they sought
to carry that axiom into practice. But Euphrasie would wonder and
ponder, and philosophize unconsciously. She did not decompose the
fragments of the mighty rocks with acids as her young friends did;
she did not classify and dissect the lovely flower; but she stood in
mute wonderment at the base of the rocks, and heard their
disquisitions on its strata having been once liquid and gradually
consolidating, and said: "What a wondrous history! what a sight for
the angels to behold the atomic attraction forming the worlds grand
order! A true theory of geology would be like a chapter of the life of
God—a true revelation of his spirit to man."
"Yes," said Adelaide; "science will yet and if superstition from the
earth."
"Superstition!" said Euphrasie. "Yes! if superstition means false views
of God's relation to the human soul. True science is mystic, and must
reveal God interiorly; but true science can scarcely be attained by
guesses or dissection. You destroy a beauteous flower by pulling it
to pieces, but I do not see how its separate petals and crushed
leaves can speak so plainly to the soul as the living plant on the
stem, or how your anatomy is a revelation."
"Nay, we discern the uses of the different parts thereby, and admire
the structure, seeing how each organ fulfils its office duly, in
minuteness as in grandeur."
"But your long words," said Euphrasie; "do they too reveal God? To
me they hide him in a cloud of dust. I feel the order, I love the
beauty, I am elevated by the grandeur of creation, because nature is
a metaphor in which God hides himself and reveals himself at once,
but I distrust a mere human key. How can we be sure of systems,

unless we spend a life in verification? Did not Pythagoras teach
astronomy in the Copernican fashion? and yet the world did not
receive the teaching till centuries after. The world receives the
theory of Copernicus now on trust; would it be wise to spend a life
in verifying it?"
"Have you any other key?" asked Annie.
"There is a key to the lesson which nature teaches," said Euphrasie,
in a low tone; "but not so much as to its formation as to its being a
manifestation of God. We must not speak of these things; they are
too high for us."
"Nay," said Eugene; "they are the very things to speak about,
especially if, as you say, they lead to higher things; my idea of
science is utility. The old Magian astrologers, the Chaldean sages
and Eastern sophists, studied cloudy myths and wrapped up their
theories in a veil of obscurity; but the modern idea is usefulness; an
abridgment of man's toil, and promotion of his comfort. Do you
reject all human research?"
"I reject nothing that God has given," said Euphrasie; "but truth is
one, error is many. The science first to be taught, is how to discover
truth—the next, how to apply it. You say the ancients applied
science to other purposes than we; if they applied it to learn the
qualities of their own souls, and we apply it to the comfort of our
bodies merely, which is the highest object?"
"What, then, would you do?" said Adelaide, a little impatiently; "shut
up our books, and sit and dream on the sea-shore on matters
beyond all practical use?"
Euphrasie answered very gently, as she rose to walk to the seaside,
"I am not a teacher, ma cher cousine, but I think mind has its laws
as well as matter, and as on the government of our minds so much
depends, even in {34} our researches after material knowledge, it is
likely that the science of mind is more important than that of matter,

and necessary for the truth-seeker to study first. But I am getting
quite out of my depth; let us go and throw pebbles into the sea."
. . . . . .
Mrs. Godfrey was a kind-hearted and very reasonable woman, in the
way in which she understood reasoning. She was bent on rousing
her young inmate to energy and action. She was but a girl, she said
—a girl of seventeen could not have been so spoiled by the
insipidities of a convent as to be beyond reclaiming for the tangible
world surrounding her; or was it that her thoughts were with the
dead, and that the deep sorrow she had undergone had penetrated
to the depths of her being? Whatever the cause, Mrs. Godfrey was
dissatisfied with the result, and her motherly warmth of heart
yearned to comfort the young orphan in her desolation. She let a
few weeks pass away in hopes of witnessing a change, but when
none came, or seemed likely to come, she thought it her duty to
remonstrate with Euphrasie, the more so as the countess being now
recovered sufficiently to join the family circle, Euphrasie had no
plausible excuse for passing hours together in the solitude of her
own chamber.
"It is not good for you, my dear, to be so much alone," said Mrs.
Godfrey to her, as one day she intruded on the young girl's privacy.
"Rouse your energies to some good purpose, and employ your mind
in some definite pursuit; it is very injurious, I assure you, to let your
faculties lie dormant so long."
Euphrasie laid aside the embroidery on which she had been
employed, and answered meekly, "What shall I do to please you, my
dear madam?"
"Why, exercise your mental faculties—study."
"I am most willing to do so, madam; but what shall I begin?"

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Virtues And Their Vices Kevin Timpe Craig A Boyd

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