By JUDE DOUGHERTY
At some time in the last century, perhaps due to the influence of John Dewey and other influential academics in this country, the concept “the values we hold dear” came to replace the notion that we may be accountable to a moral order quite independent of ourselves. Politicians, educators, and journalists commonly favor the term — Heaven forbid that anyone say something ought to be done or avoided. The term is usually employed without any reference to where those values came from or how they may be defended.
Those trained in the classical tradition do not have to look far for their defense. Moral rules for the good life and its pursuit are to be found in a one-volume treatise known through the ages as the Nicomachean Ethics. It is an Aristotelian treatise that one could wish were a part of the curriculum of every college student in what was formerly known as “Christendom” and beyond. When churchmen become uncertain, this ancient treatise speaks with clarity of the moral states to be achieved, the vices to be avoided, and much else. To those who seek a scientifically grounded moral code this comes as close as one could wish.
Aristotle has a lot to say about virtue and vice. Virtue and vice, he says, are concerned with the same thing, that is, with passions and actions. Broadly speaking, there are three objects of choice and three of avoidance — the noble, the advantageous, and the pleasant, and their contraries, the base, the injurious, and the painful. Virtue is a state of character concerned with choice. Men are good in one way, but bad in many. Praise and blame are bestowed accordingly. The good man judges each class of things rightly, in the light of what he considers noble. The unjust man judges in the light of self-interest. Aristotle observes that unfortunately the unjust or selfish once they have become so, tend to remain such. Obviously this has implications for criminal justice systems.
Discussing the nature of love from a philosophical point of view, we take note of some terms in common use drawn from antiquity: eros — refers to a passionate or intense desire [for Plato, it is a common desire for transcendental beauty]; philia — an appreciation of the other for the other’s sake [for entirely the other’s sake]; and agape — God’s love for man, and man’s brotherly love for mankind.
Aristotle’s anthropology views man as a rational animal, with appetites both rational and sensory. It is primarily the quality of the object that elicits appetite, sensory or intellectual. Normally insipid food and drink will not stimulate the sensory appetite. What child can resist a chocolate éclair, but broccoli? Taste may be cultivated and parents are known to do their best. The child, indeed most of us, have to be taught to appreciate some things.
An appreciation of the poet T.S. Eliot may require some education, so too the musician, Liszt, or the painter Van Eyck. The hideous canvases of Dutch painter Willem de Kooning may be rejected at first sight, and no amount of lecturing on what he may have intended will bring the viewer around. Dissonance in music is similarly rejected. Even a child can tell the difference between music which by definition is relaxing and soothing and the annoyance of noise.
Of human relationships, Aristotle notes, a wish for friendship may arise quickly. But friendship does not. Well-wishing does not suffice for friendship. A certain mutual love is required for friendship. Once achieved, distance does not break off friendship, he explains, but merely the exercise of it.
Perfect friendship in the Aristotelian sense is the friendship of men who are both good, that is, between those who are alike in virtue. Those who love each other for their utility fall short of this standard insofar as they do not love the other for their goodness but in virtue of some good they wish for themselves.
Cicero (106-43 BC), whom I take to offer the noblest expression to the Roman mind, indeed of the Hellenistic mind, in his De re publica develops Aristotle’s notion of a rationally ordered universe. Cicero claims no originality but thinks of himself as transposing Greek ideas about public life, specifically those of Plato and Aristotle, into a Roman context. In De re publica III, 33, he offers his oft-quoted definition of natural law. “True law,” he says, “is right reason, consonant with nature, spread through all the people. It is constant and eternal: It summons to duty by its orders, it deters from crime by its prohibitions. . . . There will not be one law in Rome and another in Athens, one now and another later, but all nations at all times will be bound by the one unchangeable law and the God will be the common master and general (so to speak) of all people. He is the author, expounder, and mover of the law.”
From Cicero’s day to the eighteenth century, moral reflection for the most part took God and an immaterial order for granted. Through the centuries Cicero’s natural law perspective has been nourished and commented upon by philosophers and theologians alike, notably Augustine, Anselm, Thomas, and Scotus. Dante took it for granted, so too Thomas More and Chaucer.
Suppose that Aristotle’s Ethics and Cicero’s De re publica were part of the curriculum of every high school or college in this country, would we have many calls for the removal of artefacts celebrating heroic deeds of times past, or the polarization we experience in the political arena today?
This was written as the United States Supreme Court was about to consider in The American Legion v. The American Humanist Association whether the Peace Cross in Bladensburg, Md., erected to recall the forty-nine men of Prince Georges County who died in World War I, is to stand.
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