Terry Eagleton on Virtue

The devil, so they say, has all the best tunes, and this seems to be the case when it comes to literature as well. Nobody would take a guided tour of Dante’s Paradiso if they could have one of the Inferno instead. Milton’s God sounds like a bureaucratic bore, while his Satan shimmers with mutinous life. Nobody would have an orange juice with Oliver Twist if they could have a beer with Fagin instead. So why is evil so sexy, and good so profoundly unglamorous?  And why does virtue seem so boring?

For Aristotle, goodness is a kind of prospering in the precarious affair of being human. Virtue is something you have to get good at, like playing the trombone or tolerating bores at parties. Being a virtuous human being is a practice, like being a skilled diver or an accomplished tennis player; and those who are really brilliant at being human – what Christians call the saints – are the virtuosi of the moral sphere, the Pavarottis and Maradonnas of virtue.

Whatever happened, then, to this ancient notion of goodness as exciting, energetic and exhilarating, and evil, by contrast, as empty, boring and banal? Why do people now see things the other way round? One answer, at least in the West, is the gradual rise of the middle classes. As the middle classes came to exert their clammy grip on Western civilisation, there was a gradual re-definition of virtue. Virtue came to mean not energy and exuberance but prudence, thrift, meekness, chastity, temperance, industriousness and so on. No wonder people prefer vampires. These may be admirable virtues, but they are not exactly exciting ones.

From there we move towards that perversion of moral thought (identified above all with the greatest of all modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant) for which virtue was about duty, obligation, responsibility. Of course, these have their place in human life. What is disastrous is to place them at the centre of one’s moral vision. I say that virtue is really all about enjoying yourself, living fully; but of course it is far from obvious what living fully actually means.

Terry Eagleton will be delivering one of The School of Life’s Sunday Sermons on Evil on Sunday 19 September, see http://www.theschooloflife.com/Sermons/

 

 

Comments

[Drew Byrne]

Attempting to avoid virtue on all suitable occasions is a sure sign of the respect naturally expressed to vice by the potential hypocrite.