Virtue: Mind and Body

I’ve been listening to Aristotle’s Nichemachean Ethics lately. Though I read the book years ago, I keep picking up bits and pieces that didn’t seem that important at the time, but which now stand out to me. For instance, Aristotle makes a quite convoluted argument about  virtue, this it is not a condition but an action, or more accurately, that it’s impossible to distinguish between virtue of character and virtue of action. One does not exist without the other. Then, in a single sentence he clarifies his point, saying “one might possess virtue, but be asleep or inactive throughout his life.” In such a case, how could one call oneself virtuous? One has to do something. A life without ethical action cannot be a virtuous life.

I’m not sure whether I have to parse out the similarity between virtue as ethics, or virtue of the mind, and virtue as running, or virtue of the body. In both cases, it is not what we think or wish, it is what we do that makes us a runner or an ethical being. James (not William, the other one, one in the Bible) said it another way: “someone will say, ‘You have faith and I have works.’ Show me your faith apart from your works, and I will show you my faith by my works.”

Martin Luther hated the Book of James, I think because he made the same inaccurate assumption, that we could separate any supposed internal attribute—virtue, faith—from its external evidence.

Yet, the intimate connection between internal and external holds true in many areas. For instance, we know the Westboro Baptist Church has no idea what holiness means because their actions are full of hate. What we can learn from the Westboro Baptist Church is how true Burke’s idea that words are “symbolic action" is. The old distinction between words and deeds is yet another misleading dichotomy. In fact, it may rise from our recognition that when a politician talks about integrity, then takes bribe money, the incongruity between his words and deeds reveals a reality he cannot hide. It is precisely because they do go hand in hand that we recognize this new reality.