STEPS TOWARDS HAPPINESS
The redintegration of human nature
Modern naturalistic education has much to say about the integration of personality. To these psychologists and philosophers of education, this integration is a goal to which all educational efforts must be directed. It is not so important to us here to notice how wrong these educationalists are in their notion of personality or of integration; what is important is that we notice how right they are in pointing out the delicate balance of the creature man.
It is puzzling for these modern educators to notice that man has something in common with stones, but is not a stone; he has life in common with plants, but is not a plant; and he has feeling in common with the beasts, yet of all the creatures he alone has need of having these elements properly balanced. The obvious explanation is that he needs balancing because he can unbalance himself; he alone has freedom. The task is really much more puzzling than these modern educators suspect: for over and above his extended substance, his life and his feeling, man has spirit in common with the angels and yet is no angel; he has an intellect and will that can reach to the uttermost boundaries of infinity, and which yet cannot say with absolute power what his feelings will be, how far they will go, or what preponderant part they will take in his actions.
Looking at man as we find him today, it is evident that his parts must be exactly proportioned and his energies be nicely balanced one against the other, if the whole man is to function smoothly as a man. In a word, it is much easier to upset that smooth functioning of man’s personality than it is for the runner to pull a tendon in his leg; and the results are more disastrous.
We can go a step further and realize that over and above the nice co-ordination of the inferior parts of man to the one supreme director of human activity which is reason, there is a further co-ordination and subordination necessary for the full perfection of human development — a subordination, co-ordination, integration to the supreme director of all activity, God Himself. And then we feel a deep pity for the bewildered educationalist who is trying so futilely to assemble the parts of man in one harmonious unit, with no notion as to what the finished product should look like. No wonder he stands back and scratches his head in astonishment at all the parts he has left over, at the weirdly different results of his efforts like a little boy who has fixed the clock. He has none of the comfortable security of the expert assembling the bones of prehistoric monsters; the monsters will never come back to give the lie to the expert, but man is always present, haunting the naturalistic educationalists with the bitter failure of his efforts.
Perhaps this need for integration is more vividly present to us who know so well that once man had that perfect subordination of sense life to reason and reason to God; and lost it. Because we know how it was once had, we know how to go about getting it again. If we lost our balance, at least we know it was lost and we know what is necessary for the maintaining of that balance. In very simple terms, we can pick ourselves up again because we know that delicate balance is obtained and maintained by the double medium of habit or virtue and grace.
The redintegration of passion
It is unfortunate that our democratic traditions made the word “subordinate” and “subjection” so thoroughly objectionable. The notion of subordinating passion to reason seems to us to have something of the unpleasantness and unfairness of tyranny about it, like the frowning annihilation of an impertinent student by an impatient professor. And this notion has been given some substance by the uncompromising fashion in which some men proceeded to the integration of passion, of the movement of the sense appetites, in the human personality.
To one group it seemed quite evident that passion was unworthy of the human personality, something the virtuous man could not admit without shame; so the Stoics and the Puritans would integrate passion by blasting it out of existence, or at least by refusing to extend to it the social amenities reserved for the respectable citizens of the human kingdom. Still others were so impressed by the naturalness and force of passion, that they would integrate it to the human personality by blasting humanity out of that personality. This is the group that recently has been telling us such bogey stories about repression, inhibitions, and the necessity of self-expression.
Distinction of passion and virtue
Passion, however, is neither pariah nor king. It has its place; and the work of the moral virtues is precisely to keep it in its place. Of course moral virtues and passions are different things; but that does not make them inimical things. A loud senseless laugh may make many enemies, or at least many grouches, but certainly it will not find itself squared off in a battle to the death with the vocal cords from which it proceeded. It is true enough that passion is the movement of the sense appetite and moral virtue the immediate principle of that movement; but that links them arm in arm rather than putting them at each other’s throat. Passion of itself is morally indifferent, while moral virtue is always morally good; but that merely indicates in a vague way the work before the moral virtues.
It is wrong to picture moral virtue, as the moderns do, as sitting on the lid of the passions as a man might sit on the lid of the safety valve of a steam-engine, an uncomfortable and dangerous position under the best of circumstances. This view allows our imagination to picture all sorts of things as happening within man himself because of the terrific pressure brought to bear by the virtues; we half expect the virtuous man literally to explode before our eyes. Or we can see passion as the browbeaten underdog and immediately our sympathies are heartily enlisted.
Moral virtue as cause and enemy of passion
The moral virtues actually produce passion. Look at it this way. Passion starts from the sense appetite, and its goal, if it is to be human passion, is reason, measuring up to the rule laid down by reason, keeping to the road mapped out by reason; moral virtue starts from reason with all the charts and maps in its pocket. Its goal is the sense appetite which it is to steer along the road of reason. Thc only type of passion that virtue will operate against is the inhuman or beastly passion which disregards the rule of reason, which hurtles itself off the road of reason as a frightened horse might plunge over a precipice. And the moral virtues will operate just as earnestly against no passion at all as they will against this unreasonable, bullying, blindly crashing passion that is wrecking the whole delicate balance of human personality.
Passion, then, is not a browbeaten underdog, nor a simmering boiler of steam with no legitimate outlet. The other older notion, that passion is unworthy of the virtuous man, we have already treated of at some length. Let us stop for just a glance at one rather amusing angle of that opinion which our Anglo-Saxon civilization has taken to its heart. The ancient version of this angle was that the passion of sorrow had no place in the life of the virtuous man; it comes from evil actually present and the virtuous man allows no evil to happen to him. The modern version is that sorrow is unworthy of a man, by reason of his manhood; it is something for women and children — at least the expression of it.
There is a little something in each opinion. It is absurd to say that no evil can happen to thc virtuous man. He is, after all, human; he can suffer misfortune in his external goods, pain in his body, sin in his soul. Even supposing that here and now he is in the best of health and good fortune, without a sin to his name, it is hardly likely that he never committed a sin for which he can entertain regret; even in this highly improbable case, he can always very laudably be sorry for the sins of others. But it is by no means absurd to say the sort of evil which makes a substantial difference in the success or failure of a human life — sin — cannot happen to a man. It does not happen; it is deliberately chosen.
It is quite silly to maintain that an expression of sorrow is a reflection on manhood, unless we insist that men are freaks with an essential part of their nature omitted while women and children are complete human specimens. But it is not absurd to say that such expression of sorrow, like all other passions, must be under a man’s control, under the guidance of his reason; that unless it is, it is a serious reflection on the very humanity of the individual in question.
Passion as material of virtue
Important as it may be to see passion clearly as the material of moral virtues, it is equally important to understand that passion is not the sole material of the moral virtues, or rather that it is not the material of all the moral virtues. We may picture the moral virtues as governors sent out by the emperor reason to the colonies — the sensitive appetite. They arrive there, participating the power of the emperor, for the sole purpose of governing those colonies; and that means for the purpose of directing them to the common good of the empire. That common good will be the good of reason, according to the rules of reason, moving along towards the ends of reason. So that everything and anything that can be governed, ordained to that good of reason, is a proper subject of the moral virtues.
Concretely, it is not merely the passions themselves that must be conformed to reason if man is to have an integrated personality, his external actions must also measure up to this standard of humanity which is reason. Put in another way, we can say that reason not merely guides the sensitive appetite along its proper road, it also guides the intellectual appetite or will which is the root principle of all activity in man. Moral virtues are no less necessary in the intellectual appetite than they are in the sensitive appetite. In the latter they regulate the passions of man; in the former they regulate the actions of man.
The joy and sorrow of virtue
The moral virtues of the will, in themselves, can operate without passion, as we can pay a doctor’s bill without sorrow flooding our souls; passion, after all, is proper to the sense appetite, something we have in common with the beasts. But even here, because man is such a smoothly working unit, passion ordinarily makes its appearance. There is joy in the will at successful, smooth operation; and that joy reacts on the sensitive appetite to cause pleasure. As a rule the greater the proficiency and perfection in the will, the greater the joy and consequently, ordinarily speaking, the greater the passion responding to that joy like an echo responding to a shout in the mountains.
A man once told me of his operation. It seems that he was on time but, as sometimes happens, the doctor was late. So he was wheeled into a small side operating-room and of course the only way to pass the time was to look about the room. There for his interest and terror was a most splendid collection of bright shiny scalpels, scissors, pincers, a veritable armoury of instruments of torture. Somehow it seemed to him that operations would be much less terrifying if the doctor could do his job with just an ordinary knife; it would not be so bad if it were something like a boy-scout knife, full of gadgets for every purpose. But at least it should be simple, direct, to give less room to the imagination’s frightful pictures. Perhaps much the same sensation comes upon a man the first time he stops to realize the complex assortment of virtues which a man must have to carve out a successful life. It would be much simpler if we were sent out to cope with life as the pioneers coped with the wilderour ingenuity; we would be hacking out our eternal homes as a pioneer hacked out his log-cabin with only an axe for an aid. But the finished product would not be much of a palace; and probably we would be scalped by Indians long before the house was finished.
No, the task of successful living is much too complicated a work. We need every one of the shining virtues which life offers us. One, no matter how complex, would only make a botch of the job. Looking at it from another angle, these moral virtues are governors of particular colonies participating in the power of the emperor reason; no one of them, however complex, could direct the whole moral life of a man, any more than a creature, however perfect and complex, can adequately mirror the beauty of God in which it participates.
- Factors of redintegration — good habits:
- Necessity of plurality of moral virtues
Our shining set of tools for the job of living is easily divided into tools for inside and for outside work, or to call them by other names, virtues of passion and virtues of action, personal virtues and social virtues. Understand, of course, that every virtue has operations by way of effects, but here it is a question of the material upon which the virtues will work — some deal exclusively with the passions, others with the actions of man. In other words, the aim of these inside or personal virtues is the conformity of man’s inner life to the rule of reason; the aim of the outside or social virtues is to regulate man’s relations with others by the rule of reason.
The foundation of this distinction is important and like most important truths is familiarly within reach most of the time. Put it this way: drinking a single glass of whisky can be a difficult mortification undertaken in the spirit of Lent for the man who is used to drinking a pint a day; for another man the same act would be one of sottish intemperance. A book that would make one person blush merely produces prodigious yawns in another. But no matter how bored a man is as he goes about his murders, no matter how lightly they affect his sleep, or how good they are for his nerves, they are always wrong, wrong no matter who does them.
In plain language, there are some acts whose goodness or malice must be judged in reference to the individual performing them, according as they affect this or that individual differently, or even as they affect the same individual differently at different times. The virtues which deal with these, principally busy themselves with the emotions of the individual. There are other acts whose goodness or malice is completely independent of how we feel or think about them, for their goodness or malice is measured in terms of what is due to another. (The virtues of the first are the personal, of thc second, the social virtues.)
- Personal and social virtues:
- The social virtues
It is immediately evident that the social virtues have one common note, a note that runs through them like a simple melody through all the complexities of a difficult piece of music. That note is one of debt, of what is due to another, of another’s rights being respected. In other words, it is the note of justice. This is particularly important: important in its insistence on the fundamental truth that the bond of social life is mutual communication, the external relations of man to man, for only by such externals can man communicate with his fellow men in this life; important today in its bald condemnation of any and all social theories that have lost sight of the rights of others in their scramble for vindication of one class, have lost sight of the necessity of fostering and regulating these relations rather than destroying them.
This does not mean, of course, that when we have placed justice, the equipment for successful social life is complete. Our debts to others are widely different: what is due to God, to parents, to civil authority, to neighbours, to subjects, to inferiors, what is due as result of a contract, of promise, in payment for a benefit received — each one offers a wealth of material for the labours of a virtue. We shall see each of these in some detail in the next volume.
The personal virtues
The personal virtues, whose material is the passions of man, automatically split into the virtues of the concupiscible appetite (from which come the mild passions) and the irascible appetite (from which flow the emergency passions). But their classification is not so simple as all this. In fact it is not at all simple. We cannot simply stop with two virtues, any more than a surgeon can stop buying equipment because he has a jack-knife. Nor can we simply click off the names of the passions and tie a virtue to each one. Evidently a man’s love of food, his desire for it and his pleasure in it are all regulated by one virtue, so intimately are the mild passions connected by their common object — the sensible good. Or again love and hate are the subject-matter of one virtue. Entering the field of the emergency passions, that intimate connection coming from a common object is missing; so we find hope and desperation dealing with a difficult good and regulated by magnanimity, daring and fear dealing with a great danger and regulated by fortitude, while anger is taken care of by meekness.
Aristotle’s enumeration of the virtues
It all seems complicated, like the bewildering array of the surgeon’s tools. I hope the reader will appreciate this complexity. One of the reasons why Aristotle’s enumeration of the virtues is given in detail in the outline preceding this chapter is to win a hearty agreement on this complexity; such agreement, in fact, as will allow the unraveling of each particular virtue to be deferred until the next volume.
- The leading factors:
- Their limitation to four: prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance
At any rate it should be a heartily comforting thought to everyone to realize all this complex assortment of virtues can be reduced to just four: prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance. These are the principal or cardinal virtues, the hinges upon which a man’s life swings; they are the root virtues to which all the other perfect or complete virtues can be reduced. We classified the intellectual virtues as incomplete or imperfect because they perfected only a faculty of man without guaranteeing the good use of the faculty; or, in simpler terms, they made man good in this or that way, but they did not make him a good man. We are talking now of the integration of human personality, the assembling of the elements of humanity into a smooth-running engine which will carry man to his goal; we are speaking of the making of a successful, a good man. Looking for the leading factors in that integration, we have only to look for the principal virtues among the perfect or complete virtues which make the whole man good. Prudence is the only intellectual virtue included in this list of four; and it will be remembered from our last chapter that the material of prudence is moral material — human acts; while the principles of prudence are furnished by the moral virtues. In other words, the interdependence of prudence and the moral virtues is so complete that one cannot exist without the other.
Their claim to leadership; their mutual distinction
These virtues have a much stronger claim to principality than mere convenience. If we remember that the goodness of man consists in conforming to the order of reason, then it is immediately evident that order can exist in reason itself (prudence); or it is imposed on actions (justice); or is imposed upon the passions, either in so far as they impel a man to something contrary to reason (temperance) or tend to withdraw him from something that is according to reason (fortitude). Even more simply, looking at thc location of these virtues, we find prudence in the reason itself, justice in the will, temperance in the concupiscible appetite, fortitude in the irascible appetite. By these virtues we have the fundamental perfection of all possible sources of human acts.
As we have pictured it in this chapter, the world is a huge human workshop, an assembly plant for human personalities. We can make an approximate job of the assembly by comparing the parts one to another; but for the first-class assembly necessary for the long, rough road over which the human machine must travel we must have the model before our eyes all the time. And that supreme model, to which all men must conform for a successful living, is God Himself.
The creatures of the universe make up a great vague mirroring of divine beauty, as though God had looked into the still waters of the pool of the universe and sunk His image in their depths. Each creature, each part of every creature, is a facet of a great jewel, throwing back to divinity one reflected ray of the divine beauty. So all creatures make their way back to God as to the source from which they come; each reaches its perfect fulfilment as it approaches closer to the beauty, the perfection of God. And all this is true of man, of every part of man, and, of course, of the virtues of man.
The virtue of God
It is ridiculous to speak of temperance, fortitude, justice and prudence in God in the same human way in which we speak of them in men. But vaguely they are moulded on the divine model. Trying to see that likeness, we see prudence as the very mind of God, temperance as the turning of the divine will to God Himself as in us it is the turning of appetite to reason; the fortitude of God is His unchangeable constancy, His justice the observance of the Eternal Law in all His works.
A scale of moral virtue: Virtues on the human plane
Perhaps it is easier to see the human personality’s approach to that divine model by looking at the different stages of its assembly. In the first, purely human, stage man according to these virtues is more and more perfect in his handling of human affairs. Through the infused moral virtues, man comes a step closer to the divine model, for by them we find man rejecting all earthly things as trifles and directing all thought to divine things by prudence; by temperance, as far as nature allows, he edges away from the use of the body; by fortitude he strides boldly to the high things of God, unterrified by the thought of separation of soul from body; and by justice he wins the whole soul’s hearty consent to this divine way of life.
Ascending to the divine plane
Finally, when the human personality has come as close to, measuring up to the divine model as the infinite generosity of God can allow, we see prudence penetrating exclusively into divine things, temperance undisturbed by temporal desires, fortitude indifferent to or ignorant of suffering, and justice perpetually associated with the divine mind through the amicable pact of imitation. These last are the virtues of the saints, whether in heaven or on earth. Sanctity is the ultimate of integration of the human personality.
It is to be noted that for that integration of personality we have frankly stepped into the supernatural. The infused moral virtues, which come not from any effort of man but only from the generosity of God as an infallible accompaniment of His grace, are only a part of that victorious sally into the supernatural which wins the essential happiness of man.
Divine plane attained
It is not to a happiness proportioned to his nature that man is destined, but to no less a happiness than the participation of the life of God. Yet he must win to that altogether supernatural happiness by the homely steps of his own human acts; even his part in the divine life must be the fruit of his clever use of the tools of life. Ordinary tools will not do; yet they must be the tools of man. God does not ask us to carve out a crystal palace with a sledgehammer; He puts supernatural tools into our hands, rather He makes these human acts of ours supernatural, He gives them a divine edge, an eternal significance which enables a man to say to himself in heaven or hell that he was the workman who fashioned his destiny. This supernatural character is given to our acts by giving us supernatural principles of those acts, supernatural habits, supernatural virtues: one group supernaturally to regulate our human moral life — supernatural moral virtues; the other to lift us up, even in this life, to the point where we can come into contact with the divine life itself — the theological virtues.
- Redintegration of human nature to God:
- Name and existence of theological virtues: faith, hope, charity
These theological virtues, the virtues whose only object is God Himself, are utterly supernatural and utterly necessary, supernatural because they can come only from God, be known only through God’s revelation, and go only to God, necessary because the goal of man is completely beyond his natural principles of actions, his natural virtues.
Distinction from intellectual and moral virtues
These are not intellectual virtues, nor are they moral virtues; their object is not the intellect of man, nor the appetite of man, but God. They are theological virtues. And yet they lift our whole moral and intellectual life to a supernatural plane. Put in another way, we can say that God equipped us no less adequately for the supernatural life, through grace, than He did for the natural life through nature itself. The knowledge of first principles upon which our whole intellectual life is based is natural to us; thc will of man naturally tends to its natural object, naturally grasps that object when it is present. Faith makes the knowledge of supernatural principles connatural; hope makes the striving for the supernatural goal connatural; charity makes union with the supernatural goal, God, connatural. In other words, by these virtues we move about the broad fields of the supernatural with the easy familiarity of natives; we breathe the rarefied air of heaven as if our lungs were made for no other; our intellects and wills join in the family life of God as though this were our home. And indeed it is; for by these virtue, the supernatural is made second nature to us.
Their number and contrast with human faith and hope
We might possibly make a modern mistake by underestimating faith and hope. If we draw an exact parallel between these virtues and human faith and hope, our pride will make them seem unpalatable. For faith and hope, in the human sphere, have something defective about them, a note of uncertainty, of lack of insight, of helplessness. Surely they had none of the strong, sure stride of virtue about them. That is strictly true; for human faith and human hope are not virtues. But that uncertainty, helplessness, that staggering stride is not present in supernatural faith and hope which are backed up by the infallible authority and omnipotent strength of God Himself.
Their scale of excellence
As the fulfilment of man’s age-long dream of becoming “like God”, these virtues are infinitely precious, a treasure to be fondled again and again, to be dreamt over, to be guarded at any cost. We know whence they come. In running these jewels through our fingers again and again, the desire constantly comes to know more about them, to know all about them. We shall fulfil that desire as far as possible in our next volume. For the moment it will be enough to insist that since they are infused with grace all three appear instantaneously in the soul; there is no first, second and third. But, as we understand them, the order of their generation is: first, faith — for we must know before we can love; then hope, for our goal must be possible to us; finally charity. But in the order of their excellence, charity leads all virtues, the other theological virtues included, for the object of charity — union with God — is the goal of all the virtues, all the actions, all the aspirations of man. It is the final goal of all human life, the essence of human happiness.
Conclusion: Virtues and the redintegration of human life.
We can sum this all up briefly by going back to our starting-point, the redintegration of personality. A stone exists but has no personality; a plant lives but is not a person; an animal has feeling but no one attempts to develop a dog’s personality. Personality is more than mere existence, life or feeling: it is the peculiar characteristic of a living, feeling, intellectually knowing substance that is responsible for its acts. In other words, a person is one who has freedom, whose acts are under his commands, whose life answers to his steering.
The perfection of that personality, then, will be the perfection of that mastery of life, that command of action, or, in the terms we have been using throughout this book, the redintegration of personality consists in bringing the whole of man under the sway of reason, of extending those controlled acts that alone are human to every department of man’s activities. The human personality is redintegrated, perfected, in so far as the will and the sensible appetites and their passions come more fully under the control and direction of reason. Even more simply: personality is redintegrated in proportion as the individual grows in virtue, for the whole purpose of virtue is precisely the extension of the sway of reason, the conforming of appetite to the rule of reason, the creation of grooves along which human action flows to the end of reason or the goal of human life. For the smooth unity, the easy, faultless functioning of this creature man, virtue is indispensable; without it man is hardly a unit, but rather a chaotic example of constant civil war. His individual life is nothing but the wreckage left by the warring armies that have passed again and again over every inch of its territory.
As virtue binds the energies of man into one mighty unit, it also binds men together into the unit we call society. It is the cement holding the bricks of society together, harmonizing, regulating, controlling all the external means by which alone men can communicate. There is no other means of holding men together except that of force; and where the mailed fist is the symbol and explanation of social unity, there is not a society of men but of slaves. It is justice alone that makes society possible; every attack on justice is an attack on society, every society based upon injustice has the seeds of its own dissolution within itself. It must cease to exist or its subjects must cease to be men, for without justice there is no human society, there is no conformity to the rules of reason, no travelling along the road of reason to the goal of reason, the goal of humanity.
Virtue is the great integrator. Only by it can man live with himself; only by it can he find life with his fellows; and only by it can he live with God. It is the great peacemaker, putting man at peace with himself, at peace with his fellows, at peace with God. ln its supernatural form it is a magic instrument lifting man from the natural universe to the supernatural life of God, stamping each of his smallest actions with thc mark which gives it supernatural value, giving every moment of his life an eternal significance that makes his lightest step echo for ever in heaven or in hell. And only when that last destiny has been for ever determined will man be fully integrated, or spend an eternity completing his disintegration.
Virtue and complete human life
From all this it is evident that virtue is not an integrating force in thc sense of dwarfing half of man’s nature, of blasting out his passion in favour of his reason or his reason in favour of his passions. By virtue alone can all the energies of man have their complete development; only by virtue can man live a complete, a full human life. He is not mere animal; nor is he pure spirit. That delicate balance between animal and spirit which will extinguish neither one but fully develop both can be had only by the inculcation of virtue.
Virtue and energetic, successful human life
Only the virtuous man is able to use his human energies to the full. All the sweeping force of passion and the sublime soarings of will are harnessed to the goals of reason and rush along the road of life in giant strides by virtue; without it man is like a mad dog, rushing now in this direction, now in that, retracing his steps only to come rushing back again, but always effectively barring himself from advancing towards his goal. Will and passion can accomplish great things when they are working together; but they work together only when they work under the order of reason. Working against reason they produce nothing but shattered hopes, fruitless quests, despairing hearts. Success in human living can be summed up in terms of good action, action in conformity to thc dictates of reason; and the principles of good actions are good habits, or virtues. This is the end of education, this is the redintegration of the human personality that means complete, energetic, successful human living — sanctity.