Virtues

G.K. Chesterton once responded to the question, “What’s wrong with the world today?” by answering: “I am.” At Columbus Classical Academy, our pursuit of virtue is predicated upon this humbling truth.

Those who invoke virtue and insist on the reality of a moral law often are perceived as self-righteous prudes. The reputation is not entirely unearned. Often those with a conscience sensitive to the created moral order take on an air of superiority rather than the introspection that such knowledge demands. We acknowledge that in our hypocrisy, we are not quick enough to recognize and correct our own depravity before we decry it in others.

Yet, as the old adage goes, “hypocrisy is the homage that vice pays to virtue.” And so, the answer to hypocrisy is not the dismantling of virtue, as some would have it, but the humble acknowledgment of our own iniquity along with the intentional formation of good and virtuous habits that help build the character to resist our vices. This requires a knowledge of what is good and right and a desire to conform our lives to it, even though we inevitably will fall short.

Many moral and political ideologies ascendant today, however, respond either by redefining virtue as the unqualified pursuit of self-interest, or by preemptively laying the line of demarcation between good and evil along boundaries of social status, identity, or material wealth, so that the very capacity for virtue becomes a function of cultural power rather than a matter of personal conduct—those who identify with the class of “innocents” are beyond reproach, while all others are beyond redemption.

These distortions are not exclusive to the political left or right. Ayn Rand’s objectivist libertarianism declares the atomizing “Virtue of Selfishness” just as Marxist humanism proclaims the balkanizing virtue of revolutionary class struggle.

After a decade of imprisonment, torture, and exile at the hands of the Soviet Union, Alexandr Solzhenitsyn understood not that his oppressors were uniquely wicked or that he and his fellow victims were simply good, but instead that “[t]he line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart….” His, theirs, yours, and mine.