Vices and Virtues (review)

The development of virtue ethics in the contemporary philosophical world, as a reaction to various forms of consequentialism, deontology, and moral skepticism, has now brought forth translators determined to offer the wisdom of pre-moderns to contemporary readers. Here is a “small work” of Denis (1402–71), the “last of the scholastics” and a contemporary of humanists like Ficino and Erasmus, who opened the modern age that is now rapidly closing. Educated in “the way of Thomas Aquinas” at the University of Cologne, the Carthusian cloister allowed him leisure to become a prolific author, often cited by Catholics during the Protestant Reformation.

He should be rescued from obscurity, for here he weaves together the vices and virtues in a way that eluded even Aquinas. In the spirit of the age, his audience was the ordinary layman. Denis brought Thomistic materials together with Scripture and the Fathers, using the Neoplatonic circle made famous by his namesake, Dionysius the Areopagite. Book One charts how sin pushes us ever deeper through the seven deadly sins. Then Book Two follows the workings of grace and nature in producing progress in virtue. Especially insightful is the way Denis uses Plotinus (as cited by Aquinas) to distinguish the “political” virtues, the “purgative” virtues, the virtues “of a purged mind,” and the “exemplar” virtues of God.

The return to God begins with the political cardinal virtues—temperance, courage, justice, and prudence—acquired through human effort. Then grace infuses the three theological virtues—faith, hope, and charity—which open us to a supernatural end. Then come ten “purgative virtues,” also called the “path of (moral) precepts” (227). Denis picked them out especially for laymen from the multitude of virtues Aquinas had described. “Fear of the Lord” begins our moral cleansing by bolstering our hope for eventual union with God, as Aquinas said. Next comes humility, placed by Aquinas under the cardinal virtue of temperance. Already we see how Aquinas’s doctrine of the infused cardinal virtues makes possible in Denis’s hands the interplay of infused and acquired virtues. Third comes patience, a part of courage, according to Aquinas. The next three virtues—meekness, chastity, and sobriety—Aquinas had situated as parts of temperance. These first six virtues purge the “inner man.” The interplay of the two efficient causes of moral progress—man and God—is characteristic of Denis’s faithful interpretation of Aquinas. Then come four virtues that purge the soul in its external relations. The beatitude, “mercy is a virtue by which the mind is stirred to pity for the wretchedness of others,” leads us on to acts of justice toward them. Then we learn “prudence.” And prudence teaches us how to act with “liberality” toward others.

Denis next turns to Plotinus’s “virtues of the purged mind,” interpreted as the “way of the evangelical counsels” adapted for laymen (227). First and most important is obedience to all one’s superiors, from God to Pope to prelate to prince. Then come fraternal correction, prayer, and penitence, traditionally virtues of the cloister. Once these virtues have enlivened our relations to fellow laymen, we may even decide to enter the religious life, a tradition shaken by the mendicants and about to be overturned by the Protestants. The purged mind of the wayfarer knows that the end of his journey is only achieved in the heavenly homeland, through vision of the exemplar virtues of God.

The current interest in virtue theory, the difficulty of understanding the interplay of grace and human effort in Aquinas’s theory of the development of the virtues, and the dearth of access to the learned and humane Denis should make this volume a much desired book.

The quality of the translation, however, disappoints. While workmanlike and adequate as an introduction to the moral thought of Denis, it will irritate the medievalist, because the translation of technical philosophical and theological terms from medieval Latin can only be called eccentric, to the point of unreliability. One example: terminus a quo and...