Schall on Chesterton: Timely Essays on Timeless Paradoxes

Virtue and Duty

Virtue and Duty When I do a class on St.Thomas, I like the class to read with me during the semester Chesterton’s book St. Thomas Aquinas. One rainy morning near the end of March, about eleven-thirty in the morning, by chance I read aloud to the class a short passage from the August  Chesterton Review, a passage taken from an essay Chesterton wrote in , “School Magazines,” about his early writing at St. Paul’s School. I guess I wanted to make the point to the class that almost any page of Chesterton can lead us to the most profound of topics. Among the memorable lines in this essay were these:“Man always begins by owning the universe; it is only later in life that he learns to own a home. Men should always love virtue before they love duty; the reverse produces dried souls, incapable of joy.”1 Now, I could (and eventually may, so be forewarned), write a column on the first of these two sentences, about owning the universe and finally owning one’s home. Needless to say, Chesterton no doubt considered the latter ownership, of the home, to be more profound than the former, of the universe. Better, that the only sure way to learn to own the universe—which we do with our knowledge—is to own our own home wherein we can have the freedom and love that makes the more universal ownership flourish. But this essay is on the second sentence, the one about duty and virtue. Here is how it came about. When I finished this passage, a young lady put up her hand. With a combination frown and inquisitive look on her face, she wanted to know why we could not have both duty and virtue? That was a good point, of course.Virtue is the habitual ruling ourselves to attain those goods to which our natural powers are 155 ordered. Duty looks to our responsibility, not to the object to be attained.There is no reason at all that we cannot have both. So why would Chesterton separate them, or suggest the priority of virtue? Let me attempt again to respond to this question, as I did to the student and class. In the modern world, there will always be something Kantian about the word “duty.” It has the overtones of a philosophy that sees something wrong with pleasure and delight . To do our duty, of course, has something noble about it. When all else fails, duty may save us. Duty, while it does not entirely lose sight of the object of duty, emphasizes what we owe. It seems most distant from the object of duty itself: duty toward what? Duty looks at things from our side. Duty refers to what we ought to do, what we must do. In a sense, duty looks at things insofar as we must do something about them whether we like it or not. Duty is designed to overcome our lethargy, our fear, our lack of certainty about what we ought to do.“To do your duty” implies that the rightness of the action is already decided. Duty at its best implies an orientation to what is good. Chesterton contrasted virtue and duty. He said that man should always love virtue before he loves duty. If he does this, his duty will evidently be much easier. Thus, Chesterton does not deny that we can indeed love our duty.Yet, he says that right order implies that we love virtue first. “Why would this be?” we might asks ourselves. Why does loving virtue come first? The clue can be found first, perhaps, in the consequences of loving duty more. When we love duty more, Chesterton thought, we would produce in ourselves dried souls.We would be incapable, as a consequence, of joy. Dried souls? Incapable of joy? Inspired or buoyant souls, souls capable of joy, must arise from virtue, or better, from that toward which virtue itself is directed. But how is this? Let us talk about 156 Virtue and Duty loving our mothers. If we “obey” the Fourth Commandment, it tells us to “Honor thy father and mother.”This is a command to us; it indicates a duty.When all else fails, we are still obliged to love our parents (or any one else we are obliged to love) because of our duty. But it would be of little consolation...