Making Room for Inspiration: Can We Broaden Our Understanding of Virtue to Make Room for the Divine?

The Aristotelian notion that virtue is acquired by one's own repeated good acts has become so familiar that it is treated as a truism.¹ Even in the Greek world in which Aristotle wrote, however, this was hardly the consensus view. For Homer, virtues were among the many gifts that the gods sometimes bestowed on mortals.² In Plato's Meno, the possibility that virtue is a gift from god is raised, and at least some scholars argue that he means us to take the suggestion seriously.³ Solon is said to have held that virtues could be inherited from one's parents.⁴ The Christian scholarly tradition, then, was hardly breaking new ground when it insisted that all true virtue was a gift from God.⁵ Only in the 12th century did Christians begin to acknowledge the possibility of something like Aristotelian virtue, and even then its place was ambiguous at best.⁶ Aquinas may have championed Aristotle, but he still insisted that there are divinely given versions of all the Aristotelian virtues, and that only they (the divinely given virtues) are virtues "vera et perfecta."⁷ Calvin, Peter Vermigli and Jonathan Edwards, even if they viewed Aristotle with suspicion, nonetheless acknowledged the importance of virtue. They simply held that all true virtue was a gift from God.⁸

In spite of this robust history, the notion of divinely given virtue receives scant attention from contemporary Christian philosophers. When it is mentioned, it is often as something peculiar to the thought of Thomas Aquinas.⁹ If the Christian tradition has historically understood virtue as a divine gift, why do so few Christian philosophers engage the notion? Their reticence seems to stem from two sources. First, some contemporary Christian philosophers maintain that the notion of a virtue that arises from an external source, any external source, is simply incoherent. Second, even those who do not consider the notion incoherent may consider it something too intimately connected with revelation to sustain productive philosophical consideration. In this paper I attempt to allay both worries.

In what follows, I argue that Christian philosophers not only can but should engage the notion of divinely given virtue. My argument for this thesis is divided into two parts. First, I argue for the preliminary thesis that the notion of divinely given virtue is at least coherent: it is not, as some have claimed, an incoherent or self-contradictory idea. Establishing this preliminary thesis, however, can seem to raise more questions than it answers. In the first place, coherence is not plausibility. It could be that despite the absence of a clear logical contradiction, a divinely given virtue would be incompatible with features of the moral life that we consider essential, such as agency. At a still more foundational level, the notion of divinely given virtue has its roots in faith, not in reason. As such it might seem to be a topic better suited to theology, rather than philosophy. In the second part of this paper, I will address both of these latter worries.

I. Coherence

More than one contemporary philosopher has argued that the notion of divinely given virtue is simply incoherent. Their objection is not to something specific to divine gifts, but to the very notion of being given virtue at all. The argument is that it is inherent in the very concept of a virtue that it be acquired gradually, via the agent's own repeated good acts. If a virtue is necessarily acquired in this way, then it cannot arise from any external source at all. It will be as impossible to suppose that one is made virtuous by a pill or a machine or a surgeon's intervention. In this section I will argue that there is no obvious incoherence in the notion of a virtue whose source is external to the agent. In order to make this argument, however, it will be necessary to clarify what is meant by "virtue."

Some contemporary accounts of "virtue" contain in their very definitions the stipulation...