Please note that due to software, not everything recorded in this transcript will be accurate

Virtue / Vice 

Media – Gone With the Wind 

John Dickson – Studio

That’s Scarlett O’Hara, played by Vivien Leigh, in the epic 1939 historical romance Gone With The Wind. Leigh won the role after a nationwide search for someone who could match this iconic character—and she won an Oscar for the performance. The film is based on the novel by Margaret Mitchell—not the brilliant New Testament scholar from the University of Chicago, but the early 20th-century journalist turned novelist. The story is set in the southern US state of Georgia during the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction era. Scarlett O’Hara is the daughter of a cotton plantation owner, fighting to survive during the war and its aftermath. The book, and its film adaptation, have been heavily criticised for racist stereotypes and for glossing over the horrors of slavery, which may actually make them a disturbingly realistic window into the moral blind spots of their time. We’ll put a link in the show notes to a few articles that go into more detail about all that. Researcher Al is reading the book as we speak. Producer Kaley, of course, has already read it, analysed it, and probably written a thesis on it. I, on the other hand, have only watched the film—or at least fallen asleep during it. But even I know that Scarlett has a reputation for being vain, selfish, and ruthless. We might label her key vices as greed, envy, and wrath. And yet she is a vivid character. An interesting character. She stays with you. Unlike … sweet Melanie.

Media – Gone With the Wind

John Dickson – Studio

Melanie Hamilton is a paragon of virtue. She is everything that Scarlett is not: meek, charitable, patient. She is … good. And she is also … forgettable. Everything about her pales in comparison to Scarlett’s effervescence. When Al and Kaley raised Melanie in the production meeting, I had no memory of her. I had to rewatch the scene. A New York Times film critic once put it like this: “Bad always sizzles more than good.”  Are virtuous people just … boring? The Oxford English Dictionary defines virtue as:

A moral quality regarded (especially in religious contexts) as good or desirable in a person, such as patience or kindness; a particular form of moral excellence.

And vice:

A habit or practice of an immoral, degrading, or wicked nature.

In movies, we often enjoy watching vice and virtue play out before us—one often sizzling more than the other. But what about real life? Do we still find vice sizzling and virtue stale? Are we even allowed to make that distinction anymore? And if so, how would we go about defining vice and virtue? And finally (to recall one of the most important questions of ancient and medieval reflection): what good is there in pursuing the good? I’m John Dickson, and this is Undeceptions.

Undeceptions theme

John Dickson – Studio

That is how the great Hildegard of Bingen imagined the virtues to sound like. Hildegard was a medieval German noblewoman who became a Benedictine abbess, mystic, poet, and composer. Growing up in the early 12th century, she turned out to be a polymath—and, if you can believe it, a widely known preacher. She wrote books on biology, botany, medicine, theology, and the arts, and she founded a monastery that still stands today—and that Producer Kaley is desperate for me to visit [although she has inserted into this script the words: “Or visit herself, hint hint”]. We’re planning an episode on this extraordinary woman, so one of us will get to the monastery one day. What you heard there was her Ordo Virtutum—“The Play of the Virtues.” By the way, before any Classical Latin students write in and tell me it should be m Wirtutum, this is medieval Latin where the letter ‘V’ had shifted from ‘w’ to ‘v’.  Anyway, morality plays were a big thing in the Middle Ages. Characters personified virtues and vices, teaching moral and religious lessons to the main character—usually a generic protagonist representing the average person.The most famous example is called Everyman. We’ll put a link in the show notes. It still gets staged from time to time, and in 2015 Chiwetel Ejiofor starred as Everyman in a modern adaptation. Morality plays were everywhere. But Hildegard’s Ordo Virtutum was the first. Ordo Virtutum is a sung play about the struggle for a human soul. The central characters are the personified virtues—and what you just heard was the voice of Charity. Maybe that’s more or less what you imagined when we started talking about virtues and vices: old-school, medieval ideas—interesting, perhaps, but at best outdated, and at worst strange and foreign to modern sensibilities. So let’s slow down and ask What do we actually mean by “the virtues”? Last season, I spoke with author and Bethel Seminary scholar Karen Swallow Prior for our episode on Jane Austen—who lived at the tail end of what you might call the golden age of virtue ethics. Here’s how Karen defined virtue: 

Karen Swallow Prior:
Okay.  So Virtue ethics is. A field of philosophy and ethics that talks about the character traits that we can develop over time through practice and habit to become, you know, essentially good people. Uh, that doesn’t come naturally to most of us, perhaps not to any of us. And so virtues are kind of … virtue consists of the excellencies that human nature is capable of. But again,  it can be difficult to achieve because of our, you know, our fallen human nature. And so virtue actually exists and is developed in the context of, of our own lives and times and places which are changing and. Offer different challenges for us depending on what obstacle or dilemma we’re facing. So Austin’s.

 John Dickson:
And it would be in contrast to sort of a rules based morality, right?

Karen Swallow Prior:
Yeah, so, so a rules-based morality is going to say, this is what you should always do in order to have this particular outcome. Uh, and there’s obviously a place for rules. The 10 commandments are, are rules that we follow and we should not trespass in order to, uh. To live in a just world and to be just people. And yet oftentimes, uh, there, there are lots of other, um, situations and dilemmas that we face where we have to decide what does it mean to be courageous in this situation? What does it mean to, um, be, to have integrity, to be diligent? And those circumstances vary and call upon in us different exertions of those virtues and the problem that we have in our late modern and postmodern culture, um, as Alistair McIntyre and other philosophers point out, is that we have become so subjective and so rooted in our own emotivism or just, you know, sort of our emotional understanding of the world, of the world. That what I decide is right, is what feels right, rather than what is based on some objective morality that we can talk about virtue, um, and not even be talking about the same thing because we are everything is so subjective. 

John Dickson – Studio

We’ll put a link in the show notes to Alistair McIntyre’s important book, ‘After Virtue’ — it is widely described as one of the late 20th-century’s most important philosophical works. He shows what’s been lost in a culture that has abandoned the classical concept of virtue. And my guest today does as good a job as anyone at showing why this medieval way of thinking deserves a revival. 

John Dickson:
to say. Well done. Um, I mean, I love anything that makes the Middle Ages sound not nearly as dumb and mean as everyone reckons and boy oh boy, you pull, you pull that off. Um, let’s dive straight in, uh, and in fact, let’s, let’s go there. Uh, before we sort of dive into, um, vices and virtues, um, why do you think the Middle Ages. Are so valuable. I mean, many of us were raised to just think of them as the dark Ages, as a great cautionary tale.

Grace Hamman:
Yeah, I, I do think most of us, um, completely diminish them in our minds and, and Dr. And even dread and fear them to some extent. Uh, you know, people use it as like, you don’t wanna go back to that, you know, that, that kind of threat of the past. 

John Dickson – Studio

That’s Dr Grace Hamman, a returning guest here on Undeceptions! We last heard from her on episode 114, ‘Medieval Jesus’ – link in the show notes. Grace is a proper medievalist. She has a PhD in Medieval Literature, runs a Substack called ‘Medievalish’, and hosts the Old Books With Grace podcast. She also finds time to write books and scholarly articles for publications like The Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies. We’ll link to her work in the show notes – there’s a lot of it! Her new book is called Ask of Old Paths: Medieval Virtues and Vices for a Whole and Holy Life, published by our friends at Zondervan Academic. It’s fab! I asked her if good Protestants like me are partly to blame for downgrading the Middle Ages as a period of (catholic) ‘darkness’.

John Dickson:
Do you think there’s a Protestant historiography that has influenced wider culture, uh, to diminish the Middle Ages? I mean, I mean, we have lots of listeners who aren’t, who don’t think of themselves as religious at all, but they probably have got this Protestant historiography that downplays everything before, I don’t know, 1517.

Grace Hamman:
Absolutely. Yes. I think, uh, and it, here’s the thing too, is that there was a Protestant historiography that did that, and then to compound it, there was the rise of modern historians in like the 17th, 18th, especially 18th and 19th centuries that. Glorified the ancient world. You know, the birth of Democracy, Athens, Rome, um, the beautiful architecture, the, the more, um, realistic looking art, all those things that they said. We are more like them than the Middle Ages. Rather, we want to be more like them than we want to be, like the Middle Ages. And so even the sort of. Um, for lack of a better word, secular counterpart of history. Kind of compounded the same thing as a Protestant historiography. And so we got this double level of this is bad. And this was kind of the in-between even the, the word medieval, it just basically means the in-between times, um, from the glory of then to the glory of now. All that stuff in between just glosses over it real quick. It’s like. The flyover states in America or whatever, or you’re just like, Nope, get over it. Coast, coast to coast, you know? Um, and so we suffer from that mistaken narrative very often.

John Dickson – Studio

The discussion of virtue and vice goes back to ancient times …

 

John Dickson:
Yeah. Okay. So let’s move to the, um, vices and virtues and the ancient classical world is a good starting point because these weren’t uniquely Christian – this reflection on classification of vices and virtues – right?

Grace Hamman:
Right. So there’s kind of multiple origin points for thinking really seriously about this language. The oldest one is coming out of Aristotle, really, is who, who writes down this idea of the “four cardinal virtues” is what they’re called later,  but he, he doesn’t use the word cardinal necessarily, but this idea that there’s these four virtues that are super important to the life of the virtuous citizen of the city state of ancient Greece.

John Dickson – Studio

Aristotle was writing in the 4th century BC, and his virtue theory was all about how to flourish as a human being. The purpose of being human—the end goal, as he put it—is happiness, or eudaimonia. And the way of getting there is to develop four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, courage—often called fortitude—and temperance. Aristotle argued that all humans possess inherent potentials—their talents and capacities for virtue—but those potentials need tending and nurturing to flourish. Just as an acorn is a potential oak tree, but only if it’s watered and cared for. There’s obviously much more to it than that. But that’s the idea in a nutshell. Or an acorn … 

Grace Hamman:
So. These are prudence, fortitude, so on and so forth. This, this collection of four. And then this is taken up by Christians as a good way of thinking about what a virtuous life might look like. What a good life- a whole life – might look like. And another  strand of this begins to develop in Egypt in early Christian communities, kind of the beginnings of Monasticism, where they’re taking up some of the words that Christ and Paul use in his letters and in the gospels. And then examining what developing these words looks like and how, how, again, these ideas relate to a whole life. So this is a double strand of Christian and pagan ideas of the good life.

John Dickson:
So how did Christianity develop the concept and indeed the list of the really important virtues?

Grace Hamman:
The virtues are a little more complicated. The vices have a pretty clear, like original point. Um, these guys in-men and women – in the deserts of Egypt and of the holy land, they were thinking really seriously about their lives, their vocations to prayer. Basically, this life, this community of prayer in the desert. And some of these thinkers began to come up with this list of evil thoughts or – later on this kind of became categorized as habits – things that kept you, that prevented you from this vocation to prayer and to community. And so this was the origins of what we now call, sometimes called the seven deadly sins or the seven capital vices. And then over time pastoral thinkers, folks like Gregory the Great, who is this Pope who really changed how we think of…

John Dickson:
We did a whole episode on Gregory – it was fab.

Grace Hamman:
He’s incredible. No, he’s, he’s absolutely incredible.  

John Dickson – Studio

It was Evagrius Ponticus, a fourth-century monk also known as Evagrius the Solitary, who wrote On the Eight Principal Vices. It was a practical guide to help fellow monks identify habits that could derail a life of prayer. A few decades later, John Cassian picked up Evagrius’s ideas in his own writings. Once translated from Greek into Latin, they reached a much wider audience in the Western church. But it was Gregory the Great—later Pope Gregory I—in the sixth century who gave the vices their authoritative and enduring form.

Reading

It often happens with some people that they stoutly gird themselves up to encounter some vices, but neglect to overcome others, and while they never lift themselves up against these, they are reestablishing against themselves even those which they had subdued. For one has now subdued the flesh from the dominion of lust, but he has not yet reined in the mind from avarice; and while he keeps himself in the world for the practising of avarice, and does not quit earthly courses, when the juncture of the occasion breaks out, he falls into lust also, which sin he seemed to have already subdued. Another has overcome the violence of avarice, but he has never subdued the power of lust, and when he is providing the costs of fulfilling his lustful passion, he submits the neck of the heart to the yoke of avarice too, which he had for long got the mastery of. Another has now laid low rebellious impatience, but has not yet subdued vainglory; and when for this he winds himself into the honours of the world, being pierced with the irritation of cases that chance, he is brought back a captive to his impatience, and whilst vainglory lifts up the soul to the vindication of itself, being overcome it submits to that which it had got the upper hand over.

Gregory the Great, Moralia in Job, Book VII, Chapter 28

Grace Hamman:
And so people like him and other pastoral thinkers. So they were really thinking specifically when I say pastoral, they were really thinking about Christians in community and as a pastor or a shepherd of those communities, how you could help people learn ways of following Christ or ways of human wholeness. And so folks like him started to come up with this list that sort of countered these seven capital vices. So what kinds of behaviors and practices undo the damage and the destruction of pride or of envy or of avarice?

Reading

But this house stands by four corners for this reason, that the firm fabric of our mind is upheld by Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, Justice. This house is grounded on four corners, in that the whole structure of good practice is raised in these four virtues. And hence do four rivers of Paradise water the earth. For while the heart is watered with these four virtues, it is cooled from all the heat of carnal desires. 

…

Now it is within these four corners of the house that the sons are feasting, because it is within the depths of the mind, which is carried up to the topmost height of perfection in these four virtues especially, that the others like a kind of offspring of the heart take their food together. For the gift of the Spirit, which, in the mind It works on, forms first of all Prudence, Temperance, Fortitude, Justice, in order that the same mind may be perfectly fashioned to resist every species of assault, doth afterwards give it a temper in the seven virtues, so as against folly to bestow Wisdom, against dulness, Understanding, against rashness, Counsel, against fear, Courage, against ignorance, Knowledge, against hardness of heart, Piety, against pride, Fear.

Morals in Job, Book II, Chapter 49

Grace Hamman:
And this is all held in grace. These aren’t things that you’re gonna save yourself with.

John Dickson:
I was about to ask you, ’cause some of my sceptical listeners are already listening to you going, uh, there

Grace Hamman:
No. Get out of town. Yeah. Right. So I actually love, um, a lot of medieval thinkers, and I’m thinking of Thomas Aquinas here in particular, St. Thomas Aquinas, who is the great scholastic theologian. He talked about the virtues and the virtuous life in this way. So they aren’t gonna save you. They only, only Christ saves. And um, but what happens with these words that Gregory and others were developing is that you go further along the path into human wholeness. You go further along the journey of being more like Jesus because, as we all know, we’re like Jesus to in varying extents. Some, sometimes we make decisions more like him, and sometimes we make decisions less like him. And um, and we all have people that we see in our lives who are further along that path than we are. And so that’s another way of thinking about the virtues and how they, how they transform us as we. Getting closer and closer to acting like Jesus in the world on a regular basis. Um, to have that be the disposition of our hearts, to have that be our character. And so Thomas Aquinas, um, uses the story of the, the man who is waiting at the healing waters, um, in, in John five. 

Reading

Some time later, Jesus went up to Jerusalem for one of the Jewish festivals.  Now there is in Jerusalem near the Sheep Gate a pool, which in Aramaic is called Bethesda[a] and which is surrounded by five covered colonnades. Here a great number of disabled people used to lie—the blind, the lame, the paralyzed.  [b] One who was there had been an invalid for thirty-eight years. 

 

Grace Hamman:
And Jesus meets this man and he says, um. The, the man’s telling him his life story. I’m trying to get into the water. I can never get there fast enough, um, to be healed. Somebody gets there before me and Jesus says, do you want to be well? Do you will to be made whole? And the man is like, yes. Like, didn’t I just tell you that? Yes, I do. Um, and, and Aquinas takes up this story ’cause then Jesus says to him, um. Pick up your mat and walk and, um, Aquinas is like, look, this, this man, he would never have been able to get up and to walk and to pick up this mat without the healing power of Christ without this grace. But then every step he takes after that is both held in the grace of God and also his own feet moving. So it’s this participation. In our own sanctification, and that’s what the virtues are. That’s kind of this, this vision of what sanctification looks like.

John Dickson:
You’ve mentioned a couple of times the word whole W-H-O-L-E, and this is important, isn’t it? Because it’s not, it’s not about. Racking up brownie points, getting more ethical money in the bank. Can you tell us more about this very ancient idea of an integrated whole human? That is what we mean by virtue

Grace Hamman:
Yes, this is, um, whole is a really interesting word for us in English, um, because it has, um, really, really ancient roots back to this sort of pre- English concept and word called hal and this word hal, it didn’t only sort of eventually evolve into our word whole. It also gives us the words for health and healing and hallow, like hallowed be thy name to make something holy and holiness itself. So whole kind of uniquely takes all those concepts of spiritual health, mental health, um, physical health. Being made holy, um, and, and the gifts of holiness and becoming hallowed and unites them in this idea of human wholeness. And so what we have are often tempted to do is, is sequester those ideas to separate them. But, um, what that word kind of implicitly holds with it is that, um, when we are becoming more like Jesus, becoming more human in the deepest sense possible, since Christ is. Um, the human of humans, the, the most fully person, person who ever  lived.

John Dickson:
But it does hark back to Aristotle because he, he thought there was a way a human is meant to be. We are a particular kind of being in the world. And so to live in accordance with reality is what it means to be virtuous. And you’re, and you’re saying that Christians amped that up because they agreed with Aristotle on one hand, but they thought None of us really measures up to the whole. But one does. One does.

Grace Hamman:
Well, and what Christians also did with Aristotle, that was a twist that no one had done before was Aristotle had said, human wholeness can only apply to male citizens. So not slaves, not women, not children,

John Dickson:
Because they’re defective men,

Grace Hamman:
Because they’re defective men or they’re not, you know, they’re not in the city state properly. They, they can’t actually practice the virtues as whole people, but Christians said. Everyone is made in the image of God. Everyone is called into this vision of human wholeness. Doesn’t matter whether you are Greek,  Jewish, slave free man, woman, Jesus is human wholeness, and we’re all invited into that. And so that was the, the shocking twist on Aristotle.

John Dickson – Studio

After the break … one vice and one virtue to rule them all. 

Reading

For Pride is the root of all evil, of which it is said, as Scripture bears witness; Pride is the beginning of all sin. But seven principal vices, as its first progeny, spring doubtless from this poisonous root, namely, vain glory, envy, anger, melancholy, avarice, gluttony, lust. 

John Dickson:
I want to do soon, not yet a rapid fire round with you. I want to zip through the vices and virtues, and you just give us all the special things we need to know. But I want to, um, ask about the kind of ordering the, the logic behind the vices and virtues, um, because I’m fascinated by the, the way. Lots of the medieval uh, thinkers saw pride as the base vice. Can you talk me through that?

Grace Hamman:
Yes, it pride is, uh, you, you see all these really cool, weird illustrations, um, in medieval manuscripts and.

John Dickson:
Which are in your book.

Grace Hamman:
Are in the book. Yes. And in carvings where you have this tree of vices or a tree of virtues on the other hand as well. Um, but at the tree of Vices, the, the roots of this tree are always the vice of pride and all the other vices grow out of that. So that sort of conceptualizes this idea that pride is at the roots of everything else. Um, and, and at first that might strike us as an overreaction ’cause we kind of have a complicated relationship with the word pride. Sometimes we use it in a positive sense. And there, there are forms of good pride, um, separated from this idea. But bad pride is really at its core, a rejection of creatureliness. And by that I mean, um, creatureliness, we’re all creatures, we’re all created. Um, and we, uh, are not God. We are just not in control. We are not, um. We are not the ones who made the universe. And so, um, when we reject our littleness and our limitedness and our, um, human  limitations, this becomes this, um, vice of pride. This, um, sort of grasping at ruling, at being, um, the. The one in charge, the one to control, the one who is, um, imposing my will upon the universe. So it’s this self centering, um, at the cost of everything else around me. 

John Dickson – Studio

In Bernard of Clairvaux’s 12th century work The Steps of Pride and Humility, he writes: 

The monk who observes others instead of attending to himself will begin before long to see some as his superiors and others as his inferiors; in some he will see things to envy, in others, things to despise. The eyes have wandered and the mind soon follows. It is no longer steadily fixed on its real concerns and is now carried up on the crest of the waves of pride, now down in the trough of envy. (66)

As Grace reflected on her blog about this passage: try reading (or listening!) to that and not think of how social media affects us! 

Grace Hamman:
And so we can begin to see how all the other vices grow out of that, because every other vice is a failure to love because it’s a failure to recognize the reality of somebody else. So I’m just constantly rejecting the reality of the other person, um, when I’m centering myself. At the cost of anything, no matter what. And that’s so ancient Christians saw in the, in the fall of humans in Genesis, this narrative of pride, this rejection of human limits moving into, uh, usurping the place of God. Um, and, and then the dramatic fall out of all of that.

John Dickson:
Does that make humility, the base virtue,

Grace Hamman:
Humility is the base of the virtues. And this is the part that might even be more surprising because I think so many of us would say no. Why isn’t love the base of the virtues? Love should

John Dickson:
my next question, grace, my next question.

Grace Hamman:
Love should be the base. But what we, um, skip over with that is that if we are rejecting our creatureliness, um. We are, we are moving, you know, into unreality. We move closer into reality. On the other hand. Humility. All humility is, is acknowledgement of reality. So, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who’s this great medieval monastic theologian, he defines humility as true self-knowledge, especially regarding our weaknesses. And so it, it’s the category of all self-knowledge, but in particular, knowing our limitations, knowing that we are created, knowing that we are not in fact. Um, the center of the universe and that we share, um, our creativeness with other people and everyone else. And so, um, humility, you have to start there because you cannot learn anything if you are not willing to acknowledge your need and you can’t receive love if you’re not willing to acknowledge your need. Um, and so God, in one sense, um, as love, he is the, this. The source of all virtues. So you can say in another sense, Thomas Aquinas talks about this. Yes, love is also the source of all virtues, but from the human angle, from the human perspective, we always have to turn to humility first before we can begin to love others really well.

Reading

Augustine says: “Are you thinking of raising the great fabric of spirituality? Attend first of all to the foundation of humility.” Now this would seem to imply that humility is the foundation of all virtue. Therefore apparently it is greater than the other virtues. However, just as the orderly assembly of virtues might be compared to a building, so that which is the first step in the acquisition of virtue is likened to the foundation, which is first laid before the rest of the building. The first step in the acquisition of virtue involves removing obstacles: and thus humility holds the first place, inasmuch as humility expels pride, which God resisteth, and humility makes us submissive and ever open to receive the influx of Divine grace.
In this sense, humility is said to be the foundation of the spiritual edifice …
And yet, just as perfection is greater than disposition, so charity, and other virtues whereby we approach God directly, are greater than humility. 

Summa Theologiae, Secunda Secundae Q.161, Art.5.

John Dickson – Studio

Humility is not necessarily the most important virtue – that honour is given to LOVE (or ‘charity’) –  but it is the beginning of virtue. 

John Dickson:
Does that tie into the, um, ancient Hebrew notion that the beginning of wisdom is fear of the Lord?

Grace Hamman:
It absolutely ties into that because if humility is at its core, the foundation, just recognizing the foundation of reality where you’re like, I am tiny and limited, and this boundless, omniscient, omnipotent creator is, is here. I must submit to him. And so the, or the, those words are so like submit or obey. These are tricky, difficult.

John Dickson:
It can sound repressive,

Grace Hamman:
They can, yes. But if you reframe it in terms of I am looking at reality itself, then what’s repressive about that? If you are, if you are leaning into this. I, I am nothing but a bottomless pit of need in, in the best way possible actually. I am created to need and to be able to love others in their need. And, um, because of that, I can then turn into. Um, the, the depths of love itself and, and let that transform me. Um, it is a beautiful window. Instead of being this, like, getting in your place, you know, crunch yourself down to fit. No, it’s, it’s, it’s actually quite different than that, but that’s how it can be. That’s how pride reframes it, right.

John Dickson:
I suppose it’s the freedom, um, of actually living in the place you are created to be. You know, a, a fish is free in the water, but as soon as it thinks it’s a dog, it’s not gonna go so well.

Grace Hamman:
Right, right. Or if, if you start to. If you’re, if you, you know, if speaking of the fear of God as the root of wisdom, we would think somebody insane if they, um, didn’t treat the ocean with a deep respect being in their frail, limited little human body, right? We’d say you’re being stupid. You’re denying the fabric of your own reality. Um. And so to not embrace these limits of ourselves is, is to then stick our heads in the sand about, about these bigger things. Um, and that’s why that does come back to humility.

John Dickson – Studio

Pride and humility weren’t the only vice and virtue combination for medieval thinkers. As Grace alluded to earlier with the image of the trees, all seven of the traditional virtues have a corresponding vice. Love, for example, is paired – not with wrath – but with envy. In the helpfully titled 14th-century text The Book of Vices and Virtues, the human soul is described as a garden. As the soul grows in love, the garden flourishes. But if a person isn’t careful, a Basilisk—the king of serpents—can slither in and poison it. The Basilisk, of course, is envy. And its venom destroys one’s ability to love others. It’s a powerful metaphor. But it’s not just metaphorical. This is where our medieval forebears were far more thoughtful about this stuff than we are today. They were trying to discern the rational connections between each of the virtues and each of the vices — and also the rational connections between each virtue and vice. In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas explains the logical connection between envy and love (what he calls “charity”):

“Now the object both of charity and of envy is our neighbour’s good, but by contrary movements, since charity rejoices in our neighbour’s good, while envy grieves over it.” Summa Theologiae, Secunda Secundae Q.36, Art.3.

That’s pretty hard to argue with. I asked Grace to walk us through some of the other virtue-vice pairs – in an Undeceptions rapid fire round! 

John Dickson:
Okay, now we come to our rapid fire round grace Strap your seatbelt in. Okay. Um, I want to, uh, just go through a few of the juxtapositions, vice virtue and then really can you tell me, oh, I dunno if you can try and do it as quickly as you can, what it is and, and, and what this pairing is getting at. What’s the significance of the pairing? Okay. Ready?

John Dickson:
Wrath, or should I say wrath? I don’t know. Anyway, wrath and meekness. 

Grace Hamman:
Wrath is the perpetual readiness for violence, whether in word, thought or deed. It is that turning time and time again to, uh, to, to violence. And meekness is creating space in the soul so that your anger, which we’re all gonna be angry, anger’s, not necessarily a vice. Um, but making that space in the soul for anger to conform to truth. So is this something that I can be justly angry about and that I need to act injustice on? Or is this something that my ego is driving in some way that I overreacted to or fill in the blank?

John Dickson:
Here are some old fashioned ones, sloth and fortitude.

Grace Hamman:
Sloth is a resistance to my vocation of loving others in the midst of challenge. So, uh, it’s, it’s a, it’s avoidance is what it boils down to. And that can manifest in over busyness or it can manifest in, in the proverbial couch potato lifestyle, but it’s not couch potato. It’s actually that avoidance of the demands of love in my life. Fortitude, on the other hand, is the carrying of those burdens for the sake and in the name of love. So it’s easiest to see, I think, in our family lives, right? I’m a mom of three kids. Sometimes all I wanna do is tell everyone to go away and, and be quiet forever and leave me alone. And yet I still have to feed these three little people every day. And that, as simple as that is, is an act of fortitude.

John Dickson:
Avarice and mercy.

Grace Hamman:
Avarice is disordered valuing systems around money. And so, and possessions. And so, um, it is a sort of losing sight. Um, there’s all these, uh, comparisons of it to, um, not being able to see properly. So you lose sight of where true value is, which is always in the other creature, in our fellow images of God. And you place that value in, um, manmade things. Um, and then mercy is true sight seeing with the eyes of Christ. Recognizing, uh, just like in Matthew 25, in being able to see in the hungry, in the thirsty, in the needy, in the criminal, in the stranger, the image of Christ that is in every single person and that habit of the true vision of value,

John Dickson:
I mean, just parenthetically, this word Mercy has sort of got a little bit muddled in English as we think it means pardoning someone like you have mercy on a death row candidate or whatever, but it’s actually tied to what we would think of as charity, as like the, the idea of (Ancient Greek term) in ancient Greek is the, is the, um, doing something, uh, charitable for someone in need, isn’t it?

Grace Hamman:
Yes, that’s right. And I think we’ve gotten it all muddled because actually Mercy is really just the same coin as justice, um, just the other side of it. And so we think of them as opposites, but in actuality, they are both the character of God and, and he unites them. And that’s, that’s how, that’s the closest we can get to the justice of God is by becoming merciful.

John Dickson:
Okay. I ruined the rapid fire round. Um, let’s get back on track. Uh, lust and charity. I mean, this sounds particularly medieval.

Grace Hamman:
Yes, this does sound very medieval. People think of like horrible, like Monty Pythonesque, things like chastity belts or something. But lust is, again, this. Um, seeing others as, um, something to use. So reducing the personhood of other people down into, um, objectifying them. And so it typically comes out in sexual behavior, but it does not have to, it is bigger than that. It is this objectification of other whole human beings. And chastity is the, um. Again, this, this ability to, this practice of not using people, of, um, letting people be other whole humans and you never diminish them, um, into vehicles for your own pleasure. So again – can be sexual, but doesn’t have to be, is actually about, uh, is actually closely related to contemplation and to beauty chastity is, which is very shocking for us today.

John Dickson:
I mean, that’s this great example of how medieval thinking or thinking of the Middle Ages, uh, can just reframe stuff for us.

Grace Hamman:
Absolutely. I, I mean, it’s sort of shocking when you begin to point to dive into these and you’re like. Whoa, I have totally, um, shrunk down these words in a lot of ways.

John Dickson:
Gluttony and abstinence.

Grace Hamman:
Gluttony is very, very … it’s lust’s sister. And it’s the, again, a reduction of bodies. And instead of reducing somebody else’s body, it’s a reduction of your own body into, uh, just a, a, a pleasure vehicle, basically, especially regarding food and drink. But it can also be regarding your habits of speech. So consumption in the, in many forms, um, that is gluttony. And then, uh, abstinence is the practice of being able to set your consumption and your natural good body desires in their proper contexts. So, eating when it’s good to eat. Abstaining when it is good to abstain, and learning and paying attention to when those contexts are feasting. When it’s right to feast, fasting, when it’s right to fast. Um, and the practice of discernment is kind of central to, to this practice of abstinence.

John Dickson – Studio

The virtues can sound beautiful—and demanding. But laid out like this, they can easily start to feel like a checklist … and a burden. But virtues aren’t things you ever finish. You don’t complete mercy or finally achieve fortitude. They grow in you, according to medieval thinking, and you grow in them. Stay with us.

Reading

We might think that God wanted simply obedience to a set of rules: whereas He really wants people of a particular sort…

John Dickson – Studio

That’s CS Lewis in his chapter on the cardinal virtues in Mere Christianity. He’s making a point about cultivating “virtue” – it’s not about specific actions, but a certain quality of character. 

Reading

There is a difference between doing some particular just or temperate action and being a just or temperate man. Someone who is not a good tennis player may now and then make a good shot. What you mean by a good player is a man whose eye and muscles and nerves have been so trained by making innumerable good shots that they can now be relied on. They have a certain tone or quality which is there even when he is not playing, just as a mathematician’s mind has a certain habit and outlook which is there even when he is not doing mathematics. In the same way a man who perseveres in doing just actions gets in the end a certain quality of character. Now it is that quality rather than the particular actions which we mean when we talk of a ‘virtue’. 

John Dickson:
And to remind listeners who may have lost the point already that that, um, the, the point of all of this avoiding Vice running toward virtue isn’t to earn brownie points with the Almighty. It’s to become the true human to be. Truly yourself. Am I right?

 

Grace Hamman:
That is right. And I think what, what we’ve kind of lost sight of and what, um, we, we put it into this category of like, am I behaving well? You know, a checklist, a spiritual checklist of good behaviors when actually, it is about desire. The virtues and the vices are about learning what to love and what to desire, and then, and then leaning into that. So I don’t, I don’t want to be just because I want to avoid hell or, or, you know, uh, be seen in a particular way. I want to be just because, um, in my justice I can give people what they need and what, um, what I owe them, or I want to be patient, not because, oh, it’s good to be patient, you know, I should be patient. That seems like a good thing. But I wanna be patient because in being patient, I can actually love the really complicated. Other humans who are in my life without squashing them and hurting them, or overreacting or burning things down when I’m mad, or whatever it is. So these things are about desire and about just redirecting those desires, um, so that I can love myself and love God, and love my neighbor, and love my enemy.

John Dickson:
Can we talk about how to cultivate the virtues? Um, at the end of each chapter, you have lovely pieces of practical advice, um, like this one from the end of Wrath and Meekness. I’ll read it back to you. “Pick a small way to resist Wrath through patience and meekness. A few options. Take a deep breath before responding in conversation. Stop immediately posting on social media when you are angry, wait a day. Even silly things like choosing the longest line at the checkout or refusing to cuss when someone cuts you off can be welcome baby steps into an orientation toward peace.” So is that it? Is it just trying to apply these virtues in the nitty-gritty? Is that how you build the virtues?

Grace Hamman:
It’s one, it’s, it’s one beginning way. Um, another way is through prayer. Um, through extensive prayer of that, please redirect my desires here. ’cause all I wanna do is flip this person off who was so horrible in traffic or whatever. But, um, the Lord is gracious to us. And I, I like to think of this as, it’s kind of like when you’re learning how to read when you’re a kid, right? You can’t learn how to read Dostoevsky, or you can’t even learn how to read Charlotte’s Web or whatever. Fill in the blank. If you don’t start out with P pot, right? You begin in these tiny, tiny nitty gritty weeds, um, in order to then be able to read the magnificent, world-changing novel, and that’s how humans are. That’s how we learn things. We look at who has come before us and we go, whoa, my grandfather is the most patient person I know. How can I act more like him in a particular situation? And then we also, because we are, you know, weak and limited and have a really hard time with things. We also throw ourselves on the mercy of God and say, please help me change. But the Lord helps us change by giving us those situations in which to practice and exercise those hard things. And so it’s always held in grace, but as silly as it sounds, um. You know, you can hold your tongue in a difficult argument and react with grace and love, um, in a really, really hard moment when you’ve practiced doing that in a tiny moment when the stakes aren’t very high, and that’s this very ancient, very medieval way of thinking about developing these things.

John Dickson – Studio

There’s a truth here that psychologists would recognise from Cognitive Behavioural Therapy—the approach that works on the assumption that thinking and habits shape each other. Change the way you think, and your behaviour often follows. Change your behaviour, and—over time—your patterns of thinking begin to shift as well. It’s a feedback loop. Tell yourself truer, healthier things, and you may find yourself acting in truer, healthier ways. Practise truer, healthier actions, and you may discover your inner dialogue slowly catching up. Years ago, I wrote a book on one of the virtues—humility. I’ve often described it as my greatest publishing mistake, since my friends will never let me forget the obvious question: Who on earth writes a book on humility? Fair point. I have no defence. I did it. But there’s one part near the end that I’m not entirely embarrassed about, where I talk about cultivating humility. I can’t bear quoting myself at length, so over to you Yannick Lawry:

Reading

My fourth piece of advise may sound a little crude and simplistic. Just force yourself on occasion to act humbly. I am not talking about ‘pretending’. I am recommending that you develop the humility muscle by exercising it. Obviously, thoughts powerfully affect actions. At the same time, actions also influence thoughts. One of the simplest examples is the advice to ‘face your fears’ … ‘Systematic desensitization’ basically involves forcing yourself in a controlled way into a situation you (irrationally) find frightening so that the fear is slowly minimized. Anger management can sometimes involve the same approach: force yourself to count to ten instead of exploding and over time new habits—usually allied to new thoughts—can develop. 

The busy CEO of a large company may decide to personally greet five junior employees each morning. Before long she finds that she enjoys it, partly because of the reaction it receives, and soon she ends up doing it without thinking. The captain of the football team determines in advance of the game to deflect the praise of the win onto other deserving players. Not only does this lift the spirit of the team, over time it begins to lessen his personal need for praise. The examples are endless. The point is the same. Choose to act humbly, partly because it is often the best course of action anyhow, and partly because new patterns of behaviour can influence deeper patterns of thought. 

John Dickson – Studio

The point is: Think virtue. Practise virtue. And slowly—almost without noticing—you may find yourself caught up in a virtuous cycle.

John Dickson:
Okay, but what’s in this for the doubter, for the person who’s not quite sure to make what to make of Christianity, but is attracted to the good life and thinks some of what you said actually made some sense. What do you think there is in this medieval wisdom for the person today who is not a Christian?

Grace Hamman:
One thing, I think that’s in it is that these, um, these words are so often just kind of dreary doer … I think Christians have done a pretty poor job of, of making this, these words and this life like visible and attractive. Um, which they are actually, when you stop to think about them. And in the medieval world, they used all these crazy metaphors that are super weird and interesting. Interesting, I think anyone, not just to people who are already, you know, bought in to the Christian life, but actually, you know, going, okay, so you know, why should I think about virtue and vice words? What’s interesting? What’s uninteresting? What is actually a form of life that is appealing and beautiful even when it’s hard versus what is a form of life where I’m just sort of repeating, you know, rinsing and recycling my same old dreary obsessions and anxieties and, and um, irritations. And it’s just this endless me thing going on. Um, and I think that’s something that. All of us are interested in and long for –  is how can I just stop doing that same old garbage that I don’t really wanna do? Um, how can I dive deeper and think more clearly about what that means?

John Dickson:
Finally, can you put your finger on one or two things that you think a well-informed and well-formed human in the Middle Ages gets better than we in the 21st century.

Grace Hamman:
One is that our bodies matter. So the idea of the virtues and vices is that you are always working out of your body. You’re not gonna escape your body. Your body is not a punishment either. The, you know, a lot of medieval Christians viewed the body as a punishment, but the, the clearest thinkers didn’t. And the, the ones most deeply steeped in love didn’t. So thinking in terms of like, I think one of our biggest temptations today is to escape our human limitations, specifically our body limitations through technology. Um, and so to avoid, you know, aging weariness, just natural human features, whatever it is, or to think of ourselves as somehow beyond them. Like, and, I think what’s really about the medieval era is that they took bodies really seriously and they said, you’re in your body and God is present with you in your body. Just like the … we are, we are following Christ who is fully human and fully God. And and so your particular temptations and weaknesses are not sources of shame. They are invitations into how you might be able to follow Christ in a particular way. And so I’ve been really moved by that and really moved by how they think about bodies and how seriously they take bodies. Both for good and for ill at times,  but in a way that can helpfully redirect us.

John Dickson – Studio

Let’s press pause. I’ve got a five-minute Jesus for you.

Jesus was huge on the virtues. That may sound obvious. But what I mean is that he was more interested in virtue than morality—more concerned with character than with rules. That’s not to say there are no rules in his teaching. There are. He’s pretty rule-ish on marriage, for example. Jesus said:

“At the beginning the Creator ‘made them male and female… the two will become one flesh.’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, let no one separate.”

That’s a strict rule. But you have to really search the Gospels to find many examples like that. The vast majority of Jesus’ ethical teaching is virtue-based. Even commands like “Love your enemies” or “Whoever wants to be great must be a servant” aren’t detailed moral rules. We’re not told exactly what they look like in every situation. They’re about forming attitudes and habits. Or take the opening of the Sermon on the Mount—the so-called Beatitudes. They set the tone for everything that follows, and they’re all about character, not rules:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek …
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for …
Blessed are the merciful …
Blessed are the pure in heart …
Blessed are the peacemakers …

And so on …

Christian ethics are essentially virtue-ethics. And that’s why medieval thinkers focused so much on vice and virtue. But—and this is crucial—there’s something Jesus stressed even more than virtue. It’s no accident that the first idea of the Sermon on the Mount, the first thing Matthew allows us to hear from the Messiah, is that we are given God’s kingdom not through virtuous achievement but by God’s mercy toward those who know they can’t achieve it. 

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”

Before we hear anything about virtue, we’re assured that the blessing of God’s kingdom is given to those who know they’re spiritually and morally out of credit. So we’re left with a paradox: Christianity is deeply committed to virtue—and deeply opposed to vice—but it also insists that we can’t lift ourselves into God’s favour by our own moral bootstraps. One of the clearest examples of trying to do just that doesn’t come from a medieval monk or abbess—who usually knew they were sinners in need of grace—but from one of America’s founding figures. Benjamin Franklin believed that God existed but also that God left humanity to its own devices. He admired Christian morality, but denied Christ’s divinity and grace. Franklin devised an extraordinary personal regime aimed at moral perfection. He identified thirteen virtues and resolved to master them all—focusing on one each week, cycling through them year after year:

Temperance, Silence, Order, Resolution, Frugality, Industry, Sincerity, Justice, Moderation, Cleanliness, Tranquillity, Chastity, Humility.

He even kept a scorecard, marking every failure with a black dot in a small notebook he carried with him for the rest of his life. How did he go? He thought he made some progress. But he later admitted:

“It caused me so much painful attention, and my faults vexed me so much, and I made so little progress, and had such frequent relapses, that I was almost ready to give up the attempt.”

His biographer Walter Isaacson says that Franklin felt let down—not just by his own moral failures, but by those of his fellow deists. Franklin’s system was impressive: logical, disciplined, philosophically informed. But it was doomed from the start. If the real problem lies in the human heart—as Franklin’s own experiment showed—can the solution really come from the human heart alone? This is why Jesus started his teaching with, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”  It’s what the medieval thinkers understood. It’s what classical Christianity has always taught. The truly virtuous life begins—and ends—with grace, given to those who know just how much they need it. You can press play now. 

Undeceptions theme