Christians Among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics.

Lewis, V. Bradley

Hauerwas, Stanley and Pinches, Charles. Christians among the Virtues: Theological Conversations with Ancient and Modern Ethics. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1997. xvii + 230 pp. Cloth, $29.95--This volume engages the contemporary revival of interest in the virtues among philosophers and theologians and aims to articulate a distinctively Christian contribution to this conversation through (1) a selective discussion of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics; (2) critical discussions of three leading proponents of virtue ethics: Alasdair MacIntyre, Martha Nussbaum, and John Casey; and (3) a practical display of the distinctively Christian contribution to the recovery of virtue theory in discussions of the virtues of hope, courage, obedience, and patience. The purpose of the authors is both cautionary and suggestive. They wish to caution that any Christian appropriation of virtue ethics must entail a transformation of our understanding of the virtues, and to suggest the shape of virtues so transformed.

The discussion of Aristotle serves to remind us of the classical form of virtue ethics and concentrates on Aristotle's conception of happiness as essentially temporal for human beings and explicable with reference to the metaphor of the happy life as a journey rather than as a point of arrival. Similarly, the authors see the virtues not as ends in themselves, but as dispositions which help us on the journey and thus as the "form" of the happy life. Finally, they treat the theme of friendship in Aristotle, emphasizing the extent to which philia and the virtues are inseparable from one another. They also suggest what Christians should see as some limitations of Aristotle's account, namely, the extent to which philia likens the friends to one another and thus threatens to eliminate the "otherness" of the friend. Similarly, they raise doubts about Aristotle's statements that friends will attempt to insulate one another from their own suffering. Both of these doubts question the goal of self-sufficiency toward which Aristotle's view of the virtues points and a conception of the virtues themselves as a kind of armor intended to insulate us from the vicissitudes of human life.

The second part of the book is composed of three critical encounters. The first suggests instabilities within MacIntyre's work inasmuch as in building on Aristotle's conception of the virtues, it builds on what John Milbank, in his own criticism of MacIntyre, calls a "politics of violence and exclusivity" (p. 62) at odds with a Christian conception of the virtues. Hauerwas and Pinches also criticize Martha Nussbaum for reading liberal assumptions about the separation of public from private life into her discussion of the relationship of friendship and politics in Aristotle, suggesting instead that a Christian ecclesial context provides a more adequate account of friendship. Their general argument is that Christianity provides a more satisfactory understanding of the "fragility" of the human condition which is at the center of Nussbaum's discussion. Finally, the authors criticize John Casey's attempt to find in classical pagan virtue a more satisfactory notion of personhood than that available in those rule-based accounts which he sees as the common legacy of both Christianity and the Enlightenment. Casey makes friendship understood in the context of the classical polls the center of his argument, but he never articulates a viable model of community which could serve as such a context for us. So his account loses the very particularity which he seeks as an alternative to modern abstraction. Hauerwas and Pinches again put forth the church as such a context.

The last part of the book is the most impressive and the most difficult to summarize. There the authors move toward a more constructive Christian account of the virtues which they explicate in discussions of hope as the growing receptivity that Christians show to grace, and of courage as a virtue centered not in warfare, but in the demands of martyrdom. There are also enlightening discussions of the senses in which obedience can and cannot be seen as a virtue, and of patience as essentially linked to the Christian view of divine providence.

These last four chapters are rich and deserve wide readership. The earlier part of the book is less satisfying, largely because of the haste with which many of its points are made. This is particularly the case in the treatment of Aristotle, who is interpreted as something of a spokesman for the ethos of the classical city and its demands for a virtue grounded in military prowess. A more careful engagement with Aristotle, or Plato, would show the extent to which both were deeply critical of this ethos. Their own constructive accounts pointed toward the virtues necessary for the life of inquiry, and thus toward discontinuities between conventional civic virtue and human excellence as such. With respect to Aristotle, this raises the vexed questions surrounding the interpretation of Ethics X, questions which receive only brief acknowledgment from Hauerwas and Pinches. Many of these issues are suggested in earlier parts of the Ethics as well, albeit delicately and with an eye to Aristotle's likely audience which did value warrior virtue and the honor which was its chief reward. These problems with their discussion of Aristotle seem not unrelated to the extent to which the authors are insufficiently critical of Casey's monolithic picture of "pagan virtue" and too ready to accept Milbank's criticisms of MacIntyre, criticisms based on a similar picture of classical philosophy, as well as on a postmodernism which raises a host of other difficulties. This is a very interesting volume, part of the appeal of which lies in its civil and serious engagement with scholars whose perspectives differ sharply with that of the authors.