The Catholic Message Board

I want to argue that just as the traditional medical virtues had a special
status, so those virtues have become problematic in a special way. There
is a social process by which what have been virtues in one social and
cultural context can become vices in another. I am not here referring to
the process which I have already noted whereby what are believed to be
virtues in one social order come to be believed to be vices in another, as
the quality which Aristotle counted as a virtue under the name of mag-
nanimity came to be considered by the early Christians the vice that is
the counterpart to their virtue of humility. I am referring to a process
whereby what actually were virtues tum into what actually are vices.
Before I tum to the history of the traditional medical virtues, let me list
a number of ways in which this may happen.

Chesterton wrote:The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful. For example, Mr. Blatchford attacks Christianity because he is mad on one Christian virtue: the merely mystical and almost irrational virtue of charity. He has a strange idea that he will make it easier to forgive sins by saying that there are no sins to forgive. Mr. Blatchford is not only an early Christian, he is the only early Christian who ought really to have been eaten by lions. For in his case the pagan accusation is really true: his mercy would mean mere anarchy. He really is the enemy of the human race -- because he is so human. As the other extreme, we may take the acrid realist, who has deliberately killed in himself all human pleasure in happy tales or in the healing of the heart. Torquemada tortured people physically for the sake of moral truth. Zola tortured people morally for the sake of physical truth. But in Torquemada's time there was at least a system that could to some extent make righteousness and peace kiss each other. Now they do not even bow. But a much stronger case than these two of truth and pity can be found in the remarkable case of the dislocation of humility.