Profiles in Virtue: A New Series of Posts

It's been on my mind recently that we aren't great at accepting our heroes.  There's a story in Plutarch's Parallel Lives about Aristides, an Athenian politician and general who was nicknamed "the Just" in his own lifetime, who was out walking and came across an old farmer trying to cast his vote in the annual ritual known as ostracism, where a single citizen of Athens could be exiled for ten years if six thousand Athenians voted for their exile.  The farmer was illiterate, and asked for Aristides to help him write his vote... for Aristides.  When Aristides asked why, or if Aristides had somehow wronged him, the farmer simply said it irritated him to hear Aristides constantly referred to as "the Just."  Aristides scratched his name on the potsherd, and went on his way.

This illustrates quite well that we've enjoyed taking popular figures down a peg for a very long time - it is older than feudalism. It's also not a peculiarly European phenomenon: the early years of the Minamoto shogunate show the ease with which Minamoto no Yoritomo turned on his half-brother Yoshitsune out of jealousy, and large portions of the early books of Romance of the Three Kingdoms deal with all the times the virtuous Liu Bei is cast down by jealous rivals.  Much of the Book of Job consists of Job's neighbors needling him about how there must have been a flaw in his virtue.

As a counter to this, I shall be writing a series of posts about virtuous people, from as many traditions and places as I can conveniently name.  Like most counters, it is not a hard block, but at best a redirection or deflection, and not a particularly strong one at that; I am one man, after all, and I don't expect that my words will reach a particularly wide audience.  Since frugality is one of those virtues, I shall of course be harvesting these same stories for storytelling purposes.

I don't pretend that everyone will agree with my selections (as I plan on pointing out the virtues of Cao Cao, the villain of the Romance), or even that the figures I speak of are universally virtuous or that their behavior is always virtuous.  What is virtuous in one place is very much not virtuous in another; it is very doubtful that, for instance, Geoffroi de Charny would appreciate Egil Skallagrimsson's naked greed, or that Yagyū Munenori would agree with Charny's conception of virtue.  To put it another way, what is good in the world of Gandhi might not work in the world of Richard the Lionheart.

"Virtue, virtue... can anyone see my virtue? I appear to have dropped it."

What this is meant to do, rather, is to lead readers, much like Charny's questions for knights, to consider what virtue means in their own contexts, and whether there are virtues that can be extrapolated and broadened.  Virtue cannot and should not be universalized; people are not identical and there are times, places, and callings for which certain things are a virtue and in others a vice.  The best that can be hoped for out of it is broadening - under what set of circumstances is a behavior virtuous, and under what set of circumstances is it not?

It would be easy to conclude, based on the examples I've given, that I am concerned strictly with "manly" behavior.  That is not the case.  For every male example in a given period that I could give, I could give a female (for Yoshitsune, it's Tomoe Gozen; for Charny, it's Christine de Pizan).  I could even talk about cases like the stubborn independence of Gunnar's wife in Njal's Saga, where behavior is both admirable and self-destructive.

What, then, is virtue? As I have said it is impossible to define positively and universally; instead, it's easier to define it using St. Thomas's via negativa, by defining what virtue is not.  We have already established that virtue is not universal, and that it is neither "masculine" nor "feminine."  Virtue is not not innate - it is trainable, otherwise we would not bother with examples and say "go and do likewise."  Virtues are also generally not pure; an excess of virtue at the expense of competing virtues becomes a vice - there is an incident in the Romance of the Three Kingdoms where Cao Cao brazenly lies his way out of a lethal situation by claiming the sword he was about to use to kill someone was actually a gift for him, thereby displaying both cleverness in the escape, and courage in being there in the first place.  Pure cleverness would have had someone else commit the act, thereby making someone else assume the risks.  Pure courage would have led him to complete the assassination, and die in the process.  Certainly some - looking at you, Yamamoto Tsunetomo - would say that he should have struck without regard for his own survival, but he was responsible for a whole family, and therefore his act would have cost them as well.

"The way of the warrior, I have found, is death - not fun!"

Finally, I should include a note on sources.  Generally, I have an offline reference for most of these stories - I have Munenori's book sitting on my desk, for instance.  However, because of the circumstances under which I write these, generally isolated from my references, and because I am not writing these for publication, I will generally refer to online sources.  Wikipedia is not a great source for rigorous academic work, but it is great for broad strokes and quickly finding, for instance, the right source for that story about Aristides way back at the beginning.  Thus, if there is something I write that is of interest, I strongly encourage independent research, fact-checking, and investigation; because part of the thesis is that virtue is at least partly something that everyone must decide for themselves, checking the original sources, considering the stories behind these posts, and evaluating independently is a vital part of cultivating virtue.

So - with that, let's begin.