Personification of a Virtue by Antonio del Pollaiolo
In case you missed these, here is Alain de Botton’s list of ten virtues unveiled in his Manifesto for Atheists.
1. Resilience. Keeping going even when things are looking dark.
2. Empathy. The capacity to connect imaginatively with the sufferings and unique experiences of another person.
3. Patience. We should grow calmer and more forgiving by getting more realistic about how things actually tend to go.
4. Sacrifice. We won’t ever manage to raise a family, love someone else or save the planet if we don’t keep up with the art of sacrifice.
5. Politeness. Politeness is very linked to tolerance, the capacity to live alongside people whom one will never agree with, but at the same time, can’t avoid.
6. Humour. Like anger, humour springs from disappointment, but it’s disappointment optimally channelled.
7. Self-Awareness. To know oneself is to try not to blame others for one’s troubles and moods; to have a sense of what’s going on inside oneself, and what actually belongs to the world.
8. Forgiveness. It’s recognising that living with others isn’t possible without excusing errors.
9. Hope. Pessimism isn’t necessarily deep, nor optimism shallow.
10. Confidence. Confidence isn’t arrogance, it’s based on a constant awareness of how short life is and how little we ultimately lose from risking everything.
Why these? Why now? Robert Dex explains:
De Botton, whose work includes a stint as a writer in residence at Heathrow Airport, said he came up with the idea in response to a growing sense that being virtuous had become “a strange and depressing notion”, while wickedness and evil had a “peculiar kind of glamour”.
He said: “There’s no scientific answer to being virtuous, but the key thing is to have some kind of list on which to flex our ethical muscles. It reminds us that we all need to work at being good, just as we work at anything else that really matters.”
My own response, which I sent to the Catholic Herald last week:
I like this list of virtues. It’s not exhaustive, but it’s certainly helpful. It prods you into making a sort of ‘examination of conscience’, and reminds you that there are other ways of living and relating and reacting.
There are obvious borrowings from classical philosophy, the great world religions, English manners, and the self-help books that line the shelves at WH Smiths.
Apart from the obvious absence of ‘God’, they don’t seem to have a particularly atheist spin.
If both believers and non-believers lived by these virtues, the world would be a much happier place; there would be less shouting and more laughter; relationships would be more stable, and we’d get more done in an average day. That’s surely something to celebrate!
But Francis Phillips thinks there is an implicit Pelagianism at work here:
I understand why de Botton is preoccupied with the concept of a virtuous atheist and I do not mock him; indeed I take his yearning to counter the supposedly superior claims of Christianity very seriously. It is a noble ideal and society would indeed be happier and more civilised if more irreligious people of the “Me-generation” were to reflect on his ideas. But just as that selfless quiet heroine of the Great War, Nurse Edith Cavell, realised that patriotism was not enough, so a noble and enlightened atheism, however fine its aspirations, is not enough if individuals or society are to be regenerated or renewed.
The reason, as Catholic theology teaches us, is sin, original and personal, our own and Adam’s. We are not strong enough by ourselves to be good (as opposed to “nice”) without the grace of God. Politeness and resilience – indeed kindness and niceness – are not virtues in themselves; they are attractive characteristics of some people by nature; the rest of us have to fight against being “horrid”, like the little girl with the curl in the middle of her forehead.
It is Pelagianism (and de Botton strikes me as something of a neo-Pelagian) to think we can pull ourselves up by our bootstraps and achieve virtue on our own.
Do you like them? What’s missing?
Bridges and Tangents 
L O V E
Colossians 3:14
New International Version (NIV)
‘And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in perfect unity.’
“Do you like them? What’s missing?”
A realisation that we are not the only ones that matter. Also a realisation that we sometimes need help from others to do the right thing.
I agree with Francis Phillips about de Botton being neo-Pelagian (though I confess to having had to look up the definition!)
Probably, de Botton’s list of ethics is the best that can be achieved in the circumstance (atheism). But can his philosophy adequately and coherently make sense of the universal experience of what I ought to do, etc., without an ethics rooted in the divinely revealed truth of creation-as-gift and creator-as-love can?
Apart from secondary causality, it must surely be both grace and revelation which completes nature and reason with a relative integrity and intelligibility. I will listen to any argument, whether philosophical or theological, that can do justice to my experience, but I have yet to come across any that both attract and oblige my soul the way the Augustinian-Thomistic theological account does.
Im not as smart as anybody in this conversation, but GKC quotes Cavell as well, respecting the inadequacy of natural virtues. The Roman Empire was the best natural man could do. Jesus was incarnate as the answer to Rome (secular Rome, you know, Caesar…). I evesdropped one day on a man giving his reasons for leaving the Church, which summarized are that She is inadequate and corrupt. Those were my reasons for leaving humanism.
An answer to the Why [see second answer in the Penny Catechism]
I’m with Ivan Karamazov on all this…atheistic existentialism is a submission to nihilism i.e. if we are mere victims of entropy as the universe accelerates towards its colder-than-cold silence – we make the cosmic joke a good one.
I’m afraid you’re trapped amidst oxymorons and antinomials Father – virtue has a source and an end and cannot be severed from either….
“I believe like a child that suffering will be healed and made up for, that all the humiliating absurdity of human contradictions will vanish like a pitiful mirage, like the despicable fabrication of the impotent and infinitely small Euclidean mind of man, that in the world’s finale, at the moment of eternal harmony, something so precious will come to pass that it will suffice for all hearts, for the comforting of all resentments, for the atonement of all the crimes of humanity, of all the blood that they’ve shed; that it will make it not only possible to forgive but to justify all that has happened.”
Why then does Ivan remain an atheist? Because though he believes, he does not accept. He is not a doubter; he is a rebel. Like his own character the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan is angry at God for not being kinder. That is the deepest source of unbelief: not the intellect but the will.
Then he meets the Devil.
What’s missing from the atheist account is any reason to think that virtues are important at all.
Like his own character the Grand Inquisitor, Ivan is angry at God for not being kinder. That is the deepest source of unbelief: not the intellect but the will.
I’m perplexed that otherwise intelligent people can believe in Adam’s sin and the oh so implausible doctrine of Original Sin.Read Peter De Rosa on the subject.Believe all you like but it will never make your belief true!
Ray, This is a Catholic blog and maybe you would need to start by telling us what you do believe. For example, is there right action and wrong action? If so, what is its nature? Why is it right or wrong? Is there an ontological/cosmological objectivity within it or does it all depend on the consequences or motives?
Once you get to that stage, are there things you objectively consider wrong actions which you truly do not wish to perform but find it hard not to do?
Would you wish to be more virtuous, more altruistic, less selfish?
Well ….. ?
Do you have a predilection to do that which your ‘better self’ doesn’t want to do? Is this merely grounded in genes, neurochemicals, nurturing limitations, sociocultural indoctrination, peer pressure, hormonal urges?
If this behaviourist model has ‘made you what you are’ yet your existentialist self strives to be better, is this an angst-ridden defiance against the universe that you, being at the present evolutionary pinnacle, have decided to be better than the universe which created you by aspiring to moral principles which you believe make you more human?
Think Sartre, Camus, Heidegger, etc., ….. no ‘God’ or ‘Creation’ so far involved.
Do you believe we are all victims laden with the consequences of human choices made for hundreds of generations before our existence? Are we benefited or scarred or deprived by those choices? Well, take a step back.
Now, before you consider any notions of God or creation or providence or purpose and meaning within reality, isn’t the notion of ‘Original Sin’ blindingly obvious?
Even without any religious connotations, original sin is an aspect of the most fundamental basics of understanding the human person.
Shield, you are my hero! I love you, man…
These virtues remind me very much of the people I love the most: my parents. They are both atheists, whereas I am a Catholic. They live these virtues very well and are very exemplary individuals. As I’ve matured in my faith, I have come to appreciate the mystery at the heart of my upbringing: that so many excellent aspects to my upbringing can insert themselves among aspects which were truly shocking. I admire my parents and still strive to live these kind of virtues, which they taught me, but I couldn’t follow their non-religious way. They raised us well, but in a moral void, and in an age where postmodernism is ascendant and sexuality is debased, that is simply not satisfactory, and leads to a dead end. I have come to see that what they were lacking was the ability to give us a moral framework and satisfactory philosophical foundations. It may sound old fashioned, but that kind of moral and philosophical certainty is becoming the preserve of Catholics.and it appeals to more and more people.