What Are You Guarding?

What role should anger play in a virtuous life? If anger’s rightful target is injustice, and the world is marked by persistent injustice, is it virtuous to be habitually angry? Or, on the contrary, if Christlike character is marked by gentleness, should a virtuous person have little to no anger? To address this puzzle, DeYoung incorporates insights from two strands in Christian thought—one drawing on counsel from the desert fathers and mothers to eschew anger as a manifestation of the false self, and the other from Aquinas, who argues that some anger can be virtuous, if it has the right object and mode of expression. Next, she examines ways that formation in virtuous anger depends on other virtues, including humility, and other practices, such as lament and hope. Finally, she argues for appropriate developmental and vocational variation in anger’s virtuous expression across communities and over a lifetime.

Augustine on Grace and Worship in Virtue Formation

Augustine’s attention to the role of liturgical practices in the formation of the virtues offers a subtle account of the pedagogy or training of desire. Augustine illuminates the mystery at the heart of habituation: that we cannot simply decide to desire or decide to love, even as our character is most fundamentally defined by what we love. Yet in recovering Augustine’s thought for contemporary reflection on the virtues, we must appropriate Augustine’s critique of pagan spectacle and pagan virtue with caution, recognizing how Augustine’s own insights into the inscrutability of grace undermine any monolithic construction of the secular as Other, even Augustine’s own construction of splendid pagan vice. Affirming the liturgy as the primary site for the formation of Christian virtue sustains, rather than restricts, Christian participation in the process of articulating and acting for the sake of common goods in a pluralist secular society.

Emotion, Executive Dysfunction, and Agency

Virtue theory has addressed the role of human emotions in moral agency since its earliest proponents. Timpe’s goal in this chapter is to see how far this connection can be pushed by looking at certain kinds of emotional disability (or impairments with regard to emotional control). More specifically, he explores what implications contemporary research in psychology about executive dysfunction and emotion has for thinking about virtues that take emotions as their objects (e.g., fortitude). Timpe argues that certain kinds of disabilities significantly impact an agent’s ability to develop the proper dispositions regarding emotions that are typically associated with virtue and human flourishing because of how those disabilities impact the agent’s emotions. Some disabilities will impair an agent’s ability to exercise the kind of executive function needed to regulate the emotions and develop virtue. Timpe ends by considering how the sort of disabilities considered relate to Christian flourishing and community.

Willpower and the Cultivation of Virtues

This chapter explores some roles willpower might play in a Christian’s grace-empowered attempt to “make every effort to supplement [his or her] faith with virtue” (2 Peter 1:5, ESV). Working from a distinction Robert Adams makes between “motivational” and “structural” virtues, West argues that virtues of the latter sort—of which self-control, perseverance, and patience are paradigm examples—are partially constituted by willpower. He then draws on recent empirical studies of self-regulation to explain how the wise exertion of willpower can help one not only resist temptation, but also leverage temptation in the interest of cultivating virtues in both of Adams’s categories.

Practicing Hope

In this chapter, DeYoung considers how the theological virtue of hope might be practiced. She first explains Thomas Aquinas’s account of this virtue, including its structural relation to the passion of hope, its opposing vices, and its relationship to the friendship of charity. Then, using narrative and character analysis from the film The Shawshank Redemption, she examines a range of hopeful and proto-hopeful practices concerning both the goods one hopes for and the power one relies on to attain those goods. In particular, she shows how the film’s picture of the role friends and friendship play in catalyzing hope is a compelling metaphor for Christian hope’s reliance on God.

Cultivating Honesty

The virtue of honesty has been seriously neglected in contemporary philosophy. Hardly any papers on the nature of the virtue have appeared in a leading philosophy journal in decades. Similarly, almost nothing has been said about how to cultivate the virtue of honesty. In recent work, Miller has offered a preliminary account of the nature of the virtue of honesty. In this chapter he aims to do the same with honesty cultivation. Specifically, he first looks to the psychological literature on cheating to see what dispositions most people actually possess in this moral domain. Central among them will be beliefs about the wrongness of cheating, as well as desires to cheat while also appearing honest both to others and to ourselves. With this baseline in place, Miller considers what strategies can be recommended to enhance the importance and salience of the wrongness of cheating, while weakening our desires to cheat.

The Sanctifying Work of the Holy Spirit in Christian Virtue Formation

The Christian tradition envisions the third member of the Triune Godhead—the Holy Spirit—as central to a life of virtue. But just how does the Holy Spirit figure into virtue formation? William Alston developed three models of the sanctifying work of the Holy Spirit: the fiat model, the interpersonal model, and the sharing model. In response to Alston’s argument for the sharing model, this chapter offers grounds for a reconsideration of the interpersonal model. It closes with a discussion of some of the implications of one’s understanding of the transforming work of the Holy Spirit for practical Christian spirituality.

Two Concepts of Intellectual Humility

One aim of virtue epistemology is to illuminate the nature and structure of individual virtues like curiosity, open-mindedness, and intellectual humility. Recently, two rather different accounts of intellectual humility have emerged. Robert C. Roberts has argued that intellectual humility should be understood negatively: that it is essentially an absence of certain concerns (e.g., a concern with intellectual status or power). By contrast, Jason Baehr and several co-authors have argued that intellectual humility has a positive character: that it is a matter of being alert to and willing to “own” one’s intellectual limitations, weaknesses, and mistakes. In this chapter, Baehr considers how these accounts stand with respect to each other, both logically and evaluatively. After tracing fundamental similarities between the two, he considers whether they share a common target or whether they attempt to get at two distinct virtues. Finally, he considers the relative merits and formational value of each account.

On Graciousness

Heidi Chamberlin Giannini attends to a virtue that has been largely neglected in the philosophical and theological literature of the virtues—graciousness. Giannini argues that graciousness is a virtue in its own right, distinct from other related virtues such as generosity, humility, and modesty. She argues that the gracious person notices and responds in ways that undercut indications of relative standing when social cues threaten to cause discomfort by suggesting that someone is inferior to another. While distinct from divine grace, graciousness nevertheless reflects God’s grace and importantly contributes to a life of virtue.

Cultivating Christian Love

In his “Great Commandments” Jesus places love at the heart of the virtuous Christian life. Yet, the task of trying to cultivate Christian love might seem impossible from the start. For, a prominent Christian tradition understands love (charity) to be a gracious gift from God, not a virtue we can acquire through practice. Moreover, love seems to involve emotions that are outside of our control. In response to these worries, Pelser explains how it is possible to work toward the cultivation of Christian love, even though it is an infused, emotional virtue. He develops Søren Kierkegaard’s insight that Christians can contribute to the cultivation of love in one another’s hearts by “presupposing” love in each other. Pelser concludes by explaining how certain practices that combine loving action with contemplative reflection can help till the ground of our hearts so that love might be cultivated in us by God and others.