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The Twelve Virtues of the Soul: Virtue 1
Robert Sardello This first installment of a series of twelve essays on virtue and those that follow are in the nature of working research notes. In these notes, I follow a guiding inner question - how can a careful describing of the realm of virtue help the Fetzer Community? I want these notes to be of practical significance. The very notion of application, however, will have to be approached differently from the manner to which we are accustomed. Our guiding question will not take the form of how the virtues can be applied to the ongoing life of the Fetzer Community. Rather, we will be concerned with how the dynamism of the virtues, when felt from within, reshapes our practical lives, and thus the practical life of the Fetzer Community. Virtue, then, is not to be imagined as something we add on to the way that we already live; rather, deepening into virtue in conscious ways transforms life, particularly in its practical aspects. The virtues are inherently practical because they are concerned with the good and it is never sufficient to simply think about the good or to feel it; it must be practiced. For Plato, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, exist as three transcendent archetypal realms and are grand imaginations toward which we aspire as human beings. We orient our thinking to the True, our feeling toward the Beautiful, and our actions, our willing, toward the Good. In such striving, we seek to unite our merely human ways with the ways of the spiritual worlds. The Good is the object of willing, that which our actions attempt to achieve when we act out of a harmony of body, soul, and spirit. Aristotle had a more empirical approach to virtue, but echoes Plato in many respects. In the Nichomachean Ethics he seeks to discover the good, and comes to define the good as what it is we are aiming at in life, what we are here to do. As there are many ways of doing the good, there must be one chief good, with which all the rest we can imagine are connected. This chief good, Aristotle calls Eudaimonia, which is best translated with a quite beautiful word - flourishing. The chief good is the flourishing of the harmonious life of body, soul, and spirit. That insight, it seems, is worth holding onto. What are the ways in which the soul of the Fetzer Community can flourish? What sort of human life is most flourishing? Aristotle holds that a virtuous life is most flourishing; the best human life is one of excellent human activity. In book three of the Ethics, he turns to the question of what constitutes virtuous activity. Virtues, first, are aspects of "soul", those aspects primarily concerned with mediating our emotional life. For example, anger is lived in a virtuous manner when we feel it neither too violently nor too weakly. Virtue concerns expression and action in the realm of emotion that finds the mean between extremes. The doing of virtue does not so much concern what is done as how it is done. He does not say that we are not virtuous if we become angry; on the contrary, we may not be virtuous if we do not express anger. Thus, we see right at the outset that virtue is not a matter of making a list of what counts as good and one that counts as bad and focusing only on the one, trying to exclude the other. We see that there exists a dynamism of soul that is not subject to simple rules and regulations. Living the virtues can be imagined as developing the art of the soul. You have to get the knack of it by doing it. Aristotle's view is that the virtues are acquired by doing; we are not born with them, and we do not acquire them in any other way than by exercising them. An artistic skill is required in exercising virtue. Still, there must be an inner quality of soul that recognizes a virtue when it sees one, and if seen clearly enough, becomes inclined toward that virtue. Otherwise we become involved in a rather impossible regress. If virtues come wholly from the outside, then who determines what counts as virtue and what does not? That is to say, if virtue comes completely from the outside, then this realm would be simply a matter of what is socially or culturally conditioned. Here we have to thread a careful path. The way we take up and live virtue must indeed be sensitive to context. The acts themselves, no matter what the content might be, are not virtuous. A genuinely fair action, for example, is not one that can be determined in an abstract way. It must be an action that a person knows to be fair in a given situation, chooses to do for its own sake, and done in such a way that it expresses the soul character of the person. In order to avoid confusion in all of what follows, we need to make a clearing for the consideration of virtue by differentiating virtue from ethics on the one hand and from values on the other. The primary difference centers in the concern with the soul, which we shall be following in an explicit way. When doing the good issues from the inner life of the soul, there is active enjoyment in what one does. We take pleasure in our virtuous activity; it is not a matter of duty or obligation, following a moral code, or doing what one is told to do. Ethics is a code of conduct based upon moral duties and obligations which indicate how one should behave. Values are core beliefs or desires that guide or motivate attitudes and actions. Values are not necessarily ethical. Look, for example, at the act of treating other people fairly. Fairness can be a value, a characteristic of social life that is held in affective regard. One then acts in fairness toward others because that is what is valued by the group or society; there may or may not be pleasure involved in such action. Fairness can also be an ethic, a matter of moral duty and obligation, connected with the perception of what is right. For fairness to be a virtue, it must express the inner soul life of the person acting in a fair way, and therefore carry a particular quality characteristic of that individual; the individual must also choose to act in this way, and in so doing experiences pleasure, not from what may come from acting in this way, but in the act itself. If virtuous action brings pleasure to the soul, then it is necessary to know how soul pleasure is experienced. It is not the same as sensory pleasure, emotional pleasure, nor the kind of satisfaction we might experience by doing something that brings the approval of others, nor even that which accompanies doing something well. Try to remember a time when you did a courageous act simply because that was what the situation called for. You did not do this act in order to be praised, or because it was expected that you do it; in fact, you did not even consider whether you would benefit. The quality of pleasure involved in this action can be described as feeling free, as if an existing inner barrier had been removed and you were acting in perfect accord with who you are. In such a moment, in fact, you discover more of who you are as a spiritual being than you had known before. While the pleasure connected with each of the virtues has its own particular quality, and we shall try to describe these qualities in detail, the inner quality of freedom characterizes them all. How are we to approach to question of what specific virtues to consider? There are the three theological virtues of faith, hope, and love, and there are the four cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance; these will not be the ones we shall focus on because it seems important to widen our consideration beyond the classical, Christian understanding, as noble and deep this tradition may be. We shall not leave this tradition wholly behind as much of what will be developed will encompass what these great virtues are about. The number of virtues varies, from perhaps the single virtue of love to as many as 545 in one religion of India. My method of determining what to focus on is based upon three considerations. The first consideration comes from the meaning of the word 'virtue' itself. The word 'virtue' means: "The power or operative influence inherent in a supernatural or divine being"; or, " an embodiment of such power, especially one of the orders of the celestial hierarchy"; or, "the act of a divine being". These initial Oxford English Dictionary definitions precede the more common definitions of virtue as acts of conduct carried out by human beings. Re-visioning virtue first requires going to this source meaning, recognizing that the more common meanings have now become deadened by being immersed in the dogma of one or another religion. I am interested in developing the spiritual rather than the religious way of attending to the life of virtue because this way invites each individual to find their particular way of expressing their soul and spirit life rather than doing so according to arranged practices. At the same time, the interest here is how the universally human is in each particular instance embodied. A second consideration follows: we most likely cannot directly perceive the acts of spiritual beings, and these acts are the original meaning of virtue, but we do have evidence of their action in the archetypal patterns of the universe. We can take an archetypal approach to virtue, seeking the imaginal and spiritual background to our practice of particular virtues as human beings in the work of the divine arrangements of the cosmos. A specific relation, for example, exists between the twelve constellations of the Zodiac and twelve virtues. This relation has been alluded to by various individuals, but not yet developed. H.P. Blavatsky spoke of such a relation in The Secret Doctrine. Herbert Witzenmann wrote a brief book of meditations of the virtues, The Virtues - The Seasons of the Soul, based on the indications of Blavatsky and also of Rudolf Steiner. Recently, an astrologer, Paul Platt, has attempted to phenomenologically verify the relation of twelve different virtues to the twelve constellations in his work, The Qualities of Time. Each of these contributions provide no more than indications. For our purposes, it is not a literal connection of virtue with the Zodiac that is of importance; rather, it is to have a cosmological imagination in relation to virtue. Such an imagination will help us feel we are in harmony with the larger world when we act out of virtue and prevent virtue from becoming a code of ethics to follow. The third consideration in approaching the virtues through an archetypal imagination of the Zodiac concerns the mobility of such an imagination. The year is an archetype of becoming; we move from one month to the next, from one season to the next. The virtues, then, are not fixed ways of acting but a path of inner development that we go over again and again, deepening and expanding our experience of these attributes of the soul. The Zodiac, for us, is an imagination within which we can place this work and not a system that in any way predicts, for example, that someone born under a certain sign will be characterized by a predominance of a certain virtue. Nor does this imagination provide a new system for astrological reading. We can think of the virtues as twelve stages of development, but these twelve stages repeat because we are not engaged in learning something conceptual; if we were, then once we got the concept we would have clarity. Virtue educates emotions and feelings. Our emotions have a quality that is much like the realm of dreams. You may have a most vivid and moving dream, only to forget it within a few hours. We experience emotional life in a similar way. While we are in the midst of a particular emotion, it dominates our consciousness totally. Yet, after the emotion passes, we usually have trouble describing exactly what we experienced. Thus, emotional life does not develop in the way that, say, intellectual life develops. The virtues are not intellectual concepts but rather purity of emotion; for this reason, it is perhaps not to the theologian or to the philosopher of ethics that we should look for guidance in practice of virtue, but rather to a depth psychology bearing a spiritual orientation, that is, to spiritual psychology. The correlation between the zodiac constellations and the virtues we will be considering are the following:
Initial Reflections When we imagine the circle of the zodiac as a whole, while at the same time try to imagine one region as belonging to that whole, then it is possible to feel that one virtue is not separated off from the rest. A further feeling arises; that these virtues, taken as a whole, can be named, just as the virtues of faith, hope and love are named the theological virtues because they are those soul qualities needed to approach the divine. Similarly, the virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude are named the cardinal virtues because they are the principle spiritual ways to develop one's individual emotional life. The twelve virtues listed above, seen through the imagination of the zodiac, that great embrace of the cosmos, it seems, could be named the communal virtues. These twelve virtues to be considered have primarily to do with how to engage in the practice of community. We perhaps do not get very far by trying to form intentional communities, or try deliberately to live as a community of one sort or another. The suggestion here is that by practicing the virtues, those that hold together the whole of humanity, we might find ourselves living community. Thus, as we proceed to describe the twelve qualities of the whole, we will do so bearing in mind a concern for what constitutes a flourishing community.
Devotion Every virtue can also be looked at in terms of its excess and its lack. These two qualities are the shadow of every virtue, and we must look at these excesses and lacks in ourselves quite closely. Such qualities are not to be denied, turned away from as if they are not there, for then they return as obsessions. On the other hand, we have to be able to look at these adverse qualities in ourselves without identifying ourselves with these qualities. For example, the shadow of devotion on the side of excess is malice. The shadow of this virtue on the side of lack would be the incapacity to sustain a concentration of love toward a single goal. If we do not recognize our own malice, then devotion can have no real, embodied strength. If we do not recognize our own shallowness, then our devotion will have no breadth.
Balance The virtue of balance is also reflected in everyday practical life and concerns the relation of the efforts we bring to a situation in order to influence it, and what the situation itself requires in order to be true to its own internal, and often mysterious order. The disorders of balance often show up here either as an attempt to impose our understanding and/or desires onto the situation or as an inability to act at all, a kind of apathy or inertia. Such unbalance in the horizontal direction of our work in the world, I suspect, reflects an unbalance in the vertical direction; that is, lack of balance in spiritual work precedes lack of balance in everyday life. Developing the virtue of balance entails moving from the constant oscillations of the mental life into the rhythmic movement of the feeling life, centered in the realm of the heart. This development also entails discovering the exact relationship between matters of the mind and matters of the heart. While balance can only be found in the rhythm of the heart, moving into this rhythmic domain does not mean abandoning thought, but more one of switching which takes precedence. The location of balance in the zodiac circle as between devotion and faithfulness gives an image of the work entailed here. Balance relies on the devotion of the heart and requires the development of faithfulness, that is adherence to the ways of the heart.
Faithfulness I am suggesting that it is really not possible to exercise the virtue of faithfulness in our lives - faithfulness to another person, an organization, a work, unless we are first of all faithful in the realm of soul and spirit. It is possible to be constant, to force ourselves not to change, to be present in a constant way as a matter of duty, to be conscientious. But faithfulness goes beyond constancy because it contains an essential element of spontaneity. I am not faithful out of obligation; hence, faithfulness must be something essentially creative and founded in freedom. Suppose I enter into a relationship, either of a personal and intimate sort, or even of the sort involved in day to day work. How would the virtue of faithfulness be practiced? It cannot be simply a matter of commitment, of saying that no matter what happens I will not change in my commitment. No relationship can flourish under such circumstances. Faithfulness is created in the act of doing it, and thus it must be every moment created for it to exist. We do not have to be conscious of this act every moment, but only a certain awareness of this creativeness, what the philosopher Gabriel Marcel has called "creative fidelity', shifts the burden of commitment to the joy of faithfulness.
Selflessness Development of the virtue of selflessness perhaps begins with orienting our ego toward our self, ourselves in our spirit aspect. For example, when someone takes up a practice of meditation, this is an example of the ego becoming oriented toward the self. Once given this sacred task, which takes repetition and discipline, then the self is able to do its work in the world, to fulfill its desire, which is to serve. The position of selflessness in the zodiac circle as occurring after faithfulness and before compassion shows us more about this virtue. Selflessness must be based upon the capacity to creatively be oriented toward others and must also partake of the capacity of entering into the experience of others as if it were one's own.
Compassion Compassion concerns feeling the thoughts, feelings, joys and sufferings of others, and of the things of the world as if they were our own. I want to extend compassion beyond a relationship with other human beings and also include the animal world, the plant world, and even the physical world; in doing so, I stand in the tradition of the Anima Mundi, the tradition going back as early as Plato, and certainly before that, of seeing everything in the world as having soul. Further, when this virtue is developed in a further installment, I will show that it is really not possible to have compassion for another human being without this larger, more inclusive sense of compassion. A further aspect of compassion to be developed concerns how this virtue is active, that it not simply something that one has for others, but something one does for others, an activity of radical receptivity that has real effects in the world. And, while we can readily understand how feeling the suffering of others may indeed be a virtuous act, we will have to show how this act must be extended to those who do not appear to be suffering at all. Can we have compassion for the tyrant, or for the person at work who seems completely occupied with their own advancement, or for those around us who seem to have no feelings whatsoever toward us, or perhaps even hostile feelings?
Courtesy Courtesy recognizes beauty as being at the very center of human life. Further, this virtue shows that beauty is not simply something to be looked at, to be admired, but that it can be a practice, a discipline. Interestingly, the word 'courtesy' is also related to the word 'courtesan', which on the one hand means the guardian of the court, guardian of the royalty of soul and spirit, and on the other hand means a prostitute. If we restrain judgment, the prostitute serves the bodily needs of a person. This helps us see that courtesy is a very bodily act, one honoring the soul and spirit in body. Of course, this kind of honoring of the body can become a perversion when the sense of soul and spirit is excluded; prostitution has all sorts of different forms. We cannot bypass the fact that courtesy honors the feminine face of the world. Thus, we can ponder how this virtue can become more extensive, where we can see manners as having to do with the manner of relating. Because courtesy is a matter of the heart, how we do something is as important as what we do, in fact, perhaps even more so. Courtesy makes our act sensuous, full of body, erotic - every act an act of making love. Without courtesy, our compassion, becomes sentimentalized, and without courtesy we cannot find the way to equanimity. Instead, we fall into carelessness - we could care less - which is a lack of courtesy.
Equanimity I introduce here the notion of looking at the opposite of each virtue as another help in understanding the nature of the virtues, a practice that can be applied to all the virtues, not just to equanimity. Equanimity concerns the capacity to be even in emotional life, neither swinging into highs nor dipping into lows. It does not mean detachment from emotion, but does indicate the ability to see, to observe one's emotions while they are happening and thus prevent being completely taken over by the emotion occurring at the moment. All emotions are held with equal honor. Through equanimity a refinement of our emotional life occurs, and without this virtue emotions remain crude. On the other hand, over-refinement leads to superficiality. Equanimity is of extreme importance because through this virtue we are able to develop a realistic imagination of our faults together with our virtues, and thus the practice of virtue does not fly off into an impossible and even destructive direction. For example, if I experience strong anger, the virtue of equanimity makes it possible to be fully present to this anger without however being taken wholly over by it. In this manner, the anger itself can be taken over into the practice of virtue.
Patience While patience involves waiting with expectation, it is necessary that the expectation not be filled with any content; it is rather a kind of plentiful void. If that plentiful void becomes filled with our imaginations of what should or might happen, or with what we wish to happen, then we are living in illusion. The difficulty with such illusion is that it obscures the possibility of seeing what lies right in front of us now. The lesson of patience is patience; that is to say, this virtue is unending. We are not patient just until something happens. Rather, patience is an enduring state of the soul that, if it has a purpose at all, is to deepen our receptive capacities. Patience is strained by the fact that things do happen and that makes us impatient and anxious for something to be always happening. The events of our lives, however, are always - always - less than the life of possibilities experienced by the soul. Patience shows us in fact, in a very gradual way, that soul life consists of the imagination, which is the activity of living in the possible and not any particular content. There is always a kind of surplus to any event that we experience, something that goes beyond the content of what has happened. It is this surplus that is the effective agent in bringing about transformation in ourselves, others, and in the world. The impatience of efficiency tries with technical means of every sort to get rid of this surplus, and thus, the world completely lacks patience.
Truth The need for the virtue of truth shows in its deviations of gossip, slander, moralizing, and subjectivity of opinion. All of these deviations reveal the rather universal attempt to possess the truth. We do not ever have the truth because truth has its own autonomy; it exists independently of what we may think or judge. Nonetheless, its power can reveal itself only insofar as we practice the virtue of striving for truth. We reach for the truth, try to feel it, come close to it, get acquainted with it, befriend it. When we attempt to have the truth, to know it complete, we are actually trying to seize not truth but the power that lies within truth. At that moment, when we think we have it, the truth we think we have turns into subjective judgment, gossip, slander, or moralizing. Metaphorically, the seeker of truth has to be a person without a place, always on the road, peripatetic, and if the seeker wants instead to take up residence, to feel secure, then the truth turns into lies. The development of a feeling for the truth intensifies, strengthens, and brings into form our powers of attention, focus, and concentration. These capacities do not involve just the mind, but the feelings and the will as well. We seek truth with our whole being, not just with our mind. We may find that the greater the concentration the more we find ourselves also practicing silence, and that those great deviations from truth all involved the violation of silence.
Courage Genuine acts of courage really do not happen on the spur of the moment and spontaneously; they may look that way, but that is because we do not have access or knowledge of the development and inner life of the person who acts courageously. Such as person has had to develop and now lives more from the center of the heart, but not in a sentimental way. Perception, however, cannot be at a distance the way it is for many people; it is, for the courageous person, an engaged perception, fully conscious, but not over-balanced in the direction of self-consciousness. The heart can be conscious in this way, whereas the mind cannot because it is forever self-reflective of itself. With courage we have a perfect harmony of bodily experience, centered in the heart, with the experience of soul and spirit. For this reason the courageous person has the greatest range of imagination, and is able to move comfortably from the depths to the heights. Courage, as a way of being, reveals itself in thought and feeling as well as physical action. One's whole life can be an act of courage. It is not at all necessary to face some seemingly insurmountable obstacle to engage this virtue. The person who moves along in life with clear aims and clear values, moving toward these step by step can certainly be called courageous, provided the way is accompanied by the embodied experience of soul and spirit. Ambition seeks the top but cannot see that the high summit really belongs to the spirit, and instead courage is thwarted into having authority over others rather than recognizing the authority of the spiritual worlds.
Discernment Where do we find the inner resource capable of the virtue of discernment? First, a different way of thinking has to be practiced than we are accustomed. We have to learn to be present to the activity of ideas, their coming into being, their process. When we 'have' an idea, it is already thinking crystallized, no longer fluid and part of the creative process. Such solidified ideas, which comprise the material of typical thought, occur too late in the thinking process for discernment of a soul and spirit nature to take place. A similar kind of presence, presence to the activity rather than to the momentary result of inner activity, is required in the realm of feeling in order to be able to practice discernment. We have to develop the discipline of being present to the inception of feeling more so than feeling those we already have. The virtue of discernment can be imagined as the way we ride the current of our soul and spirit destiny, and thus concerns the way that we move from where we are in our lives into what is coming to meet us from the future. Without discernment we are in fact always living in the past - in past ideas, in past emotions and feelings, in habits from the past. Discernment does not enter as something we even recognize as important unless we actually experience the reality of the freedom of our spirit. While freedom of spirit sounds perhaps wonderful, it involves living in the regions of not-knowing and having to learn to navigate these regions. We can do so only by seeking to harmonize the various elements of our inner life - our thinking with our feeling, with our perception, with our desires, with our intent. If one of these elements becomes too strong, then discerning where we are in process becomes confused. The primary discipline in the development of the virtue of discernment is thus inner stillness and listening.
Love Since love is not an object, a thing, what does it mean to give love? To experience this virtue it is necessary to become intimately acquainted with our need to receive love, because this need is perhaps the source of holding onto the love that wants to be free to circulate in the world. Thus, self-love confuses the virtue of love, and yet self-love is certainly necessary, and is in fact a prerequisite for the virtue of love. Self -love consists of the endeavor to be ourselves rather than who someone else might want us to be. Love cannot be given unless it is given freely our of our own individuality; otherwise, the acts of love that we engage in are really for ourselves and not for others and for the world. Self-love makes it possible to choose to give rather than to hold onto love. I do not want to try to define love, but we must try to characterize it so that it is not confused with certain kinds of feeling states or, alternately, too quickly spiritualized. Perhaps we could say that love consists of universal friendliness fraught with beneficence to all creatures. Given such a broad characterization, we can see the wisdom of love standing in the zodiac circle between discernment and devotion. Discernment is needed for the practice of love in order that love may be universally specific. And, because love does take us into the whole of creation, as well as the whole of the soul and spirit realms, it must look forward to being practiced in very specific ways, an anticipation of devotion.
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