The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

Love rules.the first virtue: love profane and sacred 95If ever two were one, then surely we.If ever man were loved by wife, then thee;If ever wife was happy in a man,Compare with me, ye women, if you can. 18Love can also be called a “peasant” virtue, the modern label being“proletarian.” Courage is claimed to be above all the virtue of the aristocrat.As prudence is of the bourgeois. Love, courage, and prudence. Whenshe witnessed a religious procession one night in the late 1930s in a Portuguesefishing village it was suddenly plain to Simone Weil, a French secularJew on her way to Christianity, that “Christianity is preeminently thereligion of slaves, that slaves cannot help belonging to it, and I amongothers.” 19 Love—even in its social forms as an abstract solidarity—ispacific, Christian, and yielding. It is Nietzsche’s “slave morality,” subordinateto the Greek and aristocratic virtues he admired. So did Aristotleadmire them, and disdain any love but a friendship among men. AlasdairMacIntyre notes that “Aristotle would certainly not have admired JesusChrist and he would have been horrified by St. Paul,” with all theirembarrassing talk of love. 20 The pagans were not lovelorn, at least not intheir philosophies.The feminine side of the stripped-down, two-virtue, love-or-courageway people speak of exercising a will to do good might, I say, also be called“Christian.” I mean the word “Christian” here as evocative, not exclusive.I do not mean to praise Christianity or attack non-Christians. I am wellaware that Christendom has not always been a feast of love, as Muslims andAlbigensians, Jews and Hussites know. A Buddhist nun of my acquaintancehas shown me centered virtues similar to those of the best of the Christianmonks. And I’ve seen the virtue of love in many a loving atheist and anticlerical.Nor am I, though a Christian—a progressive Episcopalian, if youcare, the quasi-Quaker branch of the Frozen Chosen—willing to claim thatChristianity brought new ethics into the world. Yet some of the virtues haveacquired a spin in the talk of literal Christians, carrying over into the mindsand hearts of nonbelievers in the bourgeois West, loading faith with doubt. 21Bear with me, then, exercising if you please a Christian charity, when I usethe loaded word.