The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

96 chapter 4In the West before Christianity the most admired virtues, the “paganvirtues,” were manful and military, not feminine and loving. In Plato’sopinion, elaborated by other pagans and by Jews and Christians, with parallelsin Chinese and other traditions, they were four, named by St.Ambrose in the fourth century AD the “cardinal” virtues: first physicaland other varieties of that courage; then temperance, justice, and prudence.22 Thus the Wisdom of Solomon (8:7) “teaches self-control [viz.,temperance] and prudence, / justice and courage; / nothing in life is moreprofitable for men than these.” And 4 Maccabees, an instance as LukeTimothy Johnson has put it, of “Jews thinking like Greeks,” reinterpretsJewish law as expressions of a natural law of prudence, justice, courage,and temperance (for example, 1:2–4, 18). 23 “Cardinal” means “hinge-like”or by extension the imagined corners on which the earth turns. So thefour virtues made the pagan world go round, absent Christian or romanticlove.The so-called Christian virtues, what St. Thomas Aquinas and his traditioncalled the “theological” virtues, are three. Thus St. Paul: “And nowabideth faith, hope, and charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity,”agape, spiritual love, “the divine friendship of graced human beings.” 24St. Paul was already accustomed before he wrote 1 Corinthians to bundlethem, for example, 1 Thessalonians 1:3, 5:8, as perhaps were still earlierChristians. The word “charity” is the King James Bible’s attempt, and that ofsome translations in other languages, such as that of Louis Segond’s Lasainte Bible of 1910, to distinguish a higher Love from lower loves. “Charity”or charité translates Greek agape, spiritual love, distinguishing it from eros,physical love, or philia, friendship.Most people read 1 Corinthians 13 as recommending love for your husbandor your girlfriend, and for this purpose the passage appears on manyHallmark cards. That’s not what St. Paul had in mind. Modern Europeanlanguages—to the confusion of Romantics in love with love—use the sameword “love” for both agape and eros. Until the gender anxieties of recentmodernity interfered with the usage, indeed, French and English and Italianand German used it also for philia, friendship of men for men and womenfor women. That is, “love” signified all four—God’s love for us, our love forGod, sexualized love between humans, and nonsexualized love betweenhumans. Amour, for example, seems to have about the same range of meaningin French as “love” has in English.