The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

the first virtue: love profane and sacred 97In Latin on the other hand amor/cāritas/amicitia parallels the Greekdistinctions eros/agape/philia. Cāritas at Rome was from cārus, “dear,” as in“expensive” or “beloved,” and signified “esteem” or “high valuation,” whatC. S. Lewis called “appreciation love,” as against amor, desire. 25 But modernlanguages blur the distinctions in their word “love.” In French too theattempt to make charité into the word for “agape” did not take, as “charity”for this purpose did not in English. Later revisions of Segond’s Bible gave inand used amour, as in modern English translations: “love,” with its vulgarambiguities.Love, charity, cāritas, agape is the greatest virtue of the three theologicalvirtues in Christianity because it is the essence of the Christian God, sounlike his predecessors, at any rate in his opinion. Hope and faith have nopurpose in a god, foresighted and immortal. Only beings who can die needthose virtues. And the Christian God does not “need” agape. By grace hegives it. No one would have accused Zeus of loving humans, except on occasionin a cheaply erotic sense. (The female gods like Athena seem to take amore motherly and less sexually dominating approach to their favoredhumans.) Yahweh demanded sacrifice of others’ sons, Abraham’s for example,but revealed no loving plans for sacrificing his own, except in tendentiousreadings by Christians of what they call the Old Testament. Yet theChristian God so loved the world, said John the Evangelist, that his onlybegotten son was ordained from the beginning of time to suffer, really suffera human death, without sure knowledge of his Godness. Norman Mailer,of all people, has written a gripping novel on this theme, The Gospel Accordingto the Son (1997), turning on Jesus’ doubt, quoting the Twenty-secondPsalm: “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”The Christian or theological part of Love can be brought down to earth,but keeps a whiff of the transcendent. Love is not merely the earthly itch oflust, eros. The Romantic poets loved nature. Giacomo Leopardi in 1819begins his most famous poem with “Always dear to me was that lonely hill.”He adopts in this as in many other cases the high Romantic arrangementnature-reflection-nature.William Wordsworth, on the other hand, as the critic Geoffrey Hartmanobserved, knew at the beginning of “Tintern Abbey” (1798) one thing only:“the affection he bears to nature for its own sake.” 26 Nature is not to be usedas an input into a utility function, as the modern economist would wish.Nor even is nature to be used in moral illustration, as poets before and after