The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

love and the transcendent 105ing, such as Marley’s ghost in A Christmas Carol. The more sophisticatedChristian’s attitude toward love is tragic. The tragedy of God crucifiedstands for all the impermanences of our loving lives.Nussbaum admires the solution of pagan Aristotle. “There is a beauty,”she says, “in the willingness to love someone in the face of love’s instabilityand worldliness that is absent from a completely trustworthy love.” 19 Oneaccepts the tragedy and goes on loving nonetheless. But then isn’t one’s godbeauty, or perhaps endurance, or flexibility? The later, Christian step, at leastin its theologically sophisticated forms, is to bring out into the open what isimplicit in the noblest pagan solutions, an implicit love of God—or, toaddress the growing unease of my dear nonbelieving readers, an implicitlove of some other transcendent and undying goal, such as art or science orevolution or the environment or the life force or the revolution or baseball.A love for the spark of the divine translates the lover into a higher and permanentrealm.Dylan Thomas on the contrary refused to mourn the death, by fire, of achild in London. “I shall not murder / The mankind of her going with agrave truth” is a pagan and anti-Sunday-school declaration, noble andhumanistic, admiring of the masculine virtues. It finds a transcendent instoic humanism. But it lacks a theology, the grave truths, the truths of thegrave. Salvation requires the transcendent and a theology, that is, a purposeto life that includes an account of why it should matter. I believe this is astrue of a modern bourgeois life as it is of any other. Maybe more. You richperson in a modern economy have time to think.Think then of this: Paul of Tarsus, and before him Jesus of Nazareth, anda little before him Rabbi Hillel, and long before them all Moses himself said,“Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul,and with all thy mind. This is the first and greatest commandment.” It is literally:“I am the Lord thy God,” amplified by the second, “Thou shalt haveno other gods before me”; and by the third and fourth about graven imagesand the Sabbath. “And the [new] second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thyneighbor as thyself.” That is a summary of commandments five through ten,relating to other people rather than to God. “On these two commandmentshang all the law and the prophets.” 20The commandments of Moses are in summary (1) God is god, which isto say there is a transcendent, a sacred, a kadosh. And (2) Love thy neighboras thyself, which is to say that a transcendent entails an ethical universe