The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

168 chapter 12That is, we humans live on air. My suggestion to my good colleagues ofthe modern clerisy is that they get used to it. The most characteristic virtuesof humans are not a rationality or a persistence that one can see plainly inants and bacteria as well. They are hope and faith. So late in the age of banishment,I wish that the advanced members of the clerisy would recoverfrom being embarrassed by the most characteristically human virtues.In his recent, elegant book, A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues (1996;English ed. 2001), the French philosopher André Comte-Sponville, forexample, explicitly rejects both Faith and hope from a place among hiseighteen virtues. The pagan tetrad of prudence, temperance, courage, andjustice he acknowledges as cardinal, and these begin his book.In the last chapter he deals also with love, along lines similar to mine, infact—he draws heavily there as I do on Simone Weil, and elevates agape toprimacy, though skirting uneasily its religious content. His attempts to distinguishlove from Compassion, Mercy, and especially generosity are notwholly persuasive. He quotes his master the philosopher of music at theSorbonne (d. 1985), Vladimir Jankélévitch, as admitting that “though thetwo are not the same, love and generosity, ‘at its most exalted,’ are hard toseparate one from the other.” 3 And so they are. Distinguishing true generosityfrom possibly self-interested indulgence of family and friends, thecare of children, for example, depends in Jankélévitch and Comte-Sponvilleprecisely on generosity being exercised “at its most exalted.” The logic ofclassification would seem to require therefore that generosity be viewed, asit is in Aquinas, for example, as a subspecies of love.But with the other two of the theological virtues, faith and hope, Comte-Sponville has no patience at all. He attempts to exclude incense-smellingfaith from his virtues entirely. One device is to call it instead “fidelity,” witha prominent chapter of its own, with no mention that faith in the transcendentmight possibly include faith in God. The device does not work verywell, since it merely substitutes the one faith-word for another, both derivedfrom fides by longer or shorter etymologies.Comte-Sponville writes wisely that “where there is mind there is memory....Fidelity is ...memory itself as a virtue.” 4 He quotes Montaigne on fidelity as“the true basis of personal identity.” But in the very quotation Montaignedeclares a “fidelity to the faith [foi] I swore to myself,” which seems a soundway to think about it. “The past,” Comte-Sponville writes, “is in need of ourcompassion and gratitude; for the past cannot stand up for itself.” 5 That too