The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

against the sacred 169seems right. The towering dead are indeed owed some backward-lookingfaith, or else we are nobodies ourselves, disloyal pleasure-machines with nosacred identity. We are not worthy of self-love if we have not faith.Fidelity, Comte-Sponville writes beautifully, is “an always particularpresence within us of the past,” our father, dead, our grandmother, the threemen with the same last name from a village in southwestern France, whosedates on the wall of the parish church record them killed successively in thevery first month, a middle month at the time of Verdun, and the very lastmonth of the Great War. 6 We should preserve, Comte-Sponville puts it,“love for the sake of what once took place.” 7But all this is precisely faith, foi, fides. It’s too bad—too bad at leastaccording to the faith of French anticlericals—that it’s gotten mixed up withfaith in God. But there you are. “Faith,” writes A. N. Wilson about thedecline of the Godly version of it in the nineteenth century, “was not somethingwhich could be gradually eliminated from the human scene. It was avital component of the human make-up—personal and collective.” 8The plainest exercise of antitheism in Comte-Sponville, however, isreserved for hope. Having taken occasional jabs at it in the previous 287pages, he finally admits the reason for his distaste: “Faith, hope, and charityare traditionally the theological virtues (because they have God as anobject). The first two I have not included in this treatise because they haveno plausible object, it seems to me, other than God, in whom I do notbelieve.” Yet Comte-Sponville has included faith, as fidelity. He continues,“Moreover, one can do without these two virtues: courage suffices in thepresence of danger or the future.” One might think that the second, forward-lookingpart of courage, “in the future,” is precisely hope. But he isdetermined not to let the word in. He thinks hope is a fool’s “virtue,” suitablefor the soft-minded who merely hope and pray when a tough, masculine,existentialist courage is what is called for.He is not here reading Aquinas very carefully. Aquinas makes plain thatcourage is about fear (in the present) but hope is about imagination (abouta future)—which analysis Comte-Sponville himself concedes during hischapter on courage: “The future is . . . an object of our imagination.” 9 Précisément.The courage to face a present pain is one thing. It is akin to Temperancein its presentness. Courage resists pain now, temperance pleasurenow. The hope to face imagined future pains for some imagined future purposeis distinct from these.