The Bourgeois Virtues: Ethics for an Age of Commerce

humility and truth 193arm of the Methodist Church”—that he could earn a comfortable livingmaking fun of them. 32The agnostic and especially the atheist, unaware of the god he believes, isas uncritical in his faith as a Sicilian widow lighting a candle before a statueof the Virgin. Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., had been annealed in the fires ofthe Civil War. He was seriously wounded three times, and saw his best frienddie. Before the war he had been a devout and peaceable Emersonian, anabolitionist who joined up on principle. In the war he lost his principles,adopting instead a hard faith of mere duty. No God for him—except theRomantic H*ms*lf of the Stoic materialist. “The faith is true and adorable,”he wrote in “A Soldier’s Faith,” delivered on Memorial Day in 1895, “whichleads a soldier to throw away his life in obedience to a blindly accepted duty,in a cause which he little understands, in a plan of campaign of which hehas no notion, under tactics of which he does not see the use.” Small comfortthe words must have been to the widows and orphans in attendance.But Holmes was a hard man.The mere, eloquent assertion of his Faith was as far as Holmes could getin defending it.“Truly courageous persons,” Daryl Koehn argues,“do not fightto death simply because ordered to do so. ...They consider whether a . . .situation demands such a stance.” 33 But Holmes did not consider ethics to bea matter of consideration. He did not bring a theology to bear, no repertoireof whys and wherefores, aims and goals, aspirations and significances. Theologiesare denied to the nonfaithful by their faiths.Yet note the title, “A Soldier’s Faith,” thirty years after the war, and listento the religious words pouring out. The man who with Captain Holmes hasknown “the blue line of fire at the dead angle of Spotsylvania . . . [knows]that man has in him that unspeakable something which makes him capableof a miracle, able to lift himself by the might of his own soul, unaided, ableto face annihilation for a blind belief.” 34 While sick with dysentery behindthe lines at Fredericksburg, a younger Holmes wrote to his mother withwhat was already a mixture of an aristocratic and a shadowy Christian view:“It’s odd how indifferent one gets to the sight; of death—perhaps. becauseone gets aristocratic and don’t value much a common life—Then they areapt to be so dirty it seems natural—‘Dust to dust.’” 35 Holmes planned hislast words: “Have faith and pursue the unknown end.”So likewise the Nobel laureate in physics and learned theologian StephenWeinberg accepts invitations to appear on television to attack the very