In Praise of Virtue

[SteRo]

Measuring a thing is a crude act, which cannot be applied in any other way than extremely imperfectly to living bodies.

Johann Goethe

Utter nonsense. Measuring a thing like a living body is the most straightforward and belief-independent (objective) way to assess a quality of the thing.

[Nicholas Weeks]

1 Say to yourself first thing in the morning: today I shall meet
people who are meddling, ungrateful, aggressive, treacherous,
malicious, unsocial. All this has afflicted them through their
ignorance of true good and evil. But I have seen that the nature
of good is what is right, and the nature of evil what is wrong;
and I have reflected that the nature of the offender himself is
akin to my own - not a kinship of blood or seed, but a sharing
in the same mind, the same fragment of divinity. Therefore I
cannot be harmed by any of them, as none will infect me with
their wrong. Nor can I be angry with my kinsman or hate him.
We were born for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids,
like the rows of upper and lower teeth. So to work in opposition
to one another is against nature: and anger or rejection is opposition.

Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, book 2; Hammond translation.

[Nicholas Weeks]

Devoid of purity, good conduct and truth, and having no faith in God or a higher Reality
beyond this visible world, man degenerates into a two-legged beast of ugly character and cruel
actions, and sinks into darkness. Such a person becomes his own enemy and the destroyer of the
happiness of others as well as his own. Caught in countless desires and cravings, a slave of sensual
enjoyments and beset by a thousand cares, his life ultimately ends in misery and degradation.
Haughtiness, arrogance and egoism lead to this dire fate. Therefore, a wise person, desiring success,
must eradicate vice and cultivate virtue.

Swami Sivananda

[Nicholas Weeks]

This is the first in a series about Platonism by Mindy Mandell, a non-academic. The Four Virtues are described as states of mind:

Mandell also teaches on Proclus' Elements of Theology. The mind of Proclus is deep, logical and wise. This text (translated by Dodds) is a blessing to any who ponder it! Greek is on facing pages.

Proclus' Elements is not an easy text, so suggest pondering many times, at first, on just the first seven verses.

[Nicholas Weeks]

The love of power is natural. It is insatiable, it is whetted, not cloyed by possession. Power renders man wanton, insolent of others, and fond of themselves.

Cato

[Nicholas Weeks]

Temperance was the next topic of Pythagoras' discourses. Since the desires are most flourishing during youth, this is the time when control must be effective. While temperance alone is universal in its application to all ages, boy, virgin, woman, or the aged, yet this special virtue is particularly applicable to youth. Moreover, this virtue alone applied universally to all goods, those of body and soul, preserving both the health, and studiousness.

Iamblichus

[Nicholas Weeks]

It would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as freedom should not be highly rated.

Thomas Paine, The American Crisis

[Nicholas Weeks]

Do your eyes expect a reward for seeing, or your feet for walking? That is what they were made for. By doing what they were designed to do, they are performing their function. Whereas humans were made to help others. And when we do help others we are doing what we were designed for. We perform our function.

Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, end of book nine

[Nicholas Weeks]

An excerpt from Kirk's essay "Virtue: Can It Be Taught?:

ln this essay I shall venture first to offer you a renewed apprehension of what “virtue” means; and then to suggest how far it may be possible to restore an active virtue in our public and our private life. If we lack virtue, we will not long continue to enjoy comfort—not in an age when Giant Ideology and Giant Envy swagger balefully about the world.

The concept of virtue, like most other concepts that have endured and remain worthy of praise, has come down to us from the Greeks and the Hebrews. ln its classical signification, “virtue” means the power of anything to accomplish its specific function; a property capable of producing certain effects; strength, force, potency. Thus one refers to the “deadly virtue” of the hemlock. Thus also the word “virtue” implies a mysterious energetic power, as in the Gospel According to Saint Mark: “Jesus, immediately knowing that virtue had gone out of him, turned him about in the press, and said, Who touched my clothes?” Was it, we may ask, that virtue of Jesus which scorched the Shroud of Turin?

Virtue, then, meant in the beginning some extraordinary power. The word was applied to the sort of person we might now call “the charismatic leader.” By extension, “virtue” came to imply the qualities of full humanity: strength, courage, capacity, worth, manliness, moral excellence. And presently “virtue” came to signify, as well, moral goodness: the practice of moral duties and the conformity of life to the moral law; uprightness; rectitude.

[Nicholas Weeks]

From HP Blavatsky's occult treatise, Voice of the Silence:

To live to benefit mankind is the first step. To practise the six glorious virtues is the second. To don this humble robe is to forego eternal bliss for Self, to help on manʹs salvation.

[Nicholas Weeks]

The manner in which one single ray of light, one single precious hint, will clarify and energize the whole mental life of him who receives it, is among the most wonderful and heavenly of intellectual phenomena.

Arnold Bennett (d.1931)

[Nicholas Weeks]

The gods in bounty work up storms about us, that give mankind occasion to exert their hidden strength, and throw out into practice virtues that shun the day, and lie concealed in the smooth seasons and the calms of life.

Joseph Addison (1672-1719)

[Nicholas Weeks]

Freedom's soil hath only place
For a free and fearless race!

Whittier.

[Nicholas Weeks]

Religion gives a man courage. I mean the higher moral courage which can look danger in the face unawed and undismayed; the courage that can encounter loss of ease, of wealth, of friends, of your own good name; the courage that can face a world full of howling and of scorn; of loathing and of hate; can see all this with a smile, and, suffering it all, can still toil on, conscious of the result, yet fearless still.

—Theodore Parker

[Nicholas Weeks]

To see a man fearless in dangers, untainted with lusts, happy in adversity, composed in a tumult, and laughing at all those things which are generally either coveted or feared, all men must acknowledge that this can be from nothing else but a beam of divinity that influences a mortal body.

Seneca