From The
Seven Storey Mountain, by Thomas Merton (1948):
The word virtue: what a fate it has had in the last three hundred years!
The fact that it is nowhere near so despised and ridiculed in Latin countries
is a testimony to the fact that it suffered mostly from the mangling it
underwent in the hands of Calvinists and Puritans. In our own
days the word leaves on the lips of cynical high school children
a kind of flippant smear, and it is exploited in theaters for the possibilities
it offers for lewd and cheesy sarcasm. Everybody makes fun of
virtue, which now has, as its primary meaning, an affectation of
prudery practiced by hypocrites and the impotent.
When Maritain--who is
by no means bothered by such trivialities--in all simplicity went ahead
to use the term in its Scholastic sense, and was able to apply it to art,
a "virtue of the practical intellect," the very newness of the context
was enough to disinfect my mind of all the miasmas left in it by the ordinary
prejudice against "virtue", which, if it was ever strong in anybody, was
strong in me. I was never a lover of Puritanism. Now at last
I came around to the sane conception of virtue--without which there can
be no happiness, because virtues are precisely the powers by which we can
come to acquire happiness: without them, there can be no joy, because they
are the habits which coordinate and canalize our natural energies and direct
them to the harmony and perfection and balance, the unity of our
nature with itself and with God, which must, in the end, constitute our
everlasting peace.
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