becoming more human by becoming more godlike 369
existence in a real society. For the ideologists and militants of the po liti-
cal programs that, over the last two centuries, proposed radically to alter
society, the war against routine was replaced by the fi ght for a future
social order in which all our relations to one another would appear
transformed by the overcoming of social and economic subjugation.
What has always remained defi cient in this history of our moral
ideas is any detailed view of the habitual dispositions— the virtues— of
a person who tries to live out the view of the possibilities of life that
these meta phors, however darkly, convey. Th ere are at least two places
in our tradition in which we can look for greater insight into these mat-
ters. Both of them are inadequate.
One of these sources of insight is the Christian doctrine of the theo-
logical virtues— faith, hope, and charity— generally understood to add
a new dimension of freedom and possibility to the pagan virtues ex-
tolled by both the ancient and the modern phi los o phers of the West.
Th e interpretation of faith, hope, and charity has almost always re-
mained tainted by the failure of the salvation religions to work out what
I described in Chapter 4 as the suppressed orthodoxies about spirit and
structure and about self and others— orthodoxies that, once under-
stood and accepted, would revolutionize what these religions have gen-
erally been taken to mean. As a result, the doctrine of the theological
virtues failed to be developed into a detailed view of how we can and
should transform all of our life experience: of how each of the secular
virtues would change as a result of the advent of the theological ones.
Such a view becomes all the more necessary when, having lost faith in a
narrative of divine intervention, we seek to develop, without support
from such a narrative, an account of our humanity that does justice to
our powers of transcendence.
Another such source of insight is the nineteenth- and twentieth-
century novel. Th is art form rings the changes on our experiences, of
living and of failing to live, as embodied spirit in societies that treat us
as something else. Art, however, is not philosophy. It cannot, without
violence to its nature, turn its discoveries into a teaching about the con-
duct of life. It can only enlarge the fi eld of vision on which such a teach-
ing can draw.
A doctrine of the virtues serves as a device, among others, by which
to make up for this silence.