Up till now in this series I have evaluated Bloom’s taxonomy and mostly used Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as a foil in my critique. And so while I have, to a certain extent, defined and described Aristotle’s five intellectual virtues, alongside offering an outline snapshot of a classical Christian educational paradigm based on them, my explanations have been mostly ad hoc, more to tantalize than to contextualize and fully explain.
This has been a deliberate rhetorical and pedagogical move: an attempt to begin with what is near at hand and understood by modern educators, before exposing its weaknesses and proposing a productive solution based in ancient wisdom. Sometimes on Educational Renaissance we begin with what is new before arcing back to what is past; other times it is appropriate to begin with the wisdom of the past before connecting it to modern research. It may sound strange to some, but in this case I think that Bloom provides the perfect entree to Aristotle.
In this article I will begin situating Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as a part of his holistic philosophy of education. And since Aristotle’s viewpoints are not necessarily authoritative, however much we may revere the accomplishments of “the philosopher,” as Aquinas called him, we will have to lay out how Christians might appropriate his philosophy within a Christian worldview. After all, the early Christian apologist Tertullian’s famous question, “What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” still needs to be answered today, even if centuries of Christian thought have done so adequately in their own cultural moment.
We will thus first delve into Aristotle’s philosophy in the opening book of the Nicomachean Ethics. It is necessary to lay a good foundation in Aristotle’s thought generally, if we are to understand his intellectual virtues specifically. Second, we will see how his intellectual virtues fit within his broader paradigm of human happiness as the proper goals of education. Third, along the way we will make reference to the Bible and Christian theology in order to show how Aristotle’s philosophy might be appropriated within a truly Christian understanding of life and education.
The Purpose of Education as the Purpose of Life
I opened this series by remarking on one of the major themes of the classical education renewal movement: rethinking the purpose of education as much broader and more holistic than modern education has been making it out to be:
It is not merely job training or college preparation, but the formation of flourishing human beings. The cultivation of wisdom and virtue is the purpose of education. There is joy in seeking knowledge for its own sake and as an end in itself.
Each one of these statements can be traced back to Aristotle. Human flourishing is a modern cipher for the good life or the life of eudaimonia, the Greek word for happiness or blessedness, which Aristotle proclaims to be the ultimate telos, end or goal, of human beings. All other goals are simply the means to this end (see Book I, Chapter 2). And the master art that aims at this end directly and encompasses all the lesser arts is called by him politics, under which he would lump strategy, economics, rhetoric and even all the sciences. Each in its own way aims at one of the goods that contribute to human happiness collectively.
It is interesting in this connection to compare the conception of Augustine’s City of God as a contrast to this polis or city of man. Because man is a political animal the appropriate unit of happiness for human beings is not the isolated individual, but the city. After all, who could be happy without friends? Or, for that matter, without the benefits of specialization and civilization?
But given the realities of a functioning city-state with the basic specialization that Plato had earlier described in his Republic, the most secure way for an individual to achieve this happiness is by the cultivation of virtue and wisdom, understood as the moral and intellectual excellences, respectively (see chapter 10 and 13). Moral excellence, Aristotle says, is attained by the cultivation of habits, whereas intellectual excellence is born and grown by instruction or teaching, requiring much experience and time (see Book II, chapter 1).
Since human happiness consists in an active life in accordance with perfect virtue of the soul (see Book I, chapter 13), education becomes the prime means of attaining happiness through developing habits in accordance with the moral virtues and instructing the mind or rational principal in accordance with the truth. Another way of saying this is that the contemplative life, as opposed to the pursuit of pleasure or honor (see chapter 5), is the best method of attaining to happiness in this life, even if good fortune still plays some role (see the end of chapter 8 and 10-11). Aiming either at bodily pleasure or the emotional satisfaction of honor will ultimately fall short, while the cultivation of the mind or rational principle will lead to the proper ordering of the whole human person.
In earlier articles on Educational Renaissance, I have already laid out a couple ways of reconciling many of these reflections with a Christian understanding of the purpose of life. In “Aristotle and the Growth Mindset” I traced the renaissance arc back to Aristotle starting from Carol Dweck’s popular idea of a growth mindset vs. a fixed mindset. Aristotle theorized that excellence or virtue was the main contributor to happiness—an idea that provides more of a solid philosophical foundation for Dweck’s social scientific study of “success”. As human beings, we may not be the masters of our own fate, but to confine human happiness (and therefore virtue as well) simply to chance or fortune does not seem to jive with reality. We have some level of choice and will in our own happiness, just as we can decide to pursue a life of virtue and make deliberate strides toward that end.
The Moral Virtues and Christian Salvation
From a Christian perspective, while divine gift and human responsibility may be reconciled in various ways, the participation of human beings in their ultimate good or blessing is a matter of both. True and lasting happiness comes as a result of God’s gracious action in salvation and believers “work[ing] out [their] own salvation with fear and trembling” (see Philippians 2:12). Christian sanctification and piety have traditionally been thought to involve the cultivation of all the moral virtues. Salvation involves the conversion of the heart.
In “Excellence Comes By Habit: Aristotle on Moral Virtue” I referenced the Christian idea of common grace to account for the fact that human beings can exhibit moral virtues even in an unregenerate state. For this reason, it is helpful to distinguish between moral and spiritual virtues. Medievals, in particular, adopted a sevenfold paradigm to sum up the moral virtues of Greek philosophy and the Christian virtues mentioned by Saint Paul at the end of 1st Corinthians 13. The cardinal virtues were justice, temperance, fortitude and prudence (interestingly this last was one of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues), and above them were the theological virtues of faith, hope and love. It might be possible for a noble pagan to display the cardinal virtues to some degree, but only a true believer could possess the theological virtues.
For Christians, then, true and eternal happiness involved the possession of both the theological and the moral virtues. As the writer of Hebrews said, “Without holiness, no one will see the Lord” (12:14). The purpose of life, and therefore the ultimate purpose of education as well, consists in the cultivation of moral and spiritual virtues for the enjoyment of eternal happiness. Of course, for Christians this happiness must be God-centered; it is the beatific vision of God himself that wells up in eternal joy for the everlasting life of the believer. Or as the Westminster Catechism has it, “What is the chief end of man? To glorify God and enjoy him forever.” And while salvation is in some sense future, the beginning of the happiness associated with eternal life in Christ is available in part to the believer even now through the process of sanctification. Holiness leads to happiness.
For Aristotle, on the other hand, eudaimonia is attained through the godlike cultivation of excellence in this life alongside good fortune and good friends. Active pursuit of the moral and intellectual virtues, without much emphasis on piety or spiritual virtues, seems for him to sum up the happy life. This life of contemplation, fortune and friends may be godlike but it does not focus upon God. Aristotle’s conception of happiness by excellence certainly leaves something wanting, but perhaps we can see it as providing a part of which the full Christian revelation is the whole.
Where Have All the Intellectual Virtues Gone?
While Aristotle certainly has the greater lack (the centrality of God in human happiness), perhaps I am not going too far out of bounds to suggest that the traditional Chrstian virtue paradigm is missing something. Moral and spiritual virtues have been well accounted for, but what of intellectual virtues? Do they play no part in the Christian’s happy life? Of course, there is a rich Christian theme of relativizing the intellect to the spirit. And in light of Aristotle’s neglect of the spirit, we can easily see why the apostle Paul would say things like, “Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up” (1 Cor 8:1). Or why he would elaborate in detail on the folly of the cross over against the wisdom of the world in 1 Corinthians 1:18-25. On the other hand, Paul does conclude that section by stating that “the foolishness of God is wiser than men,” and he goes on to claim that he and the other apostles do indeed impart “among the mature” a “secret and hidden wisdom of God” (2:6, 7). So perhaps the Bible finds more of a place for the intellect in the happiness equation than we might think.
In fact, it is worth asking the extent to which the spiritual, intellectual and moral are overlapping and interpenetrating categories for Paul. We might say that, rather than excluding the intellectual virtues from the equation, the introduction of the spiritual reframes the nature of the intellect just as it does the heart. As he explains,
What we are saying is not in words taught by human wisdom, but in those taught by the Spirit, interpreting spiritual things in spiritual words. But the soulish man [“natural” ESV, but perhaps we should think of Aristotle’s soul-focused paradigm even in the Nicomachean Ethics] does not receive the things of the Spirit of God; for they are foolishness to him and he is not able to understand them, because they are spiritually evaluated. But the spiritual person evaluates all things, but he himself is evaluated by no one. For “who has known the intuition [Greek nous] of the Lord, who will teach him?” But we have the intuition of Messiah. (1 Cor 2:13-16, orig. trans.)
The spiritual frame provides an entirely new source and measure of evaluation for moral and intellectual categories. While hundreds of years and the introduction of various usages may have obscured the definitions of these words, perhaps it is not without significance that Paul is here using the words for two of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues in Greek, sophia or philosophic wisdom, and nous or the understanding of first principles that is wisdom’s necessary forerunner. Although more digging might be necessary to determine the extent to which Paul’s use of nous conforms to Aristotle’s definition of perceiving first principles, we can at least conclude from this passage that spiritual and intellectual virtues are not, for Paul, in the end contradictory.
Divine revelation and the Spirit of God may revolutionize the content of intellectual virtues even from their very starting points in perception of the world and human reasoning, but it is not as if wisdom and understanding are done away with. In fact, we might say that it is at the level of our intuition, the starting point for proper reasoning, that the greatest shifts have taken place. We have the Messiah’s new and spiritual perception of the world and so we reason from different first principles and even from different particulars. We see the world in a cross-centered way, a God-centered way, and not in a man-centered way. The Greek saying, attributed to Protagoras, “Man is the measure of all things,” has been decisively demolished for the Christian as an intellectual stronghold in a way that even Plato’s transcendentalism could not match.
But the intellectual virtues themselves remain, or more properly are restored. After all, a “worthless intuition” is one of the things that God gave the Gentiles over to in Romans because of their idolatry (1:29). So Christians are “no longer to walk as the Gentiles do in the futility of their intuition” (Eph 4:17), but instead should “be transformed by the renewal of the intuition” (Rom 12:2). In the New Testament, salvation involves the reclaiming of the mind, as much as the heart. And the Spirit of God is the source of this intellectual restoration.
This is no less than we would expect from the example of the Old Testament. For instance, consider the inspiration of Bezalel in his craftsmanship for constructing the holy articles of the tabernacle:
The Lord said to Moses, “See, I have called by name Bezalel the son of Uri, son of Hur, of the tribe of Judah, and I have filled him with the Spirit of God, with ability and intelligence, with knowledge and all craftsmanship, to devise artistic designs, to work in gold, silver, and bronze, in cutting stones for setting, and in carving wood, to work in every craft. (Exodus 31:1-5 ESV)
The multiplication of intellectual virtue terminology fused with the language of spiritual filling clearly points to a beautiful harmony between the intellect and the Spirit. In this passage we even have Hebrew words that evoke the whole gamut of intellectual virtues. The word translated ‘ability’ by the ESV is the well-known hokma or wisdom made famous by the book of Proverbs, followed by a word for ‘skill’ or intelligence, knowledge and craftsmanship (think of Aristotle’s techne). This biblical support for the role of intellectual virtues could, of course, be multiplied from the book of Proverbs itself, which sees wisdom as a tree of life and more valuable than any earthly good. In a developed Christian view of sanctification, then, we would do well not to neglect the intellectual virtues.
A Christian, Classical Purpose of Education
We can then propose the active cultivation of the moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues as the proper purpose of life. And therefore, education’s grand goal is itself the same as that of Christian discipleship: the preparation for eternity through the cultivation of holiness in all aspects of life. While the biblical conception of holiness may not be confined to the pursuit of moral, intellectual and spiritual virtues, it certainly includes it. After all, Peter himself instructs us to add to our faith virtue, and to virtue add knowledge (see 2 Peter 1:5), perhaps deliberately endorsing the spiritual, moral and intellectual realms.
We can compare this trifold purpose of education with that of John Amos Comenius, the great Czech Christian educational reformer of the 17th century. In his Great Didactic he argues that this life is but a preparation for eternity, since as we have said, “the ultimate end of man is eternal happiness with God” (p. 36; trans. by Keatinge). As creatures made in the image of God, human beings are rational creatures, stewards of creation and the image and glory of their creator (p. 36):
From this it follows that man is naturally required to be: (1) acquainted with all things; (2) endowed with power over all things and over himself; (3) to refer himself and all things to God, the source of all.
Now, if we wish to express these three things by three well-known words, these will be
(i.) Erudition.
(ii.) Virtue or seemly morals.
(iii.) Religion or piety.
Under Erudition we comprehend the knowledge of all things, arts, and tongues, under Virtue, not only of external decorum, but the whole disposition of our movements, internal and external; while by Religion we understand that inner veneration by which the mind of man attaches and binds itself to the supreme Godhead. (pp. 37-38)
Comenius later sums up these three goals of Christian education, which is intended to prepare students both for this life and the life to come, under the titles of learning, virtue and piety. The first would correspond to the cultivation of intellectual virtues, the second to moral virtues, and the last to spiritual virtues. These three areas fulfill man’s nature and fit him for eternal happiness with God.
But what of Aristotle’s concern for good fortune and good friends to constitute human happiness in this life? The role of earthly goods is relativized to the point of insignificance by the introduction of God and eternity into the equation. The excellences of the body (being born with good looks or good health… remember that the intellectual virtues would cover bodily skill and the moral virtues proper care of the body) are excluded as “extrinsic ornaments” and not ultimately necessary to eternal happiness in light of the resurrection. Learning, virtue and piety are the proper goals of Christian, classical education:
In these three things is situated the whole excellence of man, for they alone are the foundation of the present and of the future life. All other things (health, strength, beauty, riches, honour, friendship, good-fortune, long life) are as nothing, if God grant them to any, but extrinsic ornaments of life, and if a man greedily gape after them, engross himself in their pursuit, occupy and overwhelm himself with them to the neglect of those more important matters, then they become superfluous vanities and harmful obstructions. (pp. 37-38)
Comenius’ reframing of these age-old philosophical questions in Christian terms provides a solid foundation for our restoration of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as proper goals of education. The intellect is not the entire story, but it should be situated over the heart and under the superior direction of the Spirit.
In Christian education, the ornaments of life can be relativized in a way that is impossible from the standpoint of mere classical education. Test scores and advancement, money and influence, fame and success are not the proper goals of a truly Christian education, because they are liable to becoming “superfluous vanities and harmful obstructions”; that said, they may serve as helpful sign-posts and markers along the way, as long as our true goals remain clearly in view: moral, intellectual and spiritual virtue, for the eternal enjoyment of God himself. It is in this context that we can then explore the cultivation of Aristotle’s intellectual virtues as part of the purpose of a truly Christian, classical education.
