Tag Archives: virtue

Meaning of Life

What Is the Purpose of Life? Part 10

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OK, we’re down to the final two candidates now. The runner-up is goods of the soul. There are two primary goods of the soul: wisdom and virtue. Wisdom is the good of the mind and virtue is the good of the will. Wisdom is knowing the best means to get to the best ends. Put another way, wisdom is knowing the best way to accomplish the best goal.

Virtue is simply moral excellence. Love, kindness, courage, generosity. These are all virtues.

Likewise, wisdom encompasses all of the goods of the mind. The mind and the will are what make up our souls.

So, why would the goods of the soul be the best candidate for happiness? Well, it seems that we’ve excluded everything external to the human being, meaning wealth, honor, fame, and power. We’ve also excluded bodily health and pleasure. By the process of elimination, the soul must be it. The health of the soul must be the thing that makes us happy.

Indeed, this is the conclusion that many people come to. It is common for people to say that love and wisdom are our purpose in life. Even Monty Python said we should live in peace and harmony with others. John Lennon said “All you need is love.” Jimi Hendrix said, “When the power of love overcomes the love of power the world will know peace.”

Wisdom is also a popular goal for many. Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Life is a festival only to the wise.” Wise people attract a crowd and nobody tires from spending time with them. King Solomon asked God for wisdom and he commended wisdom to his son: “Get wisdom, get understanding; do not forget my words or swerve from them. Do not forsake wisdom, and she will protect you; love her, and she will watch over you. Wisdom is supreme; therefore get wisdom” (Pr 4:5-7).

Surely the goods of the soul are the meaning of life, the thing that gets us to ultimate happiness. How can we do better than love and wisdom?

But alas, even though it is through the soul that we reach happiness, the soul itself cannot be the ultimate goal of human life. Why? The soul is like an arrow heading toward a bull’s-eye. The bull’s-eye is happiness. It doesn’t make sense to say that the arrow is flying toward itself. The arrow cannot be its own bull’s-eye, but to say that the soul seeks itself for ultimate happiness is saying that the arrow flies toward itself.

Our soul strives for our entire lives to reach happiness. We gain knowledge and wisdom, we learn to love others, but those things are all aimed at our ultimate goal. To say that our soul is that goal is to say that we are going in circles for our entire life, like a cat chasing its own tail. It may be true that we attain happiness with our souls, but our souls are not what gives us final happiness. What is it that our souls long for? What is the bullseye? What is our destination?

Morality

Why Is Morality Ultimately Relational?

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Post Author: Bill Pratt 

Can a person be moral without knowing God? Yes, but this kind of moral life is stunted and incomplete. It is only through relationship with God that the moral life flowers. Once again, I must quote from David Baggett and Jerry Walls’ brilliant work, Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality.

If God is the source and root of morality—in any fashion close to the way that we have depicted it here—then the tug of morality within us is less like a cold deliverance of reason, and more like a warm and personal invitation to come and partake, to drink from a brook whose water quenches our thirst in the most deeply satisfying way we can imagine.

The voice of morality is the call of God to return to our only true and ultimate source of happiness. It’s not an overactive superego or a societally imposed joy-killing curfew, but an intimation of the eternal, a personal overture to run with rather than against the grain of the universe. It’s a confirmation of our suspicions that love and relationship have not just happened to bubble up to the top of the evolutionary chain, reflecting nothing, but rather that they penetrate to the very foundation of all that is real.

Reason and relationship, rationality and relationality, go hand in hand, and they weren’t merely the culmination of the elaborate process that enabled us to reflect about it all and inquire into the meaning of life; no, they were what began it all and imbued the process with meaning right from the start.

How does our relationship with God make us more virtuous?

Virtue itself is relational. Experience reveals that we grow to become like those with whom we fraternize. Relationship with God is what makes us more like him; intimacy with Christ makes us fully human. By hiding his words in our heart we become better able to resist sin; by yielding to his will we walk uprightly; by allowing the power of the Holy Spirit to animate us, we find deliverance from the bondage to sin.

Virtue, to our thinking, is not just a set of dispositional qualities; it’s a function of ongoing relationship. Intimacy with God is what engenders holiness of heart. Trust in his faithfulness and goodness manifests itself in a holy life. Morality, ultimately, for the Christian, is all about relationship, first and foremost with God, and then secondarily with others. All the law and the prophets, Jesus assured us, hang on these two commandments: To love God with all of our hearts, souls, and minds, and our neighbor as ourselves.

Yes, we can be virtuous without knowing God, but it is of a secondary quality. The path to true virtue is through relationship with Jesus Christ.