In our modern egalitarian world, there is a widespread assumption that moral goodness and intelligence are completely separate, unrelated, and unconnected things.
We have all encountered good and kindhearted folk who are more modestly blessed with intelligence. And certainly, we have all encountered clever people who are dishonest, mean, and conniving. Indeed, in our popular culture, we hear far more about fictional evil geniuses like Darth Sidious, Hannibal Lecter, and Lex Luthor, and about real-life serial killers long successful in evading the law, than about men who possess both great intelligence and great goodness. And this is true, in part, because there is more general agreement about what is evil than about what is good — but not a great deal more.
Everyone agrees that serial killers are bad (except the serial killers themselves), because no one wants to be cruelly and sadistically murdered. But in a world where most people are spiritually unregenerate, where many professing to be Christian are not truly Christian, and where many of these unregenerates are reprobates predestinated to hell, we have many among us who view what is actually evil as good and what is actually good as evil. And analogously, these same unregenerate and often reprobate people tend to view smartness or intelligence as that which advocates and promotes, by the use of our various mental powers, including reason, imagination, memory, and so on, what is actually evil over what is actually good.
These days, "intelligence" is viewed as that "skill set" of mental traits and attitudes and behaviors that bring to their possessor worldly success, including broad Hegelian recognition in the eyes of the world, and of course, a lot of money. "Goodness", on the other hand, is widely considered to be relative and subjective if not irrelevant, while that which is truly bad is sometimes sinfully and outrageously valorized or portrayed by truly confused and bad people as good.
In our modern "progressive" world, which thinks little or nothing of murdering tens of millions of human babies annually because of their "inconvenience" to their irresponsible mothers demonically bereft of all natural affection (2 Timothy 3:3), any mention of "virtue", or of the virtues is met with quizzical and uncomfortable and haughtily amused looks, and then much foot shuffling .
If one seriously broaches the subject of actual individual virtues, the more receptive listeners are profoundly unaccustomed and unprepared on the subject, while the less receptive listeners evince a combination of boredom and irritation, as if the broacher is wasting their precious time with arcane irrelevancies when they could be more profitably and pleasurably spending their time watching football, pleasure shopping, playing games on their smart phone, tweaking their stock portfolio, or plotting how best to advance themselves in the world at the expense of others.
And then, of course, along with the personally pathetic and ever-whining diversity-equity-inclusion feminists and racial untermensch, there are the super-liberal uber-modern (and typically malodorous) freaks -- the all-out metaphysical rebels, all tatted up and pierced, with dyed hair and confused sexual identity -- who are determined, as activists and voters and public officials and college professors no less, to redefine both moral goodness and intelligence to match his/her/its ever-changing and ever-worsening reprobate appetites. But to all of this reprobate absurdity we say: "Woe to all moral relativists" (Isaiah 5:20).
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And so, corrupt and ridiculous liberal modernity aside, the word "virtue" comes from the Latin word "vir", meaning man or strong, as compared with "puer" or boy, from which we get "puerile" or weak. So a good man is a man with moral strengths or virtues, and an intelligent man is a man with intellectual strengths or virtues.
Plato and Aristotle taught that the four foundational or cardinal moral virtues, upon which all other virtues which characterize the moral life of a good man hinge, are prudence, justice, courage and moderation. And in his Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle famously emphasized, in a manner agreeing with God's Word, how all virtues are habits or dispositions of character established in the child by good training and, specifically, by practice in doing the right over and over (Proverbs 22:6). Analogously, bad moral character or personal viciousness tends to result from an absence of sound parental training and spiritual protection of the child (Proverbs 13:24) and from evil example and influences. And the corrupters of children are promised as Judgment a worse horror than a swift and unstoppable slam to sea's bottom by a millstone fastened around their neck (Matthew 18:6).
Aristotle defined as virtuous an act done or performed in the right way, at the right time, and from the right motive. Centuries later, the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), who was Christian, underscored, concerning motive, how the only thing in human life that is good without condition or qualification is a truly good will, which can come to fallen man only from God's saving and sanctifying grace. And, the great Christian theologian and philosopher Duns Scotus (1265/66-1308), following St. Augustine of Hippo (354-430), emphasized how the will, and not reason or the understanding, as the locus and source in man of all his motivation, is the central and ruling faculty of man.
Later, the great German philosopher Leibniz (1646-1716), a Reformed Christian and a pioneer in the science of psychology (as well as in physics, metaphysics, and mathematics), noted how, at the most fundamental level, we humans are creatures, not of indifference, but of definite and determinate inclination toward what appears or seems to us to be good. And these appearances either correspond to or diverge from reality, according as God, by the giving or withholding of his grace, allots spiritual sight and hearing (Matthew 13:16) or spiritual blindness and deafness (Ezekiel 12:2) to individuals as central and decisive causal features of their personal destinies — destinies He predetermined before the beginning of the world.
But having now introduced and defined virtue, let's review some of the main virtues.
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Courage, according to Aristotle, is the virtuous or golden average or mean between two vices, the excess of spirit we call "rashness"and the deficiency of spirit we call "cowardice." Moderation (sophrosyne) involves self-control and the wise regulation of desires and pleasures. Justice is giving to each his due. Prudence involves acting wisely in all situations of life. And true eloquence, by the way, is a form of wisdom and therefore a virtue.
Far from being mere glib and catchy expression or flowery and soaring but empty and sophistical emotional utterance — like, for example, the most famous of speeches of Lincoln and MLK — eloquence involves, above all, speaking wisely, and not in the unwise or foolish way pleasing to the unreflective and appetitive masses. And as the wisest of men, King Solomon, eloquently put it, true eloquence is words fitly spoken, like apples of gold in a silver setting (Proverbs 25:11). So wise King Solomon spoke wisely or eloquently about the true nature of spoken wisdom or eloquence.
And after the moral virtues we have the intellectual virtues. And so the moral virtues or strengths of heart or of character are sometimes found combined in some men with virtues or strengths of mind, to make the occasional excellent man who is, by God's grace alone, great both in goodness and intelligence.
The intellectual virtues are learned character traits or habits of mind that enable individuals to think well, reason soundly, and pursue truth effectively. They include: artistry or techne, which is skill in productive thinking and creation, whether in the arts, crafts, or intellectual endeavors; practical wisdom (phronesis), which is good judgment in managing affairs and making decisions; knowledge (episteme), which is deep theoretical understanding and mastery of established truths; intuition (nous), the abiiity to grasp first principles and foundational truths; and finally, wisdom (sophia), which is deep understanding and insight.
Other intellectual virtues include a proper or pious curiosity, intellectual humility or knowing one's intellectual limits as finite and fallible man, a reasonable open-mindedness, charity or fairness in treating the ideas of others, autonomy or independence of thought, and attentiveness and carefulness in reasoning.
And finally, the intellectual virtues include intellectual courage or commitment to truth, and perseverance in the Lord, Who is Truth. Intellectual courage is a virtue because the fear of man lays a snare, but trusting in the Lord brings safety and courage (Proverbs 29:25). For as Augustine noted in The City of God, the Christian must not fear his fellow men because of their power to kill the body, to take from him other earthly holdings, or to deny to him what he would, of earthly values, seek to gain.
Also on Aristotle's excellent but incomplete and imperfect (because pagan) list of virtues is one that even the vicious dullards among us, those bored with the subject of virtue and with every other worthwhile subject, may find of at least slight interest. Aristotle describes wit and wittiness as the virtuous mean or average that lies between that vice or deficiency of humor called humorlessness or boorishness, and that vice of ridiculous or clownish excess we call buffoonery. Thus the man of wit stands between and above the boor and the buffoon.
Accordingly, only the man of true goodness and intelligence is capable of true humor or wit, and his ever-apt use of wit, whether as biting satire and mockery of corrupt and tyrannical power, or as gentle jest to lighten by irony and mirth the burdens of self and of others in this earthly veil of tears, is always promotive of good and demotive of evil.
Indeed, a man is what a man believes; and what a man finds amusing or funny reflects both his degree of intelligence and the moral and spiritual condition of his soul. Food for thought the next time you laugh or express an opinion.
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But crowning all the other virtues, moral and intellectual, including courage and prudence and wit and moderation and wisdom, are the virtues traditionally deemed uniquely Christian. These are the theological virtues -- faith , hope, and charity (love), virtues conveyed to the believer upon believing or regeneration by God's saving grace, and virtues strengthened by subsequent sanctifying grace.
Faith is the virtue by which a Christian believes in God and in all He has revealed, a force that impels the Christian to deny himself by committing himself to Christ. Hope is the virtue that enables the Christian to desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life, trusting in God's promises amidst all earthly trials and vicissitudes. Charity, or love, is the greatest of the theological virtues. It is the love of God above all things and the love of one's neighbor for God's sake or for God's glory.
And at the very foundation and the very heart of all the virtues, both the moral and the intellectual, is the love of truth, implanted by the Triune God in the elect at the point of their regeneration. And this very fact raises the question as to whether unbelievers or non-Christians are able to possess any virtue at all, despite external appearances.
Earlier I said that faith, hope, and love are virtues unique to the Christian, but now we begin to see how, in a fallen world, all virtues are unique to the Christian. This is so because the unregenerate, being in the spiritual condition non posse non peccare, meaning "not able to not sin ", do in fact sin continuously in thought, word, and deed. And how can anyone who sins continuously and without interruption at the same time or simultaneously exercise habits or dispositions that are virtuous and actuated by a will that is truly good, doing the things they do from right motives or for the right reason(s) or with a right or circumcised heart of flesh and not a heart of stone? (Ezekiel 36:26)
But whether or not non-Christians can possess virtue or goodness is a subject I have treated in an earlier essay, and our present concern is the fundamental Providential and ontological and causal relationship and connection or nexus between the moral, on the one hand, and the intellectual, on the other hand. Having now considered what is the moral, or the moral virtues, and true intelligence, or the intellectual virtues, let us now consider how the Lord has connected the moral and the intellectual causally or phenomenally in His Providence, which is the history of man within creation.
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The nexus between the moral and the intellectual was explored to great profit by America's greatest theologian, James Henley Thornwell (1812-1862) of South Carolina.
Thornwell was a Reformed believer who himself possessed extraordinary moral and intellectual virtues, as attested by no less a figure than his friend and older contemporary, the great statesman and philosopher John C. Calhoun, also of South Carolina. Thornwell's life and writings make it clear that he was a preacher and teacher of God's Word with Biblical learning, depth, perspicacity, and zeal on par even with John Calvin, with Reformed Scholastics like Francis Turretin and John Owen, and wth great Puritan writers like Thomas Watson and John Flavel.
The great Calhoun, it should be noted, after hosting Thornwell at his plantation home Fort Hill (the site now of Clemson University), where the two men conversed for hours on matters philosophical, was greatly impressed by the younger Thornwell's powerful mastery of fundamental matters both theological and political. Thornwell's mastery of subjects or topoi relating to virtue, as noted by Calhoun, and as we shall sample below, included a very strong and express appreciation of the ethical works of Aristotle. And so here, below, we find a highly intelligent and virtuous man writing about the Providential nexus in man's nature between the moral and the intellectual.
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In his Collected Writings, Vol. II, in Discourse II, on "The Love of Truth", Thornwell eloquently explains how:
"The moral habits can no more expand nor take root downwards and bear fruit upwards, while the understanding, the true sun of the intellectual system, is veiled in darkness, than the plants and herbiage of nature can flourish in beauty and luxuriance without the genial light of the day. The sense of obligation is always just in proportion to the enlargement of the mind with liberal views of the relations of mankind; and although the knowledge of the right does not necessarily secure its practice, it does secure what is always of vast importance to society — remorse to the guilty and a homage of respect to the good."
So now here the modern reader — accustomed to perusing empty verbosity that is mere opinion and truncated textese that deals in mere mundane fact -- must slow down to try to register and to absorb serious thought expressed seriously, meaning actual wisdom and insight. To help him register and absorb fully, the typical modern reader may also need assist from his google dictionary.
Thornwell's metaphor here of the understanding of the regenerate man as the "true sun of the intellectual system" evokes many verses about light, not least of course is Psalm 119: 105, "Thy light is a lamp unto my feet ..." But his central point here is that the moral practice of man cannot step or reach beyond the light or knowledge of right cast by the Holy Spirit through the regenerate understanding. Stepping or walking along an unlit path must lead to stumbling and falling, since the knowledge of right must precede the doing of right. As Aristotle noted, a right or virtuous action involves doing the right thing at the right time from right motive — a motive which, in turn, must precede right action. And a central part of right motive is knowing that right is in fact right, and not merely doing a "right" thing by accident.
Again Thornwell:
"There can ... be no progress in virtue beyond the merest elements or primary dicta of our moral constitution without progress in intelligence. Hence a variable or fluctuating standard of truth necessarily introduces a varying and fluctuating standard of morals; whatever system legitimates error legitimates crime; whatever blinds the understanding corrupts the heart. The moral nature, developed side by side with the intellectual, and in a large measure dependent upon it, is always involved in the same ruin."
But note, dear reader, that Thornwell was a deeply learned and powerful thinker and an eloquent and pithy writer, so there is much to unpack here. Note how Thornwell the true philosopher-theologian clearly conceptualizes fundamental phenomena of the human condition.
Progress in virtue. Our intellectual constitution. Our moral constitution. Progress in intelligence. Standard of truth. Standard of morals. A social system that legitimates error. A social system that legitimates crime. What blinds the understanding and what corrupts the heart.
And being faithful and true to reality and accurate in expression, Thornwell takes great care to introduce no distinction with concepts where there is no difference among phenomena.
Again.
Man's moral constitution. Man's intellectual constitution. The primal and fundamental causal link between error and crime, and between intellectual blindness and corruption of the heart or character.
(What clean and clear concepts to piously describe the created reality. What depth and breadth of explanatory power. No wrong note is struck during the analytical and synthetical, the upward and downward motions of performance on the philosophical keyboard. This is how a highly intelligent and noble and Godly man prayerfully writes!)
And so earlier we saw — by Thornwell's analysis — how woe is to the moral relativist, and now we see how woe is first and foremost to the intellectual relativist. Now, in this current passage, Thornwell clearly displays the connection between the two forms of relativism and suggests how they are ultimately of a single piece as it were within the torn fabric that is the fallen human soul. And this is a tear that only the Great Seamster of souls can mend.
In sum, darkness in the understanding begets dark or wicked conduct. Moral and intellectual relativism, gone unchecked, leads to moral and intellectual nihilism, and from there to the demonic devolution and destruction of all human civilization, government, and society.
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Having then descried and underscored the nexus within the individual between the moral and the intellectual, Thornwell turns to explore the social and international implications of this fundamental and primal anthropological-spiritual reality.
Everywhere around the globe, all over the world, both between different peoples and within those peoples considered separately, progress in virtue hinges on progress in understanding. Nowhere can morals advance beyond the understanding. And Providentially, with the Great Commission, the light shines progressively out and around the whole world, as the Word is missioned and translated and debated and digested. And so His bride, the Church, is gathered to Him as sheep to the Shepherd from the different races and nations.
But, when surveying the different peoples of the world, morally and intellectually, one encounters the hardest and most intractable God-made and therefore Providential realities — realities that are most repugnant to modern atheist egalitarians, including the many "Christian" egalitarian heretics among us. I refer to the hard and fixed and immutable God-made inequalities in natural gifts and personal destinies that seem especially hateful to the mindless among us who endlessly prate about all persons being equal in the eyes of God.
Observing this global Providential inequality, Thornwell says:
"Rude and barbarous nations are as much indebted to imbecility of reason, superinduced by neglect of cultivation, false associations or ill-judged discipline, for their mistaken apprehension of good and evil in the practical details of life, as to depravity of taste or perversion of moral sensibility. Their deeds of darkness are performed without compunctious visitiings of conscience, not because that messenger of God slumbers in the breast, or is bribed by the sinner to hold its peace, or prevaricates in regard to the fundamental distinctions of right and wrong, but because that light is extinguished, that soundness of judgment is wanting, without which it is impossible to discriminate in the cases presented."
So in this best of all possible created worlds, infinite and perfect God has distributed His common and saving and sanctifying grace unequally. For all of creation reduces to grace — all of it, including every grain of sand, every turn of history, and every personal destiny.
And so everywhere, men differ. Everywhere, men are unequal. And as men are different and unequal, so too are social classes, whole societies, whole cultures, whole races, the two and only two sexes, and whole nations.
And also among believers, there is no equality of grace given of Him. Instead, by His differentially dispensed grace in this best of all possible created worlds, believers are not given to see or to understand his Written and His Spoken Word (creation) equally well. And, in keeping with Thornwell's analysis of the moral and the intellectual, individual Christian believers are not given by Him to obey Him, in their doings, equally well as one man is compared to the next. So the wise man's prayer to God is: "Lord, please give me the intellectual power and the will to both see the right and to do it." And the right, of course, is obedience both to the letter and to the spirit of His Law.
Thornwell goes on to describe the emergence of moral sense of right and wrong in individuals and in whole societies.
"He that acknowledges a legitimate standard of moral obligation will find in his conscience a check to those crimes which, through weakness, he is unable to suppress — a restraint upon those passions which, through frailty, cannot be subdued. The transgressor who violates rules of unquestioned authority which his own understanding has deduced from the phenomena of conscience will assuredly drive tranquility from his bosom and repose from his couch. He sins indeed, but without that moral hardihood which attached to those who, in their blindness and ignorance, put light for darkness, and bitter for sweet."
And so, as the Scottish philosopher David Hume (1711-1776) taught, in every human community, out of the agreement of moral sense in individuals emerges a common sense of right and wrong that is the spiritual foundation of that society. This common sense or sensus communis about right and wrong is cultivated and evolves over time as grace within individuals ebbs and flows within and between generations. But sadly Hume, being an atheist, was blind to the role of grace as the causal primer mover operating here, and he was oblivious to the reality of God's total sovereignty over all human affairs, as First and Final Cause and as Author of all intermediate causes in creation.
But human finitude, combined with the moral and intellectual infirmities proceeding from man's fallen and sinful nature, tend ever to inhibit man's moral sense and to cloud his understanding. And even after man has achieved higher techne and higher culture and higher civilization, seductive heresies and false philosophies lie in wait and in ambush for him, like crouching tigers, ready to undo all progress.
And these dark forces of the mind and soul are the most potent and dangerous enemies of man. They are poisonous intellectual-moral refinements — false and wicked but plausible and seductive ideas — derived ultimately from a toxic combination of the primal impulses of man's rebellious will and from demonic suggestion and influence. They are chief among the weapons wielded by the dark spiritual and demonic "powers and principalities" referred to in Scripture (Ephesians 12:6). They are the poisonous spiritual spearheads of the dark schemes and inventions created by fallen man, who was created upright (Ecclesiastes 7:29), but who, since the Fall, has possessed an ever-deceitful heart (Jeremiah 17: 9).
And yet, withal, our Triune is Sovereign over all and holds all in His mighty hand, and works all to the good of those who have been given by Him to believe in Him and to love Him and to obey Him. Alas, the Lord holds all false philosophers and authors of heresy in His Hand, as He does Satan himself, and allows them to operate amongst His flock and to test them for a time — that iron may sharpen iron — for His greater glory.
Finally, the truths that Thornwell perceived about the inequality of understanding and character among men has been in somewise noticed by other astute men.
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One of a best theologians and preachers of our own time has been R. C. Sproul (1939-2017). In his excellent and highly readable work titled The Holiness of God, Sproul underscores the moral-intellectual distinction and nexus illuminated by Thornwell as it relates, very specifically, to preachers and to preaching. Sproul notes how:
"All preachers are vulnerable to the charge of hypocrisy. In fact, the more faithful preachers are to the Word of God in their preaching, the more liable they are to the charge of hypocrisy. Why? Because the more faithful people are to the Word of God, the higher the message is that they will preach. The higher the message, the further they will be from obeying it themselves."
And so, all preachers, and all preaching, are not equal — just as all hearing or listening congregants are not equal.
The differences are moral and intellectual. And here, Sproul is concerned specifically with the gap or distance or chasm even within the preacher who does higher preaching between his seeing the right, on the one hand, and his doing the right that he sees, on the other hand. And the etymology of "hypocrisy" tells us that it involves a "hypo" "kritikos" or lack of rational or critical examination of one's own thoughts or actions.
But how can one message from the Word be higher than another? The answer? By its depth of insight, by its degree of beauty In expression, and by its degree of nobility.
Those who have been given to see with their understanding more deeply (and thereby and therewith to sense with their heart more deeply) have created within themselves a wider and deeper chasm between their own actual moral condition, on the one hand, and what they are given by grace to see what is truly good and truly right, on the other hand.
So the more enlightened and eloquent preacher is thereby more liable to commit hypocrisy than his comparatively shallow and benighted and morally unperceiving fellow preachers. The Lord gives some men to see farther beyond their own doing than others. Grace to see the right may therefore be distinguished from grace to do the right. And this reality leads again to the prayer: "Lord, please give me the power by Your grace to understand and to obey Your Law." And this wise prayer underscores the anthropological reality of the moral-intellectual nexus in man, and it seeks, by the aid of His power, both to extend our seeing of the right and to close the gap between our seeing the right and our doing the right. (And here we note in passing the moral-intellectual inequality of the prayers of men.) And the ultimate end of this progress in seeing the right and in doing it is a point that finite man may ever, by His grace, approach, but never, by man's finitude, actually reach -- which is to be perfectly and completely like Infinite Christ.
So, among men, there is higher and lower preaching, higher and lower listening, and higher and lower prayer. But, to quell any rebellious stirrings of pride in our gifts, God tells us that more is expected and more required from those to whom more has been given (Luke 12:48).
Sproul goes on to explain the great discomfiture felt by the higher preacher as he does higher preaching.
"I cringe inside when I speak in churches about the holiness of God. I can anticipate the responses of the people. They leave the sanctuary convinced that they have just been in the presence of a holy man. Because they hear me preach about holiness, they assume I must be as holy as the message I preach. That's when I want to cry out (as did Isaiah), "Woe is me." It is dangerous to assume that because a person is drawn to holiness in his study that he is a holy man. There is irony here. I am sure that the reason I have a deep hunger to learn of the holiness of God is precisely because I am not holy. I am a profane man — a man who spends more time out of the temple than in it. But I have had just enough of the taste of the majesty of God to want more. I know what it means to be a forgiven man and what it means to be sent on a mission. My soul cries for more. My soul needs more."
This great discomfiture of the higher preacher stems directly from the reality of the moral-intellectual nexus in man and the commonly chasmic lag, in this earthly life, between intellectual actualization and moral-spiritual actualization.
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When one reflects on Thornwell's moral-intellectual nexus, and on Sproul's point about hypocrisy-generating higher preaching, what springs to mind is an image of the young Martin Luther, as Augustinian monk, relentlessly listing and confessing his sins, from capital crimes to peccadilloes, and afterward self-flagellating to a degree that astonished and irked his superiors in the monastery. Luther's surpassing intellect and moral and Scriptural perception convicted him far more thoroughly and relentlessly than the less acute faculties of his monastic fellows and superiors convicted them.
Thornwell ends his discussion of the moral-intellectual nexus with a poignant reminder and warning. Fully aware of the presence and machinations of the lovers of darkness among us, he says:
"They are the most dangerous offenders who tamper with the principles of rectitude itself, who seek to escape the reproaches of conscience by degrading the standard of moral obligation, who pursue peace at the expense of truth, and extinguish the light that they may not behold the calamity of their state. "
In HIs planning and creation of the world, the Perfect God has dispensed His common and saving and sanctifying grace unequally among the races and sexes and individuals of humanity. The Lord tells us He came down to earth not to unite but to divide (Luke 12:51).
The bound and contented captives in Plato's cave (Bk. VII, 514a-520a) would murder those who would unbind them from life-taking ignorance and sin. He loved us while we were yet sinners (Romans 5: 8), and we as lost sinners, led by the children of Satan from among His own people, put Him on the Cross. A sobering reminder at Easter.
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A native South Carolinian and proud son of Confederate veterans, Winston McCuen, a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Furman University, holds an M.A. and a Ph.D. in philosophy from Emory University, is a John C. Calhoun scholar, and is a Senior Certified Metallurgical Welding Engineer.. He is the son of Dr. William Garrison McCuen, Sr. and Anne Ballenger King McCuen.
