Browsing by Subject "Virtue"

This study examines medieval edification in all of its rich senses: moral improvement, the building up of community, and the construction of a city or edifice. Drawing from medieval literature, religious writing and architectural sources, my dissertation investigates virtue formation and explores what kinds of communities nourish or hinder those virtues. The Christian virtue of love stands at the center of my project. Drawing from the work of Alasdair MacIntyre, I show that medieval Christians learn the craft of love in a lifelong process into which they are initiated as apprentices to those who teach the craft in the Church. For parishioners in late medieval England, apprenticeship in the craft of love entails participation in sacramental practice, particularly in the sacrament of penance.

Chapter one considers Jacob's Well , a fifteenth-century penitential manual written by an anonymous author that uses architectural allegory to describes the penitential process. I argue that the author, a self-proclaimed "man of craft," apprentices the reader into sacramental practice. The author is both an exemplar to the reader and apprenticed to Christ. In chapter two, I explore the role of the narrative exempla in Jacob's Well. The exempla often resist the paradigm set forth in the allegory of the well. My chapter shows that learning to read these stories trains the reader to recognize forgiveness and sin in others and then to use this recognition to evaluate one's own story. Chapter three considers William Langland's richly complex fourteenth-century poem, Piers Plowman. The horrible failures of the sacrament of penance in this poem cause the Church to crumble. The allegorical Wille is left within this Church with the enjoinder to "learn the craft of love." For Wille to learn the craft of love means more than learning to forgive and to be forgiven - it means learning to be charitable. For Langland, a charitable Church is yet to be practiced, yet to be constructed. My last chapter examines Pearl, a late fourteenth-century apocalyptic allegory written by an anonymous poet. The poem opens with a jeweler lamenting the loss of his pearl in a garden. As the poem progresses it becomes clear that the jeweler is a father who mourns the death of his infant daughter. In a dream vision, his daughter appears to him as a Pearl Maiden, one of the 144,000 virgins from the Book of Revelations. In an inversion of the usual parent-child relationship, the Pearl Maiden teaches the jeweler to recognize that their interlocking narratives stem from the same Christian tradition, although his particular narrative is one of penitential practice and hers is one of grace. The Pearl poet's architectural allegory focuses on the completed City of New Jerusalem rather than on the upbuilding or crumbling of the Church.

Respect for autonomy is the foundation of modern bioethics, even (or especially) where bioethics is attentive to the problem of suffering caused by the practice of medicine itself. It provides guidance in the midst of therapeutic and moral uncertainty, justification for morally problematic enterprises, and the promise of protection against self-serving or predatory medical personnel. Yet bioethical arguments that appeal to the injustice or the horror of suffering depend on an instinctual and uncomplicated association of suffering, especially imposed suffering, with evil. This uncomplicated association, this flattening of the complexities of the moral landscape, must lead to a diminished capacity to navigate the very difficulties that define the field of bioethics. This dissertation explores the relationship, particularly, of autonomy, suffering, and happiness in modern bioethics, as represented by three key theorists (James Childress, Tom Beauchamp, and H. Tristram Engelhardt). It then contrasts these findings with resources from the Christian tradition: Luke-Acts, the letters of Paul, and the theologians Thomas Aquinas, Catherine of Genoa, and Margaret Ebner. Their accounts of the meaning and experience of suffering within well-lived lives makes for a more robust account of the moral life, one in which suffering plays a formative part.

My dissertation aims to shed light on the importance and distinctive nature of intimate relationships such as parent-child relationship and friendship by developing my own version of a virtue-ethical approach.

In Chapter 1, I critically examine important contemporary Western theories of filial piety and argue that they do not adequately capture the nature of a desirable parent-child relationship and filial piety.

In Chapter 2, I show why the duty-centered approach to filial piety is inadequate focusing on why it fails to make sense of filial love and argue that filial piety is better understood as a virtue by showing how it can do justice to the normative significance of filial love.

In Chapter 3, I introduce what I call ‘gratitude for being’ to capture the distinctive type of gratitude we owe to people who have consistent and particularized care for us, especially our parents. I argue that the idea of gratitude for being can best make sense of deep gratitude typically found among intimates who care for each other.

In Chapter 4, I introduce what I call ‘relational virtues,’ which are virtues required for the participants of a given type of personal relationship and argue that it offers a valuable resource for answering questions concerning the value of intimate personal relationships. Next, I propose my own relational virtue theory of filial piety.

In Chapter 5, I discuss several aspects of the Confucian conception of filial piety—early filial piety, the close connection between self-cultivation and filial piety, and postmortem filial piety—and show how my relational virtue theory can defend and make sense of them. Lastly, I show how my view of filial piety is different from the Confucian view, or at least a version of it.

In Chapter 6, I discuss the virtue of friendship as a relational virtue and show how it can make sense of the nature and value of friendship. In particular, I show why the virtue of friendship is distinct from general virtues such as benevolence or generosity and why it is morally important to have this virtue.

Finally, in Chapter 7, I propose what I call ‘relational activity view’ on partiality. After critically examining existing views on partiality, I suggest a picture of how special values are transformed, delivered, and created within intimate relationships.

This dissertation draws on the virtue ethics tradition in moral theology and moral philosophy for inquiries regarding the acquired and infused virtues, virtue's increase and remission, and virtue's relation to sacramental practice. I rely on two medieval texts to ask and answer these questions: the Summa Theologiae by Thomas Aquinas and Piers Plowman by William Langland. My arguments are primarily inter- and intra-textual with some attention to the texts' history of interpretation and the socio-historical Catholic culture in which they were written. I conclude that the texts share pedagogical features that teach their readers in what the perfection of virtue consists and show readers how to increase in that perfection.

This thesis follows from the work of David Aers, Stanley Hauerwas, Alasdair MacIntyre, Josef Pieper, and Eberhard Schockenhoff.