Heroic Virtue

Do we need to be heroic to be ordinary?

Kate over at Dying Breed wrote that it no longer suffices to be “existentially average.” I read that with approval, but thought that the Catholic notion of “heroic virtue” could shed some light on the topic.

A virtue is a disposition that allows you to choose the good. The word arete in Greek means excellence, which is a quality of a thing that makes it a good example of that thing. A good knife has the virtue or excellenc of sharpness. A good human has the virtue of temperance. A heroic virtue is virtue in a degree that outshines ordinary people.

The Catholic Encyclopedia quotes Benedict XIV defining it thus:

“In order to be heroic a Christian virtue must enable its owner to perform virtuous actions with uncommon promptitude, ease, and pleasure, from supernatural motives and without human reasoning, with self abnegation and full control over his natural inclinations.”

In other words, if you have more virtue than most people, if it’s really easy for you to do the good, and if you do it in situations where everyone else falls away, your virtue could be heroic. Consider Kipling’s poem If.

Examples of heroic virtue: St. Lawrence, while he was being burned to death on a griddle, joked with his torturers that he was “done on this side” and that they had better flip him over. St. Anthony heard the gospel story of the rich young man and without another thought sold all he had, gave it to the poor, and headed out for the desert. St. Basil the Great had only one cloak, because the gospel says “let him with two give to him who has none.” St. Francis, in order to escape sexual temptation, threw himself into a snowbank. The same saint embraced a leper to show Christian love. St. Stephen, as he was being stoned to death, prayed that his killers be forgiven. Examples abound in the stories of the saints, who are raised to the level of saints precisely because their virtue is heroic and can inspire the rest of us.

Do we need heroic virtue to be normal?

The idea of heroic virtue presumes that there is ordinary virtue, that if you’re not heroic, you’re still virtuous. In the Christian context, it means that the ordinary believer has hope of salvation even if he’s not throwing himself into snowbanks. But is this possible now? Can you afford to be ordinary?

Let’s take the example of chastity, of being rightly ordered in the matter of sex. Who nowadays in rightly ordered? Is it enough to have the ordinary level of this virtue when you possess the whole world of temptations in your pocket at all times? When Instagram reels are designed by an algorithm to distract you? You are awash in “thirst traps.” What will you do?

Perhaps you disengage from the internet, and you turn off all of your social media. Good for you! But this means that you are turning off a great deal of the ordinary intercourse of society. Everybody’s doing their talking on the socials these days. I remember a young relative who was afraid to ask a girl out to coffee in real life because “nobody does that anymore.” The fear of weirdness kept him from doing what was necessary. It would be heroic to turn all of this off.

What about fortitude? Do you remember the recent unpleasantness, when the entire world shut down because of an illness? Many good things in life were abandoned from the fear of death. To go against this trend, to attempt to lead a normal social human life, required uncommon fortitude.

Companies and governments have enough data about human beings to engineer your responses, to hack your reward systems. See, for example, Robert Lustig’s The Hacking of the American Mind, or look into the way food and social media has been designed to keep you clicking and eating. To put this in Catholic terms, your temptations have been weaponized against you. St. Francis had to deal with the ordinary temptations of medieval Italy, but you have to deal with the extraordinary temptations of the whole world piped into your Iphone.

St. Francis, being heroic, wouldn’t have had an Iphone.

A digital monasticism

In the early Church, Christians of heroic temperament would go out into the desert. This is how they got rid of their phones. St. Anthony in Egypt, St. Benedict at Monte Cassino, St. Simeon on top of his pillar. The ordinary faithful would participate in this monasticism as much as they could by following the feasts, fasts, and liturgies of the Church. What would the modern equivalent look like?

We need to disengage from the world as distraction. But how do you do it when your livelihood requires you to be ‘connected?’ In ancient times groups of men and women would get together for mutual support and a common life that helped them to be heroic. Perhaps we need sodalities and fraternities of digital minimalism! You could start a telegram group whose primary focus was to scold any of the members who were online after 8pm.

Once you disengage, what do you do? I don’t think it’s enough just to detach yourself. You need to do it for the sake of something. The monks filled their days with prayer, chanting all 150 psalms every week. Can you do this? You probably need to do something like this. Christians can engage in the Liturgy of the Hours, which can help to fill one’s mind with good things in the place of doom scrolling. It’s nearly time for me to pray nones, the ninth hour, for example. But if that option isn’t good for you, I think you need to find something that you can do regularly that is good, wholesome, and peaceful. The digital environment is actively hostile, and you need to be on your guard.

What would you do to be heroic?