The beauty of a grace-filled life

Most interesting essay at First Things by Ross McCullough:

In that sense moral behavior is a grace-ful thing, and the saint behaves in something like the way that Astaire danced or Sugar Ray boxed or (to sample the life of the mind) Capablanca played chess. The examples can be multiplied indefinitely, but the point is this: There is a beauty to the moral gesture, the moral life, the moral soul; there is a quiet harmony to the parts of the act and to the priorities of the life and to the passions of the mind; and there is from all this a beauty that spreads slowly and subtly but unstoppably out across this sleeping world, like the first signs of the sun.

For there is no doubt that here the world is asleep. Whatever we think of the politics and prohibitions of modern morality, there is little draw to them. We lie dumb and desensitized in a picturesque moral landscape and dream in browns and grays. I frame this as a secular sleep, but I do not see why such dreams should be inherent to secularism. There is no straight-forward syllogism to show why in denying Providence we must deny beauty or goodness, including the beauty of goodness. I spoke of Birkenstocks and Volvos and righteous indignation, but I spoke in caricatures; there are also atheists who live a patient, everyday sort of nonviolence, who do approach the beautiful in their moral life. This indeed is why I am making a sort of pretheistic argument, be-cause this is a thing available to the unconverted atheist, because I am urging on him something other than simple conversion, because this is more about becoming a man than becoming a god.

And importantly, the inverse is also true: None of this is guaranteed the theist. Intimacy and the eve-ryday are all well and good, but the Catholic might be confessing through sheer legalism and scrupulos-ity, the evangelical might be chaste in pure terror, thinking always of avoiding the dancing demons and never of joining—in this very act, however imperfectly—the dancing God. We all know to act for the glory of God, even if the saints and my sequel have much to do in unfolding its meaning, but we some-times forget that we can act in and with that glory, that our acts can be shot through with the rhythm and symmetry of a supernatural elegance. We must first see ethics in the everyday, but we must second see beauty there, and the serious theist is often only halfway along.

I will not attempt a full genealogy of the problem here: The exercise too often proves facile and unconvincing. Somewhere along the way the traditional scheme of virtues was greatly flattened. Morality was collapsed into jus-tice and justice reduced to its political dimensions: Prudence came to be conceived as cleverness, tem-perance as a lifestyle choice, fortitude as an admirable but not a moral thing. General prohibitions and political action items became the substance of everyday moral thought: Do not rape; end global warm-ing. We lost sight of the truth that chastity is no more about avoiding rape or even adultery than kind-ness is about avoiding murder: Certainly the two are incompatible, but cultivating the virtue goes far beyond avoiding its most flagrant violation.

Some blame may be laid at the feet of moral philosophy, which in the ¬anglophone world has been dominated by utilitarian and Kantian theories, and, whatever their merits, the first tends to focus us on the grand social problems—a thing is good in proportion to the quantity of goodness it produces, so that the everyday actions of a life matter not at all in relation to large social currents—and the second has the popular effect of destroying any positive category for moral action, sorting everything into prohibited and permissible with little room for the startling, splendid, and wonderful.