True Virtue

For if ye love them which love you, what reward have ye? do not even the publicans the same? MATTHEW 5:46

Among the works Edwards wrote at Stockbridge and never saw published was a short, dense dissertation called The Nature of True Virtue. It asks what genuine goodness actually is, and its answer exposes a great deal of respectable morality as something other than virtue.

Benevolence to being in general

Edwards’s definition is that true virtue consists most essentially in benevolence to Being in general — a settled goodwill towards all that exists, proportioned to its worth, and therefore directed first and supremely to God, who is the greatest and best of all beings. That sounds abstract until you see what it excludes. Consider a man who loves his family devotedly, is loyal to his friends, serves his town, and would die for his country. We would call him a good man, and in an important sense he is. But Edwards asks a searching question: what is the boundary of his goodwill, and why is it drawn there? If it extends to his own circle and stops, then it may be nothing more than self-love enlarged. The family is his family; the country is his country. What appears as generosity may be attachment to an extension of himself. Edwards called these private systems — limited communities of affection which look like virtue from inside and function as selfishness from outside.

And if ye do good to them which do good to you, what thank have ye? for sinners also do even the same. LUKE 6:33

The Lord’s argument is exactly Edwards’s. Loving those who love you proves nothing, because it is available to anyone and requires no grace at all.

Why it must begin with God

The reason true virtue must be directed first to God is not arbitrary. If goodwill is to be proportioned to worth, and God is infinitely worthy, then a virtue that leaves God out has failed at the most important point. It has allocated love carefully among lesser beings while ignoring the greatest. A man may be scrupulously fair to his neighbours and profoundly unjust to his Maker.

Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart …this is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it, Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. MATTHEW 22:37–39

Note the order, and note that the second is like the first — flowing from it, sharing its nature. Love for God, rightly held, necessarily enlarges the circle of love for others, because it reorients the whole self away from its own centre.

If a man say, I love God, and hateth his brother, he is a liar: for he that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen? 1 JOHN 4:20

The doctrine that convicted its author

There is a painful and instructive postscript to this chapter, and it would be dishonest to omit it. Edwards wrote this dissertation while owning human beings. His own principle — that virtue must extend beyond every private system, that goodwill limited to one’s own circle is self-love wearing a respectable face — is precisely the argument that condemns slaveholding. He did not apply it. He drew the boundary of his benevolence around a community that excluded the people working in his house, and did not notice. Within one generation his students did notice. Samuel Hopkins and Edwards’s own son became prominent opponents of slavery, and they argued their case directly from this doctrine, maintaining that they were simply following their teacher’s logic to its proper end. They were right. This is worth sitting with, because it demonstrates something Edwards himself taught more forcefully than anyone: that a man may hold a true principle, teach it brilliantly, and remain blind to its application in the one place where it would cost him. The heart is deceitful above all things, and it is most deceitful where we most benefit. None of which makes the principle false. It makes it dangerous — which is what true principles generally are.

So the question this chapter puts is simple and inescapable. Where is the boundary of your goodwill? Not what you profess, but where your actual care runs out — which people fall outside it, and what advantage you gain from the line being drawn where it is.

Common virtue is still a good

Edwards took care to prevent a misreading that his argument invites, and the qualification matters greatly for how Christians regard the world around them. To say that natural affection is not true virtue is not to say it is worthless. Edwards held that the natural loves — of parents for children, of friends for one another, of citizens for their community — together with natural conscience, the sense of justice, pity for suffering and shame at cruelty, are real goods. They are God’s gifts, given to fallen people, and they restrain the world from being as bad as it could be. Without them human society would be unliveable.

For when the Gentiles, which have not the law, do by nature the things contained in the law …shew the work of the law written in their hearts. ROMANS 2:14–15

So the Christian is not to sneer at the decency of unbelievers, nor to pretend that the kind atheist is secretly a monster, nor to treat every virtue outside the church as hypocrisy. That posture is both false and repellent, and it has done enormous damage to the credibility of the gospel. What Edwards insisted upon is a narrower and more precise point: these goods, real as they are, do not amount to the thing God requires, because they leave the centre unchanged. A man may be admirable in every direction except the one that matters most, and be, at the root, still living for himself. The distinction is between what is genuinely good and what is savingly good. Common virtue restrains; it does not reconcile.

For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: not of works, lest any man should boast. EPHESIANS 2:8–9

There is a practical use in holding this properly. It should make Christians generous in their assessment of others and severe in the assessment of themselves — able to recognise and praise goodness wherever it appears, while refusing to rest their own hope on any quantity of it. And it removes a common evangelistic error. The task is not to persuade decent people that they are secretly wicked. It is to show them that a life organised around any centre but God, however admirable its conduct, has missed the point of being alive.

FOR REFLECTION AND ACTION

1. Map the boundary of your practical benevolence. Who is inside it? Who is outside, and why? 2. Ask what you gain from that boundary being where it is. That question does most of the work. 3. Identify one group you find it easy to disregard. Do something concrete for one of them this month. 4. Test whether your love for family, church or nation is virtue or enlarged self-interest. Would it survive if they ceased to be yours? 5. Ask God to show you the application of a truth you hold that you have never allowed to cost you anything.

A PRAYER

Father, You are the greatest of all beings, and true goodness begins with loving You above everything.

I have drawn a circle around the people who are mine, and I have called my loyalty to them virtue. Show me where my goodwill stops, and why it stops there.

I know that I am most blind where I most benefit. Teach me to suspect myself exactly at the point where a truth would cost me something.

Enlarge my heart. Let me love what You love, without the boundary I have quietly drawn. Amen.