Prof. MacIntyre, who died in May at the venerable age of 96, wrote After Virtue, generally regarded as one of the seminal works of modern moral philosophy in the English language.
The book came out in 1981, and I’ve since made a dozen attempts to read it cover to cover, the latest one a few days ago. Each of those attempts has failed, miserably.
Several times, including the other day, I managed to get far enough into the book to get its main Thomist premise, doff my imaginary hat in respect and nod my very real head in general agreement. Yet I’ve never got any further, which failing I put down to my two allergies: one to Marxism, the other to bad writing.
I’ve been known to swallow books on Thomist (and other Christian) philosophy before my first coffee of the day, and few of them go down as easily as my morning coffee. That’s par for the course: such books demand an effort from the reader because they delve into highly complex issues.
One must concentrate hard to follow the thread of involved thought, and I’m always prepared to do so. For example, quite apart from the primary sources, I’ve read just about every line by R.G. Collingwood, whose philosophy of history, or rather philosophical history, MacIntyre often cites as one of his inspirations.
But I’m not prepared to do the Herculean labour of wading through the Augean stables of involute, impenetrable style. Happy as I am to do my best trying to understand the author’s thought, I refuse to spend my time trying to understand the author’s language.
I believe that a writer who doesn’t write lucid prose disrespects his art and his readers, and I for one refuse to be thus disrespected. Call it a personal idiosyncrasy, call it pedantry, call it anything you want, but the effort of deciphering MacIntyre’s endless paragraphs full of modifiers with uncertain antecedents is beyond me.
And if that doesn’t defeat me, his approving references to Marx’s criticism of free markets finishes the job. If Aquinas tried to reconcile Aristotle with Christianity, MacIntyre tried to reconcile Thomism with some aspects of Marxism. The first attempt was more successful than the second.
This vindicates yet again my innermost belief that there is no such thing as an ex-Marxist. MacIntyre remained a member of the Communist Party until age 27 and a residual Marxist thereafter, for all his criticism of some of Marx’s postulates. When a grown man accepts any part of Marxist cannibalism, he has a character flaw he never loses. Intellectual acuity can make up for some of it, but not for all of it.
This is a purely empirical observation I’ve never been tempted to reassess. My aversion to Marxism, on the other hand, isn’t merely empirical and rational. It’s visceral. When my eyes fall on Marxist bilge, my knee jerks almost all the way to my chin (or would do if a regrettably large stomach didn’t get in the way).
For all that, many bits of After Virtue I have struggled my way through appeal to me unreservedly. I share MacIntyre’s disdain for the Enlightenment, with its thinkers’ attempts to concoct an anthropocentric moral philosophy independent of Christian teleology.
Following Aquinas, MacIntyre traces the development of that teleology from Aristotle, showing how it produces a coherent, rational philosophy of morality and politics. He argues that the denial of that philosophy leads inexorably to the irrational nihilism of Nietzsche, Sartre or, in later times, Foucault and Derrida.
MacIntyre laudably translates his neo-Thomistic moral philosophy into modern political realities. He contrasts favourably Aristotle’s “goods of excellence” with the modern pursuit of “external goods”, such as money, status and power. MacIntyre strongly opposes Weber’s materialist, Protestant utilitarianism, and I applaud such thoughts whenever I can extricate them from his prose.
He is correct in arguing that commitment to free markets über alles will eventually replace traditional localism with rampant centralism, destroying local communities with their old-fashioned virtues. Where I think MacIntyre goes wrong is in co-opting Marx to his cause.
Marx criticised free markets (‘capitalism’ was the term he used) not because they threatened local communities but because they threatened the power of Marxist cannibals. If MacIntyre’s thought hadn’t been tainted by vestiges of his Marxism, he would have instead followed more closely the nuanced dialectic of many serious theologians who talked about riches.
Including St Thomas Aquinas: “The perfection of the Christian life does not consist essentially in voluntary poverty, though that is a tool of perfection in life. There is not necessarily greater perfection where there is greater poverty; and indeed the highest perfection is sometimes wedded to great wealth…”.
Note the qualifiers: “essentially”, “not necessarily”, “sometimes”. St Thomas wasn’t issuing a licence to Weberian acquisitiveness. He wasn’t giving the same “enrichissez-vous” advice the French statesman François Guizot (d. 1874) offered those who objected to property limitations on franchise.
Aquinas was expressing the fundamental Christian view on pursuing wealth: Go on then, if you absolutely must. But do remember what comes first. Jesus, after all, only said man shall not live by bread alone, not that man shall live by no bread at all. But he also said that his kingdom was not of this world, leaving his listeners in no doubt that it was higher than this world.
Addressing seven centuries after Aquinas a world that no longer could be presumed to put God first, Pope John Paul II said essentially the same thing as did Jesus and then Aquinas: “It is necessary to create lifestyles in which the quest for truth, beauty, goodness and communion with others for the sake of common growth are the factors which determine consumer choices, savings and investments.”
The language is modern; the message is two thousand years old. It’s based on the Christian balance between the two planes, physical and metaphysical, reflecting the two natures of Christ: God and man. The Pope’s reference to the unity of truth, beauty and goodness, by the way, comes straight out of Aristotle’s teachings on the ‘transcendentals’.
Every Christian thinker must be wary of the excesses of dog-eat-dog free markets, but not of free markets in se. The alternative to them is Marxist tyranny, with books such as After Virtue thrown into the bonfire of goodness.
I’ll probably give After Virtue another go, but not soon. It’ll take me a while to catch my breath. Going back to Etienne Gilson’s books will help, by reminding me how lucidly Thomist philosophy can be enunciated. I can almost follow his French better than MacIntyre’s English.