Spiritual Traditions and the Virtues: Living Between Heaven and Earth. By Mark R. Wynn

Abstract

Professor Mark Wynn has developed his 2015 Wilde Lectures, retaining their accessible style, into this invitation to philosophers of religion, and many others, to reflect freshly on spiritual traditions. He offers to practitioners of a wide range of traditions a way of understanding the spiritual goods they cultivate, and to critics a way of appreciating these goods on the critics’ own terms. Wynn presents Aquinas’s concept of ‘infused moral virtues’ as an illuminating tool, partly by comparing his own broadly Thomist approach with a number of others. He rightly sees Aquinas’s account of the distinction between ‘acquired’ virtues—those Aristotle speaks of, developed by habituation—and ‘infused’—God-given—virtues, as an instance of how theological traditions fruitfully develop. Arguably, the concept of ‘infused moral virtue’ has been underused (Scotists reject it), and Wynn employs it creatively. It allows us to acknowledge the acquired virtues which promote the human good, and it bridges the gap between them and the ‘theological virtues’—faith, hope, and charity—which focus directly on God, who infuses them to enable our journey into him. The God-given forms of prudence, justice, courage, and temperance share a teleology with the theological virtues, but share a subject matter with their own acquired counterparts, empowering us to engage with the world in the light of our transcendent goal. Thomists currently debate the relationship between infused and acquired virtues, and Wynn gets it exactly right when he speaks of infused moral virtues ‘folding’ people’s ‘relations to creatures … into a God-directed teleology’ (p. 83; cf. pp. 69, 95, 186, and 224).