This past week, dear reader, you may have noticed the kerfuffle in the news about Simone Biles, especially if you’ve been following the Tokyo Olympics. Biles, a many-time national and world champion gymnast from Columbus, Ohio, has set enough new marks of excellence for American gymnasts that some pre-Olympics commentary mentioned her as the greatest gymnast of all time.[1]

Nevertheless, this past Tuesday Biles withdrew from the Olympic team gymnastics final competition. Over the remainder of last week, she proceeded further to withdraw from finals for individual events including vault, all-around, and uneven bars. Biles cited a few reasons for her decisions to withdraw, beginning with mental health and moving on to explain “the twisties,” or “loss of air awareness,” posting videos to back up her explanation of her struggles.[2]

Simone Biles’s choices stirred some Internet controversy between commentators praising and criticizing her. While I have heard some criticism expressed in-person, the discussions that I noted in major forums, such as Facebook and the New York Times, have been overwhelmingly supportive of Biles. But more than support, one descriptor stood out because of repeated use: brave. According to her backers in the public square, Biles was brave because she was “willing to just say, ‘I’m not going to do it today.’”[3] Similarly, another commentator stressed Biles’ bravery when praising her decision to say, “’Wait, my mental health is important and I can’t go on.’”[4] Notably, both statements connect bravery to abandoning or stopping something in process, leaving something unfinished.

 If we accept these accounts of Biles’s decision, it would be inaccurate to call them brave.

 While Simone Biles’s decision to compete or not compete in a series of Olympic gymnastics finals is likely of relatively minor importance for our society in the long-run, the issues she stirred up have thankfully helped to expose our miserably muddled moral vocabulary.

That’s where Alasdair MacIntyre fits into the picture. A now ninety-two-year-old philosopher, MacIntyre wrote a widely influential book, After Virtue, that attempts to establish and grapple with the problem I circled around above. To summarize one of the work’s numerous contributions, he stated that “the language of morality passed from a state of order to a state of disorder” over a period of years and philosophical developments stretching roughly from Kant forward.[5]

 This disorder is evidenced in the discussion of Biles and bravery above. The Merriam-Webster definition of bravery largely redirects to the definition of courage. That definition, more helpfully, establishes courage as “mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.”[6] The definition of venture, reinforcing the definition of courage, is given as “to proceed especially in the face of danger,” “to expose to hazard,” and “to undertake the risks and dangers of.”[7] Moving from nouns to adjectives, one synonym of “brave” among many, dauntless, is defined as “incapable of being intimidated or subdued.”[8]

Striking in their uniformity, Merriam-Webster’s definitions strongly indicate that bravery means anything but “abandoning or stopping something in process, leaving something unfinished,” which is my summary of Biles’s supporters’ assertions above. Rather, the dictionary definitions of bravery seem to be stressing that bravery means accepting and proceeding in the face of danger, setting yourself toward danger, or, as C.S. Lewis put it, bravery, or fortitude, both “faces danger” and “’sticks it’ under pain.”[9]

How could pro-Biles commentators get bravery so wrong? How could they identify something as bravery that they describe in terms almost directly opposed to that virtue? As MacIntyre noted back in the 1970s and 1980s, our language of morality is hopelessly wrecked.

Now you might be thinking at this point, “why the long disquisition, the unrequested rabbit trail on last week’s stale news?” The answer is that I find quite convincing MacIntyre’s argument that a disordered moral language lies behind the following current condition:

“The most striking feature of contemporary moral utterance is that so much of it is used to express disagreements; and the most striking feature of the debates in which these disagreements are expressed is their interminable character. I do not mean by this just that such debates go on and on and on – although they do – but also that they apparently can find no terminus.”[10]

I will spare you MacIntyre’s book-length argument on these points – not because it won’t benefit you, but rather because I don’t want to steal from you the delights and joys of self-discovery.[11] Instead, I would like to share with you a few thoughts on why our disordered moral language and interminable moral debates should matter to you.

First, according to the believer MacIntyre, the movement from an ordered moral language to a disordered one involved a movement from a moral language significantly influenced by Christian scripture (along with Aristotle) to one dominated by Emotivism, the Enlightenment, and Nietzsche.[12] To attempt to recover an orderly moral vocabulary in your daily life is not to pursue some abstract philosophical goal, but to meditate on God’s Word and to apply it. For the value of these practices, we have strong Scriptural warrant. Engaging with MacIntyre’s faith-guided contributions then should help you see your own limitations and errors more clearly, while driving you to the Word.

Second, while we’re on the subject of your limitations and errors, dear reader…well, I don’t intend to belabor the point, but when MacIntyre mentioned the deeply flawed “contemporary moral utterance” above, he wasn’t referring simply to those folks you like to critique and oppose, possibly including Marxists, postmodernists, Democrats, and your neighborhood crank. He was also thinking of you, your teachers, your mentors, your colleagues, your favorite celebrities, the journalists you read, the films you watch, your church’s members, your parents, your grandparents, your children, and your grandchildren, if you be so blessed and endowed.

C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, considered the virtues to be “pivotal” and foundational to Christian morality, a “very good” way of understanding and expressing what Christianity teaches about how humans ought to live.[13] Presently, I find very little discussions of the virtues among believers, let alone the wider culture. I myself came across the idea of cardinal virtues for the first time as a teen through Lewis, despite their centuries-long importance to Christian thought.[14] Interested in avoiding being conformed to the world? Try to develop a thorough understanding of the virtues, cardinal and theological, rooted in Biblical teaching on each of them, which is not lacking. Of course, I include myself in this admonition. I’m sure many of you are much further along than I am when it comes to understanding and practicing the virtues, but I’m confident that there’s progress for each of us to make.

Third and finally, gaining and applying an understanding the virtues will give you a new tool enabling you to engage in the public square.[15] Let’s return to Simone Biles for a moment. You might assume that because I categorically denied earlier that Biles’s actions were brave, I also deny that they were virtuous. In that defensible assumption, you would be mistaken. Because Biles’s defenders assumedly know that bravery is almost universally considered positive – like few other qualities today except perhaps love – they felt confident that it was the appropriate way to praise and defend the uniquely accomplished gymnast. They would win friends without making enemies by picking bravery, despite that virtue’s decided unsuitability to the facts of Biles’s decisions. Her defenders, and perhaps some of us as well, make a habit of ignoring several virtues, one of which is prudence, a quality that Lewis defines as “taking the trouble to think out what you are doing and what is likely to come of it.”[16]

It seems to me that Biles, on her own account of her decision-making process, chose to withdraw from several finals on prudential grounds. If true, that would be virtuous, not vicious. Alternatively, and more broadly, Biles’s decision seems to me to involve to some extent the more classical Greek ideal of self-knowledge.[17] She came to a clear understanding of herself and her situation and acted accordingly. Understanding, not fear, governed her choices. Thus, a Macintyre-informed, Lewis-informed, faith-informed understanding of the virtues can vindicate Biles while clarifying and enabling a conversation that strikes against non-Christian public discourse. The virtues can help us escape the dead ends of Internet controversies for productive, unique interactions that may proceed in ways conducive to sharing Scripture and the Gospel.

Well, I’ve done my best to convince you, and it has taken quite long enough to come this far.[18] If you want an initial step toward thinking clearly about the virtues that doesn’t require buying a book, see the recent discussion of humility and justice here on Bereans at the Gate by Dr. Emily Ferkaluk. I hope that thinking through the virtues in an extended fashion will enable you to recognize and repel the gross errors of our present moral vocabulary. May you move into a deeper, more richly Biblically-informed understanding of how to live that stands outside and against the dominant thought-currents of our present stone age of the soul.

Perhaps a closing word from MacIntyre, a better writer than I, is in order, coming from the final page and paragraph of After Virtue. “What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.”

[1] Simone Biles (teamusa.org)

[2] Simone Biles update: Won’t compete in floor exercise at 2021 Olympics (usatoday.com)

[3] Aly Raisman Says Simone Biles Showed Bravery by Withdrawing from Olympic Final | Bleacher Report | Latest News, Videos and Highlights

[4] I was getting ready for work when NBC… – Backwards N High Heels | Facebook

[5] Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, 2^nd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984).

[6] Courage | Definition of Courage by Merriam-Webster

[7] Venture | Definition of Venture by Merriam-Webster

[8] Dauntless | Definition of Dauntless by Merriam-Webster

[9] C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2000), 79.

[10] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 6.

[11] After Virtue can be purchased relatively cheaply online. Get thee hence. After finishing this blog post of course.

[12] MacIntyre, After Virtue, 121, 165-180. See the entire book for the connections involving Emotivism, the Enlightenment, and Nietzsche.

[13] Lewis, Mere Christianity, 76-77, 82.

[14] Again, see MacIntyre on this point.

[15] I ignore here the potential benefit to your individual self and soul by simply being aligned with right and against wrong. You may not yet agree that MacIntyre’s account or mine are correct, but if you do, I suggest that the following passage from Eric Voegelin may indicate some of the benefits that will accrue to you by engaging MacIntyre’s account of the virtues. “The philosopher is compactly the man who resists the sophist; the man who attempts to develop right order in his soul through resistance to the diseased soul of the sophist; the man who can evoke a paradigm of right social order in the image of his well-ordered soul, in opposition to the disorder of society that reflects the disorder of the sophist’s soul; the man who develops the conceptual instruments for the diagnosis of health and disease in the soul; the man who develops the criteria of right order, relying on the divine measure to which his soul is attuned; the man who, as a consequence, becomes a philosopher in the narrower sense of the thinker who advances propositions concerning right order in the soul and society, claiming for them the objectivity of episteme, of science – a claim that is bitterly disputed by the sophist whose soul is attuned to the opinion of society.” Eric Voegelin, Order and History, Volume 3: Plato and Aristotle, The Collected Works of Eric Voegelin, vol. 16 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2000), 123.

[16] Lewis, Mere Christianity, 77. I should note here that while I don’t believe Biles’s decisions in this particular case can be attributed to bravery, that does not mean that I deny her bravery in general. Given that she has persevered through significant dangers and difficulties to become the Olympian, champion, and gymnast that she is today, it is likely that Biles is a brave person. Being brave does not mean that every decision you make is ruled by bravery alone, but that you gain “a certain quality of character.” Lewis, Mere Christianity, 79-81. Living a virtuous life involves practicing several virtues, rather than just using one or two to guide your decisions in certain moments.

[17] A recent scholar has defined self-knowledge in part as follows: “the making of oneself into the right sort of thing, namely a thing that happens to be susceptible or obedient to knowledge.” Christopher Moore, Socrates and self-knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 5.

[18] I can only plead your indulgence on the length of this post by noting how long it’s been since I’ve contributed to Bereans at the Gate: nearly eight months! This long piece may begin to make up for a far longer absence.