The Virtue Program

Virtue is key to OLPA's culture and curricula. The Academy's virtue program is based on resources provided by the Norbertine Evermode Institute in Springfield, Illinois, the Dominican House of Studies in Washington D.C., and the Dominican Sisters of Mary Mother of The Eucharist in Ann Arbor, Michigan. 

Students are encouraged to dispose themselves to grow in God's grace of virtue through prayer, and to read and write about the virtuous lives of the Saints for inspiration. 

Students are exposed to writings from St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica as they grow in knowledge and understanding of what the Church teaches on virtue.

St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Theologica on Virtue

Virtue (Aquinas 101) - Fr. Thomas Petri, O.P.

There are so many things that are good in this world, that raise up our passions of joy and delight and love. There are also a lot of things that we're afraid of that cause us fear or anger. It's because there are so many things, and for each of us, many of these things are different. It's because we are malleable that for St. Thomas we can grow in habit and disposition. That each of us can grow in virtue and even vice.

St. Thomas follows St. Augustine who says that virtue is a good quality of the mind

by which we live righteously of which no one can make bad use, which God works in us and without us. Virtue lives in the human soul, so to speak. It lives in the mind and in the will, in our thinking and in our choosing.

But there's also a virtue in our passions because our passions, the animal part of us--our emotions, our loves, our joys, our fears, our angers--even these are part of the human person, a part of us. They participate in our reason.

Virtue confers on us when we have it not only the ability to think rightly about what

we should do, but actually to do it. It's one thing to know the right thing to do. It's another thing to do it and to do it well. That's what virtue gives.

St. Thomas says that there are intellectual virtues and there are moral virtues.

Moral Virtue

For St. Thomas moral virtue is what we most need in this life. Moral virtue disposes us to act well and it requires more than simply knowledge. It requires more than simply knowing what the right thing and the good thing to do is. Because for instance, we have to have our passions in line. Our passions have to come along. If we know the right thing to do, but we're scared to do it, we won't do it. If we know the right thing to do, and we do it with excessive anger, we won't do it morally.

Moral virtue moderates our passions, moderates our passions so that we can act according to reason for the true good. Moral virtue doesn't squelch our passion. It doesn't subdue our passion or destroy our passion.

St. Thomas is very much not a Stoic. Passions are good for St. Thomas. It's important that we feel and feel deeply. In fact, for St. Thomas, the more virtuous a person is, the more they feel and the more they feel rightly because the virtuous person is not afraid of his or her feelings. She's not afraid that her feelings are going to carry her off and make her do things that she would rather not do.

The virtuous person knows the right thing to do, does it, does it with joy, and does it with feeling and conviction. The more perfect virtue is in fact the more passionate the person becomes.

For St. Thomas, there are four principle moral virtues which he borrows from Cicero.

Prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. (We call it courage.)

Justice

St. Thomas says that justice is the disposition, the will to give others what is their do, what is coming to them. And that's true whether we're talking about a criminal getting his just deserts or giving our parents what is their due because they brought us into existence. They gave us life and raised us. To give them the respect that is their due.

Fortitude

Fortitude is the virtue that resolves to achieve a good, difficult to obtain and prevents us from doing what is unreasonable to avoid evil. Think of courage as that virtue which you need to get the good things in your life. The courage it takes for a man to ask a woman to marry him, the courage it takes for a soldier to jump into a foxhole, the courage it takes to get a college degree or to raise a child to even believe that you can raise a child. All of this is the virtue of courage. The virtue of courage keeps us from shrinking away against great difficulty, but it also keeps us from a certain audacity that would rush in, a certain foolishness. The virtue of courage is right in the middle. It's right between being a coward on one side or being a fool on the other. It's a daily virtue. It's a virtue that we all need. It's not just for the soldier on the battlefield, it's for the mother and the father. It's for the student, it's for the child. It's for all of us who interact with each other on a daily basis. All of us who are pursuing such good things in our lives.

Temperance

Temperance is also a virtue that we need. Because temperance moderates all of those sense pleasures that we experience. Pleasures of the flesh, pleasures of food, pleasures of drink, all of which can be good and indeed holy when experienced in accord with reason. The virtue of temperance is in the middle between intemperance, which is simply a pursuit of one pleasure after another, and insensibility, which is a sort of frigidity or an unwillingness to experience pleasure.

Prudence

The virtue of prudence is the most important moral virtue. It's the charioteer of virtue. It directs all the virtues. Prudence, St. Thomas says, is right reason about things to be done. It's prudence that determines what the courageous thing to do in this moment is. It's prudence that determines what the temperate thing to do and to enjoy in this moment is. It's prudence that says what the just thing to do in this moment is. It's prudence that tells all the virtues how to be themselves.

How do we become prudent?

Well, for St. Thomas, that's one of the points of the moral life. We become prudent by learning from our elders, from those who have lived life longer than us, who have had more time to make mistakes and to learn from their mistakes.

And so more time to grow in prudence. We become prudent by experience, by living life, by being self-reflective, by making choices and seeing how they've turned out and looking back and trying to figure out how we could've done that differently or how it might have gone better. How I could have worded what I needed to say in a better way.

We become prudent and moral by just being educated and taking counsel with those who we know are prudent, those who we have in our lives, who we trust to make good moral decisions.

The moral life is not something we engage alone. It's something we engage in community with those who raise us, those with whom we live, our friends, those we trust and respect.