“The beauty of the soul shines out when a man bears with composure one heavy mischance after another, not because he does not feel them, but because he is a man of high and heroic temper.”
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics
My copy of Nicomachean Ethics is old and secondhand—its margins filled with the earnest pencil marks of whoever owned it before me. I like to imagine them reading with the same mix of awe and slight panic I did the first time through. (You know the feeling: I’m following this… I think…)
Still, Aristotle has this unnerving way of making you feel as though he’s reading your thoughts, not the other way around. It’s no wonder Winston Churchill once returned the book to a friend and remarked that it was all very interesting, “but he had already thought most of it out himself.” A very Churchillian thing to say—and precisely the sort of confident humility Aristotle might have called halfway to virtue.
Aristotle moves through the moral virtues one by one—patience, courage, generosity, temperance—with the calm precision of a watchmaker (or a surgeon, depending on the section). Then comes magnanimity, that elusive “greatness of soul.” This, he says, is the virtue of knowing what one is worth—not too much, not too little, but exactly enough to act nobly. It’s an almost impossible balance, like holding your chin high without ever looking down your nose.
And yet, Aristotle’s magnanimous man sounds suspiciously close to Dante’s proud sinners or the biblical warning against the haughty heart. Pride, it seems, is a virtue in one light and a vice in another—which, if you ask me, makes the moral life feel less like a rulebook and more like walking a tightrope in the dark.
“Virtue lies in our power, and similarly so does vice; because where it is in our power to act, it is also in our power not to act…”
As I read, I can’t help but hear the echo of Mere Christianity. The kinship between philosophy and faith has always been there, but Lewis and Aristotle share a particular knack for saying something simple that rearranges your soul. If you’re new to ethics or philosophy, I’d suggest starting with Lewis—think of him as Aristotle’s friendly British translator with tea and a sense of humor—before wading into the Greek depths.
“A man without regrets cannot be cured.”
I’ve told friends this before, and I’ll say it here again: second only to the Bible, I believe Nicomachean Ethics is the most important book ever written. (Yes, I said it. Hold your tomatoes!) It shaped St. Thomas Aquinas—the Church Father and my own patron saint—who spent his life weaving Aristotle’s reason into the fabric of Christian theology. Aquinas even wrote that Aristotle had “said everything on ethics that needed to be said.” Not bad for a pre-Christian philosopher, wouldn’t you say?
“Shall we not, like archers who have a mark to aim at, be more likely to hit upon what is right?”
Though separated from us by two millennia, Aristotle remains startlingly alive. His words ask us to pause, to think, and to aim higher. So, if you haven’t yet read Nicomachean Ethics, consider this your sign.
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