What is Virtue
President Nelson wants virtue to garnish our thoughts.
Blog Friend Marilyn has been doing a study of virtue and has found some interesting things. One that stood out is the dual meaning of virtue in the English language.
Mostly its used to refer to moral goods, but then you also see it used to refer to the properties of things.
Virtue — that substance or quality of physical bodies, by which they act and produce effects on other bodies
So we have scriptures about Christ’s healing where the “virtue” went out of him, or we can describe some effect happening by virtue of its cause.
It’s pretty easy to come up with a technical definition of love or glory, but these definitions don’t satisfy. The scriptures talk about them almost as if they were a substance, some kind of spirit fluid. Virtue seems the same.
sute
April 22, 2025
I’ll add, what does it mean to have virtue garnish our thoughts vs have virtuous thoughts. Are they the same?
I look at it as those things that occupy our thoughts ought to be enhanced with high moral standard.
You could also say, let virtue garnish thy actions unceasingly…
Eric
April 23, 2025
Ever since I took a Roman history class in college I’ve thought about virtue in the sense of its Latin predecessor, “virtus”: the attributes that made one manly.
From the earliest days of Rome’s history (long before the republic, let alone the empire) when the father of a family died, at the funeral his family and friends would take turns naming the virtus he had, such as courage, honesty, loyalty, etc.
Before then I had usually heard virtue treated as another word for chastity, but its meaning is so much more expansive than that.
Zen
May 1, 2025
A provocative question for the blog: What is more unvirtuous?
Someone who sleeps around and finally marries and tries to rear a family
OR
Someone who neither sleeps around, dates or marries at all, because they are focused on their career.
E.C.
May 1, 2025
@ Zen,
Dante would probably say that one suffers from a surfeit of false love, the other from a lack of love, and would conclude that since God is love, the excess is more virtuous than the lack.
Personally, I think either option is terrible, but at least the first tried to repent.
G.
May 1, 2025
What E.C. said, pretty clearly.
Marilyn
May 7, 2025
I thought it was super interesting how extensively and specifically the Catholics think about virtue. It’s a whole avenue of study for them and the virtues are categorized and classified. Then, of course, the power or “spirit fluid” angle is the most interesting one to me. But reading President Nelson’s talk and most other talks on virtue—it seemed to me that just substituting “righteousness” or “goodness” for virtue was perfectly adequate and didn’t change any meanings. So maybe the in-depth analysis isn’t really that fruitful??