What is Virtue

Thinking about the historical development of the term virtue made me realize something about virtue sets.

Think about the scripture where the woman touches Jesus’ hem and “the virtue went out of him.”  It wasn’t His righteousness that fled.  It was some inner power.

Or think about the phrase that is a holdover from an older English where we talk about “the virtues of a course of action.”  We don’t say that because we are evaluating its morality.  We just mean the benefits of the course of action.  And of course virtue as everyone knows comes from the Latin “virtus” which just meant qualities that were good to have in a man, whether they were chosen or not.

With our emphasis on free agency, we put a strong emphasis on choice and those “virtues”–old sense–that are freely chosen, i.e., also virtues in the modern sense.    But even there the ultimate goal of a choosing a virtue is that it becomes automatic, written on the fleshy tablets of the heart, no longer something chosen and now just a good quality.

And lately we have been recovering the full extent of the Atonement.  It applies not just to sins but to flaws, imperfections, struggles, obstacles.  There is no hard and fast dividing line between virtue (new sense) and virtue (old sense).

That is why you can have a virtue set using virtue (old sense).