In his book “After You Believe” N. T. Wright describes the character-culture into which Jesus and Paul entered. It was dominated by Aristotle “about 350 years before the time of Jesus, who developed the threefold pattern of character transformation. As noted earlier, there is first the “goal,” the telos, the ultimate thing we’re aiming at; there are then the steps you take toward that goal, the “strengths” of character which will enable you to arrive at that goal; and there is the process of moral training by which these “strengths” turn into habits, become second nature.”
Thus, it was common to believe the following:
Question-What is the goal of human life? Answer-Happiness.
Question-What enables you to arrive at that goal? Answer-Character/Virtue.
Question-What enables you to develop character/virtue? Answer-Practice/Training.
The Goal
N. T. Wright states that “For Aristotle, the goal was the ideal of a fully flourishing human being…This particular goal, for which Aristotle used the word eudaimonia, is sometimes called “happiness,” but Aristotle meant it in a technical sense that is actually closer to our idea of “flourishing.”“
The Steps Toward the Goal
N. T. Wright argues that “The steps toward that goal, for Aristotle and his followers, were the strengths of character which, when developed, contributed toward the gradual making of a flourishing human being…Aristotle’s word for such a strength was aret; later Latin writers used the word virtus, from which of course we get “virtue.”…For Aristotle—and for the tradition which developed after him and formed the world of moral discourse at the time when early Christianity was growing, spreading, and teaching a new way of life—there were four principal virtues: courage, justice, prudence, and temperance…That is why those four are often called the “cardinal virtues”: cardo in Latin means “hinge”…The “cardinal virtues” are not the only virtues. But, Aristotle proposed, they are the central ones, and all the others depend on them.”
The Process
Finally, N. T. Wright shows that “The way to attain eudaimonia, Aristotle thought, was by practicing these strengths, just as a soccer player undergoes training for all the different muscles of the body and practices all the various ball skills that will be needed.”
Wright shows that while Jesus and Paul were familiar with with this belief system, and even spoke using its categories, the Christian faith offered a radical alternative: “Aristotle glimpsed a goal of human flourishing; so did Jesus, Paul, and the rest. But Jesus’s vision of that goal was larger and richer, taking in the whole world, and putting humans not as lonely individuals developing their own moral status but as glad citizens of God’s coming kingdom. Aristotle saw that to get to the goal of a genuinely human life one should develop the moral strengths he called virtues. Jesus and his first followers, not least Paul, said something similar. But their vision of the moral strengths, corresponding to their different vision of the goal, highlighted qualities Aristotle didn’t rate highly (love, kindness, forgiveness, and so on) and included at least one—humility—for which the ancient pagan world (and for that matter the modern pagan world) had no use at all…Aristotle saw that the ultimate aim was to become the kind of character who would be able to act in the right way automatically, by the force of long training of habit. Jesus and Paul agreed; but they proposed a very different way by which the relevant habits were to be learned and practiced.”
