At the time of writing this, I had just engaged with an interesting discussion on Twitter with an account known as BardVorpal, on the perception of virtuous heroes in fiction as being “unrealistic”.
Nowadays, we tend to look at virtue as a passive thing; avoiding doing anything “wrong” and being “nice” (by Crom, I hate that word!) and not causing offense. This is why virtuous heroes are perceived as “boring”. They have no teeth. I’ve come to believe that this is part of wokist effort to corrupt virtue and make it seem undesirable. We scoff at moral standards and high ideals and wonder why our culture is falling to pieces.
The fact of the matter is that being “nice” is not a virtue at all. It takes no courage to be “nice”. There is no risk involved.
This is not how the Ancient philosophers viewed virtue. To the ancients, virtue was an active, wild thing. It could be fierce, and frightening, but it was never viewed as boring. Virtues were viewed as manly attributes. Why, the very word “virtue” comes from the Latin word “vir” meaning “man”.
A virtuous man is not a man who simply avoids harming anyone - that is a coward. A virtuous man is a man who will put his life on the line for others. A virtuous man acts in the interest of justice - though that justice may be harsh on the evildoer.
One of my favorite movies is Pale Rider starring Clint Eastwood. Eastwood plays a traveling preacher, who arrives in a frontier mining town to minister to some prospectors. But this is no ordinary circuit rider; he is come as a minister of justice. You see, these prospectors are being harassed by a wealthy gold magnate, using his vast resources to oppress the miners. With nothing but his moral high ground and his two revolvers, the Preacher metes out frontier justice, even killing a corrupt US marshal and his deputies.
One modern viewer might think that this was immoral - killing so many men. But these were evil men, bent on doing violence to the weak. A virtuous man could not stand idly by and allow innocents to be harmed. A virtuous man would do anything in his power to stop that from happening, risking life and limb.
This is what makes truly virtuous characters interesting; often the outworking of virtue is not so obvious and clear cut as we would like to think. Often we have to wrestle with the consequences of our actions, or the actions of others.
But I think the main reason many moderns hate virtuous characters is because they represent an ideal to strive for. Modernists hate ideals, because it means that they have an objective standard. They know they can’t possibly meet that standard, so they try to tear it down, like they do with every other objective truth they hate.
The truth is that no one behaves in perfect accord with virtue. But that doesn’t mean that we should just do away with standards of behavior, or virtuous characters. We have to give ourselves grace when we don’t act in perfect accord with virtue, and return to the right path as soon as possible when we fall short. This is the difference between a virtuous person and an immoral person: “For a just man falleth seven times, and riseth up again: but the wicked shall fall into mischief.” (Proverbs 24:16)