Virtue, even attempted virtue, brings light; indulgence brings fog.
C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity
I studied under Byron Bitar at Geneva College. I still have my copy of his ethics textbook, and when I first read it, the following sentence changed my life.
People’s lives come to ruin not because they pursue intrinsically evil states, but because they prize lower goods to the neglect of higher goods.
With one sentence, Byron baptized my moral imagination.
I’m a twin, but my personality is that of a firstborn son. By that I mean I have what seems to be a common trait for many firstborn children: an innate sense of justice. I was also raised in a Christian home, so I had an early exposure to the scriptures, which taught me right and wrong. But until I met Byron, I lacked a way to think, to imagine, and to reason morally. Byron helped me to think ethically and to know why we should prize the higher goods, and God as the highest good.
My copy of his textbook still carries my highlighting through the passages on the scale of value, and beside one particular paragraph there is a note that reads “use in Thesis?” I did use it. Some years later, when I wrote my master’s thesis on Platonic and New Testament ethics, the whole first chapter was built from Byron’s book, and I began it this way:
Ethics is not a new discipline; in fact it is ancient. Over thousands of years serious moral thinkers have established principles that have given rise to a classical tradition of ethical thought. The writings of the Old and New Testaments have helped to establish the basis for this tradition, as well as the Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle. There have been many who have followed in and contributed to the classical tradition, great moral thinkers such as Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Immanuel Kant, and C. S. Lewis.
That is Byron’s preface in my words, and it is where his teaching on moral reasoning began. Good and evil, right and wrong, are terms of value. The problem for most people is not that they prize evil; most people instinctively avoid it. Problems arise when people prize lesser goods over greater ones. Classical ethical wisdom teaches a person what is morally good and how to evaluate multiple goods so that one can champion the greater goods and express moral goodness. Within a multiplicity of goods, it also teaches how one properly ranks them from least to greatest on a scale of value, and with a proper ranking, a person can then know what is worth pursuing as an end. The result is a life not in ruin but one that expresses moral goodness. According to scripture, when Eve looked at the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, she saw that it was good for food, it was a delight to the eyes, and it was to be desired to make one wise. So Eve took of its fruit and ate, and she also gave some to her husband who was with her, and he ate. The tree was good, but it was not as good as God’s command. Adam and Eve, and all humanity after them, came to ruin because they chose a lesser good.
Byron organized his moral teaching into four fundamental areas of ethics: natural value, action value, responsibility, and character value. Those four domains are the framework of his book. Natural value judges the value of things or individuals, humans, animals, plants, and inanimate objects, as well as states of individuals such as pleasure, pain, beauty, ugliness, and knowledge. Action value judges actions to be right or wrong, moral or immoral. Responsibility and culpability judge whether the agent of an action deserves praise or is liable for punishment. Character value is concerned with the regular moral behavior of agents. The goal of ethics is to train humans to consistently perform right actions, that is to say, to develop good character or habits that produce good moral behavior. These character traits are called moral virtues.
The word virtue is at the center of the book and was at the center of Byron’s life. The American Heritage Dictionary defines virtue first as “moral excellence and righteousness; goodness.” This is probably the most popular misunderstanding of virtue. Virtue is excellence, but to say that virtue is moral excellence does not adequately define virtue itself. The fourth definition from the dictionary describes virtue as “effective force or power; ability to produce a definite result.” This is closer to what Byron taught.
Etymologically, the English term “virtue” is derived from the Latin virtus, meaning “strength.” In the Greek tradition, the word is aretē, which means excellence, primarily in the area of physical strength. Plato and Aristotle used aretē in their description of skill, a quality that allowed a person to function well and perform effectively. Byron taught within that tradition. A virtue, in his definition, is a skill that accomplishes two things: it perfects a power so that an individual is in shape, and it enables the individual to perform an activity with excellence time after time. We call an individual who is born with a high degree of skill a virtuoso. An example of an artistic virtuoso is Mozart, in science Einstein, in ethics John the Baptist.
Moral virtue produces good character, and the last section of Byron’s book is about how it is formed. A Christian reader might rightly ask how the life of virtue is connected to the Christian life. Byron answers this question directly.
The end of Christ’s ministry was not and is not that humans be forgiven of their sins. It would be a nightmare to forgive humans and leave them with immoral characters. Forgiveness was and is only a means. The end is the transformation of bad character into good character, the nurture of moral virtue in the lives of humans, the perfection of human powers and abilities in holy habits and skills. The ultimate bond with God is good character, the love of holiness in God, self, and others. In the end, there is no friendship with God, no intimacy with God, without a holy character.
A life of virtue is available to us because of God’s gracious action toward us, that we might pursue God and reflect his holy character. Virtue acquisition and the expression of virtue belong within the theological doctrines of both justification and sanctification. My own interest in Christian formation began during my college years, in Byron’s classroom, where I seriously considered the matter of virtue in the Christian life and how Christ shapes the life of a Christian. That interest has not waned. When I later wrote a doctoral project on how a congregation forms Christian character, I found I was still working with Byron’s virtue ethic. Character formation is a part of sanctification, and sanctification is ethical in nature and addresses moral education. Byron’s chapter on how virtue is cultivated, through models and stories, praise and discipline, study, and a personal relationship with God, remained the most practical thing I had read on the subject for a church.
Why does any of this matter now? James Davison Hunter, in The Death of Character, has summarized the cause of death for moral education in America: “while we desperately want the flower of morality to bloom and multiply, we have, at the same time, pulled the plant up out from the soil that sustains it.” In brief, America wants moral education but is unwilling to seek it under the conditions in which it thrives. Byron understood those conditions and taught them. Scripture holds that the revelation of God is the highest source of truth, especially for the classical ethical tradition; but within the classical tradition there is the recognition that revelation must be engaged through sound moral reasoning. Revelation comes from Scripture and provides a sure foundation. Practical wisdom about moral actions is informed by great ethical minds such as Plato and helps to provide for us a method of analysis. By employing both, an individual may receive a more complete education in ethics. That is what Byron’s book is.
Oliver O’Donovan’s The Disappearance of Ethics (Eerdmans, 2024) argues that ethics has vanished from the modern mind and heart, not because morals loosened but because moral thought lost its object, the good; its frontier, time; and its agent, the person. Byron’s book addresses all three. It opens with natural value, the good as something real to be known and ranked; it treats responsibility as the accounting a person gives for a whole life; and it ends, as all his books end, with the horizon of death and what lies past it. O’Donovan offers this sobering warning: “Morality unsupported by argument loses its authority; moral argument without sufficient base in reasoned reflection loses its conviction. Ethics defends the reflection that makes moral reasoning fruitful and moral practice credible. A society without Ethics is exposed by the poverty of its moral vocabulary and the rigidity of its moral arguments to the destructive forces of conflict and loss of tradition.”
The study of Christian virtue contributes to the formation of Christ in the lives of believers. The Apostle Peter wrote, “For this very reason, make every effort to supplement your faith with virtue” (2 Peter 1:5). The church has a responsibility to teach ethics, to encourage virtue, and to form Christians in the image of Christ. The mission of the church must include the burden of the Apostle Paul, which he expressed in Galatians 4:19: “My little children, with whom I am in continual travail until Christ be formed in you.” Byron’s book helps us meet this responsibility. I have now taught from it twice over at Beverly Heights: in 2022 as the foundation of an adult class called Called to Virtue, and today as the basis of the curriculum in our Academy’s Symposium class.
That class is, in many ways, why I am writing this. Byron’s book has been out of print for years, and my students read excerpts from photocopies. It deserves better, and so do they.
In the last chapter of Our Sunshine, Byron wrote, “Christianity is the practice of living. Christianity is also the practice of dying.” At his funeral, his colleague Dr. Robert Frazier said that Byron was the epitome of Christian virtue. He was a teacher, the best I have ever had.