Virtue is worth thinking about. We should think, carefully, about the kind of person we want to be and the kind of habits we want to develop. In The Road to Character, Brooks asks these questions of us, rightly urging us to be concerned with developing an inner moral life of virtue and integrity. Unfortunately, his self-focused attitude toward morality leaves little room for grace for the morally weak — which is all of us.
When asked directly about the relation of grace and individual agency, at a recent Trinity Forum event, Brooks confessed that he simply didn’t know — that he had no idea which of the two should take precedence.
I don’t know Brooks’ personal faith, nor do I intend to cast aspersions on his morality. Still, he panders to all of my worst inclinations in writing The Road to Character as a stoic moral theology, with only slight glimmers of grace to lighten the way. Brooks holds up several vastly different exemplars of a moral life, from Montaigne to Eisenhower, who are united in a certain integrity and humility — an unwillingness to be governed by circumstances that are outside of our control, while focusing on the things that we can.
Brooks reduces God to being a helper needed by some, while others are perfectly capable of struggling through their moral issues alone. To Brooks, a self-built journalist should be imitated as much as a grace-oriented social worker, or a novelist who was motivated by adulterous love as much as a bishop who was driven by love for God. In his moral universe, there are many ways of developing yourself. The better ones focus on building virtues rather than a resume, but all provide pathways for individual development.
Morality doesn’t work that way, as much as I would like it to. It’s easier for me to believe that through my own hard work I can develop my morality and build my character into becoming the person I want to be — but that is fundamentally not true. Without a bedrock of grace none of us can make ourselves good people. Pretending otherwise is merely a way of slowly killing ourselves through conformity to a lifeless law.
Complicating the stoic picture that Brooks paints of the moral life is his depiction of Augustine’s moral struggle. He describes this sensitively, mirroring the way in which Augustine himself describes his life in The Confessions. This is only strange because Augustine reads his own moral history, mostly, as a move away from self-dependence into reliance on God’s grace.
Because Brooks respects Augustine, he spends a few pages describing his "renunciation of the whole ethos of self-cultivation" (203) because of the sacrifice of Jesus. He quotes Tim Keller and Christian theologians who give a clear and irenic declaration of God’s grace and how that properly humbles us and makes us reliant on God for cultivation of virtue.
And then Brooks turns and, with the same sympathy, describes Samuel Johnson’s moral life of striving to improve himself without anyone’s help — a life diametrically opposed to Augustine’s ideals. Brooks holds this tension in, without judging between the styles — or even recognizing the tension.
We do need a revival of virtue in our society today. But this needs to be rooted in realizing our inability to achieve character — what Brooks calls "Adam II" virtues — ourselves. Without looking outside of ourselves — particularly, I believe, to Jesus — we can’t break the cycle of addiction to worldly approval.
Without this, I can’t see any kind of moral repentance having true potential to make permanent change. We can keep preaching the value of humility but, I believe, without the example of Jesus we can’t reach it.
Brooks encourages us to work hard at self-cultivation in The Road to Character. This is a perfectly valid call to make, but it isn’t healthy on its own. Without a balancing emphasis on grace, it devolves into legalism.
If we focus too much on self-cultivation, even of good things, we put ourselves in danger. The true road to character lies through God’s grace — expressed, I believe, in the cross of Jesus — and not through our own hard work.
The Road to Character, out April 2015, is available from Amazon.
Greg Williams is Communications Assistant for Sojourners.
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