Abstract
Alasdair MacIntyre’s declension narrative in After Virtue was both a blessing and a curse. The tale provided a historical frame and a diagnosis that resonated with a wide audience, but it came at the cost of an accurate portrayal of the late medieval and early modern virtue traditions. It is no accident that these two fields have subsequently suffered the most neglect and oversimplification while the vastly more attended ancient and Thomistic theories of virtue have greatly enriched our moral vocabulary. So the suspicion still lingers in classrooms and at conferences: do moderns, and in particular Protestants, really have a place at the table of virtue ethics? Aren’t virtuous habits and the doctrine of sola fide contradictory concepts? These are the motivating questions of Elizabeth Cochran’s Protestant Virtue and Stoic Ethics (p. vi).
The idea driving the book is that key Protestant thinkers—Luther, Calvin, and Edwards—map more comfortably onto Stoic than Aristotelian notions of virtue. Moreover, since Julia Annas’s The Morality of Happiness (Oxford University Press, 1993) did much to ‘de-modernize’ and restore the legitimacy of Stoic virtue theory, linking Protestantism with Stoicism might now make Protestants welcome at the virtue ethics table. To this end, Cochran characterizes her project as ‘constructive retrieval’ (p. vii), ‘moral bricolage’ (pp. 22–29), and ‘reception history’ (pp. 30–41), giving it ambitious goals that cause it to shift from a descriptive to a constructive mode in a hurried manner. Nevertheless, the book’s essence remains intriguing: a number of central Stoic commitments correspond directly with Protestant doctrine, chief among these being the all-or-nothing nature of faith as the singular good of virtuous living.
The first fifty pages unpack the neglect and recovery of the Stoics, the role of bricolage (with Aquinas as exemplar) for reception history, and overlapping themes of virtue. Chapter 2 introduces the Roman Stoics alongside three emphases they share with Protestant theology: virtue as a unified, singular, and transformative good; the dynamic relationship between a virtuous agent and providence; and the necessity of aligning emotions with a virtuous assent to providence. In chapter 3 Cochran shows, contra popular opinion, that the Protestant priority of faith over love is not a reductively intellectualist account of human agents, and that there is a reciprocity between faith and love. Faith orients the Christian—cognitively and morally—towards her Creator, and then expresses itself in an embodied practice of loving God and neighbor. In chapter 4 Cochran draws an interesting connection between the Protestant moment of justification and the Stoic understanding of virtue as a unity acquired all at once. The role of providence in Stoic and Protestant theories of moral agency is then contrasted in chapter 5. The accounts of divine and human agency provided by Luther, Calvin, and Edwards are certainly controversial, cutting against the grain of contemporary moral intuitions, and Cochran’s presentation of their potential contributions to the field is both charitable and critical. In her sixth chapter we find these three Protestants more comfortably amidst the larger Augustinian tradition in their affirmation of right emotions against Stoic apatheia, especially in the endorsement of grieving. Cochran then justifiably concludes her book with a definitive statement that, given the showcased affinities between Stoic and Protestant moral theories, ‘this Protestant ethic is in fact an ethic of virtue’ (p. 195). Rather than elaborating on each of these themes in greater detail, I will now focus on what I see to be the major contributions and drawbacks of Protestant Virtue.
First and foremost, the core of Cochran’s argument—that there is a structural similarity between the all-or-nothing Stoic theory of virtue and the transformational nature of Protestant faith—identifies a compelling point of contact between the two traditions. The Stoic theory of the unity of the virtues arises from the unity found in an agent’s practical wisdom or prudence, and this in turn manifests itself in a variety of forms in accordance with each situation. This conceptualization entails virtue acquisition via ‘a marked experience of transformation akin to a conversion’ (p. 60). This occurs through an assent to a divine providence that involves both a rational and a volitional (prohairesis) component (p. 72). Cochran is able to marshal an abundance of evidence showing similarity between Luther, Calvin, Edwards, and the Stoics on this point. Other Stoic commitments—to do with the relationship between divinity and humanity and the proper role of emotions (apatheia)—seem to provide less common ground for discussion with Protestantism. Cochran consequently approaches these topics with a critical eye for improving upon Protestant moral theory via creative appropriation of Stoic emphases. In my estimation chapters 2 and 3 are the best in the book since it is there that Cochran connects the Stoic sage with the Protestant saved by faith. She does an admirable job of disarming Luther’s and Edwards’s explicit reservations about classifying faith as a virtue, while also dismantling caricatures of a Protestant doctrine of faith that lacks love.
Second, Cochran demonstrates her great expertise on Edwards by showcasing a high level of interaction between Edwards and Stoicism throughout the book. This is especially true in the sixth chapter, where the fruits of her first book, Receptive Human Virtues: A New Reading of Jonathan Edwards’s Ethics (Penn State University Press, 2011) are put on display. But she also has an eye for zeroing in on acute points of Reformation controversy that have receded into the background for some Protestant ethicists. One is the proper relationship of faith to love, especially a love that requires reciprocal agency. Calvin’s and Luther’s rejection of the medieval axiom that demarcated the relationship between the theological virtues—‘fides caritate formata’—raises the question: do Protestants have an alternative model? Cochran’s exposition shows that Luther, Calvin, and Edwards can answer with a resounding ‘Yes’. Protestant Virtue might stimulate renewed examinations of that formula and new, more ecumenical pathways for virtue theorists.
However, the ambitious goals and mixed methods of Protestant Virtue produce indeterminate results. Moral bricolage clearly prevails over retrieval theology and reception history throughout the book. Cochran tends to focus on placing the Stoics in direct conversation with Luther, Calvin, and Edwards, excluding discussion of possible intermediaries, conceptual shifts, or historical context (sans, briefly, pp. 35-41). The direct interaction of competing ideas offers clarity and brevity, but it tends to forbid a robust reception history. When Cochran’s moral bricolage is paired with the thematic structure of the book, readers have the advantage of easily accessible citations for retrieving Protestant virtue, but this comes at the cost of many historical details that would have made her case far more persuasive.
The historical dilemma facing Cochran’s book is that of primary source selection. Although Luther, Calvin, and Edwards might appear to be uncontroversial representatives of Protestantism, their selection makes Cochran’s goal of vindicating Protestant ethics as an ethic of virtue more difficult and more indirect. On the one hand, Edwards is obviously the most ideal candidate since he wrote treatises on teleology, human volition and affections, along with a theory of virtue; but since his death and the dissolution of the New England Theology tradition there has been an interminable debate surrounding the orthodoxy of his thought and whether it deviated too far from his Protestant scholastic (or eclectic Aristotelian) inheritance (see Adriaan Neele, Before Jonathan Edwards: Sources of New England Theology, Oxford University Press, 2019). Edwards’s uniqueness thus prohibits him from being a normative standard for Protestantism on a par with Calvin and Luther. On the other hand, Calvin’s legal and humanistic training inclines him to recast traditional genres of scholastic discourse on virtue (e.g. summae, ‘sentences’, commentary, disputations) into the entirely different form of the Institutes. Linking Calvin explicitly with the virtue tradition thus becomes a strenuous exercise, and Cochran could have made a much stronger case by cross-referencing the Institutes with Calvin’s commentaries (especially on 1 Corinthians 13 and Galatians 5). Alternatively, the writings of Protestants trained in the scholastic method, such as Peter Martyr Vermigli, Girolamo Zanchi, and John Davenant, might have provided Cochran with more direct bricoleurs: the kind that wrote commentaries on Aristotle, revised Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae, and wrote extended treatments on the virtues interacting with a host of medieval theologians. Similar arguments could be put forward for preferring Philip Melanchthon’s Loci Communes and commentary on the Nicomachean Ethics over Luther’s lectures and sermons.
In other words, Cochran’s project is trapped in a dilemma: Calvin and Luther are universally recognized representatives of Protestantism but they lack the type of sustained engagement in virtue discourse that Edwards offers, and, while Edwards’s credentials as a virtue theorist are irreproachable, his legacy and representative status are highly contested. To her credit, Cochran does recognize that the next step in Protestant virtue ethics is ‘to attend to a broader range of historical sources than this text was able to consider’ (p. 196), but she neither names any particular theologians for this task nor reveals that there is indeed an abundance of Protestant ethics manuals and textbooks waiting to be brought into contemporary virtue theory (see Sebastian Rehnman, ‘Virtue and Grace’, Studies in Christian Ethics 25.4 (2012), pp. 473–93; Joseph Freedman, Philosophy and the Arts in Central Europe, 1550–1700, Routledge, 1999). I presume that lesser-known theologians would fail to meet Cochran’s desire for adequate representatives of the Protestant tradition and therefore she simply made do with the famous trio—and her bricolage between Luther, Calvin, Edwards, and the Stoics does advance the conversation about as far as it can go within her own methodological limits.
Why fixate on the need for a more thorough reception history? It seems that Cochran and others have accepted the MacIntyrean challenge—one renewed by Brad Gregory—that the burden of proof that virtue and Protestantism are not essentially inimical to each other lies upon contemporary Protestant virtue theorists. This charge is both theological and historical and needs to be answered accordingly. Theologically, Stanley Hauerwas, Robert Adams, and others have already showcased the compatibility of Protestantism and virtue theory, yet the critique persists. Historically, Cochran has the right intuition to return to the sources for vindication, but her selection of Luther and Calvin requires her to perform some constructive retrieval and bricolage in order to demonstrate their compatibility with the virtue tradition. The comparison with and identification of similarities to the Stoics are thus meant to borrow credibility from them in order for Protestant virtue to have purchase today, yet this circuitous route is not likely to change many MacIntyrean minds. Furthermore, at several critical junctures (chapters 3, 5, and 6) Protestant positions are far closer to Aquinas than they are to the Stoics, which reveals the ambiguous standards of legitimacy that Cochran has set out to correct in the first place. Scholars of Protestant virtue should simply reject this burden of proof outright on the basis of the historical evidence. The truth is not that Roman Catholics kept Aristotle and Luther threw him out; the debates surrounding the appropriateness of Aristotle’s ethics belong to the curriculum shifts of the era and not to any one Christian denomination. Aristotle’s ethics continued in major Protestant institutions well into the seventeenth century and the rate of replacement tracks with that of Roman Catholic institutions (see Richard Muller, After Calvin, Oxford University Press, 2003, pp. 122–36). In short, the persistent myth of the incompatibility of virtue with Protestantism is due almost entirely to ignorance of the era of Protestant orthodoxy and its university textbooks. Although purporting to redress this lack of attention, Cochran’s book unwittingly perpetuates this myth through her choice of sources and assumption that a turn to Stoicism is requisite for bringing Protestants to the virtue table.
The spirit and direction of Protestant Virtue and Stoic Ethics are on the right track, but Cochrane’s imbalance of historical reception and bricolage prevents her from making a much stronger case. Early Protestant theologians are indeed overlooked as resources for virtue ethics, and this will likely remain unchanged until a major work on the ethics of Protestant orthodoxy is completed. It took Annas’s herculean synthesis of the ancient tradition to break down Stoic caricatures and something similarly massive will no doubt be required for the late-medieval and early modern virtue traditions as well—both Catholic and Protestant. In the meantime, Cochran’s volume is sufficiently insightful and creative to benefit students of moral theology and religious ethics, as well as scholars of virtue ethics searching for new points of entry into debates on, for example, the unity of the virtues and the role of faith in moral progress.