Everyone naturally admires excellence in human beings. Some people are excellent athletes, and
we give them Olympic medals. Others are excellent musicians, and we give them standing ovations.
Some people are excellent scientists or thinkers,
and some people are just excellent overall human beings. All of these examples prompt us to ask:
what is excellence? And how do human beings come to be that way?
In the perennial tradition of philosophy, there are three
notions that are involved in explaining what makes someone excellent at something
First, we have the notion of habit. In the ordinary sense of the term,
a habit is a settled or regular tendency that is hard to give up. One’s morning routine,
for example, can be called a habit. Habits are commonly thought to be patterns of action that
we settle into over time, often thoughtlessly, and we carry on with them more or less thoughtlessly.
One’s morning routine, for example, can be a mindless routine or habit. Smoking or chewing
gum is a habit in that sense too. A closely related concept is that of conditioning.
If we think of Pavlov’s dog, for example,
repeated instances of ringing a bell and making food available conditions the dog to salivate
just upon hearing the bell. Or we might think of our reaction to red and green lights when driving.
Now, when Thomas Aquinas uses the term habit he means something quite different. In St. Thomas’s
usage, a habit is a specific kind of quality that today we ordinarily call a dispositional property,
and when he is discussing human arts and virtues, he means something even more specific. A habit,
in St. Thomas’s sense, is a fully personal disposition to make things well or act well.
The disposition to make things well is an art, the disposition to act well is a virtue. What makes a
person to be excellent at something is either an art or a virtue, so let’s consider each in turn.
An art is a fixed and stable disposition, acquired by practice, for making external things well,
and the one who possesses it does so easily and peacefully. Cooking, carpentry, and violin
playing are all arts in this sense of the term. Good cooks make nutritious and delicious meals,
carpenters make items out of wood, and violinists make melodies on the violin. Each of these
activities has its purpose, to make this or that, and the more completely fulfills the purpose the
better one is at the activity. Arts like these are acquired over a period of time through practice,
and when someone has mastered the art, the person has a fixed and
stable disposition or ability to make such things. The act comes easily and joyfully.
Virtues are similar to arts, but different in kind. Like the arts, virtues are fixed and
stable dispositions. And like the arts, virtues are acquired through practice.
But virtues differ from the arts in two ways. First, virtues are not for the sake of making
things, but just acting well for example in conversation or in doing business. Second,
arts make their possessor good at being a cook or a musician, but do not make their possessor
good at being human. One can be a great cook or world class violinist, and be a bad human being.
Virtues are what make one good precisely at being human,
at living life well overall, and that consists of freely choosing reasonable
courses of action on a consistent basis. So, no one can be virtuous and be a bad human being.
Honesty, for example, makes someone a good person. An honest person is someone who tells the truth,
not just once in a while, but consistently – even when it is hard to do so. The virtue of
honesty is a fixed and stable disposition to tell the truth. It is an excellent trait of character.
And one becomes honest by actually telling the truth over and over, not in a mindless way like
carrying on one’s morning routine or chewing gum, but doing so on purpose, deliberately.
Now, all of this the ancient philosophers discovered by rational reflection
upon common human experience. But Thomas Aquinas went much further.
For God has revealed to us something more than what the philosophers knew about art and virtue.
God has given us his grace in Christ Jesus. In our baptism, we receive God’s grace,
and with his grace comes a whole new host of supernatural or infused virtues. The virtues that
come to us by grace in our baptism are nothing less than a share in the virtues of Jesus Christ,
and by these virtues we can live as Christ lived. It is crucial for one to practice acting according to these
virtues so that they might grow and develop. But when they do, the person who lives by them
is truly another Christ in the world, and lives as he lived on the way to true happiness in God.
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