This essay seeks to abstract from the works of Maximus the Confessor (580-662) a 'theory' of virtue ethics that engages Maximus's own categories and language while still developing conversation with contemporary virtue ethics. First is a reconstruction of the larger cosmological (and moral) 'narrative'-the oikonomia Maximus sees embodied in sacred history-that frames his essentially teleological understanding of the formation of virtue in created beings. The second part of the essay explores Maximus's doctrine of the moral self as a synthesis of 'diachronic' and 'synchronic' dimensions, and details three identifiable protocols by which moral agents cultivate the Christian virtues: first, the development of intellectual virtues such as prudence that serve clear vision (theoria) of worthy moral ends; second, the appropriate 'use' of the passible faculties of desire and temper in alliance with reason; and third, the conditioning of the virtues within moral communities (monastery or church) characterized by relations of accountability, imitation, and the traditioning of moral wisdom.
In a postmodern culture teeming with competing philosophical and physiological theories of the nature of human emotions, a striking recent initiative, in which Martha Nussbaum has been a leading player, is the critical retrieval of insights from Greco-Roman moral philosophers on the constitution and morality of the emotions. The project has involved excavating ancient debates over whether the emotions are diseases (p qh) of the soul, needing always to be sedated or expunged, or instead are rooted in appetitive and aversive faculties (dun meiς) of the soul, intrinsically related to reason, making some emotions worthy of education, healing, and reorientation for the sake of moral well-being.Nussbaum for her part has found sufficient richness in these debates to help her formulate her "revised Neo-Stoic" theory of emotion. Recovering the insight of some ancient Stoics that emotions are at bottom "judgments" of the mind rather than "blind surges of affect," 1 Nussbaum argues that emotions have cognitive content, an intelligence of their own. They carry with them a "past," and can be registers of a complex narrative history in an individual's moral formation. Indeed emotions in their more highly developed and particular instantiations are learned and refined through patterns of imitation (m mhsiς) and under the shaping influence of the available narratives of a culture, narratives that hold the key to meaning, value, the projection of desirable goods, and the determination of moral ends. 2 "We
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