TOD 02.25.08

I love ethics. I love thinking about what is right and wrong, discussing it with other people, and trying to make my ideas of virtue match up with God’s ideas. For thousands of years, philosophers have been trying to identify the heart of ethics, but I think I know the answer. Much as grammar is the rules that describe how people speak when they know a language, ethics is the rules that describe how people behave when they have acquired the language of love.

Thus, teaching morality is really teaching people to imitate love; to behave as if they were loving, even if they really aren’t. And as much as such instruction helps define the language of love, the only real way to learn it is by drawing close to God, who is the only pure speaker of it, and acquiring His heart. Just as children do not learn to speak in grammar class, but learn to refine their speaking there, we must never think that we can imitate love merely by memorizing the rules that describe it.

The critic knows the rules, but the artist creates the masterpiece.