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Notre Dame emeritus professor and philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, who died May 21, became world-renowned following the publication of After Virtue in 1981. His followers include the thousand or so undergraduates who returned to attend his densely wrought lectures delivered at the de Nicola Center for Ethics and Culture’s fall conferences. Macintyre lamented that modern society lacked a unitary vision and had no commonly accepted rational way to resolve moral disagreements. Without a shared conception of the good, we are left with individual attitudes, feelings, preferences and opinions. The works of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas influenced MacIntyre’s conversion to Catholicism. Studying these philosophers, he learned to hope. Central to MacIntyre’s thought is virtue ethics as a means of reorienting our present fragmented view of morality onto firmer ground. For human beings, he stressed, virtue is not instinctive but requires practice. Humbled by failure and guided by the pursuit of virtue, individuals and societies are directed toward the good life. A life of virtue requires community, and MacIntyre expressed a desire to create new forms of community life within which morality and civility might survive. After Virtue ends with this sentence, “We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another — doubtless very different — St. Benedict.” MacIntyre did not hide his annoyance with those who misunderstood his writings. In at least one lecture, he criticized those who interpret his “Benedict option” as the removal of faithful remnants from the modern world. He also strongly objected to criticism that his preferred solutions were millenarian, in the form of secular messianism. One of MacIntyre’s fundamental points is that modern moral discourse is shaped by rules, whereas the tradition of the virtues is shaped by stories. As such, he and others at Notre Dame informally debated about which of Jane Austen’s protagonists, Anne in Persuasion or Fanny in Mansfield Park, demonstrated the greatest virtue. No longer can we ask MacIntyre exactly what he meant by another very different Benedict, but personal experiences and stories of highly functional communities offer clues. For example, Maud Hart Lovelace wrote about two fictional college-age girls, Betsy from the U.S. and Tilda from Switzerland, visiting Oberammergau in 1916 (Betsy and the Great World, 1952). Betsy and Tilda pondered the goodness of Oberammergau’s residents, their gentle manners, their dignity, their cultivated voices, and even their handsomeness. One morning, the girls followed the mountain paths to the monastery of Ettal. Walking homeward, Tilda said, “Ettal explains a lot about Oberammergau.” The monks who had lived there long ago had done more than write the Passion Play. They had taught the villagers to act by putting on those miracle and morality plays so popular in the Middle Ages. They had taught them music. They had taught them to carve in wood and ivory. The library with its thousands of volumes had been a source of culture. A fuller understanding of After Virtue must be left to the scholars. However, we join Alasdair MacIntyre in longing “not entirely without grounds for hope” for “the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained.”
