From Ken Myers, writing at Touchstone:
In June of 1941, C. S. Lewis preached a sermon that has come down to us as one of his most enduring essays: “The Weight of Glory.” Lewis’s sermon was a reflection on the nature of the rewards that await believers, and he began by making the following claim: “If you asked twenty good men to-day what they thought the highest of the virtues, nineteen of them would reply, Unselfishness. But if you asked almost any of the great Christians of old, he would have replied, Love.”
Lewis went on to comment that the important difference between these two perspectives is more than the substitution of a negative term for a positive one. It is the claim that the really virtuous act is to forgo pleasures or benefits for the sake of others, “as if our abstinence and not their happiness was the important point.” Lewis suspected that the modern virtue of Unselfishness had its origins in Stoicism or in the ethics of Kant rather than in Christianity.
More a Strategy Than a Virtue
I thought of Lewis’s comparison of love and unselfishness when rereading A. J. Conyers’s book on the modern preoccupation with tolerance, The Long Truce: How Toleration Made the World Safe for Power and Profit. In the first chapter of the book, Conyers observes that tolerance has—over the course of the past four centuries—assumed a prominent position on the modern list of virtues. But if it is indeed a virtue, it is, he notes, a peculiar one…
hat tip: Joe Carter, at Mere Comments
