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The Christian Dogma of Male Virtue
Why does Christianity misunderstand it?
I recently watched a program about a Christian purity cult, whose members consider virginity a virtue. And, what’s a virtue? Behavior that exhibits high moral standards. One member, a forty year old male virgin, went too far, though, by misidentifing pagan Roman ‘virtus’ as connoting the same idea of sexual morality as his group’s definition of virtue. Certainly, the English term, virtue, originates from the Roman, virtus. But, does that mean that the definitons of both words are the same? That’s an interesting idea to examine. In the early stages of the Roman state, virtus specifically referred to courage in battle. Since the root of the word is vir, which means man, Roman virtus was rarely applied to women. Think about the word virility, another outgrowth from the original vir, which refers to a man’s physical strength, energy and sexually potency. That’s more in line with Roman virtus than Christian virtue. Over the thousand years that Rome was in existence, the word, virtus, did take on many meanings. Yet, the traditional, classical, masculine qualities of Roman virtue can be codified in the following: Excellence, Courage, Character and Value. The question becomes, then, how the Roman definiton of virtue fits with the idea of Christian morality. We’ll consider each of the Roman virtues along with ancient people who…
