The Seductiveness of Virtue: Abraham Joshua Heschel and John Paul II on Morality and Personal Fulfillment by John J. Fitzgerald

Journal of the Society of Christian Ethics 38 (1):206-208 (2018)
  Copy   BIBTEX

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Seductiveness of Virtue: Abraham Joshua Heschel and John Paul II on Morality and Personal Fulfillment by John J. FitzgeraldMatthew R. PetrusekThe Seductiveness of Virtue: Abraham Joshua Heschel and John Paul II on Morality and Personal Fulfillment John J. Fitzgerald new york: bloomsbury t&t clark, 2017. 240 pp. $114The Seductiveness of Virtue offers a close study of the twentieth-century Polish-American rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, and the first Polish pope, St. John Paul II, on the relationship between being good and being happy. Overall the book advances the conversation on the meaning and continued relevance of virtue in contemporary ethics, though its eagerness to build bridges across competing religious and philosophical traditions opens the argument to both methodological and substantive criticisms. [End Page 206]Fitzgerald divides the book into an introduction and four chapters. Chapter 1, "The Meaning of Our Question," establishes the definitions of concepts that Fitzgerald addresses throughout the rest his argument, including "happiness," "meaning," "freedom," "personal fulfillment," "good and evil," and "doing." Fitzgerald locates each term within the theologies of Heschel and John Paul II and provides his own definitions. Chapter 2, "Heschel and the 'Joys of Mitsvah,'" enters more deeply into Heschel's theology, arguing that, despite some ambiguity about whether morality will always lead to personal fulfillment, Heschel establishes a firm theological and practical connection between following the law (mitzvah) and being happy. Chapter 3, "John Paul II and the Good We Must Do to Have Eternal Life," engages in a similar analysis of John Paul's thought (including his writings before becoming pope) and, despite using different theological categories (chief among them "Christ"), arrives at a similar conclusion: there is a necessary connection between being good and being happy. Chapter 4, which also functions as a conclusion, places the comparison between Heschel and John Paul into a wider comparative context, examining how their respective conclusions on morality and the good relate to insights from other contemporary perspectives, including the Dalai Lama, Peter Singer, and present-day "positive psychology." Fitzgerald concludes by offering five reasons why it is important to continue, in his words, an "interworldview" and "interdisciplinary" dialogue on how virtue relates to happiness.The book is richly sourced—containing 199 footnotes, bibliography, and detailed index—and serves as a good addition to the libraries of those working on John Paul II, Abraham Heschel, virtue theory, or comparative ethics more broadly. Yet its breadth on the comparative front also highlights its vulnerabilities, particularly on the question of what defines the relationship between virtue and happiness from a normative perspective. While providing lucid descriptive accounts of different conceptions of God and the good, for example, Fitzgerald acknowledges near the book's conclusion, "whether one finds [any] author persuasive will depend in large part on one's prior conclusions about the existence and nature of God and the afterlife" (184) and notes that this topic "cannot be resolved or even explored here" (185). However, these "prior conclusions" themselves are ultimately most meaningful for answering the book's central question.This reticence to engage in meta-ethical questions also leads the text to a problematic epistemological and ethical equalizing of each perspective, one that allows Fitzgerald to claim, for example, "while there is much common ground between Heschel, John Paul II, and [Peter] Singer on the relationship between morality and fulfillment, there are also key differences" (174). Here Fitzgerald understates the contrast: one of the "key" differences between Singer's utilitarian materialism and John Paul II's gospel of life is that Singer's position could serve as a paradigmatic representation of the "culture of death" [End Page 207] that John Paul spent his papacy resisting. Thus, while providing an excellent analysis of each thinker individually, the book's argument would benefit from establishing a firmer and more transparent standard for evaluating ethical claims across traditions.Matthew R. PetrusekLoyola Marymount UniversityCopyright © 2018 Society of Christian Ethics...

Links

PhilArchive



    Upload a copy of this work     Papers currently archived: 92,923

External links

Setup an account with your affiliations in order to access resources via your University's proxy server

Through your library

Similar books and articles

Heschel, Hiddenness, and the God of Israel.Joshua Blanchard - 2016 - European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 8 (4):109-124.
Nisim ṿe-nifloes̀.Abraham Joshua Heschel - 1999 - Bruḳlin, N.Y.: Aḥim Goldenberg.
God, Being, Pathos.Daniel Herskowitz - 2018 - Journal of Jewish Thought and Philosophy 26 (1):94-117.
God in search of man.Abraham Joshua Heschel - 1955 - New York,: Farrar, Straus & Cudahy.
Man is not alone.Abraham Joshua Heschel - 1951 - New York,: Octagon Books.
Abraham Joshua Heschel.P. P. P. P. - 1970 - Giornale Critico Della Filosofia Italiana 1 (3):461.
Who is man?Abraham Joshua Heschel - 1965 - Stanford, Calif.,: Stanford University Press.

Analytics

Added to PP
2018-06-25

Downloads
18 (#855,749)

6 months
5 (#703,779)

Historical graph of downloads
How can I increase my downloads?

Citations of this work

No citations found.

Add more citations

References found in this work

No references found.

Add more references