Argument for Catholicism from Virtue Ethics

Table of Content

1. Key Argument
2. Catholicism Spread Patterns
3. Islamic Golden Age
4. Asian Confucianism
5. Vedic Hinduism
6. Protestanitsm and Modernity
7. Eastern Schism and Statolatry

Key Argument

I will present argument for validity Catholic Church from virtue ethics, by observing its relations or struggles with different cultures and civilizations.

If you recognize that virtue is somehow important, look at following problems.

• Truth and charity are among most important virtues, for they underpin progress of sciences, and good social customs. Yet past cultures did not prize them as highly as justice, courage, or prudence, seeing them as less fundamental to social order. How could we learn them, before we could see their full value?
• Virtue is seen as important, but it produces no proportional gratification in the life. It does not make suffering happy, for instance, as Stoics wanted to claim. What purpose does it serve then?

The Catholic Church alone stressed truth, charity, and virtue’s final purpose beyond this world. Both claims were essential for virtue to take a root but unpopular and contentious to many cultures.

Catholic missionaries and converts sacrificed their lives, in pagan lands or those consumed by schism and heresy. Their testimonies built a pile on which we stand, establishing truth and charity as the foundation of moral order and therefore bearing witness to the Catholic theory of virtue. This is what we seek to expose.

For our argument to be complete, few other objections should be mentioned briefly.

1. Is virtue relevant at all, if it was only achieved by chosen people and with great effort?
2. Avoiding serious intrinsinc evil might be not seen as good if it produces bad consequences; therefore virtue seems not a complete moral system.
3. Can you attribute special desire truth to Catholicism, when it is accused of the opposite by its adversaries?

Ad 1) Since the beginning of the Church virtuosity and happiness was made accessible to everyone through sacramental grace,
if only a person is determined to cooperate with it. This is what Apostles and their Disciples demonstrate and this is what St. Justin boasts in the
first Apology, stating that great multitude has reformed their sins, perfected their habits or even accepted martyrdom.
Same is accessible to this day, especially for devout “Altar and Rosary” piety that many recent Saints teach. St. Fr. Kolbe, St. Father Pio and many like them
have testified that sacraments are greatly effective if a person is well disposed to receive them.

Ad 2) Basic virtue theory assumes human nature to be ordered for goods such as truth, justice or charity, but that is not enough to give answer to every moral problem.
Catholicism teaches that world is controlled by Divine Providence that orders all things for greater good and distributes grace accordingly.
To trust in the Providence is to be ready to let go human tactical logic and human criteria of success. As in Tolkien’s book, Frodo walks his hopeless way
to the Mount Doom, decides to spare treacherous Gollum, and sees him save the day. This is key hinge that allows virtue to remain rational. Heroic charity is not stupidity but a metaphysical leverage that overpowers the logic of might-makes-right.

Ad 3) A key example of this is scholastic philosophical and scientific legacy. Intricate balance of theology and science selectively reformed
Aristotelian system in 14th century, laying foundation for modern physics (impetus, graphic integrals, laws of accelerated motion and free fall to name few).
Similar philosophical priciples were exploited by modern neoscholastic scientists, such as Newton, Euler, Cauchy or Ampere. Detailed exposition
can be found in books by Duhem and Fr. Jaki, and also two of my books available at www.kzaw.pl.

Catholicism Spread Patterns

The Catholic Church spread easily to nations that lacked any other robust system of virtue and human purpose. It spread among:

• the tribes of Northern and Central Europe
• the indigenous peoples of the Americas and Africa
• paganism in Late Antiquity, when the dim light of classical philosophy waned even among the elite

Catholicism almost never prevailed in nations with developed philosophies of purpose and virtue. Examples include Confucian Asia, Hinduism, medieval Islam, and Judaism.

Two relevant factors mattered.
– Moral demands seen as excessive—Catholicism required universal charity, chastity, asceticism, and elite accountability, which exceeded natural notions of virtue.
– Transcendent individual telos—Catholicism demanded a transcendental purpose (virtuous perfection of the individual and the afterlife) while treating earthly ends as secondary.

This contrasts with the immanent, this-worldly teleologies of Islam, Confucianism, and Hinduism. Similar factors surface in major Christian schisms: Protestantism (Luther, Henry VIII, Calvin) and the Eastern Schism (Byzantium and Russia).

Modernity is also influenced on both fronts.

• Moral demand: Modernism and liberalism dilute dogma and eliminate core requirements, such as sexual chastity.
• Immanent Telos: Modernity promotes sectarian and often disastrous visions of “heaven on earth,” or “end of history,” such communism, fascism, eugenics, or Western neomarxism.

This historical arc centers on a demanding, individual call to virtue and societies who either refuse it or hijack it for worldly ends.
The end of history delivers final overload: virtue itself becomes debris (according to MacIntyre “After Virtue”) and serves as a mask for inequity and totalitarianism
(more or less according to Voegelin’s theory).

Islamic Golden Age: Social Order and Natural Virtue

Medieval Islamic elites did not read Muhammad as a crude warmonger (as do Boko Haram or al-Qaeda). Rather, they saw him as the builder of state and social order (ummah), unifying fractured, warlike tribes into a cohesive polity with a religious warrant for stable rule. The caliph governed not merely by force or bloodline but as God’s deputy.

Tribal strife—often romanticized by modern extremists—was curtailed. With institutions like waqf endowments, madrasas, courts, and bureaucracies, society grew stable; trade and crafts flourished, and cities became hubs of learning and culture.

The Qur’an urged morality (taqwā) but offered no systematic ethics or tangible human purpose. Aristotle’s philosophy was widely adopted to fill this gap—his concept of virtue as rational fulfillment (sa‘āda) serving as a natural mirror to divine law, accessible through reason.

Muslim elites rarely favored Christianity. Muhammad’s role as a political founder provided unique benefits absent in Christianity. Caliphs and sultans drew on sacralized terrestrial power to rule multinational empires. Christianity did not endorse this fusion of religious and political authority, which often left Christian nations fragmented.
The Islamic Golden Age peaked during the High Middle Ages, overlapping with Christendom’s development. Graeco-Arabic philosophy, medieval medicine, and arabic jurisprudence reached its peak. Prestige, pragmatism, and fear of losing power favored Islam.

Key argument for Christianity stems from prioritizing truth of philosophy and theology and the allegiance to virtue above all else. In Summa Contra Gentiles (Book 1, Ch. 6), Aquinas states that Muhammad was a carnal man who filled his holy book with fables and spread his creed by arms, compromising his claim as a divine messenger.
The costs of accepting it? Lose the Caliph’s mandate. Risk instability. Accept strict Christian virtue, viewed as subversive and demanding by societies reliant on slavery and polygamy.

Asian Confucianism:

A similar story repeated itself on the other side of Asia, in China, Japan, and Korea. Their social orders, shaped by the teachings of Confucius, were founded on natural virtues: benevolence, decency, justice, and wisdom—all leading to harmony. This too prioritized social harmony and order here and now over transcendental salvation.

Regardless, China initially developed amiable relations with Catholicism, based on shared moral excellence and enlightenment. The first Jesuit missionary, Matteo Ricci, praised Confucian ethics and philosophy, pointing out crucial common ideals. His scholarship, including mastery of astronomy and mathematics, gained him access to the Imperial Court and won the sympathy of scholarly elites.

These efforts bore fruit in 1692, 82 years after Ricci’s death, when Emperor Kangxi issued an edict tolerating Christianity. This, however, proved short-lived due to an apparent blunder on the Catholic side. In 1715, the Pope condemned Confucian rites as idolatrous, which the Chinese elite saw as offensive and subversive. Therefore, Catholic missions had been expelled till 1721, and violent persecutions and discrimination occurred through the 19th century.

In 1939, the Catholic Church overturned the condemnation as too rash. The rites in essence honored social bonds and hierarchy, whether for the living or the dead, and were not idolatrous in the sense of consorting with spiritual powers other than God.

Korean scholars followed a similar trajectory to the Chinese, with some converting based on Chinese books, without missionaries. The Catholic condemnation of Confucian rites was seen as hostile and triggered repeated persecutions (with up to 10,000 Christians killed).

In Japan, Catholics encountered a darker and more violent reality. Some lords, like Oda Nobunaga, pragmatically tolerated missionaries, profiting from their technology and anti-Buddhist counterbalance. Violent persecution began in 1587 and spread across all of Japan in 1614, triggered by the shogun. Believers were often tortured to renounce their faith.
The elite were offended by concepts like equality and universal moral accountability, and they were concerned about Spanish-Portuguese influence. Also, some Japanese Catholics fought with rebels against the Dutch-supported shogun. Furthermore, Catholicism condemned the elite’s culture of prostitution, polygamy, and nanshoku homosexuality.
Paradoxically, Japan was more syncretic and less philosophical than China, but Christian claims of exclusivity posed an additional problem for the Shinto-Buddhist-Confucian mixture.

Vedic Hinduism.

Another virtue-and-purpose tradition is Vedic Hinduism. Core concepts include:

Cosmic Order (Ṛta), which governs the universe and human conduct.
Virtue and righteousness (Dharma), a core ethical principle encompassing truth, non-violence, and duties based on one’s social role (e.g., in castes like priests, warriors, tradesmen, and servants).
Good works (Sukṛta), where virtuous actions accumulate merit and rewards in the afterlife or subsequent rebirths, while evil deeds bring punishment.

Here too, social harmony—established once and preserved by divine decree—plays a prominent role. This is evident to a Westerner who examines the traditional Hindu caste system and sees it as sacrificing universal human dignity and rights for the sake of a rigid structure, where serfs remain serfs and elites remain elites as a core virtue.
On the positive side, however, historical Hindus were unlikely to shed the blood of infidels. The only major, systematic persecution of Christians was initiated by Muslim overlords (though modern violence has risen among Hindu nationalists). Conversions to Christianity were limited among Hindus, who view it through their pluralistic lens as another path to a similar end. They stick to their own socially and culturally entrenched ways rather than foreign ones.

Protestant Reformation and Modernity

Protestantism stands as the single most successful revolt against mentioned Catholic doctrines. In Calvin’s version it turned the Christian transcendent hope into a program for building paradise on earth. Its was so successful that  key practical liberal beliefs of modern Europe were often present in the preaching of the reformers of Augsburg and Geneva.

Martin Luther and John Calvin ferocity outstripped the tolerance of their early modern churchgoers, so conservative Protestantism from 17th to 19th century often aligned closer to Catholicism; still, their first blast scattered seeds for the future.

Luther deemed good works and virtue useless for salvation; only faith mattered. To justify this, he undermined the Catholic Church, councils, and Church Fathers, granting authority solely to the Bible.
This sufficed not, since the Bible stresses good works too, so Luther claimed sole authority to interpret it. He called the Epistle of St. James “a letter of straw” and “unworthy of apostolic spirit.”

A similar anti-philosophical stance led Calvin to his double predestination: humans cannot choose good or evil; God fixes every choice, leading some to salvation and others to damnation. This dismissed virtue ethics (based on free will and choice), eroded Scriptural call to repentance and good conduct, and scarred Europe with the tribal Elect-versus-reprobate mentality.

With salvation’s ledger settled beyond any human reach, only “moral activity” left to do was identifying the Elect (and thus drawing dangerous lines between those who deserved charity, rights, or place in the society and those who did not).

The medieval Catholic Church was notably more tolerant: it persecuted heresies and systematic opposition to its spiritual rule, but common sinners went to local confessions, offering prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. The final bliss was beyond the existence or history. Every villain could still repent like a good thief on the cross. Every human blueprint was stained by original sin, but not wholly evil either.

Under Calvinists, guilds and cities enforced strict behavioral standards, even on colorful dress, beer, song, and dance faced restrictions. Non-compliance led to expulsion and suppression; members flaunted arrogant “Elect” status, immune to external critique.

In doing so Calvinists reversed the essence: virtue and sactity is not about herding everyone into a penitent camp, but rather full realization of metaphysical goods like charity, truth, beauty, justice or duty.

Therefore, a peculiar system emerged, which Voegelin compares directly to Quran: Analog of confucian or Vedic “social harmony” reemerged, this time defined by appearance of being more “holy” than the papists and by earthly success that Gospels explicitly scorn.

Influences of Protestat Revolution the liberal European modernity are not hard to see. Here is the legacy of Luther, openly cherished by “liberal” strains of Christianity: religion is private opinion, moral laws are negotiated consensus, perhaps preserved as far as they concern other people, but not in their virtue-teleological meaning. Prohibitions on divorces, abortion or adultery are gone.

Calvin, as read by Voegelin or William Cobbett spearheaded immanentization of telos, providing an early blueprint of a sectarian scientistic program that empowered English Revolution and then fully realized in French Revolution’s determinism and then communism, fascism or eugenics.

The “gnostic” scheme works as follows:
Humans are thralls to necessary logical structure (predestination, marxist laws of history, Hegelian dialectics, genetics with biological evolution),
with their choices, virtues and sins being merely meaningless illusion and set of chemical reactions as meaningless as gravel rolling on the wind.

This structue however, includes latent, necessary outcome that needs to be recognized and realized sooner or later (“gnosis” as Voegelin calls it)

• Ideal society of the Elect without the reprobate.
• Fully collective-consicious Hegelian nation.
• Guided human evolution that produces society of geniuses and heroes, by “survival of the fittest” eliminating “unworthy” genes
• Classless egalitarian society, where all the needs are optimally satisfied.

Eastern Schism and Statolatry

Western Roman Empire has collapsed with the end of antiquity, while Byzantine Empire existed for another millenium,
being dominant force of early medieval period.

It was up to Byzantium to preserve of Roman legacy, but that legacy bore uncanny resemblance to other
discussed civilizations, especially Islam. Romans too boasted “heavenly mandate” to conquer and rule lands and peoples of Mediterranean Basin,
a mandate upheld by pagan religion, divine cult of Emperor and works of art such as Vergil’s “Ennead”.

The cult lost its foundation after official Christian takeover in 380 AD, but rather quickly reemerged in a new form,
painting the Emperor as sacralized holy ruler. The Emperor was stylized as “Apostolic”, “Orthodox”, annointed by holy oils, waging “holy wars” as
defender of Christians.

This coincides with attempts of theological takeover that echoes Islamic or Asian systems, pointing to social harmony as key goal.
Here is introduction to Sixth Novel of Justinian, painting Empire as parallel reality to the Church, entitled to wordly power as Church is given spiritual authority and similarly needed by mankind as Church is.

The priesthood and the Empire are the two greatest gifts which God, in His infinite clemency, has bestowed upon mortals; the former has reference to Divine matters, the latter presides over and directs human affairs, and both, proceeding from the same principle, adorn the life of mankind; hence nothing should be such a source of care to the emperors as the honor of the priests who constantly pray to God for their salvation. For if the priesthood is, everywhere free from blame, and the Empire full of confidence in God is administered equitably and judiciously, general good will result, and whatever is beneficial will be bestowed upon the human race.

The issue produced various power struggles between Papacy and Empire, culminating with two schisms in 9th and 11th century.
One familiar motif of it consists of excercise of power put beyond moral responsibility. Developed state administration
paradoxically coexisted with atrocities, such as mutilation commonly used as a punishment, reign of terror of Justinian II, or Basil II blinding 15000 Bulgarians. This is not to say that tribal Western Europeans were not barbarous, but Western Catholic clergy rarely played along.

After the fall of Byzantium in 1454, Moscow became its ideological heir, bringing the trope of holy despot to the new level.
Russian Church built its identity on rejection of the Union proclaimed by Council of Florence, which automatically allowed the title of “last Christian
Emperor” ruling “Third Rome”. Ivan IV the Terrible, notorious for cruelty and despotism, was also first to call himself “Tsar” (Emperor). Being closer to God, he needed no laws or courts to judge, according to some peculiar logic that justified his atrocities, undermining any rational moral code. In 1589 he convinced Patriarch Jeremiah to established a patriarchate in Moscow (in return he agreed to covered Jeremiah debts).

Russian Church remained under strong influence of Tsardom: the patriarchy was de-facto replaced in 1721 by a “Most Holy Synod” led by lay Over-Procurator.
The Emperors often styled themselves as in the place of Christ in artwork or liturgical texts, and Church canonized large number of military “Saints”, such
as Alexander Nevsky, admiral Fyodor Ushakov or legendary Ilya Muromets.

“Third Rome” ideal was briefly resurrected in 19th century, as a part of pochvennichestvo, a ideological movement seeing Russian folk Orthodoxy
as most pious and genuine flavour of Christianity, destined to convert world to Christ. Among its supporters we find Fyodor Dostoyevsky,
famous writer with strong anti-Catholic and anti-rationalist bias.

Final accord of the Third Rome resonates in typically Russian flavour of Soviet Communism (as opposed to communism in China or other nations):
seen not as limited to own state or nation, but rather global utopia with Soviet Russia as its vanguard (more on that in Victor Suvorov’s “Icebreaker” tetralogy).

(this section is based on Jacek Święcki lecture https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ULxaxjmu9pA and “Greek Church” entry in “Catholic Encyclopedia” 1913 )