Rhetorica:
The Little Trinity
By Gabriel Blanchard
Three mental virtues come before all others. Without them, no further thought is possible.
“The Honor of the Mind”
Dorothy L. Sayers, an Oxford scholar, translator, playwright, and theologian of the early-to-middle twentieth century, earned her bread and butter largely by writing mystery novels (starring her Sherlock-Holmes-alike, Lord Peter Wimsey). She took a great interest in intellectual integrity, and in the problems it is apt to cause people—for unlike, say, kindness, it is not a convenient virtue, either to oneself or for other people. In one of her novels, itself set in an Oxford women’s college, this topic becomes the topic of a general conversation among the female dons and the detective. The talk eventually touches on a scholar who had ruined himself a few years earlier by committing academic fraud in hopes of winning a position.
…..“You’d think it would be a lesson to him,” said Miss Hillyard. “It didn’t pay, did it? Say he sacrificed his professional honor for the women and children we hear so much about—but in the end it left him worse off.”
…..“But that,” said Peter, “was only because he committed the extra sin of being found out.”
…..“It seems to me,” began Miss Chilperic, timidly—and then stopped.
…..“Yes?” said Peter.
…..“Well,” said Miss Chilperic, “oughtn’t the women and children to have a point of view? I mean—suppose the wife knew that her husband had done a thing like that for her, what would she feel about it?”
…..… “It depends,” said the Dean. “I don’t believe nine out of ten women would care a dash.”
…..“That’s a monstrous thing to say,” cried Miss Hillyard.
…..“You think a wife might feel sensitive about her husband’s honor …? Well—I don’t know.”
…..“I should think,” said Miss Chilperic, stammering a little in her earnestness, “she would feel like a man who—I mean, wouldn’t it be like living on somebody’s immoral earnings?”1
…..“There,” said Peter, “if I may say so, I think you are exaggerating. The man who does that—if he isn’t too far gone to have any feelings at all—is hit by other considerations … But it is extremely interesting that you should make the comparison.” He looked at Miss Chilperic so intently that she blushed.
…..“Perhaps that was rather a stupid thing to say.”
…..“No. But if it ever occurs to people to value the honor of the mind equally with the honor of the body, we shall get a social revolution of a quite unparalleled sort …”2
The entire point of a liberal arts education is to give human beings the power to think. As has been repeated since time immemorial, notably by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., this power must be accompanied by good character, which does not so much restrain as balance thought.
There are three virtues in particular that are gravely necessary to thought—necessary even if we speak merely of self-reflection, and do not venture into the usual aims undertaken by rhetoric (the socially-oriented and persuasive). These virtues are: honesty; courage; and clarity.
Λόγος3
We shall (or rather, must) begin with honesty. This does entail honesty with others in the social sphere; however, it first of all means being honest with oneself. Do you see an apple (perhaps of the kind that is desirable to make one wise)? If what you see is actually a stolen pear, then don’t say “Yes”! Or, if you do see an apple, don’t say “I can’t tell.” Or again, if you genuinely can’t tell, then say that.
Honesty with oneself might not sound like a task hard enough to dignify with the name “virtue.” It is admittedly not a complicated task; but being complex and being difficult, oddly, don’t really have anything to do with each other. And the fact is, human beings lie to ourselves constantly—half the time it isn’t even on purpose. There are all sorts of things we’d like to believe, or have been told to believe, yet which we have never once sat down and thought about, never actually tried to discover what is the case about them. There are many bad, and a few good, reasons for this. The bad ones mostly have to do with our anxieties, our egos, and the short attention span assiduously fostered in us by commercial interests. The chief good reason is, for most of us, thinking something through—even something quite simple in principle, like a piece of long division—is a time-consuming thing to do. Few of us like devoting time to anything if we are not sure of some useful or pleasurable return.4
Honesty promises neither (which is why we often want so badly to convince ourselves we don’t need it). It is the prerequisite to all lasting use of, and pleasure in, anything, but it will not guarantee them; honesty has “swallowed up girls and boys, women and men, kings and emperors, cities and realms.” It may be incidentally accompanied by benefits like not having to keep one’s lies straight; but the only benefits inherent to honesty are the satisfaction of a clean conscience and the capacity to deal with reality. Nor, if we reject it, can honesty threaten us with anything except the refusal of those blessings. But that refusal places us under the doom of self-contradiction in thought and hypocrisy in behavior, which are always self-compounding, and inevitably culminate in the loss of the power to understand anything.
The present author feels that if you are reading this, you would probably rather retain the power to understand things, and indeed, to talk and to reason. He shall therefore take for granted from here on that you are, in some sense, “on board with” honesty. Most people are! … for a minute. Staying honest, that calls for our next virtue.
Purity of heart is to will one thing.
i אֱמֶת i5
Emeth is, of course, the name of a character from the Chronicles of Narnia. He comes from Calormen—a powerful, broadly hostile empire in the Narnian universe, which worships a pantheon headed by a demoniac, bird-headed creature named Tash. Emeth unexpectedly meets Aslan, and the effect is—well:
Then I fell at his feet and thought, Surely this is the hour of death, for the Lion (who is worthy of all honour) will know that I have served Tash all my days and not him. Nevertheless, it is better to see the Lion and die than to be Tisroc of the world and live and not to have seen him. But the Glorious One bent down his golden head and touched my forehead with his tongue and said, Son, thou art welcome.6
But (more’s the pity) we are not primarily here to discuss Emeth. The key point here is simply the second sentence: “It is better to see the Lion and die …” What is so astonishing about this sentiment is that it represents the apex of courage—a willing surrender of one’s own life for a single moment of something judged to be beyond all value.
We do not usually need quite that much courage to maintain our honesty! But the times inevitably come when honesty has to be about things we wish were otherwise. Wishing things were some other way is nearly always the reason we lie to ourselves in the first place.
Depending on our temperament, there can be subtler “wrinkles” here: A certain type of pessimism, for example, leads some people to assume that what is unpleasant is the truth,7 perhaps in a spirit of pre-empting disappointment. (This does not work.) Or again, certain people find the torment of not knowing something so unbearable—or are so invested socially in a reputation for knowledge—that they would rather pretend to realize the situation they are in is catastrophic and irrecoverable than utter the words “I don’t know.” The use of courage is very largely to steel ourselves to the ego costs of being wrong and not knowing things, and to go on thinking in spite of them: Mens immota manet lacrimæ volvuntur inanes.8
Claritas9
Our third and final virtue, clarity, is a bit different. It is, in substance, it is a special version of honesty, or a tool used by it, to maintain its own existence. For of course, blatant falsehood is but one weapon in the panoply of deceit. The serpent in Eden was not so crass; it opened by asking whether “God really said” such-and-such; and we have doubtless all heard the indignant demand, “What’s wrong with just asking questions?” (The answer, which the asker probably does not want, is that there can be no objection to plain questions, i.e., questions whose primary aim is to obtain information; but, depending on circumstances and intent, there can be a lot to object to in questions asked for other reasons.) For practical use, vagueness, half-truth, and banal correct-enough generalities serve quite nicely to replace outright lies—in some respects they’re actually better, since technical truths and haze are more difficult to dislodge than specifiable inaccuracies.
Remember that clarity, like honesty and courage, is first of all a reflexive virtue—one we must apply to ourselves and in our own thought. This can be unsettling. It is easy to accept things as true without really understanding them, just because all of us have to start off by doing that with everything, in childhood. The thing is, most of us learn to accept more complicated vocabulary and sentence structures, but—unless we go through some radical change in our cultural affiliation, political principles, religious beliefs, or the like—don’t really learn to go back and examine things we have previously accepted in order to at last understand them. (Those of us who do go through some sort of conversion, of whatever type, have learned to do so once; but, often as not, even they show little will or desire to rehearse the skill.) Once things are put into the “accepted” box in our minds, we don’t like to take them out again. It’s uncomfortable.
A good rule of thumb for whether we really understand our own ideas is to try rephrasing them, ideally at least twice and as simply as possible. If we cannot re-explain an idea in words a fifth-grader can understand, it’s highly likely we haven’t really grasped it ourselves. There are exceptions, certainly; occasionally, though far less than we want to believe, an idea is intrinsically difficult however we express it. But it is nearly always the case, when our tongues are tied in knots, that the knots were in the brain first.
Incidentally, it is worth noting that clarity to oneself does not entail clarity to anyone else. This will lead us into our topic for next week; for now, we shall close on an oversimplification: If Mr. A and Miss B are talking together, and Miss B explains an idea, to which Mr. A replies “I don’t understand,” there is a real chance that Mr. A is being the more honest party of the two. But more on that next time.
1At the time, “immoral earnings” was a euphemism for the wages of a prostitute.
2Gaudy Night, Chapter XVII (pp. 394-395 of the 2012 Bourbon Street Books edition).
3Transliteration from Greek script: Logos; meaning: word, message; reason, argument; order, structure.
4After all, time is the most precious of all our resources: absolutely non-renewable by all known means, incapable of going unspent, and always lessening.
5Transliteration from Hebrew script: ‘Èmeth; meaning: truth; faithfulness, reliability, loyalty.
6C. S. Lewis, The Last Battle, Chapter XV: Further Up and Further In.
7More precisely, it leads nearly all people to do this some of the time, and some people to do this nearly all of the time.
8“Unmoved the mind remains; the vain tears fall.” Virgil, the Æneid IV.449.
9Transliteration: none—it’s already in Roman script, ya goof; meaning: brightness, clarity, radiance.
Gabriel Blanchard has a degree in Classics from the University of Maryland, and serves as CLT’s editor at large. He lives in Baltimore, MD.
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Published on 20th February, 2025.