The Transfiguration of Virtue

Abstract This chapter discusses how Thomas and Laozi argue that the cultivation of virtue must conform to the most overarching cosmological reality. Human beings are enjoined to have an eccentric existence to attain the ultimate end of union with God (or the Dao). This peculiar conception of an ultimate end produces a program of ethical formation that in many ways moves beyond an Aristotelian account of acquired virtue, especially in Thomas’s infused and purging virtue and Laozi’s mysterious and elusive virtue. The solution to the difficulty of virtue they offer is a transfiguration of virtue that generates a program of self-cultivation that is more ambitious than harmony within the soul and the polis. It explicates their strategy for exhorting the good by the reworking of linear temporality and developing an expanded account of human action.