To Live Well: Bonus Question and Answer

Editorial note: Recently Mere Orthodoxy hosted a webinar with Alan Noble, author of To Live Well: Practical Wisdom for Moving Through Chaotic Times. Noble kindly agreed to answer in writing a few more of the questions that webinar attendees had submitted, but that for reasons of time, he was unable to get to during the webinar. We think these questions, submitted anonymously during the webinar, may be of interest to other readers and are grateful to publish this Q&A as a resource. The questions and answers have been minimally edited for clarity.

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Q1: I am watching [this webinar] with my three daughters, ages 12, 11, and 8. If Dr. Noble could have their ear on the topic of virtues, what would his main encouragement be?

Noble: My encouragement would be to do hard things. Take risks—risks your parents approve of, but real risks. Do hard homework assignments. Talk to adults. Try a musical instrument. Be courageous. You will fail at times, but you will grow your muscle of perseverance and courage, learning how to suffer well for God’s glory.

Q2: To what extent does To Live Well address anxiety, and how does Jesus’ command ‘do not be anxious’ (Matthew 6:25–34; Luke 12:22–34) inform a biblical understanding of living well?

Noble: The book addresses anxiety only insofar as anxiety is often a consequence of living in a world that lacks moral order. As to the second question, I think our desire should be to trust in God’s sovereignty and goodness when it comes to anxiety. Typically, we are anxious about things in our imagination, things that are out of our control, or things that are in our control but which we are ruminating over inordinately. This is what I would describe as excessive anxiety, and it’s what I think Jesus is referring to. I think living well looks like learning how to manage anxiety by trusting in God, relying on a spiritual community for support, developing healthy coping tools through therapy when necessary, and even using medication as necessary. I do think that for many people who acutely feel the chaos and moral uncertainty of the contemporary world, learning and practicing the virtues will help relieve some anxiety by providing stability.

Q3: Dr. Noble—you mentioned that modern people crave moral order because everything feels fragmented. Do you think the current revival of virtue language is a genuine spiritual recovery, or is there a risk that it becomes another cultural trend people consume without actually being formed by?

Noble: I think both outcomes are possible. I think that for some people, a desire for moral order will serve as a prompting to turn to Christ, and I praise God for that. But I think for other people, they will turn to techniques. They will turn to optimization programs, efforts to highly order their lives to achieve a sense of “balance.” The quest for perfect optimization of life will never satisfy. Our only peace is in resting in the grace of God through Christ’s finished work for us. But I fear that for some people, it will indeed be, as you say, a “cultural trend.” Our task is to appeal to people who are sensitive to this desire for moral order and invite them to see that it is only in Christ that they will find rest.

Q4: How do emotions fit into the virtues?

Noble: This is a complicated question, but a good one. I don’t think that emotions are meaningless to the virtues. For example, being repulsed by bigotry or angered over abuse is morally just. The problem comes when you decide what is just based solely on what repulses or angers you. Similarly, I think it is good to feel an emotion of love when you act in love towards someone. But that emotion is not required for you to obey the commandment to love your neighbor. Ideally, over time, our behaviors shape our emotions to align them toward what is good and honoring to God.

Q5: I will be the speaker for a high school camp this summer. How can I communicate “living well” to students without leaning into moralism? How can I introduce these big ideas to these younger people?

Noble: I would begin as I try to begin To Live Well, which is with the gospel. We don’t act virtuously to earn God’s favor or to merit our righteousness. We are already righteous because of Christ’s finished work on the Cross. Because of that work, we are new creations with the ability and freedom to turn from sin and walk in a manner worthy of the gospel. Out of gratitude and excitement over our new creation, we should desire to pursue a virtuous life, a life as God designed us to live. This will be difficult, it will take effort, but through the power of the Holy Spirit, we are empowered to be virtuous. I would invite high schoolers to do hard things. Encourage them to take the challenge. I suspect that many of them will rise to the occasion and welcome the challenge.

Q6: You talked about the fears of reformed protestants being afraid of the virtue discussion because it might lead to a works-based salvation. I've certainly felt that at times when I've sought to incorporate the cultivation of virtue. Are there any helpful thoughts as to how to functionally, truly believe that virtue is being cultivated out of a response to God's grace instead of an attempt to earn it?

Noble: I think we have to begin with the gospel and grace and end with the gospel and grace, which is what I tried to do in this book. We need to preach the gospel to ourselves and each other even as we “stir up one another to love and good works” (Hebrews 10:24). And when we fail to act virtuously, our response needs to be more gospel, more grace, reminding ourselves that our righteousness is in Christ, not our good works, learning from our mistakes, asking for forgiveness, receiving that forgiveness, and moving on in grace.

Q7: I long to live for God’s glory but I don’t quite understand what people mean when they use that phrase. What does God’s glory actually mean?

Noble: Immersing yourself in the Word will teach you how to live for God’s glory. For example, we know from David’s example that delighting in God’s creation is glorifying to God (Psalm 19). We know from Christ’s obedience that living an obedient life is glorifying to God (Philippians 2:8). We know from Paul’s example that spreading the gospel and making disciples is glorifying to God. We also know from Paul that living a quiet and humble life is glorifying to God (1 Thessalonians 4:11). Being in Scripture and learning from the examples there teaches us how to glorify God in any particular situation we are in.

Q8: In our secular post-Christian culture, we probably retain the words or vestigial nature of the virtues, but we have severed them from their Christian roots and thick context. What do the virtues look like, distorted in a post-Christian world? In a sense, to use YANYO language, what do the Virtues of Self-Belonging look like in their corrupted form and display?

Noble: I think the vestigial virtues typically look like self-optimization, a drive to become a Best Version of Yourself without an outside telos. So this might look like intense self-discipline programs, a lot of self-denial, monitoring of data, controlling of emotions, attempts to master the self, attempts to limit liability, and so on. The key here is that the virtues are approached not as practices which form us through the work of the Holy Spirit, pointing us toward who we were created to be in Christ, but rather tools we use to master our lives. So we use data collection in prudence to master choice making. We use data and will power to master temperance. And so on. But there is no telos outside the self toward which these “virtues” are pointing. It’s all self-referential.

Q9: Will you speak to the role of intimidation in inhibition, with regard to engaging the culture?

Noble: Interesting question and one I have not thought enough about. I would say that there are many intimidating forces in our culture that contribute to inhibition. One would be our hyper-competitive culture. For example, in dating, everyone is exposed not just to the attractive, interesting people in their local community, but to a world of attractive, interesting people on the internet. The pressure to stand out and compete is enormous. Then there is the threat of online cancellation, of exposure of yourself or your body. We are regularly intimidated to act according to societal standards (beauty, “justice,” politeness, efficiency, and so on) that are overwhelming. And so we freeze up and grow inhibited.

Q10: I’m a parent and a teacher of high school seniors at a Classical Christian school? What are some of the best ways I can encourage courage and temperance in my students/kids. Clearly, I can call them to “imitate me as I imitate Christ” but do you have any ideas or suggestions that I can take to the classroom and dinner table?

Noble: In the classroom, I think you want to invite them to do hard things, to face difficult projects and assignments and tasks with courage. Reminding them that the courage they use to face those tasks will aid them as they go forward and face bigger challenges in life. Similarly, you can invite them to live temperately. This looks like encouraging (not lecturing) them about how they use screens and how they are present in the world.

Q11: Your message, your book, and books like Jake Meador’s What Are Christians For and publications like Plough, are profound but pretty mind-blowing, other-worldly, linguistically and culturally dense for the average person, or even the average "evangelical" Christian to be introduced to. How can we bridge this gap to make it more accessible?"

Noble: This question weighs heavily on my heart. I hope that To Live Well directly responds to your question. It is written to be more accessible than academic or scholarly, even though it does ask readers to understand the philosophy and theology behind virtues. In fact, all my writing tries to make big ideas more accessible. But even with my efforts to bring scholars like Pieper down to an accessible level, some readers will still find it too dense. And that’s where the value of pastors and ministers and other readers come in. As they read my book, they translate it to their particular audiences.

Q12: As a reformed Christian who is actively trying to reclaim the virtues within my own life and that of my family’s, this book could not intrigue and excite me more. So, thank you. I often find myself becoming exasperated when talking with other Christians about my desire to reclaim the virtues as a Reformed Protestant. My husband and I come from rural Appalachia where there is much talk about being “Spirit-filled” but not in ways that exemplify virtues like temperance and prudence. What advice would you give to one who is trying to gracefully, respectfully- and accurately, share about/defend the virtues when dealing with Christians who are more emotionally motivated?

Noble: I would start by sharing that God cares about our habits. We know this because he has established habits in our worship to form our hearts (including our emotions) to know him and love him more: the Lord’s Day, the Lord’s Supper, regular prayer and reading the Bible. Virtues are habits that form us to be who God created us to be. These habits are ways the Spirit works to shape our emotions properly so that we come to desire what God desires. It’s not that emotions are bad, or that we don’t rely on the Holy Spirit. In fact, we are only able to practice these virtues truly because of the work of the Holy Spirit! A virtuous life is a Spirit-filled life! But what that looks like are practices that shape our thoughts, actions, and emotions towards God’s will.

Q13: How do virtues make inroads in family or institutional settings where there is a lack of personal responsibility and leadership, unhealthy emphasis on self and dominance of cultures of co-dependence and narcissism?

Noble: In other words, how does an unvirtuous community become virtuous? I suppose it starts with repentance. And that requires an awareness of the brokenness of the community. Whether it is a family or a larger institution, there needs to be an acceptance that the community is in sin and needs to turn from its vices. That’s one piece. There also needs to be some leadership. Parents need to model virtue and use language of virtue with their children. Institutional leaders need to do the same. Finally, the beauty of virtue needs to be expressed. Living a virtuous life is hard but beautiful, because it is living in a manner you were created to live by God. When you understand that living temperately is actually a lovely way to live, it’s not so daunting to pursue temperance, for example.

Q14: It seems like some of the classic virtue Literature acknowledges that various virtues are dependent on each other w/o suggesting that the work is sequential. “30 Steps to Heaven” (based on The Divine Ladder), which notes that compassion is the crown of the virtues, not a starting place (since you can be indiscriminately compassionate toward truly evil behavior). Thoughts?

Noble: Pieper argues that Prudence lays the foundation for the other Cardinal virtues. Personally, the more I study the virtues, the more I see how they are all interrelated. For example, while you need prudence to know how to be courageous, you need courage to act resolutely when you make a prudent decision. So while I lay out the virtues in a specific order that seems best to me based on the work of others, I hold that very loosely, and in the end I keep seeing how they all circle back around to each other.

Q15: How to deter from the cultivation of personal virtue resulting in a hyper-fixation on the self?

Noble: Whenever you pursue any kind of personal growth there is the potential for morbid fixation upon yourself. I think the solution to this problem is to develop virtues in community, whether that be family, church, or school. In community, you realize that justice is not about you, it’s about giving your neighbor his or her due. But even in community, some level of introspection and contemplation is necessary for growing in virtue. For example, to live temperately, you need to evaluate your inner order: are your loves disordered? Is your attention spent on things it shouldn’t be? You need to ask these sorts of questions regularly. Done properly, this isn’t hyper-fixation, but healthy self-knowledge.

Q16: My 11 year old son and I are listening in and we are wondering when you first encountered Eliot and where you think is a good place to start in reading his work would be?

Noble: I first encountered him with The Waste Land, but that is a rough place to start. I didn’t enjoy him there or find him compelling. Maybe the best place to start would be “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” with it’s fairly understandable lament about confessing one’s love to someone.

Q17: As a recent Catholic convert, after 40 years in the evangelical world, the call to live a noble life is very appealing and seems very appropriate to Catholicism, as you hinted at. Help me understand how we can navigate the complexity of being or becoming more virtuous without condemning the people around us who seem increasingly unmoored and unprincipled. Can we avoid the temptation to just “hunker down” in our religious silos?

Noble: I think I would advocate for a shift in perspectives. Rather than hunkering down, what if we are beacons of hope in a despairing world? By living virtuously, we are enacting hope, living out the gospel, living as witnesses to the truth to our neighbors. And if we can do so charitably and invitingly, we can show them that there is hope in Christ. That’s how I envision this.

Q18: Dr. Noble, you’ve written about how having children in an individualistic, self-optimizing culture is one way to testify that we are not our own. You’ve also written about enduring severe mental affliction in On Getting Out of Bed. Given those two things, I wonder how you would counsel couples for whom childbearing would put the wife at high medical or psychological risk. How might courage and prudence interact in such a case? In general, how should Christians balance risk-taking with respect for our human fallenness and finitude?

Noble: This is a profoundly difficult question to answer in the abstract. Here’s what I would say. Our task is to prayerfully seek to honor God with our lives, courageously and prudently. That does mean doing hard things. But that doesn’t mean doing reckless things. It may be that a couple works for a while with mental health professionals to reach some point of mental stability before having children. But even then, the goal would not be to achieve “perfect” stability, because no one is “ready” to have children. Courage allows us to risk suffering for the sake of the good of children, in this case. The question is, in this particular case, does the health of the mother make it imprudent to take that risk, even after treatment. I can’t answer that question. I’m not in the specific position with that couple necessary to speak into it. I would recommend prayer and the advice of wise counselors who know them personally. And I would add that there is grace for what they decide. They can make a choice together, in love and mutual respect and self-sacrifice, knowing that God loves them and promises to give wisdom to all who ask. God has promised to work all things together for their good. Their duty is to make the best decision they can and walk that out.

To the broader question, we should take risks for the sake of the good—that is courage. But when it is not for the good to take a risk, then it is recklessness. For example, if I choose to “courageously” volunteer for every ministry in my church and risk burnout because of my finitude, I’m not actually focusing on the good, which is to care for the local church. I’m focused on appearing holy. So taking your finitude into account when you take risks is important.

Q19: How can churches become gardens where the virtues blossom and ripen?

Noble: I think it begins with churches using the language of virtues from the pulpit and as a part of their culture. The Bible has a lot to say about justice, prudence, courage, self-control, faith, hope, and love. We need to use this language in our daily lives. We also need to take time in our Sunday Schools or elsewhere to talk about virtuous living. This might look like classes where we discuss temperance and smartphone usage or chastity. The virtues are practiced in community. So if they are to blossom and ripen, it will be because small groups of friends decide to sharpen each other and encourage each other with habits of virtue.