Spirituality Is Not a Virtue

William Quan Judge · Living the Life Series · 5 pages

A five-page piece by William Quan Judge, from Judge Letters I (x) pages 32–33, the shortest document in this batch. The frontispiece is credited to Deve.

The argument opens against a familiar assumption: that many persons insist on a perfect moral code tempered by social amenities, forgetting that these vary with climate, nationality and date. Virtue is granted its place — called a noble offering to the Lord — but held insufficient so far as it is merely bodily and mental uprightness, since it then stands apart from uprightness of the psychic nature, which is the virtue of the soul. That virtue is defined in two words: the soul's virtue is true Being, and its virtue is to be free; body and mind are not sharers in such experience, though they may afterwards reflect it. From this comes the claim of the title, and it is the most bracing sentence in the section — that spirituality is not virtue but impersonality, and that it is as possible to be spiritually wicked as spiritually good. The two attributes are said to be conferred on spirituality only by reason of its rising for or against the great evolutionary Law, which must finally prevail because it is the Law of the Deity, an expression of a nature tending towards manifestation, self-realization and reabsorption. The consequence is stated without softening: whatever clashes with that Law by striving for separate existence must in the long run fail, and any differentiation incapable of reabsorption is reduced to its original elements.

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