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In Revelation, we learn that the angels are singing "Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God almighty!" We speak of "holy men" and there might be a "holy moment". We strive for "personal holiness".

I've always had difficulty getting a grasp of this concept. Sometimes, it seems that "holiness" is used synonymously with "moral purity" or "sinlessness". I've also heard "being holy" equated with "being wholly other or set apart or different", but what's that supposed to mean?

As a first approximation, x is holy iff x is really, really morally good. But this feels like its lacking. Any ideas?

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy added another philosophy of religion entry this week: John Hare's contribution on Religion and Morality. It's a lot more historical than I expected, and it has a lot less detail on the contemporary issues, with only one paragraph of eleven sentences on the issues in contemporary analytic philosophy. But it seems like a good historical guide to a number of issues too often ignored in many historical introductions to ethics.

One of my projects for this summer is to prepare a new (for me) course: Virtues and Vices. I'm taking a largely historical approach to the course. The three major texts that I'm using are Aquinas' The Cardinal Virtues, Stephen Pope (ed.) The Ethics of Aquinas and Dante's Purgatorio. I have found reading this material and preparing for the course to be fascinating and stimulating. It has raised a number of questions. For instance, why would Aquinas say "since human beings cannot use reason apart from sense powers, which need bodily organs, human beings need to sustain their bodies in order to use their reason"? This seems to contradict what he says elsewhere about the possibltiy of disembodied human intellect and will. But the question I want to ask about today concerns how Aquinas and Dante rank the virtues and their corresponding vices.

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