Teaching college freshmen isn’t quite the job it used to be. Less and less can be taken for granted with each entering class. In prior generations, no professor could blithely assume enthusiasm or even curiosity among students enrolled in general courses, but one could count on a certain baseline knowledge of what came before; incoming students might not have read Dante or even Shakespeare in high school, but most were likely to recognize that it might behoove them at the least to pretend to a knowledge of those people until starting to read their works, which, at almost every liberal-arts institution, would have been on the syllabus.

Yet another thing that could be counted on in years past was a passing familiarity among students with the bare bones of wise living and thinking, with foundational ethics, whether practiced deliberately or not, and — if the institution was religiously affiliated — with how those ethics shone through the brighter prism of theology, the working assumption being that if life is worth living, it is also worth thinking about seriously. The greatest minds of the ages had told us that the good life did not come automatically, even to the prosperous, and so was worth taking pains about.

But all that was before the Great Dilution, before what were once called virtues became values and whatever was once deemed needful to know — that is, needful enough to make one read books about it — became dismissably subjective and thereby needless to learn about at all. In brief, before the entire patrimony of Western culture came to be deemed patriarchal propaganda.

Nonetheless, many of the young remain educable, with the will to learn the lessons of their betters from the past, and their intelligence is just as strong as that of any previous generation. Which is why they should still be taken seriously and served as thinking people with real futures, not as drones ripe for brainwashing.

John H. Garvey, until recently the president of the Catholic University of America, deigned for years to present to Honors freshmen a course of lectures called “The Virtues” that most certainly took his students seriously as people equipped not only with minds but, most important, with souls. Now he has distilled those annual talks to their essence, and were we a thoughtful people, we would send this book to every entering freshman at every institution run with the slightest aspirations to Judeo-Christian ideals — quiz upon arrival to campus.

This book is brief, wise, honest, and full of the kind of nourishment that sophisticatedly ignorant secularists would scorn. But they have their reward. Here we find an exposition of the virtues before virtues were reduced to a species of niceness and getting along that ceded the initiative to activists who felt no compulsion to get along with anybody they judged guilty of “hate speech” and thought crimes, which was anybody they didn’t agree with. Little wonder that “wokeness” has taken such deep root among the young: Most have had but slim intellectual resources to resist the onslaught. More critically, though, they’ve not possessed characters formed in ways of humility and self-control. And the result has been banshee screaming and “cancel culture.”

Garvey rightly points out that the social experiment in moral neutrality in college education so earnestly pursued by the secular regime has failed. Universities are promoting moral education of some kind with every policy promulgated; implementing coed dorms (or now, in some places, coed rooms) isn’t exactly a values-free practice. Nor is the elevation of professional-level athletics at the cost of serious academics on some campuses values-free. Nor is allowing biological males to compete in athletics against biological females in pursuit of an ideologically enforced attitude. Every choice involves a value judgment of some kind, and values are formed by morals. The fact is that campuses are cauldrons of value judgments.

It is into this maelstrom that Garvey wades to revive good sense. He begins by clearing the decks of cant and restoring solid, time-honored understandings, both classical and theological, of words more or less systematically ruined or crippled by leftist-engineered corruption. Take “freedom,” for instance. Freedom, according to Lord Acton, is “not the power of doing what we like, but the right of being able to do what we ought” (though Garvey attributes the line to John Paul II, who certainly agreed with it). For in order to enjoy freedom fully, virtue is required. Why? Because as Benjamin Franklin — no orthodox Christian he — said, “only a virtuous people are capable of freedom.” And from Franklin, it’s but a short hop back to Aristotle, who said the same thing. Liberty is not license, and only reckless moral midgets will treat it that way. Nor does freedom have anything to do with feelings and self-perception, no matter how consequential those feelings may be to the self doing the perceiving.

True freedom cannot be exercised at all without reference to others. And, in a very real sense, it must be earned by everyone, by every moral agent, who wishes to enjoy its privileges — earned by prudence and the repeated practice of self-restraint (enkrateia, as the Greeks would call it). “The virtues,” Garvey declares, “are habits that channel our freedom in the direction we ought to go,” a sentence that could liberate an entire generation if its truth were fully taken on board and pursued with all the hot intensity of youth.

When teaching virtues, we customarily divide them between the three theological virtues — faith, hope, and charity — and the four cardinal virtues — prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice — and this Garvey does as well. But when the virtues are laid out, we also tend to see the cardinal virtues treated first. Here Garvey opens with the theological, a reversal that takes us to the heart of divine wisdom before he explicates the more earthly gateways to it. Succinct descriptions of each are sophisticated and learned but clear: no talking down. Put all seven virtues together and we have a recipe for both success in life and, incidentally, the saving of the soul. Here’s the stuff that used to come with the price of the catechism, though now directed as much toward the seeking as to the faithful.

We’re led also to examine the virtues ideally suited to each stage of life, the so-called “little virtues” that we might consider offshoots of the major seven. When young, for example, we must learn to practice honesty, modesty, studiousness (which “disposes us to know the world with wonder and gratitude”), industriousness, and — tough for the young especially to bring off — silence (“the prerequisite to self-knowledge”). “Enthusiasm,” Garvey tells us, “is not a good substitute for wisdom.” Middle age brings the need for fostering patience, truthfulness, generosity, constancy, meekness, and hospitality. And when we reach old age, we must be mindful in our set ways to practice repentance, mercy, magnanimity, gentleness, and benignity. Of course, all these virtues should be cultivated at all phases of a conscious, purposeful life, but the point is that each stage presents the virtue-aspiring with different tests and trials. The point, indeed the imperative, is to remain vigilant.

Garvey tops off these explorations with what ought to make the fruit, the “crown,” of all these virtues for the watchful: wisdom, peace, and joy. These can deliver us to the sill of heaven. And always the faithful must allow themselves to be instructed by scripture, the church, art, and the lives of the saints and other exemplars, for they lead us in the ways of wisdom, and we “learn from them that the disorder of this world will not be the last word.”

Still, this book may prove to be most fertile for the attentive young, the people whose betterment prompted its writing to begin with. One of the little virtues pressed upon youth is docility, the quality of making yourself humble enough to be teachable, a higher virtue and a more fructifying skill than the thin gruel called “critical thinking” by the uncritically thoughtless, for, as it’s practiced in most schools and universities today, “critical thinking” can reveal logical or social errors but can also “discard truth along with falsehood.” Make no mistake: Wherever you find “critical thinking” raised to prominence as a goal, reality — as Ortega y Gasset would say — has left the room.

“We all have a lot to learn,” Garvey reminds the young. “Don’t be such a skeptic that you set to one side the accumulated wisdom of the world. Just be careful in choosing your teachers.”

Just so.