I first encountered Alasdair MacIntyre in the usual place: the opening pages of After Virtue, his 1981 classic. I was suitably impressed by his argument for the incoherence of modern moral philosophy. To my 19-year-old (literally sophomoric) mind, After Virtue may have inspired the puckish glee many youthful readers draw from Atlas Shrugged or Beyond Good and Evil. It felt delightfully daring and subversive.

My second encounter with MacIntyre was in a Notre Dame classroom: he was lecturing while I took notes. I was excited to be there, but could hardly have anticipated how large MacIntyre would loom over my next two years (and perhaps, by extension, my life). In light of his recent passing, I naturally find myself reflecting back on that heady period. I would never try to present myself as a MacIntyre scholar, nor did I know him with the intimacy of a personal friend. But I did know him, as my teacher and mentor. And what he gave me in that capacity was not trivial. 

Modern Moral Philosophy

My first class with MacIntyre was a history of moral philosophy, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and continuing on through St. Augustine, St. Thomas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Kant, Mill, and Nietzsche. It conveyed the broad contours of his thought, but it was also quite simply a captivating experience. In the classroom, MacIntyre combined the lucidity of a trained analytic thinker with the sweeping grandeur of a great novelist or professional storyteller. This is an extraordinary feat; almost no one can do it. In MacIntyre’s narration, moral philosophy became a kind of epic adventure, the Socratic quest for the good extended across centuries. As in any philosophy class, he drew distinctions, analyzed arguments, delved into texts. But history, literature, biology, sociology, and personal anecdote were also woven seamlessly into his lectures, always delivered fluidly without notes. I was dazzled. How could I not be? By October of that year, moral philosophy consumed my thoughts in almost every spare moment.

MacIntyre had a quasi-prophetic aura, surely helped by the fact that he was brilliant and immensely erudite. But it was more than that. He had passed through a gauntlet of bruising professional and political encounters, but still somehow radiated conviction and an undiminished hunger for truth. His ideas were thick and complex, but his manner was disarmingly artless. He treated philosophy more like a vocation than a discipline or profession. And despite his reputation for cutting remarks, he could be extremely generous towards anyone who seemed to be trying, however clumsily, to do it. 

It may have been a paper assignment that supplied an official excuse for my first visit to his office. The debate that occasioned it was so exhilarating, however, that the next time I dropped the pretext. I simply worked out a position I wished to argue (over and against something he had said in class), and showed up to his regularly scheduled office hour. Over time, this became a regular occurrence, with the format basically the same each time. I knocked, and MacIntyre offered me a chair. He asked genially, “What can I do for you?” I staked out my chosen dialectical ground. We sparred. 

The exercise should be readily recognizable as a classic Socratic elenchus. And as in the Platonic dialogues, our exchanges reliably ended the same way: with me conceding defeat. But that was fine. As in a rodeo, I took it that the goal was to survive as long as possible. I would sometimes spend hours preparing for these conversations, combing through texts, taking miles-long walks with my brain on fire as I worked out the nuances of my position. My roommates thought I had gone completely off the deep end. MacIntyre, for his part, never seemed impatient with the impositions on his time. It was as though he conceded my right, as a fledgling philosopher, to put forward my positions and be duly refuted. 

Once, when I finally conceded after a particularly lengthy and rousing exchange, he did offer a rare compliment. “Miss Smith, that was quite good,” he said, smiling. “And, if you think of any further arguments you’d like to make on behalf of Leibniz, I will be in my office tomorrow between one and three.” 

Those were good times. And yet, there was a difficulty. If moral philosophy is an epic adventure, it seemed in our time to be trending towards tragedy. I knew, walking in, of course, that MacIntyre had made his name by diagnosing the incoherence of modern moral discourse. Once that had seemed exciting, but as I was drawn further into the world of moral philosophy, the implications became more troubling. Although MacIntyre did not himself teach us about his disputes with the logical positivists and postmodernists, that first course I took with him tracked the once-proud Western tradition as it broke down into an incoherent jumble of moralistic debris. We saw how Enlightenment thinkers, in shedding the robustly teleological moral framework of earlier eras, lost the context for making sense of human excellence and thriving. We considered how Kant and Mill tried to paper over the problem, and how Nietzsche, after seeing it with admirable clarity, opted for nihilism over the recovery of virtue.

It was an unhappy conundrum. MacIntyre set young minds ablaze, instilling a sincere zeal to join the quest for wisdom and the Good. But he also gave us reason to think that our odds of finding it were bleak. Morality is learned in the context of cohesive communities. How many of those do we have nowadays? His lectures were filled with references to fishing crews, small hamlets, religious orders, and other exemplars of the types of communities he thought human beings needed to thrive. After a while, one started to wonder: Must I become a fisherman or a nun to lead a good life? Clearly, modernity was fundamentally ill. Virtue was the cure. But we benighted moderns were hard-pressed even to understand what virtue meant, so what was to be done?

Pilgrims in a Modern Wasteland

In later years, I have found this to be the point where many people become disappointed in MacIntyre. They want answers, and all he could really suggest was that we keep plugging away. Do philosophy, build morally cohesive communities, cultivate the virtues, and help instill them in others. It didn’t feel like enough, coming from a man with such genius and prophetic grandeur.

In particular, all sorts of people have grown frustrated with MacIntyre’s reluctance to travel (or even bless) particular roads they considered promising. Why, for instance, wouldn’t he trouble himself more to lay out a Thomistic metaphysical grounding for his moral theories? Why wouldn’t he help articulate a more tradition-friendly version of liberalism (or, alternatively, a more unambiguous rejection of the same)? Why would he not speak more firmly in support of labor unions, the pro-life movement, any political party, or candidate? It seemed he was perpetually holding back, and admirers and critics alike still speculate regularly on the reasons. It was probably the Marxism of his youth. The Catholicism of his dotage. A stubborn Scottish streak. Prejudices inherited from the British empiricists. Seriously, the man had issues.

With me, all such critiques basically elicit a shrug. It would be hard to assess them fairly without a deeper dive into his (extensive) writings than I can manage right now, but to me, it seems like MacIntyre’s curious and sometimes-maddening qualities (the idiosyncratic mix of influences and commitments, the reluctance to “ally” with causes, camps, or schools of thought) made sense, given his rather severe view of the modern landscape and our capacity to find meaning and truth within it. He admired St. Thomas Aquinas immensely, but understood that we, hapless offspring of a benighted modern age, would have to aspire to less than his achievement. And yet, less needn’t mean nothing. It is always possible to pursue the truth and cultivate virtue from wherever one happens to be. 

Maybe MacIntyre avoided certain lines of enquiry because he didn’t like to charge headlong into questions he felt ill-equipped to answer. Perhaps he tolerated tensions in his commitments because he preferred that to a hobgoblin-like “foolish consistency.” Even when he was tweaking and needling people (questioning the existence of “rights” or throwing poxes on all political parties), there was a kind of Socratic impishness to MacIntyre’s style, consistent with the goal of trying to help people see how little they really knew. It occurs to me, too, that it’s fairly common to meet people who publicly ally themselves with Christians for dialectical or political purposes, while finding it difficult to make the trek all the way to the altar rail. MacIntyre had the opposite priorities. Good for him.

In the twenty-some years since I left Notre Dame, I have sometimes found that others are surprised if it comes up in passing that I was a student of MacIntyre’s. Apparently, I don’t fit their profile. This is honestly a little bit odd. I’m still fundamentally an Aristotelian Thomist, and an adult Catholic convert. My writing still largely revolves around questions of “virtue in context,” and the ways in which different patterns of living facilitate human thriving (or not). That’s all thoroughly MacIntyrian, so where’s the puzzle? 

Perhaps the problem is that I fail to project the profound anti-modern gloom that many associate with MacIntyre. I don’t hate free markets, or liberalism. I’m not utterly despairing about modernity. I rarely sigh for the medieval hamlet. Some MacIntyre devotees are much bleaker, which makes a certain sense given his harsh critiques of modernity. 

Truthfully though, I don’t remember him being especially doom-and-gloom. Nor did he encourage that in his students. This was especially clear in the second course I took with him, titled “Three Catholic Philosophers,” examining the work of three contemporary thinkers (Jacques Maritain, Edith Stein, and Elizabeth Anscombe). We considered how they had addressed important philosophical questions, mainly by marshaling the resources available to them and working the problem. Clearly, MacIntyre admired these three modern thinkers, presented to us as worthy of emulation. There was a broader lesson there. Instead of sobbing over the decline of Christendom, why not get excited that there’s so much meaningful work out there, just waiting for a crew of baby philosophers?

Ave et Vale

In my senior year, Notre Dame opened a new building for the philosophy and theology departments, inviting one student from each major to speak at the dedication banquet. Though I didn’t mention him by name, my little speech clearly channeled MacIntyre: I spoke about Catholic universities, and their opportunity to embrace philosophy not just as a series of tricks and puzzles, but as a noble pursuit “with something more at stake.” I half hoped, half feared that he might be present. He was. But when he sought me out afterwards, and extended his hand, I knew it was all right: he was not about to take me to task for a sloppily-drawn distinction. “That was brilliant,” was all he said. He probably meant it in a British way, but I’m certain those were his exact words because even if I, too, live to 96, I will never forget that shining moment.

Soon afterwards, I graduated and went into the Peace Corps. I had just one final exchange with MacIntyre, via email, when he agreed to write in support of my graduate application, waving away my apologies for not paying the postage. (It was hard to buy American stamps in Uzbekistan.) I was overwhelmed with gratitude. But we never communicated again.

I wondered, after hearing of his death, whether that was ungrateful. But really, he just wasn’t the sort of man who craved sustained contact with a wide circle of people. Even when I was regularly in his office, there was hardly any small talk. All energy went into the elenchus. Occasionally, on a visit back to Notre Dame campus, I’d imagine myself walking unannounced into his office. “Hey, it’s great to see you, Professor! Let’s talk about Marx and cohesive moral communities.” If he did want to see old students, that might have been the preferred way. But even I wasn’t quite that audacious.

MacIntyre’s business was doing philosophy. That’s what mattered to him. He sometimes helped others to do it too, but afterwards, he simply sent his students off into the wide world to make whatever contribution they would. He had no interest in heading up a school or research program, but I don’t doubt he left his mark on far more people than have contributed to the secondary literature on his work. 

Anyway, that was me. At 20, he made me feel the tug of some high-minded philosophical calling. It’s been years since I thought much about that eager-beaver philosophy student, but on the occasion of his death, I look at my life, my faith, my writing, my classically educated children, and wonder: am I still perhaps on that mission?

Requiescat in pace, Professor MacIntyre. And thank you.