I find myself in sympathy with St. Thomas, the toucher of bodies, and his difficulty with believing what is unseen unseen. Poet Troy Jollimore, who moonlights as a philosopher, writes persuasively in Aeon that it’s not belief in God, after all, that motivates moral action (which in part explains why those who believe in holy things can feel that is enough and remain reprehensible creatures), but something more complicated and terrestrial. You can read the metaphysics, but here’s in part of what he gets to:
For [Iris] Murdoch, what so often keeps us from acting morally is not that we fail to follow the moral rules that tell us how to act; rather, it is that we misunderstand the situation before us. When we describe the situation to ourselves, we simply get it wrong. To get the description right — to accurately grasp the nature of the motivations at play, to see the relevant individuals in their wholeness and particularity, and to see what, morally speaking, is at stake — is to grasp the ‘shape’ of the situation, in the words of Jonathan Dancy, professor of philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin. It is to see things in the right way, from the proper angle, and with the correct emphasis. Once this is achieved, according to Murdoch and Dancy, it will be apparent what needs to be done, and the motivation to do so will follow naturally.
This description is set up with Murdoch’s comparison between the vision of the artist and the careful attention to particular situations the person who would act rightly must bring to bear to his or her life.
It is obvious here what is the role, for the artist or spectator, of exactness and good vision: unsentimental, detached, unselfish, objective attention. It is also clear that in moral situations a similar exactness is called for.
I like to quote C.S. Pierce, who said something like “belief is a habit of action,” and as a loyal Aristotelian I’m the perfect sucker to fawn over Jollimore’s conclusions. I’m quoting Hamlet all the time to students, often in the context of opening a book and pretend to be interested: assume a virtue if you have it not,
Given this, it is not surprising that on Aristotle’s view the cultivation of virtue and wisdom — the development of one’s own moral character and powers of judgment — is all-important. Developing practical wisdom is, for Aristotle, a matter both of acquiring knowledge and experience and of training one’s responses, including the emotions. We begin by imitating the virtuous, and end up becoming virtuous ourselves.
There may very well be what that other C.S. called deep magic, but becoming a better actor in the world requires, like everything else, a bit of work. Sorry.