The ideal of a perfectly magnanimous life, by Alexandre Havard

Review of Alexandre Havard's "Created for Greatness: The Power of Magnanimity"
by Michael Severance

A valuable contemporary philosophical book to help understand why abandoning virtuous achievement is a serious anthropological mistake


By the end of January, most of us have given up on our New Year’s resolutions. These are goals we enthusiastically set during the silent nights of self-reflection that Christmas affords us. We contemplate our Savior’s magnificent and humble life in contrast with our own feeble and self-seeking, sinful existence. We intensely desire personal renewal to become holier and nobler persons; yet, alas, we lack the will to actualize our true human potential.

Many blame the failure to commit on laziness or some other insuperable vice; others point to the natural distraction a busy life has on our focus once we are caught up in the flurry of school and work again.

While true for the most part, such excuses are symptomatic of a deeper mea culpa based on a lack of anthropological clarity of what human beings are meant to be.

Created for Greatness: The Power of Magnanimity (Scepter, 2014) by the French-Russian author Alexandre Havard provides a remedy to this intellectual and spiritual gap. It is one of the most valuable contemporary philosophical books to help us understand just why abandoning virtuous achievement is a serious anthropological mistake, leading to general discontent and even despair.

Havard’s short book—just 96 pages—is essentially the sequel to his acclaimed, multi-language publication Virtuous Leadership: An Agenda for Personal Excellence (Scepter, 2007). In it the Moscow-based executive leadership coach dedicates five chapters, replete with practical and spiritual wisdom, to the virtue of magnanimity -- what he calls the “jet fuel…, the propulsive virtue par excellence” of human achievement.

Upon reading Havard’s book I could not help but reflect on Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1981 masterpiece After Virtue. I was reminded of his criticism of a post-modern civil society that is bedeviled by its lack of belief in a true, objective model of mankind and moral behavior -- one rooted in dignity, rationality, and virtuous agency. The self-less, heroic and virtuous living that once propelled so many great generations before ours to the heights of human exploration, invention and even sainthood, now plays second fiddle to rules and useful principles.

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