Maybe the whole thing is a study in how the virtues have to work together. Seriously, I would say that Peter didn't consciously sell out. It's more that, when you cut through all the elegant, aesthetic, and 'reasonable' static, what you have left is a group with which the very concept of principle is incompatible. There is always some fine-sounding slogan, as in, "we've never been a confessional church," which sounds like it means something especially Anglican, but comes down to "We don't have any articulatable standards or canons of belief."
So I'm asking us to picture a guy who has a sense that he has to preserve and teach SOMETHING, but it's not quite clear what, and then discovers that some of his presbyters are indistinguishable from Calvinists, others ditto from Unitarians, while others are still trying to manifest a kind of updated Hookerian worldview, and others are commies with vestments.
And you've already taken a position and somehow advanced in a group in which, as you hope, this diversity will somehow lead to God's will being done and His truth being proclaimed.
AND you have sufficient humility to think, when confronted with the kind of nonsense I described earlier, that maybe your sudden wave of revulsion is a sign of your sinfulness and "intolerance."
I guess I'm proposing a kind of ecclesiastical Stockholm Syndrome, or something analogous.
Another way of presenting it, a way closer to my problem, is to ask yo to sort of imagine the unfolding of distress, confusion, and moral debilitation when you think of yourself as under obedience, and then look around and realize that neither your superiors, inferiors, or equals think of themselves in such a position nor expect you to think of yourself as in such a position.
I remember (cue mists, soft focus and harp arpeggio) when I was on the staff on the Cathedral in Jackson and was urging us to conform our liturgies to the rubrics. A colleague angrily said that I wanted to have everything MY way!
That was exactly what I did NOT want. I wanted to have everything the Church's way. But that was taken as just one opinion among many, and my contention for that opinion was seen as no less partisan than somebody else contending for having the Eucharist celebrated with Fritos and Pepsi!
So I don't think it's simply a lack of courage. It's more that when such courage as one might be given is expended fighting for the wrong side.
In a larger sense, it's a kind of testimony to the falsehood of dualism: If you're backing any but the right cause, sooner or later all the virtues will be simply impossible.
(I'm going to have to run that past my Thomist buddies. But I think it might go like courage will decay into wrath and stubbornness; prudence into cowardice, temperance into fussiness, and justive into judgmentalism. Maybe.)
"a kind of ecclesiastical Stockholm Syndrome" is the first. Which is more or less what I was driving at earlier when I talked about paralysis and how the plausible leaders of a bad organization can rope you in before you know where you're at, but much better and more elegantly expressed and driving at the real root of the matter -- an emotional reaction to being taken hostage.
The second is the idea of virtues being perverted to vices when used in a wrong cause. It's ringing a faint bell with me, something out of C.S. Lewis's The Great Divorce . . . the man and the lizard, perhaps.