Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE A boy walks through a vast, spare landscape and meets a mole obsessed with cake, a wary fox who says almost nothing, and a horse whose size is matched only by his gentleness. Charlie Mackesy's illustrated book began as a series of drawings posted to social media, but the questions the four characters ask each other — 'What do you think is the biggest waste of time?' 'What is the bravest thing you've ever said?' 'Asking for help' — turned out to be questions a great many people were carrying quietly. The book has no plot in the conventional sense. It is a series of conversations across a journey with no named destination, and its thesis, stated plainly by the horse, is that the boy is worthy of love before he has done anything to earn it. The audience is anyone who has found the distance between who they are and who they think they should be difficult to cross — which is, on most days, most people. SECTION TWO - **Created**: The horse's insistence that the boy is loved simply because he exists — not for his usefulness, his progress, or his courage — names the CCMMP's first anthropological premise with unusual directness: the person has dignity prior to performance. This is not a self-help cliche here; Mackesy draws it as a physical act, the horse lowering his body so the exhausted boy can be carried. Dignity is bodily, not merely verbal. - **Fallen**: The boy's recurring anxiety and self-contempt ('I feel small and lost') and the fox's silence born of old wounds give the book its honest weight. These are not obstacles to be overcome by technique; they are the wounded condition of the person in the Fallen state, the disorder that Aquinas calls concupiscence operating not as lust but as the habitual turning away from one's own goodness. - **Redeemed**: The horse does not fix the boy. He accompanies him, which is a different act entirely. The restoration on offer is relational — the Created goodness of the person is recovered not through introspection alone but through being received by another. This is the Redeemed arc's structural claim: healing moves through encounter, not through private effort. - **Justice (friendliness)**: In Aquinas's account of the virtues annexed to justice, friendliness (amicitia) is the stable disposition to will the other's good expressed in ordinary communication. The mole and the horse practice this not in grand gestures but in small, repeated offers — a piece of cake, a question, a silence that does not press. The book is, in this sense, a long illustration of a single Thomistic virtue. - **Hope**: The book's emotional center is not optimism — the characters do not pretend the woods are safe — but hope in the specific sense: the confident movement toward a good that is real but not yet possessed. The horse's 'you will be alright' is not a promise that nothing will hurt; it is an account of where the journey leads.
✓ Strengths
- ✓The book grounds human dignity in the sheer fact of existence rather than in achievement or performance, which maps directly onto the CCMMP's Created premise that personhood has inherent worth prior to any act.
- ✓Mackesy treats suffering and self-doubt not as problems to be solved but as shared features of the human condition, giving concrete form to the Fallen state without pathologizing or moralizing it.
- ✓The horse's repeated offers of accompaniment — carrying the boy when he cannot walk — present a legible image of grace as unearned assistance, which the Redeemed arc requires as its structural center.
- ✓The four characters together model the virtue of friendliness as Aquinas understands it in the Summa: a habitual disposition toward the good of the other expressed in word and gesture, not merely in sentiment.
- ✓The book's resistance to tidy resolution keeps it honest about the purgative dimension of growth: the characters do not arrive, they travel, which aligns with Groeschel's Purgative-Illuminative-Unitive arc in Spiritual Passages.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The book's therapeutic register occasionally collapses the distinction between consolation and transformation: feeling better is not the same as being made new, and the text does not always hold that difference.
- ⚠The source of the horse's unconditional acceptance is left unnamed and contentless — which makes the book accessible to secular readers but leaves its deepest anthropological premise (that love of this kind has an origin) unexamined.
- ⚠Without a theological grounding, the book's ethic of self-compassion can shade into a therapeutic quietism that has no account of the moral effort Aquinas calls the 'work of virtue' — the slow habituation that transforms appetite, not just mood.