Virtue scores
Review
SECTION ONE — Bookstore recommendation A buffalo replaces the lion; a bald eagle stands in for the fox; the Everglades and the Great Lakes become the moral theater that Aesop set in the Mediterranean world. Matthew Mehan's The American Book of Fables is a collection of original and adapted fables in verse and prose, organized by reading level and keyed to the creatures, landscapes, and providential history of the United States. The book's argument is that the classical fable form — moral instruction through animal story — can be naturalized to American soil without losing its philosophical backbone: that nature itself teaches, that liberty requires virtue, and that gratitude to God is the proper disposition of a free people. Families with children of any age are the intended audience, though adults will find the layered wit in the 'Bigs' section substantial on its own. John Folley's realist-impressionist illustrations treat American landscape as morally significant space, not decorative backdrop. This is a book for the family shelf, to be read aloud and returned to. SECTION TWO — Catholic anthropological reading - **Created**: Mehan's fables presuppose that the natural world is morally legible — that buffalo, manatees, and sequoias disclose something true about order, gift, and proper relation. This is creation read as gift, consistent with the CCMMP's first premise that the human person is made for truth and goodness, and that the natural order participates in that structure. - **Fallen**: The fable genre exists precisely because human beings do not naturally choose the good without instruction, repetition, and imaginative habituation. Each tale addresses some form of disordered desire — pride, shortsightedness, ingratitude, cowardice — and does so through the indirection of animal narrative, which lowers the reader's defenses and allows the moral to land before resistance forms. - **Fallen**: The book's civic dimension acknowledges that self-government fails without interior formation; liberty without virtue becomes license. This names the fallen condition of political life without requiring theological vocabulary, making the argument accessible to readers who do not yet share the theological frame. - **Redeemed**: The harmony Mehan posits between faith, virtue, and freedom is not a natural achievement but a restoration — the recovery of a right ordering that concupiscence disrupts. The book's invocation of 'nature's God' as the source of moral law places human flourishing within a providential arc, gesturing toward the Redeemed state without collapsing into sentimentality. - **Redeemed**: The household reading structure — gathering Littles, Middles, and Bigs around the same text at different levels — enacts domestic prudence as a form of grace. The family that reads together across a shared moral imagination is already practicing the ordered love that the CCMMP identifies as the restored image of God in human community. SECTION THREE — Conversation with the canon Robert McKee's account of story structure offers an oblique and useful counterpoint.[^1] McKee argues that narrative works not by stating theme but by forcing characters — and through them, audiences — to make value-laden choices under pressure, so that the story's meaning is earned through action rather than announced through commentary. Mehan's fables operate on the same principle: the moral appended to each tale is not the fable's meaning but its articulation, and the imaginative work of following the buffalo or the eagle through its predicament is what actually moves the reader toward the virtue in question. This is what Aquinas means when he locates the passions as the proximate matter of virtue: moral formation runs through the emotions before it reaches the will, and narrative is one of the few instruments capable of engaging both simultaneously. Where McKee's framework is descriptive and craft-oriented, Mehan's is explicitly teleological: the fables are not merely well-structured stories but ordered instruments of formation, aimed at a specific human end — the free, grateful, self-governing person who can sustain republican life because virtue has been internalized, not merely commanded. The CCMMP's account of prudence, especially in its civic and domestic forms, supplies the anthropological scaffolding that McKee's secular poetics cannot provide on its own. Together, the two frameworks clarify what a fable collection can and cannot do: it can habituate the moral imagination, engage the passions, and present virtue as attractive; it cannot substitute for the grace that transforms desire at its root. Mehan, to his credit, does not claim otherwise.
✓ Strengths
- ✓Mehan grounds moral instruction in the specific creatures, landscapes, and providential history of America, making virtue formation concrete and place-bound rather than abstract — a pedagogical move aligned with Aquinas's insistence that practical wisdom works through the particular, not the universal alone.
- ✓The three-tier structure ('for Littles, Middles, and Bigs') embeds the book in family and domestic life, treating the household as the primary school of virtue — consistent with the CCMMP's account of domestic prudence as the ordered governance of family formation.
- ✓By adapting Aesop's fable form to the American landscape, Mehan recovers the classical understanding that moral imagination is cultivated through narrative before it is articulated through argument, a sequencing Aquinas recognized in his treatment of the passions as the proximate matter of virtue.
- ✓The book's insistence on the harmony between natural law, civic liberty, and gratitude to God positions self-governance not as autonomy but as ordered freedom — a distinction essential to the CCMMP's account of the Redeemed person acting from internalized principle rather than external constraint.
- ✓John Folley's realist-impressionist illustrations engage the cogitative sense — the faculty Benjamin Suazo identifies as the hinge between sensory experience and rational judgment — by presenting American nature as morally legible, a world that speaks of order and gift.
⚠ Considerations
- ⚠The publisher framing leans heavily on national identity as a motivating frame for virtue, which risks conflating civic pride with the theological virtue of religion; a reader without supplementary formation may absorb patriotism as a sufficient moral framework rather than as one ordered expression of gratitude to God.
- ⚠Fable as a genre tends to resolve moral tension quickly and cleanly; the Fallen dimension of human experience — concupiscence, the persistence of disordered desire even after moral instruction — may receive less sustained attention than the genre allows, potentially leaving readers with an optimism about virtue formation that underestimates the necessity of grace.
- ⚠The book's scope, spanning all ages and all American regions in a single volume, may dilute the depth available to any one audience; families seeking serious moral formation for adolescents in particular may find the 'Bigs' section thinner than dedicated formation texts.