It is easy to wonder about the logical thread that purports to string together a chain of human virtues in consecutive fashion. It looks like artifice, like all form and no function, like empty words.
Paul does it notoriously, but before us stands rather an exemplar of the Petrine tradition:
For this very reason, you must make every effort to support your faith with goodness, and goodness with knowledge, and knowledge with self-control, and self-control with endurance, and endurance with godliness, and godliness with mutual affection, and mutual affection with love.
Support your faith with goodness. Whatever might that mean?
Not long ago arete would have been routinely translated as excellence. One is to add this superlative quality to one’s faith as a matter of exertion, of focus, even of drive. This is not so hard to imagine after all.
One knows enough of lackluster faith, of bare confession with no substance to it, of the insinuation that things are really rather spiritual when it is the absence of action that calls one’s attention.
It is not so difficult now to imagine adding excellence—goodness is not an altogether failed translation but lacking in linguistic argument—to that kind of faith. This would be improvement, a thrusting forward beyond the initial enthusiasm of belief to something enduring, ennobling, reflective.
Not a leap of faith perhaps, but a persistent, committed series of steps.
Canter Bridge 
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