Arete

I have been thinking about virtue.
Actually I keep bumping up against different definintions--at church and with the humanities class that I am taking.
The Greeks had the word arete. It translates to virtue and it meant excellence. For women, beauty and domesticity. For the men, heros like Achilles and Odysseus exemplified arete. Physical perfection, war heros, leaders, and with the endurance and cleverness to get them sucessfully through any situation.
The Romans took it one step further. Aeneas, their hero, had all the attributes the Greeks admired plus he had an incredible sense of duty to his god-given mission, to family, to the glory of Rome. His arete was proven in his self-sacrificing actions.
The Greek philosopher Socrates believed that Arete meant excellence of soul. True virtue came with knowledge and understanding truth.
I have been interested in the church's addition of virtue to the young women values. We visited Matthew and Kimberly one Sunday. When the meeting got out, man after young man came out the doors wearing gold ties. The girls and their leaders had on lovely gold necklaces. Their stake had decided that if it was important enough for the girls to focus on virtue that the young men should too. They had all their youth and their leaders make commitments for the year to become more virtuous based on the girl's personal progress program.
Virtue as per the new YW value is defined as: a pattern of thought and behavior based on high moral standards (definitely different from the Greeks and Romans). They have goals pertaining to chastity, worthily entering the temple, living so the Holy Ghost can guide you, learning about repentance and reading the Book of Mormon.
We had a speaker talk to the Stake. She defined virtue as the power of Christ. She based this on the scripture where the young woman touched Christ's robe and he felt virtue leave him. I thought that he felt the priesthood being used and that virtue was being used a different way in that story. But it did make me think about it more that I would have if it had made sense to me.
Several days later I read this in the D&C. 121:45: Let thy bowels also be full of charity towards all men, and to the household of faith, and let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly; then shall thy confidence wax strong in the presence of God; and the doctrine of the priesthood shall distill upon thy soul as the dews from heaven.

I like the use of the word garnish--like a sprig of parsely added artistically to make your salad more appealing. There has got to be an analogy here somewhere. From the dictionary virtue means: moral excellence; goodness; righteousness and some possible synonyms for garnish are: decorate,embellish, enhance, attach.

So, "let virtue garnish thy thoughts unceasingly" could mean something like," let moral excellence be attached to your thoughts all the time." With the addition of virtue we are better people not just because we are doing good acts but that goodness extends through our thoughts. Like the difference in just providing service to someone and having charity. One is an action the other is really loving and caring for someone in our mind and hearts and actions. I can see how this could be applied in my life by asking questions of myself. How can I implement a standard of excellence in my thinking? Am I trying to see virtue instead of vice? Am I making sure that each of my thoughts is being viewed with a virtuous garnish?