Prudence, Justice, Courage & Temperance The Cardinal Virtues by Fr Andrew Pinsent All booklets are published thanks to the generous support of the members of the Catholic Truth Society
CATHOLIC TRUTH SOCIETY publishers to the holy see
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Contents Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 The Christian Cardinal Virtues . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 7 Prudence (Practical Wisdom) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Justice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Courage (Fortitude) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 41 Temperance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 Concluding Practical Remarks . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 All rights reserved. First published 2017 by The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society, 40-46 Harleyford Road London SE11 5AY Tel: 020 7640 0042 Fax: 020 7640 0046. © 2017 The Incorporated Catholic Truth Society. Images: Page 8, The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck © Philip Mould Ltd, London / Bridgeman Images; Page 14, Detail from the Wilton Diptych © Art Collection 2 / Alamy Stock Photo; Page 22, The Magdalene Reading by Rogier van der Weyden © Art Collection 2 / Alamy Stock Photo; Page 26, St Thomas More by Hans Holbein the Younger © Bridgeman Images; Page 36, Detail of the Mocking of Christ by Blessed Fra Angelico © ART Collection / Alamy Stock Photo; Page 42, Joan of Arc by Albert Lynch © ART Collection / Alamy Stock Photo; Page 44, The Fall of the Rebel Angels (detail) by Pieter Bruegel the Elder © Bridgeman Images; Page 54, The Torment of St Anthony by Michelangelo © FineArt / Alamy Stock Photo; Page 64, The Resurrection of Christ by Piero della Francesca © Photo by George Tatge for Alinari / Alinari Archives, Florence / Alinari via Getty Images.
ISBN 978 1 78469 175 2
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Introduction
W
hat is God’s greatest commandment? What does God, who is Love (1 Jn 4:8), command us, if we are to be his children in truth, properly able to call God “Our Father”? Jesus gives us God’s answer, recorded in all three Synoptic Gospels (Mt 22:35-40, Mk 12:28-31, Lk 10:2528). His answer unites two commandments already found in the Old Testament (Dt 6:4-5 and Lv 19:18) and familiar to the Jewish people: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the great and first commandment. And a second is like it, You shall love your neighbour as yourself. On these two commandments depend all the law and the prophets.” (Mt 22:37-40)
These words “You shall love the Lord your God” and “You shall love your neighbour as yourself ” are easy to write down, but challenging to interpret and, of course, to put into practice. The Greek word for love here is agápē, used in the Scriptures and translated into Latin as caritas or divine love. In other words, the love with
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which we must first love God, and then our neighbour, is the love with which God loves, and that is God. Faith, Hope and Love: The Theological Virtues, the first book of this CTS series, observes that a special feature of love is that it is about particular persons. “I love you” does not mean “I love a you”, one of (possibly) many different ‘you’s’. The one who is addressed as ‘you’ is unique, just as whoever says ‘I’ is also unique. This particularity also applies to the other theological virtues. For instance, I am commanded to love you as myself, implying a holy desire for my own true good, namely the happiness of the kingdom of heaven. Hence love is linked to my hope, a desire for my own good, from a first-person perspective. And since love needs a guardian in this world, we have been given the revelation of the divine persons, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, to whom I can say that I have faith in you, the divine persons, and what you have revealed, in other words a commitment to the particular persons of the Most Holy Trinity. The main focus of all the theological virtues is therefore the first person, ‘I’, or those to whom I can relate as ‘you’. Existence, however, involves much more than first persons and those to whom we can relate as second persons. We live in complex societies, in a complex cosmos of created things, visible and invisible. The diversity of ways in which things are, and are said to be, include living beings, non-living material beings, ideas,
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qualities, quantities, relations, places, times, positions, states, actions and passions, each one of which has many subdivisions. Besides individual persons, a Christian therefore needs a range of other character-forming dispositions towards the range of beings that exist. These dispositions are called infused moral virtues and they shape our responses towards good things to pursue, difficulties to overcome and evils to avoid. The theological and moral virtues work together. For example, an individual human person, who is the subject of the theological virtue of love in the relation ‘I’ to ‘you’, is also the subject of justice to whom I owe certain obligations as a member of the human race and a child of God in grace. An evil action against you therefore violates love and justice. This booklet describes these infused moral virtues and specifically the four virtues that are the pillars or ‘hinges’ of all the others. These ‘cardinal virtues’ (from the Latin word ‘cardo’, meaning ‘hinge’) are drawn from Scripture and classical philosophy: prudence, justice, courage and temperance. The content of the booklet is based on the great systematic works of Catholic theology, especially the Catechism of the Catholic Church and the second part of the Summa theologiae of St Thomas Aquinas. Examples of great Christian art, historical references, liturgical sources, parables, prayers and new research in psychology help to illustrate and explain these ideas.
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The Scriptural translations used in this booklet are based on the Revised Standard Version, with some minor modifications. Texts from the Catechism of the Catholic Church are taken from the Catechism of the Catholic Church: Revised in Accordance with the Official Latin Text Promulgated by Pope John Paul II, 2nd ed. Vatican: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2000. The quotation from the annals of Publius Cornelius Tacitus is from the translation by A.C. Church and W.J. Brodribb of 1876, available from the Internet Classics Archive. The quotation from Dante Alighieri, The New Life (La Vita Nuova) is from the translation by D.G. Rossetti, published by Ellis and Elvey (London) in 1899. I explore the connection between joint attention and virtue formation in more detail in The Second-Person Perspective in Aquinas’s Ethics: Virtues and Gifts, published by Routledge in 2012. I also recommend the work of Eleonore Stump, Robert J. Henle Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University, who encouraged me in the research that led to this booklet.
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Fr Andrew Pinsent Faculty of Theology and Religion Oxford University Easter 2017
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The Christian Cardinal Virtues
T
he cardinal virtues are a name that we give to a set of interconnected master virtues that became influential in the late pre-Christian world. As noted in the companion booklet, Faith, Hope and Love, the Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero (d. 43 BC), as well as the Old Testament (Deutero-Canonical) Book of Wisdom, identifies four key virtues: And if anyone loves righteousness, her labours are virtues; for she [‘Wisdom’] teaches temperance and prudence, justice and courage; nothing in life is more profitable for mortals than these. (Ws 8:7) ‘Wisdom’ is personified here as a woman who is loved by the righteous soul and who teaches the four principal virtues of prudence, justice, courage and temperance. In the Latin-speaking world, these four principal virtues,
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The Arnolfini Portrait by Jan van Eyck (d. 1441)
The infused virtues and gifts of grace enable second-person relatedness to God. By means of these dispositions, nurtured by sacraments, liturgy and prayer, we cultivate an ‘I’-‘you’ relationship with God, culminating in divine friendship. One metaphor for this relationship is a covenant or spiritual marriage to the Trinity.
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under which all other virtues were grouped, were given a special name: the ‘cardinal virtues’ from the Latin word ‘cardo’ meaning ‘hinge’. In the classical world, a perfect human being had all these virtues in harmony, their presence being revealed by a tendency to act in prudent, just, courageous and temperate ways. After the coming of Jesus Christ, these cardinal virtues were gradually incorporated into an emerging Christian virtue ethic. The Christian life, however, is different from the ideal life of the Greeks and Romans of the ancient world. A Christian is not just someone with a special set of beliefs, but a supernaturalised human being, a child of God who partakes of the divine nature (2 P 1:4; cf. Rm 8:17; 1 Co 3:16). In this life of grace, a person relates to God as Father and addresses God as “you”, as in St Augustine’s celebrated prayer, “Late have I loved you!” When a person is born again into this new life, the cardinal virtues are transformed by divine love. Joint attention and the cultivation of virtue
As noted in Faith, Hope and Love, the interactions of very young children provide a metaphor for how the love of God begins for all of us in the life of grace. A child, almost immediately after being born, has the astonishing ability to recognise a face and return a smile, establishing an ‘I’–‘you’ (second-person) relation. The two aspects of this relation are a shared object or activity, in this case
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the activity of smiling, and a sense of union between the two persons. As time goes on, the child will engage in many other activities with a similar structure, such as pointing, gaze-following, turn-taking or practically any activity in which one person moves another to share awareness of shared focus on some object, task or game. Such activities, which psychologists call ‘joint attention’, draw each person out of himself or herself to share the perspective of the other person. Joint attention is, we now believe, an important context for shaping character from an early age. This formation begins with simple games in which a moral stance is shared. For example, even before the first year of age, a child begins to discriminate between ‘nice’ and ‘naughty’ puppets, the beginning of the formation of a sense of justice. A keen sense of what is ‘mine’ and what is ‘yours’ quickly follows, and shared stories help to cultivate further the principles of moral reasoning. A child knows that in the tale of the Sleeping Beauty, for example, only the kiss of the prince will waken the princess from her enchanted sleep: nothing else will do. From a surprising early age, children therefore understand, better than many adults, what is meant by moral absolutes. Joint attention activities are often, therefore, the first school of moral virtues, principles and reasoning.
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Formation in the Christian cardinal virtues begins in essentially the same way. By means of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, we can enter into spiritual joint attention with the Holy Spirit in prayer. This union with God should form a quiet and constant background of a holy life, in which our wills align with God like a confluence of steadily flowing waters. Hence a person who receives the sacraments, studies, prays and suffers as needed in the Christian life will take on an intellectual and moral stance towards other persons and other things that is distinctively Christ-like. Holy attitudes are formed and reinforced by liturgies, sacraments, devotions, prayers, stories of saints, history, art and grace-filled people. These gifts enable us gradually to share God’s stance towards divine and created things, imprinting a distinctive pattern on the Christian cardinal virtues and, over time, a distinctive and spiritual culture on Christian societies. In this new life as adopted children of God, made possible by the gift of sanctifying grace, we live in the hope of seeing God face to face. The battle against sin
The grace of Baptism and a holy home and church can help us to develop Christian cardinal virtues from a very early age. Many people, however, do not have these opportunities, and even if we are blessed by them, we will still face competing allegiances as we mature. Through
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mixtures of temptations or intimidations, there are three ancient enemies, the world, the flesh and the devil, which induce us to break our relationship with God by choosing some course of action or inaction that is hostile to God. Since union with God is second-personal, leading to a spiritual marriage or covenant of the soul to God, then mortal sin, which breaks this relationship, can be understood as spiritual adultery. Venial sin is like double-mindedness about lesser matters. When we sin, we betray God and, in effect, worship something or someone that has usurped God’s place. Such betrayals can include turning food, drink or other sensual pleasures into one’s god; or following the false reasoning of the world, such as the single-minded pursuit of mere earthly success; or darker and more explicit betrayals. Examples of such betrayals include binding oneself to anti-Christian religions (for example, Freemasonry) and occult practices. Only by repentance, reconciliation and penance, usually by means of the Sacrament of Confession, can such betrayals be amended, grace restored, and habits reintegrated into a life of true virtue. How, then, do we strengthen ourselves against these betrayals? How do we avoid sin, the greatest curse and source of suffering of the human race?
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First, we need to stay close to God in the life of grace. Ideally we need to fill our lives with God and the things of God, so that evil can find no foothold in our souls. If we fall away from God, we need to return to him promptly, especially making use of the Sacrament of Confession and associated penance. Second, we can also educate ourselves about moral laws, especially the laws of God and their implications, as well as moral and Scriptural stories. Although study cannot save us by itself, knowledge of the landscape of ideas and moral battlegrounds helps us to resist sin and supports the life of grace, especially against the false reasoning of the world and devil. Third, we need to study and practise the virtues. Although the pattern of holy virtues is not something we can acquire by our own efforts, this gift can and should be reinforced by familiarity and habituation wherever possible. Hence a well-ordered, regular life is a great source of support. This habituation will often be a source of support when the will is weak. Since the practice of the virtues is supported by the study of the virtues, it is important to study the Christian virtues. Following the previous booklet on the theological virtues, this booklet examines the four cardinal virtues, beginning with the virtue of prudence.
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Detail from the Wilton Diptych (1395–99), a rare survival of a late Medieval panel painting from England
St Edmund the Confessor (d. 1066), standing in the centre, is an example of a king who was recognised as a saint. The combination of kingship and saintliness exemplifies Christian prudence in a rare and important way: in self-governance and governance of one’s country.
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