Cardinal Virtues

Teslagrad

An introductory talk on the cardinal virtues had been requested. Ask and ye shall receive.

Proper education is a school of virtue, so it might be best to define what precisely we mean by that. Virtue, in classical philosophy, is a good habit. It’s something we do regularly and consistently that conforms our life to what is good and true and beautiful. Conversely, vice is a bad habit, a rut into which we all too easily fall, which separates us from the good, the true, and the beautiful. Virtue must be cultivated and vice resisted.

Now in order to cultivate virtue we must have both knowledge, education, and also practice, application. We must study the good and then live the good. It does us no good to practice what we do not know, nor to know what we do not practice.

The four cardinal or fundamental virtues are prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice. And these each correspond to an aspect of the soul. The human soul, or mind, consists of three parts: the intellect, the will, and the passions. The intellect deals with reason, our ability as rational beings to discern truth both within ourselves and in the world around us. The passions deal with the basic drives of physical life, our animal needs. And they are subdivided into the irascible passions and the concupiscible passions. The irascible passions are our fight-or-flight response—in other words, aggression—while the concupiscible deal with our appetites and lusts.

Finally there is the will, which takes into account both the demands of the passions and the dictates of reason, and then makes an informed choice. The will is our freedom as moral beings to choose between right and wrong as best we can discern them. We often imagine the intellect as residing in the head, the will in the chest, the irascible passions in the abdomen, and the concupiscible passions down in the nethers and the bowels.

If this all sounds familiar, it should. Dividing the soul between intellect, will, and passions goes back at least as far as Plato. Freud more recently repackaged these ancient ideas in his own invention of psychoanalysis, calling the passions Id, the will Ego, and the intellect Superego. Same model, different names.

In a rightly ordered soul, the intellect directs the will, which in turn controls the passions. We discern what is right, we choose what is right, and we harness the passions accordingly. In a disordered soul, the opposite occurs. The passions, those most basic impulses of lust and wrath, override the will, making us slaves to our passions. And then the intellect, rather than discerning truth through reason, instead becomes a tool of the corrupted will to rationalize the wrong behaviors, the vices, of our passions run amok.

How then can we ensure an ordered mind and soul? Why, through the practice of virtue.

The first cardinal virtue is prudence. This corresponds to the intellect. Prudence involves applying wisdom to everyday life. We must use our reason to discern the big picture of reality, of God, man, and the world. We must put first things first, and order our lives appropriately. Thus having sought wisdom, how do we then live in accordance with the good, the true, and the beautiful in our everyday lives? Wisdom does us no good if it remains purely theoretical, if we do not live it and practice it. We must be faithful in small things if we are to be entrusted with larger things. Thus, prudence involves the habit of acting wisely, in accordance with right reason, in the everyday situations we encounter, be they large or small.

Fortitude means strength, and it is the virtue corresponding to the irascible passions, that fight-or-flight response of fear, wrath, and rage. We must have fortitude sufficient to face our fears and control them, rather than letting our fears control us. Human beings do terrible things when we’re scared. Likewise we must be strong enough to control our anger, our desire to lash out. This is not to say that fear and anger are bad things in and of themselves. There is such a thing as healthy fear, and such a thing as righteous indignation. Sometimes we should flee; sometimes we should fight. Practicing fortitude helps us to determine when to back down, when to rise up, and when to stand steady.

The concupiscible passions, meanwhile, fall under temperance. We all have lusts. We all have appetites, be they for food or possessions or power or sex. And these appetites are good; they are natural. We should eat when we’re hungry. We should mate, when we grow mature enough to support a family. But especially in our modern society, when we have so much of everything save virtue, these appetites have been allowed to run wild. We eat too much, buy too much, take too much, and treat the opposite sex not as a partner equal in dignity but as a thing to be used up for our own base pleasures. We must practice temperance, the virtue of right balance between unhealthy abstinence and ugly excess.

Finally, justice is the cardinal virtue dealing with the will, and it is the most extensive and important of all the virtues. We must practice every day the habit of strengthening our willpower. If we know that something is right, even if it is hard, we must live in accordance with the good. And if we know that something is wrong, even if it is easy or pleasurable, we must have will enough to resist evil, lest a small slip in judgment become habit, and thus an entrenched vice. Justice takes the whole picture into account—intellect and passions, reason and need—and strikes balance, a harmony of body, mind, and soul.

These then are the cardinal virtues necessary for a well-ordered soul: prudence, fortitude, temperance, and justice—not to be confused with the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love. That is another talk entirely.