More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
July 12 - August 4, 2020
Part of prudence is “the ability to govern and discipline oneself by the use of reason.”
when such knowledge is used toward unjust or evil ends, it transforms from the virtue of prudence into the vice of cunning.
Covetousness is “immoderate straining for all the possessions which man thinks are needed to assure his own importance and status.”29
applying wisdom requires the ability to discern truth and then to act rightly based on truth.
prudence is an intellectual virtue based in the rational ability, first, to distinguish between competing goods (for Tom, too often, these competing goods are women); then to foresee the consequences of possible actions; and finally, to take the best course of action accordingly.
Perfectionism is the foil of prudence.
Temperance is unique among the virtues. Unlike other virtues that are revealed under pressure, temperance is “an ordinary, humble virtue, to be practiced on a regular rather than an exceptional basis.” It “is a virtue for all times but is all the more necessary when times are good.”
temperance is “the virtue that inclines us to desire and enjoy pleasures well.”
It helps us to desire pleasures in a reasonable manner,3 desiring them neither too much nor too little, the virtuous mean between the vices of self-indulgence and insensibility.4
One attains the virtue of temperance when one’s appetites have been shaped such that one’s very desires are in proper order and proportion.
The temperate person is one who “understands these connections between bodily pleasures and the larger human good, and whose understanding actually tempers the desires and pleasures.”8 Temperance is liberating because it “allows us to be masters of our pleasure instead of becoming its slaves.”9
This “consumer capitalism” created “a culture almost violently hostile to the past and to tradition, a future-oriented culture of desire that confused the good life with goods . . . one moving largely against the grain of earlier traditions of republicanism and Christian virtue.”
while the United States has 3.1 percent of the world’s children, it has 40 percent of the world’s toys.
“Economic plenty seems to impose materialistic limits on imagination and people devote themselves to recreation, entertainment, and physical pleasure. Freedom consequently becomes trivial. . . . Everyone lives in about the same way, and it may be difficult even to think of a different way.”
Yet temperance is more than merely restraining from vices. While restraint is one aspect of temperance, there is more to it than simply negation. Inherent to temperance is balance, as evident in the Old English word temprian, which means to “bring something into the required condition by mixing it with something else.”
Temprian is derived from the Latin temperare, which means to “observe proper measure, be moderate, restrain oneself” or to “mix correctly, mix in due proportion; regulate, rule, govern, manage.”
their value is in what they symbolize, not what they are.
Justice is the morality of the community. The
Aristotle calls justice “anything just that tends to produce or preserve happiness and its constituents for the community of a city.”
Justice, therefore, can be understood as the virtue of a community, the harmony of all the souls that form it.
Justice is, in this sense, its own measure.
Beauty and Being Just, Elaine Scarry defines justice as “a symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other.”
justice is “the whole of virtue,” according to Aristotle.
The most excellent person, Aristotle says, is the one whose virtue is perfected in relationship to others, and justice is always expressed “in relation to another person.”
Justice is the mean between selfishness and selflessness. That mean has implications within political, economic, social, and racial realms, just as it has implications for the inner life of the soul. Justice orders a person within herself as well as the lives of people together.
In other words, it was an age of polar extremes.
Absolute power by its very nature is unjust,13 for it lacks the relational proportionality that defines justice.
Augustine, more wisely, says that “a law that is not just does not seem to me to be a law.”20
A just law
is a man made code that squares with the moral law or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas [also drawing from Augustine]: An unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal law and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust.”
When the justice system becomes a form of entertainment, it surely is unjust. This is as true of the ancient Roman coliseum as it is of twentieth-century American public lynchings and of today’s trials by public shaming on social media.
The mobs murder those in power who they have determined—or suspect or imagine or do not even imagine—have committed wrongs against the people.
there “could have been no such Revolution if all laws, forms, and ceremonies, had not first been so monstrously abused, that the suicidal vengeance of the Revolution was to scatter them all to the winds.”34 It is not mere injustice that brought about the Revolution, but excessive, inhumane, and prolonged injustice. As Martin Luther King Jr. would exclaim a century later, in response to the societal admonition to “wait” longer for justice: “There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair.”35
The novel’s vision exposes the truth that prolonged systemic injustice inevitably bears the bitter fruit of violence.
Justice avoids both selflessness and selfishness.
“Love your neighbor as yourself,” Scripture admonishes (Matt. 22:39).
Plato says that justice is the proper balancing or proportioning of all parts of the soul.48 The Christian view of the well-ordered soul identifies how to have all parts of the soul in proper order: by first loving God with all one’s heart, soul, strength, and mind. Justice concerns the right ordering of not only the relationships within a community but also the parts of a person’s soul.
Although the words just and fair are often used interchangeably, justice usually involves objective, universal standards of judgment, while fairness is often felt subjectively as a sense of right proportion within particular circumstances.
Justice, likewise, cannot exist apart from the context of the community of people it serves.
A “rigorous standard of perceptual care” is required to seek and uphold justice as well. Moreover, there is not one way of achieving justice any more than there is one way of being beautiful.
Justice requires a proportionate exchange.
But even forgiveness cannot negate the ripple effects of the past. To pretend otherwise is itself a further injustice.
Right or wrong, anyone who is bold will be considered brave by someone.
Virtuous courage, in contrast, is more than boldness for boldness’s sake. Courage is measured not by the risk it entails but by the good it preserves.
The person who is virtuously courageous displays not merely a single act of courage but the habit of courage.
Courage—or fortitude, as it is often called—is defined most succinctly by moral philosophers and theologians as the habit that enables a person to face difficulties well.
To be encouraged is to be heartened or made stronger.
Courage requires putting a greater good before a lesser good.
Courage is getting your heart in the right place at the right time despite the obstacles.
There’s a little bit of the prosperity gospel in all of American Christianity, and this has been true ever since the country was founded upon the very idea of that pursuit of happiness we call the American Dream.
