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July 15 - August 4, 2023
Both the deficiency and the excess of a virtue constitute a vice. For example, the virtue of courage is found between the excess of rashness (a vice) and the deficiency of cowardice (also a vice).
Each of the virtues is such a mean.
Prudence is wisdom in practice.
Because prudence is concerned with the means to an end,20 it is easily confused with pragmatism, easily corrupted by justifying the means with the end.
It is imprudent to heed morality alone, and it is immoral to be imprudent.”
“Prudence is love that chooses with sagacity between that which hinders it and that which helps it.”
The pickles he gets himself into demonstrate how 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.
Courage must always be connected to a just end.
The four conditions of hope are that it regards something good in the future that is difficult but possible to obtain.
The practice of hope, Aquinas says, is “a certain stretching out of the appetite towards good.”
I knew from reading The Death of Ivan Ilych that it is a terrible but wonderful thing that binds all of humanity together: the bearing of one another’s burdens.
Its vision of charity—love given and received—is the image of the servant who, by tending the feet of others, bears their suffering.
Chastity is the proper ordering of one good thing (sexual desire) within a hierarchy of other good things.
Humility is not, therefore, simply a low regard for oneself; rather, it is a proper view of oneself that is low in comparison to God and in recognition of our own fallenness.32 “Humility is thinking less about yourself, not thinking less of yourself.”33
