The four Cardinal Virtues

Peter Kreeft in an older column on the four cardinal virtues:

The four cardinal virtues — justice, wisdom (prudence), courage (fortitude), and moderation (self-control, temperance) — come not just from Plato or Greek philosophy. You will find them in Scripture. They are knowable by human nature, which God designed, not Plato. Plato first formulated them, but he did for virtue only what Newton did for motion: he discovered and tabulated its own inherent foundational laws.

These four are called “cardinal” virtues from the Latin word for “hinge”. All other virtues hinge on these four. That includes lesser Virtues, which are corollaries of these, and also greater virtues (the three “theological virtues”), which are the flower of these.

These four cardinal virtues are not the only virtues, or even the highest ones. As Einstein surpassed Newton, Jesus most certainly surpassed Plato. But just as Einstein did not contradict Newton but included him, presupposed him, and built on him, so Jesus’ supernatural virtues do not contradict Plato’s natural virtues but presuppose them. Plato gives us virtue’s grammar; Jesus gives us virtue’s poetry.

Kreeft goes on to tell a great story about him as professor in a ethics/philosophy class where the students wanted to create a new ethic from a tabula rasa position, unencumbered by the outdated philosophies of the past. The result?

The students were truly amazed to find that all eight of the ideas they had just discovered were precisely the main points of this bewhiskered old classic (Plato's Republic): no double standard; justice as harmony; wisdom as understanding; courage as nonphysical; moderation versus materialism; the fit between the three virtues and the three parts of the soul; the fact that justice leads to happiness for individuals and societies, that “justice is more profitable than injustice”; and overall the use of rational discovery and persuasion rather than force.

Kreeft explains:

Why are these old philosophers so up-to-date? Because they took their bearings not from the date — nothing is so surely and quickly dated as the up-to-date — but from the unchanging essence of man, the inherent structure of the soul. Plato was the first to discover and map this, the first to give us a psychograph. The four cardinal virtues — justice, wisdom, courage, and moderation — are relevant to man in every age because they are relevant to man himself, not to the age. They fit our nature and our nature’s needs.

The human body has a structure that is inherent, not socially changeable, and the laws of its health are equally inherent and unchangeable, objective. The same is true of the soul. Virtue is simply health of soul. Justice, the overall virtue, is the harmony of the soul, as health is the harmony of the body. Justice is not just paying your debts, not just an external relationship between two or more people, but also and first of all the internal relationship within each individual among the parts of the soul.

The harmony is hierarchical, not egalitarian. When World follows Man, when within Man Body follows Soul, when within Soul Appetites follow Will and Will follows Reason (Wisdom), we have justice. When the hierarchy is inverted, we have injustice. Will leading Reason is rationalization and propaganda; Appetites leading Will is greed; Body leading Soul is animalism; World leading Man is unfreedom.

And he also addresses the most common Christian misunderstanding:

The answer to the faith-and-works issue is essentially a simple one, in fact, startingly simple. It is that faith works. The whole complex question of reconciling Paul’s words on faith and James’ words on works, and of resolving the dispute that sparked the Reformation, the dispute about justification by faith, is answered at its core at a single stroke: the very same “living water” of God’s own Spirit, God’s own life in our soul, is received by faith and lived out by virtuous works.

The water of the Sea of Galilee comes from the same source as the water of the Dead Sea: the Jordan River. But the Sea of Galilee stays fresh because it has an outlet for the water it receives. The Dead Sea lives up to its name because it does not.

The same thing happens to the “living waters” from God as to the fresh waters of the Jordan. When we bottle them up inside ourselves, they become stagnant. Stagnant faith stinks, like stagnant water. And the world has sensitive nostrils.

Kreeft concludes by saying, and I agree, that any plan to improve individuals or larger groups, up to the whole of society, must be based on this understanding of human nature and its counterintuitive "secret" to purpose and happiness.