Cardinal virtues

Based on Wikipedia: Cardinal virtues

Every door in your house swings on hinges. Remove them, and the door becomes useless—a slab of wood leaning against a wall. The ancient Romans had a word for hinge: cardo. And when philosophers wanted to describe the virtues upon which all other virtues swing, they borrowed that word. These are the cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

That's the essential idea. All other good qualities—generosity, patience, honesty, kindness—depend on these four. They are the hinges of the moral life.

Where This All Started

The concept crystallized in ancient Athens, around 380 BCE, when Plato wrote The Republic. In that sprawling dialogue about the ideal city, Plato has Socrates and his friends agree on something fundamental: a good city must be "wise, brave, temperate, and just."

Notice the order. Plato wasn't making a random list. He was mapping these virtues onto the structure of society itself.

Temperance belonged to the farmers and craftsmen—the people who made things and grew food. They needed to moderate their appetites, to work steadily rather than chase every pleasure. Fortitude belonged to the warriors, who needed courage in battle. Prudence belonged to the rulers, who needed wisdom to govern well.

And justice? Justice stood above all three, regulating the relationships between them. It was the virtue that kept the whole system working harmoniously.

Plato's student Aristotle took these ideas and systematized them further in his Nicomachean Ethics, a book still read in philosophy courses today. He expanded the list slightly, adding magnificence and magnanimity, but the core four remained central.

Prudence: The Art of Good Judgment

The Greeks called it phrónēsis. The Romans called it prudentia. We might call it practical wisdom.

Prudence is not the same as intelligence. A brilliant person can be imprudent. Prudence is the ability to figure out what to do in a specific situation, at a specific time, considering the likely consequences. It's the skill of discernment.

Imagine you discover a friend is about to make a terrible decision. Prudence isn't just knowing the decision is bad—it's knowing whether to intervene, how to intervene, when to speak, what words to use, and whether your intervention will actually help or make things worse.

The opposite of prudence is folly. Not ignorance—you can be ignorant through no fault of your own. Folly is acting without thinking, charging ahead when you should pause, or hesitating when you should act.

The Stoics particularly valued prudence because they believed life constantly presents us with choices, and the quality of our lives depends on making good ones. Marcus Aurelius, the Roman emperor who wrote philosophical reflections between military campaigns, considered prudence essential. In his Meditations, he argued that the cardinal virtues were the true "goods" a person should cultivate, far more valuable than wealth or prestige.

Justice: More Than Following Rules

The Greek word is dikaiosýnē, and it's tricky to translate. Sometimes it means justice in our legal sense. Sometimes it means righteousness—a word that sounds old-fashioned but captures something important.

Justice in the classical sense has multiple dimensions. There's the personal dimension: an inner harmony where the different parts of your soul work together rather than warring against each other. There's the social dimension: treating others fairly, giving each person what they deserve based on their merits.

And there's something broader still. Justice means being a good citizen, upholding social equality, following laws that can be justified by good reasons.

Cicero, the Roman statesman and philosopher who lived a century before Christ, defined virtue as "a habit of mind in harmony with reason and the order of nature." Justice was central to that harmony. Without justice, he believed, society collapses into a war of all against all.

But here's what makes justice interesting: it requires the other virtues to function. Without prudence, you don't know what justice requires in a specific case. Without courage, you can't stand up for what's right when it's costly. Without temperance, your desires distort your judgment about what's fair.

Fortitude: Courage Under Fire

The Greek word andreía is revealing. It's related to anḗr, meaning adult male. The ancients frankly associated courage with manliness—a view we might find limiting today, but it tells us something about how they understood this virtue.

Fortitude isn't the absence of fear. It's the ability to act rightly despite fear. It includes patience and perseverance—the strength to keep going when things are hard. It means maintaining sound judgment in tough situations, not panicking when others panic.

The Latin translation, fortitudo, emphasizes strength and endurance. Think of it as moral stamina.

Interestingly, the philosopher Seneca, writing to console his mother during his exile, substituted pietas (devotion or duty) for fortitude in his list of virtues. Different thinkers emphasized different aspects. But the core idea remained: we need inner strength to live well, because life is hard and often frightening.

The New Testament doesn't use Plato's exact word for courage, but it praises related qualities: steadfastness (hypomonḗ) and patient endurance (makrothymía). The Apostle Paul tells believers to "act like men"—using a verb form of that same root word anḗr.

Temperance: The Hardest Virtue

Plato considered sōphrosýnē the most important virtue. That might surprise us. Why would self-control outrank justice or courage?

The word is difficult to translate. "Temperance" suggests abstaining from alcohol—which is too narrow. "Moderation" suggests lukewarm commitment—which misses the point. "Sound-mindedness" is closer but sounds clinical.

Here's what the Greeks meant: the ability to regulate your desires and pleasures so they don't control you. The word was often used in discussions of drinking—knowing when you'd had enough, stopping before you became belligerent. But it applied to all appetites: food, sex, money, power, comfort.

The opposite isn't indulgence. The opposite is being ruled by your appetites, being a slave to what you crave.

Why did Plato rank this so highly? Because without temperance, the other virtues become unreliable. You might know what's right (prudence) but not do it because you're chasing pleasure. You might want to be fair (justice) but bend the rules when you stand to gain. You might have courage in some situations but cave when comfort is at stake.

Temperance is the virtue that makes the other virtues stable.

The Christian Synthesis

When Christianity spread through the Roman world, it encountered Greek philosophy. The result was a fascinating fusion.

The cardinal virtues appear in Jewish texts that Christians considered scripture. The Wisdom of Solomon, written in Greek by a Hellenistic Jew, says that Wisdom "teaches temperance, and prudence, and justice, and fortitude, which are such things as men can have nothing more profitable in life."

The Fourth Book of Maccabees goes further, arguing that "right judgment is supreme over all of these since by means of it reason rules over the emotions."

Church fathers like Ambrose and Augustine embraced these virtues while adding something new: the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love (or charity). These came from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians: "And now these three remain: faith, hope, and love. But the greatest of these is love."

The theological virtues were different in kind. The cardinal virtues were human achievements—qualities that anyone, pagan or Christian, could develop through effort. The theological virtues were gifts from God, specifically directed toward God, specifically Christian.

Augustine tried to show how they fit together. He saw faith as falling under justice—keeping faith with God was a matter of righteousness. He defined the cardinal virtues through the lens of love:

Temperance is love giving itself entirely to that which is loved; fortitude is love readily bearing all things for the sake of the loved object; justice is love serving only the loved object, and therefore ruling rightly; prudence is love distinguishing with sagacity between what hinders it and what helps it.

Thomas Aquinas, the great medieval theologian, systematized this further, arguing that the theological virtues perfected and elevated the cardinal virtues, making possible what mere human effort could never achieve.

Seven Virtues, Seven Sins?

Medieval Christians loved symmetry. Four cardinal virtues plus three theological virtues equals seven virtues. And there were seven deadly sins: pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth.

Surely these must mirror each other?

Not really. Scholars have noted that the match doesn't work. Lust is opposed by chastity, and greed by generosity—but these aren't cardinal or theological virtues. Hope is opposed by despair, and prudence by foolishness—but these aren't deadly sins.

Medieval moral writers knew this perfectly well. They often contrasted the deadly sins with "remedial" or "contrary" virtues specifically matched to oppose them, rather than forcing the cardinal virtues to do double duty.

The neat diagrams and parallel lists we sometimes see are artistic conveniences, not theological necessities.

Dante's Dance of Virtues

The Italian poet Dante Alighieri, in his Divine Comedy, created an elaborate allegory involving the virtues. In the Purgatorio, he describes a procession in the Garden of Eden—which he places at the top of the mountain of purgatory.

A chariot appears, pulled by a griffin (a mythical creature that's half lion, half eagle, symbolizing Christ's dual nature). On the right side of the chariot dance three women dressed in red, green, and white. On the left side dance four women, all in purple.

The three on the right represent the theological virtues. Faith in white, hope in green, love in red. The four on the left, dressed in royal purple, represent the cardinal virtues.

Scholars still debate exactly what Dante meant by their movements, their colors, their interactions. But the image is striking: the virtues don't stand static like statues. They dance. They move with the chariot, which represents the Church moving through history.

Still Relevant?

Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish philosopher who lived around the time of Jesus, put it simply: these virtues "serve as guiding principles for a virtuous and fulfilling life."

That's still true.

We might use different words. Instead of prudence, we might say good judgment or emotional intelligence. Instead of fortitude, we might say resilience or grit. Instead of temperance, we might say self-regulation or impulse control.

But the underlying reality remains. To live well, you need to make good decisions. You need to treat others fairly. You need courage to face difficulties. And you need self-control to keep your appetites from derailing everything else.

Some modern theologians have proposed updating the list. Jesuit scholars Daniel Harrington and James Keenan, drawing on the work of Bernard Lonergan, suggest seven "new virtues" for our time: be humble, be hospitable, be merciful, be faithful, reconcile, be vigilant, and be reliable.

Notice what these have in common with the classical list: they're all about character, about who you are, not just what you do. They describe not individual actions but patterns of living.

The Hinges Hold

Twenty-four centuries after Plato first articulated them, the cardinal virtues remain compelling. Not because they're ancient—plenty of ancient ideas are wrong—but because they describe something real about human flourishing.

We need wisdom to navigate life's complexity. We need justice to live with others. We need courage to face what frightens us. We need self-control to master our impulses.

These are the hinges. Remove any one, and the door of a good life swings crooked.

The question isn't whether these virtues matter. The question is how we develop them. The ancients believed they grew through practice, through habit, through community. Aristotle said you become courageous by doing courageous acts, just by doing just acts, temperate by doing temperate acts.

Christians added that grace was needed—that human effort alone wasn't enough.

Both might be right. The virtues require both effort and something beyond effort. They're developed through practice but also received as gifts. They're personal achievements but also communal inheritances, passed down through cultures and traditions and examples.

The four women in purple still dance beside the chariot. The hinges still hold the door.