Temperance

Well, it’s been awhile, hasn’t it? I’m sorry I’ve gone completely silent over here. It isn’t that I haven’t been writing, it’s just that I’ve been working on much longer pieces lately. But, as Lent is nearly over (or technically already over since it’s Holy Week), I wanted to share this piece I first wrote for the Lent issue of Inland Catholic Magazine.

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Description English: Labor unions hold anti-prohibition meeting Chicago 1920s Date 1933 Source https://www.loc.gov/item/99405158/ Author Unknown author

What does it actually mean to be temperate? First, we need to go back to the fourth century BC to a Greek philosopher named Aristotle. He is often referred to as the father of virtue ethics. He understood virtue as doing the right thing in the right way at the right time in the right amount to the right people.

This might sound like a kind of relativism, but it isn’t. The question isn’t about whether there is a need to be virtuous, but about what does it look like for me to be virtuous versus someone else. My natural talents and flaws might suit me to be virtuous in one way in a given situation and someone else to be virtuous in a different way in the same moment. Let me explain with an example.

Imagine a scenario where a person is walking along at night and sees a woman getting mugged. Aristotle would say that such a person needs to think, and quickly, about how to respond to that situation. First, the person who is walking, we’ll call him Magnus, needs to size up the mugger. If the mugger looks bigger and stronger than Magnus, he may need simply to call for help. If the mugger is armed, he may even run somewhere safer and then call IX-I-I (or 911 for non-Romans amongst you). If the woman is in danger, this may change Magnus’ reaction as well. He may decide to intervene because the danger is greater if he doesn’t immediately do so. This might also be the case if Magnus, as his name suggests, is bigger and stronger than the mugger. Or if Magnus is an off-duty police officer, the courageous thing to do in that moment might be to attempt to arrest the mugger. It isn’t a question of whether or not courage is needed in the moment, but what the courageous thing looks like. So virtue is doing the right thing at the right time in the right way and right amount to the right people.

Aristotle also taught that each virtue is, usually, a mean between two extremes. Fortitude or courage, for instance, is the mean between cowardice and recklessness or foolhardiness. But what about temperance? Well first, allow me to indulge in a little history.

Starting as early as the seventeenth century there have been political temperance movements. These were movements seeking not only to control the consumption of alcohol but to ban it altogether. This took root most firmly here in the United States during Prohibition. But while abstaining from something can be the proper way to be temperate, it is by no means the way. You see, just as an individual who observes a mugging must decide what the right action to take is, and adjust it according to the details of the situation, so too with temperance must we make this decision. A man who suffers from alcoholism usually practices temperance by abstaining from alcohol altogether. But another man who does not will still be practicing temperance if he limits himself in how much he drinks so that he does not cross the line into drunkenness.

For Aristotle, the two extremes that temperance sits between are insensibility and licentiousness. Here, insensibility means to be completely unaffected by pleasures. This would be like an extreme ascetism, one that sees all pleasures as inherently bad. While it’s true that we as Catholics are often wary of pleasures, most of us aren’t called to abstain from them altogether. So as we saw in the prohibition movement, trying to legislate abstension from alcohol didn’t fix the problems we were seeing. Never going near a fire is certainly a good way to never get burned, but you’ll find it difficult to get warm too. In fact, it is a good way to freeze to death. Insensibility, then is a defficiency in our relationship to pleasures. But on the other extreme is licentiousness.

Today, licentiousness conjours up, for most of us, a kind of sexual indulgence. It’s original meaning, however, was about pleasures of any kind. To be licentious is to give oneself over entirely to pleasure. It is hedonism and makes pleasure itself your god. This is like saying, “I’m cold,” and then standing in the middle of the fire until it consumes you. A stark image, I know, but an accurate depiction of where pleasure leads you when you follow it to its extreme end.

Temperance, then, is the mean between these two extremes. We can see this play out in the Church Calendar. Our time is not spent all in fasting nor all in feasting. Nor do we simply vascillate between the two, but we have the times between where life continues on in the “normal” way, at least until we are made new and then a new pleasure will consume us, the pleasure of the wedding feast of the Lamb.

Let us return to Magnus and place him in a different scenario. Imagine that instead of dealing with a mugging, Magnus has a penchant for golf. On its own, golf can be a wonderful past time. And let’s imagine that Magnus has a good relationship with it. It does not consume his every thought or every moment. He plays when he can and attends to the necessities of life in their proper space. But his friend Brutus does not. Brutus spends all of his time thinking about when he can next hit the links. He spends all of his discretionary money, and some of his non-discretionary, on clubs and balls and golf bags and hats. When it’s time to mow the lawn, he’s out on the green. When his kids have a choir concert, he’s listening to the U.S. Open in an earbud (for golf is a sport that is made to be listened to). He and Magnus might go play 18 on a Saturday and while Magnus is being perfectly temperate the same action is licentious in Brutus.

It isn’t relative in the sense that there is no right and wrong, it’s simply that one man has a different relationship with an object than another. Someone who struggles with alcoholism may have to avoid not only alcohol but painkillers as well. They may have to abstain, not because alcohol or painkillers are bad, but because their relationship with them is a bad one. The same could be said of food, pets, friends, lovers, in fact it can apply to nearly any situation where a person might over-indulge. A family with pets must be temperate in their love for their pets. They should not mistreat their pets, beating them at the slightest provocation or denying them food. But they also should not treat their pets as though they were actually human members of the family. There are many ways to be intemperate. They may not al be as showy as a man who gets drunk every night, but, as C.S. Lewis says, “God is not deceived by externals.”^⁠1

So if temperance can apply to any obsession, anything in which we might over-indulge. How do we combat it? Well, the first thing to do is to take stock of our lives. Are there things in our lives that we can rightly say are controlling us more than we are controlling them? If so, temperance will be the key to overcoming them. Once we have identified the areas where temperance is needed, we must then determine how we are to be temperate. This, I am afraid, is the most difficult part because it is different for each person. This was, in many ways, the problem of the Prohibition. Our culture saw a real problem with how much some people were drinking. And so we legislated not temperance but abstinence for everyone, but not everyone needed to abstain. Each person is different and what causes problems for one person may not cause any for another. Each will need to cooperate with the Grace of Christ to discover what their right relationship is, even if that relationship means embracing or abstaining from an otherwise neutral action.

Ultimately, what makes temperance and all the virtues difficult to acquire is that they acquired by habit. Oh I can sit here and discourse to you on temperance until this magazine runs out of pages. I could give you innumerable moral exemplars and counter examples, and that would be time well spent, but it would not make you temperate. Virtue, according to Aristotle, is not natural to us. If it were, we would all be virtuous all the time. But he does say it is not contrary to our nature, and this means we can become virtuous. We do that by habit, by repeatedly doing virtuous things. Do them enough and they become second nature to us. What Aristotle did not know, however, is the role that grace can play in this. For often there are occasions where no matter how much I try to change my behaviour on my own or even with the help of professionals, I do not change. What I need then is grace. Grace, as the saying goes, does not destroy but perfects nature. This does not mean that I can give up and simply pray and when God does not, or seems not to, answer my prayer give in to my intemperance, and say that I lacked the grace to be temperate and thus it was not my fault. Rather, I must cooperate with God’s grace, looking for moral exemplars, examining myself to know both where I have been intemperate and what I need to do to properly temper my actions.

¹ C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, 79.