Today’s Readings Podcast Description

Temperance is the virtue that keeps the strongest bodily desires under the rule of reason. In these questions from Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologica, he shows why the pleasures of food, drink, and sexual union need a special virtue to moderate them. Temperance is a cardinal virtue because these desires most powerfully resist the good of the soul. Intemperance exceeds the measure of reason; insensibility falls short of it. The virtue itself is one, yet it has many parts—shame and honesty, abstinence and chastity, and other related strengths—by which the whole life of desire is ordered according to reason.

Readings:

Thomas Aquinas — Summa Theologica, Part 2–2, Questions 141–143 (Temperance, the Vices Opposed to It, and Its Parts)

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