Modern culture resists any connection between morality and happiness, and tends to equate happiness with bodily pleasures and psychological delights.  To suggest that goodness, or virtuous living, leads to true happiness, is to suggest a return to the “dark ages” of medieval ignorance.  While ancient man knew limits to the insatiable appetite of the senses, modern man, armed with science, technology, and material domination of the world, seems to have broken through such limits.  It now seems possible to sate the senses 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, living in a virtual world of digital media and psychoactive chemicals.  The senses, far feeling limited an unsatisfied, are now overwhelmed.  Where is the value of virtuous living when goodness is relative, when justice is democratic, when emotions are synthesized, when problems are solved with a pill?  The value comes from the fact that human nature really does have limits, that human happiness does reside in an objectively ordered good.  The foundational (”cardinal”) virtues of prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude provide the habitual disposition and unlimited capacity to know this true good of the human person and to passionately seek it. 

Man is a creature of habit.  What we do forms who we are.  The cardinal virtues form us into excellent human beings.  Just as Michael Jordan is an excellent basketball player (through practice) some men and women are excellent human beings through the practice of virtue, by which they become “virtuosos” of humanity.  The four cardinal virtues perfect four different aspects of the human person:  prudence perfects the judgments of evaluation (practical intellect), justice perfects the freedom of the will (rational appetite), temperance perfects the emotions that provoke (concupiscible passions), and fortitude perfects the emotions that sustain (irascible passions).  Upon these virtues does the happiness of man ‘hinge’, “for a good life consists in good deeds” and “the entire structure of good works is built on four virtues” (Summa I-II, 57, 5 & I-II, 61, 1) Read the rest of this entry »