Josef Pieper

In The Four Cardinal Virtues, Joseph Pieper delivers a stimulating quartet of essays on the four cardinal virtues. He demonstrates the unsound overvaluation of moderation that has made contemporary morality a hollow convention and points out the true significance of the Christian virtues.

Human Agency, Intellectual Traditions, and Responsible Knowledge

The Four Cardinal Virtues

Aquinas and consequently Pieper Against Middle Class suppression of passionate expression of wrath

Zeke Taylor

The fact, however, that Thomas assigns to (just) wrath a positive relation to the virtue of fortitude has become largely unintelligible and unacceptable to present-day Christianity and its non-Christian critics. This lack of comprehension may be explained partly by the exclusion, from Christian ethics, of the component of passion (with its inevitably physical aspect) as something alien and incongruous — an exclusion due to a kind of intellectual stoicism — and partly by the fact that the explosive activity which reveals itself in wrath is naturally repugmany to good behavior regulated by "bourgeois" standards. So Thomas, who is equally free from both these errors, says: The brave man uses wrath for his own act, above all in attack, "for it is peculiar to wrath to pounce upon evil. Thus fortitude and wrath work directly upon each other." Not only as regards the "passive," but also as regards the pronouncedly "aggressive," the classical doctrine of fortitude exceeds the narrow range of conventional notions.

More so interested in his “genuine knowledge” reference

“[The unchaste man’s] constantly strained will-to-pleasure prevents him from confronting reality with that selfless detachment which alone makes genuine knowledge possible.”

The Four Cardinal Virtues quotes

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