29 10 / 2011
Virtues
Notes from C.S. Lewis’ Mere Christianity.
- Prudence: practical common sense; taking the trouble to think out what you’re doing and what is likely to come of it.
- Temperance: not abstaining, but going the right length and no further. The things themselves are not bad, and one must not look down on others who use them.
- Justice: ‘fairness’; it includes honesty, give and take, truthfulness, keeping promises, etc.
- Fortitude: courage - the kind that faces danger as well as the kind that ‘sticks it’ under pain (‘guts’). You cannot practise any other virtues very long without brining this one into play.
- Faith: the art of holding on to things your reason has once accepted, in spite of your changing moods.
- Hope: a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of things a Christian is meant to do.
- Charity: ‘love, in a Christian sense’ - not a state of emotions but of will. Don’t waste time bothering whether you ‘love your neighbour’ - act as if you did, then you eventually will.
