by Lioba » May 26th, 2008, 11:03 am
Temperance deals with our basic needs and desires.
Their are the instincts as hunger, thirst, sexuality, aggression.
Their are the emotions and the thinking, that is interested in knowing and understanding the world.
Both thomas and Pieper remind us, that all this aspects of human life exist from the very beginning itself, when God says-Everything is good.
So all these things are meant to be good too.
Any Spirituality, that condemns them principally, is not originally Christian, but is to be seen as heretic. But after paradise those gifts were perverted or brought into disorder. Temperance is focussed on the good order of our desires and attitudes.
We can fail in two ways-
1.having no good measure and/or becoming overwhelmed in concrete situations without giving up the principal value of a well orderd life and -as chtistians- the primacy of god in our lives.
2. totally denying the demands of temperance by willingly and constantly putting our greed over the love of God and the Good.
The first can happens to most of us, it will be forgiven, when we repent and we can learn to do better step by step, until we become more and more free from our impulsivness. On this way we learn to enjoy the freedom of ruling our needs instead of being driven by them.
So we can be really ourselves, the person that we are meant to be.
Iustitia est ad alterum.