How to Grow in Temperance

A "Cardinal" Virtue: the Hinge of the Moral Life

The word says it: temperance is one of the four cardinal virtues, from cardo, the hinge — those pivotal virtues on which the whole door of the moral life turns. The Catechism lists them and grounds them in Scripture:

"There are four virtues which play a pivotal role and accordingly are called 'cardinal'; all the others are grouped around them. They are: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. 'If anyone loves righteousness, her labors are virtues; for she teaches self-control and prudence, justice and courage' (Wis 8:7)." — Catechism of the Catholic Church § 1805, quoting the Book of Wisdom 8:7^[2]

Without temperance, the whole edifice falters. Prudence is of no use to one who does not master his cravings, for disordered desire blinds judgment; fortitude degenerates into violence when passion is no longer held; justice itself is corrupted in the man dominated by greed or sensuality. Temperance is therefore not a second-rank virtue, reserved for the scrupulous: it is one of the four keystones without which no Christian life stands. For the other three, see How to Grow in Prudence, How to Grow in Justice and How to Grow in Fortitude.

"Living a Self-Controlled Life": a Condition of Christian Life

Temperance is not an option of perfection reserved for ascetics: the New Testament makes it an ordinary condition of the baptized. Saint Paul sums up for Titus the whole program of Christian life in three words — living "self-controlled, upright and godly" — the first of which names sobriety:

"For the grace of God has appeared for the salvation of all men, training us to renounce irreligion and worldly passions, and to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world." — Letter to Titus 2:11-12^[3]

The same image returns in the form of the athlete. For Paul, the Christian is a runner who cannot hope for the crown without a discipline of his whole being:

"Every athlete exercises self-control in all things. They do it to receive a perishable wreath, but we an imperishable one. […] I pommel my body and subdue it, lest after preaching to others I myself should be disqualified." — First Letter to the Corinthians 9:25-27^[4]

The stakes are therefore far from small. The Apostle Peter even links sobriety to vigilance against evil: "Be sober, be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour" (1 Pet 5:8)^[5]. The intemperate soul, delivered over to its appetites, is an easy prey; the temperate soul keeps watch, mistress of itself.

What Liberates, Not What Deprives

The deepest reason for cultivating temperance is that it liberates. This is the most widespread misunderstanding: people imagine that the temperate man enjoys life less, that he cuts himself off from a share of available happiness. Experience says the opposite. The intemperate man does not enjoy more — he enjoys less, for pleasure sought without measure grows dull, wearies, and ends by enslaving. Thomas à Kempis noted it with cruel aptness:

"Every delight of the senses insinuates itself gently; but in the end it wounds and kills." — Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, book I, ch. 20^[6]

Disordered desire promises freedom and delivers chains: to be a slave to oneself is the worst of slaveries. Temperance breaks precisely this interior servitude: it makes man able to say no to what diminishes him and yes to what uplifts him, instead of mechanically obeying the appetite of the moment. Far from narrowing life, it opens it — for only a free heart can love, pray, and give itself. Deprivation is not the goal of temperance; it is only one of its means, and freedom is its fruit.

Before the means, one decisive clarification: many fail to grow in temperance because they hold a false idea of it — either a morality of prohibitions, or a contempt for the body. The virtue of temperance is something else entirely, and defining it exactly is already half the journey.

Moderating the Attraction of Pleasures

The Catechism gives the clearest definition:

"Temperance is the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods. It ensures the will's mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable. The temperate person directs the sensitive appetites toward what is good and maintains a healthy discretion: 'he does not follow his own inclinations and passions.'" — Catechism of the Catholic Church § 1809, quoting Sirach 5:2^[7]

Three words carry the whole virtue. It moderates: it does not suppress desire, it holds it in right measure. It aims at balance: not the minimum nor the maximum, but the right point where the created good serves its end. It ensures the will's mastery over instincts: it sets man upright again, reason governing appetite, and not appetite dragging reason along. The biblical word that recurs is "base desires" — not desire itself, which is good, but desire become master, the "passions of the heart" that drag us along.

Its Proper Matter: the Pleasures of Touch

Saint Thomas Aquinas specifies what temperance first bears upon, and his answer has something disarmingly realistic about it. Temperance governs the most violent and most natural pleasures: those of touch — food, drink, and the union of the sexes^[8].

"Temperance is chiefly concerned with the pleasures of touch, and among these, with the pleasures of food and of sex." — Saint Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, II-II, q. 141, a. 4^[9]

Why these pleasures first? Because they are bound up with the preservation of the individual (eating, drinking) and of the species (generation): the most deeply rooted in nature, therefore the hardest to regulate. A pleasure of the eye or the ear does not enslave man as hunger, thirst, or carnal desire do. That is why the three great parts of temperance correspond exactly to these three domains: abstinence and sobriety for the table, chastity for generation. Temperance begins where the flesh weighs heaviest.

Why a "Cardinal" Virtue and Not a Secondary One

One might think that a virtue concerned with drink and food carries little weight. Saint Thomas answers with subtlety, in two steps: temperance is indeed cardinal, for moderation most deserves praise where it is hardest and most necessary — and the pleasures of touch are the most natural to man and the most indispensable to this present life (II-II, q. 141, a. 7); but it remains the least of the four cardinal virtues, for the excellence of a virtue is measured by the good it serves — and the common good aimed at by justice or fortitude outweighs the regulation of one's own pleasures alone (a. 8)^[10]. Temperance is therefore indispensable precisely because it guards the most exposed front.

The Hidden Splendor of Temperance

There remains the most beautiful truth, and the most forgotten: temperance is not only a dike against disorder, it possesses a beauty of its own. Saint Thomas names it honestas — honesty in the sense of moral splendor — that radiance which interior order spreads over the whole being^[11]. Saint Augustine goes further: he defines each of the four virtues as a form of love, and temperance as the love that keeps itself pure for God:

"Temperance is love keeping itself whole and incorrupt for the One it loves." — Saint Augustine, On the Morals of the Catholic Church, I, 15, 25^[12]

The formula overturns everything. Temperance is not first a no said to pleasures: it is a yes said to God, so total that it keeps the heart available and whole for Him. We do not deprive ourselves out of hatred for the created good, but because we love a greater good and refuse to let ourselves be encumbered. Temperance, so understood, is the virtue of loving hearts: those who keep themselves free for what they truly love.

Reading this table: the four virtues share out the whole man among themselves. Prudence enlightens; justice regulates relations with others; fortitude holds firm before the evil to be faced; temperance governs the attraction of pleasure. We grow in temperance by cultivating this last domain — the appetite for pleasure — without ever isolating it from the other three.

Temperance is not a single block: it is a mother-virtue unfolding into a family of virtues, each applying right measure to a particular domain. Saint Thomas draws up the map (II-II, q. 143), and this map is precious for growing: we do not work on temperance "in general," but through one or another of its parts, where the battle concretely presents itself.

The Subjective Parts: Abstinence, Sobriety, Chastity

The subjective parts are the principal species of temperance, those that regulate the three great pleasures of touch.

• Abstinence regulates the use of food: it moderates hunger and the pleasure of the table, without condemning it. Its proper virtue is exercised above all in fasting. See How to Grow in Fasting; for the opposite vice, How to Grow in the Fight Against Gluttony.
• Sobriety regulates the use of drink, especially of what intoxicates: it keeps the mind clear and man master of himself.
• Chastity and purity regulate the pleasures of sexuality according to each person's state of life. It is the most demanding part, and the most contested today. See How to Grow in Chastity, How to Grow in Purity of Heart and, for the battle, How to Grow in the Fight Against Lust.

The Annexed Parts: Continence, Meekness, Humility, Modesty

The annexed or potential parts extend right measure to secondary matters, where the same temper of soul is exercised in another form:

• Continence holds the will back from yielding to vehement desires, even when passion runs strong: it is temperance in full battle, still tense, before it becomes acquired peace^[13].
• Meekness (or mildness) moderates the movement of anger, as temperance moderates desire. See How to Grow in Meekness and How to Grow in the Fight Against Anger.
• Humility moderates disordered hope in one's own excellence and the desire for honors: in Saint Thomas it is attached to temperance as the measure of self-regard. See How to Grow in Humility.
• Modesty regulates outward bearing — dress, speech, gaze, one's relation to goods — and studiousness moderates even the curiosity for knowledge.

This architecture shows that temperance is not a narrow virtue: it permeates every use man makes of himself and of things. Growing in temperance means letting this spirit of measure gradually win over each domain — the table, drink, the body, anger, self-regard, the gaze.

Reading this table: each row is a concrete application of the same cardinal virtue. We never grow in temperance "in the abstract": we work on it in one of these columns, where disorder makes itself felt today.

Like every moral virtue, temperance stands at the summit between two abysses^[14]. By excess of desire, we fall into intemperance; but by defect, by refusal of the created good, we fall into a rigorist insensibility that has only the appearance of virtue. Knowing both protects our growth, for we can miss temperance by falling on either side.

By Excess: Intemperance, When the Flesh Commands

The first defect is intemperance properly so called: letting sensible desire take command, until reason does nothing but obey. It has as many faces as temperance has parts: gluttony and drunkenness for the table, lust for sexuality, greed for goods. Saint Thomas judges it in one sense more shameful than cowardice, for it lowers man toward what he has most in common with the animal^[15].

What makes intemperance formidable is that it reinforces itself: each disordered satisfaction hollows out desire instead of soothing it, and habit turns into second nature. Jesus says it to Luisa Piccarreta with a striking image: until we have changed the air the soul breathes, the battle is endless.

"Mortification must be the air of the soul. By the air the soul breathes, one knows whether it is healthy or sick. If a person breathes the air of mortification, every thing will be purified in her; all her senses will ring with one harmonious sound." — The Book of Heaven, volume 3, 16 February 1900^[16]

By Defect: Insensibility and False Rigorism

The opposite error is subtler, for it disguises itself as virtue. Temperance can also be missed by defect: no longer excess of pleasure, but its disordered refusal. Saint Thomas names this vice insensibility (insensibilitas): rejecting without reason the pleasures necessary to life, despising the goods God made good, mortifying the body not out of love but out of disgust or pride^[17].

"For everything created by God is good, and nothing is to be rejected if it is received with thanksgiving." — First Letter to Timothy 4:4^[18]

This verse targets a false spirituality, already present in Saint Paul's time, which forbade certain foods and marriage as if they were evil in themselves. The Church has always resisted this temptation, which makes the body and pleasure an enemy: from the 2nd century against the Encratites, who proscribed marriage as a corruption^[19]; in the 3rd century against Manichaeism, for which matter belonged to the evil principle^[20]; and down to modern rigorisms of Jansenist inspiration, quick to suspect every sensible pleasure. True mortification is never hatred of the created good: it is a renunciation out of love, not contempt out of disdain. Temperance keeps here its own delicacy: it uses goods "with thanksgiving," fasts without believing itself superior, and knows, on feast days, how to break the fast with joy.

The Right Mean: a Free and Joyful Mastery

Between these two shores, virtue stands in a balance that tradition sums up in one word: a free mastery. It is firm, for it does not yield to the appetite that clamors; it is free, for it is not tensed up in refusal. The temperate man is neither the slave of his pleasures nor their enemy: he is their master, able to use them and to do without them, as the love of God and the real good require. It is this tranquil sovereignty — "master of your thoughts, master of your body, master of your heart," said Saint Pachomius^[21] — that all growth in temperance aims at.

Reading this table: temperance is not a fragile point between two dangers, but a fullness holding together what each defect separates — the recognized goodness of created goods and sovereign freedom toward them. We grow in temperance by moving away from both shores at once.

Here is the practical heart of this article. The spiritual masters did not only praise temperance: they pointed out precise, repeatable means, within everyone's reach. They can be grouped into a few great worksites.

Asking for Self-Mastery as a Fruit of the Spirit

First means, and the most forgotten: perfect temperance is not manufactured by the will alone, it is received. "Self-control" — the old "continence" — stands among the fruits of the Holy Spirit listed by Saint Paul:

"But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control." — Letter to the Galatians 5:22-23^[22]; the Catechism § 1832 gives the doctrinal list in twelve fruits after the Vulgate.

The practical consequence is immense. A temperament drawn to pleasure is not condemned to intemperance: grace can give an avid heart a mastery that nature refused it. And since completed temperance is a gift, the first reflex in temptation is not to grit one's teeth, but to ask: "Lord, grant me self-mastery." The Catechism recalls that human virtues acquired by education and effort are "purified and elevated by divine grace" (CCC § 1810)^[23]: effort remains necessary, but it leans on a strength beyond itself.

Understanding the Christian Meaning of Mortification

Temperance cannot be cultivated without a certain mortification — a word grown suspect, which must be restored to its true meaning. To mortify is not to destroy oneself; it is to "put to death" within oneself what resists God, so that life may prevail. Jesus explains it to Luisa with a luminous image:

"My daughter, Mortification is like a fire that dries up all the bad humors in the soul and floods it with a humor of Holiness, giving birth to the most beautiful Virtues." — The Book of Heaven, volume 3, 28 January 1900^[24]

Mortification is therefore not an end: it is a means of fruitfulness. The vine is pruned only so that it may bear more fruit (Jn 15:2). Saint John of the Cross gives the golden rule that saves mortification from all bitterness: every renunciation of satisfactions of the senses must spring from love of Christ and the imitation of His life — He who wanted in this life no other delight than doing His Father's will^[25].

To mortify a desire is never to despise it: it is to prefer someone to it. There lies the whole difference between temperance and rigorism.

Making Prayer the Safeguard of Temperance

No mastery of the senses holds for long without prayer, for it is prayer that keeps present the higher good for which we renounce. The Fathers saw it: prayer is the guardian of the virtues, and first of temperance.

"Prayer is the safeguard of temperance, the bridling of anger, the restraint of pride, the purification of resentment, the destruction of envy, the abolition of injustice." — Saint Gregory of Nyssa, Homilies on the Our Father^[26]

The image is exact: the soul that prays keeps its heart turned toward God, and a heart so directed is no longer at the mercy of the first appetite that comes along. Prayer and mortification sustain each other; Saint Vincent de Paul called them "two sisters closely united, one of which never goes without the other"^[27]. Whoever wants to grow in temperance will pray more; whoever wants to pray will have to mortify himself a little.

Keeping Watch over Small Things

Temperance is not won on great occasions, but in the multitude of daily small acts: a less sought-after dish, a refused glass, a turned-away gaze, a held-back word, a contained curiosity. This is the constant teaching of the Imitation, which links the evening examen to mastery of the senses:

"In the morning form your resolutions; in the evening examine your conduct. […] Check intemperance, and you will more easily check the other desires of the flesh." — Thomas à Kempis, The Imitation of Christ, book I, ch. 19^[28]

The order is precious: "Check intemperance, and you will more easily check the other desires." Mastery of the most carnal pleasure — the table, drink — is the door through which we learn to master ourselves in everything. That is why the ancients began asceticism with the belly: whoever masters his hunger will soon master the rest. The evening examination of conscience, spotting the small defeats, is the simplest and most effective tool of this watch.

Passing through the School of the Body: Fasting and Abstinence

Temperance is a virtue of the soul, but it is forged in the body. Fasting and abstinence are not relics of a harsh Christianity: they are the concrete training by which the will regains the upper hand over instinct. By voluntarily going without a permitted good, we learn that we are not commanded by it; and this freedom won over hunger is passed on to every other desire. Christ Himself inaugurated His mission with forty days of fasting, and it was fasting that He answered the tempter: "Man shall not live by bread alone" (Mt 4:4)^[29]. Fasting is the elementary school of temperance; it has its own article: see How to Grow in Fasting.

Detaching the Heart at the Root

The most radical means is not to struggle endlessly against each desire, but to cut off its root through detachment. When the heart is no longer attached to created goods, temperance ceases to be an exhausting battle: it becomes a peace. Jesus explains it to Luisa:

"This is why I recommend first of all detaching oneself from everything and from oneself. When the soul has detached itself from everything, it no longer needs to struggle not to succumb to the things of the earth." — The Book of Heaven, volume 2, 23 May 1899^[30]

Detachment is not cold indifference: it is the freedom of a heart that loves God more than His gifts. It turns temperance from a discipline into a rest. See How to Grow in Detachment.

Drawing on the Eucharist and the Sacraments

Lastly, temperance feeds on the sources of grace. The Eucharist unites the soul to the One who perfectly mastered His flesh, and strengthens against disordered desires what no effort alone attains. Confession raises the fallen soul and restores the peace in which temperance can grow again. Persevering prayer keeps alive the flame of the higher good. Confessing, receiving Communion, praying — this is staying at the sources where self-mastery is rekindled — for Christian temperance is never a Stoicism of the will alone, but the fruit of a life grafted onto Christ.

By what signs do we recognize real growth in temperance? Not by a feeling, but by stable fruits which the saints describe with constancy.

Interior Freedom

The first fruit is freedom. The temperate man is no longer pulled this way and that by his appetites: he possesses himself. "Be master of your thoughts, master of your body, master of your heart"^[31]: this mastery is not a tensing up but a liberation, for the heart freed from the tyranny of pleasure becomes able to choose the good and hold to it. Saint Anthony the Great saw in the virtues of temperance so many powers received from God, so as no longer to undergo life but to master it:

"Temperance, resignation, chastity, endurance, patience and their like are so many considerable virtuous powers that we have received from God to resist the difficulties of the moment […]. If we exercise and maintain these powers, we shall find that henceforth nothing happens to us that is difficult, painful or unbearable." — Saint Anthony the Great, Philokalia of the Neptic Fathers^[32]

Peace and Clarity of Soul

Second fruit: interior peace and limpidity. Disordered desire troubles the soul, divides it, darkens it; temperance restores its unity and clarity. When the senses "ring with one harmonious sound," in the image of the Book of Heaven, the soul recovers that transparency in which God lets Himself be seen: "Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God" (Mt 5:8). Temperance thus prepares purity of heart, which is its crowning: see How to Grow in Purity of Heart. The temperate man thinks more clearly, prays more simply, judges more rightly, because craving no longer clouds his gaze.

Availability for God and Neighbor

Third fruit: availability. A heart cluttered with desires has room neither for God nor for others; the temperate heart, lightened, becomes free to love. This is where temperance joins charity, as God taught Saint Catherine of Siena: no virtue stands isolated, all are "bound by the bonds of charity"^[33]. Temperance, which seemed a humble virtue wholly turned toward mastery of the body, thus opens onto the highest of virtues: it empties the hands so that they may give. See How to Grow in Charity.

The spirituality of the Divine Will, handed on to Luisa Piccarreta (1865-1947), gives temperance its final accent — provided the word "Will" is taken in the proper sense of the gift of living in the Divine Will: doing God's will means obeying His commands like a good servant; living in the Divine Will means receiving His very Will, which then acts in the soul as in its own domain^[34]. This gift is not earned by force of effort: it is received, and it supposes that the soul remains stably established in this Will^[35]. On this condition, mastery of the passions ceases to be an exhausting battle and becomes the effect of a divine life received into the soul: where God's Will reigns permanently, disorders fall away of themselves.

Jesus explains to Luisa that, in the Divine Will, the soul no longer has to fight its passions without respite: they die out of themselves, for lack of air to live on.

"By being in My Will, you will no longer need to fight your passions and be always at war with them. […] When one lives in My holy Will, the passions die gently, without battle and without noise. They lose life by themselves. For, before the sanctity of My Will, the passions dare not show themselves." — The Book of Heaven, volume 4, 23 December 1900^[36]

This is the very surpassing of ascetical effort: not its abandonment, but its completion. The human will, permanently established in the Divine Will, no longer represses desires by tension — it disarms them by light. Jesus explains to Luisa that His Will, being light, empties of every passion the soul that lets itself be ruled by it: placed at the center of the soul, it rids it by its life-giving warmth of every human weight^[37].

Growing in temperance, in this perspective, is not only tightening the bridle a little harder: it is letting oneself be invaded by a light that reorders desire from within, until self-mastery becomes less a victory snatched than a gift received. Human temperance, grafted onto God's Will, ceases to be an exhausting struggle and becomes the calm of a heart which nothing disordered inhabits any more.

We do not grow in a virtue by fixing it as an abstract ideal, but by contemplating those who lived it perfectly. And temperance has two sovereign masters.

The first is Christ, whose whole life holds together both sides of temperance. He fasted forty days in the desert and repelled the temptation of the flesh: "Man shall not live by bread alone" (Mt 4:4). But He also changed water into wine at the wedding in Cana, shared meals, welcomed the perfume poured over His feet — to the point that His adversaries called Him "a glutton and a drunkard" (Mt 11:19). Christ is neither the ascetic who despises created goods, nor the man delivered over to pleasures: He uses them in sovereign freedom, sanctifying them when He takes them, surpassing them when He renounces them. His temperance is that perfect freedom — neither intemperance nor insensibility — toward which all our own tends.

The second is Mary, who brought measure to its human perfection. Her hidden life at Nazareth is a long daily temperance: the sobriety of a poor existence, the humility of the "handmaid of the Lord" (Lk 1:38), the mastery of a heart that "kept all these things" (Lk 2:51) without agitation. Taking Mary as mistress of temperance means learning to use everything with gratitude and nothing with greed, to keep one's heart free and whole for God.

Growing in temperance, in the end, means becoming, under their gaze, a disciple master of himself in order to give himself better: able to use goods without losing himself in them, to do without them without hating them, and to keep — amid a world that confuses freedom with abandonment to desires — a heart "whole and incorrupt for the One it loves."

Temperance does not grow by grand resolutions, but by a small and repeated faithfulness. The means studied here can be summed up in a simple program, graded from the most accessible to the most demanding:

Reading this table: none of these exercises is spectacular; it is their faithful repetition that transforms. Begin with one or two, hold to them, then add more.

The essential thing is not to aim at temperance in general, but to posit, today, the concrete act presenting itself: this surplus to leave, this desire to defer, this curiosity to contain, this pleasure to offer up. For temperance is the virtue of measure; and measure is lived only in the detail of the hours. "Check intemperance," says the Imitation — not out of hatred for life, but to possess it at last freely, and to keep the heart available for what does not pass away.

• How to Grow in Chastity and How to Grow in Purity of Heart — temperance applied to sexuality and the gaze, a major subjective part of the virtue.
• How to Grow in Fasting and How to Grow in the Fight Against Gluttony — temperance applied to the table: its bodily school and its battle.
• How to Grow in the Fight Against Lust — the battle against the vice opposed to chastity.
• How to Grow in Meekness and How to Grow in Humility — two virtues annexed to temperance: the measure of anger and the measure of self-regard.
• How to Grow in Detachment — cutting at the root our attachment to created goods, the radical way of temperance.
• How to Grow in Prudence, How to Grow in Justice and How to Grow in Fortitude — the three other cardinal virtues, sisters of temperance.