All the cardinal virtues have misleading associations, and temperance is no exception. The ordinary associations of temperance are temperance societies, or the Temperance Movement itself, the nineteenth century response to alcohol as a grave social hazard.

Temperance does apply to food and drink, but its regulatory function is much deeper than any restraint we bring to eating and drinking.

Another notion that does duty for temperance is moderation, but moderation comes dangerously close to fear of exuberance, and is too easily confused with restriction, curtailment, and repression.

Temperance is distinguished from the other cardinal virtues by the fact that it is referred to the individual self. Prudence looks to all reality; justice to one’s fellows, and fortitude to relinquishment of possessions and benefits, even of life. The focus of temperance is internal order within oneself. 

In 1 Corinthians 12:24ff, St Paul writes that God “established a harmony” in the body, disposing the various parts into one unified and ordered whole. “There was to be no want of unity in the body; all the different parts of it were to make each other’s welfare their common care.” In the Vulgate version of the Bible, the (Latin) verb in question for God’s activity is “temperare”, and you can tell the etymological derivation of our concept from the sound of the word itself. 

The proper connotation of temperance is thus, as I say, internal order. This condition, however, is not a given. Conflicting impulses keep throwing us into disorder, a situation memorably described by St Paul in Romans 7: “Though the will to do what is good is in me, the performance is not, with the result that instead of doing the good things I want to do, I do the sinful things I do not want” (7:19).

Paul notes that “not doing” is not the work of the forces of conflict, but of the self, the divided, unharmonious “I” at the heart of it all.

Our equilibrium is threatened particularly where our strongest natural forces of self-preservation are in play, in the province of sensual enjoyment, in matters of food and drink, and in sexual pleasure. These are the natural fields of operation for temperance.

In the realm of food, the mode of intemperance is gluttony. The fault in gluttony is not liking food too much or eating too much. Food can be both a pleasure and a delight, and as for “too much,” every stomach has its limits.

Food is not at the center of the glutton’s interest; what’s central is eating. Everything becomes subordinate to it. It could just as easily be a stick of carrot, some leaves of lettuce, or a granola bar.

As for drink, St Paul counselled, as everyone knows: “A little wine is good for the body.” So is a little of any of the other spirits. It’s the counsel of sanity, which is what temperance is all about.

Temperance restores things to their proper place and significance. Thus, it allows food to be genuine pleasure and nourishment, without giving it anything like absolute status in life.

When and how much one chooses to eat becomes a matter of personal taste and discretion. One may eat to one’s heart content today and freely fast tomorrow. The issue is not denying or repressing but putting order in one’s appetite.

The need for such ordering in the sexual realm is obvious, and here again temperance aims not to curb or to repress, but to return us to genuine expression. Sexual pleasure is one of the gifts of creation, and in itself not sinful in the least.

In fact, a complete lack of sensuality, or feelings adverse to all sexual pleasure is described in Aquinas not simply as imperfection but as a moral defect. Heresy and this sort of hyper-asceticism have always gone together.

In one of his sermons, St John Chrysostom links the scriptural “two in one flesh” to the physical union of spouses, and adds: “Why do you blush? Is it not pure? You are behaving like heretics!”

Yet sex remains the realm where we are most prone to be out of control. The mode of intemperance here is lust, and as with gluttony, lust is not a matter of liking sex too much, or liking a lot of sex, or having a big sexual appetite.

Lust is the intentional separation of sexual activity from considerations of the person. It is the displacement of sexual care by sexual activity for its own sake. By definition, it’s indiscriminate, and virtually unappeasable. Unlike animals, who are in heat only periodically, humans can always be ready to go.

Chastity, or temperance in sexual matters, is neither abstinence, nor denial, nor equivalent to celibacy. The single, the married, and the celibate – all should be chaste, that is, they should all put order in sexual feelings and sexual expression.

One may thus approach sex exuberantly, sublimate it, or set it aside for special reason. Temperance restores control to our selves, not to our urges.

An unknown field for the application for temperance in Aquinas is “studiositas”, a word difficult to translate but which has been understood as “immoderateness in striving for knowledge”. What does this mean, and what could possibly be the function of temperance here? Is it possible to know “too much”? Can we be too curious?

Curiosity is obviously a value of significance. It’s how we embark on the road to understanding. Think of the state of our intellectual poverty, if we couldn’t ask “why?”

And yet, consider this remark of Goethe: “We would have a better knowledge of things if we did not try to know them so thoroughly.” That is, if we settled for nothing less than how God knows them. That’s what Goethe meant.

We may in faith affirm, for instance, that God works in history, but no one can on his or her own presume to point to any happening here and now, and say God is clearly doing this or God is clearly doing that.

 The temptation to pierce the inscrutability for God tangible everyday use is an ongoing one. Sometimes it’s much wiser to be content with seeing or exploring things in their mystery, without troubling ourselves to know fully what by definition will remain beyond our human ken.

Temperance here too functions not to deny or curtail but to put order in our ambition.