At the end of this series on the cardinal virtues, presented during Lent, we come to what may seem the most Lenten of them all: to temperance, or restraint. In a certain sense temperance is Lenten. I’ve been drawing on Thomas Aquinas as we journey through the virtues, and Lent features in his discussion of temperance in a way that it doesn’t in his treatment of the others. He brings in Lenten fasting, for instance. In another sense, however, Lent cannot be said primarily to be the season of temperance, simply because Lent is supremely the season for virtue, and temperance, while a virtue, is a lesser virtue than either prudence (the capacity to make wise moral decisions) or justice (or fairness). Those are the virtues of the first rank. We need temperance, and courage, as the virtues in the second rank, only as aids in the prudent attainment of justice.

On love of life

Aquinas is a cheerful theologian, and an upbeat writer. We see that in his insistence that temperance is ultimately about love of life, not hatred of it. Indeed, temperance is about self-preservation. Indeed, that applies twice over: first, because the domain of temperance concerns things that make for life (for instance, food, drink, sleep, and sexual relations), but also, and all the more so, because temperance is about moderation in those areas precisely for the sake of self-preservation. Human nature being as it is, the very things that most make for life, and which we therefore desire strongly, can – because we desire them so much – be taken up immoderately, and then impede life. Eating again serves as an example, or the loss of the very great good of a life-long relationship because of a promiscuous moment. It is the greatest goods than need the most diligent preservation. Just as courage recognised the good of what it was prepared to lose for the sake of the doing the right thing (for, if they were not good, why would we need to show courage in losing them?), so does temperance.

Aquinas praises fasting, for instance, but exactly not because it stands against human life or the body. Rather, he praises fasting as a way to bodily and spiritual health. Indeed, he thought that the connection, especially with respect to spiritual wellbeing, was so strong and obvious that it would oblige everyone to fast sometimes, as a matter of universal common sense, even outside the strictures of any particular religious tradition.

The middle way again

His discussion of temperance is really all about moderation. We saw in the last article that virtues have the character of a ‘mean’ or middle way, such that hope lies between despair and presumption, and courage between cowardice and foolhardiness. In this way, temperance lies between harmful excess and harmful restraint. There is a vice of too much foregoing as well as one of too little.

I began by remarking that temperance, for Aquinas, is a secondary virtue, vital but needed only because of human weakness. Josef Pieper, among his most insightful twentieth century followers, offered an admirable summary. Temperance, or moderation, does not, in itself ‘realise the good’, but it remains an important part of that realisation. Pieper offers the image of a river and its banks. Without temperance

‘the stream of the innermost human will-to-be would overflow destructively beyond all bounds, it would lose its direction and never reach the sea of perfection. But it is the shore, the banks, from whose solidity the stream receives the gift of straight unhindered course, of force, descent, and velocity.’

The magnetic pole of virtue is the good. It is not defined by difficulty or hardship. Temperance, or the virtue of restraint, is not the goal of the river that is human life, but it does form the river banks that allow a human life to flow deep and true.

Article

Creed

Politics

Suffering

Trauma

11 August 2025

6 min read

Dear Kemi, about that lost faith

Who stands with us when we suffer?

Graham Tomlin

Graham is the Director of the Centre for Cultural Witness and a former Bishop of Kensington.

Kemi Badenoch.

ARC.

Dear Kemi (if I may)

Lost faith is usually a sad tale. And you have told us how you lost yours. I hear your grandfather was a Methodist minister, and so as a young girl, you would pray, seeing answers from time to time for longer hair, good grades and the like. But when you heard the story of Elizabeth Fritzl, whose father Josef kept her captive underground for 24 years, repeatedly raping her, you began to ask why God did not answer Elizabeth’s prayers for release. And so you gave up on God.

Now I have real sympathy for you. I have struggled with this too. The Josef Fritzl story and the suffering he inflicted on his daughter is truly horrific. None of us find the problem of evil easy. In fact, I have never yet met a Christian who thinks they have solved it. Yet the remarkable fact is that many of us believe in God anyway. And it’s not because we haven’t thought deeply about it. Many people start with a simple faith in a God who answers prayers, and yet one day, they come across what seems like an anomaly – that some prayers don’t seem to find an answer.

Of course, you’re not the first to have stumbled upon the problem of unanswered prayer. For centuries, Christians have pondered deeply the strange persistence of evil in the world, from St Irenaeus to St Augustine, to Thomas Aquinas, to any number of modern theologians.

They all knew that not all prayers get answered – yet even more, they knew that this is not a marginal thing for Christians, it actually lies at the very heart of our faith.

On the top of every spire, on every altar of a church, around many Christian necks, is a cross. It recalls the excruciating death of an executed innocent man. It is the universally recognised symbol of Christianity, as recognisable as the Islamic crescent or the Jewish Star of David.

Christianity centres on this remarkable claim: that God allowed his Son Jesus to die a cruel and tortured death, and did not respond to his agonised prayer: “My God, my God why have you forsaken me?” All he got was silence. Nothing.

So unanswered prayer is not something that lurks at the margins of Christian faith as a guilty secret. It lies at the very heart of it.

And yet I still believe. Why?

Why does God not intervene to stop the suffering of the world? Why did not God not stop the holocaust? Why does he not stop the suffering of the people of Gaza? Or the Israeli hostages? Or people who suffer from debilitating depression? Or long-term mental illness?

The answer is I don’t know. And why should I? For all I know, God might stop all kinds of things from happening – by definition I don’t know about thing that don’t come to pass. Yet I have to assume that God does not intervene to stop the vast majority of the suffering we inflict on each other. The best I can say is that he seems to allow us to have our own way, giving us the courtesy of accountability for our own actions. As a conservative politician, keen to stress personal responsibility, you should know that more than anyone.

Josef Fritzl was the cause of his daughter’s suffering, not God. Fritzl was himself the child of an alcoholic father who abandoned him when he was four-year-old and a manipulative and abusive mother who brought him up thereafter. Not that this excuses his crimes for a moment, but he was part of a chain of sin and suffering handed on from one generation to another that stretched back through his parents, their parents, back to the very beginning of human history and beyond. Evil and suffering are part of our world. Christianity knows about evil all too well.

All this might hint at an answer, yet it still doesn’t satisfy. It still doesn’t reduce the suffering. Trying to explain it doesn’t make it any easier to endure it. In fact, if what we Christians say about evil is true, we cannot explain it because evil literally makes no sense. It is the absence of sense, the absence of meaning. It has no point, because it is literally pointless.

The real reason we Christians continue to believe is not that we have a neat answer to it, nor because we haven’t thought about it, but because we know that, paradoxical as it may sound, God himself, in the person of Jesus Christ, knows what it is to pray for something and not get an answer. He has been there too. Somehow, mysteriously, he stands with Elizabeth Fritzl, with Israeli hostages, with Palestinians hungry for peace and food, and with us when we cry out and apparently get no answer. In those moments, we are not, in the end, alone.

And yet, there is more. Despite that fact that we cannot explain the tangled, dark mysteries of evil in the human heart, we have been captivated by a story that tells us it has been overcome. Yes, Jesus died. Yes, he felt abandoned by God his Father. Yet the way the story turned out, the evil done to him was not the last word. God overturned the worst that the human race could do, when the most remarkable thing happened - his cold, abused, bloodied and battered body stirred once more into life. Yet this was not a return to this weary life all over again, back into the maelstrom of suffering and pain that we know it to be, but through the other side into a form of life beyond the grave that cannot be destroyed. Jesus was not ultimately abandoned, even if he, like us, like Elizabeth Fritzl, felt like it at the time.

This is what we get – not a neat answer – for that we will have to wait – but the gift of hope that it will not always be like this, that the Resurrection of Jesus is a foretaste of the Resurrection of all things one day.

And what about what you called your ‘stupid’ little prayers about hair and boyfriends? Why did they get answered and others didn’t? Again, I have no idea. It does seem that from time to time, God does something weird, brings some unexpected healing, things turning out miraculously better than expected, an unforeseen delight. Yet these are just hints, small signs of the great miracle, the Resurrection and the defeat of death. They are hints that even though God will not unravel the moral fabric of the world by intervening every time we do something wrong, occasionally we are given a small sign that he has not given up on the world and will one day flood it with his presence. They are signs to remind you, me, that all the good things we receive each day - food, sunshine, rain, air to breathe – are not accidents but come from a God who gave them to us out of love, and that evil is the anomaly, not goodness. We are left with a question – would we rather a world where that kind of surprising & delightful event never happened? Or one where it occasionally did?

The Resurrection is the ultimate reason we believe. Not because we can explain evil. But because it tells us we are not alone in our suffering. Because it tells us that evil is real, but in the end, will be banished to the pit from which it came. And because the alternative, when we think about that deeply enough – a world where monsters like Josef Fritzl get the last word – where hope is whistling in the dark and evil wins - is intolerable.

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