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

Art

Creed

Space

26 September 2025

5 min read

How black holes illuminate love’s greatest story

The universe’s darkest mysteries hold strange parallels with Christ’s Passion

Jake Lloyd

Jake is a former BBC journalist turned writer and speaker about art and faith.

A spital galaxy coloured red, white and black.

A composite image of Andromeda galaxy.

NASA/JPL, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Thanks to the BBC radio show In Our Time, I’ve found a new pleasure in life. It is this: to learn about the enormity of outer space, and the absurdity of what goes on there, and to share what I find with anyone who’s interested. By ‘anyone’, I mean my wife. But now that Seen & Unseen have published this, I mean you too.

Or that mysterious cosmic rays from deep space regularly sail straight through the bodies of each of us, and scientists are baffled as to what might have created them? Did you know that a tiny, pale area of the night sky once named the ‘little smudge’, is now known to be the biggest thing anyone will ever see with the naked eye: the Andromeda galaxy? And did you know that the strength of gravity on Venus would crush you instantly? I could go on indefinitely.

The centrepiece of all this galactic trivia, however, is reserved for black holes. Almost everything about them fascinates, baffles and scares me.

Black holes are the remnants of dead stars that have collapsed in on themselves, creating a gravitational field so powerful that nothing – not even light – can escape. If you were to pass over its threshold, you’d be obliterated as you get pulled towards the black hole’s infinitely dense centre.

They get even stranger though. Inside them, astrophysicists say, the laws of physics break down completely. Time and space somehow swap places, they say. And even though anything pulled in by a black hole's gravity is crushed by unimaginable force, in some sense it may be preserved and – in theory – might end up elsewhere, in a new form. It is a death that might not in fact be the end of us.

There are many black holes – there’s one at the centre of our galaxy. But even though we can study them and develop scientific theories about them, we have not come close to grasping them in all their terrifying and monumental glory. What goes on inside them is, and perhaps always will be, an unfathomable mystery.

This is why I’d love to see them refracted through the eyes and hearts of poets and artists, philosophers and theologians. What might their strangeness tell us about their creation, their creator? What might they tell us about how to live our lives? And if gravity at its most intense can upturn the laws of science, bamboozle great minds, and maybe even turn death into new life, then might other forces of attraction that do not adhere to known laws of physics, like love, do the same?

Scenes from the Passion of Christ by Hans Memling.

Hans Memling, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In dwelling on questions like these, I have found this painting to be strangely helpful. It tells a love story that – in terms of its sheer intensity, its pull upon us, its utter strangeness, its death-defying endpoint – is not a bad match for a black hole. It’s called Scenes From The Passion Of Christ, it’s by the northern European painter Hans Memling, and when I first saw it I thought it looked silly.

Why cram onto one small canvas over twenty scenes from the final eight days of Jesus’s life on Earth? It’s like a cartoon strip without the white lines to divide up each scene. We see Jesus welcomed by a crowd, betrayed by Judas, denied by Peter, sentenced by Pilate, stripped by henchmen, humiliated by another crowd, crucified by soldiers, and buried by loved ones. We see him upending a table, praying for an escape route, sharing bread and wine, carrying a cross, emerging from the grave, and appearing to his followers.

It reduces the crucifixion to a few square millimetres at the top. It sidelines the heart of Jesus’ story – the resurrection – to the far right edge. It shrinks Jerusalem to a tiny labyrinth resembling an MC Escher painting. It is daytime and nighttime. It is disorientating. And it is claustrophobic. But I think it is also brilliant, and it’s made me look in a new way at the strangest of weeks in the story of the world.

By showing us so much convening at this moment in space and time, we sense how impossible it would have been for Jesus’s followers to compute anything that went on during that week. As each event unfolded, they would have had to rethink what might come next, whilst dealing with some pretty overwhelming emotions. They would have had no time or space to process any of it. It seems perfect, therefore, that in this painting, we don’t either.

But as I look at it now, I wonder: have we actually processed these events, two thousand years later? Do Christianity’s attempts to explain everything that went on here really do justice to a story in which divine love does some of the unfathomably strange things that a black hole does? Or do these explanations tell us more about our own way of thinking than they do God’s?

I think there is a tendency – which I see in myself and in most churches I have attended – to resist the weird, mysterious and inexplicable nature of this story. We draw heavily on logic and evidence to try and explain a story that defies both. But just as it is within the boundaries of a black hole, so it is within the frame of this painting: the old rules no longer apply. Divine love manifests itself in ways we cannot yet fathom. Pretending otherwise saps power from the story.

At the top right corner of the painting, there is a tiny dot on the seashore. It’s the last image of Jesus in this painting. And next to it, a church. Here, the baton is being handed over from Jesus to those who follow him. The church is now the ‘body of Christ’, tasked with embodying infinite love in a world that badly needs it.

What a daunting task. Frankly, it can be easier to believe in a bizarre series of events from two millennia ago, than in a church here and now, comprised of people as flawed as I am, that is meant to be capable of embodying a world-changing love.

And that is why I am so drawn to black holes, and to this painting. In them, I see that impossible things can and do happen; that unfathomable mysteries are littered throughout reality; that these mysteries are not so much problems to solve as they are wonders to revel in; that the narrow, rational mindset in which I too often dwell is small and limiting; and that an overwhelming force of attraction can and will overpower anything in its way.

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