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.

Column

Atheism

Creed

14 July 2023

7 min read

Confessions of an atheist philosopher. Part 1: born to be atheist, born to be anxious

In the first of a series, Stefani Ruper tells of the first steps on her journey from secular philosopher to a person of faith.

Stefani Ruper

Stefani Ruper is a philosopher specialising in the ethics of belief and Associate Member of Christ Church College, Oxford. She received her PhD from the Theology & Religion faculty at the University of Oxford in 2020.

My name is Stefani. I was a committed atheist for almost my entire life. I studied religion to try to figure out how to have spiritual fulfillment without God. I tried writing books on spirituality for agnostics and atheists, but I gave up because the answers were terrible. Two years after completing my PhD, I finally realised that that’s because the answer is God.

Today, I explain how and why I decided to walk into Christian faith.

Here at Seen & Unseen I am publishing a six-article series highlighting key turning points or realisations I made on my walk into faith. It tells my story, and it tells our story too.

I began having panic attacks about dying and the meaning of life when I was four years old. I would lay in bed at night and beat my head against the mattress while imagining what it would be like to stop existing. What would it be like to cease to be? I had no idea, but it seemed too horrible to fathom. I literally tore my hair out with the dread of it.

Like many people in my generation, my parents had been raised in the church but left it as soon as they were able. They raised my brothers and me completely without God or other spiritual things. I had no idea of anything beyond what we could see or touch. My first exposure to God was through the TV, as He makes a few guest appearances on The Simpsons.

As a child raised in today’s world, God was what Charles Taylor calls “unthinkable” to me. By “unthinkable” he means literally unthinkable. It was impossible for me to think God; it remains difficult for me to think God. But here’s the thing: this unthinkability of God—the sheer impossibility, the ridiculousness, the strangeness, the preposterousness of God, to me—was a bias I inherited from being born into this specific place and time.

I was pre-wired to disbelieve in God.

The thing is, every society is founded on tacit assumptions about the nature of reality. Ours, the modern West, assumes that nothing is real except for physical stuff. Philosopher Charles Taylor calls this the immanent frame. Inside the immanent frame, you can, if you like, believe in more than just what we can see and touch. But that’s a choice, and it’s one you make while others consider the things you hold most sacred as like cartoon characters lounging on clouds in the sky. Such beliefs are difficult to maintain with grace, and people often hold them with either too much timidity or too much obstinacy; many, like my parents, eschew belief altogether. This is a recipe for a tumultuous, confusing, and often unfriendly spiritual landscape.

The great existential trade-off

We are the first society in the history of societies to be founded on nothingness. A child born 500 years ago would not have been able to imagine a world without God. Back then, God was not just real but number one on the list of possibly real things. Atheism was unthinkable. God was the singular, unchanging reality upon which all material things—constantly changing and subject to decay and death—depended. You can read a little about what it was like in this review of Pentiment, an adventure game set in medieval Bavaria.

Today, faith is, even for Christians, typically cordoned off in a little corner of life, maybe squeezed into 15 minutes on a Bible app on the way to work. But back then faith was what scholar Timothy Fitzgerald appropriately labels encompassing. God was not a hypothesis to be posed, a belief into which you could opt. God suffused the world. The transcendent encompassed all.

Here’s how it flipped.

In 1451 Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press, which made printing books faster and cheaper than ever before. New ideas about God began to spread faster than the then dominant Church could stomp them out. Within a lightning-quick five hundred years, the number of versions of the faith in Europe multiplied from one to literal thousands.

No one was prepared for the shock of it all. People began to differentiate themselves according to their beliefs, and authorities exploited burgeoning fault lines for the sake of conflict. Between 1517 and 1648, ten million people died in the Wars of Religion.

The things that seem the most real to us are those we share and discuss. The whole realm of the transcendent began to lose its status as unshakably real.

What was to be done? Philosophers like John Locke offered a solution: separate the church and the state. That seemed simple enough. And in some ways, it was. But this meant our European ancestors stopped sharing and talking about their beliefs in public. The problem is that humans are social animals. The things that seem the most real to us are those we share and discuss. The whole realm of the transcendent began to lose its status as unshakably real.

Over time, people discussed their fundamental beliefs less and less. Society even developed the notion that sharing beliefs at social gatherings like dinner parties is impolite. So religious beliefs became deeply private things, and it started to seem like people were choosing to believe them due to personal feelings or needs. This eventually made it seem to many that beliefs were mere wishful thinking—flights of fancy, silly, and weak.

On the opposing side, people who abstained from religious belief started to see their nonbelief as noble resistance to the temptations of wishful thinking. The idea was that being willing to view the universe as cold and uncaring was the difficult but right and brave thing to do. Nobody wants to seem weak, and everybody wants to seem noble. The transcendent faded out of our collective consciousness.

Or, to use Nietzsche’s terms, God died.

Thus, God and material things swapped places in our understanding of reality. God, once the most real thing in existence, became something you could believe in if you felt like it. Material things, once viewed as constantly decaying and thus only real through God, became the unquestionably real.

This isn’t normal, we weren’t made for this. We weren’t made to live without hope or homecoming or a bigger story of which we are a part.

Today, the immanent frame reigns. But it’s not inert. It has its own compulsive, even hypnotic, powers, arguably with as strong a grip on our souls as God once had. It locks our attention on the here-and-now (as that’s all there is), and in doing so elevates the status of things like food, fashion, and entertainment in our quests for fulfillment. We throw ourselves into pleasure, hoping for relief. But immanence leads nowhere except back into itself, like an Ouroboros, the snake that eats its own tail.

Immanence is so pervasive we take for granted that this is just the way things are. And yet young children do things like tear their hair out trying to make sense of what seems like an absurd existence. This isn’t normal. We weren’t made for this. We weren’t made to live without hope or homecoming or a bigger story of which we are a part. Characters in today’s novels are always buying sportscars and asking Is this all there is? Maybe it’s not.

What if all of us are grasping at the same ultimate truth, getting little bits of it right and wrong?

Betting on transcendence

My panic attacks made me obsessed with finding answers. The horror I felt at living in a cold and dark universe was relentless. But I also couldn’t lie to myself. A solution wouldn’t be real if it were imaginary. So as much as I wished I could believe in God, I couldn’t.

When I learned this history of immanence however, I realised that my automatic inclination to disbelief was a bias—an inheritance of our culture, and nothing more.

I then asked myself:

What if, as our culture sloughed off the transcendent, it didn’t move into greater nobility, truth, and progress like it tells itself, but pre-emptively gave up on the most important thing in existence? What if all of us are grasping at the same ultimate truth, getting little bits of it right and wrong? What if some of us are on the right path, exploring relationship with a Creative power beyond our imagining that loves us, helps us, saves us?

The fact is, when it comes to transcendence, we don’t know what’s true. No one knows with certainty.

But we do know that immanence is a bias. And we know the first step to finding the truth is to free ourselves from bias. We must identify and untangle presumptions, then rebuild our mental frameworks as carefully as we are able.

As for me, I’ve spent more than a decade in the academy doing this work. And in the end? Spoiler alert: I’ve thrown my hat in with transcendence.