Saturday 25 December 2010

Meekness

The Catholic Encyclopedia has no entry on 'meekness', but this is what it says about humility:
The four cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance, and all other moral virtues are annexed to theses either as integral, potential, or subjective parts. Humility is annexed to the virtue of temperance as a potential part, because temperance includes all those virtues that refrain or express the inordinate movements of our desires or appetites.
So humility is actually a sort of temperance. Really? 'The meek shall inherit the earth' surely means something very different to 'those who have temperance shall inherit the earth.'

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