A temperate man is one who is master of himself
It is not possible to be a really prudent, man, or an authentically just one, or a truly strong one, unless one also has the virtue of temperance. It can be said that this virtue indirectly conditions all other virtues, but it must also be said that all the other virtues are indispensable for man to be "temperate" (or sober).
The term "temperance" itself seems in a certain way to refer to what is outside man. We say, in fact, that a temperate man is one who does not abuse food, drinks, pleasures, who does not drink alcohol to excess, who does not deprive himself of consciousness by the use of drugs, etc. This reference to elements external to man has its basis, however, within man. It is as if there existed in each of us a higher self and a lower self. In our lower self, our body and everything that belongs to it is expressed: its needs, its desires, its passions of a sensual nature particularly.
The virtue of temperance guarantees every man mastery of the lower self by the higher self. Is this a humiliation of our body? Or a disability? On the contrary, this mastery gives higher value to the body. As a result of the virtue of temperance, the body and our senses find the right place which pertains to them in our human condition.
Guided by the virtue of temperance
We can easily realize what a fundamental and radical value the virtue of temperance has. It is even indispensable, in order that man may be fully a man. It is enough to look at some one who, carried away by his passions, becomes a victim of them—renouncing of his own accord the use of reason (such as, for example, an alcoholic, a drug addict)—to see clearly that "to be a man" means respecting one's own dignity, and therefore, among other things, letting oneself be guided by the virtue of temperance.
I think, too, that this virtue demands from each of us a specific humility with regard to the gifts that God has put in our human nature. I would say "humility of the body" and that "of the heart." This humility is a necessary condition for man's interior harmony: for man's interior beauty. Let everyone think it over carefully; and in particular young men, and even more young women, at the age when one is so anxious to be handsome or beautiful in order to please others! Let us remember that man must above all be beautiful interiorly. Without this beauty, all efforts aimed at the body alone will not make—either him or her—a really beautiful person.
Christian morality has never been identified Stoic morality
Is it not just the body, moreover, that undergoes considerable and often even serious damage to health, if man lacks the virtue of temperance, of sobriety? In this connection, the statistics and files of hospitals all over the world, could say a great deal. Also doctors who work on the advisory bureaus to which married couples, fiancés and young people apply, have great experience of this. It is true that we cannot judge virtue on the exclusive basis of the criterion of psychophysical health; there are many proofs, however, that the lack of the virtue, of temperance, sobriety, damages health.
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Pope John Paul II
Excerpt from the Audience General, November 22, 1978
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