Lent 2026 - Reading #27 - Temperance
Reading
G.K. Chesterton, in Heretics, defends the goodness of created things while insisting on their proper enjoyment: "The human race, according to religion, fell once, and in falling gained knowledge of good and evil. Now we have fallen a second time, and only the knowledge of evil remains to us. A great silent collapse, an enormous unspoken disappointment, has in our time fallen on our Northern civilization. We have not lost the sense of wonder at the universe, but we have lost something even more vital, the sense of wonder at the ordinary." Chesterton continues: "The whole secret of mysticism is this: that man can understand everything by the help of what he does not understand. The morbid logician seeks to make everything lucid, and succeeds in making everything mysterious. The mystic allows one thing to be mysterious, and everything else becomes lucid. The thing we must learn is not to enjoy things less, but to enjoy them in the right way, which is to say, with gratitude and with the understanding that they are gifts, not rights." For Chesterton, temperance is not the reduction of pleasure but its resurrection. The temperate soul, by refusing to grasp at goods as though they were owed, discovers the capacity to receive them as what they truly are: unexpected, unearned, and therefore wonderful.
Reflection
Twenty-nine days into Lent, Chesterton reminds us that temperance, rightly understood, is the gateway to joy. Our month-long journey through the cardinal virtues is nearly complete. Tomorrow we close temperance and prepare for the great threshold: the passage from human virtues to divine ones. And Chesterton gives us the perfect bridge, his insistence that temperance restores wonder. This is the secret that Lent has been teaching us from the beginning, if we have ears to hear it. Fasting is not the enemy of feasting; it is its prerequisite. The person who never fasts never truly feasts, because they have lost the capacity for astonishment at the sheer gift of bread. The person who never abstains from entertainment never truly enjoys it, because familiarity has dulled their sense of wonder. Temperance, by creating absence, makes presence meaningful. Think about what awaits you at Easter. The fast will be broken. The alleluias will return. The feast will be spread. If you have been faithful to your Lenten disciplines, imperfectly, stumblingly, but faithfully, you will taste that joy more deeply than you would have otherwise. This is Chesterton's great insight: gratitude and wonder are the products of temperance, and they are infinitely more satisfying than the grasping that intemperance substitutes for real enjoyment. Carry this insight forward. The theological virtues await.