a. About the Three Moral Virtues

54. To understand further the said virtues, beatitudes, gifts, and fruits [n.1], one must note that the three acquired moral virtues, namely justice, fortitude, and temperance, are intermediate genera.

55. For there seem to be two desirable things that are first, namely honor and delight strictly taken, or everything that is a primary good, that is, agreeable, namely either honorable or delightful. For the useful cannot be a first motive for desiring something, since it is not desired save in its order to something else. The authority too in I John 2.16, “Everything that is in the world is the desire of the flesh and the desire of the eyes and the pride of life,” shows the same thing. For ‘desire of the eyes’, which clearly relates to wealth, cannot be first when speaking of wealth as it is a useful and non-delightful good; but if we speak of wealth as it is beautiful, that is, as it is a delightful good, in this way it can be desired first (like any other visible beauty). Therefore, the first things desirable by rational nature are, as was said, honor and delight strictly taken. So the first species of temperance, which give moderation as to what is desirable for oneself, will be two; for what moderates in the case of honors is called humility, what in the case of pleasures retains the name of the genus. And there are as many species of the temperance that moderates pleasures (for instance one about taste, another about touch) as there can be distinct pleasures to which the will is inclined. Nor is this true only of the pleasures of the senses which the will, which is joined to them, delights in; but it is true also of pleasures proper to the will itself as it is will - and it is in this way that the will of an angel, though it has no separate sensitive appetite, can desire the delightful good.

56. And the proof that these temperances are distinct is that there can be supreme delight in one of them and not in another. For someone can be temperate simply about sex, wanting only to use it with his own wife or simply not to use it, and intemperate about taste, wanting to eat what he should not eat or not wanting to eat what he should eat. Someone too can be temperate about things of sense and intemperate about things of speculation. For instance, if his will is supremely delighted by the fact that his intellect is thinking supremely about intelligible things, and this thinking is not as useful in itself as some other one, this delight is in itself immoderate and needs moderating, since it is in itself disordered.

57. The species of fortitude do not need to be thus explained for the present purpose, because only fortitude in itself and patience are, among others, here touched on. Patience, as was said before [n.38] is the noblest fortitude because it does not repel what is to be repelled, so that ‘to be patient’ is a sort of ‘to permit’. And just as one would say about permission that it is a positive act of willing or not-willing, or perhaps of ‘not willing to prevent’, so one would say the same about the sort of act that is the will’s being patient about terrible things.

58. Now justice needs to be subdivided according to what follows.

Here one must note that, in one’s ordering to another, one can be disposed rightly first by sharing oneself with another as much as one can, or by sharing with him something else or one’s own possessions.

59. The virtue that inclines to the first is friendship, whereby one gives oneself to one’s neighbor as far as one can give oneself, and as far as one’s neighbor can receive. And this is the most perfect moral virtue, because the whole of justice is more perfect than the virtues that relate to oneself, and this friendship is most perfectly justice.

60. But if one shares something else with one’s neighbor, this is either extrinsic goods or intrinsic goods. To share intrinsic goods, insofar as these belong to the support of individual human life, from the extrinsic goods that men need is called ‘commutative justice’; and it is the one that people more frequently call justice, to the extent something equivalent is exchanged. But if one shares with one’s neighbor something necessary for life in community, either this is rule, which belongs to the presiding magistrate, and this species of justice lacks a name but it can be called presiding justice or lordly justice. Or one shares with one’s neighbor the justice of subjection, and this species of justice is called obedience.