The Four Virtues: Prudence

Every family has its quirks. Growing up, we weren’t a sports family. My siblings and I played a lot of baseball, basketball, and football with friends, but we also played a lot of war games. I don’t remember ever watching sports on television, except for the year the LA Dodgers made it to the World Series. We’ve always said our family sport was politics.

In my adult home, we still don’t do sports, and politics is always loudly discussed, but in his heart of hearts my husband is a philosopher. So we talk philosophy a lot. Much of our discussion of late is the 4 virtues as set forth by Plato and Aristotle, and[1] these are 4 virtues that define, on a natural law level, what it means to be human. They’re something every man and woman should strive for and attain a certain level of.

As we’ve talked about the 4 virtues, I’ve realized my parents brought them into our education via older literature. Victorian era literature—Dickens, Stoker, Robert Lewis Stevenson—older literature like Bunyan, and even more modern literature like Chesterton, Tolkien, and Lewis have the 4 virtues at the back of their minds as what formed and defined heroic men and women. Sadly, they’re not often used as a hallmark of heroes today. So I was, by osmosis, much more familiar with the virtues than my public-schooled husband.

Side Note: I am well aware that the Roman Catholic Church has been the fortress in which the virtues have survived our modern era. That’s because the Dominican branch still holds to what Thomas Aquinas taught. As Protestants, hailing from the Reformation, we also hold to what Thomas Aquinas taught about most things. While we strongly disagree with the Roman Catholic Church on much, we need to realize that there are things we do agree on. Some Catholics have done rich and deep work on theology. We need to be respectful, not reactionary. Some of the best homemaking books I’ve read are Roman Catholic. Those trained in Thomistic thought are logical and reasonable and a blessing to the rest of us.

I thought it would be interesting to explore the 4 virtues from a homemaker’s perspective and see what applications come out.

First off, what are the 4 virtues?

-Prudence

-Justice

-Fortitude (Courage)

-Temperance

Just soak that in for a minute. How much more calm, quiet, and well-rounded would our ordinary life be if these things were still taught in our homes, schools, and stories? What would life be like if these 4 things guided and guarded our culture? Can you imagine how different life would be? (Let’s earnestly pray that God would show us mercy and let us have a resurgence in the 4 virtues!)

We’ll start here with prudence.

Prudence.

Prudence, Thomas Aquinas tells us, is about our thought life. “Aristotle defined prudence as recta ratio agibilium, ‘right reason applied to practice.’”[2] Prudence is being rational, logical, and reasonable. It is not following your heart or judging life by your emotions. If you look it up in the dictionary, prudence is defined as “wise in practical affairs, discretion, care in the management of resources; economy; frugality.” The opposite of prudence is rashness, neglect, inattention, stupidity, carelessness, and so on.

It’s very easy to see what a handmaid prudence is to the homemaker and what a disaster a lack of prudence brings. (In older literature, prudence was one of the highest praises of a woman and her ability to keep her home, from the richest to the poorest of families. A prudent wife was a blessing.)

Intellectual Prudence: This is the heart of prudence. Are you neglectful of your soul, heart, and mind? Do you treat it as acceptable to be stupid or indiscreet? How is that ever acceptable? We all have God-given mental limitations, but they should never serve as an excuse for laziness and foolishness.

We should guard our hearts with reason and logic. This means we fortify, protect, train, and arm our minds. We should garden our hearts. That means plant, nurture, and tend that which is wise and good. Weed out the bad. We are all called to pay attention to what we put in the soil of our soul and what kind of training we give it. This isn’t a call to being so sober-minded we turn sour. Frivolity has its place, just like cotton candy does. It just shouldn’t be our main source of nutrition.

There is a lot of junk out there that we can fill our minds with. There is unsound theology, unbiblical philosophy, worldly foolishness, and encouragement to be self-focused. If we want to be wise, prudent tenders of our hearths, we need to pay close attention to the state of our minds.

Home Management Prudence: this is the more practical outworking of a prudent mind. It is seeing what has been delegated to us, and practicing frugality and care, not rash neglect.

This is watching how much we spend, choosing what to acquire, and what to do with it. This is decorating, maintaining, cleaning, cooking, laundry, nutrition, health, and all the other things we do to tend our home. If we wish to do them well, if we wish to excel, we must do them prudently.

We are to pay attention. We need to show respect for our husband’s work by how we spend his money and how we spend our time. One of the great benefits of homemaking is escaping the rat race and breathing in life. But we must not allow ourselves to take the gift of homemaking for granted, as something we deserve, or as our right. It is a gift and we must use it prudently.

Our husbands work hard to keep us home. Let’s honor that by being diligent in the home.

This is prudence.

This won’t happen overnight. We won’t wake up suddenly prudent. We must put in the work of failing and learning from our mistakes. We must put the work in of guarding and gardening our hearts, souls, minds, and bodies. We must not allow ourselves to get into a lazy holding pattern when it comes to growing our home management skills and experience. I think the most convicting part of studying prudence is that it demands I engage my mind. I can’t float and daydream through life, no matter how much I may want to. If I’m called to be a home manager by my King, I need to be the best I can be.

I need to make sure I’m not using anxiety, brain fog, and hobbies as an excuse to mismanage my home, or only engage in managing the fun parts. There’s that word ‘economy’ in prudence’s practical definition. Ugh. There are days I wish I could escape from the economy of living. But a prudent wife makes economy her maidservant and puts her to work for the good of the home. That means I can’t live with my head in the sand, assuming some fatalistic providence on God’s part. I’m a secondary cause that the Lord uses to provide for the people in my home, myself, my community, my extended family, and my church body. That means I need to calmly and with prayer and wisdom turn my husband’s money into food, clothing, and shelter. I need to judge the times, the lessons of history, the wisdom of Proverbs, and our specific needs as wisely as possible, so that I’m frugal in all areas for the good of my home.

This is a classic example of why I loathe the mentality that homemaking is a waste of space. When we see our place in the wider economy of our homes and communities, and we’re striving to be frugal, wise, and not neglectful, this job suddenly blows up into lifelong work. It is no small or mean thing we do, ladies. Respect your calling and practice prudence.

Prudence has character and monetary applications. It is important in our culture of calling all things feminine ‘victims’ and all things masculine ‘toxic’ to remember that we women can be ruinous to our husbands if we’re imprudent. We can make their lives miserable so that they never want to be home. We can destroy their reputations, and we can financially ruin them. We must take this seriously. Having a home is a lot of work for both the husband and the wife. Both can build it or destroy it. We must always guard and garden ourselves to make sure we’re not destroying what we claim to love.

Relational Prudence: “Because it is so easy to fall into error, prudence requires us to seek the counsel of others, particularly those we know to be sound judges of morality. Disregarding the advice or warnings of others whose judgment does not coincide with ours is a sign of imprudence.”[3] Ladies, this is a call to watch who we listen to. Don’t look to social media for your source of wisdom. Listen to your pastors and husbands first. Be in the preaching of the word every Lord’s Day. This is the first way to grow in wisdom. Make sure you listen to your husband. We must not allow the world’s message of masculine stupidity to cloud our discernment. We must listen to our men.

Once we have those in place, for the love of all that is home, make a knitting circle! Get together with like-minded women. Get some older women and get help. Listening to the women who have already done the work will help us be prudent. Having a circle of women, carefully chosen, to help us judge and move through life will bless us and our families in ways we can’t imagine. It takes work to have a knitting circle, to engage and find time to engage, but it will help our discernment. It will help us have a rich harvest of prudence. (Please note, that both the quote above and what I said included choosing those of sound judgment. A knitting circle, well done, isn’t a place of giggling gossip. It isn’t a place you get together with other chickens to peck at your husbands, children, friends, and responsibilities. A well-formed knitting circle should be intellectual, moral, wise, and an encouragement to prudence, not a source of more foolishness.)

When we really try to think of the work it takes to be prudent and prudently manage our homes, we’ll see far more work than any of us can accomplish in this life, so start small, start simple, but start! If you want to be a blessing to your home, your husband, your children, your church, and your community start seeking prudence. Start in your head and move out to your hearth.  And for goodness sake, pick up some meatier literature than the pulp women’s fiction filling the shelves. It will encourage you to stay at the work.

[1] www.learnreligions.com/the-cardinal-virtues-542142

[2] See link in previous footnote.

[3] See first foot note.