What Makes a Good Person? The Cardinal Virtues and Living Well | Prof. Patrick Callahan

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"Fortitude is the distinctly human virtue. As Josef Pieper said [in his book, 'The Four Cardinal Virtues']: 'Fortitude presupposes vulnerability. Without vulnerability, there is no possibility for fortitude. An angel cannot be brave because he is not vulnerable. As non-corporeal spirit, their intellect and will may surpass us as human beings, but as human beings, we do something that cannot ever possibly do: we can give up our life in defense of a cause.'

So, if you don't want to look at it from the Christian point of view, you can look at it from the classical point of view. [In the Iliad and the Odyssey], you see the fickleness and the stupidity of the gods because [they] just life without end, and there are no consequences. You see in the beauty of the heroes who can actually risk their lives in defense of a cause, and, in some ways, that makes them do something that the gods cannot do.

So, [to be clear]: fortitude is not fearlessness. Fortitude presupposes that you have some measure of fear, and it cannot exist without prudence or justice." —Prof. Patrick Callahan

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This talk was given on November 11, 2021 at Texas State University.

About the speaker:

Patrick Callahan is director of the Newman Institute for Catholic Thought & Culture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln as well as Assistant Professor of English & Humanities at St. Gregory the Great Seminary. He did his undergraduate work at the University of Dallas and his graduate work at Fordham University in Classical Philology. While his doctoral work focused on ancient Greek commentaries to the lyric poet Pindar, his recent work focuses on early Jesuit Latin texts.

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