the cardinal virtues
idea · 2 works · 2 mentions · 3 anchored passages
courage · temperance · justice · prudence · righteousness
in the texts
Letters
The classical virtues Basil says the soul must cultivate.
The lover of temperance continually unrolls the story of Joseph, and learns from him the deeds of temperance, finding him not only self-controlled against pleasures but settled in a fixed disposition toward virtue.
Drawn down neither to anxiety over food nor to concern for clothing, but keeping leisure from earthly cares, it transfers its whole zeal to the acquisition of eternal goods—how temperance and courage may be rightly achieved in it, how justice and prudence, and the other virtues which, ranged as subdivisions under these general ones, prompt the earnest man to perform fittingly each of the duties of life.
Stromata
The classical virtues reinterpreted as constituents of gnostic self-rule.
The forms of courage are steadfastness, greatness of mind, magnanimity, liberality, and magnificence.
and the questions of goods and evils and things intermediate, and all that concerns courage and prudence and temperance, and that perfect virtue which crowns them all, righteousness.