The Virtuous Center

“Four pivotal human virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. The human virtues are

stable dispositions of the intellect and will that govern our acts, order our passions, and guide our

conduct in accordance with reason and faith.” Catechism of the Catholic Church, page 869.

Have you read “Sense and Sensibility” by Jane Austen?” If not, get it right away, and do yourself

a kind favor: read it with deep curiosity and be rewarded with deeper insights. Jane Austen is a

genius who writes with a penetrating focus on the moral dimensions of human behavior. She is

often misunderstood, and simplistically considered by some to be writing drawing room dramas.

Her novels, though, illuminate the moral underpinnings of human actions, and portray how moral

choices cause pain and alienation, or bring joy and peace to relationships.

Her novel “Sense and Sensibility” is centered on the four cardinal virtues, and on the one

character who exemplifies them. Elinor Dashwood is the heroine of the story, the virtuous center,

the figure around whom all others are seen as possessing or lacking in virtue. Elinor Dashwood

demonstrates in her everyday actions those stable dispositions of intellect and will that govern,

order, and guide our conduct according to reason and faith, as described by the Catechism of the

Catholic Church.

In Plato’s “Symposium,” Agathon speaks in praise of love – through reference to the four

cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

In “The Four Cardinal Virtues,” Joseph Pieper says that “The precept of prudence is the

“permanently exterior prototype” by which the good deed is what it is; a good action becomes

just, brave, temperate only as a consequence of the prototypical decree of prudence.”

In his reference to the permanently exterior prototype of prudence, Pieper highlights the

objective and autonomous pattern that we should strive to adopt in our everyday conduct. Some

might wonder if the cardinal virtues still hold relevance for our modern lives. Right acting,

according to objective and eternal standards cannot lose relevance; but we can fall away from

awareness of or commitment to such standards.

In his book “After Virtue,” Alasdair Macintyre said, “It is her uniting of Christian and

Aristotelian themes in a determinate social context that makes Jane Austen the last great

effective imaginative voice of the tradition of thought about, and practice of, the virtues I have

tried to identify.”

Elinor Dashwood is the moral center of the plot of “Sense and Sensibility,” and the central figure

whose moral choices bring to light the ethical essence of the other characters.

Elinor serves this role due to her consistent embodiment of the four cardinal virtues: prudence,

justice, temperance, and fortitude.

The words prudent or prudently are mentioned 14 times, and the words imprudence, imprudent,

or imprudently are written 15 times in the novel. Justice or injustice is mentioned 5 times.

Fortitude is referred to 8 times, and temperance once in the novel. In which other novel could

you even find these words, let alone a story that portrays their essential role in our personal

lives?

The ethical qualities, or character, of each figure in the story of “Sense and Sensibility” can be

observed and judged according to the presence or the absence of the cardinal virtues in their

conduct.

The crucial pivot point in the story is not the resolution of a romantic relationship, but it is the

moral awakening of Elinor’s sister Marianne to her own imprudence and want of fortitude (pages

221 to 223).

Elinor reveals how she has suffered silently for four months, and Marianne wonders how she has

borne it. It has “been the effect of constant and painful exertion,” Elinor says.

The cardinal virtues are human-sized objective moral standards that we are to grow into through

persistent and prolonged personal efforts. The virtues are autonomous, and not changing

fashions. We are measured, like the characters in “Sense and Sensibility,” by the presence or the

absence of the four cardinal virtues in our daily exertions at right living and deep loving.

Elinor Dashwood is the virtuous center of the novel, “Sense and Sensibility.” For whom do we

serve as the virtuous center? Do we practice the cardinal virtues in our daily lives and our

personal relations? Does our conduct awaken anyone else to their want of virtue? This story, and

the character of Elinor Dashwood, will inspire you to better conduct.

I believe Plato would have loved “Sense and Sensibility,” and I’m certain you will to, when you

read or reread this illuminating novel.

“After Virtue,” Alasdair Macintyre, Third Edition, University of Notre Dame Press, page 240.

“The Four Cardinal Virtues,” Joseph Pieper, University of Notre Dame Press, page 7.

“Sense and Sensibility,” Jane Austen, Penguin Books.