Four Virtues

“For the grace of God has appeared, bringing salvation for all people, training us to renounce ungodliness and worldly passions, and to live self-controlled, upright, and godly lives in the present age, waiting for our blessed hope, the appearing of the glory of our great God and Savior Jesus Christ…” (Titus 2:11-13)

In this part

C. S. Lewis’s image of hinges is fitting: love needs structure if it is going to move reliably over time. Virtues are not substitutes for grace; they are the trained craft of love. Prudence helps you see rightly, Temperance helps you want rightly, Justice helps you give rightly, and Fortitude helps you stay rightly—especially when staying costs. Without hinges, love may be praised and intended, but it collapses under pressure.

How it begins

Titus describes faith as training—teaching the heart to renounce the lies that destroy love and to practice the truth that strengthens it.

There is a kind of honesty that is not the same thing as being “reasonable.” It can be very unreasonable, in fact—especially at the moment a person discovers he has been lying to himself.

For C. S. Lewis (1898-1963), the beginning of his change did not arrive as a sudden lightning bolt. It came more like a gradual dawning: the world was not playing fair with the escape routes he had relied on most. In his early years he had been an atheist—not necessarily because he had proved to himself there was no God, but because he had decided it would be more convenient not to have one. God had always seemed like an unpleasant extra, like a tax added to a bill that would otherwise look acceptable.

But convenience never keeps its promises. It doesn’t last.

At Oxford, Lewis could keep his mind busy for hours. He could analyze arguments, dissect writers, and even enjoy the elegance of doubt. Doubt, in that stage of his life, felt like a talent—something he could exercise with confidence. Yet cracks began to show. They were not mainly intellectual cracks. They were moral and emotional—things that do not ask permission before they arrive. He found himself confronting griefs that would not be explained away, longings that would not behave, and a simple, almost embarrassing sense that he was not living as though reality truly mattered.

So the old fortress began to lose stones.

The story continues in the book.