What Is Character? The Seven Cardinal Virtues
Character is marked by the following virtues:
- Wisdom enables us to act rightly using knowledge, experience, understanding,
common sense and insight.
- Courage gives us the perseverance and patience to confront fear, agony,
pain, danger, uncertainty or intimidation to serve God and others. Moral
courage is the ability to act rightly in the face of popular opposition,
shame, scandal, discouragement or personal loss. Physical courage is bravery
in confronting death or threat of death.
- Temperance marked by self-restraint that enables moderation in all
things providing a balanced life-style. Temperance is characterized as the
control over excess as expressed through chastity, modesty, humility,
self-regulation, forgiveness and mercy that involves limiting an excess of
sexual desire, vanity or anger so that we have a balance in our choices
Aristotle referred to this balance as the
golden mean.
- Justice, the quality of being impartial or fair, involves a constant
and permanent commitment to paying our debts to others and expecting
even-handedness in return.
- Love—a strong affection for another that enables us to see things
from another’s perspective. The Bible commands us to love the Lord our God
with all our heart and with all our soul and with all our mind and with
all our strength and to love our neighbor as ourselves.
- Faith—the assurance of things hoped for the conviction of things not
seen.
- Hope is an optimistic state of mind that is based on an expectation
of a positive outcome. It is a confident expectation for the fulfillment
of a cherished desire.
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