Ordering Our Lives with the Virtue of Prudence -Fr. Andrew Reckers
At the time this article is published, winter is in full force, and many people are struggling to remain faithful to their new year’s resolutions. We are also beginning the third week in Ordinary Time (or “ordered time”). This liturgical season focuses on the life and teachings of Jesus Christ during His public ministry where He teaches us how to order our lives rightly by being faithful to Him. It is a good reminder that we need His grace to live better lives as we follow His teachings. His grace builds on our human nature, and allows us to grow in the virtues—skills that empower us to live better as human beings. By cooperating with God’s grace and practicing the virtues, we become more adept at using them well in our lives so that we can be more loving toward God and our neighbor. One of the most important virtues for bringing order to our lives is prudence. This brief article is a reflection on what prudence is and how it works in our lives.
St. Thomas Aquinas defines prudence in his Summa Theologiae as “right reason applied to action (II-II, Q. 47, a. 8).” In other words, prudence is the virtue where we know how to do the right thing in the right way whenever we make a choice to act. It is of course good to try to bring about good consequences (or ends) whenever we make choices. However, the ends are not the only things that are important in making decisions; we also need to choose good means by which those ends come about. This is where the virtue of prudence comes in: It empowers us to be wise in choosing good means for bringing about good consequences in our actions.
In the same article cited above, Aquinas observes that prudence acts in three ways: Taking counsel, judging, and commanding. The first act of prudence is for us to take counsel about the possible means by which we can bring about the desired ends. This is a process of discovery. We can either discover for ourselves or learn by consulting other people the various ways and means we can choose to bring about the desired outcomes. This discovery phase of prudence is important for us to avoid being trapped by false dilemmas—situations where we mistakenly see no good means of acting because we have failed to think of a good alternative.
Once we have discovered the possible means by which we can act, we use prudence in its second function: Judging the fittingness of those means. Here, we narrow down the possible means discovered in the first phase by evaluating the goodness or badness of each possibility. This stage of prudential judgment is important for us to avoid hastily choosing means that may seem attractive at first glance but are either not the best available means or even turn out to be bad when inspected closely.
Finally, we need to act decisively once we have determined the best available means of achieving the end. This final phase of prudence is commanding. It is at this point that the will becomes involved, and process is no longer just an intellectual pursuit. Commanding is acting in the best way that we can as determined by the first two phases of prudence. Since this final phase requires action, it is this last phase that makes prudence to be a moral virtue (that is, a virtue governing human action) rather than a virtue of the intellect only (one governing only the reasoning of things).
Prudence is an essential virtue for us to act in a morally good way. It empowers us to discover the possible means of achieving an end, narrowing those means to the best available, and acting decisively to achieve the ends by the means that have been chosen. By prayerfully asking God to give us the grace to always act prudently, we can make our lives more ordered and more effectively remain faithful to the teachings of Jesus Christ.