Faithful Fitness

Four fundamental moral virtues can serve as foundational “virtues of fitness.” These virtues, well known to the classical pagan philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero yet also extolled in the holy Scriptures, are also called the “cardinal” virtues, deriving from the Latin word cardine for hinge, sincethe other moral virtues depend on them. Let’s look, then, at how these cardinal virtues can help us in our flight toward fitness.

Fortitude is the perfection of our passions that gives us the courage to endure hardships to obtain the arduous or difficult good. Holy martyrs display the virtue of fortitude in its extreme, but in its relationship to fitness, fortitude enables us to endure the physical discomforts that can accompany the intense rigors of strength training and the less intense but longer-lasting travails that accompany aerobic or cardiovascular workouts. The good it achieves is bodily strength, energy, and endurance.

Temperance is that perfection of the “concupiscible” or “desiring” appetite that helps us keep our desires in check when they would lead us into excess and sin. In the realm of health and fitness, temperance most directly relates to diet and nutrition. Temperance will allow us to combat the opposing vice of gluttony and find joy in eating healthy proportions of our daily bread (and yes, our chocolate and pasta). Temperance is not about special food supplements or crash diets. It’s about developing sensible habits that we can practice throughout a lifetime.

Prudence is that practical wisdom that determines reasonable and ethical means to attain ethical ends. In the context of fitness, prudence develops when we learn, through reading and personal experience, how to craft sensible, healthy routines for our lives, including strength training, endurance training, our daily work and chores, and a reasonable diet.

Justice involves giving all people their rightful due. In the realm of fitness, we can see that justice also considers the special goals and needs of individuals within special groups. Women, for example, are rarely interested in developing the bulging biceps their teenage sons are after, but they may seek means of feeling more energetic to meet all their daily challenges. The sons seeking biceps need to be aware of the potential pitfalls that await them, from steroids to harmful supplements to regimens of overeating and overtraining that can bring them physical and spiritual harm. Teenage girls need to know that how they feel and how they function are far more important than how they look. Seniors need to find safe and healthy ways to build and retain healthy muscle tissue, sturdy bones, and sufficient energy levels in the golden years.

Moral virtues also embody “golden means.” They are not about a lukewarm mediocrity, but about hitting the mark dead-on, avoiding the pitfalls of both excess and deficiency. In the realm of fitness, for example, some good Christians may fear that exercise could lead to vanity and self-absorption. Given our fallen nature, this indeed is a real possibility. For some people who spend inordinate amounts of time on exercise and diet, fitness has become their Mammon, and this we will surely seek to avoid. But fitness pursuits need not lead to vanity or obsession with worldly things if they’re kept in the proper proportion, using sensible means to achieve good goals. Christ told us, after all, to “be perfect” (Mt 5:48). As human beings, we are called to perfect our bodies and souls for the greater glory of God.