“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, 1804.

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 by referencing the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.

In The Four Cardinal Virtues, Joseph Pieper says, “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. She 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 five times. Fortitude is referred to eight 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 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. Instead, 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, 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, too, 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.

copyright 2026 Tom Medlar