Question about Vices/Virtues

[Kramgen]

If pride is the worst vice, doesn’t that mean that humility should be the greatest virtue? Or if charity is the greatest virtue, shouldn’t that mean that doing the opposite (ignorance or hatred) is the worst vice?

 

[Vico]

If pride is the worst vice, doesn’t that mean that humility should be the greatest virtue? Or if charity is the greatest virtue, shouldn’t that mean that doing the opposite (ignorance or hatred) is the worst vice?

Catholic Encyclopedia

Justice is placed in the order of the virtues before humility, and so should obedience be, for it is part of justice. Humility is, however, said to be the foundation of the spiritual edifice, but in a sense inferior to that in which faith is called its foundation. Humility is the first virtue inasmuch as it removes the obstacles to faith — per modum removens prohibens, as St. Thomas says. It removes pride and makes a man subject to and a fit recipient of grace …

Devine, A. (1910). Humility. In The Catholic Encyclopedia. New York: Robert Appleton Company. http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/07543b.htm

 

[Kramgen]

Yea, but why is justice “better.”

 

[kapp19]

It’s ordered towards the nobler good. Humility is part of temperance - the moderation of pleasures (of the ego in this case). Justice is about right relations between persons, and rendering what is due to another. Humility is ordered toward doing this.

Charity is the highest virtue because it is the very life of God within oneself. In a profound way though, this circles back to humility - the emptying of self, to be full of Divinity.

Thomas goes through these kinds of objections… For example, regarding pride:

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3162.htm#article6

Also here:

https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3161.htm#article5

 

[christismylord]

Sidenote: of justice and humility

Matthew 5:6 CPVD “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for justice, for they will be filled.“

And of St. Faustina’s Diary:

“True greatness of the soul is in loving God and in humility” (Diary, 427).

“As the soul continues to immerse itself more deeply into the abyss of its nothingness and need, God uses His omnipotence to exalt it. If there is a truly happy soul upon earth, it can only be a truly humble soul. At first, one’s self-love suffers greatly on this account, but after a soul has struggled courageously, God grants it much light by which it sees how wretched and full of deception everything is” (Diary, 593).

“The floodgates of heaven are open to a humble soul, and a sea of graces flows down upon it (…). God refuses nothing to such a soul; it is all-powerful and influences the destiny of the whole world. God raises up such a soul to His very throne, and the more the soul humbles itself, the more God stoops down to it, pursuing it with His graces and accompanying it at every moment with His omnipotence” (Diary, 1306).

 

[TheLittleLady]

One cannot have charity without real humility.