Temperance is the moral virtue that moderates the attraction of pleasures and provides balance in the use of created goods. It ensures the will's mastery over instincts and keeps desires within the limits of what is honorable. The temperate person directs the sensitive appetites toward what is good and maintains a healthy discretion: "Do not follow your inclination and strength, walking according to the desires of your heart.” Temperance is often praised in the Old Testament: "Do not follow your base desires, but restrain your appetites." In the New Testament it is called "moderation" or "sobriety." We ought "to live sober, upright, and godly lives in this world." CCC 1809

“Temperance is the first virtue that perfects man’s ability to act well with one’s self from within one’s self.  For it brings order to the concupiscible appetite, and thus to the emotions of love, hate, sensible satisfaction, desire, aversion and sorrow as they bear upon a pleasant good.”  Doug Mcmanaman

If there is one virtue men struggle with, it is the virtue of temperance.  Temperance focuses mainly on the self-control of the will in regards to our senses.  We are born with a sense of smell, touch, taste, sight, and sound and it is those gifts bestowed on us by God that has kept us going as a human race since the beginning of time.  We can find pleasure in all of our senses and it is linked to our instincts as man.  The tools that we need for survival such as food and drink, and reproduction are accompanied with pleasure.  In order to survive we need to eat, and thanks be to God that it is an enjoyable activity (at least most of the time), so much so we see it as a pastime and revolve events based around food.  The same goes for sex.  An act that is absolutely necessary if we want to continue the existence of the human race.  Our God is a great God, for He has linked pleasure with acts of survival.  Our senses draw us to the world around and as men we need to be responsible how we use these senses.  We can appreciate the beauty of a woman through our eyes, but at the same time, if we do not control our eyes, it can lead us to visually use a woman for our own selfish desires.

That is where temperance comes in.  It is the ability to control our will when it comes face to face with our desires.  We all can give examples of the cultural battles that ensue every day, from the billboards with half naked women on them, to the accessibility of pornography from anywhere in the world.  Yet even with all the temptations to fight against, there is the virtue of temperance to teach us restraint and control. 

St. Thomas Aquinas writes: "Wherefore temperance takes the need of this life, as the rule of the pleasurable objects of which it makes use, and uses them only for as much as the need of this life requires." 
A bold statement in a world where we are expected to indulge in all the pleasures that present themselves, but then again, we are expected to live against the grain in order to achieve sainthood. 

So lets look at one example that is contrary to the virtue temperance.  Gluttony is considered one of the seven deadly sins, and for good reason.  Most people equate gluttony with over eating to the point of throwing up but it’s much than that.  It’s more of a mindset than an action since it does not have to do with quantity but a desire for food and drink outside of what is reasonable.  The glutton does not eat to survive but reorganizes his life where food and drink is an end to which the remaining parts of his life are centered around. 

The desire becomes a part of who they are, and that can be very dangerous to the state of someone’s moral well being.  If a person is willing to change their lifestyle to accommodate a desire that it outside the scope of reason, it is evident that their ability to control one’s self is gone.  This is a very common theme among the vices against temperance. 

In the words of nineteenth-century Russian Bishop Ignatius Brianchaninov: Wise temperance of the stomach is a door to all the virtues. Restrain the stomach, and you will enter Paradise. But if you please and pamper your stomach, you will hurl yourself over the precipice of bodily impurity, into the fire of wrath and fury, you will coarsen and darken your mind, and in this way you will ruin your powers of attention and self-control, your sobriety and vigilance.

He is speaking of food, yes, but also a mindset of indulgence in all parts of your lifestyle.  Mother Church has given us guidelines based on her wisdom of the human condition.  If we allow sin to enter our lives we cannot gain clarity into the world we live in.  It becomes clouded with our own desires and not those of God, and thus we end up in misery.  It is only through the path God sets for us can we find true happiness.  So the church has given us a very powerful tool, fasting.  Sacrificing a desire to become stronger in our faith and obtaining more control over our will.  The church is looked at as a tyrant at times, based on requirements of its members, but for good reason.  When you fast, you learn to control your human desires.  The church expects us as men to be the best we can be.  By fasting you start to take control of your concupiscence and begin to find freedom from those things you gave up.  It’s a paradox; you leave behind the desires your human nature seeks and in turn you become much stronger in spirit.  You have more control over your emotions.  You start to see that when driving, what once caused you to give the middle finger; you now are giving an obnoxious smile.  You begin to feel strength you never felt before, and the temptations that may have kept you enslaved, now has a contender. It is all centered on temperance, that control of the will.

Most men struggle with the purity of their heart toward the opposite sex.  We are visual creatures and the beauty of a woman can cause a man to stop dead in his tracks. The difficulty is keeping our eyes in check.  We all have had the temptation to double take when an attractive woman passes by, but there is danger to that.  The double take, may lead to a triple take, and so on.  It starts to train our mind on the visual and loose track of reality; that woman is a gift from God, never to be looked at as less than that.  It is when our desires overtake us that we loose sight of the real beauty of a woman.  Temperance plays such a critical role in the quest of purity.  If we can control our desires to use a woman we can start to see the real beauty of their femininity.  That is why porn is so pervasive in the world.  It preys on man’s lack of virtue and keeps their eyes only on the surface.  It takes a man’s attention away from what it real about a woman, since beauty is more potent on the inside.  We have all experienced engaging in a conversation with a pretty girl, only to find out that they may be dull or not interesting at all, and at the end of the conversation that pretty girl may not seem as attractive when the conversation started, yet on the contrary we know of times when we have met a woman that may not have seemed as attractive, but was funny, and drew your attention immediately by her intriguing personality, and by the end of the conversation she was much more attractive.  The man who does not posses the virtue of temperance does not listen to the words of the attractive women, and won’t give the time of day to the unattractive woman. 

You see the real paradox comes when we introduce sin into our lives.  We are blinded by truth, and attracted to evil, and it always ends in our lack of ability to look outside of our own self and in turn we are alone.   The light of the world is found in Jesus Christ who is true man and true virtue.  Through the training in virtue can we find authentic happiness and finally recognize the gift God is trying to give to us, peace and joy in Him.