Teachings of the Catholic Church - Questions     

Margaret Atkins, “Can We Ever Be Satisfied?”

1. What is the significance for Ms. Atkins of the story of the coal miner in the coal mine?

2. According to Ms. Atkins, how does Thomas Aquinas define the virtue of temperentia?

3. Is virtue (particularly a virtue such as temperance or, as Ms. Atkins has it, “temperateness”) simply self-denial?  Are virtues for killing joy?  What does Ms. Atkins think?

4. What does Thomas Aquinas think about refusing natural pleasures?  According to Ms. Atkins, do natural pleasures in and of themselves lead us into intemperateness?

5. According to Ms. Atkins, what is the fundamental problem with avarice?  What has it mistaken?  Ms. Atkins makes a similar point later on in the article when she talks about how we’ve replaced the notion of use with the notion of consumption.  What happens when we do that?

6. According to Ms. Atkins, how are those of us who are not drug addicts “addicted” in our own way?

7. The title on p. 47 of Ms. Atkins’ text says: “More pleasure less joy.”  Do you think it is possible to have more pleasures, but less joy?

8. Why, according to Ms. Atkins, have we ceased to value the virtues of limit?

9. What does the ethics of utilitarianism measure happiness by?

10. What does Ms. Atkins mean when she says that “the new puritanism and the new hedonism are two sides of a single coin”?

11. According to Ms. Atkins, Thomas Aquinas limited the province of temperentia to the pleasures of touch.  (She’s not quite being accurate about this, by the way.)  Today, she suggests, we need a more “inclusive” virtue.  Why?

12. A second point, says Ms. Atkins, is that Aquinas thought that temperateness was basically a private virtue.  (Again, not quite right, but no matter.)  What does she suggest we should understand about the ramifications of not being temperate?

13. Ms. Atkins says toward the end of her article that she “cannot leave the virtue of temperateness without sketching its connections with two central Christian doctrines: creation and original sin.”  What are the connections?  What, at bottom, should be our response to the doctrine of creation?  Why is penance needed?

14. Can we be happy without temperance?  Why, or why not?
 

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