The Virtue of Moderation. Or, An Update on Compromise

Over a a decade ago I published A Theology of Compromise?  A year later I posted a brief follow-up here. As I observed in my initial piece,

[Clay] Cooke [to whom I was responding] at best provides a "negative" theological argument in favor of compromise. He combines the theological categories of human finitude and human sinfulness. We don't know everything, especially the follow-along of choices, and most especially legislative choices. This counsels wariness when pressing a law-making advantage to the hilt or voting against the good because it's not perfect. Be careful of what you wish for, as the saying goes. (Prohibition, anyone?) Combine our lack of knowledge, particularly about the future, with our sinfulness--our propensity to take advantage of opportunities to gain at another's loss--and an attitude opposed to compromise can lead to bad results.

But as I also noted, this argument lacks a postive basis for compromise. An argument in favor of the lesser of two evils is fine but shouldn't there be an affirmative moral warrant for something like compromise in public life? 

My follow-up post got a bit closer to a moral warrant where I quoted James K.A. Smith riffing Oliver O'Donovan:

Rooted in our uncompromising [primary] commitment to Christ, we nonetheless have to act, and we act always and only in [particular] situations. ... "It is an old and damaging confusion," O'Donovan points out, "to suppose that compromise in this secondary [situational] sense implies compromise in the primary sense." Thus "every moral decision will be a decision between faithfulness and compromise."

Nonetheless, even drawing from O'Donovan, there seems more pragmatism than virtue. What classical (and Christian) virtues supply a robust warrant for the evident necessity of compromise? Or is necessity all there is?

Enter the virtue of moderation. Given the nature of a virtue, moderation is something more than mere pragmatics. On its own account moderation is a habit that, combined with other virtues, leads to a flourishing life.

But what is the virtue of moderation? Or, to put the question another way: moderation in respect of what? Moderation as the restraint of appetites? Or as the tool to triangulate between two opposing vices? Is moderation another name for the mean, e.g., courage (between foolhardiness and cowardice)? Or is moderation a tool of phronesis, a form of practical wisdom? 

Enter a book recently (re)published by The Davenant Institute, Joseph Hall's A Treatise on Christian Moderation (2024) (with an introduction and scholarly annotation by Andre Gazal). Hall (1575-1656) was a bishop in the Church of England in the run-up to the English Civil War. In his treatise, Hall called for personal and public moderation, a call that was ignored as England plunged into a war that took more lives (per capita) then did WW I. In our own increasingly immoderate age, this work may find a hearing. Perhaps cultural partisans will find warrant to moderate their political wills.

If you wan't to know more before taking the plunge, listen to this podcast where Colin Redemer, Rhys Laverty, and Jonathan McKenzie discuss the Hall's book and work to distinguish the virtue of moderation from the vice of cowardice.