Wisdom, courage, temperance and justice, which Steiner mapped onto the human bodies and onto past and future incarnations.
The Four Platonic Virtues in Anthroposophy are wisdom, courage, temperance and justice, the four cardinal virtues Plato named in The Republic. In two Zurich lectures of October 1915 (GA 159, The Great Virtues), Rudolf Steiner mapped them onto the human members and the bodily organs, ranking each by the perfection of the organ it works through. Wisdom uses the most finished organs, the brain and nervous system, and harvests past incarnations. Courage works through the heart, whose forces carry into future lives. Temperance reckons with the least developed organs of breathing and digestion, still only seeds. Justice, the fourth, lives in the upright posture won in childhood. Wisdom and justice point back to earlier incarnations, courage and temperance forward, so the fourfold becomes a moral compass spanning the whole arc of repeated earthly lives.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus we have two virtues, Justice and Wisdom, which guide us back to what we were in earlier times, in earlier incarnations in the times when we ourselves were still in the womb of the godhead. And we have two other virtues, Courage and Temperance, which guide us towards later incarnations. We provide all the more forces for these, the less we give to Lucifer. We have seen how what is of the nature of courage and of temperance goes into the organs, and how the organs are prepared thereby for the next incarnation. In the same way moral life extends into the future, when we fill ourselves with spirituality. Two virtues shine out over the past incarnation: Wisdom and Justice. Courage and Temperance shine out over the incarnations to come.
What it Means Today
The most-read modern study of these four is Josef Pieper's The Four Cardinal Virtues, the 1965 English collection (Notre Dame Press) gathering essays Pieper first published in German between 1934 and 1959. Pieper, a Catholic philosopher at the University of Munster, reads prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance through Thomas Aquinas and Aristotle, treating them as stable dispositions that perfect a single human nature. Steiner, lecturing in Zurich a generation earlier, keeps Plato's four names but breaks with that single-life frame entirely. For Pieper the virtues order one earthly life toward the good; for Steiner they thread through many, each tied to a bodily organ at a different stage of cosmic development, and weighted toward past or future lives. Thalira synthesis: where Pieper asks which virtues a good life needs, Steiner asks which incarnation each virtue is paying into, turning a static ethics into a ledger kept across the threshold of death. Waldorf schools work this practically, cultivating courage and temperance in children precisely because, in Steiner's reading, those forces are still building the organs of a future life. The fourth virtue, justice, he ties to the upright posture each child wins alone in its first year, the moral gesture of standing rightly in the world.
Where to Read More