Prudent as Serpents: A Reflection on one of the Cardinal Virtues

Estote ergo prudentes sicut serpentes, et simplices sicut columbæ.

Be ye therefore prudent (prudentes) as serpents and simple as doves.

Matthew 10:16

Prudence is so often used as an excuse for cowardice, that we have come to mistake it for timidity or cautiousness. When we find ourselves between a rock and a hard place, it is easy to choose inaction for fear of doing the wrong thing and dismiss it as a matter of prudence–an “abundance of caution.”

However, in doing so, we miss the mark of prudence, which is doing the right thing at the right moment.  

It’s not for the faint of heart. Prudence is a “manly” virtue. To the Greeks, prudence (phronesis) was the mark of the most able generals in battle or the greatest of kings. Even in Christendom we see this cardinal virtue symbolized by the serpent, a cunning and unsettling creature. 

St. Francis de Sales, a gentle dove himself, admits to having a hard time loving the virtue: “I would rather possess the harmlessness of one dove than the wisdom of a hundred serpents.”

Yet, he is adamant that prudence is “the very salt of life, and a light to show us the way out of its difficulties.”^[1]

St. Thomas Aquinas explains that prudence is knowing both the correct ends and the correct means to those ends in a given situation. 

So we may know to honor our mothers and fathers, but to do so looks different in an eight-year-old girl than in a thirty-year-old married women. Or we may know to dress modestly, but this too looks different according to our state in life. The clothes of a married women are not fitting for a cloistered nun—or vice versa. 

But how do we keep the snake from poisoning the dove? Keep our ends correct—that is, fixed on God. 

De Sales distinguishes between worldly prudence and the prudence of the Gospel. He recounts that his worldly “prudent” friends advised him not to publish another book when they saw the success of his book Philothea for fear that de Sales could not possibly live up to such success a second time. He might diminish himself. Although they were looking out for de Sales, they thought only of personal glory. 

De Sales, rather, busied himself with what was pleasing to God: “it would be well worth my while to build upon its foundation some inferior work, so as to beat down the smoke of this incense, and earn that contempt from men which makes us so much the more pleasing to God.” 

He, of course, published another book. What is prudent in God’s eyes may look like folly to the world, but it is far from timid.

---

^[1] Jean Pierre Camus recounts these quotes and the publishing anecdote below in The Spirit of St. Francis de Sales.