 Though one’s passions, that is one’s emotional desires and aversions, support one’s reason in deliberation, choice and action, they are also always capable of deflecting one from reasonable and right choice. So the ready disposition to keep these passions in their proper role is an essential element of a virtuous character and life. By temperantia one integrates one’s desires, particularly but not only for sexual pleasure, with reason, lest reason be enslaved by passion and become its ingenious servant, as it readily can. Temperantia is the mean, for example, between lust and frigidity or apathy (Aquinas everywhere rejecting any “Stoic” ideal of passionlessness, and holding that there is good as well as bad concupiscentia).