Temperament is not a phenomenon that is only psychological, only biological or only moral. It is understood from the unity of the human person, who is body and soul. The human being is not a body that produces subjectivity, nor a soul that uses an organism as an external instrument, but a substantial unity. That is why temperament must be understood as the structural disposition of the embodied soul, which shows itself in the body and in the psyche and operates through the sensitive powers.
This understanding prevents two common reductions. The first is the biologistic one, which turns temperament into a reflection of neurotransmitters, activation thresholds, genetic traits or brain circuits. All of that may make up the bodily base, but it does not exhaust the life of the person, who feels, interprets, remembers, desires, judges and chooses, and that is more than physiology. The second is the spiritualist one, which speaks of the soul as if it existed cut off from the body and from sensibility, when the embodied soul normally operates through the body, the senses, the imagination, memory, the cogitative power and the appetites. Temperament arises precisely from the joining of a concrete bodily base and the life of the soul that informs and organizes it.
The wounded structure
The question, however, does not end there, because the concrete person does not live in a state of pure original nature; they live in the condition of the fall. The created structure does not disappear, but it is wounded, and the original order of the soul and its powers is not destroyed, but thrown out of adjustment. The intellect, the will, the internal senses and the appetites go on existing, only now all of them are vulnerable to disorder. That is why temperament can never be described as something neutral. Each temperament remains a created power for good, but now in a condition in which the imagination can distort, memory can imprison, the cogitative power can read reality defensively, the appetites can rebel against order and a good that the structure makes salient can be egoized.
This is where temperament touches moral life most deeply. The fall does not invent the structure; it diverts it. It does not create the energy; it makes it vulnerable to egoization. It does not produce power, the taste for the pleasant, stability or measure out of nothing; it only makes it possible for them to start serving the fallen self. The temperamental structure belongs to the domain of creation, and its deformations belong to the domain of the fall. The choleric still has strength, but it leans toward pride; the sanguine still has warmth, but it leans toward vanity; the phlegmatic still has peace, but it leans toward lukewarmness; the melancholic still has gravity, but it leans toward envy, self-enclosure and sadness.
The fall strikes especially at the path by which the structure passes from the body to the soul and from the soul to concrete life. It strikes the cogitative power, which stops reading reality justly and starts filtering it through fear, comparison, pride, flight or self-defense. It strikes the imagination, which starts fantasizing compensations, narcissistic victories, escapes or prisons. It strikes sense memory, which fixes humiliations, wounds, pleasures and the same narratives told over and over. And it strikes the appetites, which no longer easily obey reason and are moved by disordered inclinations.
Reordering, not denying
Temperament is, therefore, a wounded structure, and the moral life consists in reordering it, not denying it. Virtue does not destroy temperament. Grace and the moral order do not make the choleric less choleric, the sanguine less sanguine, the phlegmatic less phlegmatic or the melancholic less melancholic; what they do is return the energy to its right end. Choleric power stops confirming the self and starts protecting and accomplishing the good. Sanguine participation stops securing a welcome and becomes communion. Phlegmatic preservation stops protecting its own stability and starts preserving what deserves to last. Melancholic measure stops protecting the position of the self and starts serving the truth and what is due.
Body, soul and fall, then, are not separate chapters of temperament but dimensions of the same problem: temperament belongs to the embodied soul, the fall wounds that embodied soul, and maturity consists in returning the energy of the structure to its order. Without this, the study of the temperaments becomes a psychological portrait, curious and useless; with it, it becomes a way of understanding morally who you are and what in you still remains to be ordered.