Aug 10, 2026 · 19 min · 12 segments
Are you sanguine, choleric, melancholic, or phlegmatic?The four temperaments have been used by Catholic spiritual writers for centuries as a way of understanding our natural strengths, weaknesses, and…
Hippocrates, working in Ancient Greece around 400 BC, proposed that, and this is gross, warning, that four bodily fluids, so blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, governed a person's health and disposition, and that an excess of one fluid over the others produced a recognizable personality type.
Galen, a few years later, refined this into something closer to a full psychological system, tying each fluid to a pairing of qualities, hot or cold, wet or dry.
Nobody today believes that personality actually runs on bile levels, but medieval Christian thinkers noticed something that the ancient physicians hadn't intended.
The four categories mapped remarkably well onto real observable patterns of virtue and vice, patterns that showed up again and again in the lives of saints and in ordinary parish life.
Scholastic theologians picked up that framework and stripped out the outdated biology, but kept the psychological insight.
By the time Haack was writing the book in the 1930s, the temperaments had already passed through centuries of Catholic spiritual direction, refined by generations of confessors who had used it almost as shortcuts for understanding exactly where a given penitent was likely to struggle.
Haack's contribution was making the system usable by ordinary lay Catholics instead of leaving it in the Latin manuals for seminarians.
Pay attention to how you react to an impression, a piece of news, a comment, or an event along three axis.
One, how quickly do you respond? Two, how intensely? And three, how long does that reaction last? A sanguine reacts fast and hard, but forgets it by dinner.
So run a handful of recent moments through that filter, and most of us can determine and identify our dominant temperament without needing a quiz.
Hippocrates, working in Ancient Greece around 400 BC, proposed that, and this is gross, warning, that four bodily fluids, so blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm, governed a person's health and disposition, and that an excess of one fluid over the others produced a recognizable personality type.
Galen, a few years later, refined this into something closer to a full psychological system, tying each fluid to a pairing of qualities, hot or cold, wet or dry.
Nobody today believes that personality actually runs on bile levels, but medieval Christian thinkers noticed something that the ancient physicians hadn't intended.
The four categories mapped remarkably well onto real observable patterns of virtue and vice, patterns that showed up again and again in the lives of saints and in ordinary parish life.
Scholastic theologians picked up that framework and stripped out the outdated biology, but kept the psychological insight.
By the time Haack was writing the book in the 1930s, the temperaments had already passed through centuries of Catholic spiritual direction, refined by generations of confessors who had used it almost as shortcuts for understanding exactly where a given penitent was likely to struggle.
Haack's contribution was making the system usable by ordinary lay Catholics instead of leaving it in the Latin manuals for seminarians.
Pay attention to how you react to an impression, a piece of news, a comment, or an event along three axis.
One, how quickly do you respond? Two, how intensely? And three, how long does that reaction last? A sanguine reacts fast and hard, but forgets it by dinner.
So run a handful of recent moments through that filter, and most of us can determine and identify our dominant temperament without needing a quiz.
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