Two lists with one name
When people today speak of “the seven virtues,” they may mean one of two different sets. Medieval writers used both, and sometimes mixed them. Keeping them apart makes the subject much easier to follow.
- Four cardinal plus three theological virtues. This is the older and more authoritative combination.
- Seven remedial virtues set against the seven deadly sins. This is a later, more popular teaching device.
Neither list was a single official canon for the whole Church throughout the Middle Ages. They were teaching frameworks that varied somewhat by author and region.
The cardinal plus theological scheme
The first set takes the four cardinal virtues of classical origin, prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude, and adds the three theological virtues from Paul’s letter to the Corinthians: faith, hope and charity. The four were thought to be habits that human beings could develop, while the three were gifts of grace directed toward God.
Gregory the Great and other early teachers used parts of this arrangement, and by the twelfth and thirteenth centuries it was standard in the schools. Thomas Aquinas, for example, organized his moral teaching in the Summa Theologiae around exactly these virtues. Seven was also attractive for its symbolic associations, since the number appears throughout Scripture, in the days of creation, the gifts of the Holy Spirit and the sacraments.
Virtues and vices in conflict
The second scheme grew from a long tradition of picturing the moral life as a battle. A late Roman poem by Prudentius, the Psychomachia, shows personified virtues defeating vices in combat, and it was widely copied and illustrated in the Middle Ages. Later preachers and illustrators drew on this picture.
When teachers began to organize the seven deadly sins as the standard list of vices, it was natural to supply a virtue for each. The pairing often looks like this:
| Vice | Opposing virtue |
|---|---|
| Pride | Humility |
| Envy | Kindness or love of neighbor |
| Anger | Patience |
| Sloth | Diligence |
| Greed | Generosity or charity |
| Gluttony | Temperance |
| Lust | Chastity |
Different authors made different matches. Some pair greed with liberality, others with mercy, and some pair envy with brotherly love. This is one reason the later lists vary, as covered in the article on the particular virtues named in the longer title.
Why combine them?
Teachers valued both schemes for different reasons. The cardinal plus theological pattern showed the structure of the good life and its dependence on grace. The vice and virtue pairing offered a practical program, since it told a person which habit to cultivate to overcome a particular weakness. Friars and parish priests, who were instructing people with limited schooling, tended to use the second kind in sermons and handbooks, while university theologians tended to work with the first.
Medieval thinkers also blended the two. A preacher might say that humility protects against pride and that charity is the root of all virtues, and then recall the cardinal virtues in the same sermon. Writers did not always feel the need to separate them neatly.
Virtues in art and literature
Like the vices, the virtues were personified. Sculptors on cathedral portals and walls carved sets of virtues as female figures, often shown treading on or defeating the opposing vice. Stained glass and manuscripts adopted similar designs. Italian civic paintings used virtues to represent good government, and tombs could include them to praise the dead. These images used allegory and symbolism in a form that viewers could grasp without reading.
In literature, the contrast of virtue and vice shaped moral allegories and vernacular poems. Dante’s Divine Comedy draws on the pattern of vices and virtues, and later English morality plays dramatized the struggle on stage. Courtesy books and manuals for conduct used virtues as guidance for young nobles, tying into the idea of chivalric virtues.
Virtue and salvation
Medieval teaching stressed that virtues were not a way to earn salvation by effort alone. Theological virtues were thought to be infused by God, and cardinal virtues were thought to be perfected by grace. In practice, people hoped that cultivating virtue would help them overcome sin and persevere in faith. The relationship between human effort and divine help is part of the broader debate over the path to salvation.
Cautions
It is easy to read a neat, uniform list into the Middle Ages. In reality, writers varied the number and names of virtues to suit their purposes, and sevenfold schemes sat beside other groupings such as the gifts of the Holy Spirit, the beatitudes and the works of mercy. Historians also note that the popular seven-virtue list seen in many modern sources is largely a later, summarizing device, not a single medieval text. The safest approach is to treat “the seven virtues” as a family of related teaching schemes rather than one fixed definition.