Of all ancient arguments for the unity of the virtues, the arguments by early Stoics conflicted most sharply with common sense. They presented every virtue as an aspect of a single, indivisible wisdom. On this view, whoever truly has one virtue has them all; whoever lacks any virtue actually has no virtues. Stoics embraced two paradoxical corollaries: that all sins or faults (peccata) are equal, and that an individual progresses in an instant from having nothing but vices to having all of the virtues.
As Stoics saw all virtues as aspects of human wisdom, so Augustine saw all virtues as aspects of God-given charity. The superficial resemblance of his position to Stoic teachings made him all the more concerned to spell out the differences. He did so in a letter to Jerome attacking the intellectualism and perfectionism of Stoic ethics (Letter 167). For Stoics, Augustine explains, virtue is a kind of wisdom that hardly anyone ever achieves. For Christians virtue is a kind of love that many people have as a gift of grace. Where Stoics insist that those who fall short of perfect virtue have no genuine virtues at all, Christians recognize that nobody on the face of earth has perfect virtue. None are without sin; and since sin comes from vice, none are without vice. But this does not imply that Christians with charity have no virtues. They progress by degrees, increasing in virtue over time, like someone moving from darkness into light.
Augustine’s letter attracted considerable attention in the Middle Ages. Not only did the Christian in Abelard’s Dialogue use it refuting the all-or-nothing conception of virtue and the equality of sins, Peter Lombard included excerpts from it in Book III, Distinction 36 of his Sentences (Sententiae). The Sentences, compiled entirely from Peter took to be patristic teachings, went on to become the standard theology textbook for medieval universities.
When they had only Books I-III of Aristotle’s Ethics, readers assumed that he regarded moral virtues as separable. Surely a person could perform just acts (for example) without performing brave ones, thereby acquiring the virtue of justice without the virtue of courage. Only when they had the complete Ethics did scholars learn the argument in Book VI, Chapter 13, for the mutual connection between all moral virtues and the intellectual virtue of prudence. Some found the argument convincing. Others suggested that only the four cardinal virtues are inseparable from each other. Peter John Olivi (d. 1298), one of Aristotle’s sharpest critics, attacked a key premise in his argument: that prudence has an indivisible unity. According to Olivi, each moral virtue does have a prudence related to it, but these various prudences are distinct dispositions. Thus a person can be virtuous in one area, such as matters involving temperance, and still vicious and imprudent in other respects.
Perhaps the most significant development of the fourteenth century was Scotus’ reframing of the dispute as one about the necessary connection ofvirtues. In his commentary on Book III, Distinction 36 of the Sentences, Scotus divides prudence much as Olivi does. He grants that no moral virtue can exist without the prudence related to it, because the very concept of moral virtue includes prudence. Nevertheless, he argues, there is no necessary connection between moral virtues or between the prudences related to them. An individual might even attain perfection in one virtue while wholly lacking another, just as she/he might have perfect hearing while wholly lacking the capacity to see. Scotus does not suggest that this is likely. His interests lie chiefly in conceptual issues, not in empirical psychology.
World History
