CONCLUSION the History of the Cardinal Virtues in the Middle Ages

CONCLUSION The history of the cardinal virtues in the Middle Ages that has been written in the previous chapters allows two negative conclusions which are worth stating before proceeding with a more positive evaluation of the presented material. First, medieval moral thought did not progressively develop toward a Thomastic synthesis of faith and reason which gradually disintegrated near the end of the Middle Ages—a view inspired by a neo-scholastic outlook on medieval intellectual history which colours many older as well as a number of more recent studies on medieval virtue ethics.1 True enough, the history of the cardinal virtues involves elements upon which such a view can be construed. After many centuries in which the religious conception of virtue and morality was taken for granted, the reviving study of the classics in the twelfth century precipitated the introduction of alternative, philosophical conceptions, which led to a dissolution of the prevailing union of religion and morality. A further challenge to religious moral thought was posed by the recovery of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, which came to dominate academic moral debate from the mid-thirteenth century. Taking up the Aristotelian challenge, the great scholastics of the second half of the century took efforts to integrate Aristotelian ethics with moral theology in their laboured expositions on the cardinal and other virtues. Among these expositions, Thomas Aquinas’s Secunda secundae doubtless ranks first due to its size, its comprehensive character, its level of excogitation, and its influence on late medieval academic, pastoral, and educational moral writing. It is true, moreover, that from the last decades of the thirteenth century moral theology and Aristotelian philosophy were recurrently detached from each other. While some philosophers and theologians adhered to a purely philosophical conception of moral virtue, others attempted to restore the Augustinian unity of virtue, grace, and merit, so that polar- ization took the place in moral debate of earlier attempts to achieve har- mony. 1 For some recent works, see the account of Kent, Virtues of the Will, –. conclusion Propounding such a neo-scholastic view of the history of medieval moral thought nevertheless strikes me as inadequate. As I see it, a synthesis of faith and reason in matters of virtue ethics was reached in the late twelfth century by the theologians grouped around Peter the Chanter who recognized naturally acquired alongside supernaturally informed or infused virtues, clearly distinguished the properties of both, but also brought both together in a single system of moral economy. Thirteenth- century moral theology owes its harmonious character to its continu- ation of this twelfth-century tradition. Meanwhile, the predominance of Aristotelian ethics, which conflicted in several ways with Christian as well as with Platonic and Stoic traditions of moral thought, made it difficult for thirteenth-century scholastics to achieve a full integration of philosophy and theology in their discussions of virtue. The solutions they proposed often make a heterogeneous impression, as some scholars have observed.2 Notably Aquinas’s treatment of the cardinal virtues in the Secunda secundae suffers from a double ambiguity: the virtues figure as acquired (Aristotelian) but also as infused (Christian) qualities, and as general (Stoic) but also as specific (Aristotelian) virtues. The polar- ization of moral debate in the late medieval period may not so much have destroyed a Thomastic synthesis of faith and reason as have ensued from the failure of thirteenth-century thinkers to synthesize the two in a durable and satisfactory way. At the same time, the majority of late medieval moral authors—philosophers and theologians as well as pastoral and educational writers—continued to compromise between religious and philosophical conceptions of virtue, being ready to recognize virtue outside the faith on the one hand, but unwilling to dissolve the ties between moral goodness and religion on the other. Second, the history of medieval moral thought is not to be seen as a steady process of secularization boosted by an expanding lay culture— a traditional, liberally inspired view which in current scholarship on medieval virtue ethics may take the moderated form of the search for philosophy’s gradual emancipation from theology. Again, the history of the cardinal virtues in the Middle Ages contains elements which seem to allow the construction of a similar view. After their appropriation by the Latin Church fathers, the cardinal virtues were firmly assimilated to Christianity in the early medieval period. In the twelfth century, the 2 See ibid. , ; see also Müller, Natürliche Ethik, – (judging Albert the Great’s philosophy, not his theology)..

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