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Virtues and Vices. Mortal and Venial Sin. Happiness and Misery.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 September 2010
The curious result of mingling the teaching of Plato and Aristotle and Christ with the teaching of all their derivatives, of attempting to psychologize the teachings of all these alike on the basis of Hippocrates and Galen and their derivatives again is nowhere more clearly evident than in the treatment of virtue and happiness. The clear-cut thinking of Thomas Aquinas was gone, but the effect of his intricate analysis of the relation of the passions to sin was apparent in most of the Renaissance discussions of virtue. The whole treatment of virtue was chaotic, mere echoes of earlier and often discordant thinking. But there was always an insistent moral note in the discussion of passion and a determined habit of applying moral judgment to all matters.
The fundamental division of virtue in the sixteenth century seems to have been persistently Aristotelian, virtue being both intellectual and moral, or as the facts were stated in The French Academie:
[There is] a double discourse of reason in man: whereof the one is Theoricall and Speculative, which hath Trueth for his ende, and having found it goeth no farther. The other is Practicall, having Good for his end, which being found it stayeth not there, but passeth forward to the Will, which God hath joyned unto it, to the end it should love, desire and follow after the Good, and contrariwise hate eschew and turne away from evill.
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