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The ancient Romans used the Latin word virtus (derived from vir, their word for man) to refer to all of the "excellent qualities of men, including physical strength, valorous conduct, and moral rectitude". The French words vertu and virtu came from this Latin root. The word virtue "was borrowed into English in the 13th century". [1]
The use of the word grew and shifted to fit evolving ideas of what manliness meant. [2] Once, virtus meant primarily that a man was a brave warrior, but it came also to mean that he was a good man, someone who did the right thing. During the time of the decline of the Roman elite, the Roman upper class no longer thought of themselves as unmanly ...
Machiavelli extended the study of classical virtue to include skill, valor, and leadership, and to encompass the individual prince or war-leader as well. [8] Virtù, for Machiavelli, was not equivalent to moral virtue, but was instead linked to the raison d'État. Indeed, what was good for the prince may be contradictory to that which is ...
[5] The third virtue is also commonly referred to as "charity", as this is how the influential King James Bible translated the Greek word agape. The traditional understanding of the difference between cardinal and theological virtues is that the latter are not fully accessible to humans in their natural state without assistance from God. [6]
II The first he calls moral virtues, and the second intellectual virtues (though both are "moral" in the modern sense of the word). Moral virtues. Aristotle suggested that each moral virtue was a mean (see golden mean) between two corresponding vices, one of excess and one of
The distinction lies both in their source and end. The moral virtue of temperance recognizes food as a good that sustains life, but guards against the sin of gluttony. The infused virtue of temperance disposes the individual to practice fasting and abstinence. The infused moral virtues are connected to the theological virtue of Charity. [16] [14]
In Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Book 2, chapter 6: "Virtue (arete), then, is a habit or trained faculty of choice, the characteristic of which lies in moderation or observance of the mean relatively to the persons concerned, as determined by reason, i.e., by the reason by which the prudent man would determine it." [14]
This word presents certain difficulties in Chuang Tzu. Sometimes he employs it to mean conventional virtue — that is, virtue in the Confucian or Mo-ist sense — in which case it has bad connotations; at other times he employs it in a good sense to mean the true virtue or vital power that belongs to the man of Tao.