Prayers for the Seven Virtues

Francesco Pesellino and Workshop, "Seven Virtues" (1450)

What is a virtue? According to Saint Thomas Aquinas, a virtue “is a disposition either toward the good or away from the good.”

From the Latin word for habit, habitus, derived from the verb habere, “to have,” a virtue cultivates in us a desire to do the good, which for Christians is ultimately the desire to emulate the Truly Good One, Jesus.

The philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre explains things this way:

“The virtues are to be understood as those dispositions which will sustain us in the relevant kind of quest for the good, by enabling us to overcome the harms, dangers, temptations and distractions which we encounter, and which will furnish us with increasing self-knowledge and increasing knowledge of the good.”

The virtues, in other words, are dispositions of character. In practice, virtue as a habit disposes our character to both want the good and to do the good.

Vice as a habit, conversely, disposes our character to do the exact opposite: it causes us instinctually to avoid or to despise or to fear the good. Vice in practice is corrosive, self-deluding, and finally dehumanizing inasmuch as it leads to the shriveling up of our humanity.

Think megalomaniac politicians, compulsively greedy businessmen, obsessively jealous neighbors, insatiable appetites for pornography, uncontrollable gluttonous cravings, a deep-seated sloth that undermines every possibility of meaningful work, or a pride that finds oneself always superior and without fault—think of any of these instances and you begin to understand how a vice results in the distortion of our humanity and the deterioration of human community.

Everybody loses in a vicious world.

Historically, there are seven virtues that define all other beneficent habits: the three theological virtues of faith, hope and love, and the four classical virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude.

In the Collect Prayers that I’ve posted here, I’ve tried to give voice to the heart of each virtue and to the way of life that it invites us to adopt by grace.

May these prayers encourage you to want—not the “good” in an abstract or generic sense—but the deep goodness of Jesus himself, with its expansive reach, its intrinsically rich and desirable quality, and its generous-Spirited disposition towards one’s neighbors.