Humility and the Scheme of Contrary Virtues

Humility, humilitas, is set against pride, and in the scheme of contrary virtues it is the first because pride is the first of the vices. The scheme itself, pairing each capital vice with an opposing virtue, is a medieval pedagogic device rather than a doctrine of the councils: its literary ancestor is the Psychomachia of Prudentius, a Latin poem of around 400 in which personified virtues and vices fight in single combat for the soul, and the pairings were fixed in the catechetical and preaching literature of the later Middle Ages and carried into the visual arts, where the seven and seven appear on cathedral porches, in manuscript illumination and in stained glass. Humility in Aquinas is not self-abasement but the truthful estimate of oneself, the restraint of the appetite for one's own excellence within the bounds of what is true, and it is the virtue that makes the others possible by removing the obstacle.