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Seven, cont’d…

The Battle of The Virtues and the Vices…

Prudentius’ Pyschomachia…

I’ve said that the Virtues and Vices tended to be described and displayed in oppositional pairs, and now I must return to this motive. It comes jointly from the tradition I have been describing, and from another that goes back to the poetry of the fourth century, in which the war of the Virtues and Vices was a favourite theme for the new Christian epic that was then being born.

The theme’s model and locus classicus was the Psychomachia (War of the Soul), a famous allegorical epic written by the fourth-century Latin poet Prudentius, in which the antagonists are the armies of God and Satan, and the battlefield is at once the psychic interior of man and the entire universe.

The Psychomachia recounts the battle in heroic Virgilian hexameters, and displays throughout the reverence that the Christian Middle Ages held for the Aeneid. Its influence on later Christian poetry and art demands that we pause for the briefest summary.

Prudentius shows us the armies of the Virtues and Vices in menacing array on the battlefield. One by one, champions emerge from their ranks, challenge one another, and engage in single combat.

First Faith, with appropriate self-confidence, rushes onto the field; disdaining to protect herself with her familiar Pauline breastplate and shield, she advances boldly against her old enemy Idolatry, and quickly prevails.

Next Chastity, a young girl in shining armour, confronts Lust, a courtesan who carries a smoking torch. Chastity overturns the torch, cuts down her enemy with her sword, and while standing over the corpse, extols the Old Testament Judith, in whom chastity first triumphed.

Patience then advances, and stands placidly awaiting the attack of Anger, whose blows she absorbs without flinching. Seeing that Patience is invulnerable, Anger seizes a javelin in her rage and thrusts it into her own breast. Thus Patience prevails without even drawing her sword.

Now Pride, mounted on a spirited charger, prances before the army of Virtues. Her hair piled up like a tower on her forehead, she taunts them, accusing them of craven cowardice. Suddenly horse and rider disappear into the pit that Deceit (Fraus) has secretly dug on the battlefield, and Humility then approaches, takes the shield that Hope holds out to her, and vanquishes Pride. Thereupon the beautiful maiden spreads her golden wings and soars heavenwards.

Self-induglence (Luxuria) steps forward, her hair ostentatiously coiffed and perfumed, her car a marvelous chariot whose axle is gold, wheels silver-gilt, and coachwork sparkles with precious stones. Like her patroness Venus in the Aeneid, she is an indifferent fighter, flinging violets and rose-petals at her enemies instead of arrows and missiles. The Virtues are at first confused by the curious manner of her attack, but Temperance, armed with the standard of the Cross, steps in front of the car. The horses rear, the chariot is overturned, and Luxuria is tossed into the mud. Abandoned by her retinue, including Cupid, she is dispatched by Temperance with a single blow of a stone.

Meanwhile, while Luxuria is being ejected from her car, Avarice is gathering up in her claw-like fingers the gold and jewels spilled overboard. She hides them in her bulging purses and bags beneath her cloak, until Beneficence slays her and distributes her pelf to the poor.

Following a brief rally by the army of the Vices, the battle is over, and the triumphant Virtues celebrate their victory by raising a temple like that of the New Jerusalem in the Apocalypse.

 

Prudentius’ allegorical epic inspired more imitations than I could name. The Carolingian poets Theodulph of Orleans and Walafrid Strabo recounted the battle of the Virtues and Vices, to which, in the twelfth century, Alan of Lille devoted the ninth and last book of his philosophical allegory, Anticlaudianus. Theologians, biblical exegetes, and encyclopaedists also rehearsed the theme.

Hugh of St. Victor (twelfth century) treats of it in his De anima, Isidore of Seville (seventh) in his Book of Sentences; Pope Gregory the Great (late-sixth) in his treatise De conflictu vitiorum et virtutum (part of which is reproduced by Isidore, and in the thirteenth century, by Vincent of Beauvais, in his Spectrum historiale).

Scenes from Prudentius were inevitably represented in manuscript illuminations and sculptural programs on the facades of the great Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals. At Laon, for instance, we see Luxuria, called Libido, holding the flaming torch with which she threatens Castitas; we see Faith contending with Idolatry, Superbia with Humilitas, Patientia with Ira, and so on.

On the north porch at Chartres, the triumphant Virtues are shown, no longer in conflict, but hieratically, with their enemies lying prone beneath their feet. Here, moreover, the choice of scene and subject is no longer precisely that of Prudentius, but expands into the whole Virtues-Vices tradition whose history we have been tracing. Thus, Charity is juxtaposed with Avarice, who not content with filling her purse, hides her excess riches in her bosom; Pride, who tumbles head-first into the ditch that has opened beneath his feet, is ranged against Humility; Despair, who falls on his sword, is opposed to Hope.

But almost every conceivable pair of opposites is here depicted in stone: Prudence and Folly, Justice and Injustice, Fortitude and Cowardice, Temperance and Intemperance, Faith and Infidelity (who appears in the guise of the Old Woman Synagoga). With the addition of many others, including Concord and Discord, Perseverance and Inconstancy, we see the same, or similar, pairs represented in plaques in bas-relief on the façade of Notre Dame in Paris and at Amiens.

While varying slightly from example to example, the iconography of these Virtues and Vices was more or less conventional, and would have been well-known to poets and artists throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; but, unfortunately, I don’t have time to say much more about it here.

I must move on to our last important Seven, the Seven Liberal Arts.

Seven, cont’d…

Seven Deadly Sins…As the Branches of the Tree of Knowledge…

As the Heads of the Dragon of the Apocalypse…

Spenser’s Pride Parade…

The representation of the Seven Deadly Sins as the Tree of Knowledge rooted in Pride is – since Pride caused the Fall – probably the commonest commonplace of all. As Chaucer’s Parson explains,

Of the roote of thise sevene synnes, thanne, is Pride the general roote of alle harmes. For of this roote spryngen certein braunches, as Ire, Envye, Accidie or Slewthe, Avarice or Coveitise (to commune understondynge), Glotonye, and Lecherye. And everich of thise chief synnes hath his braunches and his twigges, as shal be declared in hire chapitres folwynge.

Sometimes Pride is depicted as the crowning bough, rather than the root of the Tree, as we see in a frontispiece woodcut decorating a late-fifteenth-century edition of Boccaccio’s De Claribus Mulieribus (On Illustrious Women), which shows the Seven Sins perched within the branches of the Tree of Knowledge. Pride, at the top, holds a mirror; Envy gnaws upon a heart; Avarice counts her coins in a box; Wrath brandishes a sword; Lechery kisses a woman; Gluttony is drinking; and Sloth is sound asleep.

Instead of Superbia, sometimes the Evil Tree has Avaritia as its root, in keeping with the verse (1 Tim. 6:10) Radix omnium malorum est cupiditas. (This was the favourite preaching text of Chaucer’s Pardoner, and the means by which he convinced his congregants to empty their pockets to buy his pardons, and so satisfy his own avarice.)

In some cases, too, the Deadly Sins are depicted as the Tree’s seven roots, and these roots are at the same time the seven heads of the Dragon of the Apocalypse.

This was another ubiquitous commonplace: we find it in Gregory the Great, Richard and Hugh of St. Victor, Honorius of Autun, Albertus Magnus, Bonaventure, and so on. We find it, once again, in the Somme le roi. Frere Lorens’ third tract on the Seven Deadly Sins begins with a description of John’s “beast that arose out of the sea”; accompanying the manuscript illuminations of this seven-headed beast, each head labeled a Deadly Sin, is the text, “Ceste beste senefie le deable.” The Beast is Satan, who is also the Leviathan, whose heads of sin the Christian knight on his way to salvation must cut off. As the rebel angel Lucifer, Satan is the archetypal embodiment of Pride, from whose body the heads of sin emerge, just as the boughs of sin ramify from the trunk and root of Pride at the base of the Evil Tree.

 

No less popular than their depiction as the heads of the Satanic Dragon or the branches of the Tree of Death, was the Pageant of the Seven Deadly Sins, a favourite theme of the writers of the medieval morality plays. Our example comes, however, from Spenser’s Faerie Queene I, iv, since it will serve at the same time to illustrate some of those other conventional themes and topoi that populate practically every stanza of his, and many other Elizabethan poems.

Spenser’s protagonist, Red Cross Knight (a type of Adam who falls, and then gradually conforms himself to the image of the Second Adam – King Arthur in Spenser’s allegory), has been seduced by Duessa (Duplicity, Fraus, False Religion Posing as True, Eve, the Whore of Babylon), who appears to him in the guise of Una (the One, Truth, the Second Eve, the Church, the Bride of Christ), whom a deluded Red Cross fecklessly abandons. As canto iv opens, the False Una, weary of the “toilsome way”, has led Red Cross to one of her accustomed pleasure haunts, the House of Pride.

Leading to its wide gate is a broad highway, made bare and smooth by the feet of the legions who have trampled it down: this is, of course, the broad highway of Matt. 7:13-14 that leadeth to destruction (another theme of universal dispersion). The House of Pride itself is a stately palace, magnificently faced in gold foil, and topped by lofty towers, the tallest of which displays a clock. The towers thus identify it with the Tower of Babel, and the clock is the fit symbol of Augustine’s City of Man, subject to the ravages of time. Like the goods and pleasures of this world, moreover, its apparent beauty is a tinsel of glitter, a thin and corruptible facade that seeks to imitate the true and lasting beauty of the Heavenly City. Beneath this false veneer, Spenser describes the Palace as “cunningly” constructed of brick without mortar, evoking the verse from Ezekiel 13:10, “So will I [Yahweh] break down the wall that ye daubed with untempered mortar, and bring it down to the ground, so that the foundation thereof shall be discovered, and it shall fall, and ye shall be consumed in the midst…” And indeed, the House of Pride is precariously erected upon a “weak foundation”, a sandy hill, in fact, that shifts with every breeze, evoking another well-known text from Matthew, “A foolish man…built his house upon the sand; and the winds blew, and beat upon that house; and it fell.” (Matt. 7:26)

Hidden in the depths of this sumptuous mansion, as we discover later, is a hideous dungeon, in which the corpses of those who once frolicked in the state rooms above now lay rotting. The House of Pride is thus beautiful above and repulsive below, like Duessa herself, as we also discover later, when at the conclusion of Book I she is stripped by Arthur, revealing her “nether regions” as those of a misshapen hag. (The symbolism is, obviously enough, of the retributive underworld to which the life of sin and falsehood inevitably leads.)

The building’s “hinder parts, that few could spy” were similarly “ruinous and old, but painted cunningly”. In this, the Palace reflects the iconography of the Goddess Fortuna, who is typically described as alluringly beautiful in front, but hiding a serpent’s tail and sting under her mantle in the rear, symbolic of the worldly goods that promise fair and deliver ill.

As Red Cross and Duessa are inauspiciously ushered into the Palace by the porter Malvenu (Ill Welcome), they are overwhelmed by the “endless riches and sumptuous shew” on display. Perched on a dais high above her fawning courtiers, they see the Queen, Lucifera, striving to outshine, with her “blazing beauty”, the “brightness of her glorious throne” . But Lucifera’s blazing beauty is thereupon compared by Spenser with the ill-fated brilliance of the son of the sun-god Apollo, Phaethon, who demanded the keys to his father’s solar chariot. Phaethon was another stock exemplum of the sin of overweening ambition or Pride, whose fable (as told especially in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) was commonly allegorized as a mythic type of the biblical Lucifer’s aspiration and fall.

Lucifera is herself identified as the daughter of Lucifer, or rather of another mythological type of Lucifer, the Roman god Pluto, Lord of the Underworld. Of course, she is too proud for such dubious ancestry, so she pretends that her father is Jupiter. On her throne she sits gazing toward the heaven whither, like her true Satanic parent, she aspires, when she is not, that is, gazing contentedly at the reflection of her peerless beauty in a mirror.

She rules the kingdom she has unlawfully usurped by tyrannical force and fraud, in which she is abetted by her foppish and sycophantic courtiers, including her six evil counselors.

After Duessa has been received as a familiar by the court, the Pageant ensues:

Sudden upriseth from her stately place
The royal dame and for her coach doth call…

So forth she comes and to her coach does climb,
Adorned all with gold and garlands gay,
That seemed as fresh as Flora in her prime
And strove to match in royal rich array
Great Juno’s golden chair, the which they say
The gods stand gazing on when she does ride
To Jove’s high house through heaven’s brass-paved way,
Drawn of fair peacocks, that excel in pride
And, full of Argus’ eyes, their tails dispreaden wide.

But this was drawn of six unequal beasts,
On which her six sage counselors did ride,
Taught to obey their bestial behests,
With like conditions to their kinds applied.
Of which the first, that all the rest did guide,
Was sluggish Idleness, the nurse of sin.
Upon a slothful ass he chose to ride,
Arrayed in habit black and amis thin,
Like to an holy monk, the service to begin.

And in his hand his portess still he bare,
That much was worn but therein little read;
For of devotion he had little care,
Still drowned in sleep and most of his days dead.
Scarce could he once uphold his heavy head
To looken whether it were night or day…

From worldly cares himself he did esloin
And greatly shunned manly exercise;
From every work he challenged essoin,
For contemplation sake. Yet otherwise
His life he led in lawless riotize,
By which he grew to grievous malady;
For in his lustless limbs, through evil guise
A shaking fever reigned continually.
Such was Idleness, first of this company.

And by his side rode loathsome Gluttony,
Deformed creature, on a filthy swine;
His belly was up-blown with luxury,
And eke with fatness swollen were his eyne,
And like a crane his neck was long and fine,
With which he swallowed up excessive feast,
For want whereof poor people oft did pine.
And all the way, most like a brutish beast,
He spewed up his gorge, that all did him detest.

In green vine leaves he was right fitly clad,
For other clothes he could not wear for heat;
And on his head an ivy garland had,
From under which fast trickled down the sweat.
Still as he rode, he somewhat still did eat,
And in his hand did bear a boozing can,
Of which he supped so oft that on his seat
His drunken corse he scarce upholden can,
In shape and life more like a monster than a man.

Unfit he was for any worldly thing,
And eke unable once to stir or go,
Not meet to be of counsel to a king,
Whose mind in meat and drink was drowned so
That from his friend he seldom knew his foe,
Full of diseases was his carcass blue,
And a dry dropsy through his flesh did flow,
Which by misdiet daily greater grew.
Such one was Gluttony, the second of that crew.

And next to him rode lustful Lechery
Upon a bearded goat whose rugged hair
And whally eyes (the sign of jealousy)
Was like the person self whom he did bear;
Who rough and black and flilthy did appear,
Unseemly man to please fair lady’s eye,
Yet he of ladies oft was loved dear,
When fairer faces were bid standen by.
O who does know the bent of woman’s fancy?

In a green gown he clothed was full fair,
Which underneath did hide his filthiness;
And in his hand a burning heart he bare,
Full of vain follies and newfangledness.
For he was false and fraught with fickleness,
And learned how to love with secret looks,
And well could dance, and sing with ruefulness,
And fortunes tell, and read in loving books,
And thousand other ways to bait his fleshly hooks.

Inconstant man, that loved all he saw
And lusted after all that he did love;
Nor would his looser life be tied to law,
But joyed weak women’s hearts to tempt and prove
If from their loyal loves he might them move.
Which lewdness filled him with reproachful pain
Of that foul evil, which all men reprove,
That rots the marrow and consumes the brain.
Such one was Lechery, the third of all his train.

And greedy Avarice by him did ride
Upon a camel loaden all with gold;
Two iron coffers hung on either side,
With precious metal full as they might hold;
And in his lap an heap of coin he told;
For of his wicked pelf his god he made,
And unto hell himself for money sold.
Accursed usury was all his trade,
And right and wrong alike in equal balance weighed.

His life was nigh unto death’s door y-placed,
And threadbare coat and cobbled shoes he ware,
No scarce good morsel all his life did taste;
But both from back and belly still did spare
To fill his bags and richness to compare.
Yet child ne kinsman living had he none
To leave them to; but thorough daily care
To get and nightly fear to lose his own,
He led a wretched life, unto himself, unknown.

Most wretched wight, whom nothing might suffice,
Whose greedy lust did lack in greatest store,
Whose need had end, no end covetise,
Whose wealth was want, whose plenty made him poor,
Who had enough, yet wished ever more–
A vile disease. And eke in foot and hand
A grievous gout tormented him full sore,
That well he could not touch, nor go, nor stand.
Such one was Avarice, the fourth of this fair band.

And next to him malicious Envy rode
Upon a ravenous wolf, and still did chaw
Between his cankered teeth a venomous toad,
That all the poison rank about his chaw.
But inwardly he chawed his own maw
At neighbors’ wealth, that made him ever sad;
For death it was when any good he saw,
And wept that cause of weeping none he had;
But when he heard of harm, he waxed wondrous glad.

All in a kirtle of discolored say
He clothed was, y-painted full of eyes;
And in his bosom secretly there lay
An hateful snake, the which his tail upties
In many folds and mortal sting implies.
Still as he rode, he gnashed his teeth to see
Those heaps of gold with gripple Covetise,
And grudged at the great felicity
Of proud Lucifera and his own company.

He hated all good words and virtuous deeds,
And him no less that any like did use;
And who with gracious bread the hungry feeds,
His alms for want of faith he doth accuse;
So every good to bad he doth abuse.
And eke the verse of famous poets’ wit
He does backbite, and spiteful poison spews
From leprous mouth on all that ever writ.
Such one vile Envy was, that fifth in row did sit.

And him beside rides fierce revenging Wrath
Upon a lion loath for to be led;
And in his hand a burning brand he hath,
The which he brandisheth about his head.
His eyes did hurl forth sparkles fiery red,
And stared stern on all that him beheld,
As ashes pale of hue and seeming dead;
And on his dagger still his hand he held,
Trembling through hasty rage when choler in him swelled.

His ruffian raiment all was stained with blood,
Which he had spilt, and all to rage y-rent,
Through unadvised rashness woxen wood;
For of his hands he had no government,
Ne cared for blood in his avengement.
But when the furious fit was overpassed,
His cruel facts he often would repent;
Yet willful man, he never would forecast
How many mischiefs should ensue his heedless haste.

Full many mischiefs follow cruel Wrath;
Abhorred bloodshed and tumultuous strife,
Unmanly murder and unthrifty scath,
Bitter despite, with rancor’s rusty knife,
And fretting grief, the enemy of life.
All these, and many evils mo, haunt ire,
The swelling spleen and frenzy raging rife,
The shaking palsy and Saint Francis’ fire.
Such one was Wrath, the last of this ungodly tire.

If you are fortunate enough to live in a World-Class City, you will have witnessed such Pageants before. Last week in Toronto, the Black Bloc showed us Idleness, Envy, Avarice, and, especially, Wrath. This Sunday, the gay revelers will demonstrate Lechery, Gluttony, and, above all, Pride. Enjoy the parade.

Seven, cont’d…

The Seven Gift-Virtues…The Somme le roi…Trees and Gardens of Virtues and Vices…

Reproduced and recopied in art, poetry, and especially in the school texts and popular handbooks I’ve just mentioned, the definitions, subdivisions, order, and imagery of the Virtues became lodged in the medieval and Renaissance mind as part of its common intellectual apparatus, almost like multiplication tables. They would have been memorized and recited by scholars, students and the unlettered alike, and sermonized upon by parish priests.

After the papal edict of 1215 requiring annual confessions, there came a number of important orders throughout the thirteenth century on the obligation of parish priests to instruct their parishioners, four times yearly, in the rudiments of the faith. Answering to that need, a whole array of didactic treatises and manuals was published containing expositions of the Creed, the Ten Commandments, the Paternoster, the Virtues and Seven Deadly Sins, the Seven Works of Mercy, Seven Sacraments, Beatitudes, and so on.

This is one of the reasons for the wide dispersal and popularity of a text such as the Somme le roi. Herein Brother Lorens expounds upon the Ten Commandments; the Creed; the Seven Sins; the “Art of Dying and Living”, with a “garden of the virtues”; the Paternoster; and the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit, with the virtues they nourish. In this last section, Brother Lorens discourses on the sub-virtue Magnificence, which, in a passage I discussed earlier, he lists as the sixth and last degree of Fortitude.

What is interesting is that the Fortitude that unfolds supremely into Magnificence is not the Fortitude of the Four Cardinal Virtues, but the Fortitude that is the fourth Gift of the Holy Spirit. Lorens has identified these two, though they come from completely disparate religious and cultural contexts, on the perfectly rational basis of their common name, and so imported the “parts” into which Macrobius had subdivided the classical Virtue into the train of the Christian Gift. We see then, again, the confusing interpenetration of the two quite different series.

None of the Sevens was more popularly portrayed in literature and the graphic arts than the Seven Gift-Virtues. Let me quote again from Isaiah 11:2: “And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, and the spirit of wisdom, and understanding, the spirit of counsel and fortitude, the spirit of knowledge and piety, and of the fear of the Lord”. Though the doctrine of the Gifts was never officially declared a dogma of the Church, nevertheless, in early Christian and medieval treatises, there is virtually no fluctuation in the order in which the spiritus descending upon Christ and man are listed: from Timor Domini, upward through Pietas, Scientia, Fortitudo, Consilium, Intellectus, to Sapientia, the highest. From the time of Augustine, they had become not only a fixed series, which could be read in either direction, but a hierarchical one, a gradus or ladder of the virtues to be progressively achieved and perfected during one’s Christian lifetime in one’s spiritual ascent to beatitude and the visio Dei.

Augustine was probably also the earliest authority to link the gradus of the Gift-Virtues to two other Sevens: the Petitions of the Paternoster and the Beatitudes. And inevitably, these correspondences became commonplaces.

In the fourteenth-century Glossa Ordinaria, the Gifts are those for which we pray in the Seven Petitions: in “Hallowed be thy name” for God to strengthen in us the Gift of Fear of the Lord; in “Thy kingdom come” for Piety; in “Thy will be done”, for Knowledge, and so on. In another section of the Glossa, the Gifts are read in reverse order, from highest to lowest. Thus Petition two “Thy kingdom come”, is interpreted as asking that the spirit of Understanding shine like the sun in our hearts. In the Paternoster tract in the Somme le roi, where the same connection between Petition two and the Gift of Understanding is made, we read that the good heart, seeing the darkness in which it is enshrouded, takes pick-axe and shovel to mine away sin, and to build there a fit foundation for the erection of the Kingdom of God.

As Tuve remarks, “This possibility of reading the parallels in either direction depends upon a fairly typical medieval notion of what a relationship can consist of; enforced by the prior decision to find sets of relations between series not initially related at all, the relations are uncovered, with some belief in the marvelous correspondences that are part of the very structure of truth.”

The most common order, however, is to begin with Timor Domini and end with Sapientia, in part because of the verse from Ecclesiastes (19:18), “Initium sapientiae, timor Domini” (“The beginning of Wisdom is the fear of the Lord”); and partly because Sapientia, Wisdom, is the supreme virtue of the contemplative life, Wisdom being not only required for the contemplation of, but also the essential quality of, God’s own nature.

So common is the idea of Timor Domini as the basic Gift that we realize that we are in its conventional orbit when, for instance, in the famous fourteenth-century allegory, Le pelerinage de la vie de l’homme (The Pilgrimage of the Life of Man), the Porter, who is the first to converse with Guillaume de Deguileville on the strange ship of Religion, is named Fear of the Lord. Conversely, at the end of the sixteenth century, in Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, his protagonist Red Crosse Knight has his ascent crowned by Sapientia.

The Christian theme of the Gift-Virtues is thus particularly amenable to the idea of an educational or spiritual regime that involves a gradual perfection in virtues of increasing difficulty, while the Cardinal Virtues, though they emanate and proliferate, largely escape this sort of ordering. For this reason, the connection between the Seven Petitions of the Paternoster and the Seven Gifts remained one of the most widely diffused of medieval and Renaissance commonplaces.

We find it, as I have already mentioned, in Hugh of St. Victor’s commentary on the Five Sevens; in John of Salisbury’s on the Seven Sevens; in Alan of Lille; in the following (thirteenth) century, in St. Thomas, and in St. Bonaventure’s Breviloquium; in the Elizabethan period, in Nash, Lodge, and Dekker.

Even more important is the connection between the Gift-Virtues and the Beatitudes, Augustine’s famous sermon on the Beatitudes being here, again, the well-spring of this longstanding and allegorically prolific tradition. The Gift-Virtues, as he explains, dispose us to those seven blessed conditions or spiritual endowments of which the Beatitudes speak. From Fear of the Lord, or Humilitas, we accede to “poorness in spirit”, on up to the highest gift, Sapientia, in which we know God in the beatific union of the highest mystical state, Pax, as in “Blessed are the peacemakers”.

The correspondences between the Seven Gifts-Petitions-Beatitudes furnished, as Tuve observes, “a set of seven virtues totally different in aspect from the set we know best [that is, the four cardinals and three theological], and more important than them not only for the arts but for theology.” These other Seven, which are sometimes called the “spiritual virtues”, are those which Christ and the Virgin possessed in perfection, and those which man too possessed in Eden, before the fall.

The Spiritual Seven give rise to another complex of imagery that we see illustrated in an illumination from a manuscript of the Somme le roi, in which we see seven maidens, who represent the Seven Petitions of the Paternoster, watering the Virtues that were caused to flower by the Seven Gifts. This is the garden of the virtues which is Christ in the heart of man; it is the true paradise, as the text explains.

It then continues:

The seven trees signify the seven virtues of which this book speaks. The tree in the middle signifies Jesu Crist under whom grow the virtues. The seven fountains of this garden are the seven gifts of the holy spirit which make the garden grow. The seven maidens who draw from these seven fountains are the seven petitions of the paternoster which beseech the seven gifts of the holy spirit.

One reason for the importance of this series is that it was this set of seven, not the four cardinals and three theologicals, that were set in opposition to the Seven Deadly Sins. Here, again, is Tuve: “Because they are the roots nourished in the heart by the Seven Gifts or spiritus we pray for in the seven petitions, they displace the evil roots which are the seven capital sins, the vices.”

As Frere Lorens rehearses the commonplace in his Somme le roi: “The holy spirit, by the seven gifts, doth away and destroieth the seven deadly sins.” Thus the Gift of Drede (Timor Domini), listed first in Lorens’ series, destroys the root of pride, and sets in its place the virtue of Humility of which Christ spoke in his first Beatitude (Blessed are the poor in spirit). The second Gift, Pite (Piety) “maketh the herte swete and debonere and pitous”, which casts out the root of Envy, and replaces it with the benignity of which Christ spoke in the second Beatitude (Blessed are the meek, who shall inherit the earth). The fourth Gift, Fortitude, roots out Sloth, and replaces it with the hunger and thirst after righteousness of the fourth Beatitude. The fifth Gift, Counsel, implants Misericorde (largesse, mercy), which roots out Avarice, and is related to the fifth Beatitude (Blessed are the merciful). (At this point in Friar Lorens’ schema, it is inevitable that we should be introduced to the Seven Corporal Works who conventionally follow in Mercy’s train.) The sixth Gift is Intellectus (Understanding), which Lorens says supplants the deadly sin of Luxuria (Lust) with the virtue of Chastity.

Here, in a number of later popular handbooks, including Bonaventure’s Breviloquium, we find Sobriety replacing Gluttony, and Chastity-Luxury under the next Gift, Sapientia. What surprises more than this fluctuation, as Tuve remarks, is the fact that the two highest Gifts, perfections possessed by the contemplatives, should nourish these seemingly lowest virtues, and that they should be opposed to these merely carnal vices. But all of Lorens’ terminology is meant to be read allegorically, indeed, mystice, and the connections are with the pure of heart (those who possess true Chastity) of the Sixth Beatitude; for they shall see God, as the text from Matthew continues, by the light of the incorporeal understanding.

Finally, the seventh Gift in the Somme le roi opposes to Gula’s (Gluttony’s) taste for the things of the world and the flesh the Sobrietas conceived as the complete harmony and concord between the Reason and the Appetite which is meant by the ineffable Pax of the seventh Beatitude: Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called the children of God. Lorens quotes the verse, and makes much of the “saverous knowledge”, of the intoxication of love and mystical union, which he says is the last step on Jacob’s ladder of spiritual “perfectedness”.

The precise order of the correspondences that Lorens draws amongst the Gifts, Virtues, Beatitudes, and Sins is not universal, of course, but it is their lack of rigidity in which they differ so happily with the four-plus-three. As Tuve writes, the “beautifully articulated scheme of which they are a part offers no true inconsistencies, and conceptually it is clear, tough, and resilient enough to allow of theological modifications over many centuries. Literally numberless authors and artists treated” of them.

 

The idea of the oppositional pairing of the Virtues and Vices, which we encounter in the Somme, had a long history, and throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance, we find them so paired in manuscript illuminations, stained glass, and sculptural programs on the facades of Romanesque and Gothic cathedrals, sometimes in dramatic conflict, sometimes in static opposition; but this is another discussion we’ll have to postpone.

What requires our attention first is the Somme’s garden and arboreal imagery. The theme of the inner spiritual garden of virtues is another commonplace which is also originally Patristic, arising, naturally enough, out of the innumerable allegorical commentaries by the Fathers on Genesis in general and the Fall in particular.

In his spiritual garden, Brother Lorens imagines the Virtues as seven separate trees watered by the seven fountains of the Gifts, as we have seen. The biblical Eden, of course, also had trees and fountains, two each, in fact: a Tree of Knowledge and a Tree of Life; a fountain filled with the insipid water of the world, and another with the Water of Life, or Grace. It was almost impossible for the early Christians not to allegorize these oppositions, and one of the ways in which they did so was in terms of the opposition between the Seven Gifts-Virtues and the Seven Deadly Sins.

The Tree of Knowledge, whose fatal fruit Eve consumed, bringing sin and death into the world, was the tree of the Seven Sins; the Tree of Life, that is, the Cross (which is also the Tree of Mary, the Second Eve, upon whom the life-giving fruit of Christ hangs) is the Tree whose blessed virtues uprooted the Evil Tree and its ramified vices forevermore.

In his De fructibus carnis et spiritus (On the Fruits of the Flesh and the Spirit), Hugh of St. Victor enumerates the names of each branch of the two trees. The first, he writes, is the tree of the Old Adam and has Pride as its root and trunk; from the trunk spring six boughs, Gula (Gluttony), Avaritia (Avarice or Covetousness), Luxuria (Lust), Accidia (Idleness or Sloth), Ira (Anger or Wrath), and Invidia (Envy). The second tree is the tree of the New Adam, with the Humility of the first Beatitude as its trunk, and the three theological and four cardinal virtues as its seven branches. The first of these trees was planted by Adam; the second by Christ, the New Adam, its roots fed by the fountain of life.

Though Lorens’ Garden of Virtues in the heart of man in the fourth tractate of his Somme le roi conceives of seven different trees, he is careful to do so within the context of this long tradition of the biblical Tree of Life-Virtue and the Tree of Knowledge-Sin. Lorens introduces the figure of the good man or woman as a “fair garden full of green and of fair trees and of good fruit”, planted in the soul by the archetypal Gardener. The seven trees growing in the heart or soul are called “grafts”, in that they are the virtues transplanted, as it were, from another Tree, the Tree of Life in Eden, which is Christ, and nurtured by the Spirit’s Gifts of Grace. “God’s Son, that is the Very Sun [Son-Sun being another ancient topos], by his virtue and brightness, makes them grow”; this “paradise right delitable in the heart” is the image of the other pre-lapsarian paradise in Eden:

Right as God set earthly paradise full of good trees and fruit, and in the middle set the tree of life…Right so doth ghostly to the heart the godly gardener, that is God the father, for he sets the trees of virtue and in the middle the tree of life, that is Jesu Crist, for he sayeth in the gospel, “Whoso eateth my flesh and drinketh my blood hath life without end.”

The root of this Tree is God’s “outrageous charity”, and by virtue of the “fruit of the tree of Jesse” (that is, once more, Christ), all the other trees in the garden bear fruit. The branches of the Tree of Life are Christ’s own virtues, taught to the disciples in the Beatitudes; moreover, Christ also taught the “seven perfect petitions” by which the seven grafted trees in each man’s garden receive the water of grace from the seven fountains that are the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

And here we are back to Lorens’ seven maidens/Gifts and seven streams/Petitions, discussed above.

Seven, cont’d…

The Seven Sevens…

Virtues…Gifts of the Holy Spirit…Petitions of the Paternoster…Works of Mercy…Beatitudes…Sacraments…Deadly Sins…

The Virtues…

Beyond its governance of time, the early Fathers recognized Seven as a number of primordial ontological significance. As they observe (an observation that was endlessly repeated by later medieval theologians and biblical exegetes), Seven is the sum of three, the number of the spirit, and four, the number of matter, whereby Seven is expressive of the essential duality of Christ as the God-man, and of man himself, defined as a soul conjoined with a body.

The same division into three and four governs a number of important medieval Sevens. There are, of course, Seven Virtues, consisting of the four classical or Cardinal Virtues to which the medieval church appended Paul’s three theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. She did so, that is, in obedience to the age-old significance of the three and the four: the four cardinal virtues were now understood as applicable to the so-called active life, the life of man in the world; the three theological virtues belonged to the higher life of contemplation of heaven and the invisibilia dei.

Side by side with these Seven Virtues, the Church celebrated Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit and the spiritual virtues which they inspired, as we have seen; associated with these Gift-Virtues were the the Seven Petitions of the Paternoster; ranged in parallel with the Gift-Virtues and Petitions, were the Seven Corporal Works of Mercy (feeding the hungry; giving drink to the thirsty; clothing the naked; harbouring the stranger; visiting the sick; ministering to prisoners; burying the dead), and their Spiritual Counterparts; ranged in parallel with any and all of the above, were the spiritual perfections of the Seven Beatitudes of the Sermon on the Mount (Matt. 5) (the poor in spirit; the meek; they who hunger after righteousness; the merciful; the pure in heart; the peacemakers; the persecuted); associated with any or all of the above were the Seven Sacraments (Baptism, Confirmation, the Eucharist, Absolution, Extreme Unction, Ordination, Marriage); and opposed to any or all of the former sevens, the Seven Deadly Sins.

As the art historian Emile Male remarks in his indispensable work on medieval iconography, The Gothic Image, “The grace necessary for the practice of the seven virtues is obtained by addressing to God the seven petitions of the Paternoster. The seven sacraments sustain man in the exercise of these virtues, and guard him from falling into the seven deadly sins.”

Similarly, the Church commemorated the Seven Sorrows of the Virgin Mary (at the prophecy of Simeon; at the flight into Egypt; at the loss of Jesus in the Temple; at meeting him on Calvary; standing at the foot of the Cross; at the taking down of his body; and at his burial); invested with special importance the Seven Words from the Cross (Forgive them Father, etc.; Today shalt thou be with me in Paradise; Woman, behold thy son…; Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani; I thirst; It is finished; Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit).

One could go on, of course, to note that the Gifts of the Holy Spirit were regularly connected with the seven horns and seven eyes of the Lamb of Christ in Rev. 5:6, or the seven eyes in the stone of Zechariah 3:9; similarly, the doves of the Holy Spirit descending upon Christ at his Baptism were seven, to be read, naturally enough, as the Seven Gifts in stained glass and manuscript illuminations; conflated with these image complexes were the seven lights of the candelabrum – the menorah – in the Temple, which was allegorically interpreted as a symbol of Christ very early on, an interpretation that inevitably found its way into the fourteenth-century Glossa Ordinaria.

And then, inevitably too, some or all of these sevens were traced back to the Seven Days of Creation, as in the thirteenth-century Breviloquium of St. Bonaventure. Manuscript illuminations of the seven penitential Psalms also imply their relation to the Seven Vices and Seven Gift-Virtues, and to the seven-times intoned “Dominus vobiscum” of the Mass.

In scriptural commentaries, biblical characters were also subsumed within this comprehensive image complex: in Gregory the Great’s Moralia on Job (I, 27), for instance, Job’s three daughters are read as allegorical symbols of the theological virtues, and his seven sons, of the Gifts of the Holy Spirit.

As another indispensable medieval scholar, Rosamunde Tuve, has observed in her Allegorical Imagery, “medieval discussions had made [these] several groups of seven very usual as figures. A whole complex of ideas…is intimated often when we least expect it”; and on the survival of this imagery into the Renaissance, she continues, “I think we can rest assured that the sevens were brought so frequently to men’s attention that they could not have become by the sixteenth century mere old medieval learned lore.”

As you can imagine, the significance of these explicitly Christian Sevens was the subject of innumerable doctrinal expositions by the early Christian and medieval theologians and poets, who typically ranked them, as we’ll see presently, in a hierarchy from lowest to highest, and arranged various combinations of the Sevens in parallel. The correspondences amongst them naturally appealed to the mystical imagination, and filled it with awe at the secret providential order imprinted by the Divine Mind everywhere upon his vast Creation.

The Sevens served, moreover, as an important mnemonic aid in the schools, and thus the lists were endlessly copied and re-copied from authority to authority throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. But this is a subject to which we must return later.

 

Since the Virtues and Vices in general was so ubiquitous a topos in medieval and Renaissance art and literature, a few words about the history of this tradition seem appropriate here, even if they distract us, momentarily, as they must, from the symbolic significance of the number Seven per se. For the three theological virtues, the source, as I have already mentioned, is Paul (I Cor. 13:13). The theme of the Four Cardinal Virtues traces back ultimately to Plato’s Republic, and Aristotle’s systematic discussion of them in both the Nicomachean Ethics and his treatise On Rhetoric.

As usual, however, for their understanding of the theme and classification of the Cardinals, the medieval and Renaissance poets, artists, and theologians depended upon the no less reverend authority of much later classical texts. The most important of these were: Cicero’s De Officis (On Duties), De Inventione (his treatise on rhetoric), and his Somnium Scipionis (Dream of Scipio), or rather, I should say Cicero’s Dream as it was transmitted to the Middle Ages and Renaissance in Marcrobius’ enormously popular Commentary.

From Cicero onward, each of the Four Virtues was subject to elaborate subdivision: each, that is, had its various “parts”, or “aspects”, or “emanations”, through which it was manifested. Thus Cicero’s Fortitude, for instance, breaks down into the four parts of Magnificentia, Fidentia (faith or loyalty), Patientia, and Perseverentia, each of which become in turn the subject of further philosophical elaboration.

In Macrobius’ treatment of the Cardinal Virtues in book I of his Commentary – a text that for a variety of reasons became the common property of all succeeding centuries –, Fortitude is manifested in its seven parts: Magnanimitas, Fiducia (loyalty or trustworthiness), Securitas, Magnificentia, Constantia, Tolerantia, and Firmitas. And so it is with each of the Cardinal Four.

The complications that these proliferations introduced into the medieval and Renaissance conception and imagery of the Virtues are illustrated by a thirteenth-century text of enormous popularity and influence, extant in dozens of medieval manuscripts, published in the late-fifteenth century by Caxton, reprinted by Wynkyn de Worde and Pynson, and again and again down through the generations.

 

The Somme le roi was written in Middle French in 1279. In it, its author, Frere Lorens, does what innumerable theologians, poets, encyclopaedists, and artists do before and after him; for here we meet a combination of the two great authorities, Cicero and Macrobius, in Lorens’ “six degrees” of Fortitude: Magnanimite, Affiaunce, Surete, Patience, Constaunce, and Magnificence.

Macrobius’ series is the main source of Lorens’ list, but he departs from it in omitting Macrobius’ Tolerantia, and reverts to Cicero in including Patientia. I don’t wish to confuse you (any more than usual, that is), but the point is an important one insofar as it illustrates the way in which the classical Virtues were, as it were, baptized into Christianity. Patience is, of course, a virtue of fundamental importance in Scripture; it is Christ’s special form of Fortitude, and so, freighted with these Christian meanings, it becomes customary to include it under Fortitude in the medieval tradition of the Four; for the same reason, in a series of quite other virtues, as we’ll see, Patience was shown most frequently in opposition to Ira (Wrath), especially in art.

The same long and complicated Christianizing development has led to Brother Lorens’ allocation of Magnificentia as the last and crowning phase of the “six degrees” of Fortitude. As Lorens explains (in the Caxton translation):

The sixth degree of Fortitude is Magnificence. This virtue expresseth and declareth also the philosopher, saying Magnificence is an high work and happy achieving. Our Lord Jhesu Cryst the sovereign philosopher called this virtue Perseverance by which the good knight of God endureth the evils unto the end in that highway of perfection which he hath emprised. Of this virtue sayeth Saint Paul that all the virtues run but this virtue winneth the sword. All they fight but this hath the victory and the crown. All work. But this virtue of Perseverance beareth away the reward and the merit. (I Cor. 9)

Lorens’ “philosopher” is, of course, Aristotle, who, however, defines Magnificence in the fourth book of the Ethics as “the expenditure of wealth involving largesse and scale” upon worthy, tasteful, and honorable projects. Aristotle has the visionary Keynesian politician or generous public benefactor in mind, who builds temples to the gods, or equips a trireme in the time of war, or supposedly stimulates a depressed economy by going into debt and spending it on over-budget make-work projects. But this smacks too much of grandiosity and pride to be a high Christian virtue, and so in the Somme le roi and other medieval handbooks on the virtues, it is reinterpreted as Perseverance, as the “sovereign philosopher”, Christ, that is, exemplified it.

Brother Lorens’ identification of Magnificence, the highest degree of Fortitude, with Christ’s and St. Paul’s Perseverance, perfecting the virtue by carrying it through to the end, also explains why Cicero’s Perseverantia and Macrobius’ Firmitas are omitted, since they are both included within the new Christian conception. It is this same Pauline and medieval definition, moreover, that the Elizabethan poet Spenser had in mind in his allegorical epic The Faerie Queene, in which the protagonist knight of each of his twelve books was conceived to “set forth” a different virtue, with King Arthur, who enters each book at a crucial juncture in the knight’s adventure, symbolizing the Magnificence through which all of these several virtues is perfected through grace.

Brother Lorens’ precise six degrees of Fortitude, chosen partly from Cicero, mainly from Macrobius, and amended by St. Paul, was not, of course, a selection he made without the precedence of authority. That selection had been made by the authors of a number of treatises on the virtues of the mid-twelfth-century, and Lorens, sensibly enough for a pre-modern writer, reproduced it.

We find the same series in Alan of Lille’s De virtutibus et de vitiis et de donis Spiritus Sancti (On the Virtues, Vices and Gifts of the Holy Spirit), in William of Conches’ Moralium dogma philosophorum (Teachings of the Moral Philosophers), and will find it again more than a century later, in the late-thirteenth, in John of Wales’ Breviloquium de virtutibus. All of these texts, once again, were circulated in innumerable manuscripts, reprinted in Renaissance editions, and translated into various vernacular languages, through which, along with the pictorial arts, the learned traditions of the medieval authorities were channeled into the stream of accepted common knowledge

Written shortly before 1150, Guillaume of Conches’ Moralium dogma philosophorum, was constantly re-copied, translated into French, Italian, and German, quoted by fourteenth- and fifteenth-century writers, and printed in at least five sixteenth-century editions. Alan of Lille’s treatise On the Virtues, Vices, and Gifts of the Holy Spirit (written ca. 1160), was used in the schools, and translated into French by the important fifteenth-century author Christine de Pisan.

In both of these texts, once again, the Cardinal Virtues exfoliate into their parts or emanations, and in both the framework is Macrobian. In both, for instance, we encounter the same seven “parts” of Prudence that we find in Macrobius: Ratio, Intellectus, Circumspectio, Providentia, Docilitas, and Cautio. Macrobius writes that Temperance has in her train Modestia, Abstinentia, Castitas, Honestas, Moderatio, Sobrietas, and Pudicitia, and we find them in that order in Guillaume and Alan, though Alan can’t resist adding Continentia, which Cicero makes the first “part” of Temperance.

With Justice, matters become somewhat more complicated. Cicero’s parts are Religio, Pietas, Gratia, Vindicatio, Observantia, and Veritas; Macrobius begins with Innocentia, Amicitia, Concordia, then inserts Cicero’s Religio and Pietas. With abstractions like Religio, Pietas, Gratia, and Veritas, the medieval virtues literature tends to cleave to Cicero’s list, with Alan further subdividing Religio into the three theological virtues, Faith, Hope, and Charity.

In Guillaume’s Moralia, under Cicero’s Gratia, we also find the sub-aspect Misericordia (Mercy), which illustrates another of those typically medieval logical contradictions. One of Christian Europe’s most recurrent themes, in both literature and art, is the opposition between the Justice of the Old Law and the Mercy of the New, and indeed there is a minor genre of literature in which Justice and her champion Truth accuse mankind while Mercy and her champion Peace defend him, in a debate for and against the salvation of his soul. But Mercy can also be conceived, as Guillaume conceives her, as an aspect or face of Christian Justice, and so we have a no less popular topos, that of the justly merciful ruler.

 

The principal point to be born in mind is the medieval tendency to divide and subdivide each virtue, a legacy from Cicero and Macrobius, which means, of course, that there can be any number of them, not merely the Seven assembled from the Cardinal Four and the Theological Three. The same must be said of the Vices, which, for instance, were often generated in opposition to the Virtues and their various emanations: Discordia, for example in debate or conflict with Concord, or Foolhardiness in contrast to Cautio.

I call this a medieval tendency, though more accurately, it should be called a Hellenic one, which the Middle Ages inherited from late-antiquity. We see it in the ancient Greek understanding of the various gods as aspects or faces or emanations of the One Supreme God, and we see it here, as well, in the idea that the parts or elements that follow from, or come of, or show, or declare, the great quiddity of the Virtue that is being divided, are aspects or faces in which that Virtue is made manifest.

It need hardly be added, moreover, how easily the offspring, or attendants, or embodiments of the Virtues can be personified as attendants in the retinue of their great Queen; and, indeed, that is how we typically see them in medieval and Renaissance allegorical literature and art.

Seven…

…Planets…Days of the Week…Of Creation…Canonical Hours…Gifts of the Spirit…Ages of the World…Of Man’s Life…

Seven is another number of totality and completion. It is, pre-eminently, the number of time, there being Seven Days of the Week, each of which is named after the seven Olympian deities who are the inhabiting Intelligences of the planetary spheres (the Moon, Mercury, Venus, the Sun, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn), by whose rotation, as Plato observes in the Timaeus, time is marked. (For mnemonic purposes, French is preferable to English in identifying the planets with the Days of the Week, save that in that language the last day of the week, the Day of the Sun, has been piously changed to the Day of the Lord – which merely confirms, however, that the Christian God was but the latest of the solar deities to rise and shine his redemptive light upon the ancient world.)

By creating the world within the seven-day week, in fact, God gave man the key to the whole mystery of existence. The Church celebrates the majesty of the seven-day Creation when she sings the Creator’s praises seven times a day, during the canonical hours: Mattins (or Lauds), Prime, Sext, Terce, None, Vespers, and Compline.

In his twelfth-century encyclopedia, De Natura Rerum, Alexander Neckham demonstrates the correspondence in turn between the Seven Days of Creation, the seven planets, and the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit as enumerated in Is. 11:2: “And there shall come forth a rod out of the stem of Jesse, and a Branch shall grow out of his roots: And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him, the spirit of wisdom (sapientia), and understanding (intellectus), the spirit of counsel (consilium) and fortitude (fortitude), the spirit of knowledge (scientia), and piety (pietas). And the spirit will fill him with the fear of the lord (timor Domini).” In Neckham’s scheme, Saturn, the oldest of the planets, is Wisdom, the greatest of the Seven Gifts; Jupiter, the universal ruler, is Intelligence or Understanding; Mars, god of war, is Counsel; the Sun, Fortitude; Venus, Knowledge; Mercury, Piety; and the Moon, Fear of the Lord.

Extending the analogy in the Convivio, Dante draws a parallel between the seven planets and the Seven Liberal Arts – on which more in due course –, Grammar corresponding to the Moon, Mercury, to Dialectic, Venus, to Rhetoric, the Sun, to Arithmetic, Mars, to Music, Jupiter, to Geometry, and Saturn, to Astronomy. Both Neckham’s and Dante’s parallels are justified at the expense of a laborious deal of scholarly allusion and specious interpretation, and are based ultimately and arbitrarily on the traditional order in which the planets, Gifts of the Spirit, and Arts are listed; but they illustrate, once again, that characteristically medieval and pre-modern taste for hierarchy and symmetry.

If the universe was created in seven days, there must also be Seven Ages of the World. I’ve already referred to the topos of the Six Ages of World History, from Adam to Noah, Noah to Abraham, Abraham to David, David to the Captivity, the Captivity to the Birth of Christ, and from the Nativity to the Second Coming. The Seventh Age is the Age of the Last Times: of the Apocalypse, General Resurrection, Final Judgment, and dissolution of the created order. It is the historical Sabbath, when the God of History rests, and the whole historical process comes to an end, in preparation, that is, for the inauguration of the Kingdom of God, which is the Eighth Age, the age of the Octave of rebirth unto eternity.

But I don’t want to get one number ahead of myself.

Seven Days of Creation, Seven Days of the Week, Seven Ages of History. Inevitably, then, Seven Ages of the Life of Man. The topos of the Ages of Man is, like that of the Ages of the World, what one might call numerically flexible. There can be any number of divisions, from three to eight, and in the case of the stages of life, nine, ten, and even twelve. But owing to the mystical significance of Seven, it is by far the most common.

Everyone is familiar with the topos – actually two topoi, since there is a theatrical conceit in there as well – from Jaques’ famous set-speech in Shakespeare’s As You Like It II, vii:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.
Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws, and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the learn and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank, and his beg manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans tastes, sans everything.

Critics have detected behind Shakespeare’s schema the influence of a long tradition that equates the Seven Ages with the planets, once again. The “infant mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms” reminds us that the Moon, the lowest of the planets, is the patroness of motherhood and childbirth. Shakespeare’s schoolboy evokes the next sphere, that of Mercury, who is the god of learning. (Mercury/Hermes is, of course, the patron of knowledge, of language, and literary interpretation – whence, “hermeneutics” –, and as we will see in a moment, the appropriate husband of Philologia, whose dowry is the Seven Liberal Arts.) Shakespeare’s “lover sighing like furnace” and singing his amorous ditties to his mistress’ eyebrow is surely under the influence of Venus, the goddess of the third planetary sphere. His representative of the fourth age, the soldier, is Mars’ man. His reverend Justice continues the astronomical analogy, since Jupiter is the god of justice. Shakespeare’s Sixth Age, symbolized by the shrunken old man, figures Saturn, the oldest and coldest of the planets (indeed, his “hose a world too wide” and “pouch on side” are conventional attributes of Saturn and the Melancholy his influence induces). Shakespeare’s last Age, Second Childhood, brings us back to the Moon again. The scheme, as we see, omits the Sun, for reasons that remain unclear, since in most representations of the Seven Ages he appears in his proper position.

One of the most elaborate inflections of the theme is that of the famous Renaissance artist and art historian, Giorgio Vasari, in his description of the iconographical program of a fresco, now destroyed by rain and weather, which he painted – rather incautiously, it seems – on the exterior of a house in Florence in 1554. Vasari aligns each Age not only with a planet, but sometimes as well with one of the Seven Virtues, the Seven Deadly Sins, and the Seven Liberal Arts.

I summarize Vasari’s description as follows:

1. Infancy is represented by a woman in childbed, with nurses about. In the night sky the Moon, in the person of the goddess Diana, watches over mother and child. Her infants are suckled by a personification of the virtue Charity, who was indeed typically represented in this posture for obvious reasons. A personification of Grammar, the first of the Seven Liberal Arts, teaches the children to read.

2. Boyhood shows children at play and others going to school. Mercury carries his caduceus. Another of the theological virtues, Faith, baptizes a boy. Dialectic, the second of the Seven Liberal Arts, wears a veil and holds the serpent of wisdom.

3. Adolescence shows two youths, one climbing a mountain, the other lingering behind, lured by Fraud towards a precipice. The Sun appears under the aspect of the god Apollo. Hope, the third of the theological virtues, holds her anchor. The Liberal Art Rhetoric, the third of the Trivium, appears in her resplendent gown. The vice Sloth lurks menacingly.

4. Youth shows young men occupied in games, banquets, and love-making. Venus is present with her son Cupid, while the cardinal virtue Temperance attempts to hold her bridle. Music, which in its vulgar modes can lubricate the passions, plays her instruments.

5. Manhood shows Mars in armour. The cardinal virtue is Prudence, who holds her mirror. The vice is Wrath. The Art is Arithmetic.

6. Old Age is a priest kneeling before an altar. Jupiter appears with his eagle. Fortitude is in the act of taming a lion. The art is Astronomy.

7. Decrepitude labours under an image of Saturn devouring his children, and holding an emblem of the ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail, a familiar symbol of time and eternity. The art is Geometry.

Vasari’s parallelism is, once again, achieved at the expense of torturous effort; but once again, it perfectly illustrates the pre-modern habit of mind.

A simpler and more coherent alignment of the Seven Ages and the Seven Planets is recorded in Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World:

Our Infancie is compared to the Moon, in which we seem only to live and grow, as plants; the second age to Mercury, wherein we are taught and instructed; our third age to Venus, the days of love, desire, vanity; the fourth to the Sun, the strong, flourishing, and beautiful age of man’s life; the fifth to Mars, in which we seek honor and victory, and in which our thoughts travail to ambitious ends; the sixth age is ascribed to Jupiter, in which we begin to take accompt of our times, judge of ourselves, and grow to the perfection of our understanding; the last and seventh to Saturn, wherein our days are sad and downcast, and in which we find by dear and lamentable experience, and by the loss which can never be repaired, that of all our vain passions and affections past, the sorrow only abideth.

This is the usual schema, which we find also in Francis Quarles’ seventeenth-century book of Emblems, and in a thousand other places.