Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics defines virtue as a stable disposition aimed at a mean between excess and deficiency, courage between cowardice and recklessness, generosity between stinginess and prodigality, a mean not fixed by formula but judged by a person of practical wisdom. Virtue is not known through argument alone but built through habituation, doing courageous acts until courage becomes second nature, which is why Aristotle treats moral education, not theory, as the discipline's starting point.
Thomas Aquinas received this framework into the Summa Theologiae almost whole, keeping Aristotle's four cardinal virtues, prudence, justice, fortitude and temperance, as the structure of a naturally good life, and adding the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, which Aristotle could not have named, as gifts orienting the cardinal virtues toward a supernatural end. The result treats natural ethical excellence and the Christian's final destiny as one continuous architecture rather than two systems bolted together, and it remains the working structure of Catholic moral theology's treatment of the virtues today.
Secular philosophy largely set virtue aside for rule based ethics, Kantian duty and utilitarian consequence, until Elizabeth Anscombe's 1958 essay Modern Moral Philosophy argued both approaches depend on a concept of moral obligation lacking the theological framework needed to support it, proposing a return to Aristotelian character and flourishing instead. Alasdair MacIntyre's After Virtue extended that argument into a wider history of ethics. The atlas records Virtue Ethics here for its religious reception through Aquinas, not for that later secular revival, which belongs to the history of philosophy rather than to any tradition covered here.