Kindness

Kindness is set against envy, and it appears in the lists under several names: humanitas, benevolentia, sometimes gratitude, sometimes simply charity again. The variation is a symptom of the scheme's status; the seven contrary virtues are a teaching device that circulated in several versions rather than a fixed canon, and different medieval and early modern sources give different lists, so a reader who finds another set is not looking at an error.

The substance of the pairing is coherent whichever word is used: where envy grieves at another's good, the answering disposition rejoices in it, and the tradition treats this as an act of the will rather than a feeling that can be summoned. Aquinas handles the material under charity and its effects, particularly benevolentia, willing the good of another, and misericordia, compassion, rather than under a separate virtue of kindness.

Of the seven remedial virtues, the one set against envy is the least fixed. The atlas records it as kindness, but the manuals give humanitas, benevolentia, benignitas, caritas again, and sometimes simply gratitude. Any list that names the same virtue five ways is a list whose authors were reasoning from the vice rather than from an established tradition of the virtue, and that is exactly what happened.

Envy is the hardest of the capital vices to oppose cleanly, because it has no object of its own. Gluttony wants food and lust wants a body, so their contraries can be stated as a right measure of eating and of desire. Envy wants nothing except that someone else should have less. Its remedy therefore cannot be moderation of anything; it has to be a wholly different orientation, a positive gladness at another's good, and Latin had no single settled word for that.

The variation matters for how the scheme is read. The contrary virtues are a medieval pedagogical construction, assembled for confession and preaching, and not a doctrinal list on the footing of the cardinal four or the theological three. The atlas keeps them as their own class for that reason and does not merge them into either older set.

Kindness has no standard attribute in art, and the atlas draws none. Where cycles include her at all she is usually identified by a label, or by the vice lying under her feet.