Virtues

Virtues is one of the nine choirs, or orders, of angels described in The Celestial Hierarchy, a treatise written around the late fifth or early sixth century by the anonymous Christian author known as Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite. That work arranges the angels in three triads: the highest of Seraphim, Cherubim and Thrones; the middle of Dominions, Virtues and Powers; and the lowest of Principalities, Archangels and Angels. The scheme drew together the various ranks named in scripture, the seraphim of Isaiah, the cherubim of Genesis and Ezekiel, and the thrones, dominions, principalities and powers listed in the Pauline epistles, into a single ordered hierarchy that became standard in medieval Christian theology and was carried further by Thomas Aquinas and by Dante. This entry describes Virtues as a figure of that documented theological and literary tradition.

Virtues renders a different Greek term from the one behind Dominions or Powers: Paul's dynameis, "powers" in a more literal sense, appears in Ephesians 1:21 among the ranks Christ is exalted above, and the Vulgate's Latin choice, virtutes, gave English its somewhat misleading "Virtues," a translation more suggestive of moral excellence than of the raw might the Greek intends. Aquinas assigns this choir responsibility for miracles and for the extraordinary graces granted to the world, distinguishing its office sharply from the disciplinary work he gives to Powers immediately below it.

In this collection Virtues is also correlated with a sephirah of the Tree of Life, here Tiphareth ("Beauty"). Mapping the angelic choirs onto the ten sephiroth of Kabbalah is not part of the original Dionysian scheme; it is a later development of Christian Kabbalah, given its now-familiar form by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, which paired each sephirah with a divine name, an archangel and an angelic choir. The correspondence is presented here as a documented feature of that esoteric system, distinct from the Christian theology of Pseudo-Dionysius and from the Jewish sources of the Tree of Life, and not as the doctrine of any single tradition.

Virtues is the one point at which this collection's shifted table and the classic Agrippa-attributed sequential table agree: both place it at Tiphareth, Beauty, though for different structural reasons, the shift introduced by seating Chaioth ha-Qadesh at Kether happening to cancel out exactly by the fifth choir. The Golden Dawn's own wholly Hebrew table gives Tiphareth instead to a host it calls Malachim, "Kings," dropping the name Virtues along with the rest of the Dionysian Latin vocabulary its ten-part Hebrew scheme otherwise avoids entirely.