 The earliest thirteenth-century interpretations of Aristotle’s notion practical wisdom emphasized the intellectual nature of moral virtue. The pre-1250 commentators on the NE understood phronesis as a means whereby a human being could be united to the supreme good, happiness. These early interpreters of Aristotle made the moral life an essentially passive one, in that the felix is elevated to happiness by divine causality. With the appearance of the work of Robert Kilwardby, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas a deeper understanding of Aristotle’s moral thought infused the commentaries of the second half of the thirteenth century. These thinkers, however, were also troubled by the relation between felicitas and prudentia.