A few things I’ve learned from the "dumb ox" Thomas Aquinas about how to live—🧵
If you're anything like me, you internalized a sense (from both your religious instructors and the movies) that Catholic ethics amounted to a warm-over sentimentalism of niceness, tolerance, and prudery.
Jesus was a chill liberal, like John Lennon, except that he also wanted you to feel a little weird about your natural desires.
It wasn’t until I encountered Aquinas on the virtues that I shed the heresies taught by my BoomerCath religious instructors.
"Bracing": that is the word Pieper used to describe those teachings. The Christian life is more invigorating than we've been led to think.
"Bracing": that is the word Pieper used to describe those teachings. The Christian life is more invigorating than we've been led to think.
1) Meekness is not weakness. Meekness is the virtue which “restrains the onslaught of anger” so that it doesn’t overwhelm good judgment. You could take it a step further and say that if you aren't meek, you're weak—weak because you're easily manipulated, set off.
Patton is on to something here about the importance of meekness, which helps us to choose which battles we fight, rather than being goaded into them.
2) Anger is not evil. Only ungoverned anger is a problem. Anger is the natural and healthy response to wickedness and injustice, and it can fuel a muscular response.
If ungoverned anger is an excess, the deficiency is just as bad, maybe worse. Aquinas calls the failure to be angry when anger is warranted an “unreasonable patience.”
3) Magnanimity is the “jewel of the virtues”: the love of great things and the desire to make yourself worthy of them. Magnanimity and humility are not mutually exclusive, but rather they are tandem virtue.
Just as magnanimity directs us toward things that are great, humility directs us toward things attainable.
If you want to know what magnanimity is all about, just compare movie-Aragorn (doesn't have it) with book-Aragorn (has it in abundance).
If you want to know what magnanimity is all about, just compare movie-Aragorn (doesn't have it) with book-Aragorn (has it in abundance).
4) Chastity is not prudery; it's not a rejection with erotic longing. In fact, eros is good—not a “necessary evil” but a good. It is so good that it needs to be protected. The best things, when they are misdirected, do the most damage.
5) Temperance, more generally, is not about rejecting pleasure, but about achieving self-mastery so that pleasures do not get in the way of the work before us. There is nothing wrong with enjoying pleasures at the right times and in the right ways.
Pieper channeling Aquinas:
Pieper channeling Aquinas:
6) Prudence is not small-souled cunning or calculation. It is not about evasiveness, not the coward’s virtue. Prudence rather is about turning knowledge of reality into achievement of the good.
Christians, again, are called to live in a far more invigorating way than we've been led to believe.
Happy Feast Day—St Thomas Aquinas, ora pro nobis!
Happy Feast Day—St Thomas Aquinas, ora pro nobis!
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