What Aquinas Knew About Strength That Most People in Authority Miss
In 1271, Thomas Aquinas wrote a short article in his Summa Theologica asking whether effeminacy is opposed to perseverance.
In 1271, Thomas Aquinas wrote a short article in his Summa Theologica asking whether effeminacy is opposed to perseverance. The Latin word he used was mollities, meaning softness. The question sounds remote. The analysis that follows is one of the most precise accounts of false strength ever written.
Aquinas was not writing about authority or institutions. He was writing about the soul. But the soul is where all authority originates, and what he identified in thirteenth-century Rome is the same thing that undoes people in positions of power today: the inability to endure small pressures while performing the appearance of strength.
Most cultures have a serious problem distinguishing between the two. The question of what is true strength has been answered badly for a very long time.
What is true strength? The performance and the substance
Aquinas separates the appearance of strength from the substance of it.
The appearance of strength consists in the outward display of forceful passions. Dominance. Aggression. The refusal to show doubt. The person who controls every room, retaliates at every challenge, and projects invulnerability at all times. This is what strength has often been sold as, and what a significant portion of public life still rewards.
The substance of strength is different. It consists in the ordering of the soul under the virtues, by which a man holds firm in the good against the difficulties that would move him from it. The principal act of genuine fortitude, Aquinas teaches, is not to attack but to endure: sustinere, to bear up under.
The soft man, by his definition, is not the one who is gentle or thoughtful or slow to anger. The soft man is the one who folds. Who was on the road to the harder, better decision and abandoned it because the pressure got uncomfortable. Who could not bear the weight of difficulty between himself and the thing he should have done.
What the counterfeits look like
The man who must respond to every criticism, every dissenting voice, every unflattering account of him: he is not confident. He is unable to endure the small pain of being misjudged, and so he is mollities before his own reputation. The man who cannot sit with uncertainty, who fills every silence with a decision and mistakes movement for progress: he is unable to endure the discomfort of not knowing, and so he is mollities before ambiguity. The man who performs stoic invulnerability, who reads emotional detachment as strength and openness as weakness: he is unable to endure his own interior life, and so he is mollities before his own experience.
In each case, what looks like strength is the behaviour of a person who cannot be touched by what he fears. The aggression, the noise, the performance of certainty: all of it is avoidance wearing the costume of command.
Aquinas makes a further point that goes deeper. The man captured by his appetites cannot endure even small hardships because his heart has been softened by the constant satisfaction of every desire. He has trained his soul in yielding, and a soul trained in yielding to small pressures will yield to greater ones. The man who cannot tolerate small daily discomforts will not hold when the real difficulties arrive. Public failure. Being wrong in front of people who trusted him. Waiting when waiting is what the situation requires. These demand a kind of endurance that is not built in a crisis. It is built in the ordinary days before it.
The battering ram
Aquinas offers an image worth sitting with.
A wall is not soft because it yields to the battering ram. A thing is soft when it yields to a light touch. A man is not weak because he breaks under the gravest pressures. He is weak when he yields to the small ones.
The measure of what is true strength in a person is not how he performs in the moments everyone is watching. It is how he behaves in the small moments nobody records. Whether he can hear criticism without retaliating. Whether he can hold a decision that makes him look bad in the short term because it is right in the long term. Whether he can be patient when impatience would feel better. Whether he can be honest when dishonesty would be easier.
These are the small pressures. Most of what passes for strength trains people to manage appearances rather than to endure them.
The four virtues
The path Aquinas describes runs through four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance.
Prudence is the capacity to see reality as it is and act in proportion to it. Not wishful thinking, not catastrophising, but honest assessment followed by proportionate action. Most failures of judgement begin with a failure of prudence: the man who cannot see his situation clearly, who cannot hear what the evidence is actually telling him.
Justice is the habit of rendering to each what is owed. In practice, it is the discipline of fairness: to the people around you, to the truth, to those who have no power to demand it. The man who is unjust in small ways, who takes credit that belongs to others, who distributes blame unevenly, who says one thing and does another, corrodes whatever he is responsible for from inside.
Fortitude is the endurance of difficulty for the sake of the good. Not recklessness, not aggression, but the capacity to hold firm when holding firm is costly. Aquinas is specific: endurance is harder than aggression because the man who attacks is borne forward by the passion of daring, while the man who endures must hold firm with no movement of passion to help him.
Temperance is the discipline by which appetites serve a man rather than rule him. The appetite for recognition, for certainty, for control, for retaliation: all of these, untempered, produce the kind of behaviour that damages people and institutions. Temperance does not mean the suppression of desire. It means desire ordered toward something worth wanting.
Humility and magnanimity
Aquinas argues that humility and magnanimity are not opposites but partners.
He writes: a two-fold virtue is necessary with regard to the difficult good. One to temper and restrain the mind, lest it tend to high things immoderately, and this belongs to humility. And another to strengthen the mind against despair and urge it on to the pursuit of great things according to right reason. And this is magnanimity.
The man who holds both can be small without being threatened by it. He can be wrong without it becoming a crisis. He can be corrected without retaliating. And precisely because he can bear being small, he can be trusted with being great. The man who has not learned to be small cannot bear greatness because it will inflate him. The man who has learned to be small can be entrusted with it because he will not mistake the position for himself.
Most cultures produce one or the other: people who are falsely humble and quietly resentful, or people who are visibly ambitious and privately fragile. What is true strength, by Aquinas’s account, requires both humility and magnanimity at once, and it only develops slowly.
Character is not built in a single decision
Aquinas is clear that virtue cannot be caused by one act but only by many. The appetites are inclined to many things in many directions. Reason cannot pin them down all at once. The habit of the ordered soul is built over time, by the repetition of small right acts, most of which are unwitnessed and unremarkable.
Character is not forged in the visible moments of crisis. It is formed in the ordinary days before them. The conversation where you held your tongue when speaking would only have defended your ego. The decision you made correctly when the easier wrong option was available. The feedback you heard without dismissing it. The credit you gave to someone else without announcement. Each of these alone seems to matter very little. Together, over years, they form a person whose judgement holds when the storms arrive.
The man who has not done that work will perform well in calm conditions and reveal himself in difficult ones. Not through dramatic failure, but through the small yieldings: the retaliation, the defensiveness, the unwillingness to hear what he does not want to hear.
What Aquinas offers that most frameworks do not
Most thinking about human development focuses on skills and techniques. These are not useless. But they sit on top of character rather than inside it, and a person whose character is disordered will deploy every skill in the service of his own fragility.
What Aquinas describes is the formation of character itself, which is where the answer to what is true strength actually lives. The slow, largely unspectacular work of ordering the soul so that the appetites serve rather than rule, so that endurance is possible when endurance is required, so that a person can be genuinely humble and genuinely great at the same time.
It is not a programme. It is not a framework. It is ten thousand small decisions made correctly over years, most of them in private, none of them particularly impressive in the moment, all of them together forming the kind of person that others trust when things get hard.
Aquinas thought this was the only work worth doing. Most of what we call development is a way of avoiding it.
Primary source: Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, Question 138, “On the Vices Opposed to Perseverance” — full text at New Advent
On the cardinal virtues: Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, Questions 123 to 140, “Treatise on Fortitude and Temperance” — New Advent and Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
On humility and magnanimity: Aquinas, Summa Theologica II-II, Questions 129 and 161, via Sacred Texts Archive
