What It Really Means to Be a Man | Thomas Aquinas Reveals

Overview

The video argues that the Christian (especially Thomistic) tradition offers a demanding, counterintuitive definition of “manliness” that differs sharply from modern, culture-driven ideas of strength.

Why Thomas Aquinas Matters for “Manliness”

• The discussion is framed around Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae (2–2, q.138), where he treats “effeminacy” (mollities), asking whether effeminacy is opposed to perseverance.
• The speaker claims modern discourse on masculinity is often built on definitions offered by people who haven’t read Aquinas—or the wider spiritual tradition.

Scriptural and Spiritual Tradition: Courage vs. “Counterfeit” Hardness

The video contrasts:

• Scriptural exhortations to courage and endurance
  • e.g., “Quit you like men, be strong.”
• Warnings against traits long coded as masculine, including:
  • pride
  • dominance
  • retaliation
  • love of conquest
  • inability to bear humiliation

The saints and Christ are presented as models who combine “strength” with gentleness, such as:

• Francis of Assisi weeping and kissing lepers
• Aquinas’s famed gentleness
• Christ enduring blows without striking back and bearing the cross in silence

Aquinas’s Key Distinction: “Appearance” vs. “Substance” of Strength

The central analytical claim is that true strength—real manliness (virtus)—is not outward force or aggressive passion.

Aquinas distinguishes:

• Appearance of strength
  • outward display of forceful passions
• Substance of strength
  • the soul ordered under virtue, holding firm in the good despite difficulties

Using Aquinas’s account of fortitude, true bravery includes enduring both:

• unpleasant things as spiritually apprehended (e.g., loss of life in connection with virtue)
• bodily pains (wounds and blows)

What “Effeminacy” (Mollities) Actually Is

The speaker emphasizes Aquinas’s practical definition:

• Mollities is not about yielding to extreme force (like a wall giving way to a battering ram).
• Effeminacy is yielding to small pressures—the inability to bear minor humiliations, misjudgment, frustration, or unmet desire.

Examples given of this “softness” include:

• constant need to retaliate → inability to endure being slighted
• inability to abstain sexually → inability to endure unmet desire
• need for performative invulnerability → inability to endure one’s interior life

The video also links disordered lust to weakness of heart:

• lust “enfeebles” the heart and makes the person “effeminate” in the sense that they have trained themselves to yield.

“The Man Who Looks Hardest May Be the Softest”

The video highlights a spiritual “inversion”:

• what looks like hardness may be panic and an inability to tolerate being touched by what one fears
• tenderness can be evidence of genuine strength—especially as shown by Christ:
  • enduring the cross in silence while still weeping
  • allowing closeness
  • accepting others’ tears

Applying the Theory: Resolving Contradictions in Christian Manliness

The video offers three application points:

1. Saints who seem gentle are not “soft” in Aquinas’s sense; their gentleness flows from deep strength that needs no display.
2. Modern “hard men” who dominate, retaliate, and suppress appetites through performance may actually be mollis—unable to endure small offenses and unmet desires.
3. Growth in fortitude comes through learning endurance:
   • bearing humiliation
   • waiting under desire
   • silence when defending the ego
   • suffering small daily pains for the higher good

The Path to Real Masculinity: Virtue and Habit, Not Domination

The speaker argues that genuine masculinity is built by ordering the soul through the virtues:

• Cardinal virtues
  • prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance
• Theological virtues
  • faith, hope, charity

Humility is emphasized as foundational:

• it expels pride and keeps the soul open to grace

The video insists that the means must match the end:

• manliness is the substance of a rightly ordered soul, not the appearance of force

Practices mentioned include:

• patient endurance of small humiliations
• fidelity in unseen labor
• silence when speech would defend the ego
• prayer maintained when consolation is gone

Why Change Takes Time: Virtue Is Formed Through Many Small Acts

Drawing on Aquinas’s teaching about habits:

• virtue cannot be created by a single act
• the appetitive power isn’t fully overcome at once

Thus, “small daily endurance” (unanswered insults, held tongue, unmet appetite, unseen kindness) forms stable character over months and years.

Final Conclusion: Manliness as Vocation

The video concludes that the “true man” is not defined by a moment of decision, but by a vocation of becoming:

• humble enough to be small
• magnanimous enough to be great
• enduring more than attacking
• shaped by repeated, unwitnessed acts until the appetites themselves incline toward the good

Its culmination is presented as participation in Christ’s pattern of suffering and endurance.

Presenters or Contributors

• Thomas Aquinas (“the Angelic Doctor”)
• Aristotle
• The Apostle (as quoted in Scripture)
• Tertullian/Tully (cited as “Tully”)
• Augustine
• Francis of Assisi
• Christ (as presented by the speaker)
• Eleazar (from 2 Maccabees, quoted)
• John (referenced as “John to lean upon his chest”)
• James (James 4:6)
• Hosea (Hosea 4:11)
• Vegetius
• Curé d’Ars (mentioned as an example)