Humility, Courage, Magnanimity: a Thomistic Account

Abstract

In these brief remarks, I sketch Aquinas’s account of humility, courage, and magnanimity. The nature of humility for Aquinas emerges nicely from his account of pride, and it also illuminates Aquinas’s view of magnanimity. For Aquinas, pride is the worst of the vices, and it comes in four kinds. The opposite of all these kinds of pride in a person is his disposition to accept that the excellences he has are all gifts from a good God and are all meant to be given back by being shared with others. Aquinas believes that all the virtues come together as a set. Consequently, a person who has humility also has courage. Aquinas takes the deepest kind of courage as a gift of the Holy Spirit. On his view, taken as a gift, courage manifests itself in a disposition to act on the settled conviction that one will be united to God in heaven when one dies. It is not easy to see how magnanimity could be a virtue if humility is. The solution is to see that for Aquinas the honor for the Christian virtue of magnanimity is not honor from human beings but honor from God. A person can have the virtue of humility and still strive for the greatest honors, as Aquinas sees it. The conclusion of Aquinas’s account of humility, courage, and magnanimity is this: it is morally obligatory to go for glory, because glory is a matter of being honored by God as faithful.