STARRS President Col. Ron Scott, PhD, USAF ret, highly recommends this video:
From the video description:
What does it mean to be a man according to Thomas Aquinas?
Masculinity is often reduced today to dominance, confidence, aggression, status, sexual conquest, emotional control, or the ability to appear unshaken. While these frameworks may describe certain outward traits, they often fail to address the deeper question: what does it actually mean to be a man?
Saint Thomas Aquinas understood manhood in a far more demanding way. Not merely as strength of body, force of personality, or social power, but as the ordering of the soul under virtue.
In this teaching, we explore masculinity through the Thomistic tradition, drawing directly from Aquinas’s understanding of fortitude, perseverance, humility, lust, habit, and the cardinal virtues. At the center of this meditation is the strange medieval vice Aquinas called mollities: softness. For Aquinas, softness is not gentleness, tenderness, contemplation, or quietness. It is the failure to endure difficulty for the sake of the good.
The soft man is the man who folds when the road becomes hard. He yields to appetite, anger, boredom, humiliation, lust, fear, or the pain of being small. He cannot endure the small pressures that form the soul.
This is why Aquinas’s vision of manhood is so different from much of what is offered today. The man who looks the hardest may be the softest. The man who endures may be stronger than the man who conquers. The man who can suffer without abandoning the good is closer to true strength than the man who must constantly perform it.
This is not the manosphere.
This is not self-help.
This is not another podcast take on masculine strength.
This is a classical Catholic vision of manhood rooted in virtue, fortitude, moral theology, and Christian anthropology. It is a vision shaped by Saint Thomas Aquinas, the Summa Theologiae, the cardinal virtues, the witness of the saints, and the example of Christ crucified.
In this teaching, you will learn:
- What Saint Thomas Aquinas taught about masculinity and virtue
- Why fortitude is more about endurance than aggression
- What Aquinas meant by mollities, or softness of soul
- Why lust weakens the heart and forms inconstancy
- How humility and magnanimity belong together
- Why virtue is formed through repeated acts
- Why the saints often seem strange to the world
- How Christ on the Cross reveals true masculine strength
This video is for those who are tired of shallow answers to the masculinity crisis and are seeking something older, deeper, and more demanding.
If you are seeking strength without vanity, courage without cruelty, humility without weakness, and manhood rooted in the ordered soul, this teaching is for you.
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