N.B. The talk I gave on this topic at the Renaissance of Men Conference will soon be available on Vimeo as a pay-per-view video.
Resilience means, literally, an ‘act of rebounding or springing back.’ The ultimate example of this is Christ’s Resurrection — rebounding from death itself. And one of the obstacles to resilience is fear. What if we can’t rebound? What if we can’t spring back? Even Christ was afraid before his Passion.
This is why resilience is related to fortitude, one of the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude. Cardo is Latin for hinge, and the moral life of man hinges on these virtues. Derived from fortitudo (‘manliness’), from fortis (‘strength’), fortitude makes a person unshaken from the doing the right thing by danger or difficulty. Without it, none of the other virtues is possible. The judge who is afraid to make the right call won’t exercise justice.
Accordingly, since ancient times, the education of boys has always involved physical hardship to develop fortitude. As Scripture says, ‘the life of man is a warfare’ (Job, 7:1), and fortitude moderates our fear and confidence in the battles we must face. Without it, we fall into either cowardice (too much fear, too little confidence) or rashness (too little fear, too much confidence).
Fortitude thus requires greatness of soul. This makes us love the best things and despise all that is opposed to them. It also requires greatness of deed. This make us perform generously what was nobly willed. And it requires endurance. This requires patience (not being thrown into dejection by difficulties) and steadfastness (refusal to accept defeat, surrender principles or make peace with wrong.
Christ’s Passion is the supreme example of all these: greatness of soul, greatness of deed, patience, and steadfastness.
Various vices, then, are opposed to fortitude.
The pusillanimous (little souled) man doesn’t desire great things.
The mean man won’t perform noble works on a grand scale.
The cowardly man doesn’t dare when he should.
The impatient man, unable to endure, complains and suffers excess of sorrow.
But for thinking about resilience, two vices are salient. The timorous man fears too much. And the effeminate man, distracted by pleasure or deterred by pain, lacks the stamina to go on in a necessary good. He surrenders to weariness or opposition by abandoning the undertaking or taking up with evil.
The ultimate display of fortitude is martyrdom because it’s the voluntary acceptance for the sake of God of a violent death inflicted out of hatred of virtue. In addition to this red martyrdom, however, the Church also recognises white martyrdom — being persecuted for the faith without shedding blood. In the age of cancel culture, it behoves us to apply the spiritual lessons the red martyrs have to teach us about facing the consequences of living in the truth.
Tribulation and The Great Turk
Thomas More wrote A Dialogue of Comfort in Tribulation in 1534/35, while he was in the Tower of London awaiting execution. Set in Hungary in the years 1527–1528, the dialogue shows a society on the verge of collapse. The Turks defeated the Hungarian army in battle in 1526, and the final Turkish invasion by Suleiman the Magnificent in 1529 led to permanent Turkish occupation. In the dialogue, the 'Grand Turk' is sometimes the literal Suleiman the Magnificent; sometimes he is Henry VIII; sometimes he is the Devil himself. Similarly, the ‘Turkish invasion’ is the literal historical event, the chaos of the English Reformation and, universally, the forces of chaos and evil.
For us, it comes wrapped in a rainbow flag, and it’s important to understand that you don’t get to choose your dragon. A man must fight the battles that come to him.
The two speakers are a wise, virtuous old uncle named Anthony and his nephew named Vincent, a young man seeking counsel. How should a man face the Grand Turk? In answering that question, More explains what it cost him — physically, mentally and spiritually — to get to the point where he could face his execution with serenity.
Knowing that many of his friends and family would be tortured or killed, he wrote the work to help them be resilient but without giving them false comfort. So although the book is organised around the three Theological Virtues of Faith, Hope and Charity, it also deals with their opposites: doubt, fear, despair, suicide, pride, hate.
It reminds me of the Blessed Virgin’s words to King Alfred battling the Great Turk in the form of the Danish invasion in Chesterton’s The Ballad of the White Horse:
I tell you naught for your comfort,
Yea, naught for your desire,
Save that the sky grows darker yet
And the sea rises higher.
In many ways, this is our situation today: how should good men face a bad world?
Vincent describes the atrocities of the Turks and complains to Anthony that 'so great perils appear here to fall at hand, that methinketh the greatest comfort that a man can have is when he may see that he shall soon be gone.’ Defining tribulation as ‘nothing else but some kind of grief—either pain of the body or heaviness of the mind,’ Anthony then reminds Vincent that the pains of Hell are far worse.
And he stresses that faith is the necessary foundation without which comfort is impossible: God comforts man. Unable to bear tribulation without God, even the Stoic sages killed themselves. Suicide is the biggest killer of young men today, and Stoicism is regarded as masculine by many, so this is a timely point. As Augustine remarked, the Stoics in their ‘stupid pride’ thought they could endure suffering without God. And they were wrong.
Having established faith as the foundation, Anthony then answers all Vincent’s anxieties. The Dialogue is over 300 pages and I recommend that you read it all, but I would like to emphasise the following fifteen lessons in particular.
#1: Tribulation is Good
God sends tribulation as a means for man's amendment, so we mustn’t desire it be taken away in every case. Indeed,
‘Every tribulation which anytime falleth unto us... is either sent to be medicinal if men will so take it... or may become medicinal if men will so make it... or is better than medicinal but if we will forsake it.’
Tribulation, then, is the bitter medicine that heals us. And there are three reasons it comes:
Because our own sinful deeds bring it upon us.
Because God sends it as a punishment for past sins or to preserve us from falling into sin.
Because it can help us prove our patience or increase our merit.
There are thus extremely good reasons why an all-good, all-powerful God would permit suffering and evil. No pressure, no diamond.
#2: Tribulation is The Way to Heaven
Tribulation teaches us to pray. Anthony remarks that Christ’s greatest prayers were those ‘He made in His great agony and pain of His bitter Passion.’ Tribulation is a gift — ‘the thing by which our Savior entered his own kingdom…the thing without which no man can get to heaven.’
And this is why recreation and attempts to divert from tribulation, although necessary due to the weakness of human nature, should be kept as short as possible. The lack of tribulation harms us.
Men should not seek soft lives.