Virtue of Magnanimity

I have some­thing of a con­fes­sion to make: a lot of the time I feel inad­e­quate. I feel inad­e­quate in almost every­thing I do, espe­cially in the things oth­ers tell me I’m (really) good at.  When I do feel con­tent with myself, the moment is fleet­ing. I’m con­tent until I come across some­one else who does some­thing sim­i­lar to what I do–except they do it bet­ter. Or at least that’s what I think. It doesn’t mat­ter their age, their edu­ca­tion or their back­ground. It only mat­ters that I see myself as insignif­i­cant com­pared to them and what they are doing, even if the real­ity is the oppo­site. I’ve had feel­ings of inad­e­quacy to the point of  almost believ­ing that if oth­ers really knew how much I didn’t know (and I really don’t know a lot), they would shrug me off as puffed up, a char­la­tan or a fraud. I sus­pect that in a way this is what dri­ves peo­ple to be “unique,” and it’s what moti­vated Lewis’ advise that to be orig­i­nal, you need only be your­self. Lewis’ advise is harder than it first appears. For it seems to me that we feel less inad­e­quate if we imi­tate those we con­sider ‘great’ (and in con­sid­er­ing them great, we don’t con­sider them to be inad­e­quate). But to be orig­i­nal means to face our­selves, to stand in oppo­si­tion to our (feel­ings of) inadequacy.

In fact there are two doubts about myself that are con­stantly recur­ring. The first is the doubt that I will not amount to any­thing, least of all what I desire to do. The sec­ond is that all I’m ever really doing is “repeat­ing oth­ers,” so why bother in the first place (after all, there are other peo­ple repeat­ing the same things, and in bet­ter ways).  But I hap­pened upon some­thing when dis­cussing these feel­ings of inad­e­quacy with a friend: the medieval virtue of mag­na­nim­ity.

In research­ing mag­na­nim­ity, I came across the idea that mag­na­nim­ity is some­thing akin, almost the same as, what we call “self-esteem”. I think a rea­son­able def­i­n­i­tion of self-esteem would be “con­fi­dence in one­self” (I also think many have taken this to an extreme–unwar­ranted con­fi­dence in one­self), and while I think this has its rela­tions to mag­na­nim­ity, it is only a small part of mag­na­nim­ity. As I dis­cov­ered, mag­na­nim­ity is broad, cov­er­ing many virtues–not sim­ply con­fi­dence in one­self. To illus­trate what I mean I’ll have to enlist the aid of medieval philoso­pher, Thomas Aquinas.

In his most well known work, The Summa The­o­log­ica,  Aquinas addresses objec­tions to the virtue of mag­na­nim­ity, such as: “is it a virtue?” “What is its rela­tion to con­fi­dence?’ and “What is its rela­tion to assur­ance?” (It’s inter­est­ing that there is a dis­tinc­tion, here, between con­fi­dence and assur­ance–the things that never cross my mind, but any­way). But I’ll stick to out­lin­ing what Aquinas believes the virtue of mag­na­nim­ity is, then relat­ing that to my thoughts above (or at least attempt­ing to).

Mag­na­nim­ity and Fortitude

If we look closely at my ini­tial post we will dis­cover some­thing not explic­itly stated: fear. To give fear an audi­ence in one’s mind is to entirely remove mag­na­nim­ity from one’s pres­ence. That is to say that you are mag­nan­i­mous in spite of fear — this is what makes it a virtue — but you can­not be fear­ful in the pres­ence of mag­na­nim­ity. I believe we can relate this to for­ti­tude of the mind. For­ti­tude is described as “strength of mind that enables a per­son to encounter dan­ger or bear pain or adver­sity with courage” (it can also refer sim­ply to “strength”). In this respect, Aquinas states that, “it is clear that mag­na­nim­ity agrees with for­ti­tude in con­firm­ing the mind about some dif­fi­cult mat­ter” ¹. In other words, mag­na­nim­ity is not to be con­fused with for­ti­tude (both virtues), though it relates to and works with for­ti­tude “about some dif­fi­cult mat­ter”. Mag­na­nim­ity is first of all a strength­en­ing of the mind in view of dif­fi­culty. Aquinas adds that herein Mag­na­nim­ity itself is not enough, for in mat­ters of death a man may become fear­ful (sup­port­ing my state­ment above).

Mag­na­nim­ity and Confidence

Inter­est­ingly, for­ti­tude is not the same as confidence–one flows from the other. Accord­ing to Aquinas, con­fi­dence “denotes a cer­tain strength of hope aris­ing from some obser­va­tion which gives one a strong opin­ion that one will obtain a cer­tain good” ². Con­fi­dence begins with an obser­va­tion, for­ti­tude in the mind (it seems to me that for­ti­tude is the result of a deci­sion depen­dent upon that which is observed). For instance, one may begin with con­fi­dence and gain for­ti­tude. How­ever, upon los­ing con­fi­dence one like­wise loses for­ti­tude. For­ti­tude requires con­fi­dence, and a con­fi­dence which does not result in for­ti­tude is not really con­fi­dence. This is where one’s pos­ses­sion of mag­na­nim­ity is made or bro­ken. For if in an obser­va­tion one begins fear­ing, con­fi­dence and every­thing that fol­lows (mag­na­nim­ity) is lost. How­ever, if in an obser­va­tion one takes con­fi­dence, devel­op­ing for­ti­tude, then it’s pos­si­ble (though not nec­es­sary) that the virtue of mag­na­nim­ity will be pos­sessed. Mag­na­nim­ity is sec­ond of all con­fi­dence regard­less of perception.

Mag­na­nim­ity and Security

So far we’ve dis­cussed mag­na­nim­ity as pos­sess­ing for­ti­tude of the mind, and con­fi­dence in obser­va­tion. Virtues held in spite of the “real­ity of the mat­ter,” or thoughts oth­er­wise. That is that for­ti­tude of the mind is held regard­less of self-perception; con­fi­dence in obser­va­tion is held regard­less of cir­cum­stance. The last virtue in rela­tion to mag­na­nim­ity is secu­rity (oth­er­wise known as assur­ance). By secu­rity it is meant the removal of fear–the com­plete removal of fear. We mean a par­tic­u­lar kind of fear: despair. Con­sider again my ini­tial para­graph, what can be the only result of such intense inad­e­quacy? Despair. To feel inad­e­quate is to despair in one­self.  This, I sus­pect, is the hard­est aspect of mag­na­nim­ity; the aspect which pushes this virtue beyond the grasp of most peo­ple. Aquinas says that “secu­rity denotes per­fect free­dom of the mind from fear” ³. There can be no other way about it.

Con­clu­sion: Inad­e­quacy and Magnanimity

Admit­tedly, I prob­a­bly haven’t under­stood Aquinas per­fectly. I don’t know how a medieval philoso­pher would define some of the words used above, I also don’t have any resources that would point me in the right direc­tion. Though how­ever imper­fect my under­stand­ing of Aquinas, I am com­forted in know­ing that inad­e­quacy is com­mon enough that a virtue con­trary to it exists. I am also com­forted in com­ing to under­stand­ing this virtue of mag­na­nim­ity (and, I think, our cul­ture would be bet­ter off had it a good under­stand­ing of these “virtues” of the medieval Chris­t­ian philoso­phers). And herein is the chal­lenge: liv­ing a vir­tu­ous life. Feel­ing of inad­e­quacy are lies, as are com­par­isons with oth­ers that are unre­al­is­tic (I really shouldn’t be com­par­ing myself with any­one, period. I imag­ine it con­sti­tutes some sort of envy). But we fall into these lies because it’s eas­ier than fac­ing the truth of who we are, who we really are. I will be quick to add, how­ever, that one need not dis­play mag­na­nim­ity to over­come inad­e­quacy. Rather, one need only resolve to have a strong mind, be con­fi­dent and be assured in all they do, regard­less of thoughts and obser­va­tions otherwise.

And that, I think, is a much scarier thing than deal­ing with the thought that we’re inadequate.