Martyrs of the Mind

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Recent popes have been busy expanding the faculty division of the communion of saints. After St. John Paul II made the surprise decision to declare St. Thérèse of Lisieux a doctor of the Church in 1997, Pope Benedict XVI followed his lead with promotions of Ss. John of Avila and Hildegard of Bingen to the same rank, and Pope Francis has now done likewise with Ss. Gregory of Narek and Irenaeus of Lyon. This last is remarkable for a number of reasons—one of which is that our new “doctor of unity” is most famous for his passionate anti-gnostic diatribe entitled, not so politically-correctly, Against Heresies. (If that is the model for ecumenism, then maybe I’m better at it than I thought.) But it is also remarkable because this second-century bishop has now become the only saint on the calendar to be honored as both a martyr and a doctor of the Church. Following the Holy Father’s announcement, the liturgists were immediately upset at the ambiguity of this situation, debating whether Irenaeus’s office ought to be taken from the Common of Martyrs or from the Common of Doctors, and complaining that the new settings for the Magnificat antiphon O Doctor Optime already contain so many names and chant-syllable adjustments as to make it practically illegible. Be that as it may, the existence of this the first martyr-doctor gives an occasion to reflect a bit on the relationship between these two sorts of saints: those who brave the greatest of dangers for the sake of witnessing to Christ their Lord, and martyrs.

St. Thomas Aquinas draws a direct comparison between theologians and martyrs in his Quodlibetal Questions. Literally “questions about whatever,” these Quaestiones de Quodlibet were a kind of ask-me-anything session with the Angelic Doctor, a thirteenth-century version of Theology on Tap, and—since they took place especially in the penitential seasons—also a beautiful example of intellectual almsgiving. In Quodlibet 3, Question 4, Article 1, someone in the crowd asks St. Thomas whether it is licit to seek for oneself a license to teach theology. Probably unsurprisingly, St. Thomas says yes. Then in his answer to the third objection (which is actually the sed contra), St. Thomas remarks on the likeness between martyrs, who are exposed to dangers of the body, and magisters, who are exposed to dangers of the mind.

Fortitude is the characteristic virtue of martyrs, but on St. Thomas’s telling it is not only a virtue for those who are threatened with physical death; it is also a virtue for those who are threatened with false ideas. It is true that some of the other cardinal virtues might be more obviously necessary for theologians: Studiositas is a potential part of temperance, moderating knowledge, and prudence is the one moral virtue that is also an intellectual virtue, thus obviously essential for those who would devote themselves to pursuits of the mind. Nevertheless, fortitude is an important complement to these in the soul of a theologian. For without fortitude, without the strength to resist those dangerous ideas that must be faced by anyone who adopts a life of study, the theologian will be conquered by error.

The moral virtues all exist in the “golden mean,” meaning that they incline toward the reasonable middle between excess and defect. Fortitude, in particular, moderates the passions of fear and daring. An excess of fear is crippling; a defect of fear makes one rash. In battle, the man with too much fear retreats when he should fight; the man with too much daring fights when he should retreat. The soul with fortitude knows the difference connaturally and acts accordingly. So too for theologians: The theologian with too much fear of error never tries to contemplate the truth at all, and goes away sad. The theologian with too little fear of error falls headlong into it and becomes a heretic. The doctors of our faith must therefore cultivate a holy fear—of God, yes, but also of getting God wrong. They need to be afraid of false answers, just not so afraid that they never ask the question. For just as ethics is more about pursuing the good than about avoiding the evil, so likewise speculation is more about pursuing the true than about avoiding the false. Both are about both, of course, but in an order. The theologian equipped with fortitude is the only one who can get that order right, who can fight manfully in the battle for wisdom.

In his treatment of fortitude in the Secunda Secundae of the Summa Theologiae, St. Thomas lays out four parts of this cardinal virtue: magnanimity, magnificence, patience, and perseverance. All four are relevant to the theologian. First, the theologian must be magnanimous, great-souled, extending himself to the lofty and honorable goal of contemplation. Second, he must be magnificent—not perhaps in the strictest sense, which really is about using wealth to adorn the commonweal with grand creations, but at least in the broader sense of doing something great for that selfsame commonweal, and what could be greater than leading one’s community to the truths of sacra doctrina? Third, the theologian must be patient, willing to endure sorrow for the sake of his vocation—not an unfamiliar emotion for academics. Finally, the theologian must be persevering, undeterred from his end no matter how long it takes to attain it. And since the theologian’s end is the vision of God, he knows going in that he will be waiting until heaven really to complete his task. While the rest of these virtues must be adjusted somewhat from the martyr in order to fit the doctor, in fact the perseverance of the theologian and the perseverance of the martyr are one and the same: Both sorts of saint are steadfast in their expectation of heaven, no matter how long it may take to come.

There is, however, one important difference that St. Thomas observes between doctors and martyrs in the aforementioned Quodlibet. Whereas martyrs who expose themselves to bodily dangers are praised for spurning bodily goods for the sake of spiritual goods, in the case of theologians, the dangers they endure are spiritual, and no one ought to be praised for spurning spiritual goods. So whereas martyrs should possess fortitude unto the end, even unto being conquered by their proper danger, theologians should not. It would be a vicious theologian who thought himself so rich in fortitude that he would continue to expose himself to intellectual danger even to the point of being conquered by it, for to be conquered by heresy is to forfeit one’s soul. And so, says St. Thomas, in addition to fortitude, the theologian needs knowledge, which the martyr (qua martyr) does not. The martyr can let himself be conquered by physical death; the doctor must hold fast to true knowledge so that he is not conquered by intellectual death. And if he does not have such knowledge, he should not become a doctor in the first place. For the theologian, not fortitude, but the truth, will set him free.