We need more thumos in the Catholic Church, the Platonic notion of ‘spirit, courage, wherewithal, steadfastness, zeal, magnanimity, capacity’ and we may add a host of other synonyms and related terms. Its opposites are manifest all around us: ‘cowardice, complacence, complaisance, softness, pusillanimity’, and I do not exempt myself from any of them. I strive for the former – with not enough thumos, how I know! – and so often fall into the latter.
But we have hope and inspiration from those who came before: Saint Edmund Campion was driven by a divinely-inspired thumos, rightly ordered to God, for Whom, and for Whose Church, he gave his life at Tyburn on this day in 1581.
The reader may find profit in reading over his famous ‘Brag’, which term did not have the negative connotation then as it does now. It was simply a statement of true facts, and a challenge to reasoned debate.
What the saint and martyr says of his missionary work in England at the end may be said of Canada now, and those of us working in the cause of Truth:
The expense is reckoned, the enterprise is begun; it is of God; it cannot be withstood. So the faith was planted: So it must be restored.