William F. Buckley Jr. called out a major aspect of the spiritual struggle in our time, increasingly atheistic education, 1951:

“I had always been taught, and experience had fortified the teachings, that an active faith in God and a rigid adherence to Christian principles are the most powerful influences toward the good life…

A number of persons sympathetic to this point of view have urged me to deal at greater length with the problem. I was not disposed to do this, in part because I lack the scholarly equipment to deal with it adequately, in part because I was unwilling to spend the necessary time. I finally decided to make an attempt, largely because I fell victim to arguments I have so often utilized myself: that the so-called conservative, uncomfortably disdainful of controversy, seldom has the energy to fight his battles, while the radical, so often a member of the minority, exerts disproportionate influence because of his dedication to his cause. I am dedicated to my cause.

At the same time, I cannot claim to have approached this project with the diligence and patience of a professional scholar. As far as pure scholarship is concerned, it is best said of me that I have the profoundest respect for it, and no pretension to it. As witness to this, I propose, in the nontheoretical portion of this book, to confine myself to Yale. Ideally, my observations would be based on an exhaustive study of the curricula and attitudes of a number of colleges and universities. Instead, I have confined myself to the university that I know firsthand.

I propose, simply, to expose what I regard as an extraordinarily irresponsible educational attitude that, under the protective label “academic freedom,” has produced one of the most extraordinary incongruities of our time: the institution that derives its moral and financial support from Christian individualists and then addresses itself to the task of persuading the sons of these supporters to be atheistic socialists.

I ought to add that what little experience I have had with the purposefulness and tenacity of the mid-twentieth-century conservative gives me few grounds for hope that this paradox will be remedied. So it is that for consolation I have turned frequently to a few sentences of Arthur Koestler:

Art is a contemplative business. It is also a ruthless business. One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or shut up.…

I have some notion of the bitter opposition that this book will inspire. But I am through worrying about it. My concern over present-day educational practice stems from my conviction that, after each side has had its say, we are right and they are wrong; and my greatest anguish is not in contemplation of the antagonism that this essay will evoke from many quarters, but rather from the knowledge that they are winning and we are losing.

I shall insert here what may seem obvious: I consider this battle of educational theory important and worth time and thought even in the context of a world-situation that seems to render totally irrelevant any fight except the power struggle against Communism. I myself believe that the duel between Christianity and atheism is the most important in the world. I further believe that the struggle between individualism and collectivism is the same struggle reproduced on another level. I believe that if and when the menace of Communism is gone, other vital battles, at present subordinated, will emerge to the foreground. And the winner must have help from the classroom. 

“Unless the great concepts which have been traditional to the western world are rooted in a reasoned view of the universe and man’s place in it, and unless this reasoned view contains in its orbit a place for the spirit, man is left in our day with archaic weapons unsuited for the problems of the present.”

I don’t know who wrote that sentence, which appeared in an editorial in the Boston Pilot, but I know I wish I had written it because with great economy of expression it says, really, everything my book sought to say.”— from God and Man at Yale, 1951.

Dismissive Political Labels are not helpful in the deepest spiritual struggle which we on the same side are called to engage, wherever we happen to be situated. St. Paul says,

“Remind them of this, and charge them before the Lord to cease disputing about words, which does no good, but only ruins the hearers”…”Fight the good fight of faith. Hold tightly to the eternal life to which God has called you, which you have declared so well before many witnesses.” 1 Timothy 6:12

Josef Pieper. Christians, Called to Endure in the Face of Tribulations.

The great modern Thomist, Josef Pieper, writes,

“Fortitude … does not mean mere fearlessness. That man alone is brave who cannot be forced, through fear of transitory and lesser evils, to give up the greater and actual good, and thereby bring upon himself that which is ultimately and absolutely dreadful. This fear of the ultimately dreadful belongs, as the “reverse” of the love of God, to the absolutely necessary foundations of fortitude (and of all virtue): “He who feareth the Lord will tremble at nothing” (Eccles. 34, 16).

So whoever realizes the good by facing what is dreadful, by facing injury, is truly brave. This “facing” the dreadful has two aspects, which form the foundation for the two basic acts of fortitude: endurance and attack. Endurance is more of the essence of fortitude than attack.

This proposition of St. Thomas may seem strange to us, and many of our contemporaries may glibly dismiss it as the expression of a “typically medieval” “passivist” philosophy and doctrine. Such an interpretation, however, would hit wide of the mark. Thomas in no way means to rate endurance in itself higher than attack, or to propose that in every case it is braver to endure than to attack.

What, then, does his proposition mean? It can mean only that the true “position” of fortitude is that extremely perilous situation described above, in which to suffer and endure is objectively the only remaining possibility of resistance, and that it is in this situation that fortitude primarily and ultimately proves its genuine character.

It is of course an integral part of St. Thomas’s conception of the world, of the Christian conception of the world, that man may be placed in a position to be injured or killed for the realization of the good and that evil, considered in terms of this world, may appear as an overwhelming power.

“This possibility, we know, has been obliterated from the world view of enlightened liberalism. To suffer and endure is, furthermore, something passive only in an external sense. Thomas himself raises the objection: If fortitude is a perfection, then how can enduring be its essential act? For enduring is pure passivity, and active doing is more perfect than passive suffering. And he replies: Enduring comprises a strong activity of the soul, namely, a vigorous grasping of and clinging to the good; and only from this stout hearted activity can the strength to support the physical and spiritual suffering of injury and death be nourished.

It cannot be denied that a timid Christianity, overwhelmed and frightened by the un-Christian criteria of an ideal of fortitude that is activistically heroic, has smothered this fact in the general consciousness, and misconstrued it in the sense of a vague and resentful passivism.

The brave man not only knows how to bear inevitable evil with equanimity; he will also not hesitate to “pounce upon” evil(1) and to bar its way, if this can reasonably be done. This attitude requires readiness to attack, courage, self-confidence, and hope of success; “the trust that is a part of fortitude signifies the hope which a man puts in himself: naturally in subordination to God.”

— from Josef Pieper’s The Four Cardinal Virtues, 1966. Emphasis added.

Josef Pieper (1904-1997) was a distinguished twentieth-century Thomist philosopher. Schooled in the Greek classics and in the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas, he studied philosophy, law, and sociology, and taught for many years at the University of Münster, Germany.

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(1) “Pouncing upon evil,” depending on the circumstances, can I think take many active forms. Sometimes it may indeed be direct, as in war; at other times it may mean, as St. Thomas More said when he faced dreadful injustice “using one’s wits” if this can be done without cowardice and guile. —Editor

St. Thomas More:

“Comfort in tribulation can be secured only on the sure ground of faith holding as true the words of Scripture and the teaching of the Catholic Church.” “The times are never so bad but that a good man can’t live in them.”

— Joseph Pieper on the pseudo-order and world dominion of the Antichrist

Beyond Cleverness, as “Good Soldiers“.

2 Tim. 2: “You then, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus, ² and what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. ³ Share in suffering as a good soldier of Christ Jesus. ⁴ No soldier on service gets entangled in civilian pursuits, since his aim is to satisfy the one who enlisted him. ⁵ An athlete is not crowned unless he competes according to the rules. ⁶ It is the hard-working farmer who ought to have the first share of the crops. ⁷ Think over what I say, for the Lord will grant you understanding in everything.”