“Quantum
potes, tantum aude”, As much as you can,
so much you should dare. It is a sentence written around 1264 by Thomas Aquinas in his sequence Lauda Sion Salvatorem. In the next sentence he explains the reason why: “because you can never praise God enough”.
Thomas suggests it takes a certain audacity –against God and man- to pay a
tribute to God. But he also suggests that God likes those who dare, those who
show audacity.
Medieval
man was not so different from postmodern man. Perhaps all virtues seemed more divine in those days, but most of them still stand today. We feel
intuitively that audacity has a certain value, as it is also related to courage.
If we don’t dare, we achieve less than we can, and this feels like a sin, although
we don’t call it a sin anymore. Sometimes, audacity requires the fight against
fear. Darers deserve praise. Entrepreneurs accept high mental risks and deserve
to be praised by society. There is however an unclear boundary between audacity
and recklessness. According to Thomas Aquinas, you should only dare as much as
you can. Yet audacity is often needed when you can’t know very well what
you can, and our aviation pioneers could not have brought us the wonders of flying
without a certain recklessness.
Our
society has paradoxically become extremely risk-averse in a number of things. We
could even discern a certain lethargy
in a number of areas, probably because we have become too attached to our image
and to a number of realisations of the last century, and we refuse to adapt to new
times. We tend to draw all benefits of the modern world to ourselves, yet at
the same we push back all risks of modern life to the public authorities, who
are always to blame if something bad happens. We fail to see our world will
only be safe with world-wide social justice.
Let
us therefore show audacity and courage in realising this worldwide social
justice. Perhaps our audacity will encounter resistance – also within ourselves
– but it will finally deserve praise
and God will like it, according to Thomas Aquinas.
