Ode to Audacity

“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.