The Forgotten Virtue of Severitas

The antidote against the weakness of character of the modern man.

No one seems to be able to speak plainly anymore. Political correctness has gotten to all of us, and we’ve fallen into the habit of tiptoeing around everything, always fearing the consequences of being “offensive” by daring to speak or act in a way that isn’t sugarcoated and wrapped in rainbow bubblewrap.

You see this in many scenarios:
A father corrects his son’s disrespect firmly (not violently, not cruelly, just firmly). A stranger overhears and whispers: ‘That’s abuse.’

A coach demands excellence from his athletes, pushing them past their comfort zones. Parents complain: ‘He’s too hard on them.’

A spiritual director tells a man the blunt truth about his sin. The man leaves offended: ‘Where’s the mercy?’

We’ve lost the ability to distinguish between severity —a virtue, when properly ordered and exercised— and cruelty.

This has led to a world in which we’re constantly afraid to correct one another, forgetting that it’s our duty to do so. Even within the faith, we’ve let the incessant trigger warnings of the world infiltrate our speech and our actions. Modern Christianity has embraced a sort of therapeutic softness and elevated it as the highest virtue.

The results of this disorder are that we offer gentleness without strength, mercy without justice and compassion without correction. We’ve reduced the faith to emotional affirmation, and any form of strictness—even loving, necessary discipline—gets labeled as “toxic,” “harsh,” “uncharitable”, or my personal favorite “unChristlike”.

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This is a very new phenomena that has become mainstream over the last couple of decades, and it’s an epidemic of softness that has led us to forget —or willfully ignore, because it’s a virtue that requires courage— the value of strictness.

The ancient Romans and early Christians lived by a virtue that we’ve completely forgotten in our obsession with avoiding offending others: severitas—severity, strictness, demanding excellence. And far from being cruel, it was actually essential to masculine formation, holiness, and building men of character.

In this article we’ll analyze why Christian severity is not cruelty, why we desperately need it, and how to practice it virtuously, without becoming a tyrant.

What Is Severitas? (The Roman Foundation)

Severitas (Latin) means strictness/firmness in judgment and punishment: a kind of justice that responds to wrongdoing with appropriate severity.¹

Severitas was strongly prized as a core masculine in the ancient Roman world, mainly alongside other virtues like gravitas (dignity), pietas (duty), and virtus (courage).

Severity was thought to be an essential virtue to military discipline, fatherhood, education, self-governance, and overall masculine development, as a virtue directed towards excellence in behavior. Nowadays we might consider any severity as negative judgment, but that couldn’t be farther from the truth: unjust judgment is to severity what tyranny is to leadership—a negative shadow of a virtue that is objectively good.

In every vocation, severitas served to push men towards excellence and fortitude, saving them from the natural consequences of a life of pampering and indulgences: mediocrity.

The incredible cultural, military, and institutional advancements of the Roman world were caused in no small part thanks to this virtue: philosophers, artists, educators and military commanders all practiced it in some form or another, because they understood that only by demanding excellence —righteously—, can great aims be accomplished.

Severitas was simply about refusing to accept less than what men were capable of becoming. The problem with the practice of severitas in the pagan world was that it was almost exclusively ordered towards pursuing worldly accomplishments, which led to it becoming a sure path to tyranny, pride and vainglory.

The early Christians who lived and eventually thrived in the Roman world didn’t eliminate severitas —a common misconception—, but simply baptized it and integrated it into a broader Christian moral and anthropological system, because they understood that it was a virtue indeed, just a virtue that needed to be ordered towards the only worthy kind of excellence: spiritual excellence.

The Baptism of Severitas

The Early Church embraced severity, but made an effort to transform it, by keeping the rigor, the discipline, and the strictness, but redirecting them towards holiness instead of earthly glory.

In this sense, they gave severitas a new, purer foundation, as it became a virtue motivated by love (desiring the sanctification and salvation of another), instead of a behavior motivated by pride, utilitarianism or the desire to dominate.

The early Church didn’t just invent this, they found support in Scripture:

Proverbs 13:24: “Whoever spares the rod hates his son, but he who loves him is diligent to discipline him.”

Hebrews 12:6: “For the Lord disciplines the one he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.”

Revelation 3:19: “Those whom I love, I reprove and discipline, so be zealous and repent.”

It’s clear throughout the Bible that divine love includes —and perhaps even requires— discipline. Severity then, properly ordered, is an expression of love, not —as our excessively soft era would have us believe—, an expression of cruelty.

The entire Christian tradition rests on the shoulders of great saints who practiced severity because they understood that the cost of not doing so could be that millions of souls could be sent to hell.

Even saints remembered for their mercy and tenderness, like Saint Francis of Assisi, were so incredibly strict that they would be called abusive or insane by today’s standards. There are a lot of anecdotes about the strictness with which this great Saint lived which would shock many:

When his appetite for something particular was aroused, as often happens, he seldom ate that thing afterward. Once, when in an infirmity he had eaten a little chicken, after he regained his strength of body he entered the city of Assisi, and when he had come to the gate of the city, he commanded a certain brother who was with him to tie a rope about his neck and to drag him in this way like a robber through the entire city and to shout in the voice of a herald, saying, “Behold the glutton who has grown fat on the meat of chickens, which he ate without you knowing about it.”²

The teachings of the early Christians (and from most Saints since then) were blunt, stripped of comfort, and focused on radical detachment, obedience, and honesty about human weakness. There wasn’t any sugarcoating, any fear of offending nor any discomfort in speaking the truth plainly when what was at stake was saving sous.

This same spirit carried into organized monastic life through rules like those of Saint Benedict and Basil the Great, which imposed strict schedules, silence, labor, and accountability. These systems demanded total commitment, aiming at a complete surrendering and a total transformation into holiness through discipline and correction.

None of this went against the Christian call to charity and mercy. It simply balanced that mercy and that gentleness with truth and justice. Justice and charity are two sides of the same coin, and the greatest theologians, philosophers, and saints have known this: speaking the truth, warning about the consequences of sin, and thus attempting to help others find salvation in Christ is the greatest possible act of love.

Severity and strictness are warranted when the most precious asset in the entire universe —souls— are at stake.

A World Without Truth

After WWII, Western culture underwent a massive shift: psychology replaced philosophy and spiritual direction, feelings replaced objective morality, and self-esteem and the pursuit of personal realization became the highest goods.

Whereas before we understood the need to adhere to strict moral and behavioral standards, with the rise of individualism and relativism —which started much earlier, but accelerated towards the middle of last century— we adopted a sort of carelessness, opting to just seek what felt “good” in the moment instead of obeying the eternal rules set there for our benefit and sanctification.

In the minds of most, severity became indistinguishable from abuse, because every attempt to demand higher standards of behavior (for yourself and others), were instantly labelled “oppressive” and abusive, as they went against the highest —supposed— good of free development of personality.

For example, we knew some years ago that children needed discipline to become virtuous, but now we instead adjust to the desires of the child, lest we “oppress” them by helping them develop a strong character centered on a clear moral code.

Even within our faith, this became a problem:

The reaction of the Church to the last few decades of terrible controversies has been to try and attract more people to the faith by showing how “open-minded”, “tolerant”, and “inclusive” Christianity is.

This has backfired tremendously, and it’s had the effect of further relativizing truth and trying to adjust the Gospel to the postmodern time, instead of remaining firm in the teachings of Christ and on the traditions of the Church.
— The War on Christian Men Part II: The Infiltration of the Church³

The soft, overly gentle, passive, and emotional message that has been pushed in an attempt to be seen as more inclusive has led to us rightly emphasizing God’s mercy, but wrongly concluding —or failing to explain otherwise— that mercy excludes correction.

The error comes in thinking that “Jesus was gentle and loving, therefore we should never be harsh or demanding,” while forgetting that He constantly corrected and rebuked the pharisees, drove the moneychangers from the temple. and warned repeatedly of hell, judgment, and eternal consequences.

James Tissot, Woe unto You, Scribes and Pharisees,

Jesus was severe when severity was loving. He didn’t coddle people into damnation out of fear of offending them.

The point is that both inside and outside the faith, we’ve abandoned the virtue of severity, and we are paying the price.

Men are lost as a consequence, and millions of souls are being damned because we are too afraid to practice severitas with ourselves and with the people we love. It’s because of this failure to demand more from ourselves that mediocrity, purposelessness and sadness are so prevalent in most modern men.

We desperately need to reclaim this virtue, but the way to do it might seem counter-inituitive to most of you. So how exactly can you reclaim this virtue and avoid the weakness, mediocrity, sadness, and purposelessness that the world offers you?