We live in an age that has learned to name anxiety with precision, but has understood it with surprising superficiality.
Newsroom (01/04/2026 12:13 p.m., Gaudium Press)
We know how to describe its symptoms, measure its neural correlates, calm the nervous system, and retrain patterns of thought. And yet, anxiety does not disappear.
It does not present itself only as isolated episodes, but as a constant atmosphere that envelops interior life.
Why? Because we live in an age that has learned to name anxiety with precision, but has understood it with surprising superficiality. Anxiety is not merely something that happens in the mind.
It is something that happens in the order of the soul.
The Forgotten Intuition of Saint Thomas Aquinas
More than eight centuries ago, Saint Thomas Aquinas was able to diagnose anxiety without MRI scans or clinical manuals. He did so because he understood a truth that today we scarcely dare to pronounce: The soul can become too small for the life it is trying to live.
For Saint Thomas, anxiety does not begin with fear.
It begins with sorrow.
In the Summa Theologiae, anxiety (anxiatus) appears as a species of sorrow—not as simple pain, but as a pain that immobilizes the soul. It is a sorrow experienced in such a way that there seems to be no exit.
The mind is not confused: it is trapped.
Thought ceases to flow.
The soul can no longer orient itself toward rest.
Anxiety, Fear, and Hope: The Problem of the Future
This diagnosis fits uncannily well with modern descriptions: rumination, looping thoughts, hypervigilance, the feeling of being cornered by the future.
But Saint Thomas goes further.
Anxiety is not simply fear of danger.
It is the soul crushed by the future.
In Thomistic psychology, fear and hope are twin passions: both look toward the future.
Fear contemplates a future evil, difficult and seemingly irresistible.
Hope contemplates a future good, difficult but possible to attain, especially with help.
Anxiety arises when a silent rupture occurs:
the future ceases to be perceived as promise and is lived only as threat.
What we today call “intolerance of uncertainty,” the Angelic Doctor describes as a failure of the object of hope.
Pusillanimitas: Smallness of Soul
To this interior shrinking, Saint Thomas gives a precise name: pusillanimitas, smallness of soul.
It is not shyness. It is not humility. It is not sensitivity.
It is the refusal to advance toward the good proportioned to one’s vocation and calling.
The anxious soul does not suffer because it desires too much, but because it flees from what it was made to carry.
That is why anxiety often disguises itself as respectable virtues: prudence, responsibility, preparation, realism. But the fruit betrays the root:
Life narrows. Procrastination multiplies. Obedience is postponed. Prayer is shortened.
And, almost without noticing it, vocation is deferred “until everything is more secure.”
For the author of the Summa Theologiae, this is not wisdom: it is disorder.
Anxiety Silently Shapes the Soul
Anxiety does not only afflict the soul. It shapes it, molds it.
Over time, it conditions the will to retreat instead of advance. It turns security into the supreme good, replaces trust with control, and hope with a controlled rehearsal of the future.
Good things are not rejected. They are postponed indefinitely.
Thus vocations die: without noise, without anyone noticing—least of all the person himself.
Thus generosity is delayed.
Thus holiness is postponed in the name of a poorly understood stability.
More still: anxiety rarely shouts. It prefers to whisper and promises a “later.”
Why Medicine Helps… But Cannot Heal
Modern medicine is not wrong. It identifies real mechanisms: hyperactive fear circuits, dysregulated stress hormones, procrastination loops, cognitive distortions.
Indeed, medication can calm the body; therapy can reeducate the mind; exposure can expand the tolerance of the nervous system. All of this is good.
But medicine does not ask what Saint Thomas asks:
Toward what is the soul ordered? What happens when the order of the soul is broken?
Here lies the difference: while modern psychology manages anxiety, the Thomistic tradition seeks to convert it.
The Future: A Weight That Does Not Belong to Us
Saint Thomas Aquinas is direct and unequivocal: If the present belongs to man, the future belongs to God.
And anxiety arises when the soul tries to carry both.
That is why anxiety proliferates among the competent, the responsible, the dedicated. The problem is not that they are overloaded with duties; they are burdened with usurpation.
In them, the future is analyzed, rehearsed, simulated without rest, as if vigilance could replace Providence. And it cannot.
Then the soul, bent under a borrowed weight, begins to suffocate.
Peace Is Not Relief: It Is Order
For the Angelic Doctor, peace is not the absence of difficulty or uncertainty. It is the tranquility of order. It is Reason oriented toward God.
Peace is the Will strengthened by hope.
That is why procrastination, instead of healing, shrinks the soul even more. Magnanimity, on the other hand, expands it—not as bravado or naïve optimism, but as greatness of soul. With magnanimity, we advance toward the good that corresponds to us, with courage, without delay, while entrusting the outcome to God.
The Final Purification of Hope
The Dominican Reginald Garrigou-Lagrange completes this diagnosis with eyes both severe and merciful:
The great Dominican theologian says that the soul will always fear until charity is purified.
As long as self-sufficiency hides under the appearance of prudence, as long as responsibility conceals a mania for control, as long as cowardice and fear disguise themselves as humility, anxiety will remain alive.
That is why spiritual progress, in its early stages, sometimes intensifies anxiety before dissolving it: because the soul is being stripped of false securities.
Abandonment to divine Providence is not passivity. It is the final purification of hope.
The Final Truth
Anxiety is not merely a state to be calmed. It is an attitude of the soul that must be ordered—and often, converted.
Certainly, we can benefit from what medicine offers when it calms the body and reeducates the mind. But we cannot stop there.
Tradition teaches that anxiety often camouflages smallness of soul, not because the soul is weak, but because it has forgotten how great it was created to be.
And holiness begins when the soul becomes large enough to entrust to God what it cannot carry.
By Gustavo Kralj
Related Images:
