What Is a Man?

The following essay first appeared as an article in Alvaro de Vicente’s Substack publication, Men in the Making. For more articles like this one, you can visit his page here. Subscribe to the publication to stay up-to-date on Alvaro’s writing. 

Vision without action, the Japanese proverb goes, is a daydream; action without vision is a nightmare. Such is the case for parents and educators. Without a coherent, attractive, true vision of what it means to be a man, an educator’s efforts will be like throwing darts in the dark. He may, by chance, hit the mark, but more likely he will miss it. Formation, to put it more philosophically, flows from anthropology.

For those who educate boys, moreover, this vision of a man cannot be a generic, bland notion of a good person. Though it is certainly true that a man ought to be good, merely telling a boy to be a good person is not good enough. 

The columnist Christine Emba captured this idea well when she wrote: “Telling men to just be a ‘good person’ isn’t enough. They want to know: What does that look like? What should a good man do? What should he aspire to? What are his responsibilities, his duties, his joys?”

Men and women share a single human nature. They are God’s rational creatures. But, at the same time, real men and women exist as specifically male or female embodiments of this single human nature. On one level of abstraction, then, it is true to say that the ideal man and the ideal woman are one and the same—a virtuous person. Both men and women ought to be prudent, courageous, temperate, just, and so forth. But such virtue always exists as embodied in a masculine or feminine mode.

To be effective educators of boys, parents and teachers must be able to present a specific, true, and attractive vision of masculine virtue to boys.

Two False Images of Masculinity

In the absence of such a vision, a boy may easily fall prey to the false ideas of masculinity commonly—and often quite powerfully—on display. Today, the two most dominant flawed images of masculinity on offer are the nice guy and the barbarian.

Each of these understandings of masculinity represents an unhealthy extreme—an extreme that is appealing because it is partially true, playing certain strings in a young man’s heart. Indeed, each notion takes a single dimension of authentic manhood and distorts it by making it the whole.

The image of the nice guy is rooted in the false belief that boys and girls, men and women, are really not different in any meaningful ways. As such, the specifically rambunctious, masculine dimensions of a boy ought to be flattened as opposed to shaped and channeled. As Michael Reichert put it in his book How to Raise a Boy, “Boys shouldn’t have to be brave. They shouldn’t have to strive to produce. Boys should be more like … well, girls, I guess.”¹ The result of this approach is men who are neutral, not a bother, harmless—ultimately, insipid.

On the other extreme, the barbarian understanding of masculinity is rooted in the idea that the real problem with boys and men today is that they are too “feminine.” What is needed, according to this idea, is to make the boys more macho, an aspiration that usually comes out in rough ways. This is the approach of the popular ‘manosphere’ figure Andrew Tate.

Usually these ideas come one after the other in a vicious cycle. The result either way is a truncated man.

Dangerously Good

What, then, is a man? Neither of these two—and both. Let me explain what I mean with two images.

The first image is that of Aslan, taken from C. S. Lewis’s famous The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe. As you may recall, when the children ask Mr. Beaver whether Aslan is safe, he responds: “Safe? Who said anything about safe? ‘Course he isn’t safe. But he’s good.” 

The second image comes from a painting in my office which is a rendition of John Pettie’s The Vigil. The painting shows a young man kneeling in prayer on the night before he is to become knighted, sword and shield by his side. I show this to my students to present to them the ideal of the protector. The knight, I tell them, has weapons—he is not safe—but he uses his weapons to defend what is good, true, and noble. He uses his strength to protect his family, his friends, his country, and ideals. His enemy is not other people but evil; and though sometimes he may need to neutralize threats, he is ultimately the friend of all, desiring that even his enemies should find the true path.

In short, a man is dangerously good. He has the physical, intellectual, and emotional strength to do damage, and he has the moral fiber and spiritual thirst to do a lot of good. He is not simply a nice guy, but he is meek, thoughtful, gentlemanly, refined, self-controlled. He is not a barbarian, but he is courageous, tough, risk-taking, powerful.

The world needs your sons and students to be these kinds of men because if good men are not dangerous, then dangerous men will destroy what is good.

¹ Michael C. Reichert, How to Raise a Boy: The Power of Connection to Build Good Men (New York: Tarcher Penguin Randomhouse, 2019), 5.