In order for thumos to repair our emaciated souls by giving us staying power, combating the treason of cowardice and gluing us to transcendent causes, we need first to contend with what it really means to be a gentleman.  Most people cannot say where the “gentleman” concept came from, or how it has evolved through the centuries.  And most of us have no idea how offensive a historical gentleman would be today if we were unfortunate enough to be stuck in the same room with one for more than a half hour.  He is our ideal in need of an overhaul.

The comprehensive evolution of what has been meant by gentleman is too extensive to cover here.  And besides, much of that development is pretty boring.  For our purposes, know this:  the definition, which has changed throughout the centuries, has always been a construction of what society has deemed best in men, and what it has deemed best has undergone some drastic alterations.  Those of us who respect liberty and equality would call a traditional gentleman, at best, a stuck-up weenie.

Though the Bible tells us a lot about the virtue of gentleness, it doesn’t include the long-popular concept of a gentleman.  In its original sense, the word gentleman described a male who came from an upper-class family—that is, he was of privileged birth.  A gentleman didn’t need to work, and if he did, blue-collar labor was far beneath him.  That was reserved for “lesser” men, like us.

Through much of history, a gentleman would not be someone you’d want to sit next to at a ball game or in church.  He represented the kind of rigid and punitive social order that revolutionaries saw and rebelled against.  That worldview would make the average American’s skin crawl.

Making matters worse, at times this privileged order was sanctioned by the church as being part of God’s divine providence.  For example, Charlotte Bronte was attacked by church people as godless and anti-Christian because in Jane Eyre she had undermined the God-given social order of her time.  How?  By the end of the novel she had allowed a mere governess to marry the lord of the manor.  For tradition lovers this was a scandal of biblical proportions—which is amusing, given Jesus’ aforementioned unmannerly disregard for convention.