Lines on Courage
I’m sometimes stupefied to think of how little was said of the virtue of courage during my formative years. People had come to believe modern life had evolved beyond the need for it. Perhaps courage might have mattered when the world was a dark and brutal place and monsters lurked outside the walls. But that was then—and now we lived in Enlightened and Progressive times.
What I heard about far more often than courage was safety: “Safety first!” “Better safe than sorry!” “Always buckle up!” “Always wear your helmet!” “Always have safe sex!”1
Obnoxious as the cult of safetyism should strike a sound-thinking person, there is a certain backward logic to it. The conclusion follows from the premises. We must always ask the fundamental question: what do we hold to be the point of life? If comfort and consumption are the highest goods, then safetyism truly is the crucial thing because it safeguards your ability to consume another day—safety means additional vacations, movies, video games, women, football games, pizzas, bong-hits, pornos, and all the best that modern life had to offer. Risking yourself jeopardizes the highest goods, and therefore all dangerous behaviors need to be restricted, and courage must be mostly discouraged.
As a result you raise a generation of cowards.2
This is what happens when previous generations come of age grooving out to John Lennon’s “Imagine” and other anthems of stoner nihilism. They believe nothing is worthy of the witness of blood. “Imagine … nothing to kill or die for, and no religion, too”—as though that were a good thing, rather than a nightmare!
Lines on Courage
But if a man values higher goods than comfort and consumption, courage becomes something else entirely. All the best things in life are on the other side of risk, and courage is the virtue which fortifies your resolve to confront those dangers. As Anais Nin said, “Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.” If you don’t have any, you must always be content with whatever scraps others are willing to toss your way. But if you have courage, you create other possibilities—both for yourself and others.
We would have been better off meditating on the following words.
- Josef Pieper: “All fortitude has reference to death. All fortitude stands in the presence of death. Fortitude is basically readiness to die or, more accurately, readiness to fall, to die, in battle … Readiness proves itself in taking a risk, and the culminating point of fortitude is the witness of blood.”
- Geoffroi de Charny: “If you want to be strong and of good courage, be sure that you care less about death than about shame.”
- John A Shedd: “A ship is safe in harbor, but that’s not what ships are built for.”
- CS Lewis: “Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality.”
- GK Chesterton: “Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. ‘He that will lose his life, the same shall save it,’ is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers. It might be printed in an Alpine guide or a drill book. This paradox is the whole principle of courage; even of quite earthly or brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if we will risk it on the precipice. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. He must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it; he must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine.”
- Thomas Aquinas: “Fortitude seeks not danger itself, but the realization of rational good.”
- Leon Gautier: “‘Fight, God is with you.’ Such, in a few words, was the whole formula of Christian courage.”
- Pieper again: “The virtue of fortitude keeps man from so loving his life that he loses it.”
Then there’s Scripture.
Scripture is, among other things, a nonstop exhortation to courage, calling men to face the risk necessary to do good in a dangerous world.
- Joshua 1:9—“I command you: be strong and steadfast! Do not fear nor be dismayed, for the LORD, your God, is with you wherever you go.”
- 2 Timothy 1:7—“For God did not give us a spirit of cowardice but rather of power and love and self-control.”
- Proverbs 28:1—“The wicked flee though none pursue; but the just, like a lion, are confident.”
- Psalms 16:8—“I keep the LORD always before me; with him at my right hand, I shall never be shaken.”
- Psalms 27:1—“The LORD is my light and my salvation; whom should I fear? The LORD is my life’s refuge; of whom should I be afraid?”
- Psalms 112:6-7—“He shall never be shaken; the righteous shall be remembered forever. He shall not fear an ill report; his heart is steadfast, trusting the LORD.”
- Psalm 144:1-2—“Blessed be the LORD, my rock, who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war; my safeguard and my fortress, my stronghold, my deliverer, my shield, in whom I take refuge, who subdues peoples under me.”
- Philippians 4:13—“I have the strength for everything through him who empowers me.”
- Isaiah 41:10—“Do not fear: I am with you; do not be anxious: I am your God. I will strengthen you, I will help you, I will uphold you with my victorious right hand.”
- 2 Chronicles 32:7-8—“Be strong and steadfast; do not be afraid or dismayed because of the king of Assyria and all the horde coming with him, for there is more with us than with him. He has only an arm of flesh, but we have the LORD, our God, to help us and to fight our battles.”
- Romans 8:31-32, 38-39—“If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him? … For I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.”
- 1 John 4:18—“There is no fear in love, but perfect love drives out fear because fear has to do with punishment, and so one who fears is not yet perfect in love.”
- Ezra 10:4—“Rise, then, for this is your duty! We are with you, so have courage and act!”
- 2 Samuel 10:12—“Hold firm and let us show ourselves courageous for the sake of our people and the cities of our God; and may the LORD do what is good in his sight.”
- Jeremiah 29:11—“For I know well the plans I have in mind for you […] plans for your welfare and not for woe, so as to give you a future of hope.”
- 1 Kings 2:2-3—“Be strong and be a man! Keep the mandate of the LORD, your God, walking in his ways and keeping his statutes, commands, ordinances, and decrees.”
- Luke 12:4—“I tell you, my friends, do not be afraid of those who kill the body but after that can do no more.”
- 1 Chronicles 19:13—“Hold firm and let us show ourselves courageous for the sake of our people and the cities of our God; and may the LORD do what is good in his sight.”
- Joshua 1:5-6—“No one can withstand you as long as you live. As I was with Moses, I will be with you: I will not leave you nor forsake you. Be strong and steadfast, so that you may give this people possession of the land I swore to their ancestors that I would give them.”
- Romans 8:15—“For you did not receive a spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you received a spirit of adoption, through which we cry, ‘Abba, Father!’”
- Acts 4:31—“As they prayed, the place where they were gathered shook, and they were all filled with the holy Spirit and continued to speak the word of God with boldness.”
Like all virtues, courage is a gift from God which can be cultivated or neglected according to our conduct and habits. Simply having faith is an excellent place to start—because belief puts all things in perspective. When you love the Lord, the villains and petty tyrants of this world instantly become less imposing. They may do their worst, but their worst just isn’t so bad. A man without faith has nothing but this life and must do absolutely everything to preserve it; with faith, he is free to pursue a bolder course of action and perhaps offer the witness of his blood.
These are a few meditations for cultivating a virtue which the authorities and the times would much rather you not possess.
1 Leon Kass: “Sex is by its nature unsafe. All interpersonal relations are necessarily risky and serious ones especially so … Sexuality is at its core profoundly ‘unsafe,’ and it is only thanks to contraception that we are encouraged to forget its inherent ‘dangers.’ These go beyond the hazards of venereal disease, which are always a reminder and a symbol of the high stakes involved, and beyond the risks of pregnancy and the pains and dangers of childbirth to the mother. To repeat, sexuality itself means mortality—equally for both man and woman. Whether we know it or not, when we are sexually active we are voting with our genitalia for our own replacement and demise. ‘Safe sex’ is the self-delusion of shallow souls.”
2 Which works out very conveniently for bureaucrats and corporations and all questionable authorities. Timid populations are more easily enslaved.