Explainer
Creed
Virtues
5 min read

The means of courage: sober and swashbuckling

The ‘bracing and realistic virtue’ of courage is explored by Andrew Davison in the fourth of his series on virtue.

Andrew works at the intersection of theology, science and philosophy. He is Canon and Regius Professor of Divinity at Christ Church, Oxford.

An etching show a woman operating a cannon, while dead comrades lie at her feet.
Goya's etching entitled 'What courage' depicts Augustina of Aragon heroically defending Saragossa, during the Peninusla War.
Francisco de Goya, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The ancient Greek tradition brought four aspects of a virtuous life to the fore. These are the four cardinal virtues: prudence, justice, courage, and temperance. We can understand them in terms of the image of a journey. Justice is our destination. Prudence attends to both the destination and the local terrain, and charts the course. Courage helps us to overcome obstacles. Temperance keeps us on the path, when we might be tempted to wander from it, and from the goal.

A middle way

The place of courage among the cardinal virtues is both bracing and realistic. It reminds us that all is not well with the world. We will often need courage because doing the right thing can be costly. Thomas Aquinas has been our guide in this series on the virtues, and he devotes thousands of words to courage, up to and including the willingness to shed one’s blood for the sake of justice. Indeed, for him, such willingness is the paradigm of what courage means. That said, there’s nothing masochistic about his vision of courage either, as if we ought to court danger, or seek loss, for its own sake. The losses that a virtuous person might suffer are only for the sake of the yet greater gain of attaining to goodness. That comes out in his treatment of martyrdom, and being willing to die. No one should seek to throw her life away. Indeed, putting oneself forward for martyrdom is not a good sign of virtue, not least because it lacks humility, and may well rest on a puffed-up estimation of one’s own powers of endurance. Nor is courage the same as foolhardiness. With that remark, we have a good example of the idea – derived from Aristotle, and taken up by Aquinas – that virtue has the character of a ‘mean’, or middle way.

Take the example of hope. We can fall away from hope not only in the direction of despair, but also in the direction of presumption. Despair lacks hope because it dares not hope, or has given up on hope. Just as much, however, presumption lacks hope, because it cannot see a place for it, based either on a misjudgement of the seriousness of the situation, or of our own powers. Courage is like that, lying between two poles, rising not only above cowardice but also above foolhardiness. Or, to put it another way, we could return to the first of the virtues, to prudence, and say that, to be a virtue, courage needs to be prudent: it needs to weigh possibilities, and there is nothing virtuous about doing something reckless, with little or no chance of success.

Just as courage has the character of a ‘mean’, so also, for Aquinas, the suffering it involves has the character of a ‘means’, and never an end in itself. The willingness of a courageous person to forgo ease, safety, the comforts of home, and even to risk life and limb, does not spring from hatred of any of those things, but simply because it places an even higher premium on being the sort of person who does right. In its way, in fact, the virtue of courage pays ample respect to the goodness of what it is willing to give up. It recognises all of those things as good – ease, safety, the comforts of home, bodily well-being, and life itself – and it is only because they are good that we need courage in order to rise above them if the situation demands.

Aquinas was able to stress the supreme importance of courage, and the real rise of loss in doing right, without making an idol of either loss or courage – or, indeed, of difficulty. Although courage recognises the presence of difficulty in the moral life, and steels us to face it, nonetheless, courage is a virtue, and what makes something a virtue is goodness, not difficulty. Virtue is about doing the right thing in a way that it is not, at least not intrinsically, about doing a difficult thing.

‘The essence of the good rather than the difficult’,

As Aquinas wrote.

It’s central to Aquinas’s vision that the degree of difficulty is only incidentally related to the degree of goodness. Here, in fact, Aquinas places himself a little distance from Aristotle. Aristotle had written that

‘virtue is about that which is difficult and good’

and that, Aquinas comments, would seem to imply that

‘whatever is more difficult seems to be more virtuous and meritorious’.

That though, he concludes, is to get things in the wrong order.

‘The good is more about that which is honourable and virtuous than it has to do with difficulty.’

One of the endlessly fascinating things about Aquinas on the virtues is the way he clusters an array of smaller virtues under the sheltering arms of the big seven. We have seen that he praises courage but won’t let it get above itself: no moral theatrics. In contrast, in his treatment of the virtue of patience, which he sees as part of courage, he takes what might seem to be a paltry strength of character, not much respected today, and sees greatness it in, precisely because it is part of courage. (Other excellent theological treatments of patience come from two poets, both forms of the Petrarchan sonnet. There is John Milton, a Protestant of Puritan sympathies, in his On his Blindness, and the Roman Catholic Gerard Manley Hopkins, a Jesuit priest, in his In honour of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez.)

In our day, Josef Pieper wrote, patience has come to be seen as a

‘self-immolating, crabbed, joyless, and spineless submission to whatever evil is met with or, worse, deliberately sought out.’

Turning to Aquinas, he wrote instead that patience is about endurance, and not being conquered by the suffering that it might bring: patience

‘endures certain evils for the sake of good’.

Patience, Pieper goes on,

‘does not imply the exclusion of energetic, forceful activity, but simply, explicitly, and solely the exclusion of sadness and confusion of heart.’

The brave person, in his patience, not only knows how to bear with suffering,

‘he will also not hesitate to “pounce upon” evil and bar its way, if this can reasonably be done.’

There is a heroism to courage, which is by no means entirely in vogue in moral thinking today. Aquinas was unashamed of courage, not least because it has a sobriety to it, to place alongside anything swashbuckling. Virtue requires courage, not so much in the extraordinary circumstances that we typically think of as heroic, but in every situation where doing right requires us not to take the easy road.

Article
Awe and wonder
Community
Creed
4 min read

Cathedrals are making a comeback, here’s why

From soft toys to crisis moments, these flagships hold much more than our stories.

David was the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral for ten years until retiring in 2022.

A puppet donkey peaks over the edge of a cathedral pulpit
Family carol service, St Paul's Cathedral.

What is it about cathedrals?  Under a secular French government, €700 million has been spent on renewing Notre-Dame Cathedral after the 2019 fire disaster. The money hasn’t however come from French taxpayers, but from donations large and small by people in France and from across the world.  And the number of people entering cathedrals to visit, or pray, or meet with others keeps going up, even as church attendance declines and religion seems out of fashion – so what’s going on?  

Building a large church is a long and very costly process, and Christian communities could take a century or more to build or upgrade a cathedral as resources became available. In lands where Christian faith was embraced by those in power, governments would help to build and endow cathedrals. They were not only central points for worship and church life in their area, but were large covered meeting spaces which were also used by the state for synods, coronations, meetings or services which supported political life and enhanced social cohesion. Communities and rulers wanted to have the best and biggest building they could, to the glory of God (and also that of its builders): and cathedrals were a focus for the best that could be found in architecture and art, sermons in stone and stained glass, colourful high-rise marvels inspiring the inhabitants of an often ugly and dingy low-rise world. 

So what explains the enduring attraction of cathedrals, and the emotional bonds between these buildings and us which the rebuilding of Notre Dame has highlighted? 

For a start, these buildings are the holders of stories and identities. We humans love a good story.  We want to hear, see and tell stories; to make a story out of our own life; to be part of a bigger story which gives us identity and meaning. In cathedrals, I’ve met visitors and pilgrims eager to know the history, in other words the story of such an amazing place and all it contains. There are the visitors writing their own stories who take a picture of their cuddly toy at each tourist destination. And there are the men and women at a crisis point. in their own story who come in search of forgiveness or hope or love, and begin to find it in the great story of God, Jesus and the Christian faith to which a cathedral bears witness.  

That holding of identity isn’t only individual, of course. The tragedy of 2019 in Paris was felt across the world, because Notre Dame with its glorious architecture and its treasures is a part of the world’s story with which millions of people have become engaged through their visits and understanding; a tragedy felt of course most deeply in France, where the cathedral is entwined with French history and identity. Each cathedral, whatever its age or size, carries the story of its community and people, is part of our human story, of yours and mine. Their heritage is ours too. The story a cathedral tells about identity, faith and hope can enliven and inspire. 

Then again, cathedrals are witnesses. Cathedrals don’t only host state occasions: their role is to be a place for people from a wide geographical and social area to meet and celebrate, worship, mourn, listen and learn. They are places where we are both affirmed and challenged. Whether it’s a local charity concert to help those in need, a major company anniversary, a seminar or a protest venue for people concerned about a hot political, social or religious topic, the mourners of a significant public figure, or a homeless person seeking dignity as well as shelter – cathedrals witness to the value of human life before God. As a cathedral Dean I went from greeting the monarch to talking with Terry the Big Issue seller: for a cathedral, all are beloved by God, and there to be welcomed. 
While cathedrals hold story and identity, looking backwards, and witness to and focusing of a local or national community looking around them, you might imagine another axis of attraction as looking forward and upwards, ‘flagships of the Spirit’.  

Cathedrals, like all churches, are metaphorical footprints of God in the world: spiritual space set aside to step outside ourselves and our everyday lives, to reflect, to pray and worship, to seek an encounter with the presence of God. When I worked at St Paul’s Cathedral in London, our aim was to enable people in all their diversity to encounter the transforming presence of God in Jesus Christ, whatever that would mean for them; and sometimes we succeeded. A survey of visitors entering cathedrals found that only 10 per cent of them were intending to do something spiritual; but when they came out, 40 per cent of them had prayed, lit a candle, spoken with a priest or gone to worship.  

The authorities in Paris are expecting their visitor numbers to go up to 15 million a year after re-opening. Even Donald Trump and Elon Musk were in Notre Dame. Next time you're near a cathedral, why not go and explore the story?' 

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief