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
Culture
Film & TV
5 min read

A tale of two Romes

The Gladiator sequel’s dream of equality is baloney but telling.

Matt is a songwriter and musician, currently completing an MA in theology at Trinity College, Bristol.

Chariots thunder into a Roman amphitheatre.
Scott Free Productions.

I left the theatre quite disappointed by what I had witnessed. The original Gladiator, the Ridley Scott masterpiece, remains one of the most captivating historical epics in cinema. Every time I watch it, I feel I am stepping into another time. The sequel, by contrast, baffled me by how out of time it was, jarring me out of the action by its historical inaccuracies. 

Whether it was the sharks in the Coliseum or newspapers a thousand years or so before their invention, these moments reminded me I was not witnessing an entirely truthful representation of Roman society. Perhaps I am asking too much - a movie is after all, a representation, and may tell us more about ourselves than the era it portrays.  

But Gladiator II’s biggest anachronism isn’t newspapers or sharks, but the presence of Christian values in a pre-Christianised Rome.  

The backdrop for the film is that the evil and insane twin Emperors Geta and Caracalla, have spread chaos across the world, relentlessly conquering foreign lands, imposing their will on others - in other words, doing what Romans usually do. 

Against the emperors are a group of Romans who are tired with all this conquering and violence and want to build a new Rome. Throughout the film, they remind the audience constantly of Marcus Aurelius, the historic Roman emperor from the first film, who had a dream - ‘the dream that was Rome’. Rome would be a republic. But not just any republic.  

Lucius, the hero of the sequel, in his final speech to the Roman army, sets forth what this dream could look like: ‘A city for the many, and refuge to those in need.’  The entire legion lay down their arms and cheer triumphantly for the dawn of this new Rome. 

All of this is starting to sound rather close to home. Perhaps Lucius should march to the US border next.  

We can imagine offscreen, Lucius walks into the Roman equivalent of the World Humanist Congress, to write a charter to declare the worth and dignity of every individual, and their right to freedom. 

Anyone watching who didn’t know their history might be forgiven for assuming that this would mean an end to all the conquering, and the beginning of a just and equal society for all, regardless of gender, social status and nationality.  

Unfortunately, this was not the dream of the Roman republic, even before ‘tyrannical’ emperors started ruling. Many of Rome’s biggest conquests happened during the era of the Republic. Likewise, democracy in Rome did not extend to all people. Slavery was rife. The dream that was Rome, was to have a group of men subjugate the world, rather than just one or two.  

To be fair to Ridley Scott, his Rome has a little bit more nuance than I give him credit. Denzel Washington’s character Macrinus, the gladiator master, stands as a reminder of the hypocrisy of Marcus Aurelius’ ‘dream’. Macrinus was made a slave under Aurelius’ rule, bearing the brand of Aurelius’ visage on his chest, a reminder that he was Roman property. 

The only real equality Rome has – Macrinus points out – is that a slave can violently overthrow an emperor. If equality is going to happen in Rome, it won’t be through reasonable persuasion, but violent revolution. And even then, equality won’t have the final say, but rather the oppressed simply becomes the next oppressor. This is the true spirit of Rome: the survival of the strongest.  

Gladiator II reminds us that the values we find self-evident today, that Ridley puts into the mouth of Lucius and the other protagonists, were not self-evident to Rome. The dream that was Rome is a dream that we have. But how did we come to have this dream? 

We have been shaped by this history in more ways than we know. 

There was another revolution, that Gladiator II does not portray (at least not explicitly). This revolution explains why we look back on history wanting to see ideals of equality and justice. The German philosopher Frederick Nietzsche, atheist and nihilist, writes about it in his work The Genealogy of Morality.  

Nietzsche describes a war that happened between Judea and Rome. Rome was undoubtedly defeated, Nietzsche claims. Now, before we might accuse Nietzsche of further anachronism (the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Jewish Temple in AD70 come to mind), Nietzsche is in fact speaking of a revolution in values.  

He saw that the Roman ideal of ‘the prerogative of the few’: a small group of strong men imposing their will and subjugating others as the master race, was overthrown by the ‘prerogative of the many’ in the ‘slave revolution’. This revolution was brought about by a Jewish man, Jesus of Nazareth, followed by his group of unlikely revolutionaries. 

At the centre of this movement was one central image: a man dying on a Roman cross, a punishment meant for slaves and criminals. 

God in human flesh dying as a victim of oppression, was an image that gave power to the powerless. 

Nobility was no longer be found in inflicting suffering, but in enduring it for the sake of others. 

 Historian Tom Holland writes in his book Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind

‘The spectacle of Christ being tortured to death had been bait for the powerful. It had persuaded them … that it was their natural inferiors, the hungry and the humble, who deserved to inherit the earth’.  

Holland traces this revolution and the ways in which this counter-narrative slowly seeped into Western culture, implanting a concern for the powerless. The welfare state, universal human rights, movements like #MeToo all find their source in this world-rupturing event. 

Holland writes elsewhere: ‘The wellspring of humanist values lay not in reason, not in evidence-based thinking, but in history.’   

We have been shaped by this history in more ways than we know. 

Our generation suffers from cultural amnesia. We forget the reason for how we reason today. Our desire to see Rome (and our own nation, for that matter) become a home for the many and refuge to those in need, is a desire that has been shaped by Christian values. 

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