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
Creed
Education
5 min read

Our social problems need theology, here’s why

Taking the god’s-eye view develops critical skills
young people listen, and ponder, to a speaker off screen.
M Accelerator on Unsplash.

At secondary school level, Religious Studies continues to attract strong numbers. On the surface, this looks like a healthy sign for the subject. Yet, critics argue that appearances can be deceiving: many faith-based schools make the subject compulsory, artificially pushing up participation. The result is a stark disconnect when students progress to higher education. Here interest appears to drop off sharply, and several universities have been forced to close their single-honours degrees in Theology and Religious Studies due to unsustainable student numbers. 

But this presents a misleading picture – even at tertiary level students are far more interested in Theology and Religious Studies than the statistics seem to suggest. While few undergraduates commit to a full degree in Theology, (in Scotland this is called Divinity) or Religious Studies, partly because career pathways outside of ordained ministry and teaching can seem unclear, many are eager to sample the subject alongside their main studies. This means that at the University of Aberdeen, the department of Divinity finds a different kind of relevance. Thanks to Aberdeen’s flexible degree structure, it is not unusual to find law, sociology, psychology, anthropology, and even physics students sitting in on our undergraduate modules. This interdisciplinary mix brings a distinctive energy to classroom discussions, as well as a few challenges… and challengers.  

Some students arrive never having opened a Bible, never having heard a word from the Qur’an, and never having engaged with any other religious text. Many are openly ambivalent about the existence of God, some downright hostile, and more than a few admit that they were drawn in by the promise of coursework-based assessment rather than traditional exams. Yet, once in the room, most engage with surprising enthusiasm, and even the challengers play a vital role.  

What emerges is a lively space where students approach theology less as a matter of personal faith and more as an intellectual exercise, grappling with life’s big questions, testing out ideas, and debating seriously with the prospect that God exists. Far from diminishing the subject, this shift gives the Divinity department a new role: not as a training ground for clergy, but as a forum for critical thinking across disciplines. 

In one of our courses for example, students are asked to debate this question: if a human chooses to go wild swimming in a crocodile’s natural habitat, does the crocodile have a right to kill and eat that human, as it would any other prey item that strayed into its path? Or, if a person with profound physical and intellectual disability is not able to live out many of the rights and responsibilities envisaged by the United Nations Convention on Human Rights, on what grounds are they still reckoned to be a human person? As we tease out the (multiple) possible answers to these questions, many of the turn out to be surprisingly theological. Whilst some students will work towards becoming better able to affirm and articulate their own atheism, others are surprised to discover that they have been living out a deistic morality all along; on the quiet, their internal moral compass believes in God. 

But my sense is that even if students don’t walk out with an easy A, they walk out with a set of skills that is, in the long run, far more valuable. 

Further to that, in an open letter the Theos think tank recently highlighted the role of theology in the ethical and cultural development of communities. They argue that theological study equips people to engage thoughtfully with different people groups and traditions, to develop skills in interfaith dialogue, and to promote communication across cultural barriers. Put simply: 

“In an increasingly polarised world, it helps us understand other points of view.” 

This insight is highly relevant to our students as they set out on varied career paths in an increasingly complex world. The skills honed in our Divinity classrooms – empathy, critical thinking, close observation, and clear writing – are both essential and transferable. Theology degrees do not lead only to ordination or teaching; they can open doors to careers in journalism, diplomacy, politics, community work, authorship, and screenwriting, among many others. As Professor Gordon Lynch, Professor of Religion, Society and Ethics at the University of Edinburgh, observed at a recent panel discussion: 

“It’s very difficult to think about a major geopolitical issue at the moment in which religion isn’t deeply implicated in some way.” 

The relevance of theological training extends far beyond traditional disciplines. For example, law students will need to recognise not only that a person with profound disability is a human person, but also to understand the deeper ethical and theological reasons why society judges this to be so. International Relations students will need to appreciate why resolving the Israel/Palestine conflict is not as simple as drawing lines on a map, but is rooted in long histories of faith, identity, and belonging – histories which will reach their influence far into the future as well as the present. Sports science and physiotherapy students will need to empathise with the human drive to become ever faster and stronger, while discerning when to help people recognise the limits before injury occurs. 

So, we gather all these students and more into our divinity courses, and work with them as they develop such skills. By discussing these matters as though God exists, in a space where there is unapologetic openness to confessional or deistic ways of looking at the world, students are freed to adopt a third-person standpoint, a “god’s-eye view” if you like, which allows them to critically examine both their own and other people’s perspectives. When this freedom becomes apparent, it is the challengers often find themselves the ones being challenged, and hostility soon morphs into vibrant dialogue. Also, for those who want “an easy A” it quickly becomes apparent that coursework-based assessment is in no way easier than traditional exams – if anything, it can be the opposite! Getting your ideas down on paper, coherently, and with relevant references to research from across disciplines is a sophisticated competency. But my sense is that even if students don’t walk out with an easy A, they walk out with a set of skills that is, in the long run, far more valuable.  

With an eye to business models and balance sheets, many universities don’t think they need their theology departments anymore, and with the current financial precarity faced by the higher education sector, on paper this may be true. But society is crying out for complex ways forwards with complex situations, and the problems of social division are becoming more apparent than ever. Whilst it is clear that fewer and fewer students are choosing to do whole theology degrees, it is also clear the world still needs theologians.

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