One of the basic issues that human beings
need to deal with every day is fear.
Causes for fear are frequently popping up in our environment and in the face of various
fears in life, there are two ways people can go.
On the one hand, people can more or less succumb to fear and let fear dominate their choices
and their lives.
On the other hand, human beings can rise above their fears and follow what they know is the
right thing to do even in the face of great fear.
Let us take the example of a house on fire.
A house fire is a great cause for fear.
A firefighter who arrives on the scene has to face two things.
The fire outside, yes, but also the fear inside.
The firefighter can either succumb to fear and do nothing to put out the fire or the
firefighter can rise above the fear and fight the fire in various ways.
But this act of rising above fear to do the
right thing in the circumstances poses particular challenges to human beings.
Although we can do it, it does not come easily.
It requires a kind of second nature.
A character trait or virtue for dealing well with frightening things and the ancient philosophers
called this virtue, fortitude or courage.
Fortitude is a stable disposition to do the right thing in the face of fear.
When most people are caught in a house fire, for example, they become afraid and they follow
the fear out of the house.
For most people, that is a reasonable course of action, but things are different for firefighters.
Firefighters need to learn to rush into the
burning house when everyone else is rushing out, at least when the circumstances really
require them to rush in.
For this job, firefighters need to form a certain habit or disposition that enables
them to act in a way that is contrary to what fear tells them, but is in accordance with
what reason tells them, even though they're afraid.
It takes courage to rush into burning buildings, to rescue people and put out fires.
Something similar holds for soldiers, sailors, and anyone else whose circumstances call for
action in the face of fear.
Courage then is not just for professionals.
Courage is something all human beings need in order to live well.
Courage sets us free to face our fears and rise above whatever they may be.
Now, how does someone become courageous?
St. Thomas recognizes two ways.
One way is through practice.
This requires repeated exposure to fearful things together with the opportunity and the
motivation to rise above.
Firefighters become courageous through a special training they receive and by actually fighting
fires.
Soldiers and sailors also go through training exercises and through repeated exercises they
become habituated to jumping out of airplanes or rushing toward people who want to fight them.
Long experience of the human race has taught
us that by repeated practice, human beings can acquire the disposition to rise above
fear and do the right thing, but this way of learning courage is long, slow and difficult.
St. Thomas Aquinas also acknowledges that courage comes from God.
It's a grace, but the grace of courage he has in mind is something a bit different from
the acquired courage of firefighters, soldiers and sailors.
The moral virtue of courage that comes to us by grace is not so much an aggressive disposition
to attack people or attack a threatening problem.
It is rather the disposition to suffer well, to bear the painful things that often come
upon us when we're doing the right thing.
St. Thomas principally has in mind the Christian martyrs.
The martyrs were faced with a choice to renounce the name of Christ or die and they chose rather
to die than renounce the name of Jesus Christ.
That is the courage that comes from God.
We can say something similar for confessors of the faith.
Confessors are people who testify to Christ and suffer for the name of Jesus in some way
less than death.
That too takes courage that comes by grace.
In his study of courage, St. Thomas also takes up other virtues that go with it.
Sometimes a good that we seek is a long way
off in the future, say graduation from college or a job promotion.
The very delay itself can be a cause for difficulty and fear and sometimes the very delay is too
much for people to bear.
They quit.
It takes a special virtue to deal with the delay of satisfaction and that virtue is called
perseverance.
Sometimes human beings are thrust into very sad circumstances.
When a family member comes down with a longterm and painful illness, it is a cause for great
sadness.
Now, sometimes the sadness can be overwhelming
and so human history knows the experience of family members who abandoned their loved
ones in these circumstances.
They lack the virtue necessary to bear it, and that virtue is patience.
Patient people have a kind of quality about them that makes them able to do the right
thing no matter how much sadness they have to bear for it.
Unlike those who abandoned their loved ones, when the going gets tough, a husband who waits
for years at the bedside of his ailing and dying wife has the virtue of patience and
he is a better man for it.
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