Pints With Aquinas - Can a Non Believer Be Courageous? | Fr. Gregory Pine, O.P.

Episode Date: September 30, 2024

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Hello, my name is Father Gregory Pine and I am a Dominican friar of the province of St. Joseph. I teach at the Dominican House of Studies and I work for the Thomistic Institute. And this is Pines with Aquinas. So in the tradition, plenty of people ask the question, what is courage? Or what does it mean to be courageous? And they answer that question in different fashions. But it's not clear that before the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ that any of those answers are satisfactory. And I'm not just saying that like, I'm Christian, I'm a Catholic priest and nothing before Christ comes is good. But the authors themselves

who think seriously about this matter admit at some level that their responses, that their answers are unsatisfactory. They realize a certain tension or they realize a certain incompletion for which they can't sufficiently account. And so I want to ask the question, can a non-believer be courageous and see what we can find in these resources that are present within the tradition, which ultimately come to perfection in our Lord Jesus Christ. So let's get after it. our Lord Jesus Christ. So let's get after it. Okay, so I want to take little stops along the way with Homer and then with Plato and then with Aristotle. And as we pick up resources for thinking through our problem, I want to then incorporate them in a Christian vision so that we

can make a judgment on our question here. Okay, so first, Homer. You know, Homer wrote these two poems, The Iliad and the Odyssey, and those poems, they treat courageous deeds or courageous feats, so there's a kind of meditation there on what constitutes courage. And we can think especially of the character of Achilles, who kind of dominates the Iliad. So you know that the Iliad begins with the line, sing, oh muse, of the rage of Achilles. Why is he enraged? Well, he has been dishonored by Agamemnon, who has taken away his slave girl.

And then he is enraged further by Hector, who has killed his friend, Patroclus. And so Achilles is posed with a kind of dilemma in the Iliad, because his goddess mother Thetis has told him that he has options. He can either perform courageous deeds and accumulate great honors and then die young or he cannot perform courageous deeds and not accumulate great honors and die old. And for fear of shame or for love of honor he chooses the former and we know he dies young. So he's struck in his Achilles heel by the bow shot or the arrow shot

of Paris and then he goes down among the shades in the underworld. In the second of his two poems, in the Odyssey, Homer presents to us further reflection on that choice because when Odysseus meets up with Achilles, Achilles is miserable and he seems to regret his choice, to lament his choice, to hate his choice. So there's a kind of conflict there in the understanding that we have of courage because courage seems to be the performance of great heroic deeds and the honors that accumulate to the person who performs them, but then they don't seem to sustain the effort. They don't seem to hold up in the afterlife. So there's a question there like, okay, we're talking about

honor, we're talking about glory, but where do those live? Do they like live in the political community? Do they live in the memory of those who come after? Do they live in statues or in, I don't know, where do they live? Because they don't seem to live in the person. He doesn't seem to benefit from them or profit from them. Okay, so there's like the setting of courage, all right, within the community. But then when we turn to Plato, we have set before us the question of like

where courage kind of fits in the human person himself. So the setting of courage in the individual. And Plato talks about courage in all kinds of places, in the dialogue, the Lakeys, in the Republic, in the Protagoras, and other places besides. But just thinking about the Lakis, here, they're talking about spear fighting. And the question is whether it's good to educate your sons in this particular type of spear fighting because it doesn't really fit in with the way that the Phalanx ordinarily fights because this is kind of like one-on-one combat and the phalanx typically does group combat so the question is like are we advancing or are we retreating are we on foot or are

we on horseback and you know so they're doing all these things at the beginning of the dialogue to try to suss out the details of what it means and then they eventually talk about what is courage and one of them puts forward this notion that it's like a certain steadfastness of soul. It's like standing your ground when the enemy comes. And then the other puts forward this notion that it's like knowledge. It's knowledge of the things that cause fear, that cause confidence. But as is his typical fashion, Socrates ties everybody in knots, whether for good reasons or bad reasons, not always clear.

So that way they can despair of their paper thin knowledge or their paper thin understanding. But in the process, you have certain questions which are raised specifically like where does courage fit in the soul? Is it knowledge or is it related to knowledge or is it like sub what is it? You know, like what is it? And then all these kind of different things that seem to pertain to the matter, like the actions involved and the passions involved, what is courage doing with them? Okay, so let's have this also in mind. The setting within the community, the setting within the individual. And then when we turn to Aristotle, I think here we're also brought up against the question of the setting of courage vis-a-vis eternity. Because,

all right, Aristotle proposes courage as a virtue, all right, but courage also concerns noble deeds in the face of death. And so for Aristotle, death would be the utmost misfortune. It's the most terrible of punishments. And so it seems like the courageous person is at risk of dying and when he dies he suffers misfortune and his happiness would seem to come apart. Because for Aristotle he can only really conceive of a certain imperfect happiness here in this life whereby you live contemplatively and kind of see two matters practically so as to hold it all together. But if you die, it all comes apart. So then, where does courage fit

within the setting of eternity? When we arrive then at, you know, our Lord Jesus Christ, when we take our next historical step and arrive at zero BC or zero AD, depending on how we count these things, our Lord tells forth a new... well, he preaches the gospel, I mean he gives us himself, so which would afford us a new perspective on what it means to be courageous. So, like a lamb he was led to the slaughter and he opened not his mouth and by his stripes we are healed. So the idea here is what's most important, that

he's the only begotten Son of God, that he's taken our human flesh so as to deliver us from sin and death and to welcome us into communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit so that we can partake of the divine life. So it's not just a matter of human life here, it's a matter of divine life. He wants us to live on a higher plane, remaining human, but doing or attaining to a life beyond human. And there's now a basis for a real narrative continuity between or among what happens before, during, and after death. So death is not just the worst punishment, I mean there are worse punishments still, namely damnation, but death is a point in which we can have or attain to real intimacy

with our Lord Jesus Christ, where we can meet Him in death, where He can be closer to us than death, and we can be configured to Him in His passion, death, and hopefully, you know, please God, His resurrection. So the idea here is that we have to pass through death in order to attain to life in its fullness, because while here on the surface of the earth we can lose the divine life, because we can sin against it, because we can be tripped up, but in heaven where we have been stabilized in that divine life, we live and move and have our being in permanent and most excellent fashion in Him. So there's the sense that you start you know, encountering the witnesses of the martyrs who testify to our Lord Jesus Christ, who testify to his death and seek to configure

themselves to that same death in their own passion. And when they give testimony, they give testimony to Christ, but it's sufficient for them to say, I am a Christian, because at least in the Roman Empire, at various points, you know, that's a capital offense. Thinking here of like Nero and Domitian and Trajan, and then eventually the state-sponsored persecutions, you know, of the entire empire of like Decius, Valerian, and Diocletian. And so now, this transforms what we understand by the communal setting, the individual setting, and the eternal setting of what it means to be courageous. Because we have the revelation of a beatitude that's not mere imperfect beatitude of Aristotle, but the perfect beatitude of life in God unto ages of ages.

So too, we understand where courage fits in the overall. So we, as individuals, have an immortal soul, and we can't trivialize that. We can't set that aside. We're not just like cogs in a wheel or warriors to be deployed in a battle with a general who doesn't actually care about our individual fate. Now mind you, we are subordinated to the common good of the family, and of the polity, and of the church, but we are still precious to our Lord Jesus Christ who died for each of us, to a man, to a woman. And then we can see that there are things that are more important, but that courage is in service of those more important things. So like the martyrs, we think primarily of their faith and of their charity,

and their courage is subordinated to it. So within the virtuous organism, you know you have various moving parts, but the theological life is greater than the moral life, in the sense that the theological virtues are greater than the moral virtues. So we'll talk about theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity, which give us access to God. So faith gives us access to divine testimony, hope gives us access to divine beatitude, charity gives us access to divine friendship. And then, you know, you'll also talk about the intellectual virtues in these conversations. We can set those aside for now.

But then the moral virtues, among which courage is numbered, are mostly about like setting aside obstacles or hindrances to the living of that theological life. So they're about rectifying our interior life so that way we're not thrown for a loop or otherwise distracted and dispersed when it comes time to give the testimony that is required of us. So we talk about temperance, which moderates our kind of lower emotions, and then courage, which moderates our higher emotions. So it steals us against the threat of difficulty or it kind of impels us

when it comes time to give of ourselves, to make of ourselves a sacrifice. So then this helps us to resolve some of the difficulties which we encountered along the way. So yeah, Achilles is rightly sad. You know, his fate is rightly lamentable because, as we understand it, he's in hell. Because he didn't live his life in faith and charity, in testimony to the Most High God, in desperate love with him. And so while there's a certain nobility to his actions, it doesn't attain to the full nobility of a life lived through, with, and in God. Which at the end of the day, if we don't have that, we're like a spiritual zero.

We amount to nothing or less than nothing. And then when we revisit Plato, we can see where it fits. Is it the highest? No. But insofar as death is that kind of crisis point whereby we pass over from this life to the next, upon which hinges our eternal fate, then when we talk about patience and perseverance which are related to courage, there's a real weight, right? There's a real urgency because we want to affirm our belief, we want to testify to our love unto the end, unto

our last breath, unto death. And so courage becomes very important in service of the testimony of faith and charity and in the kind of context of the supernatural organism. But it takes, turning then to Aristotle, the revelation of perfect beatitude in order to appreciate really where it fits. Because the noblest of things is testimony to the Most High God and communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And so then we can see that death isn't in fact that most terrible of things. It is with respect to imperfect beatitude, with respect to our natural lives, but with respect to our supernatural lives, it's a kind of passing over,

it's a kind of antecedent condition to a consequent enjoyment, the likes of which eye has not seen nor ear heard, nor has it so much as dawned on the heart of man. Right? What God has ready for those who love him. So I think then we can affirm that there is a certain courage present before the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, or a certain courage available to non-believers. But we would think about this in terms of what we would call like imperfect virtue, okay? Or acquired virtue, okay? Or like St. Thomas will say, virtue secundum quid. The idea here is that all of us have a kind of temperament

or constitution which disposes us in this way or in that way. And some of us might be on a natural level more courageous or less courageous. That might just be a product of nature or nurture or formation or whatever else. So there's a sense that you can acquire the habit of courage, that you can train yourself or discipline yourself to be more courageous. And that's not nothing, right? That's not trivial. That's something. But at the end of the day, it's imperfect virtue, right? Acquired virtue, virtue secundum quid. Because there's another sense of virtue, that it be perfect virtue, or infused virtue, or virtue properly so called. And here we're talking about the virtue that God pours into our hearts. And at the end of the day, our Lord Jesus Christ pours into our hearts

not only faith, hope, and charity, but also prudence, justice, fortitude, and temperance. Which coexists with his other kind, but which surpasses it. Because it's linked up in charity, so we're able to do it for the love of God. It's able to attain to its final term or its ultimate end. It's able to assume the full scope or grandeur of all human aspiration is called to this divine life. So then when it comes to our Lord Jesus Christ, the proclamation of the gospel, the giving of Himself in friendship, we have now means not only for human perfection as whatever, but we have now means not only for human perfection as whatever so but

we have now means for yeah real ultimacy or or the the heights of of human life which is to say human intimacy with with God right the enjoyment of that relationship so is it possible for that for the non-believer to be courageous yes after a manner but what we would affirm there of acquired virtue imperfect virtue virtue, virtues that couldn't have quit. But it takes a relationship with our Lord Jesus Christ to attain to the full heights of courage, which we see in the testimony of the martyrs who shed their blood in witness to our Lord Jesus Christ in His person and in conformity to His death, which is not a tragedy, but in fact a kind of comedy because it ends in the sweet embrace of the life of heaven.

So I hope that's somewhat helpful for you in thinking through what it means to be courageous and in cultivating the virtue of courage for yourself. This is Pontus of the Quinas. If you haven't yet, please do subscribe to the channel and push the bell to get sweet email updates when other things come out. Also, if you haven't yet checked out God's Planning, it's a podcast to which I contribute with some other Dominican friars. And we talk often enough about the virtues. We've had episodes about courage and our fortitude. So you might profit from those as well.

And I'm still writing these books about the virtues. I did one about prudence. I'm working presently on one about justice. There's going to be one about fortitude and one about temperance and they're going to come out some number of years from now. I just can't remember. Okay, that's all I got squad. So know of my prayers for you, please pray for me and I'll look forward to chatting with you next time on Pines with Aquinas.