He was teaching a female student driver at the time, and he told her to chase down the vehicle. Still, it is worth revisiting Lewis’s sagacious counsel, as his words resonate, or should resonate, more profoundly for those of us living today than perhaps at any other time within recent memory. The virtue of courage helps us to take the initiative to make changes in our lives and/ or to accept changes brought before us. Shortly after word reached England that the Spanish Armada had embarked, the philosopher Thomas Hobbes, born in 1588, tells us that the terror induced in his mother labor pains that resulted in his premature birth. The various virtues courage, compassion, generosity, and so on still ring well in the secular ear. Another Latin word, fortitudo (from which we derive the cardinal virtue of fortitude), brings out the strength that courage must possess. For instance, the virtue of courage consists of the disposition to feel neither too much nor too little fear, but rather some appro- priate amount in between. Fred Henry, Bishop of Calgary, Alberta, has persisted in presenting Catholic teaching despite being ridiculed in the press, vilified in public, and threatened with imprisonment. . This revelation came as a shock as the authors expected that deaths would be significantly higher given that this year, unlike in the past, COVID deaths would add to the total death toll. Aristotle said of it that it “is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others,” “the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.” Courage is “the mean” between the emotional extremes of “excess” and “deficiency.” But it is the one that is most publicly celebrated, and therein lies its danger. For sure, the inexhaustible fear-mongering on the part of opportunistic political partisans in the Government-Media-Industrial-Complex has exacerbated, exponentially exacerbated, the fears of tens and tens of millions of Americans. A driver’s education instructor became enraged when his car was cut off by another vehicle. The irrationality of their fear is staggering. But after studying the virtue and learning more about being virtuous, I have found that it is the virtue of deciding between the two vices of cowardice and recklessness. Aristotle says that virtue is a “mean” between extremes. Samuel Johnson This in turn means that for people who are not immunocompromised, COVID in the United States has a mortality rate of about five one thousandths of one-percent!). real-life applications for everyday Catholics. Lewis’s contemporaries at least had something truly dangerous to fear, for an atomic bomb, being an indiscriminate killer, was certain to leave in its wake widespread destruction and death. The classical virtue of fortitude is also translated "courage", but … In fact we are the first generation of leaders to be leading in such disruptive times. Gregory Dell, whose ministry was revoked by the United Methodist Church when he violated church law in presiding over the "marriage" of two men. Aristotle said of it that it “is the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees the others,” “the greatest quality of the mind next to honor.”. A bishop should love his flock and allow courage to flow from his heart so that he can fulfill his episcopal responsibilities. They may break our bodies…but they need not dominate our minds [.]”. Courage poses another problem because people, by and large, regard it as the most dramatic, dazzling, and desirable of all the virtues. The other driver quickly took off, and the instructor ordered the student to chase him again. Courage is crucial to all the virtues becoming “voluntary” in Aristotle because as already discussed courage is the mean between fear and confidence. So the researchers delved more deeply and discovered that, incredibly—miraculously—deaths in all other categories, in the categories of heart disease, respiratory illness, pneumonia, influenza, etc., decreased just as COVID deaths increased. Aristotle Does it attest to love in action? It persisted as the dominant approach in Western moralphilosophy until at least the Enlightenment, suffered a momentaryeclipse during the nineteenth century, but re-emerged inAnglo-American philosophy in the late 1950s. The irrationality of the fear is determined by the nature of the object of the fear. 06/02/2016 04:06 pm ET Updated May 29, 2017 ... this takes courage. Usually, the first thing that comes to mind is bravery in the face of a threat, yet it is so much more. And, as Aristotle long ago observed in his famous analysis of fear and courage, a person who habitually “fears the right thing, for the right motive, in the right way and at the right times” is a courageous person. Courage is a meta virtue - meaning that it drives the other virtues. ]”, This being the case, if and when it comes, “let that bomb…find us doing sensible and human things—praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts,” and “not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. The virtue of courage, for example, is the middle position or the “golden mean” between rashness and cowardice, and liberality is the middle position between extravagance and miserliness. 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