COURAGE

COURAGE: No quality has even so much as addled the brains and tangled the definitions of merely rational sages as courage. Courage is almost a contradiction in terms. It means a strong desire to live taking the form of a readiness to die. “He that will lose his life….shall save it” (Mark 8, 35) is not a piece of mysticism for saints and heroes. It is a piece of everyday advice for sailors or mountaineers, for that matter for anyone crossing the streets of Calcutta or going to work daily in crowded buses or trains. These words of Jesus might be printed on a mountaineering guidebook or the drill manual of an army camp. “He that shall lose his life shall save it.” This paradox is the whole principle of courage, even of quite earthly or quite brutal courage. A man cut off by the sea may save his life if he will risk it on the edge of the mountain. He can only get away from death by continually stepping within an inch of it. A soldier surrounded by enemies, if he is to cut his way out, needs to combine a strong desire for living with a strange carelessness about dying. He must not merely cling to life, for then he will be a coward, and will not escape. He must not merely wait for death, for then he will be a suicide, and will not escape. Rather, he must seek his life in a spirit of furious indifference to it. He must desire life like water and yet drink death like wine. There is a vast difference between the grave of a hero and the grave of a suicide. The hero dies for the sake of living; the suicide dies for the sake of dying. Christian courage is a disdain of death. Confucian courage is a disdain of life.