Courage

Regularly people tell me they admire my courage.  It always puts a smile on my face.  Me ...Miss Courageous.

Last night I snuggled up in bed with a magzaine and ... up came the word courage again.  The article described it as bravery, fortitude, will, and intrepidity.  The author saw it as the ability to confront fear, pain, risk, danger, uncertainty and intimidation. "Physical courage" is courage in the face of physical pain, hardship, death, or threat of death, while "moral courage" is the ability to act rightly in the face of popular opposition, shame, scandal or discouragement.

Hmmm ... this certainly put my courage in a different perspective. LOL

So this morning I googled for courage.

As a [desirable] quality, courage is discussed broadly in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, where its vice of shortage is cowardice and its vice of excess is recklessness.

In Roman Catholicism, courage is referred to as "Fortitude" as one of the four cardinal virtues, along with prudence, justice and temperance. In both Catholicism and Anglicanism, courage is also one of the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.

Søren Kierkegaard opposed courage to angst, while Paul Tillich opposed an existential courage to be to non-being, fundamentally equating it with religion:

"Courage is the self-affirmation of being in spite of the fact of non-being. It is the act of the individual self in taking the anxiety of non-being upon itself by affirming itself ... in the anxiety of guilt and condemnation. ... every courage to be has openly or covertly a religious root. For religion is the state of being grasped by the power of being itself."

J.R.R. Tolkien identified in his 1936 lecture "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" a "Northern 'theory of courage'"—the heroic or "virtuous pagan" insistence to do the right thing even in the face of certain defeat without promise of reward or salvation:

“

It is the strength of the northern mythological imagination that it faced this problem, put the monsters in the centre, gave them victory but no honour, and found a potent and terrible solution in naked will and courage. 'As a working theory absolutely impregnable.' So potent is it, that while the older southern imagination has faded forever into literary ornament, the northern has power, as it were, to revive its spirit even in our own times. It can work, as it did even with the goðlauss Viking, without gods: martial heroism as its own end.

”

Virtuous pagan heroism or courage in this sense is "trusting in your own strength," as observed by Jacob Grimm in his Teutonic Mythology,

“

Men who, turning away in utter disgust and doubt from the heathen faith, placed their reliance on their own strength and virtue. Thus in the Sôlar lioð 17 we read of Vêbogi and Râdey â sik þau trûðu, "in themselves they trusted"

”

Ernest Hemingway famously defined courage as "grace under pressure."





So my dearest friends ... what is your definition of courage???


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