The Cadence of Courage
Podcast: Download (9.4MB)
Subscribe: More
Arianna Huffington, the noted author and popular pundit, wrote a book entitled On Becoming Fearless. In it, she observed that too many women and girls today are afraid to be themselves—to inhabit the bodies they have, express the convictions they feel, demonstrate the talents they possess, and claim the autonomy that is rightly theirs. Most girls learn early that the best way to stay safe in our culture is to be pretty and quiet.
Fortunately for Huffington, she learned another way to respond when fear strikes. Her first step on the road to fearlessness came one night at the dinner table when she was a young girl. Her mother told a story about her own actions during the Greek Civil War at the time of the Occupation. As part of the Greek Red Cross, Huffington’s mother fled to the mountains with two Jewish girls. Her responsibility was to take care of wounded soldiers and hide the girls from the Germans.
One night, German soldiers arrived at their cabin and started shooting, threatening to kill everyone if the group did not surrender the Jews that the Germans (rightly) suspected they were hiding. Her mother, who spoke fluent German, spoke up and insisted that the Germans put down their guns, because there were no Jews in their midst. And then she watched as the German troops lowered their guns and walked away.
Hearing this story as a young girl, Arianna Huffington wondered how she would ever live up to such a standard. Her book is the story of how she eventually learned to embody fearlessness, as her mother had done. In a world with much to fear, this is a lesson we all need to learn.
Fortunately for most of us, our daily lives are not dominated by the constant fear of terrorism or genocide, or even rape. But there are other fears that lurk: the fear of being spurned by a lover or a friend; the fear of failing in a new venture or a new vocation; the fear of expressing what’s in our heart to the people around us. These fears are no less debilitating for having less deadly sources. Whether the issue is stopping genocide, changing jobs, or speaking truth, the temptation to stay put and keep quiet is hard to resist.
This temptation must be overcome, however. As the title of her book suggests, Arianna Huffington calls for women—and presumably men as well—to develop a sense of fearlessness. She says fearlessness is not the absence of fear, but rather the mastery of it. Because my own preference is always to describe positive virtues in positive terms, I favor the word another Greek writer used twenty-five hundred years ago to name the quality Huffington calls fearlessness. Plato’s term is courage.
One of Plato’s dialogues records a conversation between Socrates and two eminent Greek generals, Laches and Nikias. When asked by Socrates to say what courage is, Laches replies: That’s easy enough. Anyone who stays at his post, faces the enemy, and doesn’t run away, you may be sure is courageous.
Surely courage is more than staying put in battle, Socrates replies. Sometimes great victories are won by falling back and regrouping. Besides, people can be courageous in other areas of life: against the perils of the sea, or against disease or poverty. People can also be courageous in public affairs or in facing their own desires and pleasures.
This is quite true, Laches agrees.
So, Socrates continues, what is this thing, courage, which is the same in all of these cases?
Perhaps courage is a certain endurance of the soul, Laches ventures.
But what if someone endures in doing something that is foolish, or hurtful, or mischievous, Socrates replies. Is that courage?
Obviously not, Laches admits.
At this point Socrates mercifully turns to Nikias, who tries a different approach. He ventures that courage is somehow related to the sought after goal or the danger being avoided. Nikias eventually concludes that courage requires wisdom and the knowledge of what is good and worthy of pursuit, as well as what is evil and must therefore be avoided. As Socrates puts it, summarizing this argument, “Courage is not only knowledge of what is to be dreaded and what is to be dared, but knowledge of all goods and evils at every stage.”
The essence of courage, in other words, is not the ability to do something that is physically risky. Rather, it is to pursue a goal that is morally worthy or stand up against a force that is morally repugnant, despite the risks involved.
Courage is the knowledge of what is monstrous and must therefore be confronted, no matter if the risk is great and the outcome uncertain. Courage is the knowledge of what is worthy and must be pursued, no matter if the road is long and the path unclear.
But there is one more dimension to our understanding of courage. How do we know that terrorism, genocide, and rape are always monstrous evils? How do we know that human dignity is always a worthy goal? In a world of diverse religious beliefs and varied understandings of natural law, where does our collective knowledge of good and evil come from?
I once attended an address by Bill Schulz, former president of the UUA and former executive director of Amnesty USA. He said that one of the things he learned from a decade of dealing with torture and its perpetrators is that, for him at least, belief in the inherent worth and dignity of every person is a myth. He acknowledged that this is hard to admit, especially for a Unitarian Universalist. We have long championed the individual as the final source of authority when it comes to deciding right and wrong, and when it comes to assigning worth and dignity. But, Schulz said, torture has taught him that worth and dignity are not inherent. There are too many malevolent human hearts, and too many god-forsaken places, where worth and dignity have no presence.
Worth must be assigned, Schulz insisted, and dignity must be taught. We cannot stand idly by and assume that these supposedly inherent qualities will magically spring forth in the world, like flowers in springtime. They will not. For worth and dignity to exist, we must speak and act in a way that creates a place for them. As Schulz put it: “Human rights are whatever the international community—through its various declarations, covenants, treaties, and conventions—say that they are.” When human dignity is at stake, as Schulz concluded, “We cannot escape confrontation with the forces of idolatry who would reserve worth to only a few.”
Simply put, courage is not plunging down a black diamond ski trail at breakneck speed, although it sometimes requires facing significant risks. Rather, courage is the ability to see good afar off and take a step toward it—despite the obvious risks. It is to see evil close at hand and take steps to confront it despite present danger. To know courage is to know a calling that is greater than fear.
The English word courage derives from the French coeur, which means heart. This is a useful etymology. The work of the heart is not to pump a vast amount of blood in an instant and then rest for a season. Rather, the heart works best when its rhythm is steady and its beat is unrelenting.
Courage is like that, too. There is a cadence to courage: an inexorable march toward achieving what is good and confronting what is not. Courage does not eliminate fear; it sees a path through the fear to the calling that lies beyond.
Matthew Arnold, the acclaimed 19th century British poet and critic, wrote a poem titled “Rugby Chapel” in honor of his father. It’s about making a difference in the world. Arnold paints a gloomy picture of humanity as a feeble, wavering line, wandering the earth “in an eddy of purposeless dust.”
But once in a while, Arnold goes on to say, people appear on the scene who march to a different cadence.
Then, in such hour of need
Of your fainting, dispirited race,
Ye, like angels, appear,
Radiant with ardour divine!
Beacons of hope, ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van! at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, re-inspire the brave!
Order, courage, return.
Courage is not the feeling that good is invincible, nor is it the conviction that evil can never prosper. Rather, courage is a march through the fear to confront what is evil and pursue what is good. Courage has a cadence. It’s the wisdom to know which direction to go and the willingness to take a step in that direction. Whatever your fear, have courage. Face the direction you must go. Then take the first step. And then keep marching.
City. He was educated at Franklin and Marshall College (BA, 1982), Princeton Theological Seminary (MDiv, 1985) and the University of Chicago (PhD, 2004).
His doctoral dissertation is titled Comprehensive Commitments and the Public World: Tillich, Rawls and Whitehead on the Nature of Justice.
He is author of God Revised: How Religion Must Evolve in a Scientific Age (Palgrave Macmillan) and writes a column on “The Search for Meaning” for psychologytoday.com. He also writes for Huffington Post and has been published in numerous other online and print publications.
His sermon at All Souls on Sept. 16, 2001—the Sunday after 9/11—was selected for inclusion in Representative American Speeches 2001-2002. Titled “The Shaking of the Foundations,” the sermon appears along with speeches by Governor George Pataki, President George Bush and Mayor Rudolph Giuliani as one of seven “Responses to September 11th.”
He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations, where he focuses on how traditional religious beliefs and practices, both in the US and abroad, usually reinforce patriarchy to the detriment of women and democracy. In April, 2013, he visited Afghanistan with a delegation of Council members and fellows, meeting with top military, diplomatic, and civilian leaders in Kabul, as well as in Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. In February, 2013 and March, 2014, he spoke in Belfast, Northern Ireland, visits hosted by Christopher Hudson, MBE, who helped negotiate the Good Friday Agreement.In January 2012, he was part of a 15-member delegation of senior clergy from New York City to visit Israel and the West Bank, the first such delegation to meet with a broad spectrum of religious and political leaders, including Shimon Peres, then President of Israel, and Salem Fayyad, then Prime Minister of the Palestinian Authority.
He serves on the Board of Directors of Interfaith Alliance, the national non-partisan voice that champions and protects our nation’s religious pluralism; he served as chair of the Interfaith Alliance board from 2008-2012. He is a Lecturer in Preaching at Union Theological Seminary in New York City, where he has also served as Visiting Scholar. Also in the past, he served on the boards of Dads and Daughters, the national advocacy nonprofit for fathers and daughters; the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, a human rights organization; and the New York City Audubon Society.
He lives in Manhattan with his wife, Holly G. Atkinson, MD, who is Director of the Human Rights Program at Mount Sinai School of Medicine; his daughter Zoë is a physics student at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland.
- The Cadence of Courage - March 1, 2015
- A God We Can Believe In - February 1, 2013
