The Greatest Fear Is Courage

My eagerness to refute them has carried me further than I meant to go. What I set out to show is this: that the things the philosophers took for vices are so far from being vices that they are in fact great virtues. Out of the rest I will pick, for teaching’s sake, the ones that lie closest to the subject. [a]

They count dread, or fear, a very great vice, and think it a very great weakness of mind. Its opposite is bravery; and where bravery is in a man, they say, fear has no room. Does anyone believe, then, that this same fear could turn out to be the highest courage? Of course not — nature does not seem to allow anything to fall back into its own opposite. And yet I mean to show that the greatest fear is the greatest virtue. I will not do it by some skillful chain of conclusions, the way Socrates does in Plato, forcing the men he argues with to grant what they had just denied. I will do it plainly.

No one doubts that it belongs to a timid and feeble mind to be afraid of pain, or poverty, or exile, or prison, or death; and a man who dreads none of these is judged to have the greatest courage of all. But the man who fears God is free of the fear of every one of them. This needs no arguments to prove it. The punishments laid on the worshipers of God have been watched in every age, and are being watched across the world still, and new and unheard-of tortures have been invented for them. The mind shrinks from remembering the kinds of death there have been, when the butchery of savage monsters raged on past death itself. But a glad and unbeaten endurance carried those loathsome manglings of the body without a groan. Nothing astonished all peoples and provinces so much, or the torturers themselves, as this — cruelty beaten by endurance. And nothing produced that virtue except the fear of God.

So, as I said, fear is not to be pulled up by the roots, the way the Stoics hold, nor held down within measure, the way the Peripatetics want, but pointed down the right road. The other fears are to be taken away, so that this one alone is left; and because this one alone is lawful and true, it alone brings it about that nothing else is feared. Desire, too, gets counted among the vices. If it desires the things of earth, it is a vice; but if it desires the things of heaven, it is a virtue. For the man who desires to obtain justice, and God, and unending life, and everlasting light, and everything God promises to a human being, will think nothing of wealth, of public office, of command, of kingdoms themselves.

The Stoic will say, perhaps, that what is needed to reach these things is willing, not desire. But in truth willing is not enough. Plenty of men have the will for it; and then, when the pain reaches the vitals, the willing gives way and the desire holds on. If desire brings a man to the point where everything other people chase is worth nothing to him, then it is the greatest virtue, since it is the mother of self-control.

So what we ought to be doing instead is aiming the emotions rightly; it is the corrupt use of them that is vice. These stirrings of the mind are like a team harnessed to a chariot. In driving one well, the first business of the driver is to know the road; if he keeps to it, he can go at whatever speed he likes and never strike anything. But if he wanders off the course, then however calmly and gently he drives, he will either be jolted over rough ground, or slide over a cliff, or at the very least be carried somewhere he had no business going. So the chariot of life, drawn by the emotions as though by fast horses, will do its work if it keeps the right road. Dread and desire, then, are vices if they are thrown down to the earth, and virtues if they are turned toward the things of God.

On the other side, they rate thrift a virtue. But if thrift is an eagerness for having, it cannot be a virtue, because the whole of it goes into increasing earthly goods or holding on to them. We do not locate the highest good in the body; we measure every duty by the keeping of the soul alone. And if, as I taught earlier, we must not spare our property at all where kindness and justice are to be kept, then being frugal is no virtue. The name of it charms and deceives, wearing the look of a virtue. Frugality is, true enough, a holding back from pleasures; but in just that respect it is a vice, because it grows out of the love of having — whereas we ought both to hold back from pleasures and to hold back no money at all.

To use money sparingly — that is, in measure — is a kind of weakness of mind. The man is either afraid of coming to want, or has given up hope of ever getting it back, or is unable to think little of earthly things. And on the other hand, the man who is not sparing of his property they call a spendthrift. This is how they tell the generous man from the spendthrift: the generous man gives to deserving people, on the right occasions, and in the right amounts, while the spendthrift pours it out on the undeserving, when there is no need, and with no thought for his estate.

What then? Are we to call a man a spendthrift because pity made him give food to the needy? It makes a great deal of difference whether you hand your money to prostitutes out of lust or to the wretched out of kindness; whether wastrels, gamblers and pimps squander it, or you lay it out on godliness and on God; whether you cram it into your own belly and gullet, or store it up in the treasury of justice. So just as spending it badly is a vice, spending it well is a virtue. If it is a virtue not to spare wealth, which can be replaced, in order to hold up a human life, which cannot be replaced, then thrift is a vice.

So I can call them nothing but mad — men who strip the human being, a gentle and sociable creature, of his own name; who tear out the emotions, which are the whole of what our humanity is made of, and want to bring him to an unmoving numbness of mind, in their eagerness to free the soul from disturbances and make it, as they themselves put it, calm and untroubled. That is not only impossible, since the soul’s force and nature lie in motion; it ought not even to be attempted. For as water that always stands still and unmoving goes bad and grows muddier, so a soul that is unmoved and sluggish is of no use even to itself. It will not even be able to keep life going, since it will neither do anything nor think anything — and thinking itself is nothing other than the mind in motion. In short, the men who claim this unmovableness for the soul want to take the soul’s life away: life is full of activity, and it is death that is quiet. They do rightly rate some things as virtues; but they do not keep the right measure of them.

Steadfastness is a virtue. Not that we resist the people who wrong us — we have to give way to them, and I will show shortly why that ought to be done — but that when men order us to act against the law of God and against justice, no threats and no punishments should frighten us out of preferring God’s command to a man’s. In the same way it is a virtue to think nothing of death. Not that we go looking for death and inflict it on ourselves, as many famous philosophers have often done, which is a wicked and godless thing, but that when we are being forced to desert God and betray our faith we should choose to undergo death instead; that we should defend our freedom against the stupid and senseless violence of men who cannot govern themselves; and that with a brave spirit we should challenge every threat and terror the world has. So with a high and unconquerable mind we trample on the things other men are afraid of — pain and death. This is virtue. This is true steadfastness, and it is to be kept up and held to in this one thing only: that no terror and no violence is able to turn us away from God.

So that saying of Cicero’s is a true one. “No one can be just who is afraid of death, or of pain, or of exile, or of want.” And so is Seneca’s, who says this in his books on moral philosophy: “This is that good man — not marked out by a diadem, or by purple, or by a train of lictors, and yet in no way the lesser for it — who, when he sees death close at hand, is no more shaken than if he were looking at something new; who, whether the torments are to be borne by his whole body, or the flame taken into his mouth, or his hands stretched out along the crossbeam, does not ask what he is suffering, but how well.” But the man who worships God bears these things without fear. So he is just. All of which comes to this: nobody who is a stranger to the worship of the one God can know the virtues at all, or where their exact limits fall, or hold on to them once he has them.