C. S. Lewis on How Courage Ranks among the Virtues
In The Screwtape Letters, C. S. Lewis imagines the threat that God is to the machinations of the Devil. God has created “a dangerous world,” says Uncle Screwtape. And he contemplates the reasons why:
This, indeed, is probably one of the Enemy’s motives for creating a dangerous world—a world in which moral issues really come to the point. He sees as well as you do that courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means, at the point of highest reality. A chastity or honesty, or mercy, which yields to danger will be chaste or honest or merciful only on conditions. Pilate was merciful till it became risky.
— C. S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Letter 29 (February 1942)
- Do you agree with Lewis’s view that courage orders is “the form of every virtue at the testing point”?
- Can you think of a virtue where this isn’t the case?
- What would it mean to test your own steadfastness in any particular virtue against the limit of courage required for you to act consistently from that virtue?
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Alex, I appreciate the detailed consideration you give to this post from Mike. -Doug
I’m not sure Lewis is completely right, so I want to think about it, here.
I’m sure that every virtue can be tested at some point and need courage. But is it true that every testing point of every virtue is one requiring courage? In other words, is every temptation tempting because there is excessive or deficient fear? If every temptation was tempting due to an excess or lack of fear, then every temptation would require courage to overcome.
I can imagine the some newly weds are tempted to begin a pattern of giving into sensuality, very slowly at first, where lack of fear is not what needs to be overcome to prevent the initial sins of imprudence. The acts of imprudence in the beginning can start a horrible train that ends in violence. But we don’t need to insist (do we?) that the little sins in the beginning were the result of deficient fear of such dreadful consequences. At some point after the initial sins of imprudence this does seem to be a cause and hence courage would be needed, or rather, one would need more fearfulness to demotivate one’s sensual appetite. But it doesn’t seem that in the very beginning courage was needed to prevent sensuality’s initial grip. What was needed was prudence. Or so I’m wondering.
Certainly every testing point requires a virtue to overcome the temptation doing the testing. But not all testing points are the same. It doesn’t seem that when a person is tempted it is a temptation to either avoid danger (due to excessive fearfulness) or a temptation to rush too quickly into danger (due to a deficiency in fearfulness). In my attempted counterexample, the testing point, is rather a point in which the person needs to more carefully discern the benefits and dangers of sex, but the lack of this careful forethought isn’t the result of the lack of courage.
Perhaps Lewis imagines that the sort of testing points are when the person is at a point of inaction and needs to get into action in the face of danger. But in my example the testing point is when the person, under the seduction of pleasure, needs to hold his horses and think about the risk, and so he needs prudence. Prudence would have stopped the temptation before courage was needed.
Nevertheless, Lewis seems right to stress the importance of courage in safeguarding the other virtues from corruption by the very common temptation to avoid pain or danger.
For what it’s worth, here is St. Thomas Aquinas on the relative importance of Courage.
II.II. Q. 123 On Fortitude, article 12, Its Comparison with the Other Cardinal Virtues, Whether it Excels Among All Other Virtues
http://www.newadvent.org/summa/3123.htm#article12
“I answer that, As Augustine says (De Trin. vi), “In things that are great, but not in bulk, to be great is to be good”: wherefore the better a virtue the greater it is. Now reason’s good is man’s good, according to Dionysius (Div. Nom. iv) prudence, since it is a perfection of reason, has the good essentially: while justice effects this good, since it belongs to justice to establish the order of reason in all human affairs: whereas the other virtues safeguard this good, inasmuch as they moderate the passions, lest they lead man away from reason’s good. As to the order of the latter, fortitude holds the first place, because fear of dangers of death has the greatest power to make man recede from the good of reason: and after fortitude comes temperance, since also pleasures of touch excel all others in hindering the good of reason. Now to be a thing essentially ranks before effecting it, and the latter ranks before safeguarding it by removing obstacles thereto. Wherefore among the cardinal virtues, prudence ranks first, justice second, fortitude third, temperance fourth, and after these the other virtues.”