Courage is an action taken at risk to the self. It is the active component of dignity. All of the elements of dignity – wisdom, caring and courage – are ego-transcendent, and lead to spiritual development.
- Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear. [Mark Twain]
- I learned that courage was not the absence of fear, but the triumph over it. The brave man is not he who does not feel afraid, but he who conquers that fear. [Nelson Mandela]
- Courage is not the absence of fear but rather the assessment that something else is more important than fear. [attributed to Franklin D. Roosevelt]
- It takes a great deal of courage to stand alone even if you believe in something very strongly. [Reginald Rose, “Twelve Angry Men” (1954), Act 2]
- . . . courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point . . . [C. S. Lewis]
- . . . without courage, you can’t practice any other virtue consistently. [Maya Angelou]
Soldiers who volunteer for combat, police officers and firefighters, who risk their lives for a higher cause, are prime examples of the courageous. Risking death or serious injury to help others easily comes to mind when we think of courage.
Psychologically, standing up to one’s peers or one’s community is a more courageous act than facing bullets: it is more rare, and can be as important or more important. I have witnessed an example of courage up close. When my son was sixteen years old and a high school junior, his history teacher, in a public school, spent the first week of class proselytizing his extreme religious and political views. Being his father’s son, Matt knew that this violated constitutional protections under the First Amendment. He concluded that the only effective way to put a stop to the teacher’s rogue behavior was to record the classes – else Matthew would not be believed in his accusations, or have any proof of them. When word got out, he lost nearly all his “friends”, and the entire local community turned against him. I watched Matthew as he faced down all the opposition, and stood his ground. His mother and I offered to place him in another school; Matthew pointed out that he had done nothing wrong, and was not going anywhere. My son is my patron saint of courage.
Real
True Narratives
Book narratives:
- Thomas Powers, The Killing of Crazy Horse (Alfred A. Knopf, 2010).
- Malala Yousafzai, I Am Malala: The Girl Who Stood Up For Education and Was Shot By the Taliban (Little, Brown & Company, 2013).
- William Ian Miller, The Mystery of Courage (Harvard University Press, 2000): “[Miller] had planned to take up the topic of cowardice. Instead, he found himself intrigued and baffled by the opposite of that vice.”
- Eileen Markey, A Radical Faith: The Assassination of Sister Maura (Nation Books, 2016). Maura Clarke was a Catholic nun who followed post-Vatican II liberation theology, spending the final twenty years of her life serving oppressed and persecuted people in a repressive El Salvador. She was murdered at the age of forty-nine, along with three other women, two of them fellow nuns.
- Katy Tur, Unbelievable: My Front-Row Seat to the Craziest Campaign in American History (Day St./William Morrow, 2017). “Trump insulted many female reporters, but Tur seemed to be the one he hammered hardest.”
- Richard Gergel, Unexampled Courage: The Blinding of Sgt. Isaac Woodard and the Awakening of President Harry S. Truman and Judge J. Waties Waring (Sarah Crichton Books, 2019): “Gergel’s book is a revealing window into both the hideous racial violence and humiliation of segregation in the period immediately after World War II, and the heroic origins of the legal crusade to destroy Jim Crow.”
- Sonia Purnell, A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II (Viking, 2019): “Under her command, saboteurs put up misleading road signs to direct troops the wrong way (and ‘preferably over a precipice’), and laid explosive horse dung on roads. What sounds almost like high jinks took extraordinary courage and resourcefulness, and its contribution to the invasion can’t be overestimated.”
- Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague, The Steal: The Attempt to Overturn the 2020 Election and the People Who Stopped It (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2022): “The unheralded and mostly unknown Republicans active in local politics who refused to go along with Trump’s lies — and played a key role in preserving American democracy — are the main subject . . .”
- Marie Yovanovitch, Lessons from the Edge: A Memoir (Mariner, 2022): “Yes, Yovanovitch knows that ambassadors serve at the pleasure of the president. But she was ‘incredulous’ that Trump had apparently decided to remove her based on false claims by associates of Rudy Giuliani, who as Trump’s personal lawyer was trying to get the Ukrainian government to investigate the Biden family. During the hearings, Yovanovitch sounded calm and self-assured, but in her book she describes how scared she was.”
- Paul Kix, You Have to Be Prepared to Die Before You Can Begin to Live: Ten Weeks in Birmingham That Changed America (Celadon Books, 2023): “Peaceful demonstrators would have to draw the city’s notoriously brutal municipal authorities into a confrontation that would likely result in bloodshed and jail time — and do so in front of reporters and television cameras for all the world to see.”
From the dark side:
- Chris Walsh, Cowardice: A Brief History (Princeton University Press, 2014): “The book can be seen as a kind of extended footnote to William Ian Miller’s ‘The Mystery of Courage’ (2000), and it has some of the same problems, not least a tendency to mystification.”
Technical and Analytical Readings
Photographs
Documentary and Educational Films
- This Is Not a Film: a brilliant Iranian film makerstands his ground with “a defiant ‘no’ to Iran’s repression” after he is convicted for portraying Iranian government and society honestly
- Call Me Kuchu, about the first openly gay man in Uganda, where homosexuality was a crime, and how he died struggling for human rights
- Citizenfour, on Edward Snowden’s whistle-blowing, exposing widespread government invasion of privacy
Imaginary
Fictional Narratives
In Les Misérables, Father Fauchelevent is one of only a few people who do not like Valjean. One day, Fauchelevent’s cart falls on him. His life is in danger, when Valjean, a/k/a Madeleine, risks his own life to intervene.
"Ah! It is crushing me!" cried the old man. Madeleine raised his head, met Javert's falcon eye still fixed upon him, looked at the motionless peasants, and smiled sadly. Then, without saying a word, he fell on his knees, and before the crowd had even had time to utter a cry, he was underneath the vehicle. A terrible moment of expectation and silence ensued. They beheld Madeleine, almost flat on his stomach beneath that terrible weight, make two vain efforts to bring his knees and his elbows together. They shouted to him, "Father Madeleine, come out!" Old Fauchelevent himself said to him, "Monsieur Madeleine, go away! You see that I am fated to die! Leave me! You will get yourself crushed also!" Madeleine made no reply. All the spectators were panting. The wheels had continued to sink, and it had become almost impossible for Madeleine to make his way from under the vehicle. Suddenly the enormous mass was seen to quiver, the cart rose slowly, the wheels half emerged from the ruts. They heard a stifled voice crying, "Make haste! Help!" It was Madeleine, who had just made a final effort. They rushed forwards. The devotion of a single man had given force and courage to all. The cart was raised by twenty arms. Old Fauchelevent was saved. [Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862), Volume I – Fantine; Book Fifth – The Descent Begins, Chapter VI, “Father Fauchelevent”.]
Novels:
- Daniel Woodrell, Winter’s Bone: A Novel (Little, Brown and Company, 2007): “Sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly lives deep in the Ozarks, where she looks after her two younger brothers and her crazy mother, a woman who mostly sits on a chair in a kind of feline catatonia. Ree’s father is a methamphetamine cook who jumped bail after putting the family’s house up as collateral. Ree has a week to find Dad before the county repossesses the place.”
- Camryn Garrett, Off the Record (Knopf Books for Young Readers, 2021): “. . .is a story about courage and a tribute to people who have experienced sexual assault, and a reminder that everyone deserves support in finding their voice.”
Poetry
Music: Composers, artists, and major works
A courageous musician
Nina Simone lived courageously, and carried this trait into her music. “Trained as a classical pianist, she began singing in clubs to earn money. Her rapid rise as a popular performer who could play and sing anything did not prevent her from being exploited by record companies and managers, and her subsequent life-long sense that she needed a strong male protector did not always serve her well. Nonetheless, between 1958 and 1974 she recorded more than 40 albums. From 1964 to 1974 Simone dedicated herself to the US civil rights movement, inspiring activists young and old with her powerful songs against racist oppression.” She once said: “I choose to reflect the times and the situations in which I find myself that to me is my beauty and at this crucial time when everything is so desperate when every day is a matter of survival, you can’t help but be involved.” “Simone was billed as a jazz vocalist, but she often rejected the label, viewing it as a reflection of her race more than her musical style and training. She self-identified as a folk singer, with a style that also incorporated blues, gospel, and pop, among others.” Books about Nina Simone are by Nadine Cohodas, Jennifer Warner, Alan Light, Alice Brière-Haquet, and Traci N. Todd. Here is a link to her releases.
Three operas about courage
- Ludwig van Beethoven, Fidelio, Op. 72 (1805, rev. 1814) (approx. 112-147’) (libretto), “is inspired by a true story from the French Revolution. It centres on a woman, Leonore, whose husband Florestan has been secretly imprisoned by his political rival – the villainous Don Pizarro. Determined to rescue him, Leonore disguises herself as a young man named ‘Fidelio’ and gets a job in the prison where he is being held.” Leonard Bernstein called Fidelio “a timeless monument to love, life, and liberty, a celebration of human rights, of freedom to speak out, to dissent. It’s a political manifesto against tyranny and oppression . . .” Beethoven derived the story from Jean Nicolas Bouilly’s play, “Léonore ou L'amour conjugal” (Leonore, or Conjugal Love), and originally titled his opera “Leonore, or The Triumph of Marital Love”.
- Giaochino Rossini, Matilde di Shabran (1821) (approx. 189-197’) (libretto): “Rossini took advantage of the agile, sparkling style of librettist Jacopo Ferretti to create a narrative in which the ferocious Corradino, a declared misogynist, is introduced to the resourceful Matilde, who succeeds in melting his iron heart and winning his love.” “The ferocious lord of the castle agrees to receive her only out of respect for her late father’s courage.”
- Rossini, L’Assedio di Corinto (The Siege of Corinth) (1826) (approx. 142-150’) (libretto): a young woman risks her life to save her father’s. “The opera commemorates the siege and ultimate destruction of the town of Missolonghi in 1826 by Turkish during the ongoing Greek War of Independence . . .”
Other works:
- Virko Baley, Violin Concerto No. 1, quasi una fantasia (1987) (approx. 26’)
- Arturo O’Farrill and the Afro Latin Jazz Orchestra, “A Still Small Voice” (approx. 22’) is dedicated to social justice champion Cornel West. “Regardless of your stance on Dr. West, he holds our feet to the fire and demands that we deal with the social and political horrors of our day.”
Music: songs and other short pieces
- Yungchen Lhamo, “Being Courageous”
- Common & John Legend, “Glory” (lyrics)
- Sia, “Unstoppable” (lyrics)
- Lynne Arriale Trio, “Courage”
Visual Arts
- Francis Picabia, Courage (Le Brave) (1947)
- Georges Rouault, Jeanne d'Arc (Joan of Arc)
Film and Stage
- Winter’s Bone, a tale of crackling realism about “ a modern-day Antigone, making ethical demands that are at once entirely coherent and potentially fatal,” the film “is spectacular for its humanity, austere beauty and heart-stopping urgency”
- The Insider, telling the story of Jeffrey Wigand, who exposed the corrupt, amoral and deceitful tobacco industry, which systematically markets a known carcinogen to children
- The Red Badge of Courage, a dramatization about the moral successes and failures of a war hero who realizes on redeeming himself from previous acts of cowardice that he is as afraid as he had been before
- Ben Hur, a “story of a prince of Judea who sets himself and the interests of his people against the subjugation and tyranny of the Roman master race, with all sorts of terrible consequences to himself and his family”