The Anatomy of Courage

by JUDGE CHARLES E. WYZANSKI, JR.

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I SHOULD like you to consider with me a characteristic and fundamental phase of the structure upon which our society is built — its morale. You have no need to be reminded that the last generation has been living in what W. H. Auden has called the “Age of Anxiety,”what T. S. Eliot has described as “The Waste Land.”In our own lifetime we have watched the disappearance of the easy optimism of the nineteenth century — a Darwinian confidence in the inevitable progress of mankind. It is not merely that in horror we have had to reckon with the retrograde cruelties in the Germany of Hitler and the Russia of Stalin. There is in us an awareness— which our parents often lacked, though our more remote forefathers had it — that within every man there is irrational evil as well as irrational good. Whether or not this irrational evil is labeled with the theological term of “Sin,”it is an aspect of man which seems not to disappear, and hardly even to diminish, as he gains in technological mastery.

This awareness of an irrational dimension, vivid as it is to us who have lived in the years just before and the years of World War II, is even more evident in the youth in our universities. No teacher who speaks from any scientific or humanistic platform attracts a wider audience than religious leaders like Tillich and Niebuhr. They, without all the apparatus of compulsory attendance and regular examinations, draw to the chapel many times the number that go to any classroom.

While mindful of this religious revival among students, and indeed in a wider circle, I do not propose to address myself immediately to the fundamental concern which disturbs them. Rather, I shall approach my topic indirectly by considering courage in a fourfold aspect: physical courage, emotional courage, social courage, and spiritual courage.

Of all types of courage, the one which etymologically and historically leaps first to mind is physical courage. From childhood we have known the lionhearted man of medieval knighthood. And as we advanced in school we were taught that this brave figure traces his lineage to the Spartan soldier. This is the model whom Plato in The Republic glorified as the warrior who obeyed the guardians and shepherded ordinary folk. The warlike courage of this Greek type furnished substance for one of Aristotle’s four cardinal virtues. And the pattern which Aristotle discerned was refined by Cicero and even more majestically by the Stoic philosophers.

There are those who believe that in our altered social life, physical surroundings, economy, and technological circumstances we of the West have become too effete to retain our physical courage. Are reckless gallantry and a willingness to subordinate personal physical survival to the ideal of a great cause less compelling motives for men of the West than for men of the Fast?

For myself I have no doubt that in the final showdown our brothers and our sons, and we oldsters ourselves, will fight with as much vigor as any people anywhere. Remember the debate in the nineteenthirties in the Oxford Union when a majority of that house resolved that under no circumstances would they fight for king and country. Yet Hitler soon learned that what men will do when faced with danger bears no resemblance to the way they boast of indifference before the beast, attacks them. Of course it is always braver to face up to danger before it leaps upon us. Archibald MacLeish was clearly right in the famous essay in which he has exposed the reckless pusillanimity of the undergraduates of twenty years ago.

But we need not rely merely upon what happened in World War II. We already have convincing evidence that today our generation has men of physical courage. Consider Captain Carlsen and his pertinacity in saving his tanker. And shortly after Edmond Hillary climbed the highest peak in the Himalayas this summer, Americans from New Hampshire boldly attacked the second highest peak. Whatever doubt there may be as to where the Carnegie and other foundations should spend their general resources, no one has ever felt a paucity of deserving candidates for medals.

The problem of emotional courage is a more subtle issue. The basic nature of emotional courage has long been understood — by none better than Dürer, whose plates of Melancholia and of The Knight, Death and The Devil reveal the two extreme phases of men’s dispositions. Yet new light in our lifetime has been cast by Freud and other psychiatrists and specialists in the sciences of human behavior. Today most men recognize that it takes more than habit, more than training, more than will, to be courageous. Men enter this universe differently equipped; and long before they are consciously educated in any scholastic system, they are conditioned by early experiences. These, if not indelibly marked on their lives, are at any rate as difficult to erase as to decipher.

So it is that some among us, perhaps most, fluctuate in our capacity to summon forth our maximum strength. But some of the greatest contributors to our civilization and welfare have had periods of great emotional instability.

Lincoln is a familiar ease. Less well known is the example of Charles Evans Hughes. Merlo Pusey was the first to draw the veil to let us see that the great. Chief Justice whose majesty impressed us during his lifetime in person, as it has since then in marble on the front of the Supreme Court Building, was actually a man in a state of exquisite tension who balanced his years of unbelievable intellectual activity with months when he found it necessary to leave his family and his work and go mountain climbing here and abroad. What we know from the uninhibited Boswell and from Dr. Johnson himself shows that both the Great Cham of Literature and his more volatile biographer each had his alternating moods of elation and despair.

And in this company, I need hardly remind anyone of the autobiographical experience — described, to be sure, under the fiction of a French character — which William James narrates in The Varieties of Religious Experience. When seized by the green terror, James nearly succumbed. Yet as time elapsed, he not only regained his balance but dared report to the world at large the depth of his dismay. By his understanding and self-revelation he has aided all who have followed him to master their own personalities.

Indeed, have we not learned that candor in revealing one’s own limitations and acknowledging one’s own struggles is the first prescription for increasing emotional courage? What Lincoln, Hughes, Johnson, Boswell, and James described, they described not for themselves alone, but also for us. Every man has it in his power deeply to increase his fortitude by facing his weaknesses and taking those elementary precautions of rest and withdrawal which will give him serenity and assurance.

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A TYPE of courage much to the front in current discussion is social courage, occasionally called civic courage.

Ours is a very different world from that of the Colonial fathers. In the smaller societies of early New England, as in the Athens of Aristotle, every man was inevitably a political animal dwelling with his neighbors in a common concern for the welfare of a community which he could see with his eyes and understand with his experience. We live in an entirely different world: each of us is so hard pressed to earn his daily livelihood in the particular compartment where his skill is at a premium that we rarely discern the scope and nature of the social organism of which all of us are a part.

And yet no society will ever be made by a mere collection of professionals. He who is only an editor and not a citizen, or a lawyer and not a citizen, or a judge and not a citizen, cannot by being added to the heap of other men similarly narrow in their professionalism give that foundation from which will grow a cohesive and meaningful structure. A society is not a sum total arrived at by adding individualists. It is the large S which reproduces on vaster scale the small s within each of us.

But how, in the circumstances of our time, can each of us develop so that he will be a fully conscious social being contributing to the common weal? Two answers — neither adequate, but both perhaps suggestive — may be given.

The first is that in American society, and indeed in all the Western world, the method by which men grow in social stature is through participation in voluntary associations — the university, the church, the labor union, and that host of private groups whose early rise was discussed by Tocqueville, whose local history has been depicted by Professor Arthur Schlesinger, and whose legal significance Maitland described in immortal terms. These voluntary associations in society give man a chance to expand his social nature and to fool his common ties. These associations do for a peaceful society what military association does for a belligerent society. This thought has been strikingly developed in a perceptive Phi Beta Kappa address by Harlow Shapley, who took his theme from William James’s celebrated essay, “The Moral Equivalent of Mar.”

The very nature of voluntary associations demands that they must be self-generated. They cannot be sponsored by the state and articulated into its corporate existence. For this is the road toward totalitarianism. The associations of which I am speaking result from independent creative activity. Their members’ desire to contribute to the common weal must spring from the adventurous spirit of man and not be dictated by any terrestrial power. To be sure, some of these associations may not conform with the dominant views in a community. Some may be composed of protestants. And others may be regarded as wayward. Indeed this has long been recognized as one of the dangers of voluntary associations. The political tyrants of Greece outlawed them. The medieval glossators observed that both Imperial and Papal powers frowned upon associations unless they were licensed. But in America, at least until recently, we have always said that except when an association is criminally conspiratorial in character, or unlawful in its means or its ends, we would take the risk of divergence and dissent, and count this all a gain for democracy and development. We have agreed with Heraclitus that “from different tones comes the finest tune.” McCarthyism, in its generic sense, is a denial of that principle. It is the urge for conformity. And in its effort to solidify us to withstand atomic war or preparatory espionage, the supporters of the newer concept of so-called Americanism seem to me to have sapped one of the roots of social courage.

A second and perhaps more fundamental method of achieving social courage is to recognize how far each one of us bears responsibility for the wellbeing of our society and the climate of opinion in which we live. We cannot, like the Hausfrau who believes herself charged only with duties toward Kinder, Küche, Kirche, turn our backs on the politics of our day.

Can I put my views better than by reminding you of the magnificent illustration of Karl Jaspers reopening the Medical Faculty at Heidelberg in 1945? You will recall that he said to those assembled that all in the room, himself included, were responsible for the Nazi evil, if for no other reason than the fact that they were still alive: “We who survive have not sought death. . . . We preferred to remain in life for the weak, even if justifiable, reason that our death would not in any way have helped. It is our own fault that we are still alive. ... It demands that we should take on us the consequences of being alive in such conditions.” This, as Sir ‘Walter Moberly said, in his profound study of Responsibility, “is not the language of hysteria but of insight.”

And now I come to the fourth division of my topic, spiritual courage. We have been living for centuries upon the spiritual capital bequeathed to us by the men who dwelt in Palestine, in Greece, in India, and in China from 800 B.C. to A.D. 200 — the so-called Axial period of our history. The Hebrew prophets, Jesus and his immediate followers, the Greek founders of philosophy, the authors of the Upanishads, the Buddha, gave us a rich store from which we have Constantly borrowed. And although our account is not overdrawn, our own contributions to the total fund of faith have been small indeed.

It is plain that, without going further back, from the Age of Reason at the end of the eighteenth century the depletion has been precipitate. What began as a movement of deists outside the Church and was aggravated by the development of a nihilistic outlook from the time of Nietzsche has been intensified by the extremes of an existentialist movement which, in its origin under Kierkegaard, was perhaps the most original Christian activity of the last hundred years.

And now as we come face to face with a threat of a strictly materialist philosophy from the Communist states, we are on the verge of spiritual bankruptcy. And indeed nothing reveals this more clearly than our attempt to treat as though they were spiritual principles the political maxims of democratic liberalism — maxims which are and were meant to be negative restraints on abuse of power, not affirmations of the ultimate ends of man.

But, under the surface, another current has begun to tug at our society. Already I have referred to Tillich and Niebuhr and to the audiences which they have attracted. Men of science, no less than men of the doth, at last proclaim that there are and always will be limitations imposed upon the mind of man. There lies beyond his reason a territory of mystery. The further man progresses, the more man is aware that the boundary lies beyond any steps that he and his followers can ever take. How men in the future will deal with these, spiritual problems that lie beyond man’s capacity to analyze and define, no mortal dares predict. The very meaning of a mystery and of nonrational considerations is that they do not lend themselves to a plan. For a plan is by definition an intellectualization of something fully understood.

Nor is even the general direction of the way in which we shall go something that lies within my personal capacity to discern. Only one who wishes to play the role of a false Messiah could set himself up before you as a prophet of the spiritual future.

And yet, without rashness and with due humility, one may believe that philosophers like Jaspers are in general right in their emphasis on the crucial importance of each man looking into his own background of spiritual tradition. Isaiah said to us: be “mindful of the rock of thy strength,” “the rock whence ye are hewn.” Turning to our origins nourishes those emotions which make us receptive to spiritual influences.

It may be that the spiritual influences of the future will come in shapes quite different from those we and our ancestors have known. But familiarity with the older vessels will make us better prepared for what, the future may hold.