It takes another virtue - prudence - also notably absent from our virus conversations and daily lives. Courage means seeing the threat, feeling appropriate fear, and still doing the right thing.ĭoing the right thing isn't self-evident. Courage doesn't mean that we don't feel fear of a real threat or that we simply ignore it. So it's impossible to say whether he meant "grace" in a substantial Catholic sense or, as sometimes appears in his work, grace as a kind of macho pose.īut he had it basically right. Still, every day brings uncertainties and dangers - that demand courage.Īs you may have noticed during the debates - more like fistfights - about what to do now that the virus is receding somewhat, we rarely hear about the weighing of evidence that constitutes prudence.Įrnest Hemingway, in his early period, i.e., shortly after he became a Catholic and was infatuated by "all things medieval," said that courage is "grace under pressure." He left it at that. Most people spend their lives trying to ignore or deny the fact. We know that it will all someday, perhaps even today, come to an end. There's an old Latin saying: mors certa, hora incerta ("Death is certain, the hour uncertain"). This is the purest delusion and - sad to say - even widespread fear of death seems not to have brought many people back to reality. Instead, we've been busy trying to create a world where everyone is "safe" and no one has to face anything "offensive." And where institutions - or someone else, in any case - will someday arrange things so that no one will ever have to be personally courageous again. Since we've lost touch with the virtue tradition and even with the simple wisdom that used to guide everyday life, we don't much give something like courage - the need to "man (or woman) up" - a thought anymore. The absence is strange because the virtue of courage is precisely what is supposed to kick in, for everyone, at a moment like this when we're all on the frontlines. livelihoods, deaths from the pathogen and deaths from isolation, there's been one term strangely absent, except when it comes to our heroic healthcare workers: courage. But amid all the talk of safety and suffering, lives vs.
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