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An Ongoing Series of Sketches from the Contributors of Being Good: Christian Virtues for Everyday Life, co-edited by Michael W. Austin and R. Douglas Geivett (Eerdmans, 2012). More info can be found at www.beinggoodnews.com.

Using the thought of Thomas Aquinas, this chapter on courage explores similarities and differences between heroic or ‘action-adventure’ models of courage and the virtue of courage as exemplified in the person of Jesus Christ.

Courage is the virtue concerned with standing firm against fear for the sake of some good that we love. When faced with danger, we typically react with a “fight” or “flight” response—reactions Aquinas calls “daring” and “fear.” If we lack sufficient daring and give in to fear, we can fall prey to the vice of cowardice. For example, in J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books, character Peter Pettigrew is a coward because he betrays his best friends to save his own skin. While it is right and good to value our own lives, the courageous person recognizes that this is neither the greatest nor the only good. Peter’s case shows us that courage is necessary for a flourishing life, even if that life involves risk, difficulty, and self-sacrifice. He stays alive, to be sure, only to live on as a morally deformed person whose relationships of love have been destroyed by fear.

Courage requires training the passions of fear and daring to serve the good. This virtue mobilizes daring to attack what threatens (aggression) and moderates fears that might otherwise prompt us to give way under threat (endurance). Thus it can be expressed in two ways. Courageous aggression is called for when we are strong enough to overcome. Courageous endurance, by contrast, is needed when we stand in a position of weakness: either we cannot overcome the threat with force or our own power, as the aggressive person does, or we cannot escape without betraying the good to which we must remain faithful.  In these cases, endurance is the only means of holding firmly to the good we love. To picture the paradigmatic act of endurance, Aquinas offers us the example of the Christian martyr, whose sacrifice imitates (in part) the courageous sacrifice of Jesus Christ. The martyr endures even the greatest threat (death) for the sake of her greatest love (God).  Thus her love for God must be stronger even than her fear of death. Her courage is grounded in power of love, not her own physical strength or ability to overcome evil. As Augustine says, “Courage is love enduring all things for the sake of the Beloved.”

Rather than unreflectively endorsing a restricted masculine ideal of human physical strength and ingenuity, or encouraging us toward an idolatrous reliance on human power, the Christian conception of courage reminds us of the power of love, a power made possible, even made perfect, in weakness.

How do the theological virtues of faith, hope, and love transform our understanding and practice of the other moral virtues?

• See, for example, my “Power Made Perfect in Weakness: Aquinas’s Transformation of the Virtue of Courage” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 11: 2 (2003), “Historical Reflections on Sloth” in Virtues and Their Vices, eds. Craig Boyd and Kevin Timpe (Oxford, forthcoming), “Holy Fear” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86:1 (Winter 2012), and Robert C. Roberts on gratitude, humility, and other “emotions-virtues” in Spiritual Emotions: The Psychology of Christian Virtues (Eerdmans, 2007).

How can we develop of practices and communities of practice that encourage conceptions of distinctively Christian virtues, even when this is counter-cultural?

• See, for example, Craig Dykstra Growing in the Life of Faith (Westminster John Knox, 2005, and D. Smith and J.K.A. Smith, Teaching, Learning, and Christian Practices (Eerdmans, 2012).

How is courageous endurance a more inclusive model than heroic aggression, from a feminist perspective? Are there also dangers here: for example, how should morally appropriate cases of self-sacrifice be distinguished from unhealthy and abusive models, especially within church culture?

An Ongoing Series of Sketches from the Contributors of Being Good: Christian Virtues for Everyday Life, co-edited by Michael W. Austin and R. Douglas Geivett (Eerdmans, 2012). More info can be found at www.beinggoodnews.com.

Compassion is in. Celebrities champion compassionate causes. Bono, U2’s lead singer, has been instrumental in bringing attention and aid to those in Africa who suffer deeply due to grinding poverty, AIDS, and unfair trade policies. Other celebrities such as Julia Roberts, George Clooney, and Tom Brady have joined in this fight through their involvement with the ONE campaign.

A Christian account of compassion will focus on the sick and the poor. our moral exemplar in this regard is of course Jesus Himself, who was moved with compassion at the suffering of those He encountered in His earthly ministry (Matthew 9:35-37; Mark 6:30-44). However, compassion will also be relevant to our relationships with family, friends, and others who are perhaps suffering in other ways.

Many of us tend to think of compassionate actions as good things to do, but not in the sense that we are morally required to do them. We often think of compassionate acts, especially as they relate to the poor, as supererogatory acts of charity.[1] My claim is that exemplifying the virtue of compassion in our everyday lives is a matter of justice, rather than an optional matter of charity. The basic reason that compassion is an obligatory matter of justice, apart from the biblical injunctions, is that human beings have great value as image-bearers of God. Genesis 1:27 states that humans are created “in the image of God”, but what does this mean? A variety of answers have been given to this question, but for our purposes, it is enough to point out that being made in God’s image means that we are God’s representatives, and that we are representational of who God is.[2] We are free, relational, morally responsible, self-conscious beings. We reflect and represent who God is as human persons made in His image. God is the locus of ultimate value, and we, as human beings created in His image and to reflect His character, share in that value. This has important implications for ethics generally, and the virtue of compassion specifically. Given that all human beings are made in the image of God, all human beings possess a basic dignity, a fundamental value such that they have a conditional right to have their basic needs met.[3] Hence, in some contexts, especially when a person’s basic needs are at stake, showing compassion is an obligatory matter of justice rather than an optional matter of charity. Or so I believe.

Interestingly, the term “compassionate” has a verb form. Bishop Joseph Butler (1692-1752) was an influential British pastor, theologian, and philosopher, and his writings still receive the attention of philosophers today. In a sermon on compassion, Butler observes that when we

“rejoice in the prosperity of others, and compassionate their distresses, we, as it were, substitute them for ourselves, their interest for our own; and have the same kind of pleasure in their prosperity and sorrow in their distress, as we have…upon our own.”[4] 

This quotation from Butler is pregnant with meaning and insight, but note how he speaks of compassion. We are to compassionate the distresses of others. True compassion includes assisting others who are in distress.[5] For Butler, as for Christ, compassion necessarily involves action.

As an action that we engage in, compassion often involves sacrifice. Perhaps it requires that we give up some of our comfort, our time, or our talent. As Butler pointed out, it involves taking the distress of others to be as significant as our own distress. As such, it involves a turning away from what philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) called “the dear self”.[6] We often find self-love at the bottom of much of our actions that otherwise appear to be morally right. This can also be true regarding acts of compassion. However, even if this is descriptively true of human beings and our motives, this does not count against the claim that we ought to act out of a genuine and unselfish concern for others. Nor does it entail that we shouldn’t seek to take the flourishing of others to be as or more important than our own. This is demanding, to be sure, but it remains within our reach, not only as we seek to alleviate the distresses of the poor and the sick, but also those closest to us.

Further Work: Questions:

• The claim that compassion is in some sense a duty, or that others have a right to our compassion at least sometimes, is controversial. What arguments for and against such a claim are there, expanding on the suggestion above that human dignity as bearers of the image of God justifies such a claim?
• How do we engage in self-deception which undermines compassion? What sorts of practices at the individual and community level foster the development of compassion?
• In what ways is compassion relevant to the parent-child relationship? Marriage? Friendship? Employer-employee? Teacher-student? Believer in Christ-non-believer?

Michael W. Austin

Eastern Kentucky University

An Ongoing Series of Sketches from the Contributors of Being Good: Christian Virtues for Everyday Life, co-edited by Michael W. Austin and R. Douglas Geivett (Eerdmans, 2012). More info can be found at www.beinggoodnews.com.

Many are reluctant to identify zeal as a virtue. This is understandable, as zeal is frequently abused and easily confused. Acts of terrorism and brands of “Crusader zeal” shape our understanding of what it is. As a result, we tend to see zeal as vicious rather than virtuous, and to regard the actions of ‘zealots’ as universally bad. But is there something wrong with zeal as such?

The answer of this chapter is “no.” In fact, we argue, zeal is a good trait of character, a virtue. Certainly, some forms and expressions of zeal are bad and need to be condemned. But Scripture and history indicate that there is far more to the story. Jesus himself is lauded for zealously stewarding the purposes of God, and, in New Testament passages of particular ethical importance, Paul and Peter explicitly commend zeal for Jesus’ followers. Later Christian luminaries like William Wilberforce and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. embodied zeal in working for justice and equality in their day. In these and other cases, zeal plays a crucial role in the morally excellent character and behavior of God’s people.

In this chapter, we develop a conception of zeal as a virtue, both theologically and philosophically, beginning with an account of zeal as reflected in Scripture. In Romans 12, which we examine in particular detail, the ethical framework in which zeal is commended is teleological in the classical sense: an orientation toward the pursuit of good (what is supremely valuable and excellent) as an end (telos) that is “perfective” of the agent. In fact, Paul strikingly casts God’s will in classically teleological terms (v. 2), as the good, pleasing, and perfect object of pursuit. In light of the strenuous difficulty of pursuing this good, a passionateresponse is required: zeal.

Understood within the context of Romans 12 and other passages, however, such a response has clear parameters; it is rationally guided by an accurate, transformed vision of reality, and motivated by and oriented toward love. We define biblical zeal, on this basis, as a disposition to pursue what is good – rationally, fervently, and diligently, motivated by and expressed in love.

We refine this conception by analyzing zeal’s opposing vices. On the one hand, our pursuit of what is good goes bad when it is excessive, to the tune of fanaticism, and/or when it is misdirected – with respect to the end sought, the means employed, or both. These forms of “bad zeal” give zeal its bad reputation; in reality, however, they are competitors to zeal, properly understood. Opposing zeal on the other hand is a disposition where passionate pursuit of what is good is deficient – the vice of sloth, one of the “seven deadly sins.” This latter condition, in our view, is the more common failure among followers of Jesus (like us) these days. To glorify God and grow in Christlikeness, we need zeal.

Like other virtues, zeal needs to be cultivated. In this chapter, we make a number of suggestions for developing zeal, including Sabbath rest, meditation on God’s goodness, community, the Holy Spirit, and practical acts of service.

But there is far more to this underrated and misunderstood virtue than we are able to develop here. For the reader who is properly zealous for zeal, several themes merit yet further exploration. Here are three suggestions, as a start. First, zeal tends to be associated with extraordinary passion and action. But feats that call for such response are rare. We need greater understanding of how zeal may be reflected and developed in the context of ordinary action as well.

Second, as with other considerations of action and virtue, whether ordinary or extraordinary, we need a mature and robust picture of the role of the Holy Spirit in the development and expression of zeal. What does cooperating with the Holy Spirit involve in this case? How do we understand his agency in relation to ours? Where do our actions, such as practicing spiritual disciplines, fit into the process of cultivating zeal? Zeal is an important part of the morally praiseworthy life for followers of Jesus, but the ultimate source of biblical zeal (and other virtues) is God, not us. We err when we try to generate such passion in our own efforts rather than let such passion be fanned into flame by the Spirit (Romans 12:11).

A final area for further consideration concerns how we might ally zeal with the other virtues – particularly courage. Biblical zeal helps renew our mind and align our will to fervently pursue the purposes of God. But hindrances and challenges dot the way; courage is needed to overcome and continue in passionate pursuit. How then do courage and zeal relate to each other – conceptually, biblically, developmentally? There is plenty of room here for fruitful interdisciplinary work between philosophers, theologians, and psychologists.

David Horner & David Turner

Biola University