Reflections on Courage

Aristotle and Edith Stein

Portrait of Courage: St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross (Edith Stein)

“Now the brave man is as dauntless as man may be. Therefore, while he will fear even the things that are not beyond human strength, he will fear them as he ought and as reason directs, and he will face them for the sake of what is noble; for this is the end of excellence.”¹

Aristotle wrote these words in his famous “outline” on happiness and virtue, Nicomachean Ethics (named either for his father or his son—historians aren’t sure.) This excellent work served as our introductory text to Aristotle for my Online Great Books reading assignment this month. I must admit that it’s been a welcome change of pace after having spent more than a year reading the dense Socratic dialogues of his predecessor and erstwhile mentor, Plato. For one thing, Aristotle is just so refreshingly methodical and plain spoken—which is not to say that his work doesn’t also sparkle with brilliance. It’s just been an easier nut for me to crack. (At least to this point—we have yet to dive into his Metaphysics.)

Instead of giving you, dear readers, a full summary of the Ethics today, I want to focus on Aristotle’s discussion of courage in his “catalog of virtues” that comprises Books III and IV. He begins the inventory, in fact, with a lengthy discourse on the habit of courage and how it can be distinguished from its contraries of excess and defect, namely rashness and cowardice. Many of you are probably already familiar with Aristotle’s premise that virtue constitutes a “mean” between two extremes. He finds courage to be a good example of this principle because it is relatively easy to distinguish from the contrary vices already named.

“The coward, then, is a despairing sort of person; for he fears everything. The brave man, on the other hand, has the opposite disposition; for confidence is the mark of a hopeful person.”²

One might equally speak of a brave woman, of course. It’s on this note that I want to highlight a particular portrait of courage for you today: Jewish philosopher, Catholic convert, and Holocaust martyr, Edith Stein (1891-1942). As a philosopher, Stein is mostly known for her integration of phenomenology and metaphysics, of which Potency and Act and Finite and Eternal Being are her major works. Like Aristotle, she believed that the body is animated by the soul and she drew extensively from his philosophy by way of Thomistic metaphysics. In fact, her book Potency and Act is a direct reference to principles originating in the ancient philosopher’s ontology of being/becoming.

Today is the 80th anniversary of Stein’s death at Auschwitz on August 9, 1942. At the time she was taken into Nazi captivity, she had been living out her religious vocation in the Netherlands as a Carmelite nun by the name of Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. By a tragic bit of irony, her capture and execution one week later resulted from a Nazi backlash to a protest raised by courageous Dutch bishops against the inhumane treatment of the Jews. In the face of unspeakable cruelty, Edith Stein proved herself brave, dignified, and hopeful to the end, prompting one Catholic scholar to call her the “Doctor of Resilient Hope”.

In an almost prophetic statement 12 years before being turned to ashes at Auschwitz, Stein wrote to a friend that, “after every encounter in which I am made aware how powerless we are to exercise direct influence, I have a deeper sense of the urgency of my own holocaustum [i.e. burnt offering]. Let us help one another to learn more and more how to make every day and every hour part of the structure for eternity.”³ Perhaps Stein recalled these words on the day when the Nazis came for her and her sister Rosa. She reportedly said to her sister, “Come, we are going for our people.”

May we, like Edith Stein, always find the courage to face our trials with dignity and hope, “for the sake of what is noble” and for each other.

1. Aristotle. “Nichomachean Ethics.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, edited by Jonathan Barnes, Vol 2:1761. Bollingen Series. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995.

2. Ibid, p. 1761

3. Stein, Self-Portrait in Letters: 1916–1942, 60 (Letter to Sr. Adelgundis Jaegerschmid; February 16, 1930). Quoted from myinteriorcastle.com.