Courage Is Calling (The Stoic Virtues Series)
Kindle Highlights
It was long ago now that Hercules came to the crossroads.
Violence is rarely the answer—but when it is, it’s the only answer.
Don’t bother with “What would I do in their shoes?” Ask: “What am I doing now?”
Do you know what the most repeated phrase in the Bible is? It’s “Be not afraid.”
they can force you,” Seneca has Hercules say in one of his plays, “then you’ve forgotten how to die.”
“There comes a time when people get tired of being trampled over by the iron feet of oppression,” Martin Luther King Jr. would later say.
You do it a thousand times, and then a thousand times more while there is no pressure so that when there is, you’ll know exactly what to do.
We are trying to actually get better. We are trying to answer our own call, make that Herculean choice ourselves. Today. Tomorrow. At every moment
If the Bible doesn’t work for you, some version of “Be brave,” “Have courage,” and “Don’t be scared” appears more than a dozen times in the Odyssey.
Don’t worry about whether things will be hard. Because they will be. Instead, focus on the fact that these things will help you. This is why you needn’t fear them.
The opposite of fear is love. Love for one another. Love for ideas. Love for your country. Love for the vulnerable and the weak. Love for the next generation. Love for all.
Gates of Fire, the epic historical novel of this battle by Steven Pressfield, is today passed from soldier to soldier, person to person, as a kind of tribute to that example.
Seneca would say that he actually pitied people who have never experienced misfortune. “You have passed through life without an opponent,” he said. “No one can ever know what you are capable of, not even you.”
How many more Spartans are there in Greece? he asked one of his advisers. Do they all fight like this? There are thousands more, came the reply, none are equal to these fallen men, but all are just as good at fighting.
It is one of the oldest and most universal proverbs of the ancient world: audentis Fortuna iuvat in the Aeneid; fortis Fortuna adiuvat in one of Terence’s plays; ‘τοῖς τολμῶσιν ἡ τύχη ξύμφορος from Thucydides. To Pliny, the Roman admiral and author, Fortes fortuna iuvat. Fortune favors the bold. Fortune favors the brave.
Indeed, in the so-called Hero’s Journey, the “call to adventure” is followed in almost all cases by what? The refusal of the call. Because it’s too hard, too scary, because they must obviously have picked the wrong person. That’s the conversation Nightingale had with herself, not for a little while but for sixteen years.
“Paris! Paris outraged! Paris broken! Paris martyred! But Paris liberated!” de Gaulle said in his victory speech. “Liberated by itself, liberated by its people with the help of the French armies, with the support and the help of all France, of the France that fights, of the only France, of the real France, of the eternal France!”
How well we would do to remember the admonishment of Cicero—a man who was laughed at for his nouveau riche origins, for his earnest striving and his love of flowery language—that people have always talked and gossiped and squinted. “Let other people worry over what they will say about you,” he said. “They will say it in any case.”*
Churchill called de Gaulle l’homme du destin—the man of destiny. When we follow our destiny, when we seize what is meant to be ours, we are never alone. We are walking alongside Hercules. We are following in the footsteps of the greats. We are guided by God, by the gods, by a guiding spirit, the same one that guided de Gaulle and Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Charlemagne, and every other great man and woman of history.
Training is not just something that athletes and soldiers do. It is the key to overcoming fear in any and all situations. What we do not expect, what we have not practiced, has an advantage over us. What we have prepared for, what we have anticipated, we will be able to answer. As Epictetus says, the goal when we experience adversity is to be able to say, “This is what I’ve trained for, for this is my discipline.”
The four virtues were about instilling character—good character—so that at the critical point, a person could act on instinct. Courage is not something you declare, like bankruptcy, it is something you earn, that becomes part of you. Just as a writer becomes one by writing—and a great writer by writing that which is worth reading—“courageous” is a superlative paid for over the course of a life of courageous decisions
“Don’t let your reflection on the whole sweep of life crush you,” Marcus Aurelius said. “Don’t fill your mind with all the bad things that might still happen. Stay focused on the present situation and ask yourself why it’s so unbearable and can’t be survived.” But who did he say that to? He said it to himself. The most powerful man in the world, lording over an enormous empire, commanding the most fearsome army, was himself anxious and afraid.
Centuries later, Churchill remarked of the RAF’s incredible defense of Britain during the Battle of Britain that “never before have so many owed so much to so few.” This was not quite true, for even the stand of those few owes a debt first to the three hundred Spartans. It’s not a stretch to argue that all the accomplishments of Western civilization, from the Renaissance to the American Revolution, would not have happened were it not for the sacrifice at Thermopylae.
If you had lived during slavery, during imperialism, if you had watched the rise of antisemitism in Europe, if you had been born in Soviet Russia or in Mao’s China, what would you have done? Would you have been able to go against the tides of your times? Would you have been brave enough to think independently? Would you have been able to resist all the incentives and cultural norms of the moment to manumit your slaves or accept your gay son or support women’s rights? Fear
On the Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield’s first spacewalk, his left eye went blind. His right eye teared up and froze too. He was plunged into complete darkness, teetering on the edge of an abyss of even more darkness. He would later say the key to such situations is to remind oneself, “There are six things that I could do right now, all of which will help make things better.” And while it is worth remembering that, as he said, “there’s no problem so bad that you can’t make it worse also.” We can’t forget that all the energy we spend fearing that we’ll make it worse is energy not spent making it better.
“Be strong and of good courage,” we hear in the book of Joshua, “do not be afraid nor be dismayed.” In Deuteronomy, “When thou goest out to battle against thine enemies, and seest horses, and chariots, and a people more than thou, be not afraid of them.” In Proverbs, “Be not afraid of sudden fear, neither of the desolation of the wicked, when it cometh.” In Deuteronomy, again, echoing the book of Joshua, Moses calls to Joshua and sends him to Israel. “Be strong and courageous,” he says to him, “for you must go with this people into the land that the Lord swore to their ancestors to give them, and you must divide it among them as their inheritance . . . Do not be afraid; do not be discouraged.”*