C. S. Lewis on the Foundational Virtue of Courage

"Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality." It is one of C. S. Lewis's most penetrating observations about morality, subsequently quoted by Cyril Connolly in The Unquiet Grave. At first sight it sounds exaggerated. Courage ordinarily appears alongside honesty, justice, compassion, loyalty, temperance and the other virtues. Why should courage enjoy some special status above them?

Lewis's point becomes clearer when we notice the qualification: "at the testing point."

It is easy to possess virtues when possessing them costs nothing. Most people favour honesty when telling the truth brings no disadvantage. Most favour justice when justice happens to favour them. Almost everyone believes in loyalty when loyalty is reciprocated. Compassion is pleasant when it requires little sacrifice. Principles flourish magnificently when nobody challenges them.

The testing point arrives when virtue acquires a price.

Suppose a man believes that an innocent colleague has been falsely accused. Privately he says that the accusation is disgraceful. He knows the evidence does not support it. But publicly defending his colleague might damage his career. Suddenly justice is no longer an abstract principle. It has become a choice between justice and self-interest.

At precisely that moment courage becomes the form through which justice must express itself. Without courage, the man's commitment to justice remains merely verbal.

The same applies to honesty. It is easy to tell the truth when everyone wants to hear it. The real test comes when telling the truth will cost money, friendship, employment, reputation or status. At that point honesty requires courage. Without it, the supposedly honest person discovers exceptions to his principles with astonishing speed.

Loyalty follows the same pattern. Anyone can stand beside a successful friend surrounded by admirers. Loyalty becomes morally significant when the crowd has turned against him. The loyal person may then have to withstand ridicule, exclusion or suspicion merely for refusing to abandon somebody when abandonment has become fashionable.

Even compassion requires courage under some circumstances. It can take courage to defend an unpopular person from cruelty when everybody else has decided that he deserves whatever happens to him. It can take courage to forgive when one's social group demands vengeance. It can take courage simply to treat somebody as a human being when ideological passions have transformed him into an enemy category.

Lewis is therefore not really saying that courage replaces the other virtues. Courage has remarkably little moral content by itself. A criminal can display enormous physical courage. A fanatic can march fearlessly towards destruction. Soldiers fighting for an evil cause may nevertheless be personally brave. Courage tells us something about the strength with which a person pursues an end, not necessarily about whether the end is good.

That is why courage cannot stand alone as a complete morality. But the converse is equally important. The other virtues often cannot survive without courage.

This explains Lewis's unusual formulation. Courage is not merely another item on a moral shopping list. At the moment when another virtue becomes costly, courage becomes the means by which that virtue continues to exist in action. Courage is honesty when lying would be safer. Courage is justice when injustice would be personally advantageous. Courage is loyalty when betrayal would be rewarded. Courage is faith when conformity would be easier.

Until the testing point arrives, we often do not know whether we possess the virtue at all.

There is an uncomfortable psychological truth here. Human beings are remarkably good at confusing moral preference with moral character. We approve of certain virtues and therefore imagine that we possess them. But approving of courage is not courage, just as approving of honesty is not honesty. A person may sincerely believe himself principled because his principles have never required him to sacrifice anything important.

Prosperity can therefore conceal character. A man may go through decades believing himself fearless because nothing has frightened him enough to test the proposition. Another believes himself incorruptible because nobody has offered him enough. A third regards himself as independent-minded because every opinion he expresses is applauded by the people whose approval matters to him.

Then comes what Lewis calls the point of highest reality. The comfortable abstraction disappears. Something must actually be surrendered. The employer is watching. Friends may disappear. Money is at stake. The crowd is hostile. The institution has made its position clear. Silence would be considerably easier. Now we discover what the virtue was worth.

Christianity understands this particularly well because its central moral narratives repeatedly place belief at the point of cost. Peter's denial of Christ is perhaps one of the clearest examples. Peter certainly loved Christ. He had proclaimed his loyalty. Yet when association with Jesus suddenly became dangerous, courage failed and loyalty collapsed with it. The story is powerful precisely because Peter's earlier professions were probably sincere. He did not discover that he had never cared about Christ. He discovered that a genuine commitment could nevertheless fail when fear became sufficiently powerful.

The later Peter is transformed. The man who once denied knowing Christ becomes someone prepared to proclaim his faith despite persecution. Whatever else one makes of the theological dimensions of the story, its moral psychology is profound. Virtue demonstrated under safety and virtue maintained under danger are not quite the same achievement.

Christ's own Passion provides the ultimate Christian expression of the principle. Moral commitment is carried through suffering rather than abandoned when suffering begins. Courage does not replace love, obedience or sacrifice. It enables those virtues to persist at their point of greatest cost.

This also explains why courage has traditionally occupied such a prominent place in Western moral thought. Aristotle treated courage as a central virtue, particularly in confronting fear appropriately rather than simply lacking fear. Christian thought later incorporated fortitude among the cardinal virtues. Neither tradition regarded courage as reckless fearlessness. Courage exists precisely because there is something worth fearing.

The fearless man may require no courage at all. The courageous man sees the danger and acts nevertheless because something else matters more. As John Wayne famously said: "Courage is being scared to death… and saddling up anyway."

This distinction is especially important today because we often imagine courage principally in physical terms: the soldier under fire, the firefighter entering a burning building, the police officer confronting an armed criminal. These are genuine and sometimes extraordinary forms of courage. But civilisation also depends upon quieter forms of moral courage.

The scientist who reports an inconvenient result, the employee who exposes wrongdoing, the journalist who publishes something powerful interests want suppressed, the academic who refuses to alter a conclusion merely because it has become unfashionable, the citizen who says that a popular injustice remains an injustice: all encounter versions of Lewis's testing point.

The consequences need not involve death. Human beings are intensely social creatures. Loss of employment, reputation, friendship and belonging can exert enormous pressure. That is precisely why institutional conformity is so powerful. An organisation rarely needs to threaten somebody explicitly. People rapidly learn which opinions receive rewards and which produce trouble.

Under such conditions, silence can masquerade as prudence. There is certainly a place for prudence. Not every hill is worth dying on. Courage without judgment degenerates into recklessness, and constantly seeking confrontation is not evidence of moral greatness. Sometimes wisdom requires silence, compromise or retreat.

But prudence can also become the most respectable name we give to fear. The distinction appears when we ask why we are retreating. Are we preserving our strength for something genuinely more important, or are we constructing an elegant argument for avoiding the price of our own principles?

Only the individual can completely answer that question, and perhaps even he cannot always answer it honestly. Lewis's aphorism therefore contains an unsettling challenge. We should be cautious about congratulating ourselves for possessing virtues that have never been seriously tested. Character is not demonstrated principally by what we say we believe under favourable circumstances. It becomes visible when maintaining those beliefs becomes expensive.

This is why courage can properly be described as "the form of every virtue at the testing point." Courage does not tell us which values are worth defending. Reason, conscience, faith and moral judgment must do that work. But once we have decided that something is genuinely good, there inevitably comes a point at which preserving that good requires accepting some cost.

At that moment courage determines whether the virtue remains a conviction or becomes an action. Anyone can have principles while they are free. The test comes when the bill arrives.